Korax

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Korax

  1. Posted

    ME3 multiplayer had consumables like that. They were a possible drop from the gear crates that you could buy, either with in-game credits or real money. From the brief look at the menu, it seems that the consumables are available for individual purchase, but weapons and characters are still in random boxes, which is pretty much the only thing I didn't like about ME3's unlock system.

  2. Posted

    Hunter's bow, sharpshot bow, war bow, ropecaster, tripcaster, two slings - blast (explosive) and regular (elementals), rattler (burst-fire bolt thrower, never really used it), and tearblast cannon (a short-range air cannon that only blows off components - got it from the hunters' lodge sidequest chain).

  4. Posted

    A warbow can be extremely useful. If you hit a cryo cell with an ice arrow or a power cell with a shock arrow, it fizzles for a bit and then releases an elemental explosion that can help with crowd control. The purple version also has corruption arrows, which causes a berserk state that can make things crazy.

     

    I mainly kept the hunter's bow, sharpshot bow, and ropecaster, with the fourth spot swapping between whatever elemental weapons seemed appropriate to what I was doing.

     

    Just finished the main quest. I liked the ending, and they found a way to have a sequel cliffhanger without being dumb about it (though at first it seemed to be going in an extremely contrived direction). I just checked my trophies, and I only have two left to get the Platinum... so I will probably round out my playthrough of the game with those.

  5. Posted

    So I've done every single side thing that I could find (cauldrons, tallnecks, side quests, collectibles, bandit camps, vantage points, corrupted zones), hit level 50, and started going through the story. While there have been a few elements to the main story that were a bit surprising to me, it's mostly gone the way I expected. A side effect of exploring almost everywhere before the game thinks I will is that some of the impact of what was supposed to be an introduction to a difficult enemy encounter is subverted. Oh, this quest's goal is deep in Stormbird territory, it's gonna be a hard thing to get to, but I already triggered the intro cinematic when I wandered here five hours ago, also I can just tie the thing down with my ropecaster and override it.

     

    I appreciate that they tried to make collectibles useful by having vendors that will sell you reward boxes for completing sets, but almost all the actual rewards are more useful to an early-game character, and some of the areas you have to go the find them definitely aren't early-game. There's a little nod to how they're working with Kojima, with three "Stranded" collectibles.

     

    As little as I've found stealth to be useful against the machines, it's much more viable when going after human targets. They're much more likely to go down in one hit, and they don't have the detection that some of the robots do. There have still been a couple times when the game was more interested in making a specific story happen, so some people have been impervious to my sniping but then went down easily after I walked forward enough to cause a cutscene.

     

    I have the purple version of all the armor types, but I've been using the Protector armor almost exclusively, because of my proclivity to just run in and start swinging heavy spear attacks. I just finished the Ancient Armory side quest, though, and the armor I got from that seems pretty sweet.

  6. Posted

    For me, the CYOA discussion brought to mind House of Leaves. Without getting too far into it, it's a weird story within a story (within another story?). After a while, the layout of the text itself starts to reflect some of the events it portrays. During one part, characters are lost within a mysterious labyrinth, and the pages themselves become labyrinthine. The main thread isn't that hard to follow, but the entire section is a mess of footnotes, some of which have their own footnotes. Some of those lead you to loops of earlier notes, some don't actually have associated notes, and there's at least one note in the jumble that doesn't have a referent in the text. To connect it with the Dark Souls lore discussion, it actually is a book that you could read in different ways. There's all sorts of extraneous information, explicit and implicit, that's not necessary to understand the basic story, but adds flavor to what you're reading if you go the trouble of understanding it.

  7. Posted

    The way Andromeda is handling abilities is so all over the place to me. There are no classes, you can gain abilities and specialize in whatever way you want! Also here are profiles, which give you bonuses to almost-class-like groups of abilities, hope you specialize in specific ways to take advantage of them! But also you can just change between them whenever you want, guess you're out of luck, variety-wise, if you specialized in something!

     

    None of this changes the fact that I will be going full-on Adept, because being a rad space wizard who flings purple-blue orbs of energy is all I want to do.

  8. Posted

    I finished all the Cauldrons. I like that after the first one they varied up the designs so they didn't feel too similar.

     

    I also got all Blazing Suns on the hunting challenges. I like the idea of the challenges, but some of the later ones boil down to brewing a ton of potions and then just tanking damage from the 10 other machines in the area as you're trying your damnedest to kill the 2 that the challenge cares about.

     

    I've done so much side stuff that the main quest branches open to me now are level 14 and 15, and I'm level 41.

  11. Posted

    To be clear, though I'm fine with some amount of guidance (gotta learn basic controls and systems), as soon as a lesson becomes an obvious railroad I almost always try to break it. If the game handles that gracefully, great! But Horizon doesn't, at least in what I saw. And it's especially strange how it then flip-flops between jamming a lesson in your face when you don't do it exactly right and then assuming that you would never do anything but follow those instructions, so obviously it doesn't need to pay attention to what you're doing.

