Colourful.

Animavore wrote:You don't have to play Dishonored stealthy. You can just go out and kill them all with powerf magic.

Yeah, but what was annoying in the first game, is that it stupidly punished you for killing too many people. You could pretty much go through and killed only the main targets, but if you used lethal force a lot, you got some bullshit ending about making the plague worse for no real, logical reason. It's just there to bar a player from being too brutal. There was absolutely no other reason why it had that affect on the outcome of the story.

i seem to remember, as well, it was fairly impossible to play the final level with anything other than a stealthy approach...could just be my failing memory, though.....i blame too many video games....

Just finished Horizon Zero Dawn. What an amazing game. I never played a game in which I could identify myself that much with the story.

I put Ori he Blind Forest on my wishlist, and one hour later, it appears on sale at -50%.
Coincidence ? I think not.

Too bad I can't afford it right now.

Animavore wrote:Colourful.

I want to hate it, but looks like I'd probably enjoy the shit out of it.

I got DiRT 4 as I needed a good driving sim. Last time I played the series it was called Colin McRae Rally and it was '97.

Man the physics engine has changed since then. It's balls in the mouth tense on simulator mode with all assists off. You need all your nerves and concentration. If you hit a flat, oblong stone lying perpendicular to your rear wheel as you take a turn it could put you into a slide. I'm only playing at the bottom tier in an Opel of some kind.

I've saw some scenes from the prequel to Life Is Strange this morning. I dunno, it's like the world is gonna be okay now. We can all join hands around the globe and sing songs about peace and flowers; this game is coming.

You play as Chloe.

Wonderful videogame

Interesting! That one passed me by somehow. A similar gameplay mechanic is used in Scanner Sombre, but that has a different feel to it.

'unfinished swan' is a brilliant game..nice nod to 'journey' in it, too.....same team made the recent 'what remains of edith finch', which i'll be picking up in a sale at some point...

i'm still pootling through rime - lovely little game

and rime's finished.....lovely little game, would highly recommend it for the journey, abzu, ico etc crowd.....

Sorry but I find it amazing. Weird to me but there you go.

Got a loan of Mass Effect: Andromeda from a mate. Eeeeeeeeeee this game is a hot mess, so glad I didn't take a punt on it.

is it that bad? quite a fan of the mass effects but not played this one yet...

I liked it.

UncertainSloth wrote:is it that bad? quite a fan of the mass effects but not played this one yet...

From what I understand they played around with procedural generation for three and a half years to make a huge sandbox exploration RPG with space combat, only to abandon that idea and fart out the finished game from the assets that they had in 18 months. It teetered under the weight of its own ambition from the sound of it and EA lost confidence in the studio. What you get is a disjointed mess with appalling dialogue, shallow characters, terrible animations etc, etc. The gameplay itself isn’t that bad, but every other element shows that you can’t make a game like Mass Effect in 18 months. Honestly, it makes ME3 and Dragon Age 2 look like towering achievements by comparison. At a bargain bin price it’s probably worth playing as this is the last Mass Effect game your likely to get for a while as the series has been shelved. It would really be a shame if this was the swan song. Put it this way despite all it's flaws I will chug my way through to the end, it's not terrible it's just really not what it should be.

Started playing DISHONORED 2

The AI is as inconsistent as ever, much to the detriment of a good stealth-gameplay experience. Sometimes they see you where and when they shouldn't, while other times they're deaf and blind.

I read a letter from this Wyman guy, whoever he is. Emily's lover. Ugh. Disgusting.

They just could not resist writing her an immediate love-interest. Some bloke.

DISHONORED 2 gives you the illusion that you have many different paths to approach an objective from, but if you want to collect some lore and actually learn about the world of the game you're playing you'll have to snoop around and crawl through every possible path, nook and cranny to find reading material and loot.

You can breeze through, stealthily avoiding one guard, assassinating another, here, getting spotted by another, there. Fight him, go up the edges on the left, instead of down the path to the right, miss a painting and some books, letters, clues, a quarter of the loot in coins. Climb through a window, not the backdoor. See a piece of paper and some other object, bodies you could inspect, guarded by men, with no chance of getting near any of the bits of lore and loot without being detected, then you can choose to fight, knock maybe half of them out and kill the rest (although, the AI is too dumb to even hear you when you swing open the front door or when you start opening safes in the next room, so...), then opt for one path or another to get to your objective and then get shown at the end of the mission that you missed half the loot and who knows what other items, lore, characters, interaction, helping out NPCs...etc. So you have to slug around everywhere if you want to get the most out of every mission and the game, as a whole.

