marelooke

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).

Oh darn, that's going to be a hard choice between this and Forza Horizon 3. And Warframe has a new event lined up that should be releasing soon-ish as well... So much fun to have, so little time...

I've been playing Forza Horizon 3. On a PC (of course). Finally a good open world arcade racer for the PC. It's been since the original Test Drive Unlimited that we had one of those...

Enjoyed the first one, never finished it though. Gave up on 2 due to the free-roam DLC mess. Well, as a series that started on the PC this is a bit of a slap in face. I mean, how hard is it to unlock framerates? The guy who fixed Dark Souls PC release did it in one night. Mafia 2 was already DLC riddled with save points (couldn't save in free roam without DLC). From there to "consoles first" is a small step. My expectations were low, seems they've been "bottomed" though...

Hey folks, I'm right here! Stop gossiping Got lucky and noticed the online Ur-Dragon was on low-ish health (2.5 health bars remaining), so decided to slap it around as it usually tends to die at stupid-o-clock in my time zone. Ur-Dragon in Grace period (after it dies it stays in a weak state so other participants can grab their loot) Dying Ur-Dragon Leaderboard for this kill: Now back to "gitting gud" so I can actually beat Daemon's awakened form...

Completed all "story" quests (meaning all non-notice board ones, which are usually of the kill this or that or collect this or that type) in Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. I'm now actually contemplating doing a speedrun at some point to get to 100% achievement completion...

Hmm, the multiplayer they're talking about for Wasteland 3 sounds very... Original Sin 2-ish, kinda obvious where they got that idea ;-) The camera thing and obvious inclusion of voice acting leaves me indifferent, at best. At worst voice acting detracts from the experience, like it did in PoE, at least for me.

Clean hands or kill? The first target is ... Rather difficult to do on both. Both. I have this tendency to choke out as much guards as possible anyway. Think I only left 1 guard standing in the building, so dragging the guy to the chair was easy as there was nobody left to detect me... I considered killing him anyway, just for the achievements since I left all of them alive in my last playthrough, maybe if I ever do a "high chaos murder everything" playthrough. I also did all secondary objectives as Ghost (Granny Rags was interesting, had to use Time Stop, or w/e it is called). Now attempting Ghost + not killing any targets + low magic *that* would be *hard* (or just infuriating ;-))...

Went back to Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen for a bit and finally killed Death in Bitter Black Isle. So now I can start ignoring the bugger until NG+ on Hard mode. I also found that the room before the final boss of BBI is pretty good for getting all your gear Dragonforged as lots of Dragons spawn there and the ones in BBI have a rather higher chance of Dragonforging than the ones in the main game. Next up: beating Daemon to a pulp. Then maybe go back tot he main story for a bit. As for my Ghost Dishonored playthrough: successfully took care of the first target "ghostily". Holding off on continuing for a bit until I have the time to run through the next mission in one go.

With Dishonored 2 coming out I figured now was a good time to do that Ghost (alert no enemies and kill no-one) playthrough I nearly did in my first playthrough of the first game (think I only missed it due to the start of the game where I killed some guards since I figured it was still part of the tutorial, turns out it wasn't) Escaped the Prison unseen so I should be good now if I can replicate the rest of my playthrough from years ago

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a lot better in that respect: way less QTEs, no more idiotic "deathrides", better puzzles and much less teenage angst (or just pure idiocy). It is, as we like to say, a straight upgrade ;-) The one thing I miss from the first Tomb Raider (the one from '96) are the level spanning puzzles (dunno if any of the later ones had those) like Palace Midas.

'Adventure with up to 4 friends'. This signals MMO design choices for me. Can't actually remember if this was in the first reboot game, if it was then I guess it's not so pronounced, which is a good thing for me at least. It allowed two-player co-op by default, but let each player control two party members each. Mods quickly allowed for four player co-op and it was such an obvious move that it's just implemented by default in the sequel. Really the puzzle is why they didn't do it the first time around. Because the story was written around two characters. Now they have all these races and modifiers (eg. mystic, soldier) that basically "create" your goals in the game for you so it's supposed to scale a lot better. Pretty much all the "MMO-like" aspects of D:OS can be retraced back to the fact that Larian started the Divinity series by copy-pasting Diablo's gameplay loop, so they probably instinctively come back to some of those design elements. Personally, I wish they'd drop stuff like being able to see the enemies' levels and the color-coded randomized loot, but that would require some pretty significant rethinking and they probably just don't want to do it. Plus, they can get away with that game-y stuff because Rivellon is a pretty silly place in the first place. Agreed on the random loot. I hope at least major enemies drop fixed loot, haven't gotten that far in the Alpha yet. Also seems the game's tone so far has been quite a bit more serious than the first.

What got me hooked on Tomb Raider in the first place was the sense of exploration and discovery. Loved going where no (wo)man had gone for centuries and sometimes beyond the games borders Tomb Raider 2 was fun too, albeit a very different game. At TR III, they had sort of lost their touch and it was too much linearity and puzzles. IV was the first I didn't complete (those were the days before cheats and tutorials widely available on the internet). I bought the... not sure what it's name is but the first one of the new generation of Tomb Raider (same visual style as the sceenshots from sorophx), but it's telling I don't even remember it's name (and dropped it after 10 minutes, never to pick it up again). It is just called "Tomb Raider" though it's generally referred to as Tomb Raider 2013 (to differentiate it from the original).

Someone had to rake up the Diablo 3 thread...rebirthed my Demon Hunter in the Season, let's see how long I last this time...

I'd offer to charge you, but given your Warband's likely medical expenses I doubt it'd be worth it A few very bad beating drove that message home for me for sure. Anyway, been playing some Divinity: Original Sin 2 and it's been great so far. I should note that I haven't touched the EE of the first game, so all my comparisons are to the "classic" version. The new spell/skill system is a massive improvement (you now have limited capacity to "equip" skills of various levels, D&D wizard spellbook like. No more losing spells when you remove them to never find the spellbook again...). The new UI is also a huge improvement over the one from the first game. I also like how the game just strands you on an island with only the knowledge that you were "Source sensitive" and zero instructions on what to do next. Love their take on the elfs as well they remind me of the Guild Wars 2 plant people whose name I can't quite recall at the moment. Also your origin quite clearly has an effect on other characters. Will be interesting to see how the story develops. Dialogues also seem more "serious" than previously. Character creation needs work though (it's alpha, so what do you expect ), i just picked some origin "properties" sort of randomly based on their names as no descriptions were available. Makes me actually want to push through the first game now...