Archive for the ‘screenshots’ Category
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.
First of, what were they thinking naming it like that? No one, who merely hears “Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy”, will instantly realize, that this addresses the 2021 game from Eidos Montréal. This right there might be a reason it didn’t hit their “sales expectations”. Tons of people are only going to think “I’ve already seen this movie” and move on.
In any case, I absolutely love this game. There are so many different things great about it, I will definitely not even mention most of them out of sheer laziness to write it all down. This might be the game with the most voice acting ever. They never shut up. This right there might be annoying to me in most other circumstances, but miracle number one, it really isn’t here. The vast majority of what they do seems to be true to the characters and what more can you ask for? They also look so freaking amazing. I’m not even a Guardians fan, so I don’t know how they look in the comics, but what Eidos Montréal pulled off here is simply amazing.
Another thing I’m really super into here, is how this isn’t some needless open-world bullshit. They hand-crafted individual missions and worlds, that are all distinct and offer unique scenarios. It sometimes feels as if such games are of a dying breed. Which they really shouldn’t be, given how even good games like Horizon Zero Dawn are filled with needless trash, due to being dragged down by their open-world design.
What makes this game feel so good is how the player isn’t just put on a journey, but how successful this journey is portrayed. In the beginning the Guardians are fighting together more out of necessity and it’s actually noticeable throughout the game, how this gradually shifts more and more towards them becoming an actual team. The game expresses this on many levels. Of course there is also just the player becoming better and better at learning all the different abilities and using the right ones for the right occasions, but there’s also this mixture of choosing which new abilities to unlock first and some unlocking through story progress – then things shift between the characters through story and player choices. For the final fight Rocket even comes up with matching outfits for the group, because they think it will look cool. :D It just feels earned and fleshed out and all the various stages of them becoming a better team are noticeably all the way throughout the game. I don’t know of many examples which execute this so well. In so many other titles the story just declares the characters friends at some point and that’s that. It’s really not something I expected to find in something that could have been nothing but some dumb Marvel license game. This is in the vein of Batman Arkham, the best type of licensed (superhero) games.
They even wrote Groot in such a smart way, that at some points throughout the game you’ll actually get what he’s trying to express. This is so great and fun.
I’m a huge Mass Effect fan, another game that’s really focused on its characters as its main selling point and Guardians feels like an improvement on team dynamics in several regards. I get it, it’s probably easier here, because they are “just” 5 people, but I wish they would steal an idea or two from this game.
Maybe least surprising for a Guardians game, is that the soundtrack consists out of a ton of really strong 1980s hits, which are so numerous, that they really don’t repeat much. They even do something interesting with the music. During most fights the team can earn a sort of power up, they can huddle up like a sports team and if Peter Quill manages to give the right motivational speech, they’ll be more motivated and fight better, while Peter’s music blasts during the fight. It’s possible to fail here and then only Peter will be buffed.
But besides all the action and not, miracle number two definitely was for me, that there are some emotional beats that almost come over as profound. Another thing I’d never have expected. It’s also never easy to goof around and then get serious/sad all of a sudden. This game got this done.
One thing they never fixed for this game, is that it shows PlayStation prompts while playing with an XBOX controller. It makes the learning curve a little bit steeper and really confused me at first. I have the Steam version and selecting XBOX as controller did nothing for me. I got used to it eventually. Another thing that made me fear I was stuck somehow, happened when using the Nova Corps computer (that has all these audio and video files on it along the personal files), it just won’t display the button to leave, but it works fine if the player just presses Y. The game got several patches, so it’s weird they didn’t address such prominent problems, but whatever.
I’m really glad this game has a New Game+, because for once I might actually have some serious use for it. :)
PS: I made all the screenshots on my own aging PC, with most effects set to low. Clearly didn’t have an impact on my fun, but people are different.
PPS: I can’t believe I forgot to mention this, but you can actually fly the ship in this game. Which is awesome and obviously could be a game all on its own. Another thing Mass Effect really would have benefited from.
This game turned out to be pretty much exactly what I expected. I never expected to like it as much as Witcher 3, because I played those games since 2007 and I read all 8 books twice. Cyberpunk on the other hand is based on a 1988 tabletop RPG that I never even played once. The name of the game is even just the term of the genre, right there it seems so much more generic. It never stood a chance of having the same impact on me. So, in this regard, there were no expectations that could have been let down. What I’m really into in general however, is CDPR’s approach to characters, quests, stories and world-building. They are extremely good at all these things, I happen to enjoy the most in such games.
That’s why I like Cyberpunk 2077 as well, because they mostly managed to pull that off again. The major characters of this game live in this world, they have homes and stuff they are spending their time with – they don’t just pop in the game for the sake of a single quest and vanish, never to be seen again. This might be even more elaborate here, since characters can just call and text you and vice versa (to a degree of course). But again, it comes with the same caveat that they can’t fully compete with Witcher 3, because characters in that game make it seem, as if the player is reconnecting with old friends at this point. Judy and Panam are great (sorry, almost forgot to mention Kerry and Takemura), well-made characters, but they can’t compete with the likes of Yennefer and Ciri. The amount of lore and world-building these characters are surrounded by, aren’t heights Cyberpunk reaches, just as expected.
Because I’m one of these weirdos who are looking for the above, CP didn’t even need to have such a massive world. Night City is so big, that without the map, I’d be lost. Especially in the beginning. In fact, for their next game, they should probably take a long hard look at this approach and just make the world 50% smaller. Then they might get a handle on things again and hopefully have fewer bugs. The world isn’t even that impressive. I never stumbled upon something I was glad to discover. As with most open-world games, it just takes longer to get anywhere, outside of fast travel. It (again) also lacks this sense The Witcher 3 has. When I was standing anywhere in Velen, I essentially knew how far I was away from Novigrad and in which direction I would have to go. The various parts of Night City mainly differ in having different gangs active in them. If they wanted to make this world feel more alive and real (and make exploring it feel more worthwhile), they still would have to patch that in.
