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Yeah, anything works, really. My favorite weapon in the game is one most guides tell you to stay the hell away from and so on. It's pretty well balanced, at least on Normal. So you really don't need to worry about weapons too much; there's enough money for quite a bit of trial and error.
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Oct 21, 2015 17:00
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 In which Leon falls into pretty much every trap it's possible to fall into after killing all of the villagers, forever. edit: Funnily enough this video starts off with me discussing almost exactly what we were talking about on the previous page! 
CJacobs fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Oct 21, 2015 |
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Oct 21, 2015 21:52
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During his government training, Leon had his legs reinforced with titanium as part of the same procedure that would be performed on Chris Redfield's upper body years later. It's a lesser-known part of Resident Evil's lore.
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Oct 21, 2015 22:11
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It's also, interestingly enough, one of the less impressive parts of Leon's physique.
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Oct 21, 2015 22:15
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Watching farther into the video, I'm impressed that you caught a few things I was sure you would get tripped up by. Most people don't close the well before getting the pendant, so they get a Dirty Pendant, which is a lot less valuable. Then you dodged the rock first try, found all the medals, and didn't get blown up. Overall, not bad.
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Oct 21, 2015 22:34
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Also, you actually got the pronunciation of spinel right. It's "SPIN-el."
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Oct 21, 2015 22:38
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That well has a nasty trap - after you close it, you can walk up to it and an "Open" prompt pops up. If you do this before shooting the pendant down, you can't close it again and have to settle for the dirty one.
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Oct 21, 2015 23:10
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Blastinus posted:Most people don't close the well before getting the pendant, so they get a Dirty Pendant, which is a lot less valuable. Ah-ha! I didn't know that. The only reason I chose to try shooting it is because the plank holding it up is a different color than the well. It's like those old cartoons where you can tell straight away what's going to move because it's a different color than the background.
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Oct 21, 2015 23:19
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I'm glad you got the "well-toilet" puzzle too. I don't think I noticed the beam propping it open on my first time, and ended up dropping the pendant in the muck. Or maybe I fell prey to the "open" prompt that Gnoman mentioned; can't remember. You should totally break every box, in case it contains stuff. This is a survival horror game! You need that stuff. Yeah... I'm glad they show where the blue medallions are on the map. The positioning of some of them really would be a dick move, otherwise. You know, in the original ultra-shoddy PC-port of RE4, it doesn't show button prompts for what you actually have bound on your keyboard; it just says, like, "button 1", "button 2", etc. It makes quick-time events really hard when you're trying to remember what button is what - on top of the normal time-pressure you've got going on there. They also partially randomise which buttons you need to press from one attempt to the next. It was unfun. A definite shame since I think the quick-time events are actually pretty good in RE4 - as far as QTEs go. Though it could just be that RE4 came out before QTEs became the plague of modern games they are now. "The Big Cheese." Yes, it certainly is... very cheesy.
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Oct 22, 2015 00:16
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Thoroughly japed by the double bear-trap. 
