marelooke

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...

I actually started playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent, so far haven't run into any real enemies, though I've "seen" a few now, so it's likely to be soon now...

I feel like it's made for people who think raiding in WoW is too casual now. Problem is, all those people forgot all the other negatives that came with the hardcore raiding there was. About 1% of players saw the original Naxxramas raid in vanilla WoW. These are not the people you build a succesful MMO on, despite those people clearly and falsely taking credit for WoW's success. There being things that are always just out of reach is imho a good thing, it certainly is what got me into raiding, I think a big part of the decline of WoW is that it is much too easy to see everything. For this I blame the LFG-system and the raid finder. The first destroyed the sense of community on realms, the second makes it so that everybody can see all the content without any effort. (Blizzard's attempt to fix this with Cataclysm backfired massively due to the LFG system, there not being any notworthy repercussions for abandoning your team as tank/healer if things don't go super-smoothly literally killed it) Sure you can do the "normal" and "heroic" version of the exact same content but it's the still same content dropping the same gear (with another colour palette) meaning it gets boring real fast since most people do the raids on "raid finder" to get the baseline gear, then do the same stuff on "normal" with their guild and after that the *same* raid again on heroic. If that sounds boring then that is because it *is* boring. I miss when there was a natural progression both in raids as well as in the heroic dungeons (eg. Karazahn -> Gruul's/Magtheridon -> SSC -> whatever the Kael'thas raid was called -> CoT: Mount Hyjal -> Black Temple -> Sunwell Plateau) and if a guild started up later during the expansion they'd still have to go through raids in that order, more or less (our guild started "late" in TBC and we made it to just before that nasty boss in the Sunwell that destroyed entire guilds: M'uru), though generally one could skip the last (and hardest) boss of a raid for progression (eg. since we started up late we tiptoed around Lady Vash for a while...). By the time I quit WoW when a new raid was released you got handed gear at the level of the last raid for basically free (either through heroic 5mans or through badges earned in said 5mans, later they added raid finder to that list), so there is no need anymore to visit any older raid, and nobody does either, only the current content counts. Moreover since it's less necessary to actually *have* a guild people are a lot less willing to put in the effort necessary to be part of a decent guild (eg. show up on time, or at all), which lead to the top 10 raiding guilds on my realm disappearing in short order (some of them had actually been around to raid Naxxramas in vanilla). That 1% of the players still inspired the rest (or I might be special), certainly the situation in vanilla was far from ideal, but the current situation is entirely the other extreme. Sure we all have less time nowadays (I certainly couldn't put in the time I used to even if I wanted to), but handing everything out for free isn't exactly helping the feeling of accomplishment. I still fondly remember beating Sartharion 25 with 3 drakes (Sarth3d 25man) or even the first time we managed to beat Moroes (2nd boss in Karazahn) before I joined a "true" raiding guild. These kinds of moments are what raiders raid for (Moroes certainly gave met the raiding itch) and really I don't even remember any bosses that came after Wrath of the Lich King, which is saying something I guess... But maybe I'm just suffering from this affliction known to EVE players as "bittervet syndrome" and everything is actually great with how things are in WoW nowadays (though I'd argue that the declining subs are a sign that at least *something* is wrong). PS: the fact that Blizzard still doesn't have a decent grasp on character progression doesn't help any, eg. a paladin in vanilla is so different from a paladin in, say, Cataclysm it's not even funny. The same goes for pretty much every class, Paladins are just the most extreme example. These constant "total rethinks" of classes surely don't help player retention. Oh, I do agree with most of what you said (though LFR loot is no longer just a color swap, and it's always below the last tiers heroic so it's not part of the gearing process). It's just that raiding is not as big a part of WoW as people think it is. I was reading about this very subject earlier and I found the actual number of people who did Naxrammas and realized I made a giant overstatement. Ion Hazzikostas didn't say it was 1% of the players, he said it was about 3000 players total made it through Naxx. Back when Naxrammas came out, there were about 7 million players. Think about that - out of 7 million people, 3000 people made it through the raid content. That's less than 0.05%. The reason Blizzard keeps LFR because now at least something like 30% of players (still a minority) sees the raid content so they're actually able to justify making new raid content. The weird thing is that such a majority of MMO players never set foot in raids. It's becoming readily apparent that the reason Warlords of Draenor lost so many subscribers despite the raid content being almost universally praised is because it's got nothing else that's good. Normal (to a point), Heroic and Mythic raids are challenging. But everything else (including LFR) has zero difficulty. Leveling is piss easy - I can solo 5-player designed group quests when I'm level appropriate for them. Professions are pointless and easy and filled with cooldowns where you can't actually craft. Last week, I just did /follow someone in LFR and went AFK to see if that would work, and it did. Hell even heroic dungeons are a faceroll, and I did the relevant rep grinds for WoD in three weeks. And I'm not trying to make myself look awesome here, I'm a TERRIBLE WoW player. I still use the keyboard to turn. Mists of Pandaria did a lot to stem the subscriber loss because it had cool mounts that you could get through rep grinds and professions that took a lot of time and gold and because there was quest and story content in the end-game, and there were scenarios to do, and you had reasons to do dungeons. Even the LFR was a little better in MoP, it was still possible to wipe on it occassionally. But the vocal minority has been saying for so long that the only interesting thing in the game is hardcore raiding, and Blizzard believed them. Now the only thing that is any good is the raiding, and people are leaving the game in droves. I have plenty to do because I started over on a new server, but almost everyone else I know that still plays is out of non-raid content so they don't do anything but log on for raids. I keep seeing the WoW fanboy boards like MMO Champion whining about casuals ruining the game, but in truth the reason it lost 4.5 million subscribers since the launch of WoD is because Blizzard focused on them and their obsession with raiding. EDIT: I got confused on the 1% figure because that was mentioned for another raid, namely Sunwell the final raid of Burning Crusade. It wasn't until Wrath that slightly more than a completely negligable amount of WoW players actually started raiding. EDIT EDIT: I'm sorry about my weird sentence structure in the last few posts, I have the flu and my head's not where it's supposed to be... I recognize some of my sentences are awkward. I never felt as if raiding was that hard (though some bosses certainly were, but it's the challenge that makes it fun, as long as people don't lose their temper about wiping), the hard part about raiding is committing to showing up and a good guild leader could even make that seriously flexible (we had 3 raids/week of which you were guaranteed a spot in two, moreover there were no "backups", you either were a raiding member or you were not, since most people gladly raided the full 3 nights members having a real life never interfered with our ability to raid). I played the start of MoP and I don't remember operations, I remember boring questing, lots of extremely tedious daily grinding (with the removal of the cap on dailies) and rather bland raids to top it all off. MoP made me quit WoW for good as I cannot remember a single good thing about the expansion so my desire to go back based on nostalgia has been well and truly buried by that expansion. The extreme streamlining of the "old" content also killed a lot of the fun in questing for me (I was very nearly "Loremaster" before Cataclysm), finding all those mostly forgotten lore quests related to raid unlocks was fun in and of itself and they did away with all that in Cata (though I'm sure the new player experience is much better, but feels they kicked out the good with the bad to me). I think you're mixing up a few expansion since I don't remember Warlords of Draenor, which I assume means it came after Mists. And obviously, a MMO is the sum of its parts, focus on one area to the exclusion of the rest is idiotic. Then again, they homogenized the classes because of PvP, made raids easy so they wouldn't have to provide actual content to the non-raiders at the same time angering the raiders. Basically, Blizzard made a huge mess and each time they try to "fix" it they seem to be making it worse. Tanks are a lot more gear dependant, moreover players have zero respect anymore for the job (eg. making sure not to overaggro is a skill lost to time, for non-raids at least) combine those two and the amount of abuse you get if not massively well geared can be pretty impressive. Though that lack of respect goes in all directions (bad tanks dying and bitching at the healers, bad dps dying due to overaggro, etc), how I missed the days before LFG... That said tanking for a good group is extremely rewarding and fun, though DPS-ing is a skill in and of itself, how I miss when being a good mage revolved all around minimizing movement, in the good old days before being able to cast on the move and spam living bomb, /sigh)

