Again, I accept that this is a masterpiece and that I should play it.
The 100 hour thing is nonsense, it's quite possible to "beat" the game in about 25 loops (6 to 8 hours?). I think it's only completionists who are going to be putting that sort of time in. I probably could've rolled credits on my 35th run, but I made a catastrophic error of judgement.
I do think it mainly suffers from the fact that each attempt/loop is too long with buckets of RNG. I found Deathloop also had the issue of making each loop a little too long to really be that entertaining (just frustrating). And also, irritatingly, Blue Prince doesn't respect your time that much either. The dartboard puzzle was fine the first time I did it. I now have to do it over and over, and for some fucking reason it adds new elements to it and makes it more complex. WHY?
I also unlocked… something… which I can take advantage of before commencing an attempt - but it adds 5 minutes of walking in a different direction to every loop now. Like…. jeez.
Clair Obscur
Is a masterpiece. And while it looks and sounds amazing and has a stellar plot, I think this Polygon article really nails how un-videogamelike it is in the set up (contains mild spoilers https://www.polygon.com/opinion/563990/clair-obscur-expedition-33-no-exposition)
Nobody in the world stops and fucking explains things to you. Why would they? You're dropped into a world where weird shit is happening and people have histories and backstories that they don't fact dump on you the moment you talk to them. It's so alarmingly novel that I quite often felt like giving out a gasp of surprise when I clicked on a random NPC and they didn't lore-jaculate in my face.
It's also absolutely littered with a mix of English and French swears. Which is brilliant.
Only issue I have, is like with all the other old doddery gamers out there playing this on rllmuk (clearly not Alastor), is the timing for dodges/counters, which I can't get down at all. I'm playing on Easy though, so it doesn't seem to matter much. Oh, and the lip sync is a disaster.
It has to be one of the best looking games you can play on a portable though - with Lossless Scaling it does 60fps on the Ally and looks absolutely jaw droppingly good at times.
I can't imagine that the first-person combat in Oblivion is going to be as good as Avowed's.
It's not.
And yes, the first stable I came across gave me some free horse armour.
Turns out the freezing this morning was shader compilation, which they forgot to put a loading screen in for. So the game just hangs for 10 minutes. I do love a bit of Bethesda jank.
It precompiles all the shades at the first load doesn't it? There are other places too?
I can't believe they missed the opportunity to do the funniest thing and release new Horse Armour DLC for the remaster.
I liked Oblivion a lot (more so than Skyrim, I think) but I'm getting my fantasy nonsense fix from Avowed at the moment so can't see myself starting another one.
The special edition comes with horse armour DLC.
It seems like a decent remaster from what I've played so far. But Avowed really just does what it does better these days.
Suspect I might have had enough of Blue Prince as well. The RNG is miserable, and even now that I'm learning how and where to best use different rooms (and discovered a pretty significant mid-objective) I spend more runs making no progress than seems intended, waiting for it to spit out something useful that can unblock some hurdle or other.
I'm not sure I'm getting this - I've played a few runs, assembled a random collection of rooms from the options it gives me, ended up blocking myself into a corner eventually and then restarted.
I'm seeing people talking about hundreds and hundreds of hours of content and I'm just looking at it thinking HOW??? But it's oddly compulsive, and I'm tempted to start making notes as I've uncovered a couple of bits as I've gone through, so there's something about it for sure.
I find it compelling - but I do think if someone generated a mod that let you click through the map screen and quickly do runs it would be a better game. The compelling part, I guess, is the rules on how certain things happen in particular rooms, depending on positioning or timing (and uncovering that), but it is a massive killer that the cycle to check if you're doomed or not is so long and the rules sometimes so diffuse and unclear that it's massively frustrating.
Oddly compulsive though as even when I'm shouting at it, I just click to start a new run.
cavalcade