Archive for the ‘gaming’ Category
This game was a lot of fun for what it was. Probably the closest to Freelancer since Freelancer, if I may say so (to my knowledge, of course). All the ships handle really well and it’s fun to play. The main character is a woman who looks eerily reminiscent of Jan-Michael Vincent and the game has radio stations and a soundtrack like GTA games. That was clearly a really good choice and helped the game a lot.
The story was really weird and seemed to end at a point, that could have been a chapter 1. Little to nothing was resolved and calling it open ended is still putting it mildly. There are even some minor choices, but some of them don’t seem to have any effect on the game. I read somewhere, they were tracked in case DLC would be made at some point (no such DLC was made).
What ended up being more exciting/interesting than the official main story, was buying a run down space station and building it up again. It even ends up offering ship types, that aren’t available anywhere else in the game. Clearly this should have been the main event and the game should have been build around that idea.
After finishing the story and finishing the space station, I stopped playing the game – random missions are generated at stations in perpetuity, but they’ll only lead to the same combat I had experienced dozens of times already and things have to end somewhere.
It’s always hard to say from the outside, but it does feel as if this might have become a major classic in this genre, if they would have had the budget for it. The gameplay loop is really solid, flying the ships is great. Rockets hitting you is extreme, everything shakes, the glass (?) of the cockpit can have cracks and the player character will sometimes move her hands around (panic, shock etc.), as one might when the ship might be close to blowing up – another really good idea. There is distortion and everything looks really good. All the sounds are solid. Again, there’s really not much missing that could have made it an unforgettable cult classic. A lot of it is already here. I’m really glad I played this, they don’t make that kind of game anymore. I mean, not in great numbers anyway.
Oh yeah, Sharky never became a buddy of mine, so I didn’t get that achievement. I actually looked that one up and she should have been available, but she wasn’t. She wasn’t at her home base nor anywhere else. Super weird. Just mentioning this because I wasted some time trying to find her, when it was apparently impossible to do so.
Also, the ship that’s somehow presented as the best one in the game, really isn’t IMHO (it should speak volumes that it’s the very ship she’s already flying, when she’s crashing in the intro – so why should anyone be so eager to get back to that specific model?!?). The most expensive ship has a “light” hull and that means you pretty much blow up the second the shields are down – and that is going to happen since many fights are relatively long (some are almost like fights of attrition), because pirates have ample reinforcements incoming all the time, the ability to last throughout long encounters is imperative. Even just flying to a mission has hostile ships lying in wait again and again.
It’s possible to mount the most guns on that ship, but what good does that, if the ship can’t take any hits? I usually flew the freighter with he heavy hull and it even allows 4 gun turrets. Even if one prefers to fly a fast(er) fighter, the Foxbat is still a better choice, because the hull for that one is at least still “medium”. Makes all the difference. Otherwise one will be thrown back to the last checkpoint a lot. The game autosaves at certain points and that’s it. Nothing manual.
Finally, everyone should at least check out the intro. It definitely made me play this.
MONTHS ago, when it came out. But I really hate it when I don’t even publish at least one post a month, because then this month is missing from the archive links on the right side. So I sort of have to crank out SOMETHING. In any case, I think at this point everything should have been said about this game numerous times so I can just skip repeating most elements. I’ll exclusively focus on things I noticed in the game and haven’t seen discussed anywhere else (although they probably were discussed too SOMEWHERE). It’s not like I keep track of that. Or do a search or ANYTHING really.
Back when I played it (of course one of the countless patches could have changed it since then), BG3 had a level cap. Of 12. Now I really wouldn’t claim that I did everything in this game, because I’m sure I haven’t. I didn’t ignore quests really, but I also didn’t try my hardest to find everything. But despite me not playing every quest in the game, I seriously reached max level ~50 hours before the game was done. I always thought this was a sign of… somewhat less than perfect balancing (that’s why I threw in the remark with the patches, I’d almost expect them to iterate on that), when players could reach max level with so much game left. Quests should just give less XP then etc…
I mean thankfully the game has more qualities and motivating factors than just leveling up, I’m not saying that, but it’s just weird and frustrating that your character is just done and can’t learn anything new anymore with a significant part of the adventure still ahead.
