What games have you been playing lately?

rsh118

Playing the arse off Civ V, winning peacefully all the time.

jebi1717

sorry forgot. I just use my ps4 for retro.. Snes and arcade don't really bother with ps4 games. prefer the old PC Dos/windows games of old. Sim City and Dungeon Keeper / Ultima / Laser Squad / Lords of Chaos etc.

Links234

jebi1717 wrote: »

is it better than Far cry 4. ?

Well, can't personally compare because I didn't like Far Cry 3 at all, so didn't get 4. I will say that I enjoyed MGSV immensely, but with the caveat that it was an unfinished mess that was missing an entire ending. That said, it was some absolutely insane fun until the end, you could attach balloons to goats.

chrislad

Links234 wrote: »

Well, can't personally compare because I didn't like Far Cry 3 at all, so didn't get 4. I will say that I enjoyed MGSV immensely, but with the caveat that it was an unfinished mess that was missing an entire ending. That said, it was some absolutely insane fun until the end, you could attach balloons to goats.

MGSV was good, though it's very much a jack of all trades, master of none. If they had done less with the whole building a base, and recruiting, and focused more on the story, it would have been a lot better. The graphics are great, the environments are lovely, and it's fun, but once I hit the end of the Act One, I lost interest very quickly.

Robert ninja

Man this game would've been saved if they hadn't buttfecked MGO3 and made some urban area maps or something even half as good as black site from GZ. The brown, barren wastelands from the main campain are so boring. It's a shame to see such a polished game and amazing engine be wasted like that. And we know it'll never be used again because Konami are pretty much copyright trolls at this point.

Links234

chrislad wrote: »

If they had done less with the whole building a base, and recruiting, and focused more on the story, it would have been a lot better.

That's the biggest problem with the game, so many timesink mechanics to get you to pay for microtransactions, and it was just padded out beyond belief. You could tell all that crap was shoehorned in there. A few more well designed levels like the opening hospital scene and the Shining Lights mission would've been amazing.

dpnr

Been playing a lot of bioshock infinite, skyrim and fallout nv lately

Gbear

I decided, ****it, there's no point penny pinching over stuff you like, so I bought a bunch of packs in Hearthstone.

It beats buying a bunch of Steam games I'll never play.

Been having a bit of fun with Malygos.

Having 60 damage in hand from 0-4 cost spells is good craic.

With Emperor Thorissan you can end up playing pretty much your whole hand full of spells, possibly even the same turn as Malygos if you're lucky.

It's slightly galling how much you have to spend or grind to get the really interesting, game changing cards, but **** it, I've spent enough time on it having not spent a penny so in value for money terms Hearthstone isn't any worse than any other game.

LFC CONNAUGHTON

Gbear wrote: »

I decided, ****it, there's no point penny pinching over stuff you like, so I bought a bunch of packs in Hearthstone.

It beats buying a bunch of Steam games I'll never play.

Exactly how I felt buying CS GO skins recently

Robert ninja

Indeed. Any game you're spending possibly hundreds of hours in is worth an investment if the business model is done right. I mean if you consider the game as good as any other full-priced game and you really like it then it's worth about as much money, no?

Most people fail to see it as an investment, though. They see it as 'giving in'. Meanwhile they'll spend god knows how much dosh on all the walking simulators that the industry is popping out that have about as much content as pringles can after its been opened around stoners with the munchies.

Nope, your giving in. I haven't played heartstone but it sounds like there is a pay to win model in there somewhere, or just grind to get good cards. It's the typical f2p model. Everything is free and easy at first, they wait until your hooked then they make the wait times longer and you need to grind for far longer... Or just pay a tiny amount. Sure it's only a euro here and a euro there. Well everyone else is paying a small amount so why not. Suddenly you've dropped a hundred euro on a game. Maybe heartstone isn't that bad.

You can justify it in any way you want but I refuse to support not only this business model but the games that have been created specifically to bleed people. The more you pay, the more you are telling them that micro transactions are okay. It's an investment? Lol. You're investing in the continuation of terrible manipulative f2p games. It's your hard earned money, you can do what you want with it.

ED E

Wow, you've a chip on your shoulder. Hearthstone isn't P2W.

LOL - perfectly fine
WOT - perfectly fine
TF2 - perfectly fine
...

There are games that are P2W but that doesn't mean the model is bleeding society. Games aren't offline anymore, there's OPEX. If you charge €60 for a game then that pays for development and running expenses for 2, maybe 3yrs. 4yrs in the servers are gone, games useless. But if theirs a revenue stream continued if they're kept live...

