What are you playing at the moment? - December 2017

[ToomuchFluffy]

Oh, I’m playing a proper basher along with Morte, Ignus and Annah, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at all the combat I’m doing - but having come out of Clerk’s Ward where you don’t really fight anything to complete quests, the tediousness of the combat of the later stages is a stark contrast. I’m just not enjoying it at all.

As for the crashing, I kind of assumed the GoG release would already have all the relevant patches applied?

Anyway, overall it’s a great game. Just spoiled a little towards the end (for me).

I think I had low expectations for the second half of the game when I replayed it a few years ago. That probably helped. I clearly remember that I was a bit disappointed with most of the game after Ravel’s Maze on the first playthrough. Maybe being more focussed on Wisdom and Intelligence the second time through, did help to make it more interesting.

I was talking unofficial fixpacks and such that you can get at Gibberlings 3 and other such websites. Maybe you just were unlucky. I don’t remember ever having had any trouble with PS:T.

[Shadoko]

Metal Gear Solid V shines the most when everything goes to shit. For example when you mess up the exfiltration of a prisoner at the last minute by being spotted by a random sniper. In most infiltration games, I would have reloaded a save. here ? Fuck it, let’s call the air support, make a break for it while the heavy machine guns reduce the soviet soldiers to ashes while the helicopter blasts “eye of the Tiger” through its speakers.
Joke aside (even if this really happened) open-world infiltration is great. I’m quite impressed by the way the AI reacts. For example, how it reacts to a sniper. I mean, maybe it’s just me and my very small gaming culture, but it’s the first time I’ve seen AI soldiers laying down supressing fire in the general direction where you’ve been spotted. I already said that about Far Cry 2, but MGSV is also great when it comes to semi-stealth, that’s to say the situation when you’ve been spotted but the enemy doesn’t clearly know where you are : it’s great in MGSV.

I’d say the best part so far is how…logical the game can be. For example, I have to intercept tanks : what if I plant explosives in the middle of the road and mount an ambush, like, you know, a mudjahidin in 1980 Afghanistan would do ? It works. I need to capture a vehicle that’s inside a convoy. There’s a storm. What if they were forced to stop because of the low visibility and I could sneak in, threaten the driver with a gun and get away with the vehicle ? Guess what, it works too. So far I’ve rarely encountered a situation where a logical solution I had designed would not work, except when I can’t climb small hills - but I assume that otherwise it would be too easy to sneak inside camps.

Also, the story. I honestly couldn’t care less about it, mostly because I’m not an MGS fan and I’ve never played Peace Walker. Or rather, I have the same problem I have with every MGS game. The story is full of genuinely interesting ideas that are Kojima’d to the point they don’t make sense. For example, parasites that affect people depending on the language they speak and are meant to suppress the very idea of language ? It doesn’t make any kind of scientific sense but thematically it’s fascinating. Now, the same parasites turn one of the main characters into an almost-naked, mute woman used for sex appeal in a very creepy way ? Now that’s silly.

Speaking of Quiet, honestly, if she wore something sensible, I’d take her seriously and I would even like the character. But I just can’t. Yes, that’s how disturbing this outfit is. And no it’s not a commentary on anything, it’s just Kojima wanting boobs.

[LexW]

So now I can’t play Plunkbat with Endless Legend installed. It randomly started crashing the game, saying endlesslegend.exe was causing a file block. No idea why, because I had been playing for three hours before it started crashing like this.

This all sounds a bit malware-y, Viral, have you checked for that? I mean, Win 10 comes with some built-in malware stuff but I suspect it might be worth trying out Malware Bytes or whatever the latest iteration of that is. Also maybe do a general check of Windows functionality because it seems unlikely it’s actually the games themselves causing these problems.

[Shadoko]

I don’t know if it’s worth anything as I don’t know if Endless Legend and Endless Space (1 and 2) use the same engine, but Amplitude games have an habit of acting very weird. For example since a few days I can’t exit Endless Space 2 normally anymore, I am forced to use alt+f4. It happened overnight and many users have already reported this kind of behavior.
But one game preventing another from functioning properly is very weird indeed, maybe a registry problem ?

[Qazinsky]

Oh, be careful with Malware Bytes, just last week, I ran it and it told me I had 100+ infected files on my computer. I let it quarantine them and it turns out, they were all false positives. For example, my mouse stopped working, I had no mouse pointer whatever I did. Reinstalling the drivers did nothing, because, again, no mouse pointer.

After using the keyboard to Start Malware Bytes back up and restoring the quarantined files (a task made much harder when tab just randomly stopped jumping to the next element after I had marked all files so i could never actually mark the ‘Restore’-button) I ran AVG and Spybot Search & Destroy, neither found any bad things. Malware Bytes though, found 100+ infected files…

[EPICTHEFAIL]

Oh, be careful with Malware Bytes, just last week, I ran it and it told me I had 100+ infected files on my computer. I let it quarantine them and it turns out, they were all false positives. For example, my mouse stopped working, I had no mouse pointer whatever I did. Reinstalling the drivers did nothing, because, again, no mouse pointer.

Had it partially uninstall Elite Dangerous for no reason the other day. Fortunately it managed not to do anything excessively stupid, like wiping my save file. Gave me a scare though. Thank goodness for Steam’s file repair option.

[riesje]

if its a file block by registry problem then I would deinstall both games, and reinstall them. and yeah do a scan, but I would just use M. defender.

did it happen once?

[Viral_Frog]

This all sounds a bit malware-y, Viral, have you checked for that? I mean, Win 10 comes with some built-in malware stuff but I suspect it might be worth trying out Malware Bytes or whatever the latest iteration of that is. Also maybe do a general check of Windows functionality because it seems unlikely it’s actually the games themselves causing these problems.

