Just finished Expedition 33. GOTY material for sure. It's easily on my top 5 of all time.

Good game, despite all the QTE/dodge/parry bullshit being very annoying.

Playing it on Story difficulty mode just so that I don't have to bother that much with those annoyances and just beat everything (not extremely easy even at that level) and experience the story.

Also can't figure how to operate the Verso's skillset. It's so weird with the additional conditions which are very hard to control (easy to overshoot the required level). Compared to other characters' skills, it's very inconsistent with the additional triggers. Even Lune's skills are not that weird.

Which are the other games in high regard for you, btw?

@iiii KCD2 is the other big challenger

@Tounai challenger in what?

@iiii for the GOTY

@Tounai oh. I don't really care about those penis-length competitions. Games are either good, okay or bad. Does not really matter which one is "the best", especially when it's very much subjective and depends on a particular taste. Just like I find any sort of QTE mechanic in a non-musoc-rhythm, and especially in a turn based combat, game annoying as fuck, while many people (allegedly suffering from ADHD) praise it for making them "engaged in combat during enemy turn".

@iiii I'm very bland when it comes to my normal choices of games. I like narrative heavy games and usually go for something straightforward like fps. I don't play multiplayer at all because I will never be as good as a 12 year old.

I played Undertale. It was pretty good for what it was.

I want to like the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, but I'm not interested in the kind of micromanagement needed to properly build a character.

The only Pokemon games I really like were the early gen games because there really wasn't much focus on minmaxing while also not being so handholdy that it's a babygame.

I've played Hollow Knight and Sifu and loved them because they're very fast paced and smooth. I tried Furi but couldn't get the hang of it. I refuse to play any of the Souls games because I don't find watching a broken animation system kill me to be any fun.

I avoid visual novels mostly because the art direction is almost universally cringe.

So basically, whatever looks neat.

@iiii I love Halo: CE and the Valve fps games. Whether or not that's because they were my first games, I don't know, but I still like them a lot. When I had more free time, UT2k4 was where I spent a lot of time.

I love the Everspace games. And Freelancer. And Star Trek Bridge Commander. I wanted to like Chorvs but it was definitely not for me.

@cuddlyogre Some old school classics there. I saw a guy yesterday with a black t-shirt that that just said "Black Mesa research facility".

I am getting myself one of those for sure.

@iiii hate QTE in general; doesn't have to be turn based. As a PC gamer it seems like something invented for console payers to guide them through button smashing combos. It's gives me the "ain't solving captchas fun" vibes. It should have stayed on the console and died on the console.

@hjk101 nah, i like turn based combat when it's really turn based and not covertly action based (I didn't like Paper Mario for the same cause as well - QTE just breaks the chill flow of a turn based game)

and yeah, i get partially why dodge is there but goddamn why they decided to add QTE to EVERY ability is beyond me. luckily it can be disabled

The QTE for own attacks are good, I like them. Doing some extra dmg/heal if you have good reaction is fun and it fits with the animations and makes sense.

The QTE for evading attacks however is utter bullshit. It‘s not hard, it‘s just frustrating because you need to learn every attack for every enemy. And what makes it worse is that those attacks are deliberately misleading and trick you into pressing the button at the wrong time.

There are even enemies who jump 3 times and the third time they freeze mid air for a second or so. It makes no sense and it prevents you from building an intuition when to press the button.
And that‘s just the tip of the ice berg.
Many enemies just freeze for no good reason before they actually attack. Well, the reason is to fucking punish you for not having done anything wrong.

Which is a pity, because the game is actually great if it wasn’t for this bullshit.

Also I wish there was a save button.
You can save anywhere anyway (by switching the weapon), so rather than going through all the menus, they could have just given us a save button.

@Lensflare or you can just disable QTE for attacks and have attacks just work as intended without having to do overtime work in a game.

@iiii as I said, the offensive qte are fine. They fit with the animations mostly.

The defensive qte are the problem because you don‘t know what the correct time is to press the button because of how random and deliberately misleading the animations are.

@Lensflare actually pretty much every enemy has either a visual or a sound cue for the attack which shows when the attack is actually happening. Yes, some patterns have weird rhythm and some deliberately bamboozle you, but they are not that hard, just annoying mostly. The gestral boxer does a feint: shows as if it makes a right hook and then does the left one. If you react to the feint you'll get a smack in the face.

@Lensflare sound clues are more reliable in most cases.

@iiii I haven’t noticed sound cues which help to predict when the attack will be but I‘ll try to hear closer the next time I play

@Lensflare There's almost always a swish noise or grunt (with Gestrals) before the attack. Parrying right after the sound has finished playing will almost always result in a successful parry. It's so reliable, you can parry brand new enemies once you train yourself to hear it. Dodging until you can reliably get perfect dodges is how they want you to train. Sometimes it even helps not to look directly at the screen, so that the visuals don't distract from the sound.

@iiii @cuddlyogre that was a good tip. I wish I knew this earlier ^^

@cuddlyogre except some enemies don't have those sounds or the sound is too quiet so you have to only rely on visuals

@iiii I'm still a bit mad at this game for doing this deliberately misleading animation stuff and not telling you about the sound cues.

@iiii I recognize there are some late game enemies that seem to be this way, but I'm not certain that's actually the case. There's so much going on in those fights, the cues could actually just be drowned out by other sounds. And considering how tight everything else is, that might actually be a bug.

@Lensflare I specifically dislike the gestral traders/warriors who do the right hook feint. EVERY. DAMN. TIME.

@cuddlyogre I think the small enemies in the old battlefield who fight with mannequin arms don't have a sound cue or it's so subtle that I cannot notice it.

@iiii It's better not to look at the screen during those fights. I'm not even joking. I got really good at parrying and that nonsense still fooled me most of the time.

It's been a while since I was at the Forgotten Battlefield, so I'll have to check it out.

@iiii I like both turn based and and real time. Both have their place. QTE is what I hate no matter what.

@hjk101 yeah sure, some like that. I'm not saying it's overall bad, I don't like it. I find it tolerable for some special moves (in Jack Move there are QTE for the special moves, but none for regular abilities), but when you need to do it for pretty much everything you perform it becomes annoying and bothersome, and feels like meaningless work, which I have enough at my day job already 😂

And that's why I've turned on auto QTE for abilities and Story difficulty. I am not someone striving for an ass cracking challenge to be satisfied with a game.