What are you Playing Now? - Games don't make you violent, lag does

[melkathi]

Don't expect to feel good about yourself while playing.

Ventrue are scum.

Tremere are scum who do blood magic.

Do a Malkavian run on your second playthrough, so you can appreciate their insight.

Feel free to go full combat. You don't get around fighting some boss fights anyway.

Edited May 25, 2023 by melkathi

[Bartimaeus]

36 minutes ago, melkathi said:

Don't expect to feel good about yourself while playing.

Venture are scum.

Tremere are scum who do blood magic.

Do a Malkavian run on your second playthrough, so you can appreciate their insight.

Feel free to go full combat. You don't get around fighting some boss fights anyway.

I couldn't decide between a Ventrue and a Malkavian, the two of which seemed to have the best non-combat stats/skills, ended up flipping a coin and it landed Malkavian. My character looks like an insane cheerleader of very questionable moral fiber, but she does have nice hair, so...was that bad? I see now that it might have had some effect on the player dialogue, which might explain why it seems all my options were all written by a madman?

Edited May 25, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Hawke64]

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

vampire: the masquerade (/ bloodlines?)

holy crap, this is one jank game

anyone got any general tips for someone who's never played this game before

Stealth (non-lethal KO) is mostly viable. Then a boss battle happens and suddenly it is not.
If I'm not mistaken, the dialogue skill checks are static and the options unavailable are not shown, so it might be considered to use a guide for them and to avoid investing skill points unless necessary (e.g. important dialogue or boss battle).

Playing Weird West - Bounty Hunter's Journey (demo). It seems to be a stealth-action. Fine so far, but feels somehow restrictive. The controls are rebindable and the saving possible almost at any time. The opening with the Data Policy was interesting to see. I also managed to set myself on fire within the first 2 minutes of gameplay.

Edited May 25, 2023 by Hawke64

[Hurlshort]

Malkavian was the best play through, for sure. I really got into the madness of it all.

[Humanoid]

The Malkavian cheerleader was my first playthrough, didn't feel like I missed out on anything but not playing another clan first. Played mostly stealth. Dialogue wasn't *that* obtuse for someone reasonably genre-savvy.

I remember doing a partial run as some clan with Celerity and guns afterwards. Don't remember much about it other than being able to take down a boss by simply entering bullet time and emptying multiple pistol clips into them with one blood use. Quintessential vampire combat that. Nothing wrong with the run but ultimately after Downtown I saw no reason to complete the game a second time.

Edited May 25, 2023 by Humanoid

[melkathi]

42 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

 I see now that it might have had some effect on the player dialogue, which might explain why it seems all my options were all written by a madman?

Malks are all insane in one way or another. At the same time they see truths others do not. Your characters dialogue options give away details, but you have to know the information to spot it. That is why they have an added joy to play in a second playthrough when you "get it" when some information is sprung on you.

 

I am Brujha, so I am glad you did not go ventrue. We'd have to stop being friends.

[Lexx]

Malkavian on first playthrough doesn't sound like a good idea to me. I feel like it's best for the second. They make every dialog weight a lot different than before. You pretty much play a different game if I can remember it correctly (it's been many years since I last played it).

That said, ignore guns and go all-in on melee. Stealth is also useful.

Edited May 25, 2023 by Lexx

[Humanoid]

It's a mix of two things mostly. First and most common is simply substituting dialogue with wackier sounding alternatives, where the NPC then comments on before proceeding with their usual response. So it's just flavour dialogue and functionally identical to a standard run. It's like games where if you play a low-INT character, the NPC will pretend to be exasperated by your stupidity but give you the same quest in the end.

The other is bits of foreshadowing, which yes, will go over your head if it's the first playthrough, but also doesn't really harm the experience in my view. I wouldn't really count the writers basically just winking and saying "see what we did there?" as content

I'm not counting uses of the Dementation usage in dialogue as it's more just a speech check thing, same as if you had Domination on a Ventrue or whatever.

Edited May 25, 2023 by Humanoid

[Gfted1]

4 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

anyone got any general tips for someone who's never played this game before

Watch out for the werewolf.

[LadyCrimson]

Above Snakes:  purchased. Used my demo save - eventually I'll do a full restart but I wanted to see what the progression would be first. So far I'm still liking it. There are some things re: quests or functions that aren't very clear but one can figure them out before long. I did one quest and now seem to have a wolf puppy following me everywhere. I can't tell it to "stay" or anything, am not sure if it will remain forever (it stays on save reload) or if it can be killed etc. But it's cute I guess. 

I'm not sure if many here would like the game or not. It's not strategic or complicated. The combat - at least with a controller - is pretty clunky, but it's minimal. There's a story of sorts to the quests (many of the upgrades and biome-tiles are tied to completing them), but "rpg" it's not. It's not fast paced or thrilling. Mostly it's a casual at-your-own-pace design/redesign the map tiles/size with chill resource grinding to make/build different consumables, tools, stations, building materials.  Supposedly about 20 hrs worth of short quests but someone like me might spend 100-200 hours just goofing off with the map tile mechanics. That sort of thing.

Anyhoo, for myself, I like it/worth the $22.50 I paid.

[Gorth]

7 hours ago, Hurlshort said:

Malkavian was the best play through, for sure. I really got into the madness of it all.

It was very interesting playing as a Malkavian. I still have a score to settle with the stop sign.

 

That being said, my second most favourite playthrough was Nosferatu. After the luxury or ordinary safe houses of the other clans (it was my fifth play through of the game), getting a sewer pipe as your new home was a bit of a downer

[Bartimaeus]

Vampire: the Masquerade. So I started over as a Ventrue...and I made it a half hour before I realized that the insane Malkavian dialogue was actually way more interesting and certainly fun to read, so it just didn't really make sense to me not to go back to my schizophrenic cheerleader oracle. This game is unbelievably jank and silly, but...it's also somehow really fun, probably the most fun I've had playing something in a long time. Maybe modern games should try to be more janked, I don't know.

I now have a sweet katana that I got from some Japanese(?) vampire that initially beat the crap outta me until I figured out that I needed to use Bloodbuff, and it's pretty dope. Also, most everyone that wasn't manic goth girl Jeanette says my lady sounds like a total whackjob, but for some reason, they suddenly don't seem to have much of an issue with it when I seduce them. Funny, that.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Bartimaeus]

22 hours ago, Gfted1 said:

Watch out for the werewolf.

Double posting here, but I got absolutely clobbered by the werewolf in the diner like five times before I realized yeah, okay, I just don't think I can fight this guy right now. Not that I really wanted to, because there's (currently) no reason to fight him in the first place, but he just straight up Wolverines me. Doesn't help that my combat stats are absolute trash, since I keep putting all my points into...well, non-combat stuff. It's a 'final death' speedrun trying to kill that guy, though.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Hurlshort]

I started up Outer Worlds again, thanks to Tim Cain and his youtube videos. I went for a supernova playthrough at first. I love the need to actually consume the food and drink. In my first time, it all just kind of stacked up and I used very little of it, but this made me pay attention. I don't like the lack of saving though. Pavarti gets killed a lot, and I feel like I end up having to re-do too much stuff. I think I'll just restart in normal or hard. It's been awhile since I played it, so it feels pretty fresh, but I don't want to burn out in the first area.

[ShadySands]

17 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Double posting here, but I got absolutely clobbered by the werewolf in the diner like five times before I realized yeah, okay, I just don't think I can fight this guy right now. Not that I really wanted to, because there's (currently) no reason to fight him in the first place, but he just straight up Wolverines me. Doesn't help that my combat stats are absolute trash, since I keep putting all my points into...well, non-combat stuff. It's a 'final death' speedrun trying to kill that guy, though.

I don't want to give anything away but you're in for a treat.

[HoonDing]

You're railroaded into some tought straight fights even as a non-combat clan but you get so powerful no matter what that it doesn't matter.

 

Edited May 26, 2023 by HoonDing

[InsaneCommander]

Momodora: Reverie under the Moonlight

Replayed the game to defeat the bosses without taking damage and in the process I discovered several "surprising" things:

1- It's a lot easier than I expected. There are even some bosses that can be defeated by crouching in the corner or mostly staying right in front of them.

