sorophx

my invincible company (riders are shy, din't pick on them because of their numbers)

after the fiasco that was attemting to play Divinity Original Sin and Blackguards I decided I needed a different kind of RPG. Mount & Blade caught my eye. Installed it, tried it, and all I can say - it's very addictive. Such a simple concept, but riding around with my band of misfits killing bandits and sticking it to lords is really fun. the best thing about this game is its combat. it's very simple yet elegant: as with many other games you have two buttons: attack and defend, but unlike many similar games M&B actually manages to be smart about it. when you block, you character anticipates where the blow will come from based on the enemy's movements at the time of blocking for example, if the enemy is swinging left, your character with block right. this opens up a whole game in itself: depending on the attack speed (determined by the size of the weapon and the character's skill with this weapon) you can force your enemy to defend one side and quickly attempt to strike where he's most vulnerable. this also keeps the combat challenging no matter how many fights you've been through. ]attacks can be delayed, which can and will catch you off guard (I've been cut down more than once when I would prematurely transition from my block to an attack exposing myself to a delayed attack by the enemy, who'd swing his sword but wait for a split second forcing me to make a mistake). I don't understand why more games can't come up with stuff like this. make 8 animations: 4 for attacking and 4 for blocking and let the game do the rest. compared to the abomination that is combat in The Witcher 3 this simple system looks revolutionary. no stupid lock-ons, no unblockable attacks. I do have a few gripes with M&B's combat, though. first, there's no sprint in the game, so when you're dismounted on the battlefield you're slowly walking from engagement to engagement. this also means that you can't close/create distance between yourself and your target to try and take the initiative (when you're facing several opponents, for example; if they all are moving towards you, only options available to you are: stand still and wait for them or slowly move towards them). second, shields. shields are used mostly to deflect arrows (because you don't need shields to block or parry regular attacks - this is something that could be improved: in Warband you can't use both your sword and shield to block attacks from two sides, for example). but when you're blocking with a shield the magic is suddenly gone because it's very hard to tell which side your character is actually defending, the visual cues are gone. you only know that you're blocking something. which brings me to my actual subject: Gekokujo. this is a total conversion for Warband, that swaps the pseudo medieval Europe of the original game for 16th century Japan. the attention to detail is stunning, but the most important thing of it is: there are no shields. this *is* how Warband should've been made to begin with. this combat system married with this particular setting feel just right. I mean, combat feels sublime. but a picture is worth a thousand words, so here you go, a small sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_cNGbF4r_w

same here, really liked how it jumped between characters all the time. but I still think IX is a better game overall (better than most Final Fantasies that I've played, which is not much: from 6 to 10 (disqualifying 10-2, because it was just too weird for me to get into))

blasphemy!

when Behind Enemy Lines came out it quickly became my favorite game. really hoping this new one will manage to capture that magic

hmm, maybe I've been damaged and desensitized by all the modern warfare shooters I play, but I didn't think there was that much murdering. I do agree, murdering people left and right shouldn't be Lara's preferred way of dealing with her problems. and I don't like the gunplay in the new TR, but the enemies had really good AI routines, they'd flank me, pin me down, try to flush me out with explosives or molotovs, in a different game this combat would've felt awesome. and I liked some parts I could stealth. I just wish the shooting was the absolute last resort, but the game just had to have these huge fire fights...

I have Blackguards, maybe I should give it a go

all this talk makes me want to replay Fallout 2

the thing is I couldn't figure out how to get out of Cyseal, so I decided that it wasn't worth the trouble and you reminded me of something: when I met that ranger girl, she didn't have any weapons on her. so I gave her the only extra weapon I had - a two-handed sword. I couldn't afford any good gear at that point in the game. and I didn't feel like going all around town again and looking for a seller that had a ranged weapon in stock... basically, the starter town is laid out terribly and I got tired of having to walk everywhere

i guess I didn't miss much then :D anyway, I feel like TR has come full circle. it's probably the main reason the Uncharted games even exist, and now this new version of Lara Croft's adventures seems to have lifted everything from Uncharted, which kind of makes it the most TR game a TR game could ever be.

