What game are you playing?

[wankerness]

The turtle guys are a big part of why I usually use the mace as my primary weapon for the early game. Strike damage works wonders against them, you can usually chunk them down in a few hits. They're super frustrating with most other weapons, especially cause of how if you try and backstab them they fall backwards and crush you. You should be able to climb up the ladder in that firebreathing room without aggroing any turtles beyond the ones you have to kill to get to that room.

 

[gabito]

This game is at the top of the internet's shrill hysteria this week.

Yeah, almost every negative review on Steam is about the micro transactions in the game. And yes, they exist, they suck, they probably shouldn't be there, and I guess you can ignore them if you want.

Regarding the performance, like every game nowadays I guess they'll fix or improve that in the next few months. Most of the complaints I've read about performance were from PC users anyways, I don't know about consoles. I'm guessing it's in that "good enough, but it could be better, they'll fix it eventually" zone some games live for a while.

I'll eventually buy it, I liked the first one (which I played on PS3, performance be damned) but didn't like it enough to pay full price for it or a sequel.

 

[wankerness]

Yeah, almost every negative review on Steam is about the micro transactions in the game. And yes, they exist, they suck, they probably shouldn't be there, and I guess you can ignore them if you want.

Regarding the performance, like every game nowadays I guess they'll fix or improve that in the next few months. Most of the complaints I've read about performance were from PC users anyways, I don't know about consoles. I'm guessing it's in that "good enough, but it could be better, they'll fix it eventually" zone some games live for a while.

I'll eventually buy it, I liked the first one (which I played on PS3, performance be damned) but didn't like it enough to pay full price for it or a sequel.

It's goddam ridiculous. I wish Capcom would realize forcing these things into the games always causes the idiot review bombing brigade to show up in force and maybe just STOP PUTTING THEM IN for games like this where I can't imagine they'll really sell any. Keep selling all your stupid fighting game costumes, characters, and emotes for 20 bucks a pop, sure, it seems like the hate brigade doesn't care about that, but leave the 1 player games alone! A game like this which was already a niche product could actually be sunk by review bombing, unlike stuff like Resident Evil or Street Fighter.

 

[gabito]

Hey, at least it's not "New Game+ DLC" like with the last Yakuza game

Greedy bastards.

 

[wankerness]

Hey, at least it's not "New Game+ DLC" like with the last Yakuza game

Greedy bastards.

Yeah, ugh. I paid for that mainly for the extra dungeon cause I loved the game and wanted more content. Definitely not worth it for most until it's on sale. That's one of the few DLC purchases I've ever made that I shouldn't have. Not that I didn't like playing through the game again and doing the extra dungeon, but it was very lazily done. The only other time I remember outright burning money on MTX was Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, where I definitely spent some money on their lootbox bullshit to try and unlock some of the better characters/weapons. Usually I only buy stuff that I am sure is actually good (or is bundled in and on sale).

I was reading more about Capcom's history of microtransactions. Apparently they shoved them into pretty much everything. I haven't played games in some series like DMC so I wasn't familiar. Here was a good comment on this which definitely is the case here:

"Capcom has a history of making their devs put in MTX for things that any player familiar with that particular series knows would be a ridiculous thing to pay real money for; they explicitly put them in the game for Suckers and/or Lazy "Whales"

I first experienced it in Devil May Cry 5 where they put in MTX to let you buy Red Orbs, the main currency of the game, when you have to be actively trying to be bad at the game in order to be short enough on Rorbs that buying some would be feasible.

It's one of the oddest MTX strategies in the business IMO"

 

[p0ke]

The turtle guys are a big part of why I usually use the mace as my primary weapon for the early game. Strike damage works wonders against them, you can usually chunk them down in a few hits. They're super frustrating with most other weapons, especially cause of how if you try and backstab them they fall backwards and crush you. You should be able to climb up the ladder in that firebreathing room without aggroing any turtles beyond the ones you have to kill to get to that room.

