GirlVersusGame

By Sithis I'm still playing Oblivion, and being somewhat sociable in the non pixel world. My journey so far has brought me all over the map, and still on foot. It might sound like torture not to use a mount or fast travel, and sometimes it can be when you have a certain quest that sends you to every city for a specific reason but it makes my playthrough last longer.

I'm at 132hrs and still on Expert. Gear is finally making a difference even-though enemies have so much more health. I've been cheating a little by leveling a couple of stats in work, and have had a few close calls when NPCs spawned into the room I was in and all immediately started shouting at once leading everyone on the work call to ask 'what was that noise?'

I'm about to hit lvl30, I've borrowed and not returned over 10K items, I'm close to 1K creatures killed, I've only technically murdered one person and that's still up for debate, I've made a couple of million gold from selling said borrowed items (merchant maxed/haggle too) I've got a decent property portfolio, and I've somehow completed 71 quests though I'd assume those are Guild quests since I completed 2 of those already. I've got a 20K bounty but again only technically (there are ways around that) and apparently I've told 7 jokes, I don't know how. That's about it, hope everyone has a fun game filled weekend, with maybe some sun too, it's lovely today.

Also if anyone runs into a bug with enchanting (I tested this on a friends game too, both PS5s) cycle your in-game text from medium or large to small. The bug was that you could cycle skills and attributes while enchanting but X didn't select them so you always ended up with whatever skill/attribute was at the top. This way you can cycle and select. Don't ask me how or why it works but it does. And if you are coming to the game for the first time you can actually have x4 enchants on a weapon, I saw a lot of posts on other forums about there being a limit of one. It's only one enchant if you apply a sigil stone, it's x4 when using an enchanting altar. You'll also unlock more spells to apply to your gear if you learn/buy/and level that spell first so keep that in mind too. The first time you try you'll only see a few, there are near endless combinations. For example I'm currently leveling destruction magic so I can apply a weakness to fire enchant on a bow. The same bow will also get soultrap, fire damage and weakness to magic. I'll probably make one that turns whoever it hits against their allies too, for fun.

Obligatory non-spoiler image. This game needs photo-mode.

Not at all. It gives other developers and publishers room to breath. I just hope there are no more GTA leaks before it eventually does get here. Spoilers that big kill my enthusiasm for a game. Sometimes I'd prefer not to see behind the curtain.

Clair will win but Oblivion gets my vote, I'm about to hit my 120th hour into this playthrough. Still no fast travel or mounted travel. I managed 638hrs doing the same thing on Elden Ring, but I wasn't playing Elden Ring in work, I am with Oblivion. They heard an NPC yelling on a work-call today and I said it was someone in the office. Luckily it wasn't 'help someone's been murdered!'

@Cakefish All good points honestly. I think it also comes down to how much a person can spend. As someone said in an article yesterday 'gaming is a luxury' for some folks just paying for a subscription is a luxury. If I couldn't afford a subscription along with a purchase I wouldn't do it. I've tried to explain to non-gamer friends about having subscription access to a game, and then buying the game, it didn't make sense to them because they saw it as paying for something twice. Supporting a developer didn't compute. They thought it was all the same thing.

Gamepass isn't free but it feels free because that's the habit I've forged with subscription models. For someone who doesn't have Gamepass it's going to seem even more 'free'. I do think subscriptions can hurt some games, but that's not the players fault. That's down to whoever decides to host the game. The player then gets caught in the middle. There's been a number of Plus games that were 'free' that I then went out and bought physical copies of, mostly indies. But it's not always possible to just keep throwing money at every new game that hits the market especially when the economy does a back-flip into an Oblivion gate.

I bought it about an hour after Oblivion went on sale. I'll get around to playing it some time, it's just good seeing small teams with small budgets accomplishing great things. I look at it like AtomFall, a game that though technically free (Gamepass) deserved the buy to keep devs like that in their jobs. That and I think being able to rummage through a huge library of virtual games means you don't always invest the time or patience needed to find something special, or to give some games a chance. Doing it that way has meant I'm amassing a lot more 100%'s, it's a byproduct of wanting to see everything a game has to offer.

Definitely a 10/10 for explaining what you are actually getting, it's a very slick presentation. I just don't have any interest in what's on offer.

