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Post by mikegarrison on Feb 12, 2021 2:25:06 GMT -5
LOL, Wolfgang comes in here talking about sidequests that you find in the open world, and I'm all yeah, yeah, every open world game has these, and I've already found all of them in HZD. Except then I am just travelling along the road and I see a strange thing on the map. A little blind canyon that appears to have a building in it. So I decide to explore it and I get the little green "!" that means a side quest is available. Turns out there is a crazy Banuk living there who wants to "drink the blood of machines". Yeah, yeah, a fetch quest. So I go fetch the "blood" of a sawtooth. But that's not enough. Now I need the "blood" of a corruptor. (Don't have to kill that one, just fight off some glinthawks.) Now he says I need to bring him the "blood" of a stalker. OK, starting to get tedious. So I check the web and he's also going to ask me for stormbird and thunderjaw blood too. Damn this guy is needy! Stormbirds are the worst because they just keep flying around. You have to lead them just right with your arrows. Thunderjaws? Pretty easy by comparison.
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Post by Wolfgang on Feb 12, 2021 2:54:24 GMT -5
LOL, Wolfgang comes in here talking about sidequests that you find in the open world, and I'm all yeah, yeah, every open world game has these, and I've already found all of them in HZD. Except then I am just travelling along the road and I see a strange thing on the map. A little blind canyon that appears to have a building in it. So I decide to explore it and I get the little green "!" that means a side quest is available. Turns out there is a crazy Banuk living there who wants to "drink the blood of machines". Yeah, yeah, a fetch quest. So I go fetch the "blood" of a sawtooth. But that's not enough. Now I need the "blood" of a corruptor. (Don't have to kill that one, just fight off some glinthawks.) Now he says I need to bring him the "blood" of a stalker. OK, starting to get tedious. So I check the web and he's also going to ask me for stormbird and thunderjaw blood too. Damn this guy is needy! Stormbirds are the worst because they just keep flying around. You have to lead them just right with your arrows. Thunderjaws? Pretty easy by comparison. ☑️ Been there, done that. Seven times.
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Post by mikegarrison on Feb 12, 2021 3:15:12 GMT -5
The Shadow Carja have sent an army to destroy the Nora, and instead of going to save the Nora I'm taking the time to run around and get "blood" for this crazy shaman. One thing I don't like about some of these fetch quests in HZD is that they are *very* specific. Like, I killed a stalker on my way to meet this guy, but nope -- it has to be a *new* stalker. And it's really annoying that they have these "weapon tutorial" quests, but you can't get credit for them even if you do the exact thing they want you to do unless you have the quest active. Also, Wolfgang mentioned the icerail weapon. I have the improved version, but I'm not sure how to fire the "bolt" alternate attack. Mainly I rely about 95% on my sniper bow, 4% on the spear if for some reason I have to, and 1% on tripline traps. (The first cauldron I was in I set like 3 dozen traps and triplines before I realized that the game was vaporizing them. It seems there is a limit -- maybe a dozen or so, and then every new one you place despawns an old one.)
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Post by Wolfgang on Feb 12, 2021 3:32:12 GMT -5
Re. icerail.
It's pretty straightforward with my PS4 controller. You hold a button down until the crosshairs converge and then release. I don't know about your PC version.
If I recall, you have to spray your enemies with the ice to freeze them first, then you can use the high-powered bolts for max effectiveness. I don't think you can just use the bolt right out of the starting gates. It's a two-step process. You freeze them to harden them, then you fire the bolts to crack them.
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Post by Wolfgang on Feb 12, 2021 3:35:10 GMT -5
I launched bombs, sniper bow, standard bow (forgot all the different bows but I used them), the traps, rope caster, ice rail, stormslinger, forgefire, other crap I can't remember. I used them all.
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Post by Wolfgang on Feb 12, 2021 4:05:22 GMT -5
Horizon Zero Dawn Oh, I forgot the funniest (and creepiest) thing I found online. If you have a foot fetish (...and I don't btw. Feet are disgusting.), you can see Aloy's barefeet if you buy and wear the fire outfit from the Frozen Wild. I think it's called the Carja Blazon but I can't remember anymore. It's the only outfit where she wears sandals, which is odd that a fire-retardant outfit would expose your barefeet like that. Anyway, her feet is no big deal because: 1. She's a FICTIONAL character, 2. Her feet was imagined and DRAWN by some artist, and 3. Her feet looks exactly like Talanah's feet. I think they just cookie cuttered the design. I don't even understand how her feet can look so clean and pristine despite all the crap she goes through in various terrain. In real life, it should look disgusting.
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Post by mikegarrison on Feb 12, 2021 14:52:48 GMT -5
I don't even understand how her feet can look so clean and pristine despite all the crap she goes through in various terrain. In real life, it should look disgusting. It's all the swimming and wading through icy water that she does. That's what keeps her and her outfits clean.
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Post by mikegarrison on Feb 12, 2021 18:15:14 GMT -5
Horizon Zero Dawn (continued) 20. You meet those three idiots from the Frozen Wilds again in the main game if you go to that wall fortress (forgot the name). The place you go to talk to that reasonable commander about that evil Zaid slaver dude who kept that girl hostage. I never met that girl again anywhere in the game after we said our farewells even though she said to look her up. Minor logic bug. The commander denies that Zaid could be a problem. He also suggests you go back to Noraland to find some missing soldiers. If you come back and talk to him later, he will apologize for doubting that Zaid was a SOB. He also thanks you for finding his missing men. And then when you exit the conversation, he says "Let me know if there is any news about those missing men," even though he just thanked you for solving that quest.
