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CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
This reminds me; in Flatout: Ultimate Carnage, there are incremental upgrades that you can purchase for your cars like Engine Upgrade 1, Engine 2, etc., and If you go directly to the last upgrade, it "includes" all the previous ones and they are marked as purchased. If you buy every single one in order though, the price of the later ones don't change, so if you go directly for the last upgrade in a chain, you save thousands of dollars, which is a great incentive not to upgrade until you have enough money for the most expensive one. Not a huge deal, but it still annoys me because it makes the cheaper upgrades feel like a trap.

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CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

oldpainless posted:

In just cause 4 it’s hard to get anywhere quickly and the driving feels off

The driving is shameful, but wingsuiting at 200 km/h gets you places pretty fast!

I just bought Disgaea for the Switch and playing it from the beginning again made me realize how linear the early progression is. It takes forever to get anything good in the Item World if you go too early, everything in the Dark Assembly costs too much (money or mana) and is too difficult to fight for, so your best option is to grind story maps that are obviously made for grinding. I do remember that once you get one character through the soul-crushing grind of Cave of Ordeals 3, the grind gets fun, but I also remember it taking a while...

I'm also trying really hard to like Need for Speed: Heat, and I kind of do when I'm racing, but I think the game is kind of a loner and pushes people away without realizing it. There are a LOT of little annoyances, but I think the thing dragging it down the most is that if your car's rating is even a little bit over a race's recommended level, the race is piss easy, but if it's even a tiny bit under, you can't do better than like 5th place. Doesn't matter though, because for most events, finishing 5th just means you get 85% of the prize money and the event still gets marked as cleared.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

MiddleOne posted:

Knowing the name of a place rarely helps very much. There's also a lot of locations that just kinda exist until they're plot relevant or that never really serve a purpose. The vaguely stated goal is "pursue Sephiroth" but a lot of actions don't really make sense within that framework either.

I didn't remember it being this bad either, but it really is.

Right now I'm playing the FF8 HD remake and I know I'm supposed to go to Estar, and I know where Estar is, but Estar is on a continent surrounded by sheer cliffs and mountain ranges and the Garden can't cross those and I don't know how I'm supposed to reach it and that's where I stopped a few months ago.

It didn't help me get back to it that I bought a million games between then and now.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
I finally tried out Just Cause 4 and I have to say that it's way better than I thought it would be. All the major changes are, in my opinion, for the best and I absolutely LOVE what they've done with the Chaos mechanic. The only thing, however, is that the game is way too easy now, mostly because the checkpoints are so generous; it saves literally every few seconds, even during missions. Not that I absolutely want to replay entire missions, but when death means going back a few seconds, getting all your health, vehicles and allies back and all enemies are gone, it makes victory feel a little... empty.

Still a really fun game, despite some really odd graphical issues.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Dr Christmas posted:

I guess the point is that getting yourself active is more important than deciding how, and if you squash some monsters super fast, you can just play some more because it’s ultimately up to you and not the computer what you want to do and for how long you want to do it. But yeah, it’s still really weird killing a monster with a fraction of a set.
Yeah, I think it's mostly to make the game more "game-y" and less like just a workout, but it's a little annoying, mostly because it can enable you to skip exercices you don't like.

I'm also not a great fan of how the Random function basically becomes suicide very early in the game, and unlocking new exercices takes too long.

CordlessPen has a new favorite as of 12:38 on Jan 23, 2020

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Morpheus posted:

I mean, there are lots of ways to skip exercises you don't like - don't set them, cheat at doing them, or just don't select them. Kinda like real life, really.
Yeah, but I leave them in because, before I start exercising, it's pretty easy to say that I'll do ALL of the moves, and varying exercices is good, but if the game allows me to do the chair and overhead presses non-stop, after half an hour it gets mighty tempting...

Honestly, I think that once I unlock more moves it won't be as much of a problem, but when I started playing I just selected Random all the time and I liked that, but already in the second world you run out of hearts if you don't attack with the enemies' weaknesses and you only get one or two moves of each muscle group.

Another little thing: there are achievements for playing for a few days in a row, but I only play when I don't go to the gym, which is 4 times a week currently.

