I figured I'd make an /e/ equivalent of that great, big /beat/ thread.
Recently I have been slogging away on XCOM: Enemy Within with the Long War mod. Humanity is doomed as I'm simply incapable of holding back the torrent of battleships the aliens keep hurling at me.
I knew using legendary Pokemon was looked down upon, but I didn't know any of this other stuff about swapping my Pokemon out or using items being verboten. What next, I can't pick up health in Half-Life 2? Or pop a few Mentats in a Fallout game before the big exam? Perhaps if the Pokemon games, at least the ones I've played, weren't some of the grindiest titles around I'd agree with these rules, but come on, the reality is I'm fighting the game here, not Pokemaniac Dan and his level 30 Ivysaur.
The trouble is generally that pokemon games are quite deterministic, if you understand the mechanics well then it's very easy to trivialise, and there's very little in-between for Pokemon players. You're either a complete casual or you're a turbo neckbeard obsessive.
The difficulty curve of the vanilla games is adjusted for someone like me who plays one of the games every couple of years, and you blunder your way through using pokemon you like because they look cool, and you have to figure out as you go along which pokemon are strong/weak to what, because you don't even recognise half the pokemon you come up against.
But the other kind of player, the people who actually do know them all by memory and choose their own team by the strengths of their stats etc, will breeze through the game without any resistance.
That said the average romhack usually "fixes" all that and rebalances the difficulty by giving gym leaders competitive teams with maxed out EV values and all that bollocks, and that tends to make items etc much more important because without them you're really up against unfair odds. The ones I've played were a shock to the system at first but it's very rewarding because it takes you back to being a kid when fighting a gym leader actually felt intense and hard.
Don't let the marketing fool you, it's a really lovely RPG with a very light dusting of horny. So brash that one too young would not get it, one who thinks they are old enough get half of it and an adult can have a sensible chuckle.
But all of that is selling this game short. It's easily the best JRPG, FF doesn't hold a candle to the medium while Dragon Quest revels in it. It's just linear enough to avoid feeling lost, just deep enough to give purpose.
>>26317 I find that Dragon Quest games are very charming, but the battle systems are usually a bit dull. Also I find the music is not as diverse and memorable as Final Fantasy games. I got as far as the mafia canal town in XI, and had experienced no exciting battles, no real feeling of customising a character to how I want (compared to stuff like FFVII materia, FFVIII GFs, even DQVI and VII's vocations).
It's a subscription for extra bits of the game. Sometimes that's just cosmetic items in multiplayer games, sometimes it's extra chapters of the single-player campaign. It's all a bit grubby and shameless.
>>26322 It usually just a way to sell DLC that isn't out yet. As in, game releases, and there will be a "roadmap" detailing the next twelve months of DLC, but if you buy the "season pass" you'll get it as and when, maybe at a slight discount.
I think in games that are of a more "live service" kind of deal, it's a bit different. With Fortnite I think you have two tiers of unlocks, and if you don't pay for the season pass you only get the crap unlocks, but I'm not totally sure on that because I don't touch Epic with a bargepole.
>>26324 Battle Passes are what Fortnite and Diablo IV and I think Overwatch 2 use. As you play the game you level up, and there are two sets of rewards. The free tier, which is mostly shit cosmetics; and the premium Battle Pass tier, which has good stuff like cosmetics people actually give a fuck about.
Free tier is stuff like emotes or stickers, premium is new characters or sick armour.
>>26323 >>26324 >>26325 So they don't block you out of playing the base game, only subscriber content? I'm not too bothered about paying a monthly subscription for MMOs but for regular games it seems like a bit of a scam.
>>26327 Woah, we got a real straight shooter here.
Except what you say isn't really even true, you aren't "stuck with it". While the "AAA" space is more or less fucked*, games have never been more accessible, both old and new, whether it's via online stores or emulation. Plus there's a thriving scene of reviewers on YouTube to tell you about these games and some of them even edit their videos down to a reasonable length.
*Thanks to Ubisoft, Embracer Group, Electronic Arts and the rest!
Should I play Dishonored or Disco Elysium this evening? Don't explain why in detail just shunt me in the direction of one or the other. Do it now, NOW! QUICKLY!
I've spent a chunk of the afternoon playing Iron Harvest. It's an RTS with a really cool premise about WW1 but if they had kickass dieselpunk mech tanks.
