Horizon Zero Dawn was super impressive given that Guerilla Games was previously known for their work on "Killzone"(a semi-generic FPS--that I still maintain had some of the coolest near future-ish designs!).
feeder wrote: H:ZD is a great, great game. Well crafted, plausible story, gorgeous visuals, and robot dinosaurs. I recommend it every time.
The only gripe I have about that game is the overabundance of nihilistic grimdark. You think it'd kill developers to put any sort of bright spots in the storylines nowadays. They had sequel fodder in the making simply with the colony ship, but they made sure that THAT was a grimdark dead end as well.
Oddly enough, I finally finished H:ZD a couple of days ago. I don't own the DLC, but I'll probably grab it before long.
The Odyssey story (the aforementioned colony ship) was odd. The Viewpoint monologues are written from the PoV of someone who was involved in its construction. And his final monologue indicates that it launched successfully, which gives the writer pride both for the future that the ship represents, and also for the work he did on it. But then elsewhere there's a quick note in an unrelated data point that you can find that indicates the actual fate of the Odyssey. And it's kind of a smh moment. You went through the trouble of tracking down the Viewpoints to find out about the Odyssey and its successful completion, only to have it off-handedly disposed of elsewhere.
But having said that, I found the grimdark to mostly be in the distant past. And that's understandable, given that the past in question revolves around the literal destruction of all life on the planet. The present - particularly if Aloy gets heavily involved in helping out those around her - looks much more optimistic.
I started playing around with the Valkyria Chronicles 4 demo this evening. Gameplay is similar to the first game (never played 2 or 3), with the added addition of the mortar class. The mortar is very handy in the right circumstances, and I'm dreading what will happen if the other side gets them later on.
I do have one complaint about mortars, though. The game has you position the aim point along the ground, as is normal for area effect weapons. And it also allows you to adjust the Z-axis of the camera while you're aiming the weapon. But the mission that introduces the mortar has you using it against targets that are located along the top of a wall. And you can't raise the camera quite high enough to get a look at the precise position of the targeting reticle on the top of said wall. As a result, I had wasted shots that either fell just short, or overshot just a bit. The direction of the shots was accurate. But I couldn't compare the distance properly.
The game is set concurrently with the first game, but the focus this time is on a unit of soldiers from Gallia (the country that the militia was from in the first game) who volunteered for the Edinburgh (Great Britain stand-in) army. Since Gallia is officially neutral, and not part of either the Federation or the Empire, Gallians who want to join a proper military frequently join Edinburgh's army (which has a good reputation). As in the first game, you control a team of unique foot soldiers, and a single tank (which this time is a mass-produced model, instead of the first game's unique vehicle). I've heard that an APC of some sort also joins your unit later in the game.
If you played the first game and liked it, then you'll probably like this one as well. If you're not familiar with the gameplay, then you can download the demo to check it out. Any progress made in the demo can be saved and carried over to the full game (which is set to release next month), and doing so is supposed to grant you an extra goody when the game releases.
Splitting my sparse spare time between Sniper Elite 4 and Orwell, which was free for grabs over at Humble Bundle. Quite enjoying the latter, a bit limited in what you can do, but it makes for a neat interactive novel experience.
I've dug into my older collection again, and played a few more Mass Effect 2 campaigns - previously, I always played as Soldiers, with one Infiltrator, but this time, I played as a Biotic Adept, and as a Sentinel. I never realized how potent powers are,especially used in combos, up until now. So that's fun.
I'm thinking about getting Andromeda - I'm wondering if the single player in Andromeda is anything like ME2? In terms of building a team, and being able to flit about doing sidequests, upgrading, and exploring. I know the Paragon/Renegade thing got removed, but are stuff like loyalty missions still in there?
I've heard a lot about bugs and stuff, so I'm also a bit concerned about that, unless it's been patched? I'd be playing on XBone, if that makes any difference?
Getting back into Fallout 4 now, just starting with the whole Nuka World expansion. I finished Vault 88, and got about half way through that island of misfit synths one
Most of the Andromeda bugs have been patched. And there's plenty of stuff in it relating to Loyalty missions.
As it stands nowadays, Andromeda is fine, with the only real problem it has being that there's too much content in it that isn't really content. - There's these vast worlds and missions and... A lot of them they kind of don't matter...
So what I've experienced most from watching other people I know play Andromeda is, they kind of fall into the "MUST DO EVERY SIDEQUEST EVER" and burn out on the game. Then start resenting it and get grumpy with it by the end.
If you don't overdo the sidequests, focus on the main story and the loyalty quests, you do have an enjoyable game out of it, in my view.
And if it's any consolation, the 100% ending is like a bonus cutscene that happens anyway, even if you do finish it off after the main story.
Eh, my main gripes with Andromeda were with the writing. Whether it was dodgy voice acting, weird word choices in the script (the much maligned "my face is tired" being the most widely shared example but it is not alone) or a lack of responses in conversations (one example being when the engineer tells you of her faith, you only have two options in how you respond which are something like "you're dumb" or "believing in God is great, I believe too!"), it just seemed so lacking in quality from the previous games.
Compel wrote: Most of the Andromeda bugs have been patched. And there's plenty of stuff in it relating to Loyalty missions.
As it stands nowadays, Andromeda is fine, with the only real problem it has being that there's too much content in it that isn't really content. - There's these vast worlds and missions and... A lot of them they kind of don't matter...
So what I've experienced most from watching other people I know play Andromeda is, they kind of fall into the "MUST DO EVERY SIDEQUEST EVER" and burn out on the game. Then start resenting it and get grumpy with it by the end.
If you don't overdo the sidequests, focus on the main story and the loyalty quests, you do have an enjoyable game out of it, in my view.
And if it's any consolation, the 100% ending is like a bonus cutscene that happens anyway, even if you do finish it off after the main story.
Honestly, the main story is the weakest part. 'Exploration in post ME-trilogy' far too quickly devolves into 'kill the orks.' The sidequests are the game's only opportunity to shine.
Wrapped up Sniper Elite 4's main campaign and the DLC. Maaaaaaaan, the voice acting took a turn for hammy at some points, the Italian mob boss and German big bad in particular were just horrible with their horrendously forced accents and pretentious banter. At least I finally unlocked the Lee Enfield rifle, so I'm going to ace that one for sure.
Also picked up Monster Hunter World for the PC this weekend. So far so good, aside from the fact that it's not a game you can quickly pick up and play when you're in the field.
I picked up a little game called Halfway. It's a turn-based strategy game from Chucklefish (the guys who made Stardew Valley IIRC), where you control a group of survivors stuck aboard a runaway spaceship that is infested with strange creatures that want to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes (okay, maybe not that last part!). It's pretty fun so far, but I'm not even halfway (sorry not sorry for pun!) through the game yet.
Getting back into Path of Exile again. Was feeling like playing Diablo II, you know? And Torchlight is just a little too cartoony in style.
I had a Templar, but I'm currently trying out a Witch- found a neat spell called Animate Weapon, but sad that it only works on in-world weapons, and not for too long. Might try to base a build around it if I can, though. Would be silly fun.
Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote: Orion: Prelude. Little fun game consisting in slaughtering dinosaurs, with poor graphics but pleasant gameplay.
I remember that game! Could never find people to play with, but it was certainly a cool execution. Gotta give kudos to the devs too, for making what was formerly a disaster more playable.
The original Star Wars Battlefront on my newly resurrected PS2, and the occasional game of Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne on BattleNet. I've been playing since 2003, I think I'm finally getting good
Picked up Monster Hunter World again, trying to find a weapon that works for me, though according to my brother, playing with mouse and keyboard instead of a controller is the main reason I play so poorly..!
Also played a few rounds of local versus in Worms WMD, which I think is the latest instalment in the series and quite entertaining, with some odd but fun weapon choices in there. My skills with ballistics in this game are as poor as ever.
We gave up on that and resorted to using other weapons instead, even breaking the "no kill sat / armageddon" clause at one point to get to the last hiding worms.
Sudeki. It's good, but whilst it does have a great first impression, it begins to fall apart later on.
What's the point of pushing the whole "four heroes" plot point if most of the game your quartet is separated? What's the point of a fast travel system if the game forces you on a narrow path for hours after unlocking it? What's the point of introducing different merchants with different sell prices, if you will never have a chance to use them because of the aforementioned linear design? There's a lot of questionable decisions. Its not terrible, but it could have been better.
Wrapped up a victorious Skaven mortal empires campaign in Total Warhammer 2 (as Queek)
The bulk of it against Dwarfs, sadly, which sucked a little joy out of it, as they are way overtuned. (Seriously, the High King Thorgrim and 5 units vs a full twenty stack should not be considered an auto-win for the dwarf side). But it's finally complete (and I took a few extra turns for the research achievement as well), so I'm feeling some satisfaction.
Ended up with Khemri and the Elven Refugees (Tor Elithias? rogue army) as my closest allies (plus the silver host vampires trapped in a Lahmia-sized pocket), and the dwarves finally became so desperate they colonized Orion's home and the Oak of Ages as I pushed them out of Zhufbar (their final proper dwarfhold). Ungrimm was the last to die, pulled down by a horde of rats in a ramshackle dwarf-colony in Orion's Glade. Thorgrim and a few followers died in an ambush outside it. I hope the ignominy of those deaths lasts a long, long time.
To be fair, a Skaven Stack is, like, the equivalent to a single Runeweapon. Your ratslaves aren't going to be doing much except smothering the enemy with their corpses.
Hopped back into Payday 2, which since I last played however long ago, now has four new heists, a new heister and even more free guns that I'll never use.
Decided to do the whole Infamy thing again, because why not?
Anvildude wrote: To be fair, a Skaven Stack is, like, the equivalent to a single Runeweapon. Your ratslaves aren't going to be doing much except smothering the enemy with their corpses.
And I was far past the point of using ratslaves, largely due to experience in the middle of my advance on dwarven territory, where Thorgrim hit a recovering army and garrison and essentially soloed half an army after I kited his forces to death. As absurd as that was (and it was very- he killed something like 600 rats, and was the only dwarf on the field for the last 5 minutes of the battle), it isn't what I mean.
The battle (actually, my ambush) I was referring to had an auto-resolve of ~75% in his favor, when he had the Warriors of Dragonfire Pass, 2 longbeards, a warrior and a miner unit and that was it. I had my then typical stack that was a base mix of storm vermin (both types), death runners, night runners with poison slings and plague catapults, with a few other higher tier things to fill things out to 20 (clan rats at worst, maybe some rat ogres, possibly a hero, since I'd finally dealt with their assassin spam). The autoresolve said one thing (and I tried it out on the save, complete destruction with minor dwarf losses), actually fighting it was the exact opposite, a trivial fight where the dwarves were utterly destroyed, with minimal losses on my side. That kind of thing is annoying.
And it's a problem that goes back further than the dwarf 'revamp'- every ME campaign I've run has involved the dwarfs absolutely dominating their neighbors, crushing the greenskins and usually stomping the vampires flat. Every time, without exception, unless I'm playing an army close by and . take Karaz-a-Karak in the first 30 turns or so and stop the deathball from rolling. It's fairly absurd.
Yeah, the auto-resolve in Warhammer Total War is a little faulty. I don't play Total Warhammer 2, but when I was playing Total Warhammer 1 with Vampire Counts auto-resolve was always wrong. Apparently it favors some factors more than others, usually ranged weapons.
Maybe they have it set up with "Fluff Rules". Like, I think watching a Tomb Kings player, he had similar issues- even on the Auto Resolves that he won, he took heavy, heavy losses.
Maybe the Skaven AI they use is a lot less careful about friendly fire? Or deliberately explodes their own units for fun?
Well had a play through of the first few missions and all was fine until I had to defend the marine Sargent. Now i can’t seem to deploy the turrets or mines.
Now figured it out first play through this morning. Christ I only had to press left on the d-pad. Lol
After stumbling over some videos on youtube during last night's I-don't-want-to-go-to-sleep-yet-youtube-binging, I decided to dust off my old N64 and play some Ocarina of Time. Maaaaan, I love that game.
nothing on Steam Store to catch my eye ... c.b.a. DLing FO4 and installing all the mods again
oh look .. Portal 2 last played like 20 years ago, .... man this is fun .... "Yeah Honey, I'm coming to bed ... in a minute ... just after GladOS calls me fat one more time!"
CthuluIsSpy wrote: Yeah, the auto-resolve in Warhammer Total War is a little faulty. I don't play Total Warhammer 2, but when I was playing Total Warhammer 1 with Vampire Counts auto-resolve was always wrong. Apparently it favors some factors more than others, usually ranged weapons.
The problem with it is that it just based on statistical calculations. It doesn't fight the real battle. If effect it adds up the amount of potential damage a unit can cause and calculates a likely cost for that battle. As such missile troops are weighted higher because the total output after including all their ammo is much higher. It doesn't take into account that the weak unit of bats might be set up on a flanking position to shut down those missiles troops. Damage is also distributed more evenly across all units which might result in one sides units meeting its break limit sooner than in an actual battle. It does't take into account that some units are fodder units to protect more valuable ones. In Warhammer 2 this is particularly obvious for the Skaven with low leadership and Tomb Kings can sometimes get an easy auto resolve against a much harder army.
Been playing Medival 2 Kingdoms as of late, currently busy conquering the Whole of Eastern Europa with my Lituanian King, great fun and just finished of the damned Novogrodians. Now for the Teutonic Order and their Danish allies
I've been juggling a couple of games lately but I started playing Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun yesterday after picking it up in a humble bundle a while ago. Absolutely loving it so far
Shadow Tactics is indeed awesome, but I wish it was longer. If I’m rembering correctly, the dev’s secured the rights to the Commando franchise shortly after Shadow Tactics acheived commercial success and they’re heading into development.
Yeah, I'm only on the second mission so far but I am very much enjoying it. I would love it if they did a Commando reboot. I used to play that and Desperados a lot as a kid
Anvildude wrote: To be fair, a Skaven Stack is, like, the equivalent to a single Runeweapon. Your ratslaves aren't going to be doing much except smothering the enemy with their corpses.
I could almost swear people don't know how to use skaven right (or at least the A.I. doesn't). You gotta take several armies and boost the ambush skill with them so that when your army has multiple friendly armies nearby and the enemy has several friendly armies nearby all 3 of your armies ambush only one of their's. Only one of your armies technically can deploy against theirs in ambush formation but only your armies come in as reinforcements. It's basically a superior form of lightning strike. Enjoy as it's like the best thing ever.
All that said queek's starting location is the absolute worst of all possible player start positions. You're wedged against mountains squaring off against most of the tomb kings, various vampire counts, the main orks, the main dwarfs not much farther than that and you have to fight one of the main lizardmen factions not too far out. There's also a massive expanse of land to the west that causes massive desert attrition, getting land-locked and therefore blocked for sea trade is quite possible for a long time and there's a serious lack of food and that isn't even considering the public order being lower from not having karak eight peaks for a while. By comparison Tretch's campaign is a walk in the park esp. since his army boost is helpful early on for ambushing and does it's best boosting for early campaign units like clanrats. Not to mention if you're ever hurting in public order all you have to do is break a treaty with someone you're gonna be at war with anyway and it lasts quite a while (13 turns i think).
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The auto resolve is total balls for certain armies though. I will say Legendary Lords do seem to be really tough to fight against though just because they never die so can level up pretty high making them fairly immune to heroes. Dwarfs has a ton of Legendary Lords so messing them up with heroes tends to be very hard.
pix3lboy wrote: I've been juggling a couple of games lately but I started playing Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun yesterday after picking it up in a humble bundle a while ago. Absolutely loving it so far
Totally addicted to Mobile Legends Bang Bang. I used to hate League of Legends because I was poo at the controls, and thought a mobile MOBA would be trash... I was VERY pleasantly surprised. 600+ games later and I am still not playing much else besides MLBB.
