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MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Vic posted:

Yeah I reckon the difficulty in Okami was reduced on purpose due to the celestial brush gimmick. If you were required at some point to pull it off perfectly you'd get frustrated pretty quick. It's kinda like a spectacle fighter where you try to kill everyone the fastest without taking a hit. I originally played it on PS2 and drawing with thumbsticks was pretty frustrating at times, but the Switch version is great because you can use the touchscreen. It's the best version out there because of that.

I tried the original Wii version of Okami and whoa boy that was a terrible mistake. You’d think using the controller as an actual brush would work well but that thing demanded the actual precision of an artist. Hit one section where you have to make flowers bloom on a tree by needing to make multiple “drawn with a compass” perfect circles in maybe two seconds each and the thing just kept repeating over and over every time you fail one; I had to quit that stupid poo poo by resetting the console and never touched the drat game again. Honestly the only games to play on the Wii were those designed for it in my experience, anything ported to it inevitably used a lovely control scheme that made it a nightmare. Seemed like everybody decided the best use of motion controls like those were lots of QuickTime events that had to be executed by a gymnast!

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MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

exquisite tea posted:

That's just the prologue. You get Metroided out of all your weapons once the game begins in full. You get some outfits from owning the previous games but they are mostly all cosmetic.

Out of curiosity, are those all for owning the other games or beating them? Picked up the games during Steam sales, hadn't messed with Shadow yet because I'm waiting on my new computer to arrive but wanted to play it to test out my new graphics when it does show and wasn't sure if there was a need to finish the other two first.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

muscles like this! posted:

Don't forget that he's also a cyborg who was rebuilt by an evil organization with advanced technology.

Edit: Maybe the Illusive Man just didn't want Shepard to be able to run away from Cerberus.

Given Cerberus can do nothing right, I doubt it was deliberate sabotage, more likely they shoved so much drat metal into Shepard that running a few seconds was the best they could manage.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Cleretic posted:

Brainwash an entire sentient robot society vs. blow up a single space station.

The first option makes you a good guy.

Actually that one screws you over in the next game because it makes it harder to save both the Geth and Quarians since the Geth have people that remember working with the Reapers as a good thing. You have better results blowing them up in that regard.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged
I've finally gotten into Witcher 3, and while this is a VERY good game overall it does have a couple annoyances I've found thus far in the first non-prologue area:

1. Horse races are a pain in the rear thanks to the gallop controls being a "tap once then hold down" affair which seems to be very finicky about what constitutes that process. I have never managed to gallop at the start of a race thanks to that. Doesn't help the game apparently refuses to show the correct race path on the minimap past the next gate or very clearly with game graphics (with the races all happening at night to boot!); you see a light, is it a regular torch or where to aim, who knows? Not me! Compounds the issue by putting at least some of the gates right at a fork in the road so you have to guess which direction the race actually goes in and if you're wrong you're hosed. Also seems to have non-gate checkpoints which are extremely bad about registering you getting near them enough to mark it off.

2. The little loading movies may have seemed like a good way to remind people where they were in the story, but they repeat too much and run WAY too long. Can't even tell when you're able to skip them since they cover up the actual loading screens. At minimum a quick load that skips them when using the quick save should have been implemented.

3. Sword drawing/sheathing is automated very oddly at best, game seems very iffy on doing it right on its own but if you try manually that's when it inevitably decides it was going to do it so Geralt decides to draw then immediately resheathe his sword so you take on those enemies with your fists. Honestly should disable manual sheathing altogether in combat, not like it affects any of the actions you can actually take in combat whether or not the sword is out.

4. My top irritation, the open world level scaling does not have any clear regional separation on what's found where or even an ability to check the level. High level crap is randomly mixed in with at-level stuff; go fight some wolves at level and a skull level leshy pops up and insta-kills with one hit at full health. You can't even check levels before fights when you do see enemies, by the time you move close enough to see the health bar with a skull on it the enemy sees you too and comes eat your face. Assuming it doesn't do anything like let you loot a container at a map point then spawn the killer skull level creature right behind you. No warning about even the spawn, much less any prayer of knowing what level comes up without the player having psychic powers. Level gating in an open world only works when it's a GATE; if you can suddenly at any moment cross into Hurtsville without warning it's not a way to keep content away until later, it's a random gently caress you mechanic.

