Author Topic: What are you playing right now?  (Read 612125 times)

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Offline Det. Bullock

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Re: What are you playing right now?
Just finished Assassin's Creed 2 (PC)
The game is a bit trite and the contextual controls tend to drive me crazy at times but boy was it fun to be stabby Renaissance Forrest Gump.
I just wonder if the Abstergo business gets some sort of conclusion by Revelations because while I'm mildly curious about it there is something about Assassin's Creed 3 that doesn't really make it appealing to me.
"I pity the poor shades confined to the euclidean prison that is sanity." - Grant Morrison
"People assume  that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,  but *actually*  from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more  like a big ball  of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff." - The Doctor

 
Re: What are you playing right now?
Just finished Assassin's Creed 2 (PC)
The game is a bit trite and the contextual controls tend to drive me crazy at times but boy was it fun to be stabby Renaissance Forrest Gump.
I just wonder if the Abstergo business gets some sort of conclusion by Revelations because while I'm mildly curious about it there is something about Assassin's Creed 3 that doesn't really make it appealing to me.

Spoiler:


Abstergo is still a thing in modern AC, and the main character dies before he can deal with them.


 

Offline Det. Bullock

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Re: What are you playing right now?
Just finished Assassin's Creed 2 (PC)
The game is a bit trite and the contextual controls tend to drive me crazy at times but boy was it fun to be stabby Renaissance Forrest Gump.
I just wonder if the Abstergo business gets some sort of conclusion by Revelations because while I'm mildly curious about it there is something about Assassin's Creed 3 that doesn't really make it appealing to me.

Spoiler:


Abstergo is still a thing in modern AC, and the main character dies before he can deal with them.



So, basically I might as well play the ones I already have (Revelations and Black Flag) and ignore the rest.
I heard that Black Flag, Freedom Cry and Liberation have no Abstergo parts, is that true?
"I pity the poor shades confined to the euclidean prison that is sanity." - Grant Morrison
"People assume  that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,  but *actually*  from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more  like a big ball  of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff." - The Doctor

 

Offline 0rph3u5

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Re: What are you playing right now?
I heard that Black Flag, Freedom Cry and Liberation have no Abstergo parts, is that true?

Black Flag has mandatory present-day sections - you play an unnamed person in a not-Ubisoft office running Animus sims, because that's a commerical product now



I started Shadow of the Tomb Raider when my plans for Sunday evening/night fell through...

... and damn, is that game's story straining against what is demanded of it by the whole Trinity/Daddy Croft's Legacy-metaplot. In the margins you can see glimpses of smart writing and awareness of the possibilites the rebbot afforted and a 2010's update demanded, but then we have to get back to shooting generic militia bad guys and dressing up Lara in "culturally approriate attire" for the story "hiding in plain sight" sections.



And there is still a cold war on in Stellaris as the RNG fails to roll for an End Game Crisis.... (It still should, despite the fact that I already beat one of the victory conditions)
I forgot that you inherit the claims of your Vassals with no option to make them go away, hence there is no option re-engage with the AI on peaceful terms...
« Last Edit: October 31, 2018, 05:57:51 pm by 0rph3u5 »
"As you sought to steal a kingdom for yourself, so must you do again, a thousand times over. For a theft, a true theft, must be practiced to be earned." - The terms of Nyrissa's curse, Pathfinder: Kingmaker

==================

"I am Curiosity, and I've always wondered what would become of you, here at the end of the world." - The Guide/The Curious Other, Othercide

"When you work with water, you have to know and respect it. When you labour to subdue it, you have to understand that one day it may rise up and turn all your labours into nothing. For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing?" - Graham Swift, Waterland

"...because they are not Dragons."

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: What are you playing right now?
I've watched LPs of the rebooted Tomb Raiders and man, they just look...not great. Like they're dedicated to checking off every single open-world trope they can think of.  Probably doesn't help that the person I'm watching is a huge fan of the classic games and keeps snarking on the fact that there's precious little raiding of tombs going on.

 

Offline Scotty

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Re: What are you playing right now?
Tomb Raider was a lot of fun.  Rise of the Tomb Raider I've enjoyed but feels pretty formulaic.

To be fair though, old Tomb Raider was kinda formulaic, too.

