@Kalnaur - and anyone else put off playing the Mass Effect series because of all the DLC hoops to jump through - this might be old news but I've only just seen that Origin is offering DLC bundles for ME2 & 3. They still aren't super cheap, at £21.99/£24.99 (not sure what that is in US$ but I'm guessing at 25/30) on top of the cost of the games, although they are presently 20% off, but they appear to contain everything. I'm guessing the ME2 pack only works with an Origin copy, but you should be able to plug your CD key from your Steam copy into Origin to add it to your account - same with ME1, and an Origin copy of that automatically includes its two DLC packs. ME3, of course, was never on Steam and required Origin in the first place.
Figured this information might be relevant to your interests! Finally, Mass Effect DLC is made simple!
That is good to know, and I will go over to Origin to wishlist the ME2 DLC for future purchase, then. I already transferred my ME and ME2 keys over to Origin long ago, so when I have to 25 bucks or when there's a sale, I'll maybe finally look into starting the Mass Effect series.
Just have to find a good way to pipe it through steam so I can set up controller support.
@Kalnaur If you manage get a good controller setup for Mass Effect please let me know. When I tried before, the best I could find was actually assigning WASD to the control stick which feels really crappy on an analog stick. I still can't believe they removed all controller support from the PC versions.
The latest bit of Dead State jankiness: Doors in small stairwells.
Yeah, Austin is where their penchant for densely-designed buildings and plausible layouts really ran up against the engine. It just doesn't handle tight quarters well, especially vertical movement. In normal cases this would be annoying, but the hotel is one of the most dangerous places in the game, essentially a bonus dungeon complete with a boss fight (of a sort) at the top. On the upside there are enough resources for several consecutive skillups and several days if not weeks' worth of food. Even with the car I think it took two-three trips to grab everything I could possibly use.
I did appreciate the difference in gearing up specifically to fight humans, and hostile mercs no less. After spending most of the game traveling light, fighting quiet, and methodically clearing rooms, breaking out the heavy armor and expensive firepower was strangely liberating. Late-game gunplay is exceedingly dangerous, and even when Zeke isn't there to spoil the party, firefights are nasty, brutish, and short. I found tasers to be a pretty good equalizer, letting me drop lone guards for quiet melee takedowns.
As for the science lab, I think the ammo yields are pretty low, like 5-10 bullets a pop. Can be helpful for harder-to-find stuff like 7.62 or magnum rounds, but the resources are probably better spent elsewhere. Still, generally a good idea to keep that thing going, noisemakers and other fancy throwables can be hard to find.
IIRC they all play nice with the overlay so hopefully the Steam controller will be fine. Of course, Pinnacle will do the trick if you decide/need to go back to an Xbox controller for them instead. Just install them through Origin, add them to Steam as non-Steam games and run them through Steam. Origin will start up and do what it needs to automatically at that point.
I'll be happy to furnish you with the Xbox control layouts if you want/need them.
And if the worst comes to the worst and you just can't get on with ME1's gameplay (which, as much as I hate to say it, is possible), then you can get the broad strokes of the story and the major decisions taken care of with ME2's Genesis DLC, which will play if you start a new character in ME2 with Genesis installed. I hope that's not the case because you'll miss out on some gloriously colorful sidequests/side-stories that way, but ME2 is a big step forward gameplay-refinement-wise where ME1 could be clunky.
I know I'm jumping the gun a little with this, but probably the best tips for mitigating those ME1 issues are to play it on its easiest setting to minimize the combat frustrations, and keep on top of your inventory by converting stuff to omni-gel when it gets outclassed (e.g. you find a level II item to supercede a level I) or if you simply don't want it; otherwise you will at some point hit the inventory limit and have to spend longer than you'd like doing that for loads of useless junk.
I rarely play through games on anything above easy unless the game demands it, and if it does I get testy anyways, so there is that.
IMO play ME1 as a vanguard (or adept). The biggest problem with the gameplay of ME1 is the gunplay with the early guns is awful (especially when your character doesn't have any skills). Powers solve that problem right quick. Then you can use guns in the late game when you can find guns that don't overheat in a single shot and have enough accuracy that you won't miss while aiming at a barn, plus spare skill points to invest in gun skills.
If these options mean "sorta like a wizard" then that's what I prefer to play anyway is a powered individual.
Also, how "Bioware chat" are these games, exactly? I was finding the combat of Dragon Age lackluster and the chat constant (and it annoyed me that to make my companions the best that they could be, I had to find a walkthrough tree so I could navigate the minefield of "personality quirks" ad just get the mechanical efficacy), though to be totally fair to Dragon Age, I have barely made it to the first village area outside of the prologue. In that one I'm right at the beginning of gathering armies to start a war, and I'm given to understand that getting a slightly positive ending requires that I continue following a walkthrough as if these were Dark Souls NPC quests.
Vanguard is... I can't really think of a D&D or typical RPG analogue at the moment. They're the Jedi Knight of Mass Effect. Or a Dragonball character. They mix close-quarters fighting with the game's magic equivalent.
Adepts are 100% the wizards of Mass Effect. They have crowd control, buffing, ranged & AOE attack powers.
Infiltrators are rogues/snipers, basically. They use tech for stealth and debuffing, whereas the Engineer uses it for a variety of support abilities. The Sentinel is kind of the Paladin of the group, super durable with some support abilities.
Monks that use teleportation magic to punch you in the face many times.
@Kalnaur - and anyone else put off playing the Mass Effect series because of all the DLC hoops to jump through - this might be old news but I've only just seen that Origin is offering DLC bundles for ME2 & 3. They still aren't super cheap, at £21.99/£24.99 (not sure what that is in US$ but I'm guessing at 25/30) on top of the cost of the games, although they are presently 20% off, but they appear to contain everything. I'm guessing the ME2 pack only works with an Origin copy, but you should be able to plug your CD key from your Steam copy into Origin to add it to your account - same with ME1, and an Origin copy of that automatically includes its two DLC packs. ME3, of course, was never on Steam and required Origin in the first place.
Figured this information might be relevant to your interests! Finally, Mass Effect DLC is made simple!
That is good to know, and I will go over to Origin to wishlist the ME2 DLC for future purchase, then. I already transferred my ME and ME2 keys over to Origin long ago, so when I have to 25 bucks or when there's a sale, I'll maybe finally look into starting the Mass Effect series.
