T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I have had more time than last week, but unfortunately I got a little sick, so once again, very few games have been played.
What’s everyone else doing?
From The Archives:
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Push the Button!
Scenes from Half-Life 2:Episode 2, showing Gordon Freeman being a jerk.
Patreon!
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
The Dumbest Cutscene
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
Neo: The World Ends With You advances ever slowly. Recruited a new character, who came in with 2/3 the stats of everyone else, confirming I have indeed significantly overlevelled. There was a shop that was selling items for $1 more than I could possibly have, which I thought was kind of funny, I would clearly have to advance my shop relationship until I unlocked a discount. Turns out, no, there’s just a powerup that increases your money limit. That was less interesting. Then one level had a gimmick, and during the gimmick it wouldn’t let me walk from one screen to the next, I had to warp around instead. Especially annoying as the quest ended up being “go literally everywhere.” The progress bar says around 25%, which is mostly expected, but man this game feels like it’s dragging. Would I have felt this if I played the original? Probably not, there’s a lot in this game to make each of the days take a long, long time.
I want to like NEO, the World Ends with You, but it just feels like an endless series of roadblocks. Occasionally I dust it off and the story and gameplay get mildly more interesting. It just didn’t hook me the same way the first did.
I finished a run of FTL for the first time !
I started playing it when it went out, I liked it but the last boss was just too hard for me and I quickly switched to another game.
I picked it up again this week ans, while the game is still hard, I managed to finish a run (on easy) last night.
Like with most roguelikes I am more in love with the idea of FTL than actually playing it. I just don’t have the patience for replaying the same things over and over with the perspective of being screwed by the RNG. FTL is short enough that I did play it to completion at least a couple times (also on easy) but going for the, again often RNG based, requirements for unlocking all the ships was just beyond my level of interest with the game. I also got somewhat annoyed when I learned that the boss has what I felt was a bit of a “GM fiat” counter to a particular build:
killing all the crew makes the ship AI kick in which can make the fight literally unwinnable if you went in with exclusively crew killing weapons.I filled my time with Satisfactory, Monster Hunter World, Subverse and Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced Deluxe. In Satisfactory I finally finished the rocket engine factory, only to see, that my power backup is draining. And Ficsmas is on.
For Monster Hunter World it is a grinding game to get more money and crafting materials to get better gear to have a chance against the pink Rathien.
In Subverse I unlocked Taron and now doing some side quest before going for Sora.
FF Tactics about a third of the map is filled with locations now, but progress is slow when enemies dodge most of the attacks.
Analog we played Point City for the first time and The Crew Family my second time around the campaign, but with a different group. Family is sooo much easier than Deep Sea but doesn’t have as much replayability. Point City is the successor to Point Salad – a tiny bit more complicated, which still makes it easy to digest.
FFTA Deluxe? Is that a mod? I’ve never heard of anything by that name.
Played another planet in The Old Republic. Again, it’s not as easy to play as a ditzy character as I’d like, but it’s working well enough.
Also played more Mass Effect 3. One issue for me with it is that since it’s the Legendary edition I have all the DLC, but the game isn’t clear on what’s DLC and what isn’t. So I treated the mission to free Omega from Cerberus as a normal mission, but ended up finishing it about three or four hours later, which was a surprise.
Also, I can see how Aria seems to be a Creator’s Pet here, but like Kai Leng overall things are more ambiguous. Aria gets the F-bombs and the big speech at the end, but the Turian gang leader is a more interesting character and would be better for Omega than she is, so it leaves the impression that Aria isn’t as impressive as anyone wants us to think she is. The fact, however, that you don’t get a choice between her and the Turian does pretty much signal that she’s the one the writers like better. Although I did manage to get back at her because my character is kinda a mix of Paragon and Renegade, and that left Aria unable to figure my character out — since a lot of the things Aria wanted to do even my “not nice” character wouldn’t do, which meant not choosing Renegade options a lot of the time — and after asking her why she couldn’t figure my character out I was able to have the character say “I like it that way!” which was both completely in-character and tweaked Aria’s nose a bit, which was fun.
