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This weekend I bougth and completed the two Dlcs for Pillars Of Eternity 2, I found Seeker, Slayer and Surviour a bit tedious, mostly due to the amount and back forth for relics and such, but I liked the history and the new places to see. I also liked seeing more of the god of Hunters and beasts.

Beasts Of Winter was amusing and with several moments that made me chuckle and grin as I sat and played. The boss figths where challeging but fair, and the loot from both DLcs where great! So praise to the Developers for that.

Just started up Heretic. Finally getting around to beating the series.played all DooMs up to 3 and a bunch of fan made wads.

Got a friend over for a few days, so Worms W.M.D. is back on the menu.

Thanks for the recommendations on total wars to everyone involved. I ended up with base games for both and a few select add-ons.

----
Still been very involved with Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Its an amazingly faithful adaptation of the pathfinder ruleset (not just core but several other classes, feats, etc), which makes it very hard to get into for general audiences.

The developers also apparently have a thing about the difficulty of the d20/Pathfinder system. As in, they think the actual math of the game is far too forgiving.. Unfortunately, adding +7 or 8 more to hit and defense in a d20 system is not particularly viable, and it makes difficulty something of a mess. It also isn't evenly applied, so any given encounter can be a cake walk or absurdly punishing. And that's on normal difficulty.

The kingdom management aspect is also problematic. Events pop up and are resolved by your assigned advisors after a certain amount of time has passed. Unfortunately, it's resolved by a single d20 roll, based on their primary stat and their area of focus (which is +2 per level of development). Most of the target numbers are in the teens, so failure on these events is statistically inevitable. Accumulate too many failures and your kingdom is destroyed. Unfortunately a few failures also impose penalties on their rolls, and lower your kingdom stats, so once failures start happening, they happen more frequently.

And none of this communicated well (feedback is a problem), so the game can suddenly end in failure while you're travelling or sleeping. Unless you turn the management aspect over to automatic, which can fail events but not enter an end-game state. Unfortunately, unless you're save scumming for each event resolution, statistical averages drift you to a fail state. The only thing to do at that point is either ending the game permanently or just abandoning the kingdom management aspect entirely and switching over to automatic. (Though the kingdom sim isn't that interesting, so that's not a complete negative).

But you can micromanage the difficulty settings a fair bit ( to get actual pathfinder standard monsters, they need to be set to weak with 'below average' stat adjustment, which makes no sense). As an example of how confusing and fiddly the difficulty settings are, 'normal' difficulty sets stat adjustment to 'weaker than average' and the next difficulty sets it to 'tougher than average.' No difficulty setting actually uses the 'Average' setting. Which is frankly baffling. An extra baffling, because it still gives monsters significantly higher bonuses than what is standard for Pathfinder.

For example, Skeletal Champions are, in the pathfinder bestiary, level 3 creatures with +7 to hit and 1d8+3 damage. If set to 'average,' they get +14 to hit with 1d8+9 damage. This is not a reasonable change, roughly akin to going from a 40% chance of hitting to a 75% chance of hitting and upping the damage per hit (and a 3rd level fighter would have about 30 HP, so they'd only need 3 hits to drop them out of the fight rather than 4) As a rough average. That isn't a change a low level party can really cope with. And it just gets sillier as you level.

Tonight I came across a lizardman 'king' who was attacking at +27 for 1d8+34 damage. His weapon? A normal, mundane spear. This was just some guy in the wilderness, not a random encounter, but not quest or plot related either. Just a crafted map in the corner of the kingdom. And he had friends. And a queen. Though I don't know what she did because my wizard turned her into a dog, and after everyone else was dead, my barbarian splattered the dog over a fairly sizeable chunk of landscape. [Big hits on low health enemies make them explode]. Said landscape was also currently an crater made of obsidian, because sometimes that's just how you should start a fight. Some of the spell effects are really amazing, by the way.

But once you put the numbers in a comfortable place for whatever difficulty you actually want (and figure out what difficulty settings give you those results), the game is pretty fun.

There is a huge enemy variety (with a lot of stuff I've never seen in a D&D-like computer game), lots of spells, feats (too many of those, to be honest) and huge variety of classes and choices. The writing can be a little rough at times (non-English grammar bleeds through a fair bit, its a Russian studio), and sometimes the game wants you to do things but just sits back and smugly shrugs at you.

There are a fair amount of bugs at the moment, but a lot of bug fixing as well.

It has a lot of promise, but the devs need to be reigned in on their stereotypical 'killer DM' mindset. it definitely won't be well received by general audiences, but it's probably the most D&D like experience I've seen in a computer-game. But that obviously has its ups and downs.

