Posted by: @tsi

↑

Finally beat Baldur's Gate 3. My friends abandoned me after Act 2, for those keeping track. That set me back a few months while they were hemming and hawing about continuing.

What a masterpiece. It's firmly in my top 10 games of all time and likely in my top 5. Couldn't recommend it more.

Now it's on to the God of War Ragnarok (free) DLC and Pony Island, an early game by the Inscryption developer.

Curious, I'm not sure how multiplayer works.

Could someone else join you in an ongoing game?

I know a few other people probably in the same situation.

I tried to avoid the Insomniac leak because it's nasty business. It is exciting to see that multiple X-Men games are coming, though.

Posted by: @goldbug

↑

Posted by: @tsi

↑

Finally beat Baldur's Gate 3. My friends abandoned me after Act 2, for those keeping track. That set me back a few months while they were hemming and hawing about continuing.

What a masterpiece. It's firmly in my top 10 games of all time and likely in my top 5. Couldn't recommend it more.

Now it's on to the God of War Ragnarok (free) DLC and Pony Island, an early game by the Inscryption developer.

Curious, I'm not sure how multiplayer works.

Could someone else join you in an ongoing game?

I know a few other people probably in the same situation.

 

Not sure if you can join an ongoing game. My friends and I all made characters at the same time and joined the host who managed the save files.

Since you can start as Karlach, Wyll, etc., I imagine you can join an ongoing session at any time.

I beat Cyberpunk 2077 recently and I dunno.. I don't think it's fair to say I was underwhelmed because in retrospect it was a cool ending (I know there are multiple endings, but I read up and they're all cool so pick your poison). Why I do feel underwhelmed is, contrary to very popular opinion, I think the game is too damn long without enough interesting content, and so I was checked out way before I got to the end.

Now, it's fair to say I wanted to get a decent ending and I wanted to enjoy the different skills and powers and such, so I did do a lot of, but not nearly all available, side-questing and jobs. I don't know if I'd say that drags out the experience because it seems like a game like this is built around the assumption that you're going to do a fair bit of side quests before completing the game. But, and again I know this isn't a popular opinion, the game is very samey. Go here, kill these people or sneak around and steal this thing. There is TONS of inventory management for a game that rarely gives you any guns or equipment worth giving a single shit about... it's just - go to a place and kill everyone and then break down or sell all the shit you pick up because it's all mostly worthless.

I didn't look at my stats, but I would have to guess I spent about 70-80 hours in game, maybe more, and I feel like I got about 30 hours worth of content. The game is just bloated and is distinctly less fun than it would be if the pace were a little faster and the story a little tighter. Especially when there's no sense of wonder or exploration here like there is with a game like RDR2. I'm not 'discovering' anything. There's some cool sights to see, but you can see them in like two hours and then it's just 'go to point A, then go to point B, then go to Point C' and nothing interesting is happening in between those places. The world feels empty and dead.

And not unique at all to Cyberpunk, but I'm so fucking sick of open world games and this idiotic requirement to have a 'ticking time bomb' storyline but ALSO throw endless busy work at you that there's NO way you can actually justify the character participating in. Oh, you want me to head over somewhere to steal a van for you? Sure. My brain is only collapsing in on itself and I'm going to die in a matter of weeks. But I guess I'll spend some of my precious remaining days NOT trying to fix my problem so I can grab some leather jackets for you. It's dumb and kills the flow of the story.

In short; by the time I beat the game, I still had TONS left to do and I only beat the game because I literally just wanted it to be fucking over. And that's not exactly a glowing endorsement even if I did have fun for a good chunk of my playthrough.

I bought the Last of Us Part 1 after completing Cyberpunk. I've beaten the original remaster already, but this version just looked so pretty and introduced some inventory elements from Part 2 so I figured it was worth another playthrough. Loving it, just as I did the first go around.
Somehow I'm doing way worse this time, though. I've had to redo quite a few combat encounters and stealth encounters, and I missed the first two safes. This is my second time playing this game and I'm legitimately playing worse than my first go. No idea why. It's definitely not the game's fault. I'm just sucking.

