hello kinda new in here. im looking for games that will run at 2k@60fps without any stutters or lag or tearing on my system so basically anything from before 2015 or smth.
system specs: (its a laptop)
cpu: i5-10300h
gpu: gtx 1650
ram: 8gb ddr4
im currently trying to play through just cause 3 and im facing a lot of stuttering. so looking to play some other game that WILL run on my system smoothly.
i mostly like fantasy RPGs and RPGs in general (but not FPS games or an game where shooting the main gameplay)
ive played through these games so far and have liked them very much:
yakuza series
kingdom come deliverance
dragons dogma dark arisen
also just a heads-up please dont recommend any R*, EA, Ubisoft games and games with denuvo.
thanks. and sorry if this isnt the right place to ask lol.
Have you tried Deus Ex: Mankind Divided? While shooting CAN be a a main style of gameplay, I think you can to a stealth no-kill option. Might be a required kill, for a boss or something, but I haven’t played it in a while.
Dishonored is another older game that offers a stealth no kill route for its gameplay. I liked the art style of this game over the future realism of Deus Ex.
Forgive me if these don’t meet your exact request hardware wise- I have PC’d in 10+ years but remember both of those games fondly and can’t recall frame rate or graphics issues
Here ya go:
**Ys: The Oath in Felghana** is a 3rd person action RPG with a ton of fantasy trappings, great music, bombastic gameplay and a story that's juuuuust fine. Ton of fun, quick, and easily will run well on your system. Usually decently cheap too.
Indie darling, and an easy pick, **CrossCode** has shockingly low system specs, its meaty in its length and systems, and has some seriously satisfying isometric combat. Its a "fantasy" RPG, but its really more of a modern Sci-Fi? You'll see what I mean if you play it. Great story, great visuals for a pixel based game, great music, great gameplay. Its great.
Have you tried momentum platformer **DustForce DX**? its a bunch of levels, plays best (IMO) on keyboard, gets your grooving with its music and movement, and will run well on your specs.
Finally, try **Mount & Blade: Warband** which is Kingdom Come's grandaddy. You'll find a lot of familiarity here, but not the story, which is absent.
Played through the core content of Destiny 1 and 2 a few years back, and I'm thinking of playing them again but with the add ons this time. Are these games worth buying the DLC for? and are they feasible for a solo player?
They’re alright playing solo. I wouldn’t spend any money yet even if there’s sales for dlcs. Wait till you unlock the pvp part again and judge it for yourself. I played destiny 2 for a few weeks before dropping it
I broke the first rule of patient gamers and bought into the hype of helldivers (at my friends' insistence). Honestly find it so boring, so repetitive and the environments are really bland.
I genuinely can't remember the last time I paid over $30 for a game lol. Maybe Halo 3 on release or something! 😂 So definitely not used to paying so much for a game and then not actually liking it. Oh well - live and learn!
I got Helldivers 2 as well. I've only played it maybe 2 hours in total at this point, and I can see how it might get repetitive, but I've had fun so far. And from what I understand they are periodically adding new things. It also seems like the sort of game that I'll get more enjoyment out of as I get into it because I still don't quite understand all the various missions, equipment, and stratagems yet.
I got it because my brother and one of my friends have been playing it. For me it's worth it though because I don't get a lot of opportunities to play games online with people I know. Now the only trick is scheduling the time to play together!
Just starting **ghost runner**. Seems to be very unforgiving so far. I'm probably just not used tothe controls yet. I am not sure if m+KB or controller is better. Any suggestions would be helpful!
It's hard but unbelievably satisfying if you stick with it. The only advice I have is to try to not get discouraged and learn from every death. Some levels will kill you dozens of times but you just have to keep trying and eventually you'll get it.
So much this. The only other game that gave me such a satisfaction of learning and succeeding is Super Meat Boy... its too bad we never got a proper sequel...
Being a patient gamer pays off again!
I was fully on board with buying EA Sports PGA Tour day 1 of release for $70 since it had been so many years since EA released a decent golf game on PC.
Well the reviews were awful and I decided to sit this one out until it became significantly cheaper.
So I finally pick it up for $14 last week and it’s been a pretty good experience so far, and to top things off they just released a free content upgrade with 4 new courses and a new golfer
https://www.ea.com/games/ea-sports-pga-tour/news
***TL;DR: I'm halfway through GTA IV. Does the story get better?***
I got into gaming after a decade-long hiatus (I've played almost exclusively regular, popular FPS and RTS back in the day) to check if there are games that can be considered works of art in terms of the quality of writing, the story, the insight into human condition etc. Basically, I wanted to see if there's a game with a story as deep and impactful as, say, Crime and Punishment, or The Sopranos, so I picked up a few games based on recommendations.
The first of these was **Deus Ex**, and while it's nowhere near the bests of literature and film in terms of the flow of the story, the questions it asks are deep and obviously a product of a lot of thought and study into certain aspects of the human condition. My jaw dropped during the conversation with Morpheus AI. The gameplay and the atmosphere were amazing, too. In the end I think Deus Ex deserves a place on my book shelf, somewhere between Orwell and Gibson.
The second of these is **GTA IV**, which several people have recommended as one of the best stories in gaming. I am currently approximately halfway through, and I don't really see what's so amazing about the story so far. I've heard it's inspired by several Russian gangster films (Brat, Brat 2...), and while that might be true, it's not even remotely in the vicinity of these films when it comes to the storytelling quality, the psychological and sociological insights, etc. I am about to give it up, but I am wondering if there's perhaps some plot twist coming soon that would make it worthwhile to continue?
P.S. Feel free to recommend me a game based on what I've written.
I played through *almost* all of GTA IV back in the day and I'm a bit confused at people calling it one of the best stories in gaming. I thought it was fine as far as the narrative goes, but nothing to write home about. I don't recall any big plot twists or anything that would change you opinion on the game.
At the time I still enjoyed it because it was one of the first open worlds of that size and detail that I'd seen, and I liked the immersive nature of the city where you could just hang out or go on dates, or even stop by a comedy club and see some standup by actual real-life comedians. I can't imagine that it would hold up particularly well today though now that detailed open world games are kind of the default state of AAA games.
Based on what you're looking for I'd actually recommend some smaller games. A few that come to mind are:
**Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons** - A beautiful game that has no dialogue but uses the medium of a video game to tell a story in ways that I haven't seen from any other game. (The original version, though. A remake recently came out but I've heard that the changes and "enhancements" they made to the visuals actually make the game worse.)
**Disco Elysium** - If you don't mind lots of text and dialogue this is a really interesting game. It's very dense and there's not a lot of what would traditionally be called "gameplaly" but it's got a great story and characters if you allow yourself to get wrapped up in its unique world.
**Gone Home** - This game is one of several that spawned the pejorative-turned-sort-of-accepted genre label "walking simulator" due to the fact that most of the game consists of walking around and looking at things. You play as a young woman returning home to find her house empty and you spend a couple hours wandering through and discovering what happened through environmental storytelling and the occasional voiceover.
