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

[bugarup]

1 hour ago, BruceVC said:

You right it definitely takes time to find the appropriate mods , I mentioned this before but I spent about 10-12 hours finding the right mods for Oblivion. Its part of the fun of playing ES games, imagine how long its going to take me  when I play Skyrim AE because that comes with 500 creation club mods and you can load additional mods which I will source from Nexus 

What I find always speeds up finding mods on Nexus is to filter the mod list to "Most endorsed " or " Top Files " or use the " Mod Categories " so that you can easily find specific mods like NPC or Creatures. It makes your mod selection much easier 

I'm definitely installing SkyUI because the original UI is awful and I already have a mile-long list of identical notes, bugfixes because bugs are bad, and perhaps one that makes dunce townies run away from dragons; don't really care about all that glossier hair, prettier faces and louder fart noises cosmetic stuff that makes the majority of most downloaded lists though.

I like additional content, but there's not much of it save for Bruma town and Enderal, which is from what I understand a separate game rather than mod. It has a load of glowing reviews, but a good number of those come from grogs who think QoL stuff like fast travel is a) anathema, b) for nubscrub weaklings, so I have my doubts. 

 

[BruceVC]

50 minutes ago, bugarup said:

I'm definitely installing SkyUI because the original UI is awful and I already have a mile-long list of identical notes, bugfixes because bugs are bad, and perhaps one that makes dunce townies run away from dragons; don't really care about all that glossier hair, prettier faces and louder fart noises cosmetic stuff that makes the majority of most downloaded lists though.

I like additional content, but there's not much of it save for Bruma town and Enderal, which is from what I understand a separate game rather than mod. It has a load of glowing reviews, but a good number of those come from grogs who think QoL stuff like fast travel is a) anathema, b) for nubscrub weaklings, so I have my doubts. 

 

And if you like adult mods you can find them on Nexus but I recommend https://www.loverslab.com/

But a word of caution,  that website is  not for the faint hearted and innocent 

 

[Gfted1]

8 hours ago, BruceVC said:

I wish you would stop doing that, if you have something to say just say it. Dont be scared, I dont bite 

Whats the point  you want to make about  Carsomyr, I doubt I will play the BG series again so Im interested in retrospective insight ?

 

I think the gif is because @Gorth mentioned a weapon that you dont get until its too late to be useful, then I posted another example of the same issue, you dont get the silver weapon until youve already killed the greater werewolf boss (need silver weapon to damage/regens almost to full each round). Then you posted Carsomyr, which is the best 2H sword for good characters, but it was unrelated to the topic we were discussing.

[majestic]

That is one part, the other is the idea of Carsomyr in the hands of a single class thief, desperately trying to hit for the dispel effect while Irenicus wipes the floor with the party at the Tree of Life (or the 'buggy' improved Bhaalspawns from Ascension).

Thieves can't even backstab with it (unless the EE messed up something fierce). it's like, dead weight, except for that magic resistance.

I know stuffing Carsomyr in the hands of some character with UAI was a fairly popular thing to do back in the days of yore when Throne of Bhaal was new, but it did not make sense back then, and it still does not now. Even if we are talking about a Fighter/Thief, one is much better served by dual wielding Foebane and the Scarlet Ninja-To (which, outside of cheesing a Kensai base and using consumables is actually a really nice application of Use Any Item), but at least you could conceivably do something useful with it.

Edited October 17, 2022 by majestic

[Chilloutman]

ehh, you can backstab with any weapon you hold in BG IIRC. some stupid staff was best BS weapon in BG1

[majestic]

26 minutes ago, Chilloutman said:

ehh, you can backstab with any weapon you hold in BG IIRC. some stupid staff was best BS weapon in BG1

Indeed. With any weapon you can hold before Use Any Item. Thieves can use staves, therefore they can backstab with the Staff of Ram, which yes, is the weapon giving one most damage in a single backstab. Does not need a weapon you can stab with, just needs to be on the thief's weapon list. .p

edit: Specifically, the weapon needs the 'usable by thieves' flag to be able to backstab, since Carsomyr is a Paladin only two handed sword, it does not work. Neither does Staff of the Magi because its use is limited to mages, even though staves can usually be used to backstab.

Edited October 17, 2022 by majestic

[BruceVC]

7 hours ago, majestic said:

That is one part, the other is the idea of Carsomyr in the hands of a single class thief, desperately trying to hit for the dispel effect while Irenicus wipes the floor with the party at the Tree of Life (or the 'buggy' improved Bhaalspawns from Ascension).

Thieves can't even backstab with it (unless the EE messed up something fierce). it's like, dead weight, except for that magic resistance.

