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practical_romantic  1yr ago (text post)   2854 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 21, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I played through the first Chapter of Hard West 2 and it's pretty good! There are some flaws that can be pointed out and I don't think it's likely to have much replayability, but the aesthetics and combat mechanics are quite good. If you like turn-based tactics, this one is worth taking a look at for $24.

What are you playing?

Hated the CYOA nature of HW1 and was unimpressed by the tactics.

Right now I'm mostly just letting Distant Worlds 2 play itself while I do other things. I occasionally dip into Cyberpunk 2077 to marvel at the production quality, sometimes Terra Invicta to see how the Early Access is going, but I'm not sticking around much.

I occasionally dip into Cyberpunk 2077 to marvel at the production quality

Huh. That's not a sentence I expected to see based on what I've heard.

There's a resurgence in the player base lately. Apparently the latest patch fixed a lot of the issues.

Edgerunners seems to have driven a lot of new players too.

Sure, bugs. Absence of balance. Narrative issues. Too much of some kinds of content, too little of others. A lot of unfulfilled promises and unfulfilled potential. The launch, from what I hear. Keanu Reeves being really not into his role, IMO. Player choice really not having at all that much impact. The AI being as retarded as in any other game. But the product as it currently is is still fairly impressive. Visually for one, the atmosphere is pretty good, the writing is unusually good for a video game, the setting is very consistently realized, the gameplay is fairly varied and all parts are at least technically solid while some are actually quite good. It may not be a masterpiece, but in my view it's far better than its reputation and - and that's always the part that most interests me - it's very ambitious in many aspects and manages to go relatively far towards that ambition, with a relatively large scope and relatively high quality. In the end it's still just vidya, and it has a cornucopia of problems, and its ambition could be summed up as "do an immersive sim, bigger and more mature than the others" which isn't exactly revolutionary, but I'd say that Cyberpunk 2077 comfortably occupies a niche that you can find by starting somewhere near Deus Ex: Human Revolution (or maybe Mankind Divided, I never finished that so I can't say), then adding on a ton of quantity and quality. If Human Revolution was a decent or good game, then what is Cyberpunk 2077 if not a better one? One can hardly claim that it's less, or worse, than HR.

Of course in the end, Cyberpunk 2077 still suffers from one fatal flaw that I can't forgive - it's far too easy. I start it up, take a look around, go "oooh this is nice", murderhobo some gangsters with complete impunity or breeze through some story mission and close the game again, thinking what a shame that it's a walking simulator with no sense of challenge whatsoever.

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