 

Offline Turambar

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Re: What are you playing right now?
I beat the latest tomb raider, and I definitely spent lots of time raiding tombs, so that guy sounds like he really wanted to complain.
10:55:48   TurambarBlade: i've been selecting my generals based on how much i like their hats
10:55:55   HerraTohtori: me too!
10:56:01   HerraTohtori: :D

 

Offline Det. Bullock

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Re: What are you playing right now?
There is a lot of misplaced nostalgia regarding the Core Design Tomb Raider games, already the second one is a shooting gallery compared to the first one and the shooting mechanics are sincerely horrible even for the time.
"I pity the poor shades confined to the euclidean prison that is sanity." - Grant Morrison
"People assume  that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,  but *actually*  from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more  like a big ball  of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff." - The Doctor

 

Offline 0rph3u5

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Re: What are you playing right now?
I've watched LPs of the rebooted Tomb Raiders and man, they just look...not great. Like they're dedicated to checking off every single open-world trope they can think of.

1) They play a lot more along the lines of a Metroidvenias than the 3rd person open world action template. The reliance on open enviorments might be throwing you of a bit.

2) They are all flawed creations from one standpoint or another - often as a result of the directions of various aspects not harmonizing enough. It would be fascinating, to me, to hear a full, not integrated into the current marketing, neutral account of the productions (the post market push already has been "we hear that you noticed that things didn't come togehter. We will do better next time.").

There is a lot of misplaced nostalgia regarding the Core Design Tomb Raider games

... but there is just so much amusement to be had, watching the "nostalgic fans" try to square some of their conflicting positions  :drevil:, e.g. that now they are pushing Fotorealism-the-Religion(TM) but have fond memories of games where the stylisation brought upon by technical limitations was the exact fit for the gender-swapped, made-as-games revival of high- and late-colonial adventure fiction templates.
(Seriously, just taking the succession of settings from the first Tomb Raider - unspecified "Lost City" in the Andens, unspecified Greco-Roman Ruin, unspecified underground Egyptian Temple, unspecified Tropical Island with a "Lost Temple" - I bet you I can find a pulp-adventure series from sometime between 1870 and 1930 with that exact sequence as a succession of volumes)

Okay, just kidding on the "finding an exact match"-part, considering the state of preservation on many pulp fiction properties from that era is propably worse than early film and in my academic experience that's already very bad
« Last Edit: November 02, 2018, 04:10:24 pm by 0rph3u5 »
"As you sought to steal a kingdom for yourself, so must you do again, a thousand times over. For a theft, a true theft, must be practiced to be earned." - The terms of Nyrissa's curse, Pathfinder: Kingmaker

==================

"I am Curiosity, and I've always wondered what would become of you, here at the end of the world." - The Guide/The Curious Other, Othercide

"When you work with water, you have to know and respect it. When you labour to subdue it, you have to understand that one day it may rise up and turn all your labours into nothing. For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing?" - Graham Swift, Waterland

"...because they are not Dragons."

 

Offline Buckshee Rounds

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Re: What are you playing right now?
I beat the latest tomb raider, and I definitely spent lots of time raiding tombs, so that guy sounds like he really wanted to complain.

That's really quite encouraging, I might pick it up if I can find a second hand copy.

I'm currently on a Dwarf Fortress spree after a long hiatus. I genned a medium world with just 5 civilisations - 1 for each race. After regenning multiple times I was finally able to get a world where Dwarves have become extinct while the other races survived. It took a lot of regenning because the megabeasts and titans kept crushing the civs in their infancy, but I refused to lower their number to less than half the default.

So now I have a world with a nice mix of biomes and races. My plan is to play this thing long-term by seeding several fortresses and thereby resurrecting the dead Dwarven civilisation.

For a dead civ the first 7 Dwarves you get come out of thin air, as do the first 2 hardcoded migrant waves. For RP reasons I'll simply pretend that they were outcasts living amongst the hoomans that decided to band together. :) I've never done this before so I think the best way of doing it is to build several small fortresses and let time progress enough that they'll build up their population to a point where the civ starts functioning as normal. It's definitely possible, but it's a long term project. The secondary goal is to kill the megabeasts that destroyed the old civ's settlements. A single bronze colossus destroyed 2 hillocks and killed the very last king.

