Thirith on 13/4/2024 at 15:15
Skywind, the fan-made total conversion in the Skyrim engine, is shaping up nicely. It's taking a long time, certainly, but it looks to me like they'll finish it, also because AFAIK they've got permission from Bethesda.
[video=youtube;64DdkXNB1C4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64DdkXNB1C4[/video]
Tomi on 14/4/2024 at 10:18
Done with Amnesia: Rebirth! I found the latter half of the game a bit tedious, but all in all it's a decent game. I may give The Bunker a try later, thanks for the recommendation. :)
Now I'm back to playing Ghostwire: Tokyo that I already started a couple of weeks ago. I think you'd need to have some knowledge of the Japanese culture to truly understand this game, but so far it's been pretty good. Ghostwire is a FPS, but the actual combat is probably the worst part of the game. Fortunately you'll acquire some elemental powers and other stuff throughout the game, so it does at least get a bit better, but the first few hours in particular were quite boring.
The city looks good and it's really big, but it also feels a bit bland. It doesn't feel like a real place where people have lived, it feels more like a giant playground. The story is good enough and the few characters are quite interesting, so I'm looking forward to seeing where this adventure takes me.
henke on 14/4/2024 at 11:07
I enjoyed Ghostwire. It was a fun open world.
Anyway, finally played through This War Of Mine over the past couple days. I'd put it off forever because I thought it might be a really heavy game, buuuut... not really? Maybe I'm just a cold hearted son of a bitch. I was glad to discover that it is a thoroughly engrossing survival game though. The gameloop of base management at day/scavenging at night is incredibly addictive and it's hard to put down at any point, you always feel like "Just one more day! One more day!" It's also a really tense stealth game. The actual mechanics are quite simple, but the sheer weight that the permadeath structure brings makes hiding from enemies nailbitingly tense. Great game. I finished my playthrough in 9 hours. Lost 2 members of my group. Didn't kill anyone. Did steal from maybe a few folks that didn't really deserve it tho. Hey man, it was war!
Also been replaying GTA 4, getting close to the end. Is this my fave GTA? It might be? I still like how (relatively) down to earth the story is, the vehicle physics are the best in the series, perhaps the best in any open world action game. I love how gritty and un-glamorous the combat is. But there's plenty of things to be annoyed by as well: the lack of checkpoints, the constant phone calls, the rampant misogyny. This also feels like the start of R* making their missions a lot more scripted, not always to positive results. So many scripted car chases where the car you're chasing is invincible and on a scripted path until a specified point where their script ends, so their car slows down significantly and is easily caught up with and destroyed. WHY, man? Just let the systems speak for themselves!
And we had a great session of One-Armed Robber, with Sulphur, Jesh and Dema last night. When we actually planned things out and managed to rob a place without setting off any alarms it was very satisfying. I kinda wanna play one of those PayDays now.
Thirith on 15/4/2024 at 21:21
I'd be up for trying out Payday some time. I think I bought the second game at some point when it was pretty cheap.
faetal on 16/4/2024 at 08:15
I've been playing a game called Infection Free Zone, which is a fairly by-the-numbers zombie survival game, but with a very cool twist.
It uses real map data to generate the game area, to google earth LOD. So you can basically see how the zombie apocalypse will play out in your neighbourhood, or wherever you please.
It even takes into account building data, so e.g. bakeries can be looted for food, police stations can be looted for guns, libraries for research data etc.
I think it is slightly overpriced, and it is still in early access, but nevertheless, surprisingly compelling.
Aja on 18/4/2024 at 21:50
I've been playing New Vegas again, and I am decidedly not enjoying it as much as I remembered. For starters, there's so much empty space in the world, and while maybe back in 2011 I was happy to explore it all, in 2024 when I enter a building that has three floors with seven empty rooms each, I tend to want to skip it. And that's maybe the problem, that've been skipping too much. Maybe I'm missing out on some of the quests that appealed to me in the past. But of the quests I have been doing, the writing hasn't particularly stood out, especially after Pentiment and Disco Elysium. I put a lot into my speech stat, and it feels like I can breeze through almost any scenario with a quick and ultimately unsatisfying speech check (someone will be like, "I don't want to do this," and I'll say, "Come on now!" and they'll say, "Wow, you've convinced me!" and the quest is over). And the combat is pretty tedious: you run out of VATS and then you just walk backwards away from enemies, clicking on them until they hopefully die.
I feel like I'm being too hard on it, but I've almost reached the strip and I don't have much motivation to continue. I'll put in another few hours and then maybe see how well Fallout 4 has aged once that new update comes out next week.
Sulphur on 19/4/2024 at 04:57
Fallout 4 aged the day it came out. Maybe even well before that. I mean, look, if you want to shoot stuff in post-apo town, yeah sure, it does that well. But we already had Rage several years prior. FO4's great addition was settlements, because what everyone wanted in their nukular roach-shooting 50s America cultural holocaust satire series was putting up walls all over the landscape and then maintaining and defending them until you fell over dead from boredom.
I never did finish New Vegas, but now I'm curious about it again. I enabled Survival mode or whatever it's called, and that made things interesting-ish. Combat always sucked from FO3 onwards, so well, I guess that's gonna just be a bridge to cross.
But first, Outer Wilds. Hopefully before I melt into a puddle from the decidedly pre-apocalyptic sun outside.
Aja on 19/4/2024 at 14:12
I liked 4 back in the day, but that was after I switched to hardcore mode. I know it's not cool to like it, but my steam page says 184 hours, so there must've been something. Enjoy your preapocalyptic sun; it's below freezing here today and I hate it.
Sulphur on 19/4/2024 at 14:21
Nah, you can like what you like. FO4's gameplay loop worked for a lot of folks, clearly; it just feels hollow to me because that's not primarily what I'm there for, I expect it to feed into other parts that should be way better, and Bethesda...
...anyway, I think we're both having a bad time of it for very different reasons, because here it's a 43 degree celsius summer (and we haven't even hit the midpoint yet!) + humidity. Feels like I'm back in my hometown, and I sorta left there because I wanted to not feel like I was living in a sauna. Oh well, that's what living in a tropical hellscape is, I suppose.
Malf on 19/4/2024 at 15:22
I've been dipping in and out of New Vegas too thanks to the surprisingly decent TV show, as well as flailing around for something satisfying after devoting myself to Dragon's Dogma 2 for a couple of weeks.
And I hate to say this, as I previously had very fond memories of New Vegas, but I just can't stand it now. It's hard to describe, but it feels like you're playing as a camera moving around a predominantly brown wasteland in a map editor rather than a character. I know there's good stuff in there to discover, but I just can't get past how primitive the moment to moment gameplay feels.
Ultimately, someone at Bethesda needs to admit defeat, ditch Gamebryo/Creation, understand that the series just worked better when it was isometric and turn-based, realise that Larian just had a completely MAHOOSIVE hit with a turn-based, isometric RPG and say "You know what? Let's do a Larian-style glow-up on Fallout 1/2 or make a new Fallout a la BG3 / DOS2."
If there's any through-line I can see in Bethesda's games post-Morrowind, it's a drive towards simplifying role-playing and relying more on procedural content (not procedural maps, but quests and such via Radiant.)
That has culminated in Starfield.
