[Dr Lancer-X]

Baby Bonnie Hood, on 13 November 2015 - 09:43 PM, said:

I heard that you might not like how it ultimately ends.

To be honest I went into this expecting disappointment, because since Mass Effect 3 I have no illusions that a massively branching storyline that continually plays up how important your choices are will have anything resembling a satisfying conclusion given that. So there's a chance it might actually impress me instead, simply because I expect nothing from this game.

EDIT: Finished, and yeah, pretty much.

Those last chapter hallucination/nightmare scenes have also long since lost their flavour for me, after being done in much the same way in countless other games.. leaving them out would have been a better choice.

I am semi-tempted to do a replay, basically picking the opposite choice of every path, but I'm not sure. Looks like the overall story is fairly immutable, which is a common failing I've observed with Western-style adventures that pick up some of the trappings of the visual novel format but not all of them - they want to throw in all the choices VNs have but they don't write multi-route stories to take advantage of them.

EDIT 2: Also, I've figured out the problem. Trying not to spoil anything, but basically the central premise is the same as Steins;Gate, but without the good ending. It could probably have used one, and it wouldn't destroy the central theme to fix this.

[Exophase]

Baby Bonnie Hood, on 13 November 2015 - 06:43 AM, said:

Sounds like you had a bad time

I sure did. Good thing it had the music it did. I don't know if I would have lasted had it used this instead: https://www.youtube....h?v=41YOknSl0zw

That sounds more like Sans' Megaman X stage.

[CJA]

fallout 4

the spoiler sure is spoiler. i especially like the spoiler.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Seems to be the most polarising Fallout release yet- wildly divergent opinions.

I'm sure the game will be a good deal more solid when I finally play it in three years.

[Graham]

The Elder Scrolls- Morrowind. Second attempt, but I'm really getting into it now. I'm still only about 7 hours into it though.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Graham, on 17 November 2015 - 04:39 PM, said:

The Elder Scrolls- Morrowind. Second attempt, but I'm really getting into it now. I'm still only about 7 hours into it though.

I played that again fairly recently with some light modding (aside from the usual fixes and graphical upgrades, the main change was to make the R key instantly cast a spell instead of requiring you to put away your weapon to cast it, making Battlemage a feasible class to play) - great game and replaying it now after Oblivion and Skyrim really reminds you of all the things those games took out.. Morrowind allows you to become really powerful in a way those games didn't.

(To other prospective players can I suggest _not_ installing the Morrowind Overhaul? Despite being very old and there being no patches released for the latest version, there's plenty of things broken and it will cause you some mild annoyances in Morrowind and some fairly major (game-breaking) annoyances in Tribunal and Bloodmoon. Really not worth it!)

[djtiesto]

Finally beat Wild Arms 5, which means I've completed the whole series and its spinoffs. And I did the prologue chapter of Xenoblade X, which I will dive into later this week.

[Lachesis]

Tried to get into Morrowind (GotY) recently, but the sluggish movement and getting killed the first time I tried to sleep kind of put me off from it. I'll go back to it with mods, but for now I've been playing Oblivion and Dawnguard.

IIRC the assassin is part of having Tribunal installed, right? I wonder if I can just turn it off until I'm a higher level...

[Dr Lancer-X]

Lachesis, on 28 December 2015 - 10:24 AM, said:

Tried to get into Morrowind (GotY) recently, but the sluggish movement and getting killed the first time I tried to sleep kind of put me off from it. I'll go back to it with mods, but for now I've been playing Oblivion and Dawnguard.

IIRC the assassin is part of having Tribunal installed, right? I wonder if I can just turn it off until I'm a higher level...

You can disable Tribunal temporarily- no idea if that will cause any problems if you've already started playing. I didn't mind the assassins as Dark Brotherhood armour sells for a ton. There's only a small chance of being attacked so you can always reload and sleep again (the game autosaves before you sleep).

As far as the sluggish pace goes, yes. There's good reason to make getting the Boots of Blinding Speed + some method of avoiding the blindness effect your first priority (1-second resist magicka 100% is enough, if you can manage to find some way of generating that effect that you can afford. You only need the effect to be active when you equip the boots)

[T-Bone]

Been playing Fallout 4 lately, but mostly for inspiration on textures and modeling. Since I spend most of my free time now making 3D assets for indie game developers. Fallout 4, itself feels nothing like any of the previous games, which is unfortunate. You could spend hours walking around and all you'll come across is enemies to shoot. Its actually very repetitive. No real interesting encounters and the story seems very linear. I still find it hard to turn off so there is something quite addictive about it. Perhaps its the constant action.

