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I gave up on Witcher 3 recently. I finished the main game and was playing the bonus DLC that came with the game and it was just...too much of the same. So now I'm playing Just Cause 4 since it's that time of year when I need a good outlet for rage.
There are some parts of the game that I thought was an improvement over 2 and 3. Mainly, I like how easily destructible fuel tanks are now. I just need to grapple them together and they'd explode. Back in the previous games, I have to shoot them up a lot. So I like easy explosions.
That said, I don't like:
* Random things will be very difficult to destroy. There's some sort of electrical turret that will kill Rico's ass and no amount of RPGs can put a dent in it. I read on a forum you have to grapple off a panel and then shoot at its weak innards. Except it's hard to stand anywhere near the turret because it will kill Rico.
* No infinite ammos on helicopters!!! Who asked for realism in this game?
* Somehow, a lack of violence. In 2 & 3, you have to liberate civilian towns by destroying government property. And once you do that, government lackys come out and try to stop you from the destruction. This time, you "liberate" towns by doing car races and wingsuit stunts: two things from 2 and 3 that I only tried to do for completion's sake and never want to attempt again. So, I won't be doing that.
* As a follow up to the above, there also seem to be less people to kill in a government base. I would go in and cause any number of destruction and people won't try to stop me unless it's convenient to the plot of the game.
* Too much components to the game. I play these Just Cause games just to shoot things up to let off steam. I don't want to customize three variations of my grappling hook and add mods to each of them!
I don't want three different supply drop pilots each with their own personality and cool-down rate. Basically, customization and variation in gameplay is not what I'm looking for in Just Cause games.
* Endless battles for immersion. On the other end of the spectrum, Rico can participate in these frontline battles. Except they're endless and enemies spawn infinitely. So what's the point? It's not like there's a goal Rico is trying to achieve. I guess just staying alive is the goal? Ultimately, the battles always end (for me) when the government sends several bombers and drones to blow the heck out of everything.
Maybe I just need to free run better.
* Bad AI drivers. I did a driving mission yesterday and - holy crap! - the people in this fictitious nation are terrible drivers! I would be speeding but staying in my lane and cars from the oncoming lane would randomly swerve into my lane for no conceivable reason just so they can crash into me. What the hell? It's like this nation is populated by me in Forza
I read in forums that the changes were after gamers complained about lack of variation in gameplay. But most gamers on the forum agreed that those changes are bad. So I don't know who were those complainers. If one wants mindless violence, turn to 2 and 3. If one wants immersion and customization, maybe they ought to be playing a different sort of game (like Witcher 3).
That said, the game is not unplayable. It's just less enjoyable. I would probably play through the main story and not be as obsessively completionist as I was in 2 and 3.
Yesterday, I also finished reading the first (out of four) book of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. It took me 23 days to read, but I'm impressed by my ability to read a language I vaguely know but don't know how to write - so that only makes me halfway literate.
So how is the original book different from The Untamed asides from general Chinese censorship of homosexuality and the supernatural? It's largely very similar, honestly. Some dialogues from the drama are right out of the book.
The differences:
* The book makes it very clear that WWX doesn't look like Mo Xuanyu. In fact, Mo Xuanyu is shorter and clearly different looking. So there's no need to walk around with a mask on because no one would think they're the same person otherwise.
* The book doesn't have the whole Yin Iron backstory. The Wen Clan was just powerful and bullying the other clans and they got together to take them down.
* Therefore, WWX invented his Stygian Tiger Seal without the Yin Iron precedent, which is why he's known as the grandmaster of demonic cultivation, since he was First.
* Xiao Xingchen, Song Lan, and Xue Yang are not WWX and LZ's contemporaries.
They're probably a whole ten years or more younger than the main characters and weren't notable, known people during the main conflict. And what happened between the three of them happened after WWX died and he only heard about them after he came back to life. And the blind girl they meet in Yi City is a ghost, not someone that just looks like a ghost.
* In the present, they were trying to piece together body parts instead of following something that used to be an arm, then turned into a saber, that then pointed them to a headless body.
I also finished the collection Stories of Your Life the other day while waiting for laundry to be done. It's a book Joy (my co-worker) gave to Henry because he just seems like a guy that would enjoy such things. She game me some rom-com book, which I haven't read yet.
In any event, I'm not sure if I love the collection. With any collection, there are hits and misses. I really enjoyed "Hell is the Absence of God". "Tower of Babylon" was fairly okay. "Understand" was also okay, but not memorable. I had to look up what the story was about to recall anything about it. I surprisingly didn't think much of "Story of Your Life", which was the main selling point of the collection since it's the story Arrival was based on. I enjoyed Arrival, but I didn't much care for it's original. Weird. I'm neutral towards "Division by Zero" and "Evolution of Human Science". And I straight up hated "Liking What You See: A Documentary" and "Seventy-Two Letters". They were both tedious reads.
But I was just proud that I was able to get reading done at all this year.
