Eh, I liked AC: Origins just fine, though I am a bit biased to the Egyptian setting. Ancient Greece not so much, but Odyssey was a very FUN game. It felt like a comedy, but in a lot of the good ways. Origins was good too, I mean it wasn't mindblowing or groundbreaking, but I did enjoy the story and playing through the various areas. Haven't bothered with Valhalla though, partly because I just really am sick of the "ermagurd VIKINGS!!! *orgasm*" trend in current pop culture, especially since all I see when I see depictions of vikings, are the various brodudes that think they need to be prepared to live in the frozen tundra or whatever, and have Punisher tattoos. Just, all the worst aspects of broness, but with leather and axes....ok well they do that shit these days too now that I think about it.
What are you currently playing?
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My favorite was Black Flag, personally. The assassin stuff was alright, but the ship stuff I could do for hours on end.
I know my big bro liked Origins and Odyssey, but he's more forgiving, though not always, by comparison when it comes to things AC.
You can thank MCU Thor, For Honor, and God of War 4 for the resurgence and interests in all things Norse and Viking. Speaking of which, if you are interested in a unique take on Norse mythos, play Odin Sphere Leifthrasir (PS4). It's a remake of a PS2 Brawler/RPG hybrid. They revamped the combat and everything. Plays much better than the PS2 original. Though you can play in the original PS2 mode if you want, but it is not recommended.
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I know Black Flag is good, but I do not have the interest nor will power.
Yeah, Origins I think, felt more like an actual AC game, as far as the feel of it and everything. Which makes sense, since it was literally their "this is where all the trappings of the Brotherhood started" game. I think it did it well. I mean the mechanics are totally different. Full RPG leveling and skill points and stuff, but the feel/mood of it was more AC-ish than Odyssey, by a long shot.
Shame, it is a good game. Not so much an AC game, but "Badass Pirate Simulator" yes, most definitely. I found I really enjoyed the expansion story they did for the protagonists ally, I forget his name. The ex-slave that he frees and makes his first mate. The expanded story is him, off on his own doing his own thing after the events of Black Flag, and the primary focus for him, is going around the islands and freeing other slaves from the slaver ships. That was a lot more fun than I thought it would be. Is it pandering? *shrugs* I dunno...maybe? But when you are sailing into a storm in the middle of the night, with waves churning, and you and your crew go leaping from the rigging onto the deck of the other ship, screaming out battle cries, all to liberate a ship full of prisoners...I mean yeah? I'll take more of that kind of stuff any day. It was fucking FUN and awesome.
Loaded up Skyrim again, always found it hard to get into. Maybe cause there's a zillion options and you are supposed to pick one, so I got a mod to allow me to change my race without mucking things up (maybe), and set my level back so I can try using 2 1handed weapons without being at a disadvantage due to leveling up using 1 2handed one.
And various other mods so I have a Robin Hood style hat, a mask (I was doing this before covid made it cool) and a cool outfit to go attacking Imperials in.
And various other mods so I have a Robin Hood style hat, a mask (I was doing this before covid made it cool) and a cool outfit to go attacking Imperials in.
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The thing about Skyrim is that all of the weapons feel bad so...who cares what you choose?
Like, the combat is actually awful with every melee weapon, it doesn't matter if you one hand, two hand, dual swords, whatever. It all feels the same and it all just feels like you flailing at the other dude until the number gets high enough.
Better off using a bow, or magic. At least some of the magic spells can be fun to play around with and you can get a little creative with them.
Ah. I thought that was just me. Oh well. Never really got the hang of blocking, myself, is that a useful thing?
Also like the bow, yeah. Combat is boring (and I keep worrying about hitting friendlies), but sniping people, or just hunting random animals is more interesting. Usually had tried spells in the past, wanted to try something different, might give those a go again.
Hades is going on the backburner. I enjoyed it a lot, but its becoming actively painful to try to progress certain things as the game nears its natural conclusion. So many of the final tasks I want to do require a random discussion to come up, but there are so many and they're random so I've been waiting for hours for them to pop up. At this stage I spend way too much time on a given run hoping for nectar or gems, or this or that last thing for a prophecy, that I can't enjoy just the normal fights. I still like the game and the gameplay so I'll come back, just need a break. To that end...
