The Videogames Tab

Bought The Forest a while back in the days when I was still ok with Early Access and on the promise that the game was a rare beast - A sandbox survival game that was actually quite good.

It's not.

Pre-ordered Pillars of Eternity the other day.

a) It's by Obsidian and that's generally a seal of approval for anything rpg-related
2) The pre-order is 25% off on Green Man Gaming

Obsidian have an excellent YouTube channel and their video about how PoE came to be made is a stark reminder of the dangers of working at a studio big enough that you've got 100-odd salaries to pay but small enough to feasibly go to the wall if a game bombs or gets cancelled.



EDIT - The follow up video to that one is even more revealing. Basically, the Pillars of Eternity Kickstarter saved the company - They wanted $1.100,000 and got almost four million. Obsidian are basically Black Isle and I'd have hated for them to go under.

Anyone played Ori and the Blind Forest yet? It's on my wishlist but not a priority for me but I've got a friend who can't stop raving about it.



The most beautiful 2D game ever made?

__________________
"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

Arg, did you warn me about this? I don't remember it being amongst your buyer's remorse lists previously

To be fair I already knew this was a daft/risky plunge. Bought during a hurried lunch break (Noooo), my only investigations being Steam reviews ("Would set fire to turtle again 11/10"), and Yogscast vids (streamers known for undeclared shilling on behalf of steam games... that they curate.... oh dear).

Figured it was worth a tenner on the back of lots of review-ette chatter about decent and regular updates recently though. And seemed well within specs so hopefully it'll at least run well! This idea of the various clans worshipping at trees at dawn and having family behaviours and stuff (which are essentially unexplained and you have to observe / figure out) does intrigue me too.

Mainly tho, it's all about the tree fort

---

Ori does look gorgeous. Have watched the first few minutes being played and looked like it plays effectively with the ole heartstrings too, in an atavistic story kinda way. (Lot of talk about the actually platformy stuff being nothing majorly new though).

__________________
Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

I think I bought it during the last Christmas sale, uninstalled and promptly forgot about it so probably haven't mentioned it before.

I guess that a lot of the jankyness can be put down to the unfinished nature of the game but it had been through a fair few updates when I purchased so figured it would be at least somewhat representative of the finished product. Some people seem to rate The Forest in terms of what else is out there but I know that's a pretty low bar.

Have any of these sandbox survival things been finished yet? The only one I can think of is Don't Starve (which I liked) but it's from an established developer and isn't trying to be graphically complex.

Yep true, and the fact that this one is being made by a team with nigh zip experience, aiming to replicate cinematic lighting & flourishes in an open world, means the odds are def stacked against it.

The Long Dark will make it I suspect, but there does seem to be a litany of ones that are just flapping about. (Wasn't it 75% of all Early Access ever on steam are still unfinished? Posted a link here somewhere).

Anyways, I'll try and have a dip tonight and see how it sits. (If the latest comments are anything to go by, boars now work, but fire no longer does )

---

*EDIT*: It does make me think of the Minecraft beta, and how what they actually did was layer working mechanics on top of working mechanics. Granted again the focus was massively on function over form, and things did break periodically, but it seemed a much more solid build process. Maybe the answer is for early access alphas to take a step back in prominence and for paid betas to be pushed more to the fore. At least for Steam's rep at any rate! The current model may have blurred the line between the two too much )

**EDITEDIT**

Haha, the Early Access text is so hedged it could be a forestry asset

The Long Dark is the one I've had hopes for ever since I saw the first reports but I'm not going to play it until release. I know it's been discussed at length here which would usually destroy my tiny levels of willpower but I'm holding firm.

Been after an excuse for 8 or 9 months to justify changing my PC case and I think I've found one! Both of the front USB2 ports have now failed and those are not things you can swap without a soldering iron and much steadier hands than mine. I've still got two USB3 ports on the front but one of those is getting really loose. My monitor has a USB hub but that takes one of the rear PC connections which are now fully populated. Never should have bought that damn case.

Think I'm gonna but a Fractal Design R5.

Yeah, The Long Dark is gonna get there. It's sold so many copies already and they keep putting out builds with noticeable improvements. You never really know, but they're saying and doing all the right things/all the things that you'd expect from a team actually on track to release something.

Also, from what I've heard they're releasing episodes for the Story Mode, which means it'll be longer until the whole thing is out, but obviously majorly increases the speed and likelihood of the start of that process. It sounds like we'll get the first episode by the end of the year.