The only other games I'm playing atm are the hd Shadow of the Colossus and good old FSO for the new sexy mediavps. I never finished Derelict so I'm giving that a shot.

 

Offline deathspeed

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Re: What are you playing right now?
Trying out Destiny 2, since it's free!  I'm enjoying it so far (only finished one mission), and it is not what I had imagined when I read "online only shooter". 
Maybe someday God will give you a little pink toaster of your own.

 

Offline 0rph3u5

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Re: What are you playing right now?
Still Shadow of the Tomb Raider...

I must admit that my last post on the game itself was way too harsh. At that time I was just done playing where the game strained to push a big boulder of exposition up a hill and ... well, considering I find exposition to be the hardest part of creating a narrative, I shouldn't have been that judgemental.

Still, the game is messy at parts but not "a mess".
"As you sought to steal a kingdom for yourself, so must you do again, a thousand times over. For a theft, a true theft, must be practiced to be earned." - The terms of Nyrissa's curse, Pathfinder: Kingmaker

==================

"I am Curiosity, and I've always wondered what would become of you, here at the end of the world." - The Guide/The Curious Other, Othercide

"When you work with water, you have to know and respect it. When you labour to subdue it, you have to understand that one day it may rise up and turn all your labours into nothing. For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing?" - Graham Swift, Waterland

"...because they are not Dragons."

 

Offline Turambar

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Re: What are you playing right now?
Are you making sure to play at Hard difficulty, where Lara doesnt mumble to herself about how to solve each puzzle?
10:55:48   TurambarBlade: i've been selecting my generals based on how much i like their hats
10:55:55   HerraTohtori: me too!
10:56:01   HerraTohtori: :D

 

Offline 0rph3u5

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Re: What are you playing right now?
Are you making sure to play at Hard difficulty, where Lara doesnt mumble to herself about how to solve each puzzle?

No, I am mostly in it for the story and the writing - so I am also skipping past a lot of optional content. As I said, what I find most fascinating about the reboot series are where and when it "strains" against type - and, well, its long ancestry. (That's also why I don't think the original line of Tomb Raider games hold up upon revisitation - they are just an reiteration of a genre, I enjoy at times mind you, that's deeply flawed.)

It's annoying, I admit, as it hangs a lampshade on just how simplistic the definition of puzzle can be.
"As you sought to steal a kingdom for yourself, so must you do again, a thousand times over. For a theft, a true theft, must be practiced to be earned." - The terms of Nyrissa's curse, Pathfinder: Kingmaker

==================

"I am Curiosity, and I've always wondered what would become of you, here at the end of the world." - The Guide/The Curious Other, Othercide

"When you work with water, you have to know and respect it. When you labour to subdue it, you have to understand that one day it may rise up and turn all your labours into nothing. For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing?" - Graham Swift, Waterland

"...because they are not Dragons."

 

