My lunch was a microwave pouch of uncle bens brown and wild rice and a pouch of starkist ginger soy chicken.
Not eating out for lunch every day is taking some getting used to.
0
Sir Landsharkresting shark faceRegistered Userregular
yoooo ive been messing around with an up tempo version of the tempest sonata and this shit slaps imma do it on twitch quick if anyone wants to check it out
twitch -> sir_landshark
Please consider the environment before printing this post.
yoooo ive been messing around with an up tempo version of the tempest sonata and this shit slaps imma do it on twitch quick if anyone wants to check it out
I have to give a presentation tomorrow for useful google drive tools and also basic tips for macs/ipads.
Anyone know any real basic/useful stuff your average person might not know?
Shared docs make group projects super easy - you can give access to each party on what they need (view, comment, edit) all within the same document
Working in a shared document creates a permanent history so if something ever goes missing you can track changes and revert, if needed (or even just copy/cut and paste whatever you needed if a lot of subsequent changes have been made)
Do I really need to badmouth anything? Facts will work just fine.
Now i wish I'd dropped more asteriods on you
0
BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
It's weird because I know lots of people had trouble with Witcher 2's tutorial, and were finding they didn't know how to do the actions it teaches you after it? I've always wondered if it's something to do with playing it out of order, or if it's just because sometimes the prompts don't show up.
...and of course, as always, Kill Hitler.
0
Sir Landsharkresting shark faceRegistered Userregular
yoooo ive been messing around with an up tempo version of the tempest sonata and this shit slaps imma do it on twitch quick if anyone wants to check it out
twitch -> sir_landshark
dang that was rad
also the ending was amusing
lol i got cutoff. did the whole thing just now. assume its on the previous broadcasts
Please consider the environment before printing this post.
So I've started on The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for the like, third time in the past eight years. Both previous times I basically managed to get a little past the tutorial before being stymied. This time I'm determined to persevere.
So when this game came out, I distinctly remember people asking "hey guys, should I play The Witcher 1 before starting this?" and being told "NO! The Witcher 1 is like WATCHING A LOVED ONE DIE OF CANCER compared to this MIRACULOUS GEM OF GAMING." As much as I, personally, had actually liked Witcher 1 despite its rough edges and jank, everyone seemed to agree that this was some incredible paradigm shift forward. We got the start of the compare-everything-CDPR-does-to-Bioware jag, where dudes were all "I hope the people at Bioware start PUTTING THEIR PETS IN OVENS IN DESPAIR after seeing what a REAL ROLEPLAYING GAME LOOKS LIKE."
But about ten hours in, here's the thing: ehhh
So on the plus side, Witcher 2 is as well-written as the first game. It's also a genuinely beautiful game, with greatly improved character models and (particularly) animations to go with the often achingly beautiful environments and welcome, liberal use of bright light and bold colors. Oh, and you can customize Geralt's hair, which is cool and makes me legitimately happy. The full ponytail I got for him is a much better look than the stringy roadie-for-a-metal-band look he had in the first game or the elaborate half-ponytail/half-topknot thing he starts with in this.
On the minus side is literally almost everything else.
- This won't be an issue for most of y'all, but it's incredibly hostile to someone with vision problems. The first game had a big, chunky interface that maybe wouldn't get much love from some cackling wieners on a stream or a Quick Look but that I could actually decipher. Witcher 2 tosses all that out in favor of minimalist UI elements hidden at the corners of the screen (fuckin' great for someone with a limited field of view), translucent or transparent menus with tiny, sans-serif fonts, and most explanatory text (eg, inventory submenus) replaced with indecipherable icons.
- Some of this is clearly a result of the console-ization, which rears its head in other ways. Instead of mousing over things like a sensible game, you now kind of lumber Geralt up to things, have him walk into tables and walls, while spamming the interact key in hopes that the game understand you want to open the chest or pick up the thing on the table or whatever. Menus don't accept WASD input but you also can't use the mouse for everything so you have to keep moving your hands around to select things and then confirm them. Geralt himself just feels way more awkward in general. Turning around 180 degrees feels like backing out of a parking space.
- All of the control issues are even more noticeable when you're trying to navigate one of the game's ill-advised stealth sections. We've all had that moment in a Deus Ex or a Splinter Cell or whatever where sticky cover betrays us and we end up gluing ourselves to the corridor wall in full view of the patrolling guard instead of crouching behind the barrel we were aiming at, but in this, Geralt just...takes a leisurely five seconds to turn around and then does a run animation at the thing you're trying to duck behind.
