What Are You Playing Now: The Other Thread

[Mamoulian War]

43 minutes ago, 213374U said:

Hm, I kinda prefer it that way to the "WOW guys! Check THAT out! AWESOME! Yeah!!" fake style so frequent in YouTube LPs. In fact, I prefer when the player is completely mute, but if they have to speak, I prefer when they talk like a normal, not high on speed person.

I think the "bored" vibe is mostly coming from the way you sometimes speak while audibly inhaling/exhaling, with the cadence possibly affected by looking for the right words? I've had people tell me I sound exasperated over VoIP because I tend to do that too.

 I think you might be into something. Indeed I am sometimes looking up the right words. I write a lot in English in my work, but I need to speak in different language lately very seldom. One of the reasons I’ve stopped doing no commentary videos for myself is, that I simply need to train speaking, and this way it feels for me OK. I have fun with games, and still train the English conversation, even though I am only speaking to myself  

My best English improvement was during my Vanilla WoW “career” when I was raiding with English speaking guild, and they decided to make me Warlock officer and later Raid Leader, so I had to speak all the time  but that was very long time ago, so I feel little bit rusty

[Mamoulian War]

9 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

Just being multi-lingual is impressive to me. My brain simply cannot into other languages.

Well brain can be trained, and the easiest way how to learn foreign language, is to learn it while having some fun. I basically learned German by watching my favourite cartoons in German language, when I was a kid, and I have learned a lot of English from Daggerfall and Baldur’s Gate wall of texts.

If you would ever decide to give it a try, maybe if some of your favourite games have option to switch to German language with English subtitles (at least for me I feel, like German language is closest to English, but other people might have similar or better experience with other languages e.g Spanish, you never know before you try  ) , could be helpful to adjust your brain better to foreign language.

[Chilloutman]

I learned English playing Fallout 2 and holding vocabulary.

[Gfted1]

When I was a wee lad my mother taught me pig Latin. I think that pushed out the capacity for any additional languages.

[GhostofAnakin]

Oh.  My.  God.  I'm finally finished Death Stranding and that was a chore.

It's weird because the actual story was interesting.  But every single thing in between -- from the ridiculous amount of time spent walking/driving to places, to the endlessly annoying BT encounters -- was just a pain.  It's like Kojima wanted to tell a story, then just told the people working for him to add a bunch of random walking and item fetch quests to fill up time between the cutscenes.

Loved Metal Gear Solid V (at least the portion before he apparently left) and was hoping for something similar to that.  The story was close, though I still liked the GCSV one better, but the other stuff was not.

[Mamoulian War]

Another day in the world of Eora I have finally finished everything in Gilded Vale and surrounding areas. It took me 10 hours Last quest was in the ruins of The Temple of Eothas, where I solved the case of dead priests of Eothas.

The 5th part of Let's play is uploaded on youtube as well --> https://youtu.be/3ljBJod-rHA

[Hawke64]

The Outer Worlds. Finished Monarch.

Spoiler

The town there felt somehow better, than Edgewater. Less desperate, even hopeful, I suppose. The MSI leader seemed to be a genuinely nice person, trying to improve working conditions/lives of his employees/people. 
The Iconoclasts were.. there. It was really tempting to show them what the unbound anarchy and the "Eternal Truth" lead to. At first, they seemed pacifistic enough to be ignored, thus I held back. Right until its leaders suggested to attack Stellar Bay. As I said, I liked the town and Sanjar's position, so the most reasonable course of action was to protect them, slaughtering the Iconoclasts in the process.

 

[Mamoulian War]

More Pillars of Eternity, I have tried to create one Adventure NPC, just for the achievement, it ended up being Female Moon Godlike Barbarian Created it just for 250 copper, and after few more small maps around Gilded Vale, I have decided to go to Caed Nua for the first time. I cleared main area and went underground, where spider kicked my tank little bit, and then when I've spoken to Maerwald, I have for some reason completely ****ed up the positioning of my party, so he needed to hurl few spells, and I ended up in afterlife  and I have to redo the whole conversation with him again

silly me. I have to watch out little bit better for my crew next time

[Wormerine]

On 12/12/2019 at 5:09 PM, Chilloutman said:

I learned English playing Fallout 2 and holding vocabulary.

xD I did that with ADOM. Frankly had to whip up dictionary again for Pillars1 as some of the descriptions went beyond my repertoire. 

Edited December 15, 2019 by Wormerine

[Hawke64]

The Outer Worlds. Completed the game. In general, the ending was reasonably satisfying, except that awkward moment when

Spoiler

military support decided to come during my less-violent-than-usual infiltration in the Labyrinth/Tartarus. How did Junlei and Sanjar even know that I was there?

