@Tjuz Yeah, honestly, I wasn't finding her to be too difficult, but by the time I had got their I had already lost my death defiance and was on subpar health. I still got her to under half health which was great.
I already think I've played Hades II more than the original as I don't think I put in as many hours into the first game as I should have.
Since Outer Worlds 2 comes out today proper, thought I would share some thoughts formed from getting a head start due to the upgrade thingy you can do via GP.
I thought combat felt very basic, I hear it gets better as you go along but that hasn't been my experience yet. It is weird too, cause Avowed right out the gate combatwise was such a step above for that genre space and I feel like none of that is here.
Also, after listening for weeks about all the complaints about Pokemon ZA having no VA I find it weird more people aren't talking about how your protagonist in this has zero presence. They are not voiced, and all the dialogue and cutscenes (at least so far anyway) have taken place in first person. It does that old Bethesda style thing of zooming into the person you are talking to and giving you a big list of text options to pick. I think this is meant to heighten immersion, but it just makes me feel arms length away from the story.
While that all sounds quite negative I am sure, I do love how much CRPG energy is in this, this is a crunchy number rpg RPG. Building a character, so much player agency and choice choice choice. Maybe on a replay the smoke and mirrors will be obvious, but right now, the illusion of cause and effect is like strikingly tangible and so much fun. I say CRPG too because while there is a degree of scripting and gating, this isn't like a full on cinematic RPG where quests are largely on rails, like things can absolutely go sideways or you can stumble on things by accident and obviously we know it has to be coded to allow those things, but in the moment, it can be kinda fun to blunder your way headfirst down a staircase and somehow still find yourself at the right place when you hit the bottom.
@Kairuuu You made it further than me the first time on the Surface! I died in the area before her without ever making it to her. At some point that boss becomes a cakewalk too, as long as you have the right build with your weapons since up-close weapons with her can be inconvenient if you don't have the right boons to balance that out. The third boss of the Surface gave me a lot more grief to get past them the first time around, so look forward to that!
@Pizzamorg I only bought the standard edition, so yesterday was the first chance I had to play the game. A few hours in, I do share that the combat feels rather basic, but I don't mind that necessarily. I don't come to these types of games for interesting combat mechanics personally, and the freedom they've (so far) given you to approach scenarios in different ways works as a solid counter-balance in my eyes. I'm honestly appreciative that the game has no voiced protagonist here, since I don't think they could have matched this level of interaction with NPCs if they had. I do understand your issue in terms of the conversations really just involving the NPC however. It would be nice if at any point this type of RPG would divert more from the "locking in on a head while they speak"-conversations, and possibly bring more cinematic camera placement to also show off our character. I suppose you'd still only be able to do that in moments when the NPC is speaking however, with the unvoiced protagonist of it all. It feels silly I spent like an hour in character creation and haven't seen her face since! Are you playing third-person?
Like you said, I'm enjoying the more CRPG nature of the dialogue and choices so far. Despite having major FOMO, I also like that it shows you that certain dialogue options could've been unlocked if you'd had chosen different skills or gathered more intel. There's been quite a few times already where I've seen locked choices due to a lack of info, and it does highly intrigue me what I'm missing at those points. The counter-argument of that is that I might read into certain conversations too much though. As an example, I did the quest with the Spire and the double-jump boots yesterday. At the end of the quest once you've gotten up the platform, you can speak to the woman where, for me, there was a locked choice due to missing information. I took that as there possibly being evidence they had killed the other two settlers somewhere that I missed. This resulted in me looking around again, though to no avail. Ended up just finishing the quest like normal, but now I remain wondering if I actually helped out a pair of serial killers, when I otherwise might not have questioned it as much.
Still very early goings for me as I'm just exploring Fairfield at the moment. How far into the game would you say you are and would you say the quality of writing/depth of dialogue options has remained consistent throughout?
@Tjuz I did start off in third person, as I prefer third person to first person wherever possible, but combat doesn't feel like it was designed for third person at all. Melee is okay in third person, but shooting is horrible in third person and both are just better in first. Combine that with all of the ugly armour sets and an almost entirely missing fashion game (at least so far), playing in first person seems to be the way to go. Which is a shame as I spent a lot of time perfecting my characters look before I started playing.
I believe I am about 15 hours in, I have all of the companions (weirdly the first one you can recruit is also the easiest to miss). This was enough time for me to finish the main quest strand in the first major area, and make inroads to the second major area, while dabbling in the secondary mini zone you unlock on the side. I do feel like I have missed out on loads of stuff though, beyond like the main quest branch, almost nothing else is marked for the player and has to be discovered, so like there were entire areas and quest branches in that first zone I just totally missed because the game never pushed me into those areas. Not sure if that is cool or just sucks.
