What are you Playing Now: Living the Game Life

[melkathi]

How is difficulty? At launch it was incredibly easy and they supposedly did a balance pass to make it somewhat challenging?

Edited June 24, 2021 by melkathi

[Malcador]

56 minutes ago, melkathi said:

How is difficulty? At launch it was incredibly easy and they supposedly did a balance pass to make it somewhat challenging?

It seems easy enough to me, not really using clever tactics - just have one priest with an axe, two others with arc rifles.  I've not done hard missions as I'm not too confident I know what I'm doing, though  

[InsaneCommander]

Solasta: I managed to get the elusive chest in the Library. People are saying it is difficult because of a bug, I had to use two spells and force my character to stop at a very specific position on the wall to do it. People said I would get a nice wand but instead all I found was a useless language helm. My characters already speak all languages.

[Keyrock]

I'm playing the Steam Sale Forge Your Fate choose your own adventure game. It's better than Anthem. 

[bugarup]

I'm playing stuff that doesn't add more heat to what's already there (f†ck heatwaves). Like "Spellcaster University", sort of management sim / draw-a-card game that's not as casual as it wants to seem.  You got to build a magic school using cards, the school then generates resources to get new cards, then the evil forces come and knock your school over so you have to start anew though with benefits from your previous school...er, it's more fun than it sounds and is a one-more-turner despite of not being a turn-based game.  

[Mamoulian War]

12 hours ago, Keyrock said:

I'm playing the Steam Sale Forge Your Fate choose your own adventure game. It's better than Anthem. 

In all honesty even Barbie's Horse Adventures is better game than Anthem

[melkathi]

Having a goofy grin allowed me for the first time to reach the Greybeards in Skyrim.

[melkathi]

reading the patch notes for Phoenix Point. And looking at the previous patch notes I had missed. So in the previous patch they implemented this: "In order to prevent misfires due to flinching, targets will now freeze during the firing sequence when shooting in Free Aim." Funny how during the backer builds we told them about missing shots because after the players aimed, the target would move due to their idle animation, causing shots to miss. Back then we were of course mistaken and just hadn't figured out how to aim properly.

 

[Malcador]

Was not destroying the consoles, did not bother to look up the fact they reduce Necron Awakening.  D'oh.

[Keyrock]

I reached the Matador boss fight in SMT3, this is the most infamous battle in the game. You fight much stronger demons later on, but Matador is disproportionately strong for how early in the game you encounter him. He will absolutely wipe the floor with an unprepared team.

It had been so long since I had played the game that I ran into the fight very much unprepared and with a poor party composition. I actually managed to survive phase 1, which, I dare say, is impressive, given how suboptimal my team was. He then proceeded to obliterate me in phase 2. The battle is hard enough on normal difficulty, on hard it's downright brutal, even with a good team. I need to do some demon fusing to get the right team before facing him again.

[BruceVC]

I am about 18 hours into Control and it is fun, its a nice distraction from my favorite type of games....fantasy RPGS.

I am enjoying killing Hiss using Telekinesis and I appreciate the way you respawn at certain locations so that death doesnt waste too much time 

Navigating the map and finding certain locations can be confusing but I am improving my knowledge of the land so that isnt much of an issue anymore. Crafting and creating Mods for weapons is not clearly explained but I use the Interwebz for that information  

Its not a game that is gripping or really compelling  like ELEX but its entertaining and thats good enough for me 

[Malcador]

Took down Ekropis.  54% Awakening so maybe I've screwed up this game.  Was funny to unleash a canticled, energized Volkite beam...only for him to swap with another Necron.  Granted that Necron got blown away in one shot, so not all lost, but was a downer regardless.

[Bartimaeus]

Disc Room. Was fairly certain that it was going to be some dumb masochist game and was preparing to uninstall at the first sight of it becoming dumb because I don't have the patience for that crap anymore, but it surprised me by playing way fairer than I thought it would and giving you a number of different abilities that are actually genuinely useful and having neat room designs and just a handful of bosses. Surprisingly really good and neither too long nor too short, IMO.

