Video game thread

@ANoobis  
Heh. Yeah, remember the time people were spawning the entire god damn Prydwen in Fallout 76?
 
 
@FeatherTrap  
Shame they didn’t learn the trick I picked up on day 1 of playing the DLC: fuck dragonrend, get bend will. Seriously. If you’ve never tried it, bend will will bring them down IMMEDIATELY. Between that and turning them friendly, it’s just thoroughly superior. No circling for two minutes before landing on the other side of a mountain and no bullshit flying off into the horizon without ever landing at all. How they managed to make a FUNCTIONAL version of dragonrend without ever thinking “we should probably port this part back” is beyond me. That they threw their fix (however unintentional) out come the next incarnation of the engine does not surprise me in the least, however, given how they’ve had to re-fix the same engine bugs over and over again for every game since Fallout 3.
 
And yeah. That explains a hell of a lot. I tried using a vertibird for transport for the first time just a few days ago. Specifically from the insane asylum to the Cabot house. The one and only trip I’ve ever taken and the fucking thing flew to my destination and then proceeded to pull a turn and head away. And away. And away. And away and away and away before finally setting down outside the city entirely. Plenty of flat terrain all over between there and where it finally did land.
 
Maybe worth adding that I only used it at all because I accidentally equipped the signal grenades still in my inventory from bulk reporting quests on the blimp instead of my plasmas and ended up conking a super mutant in the dick with it. I have to wonder what the fucking point of them even is. The only thing they actually do is show off how tiny the map is.
 
@EverfreeEmergencies  
SO IT’S NOT JUST ME! They choose one of two things every time: me or the roof of a building I can’t reach. Either they’ll kill me or they’ll deny me my loot. Just like the fucking dragons.

@Officer Hotpants  
Speaking of dragons, I had one fly by with a giant on its back before getting into a 4-way battle between it, the giant, a giant frostbite spider, and the whiterun guards the other day. It was a confusing series of events.

@EverfreeEmergencies  
Now see, when the engine freaks out in that way it’s actually endearing. Wish we got that more often, and less horrifying elastic noodle bodies that defy physics. Or getting killed by a near-invisibly tiny static mesh because the game couldn’t read our movement over it properly and, for just a second, somehow decided we were moving at three times the speed of light and hit us with several billion points of damage. Or quest items falling through the ground and into the eternal void beyond. Or the game just crashing to desktop with zero warning.

@Officer Hotpants  

Do you really think they tried to fix any of these?  
Also, pretty sure dragon combat mods do fix the dragonrend to make it a dead stop instead of “LMAO CIAO”.

@Officer Hotpants  
Forgot I took screenshots.  
 

@Barhandar  
The insane runaway save file bloat immediately comes to mind. It was an issue in Fallout 3 that they patched. Then it was back in New Vegas and had to be fixed again. Then it was back in Skyrim, and then it was a major issue because it wasn’t rendering games unplayable by 100 hours but rather by 10. And so they pumped out the fix for it in record time.
 
And then, from what I can tell, it came back for Fallout 4/76. Except I don’t think they bothered fixing it this time.
 
As for Skyrim, maybe I’ll check those mods out someday. At the moment I’m done with it simply because they keep fucking rebreaking it.
 
 
@EverfreeEmergencies  
That is beautiful. I have little clue what could have caused it but that’s awesome.

@Officer Hotpants  

The bloat is why all locations reset in a few hours.  

That’s why you should play normal edition instead of Still Not Even One Iota Of Fixing Editions.

@Barhandar  
No thanks. That shit was so unstable as to be unplayable in its own right. I had to avoid not only using bows but allowing NPCs to use them because it was about a 1-in-3 chance per arrow loosed that the game would immediately crash to desktop the moment it struck someone. Never could find a fix for that bug that worked.

@FeatherTrap  
reject BoS buggy vertibird, embrace glorious institute teletransportation
 
 
@Officer Hotpants  
it doesnt help that the only companion with affinity for bows is in a hidden buggy quest

@TeamBlueplant  
you must choose, my son:  

@FeatherTrap  
since im playing survival, institute is as close as fast travel as it can get, and i have really bad experiences of vertibids crashing into me from beyond render distance because a super mutant with a pipe pistol can down one of those things

@TeamBlueplant  
>plays on survival mode  
>uses a fast travel method that kills it’s user with every use, only to replace them with a clone made of their genetic material

@FeatherTrap  
i see it as a win win, since the institute is the only sterilized place in the whole planet then its like being reborn again free of whatever fucking virus and asbestos there is in the air up there

@TeamBlueplant  
Why even bother? They’re just going to use that shitty basic bitch hunting bow that Bethesda inexplicably decided companions NEEDED to have at all times whether we liked it or not (but couldn’t be troubled to make properly functional).
 
