Videogame Discussion Thread

Does anyone here send audio from their PS5 wirelessly to their hifi?

I’m contemplating a projector setup and thinking through my options for sending audio from my PS5 to my DAC without running wires everywhere.

I have an Pi running Volumio connected to Yggdrasil so I’m thinking that could be the way, but I use it as an AirPlay endpoint and I don’t think PS5 can broadcast audio over AirPlay.

What do you all do?

 

Luka Doncic is ranked top 500 in Overwatch while cooking everyone in the playoffs

 

I haven't really played a video game since Cyberpunk 2077 back in 2021. Been struggling with a lot of mood related junk, and while I used to have no trouble sinking into fictional worlds and all that, been having some trouble with that over the last few years. Been trying really hard to finish my first BG3 run, but while I adore the game and the soundtrack to no end, I'm kinda just left meandering a bit; the scope of that game feels intimidating. Basically, I keep trying to have fun with games but nothing sticks for very long.

... Which is to say a relatively linear game feels like exactly what I need right now. Came across this on the YouTube let's play scene and picked it up on introductory pricing. The aesthetics are hit or miss (I enjoy it), but the whole thing is just FUN so far, and I appreciate the humour and innate sass this game has. It's basically a first person dungeon crawler mixed with quasi-Wordle, and for those of you who aren't aware I am very much enamoured with those crosswords/Wordle/Connections games, say what else you will about NYT.

Also, I know not many people will give a bother about this but there's allegedly NO generative AI involved in the making of this game which I appreciate deeply, just a lot of good VA work.

 

Do You have any Hobbies?
I play Basketball.
You go to a gym or you play on a team?
Dallas Mavericks.

 

I almost shed a tear last night playing Overwatch Classic. I have missed scatter arrow so much.

 

I've been playing a ton of Elden Ring lately. I was mega into it when it came out, that game woke my gamer brain back up.

This game just speaks to me, man. It feels like a resolution - like an answer to questions I never realized I should have asked about what my experiences with art are even about. Game experiences like this are the reason I got into video games in the first place.

I didn't play it at all for most of the year though. By the time I stopped I had 6-700 hours clocked across several playthroughs. Before playing the DLC, I wanted to take a long enough break to come at it all fresh. I started playing through the base game a couple of months back. A couple of weeks back I finished the entirety of the base game.

I've been loving Shadow of the Erdtree so far. The backhand blades, great katanas and light greatsword weapon classes are some of my favorites yet. But actually, I've most often been favoring a dual thrusting sword setup with the pristenely drippy Noble's Estoc.

People overlook these, and thrusting weapons in general. Most people think of the boring shield-poke playstyle, but that's not all they're good for. Weapons that do pierce damage have a special bonus to them that increases physical and poise damage when your target is in the middle of an attack. The spear talisman adds another 15% of flat AR bonus. Additionally, the Noble's Estoc has a unique multi-hit R2. The powerstance moveset is an aggressive and mobile mix of pokes and slashes.

What I do with them is use the poke-bonus to break attack loops. Pierce damage cuts through blocks and enemy attacks. I then let rotten winged sword insignia and millicent's prosthesis proc through the combos to reach absurd 5-figure damage levels. I can lead 2-handing the off hand and hit with a sacred blade projectile at range, switch back to the powerstance, and let the second sacred blade attack strike with both the melee and projectile for a big damage boost. Now I'm buffed with holy damage and +100% to undead that stacks and stacks and stacks. I go ripping through mobs and overpowering even the tankiest foes. You go right in with interrupts to their offensive and carve up the damage figures. The AR of these swords doesn't look like much until you realize that you can stack with hidden bonuses to double the damage figures with already DPS-geared movesets. And then on top of all that, they're actually considerably longer than they look. The hitbox extends out to be closer to the reach of the godskin stitcher.

Basically, the same things that make thrusting swords useful for shields and guard countering makes them excellent for being agile and aggro. And now we have a DLC where many enemies are weak to their strongest affinity. I have been cleaning house with these things. The projectile from sacred blade 1-shots deathwings.

Cmon though, you gotta do it for the Elden Bling. Fashion souls never dies.

