Since yesterday, my gaming goal number is 31 finished. For now, it is definitive, that I will not finish all content in FFXV and DLCs, before the end of the year, due to some boring prerequisites for last few trophies, which I still miss. Especially the last trophy in Episode Ardyn, which is this time not a trophy for beating the DLC Challenge, but about doing some boring and lengthy stuff on Easy difficulty.

Anyway...

December 29, 12:00 – I have finished storyline of Final Fantasy XV – Episode Ardyn DLC on my PS4. This one is an interesting mixed bag of an DLC. Ardyn, has definitely most interesting gameplay mechanics of the all DLC characters, but I find the content not much better than Prompto's DLC. Although, it still means, that it's the second best FFXV DLC.

3 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Nah, glass cannon always and forever in every game. If everything you attack immediately dies, there's less opportunity for you to get hit in the first place and also you mow through the game much faster to boot, . Many years ago, I intended to play through the Dooms, but at this point, I'd be lucky if I ever make it through just the original.

Generally yes, but not in Project Warlock.

Stat upgrades do not enhance weapon damage outside of strength affecting melee damage, and even the lowly handgun one finds right at the start is capable of one- or two-shotting every mook level enemy in the game after giving it the .50 cal upgrade. Dishing out damage is not an issue outside of the final boss battle, although that one could arguably work in melee. I had no intention to try running up to the boss and whack him on a run that ends in case this does not work so well.

You could potentially get away with putting every point in spirit and simply use the magic staff as weapon that uses mana instead of ammo, that does impressive damage, especially when you exploit the upgrade that gives it a long cooldown in exchange for killing almost everything except bosses in one shot. Because a spell that costs zero mana, magic light, resets the cooldown of the weapon. Even then, there are ambushes that are unavoidable right at the start of a level as you spawn into a sea of fiends and even sprinting for cover takes away a good chunk of your health.

Edit: It is also super clunky to switch spells in the middle of combat, so switching between the - in my opinion required - storm rage spell and magic light is not very fun gameplay.

Edited December 30, 20223 yr by majestic

Almost too on the nose, my Tsar Vladimir has shattered Lithuania and annexed Kiev.  Doing pretty well, having good luck with wars I guess - some day I'll learn this game.

eu4 are a little too complicated to learn at this point.even old player couldn't possibly keep up with all the new nonsense and have forgotten most of they learned in the past.pretty sure eu5 will start the cycle again soon

Edited December 31, 20223 yr by uuuhhii

EU4 was by far the most I've liked a game of that type, but the more mechanics they added to it, the less I liked it, . Did they ever add a way to just...disable stuff in a modular way? Any (predominantly singleplayer) game that has had so much feature creep over such a long period of time should have that, at least for some of the more hot-button issues. There's a few things that I would absolutely have to cut out of the game before I would ever consider picking it back up again because they annoy me too much.

Edited December 31, 20223 yr by Bartimaeus

Yeah I left it for a while and came back not knowing what estates were and how they worked and a whole lot more. But I guess that's Paradox for you.

Got dragged into some religious war, because Catholics needed Orthodox to fight the Protestants.  But I got Crimea in the fuss, so works for me.

wait 4 years for something that obviously doesn't work to change is the paradox way.estate was horrible when introduced slightly better after state eventually decent after crownland was added.paradox rarely just remove things because most garbage feature are selling point of a dlc

I'm still waiting for several more DLCs before I dive into Crusader Kings 3 because I know Paradox all too well.

Neversong. Completed the game. It was a puzzle-platformer with horror elements. I suppose, the graphics and design were nice, but all other aspects of the game, from the story (the symbolism was fine, the story itself was rather unpleasant) to the platforming part of the gameplay (the controls were not rebindable, in many cases I could not tell whether I was misunderstanding the objective, jumping at a wrong time, or it was a bug with the physics) to the combat system (the hitboxes were odd, but almost everything dropped HP-restoring items on death, bosses on every 20% health depleted) to the settings (none in-game, but it was possible to open the Unity settings menu to select the graphics preset with VSync enabled, because otherwise the FPS were reaching 4 digits). Also, all lines were voice-acted and reasonably well (children and poems were supposed to sound odd, I assume). The only story-related thing that I liked was a boss remarking about the loot and skipping the battle, which was slightly 4th-wall-breaking, but amusing.
In general, absolutely not recommended.

Edited January 1, 20233 yr by Hawke64

10 hours ago, Keyrock said:

I'm still waiting for several more DLCs before I dive into Crusader Kings 3 because I know Paradox all too well.

At the pace that actual meaningful DLC is being released for CK3, that's not going to be until next decade.

And I use the word "meaningful" very loosely. Mostly the CK3 team has been just drip-feeding poorly scripted events that are pretty much thrown in by individuals working alone with no editorial oversight.

Has there been any character limit introduced since last downtime of the forums? 😛 I get Request blocked, when I try to post anything, which is pretty lengthy today 😛 And it is definitely shorter, than my list of completed games in 2021, which I posted last year 😛

Edited January 1, 20233 yr by Mamoulian War

As far as I know, some characters may cause errors. In particular, parentheses and quotation marks.

