troyunrau

troyunrau, 8 miesięcy temu

Oooh, nice! Watched some trailers. Steam version? Or are they better on a console? Both look like they’re PS4 titles as well.

troyunrau, 8 miesięcy temu

Thanks for the recs! Already played Chained Echoes and quite liked it. Wish it was longer haha. Seen Sea of Stars reviews saying weak on story and dialogue and such, so I backburnered it, but maybe it’s worth it for the exploration elements alone?

Never played Outer Wilds. But seen it recommended before and it’s on my radar. Should it be played on console, do you think? Or is the steam version fine.

I’ll look into the rest when I have time. I appreciate all the details :)

troyunrau, 8 miesięcy temu

Price doesn’t matter. Just want a low bug comfortable experience. Sometimes games are better on one or the other. I liked No Man’s Sky a lot more on the PS4pro than on the laptop, for example – just felt more like it was the right tool for the job :)

troyunrau, 8 miesięcy temu

Steins;Gate is one of my favourites here. And Sam and Max. :)

troyunrau, 8 miesięcy temu

Excellent - thanks!

troyunrau, 8 miesięcy temu

I have had that one in my steam wishlist for a while, starting with Trails. Never pulled the trigger. I’ve heard that it is very much a slow burn, but ends up being a favourite for a lot of RPG fans. Accurate?

troyunrau, 8 miesięcy temu

Been through it, although not since the last update or two. Don’t really want to restart it. Also wish it wasn’t first person :)

troyunrau, 8 miesięcy temu

Never heard of it, but it sounds like a well crafted non-combat game. Niiiice :)

troyunrau, 8 miesięcy temu

Thanks for the detailed reply. I wish my holidays were longer – this one sounds very interesting 🤔

troyunrau, 8 miesięcy temu

I appreciate your suggestions and detailed reply. That mod looks spicy haha!

The games I mentioned do have a significant combat elements in them - but the combat isn’t the reason I play them. I don’t mind combat provided that combat isn’t the whole focus, and that the difficulty can be turned down to “cheat mode” the combat and just get on with it. Hell, I’ll break them down, cause this thread has traction and maybe it’s interesting to you and others :)

Chronotrigger is a SNES era Japanese RPG – lots of plot, story, time travel shenanigans, branching story with multiple endings, and also encounters with monsters which are handled with turn-based menu driven combat (so combat isn’t button mashing at all!). It’s old now, but still very good. My favourite trivial example of attention to detail, particularly in the context of time travel shenanigans: there’s a chest in a cave that you can access in multiple timelines – open the chest in the past, and it’ll be empty in the future; so open it in the future first, and then go back to the past and open it again and grab the contents twice! Etc. Here’s a classic bit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_JEhBGDsrY – minor spoilers.

Tales of Symphonia is a GameCube era RPG – unfortunately it has real time combat, complete with button mashing – combat feels like an arcade. But on the easiest setting, you sort of let your AI-controlled companions manage the fight, and you can just mash one attack until combat is done. The rest of the game is mint though, with a lot of inter-NPC dialogue, exploration, a good story, good voice acting (for its era), etc. You have no idea how much time I spent finding recipes for cooking in this one while ignoring combat haha. Sample: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tAYiO8NSLU

The Witcher 3 is a semi-open world fantasy setting – third person view, swords and sorcery stuff. It has a big focus on monsters, so you do have to go out there and hunt them. But it’s not just random encounters. Each monster has a story, and a reason you’re hunting them. It’s probably the gold standard in open world exploration - or maybe it was before Baldur’s Gate 3. Since you recommended romance – there’s a bunch of endings with different partners – here’s one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ_FkPNdNcs

Outer Worlds is a first person shooter with exploration elements. On the easiest difficulty, the combat sort of slides off of you, and you can focus on the exploration side. It’s kind of a “ship and crew” feel that evokes Firefly (the TV show) where you go around collecting companions and solving the mystery of this corporate hellhole of a solar system. It’s well crafted and I hope there is more like this out there somewhere. It sort of scratches the Mass Effect itch, while being entirely different in story. Samples: www.youtube.com/watch?v=taHXNV7kFcE

