What game are you playing now

[Hertzian56]

Also as I've said I'm to the final final boss being available in DS2 after grinding through the obnoxious but optional 3 DLCs there. Both DS1 and DS2 are kinda good for a replay years apart though. I def like DS3 and Elden Ring much more as a casual player who doesn't like too much frustration and looking things up online a lot as a requirement.

I know there are a lot of nostalgia based players who played these on console where there wasn't an easy way to lookup things or cheat back when these games came out. It's tied in with their childhood and such I get that. It's a sort of stockholms syndrome imo though. You can only buy a few console games at that age so you're stuck with them and so you put a lot of time and effort into just playing you discover a lot of things just by playing. High tolerance for stuff in this game. And the modern players who don't use cheats enjoy figuring out the input patterns needed to progress as a feeling of accomplishment but imo thats better spent in real life things that can have a real benefit to them like money, jobs, models, paintings drawings, etc etc Wasted energy otherwise imo.

FS has come a long way since those games where they spent time making at least the main campaign progression arc accessible just in the game itself and minimizing backtracking frustration with sensible bonfire placement. The NPCs are still mostly a mystery as to how to progress their story lines and such.

 

[Hertzian56]

So yeah I just went through the Painted Ariamis level in DS1R and it was just more of the same similar to other FS dlcs. I guess it's not a paid dlc it's an optional level so my bad there. It was not worth the hassle of going through the undead asylum again, always a pain to find things in this game though. It's not obvious you need to go to a giant birds nest which is hard to find in itself, and curl up in a ball to go back to the first part of the game. Then go through it to where you start the game grab a doll then go back to Anor Londo go down the stairs in the corkscrew staircase fight 6 enemies jump in the painting to do the same thing.

Eh for completions sake it's fine. So yeah I'm good to go into the final boss fight but I'll probably pass on it since it throws you directly into NG+ where you might or might not keep your items don't care because at this point I'm def over Dark Souls 1 Remastered. It's nice to play and see more of the DS heritage with this and DS2 but oof from someone who came later to the Souls trilogy they're a slog.

DS3, bloodborne and ER are much more accessible and better QOL designed than 1-2. I'm hoping that they did a better job with the Demon Souls remaster on PS5 which will probably be playable on PC in the near future with how the emulator for it is coming along.

 

[Hertzian56]

So after playing all of the FS souls games and sekiro in either replays, new game like bloodborne and just picking up off old saves like DS3 I decided to play some non-souls games.

I've been playing The Witcher 3 again from an old save right after the gangs of novigrad sequence where you go into Skellige islands. I've been modding TW3 also, which after almost a decade of having and playing the game here and there I never did before. And one thing I do love about CPDR and their RedEngine is that it's easy to mod. Just make a mods folder in the game directory and slap in the mod. You can control the order they load and such as well but that's talking from extensive Cyberpunk 77 modding in the past which also uses RedEngine.

TW3 I've just added 8 mods so far on the 1.31 "classic" version which I think is best if you don't have a prosumer gaming rig that costs thousands of dollars. Realistic Weather is one. This mod gives more weather and I think better clouds and such.

An older lighting mod called Super Turbo Lighting Mod v3.0 Nudel which seems to be made by German modders way back when the game was just finished after Blood and Wine DLC was released. I can't tell you how much it improves the over contrast and horrible "auto contrast" adjustment that CPDR seems to use in its games. It's terrible and gives such an eyesore and is so hard on the eyes. So I went looking for a global illumination type of mod and this works well.

A mod that adds a lot of fast travel points, a no fall damage mod, auto-win at gwent which I've never been able to get into or like, nude girls AIO ultra mod which removes clothes from major npcs and many other npcs around the world, removes level reqs for amors and such, a merchant that only sells rare items.

So I'm just replaying it with an old save from that point. I may just start a new game from scratch at some point but it's nice to be passed the training level stage. I might look for a backed up save where you just get to Velen before any Novigrad stuff idk. The Velen sequence with the Baron and into the Novigrad sequence is really great.

 

[Hertzian56]

So I've done about 12 mods for the witcher 3 v131 classic and it looks great. A couple of standouts are the mod that lets you choose who you end up with at the end, triss or yen, regardless of what you did in the campaign. I know that Triss has a bad history as per the books but I'm not reading those or not really interested in the other 2 witcher games so I just go off of in this game and definitely would choose her. Yen is a little cold and less interested in others whereas triss helps others in the game world more. Curvy redheads are really nice too lol

So I messed up on the escape from novigrad mission with triss and didn't say I loved her so she goes to kovir to come back later at kaer morhen but the romance isn't happening due to my choice of words. So in game I'll just do yen but after blood and wine triss will be the one who stays at the vineyard.

I also grabbed a mod that has ciri(if she gets the good endings) visiting geralts toussaint vineyard retirement as well and dandelion alternating as visitors. Kinda a bit immersion building ig just for fun all of it like all games.

