henke on 7/9/2023 at 16:32
500th reply in EPIC THREAD!? Hey even in 2023 TTLGers are HARDCORE enough GAMERS to hit a number like this in a yearly gaming thread. GOOD JOB TEAM. WELL GAMED.
Ok so I finished Far Cry 6, somewhat to my surprise. It was a long game and I wasn't always super engaged, but felt myself becoming gripped with it towards the end. The gameplay is good ol FC3-5 formula, with only a hint of the newfangled Ubigame leveling-system stinking up the proceedings. The mix of stealth and action is as fun as ever. The vehicle handling, which hasn't really been improved massively since FC2 except getting a bit faster, is surprisingly enjoyable too. The planes are a bit underwhelming and the helicopters are A JOKE! You can go just as fast forward whether your helicopter is tilting forwards or backwards. :nono: The overall story is... not bad, by Ubisoft standards. I've often said they haven't made a good videogame story since Beyond Good & Evil in 2004 and that's still true, but they do have likeable characters sometimes, and so is the case in this game as well! I think my fave revolutionaries were in the eastern region. The oldtimers in The Legends of 67 and the young hotheads in La Moral who butt heads with eachother. Storywise that whole region was the best one. Another thing I think the Ubisoft's open world games do well is music, in this case licensed music, and this one did introduce me to some great Latin artists I hadn't heard of before. Overall, yeah, good game!
After finishing that I fired up the new Saints Row, which is one of this month's PS+ titles. Aaaaand yeah, I can see why it didn't do so well. The on foot combat hasn't really evolved since SR3 at all, except for having these annoyingly long quick-kill animations. And I LIKE quick-kill animations, but these just feel like they go on forever. The driving isn't much better, with the cars sometimes bouncing around like crazy when you just nudge a curb. Is it possible it's even gotten WORSE since SR3/4? I like the story though! The opening bit is great, and scaling the scope down from the epicness of SR3/4, to just a tale of a few low life criminals trying to survive in capitalist America, is a good choice. I just wish it had turned out like GTA 4, which likewise scaled things down storywise, while refining the gameplay. Here things have been scaled down but the gameplay is stagnant. Also don't see what the clamors of WOKENESS (from the usual suspects) is about. The tone is pretty much identical to SR3. What's woke about it? That the main cast is largely made up of women and minorities? Because, uhh, that's been the case for most of this series.
@Tomi, yes, I'm with you on Plague Tale 2.
henke on 9/9/2023 at 11:54
Ok, played a few more hours of Saints Row. Y'know, imo SR3 had the best mission design of any GTA-alike. You'd be hijacking a nuke from a plane in one mission, then it accidentally goes off and turns a district of the city into zombies which you have to fight in the next mission. Each mission was either a crazy setpiece or introduced a fun new weapon/mechanic. And the new Saints Row? Actually kinda holds up that tradition! Mission 1 is a crazy unexpected way to start off the whole game, mission 2 is the tornado chase from Fury Road, mission 3 is the bankvault heist from Fast Five. I'm constantly surprised and delighted at the situations I'm finding myself in. This game is kinda growing on me!
Sulphur on 10/9/2023 at 05:36
Quote Posted by Tomi
I also finished
Ori and the Will of the Wisps! Great game. Almost everything that I wrote about A Plague Tale above sort of applies here too. :)
I thought WotW was a really good game, just not as fresh or vital as the first Ori. The art's always sublime, and they borrowed a lot from Hollow Knight for the gameplay, but I think that's great, because it desperately needed improvements to combat. Also, I appreciated the ending because it put a very final cap on this tale and closed the circle that began with the first one. The game certainly had less of me bitching about escape sequences compared to the first time around, so I'd say that's a net improvement.
TheRealSlimGarrett on 10/9/2023 at 12:11
Just finished a run through of Deadly Shadows on max difficulty. I found something out that I've not realised before with fairly humerous results.
henke on 10/9/2023 at 16:49
Well don't leave us in suspense, man! What are these humerous results?!?