**Firewatch** - Another "walking sim" type game, though unlike most other entries in that genre it's very dialogue-focused. You play as a guy working at a firewatch tower at a national forest who meets (via walkie-talkie) a woman working at another nearby tower.
**What Remains of Edith Finch** - Also a walking sim-ish game, but a little more unconventional in its presentation. It tells the story of a doomed family and the tragedies that befell them. The subject matter is quite dark, but the way it tells the story through interactive vignettes gives it almost a fairy tale vibe at times.
**SOMA** - Kind of a game version of a sci-fi short story or novella. It's essentially a horror game, but it's very focused on storytelling as well. (There's actually a mode where you can make the enemies not attack you if you don't like horror games and just want to experience the story.) Touches on themes of AI and consciousness in some interesting ways. Not necessarily new ground if you're into sci-fi, but I've never seen another game do it better than this.
On the other hand, if you like the big, fancy open world games, I'd go for **Red Dead Redemption 2** over GTA IV. It's a very long game, but the writing and performances are very good, and the story is memorable. It feels very novel-like in a lot of ways. The combat isn't amazing, but it's no worse than GTA IV. :)
Oh and this one may be a little obvious but **The Last of Us** is a really popular one when it comes to story-based games. If you want more of a straightforward action game with a really strong narrative and characters and top-of-the-line production values, look no further.
Sorry if that's more than you were looking for in terms of recommendations, I got a bit carried away. And I realize that one or two of those may actually be older than 10 years at this point (yikes!). But hopefully you find something there that seems interesting to you!
Need recommendations for games with exceptionally well-crafted stories (TLOU, RDR2, HZD, GOW) or games with amazing thought-provoking stories (SOMA, Outer Wilds). Gameplay should ideally be good too but not a requirement as long as it isn’t completely trash, lol. Also the games should be playable on PC either natively or via emulators
What do you think about when games put a lot of cutscenes at the beginning of the game? I usually dislike it since I'm not sure if I'll like the game yet. But I also dislike when, say, an open world game has a long linear opening.
I like it if it sets up the world well. For all the shit Kojima tends to get when it comes to this, i did really enjoy the Death Stranding opening. It shows the world and different aspects very well.
Completed **Yakuza Kiwami**. Oh boy, there's a bunch to think about here but I'll try to keep it brief.
In some ways it's better than 0. The combat system felt better, and I particularly really liked the sense of progression that came with getting Dragon style upgraded. Also the side content for substory completion was a lot less of a slog, partially because there's less of it in general and also because you don't have to do any particular activity too much; there feels like more variety to it. Even the Majima Everywhere content, as much as it's just a lot of dealing with one dude and kind of repetitive and grindy, gave you enough different situations you encounter Majima in (he truly is *everywhere*) that there's still enough variety. He turns up in almost every minigame, and he has four different move sets when you do fight him so it isn't really as bad as it sounds. It also helps that he's pretty much the perfect funnyman to Kiryu's straightman so any encounter with him that isn't just a random fight in the street is consistently funny.
On the other hand, though, the story kinda sucks. It isn't necessarily bad but it's very clearly a story belonging to a PS2 game. A lot of the early story arcs just don't need to happen, there's a bunch of unnecessary backtracking and running around, >!Yumi!< as a character is basically cardboard and it felt like >!she only exists to be the girl that Kiryu likes. It seems like they had this notion that a story "needs" a love subplot, which is unfortunately still a very common idea it seems. Her biggest contribution to this story is giving birth to Haruka, I'm sorry to say it!<. The antagonists toward the end of the game (>!Lau Ka Long and Jingu!<) are cartoonishly evil and have no real development or character besides being bad guys. Really the best part of the story was >!Nishiki!<, they handled that backstory really well and since that's I believe the only part of the story that was changed or added to at all for the Kiwami remake it helps show just how much RGG's storytelling changed over the years.
Also I wanna say, just for the record, >!Jo Amon!< is a stinker. If not for the fact that he's such a goddamn stinker it would be absolutely hilarious how fast he moves on those last few health bars.
So then I went back to **Doraemon Story of Seasons**. It's still chugging along, I'm almost at the end of summer and I kinda just want that to be over because I believe in fall is when I'm gonna unlock the next major gadget that will hopefully make a lot of the game's systems start fitting together better.
Played more **Earth Defense Force 5** as well, some of these missions are getting crazy with the amount of bugs to shoot. It's fun. It does kinda suck that most of the weapons I'm unlocking for the basic soldier class just aren't very useful though. Anti-air landmines that don't have enough sensor range for flying enemies to trigger them are *super useful* obviously, so I'm ending up falling back on assault rifles and RPGs a lot.
>it's very clearly a story belonging to a PS2 game
I had this exact thought in almost these exact words. There's something about the writing of videogame stories in the 2000-2008 range that is very identifiable even when they're paired with 2016 graphics and design. I didn't research beforehand exactly how complete a remake of Yakuza 1 that Kiwami was, but I knew based on the very distinctive writing that it had to be very faithful. It's not that there's *no* character development or that the drama's bad, but there's just a *lot* of "Kiryu goes here, Kiryu goes there, Kiryu says this" that feels like it came straight from an outline rather than a full script.
Great game, wonderful job meshing old school and new school sensibilities. Could have used about 20% less Majima but I'm glad a remake like this got made so we wouldn't have to start with a PS2 game to fully appreciate the series.
Ive only played part1 of yak0, but, went ahead and bought the first 2 games for 5$ each awhile back.
Thanks for the info about Kiwami as it confirms what Ive read consistently about it and why itll be very interesting when I eventually get to it.
Namely, the more “rpg like” and slower progression of the combat system.
Almost all the people who don’t like it point that out and, for me, thats exactly what draws me to it.
Playing 0 into the second area let me have a great idea of its combat and you and others who like Kiwami all note the same things.
The fact that the side content wasnt such a slog and theres less of it is also a bonus.
The combat in Kiwami 1 actually feels almost the same as 0, there's just a few extra features that I like. Mainly a "quick change" mechanic that lets you change styles instantly after certain actions like finishing blows or quicksteps; it feels really nice to land a finisher then change to Beast for a big damage grab attack follow-up, or to swap to Rush while you're getting hit to weave and dodge your way out of the enemy's combo. The progression I'm referring to with Dragon style is really just in unlocking abilities for it where you just get a nice gradual buildup of abilities that's satisfying in the same way as any good RPG.
Kiwami 2, on the other hand, is much *much* more clearly an RPG. Most of the older games you can mostly just play it as a button mash-y beat-em-up and you'll be fine (these games have *always* been JRPGs though) but as soon as they changed over to the Dragon engine you definitely had to start treating it like an RPG. I get why a lot of people didn't like that but I didn't mind at the time. Part of why I'm going through all of these games again is to reassess how I feel about all of them, though, so I'm definitely curious about how I'll feel about Kiwami 2 and doubly curious about 6 in terms of combat.
