eot

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Posts posted by eot

  2. Posted

    Never used Slack so I didn't notice people moving there, but I did notice activity drying up well before the podcast went on hiatus, though to be fair this was never the most active of forums anyway. Even though I used to be a diligent IRC user back in the day, I never jumped on Discord / Slack. I try to keep as few apps on my phone as possible, because I hate the idea of having a phone as a distraction, and when I'm on a computer sitting in a chat channel just doesn't feel like the thing to do any more. I probably would if I played more online games.

  4. Posted

    Not a movie, but a TV show. I finally decided to watch The Sopranos, and while the acting and production is great I struggled with it, mainly because I didn't like hardly any of the characters. Tony, in particular, is a real piece of shit. I don't mean to imply that you can't have characters with questionable morals (of course you can) but I get the sense we as the audience are supposed to care for him. This is also what I found in various essays discussing the show, with many explaining how they relate to Tony. I mean, the family he supposedly cares about would walk out the door if they knew the extent of, or weren't in denial about, his actions. They spend more time on his infidelity than his interactions with his kids. He's constantly bitching about how the therapy isn't helping, and it's true because the only bit of character growth he has comes after a near death experience.

     

    I don't know how I'm supposed to care about anyone, except Adriana, in that show.

  6. Posted

    On 9/3/2018 at 5:32 PM, I_smell said:

    Relevant note here: I don't like Deus Ex either. I think that character's voice, and every square inch of his look, is NEXT-LEVEL try-hard. Someone is DESPERATE for me to think this is sssooooo cccooooool, and that's very off-putting to me. At some time I did think Solid Snake and Wolverine or Devil-May-Cry were cool dudes, but shoving that double-shot of machismo in my face now, especially without any levity, just feels misguided.

     

    It felt like the characters in CyberPunk were really trying to jam in as much badass attitude as they could, at the behest of building compelling characters. It really painted the scene with the limp, cold body in a different light after a character said "I've got news as big as MY BALLS!" a couple minutes later. I was ready for the cool car and the cool jacket, but once you introduce the notion that this is all just pandering to my arrested development, it makes the whole thing feel like a pessimistic man-cave wank-fest, like Ready Player One or Duke Nukem.

    When you say Deus Ex, are you referring to Human Revolution?
     

    As for the pandering, that's not an aspect of the genre. Most of the works I like are very restrained, just like Blade Runner. From what little I know of the pen and paper game Cyberpunk 2077 is based on, it has a slightly different tone and is more interested in the human cost of these types of modifications than making you a badass.

  7. Posted

    On 8/28/2018 at 8:17 PM, Brannigan said:

    I thoroughly enjoyed Witcher 3....but I'm with you about this one.  Gameplay looks nice but the content is weird.  Like Batman Arkham City level of dialogue writing, which is off putting to say the least.

     

    I feel like every narrator for a video game demo or trailer seems to be required to be a bit creepy or weird?  I'm always always always turned off by that shit regardless of who's doing it.

    The first thing I noticed was the chromatic aberration, which is hopefully toggleable, but the second thing was the writing. The banter between V and the sidekick dude falls completely flat, I have no interest in hearing that character speak and I hope I'm not saddled with him for the entirety of the game. When they were interacting with the quest givers the dialogue wasn't as bothersome, but clearly a huge step back from their previous efforts. It felt like a quest giver talking directly to the player, instead of a genuine character interaction, something they were great at in the Witcher series. I hope it's not a consequence of the first person perspective, that they don't want to give us big dialogue trees. Deus Ex cut to 3rd person for conversations and I thought that worked well.

     

    This is my main worry about the game. From what I've seen of the gameplay I'll probably enjoy the game regardless. However, we don't get many of these hugely ambitious RPGs, and I so badly want a well written story with character's I'll grow attached to, especially now that BioWare seems to be out of the game. Bethesda's writing never did anything for me either.