Still a really cool game. It works much better than a lot of home exercising equipment.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
A little while ago I bought the entire Kingdom Hearts collection (1.5 + 2.5, 1.8 + 2.8, whatever that is, and 3) and now that we're confined at home I thought I'd play through the series in order, but the first game is really make me reconsider.

The worlds are super tiny, like 5-10 rooms each, and they make you backtrack through them like crazy. They feel a lot more like bad themed haunted houses than Disney worlds. Actually, it feels like a kid playing pretend in his house, running from the kitchen to the living room and back a millions times.

I know it's unfair, it's a PS2 game, but the camera is horrendous. It gets stuck on geometry, it's weirdly averse to looking up or down, it has this really weird acceleration to it when you control it manually, and it manages to give me headaches in about 15 minutes.

The combat is awful. There's very little skill involved because there's almost no choice to make. You have one ground combo, one air combo, and even then, if you're on the ground but the enemy is in the air, the game makes you jump into the air combo automatically if you attack. Actually, every attack you do homes in on the enemy you're targeting and sometimes will propel you really far, which is very often annoying when you're fighting around the game's many, many pits. There's also this mechanic that I hate where if you miss one hit of your combo, it ends, which means that you can't start attacking from afar and time it so your last, most powerful hit connects with the enemy, you'll just end up doing the first move in your combo over and over until it connects. The targeting is absolute rear end and the game will very often have you attack a box or a vase instead of an enemy. Goofy's alright, but Donald is absolutely useless; he always blows his load super early in combat and then sits the rest out because he's out of MP.

The platforming is... PS2-era 3D platforming. And there's a lot of it.

The story... Look, I played KH1 and 2 in the PS2 days; I know the story is inane anime garbage and needlessly convoluted, but replaying KH1 made me realize how little of it there is during the actual game. You get a teeny tiny bit of it in the very beginning, then you spend 10 hours looking for your friend with your other friends while your other other friend tries to stop you, then it's nonsensical drama bomb after nonsensical drama bomb for the last hour. Considering I was replaying the series to get into the story for KH3, this felt kind of useless.

The gummi stuff is actually kinda cool considering it's entirely optional, bit it's kind of a waste seeing all the time you can spend designing your ship for a part of the game you can, and probably should, ignore.

I think I remember KH2 fixing a lot of those issues, and the other games I've never played before, so maybe the rest of the collection will be worth playing, but I also might just watch some YouTubes to catch up on the nonsense and jump into KH3 right away.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Walton Simons posted:

I had Halo autosave as I was falling off a cliff in the Warthog, guess I went over the checkpoint line, just... while falling to my death.
I think I remember that if you die 3-4 times really quickly after respawning from a checkpoint, the game will automatically choose the checkpoint before that one. I thought it was both pretty clever but also should have been obvious. Maybe it wasn't in Halo 1 though..

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Al Cu Ad Solte posted:

The thing dragging down Half-Life: Alyx for me is that it's my absolute favorite type of game and perfectly paced and from my favorite game series and all that, but because it's VR I can't play it casually.

:negative:

Gotta set up a space, gotta set out a block of time, gotta make sure I didn't eat anything, gotta hope I don't get a headache :cry: What if I just wanted to chill and destroy some headcrabs and Combine??

The thing dragging it down for me is that it finally pushed me to get a PCVR headset but my Oculus Quest won't be here until early May...

:(

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Inspector Gesicht posted:

For some reason AC Unity lets you play during the pre-load, only instead of getting to play the first chapter like other Ubisoft games you get to play all 5 minutes of the Prologue before getting booted to the loading screen. Why even bother?
I think on PS4 it's a requisite (or used to be) to be available on the PSN store. At least that's what I remember from the early days, when games like (I think) Shadow of Mordor could be launched but would only give you access to the Options menu and a progress screen. It makes more sense if you consider that it's probably intended to get you started while the game is installing from disk for a few minutes, and not while you're downloading it for a few hours.

