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Playing more xcom 2. The avatar progress timer started the 24 days countdown but I was ready to assault the alien black site anyway. It should be fun. I think I have either 4 or 5 engineers now. I'm about to get another. Sadly the dark event that doubles Intel costs became active recently and that's a rather nasty one. I have full magnetic weapons right now so things should work out alright for the next mission. Unfortunately the chosen usually pops up on this mission so it might be a bit of a slog as well as hurt soldiers and maybe even some dead ones.

 Tiger9gamer wrote:

Voss wrote:
So... Anyone diving into the Steam release of Fallout 76 and/or the release of Wastelanders, actual NPCs and junk, or have they burned too many bridges with this one?

I might've if it had come with single player and offline, but...

That games just seems like a dumpster fire, and with how many problems they had with hackers, pay 2 win and bad pr i’m Worried my computer will get nuked if I try to install it.

I'm surprised that after that boatload of continuous bad PR they still have the balls to charge 40 Euros ($44) for just the base game...

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Tiger9gamer wrote:

Voss wrote:
So... Anyone diving into the Steam release of Fallout 76 and/or the release of Wastelanders, actual NPCs and junk, or have they burned too many bridges with this one?

I might've if it had come with single player and offline, but...

That games just seems like a dumpster fire, and with how many problems they had with hackers, pay 2 win and bad pr i’m Worried my computer will get nuked if I try to install it.

I'm surprised that after that boatload of continuous bad PR they still have the balls to charge 40 Euros ($44) for just the base game...

they what now?
A game that was given away for free if you bought controllers over the Rubicon, erm meant rhine
Ok now that is balsy indeed.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Tiger9gamer wrote:

Voss wrote:
So... Anyone diving into the Steam release of Fallout 76 and/or the release of Wastelanders, actual NPCs and junk, or have they burned too many bridges with this one?

I might've if it had come with single player and offline, but...

That games just seems like a dumpster fire, and with how many problems they had with hackers, pay 2 win and bad pr i’m Worried my computer will get nuked if I try to install it.

I'm surprised that after that boatload of continuous bad PR they still have the balls to charge 40 Euros ($44) for just the base game...

Kind of? The new 'expansion' (and the survival play modes that have been added over time) is included in that price so it's not really the base game. It's not really weird for expansion material to have an additional cost, they just set it up in a slightly weird way. Existing players don't have to pay anything and still get the Wastelanders stuff.

Whether it's worth it...

Can you still mod other players to be lootable at infinite distances?

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
I'm trying to finish a Hard campaign with Tyrion, and decided to tackle Bretonnia on my road to retaking the Elven colonies they were built on. I gotta say that it's a pretty tiring experience when the AI has so many upkeep cheats and can create 5 full stacks as soon as I defeat them.

Depending on what the stacks are full of it may be half working as intended. Bretonnia doesn't use Supply Chains, so they can recruit as many Lords as they want whenever they want, but the AI seems loath to give them any units the Lord doesn't have the right Vows to use without huge upkeep. Both against Bretonnia and when unifying it, there always seemed to be 5-6 stacks of peasant-tier units with a scattering of Knights Errant and the odd Knights of the Realm or Questing Knights.

Honestly my main issue fighting Bretonnia was taking out the LLs, especially when accompanied by Paladins. AI Alberic and Louen can basically solo early-/mid-game armies by themselves, and having them reappear every 2-3 turns was annoying as hell. The armies I can deal with in a handful of minutes--if not auto-resolve them. The LLs take several times as long to take out, and Louen especially is ridiculous between AI's flawless micro, unbreakable, perfect vigour, phys. resistance and ward saves, and hefty regen. He almost won a siege by himself; I only managed to take him out because my Mortis Engine somehow survived being on 0hp for a full minute as I tried to drag it out of a combat it had got sucked into, and spent the rest of the battle trying to keep my Grave Guard topped up as they tried to pin Louen down and let the Mortis Engine damage aura do most of the work.

It was not a fun battle, and both his army and Alberic's - including Alberic, who micro'd his way perfectly out of combat to run away on a sliver of health - finally routed after I had them trapped in the gatehouse with the Mortis Engine and a few choice spells. Louen kept on fighting for about double the time it took me to defeat the armies.

Playing Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, a game that has a plot and mechanics that are unapologeticly similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, including a slightly simplified job/class system. Its really good and I'm kinda annoyed I didn't know it was out there.

