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Video Games General

Megaolix said:
So, what I hear about Pokémon Legends Arceus is pretty much that the gameplay is great, but the graphics people have been incompetent and lazy.
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Yeah, I've been playing it for a few hours (beat Metroid Dread just in time for the release), and that seems fair. The graphics aren't too bad, but that might be because I play the Switch in handheld mode. Might be worse on a TV.
 
DeathShade said:
Yeah. I've heard basically the same. It's the game we've been asking for for ages, but Twilight Princess to this day looks better than it does.
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Honestly, this sounds like a good thing when it comes down to it. Graphics on the whole are massively overrated. I mean don't get me wrong, they're important sure, but realistically, over the last 15 years or so, we've pretty clearly hit the point where graphical fidelity has hit diminishing returns, with improvements that are increasingly difficult to notice to a meaningful extent, while requiring disproportionate hardware requirements. Frankly, pretty much any game released after 2007 has graphics that are, even at their worst, still perfectly functional. I'd much rather have a game that looks like it came out on the Xbox 360* but focused on cramming in as many features and refined gameplay as possible, then any of the "LEET GRAPHICS RAY TRACING WOW" shit nowadays that's going to look ugly and outdated in just a few years.

If anything, I'd argue that Pokémon Legends Arceus deciding to sacrifice graphical fidelity for making the gameplay as absolutely spotless as possible is exactly what all game devs should be trying to do. There's a reason why DUSK is one of the best FPS games released to date, despite it very deliberately looking like an FPS game made in the late 90s.





* Well, with one exception. That whole "Bloom and desaturated colors/REAL IS BROWN" era of graphics can die in a hole where it belongs, but that's an issue with the art design and direction, not a hardware one.
 
AllyDoodle said:
I find it fucking hilarious that in Doom Eternal most of the world has been taken over except for Australia.

I guess even the demons of Hell don't want to face our wildlife.
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There's actually a really good lore reason for this: Rabbits. Australia has one of the highest rabbit populations on the planet. Considering the rampage the Doomslayer went on when demons killed his pet bunny Daisy (Which you can see remnants of in the ship like a folder on his PC labeled "Daisy" and his empty rabbit cage), the demons refuse to go near Australia because they're worried they'll set off an even worse rampage by killing so many.
 



For good news, can't forget this game is next month.

Holy shit do I want it to work. I want to see how far our choices can shift the story.
 
Damn, it's really making me want to get a Nintendo Switch. They've got Triangle Strategy, Advance Wars, Animal Crossing, FE: Three Houses, Pikmen, SMT 5, and so on.
 
So, I heard about Death Road to Canada, so I went and got it. Possibly on sale, I forget.

TL;DR: Zombie Travel Game going from Florida to Canada. Carnage. Guns. Luchadores. Magical girls. Clowns. Santa Claus. Giant machines that turn you half-fly.

Finally beat it a minute ago. Sadly, all but one of my people died in the last siege. That thing goes on forever. Actual final stage was easy enough though.

But I absolutely lost my shit when the stage was over.

Because if the mounties throwing beavers (I think) at the zombies, and the attack moose weren't enough... once the horde actually got (gets?) to the gates, the giant Mountie-bot arrived, decimating the horde in seconds...

...With its "EH-ZER"
 
searcher8 said:
Honestly, this sounds like a good thing when it comes down to it. Graphics on the whole are massively overrated. I mean don't get me wrong, they're important sure, but realistically, over the last 15 years or so, we've pretty clearly hit the point where graphical fidelity has hit diminishing returns, with improvements that are increasingly difficult to notice to a meaningful extent, while requiring disproportionate hardware requirements. Frankly, pretty much any game released after 2007 has graphics that are, even at their worst, still perfectly functional. I'd much rather have a game that looks like it came out on the Xbox 360* but focused on cramming in as many features and refined gameplay as possible, then any of the "LEET GRAPHICS RAY TRACING WOW" shit nowadays that's going to look ugly and outdated in just a few years.
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This pretty much my thoughts with the addition that mocap realistic faces are dogshit. Devs need to stop pushing for realistic graphics and go back to stylized graphics.
 