Having this game (world) have half this size, also would have helped with releasing it in a much more polished state. If this was a BioWare game for instance, it would be a complete train wreck, because this EA division doesn’t really improve their games much after release. What you see is what you get. At least with CDPR, players know they are going to patch this thing until it’s going to be in a state, it should have been in from the start. I guess their investors were loosing faith and demanded they release it immediately and not delay it again. In March 2021 they’ll most likely have a version of this game out, that won’t even resemble the glitch town it still is right now.
Now, as far as I know the real intense bugs are mostly in the console versions, I’m playing PC/GOG and this version has crashed once in 60+ hours playtime. I also never encountered any game-breaking bugs, like broken quests and the like (although many other players have). That’s why I’m quite positive on the game regardless. I hate those bugs the most. A floating coffee cup doesn’t destroy an otherwise great quest for me. I also encountered, only once, a car (not mine) that kind of sank into the street while it drove by. The mirror is bugged, my character is shown bald, while having hair and a helmet on. Almost all the most noticeable bugs are visual glitches like that. The messages had a slot that was just blank, no idea if the field shouldn’t have been there, or if I missed a text because of this. After patch 1.05 I suddenly could no longer upgrade the gun Skippy. So the situation over at CDPR must be so dire and chaotic right now, that they aren’t just fixing bugs, but also adding in new ones.
The most extreme one I encountered, was during a quest in a club called “riot”, a huge crowd of people was supposed to dance to music a DJ was playing. But most people just stood there without having the proper routine and the whole club was silent. It’s literally a place they “forgot” to finish. They didn’t put all the assets in, I guess. Completing the quest there was no problem, however.
So yeah, released 3 months too soon. Only other way would have been to make it smaller. I’m going to keep playing regardless. I know already that this won’t be the only time I’ll play it and I’m actually into playing a well patched game again, after already knowing the rougher release version of it. The same seems to be true for several games right now. I really like Wasteland 3 and had lots of fun with it, but they still managed to release an 11 GB patch today, whose release notes were like 12 pages long.
When it comes to gameplay, what’s almost worse than all those visual glitches, are interface implementations like crafting. Crafting ammo for pistols, for example, requires to hold the mouse button down for a while for each clip. It’s not possible to just have it craft ammo until it’s full. It takes really long and on top of that, it doesn’t even say when the max value is reached. For that it’s necessary to check another screen. I really hope they will change that logic into something, that just says “craft until full”. Or allows to choose how much stuff should be crafted at once. The inventory wasn’t necessarily their strong suit in Witcher 3 either and that definitely hasn’t changed. The release version of Witcher 3 had a different inventory as well, they changed that a lot over time. They began with that in Witcher 1, come to think of it. :D
V is also certainly no Geralt, which is probably why Keanu Reeves is in this game. And I’m not even trying to say that V is a bad character or anything, just that V isn’t nearly as established and iconic as Geralt. That’s no problem to me, but I think that’s why they put Keanu Reeves in there on top of it, just to compensate. Everyone likes him and he’s obviously a very good fit for this genre. He did a surprising amount of voice work for this game. Even small sidequests (many players will probably ignore), often have Johnny drop in to make some remarks.
One of the more interesting gameplay aspects of CP are the so called braindances. They remind me a lot of Remember Me actually (it has a similar mechanic of being able to rewind memories). I wish they would have done more with that. The game started out strong with those and then never used them again – in my playthrough. The same is true for some very interesting story bits about AIs in this world. Just as this creeps in, it’s over again. It’s just back to fighting mundane gangs again. I wish this would have been different. Obviously I can’t say if this is different for other life paths, since I’ve played only one so far, but I highly doubt it.
The game has a “definitive end”, which surprised me – most of these open world games come up with some excuse (if needed), why the player just remains in this world, after the main story is done. CP reverts to the last position before starting the final mission – like Mass Effect 3 does it. This probably means all future DLC will then also take place before this endgame. I only have seen one ending so far, but they probably are too diverse, to allow DLC after it. Given that the main story is about V being close to death (and needs to resolve this as soon as possible), this… isn’t exactly helping immersion.
The only cyberware that visually changes V, was the gorilla arms I got (and I ended up having cyberware in ALL available slots…). Every other alteration is invisible. It too feels like something they just didn’t finish. Why would cyberarms be visible, but not cyberlegs? But then again, the player can’t even change V’s hair. Don’t know if that’s an upcoming DLC, like it was in W2 and 3.
Another thing they didn’t improve since W3, is the loot. So much stuff is constantly dumped on the player, that I’m just trashing everything outright, that isn’t legendary (the highest tier). The only really noteworthy item I ever found, besides Johnny’s gear, was Skippy.
It also wouldn’t be a CDPR game, if it didn’t have countless references to other stuff, here are just a few incomplete examples:
Okay, enough of these references. Obviously this is an ongoing drama, so in the meantime I will keep asking myself, why – despite the obvious appeal of SOME cyberware – anyone would do this to themselves (and yes I read the lore on Lizzy, I’m wondering in general):
I finished W3 after almost 65 hours (I did all the quests available in my playthrough) and I’m impressed. The level of quality was raised significantly over W2. They postponed the release of this game and it really shows. I didn’t encounter a single broken quest or serious showstopper. W2’s initial release was kind of a clusterfuck – in comparison. It really needed those patches. Thankfully these games come from a dev who bothers to make them.
I like the other improvements to the formula as well. Some are seemingly little things, but they pay off big time anyway. It’s like saving 10 seconds during a task, which doesn’t sound like much, but if it’s a task someone has to do all the time it adds up quickly. Choosing to pick a lock has the ranger with the highest skill do it. Automatically. Such a relief.
W3 on the other hand, I can count everything glitchy on one hand easily. I gave my demolitions ranger the perk to walk over mines without triggering them and that had no effect whatsoever. It also happened twice during these 65 hours, that the game was loading endlessly. It was never going to finish, I had to kill the task and restart the game. The final area that leads to the confrontation with the patriarchs daughter, had an unreachable crate next to a fence. If this was supposed to be a joke or something, I didn’t get it.
