RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE

[RomanEmpire]

I bought Torchlight II from the steam sale and it's so much fun, definitely recommend it.

A friend also got me payday so we could play it together and it's also pretty fun, a lot more challenging than I expected though

[can-]

payday 2 GOTY 2013 can't wait for ps4 release

[purkinje]

farcry 3 is butt, ubi botched the pc version

[ramseames]

far cry 2 ruled so hard. miss that game.

[BobbyZamora]

spent hours excitedly modding skyrim only to realize that i just hate the core gameplay mechanics and the RPG elements are incredibly shallow. really want to immerse myself but it's difficult when the game has no internal consistency or logic to it.

i stole a horse from some NPC in windhelm. that NPC started yelling at me, which is fine. but I had 7000 septims placed on my head (no guards were nearby) and several miles away as I escaped from the town, a guard blockade stopped me and threatened to arrest me. how did they know I was riding a stolen horse?

i eventually escaped and reached my destination in whiterun- nobody knew i was riding a stolen horse, some faith was restored in the game. I get off my horse to search an area, but when I hop back on suddenly the game tells me I have 7000 more septims on my head, and all of the guards in Whiterun begin to swarm me. :/

at that point, my suspension of disbelief was shattered. I pretty much immediately shut the game off.

really wish they would have fleshed out NPC AI a bit more instead of opting to put a lot of time in to procedurally generated fetch quests... this game would have been so much better if only its world made sense. It calls itself an RPG but you can't even disguise yourself by wearing a mask, and wearing a faction's equipment set makes no difference to how people react to you.

The combat in this game is bad, everyone knows that, but I would have easily forgiven that if it was at least a competent roleplaying game (like Morrowind. Or New Vegas. Or Mass Effect.)

[can-]

gamebryo games are garbage

[BobbyZamora]

mechanically, yes. It's a terrible engine. But I thoroughly enjoyed Morrowind and New Vegas because they compensated for the bad combat with great roleplaying elements. They had fleshed out worlds that made sense, intriguing plotlines with many twists and choices along the way, and they just generally allowed you a lot of freedom with minimal constriction and immersion-breaking elements. I rarely ran in to anything like that horse-scenario when playing New Vegas.

I remember a lot of people complained about New Vegas having invisible walls, but it honestly didn't matter because the worldbuilding was so much better than Fallout 3's and Oblivion's.

[can-]

i had fun with fallout 3 (to be fair, about 6 years ago) but most of the fun was in breaking the engine over any kind of immersive experience. there's nothing immersive about crouching behind a static npc, robbing their safe and then crit shotting them in the head via VATS for an instant kill. or gaming a speech check.

i'd like to iterate on how shitty Skyrim is with the brief experience i had with it-

I bought Skryim when it debuted with only fallout 3 as my gamebryo experience (i bought new vegas but it felt like fallout3 DLC and i couldn't get past the intro). three memories in particular that destroyed my experience with the game and humiliated me as a gamer:

1. In the opening scene of the game, you watch a (poorly) scripted and pathed sequence and witness some npc's execute some other npc's. it's interrupted by an assault on the village you're in, where the game insinuates via music and tilt shifts that you're in immediate danger and have to run for safety. the game does not account for a player who stands still or explores the environment: you can stand in the middle as a hell lets loose for days at a time and your health is never threatened. the game's ludonarrative dissolves immediately.

2. if you graciously cooperate with the game and take a false safety in the nearby cave, you are given a helpful guide NPC to bring you through the game's training exercise. it takes a long time but you can bring his HP to 0 with your fists or a weapon, at which point he kneels down for a second and stands up as if it had never happened. again, the game fails to predict the player's behavior and the ludonarrative fails completely.

3. in the cave you are presented with the first lockpick minigame, which, if you haven't played the game is basically an exercise in tedium and odium with the reward of items or money. the game is telling you "if you put up with this condescending and humiliating waste of time, I will become easier for you." I would make an analogy of trying to watch a movie in a theater, except that every 10 minutes you had to do a series of CAPTCHA's to continue watching the film. if you refuse to perform the CAPTCHA's, they start dropping a/v tracks until you're watching people mouthing words over a green screen.

[BobbyZamora]

You're spot on regarding Skyrim. It's one of the shallowest games I've ever played. I've heard it described as "big as an ocean with the depth of a puddle" before, which is pretty accurate.

I'd strongly suggest giving New Vegas another chance. While the game is made even better with mods, it does stand up on its own (I played through it at release, when there were almost no mods around anyways.) and is an enjoyable experience.

I love how it starts you out in Goodsprings. Immediately after character creation, the game lets you loose on the world and you can basically choose to do whatever you wish. It does have a tutorial section, but it is completely optional and you can shoot Sunny Smiles in the face if you so please. Your only goal is simply to go to New Vegas, it gives you little direction and there are multiple paths to take. It does have a bias towards going a particular way (the other ways are a lot harder) but you can choose not to, and if you are skilled enough the game will reward you.