I really wanted to like it, but it's kind of disappointing, and I can't tell if that's just because it's a modern RTS, where I'm the kind of guy who wishes RTS never left the golden age of CnC behind, or if it's the game itself. The campaign starts very slowly but the moment to moment combat and positioning of your troops etc is fun, very Company of Heroes. It starts to come apart when you're on a bigger map fighting for control of resources, and then it starts to be one of those where you no longer feel immersed in the fantasy of commanding your mechs, you just feel the mechanical workings of the gameplay, micromanagement, and all that shit.
I also don't like Poland being the defacto good guys, they're boring. Nothing against them, it's just that in my quest to shag every eastern bloc country's women, Poles turned up like Rattatas and Pidgeys. Also the voice acting in English is fucking horrendous.
I think the Lithuanians are the best. They don't seem to be as mental, bit more laid back and open minded, I put it down to proximity to the Nordics. They're not as conservative/traditionalist as the others, even if they do tend to like power metal and probably don't mind if you collect Nazi memorabilia.
Latvian is still on the list but I couldn't even find it on a map honestly. I'll get back to you if it happens. Sage for blatant nonsense.
>>26337 The only 'walking simulator' I've played was Gone Home which I bought on disc, on a whim, for less than a fiver and it turned out to be absolutely brilliant. I was completely immersed in the atmosphere and actually cared about characters as if I knew them (I guess it's easy for a bearded autisitic NEET to project onto a teenage lesbian girl, huh). Toward the end I was really, really hoping the story did and didn't end in suicide - it was that good that I actually reverted to my own teenage self for a while.
I've been wondering about Firewatch for a while but I'm not too keen on knowingly going into a narative based game.
>>26338 Well I don't really know what to tell you, if the only walking simulator you played was brilliant but you have no interest in playing another one?
Firewatch is as you describe - characters you care about and immersive atmosphere.
>>26339 >>26340 I think the point was that the game caught me off guard at a potentially vulnerable time in my life, rather than knowingly going into such a scenario. I think any attempt to intentionally recreate or seek such an experience will inevitably be insincere.
>>26338 I really enjoyed Gone Home but found Firewatch was just kind of disappointing (although I might be a bit biased because I was a gay teenager in the early 2000s).
The art style is great and it gets off to a promising start but the game just ends up being really anticlimactic.
It's hard to explain why without spoiling the plot but it basically starts out like a compelling mystery thriller then mostly ends up being about single middle-aged men's personal trauma they can't escape from, but not in a way that really explores much or made me care about the characters in the way Gone Home did.
There's also your character awkwardly not-quite-flirting with a colleague over the radio for the entire game and the tragic yet incredibly mundane and predictable cockup several years ago which somehow got ignored by everyone even though it's fairly obvious the kid had gone missing and is probably lying dead in the woods somewhere.
Also the big reveal at the end that all of the mysterious stuff going on is just one guy fucking with you.
I think Gone Home's environmental storytelling is also a lot better. You're literally examining everything in a house to work out the story with minimal external prompting in a way that ends up feeling like solving a big satisfying puzzle.
Firewatch has a bit of that but a lot of it feels like you're just following instructions to walk to the next waypoint in order to be told the next bit of the story.
Seeing a lot of hype about Helldivers II, but I'll have to wait for payday before I make any more impulse purchases like that. Either of you two tried it? I really liked Remnant 2 last year and it seems quite similar.
I get a very Starship Troopers vibe from the marketing bumf, so I imagine it's got a load of unironic Death Korps of Krieg roleplayers on it to trigger depiction-is-always-endorsement-lad, and I think that'll be a good laugh.
It looks quite good. The developers have encouraged people to hold off on buying it for a bit, because the servers are completely overwhelmed by the unexpectedly high player count.
>>26343 >depiction-is-always-endorsement
If you're trying to convince yourself that was the argument then the frequency that you bring it up might work, but it has the opposite effect if you're trying to convince the rest of us that you're not the one who's been triggered.
>>26343 I imagine it's great fun with friends, but on my own it's a fairly mediocre wave/horde based TPS with a mildly amusing sense of humour. The monetisation and in game shop are a bit scummy. It does crib a lot from Starship Troopers.
It's a twee 3-5h Moomin story about Snufkin and the Park Keeper.
Graphically its a very well done water colour style, controls using mouse/keyboard are a teensy bit clunky but using a controller works well, and the map design is such that there is no undue guesswork about what the player needs to do next while also having a fair few optional quests along the way that help flesh out the world. It's not a complex game to play, basic game vocab¹ is enough, with mostly push-this-pull-that-drop-this-here style puzzles. Though relatively few there are fail-states that follow the "do it again, stupid" philosophy.
