What Are You Playing Right Now, Part 2: Daggerfall

[factotum]

Just count yourself lucky that Fallout: New Vegas wasn't done strictly by Bethesda and thus its coding isn't nearly as crash happy. Not to say that it doesn't have its bugs but it's not like anything Bethesda has spat out.

And there speaks someone who clearly never played the game when it was first released. NV was *known* for how buggy and crash-prone it was--Obsidian aren't the greatest at producing bug-free games in the first place, and when they're taking someone else's engine (supplied by Bethesda, note, so it's not like it was free of their programming touch) and pushing it to the limits of what it can do, things tend to break. A lot. It's a lot better nowadays, but even so, I think the game would crash about every fourth time I looked at the Pip-Boy map when I was going through the DLC the last time I played it.

[Wookieetank]

Picked up We Need to Go Deeper with some friends over the weekend. Its essentially Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime but in a submarine and in the ocean. Few notable differences though: you can only see inside the sub, or outside the sub, but not both at the same time. Your sub can be boarded by critters/tentacles/water, and must be dealt with accordingly. Wonderfully full of eldritch critters to run across and get eaten by and the art is delightfully charming, if at times horrifying.

[halfeye]

It is indeed brown. kind of true for Fallout in general I'd say.

Except 4.

I agree that New Vegas is better, I'm not sure about 3 (crashes way too much to bother with), and I've barely played one of 1 or 2 (was free in a multi-pack, don't remember which one I actually started...).

[Lord Duncho]

I've just started playing Divinity: Original Sin. Awesome game, I like the way they described the world. And the combat system is amazing - hundreds of methods for killing enemies.

And if you think the first one is awesome (which it is) just WAIT until you play D:OS2! The sequel is amazing and totally captivating. One of the best CRPG's of all time.

[Man_Over_Game]

Now playing Borderlands 2 with reckless abandon, since the new DLC means the level cap is increased and new characters can start at level 30.

Showed my wife the glory that is a Melee Krieg. Like playing Spin the Bottle with a chainsaw, and the person it points at has to kiss the chainsaw. She didn't believe me how effective Law and Order is (+100% melee damage, 100% of all melee damage is returned as HP), but god damn is it stupid. I also totally forgot that every Moxxi weapon causes you to regain HP from all sources while you hold them, including melee attacks.

New level 30 characters have a predetermined loadout, and Krieg happens to start with a Heartbreaker (Moxxi Fire Shotgun) with a bayonet (+50% melee damage), so it looks like the devs had Krieg in mind when they implemented those synergies.

She thought it was a little bit too...intense. Everything dies, all the time, including you, and some people apparently don't play video games to have a heart attack. So Melee Krieg doesn't work with her.

She decided that she wants to stick with elemental Maya, which is great. It's frustrating that Maya is the hardest character to level up (her Phaselock is really dull and nearly useless in many scenarios), but she's probably one of the most overpowered characters when it comes to clearing out mobs once she gets past the early game (level 20+). Maya's probably the character that has been the most improved with the new changes, by simultaneously removing her terrible early levels and granting more levels to abuse her insanely synergistic skill trees.

[GloatingSwine]

New Vegas is good. played it after trying FO4, and like New Vegas better

It is indeed brown. kind of true for Fallout in general I'd say. though it might also be the cowboy aesthetic. get used to that. its not going away any time soon.

The Mojave desert is also rather brown.

[OutOfThyme]

And there speaks someone who clearly never played the game when it was first released. NV was *known* for how buggy and crash-prone it was--Obsidian aren't the greatest at producing bug-free games in the first place, and when they're taking someone else's engine (supplied by Bethesda, note, so it's not like it was free of their programming touch) and pushing it to the limits of what it can do, things tend to break. A lot. It's a lot better nowadays, but even so, I think the game would crash about every fourth time I looked at the Pip-Boy map when I was going through the DLC the last time I played it.

Obsidian's level of polish is something of a joke normally, but considering that they got the engine and assets from Bethesda, and had something ridiculous like 18 months to ship the game, it's a miracle that installing the game doesn't cause your computer to implode.

