toxicitizen

Am I misremembering or did you not do the Peralez quest line?

Yeah the main story is super short compared to Witcher 3. It's probably like 20 hours or so in total. Once you get to a point where it feels like things are picking up for real, you're basically done lol. I remember thinking I was like 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through at a particular mission but then my friend told me "Nah, it's the final mission after that." All I can say is don't be like Ethan and neglect all the side-content. The side-missions are the best part of the game by far. My favorite quest of the entire game is one of those questlines and I'm going to be super disappointed if the DLC doesn't pick up that particular plot thread.

It's been a while, so 50h may not be an accurate estimate (although I honestly think it may be too low). I can't imagine focusing solely on the main quest since getting lost in the world and just being a Witcher is like half the fun. I'd always investigate weird stuff I'd find out in the middle of nowhere and if I ran into a shitty village on my way somewhere I'd always take on any Witcher contract they had. Steam's timer obviously doesn't account for times when the game is left running or when you reload but this was after a single playthrough of the entire game : And yeah, in my experience, unless we're talking about short super linear games then howlongtobeat is almost always wildly inaccurate. I've been playing Midnight Suns and had almost 50h of playtime according to Steam. Story was ramping up and I figured I had to be nearing the end. But then I finish a big mission and the game is like "Part II" I turn up the difficulty every time I unlock a new one, though, so I end up having to do a ton of side-missions for resources and to level up my characters. I also spent a ton of time exploring the abbey early on and I've already almost cleared out the research tree. So before long I'll probably have nothing left to do but the main story missions.

How in the hell are you already done with both of them?! Hearts of Stone is a fairly lengthy quest line and Blood & Wine is basically its own open-world game. B&W alone easily added like 50 hours to my playtime.

The thing is, if they had ported FES then adding party control would surely have been trivial. But yeah, the rumor is there's a remake in the works so hopefully it's true because this is one game that badly needs it.

I'm super hyped to finally play Returnal and to replay TLoU. Haven't touched it since my one playthrough way back on PS3, so I've been itching to revisit it for a while now. Days Gone was like 12 bucks on GMG, which finally put it in "why the hell not" territory. And P3P, well... as disappointed as I am that that's the one they ended up porting, I still had to buy it. No idea when I'll even touch it, though, especially since I still need to finish P5R...

Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered Only took me 5 months but I finally finished this thing. I played through like half of the story back when it first came out but then Soul Hackers 2 came out and I wanted to play that before Persona 5 Royal. Oh and they just randomly dropped the Judgment Steam release on me in the middle of that, too. So Spider-Man just fell by the wayside. I would play a few hours of Spidey like once a month (which did wonders for the story's pacing!) but it never managed to fully suck me back in. Probably in part because every single time I'd completely forget how to play and would have to relearn. And since I was playing on Spectacular difficulty, that meant dying a lot. I think I finally realized the main reason I fell off the game while finishing it this week-end, though. So Friday night I decided I wanted to finish the campaign this week-end so I focused on main story missions and had a blast. Then Saturday afternoon I fired up the game and decided to do side-content. And after like an hour I felt like turning the game off. Turns out the side-content in this game kinda sucks! I don't know why it took me so long to realize this because I've seen people complain about it online but it had seemed fine to me while playing. I would play the game like I play all open-world games and just clear as much side-content as I could on my way between main story missions. But at some point I started consciously focusing on the side-content because I could tell I was nearing the end of the story and wanted to get as much of it done before wrapping the game up. And that's when the game becomes kind of miserable. My last few hours in the game were spent getting all the districts to 100%, which was mostly those randomly spawning crimes. And yeah, that... wasn't fun. The combat is great but just mindlessly clearing out groups of enemies just gets repetitive and dull. The main story is great, though. I really enjoyed that. And playing on Spectacular difficulty forced me to really get good at the combat and make use of all my gadgets, so that was fun, too. I still have the story DLCs to do but I don't know if I wanna get into those right now. I need to do a NG+ playthrough on Ultimate difficulty to get 100% of the achievements, anyway, and I'm definitely not doing that anytime soon. I imagine the sequel isn't coming to PC for at least another couple years so I have plenty of time to come back to the game.