There was also a version of NHL that let you play a single game with pre-selected teams while it was downloading/installing, but even if the install was complete you never got the option to progress to the full game until you re-launched, which was confusing for a few people.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
Did anyone else notice a trend in open world racing games where winning races doesn't seem to really matter? I got Need for Speed: Heat a few months ago and I kinda liked it, but it wasn't long before I got annoyed that events only got tracked as "completed" or not, instead of what position you finished. Coupled with the fact that second and third place got like 90 and 80% of the money you get when you win, respectively, there was practically no difference between finishing first and third. I feel like that takes a lot out of a racing game.

Now I bought Forza Horizon 4 and it's pretty much the same thing: as long as you finish an event, you get most of the money and experience, and the event is marked as "completed". Not sure if it works if you're dead last, but I know it does if you're 5th (out of 12), or if you lose a showcase (a gimmicky but usually super fun 1 on 1). I still really like the game, especially as a Jay Leno simulator, but it seems like the racing bit is a tad too forgiving. But then the "missions" are super hard to get 3 stars in, and THOSE the game can keep track of.

CordlessPen has a new favorite as of 03:32 on Apr 23, 2020

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Dewgy posted:

FFX’s dub is a very very special case because it’s such an early game of its scope. The whole game is built around the Japanese VO to the point where changing the length of any sound clip in the game would cause it to crash.

That’s why there’s weird moments like Tidus suddenly saying “withYunabymyside” like the end of a car commercial. They had to do some serious chopping to get everything to fit properly.

So glad to see I'm not the only one suffering through FFX remaster at the moment!

I also like all of Yuna's "Okay"s that have to fit the original 1-sylllable "hai".

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Gerblyn posted:

Yeah, everything I've heard about it makes it sound like the kind of game that I would like, ruined by hundreds of small decisions that I wouldn't like.

Kingmaker reminds me of a super weird hang-up I have in isometric games where I get annoyed at the particle/lighting effects because I start imagining them from the characters' perspective. It's hard to explain... Like, in Baldur's Gate, Arcanum, Nox, etc. the effects are perfectly fine from the player's perspective because it's so far away, but I get annoyed because I feel like, on ground level, my character must be getting blinded by an Unreal Engine 2 acid trip.

I also get annoyed by overdone effects in FPS/TPS, but that makes more sense, I think.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
It's probably just the frustration speaking, but there's too big a gap in difficulty between Expert and Expert + in Beat Saber. I remember thinking the same thing about DDR and Guitar Hero back in the day, but I'm not a fan of having the difficulty increase (1) the speed, (2) the number and (3) complexity of the notes and (4) the amount of life a wrong note takes away, because now when I play Expert I get bored and I don't feel like I get any better, but I don't really like practicing on Expert+ because I fail too early into a song (or I have to get through a minute long easy intro before failing...)

I'm just bitching, I'll keep playing...

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Ruffian Price posted:

It's possible to play this game for a hundred hours and not realize this but this button

allows you to start from any point in the song

Son of a bitch...

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

CJacobs posted:

For what it's worth, I don't think it is a bug after having played the whole thing. The first time you heavy attack an enemy in the wrong stance it'll force you to swap to the correct one, then the next time it will remind you without pausing the action, and after that it doesn't remind you anymore unless you're wailing on a dude trying to break his block to no avail. Seems like it does that once for each stance and then never again- past the middle of Act 2 it hasn't happened to me anymore.

Yeah, for me it happened once per stance, right after unlocking it, and I think it happened once or twice out of the blue (I remember once in my first Straw Hat duel, but I actually kind of appreciated that because for some reason I assumed they would be considered brutes instead of swordsmen).

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
Man, it's like Bloodborne wasn't designed for doing a BL4 run...

After Rom, more than half the enemies kill you in one hit. Some of them are actually harder than bosses because they're often in tiny cramped areas, and I don't want to waste Blood Pellets or Papers on them. I would honestly rather fight the Shadows again than go through the Upper Cathedral Ward and its loving Brainsuckers. My run is probably going to become "run from lantern to boss to lantern" until the end, which kind of sucks. I actually really liked the run up until Rom because it made fighting regular mobs super interesting and really made you learn enemies' patterns, but I feel like I can't do that at this point because I lose all progress when a Church Servant decides to do its lantern attack and I die in a nanosecond because I made the mistake of being in melee range and he couldn't be staggered.

