Official "Last game you played" Thread

[TheSameIdiot]

I started Ghost of Tsushima the other night. I haven't done very much with it, as my gaming time is really limited. But I'm mostly enjoying it so far. Yes, it's pure fantasy, but I do like the historical bent.

Turning on the ...sort've autotargetting.. seems to help a bit. I still find that Jin likes to take swings in random directions sometimes even when within striking distance of enemies. It's absolutely [email protected]#$ bizarre for a game like this to have no legitimate targeting system.

I also have to admit that I can't stand how close the camera is. Riding a horse and you can barely see what's to the left at all. It's pretty awful, and it makes combat .. not more difficult, but definitely more annoying. I have no idea why the decision in some games like this or GOW is made to have the camera be right up your ass, so that you, the player, have -significantly- less awareness of your surroundings than the actual character in the game would have.

I platinumed Ghost of Tsushima. It's possibly the best Assassin's Creed game.

It took me over a year to finish Ghost because I became frustrated with the lack of a lock-on. They added it in a later patch, but as you mentioned, it still leaves a lot to be desired.

Like a few other PlayStation exclusives (namely Spider-Man), I enjoyed it less the more I played it. I'm just over the Ubisoft-style clear-the-map gameplay. The story, setting, and art style are very good, though. And I only have my own OCD to blame for playing it after I lost interest.

I gotta disagree about God of War. GOW 2018 is my favorite game ever and I think the over-the-shoulder camera is the most inspired creative choice in a video game in a long time. The fact that it never "cuts"? Genius. Chef's kiss.

[KnightDamien]

I platinumed Ghost of Tsushima. It's possibly the best Assassin's Creed game.

Haha.. .yeah, pretty much. Some of it really even feels like an Ubisoft game. Oh look, an enemy camp with nicely spaced enemies all staring at walls. How convenient. The only AC game I even like (and I, in fact, love it) is Odyssey. But that's way more of a straight up action game even than this is. Ghost of Tsushima definitely feels like, especially early on, that it punishes you a bit more for biting off more than you can chew.

Like a few other PlayStation exclusives (namely Spider-Man), I enjoyed it less the more I played it. I'm just over the Ubisoft-style clear-the-map gameplay. The story, setting, and art style are very good, though. And I only have my own OCD to blame for playing it after I lost interest.

I definitely have grown exceedingly tired of the 'collect it all' nonsense. And that had me not wanting to play this game for quite a while because I just don't want to run around and break my immersion by constantly running to pick flowers and pick up stacks of wood that I'm apparently carrying around on my person all the time, just so that I can upgrade my stuff. I'm only a few hours in and I can already tell from running around the map that like.. 20% of this game's 'content' could just be pulled out entirely and it would make the game better.
I can't say enough that I'd like game developers to stop hiding all the cool stuff in games behind hours and hours of endless, boring grinding and scavenger hunts.

I gotta disagree about God of War. GOW 2018 is my favorite game ever and I think the over-the-shoulder camera is the most inspired creative choice in a video game in a long time. The fact that it never "cuts"? Genius. Chef's kiss.

As a fan of Ghost Recon going all the way back to Advanced Warfighter... I like over-the-shoulder just fine. I just think it's done exceptionally poorly in GOW and Tsushima. The camera is just way too close to the character, leaving you with frustrating combat because you can't see even 70% of what the actual character would be able to see. Not to mention that you're blocking off big chunks of this beautifully rendered world by having me stare at the back of my character's head. Just pull the damn camera back a few more feet so I can see what's going on.

[lalefi]

I play Return to Monkey Island, A game that immerses you in a fantastic universe, travel the world in search of many mysteries

[KnightDamien]

I bought a PS5 the other week - mostly for my son. I wanted to transfer my Ghost of Tsushima game over to it to finish it that way, but I didn't have Plus or anything so I couldn't without getting a month of Plus or an external drive to transfer the save over. Honestly.. what a stupid way to do things. And I should say that in every sense except exclusives, I still find XBox to be a superior gaming platform and I vastly prefer my Series X over the PS5.
Buuuut, I really liked Ghost of Tsushima and I figured 11.99 or whatever it is for a month of Plus gets my save game transferred over and some more games to play for a little bit.
But again.. the more I dug around the more I just said '[email protected]#$ it.' I went with the Premium Plus subscription for the year. It was on for Black Friday, so it was something like 40 bucks off for a year sub.