Just have to find a good way to pipe it through steam so I can set up controller support.
IIRC they all play nice with the overlay so hopefully the Steam controller will be fine. Of course, Pinnacle will do the trick if you decide/need to go back to an Xbox controller for them instead. Just install them through Origin, add them to Steam as non-Steam games and run them through Steam. Origin will start up and do what it needs to automatically at that point.
I'll be happy to furnish you with the Xbox control layouts if you want/need them.
And if the worst comes to the worst and you just can't get on with ME1's gameplay (which, as much as I hate to say it, is possible), then you can get the broad strokes of the story and the major decisions taken care of with ME2's Genesis DLC, which will play if you start a new character in ME2 with Genesis installed. I hope that's not the case because you'll miss out on some gloriously colorful sidequests/side-stories that way, but ME2 is a big step forward gameplay-refinement-wise where ME1 could be clunky.
I know I'm jumping the gun a little with this, but probably the best tips for mitigating those ME1 issues are to play it on its easiest setting to minimize the combat frustrations, and keep on top of your inventory by converting stuff to omni-gel when it gets outclassed (e.g. you find a level II item to supercede a level I) or if you simply don't want it; otherwise you will at some point hit the inventory limit and have to spend longer than you'd like doing that for loads of useless junk.
IMO play ME1 as a vanguard (or adept). The biggest problem with the gameplay of ME1 is the gunplay with the early guns is awful (especially when your character doesn't have any skills). Powers solve that problem right quick. Then you can use guns in the late game when you can find guns that don't overheat in a single shot and have enough accuracy that you won't miss while aiming at a barn, plus spare skill points to invest in gun skills.
Weapons in ME1 aren't worth a shit until they reach level 4.
@Kalnaur - and anyone else put off playing the Mass Effect series because of all the DLC hoops to jump through - this might be old news but I've only just seen that Origin is offering DLC bundles for ME2 & 3. They still aren't super cheap, at £21.99/£24.99 (not sure what that is in US$ but I'm guessing at 25/30) on top of the cost of the games, although they are presently 20% off, but they appear to contain everything. I'm guessing the ME2 pack only works with an Origin copy, but you should be able to plug your CD key from your Steam copy into Origin to add it to your account - same with ME1, and an Origin copy of that automatically includes its two DLC packs. ME3, of course, was never on Steam and required Origin in the first place.
Figured this information might be relevant to your interests! Finally, Mass Effect DLC is made simple!
That is good to know, and I will go over to Origin to wishlist the ME2 DLC for future purchase, then. I already transferred my ME and ME2 keys over to Origin long ago, so when I have to 25 bucks or when there's a sale, I'll maybe finally look into starting the Mass Effect series.
Just have to find a good way to pipe it through steam so I can set up controller support.
Kalnaur If you manage get a good controller setup for Mass Effect please let me know. When I tried before, the best I could find was actually assigning WASD to the control stick which feels really crappy on an analog stick. I still can't believe they removed all controller support from the PC versions.
I did figure out how to get the stick to do both walking and running speeds depending on how far the stick was pushed, but ultimately it was still just emulating regular WASD, or WASD with the walk shift, depending. I recall it being quite tricky to figure out shoehorning both onto one analog stick (and @Kalnaur helped me out with it quite a bit). That was using Pinnacle Game Profiler. AFAIK there's no way to get the movement to feel as fluid as it does on a console; the games simply aren't coded to support it on PC. You get 8-way movement, at two speeds (run and walk), and that's your lot.
I'll have to dig up that old profile, it's on my old computer somewhere.
Yeah, it's a real shame that they didn't implement native controller support on PC. I guess I can kind of understand it with ME1 because of its age, but by the time 2 and 3 were coming out, Xinput support was common in PC games.
There is literally zero reason for the lack of controller support.
A: xinput support in games is super easy, and ME1 was an xbox game so it already had xinput support in some fashion.
B: ME is made with unreal, which has controller support built in.
There is literally zero reason for the lack of controller support.
A: xinput support in games is super easy, and ME1 was an xbox game so it already had xinput support in some fashion.
B: ME is made with unreal, which has controller support built in.
C: EA/Bioware themselves didn't even do the PC port of ME1 in-house.
Actually I wonder how much of it was because the UI got redesigned for the mouse. UI switching based on input method wasn't common then, not like now of course.
Can you use a controller input emulator? I had to use x360ce for Lighting Returns and Ori in the Blind Forest because they didn't play nice with the PS4 controller. Sounds like a more fundamental issue though.
Can you use a controller input emulator? I had to use x360ce for Lighting Returns and Ori in the Blind Forest because they didn't play nice with the PS4 controller. Sounds like a more fundamental issue though.
SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
I had a great moment in Shadow of War earlier. I sent a death threat to a legendary orc captain. He was a few levels higher than me, but I figured I could take him. But when I went to face the guy, he took me down in two hits. As I was kneeling on the floor, waiting for the death blow (the orc had the perk that keeps you from being able to have a last chance at avoiding death), suddenly one of my orc allies shows up and beats the shit out of my would-be executioner. To my surprise, it killed him, despite the fact that I hadn't scratched the guy.
That felt pretty cool!
Obviously the game is full of "emergent gameplay" like that.
It makes me extra-wary about having any high hopes of liking Brutal Legend, since apparently that's also a Double Fine game, and every game of theirs that I thought was "not a point & click adventure game" has oozed that feeling anyway, and it really turns me cold.
Ironic, since most people's problem with Brutal Legend is that they thought it was going to be a Psychonauts-like action-adventure game, and it turned out to be an RTS.
I enjoyed Brutal Legend a lot, especially the story.
Idx86Long days and pleasant nights.Registered Userregular
Finally beat Alien: Isolation last night! Took me about six months of playing in 30 minute increments and then "argh this is too scary" and turning off to get through. Although my anxiety was helped a lot once I learned how to kill Working Joes. The ending was a big letdown for me though.
I'm actually doing a bit of a series binge right now and plan to watch Aliens, Alien 3, Resurrection and then the two AvP movies (I just watched Prometheus, Covenant and the original Alien movie to chronologically line up with Isolation.) I'm going to cap the series experience with a playthrough of Aliens: Colonial Marines.
