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Giganthrax

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Everything posted by Giganthrax

  1. BTW, now that Elden Ring is the first Soulslike that's actually selling a huge number of copies and isn't just a niche subgenre anymore, how soon do you think we'll start seeing crappy knockoffs from EA, Ubishit, and other companies? I bet the first ones will come out in 2023, and they either won't have the balls to go all the way with the Souls mechanics (like Darksiders 3 did) or they will completely miss the point and create tons of artificial difficulty because "that's what these games are all about" (like Dark Souls 2 did in its original form). Still, maybe we'll get a few decent ones as well.
  2. Yahtzee explained their design philosophy really well in his newest Extra Punctuation. Essentially, in order to create a true, high-quality open world, a developer needs to have the confidence to fill it with awesome stuff and then actually give the player freedom to explore it however they want. This naturally runs the risk of the player missing out on a lot of stuff, but that's okay, you shouldn't be able to get 100% completion on a good game in a single playthrough anyway. I personally have actually found the blind girl myself and went out of my way to find the grapes she needs and then follow her path north. Without google, I wouldn't have been able to find the final areas for the secret ending, but that's fine. I prefer to do some googling occasionally over having a big stupid marker on the map and a journal entry with bullet points that tells me exactly where to go and what to do. This kinda reminds me of vanilla WoW, which I really really loved back in the day. All you ever got in that game in terms of pointers was a few general guidelines on where to go. Then you had to actually follow roads and read road signs to figure out if you were on the right path. This adds a sense of mystery and adventure to the open world, and requires me to actually think about where I'm going to go next and how I'm gonna go about it.
  3. I recently got into sim racing and I'm loving it. Currently having an absolute blast with Dirt Rally 2, Assetto Corsa, and Wreckfest. However, I cant seem to find a racing game that has a decent selection of American muscle cars. In particular, I'd love to drive a (at least somewhat realistic) Plymouth Fury and/or Buick 8, since I'm a big Stephen King fanboy. Assetto Corsa modders have made some great muscle cars, but I want more. Forza Horizon appears to include some of these cars, but that's a very arcade-y game. Are there any other decent options ATM? Thanks.
  4. 60+ fps? Wouldnt that affect the gameplay since the movesets are tied to fps? Actually, her quest is a part of a secret ending. I think they deliberately made it harder to find her.
  5. Anyhow, I started NG+ and I'm sad to say that I can't see any changes in enemy placement, equipment drops, or boss movesets. Also, it's piss easy for a level 150 character. So, same problem as in Dark Souls 1, 3, and Bloodborne. This is disappointing, especially when you consider that games like Nioh 2 and The Surge 1 & 2 have NG+ modes that differ significantly from the base game, and that Sekiro actually had a true NG+ mode that posed different challenges compared to the base game. At this point, I'm probably going to take a bit of a break from Elden Ring until they've released some balance patches and the PvP meta has had the time to develop.
  6. Double boss fights in general tend to be stupid in almost every game. I don't mind them when they're optional (such as the two gargoyles), but fighting two of the same bosses I've already fought multiple times before as part of a main story mission? That's just plain annoying. That being said, I did beat that fight using a funny gimmick. I just spammed sleep arrows on the fat guy and then me and my mimic murdered the skinny dude 2vs1. The first time I tried that tactic, I easily steamrolled the fight. Obscure quests that you have to figure out like a puzzle or google are the hallmark of Soulsborne games. I don't want them to ever change! IMO the reason they use these obscure quests without clear markers or even a journal is because these games are intended to work as true ARPGs. The focus is on the combat and exploration. They don't want to railroad you by giving you map markers, boxes to tick off, and other crap to distract you from just playing the game how you want.
