What are you playing at the moment?

[Internet]

Pillars 2 is the bigger, more complete game with a big city to roam through and open world exploration, but the plot is lacking. Tyranny is relatively linear, but has a very unique setting, and a character creation plot mechanic which has never done and might not ever be done again. I spent maybe a 1/3rd of the time on Tyranny that I spent on Pillars II, but enjoyed them both.

[Det.Bullock]

Project Wingman
The only real difference quality-wise with an Ace Combat game is a relative lack of polish in the 3D assets and effects, and even that is not really that noticeable.
I was even able to use more or less the same control scheme as Ace Combat 7 allowing for the gameplay differences.
Not that it’s radically different but it’s clear the devs put their own spin on the formula, for example instead of one special weapon slot you get three so instead of cycling with a single button you are allowed to select them individually (with a 4-way hat in my case).
It’s remarkable how well put together it is considering how small the team is.

[Skalpadda]

That’s a lot of suggestion, thanks. A lot of different suggestions, dang it. There goes my plan to just play what the internet told me.

If I’ve understood it right there’s some over-arching (sci-fi?) plot to tie the games together? Is that something one should care about or is it easily ignored?

If you dont have it or any of the AC games the smart money would be just to do a Uplay subscription for a month. You can play literally any of them and certainly pre-Origins you could get through a few in a month of dedicated play. Also unlikely to be the sort of games you ever come back to.

Not a fan of subscriptions for games, but this makes sense and is probably the best option.

AC 4 is also a good game to get into the series. Still looks lovely and has pirates/sea battles but still has many of the assassin’s elements.

That’s Black Flag? I remember that as the most tempting one because pirates are fun, but then I forgot about it.

I haven’t played any others, so I don’t know if these hold true for those, but:

I was mainly interested in the sense of place, but while it had a big theoretically beautiful italian city the whole thing felt kind of bland and insubstantial for some reason.

The premise of exploring historical locations is appealing, I mostly just want to see what the fuss is about and maybe see some pretty sights. My expectations aren’t terribly high as I haven’t been too fond of the Ubisoft sandbox design in other games (it’s not bad, but tends to devolve into just cleaning icons off the map after a while).

Pillars 2 is the bigger, more complete game with a big city to roam through and open world exploration, but the plot is lacking. Tyranny is relatively linear, but has a very unique setting, and a character creation plot mechanic which has never done and might not ever be done again. I spent maybe a 1/3rd of the time on Tyranny that I spent on Pillars II, but enjoyed them both.

Yeah that sounds about what I expected. I think I’ll start with Tyranny.

[DeekyFun]

I have the fondest memories of AC2 and it’s sequels. I’d say if you went there you’d be best to play those in sequence, but they are also the oldest of the ones that come recommended so likely will be harder to engage with that this point. Certainly, when I decided to play AC2 relatively recently, there was some tweaking to be done to get the controls to work. They were good at the time, but hard to know whether it’s work starting afresh there now.

As a relatively modern standalone experience bringing the original Assassin’s Creed style, I think Black Flag is the one to probably go for, if you choose to at some point. Edward Conway is an interesting protagonist for an AC game, the pirate stuff is fun and it’s water vibrancy and sea-shanty’s were really fun. Saying that, Syndicate isn’t half bad, and I’ll also stand up for Unity now as well after some time and patching - I think it’s Paris is probably my favourite AC city out of the bunch.

The newer ACs perform a kind of paradigm shift at Origin’s focusing more on stats than the previous versions, which mark a bit of a change. The originals did have some stats, but it feel like it was more of a stealth focused experience about getting to your targets making the hit and escaping. Hard targets still went down like a sack of the proverbial when you stuck the knife in. Origins felt much more direct combat focused to me, and level focused. You hit a levelled guy with your hidden blade, he’s more often likely to pull it out and come at you again. Not saying that’s worse, but it’s a bit of different flavour. I assume it’s the same deal for Odyssey and Valhalla, but I haven’t played either of those yet, so others may have better opinions there.

