Witcher 3 has RT coming next year doesn't it? Wait till then!

Assassin's Creed Valhalla on PS5:

I bought it because I wanted to see what Ubi would do with old England, but I burnt out long before arriving there. I think it was nigh on ten hours before seeing the title splashscreen that seemed to signify the start of the actual game. It was an astonishingly long front end and bumbling about in the snow again like RDR2 was a bit much but hey.

Looks lovely on PS5 and runs well. Not that pretty close up though. NPC interactions and side quest systems are, as always, laughable - they need a massive overhaul. A quest I picked up early on when arriving in England was to - I kid you not - slow walk a fellow to the top of a hill to a waterfall whilst listening to him waffle, and then jump off. Zero risk of failure or any challenge to complete the quest. Just do it to get the exp. The way they deliver narrative in these open world games needs revamping. The whole thing is archaic and jokey and just makes me shake my head and plough on but it's so boring.

Combat is fairly god awful in many ways. You could play this game blindfolded and get places. It's unexciting, deeply derivative, and lacks any impact. Parrying is whiffy, hit detection bad and general feedback about anything happening during scraps is poor.

I don't see how professional critics can put a number on these games any more.

A newcomer to open world RPG style action games could look at Valhalla and see it as one of the best examples of the medium and they'd probably be right. It doesn't do anything remotely badly but what it does do is so exceptionally average.

I'm finding it overlong and dull. This should probably go in just given up on thread to be fair...

Deep Rock Galactic.

Fuck me, this is a lot of fun.  Anyone else playing this?

Playing some Sea of Thieves on PC with a group on Saturday nights as well. 

Took on Flameheart's Ghostship fleet for the first time last Saturday, and after an absurdly long fight with us having to loot sunken ships for the supplies to keep fighting, we got it done. Never seen the galleon so beat up afterwards. 

Later on we got sunk by skellies of all things, and as night fell found ourselves in the middle of the ocean, all crowded on the rowboat loaded with loot from the skellie ship. We navigated to an outpost by the lights of civilisation, and as in the real world it had turned midnight it was the birthday of one of our party. Cue a motley round of Happy Birthday on our instruments as we glided into port with the sun rising over the island. 

Best session yet.

The biggest thumbs up for DRG and SoT. And fucking Minecraft!

Got no time for it at the moment, me and Franny have descended into the rabbit hole of Space Engineers. Just fucking wow. Everything I could have wanted from it.

Here's Franny assembling the mining ship of his dreams in our "base":



Note the incredible cock tease of an eclipse in the background,
it never quite got there.



And here he is taking his Rover 2.0 out for a spin and getting into a spot of bother:



We don't talk about what happened to Rover 1.0


And just so it seems like I'm not picking on him, here's what happens when you only put forward and vertical boosters on your first ship:

S'me.

Space Engineers is ridiculously good, and I'm kicking myself I didn't get it when it released on console.

Eyyyyy

After a standard start, Portal 2 is ruddy awesome now. Love JK Simmons in the cast.

Started death stranding. Lololol. Strong 2020 vibes.

Arise, some more. Still not really feeling it. I blame JonB.

b0r1s wrote:

You’ll love it by the end.

I love it already. So much WTF tho.

Regardless of anything else, Koj and co know how to squeeze absolute amazing fidelity out of tech. Can run it on high specs on my laptop and it's just fucking stunning.

acemuzzy wrote:

Arise, some more. Still not really feeling it. I blame JonB.

yourfavouriteuncle wrote:

Yeah,  it left me feeling flat with it too.  It’s really quite short though but I stumbled over the finish line through gritted teeth.

 Boo-urns.

b0r1s wrote:

I’d say on a facetious level that Unc played it wrong. And on the surface I’m joking, but there is something about taking your time with this that I think is what makes the game. The more I spent in the world the more I appreciated it and eventually came to love it. I recall not being sure at the start, complaining about the UI (Gurt knows), but as I spent more time in the world and helping the world by building the world, the more I enjoyed my time with it.

I’m talking about Arise and not DS.  Not got round to that yet.

Ha ha I was on the bourbon so apologies for missing that

Immortals Fenyx Rising has made a fantastic first impression on me. Really enjoying it so far. Loving the dialogue and the characterisation of the various gods, Zeus comes across a bit of a dick and it's awesome.