Yeah, like I've said many times already, I hate those damned turtles. But generally any enemy that wields a mace will automatically be annoying. Maces somehow seem to track much more than swords, so they're hard to dodge. In Heide's Tower of Flame I could easily beat the stone guys that had swords, but then there were a few with maces... I had no choice but to run

I still haven't found a mace myself though, I guess I should've bought one...

 

[wankerness]

Yeah, like I've said many times already, I hate those damned turtles. But generally any enemy that wields a mace will automatically be annoying. Maces somehow seem to track much more than swords, so they're hard to dodge. In Heide's Tower of Flame I could easily beat the stone guys that had swords, but then there were a few with maces... I had no choice but to run

I still haven't found a mace myself though, I guess I should've bought one...

Mace is starting gear for some class, or the blacksmith in majula sells it. I'd highly recommend getting one and upgrading it ASAP. It's very, very good against all armored enemies in the game. Iron Keep especially with it is like night and day easier. Same with some nasty stone enemies that you'll be encountering later. DS2 is pretty lenient on gear loads and also upgrade materials compared to the other DS games, so you can upgrade a lot of weapons to +10. It's not like DS1 where there are like 2 titanite slabs in the whole game. I think only the boss weapon upgrade materials (Petrified Dragon Bones and Twinkling Titanites) are limited, but you can farm them off some basic enemies in certain areas.

The mace also doesn't weigh much, I usually just have it equipped at all times to switch to when it's useful.

 

[Werecow]

What area are you even talking about? Are you still in Iron Keep? There's a secret entrance to another bell covenant area (which does not have a boss) in that big room with the moving platforms that have knights/turtles on them. Then if you just go through that room and out the door to the right, you end up following a path through annoying narrow corridors with turtles to a room with a bunch of firebreathing contraptions in the middle of the room. There's a ladder in the corner of the room that's really easy to overlook, and a bonfire at the top of the ladder as well as a switch which turns off all the firebreathing statues permanently. Then if you go back down those ladders there's a pretty straightforward path that goes outdoors and to the next boss.



This game is at the top of the internet's shrill hysteria this week. The performance is apparently not very well optimized, which isn't a big surprise, but it averages around 40 fps on PS5, which is fine with me (I've played Bloodborne on PS5 and still love it and that struggles to maintain 30!!). I played the first game through at a non-locked 30 FPS on Switch and it was still great.

Both of those microtransaction things are half-truths that everyone's screeching about without bothering to read details or play the game.

Appearance editing microtransaction: You can buy, for 1.99, a character customization instead of buying it in-game with in-game currency. So basically if you are really impatient (you can access this about 15 minutes into gameplay) you can spend $1.99. It's similar to the Resident Evil microtransactions in that the store will only allow you to buy the $ version once, while you can buy infinite ones in game assuming you keep gaining the currency.

Fast travel: The game is the same as the first in that it's designed to have as little fast travel as possible. There's a consumable item you can get in game that lets you put down a fast travel point, but there's only 10 in the whole playthrough (IIRC the first game only had 5, so this is better). Again, there's the option to buy an extra one of these things. So you can make 11 fast travel points instead of 10. You'd sort of have to be an idiot to buy that microtransaction, and from what I could find online, you can only buy one.

So at most you can spend 4.98 to avoid farming in-game currency for one appearance change, and getting one extra fast travel for another. Should they have just not even had the microtransactions? Sure, but the internet hysteria brigade was already screeching and whining about the fact the game only lets you make one character (the way NG+ worked in the first game made it obvious why this was the case) and about how there's "no" fast travel and it didn't respect their time - time which they weren't going to spend cause they weren't going to play the game, just cry on the internet about it.

I read a bit more about it, and it looks like you can also buy in-game currency and resurrection stones, more things that you can get in gameplay. I'm sure Capcom just mandated they put all this shit in the game. They stick MTX in EVERYTHING. Everyone ignored it with the resident evil remakes, partly because the games were already loved by the community. It was the same junk. Basically like you could pay to avoid unlocking things in game. Extra weapon tickets in RE4, unlocking extra gear that you normally would have to speedrun the game for, etc. I guess we should be glad that this stuff is all irrelevant if you actually play the damn game (kinda like Ubisoft's infamous "pay for EXP boosts" in assassins creed odyssey). As opposed to Capcom's junk for Street Fighter, where MTX are the only way to get a ton of stuff.

