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The "What are you playing now?" Thread

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Unrelated, but I really hate when games on Steam don't have a pre-load feature. There is no reason Metal Gear Solid V shouldn't allow a pre-load when it comes out tomorrow, especially since the game doesn't even unlock until 1pm EST tomorrow to begin with (which is an additional annoyance...why not midnight when everyone who buys a physical copy can start playing?).

At least Mad Max allowed a pre-load, so I'll have something to play while I wait.

Now I just need to finish Witcher 3. Thankfully, all I really have left is crafting a few additional mastercrafted witcher items, a handful of treasure hunts I probably won't do because I'm so out-leveled for them at this point the gear I get back wouldn't be worth it anyway, and what I assume, this time, is the actual final mission, or at least the final string of missions.

I'm two hours away from the 100 hour mark in Witcher 3, by the way. I can't even remember the last non-TF2 game I've played that long. Fallout 3, maybe?
 
I swear, Witcher 3 is the game that never ends. Every time I think I'm almost done, they toss another three or four quests my way. I just hit the 100 hour mark. I'm just amazed by the amount of content in this game. There are still about ten million question marks on my map unexplored...basically all of them in Skellige save for maybe two dozen or so, a bunch in Velen, and one or two in Kaer Morhen. And that's not even considering various side quests I've probably missed just because of the sheer size of the game world.
 
Well, finished The Witcher 3 a whopping eight minutes before Mad Max and MGSV unlocked on Steam. Not bad timing, although to be fair I did marathon it today. I still have two quests I want to finish up to craft the rest of my master witcher gear (I have the Cat and Bear gear...still need Griffin and Wolf), but other than that all I really have left is all those fucking question marks.

Total time so far: 103 hours.

Final Verdict: Game of the year unless Metal Gear or Fallout 4 passes it at the finish line.
 
Initial impressions of Mad Max (which I am playing while Metal Gear Solid V downloads since Konami are dicks and wouldn't let me preload) are positive. The game looks a lot better than I thought it would, which is probably my fault for going simply by the YouTube streams I've seen the past few weeks, which are always lesser quality than actual games. It actually looks fantastic. The character models aren't as good as Witcher 3's, but few are. The art design, though, is great. The small part of the wasteland I've seen in my hour or so with the game has some nice and unique visuals for an open world game.

Max controls a little stiff (same with Geralt in Witcher 3) when he's just running around, but in combat I haven't had any issues since I got a feel for it. The combat is more or less like Batman or Shadows of Mordor. Enemies attack and you counter, stringing together combos and trying to avoid being hit. I only have the shotgun so far and almost no ammo, so it will be interesting to see how combat evolves as I level up and get new stuff.

The car controls well enough, but I have zero upgrades for it so it's impossible to judge how it will eventually control. I assume upgrades will have an impact on handling down the line. I've only been in one car combat sequence and it was the car combat tutorial. I do really like how the camera slows down to a crawl when you aim your shotgun while driving. It's a great touch that should make it very useful in combat situations going forward.

So far, zero technical issues and the game runs perfectly on my system, which I certainly couldn't say about Witcher 3, which crashed on my constantly up to when I finished it this week.

Oh yeah, one feature I really like is that the game tells you when you've fully looted an area, so you're not stuck just wandering around looking for shit that isn't there. I wish more games would do that.
 
Well, finished The Witcher 3 a whopping eight minutes before Mad Max and MGSV unlocked on Steam. Not bad timing, although to be fair I did marathon it today. I still have two quests I want to finish up to craft the rest of my master witcher gear (I have the Cat and Bear gear...still need Griffin and Wolf), but other than that all I really have left is all those fucking question marks.

Total time so far: 103 hours.

Final Verdict: Game of the year unless Metal Gear or Fallout 4 passes it at the finish line.

I'd be surprised if it isn't fallout 4 by default. They'd have to do a lot to fuck that game up.
 
Wow the first hour of the phantom pain is soo boring. Finally got to the e3 demo mission and the kids came back.