I definitely do have a chip on my shoulder. The entire mobile game market is saturated with utter tripe. Pick any of those EA games. They begin with how to bleed the players and then develop a game around that.

Varik

People use P2W to a lot more than fare, most of the time the free game is just a grind and paying just removes the extra added pain.

Most F2P games are just exploitative, not pay 2 win.

chrislad

I've put countless hours into HearthStone. I've probably spent about 15 or so on it (on expansions) , but I know the vast majority of cards and the expansions have been paid with in game currency, rather than cold, hard, cash. It's definitely not a P2W game, as you can buy 50 packs of cards, with no guarantee you'll get the best ones.

Maximus Alexander

I saw footage of Mafia 3 which made me go back and start playing through Mafia 2 again. It's... a game that troubles me. It's sorta good, but has a few annoying missteps. There's a good bit of driving around, for example, but the open world is a bit lifeless and the cars aren't much fun to drive. The plot and characters are engaging enough to keep you coming back, but then the combat mechanics are a bit bland and uninteresting. Professional and functional, but not exciting.

I like it enough that I'll finish it, but I remember why I was disappointed with it. The first one was a much better game in it's day I think, though it's far too dated to play now.

chrislad

Just hit Chapter 10 on Evil Within so I'm getting through it. It's not a bad game, but it has some issues. In the first level, it introduces the hiding mechanics, but you never really need them until Chapter 9 again, by which time you've totally forgotten them!

Glebee

Been given Lords of the Fallen another go. Id love to be able to play these type of games (Dark Souls) but they just drive me wild with rage and make me want to throw the PC out the window.(OK slight exaggeration)

Zillah

Deleted User wrote: »

I definitely do have a chip on my shoulder. The entire mobile game market is saturated with utter tripe. Pick any of those EA games. They begin with how to bleed the players and then develop a game around that.

Yeah I think dismissing it as a "chip on your shoulder" is bull****. Microtransactions are a travesty in modern gaming, which ruin the gameplay for people who don't pay and take shameless advantage of the people who do.

Links234

I'm just playing some more FTL, I just love this game and it really helps me relax.

Robert ninja

Zillah wrote: »

Yeah I think dismissing it as a "chip on your shoulder" is bull****. Microtransactions are a travesty in modern gaming, which ruin the gameplay for people who don't pay and take shameless advantage of the people who do.

If the game is F2P then it has to have some way to monetise it if wants to be commercially viable. I mean it's a free game... free games and the ability to play a large portion of a game at no charge is not a travesty in modern gaming. Whether that be cosmetics, skipping grind etc. There are plenty of F2P games that do this fairly... where you can spend dozens or even hundreds of hours enjoying the game before you may actually start wanting cosmetics or a boost of the in-game currency or whatever. Most F2P games worth their weight can be played without ever spending money on them... that's the point. As long as it doesn't give one person whose payed money an advantage over another who hasn't spent money in PvP then there's nothing to complain about.

Now microtransactions and pay-to-skip or cosmetics in games that are already full priced I will absolutely agree is complete bullshyte. If it's not full priced with some DLC like Skullgirls then it's somewhat forgivable but still undesirable. When a game like Terraria can come out for €10 and have such a big update at no extra charge down the road and be filled with tons of content it's hard to justify other companies trying to charge for it especially when they're a lot more well financed. But I guess that's the greed of them.

There'll always be whales in games with such microtransactions, though. If devs/publishers start designing the game around the whales then they're deserving of criticism.

Gbear

Zillah wrote: »

Yeah I think dismissing it as a "chip on your shoulder" is bull****. Microtransactions are a travesty in modern gaming, which ruin the gameplay for people who don't pay and take shameless advantage of the people who do.

What is it about a quantity of money spent that makes it a travesty?

The only consideration you have to make for money spent on a game is value.

Whether you pay it all up front, in little 50c increments or split between the main game and 2 DLCs is irrelevant.

The only real issue with these games is people lacking the self awareness to understand when they get themselves stuck in a loop of grinding just so they can hit some arbitrary milestone that just leads to more grinding. Habit-forming games that you don't really enjoy are often designed cynically to hit certain notes, like drugs to keep you coming back, but you've only yourself to blame.

I made that mistake with SWTOR to a large extent. It's garbage. The gameplay is garbage, the storylines are garbage, it's utterly unimmersive so I was just playing because it was Star Wars. I paid money for a few subs for no particular reason - a sunk cost fallacy, where the sunk cost wasn't money but time I'd already spent on it.
However, if it hadn't been rubbish (i.e, a proper RPG and not an MMO), it would've been a perfectly reasonable use of my money for the time spent on it.