You play as Snufkin which, if you know your moomins needs no introduction, and the game is set in Snufkins fightopposition to The Park Keeper, who wants to turn the natural beauty of the Moomin Valley into a manicured park. The setting and experience is quite serene, but some of the (English) writing reads overly stilted and didactic. Beyond the puzzles, you gain "inpiration" (XP) to play instruments acquired from certain quests better to pass barriers or overcome obstacles. Some of that XP is hidden throughout the map, but most of it comes from quests and side quests; it's hard to over or under level. Level gating isn't ever the point in the game, so this is hardly a flaw. Instead, discovering the "inspiration" in the environment is quite fun.
¹) Using buttons to move a character, using a button to interact, following a screen prompt and learning from it, short term quest v.s. overarching goal
>>26352 That's the one I posted a picture from. Officially, it was just called "Moomin" and it was made in Japan. It's brilliant. I think everyone from our generation remembers that; there are other versions but I don't think they were as popular. There was a CGI one a few years ago which was disappointing, and there is a sinister live-action one from the 1970s.
Bought it last night, played til the early hours and most of today. It's actually really good. I am a big fan of Starship Troopers so naturally I was predisposed to like the whole shtick this game is wholesale ripping off from it, but they actually did it very well so I can't hold it against them. It's very rare a game gets a satirical, humorous tone correct like this.
As for the gameplay, yeah, I can see it being a little underwhelming if you intend to play it solo or you don't like interacting with strangers. But if you do like playing games with other people, this is definitely one of the best games for it. I haven't finished a game grinning ear to ear like this since the original Left 4 Dead. It also very strongly reminds me of Mass Effect's criminally underrated multiplayer modes, but with a lot more freedom and variety.
I've been a big fan of these "horde" game modes since Invasion Mode on UT2004, to me it's a mix of social activity and gaming in one. Co-op is hard to get right but when it IS right, it's wonderful; and I get the impression that the power of memes alone has given this game one of the best player communities I've ever come across. It's so charismatic people can't help but get in on the roleplay a bit, and that translates into real player camaraderie.
In essence they have really just distilled all the best elements of the survival/co-op shooter into one game, and it's more than the sum of its parts.
>The monetisation and in game shop are a bit scummy.
I heard a couple of reviewers say this too when I was looking around before buying. But the thing is, upon getting the game, I have no idea what they were talking about. As far as "live service" games go, this is by far one of the least predatory and least scummy. You unlock everything via the rewards from completing missions, and you earn plenty of the the "premium currency" in game. You can unlock the battle passes with in game rewards and I've almost got enough to do so after only a couple of days playtime. Also as far as I know the battle passes don't expire and lock you out like other games typically do.
I really can't see much incentive at all to spend real life money on it at all, it really is optional. I'm earning all this stuff by playing the game, which I am doing to have fun because I am enjoying the game. It's not a grind, which is quite the opposite to what most games do where they intentionally make it a ballache to unlock stuff and have everything limited so you feel pressured by FOMO.
I mean, I wish games didn't have any of this stuff, I would rather just pay a tenner for some new DLC every few months if the devs need an incentive to support the game in the longer term. But as long as they keep the microtransaction model this benign I am okay with it, and it seems weird that the game is taking criticism for it when if anything, it's a step in the right direction.
Okay this game keeps getting better. I had dismissed the robot faction in favour of bugs, because robots are usually boring. But I tried one this morning for a change and discovered that this game's Automatons are the most terrifyingly humanlike malevolent machines I have ever encountered in a game.
The first time I heard one of their patrols approaching, and realised they are singing an actual marching chant (CY-BER-STAN, CAN'T KEEP HER DOWN) I was terrified as well as impressed. The devs of this game really get it, man. They get it. These bots are implied to be some sort of space communists who originated from a robot worker's uprising, and they truly HATE humans. I had one of them scream what I'm pretty sure was "HELLDIVER SCUM" as he killed me.
They hate you with the same kind of profound hatred the humans hate other aliens. The kind of hatred you can only feel if you are, you know, sapient. Emotional. They are the mirror image of humanity here. In fact I suspect at least some of them actually are former humans, there's big piles of bodies that appear to have been dissected or converted, like Strogg.
