What are you playing?

figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
Mass Effect 2

Holy crap, that was a hell of an ending. I really want to punch the Illusive Bartlet in his smug face, though.

The UI is less bad than in ME1, but it's still a hot pile of garbage. Especially weapon descriptions. I don't need to know the fictional history of the weapon's manufacture. I need to know what the gun does! How does it compare to other guns? Stop dumping lore ahead of pertinent information. Even if I want to read the lore, I'm only gonna read it once. I'm gonna need to look at technical info a lot more, and this game series sucks at highlighting the most pertinent information.

I think I need to take a break and play something else before I go to ME3, though.
 
Yoshimickster

Yoshimickster

AND taking another break from Hades 2, god DAMMIT I love this game, just when you think "Hey, can they cram anymore obscure Greek mythology in there?" They answer "FUCK YEAH WE CAN-its Hades mother fucker!"
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

Cyberpunk 2077

So I'm going to come out and say it, I was a cyberpunk hater back in 1.0 when the game launched. Even outside of the terrible bugs and poor performance, my biggest problem was the story. They forgot to put punk into a cyberpunk game. I mean, I get the ghost of an anarchist bisexual punk rock terrorist stuck in my brain, and the game wants me to treat this as a bad thing? When Johnny Silverhand said lets burn this city, I wanted to be able to agree. Smash the system! But it wasn't meant to be.

Now, however, they've really added a -lot- to this game. It's not the same game anymore. Extra story bits, tons of free dlc additions, the Phantom Liberty story expansion is pretty good... plus this is the only game that can even begin to tax the gpu of my new rig, and goddamn does it look pretty. So yeah, this isn't anywhere near the same game as it was three years ago, and it's actually pretty damn fun now.
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe said:
Cyberpunk 2077

So I'm going to come out and say it, I was a cyberpunk hater back in 1.0 when the game launched. Even outside of the terrible bugs and poor performance, my biggest problem was the story. They forgot to put punk into a cyberpunk game. I mean, I get the ghost of an anarchist bisexual punk rock terrorist stuck in my brain, and the game wants me to treat this as a bad thing? When Johnny Silverhand said lets burn this city, I wanted to be able to agree. Smash the system! But it wasn't meant to be.

Now, however, they've really added a -lot- to this game. It's not the same game anymore. Extra story bits, tons of free dlc additions, the Phantom Liberty story expansion is pretty good... plus this is the only game that can even begin to tax the gpu of my new rig, and goddamn does it look pretty. So yeah, this isn't anywhere near the same game as it was three years ago, and it's actually pretty damn fun now.
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I'd like to add to this, after another several hour gaming session where time just gets away from me, that if this game had launched in the state that it's in now, it would have been considered a masterpiece. If you played Starfield and was turned off by how really bland it was, and you want a proper sci-fi "Bethesda" style game, this is it. And I put Bethesda in quotes here because the style of this game is how Bethesda fans pretend Bethesda games are.
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

I felt like sharing my progress on my current Stardew Valley farm.

Alana_5-12-2024_30467620.png

Spring 3, year 3. I'm quite proud of the fact that all my sprinklers have pressure nozzles on them, and that I'm only using deluxe scarecrows.

Further planned improvements include:
1. Another barn for ostriches. I have the egg and the recipe for an ostrich egg incubator already, I just haven't gotten around to building the barn and hatching them.
2. There's space next to my orchard for more stuff. I might put a slime hutch there, but to be honest I've never found slimes to be worth it. I might put more fish ponds there, if I can find cool fish to raise. Alternatively, more fruit trees.
3. Aesthetic improvements, right now a lot of my farm is bare dirt, I'll probably put down flooring and paths and decorations after I've finalized where everything goes.

Then after that comes making enough money to buy my way to Perfection, because I really can't be arsed to max out my friendship with everyone, craft every item, or cook every recipe.
 
Far

Far

I don't think early access is inherently bad, 99% of the time absolutely, it just requires smarter consumers than we have to navigate expectations, more trustworthy devs which are in short supply and a more stable market and industry than we currently have. Since exceptions will never outweigh the norm, which is poorly implemented EA, it is something to absolutely be wary of.

That said Hades 2 launched into EA with more content than the first game had at it's launch and more complete than most fully launched games do in today's landscape.
 
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Bubble181

Bubble181

EA as in "pre-ordering customers can access a week earlier so we can do a soft launch and work out last minute kinks" is once thing. EA as in "we're releasing the game half finished and by the time we declare it finished the hype is long gone and everyone has moved on" sucks.
 
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Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

Bubble181 said:
EA as in "pre-ordering customers can access a week earlier so we can do a soft launch and work out last minute kinks" is once thing. EA as in "we're releasing the game half finished and by the time we declare it finished the hype is long gone and everyone has moved on" sucks.
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Alternatively, Baldur's Gate 3 was in early access for THREE YEARS and managed to keep all its hype going right into release.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
There are some EA success stories, like Satisfactory, Factorio, Subnautica, and yes, Baldur's Gate 3.
But there's also plenty of examples of how it can go wrong.
Gnomoria, probably one of the best "ease you in to Dwarf Fortress" DF clones out there never quite got finished because its dev vanished before it could leave EA.
Space Engineers and Empyrion peaked early in their EA cycle, and by the time they launched for real, their playerbase had dwindled away to only the hardcore enthusiasts... which is unfortunate for a multiplayer sandbox game that relies on other players to be the endgame content. Additionally, their Steam Workshops are choked full of deprecated mods and player content that no longer are applicable to the new versions of the game, and most of the dedicated modders have moved on.
And for all we're still enjoying it, Valheim's glory days have pretty much come and gone, despite still being in Early Access. They're just now releasing the next (and not even the last or second to last) biome update that's been in the pipe for at least a year or two.

It's rough, because for some of these games, if not being able to get the cash infusion that EA provided, we might not have been able to play them at all because they'd never have made it to market at all. But the tradeoff is the peak of the game will often come long before it's even feature complete.
 
AshburnerX

AshburnerX

From what I understand, the Space Engineers people have basically decided to redo the entire engine so they don't have to deal with the spaghetti code anymore and so they can do stuff like proper liquids. More power to them.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
AshburnerX said:
From what I understand, the Space Engineers people have basically decided to redo the entire engine so they don't have to deal with the spaghetti code anymore and so they can do stuff like proper liquids. More power to them.
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I'll believe it when I see it. 90% of Space Engineers was just lifted, unchanged, from their previous game, Miner Wars. But I guess at least it isn't Unity, like Empyrion.
 
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