Started playing Death Stranding.
I haven't played a Kojima game since probably metal gear solid 2 - nothing against the guy personally, I just stopped buying consoles and most of his stuff that I know of was PS exclusive. Wouldn't have had to tell me it was him though, the guy has only improved his ability to produce super fuckin weird stories. As far as the game goes, I'm liking it.
The story grabbed me pretty immediately which is unusual for most games I play. The "Connect America" angle is becoming a little grating, but really only because its the least interesting aspect of the story. "We want to, for survival and ideological reasons, restore America to a connected state" is fine as far as basic motivation, but I'm playing a game where the dead become nonsense hyperghosts, what appears to be titans walk the earth eating people and then exploding, I have a detection device that is a live fetus in a bottle, and I'm a deliveryman with no choice but to deal with all that. That's all in the first two hours or so. All of that is so much cooler than the motivation to cross the country. I get that you need a connecting thread, and making the characters motivated to achieve it is necessary, but I'm far less interested in that than basically everything else. Getting to learn about this stuff is tied to finding shit, delivering shit, and connecting shit too, so I don't feel the connection thing needs to be the primary topic of every discussion.
I also haven't played an AAA game in a long time, so I'm a little out of the loop here, but man these cutscenes go on, and the use of real actors likeness's is more distracting than anything. Its hard not to enter in to a cutscene and spend more time trying to figure out who this or that guy looks like than I do paying attention. As far as being powered by Monster... Whatever. It paid for a graphic modeller to send his kid to school. It feels a little out of place given I don't feel there are many bottling plants still functioning, but it doesn't really take me out of it.
As far as gameplay goes, it took a minute to get used to, but I like it well enough. Your character walks like a ruptured duck, but having worked in a warehouse I can say that's pretty true to life for people who carry heavy crap for a living. Its interesting playing a game where most of my focus is spent on navigating the terrain and not falling over rather than figuring out efficient ways to kill people. The terrain is beautiful and treacherous, and mapping out routes is a notable part of gameplay so I don't feel understimulated - my primary concern is that eventually I will be expected to actually fight people which would be way out of this games control scheme wheelhouse, but given the focus on stealth and fleeing I imagine it won't be mandatory when it does come up.
I'm curious to see where this one is going, so I'll probably sink a bunch of time into it. As of right now I can't even tell how open world vs linear it even is. I get the impression that even if the game is largely linear in nature there's enough freedom to choose your own delivery adventure. Hopefully I get to a stage soon where it makes sense to backtrack a bit and spend some more time looking around
Started playing Death Stranding.
I haven't played a Kojima game since probably metal gear solid 2 - nothing against the guy personally, I just stopped buying consoles and most of his stuff that I know of was PS exclusive. Wouldn't have had to tell me it was him though, the guy has only improved his ability to produce super fuckin weird stories. As far as the game goes, I'm liking it.
The story grabbed me pretty immediately which is unusual for most games I play. The "Connect America" angle is becoming a little grating, but really only because its the least interesting aspect of the story. "We want to, for survival and ideological reasons, restore America to a connected state" is fine as far as basic motivation, but I'm playing a game where the dead become nonsense hyperghosts, what appears to be titans walk the earth eating people and then exploding, I have a detection device that is a live fetus in a bottle, and I'm a deliveryman with no choice but to deal with all that. That's all in the first two hours or so. All of that is so much cooler than the motivation to cross the country. I get that you need a connecting thread, and making the characters motivated to achieve it is necessary, but I'm far less interested in that than basically everything else. Getting to learn about this stuff is tied to finding shit, delivering shit, and connecting shit too, so I don't feel the connection thing needs to be the primary topic of every discussion.
I also haven't played an AAA game in a long time, so I'm a little out of the loop here, but man these cutscenes go on, and the use of real actors likeness's is more distracting than anything. Its hard not to enter in to a cutscene and spend more time trying to figure out who this or that guy looks like than I do paying attention. As far as being powered by Monster... Whatever. It paid for a graphic modeller to send his kid to school. It feels a little out of place given I don't feel there are many bottling plants still functioning, but it doesn't really take me out of it.