@FeatherTrap  
That bugs me every time I use it because they specifically went to the trouble of drilling in that it rips you apart at the molecular level. Never liked Star Trek’s murder pads. I did greatly appreciate Star Ocean 3’s 4D beings explaining at one point that they moved beyond the barbaric practice of ripping people apart and building clones of them elsewhere in favor of a system that straight up cuts two regions of spacetime out of the universe and swaps them.

@Officer Hotpants  
That reminds me of the Quantum Gates from the often overlooked and underappreciated Supreme Commander universe. They only allow for one-way travel by default, so a new gate must be constructed at the target planet to travel back, or some manner of power-intensive recall device must be installed on the travelling ship/ACU in order to teleport back thru it without a return gate.
 
But the advantage of them is that they use quantum-entanglement relocation to allow the subject to be teleported to anywhere in the galaxy immediately. If we had technology like that, we could take an afternoon stroll on our earth-like cousin in the Alpha Centurai system and be back to Earth before the kettle finishes boiling.

@FeatherTrap  
You’re a SupCom fan!? I knew you had good taste but god damn. You’re only the third person I’ve met who’s heard of it.

@Officer Hotpants  

 
Sigma femboy YES >:3
 
Used to play Total Annihilation as a colt and loved it, so when I turned fourteen and saw a copy of the game sitting on the EB Games store shelf, I thought “that reminds me TA” and I picked it up.  
Little did I know, it actually was the spiritual successor of TA! I played only Halo and SupCom for the next six months straight~ X3
 
 
@Officer Hotpants  
Also, late response on this one I know but pro tip: If you’re trying to use the vertibirds to go somewhere in the main Boston city area: ALWAYS TELL IT TO GO STRAIGHT TO BOSTON COMMONS. It is the one and only part of that map the AI will reliably land in.

@Officer Hotpants  

Fun fact about Skyrim’s mechanics: the hunting bow, when fully boosted and enchanted, has the highest DPS of all stock bows.  
Because some complete cretin thought that draw speed needed to correlate with damage, and as such the harder the bow hits, the slower it draws, completely negating the DPS that would be gained from higher damage and further boosting stealth archer (a.k.a. alphastrike) gameplay.  
DLC bows don’t follow this scheme, so dragonbone and crossbows are still better.

@Officer Hotpants  
@FeatherTrap  
Fun fact: The only reason I ever heard of that series is someone directing me to some fanfiction of it for some reason. It was even half decent.
 
I sucked bad at the games when I tried them, though they did seem like the kind of thing that’d be fun if I could in any way multitask at that level.

@Officer Hotpants  
I’ve never played it, but I know a bit about it because Greg from DawnSomewhere, the guy who made the Mentally Advanced Series and Rainbow Dash Presents, did some videos about it.

@FeatherTrap  
Ever play the 360 version? That’s where I was first introduced. Ran like complete shit but still fun. By mid-to-late-game you could no longer save because the file size was larger than the system could handle and all the buildings, units & terrain would lose their textures really late in. Everything was the same flat grey and trees turned into fields of triangles. Only the terrain kept its colors.
 
There was ONE thing the 360 had going for it that the PC didn’t, though: the artillery shield. UEF special building. A very weak but quick-charging and MASSIVE radius shield. Didn’t do jack shit to protect you from sustained fire but it was great for preventing artillery bombardments. Two or three of those and you didn’t have to worry about AI artillery stations anymore (it never has shown a proper appreciation for them).
 
@Barhandar  
If the damage increase were higher then that would be fine. Too much to ask that they do the math on their own changes, I guess.
 
@Napsack  
Weird. I actually befriended someone in part because I was one of the only people they could talk to about SupCom and they wanted my opinion on a SupCom/MLP fic they were writing. I wonder what ever became of that…
 
@ANoobis  
I know I’ve heard name before. “Mentally Advanced” I mean. I can’t place it, though.

@Officer Hotpants  
i dont know if its a mod but couldnt you give bows and arrows for npcs to use?
 
 
@Barhandar  
that interesting, i wonder if that also affects zephyr
 
 
@Officer Hotpants  
i have only played supreme comander 2 and planetary annihilation titans; wich is very similar but its like if the amazon robots went rogue
 
hell, i played some supreme comander 2 maps in company of heroes 2 for the fun of it

@TeamBlueplant  
Zephyr is the best bow if you don’t enchant the rest and don’t have the OP as fuck crossbows.

@TeamBlueplant  
I’ve seen a few that try to fix the bows but they all either A) don’t work or B) cause other problems, like them randomly losing the new bows you give them too. Betheseda went out of their way to MAKE the companion bows as annoying as possible.
 
SupCom2 was an extreme downscale in both size and variety. It’s essentially a fucking phone game port of the first game. If you enjoyed it then you should definitely pick up SupCom1 next time there’s a sale. To give you an idea of the difference, here’s what one of the larger maps looks like in SupCom1. This is considered a 20x20 map. The largest are 81x81.

@Officer Hotpants  
honestly planetary annihilation was already too big in scale for me, i cant micromanage 4 different fronts at once
 
also, does supreme comander 1 have walking battleships?