  7. The tarnished guy? Nah, I steamrolled him with the mimic summon. I'm talking about the 2nd phase of the final boss of farum azula. It's like a boss from a completely different game. Half the time I couldn't even see wtf he was doing because of all the red effects on my screen. Looks cool, but a lame fight overall. Yeah, I don't think they're hard either, and I rather like fighting them on horseback. However, fighting them on foot is an extremely annoying fight because the dragon has millions of hp and you have no idea what what they're doing because you can't see them. Yeah, but I really don't want to fight two Godskin bosses as a part of a main story mission after I've already killed both of those dudes multiple times before, or have the same putrid tree spirit with a million health appear like 10 times throughout the game. It really takes away some of the excitement I have for NG+. In these cases, I really think less is more. DS3 is my favorite Souls game too. I got like 700 hours in that game, lol. I call Elden Ring a masterpiece because it took an already perfect game (DS3) and basically made it bigger and better. The level of quality and variety is truly staggering, and I can see myself playing it for a long long time.
  8. Actually, 79 hours is the character time played. Steam reports 83 hours in-game in total. I know for a fact that I have missed a few parts of the game, as well as a couple boss fights that I've locked myself out of. There's also at least one smallish area that I don't know how to access, one of the four belfries that I haven't unlocked, an ant nest that I haven't visited, and a bunch of optional bosses/dragons I haven't killed yet. I'm guessing that'll take me another few hours to complete. I also intend to play a lot of multiplayer and beat every NG+ this game has to offer. If it's in line with the other Souls games, that means at least NG+7, so I'm probably going to get a lot more hours out of Elden Ring. Hopefully, it'll carry me over until the next big Soulslike game hits.
  9. FInished the game yesterday. Took me 79 hours, but I still haven't done a bunch of optional bosses that I know of (there are probably more that I haven't found). My only complaints have to do with some bosses being reused way too much, such as godskins and tree spirits (both putrid and minor erdree guardians). One of the final bosses literally isn't even a Souls boss but rather something out of DMC or Ninja Gaiden, and is basically completely impossible to fight normally as melee, which is made even stupider because there's a special parry mechanic you can use to basically get a free kill, making his entire moveset basically meaningless. I also don't understand why upgrade materials are so difficult to come by. I literally only managed to get two items to +25 in 79 hours of play. To make matters worse, the +25 upgrade materials are dropped by dragons in the final dungeon, and you have to fight them on foot and they have tons of health. This is directly connected to my final complaint, which is the abundance of huge bosses that don't fit in your camera, so you have no idea wtf is happening during the fight. The dragons in particular are a massive pain in the ass because of this. I don't understand why they don't just zoom out the camera when fighting huge bosses. This was done in The Surge and it worked great there. That being said, all of the above are basically side-complaints. Overall, it's a 10/10 game. It really is a masterpiece.
  10. While the damage does seem crazy at times, overall I haven't really struggled on any boss so far. Godrick took quite a few tries, but even he went down in maybe half an hour for me. Perhaps the hardest boss for me was the outrider knight-like dude in one of the caves in Liurnia, but that was more me being stubborn really, I could've just come back later with a higher level and wrecked him. Everything went down in a couple of tries at most. And that's fine. I'd hate to spend hours struggling on every boss like I did on Ludwig or Orphan. xD The one boss fight that really felt insane was the all-black skinny ghost-like creature that you fight in some of the catacomb dungeons and that drops deathroot. It has very little health, but it's nearly impossible to hit and incredibly fast. It really felt like fighting a boss from a different game, lol. Yes please. Ah so there it is. Did you hit the endurance cap? I'm at 40 endurance and still keep getting more stamina with each attribute point.
  11. Unless you're playing games like Pillars of Eternity or Mortal Kombat that have a ton of loading screens, I really doubt your experience will be heavily impacted by the longer loading screens. Also, keep in mind that the base Steam Deck model costs $400. Obviously, you're not going to get top-of-the-line performance.
