What are you playing now: The New Thread

[Keyrock]

I beat the first boss in Code Vein on my first try. The second boss took me 5 tries, but I got the job done. I've been experimenting a different setups of blood codes (classes) and weapons. Currently I'm most liking the Prometheus class and halberds, as far as weapons go. My previous favorite weapons were hammers. Halberds don't stagger enemies nearly as often as hammers, but they have tons of reach, swing faster, and drain less stamina. I like how certain special abilities can be inherited and used by other blood codes. There's a lot of depth to customizing your abilities to fit your play style, and a nearly overwhelming amount of stats.

[GhostofAnakin]

About to face Troy Callypso.  Something tells me it's going to be a fight that annoys the hell out of me.

[wolfrider100]

I been playing Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG (it's in Early Access) off and on for the past few days. So far I beaten the prologue twice (now at 31 hours time played) and unlocked all 15 achievements. The game is rough in a few areas (with a few of the skills having not been added yet) but it's still very much enjoyable. The game's story-line which is set in the 1970's, it starts off with you working for the Cronus Foundation and trapped inside a massive and mysterious dome with something going horrible wrong soon afterwards. The story it has me hook, I can't wait to find out what happens next and that's just from the prologue alone.

Quick Side Note : I love Encased's starting home base (Magellan Station) and the many different people there, C12 - Nashville (a research station) is also cool, cool but very creepy [ there's a reason for that ], both places are in the game's prologue. This game I can see it getting better with each new content update / bug fix.

The character build I'm using for Encased ;

Job: Black Wing (Security for Cronus)

Full name is: Wyatt James Smith

Gender: Male [Age: 35]

Muscle: 4
Deftness: 7
Guts: 4
Brains: 7
Perception: 7
Luck: 3
Charisma: 6
Psionics: 3

His main abilities picked are : light weapons, criminal and speech.
Then grabbed hacking, lock picking, first aid, and mechanic abilities.

Edited October 6, 2019 by wolfrider100

[GhostofAnakin]

7 hours ago, GhostofAnakin said:

About to face Troy Callypso.  Something tells me it's going to be a fight that annoys the hell out of me.

 

Update: Okay, something weird happened during that fight.  Initially, I couldn't beat him.  He'd shoot those stupid rolling balls and whenever one would hit me, it would take my shields down completely.  He'd then charge at me and take my health down all the way because my shields hadn't recharged yet.  Two seconds later I'd be dead.

Rinse and repeat about 5 or 6 times until I rage quit.

After calming down, I load up the game and try again.  For whatever reason, my shields did NOT deplete when those spheres he tosses hit them.  Instead, my shield -- which is some sort of radiation damage shield which does radiation damage to anything that hits them -- kept destroying the spheres as soon as they hit them.  So I was able to lay into him with my weapons because I didn't have to try and dodge out of the way all the time.

I honestly have no clue what happened.  The first 5 or 6 times I fought him, the shields did NOT deflect a single thing.  Then suddenly after quitting and re-starting, the shields actually blocked his attacks.  So I'm not sure if they simply didn't work the first half dozen times, or if they worked TOO well the last time when I finally beat him.

Sidenote: It sucks that my best weapons now are purple and not my legendary orange.  All my legendary stuff is like 10 levels below what I'm at and doesn't do nearly enough damage as the recent purple gear I've gotten.

[Malcador]

Need to think up a way to beat Ottomans, everyone in Europe is useless to fight them so they keep rolling me, bah.

[Keyrock]

1 hour ago, Malcador said:

Need to think up a way to beat Ottomans

Have you tried one of these?

It's made for rugs, but it should work well for beating ottomans too. 

[Malcador]

Yes, it was called Sweden in my last game.  I think I'll restart my EU4 game, I think after about 20 times as Russia I'll figure it out.

[Keyrock]

I beat my third boss, Insatiable Despot, in Code Vein. This one took me 3 tries. At first I thought this battle would be harder than the second boss, Butterfly of Delirium; I got absolutely OBLITERATED on my first attempt. However, I did much better on my second attempt and figured something out toward the end. On my third attempt I handed Mr. Despot his ass. 