I feel like it's made for people who think raiding in WoW is too casual now. Problem is, all those people forgot all the other negatives that came with the hardcore raiding there was. About 1% of players saw the original Naxxramas raid in vanilla WoW. These are not the people you build a succesful MMO on, despite those people clearly and falsely taking credit for WoW's success. There being things that are always just out of reach is imho a good thing, it certainly is what got me into raiding, I think a big part of the decline of WoW is that it is much too easy to see everything. For this I blame the LFG-system and the raid finder. The first destroyed the sense of community on realms, the second makes it so that everybody can see all the content without any effort. (Blizzard's attempt to fix this with Cataclysm backfired massively due to the LFG system, there not being any notworthy repercussions for abandoning your team as tank/healer if things don't go super-smoothly literally killed it) Sure you can do the "normal" and "heroic" version of the exact same content but it's the still same content dropping the same gear (with another colour palette) meaning it gets boring real fast since most people do the raids on "raid finder" to get the baseline gear, then do the same stuff on "normal" with their guild and after that the *same* raid again on heroic. If that sounds boring then that is because it *is* boring. I miss when there was a natural progression both in raids as well as in the heroic dungeons (eg. Karazahn -> Gruul's/Magtheridon -> SSC -> whatever the Kael'thas raid was called -> CoT: Mount Hyjal -> Black Temple -> Sunwell Plateau) and if a guild started up later during the expansion they'd still have to go through raids in that order, more or less (our guild started "late" in TBC and we made it to just before that nasty boss in the Sunwell that destroyed entire guilds: M'uru), though generally one could skip the last (and hardest) boss of a raid for progression (eg. since we started up late we tiptoed around Lady Vash for a while...). By the time I quit WoW when a new raid was released you got handed gear at the level of the last raid for basically free (either through heroic 5mans or through badges earned in said 5mans, later they added raid finder to that list), so there is no need anymore to visit any older raid, and nobody does either, only the current content counts. Moreover since it's less necessary to actually *have* a guild people are a lot less willing to put in the effort necessary to be part of a decent guild (eg. show up on time, or at all), which lead to the top 10 raiding guilds on my realm disappearing in short order (some of them had actually been around to raid Naxxramas in vanilla). That 1% of the players still inspired the rest (or I might be special), certainly the situation in vanilla was far from ideal, but the current situation is entirely the other extreme. Sure we all have less time nowadays (I certainly couldn't put in the time I used to even if I wanted to), but handing everything out for free isn't exactly helping the feeling of accomplishment. I still fondly remember beating Sartharion 25 with 3 drakes (Sarth3d 25man) or even the first time we managed to beat Moroes (2nd boss in Karazahn) before I joined a "true" raiding guild. These kinds of moments are what raiders raid for (Moroes certainly gave met the raiding itch) and really I don't even remember any bosses that came after Wrath of the Lich King, which is saying something I guess... But maybe I'm just suffering from this affliction known to EVE players as "bittervet syndrome" and everything is actually great with how things are in WoW nowadays (though I'd argue that the declining subs are a sign that at least *something* is wrong). PS: the fact that Blizzard still doesn't have a decent grasp on character progression doesn't help any, eg. a paladin in vanilla is so different from a paladin in, say, Cataclysm it's not even funny. The same goes for pretty much every class, Paladins are just the most extreme example. These constant "total rethinks" of classes surely don't help player retention.

