panda_t

Re the quarry -

It's not quite as bad/hard as it seems

EDIT - just seen someone said this upthread, APOLOGIES

49 minutes ago, carlospie said:

What's the best build for a noob? Can you respec? I'm up to 20 strength but still barely scratch stuff, should I bring different weapons for different situations?

Yes you can respec later

Personally I've only had to switch weapons once, to a mace vs a crystal enemy as a boss in a dungeon thing (nothing else was doing any damage), normally main weapon should be fine (maybe check your weapon scales off your strength, if that's your main attribute though). I did a big explore after big early boss and ended up in areas where I could hardly damage stuff, so it might just be where you are in the map. When I came back to early areas they felt really easy by comparison

I second all the praise for this - took a little while to get used the handling but then it's great, the back-end-out skidding works really well and I just unlocked the second bike and it feels radically different (and is a lot tighter to control, especially downhill). Art style of the sort of impressionistically shaded trails is growing on me as well, and the rider's animations changing speeds are expressive. Nice variety of raw speed/go carefully challenges as well. It's good!

I'm playing Kaycee's Mod and had a very fun geck run just now:

This is really good

Okay, finished it now -

Decent (spoiler including) podcast about it:

https://eggplant.show/84-digging-the-rabbit-hole-with-daniel-mullins-inscryption

I got a Series X today from Very and I'd tried using firefox following a stock alert multiple times and it wouldn't connect, but using chrome it did first time, so I've no idea why that'd be the case but just in case that's useful for anyone else, maybe try chrome

3 hours ago, MikeF said:

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The one in Cataris, fires pink lasers

 

I didn't expect a flappy bird bit in a Metroid game

In case it's useful to anyone re EMMI fights - I didn't realise

3 hours ago, Strafe said:

My only real complaint is not being able to speed the text up or have a whole piece display instantly rather than being typed out on screen.

 

Anyway to speed it up I’ve missed?

If you tap B twice for each new panel it speeds it up a bit. I think you can halve the delay on how long it holds before you go to the next panel as well (there's some ambiguously named setting to that effect, I think that's what it does)

EDIT - actually, Story mode is good in this as well -> it basically plays itself, so on those rare-but-inevitable occasions where it's not clear what it wants you can stick that on, it auto-moves to the right bit of testimony or whatever and if that's enough of a hint you can then immediately turn it off

I'm playing this, like it so far - really enjoyable, savvy use of Shelock Holmes as a character

I've only just read all the posts on the previous page about being annoyed with hotdroppers (& especially Octanes), I agree so much. I think it's partly a mis-match between what the adrenaline-desperate children want and the form of a battle royale game - they'd basically be happy with the sort of COD map that went [spawn-get a kill-die to someone spawning behind you] on repeat but battle royales are the thing at the moment, and Apex is free, so they're playing this. To them, having to wait 20 seconds to get a drop location that isn't a random mess of players is intolerable. And that's why they literally just run directly at every bit of gunfire they hear, and it's why they pick Octane, because he moves quicker and the other characters' running feels slow if you're used to him. The design apparently not taking any account of it is so irritating (even things like allowing idiots to ping their banners an infinite number of times). An 'avg time to drop' filter on the matchmaking wuold be great and won't happen

There's definitely something in ranked where after a while toxic/bad players get sorted together at certain ranks (I think when you get to gold it never puts you with bronzes again?) so if you have a week/a few days not playing it at the start of a season you can end up in that. I had one season where I played it quite a lot at the start and moved up steadily and ended up in good cooperative squads a lot (won three games in a row with one pair). A lot of players literally see/hear fighting and run directly at it in lower ranks, I definitely noticed the difference in people being selective in when to attack and when to run at higher ranks

I like this season - arenas feels really pure in that you get to properly test which weapons are best (the RE45 is so good I've starting using it in ranked). People quitting after 1/2 rounds drives me nuts though, the community in this is obnoxious (loads of hot-droppers who drop solo, die in 30 seconds and then quit even if you're in banner range)

I also like world's edge - but there are definitely areas where it's chaos a lot of the time and you just constantly get third-partied or blindsided (sorting factory, fragments, used to be trainyard) so if you drop at lava city/lava fissure/skyhook it's normally manageable

