one-armed dwarf

Honestly, Starfield is a game where both the 7s and 10s make a lot of sense. It's going to divide people a bit and takes a long time to get going

Heard that one of the games this month is considered pretty good

This is also doing the early access premium thing, along with Starfield and the PS5 version of Baldur's Gate Seems like publishers have found their new annoying trend. With a fighting game especially it's kind of evil, cause people can learn tech pretty fast and the FOMO aspect is harsher for some

I think any constraints with the engine is probably software. Creation engine is pretty creaky at this point probably but insanely modular and flexible Some of the lacking UI in this game had me looking at ways to unpack the files, and looking at these swf files which control the UI. It's all done in actionscript, which is what adobe flash uses (remember that). No idea about anything in terms of how UI programming in game dev works, but it sounds like a design choice that was probably made when Oblivion was cutting edge maybe That's for UI though, not the way the world is segmented up. But I bet deep down there's some Morrowind stuff still ticking away underneath it all The tube thing is just an easy fast travel though. It's the silt strider of New Atlantis

So, wrt save scums, there is an in-game mechanic called 'Inspirations'. It lets you re-roll a failed dice roll, essentially an in-game justified version of 'save scum'. You unlock 'Inspirations' by achieving objectives which align with a characters own role playing properties. So for instance, Astorian might approve of you come up with a sneaky solution to a problem, or just being a dick. Certain characters with other alignments will have different reactions, though they have to be in your party Mention it mainly as I found it a great way to incentivise 'keeping' the failed roll cause it was interesting to bank a few 'Inspirations' for that purpose. It also encouraged me to take some strange choices in the game to give me a +1 and help get a good dice roll in the first place. The way this part of the game interacts with player decision making is well done I think, and it's mainly done for the reason of 'save scumming' IMO cause it allows you to do it while also maintaining role-playing objectives

I have the same problem, it's easily the most annoying thing I've heard about this game cause it flies in the face of how you should play it. It's hard to tell if people are just hyping up something that will kill the pacing and feeling of progression you get with a game like this. My approach Nag, and it dovetails with my preferred way to play a game like this anyway, is to limit my initial playthrough to one or two factions that do not have obvious conflicts with each other. EG, I'm not going to play as the 'goody' faction and the 'baddie' faction in one go. That seems stupid. So I will save one for the other and that will exist as an incentive to go again if I want (which I'm guessing I will want to do, based on rumours) Rushing through the main quest will mean you pass through these really interesting settlements with lots of discoveries left to the sideline, and doing that in a post-game situation will deflate the excitement you get from doing that stuff as it comes to you. You will turn the most detailed worlds in this game into side dressing and you only get to have your initial impression of them on the first playthrough. I think lots of the recommendations being made online from journos on this aren't taking into consideration the ambient nature of moving slowly through this universe, making small discoveries along the way, and are just looking at it from a meta-progression perspective which is a flawed perspective for a game that should be taken slowly, not quickly. Sometimes slow progression is just more fun. There's also an aspect of sunk cost to it I suppose (IMO of course, play as you want, but rushing seems like it will have a big drawback on the experience possibly)

Yeah that stuff is mad useful. There's an NPC on some proc-gen planet who's holding onto some harvested organs contraband for me, I placed it in his fridge so I can grab it later. The proc gen planets seem to maintain state so that you can do that. At the same time, I messed around with outposts finally cause I had to get rid of the insane amount of rocks in my cargo hold, and when I returned to it later on there was a tree in the middle of my kitchen blocking my access. The foliage is randomised on visits I suppose, even if settlements and item positions are maintained. On the way fast travel works on this, if it's a system you've not been to you have to 'galaxy hop' from one to another. Which can lead to random encounters where you get your ship blown to bits sometimes. Maybe a recency bias cause I was playing it the other week, but that is pretty similar to how Baldur's Gate 1 designs its open world. You select a journey on a map and may get accosted on the road by ogres in random encounters. At first I disliked the fact that you could teleport from anyplace in the universe to the lodge or whatever. But now I'm thinking it contextualises a gameplay reason for building a ship oriented towards combat/uncharted exploration and a 2nd larger cargo transport for outposts. A lot of the systems in this game are quite clever, but I think their presentation and integration via menus and fast travel are not very elegant and lack the flourish of Mass Effect. So what is probably very purposeful ends up feeling very disjointed, especially because previous titles from this dev have all been about making things as connected as possible. But the more you play the more the intent behind things becomes clear, or at least links up more with your role playing and creates that sense of sandbox. I expect mods to make all this more cohesive and apparently Xbox versions of BGS games have allowed mods in the past. I wish out the gate though that these aspects were done better service by the UI, which is easily the game's biggest failing. Sky UI and better handling of this sort of stuff could make this game an 11/10