The trick is to

 

mostly ignore the boss for most of the fight and concentrate on the adds. This is the first boss I've faced that doesn't fight alone. He will summon adds to aid him, but summoning them drains his health. If you tunnel vision on the boss himself the adds will wreck you, but if you dispatch them right away they are easy to defeat. You still need to watch out for Despot's giant attacks, but if you don't attack him much he will concentrate on your companion and keep summoning more adds as you dispatch them. They take a while to materialize and once you know the timing you can set up a charged heavy attack for when they materialize and nearly insta-kill them. Despot will run himself low on health summoning adds. Once he's down to about 1/3 health he will stop summoning them and you can then finish him off.

Edited October 5, 2019 by Keyrock

[LadyCrimson]

16 hours ago, GhostofAnakin said:

I honestly have no clue what happened.  The first 5 or 6 times I fought him, the shields did NOT deflect a single thing. 

Just sounds like one of the many small bugs the game has. I've encountered quite a few. Nothing huge but a lot of little things that bug out  very randomly and either resolve themselves at some point in a play session or resolve when you restart/reload.

I found this Legendary pistol with the red text "Hail" - it's like a masher with a large explosive radius, which is great when you have trouble with precise aiming via controller+enemies that run around like jackrabbits on hot coals. I'll be sad when it becomes too weak.   Edit: hubby is usually a lot better w/a controller than I am and he's having issues too, so I feel better knowing it's "not just me." Ha.

Edited October 5, 2019 by LadyCrimson

[MedicineDan]

lol My wife was listening to Deadfire and she says, "this is my favorite of the games you play.  I usually hate hearing them, but the music is really good."

I found myself whistling, humming, and singing Like a Child Rests.  My wife says she realizes why I've been doing it.  The game has a song in it that sounds just like it.

 

[GhostofAnakin]

7 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

Just sounds like one of the many small bugs the game has. I've encountered quite a few. Nothing huge but a lot of little things that bug out  very randomly and either resolve themselves at some point in a play session or resolve when you restart/reload.

I found this Legendary pistol with the red text "Hail" - it's like a masher with a large explosive radius, which is great when you have trouble with precise aiming via controller+enemies that run around like jackrabbits on hot coals. I'll be sad when it becomes too weak.   Edit: hubby is usually a lot better w/a controller than I am and he's having issues too, so I feel better knowing it's "not just me." Ha.

It was just really weird.  Like, literally the first few times I tried to face him, my shields would go down the very second one of his orbs/spheres hit me, then my health would follow because he usually followed up with a melee charge/strike.  But when I quit and then re-loaded a couple of minutes later, my shields destroyed the orbs/spheres coming at me and so when he melee charged I still had shields to deflect a lot of the damage.

My favorite weapon right now is a purple rifle.  It shoots flame damage that increases in strength the longer I hold the trigger.  My legendary gear is pretty much obsolete at this point other than my shields (which do radiation damage to anyone who comes near me).  Which kind of sucks because I like rockin' the orange gear just for the prestige of it.

[Humanoid]

I'm playing Silent Service 2. Dunno why, I never actually learned to play it properly as a kid: I couldn't handle fighting more than one armed enemy ship at a time. In the process of figuring it out now. It's basically a stealth game like Thief or Dishonored after all, except the enemies are faster than you so if you muck up the initial ambush, that's probably it.

[MedicineDan]

I've been so addicted to Deadfire.  I'm truly astounded that I had this idea that it wasn't going to be all that great and basically finally started playing it out of desperation.  I guess I do have the benefit of having DLCs and patches.  It's been remarkably stable for me so far.  I have several DLCs now, but I eschewed a couple that looked iffy to me.  That Seeker Slayer Survivor thing looks like an arena sort of DLC and I have no interest in either arenas (single or multiplayer) or multiplayer anything.  At this point, I enjoy the action as long as it goes with the story.  I'm not even planning on playing the game on anything other than classic difficulty at this point.  Yeah, it was fun back when I could map out mazes in my head, but I've only gotten dumber over the years, not smarter, and double for lazy.  No pencil and paper to keep track of maps, mazes, and messages for me.  If the game doesn't provide a record review of it, I'll probably miss it.

