What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age [Archive]

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Anonymouswizard

2023-12-08, 05:12 PM

I don't think the PotW needs to be adjusted. What I think is happening is Psykers can take a talent that reduces Degradation buildup by 2 on their first power per turn and it's triggering an underflow error. Idira had 0 degradation, but three powers in a row caused PotW kickbacks which never happened until she took the talent. It's either that or the Degradation meter is bugged and she's been in more danger than it shows. I know some encounters, especially in warp-sensitive areas, start the meter at 10 or higher instead of 0.

Diviner has a few solid powers. There's a buff that gives about +15% dodge and parry to a target for the rest of combat and a talent that further gives them +10 WS/BS for being affected by a Diviner ability. It has some offense, but it's definitely not as focused there as other psyker disciplines. It does have a wild debuff that blinds and pretty much neuters a single target which has yet to be resisted. Agreed that Officer feels like a better pair for the skillset, though.

Psykers in the game are rated from 0 to 4 on the psy-level scale. In the books a Farseer is rated around 8, so the player psykers definitely don't hit world-shattering power levels even at their strongest. By my cursory looks, you may be able to push Gamma at the absolute endgame levels, but you're probably Epsilon for the majority of the game. I don't have a whole lot of experience with Rogue Trader or how crazy Owlcat went with it, though. I did find it fun that when you reach Exemplar tier, you can actually take options to become an Unsanctioned Psyker and bolt powers onto a previously non-psyker.

Ah, a bug, that makes sense. And yeah, I suspect Diviner is solid but not the real powerhouse, it seems decent from what I've seen so far.

IIRC the tabletop game was like 1-6, with Dark Heresy Ascension Psykers reaching 10+. So I'm guessing the game tops out at mid gamma to very low beta. Anybody potentially becoming a Psyker was technically RAW but required explicit GM approval until at least Black Crusade (which dropped the careers for thematic reasons).

Progression is also much, much more linear than in the tabletop RPG, but that's not exactly a bad thing. In fact the actual rules haven't been followed particularly closely and it's no bad thing.

MCerberus

2023-12-09, 09:08 AM

I've been playing some Monster Hunter: Rise for reasons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLGskYHVaY4) and maybe I shouldn't jump right back into bowgun before I have the rust shaken off.

Zevox

2023-12-10, 12:28 AM

Played BlazBlue: Central Fiction online this evening. It works, and quite well. I mean, the one time I played someone from Japan was a connection I wouldn't want to to stick with for more than the one match, but even that was more playable than a lot of matches in delay-based netcode back in the day. But the framerate held steady, and I'm pretty confident that when I experienced connection issues, it was actual connection issues, not my PC not handling the game well enough.

Damn, I need to come back to this regularly now. There's not a ton of people playing, but there's enough that I can get matches without much waiting, and that's all I need. I might lose more than I win for a long time as I readjust to the game - and learn new characters potentially, I was playing Es today rather than my traditional main Platinum, or the other character I spent a lot of time with when CF came out, Nine - but that's fine. I love playing this, so losses don't frustrate me, they just make me want to learn more and get better.

Surprisingly, most of the people that I fought weren't amazing players either. The one from Japan seemed very strong, and there was one Hakumen playing I played quite a few matches with that was also quite good, but several others seemed more like me, intermediate players with an idea of what they were doing, but not fully in practice. Most of them more in practice than I am, but still, clearly not exceptionally polished. Which is an unexpected plus, people around my skill level still play the game, and not as a tiny proportion of the player base.

AlanBruce

2023-12-11, 04:16 AM

Just finished the DLC for Final Fantasy XVI: Echoes of the Fallen.

Its a short campaign- about three hours long. And it takes place right before the final main mission in the game. You take on the role of Clive once more and have Joshua, Jill and Torgal along for the ride.

I enjoyed the new area. The encounters were slightly more difficult than before (I realized at the very end thst I was playing on FF Mode, so that may have spiked the difficulty). The last encounter was surprisingly difficult and took me a few tries to learn its moves and counter accordingly.

Ignimortis

2023-12-11, 05:22 AM

Yeah, I don't know why I expected the game to hard lock you to the Imperium ethos. It's a Rogue Trader and Owlcat game, so I shouldn't have been surprised that there seems to be a valid Chaos Heretic path. There's even a Heretic voicepack for your character!

Funny enough, I also don't find the Psykers that amazing. They have some useful powers, but compared to my dream team of an ex-Commissar MC feeding Argenta multiple turns to explode enemies, some lightning has felt underwhelming. It became even more underwhelming when her skin peeled off and a daemoness erupted from the corpse (despite the UI saying she was at 0 degradation and no peril buildup), which promptly stabbed another character for 40 damage.

It might also just be Idira's build. Operative-Diviner seems like a weird combination. Feels like Officer-Diviner or Operative-Pyromancy/Telepath would be a better setup, though Officer would step on some toes.
That's not a bug. As an unsanctioned Psyker, Idira has a 5% to trigger phenomena/perils at any point she uses her powers, even if the veil is totally stable. It's perfectly possible for her to explode into a daemon at 0 veil with no warning, and it seems to be the intended behaviour. Heinrix never does this, being actually sanctioned, and neither does your PC, also being sanctioned.

Rynjin

2023-12-11, 05:26 AM

I've been enjoying Operative-Pyromancer on my own PC. Despite the fact that Ignite says the damage takes place at the END of the target's turn, it seems to actually trigger at the START of their turn, making it significantly better than it appears. It does around the same damage as a shot from the sniper rifle the Operative starts with, and doesn't require an attack roll.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-11, 07:13 AM

I've honestly been very happy not being a psyker, and plan to seek out a Black Ship as soon as the game lets me. My biggest regret is going Soldier instead of Officer, but that's a minor issue and I'm sure it'll matter less once I hit level 16.

Cespenar

2023-12-11, 11:05 AM

I'm kinda with warty on this one.

I'll probably get and play it regardless, since it's a tactics game and the genre is the superior genre :P, but if past Owlcat games are a sign, I'll probably drop it at the 60%-ish mark on a good day, because they tend to make games with the vision that theirs is the only tactics game people are going to play for the next 30 years or something.

Because of this other thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?662243-Searching-for-a-game-scifi-investigation-adventure), I decided to check out Song of Farca and so far it's pretty good. Reminds me a little of Orwell (the game, not the author) but less... I don't know, clinical?

Yeah, the plot and narrative was easier to get into in Song of Farca than the other hacker/detective games IMHO too. Solid little game.

Wookieetank

2023-12-11, 12:05 PM

So far my biggest complaint with Tides of Numenera is that the party size is too small. I've found 6 (7 if you count the mutually exclusive party member) so far, and you only get to take 3 with you at a time. Current party is Tybir Aligern and Rhin, and I really want to add in Oom, Erritis and Matkina, but I'm attached to the first three already. Callistege is also intriguing, but can't bring her along without ditching Aligern, and that's not happening anytime soon. *grumble grumble*

Otherwise enjoying the game, and think I'm getting close to leaving Sagus Cliffs for parts unknown (or at least only known through brief reference).

Zevox

2023-12-11, 05:24 PM

So last night I played BlazBlue: Central Fiction's ranked online for a couple of hours. Now, I don't know if anyone else has ever tried to play ranked in an ArcSys game not named Dragon Ball FighterZ more than a month or two after release, but if you have, you know how astonishing that is. Normally ranked mode in those is a wasteland after the initial release window, and everybody just plays in the lobbies/player matches. I didn't even go into ranked expecting to find anyone, I just figured I might as well turn on ranked matchmaking while I was in training mode practicing a little bit before going to player matches, see if I got lucky and there was someone else doing the same. And it's not like I'm playing the game because some event's happening that brought me back to it, rollback was added to it almost two years ago now, and the devs are otherwise long since done with it. There's just enough people playing it that I could get a decent variety of foes in ranked, seven years after its release. That's amazing and I love it. This needs to be something I come back to regularly, holy crap.

Just finished the DLC for Final Fantasy XVI: Echoes of the Fallen.

They will be releasing a longer DLC come Spring which deals with Leviathan, as clearly shown in the trailer. It was fun going back to Valisthea for a few hours and wreck things up. You evfn get Clouds Buster Sword for purchasing the DLC, which may or may not fit the setting.
Good to hear. I'm personally waiting on the Leviathan DLC to drop and then I'll play them together - doing the Leviathan one first so I have Echoes of the Fallen left over to actually use Leviathan's abilities during. Though I have to say, missed opportunity on their part that the DLC doesn't involve making Jill and Joshua playable. Even more so than the Leviathan moveset, getting to play as other characters would've been a big draw for me there.

Meanwile, I am currently getting ready to (read: reinstalling the game) play God of War: Ranarok's new DLC, Valhalla, which just dropped. I'd be more excited if it weren't a roguelike mode, but eh, it's free, and if Hades' combat and writing can carry that gameplay style for me, I'm sure God of War's can.

Edit: And I misunderstood the release date, it's tomorrow, not today. Oh well, at least I'm all set up for it.

AlanBruce

2023-12-11, 06:17 PM

Good to hear. I'm personally waiting on the Leviathan DLC to drop and then I'll play them together - doing the Leviathan one first so I have Echoes of the Fallen left over to actually use Leviathan's abilities during. Though I have to say, missed opportunity on their part that the DLC doesn't involve making Jill and Joshua playable. Even more so than the Leviathan moveset, getting to play as other characters would've been a big draw for me there.

The idea of playing as Jill, Joshua and even Dion was mentioned several times by the community. However, the games director has clearly stated that this is Clives story, so we will always play as Clive.

Sapphire Guard

2023-12-11, 06:55 PM

That was... superb. I had high expectations. Think with RPGs you can end up with skewed expectations that if you level grind enough you can save everyone... but no. Level up all you like, you can't talk everyone down.

I botched the ending, because I didnt have enough rhetoric to keep Ruby from killing herself once I broke her machine. Titus, Elizabeth, and half the Hardie boys went down. Kim trusted me so he fought back... and we found the killer, some random lunatic we never even suspected. It breaks every rule of storytelling and it's brilliant.

My team took me back, too, and we got a photo of the Plasmid. Relatively okay ending in spite fo it all.

Apparently this setting is part of a RPG. I suspected, it was too well built. Is there a sourcebook somewhere?

Went back and played the scene again, failed a 97% authority check and now... Cuno is in my party. Huh. Interesting choice.

Zevox

2023-12-11, 07:37 PM

That isnt to say we havent met amazing characters along the way- like the aforementioned companions. But unless they release some game in the future like FFXVI-2, for example, were only playing as Clive.
Like I said, missed opportunity on their part. The main game is Clive's story, sure. Add-on DLC didn't need to be. Clive already has the entire game for his story, it would make perfect sense for DLC to focus on others. Kind of felt to me like they were setting up for that even, with
Jill's expressed interest in leaving Valisthea entirely to see the rest of the world once the conflict over the crystals was done, particularly combined with her being the only survivor of the main characters. Of course I suppose that could be setup for a sequel too, but direct sequels in Final Fantasy do not have a good track record, so I'd honestly rather a small DLC expansion personally.

tonberrian

2023-12-11, 07:55 PM

Playing Owlcat's Rogue Trader game and having a lot of fun. I haven't played a 40k game before (though i do own Mechanicus and look forward to playing it later). Haven't really interacted with 40k in general before this aside from a handful of wiki dives. I'm looking forward to the dlc and the rest of the game.

Batcathat

2023-12-12, 07:55 AM

I finished Song of Farca yesterday and my initial positive impression held up. The story was pretty good (eventually I'll probably replay it, to see how much can change with some different choices), the gameplay was a bit repetitive but enjoyable enough that it didn't really bother me and the graphics were good, if fairly simple.

If I have one complaint, it's that the dialogue system (where you combine different facts you know to draw conclusions) was usually very forgiving, letting you retry it until you got it right, except that sometimes even the "wrong" choice progressed the game, but with unfortunate consequences. I don't mind a game being unforgiving, but the fact that up until that point the game had taught me that I could retry made it a bit confusing.

Zevox

2023-12-13, 05:52 PM

So I've completed the God of War: Ragnarok DLC, Valhalla. Or as it would perhaps more aptly be called, The Therapy of Kratos.

As this is a roguelike/roguelite (I don't care which) mode for the game, Valhalla here is a gauntlet that presents challenges taken from the mind of the person who enters it, in order to help them master themselves. In Kratos' case, this means a lot of dealing with his past. For gameplay terms, that means fun stuff like enemies from the original games, mostly fighting like they did back in the old games (the Centaurs are clearly mostly reskinned versions of whose deer-warrior people from Ragnarok, but others are recreated much as they were). You also earn a fourth variation on Spartan Rage, "Legacy," which lets Kratos again wield the Blade of Olympus. Story-wise, the mode has Kratos struggling with a proposition put forth by Freya, and invited to Valhalla by someone else they don't reveal right away but who won't surprise you if you played Ragnarok. Think I need to go into a spoiler block at this point though.
Freya's proposal is that Kratos join a new council she's putting together to govern the Realms in the aftermath of Ragnarok, as its God of War. Kratos is of course hesitant, as he has a lot of hangups around that particular title. The invitation to Valhalla comes from Tyr, who serves as Kratos' mentor/therapist here (alongside Mimir to a degree, of course), as well as the final boss of each run. His fight steadily gets harder with each run you complete (changing his weapon, using ones from different parts of the world each time), up to a final fourth form that is legitimately fairly challenging and quite fun to fight. Not as hard as Sigrun in GoW 2018 or Gna/Hrolf in Ragnarok, but pretty solid nonetheless.

Once you know this much, there's no major surprises. Kratos has to work out his **** before he can eventually accept that it's okay for him to claim the title of God of War once again in order to help Freya and the people of the Realms. I had expected/hoped that it would end with a literal fight with his younger self, and there is a scene where he confronts his younger self that briefly got my hopes up for that, but alas no, that's entirely him talking things out to himself. Still, there's lots of well-written conversations about Kratos' feelings, conscious and otherwise, regarding things that happened in the original trilogy. Good stuff, this series' writers know what they're doing with this character, as anyone who played the recent games knows already.
And the gameplay remains quite fun, even if the roguelike elements never feel quite as fully realized as in something like Hades - there's just nothing quite like the branching builds you can get out of the divine favors in that game, no matter which perks you pick up for each of your weapons. I'd say maybe they should've limited you to using one weapon at a time, but then the armor buff enemies can get that requires use of a specific weapon to deal with couldn't be used, so eh.

It's quite good all in all, for sure. Though at this point it feels like they have to intend to close the book on Kratos after this. Sure, you could write more stories about him, but after the character arc he had in the Norse games and it concluding like this, it feels like he's best retired to supporting character status for any future games. There's no way to top this with him, ever.

LibraryOgre

2023-12-14, 10:49 AM

My comfort game is, apparently, GalCiv3, playing as the Terran Resistance, with a starting place near the edge of the galaxy.

Cespenar

2023-12-14, 11:13 AM

Got my toes into Rogue Trader as well, spent probably a whole hour to pick 3-4 people's feats at a level up. Felt like I'm back at the D&D 3.5 days, with a mixed bag sort of feelings.

Eh, at least there don't seem to be that many trap options, compared to 3.5.

Also, that aside, the game seems to be good.

warty goblin

2023-12-14, 02:31 PM

Prodding gently at a number of things.

Halo Infinite, aka Halo Combat Evolved (Backwards). Because it's extremely OG Halo, which is good, because Halo is good. There's some necessary concessions to our blighted modern age in here, like irrelevant and kinda boring open world bits and the most tacked on upgrades known to humanity. But because the upgrades don't matter, you can ignore them, and the open world nonsense works much better as spacing for campaign missions than stuff you really do. Getting in fights and saving marines on the way from A to B is fun and feels dynamic. Just wandering around picking off map markers is an ennui simulator. Bottom line, shooting is top notch, open world is unnecessary, story is Space Magic Nonsense that sci-fi like this eventually and inevitably decays into, all blue particle effects and endless vaguely important sounding words getting promoted to Proper Noun status.

That decay would also be why I have no enthusiasm for Mass Effect 4.

Miasma Chronicles. This is an enjoyable little stealth tactics game. The combat is fine, with fewer, more challenging and deliberate encounters giving it a more novel like pacing than one usually sees. The world buying and writing are good too, characters have detectable personalities and desires. Even the early game mutant frog monsters have an apparent culture and seem more intentional than homicidal frogmen need to be.

Form

2023-12-14, 03:17 PM

My team took me back, too, and we got a photo of the Plasmid. Relatively okay ending in spite fo it all.

Apparently this setting is part of a RPG. I suspected, it was too well built. Is there a sourcebook somewhere?

Went back and played the scene again, failed a 97% authority check and now... Cuno is in my party. Huh. Interesting choice.

There is apparently a book set in the Disco Elysium universe, though it's hard to acquire. I did find this this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnlcSXqquFg) video talking about the lore and the pale, which you might find interesting as well.

In my first playthrough I got Cuno in my party near the end as well... by making the worst possible choices. I mean, take a child with you to confront the killer? Sure Harry Raphael Ambrosius Cousteau, that seems like a fine idea. Somehow this turned out to be the right choice??? Cuno really goes to the bat for you when you have to face the rest of your precint.

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-12-14, 03:28 PM

That decay would also be why I have no enthusiasm for Mass Effect 4.

I know that Star Trek does sometimes do technobabble space magic nonsense, but it usually strives to stay within a lane of plausible, human scenarios. It's managed to remain relatable and semi-grounded for over fifty years and still tells interesting stories to this day. It baffles me that sci-fi games can't take inspiration from it and keep their narratives from spinning off into fantastic tripe. I mean, Mass Effect 1 was a Star Trek RPG with the serial numbers filed off and it eroded away. Andromeda didn't even try! It started in on the magic in the prologue.

I guess I'm just saying I agree. I know on a long enough timeline a series is bound to pick up a writer who believes too heavily in Clarke's Third Law, but maybe that's an argument for not having an eternal march of sequels to every IP.

warty goblin

2023-12-14, 04:09 PM

Star Trek has the substantial advantage of being strongly episodic, and rooting most of its conflicts in ethics, politics, or the environment. The Enterprise shows up and has to stop bad thing from happening without violating the Prime Directive, or gain enough understanding to negotiate a settlement, or stop a space problem from doing a bad thing. These are all generally very character rooted things.

Videogames don't have that luxury. For one thing the main character in most games is somewhere north of 99% character free. Yoi can't have an interesting conflict about how to solve a problem without violating a character's ethics when that character is basically a cardboard cutout - the player can have an interesting debate about how to solve the problem, but that's not narrative. They also have to make the plot solvable what the player can actually do in game, which is walk places and kill things. Mass Effect does add talk to things, but because it's an RPG, it (probably correctly) assumes that players want to shoot some fools, and therefore needs to provide a steady stream of fools to shoot. Preferably culminating in a boss fight and/or sick loot.

So you need a plot that can be resolved by the player walking to the right place, and shooting the correct thing in its glowing weak point. From that, I think the descent in blue particle effect proper noun space magic nearly writes itself. You need a game, so there's got to be some obstacles to just going to the bad guy and shooting him, so here's some other places to go, full of dudes to shoot. They need a reason to be there, so they're guarding something, maybe some sort of weapon or information you need to defeat the bad guy - objective, proper noun and space magic all in one! The bad guy needs to be doing something bad that can only be stopped by shooting him, so why not a doomsday weapon? More proper nouns and space magic!

I find it notable that ME 1 and Halo 1 both mostly sidestep the worst excesses of "commander, get the Cypher to the Conduit before Lord Vile activates the Converter, or else the Archon will destroy the Nexus!" sort of story. I suspect that this is because they're the first games, which allows them to use information as an objective much more readily than later titles - figuring the Reapers out is satisfying, but you can only play that card once. Also they're just free to introduce stuff in a way that later titles aren't by dint of being first titles. The Flood are a great end of the second act twist, but you can't really introduce secret space zombies multiple times.

Rynjin

2023-12-14, 05:03 PM

The first 3 Halo games sidestep it pretty handily. The big Maguffin with the Ominous Proper Nopun is also...the title of the game, so it doesn't seem as out of palce. "Fire the Halo to destroy the Flood. It's what it was built for."

4 onward, being written and developed by an entirely different, significantly less talented team on the other hand...

Cygnia

2023-12-14, 05:09 PM

Trying to farm the last follower skin in Cult of the Lamb before the new update drops next year so I can get the achievement and take a rest afterwards. Trying to decide what to play in my Steam queue next...

Errorname

2023-12-14, 05:24 PM

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-14, 05:33 PM

Got my toes into Rogue Trader as well, spent probably a whole hour to pick 3-4 people's feats at a level up. Felt like I'm back at the D&D 3.5 days, with a mixed bag sort of feelings.

Eh, at least there don't seem to be that many trap options, compared to 3.5.

Also, that aside, the game seems to be good.

I believe they reworked the biggest trap option (+1 Wound was never worth the opportunity cost), otherwise the biggest mistakes you can make are picking up specialised Proficiency too early and building a party that misses and important skill. I believe most serious flamer weapons are Act 2 onwards, and you'll see pretty much no melta or plasma in Act 1.

