Community MetaSteam | March 2023 - You know, Wo Leon, we really are the last of March

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Durante

I <3 Pixels
Oct 21, 2018
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I continued to play Forspoken and finished it with a lot of optional content completed in about 70 hours. The game probably had some addictive and interesting properties to keep me interested for all that time.

I stand by everything I wrote about the story presentation, which is frankly quite bad. The good news is that the really slow sections with a lot of hand holding, weird camera angles and annoying loss of player control are concentrated in the first couple of hours of the game.

After a certain point, the main story is very much in the background, and free open world exploration turns out to be the obvious focus of the experience. And the open world exploration is pretty decent. Story content is almost non-existent in the open world, so the experience is perfect for having something to do with your hand and your unused brain power when you listen to podcasts. No annoying factory produced Ubi style characters and dialogue to be distracted by! What you do is using an ever expanding arsenal of magical abilities to parkour across the world, upgrading those abilities by performing actions in the world, beating combat encounters ranging from easy to somewhat challenging, solving puzzles, beating mini dungeons, beating bosses, and getting new gear as well as items to upgrade your gear with. For me, that experience was not less engaging than the one I had with Vampire Survivors or the Diablo IV beta. The game is much prettier to look at as well!
I've only played the demo, but it really sounds (and felt) like a game that would have benefited from someone forcing it to focus on its strengths.
 
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Derrick01

MetaMember
Oct 6, 2018
1,212
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I'm a square enix apologist and even I couldn't do more than ~2 hours of forspoken. I just can't do bland empty checklist open worlds anymore, especially when your story and characters are among the worst in the industry. There needs to be something there to motivate me to put up with all that repetitive bullshit.
 

lashman

Dead & Forgotten
Sep 5, 2018
32,049
90,238
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Comes out April 26th alongside a Game of the Year edition with new content.

The game released in May 2022. Did it only have 11 month exclusivity deal?
or maybe it had 6, and they just waited until the "GOTY edition" is out
 
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Mivey

MetaMember
Sep 20, 2018
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Yup. Sony, ND and Iron Galaxy hacked this one off at the knees.

Plenty will now wait until a big discount after some serious patching.

Maybe better luck with Part II?
Can we please stop talking about Iron Galaxy. They didn't work on this, they likely only advised with ND about their experiences with Uncharted, as that's probably using at least somewhat similar engine. It was Naughty Dog that did the actual work on the port.
Don't ruin the good name of Iron Galaxy by claiming they worked on a bad port!
 

yuraya

MetaMember
May 4, 2019
2,723
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Most disappointing thing about Naughty Dog struggling in the PC space is that their factions multiplayer game will probably run like shit on PCs too.

Hopefully they stress test all the issues with some type of open beta before fully launching it.
 

fokkusu

Burn baby burn🔥🎵
Dec 9, 2018
1,773
5,050
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39
I need the variant without Plus :/
€dit: found the variant where you can activate with a Student/Business/Professional key, hope the iso is okay.
Oof. I have 2013 and it stops receiving updates.. I guess I have to switch to 2016 soon.
 

C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
Dec 23, 2018
3,992
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Can we please stop talking about Iron Galaxy. They didn't work on this, they likely only advised with ND about their experiences with Uncharted, as that's probably using at least somewhat similar engine. It was Naughty Dog that did the actual work on the port.
Don't ruin the good name of Iron Galaxy by claiming they worked on a bad port!
Many apologies. When talking about Iron Galaxy going forward I will discuss all the other ports they actually botched.
 

inky

🤔
Apr 17, 2019
999
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I made the same mistake, but tbf, it felt exactly like an Iron Galaxy port and their logo is all over the thing.
 

Stone Ocean

Proud Degenerate
Apr 17, 2019
2,357
7,484
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Anyone want to chime in on whether this is actually good or more of a nostalgia thing?
I have yet to play the remake but the original is one of my favourite games of all time. Extremely unique game with a killer soundtrack and style.
 
