Sno

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Posts posted by Sno

  1. Posted

    I love the first Unreal to death, with all of its enormous open-ended levels, tough and intelligent enemies, and that willingness to slow things down and let you explore relatively non-hostile spaces as interludes between the heightened action. Add to it that relatively complicated set of inventory objects to play around with, persistent weapon upgrades, and its persistent and subdued narrative that it relays through various found logs and translated etchings. Also, online co-op.

     

    You know, and everybody loves UT's arsenal, but Unreal was the game that had to invent them. Never mind that Unreal itself also has some great MP maps and very capable bot AI. I still think it's one of Epic's best games.

     

    It has a problem though, it runs very long, sometimes feeling like quite an epic journey, but one that has to traverse some levels that just suck out loud. There's really no denying that, Unreal has some levels that are just absolute shit.

  4. Posted

    Haha was it really just me and you?

     

    I want to say it was just me and Sno who finished Killer 7 and even then I took way over the alotted time. Then I played it again right after on hard mode in a matter of two days. :o

     

    As much as I'd like to do this again, I won't have time. Also I would be big on having everyone completing the game, even though we all mostly failed each time.

     

    I definitely finished Killer 7, i love that game, but i don't think i went into the final few chapters with as much depth as i had meant to when starting out with that whole thing. That is, if i did any write-ups on those later chapters at all. I think i might have just gone and played it on my own after the group play fell apart.

     

    I bailed out on SotC though.

     

    Both of those, there seemed like a lot of tension between people who wanted to draw it out and only commit a couple of hours a week, and people who wanted to marathon the games. (Which... Might have just been me?) Personally, i can't really get much out of games if i'm only allotted short bursts over a long period of time. I like putting aside some time and diving deep, and it made accommodating people who wanted to play more casually kind of frustrating.

  5. Posted

    There are quite a lot of incidental character beats and fairly important pieces of story-telling in far-off corners that can be pretty easily missed, leading to a much more disjointed narrative and thematic experience, so i can understand how you would arrive at that impression.

     

    I played through the game twice and was pretty thorough about it, and in having that experience i was left feeling like the story generally is able to hit all the notes it needs to hit. The pieces are there, the player just isn't necessarily being forced to look at them.

     

    This obviously isn't a problem unique to Soma, and if you're watching somebody else play through the game, it's just going to be exacerbated.

  6. Posted

    It's pretty wild how well it's done in Japan, when so many games seem to tank in their current market. It's pretty much instantly become one of Nintendo's most important franchises.

     

    Also, i guess the last batch of DLC has been released for the game. How is everybody feeling about the state of the game?

     

    You guys who picked it up just at Christmas, how are you fairing online?

     

    Lastly, i made it into A+ rank a while back, i was pretty happy about that.

  7. Posted

    Hearing everyone complain about the monsters in Soma makes me actively want to avoid it. I have a very low tolerance for bullshit and I know if I got frustrated even once I'd dump it. I'm glad people actually brought up its weaknesses in any GOTY discussion, otherwise I'd have bought a game I'd probably hate.

     

    Well, for one thing, in playing Soma across two playthroughs, i died exactly once, so i wouldn't say it's frustrating in that sense.

    And putting aside scenarios where it's either a scripted chase or trying its hardest to convince you you're in danger when you're not, the real actual monster encounters make up a surprisingly small portion of the game. (With only two or three of those sequences additionally having you juggle multiple objectives on top of simply trying to survive. Trying to listen to an audio log while a monster is roaming around is admittedly crazy tense, and not in a way that will entertain everybody.)

    I also find the whole hide n` survive genre kind of stressful, the first Amnesia destroyed me in a way no other horror game i've played did, but i did not have that experience with Soma. I think it's much more in line with the experience of playing a really spooky adventure game.

     

    The one thing that might complicate Soma in a very real sense is discerning the rules each monster operates under, because they're all quite distinct in how they perceive and react to the player. (Which is one of the things i think is really cool about the game, but i've seen it spawn a lot of accusations about the game being broken in one way or another.)