I know stuffing Carsomyr in the hands of some character with UAI was a fairly popular thing to do back in the days of yore when Throne of Bhaal was new, but it did not make sense back then, and it still does not now. Even if we are talking about a Fighter/Thief, one is much better served by dual wielding Foebane and the Scarlet Ninja-To (which, outside of cheesing a Kensai base and using consumables is actually a really nice application of Use Any Item), but at least you could conceivably do something useful with it.

Im not sure what was  so complicated  or controversial about this that  you  couldnt say it earlier?

I  used Carsomyr once or twice because I only realized I could use it with UAI when someone on Codex told me about it so I waited for Vienxay to advance a level but it was  near the end of ToB. And because I couldnt backstab with it, Vienxay is a thief, it became pointless

But its a effective weapon but without a paladin in my party it was meaningless 

 

 

 

 

[Hawke64]

Started Sable. It seems to be a platformer/exploration game and strongly reminds of Shadow of the Colossus in terms of the climbing mechanic, which I like. There are (thankfully, unvoiced) dialogues, but since all options have led to the same replies, I found it meaningless.
Slowly replaying the main part of Wasteland 3, trying out different builds and companions. SMGs with explosive ammo are OP.

[Humanoid]

A couple of weeks ago I said here that Solasta Lost Valley was better than the original campaign. I'm not so sure about that anymore. Seems the deeper into I get into it, the more the seams appear, and the cut corners become more evident. Asset reuse increases a fair bit, and perhaps most importantly, their attempt at creating competing factions to choose between is their writing team biting off more than they can chew.

No, no one should expect to be able to please all factions at the same time, reputation points ought to behave in a sensible way. But I expect better than to simply talk to a questgiver for one faction and having that immediately tank your reputation with another faction *which isn't even hostile to the first faction*. Looking into it a bit deeper and it appears this was done because eventually that other faction would have sent you to the same place to do something for them. They presumably wanted to make the quests mutually exclusive and did so in the clumsiest fashion possible.

It's like, I dunno, Mr House who you've barely spoken to getting angry because you accepted a quest from the NCR to clear a Legion camp, because later in the script the game requires you to clear that camp on behalf of Mr House. And you haven't even done it, you've only accepted the quest. And you've only accepted the quest because in Solasta, talking to someone automatically accepts their quest. *facepalm*

[kanisatha]

12 minutes ago, Humanoid said:

A couple of weeks ago I said here that Solasta Lost Valley was better than the original campaign. I'm not so sure about that anymore. Seems the deeper into I get into it, the more the seams appear, and the cut corners become more evident. Asset reuse increases a fair bit, and perhaps most importantly, their attempt at creating competing factions to choose between is their writing team biting off more than they can chew.

No, no one should expect to be able to please all factions at the same time, reputation points ought to behave in a sensible way. But I expect better than to simply talk to a questgiver for one faction and having that immediately tank your reputation with another faction *which isn't even hostile to the first faction*. Looking into it a bit deeper and it appears this was done because eventually that other faction would have sent you to the same place to do something for them. They presumably wanted to make the quests mutually exclusive and did so in the clumsiest fashion possible.

It's like, I dunno, Mr House who you've barely spoken to getting angry because you accepted a quest from the NCR to clear a Legion camp, because later in the script the game requires you to clear that camp on behalf of Mr House. And you haven't even done it, you've only accepted the quest. And you've only accepted the quest because in Solasta, talking to someone automatically accepts their quest. *facepalm*

Dunno. It's working quite fine for me. Once I accepted that I am going to tank my rep with the dictator of the valley, which happened super-early in that faction's questline, then I've been able to get almost all the way to the end of the questlines of all the other factions without any problem simply by being logical in how I sequence doing their quests.

My only real gripe so far is that it is completely random what magical weapon crafting recipes you get, and I haven't been able to get very many so far.

[Humanoid]

33 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

Dunno. It's working quite fine for me. Once I accepted that I am going to tank my rep with the dictator of the valley, which happened super-early in that faction's questline, then I've been able to get almost all the way to the end of the questlines of all the other factions without any problem simply by being logical in how I sequence doing their quests.

My only real gripe so far is that it is completely random what magical weapon crafting recipes you get, and I haven't been able to get very many so far.

No, nothing to do with the dictator faction, that was out the window many hours ago. To be specific my case was:

 

Did the chain of quests to facilitate the Forge negotiating with the Rebellion. Quest complete without incident, everyone goes back to their home, everything's fine. Leave the Forge HQ, get a message saying they want to speak to me again. When I eventually go back and do so, he says "hey, we found a place in the swamp you should check out" which starts a quest, but also immediately reduced Rebellion reputation from +58 to -70 and auto-failed a quest for them.

