Thread: Blog Your Current Game

People join my game and don't notice my speed because it's a small indoor area and I nudge the stick. Then we get to a part with vehicles and they get in theirs and head down the road. I max the stick and walk past them like they're standing still and I'm in a vehicle. So funny. Being able to side-step bullets is neat, too. Can't much use sprint; it's mostly blurry until something stops me.

If anyone's on ps4, I can p-level and give gear to do it.

After being too busy to play games for a few days, I have the flu this weekend, so got to sit in seclusion in my office for hours on end, quarantined from the family. I got a lot of gaming time, is what I am saying.

I've been working through The Outer Worlds and I have a few more impressions to share...

1) While the maps are small, they do pack a lot to do in a small space. It's a lot of fetch and kill quests, but the story is entertaining. It's been interesting.

2) The balance in the game doesn't exist. As someone who is a degenerate min/maxer I was amazed out how easy it is to get too powerful for the game to be a challenge. Essentially, anyone who sticks to a coherent build becomes death incarnate and every fight becomes laughably easy. I built a long range build with the thought of going sniper with, but have realized that while you can one shot everything with the sniper build it works just as well with an assault rifle, and actually quite a bit faster. big, equal level monsters die with just three rounds. It really makes everyone giving you these quests seem like complete losers.

Quick Build guide:

* I took 2 points in Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence because I didn't know what I wanted to do with the build. I don't think these choices make much difference in teh long run as they mostly just determine how far along you are in your skills to start.

* 100 in Long Rifle .. massive damage and crit bonuses to Assault Rifles and Sniper rifles

* 100 in Science .. This gives you massive bonuses in "science damage" which is the sci-fi way of saying "elemental damage", it also gives you max ability to tinker with your weapons, giving them massive damage boosts

* Take "Weird Science" and "Wild Science" perks for a bonus 100% "science" damage.

Then just tinker and mod 4 assault rifles to each deal one of the elemental damages and you are all done. At that point all you need to do is shoot enemies with a damage type that they aren't shooting (since they have resistances to that type of damage).

Also while you work your way through the build you will always be way over matched for your enemies.

3) The Reputation game sneaks up and bites you big time. I think it was a rather major bad design to make reputation so all encompassing. While you get a lot of push quests that send you to destinations you have not yet been, many people playing the game find one particular destination to be irrevocably broken by the time they unlock the destination. To be honest, I have no clue what I did to destroy my rep with this given faction, but they happen to run a huge quest hub in the end game, and imagine my surprise when I finally unlocked the destination where I have all of my quests lines pushing me only to find everyone there wanted to kill me.

I mean, thinking about it now I think I know the mission that did it, and if I am right that is just awful... you go on a quest for someone to retrieve something from a derelict space station, and at the end of the mission it gets boarded by soldiers intent on killing you.. I don't remember seeing a way to talk my way out of it, and if you are a shooty build (like me) it probably would have been locked anyway... but a surprise quest like that should not cascade into a reputation spiral that necessitates you obliterating an entire city that happens to be a hub for quest progression.

Anyway, I guess I hit a wall now and don't feel like murdering a whole city of people, but don't see how I can move forward without doing that. I mean, I could EASILY kill everyone in the city, but I have been playing the cool and compassionate Mal Reynolds style of ship captain, and being forced to go full Black Beard on a dime doesn't thrill me as a plot twist.

In theory, there is probably a trainer out there somewhere that lets you reset reputation, but given the kind of game this is, they should have been a lot less ham handed with the consequences...

A quick update... I took to the internet to find a solution to my dilemma and I guess I found it, but it's dumb:

I went to the town and painstakingly killed all of the guards and none of the population, then ran from the rampaging population. When I got to my ship I slept for 3 days and the civ reactions all reset. Now that the city is completely devoid of guards so I can walk around the town and talk to NPCs without the fear of guards starting up a gun fight.

Also, while that is both gimmicky and lame, the thing I find most problematic is that unlike every other game with this engine, you can't pick up and drag bodies, so the whole city is now full of guard corpses and the NPCs don't react. If this were Skyrim I would have at least taken the time to throw the bodies in the river.

I can finish the game now, but that is just lame. What I wouldn't give for an Elder Scrolls mechanic where the guards could catch you and you could spend time in jail and pay a fine and have rep reset. These guards don't stop until you are dead or they are, and at this point in the game there isn't a chance in hell they'd ever kill me. I don't think I would start getting an elevated heart rate until I was facing 50 elite troopers against me alone...

"But it's all about the dialogue!" everyone says... well, the dialogue is nice, but it really isn't earth shattering. Where it tries to be deep it is thin and where it tries to be playful it quickly gets tedious.

I've soured on this game, if you can't tell. It's a whole lot of untapped potential.

Finished up the Outer Worlds. Loved it. The characters and dialogue were great. It's actually kind of sad thinking about how much better Obsidian's writing is than Bethesda. I look forward to what new projects Obsidian has in store. Hopefully the success of the Outer worlds will give Obsidian the leverage they need to get more resources for their next game. The Unreal Engine has some limitations that I noticed during gameplay.

After that I started Battlefield V again now that the Pacific expansion is out.

