The card processing company Mojang uses isn't licensed to do business in Illinois for some reason.
Assassin's Creed 3: I really haven't done anything recently but naval missions. I want Ubisoft to make some pirate game based around this. I love it so much.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine: Kind of surprised that this game is challenging at all. The multi-player is a bitch and a half. I enjoy being steeped in the thick-headed lore of W40k for the single player though. I can guess this is a short game, but I'm having fun.
Scribblenauts Unlimited: Though I miss some of the more inventive reactions of Armageddon or Time Machine being put in the notebook, the control you have as the player is much more satisfying than in other games. I loved mixing up adjectives or playing with the little mini-scenarios of the levels. Being able to totally ruin a place, and then reset it to vanilla without losing the progress I've made, is liberating and I like the open world nature more than the strict levels of the first game. The puzzles seem pretty lenient about what counts as a solution, which is nice too. Overall, I prefer this incarnation of Scribblenauts.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine: Kind of surprised that this game is challenging at all. The multi-player is a bitch and a half. I enjoy being steeped in the thick-headed lore of W40k for the single player though. I can guess this is a short game, but I'm having fun.
Scribblenauts Unlimited: Though I miss some of the more inventive reactions of Armageddon or Time Machine being put in the notebook, the control you have as the player is much more satisfying than in other games. I loved mixing up adjectives or playing with the little mini-scenarios of the levels. Being able to totally ruin a place, and then reset it to vanilla without losing the progress I've made, is liberating and I like the open world nature more than the strict levels of the first game. The puzzles seem pretty lenient about what counts as a solution, which is nice too. Overall, I prefer this incarnation of Scribblenauts.
40K SM is sadly short, but it's fun while it lasts. First time I've played a 40K game and really felt like a Space Marine (even if it's the bland as hell Ultramarine chapter).[DOUBLEPOST=1357275303][/DOUBLEPOST]Also, been playing the Adventure Time game. It's a ton of fun, but sadly way too short. It's easy to 100% in the first run and the NG+ only doubles enemy health, so it's not making it much harder or anything. I hope WayForward makes another AT game and makes it last more than a few hours.
This
But less arcade like where 10 ships come out of nowhere.
Sandbox world plz.
I too enjoyed the Naval missions and felt disappointed when there suddenly weren't anymore I could do. I barely upgraded my ship (piercing shot, wooden reinforcements, improved rudder, extra cannon) and I was able to do all of the missions with hardly any effort.
A word to the wise: the console versions reputedly have horrible framerate drops, and the PC version actually requires a pretty decent video card to run on high.
EDIT: NVM.
Glad you enjoy it!Wow, people are willing to call anything "skyrim" like these days.
Game is good but no where close to Skyrim caliber.
BananaHands
Staff member
GasBandit
Staff member
Picked up the Orcs Must Die 2 DLC during the winter sale for an actual reasonable price. After playing them, I'm really glad I didn't pay full price. Don't get me wrong, I like having them, but $5+ a pop for 3 new story levels apiece and some REALLY irritating new enemies (fire and water elementals for the motha freakin lose) are not worth full price.
I strongly disagree.
Gilgamesh's comparison to Fallout 3 is more appropriate in my opinion.
Skill-based leveling system with branching trees, story-driven but you're never forced to go from point A to B...
People need to take Skyrim off its pedestal, it's a good game but it's not a magic special snowflake.
figmentPez
Staff member
I watched X's Let's Play of the game and it's not open-world. Very much mission/level based.
Skill based leveling system with branching trees? Yeah, except skyrim has actual values for the basic skill which slowly improve over time while FC3 does not. Also, in Skyrim you have to specialize your character making them unique. I unlocked almost every single skill in FC3 in my first playthrough... and there's no real compelling reason to go back and play again.
