Fenixp

Dishonored 2 will feature highly customizeable difficulty and an optional perma-death mode. So I still have to finish my Emily high-chaos playthrough (that I've almost finished now), Emily low-chaos mostly flesh and steel playthrough, Corvo high-chaos mostly flesh and steel playthrough and then it seems I'll be bumping ALL THE DIFFICULTY options up and enabling iron man, see how far I'll get. I quite enjoy this new Dishonored game if you couldn't tell.

Moving on to the good ones, that's good.

Long War 2 is supposed to happen at some point. As it stands I feel like I was enjoying XCOM: Enemy Within with Long War a lot more than nearly vanilla XCOM 2.

So, Half-Life 3 is pretty much confirmed dead. Not that this would be particularly unexpected.

I understand point of the timers - the whole game is about guerilla warfare, and guerilla warfare is entirely based on fast hit and run attacks which are over before superior force manages to react. The thought behind them is sound. The implementation, however, is terrible and the laziest imaginable. There are many other ways to reinforce the feeling of urgency without using timers, like increasing reinforcements over time or threat of enemy just shelling the area if it looks they're going to lose it entirely (i. e. possibility of some description increasing with losing local forces) And if Firaxis really wanted to go with timers, they should have at least put some effort into them. The first and obvious bit to implement is for timers to only start when your squad loses concealment - there's a mod for this and it works, for the most part, so that's all good. Another step is to calculate timers dynamically as opposed to slapping them on the mission based on objective type - it's entirely possible that the game'll generate a mission which is literally unwinnable on time, especially when you get unlucky with VIP rescue missions. Timers should be dynamically adjusted based on distances of objectives or something along those lines. Furthermore, at least give me side-objectives in missions that'll allow me to adjust timers. This'll mitigate RNG and make the missions more interesting - like an ability to scramble enemy communications - funnily enough, Firaxis already got this right in bombing missions in the original, but somehow forgot this lesson when going into the second game. I'm entirely willing to accept timers when they're implemented intelligently and with some forethought. As it stands, Firaxis just went with the lazy and most annoying option - which I refuse to accept. Edit: Wait, I said I'll shut up about timers, didn't I? I'm a dirty, dirty liar.

As it turns out, I'm a bloody idiot and all my timers in XCOM2 are now set to 99 turns. I will shut up about the timers and play the game now.

The new Call of Duty, actually.

Well, apparently the Long War devs are working on Long War 2, so maybe they'll manage to find a way to fix that particular problem. We'll see.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=616964599 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=618055274 No need to worry about it though, it's gone from my HDD.

So I tried 2 more mods - one which should disable timers, other which should set them all to 99 turns. Neither worked. Bye bye XCOM 2, I have games that are actually fun installed.

Nope. Can't do it. Even with True Concealment mod, whenever a timer pops up (so... Always), I lose all my motivation to play XCOM2. It's not even that they'd be particularly difficult to manage, they just irritate me to no end - I enjoy coming up with overly-elaborate plans and then executing them as opposed to being efficient. Efficient's boring. So I suppose I'll download the mod to disable timers altogether and give up on the game when the first story mission with a timer comes up. *sigh* Now I'm sorry I can't refund the game to get my 12 bucks back, hope the rest of the bundle'll be worth it.

Well the sad thing is that the expansion for the first XCOM already got it right, the limited resource just wasn't as needed to act as a sufficient draw - in other words, you were usually drowning in it, but rebalance could have fixed that. See, XCOM: Enemy Within introduced resource called 'MELD'. It could only be obtained from so-called MELD canisters, two of which were present in majority of missions. The way they worked tho was that one was on a very strict time limit and difficult to obtain, while the time limit of the other was a bit looser - so getting both was fairly difficult, getting one reasonably easy, and getting none still didn't impede mission progress. And the resource acquired from the canisters wasn't critical in any way, it 'just' allowed you to purchase genetic mods for your soldiers and mech suits.

I mostly just feel that they're extremely badly implemented. As it is the game promotes reckless rushing of the objective as opposed to more systematic approach - DOOM's what I play for reckless, not a turn-based tactical strategy. And often it doesn't even make any sense. The situation would be significantly improved if: a) Countdown would only start when you break concealment (it's funny how all events get extremely urgent even when Skyranger arrives, even in spite of everything being as usual.) b) When countdown finishes, you don't get an automatic loss, but instead geometrical increase in difficulty turn by turn (rapid reinforcements) I hate time limits I can't influence in any way and I hate time limits which result in an automatic loss. Luckily I found this. I'd also like to point out that games like Darkest Dugeon or Dark Souls showed us there are much better ways of giving player incentive to take risks without stooping to such a cheap solution. Hell, the original XCOM had a good idea with MELD canisters.

