Posts made by ffff0

To the mods: let's move this topic to the Hall of Fame.

@axel Please submit results to Community Showcase or Q&A.

Here’re my top 8 2019 games:

1. Borderlands 3
2. Control
3. The Outer Worlds
4. Metro Exodus
5. Days Gone
6. A Plague Tale: Innocence
7. Apex Legends
8. The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan

The only one that didn’t make into top 25 is The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan. I really liked my first playthrough: having to react quickly knowing that every mistake can mean death or bad outcome was intense and horrifying. But further playthroughs to get all collectables weren’t that great and it’s hard to replay particular segment in the middle of your playthrough (which is fine for the 1st run, but not good for the 2nd). It’s memorable, but it’s one-and-done game.

I’ve played a demo of Resident Evil 2. Not for me – character moves too slow for an action game. And Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a From Software game and after finishing Bloodborne I will not play any games from this studio until they implement Easy difficulty and add substantial story that isn’t lore-based (so, probably never).

@axel said in The EZA Community Top 25 Best of 2019!:

Dat Luigi's Mansion 3 snub tho.

If it had proper control scheme I would play it. But with its current unfriendly controls I support this snub.

The Outer Worlds is my #3 because of its revolutionary game design.

First of all the game design in The Outer Worlds is a new step for the industry in terms of combining player freedom with storytelling. I feel like in every other branching narrative game I played (even in story-driven games like games from Quantic Dreams) I could always see the limit of my choices and the scope of their impact. But in The Outer Worlds I felt like I’m playing with a real DM, who understands my actions and changes everything accordingly. The game has so many possibilities, but it never lists them. Even with skill checks in dialog it only shows you those options that you can use immediately or very soon. This creates a feeling that there’s no wrong way to play this game and whatever you choose you always feel like you made the right call.

Another impressive aspect is its open-world design. I don’t like when open world games have no question marks on the map – I want to know that I’m not wasting time by going somewhere. But when there are question marks I clear all of them first, because I don’t want to miss any side content. But then I revisit familiar places during my quests, which isn’t that interesting. The Outer Worlds don’t have typical question marks, but instead the game sends you to every interesting location on some quests and it makes sure that all quest beginnings are near to other quest's goals. And the maps are just the right size to give you room for going off the path, but don’t make you feel like you’ve missed a lot if you didn’t. Again this is a remarkable achievement in game design.

So why this game is my #3 and not my #1? This game has countless interesting stories both big and small, but they aren’t especially emotional. Maybe it’s because game’s dialog are just talking heads, but the fact remains: I love and adore this game on intellectual level, but it doesn’t feel special. Even so I highly recommend this game to everyone especially since it’s not that long and it’s on Xbox Game Pass.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is my #25 of 36.

First things first: I don’t like Nintendo as a company and I don’t like Switch as a console so a first-party Switch exclusive has an uphill battle with me. That being said, I was genuinely interested in Fire Emblem: Three Houses and was determent to be fair to this game despite its origins and platform.

Good things first. Of the small pool of Nintendo games I’ve ever bought it’s the first one I’m not regretting buying. Also it’s the first one which I wanted to play more after reaching the credits. In fact I finished all 3.5 campaigns in a row. It was mostly because swapped face buttons is a huge problem for me, and since I got more or less used to it by the end of the first playthrough, it was wise to play other campaigns while I’m there. But still, I wanted to continue, and that is totally thanks to the game’s relaxing gameplay and decent story.

Now the bad things, which are numerous (otherwise it would not by my #25). Visuals are terrible outside of combat, especially for an AAA 2019 game. Especially during dialogs, when backgrounds wraps and bends like your character is drunk. Character animations are also very rigid, limited and repetitive. I could not look at this “early PS3” image, so I just listened to the dialogs (thankfully the game is fully voiced). Characters weren’t that memorable either (maybe because I didn’t look at them). They aren’t bad, and some interactions are worth pursuing, but there are so many of them, that the story of each one becomes too sparse and short. Combat encounters are great and controls well especially for a strategy on console, but very often inputting your turn takes too much time because there are so many characters and the battlefield isn’t small. Especially when you do them again because this game forces you to replay a good chunk of it in your second and third playthrough. Oh, and running over the castle takes too much time when you do it again and again.

In summary, Fire Emblem: Three Houses is simply too big. My closest comparison is The Banner Saga trilogy and those games are better than Three Houses in almost every aspect (except for not being fully voiced). So I would recommend them over the latest Fire Emblem, especially if your gaming time is limited.

Control is my #2.