My little sister was singing the praises of Stardew Valley. I was browsing Steam, saw it was only a Tenner, and picked it up. I figured as long as I got a few hours of enjoyment out of it, I'd call it money (reasonably) well spent.
That was Tuesday.
Four days later, I'm 31 hours in... and nowhere near getting tired of it yet!
It's a very easy game to sink time into, and I like the relaxed pace, well worth the price I paid, IMO.
Revisiting Skyrim. Unfortunately forgot I left 3 different follower mods on Aela, and she kept looking like liquid. Now I'm re-installing around 7gb of mods, and using this as an excuse to start a new character. Feels good to re-explore the place though. Perhaps it's just the familiarity, along with a bit of excitement to finish mods and quests I had not touched. Orsinium, Falskaar, Rigmor, Bruma, Vigilant, and Apotheosis especially are ones I want to try at some point.
Random curiosity however. I've heard Enderal is getting its own Steam page. Would I still be able to switch between Enderal and Skyrim of both are installed, or should there be a clean install to use it?
Also heard it's possible to make FPS games via Javascript. Will certainly give that a shot, though I'm having a bit of trouble finding an API or compiler if they are even available.
Man, I gotta get my own Skyrim mods polished and finished up. Little stuff, you know, like tweaking crafting recipes (Corundum is NOT A METAL), changing the cost of certain spells, adding some new ones. Wards, especially, needed a lot more variety which I added. And I really want to expand on the Vanilla Staff and Scroll crafting the game has with the Atronach Forge.
About 1/4th through a fresh playthrough of Pillars of Eternity 2.
I figured it was time to revisit this excellent game now that 2 of the 3 planned Paid DLC content has been released. Looking forward to exploring more of Eora and more of its mythology.
Same. Rather good, not nearly as buggy as I feared from an untested studio.
It's very faithful to Pathfinder PNP, which is both good and bad. Lots (and lots) of options, which I'm sure will overwhelm a lot of people trying it, and (especially at low levels) combat can be very brutal. The RNG can just splatter characters at times.
At the moment, I've got my typical day 2 dilemma: continue on with a party I'm not entirely satisfied with, or start over with a different character.
@Nels- did they do a lot of tinkering again with the new patch? Kingmaker has all my attention at the moment, but I wasn't particularly happy with Deadfire on launch, and the massive revisions after the first dlc convinced me the best thing to do was wait until all three DLC were out, and then wait a month or two more until they get bored of messing about with changing mechanics and classes.
I've just started a fresh play through of Dragon Age Origins - I've played it so many times but still love it. I'm also playing World of Warcraft, and really enjoying the new expansion (trolls! So many trolls!).
Same. Rather good, not nearly as buggy as I feared from an untested studio.
It's very faithful to Pathfinder PNP, which is both good and bad.
Oh yes, waiting 2-3 minutes to get out of a cave I already explored because someone gets stuck on web trap and they fail their saves constantly is reeeeeeeeeeeally tedious.
@Nels- did they do a lot of tinkering again with the new patch? Kingmaker has all my attention at the moment, but I wasn't particularly happy with Deadfire on launch, and the massive revisions after the first dlc convinced me the best thing to do was wait until all three DLC were out, and then wait a month or two more until they get bored of messing about with changing mechanics and classes.
Its been so long since I did my initial playthrough, so I can't say for sure what they changed. I didn't even touch it until a few days ago when I was bored, so I'm not even sure what was changed for the first DLC.
Only thing that comes to mind is that Druid spells feel much more powerful, and the Rangers got some new abilities. It definitely feels easier, there are times when I'm playing "Classic" mode and I have to check that I didn't somehow turn difficulty to "Story Mode". Maybe I didn't turn on level scaling, or they made the game less difficult. Or I just L2P'd and know how to min/max my characters.
Pretty sure the rival families quest line in Port Maje is still bugged. I try to play both sides and do the peaceful resolution at the end, but one or the other turns hostile once I try to get them to the table. I may have done something wrong, but it was definitely bugged at launch, as i could double dip for end quest loot.
I'm playing it pretty slow, as I don't want to burn through the content and forget about it before the 3rd DLC is released.
I just finished playing a Total Warhammer 1 Dwarf campaign on Hard. Considering the difficulty and frustration I had in my 'Hard' Empire game, this seemed like a bit of cakewalk.
Although Hard Mode still seems to be, "nothings changed, but the enemies are way more experienced and do more damage to you, so you need 2 armies to beat their 1 army." (Or, if in the Empire's case, 3 armies...)
Ashaar wrote: I've just started a fresh play through of Dragon Age Origins - I've played it so many times but still love it. I'm also playing World of Warcraft, and really enjoying the new expansion (trolls! So many trolls!).
Curiously, what did you think of DA2?
Because I loved DA:O, and I thought DA2 was perhaps the most disappointing sequel I've ever played in my life. I honestly don't remember why, exactly, but I remember feeling it was terribad.
Because I loved DA:O, and I thought DA2 was perhaps the most disappointing sequel I've ever played in my life. I honestly don't remember why, exactly, but I remember feeling it was terribad.
I loved it, but fully recognise it's terrible. Interiors being reused over and over so every cave was the same, the ending being the same no matter what choices you make... so much of it was frustrating and felt half-assed. I really enjoyed it despite all this, and keep going back to it as I love the characters. I'm pleased they made the effort to make DA:I so good in comparison - but the story felt incomplete until after the Trespasser DLC, and having to buy DLC to make it feel 'finished' left a sour taste. DA:O is by far the best of the three imo.
I think DA2 stands as something of a rough diamond. While there are undoubtedly a lot of flaws (the reused assets and maps, the graphics not holding up even to their contemporaries) there's so much I love about it.
I think it possibly has the best cast of party members across the franchise, the three-act structure is a stroke of genius I'd love to see future Bioware games have another go at, the combat is to my mind a big step up over Origins just due to the faster pace. The writing I also think is fantastic, the way it weaves the seemingly separate narrative threads together and builds up an incredible tension towards the end of each act is great. Kirkwall feels like a powder keg about to explode at any minute and has a great sense of a place changing with the world around it.
To be honest, I love the fact that we have 3 DA games that are all totally different. Origins for the old-school RPG experience, DA2 for the grand, sweeping but very personal narrative, Inquisition for the truly epic 'end of the world' adventure. When DA4 rolls around, I hope it continues this trend of doing things differently every time, rather than just being Inquisition 2.0.
@Nels- did they do a lot of tinkering again with the new patch? Kingmaker has all my attention at the moment, but I wasn't particularly happy with Deadfire on launch, and the massive revisions after the first dlc convinced me the best thing to do was wait until all three DLC were out, and then wait a month or two more until they get bored of messing about with changing mechanics and classes.
Its been so long since I did my initial playthrough, so I can't say for sure what they changed. I didn't even touch it until a few days ago when I was bored, so I'm not even sure what was changed for the first DLC.
Only thing that comes to mind is that Druid spells feel much more powerful, and the Rangers got some new abilities. It definitely feels easier, there are times when I'm playing "Classic" mode and I have to check that I didn't somehow turn difficulty to "Story Mode". Maybe I didn't turn on level scaling, or they made the game less difficult. Or I just L2P'd and know how to min/max my characters.
Huh. Difficulty was a problem from the start, I played it when it came out (and forced myself to finish early due to a bug with enemies not dying in combat, and instead becoming immortal)- but most fights were an absolute face roll.
Druid spells being more powerful is interesting.... they had apparently nerfed druids significantly last patch. Apparently too much. Yeah, I'll definitely keep waiting.
KamikazeCanuck wrote: Agree. I know all lot of people feel DA2 was made on the cheap but I actually found it to be the most fun of them all.
Agree on that. A few problems on interiors, boss fights and abomination spam, but it had the best characters, and a much better story. [I actually think DA:O is the most forgettable of the three]
Whatever they do with 4, I hope they manage the games media better than they did with Andromeda.
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So... in other news, TW Rome 2 and TW Atilla are both on sale again. Which is the better option, especially as a first dip into non-Warhammer Total Wars?
Voss wrote: So... in other news, TW Rome 2 and TW Atilla are both on sale again. Which is the better option, especially as a first dip into non-Warhammer Total Wars?
How long is the sale running for?
TW Three Kingdoms just went on pre-order (released early next year, and pre-paying gets you the Yellow Turban DLC), and there's apparently supposed to be some sort of Total War announcement on the fourth of October.
So... in other news, TW Rome 2 and TW Atilla are both on sale again. Which is the better option, especially as a first dip into non-Warhammer Total Wars?
Atilla is my favorite TW game, as it added so many great features, some of which you will recognize from Warhammer. I enjoyed Rome 2 as a sandbox, but Atilla has a more narrative driven experience in that the story is based around the titular character's birth, rise and rampages across Europe. You also have to battle against climate change, in that a mini-ice age goes along with Atilla's rise. So even if you get your gak together militarily before the Huns or any other nomadic factions come your way, the changing weather patterns might devastate your economy. There are also plagues and religious upheavals chewing up public order, depending on what faction you choose.
Playing as Western Rome in Atilla is like playing Warhammer 1+2 with Archaon's invasion starting on turn one. It was so fun and tense. It felt like an entire campaign of desperate last stands and winning against all odds. It becomes like a normal TW game once the storm has passed, though.
Opinions will vary of course, but I like Atilla the most. Rome 2 had a tainted launch but its now one of the better and more polished historical titles CA has ever released. Only took like 3-4 years of TLC (and DLC). It now has some of the features that made Atilla my favorite, but its just not the same because of the (I believe)different game engines.
Why not buy both and play the rise and fall of Rome(at least the western half)?
edit: Warning: I haven't played Atilla in a bit, and from what I read there is a bug that CA hasn't adressed in a few years. People comment on it every time there is TW news on Facebook pages. I'm not sure the extent of the bug, so can't speak to if its game breaking or just annoying. Keep that in mind when it comes time to purchase.
Huh. Difficulty was a problem from the start, I played it when it came out (and forced myself to finish early due to a bug with enemies not dying in combat, and instead becoming immortal)- but most fights were an absolute face roll.
Druid spells being more powerful is interesting.... they had apparently nerfed druids significantly last patch. Apparently too much. Yeah, I'll definitely keep waiting.
After playing it a bit more, it mainly seems to be just one spell, which is a level 10 AoE that my druid pops at the start of combat. It can reliably knock same level mobs down to about half life. Its water/ice based, so it probably has something to do with resistances. The mage fire AoE doesn't have as much effect, yet. Seems like Ice based enemies are in the first DLC, and fire in the second, just going by screenshots. I haven't delved into either yet. Just trying to get leveled and gear for the new content.
I kicked up difficulty to whatever was above "Classic mode"(I forget) and turned on level scaling. It feels better now, much more of a challenge.
Voss wrote: So... in other news, TW Rome 2 and TW Atilla are both on sale again. Which is the better option, especially as a first dip into non-Warhammer Total Wars?
How long is the sale running for?
To October 1.
One big thing is Atilla+all DLC is less than the normal price of the base game.
Rome 2 is $20 (not unreasonable) and all the DLC for that is still $77 despite big discounts on most of it. That's pretty crazy, even with Rise being very recent (and only 10% off, which is fairly reasonable given its barely more than a month old)
TW Three Kingdoms just went on pre-order (released early next year, and pre-paying gets you the Yellow Turban DLC)
Can never escape those yellow turbans. Nearly 6 months seems far, far too early to pre-order. Especially since CA has favored youtubers they'll give early access copies to, probably in late Feb. I'll at least wait until those start going up and a good look at the game happens.
An announcement, eh? Could be something for Thrones or Warhammer 2. It's about time for a campaign pack or something for either.
Or it will be disappointing and just the 4th Dark Elf lord free release.
Should be the Warhammer 2 campaign pack announcement as they had said there was going to be one at the emd of the year. October announcement gives November release and that leaves some time to put out a patch before the Christmas break I assume.
Between Rome and Atilla, both are great, Rome has a bit more diversity and a little less in the way of annoying mechanics (the food/climate change of Atilla which means everyone is going to starve to death with 1/2 being barren wasteland, its a very forced mechanic the AI can't really deal with). When it comes to DLC just skip the Rome mini campaigns (Ceasar, Hannibal and Sparta), they are decent but not that different for the price. The last two I haven't tried but last I heard the Rise of Rome one had an annoying Civil War conga line kind of bug. Atilla DLC is decent, the Last Roman isn't that amazing, Charlemaigne(?) Is better for a kind of early Medieval style TW, but again not super amazing.
Rome 2 has more diversity in factions with DLC as Atilla has the three faction super blobs. Given the choice though? Skip all the mini campaign DLC for now, one or two faction packs if they really speak to you but overall I think you might be happier with 2 games instead of 1 with all DLC if that is the way you would go. You can always get some DLC once another sale rolls by, but with mods its already going to give you plenty to mess with before the next sale comes by.
Or it will be disappointing and just the 4th Dark Elf lord free release.
Hey, they still need to add Malus Darkblade
A Malus Darkblade campaign would be pretty neat. Start off heading into the wastes and getting possessed by Tz'arkan, then have to acquire the relics and recover your soul and then march on Hag Graef.
Tried a few battles with Skaven in TWW 2. I'm honestly surprised how resilient some of their commander units are. During one skirmish against Bretonnia, a warlord managed to cleave through a unit of squires on his own. In that same fight, a warplock engineer and doomwheel managed to fight off pegasus knights and grail reliquae in close combat. They were the only three standing, and somehow won the fight.
Or it will be disappointing and just the 4th Dark Elf lord free release.
Hey, they still need to add Malus Darkblade
A Malus Darkblade campaign would be pretty neat. Start off heading into the wastes and getting possessed by Tz'arkan, then have to acquire the relics and recover your soul and then march on Hag Graef.
I would be so bummed if DE got their 4th lord before the Lizards get 3. That would be two factions with 4 lords while the Lizardmen are still stuck on 2.
Or it will be disappointing and just the 4th Dark Elf lord free release.
Hey, they still need to add Malus Darkblade
A Malus Darkblade campaign would be pretty neat. Start off heading into the wastes and getting possessed by Tz'arkan, then have to acquire the relics and recover your soul and then march on Hag Graef.
I would be so bummed if DE got their 4th lord before the Lizards get 3. That would be two factions with 4 lords while the Lizardmen are still stuck on 2.
That seems most likely. The last time I saw the Free DLC banner image, the background for the next lord was a DE city.
Can't find that recently, though.
The October 4th announcement is almost certainly fantasy though, considering the 'news' bit on the Steam page is "A fantastical announcement is drawing near'
The only hope I can hold onto for Lizardmen is that the FLC bamner got changed a lot Originally the image was a Lizard style temple and jungle, but the Norsca mess and the QntC saw it change to High Elves suddenly. The idea seemed to be Slaven and Lizardmen FLC lords with HE and DE dlc lords. Well whatever, I'm curious what they will introduce given the options and if it is Southern Realms, as most people expect, what it's going to look like. Hopefully it won't be too long of a wait for the Lizardmen versus Skaven pack after that.
Maybe they will release it before Three Kingdoms. I'm pretty curious about that one, I always hoped for a China TW. Although I'm not as excited as I used to be for other CA titles. I don't know why, but Three Kingdoms just doesn't entirely click yet, certainly after it sounds like they removed naval combat.
Turnip Jedi wrote: Trying to complete FTL on Hard with the type C stealth cruiser, it's not going well, as whilst there is clearly a knack to playing FTL well the initially no-Stealth or Shields ship is starting to feel a bit of a RNG flukefest
FTL patched for multiple languages and I thought I'd have another crack at this after giving up, still blood boilingly nigh on impossible wink
This weekend I bougth and completed the two Dlcs for Pillars Of Eternity 2, I found Seeker, Slayer and Surviour a bit tedious, mostly due to the amount and back forth for relics and such, but I liked the history and the new places to see. I also liked seeing more of the god of Hunters and beasts.