That kind of brings me right to the ending. BG3 seemed so elaborate in many parts and I’m a sucker for long elaborate endings, especially when it comes to games I’ve spent so much time in. The ending I got felt almost abrupt to me. Some of the characters barely gave more than an “k bye” before leaving forever. That’s weird after everything they went through (I played and finished all sidequests for all the companions). There was one brief scene/conversation with the romance option and then it was go ending credits go and that was the game. Of course I’ve definitely seen much worse endings, but it still felt like a little bit of a letdown, after playing this for ~150 hours.
While playing this, I caught myself numerous times thinking, that I’m happy about this game’s success, because it gives me hope there might be more (or any) D&D games in the future (as opposed to NONE). I’m first and foremost into this setting, I like and know all the places, people and whatnot and I missed it all. It’s so strange that it took “them” 20 years to do another game like this.
While I’m not one of the Larian fans, I still can only applaud this developer for just selling people a game and not have any micro-transaction bullshit or DLC insanity going on. Just buy this game once and then go play it. This mentality really isn’t something one can take for granted with major titles like this. So yeah, this game is in this weird space where its success is good for any RPG fan, because it might embolden devs with similar philosophies and could “inspire” others to do similar stuff. They were also smart doing EA the way they did. I bet CDP wishes they would have done the same with Cyberpunk and thus sidestepped so much needless drama.
btw: Why did they name it Baldur’s Gate 3 when the previous game was named Baldur’s Gate II? A subtle hint that this is from a different dev and maybe doesn’t have all that much to do with the previous games? It can’t be coincidence, right?
And I like it a lot so far. I’m surprised how hard it is. I don’t remember 2 being this tough. I’m only playing on normal and some fights I found almost unwinnable without losses at first. It’s definitely harder than XCOM 2, because there are no “superpowers”. The only thing so far I noticed that makes a huge difference, is if a weapon is fully modded. So collecting as many parts as possible plus a really good mechanic are a must. At some point I noticed that my age old tactic from JA2 is still solid: only fight at night. Slap those night vision googles on everyone and never fight during daytime. Unless the game forces this somehow.
The weather conditions are even more elaborate now, because there aren’t just day/night cycles. Fog, dust storms, rain… All those can be factors. The only thing that’s better than fighting at night, is fighting at night when there’s also some fog. :D
The only big thing I’m really missing, is the ability to just buy/order stuff on the laptop. Money now mostly serves as a means to pay the mercs and while there are some shops in some sectors, they are very rare and even then they only offer 3-4 static items, bad luck if there’s nothing amongst them, that is of interest to the player. I don’t understand this decision and can only make sense of it by thinking that this too was supposed to make the game harder. It takes quite some time to find good weapons and especially in the beginning it’s easy to run out of ammo.
Getting rid of burst modes is important without the means of just ordering more ammo, it can only be crafted in specific sectors. So a lot of the contract time for the mercs is just moving around to reach critical spots. It keeps the game really dynamic and there are more unexpected turns than there were in JA2. I’m far from finishing the campaign, but so far it seems a lot less straight forward and more complex. That’s really great.
Another improvement is, that there are way more side missions now. Pretty much every town has a character with a minor problem, or even a big one. Even enemy strongholds have optional sub-tasks, which make attacking them more interesting than simply running into the sector, the player can invest time in weakening them before the actual attack. Given how hard those fights can be, it makes a lot of sense to do all of those first. This is a situation in which the difficulty pays off. These outposts also have a real function in this world, they raise smaller squads and send them to attack the neighboring towns. So it even makes sense strategically to attack them, just to stop the threat they pose.
I’m maybe 25% through the campaign at this point, unless something unforeseen happens that prolongs it somehow and I’m happy to say that I didn’t really encounter any bugs. This game is really solid so far on my PC. There are obviously a ton of systems in this game and nothing would be less surprising if this was riddled with bugs, but it really isn’t. That’s just great.