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Post by mikegarrison on Feb 12, 2021 19:02:46 GMT -5
I totally called it. Fighting that damn stormbird was way harder than fighting the thunderjaw.
In fact, the thunderjaw was even easier than normal because I "made friends" with a sawtooth that took a chunk out of the thunderjaw's health bar.
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Post by mikegarrison on Feb 13, 2021 4:05:56 GMT -5
HZD: Well, I went back to Noraland and had a frustrating experience.
I killed some bad machines and bad people, but then died and got sent way, way back. So I had to kill the same bad machines and people again. But this time I saved a few checkpoints. And yet somehow even though I killed not one but two deathbringers because of this, I ended up without being able to loot the deathbringer corpse because it just disappeared somehow.
The game has these invisible cells that sometimes work in your favor and sometimes work against you. Sometimes you can stand just across some invisible line and the machine you are fighting will refuse to cross it. But also sometimes you cross some invisible line and the machine you killed or the machine you had on its last breath will respawn 100% healthy. I really hate infinitely respawning "open worlds". It's so immersion-breaking. And it promotes "farming".
In Far Cry 4 it got so crazy that you can watch packs of enemies spawn right in front of you. And sometimes a new enemy would spawn right on top of its predecessor and they would fight. Like you come across two tigers fighting, and it's because that's a tiger spawning location.
Anyway, I killed this thunderjaw and saved the Nora and now they all worship me like gullible dufuses. (Is there an open world game anywhere that you don't start as a prisoner or outcast and end up the most important bad@ss in the world? Maybe it would be fun to start out as the big boss and end up living in a box under an overpass.) And I sent them all to defend Meridian, for some unexplained reason, because my next quest is quite far from Meridian.
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Post by mln59 on Feb 13, 2021 16:49:53 GMT -5
been able to unlock two new areas in hollow knight
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Post by mikegarrison on Feb 13, 2021 19:31:42 GMT -5
So I went to Gaia Prime and found out that Ted Faro was even more of a bastard than we knew before.
(And I now have the shield suit. I'm not sure if it is better than my super-stealth suit or not. Likely it's better in stand-up combat, but not as good for my usual "snipe from the edges" and "choose when and where to fight" playstyle.)
At least this game avoided the trope of giving you your best weapons and armor only after you completely finish the game. That's always pretty annoying.
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Post by mikegarrison on Feb 13, 2021 19:51:08 GMT -5
HZD really -- I mean, really really -- keeps reminding me of The Talos Principle. Not in gameplay but in backstory. Talos Principle: Human overreach (human-caused global warming) releases a plague (a virus that melts out of the Siberian permafrost) that kills all humans (it kills all primates, actually). A small group of scientists react to this by trying to save as much of human knowledge and culture as they can. Then they try to restart a new intelligent race (an ai-driven android robot, who is presumably the first of its kind rather than the only of its kind).
HZD: Human overreach (self-replicating robots) releases a plague (an infinite army of self-replicating robots) that kills all humans (it kills all biological life, actually). A small group of scientists react to this by trying to save as much of human knowledge and culture as they can. Then they try to restart a new intelligent race (cloned humans raised in incubators, after the robot plague has been shut down and the Earth reterraformed).
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Post by Wolfgang on Feb 13, 2021 21:54:36 GMT -5
Shadow of Mordor
I remembered one of the best (and horrifying) things about Shadow of Mordor -- the Captains coming up to you and confronting you when you least expect it.
The way it happens is, you're either minding your business or fighting some grunts and then, all of a sudden, you can see out of the corner of your eye (or somewhere on your screen), you see some enemy walking toward you very confidently. And then, the camera zooms in on the enemy and it's a Captain! Or you're fighting a bunch of weakly grunts and then suddenly, you realize one of the grunts is actually a powerful Captain. These encounters were, to me, quite scary. In my first playthrough, these cutscenes from these random encounters scared the crap out of me because I'm now suddenly going up against a powerful Captain when I'm not ready for it.
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Post by bbg95 on Feb 13, 2021 23:50:25 GMT -5
Yakuza: Like a Dragon
After maybe eight hours total of business management simulation, I have brought Ichiban Holdings (the company I took over just happened to have the same name as the main character--apparently "Ichiban" translates to "number one" or "the best" in Japanese) to No. 1 on the stock exchange. In the process, I recruited a new party member and got her several new skills, as well as earned over 35 million yen. It takes maybe 15 minutes to run through a business cycle again and earn 3 million each time. I also unlocked the ability to call in an orbital laser strike in battle. This costs so much MP that I couldn't even cast it without equipping some MP-reduction accessories, but it does a ton of damage to all enemies on the field. It also can temporarily paralyze any enemies that actually survive. Sure, it drains all of my MP, but I can just take an MP-restoring item (which are readily purchasable at stores) in between battles.
I am now in the process of upgrading my gear as much as possible and clearing side quests before moving on with the main quest. I was surprised to learn that all but the rarest of crafting materials are also purchasable at stores. Now, these materials would be kind of expensive before, but I have so much money and the ability to quickly earn a lot more, that it makes sense to just buy what I need and move on. I appreciate that this game just lets me throw money at my problems instead of having to farm certain enemies over and over like so many other games do. They seem to have substituted 8-10 hours of business management minigame in place of 20+ hours of grinding that would cause me to not even bother with the crafting if it was too much of a pain. And the minigame was actually fun, as I built my business from a small confections shop to a multi-industry empire and recruited some superstar employees.
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