[Sarfrin]

I assume it’s the same deal for Odyssey and Valhalla,

It’s the same with Odyssey, but with Valhalla there’s an easy reaction based way you can assassinate stronger targets (I might have acquired it early on in the game via the skill tree, I can’t recall).

Regarding the overarching sci fi story, it’s annoying but a small part of the later ones. I think you could mostly ignore it altogether in Valhalla. It pulled me out of Viking times once early on but hasn’t done so since then. The are some parts of the world that look ‘glitchy’ which throw you into your modern character and produce a weird climbing and jumping puzzle with light up blue blocks if you interact with them, but I think they’re optional.

[Similar]

As a relatively modern standalone experience bringing the original Assassin’s Creed style, I think Black Flag is the one to probably go for, if you choose to at some point. Edward Conway is an interesting protagonist for an AC game, the pirate stuff is fun and it’s water vibrancy and sea-shanty’s were really fun.

Black Flag has also been free at least once, so if you pay as little attention as I do, you might find you already have it on UPlay.
Still haven’t tried it, though.

[Spacewalk]

Whilst everyone is playing Cyberpunk I’m playing Dark Data. As far as nu-oldschool games goes it might be the most successful because it’s an almost note perfect Nintendo 64 style first person deathmatch shooter and I don’t see anyone else doing that. Even though getting it to accept keyboard and mouse input (I had to unplug a joypad and press a key on the title screen) is a bit of a pain and you can’t rebind your keys and the bots are pushovers I still really like it. Hopefully that much teased single player content won’t be too far away I’d definitely come back to it again.

I also played the Graven demo or the why the fuck is the demo a 1GB download? I had to knock the lighting and AA down a notch or two which is ridiculous for a game that looks the way it does but even after doing that it still looks super nice, lovely low res textures on everything and as a whole it’s like a really high quality late nineties game so it does at least live up to its promises visually. Don’t expect fast old school FPS combat though it’s more of a slow paced take a gander at all the work we put into our environments type of game, there’s sprinting (always a bad sign) as long as you have enough sprint juice not that you’ll need it since the three enemy types in the demo all move so slowly and don’t have any good counters to circle strafing. I imagine that the finished game is going to be better than this because as first impressions go I’m not hyped. I think I’ll go back to Arcane Dimensions which looks just as good, runs better and plays much better and faster.

[BillButNotBen]

The premise of exploring historical locations is appealing, I mostly just want to see what the fuss is about and maybe see some pretty sights. My expectations aren’t terribly high as I haven’t been too fond of the Ubisoft sandbox design in other games (it’s not bad, but tends to devolve into just cleaning icons off the map after a while).

AC2’s city is still pretty pretty even now, but it is also all very samey, and the map icon cleaning does dilute it.

AFAK, AC1, AC2, AC3, Black Flag and Unity are the ones that have been given away on Uplay.

Oh, and they also gave away the ‘Discovery Tours’ for Ancient Egypt (Origins) and Ancient Greece (Odyssey) but I don’t know how much of a flavor of the full games those would give.

Assuming you grabbed any of them at the time.

Question on the newer ‘RPG’ games. How much does the parkour factor into those? Because it seems like the screenshots imply, and the open spaces of the settings would mean that it becomes a much more minor part of the game.
Not that I found the parkour in AC2 as compelling as I expected… it’s just point in a direction and run and don’t go near guards.

[Skalpadda]

Black Flag has also been free at least once, so if you pay as little attention as I do, you might find you already have it on UPlay.

Oh, and they also gave away the ‘Discovery Tours’ for Ancient Egypt (Origins) and Ancient Greece (Odyssey) but I don’t know how much of a flavor of the full games those would give.

I checked and I don’t have any, but my Uplay account has been dormant for years until I started playing Anno so I guess it’s not too surprising.

The newer ACs perform a kind of paradigm shift at Origin’s focusing more on stats than the previous versions, which mark a bit of a change.

What I’ve seen of Valhalla looks a lot like the mild RPG elements of something like The Witcher 3 (but I’m guessing less choice and consequence?).

Thanks everyone, I think signing a month of Ubisoft+ and trying several is probably the best bet as I’m more curious than committed.

