The Currently Playing & Random Game Thoughts Thread (26 June to 2 July)

[ZedClampet]

So I've really been annoyed by V Rising for one particular game mechanic. You can turn people into vampires and then they will work for you. After you unlock various places on the map, you can send them in small groups to go to that area and bring back a variety of the resources from that area. It's actually a really fun system. You outfit them with all their gear. They all have different types of situations that they are good in. There's a decent amount of strategy involved to make sure they come back alive with the resources you need. That's all great. The problem is that each mission takes a minimum of two hours and a maximum of 24 hours, and the game has to be running or time doesn't pass. As a result, for the last week, I've been running this game non-stop, all day and all night. Finally, today I hit the tilde key to see if a console menu would come up. Sure enough, it did, and it had a help section. Pretty quickly I found out how to skip time, so now I just register the time when I log off, and when I log back in, I skip how much ever time I was gone. That's so much better.

Bought Grid (2019) and the latest Asseto Corsa in the Steam sale. Looking forward to trying those later today since I can turn off V Rising now.

 

[Pifanjr]

So I've really been annoyed by V Rising for one particular game mechanic. You can turn people into vampires and then they will work for you. After you unlock various places on the map, you can send them in small groups to go to that area and bring back a variety of the resources from that area. It's actually a really fun system. You outfit them with all their gear. They all have different types of situations that they are good in. There's a decent amount of strategy involved to make sure they come back alive with the resources you need. That's all great. The problem is that each mission takes a minimum of two hours and a maximum of 24 hours, and the game has to be running or time doesn't pass. As a result, for the last week, I've been running this game non-stop, all day and all night. Finally, today I hit the tilde key to see if a console menu would come up. Sure enough, it did, and it had a help section. Pretty quickly I found out how to skip time, so now I just register the time when I log off, and when I log back in, I skip how much ever time I was gone. That's so much better.

Wouldn't the game be balanced around the assumption players don't leave their game running when they aren't playing? Or is it a grindy game?

 

[ZedClampet]

Wouldn't the game be balanced around the assumption players don't leave their game running when they aren't playing? Or is it a grindy game?

Unfortunately, the assumption is that you are playing on a server that never gets shut down. I'm not sure why that's the case. Hopefully at some point during Early Access they'll adjust this sort of thing. As far as it being grindy, you do need a lot of resources and things can take forever to craft. For instance, i got a thousand silver ore and each ingot takes 2.5 minutes to craft. We just made a bunch of furnaces and just leave them running. I'm not sure why they've gone this route.

 

[Pifanjr]

I downloaded Fall Guys since it was free and let my daughter try it out, but she fell a bunch of times and made me finish the level, then was done with the game. She really doesn't like losing, so I guess it's not a good game for her to learn 3D platforming.

I haven't gotten around to setting up the GameCube yet, but once I do maybe I can get some games that can get her used to navigating 3D areas a bit better.

Unfortunately, the assumption is that you are playing on a server that never gets shut down. I'm not sure why that's the case. Hopefully at some point during Early Access they'll adjust this sort of thing. As far as it being grindy, you do need a lot of resources and things can take forever to craft. For instance, i got a thousand silver ore and each ingot takes 2.5 minutes to craft. We just made a bunch of furnaces and just leave them running. I'm not sure why they've gone this route.

It does seem to be rated very highly, so I guess the grind is enjoyable enough? I did also see that you can increase the amount of resources gained when creating a server, so I guess you could just cut down the grinding based on your own preference.

 

[ZedClampet]

She really doesn't like losing.

Haha I've never met a little one who could handle losing. When my daughter was tiny, I'd even stack the deck in Candyland just to make sure I wouldn't win. My wife, who's hilarious, was the one who taught her how to lose by beating her in everything, then she'd do a ridiculous dance around the room in celebration (which made my daughter stop crying). Best part is my wife wasn't trying to teach her anything. That's just the way she is.

It does seem to be rated very highly, so I guess the grind is enjoyable enough?

Oh, I absolutely love the game. I just didn't like leaving my computer running. I've seen much worse grinds. I went looking for cotton seeds yesterday and ended up with 3000 cotton. i still planted the seeds, but depending on what the final gear recipes look like, i may never need more cotton.

 

[ZedClampet]

How a PC Saved My Son's Life: A Conversation I had with my son a couple of weeks ago.

