legend

2 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

 

Don’t forget Saudi royalty.

 

Yeah that sounds not great  

Acquisitions of small players can sometimes be okay because it can better fund them provided the suits don't start dictating design and game choice. For example MS acquiring Obsidian is probably for the best, because they were struggling and we wouldn't get interesting passion projects like Pentiment from them without that security. On the other hand, if the suits are stupid (and they often are) it can be destructive, like MS demanding Lionhead make a game they never wanted to make, and then dismantling them when it turned out no one wanted it, and then them greenlighting the game Lionhead actually wanted to make after destroying them. MS re-acquiring Bungie would also be the stupidest shit. That clearly wasn't a good match and Bungie sacrificed a lot to get out to begin with.

Acquisition of larger studios (e.g., Bethesda and Activision) is always awful. The best I can say for those kinds of things is maybe that at least prevents Tencent from buying them because I don't want Tencent owning anything.

23 minutes ago, BloodyHell said:

I mean, I can usually do most powers before 50% stagger and after, the cooldowns aren’t that long, and the strongest powers all have -12s to cooldown trinkets.

 

Im just not having any problems using my powers multiple times in a fight, or having a bunch ready for when they stagger

Maybe I need better trinkets, because I've absolutely been left cold on some of my abilities when I get to the full stagger if I don't use them strategically. 

On 6/25/2023 at 4:36 PM, DarkStar189 said:

My wife is into some spiritual stuff and did some quick cleansing thing. Make sure I didn’t bring anybody else home haha. Not really my thing, but I also never experienced anything I couldn’t outright explain before either. 

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you (not just you specifically, "you" in the general sense) experience things you cannot explain every single moment of your life  

(Depending on your perspective, this fact may actually be good news.)

13 minutes ago, BloodyHell said:

Gouge followed by the other power that launches you in the air almost completely decimate most stagger bars.  Staggering enemies really hasn’t been a problem for me. Those and lightning, stagger, semi prime, and unleash phoenix powers once it’s down 

I don't think the cooldowns and the fact that you usually cannot do a full Gouge on an unstaggered enemy without aborting in practice to be worth the squeeze vs saving them for the 50% stagger. I haven't played with lightning all that much beyond using it in the full stagger nuke set though. Mostly because I don't like it  But also because again, cool downs suck and it seems better to make sure you can activate them on the full stagger to get the most punch. But maybe I should try giving them more of a chance.

I should also reiterate, I mostly stopped using this strategy because it was boring. Although when I do do it, it still seems far more effective than it has any right to be.

9 minutes ago, BloodyHell said:

edit: read above post. Even for stagger, wind abilities are far better 

Gouge is great for stagger, which is why I said at the 50% mark I use it to whittle away the rest. But to get the most out of Gouge, you have to run it fully out, but you can't run it fully out because it's a long attack and the enemies are unresponsive to your attacks (my first gripe). You will have to abort it partly through with a dodge to avoid their uninterruptible attack, and if you abort it, you still have to wait for the cooldown again. So in the end, it's more effective to use magic blasts to the 50%, then pull them, then Gouge during their mini stagger to get its full use, then magic again if they're not fully staggered, then nuke, then repeat.

1 minute ago, BloodyHell said:

I don’t see how you call magic blasts effective. It takes FOREVER to kill anything, to the point I only used them in attacks of opportunity when im too far to attack right away.

You may have missed the original post or more elaboration above: I don't use it to do damage, I use it to stagger and then just unload all abilities in their stagger. When these enemies are not staggered, you don't do much damage anyway.

1 minute ago, BloodyHell said:

Wait, did you beat it already?

Oh no, not at all. But there are enough bosses in the game to reach that conclusion. I don't expect the game to seriously change beyond what it is where I am at this point based on everything else I've read too.

6 minutes ago, Slug said:

Oh I meant to ask you about this before. Are you using an accessory or something that enhances your magic? Because my magic blasts barely even do chip damage. Even charged. As a result I almost never use them. The only time I magic blast is if I'm too far away for one of my gap closing abilities; I fire as I'm running at an enemy to get in range. That's literally the only time.

Nope, but my finding with that was with respect to staggerable enemies specifically. While the magic blast does minimal damage, it does a lot of stagger and it seems like for these enemies, the overwhelming amount of damage you do is the damage you do once they're staggered (at either the 50% mark or the full). So just using the charged (and mastered) magic blast to get them into stagger and then unloading all your abilities is very effective. The one extra twist is at the 50% stagger, you should use the pull move to ground them and then use the Gouge move to tear through a lot of their remaining stagger (and do damage).

That said, I've mostly stopped fighting that way not because it's ineffective but because it's boring  Now I try to restrict it to when they're in the middle of a charge up that I can't be near them for. If I want to close the gap for melee I usually use the dash attack (square + x) or the Phoenix circle then square move.