if only writing was the weakest part of D:OS

tried Divinity Original Sin, and it was exactly as bad as I imagined it would be. the rest of this post will be me venting, mostly, but feel free to point out where I went wrong. anyway, it is supposed to be this great game that everybody likes, the return of the old-school RPG. and I guess that means it's supposed to be badly written and designed to qualify as "old school"? the very first fight after the tutorial dungeon almost kicked my ass. I mean, the enemies were all higher level than my party, they were wiping the floor with the friendly NPCs, and the only reason I survived was because my party leveled up after one of the NPCs managed to kill an enemy, and I got the xp for that kill, instantly regaining all of the HP. then I finally make it into the first quest hub, where I'm tasked with solving a murder. and this is where the stupid really begins to show through... I talk with every named NPC I can find, and the only thing I manage to get out of them is that the victim was probably murdered by his wife. I do several circles talking with every NPC multiple times, but this gets me nowhere. I'm stuck. so I think to myself, "OK, I'll just go outside and look for trouble", but that's not what the game wants, of course. the town is on lockdown, nobody can leave. so now I'm literally stuck. I try to call upon my old-school RPG credentials to figure out what to do next. "you should probably loot the whole town empty, some quest item will inevitably show up in all that trash" my intuition tells me. and I happen to have a character that has lockpicking. only I can't pick any locks, the game won't let me, they're all magically "higher level than your skill"... the only thing left to do is to dig up corpses at the cemetery or talk to the animals in town. so I finally get a break by doing both: I find out that the victim's body is missing from his grave and his dog tells me he can sniff out the killer if I bring him something belonging to the suspect. great! oh wait... I can't take anything from NPCs' homes. OK, there's a hole in the ground at the cemetery, let's go down it and see what's there. oh, hi there mister skeleton-with-a-flamethrower, let me hit you with my sword... *the party is wiped by the blast, only leaving the mage standing against three skeleton archers* - *uninstall Divinity Original Sin* all of that frustration could've been avoided if the game was designed by an experienced team. instead it felt like playing a mod for NWN made by a first-time modder just learning the ropes. let's just go step by step: 1) the fight on the beach: the game throws two casters, 2 damage sponges and a bunch of archers of levels 2 and 3 against a party of 2 randomly picked classes, both level 1. what would be the most common outcome in that fight? probably a lot of reloads. the combat mechanics aren't any good to warrant these odds! I kept struggling to position my rogue exactly behind the enemy because the game doesn't show you where you can or cannot go, you have to drag the mouse and figure it out by trial and error. would it have killed them to add a grid to combat? and then some of the abilities take 3-4 turns to reset, but the flippin' characters don't even live that long at level 1. they had barely over 100 hp combined, and one hit by the enemy would inflict anywhere from 20 to 30 damage. and I only have two healing potions... who the hell designed this encounter? 2) the murder mystery quest: now I know I probably missed some obvious step and got stuck because I just didn't look hard enough. but this is the very first quest you get in the game, it's supposed to showcase how the rest of the game will be. if the game is all about multiple possible approaches to solving problems then show me at least two from the start. it should be obvious what to do instantly in a game that doesn't have any quest markers, otherwise the player will just be running in circles - exactly like I was. I got two hints: examine the scene and talk to some officer. did both, and then the information just dried out. if I hadn't played Fallout 2 - read: hadn't had a rich experience of digging up graves - I would've never even picked up that shovel that I found. and if the part with the victim's dog was obligatory to solve the murder... than that's the worst quest design ever: forcing me to pick a seemingly optional skill to progress in the game is just... unacceptable. 3) the cave fight: this is just an obvious way to get the player to reload and come back later. the enemy is guarding the exit from a long narrow corridor, so there's no way of just avoiding him. he immediately spawns 3 additional enemies and proceeds to incinerate whomever from the player's party is closer. he explodes on death, leaving behind a cloud of poison which also detonates, burning and poisoning everyone inside the radius for 4 turns. so unless the party has a couple of ranged characters with high damage of an appropriate type (the thing resisted crushing damage, which made no sense to my RPG brain poisoned by DnD standards) I don't see how this fight can be won without casualties. that was the last straw... there are many little things I found annoying: like the constant popping up of exclamation marks above my characters' heads, demanding I'd talk to myself for a +1 raise to a random stat, or the quality of the writing, which had be just skipping through these walls of text and reading summaries in the quest log, or that ridiculous rock-paper-scissors mini-game - I cannot imagine ever returning to this game. what a complete waste of time that was... edit: spelling

Lara's dual pistols are back, hell yeah! the glorious return of Lara Croft (haven't played a TR game since TR2 came out for the Playstation)

I'm only quoting the devs themselves

I only need them to improve the combat mechanics and add coop to the game, I will play the hell out of this new Morrowind, if they do deliver these two

that's the single thing I really disliked about W3's quest design. I mean, it's understandable when you're dealing with smells, you need to figure out which smell to follow first, but with tracks? I hated that I had to interact with a patch of dirt before some tracks would magically appear next to it

I loved exploring Morrowind, that was such an awesome game. if only its game mechanics were as good, maybe I'd find the will to replay it...

if I were to name only one game W3 reminds me the most of, I'd say: Two Worlds II. in essence, W3 looks like a spiritual successor to TWII: the way the open world is designed, with all these caves and POI; the whole exploration aspect of it, random encounters with bandits and wildlife, swimming, horseback riding (feels almost exactly the same, so does crafting); the way the character talks even (whenever Geralt threw a line at an enemy, like, "damn, you're ugly", while fighting, I'd get TWII flashbacks, because that character wouldn't shut up during combat too, with the same tone even). but you can see other influences as well: timing crucial dialogue choices like in Alpha Protocol; investigating crime scenes like in Batman Arkham games; including finishers and dismemberment in combat like in Shadow of Mordor (though, it is done a lot better in SoM); lifting quest ideas from other games: heist preparation missions like in GTA V (picking your crew members and sourcing equipment), the haunted mansion quest just like in Bloodlines etc. I don't remember all the stuff that struck me as homage or straight up ripoff, but it doesn't detract from the game, like I said in my previous post, these were the things I liked the most about it. I hated W2, it was a terrible game in my opinion, so W3 is definitely an upgrade compared to that. but it still has ways to go before I can call it the best RPG to date. we'll see how Cyberpunk turns out.

