melkathi

This is the VtM game I will not be playing: https://youtu.be/0sMTC7uGU08

Darkspore had the servers taken down by EA. Any game from the Squeenix Store before Squeenix decided to sell on steam... Didn't something happen with Gaming for Windows Live at some point as well? And when looking at offline DRM, any game with SecuRom.

Controller is only better in one instance of Overlord 2, where you have to run your spider minions in circles along the walls of a tower or something like that. There the stick controls are better.

As long as it isn't the Vampire the Masquerade Battle Royal PvP Shooter that is desperately trying to convince people that whoever says VtM is not a PvP Shooter setting does not know the Vampire setting...

Not only justified, anyone who believes conspiracy theories that you could lose access to games with DRM should take off their tinfoil hat. Who has ever heard of anyone being unable to play a game because the DRM no longer works? I can guarantee you have never met such a person if you are honest

Sometimes RNG makes for the best moments. I just finished the long dungeon to get the Wolf Queen Potema's remains, to have them sanctified and prevent her resurrection. I travel back to Windhelm. When I get there it is getting dark and everyone is just locking up. So I go into the house, Lydia is standing around but the children aren't there. I look at Lydia a bit crossly, because it is getting dark and the girls should be home by now... Door opens, the children come in. Sofia see me, runs up and goes "I got you a present! Hope you like it!" It's a book titled "The Wolf Queen" describing the history of Potema. Knowing Bethesda, if they had tried to script that, it would have bugged and the event wouldn't have triggered. The child would probably have fallen through a hole in the geometry trying to reach me. But RNG triggered the right event with the right random gift.

So apparently the backstory for Lucia, the orphan girl in Whiterun, is that her parents died and her aunt and uncle took over the farm and kicked her out. She got to Whiterun, where nobody cared except for the drunk redguard beggar who thought her the basics of begging. a) bastards in Whiterun pretending they are good and proper neighbours. b) bastard Companions who pretend they are about honour and protecting the innocent. c) Where is that farm? I want a word with aunty and uncle. I have two empty petty soul gems to help me check if they even have souls.

The children used their allowance to buy me some green robes. Guess I am wearing green from now on when at home. Once I am good at enchanting, I'll have to enchant them with some out of combat skill boost - Alchemy or something like that.

Well, guess who is adding Spell Tomes to the bookshelf

You could tell a Bethesda game by the bugs... I fast travel to the middle of nowhere. As I load, the game also loads a dragon nearby who flies in to attack me. I dismount and run a short distance from the horse, as I don't want it hit by the breath weapon. Dragon lands. Dragon takes falling damage from landing. Dragon dies.

We regularly play catch and hide & seek with the kids. They cheat at hide & seek - that is not counting to 10 They ask for an allowance occasionally. Sometimes they gather flowers for me. I got them dolls, so sometimes they play with those (Sofia more frequently than Lucia). Sometimes they read (Lucia more often than Sofia) one of the books from the bookshelf. I got them wooden swords, so they do some sword training at their training dummy. Once they got into a huge fight and I had to step in and tell them to cut it out. "Both of you." Sometimes they try to stay up past their bed time. Then we argue about whether they really need to go to bed right now even though they are not tired... Since we live in Whiterun, they complain about Braith being mean to Lars and them. These things may have been added with Hearthfire or what the DLC is called.

Digital parenting done right: If I forbid her to listen, as a teenager she'll definitely join some cult... (parenting is hard) "No, Mister Justiciar, I do not believe in Talos. Bye, bye!" ... what the children will end up believing in on the other hand... Can't take the risk. "Sorry, get back here."

Me: "You are putting on a show just to welcome me to your city? You shouldn't have!" Local: "Its not a show. Its a beheading..." Me: "Dibs on looting the corpse!"

So Skyrim goes into the list of games that I could never get into until something suddenly clicked and allowed me to have fun my way. Here it was messing around with my avatar until I could have a goofy grin that makes all serious situations silly by my presence. Since then I found you can adopt children, which first few times I had tried playing the game I never got to. So now I gather skill books around the world and add them to the bookshelf in my house, then stand proudly in a corner when one of the kids grabs a book to read. They'll be the most skilled children out there by the time I am done with the game. I am considering assassinating the Talos preacher. I saw Sofia go sit on the bench where he preaches and listen to his preaching. He can believe whatever he wants and preach what he wants. But not to my daughter. Next thing you know, Thalmor justiciars will be knocking on our door and high elf blood is a pain to get out of the carpet.

6th August? Respect your elders young 'un. I'm three days ahead of you.

Happy 20th day since your birthday!

