Gaming Discussion Thread

Was going to try Skyrim on my Switch last night after a LONG time of not playing it, but for whatever reason my Joycons decided to be like "NOPE! We won't let ya play wireless off the TV anymore hur hur! :troll:" (I imagine for most that's a minor issue, but for me it really sucks...)

I've tried reading instructions on what could be the issue, but me being not techy AT all, it goes over my head and thus I got to wait for my friend to come over in order to fix them. (Which who knows how long that will be, since her work schedule is hectic and thus can hardly find time to visit.) I've also tried different games and they all work in handheld mode, but when I try to play on the TV, the controllers don't respond and their green lights only flash & then turn off. Never had this issue before, and I really don't want to buy new Joycons, so hopefully my friend can fix them.

In the meantime, I guess I'll figure out what I want to do for my next Skyrim character. I'm thinking of trying a Breton for the first time and RP'ing him as an Adventurer ala Indiana Jones or Joseph Joestar. Other ideas are an Orc, (which would also be a first for me) or a High Elf and RP them as a Thalmor/Thalmor's "assistant."
 
I beat Cyberpunk 2077. What a not great ending that was, and the game is marred by countless oddities (I had a relatively bug-free experience, myself) that I wonder about. The game would need a No Man's Sky treatment, rumour-denying be damned, because so many of its moving parts never really interact or change the gameplay in meaningful ways.

  • The consumables are missable, and I never remembered to use those "get 20% more health for 1800 seconds" things, nor did I ever find a use for the rebreather potions. Soda cans are just crafting cruft and having 200 different types of fake meat in your inventory isn't very engaging.
  • The loot system is utter crap for the most part. You kill 50 dudes and then your pockets are full of shit weapons and ugly shoes that you'll just sell, and most rare guns you find aren't much better than what you found 10 seconds ago on some nameless mook.
    Related to this: fucking shops are worthless. Everything is very expensive in the beginning, and if you buy a cool gun you'll find a better one after a battle 10 minutes later. In the end, everything is just shit and inflation hits hard (but I still had more than 600k eddies after buying every vehicle in the game) so there is no need to buy stuff unless you want to upgrade your look. And that is hard, too, because the store inventories are mostly randomised with not enough rhyme or reason for them to be reliable.
  • A lot of the clothes are really terrible, and the character creator is oddly limited, and the lack of cyberware is odd, given how the original tabletop RPG was chock-full of chrome you could get.
  • Driving is crap on a mouse and keyboard, but I installed a mod that at least made the bikes fun to drive. The AI is shit as well, so I'm baffled by the racing side-missions. Sure, it's fun to hang out with Claire, but the game is so obviously cheating to even give you the illusion to make it a race.
  • The perk trees range from uninspiring to okay, but the perk system and skill levelling is a PITA, and grinding your weapon skills just makes the game feel even more janky and full of weird systems.
  • The Mantis Blades aren't even that cool.
  • Stealth is a nice idea, but it's so bugged that V usually body slams unconcious foes or throws them in the air when trying to set down a choked body. It's clear they wanted to pay lip service to Deus Ex's non-lethality options, but it's hard here. You can't even see if someone is dead or not by using your Kiroshi optics. Enemy view cones are odd, and it's hard to peek out from behind corners since there's no dedicated button for that.
  • Crafting is just... uhng, and upgrading your gear is way too costly for the minimal return of investment given.
  • Night City isn't much bigger than my hometown, and I did use fast travel and running a lot due to the game not feeling very much like a city after 10 hours or so.
  • The factions are interesting in and of themselves, but the near-complete lack of faction play feels like a missed opportunity.
  • This ties in to this: lack of choices. A lot of the time whatever you choose isn't very meaningful, but I appreciate the game trying to get me to roleplay now and then. Still, this is as much a roleplaying game as Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.
Despite all this, I liked the game, but CDPR shot themselves in the foot by overpromising and then underdelivering oh so very hard. Credulous gamers ate the marketing they were spoonfed, because of course this was gonna be the best thing since sliced bread and the developers can do no wrong and go back to the programming mines so we can get our DLC faster etc.

The sex scenes were also terrible to sit through, so there's that. I want my innocence back.
 
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Sekiro's Last Boss Spoilers:
Fuuucking hell, it took me forever to beat Phase 3/Isshin's Second Phase, but once I did I got the asshole down to less than half Vitality on Phase 4 before I kicked the bucket. At least it's not a radical departure from Phase 3, like that one was to Phase 2.

I'm definitely stopping here today because it's very late, and I feel that's as good a stopping point as I'm gonna get without some sleep.

