Ashtear

@Ashtear@lemm.ee

Getting it done with the power of friendship since 1991.

🔥💨💧💎 🌒🌕🌘 ✨

Some suggested Lemmy communities:

!patientgamers

!jrpg

!retrogaming

Discord for Japanese-style role-playing game (JRPG) discussion: discord.gg/vHXCjzf2ex

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

Ashtear,

Unfortunately, it’s also here again with 2.0 so far. I started playing the game in 1.3, so this is the most buggy I’ve ever seen it. Vertex explosions, jumpy character animations, skills not working correctly, incorrect sound effects being played.

This is indeed the new normal, and I shouldn’t expect Phantom Liberty to run smoothly next week either. If took months after the recent big Witcher 3 update for it to play okay on mid-spec systems.

I think I was happier when I still catching up on games from a couple generations ago. Now that I’ve done that, I keep running into this stuff. 😕

Ashtear, (edited )

On my first run in XCOM 2, I made the mistake of designing a character that I liked (Bobbie Draper from The Expanse). I lost her pretty early and thought “ehhh, it was a low percentage thing, maybe just this once?” The floodgates were open to Savescum City after that.

Really annoyed at myself for doing it, because Enemy Unknown was so damn fun specifically because of the permadeath. I had a plucky, reckless recruit come in as a replacement about a third of the way into the campaign and she’d always just barely squeak by. She made colonel and became the senior officer on the squad through attrition before going down in a blaze of glory at the very end. The games are surprisingly good story generators.

Ashtear,

I’m firmly in the “no FeMC, no buy” camp, but I’m not really surprised. Including FeMC in this project would have dramatically increased the amount of dialogue, and they’ve already said P3R will have the most voiced lines ever for a Persona game.

Ashtear,

I first played Cyberpunk after 1.3 came out so I never had that early bad experience so many did (I only ran into one major bug, blocking progression in one sidequest). It was also my first introduction to anything in the Cyberpunk setting so I didn’t know what to expect, but I quickly fell in love with it. Even without Phantom Liberty, I’m sure I still have a half dozen major sidequests on top of the nomad origin story that I haven’t done yet.

I’m pumped for this, especially after being a bit disappointed in Starfield. I’m ready for graphics that pop again, the amazing facial animations, the fluid combat, and more Cherami Leigh. Hell, I’m ready to hear the character creator music again, lol.

Ashtear,

Not even that, but hostile takeovers are still exceedingly rare in Japan among domestic firms.

What buzz there is over this is just ethnocentric thinking.

Ashtear,

Well, they wouldn’t, because not all of the nine thought the game was perfect. A 100 on Metacritic only means the game placed in the top score for a given publication (4 out of 4 stars in WaPo’s case, for example).

In games criticism, a top score doesn’t always mean a perfect game. It can mean the game met or surpassed the current benchmark in its genre, or it simply was good enough to be in a top tier.

Ashtear, (edited )

Finished up my time with Starfield for now. If you’d told me a month ago that it would be the main story that would keep me playing, I wouldn’t have believed you. The story was way better than I was expecting and far and away my favorite one in a Bethesda game. As for the rest, ehhh. There are a lot of steps back here, and I really don’t like the visuals. Felt like my character was smoking inside her helmet or something. Having framerates regularly dip into the 40’s even with DLSS and tons of other tweaks really didn’t help.

I will say this: aside from some sounds with oddly harsh high frequencies (there’s a mod for that), the audio team really nailed this one. The voice acting is phenomenal, and I’d love to hear this soundtrack performed live.

Feeling non-committal at the moment. Was considering replaying Disco Elysium, but really I’m just waiting for the new Cyberpunk content.

Ashtear,

Shit-talking the god was worth the price of admission, too.

Ashtear,

Yeah, Vanillaware is one of the few remaining Japanese third-party devs to hold out on the PC market. The Japanese PC market is growing rapidly though, so hopefully we’ll see it later.

Then again, we were saying the same thing two years ago with 13 Sentinels.