Edited June 27, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[Mamoulian War]

Yesterday, I've started and finished Deadlight: Directors Cut from GOG. Pretty nice and fun zombie platformer, with occasional shooting and for me very frustrating Second Act . Despite that, I've enjoyed the gameplay, even though platformers are not my cup of tea, and I tend to be very bad playing them . This game was not an exception, so the 5 and half hours to beat the game was perfect for me.

[melkathi]

I figured out what bothers me the most about King Arthur: Knight's Tale (the turn based tactics game in Neocore's King Arthur game series).

The premise of the game is that King Arthur and Sir Mordred fought in an epic final confrontation which left both dead.

The dying King Arthur's was taken by ship to Avalon but it sunk in a storm. Something happened to Arthur, and now the land is twisted and grimdark and people rise from the dead.

Most of the knights can't die. Or they do die, but then they get back up. So does Mordred. And you play Mordred freshly raised from the dead, tryign to figure out what is going on and how to stop it.

On your way you collect a band of other knights, all basically dead and risen again and again and again.

The reason they tag along with you is simple: they hope you aren't very good at the game and will let them die.

Because in Knight's Tale death doesn't stick, unless you die during a mission with Mordred, since those have permadeath.

A game who's main premise is that the characters can't die has permadeath as a main feature.

[BruceVC]

33 minutes ago, melkathi said:

I figured out what bothers me the most about King Arthur: Knight's Tale (the turn based tactics game in Neocore's King Arthur game series).

The premise of the game is that King Arthur and Sir Mordred fought in an epic final confrontation which left both dead.

The dying King Arthur's was taken by ship to Avalon but it sunk in a storm. Something happened to Arthur, and now the land is twisted and grimdark and people rise from the dead.

Most of the knights can't die. Or they do die, but then they get back up. So does Mordred. And you play Mordred freshly raised from the dead, tryign to figure out what is going on and how to stop it.

On your way you collect a band of other knights, all basically dead and risen again and again and again.

The reason they tag along with you is simple: they hope you aren't very good at the game and will let them die.

Because in Knight's Tale death doesn't stick, unless you die during a mission with Mordred, since those have permadeath.

A game who's main premise is that the characters can't die has permadeath as a main feature.

I was reading up on this game, the marketing looks good

https://neocoregames.com/en/games/king-arthur-knights-tale

Do you recommend it despite these narrative and ostensible design inconsistencies ?

[melkathi]

Not at this point of Early Access. Possibly not later either.

 

Franchise background (you may want to skip ahead)

Neocore's King Arthur as a game franchise started with King Arthur: The Roleplaying Wargame. It was mostly a Total War knock off with far deeper roleplaying aspects: more stats, skills and equipment than any TW at the time, choose your own adventure quests, and a morality chart that tracked the player's alignment on two axes - Righteous/Tyrant and Christianity/Old Faith - unlocking extra skills and units. It got two campaign expansions Saxons and Druids that allowed you to play the game as two different rulers with their own campaigns. Two smaller expansions added some units, items, and two more knights to recruit. A fifth, stand-alone expansion, Fallen Heroes, had a stronger rp character focus and was badly received.

The game was followed by King Arthur 2 and it's pre-order bonus prequel stand alone dlc mini campaign Dead Legions. King Arthur 2 basically slimmed down everything from the original game. Players now had 3 specific heroes and only those three could lead armies. This gave the devs more control of what players could, but more importantly couldn't do. As every army in the game had a max size, this meant the devs could always know the max number of units a player would have in the game. They also simplified the game's economy, removing taxation of provinces etc. The decisions alienated a lot of fans of the original game. Combined with smaller enemy variety, as you spend a lot of time fighting the same line up of fomorian daemons over and over and over again, meant that the Steam forum at the time wasn't very positive (though not as toxic as Steam fora can get). The fact that Neocore is terrible at optimizing their games didn't help. The game got a couple of patches but no DLC. A promised patch never showed and the community manager disappeared. From a fan's point of view it appeared to be a complete failure.

After Van Helsing and Inquisitor Neocore returned to the franchise.

