I'm probably the only person in the world who wasn't aware I could stream my Xbone to my PC and play games on it whilst the wife watches the TV so having got it set up today, I have been playing a little retro Red Dead Redemption, boning up on the story a little in conjunction with my playthrough of RDR2.
Edit: Mind blown, apparently I can stream my PS4 to my PC too. My head is exploding!
Dawn of War II. Re-downloaded it after hitting a brick wall on Underail (DAMN STUN CRAP!) Might replay the campaigns, although the main one is a long list of DOW cliches: Oh orks are attacking us! But it's the actually the Eldar manipulating them! Because the Chaos/Tyranids are coming. I can understand why they do it that way, they're rather...limited as they can't introduce all the factions at once, especially for newbies coming to the game (Which DOW brought a lot in) Although, DOW 1 does that story a lot better and it's much less predictable due to it being newer for the time. Chaos Rising story is WAY better, though as the writer were free from such constraints, so looking forward to that.
Think I'm almost done with Chaosbane, probably on the last act now, still need to unlock the ability to upgrade gear with the millions of gems I've been finding everywhere.. Did find another thing to hate: gimmick boss battles, ugh. If you die, restart the entire ruddy thing from the start again. FML.
NieR:Automata is really starting to get good, seriously regretting not powering through and continuing playing it back then. Usually not my genre of game, but the style and setting is just so damned good.
And also decided to pick up Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice after seeing the trailer for the sequel. So far, whilst again not really my sort of thing normally, I really like it. The puzzle sections are a bit fiddly, but the atmosphere and voice acting is amazing, especially the Furies and Druth. Really looking forward to seeing where this game will take me.
Picked up Dragon Quest XI on sale. Its fun. Fights are too easy, and there is the predictable grind, but the story so far is fairly interesting, even if they too often default to the JRPG standard and offer a one-sentence explanation for complex situations (which doesn't actually explain anything).
Its a pleasant, pretty time filler game that doesn't demand juggling obscure lore trivia or overly-complex mechanics.
The keyboard mapping is probably the biggest annoyance. I don't need two sets of controls for navigating menus. It shouldn't matter if I'm in combat or not. Left/right/up/down is the same behavior regardless of the game state.
Decided this morning to spend the whole day playing on the Xbox...
Doom suddenly decided it needed a 60-odd GB update for a multiplayer mode I didn't ask for nor want, and Battlefield 1 has only just finished installing and updating. Had to free up space on the internal drive.
Gave up mid-afternoon and gave Pop'n'Twinbee on the SNES a damn good thrashing instead.
Yes, its true everybody; the early 90s was the true golden age of videogames. You bought a game, slapped the cartridge into your console and pressed the power switch and you started playing.
But today, you need to be a Microsoft Certified Software Engineer to play a game.
Got a PS4 for Christmas, so I'm back to playing Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag. I'd previously played some of it when I still lived at home (using my dad's console), but now I can play it on my own. I hope to pick up a few more games for it soon.
I also picked up Master of Orion on Steam (thanks to the winter sale). Pretty fun so far, kind of like Civilization in space.
Into The Breach was the free game on the Epic store a few weeks ago. I finally got around to trying it out. I love it and I hate it. I remember it being described as more of a puzzle game than a strategy game. I was not expecting a rogue-like though. It's super addicting but frustratingly hard.
Getting my ass pounded in Witcher 3 on the second to highest difficulty. Never played it before this weekend and after watching the show twice, I felt I was more than prepared.
First group of wild dogs I found schooled me real quick. Getting better though, and its tons of fun.
On to Dawn of War II: Retribution as the Blood Ravens, I am kinda missing the in-depth RPG elements of II and Chaos Rising. Chaos Rising story wasn't as good as I remembered it to be, in all honesty, still liked it, but I think I'm actually now liking the original DOW II's story a bit better. I downloaded the original Dawn of War, but the text is too small on my PC. Want to play as the Imperial Guard, especially after listening to this again.
I've been playing warhammer 40k gladius with a friend mostly. Man I'm glad I didn't start that just today when I come back from Christmas holiday or I'd have no sleep for work.
Playing starcraft 2 legacy of the void and it's decent. I rolled my eyes at a couple things. Seriously are xel Naga artifacts passed out like popcorn at this point? They also re-did the temple explosion from shakuras in brood war except with less feeling than before. Spear of adun ship lasers and powers are still fun though.
Adrassil wrote: On to Dawn of War II: Retribution as the Blood Ravens, I am kinda missing the in-depth RPG elements of II and Chaos Rising. Chaos Rising story wasn't as good as I remembered it to be, in all honesty, still liked it, but I think I'm actually now liking the original DOW II's story a bit better. I downloaded the original Dawn of War, but the text is too small on my PC. Want to play as the Imperial Guard, especially after listening to this again.
Spoiler:
Yep IG got a nice theme..
As for me, recently Kaiserreich updated their mod for HOI IV, and now i am become warlord, naturally as a swiss i picked the federalists in china, because atleast someone needs to actually have some legitimacy there.
Hades got released on Steam, and it's a lot of fun. I can't think of any Supergiant game that'd disappoint, so no surprised there.
Cliff Empires is also a fun city builder, much better management game than the sadly disappointing Jurassic World Evo.
As for me, recently Kaiserreich updated their mod for HOI IV, and now i am become warlord, naturally as a swiss i picked the federalists in china, because atleast someone needs to actually have some legitimacy there.
'Tis awesome.
Back on playing Dragon Age: Origins, really makes me miss the classic, good Bioware. A great game.
As for me, recently Kaiserreich updated their mod for HOI IV, and now i am become warlord, naturally as a swiss i picked the federalists in china, because atleast someone needs to actually have some legitimacy there.
'Tis awesome.
Back on playing Dragon Age: Origins, really makes me miss the classic, good Bioware. A great game.
They were the ones that did Kotor. Those 2 games were pretty fun. I never played the old republic though. That was the mmo right? I usually have a rule about not playing them due to per monthly payments and the fact they reset your gear to zero if you get bored for a while. I think the mmo phase has passed though but ive never been much into them in the first place.
Dragon age origins was fun. I never played any of the other games and I heard that was a good way to go with the series. I still think it would've been a cool idea that flemeth planned to possess morrigan and after morrigan gave birth to the darkspawn leader baby that flemeth eventually planned to possess it. The power of darkspawn leader possessed by flemeth would give pause to anybody. Would've also been cool to eventually play as that kid when grown up but I only played the first game so I know little of dragon age lore.
flamingkillamajig wrote: They were the ones that did Kotor. Those 2 games were pretty fun. I never played the old republic though. That was the mmo right? I usually have a rule about not playing them due to per monthly payments and the fact they reset your gear to zero if you get bored for a while. I think the mmo phase has passed though but ive never been much into them in the first place.
Dragon age origins was fun. I never played any of the other games and I heard that was a good way to go with the series. I still think it would've been a cool idea that flemeth planned to possess morrigan and after morrigan gave birth to the darkspawn leader baby that flemeth eventually planned to possess it. The power of darkspawn leader possessed by flemeth would give pause to anybody. Would've also been cool to eventually play as that kid when grown up but I only played the first game so I know little of dragon age lore.
Yeah, the Old Republic was the MMO and I've never played it, either, but it was Obsidian who made Kotor 2 (Sorry, to be a nitpicker, but Obsidian...was...one of my favourite developers especially mostly because of Fallout: New Vegas). I haven't played Dragon Age 2, it had mixed reviews. But I did try to play Dragon Age: Inquisition, emphasis on try, I didn't like it for many reasons but most especially it felt like an MMO, so I doubt you'd like it either. I like that idea of Flemeth's machinations, she always had a far greater agenda but I think Bioware wrote themselves into a corner when it all depends on the decisions of The Grey Warden whether the child is conceived or not. Morrigan does make an appearance in Inquisition, though) Did you go with her in the DLC? I...think I did. Been so long since I played DA:O all the way through.
I got hooked up on Star Wars Battlefront 2 on PS4 over Christmas. Awesome game. They have finally sorted it out and is playable. Loads of players on it still. Cool game modes, maps and of course all the sounds,characters and battles from all parts.
Great bargain as I got it for 10 quid
Still on Dragon Age: Origins, but it keeps crashing :(. Now I'm at Denerim it crashes in the middle of loading. Damned Windows 10.
Edit: Turned down the graphics a bit and now it seems to work well enough, except when I enter the Tavern in Denerim, then it crashes, but if I go back in afterwards, it works. So all good!
Still hooked on Black Desert online.. has a kind of steep learning curve but once you get into it, it's pretty cool. If you like trade skills like me, there's tons and tons of options. I do kinda wish they had regular wow-like instance dungeon / adventures, I think once you get done the main quest lines the open world monster grind might get old fast
Played Jedi Fallen Order and Control over the holidays.
Started with the former being excited for some more Star Wars and the tutorial is great, but once you reach the first real level its kind of a miserable slog. The Dark Souls gameplay feels really out of its element in Star Wars and you're just kind of miserably moving forward, getting slaughtered by wildlife and its just kind of boring, so I put it down for Control after clearing the first world.
Control is AWESOME. It's a little rough around the edges but mixing gunplay and flinging chunks of concrete while dashing around is one of the most fun combat engines I've played in a while. The X-Files meets Twin Peaks styling makes the whole thing something of an Alan Payne/Max Wake lovechild with more than a few callbacks to both. Loved this thing, particularly the Ashtray Maze sequence.
After which... I gave Fallen Order another go and you know what? It's really good after the first world. Starting with the second world, between a mix of minor ability upgrades and a switch back to Stormtroopers who aren't nearly as punishing as the wildlife, the game really clicks and I burned right through the rest of it. Really love what Disney has done with the Inquisition; easily my favorite addition to the world and it really shines in this one. Great end too after a few brutal boss fights that show how well the engine works for Lightsaber duels. Overall, really happy I persevered, just not sure why that first level was so miserable.
Playing Mount & Blade: Warband right now (Prophecy of Pendor mod). Just looking to bomb around in a few random games for the next month while I buy the parts to build my new gaming PC.
Playing Days Gone, I feel like you're more or less playing a version of Darryl from Walking Dead if he had Boozer instead of Meryl tagging along with him and that he had a dead wife hanging over his head. Gotta love crossbowing people methodically to death and although the zombie genre has been pretty stale the past few years, this game alongside RE2 seemed to have revitalized it somewhat. Certainly still looking forward to LOU Part 2 coming up this year.
I've actually been replaying A Link to the Past. It had been a while I was starting to feel like my opinion of it might be a little more of a hipster rejection of Ocarina. Nearly through it again and I'll say, it still holds up incredibly well and is probably still the best Zelda.
Gonna ,make a long story short. Fought in a game where it was 2 humans vs 2 teams of 3 harder than normal bots each. This led to 3 orks in a team and 2 guard with a space marine opponent at least. I myself did guard and my ally played chaos.
After some successes vs both factions they pushed us back hard but we got the enemy teams to fight each other and somehow lucked out. Our tactics were also really nice though. I've got a good guard line of vehicles and they're doing some serious work esp. With a techpriest to heal every so often.
We've managed to pick up from where we left off in a fairly precarious stage to basically wiping out any enemy units worthwhile that could fight as well as bring down some bases. I dunno how we managed this one. If both teams went for us and didn't fight each other we'd have lost right there.
Started playing Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. Seems pretty good so far; I really like the RPG elements (crafting and upgrading gear, etc.) and the story seems pretty intriguing!
Been playing Classic WoW and TW Warhammer 2. I've also been playing some skirmishes in Sanctus Reach here and there, I like that game a lot despite its fairly low production value.
Total Warhammer 2.
Didn't particularly enjoy Malus' campaign quirks (I hate juggling penalties), so started a Malekith campaign. Messy so far (Partly Aghol barbarians, partly because Khatep just won't make peace, despite being in multiple wars and stomping on his pointy head). Ended up Confederating with Malus just so he'd stop dragging me into wars, when suddenly this message pops up:
Military Alliance Negotiated:
Karaz-a-Karak (Dwarfs)
&
Clan Mors.
ZergSmasher wrote: Started playing Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. Seems pretty good so far; I really like the RPG elements (crafting and upgrading gear, etc.) and the story seems pretty intriguing!
Started playing that one myself the other day, it’s enjoyable there’s seems to be plenty to do but have only done a couple of the first missions while mostly collecting gear and weapons.
Ghost Recon and Modern Warfare will see me out for the next few months at least.
Voss wrote: Total Warhammer 2.
Didn't particularly enjoy Malus' campaign quirks (I hate juggling penalties), so started a Malekith campaign. Messy so far (Partly Aghol barbarians, partly because Khatep just won't make peace, despite being in multiple wars and stomping on his pointy head). Ended up Confederating with Malus just so he'd stop dragging me into wars, when suddenly this message pops up:
Military Alliance Negotiated:
Karaz-a-Karak (Dwarfs)
&
Clan Mors.
Mors atm is really wierd.
Myprevious campagins as malus had them ally with the following: Dwarfs, Empire, Borderprinces. I had a stalemate war against them for 70 turns in my malus campaign.....
The next one they were in total war mode with everyone.
So no am not surprsed. ( it's Treehitler situation all over again.)
Spoiler:
from id4 chan: Tree Hitler - Nickname given to Durthu, because on top of spectacularly pissed off and hateful diplomacy dialogue, Durthu would not only militarize and become powerful quickly, he had a tendency to invade Not-France typically wiping them out and the Empire before setting sights on the Dwarfs and proceeding to attack the rest of the non-evil Old World. Instead of being an isolationist tree, Durthu became an aggressive dictator, destroying half of the Old World before the Warriors of Chaos even showed up, which made them seem like the paltry relief force to the tree devastation, but instead of fighting each other, they would often form a non-aggression pact and even ally with each other. It is perhaps accurate to lore, as Durthu is one of the last ancient Treemen, hates anything not from Athel Loren and is tormented by forest spirits reminding him that he has failed to protect the forest and his friends from the outside world.
from id4 chan: Tree Hitler - Nickname given to Durthu, because on top of spectacularly pissed off and hateful diplomacy dialogue, Durthu would not only militarize and become powerful quickly, he had a tendency to invade Not-France typically wiping them out and the Empire before setting sights on the Dwarfs and proceeding to attack the rest of the non-evil Old World. Instead of being an isolationist tree, Durthu became an aggressive dictator, destroying half of the Old World before the Warriors of Chaos even showed up, which made them seem like the paltry relief force to the tree devastation, but instead of fighting each other, they would often form a non-aggression pact and even ally with each other. It is perhaps accurate to lore, as Durthu is one of the last ancient Treemen, hates anything not from Athel Loren and is tormented by forest spirits reminding him that he has failed to protect the forest and his friends from the outside world.
This must be TWW1, because it's the opposite to everything I've seen in over 1,250 hours of TWW2. In W2, Durthu is the WE faction that makes friends the quickest and is the most amenable to diplomacy as a whole, and it's Orion who typically takes the "I hate everyone" stance - but all 4 of the WE factions just tend to sit and sulk in Athel Loren forever, occasionally taking a minor mountain settlement near Clan Angrund or Crooked Moon and sulking there, instead.
As for weird diplomacy... yeah, diplomacy is just that sometimes: weird. And occasionally cheaty, like the AI bribing a faction it can't possibly have ever met - typically those wandering hordes that spawn around the map - into attacking you, because the AI technically 'knows' every other faction from game start. But turning its sworn enemies against you is one of its favourite tricks (flashbacks to my first ever TWW2 campaign as Lothern, and the DE "Baby's First Bad Guys" faction calling Caledor and Saphery into their war against me on about turn 3).
EDIT: Oh, and I wholeheartedly recommend a Repanse Mortal Empires campaign, because it actually makes playing Bretonnia fun and rewarding, and the snowball potential is massive.
from id4 chan: Tree Hitler - Nickname given to Durthu, because on top of spectacularly pissed off and hateful diplomacy dialogue, Durthu would not only militarize and become powerful quickly, he had a tendency to invade Not-France typically wiping them out and the Empire before setting sights on the Dwarfs and proceeding to attack the rest of the non-evil Old World. Instead of being an isolationist tree, Durthu became an aggressive dictator, destroying half of the Old World before the Warriors of Chaos even showed up, which made them seem like the paltry relief force to the tree devastation, but instead of fighting each other, they would often form a non-aggression pact and even ally with each other. It is perhaps accurate to lore, as Durthu is one of the last ancient Treemen, hates anything not from Athel Loren and is tormented by forest spirits reminding him that he has failed to protect the forest and his friends from the outside world.
This must be TWW1, because it's the opposite to everything I've seen in over 1,250 hours of TWW2. In W2, Durthu is the WE faction that makes friends the quickest and is the most amenable to diplomacy as a whole, and it's Orion who typically takes the "I hate everyone" stance - but all 4 of the WE factions just tend to sit and sulk in Athel Loren forever, occasionally taking a minor mountain settlement near Clan Angrund or Crooked Moon and sulking there, instead.
As for weird diplomacy... yeah, diplomacy is just that sometimes: weird. And occasionally cheaty, like the AI bribing a faction it can't possibly have ever met - typically those wandering hordes that spawn around the map - into attacking you, because the AI technically 'knows' every other faction from game start. But turning its sworn enemies against you is one of its favourite tricks (flashbacks to my first ever TWW2 campaign as Lothern, and the DE "Baby's First Bad Guys" faction calling Caledor and Saphery into their war against me on about turn 3).
EDIT: Oh, and I wholeheartedly recommend a Repanse Mortal Empires campaign, because it actually makes playing Bretonnia fun and rewarding, and the snowball potential is massive.
Well, atm Mors is for me pulling TWW1 Durthu.
Also yes, nowadays the tree, even tough rather unpolite, is leaving me alone in a skarsnik campaign 9/10 times, meanwhile the other Wood elf pleb, that dude makes me allways go in there and burn down his settlement after hindering my campaign for 100 + turns.
As old as it’s getting, I keep going back to Skyrim.
Had a recent stint of going through the final fantasy series but when I get to 13-2 I lose motivation.
Most of the way through Dragon Age Origins: Awakening the game has been flying by despite the fact that at first, it seemed so overwhelming when I had like...200 side quests to do. Feel like playing some Fire Emblem but can't find my Game Boy Advance. Should really be working on my script for my horror tv show, but hit a brick wall of writer's block, lately.
Zhang Yan is reduced to two counties and a vassal of Yuan Tan, Yuan Shao's successor after I captured and executed Shao along with his other leading generals before forcing him to submit to me and pay me tribute. Yuan Shao attacked my copper mine where I was able to hold against his two armies and grind him down. Lesson to be learned: defending mines can be brutal but winnable even against much larger forces as long as they haven't brought many ranged units thanks to the layout of the map where your forces have small chokepoints you can hold and raised ground behind that for archers and trebuchets.
I'm in a coalition with Yuan Shu, Gongsun Zan and Cao Cao, though Gongsun Zan is becoming too powerful near me. He is taking most of Yuan Tan's remaining counties and reducing my tribute income, and that is going to need to be dealt with. Recognizing Yuan Shu's claim to Emperorship in return for money is a nice source of income, along with trading ancillaries.
Sitting on a nice fortune of around 23k at the moment and an income of ~3k from all of the different trade deals I've wrangled (a lot from a period where military access through my lands seemed to be quite popular). Going to have to see how it is standing when those run out but hopefully by then I won't need both of my standing armies until it is time to bring Gongsun Zan to heel.
Being playing Children of Morta on the switch a lot over Xmas and picked up a load of stuff in the new year sales.
Children’s is a rougelite action RPG with cute 8bit gfx and a very cool story about a family of adventurers. Each member of the family has a different play style and are unlocked organically through the story.
I normally hate rouge style games but this is vey well done and is fun rather than frustrating as some of the genre can be.
It’s also available on the PC and I would recommend it to any one who likes this style of game or good storytelling. I will add that it is by no stretch an easy game but they patched in a story mode if you do get stuck.
I have been playing me some Resident Evil 4. Easily one of my top five favourite games of all time. I'm so much of a fanboy I own it on Game Cube, Wii and PC. Bought it when it first came out in 05 (despite being underage) And...I have no idea how many times I've played through it, way too many. Leon was my hero as a teenager, even got his emo hair cut (a few people even said I bared a resemblance, don't know how true that is, though) and began practising martial arts because of him lol. Ahh, what a great game. Shinji Mikami is a genius.
I spent so much cash on renting RE4 at my local place, I could have bought the game twice, easily, damn my childhood best friend and I spent so much time playing this.
Bobthehero wrote: I spent so much cash on renting RE4 at my local place, I could have bought the game twice, easily, damn my childhood best friend and I spent so much time playing this.
RE4 was the first game I bought after moving into my own place with my first real paycheck. Lots of fond memories of this one.
Finally got around to playing The Witcher 3. The game is great, the combat is a lot more fun than I thought it would be. I'm not too far in, but the fight with the griffin at the beginning gave me some Monster Hunter vibes, and I hope there's more of that as the game progresses.
Bobthehero wrote: I spent so much cash on renting RE4 at my local place, I could have bought the game twice, easily, damn my childhood best friend and I spent so much time playing this.
Hah! Did that way back with Super Smash Brothers Melee, until I finally bought it from the video store which I kept renting it from lol
Spent a lot of time on this one. Bloody difficult game. I like challenging games but this one got me really sweating.
the moment when you start praying for that crit. Or that you don't get the curse.
Funnily enough the pest doctor is nigh immune, then again it's the only one i have left after i had to rid myself of 4, of which 2 were casualities and 2 were fired
I loved Darkest Dungeon until the end, where I completed the first end dungeon with my painstakingly levelled up team and then I was not able to use them and had to grind all the others up again. I lost interest then, just far too much grind.
Da Boss wrote: I loved Darkest Dungeon until the end, where I completed the first end dungeon with my painstakingly levelled up team and then I was not able to use them and had to grind all the others up again. I lost interest then, just far too much grind.
Was fantastic up til that point though.
Didn't they release a mode that eases up the grind by accelerating XP gain and progression in general? I've thought of replaying the game again on that mode because I also felt the grind was getting a little too tedious.
At some point I either lost command and conquer 3 or it was stolen so I grabbed a collection of cnc games on steam for a lower price. These included the last 5 pc games in the series starting with cnc 3 and ending with cnc 4 of which i have no intention of ever playing.
I honestly feel like cnc 3 was an under-rated fun little game. I never played its expansion or red alert 3 and its expansion. If i had to say my favorite played command and conquer game was red alert 2. I wish i could play that game again but im not sure where to get it if at all possible. I'm also unsure if I'm hallucinating but watching that game get played on twitch the graphics looked way worse than I remembered.
Anyway I've been playing cnc 3 as nod which was my preferred cnc 3 faction. For the early nod campaign I'm spamming weak and fast vehicles and doing hardcore hit and run tactics which have been effective. Although end game units are fun I'm a little curious about a game with a tech limit that doesn't get to mammoth tanks, obelisks of light or any other top tier units. It has the potential for some really interesting and different tactics.
Finally getting around to playing Bloodstained. Very fun so far. Mainly just using it as a timewaster until all the parts for my new PC arrive this week.
And, just to show off a bit, this is the new PC I'm building:
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/C7TJmg
My last PC was built almost exactly five years ago for The Witcher 3, and this one is intended for Cyberpunk 2077. I'm not jumping on the ray tracing bandwagon just yet. I figure I'll wait to see how well it takes off, how well it's supported by developers, and how well the GPU companies support it (just because Nvidia was first past the gate on it, doesn't mean they'll end up being best at it). That, and using ray tracing knocks off too much fps at the moment for my liking.
Back on RimWorld again. Begun a new game and have a mod which makes HP Lovecraft your storyteller and adds attackers such as Deep Ones and Shoggoths and Dark Young and a sanity mechanic when your characters see those creatures and they have horrific dreams. Lovecraft is predictably ruthless and brutal. Makes the game much harder, but I still insist on having him as a storyteller being the masochist I apparently am lol
started on a Witcher trilogy binge, playing it "what would Cavill do" style, a bit tricky as not enough f-bombs chat choices and I'm having to do my own hmmmms (which are more Marge than Mr C tbh)
Da Boss wrote: I loved Darkest Dungeon until the end, where I completed the first end dungeon with my painstakingly levelled up team and then I was not able to use them and had to grind all the others up again. I lost interest then, just far too much grind.
Was fantastic up til that point though.
Roguelike walks a fine line for me. The tension and challenge and risk is great, but it can quickly turn repetitive if there's not a sense of progress behind it. The longer a run to see anything new the more likely I'll put it down. Rogue Legacy has thus far struck the best balance for me. Dead Cells ranks up there for me as well, though eventually the opening levels burned me out.
Went back to Destiny 2 and I'm playing through the Shadowkeep missions. I like how there's crossplay now so I switched over to my xbox. Forgot I was somehow made the leader of the Dakka Dakka clan over there but there's only 2 other members.
After weathering the storm of multiple coalitions attacking my territory for nearly 100 turns, various rebellions and having the Han Emperor stolen out from my grasp, I've gotten far enough in a Dhong Zhou campaign for him to be declared Emperor in his own right. And he promptly died of old age on that same turn. Thereby loosing all of the "Intimidation" I had banked while expanding/winning battles and throwing my economy into an uproar, as well as leaving a few generals unhappy.
Emperor Lu Bu (with his wifey Diaochan) are going to have their work cut out for them to finish the campaign. Been tons of fun so far, and this new challenge is going to be awesome.
About done platting Days Gone, moving onto Outer Worlds which I am super excited about. I've heard from multiple worlds that its pretty much Fallout: New Vegas in a next gen 3rd party format, and that'll scratch the itch that FO4 failed to do. I'll never forgive them for giving into the dialogue wheel of boredom.
Grimskul wrote: About done platting Days Gone, moving onto Outer Worlds which I am super excited about. I've heard from multiple worlds that its pretty much Fallout: New Vegas in a next gen 3rd party format, and that'll scratch the itch that FO4 failed to do. I'll never forgive them for giving into the dialogue wheel of boredom.
Save yourself the disapointment, Outer Worlds are medicore and tedious after the first two hours. Combat is dull and easily exploitebal due to the weapn modding and armor system. the quests are also far too easy and the choices you make dose not carry much weigth outside a few end game endings. But they do earn points for replicating the dullness of redtape
Felt nostalgic, and tried that N64 Smash Bros game again. It would seem controllers got better over the years, because the stiff N64 joystick is making jumping a small hassle.
Still nostalgic though! There seems to be this strangely sinister atmosphere in the two smash games. Not terrifying or anything, but noticeable.
Grimskul wrote: About done platting Days Gone, moving onto Outer Worlds which I am super excited about. I've heard from multiple worlds that its pretty much Fallout: New Vegas in a next gen 3rd party format, and that'll scratch the itch that FO4 failed to do. I'll never forgive them for giving into the dialogue wheel of boredom.
Save yourself the disapointment, Outer Worlds are medicore and tedious after the first two hours. Combat is dull and easily exploitebal due to the weapn modding and armor system. the quests are also far too easy and the choices you make dose not carry much weigth outside a few end game endings. But they do earn points for replicating the dullness of redtape
Yikes, is it really that bad? Is its main sin that it's more of the same or is it legitimately unfun to play?
Grimskul wrote: About done platting Days Gone, moving onto Outer Worlds which I am super excited about. I've heard from multiple worlds that its pretty much Fallout: New Vegas in a next gen 3rd party format, and that'll scratch the itch that FO4 failed to do. I'll never forgive them for giving into the dialogue wheel of boredom.
Save yourself the disapointment, Outer Worlds are medicore and tedious after the first two hours. Combat is dull and easily exploitebal due to the weapn modding and armor system. the quests are also far too easy and the choices you make dose not carry much weigth outside a few end game endings. But they do earn points for replicating the dullness of redtape
Yikes, is it really that bad? Is its main sin that it's more of the same or is it legitimately unfun to play?
Mostly more of the same. I wouldn't call it that bad, but it isn't particularly memorable either.
As satire goes, 'Corporations are bad because they're evil bastions of evil evilness' isn't particularly compelling. The companions are largely fairly forgettable (for several I was confronted by the fact that I had no reason to take them along on my crew- a drunkard, a scammer and a random joe with anger management issues don't scream 'team' to me). The best one is summed up as adorkable but awkward, which while cute, lacked depth (and had the most obnoxious and long series of fetch quests attached).
It isn't bad, and it was worth the $1 I paid to play it (due to the MS store promotion going on at the time), but it lacks the depth of story, characters, setting or mechanics that distinguished any of the Fallouts. It needs more places to go and other things to fight. And things to do that aren't fighting.
If anything it reminds me of Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. It teases you with a rich detailed world for an hour or two, then dumps you in a fetid sewer were you shoot ugly things in the face over and over again. And again and again and again. At some point an ending comes along as you progress through increasingly featureless quest hubs.
Da Boss wrote: I loved Darkest Dungeon until the end, where I completed the first end dungeon with my painstakingly levelled up team and then I was not able to use them and had to grind all the others up again. I lost interest then, just far too much grind.
Was fantastic up til that point though.
Gotta agree on this. Brilliant game but forcing you to level up 4 separate teams to max lvl is just to much. I hit the same brick wall but actually restarted instead and went with several teams at once. The end was still tough as hell.
Edit: also sucks when your max level badasses start dying en masse...
Got me new PC up and running (ooo, pretty lights), and now I bought and installed Control. Thoroughly enjoying it so far. Which isn't a surprise, I've enjoyed all of Remedy's games since Max Payne. And I read Poets of the Fall are back in this one, yay!
Grimskul wrote: About done platting Days Gone, moving onto Outer Worlds which I am super excited about. I've heard from multiple worlds that its pretty much Fallout: New Vegas in a next gen 3rd party format, and that'll scratch the itch that FO4 failed to do. I'll never forgive them for giving into the dialogue wheel of boredom.
Save yourself the disapointment, Outer Worlds are medicore and tedious after the first two hours. Combat is dull and easily exploitebal due to the weapn modding and armor system. the quests are also far too easy and the choices you make dose not carry much weigth outside a few end game endings. But they do earn points for replicating the dullness of redtape
Yikes, is it really that bad? Is its main sin that it's more of the same or is it legitimately unfun to play?
Yes, its unfun and a utter waste of time, as mentioned there is not one thing about the game that is memorable. the humor is bad, the whole "team" is notting more than hollow characthers meant to act as bullet sponges and buff providers to the player characther.
I wouldn't go as far as to say Outer Worlds is an objective waste of time, but it's a solid "purchase in a 50% off or better sale" with a healthy dose of "YMMV".
Hooked up my old Wii on my TV for the first time in years and played me some Guitar Hero III. It's so fun. III had a great line up of songs such as Knights of Cydonia, Helicopter, Prayer of the Refugee, Barracuda. Forgot how much it kills the hell out of my fingers, though.
Replaying the uncharted series since they were the free PS+ game last month. Then I'll probably replay the bioshock games since they are the free games this month on PS+.
Adrassil wrote: Hooked up my old Wii on my TV for the first time in years and played me some Guitar Hero III. It's so fun. III had a great line up of songs such as Knights of Cydonia, Helicopter, Prayer of the Refugee, Barracuda. Forgot how much it kills the hell out of my fingers, though.
And if you play for too long you get Guitar Hero eye
balmong7 wrote: Replaying the uncharted series since they were the free PS+ game last month. Then I'll probably replay the bioshock games since they are the free games this month on PS+.
It's too bad they didn't port over the multiplayer to next gen too, they actually had some good modes, especially the co-op ones that I'd love to play on a next gen console.
Restarted Fallout 4, mostly for a Far Harbour run, meaning just surviving in survival mode on the island.
That said , sofar i got rather unlucky in my mainland quest area, meaning i didn^t drop one decent legendary beyond a Hunting rifle...
Messing around with breakpoint again. Got the AR -18 as a reward from the terminator battle reward system. A pretty nice assault rifle. Accurate and with good grouping and snappy shots.
Really must get on with some of the story missions properly.
Adrassil wrote: Playin' me some Space Marine again, after watching a Let's Play by a certain Youtuber, forgot how damned fun it is!
That would be ArchWarhammer? And yes, the game is great fun to spend time purging xenos
Yeah, got it for free from Humble Bundle in 2018, I'm hoping they did that to canvas for interest for a Space Marine 2 and if so that there was enough interest. It drove me nuts when Arch couldn't figure out to tear the Plasma Gun off its stand when fighting the Ork gunship lol
Finished a Three Kingdoms campaign as Dhong Zhou. He died fairly early, then Lu Bu took the ball and ran with it, until he passed away and Diaochan took over as Empress and finished the job. Crazy fun, particularly once the last kingdoms standing square off.
Still not happy with how units are recruited in this game, will do an Eight Princes campaign next, with liberal use of mods that hopefully fix my beef with that process.
SPICE MUREEN! Ah, love that game. Wish there had been more to the series.
I am replaying Dark Souls 3 as a Pyromancer with some dabbling in miracles and sorceries because why not?
Finding it suprisingly difficult. Dark Souls 1 as sorcerer and Dark Souls 2 as hexer were really easy compared to my melee playthroughs. Managing flasks is a pain and I am finding the faster, more aggressive bosses pretty difficult. Fighting the Abyss Watchers now, quite challenging.
Voss wrote: With Space Marine, it would have been nice had there been more to the game. It was shockingly short and low on content.
its a fair point, but seeing our toy soldiers slice, dice and thunder hammer the enemies of mankind made up for it (even if the bolter was a smidge weedy)
Sartosa Mortal Empires campaign. Was quite a slow start, just building up a huge warchest by raiding and sacking whilst I upgraded the Swordfysh and recruited the legendary admirals to fill out my fleet officer positions. Tilea was conquered pretty early to serve as a buffer and money generator, followed by wiping out the Dreadfleet and occupying The Galleons Graveyard, which would serve as the staging ground for my next conquest.
I launched a full invasion of Ulthuan, which was in the process of confederating under Lothern and conquered it all except for the Nagarythe provinces which were taken by the Dark Elves. Aranessa also claimed the Sword of Khaine from Alarielle, which has made her ridiculously strong as in combination with her other magic items she currently has an 88% ward save, 28% physical resistance (and her battle ability which adds another 22% for a limited time), weapon strength over 1000, ridiculously high melee attack and defence and regeneration. She also has an insane campaign movement speed, to the point where there is basically never any reason to march as the movement gain is minuscule (it only multiples base campaign movement, doesn't take into account bonuses from followers etc.).
Towards the end of that war Chaos arrived and devastated southern Lustria, wiping out Teclis for me, but their fleets were easy pickings for my pirates when they tried to mvoe further up. They also left a load of empty provinces for me to waltz into. I holed up for a while, building up my newly conquered provinces and recruiting a massive amount of vampire heroes who were sent off to establish pirate coves at key cities (Naggaroth, Hag Graef, Marienburg, Altdorf, Magritta, etc.) to supplement my income and also to counter the public order loss from the Widowmaker whilst I built up public order buildings and spread vampiric corruption.
Meanwhile the Dark Elves have been waging a war with Bretonnia and the absolute monster that the Empire has become. I just watched until I saw a perfect moment to strike when Bretonnia was sailing three ships into my waters, consisting of Repanse de Lyonesse, The Fay Enchantress and Alberic de Bordeleaux. They were all within range of Aranessa and she defeated all three armies without any support, though I did have two other fleets nearby if needed.
Following that I struck Bretonnia fast, capturing the Lyonesse province whilst my Dark Elf allies struck north into Couronne. I then moved north east and captured the castle near the pass and gate to Marienburg. Meanwhile Aranessa had sailed south to deal with the Southern Kingdoms which had entered the war alongside Bretonnia and the Empire, defeating Louen Leoncoeur and razing the city he was occupying (after single handedly taking the walls and racking up over 800 kills) before beginning her march further south to deal with Etalia and then sweep up into the Border Kingdoms with one of my other admirals and attack the Empire from the south.
Meanwhile I was using payments to entice the Tomb King factions into declaring war on the Empire, Dwarfs and Bretonnia, to split their forces onto multiple fronts.
So far it is going quite well. Bretonnia should fall pretty quickly and then the plan is to sweep into the Empire and knock them down. Probably won't take many of their provinces (probably Marienburg and Altdorf for the ports and money potential), instead sacking and razing them as I don't really want a load of their landlocked provinces spreading out my empire. Might retake Sylvania and see if I can revive the vampire counts and try and lure out Isabella so I can kill her and get Regeneration on Aranessa that doesn't require a banner.
All in all having a great time. The Vampirates have got some great units to play with (Rotting Leviathans, Necrofex Colossi, Prometheans and Deck Gunners supported by Bess and Mortars is usual army composition) and I can often defeat armies before they even reach my lines, especially if Aranessa is there to move ahead and massacre them and hold them in place whilst the rest of the army unloads on them. Having a lord with 88% ward save, regeneration, unbreakable, causes fear and terror (Mask of Eee!) and who has perfect vigour is pretty OP
Got Final Fantasy XV on xbox gamepass. Enjoying it so far. The last FF game I played was 7 way back when it was new. I kinda wish you could pick different companions than just the 4 main guys though.
Adrassil wrote: Playin' me some Space Marine again, after watching a Let's Play by a certain Youtuber, forgot how damned fun it is!
Absolutely loved this game back in the day. I should play through it again, as at the time I had no real reverence for 40k lore for the plot to stand out. I just liked how it played.
Playing Trials of Mana right now. Played it ages ago with the Paladin path. Giving it a try now with the official translation using the Valkyrie.
Have reinstalled Space Marine myself some time ago with the intention of replaying it again, if only to listen to Mark STRONG purr out those lines again, rowrrrrr.
But first.. Stardew Valley with a fellow mod as we attempt to play the perfect game, or you know, just do whatever we want as we faff about with no real plan. So far, things are going quite well. Could do with some more rain though, our biggest energy waster at this point is watering our massive fields of produce.
Also decided to jump back onto Breakpoint after having not played it since two weeks after release. The Terminator event is okay and for some reason I've been given a crapton of currency to buy cosmetics with, so don't mind if I do. Will probably leave it at that for now and revisit later down the line when it's cheaper / on sale so I can rope some more friends into playing it and do a raid or two, because feth randos.
Finally getting into Pokemon Sword and Shield. Still trying to finish Luigis mansion 3. Then we will go back to finishing the Uncharted series. (Basically all my game time nowadays is showing my wife stuff because she can't play herself due to a disability. We are doing a lot of retro stuff.)
Ahh, I'm glad that the awesomeness of Space Marine has brought so many of us in solidarity! I've been playing Mount & Blade: Warband (which has easily the most hours I've put into a game according to Steam, but Rimworld is catching up quite quickly) Downloaded a mod which is like a whole new game in itself, Prophecy of Pendor. I think I was warned on its page that it was hard, but I wasn't prepared how hard it was. I transferred my level 42 character from my Native M&B: Warband game and, well, now I think I know what it's like to be a 'big fish in a small pond.'
I would say M&B Warband with the Brytenwalda mod is in my top three all time gaming experiences. Exactly the fantasy of being a celtic warlord conquering the British Isles. So good (if you can deal with the sometimes slightly dodgey translation on the dialgoue. But the historical research is amazing.)
Da Boss wrote: I would say M&B Warband with the Brytenwalda mod is in my top three all time gaming experiences. Exactly the fantasy of being a celtic warlord conquering the British Isles. So good (if you can deal with the sometimes slightly dodgey translation on the dialgoue. But the historical research is amazing.)
Thanks for the recommendation, I just downloaded it and giving it a go!
skarsnik campaign, again, Disciplined and optimitic warlord traits are worth gold.
Further, the goblin infantry that dual wields swords, how does their Smoke bomb work? Does it really indeed slow down, attackspeed?
(also why would you ever hire Nightgobos, of the non squig variety if you can make regular gobos get poison with a nightgoblin warboss?)
(also why would you ever hire Nightgobos, of the non squig variety if you can make regular gobos get poison with a nightgoblin warboss?)
If memory serves, they get bigger bonuses from some of the Night goblin Warboss skills, though its been awhile since I played as Greenskins.
Plus, being able to move about unseen has taken out quite a few arty pieces for me. With that said, I never went heavy with them until I unlocked the Fanatics upgrade, then went all out.
I've been playing Division 2 again. There's a new DLC coming out in March that bumps up the level cap to 40, and takes players back to New York to try and hunt down Aaron Keener.
Back on modern warfare. Picked up the battle pass, don’t usually go in for that kind of dlc/ reward system but it came with the Ghost character.
Hey it’s Ghost, why would I not grab it lol.
Not Online!!! wrote: Further, the goblin infantry that dual wields swords, how does their Smoke bomb work? Does it really indeed slow down, attackspeed?
(also why would you ever hire Nightgobos, of the non squig variety if you can make regular gobos get poison with a nightgoblin warboss?)
The Nasty Skulkers smoke bomb is purely -movement and charge speed. Useful for running down fleeing troops, stopping something from disengaging so you can swarm it, or blunting a charge last-second.
As for using Night Goblins over regular ones, NGs have slightly better offensive stats (including faster weapon swings) but also have Stalk and Vanguard Deployment.
A non-NG Goblin army is fine as a reserve force, especially with a Drippin' Tips warboss and also especially if you're not playing Skarsnik so you're paying full upkeep, but aside from that Night Goblins are your better infantry if you know you can win a fight (their lower leadership than base Gobbos can be a bit of a nuisance if you're stuck in a protracted battle).
Once you hit Fanatics, they're basically better than even regular Gobbos even on the front line. Being able to fling fanatics at charging enemies blunts the charge AND does enough damage that a counter-charge, surround, and Squig/Troll support can either quickly rout or ruin whatever made it through the Fanatics alive. If you can get a fanatic release off down the length of a front line without hitting your own, then it's even more devastating. If you're still stuck in a slugging match after that? I doubt even regular Goblins would've done much good.
Stardew Valley, almost done with Spring, though so far not a single day of rain all season.
Tank Mechanic Simulator, surprisingly entertaining for what you pay. Not a deep sim, quite light on some of the details, but thankfully not to the same level as My Summer Car or the like, but still something to mess around with at your own pace, here's hoping that the roster of vehicles will be expanded soon.
I decided to download no man's sky on xbox the other day, been playing that a lot. It's kinda fun exploring. I made some mistakes setting up my base the first time and everything is in a wierd position and it won't let me tear things down or move them except for a few of the portable things. Like I had a quest to build a vault, and I tuked it behind my main building, and the wires from my carbon generator can't reach it, and I can't rearrange either of them.
Got one with teclis, finally got him to a point where he can pin an entire army center down with magic and nuke them with arc lightning with archers pincushioning the defenseless units. I decided to get into Araby and just finished off arkhan the black, and planning on attacking the bretonnian armies there just for the hell of it. At least before chaos attacks...
Got another me with arkhan the black, and just wanted to see how quickly I can have him run to Naggashizar. I think it took 30 turns of just running.
And finally booted Rome total war up and been playing as Macedon, and boy howdy I love phalanxes in that game. I Am currently in a three way invasion of my lands, with Brutii, Thrace and the Greek city states all wanting my lands. It’s a lot more fun than I thought it would be!
I'm actually pretty disappointed by the lack of posts here lately. I've been playing dark souls on a friends xbox 360 as well as left 4 dead 2.
I honestly have to say going through dark souls a 2nd time it's pretty fun. I never beat it and ended with the Ornstein and smough fight but that's in part because I played the absolutely terrible and lazily ported dark souls on the pc with no xbox 360 controller. To give you an idea of how lazy the port is it still has xbox 360 controller buttons for button information and setup even When you are playing with a keyboard and mouse. When I told that friends that played, beat and enjoyed dark souls they understood why i had such a hard time playing the game.
The Xbox 360 version is much better. All the info I should've had is mostly displayed. It's a shame I didn't buy the game on the 360 but perhaps I can get things set up so I can play with an xbox 360 controller on my computer.
Anyway for dark souls I'm doing a thief build and they come with the master key as base gear. I should probably switch weapons around. I started with a dagger and then switched to a rapier and boosted it to +5 in weapon strength. I also got a light crossbow boosted that up to +5 and got lots of standard bolts. As it turns out I may have to switch to heavier crossbow bolts provided the damage difference is worthwhile but they took down those slow knights fairly well in that garden. I got pretty good with the rapier but the damage is starting to become crap and there a plenty of better weapons. If I was able to keep playing on my friends account I'd switch to that gargoyles halved maybe. I'm only about level 36 in the game currently but I've done a good bunch of the first areas paths and boss fights.
If I had to say the crossbow is good vs big and slow enemies while the man sized enemies you can backstab and move around tend to be fairly easily handled by my rapier. At the moment the combo seems to work fairly well with my build since anything that hits like a brick tends to wield heavy weapons (and therefore lack a shield often) or be big and slow and since im not a tank I tend to kite those enemies with ranged weapons and bait them to opening up their shields should they have shields. All the man sized dudes just die to backstabs usually.
If I recall there are some fast and big enemies but usually that's not the case or at least so far.
Been playing the original bioshock and honestly, this game is not as much fun as I remember. currently hoping my wife and I can power through it so that we can experience Bioshock 2 for the first time and then get our true replay of Infinite in.
Minecraft , for a forever world.
As in a world that is not there to be deleted and prepared for the Nether update. The only thing i am missing sofar is Ice for a potential Netherrailsystem.
Other than that i made a Castle village, with villagers, farmland and a mobfarm ready for exploitation. Also Never again will i dig a moat with terrain differences of up to 6 blocks with iron shovels.
balmong7 wrote: Been playing the original bioshock and honestly, this game is not as much fun as I remember. currently hoping my wife and I can power through it so that we can experience Bioshock 2 for the first time and then get our true replay of Infinite in.
You're better off stopping now. Bioshock 1 is as good as that series gets, and the bottom drops very, very far.
FFVII Remake Demo - fun run-through of an old favorite. The demo covers the start of the game, with the attack on the first mako reactor. The included boss fight took too long, though.
Dragon Quest Builders - SE's Dragon Quest themed Minecraft
Division 2 - I've finished the Warlords of New York expansion. Unforrunately, bullet sponge bosses seem to be back in a big way.
Still playing waay too much Battletech. With mods, it becomes the game that keeps on giving.
Played a little PathFinder:Kingmaker, but it feels like I'm diviving myself between two games (the rpg and kingdom management simulator) that are in competition with each other.
balmong7 wrote: Been playing the original bioshock and honestly, this game is not as much fun as I remember. currently hoping my wife and I can power through it so that we can experience Bioshock 2 for the first time and then get our true replay of Infinite in.
Make sure to play the DLC for Infinite. Seems like the whole series was just to get to that DLC which is weird.
flamingkillamajig wrote: I honestly have to say going through dark souls a 2nd time it's pretty fun.
Everybody gets lost and confused the first time through the game. I find playing these kinds of games again helps to remove some of the frustrtation of not knowing where the door/ladder/lever/key is to advance and getting stuck running in circles for hours, and also good in souls games for accessing some areas out of sequence and knowing where to pick up early stuff like the dragon tail sword and pyromancy.
Souls games are pretty replayable because of the build variety, but nothing beats the first, blind playthrough. Wonderful atmosphere and challenge going through and exploring places for the first time.
Pity Sekiro is so bloody hard. I really hit a wall with that game and stopped, need to go back to it. Been replaying Dark Souls 3.
balmong7 wrote: Been playing the original bioshock and honestly, this game is not as much fun as I remember. currently hoping my wife and I can power through it so that we can experience Bioshock 2 for the first time and then get our true replay of Infinite in.
Make sure to play the DLC for Infinite. Seems like the whole series was just to get to that DLC which is weird.
DLC is in the plans. Its the only part my wife never saw. She watched some youtuber play through 2. I have never played 2. the holes in our gaming experiences are weird. lol
ChargerIIC wrote: Still playing waay too much Battletech. With mods, it becomes the game that keeps on giving.
Played a little PathFinder:Kingmaker, but it feels like I'm diviving myself between two games (the rpg and kingdom management simulator) that are in competition with each other.
Yeah. Now that its more-or-less fully patched, I like the game, but the Kingdom Management is a drag, and turning it off entirely creates weirdness (you still have to 'check in' at the table to move the plot along).
But I dislike having to spin the 'skip time' button for Kingdom events when I want to go adventuring.
In related news, the Kickstarter for their next game, Wrath of the Righteous just finished at over $2 million, and its going to have a lot more. They're also promising that its less linear, so I'm hoping it avoids some of the Kingdom management pitfalls in regards to Army Management (Wrath puts the player as a commander of the Fifth Crusade (against an army of demons). They're adding a lot of pathfinder classes missing from Kingmaker, but sadly its over a year out at this point.
Beat Gael and the Soul of Cinder. Gael was very difficult, mostly his first phase with my squishy caster where he is so aggressive and erratic. I just did not have the stamina to keep away from him during his large attacking phases, and he moves so erratically it was very difficult to land my fireballs on him.
In the end, I farmed up a Rotten Ghru dagger (tried a spear first, as that is what I had) poison infused it and reinforced it to +10 and carefully darted in to land a few hits on him to poison him before rolling away. Then it was a game of attrition and one risky run in when he was in his upright phase to poison him again. Very satisfying when he went down, I had been on no flasks and a thin sliver of health for quiiiite a while.
Soul of Cinder was a lot easier, but still actually harder than my greatsword build from the first time I played, where I just rushed him down with damage.
The game is definitely fun and challenging as a caster. I think it is more balanced than DS1, which can be trivial with caster builds. The only build I haven't done in the three games now is a pure faith build.
Replaying Mechanicus properly for the first time since its release and the release of the Heretek DLC. Glad to see that some things have been fixed, like the ease of CP farming.
Also checked a guide to find out how to get to the secret missions and hidden boss, so have that to look forward to as well.
Playing Indivisible, you can definitely see the spots where Studio Trigger left its mark design wise. I'm also playing Dreams and I have to say media molecule really outdid themselves this time, it's very accessible but at the same time in-depth for newbies at creating games and given that it hasn't been out for that long it's amazing at some of things people have made. Attempting to make my own right now, but I realized I have to go through more tutorials to get more of the advanced ideas into practice.
If you want a short story I finally got back to playing star wars: empire at war as the rebellion. I won pretty handily and the death star destruction made things so much easier to win with. It's so crazy revisiting this game so much older I didn't realize how there are super big opportunities for great strategies and tactics if you pay close attention like i did in this campaign. Funny how rebellion raiding forces seemed kinda meh when I was younger but are great how I used them.
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Sadly couldn't download dark souls in time on my computer but I just beat star wars: empire at war on my computer. I conquered 5 more planets as rebellion today. I finished up the last planet I conquered just before they built the death star. I'm sure this cost the empire a stupidly large amount of resources to which they couldn't build a decent fleet to go with it. I love how not only can you see it you can see it move super slow around the map. Yeah it barely killed my planet before I destroyed the empire fleet but they auto lost the game since I had red squadron there to wipe it out.
I love how if the enemy has level 5 space stations and fairly weak ground forces with few production buildings on some planets you can send 3 units and some stealthy heroes to raid the planet. If you play your cards right you can win the land battle on the planet which auto destroys the space station there. 3 of the 4 capital ship production areas have only 3 buildable building slots and one has 4. So early on I took out most of these planets that the empire had through raiding forces. I'm sure the emperor was embarrassed to see that happen. So basically I do this and prevent him making capital ships while my capital ship production is super high and I have some decent mining worlds. At the end I had one world giving over 2k credits a turn which was over a quarter of my faction' s income. Jesus I'm starting to understand how Germany feels about how much money it contributes to the eu now. Keep in mind I had like 31 planets vs the remaining 12 empire planets.
Anyway I couldn't quite find the emperor. He was probably on corusant but I couldn't easily invade that world. It has like a level 5 space station and a crap ton of buildings and building slots. Only 3 to 4 of the empire's remaing worlds were worth something and would present a massive challenge to fight. About 5 of their planets at the end had level 5 space stations but not all the planets were super valuable.
Either way it was a fun game. They weren't even close to getting to Mon mothma who was in some mild danger earlier on. I only saw one hyper velocity gun that whole game which is interesting because I built tons of ion cannons on my capital ship producing worlds to make them that much harder to fight. When you think about it it's even more ridiculous because he couldn't produce any capital ships so at best he had the imperial star destroyer hero and no other capital ships. This means any attempt to face down my level 5 space stations producing capital ships with multiple ion cannons would only fight with mid level star destroyers which would be absolute garbage. It'd be even worse with all the garbage fleets he had left eventually. At that point what was the ai in the galactic conquest campaign supposed to do?
Well it was fun to play. The a.i. cheats like in most games. They had next to no resources coming in and yet they still had plenty of buildings and units. I get that local reinforcements are free and for a while I was doing most of the attacking but my economy should've been flattening his too. I mean having all those buildings and level 5 space stations as well as building a death star should take a while and if I recall that takes a level 5 space station to build too.
flamingkillamajig wrote: If you want a short story I finally got back to playing star wars: empire at war as the rebellion. I won pretty handily and the death star destruction made things so much easier to win with. It's so crazy revisiting this game so much older I didn't realize how there are super big opportunities for great strategies and tactics if you pay close attention like i did in this campaign. Funny how rebellion raiding forces seemed kinda meh when I was younger but are great how I used them.
If you have the expansion pack. The Scum faction was always my favorite to play. Forces of corruption or something.
Been curious about that one. You wouldn’t happen to know if Mordhau supports bots, do you?
Depends what bots.
Mordhau itself has an Horde mode with bots and an active and supported modding scene. I do admit though that i am not Deep enough in both of These spheres to answer your question competently enough.
I've been playing dark souls remastered on my own for 2 days now. Tried going with the thief class and had a fairly quick time with a lot of stuff. Of course now I have to fight drakes, go to blight town, fight the ghosts, fight those undead with scimitars and falchions and try not to go crazy. Sadly i remember the current stuff im doing to be the harder part of the first location. I feel like i may need a change of weapons or armor soon.
If I recall last time I went to anor londo I had plenty of stuff not completed in the first location. It wasn't a lot but there was a couple things I might have skipped.
Generally you can make any weapon work for you, the important thing is that you like the moveset and it matches your stats. When you reinforce the weapons they all end up doing a lot of damage.
Da Boss wrote: Generally you can make any weapon work for you, the important thing is that you like the moveset and it matches your stats. When you reinforce the weapons they all end up doing a lot of damage.
This. Some weapons in Dark Souls are just phenomenal (Black Knight Halberd) but even those which are mediocre can be effective as long as you're not trying to do hardcore PvP.
Went back to Sekiro. Last time I was playing I had just beaten the gate guard on horseback and was stuck fighting the old lady in the memory.
Still have not beat the old lady, thoguh I have gotten really close (those damn butterflies are rinsing me). Got past the boss immediately after the horseman (which was a crap boss) and now the world seems to be opening up, with lots of different paths to choose from.
Still feel there is a disconnect between the boss fights and the stealth gameplay. I really like the stealth but do not enjoy the deflection based bosses, although I am getting better at it my reaction time is not really that good so it is frustrating.
Dragon Age Inquisition here; I had tried it when it came out a few years back and could not get into it. Started as a mage character and finding the combat more enjoyable. Characters are interesting.
Also Gravity Rush; pretty fun - not much story there but flying around and messing with the gravity powers is a good time.
Some friends decided we should play Battlefront 2 during the quarantine so I downloaded that. It's... fine. I wasn't really missing anything. Mostly just tempting me to start a Droid army in Legion whenever I can get out of the house again.
Also randomly started playing Megaman X4 again. I've never loved it quite like the rest of the world and that remains the case, but I'm appreciating the level design a bit more. The original is still the best. X3 has traditionally been my favorite, though I should replay 2 and 3 now to see if that remains.
Been curious about that one. You wouldn’t happen to know if Mordhau supports bots, do you?
Depends what bots.
Mordhau itself has an Horde mode with bots and an active and supported modding scene. I do admit though that i am not Deep enough in both of These spheres to answer your question competently enough.
If there's modding, guess it's a matter of time. Thanks for the heads-up!
Haven't been playing much in the way of vidya games lately, still mostly on Resident Evil 4, trying to clock it on my laptop on Professional mode. Everything seems to kill you in two to three hits even when you have your health bar upgraded fully. Love it!
I am still going back to pokemon shield here and there. Every time the wild area pops up all my fun just stops. I hate that you can't tell whether or not a pokemon can be caught right away and it just kills any desire to grind the area until I'm done with the game and trying to complete my dex
Been curious about that one. You wouldn’t happen to know if Mordhau supports bots, do you?
Depends what bots.
Mordhau itself has an Horde mode with bots and an active and supported modding scene. I do admit though that i am not Deep enough in both of These spheres to answer your question competently enough.
If there's modding, guess it's a matter of time. Thanks for the heads-up!
No worries, i fully can reccomend the game.
However some of the best aspects of it are also some of the worst at the same time: the community, for one it's quite open to just fun builds , shenanigans , jokes etc. but it also has a lot of toxic people in it that can't take a beating in a melee game, with mauls .
I have come out victorious from blight town (Dark souls). I killed quelag, made a covenant with her sister (weird if you ask me), killed a crap ton of ogres, centipedes and double axe demons all to get a fire ember. I also got lots of stones or shards to make my weapons better. My light crossbow is now divine +5 And I've leveled enough that I can kill a stone golem in probably 4 shots with it (45 damage or so per shot). I think there is more of the upper floor to explore of blight town but I'm not sure what's there. I already got the 2nd fire keepers soul and gave it to quelag sister to make my estus flasks better.
All I have left is the area with drakes, sens tower, the catacombs with the scimitar skeletons, the dog syf and maybe knight artorious, the dragon at the gatehouse and the dragon in the tunnels way way down. Actually in the lava pits there was a golden area blocked by some god or something so thats a thing too.
Anyway it sounds like a lot but there aren't nearly as many areas left to explore and I only really have to explore and beat sens fortress to progress to anor londo.
Most everyone here is likely aware that Square-Enix is releasing a revamped version of Final Fantasy VII with vastly improved graphics. There's a second old Square game that's also about to get a new release with greatly updated graphics. That game is Trials of Mana - aka Sekken Densetsu 3, which just released a demo (which is essentially the early portion of the game).
I downloaded it from the PS Store, and took it for a spin. It's now more of a 3D action RPG (moreso than it used to be), with graphics that look similar to the Dragonquest games, albeit without character art by Akira Toriyama. It's worth taking a look at if you like the genre, or liked the old Mana games. This one didn't get a North American release back in the day, though it apparently had an outside Japan release on the Switch last summer.
I beat the great wolf Syf in one try in dark souls. I just stayed at range and fired crossbow bolts at him. It worked with quelag too and I only died to her once. I'm not gonna lie though had I not leveled and done other things first I probably wouldn't have won that fight. He drops a crap ton of souls too if I recall correctly including his own that you convert to souls which I haven't done yet.
I still have a few things left to do. I didn't kill all the drakes but I grabbed what they seemed to be protecting up a ladder. Not sure if killing them all would unlock a gate but probably not. I also grabbed an ember in a chest that the mushroom dudes were protecting after I killed them. If i could kill that one dragon guarding the gatehouse i would but it keeps taking off or just burning me alive with fire. Maybe i have to wait to kill it. Then there's the dragon way at the bottom of one tower with giant rats and stuff in it. I'm not sure i can even handle that yet. I still also have to do sen's fortress and fight the scimitar wielding skeletons in the crypts. Well at least i'm making steady progress. I'm not sure what knight artorias's ring does. Do i have to go back where Syf was and wear it? It sounds like it gives you help with a covenant too.
Da Boss wrote: Went back to Sekiro. Last time I was playing I had just beaten the gate guard on horseback and was stuck fighting the old lady in the memory.
Still have not beat the old lady, thoguh I have gotten really close (those damn butterflies are rinsing me). Got past the boss immediately after the horseman (which was a crap boss) and now the world seems to be opening up, with lots of different paths to choose from.
Still feel there is a disconnect between the boss fights and the stealth gameplay. I really like the stealth but do not enjoy the deflection based bosses, although I am getting better at it my reaction time is not really that good so it is frustrating.
Lady Butterfly can be a real pain. She is kind of one of the first gateway bosses that really tests your skills.
Shuriken can knock her down when she is standing on her wires, which does quite a bit of posture damage if I remember correctly and at the very least leaves her vulnerable to some hits. You can also cheese her using dodge attacks if you get really fed up, or at least you could when I was playing through, might have been patched (video example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wObTavnIkfQ).
Also, at least when I played, spamming the block button rather than trying to time it perfectly was an effective way of getting deflects (especially against enemies which hit in quick succession). Might have been patched since though.
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flamingkillamajig wrote: I'm not sure what knight artorias's ring does. Do i have to go back where Syf was and wear it? It sounds like it gives you help with a covenant too.
You need it to fight The Four Kings boss, located in the bottom of the New Londo Ruins. If you beat them before talking to Frampt (Snorey Snakey Boy) at Firelink Shrine then you can join the Darkstalkers covenant.
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flamingkillamajig wrote: If i could kill that one dragon guarding the gatehouse i would but it keeps taking off or just burning me alive with fire. Maybe i have to wait to kill it.
Yeah that dragon is tough. On new game you can kill it with poison arrows and normal arrows to switch to once the poison takes hold. Shoot it from safety under the bridge with a reasonably upgraded bow (after it takes a certain amount of damage it covers its head with its wings and regenerates health but on new game the health regen is less than the damage you can deal by poisoning it and hitting it with normal arrows once poisoned). You can also run past it and get to the area underneath it by luring it down and then sprinting like hell. Behind it there is the Warriors of Sunlight covenant for jolly cooperation, a bonfire and the lever to open the gate (though by this time in your game that shortcut is pointless).
If you want to get past it, head up the ladder from the bonfire to the under bridge section and then up the stairs to the bridge. Run out to bait it into breathing fire (don't need to go too far onto the bridge to do this) and then run back down the stairs. This'll clear out all the enemies on the bridge. Now run back up the stairs, immediately loop round the stairs back on yourself and hide behind the wall. Drakey boy will probably breathe fire, sit tight and wait for him to finish. Peek out and shoot a couple of arrows at his head then run back to our hiding spot behind the wall. Do this until he flies up to come and land on the bridge. As soon as you see him take off then run out and head straight for the gate. Provided you are not carrying too much weight you should be able to make it before he decides to flame the bridge and any other attacks should miss. Once you get through the gate immediately get out of the line of fire (ignore the bonfire for now) as he is going to turn around and try to toast you. After that he will get bored and fly away, at which point you are free to light the bonfire, open the gate etc.
I appreciate you're trying to help but I heard the best way to play the first game is with no hints though I imagine with internet connection you get minimal hints. I might be ok being given minimal hints.
Anyway I beat sens fortress and boy it was the biggest ***** of a mission ever. I died more to falls (getting knocked off or accidental jumps) and rocks hitting me in the face than anything else by a long shot. Honestly it was far more frustrating than blight town from what I remember. So thank God I found the bonfire at that towers top though I never got to boost it due to spending much of my humanity on worthless things like boosting my favor with the spider lady which I broke off my covenant with anyway. I managed to beat the iron golem in like 3 or so tries though so it wasn't a big deal.
I'm still gonna need more humanity though since that's the thing I'm lowest on. I heard once I beat Ornstein and smough (a big if) i should get something that lets me travel between bonfires which sounds insanely useful. At that point completing things should be super easy to do.
Hold up. When you mentioned earlier that you beat Syf, I thought you had long passed Sen’s Fortress. How on earth did you get there?!?
I get what you mean about Sen’s Fortress too. Not as much nightmare fuel as Blighttown (thank feth), but the tiny walkways always got me. Will be curious to see what you think of good o’l Oreo and Smores when you get there!
SkavenLord wrote: Hold up. When you mentioned earlier that you beat Syf, I thought you had long passed Sen’s Fortress. How on earth did you get there?!?
I get what you mean about Sen’s Fortress too. Not as much nightmare fuel as Blighttown (thank feth), but the tiny walkways always got me. Will be curious to see what you think of good o’l Oreo and Smores when you get there!
No I decided to go and fight Syf first. I beat him in one try. I think I only tried him once or so in the prepare to die edition and died but this time I beat him fairly easily in dark souls: remastered. I just hit him with crossbow bolts and kept him at range till he died. Speaking of shooting them to death with crossbow bolts the only person that invaded my game I beat really hardcore. Once again they just charged at me and I just kited around with crossbow shots at em until they died. An easy gain of humanity for me and it was at a bonfire so even if I lost it wouldn't have been a big deal.
Well last time Ornstein and smough roundly kicked my ass back and forth (dark souls: prepare to die edition which I gave up on) and this time was no different except the last (this game is dark souls: remastered for the pc and I didn't use an xbox controller for either). Eventually I figured out their pattern. I used demon spear +4 vs Ornstein until I killed him and then just stayed at range and peppered super Saiyan smough to death with a crossbow (magical light crossbow +5 and a bunch of lightning imbued bolts).
I finally used the dragon crossbow. I found one on a corpse somewhere and leveled it to level 5. I didn't think you could snipe with it but you can. I was using it to snipe out exposed areas on the giant metal statue dudes. God that thing is brutal. It downs those behemoth statues in 4 shots minimum and 5 max.
I was farming the area near the gate to ornstein and smough with a bunch of knights for xp earlier. They are super predictable with backstabs and parry plus critical strike (I went the parry/critical hit route almost exclusively) esp. with my critical hit boost ring. It's basically an auto one hit kill per knight. I must have done that like 10 or more times just to farm as much xp as possible. It was an average of 15k xp or so per run. Also i'm about level 60 or 62 now.
Lord Vessel has been taken to firelink shrine. God that freaking thing is huge! Where did the character even store it?
I think that's enough dark souls for like a day. I stayed up all night playing it you know. It's not like there's anywhere to be with the pandemic and all.
I've been playing a lot of Oxygen not included. I've got my usual problem of liking to start new games far more than actually going all the way through it.
Yeah I've played some games so much I just get bored of em after a while too. I play xcom 2 a lot and when you reach the end-game everything becomes easier like it's on cruise control but it becomes more boring. Of course maybe I've just played it too much now.
I wonder how long until xcom 3 is made. Enemy unknown came out in 2012 and xcom 2 came out in like 2015 or 2016. We should at least be hearing about some progress from the game but there is none. It's a shame it's one of my favorite series. I understand people that like the originals from the 90s and hopefully xenonauts has that check mark filled for you guys but I just enjoy the new version. Dunno if I could play the 90s version personally.
flamingkillamajig wrote: Yeah I've played some games so much I just get bored of em after a while too. I play xcom 2 a lot and when you reach the end-game everything becomes easier like it's on cruise control but it becomes more boring. Of course maybe I've just played it too much now.
I wonder how long until xcom 3 is made. Enemy unknown came out in 2012 and xcom 2 came out in like 2015 or 2016. We should at least be hearing about some progress from the game but there is none. It's a shame it's one of my favorite series. I understand people that like the originals from the 90s and hopefully xenonauts has that check mark filled for you guys but I just enjoy the new version. Dunno if I could play the 90s version personally.
The old games have their high points and low points. UFO Defense arguably gives you more choice than the new ones. You can customize each soldier’s loadout, and there is no class system to impose limits. You can also build multiple bases, preventing issues that you might have in EU scrambling to get as many satellites out as possible.
On the other hand, the UI and shooting can be kind of janky. EU and 2 implement movement and cover well. UFO Defense seems to rely heavily on moving out, shooting, and moving back into cover. Furthermore, the alien guns can vaporise walls and obstacles. Your usual gun cannot. X-Com Apocalypse also used RTS elements during missions, which went as well as you might expect.
I think they’re all fine games, they just both have pros and cons over each other.
flamingkillamajig wrote: Yeah I've played some games so much I just get bored of em after a while too. I play xcom 2 a lot and when you reach the end-game everything becomes easier like it's on cruise control but it becomes more boring. Of course maybe I've just played it too much now.
I wonder how long until xcom 3 is made. Enemy unknown came out in 2012 and xcom 2 came out in like 2015 or 2016. We should at least be hearing about some progress from the game but there is none. It's a shame it's one of my favorite series. I understand people that like the originals from the 90s and hopefully xenonauts has that check mark filled for you guys but I just enjoy the new version. Dunno if I could play the 90s version personally.
I really disliked 2, but rather liked the 'original' rebooot. 2 was just more of the same (with some carry-over issues that never got fixed), but with more timers and nonsense that I hate dealing with in games- especially in an otherwise relaxed turn-based tactical setup.
Firaxis is often surprisingly coy about release dates. This can be good (as they aren't yammering on a year or more in advance), but they also seem dead as a studio where they don't talk about a new project coming. I'd personally like to know if they're going to be doing Civ 7, another Civ 6 expansion or a retry at an offbrand Alpha Centauri or (personal hope) a stab at recreating Master of Magic. (the latter two names are tied up with other companies, which is why Beyond Earth happened)
However... they do have some indirect information running about. They're got an old post still on their front page from November (like I said, they're really quiet as a company) where they were advertising for a half-dozen positions. One was a World Builder, slated for 'the team that brought you Xcom' and an Environmental artist for 'the team that brought you Civ 6.' So they've clearly got something in the works along both lines. Though they could in theory be new titles, spin offs, expansions or whatever.
With E3 cancelled this year, I wonder if studios will make their own announcements in June anyway
Picked up animal crossing. I have a feeling its going to delay the classic game replays my wife and I have been doing. I could hear her playing it for two hours after I went to bed last night, and she is disabled so she rarely plays games herself because it difficult for her.
@Voss: to each their own. The only thing I didn't like about xcom 2 was the lack of enemy interrogation by capturing enemies with stun guns. Yeah it put your soldiers in danger which you could mitigate with certain things like disabling shot but the payoff was super sweet. It sped up research into other things once interrogation was done and you were sometimes left with super sweet plasma weapons that cost a lot to make otherwise. Also I kinda miss taking down ufos of varying sizes. Soldier customization for skills when they level up is more one path or another in xcom 2 but it often has greater effects in xcom 2. Skulljacking is a bit of a missed opportunity being too easy to fail and not giving the best gifts in harder difficulties (except at times allowing facility leads which is sweet). At times fire was a missed opportunity in xcom 2. It has great effect against psychic units and disables some random abilities on enemies but I find stun grenades work better for movement speed and special ability debuffs except vs psychic dudes.
For everything else I kinda prefer xcom 2 (except all the bugs). Magnetic weapons are far cooler than laser weapons. The graphics are better by a significant margin. There's a lot of character customization. There's a lot more mods and ability to make mods. There is hacking as well as hacking boosts which often provides some global boosts or further hack boosts (usually when there's a hacking mission). There are a lot of items to use in the game. Sadly I find some of these items under-utilized and some are just auto includes (mimic beacon). The proximity mine for instance while good isnt as useful by the time you get it. Itd still be great to use on some enemy pods before they scatter to cover or on melee units but I find grenades to generally be better for my needs. The soldier posters in war of the chosen are also fun if a bit not needed. The psi operative is also a step up in xcom 2 though admittedly it takes forever to get them to be good. Swords while fun were also a huge missed opportunity (fix this in xcom 3 please!) Except the chosen assassin sword which is fantastic. Concealment is also a game in itself and is good for a spotter soldier for the rest of the group to move safely around with. Also each mission type has certain soldier preferences, tactics, items needed and often preferred times in the game to do said missions.
Anyway in xcom 2 at least there's generally a weapon, item, tactic or skill that needs to be used in every situation to make fights easier or merely to handle them.
There's probably more I can add but I currently can't think of anything else.
Giving Assassin's Creed Odyssey a try, it's free to play right now and quite entertaining so far.
Also did some more coop-farming on Stardew Valley, though it should be faffing as my fellow farmer is a bloody machine when it comes to fishing and mining!
Got the Capcom Humble Bundle for 35 NZD and downloaded RE remake started it with Jill Valentine (seen as though it's easier and well, its Jill frigging Valentine **swoon**) Pretty intense, just killed my first zombie. Uhh also my friend pointed out to me the frigging Tomb Raider is free on Steam right now. Just thought you guys should know!
Jill's run is easier because she has slightly more inventory space and starts off with her handgun. I do recommend playing through with each character at least once, as both story lines have their own characters and events.
BrookM wrote: Jill's run is easier because she has slightly more inventory space and starts off with her handgun. I do recommend playing through with each character at least once, as both story lines have their own characters and events.
Will do! Hopefully completing it as Jill will get me good enough to play Chris' scenario. Just got to get out of the RE4 mentality of slaughtering everything in sight. That frigged me over in the RE2 remake lol Hard habit to break after playing RE4 so many times over the years
Hey folks, not relevant, but I didn't want to start a new thread for it.
I've got a free copy of Total Warhammer 1 if any one is interested. I got it from GW when they were giving away a copy with every order, earlier in the year.
I think it's only the base game, but It's free to a good home! If you want it send me a PM. First come first serve.
To keep the post on topic, I've been playing Darkest Dungeon again. I have the most serious love/hate relationship with that game.
I wont stop until I beat it, but as soon as I start losing maxed out heroes, I tableflip and have to walk away from it for a few weeks.
BrookM wrote: Jill's run is easier because she has slightly more inventory space and starts off with her handgun. I do recommend playing through with each character at least once, as both story lines have their own characters and events.
Will do! Hopefully completing it as Jill will get me good enough to play Chris' scenario. Just got to get out of the RE4 mentality of slaughtering everything in sight. That frigged me over in the RE2 remake lol Hard habit to break after playing RE4 so many times over the years
Chris has a better chance of landing lethal headshots and has more shotgun ammo in the long run IIRC. He also has more health, probably foreshadowing the beefy proportions he will take on in RE5.
In the original RE, Jill's run was VASTLY easier for a bunch of reasons. In the REmake there's definitely more parity between the two but she's still got a slightly easier time.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Picked up Animal Crossing for my wife and daughter. No grand appeal for it for me, not because of anything wrong with it, but just because I played the GCN original to death and haven't felt there's much new to accomplish in the new ones.
Also, despite it being the internet darling, I'm finding I just don't love Megaman X4. It's a fine game, but I've got a hundred little nitpicks that drop it below the SNES versions for me. I remember liking X5 better, but at the moment I'm not feeling like buying the second collection just to confirm.
Been mostly playing Urtuk. Pretty great game I have to say, incredibly deep with an deceptive amount of content. In early access but they might as well have released it as it is now.
Also the longing. My god, this is the most unique game I've played 2020 I think. A kind of adventure/exploration idle game I guess? Quite the experience.
My significant other got me a copy of Total War Three Kingdoms and well... Yea it's rough around the edges I dare say. Put in around ten hours in it, and while the map is nice to look at and the whole romance deal is fine, I will not be playing more of it. Too many redundant and useless units, far too dull battle system and not enough of a challenge, even when outnumbered greatly by the AI.
I will once more find my way back to a mixture of World Of Warships, Mechanicus and Tiberian Sun to pass the time until I find a game that tickels my funny bone
Battlefront II. They're doing a double XP event until the 27th, and then it moves to a triple XP event.
Scarif, hopefully, is dropping next month bringing "Supremacy"(a game mode where you start off on the ground, then board & destroy a ship) into the Galactic Civil War era and new appearances+heroes. Rumor is Jyn, Cassian, Krennic, and a Death Trooper from the comics are coming alongside of the Rebel Pathfinders and Shoretroopers as new Infiltrator/Enforcer options.
Got fed up with troubleshooting my (self-written) batteltech mod and wandered over to Bounty Train. That is a suprisingly addictive game. Just..have..to.ship..one more load!
Playing more dark souls. Took out a bunch of bosses, the sun knight dude and the bed of chaos. It was a bit frustrating but more due to distance from bonfires. Thank God the progress with bed of chaos is saved even after you die. I'd have quit for a while if it didn't.
flamingkillamajig wrote: Playing more dark souls. Took out a bunch of bosses, the sun knight dude and the bed of chaos. It was a bit frustrating but more due to distance from bonfires. Thank God the progress with bed of chaos is saved even after you die. I'd have quit for a while if it didn't.
A cheesy strat for Bed of Chaos is to save and quit after taking out each part. When you reload the save it drops you just outside the fog wall. Can save a little bit of frustration for future playthroughs now that you have experienced it in all its awfulness the first time!
I've reached the 2nd time you face syth after the crystal caves. God the crystal caves were annoying and dying to him after making the trek through the caves and getting cursed was not too fun. Part of what makes these boss fights hard now is the distance from the bonfires to them. It's a crazy distance away.
Nm just beat Syth. That was rather easy once you get curse gear and stay behind him when you attack.
Decided to pick up Assassin's Creed Odyssey, really liking it so far. Sailing in particular is fun, the shanties sung by the crew are worthy of an album on their own.
There's also the Breakpoint free weekend, my brother's going to join me for a couple of hours. Also gave me the opportunity to log on and see how the new gameplay settings work. Damned shame that wasn't included at launch, as playing the game without the horrible gear scores and constant hunt for boots of +1 to banning or your favourite gun at your level because of arbitrary numbers is bollocks. It's closer to the previous game now, which I personally approve of. The added in options to not be able to purchase gear and / or spawn vehicles at camp sites is also a nice option, forcing me to rely more on acquiring transport from the locals. Though best of all is the option to switch off the horrible player hub elements and no longer have Nowhere be swamped with -xXx-420-Vegata-420-xXx-'s looking for a group.
Predator hunting grounds has a weekend free trial for ps plus subscribers and pc gamers. I'm downloading it right now, looks fun to play as the predator but the human gameplay looks a bit basic.
I was having a bad luck streak in StarCraft 2. I play protoss and i'm in low gold right now (3rd of 3 gold leagues). I broke the bad luck streak somewhat. I had a couple good matches vs terran but that's about it. I think I lost a couple good matches as well vs protoss or something.
In dark souls I took down 4 kings yesterday and got the last of the lord souls. I actually went to fight lord gwyn once before I knew it was him. I think i'll level up my gear first. I heard the painting in Anor Londo can be traversed but I haven't done it yet. Considering how highly leveled I am and the gear I've gotten it shouldn't be such a big deal.
Tannhauser42 wrote: Will be playing Bannerlord as soon as I can after work today.
So how is it? I've had some let's play videos of it playing, but I'm not particularly sold on the 'wander about trying to chase down looters' gameplay in the early stages.
If anyone plays (or knows someone who plays) Fortnite on PS4 then send me a PM. I recently bought a PS4 and it came with a code for a skin and some v-bucks, which I'm not going to use myself
I beat dark souls last night. I accidentally stumbled into the dark soul ending by exploring a hallway. I heard somewhere about somebody that couldn't be bothered to parry Lord gwyn so I tried the parry, counter attack and heal method against him. It turned Lord gwyn into a pushover. His attacks (At least in the starter difficulty) are super predictable when you've seen it a couple times. Dunno how this dude had trouble parrying him unless his attack style changes based on difficulty.
I still haven't fought knight artorias yet or gwyndolin. I honestly didn't know how to get there. Was it the painting or should I have gone into that forest where I beat wolf syf.
Got back into Mount and Blade: Warband again now that the new one has released. I used to value cavalry extremely highly, especially Khergit and Swadian units. Maybe archers, but very few foot infantry.
I had a castle with the Swadians that bordered with the Rhodoks. Unfortunately, Swadia was at war with the Rhodoks at the same time. An army of over 900 was outside of the gates. While most of the defenders fought well, it was the two Nord Huscarls (elite infantry) that really held the line. These two were absolute monsters, and kept the Rhodoks bottlenecked on the siege tower for a good long time. The castle fell, but it cost the Rhodoks a couple hundred troops. This was in no small part due to the huscarls keeping the Rhodoks off the walls.
Now I’m questing in Nord lands to build up a new army. We’re currently at 50, and a mix of Swadian and Nord. If I can build the Nords up to Huscarls, I’ll be marching on that same castle and taking it back.
Tannhauser42 wrote: Will be playing Bannerlord as soon as I can after work today.
So how is it? I've had some let's play videos of it playing, but I'm not particularly sold on the 'wander about trying to chase down looters' gameplay in the early stages.
I'm still very much in the early tutorial stages, but from everything I've experiences, and otherwise seen and read, it's currently an updated version of Warband. So, if you didn't like Warband, you won't like Bannerlord. It's still an Early Access title, too, so it does have some problems from what I've read. My opinion doesn't count for much, as of yet.
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SkavenLord wrote: Got back into Mount and Blade: Warband again now that the new one has released. I used to value cavalry extremely highly, especially Khergit and Swadian units. Maybe archers, but very few foot infantry.
I had a castle with the Swadians that bordered with the Rhodoks. Unfortunately, Swadia was at war with the Rhodoks at the same time. An army of over 900 was outside of the gates. While most of the defenders fought well, it was the two Nord Huscarls (elite infantry) that really held the line. These two were absolute monsters, and kept the Rhodoks bottlenecked on the siege tower for a good long time. The castle fell, but it cost the Rhodoks a couple hundred troops. This was in no small part due to the huscarls keeping the Rhodoks off the walls.
Now I’m questing in Nord lands to build up a new army. We’re currently at 50, and a mix of Swadian and Nord. If I can build the Nords up to Huscarls, I’ll be marching on that same castle and taking it back.
Oh yeah, when it comes to sieges, elite foot troops and archers are the masters of that battlefield.
I still haven't fought knight artorias yet or gwyndolin. I honestly didn't know how to get there. Was it the painting or should I have gone into that forest where I beat wolf syf.
Gonna spoiler it in case you want to find them yourself:
Spoiler:
Artorias is in the DLC area. To access it you need to head into Darkroot basin and across the lake where the Hydra is/was. There should be a cave with a big gold golem in it. Kill the golem and an NPC should appear. Talk to said NPC then head to the Dukes Archives. Right at the beginning of the archives, there's a room with some crystal hollows and a blue golem. Kill the blue golem and it should drop a Broken Pendant. Head back to Darkroot basin to where you found the gold golem and approach the weird portal (there will also be a summon sign for the NPC you saved on the shore of the lake which you can use to summon her and buy sorceries if I remember correctly).
To fight Gwyndolin, either attack Gwynevere or equip the Darkmoon Seance ring (found in the catacombs) and head into the Darkmoon tomb which makes a statue disappear. This opens up the ability to fight Gwyndolin and also join the Blades of the Darkmoon covenant (if you are doing it with the ring).
Oh that's good to know. I wish a lot of this was more intuitive. Wasn't Manus yet another boss you can fight?
I heard Artorias was a tough fight from a friend once. Is this true?
Thanks for the help here. I don't mind advice when it comes to unlocking things. I just don't want serious help with fights or with big story details until I get them done.
flamingkillamajig wrote: Oh that's good to know. I wish a lot of this was more intuitive. Wasn't Manus yet another boss you can fight?
I heard Artorias was a tough fight from a friend once. Is this true?
Thanks for the help here. I don't mind advice when it comes to unlocking things. I just don't want serious help with fights or with big story details until I get them done.
Yeah, it is a bit opaque and not in the good "piece it together yourself" kinda way.
Yes, Manus is the final boss of the DLC.
Artorias can be pretty tough. He is pretty fast and can hit like a mule, especially when he buffs himself. But be careful, learn his attacks and tells and you should do fine!
Having picked up Hitman GO earlier this week, agreed! While I like the puzzle mechanics, the lack of animation is a damned shame, Lara Croft GO has spoiled me.
Decided to pick up Metro Exodus on Steam, 50% off and so far, it's okay. Biggest annoyance is that the characters talk a way too much. But liking the semi open world mechanics and the train makes for a nice hub in between tasks.
Also much to my surprise my brother liked Breakpoint and the many-many-many gameplay changes enough to buy it, so got that to look forward to as well.
flamingkillamajig wrote: Oh that's good to know. I wish a lot of this was more intuitive. Wasn't Manus yet another boss you can fight?
I heard Artorias was a tough fight from a friend once. Is this true?
Thanks for the help here. I don't mind advice when it comes to unlocking things. I just don't want serious help with fights or with big story details until I get them done.
Speaking of Dark Souls, I was a bit confused about how you managed to encounter Sif before taking on Sen's Fortress. I brought it up with a friend of mine, and he told me you need to somehow get to the ladder past the hydra. How on earth did you do manage that? Did you actually beat the thing that early on?
flamingkillamajig wrote: Oh that's good to know. I wish a lot of this was more intuitive. Wasn't Manus yet another boss you can fight?
I heard Artorias was a tough fight from a friend once. Is this true?
Thanks for the help here. I don't mind advice when it comes to unlocking things. I just don't want serious help with fights or with big story details until I get them done.
Speaking of Dark Souls, I was a bit confused about how you managed to encounter Sif before taking on Sen's Fortress. I brought it up with a friend of mine, and he told me you need to somehow get to the ladder past the hydra. How on earth did you do manage that? Did you actually beat the thing that early on?
Yes I killed the hydra early on as well as the cats near the garden. In my play of new game+ I opened the gate first with 20k souls and killed a bunch of the cat lady's minions for xp and then got the cat lady's covenant, killed big mushrooms for an ember and killed sif again in one try. It was hard this time though. I had to rely mostly on melee this time because I accidentally got bows and arrows rather than crossbow shots. I still haven't even touched havel at the bottom of the watchtower yet or gone the way through the hydra in garden.
Been playing stellaris again also, still disappointed in this thing as a game (rather than an accounting spreadsheet), despite Federations adding some much needed depth.
Sadly, its mostly surface.
The galactic forum is a mess. The AI is absurdly weighted to pass anything that increases their diplomatic weight, so by and large they auto-pass everything in the early to mid game, with maybe 1-3 abstentions or votes against.
The AI still doesn't build crap. I ended up making several empires protectorates because they didn't colonize for years and ended up super weak, and approached me on bended knee. Their starbases? Empty or just 2 anchorages. Worlds that weren't exclusively alloy foundries? Empty. As a bonus these were hive mind empires, so integration meant that I spent the next several years automatically purging their pops.... as a fanatic xenophile pacifist empire
Which, by the way, heavy trade focus and the 'market place of ideas' policy (which generates unity) breaks the game. I have so much trade coming into my capital that I have ~200 piracy in the systems adjacent to my capital, despite 5 overlapping starbases and extra protection from policies and whatnot. This generates pirate fleets adjacent to my homeworld from time to time, because I just can't build enough passive protection for the 1000+ trade that passes through my empire's heartland
Even now towards the end (where I'm soloing leviathans and the L-cluster, I had an empire apply for protectorate status. Still the same empty crap. Their capital had apparently grown to 75 and they had filled every slot, but upon integration they were at 52 pops and had 8 buildings in ruins. No idea what happened, but they had three total worlds and one new colony, and they had been one of the more successful empires (had a fallen xenophobe empire between them and the devouring swarm that ate the western quarter of the galaxy)
Said swarm is doing relatively well, but I rolled right over it. I did have to make two attempts at a fortress world- had to retreat the first time because they had 20+ armies from a giant pile of (hive army buildings), second attempt... I took it in a day, because they had stopped working in the buildings and had no armies any more.
Yeah, the galactic forum is a joke. It springs up, takes ages to vote on everything with no apparent rhyme or reason to what gets voted on at any given time, and as soon as a vote for something passes (overwhelmingly - I've yet to see a vote fail), the motion to repeal it immediately gets made.
A mid-game forum is perfectly half made up of motions to repeal everything they just implemented.
Press button to say "yes" or "no", wait [amount of years], repeat. There's no nuance, no depth, absolutely no fighting the AI on any popular motion (see: more or less every motion), and as far as I can tell absolutely no downside to simply not being part of it in an SP game, because it doesn't really do anything. Any bonuses the AI gets from various passed motions are voided or pissed away by its general ineptitude.
It's fun to play as a Devouring Swarm or Fanatic Purifiers, running roughshod over the entire galaxy as their galactic forum bickers over whether to repeal the motion they just passed, while the biggest galactic players seem to wink out one by one. It just highlights how absolutely pointless the entire thing is in the grand scheme of the game.
EDIT: It's also unstable as hell right now. Over about 30-35 hours of play under 2.6.1/2.6.2 I've crashed about 7 times. Up until then, I can't remember Stellaris ever crashing in ~440 hours of play. Most of it seems to be when I try and apply new genetic templates, but also had a weird one trying to select a fleet in motion while paused tonight that didn't correct itself until the 3rd time I restarted the save to find out what was going on.
For 20 bucks, I expected something? The Galactic Forum is basically useless, because anything less than 'good' factions get dumped on in massively one-sided votes. Calling in favors seems pointless because they flip flop back and forth and weighing of diplomatic votes is really weird. That there is no ability to veto things to not have them apply without having to physically leave is a huge oversight. The fact that the AI changes their stance multiple times during one vote just shows how arbitrary it is, there is seemingly no plan programmed behind votes.
This is basically the galactic UN with a magic enforcement mechanism. Why would a 'neutral' or 'evil' empire just agree with sanctions? How are you forced to leave or have sanctions enforced on you? Why not have trade offs of being allowed to stay in unless forced out, but not being affected by the positive votes, because the others cut you out of the deal until you sign up to other rules? Its all very artificial and they do feth all against anyone literally murdering the populations of members. Why even have votes on war crimes then?
The new starts are nice, but that is just a small piece of content. Kind of got soured, when owning 25% of the galaxy a small empire suddenly wiped out all my fleets. I was so confused, until I realized they literally suffered no damage, thanks invincible AI fleet bug, time to redo 30 min of admin.
Resident Evil 3 remake. Nemesis is even meaner than he was in the original. The game isn't a carbon copy of the old 3, either. Some of the sequences are done in a different order, certain characters get introduced earlier, some new areas are added, and some monsters get redesigned. The Hunter Gammas look nothing like they used to, but that's a good thing. Their new look brings them more in-line with their "killer frog" concept art. Voice acting is far superior, characterizations are better (Jill is very likeable and Carlos is way-less cringe-inducing). I'm excited to see how it all turns out.
Also included is RE: Resistance which is a survival-horror puzzle game where you play as survivors (each with a special skill) trying to escape a deathtrap scenario Umbrella is running them through. It's a bit like RE: Outbreak, except that you can choose to play as the Umbrella scientists trying to kill all the survivors before they escape the maze. Haven't done much with it, yet. But the tutorial made it seem interesting.
Played some starcraft 2 with hybrid. He's really good at least compared to me. I play protoss and he plays zerg. We had issues getting a game going due to region but it was good. We only lost one game and we sorta messed up. Honestly I think some of those matches he could've gone 2 vs just him and still probably won. It was absurd. He rushes pretty hard and does stuff that ive never heard of. Some of the sc2 play he does is absurdly aggressive but it works.
I'm also playing dark souls. I killed the hydra and the cats not long ago. Before that I killed have too. He goes down pretty fast vs parry combined with counter attack.
More Stardew Valley with a fellow mod, though sadly my save game got reverted to an earlier state, meaning that we were back to the end of Spring, whilst before we were at the end of Summer. Insert several expletives here and all that. Silver lining is that whilst we were playing catchup my fellow farmer did really, really well with both fishing and geode cracking.
Ok still going on with my run of new game+. I beat sens fortress, and did all of anor londo except Ornstein and smough. I also killed gwyndolin and entered his covenant beforehand. Didn't totally know killing him would force the fire keeper of anor londo to attack you. I killed her too without too much trouble. I kinda felt bad about it. I wonder if gwyndolin is gonna be pissed when I reach her. I wonder what happens with that.
I've also played a bit of starcraft 2. Faced 2 zerg players and beat them both as well as rushed them both somewhat. The first zerg player was harder to fight. If I didn't use sentry force fields to protect my guys it could've gone way bad and I might have lost. The guy was also developing mutalisk spire and hydralisks den but he only ever threw zergling and baneling at me. Mutalisks might have been mildly scary but hydralisks in numbers wouldve just sucked to fight with my unit composition. I destroyed all but one of his hatcheries far as I know so he was struggling on income. It was a pretty fun battle. I wonder if I can fight off zerg without rushing. Maybe if I expand almost as quickly as they often do.
Mechanicus. By the Emperor is it good. Playing on Iron man so a dead tech priest is a DEAD tech priest. I’m very impressed by this game and find myself just wanting to play it more. Though to be honest you probably need to do some re-balancing. The medic class for instance seems entirely useless. If you’re into stuff like XCOM or Battle brothers then you’ll love mechanicus. Feels like the team really understands 40k as well.
Nerak wrote: Though to be honest you probably need to do some re-balancing.
Playing it myself and i've reached the stage where combats are over in the first turn, with the tech priests marching up and down the length of the arena with heavy weapons and buckets of cog points.
Very different to the early game. The tech priests just get too strong.
Mechanicus used to be even easier and more broken when it was first released, it has received quite the overhaul and had several abilities nerfed or redesigned to make it more challenging.
If you want a challenge that can border on unfair, get the Heretek DLC. It gives you a new class of techpriest, some extra minions and new enemies, who are really, really nasty to fight against and can, if you're unprepared, easily wipe your entire party in one or two rounds of combat.
On my end, Resident Evil 3, which is a fun ride, but so damned short!
Also, picked up Factorio again with my brother, which we'll probably play until the we either launch that rocket or grow tired of replanning the base every time new tech is available. Though it was super satisfying to set up a functional nuclear reactor and have it go off without a hitch.
Still playing through the Final Fantasy VII Remake. Will put my thoughts on it so far in a spoiler in case anyone wants to go in totally blind. Warning, there will be some story spoilers for the original though I will try to avoid spoiling anything which is new:
Spoiler:
On the whole, I'm really enjoying it.
The combat system works well most of the time, though the AI of your party members is a bit lacking with them not really using their abilities to build their ATB gauge which results in quite a bit of micro managing to get the most out of them. I think the game could benefit from a version of the Gambit system from FF12, where you can set up some conditions for them to use their abilities without needing to switch to them constantly. The Assess materia is very important to identify the weaknesses and strategies of enemies in order to get them staggered so you can wail on them. Limit Breaks look great but be careful when using them as you can miss if fighting an enemy which can fly or dodge, for example. The summons look suitably epic for their ultimate attacks.
The main boss fights are all very epic, often involving multiple stages and varied strategies to beat them. So far I haven't dies against the bosses but some of them have been quite tricky. On the other hand, some of the monsters you end up fighting for side missions have wiped me multiple times. The first was a rabid shinra dog you're sent to kill. You only have Cloud and Tifa to fight it with, who are two fighters who need a bit of micromanaging to use well (Cloud to make use of his Punisher mode and Tifa to build her Chi levels to access more of her attacks), and the dog hits quite hard and can grab a character to deal periodic damage whilst said character is unable to act.
The materia system is the materia system. Materia levels quicker than it did in the original so you're going to be using the -ga spells by the end of the game. Not sure how they're going to provide a sense of progress on this front in the next episode considering your characters will be rocking max level materia from the beginning. The All materia is now called Magnify and is much rarer than in the original (only found one so far). Also, mastering materia does not give you a fresh version of that materia. Also, the value of materia is no longer tied to its level/AP so no more farming money by maxing out materia to sell.
The weapon upgrade system is pretty cool, allowing you to extend the use of weapons through more materia slots and attack power bonuses and build them in particular ways to help your particular playstyle. Each weapon has its own strengths and weaknesses (some are more geared to physical damage boosts, others magic damage boosts, some are balanced, some offer more defence etc.) which can be further built upon by what upgrades you get for it and resetting your weapons to spend the upgrade points a different way is easy and cheap (only costs 100gil no matter what).
Story-wise there are some good additions to flesh out some of the more undeveloped characters from the original. You learn quite a bit about Jessie's backstory and also some more about Biggs. Wedge still doesn't get that much development. The ShinRa bigwigs such as Heidegger get more screentime also. Not a big fan of the new SOLDIER character added, find him quite annoying. The Wall Market cross dressing plotline is majorly changed, introducing three new characters, an underground Colosseum and a rhythm based dance minigame. All suitably over the top and funny (also you can influence Tifa's outfit during this bit in a conversation in a previous chapter so multiple playthroughs to see all of them are required).
The voice acting performances are good. Barret's reaction following the destruction of Sector 7 stands out for me, particularly his absolute despair over the possible loss of Marlene. Don Corneo is an absolute slimeball, so he is perfect. Heidegger is great, Jessie and Biggs are great, Wedge is a bit annoying though.
Now some things I'm less happy with.
Music-wise most of the new versions of the tracks are great, though I have some exceptions. The new Turks theme I'm not too fond of. I prefer the cleaner guitar from the original. The choice of music for the section where you're fighting your way to the top of the plate is much more sombre, which changes the feel of the segment from an epic assault through the ShinRa forces into more of a desperate one. They also make worse one aspect of the plate falling that I think worked perfectly in the original. In the original, there's no music during the cinematic of the plate falling, until it goes to a shot of President ShinRa watching, in which you can hear the opera music he is listening to in the background. It just served to demonstrate the ruthlessness and evil of the President so well, in my opinion. In the new cutscene you have the same music throughout, an electric rocky thing. President Shinra casually watching thousands of people die whilst listening to some opera is gone, to the detriment of the scene.
Another issue is Sephiroth. I think there is too much of him in the Remake. I think he worked as a villain in the original by his limited screentime. It made every appearance feel important Also, his appearances serve to fill in blanks for the player that the original was intentionally leaving for this period of the game (such as the sick, number tattooed people). In the remake we have Sephiroth appearing when Cloud is interacting with these characters, revealing right away that they are connected to him. Another gripe I have with his appearances ties back to the music gripes from earlier and is that they use Those Chosen By The Planet, his main theme (not boss fight theme) from the original, in its whole orchestration. This will weaken one of the best uses of music in the original, in my opinion. In the original we first hear his theme in its entirety in the Nibelheim flashback as Cloud is telling the party about Sephiroth's destruction of the town and discovery of JENOVA. This is a great use of music as the player takes control of Cloud in the ShinRa mansion before descending into the basement. All through this, the only music is a tolling bell and something which sounds like the beating of a heart. Cloud finds Sephiroth in the basement and they have a discussion where Sephiroth reveals he is the descendant of an Ancient and the rightful owner of the Planet. He goes to leave and tells Cloud he is going to see his mother and at that line the choir kicks in and we hear the complete version of his theme for the first time. It's such a great use of music to build the tension of the scene that I am disappointed that we're not going to get the same effect this time round as we have already heard it before in the game.
Another thing I am a bit disappointed with is there not being some dialogue choices which were present in the original. There's no mistaking Aerith for the slum drunk when meeting her again in the church, no responding to Jessie as she is dying with "Is that so?" which got her to laugh in the original, no option to give the flower to Marlene or Tifa (there had better be the possibility of Barret Gold Saucer date when they get to that bit!), no option to tell Aerith that Tifa is your girlfriend. Not major plot point stuff but they were little choices that I enjoyed for their character-defining (such as acting cold with Jessie even as she was dying) or comedic possibilities.
Any way that's my thoughts so far. A bit rambly. I can overlook the flaws as they are quite minor and probably only stick out to die hard fans of the original (and a subset of them when it comes to stuff like "too much Sephiroth") so other people probably won't feel the same way.
Adrassil wrote: Arcanum's great. Gotta get back to playing that sometime soon, about halfway through but just stopped playing for some reason lol
Have you installed the unofficial patch? It makes the gaming experience much more tolerable with all the bugs.
Hmm, I thought I did....Buut it doesn't seem to be in the file, I got the Good 'ol Games version and in my experience, they tend to include patches like that, such as in their version of Vampire: The Masquerade; Bloodlines (Man Troika were awesome!) It seems to run okay, now, anyway it took me a while to make it work on Windows 10 lol
Warframe right now. Its really different to how I remember it when it first showed up, like in 2010 or something.
Its kind of overwhelming, actually, and a bunch of the new mechanics feel half-baked.
Hmm, I thought I did....Buut it doesn't seem to be in the file, I got the Good 'ol Games version and in my experience, they tend to include patches like that, such as in their version of Vampire: The Masquerade; Bloodlines (Man Troika were awesome!) It seems to run okay, now, anyway it took me a while to make it work on Windows 10 lol
Gog.com version of game is decent and nicely patched I would still suggest checking the unofficial patch out http://terra-arcanum.com/drog/ . It includes the highress patch and some cut content to game which are quite nice to have.
CthuluIsSpy wrote: Warframe right now. Its really different to how I remember it when it first showed up, like in 2010 or something.
Its kind of overwhelming, actually, and a bunch of the new mechanics feel half-baked.
Agreed it dose not feel like the same game somehow if it makes any sense
Finished off the Banner Saga Trilogy. Basically whatever decision you make it seems like people die so you always feel like you're making the wrong decision or perhaps I really am always making the wrong decision. Nonetheless, I got an ending I'm pretty happy with.
Now to finish off a Civ 5 game that's been going on forever. Tried a game as Venice. Figured their inability to make new cities would lead to less wars. Turns out it lead to the most wars ever!
Just finished the FF7 Remake. My feelings are... mixed. It was going quite well until the assault on Shinra HQ. Then stuff happens. Spoilered below. WARNING MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING.
Spoiler:
So, they removed the option to just charge in the front door of Shinra HQ, not a huge deal but yet another choice from the first game removed. You can still do the long stair climb, though. It just happens after you get inside.
Exploring Shinra HQ is less interesting. You see some main points (meeting mayor Domino, spying on the meeting etc.) but other than that there is a lot less opportunity to explore around and talk to people etc. No finding Cait Sith's megaphone in the locker room (you don't even visit the locker room) and so on. Just those nice little things are all gone.
Then you follow Hojo into his lab and here it diverges massively Red XIII joins you but is not controllable. You end up going through a massive lab with JENOVA in it, fighting a load of monsters. Sephiroth shows up, takes JENOVA. The party is never captured so you don't get to do the scene where you're talking to your party members through the cell walls, you don't get to follow the trail of bodies left by Sephiroth, just a trail of JENOVA blood. President Shinra is alive when you find him to get stabbed by Sephiroth later, Sephiroth stabs Barret only for Barret to get better thanks to a spooky ghost. JENOVA bossfight added in, Rufus zips around like crazy and can block your attacks with his shotgun unless you stun him with magic first or catch him in a very limited window while he reloads, which makes his bossfight a bit of a chore. Bossfight with Arsenal is pretty good, would've been nice if Red XIII was actually controllable though. Bike escape sequence is pretty good, miss the more techno synthy music from the original though and they removed the shot of the wheel of Cloud's motorcycle as it comes down the stairs which is a very odd choice when they were so reverential for the opening sequence.
Then it goes really off the rails. Sephiroth appears, opens a portal into another dimension/timeline where you kill a big heartless-from-KH looking thing which severs the bonds of destiny (meaning that the following games will not be following the original story), then you fight Sephiroth (and he has the stupid black wing from the other media where they took One Winged Angel way too seriously) and after that you get shown a load of bs like Zack surviving his last stand against the Shinra soldiers, Biggs being alive despite being left on the Sector 7 support tower as the plate crashed onto him, etc. They even hint at Aerith surviving.
Basically the game goes into bad fanfiction territory to remove the emotional beats of the original story, mess with the build up to fight Sephiroth by having him around way too much and having you literally fight him.
So, that all left quite a sour taste in my mouth as it is not Final Fantasy VII. The story of VII is simple but works. In one part of this episodic remake they have completely garbled it all up and made it a convoluted mess.
A Town Called Malus wrote: Just finished the FF7 Remake. My feelings are... mixed. It was going quite well until the assault on Shinra HQ. Then stuff happens.
I'm currently watching a play through, and I'm stuck on how completely unsympathetic the characters are. Cloud... is simply an jerk, and Avanlanche are pretty happy go-lucky terrorists that are far too casual about the deaths and ruin they've caused (yes, circumstances... but their intentions were to do exactly what they did, with maybe fewer deaths, but still a lot of problems for a lot of people, even in the slums- where people complain about lost jobs and having no money). They're pretty unapologetic about the blatant ruin they're bringing to people's lives, Cloud is utterly casual about openly murdering guards in the street on the walk back to the train, and almost murders a man in cold blood in the apartment next door (foiled only because his sword is too silly big for the door frame).
Tifa basically uses Cloud as muscle to shake people down for money.
Its such a relic of a different time and culture, where the terrorists and murderers are the 'heroes.' Even though the baddies turn out worse, its a long setup for people who don't even qualify as antiheroes, just villains in their own right.
Its doubly weird since the recorded announcements and lines of dialogue from people on the street are constantly reinforcing how devastating and ruinous the destruction of the reactor is. Its being hammered repeatedly during the walk to the train, on the train and through the slums, and the characters are so utterly indifferent, and occasionally openly bragging, that's its just weirdly dissonant.
Its doubly weird since the recorded announcements and lines of dialogue from people on the street are constantly reinforcing how devastating and ruinous the destruction of the reactor is. Its being hammered repeatedly during the walk to the train, on the train and through the slums, and the characters are so utterly indifferent, and occasionally openly bragging, that's its just weirdly dissonant.
It's justified within the game because of the damage to the planet that the reactors are doing. Bad things happen as a result of what Avalanche does. But the long-term results of allowing the mako reactors to run is even worse. When Avalanche says that it's saving the planet, it's not exaggerating. Early in the game, the player might see it as just a pro-forma environmental thing, with mako substituting for real-world oil. But later in the game (at least, in the original) it's made explicitly clear that Avalanche's claims are quite literally true.
Its doubly weird since the recorded announcements and lines of dialogue from people on the street are constantly reinforcing how devastating and ruinous the destruction of the reactor is. Its being hammered repeatedly during the walk to the train, on the train and through the slums, and the characters are so utterly indifferent, and occasionally openly bragging, that's its just weirdly dissonant.
It's justified within the game because of the damage to the planet that the reactors are doing. Bad things happen as a result of what Avalanche does. But the long-term results of allowing the mako reactors to run is even worse. When Avalanche says that it's saving the planet, it's not exaggerating. Early in the game, the player might see it as just a pro-forma environmental thing, with mako substituting for real-world oil. But later in the game (at least, in the original) it's made explicitly clear that Avalanche's claims are quite literally true.
Part of the problem is they don't seem particularly convinced of it, other than Barrett, who comes off as a loon (and a complete prick who seems more focused on treating Cloud like crap than his mission). Jessie even tries to excuse his behavior to Cloud, with a 'bear with it, for me' kind of comment, and a few shrugs and gestures when he really starts going on his crazy environmental rant about the planet screaming to him personally.
Wedge just seems to be along to make friends, and Biggs is just generally there..
Afterwards, Jessie is caught up in the technical problem of the magnitude of the explosion and how she miscalculated, and everyone else is just chatting about food runs, getting back and pretty much ignoring the consequences of their actions. So even though they are justified later on, they're presented as callous and self-absorbed.
And they're more than willing to lie to get help (Cloud is recruited with promises of money they don't have), and their normal routine is to shake down people to get money, with muscle to intimidate folks into paying (even for things that don't work). That and their refrain (both Tifa and Wedge say it) during the intro missions, 'If you don't look out for yourself, no one else will.' That isn't the line of people with a cause, that's the attitude of people looking out for themselves. They come across as petty criminals, that accidentally-on-purpose ruined a lot of lives and don't much care.
Its a weird introduction to people you're supposed to be rooting for.
Part of the problem is they don't seem particularly convinced of it, other than Barrett, who comes off as a loon (and a complete prick who seems more focused on treating Cloud like crap than his mission). Jessie even tries to excuse his behavior to Cloud, with a 'bear with it, for me' kind of comment, and a few shrugs and gestures when he really starts going on his crazy environmental rant about the planet screaming to him personally.
Wedge just seems to be along to make friends, and Biggs is just generally there..
Afterwards, Jessie is caught up in the technical problem of the magnitude of the explosion and how she miscalculated, and everyone else is just chatting about food runs, getting back and pretty much ignoring the consequences of their actions. So even though they are justified later on, they're presented as callous and self-absorbed.
And they're more than willing to lie to get help (Cloud is recruited with promises of money they don't have), and their normal routine is to shake down people to get money, with muscle to intimidate folks into paying (even for things that don't work). That and their refrain (both Tifa and Wedge say it) during the intro missions, 'If you don't look out for yourself, no one else will.' That isn't the line of people with a cause, that's the attitude of people looking out for themselves. They come across as petty criminals, that accidentally-on-purpose ruined a lot of lives and don't much care.
Its a weird introduction to people you're supposed to be rooting for.
That sounds a lot like internet arguments.
There are people on the internet I agree with the points and broad aims of, but damn me if that isn't their sole redeeming quality, due to being about as personally likeable as repeated strikes to various sensitive regions with an array of spiked weaponry, with as much regard for other people as said spiked weaponry has for said sensitive regions.
'They were right in the end' still leaves a hell of a sour taste, especially when everything seems to assume you like them to begin with, despite being given no reason to aside from that meta element of 'these are the good guys, got it?'.
Yeah, I think that's part of what gets me- 'They accidentally turned out to be right' just doesn't sit well.
Especially with the sheer grind of 20-30 minutes of relentless emotional bell-ringing of people affected by their actions as the player moves through the next two zones. The writers and voice actors made so much effort to make the trauma authentic that I want the team of protagonists arrested and shot as terrorists. Because they _are_ terrorists.
There's even a Shinra rep on the train who complains that in a civilized society, people have rational discussions about their differences, they don't just resort to violence. Barrett gets offended and intimidates them into shutting up.
My reaction was that the Shinra mouthpiece was absolutely correct and the protagonists have proven themselves in the wrong again. There's nothing to suggest they have actual evidence and tried to persuade people to their point of view. Barrett just 'knows' and somehow got a cult together, and they just kill people who work for the 'wrong' corporation, and if normal people have to get their lives ruined in the process, oh well.
And that's the first two hours... I'm not sure how long it takes to get to the 'oh, they're absolutely right' reveal, but that's a hard buy-in.
Voss wrote: Part of the problem is they don't seem particularly convinced of it, other than Barrett, who comes off as a loon (and a complete prick who seems more focused on treating Cloud like crap than his mission). Jessie even tries to excuse his behavior to Cloud, with a 'bear with it, for me' kind of comment, and a few shrugs and gestures when he really starts going on his crazy environmental rant about the planet screaming to him personally.
Wedge just seems to be along to make friends, and Biggs is just generally there..
Afterwards, Jessie is caught up in the technical problem of the magnitude of the explosion and how she miscalculated, and everyone else is just chatting about food runs, getting back and pretty much ignoring the consequences of their actions. So even though they are justified later on, they're presented as callous and self-absorbed.
And they're more than willing to lie to get help (Cloud is recruited with promises of money they don't have), and their normal routine is to shake down people to get money, with muscle to intimidate folks into paying (even for things that don't work). That and their refrain (both Tifa and Wedge say it) during the intro missions, 'If you don't look out for yourself, no one else will.' That isn't the line of people with a cause, that's the attitude of people looking out for themselves. They come across as petty criminals, that accidentally-on-purpose ruined a lot of lives and don't much care.
Its a weird introduction to people you're supposed to be rooting for.
It's been a long time since I played the original. But this sounds different than what I recall. I do remember that they had the money to pay Cloud. He was only joining them on a mission by mission basis, and was getting paid in advance. I remember that in the original, when he gets back to Tifa's Bar, he demands his payment for the next mission, and Barret gets annoyed because the only money he's got left is money that Barrett has saved for Marlene (Tifa talks him into paying Cloud anyway).
Jessie's response makes sense. Explosives are a rather precise thing, and she has no way of knowing that President Shinra made the explosion much bigger (incidentally, I don't remember him doing this in the original).
The "look out for yourself" theme is rather ironic, imo. In the original, (the original's been out for a long time, but regardless - spoiler for anyone who hasn't played it) -
Spoiler:
In the original, Tifa has an ulterior motive for bringing Cloud into Avalanche, though we don't find out about it until his memory issues get resolved. She had Barrett hire Cloud explicitly so that she could keep an eye on him, and make sure that he was okay.
Having that sort of line come from Tifa is odd. Barrett's attitude is from the original game, though, and makes sense. As someone committed to his cause, he holds Cloud (who's only helping out as a mercenary) in contempt.
I don't remember the mini-quests between the first and second reactor raids, though, so I can't comment on some of the other items that you bring up.
There's even a Shinra rep on the train who complains that in a civilized society, people have rational discussions about their differences, they don't just resort to violence. Barrett gets offended and intimidates them into shutting up.
Barrett's originally from outside the city, and has had some run-ins with Shinra in the past. The leadership of the company doesn't discuss differences, no matter what a low-level executive might think. Barrett's past from outside the city also might be why he knows about what mako energy really is, though I don't remember for certain. I suppose one complaint at this point might be that the writers should be doing a better job showing some of the problems with Shinra, instead of saving them for later. In the original, we get a little of that when Aeris is properly introduced (and Shinra goons attempt to kidnap her). There's also a hint of that when President Shinra makes the Reactor One explosion much bigger than it would have been. But (having only played the demo), it sounds as if the writers should have put more emphasis on this.
Eumerin wrote:It's been a long time since I played the original. But this sounds different than what I recall. I do remember that they had the money to pay Cloud. He was only joining them on a mission by mission basis, and was getting paid in advance. I remember that in the original, when he gets back to Tifa's Bar, he demands his payment for the next mission, and Barret gets annoyed because the only money he's got left is money that Barrett has saved for Marlene (Tifa talks him into paying Cloud anyway).
That isn't the case here. He asks about 5-6 times about his money and gets non-answers, then she leads him to his apartment and admits they've only got 500 of the 2000 she promised.
Jessie's response makes sense. Explosives are a rather precise thing, and she has no way of knowing that President Shinra made the explosion much bigger (incidentally, I don't remember him doing this in the original).
That isn't what I mean. Her response is focused on what she did wrong, and that's fine as far as it goes. But she made the bomb and (as far as she knows) caused a bigger explosion that killed an unknown number of innocent people, and made life more difficult for the people living around her in the slums (not just Shinra flunkies, many people in the slums talk about how they don't have jobs now, will have to find new places to live, etc).
For a young, idealistic 20-something, the idea that her reaction upon finding out that she killed a bunch of people is 'well, darn it, did I put in too much fantasy c4? Maybe if I doodle the thingamajig next time' and not 'Oh, no, what have I done! All this death!' is pretty immersion breaking.
Except for Barrett, none of them come across as hardened killers, so their indifference to a mass killing that (as far as they know) they're responsible for is bafflingly callous.
I suppose one complaint at this point might be that the writers should be doing a better job showing some of the problems with Shinra, instead of saving them for later....There's also a hint of that when President Shinra makes the Reactor One explosion much bigger than it would have been. But (having only played the demo), it sounds as if the writers should have put more emphasis on this.
I think that's definitely true. Even the insert with the evil boss and flunky doesn't help as much as it could, since it places personal responsibility on the evil boss, not the company. For all the viewer knows, he could have suborned something legit.
And it (ironically) doesn't help that the flyover introduction to Midgar is absolutely beautiful. The game is astonishingly pretty, which jars poorly with the idea that the place is dying.
--
Part of the problem is this is a common thing I find in a lot of JRPGs, but especially the FF series. The games often don't bother to explain things that the characters know but the players don't, so their motives are often a confusing mystery (especially if they suddenly vanish on a side-quest, or reverse course based on little more than a grunt and a nod.
It dodges CinemaSins exposition problems where people introduce their siblings by relationships and over-explain their pre-existing problems, but it often leads a bizarre setup of either inference or secondary material being required to get even the basic picture of what's going on, and why people are doing the crazy stuff they do.
Sadly, its mostly surface.
The galactic forum is a mess. The AI is absurdly weighted to pass anything that increases their diplomatic weight, so by and large they auto-pass everything in the early to mid game, with maybe 1-3 abstentions or votes against.
I've been playing and I have to second this.
The whole intergalactic diplomacy thing is a mess. Many of the options (outside the galactic market) don't seem to matter much and the enforcement of the 'laws' produces bizarre results. Case and point, the galaxy put sanctions on me because of my native interference policy. I had it set to allowed and apparently they demanded it be 'unrestricted.'
That's fething stupid. Why the hell am I going to be sanctioned for doing less than the law allows me to do? There's another one where the galaxy will sanction you for using less than 50% of your naval capacity... Just, wtf? Why? The logic behind many of these policies makes zero senses.
Barrett's originally from outside the city, and has had some run-ins with Shinra in the past. The leadership of the company doesn't discuss differences, no matter what a low-level executive might think. Barrett's past from outside the city also might be why he knows about what mako energy really is, though I don't remember for certain.
The remake I think does a great job with Barrett. It sets up that he has studied planetology (the FF7 universes science of studying the life cycles of planets such as the lifestream etc.) much earlier than the original did where we only find out about it really when we get to Cosmo Canyon (and he mentions that he was going to bring Biggs, Wedge and Jessie out there at some point in the future).
So it helps make him seem like a radical but intelligent revolutionary more than the original where he can come across as a bit of an idiot. He is still quite impulsive (confronting the Shinra workers on the train, proposing a full frontal assault through the main entrance of Shinra HQ etc.) but he does come across as really believing in his cause and that belief not being based in propaganda.
For a young, idealistic 20-something, the idea that her reaction upon finding out that she killed a bunch of people is 'well, darn it, did I put in too much fantasy c4? Maybe if I doodle the thingamajig next time' and not 'Oh, no, what have I done! All this death!' is pretty immersion breaking.
While I can understand that potentially being her reaction (basically throwing herself into her work for the next mission to avoid having to think about what she did), I do think that they didn't do a great job of it if that is what they were going for. Contrast it with the original where we see her in the hideout watching the news reports of the bombing, facing the destruction she caused and questioning whether that was all her bomb and that she must have miscalculated.
Lego Jurassic world.
Something about just the low key relaxing easiness of it speaks to me right now, the jokes are not belly laugh levels, but they put a smile on me.
LordofHats wrote: There's another one where the galaxy will sanction you for using less than 50% of your naval capacity... Just, wtf? Why? The logic behind many of these policies makes zero senses.
I can actually see the logic behind this one. You're not fulfilling your portion of the shared military burden. In the real world, NATO has always had an issue with this, as the bulk of the nations don't (and historically have never) paid the required two percent of GDP on their individual militaries, as required by the NATO charter.
LordofHats wrote: There's another one where the galaxy will sanction you for using less than 50% of your naval capacity... Just, wtf? Why? The logic behind many of these policies makes zero senses.
I can actually see the logic behind this one. You're not fulfilling your portion of the shared military burden. In the real world, NATO has always had an issue with this, as the bulk of the nations don't (and historically have never) paid the required two percent of GDP on their individual militaries, as required by the NATO charter.
Its not a shared military burden though. This is for the galactic forum (Space UN) not a particular federation you actually happen to be in (Space NATO).
The Blorg on the other side of the galaxy have no reason to know or care if you're keeping a large fleet around, just because you both vote on meaningless crap every X years
It also doesn't account for anything that actually matters. You can avoid this particular penalty by never raising your fleet cap and just building 10 starting corvettes with outdated tech that cost basically nothing or you can have 50 top-of-the-line battleships that can run over the rest of the galaxy, and the game counts them as fulfilling this policy despite the gross difference between having 10/20 cap and 400/800 cap.
If you've been raising your cap regularly, and upgrading your ships, the economic cost of meeting this policy can break your economy. Though given how long it takes to happen, by the time it comes up, you probably won't even notice.
I've been playing lots of Persona 5 Royal and Animal Crossing with my wife.
The single shared switch on a single TV is proving to be a problem. My wife keeps hogging the TV to play animal crossing and then the rest of us can't even watch netflix or something.
P5 Royal here as well - interesting the changes there vs the original (platinum'ed that recovering from major surgery a while back) and its such a good game especially if you have lots of time on your hands.
Also have the FFVII Remake - though I knew the story of the original I never really played it so don't have much to compare to. I will agree with some of the discussion above that the tone is a bit weird - like everyone in the crew is so happy and spirited (go team Avalanche!) while what you are doing seems pretty gritty (blowing stuff up killin lots of folks) but I am quite early in the game. I will say at times it is flat out beautiful to look at, especially the main crew character models. Side characters and some background stuff look a bit rushed - like what is it wit the super low quality background textures in some spots?
Back to xcom 2 I guess. I've gotten to the point in every legend ironman campaign if I get to the end game it gets very boring so I have to restart. Sometimes it's nice to have a bit of a breather but it's not as exciting anymore when every choice isn't as impactful.
So yeah I'm on a fairly new campaign right now. Things seem to be going decently.
Part of the problem is this is a common thing I find in a lot of JRPGs, but especially the FF series. The games often don't bother to explain things that the characters know but the players don't, so their motives are often a confusing mystery (especially if they suddenly vanish on a side-quest, or reverse course based on little more than a grunt and a nod.
It dodges CinemaSins exposition problems where people introduce their siblings by relationships and over-explain their pre-existing problems, but it often leads a bizarre setup of either inference or secondary material being required to get even the basic picture of what's going on, and why people are doing the crazy stuff they do.
A lot of that comes down to translation, particularly in the older games where they had to try and cram the script into essentially half the text space.
That said, I'm no expert on 7. I enjoyed it, but I've never clicked with Cloud as a protagonist enough to rank it among the best in the series. As I recall, the big justification from the player perspective for Avalanche was just the impression that Shinra wasn't realliy making life better for much of the city and the people below the plate were just as abused as the planet.
LordofHats wrote: There's another one where the galaxy will sanction you for using less than 50% of your naval capacity... Just, wtf? Why? The logic behind many of these policies makes zero senses.
I can actually see the logic behind this one. You're not fulfilling your portion of the shared military burden. In the real world, NATO has always had an issue with this, as the bulk of the nations don't (and historically have never) paid the required two percent of GDP on their individual militaries, as required by the NATO charter.
Its not a shared military burden though. This is for the galactic forum (Space UN) not a particular federation you actually happen to be in (Space NATO).
The Blorg on the other side of the galaxy have no reason to know or care if you're keeping a large fleet around, just because you both vote on meaningless crap every X years
It also doesn't account for anything that actually matters. You can avoid this particular penalty by never raising your fleet cap and just building 10 starting corvettes with outdated tech that cost basically nothing or you can have 50 top-of-the-line battleships that can run over the rest of the galaxy, and the game counts them as fulfilling this policy despite the gross difference between having 10/20 cap and 400/800 cap.
If you've been raising your cap regularly, and upgrading your ships, the economic cost of meeting this policy can break your economy. Though given how long it takes to happen, by the time it comes up, you probably won't even notice.
This is a really weird one. It seems to enforce building up a fleet for when the mid and late game crisis events happen. But then why? The AI shouldn't know these events are going to come up and threaten the galaxy, at that point nothing has happened to warrant a big fleet. The GC doesn't force anyone to band together against warmongers either, so this just feels like pointless busywork to handicap the player somewhat to help the AI out who do just build massive fleets at all times.
I'm trying to finish a Hard campaign with Tyrion, and decided to tackle Bretonnia on my road to retaking the Elven colonies they were built on. I gotta say that it's a pretty tiring experience when the AI has so many upkeep cheats and can create 5 full stacks as soon as I defeat them.
Also playing Wizard of Legend. That is the Avatar the last Airbender game that I always wanted to play. it's amazing!
Tiger9gamer wrote: I'm trying to finish a Hard campaign with Tyrion, and decided to tackle Bretonnia on my road to retaking the Elven colonies they were built on. I gotta say that it's a pretty tiring experience when the AI has so many upkeep cheats and can create 5 full stacks as soon as I defeat them.
Also playing Wizard of Legend. That is the Avatar the last Airbender game that I always wanted to play. it's amazing!
I hate cheating ai in strategy games. You'd think if elon musk says ai will be as smart as humans in 20 years that it wouldn't need so many cheats in every game it's in just to be a challenge. Of course maybe programmers are just lazy and elon musk meant only top of the line ai or elon is full of it.
flamingkillamajig wrote: I hate cheating ai in strategy games. You'd think if elon musk says ai will be as smart as humans in 20 years that it wouldn't need so many cheats in every game it's in just to be a challenge Of course maybe programmers are just lazy and elon musk meant only top of the line ai or elon is full of it.
All of the above!
But honestly, late game TW makes it really easy to rebuild spam multiple armies, AI or player.
Disciple of Fate wrote:
This is a really weird one. It seems to enforce building up a fleet for when the mid and late game crisis events happen. But then why? The AI shouldn't know these events are going to come up and threaten the galaxy, at that point nothing has happened to warrant a big fleet. The GC doesn't force anyone to band together against warmongers either, so this just feels like pointless busywork to handicap the player somewhat to help the AI out who do just build massive fleets at all times.
I would say it's more of a very poorly thought out mechanic intended to give diplomatic civilizations an means of exercising power outside of military force. And if you happen to be one of those civilizations, I imagine playing the forums with favors and diplomatic weight can be an interesting thing to do. I can kind of see it as a means of letting 'federation builder' play styles have a means of influencing the galaxy thematically.
For literally anyone else though, it's a worthless mechanic that imo is mostly in the way and impossible to manage. So many of the 'laws' that get passed result in bizarre things, like the AIs of the galaxy deciding everyone needs to pitch in to defend it from nothing, or everyone deciding that native interference must be unrestricted for everyone or sanctions. The AI's generally make random choices as far as I can tell. Hive Minds and Machine Races having no economic ability honestly have zero reason to join it. It's impossible to have enough weight to influence votes anyway and neither of those races really plays the diplomatic game.
flamingkillamajig wrote: I hate cheating ai in strategy games. You'd think if elon musk says ai will be as smart as humans in 20 years that it wouldn't need so many cheats in every game it's in just to be a challenge Of course maybe programmers are just lazy and elon musk meant only top of the line ai or elon is full of it.
All of the above!
But honestly, late game TW makes it really easy to rebuild spam multiple armies, AI or player.
I feel like i should play as empire again. I definitely haven't played them since they introduced the elector count system. The reason I want to play them though is that ungodly amazing gun-line esp. Helstorm rocket batteries.
My xcom 2 game seems to be going well. I still might need at least one more scientist and another engineer but I don't know if that is in the cards for me to get right now. I could potentially get another engineer or two but more scientists might speed things up. That said given all the Intel and data caches I have perhaps getting at least 2 more engineers will be easy.
Tiger9gamer wrote: I'm trying to finish a Hard campaign with Tyrion, and decided to tackle Bretonnia on my road to retaking the Elven colonies they were built on. I gotta say that it's a pretty tiring experience when the AI has so many upkeep cheats and can create 5 full stacks as soon as I defeat them.
Also playing Wizard of Legend. That is the Avatar the last Airbender game that I always wanted to play. it's amazing!
I hate cheating ai in strategy games. You'd think if elon musk says ai will be as smart as humans in 20 years that it wouldn't need so many cheats in every game it's in just to be a challenge. Of course maybe programmers are just lazy and elon musk meant only top of the line ai or elon is full of it.
<just siege them, get archers, sisters preferably and some arty. Shoot a tower or two, waste the general ammo of the enemy with a char then use the sisters to wipe the board clear.
>
Tiger9gamer wrote: I'm trying to finish a Hard campaign with Tyrion, and decided to tackle Bretonnia on my road to retaking the Elven colonies they were built on. I gotta say that it's a pretty tiring experience when the AI has so many upkeep cheats and can create 5 full stacks as soon as I defeat them.
Also playing Wizard of Legend. That is the Avatar the last Airbender game that I always wanted to play. it's amazing!
I hate cheating ai in strategy games. You'd think if elon musk says ai will be as smart as humans in 20 years that it wouldn't need so many cheats in every game it's in just to be a challenge. Of course maybe programmers are just lazy and elon musk meant only top of the line ai or elon is full of it.
the issue is that it is easier to give the AI cheats then to programm a functional diffrenting AI. Which is also one of the reasons why the AI allways struggled in sieges, regardless if attacker or defender and why WHTW sieges have been so much simplified.
Playing Sonic Mania, now. Feel like a kid again during my utter obsession towards Sonic the Hedgehog. But by the Emperor, the game can get frustrating as frig! (Taking a bit of a break writing my 40k fanfic Secret War: Upon Blood Sands so doing some gaming)
So... Anyone diving into the Steam release of Fallout 76 and/or the release of Wastelanders, actual NPCs and junk, or have they burned too many bridges with this one?
I might've if it had come with single player and offline, but...
Voss wrote: So... Anyone diving into the Steam release of Fallout 76 and/or the release of Wastelanders, actual NPCs and junk, or have they burned too many bridges with this one?
I might've if it had come with single player and offline, but...
i played with the thought off it, beeing a massive fallout fan, however seeing as Bethesda never managed to get the feel of postapocalypse as the OG team did, aka rebuilding and rubble not just rubble and mud hutts, aswell as the rather Lackluster story of bethesda fallouts, i decided against it.
Beeing sad that is all without the P2W mechanics artificial problemsolvers in the game or paid mods.
Voss wrote: So... Anyone diving into the Steam release of Fallout 76 and/or the release of Wastelanders, actual NPCs and junk, or have they burned too many bridges with this one?
I might've if it had come with single player and offline, but...
I might, when it is reduced down to a fiver. Any more than that and it is too much of a risk. With how much of a mess it has been, with pretty much every update they made breaking it in some new way (they didn't even adequately test their premium subscription benefits, for goodness sake), it'll need to be very cheap and probably abandoned by them in terms of updates or patches before I try it out
Voss wrote: So... Anyone diving into the Steam release of Fallout 76 and/or the release of Wastelanders, actual NPCs and junk, or have they burned too many bridges with this one?
I might've if it had come with single player and offline, but...
That games just seems like a dumpster fire, and with how many problems they had with hackers, pay 2 win and bad pr i’m Worried my computer will get nuked if I try to install it.
Tiger9gamer wrote: I'm trying to finish a Hard campaign with Tyrion, and decided to tackle Bretonnia on my road to retaking the Elven colonies they were built on. I gotta say that it's a pretty tiring experience when the AI has so many upkeep cheats and can create 5 full stacks as soon as I defeat them.
Also playing Wizard of Legend. That is the Avatar the last Airbender game that I always wanted to play. it's amazing!
I hate cheating ai in strategy games. You'd think if elon musk says ai will be as smart as humans in 20 years that it wouldn't need so many cheats in every game it's in just to be a challenge. Of course maybe programmers are just lazy and elon musk meant only top of the line ai or elon is full of it.
I mean, I turned off cheating for AI and I’m still getting swarmed by armies. Right now got teclis in a confederation and the twins are scouring the crusader states while my northern armies start to eye up marienburg...
And apparently the empire got wiped out by a different faction of the empire, which is weird in my opinion. I kinda miss the proving grounds, just because it was less crazy than vanilla is right now.
Playing more xcom 2. The avatar progress timer started the 24 days countdown but I was ready to assault the alien black site anyway. It should be fun. I think I have either 4 or 5 engineers now. I'm about to get another. Sadly the dark event that doubles Intel costs became active recently and that's a rather nasty one. I have full magnetic weapons right now so things should work out alright for the next mission. Unfortunately the chosen usually pops up on this mission so it might be a bit of a slog as well as hurt soldiers and maybe even some dead ones.
Voss wrote: So... Anyone diving into the Steam release of Fallout 76 and/or the release of Wastelanders, actual NPCs and junk, or have they burned too many bridges with this one?
I might've if it had come with single player and offline, but...
That games just seems like a dumpster fire, and with how many problems they had with hackers, pay 2 win and bad pr i’m Worried my computer will get nuked if I try to install it.
I'm surprised that after that boatload of continuous bad PR they still have the balls to charge 40 Euros ($44) for just the base game...
Voss wrote: So... Anyone diving into the Steam release of Fallout 76 and/or the release of Wastelanders, actual NPCs and junk, or have they burned too many bridges with this one?
I might've if it had come with single player and offline, but...
That games just seems like a dumpster fire, and with how many problems they had with hackers, pay 2 win and bad pr i’m Worried my computer will get nuked if I try to install it.
I'm surprised that after that boatload of continuous bad PR they still have the balls to charge 40 Euros ($44) for just the base game...
they what now?
A game that was given away for free if you bought controllers over the Rubicon, erm meant rhine Ok now that is balsy indeed.
Voss wrote: So... Anyone diving into the Steam release of Fallout 76 and/or the release of Wastelanders, actual NPCs and junk, or have they burned too many bridges with this one?
I might've if it had come with single player and offline, but...
That games just seems like a dumpster fire, and with how many problems they had with hackers, pay 2 win and bad pr i’m Worried my computer will get nuked if I try to install it.
I'm surprised that after that boatload of continuous bad PR they still have the balls to charge 40 Euros ($44) for just the base game...
Kind of? The new 'expansion' (and the survival play modes that have been added over time) is included in that price so it's not really the base game. It's not really weird for expansion material to have an additional cost, they just set it up in a slightly weird way. Existing players don't have to pay anything and still get the Wastelanders stuff.
Tiger9gamer wrote: I'm trying to finish a Hard campaign with Tyrion, and decided to tackle Bretonnia on my road to retaking the Elven colonies they were built on. I gotta say that it's a pretty tiring experience when the AI has so many upkeep cheats and can create 5 full stacks as soon as I defeat them.
Depending on what the stacks are full of it may be half working as intended. Bretonnia doesn't use Supply Chains, so they can recruit as many Lords as they want whenever they want, but the AI seems loath to give them any units the Lord doesn't have the right Vows to use without huge upkeep. Both against Bretonnia and when unifying it, there always seemed to be 5-6 stacks of peasant-tier units with a scattering of Knights Errant and the odd Knights of the Realm or Questing Knights.
Honestly my main issue fighting Bretonnia was taking out the LLs, especially when accompanied by Paladins. AI Alberic and Louen can basically solo early-/mid-game armies by themselves, and having them reappear every 2-3 turns was annoying as hell. The armies I can deal with in a handful of minutes--if not auto-resolve them. The LLs take several times as long to take out, and Louen especially is ridiculous between AI's flawless micro, unbreakable, perfect vigour, phys. resistance and ward saves, and hefty regen. He almost won a siege by himself; I only managed to take him out because my Mortis Engine somehow survived being on 0hp for a full minute as I tried to drag it out of a combat it had got sucked into, and spent the rest of the battle trying to keep my Grave Guard topped up as they tried to pin Louen down and let the Mortis Engine damage aura do most of the work.
It was not a fun battle, and both his army and Alberic's - including Alberic, who micro'd his way perfectly out of combat to run away on a sliver of health - finally routed after I had them trapped in the gatehouse with the Mortis Engine and a few choice spells. Louen kept on fighting for about double the time it took me to defeat the armies.
Playing Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, a game that has a plot and mechanics that are unapologeticly similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, including a slightly simplified job/class system. Its really good and I'm kinda annoyed I didn't know it was out there.
ChargerIIC wrote: Playing Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, a game that has a plot and mechanics that are unapologeticly similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, including a slightly simplified job/class system. Its really good and I'm kinda annoyed I didn't know it was out there.
Huh. I passed on that one due to the character designs and the tiny Disgaea-style battle maps. It didn't mesh well with their claims of a 'mature story,' which is a term I'm always suspicious of when dev studios use it in their steam page description- it usually either means 'softcore porn' or 'we've vastly overrated our own writing capabilities.'
ChargerIIC wrote: Playing Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, a game that has a plot and mechanics that are unapologeticly similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, including a slightly simplified job/class system. Its really good and I'm kinda annoyed I didn't know it was out there.
Huh. I passed on that one due to the character designs and the tiny Disgaea-style battle maps. It didn't mesh well with their claims of a 'mature story,' which is a term I'm always suspicious of when dev studios use it in their steam page description- it usually either means 'softcore porn' or 'we've vastly overrated our own writing capabilities.'
It's deep, but I'm not certain what they mean by mature. Unless they are referring to people getting stabbed in the street... It's really a love letter to FFT, so I'd base your decision on whether or not you like that game.
I am enjoying the FF7 remake for the most part, but I am also finding that certain things are making me annoyed or downright angry. I just did the boss fight at the top of the pillar and it was a complete mess. Two targets sprinting all over the place, stun locking whatever character I was trying to use, doing team moves that messed with my camera, resetting their stagger gauges whenever they felt like it...
I don't know if the battle system is too complex or if they just designed every fight to be down in a really specific way, and screw anyone who tried to figure out their own approach." Sorry, you were supposed to equip wind materia for this enemy - the fight is basically impossible without it". Another problem I find is that things really snowball against you if you take too much damage - no health, can't safely attack, can't charge ATB, can't heal. If you get put on the back foot after too much damage then it can make it impossible to recover.
The graphics are amazing and I feel like they did a great job of staying true to the story of the original whilst still managing to expand things. I hope I can deal with the stress it is causing me so that I can see it through to the end.
Still on Sonic Mania and I think I'm finally grasping the truth.
I suck at Sonic games.
On the last level which despite how much I suck I think it's one of the worst 2D Sonic zones I've ever played Titanic Monarch, ugh getting crushed to death too many times lol
Things are going really well in both xcom 2 and my co op40k gladius game with a friend. My guard and his tau went from falling back to his cities to overturning the enemy nids and guard force (2vs2vs2vs2). His cities are all fairly safe now and my frontier remains more untamed. I guess we will find out what we have to fight tomorrow but he should be safe regardless.
Xcom 2 I went from losing a ton of soldiers with almost 2 whole squad wipes to basically salvaging everything and having a bunch of vets and predator armor to go with all my magnetic weapons. Everything seems to be going fairly well even considering the 2 enemy chosen are getting pretty close to an avenger assault. My supplies seem to be good. I'm about to get some more engineers. I have 2 lab areas because research was slow. The only issue I really have is I need more resources but I'm getting that soon and maybe a little more Intel or engineers. That said my forces should probably go on the assault some more soon while the momentum is keeping up and before the enemies get a boost again with new forces.
Put world of tanks back on, no need for me to go in to detail as we all know the game. Ah il play it for a while until I get bored then probably not put it back on for a few months.
Voss wrote: So... Anyone diving into the Steam release of Fallout 76 and/or the release of Wastelanders, actual NPCs and junk, or have they burned too many bridges with this one?
I might've if it had come with single player and offline, but...
Me! I did! *raises hand*
And... it's... not bad, actually. I skipped 76 at launch, because it was a clear dumpster fire. But I watched a bunch of Youtube videos from people who had no difficulty calling original 76 a burning tire around the neck of Tod Howard, and most of them were very positive. Most of the reviewers were surprised at how much work has clearly been done on the game. It is no longer in beta test, that's for sure.
So: They added NPCs and new quests. This is very good, and it makes the game feel more like Fallout 4 did. They instituted the "silent protagonist dialogue response" tree from 3 and New Vegas. They also instituted attribute-dependent skill checks in the dialogue (like Strength 4+ intimidate the NPC/ Charisma 4+ charm them into helping, etc) similar to the skill % checks from 3 and NV. You can choose multiple ways to deal with a quest (at least for the new ones... the old ones are still 'do what the NPC says the way the NPC says it'. But with the introductory quest, you can choose to ally with the NPCs in the tavern hub, and wipe out a raider faction for them (or you can bribe or intimidate the raiders in to leaving them alone). Or, you can side with the raiders and wipe out the tavern NPCs for a unique item and evil giggles.
Basically, we have basic NPC interactions again, so the game is closer to what modern audiences think of when they think of a Bethesda Fallout game.
Also, many of the bugs have been patched. I played for 12 hours across 2 days and ran into exactly 2 bugs: a tree that hadn't been placed in the worldspace correctly, and a horde of enemies failed to spawn during a base-defense quest . That's all.
There's still some stuff that's a pain, but that's due to decisions about gameplay itself. My biggest gameplay complaint is that uncooked food in your personal inventory (not your stash) will spoil after a while. That was a nasty surprise, I must say. Gear is level-dependent, which is rage-inducing, too. But at least you can craft higher-level versions of any weapon you have the plans for as you level up.
TL;DR If you liked Fallout 3 and 4 and you just got $1200 from the US government and don't need it to pay your bills, you could do worse than 76 Wastelanders. Watch a few Youtube videos (not by Bethesda shills like Oxhorn; find people who crapped all over 76 at launch) and judge for yourself.
Oh, have a high-end machine. My PC is decent and runs Fallout 4 with no problem, but it struggles with 76 at times. There were some lighting overhauls that make my graphics card weep silicon tears.
So i played and beat Lego Jurassic world seeing if they lived up to what i remember as a kid and yeah, kinda
Back when i was a kid, going back to every level, getting every treasure, and getting everything made alot of sense,,, becuae i didnt have money to buy a game. but i just got a few more games on sale.
I wanted to go back and get all the amber and gold bricks and gak but then i asked myself......why? to give yourself other ways to play an OK game? to i dropped it, not bad, but meh.,
Picked up the Uncharted series..........1 really sucks.......enemies die in 15 hits, you die in 2......
2 however is shaping up to be fun.
I played a game of gladius as orks this time and won and honestly it was a lot more fun than as guard. As orks you start fighting out of the gate and ore and influence goes through the roof but esp. Influence. If I play them again I might see how mechanized orks are but honestly I think infantry play with orks is mostly where it's at. I've seen enough in previous games to know which units are strong (Mega nobs and warbosses) and which aren't so hot (battlewagons and some vehicles). Getting resources by fighting, mixing painboys and heroes into the mix and I found myself drowning in resources. Line of sight obscuring terrain, woods and other things really weakens ranged armies too and orks don't really suffer against them. That said if the enemy built serious air units I probably would've been screwed. They never really got to that point though.
flamingkillamajig wrote: I played a game of gladius as orks this time and won and honestly it was a lot more fun than as guard. As orks you start fighting out of the gate and ore and influence goes through the roof but esp. Influence. If I play them again I might see how mechanized orks are but honestly I think infantry play with orks is mostly where it's at. I've seen enough in previous games to know which units are strong (Mega nobs and warbosses) and which aren't so hot (battlewagons and some vehicles). Getting resources by fighting, mixing painboys and heroes into the mix and I found myself drowning in resources. Line of sight obscuring terrain, woods and other things really weakens ranged armies too and orks don't really suffer against them. That said if the enemy built serious air units I probably would've been screwed. They never really got to that point though.
I have Gladius but can't play it right now, because the frame rate chugs when I select units, it's frustrating.
After having put 61 hours into Bannerlord, I'm going to take a break. It's a great game, but it's mostly just a sandbox right now, and I don't want to burn out on it before it's finished. I'll come back to it every couple months to see how it evolves.
I've started a new game of Pillars of Eternity. While I beat it some time back, I never did play the DLC or get started on PoE2, so I figured I would start a brand new game to experience all of it again before going into PoE2.
Fallout 76. Extremely disappointed with it when it first game out and just deleted it. The new Wastlelanders expansion intrigued me. Only played a bit so far but it is feeling a somewhat like a real Fallout game.
I think I'm finally getting the hang of gladius with imperial guard. You absolutely must go research heavy and get vehicles fast. When my leman Russ finally reached the area I wanted them to go they had the heavy bolters sponsors research done as well. Just for good measure I made a bunch of psyker coven units just to see how well the do. They're not bad, they build really fast and they can seriously nerf enemy units or make them take more damage. They have the potential to really hurt movement and melee damage and they can use a flamethrower that avoids cranged damage reduction which is a huge boon. Also recharge of pychic abilies happens next turn.
We will see how the rest of the battlefield is going but things seem to be going well. The ork ai that I first met fought me and it went back and forth until the lemans finally advanced the line. Orks are already down a city and their next will probably go down tomorrow. There should still be 2 tau and a necron bot as well as another ork player.
flamingkillamajig wrote: I think I'm finally getting the hang of gladius with imperial guard. You absolutely must go research heavy and get vehicles fast. When my leman Russ finally reached the area I wanted them to go they had the heavy bolters sponsors research done as well. Just for good measure I made a bunch of psyker coven units just to see how well the do. They're not bad, they build really fast and they can seriously nerf enemy units or make them take more damage. They have the potential to really hurt movement and melee damage and they can use a flamethrower that avoids cranged damage reduction which is a huge boon. Also recharge of pychic abilies happens next turn.
We will see how the rest of the battlefield is going but things seem to be going well. The ork ai that I first met fought me and it went back and forth until the lemans finally advanced the line. Orks are already down a city and their next will probably go down tomorrow. There should still be 2 tau and a necron bot as well as another ork player.
I think I did 2 or 3 games learning Gladius before I beat it with guard on very hard dfifficulty (with the creatures spawn rate put down a little). I very much enjoyed the notion of a 4x civ 40k game but much less so the idea that they took random creatures from the setting that had no buisness being on the planet. Catachan devils, enslavers, kroot hounds and ambulls all on this random world? Also for some reason there's random admech robots roaming around. Anyway after beating it I tried all the other factions but quickly got bored. I found guards to be exceptionally powerfull since they can pump out so many units. Just spam infantry and get a bunch of the anti missile crew early. Soy farm to keep the infantry going. Then it's just a matter of winning on tech. you will outrange pretty much anything with the missile guys. I found tech priest extremly usefull since you can heal your sentinels early and russes late for so much essentially trading for free. Mostly I found the biggest problem to be when a unit takes one step to far and there's 2 enslavers, 3 catachan devils and 2 kroot hounds in the fog of war all waiting for you to take that one step without enough backup. Also build lots of cities.
Finally got around to Witcher 3. After seeing the show I decided to give the game another go. Last time I tried I got bored of how much random loot there was that gave like 1% difference in stats. It felt exceptionally silly to me that a master monster hunter would need to level up to use a +2% sword. Anyway I find it thet most fun when I'm out hunting monsters. Not so much the parts running around in city getting into business I don't really care about. To each his own I guess.
I wouldn’t necessarily say this is anything I’ve been playing, but I’m trying to get a better clue of energy consumption while gaming. Any idea what kind of power consumption Nintendo devices use? Only thing I could find was that a Switch uses 11 watts (presumably per hour) on Breath of the Wild while a DS Lite has a 2.3 “battery power rating”. Seems a bit too small considering a switch runs the same kinds of games you would find on an XBox, which uses around 100 watts (correct me if I’m wrong).
So like......after finishing Uncharted 1 I thought "This was the PS3s flagship series? This gakky combat, overly long no story game was what people remember about the PS? Jesus..."
Then i played 2, and my god was that fun, the combat was better, the characters where better, the graphics/design was better.
THERE WAS A VILLAIN!!!!!!!
Cant wait for the next 2.
There is also Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. It is a bit short and there is no Drake but it is still the same idea.
Anyway, I have been persevering with Final Fantasy VII Remake and, long after finishing the game, I finally felt like I got the hang of the janky combat system. I resented how much stuff I had to do in hard mode for trophies but I was able to slog through and most of it wasn't too awful. The final two simulator battles are really long and tough but I eventually persevered to get platinum.
I do wonder how the next game is going to handle equipment, materia and so on. It's an RPG so they can't just remove all my awesome stuff, but if they let me import my current arsenal then I'm just going to annihilate everything. If they don't take away my Götterdämmerung then some Kalm Fangs are going to be in for a nasty shock...
There is also Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. It is a bit short and there is no Drake but it is still the same idea.
Anyway, I have been persevering with Final Fantasy VII Remake and, long after finishing the game, I finally felt like I got the hang of the janky combat system. I resented how much stuff I had to do in hard mode for trophies but I was able to slog through and most of it wasn't too awful. The final two simulator battles are really long and tough but I eventually persevered to get platinum.
I do wonder how the next game is going to handle equipment, materia and so on. It's an RPG so they can't just remove all my awesome stuff, but if they let me import my current arsenal then I'm just going to annihilate everything. If they don't take away my Götterdämmerung then some Kalm Fangs are going to be in for a nasty shock...
There's a long list of RPG sequels that do exactly that, and take away everything. Though I admit I don't know how JRPGs tend to do it when they do a real sequel rather than an unrelated title. (Final Fantasy X-2 maybe qualifies?)
Its generally better than unreasonably buffed mundane enemies.
There is also Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. It is a bit short and there is no Drake but it is still the same idea.
Anyway, I have been persevering with Final Fantasy VII Remake and, long after finishing the game, I finally felt like I got the hang of the janky combat system. I resented how much stuff I had to do in hard mode for trophies but I was able to slog through and most of it wasn't too awful. The final two simulator battles are really long and tough but I eventually persevered to get platinum.
I do wonder how the next game is going to handle equipment, materia and so on. It's an RPG so they can't just remove all my awesome stuff, but if they let me import my current arsenal then I'm just going to annihilate everything. If they don't take away my Götterdämmerung then some Kalm Fangs are going to be in for a nasty shock...
There's a long list of RPG sequels that do exactly that, and take away everything. Though I admit I don't know how JRPGs tend to do it when they do a real sequel rather than an unrelated title. (Final Fantasy X-2 maybe qualifies?)
Its generally better than unreasonably buffed mundane enemies.
Yeah, they really backed themselves into a corner in this regard.
After what the final boss was, having any of the normal enemies roaming around outside Midgar be a legitimate threat will feel a bit silly. Hell, even the Midgar Zolom would be difficult to justify needing to be avoided like in the first game without it suddenly having an incredible increase in power (especially as the player now will have access to elemental materia which can protect them from its most powerful attack, the fire damage enemy skill Beta).
Furthermore, a lot of your materia is maxed out by the end of the game, so you'll have no sense of progression on that front either unless they take all your powerful spells away and revert it all back to level one. And if they don't do that then any new materia you find will be at level one, so you'll need to grind to bring it up to the same level as your previously collected materia. So if they don't scale the enemies up to you then you will obliterate them but newly found materia might actually be useful. If they do scale it up then you will still be challenged but any new materia you find will be useless until you grind to level it up.
So they either reset the player and enemies, which will make your time spent doing any of the extra bonus stuff in the first game feel pointless and take away the cool stuff that players unlocked previously, requiring a grind to get back. And justifying that storywise is going to be a very hard sell since the game is taking place after the party has successfully escaped from their enemies so it isn't like you can play the "you got captured and wake up with all your stuff missing" card.
Or they leave the player as is and make the enemies strength completely wack in terms of the world building (any enemy that is populating the area around Midgar that poses a threat to the party as they are at the end of the first game would make it suicide for normal people to travel to Midgar except by air and Kalm and the Chocobo farm would be overrun and destroyed by such powerful monsters), along with the player not getting any sense of progression in terms of their materia growth over the game for a hefty chunk of core spells (healing, ice/fire/lightning/wind magic etc.).
I don't really see a way for them to do it that won't piss off the players or make the world feel very strange.
There is also a limit to how much they can boost the power level of enemies. If they keep ramping up the battle speed and the damage output of monsters then by the third or fourth game it will be unplayable
I am now onto Life Is Strange 2. Ugh, I hate it. I enjoyed the original game but I can't stand Daniel in this one. He is a whiny, needy brat who is constantly screwing up. I don't really like the protagonist either since the whole plot involves him abandoning his old life for reasons that make no sense. Now it wants me to play a side game about some other kid I don't care about.
I've started playing a bit of diablo 3 for the first time in quite a while. Trying to balance out just having a bit of fun smashing things against the fact that i still think the plot is... incredibly stupid, at best.