The big thing is a lack of feedback and the game just not telling you what is going on, and devs not understanding the coinflip nature of event cards and what big bonuses on lots of d20 rolls actually do to the math and results of the game. If you aren't familiar with 3rd edition D&D or Pathfinder, I wouldn't recommend it at all. And I mean really, actually familiar. If you don't actually know what AC, DC, BAB, For, Ref, Will, and DR are, the game is not going to tell you. They had to patch in free items and advice on how to accomplish one of the earliest simple fetch quests (and it likely still isn't enough) because it involved Swarms, and expected everyone to just innately know what that means and how to deal with it. As a bonus, once you kill a couple of enemies in that fight, more spawn in behind your archers/spellcasters. Because screw you, that's why.

Was gonna wait for it to go on sale in a few months, but in a moment of weakness, I picked up Shadow of the Tomb Raider and played it all weekend.. enjoying it so far, says I'm only 40% done even with a solid 2 days worth, so it should last me a while

Diablo 3 ....yep still going
But also Darkest Dungeon, Mordheim and Dark Souls all on PS4
I like my fantasy RPG

 Trondheim wrote:
This weekend I bougth and completed the two Dlcs for Pillars Of Eternity 2, I found Seeker, Slayer and Surviour a bit tedious, mostly due to the amount and back forth for relics and such, but I liked the history and the new places to see. I also liked seeing more of the god of Hunters and beasts.

Beasts Of Winter was amusing and with several moments that made me chuckle and grin as I sat and played. The boss figths where challeging but fair, and the loot from both DLcs where great! So praise to the Developers for that.

You try your hand at the "megaboss" or whatever they called it that was introduced in this patch? Its around the top middle of the map, if memory serves. I was exploring up around there, attacking Fire Giant ships and saw the island. Landed and thought I was going to do a dungeon crawl. Instead an Arachnid of Unusual Size crawled out of a hole, with 3 red skulls above his name.

Nah.

Took my level 17s the feth out of there. I may return. Or not.

 nels1031 wrote:

 Trondheim wrote:
This weekend I bougth and completed the two Dlcs for Pillars Of Eternity 2, I found Seeker, Slayer and Surviour a bit tedious, mostly due to the amount and back forth for relics and such, but I liked the history and the new places to see. I also liked seeing more of the god of Hunters and beasts.

Beasts Of Winter was amusing and with several moments that made me chuckle and grin as I sat and played. The boss figths where challeging but fair, and the loot from both DLcs where great! So praise to the Developers for that.

You try your hand at the "megaboss" or whatever they called it that was introduced in this patch? Its around the top middle of the map, if memory serves. I was exploring up around there, attacking Fire Giant ships and saw the island. Landed and thought I was going to do a dungeon crawl. Instead an Arachnid of Unusual Size crawled out of a hole, with 3 red skulls above his name.

Nah.

Took my level 17s the feth out of there. I may return. Or not.

You mean the homicidial aracnid son of Skaen? Its damned hard and will devour any characthers under lvl 18 like a dog let loose in a sausage factory. Did try it last nigth with my lvl 19 but have not beaten the beast yet. But its on my to do list for sure, the only boss figth i can compare it to in any real scale is the figth you can have with the avatar of Rymgard in the white void in Beasts Of Winter. I reckon a lot of debuffing spells and constant damage spells will help as it did in said figth with Rymgard. Imagien all the loot one gets from such a beast like the spider!!


Well I beat the mentioned spider god and well, it leaves much to be desired when it comes to loot and general layout of the figth, the main issue is the swarms of spiderlings and their contiunal spawning from several spider dens. She is weak vs crush damage and to some degree the spells priests get accses to in late game. I found several to be outrigth overkill against her, and summoning a spirit compainon as a priest also helps. It also helps having a monk or two in your party as they will do wonders against her. But it was certainly one of the more challenging figths in the game, so yes to more mega bosses.

Forza Horizon 4 was released today so I've mainly been playing that. The Forza games are always good but there's something special about riding around the English countryside that makes this one my instant favourite.

The starting village feels like I'm racing around the villages near where I live. They've even got small details like the coloured wheelie bins spot on

Got into WOW, which feels like a more pay to win version of war thunder. Amusingly even without paying, I am pretty decent. That being said, I hate people who turn into my torps even with warning.

Runescape is pretty pleasant as well, and the RS3 type is refreshing from the grind I once knew. Just have to start levelling and back to the skills again....

War thunder is the usual mish-mash of awesome matches and rage inducing oneshot kills from the USSR. Literally at one point got oneshot by a BT-7 who saw only my tracks on one side, and got incredibly lucky with shrapnel.

The new Assassins' Creed: Odyssey game. . .

The game play is similar ish to Origins (not a bad thing, IMO), and I'm not quite far enough along to really be discovering the major plots/intrigues.