Spoiler: few more

 

Commander Gaius was a fun fight. I did a throwaway run just dodging him to see what kinds of tricks he'd pull out and thought I'd finally found the perfect moment to direct my entire kit toward the Carian Thrusting Shield. I put it on the right hand and kept my seal on the left to cast buffs. 2nd right hand is a Miséricorde for the max crit riposte. Main combat is 2-handing the Thrusting Shield, which is taking it's max guard boost from the standard affinity, but running the sacred blade ash of war, which has holy projectile and melee attacks with the damage and poise titled heavily towards the blade attack, as well as holy elemental damage buff. With the standard affinity you get really good block negation along with a full 76 guard boost at max level.

At least that's what I get with like 50 STR and 80 DEX. This is primarily a DEX/FAI build. I'm just dumping into other stats because I've spent a solid extra 100 hours workshopping throughout the playthrough, and triggering NG+ to get some dupes and items I couldn't grab the first time. It got to a point where I was just modding in stones instead of spending absurd hours farming them (sorry Michael Zaki,) just to see how I like a weapon. With the hardcaps generally being 80 at most for damage stats, it kind of stops mattering how much you over level once you cap off any two that work together. Even Vigor flatlines in level gains past 60. You can pump endurance, which is uniquely completely linear but marginal past something like 45. Similar game for mind. And you can start bringing up the other damage stats, they also bring little bits of related defense with them. But there aren't many ways to really get the benefit of more than two damage types. So past ~225-250, your character can only get as strong as your knowledge of the RPG mechanics allows.

I can honestly say having extra levels doesn't make anything easier, especially with NG+ health pools. But having played this game a bunch already, it's more fun to just be able to use whatever dex/fai gear I want with some side-utilities to compliment an already-well rewarded pair up of buffing, casting, and melee options.

My scadutree level was 11 when I fought him. He was pretty tough, but using that freaky-ass shield with the deflecting hardtear pulled me through on my third try. Honestly, I just regret not savoring it more. It was like a bullfight with a beefcake paraplegic on a rhinocerous-like (and rhinocerous-sized) boar. I'm juking diagonal jumps and slides like my life depends on it and readying to hit with a deflecting attack and chain a couple incisive but vitally-precipitous extractions of his health pool. Elden Ring seems to like having cloth dynamics in everything, to the point where there's lore in a lot of the cloth you see - it's honestly insane. It's just kind of funny that they gave you a shield that you use like a matador in a big, closed-in ancient arena. I didn't even bother with the Miséricorde.

Spoiler: Carian Thrusting Spear is utterly CRACKED

The thrusting shield has that same pierce damage bonus that automatically stacks on when you hit mid attack. So I used the spear talisman for an additional 15% every time that happens. 2H talisman for another 20% is a no-brainer. Guard counter talisman for another 20% on that, if I use the sekiro deflect tear. Lots of synergy there. Other tear is stamina regen. Dagger talisman for the ripostes.

I used sacred blade's projectile in leiu of a gap-closer, as you might usually want for a big, mobile enemy. I would just toss off a couple of projectiles when he extended the gap, to lead to quick deflects of certain incoming attacks. That's kind of its own rhythm game. It's a more dynamic playstyle, but you learn to just do anything to keep pressure and stay out of attacks without needing to be recovering from a roll. Some attacks are better sidestepped. You're kind of dancing with the bull, bucking it with this busted melee-focused shield lol. Your attacks are part of your defense in a unique way with it. You use that to your advantage to field oncoming blows.

The thing that makes it busted is something I haven't EVER seen in an Elden Ring weapon. I had to test it a bit because I just didn't believe it at first. It made sense immediately, I just didn't really thing they'd let such an utterly broken thing out there like that. See, even when you are using the R1 and R2 thrusting swipes, you are also BLOCKING. During the frames of the attack animation that the shield is up, it will block anything in its path as though you blocked it, and your attack carries through. It basically has psuedo hyperarmor frames built into its attack patterns. You can stitch that in to when you time counterattacks to do massive damage and stagger while barely taking a chip.

You can also do the traditional block-poke approach. The shield and weapon just function together. You hold the shield up vertically in front of you and make a goofy poke forwards. But that poke is nasty work because you have the block and pierce-interrupt bonus going off at the same time. I was toying around with it on different enemies and it easily stagger-loops so many of them. I haven't quite got the timing yet, but if you catch a block in the middle of an attack, you can switch-up to a guard-counter.