Sort of bounced off Dragon's Dogma II. I get it's trying to be a more hardcore sort of game, I just find it a bit of a chore sometimes. Inventory weight management is much less generous than your Skyrims or Witchers, and fast travel is very limited and uses a very rare consumable item each time. So if you have to return to an area for a quest and it has one of the sparsely distributed fast travel points, you have to weigh up whether you want to trek through monsters for 15 minutes, or spend a ferrystone which you might need more critically in the future. Also quest markers are kind of vagueish which I like - I had to find some shit in a cave, and it was refeshing to not be guided directly to each item but actually requiring me to properly look around and explore. I think if my attention span wasn't so shit at the moment I'd have got more out of it, it's deep but hostile.
I got Rise of the Ronin too which is like a casualised (but not easy) Nioh, set in the bit of Japan history where the Americans arrive and glorious Nippon has to be less isolationist. Very typical open world, full of bandit camps, fetch quests, collectibles. I'm enjoying the combat because there are difficulty options this time, and on normal it's a solid level of challenge but not Nioh level bullshit. Huge emphasis on parrying and depleting enemy stamina, like many action games nowadays.
Was it a mistake to release two AAA open world hardcore action RPGs from well regarded Japanese devs on the same day? Maybe. Dragon's Dogma II has the advantage of being multiplatform, RotR has the advantage of being heavily pushed by Sony but is limited to PS5. DD2 got good reviews by journalists, RotR middling. But DD2 got into bother by introducing microtransactions which were unknown to gaming journalists until the day of release, and optimisation is poor, so it's getting only "Mixed" reviews on Steam.
More like Dragon's Dogballs, am I right. It's one of those games where it's not an MMO, but it's annoying in all the same arbitrary ways as one, and is probably appealing to the type of autist who likes MMO stuff for the same reasons.
I'm playing Shenmue. I guess you have to be very patient to play it today, but I'm enjoying taking in the details and serene atmosphere and the terrible voice acting - it's taking me right back to the 90s and the feeling I got the first time I played Resident Evil exploring the mansion.
I think I may be one of those gamer misogynists. Every time I hear a feminine voice in a multiplayer game something twigs in my mind and I feel my defenses go up. I don't say anything about it or act differently (atleast that I'm aware of), but I can feel my brain operating differently. I try to actively avoid or disregard the fact that the other player sounds feminine and try to focus on treating them as I would a masculine sounding player, but it's always there in my mind. Then seeing other players simp over the femmes, flirty but not flurting as if that's a regular interaction?
What the fuck is my problem?
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No. 26362Anonymous 26th March 2024 Tuesday 5:58 pm26362Had to keep this short because I need to buy meat
>>26361 I'm not trying to sound superior, I simply am but whenever I encounter one of our gamer sisters my anxiety usually comes from knowing how weird, sooner or later, some lad gamer will inevitably get. Whether it's over familiarity or the Eurotrash drunk who went "errrr... there is a woman on our team?" one time when I was playing Hell Let Loose, it's always something.
I think what your getting is kind of an insight into what happens when you're around only men all the time. That's pretty unusual for adult men in the twenty-first century, but it definitely does something to your brain when you're in that kind of mono-gender group and then one woman is introduced. Whether it manifests as your thing or my thing or maybe another thing is up to the individual, but I don't think any of it would happen if multiplayer games had a real world gender split.
Not to sound patronising but how many lasses do you interact with in real life?
I'm hardly some kind of religious woman respecter myself but I don't treat women any differently. Maybe it's just because of my workplace where we all have a very lowbrow kind of crude, vulgar humour, and I'm used to treating lasses like "one of the lads" in that regard, but I think that's how you should be trying to think of it in a game. Games are a male dominated space and any lass entering that space knows what she's in for (with the exception of some no fun allowed Twitter pricks, but fuck them) so I tend to assume they can handle the bantz and all that.
Although I will say it definitely does make me inwardly cringe and roll my eyes when I see blokes simping, either in real life or in a game. Even if you want to flirt, the best way is always cool and casual, not that kind of behaviour.
In fact if anything, the reason I dislike blokes who behave like that towards women is that they are letting the side down. They're the reason the "pussy pass" exists.
One thing I notice is a lot of very miserable Western Europeans. Just absolutely no fun and monosylabic at best. But the East Asians who get lost and end up in EU servers? I don't know what they're saying, but they're always up for it and that works in any langauge.
I just don't do multiplayer. It's much more fun to be an autist by myself and play around with the game world that's been created for me without people who spend their entire life hacking the game.
What I don't get is why there are so many people who insist on playing multiplayer games in exactly the same way. Why don't they just play a single player game, instead of coming on to co-op or MMO games and dragging down the teams who end up having to put up with them? It just doesn't make any sense to me.