     

    Failing all of that, people still seem to think the game is worth playing if you cripple the AI with mods.

     

     

    A recommendation from you sir is one that I will definitely check out, seeing as we seem to have incredibly similar tastes (I still haven't played Armored Core V yet, and I feel guilty)

     

    AC5/ACVD are almost certainly a lost cause this far out from release. I held on for as long as i could and bailed only when the absence of developer support kind of fed into the player base sort of self-destructing. I still wonder what made Dark Souls really take off in the west when Armored Core just seems perpetually doomed abroad, because the two franchises actually have a lot of very similar sensibilities.

  12. Posted

    So i am led to understand that each type of Skell also has a distinct overdrive mechanic with its own biases and benefits. My player character's Mastema, for example, benefits from and provides benefits to ranged arts while in overdrive. (The specifics of which i should look up, i guess.) Overdrive for the Skells also thankfully seems a little more straightforward than its on-foot equivalent. (Which is... I've read multiple overviews of how on-foot overdrive works, and it... Still doesn't make sense, it's so convoluted.)

     

    Also, i'm starting to notice this trend where a lot of the post-skell quests are clearly designed for you not having a skell. It usually results in a lot of quests where big dramatic battles have you literally one-shotting huge groups of enemies with one aoe attack. (To be clear, i'm not even over-leveled for these, though skells seem to put you on even ground with enemies as many as 10 levels ahead of you.) It all feels like a weird concession to the fact they made getting a skell license an optional set of quests, and It really seems like they should have just made the skell license thing an unavoidable part of the main progression and built quests more around having one.

  13. Posted

    Was there a game(s) run that felt particularly like this?

     

    I thought it was a little strange having the Hat in Time speed run as part of the event - I don't think that game is even released yet? Of course I realize that is tremendously nitpicky because this is a charity event and any work in helping charity should be encouraged.

     

    That was one of the ones that seemed a little odd to me, yeah. There were a couple others that are slipping my mind after having watched so many runs over the course of the week. I share your sentiment though, that if something is interesting enough to help the charity angle, it should probably be excused. Certainly it never felt as if any commercial message was overriding the reason the event is being held. I think i'm just wary of this becoming a bit of a slippery slope.

  14. Posted

    It's struck me, this year, that some of the runs have had the runners pushing the audience real hard to go buy whatever indie game it is from whatever store its available on.

     

    It's something that's kind of always been a part of it, enthusiastic players championing their favorite games, but some of the runs this year have kind of made me feel like i'm watching an ad.

     

    That might just be me though, i'm curious if anybody else is getting a similar vibe from this particular AGDQ.

  15. Posted

    I've been kind of on the fence about this weird goddamned persona-esque crossover game, but i think that just pushed me into the "gotta play it" camp. This looks like the most glorious kind of trainwreck.

     

    More than that though, i'm just amused at how much anger this thing is drawing out from fans of each franchise.

  16. Posted

    I've seen quite a few people complain about the flight theme in the game. Mostly that it is, like you're saying, just kind of an annoying interruption to the world themes when all you're trying to do is make small leaps, but also i guess it's one of the less well liked themes in the game. Is there no way to disable the flight pack once it's obtained or anything? It's strange that it would override the jump when there are actually still unused buttons on the controller. (All ZL seems to ever be used for is reversing in vehicle form and as part of the bind input.)

     

    Anyways, my player character just hit level 30, so now i'm able to purchase skells freely, i'm no longer limited to the starter Urban, though i guess my party members still need to hit 30 themselves before i can stick them in any skells?

