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

[uuuhhii]

4 minutes ago, melkathi said:

@kanisatha

Did you enjoy Dragon Age 2's time skips between acts?

A lot of people did not.

Expeditions Rome copies it but does it worse really. It does it worse, because your character comes out of Act 1 with a mission and very possibly political ambitions. So having your character not pursue their agenda in the downtime is very immersion breaking.

And the writing in general deteriorates as the game progresses. While I could replay acts one and two, the thought of revisiting act three repulses me - they may have revamped some gameplay, but unless they rewrote the third half of the game, I do not see me ever revisiting this, just as I'd never play dragon age 2 again.

I enjoy the companions well enough. They each have a short story arc. Nothing important really, but they work and add to the experience.

 

I do not find the upgrades to the camp meaningful enough to recommend the game based on them. You will try to conquer all regions in each act to get more upgrades, but in reality it is just something to draw out the length of the game.

interesting to see how time skip didn't work in both dragon age 2 and kingmaker

there really should be a way to make a downtime mode that work in rpg

so far it seems no developer have figured it out

[kanisatha]

16 minutes ago, melkathi said:

@kanisatha

Did you enjoy Dragon Age 2's time skips between acts?

A lot of people did not.

Expeditions Rome copies it but does it worse really. It does it worse, because your character comes out of Act 1 with a mission and very possibly political ambitions. So having your character not pursue their agenda in the downtime is very immersion breaking.

And the writing in general deteriorates as the game progresses. While I could replay acts one and two, the thought of revisiting act three repulses me - they may have revamped some gameplay, but unless they rewrote the third half of the game, I do not see me ever revisiting this, just as I'd never play dragon age 2 again.

I enjoy the companions well enough. They each have a short story arc. Nothing important really, but they work and add to the experience.

 

I do not find the upgrades to the camp meaningful enough to recommend the game based on them. You will try to conquer all regions in each act to get more upgrades, but in reality it is just something to draw out the length of the game.

Thanks! I guess I'll wait to pick it up on sale then.

[Sarex]

4 hours ago, Guard Dog said:

Never! HOMM III was the high water mark of that franchise! It's been a decline into uninteresting vanilla mush after that. 

HoMM IV was my first interaction with the game and I remember it fondly, so I can't really attest if there was a decline after 3, but hearing that 3 was much less hero-centric and more about the units I think I would have liked it less.

4 hours ago, Guard Dog said:

IMO Stellaris is the bext 4X space game ever

I would think Homeworld 2 would take that crown, but I think that you were talking about space strategy games, in which case I would agree.

[Bartimaeus]

The only HoMM game I've played is Quest for the Dragon Bone Staff, and that's apparently just a remake of King's Bounty. It was entirely about the units and not the player/hero character. That game is a little terrible, but it's also kind of fun and I beat the entire game a few years back, so I can't complain too much.

Edited June 6, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Zoraptor]

I've played a bit of Old World now, and it's good. I don't know how well it's going to last though, there's a sense that they've decided to aim for the best bits of Civilisation and Crusader Kings but (understandably) aren't as developed as either, so it's a lot less... gripping, I guess. I'm also fundamentally not a big fan of one unit per tile; doomstacks suck, but there are far better fixes to that.

Someone also mentioned King's Bounty Dark Side- good game, but for me at least it regularly crashes my computer to an out and out hard reboot. Says something that I still played it for ~60 hours despite that.

1 hour ago, Sarex said:

HoMM IV was my first interaction with the game and I remember it fondly, so I can't really attest if there was a decline after 3, but hearing that 3 was much less hero-centric and more about the units I think I would have liked it less.

HoMM III is a very highly regarded game- it's GOG's out and out top seller for example- so for most people anything following it would have to be a decline.

[melkathi]

4 hours ago, uuuhhii said:

interesting to see how time skip didn't work in both dragon age 2 and kingmaker

there really should be a way to make a downtime mode that work in rpg

so far it seems no developer have figured it out

I think it exacerbates the already existing issue with the reactive nature of player activity. Thinks happen and the character reacts to them. 

Of course a player can't ever be completely proactive. They will always be constrained by what the Devs were able to predict, but sometimes the writing can try to make the plot be about the player taking the reigns. Alpha Protocol tried that. And it is part of what made it so memorable. You are coming for them.