It's still a great game, but having to install fixes so that I don't run into things like memory leak issues or crashes.

I just beat Baba Is You, which has to be the most brilliant logic puzzle game I've played in a while. And you get to usually control the weird sheep-thing that is Baba!

Also started playing Katana ZERO, which is a trip, and I love every second of it.

[Razade]

And there speaks someone who clearly never played the game when it was first released. NV was *known* for how buggy and crash-prone it was--Obsidian aren't the greatest at producing bug-free games in the first place, and when they're taking someone else's engine (supplied by Bethesda, note, so it's not like it was free of their programming touch) and pushing it to the limits of what it can do, things tend to break. A lot. It's a lot better nowadays, but even so, I think the game would crash about every fourth time I looked at the Pip-Boy map when I was going through the DLC the last time I played it.

Sure didn't. Played the game because other people wanted me to and even then it crashed. I refuse to give Bethesda any real amount of money. Not a big fan of open world games to start with but I don't think it's good practice to toss money at devs who think the words "quality control" actually means "patch it later."


In other news with E3 announcing some cool stuff from Nintendo...looking forward to a few of their announcements. Pokemon is a big one for me, already talked about that one in the relevant area. Having Smash the announcement for two more fighters in the DLC I already bought is pretty great. I'm a little confused why they went with Dragon Warrior (though I probably ought not be considering how old it is and beloved in Japan it is) and more than excited to hear that yes. Banjo-Kazooie will in fact be part of the roster. If you ask me that's a ship coming home far too late but not at all forgotten.

Trails of Mana...appears to just be a straight 3D remake or pastiche of every ... of Mana game that's ever come out. That doesn't at all mean I am not looking forward to it. It looked cool but ya know. That's what E3 is for and tempering ones hype to the knowledge that E3 is a trade show and is meant to look awesome. Breath of the Wild 2: Breathier and More Wild looks promising from the very brief bit we saw. Having enjoyed the last installment mostly in spite of the Open World-ness and all the problems that brings, if rumors and murmurings are true that 2 will be more refined with combat and less Open World is all the more promising. Also speaking of Zelda, more info on the remake to Links Awakening will tide me over until it and the next mainline series game comes out. I've owned at least four copies of it in the past. Pretty eager for the fifth. They showed off some added features including a Build a Dungeon. So that's cool.

Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics is....a weird little bag. It looks awful and Dark Crystal hasn't been relevant for 25 years. A cynical cash grab for a Netflix series if I ever saw. Most everything else was either not Nintendo Exclusive (Doom Eternal, Contra) or games that have been out for ages and are now finally coming to the Switch. Which is fine, the catalog getting bigger isn't a bad thing. Just not very exciting to me personally.

[OutOfThyme]

Trails of Mana...appears to just be a straight 3D remake or pastiche of every ... of Mana game that's ever come out. That doesn't at all mean I am not looking forward to it. It looked cool but ya know. That's what E3 is for and tempering ones hype to the knowledge that E3 is a trade show and is meant to look awesome.

Trials of Mana is Seiken Densetsu 3's remaster. The game came out on the SNES in '94, and was never released outside Japan, aside from a certain fan translation. I really enjoyed SD3 as a game, so I'd recommend it. I'd probably wait for the remaster, since you're getting overhauled graphics and maybe a few quality of life changes.

So yeah, it's a game that very few people have touched, but it's my favorite Mana game. The soundtrack has some killer tracks that I'm super looking forward to in higher quality. The Flammie theme just puts the biggest grin on my face because it's so cheerful.

[tonberrian]

I'm finishing up Battle Chasers: Nightwar. It's a fun little JRPG romp starring the cast of the Battle Chasers comic, apparently, and it does enough things right that I'm happy I bought it.