I did figure out how to get the stick to do both walking and running speeds depending on how far the stick was pushed, but ultimately it was still just emulating regular WASD, or WASD with the walk shift, depending. I recall it being quite tricky to figure out shoehorning both onto one analog stick (and Kalnaur helped me out with it quite a bit). That was using Pinnacle Game Profiler. AFAIK there's no way to get the movement to feel as fluid as it does on a console; the games simply aren't coded to support it on PC. You get 8-way movement, at two speeds (run and walk), and that's your lot.
I'll have to dig up that old profile, it's on my old computer somewhere.
Yeah, it's a real shame that they didn't implement native controller support on PC. I guess I can kind of understand it with ME1 because of its age, but by the time 2 and 3 were coming out, Xinput support was common in PC games.
Yeah, basically you'll never get a perfect one to one analogue stick feel with games that don't have that granularity built in. There's some sorts of leeway in some games, where they have a walk button, a run button, and then a default speed, but even that is almost like "tweening" animation frames more than actually giving a proper feel of gradual speed.
For some games more than others, the inclusion of such multiple speeds does help with making it feel a bit more like it's got the analogue control to it, but when it comes right down to it, it's always going to feel like you're using WASD, because technically, that's exactly what you're doing.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
Slime Rancher is a great pick. There's exploring, some farming/ranching, and overwhelming amounts of cute. I've adored both games. Some other possible options include:
Stardew Valley - This one is definitely heavier on the farming aspect, and there's less exploring, but it's a delightfully friendly world to lose yourself in.
Castaway Paradise - It's basically a small animal crossing clone (but definitely not as good as the real thing).
Yono and the Celestial Elephants - A simple Zelda-clone where Link is replaced by the cutest elephant you've ever seen. (It is on the shorter end of things though, and has an actual end.)
Okami - There is combat in this, but it really nails the delight in bringing the landscape back to life, and you gain "experience" not by killing things, but by helping things grow, feeding animals, doing favors for people, etc. It's also really beautiful and really long (although it does have an end).
Also look up Staxel on Steam. It's early access and I had a lot of doubts on it but it turns out it's amazingly neat. It's a Minecraft/Harvest Moon/Animal Crossing meld with multiplayer
Interesting... I saw that and was immediately like oh cool Minecraft But Worse for the 100000th time, but if it's actually got something to it that sounds great!
Slime Rancher is a great pick. There's exploring, some farming/ranching, and overwhelming amounts of cute. I've adored both games. Some other possible options include:
Stardew Valley - This one is definitely heavier on the farming aspect, and there's less exploring, but it's a delightfully friendly world to lose yourself in.
Castaway Paradise - It's basically a small animal crossing clone (but definitely not as good as the real thing).
Yono and the Celestial Elephants - A simple Zelda-clone where Link is replaced by the cutest elephant you've ever seen. (It is on the shorter end of things though, and has an actual end.)
Okami - There is combat in this, but it really nails the delight in bringing the landscape back to life, and you gain "experience" not by killing things, but by helping things grow, feeding animals, doing favors for people, etc. It's also really beautiful and really long (although it does have an end).
Also look up Staxel on Steam. It's early access and I had a lot of doubts on it but it turns out it's amazingly neat. It's a Minecraft/Harvest Moon/Animal Crossing meld with multiplayer
As a further note on this, if you have Starbound, you probably got a coupon recently for 25% off of Staxel. If you don't have Starbound and think that the game looks good for 15 bucks, hit me up because the coupon is tradable until the 30th of this month.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
Upon the recommendation of a friend, I just finished Doki Doki Literature Club. That was.. something. I'm still processing what actually happened. Wow, just .. wow. I do recommend everyone to play it, unfortunately the first hour or two can be boring, but it's worth playing just to experience it.
Finally beat Alien: Isolation last night! Took me about six months of playing in 30 minute increments and then "argh this is too scary" and turning off to get through. Although my anxiety was helped a lot once I learned how to kill Working Joes. The ending was a big letdown for me though.
I'm actually doing a bit of a series binge right now and plan to watch Aliens, Alien 3, Resurrection and then the two AvP movies (I just watched Prometheus, Covenant and the original Alien movie to chronologically line up with Isolation.) I'm going to cap the series experience with a playthrough of Aliens: Colonial Marines.
Has anyone used it, and if so was it a significant upgrade over the vanilla game? Any other mods worth checking into?
I haven't played the game using that mod, but I can say that while A:CM certainly deserves the amount of ridicule it gets on the internet, it can be an absolute blast to play in co-op, especially since the game was not actually designed to support co-op. As an example, there is a part of the game where you are frantically running away from a giant rhino-style alien. You run through a long corridor with a series of doors. You open a door, run through, then seal the door with your handheld welding device and then run to the next door and do the same, hopefully before the rhino alien has smashed through the door you just welded. It is, in theory, a solid game section, but it gets hilarious when you're playing in co-op and you run through the door and shut it in the faces of your three co-op partners, then seal it shut, and then lazily make your way through the remaining doors while the rhino alien kills your co-op partners and then just stands there doing an idle animation.
If you want to know more about A:CM you could ask @CorriganX, he's sort of a big fan.
Interesting... I saw that and was immediately like oh cool Minecraft But Worse for the 100000th time, but if it's actually got something to it that sounds great!
I fully expected it to be complete crap and went into it assuming that and ended up playing it all night.
I bought myself one of these. It's purty fast. I put Conan Exiles on it. Just Conan. After all, Conan is all I play any more. I'm kind of taken by it for some reason. Or rather, for about a hundred reasons. I don't think I've been this taken with a particular game since State of Decay. There are definitely better games, and there are games that I like more, but for games that I can play endlessly this one ticks so many boxes for me. Boxes everywhere. The fact I can play it with my kids is just icing on the cake.
Anyway, now I can barbarian all the things even faster! And there was much rejoicing!
The newest bit of Dead State weirdness: Party members that were permanently on fire.
While traveling on the world map, I unveiled a location called Predator Town. While suggestive of a TV spinoff of a movie series, I knew from my previous excursions that the Predators are a gang that had gone native during the zombie outbreak. Whereas the biker gang uses guns, knives, axes, and hammers and survivalists use long guns and bows, the few Predator members I had fought used spears and crossbows. While I considered an immediate strike given that even in my normal zombie hunting gear I can easily handle anything below humans equipped with military/riot gear, I decided it was worth going in with a bit better equipment if I was going to be taking on a gang's headquarters. Plus I was on horseback and usually like to use the SUV for major looting trips.
