Posts made by Thenomain

@Ganymede said in General Video Game Thread:

@magee101 said in General Video Game Thread:

The main reason I said 1$ per hour would be good for Outer Worlds is because it is marketed as a open world RPG. It's also why I don't buy games like Last of Us or the Call of Duties, I buy RPG games because I want something that will give me 40-60 if not more hours for that 60 dollar price tag.

To each their own. I suppose your analysis is why I enjoyed any of the Mass Effect games more than Dragon Age: Inquisition.

DA:I was too long for you?

I don't care that I finished The Outer Worlds in 30 hours.

I care that it didn't feel too fleshed out. I care that it didn't feel memorable.

I care that I wanted to get more involved in the world, in the companions, in the situation.

I care that it felt very late to me before I could see the plot. Maybe if I read all the terminals and data pads I would have put it together before someone said, "This is the plot," but that moment was very, very late.

I care there were teased locations that I never got to. Did I make a decision that took me away from it? This is the main reason I want to do a second playthrough where I will try to be the biggest jerk possible.

I care that the final moral decision was introduced, again, via a terminal and resolved with a "what do you do?"

I care that The Outer Worlds was so much of a tease, not a full-blown immersive orgasm. (Except for our delightful ace companion. That plot was fulfilling. Kudos.)

I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it. I liked it. I liked it enough. But with the small plotlines that rarely interwove (but were awesome when they did!), I felt disappointed.

6/10.

@Ganymede said in General Video Game Thread:

@RDC said in General Video Game Thread:

Longer games = better games is a cancer on the games industry.

The Last of Us has a run-through time of between 12 and 16 hours. At $60, that would put your cost per hour at around $4 to $5.

So, you're right.

Weird, isn't it?

@Testament said in General Video Game Thread:

@Thenomain But it wasn't Outer World enough, was it?

No. It was not.

The Outer Worlds: A 5-Second Review

Didn't hate it, didn't love it. Wished there was more...everything.

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The Outer Worlds: A 5-Second Follow-Up

Wait, Ashley Burch voiced for it? 10/10! Game of the Year! Wooooo!

@surreality said in Echoes in the Mists - CoD 2e MU:

...this would be the ad thread, I believe.

The threads we’re not supposed to be having discussions in?

@RDC said in Echoes in the Mists - CoD 2e MU:

@Thenomain werewolf gifts

Still easier than Promethean.

@magee101 said in Echoes in the Mists - CoD 2e MU:

@Rinel From what I've seen and heard, Mage in 2E is a lot easier to get right and much faster to learn than 1e Mage was.

By a million.

They took that complexity and spread it out to Promethean and Changeling.

@Auspice

Dune fans better sign a rock solid prenup, because we’ve been here before....

@magee101

As long as people know.

But I was mainly addressing why so many games didn’t want Mummy, from my understanding and feedback. Similar as to why Demon is disliked; staff isn’t interested in integrating the story.

@Jennkryst said in Eternal City MUX Needs Help!:

[...] when I went on the 1e games and shouted 'Behold! A 1e sphere to add!', people kept going NOPE.

Because nWoD Mummy is not set up for persistent game play. It's quite possibly more of a story game than Promethean. I personally think it would do the game a disservice.

I doubt this will still be the case for Mummy2e, since there seems to be a lot more care within Onyx Path to cross-balance the games.

@Auspice said in General Video Game Thread:

Outer Worlds needs more Doc Brown

Oh thank god someone else said that, because the number of characters that are almost another character keeps bugging me.

@Testament said in General Video Game Thread:

@Thenomain said in General Video Game Thread:

There isn't enough Fallout for me in Outer Worlds.

Kind of surprised that's a sticking point for some. After the dumpster fires that Fallout 4 is and the catalyst that is the worst PR nightmare for Bethesda that Fallout 76 still continues to be, and you're saying that it's not Fallout enough?

Who says that I think Fallout 4 is Fallout enough? And Fallout Shelter is more Fallout than 76. Fallout 3 and New Vegas revived a world with certain beats. These beats are shared by the original Fallouts. Some are new. These are what makes a Fallout... Fallout.

