Fenixp

Dishonored 2. So I got the opportunity to try the game out via family sharing and after playing it for 3 hours, I bought it instantly. Now, before I start hyping it up, a disclaimer: On one hand, I'm playing on a computer below recommended specs, and my CPU doesn't even meet the minimal requirement so it shouldn't come as a surprise (i5 2400 CPU, GTX 970 GPU, 8 gigs of RAM, no SSD) that the game doesn't perform great, but it doesn't perform great, especially since I'm playing on high preset. Well, to be more accurate - some locations can dip my framerate down to 30. My average framerate, however, was hovering somewhere around 50FPS. YMMV. Regardless, I am certainly getting framerate issues and while Arkane is supposed to be working on a patch, it's not been released yet. With that out of the way, if Dishonored 2 keeps up with the quality set by its tutorial and first levels, it's going to become my late GOTY of 2016. It's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. It builds up on its predecessor and adds in areas that people disliked about it - so, for instance, you can refuse the special powers offered by the Outsider and play without them, including blink. The game has been designed and optimized around this option in mind. If you choose to accept these powers, Dishonored 2 extends the skill tree available in Dishonored 1 for Corvo and unlocks a brand new one for Emily. At the start of the game you are essentially choosing a class and this'll make replays even better. Then, a lot of people disliked that Dishonored didn't offer enough ways of non-violently taking down opponents. While this issue was already fixed in Knife of Dunwall, Dishonored 2 takes all of these improvements and adds some of its own, like neurotoxin darts which'll make inflicted person forget ever seeing you (who cares about brain damage, at least you'll remain a ghost, right?) Oh and guards had their eyes checked out, so now they actually have peripherral vision. They still suck at looking up tho. What people tended to like about the original on the other hand was level design - and boy, did Arkane deliver. The first level offers insane amount of various paths and means of approaching it, and all of them feel incredibly natural. You'll be going from sewers to apartments infected by bloodflies to rooftops to exploring office buildings, all of this entirely seemless and open-ended. Good news is tho that open world is not something the game does - it's still just open-ended maps with astounding amounts of details put into them. And boy, are they detailed. I have posted some pictures over yonder, but they don't even begin to comprehend the insane amounts of detail put into the game. Just about each and every apartment or building that you enter has its own feel to it, its own ambiance and often little stories told either using environments or notes you can find lying about. I don't think I need to mention the sheer amount of talent which went into the game's art direction, it should be readily apparent. Sadly, the game still retains some issues from the original - namely, it's short if you just fight through it, and fighting through it is still a viable strategy if you don't care about ghost or non-lethal playthroughs. Even without powers, you're master swordsman who can take on 2, 3 opponents at once. While the combat can be challenging on higher difficulties, especially with enemies using firearms, it's not been made a playstyle that the game would actively discourage from and while gaining powers, you're going to become super-powerful again. Oh well.

Apologies for the compression. All of these screenshots were made on the first proper level in the game. And... I mean... Yeah.

Keep in mind that Pillars of Eternity is out for longer than Tyranny - user scores have a tendency of slowly dropping over time as people sober up somewhat. IIRC Pillars started at like 9.2 over at metacritic.

If you play RPGs for characters, storytelling or choices and consequences, go with Tyranny for sure. If you play RPGs for combat, exploration and fun spells that you have mentioned, go for Pillars of Eternity.

Oh no, sorophx really just isn't as smart as us. It's rather tragic, but there's nothing we can do about this but help him out with the puzzles.

Yeah I agree, the combat in Tyranny just doesn't work right now - at any rate, Pillars had a whole bunch of game breaking bugs on release, so Tyranny thus far seems to work at the very least.

You didn't play many Obsidian games on release, did you? :-P

Well a game made by a "forum-committee" led to a game which now seems to be well-liked by majority of its players, so it can't be considered much of a fluke-up, can it? Tyranny was made entirely without input of the community and the combat already seems to be quite widely criticized. I mean sure, Obsidian could have implemented nipsen-based combat, but they're probably much better off implementing whatever people want to play.

Normal speed with auto-pauses set up. When I figured the combat is excruciatingly slow, I switched to fast mode and auto-pause options set up - turns out this just meant it became half as excruciatingly slow, which is progress I suppose. Then I disabled auto-pause options. Then I quit putting any amount of effort into alpha striking and pre-combat positioning to speed things up. The combat is almost challenging now that I'm not even trying, but it's still not good sadly. Real-time strategy games are among my favorite genres, so I suppose there's some overlap there.