Beasts Of Winter was amusing and with several moments that made me chuckle and grin as I sat and played. The boss figths where challeging but fair, and the loot from both DLcs where great! So praise to the Developers for that.
Thanks for the recommendations on total wars to everyone involved. I ended up with base games for both and a few select add-ons.
----
Still been very involved with Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Its an amazingly faithful adaptation of the pathfinder ruleset (not just core but several other classes, feats, etc), which makes it very hard to get into for general audiences.
The developers also apparently have a thing about the difficulty of the d20/Pathfinder system. As in, they think the actual math of the game is far too forgiving.. Unfortunately, adding +7 or 8 more to hit and defense in a d20 system is not particularly viable, and it makes difficulty something of a mess. It also isn't evenly applied, so any given encounter can be a cake walk or absurdly punishing. And that's on normal difficulty.
The kingdom management aspect is also problematic. Events pop up and are resolved by your assigned advisors after a certain amount of time has passed. Unfortunately, it's resolved by a single d20 roll, based on their primary stat and their area of focus (which is +2 per level of development). Most of the target numbers are in the teens, so failure on these events is statistically inevitable. Accumulate too many failures and your kingdom is destroyed. Unfortunately a few failures also impose penalties on their rolls, and lower your kingdom stats, so once failures start happening, they happen more frequently.
And none of this communicated well (feedback is a problem), so the game can suddenly end in failure while you're travelling or sleeping. Unless you turn the management aspect over to automatic, which can fail events but not enter an end-game state. Unfortunately, unless you're save scumming for each event resolution, statistical averages drift you to a fail state. The only thing to do at that point is either ending the game permanently or just abandoning the kingdom management aspect entirely and switching over to automatic. (Though the kingdom sim isn't that interesting, so that's not a complete negative).
But you can micromanage the difficulty settings a fair bit ( to get actual pathfinder standard monsters, they need to be set to weak with 'below average' stat adjustment, which makes no sense). As an example of how confusing and fiddly the difficulty settings are, 'normal' difficulty sets stat adjustment to 'weaker than average' and the next difficulty sets it to 'tougher than average.' No difficulty setting actually uses the 'Average' setting. Which is frankly baffling. An extra baffling, because it still gives monsters significantly higher bonuses than what is standard for Pathfinder.
For example, Skeletal Champions are, in the pathfinder bestiary, level 3 creatures with +7 to hit and 1d8+3 damage. If set to 'average,' they get +14 to hit with 1d8+9 damage. This is not a reasonable change, roughly akin to going from a 40% chance of hitting to a 75% chance of hitting and upping the damage per hit (and a 3rd level fighter would have about 30 HP, so they'd only need 3 hits to drop them out of the fight rather than 4) As a rough average. That isn't a change a low level party can really cope with. And it just gets sillier as you level.
Tonight I came across a lizardman 'king' who was attacking at +27 for 1d8+34 damage. His weapon? A normal, mundane spear. This was just some guy in the wilderness, not a random encounter, but not quest or plot related either. Just a crafted map in the corner of the kingdom. And he had friends. And a queen. Though I don't know what she did because my wizard turned her into a dog, and after everyone else was dead, my barbarian splattered the dog over a fairly sizeable chunk of landscape. [Big hits on low health enemies make them explode]. Said landscape was also currently an crater made of obsidian, because sometimes that's just how you should start a fight. Some of the spell effects are really amazing, by the way.
But once you put the numbers in a comfortable place for whatever difficulty you actually want (and figure out what difficulty settings give you those results), the game is pretty fun.
There is a huge enemy variety (with a lot of stuff I've never seen in a D&D-like computer game), lots of spells, feats (too many of those, to be honest) and huge variety of classes and choices. The writing can be a little rough at times (non-English grammar bleeds through a fair bit, its a Russian studio), and sometimes the game wants you to do things but just sits back and smugly shrugs at you.
There are a fair amount of bugs at the moment, but a lot of bug fixing as well.
It has a lot of promise, but the devs need to be reigned in on their stereotypical 'killer DM' mindset. it definitely won't be well received by general audiences, but it's probably the most D&D like experience I've seen in a computer-game. But that obviously has its ups and downs.
The big thing is a lack of feedback and the game just not telling you what is going on, and devs not understanding the coinflip nature of event cards and what big bonuses on lots of d20 rolls actually do to the math and results of the game. If you aren't familiar with 3rd edition D&D or Pathfinder, I wouldn't recommend it at all. And I mean really, actually familiar. If you don't actually know what AC, DC, BAB, For, Ref, Will, and DR are, the game is not going to tell you. They had to patch in free items and advice on how to accomplish one of the earliest simple fetch quests (and it likely still isn't enough) because it involved Swarms, and expected everyone to just innately know what that means and how to deal with it. As a bonus, once you kill a couple of enemies in that fight, more spawn in behind your archers/spellcasters. Because screw you, that's why.
Was gonna wait for it to go on sale in a few months, but in a moment of weakness, I picked up Shadow of the Tomb Raider and played it all weekend.. enjoying it so far, says I'm only 40% done even with a solid 2 days worth, so it should last me a while
Trondheim wrote: This weekend I bougth and completed the two Dlcs for Pillars Of Eternity 2, I found Seeker, Slayer and Surviour a bit tedious, mostly due to the amount and back forth for relics and such, but I liked the history and the new places to see. I also liked seeing more of the god of Hunters and beasts.
Beasts Of Winter was amusing and with several moments that made me chuckle and grin as I sat and played. The boss figths where challeging but fair, and the loot from both DLcs where great! So praise to the Developers for that.
You try your hand at the "megaboss" or whatever they called it that was introduced in this patch? Its around the top middle of the map, if memory serves. I was exploring up around there, attacking Fire Giant ships and saw the island. Landed and thought I was going to do a dungeon crawl. Instead an Arachnid of Unusual Size crawled out of a hole, with 3 red skulls above his name.
Nah.
Took my level 17s the feth out of there. I may return. Or not.
Trondheim wrote: This weekend I bougth and completed the two Dlcs for Pillars Of Eternity 2, I found Seeker, Slayer and Surviour a bit tedious, mostly due to the amount and back forth for relics and such, but I liked the history and the new places to see. I also liked seeing more of the god of Hunters and beasts.
Beasts Of Winter was amusing and with several moments that made me chuckle and grin as I sat and played. The boss figths where challeging but fair, and the loot from both DLcs where great! So praise to the Developers for that.
You try your hand at the "megaboss" or whatever they called it that was introduced in this patch? Its around the top middle of the map, if memory serves. I was exploring up around there, attacking Fire Giant ships and saw the island. Landed and thought I was going to do a dungeon crawl. Instead an Arachnid of Unusual Size crawled out of a hole, with 3 red skulls above his name.
Nah.
Took my level 17s the feth out of there. I may return. Or not.
You mean the homicidial aracnid son of Skaen? Its damned hard and will devour any characthers under lvl 18 like a dog let loose in a sausage factory. Did try it last nigth with my lvl 19 but have not beaten the beast yet. But its on my to do list for sure, the only boss figth i can compare it to in any real scale is the figth you can have with the avatar of Rymgard in the white void in Beasts Of Winter. I reckon a lot of debuffing spells and constant damage spells will help as it did in said figth with Rymgard. Imagien all the loot one gets from such a beast like the spider!!
Well I beat the mentioned spider god and well, it leaves much to be desired when it comes to loot and general layout of the figth, the main issue is the swarms of spiderlings and their contiunal spawning from several spider dens. She is weak vs crush damage and to some degree the spells priests get accses to in late game. I found several to be outrigth overkill against her, and summoning a spirit compainon as a priest also helps. It also helps having a monk or two in your party as they will do wonders against her. But it was certainly one of the more challenging figths in the game, so yes to more mega bosses.
Forza Horizon 4 was released today so I've mainly been playing that. The Forza games are always good but there's something special about riding around the English countryside that makes this one my instant favourite.
The starting village feels like I'm racing around the villages near where I live. They've even got small details like the coloured wheelie bins spot on
Got into WOW, which feels like a more pay to win version of war thunder. Amusingly even without paying, I am pretty decent. That being said, I hate people who turn into my torps even with warning.
Runescape is pretty pleasant as well, and the RS3 type is refreshing from the grind I once knew. Just have to start levelling and back to the skills again....
War thunder is the usual mish-mash of awesome matches and rage inducing oneshot kills from the USSR. Literally at one point got oneshot by a BT-7 who saw only my tracks on one side, and got incredibly lucky with shrapnel.
Since I feel I've 'played out' total Warhammer with a rather easy and straightforward 'hard' dwarf campaign, I'm consider the sequel. Any essentials I should get for it?
Got the 10th anniversary pack on GOG. It's Kingdom Come Deliverance, Shadow Tactics and Battle Chasers Nightwar (never heard of it) for 25 bucks, which is a price I'm willing to pay just for KCD, which I have yet to try.
Plus Shadow Warrior 2 is free right now. So, that's a good deal.
I've been playing alot of Ring of Elysium with my gaming group.
Its basically PUBG set in a mountainous region about to get hit by a killer blizzard. You can ride/climb with gliders, climbing picks and snowboards depending on what loadout you pick at the beginning. Its been alot of fun, but it suffers the same issues that all the survival/deathmatch games do, in that it can sometimes be a lot of work for little reward. I can only do 2-3 matches a night before it gets repetitive.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Bromsy wrote: Got the 10th anniversary pack on GOG. It's Kingdom Come Deliverance, Shadow Tactics and Battle Chasers Nightwar (never heard of it) for 25 bucks, which is a price I'm willing to pay just for KCD, which I have yet to try.
Plus Shadow Warrior 2 is free right now. So, that's a good deal.
Ya, thats a killer deal. I paid for the first 2 at release with 10% off and loved both those games.
Compel wrote: Since I feel I've 'played out' total Warhammer with a rather easy and straightforward 'hard' dwarf campaign, I'm consider the sequel. Any essentials I should get for it?
The second one really hasn't built up a big list of stuff to purchase yet. There's one paid lord pack (Hellebron and the Everqueen), and the Tomb Kings expansion. If you like the Tomb Kings, then get that, obviously. The other is up to you. The Vampire Coast release will only be the third paid DLC for the second game.
Got back into playing Eador: Genesis. It’s a rather nice ‘just one more turn’ sort of game, but probably one of the most unforgiving I’ve ever played. It’s like Heroes of Might and Magic with RNG maps and more hero customization.
Compel wrote: Since I feel I've 'played out' total Warhammer with a rather easy and straightforward 'hard' dwarf campaign, I'm consider the sequel. Any essentials I should get for it?
The second one really hasn't built up a big list of stuff to purchase yet. There's one paid lord pack (Hellebron and the Everqueen), and the Tomb Kings expansion. If you like the Tomb Kings, then get that, obviously. The other is up to you. The Vampire Coast release will only be the third paid DLC for the second game.
Agreed. You can get quite a bit out of Mortal Empires without TWW2 DLC anyway.
Something to note however (which you probably already know), is that the TWW1 content and DLC does carry over to TWW2 as long as TWW1 is in your library. You don’t even need TWW1 installed to use it in TWW2. I imagine you have at least some of the TWW1 DLC if you’ve played it out, but you can still use that for Mortal Empires and battle mode. I believe that DLC is still on sale, so that might be an option.
Just finished off the main questline of Assassin's Creed Origins (Odyssey has me in an AC mood but I can't afford it just yet) and I think that technically makes it the first AC game I've played and actually finished. Top notch game really, and one of the most fun open world sandboxes to go and explore (my fascination with ancient history helps, I suppose).
Has anyone played either of the DLCs? Are they worth picking up, or should I just start saving for Odyssey?
Paradigm wrote: Just finished off the main questline of Assassin's Creed Origins (Odyssey has me in an AC mood but I can't afford it just yet) and I think that technically makes it the first AC game I've played and actually finished. Top notch game really, and one of the most fun open world sandboxes to go and explore (my fascination with ancient history helps, I suppose).
Has anyone played either of the DLCs? Are they worth picking up, or should I just start saving for Odyssey?
I got the season pass for Origins (as well as Odyssey). . .and while not crucial to play, there is definitely some fun stuff to do, especially, as I recall the "Undead Pharaoh" one (forget what its called atm)
Man, the combat in Spider-Man is tricky! Can’t simply brawl as you do in Arkham. Really need to work on your early stealth takedowns, and keep the combat airborne as much as possible.
Yeah, staying aerial and using the environment is the way to go. That, and use your gadgets and suit powers often. The game is pretty generous with the gadget refills usually and the powers cool down nice and quick, so you can rely on using them at least once per fight. Don't forget that unlike Arkham, you can heal mid-fight using your Focus Meter, which is often more useful that burning it on a takedown. Actually, webs and positioning make a great alternative to takedowns mainly as if you can get someone close enough to a surface, a few Web Bullets or a single Impact Web can instantly take them out of the fight even if they're on full health.
I also kept the early suit mods that reduce melee/ballistic damage respectively on for most of the game, they're a very small investment for just that little bit extra suitability in a tough spot and that's always useful.
I do think there's a very satisfying power curve to it though. By the third act of the game you'll be fighting some nasty stuff but you'll have the tools, skills and experience to feel like a proper badass. Learn to combine certain skills/gadgets and you can be unstoppable, just taking baddies apart by the dozen with nary a hit landing on you.
No shame in running away either to get some breathing space. And yeah, healing via focus is something I’m getting the hang of!
Automatically Appended Next Post: The web swinging really is exhilarating. Currently just whipping around grabbing backpacks and that, snapping landmarks etc.
Going to try something a bit new. A friend of mine and I used to play this very loose version of D&D. Had less of a focus on numbers crunching, more of a focus on combat than storytelling, and tended to lean towards using characters that are stronger from the get-go instead of gradually. I thought I would try a joint playthrough of one of the isometric RPGs, and see what he thinks. We would both have our own characters, and give commands during the fights (or in my case, I would play one of the NPCs).
I’m kind of wondering what Dakka recommends. The ones I can use are:
- Baldur’s Gate
- Both Neverwinter Nights games
- Icewind Dale
- Pillars of Eternity (possibly)
- Divinity Original Sin (might not be able to run it)
- Beyond Divinity
Furthermore, any classes I should recommend for him? Races?
Playing the new Bard's Tale IV now. It's...ok, I guess? I'm not getting blown away, but I'm enjoying the music, the voice acting, and the setting. The gameplay itself is a bit rough, and could use improvement.
Thought I'd jump back into Rainbow Six Siege after giving it a bit of a break. My god, there are way more ****holes playing it than I remember. Out of the 7 games I played, 5 started with someone voting to kick another player for seemingly no reason and I had to report 3 different players for team killing me in the starting area
SkavenLord wrote: Going to try something a bit new. A friend of mine and I used to play this very loose version of D&D. Had less of a focus on numbers crunching, more of a focus on combat than storytelling, and tended to lean towards using characters that are stronger from the get-go instead of gradually. I thought I would try a joint playthrough of one of the isometric RPGs, and see what he thinks. We would both have our own characters, and give commands during the fights (or in my case, I would play one of the NPCs).
I’m kind of wondering what Dakka recommends. The ones I can use are:
- Baldur’s Gate
- Both Neverwinter Nights games
- Icewind Dale
- Pillars of Eternity (possibly)
- Divinity Original Sin (might not be able to run it)
- Beyond Divinity
Furthermore, any classes I should recommend for him? Races?
Baldur's Gate II was one of my favourite games as a child. The number of spells for mage classes was really impressive, although I usually went as a rogue. I'm not sure how well it holds up now though because it's been years since I've played it
Divinity Original Sin is very fun as well, although my wife refuses to play with me after I got caught stealing a carrot during a quest, resulting in the quest giver hating me so much they refused to talk to us. The great thing about Divinity is that almost every character build is a viable option. My character was a thief who could talk to animals and loved trolling people where as my wife was a very serious mage who refused to break the rules. It led to some very interesting ideas on how to do certain quests, especially the rock, paper, scissors mechanic of deciding who in your party gets to do the talking
If you can run it, Divinity Original Sin is definitely my pick for a great co-op D&D style game. I really need to talk my wife into playing it again.
If you can get Neverwinter Nights 2 to work properly online, you'll have a great time. I recommend getting the Kaedrin Class mod to get more classes and customization. Oh and the Baldurs Gate reloaded mod if you prefer DnD 3.5 mechanics, its essentially Baldur's Gate in Nwn 2, really great work.
Finished the Battletech campaign last week, been plinking around trying out some 5 skulls for a challenge - there aren't any, really.
Went back to TWW1, finally bought the last bit of DLC for it and tried the Beastmen campaign; was cool, kind of annoying having to fight Todbringer with a full stack along with two others. Other than that, it was a pretty straight forward campaign - not really worth the $$ alone but having access to them for the grand campaign and in TWW2 (when I finally buy it) is OK.
Installed Darkest Dungeon too, going to wait until the weekend to try my hand at it - need some decent sleep and food to reduce my overall frustration level before I try the RNG simulator.
Ratius wrote: Anyone else playing / played Divinity Original Sin?
Thoroughly enjoying it so far, a really good quality game!
Had a blast playing co-op with the wife, we really liked it. Also, it's probably not worth mentioning, but the spell Charm and Charm arrows? Totally overpowered.
pix3lboy wrote:
Baldur's Gate II was one of my favourite games as a child. The number of spells for mage classes was really impressive, although I usually went as a rogue. I'm not sure how well it holds up now though because it's been years since I've played it
Divinity Original Sin is very fun as well, although my wife refuses to play with me after I got caught stealing a carrot during a quest, resulting in the quest giver hating me so much they refused to talk to us. The great thing about Divinity is that almost every character build is a viable option. My character was a thief who could talk to animals and loved trolling people where as my wife was a very serious mage who refused to break the rules. It led to some very interesting ideas on how to do certain quests, especially the rock, paper, scissors mechanic of deciding who in your party gets to do the talking
If you can run it, Divinity Original Sin is definitely my pick for a great co-op D&D style game. I really need to talk my wife into playing it again.
Bobthehero wrote:If you can get Neverwinter Nights 2 to work properly online, you'll have a great time. I recommend getting the Kaedrin Class mod to get more classes and customization. Oh and the Baldurs Gate reloaded mod if you prefer DnD 3.5 mechanics, its essentially Baldur's Gate in Nwn 2, really great work.
Thanks for the advice guys! Will check specs, and see if we can get Divinity going.
Wasn’t aware about the Kaedrin Class mod. Will try that for a playthrough later on.
Decided to skip the Origins DLC and just get straight into Odyssey. Certainly not a decision I regret, as the latter takes everything I liked about the former and then bolts on a bunch of stuff that improves the experience as a whole immeasurably. Admittedly, I'm a sucker for an action-RPG and doubly so for that in a massive open world full of stuff to stab, hide from, clamber over or set fire to, but Odyssey is just ticking all the boxes.
Spoilering this not for game spoilers but because I've pretty much written half an essay on it, quite by accident...
Spoiler:
As I suspected it might when they announced, finally having the ability to shape a character, and through them the world, has turned out to be the missing link of the AC series to my mind; the appeal for me was always the fact that the game let you go and interact with a massive, detailed slice of history but the introduction of RPG narrative elements and dialogue options definitely takes the experience from a somewhat passive one to something very active and interactive, the chance to make that world something unique and much more tangible than the older games allowed.
It's definitely a game that has mastered the illusion of choice, but it does it in such a way that I quite honestly don't mind. There are times when you get the sense both dialogue options would trigger the exact same reply, and you know that conquering a nation only makes a very impermanent mark and it'll change hands again in a few hours as the game keeps running the war in the background, but it feels like you're getting to make those choices. And that's not to say that there aren't genuine moments of choice, there's definitely been times where I've gone on to regret making a certain decision or statement a quest or two later and some of the more dramatic moments thus far have offered a greatly personal choice, even if either outcome largely has the same effect on the game world or you'll never come across the characters involved again.
On the other side of the coin, the mechanical changes that started with Origins have been built on nicely as well; the 'powers' you can unlock along with the highly varied gear/crafting system definitely encourage you to hone a specific playstyle or two and actually think about your approach to certain things. Unlike a lot of other AC titles, favouring, for instance, combat, is going to come at the cost of steath, but the game also lets you build around that and create a character setup that's an absolute powerhouse cutting down swathes of enemies. Alternately, you can really pile on the upgrades to assassination and go around keeping the body count low and precise, if that's your thing.
Personally, I'm going for something of a melee/archery balance, largely since I'm not great at stealth sections generally and when it comes to the big Conquest Battles, there are few more fun ways to do them than loosing half a dozen arrows in a single volley before charging in with a hammer the size of a man's torso. In other AC games that'd basically be handicapping myself by relying on the more overt and violent approach, but thanks to the more in-depth system here I feel rewarded for taking that path.
A lot of praise also has to go to the voice acting and performance capture work done on this game, especially Melissanthi Mahut's turn as Kassandra, who's emerged as one of the most believable and nuanced protagonists in gaming.
It's definitely an aptly named game; 'epic journey' absolutely sums up what's on offer here. The game is vast and varied, full of content without ever feeling bloated, taking as much time for the quiet and mundane as it does for the bombastic and dramatic. There's comedy and tragedy, often pitched opposite one another to great effect, there's larger-than-life characters ranging from the effortlessly charismatic and likeable to the unsettling to the endearing annoying (hello, Socrates...) and there's a wealth of potential to forge your own story. It's lengthy as well, without ever really being slow: today I've just passed my total playthrough time of Origins and I'm not even half way through the main story yet, not to mention the fact there's huge tracts of the map as-yet-untouched.
Well worth a look if action-RPGs are your thing. Quite honestly, for me it's coming very, very close to equalling the fantasy RPG mastery held by The Witcher 3, which is a remarkable achievement for a game series that, going back a few years, you'd not think to associate with this genre at all. Yes, it's a departure almost completely from what's come before, by my god is it a good one...
I finished Bard's Tale IV yesterday. Yeah, it was just ok. The voice acting was great, the music was great, the visual design was great, but the gameplay itself was kinda crappy. Just very uninspired, and it also became way too easy halfway through. I almost never even used any of the bard songs, the bard was too busy ripping stuff apart with her sword.
After that, I hit up GOG and noticed a new game was released yesterday with very little fanfare: Return of the Obra Dinn. It's from the guy who made Papers, Please. Playing that right now.
So I picked up Black Ops IV to play Blackout, and it's pretty fun, even if most games fall into either one of two categories:
1. Drop in to a hot area and get killed immediately 2. Drop in to a deserted area, gather a bunch of loot, see no one and eventually get killed later when the play area shrinks
It's definitely something that'd be better to run with a group of players, rather than playing singles or pugging the whole time.
Tannhauser42 wrote: I finished Bard's Tale IV yesterday. Yeah, it was just ok. The voice acting was great, the music was great, the visual design was great, but the gameplay itself was kinda crappy. Just very uninspired, and it also became way too easy halfway through. I almost never even used any of the bard songs, the bard was too busy ripping stuff apart with her sword.
After that, I hit up GOG and noticed a new game was released yesterday with very little fanfare: Return of the Obra Dinn. It's from the guy who made Papers, Please. Playing that right now.
I've been getting back into Rainbow Six Siege in a big way recently, although it's only me and a friend playing with randoms and no one else communicates. Still fun but the win ratio isn't particularly high. I've been trying to convince some other friends to play but no one else I know with a PS4 is interested
Tannhauser42 wrote: I finished Bard's Tale IV yesterday. Yeah, it was just ok. The voice acting was great, the music was great, the visual design was great, but the gameplay itself was kinda crappy. Just very uninspired, and it also became way too easy halfway through. I almost never even used any of the bard songs, the bard was too busy ripping stuff apart with her sword.
After that, I hit up GOG and noticed a new game was released yesterday with very little fanfare: Return of the Obra Dinn. It's from the guy who made Papers, Please. Playing that right now.
What's Obra Din about? What kind of game?
It's essentially a logic puzzle. You know, the kind where you have, say, five dinner guests, and you have to correctly guess who sat where, what color they wore, and what they drank based on clues like "the person who wore blue sat left of the person who drank beer" and such. But, the clues aren't written like that in the game, they're nearly all visual. The premise of the game is that the ship Obra Dinn has returned, with no survivors, after being considered lost at sea for a couple years. You're an insurance investigator equipped with a logbook (listing the crew manifest, a map of the ship, some sketches of the crew) and a magic pocketwatch that, when used on a body, will show that body's final moment. Using the watch gets you a bit of atmospheric sound (maybe with a couple lines of dialogue), and then a 3d snapshot of the moment of death that you can freely walk around and examine. You'll have to look for all the clues to identify the name of each crewman to their face in the logbook, how they died, and if applicable, who killed them. And the game uses a 1-bit graphic style like old Macintosh computers.
I very much enjoyed it. I had to use some hints to complete it, but otherwise the clues really are all there if you're observant enough.
Still cracking on with the magnificent vastness of Odyssey. Definitely feels like I'm getting towards the endgame (not sure what the level cap is, but the highest enemy I've seen is level 50 and I'm 45) but there's still plenty to do and I want to get the bulk of it done and all the map explored before kicking off what seems to be the grand finale of the main story.
I must admit I'm greatly enjoying
Spoiler:
the weaving of mythological elements into the game. Yes, they're all products of weird alien tech, but that doesn't really come up in the script beyond a couple of throwaway lines, as far as the hero is concerned they're fighting an honest-to-gods Minotaur or Cyclops. Makes for some satisfying boss fights and works well to blend the Greece of Sokrates and Herodotus with that of Theseus and Perseus ect. And it sounds like one of the expansions is going all-in on this concept, so I'm looking forward to that a lot.
I do love the power curve in this game. At the start you're a jobbing mercenary trying to keep their head, towards the end you're essentially a demigod among the mortals, striding through armies with ease, assassinating targets before they even know you're on your way, going one on one with the toughest fighters the game has to offer. It manages to give you a great feeling of power without trivialising the combat, which is a hard balance to strike.
I've been pretty impressed with Odyssey. The gameplay has been fun, though I've been neglecting the primary story.
My biggest gripe is they kept the dumb 'present day mind-reading blood-analyzer machine' for basically no reason. It jumps in and interrupts the story from time to time for no particular reason or payoff. And is centered around the spearhead, which has the 'DNA of two individuals' on it. Which... given they just handle it (as do at least two other characters in flashbacks*), yet drive it all-the-way-through the bodies of hundreds of people as an assassination tool, this seems unlikely.
*and yes, flashbacks inside a genetic memory reading device. It hurts my brain.
It would be a much stronger story without the intrusion. Thankfully its been fairly ignorable so far, but I've been actively ignoring the main story. I haven't even finished up Athens and I'm running around in Crete dealing with.. things.
I'm pretty amused by the long drawn out pantomime, and then... yeah. Actual real thing.
For Greece as a whole, however, I am wondering why so many active temple sites are already ruined, even given the dark age long past and relatively recent Persian invasion. Some of these places are a wreck despite having soldiers and cultists standing around waiting to be murdered.
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Gameplay is solid, though I'd have liked a little more variety, soldiers from cities not Athens and Sparta, for example.
Yeah, I do find it hilarious that they've ditched, y'know, the actual Assassins Brotherhood before they jettisoned the pointless present-day framing device, but it is reasonably un-intrusive... In the 56 hours I've played so far I think I've spent about 10 minutes on those bits, and it's only pulled me out of the main narrative twice, so it's not nearly as bad as, say, Black Flag, where you're running around for entire missions as an intern with an iPad....
That bait-and-switch-and-switch-again in Crete is definitely one of the more interesting regional quests. My other favourite is the one across the Silver Islands in the mid-east of the map, there's a series of smaller quests that link together really nicely, feature a couple of the game's strongest characters and definitely hammer home the fact that the consequences of your actions are never more than a few steps behind you.
I especially appreciate that it's a whole mini-saga hidden away on a couple of islands that the main quest never even takes you near, it's a real reward for going out and exploring, and the game does a good job of keeping a nice pace to main story when you're actively pursuing it while also leaving plenty of stuff to do if you just want to put it on hold for a while after a few main missions. It definitely follows in the tradition of The Witcher 3 in making sure that its side stories are engaging; even the ones that are simple fetch/murder missions will get you a fun line or two of dialogue or a unique piece of loot or take you to an interesting, hidden away bit of the map.
On the ruined sites, I might be mis-remembering here but I'm pretty sure most of the actual ruins have been inhabited by bandits/cultists/Sons of Ares/Daughters of Artemis rather than Athenian or Spartan soldiers, which makes at least a bit more sense; the bandits will hole up anywhere they can and the others are obviously going to congregate around sites of 'power' and prestige. As for their state of ruin in general, I think it's easy to forget just how ancient the ancient world can be. It's the same thing that comes up in Origins; there's longer between the building of the pyramids and when Origins is set than there is between that setting and the present day.
Wanted to give X-Com Enemy Unknown another shot. I always start each new game with a customized ‘good luck soldier’, who’s often managed to be the MVP of each game. Thought switching it to ‘Classic’ wouldn’t be too tough with my good luck charm leading the pack.
She has completely fallen apart thus far.
She’s been horribly injured twice. While the rest of the team have surprisingly good accuracy, this soldier’s aim has been absolutely dreadful. While previous games saw her dodging enemy overwatch consistently, she seems to be a complete bullet magnet this round. Everyone seems to panicking a lot more in general too.
The surprising thing is that ‘Classic’ on Enemy Unknown seems somehow easier than ‘Normal’ on UFO Defense. Still, the Dwarf Fortress mindset is keeping it fun.
On Chapter 2 of Red Dead Redemption 2, just starting to explore the world and such. Chapter 1 was straight up hand holding/tutorial, as is the norm, so I’m looking forward to stretch my legs so to speak.
The game is gorgeous and the gunplay has been alright, I’ve just never been a fan of Playstation controllers and I get progressively worse at shooters as the years go by. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it with more practice.
nels1031 wrote: On Chapter 2 of Red Dead Redemption 2, just starting to explore the world and such. Chapter 1 was straight up hand holding/tutorial, as is the norm, so I’m looking forward to stretch my legs so to speak.
The game is gorgeous and the gunplay has been alright, I’ve just never been a fan of Playstation controllers and I get progressively worse at shooters as the years go by. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it with more practice.
I've been watching a playthrough (don't have a PS7plus amateur edition or whatever). It's interesting. I can see a lot of potential there (and a lot of familiar subsystems), but some of it... textures and animation quality are unexpectedly weak in places. Watching someone carefully take a horse by the lead, then 'use' a hitching post and watch the lead just suddenly 'rubber-band' to a new position is oddly disappointing.
The gunplay, too, is oddly bland. Getting shot in a firefight looks so unimpactful I've seen players not even notice they've been shot... multiple times, even to the point of standing in the open and just taking it. But the 'five finger fillet' game is disturbingly visceral and a little creepy, makes me want to nope on out of watching.
While the story looks somewhat interesting, you apparently can't save and stop if you're in the middle of a quest, upon loading you have to restart a mission from the beginning, which is really annoying, especially on anything that is teaching game mechanics (like buying/selling horses, or hunting legendary animals). And these mini-tutorials continue well into chapter 2.
