April 2025 General Game Discussion

[Zed Clampet]

Played some more Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and still absolutely loving it.

****
But let me tell you, then I decided to take a break tonight and try out Oblivion. I got to the character creator, and the "randomize character" button is like playing Five Nights at Freddy's. Every time a new one of those hideous monstrosities popped up on the screen, I jumped and screamed.

So I decided I had to manually adjust my character's face. I figured that it probably started out looking okay, but when you hit the randomize button, it sends those sliders all over the place. So I took them all to zero and this is my new character, Brick Johnson:

Okay, well maybe I touched up the picture a bit. Here's the real Brick Johnson:

You know, I was really happy with this until I touched it up. Still this isn't too shabby for Oblivion.

But really, I think I should have done the remaster.

 

[Johnway]

more Doom2 goodness so that means playing Ramp 2024 - We've finished 2 more stations. The station completed was Transfer Depot so more UAC bases. This one had quite a few maps i liked or stood out:

heartbeat is your standard UAC base map thats all well made and isn't all that difficult. but it does have one gimmick: some engagements have a time limit, usually not enough for you to take your time and you're forced to take risks to get to the objective. it makes for an interesting challenge and helps increase the difficulty without thinking all too hard on balancing the engagement.

next map is Cyber Crusher gaiden. its one huge factory and i liked the detailing on this one but otherwise a standard map.

Toxins refined isn't a huge map but its well made and again, spent time taking snaps as ref material if i was going to make a doom map.

finally extraction operation, its simple enough break out of prison , call escape vehicle and escape. Its a step up from your usual Doom map with GZdoom elements, theres a few different enemies and there are objectives to complete. but besides the level design that i found appealing, was the final escape where after signaling your ride you have to face off against hordes of monsters. When the vehicle does arrive, its just blasting any surviving monsters when it lands and takes off. Epic stuff.


moving onto the next station, Lost starport, there wasn't really much to say about the maps. Nothing spectacular or interesting and one even left a slight distaste playing it. The only map that stood out was the longest one: Hellroelectric - demons have invaded a hydrodam and its pumping blood instead of water. As a first map, i have to say its pretty good. nicely designed, filled with various advanced elements and plays reasonably well. My only criticism is perhaps too much backtracking. A switch would open a door halfway across the map as opposed something nearby. The Archvile sewer maze is pretty tedious as its a switch hunt and wasn't difficult as i corner camped them one by one. lastly i did encounter some bugs in one encounter once you trigger the trap the elevator goes up and theres no way up or down the elevator. in one attempt the elevator shot back up to the previous floor and refused to function locking me out of the engagement.

 

[Zloth]

Why is this exact same pattern recognition great when Dark Souls or Elden Ring kills you 14 times in a row, but suddenly this scrub has to fight the fights twice and suddenly it's bad. You know what else is bad, this guy's gaming abilities. I've played 4 hours and lost one fight, the one I mentioned above that I arrived to almost dead.

Well, he answers that right in the article:

Git gud, right? I'd accept that reproach for a lot of games, but the trial-and-error rote memorization needed to reach credits in Clair Obscur frustrated me not just because it was constantly demanding, but because it drowned out the fantastic turn-based core.

This is not correct. That tag was always buried near the bottom because so few people thought it looked like a JRPG, but now that reviewers are calling it that, more people are voting for it.

I tried to look up just how this system works but couldn't find much. I think the developers get to put some in to start it all off, then users vote on tags, then developers delete irrelevant tags and pick from the top 20 to appear on the store page. I could really be wrong there, though.

Claire Obscura's top 6 right now are: turn-based combat, story rich, fantasy, exploration, JRPG, and Action RPG. The store page shows turn-based combat, story rich, fantasy, and JRPG, though - no exploration tag. That means it isn't just the most popular tags for sure.

Odd, I didn't read the review but got the qte statement from another video, so its a common misconception then.

There's a whole spectrum of QTEs and QTEness. (Yes, that's a word Edge, quit underlining it!!) Are those old Guitar Hero games just one long series of QTEs, for instance? What about this from FF7:Rebirth?

