Bloodporne

Shit this game is really great.

I love the hot dog guy's story.

@Commissar SFLUFANbought Norco last night based on your comments on it. I'm about 2 hours in and yea, I really really like this.

Ironically I find this more engaging than Pentiment.

3 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

yeah I started it and played maybe five hours or so. I really enjoyed what I played although the game did feel like it needed more ranged combat given the setting. I heard the second one is actually better though.

I haven't played the sequel actually but your post reminded me to put ut on my wishlist.

A big seller for the first one for me is the ultra oppressive atmosphere. By the time you hit the third major area it looks like mech hell down there.

2 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

LOL! I'll play along...

 

Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Forbidden West

Dying Light 2

Sifu

Ass. Creeds Odyssey and Valhalla

Niohs 1 & 2

Dark Souls 3

Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild

Doom Old Gods DLC

Ghost of Tsushima DLC

Code Vein

Immortals Fenyx Rising

Bloody Spell

Far Cry 6

The Surge 1 & 2

I'm sure there are more I'm forgetting.

It doesn't have the best reputation but I think the first The Surge is a really good game. It actually has its own robust take on combat with bobs & weaves and dismemberment that seems to never get old. Like you can dismember the body part that you want to loot in terms of armor. Also, it's extremely atmospheric and nails a sort of uncomfortably visceral tech dystopia feel really well. 

Highly recommend that game. It has its flaws and the last level gets absolutely bonkers with its level design but it's probably my favorite Souls style game not by From.

I've been playing quite a few like replaying Resi 1 Remake. Glad I'm doing it because some of these have been total fucking gems I nearly forgot about. 

On 12/13/2022 at 11:26 AM, TheLeon said:

As an embarrassingly white dude, whenever I say "woke" out loud, it's always accompanied with a deep, apologetic sigh. 

The embarrassment of having been born a certain way will melt away like pounds when facing a Billy Blanks VHS if you just stop actually saying "woke" out loud. 

15 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Damn. Git good. I've passed at least 5. I even got an achievement for it and I wasn't even trying hard.

I do know that the bar has be filled in order to pass but yeah, it frustrated me after the fifth or so failed check because there is nothing to indicate how much the positives or negatives contribute nor what you missed. It's just a very obtuse system and like I said, I passed one in the entire game and I'm a pretty anal-retentive player in general. I think the game absolutely is a total win on the story, dialog and art front but gameplay and pacing are sometimes pretty flawed. I do give it a huge pass though in general on that stuff for the obvious reasons. Like who the fuck even decides to make a game like this, that alone is impressive to me. 

17 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

I can’t believe that! They definitely seem to just spam everything in the world at you all at once and seem dangerously close to input reading at times. Some of the ones at the end I used summon on I just played once and saw it was bullshit and summoned. One of the last ones, the black blade, I could see I could get close but he was bullshitting me in the second phase and I just couldn’t be bothered at that point.

I've ranted about it on here before but the Gargoyles fight is a perfect example. The size of the arenas often makes things worse because you end up sprinting for a solid 10 seconds to get anywhere near the boss, have enough stamina for one hit and a stone gargoyle the size of a house hops 50ft to the side to dodge that one strike you had left in you just...because lol. Like I said, I just found the spammy "jack of all trades" bullshit exhausting about halfway through the game. 

15 minutes ago, stepee said:

I believe Godrick is one of the main bosses I beat without a summon  

 

I think because I also did a bunch of stuff in a different direction before him.

 

Thinking back on it, I think I summoned for maybe 5-6 bosses, and I did tons of optional ones in a pretty complete run. Thats like what maybe 90 minutes or content I needed summons to pass out of my 150 hour run.

 

Seems to me it wouldn’t be a hard to have a mode where those maga hard bosses are just lower difficulty so I don’t need summons and then the whole game could have been solo’d with the challenge remaining the same elsewhere and thus getting the same experience for the vast majority of the game. It was fine at the time, but I don’t know how well it would work if I hadn’t played right at launch with tons of people to easily summon and get me past them.

 

 I hear Souls fans refer to those kind of bosses as “skill checks” which okay fine but I know I don’t have any skill, that’s an easy fix to tone down those in a mode for players who aren’t that great at games.