All that is to say that I gained access to a ton of games, including Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, which I started playing the other day after I beat Ghost of Tsushima.

Man, what a disappointing pile of shit this game is. I had cancelled my PO for the game on XBox way before it came out, once all the actual gameplay stuff started to be revealed. And I've continued to avoid the game due to the general state of how they decided to make it. More recently, I was reading about how they took all the bullshit they'd put in and made it optional, so that you could go back to a more 'pure' Ghost Recon experience without weapon and gear levels and all that. I don't want to say the 'immersive mode' or whatever they're calling it is a lie.

But it's a lie.

Sure, you can remove weapon levels, but the game is still sooooo obviously designed around constantly upgrading your gear and all the other multi-player, The Division-style nonsense that the game is just not fun. It's a tedious slog where everything is locked behind endless grinding and the worst kind of forced 'exploration' and horrible mission interfaces.

Honestly, I have NO idea who though the mission hub thing was any good, but they should never be allowed to work in game design again. I've got 16 hours into the game and I still can't really figure out the missions page. It navigates like a 3-wheeled school bus and gives me a worse headache than all the screaming children in said school bus.

The weapon customization is about 10 times LESS fluid and intuitive than it was in Wildlands. The entire game, in fact, feels clunkier. Driving vehicles in Wildlands sucked balls. It was terrible. It's still terrible - literally zero improvement, but now navigating by foot also feels off. Nomad stops WAY too much. As in, it's really hard to get the contextual buttons to respond smoothly with active movement, so I constantly have to STOP, wait a half-second, THEN climb the ladder. Or get on the ladder, wait, THEN use the 'slide down' button -- in which time I could have climbed down normally so why is there even the slide-down option? Nomad is perpetually incapable of climbing surfaces that he should definitely be able to climb over, and CONSTANTLY gets stuck on tiny elevation changes in the ground. I died in a firefight once because he literally got stuck on a curb. Like a 4-inch curb that he couldn't manage to step onto.

It's a mess. I can't even believe how bad it is. Like, they somehow managed to mess up stuff that Wildlands already did well, while still obviously being 90% just 'Wildlands v2.'


Also, the worst aspects of Wildlands/Ubisoft is not only still present, but really almost comically amplified. You can barely see the map for all the icons all over it telling you to go here and there to find a gun that you DON'T EVEN GET TO KEEP.* The enemy dialogue of like 20 lines on an endless loop is distractingly too common. The friendly NPC dialogue is hilariously bad. Like, a woman I rescued a little while ago went from a breathy 'please don't hurt me' to an almost totally monotone 'I KNOW WHERE YOU CAN FIND THAT ITEM' when I spoke to her. Everything is so PAINFULLY generic that I almost wish they didn't speak at all unless it was actual main story dialogue.

As a personal thing, I was also REALLY put off that this is still supposed to be Nomad, despite the fact that they decided to alter all of the face/tattoo options to the point where I literally cannot even make a character that looks like my Wildlands-Nomad, AND they went with a different voice actor. Might as well have made this a different guy. Literally just had to change his call-sign and there's no problem. Why make him canonically the same character but not use the same voice AND not let you make him look the same as the previous game? [email protected]#$ stupid Ubisoft bullshit of not actually caring about the -game- and only being there for the 'live service' garbage that most people don't even care about. Ghost Recon players are not Fortnite players. We're not here for multiplayer and we're not here for gear levels and rarity.