I'm seriously bad at the game so far. Hopefully if I can get a bit of practice in tonight
 
I'd be surprised if it isn't fallout 4 by default. They'd have to do a lot to fuck that game up.

Well, Witcher 3 kind of re-invented how to do side quests in an RPG, and I'm currently wondering if Bethesda will do anything in that area. Side quests have often been pretty uninspiring in Bethesda games (and really RPGs in general), and rarely seem like they matter. I also wonder if Bethesda will be able to make the characters that hand them out seem like real people rather than just quest generators, which is another issue they've always had in the past.

I got bored real fast with Skyrim. I think I only played it about 30 hours, which is not much for me for an Elder Scrolls game. They keep making their worlds bigger and prettier, but there's never really that much more to do.

Witcher 3 just set the bar really high for RPGs. It ran with what worked and changed a lot that didn't. Bethesda, on the other hand, has basically been making the exact same game with some minor touch-ups since Oblivion (you could probably even argue Morrowind). I'm definitely getting Fallout 4, but I just don't know at this point how different it will be from every other Bethesda game, and that concerns me since I think I might be burnt out on their formula.

It's also incredibly, incredibly rare for me to sink 20 hours into a game, let alone 100. That's how I know Witcher 3 was something special. I get bored with games real quick and struggle to finish most of the ones I buy. When I get so completely sucked into a game experience, I know it was a classic.

But of course, I think Fallout 3 was the last game to do that to me (not the last game I beat, but the last game I went out of my way to do basically everything), so maybe Fallout 4 will work out okay.

Wow the first hour of the phantom pain is soo boring. Finally got to the e3 demo mission and the kids came back.

I'm seriously bad at the game so far. Hopefully if I can get a bit of practice in tonight

You didn't like the intro? That alone was like an hour long.
 
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You didn't like the intro? That alone was like an hour long.

i had 3 hours of childcare left and after the install and the intro i was just busting to get into it. Ended up making a sandwich whilst holding the leftstick in a forwards direction for 10 minutes.

The main game is amazing and probably a little to complex for me to feel totally happy playing right now. Do I R&D a sniper rifle to take out the spetsnaz commander? but he would be pretty useful at mother base so do i try to get him covertly? I just feel like i'm going to miss loads of cool things.
 
By the way, I would like to point out how impressed I was last night in my limited experience with each game with how well they both run. After dealing with constant crashing and texture pop-in in Witcher 3 (that was an issue for me pretty much since launch, and seems to have gotten worse with the latest patch...probably has something to do with Windows 10 I'd imagine) and the abysmal port of Arkham Knight, it was nice to jump into two games that ran completely smoothly.

I'll reserve some judgment on Phantom Pain since I only just got to the open world Afghanistan part when I quit for the night, but Mad Max ran fantastically. I think I might have gotten one stutter in almost two hours with the game, and that was when I was driving a long distance so it was probably loading-related.

I honestly don't know how Polygon gave Mad Max a fucking 5 out of 10. It's technically sound and fun to play. That should be at least a seven, even if it gets boring or repetitive after a while (which, let's be honest, is every open world game ever made).

i had 3 hours of childcare left and after the install and the intro i was just busting to get into it. Ended up making a sandwich whilst holding the leftstick in a forwards direction for 10 minutes.

The main game is amazing and probably a little to complex for me to feel totally happy playing right now. Do I R&D a sniper rifle to take out the spetsnaz commander? but he would be pretty useful at mother base so do i try to get him covertly? I just feel like i'm going to miss loads of cool things.

I haven't even gotten to the part where you start making decisions yet. I quit right after I took control in Afghanistan because it was really late and I needed to sleep. I've got a couple of errands to run this afternoon, then I'm going to play more.
 
Well, Witcher 3 kind of re-invented how to do side quests in an RPG, and I'm currently wondering if Bethesda will do anything in that area. Side quests have often been pretty uninspiring in Bethesda games (and really RPGs in general), and rarely seem like they matter. I also wonder if Bethesda will be able to make the characters that hand them out seem like real people rather than just quest generators, which is another issue they've always had in the past.