Mass Effect is a third person shooter with major RPG elements. Half the time you’re bombing around in your moon buggy looking for crashed satellites, or trying to romance the aliens you picked up, or trying to cure a plague or find out what happens if you endorse a product in a shop… In many ways, it set the gold standard for character oriented RPG interactions, with meaningful choices. Even the NPCs in the background are always having conversations that you just want to stop and listen to. For example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLpgxry542M

There was a Mass Effect trilogy re-release recently, where they got updated to be able to be played on the current generation of platforms, so I replayed it. Combat in Mass Effect 1 is still boring, but I’m going to scan every planet for anomalies, and drive my little moonbuggy around doing jumps trying to unveil the map of each little area of interest, damnit! And Mass Effect 2 is such a great experience that even the combat is acceptable. I shot the “kid” in my replay of Mass Effect 3 and didn’t know they made that do a thing and was so pumped by getting an unexpected ending compared to my first playthrough years ago. Sample with combat, cutscene, romance: www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5gqrsFLhqo

troyunrau, 9 miesięcy temu

Admittedly, the paradox launcher mostly exists so you can control which mods are turned on, which is a mostly legit use of a launcher.

troyunrau, rok temu

Yeah, side campaigns are probably the way to go.

It’s almost impossible to implement high level magic. Just the interactions between spells is insane. Basic interactions like Force Cage+any AoE (Sickening Radiance) to build the microwave of death… would be so hard to implement. They’d honestly have to veer off 5e and implement their own spells instead, tailored to the video game medium.

I do think the framework of the game would be a great place to start for additional campaigns. They could take this game and put a Candlekeep Mysteries style sequential dungeon crawl add-on and people would love it just to play multiplayer short campaigns.

troyunrau, rok temu

Even low level magic is sometimes too flexible for a computer based game. BG3 basically ignores Magic Mouth as implemented in 5e because arbitrary “trigger conditions” is just something that cannot be handled in a truly open ended way. Nevermind trying to implement Contingency properly – a spell that forms the core of high level magical shenanigans.

troyunrau, rok temu

I just finished Act 1 and am a completionist who literally inspects every chunk of map, reads every book, finishes every quest-log item before moving to next map area. I can safely say that Act 1 has been amazing for me.

I did encounter one inventory bug. Prior to patch one, I was using the Chest of the Mundane as a poor man’s Bag of Holding due to the weight reduction. At one point I took 600kg of items out of the chest to sell them to a vendor, and my inventory bugged. After screwing around with my buggy inventory for an hour (having fun earning infinite money from a vendor, for example), I reloaded from the save prior to taking the stuff from the chest and removed it in smaller chunks and everything was fine. Patch 1 killed the weight reduction in the chest, so it is unlikely others will find this fun bug.

Side note: my Lawful Good Gold Dwarf Cleric of Moradin has been a blast. I first talk my way into any circumstances, because one shouldn’t pass judgement without all the information. But after judging them as evil, wiping out the goblin, duergar, and zentarim camps has been super satisfying. The completionist in me worries about plot implications of these judgements down the line, and what I get locked out of, but so far it’s been great.

troyunrau, rok temu

Yeah, it’ll be like buying instrument sample packs for keyboards. Electronics musicians have been doing this for ages. Now you’ll be able to buy the “12 gruff voices” pack and tell it to read your script. It’ll be great for NPCs, but probably not good enough for main characters in AAA titles.

troyunrau, rok temu

Yeah, I kind of disagree with FFXIV. My whole experience there last year was entirely pleasant.

troyunrau, rok temu

Likewise, Everquest is still running, including some semi-official EQ-classic servers. Server population might be measured in hundreds – a far cry from the 500k peak in 2002.