You can easily disagree, but I think that Control is the first next-gen title. The amount of destruction with realistic physics for every piece of debris is mind blowing. The visuals are stunning even without ray-tracing – there are projectors that actually project! And when you enable ray-tracing the image becomes even better. I’ve spend $1200 on a new PC to play this game and it was 100% worth it!

But even if you can’t run this game the best way possible, it’s still an amazing experience. The combat is great – a chaos of explosions, sounds and enemies pushing from all angles. It’s easy to get swallowed by this chaos, but you also have so many tools to control it. Movement feels great, shots feel impactful and abilities are a joy to use. Even if there was nothing else in Control it would be worth playing.

But there’s more! Exploration in Control is also great. Sure, the map isn’t a winner and there were times when I was running in circles trying to understand how to get somewhere, but each room in The Oldest House is so distinct and meticulously detailed, that I didn’t mind going through the same places again and again. Even when I played the game a second time it still felt new and exciting.

World building is also top tier. I love how weird and unexplainable stuff slowly becomes just another day on the job. When you read some documents in the beginning of the game it all sounds crazy, but later it all makes sense even though it really doesn’t. Trying to communicate with the duck toy sounds crazy and it is crazy, but in The Oldest House it’s a reasonable thing to do. Also many lore pieces are interconnected and sometimes you read about on object of power before you see it, which is always nice since it makes you feel like you know what you’re doing.

Such fascinating narrative is supported by a great cast. Jesse Faden is a great lead with a great balance of relevant history and lack of experience. She is perfect avatar in this strange world, but she never feels like just an avatar – you want to help her with her goals and want to unravel her own story. The rest of the characters are also distinct and interesting and some of them you can never meet.

For a long time Control was my GotY, but it ended up being my #2, because Borderlands 3 (my GotY) made me emotional like no other game in 2019. Control is fascinating and rewarding journey, but it doesn’t have an ending that sticks with you. And that’s why it got my second place.

Death Stranding is my #16 of 36.

I can’t say that I’m Kojima’s fan: I think that he creates cut-scenes like no other, but gameplay and story of his games aren’t that memorable for me. But my favorite aspect of Death Stranding is its traversal. It just feels great to plan the path on the map and then adapt on the fly when you actually reach these places. Yes, it is tedious, but it’s a very relaxing tedium. My closest comparison would be No Man’s Sky at launch where going through motions was also a great way to relax after work.

I didn’t mind that there’s no meaningful progression in this game: the motorcycle is OP and you get one early on. I even stopped looking at the stuff you unlock and I stopped carrying any traversal cargo or weapons – you can always just drive away from enemy encounters and drive around environmental obstacles. And when you forced to fight a boss, there’s always stuff lying around. It almost feels like the game wasn’t designed around the motorcycle. And the music absolutely wasn’t – 30 seconds after a new track starts playing you reach your goal and interrupt it.

Online features are the most interesting case. Certainly there were some good online components (like roads and charging stations), but most of them were absolutely useless to anyone. There were bridges over flat surfaces, speed-up signs on roads and inside bases where you can speed up as much as you want and stuff like that. And they were clearly placed there just to gather likes, because they were always on your path. It was very annoying and while I was playing the game I was wishing it was an offline game with all useful staff just appears when you unlock new region. But after the fact I decided that this was a good social experiment that showed how useless online interactions can be when they are driven by likes.

Other aspects weren’t that memorable. I had no attachments to game’s characters (even to BB) and its story. And music is better outside of the game. But as I said, I enjoyed going through motions which is why it’s my #16.

@iboshow I have a strong feeling that Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is among the last 7.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is my #27 of 36.

I don’t like Star Wars: I think it’s pretty dumb and while new movies can be fun as visual spectacle, original trilogy lack even that and I can barely watch it. So my perspective isn’t a common one.

I approached Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order as just an action game. Combat is fun and strikes great balance between challenge and accessibility. And if it doesn’t, there are difficulty options. Level design is also great and environments look really good. Exploration is also nice, but it has one huge problem: there’s no fast travel, so opening some secrets after you’ve got necessary ability is unnecessary tedious.

As a non-fan of Star Wars I wasn’t especially attached to the story and I didn’t care about all visual updates to your gear. So the main reason to play for me was to explore new locations. Unfortunately there was one huge obstacle for me on this path – game’s music.

The music never shuts up. I traveled to some remote secluded place, nothing happening around me, let me just stand there for a second and breathe its atmosphere, please! No, - says the game, - I will drown you in music, because everyone loves Star Wars score and listen it on the loop. And it’s the same style of music no matter how different locations are! I’ve never done this before, but in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order I’ve muted the music in the middle of the game. It was a huge improvement, but it was too late, because by that point I already saw most of game’s environments and they were ruined for me.