Setting: We've arrived at the Karns High School parking lot at 2:30 am to pick up the team and head to Dallas for a national engineering contest.

Me: Son, why is there a tour bus in the parking lot?

Son: I don't know.

Me: So when you talked to your sponsor, he never mentioned we'd be taking a bus to Dallas?

Son: No, he just said to meet here at 2:30.

long pause

Me: I should have stayed on top of it and called your sponsor.

Son: Sorry.

Me: It's fine, but I'm not getting on that bus. That's going to be a 20 hour trip (I was close, it took19 hours). I'll meet you all at the hotel.

Son: I think you are supposed to chaperone on the bus.

Me: Why do you think that? You didn't even know you were taking a bus.

Son: You're the chaperone.

Me: I'm going to murder you, twice.

Son: I'm sorry.

pause

Me: I bet that thing has outlets on it, and I left my laptop at home.

Son: You can use mine.

Me: I hereby pardon you.

 

[ZedClampet]

How to tune your car in Forza Horizon games (for noobs, casuals and non pros)

Many pro drivers will spill their secrets on YouTube, and you are more than welcome to watch one of those videos and learn how to set up your car like they do. We're talking about things like aero, springs, tire pressure, etc. As far as upgrading goes, just do what you like, you can't really go too wrong there (but go for the all wheel drive). It's the tuning where you can mess things up or make things better.

You may wonder why I crossed out "make things better". That's because the wise developers who make Forza have already got the settings absolutely perfect for you. Perfect for a pro driver? No. But perfect for you? Probably, unless you are just really, really good.

How do you know if you are good enough to start tinkering with your car? Watch the pro drivers on YouTube and then watch a replay of your last race. The pro driver looks like they are almost moving in slow motion because they are so smooth. It looks like they are just casually coasting around the course. If your driving doesn't look like that, then you don't need to adjust your tuning.

By all means, test it out yourself. Start "improving" your car and see if your race finishes are better. Unless you are just really, really good, your finishes will get worse. And by really, really good, I mean that you are frequently on leader boards or very close to it, not that you are playing on a high difficulty.

The developers naturally want as many people to enjoy the game as possible. They've run simulations on every vehicle and tuned them to perfection for people who drive like most of us do. The game wouldn't be nearly as popular if they hadn't.

So how do you tune your car in Forza Horizon games? The answer is that you probably shouldn't tune it at all.

 

[Pifanjr]

Tried to play a bit of Abzu with my daughter, but 3D navigation is still too hard for her.

Played a little bit more Warhammer 2, continuing my Grom Vortex campaign. The high elves continue to be annoying. For every army I catch, a new one pops up. I got a waaagh against Lothern though and 4 full armies making their way there now, so hopefully they'll be a bit less annoying once I pillage and raze a bunch of their cities.

However, Numas also just declared war on my ally, Khemri, and has almost wiped him out in just a few turns, so now I need to divert some attention there as well. Luckily Grom was already making his way back from the west coast, so with some luck he'll arrive in time to stop any of my cities from being attacked. Well, any more, since they did try attacking one of my cities already, but luckily it was one I had a defensive building in and they only brought 4 units. Auto-resolve gave me a pyrrhic victory for some reason, but playing the battle myself let me win with only minor losses.

 

[Brian Boru]

Tactical Shooter

This one is Early Access—but 4 years old—from one of the Ghost Recon / Rainbow Six devs, and has pretty strong player comments. Weapon customization, ballistics…

Ground Branch

"Forget unlocks, microtransactions and loot boxes. Ground Branch operators get all the right tools for the job straight away"

 

[DXCHASE]

Outriders new expansion WORLDSLAYER pre-order 48 hour early access starts today. Im excited but with baited breath because Outriders is notorious for bad bugs at launch and server issues. Lets hope that its at a minimal for this expan.

 

[Frindis]

@ZedClampet I don't really care for tuning the car myself, mostly because I don't have any interest in it. If I want to have a nice drag build or one for drifting, I just watch some YouTuber or take one of the builds with the most stars, it seems to work quite well. I even won some drag races using a Diablo GTR with a really solid drag build.

