marelooke

Hmm, in what way? Getting dropped in an unfair situation?

Hmm, I provided a screenshot with the location on the map, does it matter that it was a scattered vs scattered one (both Warbands got scared by something and scattered around the area). If it does I'll add it to the report (if Steam will still let me edit it)

Well, I guess I have some bad news then... It might be the combination of debris with stairs that did it or something, I really couldn't say, but hopefully it's at least extremely rare (but then it might hit people when they least expect it, so maybe I should hope it's common, so it's easier to reproduce and fix...) Yeah, it just puts you back in the match when you load. I wouldn't mind either way if the game was free of gamebreaking bugs (but can you ever be entirely sure...?), being severly punished for bugs (or stuff outside your control, like wonky networks or overloaded servers) is not my idea of a good time (hence why I never bothered with a hardcore chacater in Diablo 3, *something* outside my control is bound to go wrong sooner or later)

OK, ran into a bit of a game breaking bug in Mordheim. On a random deployment one of my heros got stuck behind rubble on the floor. Result: I was getting slaughtered (since in effect, I was playing with one unit less, one of my strongest ones to boot). Since there is no way to back out of a game without getting severely punished (and alt+f4 doesn't work, yay for "hardcore" and stuff) these kinds of bugs can really ruin your game (since there is only one save...). Anyway, I reported it and I'm now going to wait for the patch to hit as that will mean my Warband should be reset to its pre-deployment state. After this I might sideline the game until it gets released though (or at least until these kinds of bugs are fixed) as hard as that's gonna be (game is damn addictive), but getting roflstomped due to bugs knowing there is no way to get out is *really* unfun. At the very least I'll avoid random deployments like the plague...

Playing more Mordheim, there are a couple of things I don't get though, when I have a downed warrior but I win anything they picked up is seemingly left behind and when I return it's treated as if I left those warriors behind. That seems rather harsh (also, if I win, why the hell would I leave Warband members behind?). My Initiate that picked up 20 ducats got downed (but not looted) so it kinda seriously hurt that win or lose is treated the same as far as downed warriors go

My new Warband is doing pretty well so far, aside from the hero that lost a leg (which I haven't actually used since since I managed to keep my replacement standing since then) I haven't received any injuries that seem to have had a major impact on my Warband's performance. I am struggling to keep the cash flowing though, I guess I'm playing too conservatively though my last game was better (I annihilated the enemy and got away with quite a bit of Wyrdstone and a total of 32 ducats. I unlocked another Hero slot now but I'm kind of loathe to hire a new hero (probably will just re-activate miss peg-leg). I did notice that looting enemies when they are surrounded (yeah, I'm a real hero ) doesn't always seem to work, or I'm pretty bad at finding the "correct" activation spot. I also figured out the "routing" problem from before. It was no bug just me misinterpreting the message. The message goes along the lines of "enemy routing check failed" which I interpreted as them failing the routing check and as such being routed, but it seems to mean that *I* fail the check to route them... So alas, miss peg-leg lost her leg entirely legitimately. No blaming a bug for that one (receiving the multiplayer achievement is a clear bug though since I haven' touched Skirmish, nor am I really planning to anytime soon, but they, free achievement ) Screeny (link, because Steam...): http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/394424245410784697/DBB7C0B3B2B16DFD671295EF8C63562EFE49EFA4/ I went in rather tightly grouped scooping up Wyrdstone starting from the outer edge of the map and then moving through the houses into the center of the district. My enemies turned out to be another band of Sisters, so I knew I didn't have to fear ranged units (phew). When I entered the courtyard I spotted their Matriarch, who then proceeded to charge my lone Novice, I think she quickly discovered the error of her ways because as soon as she engaged my Novice my Sister-Superior (Delma, often referred to as "she-who-brings-the-pain") came into view. Then the rest of my Warband came charging out of the nearby house (which conveniently had two exits) and quickly surrounded the lone Matriarch and started pummeling her into the ground. One of her Sisters tried to come to her aid but was promptly intercepted by my other Novice assisted by the Initiate that wasn't beating up the Matriarch (since you seemingly can only have a 4vs1, so they had nothing to pummel anyway). Once those two went down it was pretty much game over for the enemy Warband, the remaining sisters still came at me but my numerical advantage was such that they didn't stand a chance, ironically the last one to engage was their Sister-Superior which lead to them not being routed due to her high morale* so I got the satisfaction of taking every single one of them down. 6-0 in favor of The Righteous Fists, managed to grab the most loot I've been able so far and only Sister Erla sustained a Light Injury, a resoudingly successful expedition! *once I started hitting her there was a route check, which failed

How viable is it to just ditch companions and go at it solo? I generally prefer the sneaky approach and Bethesda's AI generally deals with it badly (and reading this thread doesn't give me particularly much hope that it's improved quite enough yet..)

