What are you Playing Now? I name all the operations that go down in Taipei.

[melkathi]

3 hours ago, Hurlsnot said:

I got hooked on a fun little game called Spellcaster University last night. I had actually picked it up on GoG, but then I noticed I had gotten it for free through Amazon Games awhile back. I always forget about those free games they give through Prime. Anyways, the game is a pretty fun simulation of running Hogwarts.

Hah, I even posted screenshots for a while, but people didn't notice.

I backed Spellcaster Univeristy on kickstarter actually and have been playing it through various iterations. The added dungeons were the truly huge change.

I haven't tried out the jousting yet...

 

pro-tip:

traits stack. So if you have a student who is Ambitious in a house that gives all members Ambitious, the student will get double the boost.

Edited June 25, 2022 by melkathi

[Hawke64]

The Waylanders. I have encountered 2 side quests that were impossible to complete, one for the unrecruited companion (who needed to be in the active party in order to progress the quest), the other for a recruited one (the post-quest dialogue did not trigger). One cut-scene for another quest was shown as a black screen with "Sequence LS_032_003_LorencioDefeated_B" at the bottom, but the quest was finished successfully.
Fortunately, the main quest line has not got locked (yet). The story is becoming jollier and jollier as the party advances, though the main objective for the last main quest was to gather the scattered party, i.e. not to progress the main objective.
Side note, most of the side quests have taken place in different places of the same location - only the relevant for the quest paths were available and the rest blocked. While it is not exactly bad, being able to progress all of them at the same time would have been more convenient, but much harder to code and test.

[Theonlygarby]

On 6/20/2022 at 2:52 PM, the_dog_days said:

Just finished Symphony of War. TLDR: Best indie trpg I've ever played. Fire Emblem is one of my favorite video game franchises and SoW scratched that Fire Emblem itch. I mainlined the whole game starting Friday night and finished early this morning. It was that good. I have only two problems, 1) the game has a menu based UI, which will make it a great game on the Switch when it gets ported but makes me frustrated that all I'm doing is left and right clicking the mouse, and 2) the Player Turn and Enemy Turn cards that come up at the end of each turn and can't be turned off--I know its my turn 'cause the enemy isn't moving. Everything else, the combat, the unit diversity, the enemy verity, the deep gameplay systems, the characters, the world building, and the story are wonderful. If you like trpg's, you have to check this game out, and its cheap.

I just got it.  Finished 3rd chapter.  It's very good so far.

[Mamoulian War]

I played a little bit of Assetto Corsa again, and who would have guessed it, today, third Sunday in a row, the wheel stopped to work again

Fanatec issued me an RMA, so I will be sending it to Germany tomorrow.

[Humanoid]

"Finished" Rogue Legacy 2, and by that, I mean I cleared the world ten times over to see all the content. Well, almost all the content. Technically it can be done in seven clears, because each iteration of New Game+ unlocks one "Prime" (hard mode) boss. But I'm a fairly cautious, thorough player, so I stuck to full clears instead of beelining bosses for quick clears, and as a result I tended to stay 50-100 levels ahead of the level curve.

The good news is that the core gameplay is fundamentally good and I have no notable complaints about it. But as with all games I like, I'm a lot more critical of the problems it does have, which are all at the meta level of the game, and here are some I found particularly glaring.

1) The "upgrades" system, i.e. the castle building money sink that serves as the game's tech tree. It's incredibly cluttered yet somehow also incredibly bland. Here's a picture of the fully unlocked castle:

Spoiler

Besides the incredibly high numbers and the absolutely packed grid that obscures everything, my biggest complaint would be the actual upgrades themselves. Take the five brain icons at the right side of the grid. Three of them act identically, where each point in brains increases your Focus stat by one. What does Focus do? It increases the damage your spell crits do. Then there's the brain icon with the little plus sign on it. What does that one do? It ...increases the damage your spell crits do. But for some reason it does so directly instead of by increasing your focus. Just... why? Never mind the fact that Focus itself is a trap for new players, it's a stat you should disregard entirely because spell crits (and indeed crits in general) aren't a meaningful mechanic for your first few playthroughs. Except that you do have to put one point in each of those tiles because doing so unlocks an adjacent tile. However you don't know what it'll be without looking up the wiki, and it may be something incredibly important like unlocking a new class, or it may be completely useless like being a more expensive duplicate of the thing you just bought.

