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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
I finished the new Saints Row last night. It was pretty good, not $75 CDN good though, wait till it comes to Steam and drops in price a bit.
The combat was okay, some guns like the shotguns aren't worth using, a shotgun should be able to one-shot an NPC point blank but the assault shotgun takes several mags to put down a single enemy. Sniper rifle is terrible for some reason although it can one-hit KO.
Driving is okay even when using a keyboard, although all the cars appear to have a top speed of 75Kph.
The enemy faction leaders get next to no characterization and one of them gets killed in a cutscene.
Your player character and friends are portrayed as poor college students but lack of money is never an issue in this game.
All in all the game is fun if a bit buggy, but what you're told and what actually happens in-game frequently disagree.
I finished the new Saints Row a few days ago too!
I would agree with everything you've said but I ended up having a lot of fun with the game and really enjoyed the ending even if everything leading up to it was a bit sub-par.
I found the exact same thing with the Assault shotgun, but once I got the police shotgun and upgraded it, I was damn near invincible close range. Those enemies with two health bars were reduced to nothing after two shots. The Combat rifle was a good all-rounder, even if you had to empty your clip. And the SMG was good for shooting at cars.
I think the overall area just won me over as well as the day/night transition. Santo Illeso to me looked absolutely goregeous at times. Also, I was playing on XSX, so I think with a controller and heavy use of the game's auto aim, the game is actually playable (although I had to knock down the difficulty one down from medium to get the chaotic power fantasy I was used to in previous Saints Row games).
The sniper rifle is a strange one to me - When I use it on XSX the viewfinder looks terrible, as if someone smeared vasiline on the screen or digitally zoomed in on a camera. However, like you said, you can one hit kill enemies, and if you shoot from far away, you have bullet drop. A very weird inclusion for a franchise this silly, but oh well.
My thinking was that the failure of Agents of Mayhem hit the studio very hard, and they had to cut a lot of corners on this one to make it fit within budget - it definitely has the feeling given how repetitive the side missions can be and how barebones the main story is (everything is quickly rushed over). However, the ending about friendships etc I personally feel that was Volition staff really wanting to include that message and meaning given that in the end credits, two Volition staff members passed away during development, which for me the whole ending really hit hard on an emotional level.
I don't really know how to feel. On the one hand, the game is severely undercooked and has several fundamental problems with dated design and bugs. On the other hand, it was the most fun I've had in a while and was absolutely nowhere near as bad as GTA Definitive Edition (I fell through the map on that one, as well as driven on invisible bridges, had missions become insanely harder due to weird glitches that were not present in the original, etc) and for me, Cyberpunk (I eventually bought the game second hand, and I just could not get into the game. The whole world felt dead and lifeless and the mission design was very, very much Witcher 3 but in first person).
Black Desert. I’ve heard so much about how it’s grindy and p2w but I never hear anything about the gameplay and story. The gameplay though is absolutely incredible. It’s a refreshing take on mmo combat that makes the game feel like an ARPG more than an mmo and I love it.
I went back to Final Fantasy XIV a couple weeks ago. Was feeling that MMO itch, especially since I stopped playing Eve Online back in like March or April. I've played FFXIV on and off since before the remake/redo was released.
More importantly, after so many years, I've finally finished the main story quest of the base game! My main character was originally a Lvl 50 THM/BLM, but I am very bad at skill and spell rotations. So I bought all the game expansions so I could, A) continue on the main story, and B) also start playing as a Red Mage. The skill/spell rotations are super easy as an RDM, so I'm enjoying the game a lot more. Think I'm about halfway through the Heavensward expansion already. Probably gonna look for a Free Company (guild) soon.
Literally just finished "The Great Ace Attorney Adventures and Chronicles" (Steam) -- the latest "Phoenix Wright" game. Took me a forever, since I put it down for over a year (think I've even talked about it in a past thread). But I definitely enjoyed it, and I think it's one of the best installments in the series, even though this is technically a spin-off. I loved the format, with all the cases being related and intertwined, coming together at the end and wrapping everything up. Definitely has a darker-than-usual storyline, which I appreciated.
I'm continuing to play through a smattering of games mostly just to see which games run well on Steam Deck. If I didn't mention before, I have a huge library of games I haven't really played.