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Arc

MetaMember
Sep 19, 2020
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Anyone want to chime in on whether this is actually good or more of a nostalgia thing?
I enjoyed it, but I think it's more of a curiosity than anything else. The most interesting thing to me was seeing how parts of it were similar to Chrono Trigger.

There isn't much of a sense of progression since you bounce around various stories, but there is a convergence point in the final chapter. Some of the stories have little to no combat and others are almost exclusively combat. Most of the stories are interesting, but there are some that are tedious to play through (the caveman one in particular). It'll take you, at most, 20-25 hours so it isn't a massive time investment by RPG standards.

It's a weird game and it probably isn't worth $60, but $20-30 seems like the sweet spot.
 
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Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
7,870
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Oh hey, something that has bugged me for a few months but never enough to ask : is there a way to make the steam wish list sober up ?

Let's explain a bit. I have 91 games in the wish list, but the little wish list icon displays 97.
I guessed it's remnants of games delisted while they were in my list. GG.deals seems to confirm that hypothesis, I saw things like the original Dragon Quest XI while linking account.
It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying me.
 
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Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
7,870
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Oh hey, something that has bugged me for a few months but never enough to ask : is there a way to make the steam wish list sober up ?

Let's explain a bit. I have 91 games in the wish list, but the little wish list icon displays 97.
I guessed it's remnants of games delisted while they were in my list. GG.deals seems to confirm that hypothesis, I saw things like the original Dragon Quest XI while linking account.
It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying me.
Okayyyyy. The solution involves running an unknown script in the browser dev tool section. Err, nothing less risky ?

 
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Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
7,870
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I did it, it's on you if I lost years of my life by stress :so-good-blob:

That being said, gg.deals still sees 97 games and still sees Dragon Quest XI, which was not among my delisted games :sweaty-blob:
 

Joe Spangle

Playing....
Apr 17, 2019
2,460
8,330
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Dredge has just come out...


I really like the look of it. I have £21.82 in my wallet and the game is £21.99. Might try to sell a few cards to push me over the edge.

Although i'm currently playing RE4 and it will probably be my only game for a while until i finish it.

Hey, does anyone else think that Ramon looks like Margret Thatcher?
 

spindoctor

MetaMember
Jun 9, 2019
993
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Okayyyyy. The solution involves running an unknown script in the browser dev tool section. Err, nothing less risky ?

The guy who made this guide also made a guide to remove phantom items from the 'Followed' list which I used to remove an invisible game that was stuck there. I even have a couple of comments on page 7 of this guide that you linked above where I asked about it. This should be fine for you.
 
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Rockin' Ranger

Rangers With Candy
Nov 7, 2018
503
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Dredge has just come out...


I really like the look of it. I have £21.82 in my wallet and the game is £21.99. Might try to sell a few cards to push me over the edge.

Although i'm currently playing RE4 and it will probably be my only game for a while until i finish it.

Hey, does anyone else think that Ramon looks like Margret Thatcher?
Really excited somebody finally based a game on Lake Dredge Appraisal.

 

d00d3n

MetaMember
Jan 26, 2019
319
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I've only played the demo, but it really sounds (and felt) like a game that would have benefited from someone forcing it to focus on its strengths.
Yes. And short of putting in the work to do that, the game would probably have benefitted from cutting a lot of the story content in the introduction section as well
I'm a square enix apologist and even I couldn't do more than ~2 hours of forspoken. I just can't do bland empty checklist open worlds anymore, especially when your story and characters are among the worst in the industry. There needs to be something there to motivate me to put up with all that repetitive bullshit.
I don't think the Frey character design is among the worst in the business. The dialogue and story content is quite bad, but those aspects did not poison open world exploration for me (Although I usually listened to podcasts when playing the game). The open world content is a bit repetitive, but third person parkour and combat focusing exclusively on spellcasting are not the most common tropes in open world games.
 
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thekeats1999

MetaMember
Dec 10, 2018
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So random stream of conscious type post here. There may even be something that passes for intelligent in there. But I doubt it.

