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lenoon posted:Wolfenstein tno is a very silly game, with a very silly protagonist, but the world building is pretty good. Little mentions of nazi-fied history (the Beatles singing das Blau u-boat) and references to other nazis-won-ww2 media make it feel more like a lived world, for the brief amount of time you're in it. It's also really pretty. Yeah, I've found it struck a really nice balance between somewhat more serious moments and the silliness inherent to the setting. You get to have BJ going maximum grumble about the cost of war and all that, and then half an hour later he busts out something like: "Nazis dead, Nazi robot dead, broke all your poo poo. Helicopters secured." TNO really turned out to be way, way better game than I'd ever expected.
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# ¿ Jul 14, 2014 14:33 |
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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 14:21 |
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Arx Monolith posted:I had 3 runes on my bow that were all 30+% chance to recover focus on headshot. They must have stacks or all run independantly, because I could pick off as many orcs as I had shots without focus running out. Couple combat brands later, run ahead of the group, pop, pop, pop. Watchin' Uruks.. flail about and then proceed to drop. Yeah, percentual runes like that stack additively. As long as you've got sufficient free slots it's pretty easy to get certain effects to have a 100% chance. Fortunately becoming ridiculously overpowered is really just part of the fun towards the end. Probably my favourite thing about Shadows of Mordor are the orc captains called "The Friendly". One time I was sneaking up on this guy and tried to brutally murder him with my dagger by jumping on his back from above. He just catches me, throws me off of himself, and then spreads his arms, gets a huge grin on his face and goes : "My lad!"
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# ¿ Oct 13, 2014 09:58 |
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Male Man posted:Drake is supposed to be preternaturally lucky; all those times he appears to get hit are actually close misses. Instead of losing health his luck literally runs out. Why that's represented by rapid-onset glaucoma is anyone's guess. I think the Brothers in Arms games did a similar thing. When you were out of cover and enemies were shooting at you, for a while they would just miss while your teammates scream at you to get back into cover. Only if you kept that up for too long eventually the enemy would zero in on you and land a hit, which is instantly fatal.
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# ¿ Oct 20, 2014 12:53 |
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bewilderment posted:Yeah it's nice that in Shadow of Mordor there's an act one mission that's "Go to this Orc Coliseum and kill 100 dudes in open combat" and you can just go there and do it pretty much as soon as you unlock the missions for that area. Yeah, that was pretty funny, she just straight up goes "nope, nothing there at all". While all the romancing is still ridiculously shoehorned in and , at least this time they do try to have a bit of fun with it. When you try to flirt with that diplomatic advisor lady, she'll generally just be completely oblivious to your advances. "So, now that you've settled in with the inquisition, how do you like it here?" "Well, some people here certainly make is more pleasant to be around." "Oh, really? You must introduce me to them!"
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# ¿ Dec 4, 2014 11:52 |
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In Dragon Age: Inquisition, at one point you fight a bunch of demons that are basically the manifestations of people's fears. Their physical appearance is just that of big spiders, but if you select them, their name reads things like "Blood", "Drowning", "Mages", that sort of thing. So I'm walking around in that area and see another one of those spiders, and when I select it to see what fear it represents its name just reads: "Ironically, Spiders"
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# ¿ Dec 10, 2014 00:23 |
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Speaking of Wolfenstein New Order, another great thing was that they actually used native german speakers for pretty much all the Nazi's dialogue and signage. Hearing some death camp guards deliver a pitch-perfect "Komm, gehn ma saufen." ("Come on, let's get wasted.") in a heavy dialect was hilarious.
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# ¿ Dec 22, 2014 22:20 |
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:It never ceases to amuse me that some players unironically accept the Imperials as the good guys when the game literally dresses them up as Romans. Cue "what have the romans ever done for us?" But I guess for most people it's less that the imperials are the designated pristine good guys, but just that they still end up looking fairly good next to Thalmor (who are basically the fantasy-gestapo) and the Stormcloaks (who are very fond of ethnic cleansing and segregation, in addition to being just plain old incompetent).