Story driven but you're never forced to go from point A to B. Again, true... BUT... Skyrim has so many more side quests, guild quests, romancing options and character interaction that comparing it directly the FC3 is futile. I can play hours and hours and hours doing every quest but the main one in Skyrim as the side quests and guild quests are well developed. Side quests in FC3 consist of "go here and use this gun to kill this animal" or "go here and kill this bad guy with a knife".
And your comparison of crafting is completely off. Crafting in Skyrim involves many more materials and actual skills. If you're doing a skill like alchemy it also requires learning the effects of ingredients before you can really become good at it. FC3... you stab a komodo dragon, skin it and turn it into a wallet or gun sling or something.
Far Cry 3 was good... I enjoyed it... but it's not close to the scope of Skyrim.
I got the WiiU for Christmas and have started playing ZombiU. I must say that it's fun to play a real survival horror game again, where the ammo is very limited and you have to be smart about how you get around the zombie hordes.
Necronic
Staff member
Also no magic items and the item system is a bit different obviously. The similarities are remarkable though, and it makes me wonder why more people haven't tried this beyond Fallout and Shadow of Chernobyl.
Also I like the fact that my guide looks like a young Spike Lee.
Also I like the fact that my guide looks like a young Spike Lee.
People didn't try it before Skyrim because Morrowind, Oblivion, STALKER, and other such titles weren't the huge mainstream hits that Skyrim has become. They were successful to be sure, but Skyrim has dominated the gaming culture in a way few games outside of WoW and CoD have. Now that it's become a huge AAA franchise that everyone knows about, people will want to copy that success.
I think because the game industry took a very long time to come around to the idea of selling a shooter on RPG terms instead of shooter terms. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sold 2M units. Which is great for an RPG, but pretty lame for a shooter. So a lot of people considered that too niche to be worth the trouble.
Obviously, not everyone thought that way (thank god), but "open-world" and "shooter" were thought to be fairly contradictory in terms of developmental strengths because open-world used to mean commensurate scaled-down graphics in favor of volume of content, while the modern shooter meant the complete opposite (which is also why the previous Far Cry and STALKER games tended to make PC rigs of time cry).
Right now though, we're at a peculiar point where the technical barriers to displaying high visual fidelity are relatively low cost to consumers. Whether we stay there or not, who knows, but it's cheaper than its ever been, really, to build a machine that will display 95% of all games at "ultra-high". Thus, the market for open-world shooters/action games is larger than it ever has been,
Necronic
Staff member
It seems to me that they sort of dipped their toe in with the FC2, but ended up in an undesirable limbo where the game had too many RPG/sandbox elements to be a good shooter on its own, but too few sandbox elements to be a good sandbox/rpg. The lack of fast travel (not counting bus system) in FC2 in particular was absolutely awful, as was the ultimately repetitive nature of fighting through the same checkpoints over and over again.
FC3 is a lot closer, but still needs a lot of work to consider it a great game though. Loot is generally boring. All loot is vendor trash, meaning that my big reward is an errand, and the game is nice enough to give me a map to all the chests. The weapon system seems pretty good, although it's a bit ridiculous that I have a silenced sniper rifle within 2 hours of playing. The skill system is, honestly, pretty boring. I leveled a couple of skills and then completely stopped caring (maybe there's more there to see.) World exploration is pretty awesome, and while FC3 doesn't have the advantage of underground lairs that Skyrim did (allowing a much higher density/more exploration), there still seems to be lots to see and do, as well as a number of unexpected world events.
There is a lot of potential for an amazing game here in a good Sandbox RPG FPS, but it isn't there yet. Its still missing too much of the sandbox/RPG elements. That said, the FPS side of it is excellent. The combat is still awesome (although the ability to "tag" enemies is a bit cheap). That was the one real failure of Fallout 3. They got all the Sandbox parts of the game right, but they ended up sticking it onto a pretty terrible FPS. Guns were boring and combat was incredibly broken (difficult fight? Just cutscene it!).