Games that don't just cost a single fixed payment have the capacity to suffer from this problem but, on balance, both in terms of ensuring developer support and as far as paying a reasonable amount of money for something you spend huge amounts of time on (those two elements are intimately linked), it's unequivocally a good thing that this model exists.

ED E

Zillah wrote: »

Yeah I think dismissing it as a "chip on your shoulder" is bull****. Microtransactions are a travesty in modern gaming, which ruin the gameplay for people who don't pay and take shameless advantage of the people who do.

Vote with your feet. Don't play P2W games.

Robert ninja

Been playing Blade of Darkness. The dwarf is cool! His run is so funny, I love it. After doing my barbarian run I managed to get the game running on linux Another game I don't have to reboot for. Dismembering folks as overkill is always fun. Literally thowing their decapitated heads at their allies to start a battle... too fecking badass. The lighting is so good, too.

Korvanica

Finally playing though Alan Wake. Really enjoying it so far. Excellent story and great levels/atmosphere

mahoganygas

I started the Witcher 2.
Very impressed so far. The visuals are stunning.
I find it very relaxing and love spending time reading up on each character as I progress (slowly).
I played the prologue and now I'm pottering around Flotsam, taking in all the local lore.
I'm very immersed and loving it so far.

Zillah

Robert ninja wrote: »

Been playing Blade of Darkness. The dwarf is cool! His run is so funny, I love it. After doing my barbarian run I managed to get the game running on linux Another game I don't have to reboot for. Dismembering folks as overkill is always fun. Literally thowing their decapitated heads at their allies to start a battle... too fecking badass. The lighting is so good, too.

Shadows in that game were freaking awesome. A lot of modern games still don't come close.

Their "collect all the magic things" to get the real ending was the biggest loads of nonsense I've ever seen in a game though.

Zillah

On Free-to-Play: I don't play them, they're horrendous.

It's not about the money, it's that they deliberately alter the gameplay to be infuriating if you don't throw money at them. It's not a game, it's a cash farm, designed from the ground up to manipulate people in the worst way possible to extract cash from them for all the wrong reasons. If I feel tempted to pay money to skip a grind then congratulations, you've made a terrible game. Gameplay shouldn't be a grind.

Obviously some are worse than others, but the whole concept is flawed.

Azza

Playing Street Fighter V and Hitman currently.

Street Fighter V is an utterly fantastic game despite it shipping in a very barebones state. Couldn't recommend it for single player as the current story and survival modes are truly awful. This game shines in multiplayer with a lower execution barrier than previous games in the series but retaining its gameplay depth and wisely removing the more negative aspects of the previous games meta game.

Hitman. Enjoying this. While I wasn't initially in favour of the episodic model, it does encourage replay ability of the current mission which is very open ended and allows numerous ways of completing the mission. Its a considerable step up from Absolution. Effectively Blood Money on a bigger scale. If your not the type of person who likes replaying missions to discover secrets and new ways of doing things then I probably wouldn't recommend it. Once all the content is out you might find your value worth then.

Also have X-Com 2 installed but have only played it for an hour. Performance issues put me off playing this on day 1 and I haven't gone back since. Will wait for a few patches before going back.

Also have Killer Instinct installed but only the free to play version without any season passes. Dabbled wit it for about 30 minutes. Looks decent and seems like a solid port despite coming from the windows store. Will probably mess around with a bit more but I'm not going to be getting into seriously. Learning one fighting game is more than enough for me.

Quantum Break installed as well, I picked up a CD key for cheap here on boards for the PC version. Not going to touch it until some performance patches are out, game is meant to be in a very bad state currently on PC.

Asaiah

Hyper Light Drifter for me, I need something I can jump in and out of without getting too involved as I am studying a lot at the moment. Games like this are perfect for me now.

It plays like Zelda- A Link to the past but with a unique style. Brilliant game, great to see a developer come out with something that relies on solid gameplay, which is quite difficult and doesn't hold your hand. So many AAA titles look amazing and are otherwise utterly boring and devoid of a challenge, HLD harkens back to the golden era of consoles where gameplay was king, and you learned the hard way. Great soundtrack too.

I played 'life is strange' recently which was also fantastic, very unique game for me as I had never played anything like it before. More like an interactive movie than a game. Reminds me of the old 'choose your own adventure' novels I used to play as a kid.

I might try out FTL seems people have been giving it great reviews.