How many hours to beat Dragon Age?

When focusing on the main objectives, Dragon Age: Origins - Ultimate Edition is about 49½ Hours in length. If you're a gamer that strives to see all aspects of the game, you are likely to spend around 105 Hours to obtain 100% completion.

Does Dragon Age Keep affect Dragon Age 2?

However it has no impact in Dragon Age II . Amaranthine, or Vigil's Keep, or both are saved in Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening. The Architect lived or died at the end of Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening. Nathaniel Howe remained with the Grey Wardens or not during Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening.

Does Dragon Age still hold up?

Dragon Age Origins Holds Up, Even In 2024 But in a lot of ways, DA:O. holds up better than you'd expect. Its combat isn't amazing, but I certainly prefer it to the wave of Soulslike action RPGs we've seen in recent years.

Can you save in Dragon Age?

I can't say the for sure on the xbox, but for PC you can't save until you have completed the Character and gotten through the first cutscene in prison . Once there, you access the character menu and choose the option save game. It also auto saves at different points, fairly often in fact, while playing the game.

What is the hardest fight in Dragon Age?

Gaxkang the Unbound is apparently stronger than High Dragon. The Archdemon is far and away the hardest fight in the game... That said, much about the combat engagements in this game is subjective- so it's hard to ascribe objective values to the difficulty of specific encounters.

Does Dragon Age have multiple endings?

Yep, there's about 2 major moral choices and 4 major endings . Each ending differs based on other major and minor choices and origin story.

Are they making a Dragon Age 4?

The fourth major game in the Dragon Age franchise, The Veilguard will be the sequel to Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) . Set ten years after Inquisition, the game will feature new locations in the fictional world of Thedas for the player to explore.

Which Dragon Age is the longest?

The longest game chronologically speaking, Dragon Age II begins with the Darkspawn takeover of Lothering and ends with Kirkwall in ruins around seven years later. This game takes place over several years and contains several time jumps, making the official timeline unclear for certain DLCs and other pieces of content.

Can you solo Dragon Age?

My friend soloed the game on nightmare difficulty, with dexterity dagger rogue . Using stealth, bombs, poisons, poulstices and salivas for each fight and he had to reload a lot. I soloed the game on nightmare difficulty as well, but with 2H warrior. Just herbalism and brute force.

Can you save your mother in Dragon Age 2?

No matter which option you choose (with Gascard's help or without), there is no way to save your mother from her unfortunate fate . Before Leandra dies, she tells Hawke that she is proud of them.

Can you romance in Dragon Age?

There are seven potential romances in the game , all of whom are companions. There are no restrictions of either gender or race.

How long does Dragon Age take to complete?

Powered by IGN Wiki Guides Single-Player Polled Average Main Story 513 40h 39m Main + Extras 1.1K 59h 27m Completionist 287 90h 32m All PlayStyles 1.9K 59h 5m

Is Dragon Age: Inquisition a long game?

When focusing on the main objectives, Dragon Age: Inquisition is about 47 Hours in length.

Is Dragon Age: Inquisition easy?

Dragon Age: Inquisition has extraordinarily tough battles , and it's important to make the most of a four-character party by assigning specific duties to companions. This strategy will come in handy, especially during dragon fights.

What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age [Archive]

Giant in the Playground Forums > Gaming > Gaming (Other) > What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

PDA

View Full Version : What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

Pages :1[2]3456

Kareeah_Indaga

2023-10-22, 06:49 AM

seems he's hunting the villains of the city, not the Spider-Men, at least at first. He jail-breaks Scorpion and Mister Negative pretty early, but then in the same sequence where Peter discovers who Kraven is, Kraven himself kills Scorpion, remarking at his disappointment at how little challenge it was the same way he did with the guy in the first scene with him from the trailers. And his hit list seems directed at villains specifically, with the next couple on the list appearing to be Black Cat and Vulture. Definitely didn't call that one, despite all the villains that popped up on his little map in that opening scene, I'd figured he'd be more interested in the Spider-Men that routinely defeat them.

Sony is or was planning a Kraven movie along the lines of Venom or Morbius, that might be why.

warty goblin

2023-10-22, 10:08 AM

Back to messing around in Age of Wonders 4. I find to get the most out of it I kinda have to pick a theme and RP that, rather than go for strict optimization. Today I'm back to magic elves, who run around shooting everything with lightning, arrows, poison, and arrows that are also poison and lightning. It's so electric you'll be sick!

Anyway, by leaning in on the RP theme the game becomes a really excellent fantasy scenario generator. You get to play at city governing and watch these increasingly mystical cities spread across the map, there's basically questing and dungeon delving, and the combats always look like some really cool battle from a mass market paperback with a name like "The Fire's Tears, book 4 of the Cycle of the Elements" that came out sometime between 1995 and 2004. So pretty much 100% engineered for me, personally. I kinda wish the endgame was better, but I'm hoping the DLC next month fixes that, Seals are pretty much the best victory condition I've ever seen in a game like this.

Zevox

2023-10-22, 11:11 PM

Sony is or was planning a Kraven movie along the lines of Venom or Morbius, that might be why.
That is a thing, yes, although how closely his depiction there will match his depiction here is an open question. And in any case, turns out there's probably an in-story explanation for this.

Kraven has a death wish. He's dying of cancer anyway, and seems to prefer to die on a hunt instead, so he's seeking prey that will be able to defeat him. They haven't said explicitly, but I imagine that made him avoid the Spider-Men initially since they tend to capture villains and turn them over to law enforcement, not kill them, whereas super-villains are much more likely to go for a kill.

Though perhaps not - Peter does get his attention upon acquiring the symbiote, despite him not (yet?) having an indication that would change how likely Peter is to kill him.
Speaking of, day 2 of the game, and I have finally gotten to the point where Peter gets the symbiote suit - definitely took much longer than I expected. And I'm mildly disappointed gameplay-wise, to be honest. It doesn't actually change your core moves at all, it changes you special ability options (you can use symbiote abilities in place of the Iron Spider-esque ones), and gives you a new super mode which does change and empower your base moves, but not for that long, and can't be used too often. So most of the time, playing symbiote suit Peter is like playing regular Peter, just with different special ability options. At least it looks cool. Can't help but wonder how they'll handle it when Peter inevitably loses the symbiote though, since you get a skill tree to power up his symbiote abilities, and that super mode is mechanically a counterpart to Miles' big electric burst super move.

On the other hand, I'm getting the hang of the new web wings and how they can contribute to your mobility, and they're a very welcome addition to that. Just mixing them in with regular web-swinging is good to begin with, get a horizontal launch at a good height and you can glide a long ways, but they really shine when you're conveniently going the same direction as one of the wind currents around the city, which can propel you so much you're basically flying for quite a distance at quite a good speed. The map might be bigger than in the previous games, but I wouldn't be surprised if that in particular means you can cover it even faster than before. It's really fun.

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-10-22, 11:59 PM

That is a thing, yes, although how closely his depiction there will match his depiction here is an open question. And in any case, turns out there's probably an in-story explanation for this.

Kraven thinks he sees enough "feral" in Symbiote Peter to draw it out of him. Also, if you die to hunters, sometimes they say "Leave the body. Take the suit." Indicating he may also see the symbiote as a cure for his cancer and want it if Peter turns out to be a dud.

Also if Peter just got the suit, he's technically not "Symbiote Peter" yet. Though I still don't think the moves change. There may be a few Finishers you get, but maybe I just hadn't seen those animations up to that point.

warty goblin

2023-10-23, 12:04 PM

Well my magic elf Agoe of Wonders 4 game ended in a loss, I simply couldn't produce enough stacks of enough power to win the war. Not even turning into dragon-elf hybrids was enough, though it was very cool.

So time I'm back to another staple concept, very evil cannibal rat people. Our first order of business is researching the spell that shrinks all your dudes, because more rats in a horde means getting eaten by more rats. While researching, I met a neutral city of like-minded evil rat people. Normally I establish diplomatic ties, but that's not evil at all, so instead I declared war and conquered them. During the very brief war, we caught a spy from the enemy city, and I had the option to turn him, pardon him, or nail his corpse to the city gate. Obviously I had to do the third option. An evil utilitarian might argue that's ineffective, and delays me delivering the greatest evil to the greatest number, but I opted for a virtue anti-ethics. After all its wrong to treat people as means to evil ends, when we can treat them as their own evil ends.

I then met another AI leader, who was like "you seem kinda evil" and I responded with a threat. The game doesn't say what but I like to think it was debating with The Voices about whether it was worth peeling him to use as a hat, or just eating him, so the leader called me a "dark lord" and signed off.

Naturally this seemed like an excellent time to start researching necromancy. Eat an enemy alive and torment him for a few minutes, but forcing their tormented spirits back into their gnawed bones is forever. Long term of course, my horrible rat people face a difficult choice: do we turn into demons or the undead? Or more accurately, does my despotic nightmare ruler prefer demonic serfs or undead thralls.

Errorname

2023-10-23, 05:18 PM

BG3 has got me on a bit of a CRPG kick and I'm debating starting up a Pillars of Eternity or Dragon Age character, and I was reminded of how similar the pitfalls both those settings ended up falling into were. They really feel like settings held back by the desire to do stock D&D stuff in them because that's what they think players expect

LibraryOgre

2023-10-24, 12:45 PM

Been playing the original Baldur's Gate (well, EE), with two different characters.

My Cavalier is a pretty standard run. Then there's my gnome cleric-thief. And HOLY COW does the game play different as a solo cleric/thief. I pretty much run through all the different areas. Mines? I hid my way through, killing maybe 5 kobolds, before I snuck up to Mulahey and fought him. Then I used sanctuary in the Bandit tent to free the prisoner and get the letters. Walked through cloakwood, then through the mines. Fought Daveorn's guard, popped a protection from magic scroll, and beat Daveorn in melee. It was EASY until I hit the Sarevok fight.

Batcathat

2023-10-24, 01:06 PM

Yeah, Baldur's Gate (and Baldur's Gate 2) is pretty fun as a solo something/thief, though personally I prefer mage/thief or fighter/thief. :smallsmile:

I kinda suspect some designers share my preferences, considering it feels like half the NPCs in BG2 are multiclassed thieves. (Okay, so that's a wild exaggeration, but it's certainly more common than most classes. :smalltongue: )

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-10-24, 01:11 PM

Been playing the original Baldur's Gate (well, EE), with two different characters.

Yeah. Surprisingly, with the way a solo run lets you hoard experience, the game becomes much easier past the start. Once you've cleared that initial hurdle of fighting things equal level and designed for a party, the level advantage steamrolls through most of the encounters. It's almost impossible for the game to challenge a solo character that's running several levels above the expected one. It's really funny in BG2 when you can get to epic levels halfway through the game and start killing dragons in a single round.

Of course, there are still certain pitfalls. Anything that casts Imprisonment, instant death spells, or has a no-save effect can be even more frustrating to deal with than normal.

LibraryOgre

2023-10-24, 01:19 PM

Yeah, Baldur's Gate (and Baldur's Gate 2) is pretty fun as a solo something/thief, though personally I prefer mage/thief or fighter/thief. :smallsmile:

I suspect that they have so many thieves based on the assumption that the PC wouldn't be a thief.

As for preferring a mage/thief, I do, too, and I really missed some of the cooler wands... the game would have been a LOT easier with a wand of fire or lightning... but cleric/thief is a fun combo.

Cespenar

2023-10-25, 10:59 AM

I'm trying something called Shadow Gambit, made from the fellas that did Desperados 3 and the other commandoslikes.

It's quite enjoyable if you like the stealth tactics genre. There are some new DOTA-like abilities on account of having a fantasy setting this time, so that's fun too. Also, the writing, VAs and all that are one step above what the genre IMHO necessitates, so that's a plus.

warty goblin

2023-10-25, 01:30 PM

I continue my evil rat person campaign in Age of Wonders 4. I met an evil barbarian fire sorceress, we're now allies against the despicable hordes of virtue that ring us round. I'm winning a war against some piratical crocodiles, I just need to find and destroy their last city or two, which will give me enough power to go after the real menace to evil everywhere, the revolting and just hafling Ham Binger.

The best part of this build is I've got a bunch of skills and traits that give me resources and units whenever I win a battle; money from looted corpses, food from BBQ corpses, souls from corpses for more undead, and just random dudes joining up to get in on the fun. So my enemies quite literally keep feeding my war machine, it's very convenient.

Sapphire Guard

2023-10-25, 07:04 PM

So I finally finished Dragon Age Origins.

Any sense of accomplishment is removed by the fact that I had to lower the difficulty for the archdemon. I have disgraced my name. 75 hours, to fall at the last hurdle.

I stand over my decisions, including the wrong ones. Killing Connor wasn't the best outcome, but it was rather implausible that the desire demon would just sit and do nothing while I cleared out the mage tower.

I still love Logain, and he finally got some scenes to justify it, voice actor aside. He has a very good speech in the Landsmeet, and it took several attempts to get the Landsmeet to my side (except for that one bald guy). Then we had a duel, and I tried to spare him but Alistair wouldn't go for it. Fair enough. There was a strange closeup of a random bird in the rafters that I thought would be relevant, but it never came up again.

Anora got locked in a tower, which meant she was probably slaughtered when the Darkspawn came, but may not be if they need her for sequels.

It was a bit strange, because the party keeps bouncing back from Redcliff to Denerrim and never notices where the Darkspawn are really going, despite having to make multiple journeys through their territory. Also, if the horde got all the way to Denerrim (a northern port) from the Korcari wilds in the south they have already crossed most of Ferelden anyway.

I turned down Morrigan's third option. She's not much of a liar, but I suspect she was holding back some important detail about her solution, and this was too important to leave to chance when we have a solution we know works. And, honestly, having the lead sacrifice themselves to stop the blight seems like the most appropriate ending anyway. Preumably there is some way to have Logain do it, but apart from that, I got the ending I wanted. Obviously Alistair couldn't be let do it, we'd just end up in another civil war, unless we crown that weaponsmith clerk who has his face and so is probably another of Maric's bastards. Losing my mainstay mage just before the final battle was a huge loss, Wynne is good but mostly a healer, and she goes through lyrium like a drunk Templar.

My 'no gifts' policy meant most of them didn't have quests, I only got Leliana's and Morrigans and didn't do either. (I did Lelianas but forgot to save after)

The battle was good, they make good use of Darkspawn grunts to make the numbers appropriate without being overwhelming. I ended up with 50 Daelish, Dwarves, Redcliff Knights and 12 mages. The Templars never showed up for some reason. Fighting my way across Deneriim was tough but compelling.

Final boss disappointing but possibly that's my incompetence. I was expecting some kind of dialogue but it just roars and attacks, just me, what's left of my armies, and some very jam prone ballistae. Seems like it could have just flown away or at least glided off the towertop out of our reach.

Interestingly, at least in the story options I chose, there was no grand plot apparent. Most of the random catastrophes we had to resolve every time we asked for help appeared to be genuine coincidences, Logain sent blood mages to Redcliff and the mage towers, but the subsequent demon invasions seemed unintended. If he was possessed by a demon or something I never saw it. The archdemon seems to have just got freakishly lucky that all the realm's defences were disabled at once. The cinematic in the menu screen opens with somebody with random glowing blue eyes, is that supposed to be (presumed human) me?

I enjoyed it overall, not very motivated to replay most of it at the moment, might try and marry Alistair and Anora just to see what happens. I imagine there is a Bioware perfect ending, but I think I probably prefer the one I got.

I will probably try DA2 again to see if I like it more now, but it might be a bit soon for another giant timesink. We'll see.

Zevox

2023-10-25, 07:18 PM

I imagine there is a Bioware perfect ending, but I think I probably prefer the one I got.
There is not. There are fairly obvious best results to most of the sub-plots - most people can be saved without sacrifice if you try hard enough - but as far as the main ending, goes, what the best outcome is is debatable. Partly because we still don't know the consequences for Morrigan's ritual; there was some follow-up on that in Inquisiton, and may be more in Dreadwolf if that ever actually materializes, but for the most part, it's yet to have any impact on anything.

Corlindale

2023-10-26, 12:25 AM

I've been dipping my toes into Moonring, a newly released retro-rpg by one of the Fable co-creators. I'm having a lot of fun so far, even if it's early days. It's a good mix of perfectly capturing the nostalgia of old rpgs while including the QoL features expected from more modern games (autosave, hotkeys that make sense, etc...).

It also has an interesting progression system, in that there is no xp. Instead you level up by completing tasks that align with one of the five gods, which grants you both active abilities and buffs to the stat associated with each god. For example, I've been doing some tasks for the Lords of Dust, who are all about studying ancient technology and magical artifacts, which has boosted my intelligence stat and given me related abilities. You can mix and match powers from each god, but you can also gain extra bonuses by devoting yourself especially to one of them.

I'm still mostly running around exploring the overworld just around the first city, trying to earn enough money to upgrade my weapons and armor for exploring the first big dungeon I've found. I'm already quite invested.

If any of this sounds interesting, I recommend checking it out. It's notable completely free on Steam. No paid anything, no strings attached. Apparently the developer just wanted to give a gift to the world in a time of stressful events.

Anonymouswizard

2023-10-26, 08:31 AM

So I finally finished Dragon Age Origins.

Any sense of accomplishment is removed by the fact that I had to lower the difficulty for the archdemon. I have disgraced my name. 75 hours, to fall at the last hurdle.

Anora got locked in a tower, which meant she was probably slaughtered when the Darkspawn came, but may not be if they need her for sequels.

My 'no gifts' policy meant most of them didn't have quests, I only got Leliana's and Morrigans and didn't do either. (I did Lelianas but forgot to save after)

I will probably try DA2 again to see if I like it more now, but it might be a bit soon for another giant timesink. We'll see.

You must have missed a lot of content, I'm no completionist but my average playthroughs last about 120 hours. Also Morrigan is pretty much 100% honest about her plan: she intends to get pregnant, have the soul of an Old God go into the child, and then bugger off and raise it away from Flemeth. That's basically the extent of her plan.

That's not to say that she's not being manipulated, but it's probably the one time she's actually honest.

For added lulz you can IIRC do the ritual and then leave her at the Denerim gate instead of bringing her to the Archdemon. It's incredibly cruel, but somewhat hilarious because of the cruelty. Plus if you've slept with her she's probably already pregnant.

I also recommend reloading a save just before the ritual and seeing the scene where you convince Alastair to do the ritual while telling him the truth, it's funny.

Cygnia

2023-10-26, 10:15 AM

Ooooh...*yoinks it for the library* :smallbiggrin:

Psyren

2023-10-26, 11:09 AM

So I finally finished Dragon Age Origins.

Any sense of accomplishment is removed by the fact that I had to lower the difficulty for the archdemon. I have disgraced my name. 75 hours, to fall at the last hurdle.

Anora got locked in a tower, which meant she was probably slaughtered when the Darkspawn came, but may not be if they need her for sequels.

My 'no gifts' policy meant most of them didn't have quests, I only got Leliana's and Morrigans and didn't do either. (I did Lelianas but forgot to save after)

I will probably try DA2 again to see if I like it more now, but it might be a bit soon for another giant timesink. We'll see.

IIRC judging by the Keep, any outcome for Anora except becoming Queen means she doesn't show up or ever gets mentioned again, so I'm guessing "eaten by Darkspawn while trapped in prison" is accurate, or possibly "flees the country."

That's not to say that she's not being manipulated, but it's probably the one time she's actually honest.

I also recommend reloading a save just before the ritual and seeing the scene where you convince Alastair to do the ritual while telling him the truth, it's funny.

She's honest but pretty damn vague. "Old things should be preserved" tells us nothing about what she was actually planning to do with it. (Not that it matters anyway, since she doesn't get to keep it no matter what.)

Zevox

2023-10-26, 05:12 PM

Finished up Spider-Man 2. It's a damn good game - not that that's a surprise, given how good the first game and Miles Morales were, but still well worth saying. Gameplay remains as fun as it was in the previous games, and some of the new mobility stuff (the web wings, super jump/run) are very nice additions to a game series where mobility was already a highlight. Combat's largely same-y, especially if you played Miles Morales and already got to use his eletric special moves before, but still very good, and there are a few new additions. Side quests remain quite strong - a couple got a little repetitive (the EMF stuff in particular comes to mind), but for the most part each instance of each questline is individualized enough to keep them worth doing. Even collecting all of the Spider-Bots wound up being something I did the whole quest for; although the last couple of those were a pain to locate, really wish they'd have added them to your main map with that one upgrade, not just the mini-map.

Story-wise, nothing groundbreaking, but solid, kept me interested the whole way through.
So the main plot is really the Venom one, not so much Kraven, who is mostly there to provide you a conflict up until the point where the symbiote becomes the problem. Still, Kraven himself worked fairly well as a villain, getting to see him hunting after other villains was a neat twist, the reveal about his family was as disturbing as I'm sure it was meant to be, and the big confrontation with him was very satisfying. And then he gets to be the guy who proves what a big threat Venom truly is after. Well-handled all around I'd say.

As for Venom himself, they did manage to have me wondering who it would be midway through the game. While Harry was the obvious pick since he had it initially and had been the one shown with it at the end of the first game, the fact that Norman had it before him had me thinking that Harry might die of his unnamed disease after giving the suit to Peter, and Norman would find out and blame Peter, later leading to the symbiote bonding with him, but no. Also I gave some consideration to it maybe ending up on Kraven, who at least physically fits Venom more and has his cancer that the symbiote could suppress, but not terribly surprised that didn't happen. Harry wound up working pretty well, though I'm surprised they kept him kind of alive at the end there. Similarly surprised that they did not tease the Venom symbiote surviving - I would figure that Venom as an anti-hero is too big a part of the character now for them not to include that in the next game now that they've done him as the main villain, but maybe they're genuinely not planning that.

I will say, the "Anti-Venom suit" thing does strike me as pretty silly. I had to look up whether that was something they made up for this game or not; and I'm not sure if it actually being something from the comics makes it better or worse. Though apparently the comic version was a symbiote itself, which it isn't in this one, it's just Peter getting all the powers with none of the drawbacks. I think that's my main problem with it, aside from the goofy name.

Also, despite the story clearly focusing more on Peter - mostly because this is first and foremost an adaptation of the symbiote suit/Venom storyline, after all - they did a pretty good job integrating Miles into it and making him feel like he belonged. Him saving Peter from the symbiote after the Kraven fight was great, his plotline with Martin Li/Mister Negative was quite good, got a near-equal role in the final boss fight with Venom, and he got more side-quests specific to him than Peter did to help make up for being in the secondary position in the main plot. Though granted I'm not clear on why the Mysteriums side-quest was Miles specific, but eh. Also, it was great seeing each Spider-Man interact with the other's supporting casts - Peter with Miles' mom and friends, Miles with Mary Jane and Harry.

And there's of course setup for the next game, which is interesting at points. Had to look up who that girl from Miles' post-credits scene was; apparently she's another spider-hero who gets bitten by that same radioactive spider, who goes by Silk? Odd choice of name, but with Peter entering a pseudo-retirement and letting Miles take the lead on spider-manning, I guess the idea is to introduce her as the newcomer to the Spider-squad next time and let Miles be her mentor, which could be neat. Not that I wouldn't expect Peter to be involved in the next game anyway, especially given the villains they've teased, but giving him a smaller role intentionally to focus more on the other spiders would probably be a good idea. Speaking of villains, what I can see they've got no less than three villains they've teased for the next game: Norman as the Green Goblin, the return of Doc Oc, and Carnage from that one side-quest. Not thrilled with that last honestly; Venom works fine as a villain to me, but Carnage is just Venom stripped of the interesting parts and made (more of) a psycho, IMO. No surprise Norman as the Goblin would be next after this game, but the return of Doc Oc is an unexpected possibility, leaves me wondering how they intend to handle that, given he was already the main villain of the first one. I guess just make him more of a supporting villain to Green Goblin's main villain, maybe, but hopefully that's not all there is to it.
So yeah, had a lot of fun with that. I'm actually strongly considering doing another run on a higher difficulty (did normal/"Amazing" for my first run), just because the game's not that long and I think I'd enjoy doing it again with a bit more challenge. The call of returning to my second BG3 run is also strong though. We'll see.

AlanBruce

2023-10-26, 05:25 PM

While I wait for Alan Wake 2 to be released, I decided to try a few indie games.

I found Röki and Bramble The Mountain King to be very good entries. Both deal with Scandinavian folklore, but the tone is somewhat different. Visually, both are very good. And there is a particular set piece in Bramble with a fey bard called a Nokken that was rather memorable.

Psyren

2023-10-26, 06:10 PM

I found Bramble very artistically appealing. However, the indie horror cliché of "small lonely child with a big head platforms through a scary world" is starting to grate on me a little. (See also Limbo, Inside, Little Nightmares, Ori, Song of the Deep etc etc.)

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-10-26, 10:55 PM

The Venom symbiote can still come back since they established that being bonded to it deeply enough leaves "traces" of it in your system that can reemerge. Insomniac has said they've considered a Venom spin-off game, but I don't think it's in the works at the moment.