Had a fun game today where we were going nicely and then the others insisted on running into fragment and 2 of us got killed (me included), with about 8 squads left, but our mirage picked up both banners, made the final circle, found a mobile respawn beacon in a box and we dropped in right on top of juicy death boxes and won it

Re games costing £40 ages ago - I think that might be true for the SNES/Megadrive era, but then weren't PS2 games basically all £30 at one point? Plus there was absolutely rampant piracy at that point with people selling burned game discs on market stalls all over the place. And that played a big part in a) making games mainstream/growing the market and b) setting people's general impression of what a 'fair' price is

On 24/12/2020 at 06:18, Beezer said:

You whip pots? Madman! I always throw them for this reason (and cos they’re a useful weapon)

I'm sure I've died at least once to throwing a pot and then almost immediately getting poisoned by the red snake inside :/

I was thinking about the liquid physics today and whether it's worth having in the game - what does anyone think of it? I basically think the lava isn't adding anything. It makes the drill unusable about half the time and it only messes stages up rather than offering any fun benefit. It's odd how little it adds given how different it is code-wise to the first game (having physicsy bits)

1 hour ago, Purin said:

Got a refund from Microsoft.

 

I'm out until they remove the annoying yellow dot and also patch it for next gen.

 

Also, anyone else really dislike the female V voice-over? Sounds too video-gamey, like I've heard the actor in too many games or something. Just didn't like the performance at all. What's the male V performance like?

I don't like the male voiceover, it's just typical hacky macho voice

I'm playing this on a base PS4 and it's got obvious technical problems but the mood is cool and the customisation seems really deep. I just did the first bit of BD and that sequence was genuinely fresh and interesting and very much not just off the peg open-world stuff. Reminded me of Phoenix Wright (in a good way)

Finished it on the daily challenge today, KAPOW

Having played this a fair bit now I think a lot of the small decisions just aren't very fun - like when there are creatures in pots they have basically no stun time, so either you compulsively whip every pot twice or a scorpion kills you every now and again. But double-whipping pots isn't exactly enjoyable. And avoiding the insta-kill man traps in the jungle just requires treating every bit of foreground foliage with suspicion, but having a bit of a careful look at foliage to see if there's metal behind it isn't enjoyable, exactly. I definitely don't think the balance is right and a lot of the small decisions don't make it more fun

20 minutes ago, Hewson said:

Might be just me but I’m always surprised when I hear people say this. My original DS4s have been tanks - they’re still going and have been great in terms of battery and reliability. Meanwhile I’ve had a lot of Joycon issues and my 2-year-old One X controller has drift and short battery life.

I've had four(?) I think DS4s and bits of all of them have stopped working. That and the price of the new ones are putting me off the PS5 in general (especially as xbox controllers will work across generations now)

2 hours ago, Rsdio said:

I got to the penultimate shortcut requirement a while back, the one where you have to deliver

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a hired hand

and since then I've just felt like I can't really be arsed . It's stupid really because the shortcuts barely got used in the first one, only really a few times to get to grips with each area's unique stuff then never again.

 

I think it's entirely possible I've just burned myself out though, going straight in from grinding away on a hell run in the first without a break inbetween. I'll definitely be back at some point.

I know what you mean, sometimes I'll have 3 or 4 runs in a row end in just some teeth-grindingly stupid way and think 'is this fun? Am I enjoying this?'

DID IT, finally (normal ending, anyway). Honestly the last area felt super-dangerous and I don't understand how all the stuff works there so I was just cautiously safety-bombing my way through it all. Also confused by the exactly how the final boss works but I had lots of sticky bombs and a jetpack and eventually it went down. Obviously might just be getting used to it but I think it's definitely harder than Spelunky 1 - certain specific enemies are always tricky (e.g. the tiki men who can curse you or send that spirit after you, the scorpions, the things that spit ink..) and if they get in a dangerous combination or difficult area it's a nightmare. Even hell in the first game felt manageable if you had resources and were careful. It feels more generous with power-up stuff though (got the jetpack from a dice game, there are always enough altars to get the kapala) so maybe it's just more of a snowball dyanmic and less being able to manage each individual part. Can't imagine doing the last area without bombs and high jump boots/a mount/a jetpack.

