Malf on 8/8/2020 at 16:06
Wish I could enjoy it all over again :)
The DLCs are both spectacular, and prime examples of how DLC / expansion packs
should be done.
I'd also recommend some mods to even out the somewhat janky gear system. As it currently stands, by the time you're high enough level to use a piece of gear, it quickly becomes outdated.
The main one I use is (
https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/2120) Leveling Witcher and Relic gear.
There's a bunch of other excellent mods out there that fix other stuff, such as Ghost Mode, which rebalances a LOT of stuff and fixes things that still don't work properly in the vanilla game.
Gryzemuis on 8/8/2020 at 17:43
I played Blood&Wine for a few hours. I remember I had to go to a feast, and do dumb stuff. I hope it will get better later. :) The other DLC is supposed to be excellent, and longer, I think ? Well, I'm gonna just play the main game first.
I'm searching for all the witcher gear (cat, griffin, bear, and normal, enhanced, superior, master). I'm gonna upgrade everything as soon as possible, and wear it immediately. My build and gear are probably not optimal, but I don't care. I'm using the new Gourmet talent. It makes everything trivial (now, maybe not anymore at later levels). I'm playing at normal difficulty, so I'm sure I manage, even if my gear choices are inspired by looks over function.
But thanks for the recommendation of mods. Imho, mods are not always worth the trouble. I'll check them out a bit.
Judith on 9/8/2020 at 14:02
Late to the party, but I spent an evening with Prey: Mooncrash. And it's both an amazing design construct, and not-sure-if-its-for-me kind of game. It seems to be aimed at all the careful explorers and perfect ghost save scummers in immersive sims, as it basically kicks you out of your comfort zone and forces you to see that that the real fun is elsewhere. Going with the flow, playing past your mistakes, improvising and changing play styles is where it's at. And it sure leads to some really interesting emergent stories, especially with the time limit thing.
But then again, I like my careful explorer style :) Maybe it's something that is worth experiencing and then agreeing to disagree afterwards? I plan to spend a few more evenings with it, but all in all, I'm happy that I didn't let it fly under my radar.
Sulphur on 9/8/2020 at 15:33
Quote Posted by Judith
Late to the party, but I spent an evening with Prey: Mooncrash. And it's both an amazing design construct, and not-sure-if-its-for-me kind of game. It seems to be aimed at all the careful explorers and perfect ghost save scummers in immersive sims, as it basically kicks you out of your comfort zone and forces you to see that that the real fun is elsewhere. Going with the flow, playing past your mistakes, improvising and changing play styles is where it's at. And it sure leads to some really interesting emergent stories, especially with the time limit thing.
That's the kind of viewpoint I love hearing, because it tells me there's gold to be mined as long as one takes the effort of swinging the pick. I need to get back to this game soon.
Renault on 10/8/2020 at 16:35
I've been playing Superhot VR on PS4 - the game just seems so perfect for VR. Lots of really cool, matrix type scenarios, with bad guys on all sides, and split second decisions to make. Then over the weekend I realized I've got the regular PC version in my Steam inventory, and had never played it, so I plowed through that in about 3 hours. Both versions are a blast, the VR version providing more depth and immersion but the PC version giving you much more mobility. It's a good thing that they made two completely separate versions of the game, I don't think they would have worked too well ported in either direction.
Also started A Short Hike this morning. Its really fun and clever, a good exploration game that feels very Zeldaish. Great sense of humor too. Perfect game to play casually for a few minutes, or I suppose you could polish the whole thing off in a couple of hours. Really dig the art style as well.
Judith on 10/8/2020 at 20:48
Quote Posted by Sulphur
That's the kind of viewpoint I love hearing, because it tells me there's gold to be mined as long as one takes the effort of swinging the pick. I need to get back to this game soon.