We experience plot in first person, but decisions aren't made in first person.

Gamedec, with the noirish narration and the deduction, gives players the feel they are in charge of where things are going.

Visual novels like heart of the forest try to give options that make the player appear proactive.

But most RPGs rely too much on quest givers. Even Bethesda open world games don't give the player agency beyond choosing which NPC will tell them what to do.

 

And time skips, which seem to always simplify the player's activity over that time, really underline how the player can't do anything without an NPC sending them out to fetch a Xander root and Broc flower.

[BruceVC]

10 hours ago, melkathi said:

@kanisatha

Did you enjoy Dragon Age 2's time skips between acts?

A lot of people did not.

 

What !!! That's outrageous, who are these people 

Melkie we need names and addresses of these people so they can be  brought in for questioning 

[melkathi]

Come to Greece, you can question me

[BruceVC]

17 minutes ago, melkathi said:

Come to Greece, you can question me

Thanks, I have never been to Greece and its yet another EU country I want to visit

Can I stay with you to keep travel costs down, just 5 days or so and I promise to be on my best behavior. I wont mention BLM or socialism once 

[Chilloutman]

Disco Elysium was on 65% sale so I took it. Somehow loading screens takes ages for me. I thought game crashed on launch multiple times. No idea why

[BruceVC]

2 hours ago, Chilloutman said:

Disco Elysium was on 65% sale so I took it. Somehow loading screens takes ages for me. I thought game crashed on launch multiple times. No idea why

Thats strange,  the game was rock solid for me during the 20 hours I played it

If its on  Steam use the Verify Integrity of Files to confirm their is no corruption?

[kirottu]

Doom the one from 1993

I has to be over 25 years since I last played this one and shotgunning demons to the face is still satisfying. 

[melkathi]

5 hours ago, BruceVC said:

Thanks, I have never been to Greece and its yet another EU country I want to visit

Can I stay with you to keep travel costs down, just 5 days or so and I promise to be on my best behavior. I wont mention BLM or socialism once 

You can have the sofa bed

[marelooke]

Been playing Surviving Mars. It's...incomplete? Like it should still be in early access. The potential is there, but it needs work. There's just so many things missing from the base game (some of which are then "fixed" with DLC. Yes, it's a Paradox game, why do you ask?) There's also just general frustrating jankiness with the AI, and resource management is iffy as hell too.

For example of the first issue, missing features: there's no way to transport water over longer distances (once piping becomes impractical). So you can have a colony that is borderline drowning because it's on top of a bunch of water sources, and another one where your colonists are permanently dehydrating because you have to vaporize water from the atmosphere, which is far less efficient, and there is no way to get the surplus from the one colony to the other...

Instead of doing something about this in the base game they added trains (that can transport liquids) in a DLC...

The AI is just...let me just give an example: so your colonists live in domes (because no breathable atmosphere). However, I had a dome complete building around the same time more colonists arrived, so they immediately moved into that dome, of course (even though there was plenty of space elsewhere), a dome that had no air, no water, and no living spaces(!). To make things worse, there was no way to get them to move out of that dome: I put it in quarantine, disabled all "allowed" types of colonists for the dome (after which they are supposed to move to an allowed dome with room, of which there were plenty), turned off the dome entirely (which makes it so it also isn't serviced, so no more power either at that point). The ones I could find on the map I was able to mostly manually reassign, but the rest just died from dehydration...

Resource management similarly seems iffy as hell once you have multiple colonies. It's possible to set priorities on various tasks, however the AI often outright ignores these instead choosing to do something else, like using resources to sell to your colonists in a store inside a dome instead of fixing the air filtration system that you put on highest priority...

Furthermore that priority is shared between what your drones (workers) and your colonists prioritize. So if you want to have a factory fixed asap and you increase the priority on it suddenly all colonists eligible for working in that factory drop everything they were doing and switch to working there, potentially leaving other jobs unmanned...

Frankly, the entire game seems like it should be enjoyable enough, but after a few days of this it seems I am mostly fighting the game itself, rather than the challenges I'm supposed to be dealing with.

I'd give it a 4/10: base game needs work, DLC are not an acceptable way to "patch" a game.

Might be time to go back to another, similar game, that appears way better designed: Timberborn.

Edited June 7, 2022 by marelooke

[melkathi]

If you play on epic, try Against the Storm. Or when it releases on gog and steam.

