What game are you playing?

[CrushingAnvil]

That's awesome, thanks! I grabbed the link for when I'm going to play Stalker again. Such a good series.

Yeah the amount of options you have to tweak the game to your liking is really what makes it so good. I understand that people like super punishing gameplay, but I backed that off a bit and let myself fast travel whenever I want and to all my self-made stashes. I left the damage multiplier at 1 though since that means you can still one-shot human enemies to the head but Chimeras are still terrifying.

 

[fabronaut]

Jedi Fallen Order's biggest difficulty problem is the stupid chaotic animal enemies that are unpredictable and have like zero windup to their huge attacks that take off 80% of your health. Fighting humans is actually fun on higher difficulties but it's the random bullshit aliens that make it not fun. It's just not tuned well. It's got good gameplay systems but it's way too easy on easy, bordering on too easy on normal when it comes to humans and bordering on frustrating when you fight things like giant frogs, but definitely too hard on hard with the aliens even though that seems like the "right spot" when it comes to stormtroopers and those weird darth maul looking melee humanoids.

Dark Forces 2 was a great game. I haven't played it in 20 years though. I played it after Jedi Knight 2 though and even though the graphics were a big step down (it looks more like Quake 1 than Jedi Knight 2 in terms of polygon counts) it had a lot of complex and interesting gameplay ideas. No idea how it would hold up now, though. I played Jedi Knight 2 and it all the way through way back in the day but haven't touched them since. Never played Jedi Academy even though that was apparently quite good. The modern ports to console are supposed to be awful cause they didn't account for how much harder it is to precisely aim/turn on a controller vs mouse/keyboard.

I agree that the animals are the worst part by far. the "elite" type enemies are implemented much better and feel a lot closer to the Dark Souls-ish combat experience. (note: haven't played Sekiro, but my friends compare the two, so I assume it's somewhat comparable in some regards.) the multi swipe beast on Dathomir is the worst, and I hope they adjust the animal combat and massage the difficulty tiers a bit in the sequel. occasionally I'll get killed by some bullshit where I'm downed by an animal and comboed into the ground by a group, esp. when there's a rocket trooper in the distance taking potshots. (not sure if I can slow and / or throw back those projectiles, maybe that's what I'm supposed to be doing?)

I've been playing on Jedi Master (second hardest difficulty?) and have no qualms dropping the difficulty if I just want to get through a section -- in no small part b/c some of the animal encounters or relative placing of the checkpoints can be a bit obnoxious at times. the gaps between the difficulty settings are kinda amusing, although "normal" seems okay -- whatever the notch is a step below what I'm playing on. (Jedi Apprentice, maybe?) the story mode is comically easy, but I suppose that's the point -- just about anyone can get through it by button mashing, since enemies do maybe 10% as much damage and attack a lot less frequently.

Dark Forces 2 was ridiculously good for the time, as was the expansion pack. I don't know if I ever got around to playing Jedi Academy etc. although I think I have it on Steam or GoG and have mentally earmarked it for later. I kept expecting a Force Jump and Force Dash / Speed option to be added to Fallen Order's roster of abilities, but it seemed pretty clear by mid game that the entire skill tree was about to tap out. I feel like some of the obnoxious animal bullshit would've been ameliorated by working in some kind of dark side powers, much like Dark Forces permitted... but that wasn't really within the scope of the story. I just want them to come up with a lazy pretext to let a light side Jedi dabble in the dark side powers... I mean, ffs, I'm killing these animals anyway, so what's the difference?

My biggest problem in all games is that I hoard the good items "until I really need them," which is usually after the end credits. I didn't fire a single ancient arrow even though they certainly would've helped at some points, and just used lightning/bomb arrows and ancient melee weapons to kill guardians. Next time around I'll force myself to use consumables way more often.

I feel that... reminds me of this trope. I remember playing Ninja Gaiden Black a loooong time ago, and never wanting to use the powerful magic (?) spells, since they were super scarce, but also kinda necessary to deal with the punishing difficulty. and that was in the Black edition, which had the difficulty tuned to not be anywhere near as obnoxiously hard as "normal" was in the initial release.

The switch was basically a previous gen console LAST gen, let alone the PS5/Xbox Series X gen. Just watch it struggle with games that were on regular ol PS4. Like, AC couldn't port any entries past Black Flag/Rogue to it. Dark Souls 1 runs at half the framerate it does on regular PS4/Xbone. Etc.