 

[Zed Clampet]

I'm officially, and I'm serious this time, cutting way down on my video game purchasing. Right now, as of this moment, I believe I may very well have the best "Now Playing" list of games in my lifetime, headlined in the AAA category by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Oblivion Remaster.

I've got a dozen other great games from all different genres that I have going right now. Two remarkable city builders in Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic and Kaiserpunk. I've got a really fun arcade shooter in Zombieland 3D USA that I'm still dabbling in. I've got Mini-Metro and Mini-Motorways which are fantastic, quick strategy games that have god-level replayability. I'll be playing these for years. And I can't forget the best cozy therapy game I've ever played, Farm Together 2, which I now have over 200 hours in. And in a story of the rich getting richer, in just a couple of weeks, the biggest retail sim of all, King of Retail, is releasing a sequel.

And then there are my soulmates, Satisfactory and V Rising (Expedition 33 is edging it's way in to join this group) that just came out with major updates. So, yeah, Valve, I'm going to be cutting back on that 20 plus new games a month thing I've had going on. For now I have what I need.

 

[Pifanjr]

Last time I played Inscryption I had just gotten to the beginning of a cutscene of sorts. Today when I started the game again it had skipped the cutscene with no way to get it back, so I had to look it up online, which was a bit of a bother. Luckily someone had uploaded just that part.

I beat another one of the bosses and updated my deck a bit, as I had two battles where I couldn't play any cards at all.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Well, he answers that right in the article:

I read it, and I disagree with it. His reason is just arbitrarily applied based on his personal preferences. "Cause turn-based" is not a good reason.

I tried to look up just how this system works but couldn't find much. I think the developers get to put some in to start it all off, then users vote on tags, then developers delete irrelevant tags and pick from the top 20 to appear on the store page. I could really be wrong there, though.

This is mostly incorrect, but probably how most people think it works. I have Steam back-end access, so I looked it up. The developers do not have anything directly to do with which tags show on the front page, and which tags show up varies from person to person. Valve uses an algorithm and the algorithm's primary deciders are

1) tags your friends have applied to the game
2) tags based on your activity
3) tags applied/voted on by the community

Developers cannot delete user tags directly but can request that Valve delete them. And while developers can use the "Tag Wizard" to weight tags, the weights actually favor user votes to developer weights.

My speculation is that this is to allow the massive number of players to keep developers from behaving badly with regard to tags. It is a 100 percent guarantee that many developers would just put the most popular tags into their games if they thought that would increase visibility and sales. By prioritizing user tags, this prevents this.

The Valve documentation goes on and on, but I think these were the relevant things. There is a lot about the "tag wizard" and how their discovery system works. Also interesting is that apparently new tags have to be approved by Valve. "New" meaning tags that have never been applied to any other game before.

Lastly, I'd like to point out that the developers consider the game a JRPG. I've gotten 6 hours of sleep in the last 3 days, so I have no idea what I said about this previously, so don't expect me to be consistent, but I somewhat disagree that it's a JRPG, but if the developers say that it is, then that ends the debate so far as I'm concerned. My preference is that JRPGs be more, you know, Japanese. Japanese art, music, characters, dialogue, etc.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Last time I played Inscryption I had just gotten to the beginning of a cutscene of sorts. Today when I started the game again it had skipped the cutscene with no way to get it back, so I had to look it up online, which was a bit of a bother. Luckily someone had uploaded just that part.

I beat another one of the bosses and updated my deck a bit, as I had two battles where I couldn't play any cards at all.

Did you say before that you'd already had a successful run or am I misremembering?

About the cutscenes, I had a game where I kept accidentally clicking with the mouse during cutscenes, which instantly skipped to the end, and I was actually wanting to see the cutscenes. That may have been a Darksider game.

 

[Zloth]

Phew, finished FF7 Rebirth just now. That final boss fight... that was a bit much. First you fight a Jenova form, then Sepheroth. Depending on how you count, there are 9 phases to his battle for a total of 10. No rests in between, no opportunity to save, but it does let you go back to the start of the most recent phase of the battle instead of having to start all over again. I got wasted 3 times in the final phase so, if I had to start over, I would have rage-quit for sure.