Spoiler: I try once again to make non alien faces in a fromsoft game

I've always struggled to maker non-uncanny faces in this game - male or female. I can tell that it's powerful and anything is possible. Since there are no facial animations to worry about, you can go more in depth with an expression. Just not when I do it. Rellana's set of armor has pretty good stats and looks very cool and anime, so I thought for once I'd try to put a face to the rest. I started with the hair - that frames up the face. After that I middled out most of the sliders, save for a few face-skeleton related ones. After a while of playing around with different things, I started to get a feel for how different sliders have overlap with how they affect different parts of the face. You have to be really mindful of which ones you take to either extreme, because it can even force sliders in other categories back. Building it up with slow increments is a lot easier to handle. It helps that all of the lighting and shaders are better than ever, so that it can actually flatter actors.

I swear, it's like they made the face sculpting it's own puzzle game. Even the lighting and angles they give you are on some Fallout 3 bullshit - you do not see what the character looks like in-game there at all lol. I had to drive myself googley-eyed to be able to somewhat extrapolate what I would see in the editor to what would show up in game. Best I've ever managed with it though. It's usually so much worse. I can see the power that's there, but it still has a lot of mystery for me. I've had better luck layer path-traced GI over the game. I can usually still get 30FPS with RT shadows on high and upsampling to 1440p on a 1080p display.

Spoiler: more

 

I'm just gonna keep treating this as my Elden Ring thread until somebody else adds something lol

Finally on my little Christmas break, though like a proper adult gamer, I lined up my ducks already, spotting a couple of days to shut-in and game. And all I had to do was stress myself out for a week, cramming two weeks of stuff into it!

I like to have big chunks of time for games like this. Dipping your toes is kind of unsatisfying because often progress is slow and you have to experiment. I'm stuck on Bayle right now, and I think I'm just not ready and need more scadu fragments. So I'll go and explore some more. But if I do the exploring in 30-minute to 1-hour spurts, I never get a good sense of what all I'm exploring through. I feel rushed and end up skipping over things and avoiding fights that I would otherwise let myself be stuck on just to explore the challenge itself.

It's a game that's all about exploring. I always tell people who are getting mad about progress with some challenge that feels impossible to stop trying to conquer the lands between and treat the challenges you encounter like curiosities to sniff out rather than obstacles to simply clear and forget about. Learn to find the ways you get rolled on interesting and you will tend to learn more about the challenges overall. I never get mad at Elden Ring. At most I say "Oh hooooo, not doing THIS today!" But usually when something really trips me up, it's a rare learning opportunity and I just savor the time working up to actually finding the win, weather it's skill/technique or better gearing of an RPG-related stratagem. Many items contain hints on things they can be used for that aren't obvious until you're stuck in the place where that off-label use comes into play.

It's just that it is a tough game to fit into regular schedules... it basically requires the same time frames as an MMO, without the social focus. Playthroughs can take literal months for me to complete because I don't get that many good blocks of time that I can fully commit to a game.


The main problem that I have with Elden Ring is that it doesn't necessarily respect your time. It'll put you through crazy challenges for rewards you may not even want/understand for a long time (plenty of times I disregarded some BS thing earlier only to realize its fit in a build 100 levels later.) Plenty of stuff will just stop progress... passages full of different gank situations that you just gotta accept dying to as you learn the simon-says pattern for each encounter. Or the fact that the lore and story are buried in ambiguity that requires a lot of time and observational inference to puzzle out. I firmly believe you can't begin to understand it in one normal playthrough. Some of the most important lore in the game is found on random weapons and armor that are such rare drops from equally rare and hard-to-farm enemies, that you could go 10 playthroughs not even knowing the items exist.

Item drops are honestly the biggest example... as well as playthrough limited amounts of QOL items like starlight shards and rune arcs. Rune arcs, you could always farm from rats like all souls games... at I think like 0.0125% drop rate or something like that. Even with discovery juiced you can call it luck if you get more than 1 in two hours of intensive farming. The only other option is to either win invasions, or complete co-op's successfully. I don't like either, as I just find multiplayer is too half-baked and annoying for me.

What I actually wish for is a boss colluseum. Make things like rune arcs and starlight shards a possible reward purchasable with points from beating bosses again. Make the difficulty and reward of a boss go up every time you beat the same one. I'd play that alone for years. And it seems like a fairer limiter. Heck, I'd even be happy if that let you get small amounts of temp-buff consumables that give 4x the discovery boost over the silver pickled fowl's foot or silver scarab tally, so you can reasonably go after mega-rare drops.

I mean, honestly... I just don't know why. The anti-cheat doesn't even seem to track sources or quantities. If you go online, you're going to find lots of people popping shards like candy and rocking all of the rarest gear... because your competition is modding it in. So the offline experience is made worse on the item drops and it does nothing to balance online play.