Ashtear,

13 Sentinels had me seriously craving some nikuman.

Ashtear,

I’m amazed it took this long, honestly. These are like gaming chairs: overpriced configurations with a combination of features that result in lower quality/durability when put together. I switched to a separate desktop mic years ago (paired with a fantastic set of Sennheiser headphones, coincidentally) and haven’t looked back.

I highly recommend a dedicated mic. The low-end options are very affordable and you’ll still sound way better on Discord (or Zoom calls!) than you will on a gaming headset mic or a webcam mic.

Ashtear,

The Durai Papers were suppressed by the Church at the time. The overarching plot structure is that Orran’s descendant uncovered them centuries later and this is a retelling. I’m sure Orran could have had conversations with Ovelia, but I doubt there would have been much he could have told her that she hadn’t already seen with her own eyes. It’s probably like you said: Delita just couldn’t turn it off. He always struck me as the kind of person that woke up every morning reliving Tietra’s death in his dreams. Going on a successful crusade to wipe out the nobility might have satisfied him at the time, but it wouldn’t bring her back in the end.

As I recall from back in the late 90’s/early 2000’s, the discourse around the ending was largely the same. Plenty of people also thought the two surviving was a bit of an ass-pull. For me personally, it’s one of my favorite JRPGs, but I just pretend the plot ends somewhere in chapter 4. Wiegraf was the game’s best antagonist, and I was never big into the Lucavi plot anyway.

Ashtear,

The excellent Cane and Rinse podcast just did one as well.

Ashtear,

I was more speculating on what Delita was doing next. By the end of the war, the heads of virtually all the major houses are dead and he had strong support from the commoners, so it’s certainly possible he just upended the whole system. We don’t know, though. Given Delita made his deal with the church to rise to power and it taking centuries for the truth to come out, I’d say it’s implied that from then on Ivalice became a theocratic state or went heavily in that direction.

And yeah, the joke has been that it’s only there because JRPGs always have to have some sort of high stakes, non-human confrontation. I think Matsuno handled it much better in Tactics Ogre than he did here.

Ashtear,

Tactics Ogre Reborn works just fine too. Both it and LUCT have their pluses and minuses. The especially nice thing about Tactics Ogre (both of these versions) is that it has something like 4-5x the content that FFT has.

List of specific video game communities on the Threadiverse, feel free to comment with more (kbin.cafe) angielski

When I mean “specific,” I mean things like something dedicated to a certain genre, a certain video game, to gaming suggestions, to asking whether you should buy a certain game… anything that isn’t just one catch-all for any video gaming topic. So I’m not including the various !games@instance or !gaming@instance links....

Ashtear,

The ones for the bigger games (Baldur’s Gate 3, Starfield, probably Cyberpunk soon) have been active enough to make it work.

Ashtear,

Possibly. And if so, that’s perfectly okay.

Ashtear,

I’m on Starfield this week. About 12 hours in.

Have to admit, I’m struggling to have fun, which I really didn’t see coming. I have hundreds of hours in Fallout 4, probably over a thousand each in Fallout 3 and Skyrim, and I adore space settings, so this was my most anticipated game for years. Seemed like it would be a slam dunk.

Another huge surprise is that it might be the main story that’s keeping me going. I’ve never come close to being this invested in one of Beth’s stories.

Ashtear,

Yeah, the hope is that once I become familiar with what systems are available, what I should avoid, and what needs modding, I’ll be able to settle into the same cozy game loop as I have with the previous games.

What concerns me is I’m struggling with some of the core systems like bad companion AI (can’t reposition them in combat anymore for some reason), the main quests being so unpolished that I’m not exactly looking to jump into the side content, and especially the nested prereqs in the crafting system.

Ashtear,

Ooh, was this your first time with Freelancer? It’s amazing that it’s twenty years later and it might still be the benchmark for non-HOTAS space sims.

I enjoyed Shipbreaker much more than I thought I would. Not typically my style of gameplay, but the setting is fantastic.

Ashtear,

For context, just 100k is historically a good showing for a JRPG, especially one with this production size. Atelier Ryza hitting 500k back in 2020 was a big surprise. This is well on its way to that mark.