It's very unlike FO3, where there's a town inexplicably built around a live nuclear weapon, despite the fact that there is no food source nearby. It gives you solid explanations for why the settlements exist in certain places and overall has a much more interesting world. In Fallout 3, nobody was even growing any food which was bizarre. Aside from maybe one or two Brahmin, I don't think I ever saw any food sources in FO3. New Vegas however, has people farming plants and animals regularly.

There are a variety of interesting factions for you to dabble with. Your choices in the game actually matter, there aren't just 3 endings to pick from, the ending you get is generated based on your choices in the game- just like how it is in Fallout 1 and 2. (as opposed to FO3, where there is basically 1 ending with slight variations. The choices in Fallout 3 also have negligible effect on the actual game itself, they mostly only effect the ending scenarios.)

The game never holds your hand or stops you from doing certain things. Basically every NPC in the game can be killed (except for children IIRC) which includes important characters like Caesar or Benny. If you equip a faction's armor, you will become disguised. Disguises even take in to consideration things like the weapon you're carrying- if you are wielding something that no member of X faction would obviously have, your disguise fails. Helping one faction will damage (or help) your reputation with other factions. You have actual choice in this game- which is very different from Fallout 3, which basically forced you to align yourself with the Brotherhood of Steel.

The game also just has better writing in general, with more fleshed out characters and quests.

It's by no means a perfect game but it succeeds in so many ways where Skyrim, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 fail. Honestly, the biggest disappointment in New Vegas (aside from the fact that it is on Gamebryo) was that the New Vegas Strip was a bit underwhelming. The combat is still lackluster and the engine weighs it down, but it

Some people say that Fallout 3 had a better "atmosphere", but I always hate those sort of claims since usually the people making them have typically never played Fallout 1 and 2. Fallout 3's atmosphere makes no sense- it's so barren, it feels like it had just been hit with nuclear weapons weeks ago which makes no sense since Fallout 3 takes place hundreds of years after the apocalypse.



This video goes over the two games in better detail, and touches on some of the things I mentioned. He gives a much better analysis than I could.

It's worth pointing out that while Skyrim does have farmlands, it still doesn't hold up well in comparison to New Vegas. Even if you are the head of every guild and have literally saved the world, guards will still treat you like a commoner. There is no way to disguise yourself as a member of another faction. For some reason, even if you are a werewolf you still get offered to become a vampire.. even though the game's lore states that vampires despise werewolves. There are no intricate speech trees like there are in Fallout NV. The game gives you only a small amount of choice regarding how the story pans out. Rather then a fully fleshed out and realized world that offers a fulfilling RPG experience, Skyrim is just an extremely mediocre action game with an immensely bland world.

[can-]

[oldtrailmix]

i never understood the hate for skyrim, nv, fallout in regards to certain specific things not working the way a player thinks they aught to.

it doesn't take an incredibly intelligent person to realize that in a massive open world game you can game the system pretty easily. it's impossible for a game the size of skyrim or fallout to have every single opportunity to somehow cheat the system curbed, every waking moment checked for all possible things that might break immersion.

i play these games in a way that allows me to have fun - none of my characters are going to stand still as a dragon burns a town to the ground, or crouch and shoot someone in the middle of a busy marketplace. sure, the game technically allows us to do that, but why would i purposefully go out of my way to ruin a fun experience.

if someone gives me a lego kit to build a car out of, i'm not going to take the two axles, slap a piece between them, and say "boom, there's your car. this whole lego thing sucks. didn't the lego people anticipate me being able to do this?"

"gamebyro" games are only bad for people unwilling to create their own experiences as they feel they're owed by the developers at every turn.

[can-]

I couldn't have found anything fun about the skyrim experience no matter how I played it. it's the kind of game which trades on quantity of content over gameplay or writing. I'm trying to describe my frustration as a person who really loves games and game making that a massively acclaimed and hugely selling game fails really basic and obvious tests to check if there was any thought behind the games development.

half life 2 is an exceptional example of a game which shines because of the players individual and unrepeatable experience. here, unlike gamebryo titles, the game responds intelligently if you act erratically or out of sync with the narrative. there is thought in the design. I am not being an entitled prick for expecting a videogame to expect the player. this is like telling someone they shouldn't be disappointed if they watch a movie that someone forgot to score. Bethesda titles are churned out of a machine to meet deadlines and make sales and I can't find an ounce of joy or thought in their craft.

[greggy]

I'm not sure we played the same game because I have no idea which unrepeatable hl2 experiences you're referring to.

[BobbyZamora]

[BobbyZamora]

@oldtrailmix Mods are not an excuse for the game to be a mess. The game should hold up on its own, it shouldn't have to rely on its playerbase to fix all of the poor design. Also, mods can't fix everything, I had my game heavily modded and yet I still ran in to all of these problems such as guards magically knowing when horses were stolen, being unable to disguise, NPC's generally not reacting to the player in any meaningful way, etc.

