Video Games

[DSMatticus]

So, I got the new Doom, just started playing today. It's really fun, and I'm enjoying it a lot. (I especially liked the "rip and tear" reference in the opening cutscene.)

One question: is it connected to any of the previous Dooms, or is it a reboot?

DOOM (2016) is implied to be a direct sequel of Doom (1993). The (1993) Marine goes to Hell and kills demons, earning the nickname "Doom Marine", because Hell can't into names I guess. He is eventually trapped by demons and sealed in a coffin. Eventually a (2016) Earth builds a portal to hell and recovers the (1993) Marine, and then the game starts.

That is not entirely plausible. Remember, Olivia's researchers are the ones who create the cyberdemon - in 21XX, long, long after the events of Classic Doom (which involve killing the cyberdemon). NuDoom doesn't just feature a new Earth which seems to have no recollection of any prior demon invasion; it features a new hell whose denizens have only recently been blinged out with supertech (while NuDoomguy was in his sarcophagus).

NuDoomguy is clearly supposed to be some kind of human marine (parallel Earth? Everyone forgot about the original demon invasion because... reasons?) who went on a rampage through hell and as a result has a long and super-mysterious, super-interesting backstory. And that backstory is clearly meant to be a nod to previous Doom titles. The Night Sentinels might even be a nod to a reimagining of Heretic. But they would have to do a lot of asspulls to make the exact events of Classic Doom fit into the new canon - asspulls involving time travel and/or not only parallel earths, but parallel hells. Olivia Pierce didn't find demons with rocket launchers bolted into their flesh. She found ordinary demons, and bolted rocket launchers into their flesh. It's a recent development for the hell NuDoomguy rampaged through, but an established one for the hell Classic Doomguy has to contend with. Doesn't really mesh.

[OgreBattle]

Got Phantasy Star Online 2 installed, the character appearance customization is a great combination of friendly to use and highly detailed.

Game keeps on crashing tho', not sure what's causing it. I'm using the English patches and PSO2 tweaker that reddit suggests.

[Shrapnel]

So, I got the new Doom, just started playing today. It's really fun, and I'm enjoying it a lot. (I especially liked the "rip and tear" reference in the opening cutscene.)

One question: is it connected to any of the previous Dooms, or is it a reboot?

DOOM (2016) is implied to be a direct sequel of Doom (1993). The (1993) Marine goes to Hell and kills demons, earning the nickname "Doom Marine", because Hell can't into names I guess. He is eventually trapped by demons and sealed in a coffin. Eventually a (2016) Earth builds a portal to hell and recovers the (1993) Marine, and then the game starts.

That is not entirely plausible. Remember, Olivia's researchers are the ones who create the cyberdemon - in 21XX, long, long after the events of Classic Doom (which involve killing the cyberdemon). NuDoom doesn't just feature a new Earth which seems to have no recollection of any prior demon invasion; it features a new hell whose denizens have only recently been blinged out with supertech (while NuDoomguy was in his sarcophagus).

NuDoomguy is clearly supposed to be some kind of human marine (parallel Earth? Everyone forgot about the original demon invasion because... reasons?) who went on a rampage through hell and as a result has a long and super-mysterious, super-interesting backstory. And that backstory is clearly meant to be a nod to previous Doom titles. The Night Sentinels might even be a nod to a reimagining of Heretic. But they would have to do a lot of asspulls to make the exact events of Classic Doom fit into the new canon - asspulls involving time travel and/or not only parallel earths, but parallel hells. Olivia Pierce didn't find demons with rocket launchers bolted into their flesh. She found ordinary demons, and bolted rocket launchers into their flesh. It's a recent development for the hell NuDoomguy rampaged through, but an established one for the hell Classic Doomguy has to contend with. Doesn't really mesh.

So, there is no direct connection, then, only implications and nods?

[hyzmarca]

So, I got the new Doom, just started playing today. It's really fun, and I'm enjoying it a lot. (I especially liked the "rip and tear" reference in the opening cutscene.)

One question: is it connected to any of the previous Dooms, or is it a reboot?

DOOM (2016) is implied to be a direct sequel of Doom (1993). The (1993) Marine goes to Hell and kills demons, earning the nickname "Doom Marine", because Hell can't into names I guess. He is eventually trapped by demons and sealed in a coffin. Eventually a (2016) Earth builds a portal to hell and recovers the (1993) Marine, and then the game starts.