@Johnnycide Thanks Johnny he definitely was and predicted a lot of what's happening now. I heard bits and pieces, but so much of it came down to towing the party line or you might end up in a river or fall out a window. Which seems to still be the policy even if you are safe in somewhere like the UK. He made it to retirement, many don't.

@joeyflannel LOL I never even thought of that until you said it.

Well that's like seeing a part of your childhood thrown in the garbage. I made most of my earliest friends through that series of games and by the time LBP3 launched most of them had either moved onto other games or life got in the way. It makes sense why Sony are moving away from the imagery/mascot.

There aren't enough creative games on the market, LBP was so good at what it did that it resulted in a friend (level designer) getting a job with the company. Surely Sony made a boatload off of it too, it felt like every week I was buying a new pack that featured characters/items from other Sony games/movies and so on. It never felt like a rip-off either, they were always reasonably priced.

Dreams was very good but never felt like it had the same kind of appeal, and I think the learning curve kept most people away from even trying. MM made some really bad choices at the end. It felt like there was a lot more they could have done to fix technical problems and serious bugs, instead they started quietly shutting servers down.

Edit: I told him the news and he doesn't look happy about it.

@J0HN_L0CKE Thanks, I ended up doing a little research on spouts afterwards. Which isn't what it sounds like either.

@Ravix Yeah to be fair look what Oblivion managed to do with barely any notice, unless you were watching different articles and following the rumor mill. I know a lot of people who weren't and when I messaged with 'the Oblivion remaster is out now!' they didn't believe me. It was only until I started sending screenshots of the character creation screen that they knew I wasn't kidding. I'd be tempted to say 'GTA6 just stealth launched!' for science, but I'm not the cruel.

Actually it's not that cruel at all. One of the people I know who is GTA6 crazy once spent a month terrorizing me on Conan Exiles. As soon as I'd log off they'd log back on. Destroy a wall so it looked like I'd been raided. Then systematically go through all of my loot/materials/everything and rearrange it so that nothing was where it should have been. For a whole month I'd return to 'we'll find out who did this!' then I'd raid my neighbors and they'd swear it wasn't them. Then one night I logged back on to double check something and caught them in the middle of destroying the outer walls. You can kill and eat people in that game, I kept one of his limbs on display. He never did it again.

Thanks, I didn't know which version to pre-order. I just wanted the disc. I'll put the rest into whatever physical artbook they hopefully release down the line. Sucker Punch did a great job with The Art of Ghost of Tsushima, even the slipcase was beautiful. Maybe one of the best artbooks I've ever seen, it spoiled the entire game for me too and I didn't mind. I just kept reading.

I don't mind waiting. It's a franchise that I might have grown out of (a little) and I don't spend every waking moment thinking about it. There's also that nagging feeling that the longer it stays back the longer game prices might not reach astronomical heights. I don't like to think that maybe they are monitoring the market to see what they can get away with, but it's possible.

I just hope there are no more leaks between now and the official release, the main batch almost ruined my interest in the game and may even been the reason the game was pushed back. Complete speculation but again it's possible.

Ravix has a point too and people don't have as much money as they did when GTA5 released. Some have to carefully choose which game they want to buy and support. Every game Ravix mentioned are games I'd play before GTA6. I'd like to see how much interest GTA6 would have if GTA Online had never been a thing. It feels like a significant amount of people are waiting for that element of the game more than the game itself.

@DadJKP He collects watches. People thought it was an 80K F.P. Journe Chronometre Bleu, it was actually a Bell & Ross BR V1-92. They have similar dials, so 3K but still a lot of people aren't fond of him for the right reasons. It wasn't an 80K watch, many outlets said it was then walked it back. As much as I don't like the guy I don't like bad news reporting either.

Edit for brief context: My Dad was a diplomat. In his time he said bad journalism could destabilize a region. It's worse now because anyone can be a journalist and there is almost no journalistic integrity. He said it would get worse too and it has. There's a journalistic oath in place to upload integrity, accuracy, truth and fairness. It's easier to uphold that oath in print, but almost impossible online. There's far less accountability for getting it wrong. My brief experiences with journalists were being in a room where fifty people are shouting questions all at once, then afterwards trying to sneakily get information out of you without even divulging that you'll be on the record. Also breaking into your social media to track your family, I don't have social media anymore. Sometimes I manage to go a whole year without watching the news, I didn't even know Trump was elected the first time until maybe four months later when I was in the US for work and someone told me. I thought they were kidding, nope. It might sound bad to want to distance yourself from the world/current affairs but honestly it feels really good. It removes a lot of the doom, gloom and stress of seeing a situation and knowing you have no control over it.

