What Video Games Have You Been Playing #11: I should go

[caketastydelish]

True. OTOH free is free.

 

[cardgame]

uPlay honestly isn't that bad... at least not for me, for the month or so I've had it for Division 2

 

[H4run]

Playing polytopia, it is fun, hard difficulty post insane challange if you are spawn in a wrong starting point. But not if you start quite seperately.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I have yet to get three stars and it's very frustrating.

 

[H4run]

I have yet to get three stars and it's very frustrating

You really think like me, 95 percent is too difficult to reach. It looks even impossible if you play at hard difficulty because of 60 percent difficulty rating "cap"

 

[hobbsyoyo]

There's been a couple times where the game tells me I was within a couple hundreds points (out of ~20,000) of getting 3 stars but I can never get it over the top for whatever reason.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Sounds like you need to move up to the next higher difficulty, then match your current performance in the other areas. @haroon is right, having one of four scores locked at 60% makes an overall of 95% pretty much impossible. I assume the next difficulty level will lock that at 80%, which makes a huge difference.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Not just at aiming.

What do you mean?

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Nah, I think @Dachs is right. The encyclopedia does a great job of throwing information and technobabble at you and some of that content is realistic. But the impact those realistic encyclopedia entries have on the story are negligible or non-existent in most cases. The Normandy's cloaking explanation was pretty good and that even popped up a few times as minor plot points. But other than that, most of it was just technobabble drivel with little basis in reality. And there was no emphasis on the technology - the plot would have worked just as well if set in a fantasy world.

I don't think it's necessarily worse than a lot of sci-fi franchises but I don't think it's better than most of them. I mean it basically had Jedi...

Yes. there's technobabble, but all that technobabble is based on one single type of made up exotic matter. It's a far cry from other settings that just bombard you with subspace, hyperspace, tachyons and all that nonsense.
The worst thing about Mass Effect isn't physics but biology. How does every single sapient species have the same bodytype as humans ? Our posture is even unique on our own planet.

Yeah, but that would require me to touch Uplay.
Uplay is worse than EA's Origin, and that is saying something.

I have the same attitude, but I regret that I didn't get Black Flag when that was free. This might be the day I install Uplay. It's got to the point where Ubisoft is the least bad of the big publishers.


By the way: Transistor is currently free on the Epic Store.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Yes. there's technobabble, but all that technobabble is based on one single type of made up exotic matter. It's a far cry from other settings that just bombard you with subspace, hyperspace, tachyons and all that nonsense.
The worst thing about Mass Effect isn't physics but biology. How does every single sapient species have the same bodytype as humans ? Our posture is even unique on our own planet.



I have the same attitude, but I regret that I didn't get Black Flag when that was free. This might be the day I install Uplay. It's got to the point where Ubisoft is the least bad of the big publishers.


By the way: Transistor is currently free on the Epic Store.

There was quantum communications, thermal heat sinks ammunition, micro-manufactured ammunition, shields, biotic shields, mind melds and a lot of other stuff. Every time a character speaks about those things they are effectively talking gibberish as they are not tied to anything real. Completely agree about the biology being especially bad science fiction.

 

[H4run]

Pretty much like Tim said, 95 percent achievable in crazy difficulty. But I caanot reach that 3 star, the battle too epic, with many causality.

edit: ouch I just realized it cover all of my laptop screen, really sorry for the inconvenient guy.

 

[Arakhor]

Yeah, but that would require me to touch Uplay.
Uplay is worse than EA's Origin, and that is saying something.

You could always get yourself an Xbox One and play Uplay/EA games on that.

 

[Dachs]

For some reason the Batarian Hegemony reminds me a lot of North Korea. Not sure if this was intentional.

It's completely intentional.

There was quantum communications, thermal heat sinks ammunition, micro-manufactured ammunition, shields, biotic shields, mind melds and a lot of other stuff. Every time a character speaks about those things they are effectively talking gibberish as they are not tied to anything real. Completely agree about the biology being especially bad science fiction.

Yeah.

I will confess that I haven't read nearly as widely in the genre as most of you, but I feel that if this qualifies as "relatively" hard then the genre as a whole is exceptionally soft.

 

[Akka]

Nah, I think @Dachs is right.

No, he's just pointlessly pedantic. ME1 background lore (not gameplay) is very well thought-out and care to take into account realistic consequences of its paragdim, especially compared to the overwhelming majority of SF (not to speak of SF games). You got a few genre-based schticks (like absurdly-human aliens or mind meld) but most of the rest is just based on a single "big lie" (element zero) from which lots of logical consequences are drawn.

 

[Synobun]

I was going to lay down the law on hard vs soft sci but after googling it I saw that people seem to believe hard sci is about physics/biology/chemistry while soft sci is about psychology/sociology/etc.

Which... doesn't match up with the dichotomy I've used my entire life, along with everyone else I've had debates with while in the sci-fi RP community. It doesn't really seem like a valuable dichotomy to use as that means something can be both hard sci and soft sci, eliminating the entire point of having sub-genres.

To me, hard sci necessitates that the science in the material is, in theory, doable IRL. Not necessarily practical or possible today, but it stands up to scrutiny in the theory of it.

Soft sci necessitates that there is an internal consistency to the world, but it doesn't require it to be realistic or otherwise technically possible. It just requires boundaries and limiters. You have a clear answer for why something works the way it does, but that explanation need not be rooted in real-life limitations or potentials.

Space opera, meanwhile, throws all of that out of the window. You can change the box the world is in at any time, and you can be a lot more loosey-goosey with what people can accomplish. Things don't need to make sense or be consistent.

Star Wars? Space opera. Mass Effect and Star Trek? Soft sci. The Martian? Hard sci.

 

[Arakhor]

For (nearly) every discussion, there's an obligatory TV Tropes link.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I remember finding it funny that in the second game that there were like a billion mentions of dextro-amino acids, where they were never mentioned in the first. The second game is the one that allowed you to romance one of the dextro characters, depending on your gender...

The worst thing about Mass Effect isn't physics but biology. How does every single sapient species have the same bodytype as humans ? Our posture is even unique on our own planet.

I think I read somewhere it's something about limits of the Unreal Engine that everyone has to be bipedal. Which is unfortunate because it'd be pretty funny having a Hanar or Elcor squadmate. In-universe, I just figured there was just as-of-yet undiscovered benefit of being bipedal.

 

[Arakhor]

The worst thing about Mass Effect isn't physics but biology. How does every single sapient species have the same bodytype as humans ? Our posture is even unique on our own planet.

The hanar and elcor are not bipedal and it's dubious whether the hanar are even vertebrates. If you want a fanon suggestion, maybe eezo has some sort of property that nudges evolution to selecting for bipedal stance or maybe <REDACTED> somehow seeded the galaxy in a similar manner to Star Trek's precursor species.

 

[Synobun]

The Protheans were selective over the species they were uplifting/cataloging, weren't they? Since their primary species was bipedal, perhaps it could be argued that they had a bias towards bipedal primitives, or pressuring primitives to become bipedal (in the case of salarians, I believe?). Pure conjecture, of course.

Spoiler for Aimee's sake :

The salarians were getting into the business of uplifting primitive species themselves. They and the turians did it with the krogan, kinda, and then in ME3 they were doing it with the... what were they called... the Y dudes... uh... Yahg. But you can see what kind of life they are biased towards: big, mean, and perfect for doing what squishy short-life salarians can't.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I remember that if you took the Consort's trinket to a planet, you ended up getting a weird vision (in text) of what seemed to be the Prothean's encounter with early humans.