ExoMonk

@ExoMonk@beehaw.org

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ExoMonk,

Surely they’ll just use your google account id as the identifier.

Edit: I just realized the game may not eve have that data for unity to be able to grab. Nevermind.

Dragon Age: Origins walked so Baldur’s Gate 3 could dash (www.techradar.com)

Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t the first successful attempt to marry cinematic aspirations with the traditional branching narratives and simulationist world-building of CRPGs. 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins had a very similar mission statement, offering a spiritual successor to BioWare’s earlier Baldur’s Gate titles long before...

ExoMonk,

(all the copy and paste rule of 3 quests to find three MacGuffins then SAM will figure out how to find a location for another fight).

This has been my biggest complaint as I’ve been going through ME:A for the first time. I have limited time/energy to play so jumping into ME:A for 2ish hours and basically accomplish nothing really hurts my motivation for the next play session.

When I first started playing it, I was really enjoying the game. It was about the 3rd planet where I had to go to 3 places to unlock a vault to do a thing that the progression loop really started to weigh me down.

The original trilogy was brilliant for me. Get in, do a couple of missions (each one progressing the story a little more) maybe get sucked into a couple more missions and go to bed excited for the next session. But ME:A is just a slog. I’m doing various loyalty missions which is a little better, but still seems to require a lot of go here, here, and here and shoot some guys and then go into here to finish up.

Most emotional moments in games? (SPOILERS)

Just for the heads up, this thread will probably have a lot of spoilers. I’m gonna try to go vague on spoilers for anybody that hasn’t played Hotline Miami 2. If you’ve played the game, you’ll probably know what I mean, but I’m going to say some purposefully esoteric shit to keep it out of full spoiler territory....

ExoMonk,

Final Fantasy 7 when Aeries dies. I was a teen then and it was the first RPG I ever played and the first time I experienced a main character just die and is gone from the game.

I don’t think I experienced anything like that again until maybe Destiny 2 when Cayde died. Little different with that though as they should his death in a live stream about the launch of that DLC. Had a different impact but had to be done since the entire premise of that DLC was getting revenge so couldn’t hide it from the promo materials.

ExoMonk,

I’ve been out of the loop on this game. I really liked the first one, it brought back a lot of team fortress 2 memories. How bad is the second one? The general sentiment is “bad”.

Choose Four Consoles to Have the Largest Selection of Games

So I’m reassessing my entertainment center since seeing the Video Game History Foundation’s report. Since the study it’s got me thinking, if you could pick any 4 consoles to have hooked up to your TV (4 becuase I’ve got 4 inputs to my TV) which would you pick and why? I will accept modded consoles as answers too.

ExoMonk,

I wouldn’t buy any consoles, I would build (though you can buy) a really powerful gaming PC to plug up to my 4k TV. I’ve actually recently done just that and it works amazingly well.

Things to make it a good experience:

  1. Make sure you have a 4k TV with HDMI 2.1 for 120hz gaming
  2. Configure Windows to bypass the login screen on boot
  3. Configure Steam to launch in Big Picture mode on startup
  4. Buy an Xbox Controller and the little dongle for it (it works better than just bluetooth)
  5. Buy a small wireless keyboard with built in trackpad for the odd occasion you need to use a mouse and keyboard (looking at you EA Play).

With that, you’ve got the best console ever. Huge backlog of games, games on steep discounts, a machine that has a much better experience outputting to a 4k TV than something like a Steamdeck or a console. I’ve tried the Steamdeck to a 4k TV and the quality was pretty awful; 720p does not upscale to 4k well at all. And if you wanted to, you could set it up with emulators using retroarch for any games you are missing.

My TVPC specs:

  1. Ryzen 7800x
  2. 32GB DDR5-6000
  3. 2TB NVME SSD
  4. RTX 4080
  5. Fractal Design Torrent Nano

I picked that case specifically for the huge 180mm fan in the front, the fact it can fit a massive cooler like the Peerless Assassin and the GPU gets fresh air from the bottom. It’s not the smallest case, but it stays cool and super quiet.

ExoMonk,

Yeah it was a headache for me in the past too, but the latest Steam Big Picture which behaves more like a Steamdeck has made it pretty easy. Since it launches right away, I can easily launch and quit steam games with 0 issue and when I’m done I used big picture to just shut the PC down.

One issue I found was if I let the PC sleep, it always brings up the login screen on wake so I just shut it down everytime. NVME’s are so fast the boot up is whatevs. Non-steam games are also a little painful as sometimes it won’t switch active windows, or I have to login or something.

I only use this machine for games. Like you said, HTPC was a pain. I have a different server that I have Plex setup on and I use Apple TV’s / Roku’s for streaming.

ExoMonk,

Yeah the PS5 is pretty reasonably priced for what you get. I think the issue is two fold:

  1. We already have really expensive machines that probably play games much better than the PS5 in frames and quality so buying another machine for a handful of games is just not in the cards.
  2. Many of us much prefer keyboard/mouse and using controllers is really hard when you’ve not done it in many years.

I think we just wish Playstation was more friendly to PC players and not have these long exclusives (they’ve gotten a lot better recently though). Microsoft for example is a lot friendlier to PC players than Sony. Pretty much all MS first party games are on PC pretty much day one and many of them are on GamePass day one as well.