     

    On 8/29/2018 at 5:03 PM, Roderick said:

    I did a double take when I saw that the post preceeding the gameplay trailer is from 2013. Gee willickers.

     

    Gameplay looked fine, definitely like a sandbox cyberpunk game, I guess, and boy do they go through a loooot of trouble to make sure you see those extra nicely bump-mapped breasts and asses in close-up. Early on, the narrator combines the words MATURE and VISCERAL, and I very nearly switched the damn thing off. Sure, this is just the marketing, but it doesn't bode well for the actual maturity of this title.


    They announced it as soon as they knew they were making it, which was before they actually started making it (afaik they didn't really get started until TW3 wrapped up).

     

    On 8/29/2018 at 1:28 PM, Cordeos said:

    I dislike morality systems, especially ones that are explicitly laid out in sliders, But in games like GTA I get grossed out by the total ignoring of horrific player actions. I just get the feeling this game will let me murder everyone all the time and no one in the game will bat an eye. That dissonance was already on display a bit when the main character and her partner were talking about how fucked up the scavengers were without really thinking about how many people they had killed that day alone.


    Isn't that every game with gunplay or combat though? Nathan Drake is a mass murderer.

  8. Posted

    On 8/19/2018 at 4:40 PM, Beasteh said:

    Half-Life:Echoes

    A free, fan-made singleplayer campaign for the original HL. It's a long one (around 3 hours of play) and it's good!

    Playing this dug up memories of installing HL mods from a cover disc back in 2000 or so. I didn't have many games at the time, and the internet was paid-per-minute dial-up, so what was a HL-obsessed teen to do? Eventually the disc got shared between friends and we exchanged stories about the levels we'd played. Since then, although I'd moved on, it looks like the modding community has been busy, releasing a few mods per year. Who knew?

    Levels are detailed and beautiful by half-life's standards; it's impressive what the Goldsrc engine can do. The maps are cleverly re-used in later phases, showing how the facility gets taken over by military and  alien influences.

    Combat's OK, half-life's quirky soldier AI is still present and correct. Although, the game does depend a bit on ambushes at times which feels unfair. All said and done, it's good to go back to Black Mesa again.

    I just found a bunch of PC Gamer demo disk, lots of them with Half-Life mods. Was wondering how many of those have been lost to time now. I should give this one a try.

  10. Posted

    I binged on this game over the weekend. It's hard to find anything bad to say about the combat mechanics, they're implemented near flawlessly and I'm a big fan of the enemy designs in this game. After sinking quite a few hours into it I do have a few gripes though. First of all, I think for a roguelike (or "roguelite" I suppose) the impact the items you find have on your run is too small. Sure, sometimes I get a better weapon, sometimes a slightly worse one, but in basically every run I can force a certain playstyle, and I never find something that forces or encourages me to fundamentally switch up the way I play. Items like the Cursed Sword sort of do it, but it's an exception and still not that extreme of an item in my opinion.

     

    I guess I wish there was either more randomness, or less. To me the appeal of the game is closer to something like Diablo than more traditional roguelikes, because the fun is simply in tearing through a level, collecting gear. This is why I think a different structure could've suited the game better. I would rather have had a persistent character with much deeper customisation options, than the current game where I feel like I'm repeating the same run each time, and the times I do beat the final boss on the same difficulty as before I'm not even rewarded for it. In fact, I'm better off not spending any gold at the end, because if I deplete it I start with zero gold the next run.

     

    Another issue I have is that you need to unlock items in order to try them (although you can get locked items as rare drops), but if it turns out that an item is bad (many of them are) you’ve now diluted the pool of good items. So it’s a grind in which you end up poisoning the well. If I started over I would unlock items much more selectively, and I could get the best weapons on every run.