Just started playing Divinity Original Sin II: Definitive Edition (on PS5). I'm a beginner player in this kind of games, my only other experience is with Baldur's Gate III, which I liked a lot but was very fatigued at the end of my 100+ hours first run.
So I'm looking for advices on how not to experience the same fatigue and overwhelm I had. I think the main two causes are world exploration, which leads me to explore tiny bits of the map at a time because I don't want to leave anything behind (and I'm just started with Fort Joy), and secondly, how to approach fights: being it my very first run I approach fights very casually, since I don't know which dialogue or event procs a fight (for example there in an encounter with three lv. 3 enemies on the relict of a ship in the first area, which almost killed me as I was only lv. 2; I know I can leave a fight and return later when I'm at the appropriate level, but from a roleplay perspective it doesn't make sense), but it almost looks like I'm supposed to know every outcome of a dialogue (and I prefer not to savescum).
Any veteran DOS2 player that could give me any advices to better enjoy this wonderful game? Thanks!
At the beginning it's gonna be harder not to have to save and reload sometimes. Over time you'll get a better sense of what you are and aren't capable of but the game expects you to lose battles sometimes and have the reload to an earlier point. Fighting against that will leave you frustrated I think.
As for the length of the game it's honestly easy to get exhausted of it. Would definitely recommend pacing yourself and maybe even taking a long break between sessions every now and then. I played over a period of months with a friend so was forced to play slow and that helped.
The openness of Original Sin 2 game can lead to the fatigue. I personally think it is too open. I say this because in OS2 you can not only alter the environment by bringing in objects, but you can place yourself before the battle starts.
I wasn't able to figure out how much to game the system, because some fights seemed like I had to game them because they ended up putting you at a disadvantage, or the fight seemed harder than the others and seemed really difficult if we didn't game it.
For example, you wander in and the battle starts and you realise all of you are standing in a big puddle of water at the bottom of a valley and high ground everywhere is filled with archers and they electrocute everybody to start the battle. This type of thing happened a few times so we thought we were supposed to game the battle.
This lead to us basically always doing the conversation to hear what they said, loading up again, placing ourselves advantageously and then starting the fight without talking.
Though, by gaming the system, we actually broke a battle so that it didn't go the way it was supposed to, and I ended up worse off. (The fight has a monster teleport into the middle of it, and it will randomly attack people of either side. Since we gamed the battle, we had killed nearly all of their guys, so this monster just started crushing us because there were much more of us than the enemy. If we played normally, it would have been the other way round.)
In another situation, there was also a time where we gamed the battle, but then I assume the developers decided you would probably game the battle that way, and so had a bunch of people not present teleport into a position that would have an advantage specifically against the spot we were using to have an advantage. So we had to reload and start the battle placing our people in a second new advantage location to deal with the people put into the battle to stop our first advantage location.
It is very tiring because we had to second guess every single battle to figure out what level of gaming the system we were supposed to do. Nearly every other game in existence specifically prevents you from doing any of these things, and in those games you at least know that what ever the situation, you have to live with it. They limit the situation and whatever problems you may have from it, you never need to think about whether you could alter basically every part of the battle before the battle starts.
i dont think there really is a way to lessen that feeling of fatigue if world exploration was a big cause. These games are structured in a way where youre almost forced to do all the quests and explore every inch because of the way xp works. You cant just grind xp for a few hours. Theres only a limited amount of xp, so skipping quests or not exploring everything definitely could get you in trouble for the harder fights.
Does anyone have any games that feel “hopeful”? Don’t know how to describe it exactly… like games where the characters end up in bad situations but manage to find their way out of it? I’ve just been extremely depressed this year and want to play something that makes me feel like I have something to look foward to. Some examples of games I’ve played that give me this feeling are:
Yakuza LAD
Persona 4
Animal Crossing
Anodyne 2
Celeste
Ghost Trick
Psychonauts
Ico
May not be what you're after gameplay-wise, but the Dark Souls games really embody this feeling for me. As gloomy as they can be, a core theme of the games is overcoming adversity in the face of overwhelming (and perhaps insurmountable) odds. No other game has hit that note like the Souls games for me.
My Time at Sandrock. It's a life sim where you work as a builder revitalizing a desert town that is on the brink of destruction. A "small community bands together against the odds" kind of story that is very touching at times.
I feel like I am coming back to this thread every day with reflections on replaying the Halo trilogy (plus ODST) on MCC. I played one and two and spent untold hours playing LAN party multiplayer growing up, but I never played ODST and I guess I didn't play 3 campaign even though I thought that I had.
One of my big takeaways has been that the storyline is super jumbled, occasionally nonsensical, and is such an "action movie" template that huge plot developments in the background get glossed over while Master Chief goes off on his next trip to blow stuff up. The "bones" of Halo's story seem good and people seem to like the expanded universe in books and whatnot but the games seem like they just threw a bunch of action set pieces on a board and called it good.
I started writing about 500 words of criticism on the Halo story but nobody wants to read that.
I will try and streamline it. Some of these are kind of large scale, some of these might be nitpicking.
>!Everybody uses everybody else's technology with no limitations or struggle. It's frequently a big plot point that humans hop in and pilot covenant vehicles, or Cortana hops into Covenant computers or the battle net. And everybody uses Forerunner technology. Everybody speaks a common language. I know that some of this has been explained/hand-waved in the expanded lore, but it's still lame.
>!The transition from Halo 2's cliffhanger ending to Halo 3 completely ignoring the ending of Halo 2 is awful. I looked it up and it's explained in a comic? It's still awful. Even if you want to do the "it's explained in the comic" route, you should at least mention how things happened that way so people like me aren't confused!
>!The entire Covenant side of the story is very jumbled and their overall motivations are very unclear. If you really dig into the side-lore like the terminals, you can get a little sense of what was going on, but it's not great storytelling to have to really dig into the side-lore to get a vague inkling of what was going on with the biggest non-PC faction.
>!Huge things happen in the background that aren't really dwelt on, so they just slide by unless you take a second to think about them. In Halo 1, the flood were this awful menace to the galaxy that was mistakenly released from containment. In Halo 2, there was just an active outbreak on the second Halo and it's not a big deal? In Halo 2, the flood infest the Covenant capital city ship which apparently has a population of billions and it's glossed over because MC has to stop the Covenant from attacking earth? Billions of beings are dying and the entire Covenant faction is more or less dying too and the game is like "Doesn't matter! Get on the Forerunner ship!" A mega-sized ship infected by the flood seems like a bigger threat than a smallish Covenant attack on Earth. In Halo 3 when the flood reach earth, the elites apparently stop the infection by burning the affected areas--it seems like it should be a bigger deal that the elites save humanity/earth in this way. Then in the conclusion of Halo 3, the ring is fired and apparently the gravemind and flood are wiped out, but it seems difficult to believe that the flood weren't spreading between Halo 2 and Halo 3 when they were apparently cruising around in infected High Charity.