27 minutes ago, best3444 said:

Some of you know I suck at games in general and yes, FF16 is easy. I died maybe two times with bosses but then they respawn you with all your potions and the bosses health is critically low.

 

I for for love this because I can just enjoy the combat and game. But I know a lot of you prefer a challenge and you do not get that with this game. 

IMO it's not important that a game is hard so long as it's engaging. When a game is too easy it often means you don't really have to think about what you're doing. But that's not always the case. I think FFXVI actually does fine in this regard: it's easy, but I do have to stay engaged and that's good. (Well, at least I stay engaged if I stop myself from just doing magic blasts from a distance which is far more effective than it ought to be  ) I have other issues with it -- i.e., the unresponsive enemies is unsatisfying -- but all in all it's still fun.

I'd say the combat isn't "hard." I've died a few times, but generally because I decide in those fights to refuse to use a potion (which is a matter of principle more than actual cost and abundance of potions  ). I've beat almost all boss fights themselves on the first try. The last boss I did gave me some trouble (though I did still win on the first try), but that's mostly because I was using the generally more fun Berserker ring, but which has the downside of zooming the camera so close you can't see anything but Clive's head, and since the boss (like many others) continues unimpeded through many uninterruptible attacks, the close zoom ins sometimes left me unable to see where they were to time the next dodge  

And that's mostly okay. The game doesn't need to be "hard" to be engaging. My main issue is I dislike how long unresponsive boss attacks are. One unresponsive attack at a time... okay fine I guess. Five in a row and you're getting me to roll my eyes.

2 hours ago, best3444 said:

 

That's cool. I am downloading it now and most likely will play it immediately following 16. I hope the music is close to being as magical as 16. 

FF7R has one of the best soundtracks in gaming. They took the already excellent compositions from the original game and made them everything they should be in the modern age. Their cover of the AIrbuster theme just keeps getting better as it goes and it makes the fight so fucking epic. FFXVI has a good soundtrack for sure, but it still hasn't hit the highs of the FF7R soundtrack. (Though I suppose there is time for that to change!)

11 hours ago, Rev said:

That's awesome! Did you try removing the nose guards? For me the size is totally fine without the nose guards. I can see everything perfectly. 

Not yet, I'll have to look into that!

14 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

@legend Guess Google was spying on this conversation because it recommended this article to me: 

Final Fantasy 16 Isn’t The RPG It Needs to Be | Den of Geek

WWW.DENOFGEEK.COM

---

Final Fantasy 16 is a stunningly beautiful action game that only pays lip service to RPG ideas it desperately needs to do more with.

 

Gotta say, agreeing with just about everything here. The lack of meaningful choice in character development when it comes to unique weapons and armor as well as there just straight up being better Eikon abilities just means that I'm waiting 5 hours for my next Eikon to unlock so I can play around with that a bit and then use the same powers for every battle until my next set of Eikon abilities is unlocked, all these crafting mats with nothing to craft, nothing but music to spend Gil on, all weapon and armor being simple Stat boosts you barely notice because any fight that matters is always going to be about the same dev intended length unless you suck really bad, even the accessories mostly being minor buffs to your damaging abilities is so boring. 

 

"But it's an action game!" So get rid of all this shit! At this level of implementation it just feels like it's there to waste your time. 

 

I'm already just riding past all normal encounters because there's legit no reason to waste my time doing them. The combats too easy for them to provide a satisfying challenge, the ability points you get are too paltry to matter, especially since you can only use 6 abilities and can refund them at any time. And the combat isn't complex and robust enough to make beating up on normal enemies fun for more than the first couple of hours. 

 

I think my favorite item so far is an accessory that changes precision dodges to a teleport and then gives you an attack boost for several seconds indicated by you being on fire, like a mini LB.

 

If the game was full of gear like THAT, I'd have nothing to complain about, or at least a lot less!

Yeah that's about where I am too. I'm enjoying the game, but there is some clear indecisiveness in what it wants to be and the systems often don't feel like they work together. I think God of War Ragnarok is a better version of what this game is trying to be (and shockingly has more RPG elements!). That doesn't mean it's bad -- GoW:R is an exceptional game -- but there is room for criticism here.