 

2) Scar challenges. These are sort of preset scenarios where you might, say, re-fight a boss with a twist, or complete some platforming challenge within a time limit. I have quite a few issues with how this is done. These challenges completely ignore your progression, i.e. the "lite" part in rogue-lite, and instead hard-code your level and available upgrades. Used to having nice things like increased movement speed, extra double jumps, all that good stuff? Nope, it's all ripped away from you so despite 95% of your time playing with those upgrades, you're suddenly thrust into a fight with half your normal movement speed, and none of the usual movement utility skills you've gotten used to. There's a limited handicap system you can use that crudely scales your health and damage (for combat challenges) or gives you a few seconds of extra time (for platforming challenges) but they do nothing to address the feeling of playing with your hands tied behind your back.

So with such a crappy system it might seem odd that my other main complaint is how hard it is to access. From your home base, you have to enter a building, jump up to the relevant NPC, navigate a poorly designed menu, start the challenge, tediously walk in and out of three separate rooms which each house a choice of two random "relics" (i.e. combat upgrades), click away the pop-up explaining what the relic you've chosen does, then manually enter the boss room proper. Just let me retry the challenge again without the song and dance, dammit. Furthermore, this functionality is locked out completely on the first character you use each time you start a new New Game+, so you have to intentionally die at least once. This is particularly egregious because these challenges - the combat ones at least - are designed such that you're forced to do them with multiple classes to actually get the reward. Got a perfect score on one with your mage? Well good for you, you get *nothing* until you do the same fight with several other classes such that your cumulative score is enough to reach the bronze/silver/gold thresholds.

 

3) The horrendous equipment UI. It's incredibly basic and refuses to show the information you actually need in terms of selection your loadout. The UI for purchasing gear and equipping it is one and the same, and it's remarkably inadequate for both. On the purchasing side, you have no way of knowing what tier of equipment you've unlocked until you've purchased the immediately preceding item. Have I unlocked the recipe for Leather Weapon (don't ask)+2? The only way of knowing is to first purchase Leather Weapon+1 and then seeing if the upgrade button is available next to it. And in terms of unlocking gear in the first place, there's a bit of a trap in that unlocking a higher tier of gear can be an act of self-sabotage. Hell, the NPC outright tells you to buy the unlock to get +1 gear immediately, but it's not necessarily good advice. You have the default Leather gear but have yet to find the Obsidian stuff? Well have fun having your drops diluted by Leather+1 instead of that more advanced stuff you wanted.

In terms of equipping gear, it's not much better either. Notably while you have a maximum encumbrance limit that's shown straightforwardly enough, it's actually fairly key to know there are multiple soft limits before you hit that hard cap, you gain significant bonuses by "travelling light", i.e. progressive bonuses for only carrying 20/40/60% of your hard limit. Or it may be 21%/42%/63%. Or 24%/48%/72%, etc, depending on upgrades you've unlocked. But all you get in the UI is the straight hard cap and where you are in relation to it, so the game might tell you you're at 640/870 weight and leave you to figure out the rest for yourself.

Armour rating is another trap where you have no way of knowing how much armour is enough, and how much is too much. By default you can only block 35% of the damage from a given hit (though it may be 39%/43%/etc with upgrades). Well, how hard can the enemies hit for? After all, if no enemy hits for more than 1000 damage, then having more than 350 armour is literally useless. So how hard do enemies hit in this particular iteration of New Game+? Have fun figuring that out.

Edited June 26, 2022 by Humanoid

[Humanoid]

Double post, but I guess I'll split out the non-RL2 stuff here. Started playing Shredder's Revenge, which is fortunately on Game Pass because it'd be a very marginal standalone purchase. As I believe I've said before back when first footage of the game was first revealed, I had a pretty deep sense of uncanny valley with this game, and that hasn't changed with the full release. It's like, these are the Turtles I grew up with, only, these aren't really the Turtles I grew up with - I much prefer the look of the classic Turtles in Time. The new voice actors, while unavoidable, contribute to this feeling as well.

