Murdoc

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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    2015

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Posts posted by Murdoc

  1. Posted

    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.

     

    Sable could be interesting, Cyberpunk could have been interesting until I heard the description of FPS and you play as a character, everything else just blended together into the same game. Even Nintendo didn't really have anything I'm looking forward to.

     

    Not to say I would ever do a better job or make anything remotely interesting, but damn it, someone needs to just give me money to make a game I'd want to play.

  3. Posted

    Hey, 

     

    Does anyone know how the new crates work? I can't tell if I screwed up or this thing is just stupid.

     

    So I have a bunch of points I earned and normally I would go get my rewards and get a garbage crate to get garbage item. I get this, I like this, except I always get garbage and in no way do I get those cool blue sneakers, but that's the game.

     

    But today, I went to go get my garbage crate with the points I earned and it gave me a cool crate. But that cool crate wants me to buy a key. I don't want to buy a key, I didn't know I was using my points to be asked to buy a key, I wanted to use my points to buy the garbage crate I'm used to. Did I fuck up or does it now randomly pick a crate for me that I may have to and never will pay money for thus making me waste the points I earned?

     

    I get this is probably normal in MP gaming if that is the case and I didn't do anything wrong, but I don't play those games... well until now. But I am hoping I just screwed up and I can still pick to spend my points on garbage crates.

  5. Posted

    Ugh, is anyone playing this?

     

    I found the first one pretty fun, the world was neat, the combat was neat, the story was awful, but whatever.

     

    Shadow of Wardor seems to just be a complete nightmare for me. While the first one felt "light" on various features, the sequel seems to have added just too much. It's tough to keep track of. 

     

    One of the things I could never quite get right with the batman games was eventually the enemy variation and keeping track of the way to kill them, SoW seems to have taken that way too far, I'm constantly pausing the game, looking in the menu to see whatever random important orcs class, weak points, etc.. 

     

    This is very particular example of things that bug me; I can't tell if this was by design or if it's because I'm still early on and this is like a training wheels feature. I had this one orc captain that was just impossible to kill for some reason. He didn't have anything particularly special in terms of being immune to anything, like the way the first one would level up an orc, but he just didn't seem to want to die. So I kept trying and trying, eventually he was about to kill me for a third time and some random human npc walks up, executes him instantly. No named character, just a gondor soldier flys in to save the day. What a deflating moment. I couldn't even kill the dumb npc because he took away the whole purpose of the nemesis system which made me shut the whole game off right there.

     

    I'm not far into the game, but so far the story took the all the stuff that didn't quite work in the first one and made it even worse. I haven't gotten to that point that reviewers say the game opens up, but geezus, it's hard to even get to that point with a set up like this. Just too much story too many cut scenes, it's really just terrible. The whole peter jackson lotr presentation is way over done at this point and this takes that and goes to new heights of fan fic which is obnoxious even to me, who gives zero faps about lotr.

     

    It feels like the same game as the first, but what they have added doesn't feel like a great improvement. I figured more skills, more zones, more orcs, loot, gems, etc... would be great, but maybe it's the way the game unfolds, maybe its the presentation, but I haven't outright disliked a sequel, that while on paper, improved/added to everything from the first in a long while.

     

    Just too much going on and never really allows me to interact with the world in interesting ways outside of predefined quests. Maybe I am still burnt out from the original or whatever extra ingredients they added to this just didn't do it for me, but I can't say I am enjoying it.

     

     

     

  6. Posted

    Just renewed my yearly subscription (Though this may be a last) and just wanted to drop a coupon code to the Giant Bomb store if anyone was interested.

     

    Also, yeah, just finished that Xcom episode over there and Dan's "shtick" really screwed that mission over; still not a fan and that is a perfect episode to illustrate why.

     

    Giant Bomb Store Code for $15 off: 478a5gaae01c-5bt9acf5

     

  7. Posted

    On 5/19/2017 at 8:20 AM, Badfinger said:

     

    Curious what you mean about the shooting. The shooting feels good and correct to me. The movement is an acknowledged problem (they're working on mantling rather than the weird/bad jump over small obstacles for example).

     

    The servers need to improve, that's for sure. It's hard to separate what's the actual game feel vs the crummy servers. Next week's patch is client fixes, next Monthly patch in June is server.