FC3 is a lot closer, but still needs a lot of work to consider it a great game though. Loot is generally boring. All loot is vendor trash, meaning that my big reward is an errand, and the game is nice enough to give me a map to all the chests. The weapon system seems pretty good, although it's a bit ridiculous that I have a silenced sniper rifle within 2 hours of playing. The skill system is, honestly, pretty boring. I leveled a couple of skills and then completely stopped caring (maybe there's more there to see.) World exploration is pretty awesome, and while FC3 doesn't have the advantage of underground lairs that Skyrim did (allowing a much higher density/more exploration), there still seems to be lots to see and do, as well as a number of unexpected world events.
There is a lot of potential for an amazing game here in a good Sandbox RPG FPS, but it isn't there yet. Its still missing too much of the sandbox/RPG elements. That said, the FPS side of it is excellent. The combat is still awesome (although the ability to "tag" enemies is a bit cheap). That was the one real failure of Fallout 3. They got all the Sandbox parts of the game right, but they ended up sticking it onto a pretty terrible FPS. Guns were boring and combat was incredibly broken (difficult fight? Just cutscene it!).
They're essentially opposites, really.
In a lot of ways, I think Skyrim avoids this problem by not actually being a FPS (though you can try and play it that way, of course) in the classical sense.
Fallout 3 just managed to point out that it was really kind of a sub-par shooter without the VAT system. Don't get me wrong, I love Fallout 3, just not as a shooter.
Dude, you eat Alchemy mats then mix until you win. It's not as deep as you hope. Skyrim's got more non-story meat than FC3, sure, but if you look at it, really you're just doing the same types of quests over and over. Find cave/kill Dreugar/find item/find person. Like I said it's a good game, but it doesn't really deserve to be held above others that are similar like so many seem to do.[DOUBLEPOST=1357329505][/DOUBLEPOST]Also, unless you go Backstab-to-win, Skyrim's combat is as generic as any FPS.
I still play Skyrim.
FarCry 3 has already been uninstalled.
FarCry 3 has already been uninstalled.
Necronic
Staff member
Ok, I'm not saying it's an airtight comparison (Skyrim & FC3), but most would consider Skyrim to be the penultimate Fantasy Sandbox RPG (if not the penultimate Sandbox RPG altogether). I think its also fair to say that FC3 is one of the best FPS Sandbox RPGs made to date, tied in a weird "opposites" style mentioned above with Fallout3. In that sense its the closest thing we have to FPS Skyrim, other than Fallout 3, which has more in common with Skyrim than it does with FC3 (since its such an awful FPS).
Also the voice acting/cut scene animation in FC3 beats Skyrim's/Fallout3 like a tiger unleashed in a pirates lair. Voss is one of the coolest characters I have ever seen in a game.
Also the voice acting/cut scene animation in FC3 beats Skyrim's/Fallout3 like a tiger unleashed in a pirates lair. Voss is one of the coolest characters I have ever seen in a game.
Penultimate means next to last.
I gave up on Uncharted, the controls for jumping are crazy frustrating for how accurate the leaps need to be and the gunfighting just isn't very fun when it's 1v12+ every time I round a corner.
Might poke around on WoW tonight, now that I've taken a good, long break, see what 5.1's all about.
Mainly been on Xenoblade this past week though, it's fantastic. The voice-acting is great, though hearing big angry mech-monsters taunt me in thick British accents is weird for some reason.
Might poke around on WoW tonight, now that I've taken a good, long break, see what 5.1's all about.
Mainly been on Xenoblade this past week though, it's fantastic. The voice-acting is great, though hearing big angry mech-monsters taunt me in thick British accents is weird for some reason.
Maybe lower the difficulty setting? Not trying to troll, but I didn't really have those problems. If anything the jumping felt more like, as long as I got in mostly the right place, he would automatically latch onto the appropriate spot.
I don't even know what difficulty I picked, been awhile since I started the game. I'm mostly surprised that if you don't headshot it seems to take a full clip to kill one guy. The jumping just feels off to me, I'm not sure what it is exactly that bugs me. Maybe it's because I was piddling around in Assassin's Creed III not long before.