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2018 VIDEO GAME CATCH-ALL THREAD


SirSmUgly

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2 hours ago, Smelly McUgly said:

Now that Bethesda has taken a beating sales-wise on every non-Elder Scrolls, non-Fallout SP game with high production values, they seem to be focusing more on MP games (like this Fallout game that I have zero interest in playing because it's PvP and online-connected continuously, or at least, that's what it appears to be).

Starfield, Elder Scrolls 6, and Fallout 5 will all be SP. Fallout 76 is a special case one off doing something new that they have been trying to pull for years. PvP is there, but its not the focus.

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58 minutes ago, supremebve said:

What exactly did you not like about the gameplay? That game handled like a dream and it is one of the few games where the difficulty ramped up from beginning to end where it never felt easy but didn't unfairly difficult either.  It is a game that felt like I was 100% in control of whether I won or lost for every moment in the game.  There were battles I had to retry 5-10 times, but I never grew frustrated like I didn't understand how I could adjust...even when I got to the end and went valkyrie hunting.  The combat system starts off pretty simple, but just grows deeper and deeper as you upgrade your gear, trust your son, and get new weapons.  If you only played 5 hours, I can't take your opinion seriously about the father/son stuff, because you didn't actually see any of the development.  

I mean, you don't have to take my opinion seriously about the fact that I thought the dialogue was shitty. The dialogue is shitty in most video games, TBH, and this was just another one to throw on the pile. I also don't take anyone seriously who argues that I need to play 25 hours of a game to get a sense of its plot, dialogue, or anything else. Five hours was enough for this shit. I'm also very much on the "if the book doesn't grab me after the first hundred pages, I don't need to stick around and read the next three hundred to critique it" train, FYI. 

I thought the combat was stiff. I don't think that, for example, it feels great to shift your line of vision to attackers behind you with a button press, and I found that other than throwing the ax, which feels pretty good, the melee felt unwieldy. When I fought the first boss, the patterns were simple, but moving and dodging felt shitty and stiff. I think of Souls games or Bloodborne or even Horizon, which emphasizes dodging with a dive, and those all felt good and the flow of combat wasn't thrown off by dodging. In God of War, you have to sort of re-set yourself, get your field of vision right, for just a couple of seconds, but those couple of seconds break the flow of the game. 

I'm definitely not the greatest game-player of all time, but I usually just play games on Hard from the jump, so this wasn't an "I'm bad at the combat so I gave up instead of just putting the game on easy, for fuck's sake" sort of thing. 

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22 minutes ago, Eivion said:

Starfield, Elder Scrolls 6, and Fallout 5 will all be SP. Fallout 76 is a special case one off doing something new that they have been trying to pull for years. PvP is there, but its not the focus.

I've got to find the article, but I just read an article in which Todd Howard just pointed out that a number of SP games underperformed and that they'd have to think about how they approach the games they put out going forward, which sounded ominous. 

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7 minutes ago, Smelly McUgly said:

I've got to find the article, but I just read an article in which Todd Howard just pointed out that a number of SP games underperformed and that they'd have to think about how they approach the games they put out going forward, which sounded ominous. 

Haven't heard anything about that. The main studio games do rather well. Fallout 4 and Skyrim are two of their most successful games. I'm guessing he was talking about the other studios Bethesda oversees for Zenimax.

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I think of the more recent of their current-gen games, Prey, Wolfenstein 2, The Evil Within 2, and Dishonored 2 all under-performed. Doom did well! But Howard was pointedly saying that Fallout and Elder Scrolls do 20M, and other games, not so much. He did say that they were generally happy with some of the performance, but that they'd be looking at some of these other games and series more closely. 

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9 minutes ago, Smelly McUgly said:

I mean, you don't have to take my opinion seriously about the fact that I thought the dialogue was shitty. The dialogue is shitty in most video games, TBH, and this was just another one to throw on the pile. I also don't take anyone seriously who argues that I need to play 25 hours of a game to get a sense of its plot, dialogue, or anything else. Five hours was enough for this shit. I'm also very much on the "if the book doesn't grab me after the first hundred pages, I don't need to stick around and read the next three hundred to critique it" train, FYI. 

I thought the combat was stiff. I don't think that, for example, it feels great to shift your line of vision to attackers behind you with a button press, and I found that other than throwing the ax, which feels pretty good, the melee felt unwieldy. When I fought the first boss, the patterns were simple, but moving and dodging felt shitty and stiff. I think of Souls games or Bloodborne or even Horizon, which emphasizes dodging with a dive, and those all felt good and the flow of combat wasn't thrown off by dodging. In God of War, you have to sort of re-set yourself, get your field of vision right, for just a couple of seconds, but those couple of seconds break the flow of the game. 