*Obviously, you can keep a weapon you find as long as you don't unequip it. In Wildlands once you find a weapon in the world, that weapon is unlocked and you can re-equip it whenever you want. You just have to find it once and it's yours. In Breakpoint, they went with the absolutely horrible idea of weapons and weapon BLUEPRINTS being distinct things you have to find, so you can find a weapon and use it, but you need to find the blueprint to equip it again if you ever unequip it. Just more ways to add busywork. That's all Ubisoft games are anymore; endless busywork thrown across a massive map to make it seem like the game is much larger than it is.


I think the worst part is that none of this stuff is necessary to sell people on these games. Even going back to stuff like AC: Odyssey and Wildlands - there's just so much artificial busywork bullshit designed to make the game seem 'huge' when the game is LEGITIMATELY very large even if you only do the direct story missions. Every modern Ubisoft game I've played could easily have 25% or more of its content cut right out and it wouldn't even make a difference except to make the game -better-.


Anyway.. Breakpoint sucks and I'm mega disappointed that even after the touted fixes they did to the things people hated, it's still just so utterly bad. I doubt it will happen, but I desperately just want another Advanced Warfighter 2 or even Future Soldier; a Ghost Recon game that feels like Ghost Recon and not 'generic live service shooter.'



In other news, the PS5 came with the new God of War but I still haven't played the previous one. My son is playing the hell out of it, though, as he played the previous game on his PS4. Thing is, the 5 is the digital console, and I own the previous GoW on disc, so I'd have to play it on the PS4, which is now back in my son's bedroom. So, I dunno if I care -enough- to go do that.
I also have Spider-Man now with Premium Plus, so I might play that instead. I can't decide. Got a little bit of vacation time coming up around Christmas, so I gotta decide on what game I'm going to be putting some time into.

[Magnuz]

With a ps5 you have access to the ps plus collection (separate from the premium/plus collection) that has around 19 ps4 games many of which have ps5 enhancements and and are free on any tier of ps plus. The first god of war is in there so you can download and play it for free sans disc.

I finished ragnarok and got the platinum so I went back and finished the platinum on the first and ended up starting the new game+. 2018 is maybe the best playstation exclusive game made in the last decade, ragnarok is good but I think the previous was better.

However I'm playing callisto protocol right now.

[TheSameIdiot]

Bloodborne, The Last of Us, and Uncharted 4 are also available in that PlayStation Plus Collection. They're all worth playing if you haven't tried them yet.

I just platinumed Ragnarok. It's very good. I do prefer God of War 2018, though. 2018 is my favorite game of all time. Some reasons for that:

- 2018 has a tighter story, and while Ragnarok explores more interesting ideas, I think 2018's focus made it the better game.
- Kratos felt like he was "on rails" in Ragnarok. I don't hate Naughty Dog's rails, but GOWR came a lot closer to that than any non-Naughty Dog game that I can think of. I didn't get that impression at all in 2018.
- I experienced some small bugs in Ragnarok that required closing and re-opening the game.
- While I liked runic arrows in theory, they never actually worked for me in practice. I could always get one of them to catch fire, but getting them to chain together took several tries.
- This game's version of the Valkyries was too difficult. I spent 90 minutes fighting one of them before I gave up. I had to come back when my gear was completely leveled up.

For all those reasons, I would actually rather see Elden Ring win Game of the Year on Thursday. ER felt fresh while GOWR felt like a retread. All that said, I think 2018 and Ragnarok should be looked at as two sides of the same coin. They tell a complete story together, and that's how I'll think of them going forward.

[KnightDamien]

With a ps5 you have access to the ps plus collection (separate from the premium/plus collection) that has around 19 ps4 games many of which have ps5 enhancements and and are free on any tier of ps plus. The first god of war is in there so you can download and play it for free sans disc.

Oh, nice! Thanks for that. I haven't had the time to dig through all that stuff yet and it didn't even occur to me that the first game would be included.

Bloodborne, The Last of Us, and Uncharted 4 are also available in that PlayStation Plus Collection. They're all worth playing if you haven't tried them yet.