I think there’s an argument to be made that JRPGs haven’t been this mainstream since 1997, and even then it was just Final Fantasy in the west. The genre is much more diverse today. Amazing times.

Ashtear,

Sure, Fire Emblem had its breakout in the west with Awakening, but there were real discussions being had about the viability of the genre back in 2013. It was at the tail end of a really bad time (arguably the nadir) for JRPGs on consoles.

Persona 5, NieR: Automata, Dragon Quest XI, and Three Houses all being multi-million sellers is what sparked off the current, unprecedented era for the genre.

Ashtear,

I didn’t say popular, I said mainstream. Zelda isn’t often claimed by the genre, and Pokémon was literally the only other multi-million seller in the genre in the west.

Earthbound is the very definition of a cult classic, and Dragon Quest wasn’t even getting localized at that time.

Ashtear,

I’m shelving Baldur’s Gate 3 for now after a full run plus more. Had a great time with it, but I think I’d rather wait for more polish first before I tinker with it any more or check out the story branches/side quests in Act 3 I didn’t see.

I started playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker and I was surprised at how quickly it grabbed me. The story has a very similar vibe to Papers, Please and something about the UI and the artistic design is reminding me a lot of old space sims. Surprisingly cozy game, though I might look into seeing if I can swap out the music. Don’t know if I like what it says about me that I really like games that are work simulators, though.

Ashtear,

One thing I learned about the game fairly early on (actually in that same area, with a certain imprisoned bear) is that once you do something that makes NPCs hostile, they are going to stay hostile for good. That’s not to say there aren’t opportunities to flip allegiances a bit, but going fully subversive isn’t well-supported. And to a degree, that makes sense; a good DM’s going to make it difficult on you, because once you’re seen with the enemy, it’s going to take a lot of convincing.

For the Grymforge event, you can also just…

spoilernot excavate and let Nere die in the poison trap.

Ashtear,

Yes, there are a couple of situations in the game where one can end up in a dead end situation, and that’s probably the easiest of the bunch to stumble into. The player pretty much has to either make a deal with the chief ahead of time or just not do the battle. It’s not ideal, especially since it’s likely easy for a player to go into it when needing a rest, too.

Ashtear,

For sure. The core gameplay loop is in 15 minute segments, at least at the point I’m at.

Ashtear,

DuckTales

The Moon theme is now in my head.

Ashtear,

What resolution? I’m just a tier below with a 3060Ti + 10600k and a tech review has me worried my 1440p monitor is gonna be a problem.

I don’t want another situation like downtown in Fallout 4 on my last rig where I’m trying to play a FPS with framerate dips all over the place.

Ashtear,

Yeahhh, I found a great deal on this monitor but I was a dumbass and didn’t know how bad the down-rez is when running 1080p on a 1440p monitor😅

Other than not being able to use raytracing in CP2077 it hasn’t been a problem, but I’m think I’m going to start running into trouble from this point on. Oh well, I was thinking of getting another monitor for my workflow anyway…

Ashtear,

Between this and it now becoming clear how limited the space exploration is in Starfield, it’s a bad day for space sim fans.

Ashtear, (edited )

I really hope I’m wrong about this in five years, but it looks like No Man’s Sky did even more damage to the space sim genre than we thought. We’re in a year with great handcrafted experiences that still feel vast: Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur’s Gate 3, even Everspace 2 in a similar setting (and Everspace 2 wouldn’t have had the same, fatal loading screen issue if it was a AAA game). Starfield went the other direction.

By chasing the procedural generation dream, from everything I’ve seen, Bethesda really hamstrung the space exploration to get there. Fortunately I really like the old Bethesda formula, so hopefully the Skyrim/Fallout experience that’s still there will be enough for me to want to put hundreds of hours into it. I’m just hoping developers don’t keep trying to do this for games in space settings.

Ashtear,

Asking out of genuine ignorance here: is there a setup that allows a 100+ GB game to be played on the 64GB Steam Deck?

Ashtear,

Yeah, 256 is around $20 last I looked, too. Not bad. Been considering getting one, probably not for anything with an install this large, but it’s nice to know I’d have the option.