The inventory doesn’t have a filter for the utilities, so the player has to fight their way through ALL items in order to find them. That’s probably the most inconvenient aspect of the entire game. 😁
I’m sure they are still going to find more than enough to fix/improve, but for the initial release of such a complex game this is IMHO one of the best launches in recent years. I’d see the most likely area to “quality of life” this game, in areas of rebalancing. There are a ton of weapons in this game and lots of them don’t make much damage. I especially noticed, how some weapons demand skill level 10 (max level possible), while others with level 7 or 8 do much more damage. That doesn’t sound right to me.
The only weapon in the game (I know of, of course), which does some serious damage, is the jackhammer (yes, the same gun that was in Max Payne). In most use cases this shotgun does more damage than rocket launchers… And it uses only 3 action points, while heavy weapons need 7 per shot. Only drawback is, the ranger has to get in relatively close, of course. It’s really unsatisfying to have a heavy weapon like a minigun equipped, shoot someone in the face with it for 7 AP and do barely any damage and then kill 3 people with the jackhammer, because they were in the cone of its ammo for 3 AP. Shotgun shells are also available everywhere (think looting) and among the cheaper ammo.
The second best choice of weapon were SMGs. There’s one named ripper, which was also quite strong. Even the highest tier assault rifle was quite the disappointment in comparison. btw: There is a gun from Gears of War in this game and its like shooting with a water pistol, despite being level 10.
The best skills to have and get to 10 as soon as possible are probably lockpicking and nerd stuff (or nerd stuff to 9 and equip a +1 item, lockpicking didn’t have one AFAIK), in that order. None of my rangers had animal whisperer (seriously no skill points for it left) and nothing bad ever happened to me as a result. I know that there is of course content in this game I couldn’t experience because of it (there are animals everywhere), but it’s very different than having hostages in a room (during a main quest) and being unable to access it, because lockpicking is too low. This blows up in your face quick.
There were actually situations in which I didn’t know how else to deal with them. A final boss was behind a lockpicking 10 door and that was the only way inside I could find. Okay, it’s possible to shoot at some of the doors until they are destroyed, but still.
I gave all my 4 main rangers the cybernetic upgrade and then never used it. The regular utilities seem better overall and the cybernetics don’t get an extra slot, so…
I was really into everything else I haven’t mentioned yet. Story, characters, music, setting, quests, overall design, reactivity…
W2 had more ending slides I think, but IIRC they added more in patches at some point. And they didn’t have this elaborate song system at the end. That must make it so much harder to account for “everything”.
The only good “friendlies” (AI controlled “companions” besides the actual rangers) I found where Party Pal and the toaster (loved it that they made this skill pay off big time). Major Tom died early in my game and I didn’t even notice when it happened. I just noticed after a while that he was gone. Later I bought Polly for $150 and this bird died literally 3 minutes after the purchase in the very first fight with her… This gameplay mechanic feels weird somehow. Are they supposed to die right away, so I’ll feel bad about it?
It’s not very realistic to keep such low HP companions alive for very long. I played on the second difficulty “Wastelander” (I think) and my people got downed a lot. This was mostly because of the already mentioned weak weapons. It’s hard to dominate a fight, if headshots give enemies 2% damage while they can just run at you and down a ranger with a single hit. Maybe I should have done a melee ranger? But even then, guns shouldn’t be so much weaker than melee weapons or the brawling skill.
They did a very good job of setting this world up, in terms of deciding which faction should be supported. Not only that, they really made me “suffer” through the consequences in the end. I “hated” what happened during my final fights and I felt terrible having to play through this. There were a lot of people I had to fight, because they didn’t agree with my decisions, people whom I didn’t want to fight at all, but it just happened to be the outcome of my playthrough. It all made sense, that a lot of people wouldn’t just support this. The whole time I was asking myself if it was really worth it. I guess I’m going to find out, when I play it again and handle things differently.
Almost 6 weeks ago or so, Firaxis released a first (and so far only) patch for Chimera Squad. At the same time they patched a new launcher into all their games. What a wonderful idea from management. While the patch for Chimera Squad actually helped and removed some of its bugs, the new launcher for XCOM 2 introduced at least one new bug the game didn’t have before: mods no longer worked out of the box.
Given that mods are/were THE major selling point of XCOM 2 and few of their devs could shut up about how much they cared about mods and wanted people to make and use them, it’s especially breathtaking, that this, of all things, is the function they didn’t even test once.
Now there is a workaround, to get mods working after all, but this changes little how astonishing it is, that they apparently have no QA. Firaxis even found out about it on like the same day, which probably wasn’t very hard, with thousands of players talking about that and released their, so far, sole reaction to it.
A single tweet, which they only posted to their Firaxis account and not, for instance, on their offical XCOM account. Because why would you communicate something on the XCOM account, that is about XCOM. Now, this was, again, over 5 weeks ago and so far there is no official fix, nor any further reaction. This must be some bugged launcher, that they can’t fix it in all this time.
The problem isn’t even that they can’t present a patch in record time – that I’d understand, but going completely silent on it, is just poor handling of the situation. It’s not that hard to explain the situation, they could even lie their asses off, after all. Pretty much anyone should be able to handle this significantly better.
They even could have restored the old launcher and only could have rolled out the new one, once it was working properly. Should have taken zero time on steamworks. Then people wouldn’t have been stuck with a broken launcher all this time. Every other topic on the Steam forums is now about this issue.
These screenshots are of the patched CS version and no one has to look long and hard to run into some more bugs. And by now I’m not holding my breath that they will fix anything else. Great games, poor management.
I really like playing this game a lot. Gotta be honest. The only big negative thing here, that bums me out hard, is the state of this beta. And it’s really hard to go easy on them, because pretty much all the bigger problems/flaws are in this engine since the release of XCOM 2 in February 2016 – which obviously was, at this point, over 4 years ago. I don’t see why this dev should be forgiven for not fixing all this during this time. Players probably wouldn’t forgive a small indie dev for this either. And XCOM sells as far as I know.