The whole battle, including some time to make a screenshot and some time to put the game on pause so I could read how the frak to beat a couple of the phases on the internet, took just over two hours. And it was a VERY near thing at the end. I think it was the longest boss fight I've ever done.

 

[Pifanjr]

Did you say before that you'd already had a successful run or am I misremembering?

About the cutscenes, I had a game where I kept accidentally clicking with the mouse during cutscenes, which instantly skipped to the end, and I was actually wanting to see the cutscenes. That may have been a Darksider game.

I have done multiple successful runs and I've unlocked the New Game button. I now have to beat one more boss.

Accidentally skipping cutscenes is the worst. Especially if the last save is over half an hour ago. I've also had times where I've accidentally skipped dialogue, which is especially bad when you're in a tutorial.

 

[Pifanjr]

I have done multiple successful runs and I've unlocked the New Game button. I now have to beat one more boss.

I got absolutely bamboozled.

I beat the last boss, for which I had to redo my entire deck to work around their unique mechanic. Then the game threw another fight against an even stronger boss at me, but I hadn't switched my deck back yet, so I didn't stand a chance. I tried to exit to the main menu and load the last save, but instead the game just skipped the fight entirely and just gave me 4 new bosses to beat instead.

I thought Inscryption was a pretty short game I could quickly finish, but it just keeps going. It switches up the gameplay really well though, so I'm not complaining.

 

[DXCHASE]

I have been forcing myself a little bit to play more of Expedition 33. Mainly because i have Oblivion to play, Doom the dark ages comes out in 2 weeks and Diablo 4 has a new season starting tomorrow which im gonna probably be playing mostly the rest of the week. Not including that i do need to finish The Last of Us 2 at some point.

Im not a TBC fan as some of you know, but the game is so gorgeous and i have a good enough system to play this at its full potential and the VA/story are great that i owe it to myself.

The combat is ok, im coming around to it. Its faster than traditional TBC to me. Parrying/blocking are fun even if you miss 1 you can be dead in 1 strike, but if you parrying well you can kill somethin right away in return. So its TBC with a little like souls-like parrying but you dont retaliate yourself, the game does it for you if you time it right, which i dont mind. It flows with the TBC personally.J


April turned out to be a good time for me even though i thought itd be kinda dry at the beginning of the month. Have played several different games that i want to finish that i probably wont haha.


Took some screen shots of Expedition 33:

 

[Pifanjr]

Another boss defeated in Inscryption and another new mechanic has been added. Also yet another thing that's asking for a code, but I don't think I can solve it yet. There's quite a few instances of the game showing something that needs a code before giving you a way to get the code, so I suppose I'll just have to keep playing. So far all of the codes have been fairly easy to find.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Another boss defeated in Inscryption and another new mechanic has been added. Also yet another thing that's asking for a code, but I don't think I can solve it yet. There's quite a few instances of the game showing something that needs a code before giving you a way to get the code, so I suppose I'll just have to keep playing. So far all of the codes have been fairly easy to find.

*sound of intense wind*

You'll have to close the portal on your end! I can't control it here! Must...stop...don't eat the mashed potatoes!...Must...control...the transfer...I've lost backup power....Pineapple doesn't belong on pizza! The review is wrong!

*sounds of sparks and explosions*

Female AI voice: Transfer complete. Zed's brain now exists in a small partition of @Pifanjr 's brain. Pifanjr is expected to become comically dogmatic and to post in the wrong threads.

 

[Zloth]

How do they get their faces so dirty while maintaining clean and perfectly combed hair!?

 

[Zed Clampet]

How do they get their faces so dirty while maintaining clean and perfectly combed hair!?

Their homeland used to be, before the cataclysm, the major source of the world's sodium lauryl sulfate, which is a surfactant commonly used in shampoos. In fact, in their pantheon of god's, they favored the goddess Sodie Laurel, from whom the chemical got its name. Other surfactants used in soap were cut off from them after the cataclysm.

That was a joke for any child who might stumble across this.

