Topic: PC Gaming

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 ....

I'ma be honest.

Various Daylight looked downright horrible to me.

I'll report back when I've tried it .... You want Triangle Strategy for your deck, though?

I don't.

I've already got it on Switch where I'd prefer to play it with the OLED screen and 3 modes of play.

Deck, at least for me, is strictly for games that can't run on Switch, aren't on Switch, or have serious performance issues.

Haven't posted in here for a while as I was basically just talking to myself lol but it has been quite a slow year for the Switch for me, the next game I am really interested in is the new Pokemon in November, so almost all of my gaming has been on PC.

I tried out Steel Rising because it is a Souls with difficulty options (yes, the thing that they said could never be done). The game is admittedly pretty horrible which will set the discussion backwards I think sadly, even if the flaws are nothing to do with difficulty options. Although I do think in part the difficulty options were included because they knew the core combat model they had was horrid.

Cyberpunk dropped a small free patch; it got like another five hours out of me. There were some side missions and gigs I left unfinished before, so I used this as an excuse to go ahead and just clear them all off. The moment-to-moment gameplay in this game is so damn fun. It is weird, because I thought combat in the Witcher games sucked, so I dunno, maybe CDPR should have been making FPSs this whole time.

Plus, Night City is just a really cool space, so I just took some time to cruise around it, soaking it in before I uninstalled again. A pretty massive yikes to me they are dropping previous gen support and moving on to an expansion when I'd argue the game is still nowhere near where it was promised to be at launch but as I said earlier in the year, I have sorta made my piece with CP77 at this point.

CDPR deserve everything they got for how they handled this game, and I'll forever be sad at the game we got versus the game we promised, but as it stands today CP77 is a fun, eurojank, Far Cry like game and I can vibe with that.

I am now up to Chapter 13 with Like a Dragon, so I think I am almost done. I spent like a week just purely grinding as I heard about some infamous difficulty spikes in Chapters 12 and 14. I'd honestly say some of the earlier difficulty spikes are not talked about enough, and as such, they were bigger roadblocks for me as I just didn't see them coming. Knowing these others were ahead of me gave me a chance to do prep work and I was able to beat the Chapter 12 boss combo on my first try. Even being significantly over levelled it still got hairy towards the end, but I still got them down on my first try.

The Division 2 has also started a new season. This season seems a little lighter than some of the other ones and feels very much like a bridging season, but it includes a laundry list of QOL requests the players have requested and it is completely free, with an optional paid battle pass. It has also come with some pretty disastrous bugs (like one that means that if you have premium currency, the store will always use that, even if you are using your free currency and the store are currently refusing to refund as they have not yet acknowledged this. Yikes).

However, I am over 600 hours deep in Division 2. That might be rookie hours to some, but I haven't put that many hours into anything else ever I don't think and unlike say Destiny, which seemed to make me reach for my wallet every two minutes, Division 2 may be the most under monetised live service I've ever seen. I know, from Ubisoft. This really makes me want to spend money, rather than feeling preyed upon, so maybe it is all some kind of psychological long game that I am falling for, but I know that even if I include all the optional purchases I have made and divide it over the 600 hours, it is a fraction of what I paid for Destiny over a shorter space of time.

Haven't touched my laptop since I completed Stray back in July since I've been so busy with XC3 on Switch, and it's probably still gonna be a few weeks until I'm done.

I really should dig it out just to give it a run & see if it needs any updates.

I just had a realisation that in the last 12 months I spent ~$1000AU on a PC (re-used a GPU) and another ~$600AU on a Quest 2 with the intent on filling the void for the end of this Nintendo console cycle. And when I actually think about it the only game I've at all put any significant time into has been Beat Sabre. To the point where that's been pretty much the only thing I've been playing for the last two months

..... worth it

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but is there a way to tell when a game is going to leave Game Pass? I saw that Octopath Traveler is on there which I have wanted to play, but if it's going to leave like next month so there is no way I will be able to get through it, I don't want to start it.