- To meditate, which is to say, to access a central feature of the game that is the hub from which you heal, advance in-game time, brew and drink potions, and level up, you have to hold down left control while clicking an icon. Why. WHY
- Combat is more frenetic, with a new emphasis on blocking and parrying, but it's not necessarily better. It's not really scratching the itch the way Sleeping Dogs, Batman, or Spider-Man do, but it's also not easy and fluid and fun to watch the way the old AssCreed were. It's hard to tell when enemy attacks are landing and I often fail without really knowing why I failed, and then try again and succeed without really knowing why I succeeded.
- When you die there's a big YOU DIED loading screen that takes like seven seconds jesus fuck.
- There's an incredibly unnecessary and unwelcome proliferation of "RPG elements," which is to say, worthless timesink nonsense and half-baked subsystems. Talents are on a complicated tree/web thing but also have multiple levels in and of themselves (but you can't see how many possible levels a talent can have, or what they'll do) but also can be "evolved" with "mutagens" that come in innumerable flavors and convey minor, badly-communicated set bonuses and also there's crafting because witchers are well known for their item crafting in the fiction but you don't actually do the crafting you just get plans for things and carry timber and herbs to a craftsman and pay him so why couldn't you just buy the fucking stuff in the first place but also items have color-coded rarities now like it's a fucking MMO because that was definitely what the first game was lacking.
- There is a vendor trash tab in the menu. Why not just...make a game that doesn't have vendor trash?
- The game does not do a good job introducing any of this. The Witcher 1 takes an inverted-funnel approach, starting off narrowly and widening out; it begins with a very narrowly-scoped, self-contained prologue (bad guys assault Witcher HQ) that systematically teaches you the basics. "Geralt, fight this guy! Geralt, Dave is wounded - craft a potion to heal him!" Then you exit that prologue (after an hour or two, which feels like a reasonable amount of time) and go to the first chapter, a rural village, which is more expansive but still manageable. You get a couple of basic starting quests that don't require you to venture too far afield from the village inn that serves as your HQ, and you gradually expand outward as your facility with the systems and familiarity with the environment grows.
Witcher 2 just...drops you into the middle of things, picking up in both story and narrative terms from where the first game left off, which would be fine except that the gameplay is a drastic, ground-up revision where basically none of your knowledge from the first game is useful. Its prologue chaper is a protracted multi-hour affair with sub-quests and side objectives that, instead of teaching you basic game mechanics, leads you by the nose from one big QTE setpiece to another: aim a ballista! run from a dragon and use this one button to dodge its breath! sneak out of a dungeon! Time that could have been spent teaching you all these insanely proliferating subsystems is instead spent whacking the keyboard when a blue X appears to make Geralt roll under some dragon breath, a skill that will have absolutely no bearing on the next umpty-ump hours of gameplay.
Then you conclude that lengthy, unhelpful prologue and arrive in the chapter 1 town, which is also a small village, but instead of a small-scale plot and a limited number of managable quests you immediately get four or five major objectives dumped in your lap and twice as many smaller side missions - but even the smaller side objectives are multi-stage affairs that require you to obtain specific books or crafting recipes (from vendors whose stock is apparently randomized, so they might not always have the thing you're meant to get!). It's overwhelming.
- This is a much more subjective, aesthetic complaint, but while the game is visually sumptuous, it completely abandons the first game's commitment to a tangible, down-to-earth-feeling world. Witcher 1 took you through a procession of crumbly castles, country villages, cramped medieval ghettos, cornfields, forests etc that all looked and felt like real places, like real castles that you can actually visit. it was committedly, aggresively mundane. People lived in little 400-square foot thatched huts near a copse of scraggly trees that looked like the trees in your very own backyard. Castles and mighty fortresses were two or three stories tall and made of visibly rotting masonry. It actually felt pretty visually consonant with the TV show, which is of course obliged to film in actual replica medieval villages and rotting Hungarian castles and so forth.
Witcher 2 starts you out besieging a JRPG castle with mile-tall buttresses and a drawbridge the width of a football field before sending you to a forest that looks like the forest moon of Endor. It's a jarring stylistic change and a big departure from the naturalism of the previous game, and combined with the addition of all these elements pilfered willy-nilly from other video games like loot drop rates and crafting and vendor trash, the overall effect is that the interesting rough edges about the series and its world have been sanded down to make it a more generic mass-market RPG. It feels like I could be in Azeroth or Tamriel or...Amalur..ville...or a hundred other places.