Just got to Tikawara or some such.  Place reminds me of Spanish Picaresque literature.  Everyone is abjectly poor and starving and whatnot.  Anyhow, just talked to the first several people and, of all things, I'm off to find... fruit?

Now that I see it, I wonder if I have the right Spanish genre?  Maybe I'm thinking Picayune or something like that?  I know it's pointless to think about it, but if anyone knows, that would be great.  Meanwhile, Picaresque serves as an apt description also, especially considering there's literally a rascal stuck on a post when we breeze into town.

Edited October 6, 2019 by MedicineDan

[Malcador]

For amusement before throwing my save away, I cheated to endure the Ottoman zerg, war went on so long they've lost everything in the Balkans to rebels and their economy is shattered so that was fun.

[Ophiuchus]

Work's been nuts lately so I've gone into casual mode with The Sims 3 and an assortment of expansions and mods. Frame jerks aside, it still holds up well with solid gameplay and plenty to keep your imagination satisfied. Right now my game revolves around two brothers/roommates, loosely based on our real life parallels: one is a quiet, bookish type that works from home as a writer (Gerald) and the other is an outgoing, more mechanically-minded doctor that sculpts in his spare time (Paul). I'm planning on the brothers starting lineages that are devoted to improving the town: right now they're working toward purchasing the library, and from there, I'll have Paul gussy up the property with custom sculptures and topiaries. At some point, they'll both do the marriage and kids thing, and their descendants will build community gardens, art studios, parks, hostels, museums, and other venues.

 

[LadyCrimson]

Took hubby around an hour to kill Truant, dying constantly. He's using Moze in this case, lvl 14, Truant's 15. I think I finished him in about 4-5 minutes at approx the same clvl - I might have been one level higher. (Hubby's better w/a controller/hitting what he aims at, but I'm usually a lot better at staying alive + boss kill speed abilities )

The weird thing is, Truant is doing this spiky cold-ball trick that I don't remember him doing at all when I fought him. Where he summons the ball and then after a minute or so it flies around the outer edges of the arena (making it difficult to hide up there) for a couple passes and is basically a 1-shot kill if it direct hits you. The summoning can be interrupted tho, so the only thing I can think of is I was interrupting him often enough to never see it.

Still, other bosses I've also felt like they added another attack or their attack pattern/effect altered if you take too long to kill them. They sometimes seem quite different for hubby than for me. It's odd.

Edited October 7, 2019 by LadyCrimson

[GhostofAnakin]

1 hour ago, LadyCrimson said:

Took hubby around an hour to kill Truant, dying constantly. He's using Moze in this case, lvl 14, Truant's 15. I think I finished him in about 4-5 minutes at approx the same clvl - I might have been one level higher. (Hubby's better w/a controller/hitting what he aims at, but I'm usually a lot better at staying alive + boss kill speed abilities )

The weird thing is, Truant is doing this spiky cold-ball trick that I don't remember him doing at all when I fought him. Where he summons the ball and then after a minute or so it flies around the outer edges of the arena (making it difficult to hide up there) for a couple passes and is basically a 1-shot kill if it direct hits you. The summoning can be interrupted tho, so the only thing I can think of is I was interrupting him often enough to never see it.

Still, other bosses I've also felt like they added another attack or their attack pattern/effect altered if you take too long to kill them. They sometimes seem quite different for hubby than for me. It's odd.

That stupid ice ball was a killer for me.  I believe he also does a flame ball as well.  That killed me more than any other attack he sent my way.

[Lexx]

Started a new game in RDR2... wanted to do this for weeks already, but never had the mood. Now with the pc announcement I couldn't hold it anymore.

