Sulphur on 24/2/2020 at 05:57
Quote Posted by Starker
David Cage gets a lot of flak, some of it deserved, but I have never come away from his games with the feeling I have lost something. Omikron, Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain -- they've all had something memorable, something interesting, whether it was in a good or a bad way.
Omikron was clunky as hell to play and had a somewhat cheesy premise and looked like a budget Blade Runner rip-off, but the high concept was actually pretty cool and IMO it nailed the weird alien feel of the world pretty successfully, not unlike some far better games, such as Outcast and Morrowind and perhaps Beyond Good and Evil.
Fahrenheit is actually pretty damn good in the beginning. It had me completely hooked for maybe a solid third of the game, even if the completely bonkers latter parts are just The Room in video game form.
Heavy Rain is probably the most boring of Cage games (though, as Yahtzee suggested, it does get a bit more interesting if you headcanon the FBI agent into being a visitor from the future suffering from the effects of time travel when he changes the future), but it still has its moments and again, the high concept of how far someone would go to save their child is a potentially interesting one to explore -- would you kill someone, would you kill yourself, etc... It's not always executed well in the game, but the
finger scene did make me flinch, it was just that brutal.
Absolutely. Fahrenheit always had the most interesting of openings, and Heavy Rain had a fairly decent set of ideas. It's always been the execution and the denouement that unravels the enterprise. Heavy Rain isn't great by any metric, but there are glimpses of something there that could have been good. The thing with Cage is, he comes up with these neat ideas that work for one-shot vignettes, but has trouble linking them into a cogent narrative. What is fantastic without a shadow of a doubt is the team he's working with - they've a mastery of visual design and technical artistry that's pretty much up there with the best in the industry. Detroit's quite a system hog, though. I don't think it'd do 60 FPS at High settings even at 1080p unless you have something like a 2070.
Hah, it's been a while. I actually missed it.
@froghawk: yes, please at least watch a playthrough like Starker suggested. It's the most gobsmacking 200mph to batshit insane trainwreck ever made in gaming, and it's worth it for at least that.
Thirith on 24/2/2020 at 08:24
Damn, Red Dead Redemption 2 is gorgeous on PC! It was already beautiful on PS4 and a big screen, but I'm still wowed just by moving through that sublime landscape.
Though the bit where you're relocating to your camp near Valentine highlights some of the restrictive design bullshit that Rockstar is still prone to. If you take the wrong way (that would still take you to where you're going), blam! Mission failed, start again. No warning in the dialogue (something that happens in other missions), no "Where are you going, Arthur? It's straight ahead!"
For whatever comes next for Rockstar, I very much hope that they invest some time in more robust yet flexible systems. They can still have relatively tightly scripted missions while at the same time allowing for more freedom, or at least better, more organic signposting. If it's so important that you take exactly the right path, Hosea could react to you getting off course, he could first caution, then warn you, and then there could be O'Driscolls or Pinkertons that see you and come to investigate. Anything but this kind of bullshit.
Pyrian on 25/2/2020 at 14:11
Been playing a silly team in
Into the Breach. I was dissatisfied with the Steel Judoka is supposedly themed around getting the Vek to hit each other but its members aren't great at accomplishing that, so I put together a team that has the signature Vek Hormones but also includes two of the best repositioning mechs. So, Grav Mech, Hook Mech, and Swap Mech. Problem? I have absolutely no weapons that inflict damage.
Here's this team squeaking in a win on an objective to kill 7 Vek:
(
https://imgur.com/gallery/EFRe87E)
SubJeff on 26/2/2020 at 12:19
Quote Posted by bob_doe_nz
Tried out the Dying Light Free Weekend.
This is what Dead Island should have fucking been.
I've got it, and played a couple of hours. I don't like it. It grates somehow.
Thirith on 26/2/2020 at 12:44
I didn't like the first few hours of Dying Light, but for me it improved a lot once I'd got a bunch of combat and movement upgrades. Not saying it'd be like that for you, SubJeff, but it might be worth sticking with it for a bit. Also, if you can find a coop partner who's roughly at the same level, it's very enjoyable playing with others.