[JamesSwift]

If you play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, it will totally blow your mind, however it doesn’t support PC. So PC Lover keep away!

[sonson]

Its minimal frankly. The post Origins games are some of the largest open world games ever, you spend far more time on mounts or boats than you do climbing stuff.

You can climb pretty much anything still but basically none of the game is located there besides syncing locations. At least in Odyssey after a certain level you can jump off anything no matter how high (I dont mean the leap of faith into leaves or hay, I mean off literally anything at any point) and not even Injure yourself, so there really is no gameplay at all to speak of in that sense. You dont need to traverse much that’s high and when you do you can climb it like a spider and jump off as if you could fly, theres nothing remotely parkour to it, its superhero stuff.

Theres a real shift from vertical to Horizontal gameplay after Syndicate.

[coldvvvave]

I gave up on Phoenix Point, it was fun but I couldn’t hack through the endgame. Not that it was hard but more like it became way too tedious and painfully slow. I did most of the things necessary for good ending. And then I just watched the rest on YouTube. I’m probably not going to come back to Phoenix Point.

Cyberpunk 77 is not disappointing only because I had below-zero expectations (strangely enough mainstream gamers exploded into a hype frenzy after Keanu Reeves reveal at the same time I shrugged and forgot this game existed). Graphically speaking it’s good but not next-gen (I have a new gen NVIDIA GPU so I probably have a right to say it). It looks like a scaled up version of Deus Ex Mankind Divided with some cars thrown in (I mean in the 60s there were probably more cars on the roads of some cities). Story is not very impressive so far and combat is downright bad. I can’t hate it too much because wandering around at night with HUD turned off completely is great it’s all I wanted from off-brand 1st person GTA knock off. Sadly it’s almost impossible to play with no mini-map (unlike Witcher where it was an option and I always went for no-HUD) and I don’t like the soundtrack so far.

[BillButNotBen]

I’m feeling left out of all the CP2077 hype. Maybe I should play Deus Ex: HR as a way to get some cyberpunkish vibes.

As it is, I gave Elite Dangerous a second try. Managed to finish the tutorial which was ok, but both overlong and also tended to race through things. It’d keep refering to things on the hud and then carrying on while I was still “wait! what? where?”.

Trying to play it on a gamepad despite not liking space sims on anything but a joystick (which I don’t have anymore). The controls are confusing AF, partly because it has like 100 controls, partly because the defaults seem weirdly lacking in some key functions, and partly because the menu UI splits all the control settings across about 20 pages of settings… so there’s no easy way to get a nice overview of the key functions.

Seems to be pitch and roll on the left stick and yaw on the right. It’s been so long since I played them that I don’t remember clearly, but I feel like old space sims like Tie Fighter had some kind of combined roll and yaw when you turned, as banking to follow a target feels weird here.
I guess I’ll get used to it.

[Sarfrin]

If you play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, it will totally blow your mind, however it doesn’t support PC. So PC Lover keep away!

New user with a nonsense post. Bit suspicious.

[Sarfrin]

At least in Odyssey after a certain level you can jump off anything no matter how high

They’ve rowed back a bit on that in Valhalla. You can get a perk that lets you jump from quite high but it’s still possible to hurt yourself if you’re careless.

[Det.Bullock]

I’m feeling left out of all the CP2077 hype. Maybe I should play Deus Ex: HR as a way to get some cyberpunkish vibes.

As it is, I gave Elite Dangerous a second try. Managed to finish the tutorial which was ok, but both overlong and also tended to race through things. It’d keep refering to things on the hud and then carrying on while I was still “wait! what? where?”.

Trying to play it on a gamepad despite not liking space sims on anything but a joystick (which I don’t have anymore). The controls are confusing AF, partly because it has like 100 controls, partly because the defaults seem weirdly lacking in some key functions, and partly because the menu UI splits all the control settings across about 20 pages of settings… so there’s no easy way to get a nice overview of the key functions.