I should probably look up what's the most broken prosthetic tool and fuck him up with it when I get back to Phase 4. Lack of experimentation is often the thing that bites me most in the ass with these types of games - to illustrate the point: can you believe I've basically played the entirety of the game so far with Whirlwind Fucking Slash as my one Combat Art? Yikes.

Anyway, at least Genichiro and Sword Isshin are little more than formalities by this point, and I've definitely gotten a lot better at hanging on against Spear Bastard Isshin. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be celebrating kicking his ass.
 
Finished Danganronpa 2, but I'm not sure if I should try out some of the other modes. I kinda want to hang out more with Imposter and Teruteru and complete those report cards.

I have Danganronpa V3 already and I'm tempted to start it tonight... Really hope they improved some of the game modes in the debates here.
 
Trying to do a Strength build in Demon's Souls is a pain in the ass if you're like me and want to pick the class with the highest starting strength. The Barbarian class has zero armor to start and what you do get has no defensive value at all. After dying a bazillion times and nearly breaking one weapon I finally got the boss door open. Might take a little break since I largely just wanted to get started tonight and you have to get past the first section after the tutorial in order for the ability to level up your character to be unlocked (and I'm basically right there, the first boss is fairly simple anyways).

Also started a Grounded+ playthrough in The Last of Us Part 2... holy crap what was I thinking??? xD

This is absolutely nasty with next to no HUD! I can at least get around the lack of ammo counters by going into the inventory to check the total ammo count and I think the way I have the accessibility options set is allowing me to cheat (I have enhanced listen mode turned on cause I tend to have a hard time with finding things and sometimes I get easily turned around and lost) but man this is going to be crazy. I just barely managed to reach Seattle Day 1 so that has to count for something!
 
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So we did the River City Girls co-op, made it to Yamada, died a lot, then gave up. Buying this game was a mistake as much as I hate to admit it, just not very fun with the fucking pinpoint positioning needed and enemies breaking your combos constantly but you not theirs. The block/parry stuff is near impossible to pull off with that short time window, blocking might as well just not exist at all. Leveling up and boosting stats does next to nothing it feels and most items are pretty eh considering their hefty prices.

Guess I'll give RCG another try soon since I spent 30€ on that but for now I'm in the mood for something more accessible, like Nioh 2.
 
Holy shit, I did it. It didn't even take me many tries after sleeping. Goes to show that some rest and a clear head are often your best weapons.

The fight was badass, perhaps my favorite in the whole game - at least among the ones I've seen so far, which I think is all but two.

Now I'll need to do another full run pretty much just to get more Lapislazuli for prosthetic upgrades, but hopefully it'll go quickly since Wolf's now much stronger and better equipped, plus I'll bypass all the secondary stuff. And after that's done...

Shura Time, baby.
 
HasseRovdjur said:
I beat Cyberpunk 2077. What a not great ending that was, and the game is marred by countless oddities (I had a relatively bug-free experience, myself) that I wonder about. The game would need a No Man's Sky treatment, rumour-denying be damned, because so many of its moving parts never really interact or change the gameplay in meaningful ways.

  • The consumables are missable, and I never remembered to use those "get 20% more health for 1800 seconds" things, nor did I ever find a use for the rebreather potions. Soda cans are just crafting cruft and having 200 different types of fake meat in your inventory isn't very engaging.
  • The loot system is utter crap for the most part. You kill 50 dudes and then your pockets are full of shit weapons and ugly shoes that you'll just sell, and most rare guns you find aren't much better than what you found 10 seconds ago on some nameless mook.
    Related to this: fucking shops are worthless. Everything is very expensive in the beginning, and if you buy a cool gun you'll find a better one after a battle 10 minutes later. In the end, everything is just shit and inflation hits hard (but I still had more than 600k eddies after buying every vehicle in the game) so there is no need to buy stuff unless you want to upgrade your look. And that is hard, too, because the store inventories are mostly randomised with not enough rhyme or reason for them to be reliable.
  • A lot of the clothes are really terrible, and the character creator is oddly limited, and the lack of cyberware is odd, given how the original tabletop RPG was chock-full of chrome you could get.
  • Driving is crap on a mouse and keyboard, but I installed a mod that at least made the bikes fun to drive. The AI is shit as well, so I'm baffled by the racing side-missions. Sure, it's fun to hang out with Claire, but the game is so obviously cheating to even give you the illusion to make it a race.
  • The perk trees range from uninspiring to okay, but the perk system and skill levelling is a PITA, and grinding your weapon skills just makes the game feel even more janky and full of weird systems.
  • The Mantis Blades aren't even that cool.
  • Stealth is a nice idea, but it's so bugged that V usually body slams unconcious foes or throws them in the air when trying to set down a choked body. It's clear they wanted to pay lip service to Deus Ex's non-lethality options, but it's hard here. You can't even see if someone is dead or not by using your Kiroshi optics. Enemy view cones are odd, and it's hard to peak out from behind corners since there's no dedicated button for that.
  • Crafting is just... uhng, and upgrading your gear is way too costly for the minimal return of investment given.
  • Night City isn't much bigger than my hometown, and I did use fast travel and running a lot due to the game not feeling very much like a city after 10 hours or so.
  • The factions are interesting in and of themselves, but the near-complete lack of faction play feels like a missed opportunity.
  • This ties in to this: lack of choices. A lot of the time whatever you choose isn't very meaningful, but I appreciate the game trying to get me to roleplay now and then. Still, this is as much a roleplaying game as Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.
Despite all this, I liked the game, but CDPR shot themselves in the foot by overpromising and then underdelivering oh so very hard. Credulous gamers ate the marketing they were spoonfed, because of course this was gonna be the best thing since sliced bread and the developers can do no wrong and go back to the programming mines so we can get our DLC faster etc.