Due to a certain someone constantly posting rather awesome tales from a dead city I picked up Mordheim... Of course I dived in without reading the manual (watched a bit of some youtube videos though), picked the Sisters for my first attempts (figured that not having to deal with ranged attacks and the likes might provide for a less steep learning curve) My first warband got slaughtered, chopped up and curbstomped after winning the first mission, though my second one is doing much better now (realizing that I can place my warband before starting massively increased my chances of survival ). It already three consecutive victories under its belt, though my Hero lost a leg in the last game (given how early in I am I guess it might be best to fire her?). That entire situation was a bit odd though, I got the enemy routed message and then another round started. Ended up having to beat down every single hostile in that game, if the match had ended there and then I'd have gotten out pretty much without a scratch, oh well... Anyway, my focus on survival and beating the opposition to pulp seems to have left my Wyrdstone acquiry rate a bit...wanting. Gonna take some time to figure out the right balance between things. Also according to Steam I played an online game, wasn't really planning on that, so I guess they just show up on the campaign map then, which seems odd (or the achievement is kinda buggy). Anyway, next available missions seem to be of the "hard" variety, this could hurt. So far I'm having fun at least

Only the Oghma Infinium left and I should finally be getting the "Oblivion Walker" achievement in Skyrim, assuming it doesn't bug again (I should have had that achievement a loong time ago already, but it never triggered). *knocks on wood*, then it's just making it to lvl78 or somesuch and beating up one of the supercharged dragons and that will be the first time I reach "100% completion" on a game, I think.

Not sure if it makes sense to provide a sense of urgency in an open world game. "Oh noes, the world is gonna end if $BAD_GUY is not stopped! Ooooh, shiny dungeon!", just makes the player feel like an idiot for doing anything other than the main quest, especially if you are forced to level up at certain points (istr there being a main quest in Oblivion that refused to let me start it unless I reached a certain level, that's when I ditched the game) I think it makes much more sense to provide an interesting* story, so players want to know how it plays out (eg. F:NV and even F3, since nothing in the introduction implied there was a rush in finding your dad again, which left of his own volition, assuming my memory isn't failing me anyway) without explicitly adding time pressure (so end-of-world-scenarios, kidnappings etc are out, really). Having (fake) time pressure just doesn't work really well in an open world game and real time pressure generally isn't appreciated all that much (*cough* water chip *cough*) *) de gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum. On another note, seems I fixed my Skyrim issues (*knocks on wood*) so yay, maybe I'll get those two last achievements after all...

The general vibe I get from the Steam reviews is that it's an average game and plain worse than F:NV in most aspects. A bummer but not unexpected I guess. That said, I was playing Skyrim again and it seems like my savegames went fubar after the Morthal questline again (that questchain is just broken and was never properly fixed, probably it's beyond fixing, and by "broken" I mean that every load is a roulette game with as a reward very regular CTDs, I had 0 problems before touching this questchain...). And to say that some masochists play Bethesda games on consoles where they don't even have access to the unofficial patches, makes me wonder if they actually succeed in finishing the games... (I guess they usually give up due to the lag etc) Also, my werewolf/vampire lord transformations are broken, it takes minutes (I should time it but I think it's around 5minutes) before the transformation actually happens. Great stuff. For most people this is related to messing with mods that mess with scripts, alas my mods are, barring a few exceptions, mostly cosmetic.

Made it to the Cistern in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, I have the feeling I should be closing in on the final stretch now...

