Lurker > Xiahou Shake

Will be interesting to see how the BotW discourse changes after more people play/finish Elden Ring since it's also very much a game about exploration and yet the structure and content of it's world is lightyears away (and IMO beyond) what BotW has on offer. At the same time actually moving through BotW's world is still a pretty much unbeatable experience, that's definitely where it shines the brightest.

BotW is one of my favorite Zelda games, but it's ultimately a game about going places (as in 100% journey, not necessarily destination) and messing with physics systems. You do occasionally find things but the world is pretty sparse and if you're not having fun "wandering around doing shrines and climbing towers and whatnot" then the game doesn't have much more to offer you.

The folks bringing up Odyssey are right on though since that game has the polar opposite design philosophy of BotW and is a straight up barrage of joy.

Patch for PC already confirmed thank goodness - was afraid of another DMC5 SE situation. Can't wait to see how ray tracing looks in these!

MoogleKupo141 posted...

I just came across another elevator to underground and thought, oh cool, more of this cool place!

and then it took me down to an absolute nightmare ant colony.

I had this exact same experience. Thought I was going back to a super gorgeous place and the elevator dropped me off in Hell instead.

More than anything I seriously can't believe how frequently this game can get me to earnestly mutter "what the fuck..." at whatever weird shit is around the next corner.

It's going to be hard for any other open world game to compare if this keeps up for the whole game.

Tried out a few invasions since I came across a few of the fingers to do it and holy shit it's hard. Not only are you forced into a 2v1 at minimum but I feel like everyone I matched with is ridiculously decked out with insane looking weapons and magic that feels nowhere near where I'm at in the game.

I just smacked an old woman on a bridge near the academy because she looked like an enemy as I was rushing up on horseback and now I think I've screwed myself out of an npc. Can anyone confirm if she was important? >_>

I'm scared to go to Google for this for fear of spoilers at this point, but does anyone know exactly what parts of this game GRRM wrote? This world feels so Soulsy through and through that somehow the thing that most reminds me of Game of Thrones in all of it is the accents!

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Fuck I accidentally skipped tutorial message after Godrik. Absolutely no idea what it was about.

Tutorial messages you see are all added to your inventory on the rightmost tab but it was probably about Great Runes.

Ghostwire seems pretty cool!

Most excited for Stranger of Paradise but there's pretty much no way I play it in March due to Elden Ring spillover.

Hell yeah dude, outstanding movie.

Well that shows what I know! I'm still very curious about the obvious overlap with Arceus here, unless Arceus wasn't done by the main team and they were just using it as a testbed for next gen stuff?

This game has me super confused as to how development is working at Game Freak right now. Like, the general thinking was that the main team was doing Arceus while the remake team did BDSP, right? But this sure looks like there was significant overlap both timewise and in terms of design elements.

Robert Pattinson post Twilight has just consistently been giving me reasons to like him.

I was always a Tifa guy but holy bajesus does Remake Aerith give her a run for her money.

This game is living absolutely rent free in my head while I'm not playing, holy moly

I don't think I've ever seen so much of my Steam friends list playing a game at the same time!

Yeah it's unfortunately very much a DX12 and UE4 issue, which is an extremely common combo lately! Maybe UE5 will save us, but at least for now some more tech savvy devs have been able to work around it with upfront compilation and other tricks.

Well, "guaranteed reliability" in this case appears to be a frame rate constantly bouncing between the 40s and the game's target of 60. I'm not thrilled to hear about stutters on PC but I'll take the rock solid frame rate every time.

PC seems like the pretty clear choice if your hardware can cut it seeing as its only problems are those that fade over time whereas consoles will always have a fluctuating frame rate.

banananor posted...

does "asset streaming" equate to object/texture "popup"?

No, this essentially just means that as new, unseen chunks of the game are entering the equation for the first time, you may experience a hitch in performance, akin to the kind you see when a game is autosaving.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2022-02-24-elden-ring-performance-first-impressions

For those who were waiting on console vs. PC performance news - surprise! They're both bad, albeit in different ways.

Consoles will see a general struggle to maintain 60 fps and have an inconsistent experience throughout. PC does much better on the actual frame rate, as expected, but is marred by the shader compilation and asset streaming stutter issues we've seen throughout this generation on sloppily programmed DX12 games. Basically - it's a FromSoft game!

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Already this game is just slamming all over XB2 proper. A lot of it has to do with how much more appealing the structure is to me. Knowing I'm not long to have dozens gacha blades and hundreds of affinities to worry about means I'm actually super invested in the charts and quests.

I feel this 100% - it's truly insane how enormously the game is improved immediately by removing gacha. That's not even the extent of Torna's improvements, of course, but man the decision to have gacha in a single player game is still one of the most baffling design decisions I've ever seen.

Oh my god

9/10 with the one point missing for the same reasons as others have called out - supplemental material adds a truly absurd amount of crucial context, even if you can understand the actual themes and basic plot beats well enough without it.

