Thought this should be a regular thread to go with what are you reading and equivalents.
Edit Jul 2023: there's now a tabletop gaming version of this thread! You can find it here (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=6730.msg151612#msg151612).
My most recent playing attempt was psychonauts, which I found find but I just don't like platforming that much that I want to do a whole game of it, I think. Pillars of Eternity is probably next on the list, though I may buy CK3 as that's out and meant to be good.
Good idea, currently been playing the surge 2, just to try get my dark soulsy fix while i wait until eldren ring news lol. Nice game i recommend for any dark souls combat fans.
Now doing Pillars of Eternity and really enjoying it. Like, probably not enough that I'll get the expansions, but it's got a good feel to it and I love this sort of pausable semi-tactical combat (as long as I only play it on normal mode: I'm dying every once in a while but it's about the right level of frustration for me).
Ahhh that's so cool Jub!
Pillars is one of my favourite games! It took me the longest time to get into it though :)
What kind of character have you made/ are you making?
The expansion is actually better than the base game imo, it has the gameplay which is fine but the story and the encounters are so much more varied, diplomacy is more of a thing, if you do end up getting 50-60% of the way through and think 'I like my character but wish there was something else to do' then I'd recommend it!
I'm playing Necromunda: Underhive Wars. It's about as flawed as Mordheim but is prettier so.... yay?
I've got an orlan wizard. Playing him as generally compassionate and benevolent, but also quite passionately sciencey and takes everything quite literally so I've got a pretty high honest rep. (I was a bit sad there was no bard class available, I do admit). I'm not that well built, in that my wizard has all the close combat wizard options - lots of good spells for a wizard who wants to fake being good in toe to toe melee - but I tend to take parties that have really good CC capacity so I end up being ranged support but not ideal at it.
I think if I ever play another character I'll download White March and do it with a ranger.
I've been resuming the finishing of my unpainted miniatures! I've also been playing a hearty amount of Space Hulk Death-wing
@Jub
That's awesome! Did you not like the chanter class? In my mind they're actually one of the best implementation of bards in a video game despite not being called as such. Creating phrases to make a verse which causes spell effects evokes a real groundedness to them imo.
@Baragon - I have deathwing too and enjoyed it immensely, was a bit hard solo for some of it though, and playing it with dodgy headphones was funny because all the enemies came from my right (the working headphone) lol
Quote from: Clockwork on September 19, 2020, 07:00:51 PM
@Jub
That's awesome! Did you not like the chanter class? In my mind they're actually one of the best implementation of bards in a video game despite not being called as such. Creating phrases to make a verse which causes spell effects evokes a real groundedness to them imo.
@Baragon - I have deathwing too and enjoyed it immensely, was a bit hard solo for some of it though, and playing it with dodgy headphones was funny because all the enemies came from my right (the working headphone) lol
Oh yeah, have you played it since they published the Enhanced Edition? much of it has been polished up
I don't think the game was really made to be playable solo haha, atleast all my own attempts have failed - Lately there's been a lot of new players which is great though; one thing I like doing in games is showing new players the ropes and giving them an encouraging NPE! I just wish some of the armour skins you could buy let you reskin as various other chapters...
Quote from: Clockwork on September 19, 2020, 07:00:51 PM
@Jub
That's awesome! Did you not like the chanter class? In my mind they're actually one of the best implementation of bards in a video game despite not being called as such. Creating phrases to make a verse which causes spell effects evokes a real groundedness to them imo.
Oh, I love the chanter class, I agree it's mechanically fantastic. I guess I just didn't feel they had the aesthetic/atmosphere I wanted from a true bard class in terms of e.g. spell selection? They felt much more like "here are our solemn mystic chants" than "here are our swishy fun minstrel songs" if that makes sense. Though maybe that's partly just my feelings from Kana as a character and I could make a more bard-ish chanter as a PC.
@Baragon - Ha, it's not the smoothest ride I'll grant you, but yes, doable as solo! I actually only played it since the enhanced edition was released, I never experienced the joys of regular edition :)
I've not really played much more than the main story though, personally vermintide is more my speed with regards to setting. I still fire up deathwing every now and then though :P
@ Jub - Ah okay I see what you mean and I agree. Kana, yeah. He's a historian with a potentially very pessimistic outlook depending on how you talk to him.
I actually did just that, a smartass dwarf. For me his standout chants were At the Sight of their Comrades, their Hearts Grew Bold (https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/At_the_Sight_of_their_Comrades,_their_Hearts_Grew_Bold), The Fox from the Farmer Did Run and Leap (https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/The_Fox_from_the_Farmer_Did_Run_and_Leap) (kinda useless but seemed limerick-ey) and The Dragon Thrashed, The Dragon Wailed (https://pillarsofeternity.gamepedia.com/The_Dragon_Thrashed,_The_Dragon_Wailed) I think but I can't remember the third phrase tbh. I suspect it would be that one though. I got chased a lot to use the fox chant. I think I used a crossbow but maybe a pistol?
For me, Pillars strength is in the dialogue choices, so many of them add the character which gives you that clear image and sound of your character. Mechanically, I found my island-bound barbarian king and psychic detective easiest to get abilities for which suited them both thematically and mechanically, all others were difficult to get the two to match. Druids are mixed. Clerics and paladins are easy actually but they're quite... restricted I find? Durance is a great companion though, some of the best lines along with Aloth and Eder.
Ah yes, the joys of your game crashing when someone holds down fire with their flamethrower and helicopters around the room haha
QuoteHe's a historian with a potentially very pessimistic outlook depending on how you talk to him.
I knew there was something I liked about him. ;)
And yeah, I
hate Durance, but the fact that I have strong feelings about him is testament to him being well written (at low levels nobody in my party had good mechanics skill and I would sometimes trap hunt by just walking Durance down corridors, that's how much I dislike the man). I think my favourite companion is probably either Sagani or Pallegina, I found them both quite narratively compelling (and more easy to empathise with than Eder or Aloth).
Haha yeah true!
Mhm, my characters on the whole didn't like Durance but accepted him as a force of nature or once, dove into his soul bearing it for him to see and caused revelations of his own worth and being... Being emotionally psychic sometimes has it's perks!
I've not tried just hiring random adventurers yet. Presumably they have like no interactions at all?
Also, I'm taking a break from the game for a week or so I think. I got completely stuck on the Adra dragon (I can see ways you're meant to kill it, but it seems like tbh even if you do the tactics perfectly you still only have a fairly low chance of pulling it off: having an enemy monster which if it plays optimally genuinely cannot lose against your top level party feels OTT).
I got stuck on ... what was that oughties D&D computer game with a built-in level builder? Neverwinter Nights? in a similar situation: a boss fight which I could not win but the alternative path was unacceptable
Duly completed the game. Mostly got the endings I wanted with the one glaring exception of getting quite a bad result for Sagani, who given she was about my favourite NPC was a bit of a bugger to say the least. But having looked it up, it was kind of hard to reconcile the ways to get better outcomes with the sort of character I was trying to play :/
I played some Dawn Of War with a friend recently, great experience
I still hold the same criticism of the game series not having co-op campaigns in the first set of expansions but otherwise terrific!
Bought a brand new gaming laptop a few months back. Been nothing but trouble. Thankfully it is under warranty and I am getting a replacement shipped, but in tried and tested fashion, my technology curse has struck once more.
Was having a lot of fun playing Warhammer Total War and The Isle, in amidst inarticulate rage as the machine would freeze and crash intermittently.
EDIT* Baragon, the original Dawn of War, and specifically the Dark Crusade expansion, was the high point of the series for me. Remains one of my favourite games.
Also my first foray into modding, way back in the day.
Quote from: Jubal on September 23, 2020, 10:12:39 PM
Duly completed the game. Mostly got the endings I wanted with the one glaring exception of getting quite a bad result for Sagani, who given she was about my favourite NPC was a bit of a bugger to say the least. But having looked it up, it was kind of hard to reconcile the ways to get better outcomes with the sort of character I was trying to play :/
Yeah I didn't want to say earlier as you hadn't completed it then but unforunately the Sagani quest is a bit of a let down. And I realise that's the point of it but I walked away from it going 'well that was rubbish' rather than 'huh, yeah I guess that's life'. Also the Hiravis quest is weird and grieving mother is all round bad imo.
As you say, hiring randomers has no impact on the game whatsoever, aside from the Rp you give them internally (mine were the crew of my pirate ship :D)
Pillars 2 is leagues ahead of 1 in terms of companion interaction. Unfortunately, it has it's own problems but they mostly revolve around none of the factions being likeable and the main quest being the least interesting part of the game and the pirating minigames being the most fun. It does have full turn based mode, and the spells are *so* much better, like night and day.