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Oct 22, 2015 00:37
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TomViolence posted:I can't really put my finger on it, but something bugs me about the stealth kill animations in The Evil Within. It's like there's no weight or resistance going on. Sebastian doesn't even seem to really grab them, just places his arm around them and then the knife sails in like it's cutting hot butter. Piercing someone's skull with a six inch blade like that shouldn't be so smooth or effortless-looking.  incomingI just don't like how effortless he makes some things look in general, like how he snuggles a monster covered in barbed wire the same way he would hug a harmless zombie, or how he injects scary dual "barrel" control syringes into his arm without hesitating, or how he just disarms a bomb tripwire with the same speed and care that he disarms a bear trap with, or how he willingly gets back into the upgrade chair after it attaches the brain spikes the first time. These are petty complaints, but it does slowly add to a growing annoyance every time that this person in a horrifying, reality-shattering nightmare doesn't seem to act with anything resembling fear or hesitation unless it's part of a cutscene or heavily scripted encounter. As an outsider, I know nothing about who this generically grizzled person is or where he is, the animations and gameplay should be used to characterize Sebastian and his surroundings better. Instead, it breaks all of my ~~precious immersion~~ with an inconsistent tone that I feel wants me to see every enemy and even the environment as a legitimate threat to Sebastian's safety, but is undermined by instantly stealth killing the enemies and then going to the torture chair for upgrades. Then directly comparing the games in this thread opens up a bigger  RE4 does a much better job in characterizing and establishing stakes, just looking at Leon's appearance and ladder animations tells us more about the character and the game we're playing than Seabass' whole "escape from the butcher guy" intro sequence did. Even though it's Resident Evil and has been serious survival horror up til now in the series, we know that Leon is very sure of himself, that he thinks that he's the coolest mother fucker on the planet, and that we shouldn't take threats against him too seriously because he's going to jump off of a bell tower to look cool for no one else besides himself. In contrast, with Evil Within's admittedly impressive intro sequence, we know that Sebastian is resilient and determined, and that's about it besides the cop thing. Soon we learn he's not especially smart because he trusts the nurse in the cracked mirror dimension, doesn't ask her any real questions or even press her on anything she says, and worries about getting Leslie to a hospital instead of trying to make sure that neither of them touch the bomb trap that's a foot away from the jabbering mental patient aimlessly wandering around with no concept of reality. I know that we should see everything as threatening and foreign because we're stealthing by ourselves in the boobytrapped woods that look like 19th century Poland, with almost no supplies, and bulletsponge enemies that look scary to go near. But then the enemies won't follow you into the apparently safe water, you can grab the barbed wire that grows out of them without hesitating, they turn to ash in seconds when hit with a torch, can be instakilled if they don't see you, and a 50ft drop off a cliff only serves to heal Sebastian's leg, so yeah. I don't know what I'm supposed to be thinking or feeling about Seabass/Krimson City an hour into the game and that makes me apathetic even with the cool sliding terrain and eerie deserted city teasers working in the game's favor Maybe I'm thinking way too much about this whole thing, maybe I'm upset because seeing the direct comparison of TEW to a more refined game makes the niggling problems I have with that experience into bigger problems that are harder to ignore. Really though, I want Evil Within to try to be either a serious horror game that uses horror elements to make the player feel what the character feels, or an action/horror game that uses horror elements to make enemy encounters more exciting. This feels like it's trying to be both games at the same time and it makes it more like Silent Hill Homecoming to me instead of a spiritual successor to RE4. And no one wants to think of Homecoming. Ever The Door Frame fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Oct 22, 2015 |
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Oct 22, 2015 00:58
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Antistar01 posted:You know, in the original ultra-shoddy PC-port of RE4, it doesn't show button prompts for what you actually have bound on your keyboard; it just says, like, "button 1", "button 2", etc. It makes quick-time events really hard when you're trying to remember what button is what - on top of the normal time-pressure you've got going on there. They also partially randomise which buttons you need to press from one attempt to the next. It was unfun. A definite shame since I think the quick-time events are actually pretty good in RE4 - as far as QTEs go. Though it could just be that RE4 came out before QTEs became the plague of modern games they are now. Worse, it initially had two of the button prompts backwards, displaying the wrong one.
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Oct 22, 2015 01:12
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The big kick in the gut for me with the QTEs in Resident Evil 4 is that they can be tight. You have very little time to complete them and require tons of inputs if you have to mash a button. The amount of time the prompt was up for dodging the boulder CJacobs was running from is as much as you saw the prompt; you legit have less than a second to realize the QTE prompt has changed, read the buttons, switch your fingers to the buttons, and then execute it, assuming you do it correctly the first time. Otherwise your babyface agent gets squashed and I sure hope you saved recently. This is where a lot of players that don't regularly play video games got brickwalled. If you didn't complete it the first time, it comes down to doing it over and over knowing exactly when the dodge prompt will come up.