At least on your last complaint, Witcher 3 does such a better job
So many places where they just lay a fuckin board down over some mud, because everywhere is covered in mud
here's a screenshot entering the most prosperous and largest city in the game world
It's bright and colorful but everything is so used looking, it's wonderful. There are old bridges people have done patchwork jobs on to fix, there are rotting beams and collapsing towers, all the peasants are gross and greasy, I love everything about how it looks.
When you go in the city and up, as you get to newer and newer construction, you find whitewashed brand new buildings that look picturesque, but the walls and outskirts of the city are hundreds of years old, and they look like it
It's weird because I know lots of people had trouble with Witcher 2's tutorial, and were finding they didn't know how to do the actions it teaches you after it? I've always wondered if it's something to do with playing it out of order, or if it's just because sometimes the prompts don't show up.
I definitely bounced pretty hard off Witcher 2 because of the tutorial and prologue
The tutorial basically felt like someone listing off a battery of context-free instructions and then vanishing with no further information available
I had assumed that it was a consequence of not having played the first game
So I've started on The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for the like, third time in the past eight years. Both previous times I basically managed to get a little past the tutorial before being stymied. This time I'm determined to persevere.
So when this game came out, I distinctly remember people asking "hey guys, should I play The Witcher 1 before starting this?" and being told "NO! The Witcher 1 is like WATCHING A LOVED ONE DIE OF CANCER compared to this MIRACULOUS GEM OF GAMING." As much as I, personally, had actually liked Witcher 1 despite its rough edges and jank, everyone seemed to agree that this was some incredible paradigm shift forward. We got the start of the compare-everything-CDPR-does-to-Bioware jag, where dudes were all "I hope the people at Bioware start PUTTING THEIR PETS IN OVENS IN DESPAIR after seeing what a REAL ROLEPLAYING GAME LOOKS LIKE."
But about ten hours in, here's the thing: ehhh
So on the plus side, Witcher 2 is as well-written as the first game. It's also a genuinely beautiful game, with greatly improved character models and (particularly) animations to go with the often achingly beautiful environments and welcome, liberal use of bright light and bold colors. Oh, and you can customize Geralt's hair, which is cool and makes me legitimately happy. The full ponytail I got for him is a much better look than the stringy roadie-for-a-metal-band look he had in the first game or the elaborate half-ponytail/half-topknot thing he starts with in this.
On the minus side is literally almost everything else.
- This won't be an issue for most of y'all, but it's incredibly hostile to someone with vision problems. The first game had a big, chunky interface that maybe wouldn't get much love from some cackling wieners on a stream or a Quick Look but that I could actually decipher. Witcher 2 tosses all that out in favor of minimalist UI elements hidden at the corners of the screen (fuckin' great for someone with a limited field of view), translucent or transparent menus with tiny, sans-serif fonts, and most explanatory text (eg, inventory submenus) replaced with indecipherable icons.
- Some of this is clearly a result of the console-ization, which rears its head in other ways. Instead of mousing over things like a sensible game, you now kind of lumber Geralt up to things, have him walk into tables and walls, while spamming the interact key in hopes that the game understand you want to open the chest or pick up the thing on the table or whatever. Menus don't accept WASD input but you also can't use the mouse for everything so you have to keep moving your hands around to select things and then confirm them. Geralt himself just feels way more awkward in general. Turning around 180 degrees feels like backing out of a parking space.
- All of the control issues are even more noticeable when you're trying to navigate one of the game's ill-advised stealth sections. We've all had that moment in a Deus Ex or a Splinter Cell or whatever where sticky cover betrays us and we end up gluing ourselves to the corridor wall in full view of the patrolling guard instead of crouching behind the barrel we were aiming at, but in this, Geralt just...takes a leisurely five seconds to turn around and then does a run animation at the thing you're trying to duck behind.
- To meditate, which is to say, to access a central feature of the game that is the hub from which you heal, advance in-game time, brew and drink potions, and level up, you have to hold down left control while clicking an icon. Why. WHY
- Combat is more frenetic, with a new emphasis on blocking and parrying, but it's not necessarily better. It's not really scratching the itch the way Sleeping Dogs, Batman, or Spider-Man do, but it's also not easy and fluid and fun to watch the way the old AssCreed were. It's hard to tell when enemy attacks are landing and I often fail without really knowing why I failed, and then try again and succeed without really knowing why I succeeded.
- When you die there's a big YOU DIED loading screen that takes like seven seconds jesus fuck.