The sex scenes were also terrible to sit through, so there's that. I want my innocence back.
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One thing I that forgot to add to my overly prolix diatribe was how crappy the cops are: they either spawn and you die because they keep spawning or you just outrun them in less than a minute. They're not fun to outwit, and are at worst a game over factor or, at best, entirely forgettable because if you just drive 100 metres away from the scene of the crime they'll have forgotten that you did three hit and runs when flailing around a corner.
 
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I don't think I'm cut out for Grounded mode in The Last of Us 2. Got up to the elementary school where you have your first encounter with the WLF and I just can't get past it, so I'll play something else for a bit and replay the game on my usual lower difficulties some other time.

Kinda in the mood to see how God of War 2018 looks like in it's enhanced mode so I think I'll play that next. On the PC side of things I've been really wanting to play Half Life Alyx again to see if it runs better, which it should. If I wind up not in the mood for it by the time I get around to playing more PC stuff I'll probably try to continue with Witcher 3.
 
Completed the weapon upgrades and now there's the fun part where I need to defeat the final boss again to go into my third and last playthrough... Except he's even stronger now on NG+, but at least I've got the practice down.
(EDIT: Aaaand done. Again. Thank fuck I don't need to do this ever again. :laugh:)

Something else I have left to do is get every skill, but I swear they made the grind for the last few skill points incredibly tedious, even with the increased exp gains on NG+ and with a good farm route. I'm tempted to leave this for NG++ as you get even more exp there, but since that'll be
the Shura run
I won't get to farm the endgame enemies again. Gah.

Also, I did this cheese against Demon of Hatred the second time around because it was too hilarious not to.

Vega said:
I don't think I'm cut out for Grounded mode in The Last of Us 2. Got up to the elementary school where you have your first encounter with the WLF and I just can't get past it, so I'll play something else for a bit and replay the game on my usual lower difficulties some other time.
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If it helps any, I think the school was the biggest bottleneck in my run.
 
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Joycon Update: My dad was able to fix them last night, via an update for my Switch, so they work perfectly in TV mode now. :smile:

Skyrim Update: I went the Breton Adventurer route for my new character in Skyrim, but not sure what skill trees I should focus on for him since I've never played Breton's before. On another note, he's only level 2, and I'm honestly surprised he was able to sneak past a bear. :laugh:
 
Just got the plat for Sekiro. The 'bad ending' was really cool, so I'm glad I left that for last.

Overall this was an awesome game. Kind of overwhelming at first to be honest, but once all the systems began to click for me it became exhilarating to play and progress through. Would be interesting if From Software made something else along these lines at some point, directly related or otherwise.

Next up is Yakuza 4, since my itch for more of this franchise must be scratched.
 
Yakuza 4 feels head and shoulders above 3 in terms of presentation so far, and Akiyama's my kinda dude so looking forward to playing as him for a while. Combat feels more fun so far as well, as it seems the devs addressed many of the obvious issues with that.

While I'll go for the plat as always, I probably won't bother with the full Completion List this time. Had my fill of the tedium that is Weapon Modding in Yakuza 3, and most importantly the Pool minigame is absolutely broken in these older games and completing the objectives for that in the previous one was infuriating enough already. So this time I'll actually take advantage of the lenient trophy list and do the bare minimum for the more unsavory tasks.

EDIT: I like the "new" addition of table tennis, pretty damn fun. Since it's a new one I'll aim to beat it in all levels, too.
 