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# ¿ Jan 1, 2015 15:07 |
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WickedHate posted:The Thalmor were probably more willing to not give up and turn it into mutually assured destruction unless the Imperials gave them incentives to drop it. I think there was also the issue that the Thalmor were fighting at two fronts at once (against the Redguards) and also needed enough troops to pacify the newly gained territories. While they probably would have been able to bring enough forces to bear to crush the Empire again, they would have needed to divert so many forces that their position everywhere else would have been dangerously weakened.
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# ¿ Jan 1, 2015 19:23 |
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Your Gay Uncle posted:this is because Bioware never intended for you to be able to port things over from Dragon Age to Dragon Age 2, they had to shoe horn it in at the last minute because the fans freaked out. On that note, I really do enjoy that for Inquisition they've moved away from importing some file and instead just offered an online tool for fine-tuning your world state. It's been years since I played those other two games so I don't even have those files any more, and it's also incredibly handy for setting up an entirely different background for a replay.
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# ¿ Jan 3, 2015 18:02 |
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Evilreaver posted:Evolve has some great lines. Yeah, some of Bucket's lines are pretty great. "Look, a bird swarm! Giant monster that way! Robot stating the obvious!"
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# ¿ Feb 16, 2015 18:17 |
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muscles like this? posted:In The Witcher 3 the flavor text is written by Dandelion, a bard friend of Geralt's. So you get a lot of commentary on standard RPG tropes where he makes fun of Geralt doing random poo poo for people and looting corpses. Yeah, it gives a nice ring to even the most basic quest descriptions. "And so, as always in need of coin, our Geralt readily accepted the contract. Actually I wonder, why is he in need of coin all the time, what does he even spend it on? Booze? Even more swords? Hairbands?"
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# ¿ May 25, 2015 22:46 |
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Sleeveless posted:My favorite little thing about Phantom Pain is that Quiet's ripped pantyhose are almost identical to how Eva's stockings looked after she got zapped by Volgin in 3. The dude isn't even subtle about his fetishes. So, has Kojima finally made good on his promise to make us "ashamed of our words and deeds"?
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# ¿ Aug 29, 2015 14:29 |
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JPrime posted:This thread is making me want to get MGS5. If I've literally never played any of them before (I might have played the original Metal Gear on the NES way back when), will I be lost? I'm in the same boat and got it anyways, but I'm getting along fairly well. If you google for it there a few summaries by some gaming sites that give a reasonable overview over the broad strokes of the world, though not the particulars. Additionally, there are a whole bunch of background tapes ingame (that you can actually listen to while playing) that additionally expound on certain characters and concepts.
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# ¿ Sep 13, 2015 10:14 |
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toasterwarrior posted:In XCOM2, mugshots of your alien-killing, collaborator-fragging badasses show up in wanted posters XCOM 2 has a lot of great things, but so far my favourite is probably the sword that the Ranger class gets. They managed to get the animation for it just right, it's ridiculously satisfying to use. Every time I meet a new type of alien I make sure to properly greet them on earth by going medieval on their rear end.
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# ¿ Feb 6, 2016 09:31 |
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Sleeveless posted:http://store.steampowered.com/app/296830/ Oh, that's nice to hear. I only played the first one which was almost completely linear (IIRC there was only one scripted way for each kill), so I ended up holding off on the sequel. Probably gonna give it a try now.
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# ¿ Mar 26, 2016 20:24 |
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Away all Goats posted:In Overwatch there's a character who wears and fights in rollerblades and there's a subtle sort of 'slide' to his movements as he runs around in first person view. Similarly, there's one that hovers, and he doesn't have any camera bob whatsoever. And the particularly short dwarf has his perspective much closer to the ground than anybody else.
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# ¿ May 10, 2016 09:21 |
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I finally got around to playing Shadowrun: Dragonfall, and there was a neat little thing for resolving a side-quest. During one break-in into a biological research centre, you stumble across a small lab that's been locked down in automatic quarantine because of a major phosgene (basically chlorine gas but worse) spill. To get in there you'll need to vent its atmosphere, which the system is refusing to do as long as there are dangerous compounds in the air. Now, if you've a good enough hacker along you have the usual option of brute-forcing the thing to vent it anyways. Or you could just ignore it and get to the goal another way, only missing out on some minor goodies along the way. However, the system also allows you to introduce new chemicals into the lab, by entering their formula into a text field. That looks a bit like a random gimmick at first, but then I decided to look up phosgene online. It turns out that you can neutralise it with ammonia. So I look up ammonia's chemical formula (NH3), enter that into the game, and bingo, all the nasty gas is neutralised and I could walk right in.