Anyways, that's it for now. I think I was just bored and didn't want to work so I made a post with photos. Maybe it's time to take a walk around to relax my eyeballs.
There are some parts of the game that I thought was an improvement over 2 and 3. Mainly, I like how easily destructible fuel tanks are now. I just need to grapple them together and they'd explode. Back in the previous games, I have to shoot them up a lot. So I like easy explosions.
That said, I don't like:
* Random things will be very difficult to destroy. There's some sort of electrical turret that will kill Rico's ass and no amount of RPGs can put a dent in it. I read on a forum you have to grapple off a panel and then shoot at its weak innards. Except it's hard to stand anywhere near the turret because it will kill Rico.
* No infinite ammos on helicopters!!! Who asked for realism in this game?
* Somehow, a lack of violence. In 2 & 3, you have to liberate civilian towns by destroying government property. And once you do that, government lackys come out and try to stop you from the destruction. This time, you "liberate" towns by doing car races and wingsuit stunts: two things from 2 and 3 that I only tried to do for completion's sake and never want to attempt again. So, I won't be doing that.
* As a follow up to the above, there also seem to be less people to kill in a government base. I would go in and cause any number of destruction and people won't try to stop me unless it's convenient to the plot of the game.
* Too much components to the game. I play these Just Cause games just to shoot things up to let off steam. I don't want to customize three variations of my grappling hook and add mods to each of them!
I don't want three different supply drop pilots each with their own personality and cool-down rate. Basically, customization and variation in gameplay is not what I'm looking for in Just Cause games.
* Endless battles for immersion. On the other end of the spectrum, Rico can participate in these frontline battles. Except they're endless and enemies spawn infinitely. So what's the point? It's not like there's a goal Rico is trying to achieve. I guess just staying alive is the goal? Ultimately, the battles always end (for me) when the government sends several bombers and drones to blow the heck out of everything.
Maybe I just need to free run better.
* Bad AI drivers. I did a driving mission yesterday and - holy crap! - the people in this fictitious nation are terrible drivers! I would be speeding but staying in my lane and cars from the oncoming lane would randomly swerve into my lane for no conceivable reason just so they can crash into me. What the hell? It's like this nation is populated by me in Forza
I read in forums that the changes were after gamers complained about lack of variation in gameplay. But most gamers on the forum agreed that those changes are bad. So I don't know who were those complainers. If one wants mindless violence, turn to 2 and 3. If one wants immersion and customization, maybe they ought to be playing a different sort of game (like Witcher 3).
That said, the game is not unplayable. It's just less enjoyable. I would probably play through the main story and not be as obsessively completionist as I was in 2 and 3.
Yesterday, I also finished reading the first (out of four) book of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. It took me 23 days to read, but I'm impressed by my ability to read a language I vaguely know but don't know how to write - so that only makes me halfway literate.
So how is the original book different from The Untamed asides from general Chinese censorship of homosexuality and the supernatural? It's largely very similar, honestly. Some dialogues from the drama are right out of the book.
The differences:
* The book makes it very clear that WWX doesn't look like Mo Xuanyu. In fact, Mo Xuanyu is shorter and clearly different looking. So there's no need to walk around with a mask on because no one would think they're the same person otherwise.
* The book doesn't have the whole Yin Iron backstory. The Wen Clan was just powerful and bullying the other clans and they got together to take them down.
* Therefore, WWX invented his Stygian Tiger Seal without the Yin Iron precedent, which is why he's known as the grandmaster of demonic cultivation, since he was First.
* Xiao Xingchen, Song Lan, and Xue Yang are not WWX and LZ's contemporaries.
They're probably a whole ten years or more younger than the main characters and weren't notable, known people during the main conflict. And what happened between the three of them happened after WWX died and he only heard about them after he came back to life. And the blind girl they meet in Yi City is a ghost, not someone that just looks like a ghost.
* In the present, they were trying to piece together body parts instead of following something that used to be an arm, then turned into a saber, that then pointed them to a headless body.
I also finished the collection Stories of Your Life the other day while waiting for laundry to be done. It's a book Joy (my co-worker) gave to Henry because he just seems like a guy that would enjoy such things. She game me some rom-com book, which I haven't read yet.
In any event, I'm not sure if I love the collection. With any collection, there are hits and misses. I really enjoyed "Hell is the Absence of God". "Tower of Babylon" was fairly okay. "Understand" was also okay, but not memorable. I had to look up what the story was about to recall anything about it. I surprisingly didn't think much of "Story of Your Life", which was the main selling point of the collection since it's the story Arrival was based on. I enjoyed Arrival, but I didn't much care for it's original. Weird. I'm neutral towards "Division by Zero" and "Evolution of Human Science". And I straight up hated "Liking What You See: A Documentary" and "Seventy-Two Letters". They were both tedious reads.
But I was just proud that I was able to get reading done at all this year.
Anyways, that's it for now. I think I was just bored and didn't want to work so I made a post with photos. Maybe it's time to take a walk around to relax my eyeballs.