What you are looking at there is dried blood, so he'd recently taken a nice beating. You can see it all over the clothes, too, in the relevant pictures. I do believe that it effects the hair, too, it's just not as easy to make out. Personally I think it's a bit overdone at times, but you can't see your health without pulling up a menu, so this is definitely noticeable.

 

[Zed Clampet]

@BeardyHat NVM your wife's high score. I would still find it interesting, but I've figured out what the problem was.

 

[neogunhero]

Luck be a Landlord was apparently a big inspiration for Balatro:

Is that where you heard of it?

Exactly, I'm sure I read that same article and that's how I heard of it, or some other LocalThunk interview/blog post where it was mentioned. I've had it in my wishlist for a little while but never really knew what it was. After playing Balatro, games like that now click in my head. I've also recently picked up Nubby's Number Factory which I would say is inspired by Balatro in some ways. These roguelike, slightly casino themed number games are so much fun to me now when I would have never touched them prior to playing Balatro.

I've seen people, in addition to you, reporting that Oblivion runs fine, and I've seen people say that after a recent patch that they can get Indiana Jones to 30 fps, and @neogunhero can't play either of those games with his 2060. However, I definitely wouldn't buy one now with a new one predicted to come out this year. Maybe Valve will be bold and put an ARM chip in.

I have no idea why that is because I have had the same thought. Is there something wrong with my PC for it not to be running at full power? To be fair, I've read numerous reports saying the Game Pass version of Oblivion is more broken than the Steam version, so I wonder if that could be part of the issue and I just need to wait for patches. Also, I played Oblivion, Indiana Jones and Stalker 2 right at launch via Game Pass, so definitely before any major optimization patches. And it really is just those three games that are giving me the most issues, and I haven't touched them since launch. I may give them another go, because if I can hold a steady 45FPS on lower settings then I would be happy enough to play through them.

 

[neogunhero]

Played a bunch of Dying Light 2 since Friday. Got very sick yesterday so I took the day off and played a bunch. I will say, I completely agree with everyone who say the story is the weakest part of the game, the amount of dialogue in this game is kind of ridiculous. I don't care about more than half of the characters I've met so far. I've been skipping a lot of the dialogue and just ending up in random places after the cutscene ends and trying to figure out what's going on. Just like Dunkey said in one of his videos, games are much more fun that way when you just skip cutscenes and try to piece together what's going on.

Anyways, I finally made it to the second part of the city called The Center. This is the major urban area complete with skyscrapers and all. It's a major departure from the first area which looked a lot more traditional European in design. I’ve barely started exploring The Center, it’s so massive with tons of different routes to take, I have no idea where to even start. I skipped past the cutscenes with that one lady that gives you the paraglider so now that I have it I can explore much more easily.

Parkour is still great, combat is still decent, exploration is still tons of fun. I love doing scavenging runs in the middle of the night, there are Dark Zones that have better loot at night, so I've been having fun hitting a few of them each night and grinding up my Parkour XP. I found that if you get into a Chase at the start of the night and try to hold that Chase status for as long as possible, it's one of the best ways to grind XP besides doing missions. Night last a good 30 minutes IRL so I take breaks by entering Dark Zones where the volatiles generally can't get you, though there may be one or two inside the Dark Zone itself. You keep all XP you've earned until daytime, or if you die you lose it all, but during the Chases you can get up to 2x XP, so taking breaks by escaping the Chase holds it and you can start it up again and grow that XP even more.

One of the best minor QoL features I've seen any game before is in DL2, when you are about to active a new safe zone it clearly states that all loot in the area will disappear once you activate it. The message shows up right in front of your face as you're bringing down the enemy flag, which takes about 5 seconds so there is no way for you to miss that. I stopped interacting with the flag to go double check some loot and found a very great weapon and tons of materials I was needing.

Besides the story, the game is great. Parkour feels very smooth and responsive, lite RPG elements are fun and loving all the loot to find.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Played a bunch of Dying Light 2 since Friday. Got very sick yesterday so I took the day off and played a bunch. I will say, I completely agree with everyone who say the story is the weakest part of the game, the amount of dialogue in this game is kind of ridiculous. I don't care about more than half of the characters I've met so far. I've been skipping a lot of the dialogue and just ending up in random places after the cutscene ends and trying to figure out what's going on. Just like Dunkey said in one of his videos, games are much more fun that way when you just skip cutscenes and try to piece together what's going on.

