melkathi

More crazy discussions with Labadal

Continuing discussions with Labadal, while team Obsidian loots an obsidian rock: Hurlshot joins the team: Labadal makes us some extra cash:

StarCrawlers sponsored by ShadySands Great Game Giveaway Overview: StarCrawlers is a SciFi RPG in which the player is the captain of a crew of "crawlers", of guns for hire, mercenaries, people who get the job done, whatever you may want to call them. If you were to draw parallels you could think of the crew of the Firefly or a a crew of shadowrunners. Using a space station out in the fringes of known space as a base of operation, you take on missions for the various megacorps. And somewhere there is an overarching plot, but you can safely ignore it and take lucrative, random jobs. --- Gameplay: StarCrawlers takes the old rpg formula we remember from oldies such as Eye of the Beholder or the newer returns to that style like Legend of Grimrock and adapts them to a SciFi setting and proper turn-based combat. What this means is: you walk around in first person, square by square, using WASD and QE to strafe, while the mouse allows you to look around and interact with your surroundings. When you encounter an enemy, and they enter combat range (or ambush you as part of an event), the screen changes to a battle screen, still first person, but quite similar to many RPGs of this type. At the top of the screen you see the initiative order. In the example screenshot above, it is Shady's turn and he is about to hit a security droid with a Combo Strike. Each ability has different costs in Time Units, and various buffs and debuffs can, as one comes to expect, affect the initiative order (Labadal for example can learn to Overclock an ally and bring them forward by a hundred time units). The good thing here is that there are interactions and combos between abilities, so there is opportunity for fun tactical play. Outside of combat you explore the corridors and rooms of spaceships or corporate offices. They are usually fairly dark, but that is alright as you can simply turn on your suit's flashlight. What makes the exploration interesting are the many spots the party can interact with - the panels and terminals Hackers can try to hack, or the tight spaces only a Cyberninja can squeeze through. or Of course results are not always guaranteed to be positive --- You, the player: At the beginning of the game, you will create your character by picking one of the seven classes: Cyberninja, Engineer, Force Psyker, Hacker, Smuggler, Soldier, Void Psyker. Then comes the fun part: creating the background! Each character has three stages in their backstory: Childhood, Adulthood, Now. For each class there are three options to choose from for each stage. While the flavour of Childhood events differ from class to class, they all boil down to the choice between: Street Code, Formal Education, Street Culture. these can affect conversations in the game. Adulthood and Now choices can directly affect your character's stats, their starting equipment, and or their standing with various factions. Once in-game, you will be able to spend the first ability points of your character. Similar to Diablo and its derivatives, be it Borderlands or whatever, each class has three skill trees: The inventory is rather basic, with 4 slots: weapon, armour, shield, accessory. Though your background choices can result in some interesting starting items... With the character created, the game begins with you arriving at STIX, your home for the duration of the game. --- STIX: STIX is the game's hub. Here you can buy and sell stuff, gamble for random loot, retrain your abilities, put stuff in your stash, hire new members for your party, and get missions. In this STIX is just like any other hub, be it a tavern or Tristram. But the hub has some nice detail that fit the setting. You can auction off sensitive loot through the black market dealer, and they may not have anyone directly interested and simply provide you with credits, but they may also get proper offers from factions. TEC was not pleased with all the things that ended up in other corps' hands after that raid. And if you don't want to leave your interactions with the megacorps to chance missions on the bounty board, why not call up their HQ and ask for a liaison? OK, most likely they will put you on hold indefinitely. But once they know who you are, maybe there will come a time when they will pick up. But if that is an alternative to the bounty board... what bounty board? --- The Missions: Most of your game time will be spend in missions, exploring, infiltrating, assaulting... all the good things and not so good things crews like yours get involved in. You pick a mission you like, based on rewards, the reputation you wish to earn or lose, and the mission difficulty. Then you head in, do all the stuff we mentioned above, and hopefully walk back to your ship having successfully completed your objective. Sometimes, at least in the story missions, you may find side objectives. How you will handle those is up to you, but not everyone will necessarily like you afterwards. --- The Writing: Rather tongue in cheek, and mostly reserved for the various interactions during missions and some banter during the story - do not except long exposition. But it is worth at least a chuckle, and being short and non-intrusive will hopefully prevent it from becoming tedious in repetition. Even if you end up arguing with Labadal about the possible value on the black market of a Tec-employee's porn stash.

OK, so the line-up of crawlers to hire are: ShadySands the Cyberninja Labadal the Hacker Hurlshot the Force Psyker the_dog_days the Engineer Sorophx the Soldier and I was considering Marelooke for Smuggler

And as a reward (because unlike some people think, stalking is not its own reward) you get to choose what class crawler Hurlshot will be: Engineer, Hacker, Soldier, Smuggler, or Force Psyker. edit: Disclaimer: next hire is most likely Hacker, as my lunatic keeps shouting at consoles to get them to do what she wants...

In the immor(t)al words of ShadySands: "So it begins..." Promised proper write up to follow

Random info: the first time Shady gave me a key was 13th November 2013.

I deleted some messages from October 2012. Try now?

You'd be surprised what people on the internet can find offensive But this forum is quite safe on that front.

I shall take your steam key off your hands then. It is a sacrifice I am willing to do for you and this thread. *nodnod*

Sorry. I forgot. The forum has at times been very hostile to spoiler tags, so I got out of the habit.

Do you still need to get rid of that key? When you say write a review, do you mean here on the forum or do we have to become proper bloggers/journalists?

I am starting to get the feeling that Kyros' whole scheme is to make a second overlord to have overlord babies with

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=317524419

Did they fix the bug where if a crew-member wearing shorts went to a shower, when they would hang their clothes, they'd actually hang their legs?

The Mandate posted a kickstarter update. It says stuff. Most backers seem to be rather indifferent, having written the project off as money wasted on vapourware.

I felt so at first. but they are pushing it too often. They don't just let the world be what it is, they have your character - born and raised in this world - constantly reminded as if they were an astronaut in a 50s pulp magazine, landed on venus and confronted by amazons in the jungle. My hunter character who was raised by beastwomen would not need to be lectured on male inferiority in that society. No character would need to be surprised when they figure out that an npc inherited a lot of land because she was female - it would be more of a "doh! How did we miss that?" moment for them, especially an adjudicator or sage. The game world was believably created, but the player is treated as if every encounter with the gender roles in the game were their first.

This whole "Wimin are strong. Power to the matriarchy. Ain't we cool for making strong wimin in our game" is getting old. Actually the next time I hear "Am not beastman! Am beastwoman! Rut-mate-kill-lol!" I might just end up uninstalling out of overexposure to badly written pseudo-feminism.

They should get an award for it.

God this game has abysmal pathfinding.

Green Man Gaming started their Easter sale today. Good price on some stuff, but nothing that hasn't been on sale before.

Judging by the many screenshots, the rat seems to enjoy it quite a bit. He isn't known for hate/love screenshots

Give me your account details and I'll make the gif for you

You play games? I thought you only try to give them away.

I think I need to read this thread from the beginning. I may have missed out on a fun conversation.