Topic: PC Gaming

I picked up Watchdogs Legion as I was in the mood for an urban open world. I am only about 5ish hours in, but man, this game is so impressive to me and so terrible to me, almost at the same time.

Firstly, the setting, I know Americans think the UK is just London and some vague countryside around it, but it actually isn't... that. Had we got another game set in London a couple of years ago, I probably wouldn't have cared. Give me a UK based game set in literally any other city, please.

However, with the pandemic basically killing all of my options for travel, Ubisoft urban open worlds are honestly a real treat. They offer a level of detail, recreation and one to one scaling really unlike anyone else is doing. I probably spent the first couple of hours of my playthrough just zipping from recognisable landmark to recognisable landmark, nostalgically dreaming about the days before the pandemic.

That said, reminiscent of Night City perhaps, you only need to spend a couple of hours in this London for the novelty to start wearing off and for you to really start noticing how lifeless the whole place is. From the immersion shattering Americanisms that should have never got by QA, to the repetitive, ham-fisted, exposition podcasts looping on the radio, to how buggy the game still is even today despite post launch support ending (including even a glitchy, bugged out, bench marking tool unlike anything I have seen) to just how surface deep everything is. Even shops aren't something you enter, you access from your phone on the outside.

Then there is stuff like all the procedural generation randomness, which is initially such a cool concept, but it is clear we aren't quite there yet with this tech. Almost all of my recruits sound exactly like someone fed a bunch of text through a text to speech bot. I know that is what they are, but I thought the illusion was meant to be there that they weren't? And they do mix in actual performances in between the robot voices, so it just makes the text to speech bots all the more obvious. I started to wish I was playing as just one character who was properly acted.

Then there is the gameplay. I have always liked the amount of options Watch Dog games gave you to approach a task, and that is no different here either, but much like with the London it is set in, I feel like a lot of these mechanics lack any real depth. If you think of each encounter like a puzzle to be solved, the number of individual puzzles is quite small and it becomes pretty easy to stop exploring out of the box solutions and to instead just go through the motions. I guess that is more of a me problem, than the games problem, as I could still experiment if I wanted but I wish they incentivised it more or just built up your options for longer so you got to use certain toys more before their use ends. I dunno.

ooh, very nice, I've been a fan of the SCP foundation for a long time now, and it's cool that another game is coming out. 😲

yeah, what actually proppeled me into the SCP universe so long ago, was the containment breach game, it was fascinating for me at the time. 😉

ah the old website. 😁
https://www.scpcbgame.com

also the new multiplayer looks interesting.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1782380/SCP_Containment_Br...

I am about 20ish hours into Watchdogs Legion now and just feel like I have come around on it so utterly, I really love this game, warts and all. Like yeah, the world is plastic and lacking the kind of dynamic events we have come to expect, it is also way buggier than it feels like it should be. However, the recruitment system is so compelling, the sandbox and variety of ways you can engage with each mission is just so freeing and all the wayward ambition charms, more than it frustrates, because at least they were trying to innovate, even if the tech may not be there yet to fully realise it all.

I feel kinda sorry for this game that it got met with a mostly mixed reception and then disappeared. I hope in a few years time it gets the recognition it really deserves.

Glad to hear that, @Pizzamorg .... I had a lot of fun with that game! I started with one guy because he was the 'best' of the available options but pretty much everyone I recruited after that was a girl, lol

I am just spending so much time recruiting so many people, I can't believe how many "classes" and "perks" you can find, and I love dressing them up in random, silly, outfits. I think the game does a really great job in representing the wide array of races and cultures you would find in London. Probably the only generic white guy I have is my spy character I hired (who has one of the most robotic sounding voices out of anyone, weirdly enough). The spy class is really awesome.

I made a little gallery of some of the touristy shots I took around London with some of my recruits here: https://postimg.cc/gallery/sgJwSxT

Yeah, I soon felt like I had plenty of good people that to use for the missions, @Pizzamorg .... Nice shots, though

Bit of a weird one, but I picked up AC Syndicate. There is a crossover with Syndicate in Legion, which got me intrigued. I am very much of the camp where I played AC when it was new, dabbled here and there over the years, but basically stopped caring about AC entirely until it was basically a whole different game come Odyssey (one of my favourite games of all time).

Learning that Syndicate seems to be somewhat of a black sheep, caught in the awkward teenage phase where it includes a bunch of classic AC Hallmarks, but it is very much a testing ground for a lot of the gameplay innovations to come, had me intrigued. Origins feels very much like Odyssey light and so I wondered what a step further back from that would look like.

You have two protagonists for example, which you can switch between. There is a light gear game, but it isn't the full on looter it would later become. It has Arkham style combat and a lesser emphasis on pure stealth, but you aren't quite as superhuman as you would go on to become in later titles. Not to say the combat isn't actually surprisingly fun, with some really excellent animations both for combat, but also for counters and various stealth kills. It also has a mixture of automated and manually controlled parkour as you dance along rooftops, staying out of the eyeline of the gangsters who control the streets below.

I have only played for a couple of hours, but those opening few hours are very impressive. Both of the protagonists get introduced in two big set piece missions that are loads of fun. The London depicted here is gorgeous and actually feels slightly more alive than Legion's London (but maybe that'll wear off as time goes on) and honestly after playing a lot of Legion's non lethal brand of stealth and hacking, going to a game where it just says "hey, kill everyone", is quite nice.