The Arda dragon, you can bypass it entirely by letting it possess a dragon hunter or I found it's not so bad with a large amount of crowd control spells like paralyse. I think I brought eder, aloth, durance, grieving mother and probably sagani. Eder, aloth and durance are must haves imo, regardless of player character class.
The xpac makes the fight a ton easier though as you can level higher and get more soulbound weapons which are the most powerful in the game. Some nutcases have done the whole game on max difficulty, solo, ironman. Like... Why? Why do that to yourself?
Did you meet the archwizards at all? I can't remember if that was basegame or xpac. Llengrath and Concelhaut (sp?)
Quote from: Phoenixguard09 on September 24, 2020, 03:44:08 PM
EDIT* Baragon, the original Dawn of War, and specifically the Dark Crusade expansion, was the high point of the series for me. Remains one of my favourite games.
Also my first foray into modding, way back in the day.
What sort of mod work did you do? is it difficult? most of the dev kit they used for it seems kind of alien for me
Athena Scalzi also has a post complaining that she feels like a lot of big commercial games today set the difficulty too high for players with a couple of hours a week to play.
Quote from: Clockwork on September 25, 2020, 11:03:19 PM
Quote from: Jubal on September 23, 2020, 10:12:39 PM
Duly completed the game. Mostly got the endings I wanted with the one glaring exception of getting quite a bad result for Sagani, who given she was about my favourite NPC was a bit of a bugger to say the least. But having looked it up, it was kind of hard to reconcile the ways to get better outcomes with the sort of character I was trying to play :/
Yeah I didn't want to say earlier as you hadn't completed it then but unforunately the Sagani quest is a bit of a let down. And I realise that's the point of it but I walked away from it going 'well that was rubbish' rather than 'huh, yeah I guess that's life'. Also the Hiravis quest is weird and grieving mother is all round bad imo.
As you say, hiring randomers has no impact on the game whatsoever, aside from the Rp you give them internally (mine were the crew of my pirate ship :D)
Pillars 2 is leagues ahead of 1 in terms of companion interaction. Unfortunately, it has it's own problems but they mostly revolve around none of the factions being likeable and the main quest being the least interesting part of the game and the pirating minigames being the most fun. It does have full turn based mode, and the spells are *so* much better, like night and day.
The Arda dragon, you can bypass it entirely by letting it possess a dragon hunter or I found it's not so bad with a large amount of crowd control spells like paralyse. I think I brought eder, aloth, durance, grieving mother and probably sagani. Eder, aloth and durance are must haves imo, regardless of player character class.
The xpac makes the fight a ton easier though as you can level higher and get more soulbound weapons which are the most powerful in the game. Some nutcases have done the whole game on max difficulty, solo, ironman. Like... Why? Why do that to yourself?
Did you meet the archwizards at all? I can't remember if that was basegame or xpac. Llengrath and Concelhaut (sp?)
I don't think the archwizards are in the base game, I certainly didn't meet them. I did have a soulbound magic sceptre thing which was pretty cool. IIRC Adra dragon is immune to paralyse but not to petrify - I could just never get the petrify spells to land, I had two wizards chucking petrifies at it and no dice at any point. I'm sure I must have been doing some stuff pretty wrong regardless since I struggled to take down the xaurips and adragans with any speed given their healing capabilities, probably I tended to keep my party too immobile for some of the rougher fights. I do think the Adra dragon wasn't a well made fight though - I mean I get it's kind of nice to have some uber hard challenges, but that was just painful and also really overshadowed the comparative cakewalk of the final boss.
I agree Hiravias' quest was weird, the end fight of it seemed to come very much from nowhere and it seemed like a way to push you round more of the Glanfathan areas in a slightly disjointed fashion. Which is a pity, because I liked Hiravias (not least getting some interesting insight as to how my own character would be seen as a fellow Orlan). I actually sort of liked Grieving Mother, she was creepy-weird and her "quest" felt a bit "sit here and talk through the very obvious options and reach conclusions that you're railroaded towards", but the concept was interesting. Sagani's quest... I see what they were trying to do and I don't dislike the concept, I just think the execution of it needed way more build-up and clarity and actually reaction after the event? Like the let-down of the final point on the quest felt like a midpoint in her emotional arc but it's then just cut off weirdly. The let-down wasn't per se a problem (arguably pretty much all the companion quests confound expectations a bit like that - Kana, Eder, and Aloth certainly all fail to find the certainties they were looking for), but I was rattled by the fact that she had such a grim ending and the game I felt never really flagged up to me that that was even a
remote likelihood.
QuoteAthena Scalzi also has a post complaining that she feels like a lot of big commercial games today set the difficulty too high for players with a couple of hours a week to play.
Got a link? I'd be interested to read. I generally don't feel or find this, though I think a lot of big commercial games do assume a lot of time commitment, I'd say the issue is less difficulty and more just speed of plot advancement, if I had just 2hrs/week on an average modern RPG I suspect it'd take me pretty much a year to get through it. Difficulty, well, most games do have an easy setting, though in some cases I think they could put in an easier one, and I often take a dislike to any game which tries to nudge you into
not playing on easy.
Quote from: Jubal on September 29, 2020, 11:43:18 PMQuoteAthena Scalzi also has a post complaining that she feels like a lot of big commercial games today set the difficulty too high for players with a couple of hours a week to play.
Got a link? I'd be interested to read. I generally don't feel or find this, though I think a lot of big commercial games do assume a lot of time commitment, I'd say the issue is less difficulty and more just speed of plot advancement, if I had just 2hrs/week on an average modern RPG I suspect it'd take me pretty much a year to get through it. Difficulty, well, most games do have an easy setting, though in some cases I think they could put in an easier one, and I often take a dislike to any game which tries to nudge you into not playing on easy.
'Twas Get Gud, Scrub (https://whatever.scalzi.com/2020/09/25/get-gud-scrub/). Scalzi is one of those sites whose URL I don't save because a lot of the posts are angry American or UK political / culture war stuff, although he's certainly a lot calmer than many other people today.
Been back to playing CK3 a fair bit over the past week, playing as East Anglia since the W European stuff is currently the best developed part of the game (AIUI there'll be DLCs to expand on a lot of the other areas).
Been a fairly mad game. England never formed, the Kingdom of Alba became dominant across the British mainland and I joined the Kingdom of West Francia to defend from them - which then turned into the Empire of Francia and is now the main West European power. A sub-branch of my house became Emperors at one point which gave the Empire the "Saxon Elective Monarchy" law so it's now an elector-Empire. Byzantium exploded across the map and was really hyper-dominant, including a brief period in control of Francia, reaching the Baltic, and getting close to the Gulf of Guinea - I think Songhay are still Orthodox Christians as a result in this setting. Religion has also been chaos, there was a big Cathar period though that's died down, Insular (that is, Celtic) Christianity is the major faith in the British Isles and also in southern Germany, Austria, the northern Balkans, and bits of eastern Europe. As it stands I've just finally broken through and taken the Kingdom of England for my house off the Albans (still within the Empire of Francia) and also founded my new sect of Pantoleonism which is basically "Insular christianity but we legalised witchcraft and homosexuality and made the gender laws equal".
I definitely need to write some stuff about CK3's mechanics, maybe for The Public Medievalist or something - there's a lot of good stuff there but also some really awkward bits (hyper-absolutist approaches to religion, breeding congential intelligence into families, other things which are kinda dodgy like that).
I am playing now Dragon age as I am working now remotely and chilling with this game
Ooh, which of the Dragon Age series?
dragon age 2
Oh cool :) I've only played Origins, I should get round to 2 at some point.
(Also, welcome to Exilian! How did you find us?)
Thanks! I have found this forum on another forum :D I don't actually remember what forum it was exactly
Quote from: Munz6 on November 12, 2020, 10:51:32 AM
dragon age 2
Also welcome! I did like dragonage 2
I've been playing through "They are billions". It's a good fun RTS about zombies.
I'd been finding it frustratingly difficult on the 2nd easiest setting (the default), even a couple of levels in. So I popped it down to the easiest difficulty which I've found a better stress to enjoyment ratio! :D
I don't know what to play next :( Could go back and see if Bannerlord has improved... I'm kind of feeling like another RPG would be good maybe, but I don't know which I really want to play.
Skyrim
I knew you'd say that :)
But yeah, that would make a lot of sense honestly. I just have a feeling I'll hate the combat, from what I've seen of it?
Quote from: Jubal on November 29, 2020, 05:37:04 PM
I knew you'd say that :)
Haha. Darn I am getting predictable
Quote from: Jubal on November 29, 2020, 05:37:04 PM
But yeah, that would make a lot of sense honestly. I just have a feeling I'll hate the combat, from what I've seen of it?
