These days (I’m 37) its not about the time taken but whether a game just feels like work.
I know that would be different for everyone. But I pumped 140+ hours into Eldenring. Loved every battle and experience. But most other games after a few hours if it feels more like work than fun then I give up. Time is too precious and I’m already overworked.
I can see why easy mode exists now, I want a sense of fulfilment and experience but I dont want a game to create unnecessary work
I love RPGs. But I inevitably spend more time planning out my character class, organizing my inventory, keeping track of quests, etc. Then I actually spend “playing” the game.
It’s an enjoyable play style, I mean I’m choosing to do this. But, it means that every RPG game I see immediately becomes a massive time sink. I’m too employed to ever really enjoy an RPG. :(
Ugh this is me with D:OS2 right now. I’m still in Act 1 but I spend more time looking up class builds and reading guides online than actually playing the damn game. I’m probably only going to ever have time to play it once so it gives me major FOMO not being 100% happy with my choices before progressing further :/
Similar for me. I get maybe 2 hours on a good day that I can actually play games. I’m not wasting that grinding levels or hunting down 200 feathers. I also don’t like games that spoonfeed advancement way to slowly in the beginning, I don’t want to spend 15 hours in a game just to get to the point where the combat system is actually fleshed out fully.
Both have powerful stories, and I can respect a narrative that takes risks like TLOU has. I have some gripes with the second's narrative, but I would still recommend it to many. I've also been thinking about it recently, so I'm pleasantly surprised to see it mentioned here.
I think it’s totally fine that a game may not be someone’s cup of tea, but I recall the second game getting a lot of negativity for…some reason I don’t fully remember.
Outside of the story the gameplay is better, the tech is better, the environments are better. Even today it holds up as a powerhouse in these areas.
But, again, a recall a lot of people trashing the game, and I’m not saying that’s you at all. Don’t get me wrong. I’m just trying to remember why a certain subset of people online were going all apey over it. To me it’s absolute top tier game to this day.
I recall the second game getting a lot of negativity for…some reason I don’t fully remember.
Some of the popular complaints went into spoiler territory. Since I can't seem to spoiler tag on kbin, I'll only briefly mention that they generally centered around one of the main character's choices early on, while also targeting their appearance for being "unrealistic".
Outside of the story the gameplay is better, the tech is better, the environments are better. Even today it holds up as a powerhouse in these areas.
I agree overall. I also applaud Naughty Dog for the considerable number of gameplay options and accessibility features. If I remember correctly, someone has even beaten TLOU1/2 who was born blind.
I’m just trying to remember why a certain subset of people online were going all apey over it.
Not gonna get into it here, but the lesson learned by the protagonist felt like it missed the mark a bit when looking at the events of the game after things were said and done. Ultimately, I think it's fairly minor considering that's maybe my main gripe. I suppose I had some issues with pacing too, and thought some aspects of the plot should have been fleshed out differently. I was hoping to revisit TLOU1/2 eventually to see how my thoughts have changed.
First one. The second one… I’ve read it’s more of a vengeance story in the first half, and then you play the same story from the other side, making you see how awful revenge is.
Does it have scenes like the one with the giraffes?
Yep. I hated ND at the time but by the end of the game I was blown away. One of the most immersive incredible gaming experiences I’ve ever had (story-wise, both games I mean). As amazing as the first was I almost prefer the second… I’m still torn.
It’s not for every one though and it recieved a review bomb before it was released and a lot of those people still hate it.
To answer the giraffe one and without spoilers… yep there’a lovely moments in it that stick with you
I’m replaying it right now on Survivor. Great game but so grim. I can’t do long play sessions because I find it too taxing. It’s extremely polished so you can play it at any difficulty level and it works well.
I’m here now because I want to find another game to play alongside or after that isn’t so heavy.
So many of those old adventure games were hilarious. The Monkey Island series, Day of the Tentacle, Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest. But I was also a kid back then (probably shouldn’t have been playing Leisure Suit Larry…). I wonder if they’d still hold up for me today.
@JCPhoenix They definitely do! I replayed Sam & Max and DOTT on an emulator for my phone and played the remastered versions of Monkey Island. They are still awesome games.
I want to add "ToonStruck" to this list as well. One of the funniest, weirdest games I ever played.