  12. Yeah, it's kinda weird. I'm guessing they will be more liberal with the higher level upgrade stones in NG+, or that they will change this in a patch. You'll find plenty as you progress in the game. For example, the Volcano Manor invasion questline gives you 3 full sets (one is the raging wolf starter set, two are completely new). There's also a full set of heavy armor next to the small church bonfire in the capital, a full set in the church of isolation, another full set if you do the (short) Dung Eater questline, a darkwraith set if you do the wolf lady questline and then go back to the firelink shrine, and so on. All of the different knight and soldier types also all drop their own unique armor pieces that you can farm. You can also get the full set + axe if you kill those dudes with yokai demon masks and dual axes in different locations (one drops the mask, another the axe, and the 3rd the set). I think the mages in the mage academy also drop their unique sets. These are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. IMO the game really has a decent variety of weapons and armor so far, and I expect to find a lot more as I progress.
  13. This is really weird. I'm level 80 or so, and I have a bunch of weapons of all types in my inventory. I have like 4 unique katanas, lol. I've also found like 10 different armor sets that you just loot in full + found a bunch that are drops that you can farm from mobs if you're so inclined. I've also found a bunch of unique armor sets you can buy from various merchants. I also play as wretched and didn't have any problems getting gear. The first soldier camp under the Stormveil castle where you meet the firekeeper and get the horse has soldiers that drop armor pieces + a 100% physical resistance shield + 1h longswords + you can loot a greatsword from a chest at the same camp. Since this is the path most people will take, I think it's fine. As for armor not doing much, I find it's no different than DS3, and since I played the shit out of that game, I'm used to it. As for weapons being upgradable up to +25 (so far I found a material that upgrades to +24, my assumption is that +25 is max), I think that was added because the game is a lot longer than Bloodborne or Dark Souls 3. Right now I'm 45 hours in and have a +16 weapon, and there's still a lot of the map I didn't explore + quite a few areas that are too high level for me right now, so it would be pretty lame if I didn't get any more weapon upgrades for the next 20-30 hours of the first playthrough. This does make switching weapons harder, but I think that this was always the case in Souls games. It was always difficult to switch the main weapon on the first playthrough. The vast majority of the weapon experimentation I did in the other Soulsborne games was always done during NG+, NG++, and beyond. As for bosses being unfair, I think the vast majority of them are done really well and are fair. However, I hate that there are many huge bosses, as this causes the camera to go crazy and you basically have no idea what's going on or what the boss is doing. This was always a problem in the Souls series and one of the reasons why I never liked the Midir fight despite how cool it looks. Also, they seem to have gone with Nioh 2 damage. Everything does so much damage, lol. But in Nioh 2 that's fine because your character has a much bigger toolset than in Elden Ring and you can constantly replenish large amounts of stamina if you're decent at the game + you can die up to 4 times during a single fight and still get back up and keep fighting. That being said, it could be that the ER damage is actually fine and I'm playing it wrong. My health stat is at 40 points right now and I still see no diminishing returns in health gains with each point. I still get like 40 hp for every point I add. So maybe the game is built around dumping a ton of points into health? I'll definitely be testing that out.
  14. I'm 36 hours in and Elden Ring is absolutely phenomenal in every way. Just about the only complaint I have are the occasional FPS drops while I'm riding through the open world. However, they're patching it and it's already happening less than at launch. What's most incredible to me about ER is the sheer amount of variety in enemies and bosses. There are so, so many of them and they all have tons of different moves. The amount of available equipment, spells, and whatnot is also staggering. This is especially shocking to me because I recently finished God of War, and that game has maybe 10-15 different enemy types and literally rehashes the exact same troll miniboss like 6-7 times. Even the animation showing Kratos killing this troll is exactly the same (and too long) in all but one fight. It's utterly incredible to me how a massive game like God of War that's supposedly based around a close combat gameplay can have such a pathetically tiny amount of variety in its enemies and equipment compared to Elden Ring, which isn't even an AAA game.
  15. Thank god. Bethesda launcher is a useless travesty that uses up too many system resources for some reason while offering zero functionality. It's literally just a front-end window with some website links and game installation links. I'm pretty sure its whole purpose is to mine data from my computer or serve as an additional layer of DRM. I bought Doom Eternal on it because the key for it was 20e cheaper than the Steam version, and it's a mistake I regretted many times. Just about the only launcher that's worse than the Bethesda one is Rockstar launcher, as that garbage constantly forces me to do captchas whenever I make the mistake of trying to play one of their games. Even Microsoft launcher is better than those two, as it at least has some functionalities and doesn't constantly get in my way. BTW, the funniest thing here is that Bethesda isn't even giving players the option of transfering their games to the Microsoft launcher because they know absolutely nobody would do that.