Start swiftly killing and act like a predator and you get a cynical/negative/chaotic/bad/dark ending. Why? Flies? Well, what if I eventually unlock and use my power to incinerate all corpses, then the flies would have nowhere to breed, so the plague wouldn't spread, right? Wrong. Why? Because reasons. Because it is the same bullshit they did with the rats in the first game. Came up with this whole explanation that leaving bodies around would cause panic and make the rats spread, just to force the player to hold back if they didn't want a bad ending. Even though Corvo could have the ability to make corpses "disappear", too. But, no. Apparently, that doesn't change anything. The ability doesn't mean you won't cause panic and plague. The developers haven't thought this childish morality system through in the first game and they haven't learned anything in the second, either. It is the same. Yet, they claim they've made it more nuanced by making the game consider your actions, who you let live (only in case of major targets, though), but if you leave a trail of bodies, even if no one can/will see them, you still make the world darker, even though Corvo himself was vindicated and people learned the truth.

Operating under the black and white presumption that violently resolving issues and (either some of or all of) the individuals only leads to darker world is thinly-veiled, badly-disguised, bleeding-heart, pacifistic drivel that put me off from properly enjoying the first game. And it's the same with the sequel.

And all of the faults (with the inconsistent AI, with the nonsensical, under-developed morality system and with the multiple paths and "freedom" to approach a situation) become glaringly apparent in the intro mission.

What incentive would I have to replay the game? Either on the same difficultly or harder.

Make the already inconsistent AI (that either sporadically develops 6th and 7th senses or loses all of them) be "more perceptive"? Sounds like it would only exaggerate the faults.

Replay missions to try a good, fast set of paths I map out on my first play-through and miss half the stuff I can find, as a result, do a mission under 3-5 hours, instead of 1/2 or 1, then have it all shoved in my face at the end by the score? What's the point? Oh, do it the other way around? Leave all the exploring and detailed lore for a second playthrough (because I cannot get everything on the first one, anyway), but understand only half of what's going in the world in my first playthrough? What kind of an approach is that? Is that what replayability means? Have people go through the same thing, find every angle, every corner, every quarter, every paper for a story they already know, just to drag it out? It's like going to the cinema and understanding only half of the movie. Pacing is important. On the very first playthrough the most. For both the story and how fluidly one can progress through the world to advance it. Missing half the lore because one goes down a certain (easier or harder) path isn't compensated with tedious exploring that has one barely pushing events along. And it's either one or the other. One cannot have both, especially not on the first playthrough, which is the most important and leaves the deepest impression.

And with this game, like with its prequel, unless one wants a nice, clean, hopeful, bright ending and future for the world in the game and explore all the places and lore, then the developer's predictably over-hyped "freedom of choice" is an illusion.

In the institute the guards playing dice right next to the elevator don't even get suspicious that someone is abusing the hell out of it. Sometimes a guard looking out at a square, in broad daylight, fails to see me running along the balcony of the building 20-40m across from him, while at other times some ace decides he can spot me from across the street, roughly from the same distance, through bushes and a window, sneaking in a dimly lit corridor. And I want all of that to be essentially dialed up by raising the difficultly? Hell no.

The game is almost a constant stream of frustration, punctuated by quick loads, whenever the AI has a moment of clarity and is roused from his spastic musings just to spot me for a brief moment, then ignore me before the tutorial message about enemy awareness even disappears. I don't even save the game if it shows the message, because at least that way I can more easily be alerted if I'm noticed by an enemy. And even that seems bugged. In the last mission, moving through the district to the cart, I haven't received the tutorial message about awareness, even once. Or the ones for combat, blocking...etc. Proof of that, is that it keeps showing up for the first time, whenever I'm spotted (and decide to stab a few guards in the neck, out of sheer frustration, before quick loading, again and again). Yet, at the end of the mission I showed that I've been noticed 1 time. Killed four guards, sure. But none of them saw me. And I threw 3 out of 4 of the bodies in a Wall of Light. The only person who could have possibly seen me was the civilian I rescued from being killed by the guards. And if that counts as being spotted, then Bethesda/Arkane Studious (might as well be the same) can really fuck off.

I'm finding it very difficult to return to the game, because it keeps disappointing with everything the AI does. Or doesn't do, when it should. It's as weak as in the first game. They have improved nothing. The only thing that keeps me playing and enduring missions that take several hours to slug through, is the lore and story.