Offline Det. Bullock

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Re: What are you playing right now?
So, finally in the last three or four days I started and completed Starlancer (PC)
It's really a mixed bag.
Gameplay is still rough as per Roberts brothers tradition but not that bad until you get to the final missions and then the badness hits you like a truck at full speed.
Oh, boy the final missions. [beware, here I start rambling]
First of all the game has the habit of interrupting the action with unskippable in-game cutscenes. The thing is more or less tolerable most of the time but mission 21 and mission 24 (the last one) go really overboard with it and it doesn't help they are probably the most difficult missions in the game so you'll probably have to repeat them a lot of times.
It doesn't help that mission 21 is really a mission in two parts, one a heavily scripted infiltration mission (which thanks to the horrible AI can often fail because your wingmen just have to bump into you but if you keep your distance the mission fails because you have to keep formation) and a carrier defence mission which consists of shooting down torpedoes which are much more deadly than in a game like Freespace, so missing only a few means mission failure especially if you come in blind and don't expect it (it doesn't help that the key of targeting torpedoes targets the bombers as well even though they usually just launch the things and warp out and doesn't give priority to torps like in Freespace, I managed to down one only in the second-to-last mission because I was literally in front of their carrier hangar bay, and while they are huge compared to Freespace's bombs they seem more difficult to hit).
Keep in mind that unlike similar cases in Freespace if you fail the second part you have to repeat the first which is not only slow but has also a hefty dose of cutscenes, the repetition transforms what should be a tense mission in a boring slog.
There have even been some cases in which the scripts require you to do very specific things but the game dialogues and debriefings aren't completely clear on what to do, which means walthrough time!
In general the weird quirks that are somewhat tolerable at first in the last stretch of the game become incredibly obnoxious.
The targeting displays targets differently depending on the dimensions of the target because small craft display shield and armor arcs but bigger ships allow for component targeting but unfortunately when switching between the two types theres a small animation that makes targeting switching much less snappy than it ought to be (and is in any other spacesim off the top of my head) and the targeting of the enemy fighters often acts a bit weird (why do I have to keep hitting three or four times the "target enemy in sight key" even when there is no other craft in sight? I never had this problem with Tie Fighter or Freespace), and of course the Roberts brothers still won't give you the possibility of storing and recalling targets to hotkeys or even a simple "display nearest craft attacking target" key (which makes the final mission incredibly difficult as it's very hard to tell which targets are attacking the frail ships you need to escort while they put charges on the big bad enemy base).
The game seems to have as many hotkeys as any other spacesims but they don't seem nearly as useful as the should be (fpr example why do I need two missile banks keys? Most of the time missiles are grouped by type anyway so they become useless if you only have two or three types of ordnance loaded which is what happens since some of them aren't all that useful IMHO).
Hell, even the dreaded energy triagle from Wing Commander Prophecy (here called "energy ball" but works in exactly the same way) makes its retun, this time there is some hotkey but they only get full power to the system of choice which is really silly considering the way dogfights work.
Ah, the dogfights.
Remember X-wing vs Tie Fighter and Elite: Dangerous? Ye know, that system that basically allow to trade a bit of throttle for better turning rate, usualy with one or more "sweet spots" under which you often lost turning rate instead of gaining it to avoid becoming a fixed turret? Well, here you LOSE turning rate as you cut the throttle, so the choice is between either not being able to get the target in your sights or bump into them, the weapons aren't even particularly effective at long range so dogfights usually end up at knife range most of the time. And this is from someone who has a full HOTAS so I actually have an advantage since I don't need to mash the accelerate and decelerate keys (yes, there is a "match speed" button, but in close quarters means you basically won't be able to get the target in your sights as you lose turning speed rapidly when the target slows down).
But couldn't you just sidestep the problem by giving energy to weapons and shields, you say? In theory yes, in practice the system used to do so basically disables your ability to manouver for a few precious instants since to do so you have to use the joystick itself while the game is still going. I don't need to explain why in a dogfight that's a really bad idea.
I don't know if the plot is unremarkable or just stupid. Basically is "space commies are dicks because they are commies and we know they are commies because they all have russian names and accents with the occasional middle eastern thrown in there" and the NATO analogues give the idea the Roberts might not have quite understood that Starship Troopers is satire, but it's not quite that over the top so it might just be coincidence.
It's a pity because otherwise there is much less filler compared to any Wing Commander game and in general the mission design is more creative and less repetitive, but bad design and the unskippable cutscenes for stuff that in any other spacesim would have just played out during gameplay make it if not a bad game a rather mediocre one.
« Last Edit: November 08, 2018, 04:56:23 pm by Det. Bullock »
"I pity the poor shades confined to the euclidean prison that is sanity." - Grant Morrison
"People assume  that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,  but *actually*  from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more  like a big ball  of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff." - The Doctor

 

Offline Turambar

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Re: What are you playing right now?
Are you making sure to play at Hard difficulty, where Lara doesnt mumble to herself about how to solve each puzzle?
It's annoying, I admit, as it hangs a lampshade on just how simplistic the definition of puzzle can be.

Well, you can just set the puzzle difficulty to hard and the combat difficulty to easy and you won't be annoyed and you may even feel more accomplishment when you solve the puzzle since you did it without hints.  Just letting you know the option is there.
10:55:48   TurambarBlade: i've been selecting my generals based on how much i like their hats
10:55:55   HerraTohtori: me too!
10:56:01   HerraTohtori: :D

 

Offline 0rph3u5

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Re: What are you playing right now?
Well, you can just set the puzzle difficulty to hard and the combat difficulty to easy and you won't be annoyed and you may even feel more accomplishment when you solve the puzzle since you did it without hints.  Just letting you know the option is there.