Just releasing the next game, with the same engine, without fixing age old glitches – it’s just poor. The only upside here is, that this time they only charged ~9 instead of ~60, so players can only be 1/6 as mad. Something like that. Although I noticed that they are using Google Analytics in this one, so… once more people are paying to do market research for a company.
Axiom floats over the ground, Cherub gets stuck (reloading a save usually helps) and even the camera can bug out so hard, that the game becomes almost unplayable. Too bad they can’t afford proper QA. All of this comes accompanied by more glitches, which just underline the general lack of polish.
In this screenshot, it’s not possible to enter part of the room, which makes it impossible to complete the mission. It’s apparently similar to Cherub being stuck, reloading is a workaround.
They don’t even have the same fonts for numbers in the GUI (check out 4 and 5 in the training bar on the right). All of this stuff are clear signs of a game they rushed out. Or maybe not, since every XCOM release had many bugs. Maybe it’s just their management, their way of doing things. XCOM 2 has more than enough bugs that were never addressed (too many of them seem like fixing them wouldn’t take all that much effort).
Hell, even XCOM: Enemy Unknown still has them and that was released 2012. Several of the “mods” I have installed for XCOM 2, primarily aim at circumventing bugs in the game, so it’s hardly impossible to fix anything, if even modders can do something about it. I’d really like it for a journalist to just ask them, why they have such a poor patch/support policy for this brand/entire franchise. Players everywhere spend a lot of time with those games and therefore experience all these bugs again and again and again.
The breach mechanic, which seems to be inspired by Phantom Doctrine, is fun and can surprise even robots. That’s how effective it is!
Anyways, almost everything in this XCOM is scaled down somehow and I’m into it. I generally like it when things aren’t desperate to appear epic. This time everything takes place inside one city, instead of the entire globe. Chimera Squad itself is more of a police unit than an army. I enjoy every break I can get from saving the world AGAIN.
There are also a lot of things about the very design of Chimera Squad, which I do not understand at all. When it was first announced, that agents (what units are called in this game) could not die, because it would equal a mission failure, I thought this would mean that there would be story missions, which would require certain agents to complete them. That is not the case.
There are even androids available, which can replace unconscious agents. So even if agents could die and a player would get all of them killed, they still could buy androids, just like new soldiers can be recruited in a “regular” XCOM.
So why is this game still designed this way? It feels like they had other plans initially, that were scrapped at some point and they kept some of the design decisions, which now no longer make any sense. It’s like the flashlights on weapons in XCOM 2 feel like relics, from a time when this might have been intended to be of actual use in missions.
The new characters are weird in general. What was the point? They aren’t even as fleshed out as Jagged Alliance 2 characters, let alone as “deep” as folks from Valkyria Chronicles 1 or 4. They also have this rushed feel about them. All aliens have normal human voices. As if it was out of the question to put that much effort into them. I don’t even want Torque to sound “like a snake” (which can be bad/embarrassing all on its own) but hearing her having a normal voice like any other human female, is still something I never would have expected. All the voice work itself is good though and my favorites are obviously Pallegina and Mordin.
The only explanation I can come up with, for what they have done here, is that they wanted playable units with more variations in their abilities, than their typical classes can deliver, so they decided to circumvent this problem by making them “individual characters”. There is really no other mileage they are getting out of their characters besides that. Everything else would have worked with their typical, randomly generated soldiers.
There is some banter between the agents, but it is so superficial and short, that it hardly qualifies as actual story etc. – it’s fluff. Now I’m not one of those people who hate the characters, or anything like that, but there’s barely anything here. So if I was to dislike anything in this regard, it’s only that this aspect isn’t more detailed. They could have fully embraced it. And maybe should have.
I like the general art style, they definitely did try to make the individual rooms look good, which I appreciated and I like this type of cut scene. Maybe those are cheaper/quicker to make, but I’m into this type of art, so it’s not a negative for me.
I really want to play the game again, ideally after a patch came out, but I’m not holding my breath, that they are now suddenly starting to fix over 4 year old bugs in this engine. Maybe they will address the toughest stuff a bit, like vanishing equipment (there is already a mod out trying to fix that), but then they are probably going to drop any patch support quick, like they did for XCOM 2.
The timeline should be mentioned as well, while I’m at it. I honestly can’t tell if it’s better or worse. Instead of ideally killing an entire pod before ending a turn in XCOM 2, it’s now about killing the first enemy in the timeline who would get a turn. It’s definitely forcing players to re-learn XCOM a little bit, which is a good thing? A breath of fresh air? Something like that. I’ve played CS from start to finish without doing any manual saves (it saves automatically during missions). While I save after every turn in X2.
So together with breach, these two things are definitely the biggest differences between X2 and CS. Not “characters” instead of randos or city instead of globe. That much is hardly affecting gameplay. I also didn’t miss not having to look for enemies and didn’t care much that they took out the whole pod/stealth mechanic. Which isn’t surprising, given how often I played X2. Only being thrown from small room to small room in a lightning fast fashion has it’s own drawbacks, of course.
PS: I think it’s weird how wounds are called scars and not wounds. And instead of healing these wounds, people have to undergo “training”, to get rid of them. Looking at wounds also lists them as something the agents “earned”. All of that sounds wrong and inappropriate to me. I’d expect people to react “Dammit, I got wounded” and not “Yay! I earned a scar!!!”. That’s insanity.
Another odd design choice I forgot to mention earlier, is that some missions give you +x days towards the reveal of a major story mission. And it is named “a reward”. But how could something be a reward, which is so bad for me? It’s like they don’t know what words mean. Since everything in XCOM: Chimera Squad at least “costs” time, I want/need as much of it as possible. The earlier a major mission drops, the worse the weapons/armor and everything else will be. Obviously the only correct strategy here is, to DELAY any such story mission for as long as possible, so research has a greater chance of providing the best weapons and equipment possible. That goes without saying, right?!? All of that stuff is so odd!
