Keyrock

I hope it turns out well. I enjoyed Mars: War Logs and I thought Bound by Flame was an improvement, so hopefully Technomancer continues that trend.

I've taken a break from Xenoblade Chronicles X (it's a MASSIVE game, I don't want to tackle it all at once) and have mostly been playing Satellite Reign. I like the game but so far I'm finding it all too easy to lose pursuit when I get spotted in a restricted area. Hopefully that's mainly due to me being still in the starting area and it gets much harder later and I actually get punished for my mistakes.

The Linux version of Divinity: Original Sin finally came out (only a year and a half late). I like the combat and the ability to manipulate objects and make elements interact. The writing, on the other hand... How do I put this nicely? Their attempts at humor are rather ham-fisted. It's pure cringe.

I mean, there's less than a week of this year left, I didn't expect CP3 to come out in 2015. As for comparing Pillars and SCL, Pillars had the far superior writing, even if the story was quite honestly boring, much better written dialogue, and a much deeper character and combat system. Yet, I eventually wound up hating Pillars and I enjoyed my time SCL. I think it came down to the fact that Pillars wound up being rather tedious to play while SCL was not. I credit that to SCL's impressively competent companion AI. I just don't have the patience to micromanage I did when I was younger and the fact that I could just control one character in SCL through all the filler battles and the rest of my party would act remarkably not like complete idiots made my gaming time so much more enjoyable.

CP3 is what I'm waiting for. No point in me even fiddling with the Dungeon Master tools until I can do branching dialogues.

I thought the gameplay, particularly the combat, in TW2 was an order of magnitude better than in TW1, and the voice acting and dialogue were much superior too. As far as the actual story, though, I though TW1 was significantly better. Overall, though, I definitely think TW2 is better than TW1.

Is that an arm? Oh dear. Thankfully, I didn't have to fight that mean looking black skell (yet?). I actually had my skell with me at the time, though it showed me out of my skell in the cutscene, but only my main character has a skell right now (they're not cheap) and it's a dinky starter skell, so no doubt that thing could wipe the floor with me.

Still Xenoblade Chronicles X. I finally got a skell (mech) so this already awesome game just got significantly better.

So, WCA happened. Anyone here watch it? More importantly, anyone here watch the closing ceremony after the grand final on BTS? I wound up falling asleep during the grand final because it was at like 2 or 3 AM where I am, but BTS showed a rebroadcast the next day so I got to see the rest of it and stuck around for the closing ceremony afterward, and boy am I glad I did. Anyone who watched that closing ceremony and wasn't already a fan of ODPixel has got to be a fan now. It was his finest hour... or 2 hours plus. It went on for over 2 hours and there must have been like 10 musical acts with ODPixel "translating" and singing along for most of it. My man went through several stages of madness and somehow emerged from it on the other side. The best part was Chinese Mr T singing We Are the Champions. It was amazing. The sucky part is that they put on a fake DJ after Chinese Mr T. I mean, she was hot and wearing an outfit that left little to the imagination, which was cool, but it was blatantly obvious that she wasn't actually doing anything and it was a prerecorded set. More importantly, how do you put on anything after Chinese Mr T? The show should have just faded to black after Chinese Mr T sang We Are the Champions. It would have been the perfect ending.

Clipboard Jesus sighting in Indy!

I didn't watch the Game Awards because it's an awards show and why would I do that to myself? I managed to make it through about 3 1/2 minutes of that youtube video before I had to turn it off because I wanted to throw my monitor out the window.

Tatsu is the best This beastie thought it was hot ****, and to fair, it was about 20 times my size. But then something much larger came along. Man, Japan sure does love its furries. By the Eye of Thunderra...

To be honest it's only worth playing once. Go in spoiler free and expect lots of awful combat. Well to be fair, I've heard praise for the game for it's writing, never for combat, so I still have an interest in playing it. I love New Vegas to death because of it's writing as well as it's RPG aspects, but it gets only modest appraisal from people for it's writing. As such, I'd be very curious to see what the games look like that have absolute critical acclaim for the writing. The combat isn't good, but, thankfully, a large chunk of it can be avoided. The writing, on the other hand is great. PS:T is still the bar by which all other RPGs get measured in terms of story, characters, and character development. It is my favorite RPG of all time.