Yes I'd say the melee combat can be a little clunky, but there are other options you can do - like be an arrow person or spelly person. Or maybe summon things to fight for you
And you know what ill say: the witcher 3
So, I have started playing Skyrim. So far it's... fine I guess? It's very pretty and there's clearly a lot in there, I'm not sure how much energy I have to sink myself into the lore dumps. I am as expected not hugely enjoying the combat: I definitely prefer my RPG combat more tactical and party-driven, and whilst I'm sure the game has some quickslotting and weapon switching options somewhere I've not worked them out & it could do with providing some actual training in their use. I just gave up for the evening after dying in a boss fight with a big spider thingy (OK maybe it was a mini-boss but still) and then realising I'd have to do twenty minutes of poking around the first barrow-dungeon all over again to get back to said boss fight. I do like the graphics, which are very nice indeed, and I like the very open feeling of the thing and what you can/might want to do.
Hades turns out to be next on my list: I think I'm doing OK with it, played quite a few runs so far and got as far as being killed by Theseus. I like the plotline, the combat is a bit frantic for my liking and I'm super reliant on getting deflection dashes or something to deal with that, but all in all I'd say I'm having fun and the character work is neat :)
Finished the Hades main quest. Still a lot of content in that game to go, but going to take a break from it now for a bit!
after completion whats your verdict on hades? been on my list for a while now
Absolutely recommend. It's a fantastic game, the plot is very well put together and I really enjoyed it. :)
I'm now working my way through Dragon Age 2 with the usual joys and issues of me playing RPGs - not understanding what the dialogues will lead to and always having my inventory over-full. I'm enjoying it, anyway: my character is Rusudan Hawke, she's an apostate mage, I'm basically being the party healer type. Looking forward to seeing how the plot develops (though some major bits are either obvious or spoilered).
I'll be sure to give hades a go then. Heard great things.
Been spending a disgusting amount of time playing Bannerlord recently. It may be lacking in immersive features atm but it truly is fantastic.
Yeah, I did some time in it recently and enjoyed it, I should finish writing my Bannerlord boardgame guides sometime really as I've cracked the strategies for several others of them.
My current thing though is playing Wildermyth (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=6382), which I'm really enjoying.
Playing some Warbands, in the WarSword warhammer fantasy mod, Return Of Reckoning, GasLands and testing my own stuff (but that's more as a GM)
I've gone back to Hades this week quite a lot. I've been achievement hunting, basically, at this point - I've more or less run out of plot, there are some unique dialogues I've not managed to see yet but they're so arbitrary in the RNG needed that I don't think there's much point in chasing those.
I got all 3 courtyard items unlocked, which involved a win on level 32 pact of punishment setting, something I am definitely not planning to do again any time soon: even with damage reduction on that was a bit hellish. Also tricky was the achievement for getting a 30 percent damage bonus from a particular side item, which I did eventually manage - it improves the bonus any time you complete a room without taking any damage, and I am not the nimblest of players.
All I really have left now are two of the minor prophecies - one duo boon and one weapon enchantment left to go - and one steam achievement, to max rank all the standard keepsake items, which basically is just a case of grinding through about ten runs to level them all up. None of those should be technically difficult now, it's just a question of whether I have the time and energy.
I really should go back to making and testing more of Exile Princes.
what's Exile Princes? it sounds good!
I've just been playing a bit of AVP classic 2000 today, and also some Stone Shard
That's the Strategy-RPG I'm making :) Single player windows game, slightly crappy graphics, has some roguelike elements.
I've just finished Black Geyser today: it's a new CRPG, very much along the classic sort of Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity lines. I'm not sure how strongly I can recommend it: it has some good points but a couple of big downsides.
Technically, the worst downside was that it clearly had some sort of memory hole: there was a lot of lag which got worse as sessions went on. It seems like not everyone experienced this though, and otherwise the game is fairly smooth. Wizards, like in other CRPGs, get a "too many buttons" problem at times and tend to have too many AoE spells which makes them a bit hard to use at times at higher levels without frying your own party.
In story terms, it has some very similar beats to other games in its genre in that the primary concern is The Gods Doing Shenanigans, and you get closer to the plot as various cults and intrigues interact to spread chaos which will herald the wake of the Great Evil Scheme Of The Week(tm). The story is competent, I had a big double take at the end because it turned out I'd been getting two really really important deities and their bizarre cults mixed up for the whole game because they were both somewhat not-good-aligned women deities with mysterious evil cultists and names beginning with the letter Z. The difference between them is quite important in the endgame though!
In the setting as a whole, the 'Rillow' people of the setting's Eastern Empires were something I found grating because they're just a ton of stereotypes bundled together really badly. Everything from the related spell class being called "Oriental" to the merchants deciding that their major conversation topic is how much less sand there is in Isilmerald, to their god Elenuator being presented as jealous and vengeful as opposed to the just and fair pseudo-Christian deity Alnarius, to them generally being shown as decadent merchants and little else, to the mix of visuals, it just... grates on me pretty hard, honestly. It's not helped by Siracca, the main Rillow companion who's a convert to Alnarius' faith, who shows the Rillow at their worst in their reactions to her and who reinforces all the Isilmerald conceptions about what they're like.
The dialogue writing I think gets a bit better as the game progresses, and hits some of its better beats in the late game. The 2d art I would actually put as a standout feature - it has very pretty loading screens and nice character portraits, consistently extremely solid work and very impressive. Sidequests are fine, and all contribute to an overall greed mechanic though the effects of that weren't hugely clear to me. There's some nice character stuff in the late game though it could've done with a bit more of that, and a bit more intra-party interaction probably. So overall it was fine, a decent use of time if you've played all the big to medium titles in the genre already, and I hope the problems are fixed and the devs make more, better games, but if it's between this and playing BG1/2 or Pillars, play BG1/2 or Pillars, I guess is my current advice.
Been playing Mordheim: City of the Damned, and I think I'm giving up on it after a few days.
It feels like they spent a lot of time making a turn based tactics game that was more detailed than I remotely wanted and involved a lot of trying to stack quite small bonuses in a complicated skill system whilst playing really quite slowly - and conversely not really enough attention feels like it was given to narrative design. Fights tend to end up in large brawls with a lot of clicking through standard attacks: winning and losing them rarely feels earned. And then on top of that there just isn't a lot of heart to the game. I could barely remember half my own characters' names, which is REALLY unusual for me in a party/warband game. Nothing in the game really encouraged you to engage with them and their background. It was fine to play for a bit all the same, but it wore on me pretty fast unfortunately.
Tis not a very 'serious' game but I've been playing Dreamlight Valley lately. I quite like having something a bit silly and quite relaxing to wander through in the evenings when my brain has had enough of thinking hard about Things. Has anyone else played it? Particularly after the update of a few days ago, I've found more things to explore and I'm enjoying that.
I haven't played it, I've only vaguely heard of it - what's the basic pitch?
Vicorva on Twitch has been playing The Wandering Village lately which looks good (post-apocalyptic city builder where you make your village atop a giant dinosaur monster that you can either feed or exploit), so I'm wondering if I'll get that at some point.
I have been playing a City Builder recently, but not the one aforementioned: rather, I've been playing Frostpunk, a game of depressing authoritarianism, victoriana, big steam robots, and a lot of cold. Like, a lot of cold. The low temp point that you have to survive to win the main scenario (which I've now completed once) is an astounding minus one hundred and fifty degrees celsius, which is arguably a bit silly and unarguably really quite nippy. Enough to kill someone from southern England in a few breaths, or get a northerner to get the big woolly jumper out.
I was glad I played it. It leant really, really heavily on the grimness of the setting, probably too much: the setting was for the most part so unrelentingly grim that it sort of ended up numbing you to the human tragedy of the decisions being made, whereas playing up some of the moments of joy and hope in there would have let the tragedies feel more real. There are lots of city-builders where that wouldn't matter, but it feels like Frostpunk really wants you to care about the morals of what's going on, especially in that part of the game's outcome narration focuses on how far you went down certain parts of the tech tree and whether you "crossed the line" to discard too much of your humanity in the pursuit of survival. As such I think that it needed a bit more on the roleplaying and emotional texture element: an easy win would have been the ability to name particular buildings and areas of town, because having the Coal District with St. Barnabas' Infirmary For The Woebegotten in it would be much more engaging and indeed easy to remember than "uh, there's that cluster of buildings up top near that pair of mines". All that said, whilst I think the narrative could have landed harder, on a purely aesthetic level it absolutely nails the job: the UI is good, the soundtrack will be rolling like a winter storm through my head for weeks, the whole thing looks the part very nicely, and so on.
