Dexterryu

12 hours ago, heydude93 said:

The thing I wondered about years ago... the concept of buying certain consoles for exclusives becoming more irrelevant w/ a possible rise of streaming and digital download business models... seem to be coming true.  So is there like any benefit in getting a next gen console if you can afford an upgraded PC other than access to the backwards compatible games?

I feel like we've largely reached this point with Microsoft/Xbox games. I sold my Xbox One several years ago, but have played the big MS exclusives on my PC on release.

That said, @Xbob42 has a good point in regards to the cost, simplicity, and form factor of consoles. I think we're going to see a shift over the next decade on all platforms (PC included) to streaming... but until then both consoles and PCs will have their places.

1 hour ago, Duderino said:

AAA PC ports still require time and investment from engineering, QA, UX, design, etc.  There is also no guarantee Sony 1st party game engines are even up and running on PC in the first place.  Could be running straight off the devkits.  First time they will be targeting nvidia cards too.

 

It is a different situation from Xbox 1st party devs, many of which rely heavily on the years of cross platform development that has gone into UE4, unity, etc.

The way most coding is these days is much less platform specific. There are some exceptions, but most games are built on shared libraries so that they can be relatively platform agnostic. This is a general practice in the software / dev industry as a whole (not just gaming).

This is one of my favorite games of this gen. I may double dip.

However, I am actually not very keen on the idea of a sequel. One of the major points of interest was the process of unraveling the mystery of what happened, and who Aloy was. I'd definitely need to see some good details before getting excited about it.

3 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

If this logic checks out, publishers should all be getting a cut of Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo's online service fees too.  If what Nvidia is doing is unreasonable, then the console manufactures are scam artists.

You won't see publishers put up this type of stink with xCloud, because they're used to playing ball with console manufactures.  Own the game in Microsoft's ecosystem?  Sure, go ahead and stream it, the publisher will say.  We don't care that much.  A business relationship with Microsoft is too important, and that's what Microsoft wants.  We need to be in their retail space and on their storefront.

Nvidia has little leverage here by comparison.  It doesn't matter that the demand is nonsensical (you're essentially renting hardware, not a game library).  Nvidia doesn't bring any bargaining chips, and could be threatened with litigation.

You're not wrong. In general both from the perspective of the existing relationships with MS and Sony AND what publishers/devs are doing with Nvidia are both anti-consumer.

I'm sorta mixed on this....

On the one hand, if a consumer has paid for the game license then they should be able to play it on whichever platform/machine they wish.

I can see publishers wanting a little bit of a cut for a service making money off of the ability to play their games and I don't see that as terribly unreasonable. That said, if the service allows for their game to be played by more people (therefor more sales), then I don't see how it's really hurting them.

On 3/3/2020 at 9:55 PM, Keyser_Soze said:

 

To be fair continuous moves really slow, it appears, for your stomach!

TWD:S&S is this way and I feel like it works fairly well. They have some motion sickness settings too which they vignette your FOV while moving.

Teleporting I find to be more difficult because you usually have to teleport, recognize your new spot and turn (if necessary) to face where you want to be. All in real time while things are coming/shooting at you isn't ideal.

It's exactly why I have 2 running subs (Viveport and Xbox Game Pass PC). Both are cheap ($60/year) and get me access to a ton of games. They keep me from buying a lot of games that I think I might like and keeping me from stubbornly finishing a game just because I paid for it. It's easy to try a game and love it, just like it's easy to try a game and drop it if it's not for me.

Holy F... a 51 minute review? Not that I disagree with him, but damn.

Half Life: Alyx

In a way, I'm kinda relieved. Spring was looking fairly crazy with releases of games for me with Half Life: Alyx, Wasteland 3, Last of Us 2, Doom, and Ori.

Still my #1 overall game to this day. Love playing a named protagonist with their own personality. Great characters all around and really felt like choices mattered. I've only played through it plus the DLCs only once... I skipped gwent (I just don't dig card games).

I want to say the main game + all side quests/contracts (outside of gwent) took me like 75-80 hours. 10 for Heart of Stone, and about 25 for Blood and Wine.

Really anymore with all the sales, giveaways, and games via subscriptions what I play comes down to time more than $$. I try and discard more games than anything these days... almost like reading a book. If the first chapter of a book doesn't grab me I move on. Same with games now.

2 hours ago, EternallDarkness said:

 

I definitely agree with you about the instant agro in cars....which is why I never drive anywhere, lol. 