The next new feature I haven’t mentioned yet is scouting, mercs can collect information about sectors that are close by and the gathered intel can be really valuable. They really thought about what would make sense in this situation and built the whole game around that. I’m really into it.
In the last decade or so, many movies/games etc. have had an almost excessive amount of references to older/previous stuff and I think the mentions of Arulco or the miracle drug made from the Metavira tree sap are appropriate (I just hope the Santiago woman is not a relative of the villain from JA1 :D). Oh and the menu screen shows the active squad, just like the XCOM 2 menu showed player created soldiers. That’s nice.
I just wanted to mention this game briefly, because it is too good to be ignored and I haven’t seen many people talk about it. Not that I would necessarily notice this and I haven’t been searching for fans of this game either, I just really hope this does well. There are not many games in this very specific niche, especially not at this level of polish. I’m definitely going to finish this.
So far in my game Biff died because I failed to find him in time. Sorry man! Too much stuff going on to just send the squad only after you. Many other tasks don’t seem to be time sensitive though. Really glad about that. :D The first mine was depleted really quickly, I hope not all mines deplete like this, if so, the whole game time is limited, of course, because all the mercs would leave without pay and this would make for a miserable end. In that case it could use an avatar timer, so the player is informed about this ticking clock. Wouldn’t be fun for me to be surprised by this.
So in conclusion, best tactics still are: only attacking at night, night vision googles, rooftops, prone (why don’t more games have this) and an extremely powerful and NEW attack type is setting up machine guns. They have a cone in front of them and the mercs just keep shooting as long as they have ammo. I have been in at least one situation that had so many enemies that this was the only thing I could do in order to survive. Throwing explosives and mortar strikes weren’t enough (not that one would have enough of those anyway). The inventory space is also quite restrictive (I’m constantly forced to throw things away or strip them down for parts), but this much isn’t new I think.
Really hoping I’m not the only one who likes this game, it really deserves as much attention as XCOM managed to gather. At least.
Oh yeah, the lines some mercs drop can be slightly annoying, but at least in my case it’s even less about what they are actually saying and more about the fact that they only have one catch phrase for every situation. So you’ll hear the same stuff A LOT. But I understand that voice acting is really expensive and whatnot and that they can’t give every merc hours of dialog. I can live with that. I probably should read this once more before posting, but I won’t. btw: it’s not just Biff who died in my game, also the guy from the station in the north was gone (probably dead) when I finally got there. Sorry! Also Basil got killed immediately (alongside his whole ranger team) by the army when I attacked to retake the village, there was no way in hell I could have gotten over there in time to save him. Now the whole sector has no characters left one could talk to. :D
As I say goodbye to the game, I also bid farewell to these links on my phone:
Persona 5 Royal – All 38 Crossword Puzzle Answers
They served me well.
It’s not a secret that I never really liked DAI, unnecessary open-world causing it being filled with too much crap, it almost played like a singleplayer MMO, too much cosmetic stuff without real impact on the game, early E3 prototype “promised” a very different game […] but then again, I had played DAII too many times over the years, so I thought why not give DAI another go for a change. After all this time a lot of mods are (still) available (I had never used) and there are several, that can deal with some of the worst aspects of this game. Frosty is even so buggy, it might be official EA software, if there weren’t workarounds for some of its flaws.
One of the things I hate in all games, is if the PC walks too slowly. Padding always sucks, but padding the gameplay by making the PC move like an 80 year old, is especially aggravating. So that’s where I started making this mess easier to stomach. ~50%f aster movement speed, war table operations complete instantly (this alone…), collections of minor bug fixes, more inventory space, improved that ping feature (love this one, the player can now see all the items stuck in walls or the floor, it’s incredible how often this is the case), new level cap of 50, rebalancing of all the combat skills, more levels for the Inquisition, new timing for the party banter so you actually get to hear most of it (who wants to miss one of the best features of the game), quicker looting without all the painfully slow animations – another absolute must…
Most of these are such important quality of life improvements, EA should just patch those in officially. Obviously they never would, but they really should.
