What are you playing?

IronBrig4

IronBrig4

I'm playing Subnautica on PS5. It's pretty fun but I think I'll uninstall after beating it. There's only so much room on the console and I have a hankering for Ghosts of Tsushima.
 
AshburnerX

AshburnerX

IronBrig4 said:
I'm playing Subnautica on PS5. It's pretty fun but I think I'll uninstall after beating it. There's only so much room on the console and I have a hankering for Ghosts of Tsushima.
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I just reinstalled this myself. I expect to see something for Ghosts of Tsushima 2 in the next State of Play.
 
Yoshimickster

Yoshimickster

Gotch. I'm also doing a full play of God of War, and to this DAY I still find it weird that Poseidon gives you the lightning at first and not Zeus. Like, why not TIDAL waves or something thematically accurate?
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

figmentPez said:
Book of Demons

I'm kinda mixed on this one. I enjoyed it, but by the end I was feeling like it was about to overstay it's welcome. Which is sad because it's got some great ideas.

The game is kinda Diablo-lite. The game is styled around being a book, with all the characters made of paper, and all the gameplay is pretty simplified. You can only walk around the dungeons along the straight paths. There's branches, so it's got non-linear sections, but there's no open rooms, and there's no dodging left and right if you're not at an intersection. There's no skill tree and no weapons. All skills and equipment are in the form of cards, which you equip in slots on your hotbar. Which leads to odd restrictions like deciding between having quick access to potions, or wearing armor. I never felt like I had enough slots.

Combat flows okay despite this. The limited movement feels weird at first, but the game is balanced around it, and the game makes a point of having the player do more than just click, even when you aren't using skill cards. Monsters may have shields you use a different button to break, or you can interrupt their casting if you catch them at the right time. Getting stunned causes a QTE, and may also knock your equipped cards out of position, needing to click on them to put them back in place.

However, near the end of the game all these mechanics just because a torrent of bullshit. If you don't equip the item that reduces stun chance, you'll be doing the stun QTE more than you'll be fighting. There's constant poison, ice, rocks, etc to deal with, and it feels more like whack-a-mole than ARPG combat. The mid-game, when there's a half-dozen monsters, with one or two causing disruptive status effects, feels pretty good. The end game when there's a dozen or more monsters all constantly blacking out your screen, messing with your controls, needing micro managing to defeat, it just got to be too much. I had almost all of the equipment to reduce the debuffs enemies could put on me, to the point where I barely had any skills or items to easily use, and the final fight still felt like a cluster-fuck where I was barely in control.

The thing I liked best about the game is the ability to generate dungeons of various sizes, based on how long you want to play. The game learns from your runs to make the time estimates more accurate, as well. It was nice to be able to pick from 5 dungeon sizes. Small dungeons were under 10 minutes for me, while the largest size was like 45+ minutes. It's a shame I don't really feel like going back for more. When I finished Torchlight I almost immediately went back to play with another class, but I have no similar desire with Book of Demons.
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Since this was given away for free recently and you linked to this review, I thought I'd share my thoughts.
Just finished my first playthrough as a warrior, did a bit of post-game dungeons but meh. May restart as one of the other classes to see how different they play.
I wonder, were you playing on Roguelike or some such? Because even in the late game, and without all that many slots dedicated to anti-stun etc, I didn't really have a problem with it. Sure, I got poisoned, but so what, that's what healing's for. Freeze? Eh, just lasts a few seconds. Rocks? Just walk over 'm with boots on which I was wearing anyway. The stunned minigame can be a bit annoying, but I most certainly didn't face it as often as you did - you can still dodge, as long as there's free room ahead or behind you on the path, and where rocks drop is pretty clearly telegraphed. This may of course have been changed in some patch or other.
It was a very deliberate Diablo-riff (literally all the characters are copies of ones in Diablo I, including the bad guys, and the end video is also pretty much the exact same).
I won't say it gripped me and I'll be replaying it for decades to come or something, but for an indie 7-hour game I liked it.
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
  1. Decide to play Mass Effect
  2. Start game get through opening mission
  3. Remember mods exist
  4. Spend days browsing through mods and trying to decipher cryptic guides*
  5. Resume game and see all the improvements to the interface, textures, lighting
  6. Crash
  7. Wipe it all and reinstall all the mods because once you mod the textures you can't make any more changes to Mass Effect mods
  8. Game runs without texture and lighting mods
  9. Start installing texture mods one by one
  10. Crash
  11. Reboot
  12. Game runs with the main texture and lighting mod it was just crashing with
  13. Install the rest of the texture mods (which takes quite some time, running in the background)
  14. Cross fingers and hope...

* UGH, mod makers and enthusiasts are terrible at communication. The guide very emphatically tells you that the batch mod installer does not download any mods and that you must download them yourself. Then, two sentences later tells you that you must download the mods through the batch mod installer, and not directly from the mod page. ... ... :fu: Not only is the batch mod installer part of a mod manager that downloads mods, (which I had to guess because despite being underlined in the guide many times, none of the mentions of batch mod installer are links), but you can actually download mods when using the batch mod installer portion of the interface. What the guide means is that you'll have to download the mods one by one, manually, and that you can't set to download as a batch, you can only set them to install as a batch.