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# ¿ Aug 3, 2016 15:15 |
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:it was only one server, but they're all hosted by the same guy so I wouldn't put it past something in this game to upset one of those servers so much that it has a knock-on effect on the others, but that's because I don't really understand computers Yeah, in that case there's a good chance that many of the individual game-servers (i.e. instances of the game's server executable) run concurrently on the same physical machine. So if one of those instances breaks badly enough to cause the whole machine to lock up, you could totally see all the servers that run on the same machine die at the same time just because of a single rogue dairy product.
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# ¿ Aug 12, 2016 11:54 |
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Strife posted:In Bethesda games, the NPC will actually walk from point A to B, and true to Bethesda games, sometimes they just don't get there because they stopped to be mauled by a bear or something. I think the most impressive example of that I've seen was in Skyrim. After the first dragon attack, the head of the guard in Whiterun will comment that she'll send additional forces to the small village you passed through to keep it safe. In most other games, that would just be an insignificant aside that both the game and the player would immediately forget about. But here if you follow the head guard outside right afterwards, you'll actually see her walk up to one of her soldiers, tell him to head over to the village, and he will indeed do the whole trek over there and then permanently stay there. It can be pretty handy, too. I think at one point I had a (probably randomly generated quest) to covertly assassinate a dude, and I happened to run into him in the middle of nowhere on the road between two cities. Easiest kill ever.
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# ¿ Nov 23, 2016 13:51 |
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wafflemoose posted:The more I look at that picture the more I get. I figure that's basically the artist equivalent of an author who gets paid by the word. "Hmm drat, still a little slim. Better add another belt."
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# ¿ Jul 3, 2017 14:53 |
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Prokhor Zakharov posted:A big part of Spec Ops message is that the stuff that's presented as fun badass mil poo poo that Call of Duty style games have players do would actually have pretty horrific consequences/implications in real life. Yeah, it's pretty great how that mentality even extends to Walker himself. At the beginning, you're given a very clear and delineated objective: Get in, get a general overview whether any survivors are left, and then get out to report back so a proper relief effort can be made if necessary. Except then you run into trouble, and Walker immediately snaps into the videogame-protagonist mentality, as he figures it's now up to them to resolve the situation. And in a regular game (or movie, for that matter), he'd be right: There it all boils down to just one hardened hero protagonist to go through and resolve the whole thing through grit and determination. But Spec Ops doesn't play by those rules, and instead the actually "realistic" thing happens when you throw in a group of heavily armed aggressors into a desperate and delicate situation: Everything gets even worse. It was quite the experience to look back at the end and realise that everything Walker and co did just worsened the situation. Just about nothing they did actually helped anyone at all. So much death and destruction could have been avoided if Walker had just done his drat job and hosed back off once his mission was done, but that wouldn't have been "heroic".
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# ¿ Jul 14, 2017 22:18 |
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Archonex posted:Total War: Warhammer is a fantastic game that is easily the best offering we're likely to see in years. But there's little touches that push it from being excellent to being seriously impressive. Like the fact that they actually worked a language into the Dwarven race and then inscribed it into runes on the citadels. And on the artillery rocks their side fires. Presumably the latter is basically Dwarven for "gently caress you.". They took being a nerd to master class levels and it loving owns. Another great little thing is the melee combat of the Fay Enchantress. For reference, this is her: She's the legendary lord of the Carcassonne (read: pseudo-French) faction, dipping pretty heavily into the whole arthurian lady of the lake myth. She's basically the very image of the stereotypical magic user: lots of spells, wears only a flimsy dress, and when she's not riding an actual unicorn side-saddle she literally floats above the ground. She doesn't even carry any sort of weapon, and that's in a setting where even literally every other magic user rolls around with at least a sword by default (such as the Damsel behind and to the right of her in that image). So she's really not a character who you'd ever want to put into melee. Except when you do, suddenly this happens: http://i.imgur.com/vs0V3YV.mp4 That's right, she just picks dudes up and powerbombs their poo poo. She's still fairly vulnerable in melee combat, but she can absolutely ruin the day of any old line unit. It's pretty great how they went the extra mile to give this character a whole set of unique animations for a circumstance that you're pretty unlikely to ever get into in the first place.