ExoMonk,

Yeah while MS does also “own” the PC ecosystem via Windows, I’d bet MS probably makes more money off of an individual Xbox player than a PC player which should make them a bit less friendly to PC.

For starters:

  • Steam takes a 30% cut of all sales
  • Sales and prices are usually much better on Steam than consoles so a lot of people wait for that number to drop over time
  • For most multiplayer games you need to pay for Xbox Gold which is upwards of $50-$60 a year (or gamepass which is even more, though you get more out of it).
  • You have to buy the console (this really depends on if MS actually makes money on console sales though) to play the game too.

Microsoft doesn’t have to put their games on PC if they don’t want to and in the past they kind of didn’t (no one liked GFWL). They could totally go the exclusive route again, but I think MS knows that Xbox die-hard will buy an Xbox console and obviously buy the games on the xbox store for whatever it cost. PC players will also buy it if it’s a good game and a good price and, this is crucial, is on Steam.

PC players are an untapped resource of potential customers; That’s why Sony finally decided to also cave and put their games on Steam. Money is money, but the difference is MS is betting big on GamePass and good-will right now since they are behind Sony in sales. I think because they’re behind Sony and trying to earn that good-will back, MS becomes more friendly to PC by putting their games on PC day one and on GamePass day one whereas Sony is still going with the 1-year (or more) PS5 exclusivity thing.

The interesting thing will be if MS ever gets back on top again, who knows what that looks like, but it’ll probably suck.

ExoMonk,

That’s totally fair. I’m not sure where MS’ steam games fall on “working with linux” via Proton. I haven’t heard them being actively hostile like Bungie is with Destiny, but I’m not sure where that’s at.

ExoMonk,

I agree with that for most people. I’m a bit of a weirdo who has a PC and Xbox Series X. I bought the X purely so I can play Destiny from my recliner chair on days where I just can’t sit at my desk anymore. It (along with GamePass) has also benefited my wife immensely. She’s played so many games on GamePass on the Xbox, it’s great.

Most recently I tried to make my PC hybrid between desk and TV and the experience was so frustratingly bad. Trying to send audio to 2 different places was bad (even with Voicemeter) and then the monitors kept getting all screwed up because of the TV being sometimes seen and sometimes not. It was a terrible experience. Eventually I said screw it and built a completely dedicated PC for my tv couch gaming and it honestly works pretty damn great.

ExoMonk,

This happened to me when I was streaming. My favorite hobby became like a job. I only played while streaming and the time I was putting in outside of work was kind of killing me. Working a full day, coming home to do dinner and time with my wife and then start streaming by 8pm a couple days a week. It exhausted me. At some point I started to skip days and then I just never went back. Now I play games as a form of entertainment like watching Netflix/Hulu. I do it for leisure.

Sometimes I miss it though and think maybe I should try and get back into it but so far I've just not.

ExoMonk,

Was going to say this as well. As a long time destiny player it very much feels like checking boxes or doing chores each week.

I've finally managed to break away and play other games and am so excited for my current to do pile. Mass Effect 1,2,3 done, Andromeda is in progress and after that is Control, Cyberpunk and Fallout 4.

ExoMonk,

My first run through was femshep and I just finished my second run through with broshep. He gets much much better in ME2 and is incredible in ME3.

I’ve fallen into a deep gaming rut lately. What game(s) helped “get you back into” gaming and rediscover the magic of video games?

I, like many gamers, grew up playing Pokémon Red and Nintendo 64 and was obsessed with Nintendo products. I graduated to a PS2 and PS3 and became super into Metal Gear Solid and Call of Duty and Fallout. Also spent a ton of time with the Guitar Hero series. I loved the escape gaming brought me and it genuinely helped me relax....

ExoMonk,

I've been playing Destiny nearly 100% of my gaming time for the last like 9 years. I finally decided to try other games again after a particular slow and uninteresting season. I decided to go with Mass Effect Trilogy. I loved it so much after I beat it I immediately started a new character of the opposite gender. After finishing that run I've moved on to Andromeda.

As a huge fan of space and scifi. I'm looking forward to Starfield. Mass Effect gave me that magic and I'm super excited to see all these worlds I've been missing out on.

ExoMonk,

Man Origins boss fights were great. I remember being in awe when fighting Deadshot. That fight was the definition of a slobberknocker. I don't remember much else from that game but that fight stuck with me.

ExoMonk,

Just started Mass Effect Andromeda after finishing 2 runs of the original trilogy (loved them). Sadly my internet is out and EA won’t let me play which is a massive bummer.

ExoMonk,

Destiny 2. It gets a lot of hate (a lot of it deserved) but every week me and two friends run dungeons and it's always fun.

ExoMonk,

Yeah that's a weird choice. Todd Howard said that the game has performed upwards of 60fps in some places, but they made the choice to lock it down to 30fps on console for full graphical fidelity.

I get that not everyone has a TV that supports VRR, but they should be able to programmatically check what the xbox is currently supporting. If it is a Series-X and does support VRR they should be able to unlock FPS to up-to 60. I mean even 40fps on the steamdeck is surprisingly good, whereas 30 can be really jarring. Or give a choice to the user, 4k@30 or 1440p@60 with VRR.

ExoMonk,

I just hope it plays 60+ on PC, who knows it could be pretty rough. I haven’t watched the digital foundry video on it yet, I assume it’s just Xbox version.

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