Batcathat

2023-12-14, 05:37 PM

You're not wrong, but at least that trend means less names that looks like a cat walked across the keyboard, with little care for consistency or sometimes even pronounceability.

warty goblin

2023-12-14, 05:52 PM

I am so sick of Sci-Fi writers using "the [noun]" as a naming scheme for everything. It's not like it's never worked, I like Bungie games well enough and they're lousy with it, but it can really try my patience sometimes. Feels like everyone's doing it now.
I think it's a thing where doing it once or twice, with a name that actually makes sense and is for something that genuinely matters to the story is generally fine. The Reapers? Cool, functional name for the omnicidal robots. Halo? Perfect for a giant space donut with religious overtones.

It gets a lot less interesting when it's for every last rando bit of plot junk you need to pick up. And one of them is probably like the Conduit or the Catalyst, which is just dull at this point because dear me have I brought a lot of Catalysts to a lot of Conduits.

You're not wrong, but at least that trend means less names that looks like a cat walked across the keyboard, with little care for consistency or sometimes even pronounceability.

I've always liked silly fantasy names for stuff. Done right and you can get some world building or sense of character in there. Done badly, at least it can be slightly weird.

Rynjin

2023-12-14, 05:53 PM

I decided to go Heretical (since nobody else is apparently) and was annoyed that you get an Inferno Pistol early...which is bugged and can't be equipped. Its special property is that you don't require proficiency to wield it, but it requires proficiency to wield. =(

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-12-14, 06:08 PM

I've always liked silly fantasy names for stuff. Done right and you can get some world building or sense of character in there. Done badly, at least it can be slightly weird.

Oof, color me the opposite. I've grown significantly less tolerant of lazy fantasy names, especially if they're the type to insert random apostrophes. They don't even sidestep the issue of placing "The" in front of everything. You go from chasing "The Conduit" to seeking "The K'hnduyt."

Unless you're Tolkien or willing to put in a Tolkien-sized effort of creating a language or culture, stick to real words. Besides, it's how real people tend to name things anyway. We don't make up silly names. We use a proper noun or an acronym for a phrase. Rarely, we'll call something by its creator's name, but that's about as far as we go.

Errorname

2023-12-14, 06:17 PM

You're not wrong, but at least that trend means less names that looks like a cat walked across the keyboard, with little care for consistency or sometimes even pronounceability.

I'll take a good fantasy name over "the noun" any day for most things. Would much rather call your aliens "Sanghelli" or "Eliksni" than "the Elites" or "the Fallen", personally

I don't think "the Noun" is any less lazy though

warty goblin

2023-12-14, 06:21 PM

Unless it's a word for a specific thing a culture doesn't have. Then much of time that culture just adopts some other culture's word for it. I'm not a fan of long, complicated words that mean 'sword' because English has had a word for sword as long as it's been English, but if the aliens have a planet-eating machine called a Churg-un, it's entirely reasonable for the humans to call it a Churg-un as well.

Also "the K'hnduyt" has at least the potential to be cool. A conduit is just a pipe you run cables through, even as construction supplies go its downright dull.

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-12-14, 06:28 PM

I don't think "the Noun" is any less lazy though

Sure, but it's at least less annoying. To me, anyway.

Maybe? It's 50/50 if we do that in real life. For example, we use "anime" a lot these days, but I remember back when a lot of people called it "Japanimation." We don't call Germany "Deutschland" and so on, either.

warty goblin

2023-12-14, 06:51 PM

There's sorta rules about it. Countries generally get transliterated in some way or another. Place names can go either way, though river names have been historically extremely durable, to the point that one of the arguments for the complete genocide and removal of the original inhabitants of, IIRC, the Shetland Islands by the Norse is that all the waterway names are Norse. General things can go either way, depending to some degree I suppose on how alien a concept it is to the inheriting culture. Potato is a loan word from Spanish, where it's a portmanteau of two North American words. Maize is very seldom used in place of corn, a much older word that originally referred to wheat, which isn't miles away from maize-corn in use or cultivation.

In sci-fi it always makes me wonder why those specific words aren't being translated by the universal translator I assume we all have, too. Unless it's a truly alien concept, you'd think we'd get some sort of translation out of it. Their word might be "churg-un", but that translates as "planet eater" so why don't we hear that?
They same reason they're written in modern English, and not the substantially different 28th century Future English/Chinese/Reformed Neo-Martian that they should be in: a weighted combination of audience readability and flavor, generally weighted towards readability. But using a non-English word generally forces the audience to pay attention, so it works as both emphasis and a device to encourage engagement with specific concepts. You can translate 'grok' just fine, but by not translating it, you have to engage with the context and figure it out. This is generally more meaningful because it takes more effort, and allows the word to have a much richer, more cultural definition than a simple translation would provide. Tanith Lee does something similar in Don't Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, which have fairly rich set of what slang. She does provide the exact definitions, but by using the slang throughout the actual text it works to map you into the rather alien headspace of eternally bored immortal teenagers with nothing better to do than insult each other and commit serial suicide for kicks.

Kareeah_Indaga

2023-12-14, 08:43 PM

Re: alien words I tend to like them but there's definitely a balance, and it takes a modicum of talent to pull off. The Elder Scrolls games calling their evil god-like spirits 'Daedric Princes' instead of 'Demon Lords' is nicely flavorful, and help makes the setting distinct. In contrast the Enduring Flame trilogy has alien names for things like camels and termites, which leads to kicking the reader out of the story when the context clues indicating which was which gave out two books and several real-life weeks ago, and one has to stop and think: 'Wait, which mundane critter has this alien name? Did the bad guy just bury the city under a mountain of evil corrupted camels, or evil corrupted termites?'

For games specifically, alien names also make it easier to Google if you get stuck on something. Generic names are more likely to bring up a flood of unrelated things.

Rynjin

2023-12-14, 09:09 PM

Enduring Flame was such an odd sequel trilogy. There's something about it that just slid off my brain when I read it because despite reading it a lot more recently than the Obsidian Trilogy literally the ONLY things I remember about the series is that it's the literal thematic inverse of the first series (High Magic now good, Wild Magic bad) and the bear scene near the start of the first book.

Kareeah_Indaga

2023-12-14, 10:08 PM

Yeah the main characters arent very distinct, theyre basically just Kellen and Cilarnen with hawk names, but less interesting and with some traits swapped. Plus the entire third book is very tacked on.

MCerberus

2023-12-14, 11:05 PM

I would like to nominate Destiny as the king of angering Scifi vaguery. It's so annoying because when they decide to actually name things we get cool stuff like semi-rogue AIs being named to purpose as historic figures or the incredible titles the hive have.

Anyway, tried another Shogun 2 campaign, still my least favorite Total War.

Zevox

2023-12-15, 12:57 AM

Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising is out as of today, so I spent the day playing that. Quite happy with it so far. Most importantly to me, the netcode is infinitely better than the original game's - though I knew that form the beta last month, but still, it is the most important thing for me.

On the single-player front, I was surprised to find out that it not only has its own new story mode, but also the entire story mode from the first game, and you can import data from the first game so it remembers how much you'd cleared already (and then some, apparently, since it thinks I cleared the DLC character missions that I definitely didn't since I never bought the DLC for the first game). So I'm actually re-playing the story mode of the first game before going into this one's, since I remember almost nothing of it since it was almost four years ago. It's fun, aside from boss fights it actually plays like a beat-em-up rather than a fighting game most of the time, which works very well; more fighting games should really do that with their story modes.

Looks like unlocking all the alternate cosmetics in the game is going to be quite a grind, since each character needs to be "leveled up" by playing them to get them, and there's 500 levels to go through each. Granted, there's only two things to unlock past level 300, and just from a couple of hours of online play I'm at level 30 with one character already, so it's not glacially slow, but still. Nonetheless, there is a lot of alternate colors and weapon skins to unlock, and you can spend an in-game currency you also earn through leveling characters up to get particular pieces early if you wish - and they're not all that costly, either, so if you really wanted a particular color or weapon for a character that would take a while to unlock, it wouldn't be much trouble to grab that way. As far as systems to unlock stuff go, it seems overall reasonable. Unless leveling slows to a glacial pace after a certain point, but thus far it seems like every level requires the same amount of xp, and you'll generally gain a level and a half from winning a match online, and some smaller amount from a loss (I didn't get a good sense of how much).

I am going to probably take some time to decide on a main though. Today I was playing Belial, who is definitely a front-runner for that, quite fun gameplay-wise, I love his theme music, and his personality is quite amusing to me given how rare it is to see a male character portrayed this way (he's basically an Incubus and his dialogue is 80% innuendo). His main competition, I think, will be Zeta (my old main; spear-wielding warrior woman) and Zooey (dragon-summoning guardian woman). Though I do also want to try out others, most notably Yuel (fox lady) and Grimnir (pretty-boy wind god). So, this could take a while compared to how long deciding on a main takes me in most fighting games.

Eldan

2023-12-15, 04:32 AM

My team took me back, too, and we got a photo of the Plasmid. Relatively okay ending in spite fo it all.

Apparently this setting is part of a RPG. I suspected, it was too well built. Is there a sourcebook somewhere?

Went back and played the scene again, failed a 97% authority check and now... Cuno is in my party. Huh. Interesting choice.

Did you only take a photo of the Phasmid, or did you also talk to it? It's one of my biggest complaints about the game that you can fail the interaction to talk to the Phasmid, because it's kind of the emotional climax of the entire game. (Actually, as people have talked about before, there's three connected emotional climaxes of the game: Dolores, who represents Harry's past, and talks about the future, the Deserter, who is stuck in the past, but arresting him gives Harry a second chance to take up his police job again, and the Phasmid, who is a being with no past and no future who exists in an eternal burning moment.

Cuno is one option. If Kim gets shot and you also never made friends with Cuno, you have to go alone.

Anyway. There's no sourcebook, sadly. The setting came out of a several-decades long homebrew game campaign. Apparently, it started as a D&D campaign, set thousands of years before the present age of the game setting, played by a small Estonian art collective. Then, they advanced the timeline a few hundred years every campaign, until they arrived in the present. They never wrote most of it down.

Errorname

2023-12-15, 06:53 AM

Destiny runs the whole spectrum of "the noun" names honestly, because it walks the line from cool (The Traveler is a great name for a wandering mysterious god) to inexcusable (The Veil is a boring macguffin and the worst part of a not very good expansion) and everything in between.

Something that bothers me is the alien faction names. With Halo they understood that they should probably give alternative names for all the aliens, since the names humans use for them probably wouldn't be the ones they use themselves, so the Elites are Sanghelli and the Grunts are Unggoy and so on. Destiny does this for one of their alien factions, the Fallen (Eliksni, almost certainly because someone realized that no people would choose to call themselves "the Fallen"), and then everyone else gets stuck with "the noun" as their only name. So the Eliksni have like a rudimentary conlang and a major character's name is even textually an anglicized version, but when the Empress Caiatl addresses her people she has to call them "the Cabal". So at least in the language department there's a bit of a worldbuilding gap, which is a shame.

MCerberus

2023-12-15, 09:54 AM

The duality of Destiny worldbuilding:

The Ahamkara - space 'dragons' that are/were living celestial monkey paws that refer to others as things they possess and make contracts that would make a certain anime cat demon proud
vs
"worms"

Cespenar

2023-12-15, 11:20 AM

True, item- and skill- specific options are always a gamble in these games. I got my Logic pretty high, for example, but haven't so far ran into any Logic check that mattered.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-15, 11:48 AM

True, item- and skill- specific options are always a gamble in these games. I got my Logic pretty high, for example, but haven't so far ran into any Logic check that mattered.

I think the most vital skill is Tech-Use, but you get an Explorator who covers that better than you (he begins with something like 80%, which I think you'll only get by going Forge World and pumping Int). The nice thing about Oelcat games is that unlike most CRPGs you never need anything on one specific character, you can even offload social skills (oh how I missed that in BG4).

On that note, I like the Warhammer method of doing the nouns in (faux-)Latin. It's generally obvious what it means, but you're not using everyday words.

Errorname

2023-12-15, 02:56 PM

The duality of Destiny worldbuilding:

The Ahamkara - space 'dragons' that are/were living celestial monkey paws that refer to others as things they possess and make contracts that would make a certain anime cat demon proud
vs
"worms"

I mean the worms are also a cool fantasy concept, the parasitic spawn of ancient gods that grant power but have an endlessly growing hunger that will eventually consume their hosts. They just don't get a cool fantasy name for the species as a whole.

Rynjin

2023-12-15, 03:21 PM

On that note, I like the Warhammer method of doing the nouns in (faux-)Latin. It's generally obvious what it means, but you're not using everyday words.

The inherent comedy of Tech-Priests having litle actual understanding of how tech works helps with the noun thing. Sure, scanners are "augurs", yeah machines are powered by "machine spirits", whatever.

A recent bit of the game actually made me laugh out loud because a bunch of priests basically sent a DDoS attack at the villain and described it in such flowery terms that I couldn't help but laugh.

tonberrian

2023-12-15, 03:32 PM

There are a few places where you, the Rogue Trader, have to do the skill checks personally (i dunno if it's a bug or not), especially in act 3. It's very frustrating because i did not build a character to do skill checks (I am a Warrior, i do Carouse and Athletics). Some of them make sense (you are alone for a bit), but others not so much.

LibraryOgre

2023-12-15, 03:50 PM

On the topic of "Do we call it The Cypher or Ky'fir", I offer:

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/fiction_rule_of_thumb.png

Errorname

2023-12-15, 04:27 PM

On the topic of "Do we call it The Cypher or Ky'fir", I offer:

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/fiction_rule_of_thumb.png

Reasonable argument that most things that have bad "the noun" names would still be problems even with a different naming scheme. A bad macguffin isn't going to be fixed by a better name.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-15, 04:31 PM

A recent bit of the game actually made me laugh out loud because a bunch of priests basically sent a DDoS attack at the villain and described it in such flowery terms that I couldn't help but laugh.

Tech Priests know a LOT more than they're letting on, they're just also religious fanatics who believe in machine spirits and learn a lot of the basics via ritual practices.

Like they're missing a lot of knowledge and their dogma leads them to making really stupid decisions (notably chasing after STCs over engaging in research), but when they absolutely have to be they're competent engineers and scientists. Note that one of the launch DLCs includes a ship variant developed in the last 500 years, this doesn't happen if they're as bad as sometimes claimed

Plus after Pathfinder pushing a lot of characters' religious beliefs to the side it's glorious that Rogue Trader is willing to let the fact that most of the cast legitimately devoutly believes in something colour their every action. I'm revelling in the fact that despite picking the Guard Commander background there are many options to proudly state my faith in the Emperor and the manifest destiny of mankind.

Also dammit Idira stop summoning random stuff. You're getting killed or shipped off to Terra as soon as I can, and until then I'm confining you to the brig!

MCerberus

2023-12-15, 05:07 PM

Reasonable argument that most things that have bad "the noun" names would still be problems even with a different naming scheme. A bad macguffin isn't going to be fixed by a better name.

It's really the opposite side of the coin. Like if they come up with some outlandish name for flatbread. No, it didn't need a proper noun name. Meanwhile "The Thing" type stuff actually does need a name. Going back to the worms, oh those guys have egos. They would have named themselves something.

They would not ALLOW anyone to call them worms. Meanwhile the Ahamkara example, they think being called dragons is cute but they still get a proper fantasy name.

Rynjin

2023-12-15, 05:19 PM

It's really the opposite side of the coin. Like if they come up with some outlandish name for flatbread.

Yeah, could you imagine if they came up with a dumb name like "lembas" for it?

Also dammit Idira stop summoning random stuff. You're getting killed or shipped off to Terra as soon as I can, and until then I'm confining you to the brig!

I feel like I must be getting lucky with Idira? I just did the end of Rykad Minoris and have only had one Peril trigger, which just did 8 damage to her.

tonberrian

2023-12-15, 05:23 PM

Also dammit Idira stop summoning random stuff. You're getting killed or shipped off to Terra as soon as I can, and until then I'm confining you to the brig!

Did you pick the talent that reduces how much veil strength is hit by psionic abilities by 2? I've heard rumors it's bugged and causing an underflow error to make perils frighteningly more common. I've only ever had her summon something once without it, using her even unsanctioned is very easy.

MCerberus

2023-12-15, 05:31 PM

Yeah, could you imagine if they came up with a dumb name like "lembas" for it?

No I'm with the less refined members of the fellowship. It's elf bread. bread made by elfs.

Errorname

2023-12-15, 08:38 PM

I'd actually say the Worm Gods are a good example of how to bulk up a "the Noun" name, just adding a second word helps. If you have a macguffin called "the Cartographer" just adding a modifier like "The Silent Cartographer" helps, at least enough that I can remember it. "The Worm Gods" is already more evocative than "The Worms"

Cygnia

2023-12-15, 08:40 PM

Cleared "Impostor Factory", a follow-up to "To The Moon" & "Finding Paradise" off my Steam queue. More visual novel than actual game, but damn, do they tug at those heartstrings well. Really good music too.

Oh, and apparently Pony Island 2 is in the works.

warty goblin

2023-12-15, 08:49 PM

The Silent Cartographer is a great example, because the extra "silent" doesn't really mean anything and doesn't obligate the writers to do anything, but it makes the name a lot more interesting. Why is it silent? Is that a weird translation, or are there other kinds of Cartographer? It's not that I need answers - I don't even want answers - but that little mystery makes it a lot more engaging than the room with the map.

Mind you don't need the second word all the time. The Library works fine because, well, it's a library.

Of course, it also helps something be memorable if it's a damn near perfect level. Which Silent Cartographer definitely is.

Sapphire Guard

2023-12-15, 09:46 PM

Cuno is one option. If Kim gets shot and you also never made friends with Cuno, you have to go alone.

Of course I talked to it. I did, however, not sleep on the island so I never met Delores.

Honestly, being able to miss things and screw up is one of the biggest draws of this game, Harry has a chance at an emotional recovery, but it isn't guaranteed

On the 'noun v alien name thing, both have their place. In Halo, the names are pretty obviouslywhat the UNSC calls things, impromptu descriptors/ Grunts, Elites, Brutes etc are pretty obviously shorthand descriptions of how they act in battle, not their actual real names they call themselves. That pretty much happens in wars, you get stuff nicknamed things like Hacksaw Ridge and Hellfire Pass.

Used too often, it feels very generic, though. Revashol would not be improved by naming it Shattered Harbour. A lot of places should have both. The Lonely Mountain and Erebor both work.

On the other hand, alien things need to sound alien.

The Deep Roads absolutely should have a better name. The Fade, The Veil, The Anchor. Darktown, Hightown, Lowtown, the Bone Pit, Sundermount. No one living in Kirkwall is very creative.

Grey Wardens I think works. I feel like the Inquisition and the Templars should both be called something else.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-16, 03:20 AM

I feel like I must be getting lucky with Idira? I just did the end of Rykad Minoris and have only had one Peril trigger, which just did 8 damage to her.

My first Perils roll with her was on turn one of a combat where I was not allowed to set up my party. She threw everybody to the ground, set them on fire, and ratcheted up both her and Cassia's Warp meters. I was very lucky I was building Cassia as an Officer first and Navigator second, and even that's only because my RT isn't an officer.

No, I specifically avoided that Talent, she's just wrong when she implies she's as safe as a Sanctioned Psyker. I'd take steps to mitigate it instead of planning to get rid of her if I wasn't playing Dogmatic.

As a side note I do like the slowly gathering hints that Theodore was a heretic, at minimum believing Chaos was something she could exploit.

As to 'nobody living in Kirkwall is very creative', that's people for you. Humans in the real world are fully willing to name the local hill 'the hill', or 'the big hill' if it's bigger than other hills round these parts.

tonberrian

2023-12-16, 03:42 AM

Her unique item (technically, any rogue trader can pick it up if they take the Exemplar talent to be unsanctioned if they didn't start sanctioned) from her act 2 quest made me a big fan of just keeping on rolling the dice on perils of the warp and psychic phenomena. A free psi rating every time she hits one? Very much worth the risks. And there's an item in act 3 that, iirc, gives out extra turns on rolling those too, so she just snowballs in power.

I like to live dangerously, but it'll be much much safer when i can successfully reduce veil degradation with the psyker and navigator talents.

Kareeah_Indaga

2023-12-16, 11:28 AM

Got the itch to fire up Dont Starve last night, so I started up my first ever Hamlet run.

Got to Day 11 before dying hideously of a combination of poison + ladybug monster attack. :smallbiggrin:

Zevox

2023-12-16, 11:21 PM

Completed Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising's story mode just now. Honestly, the new one for Rising was kind of a let-down. They just sort of abandoned the beat-em-stages altogether, and the whole thing was mostly cutscenes with a handful of boss fights here and there. Some of those were still good, but still, why drop what worked in the previous game's story mode like that? And the story itself is nothing to write home about, generic fantasy anime stuff all around, but I pretty much expected that after re-playing the original story mode, which was much the same. Though heck, some of it was wasted time - there was a point in the story where the group split into three to address different issues and recruit some new allies, and only one of those branches ended up mattering basically at all, while the new allies did jack squat after they were recruited.

Still, despite that bit of a let-down, I'm enjoying the game. Did a couple of days playing Belial online, now starting to play some Zooey. Figure I'll rotate characters for the first week or so while I figure out who I want to main.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-17, 08:48 AM

Nearly hit the end of Act 1 of Rogue Trader. Which means I've finally got a psyker who isn't a ticking time bomb, as long as I manage his powers right (and Warrior/Biomancy seems like a good combination). Honestly it wasn't really an issue leaving Idira behind when going on missions, the combat isn't that hard and Pascal does Int skills so much better.

There seems to be a distressing number of heretics in this system, it makes one wish for a few virus bombs or planet crackers...