Edited June 7, 2022 by melkathi

[Hurlshort]

I've started in on Black Geyser and it is pretty enjoyable. Seems like a solid BG type clone. I'm not too far into the story, but so far it is engaging.

[Zoraptor]

4 hours ago, marelooke said:

Been playing Surviving Mars. It's...incomplete? Like it should still be in early access. The potential is there, but it needs work. There's just so many things missing from the base game (some of which are then "fixed" with DLC. Yes, it's a Paradox game, why do you ask?)

Surviving Mars is certainly peak Paradox sales strategy. Very bare bones base game, obviously meant to show potential but be fleshed out with dlc. In this case, didn't really show enough potential and got summarily abandoned after the content they promised, then picked up again later for a dlc that was not well received.

I liked the game overall, but I also only ever played the '+season pass' version (latest dlc not included of course, lol) and I cannot imagine what a drag the middle and endgame must have been without them.

[marelooke]

2 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

Surviving Mars is certainly peak Paradox sales strategy. Very bare bones base game, obviously meant to show potential but be fleshed out with dlc. In this case, didn't really show enough potential and got summarily abandoned after the content they promised, then picked up again later for a dlc that was not well received.

I liked the game overall, but I also only ever played the '+season pass' version (latest dlc not included of course, lol) and I cannot imagine what a drag the middle and endgame must have been without them.

Was that last DLC also not made by a different studio, or team or something along those lines?

I might come back to it if I can get the DLC on a sale as I didn't hate the game, per-se, it just felt incomplete to a degree that I didn't think was quite passable for a release. Hence why I didn't want to give it passing marks (which would be a 5/10 here)

If I get my hands on the complete thing I might revisit that score.

 

6 hours ago, melkathi said:

If you play on epic, try Against the Storm. Or when it releases on gog and steam.

Thanks for the tip! I've wishlisted it on both Steam and Gog.

 

Edited June 7, 2022 by marelooke

[melkathi]

Against The Storm should have a proper launch this winter. Phase of the Citadel ends tomorrow, and I expect phase of the Viceroy to be the last update cycle, as it revamps the tutorial, in-game help, UI - all the things that would have been affected by all the changes up to now.

[Zoraptor]

1 hour ago, marelooke said:

Was that last DLC also not made by a different studio, or team or something along those lines?

Yep. And after something like 2 years of nothing.

I'd have advised not buying at all without the dlc. In some ways the treatment has been a real shame, since the game has a lot of potential and the general idea and systems are good, but this is one time the 'base game as dlc delivery vehicle' strategy definitely blew up in Paradox's face. There just isn't enough base game to get people interested in the dlc.

[kanisatha]

21 hours ago, marelooke said:

Been playing Surviving Mars. It's...incomplete? Like it should still be in early access. The potential is there, but it needs work. There's just so many things missing from the base game (some of which are then "fixed" with DLC. Yes, it's a Paradox game, why do you ask?) There's also just general frustrating jankiness with the AI, and resource management is iffy as hell too.

For example of the first issue, missing features: there's no way to transport water over longer distances (once piping becomes impractical). So you can have a colony that is borderline drowning because it's on top of a bunch of water sources, and another one where your colonists are permanently dehydrating because you have to vaporize water from the atmosphere, which is far less efficient, and there is no way to get the surplus from the one colony to the other...

Instead of doing something about this in the base game they added trains (that can transport liquids) in a DLC...

The AI is just...let me just give an example: so your colonists live in domes (because no breathable atmosphere). However, I had a dome complete building around the same time more colonists arrived, so they immediately moved into that dome, of course (even though there was plenty of space elsewhere), a dome that had no air, no water, and no living spaces(!). To make things worse, there was no way to get them to move out of that dome: I put it in quarantine, disabled all "allowed" types of colonists for the dome (after which they are supposed to move to an allowed dome with room, of which there were plenty), turned off the dome entirely (which makes it so it also isn't serviced, so no more power either at that point). The ones I could find on the map I was able to mostly manually reassign, but the rest just died from dehydration...

Resource management similarly seems iffy as hell once you have multiple colonies. It's possible to set priorities on various tasks, however the AI often outright ignores these instead choosing to do something else, like using resources to sell to your colonists in a store inside a dome instead of fixing the air filtration system that you put on highest priority...