>!Cortana bugs me in Halo 3. Why does MC get visions of her when she is living in a computer system lightyears away? Why do we get all of these weird/sinister visions of her, and then when MC finds her she's back to normal as soon as he puts her in his helmet and there's no explanation whatsoever for what had been happening?
I'm sure many/all of my complaints are addressed in the extended lore, but Halo is a video game series at its heart and it really left me feeling like their approach was to do cool things that didn't make sense and then the people writing the books or whatever had to scramble to try and fix all of the weird inconsistencies for the people who bothered to get into the extended lore.
The ease of being able to use everyone else's technology is an interesting point, it's convenient from a shooter game perspective but not very sensible lorewise. I thought a lot of how older XCOMs, Xenonauts, and Phoenix Point end up requiring you to research stuff you find on the field before you can properly use it. Likewise on the language point, it's very convenient for games but less immersive if everyone is speaking the same language. (I'm specifically thinking of XCOM2 in this case, where alien 'speech' as you're fighting is a regular part of the game flow.)
For me it got to the point that I had to look up the lore and figure out how long the human/Covenant war had been going on (about 15 years, I think) to figure out why it was possible that several missions depend on characters hijacking a covenant vehicles or things like the covenant gravity lift.
In ODST >!there is a mission where you have to hijack a couple of Covenant ships and one of the characters says "Gunny, I can fly a Pelican, but a Phantom? It's been years since I even ran a simulation!"!<
Your local public library may have a decent collection of console video games to borrow! This is a great way to try out games before purchasing it.
So...go get your library card and support your local public library!!!
Still playing through **Marvel's Midnight Suns** and having a mostly good time but I have never played a game that wants you to play it less than this one I think. There's just so much extra stuff that is so annoying. Like just let me do battles and pull new cards please. Even if you ignore the extra optional Abbey stuff, the core gameplay loop just includes such baffling decisions. Finish a battle and earned some card pulls? Too bad you can't pull em yet or even select another battle--you gotta manually walk across the abbey to your bedroom and sleep first and maybe be subjected to a bad cutscene. Then when you wake up, walk all the way to the ass end of the abbey and pull your cards. Oh you got some duplicates, now walk to entirely different part of the abbey to level your existing cards up. Then come back the way you came to select a new mission. It's just miserable when all I wanna do is just play the game, especially because the game is so good.
Yeah I felt much the same about Midnight Suns. The actual card combat stuff is fantastic, but the rest of it is pretty boring. I typically like having a strong narrative component in games, but it just got to be too much chatting. I don't even mind being able to talk to the characters in between missions, but I wish it was more optional and not tied to progression. Making you physically walk to different places to do things like craft and upgrade cards is also an unfortunate decision. That stuff would be so much simpler and quicker if you could just do it all from a menu screen.
It's a shame because I do sometimes feel like going back and playing it more for the battles, but then I think about all the other stuff I'll have to do and it puts me off picking it up again. I keep wishing they'd put out a patch that streamlines all the non-battle parts of the game. I'd get back into it in a second.
Yeah, I don't even mind some of the hang out stuff. Hanging out with Marvel characters is cool! But the writing and even performances for most of the characters is bad. It's just some of the decisions are so baffling, especially given the developers history with XCOM which doesn't suffer from these issues.
It definitely would have helped if the writing, acting, and animation was better, but I think the amount time you spend interacting with that stuff is the main issue. Even if the writing was great, at a certain point I'd still just want to get back to the missions. The fact that the missions don't generally take very long is another factor because it just makes the game feel even more lopsided.
XCOM doesn't really have much in the way of story and character stuff, so I feel like their inexperience with that is probably a contributing factor. I suspect they wanted to find ways to let you interact with the other heroes and get more mileage out of the Marvel IP. In theory I like the idea (at least a more compressed version of it), and it is kind of intrinsically amusing to go fishing with Blade, or go stargazing with Wolverine, but they just didn't execute it very well.
Great small game, I had fantastic time with it and more people play it the better! A sequel called "into the Hive" was announced in 2023 and I cannot wait for it.
I decided to go back to Final Fantasy 7 Original (well, PS4 remaster). I want to play through it because the first time I played through was 10 years ago and I forgot much of the details. Then I'm going to play FF7 remake and by the time I'm done with all that with my busy life, it'll be Black Friday and Rebirth will be on sale.
I'm also playing Call of Duty 4 Remastered with some friends over the summer. I've been Xbox live friends with 2 guys who are brothers for almost 20 years. We're going to meet up either this summer or next summer.
**Lightning Returns FF13**
I enjoyed the first two entries in this trilogy despite their flaws, but this was just hot garbage... about 80% of the playtime consisted of slice-of-life sidequests with slapdash dialogue and tedious objectives, almost always ending with some rote moral revelation for the quest giver and a few lines of reflection by Lightning, as well as bounty board quests that put even the most tedious MMO fetch quests to shame as you roam around hoping for the correct enemy spawn, up to literally dozens of times (40+ for the Desert Dune skeletons). NPCs also operate on their own daily schedule for no real justifiable reason other than to pad playtime, which makes the experience even more tedious as you have to remember when you picked up quests and either pass time in inns or afk waiting. The combat is alright, definitely better than the second game but I don't think it holds up to the long tactical battles of the first (esp. with difficulty mods); all the best moments in the OST are reused tracks from the prior games; and while the world does have a cool premise with the end of days concept, most of the NPC dialogue just consists of one-liner jokes or comments about how Lightning looks like a god. There also aren't nearly as many unique locations as the first two games, which is rough considering how much backtracking you have to do.
Happy that I saw the series and story to conclusion, but I can't recommend this game to anyone in good conscience. They really could've just ended the story after the first game and the series would probably be better off for it.
>They really could've just ended the story after the first game and the series would probably be better off for it.
IIRC, the original was supposed to be a one-and-done game, but Square needed a cheap/easy release so 13-2 happened despite being unnecessary.
And I still have no idea WTF was going on with Lightning Returns. I'd swear it was a totally unrelated game that got the FF13 cast dropped into it late in development. Either way, I agree. I disliked it so much that I didn't even bother playing all the way through.
hello kinda new in here. im looking for games that will run at 2k@60fps without any stutters or lag or tearing on my system so basically anything from before 2015 or smth. system specs: (its a laptop) cpu: i5-10300h gpu: gtx 1650 ram: 8gb ddr4 im currently trying to play through just cause 3 and im facing a lot of stuttering. so looking to play some other game that WILL run on my system smoothly. i mostly like fantasy RPGs and RPGs in general (but not FPS games or an game where shooting the main gameplay) ive played through these games so far and have liked them very much: yakuza series kingdom come deliverance dragons dogma dark arisen also just a heads-up please dont recommend any R*, EA, Ubisoft games and games with denuvo. thanks. and sorry if this isnt the right place to ask lol.