Yeah, it's incredibly effective at giving you a defensive tool while still making you feel kind of helpless. And then there's a section where you have to willingly get rid of it and it's such a "well, I'm fucked!" moment.

Faith: The Unholy Trinity A friend gifted me this as a late birthday present around Halloween (I think the final chapter had just come out) but I only played the first two chapters then and sorta forgot about it until now. I only got around to playing the last chapter last night and holy fuck, this game is kinda nuts. If the name doesn't ring a bell, this is that horror game with Atari-like graphics but incredibly well-done animations. You've probably seen gifs of it online: Anyway, for a game with such low-fi graphics, it is insanely atmospheric. This is usually the kind of pre-NES graphics where I nope out. It's too visually hollow for me, I just can't get into it. Not this game, though. This fucking Atari-ass game actually got me with some of its jump scares and some sections had me more nervous than actual AAA horror games. I'm honestly kind of impressed. I may give it a replay next Halloween or whatever and try to get different endings.

Crisis Core -Final Fantasy VII- Reunion I dropped this pretty early on back in the day on PSP so I feel like this version of the game is a massive improvement over the original. At least, the combat seems like a massive improvement based on what I've seen on YouTube. I don't think I would've had the patience to clear all 300 missions in the original version. But in this one, once I started grinding them (with some youtube videos on my second monitor) and making myself a broken build, I just couldn't stop. The story is kind of uneven. Zack is a pretty likeable protagonist and all the bits with Aerith are great but holy shit, Genesis fucking sucks. I am really dreading finding out whether or not they're going to bring him back in Rebirth. The last few chapters of the game are pretty great but that mostly covers stuff you find out in FFVII. I'm a little surprised that they don't appear to have tweaked the story at all considering the direction the remake is going, though. I imagine they remastered the game right before Rebirth for a reason... Also, that secret boss Minerva can eat my ass. Completely unfair bullshit fight lol. You basically need a build specifically for her because otherwise she'll sneeze and one-shot you. My build probably wasn't optimal and she still one-shot me quite a few times (you can steal x99 Phoenix Downs from her and it's seriously not optional) but I eventually managed... Now I have to decide whether to start something new (Midnight Suns or Trails from Zero) or go back and finish the games I started months ago (Spider-Man and P5R)...

Well at this point they would've had like two years to play the game so I don't really see the problem here. Also hey, they can finally fully realize their vision of a single platform for all this content! Square-Enix dropping IOI really fucked up this whole trilogy's content release plans. I'm pretty sure Hitman 2 and 3 were supposed to just be seasons for Hitman 2016...

Not gonna play it any time soon (still need to play the Hitman 2 expansion levels and I want to 100% the game before moving on to Hitman 3) but they just announced they'll delist the first two games and rebrand Hitman 3 as Hitman: World of Assassination. It'll now include the H1 and H2 levels, so they'll also be jacking up the price. Since I already own the first two games, I decided to grab the game now while it's on sale. Oh and I forgot this one in my last post but I also got this: It was paired up with Gloomwood in a bundle on Steam, which immediately got me curious and then I realized I had seen a trailer for it a while back and it looked really cool. I still haven't touched the full version of Gloomwood but I'm always down for some retro immersive sims.

