What are you Playing Now? Whatever happens, at least we're out of that mudhole, Gilded Vale.

[uuuhhii]

biggest flaw of banished are the idiotic npc and lack of housing control for player

[LadyCrimson]

The biggest flaw of Banished is that (at the time) high populations would cause the game to lag to a crawl. I think I remember that at mega populations something could go wrong with the food or AI-hunger/get food system too (didn't matter how much food you produced), causing starvation.

The food spoilage thing in Farthest Frontier is why I hesitated to buy/try it. I mean I'm sure when I'm bored in the winter or something, but that mechanic isn't something I'm going to like at all. I don't even like the "disasters", I typically turn them off if allowed. Per usual - I want to design and build re: efficiency, not manage random disasters. Pfft.

Edited September 28, 2022 by LadyCrimson

[Malcador]

10 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

The biggest flaw of Banished is that (at the time) high populations would cause the game to lag to a crawl. I think I remember that at mega populations something could go wrong with the food or AI-hunger/get food system too (didn't matter how much food you produced), causing starvation.

The food spoilage thing in Farthest Frontier is why I hesitated to buy/try it. I mean I'm sure when I'm bored in the winter or something, but that mechanic isn't something I'm going to like at all. I don't even like the "disasters", I typically turn them off if allowed. Per usual - I want to design and build re: efficiency, not manage random disasters. Pfft.

Performance for me started to bog down once my town got 130 people, granted my machine's not a powerhouse or anything.   Realize I forgot all about desirability so have no homesteads, hah, so restarted rather then correct something that busted.

 

[BruceVC]

Sadly Im reaching the end of my BG2 EE journey, I have just killed the nefarious Bodhi and taken her black heart from her remains. I enjoyed killing her finally ..she deserved to die

Highlights of the game so far include (outside of the side quests I mentioned earlier )

• The Underdark experience : Great fun, I completed several side quests that included freeing the souls of trapped insane people and rescued the Svirfneblin boy and killing the despicable Illithid Master Brain. I also let Solaufein live which worked out nicely for me when he provided fake Silver Dragon eggs and I betrayed both Matron Mother Ardulace and Phaere and gained some nice XP and items. I also had a great Romance interlude with Phaere 
• After leaving the Underdark I went to settle the score with Firkraag and that was an epic battle which I won on the third attempt

I wish they had included more Underdark races and exploration but its a memorable part of the game

I am now on my way to Suldanessellar with the lantern, exciting times. I am thinking of completing Watchers Keep in ToB?

Edited September 29, 2022 by BruceVC

[Gfted1]

Still havent found the Twisted Rune? Pity.

[BruceVC]

13 hours ago, Gfted1 said:

Still havent found the Twisted Rune? Pity.

Ah, I hadnt found it yet and I did  a quick search  now and I see where it is. I avoided that place because when I went  there earlier I got annihilated by the elemental lich  

Edited September 30, 2022 by BruceVC

[Raithe]

I've been bouncing around lately.  A bit of Phantom Doctrine, a moment of Grounded, fragmentary bits of TOR, some idling on Dyson Sphere Program...

[Hurlshort]

10 hours ago, Raithe said:

I've been bouncing around lately.  A bit of Phantom Doctrine, a moment of Grounded, fragmentary bits of TOR, some idling on Dyson Sphere Program...

You've been vacuuming?

[Gorth]

23 hours ago, BruceVC said:

Ah, I hadnt found it yet and I did  a quick search  now and I see where it is. I avoided that place because when I went  there earlier I got annihilated by the elemental lich  

Welcome to The Twisted Rune

 

Playing Pathfinder: Wrath of The Righteous. Clocking in at 150+ hours and it only feels like a week or two since I started (I know it was more than that, but it feels like)

[uuuhhii]

stellaris again after a long time.the new pop growth formula are horrible.who thought 400 growth for one pop was a good idea

[MrBrown]

9 hours ago, uuuhhii said:

stellaris again after a long time.the new pop growth formula are horrible.who thought 400 growth for one pop was a good idea

You can turn it off if you want. I find it works fine.

[Keyrock]

Well, my latest MMO experiment with PSO2 is over, didn't even last a week. It's not a bad game but... Where do I start? 