I thought the writing is getting better as I go along, but the choices are getting worse. It kinda feels like Science, Observation, Medicine, Explosives and Engineering are the only Perks which can truly open up new dialogue options, or alternate paths through missions, and the required deepness into those Perks only increases more and more as you go along, so even if you decide midway through and refocus, you aren't likely going to have enough points to ever catch up.
There are already mods out that allow you to respec your character, and while it may somewhat break their design intent, I am kinda tempted to use it, because you don't know what Perks are useless sometimes until it is too late. Like I dumped a lot of points in to Stealth, and Stealth sucks in this game, if you get discovered by one person in a space, everyone immediately becomes aware of you. even people nowhere near whatsoever. It just makes it feel hopeless clearing encounters in the way unless I guess you save scum like crazy, and I just kinda wish I could invest those points into something else now I know.
@Pizzamorg Ah, it sucks to hear that the third-person still comes across as such a second-rate experience. I had heard pre-release that animations and such in third-person were an issue, but that they were apparently improved before the full release. I suppose whatever changes they did make ultimately didn't fix the fact that it'll still turn people off however. It is very funny to think that I also spent over an hour in the character creator only to not have seen my character since, as I've been exclusively in first-person. Now that I think about it... I don't even think mirrors shows reflections in this game?
Your mentioning of the first squadmate being easy to miss has just given me a sudden bout of FOMO... I am still in the early process of exploring Paradise Island though, so I suppose I'll only have to start getting really worried if I don't have any squadmate show up within the next dozen hours or so. I did happen to come across the Spire, which resulted in my getting the double-jump boots very early. One of those times where ignoring the main quest to go explore the unmarked path really worked out for me! It also resulted in fun stuff like already knowing all the information on Ida when I confronted the Protectorate guard at the bridge who asks you for a favor, and being able to give Huell in Fairfield the schematics he requested immediately.
But yeah, in my experience in this short time, there's definitely content around every corner. Not everything necessarily being some major side quest, or even a marked quest at all, but still interactions you can have with the world and its NPCs that are at the very least well done, and at best feel meaningful. It is a shame that you seem to really have to go out of your way to explore all of that, but now that you know it, I guess you can keep that in mind for future areas or even return to Paradise Island if you're up for seeing more of what it has to offer. My rule of thumb so far has been to simply explore every marked building on the map and make sure I've followed every road, so that at least the most likely places for anything to be are covered.
It sucks to hear that the choices are getting worse over time, however. It sucks even more to hear that it sounds like all the perks that open up new paths later in the game are... none of the ones I've picked, haha. I'll be stuck with Hacking, Speech and Lockpick it sounds like. Admittedly though, I should've seen coming that a skill like Lockpick would not be particularly helpful in conversations... Thanks for the tip in making sure to focus on whatever you've started with basically, though. I do tend to go a bit "jack-of-all-trades" in RPGs, so I'll make sure to rein that tendency in a bit with this one. It sucks that Stealth didn't work out for you. I've heard many people are disappointed in the system sadly. Even though they give you the opportunity to respec at the end of the prologue still, I can imagine that the prologue didn't give you a good enough taste of how stealthing would feel once in the wider world. I'd say it's fair play to install a mod for that in those cases!
Having seen the great Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden pictures in the screenshots thread, I remembered I still have a PC key lying around from when I got a double one after already buying it. If anyone on here uses Steam on PC and would like the game, just let me know! I'd be happy to share it with whoever.
I booted up Tekken 3 yesterday, and think I'm gonna use it as my in-between game for the holidays. I never had it as a kid (although I did have a Tekken demo which I loved, I couldn't tell you which specific entry it was from, while a couple of my friends had the full games) but I have enough nostalgia for the era that I recognise most of the characters. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that it included a difficulty setting and a side-scrolling brawler mode, so I reckon I got the right one!
"If I let not knowing anything stop me from doing something, I'd never do everything!"
Just started Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth and already loving it more than perhaps any other game in the Ace Attorney franchise. The simple change of actively moving Miles around the environment, walking up to items of interest and speaking with other characters, makes a huge difference to the immersion, while the Logic gimmick is a great way of allowing you to make steady progress with the plot (outside of the usual "wait to press everything and hope for a totally unforeseen revelation" approach). Plus, my beloved Gumshoe is front and centre. Exactly as he should always be.
"If I let not knowing anything stop me from doing something, I'd never do everything!"
