What Are You Playing Now: The New Beginning Thread

[Amentep]

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On 6/6/2020 at 7:19 PM, Keyrock said:

I finished Dark Nights With Poe & Munro. It's essentially a choose your own adventure in FMV form. The game has 6 episodes (they released all at once, so it's not episodic in that sense) each one being a self-contained story, and they're all quite weird. Anyway, it was entertaining enough and I'll probably run through a couple of the episodes again to get different outcomes. 

 

On 6/7/2020 at 3:37 AM, Lexx said:

Haha yeah, exactly that. The worst is - half the missions so far don't even require you to destroy all enemy units ... but of course they don't tell you that.

What infuriates me is how easily the infantry dies. And NOD is spamming flamers like crazy... they even wreck your vehicles fast. It reminds me of why I always did tank-spam back in the days. In a way, mixing units is way more important in TD than in RA where all you do is just to throw the heaviest tanks you have at the enemy.

Nevertheless, I still love these games so much. And the updated graphics are very faithful too - after just a few minutes I don't even realize anymore that this isn't the pixelated original. Sometimes I also just hit the space bar just to get back to the old. It's great they added this feature in.

 

/Edit: I've started playing the Covert Ops missions. I actually never had the addon for TD, so this is a 100% first for me. Turns out these missions are A LOT more enjoyable. Guess they learned from their mistakes from before.

 

On 6/7/2020 at 7:53 AM, Mamoulian War said:

And after finding the way, how to remove the poison from her arena, I was able to finally defeat Mytha, the Baneful Queen. Not very hard fight without the poison, just my old bones needed to adjust the reflexes to her fast moves In total 9 tries to defeat her (including two with the poison still there).

 

 

 

15 hours ago, Malcador said:

I recall TD being very lazy in that all the missions need you to kill all units.  Mission 14 is annoying for that as they have stealth tanks, so you need to comb the map looking for that one hiding there.  On the commando mission where you can skip a mission if you somehow know to blow up the airstrip (never did figure out how you were to know what to blow up...well or why you need to blow up an airstrip only). 

Still in Arma 3's campaign. I liked the mission where you are alone and have to evade CSAT.  In missions where I command a squad, having trouble working with the UI

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Mamoulian War]

OK, I'll be can opener in this thread

After getting owned in Iron Keep a lot again and again and again, I've decided to go to the Mjaula Pit, aaand as you can guess, the most challenging opponent of the game is there on every step... Gravity

Getting to the first boss in Grave of Saints was thankfully pretty simple, due to Laddermaster selling, you guessed it... ladders, of course, the first one for 500 souls was a trap and I fallen to deep, which of course resulted in another "corpse run"

The second obstacle was naked NPC Invader with no weapons, well, at least he looked like it... of course he was wearing transparent gear and two special rings, which conceal weapons, but I have found that out only after reading an Wiki entry on that NPC the next day... Now all the hard hits to my head made sense

And after that one strange boss encounter... Royal Vanguard. I had absolutely no clue how this fight works, so for a few minutes I was just running around, like a headless chicken, while throwing Firebombs in all directions after a while, I've noticed that one firebomb hit resulted in damage to the boss healthbar, which got my attention, and after another minute or so of running around the ratswarn, I have noticed, that one of the rats in the arena has some strange fur on it's back, so I deducted, that maybe he might be a boss... well, that brought to me another challenge just go and try to lock your spells on one specific rat in the pack of 12 not a chance... and I was out of Firebombs... so next few moments I have run for a change like a chicken, with it's head focused on one target, which was impossible to get a lock on

But enough of words, you can rewatch my silly second and final attempt on this boss encounter below

 

 

[Malcador]

Man sort of disappointed in myself as I breezed through the commando mission from memory in the GDI campaign.  Mostly as I recall gameplay from 25 years ago yet can't remember tonnes of things from University

Played some MP with a buddy, the AI is a lot more aggressive than I recall, although it seems to just rush my harvester that it somehow has located.  Also did notice the bug on one map still exists where the AI sends its army to the NW regardless of who is there.

[Lexx]

Tell me about it. I finished the Ant missions + Allied missions from Counterstrike in 2 days.

I'm now doing the Allied Aftermath missions. I never realized before that some of the new units in Aftermath were also in Counterstrike - just not with custom graphics. The nuclear bomb trucks are there and if you destroy them, they drop a crate - picking up the crate will spawn a nuclear explosion. Also the tesla tanks already exist, they just use the shadow generator vehicle graphics. I'm guessing Westwood liked the idea so much, they put them into the game as "official" units.