I also usually just go for pretty ladies when I play games, but the interplay and unique elements of each protagonist and the fact they both have individual uses and gear games is actually somewhat of a better idea than what they do with this choice later on.

But hey, good on SG.

I'll wishlist it, sure.

Dishonored is literally being sold at $2. Yeesh, how the mighty has fallen. Remember how popular this game used to be back in the day? I know Steam sales are supposed to be like that, but this puts even bargain bin items in 2022 to shame.

I see Soul Hacker's 2 is getting somewhat mixed reviews, but if it is a turn based JRPG I am there. It is a shame it is not coming to Switch, but I guess PC it is.

wondering if this VR bundle is worth getting or not. Kinda leaning towards no....
https://www.humblebundle.com/games/valiant-vr

I kinda feel like the VR gaming market is still pretty thin. Lots of games that are sold purely on the fact that they are "VR games" rather than being solid games that happen to be in VR. I don't think I'd be at all interested in any of the games in that bundle if they weren't VR

Saints Row is looking like a complete disaster. It looks like the urban open world might be the most cursed game genre in history, as this conjures up memories of launch Cyberpunk and the "Definitive" GTA collection. Maybe most damning of all is their social is radio silent, even hours after the embargo lifted.

Honestly a real shame, I was rooting for this one to win as I love urban open world games and we don't get a huge bunch, but yikes.

Yeah, I hoped it'd be good .... I've seen several reviews & they're all pretty bad! Doesn't seem like the sort of issues that can really be fixed, either, unlike Cyberpunk

Yeah, I was really hoping Cyberpunk would be a wakeup call for the industry, but it turns out absolutely nothing has changed.

I am playing through Ghostwire Tokyo and I rarely feel like I line up 1 for 1 with the general consensus on a title but on this one... I do.

It is visually one of the most impressive games in existence right now, if you love rich environmental storytelling that isn't like fantasy or whatever, you are gonna be spending hours in the photo mode for this one. The combat also feels really great to begin with and during the more curated sections of the game, it really shows what this might have been.

But man, it feels like they finished the first three or so hours of this and then tossed out the rest in a weekend. Boring, antiquated, open world design. Only four weapons in the whole game that can be buffed with a skill tree but never meaningfully changed (and all unlocked within the first couple of hours). An initially really intriguing story which quickly becomes more and more hard to follow.

And probably my biggest gripe of all, and I hate this in every game that does this, sections where they take all of your powers away forcing you to stealth your way through extremely frustrating sections that block off progress. Why are we still doing this? It has never been implemented well, please burn this decision brief.

So Soul Hackers 2 dropped at like 5am or something weird here in the UK and I have been working, so really only been able to put in a couple of hours. Gotta be honest, those early first impressions are kinda mixed.

I wanted to support this as traditionally turn based RPGs seem to be a dying breed, but I gotta be honest, this does just feel kinda dated and budget to me. Like I dunno whether it is just a victim of circumstance, but I recently decided to give Like a Dragon another go after bouncing off of it around release due to the sheer volume of cutscenes in ration to gameplay. And weirdly, the two games are structurally very similar on a lot of ways.

However, whereas Like a Dragon kept traditional turn based combat (with optional QTEs if people wanted it), having it be seamless transitions into the space you are in, having people move around the space, having people actually connecting their blows on one another and having contextual events triggering depending on what is around a character just gave that combat a sense of life, a dynamic of moderness, even if it is all mostly smoke and mirrors.

Going back to turn based combat where you just statically stand there, most attacks fire from range so characters never actually connect to one another, with really lifeless environments that are used over and over again like... it is all fine, serviceable, stuff and I'd rather this than them layering it with loads of real time gimmicks but I dunno. But Like a Dragon shows turn based combat doesn't need to be this kind of stiff and flat set of exchanges that put people off of these titles, that a turn based game can be vibrant and energetic and feel like it is in real time, without having to lose that traditional turn based core.

Likewise, you think of Like a Dragon's maps and use of space, and then compare it to here where you load into these tiny zones you can barely move around in with almost no meaningful interaction or discovery. I dunno, it just makes this feel so cheap and dated.

There are some nice stylisations, and some of the use of colour is terrific, but so far this feels more to me like one of the Atlus handheld remasters than a game that has been truly built from the ground up for modern gamers and hardware. Like why this isn't on the Switch, when SMT V is (and that game is a way more modern feeling game) is just bizarre to me. I know V had some serious technical issues, so maybe that is a part of it, but again, this is a way more stripped back experience than SMT V ever was.

Well so far, anyway. Like I say, I am only a few hours in, I haven't really had a chance to engage meaningfully with any of the systems yet and so far the story is so all over the place and is introducing so many characters so quickly, I don't feel like I have a true grasp on this game yet and will reserve more weighted judgements until I have spent more time with it over the weekend.

Maybe it is a by-product of getting older and consuming so much media, but it is rare for me to experience something that truly moves me. I might still enjoy plenty of media, but I'll forget about it as soon as it is over, as it had no lasting affect on me.

That has made Like a Dragon such a special journey for me. I can't remember the last time something made me laugh, cheer and cry even just in general, but the power of this game to do it quite as often and deftly as this does is something else entirely.

Like take this scene below. The use of framing and blocking, the use of direction, the facial animation, the performances, the beautifully written characters like this is just so far above and beyond what you usually get in video games. This game just never fails to floor me.

Wow, I missed the announcement of Various Daylife & it's bundled with the upcoming Triangle Strategy on Steam ....