I sympathize with what @Mr.Vic20 is saying. I'm enjoying the game, but the combat doesn't click in a satisfying way the way God of War or something does. The most effective way I've found to fight the bosses and mini bosses is also the most boring. Here's the general conclusions I've come to

• Bigger enemies are non-responsive to player hits. They just ignore all your sword slashes and proceed through whatever canned attack animation they want to do.
• The regular dodge is often not good because the enemies will do a series of unbreakable attacks and the dodge freezes you in place immediately after you do it (even if you dodge and counter, they'll keep going through the attack unimpeded as with the above point). Instead, it's better to just free form run from attacks and only dodge if you have to.
• Never target lock, because this decreases your free form mobility to just run out of the way of attacks which is superior to close-range dodges.
• Hurting unstaggered boss/mini bosses is painfully slow (and unresponsive as with the first point)
• Charged up magic blasts (especially once mastered for quick charges) is very effective at dropping stagger

Combining all those facts together means by *far* the most effective I've been is running away, shooting with charged blasts until stagger hits (or the 50% stagger hits) and then unloading ability attacks. Which is... not the most exciting? I guess the extra thing is I use the Gouge special in particular once they are 50% staggered (and you do the pull move on them) because they can't do anything during that and you'll shred their remaining stagger to go into a full stagger.

13 hours ago, nublood said:

But hey guys, we’ll have plenty of ESO content to keep us…uh, happy. 

13 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

You know, I'd honestly love to play ESO if it didn't have some of the worst combat I've ever experienced in video games. Bafflingly bad.

My wife and I started ESO a couple years ago or something and I can't begin to describe how frustrated we were that huge swaths of the game are solo only. WTF was the point of making this "online?" As it is, it's just a shittier Skyrim with some coop for the most mundane parts.

3 hours ago, Bacon said:

OMFG

 

So I don't remember if any remember me complaining how the PS5 colors seem dull. But if you do I'm sure some of you remember me changing to full-color RGB range.

 

Well the real issue, all this time, as I just figured out, is that my custom color settings are not saved across Inputs. As in my "HDMI port 2" color settings are totally different than my display port color settings. All this time, over half a year at this point, my PS5 has been running on "standard" color settings as custom color settings start out at standard. Holy shit this IS fucking life-changing. Like my god, man.  This monitor has such shit settings out of the box and you HAVE to blast the saturation to get any vibrant colors. Like HOLY FUCKING SHIT MAN.

 

All of the games I have played and they all looked so dull and there was nothing that I thought could be done. What it took me to realize this is that I was watching someone play ff16 on the monitor that my PS5 is hooked up to, and the colors just looked so bright and crips. It was like seeing a Vizio first the first time at Walmart when I was just a kid. I never thought to recheck the saturation because I had assumed your color profiles were shared across Input sources. To me, that is obviously how it should be. Why would I want the colors to look different when going thru DP or HDMI?

 

I cannot describe how frustrated I feel over realizing this. Cuz I'm glad now that I have fixed this long-standing issue, but I can help but also be mad about it just in general.

 

fuck man...

Sucks that it slipped by for so long, but you figured it out on a good game! FFXVI's most graphically pleasing feature is their contrast and colors in HDR. Shit fucking pops.

2 hours ago, Nokra said:

Wow, that was insanely fast! Two days?! 

 

Did you order any of the accessories besides the hub?

I think I ordered it sooner than I posted that I did but it was less than a week delivery for sure. 
 

Just the charging hub for accessories. 

@Rev 

I got mine! Worked flawlessly with the steam deck right off the bat, even with the charging hub, which is the main motivation I have for these (for travel). Not setup or anything -- just plugged them in and away it went! The colors are indeed surprisingly bold seems like it will be great for my trips.

I'll echo that I feel like the screen is slightly too large. If we can modify its size that would be awesome. Maybe there is a way to do that through the steam deck system settings at least, if not through the glasses. I'm on an iPhone so I can't use it with that, but I think I heard there are adapters it will work with? I might give that a try.

7 hours ago, Fizzzzle said:

So, on reflection -

 

As much as I think it was in poor taste to meme the demise of these people, I do get it. These are people who have wealth that we will never know, who do nothing other than profit from our sweat and blood, and you want us to shed a tear? Let me play the world's tiniest violin because an expedition that you knew could be deadly turned out to actually be deadly, and seemingly in no small part because the CEO hates safety regulations that put the rest of us at risk the same way all corporations want to put us at risk, then blame us when shit goes south. The same regulations that you shoot down so you can make an extra buck. 

 

This kind of event does shed light on how the common person actually views these people. Imagine if Musk or Bezos actually bit it during a rocket launch.

 

When the wealth of the few has reached a level where a (seeming) majority of people reflect on their deaths with apathy at best or joy at worst... maybe there's a problem.

 

And again, I get it. This little trip cost more than I make in 4-5 years

It is rational to want the death of horrible people that harm the world, so that's fine. But there is no way to justify wanting them to horrifically suffer on top of that without invoking some pretty ugly values. It's a common human reaction to wish for such suffering, but it's not one we should encourage.

That's where I land.

6 hours ago, Rev said:

Let me know what you think. 

Will do!

I bought a pair. Not sure when it will arrive

I’m liking these review scores!

I did Rito -> Zora -> Guerdo-> Goron

I don’t think order matters. They suggest Rito first but even that I could see doing later.