marelooke

Finished Act 2 Mission 2 in the Sisters of Sigmar campaign in Mordheim. 2 more missions to go. I think I hit a bug though as it didn't list *any* loot on the mission rewards screen, so I fear the slog the mission was didn't even earn me anything. Can't really verify it wasn't just a graphical hitch though... (well, I could restore & reload the save I set aside in case of disaster, given how buggy some of these campaign missions used to be, but I've never had to use it so I'd rather not mess with it and break my game or so...)

Shinies! Saving the maiden? Psah, in Mordheim maiden saves you! (Agmundr got lucky though as I completed the objective (Act 2 Mission 2) and thus the mission before my Maiden of Sigmar could wipe out what little health he had left...

Went back to Mordheim, messed a bit with the new Undead faction and got that warband to Rank 3. Unless the next hero and the impressive are annoying as hell this might be the next warband I'll take to Rank 10 (the first being the Sisters of Sigmar). Then I realized I still had Act II of the Sisters campaign to complete and so I did the first mission of Act II. It was a nice reminder of why I stopped doing these campaign missions in the first place. It was a long boring slog, not sure who thought "now tank this annoying resurrecting demon while you go over the whole level collecting stuff" was a great idea. Thankfully the demoness hit like a kitten (or rather, she more often than not,didn't hit at all), but boy, were the debuffs she threw around annoying as hell especially since there was little to be done about those as she ignored the silence spell, bosses and their cheap tactics Anyway, guess that leaves another 3 missions in Act II. Not sure if I'll try for the "one year with the same Warband achievement" after as I'm "only" at 107 active days so far (iirc a Warhammer year wasn't 365 days either (slightly longer, I think?)). Then again if a mission goes south badly and I have to rebuild my Warband things might add up faster than expected...

You know what this thread's been lacking? You guessed right! Since melkathi hasn' t been delivering (for shame! ;-) ) here's some Mordheim screenshots: Started an Undead warband, so far they're good fun. Haven't had this many henchmen downed for al long while though but now that some managed to get some levels under their belts things are improving. Went back to my Sisters, decided I should man up and finish Act II, so poor Ada ended up getting a bit of a beating... I like to think being on the receiving end of this trio (Purifier is just outside the screenshot) is the stuff my enemies' nightmares are made of...

I was gonna have a quick peek at around midnight yesterday. I ended up going to bed at 3:00...

Another good example of DRM gone horribly wrong was the disc version of the first Witcher game (which I suffered through to completion). That DRM (Tages, dixit Google) would check the disc on every single loading screen and would crash or hang (don't remember) the game when it couldn't verify the data fast enough, which was quite often given the DRM's need to spin up the disc for pretty much every DRM check (since the game data was on the hard drive). Not to mention the effect on the loading times (which became horrifyingly long, up to multiple minutes sometimes to enter a small house). It was so bad CDPR presumably lost money and reputation over it and became the DRM opponents they are nowadays. Anybody who thinks CDPR was "born enlightened" would do well to remember the Witcher 1 DRM fiasco and that their stance on DRM is a hard learned lesson.

Try the ring (R0/E19 around Brussels[*] in peak traffic, be sure to have rain and dark weather for extra masochism, do set aside an hour or three, minimum, just in case it's actually realistic... For maximum masochism you could of course try driving *through* Brussels. If you're still relaxed after that, well, I dunno what to say, really * http://www.reuters.com/article/us-traffic-brussels-idUSBREA3Q03220140427 - note even though trucks are now charged as mentioned in the article nothing has really changed (aside from lost of pissed of truckers) as there are no alternatives to going over Brussels, iow it's just another tax. FWIW I work in Brussels.

Skyrim is one of the only games where this doesn't bother me in the slightest. I loved how mountains made the world feel huge and after several playthroughs I'd keep finding hidden dungeons and shrines. The mountains themselves were nice to look at. The mountains where I couldn't figure the hell out where I needed to go to get up them were a pain. Hmm, can't remember too many of those tbh. Usually, as HoonDing remarked there is a road or path or some such leading up. Of course the mountains being this big it's kinda possible you're entirely on the wrong side to be able to get up (the statue of Azura took me a while to get to the first time iirc). If it really annoys you though there's always the console and noclip mode ("tcl"), I sometimes use that after jumping down a cliff (to pick up loot after I Fus-Ro-Dah'd some enemy to his/her/it's death for example) and knowing that getting back up is a long long trek... Note that I still play the "normal" edition and that at least there using the console doesn't mess with achievements, no idea about the "enhanced" edition. On that note, played a bit of Skyrim over the weekend, edging closer to lvl70 (67 now) and as such the killing of a Legendary dragon which would give me 100% achievement clompletion. Huzzah.