My son has Bloodborne and I watched him play it. But honestly.. I hate the aesthetics and Elden Ring soured me on even bothering with more Souls games (maybe counterintuitively, I do agree Elden Ring should be Game of the Year). The Last of Us and Uncharted are games I could definitely try, though. It's almost overwhelming having such a huge library suddenly available that I kind of just grabbed the first game I recognized (Ghost Recon).

[TheSameIdiot]

Bloodborne, The Last of Us, and Uncharted 4 are also available in that PlayStation Plus Collection. They're all worth playing if you haven't tried them yet.

My son has Bloodborne and I watched him play it. But honestly.. I hate the aesthetics and Elden Ring soured me on even bothering with more Souls games (maybe counterintuitively, I do agree Elden Ring should be Game of the Year). The Last of Us and Uncharted are games I could definitely try, though. It's almost overwhelming having such a huge library suddenly available that I kind of just grabbed the first game I recognized (Ghost Recon).

Yeah, I get it. Either you like the Souls formula or you don't. If not for co-op and easy mods, I certainly wouldn't. I thought the Lovecraftian setting may appeal to you, but that's as hit or miss as Souls itself.

Naughty Dog makes some fantastic story-driven content. The gameplay isn't much to write home about, but I recommend all of Uncharted and TLOU.

[KnightDamien]

I thought the Lovecraftian setting may appeal to you, but that's as hit or miss as Souls itself.

It's kind of in the middle for me. Like, setting-wise, I think some of the monster designs are cool and the world design is nice. But I really don't dig the steampunk-Victorian thing when combined with the Souls/video gamey gigantic weapons and other nonsense that I already don't love even in regular fantasy games. So I ended up being very 'meh' about the game even if it wasn't a Souls-like.

Yeah, I get it. Either you like the Souls formula or you don't.

I definitely don't. Which I still say is a huge shame because I find the aesthetics and world-building of Elden Ring to be phenomenal and I would love to immerse myself in that world and spend dozens more hours there. But the gameplay loop is awful and I really can't understand why people like it so much. Nor why they insist that being endlessly frustrated and angry at something that's supposed to be fun is the only way this game can even exist (hint; it isn't, that's just gatekeeping by fanboys that define themselves by being 'good' at playing with their toys).

Naughty Dog makes some fantastic story-driven content. The gameplay isn't much to write home about, but I recommend all of Uncharted and TLOU.

I'm all about story, though, so that's totally good with me. I remember watching my roommate play every single Soul Reaver/LOK game because the story was so good, even though I didn't really want to play them myself because I found the puzzles irritating. Besides, you can have amazing gameplay mechanics, but without a good story to back it up, it's going to get boring pretty fast for me. S'why I can never play Call of Duty games despite that they're pretty well-polished in terms of the actual mechanics.

[Shinigami_PL]

Having SOOOO much fun with Midnight Suns right now.

[Zombie F-Body]

Grabbed a Series X a few weeks back. Jumped back in with Witcher 3 after getting the "next gen" update. Anyone else that's also playing this encountering crashing issues? I know it's got a bunch of problems on the PC. Noticed textures not loading, some framerate issues and it's crashed on me about 4-times. Prior to that I was playing Horizon Forbidden West on my PS4 Pro that I picked up on Black Friday.

Edit: So Quick Resume function seems to be borked on just Witcher now. Working on other games so I'm just reloading it. Pity too because I've been playing it nightly since the update and am really into it now. TBH I'm not really knowing if it's the game or typical crappy XB1/X/S UI causing issues. It works slightly better than it did on my launch XB1 and XB1-X but I was hoping Microsoft could make a better bespoke UI for the Series X/S. My PS4 Pro UI works amazingly well. Games are always up-to-date and barring a power outage, or a major console update, remote functions are always working. Buy a game away from my console and I know it's downloading and ready for me when I get home. Never had that luxury with any post 360 XBox consoles that have the same feature. I'd just be overjoyed if my XB series X could keep games updated. Nothing sucks more than wanting to play a game late at night and be starring down the barrel of an 80GB update!