Still love it, though. I use the headphones for this one and I've gotta say no game has ever made me just constantly feel uneasy and unsafe like this game does. Even other horror/fear-based games like an Alien: Isolation, Silent Hill, or what-have-you.

Posted by: @theknightdamien

↑

I beat Cyberpunk 2077 recently and I dunno.. I don't think it's fair to say I was underwhelmed because in retrospect it was a cool ending (I know there are multiple endings, but I read up and they're all cool so pick your poison). Why I do feel underwhelmed is, contrary to very popular opinion, I think the game is too damn long without enough interesting content, and so I was checked out way before I got to the end.

Now, it's fair to say I wanted to get a decent ending and I wanted to enjoy the different skills and powers and such, so I did do a lot of, but not nearly all available, side-questing and jobs. I don't know if I'd say that drags out the experience because it seems like a game like this is built around the assumption that you're going to do a fair bit of side quests before completing the game. But, and again I know this isn't a popular opinion, the game is very samey. Go here, kill these people or sneak around and steal this thing. There is TONS of inventory management for a game that rarely gives you any guns or equipment worth giving a single shit about... it's just - go to a place and kill everyone and then break down or sell all the shit you pick up because it's all mostly worthless.

I didn't look at my stats, but I would have to guess I spent about 70-80 hours in game, maybe more, and I feel like I got about 30 hours worth of content. The game is just bloated and is distinctly less fun than it would be if the pace were a little faster and the story a little tighter. Especially when there's no sense of wonder or exploration here like there is with a game like RDR2. I'm not 'discovering' anything. There's some cool sights to see, but you can see them in like two hours and then it's just 'go to point A, then go to point B, then go to Point C' and nothing interesting is happening in between those places. The world feels empty and dead.

 

This is why I've become a game snob. Given how I interact with books, movies, and TV shows, it was probably inevitable anyway, but now I won't even give something a look if it scores below a 4/5. The bloat, sameyness, and lack and intrigue that we see in most open-world games is a waste of my time. You and I have been going back and forth about games like Hades, Elden Ring, and RDR2 since before the forum imploded, but it becomes more pertinent every day.

You describe my experience with Cyberpunk as well. I don't want to belabor it too much because I played the game in 2020, but it's honestly shocking to me that Cyberpunk came from the same developer as The Witcher 3. I'm not a Witcher superfan by any means; I took a three-year hiatus from the game because I couldn't get into it at first. To this day, I find the combat clunky and the number of systems (available from the second you boot it up) overwhelming. When it finally clicked, though, it was fantastic. No sidequest wasted, emotional beats that hit perfectly, and while it was long, it never sent you on repetitive fetch quests. That's... not quite what I got from Cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk's development cycle concerns me, too. The gaming satire site Hard Drive wrote this excellent post skewering the game in 2020. Because the game was released half-baked, it never could reach the highs of The Witcher 3. It's impossible to make huge changes to a live game. Even No Man's Sky only changed incrementally over time, and that was more achievable because it had a smaller team and was a smaller-scale game.

In a since-deleted tweet (apparently because he was tired of abuse from the replies), games journalist Jason Schreier pondered how sustainable the AAA games industry is. He basically said if you have a team of 500 developers making $120K a year, games become unbelievably expensive. Prohibitively so, even.

Then you have the same issues that we discuss with action figures: shareholders. Most big studios are owned by a major publisher or Sony or Microsoft. If you're an independent studio and have a huge game followed by a flop, you'll be okay. You could pocket the money from your success to cushion your failure. If you're a publicly traded studio and have a huge game followed by a flop, you're in deep shit. Shareholders are taking your cushion and putting it in their own wallet. Because shareholders expect a profit every year, your big hit has to be followed by a big hit.