- There's an incredibly unnecessary and unwelcome proliferation of "RPG elements," which is to say, worthless timesink nonsense and half-baked subsystems. Talents are on a complicated tree/web thing but also have multiple levels in and of themselves (but you can't see how many possible levels a talent can have, or what they'll do) but also can be "evolved" with "mutagens" that come in innumerable flavors and convey minor, badly-communicated set bonuses and also there's crafting because witchers are well known for their item crafting in the fiction but you don't actually do the crafting you just get plans for things and carry timber and herbs to a craftsman and pay him so why couldn't you just buy the fucking stuff in the first place but also items have color-coded rarities now like it's a fucking MMO because that was definitely what the first game was lacking.
- There is a vendor trash tab in the menu. Why not just...make a game that doesn't have vendor trash?
- The game does not do a good job introducing any of this. The Witcher 1 takes an inverted-funnel approach, starting off narrowly and widening out; it begins with a very narrowly-scoped, self-contained prologue (bad guys assault Witcher HQ) that systematically teaches you the basics. "Geralt, fight this guy! Geralt, Dave is wounded - craft a potion to heal him!" Then you exit that prologue (after an hour or two, which feels like a reasonable amount of time) and go to the first chapter, a rural village, which is more expansive but still manageable. You get a couple of basic starting quests that don't require you to venture too far afield from the village inn that serves as your HQ, and you gradually expand outward as your facility with the systems and familiarity with the environment grows.
Witcher 2 just...drops you into the middle of things, picking up in both story and narrative terms from where the first game left off, which would be fine except that the gameplay is a drastic, ground-up revision where basically none of your knowledge from the first game is useful. Its prologue chapter is a protracted multi-hour affair with sub-quests and side objectives that, instead of teaching you basic game mechanics, leads you by the nose from one big QTE setpiece to another: aim a ballista! run from a dragon and use this one button to dodge its breath! sneak out of a dungeon! Time that could have been spent teaching you all these insanely proliferating subsystems is instead spent whacking the keyboard when a blue X appears to make Geralt roll under some dragon breath, a skill that will have absolutely no bearing on the next umpty-ump hours of gameplay.
Then you conclude that lengthy, unhelpful prologue and arrive in the chapter 1 town, which is also a small village, but instead of a small-scale plot and a limited number of managable quests you immediately get four or five major objectives dumped in your lap and twice as many smaller side missions - but even the smaller side objectives are multi-stage affairs that require you to obtain specific books or crafting recipes (from vendors whose stock is apparently randomized, so they might not always have the thing you're meant to get!). It's overwhelming.
- This is a much more subjective, aesthetic complaint, but while the game is visually sumptuous, it completely abandons the first game's commitment to a tangible, down-to-earth-feeling world. Witcher 1 took you through a procession of crumbly castles, country villages, cramped medieval ghettos, cornfields, forests etc that all looked and felt like real places, like real castles that you can actually visit. it was committedly, aggressively mundane. People lived in little 400-square foot thatched huts near a copse of scraggly trees that looked like the trees in your very own backyard. Castles and mighty fortresses were two or three stories tall and made of visibly rotting masonry. It actually felt pretty visually consonant with the TV show, which is of course obliged to film in actual replica medieval villages and rotting Hungarian castles and so forth.
Witcher 2 starts you out besieging a JRPG castle with mile-tall buttresses and a drawbridge the width of a football field before sending you to a forest that looks like the forest moon of Endor. It's a jarring stylistic change and a big departure from the naturalism of the previous game, and combined with the addition of all these elements pilfered willy-nilly from other video games like loot drop rates and crafting and vendor trash, the overall effect is that the interesting rough edges about the series and its world have been sanded down to make it a more generic mass-market RPG. It feels like I could be in Azeroth or Tamriel or...Amalur..ville...or a hundred other places.
I loved the Witcher 2, but after playing 3 and then trying to go back to 2 really highlights how clunky it is in a lot of respects.
I'd say 3 has better controls, setting, and individual character moments and emotional beats. But while the story telling in 3 is better, I prefer 2's overall main plot story line.
I think this is one of those recipes where you take something good, swap the three most important but caloric ingredients and then write a blog entry declaring it as good as the real thing.
They invariably come out as not even vague approximations of the real thing
It's weird because I know lots of people had trouble with Witcher 2's tutorial, and were finding they didn't know how to do the actions it teaches you after it? I've always wondered if it's something to do with playing it out of order, or if it's just because sometimes the prompts don't show up.
I definitely bounced pretty hard off Witcher 2 because of the tutorial and prologue
The tutorial basically felt like someone listing off a battery of context-free instructions and then vanishing with no further information available
I had assumed that it was a consequence of not having played the first game
Nah, a lot of people had this problem. Allowing you to play it out of order massively did not help either (since some of the sections in later parts do require buttons taught to you in earlier parts).