Anyways, I finally made it to the second part of the city called The Center. This is the major urban area complete with skyscrapers and all. It's a major departure from the first area which looked a lot more traditional European in design. I’ve barely started exploring The Center, it’s so massive with tons of different routes to take, I have no idea where to even start. I skipped past the cutscenes with that one lady that gives you the paraglider so now that I have it I can explore much more easily.

Parkour is still great, combat is still decent, exploration is still tons of fun. I love doing scavenging runs in the middle of the night, there are Dark Zones that have better loot at night, so I've been having fun hitting a few of them each night and grinding up my Parkour XP. I found that if you get into a Chase at the start of the night and try to hold that Chase status for as long as possible, it's one of the best ways to grind XP besides doing missions. Night last a good 30 minutes IRL so I take breaks by entering Dark Zones where the volatiles generally can't get you, though there may be one or two inside the Dark Zone itself. You keep all XP you've earned until daytime, or if you die you lose it all, but during the Chases you can get up to 2x XP, so taking breaks by escaping the Chase holds it and you can start it up again and grow that XP even more.

One of the best minor QoL features I've seen any game before is in DL2, when you are about to active a new safe zone it clearly states that all loot in the area will disappear once you activate it. The message shows up right in front of your face as you're bringing down the enemy flag, which takes about 5 seconds so there is no way for you to miss that. I stopped interacting with the flag to go double check some loot and found a very great weapon and tons of materials I was needing.

Besides the story, the game is great. Parkour feels very smooth and responsive, lite RPG elements are fun and loving all the loot to find.

It is just a popular thing to do with Dying Light 2, hate on the game. If you go to reddit people are complaining about everything. Story is one of them because people dislike the characters, think the story is boring and the other main complaint about the story I won't mention due to spoilers (it's avoidable, though, and I seriously doubt you'll do it in your game). There are definitely some unlikable characters, but Game of Thrones was full of them and no one complained about it there. One of the reasons characters got a bad rap initially was because of DEI. The romantic partner was shown in preview trailers as a white woman, but was actually a black woman in the game. But it's true that a lot of the characters are either overtly unlikable or one dimensional.

But people don't like everything about the game. Some of this stems from a rough launch when the game was fairly buggy (although I played it at launch and didn't have many problems). Also, a lot of these things, including some parts of the story, have been addressed in patches, but of course videos and comments last forever online.

It's worth noting that the game is 1 percent in Steam reviews from being "Very Positive" and it's sold 6 million copies on Steam, and is still selling well, so I don't think it's as bad as YouTubers and redditors want everyone to believe.

 

[Pifanjr]

A random thought that popped into my head:

One thing that makes Minecraft modpacks unique from automation games like Satisfactory or Factorio is the fact that all these mods were made by different people and don't fit well together. Every machine in a proper automation game will usually follow a similar template and is made to fit with all the other machines in the game, whereas in a Minecraft modpack there are usually at least two machines/solutions for any task and often there are many more, but each has its own way of doing it.

For example, Minecraft has multiple mods that require you to generate energy to make machines run, but there are several major tech mods that each have their own form of energy. There's Energy Units (EU), Forge Energy (FE), Minecraft Joules (MJ) and Redstone Flux (RF) as some of the more common ones, but there are a whole bunch more, with magic mods often having their own mana type system as well.

Since mod balance differs wildly, the most optimal way to get something done is often to mix different mods together, but this means you need to maintain multiple systems, each with various levels of documentation. If you're lucky someone has added an adapter to change one energy source into another, but energy is only part of the problem. Another big problem is getting things into and out of machines, which can get problematic when a machine accept and/or creates multiple different items, not to mention fluids.

All to say that I think that modded Minecraft is a much better simulation of being an engineer in the real world. Poor documentation and systems that don't fit together are just something you'll have to learn to deal with.