My guess is we start seeing the impacts of layoffs and risk-averse corporations sooner rather than later. You'll still get your GTAs and your Skyrims, but the days of new IP and big risks from big studios are likely over. From that perspective, Insomniac's leaked plan of transitioning almost entirely to comic book games makes that much more sense. What's a safer bet, a fresh IP or an X-Men game? Sadly, books, movies, and TV shows are headed in the same direction.

I've become a huge advocate of indie games recently, and it looks like that trend is only going to continue.

@tsi  I don't know if I'd classify myself as a game snob because I'm probably more of a game philistine. I'm on record that I don't think the new God of War games are fun to play - I find them irritating slogs that punish you for just wanting to play a game, with a story that isn't actually good enough to conquer the forced walking and backtracking. But like.. every single person on earth says the modern dad-Kratos games are some of the best games ever so.... what do I know.

And that makes it really hard for me to go by game ratings. Even in-depth reviews don't help me. I LOVE RDR2. It's one of my favorite games of all time. But it's been heavily criticized for the slow pace and sometimes dated mechanics.

The new DOOM has great gameplay. I reeeeally liked that game. Until the horrible grappling hook mechanic ruined the entire experience for me because I don't want shitty 1st person PLATFORMING in a Doom game. BUT, again, many reviews (maybe all?) that I saw praised the traversal mechanics as bringing something fresh to the game but still keeping it Doomy and fun to play. I totally disagreed.

I also dislike Witcher 3 because of the shit garbage combat system that feels like trying to fight multiple enemies with a freshly-greased housecat on a string. I've tried that game three separate times, I believe, because it's SO well-regarded that I MUST be wrong. Can barely get through the tutorial before Geralt's weightless-feeling, zippy movement makes me too annoyed to continue.

So the games I end up liking don't necessarily make sense. There's no obvious through-line of like.. 'this kind of game' or 'a game with this kind of critical response.'

Totally agree with the rest of the substance of your post; the hallmarks of Capitalism are a noose for video games, is really what it comes down to. You can't make MORE money with every successive video game. Endless growth is unrealistic and unsustainable in any system. Chasing that 'every game for every person' thing just results in video game stew -- nothing is anything because everything has to be everything. The three RPG-lite Assassin's Creed games are kind of a great example of this (although I unequivocally love AC: Odyssey). Even fucking Hades, which I love, has a fishing mechanic for some reason. So does AC: Valhalla. And RDR2. Of those three, ONE of them actually makes sense.

Beat my 3rd playthrough of BG3 a couple weeks ago and I think I'm done with that game for a while. 

Decided to try out the God of War Ragnarok DLC and I'm having a lot of fun with it. It's got a lot more story content than I was expecting for a free DLC. Ultimately, it really just made me want to play Hades again though. So I bought it for the PS5 (I previously beat it on the switch) and now I'm gonna be playing that for a while. 

Still gotta finish Spider-Man 2. I really neglected that game. 

I 100%'ed Hades for the second time last year. I never play games twice, so that alone speaks volumes.

I decided to save God of War Ragnarok's DLC for a rainy day. Over the last few weeks, I played some notable indies instead.

Pony Island - From the developer of Inscryption. Pretty similar in concept to Inscryption, though it doesn't have the gameplay chops. I recommend Inscryption to everyone I know. I wouldn't go that far with Pony Island, though for 75 cents, it was worthwhile. Unfortunately, I can't say much without spoiling it and Inscryption.

VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action - I'm not a visual novel guy. I had a decent time with this, but hopefully I learn my lesson and stay away from visual novels going forward.

DUSK - If you love old-school Doom or Quake, give this one a look. It's a complete homage. My only experience with Doom was the 2016 reimagining, so this was a cool way to pay my respects to some of the games that got us here. The original Halo was one of my first gaming experiences and remains one of my favorite games of all time. I could see the bones of Halo CE in DUSK even though it came out in 2018.