@Stolls mentioned about how you tend to gear up differently for fighting humans instead of zombies. Again zombies, melee is king due to the lower noise, their own range limitations, and how scarce ammo is compared to how many zombies there are. My usual squad make up and loadout is everyone with a melee weapon, three members who are better at ranged (but still serviceable in melee) with handguns, ideally suppressed, and one of those ranged members with a medical satchel. On top of that, my usual melee specialist is the elementary school teacher turned undead slaying berserker armed with a riot shield and crash axe. Many melee weapons such as knives and some swords receive penalties against zombies to simulate not being able to hurt them with blood loss while others like blunt weapons and axes get bonuses to simulate crushing skills. For large amounts of military style enemies, I drop the melee specialist (they're more likely to block my own attacks than do anything truly useful if the fight is in narrow hallways and small rooms) and go in with two medics a lot of shotguns and rifles, and only person having a melee weapon as backup to finish off people bleeding out while the rest have sidearms in case I don't have time to reload. Grenades are loaded on anyone with the item slots for them as they are really deadly when used well. Against human enemies not as well equipped, more consideration is applied.
The few Predator members I'd fought weren't well armored so burning through shotgun or hunting rifle ammo seemed excessive. But there could be a lot of them like there were in the biker gang base so I settled on one assault rifle on my medic. The other ranged specialist gets a bonus with handguns anyway and my main character has perks that make his revolver fire a lot in one turn and I wasn't worried about the short range here. A melee specialist would still be useful but this time I brought along the former biker leader. She gets a unique bonus to knives and is armed with a unique knife taken from the biker warlord that usurped her (and who himself took that knife from my party member's lover) and while knives are lackluster against the undead against humans they do full damage and their high chance to inflict a Bleed DoT effect is useful. I did break out the heaviest armor I had on my main character though, the lovingly named Apocalypse Armor, a sealed suit immune to blinding and gas effects converted by a scientist from an advanced tactical vest into a Max Max style plate mail but normally too heavy for scavenging runs. With that everyone packed into the SUV and drove off.
When I loaded the map, I looked around and noticed two things. 1) There are a lot of bodies lying around with spears in them. The area designer put in work to depict these guys as real bastards. Killing people viewed as trespassers and potential thieves is pretty common in the setting but there was a guy speared just sitting on a bench. 2) This wasn't much of a town. It was the intersection of a strip mall. I did my usual approach of sticking to the edge of the map and entering buildings from the rear entrances when possible to avoid being surrounded. Most buildings were empty. Two had three Predators in it. One of those Predators had a chainsaw. None of them really put up much fight as outside of the chainsaw they were pretty poorly armed with no armor better than firefighter jackets. The chainsaws can be strong but are also impractical as they have limited charges with no way to refuel them and are louder than guns. I had fought fewer than 8 Predators total when I cleared out the last building and was pretty disappointed when I exited via the front door and suddenly the gang's boss and his squad appeared in an ambush.
These guys were better armed than the others and the boss himself had motorcross armor. But given that we'd mostly dealt with spears and crossbows before, that wasn't saying much. Then one of those guys shot my party with a flare gun. Flare guns are another weapon with limited charges that can't be restocked and generally do little damage (one named enemy was really adept at landing criticals that hurt a lot with one and I suspect he has a unique perk for that and is the only exception) but they do set people on fire. Being on fire naturally does damage over time but also inflicts a significant accuracy penalty. Status effects tend to be extremely powerful in this game against humans and are a big part of why grenades are so useful. Still, it was more of an annoyance when I outgeared my opposition so much and had maxed out combat skills. Then I noticed that the fire effect was not ending the way it was supposed to while I was looting. The damage was negligible but the accuracy penalty would not be. After waiting a while for it naturally expire, I looked up reports of the effect sometimes being buggy and people being on fire for over 10 days which seemed extremely unpleasant. Thankfully those posts also had console commands to fix this.
All in all, there really wasn't much loot to be had. None of those buildings was really a stockpile and since you get skill points for bringing in supplies instead of experience from kills, it wasn't a very productive trip. But at least the boss had a unique sword that makes a nice trophy.
There's a pretty decent bundle for sale on Fanatical right now (Nemesis Bundle 5):
$1
Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?!
Infectonator: Survivors
Still Not Dead
GALAK-Z
$5
Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide
The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians - Enhanced Edition
Holy Potatoes! We're in Space?!
The Way
Space Hulk Ascension
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
Mytheon
Wick
$11
Lords of the Fallen: Digital Deluxe Edition
Gloria Victis
That middle tier looks pretty solid to me just for Warhammer, Space Hulk, Dungeon Guardians, The Way (which looks reminiscent of Another World/Out of This World and Flashback) and Firetop Mountain
I feel like all I play on PC lately is master race wank. Walking through a mysterious house unlocking mysteries (EDITH FINCH), talking with robots on a train about what it means to be robot (SUBSURFACR CIRCULAR) and pondering what one life matters (TORMENT). I think I need the equivalent of a chicken parma with chips as a bit of a palette cleanser after all this.
Also HELLBLADE is so good I cannot find the words. I don't understand what goes into a thing for this to be the end product. Art has been around for a while, but this kinda art? I dunno man, maybe it was implied before but it hasn't been presented like this in the past
Hellblade was done so well I actually took a break from it because it's genuinely upsetting to play through. And then when I read comments from other people like "it was boring, the combat wasn't even that good" I wonder why some people even consume media...
This doesn't have much to do with Hellblade, I haven't played it and I only know the details that get shared around here. It sounds like something I'd enjoy playing though, in the same vein as something like Spec Ops: The Line.
I do enjoy fiction and good stories and all of that and occasionally I find a video game that can give me a satisfying narrative experience. Generally this isn't the case for me though. Most of the time narratives in games feel like they are just sort of mashed into the edges where the blocks of gameplay sort of meet up and the excess is scraped off with the trowel, the various checklists are observed and off we go. So generally for fiction I go to more traditional sources; Books, comics, movies and so on. Probably because I'm a boring old Gen X dinosaur.
And when it comes to gaming I enjoy natural pacing. Scripted sequences wreak havoc on this feel for me most of the time. Narrators almost always grind against my own internal dialogue. Build as much detail and lore into the game as you like, let me discover all of that at my own pace please. I do enjoy it when the story and background are another piece of the game you can puzzle together. And this is a thing games have been doing for a long time so once again this may be my dinosaur proclivities at work here. There are lots of games meeting my appetites though, so I'm not complaining either. Caves of Qud alone can provide banquets. Illwinter are masters of this sort of thing too with their Dominons and Conquest of Elysium games.