Cespenar

2023-12-17, 10:35 AM

Yeah, I've seen a lot of Tech use, and at least the offloading is pretty nice.

Sapphire Guard

2023-12-17, 10:49 AM

Yes, but culture and language shift over time, meanings get lost and the descriptive name becomes exotic because people forget what it used to mean. Kirkwall is a very old city that doesn't seem to have much history or culture, beyond the slave statues that are needed for a bossfight.

Time to take the Normandy to speak to Vigil and then take the Conduit to the Citadel to prevent the Reaper Sovereign from eradicating the Council. And all those things actually seem to be their proper names. Huh, never realised that before.

Both of them have their place, depending on what the needs of the story are. Things that can't be pronounced by human throats are fine when they are names of creatures that don't have human throats. I like the K'Chain'Che'Malle from Malazan because thye're not linked to any other culture and so doesn't need to follow their naming conventions. Neither is better or worse.

Anyway, I'm playing Shenmue, which so far mostly consists of talking to random shopkeepers. Surprisingly realistically, this went nowhere, and I am now trying to find 'Warehouse No 8', which I can find in the phonebook. Where this phonebook is I have no idea. It seems to be a remaster of a PS2 game, with surprisingly well animated combat.

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-12-17, 11:17 AM

There seems to be a distressing number of heretics in this system, it makes one wish for a few virus bombs or planet crackers...

Don't know what difficulty you're on, but be careful. The game's combat ramps up hard once you leave the starting system. You start fighting a lot of battles that aren't full of 10-15 HP rebel chumps. Pretty early on I ran into a fight with about a dozen 150-200 HP enemies that could hit for 20-30 damage a pop.

Cygnia

2023-12-17, 12:13 PM

Queued up Legend of Grimrock for my next game. Mysterious old school dungeon crawler.

Eldan

2023-12-17, 12:41 PM

In Mass Effect you can even blame the universal translators for that.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-17, 02:02 PM

Yeah, I've seen a lot of Tech use, and at least the offloading is pretty nice.

Yeah, it really suggests a certain party shape at the beginning (the only real choice being which psyker you want), but Tech-Use and Demolitions do what Trickery did in the Pathfinder games. Thankfully by the time you stop getting a lot of large bonuses to the rolls you'll have companions who you can offload the skills to.

And Cassia if you need to offload social skills.

Probably, I'm currently stacking as many +crit abilities as I can on my main character and pairing it with a longlas (plus las specialist) so I can sharpshoot chaos spawn to death in a few rounds. I am not looking forward to when Chaos Space Marines start showing up, and I know they will, and am desperately hoping it's after I can pick up melts proficiency.

The thing is though that a dozen tough enemies would probably make for better fights than the rooms full of 40+ chaff the first act devolves into. It also sounds like I might want to start investing in Wounds as well as damage output.

Rynjin

2023-12-17, 02:33 PM

If you're enjoying the concept of Shenmue, you should play the Yakuza series. Shenmue faceplanted into an agonizing death so the Yakuza franchise could run.

As a bonus, the Yakuza series have plots that actually conclude, and in a satisfying way. As of the relatively recent Shenmue 3 there's been essentially zero plot progress in that game. Intensely frustrating.

tonberrian

2023-12-17, 04:22 PM

Not all traps are Demolition. There gets to be a bunch that are Lore (Xeno), too, when you're fighting xenos, and even at least one that's Lore (Warp).

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-17, 04:51 PM

Well maybe I'd get to that point, if the NPC allies hadn't insisted on using their actions to heal the enemy EVERY SINGLE ROUND in the last fight I had. Ended up having to reload after a twenty minute fight because after disposing of them the enemy managed to survive an attack with like 2hp remaining. To say I'm annoyed I have to sit through that ****ing conversation again is an understatement.

Did it again. And thankfully got good enough rolls that the NPCs didn't cluster around a single enemy.

ETA: thinking of restarting as a more heretical Crime Lord/Officer. I'll sleep on it.

warty goblin

2023-12-17, 07:05 PM

Got through a good chunk of Miasma Chronicles this afternoon. This is definitely sneaking up in my estimation. Sneaking around before a fight and trying to off dudes without being seen is fun and requires a bit of thinking and observation. It's sorta like the stealth bits of XCOM 2 except real time and vastly less clunky. Also you get a magic power early on that lets you pick up dudes and throw them into explosive barrels, which is hilarious.

The story isn't necessarily anything special, but it's well told, and makes good use of having fixed characters. Everybody seems to actually have desires and motivations and things to conflict and cooperate over. You know, basic writing stuff.

Cespenar

2023-12-18, 10:40 AM

Hmm, Rogue Trader started to get a little bit on my nerves with both multiple kinds of almost-game-breaking kinda bugs, and a lot of half-hour battles of nameless mooks one after the other. Which is a deadly combination when those two points decide to coincide.

Queued up Legend of Grimrock for my next game. Mysterious old school dungeon crawler.

That's a pretty sweet and underrated title. Moreso, the sequel.

Cygnia

2023-12-18, 11:20 AM

That's a pretty sweet and underrated title. Moreso, the sequel.

I'm enjoying it so far, but MAN, juggling the timing issues when trying to get to certain bits.

I'm on Level 4, where I'm trying to fall into a specific pit (the one that has a Gear Key) after pressing 2 buttons. Haven't been able to do it yet...

ArmyOfOptimists

2023-12-18, 11:45 AM

Curious what you've seen. I haven't found anything game-breaking, though I've hit a few disappointing ones. A weapon that's completely unusable because it's tagged with conflicting requirements (it essentially requires you to both have and not have the same trait, so no matter what you can't equip it) and a few talents that don't seem to work (Operative's Tide of Excellence doesn't do anything, for instance). I haven't hit anything I'd consider game breaking, though. The quests all seem to trigger fine, combat can spike in difficulty but I've been able to get through it. It's nowhere near as crazy as Pathfinder could get.

I even figured out that Idira isn't bugged. She just has a very unapparent Unsanctioned Psyker background trait that causes her to always have a 5% chance to cause Perils whenever she uses a warp power. That's why she's such a time bomb. The other psykers don't have that drawback. On the other hand, Idira has a built-in +1 Psy Power and a bunch of special talents she can take that make her much more powerful. You just have to treat her like the Wild Mage of the group. And, like every other Wild Mage, that means I bench her because I hate random negative effects far more than some benefits.

Corlindale

2023-12-19, 01:25 AM

I've mostly been playing Dicey Dungeons on the Switch lately. It's a fun little game, and tremendeous value for the ~1.5 $ I bought it for on sale.

There are six different characters with very different playstyles, and there are six different challenges for each. And those challenges often involve interesting twists on the rules, it's not just incrementally harder levels. And then I also discovered there are further DLC challenges with even more wacky rule changes.

I love how irreverent and playful the design is. An example: There's an Alchemist enemy whose equipment includes a potion that transforms her into a bear. The Thief character can copy enemy equipment during battle. But if you copy a Bear Potion and use it, it doesn't just last for the battle. Instead, you become a bear for the rest of that run, changing all your equipment and abilities, and suddenly finding bear-themed items as loot as well. That's a crazy level of effort put into an interaction that many might not even see.

Sermil

2023-12-19, 02:54 AM

Of course I talked to it. I did, however, not sleep on the island so I never met Delores.

Honestly, being able to miss things and screw up is one of the biggest draws of this game, Harry has a chance at an emotional recovery, but it isn't guaranteed

I mean, I'm not sure I'd say that Harry ever reaches emotional recovery, he just ends the games with different flavors of messed up. The fact that the game gives you a huge number of choices and they're all the wrong answer is like its calling card.

One of the greatest games I've ever played. I love it.

Wookieetank

2023-12-19, 11:16 AM

One of the greatest games I've ever played. I love it.

Befriending Kim and getting him to come work with you seems to be at least a good choice, if not the right choice. Granted I'm a huge Kim fan, and felt rather aimless when he had to head offscreen.

warty goblin

2023-12-19, 02:03 PM

I'm definitely digging Miasma Chronicles at this point. Except for the real time sneaking and stealth killing before a lot of fights, the combat is very orthodox XCOM two action stuff but single attack stuff, but it works well. The only major twist is that if you kill a unit with a critical hit, you get an action back, which can be used for a second attack. So crit chance buffs are really good. Overwatch is also a special ability not every unit has, and is directional, which keeps combat a lot more active than XCOM, because, well, you don't use Overwatch all that much.

The thing I really like is the real time sneaking combined with hand designed encounters. It does a good job of not turning into an outright puzzle so much as a way to pick up meaningful advantage. I only have one silenced weapon so far, and there's lots of enemies it can't one shot, so it's a matter of picking around the edges sniping weaker dudes before going loud from a good position. Enemies don't get the XCOM pod free move, so if you set it up right, you can do a ton of damage.

Plus exploring the world is a surprising amount of fun. The titular Miasma looks like some sort of nano machine swarm that's just doing its own thing. It's got a real proto-molecule from the Expanse vibe, so things are being sort of altered or regrown everywhere. Weird and cool.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-19, 03:36 PM

Closed Act 1 on Rogue Trader, and while the conclusion is really good it does begin to drag on, first with a long scene about whether or not to perform Exterminatus, then a second based around the warp drive not working, and finally a third setting up the initial plotlines for Act 2. It's a shame because the preceding fight with a Chaos Space Marine is incredibly good, with them nearly downing half my team before they acted and generally actually being as scary as a Space Marine is meant to be. It still wasn't a hard fight, especially when they stopped using their heavy bolter and went melee, but it hit right.

While each scene is good it feels like at least one could have been delayed to reduce text density somewhat.

Cespenar

2023-12-19, 04:11 PM

Curious what you've seen. I haven't found anything game-breaking, though I've hit a few disappointing ones.

Various animation bugs in combat for me. One that got me in perma-slow-motion, one that didn't crash but lock the game up, another that doesn't let the turn pass from a dying enemy to me, etc.

Thankfully they all let go after 1-10 minutes, which is why I said almost game-breaking. :P

I'm definitely digging Miasma Chronicles at this point.

Tried it but felt that it didn't deviate enough from XCOM for my tastes. The production budget seemed vast, though.

Sapphire Guard

2023-12-19, 06:19 PM

It's a good decision for Harry, but is it a good decision for Kim? Jamrock is a tough district, and Revachol looks like it's about to go sour.

I'm having fun, because this game is so unapologetic about having you spend time doing things most games would skip, like having to book a ticket at a travel agent. We can't afford the good travel agent, so we have to go to the shady one, which promptly swindle us, which means we have to track down the swindler and get our ticket, at which point it is swiped by the local gang boss, so now we have to get a job at the harbour and ask people on our lunch break about the gang. In game I'm spending a full day in game driving a forklift, it should be frustrating but it cycled back all the around to being hilarious. Good job, game.

warty goblin

2023-12-19, 07:23 PM

Tried it but felt that it didn't deviate enough from XCOM for my tastes. The production budget seemed vast, though.

It is rather XCOM yes, at least at the tactical level. Everything that fits around that is pretty much completely different beyond I guess dudes leveling up and getting better guns. If I didn't find the universe reasonably interesting and the writing pretty solid, I wouldn't probably find it all that engaging. But those elements do work for me, and in practice the stealth emphasis shifts the balance away from the weird techno-superhero fantasy that XCOM + expansions inevitably degenerates into. Also it's 100% Bradford free, I swear if I here "Commander, the aliens continue to make progress on the Avatar project" one more time I will start bleeding from the ears.

Zevox

2023-12-20, 12:50 AM

Deciding on a main in Granblue is not going well. I started with three strong candidates and two "eh, maybe" candidates. I now have four strong candidates. I've dropped Yuel from the list, I'll dabble with her at most, but Grimnir turned out to be a lot of fun. So I thought, okay, I'll play Belial again for a little bit, he's the most standard of the bunch, I can probably eliminate him in favor of the trickier characters now that I've given them a spin, he won't feel as fun as they did. But after playing him, no, he's too much fun too. He may be straightforward overall, but he's also basically Mr. Good Frame Data, which lets him be pretty aggressive, and he does have some tricks of his own, such as learning when to use his counter and his awkward command grab. Plus he has some of the best alternate colors of the bunch, and I will never get tired of his goofy innuendo-laden lines.

I don't know, it just feels like my favorite character is whichever one of the four I'm looking at that I've played most recently, which is not helping me make a decision. I guess it's a good problem to have that I'm enjoying all of these characters and the game in general so much, but it's still annoying in its own way.

Saambell

2023-12-20, 02:15 AM

Otherwise been playing a bunch of Pokemon Scarlet since the DLC came out. Have maybe less than 10 mons left for the new pokedex, but a few are going to be locked behind some side quests which will be bothersome to finish.

Also trying to get more into Deep Rock Galactic, but finding a dedicated dig group together with my friends who also have the game has been rough.

Eldan

2023-12-20, 07:30 AM

It's a good decision for Harry, but is it a good decision for Kim? Jamrock is a tough district, and Revachol looks like it's about to go sour.

Incredibly sour, if things end up like in the novel. Even worse if La Revacholière is right.

Cespenar

2023-12-20, 11:18 AM

Yeah, the setting was interesting enough, I'll give you that. You might want to give Lamplighter's League a look as well in that case, since it also aligns with your points (non-techno superhero, has stealth, Bradford-free, etc. :P).

Erloas

2023-12-20, 12:52 PM

Got back into Battletech, and am trying the Career mode. Playing with a bunch of the settings turned to easy, I don't really care about the scoring system. Got lucky with the random starting mechs giving me an Urbie, so I have been taking advantage of early game being friendly to light mechs to have fun with it while I can. Had a bad run of injuries and had to hire on a bunch of new pilots to have a full lance while the sickbay was crowded. So now that they have all recovered, I am now paying a ton of salaries. As things can go wrong very quickly, I'm keeping them around, but I should start considering who to fire.
I would recommend the BTA 3062 mod (Battletech advanced), it adds so much more to the game, in both gear and tactical options. Light mechs can stay viable throughout the entire game instead of the game being a race to assaults. Vehicles and Battle Armor are fun to play with.
The Lite version is almost entirely canon gear (for the era, so a lot more than the base game set in 3025), the base version of the mod can add some weird gear but would only really matter if you know and want to stick to table top gear.
As long as you have the flashpoints DLC you can do the entire campaign too, if you want to.

Cygnia

2023-12-20, 05:46 PM

I'm enjoying it so far, but MAN, juggling the timing issues when trying to get to certain bits.

I'm on Level 4, where I'm trying to fall into a specific pit (the one that has a Gear Key) after pressing 2 buttons. Haven't been able to do it yet...

Also, my cat is hell bent and determined to ONLY demand attention when when I'm trying to do those timed sprints/button pushings...*sighs*

MCerberus

2023-12-22, 06:51 PM

Alright so I was poking around the new destiny story and I did not expect a sad love story about space cats

Errorname

2023-12-22, 07:13 PM

Alright so I was poking around the new destiny story and I did not expect a sad love story about space cats

Oh right the new exotic quest dropped.

Sapphire Guard

2023-12-22, 07:41 PM

Pretty unique. The storytelling is very patient, I had a lot of fun just driving a forklift for a week.

Few surprising twists, but they do a lot with them. It was fairly clear the gang would go after Nozomi, but they waited so long to do it that it became tense. I legitimately wasn't sure if we would be able to rescue her or not.And borrowing your friend's bike was so heartwarming. Ryo shows up at 1am and urgently asks to borrow a bike his friend obviously cherishes. No questions, here are the keys. Good storytelling. Attention to detail is crazy for the era, specific characters spend their day in specific places and actually walk home when their workday is done.

Annoying glitch that cut out the music during the dramatic bike ride and on the way home. There were lots of dramatic sweeping angles that I knew had big dramatic music that I couldn't hear. There are a lot of hilariously realistic things like the extended cutscene of Ryo walking to the bus stop, or how difficult it was to get to Hong Kong.

.I was kept guessing to the end as to whether there would be an act 2 in Hong Kong or whether the credits would roll.

Rynjin

2023-12-22, 09:45 PM

Yeah, if you liked it that much I definitely recommend the Yakuza series, starting with Yakuza 0 (the prequel; the impact of the 1st game's plot is actually enhanced greatly by playing the prequel first). It has a lot of similar stuff where you can just take your time doing whatever random chores or errands you need to do, though Kiryu and Majima's day jobs in 0 (real estate agent and cabaret owner respectively) are a little flashier than "forklift operator" for sure. The Yakuza franchise is the much, much more successful spiritual successor to Shenmue (Shenmue's failure is specifically cited as a big reason why it was so hard to get the original game greenlit).

If the "menial chores offsetting the excitement" part in particular appealed, No More Heroes provides a similar experience too, though it's a lot...grindier. Each assassination target/duel requires a buy-in so you end up doing odd jobs like mowing lawns in between missions to earn cash.

And of course you'll also probably like Shenmue II as well, but I do genuinely urge you to just...ignore that Shenmue III exists. Most of the people that waited nearly 20 years between II and III wish they could as well.

Zevox

2023-12-24, 02:23 AM

Playing more Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising the past few evenings, and actually making progress on deciding on a main. Decided against Zeta and Zooey, which leaves only Belial versus Grimnir, and I'm leaning Grimnir since he's trickier and would benefit more from me focusing on him, while Belial is more standard and will likely be easier to pick up as a secondary.

And then the developers dropped this news (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrnZARbFSfo). Because apparently they want to make this harder on me by throwing in a Platinum Games character. It's especially surprising since that's the first guest character ever in Arc System Works game. (Well, besides BBTag kind of, but that was a game whose whole point was doing a bunch of crossovers.) Which also makes me wonder if there will be more guests in Granblue at some point, which could be rather exciting depending on who they choose.

But I've got a couple of months until then at least. For now, I'm at least close to picking someone to focus on at last. If only Belial would stop tempting me... I just noticed earlier today that one of his color schemes is clearly based on Yuuki Terumi from BlazBlue, which is perfect and makes me want to play him even more.

Saph

2023-12-25, 01:36 PM

Been playing Against the Storm, which has just left Early Access! With its 1.0 release they've also added a new "Queen's Hand" mode, which is basically a permadeath roguelike mode for those who didn't find the game hard enough already.

If you like roguelikes and citybuilders, I'd highly recommend it. Probably the best new game of the year, IMO.

Cygnia

2023-12-25, 02:52 PM

Still on Legend of Grimrock, now on lvl 10 -- where I need to fight the Goromorgs. And they show up in packs.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-25, 05:14 PM

My girlfriend got me P5R on Switch for Christmas, do now I can metaverse on the move!

...as Yusuke isn't an option do I hug Ann or Haru on this run...

Zevox

2023-12-29, 12:31 AM

Still playing Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising, and I finally, two weeks after launch, made my decision on my main: it's Belial. As much as I was also enjoying Grimnir, there were a couple of things about him that I don't like, and when it gets right down to it, my main should be the character I'm having the most fun playing in a given fighting game. And after a fair amount of playing, it's Belial who's on top there. Basic he may be in some ways, but there's a lot to learn with him too, and a lot of satsfying moments when I find uses for some of his more unusual tools. Like crushing Beelzebub's full-screen guard breaking black hole move with Belial's unique counter attack that has him jump to where the enemy is and stomp their head into the ground when it triggers. Thought the worst that could happen when you throw that crazy move out was that I'd dodge it and you'd waste the meter, eh Bubs? Think again, sucker. :smallbiggrin:

Also, got a few different games for Christmas, and I've gotten into the first of them: Armored Core 6. Honestly, I wasn't entirely feeling it at first, but now that I'm a little ways into the game (just finished chapter 2... which was shockingly shorter than chapter 1), I'm enjoying it more. There is a pretty crazy amount of customization options for your mech here, for sure, and finding the right combination for the play style you want seems important. I'm angling for a light-weight one myself, as I like being able to zip around and be very mobile, and going with reverse-jointed legs for extra jumping power. Currently favoring the laser pistol as my main weapon, laser blade as my second, and I've got basic horizontal and vertical missile launchers on the shoulder slots. Seems to be working out, although I'm often running out of missiles around the time I finish off boss fights. I am considering just using the more traditional pistol instead of the laser one to reduce energy load, but I really like how the beam pistol doesn't need to reload, and rarely overheats on me.

The story... eh, they're being vague about it, as is Fromsoft's style I suppose. Blessedly less vague than Dark Souls tends to though, at least. I don't get the impression that the story's high on the list of reasons to be playing this regardless though, blasting through enemy mechs and fighting giant boss machines are definitely the big highlights.

Errorname

2023-12-29, 04:37 AM

Picked up Rogue Trader. First impressions are positive, even as someone who doesn't like 40k very much. I like the XCOM style combat, even if I know I haven't really figured it out yet. Like the companions so far. Appreciate that unlike some CRPG developers I could mention Owlcat clearly co-ordinated between the artists making the character models and artists drawing the character portraits. Not perfect, but I managed to make a pretty good recreation of my favourite portrait.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-29, 08:37 AM

A nice feature is that, unlike Kingmaker or WotR, the game actually ships with portraits they intend for the player to use instead of just the NPC portraits. This means that if you use the defaults you'll look pretty close to the portrait automatically, including augmentics.

Sadly it is about one portrait per gender per background, but some work for a couple (my Guard Commander is using a Commissar portrait).

warty goblin

2023-12-29, 09:37 AM

I figure within a year or two any game that doesn't let you use some stable diffusion type algorithm to generate a custom portrait that is consistent with your model (or if they're ambitious vice versa) is going to be seriously lagging.