I'm still of the opinion that Nintendo would've been better off releasing it with the newer Tegra X2 chip that was in the pipeline and available for the initial release. then again, it's Nintendo, and I don't think they've ever skewed towards using the console as a loss leader and making money on the software alone. they've never needed to have a huge attach rate to make money on the console, since there were always decent margins on the hardware alone (not including aftermarket controllers, which are fairly high priced but generally well built). I think the Wii U is the only time that they might've eaten the cost on hardware (maybe the Virtual Boy too?), since the cost of the tablet controller decimated the usual margin they'd make on hardware sales of the console alone.

I'm surprised they never bothered with a next gen Tegra refresh for the Switch OLED or a "Switch Pro" model (not sure if that's what they called the OLED version anyhow) -- all that's been done is an efficiency refresh. they would've had a lot more leeway with graphical processing power and it would've been a boon for games that have performance hiccups. going off what my buddy has told me, BotW qualifies as one of those games that's got some fairly severe performance problems at times, to the point that he's suggested I just play it in Dolphin on the PC, as I intended to play it docked the entire time anyway and it runs way better in emulation?

 

[TedEH]

BotW qualifies as one of those games that's got some fairly severe performance problems at times, to the point that he's suggested I just play it in Dolphin on the PC, as I intended to play it docked the entire time anyway and it runs way better in emulation?

I probably wouldn't go so far as to say it's "severe", but it's clear that "fun" took precedence over performance. I'm sure an emulator could run it better (I think that's been proved out already), but it's far from unplayable.

 

[Mathemagician]

I was pretty surprised that my old Dell laptop could handle "some games" with the integrated GPU. Nothing very modern, of course, but you're the type of person who plays older games, an integrated GPU can still get you pretty far. It's the beauty of PC gaming - the historical library is vast and mostly accessible.

As much as I'm very excited to have another BotW, there's a part of me that's sort of spoiled by modern games and disappointed that the latest and greatest in such an important legacy franchise kinda looks like a potato because they just don't have the hardware to back it up. You can see some pretty egregious frame drops in the gameplay demo, and the resolution scaling is definitely doing some heavy lifting, and while they hid it well, the LoD / pop-in is definitely also doing a lot of work. It's not Pokemon levels of ugly - Nintendo at least knows how to art-direct - but there's a sense of disappointment just knowing what modern games are capable of and seeing the classics relegated to an objectively lagging platform.

Man my 2014 $300 acer laptop ram Warframe on low/windowed mode with all effects off. Was it rarely over 30 fps? No. Did I grind mods like a Diablo fiend anyways? Yes. Yes I did.

Nintendo isn’t in the habit of selling consumers what they want. They take an apple approach and tell people what will be on the menu. Typically a handful of amazing entrees and some third-party appetizers and desserts you may or may not care about.

I won’t forget the interview I read with I believe the director behind the conduit fps game explaining an early board meeting he had when discussing game features/ideas. Execs fully had no idea what he meant and demanded he stop “referencing other systems/games as they had no idea what he was on about”.

 

[wankerness]

I agree that the animals are the worst part by far. the "elite" type enemies are implemented much better and feel a lot closer to the Dark Souls-ish combat experience. (note: haven't played Sekiro, but my friends compare the two, so I assume it's somewhat comparable in some regards.) the multi swipe beast on Dathomir is the worst, and I hope they adjust the animal combat and massage the difficulty tiers a bit in the sequel. occasionally I'll get killed by some bullshit where I'm downed by an animal and comboed into the ground by a group, esp. when there's a rocket trooper in the distance taking potshots. (not sure if I can slow and / or throw back those projectiles, maybe that's what I'm supposed to be doing?)

I've been playing on Jedi Master (second hardest difficulty?) and have no qualms dropping the difficulty if I just want to get through a section -- in no small part b/c some of the animal encounters or relative placing of the checkpoints can be a bit obnoxious at times. the gaps between the difficulty settings are kinda amusing, although "normal" seems okay -- whatever the notch is a step below what I'm playing on. (Jedi Apprentice, maybe?) the story mode is comically easy, but I suppose that's the point -- just about anyone can get through it by button mashing, since enemies do maybe 10% as much damage and attack a lot less frequently.