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# ¿ Jul 15, 2017 20:52 |
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Josef bugman posted:I love all of the voices in Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War the first one is just hammy acting on top of hammy acting and it just makes everything so much fun to listen to and play as. Dawn of War always stands out in my mind as the one RTS with the most attention to detail put into the presentation and atmosphere. It wasn't just really fun mechanically, it actually really drew me in and made me want to charge in there to slice up some space marines just for the visceral payoff. Also, it still has one of the best videogame intros ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtAH7kGEqic
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# ¿ Jul 21, 2017 22:17 |
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food court bailiff posted:The plot in the BlazBlue games is so batfuckingly insane that I love it to death even if I don't care nearly enough to try to piece it all together. I bought my brother a copy of Centralfiction since he was kinda on a fighting game kick and he mentioned how he was excited to check the story out. I just kinda laughed at him, because, well... http://blazblue.kumodori.com/ I mean, there's insane anime bullshit, and then there's that. Yeah, I think at one point I mananged to actually sort of almost put it together after repeated playthroughs. Something about repeating, sorta-parallel timestreams all running in a loop or suchlike, combined with a whole lot of additional weirdness from each character that usually ties back into the setting and connects to everybody else. I remember only fragments now, because it was ludicrously huge and complex, not unlike the movie Primer. It's completely incidental to the actual gameplay, but somehow I really appreciate that some dude actually sat down and carefully plotted the whole mess out when designing this game because they felt this is a story that needed to be told. Keep on keeping on, crazy designer person.
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# ¿ Aug 6, 2017 00:20 |
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Joey Freshwater posted:Another one for Prey. During the course of the story you have to go outside of the station for the first time to get a key from a dead body that's in an airlock. You take the key to gain access to a room to fix a thing. You can do this and then leave the room. There's another one of these I just stumbled over. Very early in the game you pass through a room with a locked safe, and a whiteboard that reads "Safe code: XXXX" with the numbers wiped off. A little later you watch one of those looking glass videos filmed earlier in that very room, and sure enough when you walk over to the side you can see that same whiteboard with the numbers still un-wiped. It requires a bit of backtracking to an area you usually wouldn't go to, but it does have some neat goodies and makes you feel super smug for figuring it out.
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# ¿ Sep 1, 2017 15:45 |
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Mokinokaro posted:IIRC, Ironside objected to a lot of the game's themes and felt his Sam Fisher wouldn't do a lot of what the game had him doing. For example, it was clear in Chaos Theory that Fisher is anti-torture yet Blacklist has a fair number of scenes of bad guys being tortured by Sam and allies as part of their interrogation. Yeah, it's... very much a different character in Blacklist. He used to have a pretty sardonic and slightly cynical streak in the earlier games, whereas Blacklist Fisher is pretty straightforward and gung-ho. Also he kind of appears and acts like somebody about 20 years younger than the near-retirement Sam Fisher of Conviction.
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# ¿ Sep 3, 2017 21:30 |
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Somfin posted:I love Birth of a Wish and its variations, and Weight of the World sends tingles up my spine every time I hear it (goddamn how can one song twist in meaning so many times), but the sweeping majesty of Beauvoir just floors me every time. They made extraordinary use of their vocalists, particularly J'Nique Nicole. Yeah, I haven't even played the game very much (my aging PC just can't manage it), but Weight of the World just kills me every time I listen to it. The soundtracks for those games are ludicrously on point.