But Outer Worlds is also not Borderlands enough. It’s not Bioshock enough. It’s not Firefly enough. It’s also, and I want to be deeply constructively critical here, not Outer Worlds enough.

It touches a lot of themes and situations and does not feel to me like they are finding many beats of their own. Even if they cribbed them from all the similar (in more than look) influences, I would be feeling more in step.

I dunno, but I feel like if it was more Fallout like than it would be criticized to no end for copying Fallout, despite the fact that Obsidian is pretty much made out of a good deal of people who created Fallout at Black Isle.

You mean they would be criticized if they had stronger character arcs? More living world with more situational showing and less terminal telling? A plot that wove through everything no matter what you chose to do?

New Vegas is an example of people who created Fallout who created a whole new version of it. Twice if you count the story in the DLC. Twice! You barely step into a Vault! And they ran out of time for how in depth they wanted to make Caesar’s Legion!

So I don’t know what people think “more like Fallout” would have meant “just like Fallout”, but when I finish I plan on giving this game all the accolades possible. Even with my above complaints, there is so much to recommend about this game.

@Arkandel said in General Video Game Thread:

@Thenomain A review I read mentioned its single-player campaign is too short. Do you think that's the case?

Still working through it, but it depends if we're considering it an RPG or an...Action-Adventure? What kind of game is The Outer Worlds?

I'm now putting it solidly in the Bioshock/Borderlands camp with stronger RPG elements. I am enjoying all of the world-building and the conversations and even the RPG system is pretty nice (though I accidentally agreed to a concussion; this will be interesting), but at its core it's a Dungeon Crawler. (Not quite a Looter-Shooter.)

My euphoria from the first scenario has worn off as the game is trying to be more generic, and I can see how there isn't as much depth as there is from a typical Fallout, though I will contend it's still much deeper than Fallout 4 (but not as deep as Far Harbor).

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I started paying more attention to the messages Outer Worlds is trying to pass on and I think the tone just doesn't quite nail it. The ambient music is much more Mass Effect moody than Borderlands quirky. The world-building is neither as dark nor as satirical as it could have been. There isn't enough Fallout for me in Outer Worlds.

A lot of reactions I've been reading seem based on the marketing which always has me waffling because people need to stop being so trusting of marketing. I've brought that up in this thread already, and will continue to warn people: Marketing is there to make a product desirable, hopefully though honest means but this is a video game. Even big companies like Blizzard can't manage to get marketing right.

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I'm enjoying it for $1. If I had $60 to drop on a video game sight unseen then I wouldn't be complaining because I'd be rolling 'round in the dolla dolla bills y'all.

I guess my message is: Be better consumers.

Also: Don't know if it's worth $60 yet. Will review more when I get there and when I better know what $60 means nowadays.

@Jennkryst said in NOLA: The Game That Care Forgot:

I am code dumb, but I never really figured out why the code is a list of every possible merit, instead of just a space on a sheet for you to set a wildcard of data.

The original goal of my code was to provide the most intelligent chargen possible and to stretch my brain with @Cobaltasaurus while making the original Darkwater.

(Hah! I got it right this time!)

At the time I started on the original code, it was not unusual for staff to have to manually eyeball sheets which added administrative work on their shoulders, or all the chargens I knew about were deeply weighted to complex code that was hard for anyone to work with.

With my code, it's a matter of installing (which is too hard as it is) and educating people how to set some of the stranger WoD situations. Staffers on several games have solved this by making chargen rooms. "To set your favored attribute...", etc.

So my goals were:

1. Easy-As-Possible chargen
2. Easy system management
3. Keep Theno from being bored and Cobalt also learning to code

So yeah, if staff wants to be lazy that's on them. If they want to use their time I give them to better run the game, then I've done my job.

@Ghost

That's stupid.

Have an upvote.

@RDC said in NOLA: The Game That Care Forgot:

@Thenomain No, I get it. But this particular conflict could be negated by just not having a stat called Hallow Dance AND a stat called Hallow, right? For games without mage installed would this be a problem (any more than it is right now, which isn't much of one)?