This year’s RetroAchievements challenge has begun so I’ll have a good reason to play a lot of older games. Been playing through the original Layton game again for it, which really is as brilliant as I remember, I’ve beaten it a few times over the years. I’m also playing Bully for the first time, which has been fun but hasn’t properly picked up yet, and it’s a little choppy even on PCSX2. The other game I’ve to play is Summon Night: Swordcraft Story on the GBA which I’d never heard of so that should be fun!
Tomb Raider 4 really is the game that never ends too. Feel like I’ve been on it for an eternity and still loads to do. I’ve just done the first part of Cairo on a motorbike and it’s definitely been a giant step forwards technologically but the more open nature sort of wears you down.
Checking out the REANIMAL demo on Switch 2 right now. It's very good and runs really well. I also didn't realise it has some voice acting which is super neat!
Definitely much darker and spookier than Little Nightmares III so far.
Giving AC Shadows another try. Can't tell you the amount of times I bounced off of this, but there just ain't a lot going on right now in the gaming world. I fell off previously just cause I am old, my brain can only contain so many different control schemes, and so I like to just map everything to be the same and let muscle memory take the wheel. This game basically does not let you do that, but I am trying my best this time to fight my muscle memory and navigate the controls as designed. It is getting a little easier every hour, but I am still dying a lot cause I hit the buttons my brain associates to dodge, parry etc and they are somewhere else on the controller, there are also hectic moments where my brain just goes blank where buttons are cause I am sorta overthinking where everything is mapped.
Tomb Raider 4 really is the game that never ends too. Feel like I’ve been on it for an eternity and still loads to do. I’ve just done the first part of Cairo on a motorbike and it’s definitely been a giant step forwards technologically but the more open nature sort of wears you down.
It really was meant to be the Tomb Raider game to end all Tomb Raider games. I don't blame anybody for playing it in chunks (and fortunately, its structure makes it real easy to break up) but rest assured, if you're halfway through Cairo, you're through the worst of it. While its final set of levels feels like it's gonna be yet another interconnected maze, it's actually way linear than it looks. Best of luck!
@Werehog I do sort of get what it’s going for and it’s more of a step forwards in a lot of areas than I think the first few levels really show off. I’m pretty amazed that the PS1 could pull it off, it feels more like a Dreamcast game in terms of being between the PS1 and PS2.
@nessisonett Funny you should say that, because The Last Revelation was the first Tomb Raider game developed outside of PlayStation's home console exclusivity deal, so it actually was a Dreamcast game! It's got some fancier lighting but otherwise, it's the exact same game. You're right, I reckon it's one of the most impressive PS1 games ever released, and is often overlooked as such.
"If I let not knowing anything stop me from doing something, I'd never do everything!"
Wanted to do like a 20 hour check in on AC Shadows, cause I have access to Yasuke and Naoe now and honestly I am absolutely loving this game. I have a tendency to fall off of open world games hard (I loved Valhalla at the start, despised it by the end for having some ridiculous like 90 hour long story and recently despite loving it at the beginning fell of Yotei around 25ish hours in) and so I don't know whether this will hold, but all I can say right now, is I am loving this game.
Some of the most common complaints I have seen for this game, I just don't agree with honestly like even a little bit. I thought the moment of Naoe forgiving Yasuke was really well handled, binding all the characters and themes together, before propelling the story forwards. I really like Naoe and Yasuke as individual characters, and enjoy their chemistry a lot. Maybe this isn't present in the English dub, but in the Japanese performances there remains a subtle tension between their interactions, showing Yasuke hasn't just immediately let go of his guilt, nor has Naoe just forgiven him utterly, and I like the way that energy crackles through what are otherwise surface level banal interactions.
I also think Yasuke is wonderful to play as. Naoe is really fun too, don't get me wrong. But you play as her exclusively for a good 15ish hours, and get used to a slow, methodical, carefully planned pace to every encounter. She is fragile, doesn't hit very hard, has to pick her spots. This forces you to really engage with her full kit, and engage with the full suite of mechanics here, but it can be frustrating when one mistake sends things sideways and you just can't fight your way out.
Then suddenly having Yasuke dropped into the middle of this sandbox, and you can just charge right down the middle of encounters that were real nailbiters hours earlier as Naoe was just a treat to me. He is an unstoppable force of nature, encouraging as many guys to come at him at once. The contrast between him and Naoe is so striking, and so wonderful, she the lightning, he the thunder, it is just inspired. The animations on his moves and abilities too, oh man. When you get that big bat thing, man, I was cackling from ear to ear at the sheer joy of it.