Equally I think there's open world games that do try to do different things. Hell, Starfield is one of them (albeit it also has all those detective vision crafting skill tree things you mention, so not that different I suppose_ I used to hate these games but I think the genre has broadened itself out a lot the past few years. Death Stranding is an open world game but could not be farther from the boilerplate checklist fare of Ubisoft. I think we have a better balance of those sorts of games now

My guy as mentioned is an introvert cook, and I finally got to dismiss my companion so I'm getting that O2 buff I wasn't getting before. Beforehand, I was actually debuffed, cause of having a person following me I guess. So now I can drink all the beers I find for the damage mitigation upgrade and the O2 debuff from all the beer doesn't affect me as much. I've unlocked 'mixology' for the cooking skill as well which I guess will dovetail with this direction I'm going in, which is a weird ass wino in space running around with a knife. I also got a perk to go faster on knife kills, so it all links together in a pleasingly psychotic fashion. Season 3 of The Bear goes places. Right now I'd liken this game as a weird hybrid of Mass Effect, Death Stranding and No Man's Sky. With very little Skyrim about it, maybe a tiny bit of Fallout (I did not play Fallout 4 which is the one this gets compared to moreso) I'm playing on the hardest difficult, not cause I'm good at it but it really forces your hand with the RPG mechanics and slows the pace right down, but the game is open enough you can pursue other avenues when you hit a wall. The skill tree seems to funnel you along different directions too, so that if you aren't that interested in base building (zero interest here, at least so far) then maybe you double down on being a ship technician. Or maybe you invest in the social skill which gives you a better success rate at making other ships surrender, so you can pirate them. There's some interesting approaches there and the ways of doing things aren't so linear I'm liking it. I dunno, it's fairly inoffensive, low calorie fluff for a lot of it. But it feels like a deeper RPG than Bethesda have been making in recent years. My character took some drugs on one mission and was able to move and jump really far, the combat was similar to an alteration mage in Morrowind, with all the jumping across an entire room going on. They really embraced the jank with this one, but in a largely good kind of way There's a lot of other interesting gimmicks that have been happening on missions, some cool tricks with gravity, boosters and physics. But I don't want to be too specific about it cause it's cool to just discover yourself

People data mined the game and found a long list of names which are speakable by the robot. Normal ones like John and Kylie or whatever, but also names like Sex, Nipple and Orgasmo.

It would be too difficult to keep track of action in 'dungeons', due to the camera banging into corners and walls