I love to see smaller teams and games get the recognition they deserve (just not from that particular person) I can't wait to see what they have up their sleeves for some potential DLC or merchandising, they could easily get a couple of novels out of that universe.

I didn't think Jar Jar could look more cursed but there it is.

(2) We're still getting games like Suicide Squad because the people at the top don't want to learn and can afford not to. I don't know if that can change, they bring people in who they can mold into their way of thinking and they don't think of games as a form of art. Just a prop in a marketing strategy. They value visibility more, a game becomes nothing more than a tool to get their movie out there. And while you'd assume a successful licensed game should be enough to prove there is value in doing it right, you aren't seeing the overall earnings from merchandising and product placement.

They could have both, good licensed games with strong earnings (some have) it's just faster to cut corners, which puts pressure on Devs, leads to job losses and even studio closures. I think it all comes down to creative control, Devs aren't being given control over what they are working on, they know it will tank but their feedback is being ignored.

Some very crazy things but it mostly all ended up in a dollar amount. I was brought into the industry as a legacy, meaning my family were already established there. I started with what they call loss prevention. It basically means advising a studio how not to lose money, they usually lose it by backing the wrong project. That was very brief. After that I moved onto predictive box office analysis. We'd take what we knew about previous earnings, apply it to an unreleased script, look at current trends, global and regional stability, then depending on the results we'd advise they either green-light or pass. It was opinion based, sometimes they didn't take it.

It wasn't until the bidding that I started to not like what we were doing. The family member who brought me in was a buyer, they represented the interests of different studios for various scripts and properties, that's where you'd see private biddings. It was NDA heavy because so many scripts were being bought and not used, they'd just throw them in a vault. It started to bother me because I loved cinema and I saw it as greed for the sake of greed.

It was either because (A) it was an investment (B) they wanted to keep it out of the competitions hands (C) they wanted total control over the market . There was no specific division that handled licensing out to games, it was often just part of the marketing strategy. Which is why so many movie licensed games turned out so bad, game studios didn't get enough time or in many cases enough money to deliver something solid and the movie studio who tasked them with didn't care about quality just visibility.

It creates a system of bad games and the people at the top are still out of the loop and think gaming means online shooter. I wanted to work in cinematography, practical camera work but a foot in the door was a foot in the door. I grew-up crashing a lot of movie sets, I just liked watching directors work. Actors not so much. They go into the industry for either fame or money, but it all leads to fame. Too many of them get trapped in a situation where fame becomes the driving force. If they aren't out there getting screen time and their agent isn't getting them shows they end up in a situation where studio heads and others gain power over that screen time. Which I can't comment on, but I guess use your imagination.

Most people either stay and adapt to some very unhealthy working conditions, go down the road of excess, or leave. I took everything I'd learned (that didn't take advantage of someone else) and took it into the music industry (a lot of movie studios have music divisions) The people in Metal/Rock are infinitely more attached to reality, and care a lot about their work/families, not just their image.

@Steeleye50 LOL that's the one yeah. When talk came up about a game based on The Wire, that game was cited as why not to do it. The Shield did well as a show but HBO didn't want to risk getting the same kind of reception. They then tried their hand at The Sopranos with THQ and that didn't end well either. There are some really weird TV show ideas for games that never made it, and most people have no idea because of the attached NDAs. It's not a case of them actually developing any early test footage or even concept art, it's the earliest stage where ideas get thrown around before a developer or publisher are involved. But they still NDA it. Even before anything comes to fruition, they take licenses that seriously. Or at least they did when I was there, now there are so many leaks.

@Jrs1 Unfortunately not, mostly it's about positive and negative consequences. You can't play it like Harvey Keitel in the Bad Lieutenant. I tried that in Police Simulator too. Each time I beat/drove over etc a 'suspect' the game would penalize me for not going by the book. I eventually played it properly and even took home the platinum. I don't think a lot of people tried that game on Plus. It really wasn't half bad, you start off doing foot patrols, then work your way up to traffic violations, traffic stops, and accidents. The Precinct is a lot more action packed and gritty.

