whatchu playing now

(youtube voice) wwwwhat's up guys

i got a PS4 just to play RDR2 after years of not being a gamer. now i've beat to that to death, and will probably avoid online, but the winter is still awful here so i'm looking at other timekillers:

which of these big and well liked releases are most essential?

God of War - loved the first couple way back
witcher 3 - tried an earlier one and kind of hated it, got nowhere
Dragon Age: whatever latest - are these still any good? first one owned
Nier: Automata - is this a JRPG? reviews are rapturous but i can't tell what it even is
What Remains of Edith Finch - should i just read a book
Dishonored 2 - i think the first one was the last game i really got into? i like a stealth game
Wolfenstein(s) - this is the answer, isn't it
Yakuza 0 - or this, right? clips i've seen look hilarious
Far Cry 4 - or maybe a mayhem game?
Just Cause - " "
and as an outside chance: Cities Skylines - is this just asking for frustration on console??

Those games are all bad get a Switch

Doom, yo?

nier automata is an auteur game thats a hybrid of jrpg / character action / bullet hell shmup. its good & unique

yakuza 0 is great

don't have much to say about the others there. i liked witcher 3 but its outside my wheelhouse so i cant compare it to other stuff

Dishonored 2 - i think the first one was the last game i really got into? i like a stealth game

if you like a stealth game, definitely don't miss out on Hitman Season 1 while it's still free (free with a PSPlus subscription, until March 4 i think?). at least download it while it's free, even if you don't plan on playing it for a while. i just grabbed it last night so i'm not very far, but it was very well received

just watch switch game let’s plays on youtube.app with the controller in your hands

there's a new Trials game out, which i'll probably grab eventually when it goes on sale. this, from the kotaku review, describes quite a few games in recent years:

Trials Rising garnishes a map with fun and beautiful racing challenges, then impedes your flow between them with endless progress screens and loot unlocks. Experience gates close off new challenges, leaderboards are needlessly complex, every track has contract challenges for various sponsors that overlay the simple bronze-silver-gold-platinum system that grades your skills, and every hour or so you have to sit and watch the same reveal animation 20 times when you remember to open the loot boxes you’ve earned. These contain a neverending cascade of shirts, shoes, helmets, bike parts, victory animations and stickers with which to customize your rider. Frequently, it doles out doubles or triples that must then be individually sold via the inventory page for loose in-game change.

Who actually wants any of this?, I wondered every time I opened a box with a denim vest in it, wishing I was racing instead. Presumably a significant minority, or these loot systems wouldn’t have become so ubiquitous, but certainly not me

i'm with her, i can't stand all of this dumb extra shit, but i guess people like it enough to be willing to pay real life cash for it in many cases

Nier: Automata - is this a JRPG? reviews are rapturous but i can't tell what it even is

It's not an RPG, certainly not a JRPG.

I'm pretty vocal about my antipathy for Witcher 3 (supposedly well-written, I didn't find it so) and my indifference towards GOW, don't want to bore ILG with it again.

I will recommend Horizon: Zero Dawn or The Last of Us: Remastered if you didn't play the original on PS3.

xp its definitely a JRPG

im willing to concede yakuza not being one but nier has plenty of jrpg systems/signifiers

yakuza 0 is also an rpg

repping for both of them

But your character level and the different weapons largely don't matter -- main story enemies and bosses simply scale with you, no? And you're really just going to be spamming the attack button while the pod bullet button taped down.

i don't think the enemies scale with your level though its been a while so i might be wrong

its got jrpg style consumables and character statting with the chips

its got 'gathering points'

its got fishing

the main issue with n:a us that levels actually matter too much, to the point of being impossible to beat certain enemies (as in, you do 0 damage with your attacks) if the lvl difference is too large. most people don't notice because like you said they've balanced it enough to be somewhat invisible to many people

they should have dropped exp altogether and rely on equipment upgrades only. you can change diffculty at will mid-game, no one would need to grind anyway

i mean, try to fight the superboss while you're at level 60 and tell me how it goes. character action game skills are meaningless, you either grind and level up or you're fucked

don't get me wrong if someone specifically asked me for JRPG recommendations it's not one of the first games i'd push on them since its gameplay appeal is closer to the platinumgames side than the square enix side, but let's be real it's popular because of the story, and it's a JRPG-ass story

i mean, try to fight the superboss while you're at level 60 and tell me how it goes.