[Anonymouswizard]

And there speaks someone who clearly never played the game when it was first released. NV was *known* for how buggy and crash-prone it was--Obsidian aren't the greatest at producing bug-free games in the first place, and when they're taking someone else's engine (supplied by Bethesda, note, so it's not like it was free of their programming touch) and pushing it to the limits of what it can do, things tend to break. A lot. It's a lot better nowadays, but even so, I think the game would crash about every fourth time I looked at the Pip-Boy map when I was going through the DLC the last time I played it.

Yeah, I tend to give Oblivion games a pass at launch for this reason. I like them, I'd have Pillars of Eternity still installed if I could be asked to rip out my laptop's SSD and replace it with a 500GB one (it's theoretically possible, and I really should do I can have some more games installed on the thing*), but the bugs.

Now I think NV with hardcore mode is probably my favourite Fallout game, and probably my favourite open world game in general. But yeah, it's not strictly soaking the most stable of them. Although I haven't touched Fallout 4 yet, my only PC and consoles are still 'last gen'.

* Or get an external SSD I suppose, might be better.

[Man_Over_Game]

Trying out the new Xbox Game Pass thing.

Getting it on PC alone is like $5 a month, so it's a decent enough deal. Got that new Metro game, State of Decay 2, and Into the Breach (made by the makers of FTL), so I got a lot to sink my teeth into this weekend.

Any suggestions for any of those games? I haven't played any Metro game, ItB, and I did beat State of Decay 1.

[oxybe]

I'm one of the oddballs more excited for dragon warrior Hero then Banjo.

Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda on the NES played a huge part into getting me into fantasy, and eventually D&D and RPGs in general. Still got a NES DW cart on my shelf, just because I can.

The mechanics of the character actually look interesting IMO. Sine he has the DW skill menu and we saw the different versions of the base character, i want to believe that each alt colour is going to represent a different DW hero over a palette swap and they may be somewhat customizable a-la Mii Fighter, since highly customizable heroes is a DW staple.

Don't get me wrong: I'm hyped for Banjo, but DW as a series has far more significance for me.

[Yora]

I just finished Warcraft 3 for maybe the seventh time, and the expansion for the fourth.

Still a really good game. There's just nothing that I find being done poorly in this game.

Now I am getting back to playing Baldur's Gate for my second attempt to make it all the way through the series. I finished the first game probably six times over the years, but made it to and through Throne of Bhaal only once eighteen years ago.

[Neptunas123]

I'm still rocking the living hell out of GTA V Online... :D Been playing the game for over two years no stop, it serves as a great stress-reliever, and if you have some friends to smash the lands with cooperatively - the whole thing gets even better! <3

Also,

Alongside the GTAV which is like the thing I don't even consider 'playing' but it's rather a part of my routine, I've also just recently acquired No Man's Sky (tbh for a really awesome price)... and... I feel that it's slowly turning into my new passion. =D

So yea.. these two. :D

[Triaxx]

Fallout 4 in my experience has been almost absurdly stable. I have had about 2 crashes in around 500 hours of play.

[Razade]

Fallout 4 in my experience has been almost absurdly stable. I have had about 2 crashes in around 500 hours of play.

But you have to admit that that isn't indicative of the overall experience with the game right? That's just the nature of games, a subjective experience based on a lot of mitigating factors. The issue is that those mitigating factors don't seem to be very narrow. Review after review after review of the game, not just at launch but in perpetuity it seems, makes mention that the game is buggy. It is a running joke that people own Fallout 3 and would like to play it but they can't. Why? Because it crashes. Hell, I'm in that boat. I'm pretty sure someone else in this thread made the same statement about the same game.

The biggest problem for me, as a consumer, is that Bethesda doesn't seem to mind either the reputation or have a plan in place to fix the problem. They don't have a plan in place to fix the bugs that are present in their games at launch as indicated by the fact that people are still dealing with game crashes and graphical glitches and they absolutely and most certainly don't have any plans to fix problems as they arise which is something pretty much every Triple A video game company in the modern age has no excuse for. In the age of the Triple A "Always Connected" mantra, hot fixes and more significant patches should just be a way of life. Indie companies with four people running them are expected to do this, why aren't we holding them accountable?