All the other mods are really QOL related besides the realistic weather mod which is nice. One of the biggest improvements is the STLM, super turbo lighting mod, v3.0 which adjusts the contrast and brightness giving the game a brighter look like global illumination would. There are no in game settings for brightness, gamma, saturation, global illumination in the old v131 complete edition. A really bad thing to omit on cpdrs part.

 

[Hertzian56]

It's been years since I've played TW3 so much and it still looks amazing, is such a huge game with a ton of in depth side missions and contracts and such along with the 50hr main story. It's an incredible game still one of the best. 2015 was one of the best years for pc gaming so many amazing games released that year.

There are annoyances like the camera and controls that flip between not sensitive enough to way too sensitive, the camera is similar. The animations are rough compared to modern games past around elden ring. Souls games have much better controls and camera, especially elden ring. The combat is much smoother and more precise. But they're fine overall in tw3. The camera only has following-correcting on or off and a lot of the time I'm fighting it. Needs a delay setting or something. The horse is hard to control and at high speed isn't my fav either.

All in all still an all time great game though.

 

[Hertzian56]

With the bloodborne so called "native" pc ports I decided to try one that was featured on dsog called bbport which you can lookup and get from github. There's another few, another one is called bbhost but I think that's just one that features online included.

So bbport just takes your rom dump of the game from a ps4, I have the 0900 variant, and further optimizes it for native pc play. It can use the patches and cheats from the shadps4 sources. The cheats so far are not as extensive, no one hit kill, no inf bullets etc but it does have enemies ignore which is nice if you don't want to have to fight every enemy. Only if you attack will they fight back but if you go a bit away they forget again so it can make it a bit easier.

bbport has dlss and fsr and has some built in fixes and settings in a much easier format than your typical emulator has. And it's focused only on bloodborne so there won't be any possible bugs for bb when the emulator makes changes for other games it will run.

I can't think of any other ps4 games I'd want to play, maybe shadow colossus at some point. But for now bb is really all I'm interested in. I'd think at this rate they'd have these sorts of game focused standalone native-emu hybrids for the biggest games.

 

[Hertzian56]

So yeah just point it to your game rom and start it up. Easy gui interface with various settings. Note I used my already modded rom which has 25% textures, xbox controls, vertex explosion, and another one but that's it. I do have a backup of my vanilla rom file. With 25% textures it goes from 30gb to 20gb.

It worked fine for a while much smoother constant 60 mostly looked better because I left the native AA on instead of turning off all AA. I was unable to transfer my shadps4 save files so I had to start over which is fine.

All was fine until at some point in Old Yarnham it crashed. And trying to just reboot it would load in briefly then crash. I don't know if it's a memory leak or too much memory used but in a much faster way than shadps4 crashes after a while usually tied to out of memory is my guess. I'm on a relative potato here, 6yo laptop. I'm not sure what settings I can do to minimize vram and sysram have to look it up but there has been shadps4 sessions that lasted hours before a crash so I'm not sure if the native pc stuff eats up ram more quickly is my guess.

I moved my pagefile size back to system managed which seems to think 16gb is good I'm not sure if that's enough. When I had it higher manually it seemed to not give it the max. I'm working with a mostly full 256 nvme so to put 32gb page file would eat it up fast.

One thing that fixed it for a while was a restart but at some point it just does it again and I really don't want to have to restart it every hour or two just for one game so I guess I'll keep trying different things.

I think if you haven't or don't want to mess with emulators setup and such these native pc things would be the best option outside of buying a ps4 and disc.

 

[Hertzian56]

Meanwhile continuing with my replay of witcher 3 from an old save right after concluding the barons story in velen. I'm at the point of being at kaer morhen with the little midget. But I've also done a mission or two in both DLCs. Still looks great to me and plays fine, no dlss because the 131 classic version never had it. 1080p 60 with no fan noise and turboboost off.

TW3 is so much deeper than cyberpunk in terms of missions, contracts, dialogue, gwent, and such. Cyberpunk to TW3 is like GTA to RDR. One is much more fast paced and exciting the other is slower but much deeper. At least RDR2, rdr1 is not that deep, more arcadey overall. Cyberpunk-GTA is mostly like some hollywood action movie whereas TW3-RDR2 are like hbo series with 45min 8+ episodes per season. So 2hrs vs 10hrs type of thing. One is flashy and fun but thinner and not as in depth.

The reason is that cyberpunk was a board game and some other stuff like blade runner inspired and such with a bit of noir like blade runner but never had a series of books behind it like the witcher does. Blade Runner is FAR from it's source material a short story by Philip K Dick, not even close really kind of like so many of the other PKD adapted movies they're just mostly riffing on one or two general themes of the books-stories of PKD catalog.

So the game still looks incredible to me and the lighting and weather mods I have really bring it out more. Especially the lighting mod because vanilla is way too contrasty and swampy looking. You'll notice the remaster and next gen have this too, much brighter overall like global illumination and can go overboard there. I see no reason to get next gen or remastered at this time. They're double the size 70+gb for some dlss, more vegetation, rt pt and such.