Finally, Papers, Please - I hadn't even heard of this game until a few months ago. You play as an immigration officer in a fictional communist country during the '80s. The gameplay can feel like homework at times, but it's an experience you can only have gaming. The game presents fascinating moral and philosophical questions while challenging your pattern recognition, time management, and memorization skills. If you like politics or government, I highly recommend this one.

I've been playing Baldur's Gate, and I'm loving it so far. It took me a little getting used to since I haven't played D&D since junior high, but I've been getting reacquainted. My current character is a half-elf fighter, as I do a bit of a practice playthrough. I fully expect to replay with some sort of magic user character and explore more of the "evil" path next, but we'll see. But man...I almost feel sexually harassed by these characters sometimes and I'm not one to shy away from the skankier side of games. Innocent conversations can go crazy sideways really quickly, with your choices being essentially "Let's bang" or "You're repulsive I hate you." I mean, give me the option to be coy, please!

I'm still chipping away at Elden Ring.  It's just so good.  Spoilers below I guess?

I made my way through the giant lands and am now in the crumbling city.... and getting my butt just absolutely kicked.  One of my two persistent gripes with this game is when enemies can attack through my attacks (the other is the platforming).  If my animation breaks when I get hit so should the enemy's unless they're huge.  The Banished Knights do this constantly and it's really starting to piss me off.  Then they do chained whirlwind attacks that I have zero chance of blocking.  I've hit a bit of a wall with progress because of this.  I can sneak up behind them, crit them, and then get a couple hits in while they get up but after that I pretty much need to retreat and get off a jump heavy attack to stagger them.  Sometimes the jump attack doesn't stagger them though, and sometimes I can't even retreat before they whirlwind attack and I'm done.  Very annoying.

Speaking of annoying, I'm getting tired of the dragons.  They used to be tense fights but now they're just kind of slogs.  I've had to go toe-to-toe with two of them in this area so far and I've beat them both relatively easily on the first try.  But it just takes so long.  So now when I see a dragon I'm not like "ohhh shit, look at that!".  It's just 5 minutes of tedious dodging and recycling the same attack approach until it's dead.  Boring.

Still loving the game though.  I went back to the Volcano Manor last night.  I'd originally declined the invite because it seemed like a sure-fire way to get a "bad" ending but the more I played the more I felt like ignoring this giant castle probably wasn't what I was supposed to do.  I loved the bounty missions and was bummed that there was only three of them.  I thought they'd be keeping me busy for a bit.  The Rykard fight was pretty nuts but once I realized I could just stand in the lava and wail away it was pretty easy and only took two tries (the Banished Knights have killed me more than a freaking demi-god).  I've got a short list of other encounters and curiosities I need to revisit but otherwise I think I'm mainly left with the crumbling land and whatever comes after.  I'm not getting tired of the game at all but I think I am ready for it to end soon.  I think as the difficulty and BS factor ramps up I'm starting to worry I'll end up taking a haitus and never finishing.  I don't know how many hours I've put in so far but I imagine I'm pushing 100.  Not finishing at this point would really suck.

Edit: just found out there's a secret door in the Volcano Manor that I missed, and also... I was supposed to use that Serpent Hunter weapon to fight Rykard.  I don't know how that didn't occur to me!  I just watched a video and it certainly looked a lot easier than how I did it.

You're making me want to boot up Elden Ring again. FWIW, I beat the game in about 65 hours.

The platforming is janky as hell in every FromSoft game. That wouldn't be an issue, but almost all Soulsborne games have at least one platforming section.

The Banished Knights were an enemy type that had my number. Honestly, I just skipped them when I could. I did that with a ton of different enemies.

Every post about Elden Ring reminds me of the sense of awe I got when entering new regions and areas. I have it ranked 8th among my favorite games ever, and even that seems low.

Good game IMO.