I also really love the world, the reason I am scared of the burnout is because you can just plonk a pin on the map and get lost for hours here. But right now that is a positive, not a negative, I am always excited to see what I find, and I feel like I am always rewarded by what I find, too. Sometimes, that might just be a bit of scenery, and that is enough. The game is gorgeous, and I think the eight stage seasonal system is such an elegant solution to set this feudal Japan from the likes of ROTR, GOT etc Transforming the map, bringing new weather events and details to space with each new cycle.
And speaking of those games, I was worried that Shadows coming last would be to it's detriment, but I think whether intentional or not, it has actually worked out really well for them, as they kinda "borrow" all the best parts of those two games, and smoosh them together into this one package, doing away with a lot of the stuff in the process I didn't like in either of those games. I understand that the very things you may have liked about those games may not have survived the transition, but I feel like they are speaking to me directly with the stuff they chose to "borrow" from each game.
@Pizzamorg Thank you for leaving those thoughts about AC: Shadows (and not just because they make such a positive change from the usual stuff you find left online about the game). It really sounds like, for you at least, everything the developers deliberately set out to achieve is working. I sincerely hope that burnout you fear never comes, and that you continue to enjoy!
"If I let not knowing anything stop me from doing something, I'd never do everything!"
Dunno why it took me so long to get to it, but I'm 23+ hours deep in The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy now after starting it last week, and I regret sleeping on it for so long (day one buy, because I love the developers, but yeah, took me a minute to actually get around to it). I've only scratched the surface of the full experience, but I can already say with confidence that this is the game I've been waiting for since I first heard many years ago that Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaru Uchikoshi were forming their own development studio. Many misfires ensued (Tribe Nine, World's End Club, arguably Rain Code as well), but this game really has its claws in me in a way I haven't experienced since I first played Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. The shift to the SRPG genre was smart, and even though it's probably 75/25 in favor of visual novel/adventure game sequences, the story battles are fun and varied enough that I really look forward to what interesting new mechanics or challenges the game will introduce next.
It remains to be seen if this can settle into an experience as cohesive and wholly gripping as Danganronpa 2 and Danganronpa V3 (or 999 and Virtue's Last Reward, for that matter, since Uchikoshi is heavily involved with this project as well), but I'm really enjoying it so far. Hopefully they do a Nintendo Switch 2 Edition patch for the game, as this deserves to be enjoyed at its absolute best on console. I can confirm it runs brilliantly on PC and Steam Deck, at least.
While my last post on AC Shadows was mostly positive, as I approach hour 40, I wanted to do a bit of a "gripe dumping" - wanna be clear, still super enjoying this game. I played it all day today, will probably do that tomorrow as well. But a lot of kinda small things often grow into larger issues when a game is this long, and I just wanted to get some of them out of me rather than sitting on them. Also apologies if this ends up super long, once I start, I find it hard to stop.
In no particular order.
1. Difficulty balance / Yasuke's place in this game - outside of some really lazy side bosses which are cartoonishly overtuned in the most tedious ways possible, this game is very easy on the base normal difficulty and it kind of makes Yasuke feel sorta invalid in the overall paradigm of the package.
During your early hours, Naoe is very fragile, you want to avoid open combat as much as possible, and especially when there are multiple foes, you just got no shot. Run away, wait for the heat to die down, try again. That is why getting your hands on Yasuke feels so refreshing, cause you've spent the best part of 15 hours avoiding combat and now it is being actively encouraged and it is just great. At least for my tastes.
However, and I don't really remember the moment I crossed the event horizon, somewhere along the way, this just ended up stopping being true. Yes, Naoe is still more fragile than Yasuke, and yes she can still get overwhelmed if there are too many enemies, but weapons like Kusarigama kinda break the entire difficulty equation, since it can hit multiple targets at once, it attacks at range so Naoe is never in any direct danger, and if you have one that applies a status effect like bleed, time will finish the job off for you.
I went from being terrified of open engagements, to facing down entire camps on my own, twirling that thing around above my head like Wonder Woman, to the point where honestly Naoe might now just be better at open engagements than Yasuke is for me. And Yasuke's kinda entire kit is just open engagements and nothing else. So if he is outclassed at that, and Naoe has access to all the other mechanics, then what exactly Yasuke is for.
Especially as, additionally, a lot of the time you're either forced to play as Naoe, or her ability to access the game's full suite of mechanics, just make her the better choice. Even times when Yasuke seems like the best option, there is usually weird counter balancing to still make Naoe the best option.
An example of this, is the game has these Castles. If you clear these key figures from the Castles, you can access a chest with a piece of Legendary gear in. Early on, I found these brutally hard, for the reasons explained above. And as explained above, getting my hands on Yasuke I was like "hell yeah!" time to kick down the door, go on a rampage, get me some Legendary loot!