Lost Ark releases next week for NA, SA, and EU. Topics that've popped online about it:
  • Why were skin and hair tones changed for NPCs? Why were said options changed for players?
  • Why were outfits changed for the western release?
  • Is Lost Ark pay to win?
  • Is Amazon messing with the game too much?
  • How is class balance for pve and pvp?
  • Is it an endless grind, a gear treadmill? Is the immediate release of Tier III content outrageous?
  • Are East Coast NA servers going to be overpopulated? Will there be free transfers to low pop servers?
  • How stable will the servers be for launch day/week?
  • What are the benefits of rapidly leveling versus gradually leveling while working on side quests?
  • Why are they so fickle when it comes to releasing character names which were "locked" at creation, then stay locked for months after their deletion?
  • Is this going to kill X mmo?
  • How do folks feel about instant kill boss mechanics?
  • How many people will be hospitalized due to their attempts to maximize their character's growth?
I don't have strong feelings about the controversial stuff. I hope I like it (both leveling and the steady growth for pve). I'm trying to think up good character names.
 
Beat Blaster Master Zero 2. True ending, because it's way too long to need to go do it twice.

Fairly good game. I think I liked the first better in terms of gameplay, but the second's additions are nice. Wave beam is no longer insta-murder, but you also aren't completely fucked if you lose it. Story is good.

Once again, fuck the side-scrolling sections where you don't have your tank. Especially in the final part.

Robot Ghooooooooasts!

Also: Still criminally little hentai of Eve.
 
If memory serves, the BMZ games are nice about replaying the game to get the true ending; namely, your save gets reset to just before the point of no return so you can go back and get whatever you missed for the true ending, then head back to the finale and start the true ending sequence.
 
Hoooooooly shit, Nintendo just had a banger of a Direct. Still no Zelda because they're a bunch of cockteases but we got Xenoblade 3 and Fire Emblem Warriors 2 and a load of other stuff.
 
Live A Live is getting a remake

Earthbound is coming to the switch

A new Wii Sports that lets you E-Sports online :V
 
Starting a new file in Skyrim, how do I get flush with cash? I know Gold Rings are good money but I think there's only two or three Gold veins in the game that I could realistically get to right now.
 
Velk said:
Starting a new file in Skyrim, how do I get flush with cash? I know Gold Rings are good money but I think there's only two or three Gold veins in the game that I could realistically get to right now.
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In the Halted Stream Camp directly north of Whiterun, there is a mine system where you can find the Transmute Mineral Spell that can turn iron to silver and silver to gold. Thus easy gold and easy money. Also easy Alteration levels.
 
I believe a merchant's inventory resets every 72 in-game hours(3 days).
 
So, digging into Earthbound Beginnings since Nintendo put it up.

Only big complaint so far (other than the series' notoriously annoying menu systems) is the way the NPCs will sometimes seem to run from you and trying to get in place to use Talk is annoying when they do.

In related news, Nintendo put up the official Earthbound guide for free, as a PDF. The old-school one.

At one point it mentions putting the music into Stereo mode if your TV has that. I don't... I wouldn't call it nostalgia, exactly, but that's a weird feeling to remember when not all TVs came withe stereo sound.
 
The Triangle Strategy prologue demo is there, by the way. We get chapter 1 to 3 to try out and saves will work with full release.

I'm at chapter 3 and I goddamn love this already. As far as the ideologies go (Morality, Liberty, Utility) as you pick answers, none look 'obviously wrong' (yet). It's very ideological to say the thre nations desire peace. It's also not wrong to answer all their coffers will benefit from peace.

And the story already has characters admit the arranged marriage between Serenoa and Frederica is not exactly the biggest thing for peace, since it's between the son of a banner House and the daughter of a concubine instead of a marriage between royals.

One thing to note is that, well, it's rather easy to note who's likely to become your foe when their profiles sport an evil grin or an evil mustache. :V
 
It just occurred to me that I want to see a videogame with a pacifist route, except the pacifist route leads to the worse ending.

Like, you get to the final boss and you forgive him and he goes "Huh, really?" and then shoots you, and the epilogue is a slideshow of the rest of the rebel-side or whoever was allied to you trying to fight off the villain without you, and every boss enemy or mook that you spared on your route to reach the BBEG has gone right back to his side and is cheerfully committing the exact same atrocities that they were doing before you came along.

