melkathi

More Necromundiness: The Good: I like how the game sets specific other gangs active in the area, so for the time you spend there, you will be fighting those specific gangs. The idea is cool. After some fights your scouts will find their hideouts (and their scouts yours) and you can raid each other's bases to steal the resources you scavenged (for Mordheim players: their warpstone). The missions that can be chosen are the same for all gangs, so the AI players and you all choose missions to go on and you may end up fighting one other gang that chose it or no gang and go straight to the results screens or multiple gangs in a free for all. The Doh!: After some levels your fighters gain Virtues, Vices and Talents. My leader is a Brawler. The pure melee class. She runs around and chops people. Her Virtue "Decisive" gives her a +16% to hit with Aimed Shots... her Talent is Ranged Specialist, which gives her a massive +0% Ranged Damage. I am waiting for her to develop a Vice that reduces her Melee Damage...

@Hurlshot You chose Gray Phoenix as your first faction?

The next AAA game I plan to buy is XCOM3 in Q3/4 2022.

More thoughts on Necromunda: Comparative to Mordheim: They removed the chance to fail climbing and jumping checks. You no longer try to climb a wall, fall down and take damage. Jumping down is not restricted to very few spots and you have some minor control of the landing spot. They also added "unsafe zones" which the game doesn't tell you about until you end a ganger's turn and get the message that they are "in an unsafe zone and will be teleported". Great, because that is what I want when I have just set up my overwatch to cover the enemy approach down that passageway. What seems to be an unsafe zone? A spot that would block access to a zip line, elevator controls etc. Melee engagement has a shorter range. Also, engagement is active not passive: you have to swing at someone with a melee attack to engage them. If not you just stand next to each other. Fighters can't block areas anymore the way they could in Mordheim and if they do engage someone it is far easier to disengage: you no longer have to physically move away to disengage, you just say "I'm no longer in melee with you" and the opponent says "OK, then I'll stop trying to stab you". Or at the very least, the space needed for disengagement is minimal. Which means that you can corner someone, they disengage and fire past you at someone in the distance. Movement on the very 3D maps is calculated strangely. They tried to modernize Mordheim's movement system fluidly measuring distance from the starting point and refunding movepoints on the fly instead of having to backtrack to every waypoint. Neat in concept, but apparently they measure only horizontally, meaning that on an 8 floor map gangers can run stupidly long distances as long as they don't interrupt the move with other actions. As long as there are staircases, movement on other floors may get refunded through horizontal measurement. Add on top of that the already generous move allowance (since they wanted movement points to pay for certain skills) and you have situations where gangers deploy on turn 1, run halfway across the map, grab the objective and are halfway back to the extraction zone in their first activation. The AI. The AI takes every problem the Mordheim AI has and builds on them. If in Mordheim large characters would get stuck in doors and sometimes other warriors would run against the geometry, this happens to be the norm for everyone in Necromunda. If in Mordheim skaven would climb walls then jump down and climb again because they had passive skills that buffed them on successful climbs and jumps., that looks sane compared to some behaviours in Necromunda. For example: Enemy Leader runs through door, runs up the stairs to floor 2, takes elevator to floor 4, jumps back down to floor 2, jumps back down to floor 1 (where he had burst through the door), buffs ally's movement (ally has already activated and is surrounded) then ends turn. All this will carrying an autocannon and having loads of people to shoot at (for example the fighters surrounding his ally). Next turn the leader activates and runs up the stairs to floor 2, takes elevator to floor 4, jumps.... I think you can work out the rest.

Chimera Squad is a great game. You'll have fun. Just pay attention to the load screens. When they talk about the new avenger, make a note of the date

I'll keep you posted about second impressions.

Devs Are Idiots or at Least Have Never Even Been in the Same Room as a Video Game a first impression post about Necromunda Now, nobody denies that Mordheim had a less than stellar launch. Only 4 warbands to choose from, with one of them being 3 of the tabletop ones combined into 1 (which made sense). It had problems and some would never be fixed (Big guy AI, I am looking at you (or AI in general)). Mordheim kept a loyal playerbase by doing something right: offering a sandbox campaign in which players could grow their warbands and get attached to them over hundreds of hours. Many avoided the story missions with huge maps and endless reinforcements, as those could at best simply take up hours of running back and forth, at worst ruin a warband (the Aluress mission being extremely good at doing that, with daemonettes respawning every turn right next to the player). Once experienced, players would know to be prepared for those missions though and see them as just an hours long tedium. Let's hold onto these points: Mordheim Good: Personal, customizable warband players get attached to in Sandbox Mordheim Bad: Confusing, big maps in Story Missions, endless reinforcements in Story Missions, and fixed later on: too few warbands at launch, unable to choose deployment of fighters during missions at launch With Necromunda the dev team wanted to avoid previous mistakes. They were more experienced and had seen how players reacted to things in Mordheim. They weren't going to do Early Access again to avoid the early reviews about an unfinished product. In theory they could have learned from mistakes made by others, such as Shadowrun Returns and the fundamental changes during development (they changed game engine or what?), but that would mean caring about what happens in the industry one works in. During the first friends and family and very few randoms Alpha, the devs found out: their gameplay was pants. Simultaneous real time first person running around until an opponent enter LOS when the game would freeze to turn based. Every gamer could have told them that was a bad idea - I picture Unreal Tournament (I date myself, I know) and when that dude with the sniper rifle hiding in that sweet spot sees me, instead of me finding out because I die, I find out because the game freezes and enters turn based mode. So they scrapped that and had to go full turn based. Yay. A shame about all the time and resources wasted. So the game launches. It doesn't launch with 4 gangs, the devs having learned from Mordheim that 4 is not a good number - 4 warbands had been a major point of unhappy gamers. Instead they launch with 3 gangs. 3 != 4 so it is a good number. As players had been unhappy with the story missions in Mordheim, the approach to narration changes in Necromunda as well: a Story Campaign separate from the Sandbox game. The story campaign is 15 missions (apparently) with set gangs played in order. As it isn't in the Sandbox environment there is no gang management - no returning to base, the Avenger, Chimera Squad Warehouse or other names the in-between missions management screens get given. In this the devs may have managed a first: a tactics game with a campaign lacking even rudimentary management. During story missions the set fighters with set equipment are pre-deployed. Before these fighters activate, players have no ability to properly check their equipment. Also, some missions of course have endless reinforcements - not really a biggy so far: in the missions I encountered with those, I ran for the exit before the first reinforcement fighter even had a chance to activate. The story campaign is meant to act as a long tutorial, but by cutting out the management level of the game and just giving players some fighters to activate with little information, it actually confuses more than it explains. Naturally, many players decided to skip the campaign and go for the sandbox they bought the game for. Especially if they hadn't planned to play Escher (the first 5 missions of the story). Mordheim had quite a nice variety of customization options and Necromunda promised to have even more. The advanced colour palette options are great and allow you to easily work out a unified colour scheme for the whole gang. Then comes the rude awakening: customization options are locked. As it isn't EA or Paradox, not behind a paywall. Finish the Story Campaign to unlock Hair Customization. ... ... Yeah, read title of this post. Nice graphics, nice atmosphere, possibly a good game if you wade through enough dev stupidity. It isn't nice to talk bad about devs. The internet is full of haters and trolls. But sometimes devs really just are idiots.

Oooh, the first game in the 4R genre... Looks interesting.

Incoming. GMG did a last day of pre-order 30% discount instead of the 20% other sites were doing so convinced me. Played the first two missions last night (the game unlocked 1AM GMT so 3AM MST (Melkathi Summer Time)).

Not necessarily the best comparison when you compare your first reaction to that of reviewers when the game had just released / was about to release. There seems to be 5 years between that. That can be quite important.

Whichever game Obsidian is bringing out, has a new(ish) forum section for and this new user meant to post in I don't know. I just troll these boards, I don't keep up with the game.

Quite likely. Never got into them back then, so don't have much nostalgia either.

So basically you killed Nasrudin

Didn't that only just release this week?

Humble 1C bundle has good stuff: Fell Seal + dlc, Deep Sky Derelicts (without dlc I guess), Stygian (without an ending)... Enjoyed all three of those.

Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars is not very good. It has made no progress from that months long pre-order beta. It doesn't inspire me to write more of a review.

Obviously. If you did, your nose would be pointed towards her breath.

I read that name as Badbreath

majestic is playing.

Troy. They got the theme right. The problem of the game is that it is still a Total War game.

Total War: my fleet is caught mid sea by the enemy fleet. A naval battle ensues. It takes place on a forested hilltop. When you can't see the ocean for all the trees.