I do intent to mod for it when the Geck comes out. I've been making mods for quite some time with the Fallout series and Skyrim.

This post has been edited by T-Bone: 28 December 2015 - 05:40 AM

[Dr Lancer-X]

T-Bone, on 28 December 2015 - 03:37 PM, said:

Since I spend most of my free time now making 3D assets for indie game developers.

Cool, what are your commission rates like?

T-Bone, on 28 December 2015 - 03:37 PM, said:

Fallout 4, itself feels nothing like any of the previous games, which is unfortunate. You could spend hours walking around and all you'll come across is enemies to shoot. Its actually very repetitive. No real interesting encounters and the story seems very linear. I still find it hard to turn off so there is something quite addictive about it. Perhaps its the constant action.

Yeah, I've heard similar things. Really sad. I wish Bethesda would get Obsidian to do another spinoff game like New Vegas, because that was goddamn excellent.

[Goshi]

Pillars of Eternity. Part 2 of the White March expansion is coming out so I'm making a party ready and prepared for it. Also when it comes out, I'll definitely be jumping into the PC version of Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen.

[GetDizzy]

Been playing a bunch of stuff on my 3DS lately, Animal Crossing New Leaf, Starfox 64 3D, Persona Q...

Also been playing some Persona 4 on an emulator and some Mario Kart 8 on my WiiU.

RE: Discussion on Fallout 4, I have to agree with a lot of the things T-Bone said. That said, I *liked* it. It was pretty, I liked the storyline, I liked the way the action felt, and the *setting* felt fallout, but the gameplay felt very linear and limiting. I really didn't like the new dialog system. Like, I enjoyed that your character had voice acting but I mean, Mass Effect did that much better, in that it still allowed for a large degree of interactivity and dialogue choice while have a voice acted main character. Fallout 4 had no "extended options", you were always limited to 4 choices, and it felt like 90% of the time 3 of those 4 choices were the same thing.

I think dropping the skill system and switching everything to using the special stats and a perk system was both an oversimplification and paradoxically confusing.

I'd still put it as one of my favorite games released this year, and I'd say I didn't feel disappointed in it after being hyped up for it prior to release, so that's a thing, I guess? I dunno, my opinions on this game are very complex.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Tried playing SW:KoTOR 2 again since there was that announcement last year that the game recently got a huge official update, the first in ten years, intended to improve compatibility with modern systems.

My findings:

• Not available for the GOG version.
  
• Game is still as unplayably unstable as ever.

Oh well.

[djtiesto]

A helluva lot of Xenoblade X. Don't like it as much as the first game but the world is breathtaking. Almost finished with the main quest, but finishing up all the side missions beforehand.

[CJA]

Darkest Dungeon. The RPG mechanics are cool, if a bit oddly implemented. Attacks have to match up with a position for the source and target. For example, you can only melee from the first two ranks and hit the first two enemy ranks. A spellcaster can't be in the front to cast; they have to be in the rear three ranks. The game is very pretty in its dark gothic fantasy way, and I really wish they followed suit with the interface and combat mechanics. Instead of stuff like "Base Acc 90 Self: heal 2-3 hp Enemy: Base Acc 80 3-4 light damage Stun (20%)" they should just say a quip about something about religion, healing and damage. Just sort of a mini-lesson I learned. I had to stop and look at the mechanics to understand "oh, this is the bread and butter basic attack, this is their special status move, this one juggles enemies around." In a WRPG like this, mechanics can be buried a little deeper.

[Razerboy]

Fallout 4, although I'm stuck near the end due to a game-breaking bug that won't allow me to progress further with one of the factions (a quick google of Underground Undercover bug brings up dozens of threads on the issue). I contacted Bethesda support and received a generic e-mail response with links to worthless FAQ articles. Kinda bummed out about the whole situation.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Bethesda tech support:

Just be patient. I'm sure modders will fix this eventually, like with the rest of our games.
-sent from my yacht

[Exophase]

I just played a short game on Steam called Pony Island. It looked interesting and had extremely strong reviews. It was an okay game but overall I feel pretty underwhelmed, like I just don't get something everyone else gets. It broke the fourth wall a lot but Undertale kind of spoiled the novelty there, and it did it so much less effectively (to the point where at times it felt like a poor imitation)

And this part probably really is just me, but I utterly loathed using the mouse to aim and shoot for the running platforming parts.