    Apologies for the late reply:

     

    I guess "feels bad" is a pretty subjective thing, so I'll try to explain why I don't particularly gel with it. I believe my core issue is that is intended to feel like Day Z, which felt like Arma, which I really don't like. Aside from my belief that I don't think they need to break out a new hotkey for every action in the game, the player movement and aiming has a very rigged feel to it, the aiming and targeting feels like it is on a pivot somewhere around the mid torso and just has a particular feel to it. This may work pretty well for 3rd person, but just is garbage in 1st person.

     

    With that said, after spending more time with the game, I have adjusted to the feel of the shooting and you're right, it isn't bad. I also accepted that just because you can go 1st person, doesn't mean the game was intended to be 1st person. I thought it was crazy to play a shooter where people were third when you could go 1st, but in the end, that was a misunderstanding of the benefits of 3rd on my part.

     

    The movement for me is still an issue; part of that is the player collision and step over/jump over heights, other bits of it could just be network lag, but it feels like I am playing a cylinder with it's pivot at the center and not a moving person. There's just something about moving sideways, forward, backward and the various degrees in between that is off and I can't quite place my finger on it.

     

    Okay, enough "complaining" from me, the game is rad as hell, but I really can't wait for the copycats to make something more aestheticaly interesting and better feeling. Rockstar could flip a few switches in GTA online and eat this things lunch within a month.

  8. Posted

    This is a fascinating game; it looks like crap, plays like crap (movement, feel, shooting), yet is one of the more fun and digestible (I can play a couple matches at noon) game I've played in awhile.

     

    My same issue with Day z and other similar games is that there seems to be no importance put on to making a really good feeling shooter. Maybe that's intentional (though I don't know why) but it's fine to play a janky feeling game for awhile, but after about 8 hours, I'd love to feel like I'm getting better, but I just don't see it happening with something this weird/stiff.

     

     

  9. Posted

    On 4/18/2017 at 0:32 AM, njoos said:

     

    No, and that is exactly what they did as well? If you read up a bit the patch notes are listed. There are a lot of free features that go a long way to fixing a lot of the issues I had at least. 

    Yeah, they changed some things, I guess added some things; so I guess they are doing "that".

     

    But from the sounds of it when listening to Austin Walker speak about Utopia, it sounded like Utopia really filled in the game, but maybe it was part patch part Utopia and I misunderstood his comments.

     

    There are some perplexingly half assed systems in Stellaris that I wish they would address though (though maybe that Adams patch addresses my concerns), and maybe they will, or maybe they are half assed by design. Such a fascinating game with a lot of potentially, I really hope it realizes itself in a few years or however long it takes but won't cost us an arm and a leg to get everything.

     

    Still enjoying what I am playing, but I can see what people were talking about coming off a bit frustrated with it.

  10. Posted

    I've been playing stellaris off and on for awhile now. I like it, but like others here, eventually walk away from it frustrated.

     

    The utopia dlc seems interesting, but am a bit torn by it; stellaris feels like an unfinished game to me, or at least unfinished ideas implemented into a game. 

     

    So for updates like utopia seem like they should be tweaks the debs to the main game and not something you'd charge for.

     

    Is that an unrealistic/unwarranted expectation?

  11. Posted

    While I typically stop playing a game before finishing it, there are few I outright "quit".

     

    Hyper Light Drifter might be one of them and it's a bit heart breaking. I really dig the art, atmosphere and music, even the structure of the game should be something appeals to me, but holy cow, do I not like the feel of the combat or it's difficulty.

     

    It feels a bit related to a Dark Souls thing (another game I wanted to love, but disliked the difficulty and design decisions) in the fact it's about learning enemy movements and when to strike. While I appreciate the endeavor to have the player have to learn this, I just don't have the patience, I'd prefer an easy mode where it's more like zelda button mashing. 

     

    I'm going to search out a way to cheat through this game so I can enjoy the exploration, but if that doesn't work, I think I'll be hitting uninstall. Still a very cool looking game though.

  13. Posted

    Doh!!

    Every time I inspect a ship to buy it reminds me to move over my goods first.

    So when I save up enough credits to get this giant boat of a ship I totally ignore it, but the ship, and loose out out there warp cores and my atlas stone... Freaking great.

    Would it have been so hard to just automatically do this?

    Now I have no idea what to do to get that damn stone back.