If they did release a DLC then a bad cop arc would be a great addition. Or maybe a modern LA one like End of Watch or Training Day. I'd say The Shield too but that had a game on PS2 and it has to be seen to be believed. It's as if they'd just played The Punisher and then said 'we could do this with Michael Chiklis' then they did. But much, much worse.

@Jrs1 The Steam demo sold me on it. They really should have given console that demo, and free too. It's the closest I've seen to a game that feels like GTA but for the right reasons. It also has the kind of aesthetic you don't see enough of, if it ever gets DLC I'll pick that up too.

Time to pull a Thomas Crown Affair down under.

Too many games this month. Death Stranding 2, Roadcraft, The Precinct, Spirit of The North 2, maybe even DOOM (eventually) But for the first time ever I'll be skipping a day one Fromsoft Souls game, which sounds so wrong. I hope The Precinct does well, it's the kind of game I'd like to see more of.

BL1 and BL2 will always be two of my favorite games, BL3 never got there for me. I liked a lot of the systems and features they mentioned about BL4 so I'll probably end up playing it. There aren't many other shooters I'm interested. It bridges that sort of gap in genres for me. If I did play something like Destiny or Cod then I probably wouldn't buy BL4. Sometimes you need to just shoot things.

@RiotMaker2424 The game publisher doesn't always get enough notice. Movie studios just decide one day that it's going to be pulled. Sometimes it's because they are getting ready to reboot a franchise and they want to move away from the old Image. Warner Bros. distributed the last rebooted movie (Evil Dead: Rise) there's unofficial talk of a new one. The original Evil Deads were far superior but that's the way the system works.

Game companies don't always know what they are getting into with movie licensed games. It's too compartmentalized and all it takes is one person to make the choice. Usually that person doesn't even know what a video-game is. Vic Miller managed to get Friday the 13th shutdown and he's hardly a heavy weight compared to the actual studios. All it takes are 'licensing issues' (unofficially they want more money) and we lose a game. Unless of course there's a way to preserve a copy.

@Jrs1 £24 from Turkey at the moment. Price discrimination brings a lot of needed perspective to value. And a VPN can often be a lot cheaper than being ripped off for a year, or longer. You could even get a PO Box, send your purchases there, have it redirected and still save money each time. That's how much some countries are being ripped off right now.

@Buhjeezuz I reckon their Sea of Stars review was probably the worst I'd seen for spoilers. It was so bad that they removed the video then uploaded a new one. I haven't used the site since. They didn't even care that it was an Indie and that they could damage sales. They actually broke the embargo on the game, that's how publications get blacklisted. Nothing happened to them. I wouldn't even trust them with the time of day anymore, I'd rather spend the rest of my life trying to build Stonehenge than trust anything they had to say.

Yet another reason why I need to stick with one console/company. Why bother supporting multiple platforms when you know you are only enabling a system that is most definitely pricing some people out of their hobby. There are always going to be discounts (eventually) but day one was already looking less and less appetizing. Now so is some hardware.

@PocketHotDogs Were you on there for the last few days of Friday the 13th? It was a whole event, lots of people on there we're talking about the movies/books even the TV series. The Horror fanbase came out in force. It will probably happen for Evil Dead too. It's still not as bad as Evil Dead on the PS1 with the constant spawning of enemies, they took never stay dead to a whole new level. It meant most people never saw anything past the first level, they didn't have the ammo to get through.

@dodgykebaab I just closed on my first home. There's a garden but it's Uncharted territory. I considered buying that cosy garden sim (not this one) on PS5 to get some practice in before I start doing whatever it is you're supposed to do back there.

@Mythologue It's written by Sam Winkler. The same lead writer for Bl2, BL3 and Wonderlands. The guy is on Linkedin and all of the other places you'd expect to find someone in the industry.

Friday the 13th first, then Evil Dead, it's a safe bet that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre will eventually be next. The servers can be very choppy and the TXCM licensing has always been a rough one. For a long time it was owned by the Mafia, Louis Peraino used it as a front company, getting the rights back was almost impossible until his crew was indicted for conspiracy.

Licensing is what killed The Friday the 13th game, there's so little preservation when it comes to movie licensed games and so little transparency over ownership, the game could be be there one minute and gone the next. Not groovy.

