Anarchic Fox on 1/4/2019 at 03:28
Quote Posted by henke
BABA
IS YOU
IS GOOD
*tries to push the GOOD block over to the THI4F block, fails*
Hello again, all.
I played, perfected, and almost immediately started replaying Tametsi. If the Hexcells series is two steps improved from Minesweeper, Tametsi is one step improved from Hexcells. It takes the innovations of Hexcells, and its commitment to never having to guess, and adds an impressive variety of tesselations. These tesselations range from the sedate (a grid of squares or hexagons) to the obscure (grids of triangles, hexagons surrounded by pentagons, octagons interspaced with squares) to the downright perverse (dodecagons adjacent to triangles adjacent to pentagons). Both Hexcells and Tametsi are worth a look.
My dopamine-junkie addiction to incremental games continues, though thankfully I'm down to one at a time. The only one I trust enough to name is Trimps.
I finished good, awkward robo-roman Nier:Automata. Lots of stuff worth saying about it, and a recent furry convention included an hour-long 2 AM discussion of it with a game dev and his boyfriend. Gonna go see if there's a thread for it I can post some of our thoughts in.
Thirith on 1/4/2019 at 06:50
Having recently finished Arkham Asylum, I ended up getting started on Arkham City almost immediately afterwards, not least because I remembered playing Arkham Knight years after the other games and thinking that the game wasn't all that great at teaching you all the things it thought you remembered from the previous games. While AC lacks the focus of AA, it's nice to be in a place that feels less claustrophobic, yet not yet as huge as Arkham Knight.
For some weird reason, though, the game doesn't seem to play well with G-SYNC. There are screen tears all over the place when I turn around. No idea whether I've set something up the wrong way, but usually G-SYNC just works without me needing to fiddle with the settings.
Malf on 1/4/2019 at 08:16
Do you have two monitors Thirith?
Is Arkham City maybe set to Windowed Borderless and G-Sync ins't enabled for that mode, or vice versa?
Thirith on 1/4/2019 at 09:25
Just one screen. I was also thinking that perhaps it was a problem with Windowed Borderless mode, but at least in the settings I've selected Full Screen. It's odd - and it made me realise that thanks to G-Sync just working I'd pretty much forgotten how annoying screen tearing could be.
Malf on 1/4/2019 at 10:45
Yeah, G-Sync is definitely one of those incremental performance improvements that is hard to notice at the time, but once your acclimatised to it is glaring by its absence.
I'm still playing Monster Hunter World, which is still providing me with an awful lot of fun.
I am trying to forego "Games as a service" type games, such as Destiny, Division, MMOs, that kind of thing. Yet on the surface, MHW appears to be typical of the genre.
But I would argue it's a completely different beast, and a lot more respectful of its players.
MHW feels a lot more reliant on player ability and experience than those others mentioned above, and it rewards flexibility of playstyle and forward-planning.
Every fight forces you to examine your gear and compare it against your target's strengths and weaknesses, then adjust accordingly. So it doesn't just become about using one set of gear, but rather choosing the best tools for the job on an ad hoc basis.
Gear is incredibly well balanced so that even at the top levels, you're not able to fall back on a few overpowered pieces. There are always gaps in your attack or defence, forcing you to fall back on your abilities rather than just coast on autopilot.
I occasionally feel guilty that I'm playing it to the exclusion of almost everything else in my library at the moment, but at the same time I don't have that feeling that I'm being exploited that I do with "Games as a service".
There are microtransactions, but none of them affect gameplay, and I haven't bought a single one. They're all fripperies such as emotes, stickers and outfits for your handler.
Every fight offers some challenge, and at the high end, where you're reliant on other players to take out certain monsters, the outcome is never guaranteed. Yet at the same time, even if you fail, you've not lost anything other than a few minutes. It's easy enough to jump right back in to another hunt.
And for the most part, the "Grind" is fine. You generally know exactly what you need to do in order to get what you need. The actual grind comes from mastering the knowledge needed to hunt a specific target, and if that means throwing yourself into the meatgrinder several times over before you've learned an encounters ins and outs, so be it.
The icing on top of all this is that due to how alive the world feels, rarely do two encounters play out the same. Other monsters frequently interrupt fights half way through; targets will alter their routes through the maps; it all serves to make the game incredibly replayable.
And that's before you consider the different weapon types and the unique skill sets needed to use them properly. I started out as an insect glaive user, and up until recently, played with it almost exclusively. Yet recently, thanks to the Kulve Torath siege (the closest MHW gets to a raid, but you can play it as many times as you like while the event's live), I laid my hands on a really good hammer, and I've grown to prefer it as a weapon. The sense of power when using a hammer is palpable, and it utilises other parts of the general gameplay to reward observing your surroundings. Effectively, if you charge a hammer attack while sliding down a slope, when you release the charge, you'll somersault through the air, hitting anything in your way multiple times. It's ace fun, and tricky to master.