As far as Anti-Venom goes, it was always the powers without the drawbacks. The Anti-Venom symbiote in the comics is non-sentient. It doesn't talk or try to control the host at all. It's more like what Peter thought the symbiote was in this game: an organic bio-suit. The downside to Anti-Venom is that, as it's very focused on healing (something that doesn't really show up in this game), it can end up cancelling out Spider-man's powers because it will try to heal the radioactive spider out of him. The game took out a lot of symbiote weaknesses, though. Venom is usually weak to fire, but is shown surviving a blast furnace early on.

Zevox

2023-10-26, 11:05 PM

Agree that it's a great game, though. I was really surprised how well paced the side content was. It rarely felt like checking things off a list. By the time I was wondering "How many more of these are there?" it was close to the final task.
I suppose that's true. Just surprised they didn't straight-up tease Venom surviving, I suppose, I was fully expecting it, given how popular of a character he is. Spin-off game for Venom would also make sense though, they already did it for Miles, and they had him playable for that one segment here already.

And Anti-Venom being a symbiote didn't actually mean anything in the comics? Yeesh, okay, guess I just have that problem with the concept in general then. Thought I didn't think it was something Peter got in the comics from what I read, but rather Eddie Brock?
And yeah, pacing of the game is definitely spot-on, it never drags in any regard, main plot or side-quests, and also never feels rushed. Just very well handled there.

Minor annoyance though: no New Game+. So my new file can't carry over all those alternate costumes I unlocked but mostly didn't use - boo! Granted, I'm happy enough unlocking the gameplay stuff again rather than just being maxed out from the start, I am looking for some additional challenge this time, but I wanted to jump around those costumes throughout the game, and it takes a long while to get a lot of the good ones.

Anonymouswizard

2023-10-27, 06:03 AM

IShe's honest but pretty damn vague. "Old things should be preserved" tells us nothing about what she was actually planning to do with it. (Not that it matters anyway, since she doesn't get to keep it no matter what.)

Yes she's vague, it's part of her being the first of the mage party members who's using the party to accomplish her goals. But that also means she's the one ho isn't actually being manipulative, her lack of social skills make the fact she's pretty much planning to hide it less clear.

Morrigan is very good at manipulating people she's very bad t being honest. This isn't the first time it can come up in the game.

Rodin

2023-10-27, 05:42 PM

I'm more or less enjoying Lords of the Fallen. I do have to question why jumping is like this (answer, Dark Souls did it this way)? Why, given that jumping is like this, is there platforming (answer: Dark Souls did it, Dark Souls is perfect, therefore this must also do that. Amen.)? And really, how how the hell did nobody play this part, go "this sucks" and either get rid of the semi-precision platforming in a game with controls so tanky they make PS1 Lara Croft blush, or at least bind jump to one of the several basically unused face buttons? The Y button is right there, doing nothing. B is criminally underutilized as well. Just make jump a normal command!

I finally got around to picking up Lords of the Fallen, and now I see what you mean.

In general, I don't mind the Dark Souls jump. It's not my favorite implementation ever, but I still prefer it over Ocarina of Time's "run at a cliff edge and hope you auto-jump at the right angle" method. Elden Ring putting in a regular jump button is a straight up improvement, but I can manage with the older implementation.

As long as its done right.

Lies of P had a fiddly jump due to really crappy hitboxing. The "ground" was rarely where it appeared, making the various jumps in that game more difficult than they appeared because you needed to hit a much narrower area on the other side and the jump was also shorter than it appeared, meaning you had to wait until the literal last moment to make some of the jumps. Lies of P compensated for this by making the required jumps an absolute minimum - I think there's only abour 4-5 required jumps in the entire game, and several of them can be skipped by running over the platform before the ground breaks.

Lords of the Fallen...this game just takes the cake. Instead of making the dodge roll button the sprint button if you hold it down, they made it the left thumbstick. Ok, later Souls games had that as an option too so that's fine. Except you can't then press the thumbstick again to perform a jump. And you can't press the dodge button either. You have to press the interact button, which is an extra button press on a different hand from the one you're using to sprint. It also does absolutely nothing if you aren't sprinting, which means you have no clue if the input got read or not. With Dark Souls, at least a failed jump results in a roll, which is sometimes enough to clear the gap and if you did it early you might not fall off the edge.

And they put an extended jumping section with enemies trying to push you off ledges that early into the game? With these controls?

Honestly, I have been pretty unimpressed with Lords of the Fallen so far. I judged Lies of P harshly based on its graphics and the elements it stole from Bloodborne and called it a "B game". I don't think Lords of the Fallen reaches that high based on what I've seen so far, and that's without taking my later revision of Lies of P's score up to A/S tier. Lords of the Fallen is a C at best.

It's got one of the worst tutorials I've ever seen, hammering you with page after page of instructions that give you no time to learn the mechanics organically. These commands are often three or more parts long (Lock on with RS, then hold LT, then press RB, put your left foot in and shake it all about). After about 50 pages of instruction on how to use the lantern, it finally got around to telling me how to block. Thanks game, I got that one.

Graphically, the game is beautiful...but that beauty is used poorly. There's destructible objects everywhere. I'm constantly taking damage because there was an enemy I didn't see among piles of barrels or crates. Or because I can't see an incoming attack under all the shattered wood flying around the screen. Like Bloodborne, it's in love with scattering jagged bits of environment all over the place. I've bonked my weapon more in my first few hours than I did in my entire first playthrough of Lies of P. I've gotten stuck in crevices, unable to dodge out. At one point I got stuck inside the bosses hitbox!

And let's talk hitboxes. I can rarely tell what's going to hit me and what isn't. The first boss is one you're supposed to lose to...but I kept accidentally dodging his fire. I started my dodge animation after the fire hit me, but I was miraculously fine. Against the first real boss I got caught out a bunch because the floaty dodge trapped me in the animation and I got hit by the attack after the one I dodged. I've "parried" multiple times by just holding up my shield, or raising my shield after a blow connected. It's like the opposite of input lag.

The first real boss is bad design incarnate. The moveset is something from an endgame boss in other games - homing shockwaves, hitscan laser beam, AoE attacks that fill two-thirds of the arena, and an extendable sword that's at least 10 ft long with a dodgy hitbox. And yet you only have three potions to deal with this, and no way to upgrade your weapon. Level up you say? That's great and all, but unlike a Souls game you don't start at 600-700 souls to level up. You start at 2000. I managed to gain 2 levels before confronting the boss, and after grinding I managed to pick up 2 more. I typically level up 8-10 times before taking the first boss in a Souls game. Without grinding. The boss wouldn't be terrible as a mid-to-late game fight, but putting it here would be like Elden Ring starting players off against Mogh.

The combat alternates between floaty and incredibly stiff. The combo attacks you can dish out are neat, but their recovery is so bad that if you don't kill an enemy you're taking a guaranteed punish. Not doing combos sounds like a solution, except your damage is so poor without comboing that you'd be there all day. There eventually was a rythym I managed to get into against the first boss, but it didn't feel particularly good.

After only a few hours of play, the game has been dropped from my prime time gaming spot. It's play while watching the TV material.

Rynjin

2023-10-27, 06:34 PM

I thought Pieta was an excellent first boss. She has very telegraphed melee attacks that are easy to perfect parry and leave her open to a visceral attack, and her special moves are also likewise very telegraphed and simple to dodge or avoid. only the grab attack is really kinda BS.

The issue with the game comes as you progress and it just becomes a never-ending deluge of more and more dudes and by the time I found myself sprinting through every new area without fighting anything because it's too easy to get bogged down I just decided not to play anymore and pick up my Dream of the Strong Nioh 2 playthrough instead.

Anonymouswizard

2023-10-27, 07:48 PM

Making decent progress on my Kingmaker ranger run, killed the Stag Lord, became Baroness, and seduced a psychic via getting her a disk.

Honestly now we're a few months down the road I honestly think Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous might be slightly better than Baldur's Gate 3. Part of it is the party size, both in terms of available members and who you can have with you, allowing you to specialise some companions into more niche builds and just bringing more variety to the table, a little bit is it hitting the nostalgia targets a lot better, and honestly I think the 3.X ruleset is just better for a CRPG (I should really reget the 3.5 or Pathfinder core).

But yes, six girl parties are great. I can easily slot in two front liners (generally Valerie and Amri) and still be able to double up on dedicated archers or blasters if I want. There's also a lot less annoyance over Trickery just due to the fact that multiple characters spec into it by default.

It's making me even more excited for when Rogue Trader finally drops.

Psyren

2023-10-27, 08:05 PM

Morrigan is very good at manipulating people she's very bad t being honest. This isn't the first time it can come up in the game.

I mean, she was being manipulative though: "'tis cold in my tent, all alone!" I agree she was less problematic overall than the other apostates in the series, though.

Anonymouswizard

2023-10-27, 08:29 PM

I mean, she was being manipulative though: "'tis cold in my tent, all alone!" I agree she was less problematic overall than the other apostates in the series, though.

Let me rephrase that: she's manipulative, except when she's enacting her plan. The couple of very basic steps she gets you to do are things she's honest about, if somewhat vague on her exact goals. She's not engaged in manipulation for a significant chunk of the game unlike some other characters I could mention.

She's more manipulative when trying to get you into bed, but Lelianna is similarly indirect. At least Alastair is willing to just straight up say 'hey, I've decided I want sex, is that okay with you'.

Actually I really like Alastairs conversations on the topic, he's direct about his feelings even when those are 'I'm unsure'.

warty goblin

2023-10-27, 08:41 PM

Yeah, I didn't super hate that boss, and having the summon dude helped a lot. I even pushed through the goddamn platforming bit.

What really wore me down was less the gameplay, which I was actually getting sorta decent at, so much just how empty and pointless and featureless it was. Leveling is both super necessary, just to keep up with the number treadmill, and very boring because it's just a number treadmill. There's no characters, no locations that aren't bombed out Gothic hellscapes, the world of the dead is a slightly creepier Gothic hellscape, you're a creepy Gothic weirdo pointlessly murdering the same creepy Gothic weirdos over and over. It isn't depressing, it lacks the spine and structure and meaning to be deliberately depressing beyond, like, vibes*. it's just bland, wasted potential.

*I don't like vibes as a substitute for structure, they're just a limp attempt to end run the hard part of writing something good and effective by hiring a competent art director.

Sapphire Guard

2023-10-27, 08:57 PM

That was rhetorical speculation, folks. There's no need to jump in with detailed explanation including things from future games.

You must have missed a lot of content, I'm no completionist but my average playthroughs last about 120 hours. Also

Didn't do any DLC, if that makes a difference.

Erloas

2023-10-27, 09:33 PM

Anyone else tried Cities Skylines 2 yet? I would have waited expect it's on GamePass so it was a free look.
I know the reviews have all talked about performance issues.
So far I haven't had any, but I haven't make a very large city yet.
Some things seem like good upgrades from the first, there are a few things that used to be DLC that are now just part of the game. A few things that they didn't have but used to be part of Sim City, like more outside connections.
I've had a few issues with trying to get things like power and sewer to connect, the snapping to existing lines in 3d space seems inconsistent.
The large buildings also do weird things to uneven ground,
I also tried a hydro plant, and I thought it said it would do 80mw but for a while it was only doing like 150kw and it eventually went to 5mw, which is just entirely useless, especially for the cost. It's just not clear how it's figured and how to improve it. The worst part there was that it flooded part of my city, but even after raising the ground level around the river I had water sitting in my city that just wouldn't go away.
There are some budget issues too, in that things don't seem to scale well to small cities. Bus for a small city has the majority of the cost for a huge system, making building into things like that early very hard. Shipping, trains, education, more advanced power, all seemed to do that.
Normal it would seem like dropping the budget on them would do that, but it doesn't seem to work like expected. If you're only using 10 out of 50 buses but set budget to 50% they don't use 25 busses well, the 10 you are using no one likes because you're cutting funding.
On the school in particular I had 18 of 200 students, but if I set the budget to 50% I had 100% drop out rate.
It basically makes it impossible to actually balance a budget, literally the only way I ever had money was the big bonus they give when you pass a milestone.

That all sounds just like everything is bad, but it's not. Overall things mostly seem good it's just the issues that stand out. There are probably some mechanics that just take some time to figure out.

Errorname

2023-10-27, 10:25 PM

She doesn't even come close to Anders, let alone Solas.

Anonymouswizard

2023-10-28, 11:10 AM

She doesn't even come close to Anders, let alone Solas.

Yep, Anders is manipulating you for Act 3, whereas the entirety of Inquisition is Solas manipulating the Inquisitor and Cassandra into retailing his scheme, and by the end of Trespasser basically pulls it off without a hitch.

Morrigan gets away with it because her manipulation is mostly outside of the main plot. For Anders it works well if Hawke executes him for his actions, although as the only non-Hawke healer he's basically too damn useful to lose. However by Solas the entire game basically revolves around your mage's machinations and then he gets away scott free.

Plus Morrigan was built to be a powerful control mage and Anders the resident healer. Solas meanwhile isn't particularly special gameplay wise.

warty goblin

2023-10-28, 04:42 PM

Won my Age of Wonder 4 game as the psychopathically evil rat. I turned all my people into demons, summoned demons, reaped souls, made undead, and took the evil option in pretty much every quest that game up. Good times. Well, not good times. Very bad times. Lots of screaming as souls were ripped out and forced into horrible constructs of bone and/or literal grim reapers.

I ended up going for a conquest victory, which felt by far the most natural. I had one ally, and then just killed everybody else. The last AI to fall was actually making a credible-ish go at winning, but just didn't have a good solution to me blitzing through his territory with a couple very major demons. There's a 140 turn limit on the game... and I won on turn 140, finally seizing the bastard's throne city. I had been planning to sack his cities on at a time, but there just wasn't enough time to plod through all of them, so I flat out charged through his territory to get there with exactly enough time to win.

Anyway, gonna put AoW 4 to bed until at least the next major patch in November.

Psyren

2023-10-28, 05:08 PM

Plus Morrigan was built to be a powerful control mage and Anders the resident healer. Solas meanwhile isn't particularly special gameplay wise.

I'd say "without a hitch" is a bit of an oversell, there was a pretty big hitch:

Using the Inquisition to defeat Corypheus destroyed his Orb - forcing him to sacrifice FleMythal (or perhaps more accurately, she chose to sacrifice herself) as his backup plan. Presumably this has slowed his planned cosmic reboot substantially, since he originally believed that with the charged orb from the beginning of the game that he would have been able to tear down the veil and wipe out the current world instantly.

Anonymouswizard

2023-10-28, 06:56 PM

I'd say "without a hitch" is a bit of an oversell, there was a pretty big hitch:

True, but they're still twenty one steps ahead of everybody else.

Anyway slipped over to WotR, playing a Chaotic Good Human Kineticist (Earth) probably going Azata. I should really go back to my Act 4 Angel run, but I'm just not feeling that. I was considering a Dark Elementalist to nab all the lore skills, but I remember their soul harvest being a pain as you had to cast it during combat. Using Visual Adjustments to swap my class outfit to something a bit more dress like, because no proper lady commands a war in trousers.

20 CON is going to be fun.

ETA: having a ton of trouble hitting, I pull up my character sheet, and apparently my blast is using Strength to attack instead of Dexterity? I dumped Strength because I was planning to throw rocks around instead of actually hitting anything, guess I'm restarting and going for either fire or cold blasts instead...

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-10-29, 04:27 AM

True, but they're still twenty one steps ahead of everybody else.

20 CON is going to be fun.

That's odd. Kineticist blasts should use Dexterity if they're ranged and Strength if they're melee (i.e. Kinetic Blade). I'm not aware of any class feature that causes them to use Strength for their ranged attacks. If you didn't take Precise Shot, though, you'll suffer a nasty -4 penalty shooting at anything that another character is in melee with. Pumping to-hit isn't that necessary, though. Kineticists become somewhat ludicrous once they get Energy blasts since those target touch AC. You almost never miss once those come into play.

GloatingSwine

2023-10-29, 06:01 AM

I've been replaying the Doom series. They pretty much never get old.

This time though I've also played through Doom 64 which I hadn't before. It feels like a Doom 3 for Doom 2, if you know what I mean. Rather than reinventing the series into a horror shooter like the actual Doom 3 (on the slate next along with Alan Wake 2 for spoopy week) it moves and feels like Doom and all the enemies and weapons have pretty much the same stats, and it does some cool new stuff with moving bits of level geometry.

It does have a slightly different level design ethos to the PC Dooms, more tight spaces and twisty corridors, fewer open areas with clear lines of sight, and it likes to put a lot of beef in. Whilst it doesn't have many big swarms of enemies like Doom 2 did they found the Baron of Hell and liked what they found and so encounters with 3-5 of them are not uncommon.

Also on the top difficulty level there are a couple of dual Cyberdemon fights, which even Doom 2 didn't dare to inflict, so enjoy that. (Respect to anyone who finished it on Watch Me Die on original hardware)

Overall I think I'd put it in between Doom 1 (still my favourite of the originals) and Doom 2. Doom 2 has a few more levels that put concept ahead of theme and feel like they should have belonged as secret or side levels (eg. Tricks and Traps and Barrels o' Fun).

Sapphire Guard

2023-10-29, 07:13 AM

Contrary to my last post, I startede playing DA2. The first time I tried it, I played up to Kirkwall and stopped, so I just continued that save.

The writing is quite good. The dialogue options you are given are quite blunt, but Hawke usually actually says something much more diplomatic. The Hero of Ferelden is male, human and alive, I can't remember if I picked that or it just set the default, but either way, my casteless dwarf Paragon is lost to history.

Was surprised Athenril kept her word about a year's service. I'm not really sure why the Hawkes want to go on this random expedition in the first place. If you can come up with 50 gold sovereigns in a matter of weeks, get a nicer house instead. That's a lot of money, I could outfit a company of Arl Eamon's knights for that kind of cash. And they have been left the estate in the will, so what's the point? (If this is a future twist, kindly do not answer me)

I have circa 27 so far, minus 5 sovereigns for the refugees and sundry expenses, there seemed to be a weird glitch where I was picking up health potions off corpses but they weren't showing up in my inventory for a while.

In the least surprising twist imaginable, Flemeth left herself a back door.

Aveline is now a guard captain, Bethany is now my friend. The random muggers are annoying fights, because more people just keep materialising. The ones in hightown are especially strange, random gangs dressed as guardsmen just hang around on street corners attacking passers by. Probably shouldn't have involved Aveline in various shady dealings in lowtown, but it was on the way to the guardsman ambush, so I was too lazy to switch. Switched her out with Fenris once she got promoted, so now there are lots of arguments with Anders and Bethany over which of them are more oppressed. I would use Merrill more, but she can't heal.

Anders and Isabela's quests both required leaving giant piles of corpses in the Chantry overnight, so whoever does the cleaning there is in for a surprise.

Edit: I'm hoping the mystery missing templars are the ones I killed in the chantry on Ander's quest, but that seems unlikely.

Anonymouswizard

2023-10-29, 07:40 AM

I dunno, I burned a feat on Weapon Finesse when I restarted and that solved about 80% of my to-hit issues. I'll be picking up Precise Shot at level 3, but I always pump Persuasion early to get those conversation options working (which is why my first Wild Talent went on a snake).

Whoracle

2023-10-29, 07:58 AM

Currently playing Alan Wake II. About 14 hours in, maybe two thirds done. Good game, maybe bordering on great. Interesting world building, good atmosphere. One bug that gets to me: I returned to an area to gather collectibles, and the lighting is glitches. Can't see anything. Will see if it changes in the plot mandated return trip.

The new protagonist Saga is the weakest point so far. Not bad, not good, just in the upper positive border of bland. Maybe she gets better during the remainder.

Overall: would strongly recommend if you liked Alan Wake and/or Control. If you are ambivalent then it's still fun and a less strong recommend. If you dislike those keep off - it's very much "more of the same", mostly, and the actual gameplay is no standout that'd let you forget the rest.

Spore

2023-10-29, 09:55 AM

Started PS4's Marvel's Spider-Man yesterday due to the Steam Discount, since Part 2 was released and I finally have a computer that can play the first one. Mechanically a quite bog-standard open world game, along with the imfamous Ubisoft towers and mini challenges. But Peter's personality makes the game work, because the characters are so damn well written and the pacing helps not to overburden the player, but actually makes you feel like an overcommitted teen/tween balancing his job, his vigilante career and him helping his Aunt with the homeless shelter all while mourning his past relationship a bit. If formulaic game design helps underline great combat and writing I am entirely okay with it.

One minor gripe tho, because I am a jaded adult. I feel many of Jameson's critical points of Spider-Man and the police are - even if they are comically overexaggerated - are relevant and I hope the game does something with it. After all, a city-wide "crime radar" is the type of Orwellian nightmare one can blatantly see if their view goes an inch over the fact that this is just a thinly disguised map/tower mechanic.

And I feel Marvel needs more "small" super heroes like Spidey, Hawkeye or Captain America (with sensible writing) where a group of thugs or a mad scientist actually poses some sort of threat. Plus they can struggle and be human, if they are not so much larger than life. Hulk, Wonder Woman or Thor are just not as relatable.

Cespenar

2023-10-29, 11:03 AM

So I gave Shadows of Doubt a try. The procedural crime and clue generation is pretty genius and well designed, but the stealth parts are kinda putting me off.

I'm probably not in the target audience (or haven't played enough yet), I guess, because I'm trying to play it like Obra Dinn yet I'm ending up in Minecraft fights in randos homes.

AlanBruce

2023-10-29, 07:25 PM

Just finished Alan Wake 2.

Having played the first one back on release, I was looking forward to it. The wait did not disappoint. This game looks absolutely stunning. They captured the atmosphere and tone with the visuals- be it the golden hour soaked west coast canopy of Bright Falls, to the gritty neon drenched streets of NYC. In that regard, the game deserves high praise.

Gameplay wise, it is slow. It takes a few hours to build up on what its trying to tell. But once you get in combat (which were very few in my opinion), they are well executed. There is a detective aspect to the game, so a big bulk of the runtime is spent in a room looking at clues, which may not be for everyone.

Where they absolutely nailed it is in the story and the characters. This is perhaps the most Art House game I have played. It makes a ton of references to other media and isnt shy about it. An incredibly surreal trip, to be sure. But likely not for everyone if youre looking for something more fast paced.

Psyren

2023-10-29, 07:34 PM

I'm a big fan of horror games with detective elements (e.g. Condemned and the first Outlast) so I'll definitely give Alan Wake 2 a try.

AlanBruce

2023-10-29, 08:01 PM

I'm a big fan of horror games with detective elements (e.g. Condemned and the first Outlast) so I'll definitely give Alan Wake 2 a try.

Then this game will certainly scratch that itch. Many have said that you need to play the first game to understand this obe. Some even say you need to play other entries made by the same studio to understand the story. I disagree with that statement: Alan Wake 2 stands on its own merit.

Errorname

2023-10-29, 08:29 PM

BG3 got me into a bit of a CRPG kick and after a bit of debate between whether to do a full Dragon Age or Pillars of Eternity playthrough, I've decided to boot up a new Pillars character. For all my gripes about Pillars worldbuilding I think embracing the Early Modern setting was a really good idea. It's also very funny to me that they cast the same actor as both of your earliest companions, and I respect that Mercer actually pulled off

Whoracle

2023-10-30, 03:29 AM

Eh, partial disagree. If you've played no other games, you're fine, but understanding of some of the plot will come a bit later. Having played Control will just make you appreciate a few elements more and is 100% not necessary.

But if you have played Alan Wake, you'll most likely be quite confused, since Alan Wake 2 does not follow from Alan Wake, but rather from the DLC American Nightmare, and I'd argue that not having played AW is less confusing than having played AW but skipped AW:AN. Was for me, at least.

In other news:
I'm done with Alan Wake 2 now, too, and can second what AlanBruce said: Great game, give it a shot. Saga in the end still didn't really do it for me, but there's potential for her character in a sequel.
The PS5 home screen claims I'm 75% done, and I'd guess that's the missind collectibles, which I won't be collecting until the next few patches, since returning to Cauldron Lake still glitches the lighting there, and I still can't see crap. Like, there's a PC somewhere around where you'll have to input a password, and I can't make out the effin screen at all, and there's a light room in the same area where the light just is off, even though the corresponding generator is on. Only glitch I encountered, let's hope it gets resolved.

I hope we won't have to wait another 13 years for the conclusion/next title. There's still a few plot threads left dangling.

Eldan

2023-10-30, 04:09 AM

So, as someone who kind of missed the original Alan Wake, but now thinks it's probably right up my alley:
Does one, these days, play the remake or the original? Are there substantial changes between the two?

GloatingSwine

2023-10-30, 04:22 AM

The only real difference is that the remaster works better on modern systems and includes the two DLCs.

Anonymouswizard

2023-10-30, 06:31 AM

Huh, I never realised he did both Eder and Aloth. Also I much prefer the Pillars world building to Dragon Age's, the main reason I'm not replaying it is the lack of a turn based mode in the first game.