 ChargerIIC wrote:
Playing Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, a game that has a plot and mechanics that are unapologeticly similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, including a slightly simplified job/class system. Its really good and I'm kinda annoyed I didn't know it was out there.

Huh. I passed on that one due to the character designs and the tiny Disgaea-style battle maps. It didn't mesh well with their claims of a 'mature story,' which is a term I'm always suspicious of when dev studios use it in their steam page description- it usually either means 'softcore porn' or 'we've vastly overrated our own writing capabilities.'

Voss wrote:

 ChargerIIC wrote:
Playing Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, a game that has a plot and mechanics that are unapologeticly similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, including a slightly simplified job/class system. Its really good and I'm kinda annoyed I didn't know it was out there.

Huh. I passed on that one due to the character designs and the tiny Disgaea-style battle maps. It didn't mesh well with their claims of a 'mature story,' which is a term I'm always suspicious of when dev studios use it in their steam page description- it usually either means 'softcore porn' or 'we've vastly overrated our own writing capabilities.'

It's deep, but I'm not certain what they mean by mature. Unless they are referring to people getting stabbed in the street... It's really a love letter to FFT, so I'd base your decision on whether or not you like that game.

Not familiar with it, beyond knowing vaguely that it existed, so that really tells me nothing about this game.

I am enjoying the FF7 remake for the most part, but I am also finding that certain things are making me annoyed or downright angry. I just did the boss fight at the top of the pillar and it was a complete mess. Two targets sprinting all over the place, stun locking whatever character I was trying to use, doing team moves that messed with my camera, resetting their stagger gauges whenever they felt like it...

I don't know if the battle system is too complex or if they just designed every fight to be down in a really specific way, and screw anyone who tried to figure out their own approach." Sorry, you were supposed to equip wind materia for this enemy - the fight is basically impossible without it". Another problem I find is that things really snowball against you if you take too much damage - no health, can't safely attack, can't charge ATB, can't heal. If you get put on the back foot after too much damage then it can make it impossible to recover.

The graphics are amazing and I feel like they did a great job of staying true to the story of the original whilst still managing to expand things. I hope I can deal with the stress it is causing me so that I can see it through to the end.

Still on Sonic Mania and I think I'm finally grasping the truth.

I suck at Sonic games.

On the last level which despite how much I suck I think it's one of the worst 2D Sonic zones I've ever played Titanic Monarch, ugh getting crushed to death too many times lol

Edit: Seriously, FRIG Titanic Monarch!

Things are going really well in both xcom 2 and my co op 40k gladius game with a friend. My guard and his tau went from falling back to his cities to overturning the enemy nids and guard force (2vs2vs2vs2). His cities are all fairly safe now and my frontier remains more untamed. I guess we will find out what we have to fight tomorrow but he should be safe regardless.

Xcom 2 I went from losing a ton of soldiers with almost 2 whole squad wipes to basically salvaging everything and having a bunch of vets and predator armor to go with all my magnetic weapons. Everything seems to be going fairly well even considering the 2 enemy chosen are getting pretty close to an avenger assault. My supplies seem to be good. I'm about to get some more engineers. I have 2 lab areas because research was slow. The only issue I really have is I need more resources but I'm getting that soon and maybe a little more Intel or engineers. That said my forces should probably go on the assault some more soon while the momentum is keeping up and before the enemies get a boost again with new forces.

Put world of tanks back on, no need for me to go in to detail as we all know the game. Ah il play it for a while until I get bored then probably not put it back on for a few months.

Voss wrote:
So... Anyone diving into the Steam release of Fallout 76 and/or the release of Wastelanders, actual NPCs and junk, or have they burned too many bridges with this one?

I might've if it had come with single player and offline, but...

Me! I did! *raises hand*

And... it's... not bad, actually. I skipped 76 at launch, because it was a clear dumpster fire. But I watched a bunch of Youtube videos from people who had no difficulty calling original 76 a burning tire around the neck of Tod Howard, and most of them were very positive. Most of the reviewers were surprised at how much work has clearly been done on the game. It is no longer in beta test, that's for sure.

