Unified Vidya Games thread

[Cain]

So I think I know what is going on with the weird facial expressions in Andromeda which has everyone so wound up.

My rig meets the recommended quality that the game requires, and while I've noticed some weirdness, it's been very minor, sporadic and hasn't occured since the launch of the game itself. 

I think what they've done is they've tried to introduce micro-expressions into the animations.  I've watched closely while talking with more important characters - the Tempest's crew, for example - and they do a lot of looking around, blinking and quick smiles or frowns.  I suspect that, partly because Bioware has never had excellent animations and partly because lots of people are still running around with subpar PC specs, these aren't quite being rendered properly and so they lead to weird, stilted facial expressions.

Apparently the gay male romance is also quite poor, and doesn't recieve as much love as the other romances.  That's a shame, since apparently the gay male romance in Inquisition was very good - but then two different teams worked on the two games, Edmonton is more experienced and handled Inquisition, while the less experienced Montreal did Andromeda.  Also I believe David Gaider wrote Dorian's romance, and Gaider is himself gay, in addition to being a very experienced lead writer.

Some of the general dialogue is a bit stilted in places too, but we've also not made any really important decisions so far, that I can tell.  I've just finished off getting a settlement on Eos, the first planet, and the most important thing I've decided is whether to have a military or research settlement, and who to wake out of cryo-stasis first.  That said, I've had the opportunity to tell the leaders of the Pathfinder Initiative that I don't appreciate the political games they are playing, which is nice. Both Tann and Addison are doing my head in and are first in line to be thrown out an airlock if I get the chance.  Kandros, Turian militia leader and the Krogan are alright though.  The logical/empathetic/professional/casual options are nice, but an angry option would also be good - we've put up with a lot of bullshit already.

Montreal was the team which made ME3MP and designed several side missions in ME3 and, I believe, Inquisition, so the combat is living up to expectations.  I'm not getting much use out of the jetpack in combat, but I'm playing as an infiltrator, and I could see that being more useful for a vanguard - jump, shoot a bit, then biotic charge to get your shields back.  Hardcore difficulty is OK - I've had my ass handed to me a ouple of times, but I usually win the next fight.  I've finally got enough powers that I can have two different profiles, but I've yet to try switching them in combat.  I have my infiltrator set up with Cloak, Marksman (whatever it's called in this game - the power that makes you more accurate and fire faster) and Overload, with the Engineer profile having Overload, Incinerate and Conc Shot.  I figure those will be the bread and butter of my build - firepower, crowd control and anti-armour/anti-shields is a decent combination I think.

Multiplayer continues to be buggy with sound.

[Cramulus]

I found this super weird game for PS4 called Everything. I was hooked in because the game features narration by Alan Watts.

The game's kind of hard to describe. This is more of a zen-experience sandbox than a traditional game. It's about Being, and becoming different things. It reminds me a lot of Sagan's line that we are the universe trying to know itself.

You start off as some kind of animal - I started as an Elk. Your options are kind of limited. You can wander around, and if you see other Elks, you can press circle to "join" with them. Then "you" aren't just one elk, but as many as are in the group. You can form groups, or break groups. When beings are in a group, you can make them dance, and sometimes that leads to reproduction.

You can also ascend or descend into other scales of beings. If you're standing next to a blade of grass, you can become that blade of grass. From the grass's perspective, you'll be able to see tiny stones, ants, worms, etc.. you can shrink down and become them. If you go down far enough you will become pollen, dust, smaller leads you to DNA, bacteria, atoms, going deeper still leads you to a world which is just geometric patterns. Keep going down and you start to see galaxies--you've looped around to the top of a different cosmos.

Most of the gameplay is explorative. It has a kind of pokemon-feel where everything you become gets added to your collection, and it tells you "You've been 41% of all trees". So there's this urge to Be everything in the universe, to taste everything and try it out. There are also little icons that appear in the world sometimes - when you touch one, you unlock a snippet from an Alan Watts talk.

It's a really weird game. Relaxing. Not anything I expected.


Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY-cEIijw2I

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That game looks really cool.

I still pretty much just play Ingress.

[Cramulus]

How's Ingress these days? I haven't touched it since a year post beta. Are they still releasing those awful-acting-and-writing plot videos? those are something else

[Cain]

Dancing Elk Group is OP, Cramulus.  Expect a nerf in the near future.

[Ziegejunge]

I think you've sold me on Everything. I may check it out in the very near future.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

How's Ingress these days? I haven't touched it since a year post beta. Are they still releasing those awful-acting-and-writing plot videos? those are something else

It is essentially unchanged.