In terms of gameplay, I haven't delved into the more complex elements of the fighting just yet, so mostly playing it like a primitive two-button brawler using a combination of attacking, jumping and dashing alone. I'll look into the provided in-game tutorial when we're not in a hurry. It feels solid enough, other than impacts perhaps lacking a bit of oomph.

Also had a pretty annoying bug where during a dual boss fight, one of them just vanished from my screen, but remained on my (online) co-op partner's screen. Couldn't hit or be hit by the invisible boss directly, except when he shoots projectiles, which very much can hit me.

Edited June 26, 2022 by Humanoid

[Hawke64]

The Waylanders. I've reached the end-game and the main quest has softlocked.

Spoiler

At the moment, I am at the second part of the Siege quest, where the objective is to defeat the corrupted troops and blow the horn at Clarion's Point. But there are no troops to defeat and no way to reach Clarion's Point, except via the world map, which teleports me to the location in its pre-endgame state.
I can enter the Gorgon's Head tavern, though, and talk to Tiana there, but when I exit it, the Great Market switches to the pre-endgame state as well.
I've tried looking it up and the only thing I've found is the same bug in an earlier version of the game on YouTube.

Spoiler

 

 

I will try it again later from an earlier point.
Not counting that "small" issue, it has been quite fun, several (2, to be exact, but one of them twice) previous decisions have been referenced, however insignificant they were.
Also another companion quest turned out to be impossible to complete. This time the game kept crashing at one specific point in an unremarkable tunnel. I tried teleporting through the "crash zone", sending the character and switching to another, and turning the camera away while running with the same "Fatal Error!" message at the end. Considering that the exit was on the other part of the corridor, the only way to get out was to reload one of the previous saves.
If anyone has any suggestions for the softlock, it would be most welcome. Judging by the Steam achievements, I am 2 quests away from the ending. Stopping now would be most disappointing (unless the ending shown in the video is the best and truest one).

[Keyrock]

For whatever reason, I never paid any attention to AI: The Somnium Files, I didn't read any reviews, I didn't bother with trailers, I had no clue of what it was except that it was Japanese. Fast forward to today and I see a release trailer for AI: The Somnium Files: Nirvana Initiative (needs more colons) and, again, it looks very Japanese. I was ready to tune out and move on when I realized that it was a detective game, which is my jam, and, more importantly, I saw the Spike Chunsoft logo. Spike Chunsoft has released a number of games sufficiently demented and twisted to warm my black, shriveled heart (most notably the Zero Escape series). Suddenly, I was interested.

I read some rather glowing reviews and decided to look into the first game and it sounds like it would be exactly up my alley. Furthermore, I found out that the first game is on game pass. Needless to say, it's downloading right now.

[Chilloutman]

Was playing Solasta DLC, some things works like combat (even tho way too frequent for my taste) but man any RPG aspecs of it are completely absent. Its just go there, kill this or pick that, return back. No narrative, no different way how to solve quests. Such a drag....

[MrBrown]

27 minutes ago, Chilloutman said:

Was playing Solasta DLC, some things works like combat (even tho way too frequent for my taste) but man any RPG aspecs of it are completely absent. Its just go there, kill this or pick that, return back. No narrative, no different way how to solve quests. Such a drag....

Some quests have a non-violent way and a violent way, but that's pretty much it.

The non-linearity comes from which faction you do quests for. You can get pretty far by sucking up to them all though, so it's kinda moot.

[InsaneCommander]

No more Solasta for me. All save files are corrupted. They are even dated as being from 1970.

[Sarex]

8 hours ago, InsaneCommander said:

No more Solasta for me. All save files are corrupted. They are even dated as being from 1970.

That is the worst possible bug that can happen in a game... Sucks...