Batcathat

2023-12-29, 09:49 AM

It's certainly been a while since the original Baldur's Gate didn't include a way for character models to be bald, despite having at least one prominent bald NPC. :smalltongue:

LibraryOgre

2023-12-29, 10:48 AM

Played a little again last night, and damn but if Rebel Galaxy: Outlaw isn't a fun game, even for a few pick-up missions.

Cygnia

2023-12-29, 12:22 PM

Finished up Legend of Grimrock and have started Legend of Grimrock 2. Per the hubby's advice, I have an Alchemist in the party.

Errorname

2023-12-29, 03:01 PM

Ugh. Would much rather they take the Baldur's Gate approach and just use the model as the portrait.

warty goblin

2023-12-29, 08:30 PM

Ugh. Would much rather they take the Baldur's Gate approach and just use the model as the portrait.

I'm not in general wild about AI for any number of reasons, but the application to stuff like character customization/generation is just blindingly obvious to me. My dream version of this basically auto-populates the prompt as you go through character creation, then lets you tweak stuff before generating a couple options to choose from. My much more ambitious dream version generates both the portrait and the skin for your avatar in one go, so you get a huge wealth of options. Would be handy for NPCs as well in terms of rapidly creating lots of unique looking characters with an appearance tied to, but not overly determined by, their stats.

Like, a big problem I had in WoTR is that the default portraits were really limited. But whenever I chose a cool custom portrait, I probably couldn't find a race or class that really did it justice, and/or couldn't get the in game model to look remotely right. Petty, but annoying.

Rynjin

2023-12-29, 08:35 PM

It's honestly the route they may as well go. If you look on Nexus Mods you'll notice nobody is really making their own portraits for these games anymore, they just AI generate them and upload their favorites anyway.

Anonymouswizard

2023-12-29, 09:06 PM

Most of the people still making custom portraits by hand are those making the one portrait they plan to use. I suspect more non-AI custom portraits will crop up in time as artists are actually able to make them and there will always be those just nabbing official or fan art and cropping it to the right sizes, but sadly even for the games which have been out for a while it's being buried under endless AI and partially naked woman portraits.

It could be worse, it's nearly impossible to find custom Orlan portraits for PoE, they just never took off enough for the fandom to make more and look fairly distinctive.

Zevox

2024-01-01, 02:05 AM

I'm now into chapter 4 of Armored Core 6, feels like I'm getting into the latter portions of the game. I've actually built up a stockpile of credits recently due to not really having a lot of reason to buy new parts - I'm pretty with my build as it stands. I'll pick a new weapon occasionally to mess around with it in the training room, but it's been a while since I actually wanted to replace something in my loadout. I've got a lightweight mech with reverse-jointed legs, a generator that favors quicker recover time and booster that favors quick boosts so I can dodge as effectively as possible, a laser pistol in my right hand, the plasma blade you start with in my left, a set of horizontal plasma missile launchers on the right shoulder, and basic vertical missile launchers on my left. I had to briefly swap the laser pistol for a more basic pistol in order to free up energy for that blasted stinger weapon you had to use against the worm-mech boss, but other than that, this has been my loadout for a while, and feels like it may be for the rest of the game at this point, it seems capable of taking on anything.

I kind of feel like they're setting you up to eventually choose between following Walter's orders or helping what's-her-name, the woman whose voice you start hearing after chapter 1. Which, considering it's a choice between your boss/possible slave owner who seems to have his own unclear agenda he keeps to himself and to view you as a tool first and a person second on the one hand, and a voice in your head that you started hearing after exposure to magical space-radiation but who at least seems like a nice enough lady on the other hand, is somehow at once easy and yet deeply unsatisfying. Meh, oh well, like I said, doesn't seem like the story is the reason to be playing this game anyway I guess.
Also continuing to play Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising, still loving it. I've added a few characters to my played list lately, trying out Yuel, Vira, and Seox. Of them, I'd say I like Yuel the best, she's got some cool pressure stuff, but Vira and Seox are kind of fun too. And as an added bonus playing them helps me learn their weaknesses for when I fight against them - I've already given one Seox player a nasty surprise that way by knowing where I can mash against some of his rekka tricks if he's too flowcharty about it, and I just started playing him yesterday. Also working on ranking up Belial since I decided on him as my main. Getting him into S rank proved easy; progressing through S rank is proving hard. Seems that's where the real competition starts, at least for someone of my skill level.

Also, I find it appropriate that tonight my play time in Granblue surpassed my total play time in Street Fighter 6. So despite SF6 coming out in June and Granblue in December, and the fact that I played SF6 for about three weeks while Granblue has only been out for two, I nonetheless played more Granblue in 2023 than Street Fighter. Feels right, given how much more I'm enjoying it than Street Fighter.

Form

2024-01-01, 08:01 AM

I've been playing I was a teenage exocolonist for a bit now and the game doesn't pull any punches. I thought those content warnings were a little ominous, but damn, the first emotional gut punch comes pretty quick. I figured I'd have a little bit more time to grow attached to the colony and its people before the game would start burning everything down. So much for growing up as a carefree young child on a new world. I'm having a good time with it, though, and it's because of those gut punches it is able to provide a compelling narrative. Feeling some of their pain when things go wrong means I've grown attached to the characters, so that's a good sign. The colorful artwork is nice too.

Sidenote: You get 2 separate sliders for pronouns (she-they/them-he) and gender. It's not something I'll play around with much myself, but it's a nice touch. Makes the game feel more wholesome and inclusive.

Another ship, the Heliopause, has just crash landed bringing with it a bunch of soldiers and guns. On the hand the colony clearly needs them as it's on the brink of starvation and has been unable to handle the vicious wildlife attacks, but on the other hand these new people really don't feel like friends. Them referring to us as fugitives is not a good sign. Welp, their passage through the wormhole didn't go smoothly either and I'm guessing they're stuck here too, so we're in the thick of it now. Actually, we were in the thick of it before, but now we're in a different thick of it. This should be interesting.

... Someone's going to get shot, aren't they?

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-02, 02:33 AM

I can't wait to hear your thoughts on AC6's ending, though I'd caution that you need to play the game three times through to see all of it. The first playthrough is only about 50% of the game; repeats add significant content in both mission variety and parts. It also takes less time as, unlike most NG+ modes these days, it doesn't scale the game up. You smash through a lot of the game, especially as you don't need to tweak your mech to the same degree.

Mobius Twist

2024-01-02, 03:21 AM

A series of game impression to share:

We Who Are About To Die: Gladiator Management sim + Exanima-like physics-based combat. 5 different backgrounds that pretty heavily influence how runs go. Speaking of runs, as the game says "it's not called We Who Are About To Live." Characters die regularly and with minimal progression unless you successfully finish a gladiator career. I found that I had to turn the combat difficulty to easy to successfully see the various bonuses that successfully finishing a run gives you. Other than that, it's a very polished game for what is currently labeled as a "version 0.25". The ongoing early access promises more of everything (more weapons/items, more backgrounds, more different types of gladiator challenges, etc.). The core loop is fun enough on its own and can be tackled in small sessions if you're a busy adult.

The Bloodline: Sold as an actual open-world Skyrim-like. You play an inheritor of a castle and a historically-relevant bloodline (hence the title) that's meant to connect with the divine and act as harbingers of an invasion of deicidal elves from another dimension. Except, the last invasion was so long ago that both your purpose and the people's memory of it have descended into myth. Your father, who's supposed to tutor you on everything bloodline-related dies suddenly without passing on much of anything, so you have to go out and grind skills, discover the world, and build up your reputation (as well as your castle and surrounding village) in preparation. It's... incomplete and not getting better. As an Early Access title, this one is a cautionary tale. There are a variety of weapons and skill trees, but half the skills are weak and the others break. You can perform awesome special moves, but half of them lock you in a broken perspective halfway in your own skull. You get a constant bullet time you can activate at will, but it doesn't help if your attacks bug out randomly and stop working until you reload the game. You can run on walls, free-climb, and get a grappling hook, with all of them tied to different skills you have to grind to get better at. There are many points of friction in this one. Wait for a significant update, if this sounds even remotely interesting.

Hades: It's THE action-rogue-lite of the last few years. If you haven't heard of it: Diablo-like isometric perspective, fast combat with a variety of weapons, a deep upgrade path, and a well-connected story that you can guess if you have a grounding in basic Greek mythology. Haven't finished it, but it's got an impressive amount of content for something that expects you to die repeatedly and rub your head against a very soft wall. I have to get 5 more escapes from Vegeta (the chthonic plane, my father, and me?) before the story is revealed and I can start seriously grinding the achievements. The unfortunate part is only some weapons fit my playstyle and I kinda want to use them all instead, so I end up failing more runs than I should due to self-imposed limitations.

Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord. I held off on buying this one because the original (and its offshoots) were plenty for me, both vanilla and with mods for YEARS. Between that an a luke-warm reception in Early Access kinda soured me on a full-priced game. At this point it's fine. My overall impresson is this metaphor: I had a very useful cow for many years. It gave me milk, it ate the grass, it cuddled me. Now it's old and worn out. But! It had a lovely calf that's actually show-pretty and more or less useful in the same ways as the other cow was. What else it might be remains to be seen.

Corlindale

2024-01-02, 03:28 AM

Picked up a few games on Steam over Christmas that I'd had my eye on for a while.

First up was Last Epoch. I've been looking for something to scratch that Diablo itch after being severely disappointed with Diablo 4, and so far Last Epoch has me intrigued. I really enjoy the Specialization system, where each skill has its own skill tree that you can unlock by putting it in a specialized slot. And then the skill will level up as you play, giving you more points to put into it. So far seems to hit a sweet spot where character building is deep and interesting, but without requiring a ph.d (much as I like Path of Exile, I do tend to get a bit overwhelmed by it). Skills are also pleasantly flashy to use.

The time travel plotline also seems serviceable enough, although I don't particularly care about the plot in Diablo-style games. I'm not that far in, hit a point with my mage where he feels a bit too squishy, so I should probably tinker a bit more with the passive tree. But instead I'm taking the other classes for a spin through the early levels.

Second was Against the Storm. It first came to my attention through Saph's glowing recommendation in this very thread, and then only rose further after the full release in December generated some really good reviews as well. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect as I'm not usually a huge fan of city builders, but I tend to love roguelikes. But so far I'm finding it very addictive, it's really good design that each level ends as soon as it outstays its welcome, so the gameplay doesn't grow stale. It's also very approachable, as the UI is super informative and clear, and it is cleverly designed to drip-feed new features at a manageable pace. So far I've only played the lowest difficulty but I feel I'm ready to crank it up, as I haven't been remotely close to losing in any of my runs yet. But I hear there are a ton of difficulty levels, so I should be able to find my comfort zone.

It's also very atmospheric, really hitting that elusive balance between feeling both cozy and ominous. My first play session was on the top floor of our house during a rainstorm outside, which turned out to the perfect ambiance for an introduction to this game. So comfy to snuggle up with a cup of coffee while listening to the rain and wind both from the PC speakers and the world outside.

zlefin

2024-01-02, 11:28 AM

Ah Grimrock, it looked like such a fun game. I wish they'd put out some sort of patch to fix the light flicker headache; it made it unplayable for me, when it otherwise might've been a great game.
Sadly the time has long past and it'll never get fixed, so the game will remain forever unusable for a few of us :(

Wookieetank

2024-01-02, 04:47 PM

Finished out Tides of Numenera over the holidays. Overall enjoyed it, even if it was Planescape: Torment with the serial numbers filed off in a lot of places. Do wish it leaned more into the weirdness of its setting, you hear about all these cool interesting places, but never get to see them. Give me a time bubble or two of the Endless battle instead of the infinitely large (and boring) tombs. Really should've told less and shown more overall. Quite enjoyed everything from the Bloom on through the end though.

Before jumping into Pillars of Eternity, been poking around at a number of things I got as gifts. In no particular order:
Wargroove - medieval advance wars, dragons instead of planes, what's not to like
We <3 Katamari : Reroll
Morbid: The 7 Acolytes - soulslike with delightfully crunchy (and lovecraftian) pixels
Dwarf Fortress - been playing for years, but finally bought the steam version and the mouse support is the single best thing since sliced cheese.

Also picked up a number of vampire survivor likes in recent sales, of note:
Halls of Torment: Diablo 1 feel and visuals
Boneraiser Minions: 8 bit style, raise an army of minions to fight for you
Death Must Die: Strong hades influence in both appearance and lore

IthilanorStPete

2024-01-02, 04:58 PM

Wargroove - medieval advance wars, dragons instead of planes, what's not to like

I wish I'd heard of this before - I loved Advance Wars as a kid, I've always been disappointed that the series died out. Did you get Wargroove 1, 2, or both?

Batcathat

2024-01-02, 05:07 PM

The other day I was trying to think of what to play next and stumbled across a game called Tell me why already in my Steam library. I can't even remember hearing about it, much less buying it so presumably I got it from some bundle or give-away or something (though as I wrote this I had an idea and checked the Free Stuff thread and it's there, so maybe that's the source?). Anyhow, the basic description sounded pretty good (basically a classic mystery solving adventure game with some supernatural aspects) and a couple of hours in it's living up to it so far. The mystery's intriguing, the writing's pretty good and the graphics (especially the outdoor environments) look good.

Wookieetank

2024-01-02, 05:08 PM

I wish I'd heard of this before - I loved Advance Wars as a kid, I've always been disappointed that the series died out. Did you get Wargroove 1, 2, or both?

Just 1 so far, but it has been a delight and I'm rather likely to pick up 2 somewhere down the line.

Zevox

2024-01-02, 06:46 PM

Without spoiling anything, I'd say that the ending is one of the more poignant and understandable that FromSoftware have written. It's quite a marvel that they manage to make the characters relatable even without showing their faces.
Well, having seen one of those endings now... eh.
I'll admit I was surprised by Walter's apparent demise (and again by the subsequent revelation that he wasn't dead in the final mission) and the true nature of his mission, and even more so by him showing actual sympathy for you in his "final" message (and his boss fight). It certainly gave me more sympathy for him than I expected. Not enough to choose his ending, but still.

And as far as it goes, it's fine I guess, but I was kind of expecting more? Feels like just beating Snail shouldn't be enough to kick Arquebus off the planet, unless his "I am Arquebus!" lines were more than just his ego talking. And in general it didn't feel like there was much to it, very little sense of resolution. I guess I did like having Rusty and others come to my aid for choosing to oppose Carla and Arquebus both in the penultimate stage, that was nice.

I don't know, I can't exactly disagree with you that it's one of the more understandable FromSoft has ever written, but that's because it's fairly straightforward, and the other FromSoft games I've played are Dark Souls 1 and 2 and Sekiro. So only Sekiro is any real competition for it there - and I'd say I prefer Sekiro in this regard, even if I don't think that's a masterpiece of writing either. But poignant? Eh, not seeing it myself. I don't know, maybe I need to see the other endings to get that part.
Given how short the game is and how many other build options there are to play around with, I guess I may as well run through it to see the other endings. Started my next run switching over to a more medium-heavy weight tetrapod build, playing around with some of the bigger guns, and dropping my insistence on always having a melee weapon. Currently swapping weapons around a fair bit, but my most recent setup was plasma rifle, bazooka, vertical plasma missiles, and pulse barrier gun. So I'm a floating platform of plasma and explosions, basically; certainly cutting through the early game levels like a hot knife through butter, though to be fair those mostly exist to ease you into the game anyway (aside from that first boss, which they skip in New Game+ anyway), so I bet they'd be a pushover even with just the starting stuff again.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-02, 08:26 PM

For what it's worth, I think the Liberator ending is the worst one. It does become slightly more interesting when you've seen the bonus ending, but it's very open ended by itself and doesn't resolve much. I love Walter as a character, though. You're so prepared for him to be the magnificent bastard of the plot, but he turns out to be extremely honorable and genuinely wants 621 to be happy after the mission is over. I tend to think of Liberator as the "Bad" ending simply because it involves betraying Walter and Carla after they dragged you out of the sewers (and partially because I don't trust Ayre.)

If it didn't hit, it didn't hit, but for Armored Core - a series that famously tells its plot so poorly you tune it out - I was pleasantly surprised by how much I thought of it.

Zevox

2024-01-02, 10:49 PM

If it didn't hit, it didn't hit, but for Armored Core - a series that famously tells its plot so poorly you tune it out - I was pleasantly surprised by how much I thought of it.
I've never played another Armored Core, so I can't compare there. But as for this one, it'll take a lot of surprises for me to consider Walter's ending the better one.

I mean, I get his motivation on a base level. Destroy the dangerous stuff everyone's fighting over to make bigger and scarier weapons out of; makes sense, I can sympathize with that. But the problem that comes in after is twofold: one, that same stuff turns out to basically be the Lifestream from FF7, with peoples' consciousnesses/souls/whatever in it; two, destroying it involves reigniting a catastrophe that we're told scorched multiple planets the first time, causing untold destruction... which also still somehow failed to destroy the thing they were targeting. So the thinking here is basically "damn, we caused a multi-planet apocalypse to destroy this stuff, but it didn't take; better try the same thing again." Both on a moral and rational level, that doesn't seem like the best call, to say the least. Definitely an "the ends don't justify the means" situation from where I'm sitting, plus seems dubious how effective it would even be long-term, given it somehow failed once already.

Jophiel

2024-01-02, 11:55 PM

Finally put BG3 on the shelf for now and have some new acquisitions:

Wildermyth: A lot of my friends have this on their wishlist but few own it; I assume because it hasn't really had a sale past 30% off. CRPG game combining strategic (expanding overland map, resources, travel time), tactical (turn-based character combat on a grid map) and RPG (character bonds, events, personality traits) elements over several generations of heroes in a choice-driven game with a charming storybook aesthetic down to the papercraft looking characters and battle maps. Only about four hours in, with my first generation of now-graying heroes starting to turn over control to the kids and enjoying the experience.

Minecraft Dungeons: ARPG in the Diablo/Torchlight/Titan Quest vein. I got this for my younger kid on his Switch, saw it had multi-platform co-op and bought to play on my Steam Deck and my older son is joining in via his desktop PC (so we sit in his room). I don't know if I'd recommend over the big hitter Diablo/clones but for a family friendly experience it's been a good time.

En Garde!: Action pulp swashbuckling game with Souls-Lite combat and cartoon/comedic vibe that has you employing the environment to defeat the bad guys using shoved chairs, kicked buckets (onto heads), boiling pots and other stuff in addition to your rapier.

Divinity: Original Sin 2: Not remotely ready for another full-on CRPG experience but been meaning to get this for a long while and finally put it in the game catalog.

Solasta DLC: I played Solasta a decent while ago and will either one day run it again and/or talk some friends into it so loaded up on cheap new class/campaign DLC

Street Fighter 6: I haven't played a Street Fighter game since SF2: Turbo in my dorm lobby but SF6's been getting some good buzz for its fun and its good single player experience so decided to take a chance on it.

Rodin

2024-01-03, 06:13 AM

Finally put BG3 on the shelf for now and have some new acquisitions:

Wildermyth is an amazing game that I recommend to everybody. It's such a lovely series of vignettes that really makes you care about your characters despite the random elements. I absolutely love the multi-generational aspect which rotates out your characters and lets them have a completed story while organically adding new characters through their children.

Batcathat

2024-01-03, 06:35 AM

Wildermyth is another one of those random unplayed games I have in my Steam library, maybe I should try that next.

Cygnia

2024-01-03, 09:22 AM

It's on my wishlist, but I still have so many games to get through on my Steam queue first.

Though, En Garde! is also now on said wishlist too.:smallredface:

Errorname

2024-01-03, 01:05 PM

Got reminded of Midnight Suns's existence and decided to finally give it a shot.

On the one hand, any given line of dialogue has like a 10% chance of inflicting minor psychic damage on me. But on the other, Solomon and co. are really good at turn based combat and the game is very fun.

warty goblin

2024-01-03, 01:29 PM

That was my guess. Book club with store brand Blade causes a part of my soul* to sear and die, and I'm up to my eyeballs in tactics games that don't cauterize my innermost being. The relatable banter in Chimera Squad was bad enough. So I'm skipping this one.

*specifically the bit that prefers maximum 90s cool Blade instead of pg-13 hug box Blade. So 100% of me in other words.

Errorname

2024-01-03, 02:14 PM

Chimera Squad was much better about this sort of thing. I'd assume it'll die down as the game progresses but it seems like there's a pretty strong emphasis on party bonding, so it may be able to keep up a high density of soul searing dialogue throughout the entire game

warty goblin

2024-01-03, 02:38 PM

That sounds alarming, because I found the banter in Chimera Squad to be completely unbearable. Taking a character who's a psionic alien who used to exist in some sort of hive mind and turning them into a relatable quippy bro is both annoying because I do not want a relatable quippy bro and creatively bankrupt.

It's another case of what I think of as the suburban nice-ification of potentially interesting or challenging sci-fi concepts. Don't worry, as soon as they get a chance, radically different beings will instantly recognize that they too want to be non-threatening cardboard cutouts like everybody else. Truly the highest form of being anything can aspire to is your quippy relatable bro, because you are very cool and perfect and should never feel bad or think too hard about your existence. Anything that doesn't want to be your quippy relatable bro is irredeemably evil, and you'll have to heroically shoot them.

