I just finished the first really hard boss (Balteus) and I’m having a ball. Can recommend. But play it on PC with KB+M. I know it’s a fromsoft game, but the KB+M controls are 10X as good as gamepad controls.
I feel like I would have beat Balteus by now if I had the game on PC instead of PS5. Even with the auto lock aiming, this asshole moves around faster than I can turn the camera with a stick, even with the camera speed at 10.
Edit: Wait… Does the PS5 version support M&KB…? 🤔 I’ll have to try later when I have the chance.
I beat him with a hardcore mobility and missiles build, but I’ve heard he’s much more doable if you switch to a superheavy build of all plasma weapons (the “Meefcake” is its name in the meta). One thing I noticed is his movement habits make him pretty vulnerable to missiles, which catch up to him when he holds still.
With mouse and keyboard where you can track him well he’s very fun to fight in close range since he likes to hold still for his missile volleys (you can pour in the damage while dodging), except that his ability to punish you with the bazooka means every screw-up is lethal when you’re in close. And that’s 10X worse when he gets his flaming sword.
I feel limited in my options because I’ve gotten everything I possibly can to mix up my mech at this point through the missions and the logcabin stuff, and while I do want to be a plasma goblin, I can’t even use 2 plasma guns without overloading my energy, let alone adding in the shoulder cannons. :/
I only have access to two generators. And one of those is the one I started with.
Wow. It dropped at a rough time, too. BG3 is still going nuts and Starfield is coming soon. It's the kind of thing I'd love to check out but those two (and probably Madden because it's football season) are just going to eat the absolute hell out of my time.
It will be interesting to see how these kind of things develop over the next few years. Of course, it’s very enticing for developers to use AI voices, as they can probably save massive amounts of money through it. Will the voice actors have any options to stop this?
And lots of non-VAs/amateurs/non-union-VAs will be willing to sell their voice for a day’s work and a shockingly small cheque. You don’t need professional voice actors if you can get a wide enough range of voices to mix to simulate any desired voice. “Voice mixing” will be a new job pretty quickly.
I’m looking forward to and dreading this at the same time. I really enjoyed Elden Ring but eventually got burnt out playing it after Leyndell and just started googling what I’d missed and doing it before finishing the game.
I hope this dlc is more focused and not another 150 hours of content. I’d be more than happy with 20 - 30. Also show us Miquella!
I feel you, I’ve been burning out right after Lyndell, went from no Spirit Ashes straight to the mimic one and rushed the remainder. Missed most of it, I presume. On the plus side, I’ve been edging to play the last stretch ‘for real’ and am wating for the DLC to do so.
I’m not really interested in any MMOs these days which all deemphasize player interaction and prioritize content completion. I’m sure it appeals to the widest audience and thus is the easiest way to pay the bills, but it also makes for a braindead experience.
I’m reservedly optimistic given the wow vets involved, but if they do stuff like:
adding fast travel portals instead of reliance on player mages,
random dungeon finder,
random cross-realm interaction at the cost of fostering server communities,
and otherwise make a single player experience where other players might happen to appear,
then It’s not interesting to me. Also, I don’t think being a retail wow clone will be enough to dethrone retail wow.
I mean, it has fast travel points. It has cross sever interaction (mega servers). The dungeon finder needs work for sure. It’s definitely playable as a solo experience and when other people show up it isn’t bad. Not lining up to kill a mob as anyone who hits it gets credit. No sharing resource deposits so you don’t get upset if someone else is mining shit while you are. They’ve done an okay job at making endgame more accessible with strikes and challenge modes recently, though if you want pure endgame it’s likely not the game for you. But from what the poster had said, it has almost everything they asked for.
Honestly the dungeon finder is super helpful to people like me who have a small amount of time to play. I think they should have treated it like Raid Finder though and had it give lesser loot to encourage doing it properly.
RDF is useful if the goal is completing content, but not if the goal is interacting with other people, which I believe is a crucial part of the MMO acronym, even when I don’t have much time to game. If my goal is to complete content, there are more interesting single player games I can spend my limited amount of game time playing than WoW.