    Edit:

    Phewwww! I thought my old ship was gone for good but it's still docked and left as abandoned and I could swap my goods back to the new ship.

    That was scary.

  14. Posted

    Not that this is a story and no one really cares, but booted it up again today and I'm back at a solid 60fps... Random patches I guess because I didn't do a thing.

    At least my next post will be about the game and not grumbling :)

    Edit: back to dodgey frame rate today... This seems totally random occurrence now of when the game performs well.

  15. Posted

    Yeah, I'll see what I can do tonight, I'm running pretty default settings, so it's so strange. I'll look up where my save game goes and maybe delete it and reinstall the thing to see if that refreshes it because I seem to be the only one that had awesome perf the first day (after their visual basic update) and have gotten slammed every since.

     

    Despite all this, despite the repetitiveness, I really enjoy the game which is why it's a bit frustrating because I really want to get back into it. I save up over 2 mil and was on the look out for my mega ship so I can get all those slots!

  16. Posted

    Nah, no settings or restarting helps. It's a bit baffling, after the first update an hour or so after launch I was cooking at 60fps most of the time, a week later with whatever fixes they have done its best unplayable. I guess a lot of people are having problems, just weird how it did work for me then didn't.

  17. Posted

    Oh good, today I am now getting 7fps max.

     

    I don't want to be one of those people that harp on the technical things, but I guess I didn't have a beef when it was running mostly fine, but the last two days has been a disaster.

  18. Posted

    Base building makes sense because the crafting doesn't seem to be in service of anything other than exploring, and exploring is gets repetitive, so the game will eventually need to evolve into something else. THe center of the galaxy thing is a good goal, but a year from now, no one will care. That is assuming they want players to keep playing this... which parts of the game seem like its that kind of game, other parts seem like it's a digestible one or two off experience.

     

    ***

     

    I have a pretty weak cpu, but was still getting 60fps on launch day, the fact it is quite a bit slower since the weekend suggests they adjusted the code somewhere that "broke" it for me.

  19. Posted

    Man, this game. 

     

    So, like many of you I was pretty hyped for it, but I have a pretty reasonable skepticism to keep my enthusiasm pretty low. I kept them realistic and the game is pretty much what I was expecting. Not following the media for the past year or so, just dipping into the few big trailers they would show, I did hear about the crafting and kind of expected it to be minecraft in space.

     

    It sort of is and it sort of isn't and its not necessarily a bad thing. I'm like 14 hours in on my third star system and I've enjoyed my time, I'm glad I'm playing it now rather than hearing other people talk about their experience never really looking into myself. It's a neat game, it has a solid foundation, it just doesn't feel like a complete vision, and that is to say, it feels like it started out as something else and turned into what it is, but never got fully realized. I'd be interested in seeing if the developers continue to tune and add to it based on where I think they were going with it or if they tune it to what they originally wanted.

     

    Let's get the really bad out of the way... performance. I was ready to play the moment it unlocked on Steam and it was about an hour of frustration. The visual basic pack or whatever was missing so it didn't run, and once running performance was terrible, using your analyzer caused massive hitching and I was averaging 10-20 fps. Granted I don't have a great computer, but I just stuck in a 1070... so I expected a bit more. Within a few hours they patched it and while some hitching still occurred I was getting 50-60fps steady most of the time until it hitched for whatever reason. Anyway, past saturday I was out of town and I came back to it today, it seems like they tweaked things again and I get less hitching, but performance is back to bad 20fps with a max of 30fps... even though my setting is 60fps  or max (I tried both thinking maybe something got broken). So yeah, they are still working on kinks, but the good news eventually it should run smoothly because it mostly did before.

     

    So, I was expecting mincraft in space in the fact that you're gatthering resourced and crafting, and so far that seems to be bulk of the gameplay loop for me. The big difference, they didn't just throw "minecraft" into their exploration game. Minecrafts loop is resource gathering and crafting just like No Mans Sky, but it's about building, collaboration, and homesteading. No Mans Sky's  main motivation is exploration, so you're resource collecting and crafting is in service of exploration.

     

    This is where I it sort of falls apart for me. I love the idea of exploring space, I'm a world builder by trade, and I love exploring in video games, no matter the game, so to have an entire gmae built around that motivation sounded awesome to me. The thing about No Mans Sky is the exploration part isn't that interesting. The nerd in me revels at a procedural,y made space and how everything is a unique collage of items and algorthims, but so far in my experience, it's resulted into a lot of dull moments. 