[Keyrock]

AI: The Somnium Files is very weird and very Japanese. You play a detective with an AI eye implant investigating a murder, also there are bizarre dream sequences. Being a Spike Chunsoft game, I am fully prepared for some of the seemingly innocuous characters I've met so far to turn out to be twisted psychopaths.

[Gromnir]

On 6/25/2022 at 6:11 AM, Hurlsnot said:

Anyways, the game is a pretty fun simulation of running Hogwarts.

is it possible to surreptitiously get the entire student body burned as witches? if so, we might give it a whirl.

HA! Good Fun!

 

[melkathi]

You could get attacked by the inquisition.

Mostly you set up pyres though to train your students as inquisitors 

[Hawke64]

The Waylanders. After replaying a short part of the second-to-final quest, it fortunately got unlocked and I was able to locate the path to the corrupted troops I was to slay. The boss of the quest had very lore-friendly stats, as it was a human, though it also meant a rather short battle, 5 vs 1. Then the game offered an important story decision and it was reflected in the ending slide (there was 1 ending slide in total, thus it was the most important choice for the ending).
The final quest consisted of 3 boss battles in a row. The first slightly depended on a side quest (if you complete it, the boss has 10% less HP and is half-transparent), the other two seem to be the same regardless of any dialogue choices (there might be something different depending on another side quest and romance, but I was unable to test it, as I would have to replay most of the game and the above-mentioned companion quest was broken). I replayed it twice and noticed that it was impossible to change the party despite the dialogues saying otherwise (the second time I got stuck only with the PC and the mandatory companion).
In general, despite the story being quite broken and linear, the locations and builds very minimalistic, and the game having numerous bugs of varying severity, the Waylanders have some charm and I somehow enjoyed it. It is nowhere close Dragon Age and completely different from Pathfinder (not counting the bugs, though in this aspect, the Waylanders lead, undoubtedly), but it is worth one playthrough (~22 hours) if the player does not mind the bugs (i.e. recommended for £15 or cheaper).
On a positive note, I like that there are different body types and they depend on the class of the character. It is really immersion-breaking to see wizards and fighters being equally buff.

Edit. A small, yet amusing detail about the first boss:

Spoiler

It was possible to transform into a fish (a tidal druid's spell, into a bunny otherwise).

Edited June 29, 2022 by Hawke64

[InsaneCommander]

Unepic is much better than I expected. My first impression about the story wasn't good, with the character coming from another world. But the dialogues are actually pretty funny. And it's a great platform/metroidvania game.

[Mamoulian War]

After 6 year break, I have decided to continue in my Atelier Rorona 3rd playthrough. What an easy going and relaxing game for the crazy heat wave at my homecity

[Gorth]

I feel like playing Baldurs Gate 2 again... I have BG1, BG2 and their expansions (both original cd's and from GOG). I remember there was a mod that could enable BG1 to run on the BG2 engine, BGT (Baldurs Gate Trilogy I think). Time to dust off some old Baldurs Gate mod sites

Actually playing... mostly Guild Wars 2 these days. Been hooked, badly so, the last 4 years on that game. Watched a few youtube videos lately with a few guilds, that specializes in different mounts. No kidding. There are guilds, that create some very nice videos of the capabilities. Sadly they're quite "lo-rez" quality videos, because you can gain insane speeds on some of the GW2 mounts and recording software seems to struggle with keeping up. [DRFT] ("Drift") specializes in Roller Beetle racing and [Wing] which specializes in Griffon racing

 

...and with a Griffon serving as the camera helicopter

 

[Wormerine]

9 hours ago, Gorth said:

I remember there was a mod that could enable BG1 to run on the BG2 engine, BGT (Baldurs Gate Trilogy I think). Time to dust off some old Baldurs Gate mod sites

Tutu mod, I believe - at least that's what I have been using back in a day. Honestly it was a better update to BG1 then enhanced edition, as while it allowed players to take advantage of BG2 advancements (like new classes, dualwielding etc) it also allowed for more faithful recreation of BG1. If we find a way to solve an issue with UI being too small let me know. As flawed as they are I mostly stick to Enhanced Editions these days