 

First thing I noticed is that the stealth part of any mission is completely useless. There is no point to it at all, because it will still end in a mass shooting anyway. Might as well start shooting right away, it changes nothing at all.

The game is so damn beautiful and peaceful in free roam. It looks great, hell I could just slowly walk my horse along the road and watch. It's very much a slow game too, with the way you move around, have to grab the rifle from the horse, etc... and honestly, I very much like this. It's the style and theme of the game. It's awesome, it's *real*...

... and then you start any mission and notice right away how scared R* were about this and to compensate that, make you shoot a million bad guys along the way. It's just too much. Mindless drone swarms to headshot over and over again, in every mission. 

This Kiran(??) guy said, our group is very much like the O'Driscoll ... no, it is not. Out group doesn't consist of thousands of people who all die like flies. 

This completely rips me out of the game. It an annoys the hell out of me. Should have added A LITTLE more depth here... better ai, less drone swarms, more impactful decisions... I'm sure they could have done that if they wanted to.

 

/edit: it probably would have worked already to just cut the amount of bad guys down to 1/3 and disable auto-aim.

Edited October 7, 2019 by Lexx

[Keyrock]

I beat my 4th boss in Code Vein, Invading Executioner. I killed her on my first try, though I was 1 hit away from death when I took her down. So far, Butterfly of Delirium has been by far the hardest boss.

I've played enough of the game now that I can definitely give it a . I'm not a Souls aficionado, most of my Souls experience is with Bloodborne, so someone more well versed with these types of games can give you a better comparison and can better critique Code Vein as a Souls-like. That said, Bamco seems to have nailed down the Souls gameplay pretty well. Bamco published the Dark Souls series, and I wonder how involved they were in the development and/or if any From Software folks jumped ship to Bamco to help make Code Vein, since this game strikes the balance in gameplay systems that is so often screwed up by others trying to ape Souls game. It's easy to get the stamina system wrong; easy to make stamina drain too punishing or too lax, but Bamco seems to have found the right balance here. Weapons have a good bit of weight to them, feedback is on point, and heavier weapons with higher stagger properties and lighter weapons with lower stamina drain make both make a solid case for being used, depending on your preferred playstyle. Careful preparation and tactical gameplay allows you to get through even very hectic and/or difficult battles unscathed, while a moment of complacency can have even easy enemies ruin your day.

There are a lot of different special abilities that enhance and alter gameplay. You can inherit most of them if you have them equipped long enough or have the materials necessary to bypass the process, which allows you to use the abilities with different blood codes (classes), although many abilities have stat requirements, so not every blood code will be able to use every inherited ability. Still, the amount of available abilities, of which you can have 8 active and 4 passive equipped at a time, and blood codes I have found so far gives you tons of customization options, and I'm not that far into the game yet.

As for the story, I'm not going to spoil anything, but it is interesting and engrossing. Much of how much you would enjoy the characters and story depend on your tolerance for typical anime melodrama. I'm at the point of the game where I can very much sense an impending SHOCKING PLOT TWIST.

Edited October 7, 2019 by Keyrock

[Hurlshort]

I've been trying to play Ark, but it just feels like Conan Exiles without the cool story elements. I mean, dinosaurs are neat, but I also am getting killed a lot, and exploring seems more punishing than rewarding. I don't know, maybe I just need to get a better balance on the settings. I'd love it if I didn't drop all my stuff, and then march back to my corpse, only to be killed by the same thing because it is camping on my body.