At least I played it via Origin Access Premiere and I also played A Plague Tale: Innocence with that subscription, so it wasn’t a waste of my money.

So, yesterday I’ve tested GeForce Now service and got some interesting results. Full disclosure: in Russia GeForce Now is served by 3rd-party company, but they use NVidia branding and, and NVidia promotes their service as GeForce Now. So while my results may not be indicative of worldwide situation, it should be pretty accurate.

As a test game I used Doom 2016 and compared streamed version with a version running on my brand-new gaming PC. Good things first: I didn’t notice any visual difference between local and streamed version whether I was stationary or moving at high speed. Even things like fog had no visual artifacts of video compression. At the same time bandwidth consumption was around 20 Mbps, which is great for 1080p 60fps with individually compressed frames. Also launching games and using cloud saves is very easy.

Not so good is the delay. Doom was perfectly playable via stream, but there was a noticeable difference between local version and streamed version. I haven’t measured it and I’m bad at estimating such things, but I doubt I would notice it if it was less than a couple of frames. It definitely not a network delay (I have 2ms RTT between my PC and data center where servers are hosted), so it must be a video compression delay. Another not so good thing is that my PC load level twice faster than the server (and I haven’t the fastest SSD you can buy). Again, it’s not a deal breaker, but I expected more from the cloud-based solution.

Now the bad thing. There were dropped frames, sometimes almost a second of dropped frames. This was the most curious thing, so I’ve captured network traffic and started digging. Here’s what I found.

Besides a series of TCP connections that last for 7 seconds and barely transfer any data, communication consists of 4 UDP streams. Two transfer data to the client (most likely, one for video and one for audio) and two transfer data in other direction (most likely, one is used for control inputs and another for something unimportant since it’s the only stream that don’t have quality-of-service marking):

Now if you look at I/O graph you’ll see something interesting:

Blue is (most likely) video stream, green is audio stream, black is controller input and red is something else. When I saw dropped frames in game, there’s some significant packet drop, but only for the video stream. Other streams aren’t impacted. It’s even more obvious if you look closer:

And this is how it looks on the video-frame level:

For reference, this is how it looks on the video-frame level when everything is OK:

This doesn’t look like a network bottleneck, since other streams with same or lower quality-of-service level aren’t impacted. It potentially could be a result of load-balancing this particular stream on overloaded network link, but I know this network path from my work and I haven’t encountered any capacity problems. So I just have to assume that there’s some problem on the server’s side, possibly with the video encoding. I know it’s sounds strange since NVidia GPUs are great for video encoding, but delay I’ve talked earlier about is also indicative of some encoding issues. And it's possible that there's not enough video encoding servers (but enough servers to run games) in this data center.

In summary, GeForce Now is a service that can actually do videogame streaming, but it has some issues that needs to be fixed. So you can consider it to play Cyberpunk 2077, but definitely try before you buy.

Devil May Cry 5 is my #28.

The good thing is that Easy difficulty is actually easy and you ca go through the game without learning all that combos. And even on Easy playing as V is fun. The bad things is that there's no reason to play this game if you aren't interested in its battle system. Levels look the same, story isn't interesting (at least for the newcomers) and even Devil Trigger becomes boring because it plays too often. I liked DmC, but Devil May Cry is definitely not for me.

Metro Exodus is my first ray-tracing game and this was an amazing experience.

You all know this stealth games problem: you stand right in front of the enemy, but he can’t see you just because the place you are in the “dark” section of the level. It looks unrealistic and it constantly reminds you that you are dealing with AI that was designed in player’s favor. We are used to it, but still it breaks the immersion. But with ray-tracing it’s no longer a problem – the dark places are truly dark (but unlike turning down the brightness you can still see everything if you pay close attention to the environment). And besides making this world real, it completely changes the way you navigate in this game. Since enemies can hide in the dark just as easily as you, you have to consider every step you take and be ready for anything. I’m not easily scared (I just finished Outlast 2 and it was a walk in the park), but in Metro Exodus I was legitimately afraid of dark places and listened to the sounds like never before. If you’ll have a chance to experience this game with ray-tracing (possibly via GeForce Now), please do – it’s completely different experience.

Another nice thing for me was exploring my home environment. I live in Russia, so most of those locations and props are very familiar to me.