[Bartimaeus]

2 hours ago, Wormerine said:

Tutu mod, I believe - at least that's what I have been using back in a day. Honestly it was a better update to BG1 then enhanced edition, as while it allowed players to take advantage of BG2 advancements (like new classes, dualwielding etc) it also allowed for more faithful recreation of BG1. If we find a way to solve an issue with UI being too small let me know. As flawed as they are I mostly stick to Enhanced Editions these days

Tutu predates BGT; BGT allows you to play both within the same game and provides a bridge of sorts between the two. EET is the equivalent on the Enhanced Editions (but also requires Siege of Dragonspear).

[LadyCrimson]

Tiny Tina Wonderlands -

TLDR:  If you liked/loved BL2 but were lukewarm or cool towards BL3, you might like TTW more. I created 5 of the 4 starting classes and played them through the early main quests (doesn't take too long), so these are early impressions. Overall for myself, I like it quite a bit more than BL3. BL3 left me feeling meh even from the start, and so far at least TTW is more "fun"/interesting as a BL game, early on. We shall see!

Possible pro's: 
--the rpg stats (creating a character, getting 1 additional pt. each level up, separate from skill points), give character progression a better feel and the (eventual, so I hear) dual-classing sounds great/fun.
--Casting spells is very fun. You will still be mostly guns - but I love it. The spells (and action skills) feel more powerful then in previous games. Feels like they're mostly  worth using/building for vs. forgetting they exist half the time.
--Melee power/potential has been boosted even more, across all classes.
--plenty of things to search for/collect to gain boosts of stuff, vs. rush through the main quest, if that matters to you. Find all the gold dice to increase an area's loot-chance. Find poetry, find orbs, etc.
--the "overworld" aspect is interesting with its own mini-quests/objectives. The random encounters on it are annoying but a lot of the time you can outwalk the trigger-npc to avoid the forces-you-in portal from materializing.

Possible con's:
--the "overworld" might, instead, annoy some. You can avoid/ignore it, for the most part, in favor of sticking to the normal campaign, although the entrance to the main town seems to be from there so I don't think you can avoid it completely.
--inventory management (as always) plus some overlong npc dialogues, can disrupt the action pacing a bit and is always a bit taxing.
--I hear the campaign is shorter than BL3 and it has no new game+/TVHM) - so max clvl is going to be lowish. There is a small end-game loop but one isn't likely to get 100's of hours out of endless replay. Most might try one or two dual-combo playthrus then stop.
--if you can't stand Borderlands OTP non-stop jokes style and also can't tune such out, it's even more rapid fire and constant than ever. Just sayin'. 

[Keyrock]

AI: The Somnium Files is delightfully weird. It hasn't gotten as dark as I expected. There's still time, I guess, plus I shouldn't expect every Spike Chunsoft game to get as dark and deranged as the Zero Escape games. One minute I'm cracking stupid jokes to an AI in my eye, the next a teenage internet idol is explaining the Anthropic Principle to me. Never change, Japan. 

[BruceVC]

I have some great news for everyone. Last weekend I went to the Beamdog forums, after a video on BG mods I watched, and their are a few mods you can install that add some advanced functionality like extra NPCS, more dialogue, extra races and the additional Romance mod

So Im going through the list and selecting what is appropriate. Here is the link on Beamdog

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/50340/bg-ee-2-0-and-siege-of-dragonspear-compatible-mods

[kanisatha]

55 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

I have some great news for everyone. Last weekend I went to the Beamdog forums, after a video on BG mods I watched, and their are a few mods you can install that add some advanced functionality like extra NPCS, more dialogue, extra races and the additional Romance mod

So Im going through the list and selecting what is appropriate. Here is the link on Beamdog

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/50340/bg-ee-2-0-and-siege-of-dragonspear-compatible-mods

I'm surprised anyone still goes to that forum. Their forum moderators  blacklisted me and then eventually created an excuse to ban me for being a constant critic of BG3 (as they did to several other BG3 critics). As such I no longer have any interest in anything Beamdog.