Random Game Thoughts Thread—December 11-December 17

Far Cry 6

Continuing with Far Cry 6, Ubi says:
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More detailed stats:
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I'm currently Rank 10, I believe 20 is the highest. Ranks seem to be to provide access to 'better' weapons, ammo and gear. Playing Easy this first playthru to learn the game, and it has been quite easy—first replay I reckon I'll go to Normal to see if it makes the tactics and strategy more interesting.

System & Performance

I'm playing on a 2017 Dell Alienware Aurora R6, which has i7-7 CPU and 1060 GPU with 6GB VRAM. Game is on an old SSD.

Only small performance issue is I get occasional 'wave rolls' down the screen—I assume that's dropped frame(s)? I've never bothered with frame rates, hence why I don't know what a drop looks like :) Anyway, not a problem, only occasional and barely noticeable.

I still have the keyboard glitches I posted a couple of weeks ago, annoying but oh well. Apart from those, performance is just fine for me @1080p 60Hz on a 42" TV.

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Weapons

I ditched sniper rifle early on, as my AR is so accurate and long-range with armor piercing ammo that I don't need it. I started with the MS16S and later got the MS16L, which is same except more damage—useful v guys with helmets. I only use armor piercing ammo, since changing between ammo types depending on enemy encountered is not my idea of fun—it does the job on targets designated for soft core ammo as long as you get a headshot. I always play single shot rather than burst or auto, so the 120 magazine is way more than I've needed so far.

My 2nd weapon is Compound Bow with Blast Arrows for Chopper chopping—takes 5-6 shots to bring one down, they're way more robust than those in FC5. I also have extra-strong standard arrows available for occasional hunting, which have proven much more recoverable than the initial standard arrows—might lose 2-3 occasionally, whereas used to lose ~50% of the initial ones. Hunting hasn't been really necessary so far, I just bag animals if they bother me or sit there saying "Shoot me!".

3rd weapon is the Supercharger shotgun, which is both suppressed and quick-firing—essential traits for wildlife control near enemy installations. I only picked that up a day or so ago, and it's doing quite nicely.

4th weapon is sidearm only, some pistol or other—I haven't used it in ~10 days, so it's a wasted slot. I must check sometime if I can make it situationally useful, eg via poison or EMP ammo.

I mentioned before that you can swap weapons in the field. I have a grenade launcher ready as backup if I run out of explosive arrows, but that's about it. I may need more options later in the game, since the enemies also rank up as I do.

Anyway, looks like I have the loadout I want, hope it lasts thru the game as I like the main 3 a lot.
 
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I continued Rimworld. I got a nice big haul of components, so I could make some more armour and a few more turrets, as well as a drugs lab (strictly for medication). After a while I remembered the game was still on peaceful, so I put it back on Strive to Survive and was promptly attacked by a group of 20 tribal members, with several smaller raids following it, which made me realize my defences are still pretty poor. I lost only one colonist (one shotted by a guy with a spear), but my people were getting injured about as fast as I could heal them and it seemed only a matter of time before I would get attacked while half my colonists were still in the hospital.

So I've put the game back on peaceful while I look into different weapons, armours and turrets to see what works and I get my genetic laboratory set up to see what I can do with that.

I actually had the plan at the start of this colony to make sure my defences would be priority number 1, but I've gotten sidetracked too much. At least every colonist can wield a gun with some efficiency.
 
I made a start on Dying Light 2 and I really like it so far. Feels quite similar to how I remember Dying Light being. There are some different enemy types and a different city and story.

The parkour is as I remember it fairly simple but tenses you up in your seat. The melee combat is pretty good, there's a timed parry, which I always love in a game, though its very forgiving here. Not easy to fight huge crowds early on so you have to think and manoeuvre a bit, but you can see from the skill tree and gear stats that later its going to be mass exploding heads and general chaos. I actually like that you have to earn it, and when you get the skills one by one it gives you more time to figure out how best to chain the abilities together.

Obviously its a Zombie game so it has a lot of horror elements, which I'm less comfortable with but its not constant and there are safe zones and a day night cycle where you can breath, which makes it tolerable for someone as scaredy as me.

Writing is a bit uneven, some of the dialogue in the open world a bit forced/wonky but nice they have tried to make the place breath a bit. Voice acting seems pretty good so far on main story at least. Story was just OK in the original so wasnt expecting great things here anyway.

Big open world city, lets see how long it holds my interest, barely touched the skill tree yet and only 2-3 story missions in but all good so far.
 
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I've gotten close to the end point in Rimworld, but I'm getting a bit annoyed at the amount of micromanaging needed. One major problem I ran into is that hunting can't be automated. You do have a menu with an overview of all animals on the map where you can mark them for hunting, but it's a bother to check that menu every few minutes. I decided to check out the genetics mod I downloaded, but to get genes you need to harvest corpses, which I also already needed for meat for both my colonist meals and to make kibble for my megawolverines.