[MedicineDan]

Almost 0100 right now and I finally made myself stop playing Deadfire after getting somewhat into the Engwithan Waystation.  Okay, I've been gushing too much about the game and I want to address some things that I don't think work particularly well.  First is the Romance angle.  I mean, it doesn't make me angry.  I literally laughed out loud when I did something I almost never do and pursued a romance.  Choti was the object of my desire, although I tend not to be infatuated with people who don't bathe regularly.  Whatever, she's an accumulation of pixels.  Anyhow, I won her over and my character shows his mental acumen, cultural sensitivity, and innate charm by suggesting something like "let's go somewhere else to continue our discussion."  bwahahaha  I was actually hoping for the 'fade to black.'  That would have heightened the humor.  Alas, it was neither in the stars nor in the design.  hehehehe

Honest to God, I also had a second thing that I was going to cite, but I can't think of it now.  Probably because it's almost 1 and on most nights that means I'm one tired ol' bear not thinking as clearly as I once did.  I tell you, just insert some irritating thing or something humorous where the player wasn't supposed to laugh.  Okay Okay!  I'm half convinced that the romance was meant to be funny to someone!  I literally followed virtually none of the development of the game, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was intentionally meant to tweak the players.

I'm in the Engwithan Waystation now, only into the first level, but it's interesting.  On the way, I got my ass handed to me by some Principi pirate.  I *almost* had the pirate bastard, but there were four people with three red skull things and I just couldn't burn down the last two.  After ignominious defeat, I decided to forgo a rematch and simply avoid them.  Damned game is addictive.  I have so much work to do and I'm just not able to shake off late nights like I was wont in my youth.  I mean, if I stay up later, I find ways to get into more trouble.  Curse you, Obsidian, you've corrupted me with your brilliant arsed game!  There, that's my second point.  Swine hearted wretches!

[the_dog_days]

Just finished Greedfall. Pretty good game, but like the Technomancer I don't know if I'll ever play it again because of all the backtracking (Mass Effect Andromeda broke my soul in terms of being able to weather through excessive backtracking).

[melkathi]

Was focused on an expedition my cult was on and didn't pay attention to my fascination. Cult leader lost touch with reality and lives in her own world now.

Started a new character, a priest. Held a few sermons. Added some weird hidden knowledge into them. Got approached by a strange woman. Who turned out to be one of my disciples from the dancer's cannibal cult, headhunting my priest character to take over as the new cult leader. 

Which is twice awesome. One, because my cult still exists even after game over. Two, because now I start with a moth affinity disciple, which will make life soooo much easier.

[GhostofAnakin]

On 10/7/2019 at 7:13 AM, Lexx said:

Started a new game in RDR2... wanted to do this for weeks already, but never had the mood. Now with the pc announcement I couldn't hold it anymore.

 

First thing I noticed is that the stealth part of any mission is completely useless. There is no point to it at all, because it will still end in a mass shooting anyway. Might as well start shooting right away, it changes nothing at all.

The game is so damn beautiful and peaceful in free roam. It looks great, hell I could just slowly walk my horse along the road and watch. It's very much a slow game too, with the way you move around, have to grab the rifle from the horse, etc... and honestly, I very much like this. It's the style and theme of the game. It's awesome, it's *real*...

... and then you start any mission and notice right away how scared R* were about this and to compensate that, make you shoot a million bad guys along the way. It's just too much. Mindless drone swarms to headshot over and over again, in every mission. 

This Kiran(??) guy said, our group is very much like the O'Driscoll ... no, it is not. Out group doesn't consist of thousands of people who all die like flies. 

This completely rips me out of the game. It an annoys the hell out of me. Should have added A LITTLE more depth here... better ai, less drone swarms, more impactful decisions... I'm sure they could have done that if they wanted to.

 

/edit: it probably would have worked already to just cut the amount of bad guys down to 1/3 and disable auto-aim.

Yeah, one of my biggest gripes about RDR2.  No matter what you were told to do, no matter what "play style" you choose to play, you end up in a fire fight at the end of every single mission.

It became stupid after the first handful of times, too.  You just knew going in exactly how it would end up.

[Calax]

3 hours ago, GhostofAnakin said:

Yeah, one of my biggest gripes about RDR2.  No matter what you were told to do, no matter what "play style" you choose to play, you end up in a fire fight at the end of every single mission.

It became stupid after the first handful of times, too.  You just knew going in exactly how it would end up.

Isn't that kinda every Rock* game? You play everything normal and quiet and "BANG BANG KACHEW!"