Thankfully the game's moddable so some people have fixed some of these issues and a few others (I already took all fall damage away, correctly guessed how bad navigating in the world would be otherwise before I started), but it does have a lot of basic gameplay design issues in the vanilla setup that seemed avoidable with a little thought by the designers.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Morpheus posted:

No no no, what you do is shoot the big guys with the mako until they're down to ~10% health, then you get out and finish them on foot.

No no NO, you run over the big ones with the Mako then pop out and shoot them while they flail frantically under the tires, much funnier that way.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged
I just picked up Control too. My biggest headache is how little warning the game gives you about many things being deadly until they severely hurt/kill you. Was kind of pissed when I got sent to clear out a clog and the game rewarded my shooting the thing with an undodgable spray of acid that I had literally zero reason to expect, or walking into a red corridor and suddenly seeing my health drop like crazy with, again, no sign to expect that problem. It’s still a good game (or will be if I stop sucking at the combat), but it feels a little too lacking in feedback for “this is dangerous”; also kind of hate the lack of a minimap or other way to keep track of enemies around me in that regard.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

CJacobs posted:

Stick with the prod. Prod with the prod. Just in case though, we're police.

I certainly recall enough electrocution and smacking people with a "nonlethal" club in the back causing them to collapse to fit the police experience, yes. Can't help but think the NSF were just faking so the crazy nano-agent didn't do something worse to them (or more likely Gunther took that looted pistol I gave him to keep him happy and was executing them offscreen).

Brazilianpeanutwar posted:

Dishonored has the rat problem but that just means you end up with levels full of unconscious guards on top of cupboards who all somehow end up in sex positions with each other.

Oh like the existence of the RATS makes people pile up "unconscious" people in compromising positions (it's me, I always run around knocking out as many people as possible in stealth games and disposing of them oddly - some men just want to watch the world snore).

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Kennel posted:

I'm glad that's optional in the remake.

Seriously? It was a thing in Mafia 2 also, one of the things that made me give up on it (that and it seemed drat near impossible to escape the police in a chase, driving was an agony in that game).

Vandar posted:

There's a special place in hell reserved for the developer at Rocksteady that thought Batmobile stealth was a good idea. :argh:

Yeah, I could have dealt with it as a "boss battle" gimmick, but that one went way past its welcome, especially since naturally the second you actually manage a kill they all freak out and charge in at you right then as opposed to Predator sections where you generally get a few seconds to escape or manage a second takedown if you're clever (also a hell of a lot more ways to run away after a Predator takedown since you aren't stuck on roads). Not sure, but they might not even need line of sight to keep shooting at you too (unless I'm misremembering and that was specifically a boss move). Felt like I spent more time in the drat car than I did doing the actual fight mechanics the Arkham series made its bones on (detective mode pun intended), which rather sucked since the game did a pretty good job with those still, just wouldn't use them as much it seemed.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Leal posted:

Sims 4 released a Star Wars expansion. Besides being something that ranked dead last in a vote, you can't even gently caress Rey cause they put in special scripts to lock off romancing her and Kylo Ren.

Well THAT’S getting modded out by a lot of PC users, I bet. Did they at least have Kylo lightsaber a bunch of stuff if he gets mad?

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Decrepus posted:

When you jump out of the Mako and shoot a Geth Colossus to death with your pistol for bonus xp

Slight correction, it was generally “run over the Colossus with the Mako and park on it, then jump out and shoot it while it convulses under the tires” for me. I did appreciate THAT part of Mako gameplay at least. Too bad thresher maws could only be dealt with by parking in one spot and bunny hopping their shots while firing (and popping out last second to get the kill by hand).