 

Knight's Tale was advertised as:

"a Role-playing Tactical Game - a unique hybrid between turn-based tactical games (like X-Com) and traditional, character-centric RPGs."

Most kickstarter backers and customers stopped reading right there and said "take my money". That is a problem that is now coming to bite Neocore, who had followed up with:

"The story campaign puts a huge emphasis on moral choices, which have significant consequences in a rogue-lite structure" using a term that may not mean what they think it means. Keep the term rogue-lite in mind though, as we'll come back to it.

Anyone looking at the kickstarter had to scroll down a lot to read this:

"Reloading is not an option in Knight’s Tale – as you make your tough choices, the fun comes from dealing with severe consequences. "

I hadn't read that. If I had, maybe I would have stayed away. Because Neocore proves they are who they have always been - a dev studio that does not care what the players want. Not because they are protecting an artistic vision, but because they *know* what is fun and what is right. Probably why they did not really look at the games of the genres they are dipping into. If they had, they would have noticed that Iron Man in XCOM for example was an optional mode. They would not have needed to go from Autosave at the beginning of a mission and at the end of a mission, to making a game mode where you are allowed to save on the world map. What they have not implemented and are not sure they will ever add, as it does go against their vision of the game is: Save & Exit during missions. Once you are on a mission, you either play it or quit and start from the last autosave. It is part of the "rogue-lite" aspect mentioned earlier. Neocore believes you do not need to save during missions, because missions are short. 20 minutes at most. Only, they are not really. Not always. A specific story mission lovingly coined by the community the "nightmare mission" (because of the nightmares you fight, not because of the difficulty of the mission) can take a lot longer to figure out.

 

But let's talk actual Gameplay:

 

The game is split into two parts: the world map and the missions.

On the map you upgrade Camelot, assign heroes to be healed, to train. You buy from the merchant. You level up your heroes and manage their inventory. You make some choices (do you execute the surviving brigands from the last mission or do you give them a second chance? Do you let Christians build roadside shrines?). You spend little time here as you just do the in between missions stuff and move to the next mission.

You take up to four heroes onto missions. During a mission you run around with your whole party using WASD. When you meet enemies the game goes into turn based. Sometimes you can then choose your party positioning. Most of the times they will just step up based on how they were running at the time. Party formation is controlled similar to IE games and similar to IE games heroes don't really always stick to their spot in the party...

Heroes have action points - on average around 8 it seems. A normal melee attack costs 3 Action Points. Some Action Points can be reserved for the next turn.

Heroes have Armour, Health Points and Vitality. HP and Vitality is similar to Pillars. Once the HP are gone, you start losing Vitality, which you can't heal with a potion. Armour reduces damage but can be shredded similar to XCOM. Every attack in the game shreds armour. Whenever you take vitality damage, you hero suffers an injury, giving them a persistent debuff until you heal them at the cathedral in Camelot - unless your hero has an Injury Token and can spend it to ignore the injury. Mission difficulty comes mostly through self reviving Lost, totems that keep spawning enemies, and waves of enemies. It likes spawning endless archers, who will always get some shots in before you reach them. As a result difficulty is basically a matter of "how much damage can you soak". I got lucky and my Mordred got loot that lets him restore one point of armour on kill, meaning my main tactical thinking is how can enemies attack him and my other heroes reduce the hp of those enemies so he can kill them off and get armour back. As encounters are in small areas with minimal cover and most of the time you don't get to deploy your heroes, any real tactical planning is rather limited. You try to efficiently take out opponents before they can damage you because there is nothing you can do about them damaging you other than killing them.

The game has limited healing during the mission. Every hero can carry one healing potion. There are limited campfires around the map that allow you to rest and regain either a percentage of lost armour or of lost health.

Heroes can level up between missions and equip stuff. Leveling up allows you to spend skill points on things like a Cleave attack or a Power attack or a passive damage boost.

