Pretty excited to get my hands on this game 5 days later! Reviews are surprisingly more split than I expected, with some calling it an easy 10/10 while others call it shallow. The general impressions are: If you like Fallout, you’ll love this game. I like Fallout, so I’m in.
By the way, IGN gave this game a 7/10, which is a new one for them because they hand out 9/10s like candy.
This game is on my to buy list, but probably in a few years when they have ironed out all the issues and dropped the DLC in a GOTY or whatever edition they make later.
Console is downscaled and 30fps and one guy on pc had 45-70fps 1440p high settings using a 3600x/2080ti. But yeah, more performance info should pop up soon :)
I'm thinking Steam Deck. Or wait for the Switch 2 and expect a port to that (Microsoft seems to have no problem putting exclusives on Nintendo platforms, c.f. Ori)
I kind of enjoyed fallout but it did feel very shallow for an RPG. I’m hoping this one does a bit better in that regard but I’m trying to temper my expectations.
Fallout had a lot of clever environmental storytelling, vignettes in random buildings, drama happening via terminal logs throughout abandoned factories, etc.
I hope that Starfield hasn’t gotten rid of that aspect of their world building.
I think many ambitious games recently get divisive ratings. I remember many cyberpunk 2077 reviews rated it highly praising the (imo excellent) highs while minimizing the lows before many reviewers bashed it for the bugs and incomplete scope. When these reviews come out it almost feels like the reviewers are scared to be the first to open the “hey it’s bad” floodgates
Elden ring was my first “souls like” game and it was also an open world game too. For a gamer who wasn’t accustomed to these kinds of games, it was a totally different experience for me.
Elden ring I think is still much more accessible for a newcomer. If you try Dark Souls 1, you’ll realize that the difficulty of the game also learns pretty hard into more tedious aspects.
Getting cursed in Dark Souls 1 means you’re HP is capped to half until you find the cure, as an example.
I always figured this was an intentional part of the design philosophy. The game lets players write and read one- or two-sentence strategy guides anywhere in the world. I took the hint and figured they wanted me to look up strategy guides.
What’s your concern? I’ve never heard any issues with purchasing anything on VPN. In fact, it’s recommended to save money by getting around geo-pricing
It is against the steam subscriber agreement to use a VPN. Particularly if you’re using it to get around a region restricted game. Will they check and catch you? Probably not, but they can. It’s definately not recommended though.
(assuming your home country is USA) You are allowed to purchase games from US websites while you travel. As long as the purchase is linked to your US payment method, with US residence address on the bill, it does not matter where I’m the world you connect from.
You might raise suspicion if you bought something via NL VPN, using Dutch credit card and address. Otherwise you are all good.
This whole quest scene was so unexpected, disturbing, hilarious and made me fall in love with the game. The timer for this choice makes the situation feel like a real intense JESUS FUCK WHAT DO I DO moment
Simulation games, like the ones Maxis used to make (other than SimCity). SimEarth, SimAnt, SimTower, etc. Those were educational and fun.
I also once played a simulation game that realistically simulated running a shipping business where you shipped things by boat, sailing your fleet from port to port, dropping off your cargo and loading new cargo, giving the occasional bribe, etc. while avoiding bankruptcy. I think it was called “Port of Call.” It was made a long time ago, and I haven’t played anything quite like it since then.
I want to see puzzles that are implemented using the physics engine. And I don’t mean “toss the axe in the proper arc to trigger the gate” physics. I mean “stack the bricks on one end of the seesaw to balance it long enough to make the jump to the next platform”. Or “use the blue barrels’ buoyancy to raise the platform out of the water”.
Yesss and more destruction physics. I miss watching cars crumple and get torn apart like in the burnout games. There was a really old ww2 dogfighting game where the plane wings could get sawn off and you’d see this smoking plane spiralling into the ground while the wing flew off in the opposite direction before the plane exploded on the ground.
If I'm going to put 100+ hours into a game, there better be a setting to mute BGM, because no matter how good the OST is I will eventually tire of it and want to listen to something else.
Similarly, granular audio options that separate dialogue from ambient from music from system sounds. Definitely don’t need my ears blown out just to hear dialogue.
I like having the background music very low, but not off, system sounds a bit above that, sound effects higher than system but lower than dialogue, which is maxed. And of course ambient sound levels really depend on the game and what kind of ambiance it has.
Same thing with granular contrast/gamma/etc. Don’t just provide a few preset options, especially if they can only be set before you start the game (also they should never only be set from the main menu, never). Let the player choose whatever they want on the fly. I love playing with everything bright so I can see wtf I’m doing, I don’t give half a shit if the devs think it should be so dark it’s not navigable. I disagree.
I’d love it if a group could collude on a standard for music signals.
Imagine this: You have a music player following this signal standard.
Game starts, it signals GAME_STARTED, and the media player signals STOP_GAME_MUSIC, so the game itself plays no BGM, leaving it to the music player. But, then the game can also signal later on: THEME_MENUS, THEME_EXPLORE, THEME_COMBAT, THEME_BOSS; and the media player can respond to that by cross fading between playlists built for each.
I’m all for easy difficulty options in games, but I’m never, ever going to use them. I just can’t motivate myself to play if I’m not accomplishing something.
Well that’s not true either. I mean sometimes, sure, but in general if you know what you want and you work towards it, you can accomplish things and be rewarded.
This is the thing, everyone is different. What is difficult for some, will be easy for others, and it will even flip for the same people on different games.