It's meh. The new maps are pretty uninspired (BFVs maps in general aren't that great), and they *really* want the new weapons to take hold, so the Garand and Type 100 are OP. It's ridiculous how many times I've seen machinegunners outgunned at range by a medic carrying the Type 100. The core mechanics that make BFV a Battlefield game are still intact, but the whole game just feels like a massive letdown. This whole "games as a service" thing is such a cancer and annoying.

Apparently they're planning another expansion with the Eastern Front, and I hope it comes soon. Maybe they can do what CA did with Rome 2 and try to fix the game with patches and updates to make it more enjoyable.

Planet Zoo review:

The first thing I noticed is that, like Planet Coaster, the camera controls are odd. W and S forward and back, fine. A and D move you left and right, great. Q and E move you up and down. Wait, what? The reason god invented the Q and E keys was to rotate the camera. I still have not gotten entirely used to this. Also, there are bugs, and the internet connected portion of the game the connection was hit and miss.

But is the game any good? Well, do bears **** in the woods? The answer, which you can see ingame, is yes. My first habitat for timber wolves, I mistakenly got two males. They fought, and you could see the scratches they got. Several days later, and the scratches are gone, except for one, which seems to be a permanent scar, on the wolf's right rear flank. The details in the animals, the way they move and act, is just incredible. You will learn a ton about the various animals just by playing, as you have to get the habitat right or the animals stress. There are big encyclopedia entries on each animal, and you will want to read them before adding an animal to your zoo. Education has rarely been so fun.

Like Planet Coaster, building the infrastructure is highly customizable, but only to the degree you want. You can ignore 95 % of it and be fine. But it is nice to know you can do elevated walks, curves or straight lines, how long each section is, how curved, how tall. Or you can just leave all the settings in the properties window alone and use the default and be just fine. More artistic people than I will love the extra layers of control, but they are not mandatory.

Tutorial is simply great(much better than in Planet Coaster, by several orders of magnitude). You are assigned tasks in a pre-built zoo, of increasing complexity. First, go look at the bears. Then add a couple ostriches. Then finish an enclosure before adding the animals. Then build an enclosure from scratch. In addition to being a great way to learn the controls, being in a big zoo with many enclosures done, you can see what is possible by looking at the finished enclosures, some of which are really cool.

Overall, best game of the year so far to my mind. I will add some screenshots to the thread when I find the folder they go to.

BFV's the Pacific Expansion is a let down. The weapons they added are OP and unbalanced, and the Pacific Maps are garbage. Really dissapointed in something I was actually looking forward to.

To power-level someone from level 1 to level 50 in 10 minutes:

1. Turn off internet and load game, enter game.
2. Turn on internet and answer "no" to "exit to main and update?"

One in now offline/online glitch. Game is as per original parameters, yet one is online. Original parameters for xp is broken.

3. Level 1 joins the game of someone capable of Slaughter Shaft and has done 1. and 2. above, waits ten minutes to be level 50.

To duplicate equipment:

Guest joins Host's game. Both go into bank. Count 3, 2, 1, go. At go, the Host presses [] to "compare" (an item in bank with an item in backpack). The Guest puts an item from backpack to bank, clicking multiple times while the item does not go into bank. The Host clicking "compare" creates a lag spike which causes the Guest's clicks to duplicate the item into bank. The lag spike lasts about eight seconds.

Thus, I can power-level someone to 50 and dupe gear for the shield and artifact exploits in under an hour. The person needs to progress campaign to open the use of class-mods and then artifacts, but that's easy at level 50 with the best gear.

Just saying, if anyone's on ps4.

I tried my hand at No Man's Sky again, even though they piss me off with each update. I don't know if its repeatable, but I found a Monolith that gave me an Experimental A-class 24 slot multi-tool. It's a rather long distance from the portal, but the planets portal address is 205C:04E8:56CC. It's location is 9.32 by 39.37. The Monolith name is Legacy of Fumaiz. The answer was "grab weapon." It's in the Apmanje Fringe, Asjokar-Uymak system, planet Kajaville D4. Galactic coordinates 0ECB:0083:0684:005C. This was the first time I came across this question at a Monument. Maybe it was just random luck, but if anyone goes there, please let me know if its repeatable.

grah vy'keen ancients bless your journey zuxiong our glory we witness your glory



I love this planet and others like it. I made lots of money "storm chasing" storm crystals and selling them, and it's an "extreme hazard planet," and I'm racking up time for the "extreme survival" milestone. 2.1 more sols to go, and I max it out. I'll collect 100 or more at a time and sell them. Their base value is 129,150 units each. Much easier to get them while the storm lasts using the Nomad. Between storms, I'll dig up buried technology modules.

Take lots of Sodium with you. This planet has sodium deposits too, making it easier than most extreme hazard planets. Made most of my cash on extreme hazard planets, having now a 38/12 slot A-Class fighter, and a 26 slot C-class freighter.

Battletech: Heavy Metal: The new weapon systems are kinda cool. ACs that fire 2 rounds per shot. A PPC shotgun. A one shot artillery piece. A weapon that does more damage the more evasion pips you have, and generates more heat. Several new mechs, none of them game changing, but with some cool features. New filter for map. New missions. Everything added is worthwhile, but not enough to really warrant the cost of buying the DLC.