It's a pity because I think Witcher 2 is a massive step up over Witcher 1, albeit much smaller in scope in many ways. But the swordplay is much more interactive compared to Witcher 1's fairly minimal 3-style gameplay, they made the potion/mutagen game a lot more forgiving and signs are much better.
BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
(also I love the forest in Witcher 2, just because of how oppressive it feels to be in. It's easy to get yourself turned in circles, it looks as if it could there could be elves living in it and you would never know, it's got thick enough overgrowth to block out the sunlight, and it's got its own rock formations at jaunty angles rather than the "trees on a 3d graph" problem a lot of other games have with forests. It actually feels a lot like the more interesting European woods I've been in that have been kept relatively untouched by the forestry industry)
He lived a super great life and we were able to let him pass at home with help from a professional. He's probably the single best cat I've ever known and I'm glad we could do right by him.
+7
HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
(also I love the forest in Witcher 2, just because of how oppressive it feels to be in. It's easy to get yourself turned in circles, it looks as if it could there could be elves living in it and you would never know, it's got thick enough overgrowth to block out the sunlight, and it's got its own rock formations at jaunty angles rather than the "trees on a 3d graph" problem a lot of other games have with forests. It actually feels a lot like the more interesting European woods I've been in that have been kept relatively untouched by the forestry industry)
I just recently learned got somewhat of a grasp on how much like barriers forests used to be. What with the black forest in central Europe back in the day etc. They just didn't end, and were not navigable really.
PSN: Honkalot
+3
TavIrish Minister for DefenceRegistered Userregular
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
The first time I did not get past the tutorial with the Castle Siege because some asshole thought it'd be fun to learn how to play while trying to avoid being barbecued by a dragon. So I quit and uninstalled it.
3 years later I reinstalled it on a whim and played it and it wasn't a big deal. idk what was wrong with me the first time
*remembers*
oh yeah I was super drunk
Posts
You gonna take that?
Do I really need to badmouth anything? Facts will work just fine.
Not eating out for lunch every day is taking some getting used to.
twitch -> sir_landshark
dang that was rad
also the ending was amusing
Anyone know any real basic/useful stuff your average person might not know?
Did you know in Sweden defamation still applies even if you're only telling truth?
Shared docs make group projects super easy - you can give access to each party on what they need (view, comment, edit) all within the same document
Working in a shared document creates a permanent history so if something ever goes missing you can track changes and revert, if needed (or even just copy/cut and paste whatever you needed if a lot of subsequent changes have been made)
Now i wish I'd dropped more asteriods on you
lol i got cutoff. did the whole thing just now. assume its on the previous broadcasts
yeah this is more like it!
One of our cats are terrified of it.
I definitely bounced pretty hard off Witcher 2 because of the tutorial and prologue
The tutorial basically felt like someone listing off a battery of context-free instructions and then vanishing with no further information available
I had assumed that it was a consequence of not having played the first game
Disney has already sent a contract killer to collect the bounty on your friend's head.
There’s always next time
I loved the Witcher 2, but after playing 3 and then trying to go back to 2 really highlights how clunky it is in a lot of respects.
I'd say 3 has better controls, setting, and individual character moments and emotional beats. But while the story telling in 3 is better, I prefer 2's overall main plot story line.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Skitters passed on last year
I don’t know how I can help
They invariably come out as not even vague approximations of the real thing
It's a pity because I think Witcher 2 is a massive step up over Witcher 1, albeit much smaller in scope in many ways. But the swordplay is much more interactive compared to Witcher 1's fairly minimal 3-style gameplay, they made the potion/mutagen game a lot more forgiving and signs are much better.
He's got lifeless black eyes. Like a doll's.
He lived a super great life and we were able to let him pass at home with help from a professional. He's probably the single best cat I've ever known and I'm glad we could do right by him.
I just recently learned got somewhat of a grasp on how much like barriers forests used to be. What with the black forest in central Europe back in the day etc. They just didn't end, and were not navigable really.
i am just super amused by the pettiness
i will not
Ownin the fuckin libs
Come Overwatch with meeeee
@Atomika
*nods in central californian*
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Though he did make a detour to call cops racist.
So, uh
2/10
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
The first time I did not get past the tutorial with the Castle Siege because some asshole thought it'd be fun to learn how to play while trying to avoid being barbecued by a dragon. So I quit and uninstalled it.
3 years later I reinstalled it on a whim and played it and it wasn't a big deal. idk what was wrong with me the first time
*remembers*
oh yeah I was super drunk
welp
For real the valley is a special kind of hell
especially between Fresno and Bakersfield
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious