What Are You Playing Now: The Other, Other Thread

[Keyrock]

I was exploring in X4 and I ran into Turquoise Sea, which was most definitely a Boron sector in the previous games (Boron sectors always have aquatic names, Paranid have religious names, Teladi have business or money related names). Turns out the sector is teeming Xenon, which paints a grim picture as to why Boso Ta is the only Boron I've encountered in the game. Hopefully the Boron make a full return in a later expansion, I like their ships. I found a Xenon Wharf (manufactures small and medium ships) in that sector and a Xenon Shipyard (manufactures L and XL ships) in Scale Plate Green (used to be a pirate sector in earlier games). If I could destroy the wharf and shipyard then it would deal a crippling blow to the Xenon in that part of the galaxy, since they would be unable to replenish their fleet (unless they have another wharf and/or shipyard nearby, I doubt it). As you can imagine, such critically important stations are very heavily defended, so I can't do it just yet, but I will. I'm going full on Exterminatus on the Xenon eventually.

Edited May 26, 2020 by Keyrock

[ShadySands]

Been playing more ESO with some Civ6 mixed in. I started just doing Dark Brotherhood missions almost non stop and only other quests if they are nearby or on the way, quest log is too small to pick up a bunch of quests at once. I went to log in just now and I got a login queue with a wait time of 25 minutes. Now I think I'm finally done with this game, not going to wait in line to play.

[Mamoulian War]

4th Dark Souls 2 boss down... The Pursuer... For me this one was exercise of pure futility with 28 attempts. Most of my deaths were from me being to greedy... Sometimes I just miss patience required for this game... I really do not remember, when it was last time, when I needed so many attempts at one fight. The hilarious thing about this is, that this one is easy mode for most of the people... Sometimes I just do not understand myself   Final attempt in video bellow.

 

Edited May 29, 2020 by Mamoulian War
Replaced with YT video.

[Bartimaeus]

24 minutes ago, Mamoulian War said:

4th Dark Souls 2 boss down... The Pursuer... For me this one was exercise of pure futility with 28 attempts. Most of my deaths were from me being to greedy... Sometimes I just miss patience required for this game... I really do not remember, when it was last time, when I needed so many attempts at one fight. The hilarious thing about this is, that this one is easy mode for most of the people... Sometimes I just do not understand myself   Final attempt in video bellow.

 

Pursuer is one of the more tightly designed bosses of DS2 - with some exceptions, a lot of bosses just feel like they move, attack, and go through their AI routines kind of sloppily (consider the joke that is Flexile Sentry as an example...). Not Pursuer. He was one I had trouble with when I was trying to play with melee because of my struggles with the controls, but like Artorias of DS1, he feels like a boss that once you "understand", it's basically impossible to ever lose against him in the future because everything he does is so consistent and well-defined.

[Hawke64]

The Pursuer does require either good timing for parries or patience. Still, it is a victory and I look forward to your next video.

 

[Mamoulian War]

hmm looks like twitch cut off 30 seconds of the video, so I need to make it one more time

 

EDIT: Also on The Last Giant 10 second missing... I remade the video again, but with the same results Missing parts of the video... I do not know why

 

Edited May 27, 2020 by Mamoulian War

[Bartimaeus]

27 minutes ago, Mamoulian War said:

hmm looks like twitch cut off 30 seconds of the video, so I need to make it one more time

 

EDIT: Also on The Last Giant 10 second missing... I remade the video again, but with the same results Missing parts of the video... I do not know why

 

Were these livestreamed, or do you have the video on desktop?

[Mamoulian War]

They were livestreamed and I have used the the Highlight tool for saving them. Also I have them on my desktop and youtube. But I wanted to have the boss collection on Twitch as well. I noticed this before few times, that last few seconds of the video skips to the end any advice how to solve it, can't find anything about that issue on google

[Bartimaeus]

Yeah, I got nothing, I don't use Twitch. Nothing useful from Google, either. Only thing I could think of is to always specify an extra bit of time at the end just in case it gets cut.

[Lexx]

I thought the Pursuer  was kinda easy. You can always dodge him to the right on his attack. If I remember right, my trick was to dodge forward, past him. This way you get out of his reach faster and more secure.

[Mamoulian War]

6 hours ago, Lexx said:

I thought the Pursuer  was kinda easy. You can always dodge him to the right on his attack. If I remember right, my trick was to dodge forward, past him. This way you get out of his reach faster and more secure.

Yes you are right, he is really easy, but I just started to wear glasses, so probably my biggest issue is, that when I think, I am far enough already, I am still not. I had same reach issues with Dragonrider

[Oner]

Finally did a playthrough of Subnautica, now that I didn't feel crippling fear at anything below 50 meters anymore.
Now on to Star Traders: Frontiers and booooooooy that's a lot of interface.

[Hurlshort]

48 minutes ago, Oner said:

Finally did a playthrough of Subnautica, now that I didn't feel crippling fear at anything below 50 meters anymore.
Now on to Star Traders: Frontiers and booooooooy that's a lot of interface.

Stick with it! I loved Star Traders. Don't get overwhelmed by the crew. You can really just focus on your officers for the most part.

Edited May 27, 2020 by Hurlshot

[Malcador]

Plodding along in Disco Elysium, I guess I am doing a boring run as I am playing it like a plain old cop sort of like Kim I guess - well, other than RP'ing a US cop and blowing away a kid for being lippy.  Not sure why helping out some old lady got me marked as some sort of pathetic 'sorry cop', but whatever.

Edited May 27, 2020 by Malcador

[bugarup]

19 minutes ago, Malcador said:

Plodding along in Disco Elysium, I guess I am doing a boring run as I am playing it like a plain old cop sort of like Kim I guess - well, other than RP'ing a US cop and blowing away a kid for being lippy.  Not sure why helping out some old lady got me marked as some sort of pathetic 'sorry cop', but whatever.