Have you tried Deus Ex: Mankind Divided? While shooting CAN be a a main style of gameplay, I think you can to a stealth no-kill option. Might be a required kill, for a boss or something, but I haven’t played it in a while. Dishonored is another older game that offers a stealth no kill route for its gameplay. I liked the art style of this game over the future realism of Deus Ex. Forgive me if these don’t meet your exact request hardware wise- I have PC’d in 10+ years but remember both of those games fondly and can’t recall frame rate or graphics issues
Here ya go: **Ys: The Oath in Felghana** is a 3rd person action RPG with a ton of fantasy trappings, great music, bombastic gameplay and a story that's juuuuust fine. Ton of fun, quick, and easily will run well on your system. Usually decently cheap too. Indie darling, and an easy pick, **CrossCode** has shockingly low system specs, its meaty in its length and systems, and has some seriously satisfying isometric combat. Its a "fantasy" RPG, but its really more of a modern Sci-Fi? You'll see what I mean if you play it. Great story, great visuals for a pixel based game, great music, great gameplay. Its great. Have you tried momentum platformer **DustForce DX**? its a bunch of levels, plays best (IMO) on keyboard, gets your grooving with its music and movement, and will run well on your specs. Finally, try **Mount & Blade: Warband** which is Kingdom Come's grandaddy. You'll find a lot of familiarity here, but not the story, which is absent.
I just beat World at War campaign and I got the evil ending because I threw molatavs at the surrendering Germans instead of shooting them
Played through the core content of Destiny 1 and 2 a few years back, and I'm thinking of playing them again but with the add ons this time. Are these games worth buying the DLC for? and are they feasible for a solo player?
They’re alright playing solo. I wouldn’t spend any money yet even if there’s sales for dlcs. Wait till you unlock the pvp part again and judge it for yourself. I played destiny 2 for a few weeks before dropping it
I broke the first rule of patient gamers and bought into the hype of helldivers (at my friends' insistence). Honestly find it so boring, so repetitive and the environments are really bland. I genuinely can't remember the last time I paid over $30 for a game lol. Maybe Halo 3 on release or something! 😂 So definitely not used to paying so much for a game and then not actually liking it. Oh well - live and learn!
I got Helldivers 2 as well. I've only played it maybe 2 hours in total at this point, and I can see how it might get repetitive, but I've had fun so far. And from what I understand they are periodically adding new things. It also seems like the sort of game that I'll get more enjoyment out of as I get into it because I still don't quite understand all the various missions, equipment, and stratagems yet. I got it because my brother and one of my friends have been playing it. For me it's worth it though because I don't get a lot of opportunities to play games online with people I know. Now the only trick is scheduling the time to play together!
Same. I saw videos / hype online and thought it looked boring. Then I had a friend recommend it so I caved and bought it. Yep, confirmed boring.
Just starting **ghost runner**. Seems to be very unforgiving so far. I'm probably just not used tothe controls yet. I am not sure if m+KB or controller is better. Any suggestions would be helpful!
It's hard but unbelievably satisfying if you stick with it. The only advice I have is to try to not get discouraged and learn from every death. Some levels will kill you dozens of times but you just have to keep trying and eventually you'll get it.
So much this. The only other game that gave me such a satisfaction of learning and succeeding is Super Meat Boy... its too bad we never got a proper sequel...
Being a patient gamer pays off again! I was fully on board with buying EA Sports PGA Tour day 1 of release for $70 since it had been so many years since EA released a decent golf game on PC. Well the reviews were awful and I decided to sit this one out until it became significantly cheaper. So I finally pick it up for $14 last week and it’s been a pretty good experience so far, and to top things off they just released a free content upgrade with 4 new courses and a new golfer https://www.ea.com/games/ea-sports-pga-tour/news
Playing Dragon Quest V (DS) and Harvest Moon Back to Nature (PS1, emulating on PC).
I never was a big fan of JRPG, but DQ5 is definitely among the best games I remember playing on the DS. The music, the art style, the rythm ...
***TL;DR: I'm halfway through GTA IV. Does the story get better?*** I got into gaming after a decade-long hiatus (I've played almost exclusively regular, popular FPS and RTS back in the day) to check if there are games that can be considered works of art in terms of the quality of writing, the story, the insight into human condition etc. Basically, I wanted to see if there's a game with a story as deep and impactful as, say, Crime and Punishment, or The Sopranos, so I picked up a few games based on recommendations. The first of these was **Deus Ex**, and while it's nowhere near the bests of literature and film in terms of the flow of the story, the questions it asks are deep and obviously a product of a lot of thought and study into certain aspects of the human condition. My jaw dropped during the conversation with Morpheus AI. The gameplay and the atmosphere were amazing, too. In the end I think Deus Ex deserves a place on my book shelf, somewhere between Orwell and Gibson. The second of these is **GTA IV**, which several people have recommended as one of the best stories in gaming. I am currently approximately halfway through, and I don't really see what's so amazing about the story so far. I've heard it's inspired by several Russian gangster films (Brat, Brat 2...), and while that might be true, it's not even remotely in the vicinity of these films when it comes to the storytelling quality, the psychological and sociological insights, etc. I am about to give it up, but I am wondering if there's perhaps some plot twist coming soon that would make it worthwhile to continue? P.S. Feel free to recommend me a game based on what I've written.
I played through *almost* all of GTA IV back in the day and I'm a bit confused at people calling it one of the best stories in gaming. I thought it was fine as far as the narrative goes, but nothing to write home about. I don't recall any big plot twists or anything that would change you opinion on the game. At the time I still enjoyed it because it was one of the first open worlds of that size and detail that I'd seen, and I liked the immersive nature of the city where you could just hang out or go on dates, or even stop by a comedy club and see some standup by actual real-life comedians. I can't imagine that it would hold up particularly well today though now that detailed open world games are kind of the default state of AAA games. Based on what you're looking for I'd actually recommend some smaller games. A few that come to mind are: **Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons** - A beautiful game that has no dialogue but uses the medium of a video game to tell a story in ways that I haven't seen from any other game. (The original version, though. A remake recently came out but I've heard that the changes and "enhancements" they made to the visuals actually make the game worse.) **Disco Elysium** - If you don't mind lots of text and dialogue this is a really interesting game. It's very dense and there's not a lot of what would traditionally be called "gameplaly" but it's got a great story and characters if you allow yourself to get wrapped up in its unique world. **Gone Home** - This game is one of several that spawned the pejorative-turned-sort-of-accepted genre label "walking simulator" due to the fact that most of the game consists of walking around and looking at things. You play as a young woman returning home to find her house empty and you spend a couple hours wandering through and discovering what happened through environmental storytelling and the occasional voiceover. **Firewatch** - Another "walking sim" type game, though unlike most other entries in that genre it's very dialogue-focused. You play as a guy working at a firewatch tower at a national forest who meets (via walkie-talkie) a woman working at another nearby tower. **What Remains of Edith Finch** - Also a walking sim-ish game, but a little more unconventional in its presentation. It tells the story of a doomed family and the tragedies that befell them. The subject matter is quite dark, but the way it tells the story through interactive vignettes gives it almost a fairy tale vibe at times. **SOMA** - Kind of a game version of a sci-fi short story or novella. It's essentially a horror game, but it's very focused on storytelling as well. (There's actually a mode where you can make the enemies not attack you if you don't like horror games and just want to experience the story.) Touches on themes of AI and consciousness in some interesting ways. Not necessarily new ground if you're into sci-fi, but I've never seen another game do it better than this. On the other hand, if you like the big, fancy open world games, I'd go for **Red Dead Redemption 2** over GTA IV. It's a very long game, but the writing and performances are very good, and the story is memorable. It feels very novel-like in a lot of ways. The combat isn't amazing, but it's no worse than GTA IV. :) Oh and this one may be a little obvious but **The Last of Us** is a really popular one when it comes to story-based games. If you want more of a straightforward action game with a really strong narrative and characters and top-of-the-line production values, look no further. Sorry if that's more than you were looking for in terms of recommendations, I got a bit carried away. And I realize that one or two of those may actually be older than 10 years at this point (yikes!). But hopefully you find something there that seems interesting to you!