  16. I beg to differ. There's a reason why people don't get nearly as many viruses on their phones, Macs, or Chromebooks as they do on Windows. In addition to there being fewer viruses/malware made for these systems, the locked-down nature of these OSes significantly reduces the risk.
  17. Windows 10 is your best option if you need to use specific work software (Adobe, Microsoft Office, etc.) and if you want to play games. Linux is good and snappy and really customizable, making it an excellent option for a tinkerer. It's also phenomenal if you need to make a server, or if you need an OS for an older or weaker machine. For general computer usage & learning, it's pretty good.
  18. Unfortunately, Windows is way too prone to viruses and malware when used by someone who doesn't know what they're doign. Unless you specifically strip administrator privileges from the account they will be using (in which case you're mildly-to-severly gimping their ability to use the computer you set up for them), it's almost inevitable that they will install some malicious or virus-like program that will cause all sorts of problems. If you want to give your hypothetical tech noob friend a mainstream, yet foolproof OS, I'd say steer clear of Windows and just give them a Mac or even a Chromebook.
  19. This thread is absolutely rife with first world problems. Anyhow, the new layout is perfectly fine. I couldn't care less if it remained as is, or was returned to the old layout.
  20. Then why spend time discussing a $400 handheld device that was never intended to offer a high-end gaming experience? If Steam Deck cost $1000+ then yeah, I would definitely agree that the Steam Deck doesn't offer a good experience, since you can buy a PS5 and a 120hz monitor for that kind of money. But since that's not the case, I really don't see how complaining about "only" 60fps is a valid criticism of the Deck. It seems like you're just bashing it for the sake of bashing it.
  21. Nothing apart from the SSD is interchangeable at this point in time. But the device is clearly designed with repairability in mind, hence why it can be easily opened and components replaced without the need to desolder or remove glue or w/e. While higher framerates are great (I have a 170hz monitor and I love it), they're by no means necessary to have a great time with a singleplayer game or two, especially when playing on the go. Saying that 60fps feels sluggish is either trolling or completely out of touch with the gaming experience 99% of video game players have. They're not imitating Windows. They're implementing software solutions that have a potential to solve many of the gaming problems on Linux. Since Valve is a massive company with real resources, they may actually pull it off. This is definitely something to be excited about if you're a Linux fan.
  22. The reason people are hyped for the Steam Deck is because it's an actually affordable handheld gaming PC that's upgradable and repairable by the user. You can use it as a game console, or you can use it as an actual desktop PC to do work on. For $400. That's quite cool however you look at it. If being able to play AAA games on the go at decent framerates isn't something you're interested in, then obviously the product isn't made for you. So why make a thread about it? Furthermore, the Steam Deck is also extremely exciting from the software standpoint because it's trying to offer an alternative to Windows when it comes to gaming. This is something many people who aren't otherwise interested in a Steam Deck could potentially benefit from. Finally, the way Steam Deck is designed means that it's still going to be excellent value even if it undersells and Valve gives up on it 1-2 years from now. After all, you'll still be able to install Windows on it and enjoy your games regardless of how well the entire product performs in the long run. That's tremendeous value for the money.
  23. I replaced the keycaps sometime ago as well. Unfortunately, it's not the keycaps that are the problem. I think it's the switches underneath that are getting long in the tooth.
  24. Been using my Razer Blackwidow Ultimate Classic for 10+ years now. I also have some cheap membrane keyboards on my other computers that are still going strong 10+ years later. Sadly, some keys on my Razer are showing signs of age, so I'll either have to learn how to solder or get a new kb for my main rig.
  25. Worst case scenario (Steam Deck fails & Valve gives up in 1-2 years), people who bought it will still have a high-quality, upgradable, repairable handheld PC that can they can just install Windows on and play their games.
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