Yes! Sam and Max is wonderful! There’s something so perfect in the way they react with complete nonchalance to all the weird stuff going on. And the soundtrack is great too.
Personally from the screenshots and the vids I didn’t feel like the game would be for me. Is there actual story? Are there fun characters to hang with?
Bethesda games have quite a recognizable formula, and this seems like their blandest implementation.
But hey, i am basing this on the other games and a handful of material. Ill probably crack it and wait for it to lower in price big time.
Yeah, the story/stories and characters are the actual meat of the game. It’s not a space sim like Star Citizen or NMS, it’s an RPG first and foremost, really.
Also, so far (~20 hours in) it’s way less bland than Fallout 4. It’s a way more of an RPG (I talked my way out of confrontations multiple times, sometimes even using my background and traits, when relevant). Sure, if you just keep landing on planets and going to the auto generated structures and scanning wildlife, it’s probably gonna be quite bland. But there’s way more actual content, way more actual quests that aren’t just clearing out bandits/raiders. The space sim-y stuff, that’s just there to sell the fantasy. Yes, you can be a bounty hunter or space trucker or whatever, but that content is of course going to be way more autogenerated, bland stuff. I’d recommend doing that stuff on the side, when you want a break from story heavy quests.
But even clearing out raiders is often waymore fun in Starfield, especially when it’s in space. For example, I came across an abandoned zero-gravity casino space station that spacers (one of this games version of raiders and bandits) were in, while I was on my way to the space cowboy city, and that was a very fun fight.
Another time, I was heading back to New Atlantis when I noticed a symbol for a ship in the same system. When I went to investigate, I first got into a dogfight with another ship, disabled their engine and borded them, then I noticed there was some kind of heavy freighter they were raiding, so I docked with that. On that ship, the engines were funky and as they were turning on and off the gravity was going, too, so I was fighting my way through a ship where the gravity was constantly fluctuating, which then also factored into small environmental puzzles, like waiting for the gravity to turn off to go up an elevator shaft. Eventually got to into the vault the space pirates were trying to get into, and although I couldn’t get all of it because I didn’t have a high enough lockpicking skill (the new lockpicking minigame is also kinda fun, ngl), but I did pick up some contraband. When I then finally actually went to New Atlantis, the contraband was caught by the scanners, I was arrested and then forcibly conscripted to go undercover into the Crimson Fleet (the space pirates), although I could’ve killed my way off the ship they brought me to if I wanted. Then the contact to get into the Crimson Fleet was actually the same person that gave the orders to attack that freighter I found! (There was an audiolog, because of course.) Sorry for going off on a tangent, I just felt like it would illustrate my point better than just saying “it good”
I also probably have like 5 other quests in my quest log to go join some faction, some big factions, some small factions. And that’s without even going to the cyberpunk city.
And so far I haven’t had to follow a dog for 20 minutes in search of a chainsmoker, so that’s already better than Fallout 4.
Please don’t apologize for the tangent. It’s giving me high hopes that I’m going to like the game despite the flaws and (probably mostly legit) criticism of reviewers.
If you need a little more hope, I keep stumbling into cool and unique handcrafted locations and encounters all over the place, just doing side stuff, like, I just delivered two passengers and in doing so found two unique locations in the target star system. I originally feared it was mostly the three major cities getting the handcrafted stuff, but nope, there’s a ton of it out there.
Yes, there’s a lot of loading screens, but, honestly, I hardly even realize they’re there because they are legitimately just like 2 seconds on PC.
Honestly, I just keep kinda having that sort of look. Like, recently I was in need of Titanium, but all of the planets I found that had some were extreme environments I am not equipped for, so I couldn’t collect much. But I did stumble onto an an abandoned ship that just happened to be loaded with the stuff! Now, the crew on that ship also all died of a mysterious illness shortly after picking up the ore, but, hey, I need to mod my weapons.
I also may have genocided some dinosaurs for another resource I had a hard time getting.
For codecs it is highly dependent on the release group. For 4K it is the only valid option, but for 1080p a lot of groups make their x265 encodes too small and sacrifice quality. Take a look at the group rankings in the trash guides for sonarr and radarr for a general idea if who is the best/worst.
