What Are You Playing Now: The New Beginning Thread

[213374U]

Nah, it's essentially the same thing nowadays. Still need to be a subscriber to have uncapped credits, access to artifact equipment, hotbars, ability to use a mount, quicktravel, number of crew skills, access to ops and warzones and so on and so forth. They even added a new sidebar in the latest update that puts microtransactions literally in your face at least once every week, regardless of subscriber status.

Thankfully, none of that is really necessary to just play through the base stories. And yeah, a Double XP event is probably the best time to do it because I'm not sure but I suspect F2P players also earn less XP.

[Zoraptor]

Finished Bioshock Infinite. As a game it was fine, entertaining, reasonably challenging on hard (except for the ghost lady, which was genuinely hard), pretty engaging plot and nice aesthetics. Had the same basic problem Bioshock original had with its meta plot; it's difficult to do a compelling plot featuring determinism and pointing out all the 'but thou must' s inherent in games without then doing something different with it to subvert its expectations. It's only a bit different having someone say stuff has to happen because quantum theory says it's always happened and having someone say it has to happen because you've been programmed to obey a phrase by a sociopathic Korean. It's simply the nature of written works that they follow the script so there isn't much point pointing it out unless you're going to do something other than just point it out.

Burial at Sea kind of had the same problem. I would say it was extremely high quality in every respect for a DLC and had a lot of very obvious work put into it with new (for B: I) systems etc, but you can't avoid the fact that everything that happened happened because it had to. In a vacuum, your 'choice' may have ended up doing some good but also got a lot of people killed; but that's excused because narratively it had to happen. It's the inverse of the very common trope in pseudo 'deep' games (lately, TLOU2 is a good example) where the game forces you to do a bad thing to progress the plot, then berates you for how bad you are for doing the thing you had to do to progress the plot- in BaS you're actively excused for getting a bunch of people killed because it had already happened.

[majestic]

21 hours ago, 213374U said:

LS Sith Warrior is perhaps best represented by the -also Biowarian but otherwise unrelated- quote: "You can either fight at my side or get crushed under my heel. But you will not stand in my way."

I just found it extremely hilarious when you meet the Jedi that are hunting you as a LS Sith Warrior and you can basically tell them that revenge isn't the Jedi way, then they look dumbfounded and start arguing with each other.

Had me rolling on the floor for a bit.

That and one piece of voice acting from my Imperial Agent on Taris. My agent was someone who was very much pro Empire but, let's say, sceptical of the Sith, the story starts out with the Sith silliness almost ruining your very first assignment after all, and you'll meet a guano-insane one on Taris who talks about fire and her children - meaning the Rakghouls.

One of the reply options to this is "You're insane!", and I of course clicked on it, and the IA says in his incredibly awesome voice in an absolute deadpan: You really are Sith, aren't you?

 

[Tale]

Anyone who says anything positive about the Bounty Hunter storyline in TOR is dead to me. I wanted to shoot people for money, not be a reality show contestant chasing around morons, then inviting them to my ship because my companions think the dude being obnoxious means he's useful.

[Hawke64]

Played SWTOR 2-3 years ago (Jedi Knight). It reminded me of SWKOTOR, but with lags.
---
Observation. Seems to be a puzzle-adventure. So far, so good (graphics, VA, controls, story).

[Hurlshort]

2 hours ago, Tale said:

Anyone who says anything positive about the Bounty Hunter storyline in TOR is dead to me. I wanted to shoot people for money, not be a reality show contestant chasing around morons, then inviting them to my ship because my companions think the dude being obnoxious means he's useful.

Well I'm not really defending it, but I left that guy on the ship for the rest of the story and barely noticed him. It was a pretty boring story after that though. It lost any real momentum after the Great Hunt.

[bugarup]

  

6 hours ago, Tale said:

chasing around morons, then inviting them to my ship because my companions think the dude being obnoxious means he's useful.

Hey, you leave Gault alone!  Best companion, ditched that boring ass cyborg teenager as soon as I got him, never looked back. 

I didn't mind that BH story was kind of episodic and disjointed. Like a series of anecdotes old hunters would share while sitting around space campfire. 

[melkathi]

10 hours ago, Tale said:

Anyone who says anything positive about the Bounty Hunter storyline in TOR is dead to me.

TOR and Bioware are dead to me when they removed the Smuggler's giggle because Sith players complained about noise pollution.

Edited August 6, 2020 by melkathi

[Raithe]

I quite enjoy the female Agent's maniacal giggle when you stab people.

There's something immensely entertaining about it.

[majestic]

5 hours ago, melkathi said:

TOR and Bioware are dead to me when they removed the Smuggler's giggle because Sith players complained about noise pollution.

To be fair, they also removed the Agent's laughter.

Well, or toned it down, really. But it was fun in the beginning when every procc caused the sound effect for everyone around you.

[bugarup]

Whachatalkinabout, the giggity is still there, and not just on smugglers/agents, hunters/troopers also go "Dohohoho!" on some procc or another. I really didn't like it on my IA who was consummate professional to the marrow of his bones and would never giggle like insane schoolgirl whenever he shivved someone in the shins.   (Still better than chipmunky soundbytes of that ghastly ewok pest of a companion; there were times when it was the most OP pet of them all, you couldn't make two steps on the fleet without one of them screeching at you ).

