Ashtear

Ashtear, rok temu

While four hours would be fast for a new player, 1-10 is very doable in one sitting for those familiar with the game. Early levels are fast; the bulk of those 30 days are later levels. The 50’s in particular are a slog.

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It is, and it doesn’t, but one of the important functions of journalism is a public accounting of details such as these and engendering conversation thereof.

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So this is a de facto price increase? From a manufacturer that just reported a record high annual profit? 175GB (the slightly increased storage) hasn’t been worth $50 in years.

This generation sucks. I was already annoyed that we probably weren’t going to see price drops with this or the Switch, but I certainly didn’t see a price increase for an unproven hardware revision coming.

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It’s too bad you didn’t like the narrative structure with the calls in CP2077. That one ending uses them (or I guess you could call them voicemails, considering) to devastating effect. One of the most harrowing sequences I’ve seen in a game. It might have even saved a couple of lives.

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It’s the

ending spoilersuicide ending. All of them have calls during the credits, this one just hits very different.

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I’d be okay with $70 for this if FeMC was included, as that would mean a lot of branched content. They’ve said there will be (and shown) added content to make up for it, but that could shake out to being an extra two hours in the end.

I’m glad the UI and battle transitions look slick, though, if only to put the fan narrative that no one’s making quality turn-based JRPGs to rest.

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I do appreciate that they generally (BG3 review notwithstanding) aren’t afraid to call out bugs and aren’t one of the publications rushing to press with reviews. Even if their scoring system is ridiculous.

I don’t know if they are truly any more independent than any of the other big names, especially considering they have a (formerly E3) trade show now. They are also part of the same publishing group as Tom’s Hardware, which hasn’t been my first choice for hardware reviews for a while.

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Gematsu is niche, but I’m 99% sure there’s nothing really shady going on there.

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1998 was such a monster year because it spawned so many big franchises, including two that were arguably the genesis of e-sports. It’ll be a while before we know how 2023 measures up in that regard, although there’s not much new stuff this year that might have legs. Hi-Fi Rush and Starfield, maybe?

I’ve been thinking for a while that this is probably already the best year since 1998 though.

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This isn’t exactly giving me high hopes that Jedi: Survivor is going to be playable on PC anytime soon…

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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. 😕

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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13 Sentinels had me seriously craving some nikuman.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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DuckTales

The Moon theme is now in my head.

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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.

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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…

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

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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.

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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.

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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.