So: They added NPCs and new quests. This is very good, and it makes the game feel more like Fallout 4 did. They instituted the "silent protagonist dialogue response" tree from 3 and New Vegas. They also instituted attribute-dependent skill checks in the dialogue (like Strength 4+ intimidate the NPC/ Charisma 4+ charm them into helping, etc) similar to the skill % checks from 3 and NV. You can choose multiple ways to deal with a quest (at least for the new ones... the old ones are still 'do what the NPC says the way the NPC says it'. But with the introductory quest, you can choose to ally with the NPCs in the tavern hub, and wipe out a raider faction for them (or you can bribe or intimidate the raiders in to leaving them alone). Or, you can side with the raiders and wipe out the tavern NPCs for a unique item and evil giggles.

Basically, we have basic NPC interactions again, so the game is closer to what modern audiences think of when they think of a Bethesda Fallout game.

Also, many of the bugs have been patched. I played for 12 hours across 2 days and ran into exactly 2 bugs: a tree that hadn't been placed in the worldspace correctly, and a horde of enemies failed to spawn during a base-defense quest . That's all.

There's still some stuff that's a pain, but that's due to decisions about gameplay itself. My biggest gameplay complaint is that uncooked food in your personal inventory (not your stash) will spoil after a while. That was a nasty surprise, I must say. Gear is level-dependent, which is rage-inducing, too. But at least you can craft higher-level versions of any weapon you have the plans for as you level up.

TL;DR If you liked Fallout 3 and 4 and you just got $1200 from the US government and don't need it to pay your bills, you could do worse than 76 Wastelanders. Watch a few Youtube videos (not by Bethesda shills like Oxhorn; find people who crapped all over 76 at launch) and judge for yourself.

Oh, have a high-end machine. My PC is decent and runs Fallout 4 with no problem, but it struggles with 76 at times. There were some lighting overhauls that make my graphics card weep silicon tears.

So i played and beat Lego Jurassic world seeing if they lived up to what i remember as a kid and yeah, kinda
Back when i was a kid, going back to every level, getting every treasure, and getting everything made alot of sense,,, becuae i didnt have money to buy a game. but i just got a few more games on sale.
I wanted to go back and get all the amber and gold bricks and gak but then i asked myself......why? to give yourself other ways to play an OK game? to i dropped it, not bad, but meh.,
Picked up the Uncharted series..........1 really sucks.......enemies die in 15 hits, you die in 2......
2 however is shaping up to be fun.

I played a game of gladius as orks this time and won and honestly it was a lot more fun than as guard. As orks you start fighting out of the gate and ore and influence goes through the roof but esp. Influence. If I play them again I might see how mechanized orks are but honestly I think infantry play with orks is mostly where it's at. I've seen enough in previous games to know which units are strong (Mega nobs and warbosses) and which aren't so hot (battlewagons and some vehicles). Getting resources by fighting, mixing painboys and heroes into the mix and I found myself drowning in resources. Line of sight obscuring terrain, woods and other things really weakens ranged armies too and orks don't really suffer against them. That said if the enemy built serious air units I probably would've been screwed. They never really got to that point though.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
I played a game of gladius as orks this time and won and honestly it was a lot more fun than as guard. As orks you start fighting out of the gate and ore and influence goes through the roof but esp. Influence. If I play them again I might see how mechanized orks are but honestly I think infantry play with orks is mostly where it's at. I've seen enough in previous games to know which units are strong (Mega nobs and warbosses) and which aren't so hot (battlewagons and some vehicles). Getting resources by fighting, mixing painboys and heroes into the mix and I found myself drowning in resources. Line of sight obscuring terrain, woods and other things really weakens ranged armies too and orks don't really suffer against them. That said if the enemy built serious air units I probably would've been screwed. They never really got to that point though.

I have Gladius but can't play it right now, because the frame rate chugs when I select units, it's frustrating.

Just started Divinity Original Sin 2 seems quite cool

But also want to use the GM stuff for online gaming with friends...

After having put 61 hours into Bannerlord, I'm going to take a break. It's a great game, but it's mostly just a sandbox right now, and I don't want to burn out on it before it's finished. I'll come back to it every couple months to see how it evolves.

I've started a new game of Pillars of Eternity. While I beat it some time back, I never did play the DLC or get started on PoE2, so I figured I would start a brand new game to experience all of it again before going into PoE2.

Fallout 76. Extremely disappointed with it when it first game out and just deleted it. The new Wastlelanders expansion intrigued me. Only played a bit so far but it is feeling a somewhat like a real Fallout game.