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Oct 22, 2015 01:26
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The Door Frame posted:
Those are mostly fair complaints. The game very very slowly drip-feeds you Sebastian's backstory as you will see starting in the next video or so, when really they should've frontloaded it a bit. He's actually not as generic of a protagonist as you might think, not because of WHO he is, but because of his actions in the story. Obviously I won't spoil what I mean by that but I will refer back to this post much much later in the LP when what it rings true. He is kinda dumb though which I think is pretty great. I do disagree though on the subject of the enemies losing their scare factor because you can kill them easily. They can kill you just as easily, if not moreso. The threat they pose is not just visual; what the stealth serves to do is give you an upper hand that you desperately, desperately need. I think they could have put more effort into the stealth kill animations to make them feel a bit more weighty (you should see the one from the front side!) but the slightly dumbed down stealth AI and instant kills go a long way toward making the player brave when it comes to the enemies, because when you have 2 bullets, you have no incentive to fight anything unless you're going to get something out of it. And to be fair, this is what I expected really. I knew very little about RE4 except that people consider it one of the best horror ("horror") games ever made, and The Evil Within definitely lives in its shadow. After all, it's directed by the same person and uses the same style of gameplay and the same method of storytelling. I think the reason you feel this way about the game is because as you said you can't help but compare it to RE4 because they're so incredibly similar, but at the same time just different enough. And that's true, from what I've seen so far, they definitely are. I think The Evil Within has a few missteps that RE4 so far has gotten "right" or at least better but that isn't really determining of The Evil Within's quality by itself. It is a bummer that people have been making GBS threads on it so far but again, I saw it coming. CJacobs fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Oct 22, 2015 |
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Oct 22, 2015 01:45
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Yeah, Leon dropping 2-3 stories to ground and his legs not shattering like glass is indeed hilarious, but those higher places do serve a purpose: Knife-a-Mole! One tactic for dealing with mobs of enemies is to funnel them to a ladder spot, then just knife away at people until everyone's dead. Granted, it takes plenty of time as things go on, but it is effective in places. The silly dialogue does make me wish Paul Mercier (Leon's VA in this game) would return to the series. Even if it's only for other character Mercier voices in this game.
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Oct 22, 2015 01:57
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tlarn posted:The big kick in the gut for me with the QTEs in Resident Evil 4 is that they can be tight. You have very little time to complete them and require tons of inputs if you have to mash a button. To be fair, the game makes a checkpoint save not too far from where the boulder chase happens, so there's not a lot of walking to get back to it. The real kick in the teeth is that the amount of time you have for the prompt is based on how well you were able to outrun the boulder in the first place. If you're barely keeping ahead of the thing, you don't even have a second. And the two buttons they want you to press can change on subsequent attempts, so there's an element of luck to it as well. Even if RE4's a fun game, there are definitely some unpolished elements.
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Oct 22, 2015 02:35
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CJacobs posted:Those are mostly fair complaints. The game very very slowly drip-feeds you Sebastian's backstory as you will see starting in the next video or so, when really they should've frontloaded it a bit. He's actually not as generic of a protagonist as you might think, not because of WHO he is, but because of his actions in the story. Obviously I won't spoil what I mean by that but I will refer back to this post much much later in the LP when what it rings true. He is kinda dumb though which I think is pretty great. To be completely honest with you so I don't seem like another rabid supporter of the perfect game, I never could beat RE4. I have seen let's plays and gotten to love the characters in my own time, but I cannot stress how badly that game controls. It is so unintuitive and cumbersome that I died on the intro because I couldn't figure out how to shoot, so I sat there swinging my knife at the guy until he chopped me up. I got like 50% through the PS2 version and decided to just watch