     

    I haven't tried going back to the beginning area, but I fully expect to be able to. When you're made a Seeker, the Matriarch is pretty clear about how it affords you the ability to come and go as you please.

  12. Posted

    Okay, so, as expected, once the story finally kicks off, you get turned loose in a huge area with all sorts of stuff to find and things to do. That's much better. Faces haven't improved, but I have noticed something: when an actual cutscene is happening, there's some decent emoting going on, but as soon as you're in a conversation, the characters just lock in on each other, staring blankly and vaguely opening their lips. It's weird.

     

    One thing I will say is that stealth is way less possible/important than the intro bits want you to believe. There are some spots where you can creep around and eliminate targets one-by-one, but my overwhelming experience has been that I can get one, maybe two enemies down and then things go loud. Which is mostly fine, because the melee spear attack can just waste enemies in a way that nothing else does. Even the major story points just shove stealth to the side. The first major challenge is against an enemy that you will have to ambush multiple times and is hard to hide from once alerted. Then there's an arena fight that you just can't hide during. And then ANOTHER arena fight that prevents any stealth. Oh, and if you didn't go to the trouble of buying other weapons along the way, it's gonna be a problem, because your regular ol' bow is pretty shitty during two of those fights.

  13. Posted

    Hey, this came out! To some rather effusive praise.

     

    I've only played about 1.5 hours, so I expect (or hope, at least) that this will mostly stop when the game opens up, but HOLY SHIT does this game just want to grab you by the wrist and start cramming exposition into your ears. Did you know that you're an outcast? I'll let you know by talking out loud in a way that people never do that you're an outcast, just in case you missed it. Because that's what you are. An outcast. Who's been cast out. And shunned because you're an outcast. I sure hope you perform Dracula's Wedding, that my favorite.

     

    Then the tutorial can't decide whether it wants to hold your hand or pretend like it doesn't care. After deliberately failing a stealth section to see what happened, it reloads to a checkpoint (despite playing through what appears to be a dynamic reaction meant to keep you in the fiction), because GOD DAMN IT YOU'RE GOING TO LEARN TO STEALTH THREE TIMES IN A ROW, NOT JUST TWO. During a later sneaking area, I completely ignored the "tracking" tutorial because the enemies are completely predictable without it, and it just lets me go on with the tutorial prompt on the screen and other characters acting as if I'm following it.

     

    Like I said, this all seems like the typical overly-hand-held big-budget game opening, so I'm really looking forward to not having to deal with it any more, but it's incredibly annoying to play through.

     

    One thing that I can tell is going to bother me for the whole game is character faces. The game generally looks great. Detailed environments, detailed animations when moving around, really nice effects, etc. Some people have been lauding it as THE REASON to upgrade to a 4K TV. But then you start a conversation with someone and you get a screen full of close-ups, and man, does it not look good. Faces barely move, and when they do it's like a rubber Halloween mask has been pulled over a shoddy animatronic frame. Jedi Academy had more expressive mouth movements, and those were just animation spasms in response to the voice clips being played.

  16. Posted

    I completed the construction of my tower!

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    There's not much inside right now, but I did make a decorative design on the first floor to welcome visitors. Don't worry if your eyes start to numb when crossing it, that's probably just your imagination.

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    If you climb all the way to the top, there's an observation deck, with a view of the draw distance surrounding area.

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    And to keep the hordes at bay, the setting of the sun activates a protective lava flow.

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  22. Posted

    The recent update allows you to add custom contracts to a Favorites list, which is a slight improvement. Man, I wish they'd go deep on letting users have access to all the different stuff that the game keeps track of. There are escalations that can impose time limits on objective completion, enforce specific weapons/disguises, and completion order. There are a series of challenges in Bangkok that require an unseen kill with a specific weapon and disguise, but then also require that the body be found. All sorts of states are being kept track of. I don't know how hard it would be to allow access to those without it being a messy dev toolkit, but I want to open up the game's guts and fiddle around so badly.

  23. Posted

    1 hour ago, Wooben said:

     

    It is locked behind mastery level 20 on each destination, though.

    Does getting to level 20 require completing ALL challenges? Because that could get a little dreary.

     

    No, quite far from it. Some challenges will give you more experience, but it's pretty easy to fill up mastery by fucking around a whole bunch. Even completing elusive targets gives some mastery experience, so as long as you're doing things, you'll get there.

  24. Posted

    Got Silent Assassin after a bit of a false start. Found the perfect place to lure the target into a concealed spot, and then slightly weird pathing made him shortcut just barely around the spot 3 times in a row. A quick restart and then I pulled it off perfectly.