Got properly stuck into Act 1 of WotR, doing things s little bit differently partially to avoid the slog that is the Defender's Heart battle. Somewhat torn between going for Azata or Trickster but I figure I'll unlock both and make the decision later.

Kineticists are slightly annoying because until you get Precise Shot you're basically a support killer. However whenever the enemy actually brings archers or casters I'm very effective at killing off the support. Planning on picking up Fire as my level 7 element, it gives me access to both energy blasts and MAGMA.

warty goblin

2023-10-30, 09:39 AM

Had a poke at a couple newish lower budget/indie games, both of which sorta make me eat my hat.

Stray Blade or, soulsish combat but good. That is to say soulsish combat but they bothered to actually make the action RPG game around it, instead of coasting on lore descriptions, vibes, and art style. So you play a voiced character with an actual personality, there's difficulty levels, somebody asked whether it made any metaphysical sense for dudes to reincarnate every time you took a nap break, realized it didn't, and made that not happen. Ditto corpse runs. Ditto tutorials you can accident just walk past. But the combat is still about deliberately timed attacks and dodging and parrying, because you don't need the asinine Souls formula to do that.

What you get is a fun action adventure RPG with a charming Kingdoms of Amalur art style, but with intricate level design and weighty, timing based combat. It's a pretty potent mix, and definitely satisfies my desire to hit fantasy dudes with a sword. So Souls combat, or something like it? Fine with me, just lose the dumbass design around it.

Tower of Time or good real time with pause combat. I am very much on the record as not liking RTP combat, this may well be the exception that proves the rule. Well, it massively slows down time instead of pausing, but same principle. The important difference is that, at least at the beginning, you only get two characters, which keeps things manageable. Also the game auto-slows time whenever you select an ability. This is a marvelous feature, since it means you don't really need to manage the slow-down, you get the time to target abilities sans stress, but things play out quickly when you don't need to micro. It's proper real time as well, not faking real time over a fundamentally turn based architecture, which, if you're going real time, is the way to go.

It helps that the story is reasonably intriguing. As a child in dying world with a forgotten and mysterious past, you find the ruins of the Tower, buried upside down in the earth. A mysterious voice says to come back when you are older, which you do. But you don't play as you, you play as a group of soldiers you are psychically guiding through a crystal throne. Weird and cool.

Sapphire Guard

2023-10-31, 10:09 PM

If I'm posting too much, feel free to say so, btw.

The Party has irreconcilable differences on the mage/templar question, so the only way to stay friends is to have an all mage or all fighter party and suck up to whoever is nearby. Keep Aveline away from criminal activity, and Varric likes money. Merrill and Isabella are the trickiest so far (no advice please).

I only brought my mage party because of Bethany's nagging, I wasn't going to prior to that. Should have kept to that instinct, unles it's one of those choices where she's executed by templars if you leave her behind.

Demons habits of instantly attacking as soon as you refuse a deal does not convince me of their honesty.

Bartrand, your plan was bad. Seal one door and hope there is no other way out, even though it's an entire settlement which presumably has other exits. Even if it doesn't we could probably open the door with a Stonefist or two.

Batcathat

2023-11-01, 02:40 AM

Isn't dealing with this kind of the point of the friendship/rivalry system? (Well, unless you literally mean that you want to stay specifically friends with everyone, then you're absolutely correct).

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-01, 06:50 AM

Isn't dealing with this kind of the point of the friendship/rivalry system? (Well, unless you literally mean that you want to stay specifically friends with everyone, then you're absolutely correct).

Yeah, in DA2 'negative' approval isn't actually bad, flip flopping so they remain in the middle is bad.

Note that while Aveline is anti-mage she's not as hard-line about it as Fenris is and it's pretty easy to get friendship with her on a pro-mage run. I believe that Merrill is also less militant than Anders regarding the circles. But if a character is gaining rivalry points over friendship the best thing to do is nab more (especially for Isabella, due to reasons).

It's also quite hard to make Varric a rival, he likes a lot of things you'll be doing.

Batcathat

2023-11-01, 06:55 AM

It's also quite hard to make Varric a rival, he likes a lot of things you'll be doing.

Yeah. In my last playthrough, I decided to actually try and max him out as a rival for what I think was the first time, as kind of a self-imposed challenge.

Similarly, while I often have Fenris in the party, I'm not sure I've ever had him as a friend rather than a rival, since my characters are usually pretty pro-mage (or at least not anti-mage enough for Fenris' liking).

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-01, 10:28 AM

Urgh, I hate the Defenders Heart defence in WotR. It might even be okay in RTWP mode, but I'm playing on turn based where it's just a slog as the NPCs eat up a good 2-5 minutes per round, including a bunch who do nothing but stand there for the entire fight.

It's also not even difficult, in several plays of it I think I've lost a building once, and that's only ecause the AI cheesed their way around a summoned pit.

Now two thirds of the way through Act 1 and ready to see if I can unlock Azata and Trickster.

Resileaf

2023-11-01, 02:02 PM

It's also quite hard to make Varric a rival, he likes a lot of things you'll be doing.

It's basically why the description for rivalry with Varric is "Varric will tell your story... Whether you like it or not."

He may dislike who you are as a person, but you're far too interesting not to write about.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-01, 02:56 PM

It's basically why the description for rivalry with Varric is "Varric will tell your story... Whether you like it or not."

He may dislike who you are as a person, but you're far too interesting not to write about.

The thing is it's HARD to get him to dislike you, especially if you bring him with you. It's not that there's not stuff he dislikes, it's that he likes so much stuff you'll nab Friendship points without realising.

But yes the point of Rivalry, and something I really wish Inquisition had kept, is that no matter how much they hate you Hawke has a strong enough bond with the party members that only major events can rend. So Isabella abandons you if you've waffled too much and she doesn't want either friend sex or enemy sex with you, whereas Sebastian leaves if you support who he sees as responsible for a terrorist attack and Anders can be killed by Hawke for being the one actually responsible. The fact that Varric will always tell your story is an extension of that.

As a proof of concept the Friendship/Rivalry system is great, and there's even some neat little touches such as Varric being predisposed towards friendship and Carver's rivalry with Hawke actually being a stronger bond than Bethany's friendship (which you need to basically complete the game twice to properly see). It just needed improvement in Inquisition, so few RPGs try to have 'opinion' and 'closeness of bond' be separate (as in I can't think of any others).

Dragon Age 2 is a game where everything needed a good polish but was pushed out the door before they'd finished machining all the parts. It's still the best game in the entire series, but Inquisition could have been if it had built on DA2 instead of running in the other direction with everything. And yes I include the open world areas in that, the DLC showed Inquisition could be much better if the developers added more focus and structure to each map's quests instead of having twenty five disjointed ones and a ton of collectables. I'd love if the resurgence in popularity of DA2 caused Dreadwolf to nab some of the neater ideas from it (bring back dialogue tone icons!).

I really should replay DA2. Maybe after or as a break from WotR (level 5 and finally my Kineticist build is online).

Batcathat

2023-11-01, 03:07 PM

It also feels kind of inclusive in a weird way, since people have different types of friendships. If real life had a Friendship/Rivalry score, I suspect I would have Rivalry with most of my close friends and/or love interests.

Errorname

2023-11-01, 05:16 PM

Huh, I never realised he did both Eder and Aloth.

He's got talent, no doubt.

I do find it funny that he's technically doing three characters

Also I much prefer the Pillars world building to Dragon Age's, the main reason I'm not replaying it is the lack of a turn based mode in the first game.

I do too, for the record. It feels genuinely historical to me, ironically because they're more willing to embrace elements of modernity like colonial trading companies and early firearms. I just think that both Eoras and Thedas have a bunch of elements that feel like they were included not because the writers wanted them but because they thought players would expect them. If the creative leads had the freedom to do so I doubt either setting would have elves or dwarves.

GloatingSwine

2023-11-01, 05:39 PM

If the creative leads had the freedom to do so I doubt either setting would have elves or dwarves.

Dragon Age would absolutely have had elves, exactly as they are with their status in the world lifted from The Witcher and all.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-01, 06:43 PM

I do too, for the record. It feels genuinely historical to me, ironically because they're more willing to embrace elements of modernity like colonial trading companies and early firearms.

Both Thedas and Eoras are supposed to have had technological and scientific development in the past thousand years, but only Eoras feels like it has. Some of it comes from embracing the renaissance tech level most D&D style settings actually use, a lot comes from Animancy being described and portrayed as a new field of study, and some comes from minor details like the fact the major nations have corrected their calendar because they realised it was slightly off

If I ever do another run it'll be as a firearm-toting rogue. Maybe a Hearth Orlan if I can find a decent picture, I like Orlans.

I'm pissed off that instead of Pillars of Eternity 3 we're getting The Older Scrolls: Pillarim partially because I want to explore more of this world in a game style that doesn't make me want to set fire to the console.

I just think that both Eoras and Thedas have a bunch of elements that feel like they were included not because the writers wanted them but because they thought players would expect them. If the creative leads had the freedom to do so I doubt either setting would have elves or dwarves.

I'm fairly certain that the Cipher/Watcher split is because they thought players would want a Sorcerer class, and despite how much I like the take I'm fairly certain PoE paladins got added on obligation. I also 100% agree that the designers of PoE would have remixed elves and dwarves like they did with orcs and halflings if they thought they could get away with it.

On Thedas I get much more of an 'aren't we so clever' vibe. I actually believe that the elves and dwarves are there because the lead designers thought they were great subversions of the fantasy staples, before going off and doing the exact same thing as everybody else with them (screw you Dalish, the city elves have been out of focus for almost the entire series). Weirdly though Primal Spells seem to have been included because the designers thought mages would be no fun without them.

I put it down to Obsidian just tending to have writing staff better at the small details, and those details are what make the world building click together. Which is probably what made DA2 so great, it's the only time Bioware tried to make the Superior Oblivion Sequel.

I think a surprise drop of PoE3 is the only thing that could delay me buying Rogue Trader on launch day. I really like PoE and how the setting is obviously trying to twist D&D tropes into something different. Sometimes it even succeeds!

warty goblin

2023-11-01, 08:49 PM

Every time I've tried Pillars, it felt just different enough I'd have to pay attention, but not different enough for that attention to be all that rewarded. Also I kinda find combat an unfun mess.

Speaking of RTP combat and rewarding, Tower of Time continues to be a fantastic little gem. Got a third character, a sort of druid type with bad DPS but summons and healing, so that livens up combat a good bit. On Normal the fights feel just about right, the systems are pretty well explained, and there's plenty of non-combat exploration to keep things varied.

But really I just love the atmosphere of it. The whole game is a dungeon crawl, but thanks to some solid art design, lighting, and the dungeon being an upside down magical tower from before the apocalypse, the devs can pack it with any number of cool environments and it isn't jarring. Magical fountains, lost libraries, gardens, forges, remains of long-dead refugees still in their camps, it keeps the tower mysterious and fun to explore. And where most RPGs chronically overshare information about the world, this kinda drip feeds it so its actually fun and exciting to find. In the roughly 20 minutes a day I have to play right now its a blast.

PhoenixPhyre

2023-11-01, 11:11 PM

Every time I've tried Pillars, it felt just different enough I'd have to pay attention, but not different enough for that attention to be all that rewarded. Also I kinda find combat an unfun mess.

Yeah. This. And the writing is...so verbose. Which is utterly hypocritical coming from me, but holy walls of text and exposition dumps! I tend to bounce/get bored every time I try sometime around the first big city.

Part of it is I'm not fond of micromanagement. At all.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-01, 11:21 PM

Every time I've tried Pillars, it felt just different enough I'd have to pay attention, but not different enough for that attention to be all that rewarded. Also I kinda find combat an unfun mess.

That's fair, Pillars of Eternity is basically a D&D setting where the designers asked themselves 'wouldn't it be cool if...' eight hundred times until the setting felt that little bit unfamiliar. It'll very easily fall into the 'this isn't worth the attention' category. So you've got fish orcs and cat halflings but they'll never feel like a radical new thing.

And Pillars 1 combat is very much a case of 'put this on snooze mode, I'm here for other things' deal for me. I know some people like it, but either it's in real time and I'm pausing every half second to deal with something or it's at half speed and too damn slow. The combat feels much better in the second game when they switched to turn based :smallwink: Tyranny* is a little better due to the smaller party, but I still don't like the combat.

* Probably the best of the Pillars games, partially due to the way spells work and partially because it basically focuses on the often underdeveloped evil routes, but the combat still sucks.

Errorname

2023-11-02, 02:47 AM

Yeah. Obsidian's good at that, subtle stuff like having different currencies gives a real sense that this is a world where things grow and change.

The thing that got me worried about Avowed was when I saw the flintlocks, because I remember it being announced as a prequel set centuries earlier and the thing that made Pillars cool was the sense that technology had changed, that things evolved and changed.

I also 100% agree that the designers of PoE would have remixed elves and dwarves like they did with orcs and halflings if they thought they could get away with it

Fair. I can be really confident about Pillars on this because Sawyer has outright stated in interviews and on his tumblr that Elves and Dwarves were included because they thought it was what players expected from an infinity engine inheritor and not because it was the creative preference of him or the other creative leads, but I've got nothing like that for Dragon Age.

I do think it's interesting that both settings have really fun and novel takes on their 'orc' equivalents that are easily the most memorable bits of their respective settings.

Pillars 1 is in desperate need of the Tyranny mouse-over text, which is no joke one of the most brilliant mechanics ever implemented into an RPG. As it stands they drown you in so much worldbuilding it's overwhelming.

warty goblin

2023-11-02, 06:55 AM

Part of it is I'm not fond of micromanagement. At all.
It helped when I learned to hard ignore all the Kickstarter NPCs completely because those were just painful. But still, yeah, too much text.

I mean if they leaned harder on the weird stuff earlier on it would work better. Fish orcs sound really cool and I'd be down for messing around in fish orc culture or something. That'd be a memorable opening. Instead it's... killing wolves in ruins. Yay. I got farther than that, but it was all extremely standard encounters in extremely standard settings taken very seriously with way, way too much exposition. I don't necessarily mind standard settings, I really like the Drakensang games, which are extremely standard. But they use that standardness to reduce exposition, they don't need to explain anything because their dwarves are the dwarfiest dwarves to ever dwarfing dwarf, so when one of them shaves out of grief and shame you know it's a big deal. The whole point of a standard fantasy setting is that it conveys a lot of information extremely efficiently, being almost standard is just an inefficient version of almost the same thing.

Pillars 2 just doubles down on the blandness. The opening cutscene is all high stakes god drama, and then it's... killing boars on a beach. Yay. It's like going to a fancy restaurant, and instead of a bread basket they bring you a big mac. I confess that instantly scarpered my desire to keep playing.

See that's the thing, for the amount of combat in a game like this - and the amount of game a game like this is - I really am not willing to put it on snooze mode. That's just bad design of a pillar (heh) of the experience; arguably there really isn't any gameplay in a cRPG besides combat and leveling, which only matters because of combat.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-02, 07:27 AM

Yeah. Obsidian's good at that, subtle stuff like having different currencies gives a real sense that this is a world where things grow and change.

Yeah, and it's those bits that link all the big ideas together.

Wait, what? I'll be honest I haven't followed pre-release material for Avowed at all, I checked out when I read what they were changing the gameplay to.

Yeah, I definitely remember something like that, although I suspect we'd still have had similar races if they'd followed their hearts. They'd just have had animal traits (probably one being reptilian) instead of pointy ears or beards

I do think it's interesting that both settings have really fun and novel takes on their 'orc' equivalents that are easily the most memorable bits of their respective settings.

I do adore the Qunari, they're the only race I'll play in Inquisition these days. I'll note both settings also have a race that was historically enslaved, and still often is in PoE, but the Orlans feel less defined by it than the elves do.

I really do need to play more Pillars 2, but I want to do a run of the first game with some different choices first. Notably the Philosopher background.

It helped when I learned to hard ignore all the Kickstarter NPCs completely because those were just painful. But still, yeah, too much text.

Thank all the divinities of Eoras that those NPCs have distinct nametags.

The fish orcs culture actually appears in the second game, but you start out dealing with the East Eoras Trading Company. The second game also suffers from the fact it reset the level cap and went back to square one on the enemies, when it could have had some cool amphibious monster designs.

Fair, as I said I'm just straight up here for a different thing in the first game (the excellent, if poorly paced and exposition heavy, story). I'm a massive Planescape: Torment fan so I'm perfectly fine with the main gameplay loop being 'click on NC, select dialogue options, repeat', Defiance Bay is literally my favourite part of the game.

warty goblin

2023-11-02, 07:50 AM

Resetting the level cap is fine, boring encounters are not. You can have interesting fights against meaningful enemies at low level, plenty of games manage it.

I don't object to dialog heavy games necessarily, that's fine if the material is engaging and well written. What I don't love is padding out the dialog with several boring massacres between the good bits.

Really, what I want is a game to have respect for my time. RPGs in particular really need this, because the genre expectations that they run 60+ hours and that more is always better leaves them extremely susceptible to bloat and padding. My experience is that a lot of more classically inflected cRPGs are extremely bad about this, particularly when it comes to lots of boring combat encounter padding.

CarpeGuitarrem

2023-11-02, 08:05 AM

The DA2 chatter is reminding me of just how good the character writing was. (I haven't actually finished it, I got stuck on the first big boss fight when I played at a friend's place, so I'm avoiding spoilers for now) While the companions in DA:O are nice, and a replay is reminding me of things I liked about them, they're not nearly as memorable as the DA2 companions -- I haven't touched the game in a decade, and I still remember the whole crew fondly. They were, above all else, distinctive, which then lets the game layer character work on top of that.

That said, I did watch most of Farscape in between my original play of Dragon Age Origins and my replay, so Morrigan is definitely fun to talk to.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-02, 08:25 AM

Resetting the level cap is fine, boring encounters are not. You can have interesting fights against meaningful enemies at low level, plenty of games manage it.

Yes, but resetting the Watcher to level 1 from level 16 feels like it was done so they could have the boring enemies again, when the changed setting allowed them to go with something different. Even just going for giant frogs and lobsters at level 1 would have been more interesting than angry pigs.

At least an early sidequest in Pillars 1 let's you fight ghosts.

You're under no obligation to like the game. I like it despite the bad combat, for you it's a deal breaker. I like the exposition dumps to a certain extent, you hate them. That's fine, you don't have to like any game just because others like it.

I still don't like TES games despite everybody I know giving reviews at 3am in a woodland crowded around a portable stereo plugged up to a massive amplifier.

Batcathat

2023-11-02, 08:30 AM

I suspect my lingering disappointment about the level reset is a big part of why I never got around to finishing the second game. I had (admittedly based on pretty much nothing) assumed it would be more like the transition from BG1 to BG2, instead of basically making a completely new character with the same name.

Also, this discussion is kinda making me wanna play PoE again. (Yes, it seems like 83 percent of my gaming habits these days are just playing whatever game people around here are talking about this week. :smalltongue: ).

GloatingSwine

2023-11-02, 09:05 AM

It was done because they changed the levelling and underlying systems (especially around what does and doesn't stack) so significantly that if you'd remained at level 16 you would have been making a whole lot of level up decisions with no context.

LibraryOgre

2023-11-02, 09:05 AM

I actually love the Defender's Heart defense, but I've gotten so good at the prologue that I seldom wind up having to fight it... if you charge through everything (by making everyone ****ing EXHAUSTED), then you're done before it comes up.

But on those absolute slogs, especially when you're between waves? Turn off turn-based mode. Let it run realtime to avoid having to jump through the turns, then turn it back on when the bad guys arrive.

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-11-02, 10:14 AM

Technically, you only need to find the entrance to the Keep. You can do that pretty quickly by rushing through the square. Once you've found it, you can return to Defender's Heart and you'll get a fat reward for moving so quickly. From there the defense never happens and you have all the time you want to explore the other areas (other timed scenarios notwithstanding).

LibraryOgre

2023-11-02, 11:17 AM

I'm not sure about that... I've found that entrance plenty of times (I clean-sweep spaces before I move on), and also gotten the Defender's Heart... it all comes down to length of time, IME.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-02, 11:30 AM

Oh yeah, big battles and turn based mode font play well together, and about ten minutes was me forgetting to kill an alchemist I'd put to sleep. But I really, really don't like RTWP combat and there's only one combat that seriously drags in the first three acts so it's something I can live with.

Speaking of which I've hit act 2, current party setup is MC, Seelah (who took a horse over weapon buffs), Camellia, Sosiel, Lann, and Ember. I'll probably drop someone for Refill when I recruit him, and maybe swap Sosiel out and Daeren back in at the end of the act, but that'll probably be my party until Ashuerelah joins.

I'm considering sending Refill down Cavalier instead of Fighter or Hellknight, getting him some kind of exotic mount and the ability to provide Teamwork feats, the latter feels like it fits his character.

Wookieetank

2023-11-02, 01:50 PM

Yeah, this is a big reason why even on JRPGs I've been dropping the difficulty I play at (when I have the option anyways). Grinding up levels to be powerful enough to get past the next story boss isn't as fun as it used to be.

As to currently playing, I've managed to make it most of the way through day 4 of Disco Elysium so far without having died once. Which with how the game was talked about here, was expecting everything being out to get me. I think my favorite character is the Horrendous Necktie, and wish it had more to say than it does (Inland Empire is currently at 11).

-Got the body down on day 3, with the help of the union, pretty sure that'll bite me in the ass later.
-Stashed it in the bear fridge and was able to discover the true cause of death on day 4
-Still trying to catch an Insulindian Phasmid, much to Kim's dismay
-Still working on getting the full story out of the Hardie Boys
-Really want to talk the shipping crate into opening, but don't have enough stats to (and unless I get luck with thoughts likely won't)

Going through my first playthrough mostly spoiler free, outside general hints/tips. It's a wild ride for anyone who enjoys narrative adventures.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-02, 02:03 PM

But yeah, if the combat's still kind of engaging on Easy I'll set it to that, while I can play BG3 on Normal it's less fun and more frustrating for me. The exception is Persona games and sometimes other MegaTen entries, because there 90% of the difficulty is working out which bits of the system to exploit and I think the only times I've had to grind in Persona have been for final bosses.

LibraryOgre

2023-11-02, 02:14 PM

Oh, I play almost entirely turn-based... I'd just reach points where there was NOTHING to do, and turn off turn-based to let time pass on its own, then immediately turn it back on.

warty goblin

2023-11-02, 02:33 PM

I have to say one thing I'm really enjoying about Tower of Time is that the fights are all pretty spaced out, and designed to be reasonably challenging. They're also against cool fantasy stuff like undead and golems instead of inexplicably homicidal wildlife. Even the very first fights feel like they matter.

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-11-03, 02:23 AM

I'm not sure about that... I've found that entrance plenty of times (I clean-sweep spaces before I move on), and also gotten the Defender's Heart... it all comes down to length of time, IME.

Did you return to Defender's Heart and talk to Irabeth after finding the entrance? You need to do that, indicate you're okay with attacking the Grey Garrison, but then back out of the party selection, at which point she hands you the rewards you would normally get for the battle and it will never trigger. If you only find the entrance and continue to wander around, the demons will attack as usual.

It's slightly better to do the fight since you get a bit more XP and gold if you perfect the garrison battle, plus it triggers some flags that impact later quests. Nothing serious is missed, though, so I usually skip it just to save time.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-03, 06:25 AM

Honestly it would be fine if the Eagle Watch soldiers and cultist soldiers were individual stronger but fewer and if the important targets didn't take about ten rounds to start showing up. It also helps if you let the Eagle Watch swordsmen get killed off, as sadly the arena is not friendly towards charges and they spend many rounds walking towards their latest target.

Thankfully the next combat with a bunch of allies is designed in a more turn-friendly manner.

On future playthroughs I'm just going to skip it, IIRC Toybox let's you play with the necessary flags.

ETA: oh, to note I sent Regill into the Fearsome Leader archetype of Cavalier instead of straight or Beast Tamer. Partially because I've settled on Azata, partially because it gives him the Dazzling Display line and the silliness inherent in that, partially because it means I've now got two front liners on horses to let them abuse the fact that controlling a mount doesn't cost your move action. It also IMO fits his character better than Amiger does, he's not into glory but it's abilities are VERY practical.

Cespenar

2023-11-03, 11:11 AM

I wonder how the combats feel, because real time combats IMHO need a very specific speed vs. depth to be able to just click. Like, I remember the Pillars combats to be almost unplayable until I saw there was a 0.5x speed option. Despite the pause button.

Erloas

2023-11-03, 11:58 AM

I find that modern WRPGs are much better about this, I don't think I've ended up more than a level behind in anything released after PoE that wasn't made by Larian. Larian games are an exception that seem to want you to hunt out every last damn side quest to be at the expected level, with the Original Sin games probably being the worst and BG3 being the best (I think I've missed about two Act 1 side quests in my runs and didn't feel under levelled). But generally I find that if you nab the easily found sidequests and complete them you'll be a fraction of a level below where you 'should' be. I haven't played the Larian games much, but I've found most WRPGs tend to out-level you a lot if you do most of the side quests. It's a hard balance for sure, because I've also had some games where you really struggle just because you're lower level, and others were nothing is even a challenge because you can just walk through it. It also depends a lot on how the level scaling works, some games being a few levels high or low really changes your hit change and damage and others were those levels are fairly minor.