The best option is having a wide array of difficulty options. In stone games I get bored of it’s too easy, in others I get bored of it’s too hard.
I tend to err on ‘normal’ to ‘slightly more difficult than normal’. But some games I don’t want difficulty at all because I’m there for the ride.
I keep on getting told this by people, especially fans of FeomSoft and soulslikes.
I figured I’d take a crack at them this year, and also Bloodborne is my boyfriend’s favorite game, so I played it. And that feeling that everyone describes about the satisfaction and accomplishment… Never happened. I beat the bosses and was just like… Okay, on to the next one then I guess. I did have a much better time playing through co-op with him, but I still wouldn’t say I felt accomplished by it.
I don’t really like tower defense games, but I would never dream about trying to tell devs that they’re doing it wrong because I don’t like how they do it. I just don’t play them.
Well… You totally can. I like towerr defense games too, but I’ve never played one that I would call perfect. Even my favorite games I could dig deep and give design notes on. Where it’s feasible a lot of games have mods or hacks. A lot of people like Pokemon romhacks more than actual games. I put hundreds of hours into Civ 6 starting vanilla, but mods can fix a lot of the little inconveniences and add new content to the game. I think I’m in the minority of Skyrim players who prefers to keep it vanilla- most people mod the hell out of it.
Bloodborne was still fun, especially on subsequent runs and with co-op. I think it would be a way better game overall if they designed any sort of real onboarding experience. A training dummy in the hunter’s dream, maybe the ability to try out different weapons there before investing resources into them. Using better language (shooting someone is not a “parry”, and why does the axe do blunt damage while the hammer does piercing damage?). An actual goddamn map. A journal system to keep track of what you’ve done in the game so it’s easier to pick up again 3 months later. Clear item descriptions that include numbers. Explanations for what the stats actually do. None of this is what I would call “difficulty”, and once you gain the initial knowledge and experience these problems aren’t as big of a deal, but it does make the game a lot less accessible for new players.
And I question how much value their absence really adds to the players who do stick around to push through and get that experience. It seems like more of a marketing gimmick to be “different” and foment an elitist, hipster-esque fan base. Or maybe it’s a question allocating of the development resources. It’s a shame because there’s a lot of great design too, it’s just hidden behind these frustrating problems that the rest of the industry solved decades ago.
If I wasn’t motivated to play it for my boyfriend I would have just dropped it early on. I don’t feel like I accomplished anything by suffering through that frustration, I just feel annoyed that I had to deal with these problems I feel like I should not have existed in a 2015 game.
For me, good story and/or fun gameplay is the accomplishment, whether it’s difficult or not. If it’s too difficult, I just won’t bother. I don’t have time for that.
So I remember once “playing” a visual novel.
Over the period of ~10 hrs of reading (maybe ~ 4 hrs for a normal-speed reader), there was exactly 1 (one) point, where I had a choice to make.
The rest was just clicking “next”.
That could have been a PDF (or 4, because there were 4 options in the choice) instead of a Windows executable.
Then there is this thing in scripted events, that some of the high budget games are guilty of.
It’s stuff like press button to open door or sth, where you are essentially stuck in place with nothing else to do other than press the button and whatever action is done, doesn’t end up increasing immersion in the least, because it is just like a cut-scene getting paused in between, just to say, ‘press button to continue watching the cut-scene’.
I recently played the new silent hill and I didn’t hesitate to put combat difficulty on easy, it was a matter of my own health at that point.
I could endure a horror story, but the stress of getting beaten up and having to run away from grotesque monsters while trying to solve cryptic puzzles was too much for me.
Minecraft Java edition got 1.19.1 back in July of 2022 that enabled chat reporting, message signing and server wide bans. It was the turning point where Microsoft pulled trust and control away from its users and begun acting more like a middleman.
The issue then would be migrating all of your existing server to an offline server auth method. If there’s anyone who doesn’t log in during the migration period, anyone else could nab their account name (and presumably everything that account has on it) once it’s fully swapped over.
Plus, if the server remains popular after this, Microsoft lawyers could pursue legal action on the operation to bypass their auth servers as well
It’s inevitable. Microsoft didn’t give Notch a billion dollars because they thought they could improve the product for the users. They bought it because of the number of users. They saw a revenue stream that wouldn’t require very many resources to maintain and that they could also expand to multiple microsoft platforms and then lock behind a walled-garden to sell access as a service. Of course they wanted to confine the player population to servers that microsfot controlled. That is the only way they could ensure that any add-ons/mods/players etc were gated behind their own storefront.
Nice choice, but personally I always found Terra a bit hard to relate to, very fey and even sort of creepy in her half-Esper form.
Celes, on the other hand, is a bonafide badass, and her storyline was among the better developed ones and more humanizing than most of the other characters in the game. Although romantically I think she could probably do better than Locke. That boy needs some help.
I kinda feel like Terra developed a bit more over the course of the game, from orphan half-fey under the control of the empire to joining a rebel group while finding herself and discovering her past. In the end she doesn’t get assigned a “love interest” and become mother to a bunch of war-orphans as she gets in touch with her humanity.
Celes comes in a bit more badass to start - as a super-soldier-serum (magic infused) general who turned against the same immoral empire - but a lot of her side story aside from the island is a bit… weird what with the whole Locke Ultros opera thing. It’s like the story writers couldn’t decide whether she was a superhero or damsel in distress.
Locke’s own backstory with the Phoenix quest is neat though.
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