Definitely give this DLC a chance man, you won't regret it. It is quite confusing at first, since you have to take time to discover some basic dependencies, but it gets better and better with each playthrough. Fortunately, it's a rogue-lite and death has similar consequences as in Dark Souls series. While your inventory isn't persistent, other things are.
Just to give you a taste of what you may find here: In one of my playthroughs I found myself in a quite dire situation. I only have one character unlocked, so I'm stuck with a psionic. He is rather fragile, but the psi attack is good and makes a nice combo with silenced pistol. So I got to a central crater, where a bloody annoying moonshark (think Dune sandworm) is patrolling the area. It's super hard to kill with low level character, and it detects movement on sand very fast, so your best bet is to avoid it. You can sort of do it by jumping from one rock formation to another, but it's not like you have a rocky carpet laid out for you to navigate around the map.
This time I wanted to explore Moonworks and I missed one of my jumps on the way there. I threw a typhoon lure in another direction, but it was too late, the beast was already going for the kill. I made a desperate run for the gate leading to my destination, but the beast was much faster than me. Also, gates close when they detect a typhoon nearby, so I was stuck between rock and a hard place, and I got injured. Got hit by Moonshark melee attack, so I got the bleeding status, which can only be cured with coagulant agent. I didn't have it on me, obviously. And man these statuses are nasty. Bleeding renders you extra vulnerable to damage and if you sprint or climb (!) you loose a bit of health each second you do it. So I was even more fragile than usual and I couldn't climb anywhere without taking damage! Okay, it's really bad, I thought, but maybe it's not the end of the world. I could find the coagulant there somewhere, and I have all the 5 corruption stages for one character, so I can explore carefully and maybe get to the capsule there.
The exploration bit went quite well, with psi/pistol sneak attacks I was able to defeat most monsters during the phase 2 and 3 of the corruption, I also found a few medkits, but the bloody coagulant was nowhere to be found. I lost a lot of time not only because of my hampered navigation, but also while trying another escape option, which required me to stockpile on food and water first. But due to one unfortunate encounter at phase 4, I almost died and had to use a lot of food and drinks just to stay alive. And I couldn't find enough to complete this optional quest! This was like the third time I thought about quitting the game.
Okay, fuck it, I'm going straight to the capsules. I'll probably die on my way there, but who cares, I thought. But, surprise surprise, on my way there I finally found the fucking coagulant! Yess! So maybe I do have a slight chance to escape this hellhole. I healed myself up and explored the higher ground for a few more items and ammo. But before I knew it, it was phase 5 already. More monsters have spawned in, more things got broken, and the location with capsules was chock full with enemies. A telepath controlling several other zombies, a rogue harverster and a few lesser typhoon creatures. Fuck, this time I'm really not gonna make it, am I?
But, with careful / slightly panicky running and psi-ing / gunning, I managed to kill the telepath and other goons. I unlocked the gate, trying to reach the capsule... Aand it doesn't have navigational charts, which can be found
in the central crater! Fuuuck! Aaand, the bar for the phase 5 is like 4/5 full. Fuck, fuck, fuuck! This time I'm not even thinking about aborting the simulation so much as pressing Alt+F4 and rage-quitting.
Okay, so I'm going to die in a few minutes, but I still haven't searched the containers in this room. I already knew some things are persistent in this game and some of the items can be bought as loadout before the next playthrough. So I went searching for stuff, found one thing that could be useful for the replay and I was about to wait for the timer, basically. But suddenly I remembered I didn't search any typhoon yet. And I found something I haven't seen before: an item that can decrease the progress of the corruption! When I used it, the meter went back to like 3/4 of the final stage. I was sure that I wouldn't make it there and back again, but at least I could try to find navigational charts, so I'd know where they are next time (unless the location is randomized).
So I went back to the central crater... And got killed by the moonshark.
Fuck moonsharks.
Preferably with some giant space scuba tanks.
===========================
So yeah, one of my best gaming evenings in a long while! I don't remember when had such a ride from hope to despair to hope... and death, eventually. Definitely not during my careful play in the base game.