IMO modern WoW is designed to give you the sensation of completing content so rapidly that you mistake the resulting dopamine hits for the feeling of having fun. Meanwhile, anything that could interrupt that cycle of hits has been optimized out, which includes virtually any dependency on another player. (Vanilla has quests that require you to find another player to craft you an item! They never made that “mistake” again…)
I currently run a 10m “dad” guild in WotLK classic. We’re only on for 1 night a week for 3h to raid, and virtually every week at least 2 people can’t make it due to work, family, or other reasons. And it’s fine. Yeah, we progress slower, we still haven’t even fully cleared Ulduar which was 2 phases ago, but it makes for a more rewarding experience IMO. The goal isn’t completing content, it’s interacting with other people.
Meanwhile, when you queue in RDF, no one talks, everyone already knows all the fights, and if you don’t keep up you will be vote kicked. I don’t see the appeal. TBH I don’t even see anything “massively multiplayer” about WoW these days. Everyone else running around could be bots and I wouldn’t have any way of knowing. The hardcore WoW servers are probably where the most interesting multiplayer experiences are happening these days.
While true, I feel like games that work well on the Xbox Series S also work well on Steam Deck and when it comes to porting games to PC, those ones specifically are ported well.
All this power game developers have been getting, while great for creative endevours, has been either a waste of space or require outrageous specs just to perform normally. And some great games are bogged down by this while relying on upscaling methods to fill in the difference.
Either way, we’ve reached a point where more power and space isn’t the solution anymore to better games. Can only hope new tech gets better optimized.
Imagine relying on free labor to fix your broken ass game, and then having people defend you when called out for making a boring game that relies on free labor for content.
Imagine thinking that what is very probably the most hand-crafted content ever in a 3D game, with one of the broadest variety of choices for anything close to that scale, is a game lacking content.
It's not an opinion. If you ignore straight procedural generation with no human input like no man's sky, Starfield is very probably the biggest 3D game ever made. The fact that it's an absolutely massive game isn't debatable in any way.
Nobody who's played it is making the ridiculous claim that they ran out of content. It's fundamentally not possible for "relying on mods for content" to be in good faith.
BG3 is a top down CRPG. Having 3D assets and being a 3D game with full 3D movement aren't the same thing.
And whether it's more content is debatable. There's more pure story and production, with a lot of branching, but the overall amount of space (not counting Starfield's use of negative space because of the setting) is significantly smaller. And even in terms of total number of quest lines, Starfield has a lot. Which you can get more time out of is all about personal preference. There will be people with 1000 hours in both, easy.
Turn based and action are mutually exclusive. It is not and does not resemble an action game.
The assets are 3D. You do not play in 3D. You do not cast a spell and have the physics of your interaction calculated in real time while 10 other characters are simultaneously acting and having their spells calculated based on the real time movements of all the other characters. You do not hit a jump button and have where you land determined by your speed and direction. The actual gameplay mechanics are all pure dice roll. There are no 3D physics in play.
Your jump must be decided by the vector of your movement when you hit the button. If it is not, there is literally nothing you can do to qualify.
Your actions must be aimed in real time and the outcome determined by the vector of your aim. Hitscan is shit, but it can qualify. If the action (not the vector of the shot) is decided by a dice roll, you unconditionally do not qualify.
There's plenty more. But BG3 is not and does not in any way mechanically resemble a 3D action RPG. It has no common traits. The camera perspective outside of combat isn't relevant.
I think you’re simply misunderstanding what “3D” means. 3D does not mean real-time, dynamic, or anything else. It simply means 3D. BG3 is entirely in 3D. Every single asset is 3D hell the entire explorable world is 3D. So yes, it quite literally is a 3D game. With action. Making it a 3D action game.
Think of what the alternative would be. Is this a 2D action game? Obviously not.
If you’re looking for a 3D real-time action game then yeah, this isn’t that. But that’s not what anyone’s arguing.
Edit: Also… is your argument that a game like Morrowind isn’t in 3D? Just because hits are handled by dice rolls? That’s insane lol.