It also doesn't help that you're stuck with only the starting weapons. One of the (many) reasons Brainsuckers... well, suck is that you really need to stab'em and I can only slash'em.

Totally my fault, it's a challenge run, but I really enjoyed it up until this point and I kinda don't now.

Edit: The reason I'm doing a BL4 run is that a friend of mine started playing Bloodborne for the first time a few weeks ago and I got the itch again, and now my friend is doing a BL4 run as basically his second run ever. At first I thought he was making a mistake, but turns out his first timer's strategy of hit-hit-run is much better than my overconfident parry-dash-do-a-200-damage-viceral-get-hit-die.

CordlessPen has a new favorite as of 17:10 on Oct 24, 2020

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Your Gay Uncle posted:

The thing bringing Bloodborne down for me is the lack of build variety. Bloodtinge isn't viable until Castle Cainhurst and your'e almost 2/3rds through the game before Arcane becomes useful, and you have to be pumping the useless "arcane" stat the entire game because the best spell takes likes 60 arcane to use.

Absolutely agree with Bloodtinge, although you still need a secondary offensive stat so you can build a mediocre STR/DEX build with above average gun attacks, then get the canon/chaingun/chikage. If you went for Strength and want the Bloodletter you're gonna have an even shittier time though...

Arcane, however, becomes viable way earlier than people think. Granted, you have to know your way around the game a bit, but you can get really good fire gems in the first Chalice Dungeons (so right after BSB) that will make most of the game actually easier than with the equivalent STR or DEX build. It's true that the cool Arcane toys come too late in the game, but the build itself is still fun on the way there.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
This is absolutely not any particular game's fault but right now I'm annoyed because I started playing Ghost Recon: Wildlands again with a buddy but I'm also playing Watchdogs: Legion, and while those games are very similar superficially (you run, you sneak, you shoot, you drive...), the controls are super different (different buttons to punch, crouch, run, etc.) and it trips me up every time I go from one to the other.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

ulex minor posted:

It's an old complaint but I still think my worst gaming experience was collecting all the feathers in Assassin's Creed.

No one was forcing me to do it, it had no material gain, it was just subjecting myself to drudgery because I wanted that 100%. Does anyone actually enjoy doing these kinds of quests or are we all just slaves to our idiot brains.

I always assumed the devs were forced to put in Achievements so they randomly dropped a hundred collectibles and passive-aggressively went "There. Now go get your achievement, NERD"

I'm replying Ghost Recon: Wildlands with a friend after not touching it for 3 years and noticed that they added a few things, namely a game mode where you lose your save file if you die (ala Diablo hardcore mode) and a wave survival thing.

The hardcore mode is kinda sorta cool on paper, but I think it fails at what it's trying to do. Having only one "main" weapon is supposed, I think, to either make you bring a different weapon than you normally would or to force you to rethink the way you play, but instead it pretty much forces you to bring an assault rifle everywhere all the time. Shotguns and sniper rifles aren't viable anymore (unless you're way better than I am) so you just lug the most boring weapon around for the whole game. The permadeath isn't even that big a deal because you still get revived by your squad.

The wave survival thing, however, is just terrible. Before even starting it up, it's kind of a weird thing to have in a stealth game with very average shooting mechanics, and the flaws of the engine become really obvious really quick. They also only have one map to play on, with 5 or 6 positions to defend, so that gets boring quick. You always start with the worst shotgun in the game and there's no way to change that. Even if you play the game for a million hours, there is no way to unlock other starting weapons. And even beyond the starting loadout, the weapon selection is really bad, partly because, here too, you only get one "main" weapon so shotguns and sniper rifles are out for not being versatile enough, but also because the weapon and parts selection is very limited so you'll probably get the one decent assault rifle after the 6th wave and stick with it until the end. It also really highlights how poor the AI is, with your teammates regularly walking past enemies or just standing around doing nothing.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

JackSplater posted:

Ghost Mode taught me a lot of things about that game I'd never have figured out on my own. Most of the weapons and equipment are meant to be used in specific situations instead of as a primary. Use a sniper to pick off enemies at range at a base, then close in, change weapons at the first ammo box you find, and AR/SMG/Shotgun clear the rest / the path to your objective. Flashbangs are great for building clearing. Rifle grenades are the be all end all vehicle destroyers (with one notable exception). Assault rifles are a decent general purpose weapon, but there's enough ammo boxes around that usually it's easy to switch to a weapon better suited to what you're currently doing.

