Playing Telltale’s The Expanse. Big fan of the show which seems to be over so have to get my fix here. Follows Telltale’s formula but is more ambitious with actual open world style exploration. Guess they people complained their games where to short so they added more content…
KamikazeCanuck wrote: Playing Telltale’s The Expanse. Big fan of the show which seems to be over so have to get my fix here. Follows Telltale’s formula but is more ambitious with actual open world style exploration. Guess they people complained their games where to short so they added more content…
Are all the episodes out? I saw this when it was first announced, but didn't want to play it drip feed, as I might lose my interest like their Walking Dead games.
Eumerin wrote: In a non-historical game of HOI4, Germany has an even chance of overthrowing Hitler at the start of the game. If France is computer-controlled, it will always find an excuse to attack Germany, thereby triggering WW2 in Western Europe. This happens even when Hitler is overthrown and Germany goes Democratic, which is what makes it so blatant. But since your friend was controlling France, that didn't happen.
Sorry i tried to answer you a day or two ago but my computer's internet turned off.
I've never seen non-historical games where hitler didn't lose the german civil war it's just usually they're fascist replacements like how the soviet union got replaced by another communist nation in a civil war (i think it was Trotsky leading them but i can't remember). Oddly Italy seems to be stable and doesn't have civil wars but Spain LOVES to multi-faction civil war. Oddly Republican Spain came out on top this time which i think is communist i guess. Anyway fascist italy went down without much trouble but we think the Communist will be the biggest issue and we'll end up having to fight them. Wouldn't think i'd ever say this but it'll be nice to have Democratic Germany on our side versus the communists in a WW2 scenario. After we beat Italy i will say we carved it up quite well. Being the UK i took the islands and maybe some of africa because that felt most appropriate as the UK. However i didn't check where all the factories and resources were so maybe i should have checked more.
flamingkillamajig wrote: [Oddly Italy seems to be stable and doesn't have civil wars but Spain LOVES to multi-faction civil war. Oddly Republican Spain came out on top this time which i think is communist i guess.
The Republicans always split into two factions. If Franco doesn't unite the Nationalists, then they fragment as well. And barring something odd happening, a split between the two Nationalist factions when the computer is controlling them will all but guarantee that the Republicans come out on top.
And yes, they're Communists.
've never seen non-historical games where hitler didn't lose the german civil war
He always does. The question mark is on whether the civil war happens in the first place. Anyway, the important part is that regardless of how Germany turns out as a result of the civil war, computer-controlled French are pretty much guaranteed to go to war with them, even if the French have to start the war.
And last but not least, Paradox has released a short new video for the game. It's not particularly fancy. It shows a jungle (probably in the Pacific, since there's a warship visible in the background), and displays the date January 25. So it appears that something new will be announced Thursday next week.
decided to play through some games i have that i had set aside for whatever reason and never completed.
Just finished up World of Final Fantasy, which was fun given i enjoy monster collection games, but felt rather short for a final fantasy title
Not sure yet what i'll start on next
KamikazeCanuck wrote: Playing Telltale’s The Expanse. Big fan of the show which seems to be over so have to get my fix here. Follows Telltale’s formula but is more ambitious with actual open world style exploration. Guess they people complained their games where to short so they added more content…
Are all the episodes out? I saw this when it was first announced, but didn't want to play it drip feed, as I might lose my interest like their Walking Dead games.
Yes, whole thing is out plus a bonus episode. Just finished episode 4.
KamikazeCanuck wrote: Playing Telltale’s The Expanse. Big fan of the show which seems to be over so have to get my fix here. Follows Telltale’s formula but is more ambitious with actual open world style exploration. Guess they people complained their games where to short so they added more content…
Are all the episodes out? I saw this when it was first announced, but didn't want to play it drip feed, as I might lose my interest like their Walking Dead games.
Yes, whole thing is out plus a bonus episode. Just finished episode 4.
Nice! Gonna buy it when I get back from Arizona.
Camina Drummer was such a great character. Its wild that they knocked it out of the park with her, considering that she was apparently a composite character made to simplify/consolidate multiple characters from the books. I could be wrong though, as I never partook in the novel series.
I took Palworld out for a spin. It's fun so far. Domesticating not-Pokemon to put them to work for you. You can have them work on your base. Or you can have them fight for you, just as in all the other monster-collecting games. And all of this with a survival game setup with crafting recipes that you unlock as you level up.
I have a couple of minor complaints -
1.). There's no combat tutorial. Finding the hotkey for the Roll (dodge) command required me to be aware that it existed, and go digging for it in the Survival Guide.
2.). The Tutorial walks you through the basics, and then sends you off to clear your first tower. I finished everything else in the tutorial, got a few extra levels for good measure, and figured the tower would be fairly easy. Boy, was I wrong. Even with the new weapons I'd unlocked, and assistance from the Pals I brought with me, I don't think I could have done enough damage fast enough within the time allowed for the fight. Not that the fight lasted for the full time, mind you.
KamikazeCanuck wrote: Playing Telltale’s The Expanse. Big fan of the show which seems to be over so have to get my fix here. Follows Telltale’s formula but is more ambitious with actual open world style exploration. Guess they people complained their games where to short so they added more content…
Are all the episodes out? I saw this when it was first announced, but didn't want to play it drip feed, as I might lose my interest like their Walking Dead games.
Yes, whole thing is out plus a bonus episode. Just finished episode 4.
Nice! Gonna buy it when I get back from Arizona.
Camina Drummer was such a great character. Its wild that they knocked it out of the park with her, considering that she was apparently a composite character made to simplify/consolidate multiple characters from the books. I could be wrong though, as I never partook in the novel series.
Yes, she was one of my favorites on the show too.
This Telltale series is a bit different than the others. Without giving too much away the open world/salvaging sections aren't just a time filler, they're important. The 1st 3 episodes have 8 pieces of salvage each. I recommend finding them all especially in episode 2.
Still plodding through Monster Hunter rise. Over 600 hours in, I've enjoyed playing this series of games for nearly 20 years now going back to when it was first brought over from Japan. It's not for everyone but I find it relaxing when I need a break from painting my way through my metal/resin/plastic mountain.
I've been switching back and forth between Rogue Trader and Palworld. I'm not necessarily doing much with either, but I am making steady progress in both. I've cleared the first tower in Palworld. Since that was the end of the tutorial, and since the tutorial is currently the only overworld objective set right now, that means that the game more or less devolves down to "run around and do stuff". My Pal box (i.e. base controls and "not-Pokemon" management) gives me a handful of items to build in my base in order to level up the box (lets me have more Pals working in my base, and recently gave me the option to build a second base), but the blueprints are obtained by the usual survival game mechanism - level up and spend points on them. Otherwise, it's simply a matter of wandering around, seeing what there is to see, and catching new pals.
Gotta catch *THIS COMMENT HAS BEEN BLOCKED BY NINTENDO'S LEGAL DEPARTMENT!*
Um... right.
I've also been exploring in a dungeon. Got lost for a bit, which was annoying, The map only shows outdoors, and not indoors. And it was a pretty good-sized cave system.
As for Rogue Trader -
I'm still in Chapter 2. Left off with a fight when I got sufficiently irritated with my first attempt at it. The problem isn't the enemies, per se. The problem is that - as is often the case - the game puts you in a starting area that's largely devoid of cover, against enemies that move before much of your party. And as a result, I generally have at least half my party at half health before they even get a chance to take their first action. Meanwhile, right behind me and just off of the combat map, there's plenty of cover.
But I'm not allowed to deploy (or move) there.
It's artificial difficulty, and it ruins the gameplay experience.
Aside from stuff like that, the game is still fun - mostly.
Apple fox wrote: Tekken 8 is out and I been working on that, getting ready for stream games!
I am very happy.
Burned through the Story Mode on this over the weekend. It's very short but completely devoid of the padded nonsense that made 7 and especially 6's such a slog. Pretty perfect experience and an extremely hype third act. Easily the most fun I've had with the franchise since 5.
Apple fox wrote: Tekken 8 is out and I been working on that, getting ready for stream games!
I am very happy.
Burned through the Story Mode on this over the weekend. It's very short but completely devoid of the padded nonsense that made 7 and especially 6's such a slog. Pretty perfect experience and an extremely hype third act. Easily the most fun I've had with the franchise since 5.
That’s awesome, I mostly been playing against friends. Story when I can sit and just play through it at my own pace.
Did do some arcade as well in bed at 3am.
I did also buy granblue Fantasy relink, But Tekken keeps eating playtime up.
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Kanluwen wrote: Started Suicide Squad. Pretty entertaining so far.
I keep being told it’s not good, but I am seeing people having fun. And it looks like fun.
Not Online!!! wrote: Probably because game mechanicaly Fun but storywise not really.
Nope, story's fine.
It genuinely is fun. Lots of quippery among the squad, fun mechanics, etc
Hard to say it's great when on launch they literally closed the servers within the day because they had a 100% completion bug for people signing in (lol for the people who pre-ordered to gain early access) which let everyone gain access to all the cutscenes and terrible writing they had in the game.
So that's a big nope from me, at the very least in the story department. Completely ruins Batman from the Arkhamverse and has incredibly cringy writing, I mean even the in-universe lore is shoddily written, this is how you think Lex Luthor, one of the biggest narcissists and capitalists in the DC universe, thinks about the Amazons? I'm pretty sure in the actual comics he says the Amazons are cowards for having sealed themselves off in the world:
- there's no creative way in which the SS actually kills the heroes, each boss fight is literally "just shoot with guns till they die lol"
- they break the lore with how green lantern rings work upon the death of the bearer, you don't just get to wear it after the person dies, the ring chooses who wields it next
- Batman's boss fight, which should be the equivalent of feeling hunted by Kraven the Hunter on steroids since he's lost the "no-kill" rule, gets reduced to being a big hallucinogenic monster bat in the middle that you shoot at since Rocksteady was too lazy to do anything but lean into the Scarecrow fear toxin gimmick rather than mix that with a cat-and-mouse boss fight where he should be more like a human version of the Alien from Alien Isolation
- Literal plot armour from how the SS dead to rights should have died several times (especially against people like Flash/Superman) but get deus ex machin'ad to survive increasingly unbelievable encounters because reasons, at least give some marmy excuse like the Guardians of the Multiverse got from Strange Supreme protecting them, here it's just literal idiot ball throwing, the SS squad don't even try to use the element of surprise, they just walk up the front door each time. Hell, given that they're bringing in multiverse garbage into this game, they may as well just make it in-game that they keep bringing in variants/clones of the SS squad for every one that gets sent to die.
How you go from the superb Arkham series to....this live service drek? I guess looking at how many OG developers and staff that left Rocksteady, I feel like this is a Bioware type situation where it's Rocksteady just in name.
No offense Kan, but you don't exactly have a great history with adamantly defending looter shooters that don't end well. Remember how much you shilled for Anthem? How did that end up working out?
Mod edit - non-wargaming image removed, off-site hosting is fine, but do not attach non-wargaming images as attachments to your posts
I'm seeing wildly divergent opinions on the game. A number of people seem to like it. And a number of people seem to hate it, to the point where - as noted - there appear to be a very large number of people looking for a refund on it. That indicates that it's not just review bombing. These are people who have purchased the game, played it for a short bit, and come to the conclusion, "This game sucks!"
Personally, given what I've heard, I'm not inclined to play it.
WoW Classic SoD is pretty fun if you're not one of the 3-5 specs that sucks right now. Phase 2 looks even better.
Got Codevein and DLC for a whopping $9 after trying the demo. It's not Fromsoftware quality, but it's decent enough Soulslike combat.
Some of the artstyle is definitely questionable however...
Eumerin wrote: I'm seeing wildly divergent opinions on the game. A number of people seem to like it. And a number of people seem to hate it, to the point where - as noted - there appear to be a very large number of people looking for a refund on it. That indicates that it's not just review bombing. These are people who have purchased the game, played it for a short bit, and come to the conclusion, "This game sucks!"
Personally, given what I've heard, I'm not inclined to play it.
I think there's just a demographic that's young enough to have social groups that are primarily built around hopping to a new grind and the free time to make that enjoyable regardless of what game they're playing. If you bonded over grinding Call of Duty but tired of the competitive nature of it, games like this provide a cooperative outlet of a similar social experience. Outside of that context though, there's a lot of people that bounce off the grind pretty hard. Top that off with a game that goes out of its way to be set in the Arkhamverse for little reason (particularly when Gotham Knights would have been a better followup) that kind of goes out of its way to trash the Arkhamverse and its a big recipe for disappointment.
My impression is its fine for what it is, but what it is doesn't really appeal to me. FWIW, Palworld feels largely the same.
Not just goes out of its way to trash the Arkhamverse, but DC and the JL in particular. Case in point, I saw someone mention the relationship that Flash has with the Rogues. The Rogues are super-villains, and dedicated Flash enemies, but there's generally a reasonably respectful attitude on both sides. The Rogues avoid killing people, and both sides are on about as good of terms as you could expect a superhero and supervillains to be.
Meanwhile, in the game...
Spoiler:
Boomerang is one of the members of the Rogues, and is in this game. After Flash is killed, Boomerang unzips his fly and prepares to urinate on Flash's dead body. Deadshot starts to stop him, but there are arguments online over whether Boomerang still does it.
But Deadshot's actions are beside the point. The important thing is that such an action is completely out of character for an interaction between Flash and one of the Rogues.
In short, there are some strong hints that the writers involved in this game don't have the slightest idea about the characters they're writing. Given that this is a game with characters that have long-established backgrounds and characterizations, this is a slap in the face to DC fans.
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My impression is its fine for what it is, but what it is doesn't really appeal to me. FWIW, Palworld feels largely the same.
Palworld is memed as a Pokemon parody. But it's really more of a management game that uses the survival framework, and mons as what you're managing. I like it. But it's not really what the memes are claiming it is.
Eumerin wrote: Not just goes out of its way to trash the Arkhamverse, but DC and the JL in particular. Case in point, I saw someone mention the relationship that Flash has with the Rogues. The Rogues are super-villains, and dedicated Flash enemies, but there's generally a reasonably respectful attitude on both sides. The Rogues avoid killing people, and both sides are on about as good of terms as you could expect a superhero and supervillains to be.
Meanwhile, in the game...
Spoiler:
Boomerang is one of the members of the Rogues, and is in this game. After Flash is killed, Boomerang unzips his fly and prepares to urinate on Flash's dead body. Deadshot starts to stop him, but there are arguments online over whether Boomerang still does it.
But Deadshot's actions are beside the point. The important thing is that such an action is completely out of character for an interaction between Flash and one of the Rogues.
In short, there are some strong hints that the writers involved in this game don't have the slightest idea about the characters they're writing. Given that this is a game with characters that have long-established backgrounds and characterizations, this is a slap in the face to DC fans.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
My impression is its fine for what it is, but what it is doesn't really appeal to me. FWIW, Palworld feels largely the same.
Palworld is memed as a Pokemon parody. But it's really more of a management game that uses the survival framework, and mons as what you're managing. I like it. But it's not really what the memes are claiming it is.
That's largely what I mean. I've not really enjoyed any of the survival crafters. They just haven't clicked with me, so Palworld doesn't really have any appeal.
As for the Rogues, I will say, of them Captain Boomerang tends to be the one who most resents their code of honor and is mostly kept in line by Cold. Most of the others have a lot of respect for the Flash, but Harkness tends to revel in cruelty. It's definitely not above him, though there's a point in these things where the nastiness stops being fun and I can certainly see it reaching that point for most people.
I played Grim Dawn with a friend while i was away in Arizona (he played a soldier while i played an assassin type character). I also played Terra Invicta which was a mix between boring and slow and then fun during space battles (mostly against the aliens).
The Millennia demo (its a Paradox published take on the Civ formula).
The demo is far too short (60 turns), but a lot of the economic and policy concepts are interesting. Ages zoom by too quickly (even compared to Civ). It has potential.
Lots of little UI problems. Combat is entirely passive, but has a pop-up window anyway. Menus are kind of buried behind small icons, and the city management screen is split in two in an obnoxious way.
Voss wrote: The Millennia demo (its a Paradox published take on the Civ formula).
The demo is far too short (60 turns), but a lot of the economic and policy concepts are interesting. Ages zoom by too quickly (even compared to Civ). It has potential.
Lots of little UI problems. Combat is entirely passive, but has a pop-up window anyway. Menus are kind of buried behind small icons, and the city management screen is split in two in an obnoxious way.
I tried it out. I quit after 45 turns, as I was bored.
Too many "mana bars" to track with only the vaguest idea of how I was earning for them, and what I might want to spend points on. It simultaneously felt like "not enough to do" and "work for the sake of giving you extra things to keep track of", if that makes any sense.
Playing Helldivers 2 as well, really great especially when you have a full squad of friends. Early missions can be pretty easy but it's a good way to ease poeple who are new in and it gets REALLY hectic once you get to the higher difficulties. Not super crazy about how you unlock the main weapons so far, but overall I like that the baseline stratagems you have access to are decent to start with.
Voss wrote: The Millennia demo (its a Paradox published take on the Civ formula).
The demo is far too short (60 turns), but a lot of the economic and policy concepts are interesting. Ages zoom by too quickly (even compared to Civ). It has potential.
Lots of little UI problems. Combat is entirely passive, but has a pop-up window anyway. Menus are kind of buried behind small icons, and the city management screen is split in two in an obnoxious way.
I tried it out. I quit after 45 turns, as I was bored.
Too many "mana bars" to track with only the vaguest idea of how I was earning for them, and what I might want to spend points on. It simultaneously felt like "not enough to do" and "work for the sake of giving you extra things to keep track of", if that makes any sense.
It does. The mana bars are... weird, and the demo doesn't explain enough and is too short to really grasp what some of them do in one go.
Warfare XP is also weird, because its a self-perpetuating engine, where you do war to do more war and get more units to do more war. (and there are plenty of barbarians to farm, and camps give random bonus mana for other pools, so its doubly worth doing)
Diplomacy and Art get more esoteric (art, bizarrely, makes for free population) and diplomacy can be eh, but tied with the Olympic culture becomes another grossly unbalanced engine that fuels other XP pools (and knowledge and wealth), but runs off culture.
I'm also a little uncertain of the AI. It does special actions (which shouldn't need to be said, but modern game design is what it is) and can be aggro rather than passive, but the attitude towards the player seems...random. I'm used to Civ, where there is at least the illusion of why other empires don't like you (too close, mismatching values, agendas, etc). This just seems to set some to hostile and others to cooperative at random. And at least in the demo, maps are big enough and resources plenty enough that competition doesn't actually make any sense. I can't expand enough to really 'conflict' with other empires and everything else is focused inward so... why bother?
- Dragons Quest XI: Not really tried the Dragons Quest series much before but this ones pretty good. Feels like a pretty traditional JRPG but it does the fundamentals really well.
- Ace Attorney Trilogy: Played the trilogy years ago on my DS but enough time has passed and my memory of the story has faded enough that I can enjoy a playthrough again.
- Wildermyth: Really like the way you can develop your characters stories with this one but after playing a few campaigns it feels like its starting to run out of legs. The general gameplay loop is a bit repetitive and I'm starting to see more repeats of the random story events.
- Super Mario Wonder: Not played a lot of this so far but I've really enjoyed what I have played.
- Dragons Quest XI: Not really tried the Dragons Quest series much before but this ones pretty good. Feels like a pretty traditional JRPG but it does the fundamentals really well.
I kept meaning to get this...
I played both VII (which was unforgiving) and VIII, which was much less so. Both were a lot of fun, and the series is extremely popular in Japan. Unlike Final Fantasy, the basic gameplay elements have stayed pretty close to the original over the years. The graphics have been updated, and there have been some tweaks here and there. But the game is a classic JRPG.
And the character designs based on work by Akira Toriyska make the series very distinctive.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I've also been playing Helldivers 2 with friends.
One mission in particular...
I joined late, and my entry drop pod landed directly on top of one of my buddies. Oops!
I got killed *twice* in that same mission due to big and nasty friendly fire hitting me in the back. Oops!
There were more friendly fire deaths in that mission. Oops!
Ultimately, we achieved the mission objective, but wiped before the extraction could be called in.
^^;;
The game is a blast to play. My only real concern right now is if the "Democracy" schtick (which is satirical; it's pretty clear that the government is very authoritarian, possibly some form of hard socialist) starts to get annoying.
Played some TWW2 co-op with a friend. I played as beastmen and i suggested he play a chaos faction since beastmen tend to not play well with non-chaos factions. He chose warriors of chaos and before he could get 2 armies he got wiped by a couple dwarf armies and our game ended.
It's frustrating since i had 2 beastmen armies and a "settlement" blood ground area that i fairly recently got the blue runes from.
Maybe warriors of chaos are just really hard to play and/or suck. Horde armies tend to have a worse time of it and it was maybe his 2nd game with warriors of chaos since ever. They really need some boosts i think.
BrookM wrote: More Helldivers 2, we're doing fine so far, minimal friendly fire incidents, one unfortunate 380mm orbital barrage aside, whoops.
Yeah, that 380mm orbital barrage is crazy huge for how much ground it covers compared to other offensive stratagems. If you think you've run enough, run another 10 meters more.
Guys who have played Helldivers, how is the game coping now with cross-play and bugs? (Not the arachnid sort).
We play Helldivers 1 a fair bit but generally couch co-op, as this has cross-play are thinking of jumping to it.
I'm playing a game called Void Bastards at the moment, a rogue-like FPS which is great fun. I hadn't appreciated it was a British-produced game (although the title should have been a clue), but great sense of humour in it
Helldivers 2 has the odd random crash (had two myself in a week time), nothing consistent on our end, well aside from the one where we check out cosmetics and the game crashes, but every time afterwards it runs just fine. Sometimes you get stuck in first person mode for a bit, but it corrects itself somehow. Other than that, it runs smoothly, though we're all playing on PC. If someone drops out due to a crash, you can quickly re-join the game if it's still ongoing, no hassle at all.
If you've enjoyed the first one, you'll most certainly like this one, it's the perfect upgrade from top down to third person, keeping the good gak in there (disgusting jingoism, frantic combat, support being called in via prompts and friendly fire is always on) while cranking everything up to eleven in a good way. Great visuals, guns have a delicious bark and bite to them, a good variety of missions and best of all, both bots and bugs play completely differently. First time fighting bots after nothing but bugs was a wakeup call, those fethers shoot back!
I haven't run into any bugs yet in Helldivers 2. However, it appears that the devs were caught badly off-guard by the number of players, and there are issues related to joining other groups. I haven't been able to join any groups that don't include friends. On the other hand, when I start a solo drop, other players have been able to join me. So I haven't been stuck running solo.
The devs have started taking steps to resolve this. But afaik, they still need to boost the capacity further.
They did not expect the game to be as successful as they did, which is a good kind of problem to have. It was annoying that I couldn't hop on and play for the entirety of last Sunday, but when they got back online things have been stable since. They have made mention of making up for the downtime somehow to everybody, so looking forward to that.
I like that it runs good both solo and in coop, yesterday I spent a good chunk of my evening playing a medium level bot run solo, to hunt down those Sentinels for the daily challenge, there is something really cool about hunting enemy patrols by yourself, pulling out the autocannon for a quick kill-shot only to displace.
I cannot remember if weapon teams were also a thing in the first game, but damn it, it is so cool to have someone reload your heavy weapon for you. Taking down a charger with an autocannon while a buddy is pushing home fresh a fresh stripper is just cool. Same with the recoilless rifle, him shouting "UP!" and me shouting "Backblast clear" every time, just so cool.
It's stuff like this that puts the game right up there with Deep Rock Galactic for me, in the best way possible. Both games thrive on making things look, sound and feel cool first and foremost, backed up by a solid gameplay loop and a good variety of things to do. Getting to prep a SAM site is just cool, but that it can also shoot down enemy drop ships before they can bring in reinforcements? That's awesome.
New weekly challenge has opened up by the way, after pushing back the bugs, the bots are on the offensive now and we need to shore up a system under attack!
More Helldivers last night. Still can't join other groups of random strangers. And on the occasions when I manage to join the lobby, I get stuck at the drop pod scene, which rund until I finally give up and quit the game. Very frustrating.
I also had to try a couple of times last night to join my friends, which is something that I haven't had trouble with before.
I'm hoping they fix the heavy armour bug right now for Helldivers 2, as right now there's very little incentive to not go for light armour unless there's a very specific build you're going for because the stamina regen more than makes up for the less armour you have, especially when higher difficulties you often get one-shot if you're unlucky anyways.
I'd like them to fix the reward awarding, too, for some reason my last two missions bugged out when it came to the end screen, everyone was level 0, I couldn't access the score screen and I am not getting missions rewards, given both times we explored a fair bit, it's a lot lost.
I am wondering if it's related to that order that wants you to get evac'd from 3 successful missions, as the bug started on mission 3 following getting that order.
I finally managed to update Cyberpunk 2077 and had a game last night. I've been trying for weeks to update Rogue Trader, but it gets stuck at 99% and either restarts the download. It was...frustrating to say the least, I tried a lot of things. Including uninstalling GOG and reinstalling GOG until I decided to uninstall Rogue Trader which gave me enough room to download the latest Cyberpunk 2077 updates. It was also to test if the failure to download was GOG or Rogue Trader itself and it turned out the download worked. So, it was Rogue Trader, or a combination of them but more Rogue Trader by the Emperor what a buggy game! But now when driving around Night City the screen goes black for some reason and boy, it's annoying. Oh, well.
Pacific Drive. It's pretty fun to drive an old station wagon around, collecting resources, then trying to drive like mad to the exit to escape the storm and get back to base to upgrade the wagon. I've only scratched the surface of the story, though, but the atmosphere is great.
Started up Alan Wake 2 yesterday. Absolutely my kind of nonsense, but the difficulty options are a little wacky. Normal enemies are bullet sponges that can kill in a single hit but one setting lower and they die instantly if they even bother to attack you. The combat just isn't good enough to be worth a challenge, but the total pushover enemies remove some of the tension so.... IDK.
Luckily the combat is definitely not the draw and the game is absolutely fantastic. The reality warping effects and tension are top notch and the story is my favorite kind of creeping horror. There's remarkably little combat in it really, which probably makes what their is stand out even more as being not quite balanced appropriately.
I've been playing a fair amount of dwarf fortress still, and today had a little patch (with some nice quality of life sorting and searching options and some bug fixes), but the last line of the patch got me.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has recently been re-released on PS5.
Still clunky as heck, and I really need to get used to console controls.
I'm still in early game so that little beep and not being able to see a dot on my radar is still scary...
Been playing more Terra Invicta and Mech Warrior 5.
On the Terra Invicta side of things it's going really slow now and is at Dec. 2064. Most of the nations are mine but it's frustrating getting the last few on Earth under my heel even if like 85% of the population is under the Resistance ideology (basically resist aliens but not exterminate em as that's humanity first's approach).
It's frustrating because i can't get the best drive in the game to save my life and i've rolled it randomly like 4-5 times or so. I may need more research buildings just to get the final tier ship drive tech re-rolls faster.
Aside from that at this point it's mostly running around till i can find a speedier way to get to Uranus (yes i know haha *sigh*). I've been making smaller ships that have faster cruise speed so that i can make the travel time faster if i can't get the best drive in the game. It might not be enough which is why i'm waiting for the best drive but i also have to deal with ship and space control cap and that's a bit frustrating too.
Anyway it's been going very slowly. I can see why almost nobody streams this game on Twitch.
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On the Mechwarrior 5 side of things i'm having more fun with a friend killing enemy mechs. Gotta say that short ranged missile catapult with jump jets is broken. When i tried it in one mission i killed over half of all enemies myself and sped up ahead of everybody without losing any components. It's a bit of a shame that game seems to favor short ranged weapons and assault heavy builds (at least in my opinion.
The Hearts of Iron IV devs respond to reactions regarding the latest country pack (South American nations) -
And before I post that... On a related note, the first three expansions are going to be rolled into the core game on March 21 (which also just happens to be the last date of the Steam Spring Sale). Until then, they're all available for free.
Greetings all!
Today marks the first dev diary since the release of Trial of Allegiance, so we’ll be looking back over how things went, and community reactions in a little more detail than usual. While I would have loved to have some data on player choices and interactions for today’s diary, our analytics engine is busy chugging away. So, we’ll have to hold off on that until the machine spirit has assessed the incoming preponderance of data.
The Elephant in the Room
It would be hard to talk about Trial of Allegiance without first mentioning that we’re acutely aware of its critical reception from fans. I see no reason not to be transparent about this, and I’m going to use today as an opportunity to talk about what it means to us and how we analyze reactions, so let’s dive into some of the facts:
Everything’s on Fire!
Well, actually no. Trial of Allegiance has thus far been one of our most stable releases in terms of bugs and player-encountered issues. This doesn’t mean there aren’t bugs: stuff always creeps through, but as you may have noticed by now, we’ve had an Open Beta running with a patch scheduled sometime today. The patch notes will be attached to the end of this document. Furthermore, we have another patch scheduled in next week to give us a chance to tackle more complex problems.
Due to the low incidence of bugs in the ToA content, we’re spending a bit more time on general improvements and things folks thought were lacking.
Developer’s Perspective: bugs are defects in the game - errors or unforeseen complexities that render part of the experience to not work as intended. We don’t usually consider design choices or outdated content as bugs unless they cause the first statement to apply, since that evaluation is often subjective.
Circles Within Circles
Our steam review score has taken a fairly heavy beating on Trial of Allegiance. Reviews on DLCs are notoriously hard to draw accurate conclusions from, as very few people tend to leave reviews compared to the overall number of people who bought a DLC. Trial of Allegiance is particularly notable in that regard, as there are fewer reviews overall than we would normally expect. It’s absolutely possible to theorize behind why that is, but that’s all those are: theories.
That said, we read every review. Aaand it’s quite hard, tbh. Being a venerable ancient of the internet, I could wax lyrical on toxicity, vocabulary, and dissociation, but at the end of the day folks leave reviews for a reason. The language they use isn’t as important as the sentiment they’re trying to convey, even if they don’t always know the right way to do it.
What we try and do, therefore, is to try and don our armor of not-taking-things-too-personally, and group negative reviews by common themes or sentiments.
For Trial of Allegiance, we assessed clear ‘meta’ groupings in order of weight*:
- Unhappiness about recent regional currency price adjustments
- Unhappiness about the price of the country pack
> Compared to other HOI4 expansions
> Other
- Bought it but wanted something different
> New mechanics, or
> A european expansion
- Unhappy with the quality of the release
> In relation to specific issues;
> In relation to mods
> Unclear/Unintelligible
> Unclear/Horrendously offensive
*This requires looking at global reviews, not english-language only: something we take quite seriously.
The exact weighting here changes a lot over time, but suffice it to say that the top grouping is significantly larger than any of the others, and the last grouping vice-versa.
But hang on, does this just mean we’re being review bombed by angry interest groups? Well, that would be a nice easy assumption that allows us to feel good about ourselves and go home for supper, but there doesn’t seem to be any coordinated effort here as far as we can tell.
What we can tell here is that folks commonly leave reviews for reasons unrelated to the content we made.
So, these are the findings. So far these have been presented as factual; now we take a more subjective view when it comes to reacting to the findings.
Regional Pricing
This one was a little unexpected, though in hindsight it shouldn’t have been. Looking back over recent reviews on our other expansions, we see the same trend.
In January, Paradox made efforts to normalize pricing across various currency regions according to (as I understand it) a standard used by Valve. On HoI, we saw this as a mostly administrative change, and did not, I think, ask enough questions about the effect it might have on our game-specific player base.
I am not promising any sweeping changes here for decisions that have already been made. What I can say however, is that we will not be treating any such changes as administrative in the future. We will be doing our due diligence.
General Pricing
A little more expected, perhaps, but with some important notes. The vast majority of complaints about the pricing of this release came with comparisons or in relation to other content we’ve released in the past.
While it overlaps a little with the next topic, I feel like we could have been clearer with setting expectations about what a country pack is.
Another observation here is that our fanbase seems to attach more importance to the consistency of expansion prices than we tend to. A lot of the comparisons we’re seeing are equating content made many years ago or at a completely different scale to Trial of Allegiance.
Wanted Something Different
This one is a real games-industry conundrum. Traditionally, if you bring something to market that doesn’t interest everyone, the uninterested ones avoid it. Not so here.
We knew that South America would be a divisive topic amongst the fanbase: some regard it as important, some do not. We calculated that this would make these nations perfect for a country-pack release instead of a full expansion - including mechanics in something that may not interest everyone would put fans in the situation of having to purchase something they did not want.
And, uh, that backfired a bit. Overwhelmingly, reviews in this category are asking where the mechanics are, or why we’re spending time on X instead of Y.
Importantly though, we aren’t gonna change that. We will sometimes have country pack releases, and they will not contain mechanics, though perhaps there’s some middle ground for tech/unit/other additions.
This all comes with a big but: the Juno team who created Trial of Allegiance are not the only ones working on HOI4. Creating content packs is not being done at the expense of other things. We aren’t ready to talk about exactly what’s coming yet, but simply put: we have mechanical expansions in the pipeline that are being built at this very moment. Outside of expansions, we have even more big stuff happening for HoI in the very near future. Watch this space.
Developer’s Perspective: Even if we wanted to, making two mechanical expansions in parallel would be a significant technical challenge. Some games are built to make that easy! HOI is not one of them.
Quality of Release
This is predominantly the stuff that reviews traditionally focus on. Was the delivered content good/bad/neutral? The nature of this is subjective, and these reviews are really where we can act by making changes and fixes. Below you’ll find the patch notes for our first iteration on ToA’s content, with more to come soon.
Overall what we’re seeing from players that stated an active interest in South America is a trending positive reaction. There are some key problems raised to us from highly invested players, which we’ll do our best to address. There are learnings we want to take into future country packs or war effort patches, including but not limited to:
Shared branches were one of those things that made sense at the time, but in hindsight we should have avoided.
People love map changes more than I thought humanly possible.
Power creep is real, and we should have a balance reckoning sooner rather than later
We can do more with units, tech, and non-focus content without being explicitly ‘mechanical’ in nature. This was sort of on our radar already, but player feedback confirms that.
As I mentioned above, this has been a very bug-light release, but if an issue is plaguing you then please let us know through the usual channels, and we’ll spend any time left over on making other improvements to ToA’s content.
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Stuff That Doesn’t Really Help
Reviews that are empty/irrelevant/insulting/contain mysterious dwarven chanting are not going to be useful to us. When I say that we read all reviews, I’m not kidding - but if there’s no actionable text, we can’t do anything with it. Of course, it is your right to maintain a practice of critical ambiguity, I’m just saying it won’t produce results.
Reviews and comments that set up a strawman and try to assign a motive to the decisions we make serves only to create a rift between developers and community. We love this game as much as you do, and while it would be naive of me to assume that every discussion can be equally polite and constructive, I do believe that it is better if we let people represent themselves.
Of course, the vast majority of you understand this.
In Conclusion
From my perspective, team Juno had a cracking debut release, and I’m beyond proud of what they accomplished. The strategic side of things is where we’ve fallen short, and that is my cross to bear.
Finally, the reason I’m saying any of this stuff is to give you folks some context. This is hopefully an insight into the thought process that collectively happens behind the scenes at HoI HQ.
I'm playing a lot more Cyberpunk 2077 and having fun! I finished one of my favourite literal gigs, A Like Supreme, and I'm now blasting my way through Delamain's side quest line. I'm driving around in one of the new cars from Phantom Liberty. It's like an awesome 80s sheek and a dream to drive. I think the vehicle design in Cyberpunk 2077 is great; even if the driving mechanics weren't great, luckily, it's way better now.
Got Battletech during the Xmas Steam sales, and finally started playing it last week. Its a decent game, has a lot of Xcom game feel to it.
I think I now want to add the 3 expansions to it as well, but in no rush to get them. Wishlisted em and will get them when they are on sale the next time
been playing AC valhalla the last few weeks on and off, been a lot of fun for the most part (i hate the fishing and the mastery quest stuff)
hopefully they put out more like it one day, i have little interest in single player games that only take like 10 or 15 hours, given how much games cost anymore if i can't wait for to find it used somewhere
Rogue Trader, rocking a Soldier/Arch-Militant pretend-I-am-a-Stormtrooper character.
Game's great, got a few bugs that are a bit of a bother still, but I am having a blast, and boy is my build good even if I don't use it to its fullest extent sometimes.
tauist wrote: Got Battletech during the Xmas Steam sales, and finally started playing it last week. Its a decent game, has a lot of Xcom game feel to it.
I think I now want to add the 3 expansions to it as well, but in no rush to get them. Wishlisted em and will get them when they are on sale the next time
That sale just arrived, so snatched the season pass! Here's to playing a flock ton of Battletech during the next few months
My brother in law gave me an Xbox gift card for my birthday. Help me decide what to spend it on! At the.moment I'm largely deliberating between Rogue Trader and BG3.
Obviously RT is 40K, which is cool. I also enjoyed Pathfinder, by the same devs. But BG3 has one heck of a reputation, and D&D is a long term love of mine too. I played BG2 when it came out, and 1 since as well. But then again, the BG3 devs also made Divinity: Original Sin 2 - which I got enthusiastically but just couldn't get on with the combat...
Both sound like they're nice, deep, plot-driven RPGs which are right up my street. Um... Help?
Crispy78 wrote: My brother in law gave me an Xbox gift card for my birthday. Help me decide what to spend it on! At the.moment I'm largely deliberating between Rogue Trader and BG3.
Obviously RT is 40K, which is cool. I also enjoyed Pathfinder, by the same devs. But BG3 has one heck of a reputation, and D&D is a long term love of mine too. I played BG2 when it came out, and 1 since as well. But then again, the BG3 devs also made Divinity: Original Sin 2 - which I got enthusiastically but just couldn't get on with the combat...
Both sound like they're nice, deep, plot-driven RPGs which are right up my street. Um... Help?
Tough choice. I lean towards BG3 for just being a superior product. Polish, production value, story and replayability of BG3 make it stand taller than RT.
I enjoyed RT immensely, but it had some very annoying bugs and just felt like a grind in the latter chapters. Its also slated to get some DLC through this year, whereas BG3 is seemingly a complete standalone project.
Currently bouncing between CRYPTARK and Heroes of Hammerwatch.
Cryptark is fun and I find it really frustrating sometimes. I keep getting to the last level and just get overwhelmed by enemies. Still, I am determined to beat it, so persevere I will.
Heroes of Hammerwatch is a nice fun game. A nice range of characters with different playstyles keeps things interesting and it has a lot of replayability.
I did notice Deluvion did an update yesterday, the first one in ages. Be nice to see what (if anything) they fixed.
Dragon's Dogma 2'is getting a lot of chatter right now, and the original is less than $5 on Steam right now. So I decided to grab it to get an idea of the likely gameplay in the upcoming game.
Massive exercise in frustration. I keep running into enemies that simply don't take damage. And I'm not only talking about the various monsters. Even some of the bandits don't seem to take damage from my weapons, even when I'm stabbing them in the back. Meanwhile, all of my characters - even my tank - frequently seem to lose huge chunks of health at the drop of a hat.
And enemies are *everywhere*. There are apparently huge armies of bandits wandering the countryside. Wolves will attack, run fifty yards away, and then charge back at you in constant hit and runs. And if you chase after them, you'll agro the next group of enemies. I was on the road to a distant location, and had to deal with some big lizards at a ford. There were a few visible initially, so I figured I would test them out. They seemed difficult but doable. But then the rest showed up, and I had another big swarm on my hands. The big monsters are interesting fights with unusual mechanics. But I rarely see them. Instead, I'm dealing with impossibly huge swarms of smaller stuff that's nearly impossible to injure.
Eumerin wrote: Dragon's Dogma 2'is getting a lot of chatter right now, and the original is less than $5 on Steam right now. So I decided to grab it to get an idea of the likely gameplay in the upcoming game.
Massive exercise in frustration. I keep running into enemies that simply don't take damage. And I'm not only talking about the various monsters. Even some of the bandits don't seem to take damage from my weapons, even when I'm stabbing them in the back. Meanwhile, all of my characters - even my tank - frequently seem to lose huge chunks of health at the drop of a hat.
And enemies are *everywhere*. There are apparently huge armies of bandits wandering the countryside. Wolves will attack, run fifty yards away, and then charge back at you in constant hit and runs. And if you chase after them, you'll agro the next group of enemies. I was on the road to a distant location, and had to deal with some big lizards at a ford. There were a few visible initially, so I figured I would test them out. They seemed difficult but doable. But then the rest showed up, and I had another big swarm on my hands. The big monsters are interesting fights with unusual mechanics. But I rarely see them. Instead, I'm dealing with impossibly huge swarms of smaller stuff that's nearly impossible to injure.
Dragons dogma can be tough cookie to get into, learning what works best against each enemy is super important. Some have huge resistance, your pawns will tell you about them as you fight them.
Lizardmen don’t like cold, goblin don’t like fire. Shoot things in the eyes. Don’t use magic against the golems. Stuff like that, it’s more a preparation game than a full stats game. But stats are important in the background, so switching vocations to much can make it more difficult. But they changed stats new game so that’s a big change for two.
Also rare monsters begin to show up more and more as you progress. It’s more an immersive experience by design so it can be weird starting out.
I was building characters for Dragons dogma 2 today, it’s fun. And doing it ahead of time is worth it for me. lol only like 2 hours a character so far.
Crispy78 wrote: My brother in law gave me an Xbox gift card for my birthday. Help me decide what to spend it on! At the.moment I'm largely deliberating between Rogue Trader and BG3.
Obviously RT is 40K, which is cool. I also enjoyed Pathfinder, by the same devs. But BG3 has one heck of a reputation, and D&D is a long term love of mine too. I played BG2 when it came out, and 1 since as well. But then again, the BG3 devs also made Divinity: Original Sin 2 - which I got enthusiastically but just couldn't get on with the combat...
Both sound like they're nice, deep, plot-driven RPGs which are right up my street. Um... Help?
I ended up going with Rogue Trader. Ultimately I suspect I would enjoy either of them, but I was getting stronger pangs of missing out when I considered buying BG3 than the other way round...
Picked up Unicorn Overlord and absolutely love it. Never really been an RTS fan and even Ogre Battle didn't quite click with me, but this just has a super slick battle system that hits a sweet spot between mass battles and party skirmishes that I'm finding super enthralling. Thus far its not VanillaWare's most eye catching game, but the beautiful art really helps keep the unit types memorable. Runs great on the Switch and definitely a game well suited to handheld mode.
Weirdly got the urge to re-install and do a campaign in State of Decay 2. Had forgotten I had beat the game before and didn't know that it offered bonuses to starting new campaigns, somewhat like a "New Game+". Pleasantly surprised to get 2 M4 rifles and an Anti-Material Rifle right out of the gate, as well as a choice of vehicles with bonus abilities.
Just bought Metro: Exodus. The first game was and still is one of my favouites and Last Light was a great squeal. So I'm keen to hop into this one.
Also grabbed the entire Halo collection on a whim. Haven't played Halo in probably 15 years but I remember it being quite enjoyable. I don't even remember a lot of the plot, so I'll basically be going back into it fresh.
Apple fox wrote: Dragons dogma 2, it’s fun. Needed tea, so taking a break.
I like the night in game, soo cool.
It’s much easier to start off than the first.
Question on DD2. I poked the character creator, which was neat, but it started with a big warning that the game didn't quite require a console controller. Any idea if its really functional with mouse and keyboard?
Apple fox wrote: Dragons dogma 2, it’s fun. Needed tea, so taking a break.
I like the night in game, soo cool.
It’s much easier to start off than the first.
Question on DD2. I poked the character creator, which was neat, but it started with a big warning that the game didn't quite require a console controller. Any idea if it’s really functional with mouse and keyboard?
As far as I have seen mouse and keyboard works good, but I use controller.
Some streamers I watched use mouse and keyboard, so going of them it doesn’t seem to be an issue.
Cohh demonstrated keyboard and mouse swapping seamlessly for example.
About 6 hours in it got more where difficulty more challenging I like so I happy, nearly got dropped of a cliff by a harpy. So that nearly cost me lol Also had a cyclops come out of the forest at me, couldn’t see it until it was at that Ohh It’s going for me moment.
Some good moments so far.
Played a lot of Cyberpunk 2077 today. I've almost finished all the gigs just four Badlands ones left. I've also got to do Kerry's quest line and Claire's racing quest line, and the Us Crack's chick's sidequest. Then I talk to Hanako. She said not to keep her waiting, but I've really been making her wait, lol.
LunarSol wrote: Picked up Unicorn Overlord and absolutely love it. Never really been an RTS fan and even Ogre Battle didn't quite click with me, but this just has a super slick battle system that hits a sweet spot between mass battles and party skirmishes that I'm finding super enthralling. Thus far its not VanillaWare's most eye catching game, but the beautiful art really helps keep the unit types memorable. Runs great on the Switch and definitely a game well suited to handheld mode.
Is this Unicorn Overlord related to Ogre Battle in some way? Been waiting for a sequel to that one since N64..
LunarSol wrote: Picked up Unicorn Overlord and absolutely love it. Never really been an RTS fan and even Ogre Battle didn't quite click with me, but this just has a super slick battle system that hits a sweet spot between mass battles and party skirmishes that I'm finding super enthralling. Thus far its not VanillaWare's most eye catching game, but the beautiful art really helps keep the unit types memorable. Runs great on the Switch and definitely a game well suited to handheld mode.
Is this Unicorn Overlord related to Ogre Battle in some way? Been waiting for a sequel to that one since N64..
It's not directly related in the sense that its not set in the same world or made by the same people, but its very much the same kind of game. You have an army of characters across a variety of classes that you arrange into little parties (initially 2 man teams that grow into 5 man parties) that you give commands to via an RTS style interface. When they encounter enemy units it cuts to a battle screen that plays out automatically based on a set of rules for each class. It's a cool mix of RPS strategy with certain units countering others and finding synergistic class combinations that cover these weaknesses. Definitely give the demo a try if you like the Ogre Battle games. It's a more than worthy imitator.
I decided to pick up Age of sigmar realms of ruin.
I feel I am regretting this choice so far, but 75% off at least so hopefully the campaign gives a good time as I go through it.
Apple fox wrote: I decided to pick up Age of sigmar realms of ruin.
I feel I am regretting this choice so far, but 75% off at least so hopefully the campaign gives a good time as I go through it.
I'm an AoS fanboy and I still couldn't get into it. Its just sooo slow.
LunarSol wrote: Picked up Unicorn Overlord and absolutely love it. Never really been an RTS fan and even Ogre Battle didn't quite click with me, but this just has a super slick battle system that hits a sweet spot between mass battles and party skirmishes that I'm finding super enthralling. Thus far its not VanillaWare's most eye catching game, but the beautiful art really helps keep the unit types memorable. Runs great on the Switch and definitely a game well suited to handheld mode.
Is this Unicorn Overlord related to Ogre Battle in some way? Been waiting for a sequel to that one since N64..
It's not directly related in the sense that its not set in the same world or made by the same people, but its very much the same kind of game. You have an army of characters across a variety of classes that you arrange into little parties (initially 2 man teams that grow into 5 man parties) that you give commands to via an RTS style interface. When they encounter enemy units it cuts to a battle screen that plays out automatically based on a set of rules for each class. It's a cool mix of RPS strategy with certain units countering others and finding synergistic class combinations that cover these weaknesses. Definitely give the demo a try if you like the Ogre Battle games. It's a more than worthy imitator.
Took a closer look at it. Boy, that sure does look a lot like Ogre Battle! The main character even has the same blue hair. I'll have to add it to me endless list of games.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
nels1031 wrote: Trying out a new (new to me, I always stayed in Trumbull Valley) map in State of Decay 2. The game just got a quality of life update.
Its a pretty fun zombie apocalypse survival game.
I really liked the first one. Keep meaning to play the second one.
Went through an interesting bunch of game switching. I was playing Terra Invicta a while ago and then got bored and played Mechwarrior 5 with a friend as well as C&C: red alert 2 (the entire command and conquer series dropped on steam about a few weeks ago) and then started playing C&C 3.
Man i didn't realize just how OP nod bike rush or spamming bikes and buggies was in the fairly early-mid game for c&c 3. You just spam rocket bikes and run past enemies and around them. The amount of damage they do is so high you can just bypass any resistance and which can't keep up with your bikes and destroy enemy structures.
Red alert 2 was also fun. When you first get prism tanks and navy seals you can put the seals in ifv's and run them up with prism tanks and maybe mirage tanks or main battle tanks. Only takes a few prism tanks and navy seal ifv's to wipe out whatever enemy base is in your way unless they have tanks. Sometimes dealing with Navy is a bit annoying for me but dolphins with echo weapons are silly. Also the allied navy is mostly just a carrier fleet and anti-air/anti-missile defense. Oddly that makes the flak ships of the reds very potent against allied ships which forces you to need dolphins and their little echo weapons.
Millennia.
I'm enjoying it. Balance is wonky in places (and the player can easily break the game), and certain things don't work as well as they could (UI needs to not be spread out in corners of the screen), but I'm enjoying the inherent variety built into the game. And working out the complexity and what works well, and what production chains work well.
Definitely needs more map types, however. Islands doesn't work well with their tile/sprawl system, and inland seas keeps throwing weird almost single biome results at me
I had long gotten bored of Civ6 (and Civ5) because it stayed buggy, the AI, and every game was the same game. Unless I consciously tried to do something else, every game went down the same path and unfolded the same way.
fething Hell. After burning my way through Metros 2033 and Last Light, I began install Exodus and it's 77gb! What the feth sort of game is this? 2033 was 6 gig and Last Light was 9.
EDIT- 6 fething hours the game took to install. Blimey this better be fun.
flamingkillamajig wrote: Went through an interesting bunch of game switching. I was playing Terra Invicta a while ago and then got bored and played Mechwarrior 5 with a friend as well as C&C: red alert 2 (the entire command and conquer series dropped on steam about a few weeks ago) and then started playing C&C 3.
Man i didn't realize just how OP nod bike rush or spamming bikes and buggies was in the fairly early-mid game for c&c 3. You just spam rocket bikes and run past enemies and around them. The amount of damage they do is so high you can just bypass any resistance and which can't keep up with your bikes and destroy enemy structures.
Red alert 2 was also fun. When you first get prism tanks and navy seals you can put the seals in ifv's and run them up with prism tanks and maybe mirage tanks or main battle tanks. Only takes a few prism tanks and navy seal ifv's to wipe out whatever enemy base is in your way unless they have tanks. Sometimes dealing with Navy is a bit annoying for me but dolphins with echo weapons are silly. Also the allied navy is mostly just a carrier fleet and anti-air/anti-missile defense. Oddly that makes the flak ships of the reds very potent against allied ships which forces you to need dolphins and their little echo weapons.
Oh man, Red Alert 2. That's a blast form the past. Had like the greatest intro music ever.
Snrub wrote: fething Hell. After burning my way through Metros 2033 and Last Light, I began install Exodus and it's 77gb! What the feth sort of game is this? 2033 was 6 gig and Last Light was 9.
I haven't played it, but my recollection is that Exodus is open world, while the previous games are fairly linear.
flamingkillamajig wrote: Went through an interesting bunch of game switching. I was playing Terra Invicta a while ago and then got bored and played Mechwarrior 5 with a friend as well as C&C: red alert 2 (the entire command and conquer series dropped on steam about a few weeks ago) and then started playing C&C 3.
Man i didn't realize just how OP nod bike rush or spamming bikes and buggies was in the fairly early-mid game for c&c 3. You just spam rocket bikes and run past enemies and around them. The amount of damage they do is so high you can just bypass any resistance and which can't keep up with your bikes and destroy enemy structures.
Red alert 2 was also fun. When you first get prism tanks and navy seals you can put the seals in ifv's and run them up with prism tanks and maybe mirage tanks or main battle tanks. Only takes a few prism tanks and navy seal ifv's to wipe out whatever enemy base is in your way unless they have tanks. Sometimes dealing with Navy is a bit annoying for me but dolphins with echo weapons are silly. Also the allied navy is mostly just a carrier fleet and anti-air/anti-missile defense. Oddly that makes the flak ships of the reds very potent against allied ships which forces you to need dolphins and their little echo weapons.
Oh man, Red Alert 2. That's a blast form the past. Had like the greatest intro music ever.
Yeah i should probably finish off the end of the allied campaign for ra2. I was on the final mission where you teleport a bunch of dudes into moscow or wherever the final mission takes place. I only tried it once (not very seriously) and fought like 3 kirov's with a crap ton of rocket ifv's....it didn't work out so well. I forgot just how much hp kirov's had but it was on hard difficulty and i think it was a special guard forces so they probably had more health and damage output than normal since that's how all old rts games balanced things out (as well as cost reductions or possible free units for a.i. opponents).
If there's one serious negative i have for red alert 2 it's the fact you couldn't build multiple units from multiple factories yet. I could have 5 factories and still just produce tanks from one of them. C&C 3 doesn't have that problem. Also you going back to left clicking units to move and attack is something i'm not used to ever since starcraft 1 and more modern C&C games came by.
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C&C 3 on the other hand is a game i want to play multiplayer in so badly as well. I think the problem with Nod is that obelisks become worse in the later game (perhaps i should power them up more with beam cannon artillery for range and rate of fire boosts). A big problem however is you can only build one obelisk per command center so it can be slow. Meanwhile aside from avatars with possible upgrades it tends to be a harder offensive game if you have to face mammoth tanks (at least with railgun upgrades). Juggernauts are oddly where gdi's main offensive power is and as long as you can hit them with stealth tanks or something you should be good. For the Scrin they tend to be Air power heavy (air to ground attacks mostly) whereas nod probably has the best helicopter in the game (venoms with stealth detection, laser cannon upgrades, aa capability).
I don't know why they decided to make both venoms and attack bikes so good but then oddly most things in the game have a purpose at different times and occasions. It's a shame the nod terrorist suicide bomber dudes seem to do such little damage to vehicles in the late game. I imagine with some precision defense related destruction that they could tear an enemy base apart but against high tier vehicles that's just not the case. I may try them again against mammoth tanks just to see how well they do against them but it's probably pretty terrible.
Stealthed raider buggies with the emp coils tend to do well however. Imagine a unit running up to a spam of vehicles and just turning them all off for a while. You can have that much longer to destroy the enemy force while they can't fight back and that's them. Crazy how a lot of early tier units for nod still have a use even as upgraded parts for the avatar war mechs.
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I also remembered i have Act of Aggression (spiritual successor to Act of War) which i've been trying to get a friend to play with me. That game died so fast but i swear it was fun way back. I'm not sure what killed it whether lack of ads for it or something. If i recall the multiplayer scene died within days or a couple weeks of the game existing. I remember it being fun but slower than a lot of command and conquer games.
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I've also been playing a good chunk of MechWarrior 5 with same friend as mentioned earlier. I'm using the Crusaders with four srm6's, 2 med lasers and 2 machine guns. It hits hard but you gotta watch out for heating issues. I may need to either get better heat dissipation or generally not use my medium lasers. Generally the srm's take out chunks of enemy mechs. Even in one mission where i did fairly badly and over-heated a lot i still took out like 5 mechs and a bunch of other units.
I have Acts of Aggression. Kind of odd to think it's by the same company that's done Wargame, Steel Division, and WARNO. I think it got hurt with players because of the way that the resources were handled. I think it's telling that one of the first things Eugen did was to patch in a mode that reduced them all to just cash.
@flamingkillamajig Yes, I remember the C&C series lagged behind in "right click=move" technology which was an incredibly important development in RTS games.
KamikazeCanuck wrote: @flamingkillamajig Yes, I remember the C&C series lagged behind in "right click=move" technology which was an incredibly important development in RTS games.
Lol i know it wasn't but it's confusing. That said one factory per unit type was annoying.
@Eumerin:
I know but i prefer the 3 resources build. Maybe it's because i never used the one resource build. I mean it seems to not be an issue for some strategy games. I guess starcraft proved more than 2 is bad.
I know but i prefer the 3 resources build. Maybe it's because i never used the one resource build. I mean it seems to not be an issue for some strategy games. I guess starcraft proved more than 2 is bad.
It's been a while, but I don't remember having a problem with it either. I do seem to recall that there was something a bit unusual about the way that one or two of the resources were handled. But again, it's been years since I last looked at the game. Anyway, Eugen felt a need to collapse them into just one. So I'm guessing that they were seeing a lot of complaints about the system.
Played a lot of Cyberpunk 2077 today. Clocked it by...
Spoiler:
Storming Arasaka Tower single-handedly is a lot of fun, punching my way through Arasaka goons. But the Adam Smasher fight isn't a challenge, even after all the updates. I smashed him good with my gorilla fists. I gave my body to Johnny, mostly because I had my V promise he would at the Pistis Sophia Hotel and because I think it's a genuinely beautiful ending, my favourite of them. I might play through the ending where you let Johnny take over and attack the tower with Rogue, then maybe the one where you attack the tower with the Aldecaldos, as my V is a nomad, so it fits.
I'm considering starting a new game as a female corpo V, unlike my other Vs, who are jerks with a heart of gold or good guys who choose the "good" thing under it all and rebels against the corpos. This new character is going to be a full-on selfish and corporate sycophant. So, I will likely choose either the Arasaka ending or be a kiss-up for the NUSA.
Personal achievement for HOIV done, play Peru, form first grand colombia and then the peru-bolivian confederation whilest owning all of spanish south america. Who's the empire now?
was surprisingly easy, but then again paratroopers are insane currently.
Finished Alan Wake 2 over the weekend. Combat never quite clicked with me, but the story absolutely did. I'm a total sucker for this brand of Donnie Darko style meta-physical horror and how well the game explores it. Definitely not as fun as Control in terms of gameplay, but probably my favorite story Remedy has crafted by a long shot.
KamikazeCanuck wrote: @flamingkillamajig Yes, I remember the C&C series lagged behind in "right click=move" technology which was an incredibly important development in RTS games.
Lol i know it wasn't but it's confusing. That said one factory per unit type was annoying.
No it was! I wasn't being sarcastic. Having a different button for moving a unit from selecting it prevents accidently selecting another unit when you critically have to move a unit right now thereby losing you the whole war!
Anyway i've been playing C&C 3 Kane's Wrath. I beat the remainder of the Nod missions in C&C 3 so i figured i'd try the expansion. I have to say Nod feels a lot stronger in the original. Of course if i recall gdi needed some help taking out things like the suicide bomber dudes Nod used. Only basic infantry and snipers tended to do enough.
Meanwhile in Kane's Wrath they have a ground unit that's pretty fast and shreds air units and an air unit which detects stealth and shreds infantry only and is a transport. I guess they needed something but it felt like they went the other route with it. I suppose Nod will just have to stick to defenses and vehicles in Kane's Wrath.
Was playing genshin impact, doing co-op for my weekly bosses and it’s funny how fast it is to get a group.
Keep singing up and getting in before even able to sip my coffee.
Was fun morning so far.
Played through the first Fallout over the weekend, trying a luck build (Nah, who am I kidding, you need at least AGI 9 or you're doomed ) which did lead me into some great random encounters early on, the first being the Nuka Cola truck with close to 6K in caps and a bit later onwards, the crashed UFO with the alien pistol, just a shame I didn't have any points in energy weapons, or it would've carried me until I could get the turbo plasma rifle. But until then, the .223 pistol a.k.a. Irwin's pistol a.k.a. That Gun! did all the heavy lifting for me.
Was a fun ride, still holds up pretty well, but not the friendliest of games.
Playing original Dragon's Dogma. Weird game! The plot seems to be nonsense, sort of sub-Final Fantasy level stuff, but the combat is fun and I like the monster designs. And it's pretty cool to lead a party into battle.
It's also ridiculously hard, I was not expecting it to be so difficult in the early stages!
Da Boss wrote: Playing original Dragon's Dogma. Weird game! The plot seems to be nonsense, sort of sub-Final Fantasy level stuff, but the combat is fun and I like the monster designs. And it's pretty cool to lead a party into battle.
It's also ridiculously hard, I was not expecting it to be so difficult in the early stages!
Where are you at? The plot itself doesn’t really pick up until right near the end. With most of the subplots being more immersive background.
There is actually a few different ways a lot of quests can go or be missed, but won’t ever tell you about at all.
One of my favourite quests tells you one thing, but the best outcome is to ignore the quest and do something else.
I remember that difficulty quite well, hopefully you have fun!
I clocked Cyberpunk 2077 with my Nomad V by working with the Aldecaldos, a bittersweet but poignant ending. It may or may not be his "canon" ending in my eyes, as it makes the most sense to a nomad, I guess. I began a new campaign as a female Corpo V and, with her, likely do the opposite of my other Vs, being the most evil and selfish character possible. Who will pretend to be nice and polite in dialogue but horrible in action. Will be fun!
Still playing Midnight Suns and enjoying it. I guess it didn't sell that well for Firaxis and I can see why. It's a weird card based TBS game which is niche but beyond that it's even weirder. It's like a social club simulator. I spend like 75% of my time hanging out and talking to my superhero friends about their personal lives. I'm in a book club with Captains America and Marvel and Blade, so weird. So it's niche game within a niche game but I like it.
Been playing my female Corpo V, using her as a pistols/hacking build, one I've never done before as I've preferred weeb with katana/engineer builds. It's pretty fun. Been running around grinding by killing random gangers and doing GCPD gigs as I'm planning on doing the quests after getting Johnny Silverhand lodged in my skull.
KamikazeCanuck wrote: Still playing Midnight Suns and enjoying it. I guess it didn't sell that well for Firaxis and I can see why. It's a weird card based TBS game which is niche but beyond that it's even weirder. It's like a social club simulator. I spend like 75% of my time hanging out and talking to my superhero friends about their personal lives. I'm in a book club with Captains America and Marvel and Blade, so weird. So it's niche game within a niche game but I like it.
Yeah, from what I've read the high amount of running around and talking to everyone between missions turned a lot of people off.
Also, there are apparently still a lot of bugs that were never fixed.
Pretty chunky update to Fallout 4. Now I have a Nailgun, a Gauss Enhanced saw blade Launcher, various Grenade Launchers. Oh. And a Baseball Launcher which sets the Baseballs on fire.
Have they no regard for how much havoc I’m gonna cause?
Automatically Appended Next Post: And just ran into an Enclave patrol, which gave me a decent kicking before I succeeded.
Been playing Stellar Blade. It's a lot of fun. Great mechanics. Some of the character animations look a bit goofy during cutscenes (characters talking sorts of scenes, not battle scenes), but aside from that I have no complaints.
I strongly recommend it.
It does look like it might be a bit short (though I can't be sure since I'm not close to finishing it yet) if you just race through the main missions. But there are also a lot of optional side missions that you can run if you want. They give you something else to do, and also flesh out the world lore.
Eumerin wrote: Been playing Stellar Blade. It's a lot of fun. Great mechanics. Some of the character animations look a bit goofy during cutscenes (characters talking sorts of scenes, not battle scenes), but aside from that I have no complaints.
I strongly recommend it.
It does look like it might be a bit short (though I can't be sure since I'm not close to finishing it yet) if you just race through the main missions. But there are also a lot of optional side missions that you can run if you want. They give you something else to do, and also flesh out the world lore.
What other games would you say it's similar to? Is it 3rd person RPG? Open world? I've been looking for something kinda like Horizon and Stellar Blade looks like it might fit the bill.
Eumerin wrote: Been playing Stellar Blade. It's a lot of fun. Great mechanics. Some of the character animations look a bit goofy during cutscenes (characters talking sorts of scenes, not battle scenes), but aside from that I have no complaints.
I strongly recommend it.
It does look like it might be a bit short (though I can't be sure since I'm not close to finishing it yet) if you just race through the main missions. But there are also a lot of optional side missions that you can run if you want. They give you something else to do, and also flesh out the world lore.
What other games would you say it's similar to? Is it 3rd person RPG? Open world? I've been looking for something kinda like Horizon and Stellar Blade looks like it might fit the bill.
It's a third-person action RPG like Horizon Zero Dawn. But I'd be cautious about drawing similarities. A good chunk of Horizon revolves around ranged attacks, or manipulating robot beasts. But Stellar Blade is very heavily focused on melee action. You do eventually get a ranged weapon. But for the entire first section of the game, your only weapon is your sword.
The gameplay is heavily focused on reading enemy attacks, picking the proper response, and making your own attacks without getting smacked around. Enemies often hit hard, which means that screwing up a counter can cost you a good chunk of your health. Button mashing attacks will do the same thing, since enemies that you're attacking can often launch their own attacks at you while you're hitting them.
There's a demo available that covers the early part of the game (it was accidentally released early, automatically deleted from Playstations that had downloaded it, and then officially released a little later). It includes the intro and tutorial section, and the first level proper of the game up through the first boss fight (which is *not* the end of the level). And it saves your progress (right up until just before that boss fight, unfortunately), and you can carry that progress over to the full game. It also has a boss rush mode where you're given an Eve with a large number of purchased skills, and fight bosses one after the other. I didn't check that mode out, though. Prior to the game's release, the developer - Shift Up - noted that some gamers had spent a disturbing amount of time (as in, dozens of hours) playing the demo just wandering around the section of the first level that's in the demo, and slaughtering enemies.
Given the noise over the game, it's worth noting that even the reviewers that bad mouth the game generally praise the gameplay before adding comments about how Eve's looks will lead to the downfall of civilization.
So far I've seen six maps. Two of them are standard level maps (albeit very big ones) that guide you toward a destination, though you do have the option to go poking around in odd corners along the way. And there are times when your path will open up into an area where you're required to complete various tasks before moving on. Two are large wasteland areas that you freely wander around in (I haven't actually had the opportunity to do that in the second one yet, though I recently had to pass through a very tiny part of it). One is a friendly city / quest hub. And the last is a very linear map where I could only use my gun (presumably to force players to get acquainted with it after spending so much time using their sword). After a certain point in the game, you'll have the opportunity to go back to earlier levels (not the tutorial level).
Doing yet another playthrough of Vampire: The Masquerade; Bloodlines. This time as a Ventrue, I wanted to play a Tremere but had a brain fart and accidentally chose Ventrue. This realisation made me want to finally do a "stuck up", donkey-cave, money/power-hungry Ventrue, but I haven't managed that much so far (except for one inhuman exception). I usually RP a Toreador "Friendly Neighbourhood Vampire" as Toreador is the clan I identify the most with, or a Friendly Neighbourhood Vampire Malkavian as I guess I identify with them too due to having a tenuous hold on my sanity a bit, lol. and it's such a fun way to play. Love the scene with the Stop Sign in Downtown. I'm finding it hard to be a dick mostly because almost all the characters are so likeable, despite many of them being heavily satirical lampoons on stereotypes. There's a reason why VTMB replaced Blaz Blue: Continuum Shift in my top five favourite games: that or Cyberpunk 2077; it's a toss-up between those two.
It's amazing that a rushed game on Xbox and PC from 2004 with such wonky animations, jankiness, and combat is so much more immersive and entertaining than so many AAA games that come out today. Troika deserved much better in my book. Love VTMB and Arcanum despite all their problems.
More progress for me in Stellar Blade. I finished the map that I had left off on, and now I'm doing more open world exploration. I've got a new map waiting (had it pretty much right from the start of the new batch of open world exploration), but it's on the back burner at the moment while I roam around.
And one of the things that happened while I was roaming around is that I unlocked fishing! Yes, I can now pick up a rod and reel, and fish. It's a bit goofy, but there are a few side missions that ask for it. And you can sell the fish for some cash (not that I have any money issues). There's also a codex that tracks the kinds of fish that you've caught, and an achievement for catching a certain number of them.
I'm finding the game story interesting. I don't want to talk about it because I haven't finished the game yet, and I don't want to accidentally spoil something that's important. But the more I play, the more it becomes apparent that there are some big secrets. Eve's mission hasn't changed yet from "Kill the biggest naytiba," nor is there yet any reason to think that it will. But the game is making it clear that she has a lot of very important holes in her knowledge of the world. And I'm not talking about stuff like not understanding why people on the surface like wine.
I ended up buying Stellar Blade so we can gush over the game together, Eumerin
The combat is excellent. I may actually try a Souls game again after bouncing so hard off Demons Souls back when that came out. I just unlocked the R1 attacks and been having lots of fun with those. The sound a successful parry makes is so satisfying. It's a joy making EVE kick ass.
The story I'm finding pretty good, I'm mystery of Mother Sphere and the Final War has been really interesting. Still peeling the layers but l'm really curious to see where it's going.
EDIT: the music is phenomenal. I've caught myself humming along a few times now. The songs are just so catchy.
Knee-deep into a Tamurkhan playthrough in Warhams 3.
Love how the chieftains unlock units that are generally out of the faction (Dreadquakes!!!), or give abilities to the army. The Skin Wolf chieftain giving his parent army "Stalk" is pretty devastating when surrounded by enemies or attacking a large group of army stacks.
nels1031 wrote: Knee-deep into a Tamurkhan playthrough in Warhams 3.
Love how the chieftains unlock units that are generally out of the faction (Dreadquakes!!!), or give abilities to the army. The Skin Wolf chieftain giving his parent army "Stalk" is pretty devastating when surrounded by enemies or attacking a large group of army stacks.
Haven't even touched the new factions yet.
Stalk can also be a godsend in siege battles if it is a large map with multiple entry points. In my recent Aranessa playthrough (using the mod to increase the number and variety of living units available to her) I had to crack Clan Angrund's capital with Belegar sitting in it with a full stack including his ethereal heroes. Set up my army out the front on one side and promptly took out the towers with cannons and managed to waste quarreller ammo with a hero, then snuck in Aranessa with Stalk over a wall in the back and started capturing locations in the city which caused the AI to pull its forces way back to try and find and kill her. Then I was able to blow open a gate and get my handgunners on the walls facing inwards, with Sartosan pirates guarding the routes up. As the dwarf army rerouted to try and come back they were shot to death piecemeal and I was able to slowly grind them down as Aranessa kept many of them searching throughout their own city. Definitely cheesy and exploiting the dumb AI, but it felt fitting for a pirate to use such sneaky tactics.
nels1031 wrote: Knee-deep into a Tamurkhan playthrough in Warhams 3.
Love how the chieftains unlock units that are generally out of the faction (Dreadquakes!!!), or give abilities to the army. The Skin Wolf chieftain giving his parent army "Stalk" is pretty devastating when surrounded by enemies or attacking a large group of army stacks.
Haven't even touched the new factions yet.
Stalk can also be a godsend in siege battles if it is a large map with multiple entry points. In my recent Aranessa playthrough (using the mod to increase the number and variety of living units available to her) I had to crack Clan Angrund's capital with Belegar sitting in it with a full stack including his ethereal heroes. Set up my army out the front on one side and promptly took out the towers with cannons and managed to waste quarreller ammo with a hero, then snuck in Aranessa with Stalk over a wall in the back and started capturing locations in the city which caused the AI to pull its forces way back to try and find and kill her. Then I was able to blow open a gate and get my handgunners on the walls facing inwards, with Sartosan pirates guarding the routes up. As the dwarf army rerouted to try and come back they were shot to death piecemeal and I was able to slowly grind them down as Aranessa kept many of them searching throughout their own city. Definitely cheesy and exploiting the dumb AI, but it felt fitting for a pirate to use such sneaky tactics.
I mislabeled the ability in my original quote. What I meant to say is it gives the "Stalking" army stance to his parent army, allowing ambushes when colliding with another stack, like Skaven and Alith Anar.
I forgot that "Stalk" is a unit ability for battlefields, while Stalking is the campaign movement.
So moving and ambushing Nurgle armies when the ability is paid for! I think it lasts for 2 turns.
nels1031 wrote: Knee-deep into a Tamurkhan playthrough in Warhams 3.
Love how the chieftains unlock units that are generally out of the faction (Dreadquakes!!!), or give abilities to the army. The Skin Wolf chieftain giving his parent army "Stalk" is pretty devastating when surrounded by enemies or attacking a large group of army stacks.
Haven't even touched the new factions yet.
Stalk can also be a godsend in siege battles if it is a large map with multiple entry points. In my recent Aranessa playthrough (using the mod to increase the number and variety of living units available to her) I had to crack Clan Angrund's capital with Belegar sitting in it with a full stack including his ethereal heroes. Set up my army out the front on one side and promptly took out the towers with cannons and managed to waste quarreller ammo with a hero, then snuck in Aranessa with Stalk over a wall in the back and started capturing locations in the city which caused the AI to pull its forces way back to try and find and kill her. Then I was able to blow open a gate and get my handgunners on the walls facing inwards, with Sartosan pirates guarding the routes up. As the dwarf army rerouted to try and come back they were shot to death piecemeal and I was able to slowly grind them down as Aranessa kept many of them searching throughout their own city. Definitely cheesy and exploiting the dumb AI, but it felt fitting for a pirate to use such sneaky tactics.
I mislabeled the ability in my original quote. What I meant to say is it gives the "Stalking" army stance to his parent army, allowing ambushes when colliding with another stack, like Skaven and Alith Anar.
I forgot that "Stalk" is a unit ability for battlefields, while Stalking is the campaign movement.
So moving and ambushing Nurgle armies when the ability is paid for! I think it lasts for 2 turns.
Ah! Well, campaign stalk stance is also a really good ability, especially against some army types. Anyone who is using a lot of missile troops or war machines gets royally fethed by ambushes where they can't defend their vulnerable elements, and of course denying reinforcements.
Adrassil wrote: Re-downloaded Rogue Trader Warhammer 40,000 and am having fun with it again. A lot has been fixed with patches, and it's much better now.
Spoiler:
I Just managed to escape Commorragh; I seem to be one of the few who enjoyed that part of the game. but I'm glad to be back on my ship.
I like my Iconocast Rogue Trader a lot. I heard the game goes more downhill from the 4th part, though. which is a shame.
Regarding Commoragh:
Spoiler:
I despised the in-game cinematic pauses to remind you that you are in pain. But there is solid loot to be had in that place. I also hate the tired trope of having gear taken from you in game when you get imprisoned.
Ghosts of Tsushima is finally getting a PC release this week, but it's pre-emptively getting treated liked Helldivers 2. The multi-player mode will require PSN. According to the developer, single-player mode won't. But Sony is apparently delisting the game from countries that don't have access to PSN. This is despite the fact that the game has been on pre-order in those countries for some time now. Players in those countries who pre-ordered are having their purchases refunded.
KamikazeCanuck wrote: So what does that mean? I need to get a playstation login to play it on PC?
if you want to do multiplayer, thats what it sounds like
and that is assuming that sony doesn't try and pull the helldiver crap again in a couple months when they think people have moved on and no longer care as much
Helldivers 2 is probably pretty safe. The backlash wasn't nearly as much of an issue as running afoul of some EU consumer protection laws against rescinding services after purchase. They can likely get away with it if its part of the deal up front for Ghost.
The dev for Ghosts of Tsushima is stating that PSN will not be required for single-player. It will only be required for multi-player.
At the same time, Sony is saying that you can't even buy the game if you live in one of the many countries where PSN isn't available. If you live in one of those countries and had pre-ordered the game, your pre-order has been refunded.
Stupid, heavy-handed nonsense involving a game that has a very well-regarded single-player campaign, all because of a multi-player mode that people don't really care about, afaik. It's basically the publisher screwing over both the devs (reduced sales) and some players just so that Sony can shoot itself in the foot (since Sony also gets less money because of the reduced sales).
And not just the sales for those games. I've been considering getting another console alongside our Nintendo, and the Playstation was the one I had in mind.
Sony pulling this crap has now convinced me to not do that.
I've noticed that Victoria 3 is on sale, and heavily discounted. You can buy it and all of the existing DLC for less than a new video game.
Which begs the question - is it good? I haven't played it myself, and reviews of it have been erratic at best. So I'm curious whether anyone has played it here, and whether you enjoyed it.
I've been playing Terra Invicta as Humanity First. I think i'm much closer to the end-game. I've learned some things by myself and also through people on the steam forums for the game.
Testing out the Speed Freeks open beta, the new stompa mode is interesting and a change of pace, I'm also glad they're showing off how you can start customizing your buggies.
I've also started playing Warpforged again to try out the new SoB, definitely interesting with how they've implemented the faith mechanics to be a permanent part, so far they're pretty fun once you know how they work.
One game I'm starting to try out lately is Dyson Sphere Program. Getting some Factorio vibes from it, and it's pretty overwhelming especially since I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to be building when. The game barely runs on my PC too, which doesn't help (I seriously need to modernize my hardware at some point, but other things are taking all of my spare cash lately).
Starting on Legendary difficulty and Japanese dialogue with subtitles for the true Samurai experience was not a wise move. Subtitles are fine, but it is indeed legendarily difficult.
Starting on Legendary difficulty and Japanese dialogue with subtitles for the true Samurai experience was not a wise move. Subtitles are fine, but it is indeed legendarily difficult.
Pretty awesome game so far though.
It is a fantastic game and a true love letter to Kurosawa films. Basically everything that an AC game in Japan should have been, over whatever garbage they're shilling out right now.
Just got the final achievement on Cryptark. A few of them were annoyingly hard to get. But finished now.
Fun game and would recommend, but can be a bit on the frustrating side at times if you're trying to maximise your money with bonus objectives.
Enjoying Rogue Trader. They have nailed the aesthetics and the in game fluff is nice and accurate to the setting. The mechanics are all so complicated though it’s so hard to work out what options to go for. I’m going to have to go back and respec some of the characters at some point I think.
Also playing Rogue Trader, almost at the point where I dropped the game due to story reasons, but will see if I can power through that horrible part now.
Playing Persona 3 Reload, just got to the section where Koromaru is introduced to the gang. I'm very happy with the quality of life changes for the most part, feels like a proper remake and coming from playing on the P3P version on the PSP, it's definitely weird being able to walk around in full 3D like it's Persona 5. I would just say that the game feels a little too bright in terms of the color palette, but otherwise they didn't skimp out on the gameplay or looks when it comes to quality. For once I'm playing with the dub, and they actually did a really good job matching the OG dub in English. Looking forward to seeing how much further changes I'll come across when I get farther in the game, but definitely planning to plat it.
In other gaming news, it looks like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has been confirmed to be yet the next in a long line of live service stinkers, looks like it lost enough money that WB outright said they lost 200 million dollars in revenue partly due to the game. Can't imagine that this game will last longer past the initial year after release, before they start shuttering the game for good. Honestly, they deserve this for what they did to try and ruin the legacy of the Arkham games. Looks like it's another dud live service game to add to Kanluwen's belt of bad game choices lol.
Ya, the executive boards of these developers get dollar signs in their eyes when they hear a game can make money perpetually. Then they turn out crappy games and wonder why they lost a bunch of money.
KamikazeCanuck wrote: Ya, the executive boards of these developers get dollar signs in their eyes when they hear a game can make money perpetually. Then they turn out crappy games and wonder why they lost a bunch of money.
Bluntly? It wasn't a crappy game, nor were they really doing anything that would "make money perpetually". They updated the store once a month and most of the actual character cosmetics were trash(in a couple of instances, literally! There's a set of "Super Zeroes" skins where some of the villains are wearing their archenemy's uniform made from garbage). The "most purchased" items were the callouts that other people would see and the Joker's "fast unlock".
It got repetitive certainly, and the forced boss fight each time a new episode started was not fun.
There were things that could have been done better, but it's not like every single one of the villains you played at launch were metahumans or anything like that. The gunplay made sense for all of them barring Shark.
The game was called "Kill the Justice League". It lived up to what it says on the tin and I'll stand by it being a fun game for the main story. All this nonsense about how it "ruins Arkham's legacy" misses the point of a game that literally opened up a multiverse of opportunities and took the chance to tie itself together to a mistake that was made in an earlier Arkham game with the story here as it not being a mistake, but a precursor.
Where the game falls flat is that it really requires a party of players. The AI won't do diddly to be useful.
Flinty wrote: Enjoying Rogue Trader. They have nailed the aesthetics and the in game fluff is nice and accurate to the setting. The mechanics are all so complicated though it’s so hard to work out what options to go for. I’m going to have to go back and respec some of the characters at some point I think.
I'm also back playing Rogue Trader after losing time with other games. I'm in to Chapter 4 now and I've been enjoying it a lot. I'm liking the fact that doing the horrible decisions aren't the "right" choices but they are the safest ones. A couple of things I let slip have really come back to bite me in the arse.
They've done a great job of making an immersive and realised 40k game on a large scale. Love the things like the different random warp jump events and bizarre things you can come across.
Also I've recently given Argenta a heavy bolter and man oh man is that great fun.
KamikazeCanuck wrote: Ya, the executive boards of these developers get dollar signs in their eyes when they hear a game can make money perpetually. Then they turn out crappy games and wonder why they lost a bunch of money.
Bluntly? It wasn't a crappy game, nor were they really doing anything that would "make money perpetually". They updated the store once a month and most of the actual character cosmetics were trash(in a couple of instances, literally! There's a set of "Super Zeroes" skins where some of the villains are wearing their archenemy's uniform made from garbage). The "most purchased" items were the callouts that other people would see and the Joker's "fast unlock".
It got repetitive certainly, and the forced boss fight each time a new episode started was not fun.
There were things that could have been done better, but it's not like every single one of the villains you played at launch were metahumans or anything like that. The gunplay made sense for all of them barring Shark.
The game was called "Kill the Justice League". It lived up to what it says on the tin and I'll stand by it being a fun game for the main story. All this nonsense about how it "ruins Arkham's legacy" misses the point of a game that literally opened up a multiverse of opportunities and took the chance to tie itself together to a mistake that was made in an earlier Arkham game with the story here as it not being a mistake, but a precursor.
Where the game falls flat is that it really requires a party of players. The AI won't do diddly to be useful.
Fair enough, I haven't played that one. I guess I always just think of Anthem where that probably could have been a good game but it was given the misson of being a perpetual money machine.
Been putting an unhealthy amount of hours into Terraria the last few days. I bought it ages ago, but hadn't played it until the other day. It's... addicting.
Got super bored playing Terra Invicta and trying to destroy so many alien fleets and mining bases and so on to get the pro alien and alien fleet strength down to like 20% of the overall fleet strength in the game before i can do my final mission to win the game. I got them down to 60 something percent before just getting fed up with it and playing other games.
I've been co-oping wh40k: gladius with a friend with its new content and just reached the end of the xenonauts 2 content in a new campaign.
As far as xenonauts 2 goes it's far more important to win the air war than the ground war but at the same time you really want to get a couple armor and gun upgrades before worrying about anything in ground battles for a good long while again.
Snrub wrote: Been putting an unhealthy amount of hours into Terraria the last few days. I bought it ages ago, but hadn't played it until the other day. It's... addicting.
Just have to find a few more veins of ore! Explore that cave a little further...
toasteroven wrote: Just have to find a few more veins of ore! Explore that cave a little further...
I manged to find an item early on that dectects nearby valuables (ore veins, hearts, chests, etc) and that has got to be one of the most insidiously time sapping things ever added to a game.
Oh what, there's another heart near by? Better fething spend 3 hours finding the goddamn thing.
A chest that will likely have half a dozen potions I already have plenty of, as well as some ropes and torches? Jeez better spend all night tracking that bad boy down!
Can I help myself? Absolutely not. Will I search out ever last thing it tells me is nearby? Yes I will.
At least the Crimtane ore has the good grace to glow and be obvious.
toasteroven wrote: Just have to find a few more veins of ore! Explore that cave a little further...
I manged to find an item early on that dectects nearby valuables (ore veins, hearts, chests, etc) and that has got to be one of the most insidiously time sapping things ever added to a game.
Oh what, there's another heart near by? Better fething spend 3 hours finding the goddamn thing.
A chest that will likely have half a dozen potions I already have plenty of, as well as some ropes and torches? Jeez better spend all night tracking that bad boy down!
Can I help myself? Absolutely not. Will I search out ever last thing it tells me is nearby? Yes I will.
At least the Crimtane ore has the good grace to glow and be obvious.
That really is the most dangerous item.
I've been trying a magic build (i usually do ranged) and diamonds are eluding me.
aside from helldivers, I am still playing dawn of war soul storm with the apocalypse mod, I have kind fallen into a slump when it comes to videogames these are the only 2 I can play for more than like 30 minutes.
Just bought “Still Wakes The Deep” which looks to be some Scottish Lovecraftian Horror on an oil rig in the 1970’s. Getting great reviews, so here we go!
nels1031 wrote: Just bought “Still Wakes The Deep” which looks to be some Scottish Lovecraftian Horror on an oil rig in the 1970’s. Getting great reviews, so here we go!
Well, its got some scary parts and great atmosphere, but after about 20 minutes in its another run/hide simulator with limited fighting back. Not to say its a bad game by any stretch, but this genre's formula is kind of stale for me. I'll give it a bit more but I'll I'll probably put it down and just watch someone's playthrough for the horror story element.
Spoiler:
Imagine the alien from "The Thing" but its on an oil rig. That's my first impression from getting chased by a corrupted crew member, but I'm
not sure on the nature of the creature/phenomena.
PowerWash simulator had new DLC released a bit ago, Alice in Wonderland, so wiled some hours away on that while listening to documentaries.
Also played through both Class of '09 and Class of '09: the Re-Up with a friend after it kept popping across our feeds and well.. they weren't kidding when they said it was the anti-dating visual novel hehe.
Steam Summer Sale is on so I grabbed the Shadow of Middle Earth games, BF1 and BFV.
BF1 is as cursed and fun as I remember back when it first launched. Sure it's not 100% historically accurate (Arisaka in the Italian Alps anyone?) but the authenticity is there and getting skewered by a bayonet charge is still terrifying.
BFV is as bad as I remember it being the first time around. It was so clearly made to fight off COD: Warzone that it loses any kind of authenticity trying to get you to buy cosmetics and bundles. Oh yes, there goes a British soldier wearing a bright red jacket with a gold-plated MP40 and blue face paint running around the Alps. The devs were so obviously told to focus on the battle royale craze that the rest of MP went to the dogs.
I'm playing a lot of Hearts of Iron 4 and total war warhammer 2 (as skaven with clan moulder/throt the unclean).
My co-op game with my brits and the usa friend seems to be going well enough.
So far in the campaign we've made sure greece never fell. Turkey also sided with us and we've made sure they wouldn't fall though they keep asking me for territory and i've had to tell them to eff off twice because i need it.
Vichy france never participated in the war and i stayed out of france during the german invasion which was recommended.
Also we've taken most of italy (which had a civil war with most of italy siding with us) and invaded other axis minor nations.
I also invaded both iraq and iran. Invading iraq sorta helped for oil but i probably should've done it solo. Iran was a bit of a different story as i probably needed help from my commonwealth nations to do it.
I also succeeded with the imperial conference completely and now i'm trying to make everybody into integrated puppets so i can turn into the UK commonwealth super friends powerhouse. Which will probably take years to do even opting out of doing focuses since i have most of the ones i need now.
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TWW2 is going ok. Clan Moulder seems to be not so hard even on hard difficulty which i heard is rather low difficulty for most total war vets. Kislev and one or two other factions are on their last legs. Clan moulder has weird win conditions though but to an extent it is partly focused on killing enemies for growth vat juices to unlock other research which can take time.
Grimskul wrote: Testing out the Speed Freeks open beta, the new stompa mode is interesting and a change of pace, I'm also glad they're showing off how you can start customizing your buggies.
How does one get in on that?
I just joined their game discord and was looking to possibly participate, as the game looks like something I’ve never played before, but could find no details. Has that window already opened and closed?
Olthannon wrote: Yes unfortunately it was a weekend a little while ago. Seemed quite fun, interested to see what they do next.
Thanks for the info.
I got it wishlisted on Steam, so maybe I'll get a notification when something like that happens again.
Yeah, there were two open beta events so far, the second time I got the notification when I had it wishlisted and subscribed via my email, so you should be able to get a heads up for the next one they do. It's great in the sense that it isn't a very big game file wise (at least for the demos so far) and you can just drop in and play so it's not a very time intensive game from what I can see which is kind of up my alley at this point in my career.
Had to ban myself from playing Terreria for a while. It was getting a touch unhealthy. I haven't sunk this much time into a single game since when I first discovered Counter-strike: Source.
flamingkillamajig wrote: I'm playing a lot of Hearts of Iron 4 and total war warhammer 2 (as skaven with clan moulder/throt the unclean).
My co-op game with my brits and the usa friend seems to be going well enough.
So far in the campaign we've made sure greece never fell. Turkey also sided with us and we've made sure they wouldn't fall though they keep asking me for territory and i've had to tell them to eff off twice because i need it.
Vichy france never participated in the war and i stayed out of france during the german invasion which was recommended.
Also we've taken most of italy (which had a civil war with most of italy siding with us) and invaded other axis minor nations.
I also invaded both iraq and iran. Invading iraq sorta helped for oil but i probably should've done it solo. Iran was a bit of a different story as i probably needed help from my commonwealth nations to do it.
I also succeeded with the imperial conference completely and now i'm trying to make everybody into integrated puppets so i can turn into the UK commonwealth super friends powerhouse. Which will probably take years to do even opting out of doing focuses since i have most of the ones i need now.
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TWW2 is going ok. Clan Moulder seems to be not so hard even on hard difficulty which i heard is rather low difficulty for most total war vets. Kislev and one or two other factions are on their last legs. Clan moulder has weird win conditions though but to an extent it is partly focused on killing enemies for growth vat juices to unlock other research which can take time.
Your biggest help in lowering autonomy is the humble convoy.
We managed to retake all of turkey and took some of soviet union's lost territory but turkey grabbed it (probably because it's a different faction). I also encircled like 30+ divisions and wiped them all out in turkey. We then managed to grab a chunk of one of the axis minor nation's territory after heading into europe.
My friend also started taking a bunch more territory in italy again.
When we ended our playthrough for today my friend was invading Western Europe with a minimal D-Day. That said his constant naval invasions open up new fronts and end up helping a lot until the enemy stabilizes the front and then we have to do another naval invasion for the same thing.
Oddly i've neglected the Asian front of the war and my USA co-op partner has been handling that side of things as well as portions of the European front.
That said my air superiority and significant naval force has been invaluable. I just wish i had a lot more motorized or APC regiments to make up for my lack of tanks (i had to de-prioritize something with only 5 research slots).
Also all but india and like south africa are integrated puppets now which will help when i want to make the Commonwealth super-friends.
If i recall germany is out of manpower in our game which means they can't reinforce armies or have new planes or anything.
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Updates:
We took control of all of france and vichy france has almost fully capitulated even tho it has no land in europe now. Germany capitulated and all their land went to soviet union for some reason which declared war on us just before germany fell even though it was about 10% away from capitulation itself and most of the war had been fought and land taken by the US/UK alliance of me and my co-op partner (and commonwealth allies). We both considered that BS but what are you gonna do. Managed lots of encirclements which wiped a lot of enemy forces out.
Playing more Terraria, decided rather than try to race to the finish I'm going to relax and build a zoo, inside of a giant tree. A tree that I make myself. Should be fun and distracting.
Mechwarrior 5 in coop, just about every battle is a struggle to survive (mainly due to the many-many-many mods we installed to enhance the experience) but damn it, feels good to finally scrape together enough c-bills to exchange that Firestarter for a Phoenix Hawk and that Commando heh, for a Catapult. 😆
Also, Scorn was on sale and after a lot of uhm-ing and ah-ing, I decided to get it. It nails the atmosphere and utterly alien surroundings to a T, but damn it, why did they feel the need to include such a gakky combat system?
Olthannon wrote: Yes unfortunately it was a weekend a little while ago. Seemed quite fun, interested to see what they do next.
Thanks for the info.
I got it wishlisted on Steam, so maybe I'll get a notification when something like that happens again.
Heads up that the Speed Freeks game just got an update, looks like Early Access release is around August 6, 2024, so definitely put a pin in that date to see how it looks like around then.
Been playing a Mycenean campaign in Total War: Pharoahs Dynasties, the course correction update for this game that no one asked for.
Might just be that I'm a Total War junkie and I just wanted something different, instead of another WH3 playthrough, but this is now a pretty solid entry into the historical side of the TW series. Still has some baked in flaws and too many "systems" to manage, but its been fun.
Funnily enough, not even interested in any of the original factions, just enjoying conquering Greece as Mycenea, before I hop over the Aegean sea and take over bronze age Turkiye or move southeast to attack Egypt. Once I'm bored with this, I'll do a Mesopotamian campaign, but their unit roster looks weak and too "finessey".
Back on playing Vampire: The Masquerade; Bloodlines as a Ventrue Camarilla sycophant/psychopath and just managed to make my way through the infamous sewer section. I was going to skip it, but the door that allowed that seemed to have disappeared for some reason, could've been due to the new Unofficial Patch update? The sewer seemed to go past quite quick so it wasn't too bad. I've played through VTMB quite a few times now and I just keep loving it more and more.
Getting back on Kerbal Space Program lately. Maybe now I'll commit to it and start doing the harder (but more fun) stuff, like longer interplanetary missions. I tend to start a career playthrough, get to Mun and Minmus while doing a few other contracts along the way, then I get sidetracked by other games and by time I come back to KSP I'm so rusty that I need to start over.
HOIV Great war redux as Austria-hungary, because i like pain seemingly.
Though i decided to go the "nice" path and federalised the empire, basically baby sat an empire. Also won the great war with under 200k casualities in late 1918.
While it allows extremely unfluffy combos, the gameplay is quite fun and good enough for a few minutes fiddling with over the course of the day.
As with most mobile games, after the honeymoon period it’s a big grind to advance your guys, ut I’m still enjoying it.
Tacticus is extremely fun and addictive, and could absolutely be a huge money sink if you let it (I've spent a little bit but not a whole lot on it since I started playing). I always look forward to seeing what new characters come out.
I find that most of the matches fit the "oh, I have a few minutes to spare" time limit, and the graphics and artwork work really well. I've managed to avoid spending anything, but I end up watching quite a few adds, so they get their value out of me
Bouncing in between Total War Warhammer 2 as clan moulder/skaven and Hearts of iron 4 with co-op brits (me) and a friend as (usa) but more japan singleplayer ironman campaign. I don't think it's entirely as hard as Not online said it's just not always the most fun.
So in HoI4 we've taken out the commonwealth nations and france and i took the east coast of india, most of the islands and australia. The first 2 had a lot of resources and i mostly just wanted australia since i took about half of it through invasion and took most of the islands through invasion for resources. I also got a bunch of military factories. The Soviet Union is also about to fall which means the only thing i have to fight now is all of China. I mostly saved them for last oddly because i believed getting bogged down in china was a very bad idea and i feel justified in that.
In TWW2 most of the Empire has been taken out and their armies are like entirely wiped out. They only have like 8 or so territories left and they'll be gone. However that's left an even bigger problem being that the massive Grimgor's super confederated greenskins is by a lot the strongest army and every army he has includes a Waaagh! army meaning i'll have to do ambushes and lightning strike battles a lot. I think i have like 38 territories myself while greenies have like 50+. Anyway it should be interesting.
I downloaded a game that's a guilty pleasure for me. Resident Evil 6.
It's just so bad, in so many ways, Over scripted, campaigns with bad stories that are badly paced and feel like a chore to play through. But I love the Mercenaries mode and I can play it again and again. Trying...emphasis on trying, to play through Ada's campaign to unlock her for Mercenaries mode, but...it just isn't fun, lol.
Adrassil wrote: I downloaded a game that's a guilty pleasure for me. Resident Evil 6.
It's just so bad, in so many ways, Over scripted, campaigns with bad stories that are badly paced and feel like a chore to play through. But I love the Mercenaries mode and I can play it again and again. Trying...emphasis on trying, to play through Ada's campaign to unlock her for Mercenaries mode, but...it just isn't fun, lol.
It's definitely one of the low points for the series when it comes to its horror roots. It's a full on Michael Bay action packed whirlwind of nonsense that really only shines when you play coop and Mercenaries mode as you mentioned, I've played it with my cousin several times just for the laughs and it was during the era where split screen coop games were at their peak. Not gonna lie, I do miss couch coop games like Army of Two, now it's mostly sidescrollers or stuff like A Way Out/It Takes Two that's left in the market for console games.
flamingkillamajig wrote: Bouncing in between Total War Warhammer 2 as clan moulder/skaven and Hearts of iron 4 with co-op brits (me) and a friend as (usa) but more japan singleplayer ironman campaign. I don't think it's entirely as hard as Not online said it's just not always the most fun.
TBF i am probably still traumatised from the BICE mod in regards to japan soooo...
But the vanilia HOIV jap tree needs a serious rework regardless. _____________________________________
I am doing a gnoblar horde run in WHTW 3. Fun, but a bit rough around the edges still.
flamingkillamajig wrote: Bouncing in between Total War Warhammer 2 as clan moulder/skaven and Hearts of iron 4 with co-op brits (me) and a friend as (usa) but more japan singleplayer ironman campaign. I don't think it's entirely as hard as Not online said it's just not always the most fun.
TBF i am probably still traumatised from the BICE mod in regards to japan soooo...
But the vanilia HOIV jap tree needs a serious rework regardless.
_____________________________________
I am doing a gnoblar horde run in WHTW 3.
Fun, but a bit rough around the edges still.
I mean when you don't call in japan's two puppets for the war china just sorta conquered a small bit of japan and stays there and never declares war on either puppet faction. Then you easily block them off by the ocean and you can basically avoid china until you deem it necessary not to. Fighting the Dutch East indies comes first and then maybe some other stuff once germany fights poland. Maybe i took too long but it's partly a matter of picking and choosing your battles. Once ww2 heats up in europe i just went to town attacking the commonwealth territories. It's easier when they're bogged down in multi-front wars.
As i said in this game even on historical it's not that Japan fully sucks it's just that if you're playing historical you gotta know when the best windows of opportunity are. You get bogged down in China more often than not and it's just much better to invade all the resource rich islands and places like australia. I am sort of a little bummed though since i was really starting to hit australia really hard and take all their crap and took all but the capital of british malaya and all of the dutch east indies if not almost all of it. I mean i'd have honestly gone for india right after if germany and italy didn't invade the UK and capitulate it. This is all while axis were also fighting the soviet union.
The game is pretty much in the bag now since the USA won't join allies because the faction has been defeated and all their lands absorbed by axis in this hell world game. Comintern's Soviet Union are almost fully capitulated as well. Honestly at this point we could almost fight the USA if we really had to and still probably win with all the territory we've gained. The only real likely threat left is the Chinese Front and they probably don't even have as many factories as my nation does. Likely when the soviet union capitulates i could finally call in my puppets and invade china more easily through it. Then again i already have an open front so it's probably not too needed atm.
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I agree on Japan needing a re-work however. Compared to the British Focus tree Japan's is hot garbage. In many ways even france has some more exciting Focuses even if it's basically about making France suck slightly less before germany almost always rolls over them.
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I find it pretty hilarious without gnoblar support you can't man walls as ogre kingdoms in tww3. It's funny because those are the most garbage units ogres have but i guess it gives them a purpose so enemies don't man your walls and use it as a way to bombard you from manned walls with archers, guns or whatever crap they have. Also ogres must be fairly easy to defend fortresses/castles against as long as the gates stay intact and walls weren't destroyed beforehand.
It's a really convenient feature, but REALLY easy to abuse to the point where you have to discipline yourself to not remove the game flow. Kind of a fun exercise in game checkpointing (recently cleared SMW Tubular with it and great for skipping the first part but can sap the fun/frustration of the balloon section).
Rogue Trader... Just hit the Edge of Twilight encounter, and at this point I may not bother finishing the game.
I have not been particularly optimising my team, but I've been comfortably beatsticking everything so far. However after 4 hours of crunching my way through 2-3 hard engagements and 2 boss-level engagements without much of a break, it dumps you into a difficulty spike from hell and my guys are getting creamed.
I could re-load from before the start of the thread and re-spec all of my team to Netlists before pushing back through the grind, or I could just give up...
Flinty wrote: Rogue Trader... Just hit the Edge of Twilight encounter, and at this point I may not bother finishing the game.
I have not been particularly optimising my team, but I've been comfortably beatsticking everything so far. However after 4 hours of crunching my way through 2-3 hard engagements and 2 boss-level engagements without much of a break, it dumps you into a difficulty spike from hell and my guys are getting creamed.
I could re-load from before the start of the thread and re-spec all of my team to Netlists before pushing back through the grind, or I could just give up...
The boss fight against the Lord of Change?
Yeah, that's a tough sequence. I for sure gave up and started over on a different save to prepare myself.
If memory serves, use as much area damage as possible to whittle down the Pink's and which ever one is shielding the Lord of Change.
Honestly, I think I even reduced difficulty specifically because of this level. Its various large groups, traps/hazards out the butt, a defiler, a dreadnought, more groups, then it puts you against the LoC and friends. Pretty brutal.
Funnily enough, I just clocked Rogue Trader a couple of days ago and...well the ending was quite disappointing, in all honesty.
My Iconoclast RT
Spoiler:
chose to have Nomos take control of the C'tan shard and he'd made sure to teach Nomos to value human life so the Koronus Expanse became Independent from the Imperium of Mankind.
I don't know what I expected from what would happen in the ending slides for each character, faction, etc. but it was still disappointing, lol.
LunarSol wrote: It's a really convenient feature, but REALLY easy to abuse to the point where you have to discipline yourself to not remove the game flow. Kind of a fun exercise in game checkpointing (recently cleared SMW Tubular with it and great for skipping the first part but can sap the fun/frustration of the balloon section).
Yeah. It’s definitely easy to abuse.
But, for something like Super R-Type it’s very welcome, as you’re a One Hit Wonder, and can be taken out by barely clipping scenery. So it greatly reduces frustration.
Automatically Appended Next Post: And now back to Tears of the Kingdom, from the top.
It’s such a good game! Combat is super tough starting out as you’re typically squished in just a couple of hit. But….the combat system rewards careful timing (like perfect dodge giving you a rush attack which tends to kill most man sized stuff), as well as sneaky sneak sneak.
Add in the Ultrahand and Fuse shenanigans, and so many problems come with multiple solutions, all valid and deadly in their own way.
I've been finishing up a coop game with my cousin called Evil West that we got for free from PS Plus. It's a bit of a blast to the past since it has the vibes of the old coop 3rd person shooter games from the PS3/Xbox 360 era, and while it is buggy in some areas its pretty fun otherwise, though there are some steep difficulty jumps in certain sections (also probably didn't help we were playing on the hardest difficulty). Van Helsing meets cowboys is a fun concept though.
Single player wise, I've finished off Persona 3 Reload and the ending still hit me pretty hard even though I already played the original. Definitely one of the better remakes and looking forward to playing the DLC once it goes on sale. Moving onto God of War Ragnarok after waiting for it to go on sale for forever.
In other gaming news, I'm glad Black Myth Wukong is doing well, and I think it's one of those cases (similar to movies) where a lot of journalists/critics are trying to hate on it for arbitrary reasons while normal people are enjoying it for being a fun game with no politics or forced diversity in it. It's shocking the amount of hate spewed onto it from some online reviewers relative to how many people are playing it. Feels like another failed attempt at trying to ruin its sales like Hogwart's Legacy and another example of the Streisand Effect.
Meanwhile, other live-service slop like Concord is doing terrible, shockingly even worse than the Gollum game if you can believe it in terms of player count. There's lots of copium going around by the developers and reviewers, to the point where they're actively attacking people and changing things from behind the scenes to cover up what a colossal failure it is on launch.
Dustborn is also a joke of a game that has basically no one playing it and for good reason when it unironically lets you act "triggered" as one of the mechanics of the game.
Very interesting to see the successes and losers of certain games of this year so far, and I'm hoping that it sends a message of a focus on good gameplay and solid storytelling instead of pandering when it comes to more good games being created.
Currently playing Creatures of Ava with my daughter. Cute cartoony sci fi adventure based around rescuing adorable animals from a planet under threat from some kind of creeping nasty growth stuff. Light parkour and dodge combat. Restful and pretty. Only problem is reining in my impatience when my daughter wanders around aimlessly rather than acting with laser focus on the objective
I've been playing Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void campaign (protoss campaign) and i'm wondering what i'm doing with my life choices playing it somehow. I wanted to play diablo 4 if my computer could run it but what started off as good reviews went to bad and then went back and forth to bad currently.
I feel kind of embarrassed playing blizzard games these days and i only liked diablo 2 and starcraft 1. Still annoyed i can't just play legacy diablo 2 without the obnoxious updated graphics. Stop murdering my nostalgia blizzard.
Picked up Visions of Mana last night. Beautiful looking game but I'm not far enough to say if its any good or not. Combat is fun, but a little floaty. Enjoyed the tutorial boss though, so I'm hoping the combat picks up once I get past the rabites.
Very early into a campaign in "Lord of the Rings : Return to Moria" a survival/building game wherein you are a dwarf (of the Iron Hills variety when I created my character) helping Gimli rebuild Khazad-dum.
Not really my cup of tea so far (these games rarely are, mainly Green Hell being the big standout for me) but for 20 bucks on Steam, it was pretty much an impulse buy. Maybe when I get deeper into it and start building grand structures, it'll ignite something in me.
Apparently this was an "Epic Exclusive", so hopefully all of the bugs and ugliness got play-tested on those people.
Continuing on as my ruthless selfish Ventrue, up to the Giovanni mansion. I completed the side quest for the two old retired assassins. I was going to exploit them for cash, but I like both the old fella so much I couldn't bring myself to do it, so made them put aside their differences and become friends.
Still absolutely loving Rogue Trader. Just managed to complete chapter 3 and escape from Commorragh this morning. Marazhai is a hoot, very glad I managed to pick him up in the process.
flamingkillamajig wrote: I've been playing Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void campaign (protoss campaign) and i'm wondering what i'm doing with my life choices playing it somehow. I wanted to play diablo 4 if my computer could run it but what started off as good reviews went to bad and then went back and forth to bad currently.
I feel kind of embarrassed playing blizzard games these days and i only liked diablo 2 and starcraft 1. Still annoyed i can't just play legacy diablo 2 without the obnoxious updated graphics. Stop murdering my nostalgia blizzard.
So, you're not liking Starcraft 2? I keep thinking I'll get around to it eventually..
flamingkillamajig wrote: I've been playing Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void campaign (protoss campaign) and i'm wondering what i'm doing with my life choices playing it somehow. I wanted to play diablo 4 if my computer could run it but what started off as good reviews went to bad and then went back and forth to bad currently.
I feel kind of embarrassed playing blizzard games these days and i only liked diablo 2 and starcraft 1. Still annoyed i can't just play legacy diablo 2 without the obnoxious updated graphics. Stop murdering my nostalgia blizzard.
So, you're not liking Starcraft 2? I keep thinking I'll get around to it eventually..
It's alright. I wish my crappy old computer could handle diablo 4 as it actually has a better aesthetic and sound vs diablo 3 which i also played. Still confused there's no DIABLO in a diablo game but i heard diablo 3 caused that and to be fair Lilith is a legit character in-universe and makes sense. I didn't really like the designs for diablo 3 since it felt like it was somewhat designed in the WoW image. I can say the same for starcraft 2 actually but at least it's got gore. I will say the cinematics and some of the art screens are good. The gameplay of starcraft 2 is also good. The main issue comes from story for Legacy of the Void seeming a bit meh. I think part of the problem was starcraft 1 and brood wars had a story between missions where everybody would talk to each other and though being more interactive a lot of the side characters are a bit unnecessary. The best story of starcraft 2 came out of Wings of Liberty imo and the other 2 sequels didn't really have that. Some of the missions are very interesting.
My other issue with Blizzard games is Blizzard itself. I was never really a big Overwatch fan either but the 2nd game for it did poorly. I'm really only into diablo and starcraft. It's a shame we never will get Starcraft Ghost but i'm guessing the nova ops at the end of Starcraft 2 are the closest thing we'll ever get to that. Speaking of Nova i kinda wish Jim Raynor put a bullet in kerrigan's head and then woo'ed nova or something. I really hate how over-powered they made Kerrigan at the end of Starcraft 2 and how she is basically like Goku from dbz. I dunno it was better when her top tier manipulation made her so deadly rather than just having her with the most OP strength. Of course she tricked everybody so much you'd be a fool to trust her anymore. I dunno i wish more for Starcraft 1's story but everything else be Starcraft 2 like with the engine and A.I. I once downloaded a mod that did that but i forget about it now.
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If you want maybe we could play starcraft 2 in a 2vs2 game. I'm not really at all that good only doing high silver or low gold at the best of times. I haven't even really played competitive Starcraft 2 in years and i was extremely bad at it in any competitive form.
I'll chime in on Starcraft 2, as a purely casual and very intermittent player. The campaign is a lot of fun, and it's interesting having the research choices to customize your units between games in ways that alter them for the whole campaing. I never got into the multiplayer, because you've got to git good- and I only got older with slower reflexes since Starcraft 1.
A lot of the new units are quite interesting, and I think there's plenty worth exploring. It'll never be one of my main games, but I'm not mad I bought it, if that makes sense.
Just clocked Vampire: The Masquerade- Bloodlines and got the Camarilla ending with my Camarilla bootlicking Ventrue. The 1st time I've got that ending as I've got the Anarch, and Independent endings already. Now might do the stupid endings, joining forces with LaCroix and the even stupider ending. Joining forces with the Kuei-Jin.
I know i'm not gonna be good and never really tried to be. I'll admit even starcraft 1 wasn't really my thing. I much preferred the xcom series (except chimera squad though i could give it another shot) and the dawn of war series for wh40k.
While i think starcraft 2 is good part of me likes to imagine squads for infantry was the right choice in rts rather than singular model units.
Also you're totally right on the money with actions or clicks per minute being absurd. I don't have the reflexes for that or the patience.
I suppose i'm unsure of why minerals and gas as well as a gajillion builders and maybe building structures had to stay but i suppose that's ok. Starcraft 2 did well so what am i complaining about as a casual. I prefer somewhat updated systems that Star Wars empire at war had or even dawn of war 1 (had builders but no units collecting resources) or maybe Wargame. Then again Starcraft 2 outlasted em all but that might just be because some people would buy anything with a blizzard logo on it back in the day.
Broke my own cardinal rule and pre-ordered a game which went on early play: Space Marine II.
So far, it has kept the best aspects of the original game, while making improvements to the product as well: more visual options, more weapons, more brutal animations. Swimming through hordes of bugs, laying waste to everything around you.
So far it has definitely NOT disappointed, and has been worth the cost of admission.
Ensis Ferrae wrote: Broke my own cardinal rule and pre-ordered a game which went on early play: Space Marine II.
So far, it has kept the best aspects of the original game, while making improvements to the product as well: more visual options, more weapons, more brutal animations. Swimming through hordes of bugs, laying waste to everything around you.
So far it has definitely NOT disappointed, and has been worth the cost of admission.
That's good to hear. I've been on the fence on whether or not I'll be committing to playing it on launch day since a few friends and I are interested in starting off the coop campaign together.
I'm currently wrapping up GoW: Ragnarok to free up time for it and I've been playing Warpforged's event where you can play as Titus.
Building on what I was saying earlier about Concord though, I never thought it would do so badly that Sony actually delisted it after two weeks and just gave refunds to everyone, people have been comparing it to ET with how badly its performed since they put a budget of 200 million with a supposed 25,000 copies sold whereas ET was 69 million budget with 2.6 million sold. In a weird way the physical copies have become a collector's item in terms of it being something historical in the future of being one of the biggest video game flops in history. I'm sure our resident live service afficionado, Kanluwen, was sad that they missed out on jumping on the non-existent bandwagon.
This alongside Ubislop's terrible SW: Outlaws being as bad as the trailers showed it to be, is making it look a pretty big year of expensive game releases crashing.
I think Fairgame$ is slated for the upcoming potential bomb, going to get the popcorn and chair ready for the next one.
Ubisoft potentially has another disaster of a major release this year, as AC: Shadows is due out in November.
Just about everything that I've seen regarding Space Marine 2 has been very positive - except for maybe the publication reviewers (I think I saw one list it as a '75', though I didn't read the review). The player complaints have focused around things such as insufficient customization options for Chaos space marines in the multi-player (no spikes, for example).
Started playing Hearts of Iron 4 again but this time as the UK. I think i'm getting the hang of it more since i'm having time to see the various stats. Hard to say until the actual wars start. Might have to rely on transport planes, railroads and similar for supply issues once the war gets started. I think i handled things fairly well for now but it's still in the mid 1938 period before the actual ww2 starts.
I wish i could play several games including sins of a solar empire 2 and space marine 2 but go figure my computer sucks way too hard for any of that. Ofc a video game controller is probably the superior way to play space marine 2 anyway.
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@Eumerin:
I thought i heard the reason why people were unhappy with chaos was they made them into primaris equivalents of their space marine counterparts. I wouldn't know as i haven't played. I've just mostly watched the singleplayer campaign on Twitch.
Eumerin wrote: Ubisoft potentially has another disaster of a major release this year, as AC: Shadows is due out in November.
Just about everything that I've seen regarding Space Marine 2 has been very positive - except for maybe the publication reviewers (I think I saw one list it as a '75', though I didn't read the review). The player complaints have focused around things such as insufficient customization options for Chaos space marines in the multi-player (no spikes, for example).
Oh yeah, AC: Shadows is a whole nother can of worms that can lead you down a rabbit hole of shocking ridiculousness on the side of Ubisoft, which ranges from stealing and not crediting art from various sources, to outright fabricating history regarding Yasuke and trying to dismiss the backlash from Japan on how they've misrepresented so much of their culture. One of the highlights is seeing Yasuke go into combat and it unironically starts playing hip hop music as the BGM, like you can't make this stuff up.
It's a whole rollercoaster of how Ubisoft is memeing its game out of existence before it even gets released. It's clear they have no idea where to go since Ghost of Tsushima did it so much better before they did, so they have to try and pull the diversity angle to try and compete.
Really hope that's the one that bombs and takes Ubisoft out of commission once and for all.
Thing is, if they'd just made it a more or less standard AC game set in Japan, they probably would have done fine. Sure, they'd get Tsushima comparisons. But it's AC. It's a popular series. People would buy it just for the name.
Of course, that would still leave things like the copyright violations...
Ubisoft has managed to put its foot in its mouth in a very arrogant fashion so many times where this game is concerned. I don't know if they could have screwed up more if they'd tried.
On an unrelated note, I grabbed Astro Bot. It's pretty neat, and I'm having fun with it. Lots of references to Playstation (your mothership is literally a gigantic PS5), and various video game franchises - not all of which have appeared on the Playstation.
Eumerin wrote: Thing is, if they'd just made it a more or less standard AC game set in Japan, they probably would have done fine. Sure, they'd get Tsushima comparisons. But it's AC. It's a popular series. People would buy it just for the name.
Of course, that would still leave things like the copyright violations...
Ubisoft has managed to put its foot in its mouth in a very arrogant fashion so many times where this game is concerned. I don't know if they could have screwed up more if they'd tried.
On an unrelated note, I grabbed Astro Bot. It's pretty neat, and I'm having fun with it. Lots of references to Playstation (your mothership is literally a gigantic PS5), and various video game franchises - not all of which have appeared on the Playstation.
Legit, the dumb part is they already have a female kunoichi as the other protagonist as far as I'm aware, you would think that would have been sufficient from a diversity angle. It's weird that after making a bunch of original main characters for all the other locations in the world, only after they arrive in Japan, THEN they want to make the main character to be someone that is a historical figure and I'm almost certain it's because they have a specific skin color. It's as if being Asian isn't diverse enough for them. People have been asking for an AC in Japan for the longest time, they've resisted really hard until after GoT dropped and they were shocked at how well it did for some reason and wanted to chase after the bandwagon but in the worst possible way.
Also, cool you got Astro Bot! That's next on my list after I get through Space Marine 2. I really enjoyed Astro's playroom when I first tried it out when I got my PS5, it was nostalgic seeing how they brought up older games like Killzone and Spyro, they did a really good job of actually utilizing the haptic feedback of the controller. I'm assuming they've continued that trend for Astro Bot?
Grimskul wrote: It's as if being Asian isn't diverse enough for them.
Apparently some have started to refer to Asians as "white adjacent". Is that relevant to the decision to use Yasuke as a protagonist? No idea, but it might be.
And that's all that I'm going to say on this particular topic.
Also, cool you got Astro Bot! That's next on my list after I get through Space Marine 2. I really enjoyed Astro's playroom when I first tried it out when I got my PS5, it was nostalgic seeing how they brought up older games like Killzone and Spyro, they did a really good job of actually utilizing the haptic feedback of the controller. I'm assuming they've continued that trend for Astro Bot?
Yes, the game makes use of both the feedback and spatial functions of the controller. How you hold your controller is sometimes more important than which buttons you're pressing.
Recently bought a switch lite, generally to play the theatrythm game on which only came out for ps and switch (and I no longer own a tv nor want one, and sold my ps4 a long time ago), also played some pokemon arceus on it now and then but recently got this game called fire emblem warriors three hopes (also had three houses but returned it because the whole hub-section was a chore I do not enjoy investing in, heavily focussed on relationships and such sequences and fetch quests etc).
Anyway, so the warriors games I'm familiar with, and this has a nice take on it giving you a LOT of influence on the strategising aspect, being able to direct your units to attack, defend and even cover objectives such as opening chests or administering controls to open areas etc. Every unit is playable, their classes are all quite unique and work in a sort of rock paper scissors system against eachother.
I can really recommend it, it takes a day or two to get into it but the fun is increasing.
Eumerin wrote: Ubisoft potentially has another disaster of a major release this year, as AC: Shadows is due out in November.
Just about everything that I've seen regarding Space Marine 2 has been very positive - except for maybe the publication reviewers (I think I saw one list it as a '75', though I didn't read the review). The player complaints have focused around things such as insufficient customization options for Chaos space marines in the multi-player (no spikes, for example).
Oh yeah, AC: Shadows is a whole nother can of worms that can lead you down a rabbit hole of shocking ridiculousness on the side of Ubisoft, which ranges from stealing and not crediting art from various sources, to outright fabricating history regarding Yasuke and trying to dismiss the backlash from Japan on how they've misrepresented so much of their culture. One of the highlights is seeing Yasuke go into combat and it unironically starts playing hip hop music as the BGM, like you can't make this stuff up.
It's a whole rollercoaster of how Ubisoft is memeing its game out of existence before it even gets released. It's clear they have no idea where to go since Ghost of Tsushima did it so much better before they did, so they have to try and pull the diversity angle to try and compete.
Really hope that's the one that bombs and takes Ubisoft out of commission once and for all.
Saw you in the rings of power thread too and had me wonder wether you watch itsagundam on yt? He has great takes on these subjects that I see somewhat echoed in your posts. Quality.
As for my take on AC: Shadows.. they should've gone with the tengu route of the first main char they came up with, but perhaps they are afraid of revealing too much about its origins stirring up a new storm on the polarization-era internet.. not sure.
Yasuke is such an uninteresting character in actual history that it instantly shows where DEI its priorities lie, its all about the diversification of -everything- ignoring context and workability and it shows in "popular" media today, ofcourse the backlash of its consumers is declared either ignorance or bigotry, losing money over this apparently isn't a factor.. and one would wonder about the industry still relying on sales or subsidies.
I would raise this; can you imagine setting up a vg-company today developing a game set around the zulu'-british war and having the protagonist and player character from the perspective and side of the zulu' be a pale viking who's anscestors happened to be in the area out of displacement (A large fleet sailed in 859 south from Seine in France and on through Gibraltar strait.) because that is exactly what making yasuke the central character of AC shadows is like.
Leopold Helveine wrote: Recently bought a switch lite, generally to play the theatrythm game on which only came out for ps and switch (and I no longer own a tv nor want one, and sold my ps4 a long time ago), also played some pokemon arceus on it now and then but recently got this game called fire emblem warriors three hopes (also had three houses but returned it because the whole hub-section was a chore I do not enjoy investing in, heavily focussed on relationships and such sequences and fetch quests etc).
Anyway, so the warriors games I'm familiar with, and this has a nice take on it giving you a LOT of influence on the strategising aspect, being able to direct your units to attack, defend and even cover objectives such as opening chests or administering controls to open areas etc. Every unit is playable, their classes are all quite unique and work in a sort of rock paper scissors system against eachother.
I can really recommend it, it takes a day or two to get into it but the fun is increasing.
Eumerin wrote: Ubisoft potentially has another disaster of a major release this year, as AC: Shadows is due out in November.
Just about everything that I've seen regarding Space Marine 2 has been very positive - except for maybe the publication reviewers (I think I saw one list it as a '75', though I didn't read the review). The player complaints have focused around things such as insufficient customization options for Chaos space marines in the multi-player (no spikes, for example).
Oh yeah, AC: Shadows is a whole nother can of worms that can lead you down a rabbit hole of shocking ridiculousness on the side of Ubisoft, which ranges from stealing and not crediting art from various sources, to outright fabricating history regarding Yasuke and trying to dismiss the backlash from Japan on how they've misrepresented so much of their culture. One of the highlights is seeing Yasuke go into combat and it unironically starts playing hip hop music as the BGM, like you can't make this stuff up.
It's a whole rollercoaster of how Ubisoft is memeing its game out of existence before it even gets released. It's clear they have no idea where to go since Ghost of Tsushima did it so much better before they did, so they have to try and pull the diversity angle to try and compete.
Really hope that's the one that bombs and takes Ubisoft out of commission once and for all.
Saw you in the rings of power thread too and had me wonder wether you watch itsagundam on yt? He has great takes on these subjects that I see somewhat echoed in your posts. Quality.
As for my take on AC: Shadows.. they should've gone with the tengu route of the first main char they came up with, but perhaps they are afraid of revealing too much about its origins stirring up a new storm on the polarization-era internet.. not sure.
Yasuke is such an uninteresting character in actual history that it instantly shows where DEI its priorities lie, its all about the diversification of -everything- ignoring context and workability and it shows in "popular" media today, ofcourse the backlash of its consumers is declared either ignorance or bigotry, losing money over this apparently isn't a factor.. and one would wonder about the industry still relying on sales or subsidies.
I would raise this; can you imagine setting up a vg-company today developing a game set around the zulu'-british war and having the protagonist and player character from the perspective and side of the zulu' be a pale viking who's anscestors happened to be in the area out of displacement (A large fleet sailed in 859 south from Seine in France and on through Gibraltar strait.) because that is exactly what making yasuke the central character of AC shadows is like.
Yeah, a fair bit of the AC: Shadows discourse I got from It's a Gundam's videos, he does a pretty good job summarizing all the things Ubisoft keeps doing to mess up before their release. Always cool to find another fan of his work.
But yeah, your analogy is on point and it's unfortunate that so many modern games even before release has to preface that the game "isn't for you" or attacks people's legitimate criticism because they can't have the game stand on its own two legs.
Been playing some Spyro reignited. The Gnasty Gnorc boss fight at the end is a major pain since it has no checkpoints.
And played some Total War Shogun 1. Just got it late last year and so far I've only been able to conquer about 1/4 of Japan. The little cutscenes for events are sure cute.
Oh btw couldn't help but mention that I am really looking forward to buying and playing Zelda echoes of wisdom, I'm a middle aged man and all and playing as a little chibi girl isn't exactly very manly but the gameplay looks the most -fun- and original with the tone set on -exploration and experimentation- and that is what I have been missing a lot in gaming for a very very long time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kIXfBL6T3A
LunarSol wrote: Picked up Visions of Mana last night. Beautiful looking game but I'm not far enough to say if its any good or not. Combat is fun, but a little floaty. Enjoyed the tutorial boss though, so I'm hoping the combat picks up once I get past the rabites.
Heading into the endgame on this one and its great, but definitely falls into a lot of JRPG cliches. I'd say the worst part is definitely that early on its pacing is pretty sluggish, both in terms of story and gameplay. You get these massive setup stories for each character that often involve traversing through some absolutely gorgeous but kind of empty landscapes. They mostly cap off with some very impressive boss encounters, but it feels padded. Oddly, later on that sense of padding goes right out and the end game turns into a series of tightly designed levels with multiple fantastic boss encounters per dungeon and the game really finds its groove.
Leopold Helveine wrote: Oh btw couldn't help but mention that I am really looking forward to buying and playing Zelda echoes of wisdom, I'm a middle aged man and all and playing as a little chibi girl isn't exactly very manly but the gameplay looks the most -fun- and original with the tone set on -exploration and experimentation- and that is what I have been missing a lot in gaming for a very very long time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kIXfBL6T3A
Oh I’m definitely game for that one come payday. 2d Top Down 2.5D Zelda was a decent chunk of my childhood, so very much wanting more.
Got back into Hunt: Showdown (now called Hunt: Showdown 1896).
Having decent success as a loner just killing creatures and ambushing other players while they are trying to do the same. Gunplay is a bit sluggish and dated, but it has a great atmosphere and has tons of tense moments.
Leopold Helveine wrote: Oh btw couldn't help but mention that I am really looking forward to buying and playing Zelda echoes of wisdom, I'm a middle aged man and all and playing as a little chibi girl isn't exactly very manly but the gameplay looks the most -fun- and original with the tone set on -exploration and experimentation- and that is what I have been missing a lot in gaming for a very very long time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kIXfBL6T3A
Oh I’m definitely game for that one come payday. 2d Top Down 2.5D Zelda was a decent chunk of my childhood, so very much wanting more.
I played the original zelda games on nes, but a link to the past was my fave on snes and tbh (lambast me if you want) I have never liked the 3d zeldas and skipped them -all-.
Did play the DS topdown zelda, forgot the name' but it was based on lottp, also wasn't links awakening based on the original zeldas? Haven't looked into it cause I've had a big gaming-hiatus for many years.
I just don't enjoy investing into vg anymore, and vg is getting too big and practically substitute for real life which I rather not trade for the virtual ever again.
But that new and upcoming (actual) zelda' game is just so refreshing, bringing something exciting to the table. That does it for me.
Oh, also just started playing another one of my fave series; Yokai watch 4 + +, I actually own -THE- rarest and most expensive game for the 3ds being Yokai watch 3 xD, ordered it pretty early in and apparently people consider it impossible to get a hold of today heheheheheh.
I'm an RPG fan who hasn't played any Dungeons and Dragons, I've played almost 13 hours into Baldur's Gate. And what annoys me the most is how frail all the characters are, even the melee fighters. That and the spell casting is limited and spell slots can only be recharged by resting. Am I just a dang idiot for not yet learning to appreciate this style of RPG game?
I only recently found out that you can get AV > HDMI adapters that can allow your old consoles to play on modern Tellies. So having very hurriedly went out to purchase such a marvelous device, I've spent a good portion of the last week (and the forseeable future) playing through all my old N64 games.
Currently on Ocarina of Time and oh good I've missed it. I'm really taking my time with this one and loving every second of it.
Mostly finished Visions of Mana last night, including one of the super bosses (the other seemed to require more grinding than I cared for). It's definitely a very good game and a highpoint of the series but held back by a lot of odd little things here and there, including the story which has some very weird messaging. Absolutely beautiful game with a ton of super fun boss encounters though, which is probably a good description of the series.
After that.... Space Marine 2. It's really just fantastic. Beat the story mode and played about a dozen rounds of the co-op which is definitely as much of the content as the main game. It really captures the world in a way nothing else has managed and the combat is super fun and thankfully very fun to replay through. Very likely to stick around on this one for a while.
Playing xenonauts 2 since i can't think of any other game i want to play. Doing well so far. I guess it's the closest thing we'll get to an xcom 3 game at this point. If i recall in this version rather than the aliens being actual aliens they all come from earth from another dimension. Yep that's right. They went the marvel multi-verse route.
On the subject of xenonauts 2 i had one very bad mission last night. I think only 2 of 9 soldiers made it out at the end and it was a net loss even for rewards. At least 2-3 of the soldiers were resurrected after the fight through the medbay (35% chance for resurrection is not bad). So about 4-5 dead soldiers in one mission which is not ideal :(. I still call massive bs on the psyon alien spam.
Aside from that i have to fight a dockyard battle and either kill or bring back an enemy general as a captive. I may go straight for the kill as last time it didn't go so well in my other campaign. I guess we'll see.
Edit:
Ok yesterday's missions went really well. The UFO landing assault i expected to have heavy casualties since a lot of my guys were wounded but no soldiers died. I was surprised how well i handled that since it could've gone very wrong. The fight before the ufo was the dockyard battle vs tons of cleaners and 2 guys "died" out of 9 of em but i had my soldiers gather their bodies and gear before they left for the dropship (one of the soldiers resurrected after the mission). All this was after killing the cleaner leader in an area and taking a bunch of their data.
So yeah the game's going really well and now i have some decent armor for my soldiers. I'm going to need more aircraft soon however.
On the one hand, assuming that Midnight Suns didn't result in that particular team getting cut from Firaxis, they should be planning on XCom 3. The original game, one of the new ending scenes from the add-on, and even Chimera Squad gave plot hooks that seemed to hint at XCom 3.
On the other hand, iirc Jake Solomon was one of the primary driving forces behind the XCom reboot. And he left Firaxis for a new studio... where he's apparently working on a game that will compete with The Sims.
BrookM wrote: Back into Helldivers, because somehow, they managed to make it fun and viable again.
Definitely feels like they felt their feet being put to the fire with the very visible drop in active players and the public backlash from the playerbase on the nerfs from the flamer warbond kerfuffle. Glad they're willing to backtrack to how some of the guns were based on feedback and the new warbond is muuuuch more interesting compared to some of the other warbonds. I think there's a cool "not DKoK" skin on the store in conjunction with the ones from the warbond. Probably helps that SM2 is somewhat directly competing against them at the moment.
Personally, I haven't redownloaded the game because my friends and I have felt we've already gotten our money/time's worth since the overall game hasn't changed that much. I think what it would take is Illuminates or another faction being added into the game or a substantial addition to the armory in terms of vehicles (still waiting on that APC!).
On the one hand, assuming that Midnight Suns didn't result in that particular team getting cut from Firaxis, they should be planning on XCom 3. The original game, one of the new ending scenes from the add-on, and even Chimera Squad gave plot hooks that seemed to hint at XCom 3.
On the other hand, iirc Jake Solomon was one of the primary driving forces behind the XCom reboot. And he left Firaxis for a new studio... where he's apparently working on a game that will compete with The Sims.
Ya, that's too bad about Midnight Suns. It's a double whammy as I like that game but its lack of financial success may have affected XCom as well. Also, everyone over at Firaxis is probably working on Civ7 too. So maybe after that.
On the one hand, assuming that Midnight Suns didn't result in that particular team getting cut from Firaxis, they should be planning on XCom 3. The original game, one of the new ending scenes from the add-on, and even Chimera Squad gave plot hooks that seemed to hint at XCom 3.
On the other hand, iirc Jake Solomon was one of the primary driving forces behind the XCom reboot. And he left Firaxis for a new studio... where he's apparently working on a game that will compete with The Sims.
Ya, that's too bad about Midnight Suns. It's a double whammy as I like that game but its lack of financial success may have affected XCom as well. Also, everyone over at Firaxis is probably working on Civ7 too. So maybe after that.
I feel like Midnight Suns came at a bad time when super heroes were on the way out with their movies. It's actually a shame because comic book nerds i've known actually loved the game. I like super heroes somewhat but i've never been a huge fan of them.
I still dislike chimera squad but also i think i've had my fill of xcom 2 even when it's modded.
I heard somebody say Jake Solomon didn't want to make a Terror From the Deep style xcom game but somehow i doubt that's true. It's probably some form of "we had creative differences" sort of thing except with a less negative spin on things. It's like how Gears of War 3 was supposed to be the last game in the series and cliffy b wanted it to end but then suddenly was ok with it coming back. I dunno maybe i'm just a downer. It's a shame with Jake Solomon though. I feel like the crew that worked on xcom: eu and xcom 2 both had passion and chimera squad was their way of trying new things in a safe side venture to test for xcom 3. It's so weird to me because i actually felt like the Legacy Operations were a much better form of what they tried to do in chimera squad.
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Ok so last night i played xenonauts 2 some more. I had a cleaner supply raid which i only lost one soldier to but only because i rolled over the cleaners so hard that one berserked and shot like 3 to 4 shots at one of my dudes which may have already been injured. Sadly this soldier didn't survive post-battle.
I then went on to face the cleaner hq just before 90 days into the game and increased my per monthly supplies by a lot by winning. I lost 2 soldiers but one came back in the post-battle screen. Keep in mind the cleaner hq is supposed to be very hard. It was rather shocking i lost no soldiers with the room that had 3 turrets in it.
I am now getting ready for another battle on a Destroyer UFO. I think it's one size larger than the first ufo type you can fight a battle to secure.
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Sheesh i didn't realize how many times i started a sentence esp. paragraph with "I" for this message. Perhaps it's my autism or some weird behavior i have.
I feel like Midnight Suns came at a bad time when super heroes were on the way out with their movies. It's actually a shame because comic book nerds i've known actually loved the game.
Midnight Suns apparently has a couple of problems.
First, in between missions you need to run around talking to people and exploring the residence. It's technically optional, but the game progression expects you to do it. Some people enjoy it. Others are only playing the game to go fight a lot, and these activities take away from the battles that are supposed to be the focus of the game. Second, it sounds as if there were some very problematic bugs - particularly in the DLCs - that never got fixed, and that could potentially break your game. That sort of thing tends to annoy potential customers.
Played a bit more VTMB with the Barabba's Addon mod which changes the bloodlines you can play. I just completed the restored by the Unofficial Patch side quest where you track down a Lasombra for Beckett. The Library you infiltrate near the end of the quest is pretty damned awesome, especially the lobby.
In fact, I'm appreciating the game's art design and graphics the more I play it all of it has aged remarkably well in my eyes.
I seem to be doing ok in xenonauts 2. I need a lot more good aircraft now to fight off alien ufos. It's just sad how expensive they are. However i have been taking out an alien base, doing at least one abduction fight and several other landing ufo sites with abductors. I won all the missions so far but the next one i have is just like 7 guys rather than 9 because everybody left was injured. It can go very wrong since it's a night mission and a ufo landing of an abductor with fewer soldiers so bad news. I need more soldiers because they keep getting injured or dying. I need spares to train up.
I feel like Midnight Suns came at a bad time when super heroes were on the way out with their movies. It's actually a shame because comic book nerds i've known actually loved the game.
Midnight Suns apparently has a couple of problems.
First, in between missions you need to run around talking to people and exploring the residence. It's technically optional, but the game progression expects you to do it. Some people enjoy it. Others are only playing the game to go fight a lot, and these activities take away from the battles that are supposed to be the focus of the game. Second, it sounds as if there were some very problematic bugs - particularly in the DLCs - that never got fixed, and that could potentially break your game. That sort of thing tends to annoy potential customers.
Its a weird game for sure but I don't think it was all the talking that was the problem. It basically has the same formula as Mass Effect. Do a mission and then do a bunch of talking and those games sold well. Apparently, it was the card system. I guess a lot of people saw the card system and associated with mobile games and thought it should basically be free. Which is a shame because it doesn't have microtransactions or anything like that crap you see in free-to-play games.
I feel like Midnight Suns came at a bad time when super heroes were on the way out with their movies. It's actually a shame because comic book nerds i've known actually loved the game.
Midnight Suns apparently has a couple of problems.
First, in between missions you need to run around talking to people and exploring the residence. It's technically optional, but the game progression expects you to do it. Some people enjoy it. Others are only playing the game to go fight a lot, and these activities take away from the battles that are supposed to be the focus of the game. Second, it sounds as if there were some very problematic bugs - particularly in the DLCs - that never got fixed, and that could potentially break your game. That sort of thing tends to annoy potential customers.
Its a weird game for sure but I don't think it was all the talking that was the problem. It basically has the same formula as Mass Effect. Do a mission and then do a bunch of talking and those games sold well. Apparently, it was the card system. I guess a lot of people saw the card system and associated with mobile games and thought it should basically be free. Which is a shame because it doesn't have microtransactions or anything like that crap you see in free-to-play games.
I can only speak from my own experiences - my son played it and I think nearly finished it, was only interrupted by us upgrading to a Series X and moving to play other things. He enjoyed it fine as far as I know, but I personally was massively put off by the CCG aspect of it - to the point that I never even tried playing it. I just couldn't see it adding anything to the game, and felt it would have been just better all-round if they hadn't bothered and had made it a straight XCOM-but-Marvel-heroes turn based strategy game instead.
flamingkillamajig wrote: I seem to be doing ok in xenonauts 2. I need a lot more good aircraft now to fight off alien ufos. It's just sad how expensive they are. However i have been taking out an alien base, doing at least one abduction fight and several other landing ufo sites with abductors. I won all the missions so far but the next one i have is just like 7 guys rather than 9 because everybody left was injured. It can go very wrong since it's a night mission and a ufo landing of an abductor with fewer soldiers so bad news. I need more soldiers because they keep getting injured or dying. I need spares to train up.
And it is only now that I realise I thought you were talking about Psychonauts for the last few posts... d'oh.
Wow so uh that hit me out of nowhere. Last night i started myself on an alien base mission with 9 good soldiers mostly high ranking and armed and armored about as well as i could get them. The sad bit is the first room i entered had 2 cyberdrones, a couple sectons (basically small sectoids), 2-3 psyons of different types and a mantid (4 legged fast dude with like 270 degree vision arc and overwatch). I wiped out the first floor or so and was left with maybe 3 to 4 guys. The remaining area was the command room and i killed maybe one or two guys before getting squad wiped. I lost all my armor and guns and killed i think 23-24 of them. They still had like maybe 4 guys left in the command room.
I tried salvaging things a bit since i had like top tier jets but i stationed them somewhere with only 2 defenses. It wasn't enough to kill a boarding party which wiped out my latin american base (3rd base of 3) including my jets and after that i just think i'll call it a dead game.
I think i was around 260 days into that campaign too which is fairly long. I need more ways to keep on top of my funding situation. Perhaps i should either spend my early funds better or replace aircraft with higher tier ones. It kind of got to a point that i had a lot of stuff researched but little i really could buy aside from aircraft which i really needed to buy to shoot down more enemy ufos.
To be honest i sort of knew i shouldn't go on that mission to the alien base but i was low on resources and sorta needed something since my ships weren't killing enough ufos by a long ways.
I feel like Midnight Suns came at a bad time when super heroes were on the way out with their movies. It's actually a shame because comic book nerds i've known actually loved the game.
Midnight Suns apparently has a couple of problems.
First, in between missions you need to run around talking to people and exploring the residence. It's technically optional, but the game progression expects you to do it. Some people enjoy it. Others are only playing the game to go fight a lot, and these activities take away from the battles that are supposed to be the focus of the game. Second, it sounds as if there were some very problematic bugs - particularly in the DLCs - that never got fixed, and that could potentially break your game. That sort of thing tends to annoy potential customers.
Its a weird game for sure but I don't think it was all the talking that was the problem. It basically has the same formula as Mass Effect. Do a mission and then do a bunch of talking and those games sold well. Apparently, it was the card system. I guess a lot of people saw the card system and associated with mobile games and thought it should basically be free. Which is a shame because it doesn't have microtransactions or anything like that crap you see in free-to-play games.
I can only speak from my own experiences - my son played it and I think nearly finished it, was only interrupted by us upgrading to a Series X and moving to play other things. He enjoyed it fine as far as I know, but I personally was massively put off by the CCG aspect of it - to the point that I never even tried playing it. I just couldn't see it adding anything to the game, and felt it would have been just better all-round if they hadn't bothered and had made it a straight XCOM-but-Marvel-heroes turn based strategy game instead.
I thought the card system was fine and fit a Superhero-TBS but most people had the same reaction as you. If they did a full XCom style they would have had to make huge environments but they probably wished they had done that in the end.
Ok i am doing another campaign 2nd hardest on ironman again.
So far two missions and no deaths. I even managed to capture two cleaner soldiers. Once i interrogated one of them i sold em off. You might ask what they're worth and the answer is 20k dollars each for a somewhat lobotomized alien controlled human soldier . That's the general price for most captured specimens as far as i know.
Edit:
Ok another couple missions and in my 4th i finally lost 2 guys. A 3rd went unconscious so i had to help them out. I guess i shouldn't have gone in through the front doors and gotten swarmed by cleaners but i knocked two of em out and took one home. I had to evac with like 15 cleaner data sticks so not bad. 2 losses is sad however as i just got a scout mission now.
And it’s terrific! As you’re second fiddle in combat, summoning copy monsters to do your dirty work, this is much more of a puzzler. But it’s still that classic, winning Zelda formula.
A lot more missions in xenonauts 2. My first ufo of today's game session saw me lose 4 soldiers or at least i dunno if any resurrected. I had a bunch of missions after with zero deaths most impressive being capturing or killing a cleaner general which i captured, killed all of the normal cleaners on the map, stole i think all of their data and ran off to the dropship and won without losing a single soldier. I think my last mission or two had me losing two soldiers each or at least my last one did but they resurrected after so no harm done.
Just checked and only 2 soldiers died for good and another 2 missing in action which is basically dead but it'd be interesting if they could come up as cleaners after. Now i go to save a journalist from cleaner forces (soldiers and basically alien controlled converted special 3 letter agencies fbi, cia, mi6, etc.). The agents themselves are fun to kick around with my trained soldiers but the constant stream of reinforcements by cleaner soldiers tend to be a harder fight. Saving the journalist will give me the final data i need to find the cleaner hq. Which is always some mysterious base in iceland because the developers of xenonauts have some weird boner for iceland being the focal point for western forces vs the soviet union. Did i mention the xenonauts series also seems to have a cold war boner with a touch of alternate history?
Ok a lot more missions. The most notable was the first cleaner hq mission where i killed all but one of the aliens defending it with the cleaners and got squad wiped. So i had to re-buy my gear and managed it again but won the fight with maybe a couple deaths. I'd have to check. Thank god that happened early or i'd be in a much tougher situation. Also i had a lot of spare soldiers and spare resources this time which i'll need to re-buy more of later.
Oh and the journalist fight was a win with zero deaths so and lots more cleaner agents kicked around so that's fun.
@KamikazeCanuck:
The two south park rpg games were great to watch but i never played them properly myself.
And it’s terrific! As you’re second fiddle in combat, summoning copy monsters to do your dirty work, this is much more of a puzzler. But it’s still that classic, winning Zelda formula.
Really enjoying it. I will say the reliance on summons for combat can make some of the exploration annoying. It works better in the dungeons where you're locked to an arena, but on the overworld standing around waiting for your guys to get in hits is kind of a pace killer and I tend to just run past everything.
Still, the puzzles and dungeons are wonderful and overall the game walks a fine line between classic Zelda gameplay and the new age "I did it, but I'm not sure that's how I was suppose to" free form solutions of BotW and ToK.
Zelda having no idea who that guy that tried to save her was is my favorite reoccurring joke.
I very much agree. But, I also spend a not insignificant chunk of my times on the over world just….dodging combat.
What is nice, despite our summons not being particularly aggressive, is that the enemies do get Aggro to them. So I just fart something, anything out, and leg it, and it’s pretty rare the monsters then come after me.
And like TOTK, I’ve definitely cheesed my way to places I probably shouldn’t be. And I very much welcome that to the more traditional (well, sad old fart) Zelda experience.
Automatically Appended Next Post: And the Cheesing is important. TOTK blew my tiny mind with just how much freedom we were given as players. Sure, there are limits (only so many things can be stuck together, or for EOW summoned at once), but in an organic way.
If you can figure and brute force your way through those programmed item counts? You can more or less do what you want.
Been playing through the new expansion for Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader which has been quite extensive. You can now explore your ship (which now has a freight train going through it, which is pretty cool) and the new companion the Death Cult assassin chick ain't a bad character. Her picture gave the "game away" so to speak, so if you don't want the story spoiled I suggest you don't expand her picture.
Anyway, the expansion has breathed new life into the game for me. I just have to make sure to give Marazhai to Heinrix van Calox after finishing his character quest, regret not doing that when I last clocked the game. I just found Marazhai quite interesting, I suppose.
Adrassil wrote: Been playing through the new expansion for Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader which has been quite extensive. You can now explore your ship (which now has a freight train going through it, which is pretty cool) and the new companion the Death Cult assassin chick ain't a bad character. Her picture gave the "game away" so to speak, so if you don't want the story spoiled I suggest you don't expand her picture.
Anyway, the expansion has breathed new life into the game for me. I just have to make sure to give Marazhai to Heinrix van Calox after finishing his character quest, regret not doing that when I last clocked the game. I just found Marazhai quite interesting, I suppose.
Ha! Great idea that I didn't even think about. I probably should've done that instead of killing him in the arena of Comorragh for this playthrough.
My first couple playthroughs I recruited him and always had to hold my nose at his shenanigans and story ending.
Was doing some shin megami tensei 5 vengeance on my switch lite (besides my 3ds which is stored now, the only console I own cause I have no interest in next gen anymore) working my darnest to tactically outplay a giant subboss (some japanese deity giant) only to waste 40 mins of my time at the last 10 hp he had to have him go into CPU-LUCK mode and perma crit my entire team into a never ending chain to game-over me.
Back in the day would've thrown my console through the ceiling but now I just felt sabotaged, let my soul leave my body willingly and went to sleep annoyed.
So, today my new order came in; Zelda (ACTUAL ZELDA NOT LINK AY) echoes of wisdom.
What more does a testosterone at threshold gymbro with chestmuscles the size of tires' look for in a videogame than being able to play a pretty pink princess summoning floppy gello, chairs and flowerpots?
You tell me, cause I will be distracted by the simple fun of exploration and experimentation in this game. (and apparently you can find costumes in it so I don't have to walk around all pink) (I also started eating meat again after having been a vegan for 30 years btw, so I do not think too much of my testosterone levels will drop from playing this)
Played a ton of xenonauts 2 yesterday. Had a near squad wipe on a terror mission but somehow recovered in soldiers, weapons and armor. I now have mostly gauss weaponry aside from some pistols and the tier 3 guardian armor on all my guys. I can also throw out 12 soldiers at once now as opposed to the usual 9. That said today i lost 2 soldiers on the alien base mission which aside from the alien command room i didn't lose any soldiers or take much damage at all. The command room was a bit of a bloodbath though.
Also right after that i got an alien terror mission in north america (usa+canada in this). My guys sadly haven't healed at all practically as this generated like a day or less after the alien base mission. Sadly it's the wraith+robot combo that decimated me so badly last time but this time i have 12 guys and full coilguns so it should go better....i hope :(. I may save that mission for tomorrow since it's getting near 10 pm and i don't think screaming at a squad wipe will please the neighbors when they're trying to sleep esp. on a work day.
Sofar my first evening of playing the new Zelda has been fun without frustrations.
The controls take some getting used to (playing zelda's summoning style I mean) but I still rek'd Ganon without getting hit as Link in the prelude bit.
(threw bombs at Ganon making him magicpop himself lol, figured that one out pretty quickly) (funny how I expected a trophy to pop coming from playstation gaming ab. 7 years ago, but switch doesn't have that xD)
Anyway, trampolines are pretty useful and burning shrubs/grass with the fire gelly monster is also pretty hilareous. I felt a bit evil doing that to the other floppy slimes in the area where you first get the fire gels though. *insert this is fine meme*.
I saved and quit around the first objective icon on the map, will be freely exploring and ignoring the main quest for now.
Some more xenonauts 2. That terror mission ended fairly well. 3 of my guys "died" and only one stayed dead. I'm also making lots of tier 3 aircraft to deal with the new threats in the air. Of course things had to escalate again and now i'm facing Cruisers in the sky. I knocked one of them out of the sky but there still seems to be another around. My issue is while i have full coilguns my armor is starting to show it's problems. I need stronger armor and i swear enemies hit chance is cracked and broken good even with smoke and obstructions in the way.
I also got some new stuff but mostly just new stun/emp grenades and a strength boosting device for my soldiers allowing them to carry more gear. The power armor should be next on the list.
It's true, its my most picked non-helper.
I keep making stairways to everywhere I'm probably not yet supposed to go.
Got access to a (useless) horse now and captured a ton of new helpers including multiple types of fish (of which one is a shark I found around some boat) and a lot of orcs, also a wolf, some beaky birds etc.. still looking for a aquating slime thing though for some quest.
Anyway, so far plus points are that the game doesn't force you to do anything, you can explore as much as you want etc, only slightly hampered by the voidcracks, but not enough to confine you. It's decently entertaining and whimsical, I like the overworld artstyle etc, pleasant to the eyes. The combat is simple and easy to get used to and the differences in your helpers abillities are just as easily mastered.Having accesoiries give you special inworld abilities is a win for me too, keeps things interesting, haven't found any costumes yet but saw that those are in the game in some review before I bought this game.
Negative points so far (sadly also a bunch);
-A great part of this overworld feels drastically empty, including in terms of achieving exploration goals climbing into areas you wouldn't emediately think possible with the little means you have such as 4 triforces to make beds or making use of 3rd jump frog helpers etc.. Such areas hold nothing, no breakables, nothing. This may chance in lategame? Maybe postgame.. who knows, I would hope this game doesn't depend on some potenial DLC as I have no interest in connecting my switch to the internet, ever.
-Enemies are extremely easy, actually so far the entire game has been a little too easy. Every enemy so far can be killed even with the most basic helper summons, that includes killing big baddies with a group of bats. While stronger enemies summoned by you are generally suboptimal and easily killed (hello whirlwind plant dieing against everything else), so far the helper summons I use are either bats or the armadillo (lvl2 currently) and rarely a shield orc or black knight, considering the latter cannot be hit by physical attacks..
-The music, sad to say.. has not done anything for me yet.. and I feel like its a huge missed oppertunity that classical zelda tunes do not play in key locations, something like from a link to the past would really make you reconnect with the world. Perhaps this is in later areas as I have not explored everything yet.. but despite the instrumentation being soothing to the ears the compositions are really poor and I haven't felt connected to the atmosphere or theme of the area I am in through it so far nor had any melody stick to mind after playing while the tunes of the classical games always did.
-link mode (using the sword) so far feels like it sabotages the point of playing as zelda, the form is extremely overpowered in this already super easy game. I reluctantly still' only use it against bosses.
-npcs looks like miitopia clones, low effort.
nels1031 wrote: Ha! Great idea that I didn't even think about. I probably should've done that instead of killing him in the arena of Comorragh for this playthrough.
My first couple playthroughs I recruited him and always had to hold my nose at his shenanigans and story ending.
Thanks, I was going to do it when first heading toward the endgame, but forgot and it snuck up on me as well a bit.
I completed the main campaign of the DLC and I am still impressed how much new content is in it. There was a plot twist which legitimately got to me, Also, now my crew are at fully leveled. I made the mistake of beginning playing with my high level rogue trader so most of the 1st half the of the campaign was a breeze and I leveled up Kibellah which made it hard for my dumb brain to understand what her abilities did and how to use them which led to her being accidentally knocked out by my Rogue Trader during the last battle as he parried and countered her rain of attacks because I'd chosen the wrong ability.
Played some more Zelda (a bit too deep into the night heh) no-main-questing into wherever I could go, found some elemental wizard monsters and some big lizardman in an underwater cave I had to kill while swimming (just chugged a potion for longer breath and summoned sharks heh) and also climbed a big mountain, was some gliding quest I didn't understand how to do because whenever I control my helpers I cannot actually move them into directions I want them to move for some reason, maybe you first need to unlock that in the main quest now that I think of it..
Oh and I really do not like the chestnut hunts, even when you know how to spam bed-stairs, I'm very annoyed with anything that has a timer on it by default.
Getting a bit bored now so will be doing the main quest for a bit I guess (firstly the waterworld, cause that's where I was at last)
Xenonauts 2 and the game is going insanely well. I have a little bit of collossus power armor now and multiple high tier aircraft. I've taken down multiple cruisers now and oddly most of the panic in nations is absurdly low. In fact africa and latin america are at 0 panic and i don't think even the worst nation is above 30 panic. I think i'm between day 240-270.
I'm interested to see if there are any bigger ships with more well equipped enemies but somehow i doubt it since the game isn't finished and hasn't reached milestone 5 yet.
ZZZ is done till next patch, not 100% but all the main and side stuff mostly.
But I suck at the mini game, and I don’t know why. The little fighter arena games not a genre I play before. So guess I just gotta learn which is fun itself, but going to spend more time in a mini game than the main game soon.
Been playing Fallout 4 a lot as watching the tv show made me want to dive back in. My opinion of it now has softened a bit from when it first came out. I miss the better role playing aspect of the older games but it's still a decent timesink.
Also started Tunic. I'm getting a sort of Zelda meets Fez vibe of it but also more difficult then I was expecting. Pretty good so far though.
Del Mingus wrote: Been playing Fallout 4 a lot as watching the tv show made me want to dive back in. My opinion of it now has softened a bit from when it first came out. I miss the better role playing aspect of the older games but it's still a decent timesink.
Also started Tunic. I'm getting a sort of Zelda meets Fez vibe of it but also more difficult then I was expecting. Pretty good so far though.
Getting a bit bored now so will be doing the main quest for a bit I guess (firstly the waterworld, cause that's where I was at last)
Played more (again a bit too long lol, man half my night was gone yesterday x_x)
I've managed to beat the glide quest (didn't realise you just had to pick up the birdsummon, was trying to use tri to control it to no avail lol), did some more exploring, beat the first main (triple part) quest through
Spoiler:
Noticably harder that the rest of the game so far, but easy still .. I mean.. it's not like you can die or anything in this game, right? Don't think I even need two fairy bottles.. hardly ever get hit anyway.., but ok.. beat shadow Gannon and saved the King. Really liked the bit where you return to the holding cell area and need to redo a more difficult version of the stealth gameplay.
and also have to say some' of the music is growing on me a bit. The main theme in particular is something that sticks to mind (still) and there were a few other tunes like in the 3rd dungeon and the first part of the music in the mountain village with a flute melody.
I have noticed how 90% of minions are fluff and not exactly useful, I keep noticing how I go back and forth between either crows and fire squidthing as those latter are REALLY GOOD at stunlocking enemies from a great distance, otherwise shield orc types (club is fast but opens himself up way too much when closing distance opposed to sword orc) and in rare cases I use something that simply keeps the enemy stunlocked (the green electric floppy thing lol) and switch to link-mode briefly to one-two shot it.
Now that the game is opening up a bit more (with reduced tri costs) and getting more difficult the fun is also increasing, I was tbh considering selling the game again and getting pokemon dungeon dx remake, even though I heard mixed sentiments about it (the 3ds game sequel was really fun although a bit too much of a collection-driven drag rather than making you rely on breeding or lvling) stating that the game is worse than the original because you do not have your main-attack to clear out fluff draining your pp. But I think I'll stick to Zelda for now. (also got shin megami tensei 5V still, @ 2nd map of the game)