No, it is not. You do not have a position in 3D space. You have a position on one of a small number of discrete 2D planes. BG3 is a 2D pure CRPG that happens to be decorated with 3D assets. Calling it a 3D game is the exact same unforgivable fraud as calling Metroid Dread one. It is not and does not in any way resemble it.
If you aren't strictly in real time for combat, you unconditionally cannot be or resemble an action game.
To be fully 3D, literally every part of the core gameplay physics must occur in real time. Hits cannot be determined by any other factor but the vector of the attack projected through 3D space into a character's hit box. The existence of a dice roll to determine a hit (not the vector) is an unconditional disqualifier in all contexts. There are no exceptions, and no room for them.
Everything about your description of BG3 is fully unhinged nonsense that should be offensive to any human being with any understanding of what games are. They aren't nitpicks. You're fundamentally destroying the core definition of very basic terms in a way that completely destroys all meaning. It would be less disgusting to be a flat earther.
In BG3 you do have a position in 3D space, what’re you talking about? Have you ever even played the game? My money’s on no.
Metroid Dread is a side scroller in which only one dimension is ever viewable outside of cutscenes. BG3 is a full 3D world with full camera movement, to the point of being an over the shoulder third person game should you choose to play it that way. They’re apples and oranges.
If you aren’t strictly in real time for combat, you unconditionally cannot be or resemble an action game.
If this were true then the term “real-time action” wouldn’t exist, as the term would be redundant. Besides, how do you then define games that have a bit of both, like Chrono Trigger? The whole thing seems a bit silly to me.
Hits cannot be determined by any other factor but the vector of the attack projected through 3D space into a character’s hit box.
So again, by your definition a game like Morrowind wouldn’t be considered a 3D game. That’s completely unhinged lol, nobody would agree with that. Clearly your definition is a bit flawed.
You’re fundamentally destroying the core definition of very basic terms in a way that completely destroys all meaning. It would be less disgusting to be a flat earther.
…I think maybe you need to take a break and go outside or something.
Literally everything about game development is a trade off. It's not possible to make a game at 5% of Starfield's scale as polished as a rockstar game. The difference in scale is too massive.
The scope of Bethesda games is a huge part of the point. Nobody else makes anything similar to what they offer.
UE5 is "the same engine" iterated on in the same way Bethesda's is, there are plenty of games using UE that don't run well, and it would take plenty of custom work to build to Bethesda's scale using it.
The current iteration of Unreal is completely unrecognizable from its original rendition, meanwhile this new version of the Creation Engine literally retains bugs present back in the days of Gamebryo. You simply can’t compare the two. But, in Bethesda’s defense, this isn’t due to incompetence or anything. It’s due to resource allocation and incentive.
There’s a reason most devs have been moving towards Unreal and away from making their own engines, and it’s because making your own proprietary engine takes insane amounts of time and resources - time and resources that devs don’t get any return on mind you. For most, it doesn’t make sense to dedicate loads of time to polishing an engine, when that time could be better spent on your next game - a game that you actually do get a return on.
Unreal is completely different in this regard, as Epic actually does get a return on their investment into the engine, as the engine itself is their product. So they have every incentive to polish Unreal as much as possible. That’s why it’s so insanely polished and indistinguishable from its original rendition. Not because all engines magically improve over time and at the same rate.
I know Todd Howard said that engines are somehow meaningless, and then a bunch of Bethesda fans took that and ran with it as a way to defend any criticism of the Creation Engine, but unfortunately it’s just not that simple.
And to be clear, I want the Creation Engine to succeed. I’ve been modding Bethesda games since 2013 and am still active in the modding community! The engine is rough but makes all of it possible, and the community at this point knows it so well that it’d be devastating to suddenly lose it all. But Bethesda needs to sit down and really dedicate some time to overhauling it, and unfortunately, albeit understandably, I just don’t see that happening.
Internet commenters keep getting dumber and dumber. I figured anyone with two brain cells to rub together would see that human beings can understand nuance and that not everyone likes or dislikes the same things and that the entire game is not 100% objectively bad.