I've found a mod that adds the option to set specific species to be automatically marked for hunting, but it requires starting a new game. Since I have to start over anyway, I decided to look if there are any more interesting mods and found a bunch more that help automate stuff and make colonists work smarter.
 
Only small performance issue is I get occasional 'wave rolls' down the screen—I assume that's dropped frame(s)? I've never bothered with frame rates, hence why I don't know what a drop looks like :) Anyway, not a problem, only occasional and barely noticeable.

I noticed you dont have Vsync on, or do you have it on globally in the driver or a frame rate cap at 60? If not sounds like it might be tearing. If I remember right you could use Adaptive sync in the global driver settings to automatically turn vsync on when your GPU is outputting more than 60 frames, and off when its under that. Should get rid of any tearing if that what it is youre experiencing.
 
Well boo, it won't be hilarious anymore :(

I've been messing around with the mod options this morning to make the game a bit harder for myself, if that's any consolation. Specifically, I decreased the chance of animals joining the colony of their own will. The megawolverines were pretty cool, I'm not going to lie, but it got a bit ridiculous when I also got two rhinoceroses and 10 cobras who just decided my colony would be their new home. It devalues the animal skill a lot and makes investing into the genetics mod to make killer hybrids a lot less attractive.

I also decreased the chance of some events that drop several wounded colonists near your camp. My last colony started feeling like an interstellar garbage dump with all of the stuff that kept falling from the sky.

I'm considering starting as a tribe for my next game, which slows down the rate at which you get new technologies. In my last game I was unlocking technologies so fast it was hardly worth investing in any of the stuff I unlocked as something better could be unlocked 15 minutes later. It just made me constantly feel like I should be updating outdated stuff, but I had no opportunity to really do so.

If only I had waited until later to play Subnautica!

Good thing I waited until later to play Subnautica!
 
As I type, I'm currently downloading The Witcher 3 Next-Gen 4.0 update. I wish I had gotten out of bed earlier to install the update as it's 45.2 GB, and at my current download rate (2.8 to 3.0 MB/s) Steam estimates that it will be about another 3 hours, so I've got some time to kill.

I'm pretty excited as it feels almost like I'm installing a new, never-played-before game. It's also the first game that I'll play that has ray-tracing and DLSS 2. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to run with most graphical settings on or near ultra and still be able to enable some level of ray-tracing, depending upon how many options there are. We'll see. I'm sure that I'll be spending at least an hour tweaking graphic settings.

It reminds me of the recent PCG article by Fraser Brown: 2022 was the year I fell in and out of love with ray tracing | PC Gamer
 
I haven't been playing a lot recently. I've been focused on the relocation process for my new job, so I've mostly been hoping on Forza Horizon 5 or Modern Warfare for a bit at night.

As I type, I'm currently downloading The Witcher 3 Next-Gen 4.0 update. I wish I had gotten out of bed earlier to install the update as it's 45.2 GB, and at my current download rate (2.8 to 3.0 MB/s) Steam estimates that it will be about another 3 hours, so I've got some time to kill.

I have about the same download speed at my current place, and I'm greatly looking forward to moving to a city with great access to fast internet. The lowest Fios plan is literally like 10 times the download speed vs my current speeds! I don't need insane speeds, but downloading 100GB+ games at 3MB/s is just painful.
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
It would be nice if games would let us toggle a set of settings with a hotkey. Hit control-pause and the game cranks up the eye candy but destroys your framerate, hit it again and it goes back to something less pretty but much more playable. Then you could see how everything looks with nice graphics when you get to a nice place and quickly swap back when it starts doing more harm than good.
 
toggle a set of settings with a hotkey. Hit control-pause and the game cranks up the eye candy but destroys your framerate, hit it again and it goes back to something less pretty but much more playable
More than one remaster has done that. C&C Remastered has a key to toggle the original and remastered graphics, and I've read/viewed it for at least another remaster I haven't played—maybe Crysis?
 
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Zloth

Community Contributor
I finished my Age of Wonders planet. I was trying to shoot off my "doomsday" weapon so me and my allies could win. Doing this means defending 3 buildings you build for 10 turns. I had the game on easy, so there really wasn't anyone who could challenge me at that point - especially given there was only one other empire on the planet that wasn't an ally.

So, I got a little greedy and sent some armies to capture one of his cities. It was pretty well defended, but I still took it. AoW:p requires that you spend quite a few turns converting the city, so I just left my armies parked there. With about 3 turns left before doomsday, the enemy commander attacked my armies with his biggest armies. That led to quite a battle, but I took down both attacking armies as well as their commanders... and suddenly won the game!?