So far, not all that impressed. Horse handling feels cumbersome and after a few more shootouts, the shooting is definitely bland and not a fan of the camera. Not sure exactly how I feel about it, at this point. Was expecting better to be honest. I still have urges to play it for some reason, so maybe it will grow on me.
I also don't like the way they've handled the main character. He has a distinct history and personality (though the latter is fairly wretched), but he's...generally agreeable in a vicious, murderous way.
I know some of it is to allow the player to make moral decisions, but he honestly comes off as a respectful, honorable, torturing murderer. Which is to say, not having any sort of moral dimension or personality at all. He's just up for whatever.
His most notable trait is disliking many of his companions, while failing to note that he isn't any different. This dislike is particularly aimed at the young version of the protagonist from the first game (this is a prequel), for reasons, even once articulated,* aren't very compelling.
*and the game has a problem with the 'will explain later' trope. Hours in (and literally months later in game), and still no one will share what exactly happened to put the group in their starting state.
From a few gameplay videos I've seen, RDR2 just looks like they've put too much game into the game. The attention to detail in the look of the world is one thing, but did anyone who played the last one really want a mandatory Survival Mode? Did they want to have to worry about separate systems for cleaning their clothes, body, guns and horse? Did they want to have to worry about whether their coat was too warm or cold, or if they'd eaten the right type of porridge that morning?
It just seems a really odd choice when the last one had a pretty much laser-focus on moving you from mission to mission, story beat to story beat nice and quick. Sure, you had to trek a bit to get to each start location, but that was as slow-paced as it got. If anything, there was too little to do outside of those missions and the Stranger tasks.
But nonetheless, I'd take that over a Kingdom Come: Deliverance style 'realism'. It just seems odd to constantly interrupt a game like that with these little tedious things. Sure, an 'immersive' mode that you could turn on or off would be fine, but to have it as a fundamental part of the game looks like it bloats things far too much (and I say that as someone who's usually a massive fan of 'full' open world games in the vein of AC or Spidey).
It also seems from the gameplay videos I've seen that people weren't expecting this element at all, which I guess makes sense when you had 8 years of hype but barely any actual gameplay to look at. I bet if they'd announced this sort of stuff ahead of time people would have been a lot less keen in the first place.
And yeah, Arthur Morgan just seems like a thoroughly unlikable bastard. I didn't always like John Marston, but at least he generally did the right thing and shot the right people in the end.
I've been playing xcom 2: long war oddly. It's tough in different ways but it takes forever. Right now i have no issues with the current enemies for the most part but the big issue is avatar progress. I can handle it on hardest on ironman in xcom 2 vanilla but this is 2nd hardest on long war on ironman. It's a bit tough to know all i gotta do. Strategy map is harder in long war.
Playing RDR2 a lot, loving it.. but one thing that really is starting to bug me a little is you can't be a good guy. I usually like to do the "good" options whenever I can, but it seems like whenever i do, the next mission I have is the complete opposite like breaking someone out of jail and having to murder everyone in town to finish the mission. Or beat the tinkle out of someone who owes the gang money, then go back to camp and take a kid on a nice fishing trip down by the river. I wish there was a way to tell if a mission was going to be more of a bad guy mission before you take it, usually you don't even know things are gonna go bad until you're halfway through, and by then it's too late.
Also, my girlfriend caught me murdering and skinning a poor defenseless bunny and made me swear to never do it again.
After getting deeper into RDR2, I can say my initial misgivings are gone. This game is pretty awesome. I’m still not too deep into the story, but I explored quite a bit of the world and did some random missions. Still have a few minor complaints, but I’m having a blast.
Medieval: Total War, finally trying to win the campaign for the first time. Playing as Spain. I have 36 turns left to conquer about 25 territories. Not sure I am going to be able to do it.
Been playing through a variety of older games since I got my new laptop.
Dark Souls 3: Cool game, some really fun parts to it. Overall quality very consistent
Dark Souls 1: Went and replayed it as a pyromancer and a sorcerer.
Shadow of Mordor: Finally got round to this. Fun, but repetative and the nemesis system ended up being less cool than I hoped. Still, worth the six quid I paid for it!
Now I am playing the Witcher 2. Actually really enjoying it, even though I had seen some negative reviews (this seems to be a theme for me!).
Once I finish that, gonna give either Warhammer Total War or Witcher 3 a go. Divinity is also on the list.
Just started up another game of Mass Effect: Andromeda.
And in related news...
On the odd chance that anyone was still holding out hope for an immediate continuation of the story, the newest Mass Effect novel is covering the story of what happened to the Quarian ark. And with that, the last immediate dangling plot hook from the game is addressed. Presumably, the story would have been covered in a DLC. But since no additional single-player levels were released, it got a novel instead.
Also, for N7 Day (November 7th), Bioware releeased a graphics update for the game to improve the graphics on the XBox One X.
So, Witcher 2 started being a bit frustrating mostly due to the sudden death nature of the combat with no autosave. I have become used to fairly regular autosave, but W2s is very erratic. It seems to only save when you recieve a quest, but not when you finish one. Annoying. Had to replay several bits now because I am not in the habit of save spamming. Getting better at the combat, but it is pretty janky and awkward in places.
So, being frustrated, I decided to give Nethack a go. My first run as an Orc Barbarian ended with me opening the first door I found and getting zapped by a kobold wielding a death ray wand.
Started playing Crossout a little. It's pretty fun. Grindy, but the grind is full of pretty explosions and chunks being blown off vehicles, and cars with one wheel limping into a capture point and winning the game, so that's something for it.
It's got this, like, super-integrated Store system, which is interesting. It's clearly built to make microtransactions easy and simple, to encourage them, but it's also tied directly into the base free-to-play game, too, where you can sell any equipment that you win, as well as basic scrap resources, for the premium currency, and then use that to buy better parts and the like. Like, it has time-based crafting for most everything that utilizes prizes from missions, but it's almost faster and easier to just sell your stuff and buy the better equipment via market. Smoothly implemented, all in all, though.
Red Dead Redemption 2 on my Ps4, so far the game has yet to make me feel invested in it. I find the whole package quite stale, but I will at least try to sink a few more hours into it before I drop it.
This is something that makes me a bit frustrated since I liked the first game, and wanted to like this one. But so far it seems that emotion will elude me when it comes to RDR 2
Completed the quest to find the serial killer in Read Dead Redemption 2 !
Spoiler:
The reward for your quest: A thank you and a princely sum of 20 bucks... Now I’m wondering if I should have let the psycho kill the sheriff and then kill the psycho to loot both corpses.
I’m trying to like you, RDR2, but you’re making this very difficult. I’m not at the “feth you game” level that I was when playing Farcry 5, and I doubt I will get to that level because this game is nowhere near as annoying and much better made, but I’m finding it hard to pick up the sticks and play this game. I think the problem is that I’ve been doing my own thing instead of the yellow camp quests for the most part, but even some of them have been “meh”.
I'm almost done RDR2, I think I'm about halfway through Epilogue 2. It's a nice setup for the events that take place in the first game. Maybe RDR3 will be a pre-prequel where you play as a young Dutch? I"m gonna have to replay RDR1 now, a lot it I just don't really remember so I think it'll be fun to play that like it's a sequel to this one.
Spoiler:
The part I hated the most was saying goodbye to Arthur's horse in the final battle. That was sad :(
So after the fiasco that Rockstar made with GTA:5, I decided to avoid RDR2....seems like I made the right choice.
And then, probably going to wait for Fallout 76 to become less pricey and more fixes and content added. I heard a LOT of stuff about Fallout 76 being quite low in content and quite...uninspiring to explore.
Disappointing to hear RDR2 isn't living up to expectation, I think I might wait for it to drop off in price a bit before I try it for myself. Liked the first one, but I'm not 100% sold on the whole psuedo-prequel thing.
I've been playing FO4 on survival, which added a bit of interest to a game I was pretty much bored with. Of course, once you get to lv 20-30, with a few good settlements and access to vertibird travel, it does drop off in terms of challenge pretty sharply, compared to early-level where a radroach is a threat, and a single super mutant is an utterly terrifying prospect.
I also picked up "Oxygen not Included" on Steam, which is by Klei, who made "Don't Starve" - it's a fun little ant farm style thing, with a lot of complexity and depth. "Riding the disaster curve" is an expression that I think fits quite well - you run out of oxygen, so you build a ventilation system, but that needs power production, which produces heat... it's the most in-depth resource management game I've ever played (not saying much, admittedly) but despite the steep learning curve, it's a fun game.
Eumerin wrote: Just started up another game of Mass Effect: Andromeda.
And in related news...
On the odd chance that anyone was still holding out hope for an immediate continuation of the story, the newest Mass Effect novel is covering the story of what happened to the Quarian ark. And with that, the last immediate dangling plot hook from the game is addressed. Presumably, the story would have been covered in a DLC. But since no additional single-player levels were released, it got a novel instead.
Also, for N7 Day (November 7th), Bioware releeased a graphics update for the game to improve the graphics on the XBox One X.
Ah Good. Hope its better than all the other ME:A books that have come out so far.
Dark Apostle 666 wrote: Disappointing to hear RDR2 isn't living up to expectation, I think I might wait for it to drop off in price a bit before I try it for myself. Liked the first one, but I'm not 100% sold on the whole psuedo-prequel thing
.
Its definitely not a bad game, I’d wager most developers would give their left nut to release a product like RDR2. I’ve been critical of it, but I’ve mainly just been playing explore and hunt, doing the odd side of the road white dot quest or bounty hunt mission. The most recent story mission that I played, the gang was chased out of the starting town and the flight/gunfight was intense.
There is definitely alot to like in this game. The early mission where you go out and get drunk with the biracial black/Native character was laugh out loud funny, and some of the situations that you can walk into are fun as well. I found what seems to be a gang of inbreds and had a huge fight with them last night, as well as stormed a fort full of confederate holdouts to collect their boss for a bounty. Great times!
I think my main dislike and major source of frustration is the fact that I’m playing a console(PS4) and find the controls clunky/unintuitive for my tastes.
Necros wrote: Maybe RDR3 will be a pre-prequel where you play as a young Dutch?
One of RDR2's themes seems to be "The past isn't as great as you remember it," so maybe RDR3 should go back to the early 1810s and show that no, it's not civilization's encroachment that forces people to be terrible - they're going to be backstabbing, double crossing, murdering monsters that try to dress themselves up as idealistic heroes no matter the situation. And maybe we can meet one of Dutch's, Arthur's, or John's ancesters.
Dark Apostle 666 wrote: Disappointing to hear RDR2 isn't living up to expectation, I think I might wait for it to drop off in price a bit before I try it for myself. Liked the first one, but I'm not 100% sold on the whole psuedo-prequel thing
.
Its definitely not a bad game, I’d wager most developers would give their left nut to release a product like RDR2. I’ve been critical of it, but I’ve mainly just been playing explore and hunt, doing the odd side of the road white dot quest or bounty hunt mission. The most recent story mission that I played, the gang was chased out of the starting town and the flight/gunfight was intense.
There is definitely alot to like in this game. The early mission where you go out and get drunk with the biracial black/Native character was laugh out loud funny, and some of the situations that you can walk into are fun as well. I found what seems to be a gang of inbreds and had a huge fight with them last night, as well as stormed a fort full of confederate holdouts to collect their boss for a bounty. Great times!
I think my main dislike and major source of frustration is the fact that I’m playing a console(PS4) and find the controls clunky/unintuitive for my tastes.
Yea the controls are odd and realy makes the game suffer because of it. They should have stuck with the normal controll layout in such games. And yes! That mission with the man named Lenny is hillarious.
Necros wrote: Maybe RDR3 will be a pre-prequel where you play as a young Dutch?
One of RDR2's themes seems to be "The past isn't as great as you remember it," so maybe RDR3 should go back to the early 1810s and show that no, it's not civilization's encroachment that forces people to be terrible - they're going to be backstabbing, double crossing, murdering monsters that try to dress themselves up as idealistic heroes no matter the situation. And maybe we can meet one of Dutch's, Arthur's, or John's ancesters.
Sounds like a cool idea, though I think the lure of the American Civil War may be too enticing for the developers to skip over it and go back that far. These games owe so much to the spaghetti westerns (and the westerns that followed which were massively inspired by them) that skipping over the time period of arguably the greatest of those films (The Good, The Bad and the Ugly) would be a tough sell with how many incredible set pieces it would allow for within the game.
I finished RDR2 last night. Good ending, and if you sit through the 20 minutes worth of credits there's some cut scenes mixed in leading up to I guess the start of RDR1 and you also get to see some of the other characters from Arthur's gang and what they're up to these days. The final battle was cool.
On the map there's a whole unexplored section below Blackwater, never really had any quests take me down there. I'll probably explore a little .. I wonder if they have future DLC plans to add new quests for that area?
Still in and out of Odyssey. I'm really enjoying the approach to the post-launch content that they've started to implement here. Aside from some just nice-to-have features added off the back of community feedback (gear visual customisation, higher level cap with surplus XP carried over if you hit the cap a while ago) there's been a decent flow of stuff to do, including a couple of hour's worth of new multi-part questlines and a new endgame boss or two with unique rewards.
That's all well and good in itself, but I'm also finding it's just giving me an excuse to keep booting up the game a good dozen hours or so now after I finished the main storylines. I'll hop on to do one of these new quests, and stumble across a new location or two, or decide I want to stage another Conquest battle, and I'll easily get another couple of hours out of it each time.
Started Conan Exiles, as it seems to be one of the few survival games that sticks to antiquity/medieval gear, it's fun so far but I am expecting it to be much better when I play with my friend who also has the game.
Conan Exiles is good fun, though word of warning when playing in coop: you can't travel too far from the host of the server due to limitations of the game. Makes travelling between bases and stashes a bit of a bother.
BrookM wrote: Conan Exiles is good fun, though word of warning when playing in coop: you can't travel too far from the host of the server due to limitations of the game. Makes travelling between bases and stashes a bit of a bother.
Necros wrote: On the map there's a whole unexplored section below Blackwater, never really had any quests take me down there. I'll probably explore a little .. I wonder if they have future DLC plans to add new quests for that area?
People have glitched across the river and into Mexico, so there's room for more.
I'm hoping for some Sadie Adler DLC post game but pre-epilogue, or maybe concurrent to RDR1. I want to play as the rootinest, tootinest, shootinest lady in the ol' west.
Don't know if people still play Vermintide 1- at least, not lower-level general play. I think people are still doing Legendary runs and the like, and I think it still has more mods. Do you own Vermintide 2? Because that's just... a fantastic game.
I've hopped over to the sequel myself, the first game was good, but Vermintide 2 is just so much better that I can't go back any more. I mean, more character options, better loot drops that are actually for the character you play instead of something random..
Fairly certain that Vermintide 2 is also heavily discounted on both Steam and Xbox at the minute, you can pick it up for about £12 or equivalent, I believe.
BrookM wrote: Conan Exiles is good fun, though word of warning when playing in coop: you can't travel too far from the host of the server due to limitations of the game. Makes travelling between bases and stashes a bit of a bother.
Ew gross, coop. Don't play coop in games like this. Its not what they are for. Just run a server in the background.
I am heavily considering getting into Red Dead Redemption 2 right now.
Haven't been gaming since a while and Space Hulk Tactics and Martyr disappoint apparently. No decent Warhammer based games on PS4 right now. Wonder if Vermintide 2 will be any good?
Spend more time making games these days, but I have just finished Megaman X 1 & 2 for the SNES. Sadly, MMX3 is proving to be too frustrating to be any fun. The first two games aren't too bad though...
Warhammer 2. 50 turns into a Count Noctilus Eye of the Vortex campain.