[CJA]

I wanted to make a post about Undertale, but I can't really do it justice. I played it four times just to understand the story and what the heck was going on.

The music--just the general quality and the haphazard unity of 8-bit, 16-bit and modern styles--is just right up my alley, 100%. I can just listen to the OST by itself straight through while I'm at work or something. There are a lot of recurring motifs, which I'm still discovering, that just give the music this extra depth and meaning. I would tell you which one is my favorite, but, okay ALL THE BOSS THEMES.

Haven't felt this sad to finish a game and let it go since Cave Story.

[Exophase]

CJA, on 19 January 2016 - 08:15 AM, said:

I wanted to make a post about Undertale, but I can't really do it justice. I played it four times just to understand the story and what the heck was going on.

Huh, I thought the story was pretty straightforward. Maybe some confusion about the exact nature of the principle antagonists.

I just beat a Zelda-like game called Anodyne and that had a really vague story. But it was probably supposed to be.

CJA, on 19 January 2016 - 08:15 AM, said:

The music--just the general quality and the haphazard unity of 8-bit, 16-bit and modern styles--is just right up my alley, 100%. I can just listen to the OST by itself straight through while I'm at work or something. There are a lot of recurring motifs, which I'm still discovering, that just give the music this extra depth and meaning. I would tell you which one is my favorite, but, okay ALL THE BOSS THEMES.

It's one of those very listenable soundtracks, yeah. I mentioned earlier but Megalovania helped make that crushingly difficult battle playable. That music was apparently recycled from an earlier game, I'd like to hear the original, wonder if it's on Youtube...

I've seen people characterize the soundtrack as predominantly 8-bit, which strikes me as weird because I can't really think of more than a few tracks that sounded like that. Maybe I'm not really remembering it properly.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Megami Tensei II. I think it might be the best NES/FC JRPG? It's pretty great stuff.

I'm basically starting a playthrough of all the Megami Tensei games, save the ones that were only released on consoles I can't emulate.

[CJA]

Exophase, on 19 January 2016 - 05:49 PM, said:

Huh, I thought the story was pretty straightforward. Maybe some confusion about the exact nature of the principle antagonists.

Well, TBH, the second play was to do it the right way, the third play was to satisfy a morbid curiosity (you know what I mean... luckily, I gave up), and the fourth and fifth were to make it right again. (And because I loved it enough to play it again.) I felt like I needed to be sick of the game to stop playing it.

[Wervyn]

Lots of love for Undertale, I kept thinking how I could totally see it as a Megazeux game as I was playing through it. Due to the way I approach games generally, I naturally fell into a pacifist run straight away without the need for any backtracking but the part that's required. And just personally, I don't have any particular curiosity for the darker side of the game, I'm perfectly content to hear it described. I have trouble being intentionally cruel in games if they provide any way to avoid it, so when a game tells me "hey, you don't have to kill ANYONE" I say "sounds awesome, let's do that." I still haven't done a full playthrough of Dishonored where I kill anyone, or don't try to avoid deaths in scenes that I wander in on. I always ended up straight Paragon in Mass Effect...except for some of the renegade QTEs which were especially funny...oh well.

The other Choices Matter game I've been enjoying lately is Life is Strange. It wasn't quite the emotional gut punch for me that Undertale was, but it was quite good. (To explain, Undertale is a story about redemption, and those always hit me really hard. Life is Strange is a story about acceptance, which I also love, but they tend to leave me more in a place of melancholy than eucatastrophic catharsis.)

By the way, the next time you do find yourself in Undertale's happy epilogue, make the effort to trek back to the beginning of the ruins. It takes some time, but I thought it was worth the trip.

"Don't you have anything better to do?"

[Razerboy]

Dr Lancer-X, on 14 January 2016 - 07:21 AM, said:

Bethesda tech support:

Just be patient. I'm sure modders will fix this eventually, like with the rest of our games.
-sent from my yacht

Although not long after my gripe, I almost wept when I read the patch notes for 1.3.45, which is currently in beta on PC:

"Fixed an issue where the player couldn't talk to Desdemona to complete "Underground Undercover"

Maybe I'll be able to finish the game, after all.