It also depends on what scale of colonization are they talking - sending in a ship to attempt to colonize entire star systems would make no real sense, but equipping the ship for building a colony once the expedition arrives would.

Good thing monster immunities were added then. At any rate, my argument stands - if Obsidian's solution is to hand me the most boring way of playing on a golden platter straight away and not giving me any options of playing the game outside of them, I'm not going to be exactly thrilled considering how much fun I could have had with Pillars, hm? First of all, Pillars of Eternity was designed to be soloable, Tyranny wasn't. Another option we have in Pillars that we don't in Tyranny. Secondly, with increasing complexity, chances of finding overpowered combinations increase exponentially. So yes, making a dumbed down system that's more difficult to exploit is a lot easier than making a highly complex one.

No, He climbed the highest mountain that's never been climbed before. That's a fairly important distinction, because if He just climbed the higher one, your argument would make a lot more sense. Naturally, He couldn't climb Olympus Mons if he wanted, since it was not technically possible. You still didn't answer the question of how was he skipping all the other unscaled mountains logical, by the way. Similarly, while colonizing the Earth, we could have hardly taken off to Moon as we didn't have the technology to do so. Argument can be made that humanity would not develop technology necessary for extragalactic travel unless this was absolutely necessary, but developing technology was also never what Mass Effect dealth with, considering it's been found ahead of natural curve, not developed. One of the primary defining factors of sci-fi is asking "What if?" and what entire Mass Effect is trying to deal with is a (rather tired) trope of "What if humanity found technology it wasn't prepared for?" What if 16th century Britain was given means of relatively easily reaching Moon or Mars? Yes, going for them would be illogical - yet our own history is filled with examples of exploration or expansion that's been fueled by very different motives than logic, like disastrous Terra Nova expedition or Napoleon's ill-conceived invasion of Russia. While you are correct about overal tendencies of human development were those of incremental progress as that's the path of least resistance (and Mass Effect isn't actually refuting this, considering the universe shows humans at large still wanting to colonize more of Milky Way), there are also many examples of highly unorthodox and dangerous ventures, which often ended up in a disaster - and that's what Mass Effect: Andromeda seems to be drawing from. It naturally won't use the principle to its actual potential, which would be turning the game into fairly hardcore survival in harsh conditions, but... I'm not about to buy it anyhow, so hey. No. Shockingly enough, I frequent discussion boards because I enjoy discussing things. Also with other people than you. Y'know, I feel like somebody should apologize for this. It would probably be better than another Mass Effect tho.

Yes, Act of War is the best. Cheesy acting and fun real time ... Ehm, "strategizing" if you could call it that.

That's turn-based tho. Turn-based combat is rubbish. Just rubbish. DON'T TAKE MY RTWP AWAY FROM ME!

It's literally one location with a combat encounter that's not particularly difficult to begin with (on purpose I imagine). So even if you are affected by the bug, it's not a big deal.

He didn't tho, did He? Before Mount Everest, the highest mountain He has climbed was Mount Cook in New Zeland, nowhere near the second highest mountain in the world. By your logic, before attempting to climb Mount Everest, He should have first focused on other mountains which were not scaled to date, and there was quite a few. Because that's logical progression. So why didn't He? Why did He instead make the illogical step of attempting for the highest one? I can pretty much guarantee you 'logic' wasn't part of the equation. Challenge, curiosity, prestige - those most certainly were. In fact, this is an excerpt from interview with the man himself: Source So we're back to my original question, aren't we? What exactly was logical about being the first man to climb highest mountain in the world that isn't logical about attempting to be the first man to do just about anything? As for the more in-narrative reasoning, and this is a bit of a spoiler, Reapers proved to be more than capable of scaling extragalactic distances after the events of the original Mass Effect. ... aaand we're back to ad hominems. Stay classy, Nonek. By the way, I don't really like Mass Effect series all that much. Of course it primarily exists to sell more copies, just as pretty much everything in Mass Effect. There's a reason why they chose one of the most tired sci-fi clichés for their main plotline.