Yeah, you can toss the missiles back at those guys. IIRC you have to use force push at some point between them firing it and it getting to you, and the timing's pretty lax. I forget, I haven't played it in a few years.

I don't think it's very comparable to Sekiro apart from the parrying mechanic can feel similar. I don't really remember how the boss fights go and I played this game long before I played Sekiro, so maybe it did have something like this, but I think that it removed one of the most key pillars of Sekiro's combat which was the "posture" bar where if you successfully deflected enough hits on an enemy (bosses included) you basically got a free hit to knock off their entire lifebar (with many bosses having multiple lifebars). I think Jedi Knight has a much more basic DS style parrying system where you still have to chip their health down the same way you normally would, it just is very viable to try and parry a ton of attacks, unlike Dark Souls.

going off what my buddy has told me, BotW qualifies as one of those games that's got some fairly severe performance problems at times, to the point that he's suggested I just play it in Dolphin on the PC, as I intended to play it docked the entire time anyway and it runs way better in emulation?

Your buddy sounds like he might be one of those PC Master Race (or maybe PS5/Series X master race) people that has become really common the last couple years who claims things are "LITERALLY unplayable" if they ever dip below 60 fps. Ex, I've heard some including some on this forum say Elden Ring is "literally unplayable" cause the PS5 version tends to waver between 45-60 fps depending on what's going on. Like, it's as if they never played a game before 2020. BOTW most definitely has performance issues in certain situations, especially being in Kakariko Village or fighting an enemy like Guardians which creates a lot of explosions, but it's very playable and unless you're one of those framerate wackos it's a minor annoyance at worst. Your eyes will adjust in probably less than 20 minutes to the reduced framerate, unless you convince yourself that you can't.

As an old fart that played a lot of Star Fox on SNES growing up, which chugged ALL THE TIME to probably something around 10 FPS, I have no patience for these people. I like games to have consistent framerates, definitely, but unless it's unpredictably chugging during combat when precision timing is required (ex, Bloodborne in some sections will dip below the usual 30 FPS and occasionally it messes up dodge/parry timings - that pisses me off) I really couldn't care less if a game is 30 FPS. I will always choose "performance" mode if available for the higher framerates, but if all we get is 30 FPS, whatever.

I think you probably need a pretty beefy computer to be able to emulate BOTW better than a Switch runs it. I mean, definitely lots of PC gamers have them, but I am pretty sure mine couldn't handle it.

 

[StevenC]

The switch was basically a previous gen console LAST gen, let alone the PS5/Xbox Series X gen. Just watch it struggle with games that were on regular ol PS4. Like, AC couldn't port any entries past Black Flag/Rogue to it. Dark Souls 1 runs at half the framerate it does on regular PS4/Xbone. Etc.

Basically, it's barely more powerful than the Wii U. The Wii-U ran BOTW almost identically apart from disc loadtimes vs flash memory loadtimes.

Switch runs BotW at 900p compared to 720 on WiiU.

 

[TedEH]

If Digital Foundry doesn't show me a frame pacing graph that's just a strait line, it's literally unplayable.

Switch runs BotW at 900p compared to 720 on WiiU.

Switch is a weird exception to other consoles in that rendering isn't always the bottleneck.

 

[CTID]

been trying the cycle: frontier a bit since the new season dropped yesterday, and tarkov is kind of a shitshow right now. been enjoying cycle a pretty good bit so far

 

[wankerness]

Switch runs BotW at 900p compared to 720 on WiiU.

Hmm. In practice it looks identical and has the exact same frame rate hitches. The only difference I noticed was some of the sun effects looked differently colored (it seemed more contrasts and less subtle on wiiu) but that may have been a tv thing since the setups were in different rooms.

 

[CTID]

botw on a wii u emulator can also be upgraded to run at 1080p/60fps. i haven't touched it on the actual console since emulating it. the shrines with the motion controls suck on it, but there's only 5-6 in the entire game so it's pretty manageable.

 

[Mathemagician]

Diablo 4 beta had me jonesing for more isometric action and so I downloaded Path of Exile again. And now I remember why I quit at lvl 18. So much crap going on at once. Picked a ranger and am just getting every attack speed/damage/accuracy skill. Figure I can’t mess up a bow build too much for casual play.

