I'm kinda interested in it because I've heard it's very story heavy and most of it can be solo'd. I've also heard it has serious latency issues, as in you click and wait 2+ seconds for it to register, and enemies teleport around buggily in combat.
Let me know if those issues are fixed, I got a lot of free time for the next couple weeks and wouldn't mind something LOTR-related.
The latency issues are weirdly intermittent; it's one of those things were you'll just randomly lock up for a few seconds, more of a minor annoyance than anything in my experience. While the majority of content is soloable certain classes will, obviously, have an easier time than others and some quest chains have the climax in a group dungeon. The thing I love the most about LOTRO is that your story plays out parallel to the story of the Fellowship so you get to see the events from an outside perspective. I'd say it's worth at least trying out despite the issues.
That was my experience with ram. Some new games that barely chugged on all low, now had the space to run on medium and it was a huge breath of fresh air to postpone a major upgrade.
Funnily enough I thought I was having RAM issues for a while, despite doing at least a couple of very diligent overnight error checks on my sticks and they returned no issues both times. It's bizarre how just the OS dust of 5 years manages to fuck with everything.
While the majority of content is soloable certain classes will, obviously, have an easier time than others and some quest chains have the climax in a group dungeon [...] I'd say it's worth at least trying out despite the issues.
I'm not really bothered, i'm not an MMO guy and there won't be any commitment to it so I'll just skirt around anything that tries to get me to party up until I'm tired of the overall experience (assuming I don't find the latency issues so annoying I immediately drop it).
I'm kinda interested in it because I've heard it's very story heavy and most of it can be solo'd. I've also heard it has serious latency issues, as in you click and wait 2+ seconds for it to register, and enemies teleport around buggily in combat.
Let me know if those issues are fixed, I got a lot of free time for the next couple weeks and wouldn't mind something LOTR-related.
As was already said, the latency issues come and go. I'll go days without having an issue but then after maintenance yesterday the game was downright unplayable for a couple hours.
You can solo 90% of the game, particularly if you're willing to go back and do dungeons later when you outlevel them, but pretty much everything questing related (which is the bulk of the game) is doable solo at level with any class. If you're just looking to immerse yourself in the LOTR lore and have a relaxed time I'd suggest playing a Hunter or Beorning, both are very strong for questing and simple to play and hunter especially gets lots of travel options that make getting around a lot faster.
One thing that you'll need to be ready for is that unlike a lot of modern MMOs you will be traveling back and forth on foot/horse quite a bit, most of the zones aren't streamlined at all until you get to more recently added ones so it's not unusual to be sent back and forth to places repeatedly. On the one hand this can turn a lot of people off who hate backtracking, on the other it kinda fits with the game being more about the journey than the destination and with LOTR in general being one long road trip for a huge chunk of the books.
The community is nice and trends older than most MMOs, lots of people aged 30-40+ who have been playing for decades, so it tends to be less obnoxious (usually) than other games.
Subnautica 2 is a funny game. You have to agree to a 40 page terms of service contract that gives the devs access to your cookies and information on your computer completely unrelated to the game to get access to the story that is "muh capitalism bad and like debts not good n shit"
Here are some pictures of Tokyo Xtreme Racer, i'm probably pretty late to the starting line playing this... But that must be what not owning a honda civic feels like. Bigups to the bossman
Audio logs from dead people talking about corporations and having a million dollars of debt, a robot who talks about waiving some of your debt if you help him. Every audio log contains the word debt. I'm not far enough in yet but there was also a suggestion that the TSF from Natural Selection 2 are going to like become some dictatorship.
I continue to play Gray Zone Warfare, and it continues to be the best shooter I've played in ages. The reason it's more than just "Tarkov PVE" is the design is really focused around the PVE. They're constantly tweaking the AI and missions, and they do a good job of visual storytelling and building the scenario through the missions. Gunplay is fantastic. Autistic 19-year-olds can't shoot me in the head and shit on my corpse.