It also taught me that a) playing solo is way easier since sync shot is incredibly overpowered, b) if you're not in stealth you're dead, and c) the game is very buggy. Did you know if you're in combat in a mission, go down, get revived, and then fail the mission, when it reloads the last checkpoint the game thinks you've already gone down in that fight, so going down again is an instant game over?

That's exactly what I "get" from Ghost mode, but I feel like it does the opposite, practically. In normal mode, I'll pretty often rock a shotgun or SMG if I know I'm heading into a mostly indoors area because I can take a rifle as well in case I get spotted by a sniper, plus if I miscalculate and need a completely different loadout I can hide somewhere and change it (which, I admit, is kind of silly that you can do that anywhere...), plus if I get everything wrong and I get killed, no biggie, I'll try again.

In Ghost mode, I hesitate to bring a sniper rifle to clear a base from afar because if get spotted and rushed, I don't have much to defend myself with, I can't switch up my weapon without a weapon case, and if I die in the game, I die for real.

It could definitely work, but an assault rifle with a decent scope is so versatile it's hard to justify bringing anything else.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
I got DMC5:SE along with my PS5 and while it's an amazing game made even better, there are a few things that I think are annoying.

I made a post in the other thread to say that I really appreciate how a single run through LDK as Vergil (which I believe is the first thing a DMC5 player would do in the SE) will pretty much allow you to purchase every move for every character once you get back to Nero/V/Dante, but I'm a bit annoyed at still having to unlock a few things, most notably Nero's end game abilities, Dante's swords, the harder difficulties and the Bloody Palace.

I don't understand why Vergil has his own listing for the secret missions. The missions are the same and completing one as Nero/V/Dante unlocks the orb/fragment for Vergil as well, but if you want to go for 100% completion, you have to find and complete all secret missions again.

Virgil's battle theme kinda sucks. I thought the same thing of V's and Nero's at first, but in context (killing demons), they grew on me, but so far Vergil's hasn't.

Still a kickass game though!

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
One thing that annoys me about V, especially on harder difficulties, is that any evasive manoeuver (save for a single jump) he has will pull back one of his familiars (Shadow for dodging, Griffon for double jumping) and cancel any charge you were holding and REALLY encourages you to stay WAY back, which is annoying because it makes things very hard to see which in turn makes moves harder to do, and it makes you have to run to finish off enemies with your cane.

I also REALLY hate the the part where you fight to get your familiars back one at a time...

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

DrBouvenstein posted:

I assume even the PS5 sucks at wifi so it'll be there when I upgrade at least.
It's actually decent. Better than my girlfriend's One... S? You're still way better off wired though.

For some reason, last week I remembered that I'd never beaten (or even got that far into) Middle Earth: Shadow of War and started a new game, and while I definitely like the global experience, it's absolutely full of little annoyances that come real close to making me stop playing.

The difficulty is extremely hard to gauge, for a lot of reasons. The early game is extremely generous with Skill Points, but this slows WAY down around the halfway point. There are 30-ish skills, each with 2 or 3 purchasable upgrades, but each skill can only have one upgrade active at a time, so after 30 skill points, you can either have all the skills with no upgrades, or 10 skills with all their upgrades, and the game doesn't seem to know how to balance that. Basic orcs become really easy really quickly, but captains can be really hard depending on what skills you have. There's also quite a bit of randomness involved, so even if you know your poo poo and breeze through everything, you can still end up with an Overlord with any combination of traits that can kill any player in a single attack, which is VERY frustrating. Oh, and he loving levels up every time you fail so... yeah. Frustrating.