In terms of the gameplay and core narrative, the story of the main scenario is simple but effective, and the gameplay is pretty harsh but that actually usually helps hammer the point home, especially on resource scarcity. It does a bit less well with the social mechanics, because a lot of the "hits" to those feel pretty arbitrarily forced by game conditions, and effectively designed to try and force you to use whichever of the authoritarian paths you chose, which doesn't really feel like it ought to be necessary when you're actually running a completely tight ship economically, everyone is eating well, warm, has good housing and healthcare, etc. I'd have been interested to see Purpose paths for Popular Will (get hope via a more demanding democratic populace, at high material costs: the more extreme use of the tree has citizens banish others and demagoguery/populism) and Technology (get hope via technical enhancements, but with more and more ultimately being done by the Engineer class potentially at the expense of the workers) as well as Faith and Order.
The general mechanics were really smooth and I got on well enough with them: I enjoyed the exploration elements, the cutscenes were very pretty, and the range of challenges was generally good. The "faction challenge" section in the middle was my least favourite because, again, really arbitrary penalties - I thought the storm section at the end felt like a pretty good finale even if the -150 temperature felt a bit OTT. I may well try some of the other scenarios, though I think I'll possibly play something else first - we'll see.
I remembered the classic text game A Dark Room which I play every few years http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/
After a connection on Mastodon I am trying https://www.improbableisland.com which is a kind of MMOD or text adventure
I looked at Improbable Island too, for much the same reasons - thanks for giving us the shout on that, I'll be in touch with them soon once we've worked out a banner image. The game is pretty bizarre, but enjoyable in a very silly 00s-y sort of way. I feel like there's less of that kind of flat surrealism around than there was then, or what there is feels like a throwover. High surrealism in games and media nowadays feels like it's often focused on the dark twist - things like Cyanide and Happiness games or webcomics - whereas something like Improbable Island or a comic like Station V3 (http://www.stationv3.com/) which is more purely surrealist, has a much more 00s feel, to me. But that might just be me?
I was defeated by some Purple Prose after finding too many Supply Crates and overloading myself
What distinguishes purple from other colours of prose?
I've occasionally been playing a little of the Divide and Conquer LOTR mod for Medieval 2, because TW peaked with Med2 and nothing will ever be as good again so we might as well all give up wooooooo
Quote from: Jubal on January 31, 2023, 12:03:03 PM
What distinguishes purple from other colours of prose?
It wants you to join its writing circle.
After last weekend I feel I really ought to go play Pentiment. But also NWN2 is high on my list. I don't think I'm so stoked by Oblivion that there's a big deal of stuff I want to do in that beyond what I already did... Hmm.
Quote from: Jubal on March 01, 2023, 05:20:31 PM
After last weekend I feel I really ought to go play Pentiment.
:tusky:
The mystery is revealed! :o
So my most recent gaming foray was Windbound, which was 90% off on GOG so I got it. It has a premise that very much appeals to me - a sort of survival-adventure where you get to tootle around in a catamaran discovering islands, surviving, uncovering ancient myths, etc.
The problem is that the execution of the game is less than ideal. It's designed in a sort of roguelike, kick you back to the start manner - even in the easier mode, you get kicked back to the start of a level on death. But unlike a lot of roguelikes, the levels are intentionally a tricksy survival grind and take multiple hours to complete. Even this would not be a problem if the game didn't also have compulsory and very difficult boss fights which require a mastery of a combat system that can generously be described as janky. Strike-and-roll combat is something I used to think I hated. I don't think that any more, because I genuinely got to the point of enjoying it in The Witcher 3 which nailed its execution (for me at least)... but I still think that strike-and-roll is difficult to get right, and Windbound does not in fact get it right. The strikes are pointed, so you need to line them up, but you can't zoom and the lack of camera control makes life very difficult. The "combat lock" is supposed to help you align with enemies but also turns your jump button into a dodge-roll button, which is deeply problematic when you actually want to jump to get away from creatures mid combat: the combat lock also does not lock on very well meaning you need to keep unsetting and resetting it, and suggestion tips keep annoyingly popping up even when you've dismissed them a bunch of times already.
If I could just save the game at my own pace and try the boss fights a few times by going back from a static save, the game would have been fine, but as it is I bounced, decided that for the time being I don't have the energy to push past the level three boss fight. It's a pity, because there's really quite a lot to like about Windbound other than that. I generally really like most of the creature designs, even if some of them are brutally annoying to fight, and the lore is fun. The look of the game is nice, too, and I like being able to customise your ship: I'd actually have liked to lean more into that part of the game. The crafting system all works neatly and feels quite balanced.
There are a few other missed opportunities in Windbound. I think the way the core mechanics work, it's sort of leaning towards a survival-RPG thing, and adding a bit more of the RPG side and giving a bit more human lore at times would have been helpful. I'd have liked to see a bit more interactivity in the lore discoveries rather than them just being end of chapter rewards.
I might go back and finish it sometime, but I think for now I'd rather move on to something that's a bit better delivered rather than have the frustration of running through more or less the same bunch of islands on repeat. "Mastering" that messy a combat system doesn't seem like it's something I super want to do at the moment.
I've spent any free gaming time lately playing Tears of the Kingdom, which I have mostly positive feelings for, although there are definitely some elements of its design that I felt weren't as well optimised as they could be.
My main critique, without getting into details that others might find spoiler-y, is that the game felt as though it really hyped up the sky islands, both in the trailers and the initial tutorial area, and then I felt rather let down when I discovered how much actual content was on those islands relative to the surface of hyrule and the depths. Did anyone else find this?
I have, weirdly, never played a Zelda game. Should I do so? BotW/TotK have the sort of vibes that indicate I might like them, but I don't know if I actually would.
Anyhow, I've recently been enjoying some Dragon Age, which I commented on in too much depth in the relevant thread. Might do Pillars of Eternity 2: Dreadfire next, I think that or Pathfinder: Kingmaker are the obvious RPGs on my list. I think I'm definitely in a mood for narrative games lately, though sometimes tactical RPGs do disappoint me there and I'm sort of worried that after playing the Dragon Age Origins DLCs that's actually set the bar too high for a lot of standard tactical RPGs in terms of the character interactions and developments.
Most recent game was Impossible Creatures, a 2003 RTS where the theme is that you make chimerical beasts and duke it out with them, with drawling 1930s henchmen, gyrocopters, and other mad science attributes key to its plot. There's a campaign and random single player maps, I only played the campaign and only half of that. This is partly because I don't enjoy RTSes very much, like most RTS games IC is heavily balanced towards a fast, punchy, well optimised playstyle and it also doesn't even have a way to lower the difficulty. I meanwhile would rather a much more casual game where I can turtle my way across the map much more happily, and I didn't get that from this. That said, there was a lot I earnestly enjoyed about the game and its sillinesses.
The good: Mixing creatures is fun! I would happily spend more time playing in the creature generator. Also the base part of the plot (excepting the yikes bits below) is actually good fun: American journalist laid off for getting too involved in fighting fascists in the Spanish Civil War goes to find his Russian scientist father in the south Pacific, turns out there's a mysterious powerful technology being secretly developed by a tycoon there that could change the world utterly, shenanigans ensue. I found the old-school graphics pretty endearing though I guess that might be my age. Also, you can make a porcupine with owl wings!
The bad: You can make a porcupine with owl wings but the game strongly pressures you not to use it. The gameplay, built with no way of giving yourself a gentler ride, is actually far too focused on trying to find optimised animal combinations rather than fun ones, which I feel kinda takes away from the experimental, silly spirit of the game. Things could have definitely had some better design to make more of the possible options play-viable rather than there being such a heavy optimisation metagame.
The yikes: Representation of indigenous people. Yes, it's riffing on mid C20th pulp tropes, but when literally all your characters who aren't white, in something set on pacific islands, are excitable pygmies babbling about sky witches, there may be a problem. Also, relatedly, the silly pulp plot of the campaign occasionally takes on wildly heavier material than it actually can support as a silly plot for a game about mad science. Most specifically, there's a part where it turns out one of the evil scientists has been literally killing the locals for human experimentation, and we mainly get this as a character development moment for the good-team scientist who unwittingly worked on the same project. That's some quite heavy theming for a game that's mostly about mutated wasp-rhinos, and it does not land well at all.
Quote from: Jubal on July 31, 2023, 09:56:55 AM
I have, weirdly, never played a Zelda game. Should I do so? BotW/TotK have the sort of vibes that indicate I might like them, but I don't know if I actually would.
I certainly think there's a strong possibility that you would! I quite enjoyed them, particularly that it was entirely possible to Embrace the Vibe of just wandering about exploring and picking mushrooms, which is what I spent a large amount of my time in both games doing. The fact that it doesn't push you to get involved in combat, and that there are usually ways to achieve your goals without engaging in a fight as you explore, I quite enjoyed.
That said, the main story beats do require significant Boss Fights, and it depends a bit on how you feel about that. I must admit I am generally rubbish at mastering the more complicated combat techniques, and so tended to operate on a 'wear the best armour, get the best gear, down an enhancing potion and then Just Whack It' approach to the whole thing. It worked? Indeed, I recently completed Tears of the Kingdom, and now plan to spend some time finding Korok seeds, to get the 100% completion rate.