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Hippie Hedgehog posted:

The little thing dragging X-wing Star Wars: Squadrons down is the lackluster plot and boring characters.

... Oh wait, I guess that's not really a little thing... :saddowns:

I do like the gameplay, though.

Meh, it has as good a plot as the original X-Wing game really and certainly more engaging characters than THAT, at least from the bit I've done thus far now that I got a new HOTAS. Just wish my ability to fly and lead shots correctly had stayed the same as back then too :sigh:. TIE Fighter admittedly had more interesting mission design, they worked around the whole "flying for the bad guys" thing without really making the Imperials actually good guys. Didn't even fight the Rebels the majority of the game; think you just had maybe the first campaign hunting down Hoth escapees, the sort of interaction Harkov had with them (though I recall mostly shooting Harkov's people over Rebels working with him), protecting that one space station Thrawn was setting up, and the set up for the Battle of Endor, but don't remember any other major fighting against the Rebels in the game. Whereas you spent far more time hunting down Harkov then Zaarin, who were rogue Imperials and had you shooting "your own". Think not going straightforward good/evil (because it's obvious which you'd be) helped that game mission design-wise a bunch.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Dr Christmas posted:

The first battle in TIE Fighter sees you patrolling for Rebels from Hoth. Campaigns 5 and 7 are spent on Harkov’s defection. The 12th campaign has you softening up the Rebel fleet and denying them intel to ensure they commit everything to Endor. Clicking around Wookiepedia, rest of the missions against Rebels have you in defense. There were a lot of local “pirates” not affiliated with rebels. A good amount of the later campaigns are about getting new fighters, and then losing them so they can’t be used at Endor.

Yep, though I think I'm just as glad the Missile Boat hasn't shown up in the new universe again, it wasn't as fun as dogfighting in the Defender anyway.

quote:

One fun thing was the Sepan Civil War, where the Empire intervenes to stop two warring planets, Dimok and Riplubus. They don’t show up anywhere else in the EU as far as I know. The Empire tries to not show favorites, which ends up pissing off both sides. The Empire crashes a diplomatic meeting that turns out to be a hostage exchange of the planets’ Leander’s’ children. The war is stopped when the Empire fights off an attack from their combined fleets.

Was kind of funny seeing the Empire trying to deliver on their big promise of "making the galaxy safer" and mostly flailing around in that one, yeah.

quote:

Harkov never had any philosophical problems with the Empire. He was selling weapons to any who would buy them, including the Rebels and both sides of the Sepan Civil War, which you discover by doing secondary objectives. He was planning to join the Rebels for a pay raise, and ended up joining just to survive when he was found out. Zaarin was just an rear end in a top hat who thought he should be in charge. I don’t think the Emperor was established as a combat demigod yet, so looking back, it’s funny that they have a mission where he’s captured.

Seem to recall the Legends EU tried to retcon this one character from the one fighting game (Masters of Teras Kasi, I think?) who was a force wielder as helping Zaarin capture the Emperor. Personally something along the lines of just "they sabotaged his shuttle" would have worked better for that mission.

Hippie Hedgehog posted:

Agreed that Tie Fighter had the better writing. Also, Admiral Thrawn, and a secret society of the "Emperor's boys".

I don't remember the plot of X-wing at all except that you got to fly the trench assault mission which IMO justified the game's existence 100%. It didn't take as much to impress me back then.

I've only played a few hours of Squadrons' campaign yet but it has so far failed to hook me into the drama.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOVG_xlq-fk

You could cheese that last mission by turning down the detail on the Death Star (which was its own setting) which wound up removing all the various crap you had to fly around in the Trench Run for the game. Felt better anyway, didn't see Luke maneuvering around random crap in the movie, just dodging shots. Was hilarious just shooting down three TIEs before going in, so much for Vader chasing you.

quote:

(I love how they sanitized it from the main characters. The Battle of Yavin happened, but it was all YOU. Mon Mothma hands you the medal, not some princess what's-her-name-again. Presumably they didn't have permission to use those characters, or they just decided this was better for player immersion.)