Talking about good games -- man I love The Last of Us. I beat the Remaster a long time ago. Just recently I bought 'Part I' and beat it twice, back to back. It's just so good. I just bought the remaster of Part II and am working my way through that. What I really like is that I can start the remaster on New Game + because it allows you to import your original game. Very cool.

I really, really like Part II. But I do think I know why maybe it doesn't get the love Part I gets (besides blatant misogyny). I feel like Part II leans a lot more heavily into the 'action' part of survival-action game. Like, it's very rare in Part II for me, even playing at night in a pitch black room with headphones on, to feel legitimately threatened or nervous. There's a few parts, of course, like the Rat King, that'll get your heart rate up. But the game definitely is not as tense as Part I.

Also, despite being more open than the first game, I feel like this one has a lot less of that feeling of exploration and visiting a dying world. Maybe that's because once you've spent an entire game rifling through destroyed/rotting houses and reading old, sad letters.. it doesn't feel interesting/unique to just do that again for another game. But also because the game centers so much on hunting down other survivors (i.e. INTENTIONALLY going to occupied areas), the world feels a lot more alive and lived in than Part I felt.

That being said, I still love it. But it could definitely stand to be 5 or 6 hours shorter.

While we're talking about Part I, though, I am reminded of the one real criticism I have of that game; the M4. Having played it again twice just recently, I can't get over how much they sucked the wind out of the finale. That gun fucking sucks. It sucks so goddamn hard. I understand that making guns unreasonably/unrealistically wobbly and awful is done to ramp up tension. But this is the end of the game.
By this point you've probably upgraded your other guns to be more accurate and easier to handle. You may even be on New Game+ and have MOST of your guns fully upgraded. And the mood created going into the final mission is not 'sneak around slowly' - it's 'GET TO ELLY.'  You want to rush. You want to keep moving. You want to put people down hard and walk over them. The M4 being the 'special weapon' for the final mission, something you don't get to play with during the rest of the game, allowed it to be different. It could be a ridiculous good weapon and allow you to follow through with the tone of this part of the game by being an unstoppable killer. Instead you're three feet off target within .5 seconds of holding the trigger down, and the gun isn't even very powerful compared to smaller caliber arms you're already carrying.

In short: You shouldn't feel at ALL compelled to swap out of the M4 unless you run out of ammo. But in all three times I've played the final mission, I've barely used the M4 unless my other guns were running low. That's pretty lame.

Also, playing Part II directly after Part I really makes me wish Part I had slightly better mechanics like Part II has. Such as crawling and aiming from prone.

Anyway.. really enjoying both games. And it speaks to how great -some- games can be that, even with PS+ and Game Pass, and new games releasing all the time, many of us keep going back to certain games. I think developers/designers deserve all the credit in the world for crafting games that we're willing to play over and over again not because they're designed to be addictive or because they technically offer endless replay value like shooters/fighting games, but because the story and world building is just so good.
Last of Us, RDR2, Mass Effect, Dragon Age... these types of games I can go back to over and over again.

I'm gonna try something different after Part II. I think I'm gonna go for that Tina Borderlands/D&D game. It's on PS+ now and my son is starting it. Looks fun.

I have an interesting relationship to TLOU. I actually like Part II significantly more than Part I.

I've only played the first game once, back when it came out in 2013. Don't get me wrong, it's a great game. The literalization of the trolley problem makes for a memorable conclusion, but to me, it doesn't have great gameplay. That's in part because I only played the original and not the remasters or remakes, but the game is barely a decade old. There's no excuse for janky combat or unintuitive puzzle design. Other people bitch about the lack of polish in Uncharted's gameplay, and that's how I feel about TLOU.

I find the second game's themes more compelling. Forgiveness, the cycle of violence, and the emptiness of revenge are far more interesting to me than what Joel does at the end of TLOU. The gameplay also leveled up in a major way. After beating the second game, I moved it to #2 on my list of my favorite games ever. I've significantly cooled on it since then (it's #14 now; Part I is not on the list). Part II is far too long, has major pacing issues, and is often punishing and cruel for the sake of being punishing and cruel. Both games are desperate for some levity. Why do the characters even bother? Everything is grim and ends in tragedy. Where the show had the Bill and Frank episode, the games have nothing. Ellie's trip to the museum is not enough.

