marelooke

So it's a post apocalyptic shooter that oozes atmosphere, has some inventory management (guns are heavy man), has good gunplay, a good/realistic variety of weaponry and an engaging storyline (and yes, I thought at least SoC has a rather good storyline)? Maybe I should check it out after all once I'm done with Skyrim... How I wish for an actual Stalker 2, if they'd just fix all the half broken mechanics and leave the formula alone otherwise then I'd so be all over it...

Soooo, thanks to melkathi I stopped being such a chicken in Mordheim and actually did the first campaign mission. So yeah...maybe I should've done it a bit earlier as "steamrolling" would have been an understatement (my Warband's rating was around 1100 vs the mission's 700). I think I took a few arrows to the (armored) knee but that was about it. The impressive unit they have at the start scratched armor of Clara-the-tank (Sister Superior built for tankiness) a little bit but my Impressive together with the "Dramatis Personae" provided for the mission (basically another Impressive with slightly less health and a more damage) took it down in no time at all (I think 4 hits that connected were all it took). Then the rest of my Warband piled into the Cathedral and curbstomped everything in there... The biggest challenge ended up being getting to the tower bell... Apparently heavily armored units tend to have some trouble jumping over gaps and climbing onto things. Who'd have expected... (never bothered me in Skyrim! ) So I guess that giving the item I needed to cleanse the tower bell to the "Dramatis Personae" might not have been such a great idea as it ended up taking me like 5 or 6 pretty boring turns to get over the gap on the first floor (during which the rest of the Warband was mostly busy playing cards or being generally bored) because she fell down twice while trying to jump over the gap, thankfully I got lucky on the cimbing part a turn later. Pretty sure there must have been quite a bit of reinforcements spawned by then, only one managed to make it into reach of my Warband though, poor Chaos dude found out 7 vs 1 aren't really great odds... EDIT: damn, those are some pretty F:NV screenshots...

That is pretty cool. I'd been considering buying the game, but the fact that it was only part 1 of a series (and supposedly rather buggy to boot) kinda put me off of it, knowing that that might get sorted out gives me some measure of hope

Ugh, yeah, had my first "I ambush you" mission and the only real upside is that I get to at least position my team...starting within reach of enemies just always sucks. I've been putting off the storyline missions forever, maybe I should at least try to get Act 1 done, seems the missions don't scale so that first missions *should* theoretically be a cakewalk by now... I hope... Maybe I'll just wait a little longer...your reports are kinda scary and all...

Got dropped into my first ambush mission, it was pretty horrible. Ended up against Skaven, which high initiative, can run long distances combined with being dropped in a horrible starting position made it look pretty bad for me real fast. Thankfully Skaven have low morale so I managed to get a victory out of it with "only" two warriors downed (I thought I was going to get beaten into a pulp, I got *extremely* lucky with my Matriarch as they got routed when she was on very low HP...). Alas: http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/393299074077407370/08561A4B42F1B1985B5E8D8A229D23719167D788/ It was bound to happen eventually, ironically enough the other downed sister didn't even have a scratch... The AI isn't always very bright either, this Skaven (in another game than the one I lost the sister in) had disengaged and run away only to do this: http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/393299074077408869/85B982F61C6524B4ABDF5511ADC4A405FC9545CE/ (for the uninitiated, he was low on health and figured it was a good idea to jump down from a building, which killed him...) My Matriarch versus a poor Skaven (sorry Keyrock), might have been the one from the above screenshot too... http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/393299074077408700/80300A919AB703CFA3449DB6E2034280776139C1/ I found the way he seemed to react to the hammer that was about to fall rather funny...

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...