I'm definitely not the greatest game-player of all time, but I usually just play games on Hard from the jump, so this wasn't an "I'm bad at the combat so I gave up instead of just putting the game on easy, for fuck's sake" sort of thing. 

The plot of the game is an extremely slow burn, and you don't even know who the main villain is for at least half of the game.  The father/son stuff doesn't progress much at all in the first 5 hours, so no I don't take your opinion seriously about it.  You just heard Kratos grunt at a kid and be a grump...it changes a lot and absolutely pays off by the end.  You don't have to stick with it, but I also don't have to take your opinion about it seriously.  The one issue I did have with the story is that by the end of it I felt like it was just an extended prologue.  The foreshadowing of the next few games in the spirit is pretty apparent, but am I really going to have to wait multiple years and console generations to get through this entire story?

Our experiences with the combat are vastly different.  I thought the combat was way more responsive than Horizon, and I love that game.  By the end of the game, I was hitting a 3 hit combo with my axe, throwing it a distant enemy, changing weapons to hit another combo, while moving in a position to hit another enemy when I called my axe back.  The best part is that all those things flowed together in a way that made sense and felt really responsive.  It really shows when you are hunting valkyries, and you have to switch from weapon to weapon to take advantage of the constantly recharging special attacks.  The Valkyries are incredibly strong and fast, and your timing has to be almost perfect when you attack or you'll waste your opportunity.  They are fights I had to do multiple times and each time I knew exactly what I did wrong and went right back in to fight it again.   

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I mean, that's cool. I don't take your opinion seriously about the story or dialogue either. We can ignore that entirely and agree to disagree. 

Horizon has bad melee combat, but everything else about it feels better. Aloy is more responsive and doesn't move as slowly as Kratos. It's easier to turn around manually with her and sight an enemy. The combat is also different, mind you, because you can play so much of it as a tracking game where you track and lay traps, so the actual combat has lots and lots of set-up on Hard or Ultra Hard if you want to give yourself the best chance of winning a battle going in.

God of War springs battle upon you suddenly since you get ambushed a lot, which makes it all the more important that Kratos shouldn't feel slower and more unresponsive than Aloy. This explains the imperfect choice of having a "turn 180 degrees" button, which also takes away from your mobility since you're not really turning necessarily where you want to turn when getting attacked from behind. I'm not a huge fan of where the camera positions itself when you're in combat, either, which I think hampers your ability to react to enemies.

Tossing the axe does feel good, but the attacks without the axe up to where I played felt so low-damage that it negated the feel of throwing the axe for damage. Combat became this numbing, slow thing where I was just trapping dumb enemies in a loop to chip for damage until they finally fucking died. 

Yeah, I really disliked that game, which is a shame, as I was pretty interested in it before playing it. 

 

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I'll try to use as few words as possible here, because I'm well aware I could rant about this game for a month straight (thus "no")

The overwhelming praise and success of god of war makes me concerned that I played the wrong game, and there's some other god of war out there that has all the things that people have talked up

it's also caused me to retroactively love Mortal Kombat X

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52 minutes ago, Raziel said:

You'd have to think with how well TES5 did, and how not well TESO did, they'd lean Single player.

I think TESO actually does fairly decent at the moment, or at least that was what I last recall seeing somewhere.

47 minutes ago, Smelly McUgly said:

I think of the more recent of their current-gen games, Prey, Wolfenstein 2, The Evil Within 2, and Dishonored 2 all under-performed. Doom did well! But Howard was pointedly saying that Fallout and Elder Scrolls do 20M, and other games, not so much. He did say that they were generally happy with some of the performance, but that they'd be looking at some of these other games and series more closely. 

Yep, those would all be games from studios under their umbrella opposed to Bethesda themselves.

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18 minutes ago, Eivion said:

I think TESO actually does fairly decent at the moment, or at least that was what I last recall seeing somewhere.

Yep, those would all be games from studios under their umbrella opposed to Bethesda themselves.

Sure, but those games don't get made without Bethesda's support, so let's just hope that they shift their money to other SP games or series rather than looking to make a shift significantly toward multiplayer games-as-a-service (single-player games-as-a-service is more than welcome, at least for me). 

I mean, this is the company that green-lit Rage 2 in 2018, so I'm probably worried about nothing. 

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I thought God Of War was fine from what I played but the combat didn't really hit the sweet spot between Dark Souls weightiness and more traditional God of War craziness that they were going for. It all felt a little too sluggish.