Yeah, the auto-resolve is pretty bad in some strategy games. It's not a perfect solution, I'm just spitballing here. TToN will supposedly be the game that answers my prayers as InXile are promising no filler battles and all combat is avoidable if you're really clever. Hopefully they deliver, we'll see. As for Wizardry, those games were dungeon crawls. It's pretty much understood that dungeon crawls are 98% combat. They were really good dungeon crawls, though... once you got past the beginning, anyway. I remember I used to spend like 3 or 4 hours on character creation in Wizardry games because everything was random and you could, and would more often than not, get saddled with garbage stats and like 2 hp to start. After finally rolling a good party, the first couple hours of the games would be frustrating save scumming sessions as your character were so ridiculously weak and vulnerable at very low lev and you'd get party wiped constantly. The games got MUCH better once you leveled up a bit, but those first few hours were BRUTAL. I guess I had a lot more patience when I was younger because there's zero percent chance I could make it through those first few hours to get to the good stuff now.

I kind of wish RPGs would implement what some strategy games do, that is, give you an option to auto-resolve battles. So, every time you would come across what would qualify as a filler battle a prompt would pop up giving you the option to manually resolve the battle or auto-resolve the battle. If you chose auto-resolve 2 seconds later a screen pops up telling you whether you won or lost, how many potions you used, how much exp you got, and what loot you found. Obviously, this option should not be present for meaningful/boss battles, those should be mandatory manual resolve. To some degree, JRPGs have done this for decades, allowing you to set your party on auto and the battle plays out automagically. If you crank up the battle speed to max the battles often play out in 10 or 15 seconds and you can move on with your life. Considering how much grinding traditional JRPGs tend to include, this is a godsend in those games.

*sigh* [rant] Two things I desperately want to see die a painful fiery death in RPGs: Gathering/fetch quests and filler battles against trash mobs. I guess some people find this stuff to be valuable content, but I sure don't. I don't play video games to do menial labor.[/rant] As to what prompted my little mini rant, it's gathering quests in Xenoblade Chronicles X. Granted, in terms of the game world and story, gathering quests make perfect sense. Earth is gone and you're stranded on an alien planet. This is now your home, like it or not, so you need to scavenge and gather to survive and create a sustainable future. Still, as a player character, I'd much rather be doing more exciting stuff than gathering freakin' berries or whatever. Anyway, I don't mind gathering quests as side quests. I can pick those up, forget about them, and they'll sort of get completed automagically while I do more important stuff. In fact, what I do is accept as many of them as I can (the game limits you to 20 active side quests at a time) and forget about them. Occasionally I get a pop up on my screen that I completed something and got some money or experience or whatever for essentially doing nothing. Cool beans, I guess. It bothers me, though, when gathering is part of an affinity or main story quest, because you can't just forget about those, you can only do one affinity or main story quest at a time and you have to finish said quest before you can continue on with the story, so you are literally stuck picking berries or whatever until you finish before you can continue the game in a meaningful way. Luckily, gathering has been the exception rather than the norm in main/affinity quests, so I haven't had too much to grumble about. Let's hope it stays that way.

Alien Unicorn!

Mostly nothing, I'll be spending time with family. I'll probably sneak in some Xenoblade Chronicles X in there somewhere.

The Warriors setting records is nice and all, but can we talk about what's really important for a second? How about Steven Adams' caveman look? That's a pretty glorious shaggy hair/porn stache/neckbeard combo.

I'm really happy that it sounds like polearms will be in the game. It would feel weird playing a game in that time period without polearms, plus I get to use my favorite weapon, the pollaxe.

That is one tiny planet. You can clearly see the curvature even when the ship is less than a mile above the surface. At the same time, it's probably not practical to procedurally generate a planet even the size of Earth, which is really small on a planetary scale, in a video game for a variety of reasons. Still, I can't help but notice these things and when I see a planet that's considerably smaller than our moon I can't unsee it, I can't put it out of my mind because sense of scale is so important to me in a space game.