Not quite the same, but in Borderlands 2 one that stood out to me was a DLC that I went into a few levels early and the whole thing was a challenge and the boss was an epic fight, it was hard but we won and it was a lot of fun. But I did it again as another character with more levels and it was just a cake walk and wasn't anything to remember.

LibraryOgre

2023-11-03, 12:02 PM

I wound up giving him the Hellknight levels to get the "If you shake someone, they get fear instead".

He will mess up a battlefield.

warty goblin

2023-11-03, 01:02 PM

For me it's about right. There's some stuff that really helps keep the chaos under control. As I said, it engages slow-time (which is really slow) whenever you select an ability by default. That means that targeting is never a hassle. You also only have max four characters active at a time - I've only got three yet - so there's just fewer dudes to micro. There's some summoning, but they're 100% AI controlled. And since it isn't a TTRPG adaption or wanting you to think it is one, there's fewer abilities per character, and they're evenly distributed across characters. I've got four per character now, it looks like there's maybe 10 or 12 total per character. You also get a complete resource reset between fights, so you aren't wondering if you need that fireball now or later.

All in all I find it just really pleasant. Some fights are pretty hard, some are easy, but none of them are braindead trivial, and they've got reasonable diversity in enemy design. Encounter maps could be a bit more varied, but they aren't bad by any means.

Cygnia

2023-11-03, 01:34 PM

Röki (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1067540/Rki/)was on sale on Steam. Nordic themed puzzle adventure where you need to rescue your younger brother from a jotun.

Eldan

2023-11-03, 03:12 PM

Going through my first playthrough mostly spoiler free, outside general hints/tips. It's a wild ride for anyone who enjoys narrative adventures.

So, the "dying all the time" thing happens mostly in one case: people who distribute their stats so that they start with either 1 volition or 1 endurance and die the first time they take damage. Or use the Thinker premade archetype, which also has 1 volition.

Edit: for the Horrendous Necktie to say its most important lines, you need to never take it off. Which is annoying, because the game doesn't tell you that and other neck items have better stats.

GloatingSwine

2023-11-04, 04:20 AM

So I don't think this is right.

Everything that's relevant in American Nightmare is explained in 2. Because the truth about American Nightmare is that if Mr. Scratch isn't on the screen it isn't relevant and 2 recapitulates all that material pretty fast.

In fact, I think American Nightmare might just be the Remedy game that will add the least things to point and go "it's him!" at.

If you only play the original Alan Wake you'll understand everything you need to grok 2. If you play the rest of the Remedy games you'll see the fnords.

Form

2023-11-04, 05:25 AM

I've finished Forgive Me Father, one of those retro style shooters. Decent game, had fun, but not particularly noteworthy other than perhaps its art style. I'm not sure if I'll give it another playthrough as the journalist.

And even then you should be fine as long as you've got some nosaphed and magnesium on you. Other than dying at the start because your stats might be low and when you don't have any healing items yet you'd have to be very unlucky and unprepared to get killed.

Edit: for the Horrendous Necktie to say its most important lines, you need to never take it off. Which is annoying, because the game doesn't tell you that and other neck items have better stats.

Yes, but..... you wouldn't betray your bratan like that, would you?

Saph

2023-11-04, 01:39 PM

For the past couple of months I've been mostly playing Against the Storm (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1336490/Against_the_Storm/), which I've been really enjoying. It's basically a roguelike with meta-progression and a Slay-the-Spire-like 20-level ascension difficulty system, except that instead of playing an adventurer in a dungeon you're a viceroy managing a small settlement. Each new settlement is a new "run", with a new map and new resources, and you have to score enough victory points before time runs out.

It's just a really polished and well-designed game, with mechanics that work together very nicely. Still Early Access, but it's basically ready for full release and if there are any bugs I haven't found them. Very replayable I've played a few hundred hours so far and haven't gotten bored of it yet. If you're a fan of roguelikes and/or citybuilders, definitely give it a shot.

Mobius Twist

2023-11-04, 03:12 PM

A nomenclature pedantry note: Rogue-like describes a turn-based, one-life (permadeath), procedurally-generated game in the vein of Rogue, a very hardcore dungeon crawler. No meta-progression is implied, except perhaps unlocking new classes. Rogue-lite describes a game that plays with those characteristics in service of a less-punishing experience with meta-progression and a gameplay-mastery curve that is aided by things other than player skill with the game systems in a given period of play.

As for me, I got Subnautica recently and "dove in", playing through the game without aid of wikis, maps, or assistance. A bit of pain was had in discovering basic systems (e.g. cave sulphur!!!), but it's an enjoyable experience all-told. As with most survival games, initial settlement-building mechanics lead to "wouldn't it look nicer like this" waffling and constant rebuilding. I managed to stop myself once I got to "functional, but not pretty", else this would be a very long game.

Rynjin

2023-11-04, 03:32 PM

A nomenclature pedantry note: Rogue-like describes a turn-based, one-life (permadeath), procedurally-generated game in the vein of Rogue, a very hardcore dungeon crawler.

Agree with the rest of your post, but nitpick: Rogue-like does not require the turn-based stipulation anymore; there are plenty of Rogue-likes these days that keep the important elements (procedurally generated, no meta-progression) but are not traditional RPGs. Noita comes to mind, for example.

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-11-04, 03:39 PM

This is one of those weird genre-shift things in the making. Rogue-like originally described anything that adhered to the Berlin interpretation, a list developed at the 2008 International Roguelike Developer's Conference of high- and low-value factors derived from five of the agreed-upon roguelikes at the time (Rogue, NetHack, ADOM, Linley's Dungeon Crawl, and Angband). A Roguelite was any game that had some of the Berlin interpretation's features but not enough to be a true Roguelike. I'm pretty sure the devs present at the IRDC would gag at the thought of meta-progression at all, especially the raw advantage type many "roguelites" include these days.

Since any game that has procedural generation and/or death-resets gets called a Roguelike these days, nobody seems to agree on what it means anymore. Personally, I think meta-progression that eases future runs in the form of permanent statistic advantages disqualifies a game from being a roguelike/roguelite at all. At that point, you're just moving the player to the beginning on death but not actually resetting all their progress - creating a brute-force methodology to winning the game that goes against the nature of the genre basing its challenges on observation, tactics, and experience.

IthilanorStPete

2023-11-04, 03:46 PM

Cave sulfur's tricky to get even when you're referencing a wiki; those small cave systems are disorienting even when you're *not* dodging Crashfish.

How far are you? I got nearly to the end of the game; I didn't quite beat it, but I liked it a lot. I didn't spend that much time on settlement-building, my first base near the surface was pretty ad-hoc and sprawling, but I did plan out and build a second base that I thought was pretty neat.

Rynjin

2023-11-04, 04:16 PM

Well, that's the point of the "lite" bit. And brute-forcing things usually isn't in the cards in any case, since straight numerical bonuses are often run-specific, not part of the meta progression. Eg. Slay the Spire is often referred to as a Rogue-lite, because it has meta-progression. But said progression is ONLY in the form of unlocking new items/cards/options that you can find in future playthroughs.

It's sort of like if when first playing NetHack you could only start as Tourist, but by completing certain bonus objectives in a run could unlock other classes. I don't think that would in any respect constitute "brute forcing" a run, since most classes are equally viable if you know what you're doing.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-04, 04:56 PM

This is pretty much the definition I use. Most people don't care enough to make a distinction (I barely do), but that's what makes most sense to me.

Wrath of the Righteous is finally starting to inflate enemy AC to the point I'm considering dropping their stats, right at the end of Act 2 almost exactly where I remember the difficulty spike. It's not as bad as my Skald and Cleric runs felt it, but that's just because as an Earth/Fire Kineticist I can target Touch AC at-will. Maybe if I can hold on a bit longer unlocking the Path of the FRIENDSHIP!!!!!1!XD will help a bit. At the very least it'll give me a cute ickle dragon to pet (and eventually ride).

Rynjin

2023-11-04, 05:15 PM

This is pretty much the definition I use. Most people don't care enough to make a distinction (I barely do), but that's what makes most sense to me.

Yeah, I'm not a super-purist either but I think the distinction is helpful for people to know what they're looking for. Rogue-like = "every run is unique and everything has an equal chance of appearing form the start" and Rogue-lite is "every run is unique but you might unlock new stuff, so it kind of eases you into the trillion options of the game".

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-11-04, 05:17 PM

There are a lot of Roguelites where stat progression is the default. Rogue Legacy and Hades come to mind, to the point where I've met many people who think grinding meta-progress is a core feature of the genre. There's also Vampire Survivors and its many derivatives where meta-progress is expected, though I don't like calling those Roguelites.

I tend to stick to classifying traditional turn-based, tile-based, Rogue-inspired games as "Roguelikes" and there's still a lot of those being made, Quasimorph and Cogmind are fairly recent additions. Games that take the spirit of Rogue and deviate further out of turn-based or tile-based RPGs, like Enter the Gungeon or Slay the Spire, are "Roguelites." Anything that adds meta-progress beyond variety (unlocking new classes or items) ceases to be Rogue-anything at that point. If you aren't starting from zero every run, you aren't that far off most non-Rogue games that set you back some amount of progress on death.

It's sort of like how Soulslike has been stretched so thin that any game that has a stamina bar or loss of currency on death is now a Soulslike. Heck, I've seen some people put Armored Core 6 in the Soulslike category simply because it's made by FromSoftware, which is a terrible way to classify anything.

Saph

2023-11-04, 05:38 PM

A nomenclature pedantry note: Rogue-like describes a

:smallsigh:

Well, for those who are interested in the roguelike/roguelite genre, I'd recommend the game. It's a really good example of an indie game that's better polished than a triple-A one. The devs have been really good at listening to and acting on feedback.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-04, 08:16 PM

For ****'s sake. Dear WotR game designers, if you're going to design your game based on the assumption that all offensive casters will maximise Spell Penetration as fast as possible make it easy to tell what abilities are affected by spell resistance. Either an explicit tag in the ability description or a big noticeable effect to alert the player it's been resisted. That way players won't get to a major boss to find that their main character's build only works if they roll a natural 20.

Yes, one of the bosses in Drezen has 31 spell resistance, whereas every previous enemy that has had it has been in the 20s at most. Meanwhile if you've grabbed every last possible boost to spell penetration you're looking at a +14, build that also spent normal and mythic feats on accuracy maybe +10. It's also probably the most annoying boss in the game consider just how ridiculously overlevelled it is.

Yes, I'm talking about the Balor, who my dedicated fighters needed like 17s to hit. I get that mythic powers make the party more powerful, and that there's a six round limit to the fight, but you're not so powerful that he can't just wreck your party within that limit with only a little luck (point blank fireballs can wipe half a tank's health while doing basically nothing to him).

I'm sure Staunton and Minagho aren't quite as extreme defences wise, but IIRC one of the other bosses has an AC of like 40.

Saambell

2023-11-04, 09:09 PM

They really need to come up with a new term for "repeat run based meta progression game" that doesn't get "um by strict definition"ed to heck.

In terms of what I have been playing, mostly Starfield still, with occasional tries of Balder's Gate 3.

Somehow I like the openness of Starfield to just grab a pile of missions of a poster board, run off and do them, check back in and grab new ones. Sure the returns on them are minuscule and its all lazy procgen nonsense, but its kinda just how I like Bethesda games. Even when playing Skyrim, I mostly just spam bounties. Now, in Skyrim I added a mod that ups the gold reward and gives a perk point for each one I do, so its actually a very valid method of progression. But as I have yet to find something similar for Starfield it just feels wasteful. Once the Creation Engine gets released for Starfield and the bigger fancier mods start appearing I might make a new character and give it another go, but for now my drive to play is kinda stalling out.

Meanwhile BG3 is somehow less open but not as directed as Starfield to me? I have no pointers to anything and generally feel too weak to do the stuff that's there.

Getting a pile of mods ready for another Skyrim run, might get around to starting that this week now that the other big games are proving not my thing. I don't touch the main story and just run around doing side quests and seeing some corner of the map I don't often see.

Otherwise still doing daily Mobile Gacha Game things. But I don't think we usually count those here.

tonberrian

2023-11-04, 09:56 PM

I'm sure Staunton and Minagho aren't quite as extreme defences wise, but IIRC one of the other bosses has an AC of like 40.

...I'm pretty sure in the detailed view of every ability they say Spell Resistance: Yes if spell resistance applies. Might not be in the mythic spells because I think *all* of them ignore sr.

AlanBruce

2023-11-04, 10:00 PM

Röki (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1067540/Rki/)was on sale on Steam. Nordic themed puzzle adventure where you need to rescue your younger brother from a jotun.

I was fortunate enough to get it for free on PS Plus and it was a most delightful experience. I really liked the art style and story. The main character, Tove, is most endearing and uplifting, despite the dire situation she finds herself in.

I found Inside just a few days ago and decided to give it a completely blind playthrough.

I suspected there was some familiarity with Limbo. Later, I learned that its the same team, which makes perfect sense. Utterly surprised, transfixed and slightly disturbed from start to finish.

Psyren

2023-11-04, 10:26 PM

:smallsigh:

This was my reaction.

They really need to come up with a new term for "repeat run based meta progression game" that doesn't get "um by strict definition"ed to heck.

I use "roguelite" for the ones that allow for permanent power progression to carry over between runs (e.g. Hades' Mirror and Weapon upgrades), and "roguelike" for the ones that don't. (I will not be taking questions at this time)

WritersBlock

2023-11-04, 10:39 PM

The Consuming Shadow is a fantastic roguelite and I should probably do a few more runs later. (car speed is top tier as is item find rate.)

Mobius Twist

2023-11-05, 03:29 AM

Cave sulfur's tricky to get even when you're referencing a wiki; those small cave systems are disorienting even when you're *not* dodging Crashfish.

I got to the almost-end right now. I have a feeling if I wiki it, the solution will be marvelously, frustratingly obvious.

I built the escape rocket and hatched/freed the cute little baby/juvenile emperors. Now, I'm completely befuddled since nothing immediately cured me and I couldn't disable the quarantine enforcement weapon. I tried sucking up the golden stardust trailing behind the adult and/or the peepers that spread it around the world, so far no go. I'm sure the juveniles are actually out in the world for me to find and interact with, but that's 5 unique fish in 4 square (circular) kilometers of terrain, plus verticality. At least they're supposedly in "the shallows", whatever that qualifies as. They're certainly not in the starting shallows.

Mobius Twist

2023-11-05, 04:00 AM

I certainly didn't intend to go all "um ackchually" on anyone. The pedantry was meant to be an aside. The subsequent discussion was illuminating to me (had no idea about the strictness of the Berlin interpretation), so I don't feel sorry for bringing it up, but I do regret frustrating those of you fully on the up-and-up.

Against the Storm, in particular, has been very well received among the subgenre. Certainly moreso than some others I've played (Renowned Explorers: International Society (https://store.steampowered.com/app/296970/Renowned_Explorers_International_Society/), Griftlands (https://store.steampowered.com/app/601840/Griftlands/)). It's also got a novel premise to wrap the mechanics around, like Saph described.

DaedalusMkV

2023-11-05, 05:42 AM

I got to the almost-end right now. I have a feeling if I wiki it, the solution will be marvelously, frustratingly obvious.

There should have been a glowy golden ball involved in the hatching of the cuddly sea creatures. To my knowledge you would have had to have covered your arms in glowing golden goop as part of that? If not, go back to the hatching platform and look around for a glowy golden ball to poke.

You've completely all the necessary steps, you might have just somehow missed the 'cure yourself' step.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-05, 07:18 AM

...I'm pretty sure in the detailed view of every ability they say Spell Resistance: Yes if spell resistance applies. Might not be in the mythic spells because I think *all* of them ignore sr.

It's clearly noted in the spells, but not in Kinetic Blast. Which is why my Spellcasters all already have the entire Spell Penetration line, but not my main character.

Side note that I didn't realise until this run but is amazing: while WotR has your character be the one picking dialogue options checks will be performed by whoever has the highest bonus. Including Persuasion, meaning that if you want to you can dump it and just lug Daeran around. It's something that would really make skill point allocation easier of added to other CRPGs (yes BG3 I'm looking at you).

The Consuming Shadow is a fantastic roguelite and I should probably do a few more runs later. (car speed is top tier as is item find rate.)

Is that the one made by the sweary video game review guy? I keep meaning to try it but never remember to.

Cygnia

2023-11-05, 07:58 AM

Since it's currently free on Epic Games, I binged through "Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion" last night. Twistedly adorable evenifIdidplayitonGodMode.

Bohandas

2023-11-05, 11:18 AM

They really need to come up with a new term for "repeat run based meta progression game" that doesn't get "um by strict definition"ed to heck.

Similarly they also need to come up with a term for a game with procedurally generated levels that doesn't come with all the other baggage of the term "roguelike"

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-05, 11:37 AM

So anyway, any new Doom CL nes come out recently? :smalltobgue:

Considering we still have arguments over what ARPG means I don't think we're looking at this getting sorted any time soon. We should also probably drop WRPG and JRPG, especially as the second spent quite a while with negative connotations, but that's not too likely to happen. I prefer to talk about the Isometric RPG Renaissance rather than the WRPG Renaissance but I believe I'm in the minority.

Rynjin

2023-11-05, 12:02 PM

It's clearly noted in the spells, but not in Kinetic Blast. Which is why my Spellcasters all already have the entire Spell Penetration line, but not my main character.

It's because it's not universal to Kinetic Blasts in general. Energy Blasts (Fire, Electricity, Cold, etc.) are subject to Spell Resistance, but physical Blasts (Earth, Wood, Air, etc.) are not. If it attacks Touch, it interacts with SR.

So anyway, any new Doom Clones come out recently? :smalltongue:

You jest, but I think that genre title might still be usable. There are plenty of retro-inspired games coming out now that could be reasonably described as explicit Doom clones rather than "just" an FPS.

Although the accepted genre name for them is now "Boomer Shooter" lol.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-05, 12:11 PM

I swear the game doesn't spell that out, serves me right for not attempting to throw magma in the fight. I should also probably pick up a few of the AoE blast types, although I do like how Earth basically focuses on ranged combat maneuvers.

Although the accepted genre name for them is now "Boomer Shooter" lol.

Yeah, I used Doom Clone precisely because I knew that there's an accepted name for games explicitly copying Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. More seriously my point was that the name for a genre is really just what everybody accepts.

Mobius Twist

2023-11-05, 03:28 PM

You've completely all the necessary steps, you might have just somehow missed the 'cure yourself' step.

Huh. I went back and visited the area you mention and there's nothing there. I'm of the opinion that it just didn't spawn, rather than it despawned or I missed it. Time to go globetrotting to find the ring of power, I guess.

Rodin

2023-11-05, 03:46 PM

Although the accepted genre name for them is now "Boomer Shooter" lol.

Even so I don't know that I like folding all of them under the "Boomer Shooter" label. As you say, a Doom Clone implies that it's an homage to the original Doom games. It implies retro. Which funnily enough puts Doom Eternal into a separate category from its own series, but I still feel that there's enough distinction there to separate out the games which follow the old-school design principles as opposed to modern Doom Eternal and the games made to mimic it.

Still, I guess there's no point in nitpicking. The big terms kinda have to be vague because there's so many sub-genres that you need all-encompassing terms to give newcomers a general idea. Roguelite for "random generation, permadeath, with progression between runs" is perfectly fine for getting you into the main genre. Then you can start subdividing - it is a Slay the Spire Clone? Or is it closer to Binding of Isaac? Maybe it's a Dead Cells style game.

Start with kingdom (RPG) and then work your way down to species (Baldur's Gate 2 style real-time-with-pause party-based Western RPG).

Psyren

2023-11-05, 04:08 PM

"Frustrating" is a bit strong of a way to characterize what was ultimately a brief eyeroll and a quick pagedown on my part :smalltongue: It's not like skipping any of the wrangling cost me more than a few seconds after all, so no worries!

I'm still playing Baldurs Gate 3 but the new update caused just enough instability with my mod layout that I'm taking the excuse for a quick break.

Exoprimal (Capcom's third-person "Warframe meets Dino Crisis" horde shooter) has a free weekend on Steam currently! It's scratching a bit of that itch Anthem's abandonment left me with. It's also included on GamePass for those who end up wanting to play past this weekend.

I'm also firing up Resident Evil 4 again to get through the Separate Ways story DLC, and will be playing Remnant 2 after that.

IthilanorStPete

2023-11-05, 05:16 PM

I got to the almost-end right now

Great, I can share my base without spoiling anything. :smallbiggrin: I built it in the Lost River, in the cavern with the big blue tree:

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/792006428734166360/A11650A1C9ED5289E3BA69577E7B2F0B6AF4E3B3/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

From left to right:

Moonpool; annoyingly the base is just a bit deeper than the Seamoth's max depth (even with the best depth module), so getting the Seamoth in and out of the Moonpool would cause some damage.
The big stack of multipurpose rooms has three Alien Containment tanks stacked on each other, with a nuclear reactor in the basem*nt to power everything.
Observatory for relaxing and enjoying the view.
Multipurpose room for storage.
Living space, with a bedroom on the top floor.
Scanner room.

This video (https://youtu.be/xeOIEv6iGto?t=212) shows how you should have gotten the cure (~3:30 in). Googling around, it seems like this behavior can be somewhat buggy; this thread (https://steamcommunity.com/app/264710/discussions/0/1473095331504046350/?ctp=1) has some conversation about it, though nothing conclusive (and it's based on older versions, anyways).

Mobius Twist

2023-11-05, 06:38 PM

The base is lovely, IthilanorStPete. I had that area marked as "Ferngully Tree", given its contents. As I recall, it's also right next to the entrance to the lava biomes, so that's a very useful place to settle down.

I did ultimately find the golden enzyme blobs today. They seemingly spawned on the other side of the portal (near the Precursor Quarantine weapon structure) and got batted about by fish and such. It was such a "oh, that's where I put my socks" moment of disenchatment with the climax of the whole game when I quite literally bumbled upon one. I'm far more amused by the thought of some newbie later discovering my gift of one whole cave sulfur via the time capsule. Frankly, that's about all one needs.

warty goblin

2023-11-05, 10:12 PM

The further I get in Tower of Time, the more impressed I am. The game paints with a very light touch, leaving a lot up to implication and the player's imagination. The world has been overcome by some apocalypse, but beyond the sun being obscured, it's left very vague - the entire game is set in the eponymous tower so you never see the outside world - and you have a lot of imaginative and interpretive space.

This is also the first time in ages that I'm genuinely interested in the lore diaries. Mostly because they aren't lore so much as their own story, compelling both in itself and for how it interleaves with the story I'm playing.

It sort of feels like a novel, almost. Not structurally, but in the slow revealing of a single central story, and the hints about what lays ahead.

Wookieetank

2023-11-06, 01:51 PM

Edit: for the Horrendous Necktie to say its most important lines, you need to never take it off. Which is annoying, because the game doesn't tell you that and other neck items have better stats.

Ah, makes sense. Although I've been running the Thinker premade without any difficulties staying alive.

That's unfortunate on the Necktie, took it off once to sing Karaoke (still failed), and then yesterday pickled it in alcohol.

Managed to find out most of the story of what's going on, but there's a number of people being overly cagey still, and some rather glaring discrepancies related to who is to blame.

Found the bullet wound, and got the story from Klaasje that he was shot through the window of her room while romping, but no one heard the gunfire, or the glass shatter. Not to mention the improbability of getting a bullet wound in the top of your mouth from that.

A lot of things were pointing to Ruby, but:
Finally tracked down Ruby, and was unable to keep her from offing herself. Pretty sure this is yet another thing that is gonna bite back hard.

Hoping either today or tomorrow I can find out what's going on.

Sapphire Guard

2023-11-06, 08:11 PM

60 hours this time, it feel much shorter than DA1, but wasn't that much really.

Very mixed feelings.

After the Deep Roads, there is a difficulty spike, but it is a boring difficulty spike, because it's just 'more people suddently appear once you have dealt with the current batch'. I have a strong preference for fewer more dangerous enemies than random giant gangs unless you have a good reason, so didn't enjoy the combat as much. I was a bit more completionist with this one, but didn't do every mission. (the smear campaign against Aveline is not worth my time, and after the third massacre at my mine, the dragon can goddamned have it.)

There's basically good character work, and I did enjoy it, but the main plot relies on a lot of coincidences and requires the Templars to never actually be where they are needed.

Tried to romance Fenris, it almost worked but he had a memory flashback at the wrong moment. Then Merrill decided she loved me out of nowhere after we bonded over killing her mentor (?), I accidentally slept with her because I didn't realise that was what the dialogue choice meant and had to break up the following morning.

Isabela dropped out of the party because I didn't go on her mission (the only reasons to prioritise her were meta, but I didn't care about her anyway.)