So, basically the only way this game was going to avoid all the whinging was if it changed what it was to be like Starfield. I'm just hoping in a couple months all these people get off the subreddit for the game cause it's been unusable for the last couple months ever since thousands of people who'd never played the first game joined after seeing cool trailers and immediately started making all their posts about things they were mad about that weren't going to be in the sequel (and hadn't been in the original).

IMO the performance thing is the only actual problem here but we'll see how it goes. Hopefully things improve with patches, but if not, I'm not in any way the kind of weirdo that claims to get motion sickness if the framerate drops below 60 for even a second. I don't understand how any of those people ever played any videogames before 2020.

I'd read the details, i'm just really fed up with companies who are trying this on, and Capcom in particular have been getting more and more anti-consumer the last few months. They've been adding DRM to their older single player games on PC in an attempt to prevent modding as well. They probably use DRM in general just so that people can't mod their single player game to give them things the microtransactions pay for as well.
I refuse to do any business with companies when they're up to this sort of thing, even when it's a game i'm really interested in. It's just making gaming as a whole worse and worse.


In other news, Horizon Forbidden West on PC runs excellently, and not much worse then the previous game. Much better than i expected.
The facial animations/capture are so good at times that it sorta weirds me out in an uncanny valley kind of way.

 

[gabito]

In the (not so distant) future mods will be allowed only if you buy the "Mods Enabled" DLC for 1.99$.

 

[wankerness]

In the (not so distant) future mods will be allowed only if you buy the "Mods Enabled" DLC for 1.99$.

Well, for almost all games, they're already only allowed if you buy the "mods enabled" hardware for an extra 1000 bucks over the cost of a console.

Bethesda's already charged on console for fan-created mods for Skyrim, IIRC

 

[gabito]

Bethesda's already charged on console for fan-created mods for Skyrim, IIRC

Greedy bastards.

 

[Werecow]

In the (not so distant) future mods will be allowed only if you buy the "Mods Enabled" DLC for 1.99$.

I clicked the "haha" reaction, but i hope it remains a joke, and doesn't give Capcom ideas

 

[p0ke]

Mace is starting gear for some class, or the blacksmith in majula sells it. I'd highly recommend getting one and upgrading it ASAP. It's very, very good against all armored enemies in the game. Iron Keep especially with it is like night and day easier. Same with some nasty stone enemies that you'll be encountering later. DS2 is pretty lenient on gear loads and also upgrade materials compared to the other DS games, so you can upgrade a lot of weapons to +10. It's not like DS1 where there are like 2 titanite slabs in the whole game. I think only the boss weapon upgrade materials (Petrified Dragon Bones and Twinkling Titanites) are limited, but you can farm them off some basic enemies in certain areas.

The mace also doesn't weigh much, I usually just have it equipped at all times to switch to when it's useful.

Yeah, I guess at this point I could just find out which mace-like weapon is the best and where to get it and then just acquire it and upgrade it to +10. I've got a lot of titanite, but not the kind I need to further upgrade my bastard sword, which is at +7 right now. I might wanna change that out to something more epic as well though, so maybe I'm done upgrading it...

 

[wankerness]

Yeah, I guess at this point I could just find out which mace-like weapon is the best and where to get it and then just acquire it and upgrade it to +10. I've got a lot of titanite, but not the kind I need to further upgrade my bastard sword, which is at +7 right now. I might wanna change that out to something more epic as well though, so maybe I'm done upgrading it...

I think that bizarrely you start getting titanite slabs in that game before you have enough titanite chunks to get anything to +9. You can clear out the dwarf guys in the doors of pharos to get them occasionally, otherwise they eventually are sold by the ore vendor girl once you've progressed the main game far enough. If I'm right, you've lit two of the four primal bonfires (lost sinner and the rotten), and are about to do a third, but haven't gotten to the doors of pharros/the mines for the last one? Once you light all four of those, and go through the door it unlocks, the game kind of opens up and you can start getting keys to the DLC areas and stuff.