The game guides had little stories with their own "PC" character, I like how the X-Wing one just had the mission reported on by Luke instead of the main character thus far (he was supposedly flying the one Y-Wing you see fly away from the Death Star with Luke and the rest right before it blows and was doing a diversion attack elsewhere) and I think they justified the ROTJ Death Star run in Alliance by claiming the guide's main character was one of the gunners on the Millennium Falcon for that mission. Really appreciate you can get the names of any of those PC characters when picking random names for your guy in the Squadrons campaign.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Inspector Gesicht posted:

Outside of Star Citizen what game had a high budget but was mismanaged so that you never see the dollars onscreen? Like they expend a poo poo-ton of resources towards cutscenes and one-off areas you only visit for ten minutes, but a good chunk of experience is on low-rent grindiness? Naturally there's the original FFXIV which had excellent mocap in the cutscenes but pitiful nothing in the gameplay.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning I know had some major budget/design issues (including the state of Rhode Island thanks to Curt Schilling), seem to recall it had a decent RPG idea under a lot of crap. Certainly the chaos/financial mismanagement of that one brings a Star Citizen comparison to mind.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Inspector Gesicht posted:

Playing Devotion retroactively made the already middling Layers of Fear into crap.

Both games contain DNA from the cancelled Kojima game PT. You walk around in an enclosed domestic space while a heeby-jeeby spooks you. The difference is that Devotion has actual substance. There's a story about a prideful father who can't admit fault, and he leads his family to utter devastation when his selfish mindset falls prey to a bigger fish. It's an effective story on it's own, made better in how it's rooted in Taiwanese culture. Religions, traditional medicine, parental pressure, and the stigma of addressing mental health all feature here.

Layers of Fear was something about a painter.

I feel if a game is 15 bucks and two hours long then it should maximise it's play-time by making every moment, scene, and scrap of knowledge important. Devotion is up there with Edith Finch. It's one folly is a few unnecessary jump-scares and a bit where you get chased for 30 seconds.

Layers of Fear is the opposite where it has no original story to tell of its own, no theme to impart, and has to resort to padding out it's length with inane moon-logic puzzles. It even has to halt its climax so you have to scour a room looking for chess pieces for some reason.

I blame Dear Esther for giving some designers the wrong idea. That game was an hour of walking around while listening to a laundry list of randomized jargon. I hate it when a game sprinkles some words around and calls it 'lore'.

Go play Devotion before some "concerned gamers" try pulling it again.

I will grant Layers of Fear did give us this glorious moment at least :D.

Gaius Marius posted:

Yes! Meld was so much better than what they did in two, I have no clue what they were thinking with that sequel

Hell, Chimera Squad pretty much went back to that considering how many "reach this area in X turns to get a secondary objective/reward" things I recall. The only other "time pressure" was mostly just having constant enemy spawns until you left, so you if really didn't want to rush you wouldn't suddenly have a mission failure because you didn't hit an arbitrary timer, you just had to fight more enemies i.e. do more of what you're playing the game for in the first place.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Piell posted:

Because companions in Fallout have always been way more trouble than assistance

Looking at you, Mr. Ian “Machine Gun Blast to the Back of My Head” (though at least the friendly fire issues went down in future installments).

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

RenegadeStyle1 posted:

I always found it hilarious how the rap against the NCR was bad governing like its somehow even comparable. I imagine someone saying "Join our rapists and slavers because the other team takes forever to file your tax return"

Feels like we should insert that "I tried to shoot the NCR president because he was going to tax me!" "Understandable" edit here somewhere :).