Whoever came up with the idea that time limited missions of XCOM 2 (which is like... The majority I played thus far) would be fun should get smacked. I'm mostly loving the game now that it's surprised me in a monthly humble bundle, and I really looked forward to mechanics like concealment which would let me carefully position my troops before engaging - except none of that happens as careful positioning takes turns and turns are a resource the game refuses to grant me. Edit: In retrospect, overwatch crawl wasn't that bad.

While actively trying to ignore marelooke on the off-chance that I'd actually start enjoying Dragon's Dogma which'd hog all my free time, I'm playing through DOOM and Dishonored 2 again. Through DOOM because it's awesome - not much to prove there considering I've already 100% the game on second highest difficulty (ultra-nightmare just removes saving. Completely. When you die, you lose all progress through entire campaign.), it's just... Fun. I'm still having a blast playing it, even after finishing it twice and putting over 50 hours into it. Dishonored 2's a significantly different experience now that I'm trying to go for a high chaos run. The combat mechanics are a lot more fun (and a lot more challenging) than they were in the original, and I do like noticing a lot of subtle changes based on my previous actions - however, the game does not seem to be nearly as reactive as the original was, which is a big shame. Nonetheless there's a ton of details and some major parts changing based on what you're doing anyway, so it's still way above majority of games on the market. I do have to criticize guards when you attack them head-on tho, it seems that for as long as you prevent them from ringing an alarm, guards in a different courtyard will completely ignore gunshots and explosions from an adjacent street.

*sigh* You have to be this high to conquer Soutwark! And look, we can also make painfully corny jokes! Whelp, at least I found a guy who's read the security manual.

You're asking this question about a game in which you'll eventually find a wooden stick that's many times more powerful than a Witcher sword. Itemization in W3 is lazy and the entirely of progression mechanics sucks. ... So like 99% of all RPGs then!

Would be nice if you could send a bloody missive at least. "Yos, Inquisitors, since you're a bunch of incompetent b****s and I have to do everything important around here, here's my orders I send via my trusted mule, as he's significantly more capable than you lot. My orders are as follow: ... I'll now go and collect Elfroot, because when I tell you to do it, entire hunting party brings me 6 of 'em. Idiots."

They couldn't even get the town layout right...

I wouldn't discredit it entirely. If you liked the original Fallout (and if you've not played that well... Screw Arcanum and go play it, Fallout's insanely ahead of its time), Arcanum is a very nice throwback to it. It's true that the game is neither as elegant, as concise nor as functional as the original Fallout was, but it's still a very nice story to experience, and it has city of Tarant going for it which is among the best cities in RPGs (even if a little starved for content in places.) It does have a lot of problems of course - they went with a choice of whether you want to play turn-based or real-time battles, resulting in neither method working particularly well, character development is broken beyond belief when combined with (rather poor) encounter design - I could go on, the game just doesn't play very well. But the world is amazing, extremely detailed with a ton of hidden things to find and it gives you a lot of agency in how do you wish to resolve individual quests. And while Gromnir isn't wrong about individual characters being rather forgettable, many locations and stories unfolding in them will stay with you as some of the finest RPG experiences. At the price you can currently get Arcanum at, especially on sales, there's very little reason to not at least give it a shot, especially if you're a fan of classic Fallout games. Note that the large part of idiot-proof exploration actually means that the game has limited level scaling (none with fan patch), so you can meet random encounters that will kill you with no choice but to reload the game, more or less regardless of location of the map you're at. And considering method of saving the game on global map is... Rather contrived, you'll wish the game was a bit less idiot-proof (how did original Fallout get this right and Arcanum managed to screw it up is beyond me, but it's a big pet peeve of mine with the game.)

"Find cover" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEwlW5sHQ4Q

Diablo II is an entirely different game tho. The original, when played as designed at any rate (so no repeated starts of New Game with the same character) is a slow, rather methodic game where enemies are actual threat and resources are quite scarce. The game's focused on exploration, on finding right ways to approach combat and overcome difficulty, and only then is it about character development and finding ph4t l00t. It can be rather vicious, unrelenting and unforgiving experience. Whereas Diablo II... Well, we all know how Diablo II turned out. I enjoyed it at the time, but recently, I'm much more likely to replay the original as there's still nothing quite like it (that I know of anyway) Edit: 'sides https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnMR6SOBa9k

Lower right corner of the top screen

Finished Battlefield 1's campaign. Still among the best modern military shooter campaigns (yes, it's weird that a game from WW1 would belong to that lineup, eh?), but overall, there were two campaigns which were rather great, two which were merely pretty good and one which was distinctly meh. A lot better than what I expected nonetheless.

Points of interest reward you with next to no XP. You get most XP for main questline, then for secondary quests (this is tiered even further by getting more XP for secondary quests directly tied to main questline as opposed to those which are not), and you get the least XP for... Well, anything else, really. Additionally, the game rewards a lot less XP for quests which are way below your level.