Furthermore that priority is shared between what your drones (workers) and your colonists prioritize. So if you want to have a factory fixed asap and you increase the priority on it suddenly all colonists eligible for working in that factory drop everything they were doing and switch to working there, potentially leaving other jobs unmanned...

Frankly, the entire game seems like it should be enjoyable enough, but after a few days of this it seems I am mostly fighting the game itself, rather than the challenges I'm supposed to be dealing with.

I'd give it a 4/10: base game needs work, DLC are not an acceptable way to "patch" a game.

Might be time to go back to another, similar game, that appears way better designed: Timberborn.

I'm a little surprised by your experiences. I really like the game and play it quite often. And things generally work pretty well for me with a solid, well-developed colony (I always only build a single colony). And I haven't bought the two most recent DLCs.

Re. what happened with your colonists, maybe they couldn't reach your other dome for some reason, either before they went into the uninhabitable dome or after? Turning off a dome should automatically move all colonists out of it, so long as they can reach another dome that allows them access. I have done this myself, when I want to demolish an old dome. Never lost any colonists.

Re. AI prioritization, yeah that is hit or miss because you will have a lot of things at the same level of priority and the AI then just randomly decides what it wants to do. So I usually keep everything at the lowest priority setting, and only assign higher priorities to very select few things to ensure they get prioritized.

[Malcador]

Just have massive pipe networks and drone stations in the middle of nowhere, ah, my colonies are so unsightly.  I am still bitter due to the CTD when apparently a transporter is moving around waste rock, they fixed it they said but I still got it and that aborted my Russia game. 

[Hawke64]

Nioh 2. I think I am pretty close to the end of the main game. Defeated Lady Osakabe, aka the castle with tentacles. Luckily for me, her 2nd phase tentacles spawned at the farthest side of the roof and I was able to shoot her in the eye almost issue-free.
So far the only things I dislike about Nioh 2 are

1. The main story is linear, which should be expected, but still unpleasant;
2. The loot is unsatisfying, like in Diablo or Divinity, colour-coded piles of RNG'ed story-free pointy sticks, instead of unique lore-rich legendary artifacts;
3. There is no auto-saving on exit, only at the shrines ("bonfires");
4. The size of the game is ridiculous, around 76GB.

Otherwise, it is a decent Souls-like with comfortable customizable controls, diverse character builds, and epic bosses. There is no open-world, the game uses mission-based structure, though the locations are quite large.

[Keyrock]

I should be nearing the end game in Elex 2. I'm level 38 and I'm pretty much walking death. I can still be killed if I get sloppy, but nothing scares me any more. There's nothing out there that I can't obliterate. Max level Alb magic is terrifying and it's not even my best weapon. Most of my companions are at true friend relationship status, I think only Falk and Bully aren't and they admire me, so I'm close to true friend with them.

With any luck, I'll finish Elex 2 before The Quarry comes out. I was always interested in playing Until Dawn, but I never did, for whatever reason. Seeing as this is essentially Until Dawn 2: Slasher Movie Boogaloo, this is my chance to right that wrong, sort of. Plus, I kinda want something to flex the xXxBOxXx's graphical muscles. While The Quarry does still have last gen versions, so it's likely not going to push the xXxBOxXx nor the PS5 to its limits (it's likely 6 months to a year before we get games like that), it should give Forza Horizon 5 a run for its money for prettiest game I have on Microsoft's console. Reviews are starting to come in and they're generally positive, so I might take the plunge and see if I can help a group of campers survive the night.

[Guard Dog]

On 6/6/2022 at 4:22 PM, Zoraptor said:

I've played a bit of Old World now, and it's good. I don't know how well it's going to last though, there's a sense that they've decided to aim for the best bits of Civilisation and Crusader Kings but (understandably) aren't as developed as either, so it's a lot less... gripping, I guess. I'm also fundamentally not a big fan of one unit per tile; doomstacks suck, but there are far better fixes to that.

Someone also mentioned King's Bounty Dark Side- good game, but for me at least it regularly crashes my computer to an out and out hard reboot. Says something that I still played it for ~60 hours despite that.

HoMM III is a very highly regarded game- it's GOG's out and out top seller for example- so for most people anything following it would have to be a decline.

Yeah I'm a little underwhelmed by Old World myself. It's right up my alley but just leaves me wanting more/.