I feel like there’s two parts. On the one hand, Larian’s engine is fantastic and allows really creative and diverse approaches to their puzzles. There’s a number of fights that feel more like puzzles than fights, because they’re nearly impossible if you just go in spells blazing, but not nearly as threatening with a little preparation. They’ve honed that engine through DOS & DOS2, so it’s much more mature than you’d get if this were a pure derivative of BG1/2. The first time I lit Shadowheart up with Spirit Guardians and dashed her around a battlefield reaping the canon fodder…I actually giggled with glee.
Then there’s the storytelling. My journal is filling up with quests & side quests, but I don’t think any of them have been the “Kill 5 orcs,” “gather 10 blood moss,” or “deliver this McGuffin” variety. The NPCs you meet tend to reappear later and react differently depending on how their previous quest ended. I suppose, technically, that’s similar to going back to the same quest-giver, rising in their ‘ranks’ toward some prize, but it doesn’t feel the same. The NPCs, even the side-quest NPCs, feel like they’re woven into the overall narrative and it makes for a much more immersive experience.
I can’t imagine how much writing, animation, and voice acting had to be done to accommodate all the choices I won’t make. Even just the times some NPC voices my gender.
I agree about the quests feeling fairly good, but my hod is the jour Al itself atrocious. No way to remove/hide quests from the map. Many quests sort of remain in this “not done” quest state because completing it will have undesirable outcomes and it feels weird that I have to keep it there still
I agree, and the fact the NPCs have conversations and stories that play around you which are not automatically turning into quests for you to do (sometimes even chiding you for eavesdropping) makes the world feel much more alive and less player-centric.
You’re right, but I think OP meant almost all the games that are developed by Valve have a Linux version, meanwhile non of the games developed by CDPR has it.
Totally agree, I don’t want to have to do research before or during playing and have to consult a build guide for every level up, just so I don’t mess up my character.
Just let me fuck around, find out and do it better all over again in my own time.
Origins is definitely the best and the closest to that classic Bioware feel you like.
DA2 was polarizing but I enjoyed it. Very different from the first mechanically. Worth playing tho, IMHO.
DA:I was… not fun for me. I feel like they tried to modernize the formula and added all the worst parts of modern (at the time) games, namely HUGE time sinks for no reason because it’s not a fucking MMORPG that makes money by the hour. /deep breath Sorry, I am still a little bitter at how that game turned out. Anyways, probably worth checking out, maybe you will feel differently. But it wasn’t for me.
Dragon age 2 was insanely fun to me, i definitely played it more than origins. (Im aware I’m not in the majority with that) I thought the combat was so fun and i loved doing different play throughs with different builds in that game
2 definitely shows the issue of EA wanting to push the game out in 1.5 years. Many cut corners and a lack of assets with the repetitive maps.
I think it's the weakest entry in the Dragon Age series, and a lot of it's negative reception was because it failed to live up to expectations of DAO.
If Dragon Age 2 wasn't a Dragon Age game, it wouldn't have gotten the poor reviews it got. As a standalone game it's actually not bad.
I always recommend playing it, as it directly leads into the story of Inquisition and it has some great characters in it.
DA2 takes a different take for me when I realized that you’re playing through Varric’s retelling of the story. It kinda explains why people are falling out of the sky to join the battle and other inconsistencies.
This gets often overlooked, glad it got brought up. The entire game is an exercise in unreliable narration. Gives you a very different lens to experience the game through.
Ultima Online is a 25 year old MMO that still has the original servers running. The install is about 3GB and can run on any PC from the last 20 years. For the official servers, the player base is largest on Atlantic and you can sign up for a free Endless Journey account. PVP is only allowed in certain zones.
There are many many player run servers that fit a lot of play styles. The most populated being Outlands. That is where I mainly play as it is by far the most populated UO server, 2.5k-3k people on usually. Just beware, outside of the starting zone and towns, it is open PVP almost everywhere.