Sure, but tell that to console peasants. (Not that I am one. Just saying that if you aren't playing with mods, then the games start is really bad once you feel like replaying) I will never understand people playing Bethesda games on consoles...modding support (if only to fix all the breakage Bethesda doesn't) is vital, and I'm not normally much of a modder... Anyway, I picked up my playthrough of The Wichter 3 that I had sort of abandoned. For some reason the game hadn't been able to suck me in, I mean, when I started a play session I kept playing until the wee hours, but when I stopped there was literally no urge to pick it up again the next day. So I'm happy to report that after making it to Novigrad that's finally changed. Things are at last getting somewhat interesting and the setting's definitely improved over the bore that was Velen. (though given the huge amount of unfinished content I still have there I guess I'll be going back occasionally, if only to finish up the various contracts)

Colour based puzzles? Does that mean game over for colour-impaired people like me?

Tried to go back to my Skyrim playthrough. It appears some not particularly smart guy at Bethesda figured it would be a nice touch to lock people out of kb/mouse controls when a controller is plugged in (can't even get into menus with Escape). So Alt+F4 it was and I guess it's either unplugging the controller or back to Forza... (for which I *do* use that controller). Ugh. Oh yeah, also not bothering with the "enhanced" Skyrim since I can't just copy/past my entire mod setup.

That's what confused me since I had all the Quest achievements for MoP (bought Draenor and never really started playing that expansion), so I was wondering what I missed... Guess I stopped playing just before that final raid and those scenarios. Of course now there is the same problem they introduced Raid Finder for anyway: people missing out on content due to not being able to raid (or playing at the time), guess next up is a single player version of each and every raid </sarcasm>. I mean not even a single mention to people that join or return after the fact is kinda...lame? Suddenly everything's changed and apparently nobody still talks about it. For something that was apparently a big deal that's kinda weird. Seriously some quest connecting things (just dialogues filling people in would be good enough) would have been nice. Then again WoW has always been pretty half-assed in this respect, compared to say, EverQuest 2 (where NPCS were still talking about the destruction (and rebuilding) of Freeport so even people that weren't around at the time, like me, still got the gist of what happened). Also given the fond memories most raiders have of M'uru I don't see the Naaru suddenly being the bad guys ending well, though players did manage to kill A'dal on my realm (Wildhammer-EU) during the Scourge Invasion, which was kind of hilarious ;-) Also, don't they dare devalue the awesomeness of my "Hand of A'dal" title! Oh yeah, and aside from WoW I'm still mostly playing Forza Horizon 3. Next major patch (expansion) to Warframe should be arriving this week too, looking forward to that since it'll be a lore patch! EDIT: typos, so many typos!

Catering to a pretty common handicap (at least for males from Northern European descent) is hardly a "gimmick", especially given how fond game devs are about using colours in places were not being able to discern them can be a serious disadvantage. I also think that there's tools available nowadays for game developers to make catering to this easy (I base this assumption on how common colour blind modes are nowadays compared to the "bad old days") I remember "fun times" in Warframe where I had to hug every damn locker because I could not differentiate based on colour whether it was open or locked. I remember having similar problems in some RPGs where I couldn't discern whether an NPC was friendly or hostile (until the hostile ones attacked me, of course) by the circles under their feet (that might even have been PoE, might also have been the Beamdog IE reboots) On that note, modern World of Warcraft has the most extensive colour blind options I've ever seen. Props to Blizzard for that. That aside I do agree that not having the autosave sucks. Story mode difficulty for the win, for me. It makes most trash negligable. It also makes the real fights negligable, but since I've never been someone to really get deep into the strategy of CRPGs and am mostly there for the story, it makes the sacrifice worth it. Ironically, the cloth wearing mages and warlocks are much tankier than my mail wearing Shaman. Enhancement Shaman has never been more fun. Anyway, don't expect much of Shattrath. You never get to go in. Well crap, that just killed my motivation to soldier on... Combat is completely broken nowadays so I'm just taking in the sights really, and if those end up sucking, yeah well... Also I figured out that I need a group to find out what happened to Hellscream (and for some reason Saurfang is in his place and Mr. Troll Chief is also gone). Honestly WoW does a beyond terrible job of keeping people in the loop about what happened if you're not constantly playing. Would it have been so hard to get Saurfang to give you an explanation or something? Thankfully there's still the Wiki (such as it is, seems to be well past its glory days) so I now know that Sylvanas is Warchief (that's gonna be interesting) and that Troll Boss apparently got killed in the most lame way imaginable.