[Bartimaeus]

13 hours ago, Mamoulian War said:

OK, I'll be can opener in this thread

After getting owned in Iron Keep a lot again and again and again, I've decided to go to the Mjaula Pit, aaand as you can guess, the most challenging opponent of the game is there on every step... Gravity

Getting to the first boss in Grave of Saints was thankfully pretty simple, due to Laddermaster selling, you guessed it... ladders, of course, the first one for 500 souls was a trap and I fallen to deep, which of course resulted in another "corpse run"

The second obstacle was naked NPC Invader with no weapons, well, at least he looked like it... of course he was wearing transparent gear and two special rings, which conceal weapons, but I have found that out only after reading an Wiki entry on that NPC the next day... Now all the hard hits to my head made sense

And after that one strange boss encounter... Royal Vanguard. I had absolutely no clue how this fight works, so for a few minutes I was just running around, like a headless chicken, while throwing Firebombs in all directions after a while, I've noticed that one firebomb hit resulted in damage to the boss healthbar, which got my attention, and after another minute or so of running around the ratswarn, I have noticed, that one of the rats in the arena has some strange fur on it's back, so I deducted, that maybe he might be a boss... well, that brought to me another challenge just go and try to lock your spells on one specific rat in the pack of 12 not a chance... and I was out of Firebombs... so next few moments I have run for a change like a chicken, with it's head focused on one target, which was impossible to get a lock on

But enough of words, you can rewatch my silly second and final attempt on this boss encounter below

 

 

Some of the boss designs in DS2 just...uh...aren't great. They could've had fun with a concept like this, but it really just comes across as kind of lazy and uninspired, haha.

[Mamoulian War]

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

Some of the boss designs in DS2 just...uh...aren't great. They could've had fun with a concept like this, but it really just comes across as kind of lazy and uninspired, haha.

In this case I think you are right. concept is fine but because of AI and small arena and clunkiness of controls for caster class, it missed the mark IMO. it was even worse in Congregation Fight...

[Bartimaeus]

4 minutes ago, Mamoulian War said:

In this case I think you are right. concept is fine but because of AI and small arena and clunkiness of controls for caster class, it missed the mark IMO. it was even worse in Congregation Fight...

Yeah, especially because when I compare them to other Souls games, both Bloodborne and Demon's Souls had much better "boss protected by a lot of minor enemies" executions...in fact, I can even think of one in Dark Souls 3 that did it better. Dark Souls 2 is just kind of a funky game all around, haha.

Edited June 9, 2020 by Bartimaeus

[Mamoulian War]

And for a change little bit better boss design in Dark Souls 2. The second Great Soulbearer - The Rotten. Just the arena around it was kind of to hot I died more times trying to avoid lava, than while outrunning the boss Also the area, which you had to traverse to get to the boss was annoying. To many poison spitting statues lying around... All in all 13 attempts to get him down. The final attempt bellow

 

[Malcador]

Thought I was doing the Arma 3 Breaking Even mission so well, got my squad to the town and hunted the mortar team down solo as they decided to not advance.  Then my AI team decided to just stay in the town and get wasted by an APC.  However, the enemy APC decided to not attack and just wait on the road for me to destroy it with rockets.  Funny instance of the AI scripting breaking, happens a lot in this game so far. 

 

[Lexx]

Problem is that the game has changed quite a lot since the campaign was made. Occasionally BI is fixing these issues, but many of these issues aren't exactly easy to fix.

Later campaigns are much less error prone.

[Hawke64]

Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition. I've completed the second chapter. The boss was rather disappointing lore-wise - just some random lizardfolk with a large party (2 mages, 2 archers, 6+ fighters). I was able to aggro them by smaller groups.  On the other hand, now I think that 6-level-deep troll cave was somehow related to the final (?) boss.

[Mamoulian War]

After some struggles and 8 attempts, I was able to defeat Scorpioness Najka. IMO encounter with one of the most interesting designs in DS2. My favourite is still Executioner's Chariot, but this one was much more challenging. The biggest issue was to get there. First the poisoned hollows who attacked always in big groups, then invisible enemies in fog area, and next cursed goat-lions with extreme magic and elemental resistances... I do not know, if there was some glitch in development or if it was intentional, but the next two areas after this boss have much much weaker enemies, which I found strange...