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# ¿ Sep 11, 2017 13:36 |
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Mr. Flunchy posted:Kane and Lynch: Dead Men is an inarguably lovely game packed with escort missions, instafail stealth sections, awkward sniping missions and just generally crap game mechanics. K&L also had a really interesting multiplayer mode, and to this day I wish it would have been attached to a better game or had otherwise taken off. Basically, it's a pseudo co-op deal where all players are a crime squad going on a series heists together against NPC cops and security. You go in guns blazing, stuff your bags with money (the longer you stay the more money you get) and then try to make it to a getaway car. By default, all players who make it to the getaway car pool all the money they carry and it's split evenly among the survivors. However, the actual goal of the game is for you personally to come out with the greatest amount of money of all players, and splitting fairly doesn't help much with that. So you can also try to kill one or several of your accomplices, take the money they're carrying, and not have to worry about splitting. But doing that flags you as a traitor, so all the other players can murder you right back with no repercussions, and of course everyone will remember it in the subsequent rounds. So if you're feeling a little less murderous and more passive-aggressive, you can also bribe the driver of the getaway car to drive off prematurely, leaving the rest of your group to fend for themselves for several minutes until the getaway comes back. With a bit of luck some or all of them get killed by the police, so you don't have to share your hard-earned money with as many accomplices or even at all. It's a really fun and interesting dynamic, and I hope some other actually good game will pick it up again eventually. Perestroika has a new favorite as of 12:30 on Sep 14, 2017 |
# ¿ Sep 14, 2017 12:16 |
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poptart_fairy posted:If I remember right one of the Splinter Cell games that put mercenaries (rifles and traps) versus spies (stealth and gadgets) allowed the latter to grab the former, muffling the mercenary's team communication but allowing the spy to talk to grabbed individual. If a merc managed to knock a spy down to the ground with a melee attack, they could also return the favour during the execution. In some iterations of spies vs. mercs there were also gadgets that allowed you to covertly listen in on the enemy's voice chat, too. I think one of the later Splinter Cell games also had a coop mode where the ingame voice chat could be heard by the enemy NPCs, alerting them to your presence. So you always had to whisper when sneaking close to enemies. Or alternatively you could should "OI, FUCKER!" to lure them closer to you.
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# ¿ Sep 14, 2017 13:15 |
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Strom Cuzewon posted:So the Jews DO secretly control the world? Because....uh....that has some baggage. Nah, from what I remember from the game, that group basically just kept to themselves and tinkered/did research without paying much attention to the rest of the world. They basically considered the act of invention a kind of religious ceremony. The only time they did intervene was by giving some of their tech to the US in response to the Nazis digging some up first, but that ended up being too little, too late.
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# ¿ Nov 3, 2017 23:09 |
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Hattie Masters posted:what game is this i need it in my life yesterday Looks like Divinity: Original Sin 2.
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# ¿ Nov 13, 2017 13:14 |
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Shai-Hulud posted:I love how in Wolfenstein 2 they used german voice actors for the German characters. Even the random soldiers who talk about terror Billy or just chat about their day speak perfect german. Even better is that they went the extra mile and made the German spoken in there basically period-appropriate. It's not a huge difference, but you can definitely tell that it's not just colloquial modern German, but just a little bit old-fashioned. Which is perfectly appropriate, given that the Nazis absolutely would be the kind of people to make sure their language never changed the least bit from how it was like in the thirties.
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# ¿ Nov 18, 2017 23:33 |
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Samovar posted:I'd been hearing that it wasn't that good, but that's just insulting. It's basically just par for the course now. The last CoD set in WWII also just straight-up copied that fountain scene from Enemy at the Gates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_ZYyXgf0MU
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# ¿ Nov 19, 2017 10:57 |
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exquisite tea posted:Hellblade is one of my favorite games of 2017 but it's hard to recommend because it's not for everyone. The gameplay isn't awful by any means but it's quite simple and isn't the main core of the experience. If you come in purely expecting complex hack & slash combat or brainbending puzzles then you'll be disappointed. It's one of those "executes on a dedicated artistic vision to become more than the sum of its parts" kind of game and is worth experiencing for the combination of the visuals, audio and story. If you've enjoyed games like Shadow of the Colossus, Silent Hill 2, or SOMA then Hellblade shares some common DNA there. Yeah, same here. For example, there are a few extended fight sequences in that take a really long time and start to kind of drag. Taken on their own, those parts were frankly not very good, gameplay-wise. However, since I played through the whole game in just two long marathon sessions, that actually worked to the game's advantage. These super long extended knock-down, drag-out fights really emphasized the sheer struggle and attrition on the part of the protagonist, which made the final release at the end that much more impactful.