For a long while I thought it might have been more interesting if the Legion was a little less cartoonishly evil (pulling the rape and sexism out doesn't SEEM like a big change, for instance), but real life watching of fascists has finally educated me that yes, that IS the inevitable result of any "order uber alles" society because it will inevitably gravitate to that kind of evil bigoted crap by its nature of needing "enemies to fight/punish". Caesar may claim he wants to reform into a less militant style government "after the conquest is done", but can you really see him accepting the lower personal authority any state like that would require? He'd just shift to internal persecution of "undesirables" instead, because that's the only way he'd keep his authority, by redirecting hatred of the results of his policies towards whatever scapegoats were established.

So really, I suppose one little things dragging down New Vegas is it kind of established NCR and Legion as equals, which has lead too many people to consider them MORAL equals. Thematically it might have been better to compare them as drawing two different lessons from pre-War, with the NCR chasing the ideal the US held up, with the Legion probably more reflective of the reality since the pre-War USA had some pretty obvious fascist overtones to a lot of stuff. Not sure what the best way to contrast the House/no faction would be under that theme though.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Oxxidation posted:

iirc chris avellone's opinion on the new vegas factions was "anything is better than what we had before" so he was down on the NCR in particular, which is a little hard to swallow with how the legion is presented

one of the many things wrong with lonesome road is that you're stuck with avellone's mouthpiece for the antagonist, and ulysses is going to make you sit through his Very Important opinions on nation-building whether you like it or not

Yeah, definitely can't agree with Avellone, like I mentioned the NCR is more chasing the ideal of the USA rather than "what we had before" (which I noted the Legion probably was closer to). They're certainly having a lot of problems living up to their good intentions, but I put them well ahead of the horrors the pre-War US was cheerfully leaping into. Now there's a good story to be had in "can you do better at those ideals or are you doomed to fail like the USA did?" but I can't call the NCR especially bad by nation-state standards, whereas the Legion... yeah, can't see them surviving even if they "won", too many fatal flaws in their system even if you overlook the obvious evil. If nothing else, the almost inevitable loss of Caesar in the near future (as in, happens unless a Courier happens to defy probability) practically guarantees its collapse.

Stexils posted:

i didn't dislike ulysses solely because i like his voice. VA really carried that DLC

Yeah, he was awesome to listen to even though he went far beyond Sturgeon's Law in regards to how much was crap. Though the Legion support I'm not entirely sure of, he seemed more like he was trying desperately to justify his support in retrospect for a conquering nation that colonized his tribe (and realizing he really couldn't deep down probably).

DoubleNegative posted:

Someone in this thread mentioned it the last time there was a discussion about Ulysses, and so it was on the tip of my thoughts as I was going through the DLC about 6 months back. Ulysses has such an awkward, stilted manner of speaking. It's like he doesn't use any pronouns at all when he's speaking. "(I) Spoke with Caesar about the bonfire. (Then I) Went to the bonfire later. Nobody (there) was singing. (I) Made them sing."

He sounds like someone very badly trying to do a take on Rorschach's narration from the Watchmen movie.

I tend to support the fanon that English isn't his first language (his tribe probably had their own), so he tends to be very stilted at best in it.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Retro Futurist posted:

“Ggaaaarrrrryyy! Gary Gary! Gaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrryyyyyy!!!”

“They’ve killed Fritz! They’ve killed Fritz! Those lousy stinking yellow fairies!”

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Unkempt posted:

You can eat the corpses, if you need the food. Or just if you feel like it I suppose.

Y'know, realistically if a colony in Rimworld or whatever is cheerfully cannibalizing raiders, you'd think word would get out to the rest of the raiders VERY QUICKLY to stay the hell away from that place because those people are hosed up. Granted this should also result in instant freakouts if you visit someplace else and certainly no guests stopping by.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

My Lovely Horse posted:

That tends not to work out well in Kojima games

At least calling it Outer Heaven would make more sense in this one given the number of souls floating around in it.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

moosecow333 posted:

The ratio of physical weapons to energy weapons I’ve found in Mechanicus is super out of wack. I’m still using my machine gun from the beginning of the game on some guys since I just can’t find any other non-melee or flame related physical weapon.