 

Edit: I noticed the typo on mega hard but decided to keep it 

I'd consider myself a Souls fan and the only way I refer to some of the main bosses in Elden Ring is bullshit. In my opinion at least, From seems to have run out of ideas how to really make bosses increasingly difficult so they decided to make essentially every boss a jack of all trades. Massive AoE, elemental damages, projectiles, fast combo chains, mega-jumps if you gain distance on them and so forth. Summons feel like a bandaid to distract their ultra-aggressive good-at-everything AI so you can get some cheap shots in. They're more exhausting and belligerent than challenging. Going back to playing Demon's Souls remake was an eye-opener as to how far they've ratcheted up the boss difficulty since.

10 minutes ago, BloodyHell said:

I mean, I think it was a polygon reviewer who claimed the use of the word “xenos” in returnal was basically hate speech against immigrants.

As an immigrant, that's the dumbest shit I ever read. How much harder can you possibly try. 

Edit: I meant as in I read it when that was posted and thought it satire, that's how stupid it was. 

12 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

You could be - Polygon's not bad but their problem is they are way too focused on story and characters and stuff. I get it was a divisive game but their The Last of Us: Part II review, for example, it was all they could focus on and they tend to do that frequently. I get different websites emphasize certain things given the nature of there content generally but there's more to a game than just story, plot, and characters. Still, they do try to cover a lot in their reviews at least, they tend to be lengthier.

Their RDR2 review was absurd in that regard. It's like they're reviewing a movie and if the game involves any "heavy drama", it's an instant win. One of the worst review outlets for my tastes. I usually check Eurogamer and SkillUp these days. Not because I want someone to agree with me but because I already know they seem to value aspects I value the most. In general, I think SkillUp has some of the best gaming reviews I've ever seen in terms of being well-rounded, well-articulated and really detailed. 

47 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

If you're really stressing some skill check situations you can kind of save scum. Just go to the main menu and reload. The game only saves if you leave the area so you can reload as many times as you want. I know this kind of gets rid of some of the ride or die nature of the game but it's good if you want to see some other pathways. Some skill checks I don't think you can pass even if you get all the positive reactions so don't feel bad if things don't fall your way.

It's weird. I'm not really stressing about it and like the idea of "well, that's how the conversation went!" but just wish I had more of an idea prior how I could possibly influence this. It's hard not to directly compare it to Disco Elysium where you never get stuck in those but can actually opt to influence them in several ways. But I appreciate the tip either way. 

I actually have yet to fully finish the game, I'm way at the end I think but week has been crazy hectic so no play time. 

11 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

@Bloodporne - no argument from me with how seemingly obtuse/inscrutable the game's "dialogue check" system genuinely appears to be.  Just as you described, I've experienced instances where I've had an overwhelming majority of blue "positive"" arrows but still somehow failed the dialogue check and I was pretty sure that I did speak with enough other NPCs to have had enough information to pass the check though I could very well be incorrect in that assumption!  I really do think that you have to pay close attention to what is said during conversations with NPCs as well as what's written in the journal in order to have some chance at successfully passing the dialogue checks.

 

The game is definitely intended to be played through multiple times as I think that you simply don't have enough time to fully explore every quest option in either the first or second acts.  Also, there are achievements/trophies that are directly tied to having specific backgrounds/traits selected at character creation.  I'm enjoying my time with the game well enough to give it another playthrough (or two), but I'm not sure if I'm actually going to change my ultimate decisions for either the first or second act as those choices that I made somehow feel "correct" to me even though I have absolutely no empirical evidence to support that claim!

 

I will say that I'm very pleased with the way the game's writers approach the subject of religion and the faith/beliefs of the characters.  The writers really do seem to have recognized the significant role that religious faith played in the lives of ordinary people during this period of history and therefore depict this role respectfully and seriously.  This isn't to say that the writers are uncritical of the Church itself and its hypocrisy, corruption, etc. but they draw the important distinction between the acts of the Church and its ecclesiastical hierarchy and the faith/beliefs of the townspeople.  That's a balancing act that the Obsidian writers should be proud of themselves for having pulled off! 

I get their decision to kind of introduce a bit of realism, though I use that word loosely here, into the proceedings by giving you a time limit to work with but it does frustrate me a bit on a pure videogame level. I do enjoy the game on many levels but I'm not sure I have time to dedicate three playthroughs to it to try to see 90% of what's going on. Also combined with the skill checks that seem super obtuse, it seems difficult to tell if I'd even get what I want out of a second playthrough. I guess what I'm saying is that I like the system overall but I do think it's just a tad too restrictive unless I'm just a dummy and rushed to bed too early when the game told me to in the beginning. If they loosened it a bit or introduced an option to get out of some conversations so you don't lock yourself out of paths, that'd be ideal in my opinion. I think the Martin questline I described in the spoiler above soured me a bit overall. Just give me a dialog option at the end that has a [LIE] and have Andreas go "Oh it's nothing, talk soon!" or something simple. 