So, grabbed 20 Minutes Till Dawn and Dredge (thanks AiyuLuni for reminding me that 20 Minutes exists). Not tried Drudge yet because 20 Minutes keeps getting in my way.

The release of the Last of Us just reafirms my stance that I will wait at least 6 months for AAA games now. £49.99 is too steep for me. Plus having just watched the TV series it actually puts me off playing as the Story is still fresh in my mind. Then there are the technical issues as well. Usually Beta Testers actually get paid.

Now there are a couple of exceptions here and there, I will be there day 1 for FFXVI (or rather day 730+ with the usual S-E shenanigans) and I grabbed RE4.

Somebody else mentioned this earlier, but I do miss the silliness of the RE series that seems to be getting slowly smoothed off the games as they get remade. I mean, OK it is the silly side of silly. But that way leads to reboots like Devil May Cry (I enjoyed the game but didn't get on with the tone for some reason). I mean do you think we will ever see Chris Redfield quick timing a boulder to death.

On the other hand RE5 could really do with some sanding down. Like a lot.

Rewatched Girls Und Panzer recently (catching up on the Das Finale films) and it makes me sad that they never released the PS2(?) game on the PC. I too want to powerslide a Panzer tank.

Now to tear myself away from 20 Minutes so I can install Dredge.
 

Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
7,870
15,903
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Is VR still focused on standing play these days ?
 

C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
Dec 23, 2018
3,992
11,886
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Is VR still focused on standing play these days ?
Most games I've played work fine seated. So long as you've got good arm mobility on the chair (so no sofas or armchairs - certain office chairs and dining-room chairs are best) there's usually a setting to play sat down and you can have a great time.

Some games are mostly standing still, but usually those are the "active" games like Beat Saber and such.
 
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dex3108

MetaMember
Dec 20, 2018
3,441
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TLoU textures on medium cause that some assets literally look like PS3 assets. That is why i don't understand why game needs that much VRAM.
 

Sobatronix

MetaMember
Mar 9, 2021
796
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TLoU textures on medium cause that some assets literally look like PS3 assets. That is why i don't understand why game needs that much VRAM.
The VRAM and for me, it's the CPU usage, it's constantly maxed out at medium settings 1440p with FSR performance (I have a ryzen 5 3600), that makes the game stutter like hell. The fact that this game uses so much ram, vram and CPU is baffling, especially for a linear game, usually the games that are CPU bound tend to be larger open worlds, I just don't get it. It feels like I'm playing this game on an emulator, not a native PC port.
 

Madventure

The Angel of Deaf
Nov 17, 2018
1,666
5,745
113
I like really doubt diablo 4 will go on steam even if the microsoft/activision stuff went through immediately magically tomorrow.

It's the reason battle.net even exists and they want to microtransaction it to hell to milk peoples bank accounts so I don't think they would want to give valve any of that along with a long list of other reasons I could think of

The bethesda one made more sense to me because their "Launcher" was just something that essentially double clicked .exe files and then had hyper links to websites. I know that sounds super advanced but however it's surprisingly shit
 
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Mivey

MetaMember
Sep 20, 2018
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So, out of sheer curiosity, I wanted to look at how Last of Us look and plays on the Steam Deck.
I set it to Medium in the big toggle in Graphics, had FSR 2 set to Quality, and put in a 30 FPS lock with tearing enabled. And it runs fine? It's constantly above 20W, so you can't expect a long play session, but in the short (~30 min) bit that I played it was at a locked 30 for a long time, with only occasional stutters on a big scene transition, and then smooth afterwards.



It won't look impressive on a big screen, but screenshot looks great on the Steam Deck, and given the slow pace of the game, 30 FPS fits it quite well. No crashes in my short time with it either. Admittedly, that might be a problem for longer sessions, no clue.

I won't continue on the Deck, this game looks far too gorgeous in 1440p to try it on the tiny 720p screen, but it doesn't exactly seem broken port to me, and yeah, I get why its verified. Maybe it's just the very intense opening section that runs crap on the Deck?
 
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