[KnightDamien]

I've been playing Spider-Man. I don't know how it plays on the PS4, but it's buttery smooth on the PS5. VERY pretty game, as I'm sure everyone already knows. And swinging around the city is loads of fun. I think I'm at about 50% now. It's nice to know that if I don't push to unlock every suit and chase every collectible, then it's not another massive 100-hour time sink.
Ironically, I sometimes feel like I'm moving through it too quick and that I'll only be -really- good by the time it's over.

Not that I'm any good. I'm really not. Bruisers regularly still beat the piss out of me (I genuinely, from a balance standpoint, [email protected]#$ hate that they can basically slide across the entire screen to hit you if you're near them during their wind-up, even if you do dodge back and jump away).

I kind of wish it had the Ghost of Tsushima-style option to pre-assign abilities and mods to each suit, so you can just swap to a suit and gain all of the pre-assigned benefits you want that suit to have rather than having to change everything every time. That being said, besides dalliances with the classic and clone suit, I actually find that I keep going back to the core 'game' suit. Which is weird because I expected to ditch that in favor of a comic-style suit almost immediately and never go back. But it actually does look really good. Whoever designed that one has a good eye, I'd say.

I'm assuming the second game will have the symbiote stuff since they didn't even give you the black suit as an option in this game, which is an interesting idea. If the second game ends up being basically Maximum Carnage 2.0 I will be [email protected]#$ -ecstatic-.


That being said, as incredibly good as the game is (and it is), the reviews I've seen are probably a little too easy on it. If you want to actually enjoy doing a lot of fun SM things and wearing different fun costumes before you're in the end game, there's quite a lot of mindless grind here, and once you've done like 5-10 of any given collectible marker, it gets really old. So we're still stuck in this idea that the open world map has to be, Ubisoft-style, just COVERED in symbols for you to go to for very little real benefit and very little actual fun.

And SM's controls aren't the best for any kind of precision. More than a few times I've been trying to do one thing only to have SM just bounce off what I want to do and fly 300m in the opposite direction, or whatever. So it definitely feels finicky at times.

Minor bitching aside, it's actually just loads of fun and I'm really enjoying it. Stun grenades can [email protected]#$ all the way off, though.

[TheSameIdiot]

That being said, as incredibly good as the game is (and it is), the reviews I've seen are probably a little too easy on it. If you want to actually enjoy doing a lot of fun SM things and wearing different fun costumes before you're in the end game, there's quite a lot of mindless grind here, and once you've done like 5-10 of any given collectible marker, it gets really old. So we're still stuck in this idea that the open world map has to be, Ubisoft-style, just COVERED in symbols for you to go to for very little real benefit and very little actual fun.

Sounds like you're having the same experience I did. Here's what I said on the last page:

Like a few other PlayStation exclusives (namely Spider-Man), I enjoyed it less the more I played it. I'm just over the Ubisoft-style clear-the-map gameplay. The story, setting, and art style are very good, though. And I only have my own OCD to blame for playing it after I lost interest.

The Ubisoft-style garbage is hard for me to swallow in 2022. When I was playing Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood back in 2010, it was great. I was in high school so I wanted to get the most bang for my buck. There weren't as many entertainment options. Gaming hadn't evolved beyond the endless collect-a-thon yet. I cut Spider-Man some slack because it's a game for kids, so the bad-guy warehouses and repeat crimes probably aren't as monotonous for the core demographic. That said, I hope the sequel takes more from games like God of War Ragnarok, Hades, and Elden Ring than the Assassin's Creed franchise. Less is more.

I honestly had more trouble stomaching the Spider-Cop stuff than the gameplay. In any case, there's definitely room for improvement in next year's sequel.

[BDCdiesel]

Ironically, I sometimes feel like I'm moving through it too quick and that I'll only be -really- good by the time it's over.

One thing I enjoyed about the game was doing the side quests. The side quests, though repetitive, do stretch out the time and help build up your skills. Best thing to do is do the silly side quests as you play the game, I waited and had to do them all at once. Very tedious. I'm a platinum whore though, the only trophy I have left is beating the game on hard mode.