Yeah, I wasn't even surprised when I heard that, I've come to expect it at this point. Somebody from Larian gave a bunch of excuses as to why, having to do with console versions having to go through certifications, thus being the lead platforms, then Windows being the base version for the PC versions, or something. The excuses may or may not be valid, I don't much care at this point. If you have a "base" version for cross platform development and it's not the lowest common denominator then you're already failing at cross platform development. I'm pretty convinced they just picked whatever libraries they were familiar with without checking whether they were cross platform and/or with the idea "yeah we'll find a version for $PLATFORM later and we'll just map the one api on the other" (though any dev that's been around for longer than an internship will be able to tell you "lolfacepalm, that ain't how it works"), since cross-platform development isn't exactly a secret art (people have been doing it since at least the 70's after all) I'd say they majorly messed up. Sure I can get that they pressed their budget to the limit to get more game, but not taking all the platforms you will support into account from the start will cost you *massively* more time and effort in the long run, which leads me to believe that if the game hadn't been as successful as it has been they'd have simply droppped the Linux/Mac versions. I'm still going with "don't attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by incompetence (or inexperience)", then again I don't own any consoles and instead I just buy a Windows license to use as a "console" (since I refuse to run any of the "gaming approved" Linux distributions, like Ubuntu, due to systemd, but that's an entirely different discussion), so even though I'm a GNU/Linux user I wasn't majorly affected, this time...

So, the Linux version of Divinity Original Sin (enhanced edition) has been pushed back to (at least) december (which is past the console releases). I doubt that at this point there are still many who care (they either just played the game on Windows or gave up on Larian, possibly/probably both)

Finally finished Act II in PoE, I had been putting off the "hearing" for a while now. Audio of the Dozens guy was pretty buggy (sounded like he was 2 rooms away). My camping supplies also seem to have mysteriously disappeared. Odd, hope that's not a recurring thing though.

Didn't WoW do away with skill trees? Because choice confuses people and all that, so let's not do that anymore... Personally mostly playing Warframe, still a serious bummer that UT3 has no Onslaught mode (Survival is the Warframe game mode I easily enjoy the most). Had a quick look at Age of Decadence, died in the tutorial, like a boss (and pretty much everybody else I guess ), think I'll just roll a non-combat character and ignore combat for now.

Well this sucks, I truly hope he manages to be the outlier.

It's pretty sad how much the first game was better than the second one in pretty much every department... (except maybe graphics)

Made it through the Storage in Amnesia: The Dark Descent , wasn't too bad really. I died once due to a bug (monster just kept waiting outside a door infinitely, making getting out kinda hard...). Of course coming face to face with the adversary sort of killed some of the scare factor for the rest of that level...

Can't really get into anything atm, been hopping between various grindy MMOs but anything that requires even a modicum of brainpower seems to be off limits currently So yeah, Survival in Warframe is always fun (gods know why they decided to scrap Onslaught in UT3, but I certainly miss it...), also some mindless grinding in Skyforge (game has some nice ideas, but when it comes down to it it's just one big, rather glitchy, grindfest), even gave TERA a try (not my cup of tea, and I'm not even talking about the character "design" here...). Started to run into hostiles in Amnesia, so guess I might just be chickening out on that one... Anyway, still can't for some reason motivate myself to pick up any of my unfinished cRPG playthroughs (I have PoE, Wasteland 2 and D:OS all in various states of completion...), if this keeps up I'll have to just start over since I'll have forgotten where I was at...

It was Cataclysm that removed both the defense and block stat on items (along with a few other things), not Wrath of the Lich King. Tanks still had to be crit immune and balance their avoidance in Wrath. Endless healer mana-pools and overpowered paladin healers in ridiculous 25 man raid encounters just made it so that tanks geared for the minimum defense necessary and put everything else into their health. Hmm, not sure which stat it was then, I'm sure they greatly simplified gearing for tanks with WotLK though, maybe they just shifted things around to make it easier (well, pallies no longer requiring int definitely made gearing them easier, but there was more to it than that istr and it had something to do with a certain stat that made one immune to crushing blows or crits by bosses, and had to be at different levels for raid bosses and heroic dungeon ones (due to the level difference between the player and the boss)), but since WoWWiki (which had a lot of articles on that legacy stuff) apparently went the way of the Dodo (which was a bit of a "WTF?" moment tbh, I' ve been using that wiki since forever ) I'm just going to leave it at that. EDIT: http://wow.gamepedia.com/Defense found this, doesn' t seem defense changed much, maybe it was just a lot more plentiful than before. It's been such a long time... EDIT2: pretty sure it was related to the crushing blow change in patch 3.0.2 mentioned here: http://wow.gamepedia.com/Crushing_blow though that article is rather light on details. Found an old Paladin guide here that says this: Iirc one needed a certain amount of defense to get immune to crushing blows from raid bosses (which are treated as being 3 levels higher than the player), the removal of that mechanic (by only having crushing blows from mobs 4 levels higher, instead of 3, as was the case in TBC) effectively lowered the required amount of defense, making gearing much easier. Well that was an interesting trip down memory lane, that much is sure