Now I going to try one option, which I was unsure of and which is likely to take about 3 hours. Less, if I just run and ignore terminals.

Spoiler

Does the amount of Dimethyl Sulfoxide acquired affect the ending?

Somehow the open-world (or just very large locations with very imprecise maps) structure, a lot of small interactive mostly-useless objects and the first-person view (with my preference for melee combat) do not inspire me for another full completionist run.

[Malcador]

Finished Yesterday. Paid $5 for it and still feel like I overpaid by $20.   Well ok, upon reflection maybe too harsh.  Sure was a weird experience, not a lot of sound in the game, either by design or just incredibly buggy.  Interesting premise though and the flashback bits are interesting - characters definitely are not.

Edited December 15, 2019 by Malcador

[melkathi]

Playing Coteries, and while the writing is good and the characters interesting, I am unsure about replayability.

The feeding mechanism can be frustrating, as you can't just waste a night to hunt but are limited to the feeding opportunities the story provides you with (which also sadly hurts the Ventrue feeling they built up so nicely early on). On the other hand it helps showcase you are an extremely young vampire who does not yet know how often, when and where to feed properly.

[the_dog_days]

21 hours ago, Mamoulian War said:

then when I've spoken to Maerwald, I have for some reason completely ****ed up the positioning of my party

This is a reoccurring problem with POE1. In scripted cut scenes it will put your main character at the front of the party whether or not that's where he/she's supposed to be. On the positive side, I don't recall any of this in Deadfire.

[melkathi]

Finished my first playthrough of Coteries. Yes, depending on reading speed I'd say between 4 and 5 hours.

You don't get to finish all side missions, so on a future playthrough you can do different things. It may matter how early you do certain things.

 

I think there were 3 typos (Boos instead of Boss at one point) and they were all pretty close to one another. Once a character called another Declan, just for the story to then tell you that Raoul walks away...

I found it a bit stiff that sometimes you are referred to as "they" because they didn't have the text adapt to your gender.

 

That said: very atmospheric vampire game. The visual novel medium allows it to tackle the subject of a fledgling vampire struggling with suddenly being a monster; the underlying struggle of every vampire to stay sane. Obviously some clans will make for a more interesting tale than others.

Going to play it again to see if there is a different ending.

[Gorth]

Being the lucky owner of a new mobile phone, I figured I had to really put it through its paces!

 

Started a game of.... yes, Pathfinder Adventures! Because it was the only mobile game I remembered the name of, besides solitaire that is

 

[Keyrock]

I've been having a really tough time trying to get into Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. First off, I HATE the switch to full 3D. The 2D hand-drawn backgrounds in Silver Earring looked so much better. More importantly, this game just starts out really slow. Silver Earring didn't have any foreplay, it' was just *BAM* straight to murder! The Awakened wants me to take it out to dinner, give it compliments, and gently stroke its arm. What the ****!?

[melkathi]

So, Coteries basically allows for two playthroughs so you can do all side-missions. Three if you want to play around with some choices in some of them. The game apparently only has one ending, a very disappointing fact.

[Keyrock]

Wait, a visual novel with only 1 ending? I didn't know such a thing existed. 

[melkathi]

The store description claims there are more endings, but the players refuse to count the ability to commit suicide two ways in one specific situation early on as extra endings

[Katphood]

Playing God of War(2018) for the first time. Took me a few hours to get used to it but I'm liking it. It sure looks gorgeous though, and I am playing it on a base PS4.

Also playing Drakengard on the PS2. Man, this game made me rediscover my love for the PS2.

[Hurlshort]

I'm hooked on Conan Exiles again. I started a new game with a mod called Age of Calamitous. I'm not big on the lore aspect, but I like the new crafting options and speed of play. 

[Zoraptor]

Think I might be finished with Metro Exodus. It's a game I should like a lot in theory given how much I like StalkerSoC/ CoP and even the much maligned Clear Skies and even though I tend to dislike straight out shooters, but... dunno. You're kind of forced into stealth gameplay quite often which is theoretically fine since I liked Thief but it simply isn't as good at it as Thief was, the open areas are theoretically an improvement but practically tend towards being just wider corridors than 2033, the objectives are sometimes far too opaque and there isn't quite enough variation, atmosphere or story to keep me interested. I'd probably have soldiered on through but (and it's a bit of a rant since it's a pet peeve of mine)...

tldr; good lord do I hate not having manual saves, especially when the chapters are long and the objectives aren't really clear enough.