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I started to play Yaga, recently released game on Steam. It's nice rpg/action/adventure. Relatively simple to play with story based on Slavic fairy tales, folklore.
 
Yakuza 4 Act 4 Spoilers

I swear these deaths due to turning their backs on villains just keep getting fucking dumber.

I wasn't going to write again until I was done with the main story, but that whole thing with Saejima turning away and Yasuko dying on his behalf was so dumb I had to vent a little - even by dumb Yakuza death standards. Funny how Yasuko's the only character around with enough balls to do what's gotta be done, too. The gal with all the charm and entertainment value of an empty juice brick somehow still trumps the protags in decision making.

Also, I was pretty damn excited at first about exploring Saejima's backstory and the bit where he killed 18 dudes at once, since he was Majima's bro and it was teased to me all the way back in Zero. But then they come up with the whole rubber bullet crap because heavens forbid we get a playable character who's officially gotten his hands dirty.

The worst part, though, is that the whole thing doesn't make an ounce of sense. You're telling me the guy can't tell the difference between a rubber bullet and a real one after shooting someone? You're telling me that completely bloodless bloodbath didn't sound any alarms either? The guy walks all the way back to exit the ramen place and he can't tell anything was off with any of the "corpses"? Give me a fucking break, Saejima. No amount of shock can explain that BS. I'm honestly kind of angry that they had to ruin a scene which sounded so legitimately badass.

Arai is a stock background character ass looking motherfucker, so I'm not looking forward to him, regardless of whether he turns out to be a villain, an antagonist or a last-minute-twist ally. Guy's just boring, man. They should've made Katsuragi the final baddie, not him or that Munakata police dude.

This story felt more ambitious (if at times convoluted) than previous ones in how it linked up many different plot threads and even connected directly to the events of the first game, so it's too bad they had to sour it for me with a) perhaps the worst version yet of that terrible cliché; and b) the dumb '85 retcon. I can already imagine how the finale's gonna play out because all points to them following the exact same formula as in 1/2/3, but even if they deviate from that I'm not that thrilled.

Closing thoughts: Daigo's a bona fide pussy. It needed to be said, sorry not sorry. He spent the entirety of 3 in a coma and the entirety of 4 taking shit from everybody. The only time the Tojo Clan didn't feel like a joke was back in Zero.
 
LinkSword said:
Yakuza 4 Act 4 Spoilers

I swear these deaths due to turning their backs on villains just keep getting fucking dumber.

I wasn't going to write again until I was done with the main story, but that whole thing with Saejima turning away and Yasuko dying on his behalf was so dumb I had to vent a little - even by dumb Yakuza death standards. Funny how Yasuko's the only character around with enough balls to do what's gotta be done, too. The gal with all the charm and entertainment value of an empty juice brick somehow still trumps the protags in decision making.

Also, I was pretty damn excited at first about exploring Saejima's backstory and the bit where he killed 18 dudes at once, since he was Majima's bro and it was teased to me all the way back in Zero. But then they come up with the whole rubber bullet crap because heavens forbid we get a playable character who's officially gotten his hands dirty.

The worst part, though, is that the whole thing doesn't make an ounce of sense. You're telling me the guy can't tell the difference between a rubber bullet and a real one after shooting someone? You're telling me that completely bloodless bloodbath didn't sound any alarms either? The guy walks all the way back to exit the ramen place and he can't tell anything was off with any of the "corpses"? Give me a fucking break, Saejima. No amount of shock can explain that BS. I'm honestly kind of angry that they had to ruin a scene which sounded so legitimately badass.

Arai is a stock background character ass looking motherfucker, so I'm not looking forward to him, regardless of whether he turns out to be a villain, an antagonist or a last-minute-twist ally. Guy's just boring, man. They should've made Katsuragi the final baddie, not him or that Munakata police dude.

This story felt more ambitious (if at times convoluted) than previous ones in how it linked up many different plot threads and even connected directly to the events of the first game, so it's too bad they had to sour it for me with a) perhaps the worst version yet of that terrible cliché; and b) the dumb '85 retcon. I can already imagine how the finale's gonna play out because all points to them following the exact same formula as in 1/2/3, but even if they deviate from that I'm not that thrilled.

Closing thoughts: Daigo's a bona fide pussy. It needed to be said, sorry not sorry. He spent the entirety of 3 in a coma and the entirety of 4 taking shit from everybody. The only time the Tojo Clan didn't feel like a joke was back in Zero.
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Yeah, the rubber bullets are easily the dumbest things I've ever seen in any story. I can't think of anything dumber that I'm aware of even outside of video games. To be honest I've forgotten most of Yakuza 4's story other than the awful rubber bullets crap.
 
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