I think I'm finally getting the hang of gladius with imperial guard. You absolutely must go research heavy and get vehicles fast. When my leman Russ finally reached the area I wanted them to go they had the heavy bolters sponsors research done as well. Just for good measure I made a bunch of psyker coven units just to see how well the do. They're not bad, they build really fast and they can seriously nerf enemy units or make them take more damage. They have the potential to really hurt movement and melee damage and they can use a flamethrower that avoids cranged damage reduction which is a huge boon. Also recharge of pychic abilies happens next turn.

We will see how the rest of the battlefield is going but things seem to be going well. The ork ai that I first met fought me and it went back and forth until the lemans finally advanced the line. Orks are already down a city and their next will probably go down tomorrow. There should still be 2 tau and a necron bot as well as another ork player.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
I think I'm finally getting the hang of gladius with imperial guard. You absolutely must go research heavy and get vehicles fast. When my leman Russ finally reached the area I wanted them to go they had the heavy bolters sponsors research done as well. Just for good measure I made a bunch of psyker coven units just to see how well the do. They're not bad, they build really fast and they can seriously nerf enemy units or make them take more damage. They have the potential to really hurt movement and melee damage and they can use a flamethrower that avoids cranged damage reduction which is a huge boon. Also recharge of pychic abilies happens next turn.

We will see how the rest of the battlefield is going but things seem to be going well. The ork ai that I first met fought me and it went back and forth until the lemans finally advanced the line. Orks are already down a city and their next will probably go down tomorrow. There should still be 2 tau and a necron bot as well as another ork player.

I think I did 2 or 3 games learning Gladius before I beat it with guard on very hard dfifficulty (with the creatures spawn rate put down a little). I very much enjoyed the notion of a 4x civ 40k game but much less so the idea that they took random creatures from the setting that had no buisness being on the planet. Catachan devils, enslavers, kroot hounds and ambulls all on this random world? Also for some reason there's random admech robots roaming around. Anyway after beating it I tried all the other factions but quickly got bored. I found guards to be exceptionally powerfull since they can pump out so many units. Just spam infantry and get a bunch of the anti missile crew early. Soy farm to keep the infantry going. Then it's just a matter of winning on tech. you will outrange pretty much anything with the missile guys. I found tech priest extremly usefull since you can heal your sentinels early and russes late for so much essentially trading for free. Mostly I found the biggest problem to be when a unit takes one step to far and there's 2 enslavers, 3 catachan devils and 2 kroot hounds in the fog of war all waiting for you to take that one step without enough backup. Also build lots of cities.

Finally got around to Witcher 3. After seeing the show I decided to give the game another go. Last time I tried I got bored of how much random loot there was that gave like 1% difference in stats. It felt exceptionally silly to me that a master monster hunter would need to level up to use a +2% sword. Anyway I find it thet most fun when I'm out hunting monsters. Not so much the parts running around in city getting into business I don't really care about. To each his own I guess.

I wouldn’t necessarily say this is anything I’ve been playing, but I’m trying to get a better clue of energy consumption while gaming. Any idea what kind of power consumption Nintendo devices use? Only thing I could find was that a Switch uses 11 watts (presumably per hour) on Breath of the Wild while a DS Lite has a 2.3 “battery power rating”. Seems a bit too small considering a switch runs the same kinds of games you would find on an XBox, which uses around 100 watts (correct me if I’m wrong).

So like......after finishing Uncharted 1 I thought "This was the PS3s flagship series? This gakky combat, overly long no story game was what people remember about the PS? Jesus..."
Then i played 2, and my god was that fun, the combat was better, the characters where better, the graphics/design was better.
THERE WAS A VILLAIN!!!!!!!
Cant wait for the next 2.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Cant wait for the next 2.

There is also Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. It is a bit short and there is no Drake but it is still the same idea.

Anyway, I have been persevering with Final Fantasy VII Remake and, long after finishing the game, I finally felt like I got the hang of the janky combat system. I resented how much stuff I had to do in hard mode for trophies but I was able to slog through and most of it wasn't too awful. The final two simulator battles are really long and tough but I eventually persevered to get platinum.

I do wonder how the next game is going to handle equipment, materia and so on. It's an RPG so they can't just remove all my awesome stuff, but if they let me import my current arsenal then I'm just going to annihilate everything. If they don't take away my Götterdämmerung then some Kalm Fangs are going to be in for a nasty shock...