I have also begun playing Baldur's Gate 3, which I am deeply enjoying and am incredible in awe of. Somehow it manages to be incredibly faithful to most of the best elements of DnD (that it is possible to translate into a computer game at any rate), while also improving on many of the mechanics to make them more interesting and enjoyable.
The complicated interactions between questlines/characters make any number of incredible different options available to someone playing through the game, and despite only being about halfway through the plot (I think!), I am in fact already planning a second playthrough, to try out some alternative options.
Quote from: Spritelady on August 22, 2023, 05:13:32 PM
just wandering about exploring and picking mushrooms, which is what I spent a large amount of my time in both games doing
Ah, so the game has the same premise as Skyrim (from my perspective) then :p
I'm not sure how well I'd do the boss fights: I rarely have much tolerance for learning first person combat systems unless they're either very quick to do reruns of or they're really well designed. I guess I did it in Son of a Witch, Hades, and The Witcher 3, but I've definitely bounced on that problem in other games.
Will comment on BG3 in the Forgotten Realms Games thread!
Recent post-BG3 update (I will post more BG3 details sometime soon) - I had a go at playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker, I'm 20hrs in and I'm stopping, which is really unusual for me but also, this game is something unique in its artistry, specifically that it is artisanally badly balanced. The look is fine, the plot is... okay, the mechanics are terrifyingly bad.
The combat is wildly variable - some fights I can sleepwalk, some fights are simply impossible at levels where you can easily encounter them, and there's very very little way to tell which shall be which. The random encounters are bizarre - I randomly came across four large water elementals in the wilderness, hanging out in a canyon (why? where is the sense of storytelling?), two would have been a fairly hefty challenge for my party, I just about managed to kill two and get the other two to the point where the end of the battle would be on a knife edge, and then the game spawned four more large water elementals at the edge of the map. The game also autosaves upon starting random encounters or various of its fights, meaning if you forgot to save, it's locked you in to whatever unwinnable thing it can throw at you.
There are some nice bits of the game, I actually like the different roles and micromanagement of camp functions, that's great. And I in theory like the event based realm management except the bits where some things randomly do time skips and you don't actually have all the people you need to run the basic functions of your kingdom and there's a lot of numbers and it's not clear what contributes to what and none of it makes a lot of sense. The plot of the first chapter is fine if fairly basic, I pretty much lost track of the plot after I got my own barony, there was some stuff with curses and trolls and the nymph but I wasn't sure what I was meant to be doing in what order between the very long map travels (which as noted could be very murderous) and the myriad possible events that seemed to be firing back at my capital, so I ended up sort of ignoring all that and trying to clear some dungeons to level up and get myself into a less embarrassing state, which was slowly sort of working but involved trial and error map exploration because some locations would randomly slaughter me very very fast and others barely broke a sweat. Also travel in Kingmaker is expensive because of the supplies requirement.
I think in short that I've never met a game that better simulated the failure state of a bad gaming table. The "GM" hates you as the player, and doesn't know how to balance combat, so neither your losses or your wins feel good and heroic because you have no idea if what you just faced was reflective of more than the game master's dubious grasp of the rulebook and indeed of reality. The consequence of this was the plot getting basically abandoned in favour of a party that mooched around trying to rob any dungeon they could find or sitting in a castle talking to random NPCs to see what happened. Bits of time randomly disappeared in time skips nobody understood, and the whole thing had various nominal time limits far too numerous to keep track of without breaking out some heavily modified planning software.
I still might go back and finish it sometime because I'm very stubborn about giving games a fair run and because I'd sort of like to see what happens to the characters, though I guess I could look up the latter. But right now this is not what my gaming brain wants to deal with, and I should get better at accepting that I don't have to and can just play something else. Soooo I guess I will.
On the major RPGs front I've started playing Divinity: Original Sin. I'm enjoying it thus far, though I stopped for a week or so. It's definitely very zany hyper-high fantasy, and I think it sometimes leaves a bit to be desired in terms of giving you choice paralysis and signalling expected game order, but mostly it's very good. I'll write it up better when I'm finished.
Also this week I've played through Scribblenauts: Unlimited, which whilst not nearly as unlimited as its name implies was well worth picking up at sale price. It wasn't perhaps as good as it could have been for me, but the core mechanic of creating and using items from a really wide list is just a very good one.
The limits on it: Scribblenauts is obviously designed at a younger user base, though given that, some of the references needed for certain bits are really tricky - I was having to look a bunch of stuff up at times for the item achievements because there are some quite obscure USian terms and references used. Separating the secondary item-driven shard achievements so totally from the main game I think was an error, those should just have been added to relevant areas as things to do rather than making them a huge stack to work through at the end of the game. I'd also have really liked trickier core puzzles, most of which were e.g. "give this guy a weapon!" rather than making the item achievements which included "work out that you're meant to ring a bell to give a wingless bird wings possibly based on a 1940s US film reference" the hard bit. Some of the item combining is janky too (you have to combine bread and cheese for a "make grilled cheese" achievement which would be logical except that the game also includes grills, toast, etc and it's very easy to spend ages doing all this in the wrong order or with the wrong absolutely specific items). Sometimes the item specificity is awkward, such that you can waste frustrating time with items that are not quite the thing you need from the game's POV even if they would absolutely work (example: a "beater" doesnt exist, and you can't get the NPCs to hit a gong with a drumstick, stick, or club, it has to be a mallet).
The game is also hilariously American, in that you can absolutely get rocket launchers and nuclear missiles but there is no alcohol, at all, even when puzzles like embalming/pickling come up. And it's wildly white, there is hardly a non-white face in the entire thing to an extent that I, a very white person who's only lived in countries where white people are a supermajority of the population, found it really noticeable. So that's odd.
That said, the core gameplay mechanic is fun and if one wants a low brain puzzlefest then it's very worth playing through if you can get it cheap. Some puzzles like the prison gauntlet are fun, generally coming up with silly answers to everything is also fun. I amused myself by having weird go-tos for things, so I'd use banana pie every time anyone needed food, and if someone wanted a weapon they were very much always getting an atlatl, and I was using as many mythical creatures as I could too. Some of the levels were especially notably fun - the volcano had an interesting little puzzle chain in, and taking out the space station by summoning an electric eel was a fun moment. I'd really like a more advanced version, but as that doesn't exist this one will do fine.
I finished Divinity: Original Sin!
It does what it says on the tin, there was divinity, there was a cod-Edenic narrative, and it was played in a way I didn't hate, which is actually very good going given how I generally feel about the overly apocalyptic nature of a lot of fantasy RPGs. I think the big thing with D:OS is that it is very much turning both the epic and fairytale bits of fantasy up to eleven: it's very pulpy and it's not trying to keep too straight a face about what it's doing. The fairytale bit is interesting too, it's a very "you can chat to all the animals and rescue a wishing well from fairyland" level of fantastic, which other games mostly don't quite jump into with both feet in the same way. So I appreciated that.
My player characters were alright. The game gives you a duo, mine were Mnemikre, a cautious but easy-going geomancer/crossbowman/hydrosophist who was the party's healer, secondary archer, and summoner as a fairly general all-rounder, and the rather sharper (both in wit and outlook) pure intelligence focused damage mage, Sarasande, who focused on witchcraft, aerotheurgy, and pyromancy. I'd suggest to anyone else trying to do a first run that this was a bad combination, and given the limited four-option companion range and their abilities I'd make one PC a true tank. This is especially important given that the rule for "game over" and having to reload last save is when both your PCs are downed, even if your companions are still tootling along quite happily.
The core game loop is good too. The different systems are generally well signalled, it's obvious what does what and the main gameplay being about elemental damages and resistances with various abilities to hit in with those and a set of basic status effects which have mostly-logical outcomes. I had a few annoyances like where enemies' idle animations would suddenly drop them out of the cursor at the last second leading me to walk a character somewhere I really didn't want them, but that didn't happen often, by and large the gameplay was fun. Charm is an immensely powerful spell given how the balance works, because you're rarely fighting swarm enemies: it's rare that there are many more than six or so enemies at a time except in a few boss battles, and often fewer, but they're relatively powerful, so generally the core tactics involved finding ways to "tie up" some enemies with charm, lightning stuns and summons (I never really had a true shield-tank in the party) whilst my archer and two-handed warrior, both companion characters, hacked away and dealt damage.