It's really any time a bad guy sees you... vehicle or not. Supposedly they don't know you exist (at least to the point of the game I'm in) yet they instantly recognize you. They just start shooting.

Happened across this thread and you guys convinced me to pick it up. Got it on PC from EGS for $13. Having a good time with it. Some really good Quality of Life improvements and some things that still annoy me. I haven't really been bothered by the item level/gear score stuff. Doing side missions/intel seems to keep that afloat fairly easily.

What I'm still finding annoying is the AI that seems to recognize me as a threat for no reason. Just driving down the roads and if one of their trucks come by, I'm insta-agro'd. That said, other than that, I find the combat AI to be fairly fun. It's easy to set them off on a red heron and double back & disappear or flank them. Drones are a pain, but they are supposed to be.

On 11/30/2019 at 3:47 PM, skillzdadirecta said:

Why would you pay top dollar for an experience you find barely acceptable? Especially when the tech is just going to continue to improve? That just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I was leaning towards the PSVR or the Quest for primarily for the price point. Dropping a couple of hundred dollars for tech that is still basically a gimmick is fine at this point. What won me over to Sony's system ultimately was the games it has that you can't play anywhere else. Honestly the Quest may have suited me better, with it being untethered but I decided to go with Sony. I know Valve's system is the most advanced , but the price point along with not having the room to set up that system properly made it prohibitive for me at the moment.  I've played around with it and it IS cool. But Sony's machine is decent enough at this point for the price and the fact that it will be compatible with the PS5.

For me it was a couple of things... #1) The actual headset I view as temporary. There is a difference between barely acceptable (which Index far exceeds) and barely good enough. Probably a bad choice of words on my part. Several things make Index stand out to me (and I've played on Wireless Vive Pro, Oculus, etc...). The increased vertical FOV and higher refresh rate are extremely noticeable. When I go back and play my friends Vive Pro I feel like I have blinders on and am moving my head vs looking with my eyes. So I fully intend to upgrade/replace my headset at some point. That said, the headset iteration hasn't moved all that quickly, so my logic on the headset is that I'll probably have it at least a couple of years before something that is head & shoulders better becomes available.

#2 is that the Base Stations and the controllers I think are a major step forward. It's not a big deal for older games that simply remap inputs, but the games that natively support them they're a game changer.

Finally, regarding the price point... you really do get what you pay for and it's a decent value compared to what you're giving up by going with a less expensive headset. That said, the price point isn't that expensive for me. My debate was between the Index and the Pimax 8k or 5k+. 

I hope I don't come off as a VR snob here, but I've got a Valve Index. I waited for a while to get into VR and I'll tell you that even while the Index is very good, I consider it to be barely good enough.

That said if I were to recommend buying a VR, I would definitely go the PC route and going all in. It has the best library and the ability to mod. Beat Saber is a great example.. on PS4 you get like maybe 30 songs, plus about 30 more as paid DLC. On PC there are thousands.

I'd definitely have a different list... we've had a few new genre's birthed from a couple of games that didn't make the list.

First there is Overwatch... gave us the hero shooter and is still super relevant

Then there is PUBG... for which without it I doubt Fortnite would be what it is.

Witcher 3 is still (IMHO) the definitive open world game with narrative and choices that actually effect the world & story.

General gist for me is that if there is smoke there's fire... which goes to the question of if they release games that are fun and good then do we ultimately care?

2 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

Well, I left this thread alone for quite a while as promised, but even so, in the intervening week or two or whatever, I only have this to add: I've stopped playing it completely. It's just underwhelming in every way that counts for a game like this. It's competent at everything it does, but no more than that. Nothing about it makes me want to keep playing. A shame, but eh, can't win 'em all. I'm glad people are enjoying it, but I hope for a lot more out of their next outing. Competence alone just doesn't capture my interest. I know we love dunking on Fallout (especially 76) in comparison to this, and while I'm always on board to take a fat shit on the trash-tier games that are the recent Fallout entries, one thing they did have was very large spaces, which served as a great way to hide really interesting things. Now, I don't think there were enough of those interesting things to warrant the map sizes, but Outer Worlds takes it way too far in the other direction, with every map feeling like a little snowglobe, you can practically predict the level design of every area before you get there.