And why are flames so effective against necrons? They are literally machines, the T-1000 wouldn’t care about being set on fire.

T-1000 literally got destroyed by too much heat though.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Der Kyhe posted:

The same reason why they first let you play as a super cool colonial James Bond for the first couple of hours, and then switch to the actual main character who is pretty much worse on all aspects related to doing his job. Connor being chronically cut-scene stupid does not help that at all.

On the other hand I was somewhat annoyed Haytham apparently couldn’t do any of the new parkour stuff Connor can, like flow around a tree trunk to the other side’s branches. They were showing off all this additional movement in the trailers then you have to sit through the prologue and yet ANOTHER ton of tutorials to do it. I did get most of the “butcher guards at random” for control practice and amusement out of my system with Haytham, so at least it felt more appropriate the guy I played as a bigger psychopath was the bad guy.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Inspector Gesicht posted:

The new Halo is getting faulted for one half of the missions taking place in a samey alpine biome, and the other half in a big metal box that gets reused ad nauseam.

What games are the worst for not varying their landscapes?

Dragon Age 2 definitely has an issue with that thanks to outright map re-use.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Sandwich Anarchist posted:

FF7 Remake makes Aerith so unlikeable holy poo poo. She is presumptuous, sarcastic, pushy and just overall overbearing and aggravating. The engine giving facial expressions and voice acting really changed my perception of the character alot.

Uh, she was an aggressive smartass in the original, if anything it was nice to see them walk back the pure saintly sweetness thing they had going with her in all the follow-up material. Besides, she grew up in a freaking slum, she IS saintly by those standards.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

credburn posted:

Weirdly I was more annoyed that she was just kind of anthropomorphized in a pleasing way but not egregiously sexualized like a 00s era Ubi Soft dominatrix villainess.

As is having her constantly press Talion against her tits poison glands got a little old.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Thankfully they stripped all of that out at some point.

The game is still overloaded with systems. Two "max out this meter for a powerful ability" things, plus a mana bar, plus ammo, plus 2 separate cooldowns, plus the standard combo stuff, and that's just the in-combat stuff. The nemesis system is fantastic, the skill tree is really solid and allows for lots of choice and experimentation but the game is bloated as hell.

Yeah, I'm trying to finally get the true ending after checking out during the original excessive epilogue, and the combat is a little too bloated. Bigger headache for me is they added too many things for captains; some of them become downright impossible to kill at high levels. The betrayals "stacking up" behavior is bullshit too; had four of my maybe seven or so non-warchiefs in a zone randomly turn on me and literally got stuck in place and insta-downed because they threw too much crap at once for me to even move and somehow the one single guy with No Chance gets the kill shot on my first downing (and the game lovingly promotes him from fairly low below me to two levels above). Orcs turning on you should be a hell of a lot rarer without provocation (though random blood brother stuff can gently caress off too).

gohuskies posted:

My criticism of Shadow of War was it seemed like they added millions of low-level enemies everywhere. In Shadow of Morder, if I wanted to fight uruk-hai I had no trouble finding them, but if I just wanted to get somewhere quickly then I could usually avoid them too, except in certain locations that made sense to be packed with enemies. In SoW, I couldn't go five feet without having to kill a mob. Just got tiresome.

Yeah, that gets to be obnoxious, though you can at least use the speed boost from running over things to get past enemies. The large swarms play hell with targeting; love to randomly execute some slave with a club instead of his boss that's shooting nukes out of his crossbow or randomly swing at a savage who head butts me.