 

[Malcador]

Decided to be lame and just cheat my way through Arma 3.  Cheating with Zeus is pretty fun, can drop a NATO platoon to help me out when need be, hah.

[marelooke]

Tried to play Metro Exocus, tried, because it was barely playable at the graphical settings I wanted. Not entirely sure which part is the bottleneck, CPU or GPU though given that the base platform is still an i7 930 the answer is probably just "Yes".

Oddly enough I played through the first region before on this PC and somehow managed...

Edited June 11, 2020 by marelooke

[Hurlshort]

I tried to navigate through the crazy amount of Stellaris DLC before starting a new campaign. I already had Federations, but I decided to add the humanoid pack so I could make a dwarf galactic mining consortium, and the artifact story pack. I know I should have waited for a sale, but I want to play now! This DLC stuff is dangerous, you can spend waaaay too much on it.

[Tale]

I'm sticking with FF 14. So many people have said it gets better in Heavensward. And playing Gladiator/Paladin instead of Thaumature/Black Mage has resolved the feeling of monotony.

I finished Astroneer. Fun game, I might go back if I clear other stuff off my plate. But the same thing that makes me want to go back has me eyeing Satisfactory instead.

Also ended up buying a game on itch.io along with that bundle of like a thousand games. A Hand With Many Fingers. It's a conspiracy theorist simulator, only not racist or mentally ill. You get two white boards and an archive and you use that to unravel a mystery. I'm not very far in, but I'm intrigued. I love mystery games where you unravel it.

[213374U]

1 hour ago, Hurlshot said:

I tried to navigate through the crazy amount of Stellaris DLC before starting a new campaign. I already had Federations, but I decided to add the humanoid pack so I could make a dwarf galactic mining consortium, and the artifact story pack. I know I should have waited for a sale, but I want to play now! This DLC stuff is dangerous, you can spend waaaay too much on it.

The Humanoids pack is barely worth it unless you're buying it off G2A for $2 or something. The Lithoids one does add some interesting mechanics aside from nice aesthetic variety, but as usual, it's fairly buggy. Plantoids is like Humanoids but it does at least add fairly distinct visuals.

Ancient Artifacts is cool because it focuses on what's the weakest point of Stellaris (aside from bugs, AI, clunky interface...), and that is story flavor. They seem to have taken inspiration from one of the coolest aspects of Endless Space 2 and adopted it somewhat. The mechanics of how it's actually done aren't very engaging though, which is made worse by not allowing excavations unless you own the system.

I've all but given up on vanilla Stellaris by now. I'll start a Dominion playthrough in New Horizons when they iron out the kinks in the latest version, though.

Edited June 11, 2020 by 213374U

[Mamoulian War]

And another boss in Dark Souls 2 down. This time nothing special, just Prowling Magus and Congregation. Not very proud of that, but I needed 4 tries to get it done. Including one when my controller run out of battery What to say, I did not like the encounter, but I did not need to spent a lot to get it done. All I needed was to learn how to avoid the Lightning Bolts *shrugs*

 

 

[majestic]

I've been playing Dead Cells ever since it was discounted on GOG not that long ago.

Finally managed to beat the secret boss (i.e. finish Hell mode, also known as "5 BSC"). The difficulty curve of the game is really weird. It starts out easy, stays that way until two boss stem cells, then becomes insanely hard, three and four stem cells is comparatively easy again and 5 BSC is... strange, because the only truly difficult part for me, apart from not paying attention and dying to something silly is the Hand of the King (final boss in 0 to 4 BSC).

The first run I've managed to get past 5 BSC HotK was the one I beat the game at - I'll freely admit that I've watched a bunch of people kill the final boss on YouTube before ever seeing him so I knew what was going on, but still, killing him first try was weird. I've seen people on Steam and Reddit post that they can defeat Hand of the King with no issues but struggle on The Giant or the final boss. For me that's entirely the other way around. Both The Giant and the final boss have very well telegraphed attacks that seldom overlap into ridiculous stun lock insta-gibs. HotK can do that, his attack patterns are way too random, they can sometimes get stuck and heaven forbid if you whack his transition phase too quickly and he fist charges you into leftover Disgusting Worm bombs. It's also really frustrating when he summons exploding banners, follows this up with his super-souped up Telluric Shock and then forces you to eat the banners by dashing around.

Anyway, fun game. Will probably play some more, there's this final, final ending left to see and all that. 140 hours so far out of a 10 € investment ain't half bad.