Seems to be pitch and roll on the left stick and yaw on the right. It’s been so long since I played them that I don’t remember clearly, but I feel like old space sims like Tie Fighter had some kind of combined roll and yaw when you turned, as banking to follow a target feels weird here.
I guess I’ll get used to it.

Yeah, Elite has always been different from other spacesims. Most of them went yaw into a slight roll while Elite was always pure roll originally without yaw which is much more “airplane in space” than many classic spacesims. I was fine with it because I had vague notions of how to deal with it from some games with aeroplanes I played (mostly demoes like Crimson Sky) and probably because with a joystick is all much more intuitive anyway due to decades of built in muscle memory.
Though sincerely I can’t imagine landing without a throttle with an analog ministick, I tend to make small mistakes on initial approach and while with separate lateral and vertical thrusters controls it’s OK because you can use them easily to better align yourself to the landing pad I can’t fathom I’d be OK using whatever combination the pad requires to use them.

If you want something that plays more like the classics Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is a better choice if you haven’t played it already.

[BillButNotBen]

I’ll probably get used to it, if I stick with it long enough.
For now I’ve just set the throttle to increment/decrement in 25% jumps. Seems ok, but i haven’t tried any manual landings yet.
Really wish I still owned a proper joystick.

RG Outlaw is definitely high on my wishlist. I had actually just decided to install Freespace 2 when Epic decided to give away Elite, so I guess if I really want something that plays like the classics then that’s always an option.

[Det.Bullock]

I’ll probably get used to it, if I stick with it long enough.
For now I’ve just set the throttle to increment/decrement in 25% jumps. Seems ok, but i haven’t tried any manual landings yet.
Really wish I still owned a proper joystick.

RG Outlaw is definitely high on my wishlist. I had actually just decided to install Freespace 2 when Epic decided to give away Elite, so I guess if I really want something that plays like the classics then that’s always an option.

Regarding Elite I remember that being able to throttle up and and down carefully was essential to save time during supercruise while approaching a station or a planet, at least I remember going down with the throttle very gradually so as to always to keep the maximum speed possible relative to distance

RGO is currently discounted on GOG FIY. Also remember to use knossos (https://fsnebula.org/knossos/) with Freespace 2 if you haven’t already though it’s still very much not gamepad friendly unlike RGO.

[Skalpadda]

I’m enjoying Tyranny so far. I’ve only just completed the first stretch of the game (taken the tower and averted the Edict) but I’m genuinely curious to see where things will go. I’ve spent more or less the whole game so far telling everyone to go fuck themselves which is a bit different from how I usually play RPGs. I try to stay away from channeling Jesus, but I generally try to be somewhat friendly with most people and factions I come across.

Mechanically it is a bit janky. I expected a bit of jank given it’s a low budget game, and RTWP always feels like a bit of a fustercluck with bigger parties to me, but I wasn’t expecting stuff like my characters’ absolute determination to get stuck on scenery every chance they get. I’ve had it happen twice that I’ve tried to do a combo move with a party member and both of them got stuck running into scenery for the rest of the fight without me finding a way to interrupt the move.

The UI is pretty terrible.

And I kind of wish they’d skipped the voice acting entirely or only used it in cutscenes. I’m not a super fast reader but I read a lot quicker than the VO, so whenever it turns up, seemingly at random, it’s either a big clunk where everything slows down, or I just ignore it and read through and then cut it off mid-sentence.

But those are things I can live with as long as the story, characters, and role playing are interesting and so far they are.

[Lukasz]

I’ve spent more or less the whole game so far telling everyone to go fuck themselves which is a bit different from how I usually play RPGs. I try to stay away from channeling Jesus, but I generally try to be somewhat friendly with most people and factions I come across.

haha. i generally play as Jesus the Incarnate so also played Tyranny the opposite way.

had to reload at one point as i started instinctively to defend a poor merchant against some random thugs. after reload I applauded the thugs on a good job done.

Its good game but it does have shortcomings. I think the first part is the weakest part of the game*. so hope you will enjoy rest. There is quiet nice complexity to factions and how everyone acts to you and to your boss.

*seems it supposed to be more complex but they cut lots of content after finishing other major areas.