So after all these changes, it’s so much easier to just focus on the good parts of this game and finally enjoy it, instead of screaming at the war table operations or the time suck that was picking up elfroot or whatever.
Frosty even accepted all the mods without any problems, that were intended for an older toolset, initially I thought this might be game over for these mods, but it wasn’t. Because it was possible to just focus on the content itself, I even finished all the mosaics for the first time since this game came out almost 10 years ago. The mere thought to attempt that, wouldn’t have come to me before.
Maybe I’ll check out the mods for Andromeda at some point, they also use Frosty.
Every time I write something about this, I really don’t want to, but it unfortunately keeps coming up. At times it almost feels as if they lost control of this service. Origin might have had a bad rep, but I never had these problems with it. Last Friday it just stopped showing any games and said “Your collection is empty” instead. At least they acknowledged this problem on Twitter.
After a while it started showing the games again, but even after their all clear on Twitter, some different problems stuck around for some time.
Since so far problems primarily affected older games, it’s fair to guess that this might have something to do with their new implementation of Origin being… flawed. They are not patching older games after all, but putting some Origin functionality into their new app, so the games don’t know they no longer run on Origin. It’s maybe sort of what a crack might do to circumvent DRM, except that they are only “cracking” it, so it will run with another EA DRM software instead. It’s a true shame that only Dragon Age: Origins is on GOG. That remains the only one of those games that is truly free of all this crap. And yes, it works flawlessly without all this baggage.
I already wrote about EA retiring Origin for the newer EA Desktop App months ago, but as it turns out, I really buried the lede there, because after switching to the EA app, I could no longer download Mass Effect 3. Especially From Ashes DLC and the Rebellion multiplayer DLC. This last part is especially relevant, because in order to play the multiplayer, all players have to have all the multiplayer DLC installed, or they won’t find each other. Furthermore, the multiplayer is now the only reason to have Mass Effect 3 installed, because that’s the only part not included in the Legendary Edition release.
After a couple of weeks and several sessions with the very nice and very unhelpful EA support, the EA app would download Mass Effect 3 again (although I don’t know if there is any direct connection to the download working again), but ever since then the EA app only says “Your game failed to launch” every single time I try to start Mass Effect 3. Cheered too soon it seems.
This persists for months now. I contacted EA support about this like 2 or 3 times during this period and I’m not looking forward to doing it again. At this point they always say that it is a known problem, that it has been escalated towards the dev team and that they are working on a fix and will update people about this on their EA support Twitter account. Quite frankly I’m wondering if this speech is just a method to get rid of people complaining about this.
I just got this checked by the team and I would like to inform you that this is a known issue and has already been reported to our team as many players around the world reported this issue to us and at this very moment we’re are trying to fix it. We are seeking for a little time window from your end so that we can make things right for all of you at the earliest. I cannot commit any time frame on behalf of my higher authorities else it would be a false commitment. Once we have any new update, we’ll let our players know through in game or through our social media channel here : https://twitter.com/EAHelp
At this point we have no further details about it since the issue is already under investigation by our team. Any new update about it will be shared by our social media team on above shared link.I really appreciate your patience while we are working to fix this issue for all our affected players. Glad I was able to share available information. Is there anything you need help with?
While threads discussing this issue are common and easy to find, it’s still hard to say how many people are actually affected by this. In any case, it’s sort of retiring the multiplayer, because it means an ever decreasing amount of people will be available there, even if they still would want to play. Now I gladly believe that this is just an unfortunate coincidence/byproduct, but even then, it leaves me with a game I bought on this service with all its DLC, that I now can’t even launch anymore, with no change in sight. While all other games in my EA account work without this issue, I’ll still think twice before ever buying anything on this store again. Nothing like this has ever happened to me on Steam, GOG, uplay, itch, Epic […].
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adrift 