Lydia getting drunk after realizing the only action she'll see as the Dragonborn's housecarl is babysitting

Grinning awkwardly at the npc

Squenix? Last time they removed old versions of games we got a 20% discount coupon... (not compatible with sales naturally)

Yeah, I thought that may affect the purchase decision. It's why I didn't get it.

Inquisitor apparently is very repetitive. It also is always online. You have to connect to neocore's server even if you always play single player. But neocore doesn't see an issue with that. No offline single player is a design choice they believe makes inquisitor a better product.

That sounds a lot more fun than at release. Killed all those bosses without them even having a chance to act back then

Not at this point of Early Access. Possibly not later either. Franchise background (you may want to skip ahead) Neocore's King Arthur as a game franchise started with King Arthur: The Roleplaying Wargame. It was mostly a Total War knock off with far deeper roleplaying aspects: more stats, skills and equipment than any TW at the time, choose your own adventure quests, and a morality chart that tracked the player's alignment on two axes - Righteous/Tyrant and Christianity/Old Faith - unlocking extra skills and units. It got two campaign expansions Saxons and Druids that allowed you to play the game as two different rulers with their own campaigns. Two smaller expansions added some units, items, and two more knights to recruit. A fifth, stand-alone expansion, Fallen Heroes, had a stronger rp character focus and was badly received. The game was followed by King Arthur 2 and it's pre-order bonus prequel stand alone dlc mini campaign Dead Legions. King Arthur 2 basically slimmed down everything from the original game. Players now had 3 specific heroes and only those three could lead armies. This gave the devs more control of what players could, but more importantly couldn't do. As every army in the game had a max size, this meant the devs could always know the max number of units a player would have in the game. They also simplified the game's economy, removing taxation of provinces etc. The decisions alienated a lot of fans of the original game. Combined with smaller enemy variety, as you spend a lot of time fighting the same line up of fomorian daemons over and over and over again, meant that the Steam forum at the time wasn't very positive (though not as toxic as Steam fora can get). The fact that Neocore is terrible at optimizing their games didn't help. The game got a couple of patches but no DLC. A promised patch never showed and the community manager disappeared. From a fan's point of view it appeared to be a complete failure. After Van Helsing and Inquisitor Neocore returned to the franchise. Knight's Tale was advertised as: "a Role-playing Tactical Game - a unique hybrid between turn-based tactical games (like X-Com) and traditional, character-centric RPGs." Most kickstarter backers and customers stopped reading right there and said "take my money". That is a problem that is now coming to bite Neocore, who had followed up with: "The story campaign puts a huge emphasis on moral choices, which have significant consequences in a rogue-lite structure" using a term that may not mean what they think it means. Keep the term rogue-lite in mind though, as we'll come back to it. Anyone looking at the kickstarter had to scroll down a lot to read this: "Reloading is not an option in Knight’s Tale – as you make your tough choices, the fun comes from dealing with severe consequences. " I hadn't read that. If I had, maybe I would have stayed away. Because Neocore proves they are who they have always been - a dev studio that does not care what the players want. Not because they are protecting an artistic vision, but because they *know* what is fun and what is right. Probably why they did not really look at the games of the genres they are dipping into. If they had, they would have noticed that Iron Man in XCOM for example was an optional mode. They would not have needed to go from Autosave at the beginning of a mission and at the end of a mission, to making a game mode where you are allowed to save on the world map. What they have not implemented and are not sure they will ever add, as it does go against their vision of the game is: Save & Exit during missions. Once you are on a mission, you either play it or quit and start from the last autosave. It is part of the "rogue-lite" aspect mentioned earlier. Neocore believes you do not need to save during missions, because missions are short. 20 minutes at most. Only, they are not really. Not always. A specific story mission lovingly coined by the community the "nightmare mission" (because of the nightmares you fight, not because of the difficulty of the mission) can take a lot longer to figure out. But let's talk actual Gameplay: The game is split into two parts: the world map and the missions. On the map you upgrade Camelot, assign heroes to be healed, to train. You buy from the merchant. You level up your heroes and manage their inventory. You make some choices (do you execute the surviving brigands from the last mission or do you give them a second chance? Do you let Christians build roadside shrines?). You spend little time here as you just do the in between missions stuff and move to the next mission. You take up to four heroes onto missions. During a mission you run around with your whole party using WASD. When you meet enemies the game goes into turn based. Sometimes you can then choose your party positioning. Most of the times they will just step up based on how they were running at the time. Party formation is controlled similar to IE games and similar to IE games heroes don't really always stick to their spot in the party... Heroes have action points - on average around 8 it seems. A normal melee attack costs 3 Action Points. Some Action Points