Ashtear,

I was fortunate enough to not run into any of the quest-breaking bugs. Had no issues doing what I wanted to do. What I did run into a lot was buggy scripting where dialogues assumed I had information I didn’t, so I wouldn’t know what my companions were talking about some of the time.

The bigger problem in my eyes is spells/items/class abilities/feats not working correctly and being outright non-functional in some cases. That’s going to be an enduring problem for replays, and it’s not encouraging to me that very little has been done on this since release.

I do think this game wouldn’t have scored as well as it did if so many publications didn’t rush to press with half a playthrough. In this particular case, I think the game–bugs and all–is still a strong GotY contender, but I really hope there’s a conversation being had in the professional games criticism sphere about how this practice could cause a scandal in the future.

As it is, I’m genuinely surprised the reviewers aren’t coming under fire more than they have for this. I come from an era where publishing a review without completing a game would have been unconscionable.

Ashtear,

For the items, etc. the ones I can remember offhand are:

  • Boots of Stormy Clamour (applies Reverberation with conditions) - never seen it proc with any of the conditions I’ve tried. Meanwhile, Diadem of Arcane Synergy will (likely incorrectly) proc on damn near anything, even self-buffs.
  • Jhannyl’s Gloves (auto-cures Poison/Paralyze/Blindness) - hasn’t worked for me once. The +1 to saving throws is active though.
  • Goad (disadvantage on attacks, from Battle Master subclass) - either doesn’t work or is very inconsistent.
  • Uncanny Dodge (Rogue) - I think everyone that’s played a Rogue knows this one. It’s got a weird passive effect implementation that auto-disables a lot.
  • Chromatic Orb - having occasional issues getting Storm Sorcerer’s Heart of the Storm to proc with this. Still pinning this one down, if anyone else has run into it?
  • Lucky (feat) - doesn’t reroll incoming crits.
  • Polearm Master (feat) - I have no idea where the bonus action is. Either I’m blind or it’s just missing.

There’s also stuff on the plus side, like Titanstring Bow double dipping with Lightning Charges or, famously, Haste and Haste-like effects (Elixir of Bloodlust) granting second attacks on each additional action for lv. 5+ martial classes. It’s possible Larian just balanced it this way, but I don’t think so. It’s crazy broken.

Ashtear,

Okay, I’m seeing it now. It’s sort of like Ranger’s Horde Breaker. It only appears after an attack and it disappears after the turn.

Ashtear,

These two don’t show up there unfortunately under normal circumstances. The first Horde Breaker attack shows up there, the follow-up doesn’t until the first has already been executed. The feat one doesn’t even have a similar indicator there. It’s kind of a weird implementation.

Ashtear,

To me, the biggest improvement in BG3 is how much looser the gameplay progression is. Since being just two levels behind meant death was all but certain in D:OS2, the path even on an “open” map like the Reaper’s Coast was still very much on rails. XP gain was so tight that side quests weren’t really optional, even to the point of discouraging roleplay by doing things like passing persuasion checks and then killing everyone anyway to squeeze every last drop out of the map. The first D:OS also really struggled with this until later in the game.

BG3’s first large map is a little tight, but even a new player can easily go off script and pick and choose what quests they want to undertake once they hit level 5. Encounters with enemies two levels higher can still be comfortable after that point, even three higher if the player has a good party build or has mastery of the battle system. And the player will want to, because the game is huge. It’s such a delight to just go, and it’s exciting to see Larian turn a major weakness into a strength.

But essentially, BG3 meets or improves upon every system in D:OS2. The dialogue scenes are the most flashy improvement, supported well by good writing, voice acting, and mocap. The only thing I found to be a step back was the soundtrack. I don’t think it’s bad, and there are some standout songs for sure, but D:OS2 really excelled in that area both in terms of the quality of the music and how it was used in battle (but then I’m a sucker for cello). It also won’t compare favorably to D:OS2 in its current state in terms of polish, but D:OS2 wasn’t exactly bug-free on release, either.