Here are some pictures of Tokyo Xtreme Racer, i'm probably pretty late to the starting line playing this... But that must be what not owning a honda civic feels like. Bigups to the bossman
Might have to give it a look.
I've been waiting for something like PvE Tarkov to come along, but the only one I've seen so far is Road to Vostok: I played the demo for a couple hours but it's a bit too tedious for me.
Okay, just beaten The Hushed Saint in Lords of the Fallen. I've been trying to avoid spoiling myself on anything, so I can only very broadly estimate I'm like 20%-25% through. This fight in particular has really cemented some things I've been mulling over, particularly about why Souls veterans maybe didn't get into it.
LotF already has a lot of things that punish Souls Veteran Behaviour which weren't really present in Souls until DS3 and ER. Enemies adding extra attacks onto their combos, having attacks that appear to be "50/50s" (until you notice one move has like 3 more frames of delay after seeing it 1000 times), weird breaks in their patterns that throw you off, hesitations in attack animations, and a few other things. When you combine that with it only really aesthetically being similar to Souls, and the gameplay more being a mashup of Sekiro and BB, this game really fucking punishes you for trying to just run on your Souls muscle memory. For the most part, I think that's a good thing. Nothing interesting happens if a game just outright copies its inspirations verbatim.
I do have some personal taste complaints though:
- The game uses way too many particle and cloud effects, which outright obscure enemies' followup attacks a lot of the time. It feels very cheap, and a 'fuck you' in a way I'm a lot less accepting of than the "punishing veteran behaviour" things I mentioned above.
- Animations are very bizarre. Many attacks have cartoonishly long windups, which snap into cartoonishly fast active frames, giving so many things in the game a feeling to total weightlessness and impactlessness. I say "cartoonish" specifically because they feel like the complete opposite of LotF's grimdark but grounded aesthetic. Non-attack animations have this too though, especially noticeable on your own character: Anything you do when interacting with other NPCs or with Vestiges (bonfires) feel similarly way too cartoonish, weightless, and like the animations are playing too fast. I have tons of FromSoft games installed right now where I can compare animations, and FromSoft's animations are smoother, weightier, and enemy attack animations in particular are very clear and obvious compared to LotF.
- There are some weird sound bugs. Killing enemies doesn't stop any sounds they had playing or cued up, so if you killed them just as they were about to do something, screams and roars and attack sounds can start playing even several seconds after an enemy is dead. Not a huge detriment to gameplay, but it'd be nice not constantly being paranoid that there's yet another enemy who's just emerged offscreen from a nearby wall texture (that IS a thing that happens, fairly regularly, as well as just spawning out of thin air in Umbral)
- Planting your own Temporary Vestiges was a really weird choice for them to put in from day one. It makes sense NOW, when they have Difficulty Modifiers that reduce or almost completely remove the pre-existing Vestiges from the world, but if you aren't playing that way these things feel damn near useless. Vestiges feel like they are paced out in the same way Lanterns in BB seem to be (have one at the start of an area and then one in the middle of tons of converging paths) so adding in your own just seems like a weird choice without the modifier
- If you do a riposte/grapple/whatever on an enemy, other enemies are often smart enough to wait for you, and exploit the timing of your animation ending to just fuckin' steamroll you.
None of those things are dealbreakers though, the game is still enjoyable enough and a refreshing enough change that I really wanna power through it. I should go and look at the thread here on the Farms and some reviews on Steam and wherever else to see for sure, but I have a strong feeling that if I look between the lines on a lot of people's complaints (not including ones that were true about the Launch version but have been fixed in patches), a lot of them would probably boil down to:
"This isn't exactly like Dark Souls, and I don't want to have to go through the process of eating shit repeatedly as I learn a new masocore Souls-like game from scratch, so I'm going to apply a double standard and say LotF sucks. I'm a Souls God, if a game challenges me or does things I don't expect then it must be because it's bad."
Here are some pictures of Tokyo Xtreme Racer, i'm probably pretty late to the starting line playing this... But that must be what not owning a honda civic feels like. Bigups to the bossman