Finally, after getting through the story, it's incredibly easy to just hop in and play with other people. Either start a quest and fire off an SOS flare, or search for one from the menu, and you'll generally find someone doing something you want. And because gear upgrades require ingredients from across the entire bestiary, there's always someone fighting or willing to fight the monster you're currently hunting.
Edit:
Can't wait to see what they do with the Witcher crossover event, and I'll also be picking up the Iceborne expansion.
That's the other thing this game gets right; they've continually added more and more actual content, such as monsters, quests and gear for all players without charging a single penny.
The expansion will cost, but I'm sure it'll be worth it.
Sulphur on 2/4/2019 at 04:39
While I can look past MHW's nakedly obvious Skinner box model for a few minutes (fight monster -> get materials -> make weapons/armour to fight next monster -> fight monster), I realised there are two things about it that don't work for me: a) it lacks any sense of immediacy because it takes a metric shitload of time to track and down an enemy, and b) there are almost no meaningful smaller fights outside of the boss rush that makes up the game's primary targets.
I then took a look at what else about the game lets you be a part of its world, and came up with nada. You have a poogie and a palico you can dress up, which is cute for all of two minutes, but literally everything else has to do with boosting the main loop: boring MMO resource collection for fights, creating tools for fights, eating food pre-fight, or fighting monsters in an arena for, um, fights.
And that's a fucking shame. I love the amount of detail that's gone into its environments and the beautiful animation for its monsters, but the game's focus on killing large things and collecting large amounts of things is to the detriment of any incidental flavour that could endear it to me. It's a game about grinding towards better numbers, like most games are, but I find myself shorn of reasons to care because while it hints at a fun personality beyond its big, dumb, beautiful face, the moment I try to find it, it disappears, and I'm left with the feeling I'm chasing a rainbow.
I still like its core loop enough to consider it a decent time-waster though, so I'll dip in from time to time. I just wish there was more to it than swatting at and being batted around by angry dinosaurs for half an hour at a time.
Malf on 2/4/2019 at 11:35
Fair enough.
Myself, while I enjoy a good narrative, I've always preferred games with deep systems. And MHW's intricate, interwoven weapon, armour, weakness and strength systems do a lot to float my boat. It also features so many moving parts that the concept of the "optimal build" is anathema, which is really refreshing.
They're also not constantly buffing and nerfing game elements in response to the demands of the community, which is what generally ends up happening with most Western online games. Sure, this is helped by the fact that the game's not competitive, so they're not always striving for "balance". But it's getting increasingly depressing to see other developers caving to the demands of grognards in their communities and "balancing" the fun out of their single-player or co-op games.
Sulphur on 2/4/2019 at 18:19
Yeah, I get that. I don't usually prioritise systems first, I prize user agency over clouds of colliding abstractions, so the first impression I got of the combat was that it was clunky and floaty in a way that made enjoying thwacking shit difficult. I wasn't expecting something as razor-sharp as Nioh, but the old-fashioned clomp and stomp of it made me do a double-take the first time around. I'd usually be loath to link to a Forbes gaming article, but for a change (
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2018/01/30/5-reasons-why-monster-hunter-world-may-not-be-right-for-you/) this one called out exactly why I didn't get along with it as much as I thought I would.
Things did get better once I knew what to expect, and I do get a nice tingle from settling on the right kit and caboodle for a fight even if it's just a matter of matching elemental protection and damage. It's just the other stuff like the huge-ass bounding boxes and roars that lock you in place for a second or two unless you happen to be dodging at the time that make me shake my head. It's all par for the course for the kind of game it is, and even charming in its own way if you're able to accept its grind/craft MMO model and damage spongey battles.
irg on 3/4/2019 at 00:16
Greatly enjoying the newly released Risk of Rain 2 alongside just about everyone I know. Their buy-one-get-one launch deal really did a number. I had put maybe less than an hour into the first game before losing interest, but everything it had going for it works and feels dozens of times better in 3D for the sequel. It's sure to be another mainstay co-op game with friends like Vermintide 2.
For singleplayer I had finally picked up the PC remasters of Turok 1 and 2. I cleared the first game last week and had a good amount of fun with it, but maybe for unintended reasons; I mostly just had a blast diagonally running super fast through the majority of enemies. The sequel so far feels a bit more railroaded but it makes up with more enjoyable shooting, especially the bow. Being able to pick up my missed shots off the ground always makes for a good primary weapon.
the_grip on 3/4/2019 at 04:28
Quote Posted by PigLick
Its called getting old lol. I sometimes find the same thing, games that I know are objectively good that I once would have spent hours and hours upon, now I find myself almost having to force myself to play. Although I have just recently started Vampire Bloodlines again and I find that very compelling indeed, maybe its the superior writing.
I begrudgingly picked up Stardew Valley which is typically not my style of game but it has had rave reviews. I have been sticking with it now for about 10 - 15 in game days, and I'm finally starting to get why people love this game. It is unexpectedly growing on me.
I'm on the day where they have an egg festival and I actually want to see what happens. Totally different experience, 100% relaxing.