[majestic]

Oh, the sound is still there. Just a lot... and really, A LOT less than it was at launch. Smugglers and Agents where essentially laughing maniacs depending on their specs. Scoundrels and Operatives were also capable of stunlock/instagibbing anyone regardless of tankiness from stealth while giggling like that. People complained. A lot.

And so Bioware toned down the laughter and nerfed the stealth burst, removing the one thing that melee Smugglers/Agents excelled at, leaving them playing healers or bringing their team down in PVP for a long while. Well, for as long as I played., not sure how the balancing is right now.

edit:

The melee spec of the class was pretty useless in PVP outside of the stealth stun/burst, and that had a cooldown of two minutes. They never recovered from that nerf in the years that I played. Bioware managed to fix the class for PVE though - as much as you can fix a melee spec in a world of MMOs where every boss encounter seems to have been designed with the prime goal to make melees as useless and difficult to play as possible in mind.

If it weren't for Bloodthirst we'd have gladly dropped our Marauder. Nice guy, sure, decent player even, but eh. Yeah...

Edited August 6, 2020 by majestic

[melkathi]

I quit after my sawbones had her giggle replaced with an inaudible beep, which meant I could no longer hear when my abilities proced over the sound of sith force lightning. B"ut good thing the Sith players were happy. Which at launch was all Bioware cared about.

[Hurlshort]

It is also good to remember that you could kill Gault originally, but people complained about thier actions having consequences, so Bioware took the decisions out of players hands.

[rjshae]

Finished Blackguards 2. It wasn't nearly as bad as everybody said; I enjoyed it.

[majestic]

Played a bit with the new Dead Cells patch.

I see potential in stacking bleeding sources. I just trashed 1.9 Giant with a Blood Sword, a Cleaver and Open Wounds. He only got two attacks off before dying. The only time I saw Giant die that quickly was with a Networking setup specifically tailored to kill him.

Promptly skipped to the Throne Room to properly die to Hand of the King, of course, but I think I have a new favorite build.

[Keyrock]

Anyone here play Control? I'm thinking of getting it once it hits Steam, or once I build my new rig in a couple months.

[Tale]

I played it when it first came out. Pretty awesome game. I'll double dip on Steam when it hits a good sale.

[Keyrock]

I was told that if you are the type of gamer who doesn't skip any dialogue and furthermore goes out of their way to find every bit of lore and also is into really weird mind-bending ****, then Control is pretty much a wet dream.

[Tale]

I skip dialogue in lots of games. It's just Control is better paced then most games where they just blather at you. Log entries aren't really important, either. It's just a well made game. It's got interesting log entries to find, if I recall correctly. So if you're down for that, you'll find it. It's just not what makes the game good.

[213374U]

13 hours ago, majestic said:

And so Bioware toned down the laughter and nerfed the stealth burst, removing the one thing that melee Smugglers/Agents excelled at, leaving them playing healers or bringing their team down in PVP for a long while. Well, for as long as I played., not sure how the balancing is right now.

edit:

The melee spec of the class was pretty useless in PVP outside of the stealth stun/burst, and that had a cooldown of two minutes. They never recovered from that nerf in the years that I played. Bioware managed to fix the class for PVE though - as much as you can fix a melee spec in a world of MMOs where every boss encounter seems to have been designed with the prime goal to make melees as useless and difficult to play as possible in mind.

If it weren't for Bloodthirst we'd have gladly dropped our Marauder. Nice guy, sure, decent player even, but eh. Yeah...

Concealment/Scrapper has excellent single target burst nowadays. The vanish is still base 2 min, but that's plenty for PVP -- the idea is that you don't vanish more than once per fight because you can just go around the corner and rest heal yourself to full, and come back to troll them some more. Bioware also caught on about stealth rezzing and made just about every other boss "radiate" low raid-wide damage to pull you out of stealth to put a stop to that in phases where it would otherwise be workable. Still, It's the class with the single highest utility in both PVP and ops, with a raid buff, self-heals and stealth. It's pretty great right now. Hard(er) to play, compared to the other healers though (not sure about DPS).

Mara is not very good right now, doing ~20% (!) less damage on bosses than the FOTM specs (PT and Lightning currently) while also being harder to play. I have to work about twice as much as on my jugg to pull similar numbers. Not that I care because I'm usually tanking, but still...

[Humanoid]

11 minutes ago, 213374U said:

Bioware also caught on about stealth rezzing

Blizzard caught on to my stealth rezzing shenanigans back in 2006, so they took their sweet time on that.

 

Still, good times, good times.

[Sarex]

Playing Control, which seems to be a spin-off of Alan Wake. So far I haven't encounter any connections, but I heard there will be. The game on it's own is not bad, so far.

Edited August 8, 2020 by Sarex

[Skazz]

Majesty Gold HD. But only for a little bit, I swear!

[Mamoulian War]

I've started NG+ of Dark Souls 2 today... I am dieing much less than in first game, but still I have issues with some of the mobs

The encounter of The Last Giant with Mild-mannered Pate was like a breeze Less than 2 minutes