I got bored real fast with Skyrim. I think I only played it about 30 hours, which is not much for me for an Elder Scrolls game. They keep making their worlds bigger and prettier, but there's never really that much more to do.

Witcher 3 just set the bar really high for RPGs. It ran with what worked and changed a lot that didn't. Bethesda, on the other hand, has basically been making the exact same game with some minor touch-ups since Oblivion (you could probably even argue Morrowind). I'm definitely getting Fallout 4, but I just don't know at this point how different it will be from every other Bethesda game, and that concerns me since I think I might be burnt out on their formula.

It's also incredibly, incredibly rare for me to sink 20 hours into a game, let alone 100. That's how I know Witcher 3 was something special. I get bored with games real quick and struggle to finish most of the ones I buy. When I get so completely sucked into a game experience, I know it was a classic.

But of course, I think Fallout 3 was the last game to do that to me (not the last game I beat, but the last game I went out of my way to do basically everything), so maybe Fallout 4 will work out okay.



You didn't like the intro? That alone was like an hour long.
What did Witcher do for side quests that broke the mold? Honest question, I haven't played it.
 
What did Witcher do for side quests that broke the mold? Honest question, I haven't played it.
On a broader level, Witcher 3 was probably the first rpg that I felt the world around you was alive and you were just one small part of it, instead of being the center of the universe. Biggest problem with Bethesda games for me is that 1) every character seems boring and static and 2) it seems like someone hits the off switch when you're not around.

The Witcher 3 puts a ton of effort into developing the characters in these quests. Also, the main quest in the Witcher is to find and save your surrogate daughter, but there are some world-altering sidequests that change the fate of nations. Just incredibly well done.
 
What did Witcher do for side quests that broke the mold? Honest question, I haven't played it.

Basically what howler said. You get a sense that the things you are doing in side quests matters, that the people who hand them out have lives that are impacted by the things that you've done for them. There are some fetch quests (although those are mostly put into the Treasure Hunt quest category), but for the most part side quests just feel like they matter, which is almost never the case in Bethesda games.

In addition, the characters who hand you the quests don't generally seem like they exist solely to hand out quests. They have a stake in your success or failure. You're looking for their loved one, or trying to find out who is killing their livestock, or just generally making it safer for them to walk around at night. They're not always happy with the outcome, either. I told a guy I found his brother dead, killed by the monster I tracked down and eliminated, and he refused to pay me for the contract, for example. The people just feel realer than in most other RPGs.

Not every side quest is like that, of course, and there are some fetch quests in there, but even those tend to have better writing than most other RPGs, and a lot of times you're accompanied by someone else on the fetch quests, so they keep you engaged by talking to you and fleshing out the world.

Other than that, the characters are just so much better than in the average Bethesda game. Can you name any characters of note from an Elder Scrolls game? I remember Patrick Stewart let me out of jail in Oblivion before promptly being murdered, and Sean Bean showed up in Skyrim but didn't really do anything, and that's about it. There are a couple of side characters in Witcher 3 that are more fleshed out than any character in an Elder Scrolls game, like the Bloody Baron, for instance.

You really should play the game, though. It's a fantastic game. One of the best RPGs I've ever played.
 
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Basically, what Jack and I both agree on is that the old Fallout 3/Elder Scrolls style of RPGs (might as well throw in Dragon Age Inquisition in there) are now obsolete after this. It just completely redefined world building on an open-world game scale, and it'll be tough for me to replay any of the similar games that came before it, because the Witcher 3 is just plain better in almost every way.

The game does the little things so well, including some of the best overall voice acting I've seen in a game. Not just the main characters, but even the people you walk by in the city speak as if they're going about their daily lives. Also, I think the cities are significantly larger in scale and detail than any other RPG cities.
 
Man so many good games out that I havent played. MGS4, Rocket League, Witcher 3, Fallout 4 SOON... hopefully santa hooks it up with steam cards lol
 

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