[Exophase]

CJA, on 19 January 2016 - 11:12 PM, said:

Well, TBH, the second play was to do it the right way, the third play was to satisfy a morbid curiosity (you know what I mean... luckily, I gave up), and the fourth and fifth were to make it right again. (And because I loved it enough to play it again.) I felt like I needed to be sick of the game to stop playing it.

Wervyn, on 20 January 2016 - 12:37 AM, said:

And just personally, I don't have any particular curiosity for the darker side of the game, I'm perfectly content to hear it described.

I'm surprised to hear that a lot of people refuse to play the genocide run. I personally didn't have any problem with it. I commend the game for giving people the illusion that they're really interacting with the game world on a direct and personal level. At the same time, while playing it I also kind of consciously felt like the game creator was being a manipulative bastard. On some level anyway.

On the other hand, I played LISA without sacrificing anyone and that game really punishes you in gameplay for doing this (without rewarding you in narrative). I even spent several minutes save scumming through the one part where it's really hard to avoid sacrifice, just because I was so determined to offset the cruelty that had already been subject to me. So I guess I'm not really one to talk about having an irrational emotional response to gameplay.

But here's where I draw the line: I've actually seen people say that Toby Fox doesn't want people to play the genocide run. As if you, the player, were pushing the game down the path of providing this very scripted already created response.

[Wervyn]

I saw the game more as making a philosophical point about achievement-oriented gameplay, where you conquer all the challenges in the game just because they're there, and exhaust every option before discarding it and moving onto the next world. I would absolutely believe that Toby Fox prefers the good ending of the game, and thinks that committing to play all the way through the bad one says something about your character. (He also apparently thinks NOT playing through genocide but satisfying your curiosity second-hand says something even worse.) But you're right, it's silly to say that he doesn't WANT it to be played. The content is just as lovingly crafted, if he didn't want anyone to experience it he wouldn't have made it. More than that though, I think Undertale HAS to fully explore the consequences of both polarities to have the impact it does. Otherwise, your choices don't really mean anything. Like, Toby could have very easily made the sans fight actually impossible to beat, if he didn't ever want anyone to move past it. But then the game's central idea about the power of a player's determination to win, and that it's not always a positive trait, wouldn't really hold together.

Now for me, and again this is just my personal approach to games, Undertale's genocide route sounds unpleasant to play through. And this is very much by design. Played that way, it becomes a horror game (with the player as the central antagonist), and I just don't like horror games or other media much at all. The primary motivations for actually playing it myself are a couple of really difficult boss fights, and that doesn't really sound all that fun to me (though it does for other people). I actually think the concept behind the sans fight is hilariously brilliant, he knows that there's nothing he can actually do to stop you, the only thing he can do is present the most trollishly unfair fight possible and hope you eventually get too frustrated to continue. And ironically this directly pokes at the "challenge accepted" nerve that lead you to that point in the first place. But since I don't enjoy twitch gameplay challenges all that much myself, I don't have a lot of motivation to attempt this personally, especially when the story reward for it is "congratulations, you unlocked the TRUE BAD END!"

I'm a compulsive collector in games. You tell me there are a hundred macguffins in a game and you can be sure I'm going to go look for those hundred macguffins. I've realized that I'm not really a game completionist though, I find that I don't have to squeeze every drop of content out of something to be satisfied with the experience, I just want to find all the content I know I'll enjoy. I appreciate that Undertale endorses that approach, saying "there's plenty more stuff you could do in this game, but it's really okay if you never do any of it. Feel free to stop playing, in fact, please never play me again."

By the way Exo, did you play Ever 17 back when we were all doing that? I forget, but I always think of it when it comes to games and stories that engage the player in an unconventional way.

"But nobody came."

[Exophase]

Of course Toby Fox prefers people play the normal path of the game, he obviously put way more work into it. What I'm saying is that there are people who think Toby Fox doesn't want you to play the genocide run at all, ever. Even if you stop before the very end or save it for after you've played it the other ways. They see the permanently altering part of it as the developer punishing the player rather than part of the meta-narrative.

There are people who say things like this to outright discourage others from playing it. But the genocide run isn't just about slaughtering everyone; a decent amount of character depth and background is revealed during it. Stuff that, from my perspective, really compliments and strengthens the main playthrough rather than diminishing it. And that's what compelled me, not compulsion to do everything in the game. I'm really not anything close to a completionist either.