A big part of why this game is so big in the zeitgeist right now is because Larian was able to pounce on a lull in the release schedule. I’d call the pre-release hype for this game average at worst for that reason alone. Early reviews were beyond glowing, marking a studio’s successful graduation to AAA development with a game that has no aggressive add-ons or DRM. That will spur gaming enthusiasts to generate all the marketing you need.

Ashtear, (edited )

I started a second run of Baldur’s Gate 3 this week. I don’t know the last time I’ve ever finished a game like this just to go right back into it. It’s certainly been 20+ years since I’ve done it with an RPG. Part of why I wanted to do it might have been how much more polish there is in the first act, so it’s a cozier experience. I also skipped a full zone and a half on the first play, so that’s all going to be new, and I want to see the other side of a big decision point in Act 2. Probably going to end this run around that point and maybe actually play a different game for once.

I’m realizing now that this game fixes all of my problems with Divinity: Original Sin 2, and that was an excellent game. There are very few steps back here, mostly just the lack of polish.

BG3 is still a triumph despite the (many) rough edges. I’m sure I’m going to go back to it yet again down the road after a few patches and some of the cut/unfinished content is in the game, especially around the ending.

Ashtear,

BG2 is one of those games I wish the gameplay would let me recommend. The story is brilliant and Jon Irenicus is an amazing villain, capped by David Warner’s performance, still to this day one of my favorite voice acting performances in a game.

I think the initial premise might have been flawed from the start on the gameplay front anyway. Vincke’s already talked about how difficult it would be to tack on a sequel expansion/DLC to BG3 because of how crazy D&D gets at high levels, and Bioware was still pioneering the artificial DM concept back in 2000 to begin with.

Ashtear,

Outside of Game Pass, it hasn’t been in a great place for a while.

Games sell consoles, and they were fortunate to have lightning-in-a-bottle in Halo as their big launch game back in 2001. For exclusive software offerings, they’ve been coasting on that while also having some success with Gears, Fable, Forza. Thing is, when their competition isn’t shitting the bed, that hasn’t been enough.

Xbox has had some very favorable external, unusual circumstances over the years, starting from a not-insignificant number of consoles being sold as DVD players (especially when PS2s were out of stock). Sony launches an overengineered console hostile to both developers and consumers, leading to Xbox 360 being the go-to third party console. Finally, the fact that the Xbox brand never got a foothold in the Japan market becomes less relevant by the day as the home console market there continues to shrink.

Services like Game Pass hit a subscriber cap pretty quickly, so if they want growth there, they have to sell more consoles. Microsoft has done what they can to get those exclusives over the years, being early to invest in the indie space, and acquiring Mojang. Now since Game Pass, they are even more aggressive, picking up Bethesda and ABK. I don’t know if any of this will lead to something along with Master Chief being the face of the brand, but Xbox will be in a much better place if something does get there.

Ashtear,

Heh, yes, I still have fond memories of the late 16-bit generation and early fifth-gen games that didn’t get on board the 3D bandwagon. Sprite-based games started to look mighty sexy until everyone decided that untextured polygons were the way to go for a while. 😑

Ashtear,

This thread’s on Baldur’s Gate 3, that’s one of them. I should have specified the other of the two most highly-rated games this year; it’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Both games are more or less running last-gen graphics tech and are ahead of the pack on review scores. Zelda looks good for a Switch game, though.

You could probably ask a dozen gaming enthusiasts and get a dozen different answers on why this year has been exceptional. I’d say it’s because we have a lot of big releases from venerable franchises arriving all in the same year (Baldur’s Gate is one, plus Diablo, Final Fantasy, Harry Potter, Resident Evil, Star Wars, Street Fighter). There are hits from new IPs like Cassette Beasts, Dave the Diver, Hi-Fi Rush, and maybe Starfield in a few weeks if it’s not a disaster.

It’s a nice mix of old and new worlds and plenty of surprises. On top of all that, it’s only August. I think there’s a sense that the industry is starting to leave the pandemic behind, too.

Ashtear,

See also: Pokémon.

I’ve always been bothered by the lack of competition (and anti-competitive behavior) in the football space.

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