There are some downsides. I'd have enjoyed a more streamlined system for several bits, most obviously looting where there were sometimes tens of containers to check through per room which given I am a very impulsive check-every-container person is a good way to leave me stuck in actual hell. Also there's no obvious way of searching for particular item bonuses, so when you need to e.g. boost Loremaster working out how to do that is hard. Some skills are also much easier to boost than others, which isn't obvious at the start: so e.g. you never need Loremaster above 3 because getting a couple of +1 items for it is super easy and the hardest check is a 5. But skill-based abilities like, say, Geomancy you kind of want to pump up to five fairly efficiently and there's no equipment (at least none I found) that boosts those.
I also think the game was about 10-20 hours too long in my 83hr playthrough, and I didn't get round all of it and never got to doing lots of the crafting etc that I was kind of interested in playing with. The crafting part really needed a shared inventory pool accessible in lots of places in the Homestead including e.g. next to the forge. The other thing was the number of areas that could have been reduced in size quite significantly, or just been given less ambient damage effects, most of which made no tactical difference, just slowed you down while you waited around casting regeneration spells repeatedly. The run of goblin fights up to the mine entrance was one example - but a lot of areas in general could have done with one or two fewer combats.
Nonetheless, overall I think D:OS is very solid. I think it's at the better end of my pool of mid-range RPGs, I'm relatively unlikely to play it again but I think mechanically it's good fun (definitely beats out e.g. the Pillars games) and it has a gonzo charm which I think makes it stand out a bit as something that's a step pulpier and funnier than the standard RPG setting, which I enjoy.
I finally have time for a 2024 update on Spritelady's gaming experiences! I've actually played quite a few games so far this year, at least by my standards and in light of the fact that I also seem to have A Lot going on at any one time.
I started and quickly completed Wylde Flowers, a cute and cosy farming sim where you play as a witch and attempt to bridge the gap between the local coven and the townsfolk.
Mechanically, it's rather like Stardew Valley in many ways, but the focus of the game is almost completely different. There is no combat in WF the way that the mines allow for in SV, and the focus is almost entirely on befriending locals and advancing the main story (alongside many weird and wonderful side quests). You meet a fantastic array of people, from a range of backgrounds and with diverse personalities.
One of my favourite elements of the game is that all the recipes that you can learn to cook come from an incredible range of cuisines, most of which relate to the background of the villagers. I excitedly told my fiancé's mother that Bobotie (a South African recipe that she has made for us on more than one occasion) was craftable in the game. She told me she'd be rather more excited if I made it in the real world, alas(!), but it was still lovely to see so many countries represented in the game.
The diversity in the game generally is commendable in my opinion. It feels like they genuinely wanted to mix together a wonderful range of people and spent time developing them all, rather than simply throwing in a few 'minority' characters for the credit. I definitely recommend this to anyone who wants a chill game with an interesting story and enjoys growing flowers ;D
Other notable mentions on the gaming front include playing through the main campaign of Anno 1800, which I bought on sale and which is my first Anno game. I found it very enjoyable and hope to continue playing, possibly in Sandbox mode, at a later date.
I have also started, although not yet finished, Link's Awakening on Switch, which I was given for Christmas. I'm enjoying it, although it's clear that I did not game much as a child and thus am less au fait with the logic that permeates earlier games. That said, I'm having fun with the various mechanics and don't feel too awful when I inevitably die because I am dreadful at real-time combat.
Finally, I am in fact playing Palworld. Again, I'm enjoying it quite a lot (I quite deliberately put my settings on easy mode so that I didn't panic whenever I died) and a lot of it is quite cute. I am also coming to the conclusion that either I am a softie or my fiancé is a little bit psychotic, because I get quite upset if my Pals are sad or injured and devote a lot of time to petting them and being nice to them. My fiancé laughs whenever he butchers a Pal for its meat...
Wylde Flowers sounds enjoyable :) I should maybe look at Palworld but it doesn't immediately appeal... I'm not sure if it's the aesthetic or what, but yeah, it doesn't land.
Speaking of things that didn't land, I played some games recently that I do not have good things to report about. The shorter was Age of Mythology Extended Edition's Tale of the Dragon, a campaign that made me realise I maybe don't like RTS gameplay, but which was also narratively a whole bunch of not much. It is literally never explained what the villain wants out of being a villain, and the campaign exists to intro the Chinese faction and doesn't really manage to make them seem terribly exciting or showcase anything that looks and feels particularly new.
And then in much bigger news, Divinity: Original Sin 2. I did not enjoy this as much as the other two Larian games I played: it lacked the gonzo charm I liked in DOS1, taking itself a bit more seriously to its overall detriment, but also lacked the actually enjoyable combat and really really good character work of BG3, so it somewhat fell between stools I think. Also, as an overall comment, the combat mechanics are miserable. The level scaling is overly strict despite the maps being designed to be open-world, and the physical/magical armour system where you can't apply vital status effects until you've burned through a character's armour means you have a weird double track of either speccing for physical or magical damage and not really utilising a mixed party.
For the most part the game is reasonably solid, the writing is fine though I can't think of many moments I felt wowed by, the tactical challenges are also fine and a
The plot starts getting convoluted by Act 3 and really lost me in Act 4, and I'm going to spoiler tag the rest but rant below:
Spoiler
So by Act 2 we've determined that a) the gods are probably doing something rather bad by taking people's Source from their souls and b) that the gods are Eternals, . This would have neatly set up a final act where we challenge the gods for divinity and then choose whether to rule or set up a new order or whatever. Except that this plot has more moving parts than that, and Dallis, who I think we're supposed to assume is working for the source king or the void but actually isn't, purges the huge source wellspring at the end of Act 3, at which point your gods attack you and you just... kill them, basically. Which frankly was a waste of an A-list villain group setup for a B-list slot, and also means that objectively speaking there are regular nameless guards running around Arx who are definitely capable of hacking gods to pieces (sure, the gods are weakened by this point, but even so).
So then we all head out to Arx to work out what Dallis did after she stole all the god-level magic, and this was where the wheels started coming off a bit. The early bits were OK, if getting further convoluted as the Magisters (the bad guys who do a lot of trying to kill and brutally torture source users to destroy their source) are being purged by the Paladins, who are alright, but then it turns out the Paladin leader is working for the God King, who is not to be confused with the Source King because the Source King Braccus Rex is a malevolent figure from within recorded history who has a habit of sparking weird cults around him and has a lot of undeath related abilities and the God King is a malevolent Eternal who was overthrown by the first gods who has a habit of sparking weird cults around him and has a lot of undeath related abilities and the Source King is secretly alive and working for the God King but is shackled by Dallis but turns out not to be. Hope you got all that, there'll be a test at the end.
I didn't have the Red Prince, and consequently a whole section of late game Lizard folk content was there but made absolutely zero sense and I had no sensible way to engage with it, once I'd worked out the mirrors fight I hauled myself into the next room, ended up being attacked by the dreamers which got me locked in to being attacked by the next lady who I'd never met before in my life, and once she flattened me once (because I'd run out of resurrection scrolls and was soloing it) I just decided to sneak past her because I had no reason to engage, it was all just very strange.
I was as mentioned playing as Beast, whose Act 4 stuff still made no sense at all. It's abundantly unclear why Justinia is trying to gas everyone in Arx with a doomsday weapon, there's no particular sense that the magisters and paladins are posing an active threat to her and her reign: "Isbeil persuaded her" is part of an answer but that's a how, not an underlying reason. Also, just as annoyingly, the options for confronting Justinia are incredibly unsatisfying, it's basically "shank her in a sewer" or "become the ally of the red handed tyrant" or "piss off and let the red handed tyrant do her own thing". Given Marcus' start is as a possibly jaded former revolutionary it's immensely weird that there aren't any options to try to tell her to stand down & be deposed, or similar (and she might then attack you but then it's on her). It's just this sort of weird "hey, while you're in Arx, someone's threatening it with a doomsday device so just pop over and sort that sometime while you're in town if you could?"
At last we reach endgame. I'm on track and have finally found the tomb of the divine, the game is building towards its grand reveal, and what the game decides to throw at me is first a C-list fight with some guy who I triggered a quest about without actually noticing I'd done so as I was running around a sewer and who turns out not to be a small child but actually to be evil, so that was a thing. Then, uh, there were the immortal magic draining puppets. The prospect of being beaten up by annoying squeaky voiced puppets who can't die definitely does not wildly undercut the moment (whilst DOS1's ending is a bunch more elongated than it should be, it does nail the sense of over-the-top acceleration up to the final fight).
And then we have THE REVEAL as we find out that Lucian the previous divine is not dead, leading to interesting questions like "so how is he still a full Divine but also there was enough source left in the fountain to make another Divine in theory", and "how does any of this make sense" (see next para), and "what the hell, dude". Also Dallis is Fane's daughter and blames Fane for everything. Then Braccus, the Source King, who was an Act 1 boss in DOS1 and is now suddenly the Big Bad after tootling around under a pseudonym in a hood all game, suddenly calls on the God King, and half the bloody B-list villains turn up again, being spat out by the Kraken, which is also back for Reasons. Despite the God King being from and bound to the void, all the enemies here are undead so we don't even get the voidwoken's distinctive look and feel. The final fight as a whole also felt really ignominious, in that I just sat there fending off the B-listers while Lucian chopped Braccus to pieces bouncing around the map and all but one of my guys did not have the movement abilities to follow them up effectively.