Downgraded graphics? Seems so. Especially texture quality. It ain't max settings according to CD project though. Still hoping for better final product.

The Witcher's gone open world as opposed to the previous games' smaller maps so it won't be a surprise if there aren't 4k textures across the board. It's also very much a console game now and the Xbone & PS4 are about as powerful as my old gaming PC (which was mid range in 2011 when it was built) so there's no way they'll even get close.

The PC master race crowd will have HD texture mods within days of release, no doubt, but outside screenshots who really cares? I doubt we'll see vanilla textures as gnarly as some I've seen on Bloodbourne screenshots for example. If I can keep a steady 60 at 1080p I'll be happy.

Talking of textures, here's a screenie I took of the first Dark Souls game, the one with the terrible PC port which was locked at an internal resolution of 720p and in many ways looked worse than the console versions. Before the game was even released we had a mod which allowed you to adjust the game's rendering resolution and I run the game at 4k downsampled to 1080p now. No graphics mods here, just the vanilla textures at 4k.



It's a beautiful looking game but you need to jump through a few hoops.

Well I survived a day in The Forest (and about 10 minutes of dawn )...

Quite like what I've seen so far. It seems to have one of of those tough first humps where you take several goes to get established but that's cool. (I might faff around in 'vegan mode' with the clans turned off, just to have a nose around the survival mechanics alone). They are quite a pleasingly disturbing presence at the moment though. Mainly the way you can suddenly look up from a task and see one watching you... (and that means there are probably a few more fanning out nearby...). Something about that stepped-back behaviour makes them even freakier, and makes stumbling on their picturesque villages disturbing even when they're apparently deserted.

On the survival front, so far I've learned that: giant iguanas are the easiest thing to catch, cannibals will visit areas covered in corpses (shockingly), and that I can't find anywhere that isn't marked in their clan signs. Also felling trees seems to draw their attention. This makes house building a challenge...

I'm glad you're not finding The Forest a total bust, T. Sounds like the game's had a few updates from when I played it.

^^^mobile photo as screenshots not in yet^^^

Just had another dabble, and there are definitely things that are semi-broken or outright silly . Most of it I don't mind so far though. Stuff like dried meat just plopping straight through the drying rack and auto-cooking on the floor in seconds. And the freeform building stuff has obviously been scaled back as it's pretty clunky. (They took away the treehouses! The bastards! )

I've scampered off well away from the plane crash in my second life, and it's giving me a bit more time to explore the mechanics. Haven't actually seen a cannibal yet. (I did wake up to find that my camp, placed protectively near some 'coming soon text' territory, was also sandwiched between two small camps though. Damn thunderstorms!). Will find out if my new perma-fire brings em running I guess.

So yeah, there's plenty that's clunky. It does feel like an Alpha that's just about playable. Nothing near as swish in survival execution as Long Dark as yet, but does feel like it's got some nice balances in there, and this darker backstory going on. (There's lots of other niggles, like why do I have to forage in the dangerous forests for sticks, rather than like, chopping up all these big logs I've got? But every game has those I guess).

Still faffing with the graphics - currently getting 40fps with the odd lag spike at medium settings, but gonna keep playing as high does look much prettier.

Steam Review: Best tree felling simulation eva!

I think that's where a lot of these games fail - Tiny, inexperienced studios let loose with Unity or Unreal and trying to do a janky version of 'realism' in the visuals. The Forest looks quite good in that department but all those lighting effects sap power and optimisation is usually one of the final things tackled in development.

Maybe that's why I like Don't Starve and (although it's more of a walking simulator than a survival game) Eidolon?

Probably not.

Blimey, Eidolon seems to feature so much walking there's an 'auto walk' cruise control

---

Got Forest looking more enticing (grass numbers at minimum, SSAO & anti-alias whacked back up), and have been a on a pretty decent adventure now

Have also encountered a whole slew of glitches and shoddiness though. Aquatic deer (wouldn't mind, but I was about to land the killing blow when they dashed to the sea floor!), no hotkeys (so you have to lay down a picnic to select your weapon), fires that don't give off heat. Dying of dehydration is like an attack of the amateur dramatics, and the meat drying rack just... doesn't.

And then there's the building. It's... awkward...