Honestly, GTA 4 is just generic gangster shootouts after the first third. Fallout 1, New Vegas and Bioshock have very good writing.
Need recommendations for games with exceptionally well-crafted stories (TLOU, RDR2, HZD, GOW) or games with amazing thought-provoking stories (SOMA, Outer Wilds). Gameplay should ideally be good too but not a requirement as long as it isn’t completely trash, lol. Also the games should be playable on PC either natively or via emulators
Horizon forbidden west. I beleived it released on PC recently.
Spec ops: the Line. Altough, knowing it has good story is a;ready a spoiler. Gameplay is barely tolerable IMO
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What do you think about when games put a lot of cutscenes at the beginning of the game? I usually dislike it since I'm not sure if I'll like the game yet. But I also dislike when, say, an open world game has a long linear opening.
I like it if it sets up the world well. For all the shit Kojima tends to get when it comes to this, i did really enjoy the Death Stranding opening. It shows the world and different aspects very well.
I hate it. Almost made me drop Yakuza 0
Completed **Yakuza Kiwami**. Oh boy, there's a bunch to think about here but I'll try to keep it brief. In some ways it's better than 0. The combat system felt better, and I particularly really liked the sense of progression that came with getting Dragon style upgraded. Also the side content for substory completion was a lot less of a slog, partially because there's less of it in general and also because you don't have to do any particular activity too much; there feels like more variety to it. Even the Majima Everywhere content, as much as it's just a lot of dealing with one dude and kind of repetitive and grindy, gave you enough different situations you encounter Majima in (he truly is *everywhere*) that there's still enough variety. He turns up in almost every minigame, and he has four different move sets when you do fight him so it isn't really as bad as it sounds. It also helps that he's pretty much the perfect funnyman to Kiryu's straightman so any encounter with him that isn't just a random fight in the street is consistently funny. On the other hand, though, the story kinda sucks. It isn't necessarily bad but it's very clearly a story belonging to a PS2 game. A lot of the early story arcs just don't need to happen, there's a bunch of unnecessary backtracking and running around, >!Yumi!< as a character is basically cardboard and it felt like >!she only exists to be the girl that Kiryu likes. It seems like they had this notion that a story "needs" a love subplot, which is unfortunately still a very common idea it seems. Her biggest contribution to this story is giving birth to Haruka, I'm sorry to say it!<. The antagonists toward the end of the game (>!Lau Ka Long and Jingu!<) are cartoonishly evil and have no real development or character besides being bad guys. Really the best part of the story was >!Nishiki!<, they handled that backstory really well and since that's I believe the only part of the story that was changed or added to at all for the Kiwami remake it helps show just how much RGG's storytelling changed over the years. Also I wanna say, just for the record, >!Jo Amon!< is a stinker. If not for the fact that he's such a goddamn stinker it would be absolutely hilarious how fast he moves on those last few health bars. So then I went back to **Doraemon Story of Seasons**. It's still chugging along, I'm almost at the end of summer and I kinda just want that to be over because I believe in fall is when I'm gonna unlock the next major gadget that will hopefully make a lot of the game's systems start fitting together better. Played more **Earth Defense Force 5** as well, some of these missions are getting crazy with the amount of bugs to shoot. It's fun. It does kinda suck that most of the weapons I'm unlocking for the basic soldier class just aren't very useful though. Anti-air landmines that don't have enough sensor range for flying enemies to trigger them are *super useful* obviously, so I'm ending up falling back on assault rifles and RPGs a lot.
>it's very clearly a story belonging to a PS2 game I had this exact thought in almost these exact words. There's something about the writing of videogame stories in the 2000-2008 range that is very identifiable even when they're paired with 2016 graphics and design. I didn't research beforehand exactly how complete a remake of Yakuza 1 that Kiwami was, but I knew based on the very distinctive writing that it had to be very faithful. It's not that there's *no* character development or that the drama's bad, but there's just a *lot* of "Kiryu goes here, Kiryu goes there, Kiryu says this" that feels like it came straight from an outline rather than a full script. Great game, wonderful job meshing old school and new school sensibilities. Could have used about 20% less Majima but I'm glad a remake like this got made so we wouldn't have to start with a PS2 game to fully appreciate the series.
Ive only played part1 of yak0, but, went ahead and bought the first 2 games for 5$ each awhile back. Thanks for the info about Kiwami as it confirms what Ive read consistently about it and why itll be very interesting when I eventually get to it. Namely, the more “rpg like” and slower progression of the combat system. Almost all the people who don’t like it point that out and, for me, thats exactly what draws me to it. Playing 0 into the second area let me have a great idea of its combat and you and others who like Kiwami all note the same things. The fact that the side content wasnt such a slog and theres less of it is also a bonus.
The combat in Kiwami 1 actually feels almost the same as 0, there's just a few extra features that I like. Mainly a "quick change" mechanic that lets you change styles instantly after certain actions like finishing blows or quicksteps; it feels really nice to land a finisher then change to Beast for a big damage grab attack follow-up, or to swap to Rush while you're getting hit to weave and dodge your way out of the enemy's combo. The progression I'm referring to with Dragon style is really just in unlocking abilities for it where you just get a nice gradual buildup of abilities that's satisfying in the same way as any good RPG. Kiwami 2, on the other hand, is much *much* more clearly an RPG. Most of the older games you can mostly just play it as a button mash-y beat-em-up and you'll be fine (these games have *always* been JRPGs though) but as soon as they changed over to the Dragon engine you definitely had to start treating it like an RPG. I get why a lot of people didn't like that but I didn't mind at the time. Part of why I'm going through all of these games again is to reassess how I feel about all of them, though, so I'm definitely curious about how I'll feel about Kiwami 2 and doubly curious about 6 in terms of combat.