On the subject of religion, I agree with you 100%. It's easy to simply condescend and ridicule, a trap quite a bit of historical fiction falls into imo, but I love how much care was taken here to put you in the characters' shoes IN the 1510s. You get immersed in those thought patterns and don't just watch it from the outside in a way. This is something I deeply value about the Pötzsch novels we talked about. That and also what you said especially since there's a common misconception that people in that era were just superstitious morons who blindly ran after the church in general, not the case at all. I really like the friction between peasants and holy rollers up on that hill in general and the conversations about the subject are very intelligently written. 

8 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

You should have checked out that AI djent stream I posted in the listening thread.

Actually I already have the band:

I would totally listen to a band consisting of Skynet robots 

I've been listening to a Horror-related podcast and this King adaptation kept coming up. Somehow I must've skipped this as a kid which actually surprised me. I guess the premise isn't terribly exciting though. 

Anyway, this was way better than I expected and the situation they find themselves in ends up being pretty terrifying. The dynamic with her son being in the hot car adds a lot of tension and they're both great actors. The dog really does look suitably intimidating and gross. Bonus points for the surprisingly beautiful cinematography, many super atmospheric shots here. 

7.5/10 

3 hours ago, BloodyHell said:

The first is one of the most disappointing games I’ve played, so unless this has totally different gameplay….. 

I hope we literally wear UPS uniform this time and the only mode of transportation is a skateboard just to spite you

I'm up for anything in that universe quite frankly. The actual story is, yeah, I get the criticisms but the LORE is fantastic and incredibly compelling to me. I love all the emails he threw in there going into dinosaurs, fossils. People can call it nonsense all they want, it's just fun storytelling to me and it works. I think it's great to see a AAA game that gives zero shits about being grounded, believable and realistic but instead goes all in on things we used to take for granted during the PS2 era or whatever. I had a lot of respect for DS in terms of being videogame-as-fuck in that regard despite incorporating actors and all. 

Just now, Greatoneshere said:

That'd be interesting - so you think it's a prequel or side story? Because the ending was pretty definitive I felt. I also wouldn't hold it past Kojima to completely change the combat - I doubt this will be a fetch quest delivery sim, I agree with you there.

I mean I can't be sure but I bet it's a straight sequel. Despite the ending, I honestly think you can take this anywhere. It's literally a completely different world that isn't bound by any real world logic and so on imo. 

I listened to a Kojima interview last night and he said exactly what I wanted to hear really. He was talking about how when coming up with a new IP, it's mandatory to get the basics right, get the basic gameplay dialed in but already know how you want to expand on that with your sequel, to design with that in mind. He also mentioned he had a million more ideas for the gameplay in the first one but considering the time, it wasn't feasible and he's been working on those gameplay ideas ever since. 

12 hours ago, Brian said:

and it is Bioshock Space 

...which in turn is System Shock...which already had a spiritual successor in Prey that I'm willing to bet $10 on this game won't even come close to with a yard stick. 

14 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

I'm sure Kojima will find a way, but not sure how they're making a sequel given the ending of the first one - definitely super interested though, loved Death Stranding.

I'm curious to see if this is going to lean more into the combat mechanics. I don't put it past a Kojima game to take a hard 90 degree turn in any capacity and the mood and colors of the trailer footage is a lot more "shit is fucked, we have to fight" to me. Wonder if we're knee-deep in one of the extinction events in this one, kind of like Mad Max --> Road Warrior.

7 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

 

In a Discord chat that I was in last night we called it "Great Valu Returnal"

Oh shit, so it's not just me, good. It's absolutely bargain bin Returnal but somehow I'm still intrigued. I kind of liked that there seem to be puzzles and an emphasis on enemy weak points? I'll keep an eye on it. 

Also, that title is stupid. Scars Above,  Post Trauma, what's next? Self Harm 2: Psychology Eternal?

While it looks really derivative of Silent Hill, so was Signalis and I enjoyed that game greatly. Also, I really like that protagonist. I'm all for any game that doesn't have Buzzcut McDudeBro. I've been on a Survival Horror kick and I'd gladly give this a shot if it turns out decent.