A couple months back I played PD, so I wouldn’t just play XCOM all day long. It has a couple of cool gameplay tricks up its sleeve, like breach and next week XCOM: Chimera Squad comes out and it has a new option called breach, so it seems like a good point in time to discuss Phantom Doctrine. 😛
Instead of commanding soldiers to fight aliens, PD has the player command agents to mostly infiltrate hostile sites to gather intel. Its setting is the cold war. While it’s only consequent, to have the missions in a spy game focus on stealth, this still bummed me out somewhat. It makes every mission really long and slow and I liked the fights XCOM 2 WotC has to offer. It’s possible to fight in PD as well, but blowing ones cover is almost the same as failing a mission.
The enemy will keep calling in endless reinforcements, who will usually crush the agents on site. So there isn’t really an alternative to complete stealth. This also leads to a full campaign being really long. I wish there would have been more opportunities to use all the guns that are in the game. But playing PD is really about knocking hostiles out and hiding their bodies. I guess the real maestro will even circumvent enemies entirely. That’s something I don’t like doing, since even civilians in the area can blow an agents cover, if they are spotted doing anything suspicious. It’s so vexing, if the cover is blown at the last moment during evac, because an agent was seen carrying a body.
There is also a lot less variation in missions, which further adds to the grindy feeling. PD’s world map throws a lot of routine missions at the player. Not doing them isn’t an option, because this will raise the threat level, which forces this agency to move the base, which eats up a lot of resources. Moving the base costs almost as much money as the agency earns in total, so… It feels like hell. 😛
What’s really good about it, is that it runs really well, I don’t think I encountered a single bug during my 68 hours with this game. This is incredible. It’s also superfast. After release, XCOM 2 was sometimes lagging so hard, as if the PC was trying to run it at 8K resolution. Not PD, this game is super-smooth at all times.
I also liked the idea of creating this main agent at the beginning, like it’s an RPG. My favorite game mechanic probably was breach, it becomes available if enough agents are positioned at doors/windows around a room. If triggered, all positioned agents run into a room and start shooting. This is one of the few instances in which the player can use guns without getting into trouble, as long as all guns have silencers on them, which should be taken care of as early as possible in the game. It’s game-changing.
Another part of the gameplay, that I liked much more than I should have, is this minigame of connecting all the clues until a case is solved. It’s possible to order agents to do this automatically, but it takes so much longer than just doing it manually.
The reason why I like this less than XCOM is really the heavy reliance on countless stealth missions (I guess I don’t like every type of stealth game there is), which could have been very cool in moderation, but is done to death here. I stuck with it to at least experience the story once, but when the ending screen unfortunately informed me, that I have to play it through once more, to really experience the full story, I had to give it a hard pass. 😛 Maybe one day!
Once upon a time these games were nothing but “dumb” shooters, sure – they could be fun, but there was little else to them. Maybe that’s why WII feels like such a big spectacle to me. Some people say the first one was better and that could be the case, not sure, but it changes little.
WII still represents the current pinnacle of this genre. The entire gunplay is really satisfying and BJ has more depth as a character than anyone would ever expect from a game like this. His body is broken in the beginning of the game and in his inner monologue he is asking himself, how long he still might have and how to make the most of it. Damn. They even got Varric Tethras/John “shut up already” Bradford to voice him. None of that would have been done during the “good old days”.
Together with Doom 2016, these 2 Wolfenstein games probably represent the most outstanding FPS games in the last decade. I mean I was also totally into BioShock Infinite and all that jazz, but I would almost describe this as another genre, since BSI seriously is about the story/atmosphere first. Much more so than WII, which (like I said) offers more in this regard than these games ever have, but true to its origins is still about the action first anyway.
WII is partially so elaborate actually, that it’s almost a shame they couldn’t explore some of those elements more. The resistance has a submarine for an HQ and a lot of unusual characters hang around on it. They even created unique lines for many of those people, but… that’s it. It’s somehow odd to me, that the dev would create such a huge hub, filled with numerous (it’s definitely over 20 unique characters on there) people, but they serve no other function. They aren’t generic figures either. Some of them are really memorable. But, with few exceptions, there aren’t really missions with them and I can only remember 3 mini-sidequests on the sub.
Lots of RPGs don’t put as much effort in their quest givers, so I just have to ask myself, if it was always their plan, to create so many unique characters for no real purpose whatsoever. Or if they had to cut a lot of ideas because, as always, those damn games have to be shipped at some point. Is there some sort of postmortem for this game?
Since I don’t know the lyrics to purple rain, singing Kathy Rain to the music instead, is a perfect fit! Anyways, I really liked playing Gabriel Knight uhm… I mean Kathy Rain. But I must say I was really surprised Jane Jensen wasn’t prominently featured in a special thanks section during the credits, like George Lucas is in anything Star Wars. I was patiently waiting for it.
– Kathy drives around with a motorcycle like GK (named after Corley Motors from Full Throttle I presume)
– she visits her grandmas house, which holds secrets from grandpa to discover in the attic
– there’s the police station with the grumpy cops
– the city she’s in has a lake reminiscent of Lake Pontchartrain
– she has a quirky sidekick who helps her out and gets in danger during the adventure but can be saved
– the game is structured in separate days (is there anything more GK than this?)
– KR dreams every night about something tied to the case she’s working on
– KR visits a cemetery with a crypt that has the near identical looking graves to the ones in the GK Gedde tomb
– conversations have this list of words which can be used with every character
– there’s this church in town which is also tied to the case
– tape recorder
I could go on but I guess I made my point. I guess the game works anyway because KR is likable (good voice acting too) and I haven’t played GK in quite a while. :D
The only part that really let me down a bit is the ending. IMHO too much wasn’t explained and several characters just vanished from the game. Some people who seemed important to the story were gone all of a sudden and it really looked like they too needed some closure. It’s a game, so maybe they ran out of production time at the end? Who knows, it sure looks like it.