Plodding my way through Draenor in WoW, if nothing else it's nice for the nostalgia factor of seeing Draenor before it got turned into the hell-hole that was Outland. Quests are uninspired as ever though: go free this guy. Oh, and in case you were considering trying something smart that didn't involve murdering your way through the enemy: here's a quest to kill 15 of the enemy's guys. I feel like these areas mostly coast on the nostalgia wave, at least for me. Anyway, *hate* what they did to the class balance. My mage is as tanky as your average paladin for some reason, and hits like one too. Glass cannon? Yeah no. "Concrete peashooter" more like. The lack of skill trees totally killed the variety in skills you had as well (after they already murdered utility skills earlier; in Cataclysm or WotLK or so), no more access to Arcane Explosion if you aren't arcane specced. Huzzah and stuff. In general it seems they've continued pushing the Fire mage spec in the wrong direction. I kinda enjoyed how positioning and aggro management were key to getting good DPS out of a Fire mage, now with all these mobility crutchestools it's just too...streamlined? Honestly, it feels more like playing an Arcane mage in WotLK (which I didn' t quite enjoy as much, so yeah)... Anyway, will probably work my way through Draenor at least (curious to see Shattrath) after that is up in the air.

Well, reactivated my WoW sub to see what's what nowadays. Running into a bit of an annoying problem: the game sends me off to start the Warlords of Draenor stuff but clearly I'm missing parts of the story to have this thing make any sense. Guess I need to figure out where I left off in Mists of Pandaria now so stuff starts making some semblance of sense... Oh, was pleasantly surprised that aven after ~4years most of my essential mods still worked after upgrading them.

That's the thing though, you shouldn't run through all the difficulties. They're targeted at different audiences. There is no need to run normal before starting in heroic, you don't even need the gear from there. If you're a heroic raiding guild, start in heroic immediately. Although if you're a heroic raiding guild, normal is easy enough that you can probably blunt force through it in one evening. The don't think that was the case when I quit (did a check, quit at the start of the expansion that upped the level cap to 100). I think at that point running heroic without normal gear would de-facto mean you'd fail the first DPS-check boss you encountered. If this has changed then that is a very good thing indeed. I am now slightly tempted to re-activate my account and see what has changed. Though any form of serious raiding would probably be out as I just can't fit that in my schedule anymore...

Just cruising around the outback...

Undead DLC for Mordheim has been released, party!

That was probably true during "vanilla" or for some raids in TBC, though I doubt it was true for, say, Karazahn and certainly not for any of the Wrath of the Lich King raids (which were still pre-raid finder). At least on our realm PUGs used to clear the previous "generation" of raids during WotLK (eg. we ran PUGs for Naxxramas/Eye of Eternity(Malygos)/Sartharion with alts while clearing Ulduar and started PUGging the first few bosses in Ulduar while working on heroic Ulduar). That, imho, was fine: hardcore raiders got to see the new content, and got it first, the rest just got to it later. It was already better than in TBC where most people indeed never got to see the inside of Black Temple. After Ulduar Blizzard imho just got lazy, instead of designing different fights for hard mode they just upped damage/hp on bosses and called it "heroic mode", moreover most raiders went through what is basically the same fight three times (raid finder -> normal -> heroic). Whether these were hard or not isn't even the point, it just got boring doing the same fights over and over (much more so than ever before) and you didn't even get any awesome loot to show off for it (a recolouring of the same items everyone else got hardly counts). If they'd continued on the Ulduar path then I'm sure hardcore raiding in WoW wouldn't be dead (exactly none of the raid guilds on my realm survived the introduction of the raid finder for long). If I just want to quest and wander around I just resub to EverQuest 2 tbh, that game is far superior in the actual RPG department to WoW. Our pseudo-hardcore guild just steamrolled Naxxramas in two raid evenings or so (we even nearly killed the first boss with only 10 as our raid leader hadn't figured out the switch between 10 and 25man modes...note that our guild was "special" in the sense that nobody was allowed to look at videos of fights before the guild had cleared it for the first time, in stark contrast to how most guilds operated), that said, some of the heroic modes were real fun in early WotLK (until after Ulduar, see above), I greatly enjoyed Sarth3D on 25man.

This reminds me of how World of WarCraft players say people only play that game for raiding. Nah, there's some weirdos that enjoy Arena PvP as well.