     

    I had so much money so i ended up buying a bunch of skells to play around with them and get a feel for stats and vehicle handling and really just to gawk at how cool they are. I broke them down to their basic components, stripped out all their gear to see what their core stats are, and it generally seems like you get potential with the light skells, a ton of GP with the mediums, and loads of HP and fuel with the heavies, all with ranged/melee biases on individual robots inside of those groupings. For the time being, I've settled on the range-focused heavy, the Mastema, for my player character. (In part because i think it looks really, really cool.) Its vehicle physics are very strange though, it turns super sharply and oversteers like crazy. Took a while to get a handle on it and not be flying all over the place.

     

    (Also, i ended up finally having to look it up, but potential determines how much health you regain from soul voice combos and repair arts, as well as conferring bonus damage to TP arts.)

     

    It's kind of crazy that this whole massive second layer to the game is buried basically a minimum of 30 hours into the game. This isn't just some additional combat system being thrown into the mix, it sort of makes it a pretty fundamentally different game.

     

    At the same time though, i hope people aren't rushing through that main story to get to the skells. Or more specifically, i hope people are doing side quests. For myself, taking the game slowly, it's clear to me that all of the side content was a big emphasis for Monolith. Many of the affinity quests are as fleshed out as any of the main story missions, and even the normal side quests are often quite elaborate. It's a huge improvement from the first Xenoblade where the side quests were frequently just painfully simple resource grinds. (Those are still here though, they're just clearly separated out as the stuff you get from the quest board.)

     

    I will reiterate though: Everybody should be careful about bringing under-leveled party members into story quests or affinity quests, that can lead to some misery.

     

    Edit: About not neglecting ground gear and on-foot art/skill loadouts, i've seen people argue that some of the more difficult fights in the game can be hugely mitigated by mixing skell and on-foot arts. Either yourself disembarking to fire off a few useful on-foot arts before getting back in your skell, or having one of your party members stay on foot while your skells are set up to synergize with on-foot arts. (These strats are reinforced by the fact that for each active skell in your party, the remaining on-foot party members gain a 20% defense buff. So three skells and one on-foot party member is apparently intensely viable.)

     

    (At this point, it would be good to note that in the list of party commands for battle, you can tell party members to disembark from their skells.)

  17. Posted

    So i just got a Skell finally, and it's... I mean, it was hugely liberating after dozens of hours of slowly trekking across that world from a minuscule perspective to be able to race around quickly in a sweet transforming robot bike. There's a lot to say about the dramatic shift in scale that both opens up and closes off paths, how the game suddenly opens up this entire second parallel progression system in customizing your robots, and how the additional and distinct combat layer they provide exists in tandem with the already established mechanics, but... I really just want to talk about how fucking cool those robots are, you know? I love the awkward standing transformation and how they animate the stowed bike frame rattling as you run around in the biped form, etc, etc. I am fully sold on Xenoblade X. This game is for me.

     

    Just skimmed these posts but cool to see some enthusiasm for this. It's joint top on my to-get list. I've still got a couple of hours left of GB's mammoth goty 'casts, but so far there seems to be absolutely zero Xenoblade talk, like they've forgotten it. They've discussed EVERYTHING in the final debate, so it's weird that this slipped through the net.

     

    Austin made a few comments about not having played enough of it to really make any judgements, and he seemed to be the only one among them that had played it or really had any interest in it, and also didn't actually seem all too hot on the game anyways.

     


    Next week I'm planning on getting Xenoblade or Splatoon. I'm leaning towards Splatoon because I feel like the multiplayer focus is more time-sensitive than this. If I didn't get to this until next year, would the play experience differ at all? Are they changing it on the fly a la Dark Souls 2 or does the multiplayer rely on having a super active player base?

     

    Xenoblade X has a bunch of Dark Souls/Dragon's Dogma-esque online systems, but your experience shouldn't be too severely impacted if you come to it late, it's all very passive. You probably won't find any co-op games happening with level appropriate groups later on though, but that's already an issue, and it's ultimately a smallish corner of an absolutely enormous game. (You can totally ignore it if you want to.)