Rodin

2024-01-03, 04:05 PM

I feel like that's a bit much to expect from both the XCom franchise and Chimera Squad in particular. The writing in XCom was never up to much, and Chimera Squad was a DLC for XCOM2 that was packaged as a separate budget game (launch price was $10 US) so they didn't have to do any rebalancing for XCOM2. They weren't going to go Three Houses on the story for this thing no matter what happened, and the quippy banter fit the "What If?" feel of the game.

Don't get me wrong - I would love to see a heavy, story-focused tactical game set in the post-alien-defeat era of the XCOM universe. Heck, a Telltale-esque adventure game or a game of a different genre in that setting would be fascinating. But Chimera Squad was never going to be that game, and I have my doubts Firaxis as a company is even capable of that level of writing.

warty goblin

2024-01-03, 05:01 PM

Oh it's definitely outside of what Firaxis can write. They're the ones who decided to make a dirt cheap character focused game out of their full price character free* franchise, though. Had they just gone with smallscale XCOM but you can recruit alien classes now, I don't think I'd have cared. But they went with character focused, so it's fair to look at the characters, and boy howdie did I find them grating. It ain't like that's a requirement for low budget tactics games either, I've played plenty of indie titles that could hardly have been swimming in cash that didn't set my teeth on edge.

*OK, the department heads had some character, but the units didn't. You see the difference.

Lord Raziere

2024-01-03, 05:36 PM

Beat Borderlands 3:

playing sniper as Fl4k, was going through the game as fast as possible to get to playing Baldur's Gate 3, and a few discoveries happened: there is a pistol that has infinite ammo, so I just.....used it whenever I got lazy/tired of saving ammo and just started holding down the trigger to kill whoever is in my way, because as it turns out, when you have unlimited ammo for something, how much damage it deals doesn't matter all that much, because you don't need to save ammo and thus buy better guns to make sure that ammo deals more damage, nor do you need to pay as much for getting more ammo for your other guns. the infinity pistol basically breaks the game by giving you a gun for clearing trash mobs without worry, or firing off at a boss forever for chip damage when you don't know its weakness yet. I basically didn't bother with any other pistol once I got it, even ones that did twice or more the damage, because whats the point of those when you hold down the trigger as you move and kill anything thats in your way?

another thing I picked up that seemed bad until I tried it: a shield that gave me zero shield. as in, I have no shield using it, but gain bonuses in return and at first I'd thought slap it on, I was nearing the end of the game, and if I died due to only having a health bar, I could switch back, I thought it'd be a funny little experiment. Turns out? the zero shield thing made me a god. in return for having no shields, I reloaded faster, I was dealing more damage, everything just became more fun and I wasn't even dying to any of the mobs all that more often. it didn't impact my survivability negatively and in fact improved it because I kept sniping the enemies faster than they could even damage me. No shield? No problem. Got all the way to Tyreen and the only death I experienced was falling off the boss platform because I wasn't paying attention. gravity was more of a threat to me than she was.

story was about legacy and what you pass onto to others. its actually well put together and thematic, and could shine more without some of Borderland's grime holding it back. had fun in general, got in some sniping, even if I had to mix it up with other things, not gonna do any more DLC after the lovecraftian one had a damage-sponge enemy with multiplying eye minions though. best to just do the story and move on to Baldur's Gate 3.

Errorname

2024-01-03, 05:56 PM

Chimera Squad with hindsight is an obvious trial run for Midnight Suns, and for what it's worth I think a lot of the writing in that game is pretty sharp, there is interesting stuff going on with how they approach the idea of post-war reconstruction. But the actual character writing for your squaddies tends to be the weakest link, which is a shame because that's usually the best part of a character based tactics game.

Rynjin

2024-01-03, 06:09 PM

Beat Borderlands 3:

Borderlands 3's story is tragic because there's some good themes and interesting ideas there but they're almost all executed awfully lmao.

Sapphire Guard

2024-01-03, 06:23 PM

Chimera Squad would be top of my wishlist, if only it was on console.

Finished Shenmue II. It's very unique.

I can't think of another game that would let you just hang out in the woods for two hours after the climax. Really enjoyed it.

GloatingSwine

2024-01-04, 04:37 AM

Beat Borderlands 3:
another thing I picked up that seemed bad until I tried it: a shield that gave me zero shield. as in, I have no shield using it, but gain bonuses in return and at first I'd thought slap it on, I was nearing the end of the game, and if I died due to only having a health bar, I could switch back, I thought it'd be a funny little experiment. Turns out? the zero shield thing made me a god. in return for having no shields, I reloaded faster, I was dealing more damage, everything just became more fun and I wasn't even dying to any of the mobs all that more often. it didn't impact my survivability negatively and in fact improved it because I kept sniping the enemies faster than they could even damage me. No shield? No problem. Got all the way to Tyreen and the only death I experienced was falling off the boss platform because I wasn't paying attention. gravity was more of a threat to me than she was.

I did the opposite. Thin Red Line Moze with the shield that reduces your health by 60%. Permanently stuck on 1HP but had hundreds of thousands in shield and anything that would restore health restored shields, and had a permanent 120% damage bonus from having an empty health bar.

Borderlands 3's story is absolute garbage, but in terms of game feel and build variety it's better than the others.

Cygnia

2024-01-04, 02:28 PM

"An Arcade Full of Cats" had a new stage drop today, so I had to binge that.

DaedalusMkV

2024-01-04, 02:51 PM

Dragon Age awaits! After 9 long years, anticipation rises. Hoping for epic quests, intricate plots, and memorable characters.

I'm curious, is there some sort of positive news on that front? I saw an update from Bioware that amounted to "We'll give you a trailer and release date in summer, maybe even release the game in fall/winter who knows", but considering Bioware has done basically the same thing every year since 2020 I'm not sure it means much.

Also, to be honest, given Bioware's recent track record (and by 'recent' I mean 'since Mass Effect 2'), I don't have a lot of confidence in them releasing something I'd actually want to play. I enjoyed Inquisition, but it wasn't exactly a masterpiece and their last two game releases were out-and-out disasters.

warty goblin

2024-01-04, 04:38 PM

Be fair now, Andromeda was only a relentlessly mediocre disappointment. Anthem was a disaster.

Zevox

2024-01-04, 05:19 PM

I'm curious, is there some sort of positive news on that front?
No, that's likely just a bot account generating a post based on the thread title.

DaedalusMkV

2024-01-05, 02:02 AM

No, that's likely just a bot account generating a post based on the thread title.

*Facepalm*

That... That would make sense.

LibraryOgre

2024-01-05, 09:58 AM

No, that's likely just a bot account generating a post based on the thread title.

The Mod Ogre: FWIW, I just checked, and they haven't done anything overtly wrong, yet. Just posted very botly.

MCerberus

2024-01-05, 10:39 AM

The early Bioware jank era was also ruined for me when it came to light during the Anthem debacle just where all the charming oddness came from: horrible working conditions due to project mismanagement.

My memories of exploding zombies in NWN because of how negative hp worked can never recover.

Zombimode

2024-01-05, 04:10 PM

Over the holiday season I've finished a number of games:

Operencia: The Stolen Sun
A first-person "blobber" RPG (think Might & Magic or Legend of Grimrock). I found it very comparable to Bard's Tale 4. Like Bards Tale 4, Operencia has a fixed cast of companion characters. I found then to be much more memorable and likeable then in Bards Tale. Story and the interaction between the characters is a strong focus in Operencia. It's all set in stone, the player is just along for the ride.
Like Bards Tale puzzles play a prominent role, although they are less frequent and much less intricate.
Finally the battles look deceptively similar to the battles in Bards Tale, but they are completely different. Battles in Bards Tale are optimization puzzles in themselves with highly deterministic results and no lasting consequences. Battles in Operencia on the other hand are much more dynamic and form the core of the attrition/resource management the form the core of the game-play in Operencia: everything is limited in Operencia. Nothing regenerates on its own. As such I found myself constantly swapping characters to maximize usage of HP and mana before taking a rest. Personally I really enjoy that style of game-play but I know this is not for everyone. Apparently 5 minute adventuring days are very common among video game RPG players.
The game has a very nice and coherent art style. Many of the locations are beautiful and fantastic. These are nicely contrasted by some very grounded and mundane looking locations.
I can heartily recommend Operencia :smallwink: To anyone who enjoys this style of game anyway.

Nexus: The Jupiter Incident
Nexus is an old space real-time-tactics game focused on small fleets engagements. Its... not very good, I have to say.
For one story and setting are tonally dissonant, in that it is both hard sci-fi in the style of The Expanse AND humoristic rubber-forehead space opera.
In addition the game-play has two problems. The mechanics of the space combat actually has a lot of depth - but most of it is automated away. Then, the campaign scenarios simply do not manage to do anything interesting with the mechanics. Save for the last two missions my strategy was "focus fire shields, focus fire hull, repeat".

Demonicon
I have played almost every DSA (The Dark Eye) video game in existence even though I am not a DSA player on the tabletop. This is surely in part because the setting of DSA is so unmistakably german that I can't help but feel at home. But more importantly DSA video games have a very good track record of being, well, very good games: the old Realms of Arkania trilogy, the Drakensang games (especially the second one), the Chains of Satinav games, the first Blackguards...
And then, there is Demonicon.
The reviews at release were so bad I disregarded it back then and promptly forgot the game existed. It recently came to my attention on GoG. The user reviews hinted at it being a hidden gem, and I got it on the cheap in the winter sale. So I gave it a go.
Well... Demonicon is not a good game. But it is also not a horrible game. And there is some genuine good in there that make me wonder what could have been with a higher budget.
The games presentation looks incredibly dated and inconsistent in quality. But the actual design of the characters and locations is done with care and full of meaningful detail.
The strongest part of the game is the plot, especially the surprisingly mature and nuanced discussion of the DSA religion of Borbaradianism and by extension of fantasy religion of the "dark cult" variant in general.
Sadly the game as a whole does not provide a fitting framework for those good parts to shine.
As is, Demonicon is a technically unimpressive linear action adventure with an uninspired combat system.
Also, I'm pretty sure more then one reviewer was disgusted by the initial implications of incest, even though it a) turns out not to be true, and b) it was really not the point. But to know that you would have to actually play the game, which is something "game journalists" almost never do.

For my next game, I'm not sure. I tried to limit my winter sale shopping spree as I try to avoid buying games on sale in general.
On Steam I got Octopath Traveler. I had no qualms buying it at 50% off since I frankly find the normal asking price of 60 quite ridiculous. And its Square Enix. They have enough money.
On GoG I got Weird West and Spellforce 3, both at 75% off.

But instead of playing any of these I think I will finally start Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. It is the last remaining game from last seasons winter sale shopping spree.

Jophiel

2024-01-05, 04:27 PM

I played Operencia a year or two ago when it was on Game Pass and enjoyed it. It was a bit janky but had its charm and I had fun. I do feel like someone has to fall into its niche to appreciate it though.

warty goblin

2024-01-05, 04:36 PM

To be fair, the incest vibes in Demonicon are really heavy. It's quite literally a plot point that the only reason you and your sister aren't banging it out like a blacksmithing contest is that you are brother and sister. Not a plotline that really bothers me - maybe I read A Game of Thrones and Time Enough for Love too young - but mentally and/or actually bailing at that point isn't crazy if it does bother somebody.

(Yes I know they aren't actually related, but that's revealed we'll after a lot of very obvious sexual attraction.)

tonberrian

2024-01-06, 01:41 AM

Welp, finally found a game ending glitch in Rogue Trader. Will probably put it on hold until it gets more dlc. Love the game though.

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-06, 07:39 AM

Welp, finally found a game ending glitch in Rogue Trader. Will probably put it on hold until it gets more dlc. Love the game though.

I finally got access to my spare lens and playing the game is so much easier, reading no longer tires me out.

Restarted the game as a Hive World Crime Lord Officer, probably going Vanguard at level 16 due to my melee weapon focus. While my IGRT went full dogmatic here I'm going for a mixed approach leaning Iconoclast but with heavy punishments for failing and rebellion (and also some of the less outright Chaos-focused Heretical options).

It annoys me that I know there's not a second chainsword for all of Act 1, and I suspect they might not have added any Eviserators in the entire game. Yes most of my turns will be spent throwing out buffs and extra actions, but I still need a decent option for when I do melee.

Zevox

2024-01-06, 11:10 PM

Alright, second run of AC6 complete. Midway through I wound up realizing I had built my tetrapod build heavier than I intended, because I kept wanting to try all the heavier weapons I passed on during my first, lightweight run, so I made a conscious decision to scale it back to a more true midweight build. Wound up favoring a setup with a machine gun in the right hand, siege missile launcher in the left, heavy standard missile launcher on the right shoulder, and double-barrel grenade launcher on the left. Did really well against most things, but boy were certain bosses tough (and I wound up using the heavier build, which I saved just in case, on a couple). Iblis notably still took quite a lot of tries (and the medium build wound up feeling better for it than the heavy), and then the final boss... oof.
Ayre was definitely a much harder final boss than Walter (though to be fair, the other route had Snail as a penultimate boss that was also much harder than Walter). I wound up having to tinker with my build a lot to beat her, and I don't just mean the weapons. I wound up deciding a tetrapod build was ill-suited to that fight, as hovering was useless but dodging things vertically seemed important enough to warrant using reverse-jointed legs, so I bought the heavyweight reverse-jointed set and retooled my build around that. Eventually that won out, but it still took quite a few attempts. I don't know who between Iblis, Snail, and Ayre is the toughest boss fight I've faced so far, but I'm kind of leaning towards Ayre, just because the other two at most made me tinker with my weapons loadout.
One ending to go. Plan this time is to use a tank build, probably going super-heavy with it (though I think I'll try lighter versions as well, just to see what I think of them).

Meanwhile, still playing Granblue Rising, and I'm finding I lose track of time quite a bit while playing, so fair to say I'm still enjoying it a lot. Spent the last couple of days fooling around with Avatar Belial, and, well, the fact that I could hardly get him past rank A5, by far my worst performance with any character I've put this much time into, shows I was pretty right to figure he wasn't quite for me. Still, I do enjoy some of the things he can do, so I'll probably mess around with him like this from time to time. It's just that he's such a glass cannon with his moves damaging himself, and some of his cooler tricks are so slow that they're really not good against people who know what they're doing. He does benefit from being a rarely-played character that plenty of people have little experience fighting though. Plus for some reason he and normal Belial share the same character level, so I'm getting extra cosmetics for my main while I'm using him, which is a nice plus.

Rynjin

2024-01-07, 03:22 AM

I finally got access to my spare lens and playing the game is so much easier, reading no longer tires me out.

Pretty sure there's a few chainswords in act 1, you just gotta kill the people who have them.

I also just saw my first Eviscerator...in Act 4. You get it as a quest reward for one of your colony improvements. I think it may be the only one. It does an astronomical amount of damage though.

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-07, 01:37 PM

Pretty sure there's a few chainswords in act 1, you just gotta kill the people who have them.

I also just saw my first Eviscerator...in Act 4. You get it as a quest reward for one of your colony improvements. I think it may be the only one. It does an astronomical amount of damage though.

Maybe I just didn't kill enough Imperials :smallwink:

And yeah, Eviserators are kind of weird as well. 40k tends much more towards dual wielding in melee (generally sword+pistol or specialised weapons), with two handed melee weapons being really rare. But Eviserators are a really good alternative to power swords as apex melee weapons, trading armour penetration and a free hand for more raw damage, but it's still annoying that what's supposed to be a powerful legitimized criminal noble position doesn't let you pick one up for a good portion of the game.

Not that it'll likely matter, as in retrospect I'm probably going to spec into 'lol buffs'.

tonberrian

2024-01-07, 02:45 PM

By the late game of Rogue Trader, there were only a very few fights that officer-officer-argenta didn't solve before anyone else got turns. Officer has a talent that gives them an extra turn at the beginning of a fight (that you can use to give other people extra turns!), Tactician has a talent that grants an extra turn whenever the first ally uses a heroic act. So Officer 1 extra turn>Argenta turn, Officer 2 extra turn>Argenta turn, argenta uses heroic act, officer 2 uses extra turn heroic act on argenta, officer 1 gets extra turn to use extra turn heroic act on argenta, officer 1 finishes their turn and can attack, officer 2 has a turn and can attack. All before any enemy gets a turn. The only time it doesn't work quite right is if argenta can't get any kills to get momentum for her first heroic act.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-07, 03:50 PM

If you really want to cheese it, you pick up the trait that gives Cassia extra Willpower whenever anyone gets an extra turn. Then you have another officer grant her an extra turn, she reciprocates by giving them an extra turn, and you do this as much as you want until she has 200-300 or more Willpower. At this point you can use her buffs to then grant your team insane amounts of other stats or just nuke the enemy groups with her cone attack.

This'll probably get fixed and it's both completely broken and not particularly fun to use, so I wouldn't recommend using it. It's funny to pull it off once, though, just to have a whole group of Primarch Space Marines running around with 150+ stats in everything.

Rynjin

2024-01-07, 04:02 PM

Rogue Trader in general is not a very hard game, and I mean that as a compliment. It does a much better job than Wrath of the Righteous at delivering on a simple power fantasy while still leaving the combat as feeling fun and satisfying due to the more XCOM-esque presentation.

My character has switched playstyles three times over the course of her career from full melee, to melee/ranged switch hitter, to full Psyker and never once have I even needed to rebuild for it...it's just been a natural progression based on talents I can take when I decide to switch and cool gear that gives you the bulk of your power anyway.

The game has simple enough, widely applicable enough talents that just about no matter what you pick there's a viable option.

Not that it'll likely matter, as in retrospect I'm probably going to spec into 'lol buffs'.

Case in point, I think you might be surprised later at how potentially good your Officer/Vanguard can be at just killin' people. There's an item I picked up...somewhere, i genuinely don't remember where, that gives your melee attacks additional damage equal to how many Temporary Wounds you have. My Warrior/Vanguard Abelard is casually smacking people for ~130 damage in act 3 just off that cloak; every talent and whatnot he has is based on defense and not damage. He's far from the highest damage dealer in the party but 130 per swing is...respectable.

It's only a little slower with one Officer. I don't run Jae (because I hate her) so it's just Cassia. She feeds all her extra turns to my Warrior/Arch-Militant Psyker (Biomancer/Pyromancer) and I typically end turns with at minimum whoever the boss is at 0 and a few chaff exploded. I deal about 250 damage just performing my buff routine.

Pyromancer has a talent that deals direct damage equal to 6x your Psy rating to all adjacent enemies every time you cast a Psyker power, and Biomancer has one that makes Biomancer powers cost -1 AP on turn 1. So I have Cassia use Move, Move, Move! to move my character in position, cast Iron arm (30 damaage to all adjacent), Invigorate (30 damage and primes the necklace that gives you a huge boost to Psy powers if you cast another Major Psy power in the same turn), and a 1 AP Wildfire for Molten Beam (30 damage just from casting, much more from the power). Then Extra turn deals another 70 damage (up 10 because my psy rating goes up by 1 while I'm on fire) from lighting myself on fire with ignite and Orchestrate Flames, and 70 more for buffing other allies and healing for 0 AP.

Spacewolf

2024-01-07, 04:18 PM

I haven't got Argenta to really work in my RT game. Meanwhile my operative sniper Elf and Sniper RT combo with officers means I can sweep the board pretty easily. I'm glad RT has so much less pointless BS combat than in previous Owlcat games, the easier building of your characters also makes the game alot less annoying than the pathfinder games so I don't feel like I need to minmax just to survive or spend 5 mins buffing before every battle.

However RT does suffer from coming after BG3, it's just so much obviously shallower in terms of quest design and character interactions even if it is broader. I think that's going to be the next big thing for owlcat, I'm not bothered about them voicing everything but they really need more intractability.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-07, 04:35 PM

I have to disagree on BG3's characters versus RT's. Like, Cassia alone is way more interesting and foments more different interactions than any of the BG3 characters. A weird mutant with superpowers that she can't really control, doing monstrous things just by existing but with no ill will behind them, and a necessary component of your crew creates all sorts of answers to the question of how to deal with her. Versus BG3s half-dozen carbon copy madlibbed examples of a person being traumatized by their abuser, which more-or-less only leads to a single correct outcome of helping them overcome their trauma and kill their abuser.

I don't know if it's just me, but I really struggled to care about anything in BG3. Something about its writing came across as extremely shallow and failed to draw me in at any level. I'll give it credit for giving way more freedom in quest resolution, though, even if it lead to a whole lot of unsatisfactory or confusing outcomes in my game.

Spacewolf

2024-01-07, 04:48 PM

I said interactions rather than lore. A simple character told well is better than a deeper character told badly. I mean every owlcat game is you talk to your party at the start of the chapter do whatever side quest they have talk to them after then you don't need to do anything with them until the next chapter, even if you do something that they should want to talk about. Meanwhile BG3 the characters will stop you while you're walking about to talk to something, will have different responses to you talking to them based on what you have done recently, come and see you when you rest all that sort of stuff. Which helps them feel more alive than.

Plus I don't really see anything particularly different about what you say about the BG characters vs the RT characters, as long as you act reasonably with Cassia there's no downside or any real impactful moments of her losing control. I can say for all characters the only real moments that resonated with me were to do with what was done to them in Act 3 as opposed to anything they did themselves and those events have hilariously little impact after that chapter.

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-07, 07:22 PM

I However RT does suffer from coming after BG3, it's just so much obviously shallower in terms of quest design and character interactions even if it is broader. I think that's going to be the next big thing for owlcat, I'm not bothered about them voicing everything but they really need more intractability.