 

Edited June 12, 2020 by majestic

[the_dog_days]

I'm about 25 hours into a replay of Elex. I'm mostly done with Edan and Tavar and thinking about heading to Abbessa now that in terms of character strength I've finally gotten over the hump and don't have to run from every fight. Last time I played I joined the clerics. This time I'm thinking about joining the berserkers. What's surprising to me is how much easier the game is on a second playthrough. Mostly 'cause now I know when to run and when to fight and I'm not banging my head against a wall as much trying to do one quest. Instead if I can't beat a boss for a quest, I move on to the next one on the list and keep going and come back to it later. You know, like how the game is designed to be played. 

[Sven_]

Disco Elysium

+

Expeditions: Viking

 

In particular with the latter, I'm wondering whether that's a format that would be viable for Josh Sawyer's Dream turn-based historical RPG. Would be interesting to see what their dev budget was... but in either case, that's a pretty good soundtrack and composer for an indie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9FkldqiH5Y

 

 

[LadyCrimson]

Stardew Valley - maybe years later I'll finally check out new stuff/features ... how do you play or even use this freaking watercan, again? What was the best crops for making money early on again? Looks good on 4k TV tho.  :P

Diablo3 - why is there 300ish items in mail from seasonal when I haven't played since Ssn16? I thought they would all have poofed by now.  I wanted to play, not sort through massive inventory and mule accounts for two hours. Wait how does Adventure mode work again?

BL3 - new Takedown looks tough, and 40-60 minutes to get through (no EZ farm runs) I think I won't be doing that except maybe on M1.  Yellowcake somewhat nerfed already, especially, I think, its longer ranged distance/damage (Tyrene-boss seemed to take way less dmg. from it). Still works good close up/mobs.  They updated some SMG's with more damage - ofc it's all the SMG's no one uses and likely still won't use...

[Keyrock]

X4 - After completely wiping out the Xenon Wharf in Turquoise Sea, I took a short trip over to Scale Plate Green to destroy the Xenon Shipyard there. The wharf was heavily protected, the shipyard was LUDICROUSLY heavily protected. I'm talking 1 I destroyer, 6 K destroyers, and more frigates and fighters than I could count.

This took a very long time and there was more than a little save scumming involved, but eventually I destroyed all the critical parts of the shipyard (fabrication/maintenance modules, storage modules, and defense modules). I didn't completely destroy the station, like I did the wharf, and I didn't destroy the I destroyer because it would have taken too long and I have other stuff to do right now. The I desyroyer's shields are just too beefy for me to take down quickly and I can't employ my previous tactic of flanking the I, setting up shop and opening up on it, then moving to flank again as it turned to face me and intercept with 50 fighters pounding my shields simultaneously. I could destroy the Ks because I could take down their shields quickly enough to do hull damage before the fighters swarmed on me. I can't come close to taking down the I's shields before I get swarmed and have to withdraw and reset and by the time I get back the shields have recharged. I'd have to wipe out all the fighters first then fight the I 1 on 1, and that would take more time than I'm willing to invest right now.

Anyway, I did enough damage that it will be a while until the Xenon can build ships in that region again. The 1 I destroyer, a handful of frigates, and a hundred or so fighters is all they have for a while, they can't replenish their fleet unless they import from halfway across the galaxy, so I should be mostly free from harassment for a while. Now I'm off to increase my standing with the Holy Order of the Pontifex and to make some money.

Edited June 14, 2020 by Keyrock

[MedicineDan]

I've had a little extra time and I *finally* finished Darkest Dungeon.  I cheated in that I did it on Radiant.  However, now that I understand you can just keep throwing people at the RNG, you'll eventually win, I understand that harder levels just mean more patience.  All good.  I downloaded the expansions because the game is just. that. addictive!  This game is splendid for getting your mind off of our current socio-political environment.

[Orogun01]

7 hours ago, MedicineDan said:

I've had a little extra time and I *finally* finished Darkest Dungeon.  I cheated in that I did it on Radiant.  However, now that I understand you can just keep throwing people at the RNG, you'll eventually win, I understand that harder levels just mean more patience.  All good.  I downloaded the expansions because the game is just. that. addictive!  This game is splendid for getting your mind off of our current socio-political environment.

Yes, a game where a shadowy heir to a fortune sends unfortunates to their doom for profit definitively takes your mind of the current political environment.
Joking aside, best Lovecraft game yet.