I know it’s probably just a line they dropped in case it actually happens, but someone says a sentence with “first case” at some point and I really hope this gets a sequel. GK made it to 3 games too, after all. :P
I was warned about a million times before even downloading this game, that it ends abruptly and doesn’t resolve everything. With that in mind I was prepared for the worst and was almost pleasantly surprised by the ending. While there is definitely stuff left that could be explored in a sequel, I’ve seen supposedly finished games, which did a much worse job in wrapping everything up (too many don’t even try). At least this gave me a good sense what had happened and an explanation for the whole scenario was offered. How satisfying anyone would find this is surely subjective, but at least something’s there. :D
All the various parts of the game, speaking of art, music and voice-acting, are actually quite well done. What stuck out to me, is how Michael (the PC) talks a lot about every item that can be looked at. Usually this is one sentence max. Maybe this doesn’t sound like much, but I can’t name a second adventure right now, which does this.
Anyway, it took me ~7 hours to finish this and I don’t regret playing it. As far as I know there definitely won’t be a sequel [1], but for once the lack of a more elaborate conclusion doesn’t bother me much. I’m glad I played this and given how well done this game ultimately still is, I’m surprised it sold this poorly. I guess the adventure game niche is so small, that it’s especially easy for games to die there.
[1] According to Carsten Fichtelmann of Daedalic Entertainment, Dead Synchronicity was a commercial flop. He said in 2016, “Unfortunately it did not sell well, only a few thousand units, so we had to say to the developers that we cannot put money in a second game, because we lost money with its first par
I’m usually not into “visual novels” – nothing but text and pictures doesn’t do it for me. I’d rather just outright read a book, at least I won’t need a PC for that. Luckily, TD is better than that. Besides an interesting story, it has just enough gameplay to make it interesting. It’s positioned between a VN and a full blown adventure, a niche not many games exist in. I very vaguely remember this being on Kickstarter, but I had the good fortune to not play this until now. Not saying it wasn’t, but it’s perfectly smooth now.
I like the SPIN system (stats for the player character which change based upon gameplay decisions) and the more interactive environment (compared to a typical VN). Since I was kinda hooked on this, I finished it in 2 sessions which took about 8 hours total. At the end it unlocked a “new game+”, which makes sense here, given how many different endings this game has, but I find it difficult to “repeat” a game I just finished. While I like replaying good games very much, I usually wait (at least) several months before doing that. So I’m not sure if I’m going to make use of this option here.
Certainly there is more to say here, but in a story centric game everything is a spoiler. And I knew nothing about this game when I started it and I enjoyed that a lot. Maybe I should play the game again, just to learn what else might happen to the detective…
It better be, because now that the entire Klingon Empire knows you tried to trick it, they’ll definitely try to kill you. :P
Just imagine how stupid it would have been, if Jon Snow would have fought and killed the Night King in Season 2 of Game of Thrones, kind of still in the beginning of the show. And then in the next Season, they would have done… what? The reason Game of Thrones used to be so satisfying to watch, is that they took years to build everything up and then tried to pay most of it off. For both characters and the story.
STD is nothing like that. They already had the ultimate threat right away, the death of everyone everywhere in the galaxy was at stake. So either they have the same basic premise in every Season from now on, or… At this point I wouldn’t even be surprised if they blew up a planet each episode, or something equally idiotic. They do treat this as a Star Wars show after all. A scene in Game of Thrones with nothing but 2 characters talking is a thousand times more interesting to watch.
btw: Remember how Season 1 of STD was darker (in the ship), because Lorca supposedly had this eye condition (although the real explanation was, of course, that he came from the mirror universe) and they dimmed the light to help him cope? And then in the second Season of STD, long after Lorca was dead, they still had the same dark lighting anyway? :D
The maybe saddest part of it all is, that I’m not even trying to point everything out that’s “wrong” with it. My entries would have to be much much longer to cover all that and I’m way too lazy to do any of that. No, this is the stuff that remains after already overlooking a lot. I also don’t make any notes while watching this. And I watch it once.
Now that the second Season is over, I’m sad to say that Season 2 was much worse than the first one. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Season 1 either, but if anything, Star Trek has somewhat trained me to expect first Seasons to be “terrible”, so it didn’t bother me much. Lots of shows have to find their footing first. STD however, didn’t improve at all and rather doubled down on most of its worst elements.
Was it original to bring the mirror universe back in Season 1? No, but at least those episodes were kinda fun. Season 2 however, was dedicated to “Control”, one of the worst villains ever. Despite having over 50 ships, Control never built more than one single body. Why not convert all the Section 31 personnel into parts of itself? Discovery tried to hide the database in the future… Why didn’t Control just go dormant and wait for… the future? Why didn’t Discovery try to hide it in the past, where it was actually unreachable without more time travel?
Control was sometimes fighting really well and other times it was barely keeping up with the Emperor, who is a completely normal person. STD never established what Control was capable of and what its limitations were. After watching the whole Season, I can only say they had to do it this way, since they changed Control from episode to episode, to whatever they needed at that point. This is a horrible way of setting up a story and a character. Other writers did a much better job 30 years ago with the Terminator. Everyone in the audience knew what this thing was capable of specifically.
All of this doesn’t even cover one of the most important parts of any character: Motivation. What was Control’s motivation to end all life everywhere? Why did it do anything really. Even after watching the whole season, I have no idea. At one point they said Control tried to become sentient (by gaining access to the data), but it clearly already was. It was evil without a cause. The Season just needed a villain and Control was the best they could do…
Characters really aren’t their strong suit. This is especially deadly here, because they completely said goodbye to the mystery of the week format, earlier Trek shows had. If drama between characters is supposed to completely replace such stories, it obviously becomes all the more important, to have good characters. But they just aren’t. Even Burnham, as the sole central character of this show doesn’t have much to offer. What are her characteristics, besides Spock, Sarek and Vulcan? I always thought it was a detriment to her character, that the STD writers felt she needed this “bump”. Kirk wasn’t anybodys relative. Nor was Sisko. They didn’t need to be.
Burnham was acting like a Vulcan in the beginning and now is hyper-emotional. Couldn’t they have done something in between? If the whole show is just about one single character really, shouldn’t then at least this character be especially likable?