Why is the general tone when Bethesda (aside from Fallout 76 and we'll get to that wrinkle) releases a game like having a dog that pees on the rug every now and then? Yeah you're upset but damn if it isn't cute. That seems the wrong way to handle crappy business practices. The dog at least can be trained not to pee on the rug, Bethesda seems incapable of learning from these mistakes or just feel emboldened by the general lack of pushback. There are smaller teams with vastly smaller budgets that release games with minor bug issues and patch those out when they arise. I'm not saying there's a game out there that's bug free, but there are companies doing their part to at least fix the problem for better quality of life for their costumers.

It's only recently that some of these chickens have come home to roost though I doubt it will come to much. This would be the absolute crapstorm of bad press they got over Fallout 76. Not just because Fallout 76 made all the single player fans of the series angry for diverging from the formula...that's at least praiseworthy...but because Fallout 76 was and still is a slogging buggy catastrophe. The response from the company also has something to do with that but...that's been Bethesda's MO for years. Mostly. The whole affair about not giving people canvas bags because they were deemed to expensive except wait! They totally made canvass bags and gave them to people who promoted Fallout 76 and no it's totally ok we'll just give you some ingame currency but not nearly enough to actually buy anything in the digital store...the issues go on and on. Internet Historian has an amazingly good video detailing the blunder for people interested in seeing the whole crapsack tale. We can laugh about the ill-thought out lawsuit against Mojang when they made Scrolls (a game they didn't have any reason to fear in hindsight) but they've had much more vicious legal battles. One of which over the rights to Fallout's IP but Bethesda's a symptom of the larger issue in the Triple A dev community.

tl;dr - Just because your game didn't crash much doesn't indicate it's not a problem with Fallout 4 in specific and Bethesda in general in the face of just overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I'm one of the oddballs more excited for dragon warrior Hero then Banjo.

Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda on the NES played a huge part into getting me into fantasy, and eventually D&D and RPGs in general. Still got a NES DW cart on my shelf, just because I can.

The mechanics of the character actually look interesting IMO. Sine he has the DW skill menu and we saw the different versions of the base character, i want to believe that each alt colour is going to represent a different DW hero over a palette swap and they may be somewhat customizable a-la Mii Fighter, since highly customizable heroes is a DW staple.

Don't get me wrong: I'm hyped for Banjo, but DW as a series has far more significance for me.

I'm equally hyped for both. The Hero certainly looks more interesting from a moves standpoint. Banjo and Kazooie's moves, or what we've seen of them, are pretty much blow for blow what I imagined they would be when I first heard they were a possible roster addition. Kazooie for the up special, shooting eggs another, a wing dash and an exploding egg for the remaining two...they're staples of the games but not really impressive.

The Hero most certainly has different costumes instead of a palette swap much like Link or Bowser Jr. I doubt we'll see a customization move list though even if it's a thing for the series. Obviously this is speculation but we saw a list of spells they had, all of them having been shown off in the trailer and an MP gauge. It's more likely they'll be like Shulk and you'll get to change between them and that'll be that.

[deuterio12]

I'm one of the oddballs more excited for dragon warrior Hero then Banjo.

Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda on the NES played a huge part into getting me into fantasy, and eventually D&D and RPGs in general. Still got a NES DW cart on my shelf, just because I can.

The mechanics of the character actually look interesting IMO. Sine he has the DW skill menu and we saw the different versions of the base character, i want to believe that each alt colour is going to represent a different DW hero over a palette swap and they may be somewhat customizable a-la Mii Fighter, since highly customizable heroes is a DW staple.

Don't get me wrong: I'm hyped for Banjo, but DW as a series has far more significance for me.

You and probably most people in the east too since Dragon Warrior's massively huge there for being the first "classic" rpg. However in the west it ended up overshadowed by Final Fantasy that technically came next in Japan but was released to the rest of the world first, and been basically lagging outside Japan since then.

Also unlike Banjo, DW actually had a new game in the recent decade (plus lots of spin-off stuff in Japan).