Finally got past the timeskip in Three Houses. Interestingly, the “secret” of unlocking this route by talking to a person and then the game giving you a big “this choice will have consequences” box, is actually a fake out of sorts. Going back and seeing how Ch11 starts if you take the other option, it’s exactly the same- I expect the only change is that if you didn’t have the little side scene, you’re not allowed to make the *actual* choice at the end of the mission (though choosing *not* to do the scene during downtime means that’s the only choice you get and your consequences are made). Ironically, the version where you side with the church does a better job of explaining why you should be working against them, because you get a scene of a rally to convince people to do so with the arguments all laid out, rather than the are you really sure/pep talk you get after siding against them. The reasoning isn’t bad, but siding against them is apparently done first for blind faith rather than logical argument.
I don’t know how many save slots the game started with, but the notices after downloading updates suggest that it was lower. How much? Traditional Fire Emblem games had three. This game with updates has 25. I can definitely see a lot more of a make big choice and stick with it on faith vibe working with 3 slots than the 25 I have here allowing comprehensive save spamming and scumming.
I have complained previously about clipping on some of the character models, but while I was aware of a timeskip, I was not aware that every single character was going to get a new unique personal model, portraits, and even some base character alterations that persist in the generic class outfits. In light of that I can much more easily excuse some minor clipping on a class/character that’s barely likely to see play for even a few levels.
Yeah, if you don’t do the scene, that option is replaced with just “…” and you only do one route. Personally, I thought the earlier chapters including everything around Lonato and the Western Church were already enough to make me want to fight them, but I do feel it’s designed as a more character- and emotion-driven scene than we see in some other RPGs. (Like, if it were Dragon Age Origins, you’d stand there for ten minutes asking the two main people there a battery of questions about their motives and goals each.)
I think the game originally started with five slots? I know Fates (at least the special edition with all the routes) had nine, and here three wouldn’t even be enough to have one per route. And timeskip-wise, they also all have new (or mostly new) in-battle voice clips, and I thought that was a nice touch as well.
I also smiled at your phrasing there, since “this action will have consequences” I’m pretty sure was originally used as a phrase by the other game I know that starts with the protagonist discovering she can reverse time by saving the life of a woman who drives the plot and can have a romance with other women including the protagonist.
True, they did have us putting down rebellions or “rebellions” from the other church branches, but it’s conceivable that as the central governing branch those actions were appropriate (though the Flayn/Seteth side mission was quite stark). Until the archbishop puts on her crazy voice for a moment and makes it clear that she’s gonna go 40K on some Heretics. Like I said about the major character death, the heavy-handedness of all the foreshadowing I think is pretty weak: they laid it on so thick I was half-sure a bunch had to be red herrings, until it turned out everyone was the traitor and every bit of foreshadowing has come true like clockwork. Though I’m not sure whether the apparently 100% predictable foreshadowing, or the *incredibly* abrupt, awkward, and glossed-over timeskip, is the weaker bit.
Fates had 3 slots per game, since it was effectively 3 games. So if you were just running with the single Conquest or Birthright cartridge you’d have 3, until you downloaded one or both of the others and had 6 or 9, which could use use for whichever saves you wanted. I believe I initially tried to keep them all separate and played Conquest with the 3 limit because hardcore, but then let my Birthright saves overflow until I finished the route and culled them back down, much more sensibly.
I feel like “this action will have consequences” must be so old that any claims X was first can be dethroned by another. There’s no way Life is Strange got there first, I’m sure I’d seen it before then. I’ll recognize that it popularized and meme-ified it though, and I may be muddled by how many more games since then could fit that description.
Still sick, but better. I’ve done nothing but play Prey. I’ve done two full playthroughs already, one normal and one NG+, with increasingly harder difficulty but still running into the issue that the game just lets you be way too powerful.