On 20/08/2020 at 22:03, Moz said:

 

The game doesn't force you to do anything, you can turn it off. Which bit was that, can you elaborate without spoilers? Every time Ellie did something I disagreed with I felt the distance between myself and her grow, and that gap got larger and larger as I played the second half of the game. It was a quite a linear progression, the same kind of thing seen with Walter White. I never thought "that's dumb, I would never do that". I thought "oh God, what are you doing!" It's an interesting tension which only games can provoke, I guess some players thought their agency had been removed as they couldn't make better decisions for characters they loved in those moments.

I was talking about the first game, in the ending

so it does force you to do things (& so does this one, with the button prompt before

On 16/08/2020 at 00:49, Moz said:

It’s an idea which builds upon the moment from the first game where Joel encounters the doctor and the player is forced to play out his decision and confront their understanding of him and the unease this provokes. It feels like a betrayal. The lack of player choice in these moments is not a limitation of tech, storytelling or imagination, it’s a limitation of the character. It’s somewhat unfashionable after a decade of Mass Effect style “Genocide Y/N” moral choices so it doesn’t sit right with many people, but I thought that was the point.

I think there are two things here - one of which I agree with you on, and one I don't. Definitely some criticism/backlash is people used to games being constructed to make you feel powerful and heroic, to the extent of saving the world/universe, and the shock of playing someone not heroic like that is a shock to their fragile egos and they react negatively. But where I disagree is that some of the stuff the characters do isn't an expression of the themes in a meaningful or inevitable way, it's arbitary and transparently just a decision of the writers. So Joel taking Ellie out of the hospital from selfishness I completely accept as something meaningful and character-based, and 'how does our selfish love weigh against the wider good?' is an interesting question that's worth making games about. But that game forcing you to murder a surgeon for no reason, *even when the gameplay situation you're given control of makes it obviously unnecessary* is ridiculous. That bit being set up for your character to have to sort of hang about in a room full of people panicking until you press a button that stabs an obviously innocent medical professional who's trying to help in the neck is just rubbish.

9 hours ago, Thor said:

Haha I know it's a pretentious thing to say on a game forum but what I mean is - it's an incredibly famous play and it's 400 years old, and it's all about the morality of revenge/justice/mercy so if you're were making something on the topic today you should at least know it (it's like LOU2 re-runs the basic plot set-up and stops before the nuance/complexity/thought)

One other thing I think is relevant is what they make fun - they're amazing at making stealth/shooty bits enjoyable, so the player naturally wants those bits to continue (and loads of the systems are built for it), but they're much less experienced at making non-shooty bits enjoyable - I don't think you can imagine a whole game of the characters peacefully living their lives being something you'd want to play. So there's a tacit understanding of what we're here for and the choice of pursue revenge/live is actually 'play fun game'/'..walking simulator?'

1 hour ago, Popo said:

@panda_t pos’d for such an eloquent and soundly argued post. I don’t agree with any of it, but it’s all very well reasoned and argued. 
 

There’s only one thing I want to add, and it’s repeating myself from way back, but in my opinion the player collusion in gross acts of violence in the name of revenge, and your

(and my) reaction to it, which you described, is exactly what the game was trying to achieve. It’s no coincidence that we and (hopefully) everyone else who plays the game feel downright rotten by the end because that’s the intended aim - provoking that gut response and generating not an understanding that revenge is bad but a strong emotional response is a brilliant use of the nature of games and something you can’t achieve in, say, a movie in the same way. That, to me, is what sets it apart from being just another well trodden revenge story and gives it some real merit. 