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# ¿ Mar 6, 2018 20:51 |
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Kit Walker posted:Alright I finished Hellblade and god drat was that an experience. It really is true that just about every aspect of the game is designed to express the themes it's going for. And there really are so many little things that are great about the game. Senua's appearance changes in minor ways throughout the whole game, like how her war paint gets smudged and is almost totally gone by the end. The game also implies that if you die too many times you'll eventually be permakilled (as the corruption spreads further with each death) and lose your save file completely, but this is a lie. The corruption does actually spread a little further each time (up until a certain point) but the idea that permadeath is a possible consequence is just there to gently caress with you. Heck, it's even thematicaly appropriate what with Senua herself being misled so many times in her life by the people around her. Also, the default combat difficulty is "auto," which I'm guessing is a dynamic setting and seems to be tuned well enough that you always feel like you're just barely managing to win. Another really cool part in relation to her illness was how the voices changed in the very final stretch. Up until then, the voices had always been a discordant cacophony. Even when they were technically helpful, such as pointing out an enemy behind you, it was still a chaotic and panicky mess of sounds. But then, during the very final sequence, that changed. The voices didn't go away entirely, but now there was only one single voice, calm and supportive. It's such a simple thing, but extremely effective at conveying the sense of purpose and focus that Senua had found at that point.
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# ¿ Mar 15, 2018 11:19 |
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FactsAreUseless posted:This is why I never minded Quiet in MGSV, or characters in Hideki Kamiya games. Kojima is emulating classic spy and action movies, which are very male-centric and full of sexy action women, and Kamiya is pretty up-front about being like "oh I do this because I like the sexy women." It's a lot better than trying to pretend they're being empowered by it. On the other hand: https://twitter.com/hideo_kojima_en/status/376424398023962624
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# ¿ Apr 4, 2018 16:04 |
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The upcoming Battletech also does that, allowing you to pick a pronoun (he/she/they) in addition to the visual customisation. Of course the usual suspects immediately threw a shitfit, complaining about effort being "wasted" on something like that, even though the pronoun selector probably only took like 30 minutes to implement.
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# ¿ Apr 7, 2018 09:43 |
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RBA Starblade posted:Dark Messiah had some real fun morality choices too. Halfway through the game it's revealed that your partner is a succubus and you are the son of Satan. Wow! You were brainwashed into forgetting that so you could kill Satan for humanity and save the world. Now that you remember though the succubus suggests killing and usurping Satan instead (she's like bonded to you or something and trying to weasel you to power so she can also have power). The third option you can choose at the very end is to blow everyone off, decide you love your dad, and free Satan and rule as father and son. Oh drat, I never even knew about that particular option even though I played through it several times. When I went the bad route I still freed whatsherface, probably because I didn't realise that leaving her was an option at the time. She gave me an ultimatum to exorcise the succubus, and when I didn't I kinda had to murder her right in the face.
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# ¿ May 17, 2018 12:46 |
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Inzombiac posted:I'm still waiting for an action game that you can play normally or go full strategist and treat the characters as programmable pawns. Check out Gratuitous Space Battles, if you haven't yet. The whole idea behind that game is that all the player input happens before the actual battle, and none during. You customise your ships, set up your fleet, order them into formations, and give each ship detailed orders how it's supposed to behave. Then you hit go and get to watch the fireworks as the battle plays out without any further input from the player. Also, it looks pretty.
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# ¿ May 18, 2018 11:00 |
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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 14:21 |
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exquisite tea posted:PoE was honestly one of the most boring games I have ever played, and I've played a lot of slow-rear end CRPGs, so I'm really hesitant to try PoE2 even if people say it's much improved over the original. Yeah, after hearing good things about PoE 2, I went back to PoE 1 and tried to actually finish it so that I'd have a save to import. Just couldn't manage it, quit somewhere about halfway through (at least I hope it was at least halfway, because otherwise oof). There's just so little momentum to the plot, and few of the sidequests were all that interesting so far. So I decided gently caress that, I'll go into PoE 2 blind. Pirate adventures here I come.
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# ¿ Jun 2, 2018 15:29 |