March 2024 General Game Discussion Thread

[Pifanjr]

No no no no! Those are mostly VOICE packs!

I didn't even check the option to have each soldier use their native language...

 

[ZedClampet]

What's better, Discord as the only place to communicate with developers about a game or dental surgery without being numbed?

From now on, if I see the "visit us on Discord" notice, I'm not buying the game.

 

[Pifanjr]

Thanks, that's a great deal. Unfortunately we're really tight on money right now, so I can't justify it at the moment.

My wife disagreed and bought the XCOM 2 Collection on Steam for me, which was only about €3.50 on sale. I will have to restart the campaign, but I think I've only played about half a dozen mission so far, so that's not too bad. Plus now I can just use the Steam Workshop for mods.

 

[BeardyHat]

What's better, Discord as the only place to communicate with developers about a game or dental surgery without being numbed?

From now on, if I see the "visit us on Discord" notice, I'm not buying the game.

I hate Discord so much, at least, as people use it, which is a replacement for forums. I don't mind it as a small chatroom function like my friend uses it, as well as for voice chat, but I'm not going to try and troubleshoot an issue by using Discord.

My wife disagreed and bought the XCOM 2 Collection on Steam for me, which was only about €3.50 on sale. I will have to restart the campaign, but I think I've only played about half a dozen mission so far, so that's not too bad. Plus now I can just use the Steam Workshop for mods.

Nice!

I think you'll actually keep your saves too. I do believe XCOM2 saves to Documents/My Games, which should be universal, so once you grab it on Steam, it should find those saves automatically.

 

[neogunhero]

Been doing a lot more testing on my 5700X. It’s surprising how many games were bottlenecked due to my old CPU. I tried another game I had trouble with, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. On the old 1600X, I had to play that game on medium settings and could barely hit 60fps. Now on full ultra, the benchmark gave me average FPS of 86, and capped to 60 with Vsync makes it buttery smooth. I played that for a few hours last night and was having a blast. Games can become a lot more fun when you’re not having to play on PS2 graphics 30fps lol.

I switched the top case fan around, I accidentally installed it upside down the other night. After that and closing up the case, my GPU temps went down a good ~10c on average. Noctua fans ftw.

I’m very happy with this new cpu and I can’t wait to test other games, most notably Starfield.

 

[ZedClampet]

Been doing a lot more testing on my 5700X. It’s surprising how many games were bottlenecked due to my old CPU. I tried another game I had trouble with, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. On the old 1600X, I had to play that game on medium settings and could barely hit 60fps. Now on full ultra, the benchmark gave me average FPS of 86, and capped to 60 with Vsync makes it buttery smooth. I played that for a few hours last night and was having a blast. Games can become a lot more fun when you’re not having to play on PS2 graphics 30fps lol.

I switched the top case fan around, I accidentally installed it upside down the other night. After that and closing up the case, my GPU temps went down a good ~10c on average. Noctua fans ftw.

I’m very happy with this new cpu and I can’t wait to test other games, most notably Starfield.

It's amazing how much better games get with higher frames. My son and I were playing Helldiver 2, and I noticed we were getting about the same number of kills each mission, which is not at all right. He's a lot better than I am. I asked him what framerates he was getting, and he said about 20 FPS, so we adjusted his graphics settings, including the quality level of his DLSS, and now he's back to slaughtering me. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

 

[Johnway]

My wife disagreed and bought the XCOM 2 Collection on Steam for me, which was only about €3.50 on sale. I will have to restart the campaign, but I think I've only played about half a dozen mission so far, so that's not too bad. Plus now I can just use the Steam Workshop for mods.

hurrah! enjoy the power of mods! stop the timer, increase the number of people you can deploy play longwar, make it harder! add more enemies like MOCX. with the XCOM2 collection you can also face of against the chosen who are annoying bastards but beat them and you get swanky weapons. Oh and also added biomes and enemies.


i do have too many customization packs tbh. Like added hair styles, free the hood, increased modular of older gear, simple true concealment, miltary camouflage patterns, capnbubs accessories and a whole load of voice packs as well.

i spent hours just creating characters. The problem with doing that is that i find that characters don't grow or develop organically. For example i like them to look underdeveloped or ordinary and as they pick classes, certain things happen to them, i like to alter them accordingly. the only downside is that by end game when you have the super armours the options are extremely limited. Which is where the mods come in.

Who would have thought in one of my games my mopey, introverted, hoddie wearing female operative would become the defacto leader of my soldiers? By the end i had her wearing a beret, advent commander armor and she lead from the front with a shotgun and kitana. Changed her downer stance to one of standing tall and proud.