 

[gabito]

I clicked the "haha" reaction, but i hope it remains a joke, and doesn't give Capcom ideas

I’m sure they already thought of that and they are just waiting for the right moment to do it.

 

[p0ke]

If I'm right, you've lit two of the four primal bonfires (lost sinner and the rotten), and are about to do a third, but haven't gotten to the doors of pharros/the mines for the last one? Once you light all four of those, and go through the door it unlocks, the game kind of opens up and you can start getting keys to the DLC areas and stuff.

Yeah, that's where I'm at. I looked at the specs for weapons and it looks like there a two hammers that deal better damage than the mace, and I already have both of those. So I guess I'll upgrade one of them to the max and go with that.

 

[wankerness]

Played a few hours of Dragon's Dogma 2. I'm not acclimated to this game yet. First impressions are that it feels about like what I remember of the first - but when I don't yet have any idea what I'm supposed to be doing or where I'm supposed to be going or where good gear is, and with that combined with the rather harsh save/rest system, it is sort of overwhelming. It's definitely got the same kind of user-unfriendliness that the original had. I can't really remember my early time spent in that game. I think I just sort of fumbled through it and was able to get through while failing tons of sidequests. Which I will probably do here, but it always ruins my completionist OCD to not know what I'm doing and be missing things.

Performance so far is not a big deal to me, at all. I am bad at judging FPS but I think it's probably always over 30 fps and usually more like 40-50. Definitely not 60, but way better than the terminally online people had me believe. It's no impediment whatsoever to my enjoying the game, anyway.

I'm playing as an archer, which feels WAY better on console than it did in DD1. There seems to be a lot more of an allowance for aiming with a controller - it was awful playing an archer without using mouse/keyboard on DD1, here it's pretty much fine and you can spam an auto-aimed attack if you want (it just does way less damage). I'm going for ultimately being a magick archer cause that was insanely fun in DD1, but I've read that you don't unlock it here for a long time.

Pawns are smarter than they were in 1 for sure, but still pretty dumb. It's a very unique system, though, and I like its implementation even if it's overly complicated in some ways (setting pawn quests, etc). I like that you can search for pawns that know how to complete quests you currently have and then ask them for help and they'll run you to the objectives, basically. I also think the healing pawns are a lot more helpful than they were in 1. I just wish you could level up the "hired" pawns instead of just having to replace them every few levels. I found a shadowheart clone that had actually good knowledge, but now she's like 6 levels behind me so not so helpful anymore!

 

[thebeesknees22]

I finally finished FF7 rebirth.

wehhhhweeew. I have some strong thoughts on this one. I need a bit for all that to sink in.

Great game though minus getting mini-gamed to death.

What they did to my boy Cloud .... He's so much more psychologically fucked up in this one than he ever came across in the in original. Makes me wonder just how insane they'll make him in the 3rd installment before he's set straight. ...er.. if they set him straight.

 

[p0ke]

Defeated the Iron King in DS2. I was surprised he was that easy. It only took me two attempts because I accidentally rolled into the lava the first time
And then I also defeated the scorpion woman in the shaded woods on my first attempt. These bosses are seriously not up to par with the other DS games...

What they did to my boy Cloud .... He's so much more psychologically fucked up in this one than he ever came across in the in original. Makes me wonder just how insane they'll make him in the 3rd installment before he's set straight. ...er.. if they set him straight.

Oh, he was fucked up in the original too. I guess it was just harder to get the point across when the characters basically looked like legos

 

[thebeesknees22]

Defeated the Iron King in DS2. I was surprised he was that easy. It only took me two attempts because I accidentally rolled into the lava the first time
And then I also defeated the scorpion woman in the shaded woods on my first attempt. These bosses are seriously not up to par with the other DS games...



Oh, he was fucked up in the original too. I guess it was just harder to get the point across when the characters basically looked like legos

I know he was fucked up in the original. I beat the original tons of times. He just comes across as so so much more fucked up in this one.