While my favorite art is often sad, introspective, and bleak, that's not all it is. Some artists have internalized the idea that the darker something is, the better it is. Neil Druckmann is one of them.

Somehow this has turned into a very negative rant about two games that I adore. 😆 

@tsi  Oh, I go on negative rants about things I like all the time. I think some people are also maybe wired to be more critical of the things they enjoy because those are the things they actually spend time thinking about and dissecting versus complaining about things they don't care about. You will never see me complaining about the latest sport balling game where sporting balls are used for sports reasons.

Don't necessarily disagree about the first game's gameplay limitations. It's definitely a game I enjoy more for story and atmosphere, where the gameplay is good -enough- to not hamper my enjoyment. That said, I definitely feel like the gameplay limitations/problems are -way, way- more apparent if you play the second game just because the second game corrects a lot of those issues directly. It's one of those 'once you see it...' situations.

I'll also say, to your point about themes, is that Part I just doesn't have as many to digest, which kind've seems in line with your criticism. Part I gives you lots of atmosphere, world-building, and story between mostly two characters and this broken world you get to explore through them. But most of the mental exercise comes in only at the very end. For most of the game you're not really asked to think too hard about what you're doing. Mentally and emotionally, you are a passive observer of Joel and Ellie's relationship. It's only at the end where you, the player and 'audience member' are really asked to think about something - about the nature of what happened.

Whereas Part II delves through the themes you mentioned throughout its entire runtime. You are processing these things throughout the course of the game, not just at the very end. That makes for a richer experience. Or at least maybe a more interactive one.

Can't say I disagree about needing some levity. Although I think Part I has a bit since Ellie's youth and temper can make her a funny character at times, whereas Part II is pretty much lacking any at all after the snowball fight - meaning, the entire goddamn game.
And a lack of levity means the game FEELS like its full length. 15 hours in and you're just trudging through this absolute misery without an end in sight, and you start really feeling every hour after that because it's just awful after awful thing happening. Surely that was the intent - to give the game that feeling of burden and sadness and even pointlessness. I get it. I get wanting to create a piece of art that basically says 'there's almost no hope because we are fucking monsters.' But still. Hard to live that for 30+ hours of your precious escapism time.

I will say that the end of Part II hit me WAY harder than the end of Part I. And that should be saying something because I legitimately love Part I and how it ended and it still tugs at my heartstrings after 3 full play-throughs.

I haven't played TLoU yet so I can only skim the above posts.  I'll fix that soon, maybe after I finish Elden Ring?  I've had the remaster for probably 6 years or so, and even installed it on my PS4, but haven't played it.  Sometimes I do this dumb thing where I don't ever play a game I'm really excited for.  I don't know if it's not wanting the hype to end or being afraid of it not meeting my expectations, but I do it often.  The same thing keeps me from completing a lot of games, too.  Awesome.

What's the difference between the remaster and Part 1?  Is Part 1 the same game just rebuilt from the ground up?

@mikeysee  The Remaster of TLOU is just a small visual upgrade for the PS4. 'Part I' is a much nicer visual upgrade for PS5, and also changes some accessibility and quality of life/mechanical elements to incorporate advances they made while making Part II.

If you're on a budget, the Remaster is perfectly sufficient to enjoy the experience. If you're a big graphics guy, or struggle to play games that are looking a little long in the tooth, I'd go for Part I.

Your final thought on Elden Ring is what happened to me, for sure; didn't beat the game before it drove me to quit. I do want to replay eventually, but I'm SO out of practice that I'll basically have to start over and relearn everything. The Haligtree area just absolutely sucks. To be honest, I regret ever going there instead of just beating the game, because the Haligtree is what essentially killed the game for me.