That is not entirely plausible. Remember, Olivia's researchers are the ones who create the cyberdemon - in 21XX, long, long after the events of Classic Doom (which involve killing the cyberdemon). NuDoom doesn't just feature a new Earth which seems to have no recollection of any prior demon invasion; it features a new hell whose denizens have only recently been blinged out with supertech (while NuDoomguy was in his sarcophagus).

NuDoomguy is clearly supposed to be some kind of human marine (parallel Earth? Everyone forgot about the original demon invasion because... reasons?) who went on a rampage through hell and as a result has a long and super-mysterious, super-interesting backstory. And that backstory is clearly meant to be a nod to previous Doom titles. The Night Sentinels might even be a nod to a reimagining of Heretic. But they would have to do a lot of asspulls to make the exact events of Classic Doom fit into the new canon - asspulls involving time travel and/or not only parallel earths, but parallel hells. Olivia Pierce didn't find demons with rocket launchers bolted into their flesh. She found ordinary demons, and bolted rocket launchers into their flesh. It's a recent development for the hell NuDoomguy rampaged through, but an established one for the hell Classic Doomguy has to contend with. Doesn't really mesh.

NuDoomguy's armor was explicitly made eons ago in hell by an outlaw demon. But it has English text and arbibic numerals on it. And he's explicitly been locked away from thousands of years. The English language didn't even exist at the time that his armor was made, if we're dismissing the possibility of time shenanigans.

[Meikle641]

It's also worth remembering that when you first put on the armour the HUD changes from alien text to English.

The explanations I'd heard basically sums up that Doom and Doom 2 were ancient pre-history, and THEN moved to Earth after everything on Mars got ruined, then history sort of regressed and got to where the game is millenia later.

[Stahlseele]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjEeDz51pHE
First Video Footage of the New Battletech Game

[Shrapnel]

So, I'm stuck in Doom 16.

I'm in the Lazurus Labs level, right, at the area where the second demonic lockdown event is (the area where you can get the Quad damage pickup), and I can kill all the demons fine enough, but... after I kill all the demons, the lockdown doesn't end, because there's still some assfuck throwing fireballs at me. Problem is, this [EDITED] is fucking invisible, and I can't find the little shit. I try to track him by the fireballs, but every time I shoot at the locations of the fires, he's moved. I'd use the BFG and be done with it, but I don't have any ammo for it and I stupidly missed the ammo pickup earlier in the level.

Did anyone else get past this [EDITED] fucking [EDITED] [EDITED]?

[Longes]

Welp, No Man's Sky barely runs on my laptop. I guess that's another game for my "when I buy a real computer" backlog

[DSMatticus]

No Man's Sky apparently barely runs for anyone. It's pulling a 43% on Steam user reviews and most of those reviews boil down to either "the game doesn't run" or "the game runs so slowly that I can count my frames as they appear." And honestly I'm not sure you're missing much. It's your typical exporation, resource-collecting sandbox game, except... with no construction? So... you wander around digging rocks out of the ground so you can buy an inventory capacity upgrade so you can dig more rocks out of the ground and then never under any circumstances do anything interesting or creative with those rocks?

No Man's Sky is basically a $60 procedurally generated digital safari. There's a lot of weird shit to look at, but there's nothing interesting to do. The world is static and uninteresting and you can't even use it as the foundation for some kind of "look at the weird shit I can build." The combat (space or otherwise) is beyond terribad. The complaints about the inventory system - which is basically the entirety of the game at this point - are numerous. There's just... nothing there, game-wise. It's a digital zoo for digital weirdness. Is it technically impressive? Yes. Would it make a solid pitch for a real videogame? Yes. Is it a sixty dollar title? Fuck no.

Refund it. A half year from now, it'll be cheaper, it might actually be playable, and it might actually be worth playing. But as is you should probably consider this a sign that you should get your money back and wait for them to figure out how to turn NMS into something that both runs and is worth running.

[PhoneLobster]

I got No Man's Sky on my waste of space PS4 so it had anything on it other than disgaea and so I could sit on the lounge with my unreasonably small dog for some of my gaming time.

Now, I actually had fairly low expectations for it... aaand they've largely been met which could be considered both a good or bad outcome really.

So notably... the combat is fucking terrible, wish I had mouse aim, the game does auto aiming to accommodate for the controller interface, but only barely and only sometimes when it feels like it. The space combat is worse but has a bad habbit of not happening or never ending in ways that keep you locked in place unable to fast travel but with NO VISIBLE ENEMIES.

