Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN MAY 2025?

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> writes:

I always got the impression that the primary purpose of the speeder
bike wasn't transport but for those awful racing mini-games scattered
across the map (in typical Ubisoft fashion). After all, the assumption
was that if you wanted to go from place to place, you'd just use the
fast-travel. Meanwhile, the races were all about speed and not
shooting your opponents, so no need for blasters there. It just didn't
occur to them that people would be revving across the landscape
picking fights.

I don't know, the fast travel points are few and far between so riding
around with the bike is kinda mandatory unless you really want to hoof
it. Not to mention reaching the few islands on Akiva, you can't actually
swim there. Either way, there are random encounters aplenty, thugs who
just attack you out of the blue, on foot or on speeder bikes. Other
random events like "defend colonists" or "imperials are attacking
pirates, join in on the fun" happen fairly regularly.

As for the races, AIUI they're in the same random event category as
everything else. I skipped them early on asI really don't care. But
later it turned out there's an ability which requires you to win a
couple. Not a particularly useful ability but for the sake of
completion... But the stupid races won't spawn any more. At least not
for me. And apparently fast travel affects the spawning so if I really
wanted to do those, I'd need to ride the bike back and forth between the
possible spawn points ad nauseam so no thanks.

I didn't have as much fun with "SW:Outlaws", although apparently one
of my major complaints --the too-frequent crashes-- had more to do
with Nvidia than Ubisoft. Supposedly, a major patch (and new drivers)
solves most of those issues. I figure I'll give the game another shot
one of these days but I'm in no immediate rush. I found the game too
generically Ubisoft to want to rush back any time soon.

Yah, Nvidia here too, I had maybe a couple of crashes in 70+ hours of
play. So practically crash free. Just could almost never go over 60 fps,
that was weird. Just a black screen if I tried, almost every time. In
fact, when it deigned to allow me to set monitor refresh to 160 Hz, it
usually still didn't go over 60 fps. OTOH, 75 fps was fine on my other
monitor so not performance limited.

I have to appreciate the level of detail in the config options, I don't
know if it's typical for Ubi since I rarely play anything of theirs.
Could do without the epilepsy warnings and videos, luckily there's a mod
to skip all that and go straight to menu. Unfortunately, the game still
takes a long time to start.