As far as gameplay goes, it took a minute to get used to, but I like it well enough. Your character walks like a ruptured duck, but having worked in a warehouse I can say that's pretty true to life for people who carry heavy crap for a living. Its interesting playing a game where most of my focus is spent on navigating the terrain and not falling over rather than figuring out efficient ways to kill people. The terrain is beautiful and treacherous, and mapping out routes is a notable part of gameplay so I don't feel understimulated - my primary concern is that eventually I will be expected to actually fight people which would be way out of this games control scheme wheelhouse, but given the focus on stealth and fleeing I imagine it won't be mandatory when it does come up.
I'm curious to see where this one is going, so I'll probably sink a bunch of time into it. As of right now I can't even tell how open world vs linear it even is. I get the impression that even if the game is largely linear in nature there's enough freedom to choose your own delivery adventure. Hopefully I get to a stage soon where it makes sense to backtrack a bit and spend some more time looking around
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Why block when you can pause combat and eat 17 wheels of cheese to get back all your health?
I couldn’t get through the first one. First for glitches, second try for just being so monotonous. However I’ve also heard it is the most boring one as it was basically just a proof of concept at the point, but still. The other comments I’ve always heard about maps full of icons and interesting but unfulfilling game mechanics never helped either.
AC1 is super rough and repetitive. Just play II, Brotherhood, and Black Flag. After that, you've seen everything the series has to offer.
The AC game are pretty repetitive, but they make for great game to play while watching something so I usually end up playing some of them at some point. I think I'd like them more if the combat wasn't so shallow. Newer one added a lot of loot management and stuff, but none of that is that interesting since the gameplay tend to be pretty shallow so I don't really care about my stats and if you do most activity you end up horribly over level anyway so it doesn't matter what you equip anyway.
Whats really funny, is Elder Scrolls Online, the MMO you'd expect would have the worse moment to moment stuff actually has dodge rolls, interrupts, positioning based maneuvers and so on, lol
I mean, both games were pandering, really, but that didn't stop them from being fun.
Even if Freedom Cry was like 5 hours long, it's basically Django Unchained as a video game....with pirating. And let's face it, Slavers are right behind Nazis on the scale of "People I don't feel at all bad about killing". I always found it amusing raiding some of the plantations to set the slaves free that you could take down the overseers in full view of the slaves and they'd just "Huh, did that asshole with the whip just mysteriously get murdered and dragged into the bushes? Nah, must be the wind"
You have me there. Maybe it's supposed to be fun or cool?
In a previous try, I liked being a magic using khajit and not using weapons per se, but hadn't found a good unarmed combat mod for when it comes to punching people.
Stealth sniper is my go to option naturally. It took me months to realise how crappy the melee combat was in Oblivion because I never had to use it.
It doesn't suddenly make the melee combat great, but the ordinator perk mod does add a bit more to it. Blocking can be useful, directional power attacks have different effects, doing a combination of power and normal attacks can do things. It's still skyrim combat, but you do have a reason to "timed block- attack, attack, attack, standing power attack rather than just attackattackattackattack. It is perk based though so you do have to level up to make it more interesting.
The FO/ES games are definitely RP'ers RPGs. I go for a character concept rather than what works best. The first 20 levels are usually the most fun anyway, so play it to about level 20-25 then go with something else interesting.
Plus mods, mods make it good.
Anyway, to answer the topic, I've been playing:
Total Warhammer 2 with the new wood elf DLC. It's good, gives them a much more interesting campaign.
Skyrim
Finished The Saboteur, after about 19 hours of play time. The final act goes by super quickly, but I appreciate that the game isn't overloaded with pointless stuff like most open world games. None of the mechanics stand out much, with the game taking many ques from GTA and AssCreed, but unlike the GTA games I've played The Saboteur had much better controls and felt less repetitive and frustrating in general.
I didn't enjoy it more than any of Pandemic's PS2 era games that I've played, but it's nice to know they ended their run on a positive note.
I didn't enjoy it more than any of Pandemic's PS2 era games that I've played, but it's nice to know they ended their run on a positive note.