City of Heroes now has player run servers. The install is around 5GB. Homecoming is the most populated, with a lot of added content. Rebirth is less populated but tries to be the closest experience to the official servers.
Likewise, Everquest is still running, including some semi-official EQ-classic servers. Server population might be measured in hundreds – a far cry from the 500k peak in 2002.
The fact that games act like climbing doesn’t exist. You reach a path blocked by a small rock that any normally able bodied human could climb and it just pisses me off.
Like Pokémon games with a rock you could easily just walk around but noooo you gotta travel to this other town to get a special item or learn a special skill to get around this thing you could easily climb over or walk around.
It’s even worse in VR games. As much as I love Half Life Alyx, there were certain barriers that are literally just a pile of rubble or a chain link fence.
Artificial difficulty. If I can only finish a game by grinding for hours on end or after endless tedious fetch quests, I am going to be very disappointed. Like there’d better be something else real strong in the title’s favor or I’m likely to drop it altogether.
There was a time when making games more difficult by way of time investment made more sense from a design angle, but that time has long since passed. It’s just lazy design in 9/10 cases theses days.
i can tell you the one that surprised me the most: Yoku’s Island Express! utterly adorable pinball metroidvania. you’re a little dung beetle pushing a big ball around to deliver mail.
i find that there is so much focus on dark and dreary in the metroidvania genre, which makes sense considering the roots of the genre. me, i get enough of that in my daily life. i want colorful and full of curiosity. the ori games are good for that too, as is supraland, but i don’t know of many more.
PSA: Don’t buy a gaming laptop. They are trash. The plastic case will melt, the wifi card will come loose, the battery will die within minutes. A steam deck is truly your best option.
And never ever buy alienware. Screw them in particular.
Literally every higher end laptop gets called a gaming laptop… It’s a nothing term. Even the absolute least flashy laptop with no RGB and is basically just a glorified Thinkpad with a 4080 mobile in it gets called a gaming laptop just cause of the 4080.
Saying don’t buy a gaming laptop basically means you can’t buy literally any good high end hardware full stop.
It’s a short sighted and frankly stupid piece of advice that just hurts people.
The Alienware bit tho, that’s spot on. 100% fuck em.
Correction, don’t buy a cheap gaming laptop. There are plenty of ones like the lenovo legion and rog strix g16 that have good build quality and will last you years.
The ones with crappy plastic and overheat regularly are usually the ones under $1000
Yeah. And Dell bought them a long time ago so they would have a ‘gaming’ brand. Just buy a regular Dell machine and save money, it’s about as simple as that.
I wish this was a likely outcome but realistically steam hardware is too small a userbase. They are most likely to get performance profiles for their hardware due to the standardization and free steam marketing of compatibility, but windows users are still a supermajority.
Steam hardware has so far been pretty niche, though. If the user experience is smooth enough, a SM could replace many people’s xbox/playstation.
We’re like 5y into the PS5/XBSX, new games are jumping up to $70-100 each, and hardly any are platform exclusives. Msft have all but canceled the next Xbox, and if Sony tries to push the PS6 in a few years, I think there’s a world where a good chunk of people say nah.
And with the amount of attention Linux is getting from the win10 eol, we could be at the beginning of an historic inflection point in gaming.
Unfortunately, we didn’t create enough art for Joseph Gordon Levett to sell so Volnutt is forever stuck on the moon and we will never get an aged up Tron Bonne outside of the internet.
Deep Rock Galactic. I was really excited to play it and I tried to like it. The colors and graphics were 10/10 awesome, I just found it to be extremely boring and repetitive.
For me, deep rock really shines when you’re playing the higher hazard levels. Seeing a wall of the cave move because it’s covered in enemies, and then hitting them with a fat boy gave me happy chemicals.
Man I LOVE drg. A good team on a call made this the most fun I’ve had playing in recent years. Unfortunately, the population is lower and one may have trouble finding new players. Veterans are usually happy to help, but you’d need a patient one.
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