Started into Divinity Original Sin last night. Really enjoyed it!
Will do a binge Friday night with it I think #party

Yesterday night I started Resident Evil 7. Got it for 7 €.

Seem good at ATM.

Since I feel I've 'played out' total Warhammer with a rather easy and straightforward 'hard' dwarf campaign, I'm consider the sequel. Any essentials I should get for it?

Got the 10th anniversary pack on GOG. It's Kingdom Come Deliverance, Shadow Tactics and Battle Chasers Nightwar (never heard of it) for 25 bucks, which is a price I'm willing to pay just for KCD, which I have yet to try.

Plus Shadow Warrior 2 is free right now. So, that's a good deal.

I've been playing alot of Ring of Elysium with my gaming group.

Its basically PUBG set in a mountainous region about to get hit by a killer blizzard. You can ride/climb with gliders, climbing picks and snowboards depending on what loadout you pick at the beginning. Its been alot of fun, but it suffers the same issues that all the survival/deathmatch games do, in that it can sometimes be a lot of work for little reward. I can only do 2-3 matches a night before it gets repetitive.




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 Bromsy wrote:
Got the 10th anniversary pack on GOG. It's Kingdom Come Deliverance, Shadow Tactics and Battle Chasers Nightwar (never heard of it) for 25 bucks, which is a price I'm willing to pay just for KCD, which I have yet to try.

Plus Shadow Warrior 2 is free right now. So, that's a good deal.

Ya, thats a killer deal. I paid for the first 2 at release with 10% off and loved both those games.

 Compel wrote:
Since I feel I've 'played out' total Warhammer with a rather easy and straightforward 'hard' dwarf campaign, I'm consider the sequel. Any essentials I should get for it?

The second one really hasn't built up a big list of stuff to purchase yet. There's one paid lord pack (Hellebron and the Everqueen), and the Tomb Kings expansion. If you like the Tomb Kings, then get that, obviously. The other is up to you. The Vampire Coast release will only be the third paid DLC for the second game.

Got back into playing Eador: Genesis. It’s a rather nice ‘just one more turn’ sort of game, but probably one of the most unforgiving I’ve ever played. It’s like Heroes of Might and Magic with RNG maps and more hero customization.

Eumerin wrote:

 Compel wrote:
Since I feel I've 'played out' total Warhammer with a rather easy and straightforward 'hard' dwarf campaign, I'm consider the sequel. Any essentials I should get for it?

The second one really hasn't built up a big list of stuff to purchase yet. There's one paid lord pack (Hellebron and the Everqueen), and the Tomb Kings expansion. If you like the Tomb Kings, then get that, obviously. The other is up to you. The Vampire Coast release will only be the third paid DLC for the second game.

Agreed. You can get quite a bit out of Mortal Empires without TWW2 DLC anyway.

Something to note however (which you probably already know), is that the TWW1 content and DLC does carry over to TWW2 as long as TWW1 is in your library. You don’t even need TWW1 installed to use it in TWW2. I imagine you have at least some of the TWW1 DLC if you’ve played it out, but you can still use that for Mortal Empires and battle mode. I believe that DLC is still on sale, so that might be an option.

Spider-Man.

All the best bits of Arkham’s style, but I find web swinging more satisfying than the gliding.

Overall, not necessarily a better game than Arkham Knight, but most definitely an equal!

Still playing For Honor. Now I'm also playing the new Assassin's Creed game. Plus I'll be getting Black Ops 4 when it comes out.

Just finished off the main questline of Assassin's Creed Origins (Odyssey has me in an AC mood but I can't afford it just yet) and I think that technically makes it the first AC game I've played and actually finished. Top notch game really, and one of the most fun open world sandboxes to go and explore (my fascination with ancient history helps, I suppose).

Has anyone played either of the DLCs? Are they worth picking up, or should I just start saving for Odyssey?

 Paradigm wrote:
Just finished off the main questline of Assassin's Creed Origins (Odyssey has me in an AC mood but I can't afford it just yet) and I think that technically makes it the first AC game I've played and actually finished. Top notch game really, and one of the most fun open world sandboxes to go and explore (my fascination with ancient history helps, I suppose).

Has anyone played either of the DLCs? Are they worth picking up, or should I just start saving for Odyssey?

I got the season pass for Origins (as well as Odyssey). . .and while not crucial to play, there is definitely some fun stuff to do, especially, as I recall the "Undead Pharaoh" one (forget what its called atm)

Man, the combat in Spider-Man is tricky! Can’t simply brawl as you do in Arkham. Really need to work on your early stealth takedowns, and keep the combat airborne as much as possible.

Side missions and that are also fun!