Tomi on 13/8/2020 at 10:21
Inline Image:
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1501341213941318984/8A56DE3D90871CDB7CCFB1FDCCB67E70F4EFBC95/Gris.It looks great, it sounds even better, but the actual gameplay? Well, there isn't much of that. I just kind of breezed through the game in about three hours. The simple puzzles didn't slow me down much (which isn't actually a bad thing), and while the artwork is really awesome at times, it's also quite repetitive and never really made me stop to admire the view. There's kind of a vague story that's open to interpretation, but I suppose it was too deep and meaningful for me, as I spent the first half of the game wondering what on earth is going on. I think it would have been a good idea to read some sort of a description of the game before playing it.
I still enjoyed the experience, but I'm happy that it didn't last for any longer. Gris is a fine work of art, but as a game it doesn't really hold up. I think I would have been a bit annoyed if I had paid the full price for it.
demagogue on 13/8/2020 at 10:51
The first thing that you have to get--that's kind of hard to imagine a person playing through the whole thing and not getting it's so incessant--is that the entire thing is an extended metaphor for the grief the player character is going through, and basically every symbol relates to that in some way. It's literally structured into the 5 stages of grief.
I was really into a lot of it, especially the visuals and even the low-key gameplay. I loved the look of it and at least wanted to love its world anyway. I was in the right state of mind for it. But I could understand the criticism it got, which you basically summed up. What I didn't like so much wasn't that it was artsy or indie or "serious" or gameplay-shallow per se, all those things by themselves can be okay. Those are the kinds of games I love even. But I didn't like the tone they did it with here.
It was somehow preachy and value signaling, or heavier-handed doing that, than it needed to be. It was drenching itself in these metaphors almost to the point of bathos. If it had been more hands off and let this mystical world just reveal itself as it is, I think it would have connected better.
Well, let me put it this way. The way they could have done it that I would have really liked is like nifflas games, Knytt, Knytt Strories, WADF, (or in other genres: Stalker, Thief, System Shock) which presented these glitched out worlds that didn't really try to explain themselves. They just were, and they just came as they were. And the mystical parts weren't played up; they were just there like anything else, and the gameplay grew organically out of that.
Gris reminded me of all these movies and games where they're trying too hard to have these metaphors and have the world speak to you, and even when it wasn't that it was still a scene to "feature a platform gimmick", and the gameplay didn't have that feeling of you just being in the flow of this world as it comes like those other games. Yeah, I like more of the former and less of the latter.
Briareos H on 13/8/2020 at 11:30
I'm coming to the frustrating and sad realisation that the more Horizon: Zero Dawn opens up, the less I feel engaged in it. The game is beautiful and I want to know where the story takes the main character, but the gameplay routines become duller and duller as the sidequests pile on. I'm almost wishing it wasn't an open world game.
Will I miss a lot if I focus only on the main quest? A different ending maybe? Are there any really good sidequests?
Harvester on 13/8/2020 at 15:40
I played the Machine Games Quake Episode 5: Dimensions of the Past. The levels have a lot of personality and are well-designed, and it's nice that they are a bit more detailed and high poly than the regular Quake levels. Back then I guess levels like these would have been technically possible within the engine, but systems back then would've struggled with it.
Quake on Medium is a tad on the easy side for me, but this fifth episode is just the right difficulty for me to have a decent challenge without it being overly frustrating. Health and ammo is scarcer than in the main game, on Medium sometimes you get just enough ammo to kill everything. Maybe on Hard you're left with no choice but to leave some monsters alive and run from them instead. While tactical shooters, ImSims and stealth games are valid genres, in arcade shooters like these I prefer to be able to kill everything, so Medium was the right choice for me.
I can recommend this episode to any Quake single player fan! :thumb: By the way, I didn't find the secret level but I found Dopefish! :D
On to Scourge of Armagon!