I'm a few hours in, steam says 6 hours but it's closer to 4 with AFK. I'll say so far it's not what I was really expecting, which I mean in both good and bad ways I guess. Firstly it's not really a BGS take on No Man's Sky, or Elite or any of those games. It's not really like Skyrim either though, so far. What it feels more like is a Bethesda take on Mass Effect 1, in that it's an open 'universe' game that's very fragmented. You have central hubs which contain lots of quest givers, then menus which connect you to the rest of the universe. You have bespoke planets like Mars which contain a small open world and settlements. You go in your shuttle and take your pick from a map, and you end up in front of a skybox which represents the nearby planet you're orbiting, and there's some random encounters that can happen out there So that's the way the space travel works in this. You can also immediately just travel somewhere by opening the map whenever you want. That seems kind of spoiling the fun to me though, like a way of making things feel small. In a sense, this is pretty disappointing. Not because it isn't a massive seamless space sim, but moreso the way all the transitions are handled. It seems kind of dated and disconnected. Taken in context it might not turn into such a big deal when the rest of the parts come together and questlines progress. But it does feel a little bit of a misdirect by Bethesda, intentional or not, as to the true character of this game. But in any event Mass Effect 1 is an extremely good game that holds up, so its take on space exploration isn't a bad one to ape. Question is does it work well within the framework of a Bethesda game The setup is pretty dry. It also kind of feels like Mass Effect a bit. You get your macguffin and a companion goes with you. Reviews have said it's a good idea to prioritise the main quest, for gameplay and progression purposes. I don't really know why, but I did plan to mostly stick to it with the odd sidequest rather than drag the pacing out so that's fine. But the universe is not level scaled like Oblivion and Skyrim so at some point you will presumably be forced to do optional stuff to account for that. Also just in general, mainlining a main quest in these games seems like shit advice, you want to weave those sidequests in as well One thing I like: your companion can input on dialogue interactions. Went to a sort of Mos Eisley place on Mars where my companion butted it and haggled with another NPC. This was a sort of tutorial for this mechanic, but it would be an interesting example of the game's flexibility if these quest interactions also extend to the other optional companions you can find. I don't know that they do that for a fact, but you would reckon that they do. Another thing I like is this one quest early on where a guy asks you to find some patient data he misled, and just tells you the general area he lost it in. No waypoint for this quest, you just sort of wander around and it forces the player to take in the environment and incidental dialogue, as well as read signs and develop a mental map of the area layout. Not that the dialogue is riveting or anything, but it's a minor pivot back towards the design of stuff like Morrowind where the world was the point. In terms of reactivity, I picked a trait called 'Serpents Embrace' that made my character addicted to grav jumping or they take a debuff (and a buff if they do grav jump). I completely misunderstood this when I picked it, I thought it meant I had to literally jump all the time, but it means warpspeed jumps with your space ship. Doh. Turns out this also means they are a follow of a thing called the faith of the serpent, which is a pretty edgy backstory for an introverted chef. I got unique dialogue options during one quest because of this, so maybe there's more things like that which branch out and lead to different options. I also like how gravity effects the combat. You can cyberpunk style spring jump over buildings and lightly glide an explosive down a hallway, gently carried by the low gravity of Mars, like a spicey present for the space raiders. It seems like temperature might also play a part in outworld exploration, but I'm not sure in what way really. In terms of hubs, the first hub is a bit boring. Too green. But the 2nd one I went to on Mars was pretty cool and reminded me of Omega in Mass Effect 2. Also seems to be the place where you can take jobs from bounty hunters, if that's the way you want to point your character. Things I don't like, exploring the surfaces of planets seems mad boring. It's just a bunch of fucking rocks, the lack of a Mako is keenly felt. At the very least tho they have different environments. I took a radiation debuff on the surface of the moon which apparently fucked my suit up. Another thing I dislike though it's subjective, they put a weird filter on the game in certain worlds. The starter hub area has The Matrix filter on it. Shit's green all the time. The Mars area has a red filter. You can walk in a room and see the filter fade in and out, it's very weird and overdone and leads to a blown out look. It doesn't look good on OLED, looks fine on LCD though No HDR btw, at least not on PC. You can get auto hdr working using a weird work around, but it looks bad and make things more blown out so IMO stick with SDR. Apparently it's a similar situation on Xbox

I mean, feel free to create that thread. I'm not trying to lay ownership on it or anything, share the 'meh' impressions of the Digital Dickhead edition as you've played more than I have at this point To keep the thread news related then I guess I will share the Digital Foundry writeup on the Xbox version. They also say it's good https://www.eurogamer.net/starfield-launches-as-a-polished-consistent-experience-on-xbox-series-x-and-series-s