So yeah, I do dig mixed media when it's done to my tastes. But I don't play games for the same reasons I enjoy fiction. When they get the mix right I dig it, but the push towards interactive blockbusters isn't really my jam. So when someone says something like that about Hellblade I get where they are coming from, even if I did enjoy the game's narrative presentation. I had that very experience with Spec Ops where I enjoyed the total package even though the gameplay was uneven and workman-like.
We know another game that will be together with Civilization VI in current Humble Monthly - Owlboy.
... yeah, that's pretty good. 12 $ would be a good enough price for Civ VI alone, and now we get one of more interesting indie games of last year. One more really good game and it may be one of the best bundles ever.
It has been a very long time since a game has gotten it's hooks into me like They Are Billions has. For the first time in close to 10 years I found myself looking at the clock thinking it's around midnight only to realise it's almost 3am.
Slime Rancher is a great pick. There's exploring, some farming/ranching, and overwhelming amounts of cute. I've adored both games. Some other possible options include:
Stardew Valley - This one is definitely heavier on the farming aspect, and there's less exploring, but it's a delightfully friendly world to lose yourself in.
Castaway Paradise - It's basically a small animal crossing clone (but definitely not as good as the real thing).
Yono and the Celestial Elephants - A simple Zelda-clone where Link is replaced by the cutest elephant you've ever seen. (It is on the shorter end of things though, and has an actual end.)
Okami - There is combat in this, but it really nails the delight in bringing the landscape back to life, and you gain "experience" not by killing things, but by helping things grow, feeding animals, doing favors for people, etc. It's also really beautiful and really long (although it does have an end).
Also look up Staxel on Steam. It's early access and I had a lot of doubts on it but it turns out it's amazingly neat. It's a Minecraft/Harvest Moon/Animal Crossing meld with multiplayer
Also have a look at My Time At Portia, which seems to be the same thing as Staxel but with a cartoony look instead of a blocky one. I haven't played either, but both came out on the same day and are getting positive reviews, so maybe have a look at both of them.
Been slacking a lot on the Backlog challenge. Sorry Team! Technically I've beaten one game so far, but it was on Xbox One, and was acquired specifically for review purposes. I'll try to knock something out before the deadline.
But, I kind of just want to play through FFVII again right now. See back in the school year of 1998-1999, I roomed with a fellow Computer Science major who introduced me to the joy of that game. Two years later, after he'd graduated, left, then come back to work for the college, I borrowed the game for a couple of months and did a full play through (to the slight detriment of my Senior year grades).
Since he and his wife now lived off campus, and had both internet and cable TV (something us dorm-dwellers didn't yet enjoy) another friend and I would often load up computer towers, massive 17" CRTs, and truck over to his house in a Saturday to play Starcraft or Diablo together.
We kind of lost touch after I graduated. Oh, we'd exchange Christmas cards every year, but that was about it. He had a Facebook page, but never did more than just sign up.
Anyway, I just found out, from a hand-written note sent in reply to our annual Christmas card, that he passed away last August, at the far too young age of 42. It hurts that my friend is gone. It hurts that we'd drifted so far apart that I didn't even know he was gone for six months.
I'm going to call one of my other college friends whom I haven't spoken to in a couple of years this weekend. And like I said, maybe start an FFVII play through. Life's too short to keep losing contact like this.
I feel like all I play on PC lately is master race wank. Walking through a mysterious house unlocking mysteries (EDITH FINCH), talking with robots on a train about what it means to be robot (SUBSURFACR CIRCULAR) and pondering what one life matters (TORMENT). I think I need the equivalent of a chicken parma with chips as a bit of a palette cleanser after all this.
Also HELLBLADE is so good I cannot find the words. I don't understand what goes into a thing for this to be the end product. Art has been around for a while, but this kinda art? I dunno man, maybe it was implied before but it hasn't been presented like this in the past
Hellblade was done so well I actually took a break from it because it's genuinely upsetting to play through. And then when I read comments from other people like "it was boring, the combat wasn't even that good" I wonder why some people even consume media...
This doesn't have much to do with Hellblade, I haven't played it and I only know the details that get shared around here. It sounds like something I'd enjoy playing though, in the same vein as something like Spec Ops: The Line.
I do enjoy fiction and good stories and all of that and occasionally I find a video game that can give me a satisfying narrative experience. Generally this isn't the case for me though. Most of the time narratives in games feel like they are just sort of mashed into the edges where the blocks of gameplay sort of meet up and the excess is scraped off with the trowel, the various checklists are observed and off we go. So generally for fiction I go to more traditional sources; Books, comics, movies and so on. Probably because I'm a boring old Gen X dinosaur.
And when it comes to gaming I enjoy natural pacing. Scripted sequences wreak havoc on this feel for me most of the time. Narrators almost always grind against my own internal dialogue. Build as much detail and lore into the game as you like, let me discover all of that at my own pace please. I do enjoy it when the story and background are another piece of the game you can puzzle together. And this is a thing games have been doing for a long time so once again this may be my dinosaur proclivities at work here. There are lots of games meeting my appetites though, so I'm not complaining either. Caves of Qud alone can provide banquets. Illwinter are masters of this sort of thing too with their Dominons and Conquest of Elysium games.
So yeah, I do dig mixed media when it's done to my tastes. But I don't play games for the same reasons I enjoy fiction. When they get the mix right I dig it, but the push towards interactive blockbusters isn't really my jam. So when someone says something like that about Hellblade I get where they are coming from, even if I did enjoy the game's narrative presentation. I had that very experience with Spec Ops where I enjoyed the total package even though the gameplay was uneven and workman-like.
Nier: Automata made me really appreciate ways that a game can tell a great story in a way that only a game could. And the gameplay was great on top of that.
Not every game gets to have an imaginative project head, Square Enix money, and Platinum Games mechanical expertise though.
In contrast, a lot of games have great stories but clunky presentations. Audio logs are one of the biggest example of this. In addition to often feeling a bit out of place (South Park: The Stick of Truth had a short segment where you could find audio logs complaining about finding older audio logs that had no helpful information and the inanity of making a log while trying to survive a present threat), they often take you out of the gameplay to really digest. At that point, I feel like I should be reading a book instead. Making me read actual short stories from an in game interface is even worse.