 

[DXCHASE]

It's amazing how much better games get with higher frames. My son and I were playing Helldiver 2, and I noticed we were getting about the same number of kills each mission, which is not at all right. He's a lot better than I am. I asked him what framerates he was getting, and he said about 20 FPS, so we adjusted his graphics settings, including the quality level of his DLSS, and now he's back to slaughtering me. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Are you suuure it was the framerate and him not just being nice?


But dont fret! Kills is the very least thing helldivers should be worrying about. Mechs suck up kills like no other for instance, esp. against bugs so if you are doing objectives, reviving people, collecting samples then you arent killing and actually doing what you are supposed to be doing.

HD2 does look amazing and runs really well (esp with high framerates) in ultrawide with a 4080s, but the game in general is just well optimized for the most part.

 

[ZedClampet]

Are you suuure it was the framerate and him not just being nice?


But dont fret! Kills is the very least thing helldivers should be worrying about. Mechs suck up kills like no other for instance, esp. against bugs so if you are doing objectives, reviving people, collecting samples then you arent killing and actually doing what you are supposed to be doing.

HD2 does look amazing and runs really well (esp with high framerates) in ultrawide with a 4080s, but the game in general is just well optimized for the most part.

Yeah, he needs an upgrade or two. Actually, he needs a new laptop for school, so I'm just going to get him a good gaming laptop.

We've been playing just the two of us because no one else wants to do the optional objectives, so we both do pretty much everything. We're only level 11 so we don't have the mechs yet. We just started playing this week. Actually, early in the week you got a free mech on each mission, but they got rid of that. We've only unlocked Hard difficulty, but I think anything more than that might be too much for me with just the two of us. I don't know. Hard doesn't actually seem all that hard on most missions, but I was basically overrun on one mission. Had to be revived multiple times.

 

[Zloth]

What's better, Discord as the only place to communicate with developers about a game or dental surgery without being numbed?

I don't like it, either, but I can see where they're coming from. When you've got people buying on Steam, GOG, and Epic, it's hard to talk to everyone at once. (Especially Epic, as they can't be bothered to make any sort of forum at all.) Throw in console gamers and there's just too much for the smaller companies to deal with.

hurrah! enjoy the power of mods! stop the timer, increase the number of people you can deploy play longwar,

Did they ever get Long War working with WotC? They were trying hard when I played through it, but it was having real problems.

That first WotC mission is soon after the tutorial. It ain't easy, either!

 

[ZedClampet]

I don't like it, either, but I can see where they're coming from. When you've got people buying on Steam, GOG, and Epic, it's hard to talk to everyone at once. (Especially Epic, as they can't be bothered to make any sort of forum at all.) Throw in console gamers and there's just too much for the smaller companies to deal with.

Did they ever get Long War working with WotC? They were trying hard when I played through it, but it was having real problems.

That first WotC mission is soon after the tutorial. It ain't easy, either!

I see why they do it, but it's miserable. There needs to be something else.

 

[neogunhero]

I see why they do it, but it's miserable. There needs to be something else.

Steam Discussions are absolutely no place for productive community engagement, yet tons of games only have that and Discord, no real forums to make well organized posts to communicate with developers and other community members. Not everyone uses Discord and I’m one of those people, so if the game I’m playing tells me to report any bugs to their Discord, I’m basically SOL for giving any input.

 

[ZedClampet]

Steam Discussions are absolutely no place for productive community engagement, yet tons of games only have that and Discord, no real forums to make well organized posts to communicate with developers and other community members. Not everyone uses Discord and I’m one of those people, so if the game I’m playing tells me to report any bugs to their Discord, I’m basically SOL for giving any input.

I wouldn't want every game to have its own forum. Someone needs to make a game forums website and advertise it to developers. Every game gets its own forum on that site, etc.

 

[Brian Boru]

discord /dĭs′kôrd″/

noun​

1. Lack of agreement among persons, groups, or things. synonym: conflict.
   Similar: conflict
2. Tension or strife resulting from a lack of agreement; dissension.
3. A confused or harsh sound or mingling of sounds.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

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Hmm yeah, I see why you guys don't like it—me neither

There needs to be something else

How about Thick Talk, I hear that's pretty stable?

 

[ZedClampet]

Enshrouded has the best feature ever. You can "gift" other players things from your inventory. So if we're out on a long expedition, and I've run out of room, I can quietly dump things into Guido's inventory.