I've been playing the Callisto Protocol. It is kicking my ass. Man, I'm getting old. My reflexes are not what they used to be. That also adds to my inability to platinum Spider-man.

[KnightDamien]

That being said, as incredibly good as the game is (and it is), the reviews I've seen are probably a little too easy on it. If you want to actually enjoy doing a lot of fun SM things and wearing different fun costumes before you're in the end game, there's quite a lot of mindless grind here, and once you've done like 5-10 of any given collectible marker, it gets really old. So we're still stuck in this idea that the open world map has to be, Ubisoft-style, just COVERED in symbols for you to go to for very little real benefit and very little actual fun.

Sounds like you're having the same experience I did. Here's what I said on the last page:

Like a few other PlayStation exclusives (namely Spider-Man), I enjoyed it less the more I played it. I'm just over the Ubisoft-style clear-the-map gameplay. The story, setting, and art style are very good, though. And I only have my own OCD to blame for playing it after I lost interest.

The Ubisoft-style garbage is hard for me to swallow in 2022. When I was playing Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood back in 2010, it was great. I was in high school so I wanted to get the most bang for my buck. There weren't as many entertainment options. Gaming hadn't evolved beyond the endless collect-a-thon yet. I cut Spider-Man some slack because it's a game for kids, so the bad-guy warehouses and repeat crimes probably aren't as monotonous for the core demographic. That said, I hope the sequel takes more from games like God of War Ragnarok, Hades, and Elden Ring than the Assassin's Creed franchise. Less is more.

I honestly had more trouble stomaching the Spider-Cop stuff than the gameplay. In any case, there's definitely room for improvement in next year's sequel.

Yeah, I had missed/forgotten your earlier post but we're definitely in agreement here. It's kind of like they had a good core game, but someone in the process insisted that 'it has to be like this' and showed them the various stupidly-successful Ubisoft games where you can't actually see the map through all the objective/collectible markers, so they just started throwing in random bullshit.

Or, more like, turning a series of a couple of cool missions into endlessly repeated bullshit.

I don't think there's really much going on in the game that I actively dislike (okay, maybe the times you have to play someone other than Spider-Man because that's literally idiotic and why on Earth would anyone think that's a good thing to put in this game? -- oh yeah, can't wait to hide around corners as a civilian and auto-lose if anyone sees me... in this superhero beat-em-up game -- [email protected]#$ off.)

Really, if I were tasked with making the game better, I really think the only major thing I would do is take ALL of the never-ending and collectibles nonsense and compile them into a single mission thread. One mission to collect all five of Peter's backpacks. One mission thread of maybe three separate missions to do Oscorp Research Stations, etc. Just enough of all the things in the game that it's fun without it becoming a chore. Even chasing pigeons would be fine as a single side quest rather than this ongoing collectible shit all over my map.

That being said, I have zero faith that any of this is on the table for SM2. The game did extremely well. They're just going to copy-paste this exact game with a better frame-rate or something and a few new enemies. Maybe, as I said, do the symbiotes angle as the core storyline. But I expect the major portion of the functionality of the game to be exactly the same.

One thing I enjoyed about the game was doing the side quests. The side quests, though repetitive, do stretch out the time and help build up your skills. Best thing to do is do the silly side quests as you play the game, I waited and had to do them all at once. Very tedious. I'm a platinum whore though, the only trophy I have left is beating the game on hard mode.

I'm lucky, I think, in that percentages mean nothing to me. If I've had my fun and beaten the game, it does not bother me at all to see '39% complete.' [email protected]#$ you. I won the game. That's 100% complete in my book. I do agree that some of the side quests are great and I'm mostly fine with those. Granted, I'm not even fully half-way through the campaign yet, so maybe they get way more ridiculous later. But right now at any given time I may only have two of those available to me and if I do them, I don't necessarily immediately have more to do, so it feels earned instead of being just random busy work that the game is going to infinitely copy-paste onto my map.