On a related note, I've been impressed at how Dead State handles this. You pick up smart phones, hard drive data, and the like and bring it back to base to decrypt and get text entries of varying tone and style. Few outright logs of the type you normally get but shorter and more natural flowing things like social media posts, phone text messages, forum posts, research notes, and interview transcripts with only a few genuine logs or attempts to record events. Part of the reason I think it works better than it would in many games is that you only can read the stuff back at the shelter where you already do the menu and text heavy stuff like talk to fellow survivors and assign daily jobs so handling the stuff isn't taking you out of the scavenging and combat gameplay.
Something like Hellblade strikes me as a different beast though, telling a story more through visual and auditory means. But since those things come during the actual gameplay, weaknesses there are going to be linked with the presentation for many players and it's a year where we've gotten some games that tell great stories more tightly linked with good gameplay.
I got a second hand Steam Link cheap on EBay to go with my shiny new 8bitdo blue tooth controller I got in the G&T Secret Santa. Easy to set up wired for me so it seems to work great! I'm bit confused at what appears to be an extraneous steam logo-ed usb dongle that came with it though. Is that meant to be part of the Link setup or is there somebody buying a Steam Controller from this guy in for a nasty surprise?
It has been a very long time since a game has gotten it's hooks into me like They Are Billions has. For the first time in close to 10 years I found myself looking at the clock thinking it's around midnight only to realise it's almost 3am.
Does anyone have recommendations for a game that's similar in scope/style to Yonder?
I got it a while back and my girlfriend tore it to pieces while she was sick, like 40-50 hours in a week.
Now she's interested in another similar experience to maybe stretch out over more than a few days!
I was thinking Slime Rancher, maybe? Anything else come to mind?
durandal4532
Slime Rancher is a great pick. There's exploring, some farming/ranching, and overwhelming amounts of cute. I've adored both games. Some other possible options include:
Stardew Valley - This one is definitely heavier on the farming aspect, and there's less exploring, but it's a delightfully friendly world to lose yourself in.
Castaway Paradise - It's basically a small animal crossing clone (but definitely not as good as the real thing).
Yono and the Celestial Elephants - A simple Zelda-clone where Link is replaced by the cutest elephant you've ever seen. (It is on the shorter end of things though, and has an actual end.)
Okami - There is combat in this, but it really nails the delight in bringing the landscape back to life, and you gain "experience" not by killing things, but by helping things grow, feeding animals, doing favors for people, etc. It's also really beautiful and really long (although it does have an end).
Also look up Staxel on Steam. It's early access and I had a lot of doubts on it but it turns out it's amazingly neat. It's a Minecraft/Harvest Moon/Animal Crossing meld with multiplayer
Also have a look at My Time At Portia, which seems to be the same thing as Staxel but with a cartoony look instead of a blocky one. I haven't played either, but both came out on the same day and are getting positive reviews, so maybe have a look at both of them.
We know another game that will be together with Civilization VI in current Humble Monthly - Owlboy.
... yeah, that's pretty good. 12 $ would be a good enough price for Civ VI alone, and now we get one of more interesting indie games of last year. One more really good game and it may be one of the best bundles ever.
If you subscribe to the bundle can you give the keys away to others?
Posts
@Kalnaur If you manage get a good controller setup for Mass Effect please let me know. When I tried before, the best I could find was actually assigning WASD to the control stick which feels really crappy on an analog stick. I still can't believe they removed all controller support from the PC versions.
SteamID: edgruberman GOG Galaxy: EdGruberman
It’s called, iirc, The Climb, and it’s also for VR.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I would enjoy a sequel in the land of funk, with a certain tentacle hero riding the Funktapus like Muab-dib.
Fuck, I'm going to watch that scene again.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Yeah, Austin is where their penchant for densely-designed buildings and plausible layouts really ran up against the engine. It just doesn't handle tight quarters well, especially vertical movement. In normal cases this would be annoying, but the hotel is one of the most dangerous places in the game, essentially a bonus dungeon complete with a boss fight (of a sort) at the top. On the upside there are enough resources for several consecutive skillups and several days if not weeks' worth of food. Even with the car I think it took two-three trips to grab everything I could possibly use.
I did appreciate the difference in gearing up specifically to fight humans, and hostile mercs no less. After spending most of the game traveling light, fighting quiet, and methodically clearing rooms, breaking out the heavy armor and expensive firepower was strangely liberating. Late-game gunplay is exceedingly dangerous, and even when Zeke isn't there to spoil the party, firefights are nasty, brutish, and short. I found tasers to be a pretty good equalizer, letting me drop lone guards for quiet melee takedowns.
As for the science lab, I think the ammo yields are pretty low, like 5-10 bullets a pop. Can be helpful for harder-to-find stuff like 7.62 or magnum rounds, but the resources are probably better spent elsewhere. Still, generally a good idea to keep that thing going, noisemakers and other fancy throwables can be hard to find.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
Monks that use teleportation magic to punch you in the face many times.
With bullets.
From a space shotgun.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Forego the the use of legs and just muscle up an entire mountain
Weapons in ME1 aren't worth a shit until they reach level 4.
I did figure out how to get the stick to do both walking and running speeds depending on how far the stick was pushed, but ultimately it was still just emulating regular WASD, or WASD with the walk shift, depending. I recall it being quite tricky to figure out shoehorning both onto one analog stick (and @Kalnaur helped me out with it quite a bit). That was using Pinnacle Game Profiler. AFAIK there's no way to get the movement to feel as fluid as it does on a console; the games simply aren't coded to support it on PC. You get 8-way movement, at two speeds (run and walk), and that's your lot.
I'll have to dig up that old profile, it's on my old computer somewhere.
Yeah, it's a real shame that they didn't implement native controller support on PC. I guess I can kind of understand it with ME1 because of its age, but by the time 2 and 3 were coming out, Xinput support was common in PC games.
Steam | XBL
A: xinput support in games is super easy, and ME1 was an xbox game so it already had xinput support in some fashion.
B: ME is made with unreal, which has controller support built in.
C: EA/Bioware themselves didn't even do the PC port of ME1 in-house.
Actually I wonder how much of it was because the UI got redesigned for the mouse. UI switching based on input method wasn't common then, not like now of course.
Steam | XBL
Pinnacle worked fine last time I tried.