This is my first foray into the Vampire Coasts faction and I’m finding it difficult to win battles in convincing fashion. Mortars are a big help to soften the enemy up before they hit my lines, but once the enemy hits my lines it feels like “Mutually Assured Destruction”. Granted, I have the Unit Rarity mod active, so that greatly reduces my Depth Guard numbers, but even they feel soft.
Despite the troubles in battles, or maybe because of it, I’m having tons of fun and I’m going to start a new campaign, now that I understand the mechanics and tricks. Going to send agents out in every direction to get Pirate Coves up and running for easy income for instance. Probably take Sartosa, too, just to have another staging point.
Don't take too many agents. Every time you establish a cove, you get a cost increase for 10 turns, and in the early game, it takes a while for coves to start paying off the initial cost. Especially in cities that might change hands, as coves are destroyed when the city is conquered by someone else.
Personally I found focusing on the ship (and getting more legendary admirals from the tech tree, who also have ships), beats having cities for armies (though cities are important to the coast for just generating money hand over fist). The important thing is to have a level 5 admiral in the 'fleet engineer' office so the ships grow like crazy. It's worth it to take the +5 lord level tech to ensure that.
Mortal Kombat. It’s kind of fun how the story mode goes through the storyline of the first 8 games. Pretty sure these 2 on 1 fights are against tournament rules though!
Well, I beat The Dreadfleet Eye of the Vortex campaign!
Barely had anything left when Fellheart finally showed up with a fresh army at the very end of the battle. Thanks god for Deck Gunners, mortars and Depthguard just chewing through any infanty put in their way.
Was a fun campaign and the developers did a great job at making the Vampire Coast a unique play experience. I only ever took Sartosa when it came to territorial gains. All my money came from Pirate Coves in Ulthuan and raids of Lustria. My next playthrough I will try Saltspite and do more pirate and treasure hunting.
Black Friday sales have not been kind to my bank balance. Picked up Diablo 3, Star Wars Battlefront II, Spider-man DLC, Sonic Mania, Red Faction Remarsterd and Assassin's Creed Origins. Finished the first Spider-man DLC and was a little dissapointed, then done the Battlefront story which was actually better than I was expecting, although it is very short. Now I'm playing Origins. I'm enjoying it so far
Fallout 76. Not sure what the point of it is. I guess its for the multiplayer but is the combat in Fallout so great that we have to play it all together in a big group? No, no its not. It's all the stuff that's missing from this game that makes it fun.
Killing time with Frostpunk endless mode, which is fun for survival challenge but a bit lackluster as a city builder. Can't wait for the huge battle brothers expansion tomorrow. I've been praising that game alot and now it's gonna get about 30% bigger!
Finding Hitman 2 to be the easiest Hitman game I've ever played in the series.
Its fun, but on a few of the maps I can kill one of the targets within minutes, undetected. The AI needs a bit more work, or more NPCs should be floating around in my opinion. Granted, I'm on the "Professional" difficulty, and recently finished the previous entry in the franchise a few weeks ago, so I'm well versed in the art of the bald man stealth killer, but its been suprisingly easy. I guess I'll just do a play through to get some stuff unlocked and then take another crack at it on the higher difficulty.
Started playing Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun again. Unfortunately, a patch at some point after the last time I played it rendered all of my old saved games unusable. So now I've got to play through the levels against starting from the beginning, instead of just jumping to the levels I want.
Oh, well. It's a good game, so I don't mind that issue as much as I might with some other games.
The company's next project is Desperados III, which is due out next summer. There's an amusing trailer for it that pretty blatantly shows the protagonists restarting from a Quick Save multiple times as new threats reveal themselves at the wrong times during a particularly tense moment.
Tried to try out the new battletech patch. Game hung. Tried a couple fixes, gave up.
Was curious about the new mercs campaign mode, didn't care to drop $20 for 3 mechs and a couple missions. But the patch is apparently incompatible with my completely unmodded game. So... That's exciting.
Been playing a lot of Hearthstone lately. Finally took the time to go back and beat the Lich King with all 9 classes, so I unlocked the special hero from that.
Call of Cthulhu. Just finished a second run to get the other endings. Definitely not a high budget title, but damn it builds the sense of dread beautifully.
Bromsy wrote: Battle Brothers. Their new beasts and exploration DLC dropped, definitely refreshed the game.
Me too. Been playing it theese last two days. The dlc makes the game feel more fleshed out. The world feels a bit more alive now and everything has a more low fantasy feel to it. I can definetly recomend it to anyone who enjoyed the base game, easily worth the price tag.
Been cycling between a few different games depending on my mood.
WWE 2K19 universe mode when I feel like some simple fun. Just had a 4 tag team TLC match for the tag titles in my womens division which was pretty chaotic and a lot of fun. It ended with my custom wrestler tag team winning as my AI partner grabbed the belts as I laid out everyone trying to stop her with a steel chair and finishing moves (TKOs all round!)
Also recently reinstalled Fallout New Vegas and am doing yet another run through. It is such a great game.
Then I've just started Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Getting my ancient Greek on. Seems fun so far but haven't got very far into it at all yet. Gameplay has certainly improved since the last one I played (Black Flag), especially the combat.
Finally got battletech to work again:
changed settings through the launcher that I hadn't previously even known existed, which did nothing.
Uninstalled, but the devs apparently don't know how to build a proper installer or uninstaller and the game litters the entire system with crap, and apparently the only way to do a clean uninstall is follow some random guy's video (not affiliated with company). It's a big multistep process that can involve digging into the system registry to get rid of things, which can break your system if you do it wrong. Which is absolutely offensively bad, and gave me a severe WTF! moment.
And then finally, based on some advice by people who were NOT the devs, switched to an older build, started it up, and then switched back to the current patch. That actually worked (for reasons no one can explain), but the process severely annoyed me. Mostly because the patch to 1.3 just made my completely unmodded game not work, there was no explanation, and no real justification for it, or any indication they are even working on it, as it isn't an uncommon issue.
I like the career mode better than the story mode (mostly because the storytelling was so awful, the game is just better not having it). The big change is the career mode doesn't just hand you free mechs (like the centurion in the Argo, or the later lostech stuff) or just hand out literally millions of C-bills for early missions. It feels a bit more like pure battletech, where you actually have to put some effort in to make the transition out of a recon lance (medium and 3 lights).
New Stellaris dlc megacorp got out. Gave it a quick spinn but quickly gave up. There's several changes to how planets work, so I'll have to re-learn it and get back into it. Looks promising though.
Spent most of the weekend with it myself. I like the planet changes, makes it more meaningful and less 'click trivial upgrade decisions.' Only flaw planet side is the 'job priority' concept on the population panel. It isn't any such thing. You aren't prioritizing, you're disabling job slots to force Pops into other jobs (which is often really necessary to force them into energy production, which is last on the list), and it means you have to manually un-disable jobs to avoid unemployment.
The UI changes make me angry. Over a third of the top bar is empty, but they obscure the three science totals and the individual rare resources, which are much more important now for building upgrades. Also they un-hot keyed the tech screen.
The market is purely exploitable, and rather incredibly, the AI seems.... A lot worse. It just doesn't keep up in science or fleets or building armies to defend planets with (partly because defensive armies only happen if you build specific buildings and staff them with pops)
Mostly it's still the same 'let them game run and watch resource totals change.' Maybe pause and fix things if the numbers go red (but with the market you really don't have to and may not even want to unless it gets really bad).
The trade system is... Eh. Forgettable. A bit of extra money, but generally not worth getting excited about. Going gestalt consciousness and just not interacting with the new stuff is fine (and often absurdly powerful)
I started Dragon Age: Inquisition again after the DA4 teaser dropped. I love most things about the game but I forgot who much of a grind resource gathering can be. Thank god for mods.
I've also been playing R6:Siege a lot with a friend, although playing with three randoms is starting to get a little frustrating. I really need to convince some more people to play
Currently playing the Return to Ubersreik DLC for Vermintide 2. Good fun and not too expensive for 8 Euros. New weapons are pretty 'meh' so far for the ones I got
Started with Red Dead 2 on PS4. Bit slow at the beginning and limited area of the map available but once you get through the first chapter it opens up and shows it's full beauty and potential. Recommended.
Haven't tried the online part yet but I have been hearing is is getting better and better and they are adding stuff to it before the official launch of Red Dead Online.
First post on this thread, hoping for some replies.
Started to get back into Battlefield 1, got it for Christmas along with Titanfall 2 (best game ever made!) and thought I'd give multiplayer a go.
I have very mixed feelings on it, on one hand it's a very realistic, sometimes very harrowing representation of WWI, but on the other hand the whole multiplayer system is a bit of a joke. I'm Lv5, stuck with a few basic weapons that don't seem anywhere near as good as they should be, and there's no apparent balancing system, so I'm up against Lv70, 80, even 100+ with a huge variety of extra weapons and stuff. I was playing an Assault class earlier and it seems in the time it takes me to raise my pistol, my enemy's spun up an LMG and has hosed me down. The last game I played I spent more time waiting to respawn and getting to the battle than I actually did in the battle.
It's a shame, I was so hyped for this game but it's a huge letdown. Campaign is slightly better, but even then it's a bit lacklustre as every mission somehow just turns into stealth. Doesn't matter wherever you're a tank driver, pilot, or even cavalry under command of T. E. Lawrence, you end up just having to sneak around throwing lures out.
Valkyrie wrote: Doesn't matter wherever you're a tank driver, pilot, or even cavalry under command of T. E. Lawrence, you end up just having to sneak around throwing lures out.
Yeah, I was thinking about this just the other day. The very first campaign is ostensibly about being part of a tank crew. But half of the missions (two out of the four) are you on foot running around by yourself.
I've gotten back into The Lord of the Rings Battle For Middle Earth 2. Now I remember why I loved this game so much. It is so much better than many modern RTS.
New operators and map for Rainbow Six Siege dropped, so having some fun with those.
Also really, really enjoying Slime Rancher, the lack of a fixed calendar and events means you're free to explore and expand at your own pace, something I really like.
Valkyrie wrote: Doesn't matter wherever you're a tank driver, pilot, or even cavalry under command of T. E. Lawrence, you end up just having to sneak around throwing lures out.
Yeah, I was thinking about this just the other day. The very first campaign is ostensibly about being part of a tank crew. But half of the missions (two out of the four) are you on foot running around by yourself.
Yes, I was really disappointed in the campaign. Battlefield always has really good trailers but this game reminds me to never fall for them ever again. Like they have like 5 campaigns set in WW1 and you don't even go on a trench raid.
The multiplayer felt more WWI is in that I'm getting shot crossing no man's land all the time but I think it would have been better if they used more of the bolt action weapons. Everything was way too advanced. I think because they made it so that everyone is actually running around with crew serviced weapons rambo style.
Yes, I was really disappointed in the campaign. Battlefield always has really good trailers but this game reminds me to never fall for them ever again. Like they have like 5 campaigns set in WW1 and you don't even go on a trench raid.
The multiplayer felt more WWI is in that I'm getting shot crossing no man's land all the time but I think it would have been better if they used more of the bolt action weapons. Everything was way too advanced. I think because they made it so that everyone is actually running around with crew serviced weapons rambo style.
The air combat campaign had you crossing the trench lines.
The second mission in the Italian campaign was sort of like that. But it came across as more of a confused muddle than anything else.
As for the weapons...
Unfortunately, I can fully understand the decision for that. If they'd gone with the weapons that were commonly in use instead of the more experimental and limited run stuff that is commonly used, then the game would likely have been a lot less popular. I would imagine that the new WW2 Battlefield game (which I haven't played) is quite similar in that regard.
Saw that Divinity 2 got a big update/patch "Definitive Edition" and decided to give it another go. Not noticing anything particularly different so far, but I think most of the new updated stuff was for endgame that I never delved into because of other games releases around that time.
I had forgotten how well made this game is. Most of the fights are pretty challenging and I loved how spells interact with each other. On its surface it looks cartoonish and some of its humor is corny, but if you look at the whole body of work this game is pretty dark. The cast of characters are fun as well.
Aside from Insurgency: Sandstorm, I don't foresee anything else taking up my gaming time so I'll probably finish this game by Sunday.
Edit: Well gak, 3rd and final DLC for Pillars of Eternity 2 just dropped today...
Valkyrie wrote: Doesn't matter wherever you're a tank driver, pilot, or even cavalry under command of T. E. Lawrence, you end up just having to sneak around throwing lures out.
Yeah, I was thinking about this just the other day. The very first campaign is ostensibly about being part of a tank crew. But half of the missions (two out of the four) are you on foot running around by yourself.
Yes, I was really disappointed in the campaign. Battlefield always has really good trailers but this game reminds me to never fall for them ever again. Like they have like 5 campaigns set in WW1 and you don't even go on a trench raid.
The multiplayer felt more WWI is in that I'm getting shot crossing no man's land all the time but I think it would have been better if they used more of the bolt action weapons. Everything was way too advanced. I think because they made it so that everyone is actually running around with crew serviced weapons rambo style.
That's exactly it, nothing that conveys the stereotypical view of WWI, a trench raid. I also thought that a mini-mission of the Christmas Truce would have been a good addition. Imagine just an extra bit of play after the credits for example, no combat, you just walk around seeing the two forces mingling, artillery still going off in the distance, with a bit of player interaction.
Multiplayer is just how you described it, guys running around with huge LMGs that just hose you down. I played last night, spent about 10 mins trying to be as tactical as possible, crawling across the no-mans land, taking cover where possible, really taking my time to stay alive, then bang, one bolt-action shot from a Lv90 guy and I'm back to the start. The lack of balancing is really my main irk with this game, I've managed to get up to Lv14 and I'm still being placed against Lv>70 guys.
The Battlepack system is pretty crap too. Managed to get a pack for levelling up, it had a skin for an artillery truck. Who ever uses these?
Battlefield One should have had the final mission of the campaign be a slow walk through a trench as an officer, talking to your men, hearing little snippets of their conversations amongst each other, hearing them pray, cry. See them looking at pictures of loved ones, writing what could be their final letters home. All the while you are constantly hearing shells exploding in the distance, like constantly rolling thunder.
You eventually reach your post and line your men up at the steps. There are no words, just the thunder of the guns. And then that stops and there is nothing but silence. You look down at your pocket watch and see the seconds count down, the only sound the shuffling of feet, rustling of uniforms.
30 seconds. You give the order to fix bayonets and your men do so. You hear the clicks of the bayonets being fixed to rifles.
20 seconds. You remind your men not to bunch up and to keep moving forward.
10 seconds. You step forward into position at the ladders out of the trench alongside your men.
0 seconds. The sounds of whistles. You blow your own. You head over the top, your men alongside you. Bullets crack around you and the whistling of shells rain down. ahead of you lies 100 yards of scarred earth, mud and barbed wire. You look right and left. All around you men fall. Some are dead, others dying. The ground erupts in front of you, mud flying high into the air and raining down upon you. You are dazed, your ears ring, the colour seems to have drained from your vision. You seem to be outside your body, looking down at yourself, buried under mud. You rise over no mans land see thousands of men moving forwards, many falling amid shells and bullets.
The image of war slowly fades out, replaced with an aerial video of the battlefield today, red with poppies, craters are now lakes.
Yes, I was really disappointed in the campaign. Battlefield always has really good trailers but this game reminds me to never fall for them ever again. Like they have like 5 campaigns set in WW1 and you don't even go on a trench raid.
The multiplayer felt more WWI is in that I'm getting shot crossing no man's land all the time but I think it would have been better if they used more of the bolt action weapons. Everything was way too advanced. I think because they made it so that everyone is actually running around with crew serviced weapons rambo style.
The air combat campaign had you crossing the trench lines.
The second mission in the Italian campaign was sort of like that. But it came across as more of a confused muddle than anything else.
As for the weapons...