Considered upgrading to the signed KS edition, but $200 is a bit steep and none of the tiers above the physical KS edition appeal to me, so $125 it is I guess.

what i say i heard from Swen himself during a preview of the game he made with angry joe im not sure about the "all characters start together part" but he does say that "each has a personal story and it's up to the player controlling him to role play the outcome, and in single one player makes the choices for all" Isn't the party a lot bigger in D:OS2? I thought I read that the player creates four characters but can also recruit some, resulting in a maximum party size of 8 (4 player created and 4 that you pick up along the way). Can't find the source anymore though...

Sure, but in TBC days it was perfectly acceptable to let said idiots die. It was also perfectly acceptable to point and laugh after warning them a few times or just plain boot them from the group if they kept up their asocial and idiotic behaviour since in those days the tank was pretty much always the party leader... Moreover angering tanks in PUGs was a very bad move if one wanted to continue to be able to find PUG groups on that realm...thankfully idiocy among players was fairly limited until LFG was rolled out so I never actually had to blacklist players (and with cross realm LFG blacklisting was pretty pointless anyway). The fun was in setting up the pull (eg. marking the targets, making sure not to pick up patrolling mobs, making sure you have aggro on everything etc), compensating for AOE, keeping the flow of the dungeon going (which wasn't exactly evident as a pally in TBC... insert "table please!" or "OOM!" here) and trying to keep people from overaggroing without breaking the CC yourself... aside form a single alt run in Karazahn I didn't really tank any raids during TBC though. In WotLK tanking had gone from something hard to something trivially easy though. Gaining and keeping aggro was easy, AoE tanking was also trivial and pallies didn't need intelligence anymore and going OOM was also pretty much impossible on top of that a few stats that made gearing a tank hard were removed (anybody remember "crushing blows" and "crit immunity"?) On that note, being a DPS was also harder since gonig bonkers with AOE was generally not appreciated due to CC. It was also imperative to keep your CC target sheeped/banished until the tank called for said target to be killed. CC just made everything harder for everybody, really. It's a shame it became pretty much irrelevant with WotLK (I think Ulduar and Sartharion required some CC when we first we ran them, but 5mans certainly didn't need any). (disclaimer: I levelled a paladin tank in TBC pretty much by living inside instances with PUGs, I was pretty bitter about what they did to the Sunken Temple, I spent so much time in there...)

D:OS has a good co-op mode that was well-implemented, but it was NOT by any means meant to be played co-op only, with singleplayer as an afterthought. For combat, you have a party of 4. It's a turnbased game, you can easily do it singleplayer. All co-op does is split the task btw 2 players (2 characters each). Co-op was a blast, but it is completely unnecessary to enjoy the stellar combat system. Seriously, this is my favorite TB RPG combat system ever. For non-combat/dialogue/roleplaying, the coop is unnecessary and gimmicky. Yeah you can select opposing choices in dialogue and do rock-paper-scissors, big deal. All the good parts in D:OS can be enjoyed singleplayer. Coop just happens to well-implemented, and a a great feature for people who want it. For those who don't care about multiplayer, coop does not actually add anything, and the game is not diminished by playing it singleplayer that is true for the first game, but the second game seems more multiplayer oriented with characters that may even be enemies with each other in the party and you have to role play all of them if you dont have others to take on their role... unlike the standard model where you play your character and what the party members do is determined by a combination of your actions and what reaction the writers decided that the characters shoud have based on said actions Could be interesting if some of the NPCs you pick up could actually try to work against you though...