     

    Splatoon on the other hand, i'd say right now is actually a pretty good time to dive into it. After Christmas landed, i rocketed up to A+ rank for the first time after being stuck in B+ limbo for months. Basically, it feels like there's a lot of new blood figuring the game out right now and it's probably a good time to jump in.

  18. Posted

    I'm really annoyed with myself that I spoiled Soma and Cradle listening to the GB podcasts. No one to blame except myself, but I don't know if either will really be worth playing now.

     

    I argued pretty hard around here for people to play Soma, but it kind of ended up being the old "You just have to take it on good faith, because you don't want this shit spoiled" thing that nobody listens to.

     

    Even if you have had the story spoiled, i think the game is well worth playing, there are some seriously clever scenarios in that game and it is thick with atmosphere. (Also, perhaps more importantly, the GB guys didn't even talk about some of the biggest moments in the game, to my surprise. They also had a long argument about how the monsters are non-responsive to thrown objects, which i'm 95% sure they're wrong about, because i used thrown objects in a lot of the encounters to distract enemies and it sure seemed to work. The monsters all have different rules to suss out though, and that can be hard to do when you're in a panic.)

     

    Still, going into that game relatively blind, really only knowing about the marketing materials that had been put out in advance of it, i had multiple "I need to stand up and walk away from my computer for a few minutes" moments with the game. It's really something that shouldn't be spoiled, if at all possible.

     

    Cradle is really terrific too, perhaps one of my favorite pieces of sci-fi world building ever, it's full of fascinating ideas, but the GB guys are completely right about it not sticking that landing. The actual puzzle progression is sort of blah and it lands at a pretty aggravating conclusion.

  19. Posted

    They definitely do. That's one of my struggles with Morrowind, because the game is kind of annoying to play when you're weak, but then they give you all these ways to empower yourself and eventually remove all challenge from the game and that's boring too. I was never able to find a good medium where I enjoyed the challenges presented to me. For the same reason I struggle to play Diablo II in permadeath mode (which is my preferred way) when I play offline and can easily revive my characters, I also struggle to enjoy Morrowind the way it is. Maybe the problem is more with Morrowind's mechanics than the broken spell system, because it's essentially just a way of cheating built into the game and then the issue is that the game tempts you to cheat.

     

    Yeah, i understand what you're getting at, and Morrowind is definitely so broken that it's hard to draw a line between intended gameplay and systems exploitation. (100% chameleon being permanent and unfailing invisibility that you can stack towards across small and easily made enchantments, for example. It feels really broken, but you're not really exploiting a glitch or anything.)

     

    You know, did anybody ever make any kind of major balance overhaul mod for Morrowind? That seems like something somebody should have done.

  21. Posted

    Speaking of bosses, if anyone doesn't mind, could you check the worldwide stats for Volkampf, the Pursuer for me? Just curious about those numbers since, being the only tyrant required to kill (and quite early too), it's somewhat indicative of how many players there are now.

     

    This is a bit of a delayed response, but i looked at the numbers for a few of the early tyrants and it seems to imply that around a quarter of a million people are playing Cross. (Now, that's for North America. I don't think that includes Japanese players, i think they must be on their own servers, but i do think Europe is sharing servers with NA.)

     

    Ok I get it, it still sounds pretty complex though. I've just joined Lifehold squad every time, not really knowing what I'm doing.

     

    I think this is a big problem a lot of games are having in the last few years, big ambitious online systems that completely fail to engage players because they're poorly understood.

     

    I am all for games not hand-holding players, but i think online systems should be an exception to that. Those should be the things that are laboriously explained in detail, because people being able to use those systems depends on lots of other people also understanding and using them.

  22. Posted

    Halo 5

     

    Finished this up tonight. I know it got kinda mixed reviews, but I really liked it a lot. Glad the story decided to mix things up a bit.

    Obviously Locke and Chief had to team up at some point, but the fact that they're doing so AGAINST Cortana was kinda cool.