the rest of it on YouTube. On top of that, I had gotten all the way through EW before I even touched a Resident Evil game. Evil Within is an exciting ride, but I hate the story and how convoluted everything is. Maybe it's because I haven't seen all of the notes or done anything besides a barebones run through, but in terms of story, atmosphere, and characterization, Evil Within falls flat for me and I haven't cared to look at it again. Of course, until someone like you came along to show all of the stuff that I probably missed. Sebastian's thickness just makes me mad because it doesn't help me understand the game any better, but I can see it being endearing like Leon's ultra-cool persona. I think the two games are bizaro mirrors of each other. RE4 looks like poo poo (except the fire effects), has one of the most time consuming inventory systems for an action game, and controls like it was made to be played by two different people using the same controller, but has some of the best gameplay pacing ever and great characters. EW plays very smoothly, the combat and visuals are great, but the characters are meh and the story is a convoluted mess. The thing that really got under my skin was seeing the direct comparison of how EW was supposed to make me feel in Leon's version of the same woods level that Sebastian was in, down to the same line of bear traps, the same house with the same perpendicular trip wires, the bonfire, and the bonfire enemy rush to deus ex machina. It bugged me baaaaaad man. It draws an unfavorable comparison on Evil Within in some of its first moments, when if it was the same level layout, but set in a city square or mall or any urbanized area, it would feel more like an homage instead of the cynically blatant attempt at recapturing the magic of RE4 in a game that has very different strengths, themes, and aesthetics. Quality as a whole talk for EW, I was mostly complaining about what we as a thread have seen so far as gameplay, which is combat via stealth in large locations. That slow pace allows for thoughts about what the game means and is trying to say, which I think is bad given how little we have to latch onto at this point in the story. In a chapter or few, when encounters start being straight up fights and you have more weapons, the game starts being a crazy adventure into the horror equivalent of dadaism, which is a lot of fun and I'm really looking forward to.
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Oct 22, 2015 03:16
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Add finding the beerstein on your first time through that map to the list of things to be amazed with. You can get a clue that it's there later but that hiding place is really sneaky. Another possibly interesting little bit - that spider that freaked you out is one of I think two in the entire game and both are completely harmless. Another reason why this is the best RE. Oh, yeah, and we've met probably the best character in the game. Luis is probably the only character with one-liners worse than Leon's; there's still a lot to look forward to there. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Oct 22, 2015 |
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Oct 22, 2015 07:01
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Whilst there's no excuse for how easy the kills in The Evil Within look I will point out that Sebastian not being scared of things actually isn't that bad. I don't think he gets that scared in the cut-scenes either, instead he just sort of looks uncomfortable and grossed out by the monsters and the unpleasantness that's going on. It's actually kind of interesting in that it shows the evolution of the horror genre of games to an extent. Most games these days marketed as 'horror' tend not to be scary so much as disgusting and cliche, so people who've played horror games in the past become less and less scared of them over time. Mirrored by Sebastian who beyond being uncomfortable with the nastiness going on seems to be taking it in stride. This however is not true of all games in the genre and plenty still do it right.
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Oct 22, 2015 08:32
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anilEhilated posted:Oh, yeah, and we've met probably the best character in the game. Luis is probably the only character with one-liners worse than Leon's; there's still a lot to look forward to there. Leon is a huge doofus who is incredibly good at actually killing monsters and doing stunts, and it's wonderful. It reminds me a lot of how Barry in Rev2 is actually really smart on his feet and an excellent fighter and survivor, he's just incapable of anything but extremely lame one-liners and dad-jokes when he tries to seem cool. It's great.
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Oct 22, 2015 08:35
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anilEhilated posted:Oh, yeah, and we've met probably the best character in the game.