Because mercy is all well and good, but badguys don't stop being badguys just because you've decided to play at being the bigger man.
Being tolerant of evil isn't a virtue. At best you have no impact on the world and the villain will just continue on as if you'd never existed, and at worst you're sabotaging innocent people's attempts to protect themselves.

As for what brought this on...

Mostly dunking on Undertale nerds, i guess. Sometimes [Spare] isn't the correct option, and if you fall through a hole and land in a cave full of monsters that want to kill you and rip out your soul, you should probably fight to protect yourself.

Also, I just beat Sifu.
The plot of the game involves hunting down the group of martial artists that murdered your father, and having badass kung-fu fights about it.
Each bossfight, by default, ends with your killing the boss-enemy with their own weapon. (a machete, a staff, a dagger, a rope)

In what is basically NG+, you can do the exact same levels but spare their lives instead of killing them, for a better ending that expounds of the idea of 'Wude', and breaking the cycle of revenge and violence.
Except that if you spare Yang, the last boss, he fucking kills you.

Each other boss, you beat them down then seize their own weapon and come within a hair's breath of killing them with it, leaving them broken, exhausted and defeated. Even without being killed, they clearly have no fight left in them.

Except Yang doesn't fight with a weapon. He fights like you do, with his fists, and he killed your father with his bare hands.
If you take the 'kill' ending, you use the same technique he used to kill your father, a punch to the chest that stops the heart, and he dies from it.
But if you take the spare-ending, the scene goes exactly the same until your character lines up for the final blow, and hesitates.

Yang does not hesitate, he takes away the magical artefact that you've been using to revive over and over for this entire game, and then he punches you in the heart and kills you stone dead.

Which leads into the third phase of the bossfight, where you and him throw down in what appears to be the spirit-realm or the afterlife or something.
After defeating him there, your character wakes up on the floor in the living world and it is implied that the third stage of the fight never happens, and after you died from Yang's Heart Punch, he brought you back from the dead using the talisman that he took from you earlier.

Which... is a really cool scene for a martial arts game/movie, but as the moral to a story, it feels kind of screwy.
"Let your enemy kill you and then hope that they feel bad about it." isn't a very good plan.

Or something like a farcry game where you get to the final boss and refuse to kill him because you're better than that, and he laughs at you and reminds you that you've killed like 400 of his employees just to reach him and that not even five minutes ago he watched you direct-impact one of his personal bodyguards with a rocket-launcher, turning the poor bastard into bloody chunks.
"Tahir had a family, you know." he says to you. "A wife, three kids. The eldest daughter just enrolled in college."


The moral doesn't have to be 'killing is awesome, you should kill everyone' but you have to actually look at the realities of the situation instead of just choosing the blue 'mercy' option every single time the game presents it to you, just because other games have programmed you to believe that Mercy = Good Karma = Light Side Ending.

I want party members who find your absurd idealism to be naïve or condescending. People who don't change their mind 75% of the way through the game and shift their alignment to meet yours.
 
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iamnuff said:
I want party members who find your absurd idealism to be naïve or condescending. People who don't change their mind 75% of the way through the game and shift their alignment to meet yours.
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On the flipside of that, I want more games where taking the "evil" route doesn't necessarily involve kicking puppies and being a douchebag for the hell of it, or endings where "kill the villain" doesn't involve your character instantly turning into a full-blown cackling Sith Lord when you've been largely pragmatic throughout your playthrough.

I'm specifically recalling Jade Empire's morality system, where the Closed Fist path was allegedly a legit martial philosophy about seeking personal strength and betterment and sometimes helping other people do the same but in practice was just about being a douche 99% of the time.
 
Okay, what the HELL is this encounter rate? Sometimes I can cover half the map between fights, other times... three steps- battle. Three steps- battle. Four steps- battle. Two steps- battle. One fucking step- battle. In that order, with nothing in between.

I thought part of it was the run function just accelerating the framerate so even when sitting still the battle counter or whatever is going down at high speed- which may still be the case- but it still happened when I kept my finger off of it, damn.
 
iamnuff said:
It just occurred to me that I want to see a videogame with a pacifist route, except the pacifist route leads to the worse ending.
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I want the exact opposite of this. I want a game where you get to be an unrepentant evil bastard or on the evil side without the game bitching out and having you switch sides. Even better if you don't face any real consequences for it.
 
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