Komag on 10/9/2023 at 18:55
(it's the bit about oil making Gamall slip)
Jason Moyer on 10/9/2023 at 21:57
Finished the final DLC for Borderlands 3. What a great game. The only 2 holdover complaints from previous games that I have are the UI, which is tolerable, and the same sound bugs that have been in each game. Otherwise, it exceeds the prior games in every area. The campaigns were great, the core mechanics are great (gunplay, skills, movement, etc), low-level play isn't tedious, endgame content isn't a grind. A solid 4/5 for me until I decide to revisit it in the future, which is the highest grade I'll give a game until that happens.
I dunno what I want to play next. Might just bite the bullet and pick up Starfield and tell the backlog to fuck off for a month or two.
Thirith on 12/9/2023 at 07:01
Ironically, after giving up on Divinity Original Sin 2 because of some very specific things that bothered me a lot, and because I don't want to play a game of this size if I'm really bothered by some key aspects, I'm now playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla, where a lot bothers me, but only a little - and it's an even bigger, longer game. At the same time, I'm pretty sure I won't finish this, and I'm kinda okay with that. I mainly want to check out the game's representation of medieval England, the landscapes and towns and cities. But yeah, while I liked the earlier, more compact Assassin's Creed games set primarily in big cities, I found Odyssey draining, and I suspect I'll find Valhalla more so. There is the occasional interesting moment and fun character, but they are exceedingly rare. By and large, this is another Ubisoft concoction of shallow systems and shallow narratives; at this point, Assassin's Creed has long been a case of endless mad libs where we get all the same tropes, just with the names and cultures switched out.
What I still find weird about this: even though I burned out on Origins as well, for the most part I liked that one a lot. The world felt interesting and specific, the characters came alive. There's so much that Odyssey and Valhalla do very similarly, yet apart from the initial enjoyment of new worlds and cultures, neither of them seem to come close to Origins, even though they're practically the same game. I wonder what exactly it is that Origins did right, but I suspect a lot of it is the main character.
Edit: Mind you, I kinda owe it to my roots to play this one. Apparently my mum's family goes back to the Vikings, where they were either chieftains... or goatherds. Ah well. Waiting for Valhalla to break out the goatherding minigame.
reizak on 12/9/2023 at 09:48
Quote Posted by Thirith
Apparently my mum's family goes back to the Vikings, where they were either chieftains... or goatherds. Ah well. Waiting for
Valhalla to break out the goatherding minigame.
Well, even if the chieftain thing doesn't play out as you'd like you're still a direct descendant of Charlemagne, King of the Franks and Emperor of the Romans, so no need to fall back on the goatherding lineage.
On the topic of the AC games, the first AC2 remains the only one I've ever finished and I'm fine with that. They're nice to poke around in and sightsee, but even if they weren't so full to the brim with busywork to inevitably derail you from the main plot, the stories don't tend to be interesting enough that I'd care to see where they go. I have a feeling these must be some of the most rarely finished games ever.
demagogue on 18/9/2023 at 04:31
I finally finished Subnautica. I played it a ton when it was still in alpha, mostly building my base and exploring, but this was the first time properly following the plot. It's striking that the story is about as great as exploration and the environment, and the exploration and environment are awesome.
In terms of design, they had a really good sense of controlling the flow of progression and the plot. First, depth & resources are such natural progress conditions, that part practically designs itself. But using the radio feed and the tasks it gives you that force you to visit a lot of the major locations, and then following that up with the saga of spoiler, the plot could really hold a person, and basically you knew what you could do next to get on with it. But to their credit, they also allowed you to do it all at your own pace and spend as much time as you also wanted exploring and base-building, and the two are kind of connected anyway since you have to explore no matter what.
Well I had a great experience with it. It's also really good about playing the emotions ... the sheer dread, panic, wonder, and fun of a lot of areas or creatures. The environments weren't just pretty. They completely immersed you into their vibe in, er, more ways than one.