As for Tdarr, you should only really use it for audio and subtitle processing. For one you should not re-encode video so unless you’re starting with remuxes you’re further degrading video that is already degraded. And for two it’s best left to the people who know what settings to tweak for each movie or episode. There is no universal setting that works well for everything so while you might be able to get acceptable quality with automation it’s never going to be great. The best groups already took the time and effort to get it right so you might as well get those and save yourself the time/electricity.
Grids aren’t needed to get the same effect in a computer game. Also, when speaking about video games specifically, “grid based” combat has a bit of technical differences that you don’t necessarily want or need in a strategy game. It affects positioning and animations. It makes diagonal movement and height changes awkward. It makes sense when playing PnP and helping to visualize and handle rules. But when a computer is doing all that in the background, having the freedom of movement and the visuals match a more realistic way of traversing terrain is better.
I don’t really like grid-based movement in video games. It always feels weirder. It always shows how absurd some rules based on positioning are. It just sucks vs the more fluid style like BG3 has. Like, I love me some XCom, but I’ve played knock-offs that don’t use grids, and they feel way better.
If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. It’s possible that this site you found is perfectly safe, but it’s also very possible that it’s a honeypot or they’re serving up their cracks with a side of malware. I would recommend known torrent websites and reputable crack builders. Running a custom, unsigned .exe is already a risky activity, don’t make it more dangerous.
I can’t believe no one said Crusader Kings 2 nor Dwarf Fortress yet. The tutorial in CK II is so bad, it somehow makes thing more confusing, it is much better to just start a game in an easy location like Ireland and learn the game by yourself.
Dwarf Fortress has a tutorial nowadays, but I started playing it many years ago when you had no choice but to alt-tab to the wiki and figure out things on your own.
I mean, what’s another way of easily conveying the same idea. “Those people who you might not typically consider to be X”?
I feel like I’ve seen and heard normies used in a variety of contexts, to refer to people outside of a particular group. Not to say they can’t be in the group, or that there’s anything wrong with them.
You’d have to say all 3 of those, and then you’d still be missing a ton of the other groups that also fall under “normies”, even in just this specific instance. “Non-hardcore gamers” would work in this context, but the whole point is to have jargon for it as a concept (“someone who is not a member of your specialized in-group”), rather than saying the specific in-group being discussed each time. “Non-Supernatural fandom-nerds”, “non-/a/ lurkers”, “non-r/SocialistRA lurkers”… or just “normies”.
I think what isn’t being discussed enough is how many fans of games like Dragon Age Origins this game is pulling in.
What this game does is straddles the difference between classic CRPGs like the original Baldurs Gate and modern, cinematic RPGs like Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect, whose games began to veer into very action-oriented cinematic style as opposed to classic three-quarter-overhead-view turn-based style. It also brings the cinematic aspect to romancing companions as well, something that was also pioneered in DAO and ME. Other games had ability to romance as well, but not deeply like DAO and ME made it, with their cinematic style allusion-to-sex scenes.
This game does both and so it is grabbing the attention of people who loved classic CRPGs like Baldurs Gate, Fallout and Neverwinter Nights, but it’s also grabbing the attention of more “normie(?)” players who cut their teeth on Dragon Age Origins through Inquisition.
It’s a “best of both worlds” approach that has solidified success because it appeals to the people who loved classic CRPGs as well as the people who wanted the cinematic beauty as well as ability to cinematically romance companions. It has beautiful cinematic detail as well as a fully fleshed out CRPG system and non-linear CRPG story. It’s giving players of all types what they wanted out of an RPG.
Also, excellent console controls directly help this. Old CRPGs required a mouse and keyboard, but I can play this game split-screen with my SO who only ever played the Dragon Age games and who I struggled to get into D&D previously.
My SO fucking loves this game, and she wouldn’t have ever been opened up to such a style of game without the excellent cinematic graphics alongside the top tier classic CRPG gameplay. There is no way in hell I could get her to play a strictly top-down no-cinematics classic CRPG. This game opened her up to the genre. It’s essentially the perfect modernization of a classic CRPG.
This is it right here, at least for me personally. I’m a huge Dragon Age fan (played through DAO and DA2 before Inquisition’s release) who has always been vaguely interested in Larian’s Divinity Original Sin games but never made them a priority in my backlog. Seeing the cinematic cutscenes and the 3rd-person voice acted dialog for BG3 made me immediately interested and now I’m 10-ish hours deep into Baldur’s Gate and loving it!
