toxicitizen

Dude, sto-- Well, as long as you realize you have a problem... I have a feeling the best way to help you is probably to force you to play that last one in its entirety before allowing you to buy or play anything else. Like the video game equivalent of a dad catching his kid with a cigarette and making him smoke the entire pack.

True but I'm not familiar with this publisher. They could end up being region-locked. And even if not, the ports might be complete garbage or have ridiculous online DRM (like the old Chinese ports) that makes it all a pain in the ass. Not exactly an ideal scenario.

Crossbell coming to Steam but... They also have pages up for all the Sen games, the first two being the KAI versions. As far as I can tell, none of them have the english loc. Just Chinese and Korean.

Completely off topic but this thread wasn't very active over the years so going back just a few pages was kind of a blast from the past. So many names I haven't seen in years. You guys remember FDS? Man, that guy was such a fucking dick lol.

Ah ok, yeah I don't really look at game reviews anymore tbh. I've come to realize they're completely useless to me. These days I just kinda know what I'm interested in. So either I'll buy the game regardless of review scores or I'll take a quick glance at metacritic and opencritic to know if I want to wait for a sale.

Yeah, this is one of those things where they're branding it like a fresh start and PR says it's a "perfect entry point for newcomers!" but if you ask fans they'll tell you you absolutely should not start there. Kinda like Cold Steel III. Basically never fucking trust PR. It's why I'm so annoyed they're dropping the 7 for the western release and trying to pass it off as a reboot. It's really not.

Enjoy it for both of us, man. I refuse to jump ahead, so no buying it for me until they put Y3-6 on PC.

...once the price drops a bit.

Wrapping up Witcher 3 just one achievement short of full completion was too annoying, I had to get my fix somewhere else! Also, freeing up that much space when I uninstalled it felt pretty good. So getting to uninstall these two as well served as extra motivation.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Well, ~10 months later I've finally reached the end of the Path. This is technically for Blood and Wine but I don't think I ever made a post for Witcher 3 proper, so here's the whole thing. It's been so long since I finished the base game that I don't really have much to say though. It was pretty incredible and completely consumed my entire existence for a solid month. The main story was kinda eh but a lot of the side-quests are fantastic and the world itself is just so easy to lose yourself into. I will say the main story loses a lot of steam near the end. After you find Ciri, things build up to a climax at the battle of Kaer Morhen but things just keep going from there and it never quite manages to get the same kind of momentum going. Then the actual climax feels a little unearned comparatively. But all in all, a fantastic game and I'm not sure what I could possibly say about it that hasn't been said a hundred times before. Hearts of Stone is just a damn solid quest line. It's honestly up there with the best from the main game, I was kinda surprised. It all takes place in the base game's map, though, so it doesn't feel as meaty as an expansion. Blood and WIne, though. In my Control post, I was going on about how story DLC that takes place outside the main game usually sucks and man does this one prove me wrong. I thought the main quest wasn't quite as good as Hearts of Stone but considering there's a ton of new side-quests, witcher contracts, a whole new tier of witcher gear and an entirely new area to explore (and a gorgeous one at that), I really can't complain. I'm really glad I post-poned this one until I had read the books, though, because I feel like I got so much more out of it now. They're not mandatory by any means but there are frequent mentions of Geralt's last time in Toussaint along with a major character from the books that shows up, so there's a lot I would've had no context for. Ultimately, Blood and Wine is like the Witcher 3 experience in a nutshell. It's to DLC what Witcher 3 was to RPGs for me: way longer/bigger than I'd normally want but I really didn't want it to end. Also, I've never regretted not playing on the hardest difficulty more than I do right now... When I started, I was worried Death March would be too frustrating but about 50 hours in I realized that if you do all the side-quests and witcher contracts then you end up so overleveled that the game becomes ridiculously easy. Guess that gives me an excuse to do New Game + at some point in the future. Ideally after the ray-tracing update drops and once I have a card that can run it.