The controls are kind of poo poo. I honestly don't remember if it's a product of the era, because I remember the first Assassin's Creed also having this problem but I don't know if it was fixed in 2017, but the game tries to help you control your character and make everything look fluid, but more often than not it makes you do poo poo you didn't intend. Your character can jump insanely far, so if you're trying to climb down a wall but there's anything in front of you, the game will make you go forward instead of down. Trying to hop over a small rock? Nah, surely you want to climb that wall next to it! Do you want to stab that guy in the back? Sorry, he turned around, now that button means you want to hang from the ledge!

This might be more personal, but I don't like the gear/loot. I know it changed a lot since release because they took out the "suprise mechanics", but the thing I like the least is that the gear can be upgraded up to your level after doing a challenge relating to the item you want to upgrade and varying based on the item's quality. Basic items can be upgraded whenever, rare items after a basic challenge, epic items atfer a slightly harder challenge, but Legendary gear have 3 challenges that are always the same; recruit an orc of the tribe/class related to the item and that is level 20/40/60. Not too bad by itself, but since you can only recruit orcs up to your own level, Legendary gear is only viable at max level. Sure, you can make a piece relevant for a while when you're level 40, but by the time you get to 43, any epic gear you get showered with, and that you can upgrade at any point after backstabbing 3 guys, will be better and you can't do anything about it until level 60.

Lastly, but not leastly, you lose the "SUFFER ME NOW" voice clip in the end game :(

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Inspector Gesicht posted:

The worst kind of puzzle is one you know the solution to, but it's so arduous to complete because it's overly linear/ too-strictly-timed/ slow to reset.

loving Tomb Raider.

That's how I felt the entire time I played Last Guardian. I'd look around the room, figure out the puzzle, then spend half an hour trying to get Trico to do what he's supposed to do.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
It's especially annoying because it would be EXTREMELY useful in the boss fight where the boss makes you look up at all times but also punches a million holes in the floor, usually directly under you.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

NonzeroCircle posted:

Devil May Cry 4 SE

I played the original to death on 360 and loved it so picked this up in Steam sale.
It looks great (I'm sure the HD upgrades make it look like 'how I remember it' rather than how it actually probably looked).

Oh god the hand cramps, these are what drag it down. And I haven't even unlocked any of the charge moves yet, just killed Belial.
Is there a friendlier control scheme? Using a wired 360 pad.

The only thing I changed was to set Shoot to RT with Nero to be able to charge shots while doing other stuff. Depending on your style, you might want to do something similar with Vergil, but I never felt the need to.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
Good ol' Bea Treya.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

My Lovely Horse posted:

I strongly disliked Dark Souls for a long time but then I played Bloodborne and loved it so I at least get where people are coming from now, that being said whenever someone goes "the persistent unpredictability of online invasions is what makes these games good" I think "no interacting with gamers is the bane of everything that was ever good about games"

at least you can explicitly set Bloodborne to offline.

I don't know, a system where the other player can only communicate through limited animations and very limited voice clips and where every interaction lasts 5 minutes seems like a good deal to me!

The main reason I remember finding invasions annoying in Dark Souls was the absolute dread of losing my souls. It's also annoying to start back at your last bonfire if you're exploring a new area and are looking for the next bonfire. That's actually something I'd say about the entire Souls series; they really seem balanced for repeat playthroughs. A lot of the mechanics are really frustrating when you're trying to figure them out. Like, it's super easy to kindle the "wrong" bonfires, completely mess up a weapon by upgrading it wrong, gently caress up an NPC quest line... Even in Bloodborne, I'm pretty sure 95% of players used their starting weapon for their entire first playthrough (with the possible exception of the early unlocks like LHB, Kirkhammer, etc.), because by the time you find any other weapon, yours is +8, making it really hard to tell if the new find is better and potentially making you run out of materials to upgrade.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Rockman Reserve posted:

i mean my bad but i've never experienced that and your post didn't make it clear. Were you able to see player messages and phantoms? Were you super over/under-leveled for the places you were trying? I think I had like one or two times total where I didn't get summoned/summon/get invaded within a minute of ringing a bell.