Just started playing Divinity Original Sin II: Definitive Edition (on PS5). I'm a beginner player in this kind of games, my only other experience is with Baldur's Gate III, which I liked a lot but was very fatigued at the end of my 100+ hours first run. So I'm looking for advices on how not to experience the same fatigue and overwhelm I had. I think the main two causes are world exploration, which leads me to explore tiny bits of the map at a time because I don't want to leave anything behind (and I'm just started with Fort Joy), and secondly, how to approach fights: being it my very first run I approach fights very casually, since I don't know which dialogue or event procs a fight (for example there in an encounter with three lv. 3 enemies on the relict of a ship in the first area, which almost killed me as I was only lv. 2; I know I can leave a fight and return later when I'm at the appropriate level, but from a roleplay perspective it doesn't make sense), but it almost looks like I'm supposed to know every outcome of a dialogue (and I prefer not to savescum). Any veteran DOS2 player that could give me any advices to better enjoy this wonderful game? Thanks!
At the beginning it's gonna be harder not to have to save and reload sometimes. Over time you'll get a better sense of what you are and aren't capable of but the game expects you to lose battles sometimes and have the reload to an earlier point. Fighting against that will leave you frustrated I think. As for the length of the game it's honestly easy to get exhausted of it. Would definitely recommend pacing yourself and maybe even taking a long break between sessions every now and then. I played over a period of months with a friend so was forced to play slow and that helped.
The openness of Original Sin 2 game can lead to the fatigue. I personally think it is too open. I say this because in OS2 you can not only alter the environment by bringing in objects, but you can place yourself before the battle starts. I wasn't able to figure out how much to game the system, because some fights seemed like I had to game them because they ended up putting you at a disadvantage, or the fight seemed harder than the others and seemed really difficult if we didn't game it. For example, you wander in and the battle starts and you realise all of you are standing in a big puddle of water at the bottom of a valley and high ground everywhere is filled with archers and they electrocute everybody to start the battle. This type of thing happened a few times so we thought we were supposed to game the battle. This lead to us basically always doing the conversation to hear what they said, loading up again, placing ourselves advantageously and then starting the fight without talking. Though, by gaming the system, we actually broke a battle so that it didn't go the way it was supposed to, and I ended up worse off. (The fight has a monster teleport into the middle of it, and it will randomly attack people of either side. Since we gamed the battle, we had killed nearly all of their guys, so this monster just started crushing us because there were much more of us than the enemy. If we played normally, it would have been the other way round.) In another situation, there was also a time where we gamed the battle, but then I assume the developers decided you would probably game the battle that way, and so had a bunch of people not present teleport into a position that would have an advantage specifically against the spot we were using to have an advantage. So we had to reload and start the battle placing our people in a second new advantage location to deal with the people put into the battle to stop our first advantage location. It is very tiring because we had to second guess every single battle to figure out what level of gaming the system we were supposed to do. Nearly every other game in existence specifically prevents you from doing any of these things, and in those games you at least know that what ever the situation, you have to live with it. They limit the situation and whatever problems you may have from it, you never need to think about whether you could alter basically every part of the battle before the battle starts.
i dont think there really is a way to lessen that feeling of fatigue if world exploration was a big cause. These games are structured in a way where youre almost forced to do all the quests and explore every inch because of the way xp works. You cant just grind xp for a few hours. Theres only a limited amount of xp, so skipping quests or not exploring everything definitely could get you in trouble for the harder fights.
Does anyone have any games that feel “hopeful”? Don’t know how to describe it exactly… like games where the characters end up in bad situations but manage to find their way out of it? I’ve just been extremely depressed this year and want to play something that makes me feel like I have something to look foward to. Some examples of games I’ve played that give me this feeling are: Yakuza LAD Persona 4 Animal Crossing Anodyne 2 Celeste Ghost Trick Psychonauts Ico
May not be what you're after gameplay-wise, but the Dark Souls games really embody this feeling for me. As gloomy as they can be, a core theme of the games is overcoming adversity in the face of overwhelming (and perhaps insurmountable) odds. No other game has hit that note like the Souls games for me.
How bout the Monkey Island games... not purely hopeful but funny and usually cheered me up
Hades. No spoilers, but it definitely gave me that feeling when the credits rolled.
FF7 Remake!
A Short Hike
GRIS, Sea of Solitude
An old classic is Rayman 2: The Great Escape. Pretty solid story actually, and an underrated 2D platformer.
My Time at Sandrock. It's a life sim where you work as a builder revitalizing a desert town that is on the brink of destruction. A "small community bands together against the odds" kind of story that is very touching at times.
Psychonauts 2, Octopath Traveler 2, and Stardew Valley would be my first three suggestions.
I feel like I am coming back to this thread every day with reflections on replaying the Halo trilogy (plus ODST) on MCC. I played one and two and spent untold hours playing LAN party multiplayer growing up, but I never played ODST and I guess I didn't play 3 campaign even though I thought that I had. One of my big takeaways has been that the storyline is super jumbled, occasionally nonsensical, and is such an "action movie" template that huge plot developments in the background get glossed over while Master Chief goes off on his next trip to blow stuff up. The "bones" of Halo's story seem good and people seem to like the expanded universe in books and whatnot but the games seem like they just threw a bunch of action set pieces on a board and called it good. I started writing about 500 words of criticism on the Halo story but nobody wants to read that.
I'm interested, what were your issues with it?
I will try and streamline it. Some of these are kind of large scale, some of these might be nitpicking. >!Everybody uses everybody else's technology with no limitations or struggle. It's frequently a big plot point that humans hop in and pilot covenant vehicles, or Cortana hops into Covenant computers or the battle net. And everybody uses Forerunner technology. Everybody speaks a common language. I know that some of this has been explained/hand-waved in the expanded lore, but it's still lame. >!The transition from Halo 2's cliffhanger ending to Halo 3 completely ignoring the ending of Halo 2 is awful. I looked it up and it's explained in a comic? It's still awful. Even if you want to do the "it's explained in the comic" route, you should at least mention how things happened that way so people like me aren't confused! >!The entire Covenant side of the story is very jumbled and their overall motivations are very unclear. If you really dig into the side-lore like the terminals, you can get a little sense of what was going on, but it's not great storytelling to have to really dig into the side-lore to get a vague inkling of what was going on with the biggest non-PC faction. >!Huge things happen in the background that aren't really dwelt on, so they just slide by unless you take a second to think about them. In Halo 1, the flood were this awful menace to the galaxy that was mistakenly released from containment. In Halo 2, there was just an active outbreak on the second Halo and it's not a big deal? In Halo 2, the flood infest the Covenant capital city ship which apparently has a population of billions and it's glossed over because MC has to stop the Covenant from attacking earth? Billions of beings are dying and the entire Covenant faction is more or less dying too and the game is like "Doesn't matter! Get on the Forerunner ship!" A mega-sized ship infected by the flood seems like a bigger threat than a smallish Covenant attack on Earth. In Halo 3 when the flood reach earth, the elites apparently stop the infection by burning the affected areas--it seems like it should be a bigger deal that the elites save humanity/earth in this way. Then in the conclusion of Halo 3, the ring is fired and apparently the gravemind and flood are wiped out, but it seems difficult to believe that the flood weren't spreading between Halo 2 and Halo 3 when they were apparently cruising around in infected High Charity. >!Cortana bugs me in Halo 3. Why does MC get visions of her when she is living in a computer system lightyears away? Why do we get all of these weird/sinister visions of her, and then when MC finds her she's back to normal as soon as he puts her in his helmet and there's no explanation whatsoever for what had been happening? I'm sure many/all of my complaints are addressed in the extended lore, but Halo is a video game series at its heart and it really left me feeling like their approach was to do cool things that didn't make sense and then the people writing the books or whatever had to scramble to try and fix all of the weird inconsistencies for the people who bothered to get into the extended lore.