This week I went crazy just seeing which of my JRPGs would work and I'm amazed at how often they do. Now I'm a bit sad that most of my Falcom collection is on GOG instead of steam because I can imagine getting those working on the steam deck would be something nightmarish. But one thing I was really surprised to see is that it runs Gurumin like it's nothing. I've never gotten Gurumin to run well; everything always falls apart. I'll probably spend a bunch of time playing it. It's going to be quite a treat for me since it's basically the last time Falcom worked on the PC as a primary platform.
I also started playing Ys VIII again. I know this is a strange oppinion, but I feel like modern Falcom games really don't play well on the big screen; they're very text-heavy and the Ys games in particular have quite a shift in tone as they switch between long conversations, exploration, and boss/raid fights, and each of them come in relatively small bites that make it feel like they're great for picking up and putting down. My husband bought this game on Switch when it first came out and beat it already, but the Switch version has really terrible performance issues, so I didn't want to play it that way.
I actually looked into it last week, but Valkyria Chronicles 4 is also playable on Steam Deck, and my goodness does it play well there. It's so full of beautiful colorful visuals and strong powerful music that it makes a really nice showcase for just how much effort Valve put into ensuring a quality experience on the Steam Deck. You just can't play through the first introductory mission without starting to feel something.
It's not trivial, but it doesn't actually look that difficult either, so long as you're reasonably technically inclined:
https://www.dexerto.com/tech/how-to-install-epic-games-on-steam-deck-1894333/
I picked up Guild Wars 2 because it recently launched on Steam. Steam says I have 19 hours played at this point. My early impressions:
The early levels are too easy. I have a couple characters in the mid- to upper-teen levels (out of L80). I felt very little danger, ever, except now that I'm getting into the upper teens. Even then, it's easy to play safe.
I like customization and cosmetics, and GW2 delivers on that. Though a lot of cosmetics are locked behind progress and/or paywalls, a decent amount of customization is still available for free.
The tutorial system is good, and I feel well-educated as I advance through the game. The wiki nicely provides further reading, whenever I want it on any given topic.
I think I've been spoiled by Kingdom Come: Deliverance, because the combat in every other game feels arcadey and too unrealistic. This is not to say that I think there won't be any challenge in GW2. From how it feels now at my current levels, I can extrapolate that out and imagine how it will probably get quite complicated managing well all of one's unlocked skills, abilities, magic, etc. in the heat of combat.
While I can see that they designed the game to allow some people, if they want, to have a relatively pacifist playstyle (gain XP from exploration, healing, retrieval quests, etc.), it looks to me that combat and violence play a big part in character advancement, at least in the PvE part of the game.
I've played only strictly PvE, but I intend at some point to dip a toe in PvP, and the touted, so-called World vs World mode. In PvE, I found the storyline of my Human Hunter character rather mundane and cliché, but the story of my second character, a Sylvari Elementalist, is a lot more interesting, and I'm eager to keep advancing the storyline through story quest completion. In the cut scenes, the art is good, the voice actors seem pretty high calibre, and the character models, though not photorealistic, are still pretty good. The lip movements are noticeably delayed from the audio, though, and it's kind of irritating and distracting for me. I couldn't find any settings to tweak to address that.
All in all, I think it's a good game, and I'm certainly getting good value out of this, considering I've paid $0 (so far). I've marked the DLC on my wishlist, and will probably pick one up if any go on sale.
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion Im glad I got it on sale to play a bit at a time, but it isn't pulling me in, exactly. It's fun and cute, but a bit less than compelling.
Fallout 4 I got bored, killed Kellogg to get past that quest (with missiles this time, harder than with a nuke) and have just been running around. I killed a pre-war cult (that I then had to go back to), killed a bloodsucking family, launched a rocket-powered ship (after going to Corvega again, I hate Radiant Quests), and a bunch of other weird shit I didn't even know was in this game or the DLC. I wish I'd just messed around my first time last year, it's a fun game world to just play around in.
Twilight Princess HD by way of emulation on the steam deck. I didn't realize it was just a straight render resolution increase of the game cube version, shame because a lot of the visuals didn't age too well, it's a game that could definitely benefit from having a little bit of work done on the textures at least, and I might just switch to the gamecube version to use a fanmade retexture. That said, Twilight Princess is still one of my absolute favorite Zelda games, and I'm enjoying it a lot.