I feel like most people just start modding items in and calling it a day. To actually farm every item you can get would absolutely take over 1000 hours. I get keeping things locked down a bit for PVP, but the PVE playerbase than has to suffer MMO drop rates, with no real trade economy to make up for it. It's ALREADY a huge game. If you're being efficient, an exhaustive playthrough of the base game alone still takes over 100 hours. What this means, is that the majority of drops in the game may as well not exist for anyone without the severe ocd needed to grind them out. I'll never forget spending nearly 4 hours grinding for the headpiece of the deranged perfumer set and giving up after the 10th consecutive pair of gloves dropped. It's not even good, I just wanted it!

Certain decisions I just don't understand. I do mod in some farmable items and gear at this point. Because if I did it on every playthrough, I'd double the now 900 hours I have sunk into the game. I farmed the unaltered banished night set legit the first time around. Now, I just give it to myself when I reach their location in the snowfields. Generally, if I want a drop weapon/armor and I have at least beaten the main area for that enemy, I consider it a prize to myself. But I do stuff where if I want to mod something in, I have to complete certain challenges, so that I don't cheat myself out of feeling progress but also have access to the things that make combat more fun and rewarding for me.

It's crazy man. So many of these weapons have advantages beyond stats and ashes of war... the real strength of most weapons comes from unique movesets you don't know about unless you TRY them. And you're less encouraged to do that by upgrade limitations, the further in you get. To try stuff out, you get stuck with underleveled weapons that can't shine through with their movesets because they can't do sufficient damage. It makes no sense to me that a game with such astronomical gear variety hides the majority behind a grind that is then behind another grind. You probably don't even know that your favorite weapon is some random spear you wrote off because you didn't have stones to spare to find out. I've gotten so much more enjoyment and learning out of just modding weapon upgrade levels closer to my highest level main weapons... so much I missed out on behind the wall of tedium.

It'd be nice if NG+ runs at least increased drop rates significantly to let you get more smithing stones. That's a whole ordeal. I get gating off the levels of stones you can get by area... but they always put the bell bearings for buying them way after you'd want those upgrade levels for weapons you'd try. 5 and 6 aren't buy-able until you burn the erdtree and trek the most frustrating areas in the game, even though weapons at that level peak on Altus and start fizzling by snowfields. By then you've already been trying to get every 7 and 8 you can just to have one or two truly viable damage options! +18 or whatever doesn't cut so well on late-game enemies.

I do notice a lot more stones dropping in the DLC, but it's still completely ridiculous, how limited the quantities on them are.

I don't know what the advantage of having more upgraded weapons is when you can only carry so many at a time. All it does AFAIC is limit experimentation, which is a big part of the game. It sucks that many hours of drudgery are needed to simply experiment with weapons and I refuse to do it anymore.


I'm still just happy to have a couple of days to play as much as I want. I'm hoping to finish the DLC before Christmas and I probably have ~30 hours left on the main content of it. I'm perfectly okay with, and expectant of the fact that it will eat lots of my time. But that's basically the only way I can play it, and I kinda hope that in future titles they'll explore ways of making that less so without diminishing the challenge factor, and the discovering processes players undergo in search of victory. They could do a lot more with QOL and accesibility, that I think would actually better showcase the spirit of challenge. Every weapon in Elden Ring is the best weapon to somebody. I see no harm in letting the find out what it is. The challenge level doesn't change, only the fun-factor.

 

Does anyone play Tarkov?

 

I would, if I didn't already know that was another time crater. I am in the Elden Ring time crater already. And then I really want to try out Stalker 2.

Tarkov is one of those games that has always been on my radar for the interesting survival elements and immersiveness of it, but it seems like it can take a while to get going and you can go a long time between encounters.

 

Very much a grind, but no game has fucked with my heart rate like it.

 

Honestly, I get that about it, and it's part of what makes it appealing to me. You spend all of this time kitting out and hunkering down, and one flubbed encounter, or an encounter with someone who just did better preparing, can undo all of it. You're never fully safe. That's both the reason I want to play... and haven't yet lol. It seems like when it's exciting, it's really exciting. But I'm not sure I have the time investment to not be frustrated by that same aspect.

 

30% survival rating I'd pretty good. But it's better more with team closed servers. No cheaters.

 

I could say the same thing about Mario Kart 8: Deluxe…

 

One of my favorite games as a youngster.