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Oct 22, 2015 20:25
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I think your game is bugged. He looks all wrong from how I remember him... /Update%207/Image26.jpg) (hoping hot-linking to the archive is ok)
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Oct 22, 2015 20:59
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I got a new graphics card because my old one was starting to show its age, so let's talk about The Evil Within's general performance issues. As you may have noticed if you've played it, the game is optimized like absolute dogshit. It uses a similar engine to RAGE (idTech 5) that uses that ridiculous proprietary supertextures thing to display and stream in basically everything that has a texture, while you're playing. This is meant to reduce initial load times and general processing overhead to make overall performance have less of a plateau. It's supposed to make rendering big, open expanses easier. And to be fair, that does happen and in that aspect it works just fine. The Evil Within's load times on PC are anywhere between 10 and 20 seconds and hardly ever any more than that. On consoles the supertextures thing isn't so bad and can actually help with performance (at the expense of lots of pop-in) because they have a whoooole lot less ram/vram to work with. On PCs, it's horribly optimized and basically doesn't work at all and makes the pop-in much worse. They tried to fix this initially with the letterboxing which would hypothetically improve performance by drastically reducing the FOV that has to be rendered each frame... but the stuff inside the letterboxing isn't actually excluded from being rendered even though you can't see it because of said letterboxing. So it literally does nothing.  And The Evil Within doesn't even make use of the 'big, open expanse' thing. If you're a fan of my LPs you may have seen me complain about a similar issue with Max Payne 3 back when I was doing my playthrough of that. That game uses Rockstar's streaming-in loading technology for loading in new areas, models etc. but what that actually leads to is very very long loading times. In GTA, the world is loaded in a bubble around you so that it's always streaming parts of the game world in and out and it's a very fluid system that works well. But Max Payne 3 is a linear game with areas separated by cutscenes and loading zones, which means you can't stream an area out until the player moves on, and you can't stream a new area in until the player approaches the loading zone, which is why that game's load times in cutscenes are so drat long/arbitrary. It's a similar issue here. Tango Gameworks tried to apply the usage of id tech 5 in RAGE to a linear game like The Evil Within, and it worked out incredibly poorly. So if you want to know why the game runs like crap, there you go. I've hosed around in the game's configuration files to minimize the pop-in but you might occasionally still see it, and in addition, idtech 5 being a lovely engine means the game runs pretty much universally poorly. BUT, with my new gpu, my computer is finally powerful enough to get a solid 60 over the entire game in 1080p (except when like, a million fire effects are right in your face). So I was thinking about rerecording The Evil Within in 1080p, as 720p has some weird downscaling issues that lead to gross jaggies on basically everything in the distance. Now, that may take a couple days, so you might be getting an RE4 update without a TEW one this week. And I do apologize for that since I'm trying to stick to a real schedule for once, but I think the massive increase in quality will be worth it. CJacobs fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Oct 23, 2015 |
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Oct 23, 2015 17:51
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What's the new card? Anything sexy?
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Oct 23, 2015 18:02
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It's an EVGA Nvidia GTX 960. Nothing extremely high-end (I was gonna get a 970 but it was too expensive for my blood) but definitely nothing to scoff at either. Before this I had a GTX 760 and it was fine, but starting to show its age. Here are my current specs: It did come with tweaked clocking to make it perform better than the stock and I could overclock it if I wanted but I don't really want to considering the thing does everything I want right now!
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Oct 23, 2015 18:04
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CJacobs posted:PC stuff. That's a nice machine. The 960 is pretty great for the money.
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Oct 23, 2015 18:14
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I have a copy of Rage on a relatively low-end gaming machine. The streaming textures help make it run extremely smooth, almost on par with consoles, but literally every single texture you see on my machine starts out as a blurry and blobby long-distance texture and then loads after about half a second. Because it only renders what's on screen, it needs to reload textures whenever you look away (no matter how long you do). It feels like you're playing an Ark survivor with very bad eyesight who keeps needing to wait for his vision to focus when he looks around.
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Oct 23, 2015 21:51
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It almost sounds like someone came up with a game engine that runs the same on all systems over the min specs.
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Oct 23, 2015 22:13
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Major_JF posted:It almost sounds like someone came up with a game engine that runs the same on all systems over the min specs. It's a shortcut to let it be playable on even lower end computers, but the cost is that the game spends about a second looking butt ugly every time you shift your vision about a foot in any direction. Imagine the same texture pop-in you get on most games, but happening to every single thing you look at no matter how many times you look. It can get distracting.
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Oct 23, 2015 22:32
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Major_JF posted:It almost sounds like someone came up with a game engine that runs the same on all systems over the min specs. As this game goes very well to show, it doesn't always work out that way.