Unfortunately, I can fully understand the decision for that. If they'd gone with the weapons that were commonly in use instead of the more experimental and limited run stuff that is commonly used, then the game would likely have been a lot less popular. I would imagine that the new WW2 Battlefield game (which I haven't played) is quite similar in that regard.
That was a trench stealth mission! Another damn solo stealth mission. Not an “over the top boys” trench raid.
By going with the Rambo weapons it just made Battlefield 1 just like every other WWII game and every other shooter quite frankly. They really squandered a chance to make something that feels different.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
A Town Called Malus wrote: Battlefield One should have had the final mission of the campaign be a slow walk through a trench as an officer, talking to your men, hearing little snippets of their conversations amongst each other, hearing them pray, cry. See them looking at pictures of loved ones, writing what could be their final letters home. All the while you are constantly hearing shells exploding in the distance, like constantly rolling thunder.
You eventually reach your post and line your men up at the steps. There are no words, just the thunder of the guns. And then that stops and there is nothing but silence. You look down at your pocket watch and see the seconds count down, the only sound the shuffling of feet, rustling of uniforms.
30 seconds. You give the order to fix bayonets and your men do so. You hear the clicks of the bayonets being fixed to rifles.
20 seconds. You remind your men not to bunch up and to keep moving forward.
10 seconds. You step forward into position at the ladders out of the trench alongside your men.
0 seconds. The sounds of whistles. You blow your own. You head over the top, your men alongside you. Bullets crack around you and the whistling of shells rain down. ahead of you lies 100 yards of scarred earth, mud and barbed wire. You look right and left. All around you men fall. Some are dead, others dying. The ground erupts in front of you, mud flying high into the air and raining down upon you. You are dazed, your ears ring, the colour seems to have drained from your vision. You seem to be outside your body, looking down at yourself, buried under mud. You rise over no mans land see thousands of men moving forwards, many falling amid shells and bullets.
The image of war slowly fades out, replaced with an aerial video of the battlefield today, red with poppies, craters are now lakes.
In other words, really Blackadder Goes Forth it.
Yes! Exactly. Nothing in the game conveyed the typical experience of a foot soldier on the western front.
They only thing that’s close is the opening scene where you play as the Harlem Hellfighters. That lasts about 1 minute and that’s where the game peaks.
Anvildude wrote: Well, if not a good WWI game, how about the Civil War?
War of Rights looks like it might be decent.
Ugh. . . despite all the positive reviews of that game, I simply cannot give it a shot given that it is following apologist Lost Cause doctrine in its very fething name.
Anyhow. . . What I'm playing:
Been on a F1 2018 kick, interspersed with a tiny bit of RDR2, and then Just Cause 4.
RDR2. . . I didn't care for it personally as once I got into my main camp and the world opened up. . . . the entire world is just too fething huge!!! I did a few missions to progress the story, wandered the map, but it just felt like it took an eternity to get anywhere on horseback. Not to mention how dumb the horses are (seriously, the auto-trot features barely, if ever worked for me). The shooting/hunting and "action-y" gameplay was fun enough, but it progressed slower than 2001: A Space Odyssey for me.
Just Cause 4. . . well, I'll be honest, never played one of the games in this series before. I saw the advert for it, looked like Saints Row but more "realistic" (if that's such a thing), and with a destructible environment. .. and granted I haven't gotten far, but so far, so good. Ohh, and added bonus, they have on the global map, a feature similar to SR games in "territory" holding/unlocking and to expand in this game you must raise your Army of Chaos. . . Tho, so far no metal bawkses
As far as I can tell, Just Cause is "Modding: The Game"- it's basically a series where the modders got ahold of it, and the developer just... ran with the crazy.
Empire total war. (AI is still some chromosomes short so ehhhh)
Fallout (4 new survival charachter) and New vegas (old but gold)
HOIV: I have done everything, i've even done the Austria- Hungary Achievement, the grand colobia and etc. So now i mostly meme stuff, (F.E: stacking Trotzky subversive actions with NKVD for instant coups in other countries, an all mechanized Romania, because what it steel and how do i get it, such stuff)
Company of heros 2: especially after the recent update.
Just Cause 4. . . well, I'll be honest, never played one of the games in this series before. I saw the advert for it, looked like Saints Row but more "realistic" (if that's such a thing), and with a destructible environment. .. and granted I haven't gotten far, but so far, so good. Ohh, and added bonus, they have on the global map, a feature similar to SR games in "territory" holding/unlocking and to expand in this game you must raise your Army of Chaos. . . Tho, so far no metal bawkses
I have the second one. It's been a while since I last played it, buy my recollection is that you could blow up a ridiculously large amount of stuff.
nels1031 wrote: Saw that Divinity 2 got a big update/patch "Definitive Edition" and decided to give it another go. Not noticing anything particularly different so far, but I think most of the new updated stuff was for endgame that I never delved into because of other games releases around that time.
I had forgotten how well made this game is. Most of the fights are pretty challenging and I loved how spells interact with each other. On its surface it looks cartoonish and some of its humor is corny, but if you look at the whole body of work this game is pretty dark. The cast of characters are fun as well.
Aside from Insurgency: Sandstorm, I don't foresee anything else taking up my gaming time so I'll probably finish this game by Sunday.
Edit: Well gak, 3rd and final DLC for Pillars of Eternity 2 just dropped today...
I played trough the new DLC for PoE 2 this week, a decent one if a bit on the short side but worth the coin, Some of the new areas are rather amusing as well. That and we get a load of more lore too.
I rushed through the game once when it came out (due to an annoying bug where enemies just wouldn't die), decided to revisit it now that all the DLC is out.
Unfortunately, I just got to the new one, but I'd forgotten how tedious and unsatisfying this game is. I enjoyed the first part of Beast of Winter, but it bogged down in pointless fights for the second half.
SSS, on the other hand, felt completely pointless all the way through. Partly because there isn't anything to gain as it doesn't unlock until the main game's end game, and no level cap raise or any interesting items, but its just more of the same kind of pointless fights.
Forgotten Sanctum looks... potentially interesting, but I haven't gotten very far yet. I have a feeling I'm just going to end up murdering things rather than trying to stealth-steal books that serve as keys.
--
After this I'm debating if its worth trying to get back into Pathfinder-Kingmaker, or if I should wait for more big patches.
Got Xcom complete 2 for 75% from Steam (going from 174$ to 40-something, amazing). Since I've already completed an unmodded run on my friend's PS4, I am going to 40k the gak out of my game and purge the Xeno.
Want to play Bomber Crew, but seeing as there's a Steam Sale going on, Steam isn't working properly. No access to cloud saves, store not working, GG Steam, you'd think that they'd be ready for this by now.
Dead Rising 2 kind of annoying me. The game seems to operate in the premise “time limits are fun!” They’re not. It’s one thing to have a time limit to find Zombrex but the game feels the need to layer on the time limits. Time limit for when the military arrives and you lose the game and another time limit for the main quest for no reason at all. Was in the middle of it when arbitrarily lost the whole game. Meanwhile it keeps throwing other side quests at you with time limits. Like I got time to do those! Anyway, I’ll stick with it for now but I hope the later games in the series got ride of this game mechanic.
I really thought I'd finished it but following a pub chat with an old work mate he said he struggled with a bit near the end that I totally didnt recall, turns out I haven't finished it
also another go at the Stealth C on FTL, I want to punch things now
Deep Sky Derelict, loving the art style and the game has its charms, aside from time to time giving you fights that are nothing but repeated kicks to the balls as the enemy throws nothing but stuns and high damage attacks at you.
Got battlefield V for Christmas, the game really does feel a lot better than the Beta, the team work dynamic has really improved and it actually feels a lot more rewarding to play the class roles.
Also if there are any RS6 players who haven't logged on since Christmas there's a pack waiting for you with a free Operator unlock.
Was playing through the new WOW content, but I think I'm about done with that. Story was good, but now it's back to the same old rep grind and I'm just not into that. I'll be back for the next update I guess
Now I have a good 2 months or so to wait for Anthem...
Necros wrote: Was playing through the new WOW content, but I think I'm about done with that. Story was good, but now it's back to the same old rep grind and I'm just not into that. I'll be back for the next update I guess
Now I have a good 2 months or so to wait for Anthem...
May not be much point in that. Some of the press preview articles are suggesting another neutered shell of a game, along the lines of Fallout76. Without dragging friends along to entertain you, the game itself is a hollowed out grindfest that bears little resemblance to a bioware RPG, except maybe the worst parts of inquisition.
Was given battlefield v for Xmas. Played last night for the first time, jumped straight in to multi and really enjoyed it. Been playing since battlefield 2 came out on the 360, while some have had issues so far I’m pretty happy with this one.
Didn’t really play battlefield 1 as hell the internet was prettty crap at the time and the updates took days so didn’t bother but am now on fibre so it’s all good .
Necros wrote: Was playing through the new WOW content, but I think I'm about done with that. Story was good, but now it's back to the same old rep grind and I'm just not into that. I'll be back for the next update I guess
Now I have a good 2 months or so to wait for Anthem...
May not be much point in that. Some of the press preview articles are suggesting another neutered shell of a game, along the lines of Fallout76. Without dragging friends along to entertain you, the game itself is a hollowed out grindfest that bears little resemblance to a bioware RPG, except maybe the worst parts of inquisition.
Funny, because nothing I've seen/read suggests that beyond some of the usual derp articles perpetuated by people who think MMOs need to be grindfests.
Necros wrote: Was playing through the new WOW content, but I think I'm about done with that. Story was good, but now it's back to the same old rep grind and I'm just not into that. I'll be back for the next update I guess
Now I have a good 2 months or so to wait for Anthem...
May not be much point in that. Some of the press preview articles are suggesting another neutered shell of a game, along the lines of Fallout76. Without dragging friends along to entertain you, the game itself is a hollowed out grindfest that bears little resemblance to a bioware RPG, except maybe the worst parts of inquisition.
Funny, because nothing I've seen/read suggests that beyond some of the usual derp articles perpetuated by people who think MMOs need to be grindfests.
You link Forbes(I'm guessing it's a Paul Tassi article, right? If you don't know why that's bad--this is the guy who constantly whines about Destiny 2's mechanics now but also continually argued for the mechanics in question to become a part of the game.) and GameRant?
1) Of course it's "always online". It's an online game to begin with. What else were you expecting on that bit?
2) It's a social game. They've made it clear that you can play solo but certain activities(Strongholds) will be either extremely difficult or outright impossible as they're tuned for a group.
3) They've already talked about how the loot system works. Those "legendaries" you're grinding for? They have a specific creature in a stronghold or world instance that drops them--meaning it's a hell of a lot more predictable to try to get them.
I don't care who's saying it. I care about who they're quoting and what -they're- (the devs) saying. In this case, the Anthem devs are making a big deal (as the Bethesda devs did with fallout76) of telling their current player base to get the hell out. They need loot monkeys and gambling addicts to be their organ grinders as RPGs don't make enough money.
1- thanks for the tautology. Amazingly, most games can still be played offline if you don't want multiplayer. Not allowing it a conscious choice by the devs, one I consider poor. See Diablo 3, destinies, fallout 76
2- yes, they have made that clear. I consider that a terrible choice, and bad news for the game, enough that it alone is putting me in the 'not buy' camp. See fallout76
3- yay. Wow and other MMOs have had specific loot tables for bosses for decades. It doesn't make it any less a grindfest. In fact it ends up worse, as getting best or even relevant gear means grinding the same fight over and over again, based on whatever spawn/drop limits the developers feel like inflicting on the players. No idea why anyone would consider that a positive.
It does seem clear. Feel free to interpret dev statements about multiplayer being intended and solo play being less rewarding as the exact opposite if you like, but I'm not sure why you would.
But I will indeed enjoy not playing. I enjoyed fallout 76 immensely for the trainwreck it was and the satisfaction of being right about it, I expect to the feel the same about this garbage.
Destiny clone + iron man - what little bioware is still competent at = Failure. They will long for the reaction to ME: Andromeda after this mess.
On holidays I've grabbed a bundle offering STALKER Shadow of Tchernoby that I'm currently playingl, Call of Pripyat and Clear Sky. Otherwise enjoying For Honor, neverwind the chinese characters that I really dislike.
Splitting time between Martyr, for which I decided to pick up the DLC (but can't access yet due to being too low levelled, yay) and Rainbow 6 Siege, which has a holiday gift pack going on for its players until some time tomorrow, but is as with a lot of stuff by Ubisoft, a bit bugged for those who already have all DLC operators..
Spoiler:
Still not fixed. Will be interesting to see when it will be fixed at this rate and if they'll extend the date by which it can be claimed, as it's been up for a week now and still borked.
Picked up Heroes of might and magic 2 and 3 on GOG. I’ve been enjoying my trip down nostalgia lane immensely. Also been contemplating how much fun I’m having with the games, I guess they still hold up pretty well.
Given the recent bickering over Anthem in this thread...
Anthem will have both closed and open betas. The closed beta will be for people who either pre-purchased, or who use EA's subscription service. It'll take place at the end of January. The "open demo" will be open to everyone, and will run February 1-3. It'll apparently skip over the early game stuff, and run from levels 10-15.
So you'll get a chance to evaluate it for yourself before it goes live.
Mainly playing Save the World in Fortnite.. the battle Royale gets flak for whatever reason probably the building element which bugs me as well tbh, but the co-op campaign has been one of the most fun games I've played in the last six months.
Deep Rock Galactic has had a few updates since the last time I checked in and my brother wanted to play again. Quite disastrous that was, what with him insisting on playing it on a very high difficulty level while we were nowhere near as ready for that with our skills and equipment.
So after he more or less rage quit I decided to play along solo at a more reasonable pace, slowly playing through the probation missions while gathering gold and resources to upgrade kit and fulfil tasks to get more perk points.
The game is still unforgiving at times and loves to heap a crapton of bad stuff on you like a merry humiliation conga, but it's fun.
Also dug out Shadowgrounds in a bout of nostalgia.
I've been playing the fourth Myst game on Steam. I had played the first three games years ago, but had never bothered with the fourth. I'm enjoying it so far.
Just finished platinuming P3 and P5 Dancing games, I was bit surprised that there weren't as many good song choices on the P3 one as I expected, classics like Iwatodai Station and Maiya were missing, I guess because they didn't have any lyrics, but many of the remixes didn't either. I also finished playing a Way Out with my sister and it was surprisingly better than I thought it was, I had a lot of laugh out loud moments screwing around with the co-op bits. We've moved onto Divinity 2 next on the PS4 and its fun to play an RPG again.
Single player wise, I'm going to be playing P4 Dancing All Night next. I have a large backlog thanks to Christmas, since I still have Titanfall 2 and RDR2 lined up afterwards. All of which are making me procrastinate from painting my orks! #firstworldproblems
Been heavy into Insurgency: Sandstorm, and in the early turns of playing as the Huns in Total War: Atilla. Nothing else really to do (video game-wise) as I await Total War: Three Kingdoms.
nels1031 wrote: Been heavy into Insurgency: Sandstorm, and in the early turns of playing as the Huns in Total War: Atilla. Nothing else really to do (video game-wise) as I await Total War: Three Kingdoms.
nels1031 wrote: Been heavy into Insurgency: Sandstorm, and in the early turns of playing as the Huns in Total War: Attila. Nothing else really to do (video game-wise) as I await Total War: Three Kingdoms.
huns are easy mode though
Vanilla game they are, but with a selection of mods that increase AI aggressiveness, increase garrisons and improve unit selection in AI armies, its a bit more of a challenge in the early goings of the campaign. You make some mistakes or overextend, you're proper fethed. I also like following the chapter objectives and missions, just for an extra challenge.
Once they get their war machine rolling, sure they're easy, but thats true of all Total War factions, in all Total War games.