Also slowly resigning myself to DA4 not even coming close to matching BG3 in quality given the circumstances of its development.
I can finally play D&D instead of always being the default GM! Yay!
It’s a fantastic game and I am having a blast with it. It’d be neat if they found a way to incorporate a little more of the utility stuff (scrying etc.) but I can imagine how difficult that would be. The scope of what you can do in the game is definitely much farther than I thought they’d go!
Scrying type spells are not in the game as far as I know. There are a lot of non-combat spells in D&D that are not present, likely because they are based on creative liberties, and difficult to replicate on a computer.
If you’re not averse to piracy, you could go that route.
If you are averse to piracy, and have consoles to play on, buy used copies of games (where it’s even possible to) - the publisher sees no proceeds from that.
Failing that… There’s a lot of great indie games out there that aren’t problematic. I know it feels like you’re missing out if you aren’t playing whatever the current big AAA game is, but really, there’s plenty of indie games that are just as good, or that you’d get just as much enjoyment out of.
I'd recommend against piracy in either case. Part of the action you take as a consumer is not just refusing to give Bad Company A your money, but you're also giving Bad Company A's product less attention and mindshare while spending money and attention on Good Company B's product, encouraging more of Good Company B's product to be made. The likes of Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard, etc. used to be the companies that made games that a lot of us loved, but they trimmed their portfolios of their less profitable (note that I didn't say "unprofitable") games, which means they're not scratching all of the itches they used to scratch, and they've diluted a lot of the games that we still enjoy with business models that encroach right up to the point where they annoy or anger us. So if the business models they're using now piss you off, it's important to stop supporting those and instead show that buying a great product at a fair price is what we as customers want.
For me, if a game requires an internet connection instead of letting us host our own servers or run a LAN or run local play totally offline, I don't buy it, I don't pirate it, I don't play it. I just move on to games that respect their customers.
You know, it’s funny, I used to feel big FOMO when it came to games I wanted to play. Then the Epic Game Store came along, and started paying for timed exclusives, and I adopted the philosophy that I’d just wait for the games to get a Steam release.
There’s only been a handful of instances where I even bothered buying them once they came to Steam; turns out that by not buying them when they’re being hyped by all of the new release marketing, I’ve mentally moved on to other things by the time they come to Steam, and I just don’t feel the need to buy them anymore. I just needed help getting past that initial mental hurdle.
The same applies to companies whose philosophies I object to; as long as I have a reason to mentally justify not buying them initially, I just lose interest in the products entirely very quickly.
People would often respond to me with the sentiment that "games aren't fungible", which is true, but there's so much good stuff out there that something else will be pretty close to the itch you're looking to scratch, great in its own ways, and you don't have to feel lousy about supporting it. Like if Diablo IV feels scummy, I hear Grim Dawn is great. That kind of thing.
Hades really is a banger. I cannot wait for Hades 2, my goodness.
Another perfect game for me is Outer Wilds. It’s hard to really get across the emotional impact it has on you.
Unfortunately due to the nature of the game, you can only really ever play it once. You are able to complete the game immediately, but the whole point is you discover clues as you explore that eventually build up to a point where it all clicks together, and suddenly you know what you must do.
Go in completely blind. Play on your own with your headphones on and get truly immersed. Try not to look up any guides. If you can get there on your own it’s truly satisfying.
When people say videogames are stupid I think of this game and feel sorry for what these people miss out on!
Edit: Oh mechabellum too - great shout. It’s criminal how small the player base is for such an addictive and fun game.
I’ve already told my wife that if I suffer a brain injury and lose all memories, to not bother showing me pictures of our wedding day or any of that guff. I want to play The Outer Wilds again.
Although having said that she might take the opportunity to pretend she never met me.
Outer Wilds is top of my list for most profound video game experiences. I have never went from joy to thinking "Oh. Oh..." so fast in one game. Plus, the music and graphics are so well done and support the narrative themes and mood. Just a masterpiece game.
I need to play Outer Wilds. I think I actually own it already, but I’ve not got round to it. You’re like the fourth person I’ve seen in this thread mention it
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