Friends: Bethany, Aveline, Varric, Anders.

Rivals: Merrill, entirely by accident.

Undecided: Fenris

Absent: Isabela.

There had the bones of something interesting there, but the overall issue in this game seems to basically be bureaucratic. Meredith shouldn't have the power to invoke the right of annulment by herself. Notably, Gregoir didn't in DA:O, he had to send for Denerrim for authorisation. Kirkwall is a city state, but perhaps she should need agreement from the viscount or the chantry or something. Also, avoid cursed idols (what the idol is, why Meredith was in the market for ancient dwarven idols, why it gives her the power to animate appropriate statues, unexplained.)

Mages don't like being under the Templars, but they also turn into demons at the drop of a hat, and they don't have any alternative. Except in tevinter the brutal slave empire, which everyone hates but everyone also sends their problem mages there for training. As far as we know so far, it isn't overrun by demons, oddly enough. Unless we find out later that it secretly is, which would not entirely surprise me.

All out war is perhaps the least interesting way to end it. I played through both endings, but they are basically identical. Varric's monologue at the end is even identical. it's one of those fake telltale games choices which make no real difference. Same bossfights, but mages are much harder to deal with as enemies, and motivations shift very slightly. Mredith has no reason to try to kill me if I side with her. Side with the mages, and she has reason, but Orsino decides he is doomed after we easily squash the first wave of templars in goes for his worthless blood ritual.

I executed Anders (I didn't complete his 'get me into the chantry' mission because I thought this would happen), which lost me my primary healer just before the final stretch. Tried to go it wothout Bethany and couldn't, but she's weirdly okay with purging all the mages and the Templars are mysteriously okay with having her and Merrill on my team).

Mages are far more difficult to deal with than Templars, even if the story seems to think it is the other way around.

I'm late to that conversation, but I'm willing to give them a laack of different currencies/calendars/languages because that's a giant headache for the player to have to deal with converting calendars or worrying about exchange rates and such. Having a singular elven/dwarven culture is something of a shortcut, making them both almost exterminated minorities mean you don't have to come up with multiple cultures for the non human races, you have two each, amounting to Surface dwarves/Orzammar Dwarves, City Elves/Dalish, and Qun/not Qun. You have only so much time for writers to develop these things. Most notable thing was that Orzammar is the only surviving dwarven city, which means that a Blight in Ferelden should have triggered an exalted march from the chantry to save it, because if Ferelden falls, access to Orzammar goes with it. Which means no lyrium, which means, templars, mages, and chantry all come crashing down. Which would be easily addressed by having other surviving dwarven cities. We wouldn't have to see them, just know they're there. (I know there is a recently discovered one caled Kal Shurok, but until then Orzammar was thought to be the last survivor.)

Kirkwall...doesn't really seem any different that Ferelden culturally. Even the monsters are the same.

Ignimortis

2023-11-07, 01:26 AM

Been getting back into Elden Ring lately - it's become my "game to mindlessly walk through while actually listening to podcasts and YT", to be honest. After a few playthroughs, I think that From do not test their games strenuously enough from the point of actual design - doing a fist weapon playthrough is far, far, far more punishing than just picking up the (Colossal) Greatsword and going to town, and several recurring enemies are absolutely not tuned for weapons shorter than straight swords, with most strikes whiffing despite me being pressed against their hitbox. In general, having a Colossal weapon seems to make the game as easy as it can be without cheesing bleed builds.

Then again, doing a twin Reduvia run was also not very easy until I hit +8 or +9 on both of them and levelled up enough Arcane that bleed procced every third L1 combo or so - ended up melting Mohg before he could even enter P2 - so the worst offenders for bleed are actually katanas, which just have both the raw damage and the status buildup.

And some weapons with a unique moveset end up suffering because of said moveset - the Treespear has an interesting charged R2 that hits twice, but that double hit costs stamina with every swing, and actually does not do increased stance damage. It also has no innate bleed/frost buildup, which means that it doesn't interact well with either of the two primary combat subsystems the game has. Still not sure why the hell ER has no visible stance bar when it's one of the most important mechanics in the game.

Corlindale

2023-11-07, 02:02 AM

Hah, I just checked into this thread to post about getting back into Elden Ring. There's some Internet hivemind stuff going on, probably.

Still very much a novice plodding through my first playthrough while trying to look up as little as possible. Not playing completely blind anymore though, as I have been checking the occasional wiki when stuck at a specific point, or confused about some mechanics. I have reached the boss of the Academy and thought I had finally beaten her, only to discover there is a second phase to the battle which promptly melted me. So now I'm exploring other stuff until I get a little stronger. Found a cliffside mineshaft in Liurnia, which may be the key to finally getting both my staff and my cold-enhanced shortsword to +15 (playing Astrologer going for a fairly pure mage build, as has been my tradition with all the Souls-games). I've mostly been levelling Vigor, Mind and Int so far, almost at level 50 now.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-07, 05:10 AM

60 hours this time, it feel much shorter than DA1, but wasn't that much really.

Very mixed feelings.

There's basically good character work, and I did enjoy it, but the main plot relies on a lot of coincidences and requires the Templars to never actually be where they are needed.

Isabela dropped out of the party because I didn't go on her mission (the only reasons to prioritise her were meta, but I didn't care about her anyway.)

Friends: Bethany, Aveline, Varric, Anders.

Rivals: Merrill, entirely by accident.

Undecided: Fenris

Absent: Isabela.

Mages are far more difficult to deal with than Templars, even if the story seems to think it is the other way around.

Kirkwall...doesn't really seem any different that Ferelden culturally. Even the monsters are the same.

A lot of DA2's issues stem from two things:
1) it didn't get the time needed for a redraft and rebalance
2) it's basically a 40+ hour prologue to Inquisition

Both the mages and Templars get better treatment in Inquisition and it actually explains what the freaking MacGuffin was. Plus Inquisition drops the endless wave based combat, but sadly removes almost every ability that isn't +damage or +defence. On the plus side your character can have HORNS, I like horny characters

Ignimortis

2023-11-07, 11:09 AM

Hah, I just checked into this thread to post about getting back into Elden Ring. There's some Internet hivemind stuff going on, probably.

Really enjoying myself, and I continue to be impressed by how gorgeous the game looks. It seems every other moment there is a stunning vista to look at, and no one does a sprawling, gothic castle like From Software. Even opening a door they always turn into a dramatic moment.
+15 is unlikely unless you head to some areas that are pretty rough for a beginner right after finishing Liurnia. Then again, western Caelid should be okay for level 45 to 50, so you might want to poke around there for a mine. Regarding the Academy boss, her second phase's weakness is constant pressure - it's a fight that highly rewards you for staying in melee as much as possible, as her poise is non-existent and you can interrupt a lot of her spells. A +10 to +12 weapon should be enough to deal with her, especially with a Cold weapon.

As for the game being gorgeous, I would generally agree. It's not spectacular technically, but some vistas are great, and the Legacy Dungeons (big dungeons with important bosses) are generally well-designed, Stormveil Castle in particular.

Corlindale

2023-11-07, 11:57 AM

+15 is unlikely unless you head to some areas that are pretty rough for a beginner right after finishing Liurnia. Then again, western Caelid should be okay for level 45 to 50, so you might want to poke around there for a mine. Regarding the Academy boss, her second phase's weakness is constant pressure - it's a fight that highly rewards you for staying in melee as much as possible, as her poise is non-existent and you can interrupt a lot of her spells. A +10 to +12 weapon should be enough to deal with her, especially with a Cold weapon.

Thanks for the advice. I already found and raided two mine-type areas in Caelid, so my staff is already +14, although my sword is only about +8. I just somehow missed that cliffside mine entrance on the map in Liurnia for the longest time.

Good tips for the boss. Only tried phase 2 that one time, but spellslinging from a distance certainly did not seem to work well (don't try to beat her at her own game, I guess the message is). The Cold sword was also key in the first phase, did much more damage once I switched away from Magic. So the plan is to give it another go once its levelled up a bit more. Should also get me more quickly through the first phase, as an extra bonus.

Yeah, I generally feel the game peaks in the big dungeons (although I've only played Stormhill and Academy so far). Both because of brilliant design, but perhaps also because they are the parts that most closely resemble the more focused nature of the Dark Souls-games. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about From Soft's decision to go open-world, so perhaps that's why I particularly enjoy the more focused and tightly designed big dungeons.

Rynjin

2023-11-07, 12:11 PM

Colossal weapons are like...the weakest weapon type in ER across the board lol. They were made a lot better with patches but are still mostly subpar with a few specific weapons being the exception. As for fists, the Spiked Caestus for example will absolutely destroy pretty much anything in the game if you build for Arcane a lot easier than using a big honking sword will. I found the Cipher Pata to be a solid backup weapon (not great as main since damage is subpar) as well since it has zero weight and easy access to a shield piercing move. It does pure elemental damage so bypasses the defense of enemies with the massive physical defense buffs. For Dex/Quality builds the Veteran's Prosthesis is very solid as well. Never tried a pure Strength-based fist build before I started putting mods into the mix so I won't comment on the efficacy of like the Iron Ball or anything, but I assume the Star Fist is similarly good.

The Lifesteal Fist (Ash of War, not the actual weapon) is also surprisingly good. It works on pretty much anything that's not a boss or supermassive enemy, including like the Fell Ogres and other large baddies.

Ultimately it's just a matter of building right and having a feel for the weapon type. I'm guessing you player UGS build sin previous Souls games and keep a similar muscle memory; likewise I still used Fists in other games and have a good feel for when and how I can safely attack.

Not saying the game is 100% balanced, but what you have a feel for is much more important than the actual weapon class for the most part.

Ignimortis

2023-11-07, 01:00 PM

Not saying the game is 100% balanced, but what you have a feel for is much more important than the actual weapon class for the most part.
Nope, was never a UGS user in previous games. If anything, my preferred weapon for the DS games was either a polearm or a thrusting sword (generally Estoc), although DS 3 sort of forced me to use a regular greatsword (BKS) to make any decent progress near the end of the game.

My first playthrough of ER was with a Keen/Cold Heavy Epee into Cold Godskin Stitcher, and let's just say that a second playthrough with a Heavy Greatsword was so much easier in every respect - somehow it is fast enough to not feel slow, has absurdly high range and extremely comfortable attack arcs, can serve as a shield in a pinch, and punches through stance like nothing, as well as having stupidly high damage when Heavy-infused. I initially thought that it was just my familiarity with the game, but my next playthroughs convinced me otherwise.

Occult Spiked Caestus is decent, but before I discovered a true combo with Storm Stomp (very late into the game), it was a pain to deal with enemies with actual poise (i.e. the most troublesome enemies in general), or bosses whose hitbox was smaller/misaligned with collision boxes - for instance, Erdtree Avatars and Gargoyles of all stripes are simply a PITA for Caestus. Ball/Stars are terrific with STR, but I liked the imagery of Caestus better. Other fist weapons felt terrible, since they do very little stance damage and don't really compensate for it with anything else in PvE. Oh, and both deer bosses were basically unplayable with fists, because you can't hit them properly when locked on and have to free-aim punches at small targets, namely their legs.
Double Reduvia was excellent starting from midgame onwards, before that it was just a Blood Dagger with all the weaknesses of a dagger (terrible damage, no stance damage to speak of, little range) but a decent AoW. Felt nice to simply shred through a certain lategame Duo in 20 seconds, though.
A katana playthrough was also very easy, because the Uchigatana simply has everything for some reason, even if you don't go for Rivers of Blood or Arcane builds. Great range, solid damage, insane default AoW, and bleed buildup on top of that, too.

Currently I'm running a Flame Art Flamberge faith build, and it seems to be somewhere middle of the road for now (good damage, good stance damage, decent reach, weak bleed sometimes helps out), but I haven't made it to the snowy part of the game yet, so that might change. Tried out the Treespear, but in most fights it was outright worse than the Flamberge despite being reinforced to the max and the Flamberge lagging behind. It does good damage, but the moveset is too unwieldy for what it offers.

Rynjin

2023-11-07, 01:47 PM

Jump attacks good is all I can say.

Manual Workaround Tentative Fix (Works for existing customers not new):
Any item used with Item generation list, and
Updated what they want to see on list Double Reduvia was excellent starting from midgame onwards, before that it was just a Blood Dagger with all the weaknesses of a dagger (terrible damage, no stance damage to speak of, little range) but a decent AoW. Felt nice to simply shred through a certain lategame Duo in 20 seconds, though.
A katana playthrough was also very easy, because the Uchigatana simply has everything for some reason, even if you don't go for Rivers of Blood or Arcane builds. Great range, solid damage, insane default AoW, and bleed buildup on top of that, too.
[/quote]

Yeah, the Uchigatana is and has always been good. I didn't have the chutzpah to stick with double daggers past the early game, it felt SO bad.

There are a lot of really good regular greatswords for Faith builds unsurprisingly. The Blasphemous Blade in particular is very nice.

Side note, I'm glad somebody else uses ER as their "idle game".

Sapphire Guard

2023-11-07, 05:33 PM

A lot of DA2's issues stem from two things:
1) it didn't get the time needed for a redraft and rebalance
2) it's basically a 40+ hour prologue to Inquisition

Once again, you don't have to jump in and explain future events every time I refer to them.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-07, 05:59 PM

Once again, you don't have to jump in and explain future events every time I refer to them.

Oh please, that's barely telling you about events. It's not like I'm blabbing about how Cassandra is in a secret relationship with Black wall for 90% of the game.

Cygnia

2023-11-08, 09:40 AM

Binged through "Finding Paradise" last night, a sequel to "To The Moon". Another game where you're tasked with granting a dying man's last request virtually.

warty goblin

2023-11-08, 10:15 AM

Cleared the second floor in Tower of Time, after getting slightly hung up on the last fight. This one featured three portals that summoned enemies on timers, like Goldilocks there was a long time for really dangerous stuff, a medium timer for the not too bad stuff, and a short timer for your basic orc scrubs.

The complicating factor is that if you attack a portal, it's timer decreases. This meant that it was really easy to, say, go after the hard portal, get flanked by the easy/medium portals, and then absolutely dumpstered by the arriving hard wave.

The other complicating factor was that my most powerful strategy is to fix an enemy horde in place with magical runic land mines then drop a cloud of lightning on their heads. Easy to do defensively, more challenging on the offense.

Also I'd used a couple items that permanently reduced my druids HP for more mana. Dude has the health of a hemophiliac lodging with Count Dracula, but he can cast spells all day. At least until something looks at him sideways and he dies, turns put a full mana bar doesn't really do you much good when dead. So I spent a lot of resources tweaking all his items to give +hp and scored him a nifty new wand. Also found a very good shield that does %armor as a constant AoE. So now my tank is very tanky, and also his armor kills you.

Now I'm scouting out floor 3, running around in the rafters looking at the hordes of evil plant(?) beast things below, while the party keeps being all "hope we don't have to fight those."

Bad news guys. We're gonna have to fight those.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-08, 04:52 PM

Got into Act 3 of Wrath of the Righteous properly, and as Azata appear to be some kind of fey monarchs, or at least the celestial version, I've had to come up with a name for my court.

Now I could do rude, but that's not really fun in a game clearly aimed at adults where I can sleep with a good third of the party. So instead I tried to be silly and whimsical.

I now rule over the Court of the Aromatic Sky.

Other than that while I did enjoy Angel for going all serious at all the right moments, I'm liking Azata a lot more because underneath all the silliness there's a kind of logic. Aivu is a kid, but she'll help keep the commander from overly focusing on the big picture. Half of the free crusaders are artists, but they'll also be the ones who keep the crusade's morale up and avoid it becoming drudgery. And the alchemist... Is pretty much everything I want in a mad scientist, welcome aboard let me know when you've come up with explosive Ice IX!

Corlindale

2023-11-09, 01:51 AM

Still playing Elden Ring, feels like I've gotten pretty far compared to where I was. Turns out that cliffside mineshaft led all the way up to the Altus Plateau, a huge new area I've only just tentatively begun to explore. I quickly located yet another mineshaft and finally have those juicy +15 weapons. Also found a boss with a really neat-looking dark magic sword I wouldn't mind stealing, once I am good enough to take him.

Had another go at the Academy boss but still died on the second phase. But it was a close thing, I feel I understand how to do it now. It also helps that the first phase feels like easy mode now that I now exactly what to do (only one attack in the first phase is actually dangerous, and it is HEAVILY telegraphed and easy to avoid when you know how).

Psyren

2023-11-09, 04:23 PM

Got into Act 3 of Wrath of the Righteous properly, and as Azata appear to be some kind of fey monarchs, or at least the celestial version, I've had to come up with a name for my court.

Azata are the PF version of D&D's Arborea celestials (called Eladrin in 3.5e, no idea if they're still called that in 5e where Eladrin are now more associated with the Feywild than the CG outer plane.)

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-09, 05:32 PM

Yes, but for the game 'fairy monarch' seems to be the relevant archetype. Wonder, chaos, and a court independent of mortal power structures.

The game is simplifying Pathfinder lore so as not to confuse people, hence Archons being called Angels, Azata having a more fey than celestial presentation, and the Demon/Devil split only mattering on two out of six paths (and thankfully not Demon itself). Considering that there's no actual Fey path Azata leaning into fairy trappings isn't a bad thing.

I've also already got plans for subsequent runs, including a Rogue/Trickster (partially out of annoyance that Woljiff is a caster) and Cavalier or Paladin* Demon->Legend run. Might even do Demon->Gold Dragon at some point.

* Possibly a Good character who fights their transformation, possibly a Paladin of Tyranny if that's an included archetype,.

warty goblin

2023-11-09, 07:08 PM

Previous Crimsonland Waves high scores: 6 million and change. New Crimsonland Waves mode high score: 15.67 million, 5,400 kills.

The land was, indeed, crimson. So very, very crimson.

Zevox

2023-11-10, 12:57 AM

Open Beta for Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising started tonight, so I got some time in with it. Best news for me, training mode is in the beta now, so I can actually try and learn some things about characters before fighting people.

Played about 30 matches with Vira. I was generally having fun, but I can already tell that against better players, I was not thrilled with what the neutral came down to with her. Feels a bit too honest - no projectiles, her only advancing special move is questionable on block, her pokes feel so-so. She does get air dashing, but only after entering her armored state, which requires either using a super install or landing a pretty slow command grab. I'm currently thinking she probably won't be my character, even though there's some things I do like about her.

Unfortunately, the timing for the beta is awkward for me. It goes through most of tomorrow, but between work and my D&D group I won't really have time for it then. It's then down on Saturday for some reason, and back on basically all day Sunday. Which functionally means Sunday will be my only real time with it outside of the couple of hours tonight. I'll need to squeeze in trying a bunch of characters though, there's so many more than there were in the base version of the previous game, which is all I've played before. Just from brief fiddling in training mode tonight, definitely want to give Zooey, Belial, Avatar Belial, and Yuel a shot (though Yuel feels like she may too complicated to learn in a brief beta, better saved for launch), plus maybe Cagliostro or Seox. And that's ignoring the characters I liked in the original game, who I do kind of want to see how they've changed too.

Form

2023-11-10, 07:09 AM

I've been puzzling my way through the The Talos Principle II and having a good time. I'm enjoying the puzzles, the bits of lore and I approve of the robots' apparent obsession with cats (there's a cat monument in the city and a bunch of them have cats). So far it's nothing too complicated and it's taking care to gradually introduce new puzzle elements.

The only thing that bugs me is that I suspect I missed out on a secret near the beginning. There was a puzzle element outside of the bounds of one of the puzzles in the booting up simulation which I couldn't get to, no matter how much I looked around and searched for hidden switches or platforming tricks. Maaaaybe I'll return to that area later in the game? Ah well, I don't have to find everything.

Cygnia

2023-11-10, 08:34 AM

I've yet to finish the first game. Which is driving me NUTS because I like it a lot, but I just don't have the eye-hand coordination to get past some of the levels' moving bombs (and these are the levels I can't parkour my way out of). :smallfrown:

Form

2023-11-10, 08:59 AM

The game doesn't tell you this, but you can put boxes on top of floating mines and ride them. There's at least one puzzle that requires you to do exactly that and I got stuck on that one for a while, constantly trying to dodge the mines instead of using the boxes this way.

Cygnia

2023-11-10, 09:11 AM

Unfortunately for the levels I still need to finish, that trick isn't applicable.

warty goblin

2023-11-10, 10:02 AM

Started exploring Age of Wonders 4 with the most recent patch/dlc. It's good. I mean it already was good. But it's even better now.

First big change, the race/ancestry system has been deepened. Now instead of each species getting a body and a mind trait, you get five points to pick what you like. There's default options for appropriately elvish elves, but you can tweak away for wood elves or underground dark elves or just go full min-max.

Second big change, which is DLC exclusive, the Seals victory is back. I'll have to see how good the AI is at going for Seals, one of the reasons it was so good in Age 3 is the AI did a pretty good job of contesting them.

Also the DLC adds bird people. Nifty. And a sort of magical technology pirate culture, so now I'm playing a hot babe fire sorceress from beyond space and time leading a horde of magical buccaneer lizards. I didn't know this was a thing I wanted, but its so goofy and pulpy and awesome.

Zevox

2023-11-10, 08:30 PM

Unfortunately, the timing for the beta is awkward for me. It goes through most of tomorrow, but between work and my D&D group I won't really have time for it then.
Well, I was wrong, D&D got canceled this week, so I had several more hours with GBFVR. Tried out Zooey and Avatar Belial, liking both of them better than Vira I'd say. Zooey may be my favorite at this moment, I like the sheer variety she has to her bag of tricks, including an air projectile that can bait anti-airs. Avatar Belial actually felt rough to try initially, but I was getting the hang of him after a while - though it seems he's significantly nerfed from the original game, since in this one only the new blue special moves that cost 50% super meter give hard knockdowns, and he apparently used to have a meterless combo ender that gave him hard knockdown at the expense of spending some of his health to do it. Kind of hope they give him that back honestly.

Also, have to say, it's really nice to play a fighting game with good music again. The last two I played were Street Fighter 6 and DNF Duel, and while DNF has a couple of good tracks, its music is mostly forgettable outside of Brawl of Hendon Myre. And SF6's music is its weak point, if it's not Jamie or Kimberly's themes (or round 3 with JP's), it's not worth listening to. But Granblue's got great music in spades. I've been setting my pick to Parade's Lust thus far, but listening to other people's picks when they're player 1 is still pretty darn good.

Cespenar

2023-11-11, 11:20 AM

I dipped my toes into Lamplighters League out of respect for the developer, and it's... good, but a bit too XCOM-clony to be a great game, IMO.

So also got into Mask of the Rose, which looks good so far, though it's too early to say for sure. There's an Obra Dinnlike mechanic for creating custom stories and then using them as guesses, lies, etc. but we'll see how good it will be utilized.

Also, obviously, the Fallen London fellas can write.

Zevox

2023-11-13, 01:06 AM

So, I actually had a lot more time with Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising than I thought. I'd misread the beta schedule, and it was not down all day yesterday, just in the evening and into the late night on Friday. So I got plenty of time to try out the characters I wanted to after all.

Of those I played, Belial was a clear favorite, probably the one I used the most. He may have leapfrogged Zooey as my favorite of the new characters - that tricky projectile of his is great fun to use, and his command grab quite satisfying to land. Unlike his Avatar version he feels more like, while an all-around overall, he wants to be in close (Avatar Belial definitely leans more towards the zoning side of things), which is more to my liking for sure. And I've just gotta love his goofy, over-the-top Incubus-style personality and animations, you don't see this kind of thing often with male characters in... well, anything, really, but fighting games included.

I also liked what I played of Yuel quite a bit, but she'll definitely take more time to get the hang of than I was going to have in the beta, so I didn't stick with her too long; she's a "give her more of a shot when the game's out" character. Cagliostro I tried for a bit, and as a zoner she's probably more to my liking than Avatar Belial (has traps and pillar summons rather than just various projectiles), but not one I think would be a top pick for my main. And I also gave my old main, Zeta, a spin towards the end of tonight, and yep, still quite like her. Wanted to do a bit with Percival too, but he's more complicated and I waited too long to do it since I was trying the new characters. But yeah, I've definitely got a fair few characters I'll need to play for a while before I can decide on a main once this comes out, which is a good thing.

Was also kind of impressed by the character variety I ran into online. Aside from the one character who has never been playable before this beta, Anila the sheep lady, no one stands out too much as the "popular character" that I saw a lot of - and even Anila wasn't all over the place, just noticeably more frequent to see than any one other character. I could probably identify a few that were slightly more common than most, but they weren't so common that it was too noticeable. There's a few that I saw only once or twice, and I think two I didn't see at all (Anre and Seox), but overall a good, solid variety to the opponents. Which is quite nice compared to playing the original version back in 2020, where Gran, Zeta, and Katalina felt way more common than anyone else, IIRC.

NeoVid

2023-11-13, 02:03 AM

After finishing my playthrough of Fuga 2, I decided to search the Game Pass for things that have been on my Steam wishlist so I could play through them without spending more cash.