I'm a bit late to the party, but I just finished both the main campaign and HoS, and I'm done with the game. I don't know if it's oversaturation (like it was with New Vegas for me, where I went through all the DLCs right after finishing the main game, and I only managed to finish one of them, losing steam in the middle of Old World Blues) or just me getting tired of all the bull****, but Blood and Wine killed the will to play this game in me. this would've been a great game, if not for all the small annoying stuff (like the balance issues, the terrible combat system, the awful skills system, the cheating fist-fighters, the stupid horse getting stuck everywhere, uneven writing, crappy quest design in some instances etc.), but simply the amount of stuff you can do is the game's saving grace, I think. when I got tired of one thing, I'd just move onto the next, and that kept the game fresh for me for the duration of the main story line. HoS is another story, though, I don't remember when the last time was I cringed so much. it's just ridiculous, and in some places just plain stupid. but it's short, and it has that one quest, that was lifted straight from Bloodlines, and its boss fights are more interesting than anything in the main game, so it gets a passing grade from me. but I still found myself just clicking through cut scenes closer to the end (I was alternating between the main game and HoS, and at some point my patience for this "writing" ran out, I stopped caring about any of these characters). so much so, that I still don't know what the whole Wild Hunt's deal was. I killed all of them simply to get the whole thing over with. I still don't know who they were and what their motivation was. were they really the villains of the story? I don't know. who gives a ****? I did feel satisfaction when I accidentally got the best ending for Ciri (she was by far the most interesting character for me, I'd go as far as saying she was the real protagonist of the story, which made the whole thing even more annoying, because I wanted to play as her, but got very few possibilities to do it). in contrast, I felt completely stupid for having to swing a certain way in the HoS finale simply to get the "best" ending (mostly it's best in terms of rewards, but I think it's also what CDPR considers the proper ending, those hacks!), which conflicted with my personal wishes (the fact that the last sequence is poorly designed and felt rushed made things even worse; I reloaded and watched the other outcome that felt more natural, and I had a strong urge to leave it at that, but the loot you get for "properly" ending it was too much to let go of). I wanted to elaborate on the things I strongly disliked, but I don't see the point anymore. who cares? it's a flawed gem of a game. I still enjoyed it. for one thing, it's beautiful to look at, and there's always somewhere to go. it reminded me of Morrowind and Dragon Age Origins for some reason, and I have only good memories about those games. there were two sequences I really liked, though, to the point of being the best gaming experience I've had all year: Avallach's personal end-game quest and the mission to retrieve the purple rose in HoS. I also loved the whole noir aspect of it. investigating murders in the city, saving dames, listening to Geralt narrate his experiences during the investigation was really fun, I didn't expect the game to go that way, and some quests were too simple to warrant the whole investigation angle, but overall it felt really cool. ultimately The Witcher 3 lifts too much from other, better games without giving much back. and now I think I would've preferred a DLC about Ciri and her adventures as a witcher (and for those of you who say, "oh, she's too powerful for that, how would they make it interesting" - just look at the DLC for Shadow of Mordor where you play as Celebrimbor; you play as the most powerful being in the realm, having the more powerful versions of all of the abilities from the base game unlocked from the start, and it's still a harder game than the original, because all missions are designed around the player having these abilities and using them) instead of that poor excuse of a story that was HoS. edit: oh, I forgot to mention. I felt repulsed by Geralt's smug face for the duration of the game, so much so, that when I got to Novigrad and found a shop keeper with masks in stock, I bought one, put it on, and that made the whole experience so much better! I kept imagining that Geralt was a fantasy version of Moore's "Guy Fawkes" - V. I made up a small back story, that Geralt's face had been disfigured at some point between the events of W2 and W3, so he doesn't take off his mask. it went really well with his cat-eyes and his neutral voice, and it played nicely into HoS's schtick with Geralt getting branded by the Mirror Man (I laughed out loud every time Geralt would ask someone, "do you know how to get this thing off my face?"). the game actually acknowledged it in one quest! when Geralt is making preparations for the big heist, one of his crew members comments on how they all need masks, with Geralt being the only one already having one on. these small touches are what made the game enjoyable for me.

tried it. than tried Gollop's Chaos Reborn, and CR stuck with me more (I think they're very similar games).

been playing Witcher 3 and coming across these beautiful locations. I kept hitting F12 and couldn't understand why Steam wasn't saving my screenshots... two days later I realize I'm playing the GOG version

I'd like that, if the gameplay supported it fully

I played all of the FF games strictly for its combat and summons in particular. I loved collecting those, it was my childhood's Pokemon of sorts. still remember how excited I was to get Ifrit for the first time in FFVIII. I can't believe it was almost 17 years ago.

@HoonDing so you saw something too! sneaky

when Cerberus falls down from the cliff, he grabs someone at the last second and drags the poor sob with him (at least that's the impression that I got, the editing in the video was a bit too wonky)