I had no idea the first game was due for a ray-tracing update. Thanks for the heads-up. Although, if recent similar updates are any indication, I'm starting to suspect my 3080 will turn out to be nowhere near as future proof as I expected it to be. I ended up deciding not to replay Witcher 3 right now because you basically need DLSS3's frame generation to get a decent framerate. It honestly runs like shit* on my 3080 and I wouldn't expect Plague Tale to be any different given how demanding the sequel apparently is. I'm sure my ultrawide monitor's resolution plays a role here, though. *by shit I mean consistently sub-60fps, which isn't a huge deal but it annoys the hell out of me considering how much I paid for the damn card and it's just low enough for gsync to not be able to help smooth things out

Already 33% off. I was considering it day one so why the hell not? Also grabbed some Age of Empires games (Definitive Editions) cause they were like 5 bucks each along with Which I've been meaning to get for a while now. It sounds right up my alley and I've been itching for a proper stealth game ever since it became obvious that there isn't going to be a third Styx game...

I never finished the PSP version back in the day so I'm glad I get to give the game another shot. I'm like 3 hours in and it's pretty fun so far.

I think this is one of those games where the critics are kinda missing the mark because apparently it's been doing insanely well on Game Pass, which is probably driving sales on other platforms like Steam as well.

Holy fuck did I speak too soon. From looking at pictures online, it seemed like a 32:9 monitor would be massive but a 21:9 (what I got) would only feel slightly larger than my old monitor. But no, this thing is huge! I had to rework some of my cable "management" just to get my two tiny speakers to fit on the desk alongside both monitors lmao. At this point, I'm just going to need a bigger desk, I think. My PC is close to the radiator, which is fine in summer since it's off, but now winter is coming and I no longer have anywhere to move it to. At least the side facing the radiator is the back chamber with only the cables and the PSU. The vent on that side is exhaust from the PSU, so at least it won't suck any hot air in. Hopefully that'll shield the rest of the PC from the heat somewhat... Edit: oh and while I'm here The thing about 40K is that it's so rad that it makes you want more 40K. edit2: Godammit, Darktide! They haven't made a 40K Total War yet so this will have to do for now.

Yeah, if you have a nice TV that you play PC games on then a high-end monitor probably isn't worth it. In my case, it's not just for games. My PC is basically my TV as well. I watch everything on it. That makes high-end monitors significantly more appealing. I'm sure eventually I'll want to upgrade again to a 32:9 monitor...

What's that? I bought a brand new monitor less than a year ago? Well, it's not an ultrawide ok?! Shut up, Ethan!!! But yeah, I've been eyeing this particular model all year and was already considering buying it as a personal reward/celebration. And then they finally announced the release date for the Witcher 3 update and gave me the final little push I needed.

1440p. I updated my drivers tonight and tried using DLSS on Performance mode and there was a noticeable improvement. The game could definitely use some more optimization but it's definitely manageable. And if you can live without ray-tracing then it's a non-issue.

With ray-tracing (at max settings) on it can barely hold 60fps on my RTX 3080 at the best of times. It'll shoot up in an elevator or whatever enclosed area but when shit's going down it dips pretty hard. The most demanding area is, weirdly enough, the main hub. My framerate drops to the low 40s in it. It looks absolutely incredible, mind you, but yeah. The game also kept crashing for my friend but that stopped (and performance really improved) once he turned ray-tracing off completely. He's on a 3060, though. I haven't done much tweaking yet but I'm hoping that with DLSS and the right settings I can get it to stay above 60fps even with ray-tracing on.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide I had briefly tried one of the betas a few weeks ago but my friends and I pre-ordered and finally had a proper co-op session last night. Holy fuck, this game is great! Like, Vermintide was super fun but 40K just makes everything better. They really nailed the 40K aesthetic so it's a real treat to see the grim darkness of the far future (where there is only war) done justice in such high fidelity. Can't wait to play more!

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story I've never been a huge Weird Al fan but I got curious about this when a friend of mine told me it's not a biopic and more of a Walk Hard-style parody that just happens to also be about Weird Al. And yeah, this is a pretty solid comedy. It's obviously mostly bullshit and at times barely even operates on real-world logic but I thought it was pretty fucking funny. I especially loved how

My friends and I played a shit ton of Vermintide 1 and 2, so this is a no-brainer.