     

    Finally, I’m not a fan of the bosses in the game. The three mid-game ones are fine I suppose, because you can breeze past them most of the time, making them a non-issue. However, they still have the same problem as the final boss, which is a damage cap. You can have a build that lets you rip through the entire game, but that gets completely negated by bosses. It favours low damage per shot, high rate of fire weapons over slower weapons. I mean, I can have a build where I one shot every enemy in the last area of the game (which can be fairly tough), and the last boss just shrugs it off. Another mechanical complaint I have is how each scroll you use scales the enemies. Not a fan of enemy scaling in any game.

     

  11. Posted

    I picked it up and played a little last night on my laptop, works fine on a keyboard but might take me a while to get comfortable with the controls.

     

    What do you guys think about the map randomization in the game? I understand why they included it and it's not something I mind, but I also don't think it adds much. The variety seems to come from the weapons, not the encounters, and I think I might've preferred hand crafted areas over randomized ones, even despite the fact that you'll play through the first area hundreds of times probably.

  14. Posted

    @Merus While I haven't played Nier (I don't have a PC at the moment), I did play TWD and while it's not what I had in mind, it's not too far from what I meant. TWD doesn't have gameplay in the sense in which I think of it, or the degree to which it does is at least very limited. I don't say that to disparage the game, just to clarify what I mean. The tension I referred to is between gameplay systems that are mechanically engaging (this is what I meant by gameplay, which I think is different from more general interactive elements), which are almost always spatial (driving, jumping, shooting etc.), and narrative ambition. Broadly speaking, releasing that tension requires giving these system narrative meaning, but while there are instances in which this works, it's in general not possible to map a narrative idea onto such a small space of systems.

     

    If you think this is a hyper specific version of the problem that I just cooked up in my own head, that's fair. However, I do see a divide between games that are mechanically enjoyable, and games that tell stories well.

     

    @TychoCelchuuu I don't think games will stop evolving, and it's not seeing games from E3 that I have no desire to play that makes me pessimistic about storytelling, because most of those games aren't even trying. It's just what triggered me to think about it. If you can give me just five games that you think tackle this problem so well you don't even consider it to exist, then I'll be happy to try them.

  15. Posted

    On 6/14/2018 at 6:02 PM, Murdoc said:

    I know that every E3 recently has deflated me, maybe it's because I'm old, cynical and burnt out on AAA. But wow, do they just not make games I am at all interested in. They all look "cool" and just fine, but I couldn't be bothered with paying or playing 99% of them.

    I'm in the same boat. Trying to figure out how much it's me having outgrown these games, and how much it's the opposite, me wanting games that respect what I liked in games growing up. For example, I don't think I'll ever accept the lack of player hosted dedicated servers, level editors, user made skins, mod tools etc. in modern games as non-objectionable. That's because it's a business decision that comes at the expense of things I appreciate. The bigger issue is that most big budget games seem to be marketed at teens (or maybe people in their early 20's), and that's clearly just a problem of me getting older. Also, having played a good amount of games my tastes have probably become too specific to ever be met by AAA titles.

     

    I didn't see any of the Cyberpunk coverage, but CDPR is one of the few companies I think could put out something interesting, and I have enough trust in them as a studio to develop something that isn't easily judged pre-release (and franky speaking I don't think they'll make a good shooter, so it'll have to make up for it in other places). It's really a shame that in such a huge industry they are the only ones putting out these kinds of games. After ME:A I consider BioWare lost.

     

    While I'm on this negative rant, I've kind of given up on games ever evolving past their current state. I remember, about a decade or so ago, when I used to listen to the 1UP podcasts that they were always talking about how video games are a young medium, and that they will evolve in terms of storytelling. To be honest, I don't think it's a young medium any more and worse, I think it's stagnant. Sure, you can point to the work being done for example by the founders of this site, but the fundamental tension between gameplay and storytelling has only been addressed in a handful of games that I consider to be exceptions, whose methods cannot be generalised. I know lots of people love games that relax their gameplay to focus on story, but they inevitably fail to hold my attention. My strongest impression while playing Dear Esther was my middle finger hurting from holding 'W' and that's not me trying to be cheeky. On the other side you have the problem that the range of stories you can tell that involve the killing of hundreds of people is limited. I don't expect I'll live to see the day when I'll consider video games on par with books and film as a storytelling medium.