I looked up the quests:

- Accepted quest The Renewal from The Forge. As above, the conversation for the quest is "Hey, we found that Mr Dictator has a secret base in the swamp," which has no logical ties to the Rebellion whatsoever.

- Quest The Wizard's Lair from The Rebellion auto-failed. The quest at that point wasn't even asking me to do anything but talk to someone, who would have presumably asked me to go investigate a wizard's lair of some sort.

These two events do not reasonably relate in any particular way. But after reading the spoilers in the links above, the only explanation seems to be that the Wizard's Lair quest is a complete red-herring, it is a sidequest and is not in itself incompatible with the Forge. But this Forge quest actually leads to a fight with Mr Dictator, and the Rebellion will eventually also have a quest to fight Mr Dictator, so to prevent double-dipping, the game auto-cancels all your quests with the Rebellion including side-quests and destroys your reputation with them to ensure you can never interact with them again. All because I "accepted" a quest that unbeknownst to me will lead to the death of a guy that they also happen to want dead. It's a very meta-level interaction and I remain of the opinion that this is a very clumsy and heavy-handed way of dealing with faction interaction, almost feels like the DM panicking, so to speak.

Curiously none of the other reputations with other anti-Dictator factions were affected though. Hmm.

Edited October 19, 2022 by Humanoid

[Hawke64]

Completed Mortal Shell after taking a month-long break. In general, it runs perfectly well, the controls are comfortable and rebindable, the graphics are well-made, the file size is reasonable, the save files are located in /Documents/My games. The sound and movesets are adequate. What I strongly disliked was the encounter and area design - too many too similar regular enemies, too corridor-like similarly-looking locations with few to none landmarks - walls/high cliffs and fog effectively prevented from meaningful navigation*. While it was nice that after defeating an area boss, the area changed slightly, the fog got old rather quickly. As for the bosses, most of them* had 1 very punishable and baitable attack and it was just a matter of patience, which is better than total randomness, but not exactly engaging.
About the final boss. Unlike the previous ones, it was not a armoured humanoid, but he was just as easy to bait. The difficulty came from his summons, fragile as they were, - around a dozen of them beelining to you and doing jumping attacks. 3-4 times during my successful attempt. Another thing that the boss was regenerating after getting to ~20% HP, and seeing the bar getting to ~70% was rather discouraging. Preventable, though.
*the exception is the second part of the ice area - you had a hole in the middle of it and that's where you needed to go. The boss as well had different movesets in different phases and was less predictable than the others.

[Hurlshort]

I have been running around in the shadow of the Black Gate getting ready for the assalut on Mordor. I am level 110 now. The storytellimg continues to be top notch in LotRO.

[BruceVC]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/362490/Exanima/

I have exciting news for everyone, I have decided to play this game next. I have read some non-spoiler guides on Steam and the unique combat seems to be a huge part of appeal

I dont know if anyone has played this game and has feedback?

[kanisatha]

On 10/19/2022 at 8:51 AM, Humanoid said:

No, nothing to do with the dictator faction, that was out the window many hours ago. To be specific my case was:

  Hide contents

Did the chain of quests to facilitate the Forge negotiating with the Rebellion. Quest complete without incident, everyone goes back to their home, everything's fine. Leave the Forge HQ, get a message saying they want to speak to me again. When I eventually go back and do so, he says "hey, we found a place in the swamp you should check out" which starts a quest, but also immediately reduced Rebellion reputation from +58 to -70 and auto-failed a quest for them.

I looked up the quests:

- Accepted quest The Renewal from The Forge. As above, the conversation for the quest is "Hey, we found that Mr Dictator has a secret base in the swamp," which has no logical ties to the Rebellion whatsoever.

- Quest The Wizard's Lair from The Rebellion auto-failed. The quest at that point wasn't even asking me to do anything but talk to someone, who would have presumably asked me to go investigate a wizard's lair of some sort.

These two events do not reasonably relate in any particular way. But after reading the spoilers in the links above, the only explanation seems to be that the Wizard's Lair quest is a complete red-herring, it is a sidequest and is not in itself incompatible with the Forge. But this Forge quest actually leads to a fight with Mr Dictator, and the Rebellion will eventually also have a quest to fight Mr Dictator, so to prevent double-dipping, the game auto-cancels all your quests with the Rebellion including side-quests and destroys your reputation with them to ensure you can never interact with them again. All because I "accepted" a quest that unbeknownst to me will lead to the death of a guy that they also happen to want dead. It's a very meta-level interaction and I remain of the opinion that this is a very clumsy and heavy-handed way of dealing with faction interaction, almost feels like the DM panicking, so to speak.

Curiously none of the other reputations with other anti-Dictator factions were affected though. Hmm.