Steam | XBL
That felt pretty cool!
Obviously the game is full of "emergent gameplay" like that.
https://www.kotaku.com.au/2018/01/valves-case-against-the-accc-is-going-to-the-high-court/
Steam / Origin & Wii U: Heatwave111 / FC: 4227-1965-3206 / Battle.net: Heatwave#11356
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
I enjoyed Brutal Legend a lot, especially the story.
Upon closer examination of my library, the sega games bump it up to over 600
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
I'm actually doing a bit of a series binge right now and plan to watch Aliens, Alien 3, Resurrection and then the two AvP movies (I just watched Prometheus, Covenant and the original Alien movie to chronologically line up with Isolation.) I'm going to cap the series experience with a playthrough of Aliens: Colonial Marines.
I know A:CM isn't heralded but have read a lot about this mod: http://www.moddb.com/mods/templargfxs-acm-overhaul
Has anyone used it, and if so was it a significant upgrade over the vanilla game? Any other mods worth checking into?
2008, 2012, 2014 D&D "Rare With No Sauce" League Fantasy Football Champion!
Yeah, basically you'll never get a perfect one to one analogue stick feel with games that don't have that granularity built in. There's some sorts of leeway in some games, where they have a walk button, a run button, and then a default speed, but even that is almost like "tweening" animation frames more than actually giving a proper feel of gradual speed.
For some games more than others, the inclusion of such multiple speeds does help with making it feel a bit more like it's got the analogue control to it, but when it comes right down to it, it's always going to feel like you're using WASD, because technically, that's exactly what you're doing.
Also look up Staxel on Steam. It's early access and I had a lot of doubts on it but it turns out it's amazingly neat. It's a Minecraft/Harvest Moon/Animal Crossing meld with multiplayer
As a further note on this, if you have Starbound, you probably got a coupon recently for 25% off of Staxel. If you don't have Starbound and think that the game looks good for 15 bucks, hit me up because the coupon is tradable until the 30th of this month.
Still not ashamed.
2008, 2012, 2014 D&D "Rare With No Sauce" League Fantasy Football Champion!
I haven't played the game using that mod, but I can say that while A:CM certainly deserves the amount of ridicule it gets on the internet, it can be an absolute blast to play in co-op, especially since the game was not actually designed to support co-op. As an example, there is a part of the game where you are frantically running away from a giant rhino-style alien. You run through a long corridor with a series of doors. You open a door, run through, then seal the door with your handheld welding device and then run to the next door and do the same, hopefully before the rhino alien has smashed through the door you just welded. It is, in theory, a solid game section, but it gets hilarious when you're playing in co-op and you run through the door and shut it in the faces of your three co-op partners, then seal it shut, and then lazily make your way through the remaining doors while the rhino alien kills your co-op partners and then just stands there doing an idle animation.
If you want to know more about A:CM you could ask @CorriganX, he's sort of a big fan.
I fully expected it to be complete crap and went into it assuming that and ended up playing it all night.
Anyway, now I can barbarian all the things even faster! And there was much rejoicing!
While traveling on the world map, I unveiled a location called Predator Town. While suggestive of a TV spinoff of a movie series, I knew from my previous excursions that the Predators are a gang that had gone native during the zombie outbreak. Whereas the biker gang uses guns, knives, axes, and hammers and survivalists use long guns and bows, the few Predator members I had fought used spears and crossbows. While I considered an immediate strike given that even in my normal zombie hunting gear I can easily handle anything below humans equipped with military/riot gear, I decided it was worth going in with a bit better equipment if I was going to be taking on a gang's headquarters. Plus I was on horseback and usually like to use the SUV for major looting trips.
@Stolls mentioned about how you tend to gear up differently for fighting humans instead of zombies. Again zombies, melee is king due to the lower noise, their own range limitations, and how scarce ammo is compared to how many zombies there are. My usual squad make up and loadout is everyone with a melee weapon, three members who are better at ranged (but still serviceable in melee) with handguns, ideally suppressed, and one of those ranged members with a medical satchel. On top of that, my usual melee specialist is the elementary school teacher turned undead slaying berserker armed with a riot shield and crash axe. Many melee weapons such as knives and some swords receive penalties against zombies to simulate not being able to hurt them with blood loss while others like blunt weapons and axes get bonuses to simulate crushing skills. For large amounts of military style enemies, I drop the melee specialist (they're more likely to block my own attacks than do anything truly useful if the fight is in narrow hallways and small rooms) and go in with two medics a lot of shotguns and rifles, and only person having a melee weapon as backup to finish off people bleeding out while the rest have sidearms in case I don't have time to reload. Grenades are loaded on anyone with the item slots for them as they are really deadly when used well. Against human enemies not as well equipped, more consideration is applied.
The few Predator members I'd fought weren't well armored so burning through shotgun or hunting rifle ammo seemed excessive. But there could be a lot of them like there were in the biker gang base so I settled on one assault rifle on my medic. The other ranged specialist gets a bonus with handguns anyway and my main character has perks that make his revolver fire a lot in one turn and I wasn't worried about the short range here. A melee specialist would still be useful but this time I brought along the former biker leader. She gets a unique bonus to knives and is armed with a unique knife taken from the biker warlord that usurped her (and who himself took that knife from my party member's lover) and while knives are lackluster against the undead against humans they do full damage and their high chance to inflict a Bleed DoT effect is useful. I did break out the heaviest armor I had on my main character though, the lovingly named Apocalypse Armor, a sealed suit immune to blinding and gas effects converted by a scientist from an advanced tactical vest into a Max Max style plate mail but normally too heavy for scavenging runs. With that everyone packed into the SUV and drove off.
When I loaded the map, I looked around and noticed two things. 1) There are a lot of bodies lying around with spears in them. The area designer put in work to depict these guys as real bastards. Killing people viewed as trespassers and potential thieves is pretty common in the setting but there was a guy speared just sitting on a bench. 2) This wasn't much of a town. It was the intersection of a strip mall. I did my usual approach of sticking to the edge of the map and entering buildings from the rear entrances when possible to avoid being surrounded. Most buildings were empty. Two had three Predators in it. One of those Predators had a chainsaw. None of them really put up much fight as outside of the chainsaw they were pretty poorly armed with no armor better than firefighter jackets. The chainsaws can be strong but are also impractical as they have limited charges with no way to refuel them and are louder than guns. I had fought fewer than 8 Predators total when I cleared out the last building and was pretty disappointed when I exited via the front door and suddenly the gang's boss and his squad appeared in an ambush.