First of all, there are 2 different games, PSO2 and PSO2:NGS (New Genesis), and they are completely different games. NGS is the recent revamp/relaunch/reimagining/rewhatever and it's what I played first. I only played the Gunner class, these observations may or may not apply to the other classes.

NGS is a fast-paced game, you are always moving. There is a dash, a double jump, and a glide you can perform, and these are awesome... Almost. Keep that in mind, I'll get back to it. You have several different attack abilities, basic attack you can spam as much as you want and special attacks that consume PP. Also there is a giant super attack that you need to build up energy for that has a long cool down. You can perform every attack while moving, running and jumping, doing flips through the air. With the gunner's twin machine pistols it's a John Woo movie minus doves taking flight in the background.  There is a big ol' world to explore with lots of verticality. Main quest cutscenes are voice acted and the voice work is... Passable. So far so good, right? Let's get to the negatives.

NGS suffers from what a lot of games, not just MMOs, though MMOs are the biggest offenders, suffer from, I call it "complexity for complexity's sake". This game has A TON of systems, many of which do nothing to make the game more engaging. It could be argued that it makes the game "deeper", and there may be some truth to that, but at the cost of making it more confusing and way more tedious. Within minutes of starting, my inventory is already cluttered with a metric ****ton of different items, most of which are used in various crafting systems. There are ingredients, modifiers, items that increase success rate, items that increase chance of critical success... Ugh, I hate crafting so much. I'm a ****ing adventurer, shouldn't a weaponsmith be making super cool gun +5 for me rather than me having to waste my time scouring the land to make super cool gun +5 myself? There's a weapon crafting system, armor crafting, food crafting, I could go on and on. The leveling system is needlessly convoluted. Going up levels only increases your HP and PP and allows you to use level-gated items. To get skill points you need to find these buildings called "cocoons" where you can do trials. Trials are short mini-games and completing a trial earns you 1 skill point. There is a nice bit of variation to trials. One of the trials is a platforming course meant to show off the movement systems. In theory, this should have been a trial that I had a blast with, and I almost did... Almost. The problem is that the jumping and gliding mechanics are inconsistent. The way it's supposed to work is that you press the button to jump, hold it down for a higher/longer jump. No problem so far, pretty standard. Tap the button again for a double jump or hold it down to glide. You can also glide after a double jump (tap or hold, tap, hold). That's how it works most of the time. Sometimes, regardless of how quickly you tap the jump button, instead of performing a second jump you go into glide. Inconsistent mechanics are extremely frustrating. My last gripe is that the world is level-gated. To enter certain zones you need to have a certain battle score and if you don't you are stopped by a force field. I hate this so much. If I'm too weak to enter an area, give me a warning but let me still enter the area and potentially get horrifically murdered.

PSO2 is the original, now 10 year old game. This game is slower paced. There is no dash, no double jump, and no glide. You cannot move while shooting, which prevents me from John Woo-ing, but does introduce some tactics because special attacks lock you into an animation which will prevent you from dodging, so you have to be smart about when you use them. There is a bit of a rhythm game to combat as attacking again at just the right time, represented in the game by a red circle around you, does extra damage. Leveling is more traditional and simple, you get more HP, PP, and a skill point when you level up. Unfortunately, there is no game world to explore, in the traditional sense. You have a hub area and you teleport into instances. That's it. This killed the game for me as exploring the world is the most fun part of a MMO for me and that doesn't exist here. No matter how varied you make the instances, it's not the same.

 

[majestic]

You should try EverQuest 2 when a new Time-Locked Realm opens up. Before the game update that changed the system to be more like WoW's, it took crafting to a whole new extreme where you couldn't even craft anything beyond the basic items your chosen path offered without ingredients you could only find in the game world which was populated, at that patch level, with enemies you more or less needed full groups to deal with, and using items crafted by other crafting classes.

If you were a scribe and wanted to write a spell scroll, you needed to buy vials of ink from a friendly neighborhood alchemist, who in turn needed the vials from a jeweler, while making paper yourself (paper that other crafting classes needed, like carpenters and tailors, for their designs/sewing patterns). Once you had everything together, crafting was a four staged process that had a completion and a durability gauge that filled (and dropped) at regular intervals.