Besides these issues, there's the logic, and I can accept a lot of handwaving in games but because I'd been taken out of the reverie anyway I started poking it and it really doesn't hold well. The ending lacks any actual theory of how source works so it's abundantly unclear why they need to source-out you specifically. Like, my guys have 3 source points each - there's at least that much source in the previous room's puppets, or I can just take a trip to the infinite fountain that's sitting in a guy's doom cellar down the road. Also unclear why the world needs to be *totally* purged given the strong implications that before the veil was drained, eternals were already using source, it's just that the veil was a huge source of source that allowed the seven to take power and reshape the world. Nor is it the case that they specifically need us to drain the stolen source from the veil because there's still a bunch of gods out there who are quite specifically not taken out of the picture in Act 3 (D:OS3 should just be Xantezza messing with everyone honestly).
The character work broke down badly at the end for one of my companions too, in the form of Ifan, whose Act 4 stuff might have been bugged, I don't know, but he just randomly decided to off me at the end having been totally supportive for the whole game, supported me wholeheartedly in Act 3, and not expressed any issues. Indeed more weirdly he decided to poot his lil crossbow bolts at me to avoid anyone becoming divine, a thing that I was *explicitly not about to do and then went and did not do*. This was one of the weirdest character breaks I've had in an RPG in a while, it just felt bizarre. Doubly so because him versus me, Lohse, and Fane was stupidly obviously unwinnable, I felt really bad for him.
Conversely Lohse's Act 4 stuff was mostly pretty cool, except needing to reload because the dialogue needed to stop her doing candle doom is very much not clear (in that you can do dialogue that looks very pointed at that but it doesn't do the thing you'd expect). The drama leak basically took repeated hit and runs (send 3 party members in, with Lohse left outside, flatten a few goons, depart the mortal coil, Lohse picks up the remains and teleports to rez, once the goons are all down after a few repeats them go for him directly). My other problem with it was not getting any ending option for staying with her despite the active romance, which felt weird as hell.
No real complaints about Fane, his stuff felt earned, you do you my lil undead buddy.
Once we were past endgame, finally, some of the long set of final slides felt a bit weird. We don't get a chance to object to Lucian remaining Divine-in-name if we purge (which seems weird), you get to offer Han a job and that's not reflected in the slides immediately afterwards, various other things that just sat oddly. You get to learn what happened to a random fisherman from Act 2 who you retrieve a wedding ring for, but almost none of the other minor questgiver characters (like the little girl who had an undead cat called Buttons who was much more memorable than Wedding Ring Guy).
So... yeah. The ending just kinda left me cold I guess, which is a pity because I thought DOS1 and BG3 really stuck their landings quite well? I don't know if maybe I should just have had a different party, or if taking a different approach to the game (I went with being source-cautious and careful with people's souls then closed the veil at the end) would have been more rewarding. But I know it's lots of people's favourite game, and I'm kind of confused why it didn't hit right at all in my case.
I have played Tyranny which was kindly gifted to me by Tuco. It's very good indeed!
With the baseline pitch of "the evil overlord has already won and you're working from the inside" I was kind of worried this would be a game that was going to relish forcing impossible evil-evil choices on me: by and large it doesn't do that: it requires cleverness, loopholes, and pumping your lore skill rather high to be able to do a fully good playthrough but one can generally do so.
There are some very interesting gameplay bits that are well tied into the world-building. The opening with a choose-your-own adventure section for the conquest (in which you were in the Overlord's army) is a really neat starting point for the game and is a good compromise system where you get a good amount of rapid grounding in the world in a way that works quite effectively. I'd like to see more games borrowing that kind of system. I thought that the way the Edicts and magic worked was actually really interesting: whilst the way the edicts could be revoked was often a bit overly simplistic, the sort of geas style of "magic with a loophole" worked rally well for me. Also the overall bronze-and-iron aesthetic was really nice and the game, whilst its level of graphics isn't high, has a fairly unique look which I liked a lot. Falx-style swords are fun and I'd like more of these please, thank you.
Tyranny also has some really classily written characters: Graven Ashe and Tunon the Adjudicator are really well written Lawful Evil villains, really showing that you can have complex characters with interesting relationships who are nonetheless very much capital-e Evil. Bleden Mark and the Voices of Nerat are among the better Chaotic Evil ones I've seen as well, they're perhaps a bit less heavy-hitters than Ashe and Tunon for good writing but the Voices is a love-to-hate-them done well and Mark has the "genial killer" thing down very well indeed. I was very much mentally taking How To Write Good Villains notes from this game in a way that I rarely do with games: I struggle to think of many other games where I enjoyed the antagonist writing this much.
The companions are less key and could have done with more work and companion quests (apparently one of the DLCs adds some, so I'll try that if I do a second playthrough). I'd have liked them to have slightly more arc in their characters, and some seemed tricky (Sirin, who I used, apparently is very hard to get a high reputation with unless you make specific choices in the Conquest prologue section). But in any case they're generally a sensibly selected bunch and I liked them for the most part.
The final act leaves a bit to be desired, it's a bit of a run of boss fights at that point, and the dialogues around them are good but it feels a bit lacking in padding. The way it's put together suggests some hefty cuts were made: some aspects of the game such as the tower upgrades and research facilities seem to envisage the whole game taking more time than it actually does for you to make use of the very wide array of side characters, weapons and armour production, etc that are there. There's probably a not dissimilar level of production capabilities to what you get in Dragon Age Inquisition, for a game that's a third as long at most. There's also a bit of an over-long run of ending slides (the Larian style "after-party" for getting some of your post-game updates is something that Obsidian could do with adopting).
Anyway, overall very much a breath of fresh air: absolutely would very much recommend to anyone who likes pause-and-play RPGs.
I purchased a copy of Tyranny myself when it went on sale recently, and am looking forward to trying it out when I get the time! A fair few games I'd had wishlisted on Steam recently went on sale, so I've acquired them too. They include a game recommended to me by my father, Sinking City. Interestingly, and in a strange contrast to most other games, he found that the longer it went on, the more interested/involved he got with it, and the more he enjoyed it. I had a brief play around to see how it worked when visiting him a few weeks ago, and thought it was quite interesting, so we'll see what a proper playthrough yields!
I've been starting makign some runs at Hades II: I think I'm about twenty runs into the game now, so I've got as far as the third boss going down and the first going up (which I promise makes sense in-game). In terms of an initial review, it's pretty much exactly the game you'd expect from "Hades II", at least if one has played Hades and has the expectations from that. HII I think expects you to have played Hades and has a slightly higher overall difficulty, a bigger world and more complexity, but I've not found it too overwhelming. If you liked Hades for style, plot, characterisation, etc then you'll probably like Hades II. Will write up more on it when I've got further through I expect. :)
EDIT: Have done Hades II for now, will probably write up better when the full game is released but I think my "if you liked Hades" is pretty accurate, it hits the vibe of its predecessor pretty well for the most part.
I played through a little Brazilian game called Sky Caravan (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1792270/Sky_Caravan/) today. It markets itself as an RPG but is really more of a visual novel/choose your own adventure (and it's not 110% clear how different the possible endings can really be). Despite the fact I'd have preferred a more choice-meaningful game and something with more elements beyond the multiple choice, I would absolutely recommend Sky Caravan. Why? Because being in a Brazil inspired Sci Fi world where you do weird transport missions for a capybara to pay off a mysterious loan shark is really good fun.
That's basically the pitch of it: there's something enormously refreshing about being in a SF setting that's so very Latin-America-as-default. The characters are generally well written and I enjoyed the crew dynamics, and the different bits of the setting were well explored in ways that told you what you needed to know without infodumping, which is often a difficult skill for game writers to master but something these guys really had down. It probably doesn't bear a lot of replay value, but I got it on a 75% off sale which is absolutely madly good value for money, 2.5 euros for about 2.5 hours of well written game story is something not to be sniffed at.
So, in bad need of some comfort material this week, I opted for Melody of Moominvalley (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1808680/Snufkin_Melody_of_Moominvalley/), a game where you are Snufkin and play instruments at birds and pull up officious signage, which is very much life goals from my perspective.
It's not a super complicated game, I got most of the achievements on a single run-through, at the start it's fairly linear and there aren't a lot of side-quests. I'd have liked it to keep the world a bit more open and have a few more side-quest stories in there, and/or at least follow one or two of the side-quests up at later points in the game. It tends to stick to its main narrative. That said, it's probably designed to include slightly younger players etc.