I’m still running Windows 7. I run Malwarebytes twice a week, just did a scan again and nothing there. I uninstalled Endless Legend and reinstalled and that worked fine. No longer having any issues with it.

if its a file block by registry problem then I would deinstall both games, and reinstall them. and yeah do a scan, but I would just use M. defender.

did it happen once?

It happened out of nowhere and then proceeded to occur every time I launched Plunkbat.

[alms]

Oh, be careful with Malware Bytes, just last week, I ran it and it told me I had 100+ infected files on my computer.

You win! I ran a full scan a few weeks ago (with Windows Defender, BTW) and only stopped at about 40. Most of them weren’t strictly false positives, mostly PUAs or stuff that Defender think is, like Nirsoft’s PassView.

The high severity of the ‘threats’ found, though, would certainly alarm (scare shitless, better) a less technically minded person, for many of them I had actually to look up the threat manually, only to determine that it was essentially harmless.

[alms]

PSA:

1.19 has a problem in Carter Hydro Dam, which resets every day the trailer on the left, when looking out. Depending on the specifics of your game, that bug may actually make it significantly easier. For me, it provided a convenient source of water and calories.

If you’d stored stuff in containers in that trailer, you’ll find everything inside Carter’s main entrance. Items that have been dropped outside a container, like pelts, may be gone forever, though.

This bug should have been fixed by today’s hotfix.

[vinraith]

So, it turns out I’ve had basically the worst luck imaginable with The Long Dark.

Game 1, I spawn in one of the few places in mystery lake that’s nowhere near a shelter. Forced to spend the night outside with only my starting supplies and no idea how to play the game, I almost die of exposure before managing to set myself on fire (hey, at least I died warm I guess?)

Game 2, I spawn near the glitched trailer by the dam, discover a giant pile of useful resources, but from the very moment I started the game was ramping up to a blizzard. This is why I couldn’t get anywhere without freezing to death.

On the one hand, this definitely makes me inclined to try again. On the other, it does imply that the spawning conditions are a bit too harsh considering the low difficulty I’m playing on. How is anyone supposed to survive a blizzard on day 2?

[Shadoko]

Ok, Metal Gear Solid V now I have questions.
First, letting me play as a female character is awesome, so that’s a bonus point for you. (And my character is called Armored Griffon too, so 2 bonus points).
Now…

If Quiet breathes through her skin, why does she wear clothes at all ? There’s lots of skin down here. Why isn’t she just wearing some kind of cape to protect herself from the dust and nothing else ? Or you know, why isn’t she wearing sport clothes that were already a thing in the 80s ?
Also apparently she also does photosynthesis. Why isn’t she, y’know, green ?

Actually, a green-skinned sniper wearing high-tech sportswear would have been an amazing concept for MGS.

[alms]

Game 1, I spawn in one of the few places in mystery lake that’s nowhere near a shelter.

I wonder whether this is possible, or there is a shelter you don’t know about yet, or something else that would have let you survive: there some nooks and other natural formations that will let you get out of the wind and put some sort of roof over your head, however they don’t stand out as much as a building, in bad weather it’s probably a massive stroke of luck locating one if you don’t know about it already.

If you can place that spot on the map, I’d be interested in taking a look myself, BTW.

How is anyone supposed to survive a blizzard on day 2?

I had a very similar experience at least twice. First time, no buildings in sight, late hour and bad weather, died quickly. The second time, some games later, I looked around and thought: “wait, so if I go this way…” - still playing the same game now, and (gonna jinx it now), past day 20.

The comparison with Dark Souls is not perfect for a variety of reasons, among them, in TLD there is extra randomness, which makes everything less static, and yet… pre-existing knowledge is what makes SL1 runs possible?

Both are games that have absolutely no qualms about killing the player again and again, and even right from the start, but each time they’ve taught new things.

I almost die of exposure before managing to set myself on fire

That must be a rite of passage that the one thing that is so essential to the PC’s continued existence, can also hurt or even kill, is like a reminder from the designers about the very nature of the game.

[LTK]

There are a number of things I could critique about Submerged, but what I really want to do is compliment its camera controls, because when do I ever get a reason to do that? It’s a third-person game, but if you point the camera up, you look straight up. It doesn’t stop a few degrees before the zenith of the sky, like many third-person action games, and so there’s never any point where you have to maneuver around to get a good angle on a very high point that your character can obviously see, but you can’t. I never noticed how much of a frustration that is until I felt a distinct lack of it in this game.

That this is my best praise for the game might sound pretty damning, but the fact is that Submerged is a perfectly fine short-form indie game, the 7/10-ish-ness just radiating from it. A nice way to spend an evening.

[vinraith]

I wonder whether this is possible, or there is a shelter you don’t know about yet

Totally possible. I ended up walking in what turned out to be a long, slow circle. I can tell you that there was a frozen pond (it had a name, but I don’t remember what it was) with a very small wooden stand (not enclosed in any sense, so seemingly useless as shelter) and a bunch of deer. Other than that, it was just a mountainous expanse of snow. I tried to find a cave, a nook, anything at all, but had no luck. It’s totally possible that I was just over the hill from something that would have saved me, though.

[alms]

This hunting blind, by any chance?

[vinraith]

Yup. To be clear, that’s not where I spawned, but it’s the only distinctive thing I came across in my aimless wandering.

[alms]

There’s shelter not far away, I originally wrote more but deleted everything to avoid spoilers.

[vinraith]

Of course there is. Just look for my charred remains and hang a left, yeah?

[Thermal_Ions]

Seems I may not need a Steam Sale Talk Down thread just yet - in regards The Long Dark anyway.