I mostly sided with Disfavored because I knew how rushing castle walls with tons of weak soldiers worked out in Stronghold games...

I'm willing to bet he'd absolutely go to climb a mountain in any stupid destination if he could and the climb proved more challenging and prestigious. He couldn't tho, so Mount Everest it is. I'm also not entirely sure how do you consider him facing up to a challenge and wanting to be the first to do a possibly deadly climb logical as opposed to human colonists facing up to a challenge and wanting to be the first to colonize a different galaxy - I can pretty much guarantee you that if we had the means to travel to another galaxy, we would. Human curiosity is logical by its nature, but the way we sate this curiosity isn't. Throughout history, people have made many illogical steps in the name of curiosity, often even losing their own lives in the process. Not to mention that such a feat is quite logical even as far as Mass Effect universe goes - the logical reason why, right now, we need to try and start colonizing Solar System or Milky Way at large is for long-term survival of our species. It's the same when it comes to Mass Effect universe and lore, especially since all life in Milky Way galaxy was in danger when the mission was said to be started. Besides, there are dozens upon dozens issues with Mass Effect storytelling - I'm not entirely sure why the one thing that's actually quite believable (people wanting to try and do something noone has ever done before just for the sake of it now that they can) is the thing you take issue with.

People didn't even explore entire Solar System yet they're attempting to glimpse the rest of the Milky Way. That's what's happening right now. I'm also pretty sure Edmund Hillary didn't scale more than 1% of Earth's mountains before proceeding to Mount Everest.

Yeah, the performance complaints are mostly bollocks, but the issues you see with Linux configurations are just a start of a much larger problem with compatibility on unsupported systems. It's not that much of a problem right now as most active gamers will run supported configurations, but will the next iteration of Windows be supported? And what happens if it isn't? The original Fallout had no anti-tampering protection and I'm still playing it to this day from the original CD thanks to this - people were able to reverse engineer game's executables and ensure compatibility with modern systems. They won't be able to do anything of the sort with DOOM 4 in 2034. It's entirely possible that games using Denuvo will see official support for decades to come, but somehow I doubt it. Best case scenario is that in 5 years or so, the most popular Denuvo games will see re-releases on PC, ideally free of charge for people owning the original games - but we'll probably have to pay again like console folk do for games basically receiving HD treatment. Worst case scenario is that these games just get irreversibly lost, which is a tragedy for any work of art, and completely avoidable in this day and age. Personally, I don't mind Denuvo too much right now, but I'd generally be quite glad if it quite simply got patched out when crucial period of a title's sales ends - like a year or 6 months down the line, while it's still actively supported. That's not going to happen tho.

It prevents running games which would otherwise be perfectly playable via Wine on Linux for starters. I know you have a weird hard-on for piracy, but there's no DRM which doesn't hit legitimate buyers in one way or another.

Yeah, the decision to remove recovery from potions was an ... Interesting one.

Using 5 skills all the way is not interesting and you're right, you could do that in Pillars. That's incredibly boring tho. So I didn't. Tyranny doesn't leave me with much of a choice. I'd also argue that instead of trying to solve the problems, entirely gutting the system is quite simply not the way to go - that's how Bioware got from Baldur's Gate to Mass Effect. Quite a lot, actually. Even a class like Cipher, Monk or Chanter who generate resource for using their abilities are by far more interesting than a bunch of cooldowns, purely because their skills make use of a shared pool and using one skill prevents you from using another - choosing what is it you wish to use matters, as opposed to cooldown-based system which encourages you to use all the skills, all the time. That's made even worse in Tyranny by far slower pace of combat, usually I could comfortably use all per-encounter and cooldown-based skills in sequence in most fights - time spent on casting and recovery no longer seems to be that big of a deal. And what I just talked about were merely 3 classes in the game, each generating their resources differently, with different mechanics you had to consider while designing these characters.

Back in early 00s I was lurking about a local Fallout community and it was... Basically raiders from Mad Max manifesting themselves on the internet. They didn't kick my dog per se, but I'm pretty sure detailed descriptions on how dogs can be dissected, cooked and eaten were not a rare topic of discussion :-P It was basically 4chan - and from what I heard, English speaking Fallout communities weren't much better back at the time, the game seemed to have a tendency of attracting ... Strange people. Which is telling as first Fallout is among my favorite games of all time, eh.