What I have done the most is using a Honningan drift build and going to the abandoned airport for some easy points, which I use for getting new cars. It's fun, get some nice screenshots and be as chill as you can get in my eyes. Forza Horizon is overall a pretty relaxing game, can't really do anything wrong, with the exception of getting outbid when sniping or failing trials of sorts.

Right now I am playing Brotato demo. It's basically a top-down shooter with waves of enemies you have to kill. Manage a build of your liking and see if you can get through wave 12. Might sound easy, but it is not, at least not before you understand what you need of skills/items to survive the later waves. Highly recommended and I'd say it would be suited for anyone from the age of 12+.

Obviously, Witcher 2 is on the agenda. Last week before my one-week habitus, I had just finished drinking with some people I encountered in shitty Flotsam and somehow I ended up half-naked on a river bed with a tattoo on my neck. Oh, and of course, I also tried to use four brothel women as a raft, so I could try and cross the river. You would think a Witcher would be able to handle the liquor 😅 The tattoo I got:

 

[ZedClampet]

@ZedClampet I don't really care for tuning the car myself, mostly because I don't have any interest in it. If I want to have a nice drag build or one for drifting, I just watch some YouTuber or take one of the builds with the most stars, it seems to work quite well. I even won some drag races using a Diablo GTR with a really solid drag build.

What I have done the most is using a Honningan drift build and going to the abandoned airport for some easy points, which I use for getting new cars. It's fun, get some nice screenshots and be as chill as you can get in my eyes. Forza Horizon is overall a pretty relaxing game, can't really do anything wrong, with the exception of getting outbid when sniping or failing trials of sorts.

I should have said "racing" tuning. You really don't have a choice but to change your tuning for drifting. I think maybe for drag racing the only thing you'd have to do is check your gear ratios. Not sure about that because I haven't been doing the drag racing.

*************

My son is visiting his sister in Nashville this week, so I've been on my own in V Rising. I told him I wouldn't do anything important, but I kind of, sort of, maybe killed the next boss. But that's it. No more important stuff. I just needed to unlock the atheneum research table so I could continue decorating the castle. Anyway, as soon as we play again, we'll go murder him so Guido can get his unlocks. This boss also happened to give the best ultimate so far in the game, so I'm pretty happy I went ahead and did him.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

My son is visiting his sister in Nashville this week...

We're getting ready to move my oldest son to Bloomington this Friday. It's about 2 hours away from us. It will be good for him to get out and have some independence, but I kind of wish it were a little closer to us.

 

[Zloth]

@Frindis - if you load a Witcher 3 game from Witcher 2, the tattoo will still be there.

I did my Steam buy for the summer last night. I got.... (Looks over at the quiz topic. 😮) I got some titles to be announced later.

 

[ZedClampet]

Some reprobate logged into our V Rising server and tried to steal my son's max speed horse.

 

[Brian Boru]

I also tried to use four brothel women as a raft

You took a week off for that? What? 6 days 23 hours and 58 minutes to recover… ah right, that's the Frindis we know and love!

Huh, I didn't realize tats came with their own ratings these days, very handy.

independence … closer to us

Checks dictionary. As I thought, doesn't work that way, sorry

Some reprobate … tried to steal my son's max speed horse.

My money's on the sister!

 

[ZedClampet]

My money's on the sister!

It was weird. No one's ever joined our server before. He didn't see me, so I just stood there and watched as he walked up to each horse and checked their stats. Then he found the prize horse and hopped on. I knocked him off the horse with my throwing axes and killed him (I'm late game and he had created a new character). Then I logged out because I've been through all this before in other games, and chances are good this guy wasn't going to give up. When I start the server back up, I'm just going to move the horses inside, but if he keeps coming back and messing with us, I'll just ban him from the server. Starting a PvP server was my son's idea, not mine, and I'm not really interested in letting people on when my son isn't there.

 

[ZedClampet]

@Frag Maniac Finally just started playing Grid 2019, and it's great so far. In the first season on Hard. Won the first race, but in the second race, I was on lap 3 in the lead when I took a turn too hard. I could have recovered, but there was another turn immediately after that I was just in miserable shape for, and I spun out and ended up coming in 6th. Lots of fun. I also like the qualifying lap, although I haven't done well at those yet. I was disqualified in the first race, which I assume was for cutting a corner or something (that's a Forza thing) and in the second race I only qualified 12th, so I need to get better at that.