Been dividing my time between: Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen: I'm in post-dragon of my second playthrough, trying to tie up most of the notice board quests with actual rewards (before they start repeating and only give gold) and on the fence of whether I should keep going until I've beaten Daemon's awakened form or whether I should power through to the end, go through hardmode and then, hopefully at lvl200 (I'm level 171 or so right now) deal with awakened Daemon (probably fit in a speedrun as well should I decide to end this playthrough) Shadow Warrior 2: kinda fun, some levels feel empty though. Also the weapon upgrade system just feels like too much work to me, especially since it's not even classes of enemies you deal with, same monsters have variations with various weaknesses and resistances which makes constant weapon switching kind of a chore. So I think this'll be one of those games I'll be finishing in bits and pieces over a long-ish period. Forza: Horizon 3: I was going through the new Forzaton challenges until I figured out I had to actually go into multiplayer, which was a serious downer. Might do it anyway just to see how it goes, but: meh. Another thing that's been bothering me is that you get absolutely no information about most features of the game. You have "driver clubs" and they push you to join one but they don't tell you wtf it is, what the benefits are or anything and this goes for many features. Still loving the game though, hopefully they'll make something with the scope of Test Drive Unlimited 1 (not the garbage that was TDU2) one day. Warframe: well, this is my go-to game when I want to shoot things, though it's been on the back-burner ever since they changed Void grinding, while the old system was repetitive the new system feels like step back (which was hard to imagine, truth be told), while it's less repetitive it is much more boring since any semblance of challenge has been sucked out of it, so you end up running lots and lots of short and easy missions in a row. It's about as interesting as it sounds. I've also been having the worst luck since the Void 2.0 introduction even though "statistically" it should be better. Anyway, since my "rule" is that I don't bother with things I consider unenjoyable I've been grabbing my daily login rewards and running the odd mission here and there until changes happen. My Dishonored Ghost-playthrough is still on-hold mostly due to real life still not giving me large uninterrupted blocks of time to play games in.

Huh? I found a couple of secrets already. Although it's always just been money so far. Or did I somehow miss what you meant?

No. QTEs for the most part are out (I don't remember any, so if there were any they weren't that distracting) and so are the idiotic "deathrides" (there were none of those). I also enjoyed the overarching story more. I mean, it could have made a decent Indiana Jones film. Then again Holy Roman Empire might mean I'm kinda biased... In general I felt there was less teenage angst and general stupidity. At least the "Lara" parts of the reboot very often made me cringe, in Rise there were far less such instances. As I've said elsewhere: as far as I'm concerned Rise is a straight upgrade to TR2013: more of the good stuff (puzzles, lore/history) and far less of the bad stuff (teenage fiction), insofar the bad stuff hasn't been scrapped entirely (QTEs & deathrides are out)

That's actually one of my favorite scenes in games in general. I look the clip up on YouTube occasionally just to revisit the moment. Although they drive the scene better than I did. lol. There's a scene in SAINTS ROW 2 that really transcended for me, when The Boss is drugged and the Sons of Samedi kidnap them/attack the base. The character I was playing, plus the voice set I'd chosen made the scenario attack both gripping and daft at the same time. You weaving around on drugs shooting up badguys before finally tripping over a couch after the fight. It sealed me as a fan of the game. Truly hated they changed the voice sets in SRIV since the one I was using wasn't there anymore. On a totally different note, when I played Dragon's Dogma I spent a lot of time exploring. I loved going out at night with a lamp on and how it changed the ambience. But one thing is I saw walking around a waterfall - games had taught me that secret stuff can be hidden behind them, so I walked up and...there was a cave that led to a temple. Wandering around the temple I got into a fight with a cyclops. Couldn't get far because I hadn't even gotten the quest to go to the temple yet. But it really made the exploration work for me, finding that cave and that cyclops. Ah, the Watergod's Altar. I remember the first time I got jumped by a Chimera while minding my own business making my way to the Shadow Fort (and actively avoiding the "big scary monsters" because I assumed they'd tear me to shreds). It was a fun fight (and I won) and got me hooked on the game (and hunting bigger and bigger baddies). At one point in F.E.A.R. I was skulking around an empty office building where all the offices had glass walls when suddenly something seemed to be tossed through one of those, shattering the glass and almost giving me a heart attack (no enemies were involved, the building was and stayed empty). That was the first and only jump scare in the game and it worked so well *because* it was the only one as the rest of the game I was always on edge expecting more of that...

The multiplayer sounds like it'll be D:OS style (not surprising, really). Not really interested in that (since I have nobody who would want to play co-op RPGs with me anyway).