First up was TOEM, which was pretty much what it looked like: A relaxing photographic exploration/puzzle game. Got hooked, but because the game was so nice and short, I finished it in a weekend. And I'm glad I did, it was a unique experience... and I should have realized that the game is in black-and-white so that the one moment that isn't stands out even more.

Next, I decided to try one that's been making a big impact recently: Sea of Stars. At first, it looked like it would be another of the 30% of Game Pass games I couldn't get to launch successfully, but then I saw a recommendation to delete one specific file from the game's save location, and it worked perfectly after that. What the?

Anyway, a couple of hours in it was bringing back my best memories of playing Suikoden/Chrono Trigger/Wild Arms, which is clearly what the developers were going for. SOS also has several mechanical features that I've never seen in a JRPG, like multiple reasons to use the basic Attack command, and to pay attention to enemy actions in random fights. The entire reason I learned how to minmax in games is due to my JRPG experience in my younger days, where abusing the combat mechanics would mean the fights almost became a non-issue and didn't get in the way of the parts of the game I cared about. SOS is actually making me want to go into combat, which is ironic since its open world enemies don't drop anything worth the effort. The story and setting, the things that primarily keep me interested, are pretty damn good. Just the change from the tutorial zone to the first island you reach is making me wonder just how varied this setting is going to get. I'm going into this game nearly blind, something I rarely do in RPGs, but I have heard that there's some very out of left field weirdness in the game, which I'm looking forward to. The player characters being "The two chosen ones... and their ordinary nonmagical best friend" is another variation on the formula that I want to see the result of. I think I'm going to be staying with this game for a while...

Erloas

2023-11-13, 09:06 AM

Still been playing Cities Skylines 2, I haven't noticed much for performance issues, though I've only now passed 75k people and I think most people didn't run into big problems until 100-150k.

It has some of the same traffic issues, and demands of the first. Like you're normal city of 40k people is usually pretty slow but it's easy to have huge traffic problems by then. I also have a medical and technical college, 2 regular colleges, and a university, which seems like a lot, but then only one high school.

There also seems to be complaints from buildings about crime even though the maps show good coverage.

Overall though it's good if you like the genre. I really like the production\supply info, and the specialized industry is similar to the DLC in the first game. The parking is a new thing to manage, it works it just seems oddly specific to control, maybe that's just because it hasn't been a thing in other games.
The ability to finely tweak the roads is nice, it's not quite as robust as the Move-It mod from the first but it's a big improvement over the base in the original.

I'm just wishing I had planned out the start of my city better. But it's a bit hard to plan for larger roads and infrastructure when you're a long ways away from unlocking them. And destroying large areas of established buildings to upgrade the roads or put paths in is hard, at least psychologically.
But I'm having fun, and stayed up way too late several times doing just a little bit more.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-13, 10:05 PM

Went back to Dragon Quest XI, found the place needed to continue the plot, and after a couple of hours got what seems to be the final two party members (Funny Old Man and Sexy Noble Lady). Then for some reason the game became Final Fantasy and told me to find four crystals orbs.

This game can have a weird habit of playing a cutscene, having you walk ten steps, and then triggering another cutscene. Getting the orbs quest is probably the most extreme example (they probably should have had the second cutscene when you nearly get back to the ship), but at least the story's been generally decent so far (I like that we picked up a MacGuffin all the way back in the first proper dungeon).

tonberrian

2023-11-13, 11:46 PM

Orbs are a Dragon Quest Tradition dating back to DQ 3!

Rynjin

2023-11-14, 12:37 AM

Orbs are a Dragon Quest Tradition dating back to DQ 3!

I've only played a little of XI and never any of the others but they hammer in very early the "He's reincarnated from some other Hero" thing so much I figured he was supposed to be the reincarnation of a previous game's Hero. Make of that what you will.

Zevox

2023-11-14, 12:04 PM

Orbs are a Dragon Quest Tradition dating back to DQ 3!

Edit: Looking at the wiki, the orbs in DQ XI might in fact be the same orbs from DQ 3, because it looks sort of like the world of DQ 3 is the far future of DQ 11 due to post game cutscenes. This would make it the same world as DQ 1 and 2 since those take place in the future of DQ 3. But it's not entirely clear what's going on in the cutscenes, and i haven't seen them to form an opinion, so *shrug*.
The bolded isn't entirely true. While DQ3 is a prequel to 1 and 2 in that it turns out the character you play in 3 is the legendary hero you were descended from in 1 and 2, the world in which most of 3 takes place is not the world from 1 and 2. You travel to the world from 1 and 2 late in 3, and the portal between the two closes when you beat the final boss, stranding you there. So if the world from 11 is the same as from 3 - which I don't recall being the case, but it's been a while since I played it - it still wouldn't be the same one from 1 and 2.

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-11-14, 12:44 PM

The bolded isn't entirely true. While DQ3 is a prequel to 1 and 2 in that it turns out the character you play in 3 is the legendary hero you were descended from in 1 and 2, the world in which most of 3 takes place is not the world from 1 and 2. You travel to the world from 1 and 2 late in 3, and the portal between the two closes when you beat the final boss, stranding you there. So if the world from 11 is the same as from 3 - which I don't recall being the case, but it's been a while since I played it - it still wouldn't be the same one from 1 and 2.

Form

2023-11-14, 01:06 PM

Oh no, they've introduced gravity shifters. This is going to get real disorienting, real fast.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-14, 01:39 PM

Orbs are a Dragon Quest Tradition dating back to DQ 3!

I wouldn't really know, everything I've tried pre-8 has had an early grindwall that turned me off. I really should get another copy of 8 though, I did enjoy the half(ish) I played.

I believe it's supposed to be part of it's throwback nature, with the heroes of the first three games being the descendants of great heroes. Although I think the series does very roughly fall into two sets of continuity (1-3+11 and 4-6), with 7, 8, and 10 being standalone and 9 being a potential distant prequel to any of the others

I'd like to note that the bosses tend to absolutely wreck me and leave only one or two iarty members standing, but whenever I recruit a new party member I've not been more than a level behind them. The difficulty in this game is interesting, I think it's that it's expecting me to have the stat buffs from multiple parts of the skill tree rather than focusing every character on one area. Although I probably will start diversifying now, most characters have picked up the abilities I was building them towards.

Zevox

2023-11-14, 01:42 PM

The game closes with a mother reading the story of the Luminary before going to wake up her child, which sets up the opening of Dragon Quest III. Implying either the two games are in the same world or that DQ11 is a fictional epic in DQ3's universe. I'm inclined to believe it's the former, since the "Erdrick" title is also coined at the end of DQ11 and carries over into DQ3.
The thing that doesn't work about that is actually exactly that last bit. The title Erdrick - or Loto, in the translations I played - was never a part of DQ3's world, only DQ1 and 2's. It was bestowed upon the hero of DQ3 by the king of the kingdom in that world after they'd defeated the final boss and the portal back to their original world had closed. So using it in DQ11 comes across as just a reference to the old classic, rather than something that means their worlds are the same.

Now, if memory serves the king did say the title was from another hero in the past when he bestowed it, so perhaps the world of 11 being the same as 1 and 2 could fit. Except then we wouldn't be seeing the hero of 3 prior to starting their adventure, since they came from another world... so yeah, it's weird.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-16, 08:45 AM

Started a Pillars of Eternity run because it's Pillars of Eternity and I like the setting. I make an ex-blacksmith Orlan Rogue and immediately missed the pistol in the starting area, so I guess I'm using crossbows for a bit.

warty goblin

2023-11-16, 11:04 AM

You know in fantasy series how there's often a long gone civilization of impossibly powerful magic users? My Age of Wonders 4 game has reached the point where I am that civilization. In this case as elves who have partially fused with the astral plane, have augmented their bodies with living, magical metals, and command armies of golem warriors.

All that remains is casting the spell, the final spell, that will carry my leader beyond this world and into eternity. That, and curb stomping some very dumb dragon people who picked a fight with me.

Bohandas

2023-11-18, 11:12 AM

The player characters being "The two chosen ones... and their ordinary nonmagical best friend" is another variation on the formula that I want to see the result of.

That sounds a little like the Disney cartoon show Hamster and Gretel [sic]

AlanBruce

2023-11-18, 01:24 PM

Lies of P just got another patch.

Now you get Rising Dodge as basekit, which shouldve been the norm since the beginning- getting downed by a shovel puppet and stunned locked on the ground by subsequent shovels because you cant roll away unless you upgrade on a skill tree was most unfun.

The store also got a few upgrades, with quartz being offered really early and in large numbers. They mentioned ease of play for heavier weapons and monster modifications. Whether these are good or not, I havent tested them out.

They did expand on the cosmetic section for free. Now you can wear a hat and glasses, to round up your style. They even have Alidoros outfit, so you can go around killing puppets like a rabid hound.

I also purchased and played a little of After Us. Its an indie platformer I saw earlier this year and was for sale. The visuals are very interesting. The character looks like she belongs in a Pixar movie. For a platformer, I wish the controls were a little more forgiving with the jumps and accuracy, since thats the meat & potatoes of the game, but I can let it slide. Visuals look gorgeous and although the story is almost non existent, its a short campaign.

Rodin

2023-11-18, 07:04 PM

Lies of P just got another patch.

They did expand on the cosmetic section for free. Now you can wear a hat and glasses, to round up your style. They even have Alidoros outfit, so you can go around killing puppets like a rabid hound.

I never bothered with Rising Dodge after my first playthrough - other than the shovel puppet it never made a difference. Most enemies don't follow up on you when you're on the ground, so those two Quartz were much better spent somewhere else. It's nice to have it off the P-Organ tree, but I would have much preferred to have the Link Dodge moved to base.

The monster modifications aren't much from what I've seen - the only really obvious one is the aforementioned shovel puppet, which has a much slower slam attack. So moving the Rising Dodge was pointless anyway.

The heavy weapon modification though? That is transformative. I tried a full heavy weapon run before and found it nearly unplayable. Heavy weapon + heavy handle was just too slow, you would get countered by every enemy and you could only ever get a single swing off before needing to back off even on the best punishes. With this change, the absolute heaviest weapons are still that way (Frozen Feast is painfully slow) but all of the "normal" heavy weapons are finally viable. I've been running the Bone-Cutting Saw on the Exploding Pickaxe handle and it feels great. I just swapped on the Live Puppet's Axe blade and it similarly feels great, if with a bit less range.

The dev team has clearly listened to feedback and made changes that improve the game without taking anything away. They also released the soundtrack for purchase, which I immediately picked up. There is a lot of beautiful music. Now if I could only hear it over the sound of me cursing out the Swamp Monster after yet another death...

warty goblin

2023-11-18, 08:29 PM

Funnily enough I just picked this up, I found the whole all the people a d also everything else is dead an arresting concept. Haven't started it yet though, I remain very distracted by Age of Wonders 4.

AlanBruce

2023-11-18, 08:38 PM

I must concur that the developers are clearly listening and improving on the game. When it comes to a pure Motivity build, I bring the tried and true Pipe Wrench Head + Krat Police Baton. Short range, but devastating when you pull off the Patient Smash fable art coupled with Conqueror and Extreme Modification amulets. Ideally with 5 fable slots to capitalize on the damage.

Form

2023-11-19, 08:19 AM

I've nearly finished The Talos Principle II with only the golden gate puzzles still remaining. I suppose I could skip those and move on to the end as the game doesn't force you to solve those, but my pathological obsession with these puzzles demands I solve them.

I also wanted to mention the sense of wonder and hope for the future the game instills. It's rare to find something with this much optimism and it's something I needed, having been stuck in cynicism the past few years. It's a realistic optimism too, not the kind that comes from just sticking your head in the sand and ignoring all the bad things. It feels good to have that faith in a better tomorrow be rekindled, so if any of you have felt similar than I can absolutely recommend this game to you as well.

Cygnia

2023-11-19, 08:46 AM

Cracked open Cult of the Lamb in my backlog and have so far been enjoying it.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-19, 11:25 AM

Picked up Warhammer 40,000: Mechanics. Which I have very mixed feelings on.

Mostly that it says it's going to let you experiment, and then insists on explaining 90% of things anyway. Specifically it teaches you the things that would be fun and rewarding to figure out, but not the actual basics of the turn based combat.

Like the 40k strategy games have had pretty bad tutorials since at least the first Dawn of War, but a trend I've noticed in a lot of turn based games recently is an assumption that you know how they work. The game would have been a lot better if it explained it's basic mechanics and then let me figure things out like enemy scanning and CP generation, instead it expects basic familiarity but can't wait to explain how it hides it's numbers. It would have made the final tutorial mission a joke if I hadn't forgotten to check the map for the Necron Lord, and even then I managed to beat it without thinking.

It's a shame because the setup is really good for a 4X/Turn Based Tactics game.

Rodin

2023-11-19, 02:37 PM

Pure Motivity builds were always good, the problem was that everyone wound up using the exact build you describe - heaviest blade + lightest handle. You could get away with other stuff, particularly with the pure Technique weapons, but you were deliberately nerfing yourself in most cases and the heavy handles with heavy blades were just unplayable. They used a light touch on the OP weapon combinations but brought a lot of the other combinations up so that they're a viable choice now.

Strangely enough I've never liked the Krat Police Baton moveset - it's undeniably a DPS monster but the moveset itself kinda sucks. It's a straight jab at very close range with no side-swing to deal with multiple attackers. My first playthrough I think I used the Electric Coil Stick handle for most of the game in order to benefit from the swingy moveset and the excellent charging Fable Art. My damage was a bit lower since I had no Advance, but the utility of the moveset more than made up for it.

I'm looking forward to trying some of the other really heavy weapons to see what they're like - the Coil Mjolnir in particular looked fun but was painfully slow prior to this patch. I also kind of want to try a heavy-blade Advance run, although I suspect that will still have problems due to how elemental damage build up works.

Edit: Can now confirm that Coil Mjolnir is in the "massively improved" column. You can actually get hits in now without getting absolutely bodied by anything you didn't kill, and you have enough time to get the two-hit combo in. It's still not as good as my previous weapon, but it plays entertainingly different. It hits so hard that it interrupts the hell out of large enemies and easily staggers them. On the flip side, anything with a spammy attack will eat your lunch.

Rynjin

2023-11-19, 03:31 PM

Picked up Warhammer 40,000: Mechanics. Which I have very mixed feelings on.

It's a shame because the setup is really good for a 4X/Turn Based Tactics game.

I feel that. Games like Mechanicus wear the "XCOM-clone" label proudly, to the point that I guess they just ASSUME the only people willing to buy it are people who played XCOM?

Zevox

2023-11-20, 12:31 AM

So aside from wrapping up my second time through Baldur's Gate 3, I've been playing two things this weekend: the beta test for Under Night In-Birth 2 Sys:Celes (yes, that's actually the name) and Persona 5 Tactica.

Under Night is one of those fighting games I know I probably should've tried a while ago, since it seems like it should be right up my alley, but just haven't gotten around to; now that the sequel is getting rollback netcode and crossplay though, feels like the time to give it a shot, and the beta was a free chance to do so. Didn't take much to realize I'd need to stick to just one or two characters though, because wow, just messing around with the game, it has a lot of mechanics and a lot of options for you to wrap your head around at all times. I wound up picking Nanase (schoolgirl with a big sword and wind magic) and Wagner (warrior woman with fire powers) for my two, and I think I wound up liking the former more than the latter, her extra air mobility and the reach of her normals felt better to me, whereas I struggled more with how to handle Wagner in neutral. Though honestly, struggling was most of what I was doing, as it was pretty clear there weren't a lot of players like me playing, mostly veterans who clearly knew how to handle the game much better than I could learn it playing for a couple of hours a day over just a few days, even if I wasn't getting paired with the best of the best.

Main takeaways for me were basically that yes, it is very much up my alley in a lot of ways, but there are some caveats to that. Notably, I was quite frustrated by just how very many attacks were air unblockable. I'm used to fighting games that have air blocking but make dedicated anti-airs air unblockable, or sometimes grounded attacks in general, but in this one even air-to-air attacks couldn't be blocked in the air, which just felt super frustrating. Projectiles and I think some grounded attacks were air blockable, so the game clearly has air blocking, but it feels a lot more limited than any other game with air blocking I've ever played. And there's also certain characters I greatly dislike playing against in the game - most notably Hilda, a character defined by having the dumbest giant-sized screen-filling normal attacks ever put in a fighting game. I already fought and hated her in BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle, and she's no better, and possibly worse, in her native game - she can teleport in this one, after all, which they blessedly left off her moveset in BBTag.

All that said, the reverse beat mechanic in particular is something I was quite enjoying - getting to freely chain normal attacks not just from lighter to heavier, but from heavier to lighter as well, so long as you don't repeat the same attack twice in the chain. Both for combos and pressure that creates very unique options compared to other games that I quite enjoy. So I still might have to pick this up once it comes out - although its release timing, coming only a week before Persona 3 Reload, is quite bad for me.

Speaking of Persona, Tactica. I've only got a handful of hours with it thus far, but it's quite promising. It's clearly based on the Mario + Rabbids combat system at a baseline - there's clear full and half cover that visually looks a lot like it does in that game, explosives that can act as cover but obviously aren't smart to stay near, free movement without your movement range until you decide to take an action that ends your character's turn, the only things that are missing really are the dash attacks and team jumps. There are plenty of differences though: for instance, rather than cover giving a 50% chance for a shot to miss if it's half cover and 100% chance to take the shot if it's full, being in cover covers the "resist" status. While you have that, you take less damage from any hits you take, regardless of what angle they come from. Full cover also blocks all standard attacks that don't come from behind you - even side shots that would be flanking shots in Mario + Rabbids (or X-Com) can still get blocked by it if they're not sufficiently behind the cover. However, you can force an enemy to lose their "resist" status with melee attacks or Persona spells/special attacks. Doing this functionally negates the cover as well (although you still need to get around full cover to hit them with basic gun shots), and any enemy that doesn't have cover/resist will be critically hit and knocked down if attacked, conferring a One More extra turn to the attacker. Once you've knocked someone down like that, the character that did so can set up an All-Out Attack that affects all enemies within a triangular area in between the three active party members, doing massive damage (even to enemies that aren't downed). And that's just the basics.

Interestingly, while you can only have three party members out at once, you can swap in other party members if one of your active ones is KOed, which feels like a nice way to let you use more of the party while still maintaining the party size they want the game balanced around. Though thus far, I've not had to use that, as the early missions I've done have been very easy, at least on the normal difficulty. Hope that picks up; if not, I might need to bump the difficulty up.

The game does seem like it might be a lot shorter than is usual for a Persona spin-off though. I'm only five hours in and I'm already level 15, which is a blistering pace compared to not just the normal Persona titles, but spin-offs like Persona Q as well. Maybe that'll slow down as I go, but if it keeps up, this might be a much smaller game that I anticipated, given the typical Persona game ends with your level in the 70s if you don't go deliberately grinding for higher levels.

Sapphire Guard

2023-11-20, 11:07 PM

Not sure what to make of this still, I literally finished it about half an hour ago. 79 hours to clear data, which is very similar to Origins, but I was very much not a completionist on this one, I fairly quickly decided to do as few quests as I could, especially avoiding all the 'collect X amount of item' ones unless I did them accidentally. Also I've done no DLCs, including the one that goes into Corypheus' origins. I missed whatever backstory was there, so maybe that's why he didn't engage me.

It feels...more generic... than the first two. Corypheus is standard unhinged mage, protagonist is standard blank slate, who everyone keeps calling Qunari even though my game backstory makes clear that I'm Tal-Vashoth, not Qunari.

The idea of building the Inquisition's power is great in concept, but mechanically, 'you need X amount of power to unlock the next story mission', could be very frustrating. The last big mission, the one you need 40 power for, meant spending literally hours doing sidequests I didn't care about because all the ones I was interested in I'd already completed by that point.

There was one room you had to unlock by collecting shards, and then you do that, and one empty room later you encounter three more doors that require more shards to unlock. I turned, left, and never came back. There was the Grey Warden questline that involved 'unlock crestwood, find contact, have one cutsence, build power to unlock western approach, one cutscene, one small fight, than build more power to unlock the real mission, because there is no possible way to catch the mage with five minutes head start in the middle of a featureless desert.

I sided with the mages, mostly because it seemed more urgent and rogue mages are much scarier than rogue templars), but took them prisoner, because clearly Fiona couldn't be trusted to make decisions since she got usurped by a Tevinter Blood Mage, who is screwing around with timetravel, thereby wrecking Corypheus' plans by spilling them ahead of time. It's strange to just casually introduce time travel like that and not even have it come up again

Defending Haven was a good mission, although where were all my assembled mages and why weren't they doing anything? It would admittedly wreck the game to just have my giant army of mages (who are combat veterans and were specifically assembled nearby to close the breach) instantly squash the invaders. Seems like the story just decided it was hopeless even though it shouldn't have been

Didn't enjoy this one much, Corypheus ability to control Wardens seems odd and arbitrary. If he can do this, why can't the archdemon do it? If he can control them, what does he need to persuade the knight commander for? How does this work and what are the limitations? It was an easy decision to sacrifice Stroud. I just didn't believe it would be so easy to persuade all the Wardens to participate in this ritual, demon mimicking the calling or not. Seems more likely there would just be a Warden Civil war.

Really enjoyed this one. Usually this kind of thing is pretty simple, but there is actually a fair amount of political scheming that had decent complexity and took a fair amount of time, with considerations like 'you can't disappear for too long.' It was also one of the occasions where I could believe Florian would do this. I saved Celine, but was a bit sad I couldn't keep Gaspard alive as well. Morrigan is the court adviser, so her promise to never be seen again didn't last long.

Allied with the guardians. Seemed a bit unnecessary to randomly destroy the Well, but there wasn't an option not to do it. Once Samson went down, it would be Corypheus and his dragon alone against the armies of Orlais, the Inquisition, and the elves, did we really need to flee through the Eluvian? I drank it, could not trust Morrigan to do it, from the Inquisitor's perspective she is some random mage who may or may not have any idea what she is talking about.

Was not particularly expecting Flemeth or the Solas reveal, not sure what to make of that. Dragon was fairly easy, and Corypheus fight itself I got through first time thanks to helpful supply crates. Nothing much of note. My plan was to dissolve the Inquisition once Corypheus was dealt with, but the game didn't let me. Vivienne somehow ended up the Divine, even though I didn't support any candidate. I kind of treated the Inquisition like XCOM, our mandate was defeating the demons, everything else was not my concern.

Red Lyrium. Dagnas discovered that it is normal Lyrium with Blight, which doesn't explain much, because it was rare until recently, and if it was just blighted lyrium the deep roads should be full of the stuff. Templars who ingest it get superstrength and super toughness, but you don't need to ingest it to be corrupted as per Varric. By the endgame, all my party have been exposed to a lot of red lyrium, why aren't we corrupted when Bartrand fell instantly. What determines who gets corrupted and who doesn't?

It's above average, but narratively this one doesn't hang together quite as well. I just don't believe most of Corypheus' plans could work. My favourite is still origins, while DA2 had some story issues but made up for it with its character work. It's a good game series, but I don't know if this was worth the 200 hours it took.

Errorname

2023-11-20, 11:28 PM

Dragon Age Inquisition is frustrating because Trespasser is kind of mandatory content that they sold and released separately, and the game as a whole suffers because it feels like it's just laying the foundation for the story they want to tell in the next game that's definitely going to come out eventually.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-21, 04:11 AM

The game really suffers from having the open world zones and useless horses. The story missions are amazing, the open world zones are padded and I don't feel the same attachment to the side quests as I did in the first two. I feel like the story would be a lot less divisive of they'd focused on it, like actually having to smooze up to the Orlasian nobility to get a ball invitation rather than being able to do it with the sheer prowess of your flower picking.

There's one non-story area I really like, and it's the linear one where you recruit Sky Watcher.

I'll also note that unlike Origins where they were out of focus and 2 which shuffled every reasonable one out of the way before they took centre stage I like how Inquisition treats the Templars. They're more specialised compared to the mages, but they're incredibly effective at dealing with Fade stuff, and there's members who actually live up to the ideal. Considering that one of your big issues is spirits breaking through and becoming demons the main reason to go with the mages is that nobody really believes Cullen that they could suppress the rift, but he's 100% right.

Found all six orbs in Dragon Quest 11, partially because once you reach Nautica the game basically throws up it's hands and tells you were they are. I'm clearly only halfway through the game at best, being in my low-30s level-wise, but I strangely do seem to have explored about 80% of the world. So clearly there's either a second world map or I'm going to have to later hunt down another set of MacGuffins hidden in dungeons.

Cespenar

2023-11-21, 11:07 AM

Found a sleeper hit in the aptly named Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane.

It's Phoenix Wright but with D&D magic. Really. And it's well written.

Picked up Warhammer 40,000: Mechanics. Which I have very mixed feelings on.

I'd suggest sticking with it, it's really one tier above all the other XCOM clones out there, so much so that it might not arguably be considered one.