But that's just one of several critical bugs and crashes that plague even the console release.

Everything else is just pretty bog standard technically acceptable run of the mill boring game play.

[Stahlseele]

it is appearantly so bad that a certain cynical brit felt the need to make a video on it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRkHPsZak08

[Longes]

So notably... the combat is fucking terrible, wish I had mouse aim, the game does auto aiming to accommodate for the controller interface, but only barely and only sometimes when it feels like it.

It's no better on PC. Remember the infamous Kotaku DOOM shooting? Well it's like that. Your movement speed is always crap, so there's basically no difference in combat between standing in place and trying to shoot the enemy and trying to move and shoot the enemy.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I wonder if it released on a Tuesday specifically so that it would be the maximum amount of time before Zero Punctuation could savage it.

[Mechalich]

No Man's Sky runs fine for me - but then I have a recently purchased reasonably high-end gaming rig. I can certainly see how it would be a problem - especially since moving around efficiently requires you to conduct low-altitude flights in your ship and glance around visually to spot things you want to land next too. The landing interface is pretty good, though it has a tendency to overshoot and undershoot slightly - which gets awkward due to the large degree of elevation variation on most planets I've seen so far.

The inventory system isn't that bad, early on. You do need to upgrade some pretty quickly - which means finding drop pods to unlock exosuit slots. There's a trick or to doing that, but once you get even two or three extra slots and learn which resources you should be picking up and which ones are mostly to ignore it's not bad.

I've mostly avoided combat, except for a few points where I've been ambushed by extremely aggressive predators or ganked by the sentinels. The combat's not special - but with a good rig you can move about. Strafing makes a huge difference against predators due to the way they move about, less so against the sentinels, which don't really move that much.

I got into space combat all of once, when I accidentally shot a ship while trying to mine, and that resulted in my death fairly rapidly. That system is indeed a mess - though I suck at flight sim combat in all games, so hard to say really.

The thing that disappoints me so far is actually how similar the planets tend to look. Sure the animals are vastly varied, but most of the time there aren't any animals on screen and you're staring at procedurally generated rocks that look very similar from planet to planet (something that you recognize as you keep scanning them one after another). The various structures are also incredibly similar modular constructions in a way that reminds me of the installations from Mass Effect.

[Shrapnel]

So it turns out my issues in Doom were the result of some kind of glitch.

I tried the level over again, and when I got to the part where I was having trouble, I once more experienced invisible demons. Except instead of an unseeable imp, I was now dealing with an invisible Possessed. So I tried the level a third time, and I finally didn't sink into swamp. Following a hunch, I killed every demon EXCEPT for a Mancubus, whom I saved for last. This allowed all the other demons to spawn normally, and when the rest were dead, I ripped out that fat bastard's stomach and gave him a taste of his own medicine delivered via a knuckle-stomach sandwich with honey mustard sauce. Of justice.

And then the area lockdown ended and I was able to proceed. It was a very strange glitch, but I'm glad it's done with. Now I just have the level a FOURTH time because I missed the siphon grenade the last time. Sigh.

Relatedly, the cyberdemon was one hell of a fight. And the final Rune Trial was utter bullshit.

[OgreBattle]

Are there giant bugs in NMS? The screenshots and videos I've seen only show dinosaur-mammal things

[Stahlseele]

Bugs as in Creatures or as in undocumented features?

[karpik777]

Are there giant bugs in NMS? The screenshots and videos I've seen only show dinosaur-mammal things

[Longes]

Are there giant bugs in NMS? The screenshots and videos I've seen only show dinosaur-mammal things

All creatures in NMS are done via LEGO mad libs, so you can encouter bug-like thing.

[Mechalich]

Creatures with the various arthropoid procedural components do seem to be less common than various tetrapod lifeforms.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Some news about the upcoming Nier game:

[Longes]

Steam version? Sweet!

[Stahlseele]

the no quitters mod has pulled me back into the black hole of time loss that is civ 5 and oh gods i had forgotten how utterly brutal civ5 deity mode is if you enable raging barbarians x.x

[RelentlessImp]

Some news about the upcoming Nier game:

Dear Yoko: STOP. RIPPING. OUT. OUR. HEARTS. WE CAN'T FUCKING TAKE ANOTHER ENDING E!

[Longes]

Yes we can, Imp. Yes we can.