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Just beat Yakuza Kiwami. Official play time was 124 hrs but after subtracting the number of times when I left it sitting on a dialogue tree or store until the PS4 powered down, it's probably more like 100. Still a pretty long play time considering how many things I failed to do, but damn was it fun. I haven't sunk this much time into a game since GTA5, which coincided with the 2013 government shutdown.  Going straight into Zero, with plans to play everything that got a US release except maybe 3 since it's disc-only and expensive. (I might take a break after Zero for Spider-Man and then play Lost Paradise before returning to the main series with Kiwami 2)

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Best Buy has their Black Friday in July sale going on. 

No great shakes to see, but I did order 3 games. 

Got Dirt 4 for $16 because I figure the next Gran Turismo will be PS5. 

The new hype on No Man's Sky suckered me in and for $16 it won't be a great loss if I wind up hating the game. 

Tomb Raider Definitive for $7.xx will get me in the mood for the new game later in the year. 

I've already got the last Tomb Raider game in my "to play" pile for the XB1. 

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11 hours ago, Cliff Hanger said:

Just beat Yakuza Kiwami. Official play time was 124 hrs but after subtracting the number of times when I left it sitting on a dialogue tree or store until the PS4 powered down, it's probably more like 100. Still a pretty long play time considering how many things I failed to do, but damn was it fun. I haven't sunk this much time into a game since GTA5, which coincided with the 2013 government shutdown.  Going straight into Zero, with plans to play everything that got a US release except maybe 3 since it's disc-only and expensive. (I might take a break after Zero for Spider-Man and then play Lost Paradise before returning to the main series with Kiwami 2)

They're eventually (like this year or next year) re-releasing 3-5 as PS4 digital downloads, completely due to the ton of fans the series has gained in the West since the release of Yakuza 0.

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Me: Ugh, I really want to buy a Switch, but I have enough video game shit.  Tell me it's a dumb idea and I shouldn't do it.

My wife: You should buy a Switch.

Me: Baby, I love you so much.

Paraphrased, but only slightly.  My wife is a terrible influence on me.

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No, your wife is actually a certifiable genius with great ideas because the Switch is fantastic.

And I say this as someone who hasn't liked a Nintendo home console since the N64 or a Nintendo portable console since the GBA SP. It's a lovely little device to use, and I stay astonished at games that look like BotW or Super Mario Odyssey or NBA 2K, etc., etc., etc., looking and running like they do in handheld mode. 

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I’m enjoying my Switch, save for the size of the JoyCons. I’m 6’5”, so my hands just swallow them. Playing undocked has been helpful, though. 

Playing SteamWorld Dig 2 now. So much better than the first, and I say that as someone who liked that first game a lot. 

Borrowed Odyssey from work. Got to the daylight version of New Donk before I had to return it. I’ll probably end up buying it, because I sorta want to find every single moon. 

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I'm definitely getting a pro controller.  I have fairly small hands but non-ergonomic controllers give me hand cramps.

I'm trying to decide if I want to get Zelda and/or Mario to start.  Do I need to get a microSD card right away if I'm not buying digital games?

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33 minutes ago, Zimbra said:

I'm trying to decide if I want to get Zelda and/or Mario to start.  Do I need to get a microSD card right away if I'm not buying digital games?

Nope. I had saves going for plenty of games + like ten indies / downloadable little games.

Which, now that I think about it, includes Sonic Mania, Golf Story, Hollow Knight, Celeste, vvvvvv, Snipperclips, Night In the Woods, Thumper and Stardew Valley. I don't have a bad thing to say about any of them. I'd put some of them above Mario Odyssey, which I adored.

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8 hours ago, Tromatagon said:

They're eventually (like this year or next year) re-releasing 3-5 as PS4 digital downloads, completely due to the ton of fans the series has gained in the West since the release of Yakuza 0.

I know 3 is out next month in Japan. I just hope they can get it out here around the time I finish Lost Paradise, so that I won't be stuck waiting, staring at 4 on my PSNow home screen.

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2 hours ago, Zimbra said:

I'm definitely getting a pro controller.  I have fairly small hands but non-ergonomic controllers give me hand cramps.

I'm trying to decide if I want to get Zelda and/or Mario to start.  Do I need to get a microSD card right away if I'm not buying digital games?

Unless you like to switch (ha!) back and forth between games, you could just get one of Zelda or Mario if you're trying to save cash or wait until B2G1 sales around November or whatever. I put 250+ hours into Zelda and the DLC (and I didn't finish the DLC) and 90+ hours into Odyssey. You can eat off one game alone for at least three or four months. 

You also can wait for a sale if you want to get a microSD card. You can likely wait it out until Black Friday. 

If you want game suggestions, please let me push my favorite games on the console onto you. 

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