The biggest thing RT could learn from BG3 is let everybody seduce the freaky mutant girl.

As to going Officer/Vanguard, I'm still considering it because 1) I've already specced into throwing out temporary wounds and 2) as a Hive Worlder I suffering nobody's near me, and enemies can proc the 'people' bonus. Plus if I can juggle the fact that my theoretical build wants roughly five stats (WS, STR, AG or TOU, PER, and FEL) it'll just be fun to be Miss Reasonable until the chainsword comes out. I'm guessing half the reason Vanguard specs into bonus wounds is that Officer/Vanguards are at risk of becoming glass cannons.

tonberrian

2024-01-08, 09:39 PM

Review of Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince

It is a Dragon Quest Monsters game. If you've played Joker or Joker 2 and enjoyed that, you'll like The Dark Prince. If you enjoyed the combat in Dragon Quest 8 (or 11, even), and don't mind it being a tad grindier and the story being sort of just there, you'll enjoy the Dark Prince. It's sanded down many of the rough edges that Joker 2 had (dunno where between joker 2 professional, Terry's Wonderland, Iru and Luca's Marvelous Key, and Joker 3, but they have. It's been a LONG TIME since the US got a Dragon Quest Monsters game!), most notably getting rid of gender polarities of monsters. In older Dragon Quest games, you needed monsters of different gender polarity to fuse together, either +, -, or + -. Now that's gone and no one misses it.

Storywise the game is a step up from previous dragon quest monster games, but still a step down from the stories of Dragon Quest 8 or 11. It's actually a retelling of the story of Dragon Quest 4, but this time from the point of view of Psaro the Manslayer, the main villain. Sort of like how the original Dragon Quest Monsters serves as a backstory for Terry and Milly of Dragon Quest 6. If you've played Dragon Quest 4 recently, you know how this is going to go in the broad strokes. Alas, poor Psaro and Rose.

Monster-wise, we've got over 500 different monsters (though some are palette swaps, that's just a thing that DQ does) to collect and fuse, and a new twist on the Size mechanics of past games. In previous games, a monster's size was fixed for that species - you'd never find, for example, a Ruin (gigantic castle monster) that wasn't size 3, taking up the place of 3 normal size monsters. Instead, here there are two sizes - regular and Large - and any monster can be either size, though finding Large monsters to scout is a bit of a pain. Large monsters have a different set of passives compared to a regular size monster, and always have their first passive that allows them to sometimes take 2 or even 3 turns per round, and take up the space of 2 monsters (out of 4) that you have in both your frontline and backline. Fusing a large monster with a small one only sometimes gets a large result (and you can't even see previews of it happening), but two large monsters always fuse into a Large.

Graphically, it looks on par for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. Which, not great for a AAA tentpole game, but perfectly useable for a A side game.

All in all, a solid 7/10 game that brooks no pretentions about being anything but what it is. And it's nice to have those once in a while.

Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince is available on Nintendo Switch.

Ignimortis

2024-01-09, 06:08 AM

Eh, they're aiming at different crowds. It's why in one you have no support and have to scrounge up ever advantage you can get in combat, whereas in the other you roll up, throw around some extra turns, and wonder where the enemies went. Note that the Act 1 boss has it's difficulty mostly dependent on two things: have you built your party well enough to survive it's first turn, and can you exploit positioning to trap it in melee (why I'm going to go in with 2 Warriors and a melee Officer this time).
Wym? BG3's difficulty curve peters out much earlier than RT's. Yes, RT does become a total cakewalk towards the end of Act 3, but the first two acts are reasonably challenging. BG3 kind of throws the towel as soon as the player hits level 4. My only deaths (not TPKs, single character deaths) after level 4 were specific events like "three NPCs spend their turn specifically to move a character 40 feet into lava" or "two NPCs spend their turn specifically to kick a character off a cliff". Actual combat-wise, they couldn't do jack to my party, and whenever areas of instant death aren't present, it's just whacking people for a few rounds and maybe chugging a few potions sometimes.

The biggest thing RT could learn from BG3 is let everybody seduce the freaky mutant girl.

Disagree.

Re: thread, finished Rogue Trader over the holidays. Did not encounter a single game-breaking bug, although there were some others. Story kind of loses focus a lot after act III, feels like it needed some structural improvements and outlining "act themes" more directly. Act IV is surprisingly short but meandering, and Act V is...okay, but lasts maybe 3 hours if you do all the stuff.

Afterwards, got back into FFXIV for a bit. Started a new character just for kicks, currently levelling all DoH/DoL jobs (sans CUL/FSH, because I hate both) without resorting to either vendors or the marketboard. It's surprisingly fun.

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-09, 07:23 AM

Wym? BG3's difficulty curve peters out much earlier than RT's. Yes, RT does become a total cakewalk towards the end of Act 3, but the first two acts are reasonably challenging. BG3 kind of throws the towel as soon as the player hits level 4. My only deaths (not TPKs, single character deaths) after level 4 were specific events like "three NPCs spend their turn specifically to move a character 40 feet into lava" or "two NPCs spend their turn specifically to kick a character off a cliff". Actual combat-wise, they couldn't do jack to my party, and whenever areas of instant death aren't present, it's just whacking people for a few rounds and maybe chugging a few potions sometimes.

Hard disagree so far, but maybe that'll change once I dig into Act 2. But I've had issues with BG3 encounters all the way up to level 11 (and haven't got a character to 12 yet).

Disagree.

I'm not a fan of gender locked romances, actively dislike straight locked ones, and Cassia is the only romantic option who looks cool

Zombimode

2024-01-09, 07:42 AM

I find it surprising that Rogue Trader is considered easier than BG3 which I found to be very much lacking in challenge. Kingmaker, the only Olwcat game I've played so far, was on a completely different level challenge wise compared to BG3...

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-09, 08:45 AM

Kingmaker and WotR both engage in somewhat ridiculous stat inflation. Rogue Trader doesn't... But it does give enemies access to the same buff and debug powers, some of which stack to insane levels.

Their previous two games expected you to run a high op party, Rogue Trader has a few easily discovered exploits and a large number of looks to help get your Momentum up. BG3 is easy, but requires you to have to unlearn a lot of standard CRPG habits, like remembering to actually use those consumables (although I've got into the habit of spamming basic healing potions to save on spell slots anyway).

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-09, 10:40 AM

Put me in the camp that finds BG3 considerably easier than RT. Not that RT is a particular challenge, but the game does spike on occasion. It also doesn't give you the tools to undo mistakes. If two characters drop in the first round of BG3 combat because you weren't prepared, the game gives you a sack of tools to bring them back even at level 1 - the moment you realize you can hurl a healing potion at a dying teammate to put them back on their feet, there's no way to lose standard combat. The enemies have to drop kick you off cliffs to get the job done. RT characters go down and are out for the rest of the fight, meaning a bad break can impact your chances of winning a lot more. Though you can break both games if you know what you're doing, it's far simpler to do it in BG3 just by recognizing what parts of 5e Larian changed (Yes, I'm never going to get over them deciding to make one of the best buffs in the game even more powerful). Breaking RT requires at least a small amount of reading and thought.

I didn't find Pathfinder requiring a high OP party either if you stuck to Normal/Core difficulties. My characters in the games were largely single-classed and just played to the system. I even ran mods that removed some of the more egregious bonus-stacking Owlcat included and didn't have issues completing the games. There's two fights in WOTR I found over the top near the end of the game, but that didn't involve inflated numbers. The game special cases some enemy abilities in those fights to ignore counters, which makes them extremely tough to deal with.

GloatingSwine

2024-01-09, 11:37 AM

The biggest thing RT could learn from BG3 is let everybody seduce the freaky mutant girl.

One of the laws of Owlcat is that you can't romance the character everyone ends up wanting to.

Though in RT that's variously Abelard or Argenta.

Rynjin

2024-01-09, 12:35 PM

I enjoy that not every character in Rogue Trader is a ravenous playersexual. You can't romance Abelard because he is still grieving the death of his dead wife and later new flame in Theodora. You cant romance Argenta because she simply isn't into you lol.

BG3 is a great game but everyone thinking your character is their favorite person in the world 5 minutes after meeting them is the dumbest thing about it.

warty goblin

2024-01-09, 12:37 PM

Crpgs seem like a genre that more or less by default aren't very hard. Particularly when turn based they really are just number comparison tests; does your damage deplete the enemy HP + healing faster than vice versa. There's a lot of noodling around with damage types and resistances and action economy and player resources and sometimes even map positioning and so on, but ultimately you'll win if, on a per round basis,

(enemy hp)/(your damage) < (your hp)/(enemy damage).

At first glance I suspect that in a lot of fights that doesn't hold, at least when only considering basic abilities. But this is mitigated by two factors; the AI is generally stupid and doesn't do things like focus down your high damage/low hp characters early*, and most RPG systems are designed to be deliberately breakable in the player's favor.

The difficulty in any particular encounter is then just how much you have to increase your effective HP and damage output. Because the monsters stay uniformly stupid, and the player does not, and the system generally gets more and more broken in the player's favor, this gives the classic RPG inverted difficulty curve, where the first non-tutorial region is the hardest, and by a couple levels in you are an untouchable god most of the time.

*There's also deliberate asymmetries in the mechanics a lot of the time, where a downed player unit can be got back up for as little as 1 action and maybe a cheap consumable, while most of the time a dead enemy is 100% dead and stays that way. This gives the odd impression that the evil and merciless monsters in fact super carefully only gently incapacite people with the minimum possible force, while the heroes on the side of life, liberty and justice gleefully and thoroughly butcher everybody they can. Often with bespoke and excessively violent animations.

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-09, 02:20 PM

Batcathat

2024-01-09, 02:54 PM

It feels like Baldur's Gate II (that admittedly is from the distant dawn of romanceable NPCs) has good examples of both problems. I don't know what's worst, that Jaheira is open to romance maybe a week or so after her husband's brutal death or that female PCs can only romance Anomen of all people. Granted, that's still one more option than gay PCs. (Of course, there are roughly seven billion mods to expand on the options, but still.)

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-09, 03:13 PM

I admit I haven't played BG2 in a while, but isn't Jaheira's romance kicked off as a trauma bonding incident? It's not like BG3 where the companions are chomping for your bits, but more like "You've lost your sister, I've lost my husband. Can we talk about it? I just need someone to talk to." and it gets more romantic from there? It's even played out as an in the moment fling in the ending, as you end up drifting apart after the plot is over.

Kareeah_Indaga

2024-01-09, 03:17 PM

I wish Skyrim was more like that. Having every marry-able NPC have no preferences of their own just screams Im a batch of pixels and not a real person! to me.

GloatingSwine

2024-01-09, 03:20 PM

I think it's better when characters have preferences that aren't just "is driven by the player".

Like as in the subject under discussion, Cassia has a very particular idea what she wants out of a romance, she wants a grand courtly seduction before she's inevitably shuffled into the generational eugenics program that are the Navigator dynasties where her preferences will be discarded forever.

Sure everyone should avoid being stuck with Anomen as the only choice, but don't take the character out of non-player characters.

Batcathat

2024-01-09, 03:43 PM

Sure, it's not like they don't mention Khalid, but she still goes from "happily married" to "finding husband in pieces" to "starts a new relationship" in... maaaybe a few months? Which seems unhealthy, at best. Also, it's been a while since I read her ending, but that's not really how I remember it.

That said, it might still be my favorite romance pre-Enchanted Edition. Aerie and Anomen are both so annoying in their own ways, I think, and while Viconia's romance has some good parts (my top pick is definitely her or Jaheira) I think she suffers from the drow's regular "muhaha, we so evil!" characterization (though admittedly less than a lot of them).

tyckspoon

2024-01-09, 03:46 PM

I think it's better when characters have preferences that aren't just "is driven by the player".

Personality preferences is absolutely ok! Romance options certainly can and should have distinct preferences in how they wish to be courted, what sort of player character approaches and actions they respond favorably to, and so on! We just don't want to be locked out of a romance option because we checked the 'wrong' option in the character creator.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-09, 04:12 PM

I went and looked it up. I was wrong. It talks about you being apart from each other for years sometimes, but always returning back together. So it is a lasting relationship.

Rynjin

2024-01-09, 04:40 PM

Even in that regard, the character's preferences generally make sense.

Cassia is straight by necessity if nothing else; she has obligations to produce an heir and it's implied she tries to suppress her desire for romance due to that.

Yrliet is an elfsexual; you can romance her but you're not gonna bone.

Jae is definitely down to les from what I can tell, not sure if she's bi (my character is female). I ended up in bed with her by complete accident.

Argenta and Abelard are non-romanceable, as mentioned. Apparently Idira is too, though no reason given for her. Not sure about Marazhai, as he broke a promise to me and got given over to the Inquisition. I told that mother****er when I recruited him that if he ever referred to me as a mon-keigh again I'd kill him. Guess he thought I was joking.

And that leaves Heinrix, who I agree is the biggest missed opportunity. I've been really enjoying the romance with Heinrix as an enemies-to-lovers plot with my Heretical turned Iconoclast character (once the Heretic options started being primarily "for the evulz" Chaotic Stupid stuff I bailed). It's so...gloriously melodramatic. "But Rogue Trader...what about your reputation? To be seen cavorting with a lowly Inquisitor apprentice...the scandal!" "I don't care Heinrix, take me now!"

It would work just as well as a male-male romance and him being at least bi would have been perfect. He gives off those vibes anyway, as someone who is really more enamored with a person and their deeds than sex from what I can tell.

I think the biggest "issue" as far as diversity of romances is that there's only five of them in the party. Technically 4 because there is zero logical justification for keeping Marazhai alive.

Ignimortis

2024-01-09, 05:02 PM

BG3 is a great game but everyone thinking your character is their favorite person in the world 5 minutes after meeting them is the dumbest thing about it.
Yes, this, exactly this. Even character who do have romances should be allowed to have preferences.

I think it's better when characters have preferences that aren't just "is driven by the player".

Sure everyone should avoid being stuck with Anomen as the only choice, but don't take the character out of non-player characters.
This too.

I'm not asking for every character to be playersexual, just for all romanceable ones to be. There are good reasons for Abelard, Argenta, Ulfar, and many others to not be romanceable, and even one who is that probably shouldn't be. Abelard definitely should be nowhere near the player's romance, if you deputised him there would be no way for your seduction to fail!
RT: Abelard, find a way to this particular person's heart for me.
Abelard: Returns in a few hours telling the RT that all preparations have been made, the person in question is utterly smitten with Lord Captain's persona. Doesn't matter if it was a xenos, a Space Marine, whatever. It is now romanceable in a few short phrases (helpfully supplied by Abelard on a data-slate).

Honestly, Abelard is amazing. I never thought I'd enjoy having my own personal hype-man who is also a veritable force on the battlefield, that much. He falls off a bit in Act 4 onwards (as all melee chars do, tbh), but before that he's basically the greatest guy on the field unless you're specifically building your RT to eclipse him. Got a very good ending for him as well.

Apparently Idira is too, though no reason given for her.
Idira is hinted at either currently being in or having recently ended a relationship with your Vox-master, Toliman. Judging by some dialogue lines, they at the very least still care for one another, without demonstrating it too openly.

LibraryOgre

2024-01-09, 05:19 PM

BG3 is a great game but everyone thinking your character is their favorite person in the world 5 minutes after meeting them is the dumbest thing about it.

In defense, you've all got a little traveller who might be influencing it.

Except Halsin, Minsc, and Jaheira. And Halsin is a freak, and gods know the first time you fight on her side, Jaheira proves she's a cougar at heart. :smallbiggrin:

Minsc? Entirely possible he just doesn't know what's going on. :smallwink:

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-09, 05:28 PM

Cassia is straight by necessity if nothing else; she has obligations to produce an heir and it's implied she tries to suppress her desire for romance due to that.

Okay, but why does she have to be straight?

Yrliet is an elfsexual; you can romance her but you're not gonna bone.

Chaste romances are fine

Argenta and Abelard are non-romanceable, as mentioned. Apparently Idira is too, though no reason given for her.

No romanceable is fine.

As has been said this is more not being locked out because we picked the 'wrong' choice back before we had a chance to meet the characters.

Yes, this, exactly this. Even character who do have romances should be allowed to have preferences.

I find this a fairly strawmannish argument. 'No, characters cannot have preferences if pan!'

RT: Abelard, find a way to this particular person's heart for me.
Abelard: Returns in a few hours telling the RT that all preparations have been made, the person in question is utterly smitten with Lord Captain's persona. Doesn't matter if it was a xenos, a Space Marine, whatever. It is now romanceable in a few short phrases (helpfully supplied by Abelard on a data-slate)

Exactly!

Abelard's one issue is that he doesn't know how to deal with a more hands-on boss. Which makes for great moments.

GloatingSwine

2024-01-09, 05:52 PM

Okay, but why does she have to be straight?

Because she is. Because sexuality is a relatively ingrained part of who a person is. Judy Alvarez is a lesbian, that's part of her identity and if you're packing sausage you aren't the one for her.

And as someone who played V as male I am totally fine with that.

NPCs having actual defined sexual preferences is part of making them rounded and believable. Believable characters get to say no because you're just not their type.

LibraryOgre

2024-01-09, 06:35 PM

Because she is. Because sexuality is a relatively ingrained part of who a person is. Judy Alvarez is a lesbian, that's part of her identity and if you're packing sausage you aren't the one for her.

And as someone who played V as male I am totally fine with that.

NPCs having actual defined sexual preferences is part of making them rounded and believable. Believable characters get to say no because you're just not their type.

But, dammit, I wanna play FemShep and get with Tali. :smallbiggrin:

Lord Raziere

2024-01-09, 06:57 PM

But, dammit, I wanna play FemShep and get with Tali. :smallbiggrin:

With mods you can. I got a mod, played through the Mass Effect trilogy and romanced Liara, Tali, then Liara again as femshep. who cares if its not canon as long your having fun?

Rodin

2024-01-09, 07:10 PM

Because she is. Because sexuality is a relatively ingrained part of who a person is. Judy Alvarez is a lesbian, that's part of her identity and if you're packing sausage you aren't the one for her.

And as someone who played V as male I am totally fine with that.

NPCs having actual defined sexual preferences is part of making them rounded and believable. Believable characters get to say no because you're just not their type.

This is where I fall emotionally. My preference for the games I play is to have characters with defined sexuality, wherever that may fall on the rainbow infinity prism.

Logically though...I understand why it has to be playersexual. Particularly in character-driven RPGs with a small number of party members. If you don't make the NPCs playersexual, somebody is getting excluded. And that sucks.

Rynjin

2024-01-09, 07:16 PM

Okay, but why does she have to be straight?

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-09, 07:37 PM

Or, and here's a shocking thought, there could be more options than the extreme ends of the Kinsey Scale. Bisexuality: all of the cool kids* are doing it!

And unlike WotR there aren't any gay-only romances to balance it out. Even there I was still a bit annoyed about the cute artist boy being gay. It also sucks that the only actually inhuman looking one is locked behind a gender choice that is far too restrictive (although fitting for the setting, considering the Imperium was founded by a sexist twelve year old gay boy), because you knew w that if we'd got a T'au or Ork party member a significant portion of the fanbase would be moaning about how they couldn't sleep with them.

...of course Orks have sex, they love having orgies with the Imperium.

* here defined as 'the bi and pan ones'.

Zevox

2024-01-09, 07:40 PM

Because the implications of the lesbian character being repeatedly raped after the plot to be impregnated against her will are pretty ****ed up and, while fitting for a WH40k story, wouldn't be very fun to think or hear about.
Frankly that sounds like something that's equally ****ed up regardless of the character's sexuality. :smallconfused:

Cygnia

2024-01-09, 07:40 PM

Hell, I just want asexuality as a legit option in video game relationships (and not treated as a joke or robot/alien).

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-09, 07:48 PM

Frankly that sounds like something that's equally ****ed up regardless on the character's sexuality. :smallconfused:

To be fair to Slaaneshi cultists that's just Thursday night.

Slaaneshi cultists in Warhammer Fantasy that is. The 40k ones occasionally get weird and start bring ConNonCon into the mix. Nobody's quite sure why, you can't really hear anything over the screamo power metal they're playing.

Although Chaos cultists following anything other than Undivided are just plain bizarre in general. Slaanesh is probably the most understandable, their worshippers basically become cenobites.

Which isn't even getting into the Chaos god of atheism (he mostly manifests in churches to point out contradictions in dogma).

Rynjin

2024-01-09, 08:09 PM

Or, and here's a shocking thought, there could be more options than the extreme ends of the Kinsey Scale. Bisexuality: all of the cool kids* are doing it!

Even if you're bisexual, "lying back and thinking of England" can't be a particularly comfortable experience. For a plot like this to work it would need a lot of focus, which other games have had the budget to accomplish. Rogue Trader has to make a lot of cuts and it seems like the romances were pretty much an afterthought. I would prefer they just kind fo sidestep any unfortunate implications than address them and not provide solutions.

And unlike WotR there aren't any gay-only romances to balance it out. Even there I was still a bit annoyed about the cute artist boy being gay.

Yeah, like I mentioned before Heinrix seems like the perfect candidate to be bi and or gay. He is unfettered from familial obligations, and his romance plotline of needing to juggle his political aspirations and romantic ones works regardless of PC gender. him being gay would be just a little extra sauciness to top things off, especially since you need to "tempt" Heinrix more than once along his route.