The game itself makes it abundantly clear before you start.


Anyway, just finished and I think I have reverse my judgement again:
Stuff I though were a weak link actually pay off - Trinity as the worst kind of conspiracy theory antagonists remain an issue IMO. Overall, I think the game is well written (if a bit messy in a few spots) and baseline (all normal) gameplay is up to the standards of the genre - pulling up the "Puzzels" difficulty is a sure way to improve the experince.

Now about that discussion on the "White Savior"-trope and Lara's last sequence of character developments (esspecially some paralell development with another character), that's conversation worth having, in an appropriate time and place.
"As you sought to steal a kingdom for yourself, so must you do again, a thousand times over. For a theft, a true theft, must be practiced to be earned." - The terms of Nyrissa's curse, Pathfinder: Kingmaker

==================

"I am Curiosity, and I've always wondered what would become of you, here at the end of the world." - The Guide/The Curious Other, Othercide

"When you work with water, you have to know and respect it. When you labour to subdue it, you have to understand that one day it may rise up and turn all your labours into nothing. For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing?" - Graham Swift, Waterland

"...because they are not Dragons."

 

Offline Iain Baker

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Re: What are you playing right now?
Going through my second play-through of Subnautica. First was totally vanilla, thus time I modded the crap out of it. It is a truly unique game and very much worth giving a try. I would highly recommend adding the PDA map addon from Nexus mods, it can get bloody confusing without it.

Also been breaking many traffic laws playing Burnout Paradise on my old PS3. I found it second hand in GAME for under a fiver - result!!!

What else... oh yeah, recently finished the superb half life mod Half-Life: Echoes. Its great and its free, whats not to like  :D

Freespace wise - recently completed 'The Aeos Affair' and now flying one of the most OP fighters ever in The Aftermath Reboot :-)

Thinking I will try STALKER CoP Misery 2.2 next as I'm a masochist with more balls than brains  :p

Oh, and Vampire TM:B - since Wesp5 has made another update for it and I want to try out being a bat$h1t malkavian  ;7 
Wanna check out my video games, technology and media website? If so, visit; https://www.nomadsreviews.co.uk/

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Offline Colonol Dekker

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Re: What are you playing right now?
I know I'll never have the time to enjoy this, but this game in trudges the heck out of me.


Campaigns I've added my distinctiveness to-
- Blue Planet: Battle Captains
-Battle of Neptune
-Between the Ashes 2
-Blue planet: Age of Aquarius
-FOTG?
-Inferno R1
-Ribos: The aftermath / -Retreat from Deneb
-Sol: A History
-TBP EACW teaser
-Earth Brakiri war
-TBP Fortune Hunters (I think?)
-TBP Relic
-Trancsend (Possibly?)
-Uncharted Territory
-Vassagos Dirge
-War Machine
(Others lost to the mists of time and no discernible audit trail)

Your friendly Orestes tactical controller.

Secret bomb God.
That one time I got permabanned and got to read who was being bitxhy about me :p....
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Offline Det. Bullock

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Re: What are you playing right now?
Finished Tomb Raider 2 (PC).

It took 763 saves but I made it somehow.

It would be a great game if they didn't go overboard with the shooting in some levels, I can forgive the last few levels (because like the first by that time you have an abundance of medikits and ammo that more than make up for Lara's utter lack of agility in combat, especially if you've been secret hunting and got all three dragons for most of the levels) but some of the early ones like the Venice levels are just plain bull****: you can't fill the levels of a game that has one of the most awkward combat gameplays ever like it was Quake and I wouldn't be surprised if this was a way to pad the levels so they could make it to the yearly deadline that was imposed to Core Design.

There are some little improvements like the sidestep keys to help align yourself to the various switches and the game even without considering the combat has some more difficult platforming but I don't really think I would play the game again.

The credits music is one of the most stupidly 90s things I ever heard, a stark contrast to Lara's theme (which I like a lot instead) that can be heard in the main menu and occasionally in-game.
"I pity the poor shades confined to the euclidean prison that is sanity." - Grant Morrison
"People assume  that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,  but *actually*  from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more  like a big ball  of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff." - The Doctor