In a way the simultaneous reveal of Banjo and DW heroes are a great way of appealing to the wider crowd.

[Triaxx]

Okay, wow, holy mother of Wall of text rants.

Yes, Fallout 3 is unstable. 76 my experience is limited to about 15 minutes of play time. I am not absolving Bethesda of responsibility, but I am also not falling to the trap of accentuating only the negatives in a false attempt to engineer outrage. The fact you're telling me all about launch issues and bad reviews tells me that inspires of your previous experience, and the wealth of knowledge you had available, you still chose to buy.

If you really feel that strongly, stop buying. Vote with your wallet, but understand I'm going to vote my way.

[Razade]

Okay, wow, holy mother of Wall of text rants.

Yes, Fallout 3 is unstable. 76 my experience is limited to about 15 minutes of play time. I am not absolving Bethesda of responsibility, but I am also not falling to the trap of accentuating only the negatives in a false attempt to engineer outrage. The fact you're telling me all about launch issues and bad reviews tells me that inspires of your previous experience, and the wealth of knowledge you had available, you still chose to buy.

If you really feel that strongly, stop buying. Vote with your wallet, but understand I'm going to vote my way.

The majority of the "rant" wasn't really directed at you, it was just expressing an opinion that came about from your post. I haven't bought them, short of Fallout 3 which ya know. That game came out 11 years ago. I haven't spent a dime on Bethesda's stuff since then. I'm not talking about launch issues either, in fact that was my point. The problems have persisted well past launch. Fallout 3 is, for a not insubstantial number of people, unplayable. For eleven years. A review isn't bad if they're pointing out wide scale problems with the game. That's called an accurate review. A bad review would be one that didn't indicate issues with bugs and performance issues as if they didn't exist or a select few people didn't experience them. This isn't false outrage, it's justified. You'd never eat at a restaurant again if they consistently mucked your order about. I'm just arguing, also practicing, not doing it for my video games.

[Anteros]

And there speaks someone who clearly never played the game when it was first released. NV was *known* for how buggy and crash-prone it was--Obsidian aren't the greatest at producing bug-free games in the first place, and when they're taking someone else's engine (supplied by Bethesda, note, so it's not like it was free of their programming touch) and pushing it to the limits of what it can do, things tend to break. A lot. It's a lot better nowadays, but even so, I think the game would crash about every fourth time I looked at the Pip-Boy map when I was going through the DLC the last time I played it.

I've honestly never had a problem with any of these games crashing. Maybe I'm just incredibly lucky, or maybe it's because I typically don't install a thousand mods. I've had a few crashes, but that's to be expected in hundreds of hours of gameplay. Maybe one every 20 hours or so?

[OutOfThyme]

Honestly, it always struck me as bizarre that Bethesda was so lazy that they'd allow the community to provide fixes for their own buggy, broken games. I don't blame Obsidian for New Vegas being a buggy mess because of the 18 month development cycle, but when Bethesda, a larger company, has more time and manpower to make a game and still releases a buggy, glitchy mess, it's just downright disgraceful. I'm a little glad that they've gotten a bit of comeuppance with both Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls: Blades, but I still doubt that will make them any more competent.

In other news, I'm way more excited for Trials of Mana in HD. Nintendo had a segment as part of Nintendo Treehouse that showed it off, and it having the music remastered takes everything to the next level. Only thing I'm a little concerned about is if they've changed the grind for the 2nd job upgrade. Astral Chain and Daemon X Machina both look pretty neat too, but I only have so much money that I can throw at my Switch.

Also, beat Katana ZERO yesterday. Boy, that was an insane game. Literally.

Probably going to restart playing Witcher 3, or try to beat 4 Boss Cells mode in Dead Cells.

[halfeye]

I didn't find NV buggy. The one that was buggy for me was Fallout 3, it would sometimes hang on the loading screen, sometimes between scenes, that wasn't too bad to start with but it got worse as time went on, eventually it just mostly wouldn't load. New Vegas was always better than that.