It could, but as it's endemic of a larger issue, the answer is to fix the larger issue before it causes problems on games regardless of what game lines they install. To be honest, I'm extremely surprised it didn't happen before now.

The real issue: I was using a string sort for a numeric list while determining stat sort order.

So in the end, who cares if it was Mage or Changeling, or how it was named? Because in the end that wasn't the problem. (Though it did lead me to the problem, so it wasn't a waste of time.) It would have happened eventually to any game with a few game lines on it.

This is the level of attention to detail that you get with ThenoCode. Accept no substitute...er...for Theno's code.

@Ghost I don't get it.

@RDC said in NOLA: The Game That Care Forgot:

@Thenomain Non-coder question: Couldn't we fix this (at least temporarily) by naming Hallow Dance something like 'Dance, Hallow'?

This problem affects everyone using my code.

Here's the amusing bit, I decided to see how the system was converting 'str' to 'attribute.strength' as well it should, and, well, look:

attribute.strength 
rote.strings_of_fate_() 
skill.streetwise 
merit.strained 
merit.street_fighting 
merit.strength_of_resolution 
merit.strength_performance 
merit.striking_looks_() 
merit.strings_of_the_heart

Rotes, as well as any other gameline power set, belongs at the end right before "bio". How in the world did it get to second? And this is true for every search that matches a rote.

And this is why hallow dance—a rote—matched before hallow—a merit.

Clearly I'm going to dive into the search algorithm, but in the meantime here's a comment about how Mage takes over games. F'in' Mage.

(More Nerd Talk: The system sorts attributes by a hierarchy. Rote stats seem to be ignoring it. F'in' Mage.)

@Rinel said in General Video Game Thread:

it's two steps away from being Borderlands 4.

This is my only problem with it so far. It's not as deep as I'd want from a Fallout game, but I'm still enjoying the game as much as I'd hope.

I mean, VtM:Bloodlines was extremely linear but for some bloodline-based changes, and it's worth a second playthrough. Sometimes a third. Hell, how many times have I played through Portal 2?

--

I second the request for spoiler tags. The game's only been out three weeks, and not everyone a) has $60 to spend on it, or b) wants to give Epic or Microsoft $60 for it. (Or even has time for it.) Chillax, y'all.

@RDC said in NOLA: The Game That Care Forgot:

@Thenomain Don't need dibs or anything, but if you tell us how it's breaking core CofD code, Mel might be able to fix it.

NERD ANSWER ALERT!

The core stat lookup code does a bit of name-completion. If someone looks up "st", the system has to determine if you meant "strength", "stamina", "stealth", or "stoat of the ages". On top of this, the system also knows to stop if it finds an exact match. "strength" is always the attribute, never "strength of the lion", a possible power or merit.

There are several kinds of stats, mostly caused by merits, wherin you can take the stat once at one or more values (almost all of them) or even the same stat several times; "language" is the most obvious of this. You can take French, Latin, or in the rare case for most of us, English.

The system represents those by "instances", the stats with the parenthesis. If you take the French instance of the Language merit, you have taken "Language (French)", and so on.

In normal circumstances, it is very good at telling apart normal from instanced stats, "str" from "str (foo)".

Changeling has added two instanced stats that are very similar:

• hallow ()
• hallow dance ()

So when someone types stat hallow (or set, or what have you), "hallow dance ()" is coming up. This is making it impossible to set "hallow ()".

For some reason, the name-completion is catching the () while sorting, and doesn't know to ignore it. This is because in an alphanumeric sort, "hallow (" comes after "hallow d". So now "hallow ()" is impossible to set! This is happening even with stat hallow (), which is a huge part of the problem. The name completion is not seeing the exact match.

I just have to figure out where in the system the exact match is determined and go backwards from there to find out what it's doing with "()". I have a few ideas, but all of the above was deduced from descriptions given to me while I was standing at work trying to look busy.

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(edit)

FAQ:

Q. Hey Theno! Isn't Hallow/Hallow Dance a Mage thing?!
A. Um...apparently.