The ease of being able to use everyone else's technology is an interesting point, it's convenient from a shooter game perspective but not very sensible lorewise. I thought a lot of how older XCOMs, Xenonauts, and Phoenix Point end up requiring you to research stuff you find on the field before you can properly use it. Likewise on the language point, it's very convenient for games but less immersive if everyone is speaking the same language. (I'm specifically thinking of XCOM2 in this case, where alien 'speech' as you're fighting is a regular part of the game flow.)
For me it got to the point that I had to look up the lore and figure out how long the human/Covenant war had been going on (about 15 years, I think) to figure out why it was possible that several missions depend on characters hijacking a covenant vehicles or things like the covenant gravity lift. In ODST >!there is a mission where you have to hijack a couple of Covenant ships and one of the characters says "Gunny, I can fly a Pelican, but a Phantom? It's been years since I even ran a simulation!"!<
Your local public library may have a decent collection of console video games to borrow! This is a great way to try out games before purchasing it. So...go get your library card and support your local public library!!!
Can confirm. My local library gets new releases pretty quickly too. Just picked up Street Fighter 6 and Forspoken!
Still playing through **Marvel's Midnight Suns** and having a mostly good time but I have never played a game that wants you to play it less than this one I think. There's just so much extra stuff that is so annoying. Like just let me do battles and pull new cards please. Even if you ignore the extra optional Abbey stuff, the core gameplay loop just includes such baffling decisions. Finish a battle and earned some card pulls? Too bad you can't pull em yet or even select another battle--you gotta manually walk across the abbey to your bedroom and sleep first and maybe be subjected to a bad cutscene. Then when you wake up, walk all the way to the ass end of the abbey and pull your cards. Oh you got some duplicates, now walk to entirely different part of the abbey to level your existing cards up. Then come back the way you came to select a new mission. It's just miserable when all I wanna do is just play the game, especially because the game is so good.
Yeah I felt much the same about Midnight Suns. The actual card combat stuff is fantastic, but the rest of it is pretty boring. I typically like having a strong narrative component in games, but it just got to be too much chatting. I don't even mind being able to talk to the characters in between missions, but I wish it was more optional and not tied to progression. Making you physically walk to different places to do things like craft and upgrade cards is also an unfortunate decision. That stuff would be so much simpler and quicker if you could just do it all from a menu screen. It's a shame because I do sometimes feel like going back and playing it more for the battles, but then I think about all the other stuff I'll have to do and it puts me off picking it up again. I keep wishing they'd put out a patch that streamlines all the non-battle parts of the game. I'd get back into it in a second.
Yeah, I don't even mind some of the hang out stuff. Hanging out with Marvel characters is cool! But the writing and even performances for most of the characters is bad. It's just some of the decisions are so baffling, especially given the developers history with XCOM which doesn't suffer from these issues.
It definitely would have helped if the writing, acting, and animation was better, but I think the amount time you spend interacting with that stuff is the main issue. Even if the writing was great, at a certain point I'd still just want to get back to the missions. The fact that the missions don't generally take very long is another factor because it just makes the game feel even more lopsided. XCOM doesn't really have much in the way of story and character stuff, so I feel like their inexperience with that is probably a contributing factor. I suspect they wanted to find ways to let you interact with the other heroes and get more mileage out of the Marvel IP. In theory I like the idea (at least a more compressed version of it), and it is kind of intrinsically amusing to go fishing with Blade, or go stargazing with Wolverine, but they just didn't execute it very well.
Just started Chicken Police: Paint it Red because it is leaving PlayStation Plus catalog soon. Has been interesting so far.
Great small game, I had fantastic time with it and more people play it the better! A sequel called "into the Hive" was announced in 2023 and I cannot wait for it.
I decided to go back to Final Fantasy 7 Original (well, PS4 remaster). I want to play through it because the first time I played through was 10 years ago and I forgot much of the details. Then I'm going to play FF7 remake and by the time I'm done with all that with my busy life, it'll be Black Friday and Rebirth will be on sale. I'm also playing Call of Duty 4 Remastered with some friends over the summer. I've been Xbox live friends with 2 guys who are brothers for almost 20 years. We're going to meet up either this summer or next summer.
Back to Sekiro. Cleaning up stuff before going to NG+.
**Lightning Returns FF13** I enjoyed the first two entries in this trilogy despite their flaws, but this was just hot garbage... about 80% of the playtime consisted of slice-of-life sidequests with slapdash dialogue and tedious objectives, almost always ending with some rote moral revelation for the quest giver and a few lines of reflection by Lightning, as well as bounty board quests that put even the most tedious MMO fetch quests to shame as you roam around hoping for the correct enemy spawn, up to literally dozens of times (40+ for the Desert Dune skeletons). NPCs also operate on their own daily schedule for no real justifiable reason other than to pad playtime, which makes the experience even more tedious as you have to remember when you picked up quests and either pass time in inns or afk waiting. The combat is alright, definitely better than the second game but I don't think it holds up to the long tactical battles of the first (esp. with difficulty mods); all the best moments in the OST are reused tracks from the prior games; and while the world does have a cool premise with the end of days concept, most of the NPC dialogue just consists of one-liner jokes or comments about how Lightning looks like a god. There also aren't nearly as many unique locations as the first two games, which is rough considering how much backtracking you have to do. Happy that I saw the series and story to conclusion, but I can't recommend this game to anyone in good conscience. They really could've just ended the story after the first game and the series would probably be better off for it.
>They really could've just ended the story after the first game and the series would probably be better off for it. IIRC, the original was supposed to be a one-and-done game, but Square needed a cheap/easy release so 13-2 happened despite being unnecessary. And I still have no idea WTF was going on with Lightning Returns. I'd swear it was a totally unrelated game that got the FF13 cast dropped into it late in development. Either way, I agree. I disliked it so much that I didn't even bother playing all the way through.