@Don_Corleone I wasn't surprised, I only saw it as a trailer but some of the reactions were as if the sky was falling. There's still a lot of disbelief that games like Forza made it over to PS5 with some Xbox users questioning what's next. For some people it will take a while for that belief to shift but profit is profit. Everyone wins in this situation, even if they don't see it.

It's a weird situation, one I didn't think we'd ever see but it makes it easier to focus on one console when you previously had to switch between two. They've moved over almost all of the the Xbox exclusives that I cared about. Now all we need is for Flight Simulator to land on Sony's doorstep.

I don't know how I'd feel as an Xbox fan right now, I saw the reaction to that one DOOM trailer. Part of it felt like a touch grass situation, but I can get why they might feel burned by Microsoft. At the end of the day both companies are profiting from this situation, and profit often equals growth. The one thing this will probably do is prevent me from buying the next Xbox, whatever form that takes. I don't see a reason to, yet at least.

I have only one question. Why is her watering-can upside down.

I still have to remind myself this isn't Tokyo Xtreme Racer: Zero. I had a bootleg of that game with the Ridge Racer name both on the box and on the title screen, with a full dub. For years I thought I was playing Ridge Racer. It wasn't until I heard the soundtrack being played in a sketchy nightclub in Poland that I found out. The guy was a gamer. He even played Hell March from Command and Conquer, a mini moshpit instantly formed. Bootlegs were really common, most official games never got released and bootleggers often got inventive like that. Switching titles especially, I've seen about 20 different versions of GTA since then. I keep meaning to start a collection but it doesn't feel right giving them shelf space.

A game might always be for me but I respect the hustle. They didn't just showcase a game last night they showed the power of the console/platform too. Regardless of the game and how well it sells it does give the console/brand even more visibility and that means more potential sales for Sony. There's always more than one way to look at it.

Had I not watched it I'd have had no interest in BL4. Their initial reveal trailer didn't sell it to me, the characters looked too trimmed down. They didn't in the showcase. I love the first two BL games. One day a message arrived from some LittleBigPlanet friends to check out a new game and the next day we were all on there shootin' and lootin', just brilliant memories. And one of my earliest platinums, it made me want to try every class from start to finish. Few games do that, so did BL2.

I never had that with BL3. Too many people were experiencing a kind of franchise fatigue, especially with so many DLCs. We never had a dedicated group of friends playing at once even when it was on Plus. I've got a lot more optimism for this new one. It looked a lot more like BL2 than I expected and it definitely made me consider a buy.

I think Sony are onto something here, and I don't think the game has to appeal to me to work. It will appeal to someone and that's all they have to do. Of course I'd like to see a State of Play for something like Death Stranding 2 but I don't need to see it to know I'm going to buy it. If I did see more footage of the game it would only spoil something I'd rather discover by playing it. BL4 needed that stream, Death Stranding 2 didn't, it'll sell gangbusters.

@Deljo If you are gay and a perv that's not my business, the game is for everyone. More power to you. I don't judge.

It looks really promising and definitely one of those times where my cautious optimism turned into something more definitive. The gameplay looked tight and slick on the Pro. The level we saw looked more bleak and realistic, the glide mechanic looked a bit off but only because it's from a first person perspective, dynamic weather and dynamic events are something I didn't expect. Nor was what they call 'Big Encore' meaning we can farm bosses more easily. The weapon customization looked fantastic as did the overhauled loot system, skills and traits.

I didn't expect couch Co-op either (something more games need to do) It looked a lot more like the first two games, which is what I'd hoped for but never expected. I'm sure folks will still find something wrong with it but as a looter shooter it seems to (from what they showed us) do exactly what it's meant to do. Thanks for hosting the Livestream.

@Bamila This actually isn't Ark 2. It's the same game (Ark: Survival Evolved) enhanced for PS5 with the DLC maps included (added over time) Ark 2 is still in development. There was no upgrade path from Ark Evolved PS4 to Ark Ascended PS5, which as you imagine didn't go down well. It had to be bought again. They even closed down the official servers. Now you have to play Ascended if you want to run c-op/clans.