You get to be sorry cop if you apologize a lot. So it seems that your US cop has been replaced with Canadian cop. 

[Tale]

Final Fantasy XIV, the MMO, was free on PS4 recently. And it was lots of fun for a few days. Until the story completely failed to present a hook after like a dozen hours and I looked stuff up and saw there was nothing cool to look forward to in abilities. At that point it just started feeling like every other MMORPG I played and got tired of. It's cool to have the Final Fantasy brand, but sucks that it has none of the Final Fantasy coolness and power fantasy. As a Thaumaturge, all I have to look forward to is eventually getting Flare. Limit Breaks can only be used in parties.

I have precisely 0 interest in spending dozens upon dozens of hours doing nothing but a blizzard/fire juggle. Thunder, my favorite of the three common FF spells, has been turned into a dot.

As to the story failing to hook, the entire story so far has been about a criminal gang out in the desert who aren't even worth giving names. I'm level 30 with a 50 cap and I've seen one cutscene of some Empire I know nothing about doing nothing I care about.

So I bought Astroneer and I'm exploring space. And it is good to explore space. 

[Keyrock]

The only MMO I've ever played that had a story that hooked me was The Secret World. That game has writing better than a lot of single player games. Unfortunately, it also has some of the most soul crushingly boring gameplay ever.

The flip side is that Tera had by far the best gameplay of any MMO I've played but a completely forgettable story and the most bog standard quests imaginable. Can anyone make a MMO that is both fun to play and has good writing? *sigh*

Edited May 27, 2020 by Keyrock

[the_dog_days]

Wrapped up my speedrun of Cold Steel 2. Despite skipping dialog, using turbo mod, and bypassing some fights it still took me 38 hours. CS2 is easily the weakest of the kiseki games but still really good. Mostly it just suffers from a combination of open world syndrome (even though it's not open world; they connected the hubs of the first game with linear paths) and middle book syndrome. I didn't pay enough attention to my resources to make the perfect save game state for my upcoming mega series playthrough but I'm close enough.

[Bartimaeus]

Underhero, courtesy of @Oner. It was a Paper Mario-style RPG with timing-based combat elements. The premise is that you're going to play a rando minion that, rather than getting effortlessly brushed aside by the hero in battle, instead took initiative and concocted a plan to basically drop an anvil on the hero's head and instantly murder them while they were walking up to the main villain's lair, and now what is everyone going to do with the hero dead?

It's an interesting premise, the environmental characters are appropriately wacky and zany like you might expect of a MOTHER/EarthBound-type game, it has solid enough gameplay, but the main characters and plot were written so flatly and by the numbers that I found myself completely checking out about half of the way through the game in a world-investment sense. The main character becomes the hero for no discernible reason (there was literally zero motivation for the protagonist doing anything at all the entire game - it felt really weird and inappropriate/nonsensical given that the first thing you do is murder the hero), and worse, there was a big "the villain isn't really the villain + let's all come together and do this" sequence a la Undertale at the end involving a completely unlikable cast of characters that fell so completely on its face that I started laughing at the game. Really unfortunate for an otherwise solid game that they went that direction. Still, it wasn't too bad - just a little disappointing.

Edited May 27, 2020 by Bartimaeus

[Oner]

19 hours ago, Keyrock said:

The only MMO I've ever played that had a story that hooked me was The Secret World. That game has writing better than a lot of single player games. Unfortunately, it also has some of the most soul crushingly boring gameplay ever.

The flip side is that Tera had by far the best gameplay of any MMO I've played but a completely forgettable story and the most bog standard quests imaginable. Can anyone make a MMO that is both fun to play and has good writing? *sigh*

Guild Wars 2 has a decent story once you reach the first expansion and the subsequent living story episodes. FF14 is praised for the story of the first, but especially the second xpac. Friends of mine have been praising Blade and Soul's story, though I haven't played it. I've heard good things about LOTRO too from the forumites here.
But yeah, there's not a lot to pick from if you want an MMO with worthwhile storytelling, I'm still convinced that any story you do in an MMO, no matter how good, would be a lot better as a singleplayer game.

[Tale]

Destiny 2, not really an MMO but aspiring that direction, hooks their story early. The city is attacked by the bad guys and now you've got to regroup with you rallies to take it back. It's not like it's super deep, but it's interesting and exciting. It makes you want to see what's next. You're introduced to the big bad right away and are motivated to defeating him.

I have no idea who I'm supposed to be against in Final Fantasy 14. I assume it's that Empire who was featured in the opening cinematic and my character has yet to encounter.

[bugarup]

On 5/27/2020 at 8:46 PM, Keyrock said:

 The Secret World. That game has writing better than a lot of single player games. Unfortunately, it also has some of the most soul crushingly boring gameplay ever.

Agreed on both counts. Lovecraft country was so good, but Egypt wore me down at the end so much I didn't even get to Uberwald.

[ShadySands]

Finished my Civ 6 game. This time I won a cultural victory with Sumeria. Early war cart rush followed by ziggurats everywhere to boost science and culture. 

[rjshae]

While my broken game PC is being replaced, I began a replay of Icewind Dale. Unfortunately the character voices are broken and it uses the ancient AD&D ruleset, but otherwise it's playable. I did check the progress of the Co8 port of IWD, but that seems to have slowed to a near halt. That's too bad; I would have liked to played it with the ToEE engine.

[Hurlshort]

With my broken hand, it is a bit of a struggle to work the mouse, so I dusted off my PS4 and played some MLB The Show.

I'm also just exploring the world of Lord of the Rings Online, since I can still move around, but combat is a bit tricky.