Yeah, staying aerial and using the environment is the way to go. That, and use your gadgets and suit powers often. The game is pretty generous with the gadget refills usually and the powers cool down nice and quick, so you can rely on using them at least once per fight. Don't forget that unlike Arkham, you can heal mid-fight using your Focus Meter, which is often more useful that burning it on a takedown. Actually, webs and positioning make a great alternative to takedowns mainly as if you can get someone close enough to a surface, a few Web Bullets or a single Impact Web can instantly take them out of the fight even if they're on full health.

I also kept the early suit mods that reduce melee/ballistic damage respectively on for most of the game, they're a very small investment for just that little bit extra suitability in a tough spot and that's always useful.

I do think there's a very satisfying power curve to it though. By the third act of the game you'll be fighting some nasty stuff but you'll have the tools, skills and experience to feel like a proper badass. Learn to combine certain skills/gadgets and you can be unstoppable, just taking baddies apart by the dozen with nary a hit landing on you.

No shame in running away either to get some breathing space. And yeah, healing via focus is something I’m getting the hang of!


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The web swinging really is exhilarating. Currently just whipping around grabbing backpacks and that, snapping landmarks etc.

Going to try something a bit new. A friend of mine and I used to play this very loose version of D&D. Had less of a focus on numbers crunching, more of a focus on combat than storytelling, and tended to lean towards using characters that are stronger from the get-go instead of gradually. I thought I would try a joint playthrough of one of the isometric RPGs, and see what he thinks. We would both have our own characters, and give commands during the fights (or in my case, I would play one of the NPCs).

I’m kind of wondering what Dakka recommends. The ones I can use are:
- Baldur’s Gate
- Both Neverwinter Nights games
- Icewind Dale
- Pillars of Eternity (possibly)
- Divinity Original Sin (might not be able to run it)
- Beyond Divinity

Furthermore, any classes I should recommend for him? Races?

Playing the new Bard's Tale IV now. It's...ok, I guess? I'm not getting blown away, but I'm enjoying the music, the voice acting, and the setting. The gameplay itself is a bit rough, and could use improvement.

Thought I'd jump back into Rainbow Six Siege after giving it a bit of a break. My god, there are way more ****holes playing it than I remember. Out of the 7 games I played, 5 started with someone voting to kick another player for seemingly no reason and I had to report 3 different players for team killing me in the starting area

 SkavenLord wrote:
Going to try something a bit new. A friend of mine and I used to play this very loose version of D&D. Had less of a focus on numbers crunching, more of a focus on combat than storytelling, and tended to lean towards using characters that are stronger from the get-go instead of gradually. I thought I would try a joint playthrough of one of the isometric RPGs, and see what he thinks. We would both have our own characters, and give commands during the fights (or in my case, I would play one of the NPCs).

I’m kind of wondering what Dakka recommends. The ones I can use are:
- Baldur’s Gate
- Both Neverwinter Nights games
- Icewind Dale
- Pillars of Eternity (possibly)
- Divinity Original Sin (might not be able to run it)
- Beyond Divinity

Furthermore, any classes I should recommend for him? Races?

Baldur's Gate II was one of my favourite games as a child. The number of spells for mage classes was really impressive, although I usually went as a rogue. I'm not sure how well it holds up now though because it's been years since I've played it

Divinity Original Sin is very fun as well, although my wife refuses to play with me after I got caught stealing a carrot during a quest, resulting in the quest giver hating me so much they refused to talk to us. The great thing about Divinity is that almost every character build is a viable option. My character was a thief who could talk to animals and loved trolling people where as my wife was a very serious mage who refused to break the rules. It led to some very interesting ideas on how to do certain quests, especially the rock, paper, scissors mechanic of deciding who in your party gets to do the talking

If you can run it, Divinity Original Sin is definitely my pick for a great co-op D&D style game. I really need to talk my wife into playing it again.

If you can get Neverwinter Nights 2 to work properly online, you'll have a great time. I recommend getting the Kaedrin Class mod to get more classes and customization. Oh and the Baldurs Gate reloaded mod if you prefer DnD 3.5 mechanics, its essentially Baldur's Gate in Nwn 2, really great work.

Finished the Battletech campaign last week, been plinking around trying out some 5 skulls for a challenge - there aren't any, really.

Went back to TWW1, finally bought the last bit of DLC for it and tried the Beastmen campaign; was cool, kind of annoying having to fight Todbringer with a full stack along with two others. Other than that, it was a pretty straight forward campaign - not really worth the $$ alone but having access to them for the grand campaign and in TWW2 (when I finally buy it) is OK.

Installed Darkest Dungeon too, going to wait until the weekend to try my hand at it - need some decent sleep and food to reduce my overall frustration level before I try the RNG simulator.