Trashy romance novel plot? Yes. Great? Also yes.

Although Chaos cultists following anything other than Undivided are just plain bizarre in general. Slaanesh is probably the most understandable, their worshippers basically become cenobites.

Slaanesh and Tzeentch are probably the two worst options to follow solo. Nurgle provides EXACTLY what he promises; no tricks, no gimmicks, he says "You'll be ugly, but you'll fear no pain or sickness" and delivers. He'd pretty much be non-evil if his followers weren't contagious.

Khorne likewise provides his followers exactly what they want. You wanna fight? I'll make you better at fight, and give you people to fight. Easy.

Tzeentch is too up his own ******* to be safe to follow, and Slaanesh is just too stupid and shortsighted to be worth it. You can engage in all sorts of hedonism you want without being eternally soulbound to the murder-****-torture god.

Errorname

2024-01-09, 08:20 PM

NPCs having actual defined sexual preferences is part of making them rounded and believable. Believable characters get to say no because you're just not their type.

You can do fun stuff with restrictions, Solas only wanting to date lady elves is a compelling character detail and I think forcing a shared cultural connection lets the writer do interesting things with the character, and the stuff with Dorian is trying to tackle some heavy real world subject matter about being gay and that's absolutely something that games should be allowed to write about.

But.... while this is an idea which sounds great, it tends to work better in a game like New Vegas, where there's basically no dating sim element. Because the way it actually tends to work in a Bioware style party game is that you have like 1-2 options. Cyberpunk has 4 love interests total, if I'm not mistaken? Now personally, I have mixed feelings about dating sim elements generally, I'd rather my character play matchmaker between NPCs than date one of them and I think that's an option CRPGs would do well to explore instead, but if you're taking the dating sim path and you only have a handful of options, even simple restrictions will feel really constricting for players

Kareeah_Indaga

2024-01-09, 08:51 PM

I'd rather my character play matchmaker between NPCs than date one of them and I think that's an option CRPGs would do well to explore instead

Tangent, but Im still annoyed I cant help the blacksmith get together with the blue-haired girl in Stardew Valley.

Lord Raziere

2024-01-09, 09:55 PM

I mean the thing is your all discussing a videogame rpg, which has the inherent weakness of basically being three genres of videogame in a trenchcoat in modern game design:
-a visual novel
-an exploration game
-turn based strategy or other combat engine

your not going to get the best possible visual novel experience (the dialogue sections) from an rpg, because those resources are being dedicated to the exploration and TBS parts. like, RPG is no longer a separate genre but rather this super-genre that encompasses multiple facets that are now fracturing and doing their own thing.

So I'd never expect an rpg to handle and do this sort of romance thing as well as something specialized to it would do. its kind of a miracle we get the option at all, because there are so many resources and time put it into this and everything has to contribute to the final product, so putting in a romance sideplot of any kind is a risk because you have to do it well, and it potentially doesn't actually contribute to it all adding up, because you can play these games without engaging in it and probably wouldn't impact your experience of the game all that much. the asexual option? just don't talk to people when I was younger I didn't even run into the bioware romance plots or finish them because I was too busy playing the actual meat of the game.

like sure I enjoy romancing characters when I can but I wouldn't say its the meat of the experience you know? its mostly a side dish at most.

so when the decision comes to a character's sexuality and whether they should be playersexual or not.....I'd say you have to like make it clear what assumptions your making about the world when you make it, and make it clear to the player what those assumptions are because there are two assumptions both valid:
-player's sandbox assumption:
the playersexual option where the characters are there for the player to play with, and whatever they are, they are there to be molded to what they want for maximum fun. this is best for things like Skyrim mass effect and other such worlds which are intended to be shaped however you want.

-the world window assumption:
in this assumption, the player is looking and interacting with a fictional world that acts as if its just a window into it. they can't mold the world to be different for their own preferences, just interact with it as a place that hypothetically exists and thus hypothetically has people in it that have to be respected. this works for works like Undertale, One Shot, things like that.

these assumptions are both valid, just not compatible. You can't have both in the same game. you either have a consequence-free sandbox or you don't, there is no middle ground. something like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Skyrim, what I know of BG3 all are heroic in their narrative and open so they are more fit to the sandbox assumption in my mind. you kill a bunch of people in grand theft auto 5 or Oblivion doing something ridiculous its all good, who cares? I'm not judging.

but if a youtuber kills Toriel and blows it off as a joke in their playthrough of Undertale I immediately stop watching the video and say "not interested" and/or "don't recommend channel" to their videos forever.

so establishing the player sandbox assumption or world window assumption is pretty important and given what kind of universe WH40k and Rogue Trader is....I'd say its pretty reasonable to go with world window assumption there, because a grimdark universe where everyone is horrible probably shouldn't be steamrolled by a hero who can do no wrong in a videogame like this, it very much should be an opportunity to explore the consequences of making bad decisions and seeing what limits you run up against from the position your in. thus not reasonable for people to be playersexual here, because lets be honest, 40k ain't really a place for romance in general. and if Rogue Trader as a game acts very player sandboxy then randomly goes world-window thats mixed messaging, I'm sorry, they screwed up from either way you look at it. you can either be a player sandbox or you can be anything else but you can't be both.

Grim Portent

2024-01-09, 10:03 PM

The whole arranged marriage and forced breeding thing that the Imperium does a lot does serve the useful function of being an obvious villainous act and reminding people that the 40k setting is not a nice one to live in even for the rich and powerful. It's a dark subject, but one 40k has broached in vague terms before (Dark Heresy has a brief bit about implicitly gay nobles being made to produce heirs as part of a Sororitas program to breed better nobles IIRC,) even if they never present a solution other than turning traitor and escaping into fringes of society or fleeing the Imperium entirely.

Nurgle provides EXACTLY what he promises; no tricks, no gimmicks, he says "You'll be ugly, but you'll fear no pain or sickness" and delivers. He'd pretty much be non-evil if his followers weren't contagious.

Eh, Nurgle kills a lot of people who ask him for help, he's not really any more benevolent than the others, he just thinks he is.* One of the acts attributed to him is responding to prayers for rain during a drought, sending a rain that lasts so long it turns the farms to swamps killing all the crops, causing a famine and spreading disease, then a demonic invasion that just kills the people who aren't already dead or dying. While technically fulfilling the prayers at first he goes overboard and kills the people because he's just as cruel and arbitrary as his brother gods.

*Of course all the gods think they're better people than the others, because they value the things they do and are blind to the misery they inflict or consider it to be worthwhile.

tonberrian

2024-01-09, 10:11 PM

Not straight != Only hom*o. Bi and Pan exist.

Batcathat

2024-01-10, 02:37 AM

Yeah, this is pretty much my take on it too. It makes sense for NPCs to have preferences, but since it means an already probably pretty small pool of people getting even smaller (especially if they also have preferences unrelated to gender, which I generally find more interesting) I'm fine with suspending my disbelief on the matter.

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-10, 04:55 AM

Even if you're bisexual, "lying back and thinking of England" can't be a particularly comfortable experience.

Can't be particularly comfortable for straight people either. So basically the closest thing you have to an argument is 'LGBT people can't have ****ty fates?'

For a plot like this to work it would need a lot of focus, which other games have had the budget to accomplish. Rogue Trader has to make a lot of cuts and it seems like the romances were pretty much an afterthought. I would prefer they just kind fo sidestep any unfortunate implications than address them and not provide solutions.

To be honest Rogue Trader probably shouldn't have had romances.

Also the game is already sidestepping a lot of issues with Cassia simply because the Imperium and Rogue Trader needs Navigators. Plus she avoids the worst mutations because she was made a love interest.

And Cassia's desire for courtly romance doesn't because...?

Yes, but that's not what I'm talking about. There's just something understandable about 'I wanted to feel more sensation so I rammed a red hot poker into my genitals'.

Eldan

2024-01-10, 06:17 AM

Cyberpunk has 4 love interests total, if I'm not mistaken?

Cyberpunk has four, yes. Straight man, gay man, straight woman, lesbian woman.

GloatingSwine

2024-01-10, 06:56 AM

Frankly that sounds like something that's equally ****ed up regardless of the character's sexuality. :smallconfused:

It's also completely the norm for dynastic arranged marriages throughout history. They married off for politics in order to unite noble bloodlines. The Navigator families just arrange those marriages around the eugenic development of the navigator powers not who owns Upper Silesia.

Triaxx

2024-01-10, 08:35 AM

I wonder how much better games could be if we didn't take 90% of our 14 year dev times and 400 million dollar budgets animating jiggle physics for 13 seconds of PG13 content.

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-10, 08:36 AM

Navigators also have the joint issues of 1) it being a recessive trait and 2) being absolutely vital to the Imperium's star travel. Artificial insemination and exowombs would be an answer, but Tech-Priests.

Although maybe that'll change soon. I don't know, I've recently dropped the wargame to move to Beyond the Gates of Antares.

Grim Portent

2024-01-10, 10:39 AM

Although maybe that'll change soon. I don't know, I've recently dropped the wargame to move to Beyond the Gates of Antares.

Artificial reproduction methods in 40k are unreliable and taboo for some reason.* Given the already high chance of navigators being born so deformed they get locked in the basem*nt to maintain appearances I wouldn't be surprised if any of the artificial ways to reproduce aren't worth it.

Plus of course they want to keep the population of navigators at a certain level for financial and political reasons. Make too many and the negotiating position of the houses is weakened by an excess of supply for their services.

*Probably based on some older work, but I don't know enough about the various older sci-fi media that inspired 40k to know which one.

GloatingSwine

2024-01-10, 11:19 AM

Technological solutions in a universe where there's a 50/50 chance of anyone even understanding the cargo cult version of how a technology works beyond "it just works, don't question it in case machine spirit gets angry" are probably not best to rely on for the underpinning of your entire ability to connect your nation.

Errorname

2024-01-10, 01:08 PM

I wonder how much better games could be if we didn't take 90% of our 14 year dev times and 400 million dollar budgets animating jiggle physics for 13 seconds of PG13 content.

To answer this question, look at the current state of games, because not only are RPGs with player romances pretty uncommon in the AAA space, I can't think of a single AAA rpg where it wasn't obviously a secondary concern for the production team.

It's also something that many players clearly like and feel strongly about, so there is an audience for it.

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-10, 02:21 PM

Getting closer to re-ending Act 1, just a couple more quests to do. Actually found a chainsword this time, while Abelard has been upgraded to a mace I bought. I honestly think restarting was right, simply because I was more willing to slow down and dig into the maps.

Melee attacks feel weird, based on the loading screen I gather that Weapon Skill has no bearing on hot chance (which is effectively always 100%), but instead reduces the enemy's parry and possibly dodge chance. It would certainly make sense from how combats go.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-10, 02:37 PM

Yes, melee always "hits" but is opposed by the enemy's chance to dodge and parry, reduced by having high Weapon Skill. Ranged has a hit chance, but can still be dodged and is affected by cover modifiers. Probably the more interesting thing about ranged is that every hit% above the cap of 95% is converted to crit%, so you can't waste having an enormous Ballistic Skill.

zlefin

2024-01-10, 05:21 PM

(enemy hp)/(your damage) < (your hp)/(enemy damage).

I wonder when this happened; I haven't played crps so much these decades. Iirc it was different in the old days; more chance of encountering really dangerous stuff and less of a clear ordering to ensure you didn't take on risks out of order. I'm remembering Pool of Radiance for instances, and died quite a bit there; also Realmz. A related factor is how hard it is to escape if you realize a fight is too tough for you; some games, especially these days, it's fairly feasible to just plain run away from stuff.

I wonder if it's more 'by default they aren't hard' or more 'the default setting most users prefer is one that isn't hard', or if there's really a meaningful distinction between the two. I do think there's been a change in the expected difficulty of games over the decades, perhaps due to market evolution or the more widespread adoption of computers.

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-10, 06:24 PM

Stronger stories guiding progression has been a thing since at minimum Ultima 7, and I believe tying area access (and this monster access) to story progression happened sometime between Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights (Bioware game). For games that retained the open world model Oblivion seemed to make level scaling to remove the risk the done thing.

The ideal would of course let you stumble across ridiculous difficulty while providing somewhat more subtle signs it's there. But that's harder to make enjoyable.

Errorname

2024-01-10, 07:13 PM

The ideal would of course let you stumble across ridiculous difficulty while providing somewhat more subtle signs it's there. But that's harder to make enjoyable.

Obsidian's never made a game world as pretty as what Bethesda are capable of, but New Vegas's worldmap having that soft-railroad is probably my favourite world design I've ever seen in an RPG.

Lord Raziere

2024-01-10, 09:06 PM

Obsidian's never made a game world as pretty as what Bethesda are capable of, but New Vegas's worldmap having that soft-railroad is probably my favourite world design I've ever seen in an RPG.

And Obsidians better for it. if anything in the last decade has shown us a "pretty" or "big" game has little to do with whether its "fun" or "good".

we have indie titles innovating new stuff on graphics that are supposed to be "outdated" while mainstream games only seem to make bigger worlds with more pretty lights and feeling empty. get rid of the boring fields of Starfield and get some bespoke handcrafted environments that are actually fun. BotW/ToTK won't last, because how many times can you really make an open world Hyrule with the same toolkit gimmick before it gets old?

and at some point with open worlds, making it bigger is just not going to be.....a good idea anymore. like, how much playspace do you really need before your like its enough y'know? like we already have No Man's Sky with its generation nonsense being more stuff than you can ever play. and I'm pretty sure open worlds are past the point where its reasonable to expect you to actually do everything in them.
at some point, you have to actually start filling those maps instead adding more space to them, or start y'know actually making bespoke/handcrafted content because wandering around open fields doing random stuff gets old sooner or later.

like if we stop trying to make open worlds bigger and start working on whats actually in them, that might be a win because if we stop where we are in terms of size and grpahics, who cares? its what in the space that matters now, not how big the space is. limits as they say, allows for creativity. ToTK may be the peak of open worlds now, but if you can make a game at the sizes we have now or even a bit less big and focus on quality and density of things to do in them, you could have tons of great things happen. like at some point with things are going now, people are just spending more to do the same things they did in previous games but with expending more processing power and electricity. pretty graphics and massive worlds are basically money holes, they don't return anything meaningful.

Errorname

2024-01-10, 10:12 PM

Got back into Into The Breach, and damn can these guys make a tactics game. I kind of prefer FTL's general premise but Into The Breach is one of the tightest designed games I've ever played.

warty goblin

2024-01-10, 10:22 PM

I wouldn't necessarily hold up Obsidian as a shining beacon compared to Bethesda. The Outer Worlds is somewhat less boring than Starfield, but is somehow even less ambitious. And yes Obsidian has done some good stuff, but they also perpetrated the crime against party AI and camera control that is Neverwinter Nights 2.

I'm not even really sure I'd hold up indies as a font of inspiration. Yes on net most new ideas come out of indies, but there's an absurd number of them - just over 14,500 games came out on Steam last year, by any sane qualification most are indie, and I guarantee you any random sample will contain enough absolutely derivative drek to leave you begging for a nice Assassin's Creed map of icons to clear. Even among indies a bit more ambitious than Anime Boob Puzzle Game #3469, how many are a pixel art metroidvania inspired by Dark Souls, a Vampire Survivors clone (but with anime boobs), a Slay the Spire knockoff, a 16 bit RPG inspired by the classics, an artsy platformer about sad children, or one of the otherstaple genres a small team with no money can actually execute?

It ain't 1992 any more. Gaming is pretty mature, which means derivative interactions on existing formulas.

Errorname

2024-01-10, 10:48 PM

I'm holding up a specific game design choice in a specific game as superior to Bethesda's approach.

The Outer Worlds is aggressively unambitious, but it's legacy will be determined by how Obsidian follows it up, it's very obviously a first step to establish an inhouse pipeline for action RPGs. If Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 turn out, then the Outer Worlds becomes a Fallout 3. Not a great game, but an important stepping stone without which better games wouldn't exist.

Zevox

2024-01-10, 11:50 PM

Beat the final ending of Armored Core 6 today.
Ah, there's that Dark Souls writing, an ending that leaves me going "what the hell even was that?" Everything about Allmind was about as clear as mud - what was it, why did it do what it did, how the hell was Igauzu somehow part of it (and why did the writers think him being pissy at you was important enough to toss him into this ending), what even is "Coral release," why would you being doing it, the hells happened when you did it... blech. After all that, I think the best ending is still the first one I did. It's a bit abrupt, but it's a satisfying resolution of the narrative. Carrying out Walter's mission and igniting a new Fires of Ibis has too many morally questionable/bad elements to it, while this third ending just kind of comes from nowhere and doesn't feel like it fits the game's narrative in the slightest.

Sadly, the final boss for that ending, while almost certainly the most difficult in the game, was not so in a fun way. Allmind itself was probably not as hard as an individual boss as the other three particularly hard ones (Ibis, Snail, and Ayre), it's the fact that they give it allies in two of its three phases, which are all difficult to take out. The batch in the first phase because they're fast and evasive, the ones in the second because they have a ton of health. I wound up having to ignore the ones in the second phase and hope that Ayre would draw their fire just because it was taking way too much ammo to kill them, too - it's a blessing that reaching the final phase automatically destroys them. Honestly, if I could've gotten to that phase with most of my repair kits (and more of my ammo) intact more consistently it wouldn't have taken me nearly as many tries, I think, but with the boss getting so much help, that's a pain in the rear to accomplish.
Still, it's a pretty darn good game on the whole, quite a bit of fun. I enjoyed tinkering with the different mech builds a lot, and the missions are quite varied in design. I think this helps cement my personal feeling that I like FromSoft best the further they get away from Souls game design, as aside from having some tough bosses, AC6 is nothing like a Souls game, and I definitely like it more than their Souls-based games that I've played. Probably even Sekiro, my previous favorite from them, which itself has more to set it apart from standard Souls gameplay than the rest, despite having a fair bit more in common with them than AC6 does.

Also, a brief summary of my last few days playing Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising:

Trying out Cagliostro: okay, took some time to get used to this character, she forces me to think of the game in a very different way than I normally do, but she's fun. Not a favorite, but definitely going into my rotation of characters to play.

You know, I should try the other characters I liked in the original game back when it came out again, Katalina and Percival, I bet they're still fun.
[A couple of hours of playing Katalina later]: Gods this is boring. Holy crap, this character has nothing cool or fun, even with her ultimate specials. Feels like all she can do is poke. Blech, well, Percival will be better, surely.
[A couple of hours of playing Percival later]: How is he so bad?! He needs his special resource just to do basic combos? I didn't think that was the case before, but looking back at some old videos, apparently it was. That's terrible. Someone like this who has to stock up on a character-specific resource should be getting noticeable benefits from it, not need it to do what everyone else can do normally. And he's been nerfed - his command grab now does literally nothing mid-screen, as it does no damage on its own but now it leaves the enemy too far for any combo unless you're in the corner. He's more fun than Katalina with his command dash stuff and some fancier combos, but wow, he must be one of the weakest characters in the game as it stands, about all he has to recommend him is the range on a couple of normals.

Well, okay, lesson learned, guess I'm leaving those two behind. Not that I'm lacking fun characters in this game, but still, that was a bit of a shock, I remember liking those two four years ago when the original game first came out.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-11, 12:32 AM

Beat the final ending of Armored Core 6 today.
[spoiler=Story]Ah, there's that Dark Souls writing, an ending that leaves me going "what the hell even was that?" Everything about Allmind was about as clear as mud - what was it, why did it do what it did, how the hell was Igauzu somehow part of it (and why did the writers think him being pissy at you was important enough to toss him into this ending), what even is "Coral release," why would you being doing it, the hells happened when you did it... blech. After all that, I think the best ending is still the first one I did. It's a bit abrupt, but it's a satisfying resolution of the narrative. Carrying out Walter's mission and igniting a new Fires of Ibis has too many morally questionable/bad elements to it, while this third ending just kind of comes from nowhere and doesn't feel like it fits the game's narrative in the slightest.

The technology that ties you to the core is enabled through Coral, which acts as a brain-machine interface. Coral Release is the realization that you could supercharge the Coral and merge consciousness into it, which is what ALLMIND wants to do to expand itself into a fully dominant hivemind. It identifies several candidates to be its instrument in enacting the plan and being the wetware that's going to run ALLMIND after it assimilates one of them. Iguazu, being a GEN4 augment like you, is whitelisted as one of those candidates since he's viable and also prone to manipulation. As for why you did it, that's more of a question to the player, but it's essentially what you did in the Liberation ending with a much more definitive payoff. Unlike the Liberation ending, Release actually has an answer for what to do with the Coral. You merge everyone on the planet into it and create a new lifeform in the process.

There's a whole lot of additional content in the log files and such that clarifies most of this. For instance, Coral Release was attempted before under Dolmayan, through a Coral Consciousness called Seria. They had a similar bond like you and Ayre until Dolmayan realized he was about to kick off the Human Instrumentality Project and backed out. There's some implication that ALLMIND is actually Seria continuing to pursue the plan, too. When you kill Dolmayan, its voice shifts to an uncharacteristically savage and merciless tone to insult him that it doesn't use anywhere else. He even calls out her name as he's dying.