These guys were better armed than the others and the boss himself had motorcross armor. But given that we'd mostly dealt with spears and crossbows before, that wasn't saying much. Then one of those guys shot my party with a flare gun. Flare guns are another weapon with limited charges that can't be restocked and generally do little damage (one named enemy was really adept at landing criticals that hurt a lot with one and I suspect he has a unique perk for that and is the only exception) but they do set people on fire. Being on fire naturally does damage over time but also inflicts a significant accuracy penalty. Status effects tend to be extremely powerful in this game against humans and are a big part of why grenades are so useful. Still, it was more of an annoyance when I outgeared my opposition so much and had maxed out combat skills. Then I noticed that the fire effect was not ending the way it was supposed to while I was looting. The damage was negligible but the accuracy penalty would not be. After waiting a while for it naturally expire, I looked up reports of the effect sometimes being buggy and people being on fire for over 10 days which seemed extremely unpleasant. Thankfully those posts also had console commands to fix this.
All in all, there really wasn't much loot to be had. None of those buildings was really a stockpile and since you get skill points for bringing in supplies instead of experience from kills, it wasn't a very productive trip. But at least the boss had a unique sword that makes a nice trophy.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
That middle tier looks pretty solid to me just for Warhammer, Space Hulk, Dungeon Guardians, The Way (which looks reminiscent of Another World/Out of This World and Flashback) and Firetop Mountain
SteamID: edgruberman GOG Galaxy: EdGruberman
This doesn't have much to do with Hellblade, I haven't played it and I only know the details that get shared around here. It sounds like something I'd enjoy playing though, in the same vein as something like Spec Ops: The Line.
I do enjoy fiction and good stories and all of that and occasionally I find a video game that can give me a satisfying narrative experience. Generally this isn't the case for me though. Most of the time narratives in games feel like they are just sort of mashed into the edges where the blocks of gameplay sort of meet up and the excess is scraped off with the trowel, the various checklists are observed and off we go. So generally for fiction I go to more traditional sources; Books, comics, movies and so on. Probably because I'm a boring old Gen X dinosaur.
And when it comes to gaming I enjoy natural pacing. Scripted sequences wreak havoc on this feel for me most of the time. Narrators almost always grind against my own internal dialogue. Build as much detail and lore into the game as you like, let me discover all of that at my own pace please. I do enjoy it when the story and background are another piece of the game you can puzzle together. And this is a thing games have been doing for a long time so once again this may be my dinosaur proclivities at work here. There are lots of games meeting my appetites though, so I'm not complaining either. Caves of Qud alone can provide banquets. Illwinter are masters of this sort of thing too with their Dominons and Conquest of Elysium games.
So yeah, I do dig mixed media when it's done to my tastes. But I don't play games for the same reasons I enjoy fiction. When they get the mix right I dig it, but the push towards interactive blockbusters isn't really my jam. So when someone says something like that about Hellblade I get where they are coming from, even if I did enjoy the game's narrative presentation. I had that very experience with Spec Ops where I enjoyed the total package even though the gameplay was uneven and workman-like.
... yeah, that's pretty good. 12 $ would be a good enough price for Civ VI alone, and now we get one of more interesting indie games of last year. One more really good game and it may be one of the best bundles ever.
Also have a look at My Time At Portia, which seems to be the same thing as Staxel but with a cartoony look instead of a blocky one. I haven't played either, but both came out on the same day and are getting positive reviews, so maybe have a look at both of them.
But, I kind of just want to play through FFVII again right now. See back in the school year of 1998-1999, I roomed with a fellow Computer Science major who introduced me to the joy of that game. Two years later, after he'd graduated, left, then come back to work for the college, I borrowed the game for a couple of months and did a full play through (to the slight detriment of my Senior year grades).
Since he and his wife now lived off campus, and had both internet and cable TV (something us dorm-dwellers didn't yet enjoy) another friend and I would often load up computer towers, massive 17" CRTs, and truck over to his house in a Saturday to play Starcraft or Diablo together.
We kind of lost touch after I graduated. Oh, we'd exchange Christmas cards every year, but that was about it. He had a Facebook page, but never did more than just sign up.
Anyway, I just found out, from a hand-written note sent in reply to our annual Christmas card, that he passed away last August, at the far too young age of 42. It hurts that my friend is gone. It hurts that we'd drifted so far apart that I didn't even know he was gone for six months.
I'm going to call one of my other college friends whom I haven't spoken to in a couple of years this weekend. And like I said, maybe start an FFVII play through. Life's too short to keep losing contact like this.
Contributing writer at Marooner's Rock
Twitch broadcasting! Currently playing through Wing Commander: Privateer
Pinny Lanyard
Nier: Automata made me really appreciate ways that a game can tell a great story in a way that only a game could. And the gameplay was great on top of that.
Not every game gets to have an imaginative project head, Square Enix money, and Platinum Games mechanical expertise though.
In contrast, a lot of games have great stories but clunky presentations. Audio logs are one of the biggest example of this. In addition to often feeling a bit out of place (South Park: The Stick of Truth had a short segment where you could find audio logs complaining about finding older audio logs that had no helpful information and the inanity of making a log while trying to survive a present threat), they often take you out of the gameplay to really digest. At that point, I feel like I should be reading a book instead. Making me read actual short stories from an in game interface is even worse.
On a related note, I've been impressed at how Dead State handles this. You pick up smart phones, hard drive data, and the like and bring it back to base to decrypt and get text entries of varying tone and style. Few outright logs of the type you normally get but shorter and more natural flowing things like social media posts, phone text messages, forum posts, research notes, and interview transcripts with only a few genuine logs or attempts to record events. Part of the reason I think it works better than it would in many games is that you only can read the stuff back at the shelter where you already do the menu and text heavy stuff like talk to fellow survivors and assign daily jobs so handling the stuff isn't taking you out of the scavenging and combat gameplay.
Something like Hellblade strikes me as a different beast though, telling a story more through visual and auditory means. But since those things come during the actual gameplay, weaknesses there are going to be linked with the presentation for many players and it's a year where we've gotten some games that tell great stories more tightly linked with good gameplay.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
It's already in the post, my dude.
If you subscribe to the bundle can you give the keys away to others?