 

[Zed Clampet]

A random thought that popped into my head:

One thing that makes Minecraft modpacks unique from automation games like Satisfactory or Factorio is the fact that all these mods were made by different people and don't fit well together. Every machine in a proper automation game will usually follow a similar template and is made to fit with all the other machines in the game, whereas in a Minecraft modpack there are usually at least two machines/solutions for any task and often there are many more, but each has its own way of doing it.

For example, Minecraft has multiple mods that require you to generate energy to make machines run, but there are several major tech mods that each have their own form of energy. There's Energy Units (EU), Forge Energy (FE), Minecraft Joules (MJ) and Redstone Flux (RF) as some of the more common ones, but there are a whole bunch more, with magic mods often having their own mana type system as well.

Since mod balance differs wildly, the most optimal way to get something done is often to mix different mods together, but this means you need to maintain multiple systems, each with various levels of documentation. If you're lucky someone has added an adapter to change one energy source into another, but energy is only part of the problem. Another big problem is getting things into and out of machines, which can get problematic when a machine accept and/or creates multiple different items, not to mention fluids.

All to say that I think that modded Minecraft is a much better simulation of being an engineer in the real world. Poor documentation and systems that don't fit together are just something you'll have to learn to deal with.

So there isn't enough frustration in Satisfactory and Factorio. Something else there isn't are 2 or 3 types of the same resource that aren't interchangeable, which happened in one of the modpacks that I used. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed that game, and you're making me want to play some Minecraft. I have no idea how to go about this anymore and am clueless on my username and password. Do you still have to use Forge to play with mods?

 

[Zed Clampet]

Also, I'll never get around to actually playing Minecraft because I'll immediately decide to make my own resource pack to change all the graphics.

 

[Pifanjr]

I was going to play Outward with a friend of mine this evening, but we couldn't connect to each other. Turns out I didn't have access to the Definitive Edition, probably because I was accessing the game through Family Share. Normally everyone who owned the game and DLC gets a free upgrade, but I guess it couldn't detect the DLC properly through Family Sharing or something

Regardless, we ended up playing Barotrauma with two more people. I still don't quite get the appeal of the game, it seems like you spend a lot of time doing nothing if you're not the captain, but it was still nice to hang out with friends.

So there isn't enough frustration in Satisfactory and Factorio. Something else there isn't are 2 or 3 types of the same resource that aren't interchangeable, which happened in one of the modpacks that I used. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed that game, and you're making me want to play some Minecraft. I have no idea how to go about this anymore and am clueless on my username and password. Do you still have to use Forge to play with mods?

I think there is a mod specifically for merging duplicate resources of different mods.

You don't have to use Forge, there are a bunch of different ways to manage mods and modpacks. For Blightfall I used MultiMC.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Holy cow!

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was made by only 30 ex-Ubisoft devs. That's remarkable for a AAA game.

I was going to play Outward with a friend of mine this evening, but we couldn't connect to each other. Turns out I didn't have access to the Definitive Edition, probably because I was accessing the game through Family Share. Normally everyone who owned the game and DLC gets a free upgrade, but I guess it couldn't detect the DLC properly through Family Sharing or something

Regardless, we ended up playing Barotrauma with two more people. I still don't quite get the appeal of the game, it seems like you spend a lot of time doing nothing if you're not the captain, but it was still nice to hang out with friends.



I think there is a mod specifically for merging duplicate resources of different mods.

You don't have to use Forge, there are a bunch of different ways to manage mods and modpacks. For Blightfall I used MultiMC.

Thanks. Used to, there was only Forge. Ah, I see that MultiMC launched in 2014, which was the year I quit playing Minecraft. Probably the merging resources mod didn't either.

I was extremely turned off by the resource pack makers. Every one I was interested in said "Visit my Patreon to download". That's definitely different from 2014. I'm not playing with vanilla textures, and I'm also not going to their Patreon. All I need is a template to make my own resource pack.

Edit: Found a template on curseforge. When I'm done, I'll charge everyone $9.99 to see it.

 

[Zloth]

Holy cow!

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was made by only 30 ex-Ubisoft devs. That's remarkable for a AAA game.

Oh!! Unless those were stunningly well paid devs, wouldn't that mean that this is a AA game?