It’s my number #4 because I wasn’t especially attached to the story and characters. Russian VO is OK but not great and scripted cut-scenes feel rigid and detached (partly because you can move and look away). Too bad, if they nailed those aspects, it could be my #1.

P.S. If you wan't to look how ray-tracing look in Metro Exodus, I've submitted a couple of screenshots to the December Community Showcase:

Youtube Video – [2:37:38..]

I love our ranking this year! So many beloved games already made their appearance and we still haven't touched the top 10. I have no idea what's coming and in what order and it's exciting.

Kingdom Hearts III is my #12 of 36.

My perspective is unusual. I know next to nothing about Final Fantasy and I never watched some of Disney classic animation films. I also never played Kingdom Hearts games before 2019. I was thinking about it several years ago, but when I saw that Sora screams constantly during battles I decided not to. But in March 2019 Kingdom Hearts All-In-One Package went on sale and the deal was too good to be missed.

So in July I started playing all these 10 games (or 7 if you exclude movies). And almost immediately I regretted that I bought them. First of all they are insanely hard. I had to restart first game on Easy after 4 hours on Normal, but even then I was stuck on multiple bosses for hours. I even nearly gave up on Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, but then I read about EXP Walker, so I made it and left my character running circles for a night. Secondly, the worlds are small and looks old, but objectives aren’t always clear, so you go through the same rooms over and over again. Finally there is a lot of repetition in the series, so games can be pretty boring.

After all that tedium I played the first current-gen game Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep – A Fragmentary Passage, and it was a breath of fresh air. It was short, so when I went into Kingdom Hearts III it was still feeling fresh, new and big. And playing it was a joy, especially since almost every world in it was new.

But Kingdom Hearts III eventually also became tedious. Many worlds and many moments felt longer than they need to be (especially Arendelle). And the ending is longer than in Lord of the Rings. I get that it tries to wrap up so many games, but culminating the game with a series of 22 boss battles is way too much.

Still I’m happy that I took this journey. I got attached to its characters and story and I ended up liking its music. Kingdom Hearts III is definitely the second best games in the series (A Fragmentary Passage is my favorite because it’s new and short) and it’s my #12 only because there were games I’ve enjoyed more.

Days Gone is my #5 of 36.

At first I didn’t like the pacing of this game. It starts and stops, becomes interesting then boring and again and again. But after a while I realized that Days Gone isn’t a typical fictional story – it’s a slice of life. Like in real life not every moment is meaningful and not every dream will be realized, but it only makes your highs so much higher. Once I understood that everything felt into place.

As a game it also works well. There’s satisfying gameplay loop “gather resources – do your thing” and riding on the bike in the open world feels great. Enemy AI isn’t particularly smart, but since odds are stacked against you, particularly near the end, abusing its weaknesses was fun and satisfying. I played it in September and there weren’t significant technical problems besides engine’s struggles to load the assets when you travel fast. But even while it was noticeable it didn’t bother me that much.

I think that despite high marketing budget this isn’t a universally appealing game, but if its ever come on PlayStation Plus, I would recommend to check it out.

@tokyoslim You right. I admit I wasn't reading thoughtfully every world, because there's a lot of text with complex vocabulary there and English is my second language. I guess I wasn't paying necessary attention during this critical moment. I wish it was voiced.

Well, I partly retract my arguments about progression feedback. I still think the game could communicate better its time progression (I was wrapped up in Wednesday, because I felt like there will be much more stuff to do and I don't have much time left).

I keep thinking that maybe I'm just the wrong audience for such games, but at the same time I loved Telling Lies which also doesn't guide you, has a lot of missable stuff and is time-based. Maybe lack of VO is a deal-breaker for me.

@tokyoslim Video games have certain language that we all know. When your HP reach 0, you die; you should go toward the light; fast attacks deals less damage than strong attacks - stuff like that. And it's a common practice to explicitly inform the player about going to the endgame either through a dialog or with a message pop-up. If this info was in the journal - great, but this is not where I'll be looking for it. And I wan't looking into the journal alot because I have good memory.

I'm not saying that all games should follow the same template. But they should not break something if it makes sense. Voices could easily tell me about locking content when I was going through the basement of this abandoned building, but the only warned me about upcoming confrontation.

P.S. I'm so frustrated about Disco Elysium only because I could easily love it if the game was only slightly different.

@tokyoslim Well, then the game did poor job of communicating to the player that it has some guiding, because I didn't know that. As for the warning the player it only warns you about the second locking out. It doesn't warn you about the first (when you meet a certain character in the basement), and it took me about 2 hours to realize that I no longer can do multiple quests.