Malf on 26/2/2020 at 14:32
See, I reckon if they got rid of the whole RPG silliness, the game would be a LOT more enjoyable, and much better for co-op. But I would also say the same for Destiny / The Division / etc.
Thirith on 26/2/2020 at 15:51
I'm torn on this. With Dying Light I enjoyed learning new skills, but I first had to reach a certain level and have a number of skills to make locomotion and combat enjoyable rather than clunky. At their best, the skills represented a wider, more varied set of tools to deal with the world of the game and the obstacles in it. However, once I got to the point where combat pretty much turned into superhero silliness my enjoyment pretty much stopped, and the grappling hook also kinda ruined my enjoyment of getting around. I like well-done parkour in games, I like its physicality. The grappling hook replaces much of this.
What I definitely don't enjoy is RPG The Division-style, where for the most part skills are all about combat and the combat itself is mediocre at best, and where the toolset pretty much consists of minor variations on a handful of types: DPS, area damage, damage types, that sort of thing. I hate RPG mechanics that are all about higher HP counts, resistances and bullet sponges. There was little of interest to me in The Division's combat and skill trees, it was mainly about being prepared to tackle enemies with more hitpoints that had to be hit with bigger and badder guns.
Tomi on 1/3/2020 at 19:34
I started playing the latest Epic freebie, Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, mostly because I haven't played an AC game for years and I found the theme interesting. Had some mysterious technical problems at first, but eventually got the game running. It took me a while to get used to the "I didn't intend to jump there or do that, but I guess that'll do" control scheme again, but I'm starting to get the hang of it a bit now. Moving around can still be very annoying at times though, some rooftop chase scenes especially where you can't afford to lose too much time can be quite infuriating.
I like AC: Syndicate though. Yeah, it's grindy and it's basically still the same game that AC has always been, but the city is very beautiful and actually feels like a living city, and there are a lot of things to do. Perhaps too many things to do for a completionist like me. The skill points system and crafting are fairly basic but nice little additions. Having two protagonists makes it possible to switch between stealthy and non-stealthy playing styles whenever I like, and that's quite nice. The zipline thing makes me feel like the Spiderman, sometimes it works from crazy distances and sometimes it doesn't seem to work at all. Londoners seem very stupid; normally they don't seem to understand (or care?) what's going on even when I murder people in front of them - I guess this sort of a game needs some of that stupidity to be any fun, but I think the AI is a bit too stupid.
The main story doesn't really seem to be going anywhere at the moment, and even though the side quests are entertaining enough for now, I hope that things get more interesting some time soon. Still glad that I tried this!
Tomi on 2/3/2020 at 18:22
I'll probably be all AC'd out for the next two years once I'm done with the main story, but I'll keep that in mind!
Renault on 2/3/2020 at 21:24
I've been simultaneously playing Doom 2016 and replaying Doom 2. Kind of an interesting experiment. Doom2 is as fun as it has always been, not much debating that. It's been great replaying all these levels that I haven't played for probably 10 years or so. Not sure if I have the nostalgia glasses on too tight or not, but D2 seems like more pure gaming fun that most of modern games I've tried recently.
But Doom 2016 - I know a lot of folks here have praised it, and it's not bad, but it just doesn't seem...great. The visuals are pretty, but the gameplay, it all seems so staged. It's a constant recycle of set piece, kill 30 bad guys, quiet area, then repeat. Plus, you have the helper government guy who communicates with you remotely and guides you through the game. Very cliched, so far at least. I plan to finish it, but in some way its a slog at the moment. Maybe it will get better. It also just doesn't seem to have the same punch (for lack of a better word) that the original games had. In one area near the beginning, I died 5 times in a row, partially because I didn't even realize I was been being hit by the enemy. Weapons just don't seem as powerful as in the originals. It's gory as hell, of course, but you don' really feel it. If that makes sense.
At this pace, I'm going to be way more excited for Doom 64 than Doom Eternal when they come out later this month, but we'll see.