For co-op, I've had the same experience; even nowadays I get summoned in a minute or so, but for invasions I'd have to disagree; I haven't been invaded in the Nightmare in probably a year, my co-op group has pretty much never been invaded since a month after release, and even in the Loft I get invaded less than 30% of the time. I never bother killing the bell-ringing maidens anymore.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

pentyne posted:

I really like Control but when you get launch upgraded it really feels like the other powers just aren't nearly as good. The shield has utility as a "oh gently caress run away" mechanic to recover from near death, mind control was cool but felt meaningless, and I can't remember if there were any other powers.

Mind control is pretty helpful in the later encounters and in the expeditions, especially turning the healing orbs to your side. But I guess you could make a similar argument for most powers...

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Tender Bender posted:

Xenoblade Chronicles X. The combat system is a complex interlocking set of skills that involves planning synergies with yourself and your other party members, and setting up specific callouts that let you respond to your party along different triggers to build up special attacks and heals. It's really cool.

Halfway through the game you get giant mechs which are really cool. Their combat system throws out all the fun stuff from the standard system, there's no interlocking skills or callouts, you just mash stuff on cooldown. You use these mechs for most of the rest of the game.
I think I remember something similar in one of the Xenosaga games, I think Episode 1. It's been a while, but I think that you could either engage with the normal combat mechanics and level up your party, learn abilities, etc., But you could also just spend an insane amount of money on your AGWS (robots) and plow through the game. Although I think that the only ways to get that kind of money was to either grind so much that you'd become overleveled either way, or to cheat/save-scum at gambling.

Sorry, it's really been a while...

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
The bus that couldn't slow down

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

SubNat posted:

A two-fer:

Flashlights that have insanely short battery life, even though they have no mechanical use or benefit or anything. I'd understand it if the flashlight provided some mechanical benefit like puzzle solving, harming enemies, etc etc.
But it just feels like so many games have flashlights with <1 minute usetimes because 'that's just how it is.'. (Even though they'll recharge without issue in the background.)
I get why they obviously had to do it the way they did, but Alan Wake will always crack me up with its one-two punch of super obnoxious Energizer product placement and comically short flashlight battery life.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Thundercracker posted:

Rage uninstalled Control last night. I went back to it to do the two DLCs and got to a boss that takes place on a tiny platform that the giant boss is constantly destroying. You can look up at the boss to dodge his attacks and attack back or you can look at the floor and not fall. You can't do both and Control has the Remedy problem of combat being incredible hard to see clearly once poo poo starts with stuff flying in your fov all the time.

Basically Control combat kinda sucks and this one boss exacerbates all the flaws. Like Remedy thought they were clever in leaning into the faults for this fight's challenge.

The worst thing about that fight is that it would be a billion percent less frustrating if you could levitate up once you've started falling.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Nuebot posted:

A bit late to Fallout 3 DLC chat, but I think an important thing to remember is that by the time fallout 3 had released, let alone all of its DLC, Bethesda had made Shivering Isles. One of the few DLC releases that, to this day, people will stop and talk about how good it was despite the insane number of flaws Oblivion had. Shivering Isles was real good and cool.
While I do think Shivering Isles was pretty good, I think a lot of the hype comes from the fact that it was still the very early days of DLC and people were a bit wary that Expensions were dead and would be replaced with much smaller "nickel and dime" DLC bits. Shivering Isle was good, but more importantly it was reassuring.

Maybe I got my chronology wrong, but that's how I remember the Oblivion days.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
Nier is a game that's way more fun to hear about than play.

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

So... what is it?!

CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...
My first (and only) Star Ocean game was Till the End of Time and I remember spending the vast majority of the game hoping it got good (it never did). I only kept playing because I couldn't believe a sequel to a game that so many people liked could be this bad. At the very least the series found some very impressive ways to get exponentially worse with time!

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CordlessPen
Jan 8, 2004

I told you so...

Febreeze posted:

Do you just consider any game with randomized loot a lootbox? Darksiders 2 is a game where every chest drops random gear/weapons/cash, does that make them lootboxes?
They're lootcoffins.

The most egregious thing about the HZD lootbox-shaped loot is that it looks like a vestigial mechanic from a time where there would have been a Shadow of War-like pay-to-win aspect to the game. The procedurally-generated mods also fit into that idea.

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