  16. Posted

    On 6/15/2018 at 9:44 PM, TychoCelchuuu said:

    I played through a moderately good chunk of Shadow Warrior before I ended up reformatting my computer a while ago (dunno if my save is still in the cloud). It sounds like I ducked out before the tedious stuff.

     

    Spec Ops isn't satire - there's basically zero humor. I think it's a tremendous game. Most people aren't huge fans of the shooting and divide up just based on whether the story worked for them vs. whether it didn't.

    I think the shooting was okay, but I don't think the gameplay supports the story. I'll wait for Ben to get through it, but It's been like five years since I played it so I'm not sure I can articulate how I felt about it. Anyway, it's a game you should finish if you're gonna bother with it at all, it's not very long.

  18. Posted

    8 hours ago, Roderick said:

    B-B-Bethesda just teased Elder Scrolls VI last night (it was night in Europe). Location-wise, the landscape looks like a Hammerfell-y, Highrock-y scene, so back to the days of Daggerfall. But they could be messing with us and turn the camera and BOOM, there are the forests of Valenwood or the swamps of Blackmarsh. Anyway, ES6 won't see the light of day until way into 2020, probably, so this is just the first of years of waiting.

    2020 is optimistic. It's coming after Starlight, which is already said to be next-gen.

     

    Have to say that I thought the reveal was weak, especially compared to Skyrim.

  20. Posted

    On 6/7/2018 at 4:07 AM, Merus said:

    I'm a bit conflicted, because the original song was a critique of the game's paper-thin justification for running around and breaking shit, and using it as trailer music completely neuters the critique. It's like Republicans using Bruce Springsteen songs at campaign rallies, or the Dove Real Beauty campaign. There's a real critique there, and turning it into advertising lets the company safely dispose of it.

    I'll be honest, I'd completely forgotten about that part. Doesn't bother me though, I think the appeal of the game is so singular (the destruction) that the poor contextualisation doesn't matter. You could even read them using the song as embracing that.

  21. Posted

    I dunno how well thought of it is actually. I played Shadow Warrior back in the day and liked it, but it's nothing special. It's maybe the 3rd best Build engine game, with some racist jokes and a few good weapons.

     

    If you want to play games from that era, I would recommend Blood instead. That's a classic, and by Monolith no less.

  22. Posted

    On 6/4/2018 at 11:20 PM, Ben X said:

    This is getting a remastered edition, and you may just recognise the track they used for the official trailer:

     

     

     

    HOLY SHIIIIT!

    I opened this thread, saw the embedded video and though "ah man what if they used Chris's song", then I read your post.

     

    That's amazing!! But it was kind of distracting, I didn't even read any of the text. Kudos to whoever chose to whoever okayed that.

  23. Posted

    On 5/22/2018 at 2:01 PM, Henke said:

    In case you're looking for stuff to add to the list, you might wanna give RPS' newly-published 50 Best PC FPS list a scroll-thru. It's good for finding stuff you might've missed, even though I'd say it's way too broad. Alien Isolation, Prey, and Dishonored are great games tho I'd never describe them as FPSes. Shooting stuff or engaging in ranged combat is like 5% of what you do in those games. Also, including Shadow Warrior 2 instead of Shadow Warrior 1 is just wrong.

    That is a bizarre list, at least they put S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl third. Half-Life 2 at second place is baffling to me as that game doesn't hold up well at all. Far weirder picks elsewhere though.

     

    Lists...

  24. Posted

    I'm learning German right now, I guess I should give this a shot. Games played a big role in me learning English, I'm quite sure of that. Part of it was reading PC gaming magazines, but also talking to people online and so on. Problem is that I hardly ever play games any more.