The proximal cause of my annoyance is having an objective to find out information on Alyosha's whereabouts which is actually a progress objective, to take a zipline. But, it doesn't actually have an interim objective like 'bypass the camp' or whatever, so presumption is that the information is in the camp where the marker is or Alyosha is in a cell in the camp or someone there has information on them; and while I typically hate loot glint it's very easy to miss stuff without it- and the exit is a zip line, so (potentially) one way. So, you spend ages looking for clues and knocking everyone out because you're told not to kill them when you could (presumably) just zipline away in 5 minutes like you are (presumably) meant to.

And that leads to the ultimate reason I'm probably dropping the game. I decided to check that there wasn't anything I was missing since it seemed to be a one way gate, and found out that Damir was meant to come with you from the previous area. I was a bit curious as to what I'd done wrong and the apparent answer is... nothing; I'd freed the slaves when I could and done missions stealthily when it was suggested. Worse than that, on the face of it Damir staying is a good result. My presumption is that in the Volga area you'd have lost Duke (?) if you stuffed up the final mission so it would be an obvious stuff up. With Damir he's staying to be a leader to his people and- especially since it's a bit of a running theme in the game- staying with Giul too. There's hints in the radio chatter on the train that it may not be a 'successful' decision, but they're hints only.

That's the sort of thing which has always left a disproportionately bad taste in my mouth. It's one thing if I'd stuffed up, but it feels a lot more like it's the game which has stuffed up for me by being unnecessarily obtuse. The combination of that with the 'fuzzy' objectives means I have little to no confidence I wouldn't stuff up Taiga as well due to, well, who knows? Knocking out too many people maybe? Someone slipping into water and drowning? Someone getting a look at me a second before being knocked out? Who knows, it looked like I did everything fine previous area but seemingly didn't. And the alternative is replaying 10 hours or whatever of not particularly compelling stealth gameplay to potentially get the same end result.

At least if you have manual saves if you can go back to one of them and save some time or check if it really was you who stuffed up without realising it or whether it was a bug.

 

[bugarup]

Greedfall. I expected Eurojank, and Eurojank I got.  Which is fine by me as I am not that bothered by less than perfect graphhix and other shiny bells and whistles, but one can expect those games to be less tropey than focus group tailored, risk averse multiple A's of yonder.  

So far I find it indeed much more interesting than Inquisition, starting with the fact that the PC is just some minor royalty sent overseas with specific purpose to kiss ass of potential allies and not some useless schmuck suddenly slapped with the Chosen One title out of the blue. Setting mayhaps not that original (Renaissance + Age of sail, science/technologies vs religious zealots vs noble savages vs merchant princes), but is more interesting just because these are much rarer in RPGs than bog-standard high fantasy schlock. Love little tidbits of lore like tattoos of the Nauts signifying experience of sailors and then seeing few wiggly lines on cabin boys against full face paint of admirals. I like the quests, their writing might be not as professional as, say, Bioware's, but they often make more sense in the context of the world if you can behind not so stellar wording. All in all, love the world a lot so far.

Now things I don't love. Backtracking. I realized pretty early there's no point of exploring things before the story sends you that way so it's not as bad as it could be, but it's not fun all the same. Fortunately, areas aren't as vast and empty as in DA:I

Fighting. Hate fighting that's obviously meant for console controller.  Made myself a pretty decent crowd control/support build that works well enough on trash, but bosses are pain in the arse. Dying a couple of times to figure out their pattern and then applying "roll roll roll roll shoot roll roll, repeat" 300 times is not my idea of fun (could be a good practice for "Witcher 2", though). Companions being uncontrollable isn't helping any, since their AI sends them to headbutt everything and that strat works predictably poorly on bosses. Oh well, I could always drop difficulty and respec into "cheese the bosses" build if the game starts throwing them my way on regular basis. 

Still, both fighting and backtracking aren't so bad that they'd ruin good things like setting and atmosphere and quests. Here's hoping it stays that way. 

[Chilloutman]

trying bit of CS:GO but my boomer reactions are way off against those russians

[Mamoulian War]

More Pillars goodness last few days  I was able to clear two levels of Endless Paths some wilderness areas between Caed Nua and Defiance Bay, and built first few upgrades in my new stronghold  I have arrived at Raedric’s Hold and cleared the “roofs” of “badguys”  I quit just after I found some priest robes, because it was to late in the evening

 

also three more parts of my Let’s Play uploaded into my Youtube channel, and a very big thank to Katphood for becoming my first ever subscriber     

Link to playlist in my signature