Topic: Returnal

@Th3solution Don't worry, I found out about the locked gates much, much later. I just assumed I needed an ability I didn't have yet.

With 3D audio, when they are connected to your console go into Settings > Sound > Audio Output. If your headphones support 3D Audio you be able to enable it and calibrate a profile.

I've just thought of some more tips. With keys I tend to save them for doors instead of opening chests. More so after biome 1, as chests mostly contain weapons which are readily available. Doors usually hide an artifact, a load of obolites, or something else handy.

The orange/yellow doors can be opened by buying the Blade Balance Artefact.

When it comes to the evil Groots I just melee them once which staggers them, then if there's no more enemies two more melees should kill them, if there is more enemies I abandon ship and shoot them while they're kneeling. Can usually finish them off before they fire a shot as long as you get to them fast.

@Thrillho At least if you get one on its own you can melee them, as @johncalmc says - definitely my preferred way of taking them out

@JohnnyShoulder Open chests usually have weapons in them, but I think locked chests tend to have items/artifacts in them. I used to save the keys for doors, but while I've been playing biome 2 over and over I've switched to using them for chests.

Honestly I'm always using that melee attack to stagger things and then hitting them from afar while they're stunned. It's sometimes a bit dangerous, but as long as you remember their attack patterns you can usually dodge their leaps/swipes/whatever and then melee them and it works against most things. The only things that it fails at abysmally are some of the later lockdown enemies - and basically everything in the sixth area - and any malformed enemies you come across laugh it off.

@JigsawPieces Hmmmm, that is not my experience. Chests in general may contain an artifact or item, but more likely to have a weapon. Could be the RNG messing with us though.

Also, @Th3solution make sure you destroy everything that can be destroyed. Pillars, statues, and those purple egg plant things may contain obolites. Statues with glowing eyes will definitely contain obolites.

I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier ... but given I'm so close (I hope!) to the platinum, and I've been having problems with my saved game data, I've switched auto cloud sync off on the PS5. I'll just sync it manually at known good points, for now!

I'm looking forward to getting back to the hunt for the last cipher, but got a day of work to get through first ...

@johncalmc Funny as my technique with melee is the opposite; fire from distance until they’re staggered and finish them off with melee.

But if it works, it works.

@JigsawPieces That’s what I did after getting my saves corrupted by that bad patch. Auto sync off until getting the platinum and syncing after each session. Turned out it wasn’t needed but better safe than sorry

@JohnnyShoulder Cheers for the destructible pillars and statues. Definitely had no idea about that.

@Voltan @JigsawPieces Yeah cheers for that Jigsaw, I've had a couple of crashes this week, and one of them was linked to saves not syncing up correctly. I also had a few errors with PS4 saves uploading, but turns out I had reached my limit of cloud saves, so deleted a load.

@Th3solution No worries! I'm back on the game after a break over the weekend. Even when it feels like you haven't made much progress, you actually have, even if is just collecting a few cyphers or something.

@JohnnyShoulder With the chests the locked ones, which require a key to open and have red markings around the lock, always contain an item. The ones that don't require a key have blue markings and are always weapons. Then you've got the locked doors, also marked with red around the lock, which can have a mixture of things in them e.g. items, consumables, fabricators, parasites etc.

It will be interesting to know what everyone else does but in B1 and B4 I find that the red marked doors usually have less useful items in than the chests, whereas other biomes like B2 the locked doors usually reveal several useful items so I always saved them for those. It's definitely going to be personal preference or how you feel a run is going as there's never enough keys.

Also, there's a limit on the number of cloud saves you can have? I didn't know that, I just assumed it was unlimited!

@render Hmmm, I'm pretty certain I've had weapons in locked containers. But i could be remembering wrong, which is entirely possible!

And yeah there is a limit of 100gb for cloud saves. The support pages for PlayStation only refer to PS4 in that respect though, so I assume it is the same for PS5.

@JohnnyShoulder I could be wrong also as has been proven many a time, especially by the wife 😀

That's good to know about the cloud saves though, I'm not sure if I'm anywhere near that limit but I'm intrigued now.

One thing that's always flummoxed me about cloud saves is how they are tied only to the user with the PS+ account. My other half and the kids use the playstation also but they unfortunately don't get the cloud saves extended to them. Shame that isn't also applied to family accounts.

@render Agreed! Especially as (unlike the ps4) we can't copy saved data off onto usb storage.

Well I "finished" Returnal. According to the ship's log the time spent in the suit which I assume to be playtime was 116 hours. Holy cow.

@johncalmc Well done! Is that finished to the point of acts 1/2/3 all done or platinumed as well? It's amazing how many hours you can rack up. I haven't looked at mine for a while but still been going back to it to unlock weapons traits and just to have fun.

@render it's I've seen the credits. Now I'm messing around in act 3 seeing what it's all about!

@adrianthealchemist Thanks for setting me straight. Either I've forgotten or the RNG must favour artefacts in my case as I can't remember any times that I've used a key on a red marked chest and got a weapon 😆.

The malignant chests I stopped using as I pretty much always got less useful things from them and they just didn't seem to be worth the risk or ether.

@johncalmc Just in case, remember to do biome 4 first for the house sequence needed to unlock the fragments.

And be aware that the biome 6 fragment is the easiest to miss.

@Thrillho I'll be sure to look out for it. I've done biome 1, 2, 3, and 4 so far. 5 sucks so hopefully it isn't too hard to find.

Oh and I seem to have happened upon a crazy glitch. I cleared out all three of the first biomes and hit maximum integrity just before the boss in 3. After I killed it and did the transition I'm back to normal health but it still says I'm at maximum integrity. Now no matter how many times I restart the cycle I can't upgrade my integrity at all. Uh oh.