 

Scattered boxes for cover, a bunch of containers lying around that you have to scrounge through for crap, maybe a roof you can jump onto, yet another terminal to hack to open a door or read a Super Wacky™ message, a conveniently enormous crawlspace located above something, extremely visible and easy to get to, that leads to a little bonus loot. The level design and worse, the characters, are so by-the-numbers and predictable that it completely kills any sense of wonder when I land somewhere, because the only interesting thing is the visual design of wherever you are, which wears off in a few minutes. If you're tired of hearing about Disco Elysium, play another Outer W__lds game: The Outer Wilds. It's not the same genre but it's unlike just about anything else you've played before and it also involves space travel! I didn't like it all that much at first, but once I saw what it was going for it got REALLY interesting.

Nothing I disagree with here... especially Outer Wilds. In general I've been kinda trying to motivate myself to play Outer Worlds mostly because I have like 3 days left on my Xbox Game Pass to see if I can either finish it or if it gets good enough for me to keep my subscription alive.

On 11/1/2019 at 11:28 PM, Xbob42 said:

This leak from a while back is proved true bit by bit...

 

 

 

I'm not sure what to make of all of this. On one hand, the announcements give it a lot of credence. On the other, if the games they ultimately release are good then we're kind of in a tough spot as consumers. If the games are good, and we want to play them and we buy them we're just encouraging this. Obviously this sounds like it's not a good place to work, but no one is making people stay at their current employers (While not a game dev specifically, I'm close enough to it to know there are TONS of opportunities).

It's also interesting how much this parallels with EA and Bioware after ME:A and Anthem. Even Ubi to a certain extent. Suits are trying to push for annual cookie cutter "living game" releases and gamers are (finally) stopping from buying them. That'll get the investors to (hopefully) realize that they need to listen to the developers (who are much more close to the actual customers).

On 10/30/2019 at 2:12 AM, Bacon said:

So like, this game is quite lacking. 

 

Not really many weapons, and every weapon is bland to the point where you might was well make everyone use an mini-gun and call it a day. That or the Heavy AR. My PC was rocking 4 AR's with different modifiers. Shock, Plasma, Acid, and N-ray.  It is very noticeable that their are no real explosive weapons or things like grenades and mines. You won't really find anything neat like a fatman/mini nuke,  or a gun that shoots junk. Outside of Science Weapons, there are no unique looking weapons as far as I am aware of, and unique weapons are just named normal weapons, with the same basic mods that you can put on any weapon yourself. You can't change or add mods on the unique weapons making them mostly useless. 

 

Armor is crap. Unless you are doing a hardcore sneak build, this is no reason to no deck out everyone in the Heaviest of armors. I just carried some lighter stat boosting armors for stat checks.

 

The worlds in The Outer Worlds are quite dull and bland.  You get a green area, and brown area, and a grey area. You are VERY unlikely to encounter a friendly Human NPC in the outdoors. It makes sense in a way, but that just means the only things that happen in the outdoor sections is you killing marauders/outlaws, or 3 types of beasts. The towns don't have much to offer either. The monsters fucking suck. Rocky Apes, large Mantis bugs, and fucking Skag's from borderlands. I guess there are space rats, but lol. There is also nothing to find in the world. As in, there is no reason to explore the outside unless you are looking for more ammo. But at the end of the game I have over 4k Heavy ammo and that was all I ever used. Never once bought ammo. Bits are pointless except for tinkering and you sometimes need to spend a few grand to advance a quest. Not putting this against the game as it is more preference, but I kinda find the 70s/80s era sci-fi aesthetic to be stupid. Like, why are they using fucking DOS pc's? I prefer sci-fi to be somewhere between Halo and Mass Effect.

 

The games really lacks character. There aren't any of those cool random events, except for one time on your ship when a bunch of space cows show up for no reason. This game really needs the wild wasteland perk. The wacky weapons really aren't, and there are only 4 or 5 of them. The entire game I really missed the radio. That has to be one of the best things about fallout. I could just play music myself, but it isn't the same and it wouldn't be controlled by the game so you'd have to pause it every time people start talking. There are not crazy wacky quests. You will not be helping a ghoul go to the moon. You will not be abducted by aliens(aliens not existing is kind of a small spoiler). You will not find a Republic of Dave on the map. You will not encounter an endgame monster in the parking lot of an abandoned grocery store despite only being level 3. There is nothing in the game that even comes close to creepy vibe of the old vaults, and you will never ever GARY! There is nothing like any of that in this game. To me, shit like that is what these types of games are all about and The Outer Worlds fails hard in this regard. 

 

Perks are just % boosts. You could remove them from the game and you wouldn't miss a thing. Run and Walk speed were the only perks that I had to have.

No real choices outside of choosing Group A or Group  B at the end of a quest line. Most everything least to the same end result.

Reputation can mostly be ignored.