can be reserved for the next turn. Heroes have Armour, Health Points and Vitality. HP and Vitality is similar to Pillars. Once the HP are gone, you start losing Vitality, which you can't heal with a potion. Armour reduces damage but can be shredded similar to XCOM. Every attack in the game shreds armour. Whenever you take vitality damage, you hero suffers an injury, giving them a persistent debuff until you heal them at the cathedral in Camelot - unless your hero has an Injury Token and can spend it to ignore the injury. Mission difficulty comes mostly through self reviving Lost, totems that keep spawning enemies, and waves of enemies. It likes spawning endless archers, who will always get some shots in before you reach them. As a result difficulty is basically a matter of "how much damage can you soak". I got lucky and my Mordred got loot that lets him restore one point of armour on kill, meaning my main tactical thinking is how can enemies attack him and my other heroes reduce the hp of those enemies so he can kill them off and get armour back. As encounters are in small areas with minimal cover and most of the time you don't get to deploy your heroes, any real tactical planning is rather limited. You try to efficiently take out opponents before they can damage you because there is nothing you can do about them damaging you other than killing them. The game has limited healing during the mission. Every hero can carry one healing potion. There are limited campfires around the map that allow you to rest and regain either a percentage of lost armour or of lost health. Heroes can level up between missions and equip stuff. Leveling up allows you to spend skill points on things like a Cleave attack or a Power attack or a passive damage boost. Equipment is rather boring. You do not find new weapons or armour. You find new runes for them. It is the same as equipping a new sword, only that thematically you put modelling putty in the old rune and inscribe a new one. Basically it means that the game only needs one model per hero which does not alter based on equipment. It does take part of the fun out of new equipment, as all you loot is new sets of stats for your existing equipment. It also means your hero will never differ much: Mordred will always be the dude with the sword and shield. Balin will always be the dude with the two handed ... axe? Tristan will always carry two swords. If a hero dies they are dead. Unless they were critical to the mission, then you fail and need to restart from the autosave. Mission failure is not an option: once you are in a mission you either keep trying until you succeed or you restart the campaign. Or uninstall. It is funny how devs never realize there is that third option. There are planned to be around 30 unique recruitable heroes in the final version, though based on your morality only some will be available to you. Currently, early on, when you only have a handful of heroes, if a hero dies you may as well restart from the beginning. Writing: The writing is not up to the standard of previous Neocore games. The English needs some proofreading. But even then, that can't fix the content. Mordred is a brat. "Are your sons as ugly as you?" does not make me feel that I am playing the dark knight who brought down a kingdom but a brat. It seems to mellow down a bit after the intro mission. Possibly because the very first feedback they got on releasing the EA was me saying on Discord that "I like the setting, but I don't like playing as Mordred" who isn't dark but a jerk. Most narration comes from the mission description and some comments by the Lady of the Lake during missions. Heroes will have a bit of story in the mission they are met and may trigger events on the world map after missions (whatsherface wants to host a tournament - do you host it for her so she doesn't get all the fame? Do you say no? Do you let her do the hosting? (+1 loyalty with all heroes / -1 loyalty with her / +3 loyalty with her)). And that's it. As tactics games go there isn't much tacticing. It is better than cash grab XCOM clones like Falling Skies or Narcos. But it is also not memorable or does anything to recommend it. And the writing early on just isn't strong enough to recommend it for the setting. King Arthur: Knight's Tale - It's a game. It Exists.

I figured out what bothers me the most about King Arthur: Knight's Tale (the turn based tactics game in Neocore's King Arthur game series). The premise of the game is that King Arthur and Sir Mordred fought in an epic final confrontation which left both dead. The dying King Arthur's was taken by ship to Avalon but it sunk in a storm. Something happened to Arthur, and now the land is twisted and grimdark and people rise from the dead. Most of the knights can't die. Or they do die, but then they get back up. So does Mordred. And you play Mordred freshly raised from the dead, tryign to figure out what is going on and how to stop it. On your way you collect a band of other knights, all basically dead and risen again and again and again. The reason they tag along with you is simple: they hope you aren't very good at the game and will let them die. Because in Knight's Tale death doesn't stick, unless you die during a mission with Mordred, since those have permadeath. A game who's main premise is that the characters can't die has permadeath as a main feature.

reading the patch notes for Phoenix Point. And looking at the previous patch notes I had missed. So in the previous patch they implemented this: "In order to prevent misfires due to flinching, targets will now freeze during the firing sequence when shooting in Free Aim." Funny how during the backer builds we told them about missing shots because after the players aimed, the target would move due to their idle animation, causing shots to miss. Back then we were of course mistaken and just hadn't figured out how to aim properly.