The Video/PC Game Discussion Thread

I just finished playing through Portal Stories: Mel, which is a mod for Portal 2. Despite being a mod this is basically a fully-fledged Portal game; very well done with voice-acting and a plot which ties in to the official plot of the first two games (the very end implies a prequel). 

I find The Witcher 3 to be a well optimized game on PC. Not perfect by any means but it actually runs hell of a lot better than some older games I own with lower specs, not least the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which actually runs like shit in some locations.

15.5 hours into Fallout 4 and still no serious bugs or performance issues, and a lot of that time has been spent exploring side areas very far away from the man quest. It's actually been surprisingly stable for an open world game, and I'm loving the improvements to combat. Radiation poisoning is harsher and had been giving me problems for a while, but I found enough radaways to deal with that now, so at this point the game is just pure, ridiculous fun. I've pretty much been playing my character as stupidly as possible, and this has led to a bizarre, off the rails feeling playthrough but in a delightfully entertaining way. So far its easily my favorite Bethesda game and probably my favorite Fallout (I liked New Vegas way more than previous games as well.)

From my experience it isn't glitchy, just very harsh. It seems to be consistent for me in each spot where it comes up, the problem is it can be very tricky to know when it'll come up sometimes: I'll be in an area that seems free of it, then step in a wrong place, and all of a sudden I'll be seeing "Rads + 5" on my screen, and be like "WTF".  Apparently in this one it triggers as soon as you're near anything with radiation, so that's why it seems to happen faster than normal, and why it goes off just from being too close to ghouls or bugs. I like that it adds an extra survival element to the game, but running around with over half of health bar redded out early on, until I found good sources for radaway, was pretty frustrating.

I really don't get that complaint at all. They made numerous changes to the game, some of which make things more convenient, some of which make things a bit tougher but more interesting, and some things which are entirely new elements to the game (settlement building, for example.) I mean, yeah, it's still an open world RPG set in a wasteland, but what the hell would you have expected? It feels like the game is getting an insane amount of backlash, and I don't get it, because it's easily the most fun I've had with a Bethesda game and possibly the most fun I've ever had with an open world game period.

It looks pretty good, but I'm not paying $80 for a console port

I can't make even the slightest comment on the story yet, because after playing for 24 hours, I haven't tried advancing the plot even once after the intro. Pretty much all I know is I need to go to Diamond City, and I keep getting so sidetracked by other things that I haven't made it there yet, and may not even get there tonight.

Edited by DippoMagoo - 13 Nov 2015 at 6:53pm

I've done a little bit of it, though not too much, mainly because my character is more combat focused, has 1 int and 1 charisma, so that actually locks me out of doing certain things with it, like setting up stores, for example. I will probably go deeper into it on another playthrough. From what I've seen it's a bit complicated to figure out, and certain aspects of it are a bit confusing until you've messed with them a bit to get used to how they work, but it's definitely interesting and I have heard of people using it rather extensively.

One review I read basically said that the game forces you to "lose" no matter what choices you make, in both the finale and the season on the whole. I was getting that impression myself throughout most of the game, so I'm not terribly surprised to hear that, but it still gives me less motivation to actually play the finale. I was planning on putting it off for a bit anyway, due to Fallout 4 and then Bloodborne DLC next week, but at this rate I don't even know if I have the motivation to finish it at all. I think Telltale has really dropped the ball with this one and season two TWD, and I think in the future even if one of their games looks interesting, I'll wait for at least 2-3 episodes to be out and for the first episode to be free before deciding to buy it or not, because lately it feels like I've wasted too much money on their games only to be consistently let down.

Edited by DippoMagoo - 18 Nov 2015 at 1:38am

Telltale would honestly probably do better if they weren't trying to juggle several episodic games at once as they have been recently.

I personally quite enjoyed their Game of Thrones game though I think it has a lot of faults in it. I expect I'll get the second season if they make one (I presume they are after how this one ended), but only when it's cheap. I agree with what Travis said about every season having a conclusive ending as well. For me this game would have been better if your choices affected the end in such a way that it's possible to beat the Whitehill's. The Forrester's seem pretty much screwed whatever you do.

A few things that really stood out as negatives for me were (sorry, spoilers):

Mira's story. This one in particular seemed pretty worthless in the end. She got beheaded at the end of my game without having really done anything that really helped her family.

Gared's story. I quite liked his story overall but not the way it was dragged out across all six episodes. The Forrester's pretty much lost everything by the time he even got to the North Grove in my game, so no matter which choice you pick for him at the end of episode 6 it somehow feels meaningless by that point.

Finally I feel that a lot of the main characters were just carbon copies of the Stark's. Mira/Sansa for example or Rodrik/Rob. Even Talia/Arya (Talia is more feminine than Arya but I always get the impression that underneath the exterior that kid's tough as nails).