WritersBlock

2023-11-21, 06:06 PM

Just picked up Heroes of might and magic 3 on Gog thanks to early black friday sale, will give it a try when I finish my playthrough of the might and magic 6,7,8 merge mod. (finished the 8 part, one quest left in 6 and a few quests left in 7)

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-21, 07:10 PM

Quests in Dragon Quest XI are either fine or annoying, especially the 'initiate combat with enemy A to hopefully find enemy B' ones where the required enemy appears less often than metal slimes (which I can nearly semi-reliably kill by now, so grinding has been replaced by slime hunting). Hard enemies are fine as at worst I'll just grind and retry, but such quests are just tedious.

Also finished Act 1, and yep that's definitely not what I was expecting. Well played game, you've a less basic story than I'd assumed.

Alabenson

2023-11-22, 01:01 PM

I've started playing Elden Ring. So far I've taken down a bunch of the early optional bosses including Agheel, and I'm about ready to head off to the Weeping Peninsula.

Wookieetank

2023-11-22, 02:47 PM

I've started playing Elden Ring. So far I've taken down a bunch of the early optional bosses including Agheel, and I'm about ready to head off to the Weeping Peninsula.

Watch out for the furry murder mountains bears. They're flipping everywhere.

Sapphire Guard

2023-11-22, 08:54 PM

I went back and did the 'recruit the templars' mission, and their defence of Haven. Missionwise. it's not as fun, and they don't helpfully spill Corypheus' entire plan.

The templars are interestingly much more repentent than the mages were, and you can rally them to fight once they understand the threat. The mages don't help against Alexius at all, and Fiona is much less repentant about her choices in letting some unhinged Tevinter mage take over despite being of relatively sound mind.

Haven defence was much easier. Maybe I'm just more familiar with the combat system now, but the Red Templars are a much bigger problem. Most of the attackers were just ordinary soldiers. I was expecting them to summon Shades and demons as meat shields like they usually did before, but they didn't for some reason, and Fiona didn't put up much of a fight.

So far, the ideal mage templar relationship was probably in DA:O. Gregoir seals the tower when it is overrun by demons, but he doesn't panic, and he is willing to accept Irving's word that everything is safe. Kirkwall is a bot of a hellhole, it has a strong templar presence, but you also trip over blood mages every time you go outside.

I think a Bioware protagonist isn't really the best way to explore this, as every time they encounter them there has to be a protagonist shaped hole in their problems.

Ignimortis

2023-11-22, 11:08 PM

Quite literally thousands of hours of fun. Though I do think that a major part of that is custom maps, but the base game is still excellent.

Zevox

2023-11-24, 12:27 PM

Finished up Persona 5 Tactica this morning. Definitely a much shorter game than I was expecting - other than Persona 4 Arena, definitely the shortest of the Persona spin-offs. But a pretty darn good game anyway.

Plot-wise, it's pretty much what you'd expect if you've played a Persona game, especially one of the Persona Q games, before. You have the group getting stuck in the cognitive world, meeting new characters that need their help, and needing to resolve the world's and those people's problems in order to find their way out, ultimately facing off against the entity responsible for them being trapped in the first place. What makes it different is that it's ultimately built around the story of one character: Toshiro Kasukabe. For the first time the series, an adult (age isn't specified to my recollection, but I got the impression he's probably in his early 30s, certainly at least late 20s), and a politician of all things at that. Unfortunately any details about his story are spoilers since he starts the game with a hefty case of amnesia, but it's really quite good, definitely the best of the spin-off Persona titles, and I say that as someone who really liked Labrys' story in P4A. And the way he plays off the Phantom Thieves works great too, basically all of them get their moments where their own personal stories from P5 connect to his in some way, and yet it never feels artificial, like they were going out of their way to do that. Doesn't seem to matter how much time passes, the Persona team just has really damn talented character writers, and somehow that's remain true from Persona 3's development 20 years ago until today. That said, it is definitely a game that assumes you've played Persona 5 itself, and is not going to explain the Phantom Thieves' backstories or references in any great detail to you, so there is that; but then again, that tends to be true of all Persona spin-off titles.

Gameplay-wise, it's fun, but definitely very easy. Maybe I should've cranked the difficulty up at some point, but I wound up leaving it on normal the whole time, and I think I had a character hit 0 hp once, because I got very careless. Otherwise, I never felt in any real danger, even against the final boss, and effective use of All-Out Attacks could clear entire stages with ease. Finding ways to set those big AoAs up using the game's varied mechanics was still fun though. For a first try at a tactical RPG instead of their usual ordinary turn-based ones, they did pretty good at I'd say.

Though one other criticism that I have of it however is that the boss fights are not great. A couple of them work well enough, but with one exception, they all suffer from the boss mainly being a big wall of HP you need to blast down through attrition, which isn't very interesting in a game that's otherwise heavily focused on positioning and exploiting powerful extra-turn mechanics. The exception is the second boss, who plays out more like an obstacle course - you work your way through the stage before him, fighting standard enemies while he fires his own attacks at you, until you get a character to the end where they can approach the boss and attack him; after which he'll blow them away, the stage will reconfigure and repopulate with enemies, and you'll repeat the process a couple of times before you'll have done enough to finish him off. Though it's kind of telling that that's better than the other boss fights, since it's basically just a few stages in a row with a slightly non-standard objective instead of the normal ones. The final boss also isn't too bad - still kind of a slug-fest, but his unique mechanics do create more interesting scenarios for you to deal with during the fight than the other such bosses at least.

Still, all in all, very enjoyable game, glad I played it, and it continuing to show just how damn good the writers for this series still are makes me that much more excited for Persona 3 Reload, and hopeful for Persona 6 whenever that finally comes.

Razade

2023-11-24, 02:40 PM

tonberrian

2023-11-24, 03:11 PM

Even relatively recently we had the Devil Survivor games that I know you played, Zevox. They were quite good. Enough so that I bought both Devil Survivor 2 and then Break Record again.

Zevox

2023-11-24, 03:21 PM

One point of contention here. This isn't Atlus's first go at a Tactical RPG. That was Atlus's bread and butter for a while, and they've got a big one coming up here in 2024 with Unicorn Overlord. The team's express intent for Tactica was to leverage Atlus's Tactical RPG experience and fame specifically with the Persona series. They had a number of veteran Atlus people join the project with some serious chops in the genre to help. It's also not the first Tactics style game in the SMT franchise. Both Devil Survivor games are Tactical RPGs for instance, and the original Persona game and both versions of 2 (if I recall, pretty hazy on 2 and its sidequel) were grid based combat. Hell, even the options for characters harken back to the original Persona game with Use Gun, Use Persona, and Use Melee. Tactica is just more modern with a way more smooth UI. So if anything, Tactica is a return to form for Atlus in a lot of ways, rather than breaking or treading new ground.
True, I was thinking specifically within the Persona series, which has stuck to turn-based RPGs until now, aside from a couple of games that they partnered with other developers to make (Persona 4 Arena, which was ArcSys, and Persona 5 Strikers, which was Koei Tecmo). Persona 1 and 2 were a very different thing - grid-based, yes, sort of, but not like a tactical RPG at all. I don't really know how much crossover there is between teams within Atlus on these games. I must point out that Tactica works very differently from Devil Survivor though, which used tactical RPG style maps, but had combat work much more like in a normal SMT game, switching to the ordinary turn-based combat when you attacked, just with a limit on how many turns you got before it backed out to the map. Tactica works considerably closer to other strategy RPGs, with clear inspirations from Mario + Rabbids in particular.

Even relatively recently we had the Devil Survivor games that I know you played, Zevox. They were quite good. Enough so that I bought both Devil Survivor 2 and then Break Record again.
Hate to tell you, but those were not recent. Even Devil Survivor 2 was 2012 for its original release, and 2015 for the 3DS re-release. And while I liked those, I never felt like I needed the re-releases since the 3DS could play the originals anyway, so I haven't played them since around when their original releases occurred.

tonberrian

2023-11-24, 03:50 PM

Hate to tell you, but those were not recent. Even Devil Survivor 2 was 2012 for its original release, and 2015 for the 3DS re-release. And while I liked those, I never felt like I needed the re-releases since the 3DS could play the originals anyway, so I haven't played them since around when their original releases occurred.

*ages to dust*

Zevox

2023-11-24, 04:21 PM

*ages to dust*
I know, right? It's weird that more time has passed between Devil Survivor 2 and now than passed between Persona 4 and 5.

Heck, for that matter unless they surprise us with Persona 6 next year somehow (and between P3 Reload and Metaphor I think we all know that isn't happening), it's going to be longer between Persona 5 and 6 than it was between Persona 4 and 5, and was already an 8 year wait. Not that I want them to rush it, mind, I'm happy to give them as long as it takes to make games as great as mainline Persona has been since 3, but still, it's quite surprising for the gap to get even longer than last time.

tonberrian

2023-11-24, 04:58 PM

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-24, 06:22 PM

Picked up both Dawn of War 2 and Smurf Marine in the Steam sale, and booted up DoW2. As I immediately remembered it's good but gives me a hankering to play some Imperial Guard. I've got Retribution though, so I might just skip to that.

As for Space Marine, it's good but the interaction between the health system and the enemy design is annoying. You're encouraged to get up close to make use of Executions, only for the game to very quickly start throwing multiple squig bombs or Nobs at you. I'm going to have to turn down the difficulty, but at least unlike Fire Warrior it wasn't trend chasing and tried to be it's own thing.

Even if it is annoyingly effect to hang back in cover and Bolter Orks to death.

I think I'll definitely be playing a lot more DoW2 though.

LibraryOgre

2023-11-25, 10:40 AM

Picked up the expansions to Civ VI because they were on sale less than my remaining birthday money. Played a little, but I'm not depressed enough to full immerse myself.

I also played some Frostpunk, which I got free from Epic at some point in the past. That thing is HARD. Last time I played, I was able to get over the first hump (kept most people after the Londoners), but the second, when you're getting waves of refugees, just before a massive temperature drop? Holy cow, but that is brutal, and I think I'm too compassionate to do what needs to be done.

Zevox

2023-11-25, 12:53 PM

I was actually surprised how close persona 3, P3P, P4, and P4G were all together. Somehow I managed to miss all news of P4 original flavor. I picked up P3 FES when it must have been just out, but I had picked up a cheap ps2 used so I thought FES was much older when I got it.
Ah, we had similar experiences there. I picked up a cheap PS2 in mid-2008 and got Persona 3 on recommendation of a friend, so I actually wound up getting P4 on release as a result of that. I also didn't realize P3 was as relatively new as it was at the time, I just sort of assumed that since we were a couple of years into the 360/PS3/Wii generation already that all PS2 games were older at that point.

But yeah, P3 and P4 were much closer together - but both were also very late-life PS2 games, with P3 releasing mere months before the PS3 came out (and that only in Japan, the rest of the world got it after the PS3 was already out), and P4 two years after the PS3 was already out. They no doubt benefited from Atlus already having plenty of experience developing for the system, and from reusable assets, especially in P4's case. Plus development times were just shorter back then for various reasons, not the least being the fact that hi-def visuals weren't standard yet.

Form

2023-11-25, 01:10 PM

The first time I played it I aborted my run fairly early on. It was not going well and I could see the writing on the wall. The second time my people lost hope and banished me to the frozen wastes. After all I had done for them, those ingrates! I gave them child labor and amputations and when someone got stuck in the sawmill I didn't stop opera-....., oh yes, I see the problem now.

The third time was the charm and I made it all the way through. I, uh, had to make some severe moral compromises though. The fourth time I managed to pull through with clean hands, so it is possible, but unlikely at first.

LibraryOgre

2023-11-25, 02:15 PM

I am having a horrible time balancing food. Just... never enough, and never able to feed people.

PhoenixPhyre

2023-11-25, 06:24 PM

Tried to play Borderlands 3...got to a (very early) point where it would crash going into a particular cutscene no matter what settings I toggled. Sigh. Uninstalled.

warty goblin

2023-11-25, 07:52 PM

Space Marine is very much built around both very rapidly switching between melee and ranged combat, and tanking damage through murdering orcs right in their stupid faces. It takes some getting used to, but once you work out the rhythm, and find a couple power weapons, you turn into an absolute blender of death. The closest thing to it is either Doom 2016, or possibly Bloodrayne 2, but honestly for simple mayhem unleashed it probably outdoes them both.

Though you can't suck the blood out of some club punk all sexy-like, then backflip off him and cut him in half lengthwise, so Bloodrayne 2 gets a point there.

Eldan

2023-11-26, 06:32 AM

Getting to the end of Phantom Liberty now, and I'm having my first serious bug.

Which is hilarious, because I played through Cyberpunk when it came out and it was a totally bug free, awesome experience.

Anyway... I have a stealth build, and enemies can see me through walls now. ALl of them. Even when I'm invisible and sneaking. So, stealth is dead now. Reloading didn't help. Loading old saves where I know the bug didn't exist doesn't help. It's just there.

Refunded my skills. I'm just a normal melee tank build now, V is done playing nice.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-26, 06:08 PM

It actually feels ahead of it's time to me, like it's not a Boomer Shooter but it kind of focuses on the same sort of things to help it stand out of the crowd. Maybe it's an arena shooter like Doom 2016, and certainly it's best moments ard in arenas where you can smoothly transition from Bolter to chainswords and back smoothly as the situation demands it.

It makes me very angry at GW trying to make regular Space Marines less cool to try and flog people armies of Primaris. I'm even slightly annoyed that the sequel has felt the need to make Titus into a Primaris, when the game is very good at showcasing how the regular Marines are already gods amongst men.

Witty Username

2023-11-26, 07:42 PM

In an infinite sea of new and interesting games, BG3 hit my nostalgia center, and now I am playing Baldur's Gate EE again.
Also, cutting it with Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma, but that is not at all Dragon Age related.

Form

2023-11-27, 01:56 PM

I've started playing around in My time at Sandrock. So far it's largely the same as it's predecessor, though water is an important resource this time around and I'm expected to sometimes dust off my machines lest they become less efficient. I hope later on there will be some way to render the dust issue moot, because I'm not looking forward to routinely having to go by all my machines to dust them off just to avoid their efficiency getting halved. At first glance I'd say that's just pointless busywork meant to keep the player busy.

As for the town itself, I believe I have arrived in the aftermath of some sort of coup d'etat! I have identified the Church of Light as the true power, specifically Burgess as he controls the water supply. Then there's also Matilda, another Church of Light member, who is filling in for the mayor who is 'out in the desert planting trees'. Uh-huh. I bet their corpse is out in the desert somewhere alright, serving as fertilizer for some plant growth. At some point I'll either have to wrest control of the water supply away from Burgess or find an alternative. Finding evidence of the mayor's fate may help dislodge Matilda from her position as de-facto mayor, but probably won't be enough by itself. There may be some kind of secret police here too as Burgess had me fill out a survey to check my disposition towards their rule and spied on me when I chopped down a tree too close to the town.

My first priority should be to take the commerce guild from Yan and establish my own powerbase. I believe Catori and Mi-an would make suitable allies. If I can help Catori with setting up her entertainment hub it could be a useful part of said powerbase. Mi-an as the other builder who recently arrived is an obvious choice to help me remove Yan. Hm, I should probably marry either Mi-an or Catori at some point to finalize our union.

Wookieetank

2023-11-27, 02:11 PM

As part of the Obligatory Steam Sale(TM), one of my buys was to finally pick up Torment: Tides of Numenera. Only gotten to play it a little bit so far (maybe 2 hours), but it has been an interesting go so far. Glad to see a very different take on the amnesiac PC (particularly after having recently played Disco Elysium). Being a newborn adult, who's body was recently vacated by a deity of some sort, makes for a wild start. Particularly when you run into a cult of your body's previous occupant. Has a lovely mis-mash of sci-fi and fantasy trappings going on as well.

Sapphire Guard

2023-11-27, 05:50 PM

I really enjoyed Space Marine. It was exactly what it was supposed to be.

Tried Baldur's Gate 2 again.

Last time, I gave up at the dragon, this time I got through it and am now in hell. My lead is a Paladin, and has held on to his virtue so far, but you wear one cloak made of nymphskin, and that's too far. My party is level 13/14, and I'm not sure I can take the Elder Orbs in a fight.

I will give the devs credit, three of the encounters were easy to talk my way around, and you can usually get around , but this is legit a tough choice.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-27, 08:01 PM

Back to Wrath of the Righteous, with definitely no save scumming to kill that darned dragon. Mostly in holding until Rogue Trader comes out, WotR is in no way bad but Pathfinder doesn't hit the nostalgia sweet spot for me like Warhammer (Fantasy Battles or 40k) does.

Also squeezing in the occasional Dawn of War 2: Retribution mission, because even if the first two stories are good this really isn't the kind of game which should have starred Space Marines. Military campaigns are the province of the Guard, whereas Space Marines perform occasional high value strike missions two systems over because there's less than one of them for every million worlds in the Imperium. One of the minor aspects of Space Marine I like is that, at least in the parts I've played, the tasks you're doing are pretty much about removing what's stopping the Guard from deploying.

warty goblin

2023-11-28, 10:28 AM

Wrapped up a pretty tense Age of Wonders 4 game this morning. I was going for a Seals victory, and ended up at war with everyone on the map. That, plus the genuinely terrifying stacks spawning in to attack my seals was causing the utter disintegration of my empire.

But it held together just long enough to clinch a win. That, and an extremely cheesy victory where the AI sent a T3 Iron Golem to grab a Seal from my T1 skirmisher unit. My wimpy little guy should have ended up a smear on the golem's boot, but I had a spell that summoned a pillar that itself summoned a random animal every turn, and enough mana to cast it twice. So I buried the golem in crows, spiders, and irate piglets.

I then briefly considered playing something else. Instead I started another AoW 4 game as a bunch of lightning obsessed, magic addicted cat people.

Cespenar

2023-11-28, 10:34 AM

Numenera is pretty slept on IMO. It dared to do a few things different than other classic RPGs and thus got crapped on, but it's a pretty solid title.

Zombimode

2023-11-28, 03:10 PM

Spend the last month or so with two games:

1) Lost Eidolons
A turn-based tactics game with a strong narrative focus. A suprise hit for me. I tried it out earlier this year and didn't like anything I saw. But at that time I was really craving for a classic fantasy RPG and Lost Eidolons is just something very different. The writing reminded me of (bad) fan-fiction early on, but I got really invested in the plot and characters over time. Especially the characters.
This investment paid off: only then the loss of a character really hits you.
The game's main gameplay are, of course, the tactical battles. Each (main) scenario has something unique going on for it. In side battles there is some repetition but not much: there are about 5 maps and maybe 15 side battles in total. It is also not an easy game. I played on Normal difficulty with Limited Turns and Maniac options enabled. Maniac is some sort of "Iron Man": with that option enabled should one of you characters fall in battles they are gone for good. They still appear in cutscenes and the camp, but they are effectively no longer fit for battle. For me having this options enabled meant that I had to find a way to victory without losing any units. For me the level of difficulty was really spot on, always fair and never tedious. I managed to beat all battles in the first attempt but it took quite some effort. Especially in the last third of the game it took me often several hours to complete a single battle. On Hard I think it is expected that you use your knowledge of the scenario and build your unit composition for the battle with that knowledge in mind.
The game is strongly on the deterministic side: there is no "to-hit", units deal a fixed amount of damage which is in turn reduced by the targets armor. There is a chance to crit (dealing more damage), and a separate chance for the target to block (reducing the damage). None of these chances are typically very high, sometimes even zero.
Thus the game focuses on strategy and on the tactical optimization puzzle. Personally I really liked how the game plays.
From my post-game research Lost Eidolons main inspiration is the Fire Emblem series. I'm not familiar with Fire Emblem so I can't comment on how it compares.
All in all I can easily recommend Lost Eidolons :smallsmile:

2) Scars Above
A third-person shooter/sci-fi action adventure. The game was obviously made on a budget but high on ambitions. It is limited in scope and a bit rough on the edges. I found it nonetheless quite enjoyable.
The characters fell flat for me, but the overall plot narrative was ok.
The level design has it strong points and otherwise ranges between serviceable and good.
The gameplay focuses on learning the various enemies weaknesses and then exploiting them. This game really rewards you for using the right tool/strategy for the job. You can kill everything with every weapon, never pay attention to weak points or the environment, but doing so is incredible inefficient.
The game also does not overstay its welcome: Steam clocked in 30 hours for me and I'm a slow player.
I would not blindly recommend Scars Above. To me it was a nice and short filler/palette cleanser game, something to play after a hard day of work.

Next up is Inscryption.
I know almost nothing about this game. It landed in my wishlist because of a recommendation as a good horror game.
Well, lets see what this game has in store... :smallsmile:

NeoVid

2023-11-29, 06:10 AM

I really want to hear the reactions from someone going into Inscryption unspoiled!

Speaking of experiences that are better unspoiled, I just beat Sea of Stars. The final sequence felt like there was a lot missing, with plenty of plot threads going unresolved. Then I did the thing that had only become available after the final battle, and damn... what started from there turned out to include just about every dangling plot thread and named character I'd encountered over the course of the entire game. Complete with a clear tribute to Chrono Trigger that gave me one of the things I'd hoped for the most during the entire story!

Honestly, the path to the true ending was so stupidly good at hitting on all the plot points that had been introduced that I was shocked at the fact I could think of one character who'd been left out. If you're wondering, that was the Matriarch. I thought the last surviving primal spirit would show up more than once in the game, especially since everyone else did, but oh well.

Sea of Stars immediately jumps right near the top of the list of best JRPGs I've ever played. Not just because the storytelling was excellent, but also because it did something I'd never imagined in all my years playing the genre: It made me want more of the combat. Usually the most fun ability you can get in a JRPG is Encounter-None, but SoS was a massive exception.

Eldan

2023-11-29, 06:39 AM

I got Inscryption on sale recently too, but I'm finishing Phantom Liberty first, and then probably play Acts II+III of Baldur's Gate.

Cygnia

2023-11-29, 09:43 AM

I still need to finish The Hex and Pony Island. My lack of skill at shoot-em-ups is coming into play in my progression. :smallconfused:

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-29, 11:43 AM

So I've discovered that after a little while Dawn of War 2: Retribution starts encouraging me to leave my high status commanders back at camp so I can bring some high tier units more guardsmen to the field. It's a nice touch when you consider how the guard memetically operates.

Also any time the campaign sets a battle near a HQ building the sheer speed with which you can bring in new squads of guardsmen becomes hilarious. While I'm sure it won't work in MP the campaign gives you enough Requisition to just drown the enemy in lasgun fire.

Yes I've unlocked other units, and I quite like Sentinels to provide fire support, but until I get Leman Russes nothing is going to feel as practical as just taking more squads of Guardsmen and backing them up with heavy weapons teams.

Sapphire Guard

2023-11-29, 07:28 PM

Once again, I had to lower the difficulty setting for the final boss of Baldur's Gate 2. I was a Paladin with an excellent reputation, but I had to use Slayer Mode too many times, and ended up succeeding but at the cost of Falling and losing my reputation. So I am now a despised Fallen Paladin and have to work my way back up through Throne of Bhaal.

Anonymouswizard

2023-11-30, 09:41 AM

My brother accidentally got me into Josh Strife Hayes's YouTube videos and I ended up with MMO nostalgia. However I decided I wasn't interested in going back to WoW or anything similar because I already own a lot of fantasy games, so I ended up downloading Champions Online.

The restriction to only 10 of the archetypes without paying money is annoying, but as I'm planning to avoid the cash shop I knuckled down and spent weeks deciding between my favourite two of the unlocked ones. Mostly because I was having trouble coming up with a backstory. Eventually I settled on a brick in a tank top, cargo shorts, trainers, a domino mask, and a scarf and finally got playing.

It's... good. Like the tutorial is great, the quest lines mostly devolve into 'beat up X thugs' but that works for a superhero game. Despite technically being a tank my damage is not terrible and I get multiple damage mitigation options as I level, and the world map is clearly designed for superpowers (mainly Flight, but I picked Athletics and there's plenty of shortcuts with my enhanced jump). I can see how it could devolve into a grindfest or pay to win, but it's not so far and even the 'limited' free character creator has a bunch of options. Plus I'm getting a silky smooth frame rate and very little lag, the main issue I'm having is with the tab auto target and I think I can just start using the mouse anyway. It's definitely not the best MMO out there but it's perfectly fun.

Cygnia

2023-12-03, 10:05 AM

Now I'm on the endgame of things with "Cult of the Lamb". Meanwhile, hubby just picked up "Inheritance of Crimson Manor" for himself since it was on sale from Steam.

Anarchic Fox

2023-12-03, 11:45 AM

Also finished Act 1, and yep that's definitely not what I was expecting. Well played game, you've a less basic story than I'd assumed.

Yeah, I appreciate the game taking such a bold turn. I was expecting there to be a second world of some variety, a la Dragon Quest 3 or 6.

I still need to finish The Hex and Pony Island. My lack of skill at shoot-em-ups is coming into play in my progression. :smallconfused:

I don't think there's continuity between the games, so you're free to play them in any order. In particular Inscryption doesn't test your reflexes.