ADA was interesting at first, but after like 1 story mission she has nothing almost nothing to say the rest of the game. Felt like a waste. 

I liked the ending I got.

There is a shitty ass sequel bait part that makes me want to say fuck you as what is revealed is far more interesting and I rather play that game. 

 

So, all that said, the game is not bad. It is just OK. I don't think would have been thrilled to spend $60 on a game like this, but I didn't so yeah. I'd give it a 7/10. Game was mediocre. At $1 I got great bang for my buck. And like, I didn't hate my time with it. I didn't love it, but if there is a sequel and they fix some of my complaints, then I might get it. And, I mean if it comes to game pass for a few bucks then I'd definitely get it either way. 

Very well said. Game is decent... tries a little too hard to be like firefly sometimes and doesn't succeed very well at it.

On 10/28/2019 at 11:07 AM, Kal-El814 said:

That’s interesting, because I feel that almost all of the ME characters are tell, not show. I get that it’s an WRPG and there needs to be a lot of telling, I’m not objecting to it on a vacuum. Morrigan and Sven in DA are well written and I think it takes some time to get to know what their specific world view is. I feel that Leliana is, somewhat ironically a pretty egregious example of what it is that you’re talking about, as is the rest of the DA cast through 2 (haven’t played Inquisition) and almost all of the ME cast across all the games through 3 (haven’t played Andromeda) with the exception of Liara. 

Some of it is that ME you are playing Shepard who isn't a voiceless silent protagonist. ME feels more natural like a conversation because you have a little more back and forth. Bethesda games (including Outer Worlds) feel much more like the NPCs monologuing at you. They speak paragraphs whereas you get to choose from some 1 sentence responses. DA:O was kinda the same but if memory serves they weren't quite as long winded.

Keep in mind, a lot of this is my personal preference. I enjoy playing a game with a named player character that has their own personality. IE... I prefer being Geralt vs being the "dragonborn"

13 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

Of the companions I have so far, I can say that they feel less “about” the player character than the ME / DA companions are. I kind of like that. The first two at least have more compelling reasons to join the squad than I felt that most of the ME characters did.

I guess what I'm saying is more the "acting"... and I don't mean the voice acting. The ME/DA characters I felt acted a certain way. They felt a little more like real characters based on the way they acted (and portrayed who they were by their choices rather than basically coming right out and saying it). For example, Leliana was devout and it showed in everything she did. Cassandra is dedicated and it was easy to see in everything she said (without her saying "I'm dedicated"). 

Don't get me wrong. The companions here are better than I've seen in any previous Bethesda game. They just feel more like character sketches than characters. Compare Morigan to Vicar. Morigan acts ambiguous but Vicar basically just comes out and says it. Jack is full of rage but you have to pull it out of her as to why. 

My opinion may definitely change as the game goes on. I'm just saying that early on the character development is being done via telling me rather than showing me.

Figured I'd chime in here... Definitely more Fallout than ME. Also definitely see the Firefly homage. I'm finding the corporate satire to be a little bit over the top and that it'd probably have been better to be more subtle and less a hammer to the face.

So far I'm just off the first planet. Reading everyone's comments about the companions vs ME... I'm not sure what it is (and I'm still very early) but there was something that Bioware had in the way that they wrote the companions that made me feel much more connected to them. This game looks like it's trying to replicate this but so far hasn't pulled me in... it's like they have personalities but at the same time they don't. Both the ME and DA companions definitely seemed to have a stronger sense of show, not tell... while at the same time not being so blunt. I know that may not make much sense but it's the best way I can put words to it.

Gameplay wise, I definitely like the shooting better than any of the fallout games I've played. I never really loved VATS in Fallout even though it's a kinda cool mechanic. So I like this one better since I still have to aim vs pick something with the highest percentage of doing what I wanted.

1 hour ago, Biggie said:

No game pass for me and I’m debating if this is worth the $60 price tag

 

It's definitely worth the $2 for two months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate if you have an Xbox or PC.

On 10/24/2019 at 8:53 AM, Nokt said:

I bought this game a long long time ago. I enjoyed running around gather materials, fighting off wolves. No story had been build the last time I touched it.

Are these chapters worth playing? I feel like I haven't even heard anything about this game until now.

It's still good... very similar to how you remember the gameplay just with some difficulty options in the story mode. Some of the story components were really good, some of the dialogue and characters felt a little like the dev was trying a little too hard to set a tone. That said, the story modes are definitely worth playing and good overall... especially for an indie game.