I haven't had a chance to drive the same car in both games yet. May try to do that tomorrow. But these stock cars drive a lot differently from anything I raced in Legends. They have a much more "sim" feeling to them, but it could just be the type of car.

 

[Frag Maniac]

@Frag Maniac Finally just started playing Grid 2019, and it's great so far. In the first season on Hard. Won the first race, but in the second race, I was on lap 3 in the lead when I took a turn too hard. I could have recovered, but there was another turn immediately after that I was just in miserable shape for, and I spun out and ended up coming in 6th. Lots of fun. I also like the qualifying lap, although I haven't done well at those yet. I was disqualified in the first race, which I assume was for cutting a corner or something (that's a Forza thing) and in the second race I only qualified 12th, so I need to get better at that.

I haven't had a chance to drive the same car in both games yet. May try to do that tomorrow. But these stock cars drive a lot differently from anything I raced in Legends. They have a much more "sim" feeling to them, but it could just be the type of car.

Wow, you seem willing to take results I usually took time to improve on via restarts, so I respect that. It's a bit more immersive and realistic the way you're playing it, but honestly, this game also takes time to master, including hot laps. In fact hot lapping is usually where I discovered what sections I could take full gas, and where I could improve momentum in corners. You will find many of the Barcelona races require precise lines and full gas, because the AI give no quarter with their speed there.

Yeah, like I said Stock cars, Muscle cars, Trucks, Super Tourers, and some of the invitational cars are quite a bit harder to handle. It gets even messier in rain and/or on tracks that have lots of tough turns. I'm not surprised Legends feels more arcade, I could tell by the comparative AI sector times and event types it had. I wouldn't be surprised if you feel even more disparity between the two as you progress. This is part of the reason I've been reluctant to get Legends, I worried it would feel like a let down from 2019.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

Checks dictionary. As I thought, doesn't work that way, sorry

Lol. I don't mean closer to us than he already is. I mean closer to us than 2 hours away.

 

[ZedClampet]

Wow, you seem willing to take results I usually took time to improve on via restarts, so I respect that. It's a bit more immersive and realistic the way you're playing it, but honestly, this game also takes time to master, including hot laps. In fact hot lapping is usually where I discovered what sections I could take full gas, and where I could improve momentum in corners. You will find many of the Barcelona races require precise lines and full gas, because the AI give no quarter with their speed there.

Yeah, like I said Stock cars, Muscle cars, Trucks, Super Tourers, and some of the invitational cars are quite a bit harder to handle. It gets even messier in rain and/or on tracks that have lots of tough turns. I'm not surprised Legends feels more arcade, I could tell by the comparative AI sector times and event types it had. I wouldn't be surprised if you feel even more disparity between the two as you progress. This is part of the reason I've been reluctant to get Legends, I worried it would feel like a let down from 2019.

I didn't notice an option to take practice on a track, so if that's the case, I may start doing multiple qualifying laps just so I can learn the track. Had I done that on that last race, I don't think I would have spun out.

Not counting the old Need for Speed games, I've usually just accepted the results. If I screw up an entire championship, I'll just do it again. Usually I'll only restart if I'm angry, which generally means one of the AI put me into a wall or something. Or in the case of one Legends race, someone parked a truck around a blind corner in the racing line, and I slammed into it. Who makes a track that way? You're in the racing line, and all of a sudden you're slamming into a parked vehicle. Just baffling.

 

[Pifanjr]

I played some Phasmophobia last evening. One of my friends convinced another friend to share his library with me so I could join him and two of his friends. I had a basic idea of what I needed to do because I watched some of my friend's stream, so I could just jump in and start playing. The only problem was that I couldn't find the USB adapter for my headset and my desktop computer doesn't have a plug that does both sound and microphone, unlike my laptop. So I ended up plugging it into my Xbox controller, but that forced me to play with the controller, which was suffering heavily from stick drift on the right stick which caused it to automatically point up.

So that wasn't ideal and probably caused me to die once because I couldn't find the exit quick enough (I literally died on the door step). But it worked well enough to enjoy the game.