It seems that one of those commanders was actually the commander of the entire empire! With that empire down and the rest allied to me, I won the game! But I didn't want to win like that! I loaded a save from just before the enemy attacked and ran away. I outnumbered him 3 to 1 so it looked pretty silly, but I just had to do it for a few turns. I was worried he would ambush me, force me to kill him, and make me win again before I got my proper victory, but I managed to get away. Not-so-evil-orange-and-red victory avoided, happier blue with just some orange victory accomplished. (The fact that the achievement for the latter has been achieved by fewer than 2% of players had nothing to do with it, of course. I was totally roleplaying! Iswear!! ;))

More than one remaster has done that. C&C Remastered has a key to toggle the original and remastered graphics, and I've read/viewed it for at least another remaster I haven't played—maybe Crysis?
That's actually even harder! I'm thinking of just setting up all my settings, then press control-pause, then change some of the settings, then play the game. If I press control-pause while playing, the game changes the settings just as if I had paused the game and changed the settings the normal way. If I press control-pause yet again, it swaps the settings again.
 

Sarafan

Community Contributor
I never thought that playing FIFA online is so much fun. Yesterday I went through a few matches and it was amazing! Never done this before. So much fun!

Besides that I started playing BioShock Remastered. Before this I played only a demo of the original game. While the graphics in overall are quite outdated (the game didn't age good unfortunately) the water effects still make a positive impression. And of course the gameplay is still great.

More than one remaster has done that. C&C Remastered has a key to toggle the original and remastered graphics,

It's the same in Starcraft Remastered, Diablo 2 Resurrected, fan-made Quake RTX and probably a couple of other remasters. It's a really nice feature and I'd certainly would love to see it in more games.
 
I've been trying a few games on Microsoft game pass and I just can't get into them. Tried Dragons Quest and Ni No and while both are wonderful looking I just can't get into them. I don't know why.

Gonna give Psychonauts 2 a spin. I loved the first one and hope 2 is a blast.

Still hooked on Darktide, but not a fan of the new Maul hammer thing. Give me my chain sword and revolver. It's all I need. That revolver is one of my fav weapons in gaming in a long time. Nothing like firing it into an oncoming horde and watching everything die in a single shot.
 
I started a new game of Rimworld as a tribe, as I planned. The new manager mod is pretty great, it automatically creates jobs to harvest berries and healroot, chop trees and hunt animals, automating a lot of tedium from the game, though I need to mess around with it a bit more to prevent it from marking trees all over the map for cutting. The other mods are also working out great, so I ended up spending far too much time playing instead of working again today.

I did already lose one of my colonists to an infection and the new colonist that requested to join turned out to be a traitor from a hostile faction. Also, the only two colonists that are capable of constructing got into a fight and put each other in the hospital for several days. And when I say hospital, I mean they just slept on their designated sleeping spot on the floor.
 


Interesting Reddit post here on monetization in games as a service, seems legit but grain of salt always obviously. I hadn't really given much thought to the personalisation aspect before.

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Dying Light 2 is a pretty good game. Its much bigger that the first but feels quite a bit more janky and less smooth somehow. Not sure why the devs decided on the architecture style they did in a parkour game, the Mansard roofs just feel wrong every time you magically swing out a metre from the wall to get to a roof while climbing up.

15 hours in, there's a lot to do. I don't mind the main story so far, it forces you to make choices quite quickly that are permanent which some might not like. I think it helps make the decisions feel a bit more weighty. A bit annoying that weapons can't be repaired but where I am in the game they are getting obsolete by the time it matters anyway. Electrocuting and burning zombies while drop kicking everyone is always fun, and the missions and loot system are good excuses to explore and find places to do more of that.

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Didnt finish the Resident Evil TV series, it went off a cliff after the middle episodes with Wesker. They also threw in a dig at 4 Chan so I think I found where the review bomb motivation came from. Pretty dumb to throw that in IMO, not that it bothered me but you'd think they would know the audience for their own show.
 
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My wife and a friend of hers wanted to try out Hearthstone, they hadn't played it before but have played/been playing a lot of WoW. They invited another friend and I to join, with both of us having played a lot of Hearthstone in the past. This ended up with my wife and her friend doing the tutorial while the other friend and I tried to get some decks together from the few cards we had that haven't been rotated out of standard yet or been banned in wild since we last played.

Which is how I got reminded how much I hate playing against Murlocs.

Interesting Reddit post here on monetization in games as a service, seems legit but grain of salt always obviously. I hadn't really given much thought to the personalisation aspect before.

I knew about Candy Crush adjusting difficulty to get you to spend more and I've read about it or seen it in different games, but I hadn't realised it might be as widespread as it probably is.
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
Makes sense but I hadn't thought about it before, never really played mobile games or any live service games with optional monetization so guess that why.
Me, either. The whole free-to-play model seems terrible to me. Our games certainly have issues with trying to make games that look great in trailers, and I expect there are shenanigans going on with "influencers" getting paid off, but the best way to make money with buy-to-play is still making a game that's really fun - at least to some part of the market. With free-to-play, fun isn't at the center. Getting the player to think they will have more fun if only they would pay just a little more money is.

P.S. Will there ever be a game that keeps track of your normal activities and stays fun for just a few days. Then, once it thinks it knows it has caught you, threatens to tell your boss how much you've been playing at work unless you pay $10/month AND get two of your (soon to be former) friends to sign up for the "game" with your special code? ;)
 

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