Their inability to develop good characters led to their “tell, don’t show” approach throughout the series. They never show the audience why a character is likable or cool or anything. They tell. We need the audience to cry? No problem, we just tell the audience they have to like this random extra now… In the same episode we kill them of course. The audience will never catch on to that! How elegant and crafty we are!
Routinely swapping Captains every Season is yet another symptom here. Now obviously characters can die or move on somehow, but having it happen like this every Season, is the farthest from it feeling “organic”. The audience knows its coming and it’s just this thing they do, it’s not happening because of any cool explanation that makes sense within the story.
Maybe this second Season is what I needed to finally let go and not return for Season 3. At this point this is what STD is all about. Maybe the Picard series will be better, if they get different producers and writers. I hope it will be good, I’d really like to watch a Star Trek show again.
PS: The Orville actually bothered to give their evil killer robots/AI a backstory/motivation. The Kaylon were essentially a slave race to their creators and as a result were treated poorly. So they thought striking against organics was essentially self-defense. It’s not deep nor original either, but at least it makes sense and it works, it’s clearly better than STD’s “I’m an AI and therefore evil”.
Playing QB was a little bit of a “weird” experience. It reminded me of games from the 1990s, since FMV (with choices) isn’t usually something that current games still offer. And then there’s this thing that this is so clearly a Remedy game. During the ending Jack Joyce whispers to Beth “I’ll come back for you” and obviously I immediately yelled “No you won’t”. :D Because that’s just the thing they’ll never do. Whether it’s Max Payne (remember the “secret” ending in which Mona Sax lives? :D), Alan Wake (remember how this never had any explanation and just ended?) or Quantum Break (remember how their next game Control has nothing to do with QB?), they’ll never get back to it and never offer any kind of resolution/payoff. :P I understand that they got Beth’ actress back for Control, but that’s something else entirely.
Mentioning Beth, she was clearly the best character in the game, right? I only think so, because I read her diary. Come to think of it, it probably wasn’t the best choice to put one of the best story bits of the game inside an optional book most players won’t bother to read. This should have been a playable part of the game. It was truly heartbreaking how she gives this book of all the shitty future events to herself when she was still a child – and fucks up her own life due to the seemingly inescapable laws of QB time travel.
Although I enjoyed playing this, there wasn’t much else to root for. The worst part probably would be the enemies. Again, in terms of gameplay they were fine (which is why playing this is fun), but these mercs make no sense. They are boring as far as opponents go and it makes little sense that simple mercs would throw their lives away with such a zeal against someone who clearly has superpowers. Normal dudes with guns also aren’t very scary or threatening. In fact, at some point in the game, “shifters” are mentioned, beings that only pose a danger when time is frozen. So obviously I expected those to show up as new enemies, but they never did. I’m guessing they were cut from the game at some point and they forgot to also take out the references to them. I think Martin Hatch is a shifter, but there are no fights with/against him.
There is one single boss fight in the game and it kind of sucked. :D I had to play this at least 5 times, because it wasn’t obvious to me how to win. The boss is protected by a shield and the rectangular room is flooded with henchmen. Red dots show up every now and then, and being close to them ends in insta-death. So staying in constant movement while there’s anything red visible is a necessity. At some point the boss will trigger a big explosion and the only defense against it, is to run to the opposite side of the room as fast as possible. To survive this it’s necessary to instantly know where the explosion is coming from, there is no time for anything, because it insta-kills too. After this is survived, the boss won’t have a shield and can be shot at. Then the cycle repeats. After the second big explosion is survived (and the boss is shot again after loosing the shield again), the game is won. This is a fairly lengthy affair and any mistake will reset the whole thing. I felt so relieved when I was finally done with this. :D
Why does this feel like they are giving me the finger? :P
The game feels very ambitious and wants to be a big spectacle and due to crazy stuff like the mentioned live action TV show it kinda is, but such big and complex ideas also often come with a certain sense of disillusionment. Usually due to time/money constraints, it’s next to never possible to hit all the marks and audience members kind of end up seeing the wall such endeavors have to run into. Maybe I’m being unfair to this game, but it’s hard to see much more than a straight up action game with a story that isn’t nearly as deep as it wants to be. Maybe I’m just sad they couldn’t get more out of a science-fiction story about time travel. But then again, this IS better than STD. :P
PS: There are a few things I didn’t understand at all. Is Jack an idiot for telling Beth that he’d come back for her? Since nothing can ever be changed? And how is Martin Hatch still there at the very end? Wasn’t he killed? If he was, this might change the answer to my first question. :P
It really was… Good grief. It’s like Trump is a writer on this show (I have the best and biggest time travel, I’m a very stable writer…). Every time he is caught in a lie, he’ll just double down and keep repeating the lie, despite being completely aware that everyone already knows it’s a lie… They said last episode they can’t contact Starfleet for backup and they repeat it this episode. Although it already was so painfully obvious last week, that they could have jumped to Starfleet directly with their spore drive at any time. No comms needed… They even use the spore drive last episode, just not to get help… The fuck? And let’s not go into it again, how Sarek could contact them, no problem. He has Starfleet on something like Skype or Discord for sure.
They really rub it in too (typical Trump move). In the last episode they sent messages to their friends and relatives, in case they won’t make it. This week we learn these messages were received. So how can they radio everybody, except for Starfleet? This is so extremely idiotic. Although this makes no sense in the first place, they could have asked their relatives to tell Starfleet all about their situation, since they forgot Starfleet’s number and Starfleet seemingly isn’t on Twitter.
But if someone thought they couldn’t go dumber than this, they sure showed us. Ash Tyler leaves the ship supposedly in a shuttle, which obviously has no spore drive and yet it’s no problem for him either, to reach the Klingon homeworld Kronos and get back to Discovery just in time. He too obviously could have contacted Starfleet and just chose not to for no reason whatsoever.
This however, isn’t even the worst part. We learned before, that L’Rell’s power as chancellor is completely based on the lie, that she killed Ash Tyler. But by Ash Tyler showing up alive and well now, this entire ruse has been exposed. L’Rell would loose all her power and the entire Klingon empire would go nuts. Overall STD has been very prolific in ignoring and/or retconning Star Trek, but STD can’t even manage to uphold its own lore/story.