Just need to beat stage 3 of the epilogue then debate if I want to try the DLC or call it a day.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged
Think I commented here about it previously, but finally got the "secret" ending for Middle Earth: Shadows of War and OMFG that drat game nearly broke me with its bullshit. I lost two forts in a row because the game randomly had a No Chance enemy right near me when something else downed me, cheerfully loving me over for the entire defense and making me sit through the drat fortress assault (thank God recovering the fort advances the quest or I would have straight up quit right then). Then, when I decide to try to set up some betrayals to skip some of the more obnoxious warchief killing quests, the game randomly decided "nope, can't do it" and despawned the mission to betray them for every attempt. Then it decided after I tried the regular way to summon the warchief he suddenly ran off and autofailed the mission for me and decided my followers weren't infiltrated any more without explanation. Kinda enraged me given how obnoxious those infiltrations were since it interacted with the arena minigame, which is a broken piece of poo poo because apparently my followers can't be bother to loving ATTACK ANYTHING! They literally stand there like idiots while the enemy just smacks them; lost several easy fights because apparently the AI is garbage, especially if you make the mistake of picking the wrong class (archers just cannot win any fight because their actions consist of load their crossbow, bump into something/get hit, try to reload the crossbow, bump into something/get hit...). Add in the game liked to randomly increase the enemy's level by up to 6 from what it displayed, and those arena matches were utterly stupid. I wound up brute forcing it with random high level orcs until I won what I needed, and just took over the enemy if they won instead, assuming it didn't suddenly bullshit their level too high for that. It was fun at lower levels but don't think I'm ever playing that game ever again even for the DLC, it's too frustrating.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

mind the walrus posted:

It really does have that Clive Barker touch for throwing you right into the slop. Within 30 seconds of gameplay you're staring at a bloody hanging ghost-corpse, within 2 minutes you've met a ghost and his flayed corpse, and within 5 you're shooting horrific wolf monsters. I ran into the hallways with floating curtains and thought "oh my this is the most 2001 PC game detail and the most 'This is a Clive Barker property' touch I'll ever see."

I just wish it didn't all feel as much like playing a bad dream as it does to experience. The neverending respawns in areas plus the genuine labyrinth of empty rooms is disconcerting in the bad way after a spell.

In the category of “bugs that should have been features”, I understand several of the enemies are scripted to say lines as they enter the room but will still do so even if you kill them immediately, which can result in decapitating an enemy and his severed head informing you “I’ll see you in hell!”.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Perestroika posted:

It seems kinda wild to make an entire trilogy with the overarching theme of "all gods are garbage rear end in a top hat and humanity ought to be freed of them", but then plan to cap it off with "this one particular god is fine tho". :psyduck:

Uh, I don’t know if “this particular god is fine” is an actual message in the original games, he seemed to clearly be a bastard too. It’s definitely a major theme Kratos is deeply regretful of his past actions in the new games.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

credburn posted:

I'd like to see him take on the 200+ gods in the Aztec mythology.

They do have an association with massive bloodshed and sacrifice, they'd be hypocrites if they complained about being subjected to them by Kratos!

Len posted:

Kratos vs the Mayans. Let me kick in the doors to Xibalba

That does sound like a GoW set of levels, just need to think of some ways for Kratos to creatively kill bats and jaguars with brutal attacks (I vote rip the jaguars in half in the name of upholding a GoW traditional glory kill, and scream in the face of the bats so loud their heads explode) and the right puzzles for the other locations.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Danger - Octopus! posted:

It's a little known Bat-fact that Batman has a no-kill rule, but the Batmobile has an unholy lust for blood that cannot be sated until it has murdered every last criminal in gotham under its deadly wheels.

Would explain why he works with the Red Hood, he's used to murderous sidekicks and the Hood probably has fewer casualties than the Batmobile would.

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MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

John Murdoch posted:

Afaik, Daggerfall rarely if ever expected you to travel far on foot. That said, looking it up, vampires straight up can't fast travel during the day which is its own BS.

Morrowind has a similar deal where becoming a vampire gets you shunned by like 90% of all NPCs, including most travel services.

Being harmed by sunlight has remained a mechanic in every game. I think it wasn't until Skyrim that they threw in some means to skirt around it beyond hiding indoors.

I still remember accidentally waiting outside as a vampire in Oblivion into daytime and coming out of wait only to immediately burst into flames and fall over dead. Honestly that was too funny to be angry at though.

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