Death Stranding, enjoying it quite a bit so far. Enjoying the Portal and Cyberpunk 2077 references. Would write a lot more, but forum only lets me write a single paragraph, and only when using Chrome, at that (also can't react to posts )

Yes, it's better to not post anything more than a few sentences long at this point...which is kind of limiting for discussion.

Edited January 2, 20233 yr by Bartimaeus

You kids these days, back when I was your age and we still had to hike backwards up a mountain to get to school... uhm, insert something witty about super slow internet and connection loss when your mom got on the phone here.

And you had to have a good reason to be online and tying up the phone line.

In EU4, Mother Russia is almost secure, Lithuania is a vassal, have them, Kiev, Chernagov, Moldovia and maybe Galich as vassals between me and Austria.  Next up, is to erase Sweden.

 

Edited January 2, 20233 yr by Malcador

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

Yes, it's better to not post anything more than a few sentences long at this point...which is kind of limiting for discussion.

The void is hungrier than ever, hopefully it is a sign that some outer god is waking up and will soon save us from the clown apocalyptic reality we are trapped in.

I'm playing Grim Dawn again. At this point most of you are already aware that the game is awesome. This time around I'm running a Purifier, guns akimbo style. I've mainly been investing in Inquisitor and have only dipped into Demolitionist to get Fire Strike to replace my default attack. My attack speed is already ludicrous and it's only going to get more ludicrous.

I got a bit distracted by a Xenonauts playthrough. I just built my 3rd base and have the planet decently covered but I need more jets. The community mod basically floods you with saucers a couple times a month, so I struggle to keep up.

22 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Yes, it's better to not post anything more than a few sentences long at this point...which is kind of limiting for discussion.

Well, quotes don't work either, but with Elon running Twitter into the ground people have been looking for alternatives, I just didn't expect this forum to try to be one More on topic: Death Stranding is messing up my sleep schedule. Got spoilered, unfortunately, but fortunately that just confirmed a hunch I'd been having for a rather long time already. Still curious how it will all pan out. Slogging through the mountains right now, got trolled by another player placing a zipline that zipped me right in the middle of a BT zone. That'll teach me trying to take shortcuts.

Edited January 3, 20233 yr by marelooke

Started yesterday the final Menace Dungeon in Costlemark in Final Fantasy XV. It is pretty challenging, as you are unable to use items, and can save only every 10 floors. The gauntlet has 60 floors. Some floors are easier and some are crazy hard, and I had to spent hour and half on unsuccessful attempts and reload after being Knocked Out. The HP pool regenerates after each encounter, but with each hit, you and your party members are affected by the loss of MAX HP, until the next rest/save. So if you are not cautious enough, you can end up with few hundred HP out of few thousands before reaching the rest/save area. You can counter this for your main character with Healcast: Element magic/grenades, but they are limited and you cannot replenish them in the dungeon, so you need to save them as much as possible. Theoretically it should be possible to heal your companions, if you equip them with spells as well, but due to the way, how the combat system works, they are less likely to be attacked by mobs, so it is better to use the spell-grenades for Noctis only. I ended up on floor 50 yesterday, and today, I'll try to finish up last 10 of them. From the list of enemies, which are awaiting me, it looks like, that the hardest sections and mobs are behind me. Not counting the final boss of course.

3 hours ago, marelooke said:

Well, quotes don't work either, but with Elon running Twitter into the ground people have been looking for alternatives, I just didn't expect this forum to try to be one More on topic: Death Stranding is messing up my sleep schedule. Got spoilered, unfortunately, but fortunately that just confirmed a hunch I'd been having for a rather long time already. Still curious how it will all pan out. Slogging through the mountains right now, got trolled by another player placing a zipline that zipped me right in the middle of a BT zone. That'll teach me trying to take shortcuts.

The half-posting issue is usually at least cleared by removing all forum cookies and accepting the social media cookie. The blocked request error, well, not so much.

Testing if

I can

 

post after reseting

 

cookies on Safari

 

edit: it worked, thank you @majestic

edit2: I have finished all Menace Dungeons in FFXV. Learned all food and I am still missing two fishes to complete the Archives. I still need to visit one optional dungeon, to have 100% of datalog full.

And I need to defeat Omega and Adamantoise, and finish Episode Ardyn on A+ rating to have 100% of the trophies. So if I’ll be lucky, I might be finished before the end of the week.

Edited January 3, 20233 yr by Mamoulian War

I reached the underground transit, Warden Krieg isn't far now. I'm playing on veteran difficulty and while I wouldn't call my build full-on glass cannon, it's definitely glass cannon adjacent. With that in mind, I've gotten horrifically murdered quite a few times already (whereas with some other builds and on regular difficulty I didn't have my first death until after Warden Krieg), the latest of which was in the warden's cellar. It was one of those shrines that drops a bunch of good loot but you have to clear a bunch of tough monsters that spawn when you click on it, so I knew I was in for a tough fight. I was proactive and dropped a couple of glyphs on the ground near the shrine, then activated it. I was not prepared for what happened next. They dropped like 5 hero monsters, 2 of which were summoners, and 10 tough monsters into the (relatively small) room. Suddenly there were like 50 ***holes right on top of me. Needless to say, I died very abruptly.