Automatic robot repair drones (which drive around on the hull like R2-D2 in Star Wars)? Is anyone still counting how many retcons this makes in total?
During the fight we learn that Enterprise and Discovery somehow hold 500 shuttles each. :D I don’t even…
I love it, when Saru is just as WTF at his sister (the primitive village priest), being a fighter pilot all of a sudden, as the audience is. :D Once again, everyone is available on comms except Starfleet. No matter how remote they are.
How did the Kelpiens get the advanced fighters from the Ba’ul btw? Have they murdered all of them since we last saw them and took all their stuff? :D
The torpedo that gets stuck in the hull looks nothing like any other torpedo, why? They couldn’t figure out what that would look like, right? All other torpedos are these glowing red thingies. Not grey rectangular objects.
Then the Admiral dies for nothing, because she has to pull a lever… No one thinks of using a rope to pull the lever from the other side. FIXED. Or they could have beamed her out, since they have a TRANSPORTER ROOM. There is also this embarrassing moment, when Number One says goodbye and the Admiral says nothing back, because Number One doesn’t have a name… THE PAIN. :D
During the confrontation between the emperor and the AI, the emperor gets the AI, a being that doesn’t feel pain, to scream on command… I don’t have words.
The best part of the episode is, when Burnham’s usage of the red angel suit looks like a scene straight out of Star Trek: The Motion Picture from 1979. :D Come to think of it, so does Discovery’s flight through the wormhole. Which probably means this is no coincidence. It’s too bad that ripping off other stuff doesn’t automatically mean your stuff will be at least as good. :P
I’ve always said they were going to do something really stupid to explain the spore drive out of existence (because it never existed) and they did… It was every bit as dumb as I expected. During the debrief at Starfleet, it is declared that everyone in the know is forbidden from speaking about the existence of the spore drive (!) because of time travel. The spore drive however, has nothing to do with all the time travel. All of that was the red angel/Iron Man suit. So why should they keep a thing secret, that had nothing to do with the time travel? Once more this show wants everyone to be a complete idiot, who won’t be able to notice anything.
There is no way in hell, Starfleet would develop such a technology and then never use it again. During the Star Trek movies, it’s been made clear, that Starfleet is trying to develop the so-called transwarp drive. Remember the USS Excelsior? So Starfleet is clearly trying to improve their drive systems. But why put so much effort into developing a worse drive system, than the one Discovery already has? Starfleet could have needed the spore drive countless times and never would have abandoned it. Other species could have developed it, leaving Starfleet at a fatal disadvantage.
Even if they are in the future now (where they should have been in the first place with this show), it’s still a poisoned well, since it won’t wash them clean of their shitty origin. It’ll just make it harder to overlook, that they were shitting on Star Trek all this time for nothing. They even personified this with Spock. He did nothing the entire season and was entirely superfluous as a character. His sole reason for being there, was so they could name drop him in ads. Pathetic.
During the ending credits, they play the Discovery music AND a remix of the Star Trek theme simultaneously, which sounds as shitty as you would imagine. I guess it’s just consistent with the rest of the episode, in that it is designed to piss people off. :D
Other than season 1, the season 2 end gives no clue as to what 3 will be about, which probably means they have no fucking clue themselves and want to keep all options as wide open as possible.
Only one piece of information, which is not in the show directly, hints that Discovery won’t stay in the future, since the emperor was confirmed to get her own Section 31 show and she was still on Discovery when they departed. So they would have to get back just for that reason. Unless the emperor starts running Section 31 in the far future. Nothing is too far-fetched for this show, so…
PS: Why did Discovery have to go into the future at the end at all? The only reason to do it, was because of Control and the AI was killed, thus removing the entire reason for this operation. *sigh*
PPS: I’ve seen Orville 2×13 by now and it was great. :P It was about time travel (what isn’t these days…) and it was way more engaging than…
I really liked the first game, so I was always interested in playing the second one too. I admit I sometimes miss the show when it’s not on (I sometimes think about how South Park might process something crazy that’s currently happening, if they would have made an ep about it) so being able to play this game during such a break is a NICE alternative.
The fact that it requires uplay didn’t really bother me. Some players felt like this game is too much like Stick of Truth, but for me this formula is still working. I still get a kick out of the fact that it is like watching an episode, but of course I’m playing it. There still isn’t anything else quite like it. They nailed that. South Park seems big enough to warrant more than one game in my opinion. A lot of the elements, that were already used in SoT, are therefore missing in this one. Even bigger characters like Terrance and Phillip aren’t in this, because they were already in the other one. I think there’s a shirt hanging somewhere, but no actual appearance. It’s appreciated, that they tried to be more than just a recurrence.
As I already mentioned Fractured But Whole requires uplay and it’s the first game I actually played on this store. It works well enough and is usually no trouble, there is just one thing that I found really creepy. After reaching certain “milestones” in the game, uplay will send emails to the player about it. “So you’ve just played this part of the game, HAVEN’T YOU?!?”. :| After finishing FBH I started another game, but stopped playing after a while, which prompted uplay to send me an email somewhere along the lines of “why have you stopped playing although you haven’t finished this game yet???”. Who over at Ubisoft thought it was a good idea to do this? Now Steam [1] stores every piece of information about its players as well, of course, but over at Valve they are smart enough not to rub everyone’s face in this fact. Seriously, what’s going on guy and or buddy – I mean friend?
btw: I played the DLCs too, except the combat focused one, because no one plays the South Park game for the combat. The DLCs are okay, I guess, but they ended a little bit too abrupt for my taste, but then again, so does the game. But then again this is a SP game, so you laugh for a while and then you stop. Right?
[1] former Valve developer Richard Geldreich chimed in to assert that claim that the Epic store is spyware are “insane,” saying that Valve gathers “huge amounts of data about virtually everything you do with the Steam client. Yet no one calls Steam spyware.”
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/340279/Epic_Games_Tim_Sweeney_addresses_Chinese_spyware_rumor.php
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