You couldn't just craft, you had to pay attention, because during the crafting stages random things could happen you needed to counter with a special ability. Like a loss of heat in a forge, or an excess of heat, knots in the wood you have, and so on. Using the right ability would boost your completion while ideally keeping your durability. Picking the wrong counter ability or ignoring problems would lead to reduced durability. There were also critical successes while countering and critical failures that could randomly happen every moment - the former would greatly add to your progress bar and maybe even restore some durability, the latter would pretty much guarantee that a level of quality would be lost forever.

If the game would decided that you were exceedingly unlucky, you might even walk away without any results, a critical failure at the beginning might spell doom for your crafting process. If you start with a critical failure and the game then decides to give you no crafting problem at all in your stage (to boost completion and maybe repair some damage), or worse, a second critical failure, you'd slowly stare at the progress bars and watch your ingredients disapear. You know, the ones you either paid a premuim for at the auction house or went collecting with five other people who all had different things to pick up and wanted to do different things.

Having critical failures as a blacksmith was even better, because exploding forges weren't unheard of and could eailsy, ah, kill the player character.

At least the game was fun - when you were done with the attunement questlines, some of which took weeks or months to complete because you needed to kill one specific rare NPC for it who would only spawn once a month and only if you wrote a ten page essay in stone giant blood, backwards on vellum blessed by vestal virgins and read the essay at ten and a half seconds past midnight on the first day of a new moon.

Okay, that latter part was slightly exaggerated, but killing placeholder enemies for a 1:1000 spawn chance wasn't unheard of, as were enemies that only spawned once in three weeks - out in the open. Back when I played I changed factions (the betrayal quests were the only way to have some class and race combinations in your chosen faction), and for that you needed a week long reputation grind, and something you really needed to camp named NPCs for.

Good times. Good times.

Edited October 2, 2022 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

I tried that crafting system probably like twice before I said that I was literally never, ever going to craft anything. I kept to my word...of course, I also quit the game when I got to like level 30 and stopped trying to play MMOs thereafter, .

Edited October 2, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Keyrock]

My best bet might be to jump into a MMO right after it first releases. Jumping into a 10 year old MMO comes with 10 years of feature bloat. It's one thing when you are an existing player and a MMO adds a new system in an expansion, you only need to learn the 1 new system because you are already familiar with all the existing systems. As a new player I am bombarded with 2 dozen systems and expected to learn them all at once. Also, MMOs sometimes start out with good early game progression but then after an expansion or two they add boosts and/or tweak the progression so that new players can rapidly get to the end game stuff they have been working on for the last however many years and join their friends who have level 80 or whatever characters quickly. That's all well and good, but in the process they kill the progression curve of new players who want to experience the early and mid game as it was originally intended.

[Gorth]

@Keyrock if you ever decide to give Guild Wars 2 a try, give me a shout. Combat is (sans rebalancing) the same now as in 2012. BIS gear is the same as it was in 2012. The base game is free and you can complete the original story without ever touching the in game cash shop. If you’re dying to get something in said shop, you can trade in game gold for cash shop currency (and vice versa)

[Zoraptor]

Still working my way through Pathfinder WotR. Turned down the difficulty, and inevitably blow through just about every combat in five seconds flat (though see spoilers). Had the same issue with Kingmaker, at lower (character) levels the difficulty is very granular and you need to know the right order to do everything in to get the levels up at the right time, at some point on the lowered difficulty nearly everything becomes easy. Liberated a city, splattered some demon armies, now I'm anarchist Jesus or something.

Spoiler

Suspect I'm about a third of the way through Chapter 2.

Some of the fight scaling is pretty hilarious. Those Serkonan ghosts in that village you can fight in Chapter 1 were 'interesting' even in Chapter 2. That lady summoning a demon in Drezen soloed my party with her transformation spell or whatever it is (is there a 'proper' way to win that? half rhetorical question, couldn't find any way to reliably dispel her buffs) then I tried summoning some demons on her and they had her dead in 3 rounds; in comparison the fight with Vhane and Minagho was utterly trivial. Get some quest that is pretty much go slaughter some poor unfortunate mooks in ten seconds, have another one with no (?) disambiguation where you go off on a journey to hell or something and there's a new travel map... yeah, nah. Kill a dragon, easy peasy (well, easy peasyish, that breath weapon was non trivial even with prep and positioning); then get kerb stomped by the two mandragora in the basement. OTOH, the much hyped demon armies coming to get met with their fearsome leader couldn't have been damper squibs if someone had misspelled them as squids.