People tend to think on black and white and not grayscale.
If you objectively compare the mechanics, writings and factions to fallout 4, Starfield is almost a direct upgrade from fallout 4 in several aspects. Gunplay, gun customization, rpg check choices that play more role in having a unique experience, factions that arent totally terribly written like it is in FO4, where almost all factions are unlikable or not interesting.
The people who are let down by starfield expected bethesda to not make a bethesda game in simple terms.
Do i think its GOTY material, hell no (im basically at the point of no return point in the game). Its a helluva lot better than FO4, but people treat the game like it killed their first child.
Well, I wouldn't necessarily say the exploration is as good, I think the issues about not having maps and there being a lot of loading screens are valid, but those problems don't automatically make the game horrible, and while the optimization isn't awesome after the recent update and Nvidia driver it looks decent and runs at an almost always locked out 60 FPS on my RTX 3060 with the settings lowered, so if you want the better visuals you can get there, and if you wanna play with smooth frame rate you can make that work, too. Again, not that that excuses it, but it's not irredeemably bad.
I think it's important that people understand what works about the game and what doesn't, whether they come to an end result of liking it or not, I hate to see people shit on it wholesale, and I also hate to see people defend it wholesale as well. It's got problems, but it's got successes, too.
I've actually been really enjoying it. It's a pleasant universe to just get absorbed in.
Sure, it's got a lot of very valid complaints (performance, UX etc.) but they matter less to me the more I get into it. Writing is not groundbreaking, but it gets pretty good. Since very good voice acting from otherwise random NPCs.
Also the first game I've played that lets me use non-binary pronouns as a third option, rather than just Gendered or not. Very cool and I hope to see more games do that.
I'd say the most disappointing thing is how straightforward almost every quest is. They don't do what Obsidian does in games like New Vegas and Outer Worlds where lots of quests have multiple resolutions, some hidden. In this game if it's not in the objective list it's usually not an option. It's the typical Bethesda experience of course, rather than Obsidian's, so it's still nice for what it is.
It's the closest I've personally felt to exploring and interacting with the worlds of Mass Effect 1 and Knights of the Old Republic in a long time. It's got that sense of wander about it for me.
Yeah the straightforward quests are sometimes a little disappointing.
I.e. there’s a tiny side quest where you have to get some rich guys wedding ring back from his fiance. You go to the fiance and that say that they saw the rich guy cheating (having a conversation) with the waiter at their favorite restaurant, and that they shouldn’t have to give the ring back.
I went back to the rich guy to find out if this was true, and to insert myself firmly into their drama, but there was no new dialogue from the rich guy. I just had to pick a dialogue option to either take the ring or let the fiance keep it.
It would have been nice to be able to confirm my suspicions that they were just being friendly with the waiter, not cheating, and maybe get the two back together. But no it was go to person A, get quest, speak to person B, return with ring/update that they are keeping it.
There are some great quests, and lots of cool world building, but the RP portion is sometimes a bit lacking compared to (as you mentioned) New Vegas.
The only game that scratches the space exploration itch Elite doesn't quite scratch (I mean, Elite is very good, but has it's shortcomings when it comes to on-foot stuff). Ship interiors, base building and having actual life on planets, not just some fungoida and bacterium patches, alone are a reason to be excited about Starfield. Also, jetpack combat.
Funny how Elder Scrolls veterans are enjoying the game for what it is while bitter Playstation diehards, wishful thinkers with gigabyte-sized dreams.txt and bandwagon-o'-hate jumpers are complaining about things that never were to be so loud you can clearly hear the "Reeeeeeeeeee...." from Alpha Centauri😏
I will happily continue to not pay for games that do this and I won’t be missing out on anything.
This is on par with restaurants that microwave garbage food. They’re phoning it in to squeeze as much profit as possible out of the product. That tells me you don’t want to make games people enjoy, you want to make games that do nothing but maximize profit. I ain’t here for that shit. I’m willing to pay money for companies that respect art and trades, not ones that worship capitalism and exist to appease assholes in suits.
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