[greggy]

what you're complaining about though is attaching wheels to the hood of the car and wondering why it doesn't move

video games have to have some sort of rules - even the simplest sandboxes (i.e. minecraft) do - they might not make sense compared to "real life" or what you think they should be, but they exist to create some sort of framework at least. after all, it's just a game. we're not at the level of AI where you can expect it to react to whatever random response you think of - it has to be pre-coded.

for example, regarding the stolen horse problem, each time you mount a horse that you haven't bought, you're simply stealing it again, hence incurring a bounty. therefore i don't think it's unreasonable of the developer to expect the player to ask himself "why does this work this way" and come up with some semi-reasonable explanation, instead of going "game is shit 0/10" (which of course is the natural thing to do, dunning-kruger and all)

of course everyone has different levels of tolerance for bullshit and different expectations so the experiences of gaming are totally different

[can-]

[darfest]

SO HEY GUYS THERE'S A COUPLE OF STEAM CARE TAGS ACCOUNTS WITH NIDHOGG THE FENCING GAME FOR SHWODOWNS AND WHATNOT.
SHOW ME YOUR MOVES
caretags
caretags2
pw is care-tags1234

[ramseames]

[popcorn]

bought torchlight II, very good game

they have the same forums as we do

[BobbyZamora]

[greggy]

[BobbyZamora]

I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding my argument. Many of my favorite games are sandboxes. I love Dwarf Fortress, The Witcher, Morrowind, New Vegas, Dragon's Dogma, Infamous, Crackdown, GTA, STALKER (Especially STALKER. STALKER is one of my top 5 of all time games), Far Cry 3, Red Dead Redemption, Terraria and many more. These are all sandboxes just as much as Skyrim is. I love all of these games because they succeed in many areas where Skyrim fails. I even enjoyed Minecraft for what it was, even though I consider it a deeply flawed and ultimately lazy game.

The problem I have with Skyrim is that it doesn't really succeed in anything it tries to do. I spent $60 on the PS3 version at release and then another $20 on the PC version a while later, and I put in a respectable amount of hours in to the game. Despite this, I still struggle to find any redeeming qualities in the game.

And no, I don't like Skyrim. But I wish I did. I wouldn't have so much of an issue if it wasn't for all the lost potential that I see in the game. Skyrim was something I had anticipated greatly for a long, long time, but the actual game was such a major disappointment. I felt like I had wasted my money- I only bought the PC version because I hoped that mods would fix the issues I had, which was a poor assessment on my part.

Also, attributing my problem with Skyrim to Dunning-Kruger effect is nonsensical and a little insulting, since my problem with Skyrim is objectively the game's fault. I don't care that it penalized me for stealing- this is to be expected. I am however bothered by how it penalized me twice for the same thing, with the second penalization not making any sense and only being a result of lazy design.

I don't have a problem with the harshness of Dark Souls, Dwarf Fortress, Monster Hunter or STALKER, so it's a little silly to say that Dunning-Kruger effect is the cause of my issues with Skyrim.

[Syeknom]

Hearthstone is terribly addictive but I suck

[chilljin]

the new divinity is do damn good, exactly what i was looking for in a game

first non blizzard game ive bought or even played in a long time, I can start playing at 12 and suddenly its 4pm and what

[Blastoise]

[starfox64]

evo recap:



this was pretty nuts:

[oldtrailmix]

i wish i could play FIFA to relax but i suck at it when im tired

[can-]

who's got destiny on PS4?

[mc-lunar]

So I've recently decided to get into MOBA-style games because I need something to distract me from online clothing marketplaces (kinda joking) and 2 friends and I started Dota 2 at the same time. They're both super into LOL (but I didn't get the sense they were especially good) so they knew what mobs were, what the basic controls were, what the goal was, whereas I was literally flying blind. It took me an entire game to notice the minimap. Anyways I've since played the tutorial and spent something like 40 hrs in-game and I feel mildly qualified to discuss it now.

I think as far as First MOBAs go, Dota 2 has been a good choice. It's free, as far as I can tell money can only be spent on cosmetic options and nothing gameplay-affecting, which makes it a better F2P game than tf2. The tutorial is really good at introducing me to things like Last Hits, proper item usage, and such. It doesn't do much for gameplay strategies and I've had to have the meta explained to me by irate teammates but I can see why that's the case. The amount of support for competitive play is ridiculous, coming from a TF2 background where Valve essentially pretended it didn't exist.

It can be really discouraging to be on a losing team and knowing that you'd only be able to be contributing if you had the money/level advantage of a member on the winning team, because it's really hard to fight momentum in my experience. So from that point you're basically respawning and quickly dying for the next 15 minutes, because you're punished for leaving.

That brings me to my next minor gripe - I wish the game length was more like 20-30 minutes, rather than the 45+ it can be unless one team gets a big advantage and capitalizes. But I understand, I think, that comes with the territory in MOBAs? Maybe?

I'm going to try Psychonauts soon, I think - I have a friend that strongly recommends it.