Eastern Rome always felt like auto-win in Attila, personally.
nels1031 wrote: Been heavy into Insurgency: Sandstorm, and in the early turns of playing as the Huns in Total War: Attila. Nothing else really to do (video game-wise) as I await Total War: Three Kingdoms.
huns are easy mode though
Vanilla game they are, but with a selection of mods that increase AI aggressiveness, increase garrisons and improve unit selection in AI armies, its a bit more of a challenge in the early goings of the campaign. You make some mistakes or overextend, you're proper fethed. I also like following the chapter objectives and missions, just for an extra challenge.
Once they get their war machine rolling, sure they're easy, but thats true of all Total War factions, in all Total War games.
Eastern Rome always felt like auto-win in Attila, personally.
I played a wre vanilla campaign through, after that everything is easymode tbf
I played a wre vanilla campaign through, after that everything is easymode tbf
Yeah, WRE is off the chain. Something happening every turn, and great fun. I just finished a Rome 2 : Empire Divided campaign, which is close to the same thing if you are playing as Aurellians faction, so I wanted a change of pace.
Been doing a lot of Stellaris. Finally got around to learning how to megacorp. I like that trade is now a thing and that worlds just kind of feels bigger. Overall I like what they’ve added. I’m honestly still not a fan of limiting the game to hyper lanes only, though the game is better for it. It was just a bit more sci-fi before. I know that was changed pretty long ago but still.
Playing ''They Are Billions''. It's a fantastic little game that's still in development. Don't be put off by that though - what has already been released is in itself an excellent game and I would be happy to pay if that's all there was.
It's a cross between a civ-building strategy like Age of Empires where you build a city, manage resources and tactically expand; and a tower defence game where mobs generally come from one of four compass points at regular intervals (and then every point for the final wave).
It's classed as a Real Time Strategy game, though you can pause the game at any time in order to build/give units orders etc, so when you un-pause all of your actions will be carried out (the game tests your strategy and tactics, not how quickly you can click/react to stimuli).
Yep, They are Billions is great. Definitely worth the price tag for what they offer in the game now. I'm not even too concerned with the "Campaign Mode" that they have been working on for so long. A Co-op survival mode would be more fun for me, if they don't have it yet.
Probably one of the best RTS games to come out in the past few years. I've been meaning to dive back in to play with the level editors and such. Last time I played was after they added the Zombie Giant to the maps. Worked up a perfect strategy to kill it before I expanded in its direction, and as I pulled off the kill, like 3 basic zombies made it through a gap in my defenses and then they grew exponentially inside my walls before I could re position my army. Game over. Time to start a new settlement!
I'm hoping they add more late game units. I tend to favor the Lucifers, find the Thanatos too slow, and the mecha thing too expensive.
Gave the Resident Evil 2 demo a try and loved it, cannot wait for the full release now. Especially with both HUNK and Tofu confirmed as also being in the game.
I got State of Decay 2 for xbox this weekend.. seems cool, but a little too much traveling back and forth. Really needs some kind of fast travel function, but I understand why it's not there. The driving gets boring. And it's really tough to keep up with clearing infestations and also doing the other missions at the same time since my guys need to rest up after each mission. Would have been cool if you could just send people out on supply runs that they complete automatically over time. Overall pretty decent zombie apocalypse community building kind of game.
Been really enjoying Dead Cells (on the Switch). I've heard descriptions such as 'Dark Souls in 2D' but not sure if that fits that well: It's certainly very difficult, and punishes you when you die (like Dark Souls, there is an element of progression) but this is fine tuned, in terms of responsiveness and how much your own life falls on your own reflexes, in a way that a 3D game never can be. It's also got a sense of humour and a level of irreverence running through it that sets it apart from the From Software game.
Would thoroughly recommend it (but it's not for the feint-hearted!)
BrookM wrote: Gave the Resident Evil 2 demo a try and loved it, cannot wait for the full release now. Especially with both HUNK and Tofu confirmed as also being in the game.
I am seriously looking forward to that game! Been many, many years since I played it last.
I agree about Deadcell being a decent game. I tried playing it on Nintendo Switch though. Right now, I'm grinding my Hunter Rank in Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate.
I've been ploughing through some old emulators on a new laptop I bought.
PGA2, Robocop Vs Terminator, Cannon Fodder on the Megadrive and Zelda on the SNES.
PGA2 is strangely addictive if a little frustrating at times (hint: save often!!!).
I will give a +1 to They Are Billions. Haven't played it in a long time, but when I was playing and it was only the survival mode it was worth the money. I will say this, it is hard. Hard hard. Do not expect to win the first map.
Kingdom Hearts 3 comes out tomorrow, so that will be my life until I can complete it.
Put more time into Deep Rock Galactic, almost at level 25 with the Driller, all weapons and equipment upgraded, just need to get some good perks and I'm good for whenever coop play picks up around here again.
Also preloaded Resident Evil 2, tomorrow can't come soon enough!
Got my driller promoted, so done with Deep Rock for now.
Also played RE2 for a bit, loving it so far. Replacing the tank controls with a proper 3rd person setup is nice and the more durable zombies nicely offset the extra mobility you have now.
I thought KH3 was supposed to come out today. Turns out it was only in Japan. What a let down. I did get to read a lot of reviews, which are pretty positive. The Polygon review in particular was funny because the author asked if the writing had always been this bad. Yes, yes it has. Its a fun and entertaining game. But it is a convoluted mess of alternate realities and time travel that makes very little sense as a whole. It amazed me people didnt realize this when they released the first spinoff.
So because I never got to play that, I spent all night playing LoL. Woooo
Anvildude wrote: Just bought Monster Hunter World the other day while it was on sale. Probably gonna start up with that soon. I'm thinking Lance.
I just picked this up a couple of days ago.
Apparently there's an event starting very soon (from what I understand, 1/26 midnight GMT). It'll run for a month, but you still might want to consider starting sooner rather than later.
Picked up At the Gates, which is ... a sorta 4X clan survival game?
Basic premise and start are interesting- its a matter of prioritizing resources (wood, exploration, food, stone, pretty much in that order) then expanding.
But... the UI is clunky, and the game is, as far as I can tell, unfinished.
The endgame is conquering Rome, either by getting 5 of your clans trained as legions (24 turns each, but you can do them simultaneously as long as you have enough steel weapons and armor), and then 24 more turns to take over the empire. Or you can physically conquer the east or west roman empires.
However... the map size makes the latter difficult if you don't start near them (and the healing mechanic, which requires you to sit on your single settlement and expend resources).
And the former is too easy. Get an economy rolling, get 50 (25?) steel armor and weapons, hit 'finish turn' 48 times, the end.
There are religions, but them don't seem to do anything.
There is diplomacy, but the player can't initiate, and besides random gifts, it doesn't seem to do anything.
There is war, but aside from attacking their units and conquering capturing/pillaging settlements, it doesn't really do anything (and there isn't a peace mechanic)
The AI also doesn't seem to do anything. They react to AI bandits but don't move anything outside of that. Bandits move and attack if something gets too close, and occasionally spawn out of their camps and wander a short distance.
I've always been too far (or moved away) from the AI factions to be attacked, and they don't send out explorers or anything.
You're locked to the (ahistorical) Goths at first, and unlock other factions by taking their settlement or allying with them.
Interesting premise, and the initial turns are interesting, but the gameplay stays the same except for tribal quirks. Slavs are easy mode, and don't require supply except in other people's territory. Lombards have the worst start (as they can't train clans as foragers, just settled professions, which... effectively means buying wood from caravans (to create camps, farms, mines) or getting lucky with explorers or gifts.
It's an interesting base for a game, but it ain't done, and won't be for a while. Despite being released for sale.
Also has a weird tendency to crash when starting a new game.
I've been playing Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. Gameplay-wise, it's fun--the first one had a lot of annoyances with bullet-sponge enemies and the weapon selector, which have been mostly fixed here. The visuals are cool and imaginitive, and like the first one, the story is much stronger than it needs to be, though I've just passed the biggest bit of mood whiplash I've ever experienced.
Spoiler:
Going from the meeting with BJ's dad at the family home, to the....head transplant?! I mean, it did get foreshadowed if you spend time checking out stuff on the sub, but still....
Total warhammer 2 again now that the Festag update is done.
Rambling around with Azhag the Slaughterer. Took my usual approach- punch Red Fangs until a Waaagh happens then take a run for the Dwarfs before they start to expand. Karaz-a-Karak also helps the orc economy immensely.
Also took out Belegar and am sieging Barak Var. May go for Ungrim if the vampires haven't finished him off. After that it should be pretty smooth. Just managed to confederate with the bloody spears, so I've got a secure hold all the way up to Gunbad. I expect one of the vampires to turn on me later, but I have an alliance with saltspite who has eaten most of the border princes.
After that, probably destroy karak hirn and then turn south to bring the rest of the tribes in line. Wurzag Is doing rather well for himself, so may get uppity, but I'm already in a position to field three armies and can just roll through the savage orc lands if need be
Really enjoyed my first play through of RE2 as Claire and the side playthrough as Leon. Doing a side playthrough of Claire now.
The gun options for the side playthroughs are a bit.. iffy though. Leon gets a .45 that he holds gangsta style and Claire gets a revolver that's an utter terror to use as she can only use it with a back fan technique, which feels really inaccurate and burns through ammo quite easily. Looks cool though and it explains why Claire had a cowgirl outfit in Revelations 2.
Also unlocked HUNK mode, still need to beat it, as it is rightly so quite hard, but neat nonetheless. Makes me worry about how evil Tofu mode is going to be whenever I unlock that one..
Enjoying Anthem's second demo weekend. But man they need to give more of a warning when you encounter higher level content like the one raid you have access to during the demo, cause the disparity is pretty bad. Not Destiny 2 bad (thank god, it's still playable), but still it's not terribly fun when it happens due to how beefy enemies can get to lower tier weapons.
I've been playing Final Fantasy XIV again. I always forget how much I love this game.
And lots of new news about the upcoming Shadowbringers expansion. Things are getting crazy...
- New race - Viera
- New beastmen races include Nu Mou, Dwarves (which I think is the first appearance of dwarves since Final Fantasy IV), and Pixies
- Gun Breaker - a new tank job that uses a gun blade
- The theme for the new 24 man raid appears to be NieR: Automata
Paying a bit of Bfv and while I enjoy it I can only seem the play a couple of matches before getting bored which is a shame as am a long time bf fan. Damn I miss bf3.
Also picked up ace combat yesterday and played the first couple missions last night, had a look through the tech tree and can’t wait to unlock the A10 warthog. Brrrrrrrrtttttttt.
Spending some time with the Division 2 private beta, though alpha may be a bit more appropriate given some of the bugs and whatnot.
But so far.. more of the same with some streamlining involved as one would expect of a Ubisoft sequel. It's okay I suppose. Getting access to the end game classes and giving those a whirl is a nice touch as well.
Also a bit annoyed by ISAC constantly telling me that xXx-420-scrotum-69-dipper-420-xXx is in need of help. Going to dig through the settings again and see if it can be switched off, it's so annoying.
Deep Rock Galactic is also back on the menu, pounding away at getting the Driller to 25 again and slowly collecting enough perk points to unlock my fourth skill slot.
Picked up Kingdom Heart 3. A lot of the charm of the series has been squandered and the plot has become increasingly dumb and the gameplay is a little dated and yet.... still enjoying it. I still find the aesthetic and mythology really magical and the combat is still kind of floaty fun. Need to play through more of the worlds, but thus far I'm enjoying fighting alongside some modern classic characters and wishing I could skip when the plot returns to blah blah blah hearts blah blah darkness stuff.
I see ads for it from time to time, and it looks like it's just flogging all the modern Disney properties at once, with no rhyme or reason to it.
It's one of those console games that I was vaguely aware of but had no interest in, so it's hard to figure out what the appeal is/was. Especially since the originals came out during one of Bad Periods for Disney, rulers of copyright, appropriators/sanitizers/destroyers of folk tales, and their live shows centered around exploiting naive teenagers as much as legally possible.
Voss wrote: Especially since the originals came out during one of Bad Periods for Disney
?
The second one included Pirates of the Carribean, which should give you a rough idea on when that one was released (which was not all that long after the first). I wouldn't call that Disney's "Bad Period". The "Bad Period" would be the time period when properties like the unfortunate 'Black Cauldron' (which was a great book series, but a lousy animated movie) came out. IIRC the "modern" (at the time) settings in the first game were The Little Mermaid, and Tarzan. Everything else was older classic stuff (including some very weird maps in Wonderland).
In any event, they're fun. What other game is going to allow you to fight Chernabolg from 'Fantasia'? I don't have the third one, but the ones that I've played are a fun mix of Square (pre-merger with Enix) and Disney settings and characters.
I wasn't referring to film quality. Just their behavior as a Corp, though checking, a lot of what I was thinking of as the hallmarks- like Lion King (aka the complete rip of Kimba the White Lion) and Mulan were a few years earlier.
What other game is going to allow you to fight Chernabolg from 'Fantasia'?
Yeah, see this is more what I meant by appropriators/sanitizers/destroyers of folk tales. Battling a Disnefied version of a Slavic myth alongside Donald Duck has negative appeal to me.
Voss wrote: I wasn't referring to film quality. Just their behavior as a Corp, though checking, a lot of what I was thinking of as the hallmarks- like Lion King (aka the complete rip of Kimba the White Lion) and Mulan were a few years earlier.
What other game is going to allow you to fight Chernabolg from 'Fantasia'?
Yeah, see this is more what I meant by appropriators/sanitizers/destroyers of folk tales. Battling a Disnefied version of a Slavic myth alongside Donald Duck has negative appeal to me.
Yeah, because video games in general do such a great job of not completely upending the original material.
Voss wrote: I wasn't referring to film quality. Just their behavior as a Corp, though checking, a lot of what I was thinking of as the hallmarks- like Lion King (aka the complete rip of Kimba the White Lion) and Mulan were a few years earlier.
What other game is going to allow you to fight Chernabolg from 'Fantasia'?
Yeah, see this is more what I meant by appropriators/sanitizers/destroyers of folk tales. Battling a Disnefied version of a Slavic myth alongside Donald Duck has negative appeal to me.
Yeah, because video games in general do such a great job of not completely upending the original material.
It is a poor genre for that, as gameplay tends to trump narrative. But if the goal is to retell a story (as in most Disney films), sanitizing and violating the original are poor decisions.
Yet Kingdom Hearts reads like bad crossover fanfic, yet for some reason (from what I've seen elsewhere) is especially well beloved by people who claim to hate fanfiction.
See also "blah blah blah hearts blah blah darkness stuff" above.
If fighting against/alongside Disney characters is a plus for people, then fine, end of story. But raising and turning the question of originality around on the entire industry doesn't really help explain why KH appeals to people.
Still progressing in my career game in Kerbal Space Program. Having a hard time designing efficient ships to take 3 Kerbals to the moon and back. Fuel is heavy, so adding more just makes launching harder. I must use my engineering mind and think about this.
ZergSmasher wrote: Still progressing in my career game in Kerbal Space Program. Having a hard time designing efficient ships to take 3 Kerbals to the moon and back. Fuel is heavy, so adding more just makes launching harder. I must use my engineering mind and think about this.
Have you throttled your engine stages for atmospheric flight? The decreased efficiency and effects of air resistance which increases as you travel faster means that you need to set up your engines for the atmospheric part of the launch such that you aren't wasting fuel trying to travel too fast at too low an altitude. So you throttle the engines such that the beginning stage gets you to a certain height at which you have hit the maximum effective speed, then change to the next stage to get to a height with a new effective speed etc.
Also, I assume you're performing a gravity turn where your flight plan takes a gradually increasing diagonal trajectory through Kerbins atmosphere in order to use the gravitational pull to gain delta-v? If not then this wiki article explains the concept.
I mean, more character options, better loot drops that are actually for the character you play instead of something random..