Thanks - see, I don't think the game does do this better than other media - I think radio documentaries on growing up during the troubles were better than this. I think other media can/do make me feel disgusted by cycles of revenge. I also didn't feel fine with revenge at the start - it didn't gradually dawn on me it was bad, I'm used to it being used as a paper-thin justification for stuff in games (murdered loved one used to justify game action) and I didn't/don't feel any catharsis/pleasure when anyone got battered (beyond the little normal game-related 'I completed that bit' pleasure). I don't feel any differently about revenge at the end of it than I did at the start

1 hour ago, Stanshall said:

@panda_t

 

I agree with a lot of the points you raised, not least about the dialogue and grimness-serves-gameplay approach, but I do think it's impossible to fairly analyse the intentions or relative success of a narrative without having seen/experienced the entire narrative. A number of the points about it being one-note aren't true when you see how a range of characters cope with loss in different ways -

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not least the two major protagonists. And in fact, that divergence is directly at the heart of the game

 

I understand that from what you played, you could come to that conclusion, though. I'm not dismissing your observations or analysis of what you've played, many of which I agree with. 

 Yeah, since my post I've heard about the ending section and it does change things a bit. It's like the whole game has this miserable dramatic irony where we know the player's choices are bad but they don't, and the ending just makes them realise it. This is speculation because I've not played it but they'd have to be an idiot not to notice revenge having bad effects with

and so on?

1 hour ago, Stanshall said:

I also know that your understanding of 'what they want the player to feel' is at odds with what the devs themselves have said. Joel is a monster 

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and he deserved it. On a replay, I could also understand the level of violence from Abby even if I didn't necessarily need to see it. 

Ah, I'm glad they think that overall - they definitely definitely want you to feel conflicted about him though, the whole dinosaur and space parts are only there to humanise him and have his relationship with Ellie seem warm and loving.

1 hour ago, Stanshall said:

On the other hand, there are plenty of people who feel differently to me, you, some devs because of their view of the character. I wonder how much of that audience group also 

 

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struggled to build empathy with Abby and went apeshit that their revenge got blue balled 

I agree, some reaction to it is people who want Joel as a straightforward hero and are frustrated it's not that (I don't really care about what those people think though)

1 hour ago, Stanshall said:

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the character switch, I groaned as I realised what

I've read plenty of comments that it's a game which primarily wants to hammer home the trite observation that 'revenge is bad' or 'violence begets violence', and I think that's reductive. It's a game which uses violence as a cathartic reward but eventually exhausts you with it, deliberately. 

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the role reversal, broad parallel strokes, Eliie boss

Anyway, scattered thoughts because I'm waiting for a train! Cheers for your take on it, some interesting points. 

Sorry, I can't work out how to do the formatting neatly on this, but (for me, and maybe this is why I feel differently about it to others) I didn't ever feel revenge as a cathartic reward in it. The gamey bits have gamey pleasures - like in the resident evil bit in the hospital, you feel threatened because it's very enclosed and dark and then when you kill the big monster you feel relief - but there's no revenge element in the pleasure of killing it, it hasn't done anything to you beyond a standard jump scare, it's just normal game-section-completed enjoyment. And loads of bits are like that (e.g. the whole Lev section in the infested building). So I do think it's just hammering home that idea.

1 hour ago, Stanshall said:

 

I totally agree with this. I don't feel it's inherently a fault when a game doesn't present you with a choice.

 

I agree with you, (and sometimes games slightly trolling the player by cheekily forcing them into things they don't want to do can be enjoyable or interesting) but I also think that in this case it doesn't work because they've got nothing for the player who thinks 'this is a bad decision, I don't want to do it', is forced to do it, and then watches obvious and predictable bad consequences unfold. Part of the grimness is expecting it, knowing it's coming and then having to sit through the horrible work of really skilled artists and animators who've spent a long time and lots of resources on making it a horrible experience. When Ellie was starting out pursuing Abby I just felt this enervating sense of 'I don't really want her to get there but there's no game without going towards that'

Cheers for the discussion, it's interesting to hear thoughts from people who rate it.

@Rsdio I'd go for hell - you need a really juicy run to do it and I actually found that quite fun because you can't expect every run to go that well so there's no pressure. I think on the one when I did it I had jetpack/shotgun/30+ bombs/ridiculous amounts of health from the kapala.

I'm so looking forward to this - Derek Yu's design is so sharp and thought-through and his comments on that video make me believe it's going to be great in co-op especially