     

    That isn't to say you would want a game like this to be the most exciting and amazing situations ever, I think the problem with my expectation of NMS vs. the reality of it is that it's too big, there are too many variations to the point where the variations are meaningless. 

     

    Sure from a content point of view it all looks the same but with different colors, different names, regions, etc... but because there is a seemingly infinite amount of terrain to cover on a world, then an seemingly infinite amount of worlds and solar systems, the discoveries become meaningless. The first hour or two on my starting planet every discovery seemed amazing, there is an outpost, a swamp, an ancient temple and I was naming them all, but slowly the sheer size of the game started to reveal itself. One world is massive, it has dozens, hundreds of locations to discover, and the variety between them is not that different... things started to feel less special every time and my lexicon of location names quickly ran out and that was on one planet.

     

    So variety is a bit of an issue due to its size, but the exploration part of the game is also a bit lackluster, you'll venture upon 1-20 different templates on a single planet and while the architecture for the different races seems to change, it's essentially the same experience every time. The discovery doesn't become meaningful anymore and with so many of these locations on a single planet, who cares what it's called or why it's there? There is nothing special about most of these places, there is nothing to discover beyond the location itself, most interactions no matter what the hook is to these places (Talking with an alien, activating a shrine, activating a becon, activating a computer, etc...) results in running up to it and essentially pressing "X" to interact.

     

    Exploring, as in the game functions of interacting with the world, becomes a chore and sort of meaningless to the point that I'm almost completely ignoring it and only looking for minerals to upgrade and language terminals to learn language (and that's mostly just for me as it really has not a lot of use in the actual function of the game). Wandering around a planet is fun, since it's what I like to do, but again the sheer size really nullifies any sort of satisfaction of being a catographer and eventually is only in service of mineral finding.

     

    That's where I think there is that split for NMS. If like minecraft my main purpose is gathering resources and crafting than either let me build and collaborate like minecraft, or do something to make these discoveries of your environment more special and meaningful. Which is why I feel it may be too big for it's own good; it needs more "gameification". Make the worlds smaller, even if it is unrealistic, make less seeded discoveries and devise a better loop for why these places exist and why I should care about discovering and naming them other than going up to a terminal and pressing "X".

     

    I do enjoy the aesthetics and the atmosphere, that's what keeps me going, I hope to see it through till the end. But I"d be really curious to see how this thing evolves over the next year.

  20. Posted

    Personally love the zelda art style, but I do agree with a few of the comments about fidelity. It's running at a lower resolution or there has been some optimizations since last years show. 

     

    I'm one of those idiots that didn't care if Zelda has been formulaic every time, so this new gameplay seems a bit weird to me. From the screenshots, videos and conversations from the developers, I'm concerned that they've created this game that I'm visually inspired by, but also created this giant, empty world full of filler content. I'll wait and see, but definitely will be buying whatever the nx is to play it.

     

    My take away from E3 is being intrigued by God of War and I don't think I'd ever write that in my life time. It's funny too, because I was pretty impressed by Doom from last years' show and when I was telling non gamer friends who don't watch these things, they thought I'd gone crazy.

     

    All in all this feels like that other year where E3 is ramping down; most companies barely had anything of note to show or didn't bother to, EA and ubi may as well had been non parcitipants.

     

    One thing though, I'm really glad games are finally at a visual quality where it almost doesn't matter anymore;that is to say, we're not at a perfect state, but watching the higher budget games footage, it's really great to see such consistency that you don't even have to comment or think about it being a game.

     

    I hope this allows fans and the industry to start critiquing and critically thinking about art direction for games more than discussions about fidelity, pixels and rendering tech and that's an amazing place to finally be at.

  21. Posted

    Ok, I bought into this. I've only played a couple hours, but I have one question that maybe someone here can answer.

     

    Is this worth playing? (I know that is very dependent on a variety of things, so let me expand on this)

     

    I liked Harvest Moon for the snes, it's why I bought this, I get it, it's harvest moon. However, so far, and this could be old nostalgia memory talking, I can't tell if this is any different/better than the game I played in 1998. Since I am a sucker for art, I can say I think I'm playing a slightly worse looking version of the game I played in 1998, so I don't know why I am playing this and not that... is it noticeably different/deeper as you keep going?