 

[BMFan30]

Diablo 4 beta had me jonesing for more isometric action and so I downloaded Path of Exile again. And now I remember why I quit at lvl 18. So much crap going on at once. Picked a ranger and am just getting every attack speed/damage/accuracy skill. Figure I can’t mess up a bow build too much for casual play.

It way more fun & easier to farm shit if you can pair up with another player so if i you don't have any pc gamer friends, or ones that don't like arpg's then find a random to run dungeons. Me and a buddy a few years ago would smoke up a storm while playing PoE, was a ton of fun.

PoE also gets closer to D2 vibes aesthetically than recent Diablo has or since D2 came out. Really the only reason we even thought to download it in the first place, weren't disappointed so we ended up rolling a few characters and grinded through that story so many times. I defintely think my experience would have been less fun & far more difficult had I not played co-op with someone.

 

[gabito]

Finished Yakuza 3. It seemed to be shorter than 0 / 1 /2? I don't know. It was OK, not terrible like some people say, but it wasn't great either. The main story was somewhat uninteresting, but it was nice to see papa Kiryu doing something different.

I couldn't find that many substories this time, maybe I needed some gizmo or skill to help me find them (that exists in the other games) but oh well...

The revelations mechanic was amazing: you learn new fighting techniques by taking pictures of some ridiculous event or NPC. Those were something.

Hearing Mine and some of the other japanese characters speaking English was funny, it took me several seconds until I realized they were doing so (I get it, if it passes as English for a japanese audience it's OK) But hearing Richardson - an american character- speak like an average voice actor from the PS1 era and using every cliché from every american action movie and video game ever made was fucking hilarious.



I'm not really invested in this one, so I guess I'll move on to Y4.

 

[p0ke]

I just had the most anticlimactic ending possible in Final Fantasy VII. I had the counter attack materia equipped, so instead of finishing Sephiroth with Omnislash, I just countered his initial attack and that was it

 

[wankerness]

Finished Yakuza 3. It seemed to be shorter than 0 / 1 /2? I don't know. It was OK, not terrible like some people say, but it wasn't great either. The main story was somewhat uninteresting, but it was nice to see papa Kiryu doing something different.

I couldn't find that many substories this time, maybe I needed some gizmo or skill to help me find them (that exists in the other games) but oh well...

The revelations mechanic was amazing: you learn new fighting techniques by taking pictures of some ridiculous event or NPC. Those were something.

Hearing Mine and some of the other japanese characters speaking English was funny, it took me several seconds until I realized they were doing so (I get it, if it passes as English for a japanese audience it's OK) But hearing Richardson - an american character- speak like an average voice actor from the PS1 era and using every cliché from every american action movie and video game ever made was fucking hilarious.



I'm not really invested in this one, so I guess I'll move on to Y4.

Wow, I don't remember that guy.

My biggest issue with 3 apart from the fishing minigame (mostly joking, I think I tried it twice and never again) was the combat. The enemies seemed to block EVERYTHING and combat got really tedious since every fight would consist of you punching away at them over and over before getting through the block, repeat ad nauseum. I mean, I sort of see what they were going for (having to find openings and do positioning tricks to get through guards), and it would be more interesting if it only worked like that on bosses, but from what I remember it was like that with every random encounter, too!

4 has some quirk like that with the AI doing something over and over that's really annoying, too, but I forget what it was. Maybe constant grabs? I don't remember. I think 4's definitely much better than 3.

Yakuza 3 and 4 have way fewer substories than 5 and onward (Kiwami 1/2 have a LOT more than the original versions did).

 

[gabito]

Oh, yes, you're right: enemies block everything all the time. That was frustrating.

 

[fabronaut]

I don't think it's very comparable to Sekiro apart from the parrying mechanic can feel similar. I don't really remember how the boss fights go and I played this game long before I played Sekiro, so maybe it did have something like this, but I think that it removed one of the most key pillars of Sekiro's combat which was the "posture" bar where if you successfully deflected enough hits on an enemy (bosses included) you basically got a free hit to knock off their entire lifebar (with many bosses having multiple lifebars). I think Jedi Knight has a much more basic DS style parrying system where you still have to chip their health down the same way you normally would, it just is very viable to try and parry a ton of attacks, unlike Dark Souls.