Fallout 4 hasn't been buggy for me either, there are one or two places where the surface looks very bad (out of focus or something) and you can fall through it, and take damage, which might be lethal depending on how far you fall, but I always thought that was deliberate, strange but deliberate.

[Anonymouswizard]

The problems have persisted well past launch. Fallout 3 is, for a not insubstantial number of people, unplayable. For eleven years.

I didn't have the best experience with Fallout 3 when I first got it. Mainly because despite being above the required specs my machine couldn't run it. Could get to the menu, but trying to start a game? Nah, would crash.

After over a decade I finally managed to get my copy working. It turns out that because I mainly use laptops (when you're one of five siblings you can't all have desktops, and when you have your own machine it's harder to get time on the one desktop in the house) and didn't have a massively expensive gaming laptop I have to trick the game into thinking I have a different graphics card. Once I do it's incredibly stable for me, but that's because I mod it up right after.


So I've started Pokémon Sun, and picked Litten as my starter because it's a kitty (and I'm going to have to find an everstone because that final evolution looks terrible). It's fun, I'm liking the increased focus on story as much as I did back in White, but there's just all those little annoyances. The lack of variety in the opening area meaning that my team isn't as balanced as I'd like, as well as the game's pressure to fill out my team despite the fact that I had a full six before I got to the festival. Plus how it took so long until trainer customisation became available.

[Rodin]

Finally finished off CrossCode. All the feels, man. Trying to decide if I want to go back and finish off any end-game quests I might have missed, go kick some heads in the arena, or start a fresh playthrough to actually beat Emilie in some of the dungeon races (she whooped me 5-0, I suck at puzzles). Best Secret of Mana-like that I've played since Seiken Densetsu 3.

[Triaxx]

Fair enough, though I think Games for Windows Live did a lot to destabilize Fallout 3.

[LibraryOgre]

Fair enough, though I think Games for Windows Live did a lot to destabilize Fallout 3.

I wish anyone had learned from that particular Charlie Foxtrot.

[Erloas]

I've honestly never had a problem with any of these games crashing. Maybe I'm just incredibly lucky, or maybe it's because I typically don't install a thousand mods. I've had a few crashes, but that's to be expected in hundreds of hours of gameplay. Maybe one every 20 hours or so?

I will say that I simply don't remember Fallout 3 because I didn't find the game engaging at all, so all these years later I simply don't remember if it crashed. But Fallout NV crashed constantly for me, in all of the same ways that everyone else reports. That was with zero mods. I installed a few mods specifically to fix some issues (stuttering and crashing) and while the stuttering mostly went away it crashed just as much as before. It was always on transitions though, so if I was running around the wastelands a lot I could go a long time between crashes, but head into a city where you're going through transition doors regularly and it crashes regularly.
I think it is telling that a lot of companies used the older Gamebyro engine, and had similar sorts of issues, (but that was a lot more expected of the time) but virtually every other company switched to different game engines while Bethesda just keep on with that engine (just renamed it so it was less obvious).


Although I didn't come here to talk about the mess that is Bethesda.

I just recently started Dauntless, mostly because of the LRR crew. Was kind of surprised to find nothing at all about the game in a search here. Just wondering if anyone else was playing and any thoughts on the game.

[Resileaf]

Playing the Warpath campaign in Total War Empire as the Iroquois on hard...

It turns out that the US are hard-coded to declare war on the first turn. Then France, Spain and the Dutch follow up with war declarations of their own in the following turns, and the British refuse to help for anything else than the Americans. I've restarted the campaign three or four times now, trying to find some way to stay afloat, but I'm drawing a bit of a blank.

[Triaxx]

NV's big issue is that it doesn't clear it's caches properly. You basically need to purge the cell buffers every time you change areas to keep the crashing and load times down. A couple mods, notably NV Interiors, and A World of Pain both had issues with crashing because they had so much clutter it'd do horrible things to the cell buffers.

I keep trying to play new things... and then go back and play the good ones I've already learned. It's a bad habit.