My best effort against this boss was lasting 5 seconds, but it's an optional boss!

I can agree that the story is similar to ones you'd find in conventional JRPGs, but as far as game mechanics? I guess you can think of the chips as materia or w/e.

its also, like, the 5th game in a long running action-rpg series so it gets some benefit of the doubt with rpg-ness though i still think it passes the bar on its own

the jrpg umbrella has included action games since at least like secret of mana if not going all the way back to ys 1 and dragon slayer and such

Spiderman!

Edith Finch: Not that you should never play it, but I found it to be pretty inessential. The story is cool, but I wasn't like WHOOOOOOOOOA MAN. I'd suggest The Witness if you like puzzles, or Life Is Strange if you like Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Cities: This is fun if you have Excel open in another window, but on a console? I dunno. Even among sims by that developer, I'd suggest Surviving Mars instead.

just got gungeon and it's fun! Think Smash TV roguelike

Yakuza 0 is super fun

Karl Malone otm about loot box bullshit. Who wants stickers for their in game bags?

sadly it only takes a small % of people willing to pay for including that stuff to be profitable

yakuza 0 is river city ransom for the new era

that's a potent dog whistle for me.

i hope you mean that in a good way and not the bad way!

very much good! the one yakuza game i played (can't remember the number) was a bit of a disappointment so i don't think i even tried this when it was a freebie on the PS+ but it is on my hard drive, so...

probably yakuza 4? i have that one lying around on my ps3 from a ps+ freebie. i only played it for a few minutes before saying "meh, maybe later" and not touching a yakuza game until 2018, when i played kiwami and zero. i fell in love with those two. while i played kiwami first (remake of 1) i can also see the appeal of playing 0 first. far more "hooky" than Y4, especially out of context and on ps3 and with the "it's a free game so who cares" mentality. (y'all know this is real)

alright, on the docket.

i have Kiwami unopened - better to get through that before tackling Zero, right?

Most of what I've read online sez that starting with 0 is the way to go. I'm buying it this week, too!

play 0 first if you're planning to play both imo

if ya'all start playing 0 maybe i'll go back i quit pretty early on (there was too much other stuff to play!)

It’s awesome

The side stories are terrific but so is eating okonomiyaki

true out of game, assume it must be so in game

EastShade is a perfectly charming itinerant painter "puzzler".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WZ_LMqEMkY

yeah that's been on my wishlist for a bit

Enjoyed ‘The Letter’, a big horror visual novel. Must have got one of the worst lines through it, though will go back to it.

I bought Yakuza 0 last night! Still going to be some time before I play it.

I’m playing the Talos Principle which I got from that PS4 humble bundle, it’s well-written but the world feels uncomfortably arid.

talos principle was a dud for me, played it because a bunch of people compared it to the witness but that turned out to be super misleading

I didn't like it either. I only played it for a couple of hours, but it kind of felt like portal without the portals! Just logic puzzles mapped onto gates and buttons in an English garden

felt like a 2d puzzle game that was arbitrarily built in 3d instead, it didn't do anything with the perspective like the witness at least in the first however many hours i played.

the talos principle is like a fun version of the witness

drama!

talos principle was a dud for me, played it because a bunch of people compared it to the witness but that turned out to be super misleading

otm

it's not like the witness at all, and it was not fun

however just to rekindle an old argument, i also don't think nier automata is a jrpg so what do i know

Was it here that someone recommended Slay the Spire? It's got its hooks in me. I wish the art was a little less, I dunno, first edition monster manual? But whatever it's a good time.

the rerelease of the first Valkyria Chronicles for the Switch

not hard enough imo

tempted to pick that up in the sale