Everything else about the game is
fantastic. The art is beautiful, and it manages to nail The Vibes which are some of the most important parts of Tove Jansson's work. The plot develops relatively linearly but it's nice having the characters you're fond of playing their parts in it, and they're all very effectively written. Little My is as funny as she should be, Moomin plays a good key role at the end: I'd have liked to see a bit more of Moominmamma and the Snork Maiden, but that's just a "this was good, I'd like more of it" ask.
I also came across a little video essay (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbaeO9KMNBM) about it online which I thought made some good points about how it reflects Jansson's work. The core thing of finding inspiration in nature and using that to better connect with and engage with the natural world is something I think was captured especially well.
Some screenshots below :)
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Oh, this looks adorable. :) Maybe I should finally go and read the Moomin books in the near future.
Don't know if it really counts as a game, but I've been playing with this thing I saw on Mastodon:
https://dennisfriedl.de/programme/alienae_litterae
Basically "improve your historical fonts reading skill" (German, English, or Latin) in Tetris-style. Kinda addictive. Though I don't know what's up with the Leaderboards, it's always the same names from 2021 or so, and mine never shows up even when I break records...
I went back to Hardspace: Shipbreaker this week, after a while away, and it's still an incredible game.
It's essentially breaking down old starships in zero-g, with a grapple beam and a laser cutter. The ships start off as relatively simple shuttles where you just have to cut a handful of points and drag the passenger seats into the trash, and rapidly escalates into vast tankers with flammable canisters and decaying nuclear reactors that need to be safely - and rapidly - disposed of once they start melting down.
It really hits that sweet spot of learning a repetitive, hands-on task, and falling into that meditative state of doing something that you've become good at, while knowing that screwing up that task could have mildly catastrophic consequences for your workday.
Quote from: The Seamstress on September 07, 2024, 01:39:03 PMOh, this looks adorable. :) Maybe I should finally go and read the Moomin books in the near future.
Don't know if it really counts as a game, but I've been playing with this thing I saw on Mastodon:
https://dennisfriedl.de/programme/alienae_litterae
Basically "improve your historical fonts reading skill" (German, English, or Latin) in Tetris-style. Kinda addictive. Though I don't know what's up with the Leaderboards, it's always the same names from 2021 or so, and mine never shows up even when I break records...
Oh that's interesting! And definitely a game IMO. Also yes you absolutely should read the moomin books, they're... important sorts of books, I think. Gentle in the way children's literature should be, but with a certain melancholy that always spoke to me.
Meanwhile I have played through Adventures in Castle Heterodyne (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1789370/Girl_Genius_Adventures_In_Castle_Heterodyne/), the tie-in computer game for the webcomic Girl Genius (https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/) which I've read for many years.
It's alright! It's a mix of dodge-and-roll combat and puzzle platforming as you go through the narrative of the section of the comics where Agatha claims Castle Heterodyne as her own. I liked the exploration, the puzzles were mostly fairly fun, I particularly liked the sort of hidden doors and paths through parts of the castle, that side of stuff was really nice. I also liked the extended post-game where you could go back and find stuff you missed and check out the vaults etc, though
There are some downsides - not least that it's kinda clunky in the combat, which isn't too much of a problem in regular rooms but two of the three boss fights took a lot of attempts. Also, some of the puzzle gameplay was not ideal: some of the things I had to look up were on the "I essentially tried this already but there's nothing to tell you that's the solution and you need to do it perfectly to even work that out."
The final fight part 1 (there's basically a run of two boss fights against the same character, the first with a giant plant complicating things and the second with robots in a library) was interesting to me because it felt narratively successful whilst being ludically the worst thing I faced all game. The opponent is a smoke knight, and it really felt like fighting a smoke knight! You're ducking the giant plant and she's dodging in, whizzing discuses at you, or stabbing you, then vanishing out the way again. There's only one of her attacks where she stays around long enough to get hit by a plant tentacle, which can stun her long enough for you to do damage, but you also need to line her up to get hit without getting hit yourself. The thing is, that isn't much fun. Most of the fight you are just trying to wait things out for a chance to line her up for the next round of attacks, and it takes ages. It feels like fighting a smoke knight, but making the player feel slow and clodhopping is tiring and kinda sucks.
To end on a more positive note, the other thing I really liked was the mini-clank sections: you get to shift focus to be one of the main character's little clockwork robots and explore the map from the view of this tiny foot-high thing, with lots of extra holes in the walls etc that are important for solving some puzzles (and you can unlock a drill and a fan later on). These for me were the most fun part of the whole game, I really enjoyed them and it was very cute. And you can collect little friends for the tiny clockwork robot. It's wonderful.
This is just a copy of the review I left on steam for Arco, which I've just finished playing, but it says the things I wanted to say, which are in short that Arco is a magnificent game, and you, dear reader, should play it.
The fundamental reason is the storytelling: it combines the vibes and pulpiness of a vengeance western with a nuanced and very human look at colonisation and the price of resisting it. It also does it in a world that is not portrayed as a sort of suffering grimdark horror tale, but as somewhere with real joy and hope and silliness and therefore a much more real sense of pain when the story shows how fragile those things are. I laughed at a donkey braying at me when I petted it too much, and a little creature that wanted to make a shop but only accepted sticks as currency, and at digging for supplies and finding an anachronistic toaster... and, equally, it hit hard when major characters died or you saw a burned village that you'd been talking to everyone in not so long before. People in the story are human and treated as such, and that in many ways makes the villains more frightening: the invaders and colonisers aren't zombies or a faceless horde, they're people. Which means they, in some way, and for myriad reasons, *chose* this. It's very good writing.
The storytelling is also backed up by absolutely drop-dead gorgeous landscape pixel art. It's genuinely stunning and enormously evocative, and honestly part of me wishes there was a post-game where I could just wander the whole game world as a surviving character to go "ooooh" at the pretty scenery and make some bits of money and chat to the NPCs. Having a setting for a fantasy RPG (including fantasy creatures, ruined temples, quests, the works) that is so heavily rooted in south America is really refreshing rather than another implicitly pseudo-late-medieval-Europe knockoff, and I say that as a professional medieval historian!
The combat gameplay is the bit that takes a little time to get used to, especially the meta-level where the expectation is that you might need to "rewind" from failed combats to rejig your inventory and skills before having another go - but the reason it takes time is mostly a good one, which is that the mechanics are very locked into how the game works and work with that. The gameplay is fun once you're used to it and offers quite a lot of pacy tactical puzzling as you go. Actually mechanising the characters' hope and guilt in manifested ways was also really interesting and I liked it a lot.
So, yeah. This is probably one of the best indie games I've seen released in the last couple of years, and I really strongly recommend it to anyone who's inclined to have a go.
| (https://i.imgur.com/YdOhBTA.png) | (https://i.imgur.com/wEsSgIs.png) |
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I've been playing a bunch of Core Keeper the past couple of weeks, playing co-op with my wife. She played a chunk of it in Early Access, then convinced me to give it a try when it hit 1.0 release, and we've been having a great time.
It's got a lot of Terraria vibes, but top-down and for me it feels a lot more intuitive. Unlike most of these digging and crafting games I haven't felt the need to break into a wiki or look up all its secrets to understand the nuances of basic mechanics, and the core progression through forging different metals and unlocking new technology has been satisfying.
Speaking of digging and crafting, I played a little bit of Dwarf Fortress, a game everyone always assumes I have played but which I actually really haven't very much. I was using the new Kitfox games version from Steam with its graphics upgrades rather than old ASCII DF.
I feel like I ought to like the game more than I do. I like complex world simulations to interact with in games, I like building things, and I definitely like dwarves. And it's not that I dislike it either, it's a fine way to spend a few hours. I think I kinda always wanted a bit more narrative and a bit less management out of it in places: the visitors to my hold's tavern always seemed to be off doing interesting things while my dwarves were just tootling around waiting to be told to make a bunch more chairs or chop down another couple of trees.
It may just be my lack of mastery of the systems, but I never felt I had a hugely clear idea of why some bits of my economy were booming and others weren't, so there's definitely a lot I stil haven't learned. I don't know if the new version stops the Dwarfs doing objectively stupid things more than older versions, but the fact that they'd stop digging when reaching a high cavern below or when reaching a damp wall meant I really didn't have many catastrophes, and my fisherman just seemed to be single-handedly feeding the hold despite my failures at establishing agriculture. I guess I wasn't finding much of the deadly chaos that DF is sometimes reputed for: nobody died, nobody fought anything bigger than an angry wild bird, I made a few nice little temples and a pub and some overly roomy bedrooms for everyone and it was fairly chill but I wasn't super sure where I was next going with it all. I may go back to it sometime and see where I next get to, though.