Whatcha playin? (Video games wise.)

Le Saboteur

Active member
I'm sure Finn's seen this, but I thought I would share it here as well. It's oddly affecting, and I'm not even a long time fine. The world though, the world is a fantastic place. Hopefully the Netflix series does it justice (except people tell me that Geralt is kind of a whiner).

 

Goodsport

Member
The Battlefield 1 DLC pack In the Name of the Tsar is now up and running for Premium Pass members. :cool:

Coming later this month: FIFA 18 and the Guild Wars 2 expansion pack Path of Fire. :)


-G
 

Finn

Moderator
Staff member
Le Saboteur said:
I'm sure Finn's seen this, but I thought I would share it here as well. It's oddly affecting, and I'm not even a long time fine. The world though, the world is a fantastic place.
Yeah, I saw that last night. If you felt affection, try imagining my feels when Geralt broke the fourth wall, as someone who was there ten years ago on day one.

I paid the full price at release for two games in 2007. The other one was Jade Empire.

Back then, I pretty much went in blind with no prior knowledge of the book series and other lore the game was based on. I saw some blurbs about "gritty dark fantasy world", and while the reviews weren't shining, they were still solidly hovering around the 80-point-mark, giving the vibe of what I call an "acquired taste" game.

The fact that they cleverly touted BioWare's involvement in their marketing probably helped too. (In reality, that amounted to CDPR licensing said firm's already-somewhat-aged Aurora engine, but I can't help wondering how many copies they sold simply because they had the gall to slap that logo on the game box.)

Well, the hive mind was pretty much spot on. From a purely technical standpoint, The Witcher in its release form wasn't a masterpiece. Needless to say, that vanilla 1.0 has also aged horribly. (However, the Enhanced Edition with better-if-still-somewhat-wonky voice acting + a bunch of mods that enhance certain gameplay mechanics, textures and other visuals can make it a passable experience even by modern-day standards.) But despite its shortcomings, even back then the game's worldbuilding did achieve some unique highs. They were trying to tell stories by planting little details around the world even back then.

Despite its flaws, the game obviously did get enough things right in the end to make The Witcher 2 a day-one purchase for me. (CDPR's business practices helped too.) And if the first part of the series probably requires a hefty bit of nostalgia (and those mods) to enjoy it today, part two actually manages something marvelous for a game that's six years old - it hasn't aged a day. If it came out today, it'd clear every bar most gamers expect from a 2017 AAA title release. And again, it achieves it through meticulous worldbuilding. The environments are clearly lovingly crafted with plenty of attention to detail. So much in fact, that many of them feel almost underutilized. There are places you spend perhaps merely a few minutes in and others that are completely optional - meaning they don't even have a side quest attached to them. And yet there's nothing about them that are usual telltales of "secondary content" in most games*.

And this gets us to why The Witcher 3 is such a digital wonder of the modern world. Somehow CDPR built a game that's at least twenty times bigger than the previous entry, but the attention to detail didn't suffer at all. Every nook and cranny in this world is so friggin' detailed, no matter whether it's a place where something plot-critical is supposed to happen or just something you pass by on your way to turn in the next quest. Usually these massive open worlds recycle content or otherwise cut corners somewhere**. The Witcher devs never did, and it's not easy to give them enough rounds of applause for that***.

*If you want a particularly good example of a game that puts in some nice attention to detail for the main story content and quests, but the execution of the side activities is down right sloppy, look at Mass Effect 3.

**A prime example of this: Skyrim. While I've never been particularly bored with its endless dungeon crawls, there's hardly anything uniquely memorable in them either, thanks to heavy asset recycling. It somewhat extends to the story content too, with its "radiant" questing mechanic. Or perhaps that's because. The locations need to be uniform enough because a random quest can send you into any random dungeon.

***They're not completely unique in this sense though, Rockstar is pretty good with it too. It's especially hard to find cut-and-paste stuff from GTA V. But they've been at it for two decades, CDPR essentially nailed it with their first try. (Also makes me wonder what's up with Ubisoft, since they continually fail to take notice. Really, guys. You could just try releasing the game "when it's done", not because you have a set deadline for a given year's holiday market.)


TL;DR: It's been a good decade for sure.
 
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Goodsport

Member
The Ghost Recon Wildlands PvP Open Beta runs from Thursday, September 21st through Monday, September 25th.

The beta pre-download can be started from here.





-G
 

IndyBuff

Well-known member
I've been on a video game kick recently. I just finished the first Jak and Daxter last night and I'm planning on moving on to MGS V. For the first time in years I'm finally excited about new releases and going through my back library of games.:)
 

Goodsport

Member
"World in Conflict: Complete Edition" free giveaway

Available to download for the PC for free via Uplay here until 2:00am PST on Monday, December 11th. :cool:

For those who've played this game before, is it worth the time to download and play it?


-G
 

Finn

Moderator
Staff member
Goodsport said:
For those who've played this game before, is it worth the time to download and play it?
Given it's a freebie, why don't you just grab it and see it for yourself?
 

Goodsport

Member
Ubisoft extended the World in Conflict free giveaway (now along with free giveaways of both Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and Watch Dogs, also on the PC) until 5am EST / 2am PST tomorrow (December 23rd). :)


-G
 

Le Saboteur

Active member
Le Saboteur said:
Sleeping Dogs is five years old today.

And despite ostensibly being dead and buried, it just won't die. A group of producers associated with The Fast and The Furious scooped up the film rights. That was over a year ago. Not a problem normally. Rights get scooped up all the time without ever producing a movie (despite having a star attached). And when I had forgotten all about it said star, Donnie Yen, goes ahead and posts this to his Insta.



I like Donnie Yen. I think I've seen his entire catalog aside from his appearances in Hollywood productions, but he's wa-ay too old for the role. They're going to have to do some interesting things to change the story. I'm game, though. I'd like to see a Hong Kong production with a Hollywood budget.

I'd still rather have a sequel. The stuff United Front wanted to do had a lot of potential.

In other news, I picked up this:



I don't know why though. I've got a stack of games to get through including The Witcher that include a hundred hour time sink. All this while being waist deep in this:

 

Finn

Moderator
Staff member
Le Saboteur said:
In other news, I picked up this:

I don't know why though. I've got a stack of games to get through including The Witcher that include a hundred hour time sink.
And you can safely drop it at the bottom of the backlog. This one's going to need a metric crapton of patches to be anywhere near playable.
 

TheFedora

Active member
Currently Im playing Assassin's Creed: Origins. Working through it slowly but surely. Egyptology may not be my field in archaeology but damn if the world isnt vibrant, alive and interesting.
 

Goodsport

Member
The free 2018 World Cup update for all versions of FIFA 18 is available today. (y)


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-G
 

Kai Hagen

New member
I'm playing an old game called Rainbow Six 3: Gold Edition thanks to Steam. It's a strategy/FPS game. The lesser graphics run very smoothly:


I have the old Rogue Spear CD, but it has issues with the latest Windows.
 
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