I can see the horror aspects of the genocide run, it's definitely styled that way but I think I enjoyed it in ways I wouldn't normally enjoy horror games - which I normally don't care for either.

I've never played Ever 17, or heard of it for that matter.. I'd say I'd try it but I'm really not interested in VNs. So I dunno, maybe some time but probably not.

But while we're on the topic.. I mentioned Pony Island earlier in the thread, and that got me thinking about the whole fucking-with-the-player and dancing all over the fourth wall mechanics. You know, the stuff that Undertale does well, but really serves as kind of a extra layer and subtext to a game that has a very solid core. Well Pony Island feels much more like that's the core and a really standard (and not very fun) infinite runner and "coding" puzzles are more there to support the theme than to be great. And it seems like everywhere I look people are eating that up. Somehow it didn't really strike me as that compelling, I mean it was okay and worth some laughs but didn't catch me off guard or totally redefine how I look at games or leave me in awe at how intelligent it is. I got the feeling like I'd seen all this before somewhere, and actually not really with Undertale, and that made me think.. I can't really put my finger on examples but this stuff feels very MZX. Like the kind of content from back in the day where there's a lot of jokes involving the game creator interacting with the game world as some kind of sadist and poking around with the player's expectations.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Quote

By the way Exo, did you play Ever 17 back when we were all doing that? I forget, but I always think of it when it comes to games and stories that engage the player in an unconventional way.

If you want a VN to compare to Undertale, Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi is way closer to the mark (although not one you can exactly recommend to Exo), since it's fundamentally a critique of 'romance one heroine, then reload the game and romance another heroine, repeat until all heroines are thoroughly romanced' VN gameplay - it also breaks the fourth wall in a very clever way and features a whole 'meta-VN' segment that is pretty unique among the medium.

[CJA]

Wervyn, on 20 January 2016 - 09:42 PM, said:

I appreciate that Undertale endorses that approach, saying "there's plenty more stuff you could do in this game, but it's really okay if you never do any of it. Feel free to stop playing, in fact, please never play me again."

Exophase, on 20 January 2016 - 10:26 PM, said:

There are people who say things like this to outright discourage others from playing it. But the genocide run isn't just about slaughtering everyone; a decent amount of character depth and background is revealed during it. Stuff that, from my perspective, really compliments and strengthens the main playthrough rather than diminishing it. And that's what compelled me, not compulsion to do everything in the game. I'm really not anything close to a completionist either.

The reason I played Genocide, honestly, was for answers. I wanted to know exactly what -they- were, how they were related, and exactly what happened before the events of the game. Interestingly, when I was playing Genocide, I had a very detached feeling. I wasn't the protagonist, I wasn't doing this stuff. This was just research, and nothing I did bothered me at all. I just now realize that that might have been the very point Toby was trying to get across.

Exophase, on 20 January 2016 - 10:26 PM, said:

But while we're on the topic.. I mentioned Pony Island earlier in the thread, and that got me thinking about the whole fucking-with-the-player and dancing all over the fourth wall mechanics. You know, the stuff that Undertale does well, but really serves as kind of a extra layer and subtext to a game that has a very solid core. Well Pony Island feels much more like that's the core and a really standard (and not very fun) infinite runner and "coding" puzzles are more there to support the theme than to be great. And it seems like everywhere I look people are eating that up. Somehow it didn't really strike me as that compelling, I mean it was okay and worth some laughs but didn't catch me off guard or totally redefine how I look at games or leave me in awe at how intelligent it is. I got the feeling like I'd seen all this before somewhere, and actually not really with Undertale, and that made me think.. I can't really put my finger on examples but this stuff feels very MZX. Like the kind of content from back in the day where there's a lot of jokes involving the game creator interacting with the game world as some kind of sadist and poking around with the player's expectations.

I looked at the demo video of Pony Island and it really struck me in the same way. Honestly it also reminds me of tabletop games because the DM is right there, able to pull the rug out from under you, watching not only your character but the player themselves. It does remind me a lot of MZX in a way, too. Val said (and I agreed with this) that if POOP ROAD >:( had survived and evolved out to other media, we perhaps could have made something like Undertale. That makes me feel really wistful for some reason.

I'm just surprised nobody started a standalone Undertale thread. But I guess with DMZX the way it is...