Guido: "Why do I have 2 stacks of sticks and a stack of 'critter parts'? I swear I don't remember picking these up..."

 

[Pifanjr]

A friend I hadn't talked to in a while randomly messaged me yesterday asking if I was available to play a game. We tried to play Lethal Company, but I couldn't hear him in-game, so we played Sea of Thieves instead. I'd never played before, but I had watched my wife play through the tutorial, so I picked it up pretty quickly.

It was fun, but I don't think it's a game I would want to play very often. We gathered a whole bunch of gold but I didn't see anything I could spend it on and handing in all the treasures was honestly a pain. And while the concept of steering a ship together seems fun, in practice it meant I spend most of the ship battles below deck plugging holes and scooping out water.

I wouldn't want every game to have its own forum. Someone needs to make a game forums website and advertise it to developers. Every game gets its own forum on that site, etc.

The closest thing we have to that is Reddit, which is at least a lot better than Discord.

 

[Brian Boru]

Reddit

But Reddit is going public soon, isn't it? That will change the priorities bigtime, so don't count on it for anything.

 

[Johnway]

I don't like it, either, but I can see where they're coming from. When you've got people buying on Steam, GOG, and Epic, it's hard to talk to everyone at once. (Especially Epic, as they can't be bothered to make any sort of forum at all.) Throw in console gamers and there's just too much for the smaller companies to deal with.

Did they ever get Long War working with WotC? They were trying hard when I played through it, but it was having real problems.

That first WotC mission is soon after the tutorial. It ain't easy, either!

not played Long war myself, so not entirely sure. but there is Long War of the Chosen mod which tries to get much of it intact as possible.

if you do really want ot play longwar, i believe you need to turn off WOTC in the 2k launcher and it will load the original xcom2. This goes with other non WOTC compliant mods.

​

The chosen are tough bastards and mercifully when they enter the fray, the timer stops and after you shoo them away it resets. But yeah, can seriously ruin your day when they arrive and made it my objective to remove them ASAP. There was one advent event i encountered whereby all weaknesses the chosen had would be removed (thus making them all super tough) - no surprises i picked that over every other advent event...

 

[ZedClampet]

But Reddit is going public soon, isn't it? That will change the priorities bigtime, so don't count on it for anything.

Also a lot of people would refuse to use reddit simply because of its reputation as toxic. People seem to hate it more than X.

 

[Pifanjr]

Also a lot of people would refuse to use reddit simply because of its reputation as toxic. People seem to hate it more than X.

Do you happen to have any data on that? Because my gut feeling is that Reddit is more popular among gamers than X, but then I don't use X at all.

 

[ZedClampet]

Do you happen to have any data on that? Because my gut feeling is that Reddit is more popular among gamers than X, but then I don't use X at all.

I don't have any data. That's why I used the word "seem". I don't even have an X account right now. I use reddit occasionally. Reddit is set up better for this type of thing, but I see a ton of hate towards it in the Steam forums and on YouTube.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

It probably depends a lot on the sub-Reddit in question and how its moderated. You probably wont find too many problems in R/flowerArranging.

People in tech forums tend to complain about the Reddit versions, maybe because Reddit is so massive you can get a pretty wide range of bad advice on there and its harder for new people to parse who knows what theyre talking about if they dont know the answer already.

 

[D10S]

I heard The Medium was good, but I didn't know it's THAT good.
A brilliant psychological thriller story told from the perspective of two characters, connected via both real and paranatural events being revealed step by step. Material and spititual worlds wonderfully intertwined, I think Bloober Team were ahead of Remedy in doing this (it's a 2021 game, more than 2 years before AW2). Not only that, but they took it a step further by enhancing the experience with split screen mechanics. All that with the mood of Beksinski's art just oozing out of every location.
This is a 10/10 game. I'm so taken aback by how brillaint it is.

 

[ZedClampet]

I heard The Medium was good, but I didn't know it's THAT good.

Played it on Game Pass and really enjoyed it. That's why I don't get the hate for Bloober Team making the Silent Hill 2 remake. They've made some great games, and Silent Hill is exactly the type of game they excel at.

*****

I occasionally get random friend requests on Steam. I always look at what games the player has, and I almost always select "Ignore Request", but today the friend request came from someone who has a remarkable collection of bad games, so that was an immediate "Yes" from me.

 

[ZedClampet]

Why do we continue to make small, blurry and pixilated GIFs like it's 1997 and our moms keep picking up the phone and disconnecting us from AOL?