Wait, I haven't played DE. What's this yellow brick road stuff?

You have good reason to look forward to Torna! Really the only thing bad about it is by the time it's done you'll wish even more that XB2 could have been better than it was.

Farming vials is a complaint I've never quite gotten since you can buy them cheap in the Hunter's Dream - I found that buying a bundle in early game one time only plus the natural pick-ups from just playing normally had me never having to think about it again. If anything, healing is actually a bit too plentiful!

neonreaper posted...

The review I watched used a 2080ti and called it "poor" and "frustrating" and said the PS5 is the way to go, but he got used to the PC aside from the performance getting him killed

I'm getting the impression that this game is very CPU-bound, since people on similar graphics cards appear to be having pretty wildly different experiences and aren't mentioning their other specs as much as I'd like to see. From what I've read if you have a decent CPU (and the GPU to back it up, of course) it shouldn't be too hard to hit a level where even if the experience is uneven it will still be better than on PS5 and certainly PS4. Guess we'll find out for sure tomorrow, though!

UshiromiyaEva posted...

All the flashback cutscene stuff is astoundingly more intriguing that the modern cutscenes!

Boy do I have good news for you

Always the hardest difficulty unless it's something I know is truly ridiculous or relies on mastery from an initial run for a smooth experience, like Give Me God of War or Legendary in Halo.

I played the demo for that one but haven't gotten around to the full game just yet. I definitely enjoyed it, though! Felt a little more "raw" than this does, but there's so much room for style and mastery there that I'm definitely excited to get around to it.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1533420/Neon_White/

I was curious about this game from its initial trailer but holy shit the gameplay is so fun and satisfying. Definitely worth a look if you have time to check it out.

Maybe an unpopular opinion but with this plus the Prae/Castrum changes I really hope MSQ Roulette gets banished to the shadow realm and its exp gets moved to the 50/60/70/80 roulette.

It's always cold in Siberia

Nintendo's always going to be on the bottom of the totem pole performance wise, yeah, and that's generally been fine in the past. The trouble with the Switch is that it was released with less powerful tech than its contemporaries and then there was a considerably huge leap in tech just a few years later. I don't know if anyone's tried playing any cross gen games on PS4 but that's generally not a fun experience, either!

What really hurts though is that now we're seeing even Switch exclusives chug to the point that you really can't help but wish they were available anywhere else. Like we had considerable frame drops in a Mario game recently - let that sink in.

Unsurprising, but man I was really hoping this was going to be more than, like, the least informative trailer ever - especially considering we already knew this game was in development.

Considering the timing with the tournament, I'd be very surprised if it was anything other than SF6. The font of the countdown itself matching RE a bit makes me wonder, though.

3/10

Generally terrible and unnecessary, but it's at least not too invasive past the opening and provides some laughs from stuff like Mario in jail, "I'm your mama?" and... Bowser talking. (Glad they turned that ship around real quick!)

I'm not really convinced that giving OoT even the best cutting edge graphics (which isn't even what it would get if it came out right now on the Switch) would actually make it any better of a game. Seems just as likely that they'd wreck it in some way that would end up with a lot of the player base preferring the original anyway.

mnkboy907 posted...

A bunch of NPC affinity links are only established or updated by talking to them at various times throughout the day, which increases area affinity. There's also situations were finishing a quest for Person A might trigger Person B to comment about Person A (or Person C!), which results in a new or updated affinity link.

I've always been so fascinated by how deep this system goes when it's something that you can 100% ignore and not really miss out on anything. Like I've played this game three times and I don't think I've ever actively engaged with the NPC affinity stuff at all and even after looking it up, I still am not aware of any actual rewards you get for doing so.

Edit: Oh, derp, I guess I did forget about the extra skill trees, but I don't remember ever actively grinding anything for those?

Axl_Rose_85 posted...

I wanna know if this is worth playing for someone who thought he's completely done with Pokemon after the lazy blandfest that was Sword/Shield.

I feel extremely negatively towards the main series at this point but just playing through the tutorial of this I found myself to be pretty intrigued! This feels like the sort of step forward that people wanted Sword/Shield to be back when people were still going "oh wow guys a mainline Pokemon on a CONSOLE"

What are the best resources for someone looking to dip their toes into this as far as deck building goes? I haven't played since xyz was introduced and have no clue where to begin. I used to play Zombies so maybe seeing what they look like these days could be fun.

Finished it last night - still processing and don't know if I'm going to end up doing a big text dump like others have done but I'm totally floored by this expansion. I still think ShB is a *bit* more consistent overall and has the highest high in the series in the final trial and it's build up, but EW has like, all the rest of the highest highs and there are a lot of them!

Also quite frankly wasn't at all expecting a Final Fantasy game to go deep on a nihilism/existentialism dichotomy as its core theme and actually do a shockingly good job of it, like what