Got to the last boss on my route last night, there's some missions marked 'Decision' which can have differing outcomes. Came close to beating that boss, but now Starfield is out it's on the backburner Overall, I can't really figure out what they were trying to do with this game. I like it a lot, but it's all over the place in terms of difficulty. Insane wall at the end of chapter 1, a much better balance of difficulty and level gimmicks in chapter 2. An overall not very challenging chapter 3, with a few spikes here and there. Chapter 4 very easy, except for its last boss. Which is the only one that feels appropriate for the stage of the game you fight it in, but you can still landslide it with the right loadout. Which is also fine, because that's what AC is. Then some chapter 5 cleanup. Balteus is so difficult but nothing reaches that level again on the initial playthrough, so either it's an overtuned entrance exam and FROM fucked up the difficulty balancing here, or they just intended that mission to teach you everything you need to know to play the rest of the game I think the weirdness in difficulty comes from the fact that the old games don't have checkpoints 99 percent of the time, or supply sherpas. So you had to build a mech that could take on an entire level, account for versatility and economical weapon choices. In this, you don't have to do that, so some of that difficulty and pre-planning evaporates. They try to account for that with Souls style boss fights, but they don't always fit well within the context of the freeform build options this game provides. Which is why they put it S ranks the way they did I suppose, but it means the game is missing a middle ground here and kinda doesn't feel as well designed as older titles even if it's more polished overall A game with this much agency in how you build your mech will probably lead to really different experiences. It's fun picking parts together and looking for ways to mitigate damage which aren't just about spamming quickboost. Found one design that let me just vertical thrust and passively drift past most kinetic ordnance, feathering the shoot button on flamethrower to slowly burn them down without overheating the weapon and letting some plasma drones chip away at them as well. Which was great from a resource management perspective, that made the most complained about mission online very easy on my playthrough. The mech design theory crafting is something you can lose hours to, and I plan to dive into PVP a bit more to come up with a design that shuts down the dual shotgun spammers. Shotgun-bots are like the Ken players in Armored Core 6. Annoying, but they're so common that eventually you will come up with a counterplay and they will still only have their one limited gimmick, random shroyukens/shotgun stagger. The level design is often great in this with interesting mission gimmicks, but I still don't really love the dodge spamming in an AC game. it kind of forces you to use the hard lockon I feel like, which leads to twitchy encounter design that again feels more Elden Ring esque in my view (tho For Answer was also like that) Apparently NG+ is very good in this so maybe my view will change when I do that.

I put an hour into it and it ran at like 60 at 4k, it's very demanding on the GPU side. That said, it looks really good. I picked 'chef' as the class for my character, and gave him traits that make him introverted, addicted to jumping and a bounty on his head. You know, a backstory that just makes a lot of sense and leads to immersive role playing outcomes involving jumping over bounty hunters and trying to avoid social situations so you can cook some weird alien dishes and eat them alone in space I'll make a thread over the weekend I guess

Oh, I never knew that game got a PC version I will buy this

I can't link the patchnotes cause half of it is spoilers, but they have fixed and changed so many things already. To the point they're going to do a new epilogue, which means bringing voice actors back. This game must have done insanely well for them to justify doing all that work I'm still just going to wait for the Definitive Edition though at this point to go back to it.

Well we might see the FFVII sequel* again, which makes it more interesting *

I mean, anyone who actually argues something like that is an ignorant shit head. Chip cheezum is one of those affected, did those really cool lets plays of Metal Gear Solid V

That IGN 7 will be responsible for some 'discourse', I am sure. 🍿

Yeah they might do a very long bit on Spidey, tho honestly that would be more tedious for me at least. I'm being salty tbh mostly cause I'm very disappointed in what Sony's VR offering has been like, what a waste

Very hyped for an announcement of some DLC, squad based online shooters and a few ports of some Quest 2 games to PSVR 2

I don't reckon a gacha game is thread worthy, but it's weird seeing a young(-er) version of Sephiroth Shame about the monetisation mechanics cause it looks kind of cool

Hopefully they take the time to fix that netcode, and maybe implement rollback Realistically though I don't think I'll be taking Tekken very seriously. Strive got a bunch of updates and I have SF, and these new Tekken games don't really look like my kind of thing tbh, having watched a good bit of it at this point

🐍 new main, sorry Kim