I have never watched the videos, and I play with the sound off. I don't even care about their storyline.

[Cain]

OH SHIT, JUNKENSTEIN

Beamdog have made Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition.  Turns out this is what Chris Avellone has been working on lately.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2wXLCIpFRg&lc

http://planescape.com/

[Junkenstein]

Hmm. Kind of ambivalent here.

On the plus side there's no new mediocre npcs and it basically looks to be implementing various fan patches over the years. No mention of new/expanded plot beyond bug fixes.

It also seems to be selling itself heavily on "old version hard to install and play" which is quite frankly bullshit. I've had no issues running it on win10 at all, either disc or the standard gog release.

Which leaves graphics and ui as the main change. In beamdog terms that means "slap a white outline round your guys" and in general look cutting edge for around 2005 or so. There was some other nonsense about screen resolutions and loading speed too. Ho hum.

It's very strange, there's a lot that could have been helped here, you're dealing with a game from around 99 after all. There's a big enough fan base to support a remake over a dodgy remaster.

[Cain]

I actually had some issues with a disc I bought a few years back with installing (Windows 7 and 10) and had even more problems with trying to mod it so UI and screen resolution overhaul is perfect for me.

I'm also not sure that there needs to a successor to the game.  A spritual successor (not Tides of Numenera, from what I hear that doesn't quite come up to standard), maybe, but not a sequel.

[Junkenstein]

That's odd, modding skyrim to a functional state is far more arduous.

For clarity by what I meant, the infinity engine worked well in its day, but it was lacking in a few areas which were largely fixed in say, pillars of eternity. So those are easy fixes to copy. What planescape lacked, if anything, was cutsences. There's a few plot critical bits where you have no control and a 30 second fmv would have done wonders for. And the source art and script is right there to make something quite fancy with. Instead the only film clip of the ultimate bbeg is a 5 second death clip. There's at least 1 point that would easily benefit from a reveal for pacing.

I'd go on but spoilers and such. Next post assumes you've bothered playing it through or at least getting a Wikipedia summary

[Cain]

I played through, it just took a lot of work to get to that point.

And yeah, I've modded other Infinity Engine games before - I must have had half a dozen mods running for BG2 by the end, class overhauls, additional classes, additional companions, encounter overhauls (including those which eventually formed the basis for Strategems of the Sword Coast) and new quests - so I don't know what happened there.

[Cain]

Speaking of complex modding, I'm attempting to mod Oblivion.  Nothing fancy, just a bajillion bugfixes, crash fixes, a new levelling system, a new UI and up to date graphics.

Should be a piece of cake

 

[Cainad (dec.)]

Speaking of complex modding, I'm attempting to mod Oblivion.  Nothing fancy, just a bajillion bugfixes, crash fixes, a new levelling system, a new UI and up to date graphics.

Should be a piece of cake

 

Psssh, I bet Oblivion doesn't even have ONE quest where you kill some Draugr, dodge traps that you then spring on more Draugr, and then a bigger, meaner Draugr that you fight by chugging 40 potions and kill with a dagger for cheap yuks.

You can't mod in that kind of creativity.

[Cain]

Finally made my way through Andromeda.

Meh.

7 patches later, and the game is mostly as it should have been when it was shipped, though the multiplayer is still an unholy mess of bad netcode and grind designed to lure you into microtransactions. 

With the exception of maybe Drack, who is basically Wrex 2.0, and Reyes Vidal (voiced by the always excellent Nicholas Boulton), none of the characters stand out, except perhaps to piss you off.  It's not clear that any of your actions have any impact, at least in this game.  The "story-rich" side quests seem designed to actively piss you off...I actually took a break from the game after doing the now infamous "Contagion" questline (which makes you backtrack over what feels like the entire cluster for very little payoff in terms of story or anything else).

Ironically, some of the best content may be the stuff we never see, or is only alluded to.  The "Ryder family secrets" and fate of the Quarian Ark, while obvious sequel bait, have a lot more potential than anything else we see in the entire game.

The combat is also pretty fun.  I've been doing a Insanity difficulty vanguard run, mostly to show up the whiners who are all "you have to sniper on the higher difficulties" weenies.  You can effectively chain invincibility frames from biotic charge, nova and the (asari sword) melee which, along with the saving barrier upgrade and vanguard profile siphoning strikes makes you unkillable. 

But yeah, if you're going to play it, just do the main quest, which is mostly OK, though nothing amazing, and the companion quests.  Everything else just isn't worth it.