  22. Posted

    I really love the look and concept of the world design...but I'm not sure if I am down with the gameplay/controls(?).

     

    What's the term I am looking for? The way you interact with the controlling the player and doing the things the game wants you to do doesn't look that smooth/fun.

     

    Also think WC is onto something, I want to do anything but murder people in that world...

  23. Posted

    So I finally got around to playing this. I kickstarted it back in the day for a ton of money because I a. Like Brad Muir, b. It sounded rad. I played a bit of the beta/alpha/something but it was before controller support (or a functioning controller support) so I didn't get too deep into it... like maybe the tutorial.

     

    I'm glad to say that the game turned out just fine, it's a game, it plays, it has a lot of interesting things going on in it and I've encountered only one bug with the controller that is fixed by just using a mouse and keyboard for that particular battle.  I believe my biggest gripe with the entire game is what I immediately had when they were fleshing out the concept and that's the art style; it's well executed, but lacks charm or soul, which is a considerable issue in this particular game type when I need to care about the people and houses. It has had a lot of color added to it since the beta, but I find that the characters are void of anything interesting and perhaps the lack of voice acting makes it less meaningful to lose a hero.

     

    I haven't gotten the knack of the combat like I did in Xcom, so by the time of writing, I am losing quite a bit. It feels very Xcomy, but the options/classes/whatever are different enough that I can't just apply what I learned in that game to this. So, I can't tell if the combat just isn't as deep or simply that I haven't gotten the hang of it. You get to progress your heros much like xcom with items, armor, and skills, but the time between incidences seems so far apart that I'll be lucky if I get to use one hero for 1 or 2 fights before they die of old age... I don't believe this is an issue with design as it seems pretty obvious, this must be an issue with how I am playing... like I need more upgrades to get higher level heros early, or something to extend life times or the incidences start to happen more frequently... I'm not sure. I have played 6 hours, within those are two different games and I've only made it up to Year 50-60+ before being totally screwed... so I need to get better.

     

    One thing I didn't realize it had was FTL style events, basically a choose your own adventure thing with flavor text. However, I feel the tuning on it is on the purposefully sadistic side where as I don't even want to participate in them anymore. Much like FTL, it just seems like no matter when they come around, you're getting screwed, but unlike FTL, not participating in it also screws you. It's an odd game overall as in that it tries to be this serious XCOM style game, but at the same time, has enough flavor to be fun and goofy... I'd much rather the Flotilla style of adventure choosing; where good things could actually happen and are fun. This whole thing reminds me of a Civ 3 or 4 discussion at GDC where they had to tune their systems not to be perfectly random because players felt like they were being cheated... this feature just feels like I always being cheated and not sure if it fits 100% with the tone of the overall product.

     

    The thing that helped my general malaise over the lack of charm in the House personalities is choosing Houses that reference something to me that matters. I think the Houses are neat, but it's hard to really care about the random houses, so much so it makes you wonder (aside from the obvious Kickstarter benefits business) why the make your own house feature wasn't built into the game. Like in FTL or Oregon Trail, I'd name the faceless characters after friends. Also, for the record, I have a house from kickstarter... I should have thought it out better as it's dumb and I don't even use it. However, after listening to the GB East podcast, I started to use one of the houses from the caster, then looked around to find House Muir (Brad Muir), House Davis (Ryan Davis), and House Remo (I assume Chris as Chris Remo is the founder)... this made it way more important and funny to me, especially within a generation, House Muir sent what was left of their clan to help defend the keep the Remos held... sadly the Remos were on their last legs with a child regent at the time. A few years later when the child came to age they were married to a Muir. So basically I have this huge interweaving story of Game Personality families in a weird fantasy universe... it's just getting all sorts of strange of a meta and hilarious to me to see what happens next.

     

    Over all, I guess I was ready for this type of game again and it's doing enough unique things and similar things to the genre that I enjoy. There is a lot of inspiration to go off of for an expansion or a sequel, so I hope they really hope they get the chance to do that as I'd love another iteration. Going to keep playing and see if I can understand the combat any better to conquer it and understand if there is any depth here or if it's just what it is on the surface, a hard ass tactical sim.