@Matroska If that's the same Gun with Thomas Jane (The Punisher before Dolph Lundgren) Ron Perlman, Lance Henriksen and a bunch of others then I absolutely remember it. I hadn't thought about that game in years. It was pretty bad but the cast made up for it. Crime Boss: Rockay City had a good cast too but they didn't make up for it. I don't know what happened to the direction in that game but the voice acting was dreadful, they even made Chuck Norris sound bad.

I have a high tolerance for bad games, it comes from seeing if they have any actual redeeming features. I managed to make it through both SAW games, it was like being tortured by the real Jigsaw. It was that bad and brutal. I had dreams about it for weeks after. I can still hear Billy the puppet laughing each time I died to some broken janky mechanic.

I played it on Gamepass (all my DLCs are over there) it feels very surreal but I'm not buying all of the extra content again. The base game would feel weird without it.

@DTfearTheBEARD But it's just a card game. How fun could that possibly be? - was me with Gwent in The Witcher 3, then Slay The Spire. There's something really addictive about card games.

@Kiefer-Sutherland I think 7 Days got so much hate because the version we got back on PS4 was an early Alpha. I found it day one in a local gamestore, they'd gotten in 3 copies and they'd put one aside thinking I'd like it. We were due updates but everything went into limbo. The review copies ended up being that Alpha and people tore it apart. Sammy called it 'Youtubers The Game' and gave it a 3/10, the Alpha was that bad.

They didn't send out enough review codes when they launched the nextgen version. I'm still hearing from people who didn't know it existed, they assumed I was on the Alpha. It's still very under the radar on the store. They have a roadmap now with a lot of new features and systems. I didn't think we'd ever see the current build on console. We're up to a 860% player increase now on PS5, that's after they delisted the old PS4 version.

@wildcat_kickz Alright so it's more like Green Hell and The Forest than any of the other games you mentioned. Survival is probably my favorite genre, I like being given nothing and being forced to just survive. Ark can be really punishing at first but unlike most survival games it lets you tame dinos/creatures which means they can do a lot of the work for you. I made one of them my lawn mower and never had to gather fiber again. Another dino I used to chop wood. Taming them is easy enough and the PS5 handles a lot of dinos at once. There are no quests (which is one of the negative points) but it does have a good levelling system with a lot of unlocks (all needing to be crafted) it's very craft heavy.

It's got more server settings that any other game I've seen on console, most people tweak those for their first playthrough. It can get a little frustrating, I'd definitely refer to guides because everyone I know who's ever played it has. The rest really is all basic, gather food/water/materials. Also be ready for your dinos to die, I have a graveyard for mine. I made the mistake of getting attached to so many of them, everyone does, but definitely start taming early. If you have any other questions feel free to ask. I haven't been on there in a few weeks, 7 Days to Die PS5 edition got updated to the current PC build, I've been doing all of my surviving on there, 630hrs worth so far. It's become my favorite survival game.

@wildcat_kickz What other survival games have you played?

Great month I've heard nothing but good things about Balatro!

For anyone wanting to try Ark. If you want a smoother experience and don't care about trophies you should look into disabling things like clouds/fog (just for a start) I've been back and forth to the game since it launched (mostly to build) and it's still got a lot of problems. It's playable but performance-wise it still needs word. A lot of the old bugs still remain but the Mod store is fantastic (even-though it was recently monetized) the vast majority of Mods are free. There are lots of posts on reddit about fixing the performance through keyboard commands. If you download it (over 100gbs now with the current maps) and think 'this looks awful!' it will look/respond better if you seek out those keyboard commands. Unfortunately the devs are busy pushing DLCs again so don't expect fixes for some time to come.

That's one of my Trikes (Tracy Chapstik) with all of the visuals (Unreal 5) I was at 33.90fps on a base model PS5. If you want more light rays/mist etc you'll be looking at 40ish fps. Give or take, and depending on where you go. The Redwoods and the Swamp can make it dip a little due to all of the creatures in there that want you dead. They did improve the performance since the PS5 launch, there's just more they could do with it.

@Lup They probably didn't want Disney knocking on their door, there's a Ducktective in Gravity Falls.

I better play this before IGN spoils all of the unlocks, all of the secrets and even the ending. Again.

@Kidfunkadelic83 You're welcome, I'll try not to download it again later on. I brought a PS5 to work today for Oblivion, I've been on work calls while I level my Illusion and Alchemy. No one has figured it out yet. I'd do the same for Nikki.