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Oct 23, 2015 23:35
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chitoryu12 posted:I have a copy of Rage on a relatively low-end gaming machine. The streaming textures help make it run extremely smooth, almost on par with consoles, but literally every single texture you see on my machine starts out as a blurry and blobby long-distance texture and then loads after about half a second. Because it only renders what's on screen, it needs to reload textures whenever you look away (no matter how long you do). It feels like you're playing an Ark survivor with very bad eyesight who keeps needing to wait for his vision to focus when he looks around. id blamed it on AMD, who blamed it back on id, but considering that it was fixed by editing files to allow more textures to remain in the RAM, I'm pretty sure RAGE was just a really poorly developed game. Wolfenstein The New Order really showed what id Tech 5 could do though, with proper attention. The level of variety of environments in that game is astounding for a big name development. I would also not be surprised at all if id created the timing of the loading of textures in RAGE on how fast consoles could turn the player camera, not a mouse.
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Oct 24, 2015 04:11
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Kibayasu posted:id blamed it on AMD, who blamed it back on id, but considering that it was fixed by editing files to allow more textures to remain in the RAM, I'm pretty sure RAGE was just a really poorly developed game. Wolfenstein The New Order really showed what id Tech 5 could do though, with proper attention. The level of variety of environments in that game is astounding for a big name development. Consoles are different in how their power is divided. The rough of it is they're really good when it comes to graphics (which is why they can accomplish quality graphics at 60 FPS for a fraction of the cost of a PC with the same power), but are useless for most everything else.
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Oct 24, 2015 05:35
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CJacobs posted:It's an EVGA Nvidia GTX 960. Nothing extremely high-end (I was gonna get a 970 but it was too expensive for my blood) but definitely nothing to scoff at either. Before this I had a GTX 760 and it was fine, but starting to show its age. Here are my current specs: Sorry to break topic, but how does the 960 handle other games at that resolution? I need a new graphics card and everyone is telling me to just ignore the 960 and get a 970, but I'm only using a 1080p monitor, the 970 seems like overkill.
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Oct 24, 2015 09:40
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So far, excellently! I haven't played a single game since getting this thing that I can't run in 1080p at a solid 60/30 fps depending on the framerate lock. I was probably most surprised by The Witcher 3 which I went from being able to run kinda-okay on medium-ish settings to perfect no-frame-drops 60 fps with all settings on ultra. It's actually kind of mind-boggling how much of a difference it made in general.
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Oct 24, 2015 13:54
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Haerc posted:Sorry to break topic, but how does the 960 handle other games at that resolution? I need a new graphics card and everyone is telling me to just ignore the 960 and get a 970, but I'm only using a 1080p monitor, the 970 seems like overkill. Honestly, if you don't need/use the nvidia feature set the AMD offerings get you a little more oompf for the dollar based on bench marks. And this is coming from someone who only runs nvidia.
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Oct 24, 2015 16:54
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So, I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that I got the game re-recorded! And it looks awesome in 1080p/60fps! The bad news is that it took 2 days because the drat thing's 15 hours long, so I don't have a video for you today. Tomorrow I will, though! 
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Oct 26, 2015 17:05
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 I hope you learned the mechanics during the opening sequence because boy does this game throw you to the wolves. How will Sebastian survive? No really, how will he survive? These odds are like downright impossible.
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Oct 27, 2015 19:48
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This chapter of the game is the biggest difficulty spike of them all and it gets way easier later, yeah. I do like the level design, though. It's not a wide open sandbox but it is a good solid playground of discovery and destruction...with you getting stabbed in the face with a knife every so often.
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Oct 27, 2015 20:58
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I wish I could have done this chapter and one coming up later on blind in my playthrough. They're both pretty good for first impressions!
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Oct 27, 2015 21:59
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Those bombs are really nasty; it feels like they've got a weird delay between when you press the button and the needle actually stopping. They got to be so bad that I just started avoiding them. Trying to disarm them for a little bit of scrap wasn't worth the risk. And yeah, this village area was really hard! The similarities to RE4 become really obvious here; an early difficulty spike, in a somewhat non-linear, dilapidated, European-esque village full of not-zombies. There's even a mini-boss with a chainsaw. Evil Within does introduce some stealth elements to it though, so it can feel a little different initially.
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Oct 28, 2015 00:53
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