Coincidentally, this is why I think the Liberation ending is actually the bad one. For one, it solves nothing about the Coral. We know the stuff is a living bomb, multiplying at an exponential rate, and very close to escaping the planet. The Liberation ending might save the current Rubicon, but it's about to unleash a self-replicating bioweapon that can obliterate whole solar systems. Further, you might beat Arquebus and Balam, but more corporations will come seeking Coral - it's going to be one planet versus the galaxy, a never-ending battle for Raven and Ayre. On top of all that, Ayre might talk a sweet tune, but the only other Coral being we know about was manipulative and vindictive, and there's some hints that Ayre was two-timing the player. Iguazu mentions hearing her voice before, for instance.

Fires is extreme, but it's sacrificing one planet to eliminate a horrible plague from escaping. It's nuking the facility to stop the zombie outbreak. The whole plan was setup by Walter and Carla to work, as they explain why it's different to the original Fires of Ibis: the Coral is concentrated at the Vascular plant so the chain reaction will be big enough to get all of it, unlike Ibis which set it off on a whim.

The whole game's narrative deals with the ideas of servitude and freeing yourself from the yoke. I think all the endings line up nicely with that theme. Fires says the answer is to carry out the terms of your service and be free after. Liberation opines that you should find a service you believe in to dedicate yourself to. Alea Iacta Est/Release pushes that the answer is to break everything and find freedom by building it out of the pieces.

Tastes vary, but I think it's the best plot FromSoftware has written to date. Each ending has its positives and negatives, while providing a resolution to the story in their own way. The trademark ambiguity is still there in some areas, but you can have far more interesting discussions regarding why one course of action speaks to you than you could in the Dark Souls series, which was so ambiguous it mostly came down to which characters you liked more.

DaedalusMkV

2024-01-11, 12:33 AM

Even among indies a bit more ambitious than Anime Boob Puzzle Game #3469, how many are a pixel art metroidvania inspired by Dark Souls, a Vampire Survivors clone (but with anime boobs), a Slay the Spire knockoff, a 16 bit RPG inspired by the classics, an artsy platformer about sad children, or one of the otherstaple genres a small team with no money can actually execute?

It ain't 1992 any more. Gaming is pretty mature, which means derivative interactions on existing formulas.
I mean, there are still a lot of very standout indie games. To your point, if we accept that maybe one in 1000 new games is something that can really push the boundaries of the medium (and also define no-effort asset flips and anime p*rn game #69 as 'not new', which I think is fair), then obviously the indies are going to produce a lot more of those real standout games than the AAA studios - this year had somewhere in the realm of 120 AAA releases compared to about a thousand indie games. But I still think it's a mistake to underestimate the potential for a real creative-type game developer to release something that totally breaks the mold. It then usually creates a new mold which creates a zillion sequels (oh, what's that, Cave Story inspired a hundred pixel art metroidvanias?), but that's just how the world works. Like, let's be honest. What was the most influential game of 2015? The Witcher 3? Oh, geez, that basically redefined the open-world action RPG. Um. Undertale? Uhh, wow, I picked a heck of a year, huh? I guess that example isn't the best... Fine, I'll just default to Minecraft. Made by one guy, became a multi-billion dollar media empire, inspired effectively an entire genre. Or, yeah, Undertale, which also inspired basically an entire genre.

Interesting. I actually found Allmind not terribly difficult as a final boss, to the point that I beat it on my first attempt. I wasn't even using a particularly nasty build on my third playthough; double linear rifles in my hands and either a pair of vertical-launch plasma missiles or 10-cell direct missiles on the shoulders (plasmas as a default, switching to the direct shots if the roof was too low for vertical-launch), with a fairly high-mobility medium-weight reverse joint build. I just focused everything I had on Allmind's main machine in each phase and got through it without too much trouble each time. Ayre gave me way, way more trouble than that - took me probably 20 attempts to beat her, and I had to switch builds several times when my initial setup proved to be just insufficient to kill her first phase in any meaningful time frame.

As for the story, I tend to call the third ending the 'being an idiot' ending. Because you'd have to be utterly stupid to ever go along with it. It requires you to actively sabotage Walter's plans on multiple occasions on the word of an entity which has given you absolutely no reason to trust it (and in fact which has actively attempted to murder you multiple times already), in pursuit of a goal which you know effectively nothing about and which the people in the know seem to think will probably be Really Bad News, in the vague hope that it will result in a good outcome somehow. And you need to keep doing it while Allmind blatantly lies to your face, despite the only justification for doing any of this being 'because Allmind asked me to'. And then you need to murder literally every named character in the game except Ayre, and probably cause the extinction of the human race, to do it. If Walter's ending is the 'pessimist' ending (humanity can't be trusted with the Coral) and Ayre's is the 'optimist' (our plan requires us to stand against everything the corporations can bring to bare for long enough to establish a functional society and convince the rest of humanity that our way of doing things is better than theirs), Allmind's ending is the 'I have severe brain damage' route.

Honestly, I can't imagine any logical reason anyone would choose this course of action. It's bat**** insane, and the only reason I did it was for the sake of experiencing the entire game. But I think it's probably the single most evil route in all of Armoured Core, and I'm counting the Old King ending of For Answer in which the player decides to kill 800 million people for fun.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-01-11, 12:44 AM

It certainly doesn't doom all of humanity. At least not immediately. Any action you take on Rubicon only affects the planet. At worst, you pull a Gendo and force-merge all the survivors on the planet into the goo. It's not a morally good ending. If the Walter ending is you being a dutiful hound and finishing the wishes of your master because he took care of you and Liberation is you finding a new home and purpose tying yourself to the fate of Rubicon, the Alea Iacta Est ending is the player saying "All of you are trying to pull one on me, I'm taking my girlfriend and going home over everyone's bodies." Or at least at the beginning it's you bucking the chains and trying to find a third way out, up until ALLMIND turns on you and you have to take it out to be truly free.

I don't disagree that it's an insane ending. It fits with Armored Core's secret endings often being the selfish or evil one, though.

Lord Raziere

2024-01-11, 03:11 AM

It ain't 1992 any more. Gaming is pretty mature, which means derivative interactions on existing formulas.

Who cares about ambition!? As long as its good, ambition seems pretty irrelevant to me.

"Ambition" gets us Starfield. "Ambition" gets us empty open world games like we're doing right now. say what you will about The Outer Worlds, but at least I could play it, finish it, it had something to say, had themes and a story that had a point. thats lightyears better than Starfield.

and who cares about even trying the drek? its drek. you don't play drek, you swipe left until you find the good stuff, the gems. filters are your friends. and yes everything is derivative, what great wisdom, I'll file it next to "the sun rises in the morning". people coming up with tons of stuff and people filtering for the good things is just how media works, ain't no use complaining about it.

relevant meme:

https://i.redd.it/4xtfoej4mso71.png

Rynjin

2024-01-11, 03:39 AM

Yes, but that's not what I'm talking about. There's just something understandable about 'I wanted to feel more sensation so I rammed a red hot poker into my genitals'.

Given that you (presumably) have not done this, I doubt it's all that understandable. Especially given the circ*mstances leading up to that idea. Like, an infinite universe to explore with infinite time to experience infinite new things and you're...bored? Bored enough to burn your **** off because you've never done it before? Why? That's ****ing stupid.

Who cares about ambition!? As long as its good, ambition seems pretty irrelevant to me.

"Ambition" gets us Starfield.

Ambition is what makes a game good, much of the time. It's how fresh new ideas are born.

Starfield is one of the least ambitious games of the modern era. It's a subpar rehash of Bethesda's last 4 games. It takes zero risks, changes zero things of value in the formuka or overall gameplay, and does not aspire to be anything other than a mediocre product designed to be sold to suckers who still believeBethesda could amke a good game if they put their mind to it (like me).

The only difference between Starfield and the yearly Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, or Madden releases is that Starfield for some indecipherable reason took 8 years to develop instead of 8 months despite being a glorified Fallout 4 mod.

Ignimortis

2024-01-11, 04:40 AM

Who cares about ambition!? As long as its good, ambition seems pretty irrelevant to me.

Hell nah. Starfield's only ambition is to be as pointlessly large as possible and it achieves that by heavy-handed procedural generation, thus throwing away the last advantage Bethesda games had on their competitors - a hand-crafted world that always offers something new beyond the horizon. Everything else about Starfield is supremely unambitious and incoherent, being an unapologetic rehash of everything they've done the same way since forever.

Eldan

2024-01-11, 05:51 AM

Who cares about ambition!? As long as its good, ambition seems pretty irrelevant to me.

relevant meme:

https://i.redd.it/4xtfoej4mso71.png

Being unambitious gave us Outer Worlds. Which is just such a duuuuulll game. Boring world, boring story, boring gunplay, boring levelling system, boring characters, boring quests. Hooray, I get to pop out from behind rocks and fire an assault rifle at raiders. Behold the imagination, behold the wonder.

Rynjin

2024-01-11, 06:14 AM

The Outer Worlds was a great game right up until I left the first planet. It's like they blew their narrative load there and had nothing left for the rest of the game.

GloatingSwine

2024-01-11, 06:50 AM

Ambition is what makes a game good, much of the time. It's how fresh new ideas are born.

Generally when a game gets called "ambitious" there's an unspoken "we recognise these ambitions were unmet but want to say something nice anyway".

Fresh new ideas are born from craft and imagination.

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-11, 06:57 AM

Tbf while I enjoyed playing TOW I never actually finished the first planet. I think I just kept running into enemy fights that felt a little bit too difficult and just never booted it up again.

Honestly at this point I'd love a platforming RPG. Like just a story based game with platforming challenges instead of gameplay, and you unlock new traversal abilities instead of new combat powers. Set it in a small but dense open world or some kind of dungeon with many routes closed off to the player.

Actually I've had this idea for quite a while. Big alien structure crumbling to ruins, you are Jo Blogs low ranking member of an exploration team. You enter the structure with a scanner, bag, and a jetpack with limited fuel, and have to bring back resources/artefacts to unlock more jetpack fuel, tools, and environmental protections. No enemies, just you the rest of the crew to bond and conflict with.

Batcathat

2024-01-11, 07:04 AM

That sort of sounds like a video game equivalent to Rendezvous with Rama (admittedly in tone more than gameplay), which would potentially be pretty cool.

Eldan

2024-01-11, 07:45 AM

Tbf while I enjoyed playing TOW I never actually finished the first planet. I think I just kept running into enemy fights that felt a little bit too difficult and just never booted it up again.

So, a party-based Metroidvania?

Anonymouswizard

2024-01-11, 07:54 AM

That sort of sounds like a video game equivalent to Rendezvous with Rama (admittedly in tone more than gameplay), which would potentially be pretty cool.

You'd basically have to get a good writer in to give you a good network of interpersonal relationships.

So, a party-based Metroidvania?

Not sure if it would be party based or not, but yes loosely a combat-free metroidvania. I'm not even sure there would be traps, ideally I'd want all the challenges to be traversal and route planning.

The biggest difficulty would be making repeated runs to and from the entrance(s) fun, because in my vision of the perfect iteration of this game there would be no fast travel

Eldan

2024-01-11, 08:08 AM

Oh, I'd love that. Not enough games do interesting traversal and exploration and even better if there was one without combat.

Batcathat

2024-01-11, 08:11 AM

You'd basically have to get a good writer in to give you a good network of interpersonal relationships.

I nominate Becky Chambers, on account of "To Be Taught, if Fortunate" basically being about about the interpersonal relationships of a group of explorers (of exoplanets rather than big alien structures, but still).

Now I should probably stop trying to drag books into the video game thread. :smalltongue:

GloatingSwine

2024-01-11, 08:34 AM

Barring the upgrades, of which it has none, this is basically Outer Wilds. Quite possibly the best videogame ever.

Eldan

2024-01-11, 09:55 AM

While Outer Wilds is great, I'd argue that ability progression and possibly resource management would be absolutely central to an exploration game as described.

Lord Raziere

2024-01-11, 10:50 AM

I'm not wrong. The ambition of the pointless bigness leads to the other problem by focusing the resources on making MORE WORLD they never stopped to think about the world they had better. resources are finite, so of course they spent it all super-bigness then forgot that they had to actually fill all that space in a limited amount of time, rather than limiting the worlds they could work on and thus making them BETTER. its totally ambitious, which is why the incoherent stuff happened because they didn't think it through and thought they could fill that big area with ideas that probably never came to be.

Yeah, and replayed it and had fun, unlike Starfield, which I can't play.

and guess what unambition also gives us? every indie game that accepts they can only do a 2D world, and makes the best of it. Undertale, Hollow Knight, Shovel Knight, Wandersong, things like them.

Eldan

2024-01-11, 11:30 AM

Are you really calling Hollow Knight unambitious. The huge game made by like three people, that was entirely hand-drawn and animated. Unambitious.

Or Starfield "ambitious". The game that's running on the same engine Bethesda have been using for over 20 years now and that has the exact same gameplay as all thei r other games.

Lord Raziere

2024-01-11, 11:45 AM

Are you really calling Hollow Knight unambitious. The huge game made by like three people, that was entirely hand-drawn and animated. Unambitious.

Or Starfield "ambitious". The game that's running on the same engine Bethesda have been using for over 20 years now and that has the exact same gameplay as all thei r other games.

I think I've given a sufficient amount of information to conclude that I don't think ambitious is a positive word in this context. So don't act like this is a comedy skit where its sooooo unbelievable that I have a different viewpoint and definition of a word than you. Arguing over definitions is cringe and a waste of time, so just substitute whatever word you think would be more fitting for what I'm talking about, I don't care.

my point stands is that the bigger game is worse than the smaller game, game size is what is "ambition" to me. you seem to be talking about detail and care, which is what I'm arguing in favor of introducing more of by reducing size.

warty goblin

2024-01-11, 12:17 PM

Taking "ambition" to be synonymous with "big" seems like a very weird, kinda meme driven personal choice to me. Ambitious generally means trying to do something difficult, risky, and potentially unprecedented. In the realm of videogames that can be "big" in the colloquial sense of "a big job" or "a big risk" without meaning "big" in terms of how many square km of virtual topography is being simulated. Scorn was definitely ambitious in the sense of being risky and experimental, it is not a very large game in terms of digital real estate.

Saying bigger is always worse is the same bad, overly linear thinking as saying bigger is always better, just with a flipped sign. I don't think you even need to get silly and reductive about it, space in games is a tool, and like most tools it can be used well or badly.

Lord Raziere

2024-01-11, 12:27 PM

I didn't say bigger is always worse. You said that. I am making a point about specific context and trend in videogames and how to fix it. If you draw absurd conclusions like that from what I say, yes I have to clarify so you don't have them anymore, but I don't feel responsible for you making them.

LibraryOgre

2024-01-11, 12:29 PM

It doesn't necessarily need to be rape... there've no doubt been many heirs born to those who laid back and thought of England (or cheerleaders), and ones sired by men who were thinking of the stableboy, but knew that the Duchy needed an heir and a spare.

Eldan

2024-01-11, 12:36 PM

No, that's not what I mean. Pure size is not ambition, is what I mean. Just because something is big does not mean the people who did it had any ambition. Ambition is a drive to try new things.

Hollow Knight was created by a handful of people, who created an entire world, thousands of enemies, animations, powers, rooms. Music, artwork, all of it. It is an absolutely colossal project for those who attempted it.

Meanwhile, Starfield is hundreds of people slapping together an existing engine and then limply ejacul*ting some procedural generation all over it. THere's no drive there. No energy. They didn't *try* to make something big, they just heaped up a lot of stuff and declared it complete.

One person writing a fifty thousand word novel is ambitious. A hundred thousand people each selecting a word from a dictionary is not, though the amount of words you get in the end is bigger.

Lord Raziere

2024-01-11, 12:43 PM

No, that's not what I mean. Pure size is not ambition, is what I mean. Just because something is big does not mean the people who did it had any ambition. Ambition is a drive to try new things.

One person writing a fifty thousand word novel is ambitious. A hundred thousand people each selecting a word from a dictionary is not, though the amount of words you get in the end is bigger.

well okay since your insisting on definitions, lets make us both wrong:

am·bi·tion
/amˈbiSHən/
noun
a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work.
"her ambition was to become a pilot"

ambition thus neither means trying new things nor doing something big, but technically you can say that Hollow Knight required more strong desire, determination and hard work, so technically you can say your correct but not in the way you claim, so therefore, you win the definition whatever this is, happy?

Eldan

2024-01-11, 12:54 PM

It's not about winning. Common vocabularly is required for any kind of clear communication.

And Starfield breathes half-assedness out of every pore. By the very definition you posted. No hard work, no determination, just working to spec based on things that had been done before.

Lord Raziere

2024-01-11, 01:07 PM

It's not about winning. Common vocabularly is required for any kind of clear communication.

And Starfield breathes half-assedness out of every pore. By the very definition you posted. No hard work, no determination, just working to spec based on things that had been done before.

You could just agree with me that its bad instead of having a pointless conversation about whether something is ambitious or not. I don't super-care all that much how something is bad, bad is bad and there are many ways to define HOW something is bad from many viewpoints, in some ways Starfield is both ambitious and not ambitious to me because I can see your viewpoint and don't see any reason why would it invalidate my own or why mine would invalidate yours. Thats how subjectivity works, or so I have been told.

Bohandas

2024-01-11, 01:27 PM

Yes, but that's not what I'm talking about. There's just something understandable about 'I wanted to feel more sensation so I rammed a red hot poker into my genitals'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5mrmW8QT9Q

Cygnia

2024-01-11, 01:29 PM

Finished "Purrgatory" (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1713610/Purrgatory/), a free game that had been in my Steam backlog for a year or so.

It's cute, but not very intuitive in terms of What To Do. Still, the set-up and the character interactions were endearing.

Zombimode

2024-01-11, 02:09 PM

I made some progress into Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. I got as far as the fourth misson ("Kalash Site") but I fear I have to admit that this game might not be for me.
Which is a shame since I do enjoy its presentation and style.

Gameplay and the controls haven't really "clicked" with me from the start. The final nail was that I discovered that the enemy will just infinitely spawn units and there is nothing you can do about. And.. that's just not the kind of game I won't to play. Maybe it is just this mission, from a quick google search "infinite enemy waves" seems to be a common complaint about Deserts of Kharak.
I will keep it installed for now because maybe I feel the urge to try my hand at it again.

So, what else to do with my gaming evening? For some reason Octopath Traveler seems attractive to me, so I will start that instead :smallsmile:

Saambell

2024-01-11, 02:22 PM

Been trying to get more play time in a Left 4 Dead clone that's jam packed with live service nonsense(1). Sadly its just not great without friends to play with in voice call, and its annoying that by the time I can get a group together, the live service progress system has reset. I've unlocked the first 2 or 3 of each reward tree several times now.

Otherwise have played a couple of Slay the Spire clones(2), the most ambitious of them being a hex based roguelite(3) with auto attacks and only using limited use cards for skills and special attacks.

Been fussing with mods on a open world fantasy game(4), but the thing is stuck crashing every time I leave the starting room, so that's on hold for now.

Not sure if I should play a GTA clone with RPG elements(5) next, get back to a talking simulator with a tactics game stapled on to it(6), or play an excel spread sheet with a history skin spread on top(7).

1:Deep Rock Galactic, 2:Last Evil, 3: Loop Queen, 4: Skyrim, 5: Cyberpunk, 6: Balders Gate III, 7: Crusader Kings III

Rynjin

2024-01-11, 04:21 PM

That sort of sounds like a video game equivalent to Rendezvous with Rama (admittedly in tone more than gameplay), which would potentially be pretty cool.

It was reasonably cool when they did it in 1996. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama_(video_game))

Ross Scott/Accursed Farms has a pretty solid video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu4n5YXPaMQ) on it on Youtube.

Batcathat

2024-01-11, 04:44 PM

It was reasonably cool when they did it in 1996. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama_(video_game))

Ross Scott/Accursed Farms has a pretty solid video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu4n5YXPaMQ) on it on Youtube.

Oh yeah, I think I've heard of that one, but despite my love of both the book and old school adventure games I've never played it. The fact that it's also based on the sequel makes me a little worried though, but maybe I should check it (or possibly just that video) out.

Erloas

2024-01-11, 05:00 PM

Obsidian's never made a game world as pretty as what Bethesda are capable of, but New Vegas's worldmap having that soft-railroad is probably my favourite world design I've ever seen in an RPG.
Maybe it's because I've been though the area and came from Fallout 1&2 but I didn't like the map in New Vegas at all (also didn't like 3), it seemed way too small and was completing missing the feel of a post apocalyptic desert wasteland. The "we can't safely get to this far away city for something" when you can literally see that other city from the edge of where you are. None of the cities seemed believable either.
I thought a lot of the same in 3, it was at least set in an urban area but it was packed so full it never felt like long after the apocalypse.
The first games had lots of empty space even if most of it was fast traveled across. The cities were fuller and felt like they could actually work and were the remnants of something real plus post destruction rebuild.

I think that's a big problem with most RPGs, nothing is built to a scale to believe and feel real. You really just need some "empty" space and that seems to go against game world building at this point.

Eldan

2024-01-11, 05:04 PM

Some newer RPGs manage scale pretty well. Witcher 3 and Kingdom Come had cities and open land that felt pretty good.

Batcathat

2024-01-11, 05:28 PM

The first games had lots of empty space even if most of it was fast traveled across. The cities were fuller and felt like they could actually work and were the remnants of something real plus post destruction rebuild.

As much as I love the early Fallout games, I don't agree about the cities being any more believable when you think about it. They basically have the same problem as the cities in New Vegas or Skyrim, where even the "major" cities are basically village-sized with a population to match.

What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age [Archive] - Page 3 (2024)

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