For all that, I've survived far longer than I thought I would and had fun on the whole . Each time I thought I was done I've scraped on through. When I was freezing to death, lost and stranded on a beach, with my leaf stock foolishly split between an unfinished fire & a bivouac (while ungrabble leaves drifted charmingly but maddeningly by), my isolation actually saved me. Extreme hunger doesn't kill (realistic I guess), just wipes out your energy, so a fight would have been final. The cold I'm less clear on - either it's really forgiving, or setting myself on fire with a last ditch molotov staved it off for a bit

It felt like a miracle when the morning found me ashore, with a new basic base, and my stats on the up...



I've only seen one tribesman this time, and he was moving unawares through shafts of light in the distance. But literally everywhere I've been I've acted with them in mind, and often with my heart in my mouth when exploring new territory.

Dehydration is the thing most likely to kill me at the moment though. It was what forced me to explore in the first place. And in theory it did for me on the trail, but you get a second chance - being dragged unconscious to a cannibal cave. (And thoughtfully rehydrated in this case). I scrambled out, counted my lucky stars, nicked what I dared from the village (less picturesque now I've seen the corpse sculptures), and dragged myself to my backwoods base. Only to find hydrating berries in abundance... at the tiny settlement I'd been avoiding... right...next...door

So yeah, it's a glitch beast, but the animals and environment look great, even if they don't always act that way . Reckon I'll stick around for a bit, and finally get the tree platform to work at least

Any thoughts on Pillars, Taccy? A friend of mine is raving about it...

__________________

Wasteland 2 was my GOTY last year and I wish that it was as polished as PoE. Those hand drawn backgrounds are flat out gorgeous and the UI is a slick, classy reinterpretation of the menus in the old Infinity engine games.

Indeed, the whole game reads like a love letter to Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale (just as Wasteland 2 was to the early Fallouts) but bang up to date. Combat's the same realtime with pause, too, which took a bit of getting used to. I know you've played BG recently so it should fit you like a comfy pair of slippers.

It's not D&D rules though. Much like Bioware did with Dragon Age, Obsidian have created their own set.



Talking of Dragon Age, I've probably given up on Inquisition. The game's got so much pointless busywork masquerading as side quests (and you need to do at least a portion of them for EXP) that it's become a real chore to play through. The stale MMO-style combat doesn't help either.

After the fantastic game that was Origins, Bioware seem to have forgotten how to do cRPGs. Luckily we've got people like Obsidian, Larian, inXile and Harebrained.

I'll try keep a RuneScape diary to some extent going.

26/03/2015

66 Farming


20 Divination


53 Crafting


Also 72 Fletching but I missed the screen-shot.

Interesting list of the DA Inquisition voice cast:



Some very familiar names there - If nothing else, Inquisition is a sumptuously produced game - and quite a few character models based on the actor lending their voice. Indira Varma as Vivienne? I'd never have guessed, but the best of the lot is probably Jennifer Hale playing ... a bloke?

Years ago I'd promised to track down and marry whoever voiced Leliana, even if they looked like Giant Haystacks. Fortunately they don't.

Well, just finished Blood Omen 2: Legacy of Kain. Its a cool game, from ps2 era. Characters have good voice actors and well made models. Main character is not good guy, he is not bad guy going good, he is not here for love, he is not here for friends or family, he is here for blood, revenge and power, he is a vampire btw. Story starts of interesting but losses some of its charm near the end. You gain hp and exp by sucking blood of enemy's or civilians you kill, awesome system in my opinion. You can take weapons, each one looking differently and having different (bloody) finishing move when you use fog to kill. Fighting can get clunky when fighting 2 or more enemy's. It has some puzzles but they are easy, game is mostly straight forward but levels are large and it gave me 15 hours of gameplay, for example I finished Arkham City in 12 hours. You may have crashes but that's easy to fix, just go to Google and type "Steam Blood Omen 2 crash" its really easy, takes 2 minutes to fix and I never had crash after that. There are three more games after this, all connecting into one big story. Dialog is really great, my favorite lines are :
- Kain, I'm dying
- Yes, you are
- I need you blood, please , you can save me
- I know. Tell me child, do you see me ruling Nosgoth
- Yes, yes, I see it now
- And you believe Nosgoth belongs to me?
- Yes Kain, please
- Then you may die, knowing the truth, you should have never betrayed me (kills him/her, dont want to spoil)

__________________
“By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.”

Great news on Pillars! Looking forward to playing that at some point.

I remember Legacy of Kain! I played the original one on I think PSOne? Or wait...was it SNES?? It might be that far back, now that I think of it...

27/03/2015

56 Herblore


75 Firemaking


67 Farming