yeah, there's definitely no "posture" bar where you can cumulatively stagger an enemy. that would've made the larger beasts way less of a pain in the ass to fight. Jedi Fallen Order essentially has a Souls-like parry mechanism, but without the need to be wary of stamina drain. I suppose the red colour coded "unblockable" attacks are their way of mimicking a stance break or stamina break while streamlining it heavily. I'd say it works well, but it's definitely not the most elegant solution I've come across.

for reference, I've only ever nearly beaten Demon's Souls on PS3, a decent opening chunk of Dark Souls and Elden Ring on PC, and half of Remnant: Ashes of the Fallen I got free on Epic. (that one was fun but kinda jank. didn't seem quite as wonky as some of the other "me too" budget Souls-likes I got to try on free weekend or Xbox Game Pass though, like The Surge.) it's strange how so many games with Souls-like mechanics or combat can have a really good iterative concept but whiff on important fundamentals. I think I own all of them (including Bloodborne), intending to play through them in order, but wrangling my ADHD brain into staying on task and getting things done can be tricky.

Your buddy sounds like he might be one of those PC Master Race (or maybe PS5/Series X master race) people that has become really common the last couple years who claims things are "LITERALLY unplayable" if they ever dip below 60 fps.

...

As an old fart that played a lot of Star Fox on SNES growing up, which chugged ALL THE TIME to probably something around 10 FPS, I have no patience for these people. I like games to have consistent framerates, definitely, but unless it's unpredictably chugging during combat when precision timing is required (ex, Bloodborne in some sections will dip below the usual 30 FPS and occasionally it messes up dodge/parry timings - that pisses me off) I really couldn't care less if a game is 30 FPS. I will always choose "performance" mode if available for the higher framerates, but if all we get is 30 FPS, whatever.

my impression is that he recommended emulating it since he knows I have a fairly powerful system and wouldn't have much trouble getting that set up. I have a CPU upgrade sitting on the shelf and the only reason I haven't installed it yet is because I had planned on swapping in a much delayed graphics card upgrade at the same time. I wouldn't go so far as to say he's the type to say things are "literally unplayable" -- and yeah, I know the type, as I've grown up playing PC games. I didn't have current gen consoles as a kid, but I always enjoyed what they offered. if anything, as an adult I'm even more appreciative of the convenience factor, and that's why my Switch has 90%+ of its playtime on a turn based strategy deckbuilding game... I don't always want to spend the time tinkering, but it is nice to have that option available.

Bloodborne is one of his favourite games ever and he would be more than happy to put his money down for a performance optimized / improved version of the game, whether in emulation or through a hardware boost (PS4 Pro / PS5 -- he has a PS5). I agree that framerate stability is king. not sure if there's a difference between console and PC versions of Elden Ring, but it has a pretty bad texture loading quirk where the first time something is loaded, the game engine practically stalls. something to do with the team's inexperience with Direct X 12 (?) API calls? Digital Foundry / Eurogamer had a good video about why it didn't really matter how much hardware you throw at the problem, it's an engine programming / technical issue. (no idea if this has been fixed.)

not sure how the numbers will shake out long term, but the graphics card market pricing shenanigans seem ridiculously short sighted. it is pretty amazing how good some of the integrated / on die GPU stuff is nowadays (Apple M1 chip, AMD Ryzen APU and resizable BAR tech), but that tech isn't in every new reasonable baseline current year model. I've have friends that teach who frequently mention how younger kids and teens reach for tablets over even laptops for an absurd number of tasks, including completely suboptimal ones, like writing essays. seems like they're gunning for much lower volume of sales at higher margins in the PC market. there's a name for this as a psychological purchasing tactic, can't remember what it's called. if you were to look at getting an iPad or similar device, there's a mess of intentional pricing overlaps and marginal feature upgrades per product tier (storage, port access, camera, processing speed), with the hope that it'll convince the buyer to stretch their budget that much farther. and it works.