Yup, only the dragon fights require a bit of micromanagement (note though that I said "micromanagement" and not "tactics" on purpose) Decided to check out Skyforge, it's got a couple of interesting concepts, the unlocking classes through a sort of gigantic skill graph kinda helps differentiate people after a while. Graphics are nice (though not nice enough imho for it to be acceptable for my GTX970 to dip to 9fps occasionally), setting is cool, combat is not bad (though not especially noteworthy either imho), voice acting is often downright terrible (and the syncing with the character animations is often way off, maybe because those assume Russian?), story could potentially be interesting, the way it's brought is...meh though ("your character acts like a bleeding moron to further the story" kind of stuff) In other news, even though I backed through PayPay (which apparently meant I didn't get an expansion key, though everything else of that tier was in) Obsidian has been awesome and provided me a key anyway, which is pretty damn nice of them (and much appreciated since funds are kinda tighter now than back when their KS had just finished, what with buying a house and all that), details here.

And if both 1 & 2 are true but I did not back through Kickstarter but PayPal (because I missed the campaign )? EDIT: I should probably also get the Obsidian Order thing sorted out, while I'm at it, fashionably late to the party Hey, marelooke. I took a look at your tier. The retail version of the collector's edition (the version available after the Kickstarter) does not come with the expansion pack. You would need to purchase the expansion pack separately to play it. I will make a post if anything change on that front in the future. Ah bummer, I figured it was part of the tier since I got all the other goodies from that tier, I'd probably have added extra if I'd known in advance. Oh well, can't be helped now, thanks for clearing it up though! We talked this over internally and we have decided to give anyone who purchased the $250 retail tier a copy of the expansion pack, as well. To get a copy just send an email to support@obsidian.net and they can hook you up. Got a key, thanks for being awesome, Obsidian!

Cool robot. ... what?