Equipment is rather boring. You do not find new weapons or armour. You find new runes for them. It is the same as equipping a new sword, only that thematically you put modelling putty in the old rune and inscribe a new one. Basically it means that the game only needs one model per hero which does not alter based on equipment. It does take part of the fun out of new equipment, as all you loot is new sets of stats for your existing equipment. It also means your hero will never differ much: Mordred will always be the dude with the sword and shield. Balin will always be the dude with the two handed ... axe? Tristan will always carry two swords.

If a hero dies they are dead. Unless they were critical to the mission, then you fail and need to restart from the autosave. Mission failure is not an option: once you are in a mission you either keep trying until you succeed or you restart the campaign. Or uninstall. It is funny how devs never realize there is that third option.

There are planned to be around 30 unique recruitable heroes in the final version, though based on your morality only some will be available to you. Currently, early on, when you only have a handful of heroes, if a hero dies you may as well restart from the beginning.

Writing:

The writing is not up to the standard of previous Neocore games. The English needs some proofreading. But even then, that can't fix the content. Mordred is a brat. "Are your sons as ugly as you?" does not make me feel that I am playing the dark knight who brought down a kingdom but a brat. It seems to mellow down a bit after the intro mission. Possibly because the very first feedback they got on releasing the EA was me saying on Discord that "I like the setting, but I don't like playing as Mordred" who isn't dark but a jerk. Most narration comes from the mission description and some comments by the Lady of the Lake during missions. Heroes will have a bit of story in the mission they are met and may trigger events on the world map after missions (whatsherface wants to host a tournament - do you host it for her so she doesn't get all the fame? Do you say no? Do you let her do the hosting? (+1 loyalty with all heroes / -1 loyalty with her / +3 loyalty with her)).

 

And that's it.

As tactics games go there isn't much tacticing. It is better than cash grab XCOM clones like Falling Skies or Narcos. But it is also not memorable or does anything to recommend it. And the writing early on just isn't strong enough to recommend it for the setting.

King Arthur: Knight's Tale - It's a game. It Exists.

Edited June 28, 2021 by melkathi

[Malcador]

Motored through the two next bosses, the Void Admiral was pretty trivial, shooting him in the face with a Volkite gun was fun.  The Flayed One boss was a fun fight, trying to rush up the stairs, one of my Skitarii heroically tased one and one shot 2 and killed another in the rear guard as his last action before the Deathmark blew him away, heh. 

Have to do the last boss now, I'm at 74% awakened so better not wait too much longer.

[melkathi]

That sounds a lot more fun than at release. Killed all those bosses without them even having a chance to act back then

[Malcador]

Well...that was anti-climactic, the head boss ended up being offed by the blade of a Skitarii Sort of funnier for his line threatening Faustinus with doom and all right before I killed him.  Didn't think my build was that great or anything so, guess it was all pretty easy.

[Mamoulian War]

8 hours ago, Malcador said:

Well...that was anti-climactic, the head boss ended up being offed by the blade of a Skitarii ...

Oh my, I was reading it "...head boss ended up being offended by the blade of Skitarii..." and though what a fitting gameplay mechanic for 2021... Color me disappointed...

[Malcador]

Well, given how Necrons view non-Necrons, it is a fair assumption he was offended as well.   Was worried when I saw he had 99 HP, no armour though.  Overall, game would have been worth paying for (got it as a gift), and is nice to see a 40k game that's not crap.

I may get Inquisitor, coworker says it's fun and is Diablo in 40k apparently.

[melkathi]

Inquisitor apparently is very repetitive.

It also is always online. You have to connect to neocore's server even if you always play single player.  But neocore doesn't see an issue with that. No offline single player is a design choice they believe makes inquisitor a better product.

[Malcador]

8 minutes ago, melkathi said:

Inquisitor apparently is very repetitive.

It also is always online. You have to connect to neocore's server even if you always play single player.  But neocore doesn't see an issue with that. No offline single player is a design choice they believe makes inquisitor a better product.

Well, then, forget that. D3's irritates me with my connection invariably dropping when I'm doing great in a GR But at least I have the excuse of friends around to pop in often, there.

Guess will look at the list of games I own but never play....Star Ruler 2 is up!

[melkathi]

Yeah, I thought that may affect the purchase decision. It's why I didn't get it.