 

[ZedClampet]

I played some Phasmophobia last evening. One of my friends convinced another friend to share his library with me so I could join him and two of his friends. I had a basic idea of what I needed to do because I watched some of my friend's stream, so I could just jump in and start playing. The only problem was that I couldn't find the USB adapter for my headset and my desktop computer doesn't have a plug that does both sound and microphone, unlike my laptop. So I ended up plugging it into my Xbox controller, but that forced me to play with the controller, which was suffering heavily from stick drift on the right stick which caused it to automatically point up.

So that wasn't ideal and probably caused me to die once because I couldn't find the exit quick enough (I literally died on the door step). But it worked well enough to enjoy the game.

Such a basic game with mediocre (at best) graphics, and yet it's an absolute blast to play with friends. The whole crucifix thing, how it works, is dumb as hell, but the rest of the tools are fun to play with.

The longer you go without decent evidence, the scarier it gets. If your sanity goes too far down, or to zero, at least on the highest difficulty, the ghost will hunt, quit for about 5 to 20 seconds, and then start hunting again, over and over. If you've got your own equipment, the best thing to do at that point is to get out of the house. If you've brought the sanity pills, I would let your best player take them and try to go back in and finish up by him/herself because the higher the sanity levels, the fewer hunts their are, so concentrating the pill effects on one player seems the way to go.

But as long as you've prepped the rooms for hiding and maintain awareness of where you are, everything should go well unless the ghost spawns right on top of you. It's just that if your sanity goes down too far, you really don't have time to do anything between hunts.

**********

I bought two more racing sims on sale, but I really need to pick one and concentrate on it. I have the project cars and the Rally games I've never played. I also have F1 2020. What I want is to play Forza Horizon and the Grid games casually and pick one sim to concentrate on. I just have to install and play them all to see which one I want to start with.

***************

I played the demo of Return to Enen (an SP survival game with optional enemies). It's supposed to come out in early August. Hopefully by then they will have added of QoL things; for instance, tool tips. You go into the crafting menu, and it tells you that you need 6 of (picture of thing I have no freaking clue what it is). So you hover your mouse over the mystery item, and nothing happens, so you have no idea what you are actually looking for.

 

[Brian Boru]

Ghost Recon Wildlands no squad, first-person

Quit this quickly last year due to 2 things I don't like:
Squad play with 3 mates, either MP or AI;
Third person perspective.

No Squad
There's a setting well hidden in the menus for 'lone wolf' play—nice, but why hidden, surely that's a main decision for a player to make?

First Person Perspective
There's a new mod this year for this, which works quite well—a few little graphic glitches which aren't a problem. A hotkey—zero for me—switches seamlessly between TPP and FPP, which is handy for taking screenshots cos they need TPP apparently.

First Person_plus Extras

Fixed to work on update from 2023-09-19

www.nexusmods.com

Note the base TPP game has an option for FPP aiming, which is nice.

Interface
There's a lot in there, which I haven't gone thru as it's pretty busy, would take an hour or two to study. The mechanics of it are fine, ie clicking and moving around.

There's a 1-click 'Quit to Desktop'—THANK YOU UBI!—which works very quickly, ~1 second. Launch game isn't as good, but not bad.

Map
I've only played the first mission and a bit beyond, but it's clear the map is huge—where I've been is only a dot in the whole thing. It's set in Bolivia, in really rugged landscape so far, which is a joy to wander around in. I haven't met any wildlife, but there are loads of NPCs wandering about, and lots of traffic on the roads—so it's generally alive.

It's open world, so there's a lot of freedom about which objective to tackle, and the choice to just futz about looking for trouble, which I love doing.

 

[ZedClampet]

No Squad
There's a setting well hidden in the menus for 'lone wolf' play—nice, but why hidden, surely that's a main decision for a player to make?

Maybe, dunno. I do know that the squad play was a huge point of emphasis, so I think maybe they just assumed people would use it.

Played this a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. The main thing I didn't like was that you have to do missions to get certain resources, and you do the same thing over and over again. I must have stolen a helicopter 20 times. Other than that, I thought it was a nice game. I like that it isn't a bullet sponge game. You shoot someone in the head and they die, but the same sort of goes for you. You can't take many hits.

So I was looking forward to Breakpoint, and they completely screwed it up by reinventing the wheel at every step in the process. It took me forever just to figure out the missions page. But Ghost Recon is a fine game, at least.

Oh, and you are going to find third person more useful than just for pictures. It's far superior during stealth, as you can look around corners.