I decided I should read more short fiction and the place I get my books from has all their Stephen King on sale for October. So, I did the natural thing: went completely overboard and bought most of his short fiction collections (along with a few of his novels that I really want to read.) The ones marked in red are those I already had. I also got this collection of 100 short stories by Ray Bradbury because you gotta have some Ray Bradbury. Can't just be all Stephen King all the time.

Goddamn, No Man's Sky?! I can understand some healthy skepticism but those are some abysmally low expectations lmao. Can't say I see where you're coming from at all. Especially since we've seen some pretty elaborate gameplay demos of Cyberpunk whereas the whole NMS thing mainly revolved around people deluding themselves into thinking there HAD to be more to the game that they were keeping under wraps for some mysterious reason. At this point, all I can say is that I sincerely hope you're as wrong as I think you are.

It's less embarassing that way. You're making a video game movie but also not really. Either that or Paul W.S. Anderson is such a hack that he can't conceive of another way of introducing and building that world. Just look at the weird fantasy world through the eyes of normal-ass soldiers. That's surely the most interesting way to go about it.

That was in response to what Thursday said, not to your purchasing decision. Also, when I say "best game ever" I just wanna clarify that I'm speaking specifically as a hardcore Deus Ex fanboy lol.

Aren't pretty much all of these things fairly typical of AAA game development to one degree or another? It sounds kinda bad when you put it all together like that but it's not like any single aspect of Witcher 3 is flawless, either. But the overall package still ends up being greater than the sum of its parts. At least, in my opinion. I know some people still like to go on and on about how the combat is somehow "bad" lol. Personally I'm not too worried. A part of me foolishly expects the best game ever made (lol) but I also know to realistically expect it to be rough in some ways, especially around launch. And even then, it HAS to end up being more interesting than Assassin's Creed, of all things. I'll take ambitious-but-flawed over assembly-line-cookie-cutter any day.

Probably something along the lines of "amount of work required to get game running on PS5 is not zero and game is unlikely to make us any more money", so the devs couldn't be bothered. Like, that list is mostly stuff I've never heard of, mediocre trash or Hitman Go. Shadow Complex is the only one I'd consider a game worth putting any effort into.

I was gonna wait until closer to launch but a friend surprised me with a Steam gift for my birthday. Why isn't it November 18 yet????

My main issue with Foundation was how formulaic it was. The new powers were cool but "Go there and interact with this altar kinda thing. Alright cool, now do it 3 more times" was just boring to me. Exploring the Oldest House in the main game was great because I never knew what weird shit I'd find around the next corner. Foundation was less interesting to me because it lacked that unpredictability. I'm assuming the whole thing with Former being out of the Astral Plane at the end is sequel bait. Which could be really cool if, you know, they actually follow up on it.

Control: Foundation and AWE DLCs Well, these certainly didn't do much to change my view that single-player DLC that takes place outside the main campaign is rarely all that great. It was more Control but it somehow lacked what made Control so great. I don't know if it was due to me taking a break between the base game and DLC or this just not working as well in short-form, but I just couldn't really get back into it. By the time I started the AWE questline (which is the thing I had been anticipating since starting the game), I was already checked out and ready for the game to be over. There wasn't much going on story-wise but what was there was fine. Foundation touched on some mysterious stuff from a main game side-quest but didn't really resolve anything. AWE obviously fleshed out the Alan Wake connection but here I enjoyed reading the documents about Bright Falls more than the actual events of the DLC. Also, that better be Alan Wake 2 they're teasing at the end because if they blue-ball us again on this I think I'm gonna have a hard time getting excited about anything Remedy makes in the future. Between never getting sequels/closure and every single game being caught in some shitty exclusivity deal, there's only so much I can take. I think I'll just brace myself for the worst and assume that IF Alan Wake 2 is actually happening (as opposed to just more Alan Wake-themed Control), then it's likely the game being funded by Epic's newly-established publishing arm. Which means it'll likely be a permanent EGS exclusive lol. That would be preferable to the game not existing but not by much...

Couldn't say no to more Spelunky. The good news is it's still good. The bad news is I still suck at it. Somehow worse than before. I mean I haven't played in a while but I honestly didn't expect my first run to actually end within sight of the entrance lol.