Interesting. I guess I accepted the various quests in a different order and so did not suffer this specific issue.

The impacts on the rep of other factions happens right away, so one option obviously is to load your last save and replay things differently.

[Humanoid]

23 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

The impacts on the rep of other factions happens right away, so one option obviously is to load your last save and replay things differently.

Yep, just finished up tonight's session, reloaded a previous autosave to ignore the main Forge leader and just did a sidequest for his underling instead, that was no problem at all. The plan for now will be to do Rebellion quests, until (assuming my expectations are correct) I take one that destroys my Forge reputation. Then who knows with the other two factions.

[kanisatha]

On 10/20/2022 at 9:38 AM, Humanoid said:

Yep, just finished up tonight's session, reloaded a previous autosave to ignore the main Forge leader and just did a sidequest for his underling instead, that was no problem at all. The plan for now will be to do Rebellion quests, until (assuming my expectations are correct) I take one that destroys my Forge reputation. Then who knows with the other two factions.

FWIW, I started out doing a lot of Forge quests (because they give you those weapon crafting recipes), but then started doing the quests for all four factions (Forge, Rebels, Mask, People) in sort of a parallel way, never going too far ahead with any of the factions. Just need to keep in mind a couple of things:

Spoiler

For 'The Conquest' (Mask) quest, when you get it The Outpost you need to go to is Rebel-held. But, if you do People faction questline all the way through 'Tortured,' it becomes Dominion-held. This way you can avoid tanking Rebels rep when assaulting that outpost and therefore complete the questlines for all three (Mask, Rebels, People).

For quests involving the Rebels base area, first do the quests for the Rebels themselves, and then for Mask, before taking the Forge leader to meet the Rebels leader.

[Malcador]

OW2 isn't all that fun, some tanks seem really OP.  In a low ELO as well, as usual, so trying to be a healer when everyone's off being the MC in their own video game is an exercise in futility. 

Spent more time in Farthest Frontier, got to town hall level 3 so can make beer and such (I generate gold ingots from the pubs...but not really sure where the gold ingots are coming from, to be honest).

[Humanoid]

14 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

Just need to keep in mind a couple of things

I remember capturing the outpost for the Mask, it was definitely Dominion but had to click the banner a couple of times to get the quest to complete, so it flipped to someone else first. Don't believe I lost any rep with anyone at that point, but earlier today I finally progressed the Rebellion questline such that I now have to quest to capture a bunch of outposts. No idea if that'll conflict with anything, will find out in a day or two.

Playing in co-op with limited time availability anyway so not going to try to optimise too hard, especially given we've just hit level 10 already. The order in which we've done things has been pretty arbitrary, haven't really paid attention to actual faction rewards much.

Actually I remember some dialogue in passing about some faction being disguised as another faction at the outpost, so maybe that was their way of handwaving the weird outpost flipping.

[LadyCrimson]

Yes, I would like more "cozy" games, please. Although...I've had enough of "cutesy farming sims" already. But stuff that's more about escapism, cats, exploration, sim-elements, cats, design efficiency, not too complex...anything but pure combat power-fantasy. Edit: oh, and not MT-filled phone/mobile.

(vid has language - it's Zero P after all)

 

Edited October 22, 2022 by LadyCrimson

[Hawke64]

Wasteland 3. The attention to details is amazing - I've been replaying Denver and the area changes slightly as the story progresses. The former Godfisher camp was inhabited by drools, then a quest-unrelated NPC appeared, whom I had not seen on the previous playthrough. The base game has quite impressive quality and quantity of voiced dialogues. While I wouldn't mind it being only partially voiced and having more dialogues, the VA is reasonably good and the options are plentiful and meaningful.
I also found the Golden Toaster and now it is following the party (by levitating).

[Lexx]

2 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

Yes, I would like more "cozy" games, please. Although...I've had enough of "cutesy farming sims" already. But stuff that's more about escapism, cats, exploration, sim-elements, cats, design efficiency, not too complex...anything but pure combat power-fantasy. Edit: oh, and not MT-filled phone/mobile.

(vid has language - it's Zero P after all)

 

He is not wrong. Personally I also feel a need to play low-anxiety games, and from my past experience that means we might be up to something soon.

[Gorth]

1 hour ago, Lexx said:

He is not wrong. Personally I also feel a need to play low-anxiety games, and from my past experience that means we might be up to something soon.

In that case, we can rule Solitaire out. It's one of the most soul crushing, frustrating games where you just want to punch your fist through the wall at times

[Wormerine]

Does Elden Ring count as a cozy game? I find it cozy.

[Keyrock]

I found Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator to be "cozy" games. I only stopped playing them because I now do that for a living, but they were super chill games.