But it actually doesn't work this way, because if you approach the castles this way, you become Wanted. And this creates these things called Guardians, which spawn in out of nowhere, seemingly spawn in endlessly, and are just these massive bullet sponges which can two tap Yasuke no matter what his level, gear or whatever else is. It basically creates a scenario where you cannot win.
So actually the only real way to clear these castles is to play as Naoe, use your X-Ray vision, tag targets that get you access to the chest. Assassinate one. Run away, wait for them to forget you. Rinse and repeat until they are all done. Get your Loot and leave. Like there are all these locations, and enemies, within these Castles you just ignore entirely, because they are actively detrimental. Just making the whole thing feel kinda pointless and boring.
2. World / progression systems. The world is gorgeous, I love the weather system, but it is also boring, annoying to navigate and lacks evolution as you progress.
Let us tackle the navigation point first, since the other two points are kind of two sides of one point. Like it seems with almost every open world game for some reason, there is always some kind of mountain between you and where you want to go, and no matter where you fast travel into, you're always having to find the long way around.
Early on, this is fine, because it pushes you out into the map to discover new things, but at the point I am at in the game, I just want to get to my objective, and making the path to the objective always the longest one available is just frustrating. And I feel like all open world games are kinda designed like that these days. Please open world designers, you can have elevation into your titles, but please create worlds where any obstacle you can either go over or through, please!
The second two headed point, which feeds into a wider point about progression, is that within the first zone of the game, you've basically seen everything this game has to offer already. And I recognise this is more of an issue of open world games in general, and not unique to this title specifically, but it is still disappointing to me that Shadows has so few open world activities, almost all of them are boring (and you can even select options for a lot of them that just automates them, so you can hit go and go for a wee or get a drink, like they know this stuff sucks to the point where they basically offer a skip content option then why include it in the first place?) and no new activities appear, as you enter into new regions of the map.
The same goes for gear too, during those early hours, the loot seems really exciting because you're thinking. Wow, I am getting gear with perks this strong already, I can already start forming real builds with this pieces out of the gate? This is awesome!
Well the reason you can do that, is because you're kinda starting with end game gear from the rip. The rarities go up, but they just balloon the stat rolls, not the shape the gear takes. The gear has only a small possible number of stats and perks that can roll onto them, so within the first few levels, you've kinda seen how far this gear game can go already, and from there it is just a case of getting effectively higher level, bigger stated, copies of your favourite items to drop.
You would think Legendary gear addresses this issue, but at least at my point in the game, the Legendary gear is rarely transformative in the way the best Legendary gear is in other ARPGs, its just another stat bump but maybe slightly obfuscated like "x percent chance to do bonus damage below x health segments", you could basically just slap a x percent damage roll on this and it basically does the same thing, but I guess because that can roll on regular gear, they can't, so they do this around the houses roll to the same destination and call it Legendary.
And I get there is this vague strive for realism here (although there is a lot here which kinda betrays that so...) so maybe they couldn't go all Borderlands with it and have Yasuke firing a teppo that can chain lightning or something but I dunno. The loot is boring, and you will quickly stop caring about it.
I miss the system we had in Odyssey. And I know some people hated that because they went full looter on us basically, but we have had two games now that have attempted to address those complaints and both created more boring progression systems as a result of trying to appease to that section of the fanbase and I think that sucks personally. I mean sure it is better than Valhalla, but I still don't think Shadow's go at this is right.
Talking of Valhalla and sticking with progression, Valhalla's skill tree was problematic because it was bloated with filler nodes, and didn't allow the player to make informed choices, with you just stumbling blindly down branches and if the payoff nodes sucked then too bad. Shadows has tried to address this with smaller, more focused, more meaningful, set of trees for Yasuke and Naoe, but the way you progress through these trees just sucks?
You get points to spend in the tree when you level up, but then you also need to source Knowledge Points from open world activities to access higher areas of the trees. Maybe it is just because of how I am playing, but these two sources are not correctly tuned or aligned whatsoever for me, rendering levelling up largely meaningless. I seem to often end up pooling 20 to 30 mastery points, waiting to get enough Knowledge Points to unlock higher parts of the tree, so I can spend some of them.
Like I say, outside of the first few hours of play, I didn't care about levelling up whatsoever, and levelling became just a function for me in working on what my next quest or not would be, as I tried to arc through the quests at the appropriate level to follow some sort of intended canon path. If you want to make AC a true RPG franchise, you can't make levelling up seem meaningless like this.
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