I remember essentially doubling my previous graphics card budget when getting a 1070 for around $600 - 700 CAD (tax in?), 8 years or so ago, and feeling like that was a pretty huge splurge at the time. (not bad when you consider how much use I've got out of it, but the sticker shock is real for a frugal bastard like myself.) now that same performance class card seems to be priced at around ~$1200 or so before tax! I've been holding off on that upgrade for quite some time, and it was disappointing to see the crypto bullshit having shunted the prices higher permanently. I'm not gonna drop 4090 level money, even though I could squeeze that. if they were asking ~30% less for the sticker price of a 4090, maybe. the price of some of these cards alone costs as much as an entire system once did, for a comparable level of current gen performance.

funniest part is that it's been so long since I've upgraded, I'm not even sure what the real world performance difference will feel like in use. the prices have stayed so high, I've just waited and waited. it's not as if I'm ever gonna run out of games, at this point... I could stick to just console stuff for the next few years and still have left a few games untouched putting a dent in what I've collected.

 

[Mathemagician]

It way more fun & easier to farm shit if you can pair up with another player so if i you don't have any pc gamer friends, or ones that don't like arpg's then find a random to run dungeons. Me and a buddy a few years ago would smoke up a storm while playing PoE, was a ton of fun.

PoE also gets closer to D2 vibes aesthetically than recent Diablo has or since D2 came out. Really the only reason we even thought to download it in the first place, weren't disappointed so we ended up rolling a few characters and grinded through that story so many times. I defintely think my experience would have been less fun & far more difficult had I not played co-op with someone.

Yeah the D4 beta was more fun since I played with people each weekend. I’m going to have to see if anyone plays POE that I know. These kinds of games are PERFECT for grinding while just shooting the shit. Turn on, play for an hour (or 4) and then just turn brain off.

 

[BMFan30]

Yeah the D4 beta was more fun since I played with people each weekend. I’m going to have to see if anyone plays POE that I know. These kinds of games are PERFECT for grinding while just shooting the shit. Turn on, play for an hour (or 4) and then just turn brain off.

Exactly why I liked it, we'd have so many lols playing & trolling his little Greek brother before he went to school every morning pissing him off, cause we didn't have to do shit like that since we both worked remotely.

Laughing at him cause his big bro always had a beer and I was always ripping my bong over the mic in the background as his lil bro backpacked out that front door screaming half baked american obsceneties at us right as that front door would always hit him in the ass as he would leave for school with his mom into their Opel. Then me and his big bro would go back to grinding.

Ah, man good times. Hearing that fucker stutter over the word "skoooool", with his Greek accent, desperately trying to say one curse word correctly with that hard "L" at the end while I hit my own big ass L was fucking hilarious and never got old. I wish that tradition didn't die.

 

[wankerness]

Finished FF8, platinum and all (that monkey quest is SO BAD). The whole time travel thing is confusing. I think where I got in the original was up to the point where you get Rinoa back from the space prison and then are supposed to talk to NPCs in some specific room in the big city. I don't remember finding out Laguna existed in the current time still - I think my memory was that I was sure the game was going to reveal that Squall was Laguna reincarnated or something and likewise with the other dudes. But nope, it's more confusing and less contrived.

The ending is really sappy and really confusing, but I guess I like the sentiment of seeing basically everyone in the whole game get a happy ending.

But man, that J-pop song in english is BAD. Though the ending is less cringey than when it's used earlier for Rinoa and Squall's zero-g romantic scene.

The last bosses were some serious bullshit. Like, the last bosses just have spells to randomly blow away stacks of your spells. And lots of SERIOUS aoe spells. And there's a mechanic by which if a character dies, they get sucked permanently out of the fight after another turn. So of course squall AND one of my final party got knocked out simultaneously and I couldn't rez the non-squall one fast enough, so they got removed from the fight and they gave me the totally unjunctioned reserve character, who was worthless. So I had to go through over half the fight with two characters. Fortunately using aura +squall and irvines limit breaks was completely ridiculously overpowered and I just spammed limit break, aura, and x-potions as needed until I won. Still scary since I didn't think ahead to buy more potions and only had the ones I'd organically received anyway.

I like this game, but think the leveling system is awful (you should NOT get substantially weaker as you gain EXP, I absolutely hate this model, Oblivion and Skyrim are guilty of this too but their version makes a bit more sense), and I hate the junction system because of how it so strongly discourages magic use. Magic needed to be something other than single use items, I think. It's dumb that you have all these great spells but if you use even one of them it negatively impacts your stats unless you go out and find another source to farm more of them to replenish your stock to 100. Either make it so you can have two stacks of a spell but can only junction them, or just use a mana system and make junctioning weaker, I dunno. It's an interesting experiment but it had big problems.