Last week I said:
and while I still believe it I can’t also help but notice it’s one of the more game-breaking aspects, and not in a good way. There are a bunch of sidequests that end up completely broken if you happen to start them before (or after) you’re supposed to. The game gives you the freedom to start them any time you want and then screws you if you picked the wrong time. I want to make this clear: this is a bug, not a feature. For instance, an item refuses to spawn in a person’s body if you decide to wait until later to visit that room instead of doing it at the first chance. Your actions in that place are unrelated, it just doesn’t show up. People have complained about this since launch and at this point it’ll never be patched,
This means that effectively if you want to complete all sidequests you need a guide, which is BS. And don’t even get me started on achievement hunting.
Thinking of doing a third playthrough to get all those done. Then again, I also want to try the System Shock remake, which is a similar kind of game. Anyone here has played it? Is it any good?
Haven’t played it. The complaints I’ve heard are that it’s too faithful to the original; they prettied up the graphics, made the screen much cleaner, and fixed the controls, and otherwise recreated a game from 1994.
I’ve played the original, though it was a long time ago and I didn’t get very far. It’s certainly atmospheric; obviously SHODAN is the defining feature, but also breaking cameras and getting “Level security now 98%” makes it feel like everything’s connected. Couldn’t say gameplay-wise, it’s not my kind of gameplay.
I’m back from vacation. Technically a staycation but when I’m not at work time becomes weird, I enter a sort of fugue and forget to do everything as days just fly by, including checking this place…
Anyway, I’m playing primarily Dragon Age:Veilguard. I know, I know, but hear me out. I ended up buying it after an online friend said it’s pretty good, also EA did some not awful things for once: available on Steam without having to use the EA client (you do have to accept their EULA but I’ve noticed that’s been popping up with even games from smaller publishers nowadays), no Denuvo (which I’m not as hard against as some people but still) and finally, which was really the selling point for me, no DLC planned so I am getting the game “as it is meant to be played”. Also, do not trust the ratings on this one, the game is getting review bombed a whole lot. I think stuff like the difference between Steam, where you have to actually have the game to rate it, being at around 73% positive last time I checked and Metacritic being at 3.8 is telling.
Aaaaanyway, there is definitely stuff here that some fans of the series will not like. Combat is very actiony compared to the previous instalments, although I feel like skill builds are deeper and more interesting than they were in Inquistion (admittedly a low bar to clear). They also pretty much did away with carrying over previous game choices essentially limiting it to letting you determine who your inquisitor was and one mostly personal choice from the end of Trespasser. Also, some people have complained about anachronisms popping up in conversation and that the dialogue is very “quippy”, the first I can confirm although it’s not particularly immersion breaking in my opinion and Dragon Age was never written in some kind of Ye Olde language style, the second… kinda? But I also feel like this complaint is weird considering the way party banter looked like all the way back to DA:O? The bigger issues for me are that the dialogue wheel still sometimes leaves you guessing what you’re actually going to say and that the “tone” choices do not feel as different or as consequential to your character personality as they felt in DA2 (still a big supporter of DA2. Fight me!).
So bearing all of that in mind there is a lot of good in the game. If you’re okay with action rather than tactical combat than it is flashy and has a pleasant oomph to it. I am by no means a theorycrafter but just playing a mage I keep finding gear or looking at the skill tree and thinking “this would make for a cool build”, and if I wasn’t lazy I could actually check it out because you can respec for free literally anywhere outside of combat. Narratively I believe I’m about 2/3 maybe 3/4 through and it has a very ME2 structure where the majority of the game is gathering companions, helping them get through their personal stuff, with the addition of doing faction quests that the companions are somewhat tied to. Mileage varies here but I will say that while I like some companions more than others I have found none of them that I actively dislike or that I’ve found very boring. Also, unlike ME2, while the jury is out on the main storyline until I see the ending I have actually rather liked the additions the game made to the “big” lore of the setting. Also, while I said the dialogue wheel remains the enemy oftentime when the line hit right it hit juuuuust right and I remember at least a couple of very good, heartfelt conversations. Also some backgrounds (there are six total in addition to race and class) have some very nice scenes in certain situations.
I do feel like I could have waited rather than buying it at full price, BG3 was still a much better purchase in my opinion, but at the same time I don’t particularly regret getting it and being able to talk about it with friends. At the end of the day depends on your budget I suppose.