    Controlled great, weapons were awesome, levels were good. I had a really fun time with this game. Good job, 343. You made a really good Halo.

     

    There's been a weird thing happening with 5 where other fans i've seen talk about the game have actually been exceedingly positive about it, which is a strange twist for a 343 game after how much the Halo community revolted against 4. I've even seen people say 5 is the best one since 3. (I generally get the vibe that the community overall saw the customized loadouts from Reach and 4 as having been the wrong direction for the series, and i actually agree. The expanded mobility options seem to be a big hit too.)

     

    Yeah, and that's happening opposite the game being reviewed fairly lukewarm, it doesn't seem to have gotten any mileage within the critical community.

     

    I'd probably be all over 5 if i felt like i had other compelling reasons on top of it to go seek out an XBO.

  25. Posted

    Can anyone explain briefly how the multiplayer system works. I have no clue, and it's apparently quite good.

     

    First, you have to be a ways into the game, a few chapters deep. When the game starts asking you to join a squad when you boot up, you know you're in far enough. (It happens around chapter 4, i believe?)

     

    So...

    Okay, there's a few different systems to talk about.

    1 - Miiverse integration - It's junk, turn it off. It might be the worst Miiverse integration in a shipping Nintendo game.

    2 - Scouts - So either from the hub or actually out in the field you can recruit AI versions of other players into your squad as party members, complete with their own soul voice setups and class configurations. Use them to beat tough bosses or whatever, then go release them at the hub. The player whose scout it was will be notified that their scout was deemed useful and will be rewarded appropriately. It's quite a bit like pawn system from Dragon's Dogma, minus the whole "learning" thing the pawns did.

     

    3 - Divisions - In a lot of different ways, this feels like a PVE take on the covenants idea from Dark Souls. You perform certain actions in the game to earn points for your division, and each day based on the results of this the division members can claim rewards from the barracks. It's a neat idea, but it's massively imbalanced in favor of certain divisions and seriously needs some patching. There's also something about being passively buffed by players in other divisions who, in their own instance of the game, are in the same region as you. You can also get time-limited versions of those buffs from scouts you find in the field. Honestly, I don't really understand the buffs that well. The bar for it sits below the radar map, but i don't really understand how to read it. Sometimes it shows numbers, sometimes icons are gold, i have no idea what's going on. (Keep in mind, you only get passive/active buffs from these scenarios, you do not get a buff simply for being in a division.)

     

    4 - Squads - This is the big one.

    So when you start the game you'll be asked to join a squad that is either solo or MP-centric, or to join a friend's squad. If you just want to play the game and don't want to be bugged with invites and stuff, choose the solo squads. (Lifehold squads.)

     

    So you're now passively connected to 31 other players and you have a whole lot of different options available. First off, i said turn off the miiverse stuff, but leave the social notifications on so you can see when people are trying to invite you to co-op or trade items. Probably turn off squad achievement notifications though, those never stop.

     

    So first step: Squad tasks will show up and give you a list of things to go kill in your solo instance. As those tasks are completed, co-op missions will open up in the barracks. They disappear when the session time limit is up though, so go play them. This will be a dead end if you're playing in a lifehold squad where everybody is just solo questing, because you'll need to find people to join your co-op missions. (Friends can join, of course.)

     

    As people complete these actual real multiplayer co-op quests, which are quite enjoyable in and of themselves, a global meter fills up for a global raid boss that everybody can contribute to fighting. (The one fight that has happened, i couldn't join. You need blade medals and... I have no idea how to earn them, i haven't actually gotten any from co-op quests i've done, i don't know what's up.)

     

    Also, i mentioned above that there's trading, and there is. You can only trade from fight rewards though, it's an option on the resolution screen. Get something you don't want, give it to somebody else. Seems kind of dumb to me.

     

    So yeah. Lots of weird online stuff happening in Cross. Some of it's really cool, some of it doesn't really pan out.