EDIT: Also, I skipped over all my efforts to get my EA app copy of Mass Effect Legendary Edition working with my Steam Controller. If I hadn't gotten this copy "free" with Amazon Prime, I would have bought it through Steam and had fewer problems, but I did manage to get it working by adding the EA app as a non-Steam game, instead of adding either Mass Effect LE 1 or the Mass Effect LE Launcher. Should have tried that earlier, rather than going down rabbit holes of OSOL, GlosSI, and Fuck Off EA App.

But I got it working, and even found a mod that will lock the HUD to displaying controller prompts. Which is, apparently, the only major issue with having Mass Effect play nice with mixed inputs; good for anyone wanting to play with a Steam Controller, or use gyro aim on a Steam Deck.
 
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Bubble181

Bubble181

Giving Banished a whirl.
Remember GasBandit said - don't expand too quickly.
Well, my first town's now in year 8, and what with the fishermen and farmers dying of starvation, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be screwed real soon.
And I didn't even build a single new house since I never had any food surplus.
Well, fuck.
 
Dei

Dei

It's a super delicate balance because you also do actually need to build houses early or else you don't grow enough to have enough labor to get enough food. This game is soooo punishing until you learn it for sure.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

I started on easy (obviously) which means 6 families and houses so I thought I had some time.
But I fully expected my first village to all die gruesome deaths within two years and that didn't happen - technically the town is still going, just... Slowly trending downwards in a way I don't see as easily reversible.
I had 10/17 adults working in the food industry and people were starving. Not a clue how you're supposed to start with less people and resources and make it. Which is a good thing, to be clear.
 
Dei

Dei

So the main point though is that if you don't have children at steady intervals, your population ages and stops working and then dies. Or, if you do build but wait too long, they die and leave a lot of orphans who also die.
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
Mass Effect Legendary Edition (Modded)

I'm enjoying this a lot, but damn this is a mixed bag. The lore is extensive, the party banter is great, and it's overall a good experience. I should start doing more of the plot missions, so I can get a better perspective on what the map design and environments are like. Too many of the side quests take place in copy/paste buildings with different crates inside.

The interface is fucking horrible, though. Who designed this? I'm baffled at how anyone thought this was an acceptable design for the menus. Inventory management is a nightmare. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it...
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
Still playing Mass Effect, and this continues to be a very mixed bag. Even when the levels aren't reusing the same rooms, the gameplay and the levels never really mesh. The story is interesting, though, and the voice acting is fantastic.

I continue to absolutely loathe the UX.

--

Last night the batteries in my Steam Controller died mid-mission, and my second pair of rechargeable AAs I use with it only lasted like 15 minutes because they're old, so I resorted to playing with mouse & keyboard to finish the mission I was on. I realized I haven't played an FPS with a mouse in years. I'm out of practice. Heck, I'm not even sure how long it's been since I used a mouse with my right hand at all (I game righty, general computer use lefty, to cope with RSI issues.) So my right hand was cramping up, and I was struggling to get used to the mouse sensitivity. It was weird to feel uncoordinated trying to aim with a mouse.
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

I'd just like to note that the UI (especially the inventory UI) and the copy-and-pasted environments were absolutely the biggest complaints when the game first came out, and consequently Bioware made a point to fix these two issues in the sequels.

Well, okay, there was also a vocal section of people who loudly complained about there being hanky-panky scenes, but that doesn't count.

EDIT: And the Mako, people complained about the Mako. So the UI, the copy-and-pasted environments, and the Mako, those were the main complaints.
 
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figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
bhamv3 said:
I'd just like to note that the UI (especially the inventory UI) and the copy-and-pasted environments were absolutely the biggest complaints when the game first came out, and consequently Bioware made a point to fix these two issues in the sequels.
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That's good to know, because the UI feels like listening to a small child telling you about their day at school. Lots of unfocused, random details before they finally get to what they're trying to tell you, and that's still not the important parts.
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

figmentPez said:
That's good to know, because the UI feels like listening to a small child telling you about their day at school. Lots of unfocused, random details before they finally get to what they're trying to tell you, and that's still not the important parts.
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No joke, I only just found out in the last few days what "sell all junk" and "convert all junk to omni-gel" means. I've been on another playthrough of the Legendary Edition too, and I first played ME1 back when it came out in 2007, and in all the intervening years I've never gotten "sell all junk" to work for me because I didn't know how to mark items as junk. I just ignored this particular feature and sold or converted everything manually. But then my curiosity got the better of me a couple of days ago, and I finally looked it up, and it turns out there is a VERY faint trash can icon on the left side of every item in your inventory, which you can click to mark something as junk, and then you can sell/convert your junk items all at once with one click.

So believe me, I very much know how you feel when you say the ME1 UI is complete ass.
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

Tonnny_01 said:
Just wrapped up my fifth run through Elden Ring, and man, it's still as awesome as ever! I mean, exploring the Lands Between, taking down those crazy bosses – it never gets old. Even though I've been through it a bunch of times now, there's always some new twist or turn that keeps me hooked. It's like the game that just keeps on giving, you know? Can't wait to dive back in for round six!
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Well hello chatbot, how long before we get a link to your totally legit camshow?
 
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