Wow, Camellia's big secret was that that fat bloke is her father. And to think I was all suspicious of her and her alignment hiding necklace. Apropos of nothing I'm not altogether keen on Owlcat's penchant for the most very obvious misdirection, like Wotsit disappearing when you're looking for a traitor. I even went with halfling braid girl's suggestion for attacking Drezen to see exactly how she'd betray me- and it wasn't particularly impressive.

And just in case Bruce is reading I cannot recommend the romantic prospects all that highly. Not only would I leap at Seelah if she showed any interest at all, I'd just about consider her horse to be in 2nd place. I would probably like Arushalae a lot more if she wasn't a succubus, and hence a bit of a cliché of a cliché, but she is. As it stands... Wenduag maybe? What's the worst that could happen?

I'll probably start posting in the actual Pathfinder thread for the next update, since I'm getting a bit further through.

[bugarup]

12 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

About nasty cultist lady

The best way to deal with her is to let her summon whatever she's summoning, because that guy is easier and gives way, wayyyyy more XP. I've read that the more of her cultists you kill before they explode in ritual, the easier she is to fight but cannot attest to that. 

[xzar_monty]

2 minutes ago, bugarup said:

The best way to deal with her is to let her summon whatever she's summoning, because that guy is easier and gives way, wayyyyy more XP. I've read that the more of her cultists you kill before they explode in ritual, the easier she is to fight but cannot attest to that. 

Incidentally, the first time I saw that lady, I ended up not even realizing that the fight is difficult. I cast Slumber on her, and then did a coup the grace. The odds of that Slumber succeeding must have been 1/20, but it did succeed. What an odd piece of luck.

[Gorth]

27 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

  Hide contents

Wow, Camellia's big secret was that that fat bloke is her father.

 

 

Warning, (big) spoiler ahead:

No.

 

 

[xzar_monty]

51 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

Turned down the difficulty, and inevitably blow through just about every combat in five seconds flat (though see spoilers).

I wasn't able to find a difficulty level that was even remotely pleasing throughout. It was like listening to the Final Cut by Pink Floyd: the dynamic range is too wide, you have to keep adjusting the volume, which really sucks.

With Deadfire, the difficulty curve was the strangest of all: the first isle contained a couple of extremely difficult battles (Gorecci Street, the Digsite), but after that there was essentially nothing even close to that difficulty. Very, very odd.

[Zoraptor]

I suspect I could metagame the encounters in WotR to play on Core Rules. It's just way too much effort to do the first time through. Far easier on a replay.

I think technically the weirdest difficulty 'curve' I've seen is still something like Oblivion. Nothing like having bandits dressed in armour that they could simply sell and then retire for life from the proceeds of; and the 'best' character development strategy being never to formally level up past 2.

43 minutes ago, Gorth said:

To be clear, I'm 100% expecting that to be misdirection, at least in so far as it being the 'big secret'.

[Gorth]

17 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

I suspect I could metagame the encounters in WotR to play on Core Rules. It's just way too much effort to do the first time through. Far easier on a replay.

I think technically the weirdest difficulty 'curve' I've seen is still something like Oblivion. Nothing like having bandits dressed in armour that they could simply sell and then retire for life from the proceeds of; and the 'best' character development strategy being never to formally level up past 2.

To be clear, I'm 100% expecting that to be misdirection, at least in so far as it being the 'big secret'.

I don't know if it was intended as misdirection, but the "reveal" happens in Act III (you get some hints though when going through her childhood home) iirc.

[Hawke64]

Spoiler

Act V, in her final quest.

Spoiler

And only if you decide to play along.

Edited October 3, 2022 by Hawke64

[Gorth]

42 minutes ago, Hawke64 said:

  Hide contents

Act V, in her final quest.

  Reveal hidden contents

And only if you decide to play along.

Wait.... are you saying that: (bear in mind, I'm only in act IV, so I've no idea what happens in act V)

 

There is more to her than just both of you getting naked, straddling the body of her latest victim, while engaging in some really kinky sex.  Because her spirits are even crazier than her, telling her to sacrifice people and making her all horny in the process?

Edit: Well, the spirit she has trapped in her amulet at least, which is why she doesn't want to part with the amulet (without which she would go through life in a constant sexual arousal and bloodlust)