 Bilge Rat wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Cant wait for the next 2.

There is also Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. It is a bit short and there is no Drake but it is still the same idea.

Anyway, I have been persevering with Final Fantasy VII Remake and, long after finishing the game, I finally felt like I got the hang of the janky combat system. I resented how much stuff I had to do in hard mode for trophies but I was able to slog through and most of it wasn't too awful. The final two simulator battles are really long and tough but I eventually persevered to get platinum.

I do wonder how the next game is going to handle equipment, materia and so on. It's an RPG so they can't just remove all my awesome stuff, but if they let me import my current arsenal then I'm just going to annihilate everything. If they don't take away my Götterdämmerung then some Kalm Fangs are going to be in for a nasty shock...

There's a long list of RPG sequels that do exactly that, and take away everything. Though I admit I don't know how JRPGs tend to do it when they do a real sequel rather than an unrelated title. (Final Fantasy X-2 maybe qualifies?)
Its generally better than unreasonably buffed mundane enemies.

Voss wrote:

 Bilge Rat wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Cant wait for the next 2.

There is also Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. It is a bit short and there is no Drake but it is still the same idea.

Anyway, I have been persevering with Final Fantasy VII Remake and, long after finishing the game, I finally felt like I got the hang of the janky combat system. I resented how much stuff I had to do in hard mode for trophies but I was able to slog through and most of it wasn't too awful. The final two simulator battles are really long and tough but I eventually persevered to get platinum.

I do wonder how the next game is going to handle equipment, materia and so on. It's an RPG so they can't just remove all my awesome stuff, but if they let me import my current arsenal then I'm just going to annihilate everything. If they don't take away my Götterdämmerung then some Kalm Fangs are going to be in for a nasty shock...

There's a long list of RPG sequels that do exactly that, and take away everything. Though I admit I don't know how JRPGs tend to do it when they do a real sequel rather than an unrelated title. (Final Fantasy X-2 maybe qualifies?)
Its generally better than unreasonably buffed mundane enemies.

Yeah, they really backed themselves into a corner in this regard.

After what the final boss was, having any of the normal enemies roaming around outside Midgar be a legitimate threat will feel a bit silly. Hell, even the Midgar Zolom would be difficult to justify needing to be avoided like in the first game without it suddenly having an incredible increase in power (especially as the player now will have access to elemental materia which can protect them from its most powerful attack, the fire damage enemy skill Beta).

Furthermore, a lot of your materia is maxed out by the end of the game, so you'll have no sense of progression on that front either unless they take all your powerful spells away and revert it all back to level one. And if they don't do that then any new materia you find will be at level one, so you'll need to grind to bring it up to the same level as your previously collected materia. So if they don't scale the enemies up to you then you will obliterate them but newly found materia might actually be useful. If they do scale it up then you will still be challenged but any new materia you find will be useless until you grind to level it up.

So they either reset the player and enemies, which will make your time spent doing any of the extra bonus stuff in the first game feel pointless and take away the cool stuff that players unlocked previously, requiring a grind to get back. And justifying that storywise is going to be a very hard sell since the game is taking place after the party has successfully escaped from their enemies so it isn't like you can play the "you got captured and wake up with all your stuff missing" card.

Or they leave the player as is and make the enemies strength completely wack in terms of the world building (any enemy that is populating the area around Midgar that poses a threat to the party as they are at the end of the first game would make it suicide for normal people to travel to Midgar except by air and Kalm and the Chocobo farm would be overrun and destroyed by such powerful monsters), along with the player not getting any sense of progression in terms of their materia growth over the game for a hefty chunk of core spells (healing, ice/fire/lightning/wind magic etc.).

I don't really see a way for them to do it that won't piss off the players or make the world feel very strange.

There is also a limit to how much they can boost the power level of enemies. If they keep ramping up the battle speed and the damage output of monsters then by the third or fourth game it will be unplayable

I am now onto Life Is Strange 2. Ugh, I hate it. I enjoyed the original game but I can't stand Daniel in this one. He is a whiny, needy brat who is constantly screwing up. I don't really like the protagonist either since the whole plot involves him abandoning his old life for reasons that make no sense. Now it wants me to play a side game about some other kid I don't care about.

I've started playing a bit of diablo 3 for the first time in quite a while. Trying to balance out just having a bit of fun smashing things against the fact that i still think the plot is... incredibly stupid, at best.