Zombimode

2023-12-04, 09:31 AM

I really want to hear the reactions from someone going into Inscryption unspoiled!

Finished the game last night.

Warning! Inscryption is a game you do not want to be spoiled about if you have any inclination of playing it.

My thoughts:
Playing Inscryption has been a very stimulating, interesting and also fun experience. My mind was constantly chewing on it. It didn't help that I also suffered from Corona over the weekend
and especially in the nights when I was kept half-awake by the sickness my mind was constantly cycling around Inscryption - albeit rather lucidly. When I got up, none of my night-time thoughts made any sense... Or did they? :smallamused:

Inscryption was advertised to me as a horror game. But I ultimately disagree with that description.
The games uses horror aesthetics: the design of the first act, the whole Found-Footage thing etc.
But it doesn't do horror: no body horror, no jump-scares, no gut-wrenching psychological horror (think Doki Doki)...
Instead I would describe it as a perfectly executed artistic "meta" game that also incorporates a satisfying (at least to me) deckbuilding/card game in the style of MTG.

The theme of this artistic expression, the "what is this about", is not a human condition like psychosis (Hellblade) nor a philosophical question like the idea of "self", what it means to be a person and what it means to be that person (Soma). Instead Inscryption is more about the medium it it presented in itself: video game. Art that questions and pushes the boundaries of its respective medium is nothing new and I'm certain that the creation of Inscryption was heavily inspired by the Modernism of the last century. In my view it does succeed as such: first it send the player journey of reflection: about games, their definition and boundaries, what can and what you can't (or shouldn't) do in them, about genres and of course the primary mysteries of the game it self.* Each way-point offers revelations but also more questions, guiding the mind like a map. And finally the game actually transcends (hah!) the commonly understood boundaries of a single video game: Inscryption incorporates meddling with the game's files, previously released video games, and meat-space items into its own framework.

On the other hand one could raise criticism against Inscryption of making it hard if not impossible to be experienced fully by most players. Even ignoring knowledge requirements or the need to own specific other games, there was only ever be one group of people capable if finding the buried floppy disk - since there was only the one. And the other three floppy disk had to be ordered separately from a website. And again, these were unique as well. Deciphering Inscryption was and had to be a community event. One that cannot be re-experienced or replicated.

On yet another hand I'm not sure if that actually matters. During my play-through I was complete aware that I did not uncover all the secrets. I was aware of an abundance of clues that I could had no use for. And there were many clues that I did not even recognize. All well within the traditional boundaries of the game. So it feels a bit hypocritical to remark the lack of accessibility if I did not even made the effort to exhaust the resources available to me.

When I described Inscryption as "perfectly executed" I was not really referring to the post-game. Instead I meant the games actual presentation. Everything has purpose, every detail is accounted for. I also enjoy small things like all achievements being named after cards from Magic: The Gathering**. There was no scene where ambition was countered by a lack of effort or talent from the developer. The ending in particular was great: the whole set-piece, seeing the remaining scrybes "table" set-ups, and the heart-warming realization about the one thing that they actually cared about the most: having a good game, including the common gestures found in the real-world card gaming communities like shaking hands after a match.

* One of my first rather naive thoughts was: "Hey, I discovered by accident that you can get up from the table at pretty much any time... What if a player never realizes that?"
** This one I found out by myself and I am sheepishly proud of that. It was after finishing the game, when it closed itself and brought me back to the game's page in GoG Galaxy. Mindlessly I was hovering over one of the achievements that I had unlocked: "Painter's Servant... huh, funny, that a card in Magic: The... WAIT A MINUTE! Murder? Essence Capture? Balance of Power? Blood Artist? I think I'm onto something!"

All in all Inscryption has been a great addition to the already fantastic gaming year of 2023 :smallsmile:

Erloas

2023-12-04, 01:19 PM

Still at it with Cities Skylines 2, the last few patches have fixed a few things and I'm starting to understand the mechanics of the game a lot more. It's got a lot more things going on than it seems and a lot more than previous city builders I've played.
Although with the last patch and exports being fixed, the money side of the game went from only a small issue after the early stages of the game, to absolutely nothing to even think about after a little bit.

I think the population vs services numbers are somewhere between 2-5x of what they should be. As in a city of 100k seems to require a lot more services than a real city of that population.

Mass transit is vital to keeping a city going, but at least the cims are happy to take it and walk a decent amount. But even then, poor connections and road bottlenecks can really grind areas to a halt.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-04, 06:49 PM

Planning on restarting Wrath of the Righteous AGAIN, as fun as Kineticist and Azata are I'm just not feeling it right now, especially as I seem to have slipped from focusing on Earth as I wanted to mainly using fire. I considered Cavalier Demon->Legend/Gold Dragon, but I've gone heavy on mounts on my last two attempts and want to try keeping everybody's feet on the ground.

I ended up going Magus (Sword Saint), Chaotic Neutral for now, and possibly aiming for the Trickster path. May end up going Azata again, or I might do Demon->Legend or Dragon. We'll wait and see what I unlock.

Sword Saint is going to be fun though, if only because it's clearly designed for crit fishing with a rapier.

WritersBlock

2023-12-05, 05:03 PM

Well checked Gog today and out of nowhere Legends of Amberland 2: The songs of trees released. What a pleasant surprise. So yeah, that is what I am playing now. Anyone who liked might and magic (like the 3-5 ones) or the goldbox games would also probably enjoy it. After playing the first one "The forgotten crown" a year or so ago, this one was an instant buy for me.

Basically like the 3-5 might and magic games with modern qol improvements. (It even has difficulty settings) Currently checking all the shops for all the status effect resist equipment I can find (Something I wish a few other similar games like this would have had) Hope the dev added a few new enemy types to this installment as well.

Sapphire Guard

2023-12-05, 06:49 PM

I gave up on Throne of Bhaal for the moment. My Fallen Paladin lost his abilities and I'm struggling with the encounters, Keldorn is the only person I have who can take hits, and I barely got out of Saradush.

Playing Disco Elysium instead. I have seen Youtube playthroughs of the first hour or two, but I'm now past that part and off the map. Day 1, 2pm, I need to have 100 real by tonight or I have nowhere to sleep. Current funds: 1.75 real.

tonberrian

2023-12-05, 09:13 PM

Can't you donate gold to temples to increase your Reputation enough to have class features again?

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-06, 02:23 AM

If you can't raise the money (which is really, really difficult) there's at least two alternatives. One presents itself automatically while if you've found your clipboard you've unlocked another.

Batcathat

2023-12-06, 02:30 AM

Can't you donate gold to temples to increase your Reputation enough to have class features again?

I'm pretty sure raising your rep doesn't unfall paladins. I think there's a quest that can do it in BG2 (I barely ever play paladins), but I don't know about ToB.

If you can't raise the money (which is really, really difficult) there's at least two alternatives. One presents itself automatically while if you've found your clipboard you've unlocked another.

Well, the difficulty kinda depends on your approach. When I tried a playthrough as a very, very corrupt and super opportunistic detective, I pretty quickly had more money than I knew what to do with. Though that is admittedly a rather specific play style. :smalltongue:

Zombimode

2023-12-06, 04:17 AM

Sounds rough. Do you play with some self-imposed iron-man challenge or so? I wonder how you'd get in such a situation in the first place :smallbiggrin:

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-06, 06:31 AM

Yes, but otherwise (like if you're going for boring cop, sorry cop, or supercop). Money is very hard to come by for a day or two, especially as IIRC you can find the recording on day one and buy the boombox before you know how tight money is. Plus if somebody's got 2pm and has so little money they've probably not been taking bribes.

Like you can do it, but you have to be playing corrupt for the first day. The developers want you to see the scene where Kim sells the hubcaps and so made most routes likely to encounter it.

Psyren

2023-12-06, 05:07 PM

Finished the game last night.

Warning! Inscryption is a game you do not want to be spoiled about if you have any inclination of playing it.

All in all Inscryption has been a great addition to the already fantastic gaming year of 2023 :smallsmile:

Theres definitely psychological horror imo:

the fact that the custom cards you get to make, and that Leshy gets to send against you later, are actually prior victims, or possibly even prior/doomed versions of yourself.

tonberrian

2023-12-06, 11:38 PM

My brother got me Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince for Christmas and I'm looking forward to playing it. Not right now, i have too much Baldur's Gate 3 to do, but eventually. I'm also looking forward to Owlcat's Rogue Trader tomorrow, but reviews haven't been exactly glowing.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-07, 07:35 AM

I'm also looking forward to Owlcat's Rogue Trader tomorrow, but reviews haven't been exactly glowing.

I've unfortunately got to wait until Friday, but as long as they keep the M42 bollocks out of it and give us a good M41 type story it can't be that bad

Eldan

2023-12-07, 08:15 AM

The reviews I'm seeing don't look so bad? One mentioned a lot of bugs, but with Owlcat, I expect those to get ironed out. Several mention that the menus and character advancement are messy and complicated, but that's not the worst thing. And they mostly say that the game is big and deep and the world interesting, so that looks pretty good overall?

GloatingSwine

2023-12-07, 08:49 AM

Yeah, the reviews look pretty good to me. That said it's also a big game so I'm more looking for slightly delayed reviews when people have had time with it.

warty goblin

2023-12-07, 09:03 AM

The Rogue Trader reviews I've seen are pretty mid. Does the setting well, combat is good to ok, but there's a lot of it and takes a long time. Which, yeah, sounds like an Owlcat game, because they sure do love their combat encounters. Next time I attempt Wrath of the Righteous, I'm gonna turn the difficulty to Easy and never take it out of real time mode so I maybe get somewhere inside of one human lifetime.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-07, 10:17 AM

The biggest issue with WotR isn't the combat, it's the endless restarts.

warty goblin

2023-12-07, 10:36 AM

The biggest issue with WotR isn't the combat, it's the endless restarts.

No, no, it's definitely the combat for me. I've worked out pretty much exactly what character I want to run (Instinctive Warrior or whatever the Wisdom barbarian option is, plus the mod that lets you customize your avatar so I can permanently rock the Red Sonja look) but most attempts fizzle out because I can't take five bloody steps to do a side quest without having to pulverize the same 2 idiot no challenge scrub mooks the game keeps mistaking for interesting encounter design. Takes too damn long and is hideously boring. So next time the difficulty is going down to where I can auto-murder everything short of an actual boss or something.

The trick to avoiding Restartitis is to remember two key facts about RPGs: the perfect playthrough is a lie, and there's much less actual variety than apparent variety. Ever notice how on the nth restart with the Ultimate Perfect Character it still feels pretty much like restart n-1 with the terrible flawed character? It's the same game, restarting ain't gonna fix that, and most of the options don't make that much difference. It's like a frozen yogurt bar, there's a lot of options but fundamentally only three actual choices: fruit, chocolate or a hybrid like orange and chocolate. Pick something that basically works, add whatever kinda sprinkles you prefer, and eat the thing.

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-12-07, 10:59 AM

I've never found the combat in either of the Pathfinder games that terrible. The combat is the game part, after all. If I didn't enjoy it, I may as well go watch a movie or pick up a visual novel instead. Real-time mode lets you stomp all over any encounter that isn't a tactical challenge, so I switch to that any time a few mooks show up and need to be dealt with.

I understand why people wouldn't like how combat heavy they can get, but I feel it adds a ton to the game. There are parts where you're literally fighting on a battlefield and it feels like it due to enemies being around every corner. Games that hew to the idea of only including intricate, puzzle-like combat end up feeling artificial in my eyes. Like no matter how dangerous a place is said to be, you know you'll fight only one or two battles there.

I also find the worst part of CRPGs is the walking when nothing else is happening, so frequent combat helps break that up. I think my BG3 multiplayer group quit in large part because so many of our sessions were just walking, looting the environment, and waiting for someone to talk to an unimportant NPC. No surprise that there's a certain chapter of WOTR that's sunk my replay attempts every time.

warty goblin

2023-12-07, 11:23 AM

I don't dislike the combat. I dislike the encounter design, it's a mechanically fine to good basis that the game generally gives me no reason to utilize or engage with because so often I'm fighting literally two guys who might get one attack off if they get lucky with initiative.

Combat heavy is fine, I'm not complaining about the quantity of combat in the game.
My complaint is solely that far, far too much of it is complete throwaway encounters. These don't make the game feel dangerous or like I'm in the middle of a battle, they turn it into a loading screen simulator so I can kill like 2 guys in a random encounter. This is boring.

Crpgs have frequently struggled to have stuff that isn't either combat (cheap content) or character interaction (expensive content). The Pathfinder games, with their apparent disinterest in any form of environmental interaction, and 3rd tier puzzle design when they bother to have them, are particularly afflicted with this limited scope. If you make the setting make a difference and be meaningfully interactive, this is less of a problem. One can also of course just make areas smaller, a great benefit of the top down perspective is that the player can only see like 40 feet ahead of the parry, so you can absolutely pack stuff in.

One thing I hope the massive success of BG3 does is get the genre to actually have the environment matter. I had a fight in Pathfinder on a cursed island in hell where the sky rained blood. This was less important - in the sense it literally did not matter and could have been in a field of primroses or a sheet of graph paper - than the muddy floor in a dungeon in BG3. That is a wasted opportunity.

Spacewolf

2023-12-07, 11:59 AM

I absolutely hate the quantity of combat in the Pathfinder games. The quality is Ok but the amount is way off and kills the flow of the game for me.

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-12-07, 12:02 PM

You can't have a lot of meaningful encounters. I know that sounds needlessly reductive, but if every encounter required considerable thought and there were a dozen of them in every area, it would be exhausting. It'd take days to clear a dungeon with no guarantee it'd be much more engaging. There are only so many ways to build an encounter, after all, so they'd bleed together eventually. Especially if you tried to keep the theme intact and didn't start pulling in random monsters just to spice it up.

I don't understand the loading complaint, though. You don't have to load into battles in Pathfinder like it's a Final Fantasy game. Certainly, some side areas in the game are just a small field with a few enemies, but that's not even a throwaway fight by design. You may have just overleveled before finding that location. I remember a certain area near your city in Kingmaker that had some lycanthropes in it which dropped a decent weapon. On a repeat playthrough, I rushed there to get it only to find that a low level party gets completely eviscerated by that encounter.

I suppose we won't see eye to eye. I think Pathfinder has decent-to-good puzzle design. Their UI for the puzzles is atrocious, though. The tile puzzles in WOTR are fairly clever, but using the in-game looting interface to place and move them about turns the whole thing into frustrating tedium.

More environment interaction would be nice, though I can understand why it isn't done. It's the kind of thing that can really irritate players who get set in a strategy and rankle when a wildcard is introduced that shuts it down. It also has a balancing issue in that environmental effects are often either too weak as to be ignorable or too strong and they overwhelm the rest of the combat design (and I tend to think Larian falls on the latter here. D:OS2 is infamous for its environment interactions taking over whole battles.)

LibraryOgre

2023-12-07, 01:42 PM

My biggest complaint with the Pathfinder games was stat creep; it was particularly bad in WotR, where monster have simply ludicrous stats to keep them challenging.

warty goblin

2023-12-07, 05:12 PM

Yes, there's a limit on how many substantively different encounters you can build with a given set of combat mechanics, enemies, locations, etc. There's also virtue in having some encounters be easy and some hard, that's good pacing. My preference is that when a game has more or less exhausted that repertoire of encounters, it stops. From what I've played of WoTR, it really likes to have lots and lots of easy encounters with the same enemies where you use the same mechanics in the same (irrelevant) environments. I think this is boring design, a position bolstered by the fact that the proc gen dungeons in Midnight Isles feel at worst identical to, and often better paced than, the hand designed ones.

I don't understand the loading complaint, though. You don't have to load into battles in Pathfinder like it's a Final Fantasy game.
Random encounters, a still terrible idea that games with overland maps insist on including for some reason. WoTR doubles down by making lots of them very easy. I do not enjoy sitting through two loading screens to kill two dudes.

This is to me one of the things that generally inhibits my enjoyment of RPGs. They're so oriented around character builds that environmental tactics have to fall by the wayside, because otherwise they'd invalidate somebody's character design. But this in turn means that encounters tend towards the bland because any reasonable character has to be able to do them, and the gameplay ends up less diverse because a character build is generally one or maybe two ways of winning an encounter. Play a charge character, you charge everything. Every map has to be open enough to allow for charging. Now charge at every encounter for 100 hours of playtime. I don't even really end up caring about the possible diversity of characters because I'm stuck playing this character for this playthrough, and this character is a very specific kind of hammer that can only pound nails just so. It's optimizing between-playthrough variety at the expense of the experience within a single playthrough, which ironically makes the game less replayable for me because I'm less likely to finish it in the first place.

Sapphire Guard

2023-12-07, 06:34 PM

Sounds rough. Do you play with some self-imposed iron-man challenge or so? I wonder how you'd get in such a situation in the first place

Nah, I reload the save every time I can't immediately revive characters, because sorting through the inventory and who is supposed to have what is too much effort. I do play for the narrative experience rather than optimising and don't grind, so I pick my characters for narrative reasons rather than effect. Late in Shadows of Amn I used Slayer Mode too many times so my Paladin fell, he can take some hits but I keep him out of he frontline because if the Bhaalspawn goes down that's instant game over. I had a party of about level 7 against Sarevok in BG1,and couldn't beat him with that so had to switch to easy mode for that fight.

My party is mage heavy which is good against crowds but suffers when you have a single enemy that hits hard. Typically I would summon a bunch of monsters to take the hits, but now the enemies hit hard enough to get rid of those pretty quickly. There are ways I could keep going, but for now it has surpassed the amount of effort and attention I'm willing to put in. I'll get back to it eventually.

I knew they weren't actually going to have me freeze to death, but that was a particularly sweet way of doing it. Kim sold something precious to him for the sake of some lunatic alcoholic he's just met. Awwww. Good writing.

Zevox

2023-12-08, 12:25 AM

So, aside from continuing my third run through BG3, I'm at least for the moment playing a bit of a game that I haven't touched in much too long: BlazBlue: Central Fiction. Took the risk of grabbing the steam version - the only one they updated with rollback netcode for some reason, even though ArcSys put it on the console version of most every other game they retrofitted with it - and at least so far, it seems to run fine on my PC, some screen tearing issues notwithstanding. Though thus far I've only been playing in Challenge Mode, I haven't gone online just yet.

Still, I really need to make a point to revisit my old favorite fighting games like this from time to time, because goddamn does it feel good even just doing Challenge Mode in this again. The gameplay and how it controls just feel right in a way few fighting games do to me, the characters are fun, the combos are still some of the coolest in the genre IMO, and the music. Goddamn, I know SF6's music being mostly lame has made me extra sensitive to this lately, but BlazBlue's music is just so damn good. Not every track of course, and there were some I still had fairly fresh in my mind from using them as training mode music when play BBTag not that long ago, but then I put on random songs like Imperial Code, Childish Killer, or Reppuu that I haven't heard in ages and remember how great they are on top of the ones I remember, and.... damn. Revisiting it like this just makes me remember why I fell in love with the game, and through it the genre, all over again.

I'll definitely need to hop online over the weekend and see how it feels. Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising is coming next week, and I'll probably want to play that as my fighting game for a while, but I want to know if actually playing the steam version of BBCF online is feasible for me. I sure hope it is.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-08, 04:00 AM

Rogue Trader is downloading so there's only one question left: do I spec into chainswords or lasguns? I could do both, but Rogue Traders are also supposed to spec heavily into social abilities.

I know if I go the former I'll probably end up with either a power sword or eviserator, whereas if I go the latter I'm hoping the Rogue Trader armoury let's me skip past bolters and straight into hot-shot volley gun territory. I'll still carry a twin linked lasgun of course, but only to see in dark areas.

At least there's not twenty different classes to prompt me to endlessly restart.

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-12-08, 10:21 AM

Rogue Trader is downloading so there's only one question left: do I spec into chainswords or lasguns? I could do both, but Rogue Traders are also supposed to spec heavily into social abilities.

At least there's not twenty different classes to prompt me to endlessly restart.

So far the game has been pretty limited on initial equipment. Lots of standard ballistics in different forms (pistols, autoguns, carbines) and a decent amount of lasguns. One character starts with a personalized bolter you can't remove, but you can find others later. I've just now started finding hand flamers. Heavy weapons continue to elude me.

Somewhat interesting, there's no currency. You get loot in the form of various sundries and cargo you pick up that I've been told will eventually be used to curry favor with the various factions. At 10 hours in, though, I haven't seen that part.

Really enjoying the game, though. There's a decent mystery in the background with an upfront crisis to solve that's got me hooked. The characters are fairly interesting, though I'm cooling on Idira the Psyker due to some bugs with Veil Degradation.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-08, 11:04 AM

I mean, I went for an ex-Imperial Guard (they do not have any other names) Officer, so I'm perfectly happy with a decent lasgun until the game starts dropping the serious stuff. I'm guessing heavy weapons will be at least mid game content, do probably something like 30 hours in, even if the tabletop game let you start with them.

I'm going to be avoiding bolters because A) I like lasguns and B) it'll help distinguish the Sister of Battle companion.

I might do a second run as a Crime Lord/Warrior instead of Guard Officer/Soldier.

That's pretty accurate to the RPG, where 'a finite but arbitrarily large number of high quality clocks' was a valid starting pick. Rogue Traders have moved to the point where anything priced in thrones isn't worth their time.

I'm enjoying it as well, especially the fact that combat is now designed around it being turn based. But then I've basically wanted this game for a decade and a half, my bosses are strong.

I'm going to be avoiding bringing psykers with me as much as possible this run, being a conservative general who trusts in the power of a hundred guns and a hundred corpses. If I do do a Crime Lord run though they'll be borderline heretical.

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-12-08, 11:21 AM

Yeah, I don't know why I expected the game to hard lock you to the Imperium ethos. It's a Rogue Trader and Owlcat game, so I shouldn't have been surprised that there seems to be a valid Chaos Heretic path. There's even a Heretic voicepack for your character!

Funny enough, I also don't find the Psykers that amazing. They have some useful powers, but compared to my dream team of an ex-Commissar MC feeding Argenta multiple turns to explode enemies, some lightning has felt underwhelming. It became even more underwhelming when her skin peeled off and a daemoness erupted from the corpse (despite the UI saying she was at 0 degradation and no peril buildup), which promptly stabbed another character for 40 damage.

It might also just be Idira's build. Operative-Diviner seems like a weird combination. Feels like Officer-Diviner or Operative-Pyromancy/Telepath would be a better setup, though Officer would step on some toes.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-08, 11:30 AM

I mean, I suspect the power of psykers is going to be stuff like telepathy or biomancy, although if I really wanted buffs I'd have picked Officer over Soldier. I also suspect the game might actually be following the lore whereas most 40k media only really shows you the top tiers of psykers, it's possible that a psyker RT and your companions are actually Delta or Epsilon level (which would be closer to a member of a Sanctioned Psyker squad than a Primaris or SM Librarian).

I also wouldn't be surprised if PotW gets patched to be less punishing in a couple of weeks.

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-12-08, 12:48 PM

I also wouldn't be surprised if PotW gets patched to be less punishing in a couple of weeks.

I don't think the PotW needs to be adjusted. What I think is happening is Psykers can take a talent that reduces Degradation buildup by 2 on their first power per turn and it's triggering an underflow error. Idira had 0 degradation, but three powers in a row caused PotW kickbacks which never happened until she took the talent. It's either that or the Degradation meter is bugged and she's been in more danger than it shows. I know some encounters, especially in warp-sensitive areas, start the meter at 10 or higher instead of 0.

Diviner has a few solid powers. There's a buff that gives about +15% dodge and parry to a target for the rest of combat and a talent that further gives them +10 WS/BS for being affected by a Diviner ability. It has some offense, but it's definitely not as focused there as other psyker disciplines. It does have a wild debuff that blinds and pretty much neuters a single target which has yet to be resisted. Agreed that Officer feels like a better pair for the skillset, though.

Psykers in the game are rated from 0 to 4 on the psy-level scale. In the books a Farseer is rated around 8, so the player psykers definitely don't hit world-shattering power levels even at their strongest. By my cursory looks, you may be able to push Gamma at the absolute endgame levels, but you're probably Epsilon for the majority of the game. I don't have a whole lot of experience with Rogue Trader or how crazy Owlcat went with it, though. I did find it fun that when you reach Exemplar tier, you can actually take options to become an Unsanctioned Psyker and bolt powers onto a previously non-psyker.

Batcathat

2023-12-08, 04:53 PM

Because of this other thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?662243-Searching-for-a-game-scifi-investigation-adventure), I decided to check out Song of Farca and so far it's pretty good. Reminds me a little of Orwell (the game, not the author) but less... I don't know, clinical?

What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age [Archive] - Page 2 (2024)

FAQs

How many hours to beat Dragon Age? ›

Can you romance in Dragon Age? ›

Single-Player	Polled	Average
Main Story	513	40h 39m
Main + Extras	1.1K	59h 27m
Completionist	287	90h 32m
All PlayStyles	1.9K	59h 5m