2- It'd have been even easier with the active items that I thought had limited charges but actually recharge every time you hit a save bell. It took me almost two playthroughs to find this out.  Using these items at will would make the game ridiculously easy, though, so no real problem about that.

3- The items you get by defeating the bosses unharmed were all familiar to me, so I probably bought them in a shop later on when playing for the first time. The one exception seems to be the Heavy Arrows, which are pretty useful, btw.

4- I somehow defeated the last boss without taking damage the first time, because I had already gotten the achievement for the true ending.

[Hawke64]

Weird West (demo). Finished and somehow annoyed. Enemy positions randomise on reloading a quick save, the loot mostly consists of junk items sold for $1 taking the limited inventory space (a side quest earns about $100), the controls seem to be console-focused - from the GUI to holding and pressing a key being different actions (using a melee weapon requires both - holding the "aim" key and pressing the "attack" key), the quest descriptions unclear - "question the NPC" did not mean "talk to the NPC", but "go into the basement and talk to another NPC". Additionally, there are children NPC, who are immortal but possess the same ability as normal NPCs to report if you are trespassing. Just in case, tried to shoot them and to stab a "Mysterious" child surrounded by the corpses whom I had not killed (at a later interaction a pack of dynamite made the plot-armoured abomination run away). Also, it does not seem to be possible to aim up or down at a distance (possible when the auto-aiming kicks in), but at the same time there is very little verticality for a stealth game. The detection of interactive objects feels imprecise, especially when they are close (e.g. an unconscious NPC and a bucket; a door and a random rat who, unlike the children, cannot harm the PC, but are possible to kill accidentally). The NPC followers are not particularly intelligent - one caught fire by standing next to a torch and kept standing there until I moved.

On a positive note, you can pet horses and there are some surface/elemental interactions (i.e. throwing lamps to cause a fire AoE). The character development is bound to exploration and most of the abilities should carry between the playable characters, who cannot be chosen, only played in order. The strategy of knocking foes down in one-hit, then slashing them with melee weapon 4-40 times has been very effective (defeated the final boss that way). At least in one area it was possible to lure the human foes to be killed by a monster.

I guess, I am glad that there was a demo. Overall,Weird West feels like a worse version of Seven (which had its own issues) in the Wild West setting. Playable, but not exactly enjoyable.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Hawke64

[majestic]

Well, this just in: I really am the only person on the planet who has Vampire the Masquerade - Bloodlines, did not mind the jank and yet did not find joy in it. 

[Humanoid]

The jankiness probably helped me. I can't play Valve/Source games because they give me motion sickness, but Bloodlines was generally fine. If they had launched with the finished, polished version of the Source engine, who knows if that would still be the case.

I'm not even someone generally susceptible to motion sickness, I can't think of any other game that triggers it for me. Then again I don't play a lot of first-person games so the sample size isn't huge.

It occurs to me that perhaps one big reason I liked the game is that there was no real faffing around with gear. A gun's a gun, a bat's a bat, and you get exactly one armour upgrade per chapter that's a linear upgrade over the previous set. Looting is the bane of roleplaying.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Humanoid

[majestic]

Well, I'm not someone who needs compelling gameplay to stick with a game, heck, I really enjoyed Planescape: Torment, for instance, a game I cannot blame anyone for not liking because the game part of it is terrible, but there was nothing that appealed to me in Bloodlines. I did not like the characters, and while I really like the setting, I did not care for either the plot or playing a vampire.

It also probably did not help that Jeanette...

Spoiler

...was already a really tired, overused element in entertainment by the point the game came out, coming out the same year that the film adaptation of Secret Window, Secret Garden made me yell can we please stop using multiple personality disorder and trying to pass it off as a plot twist for a while, like five minutes into the film. I watched The Secret Window with my mother and annoyed her with that.

Also, was anyone ever, like, meant to be surprised by how that little story played out?

 

[Bartimaeus]

the fact that they have 'them' argue in front of you the second time you meet her and it's literally just the same voice back to back arguing against itself and then jeanette 'disappears' in a room without any other entrances/exits besides the one you're already standing in surely does not help conceal the mystery

a lot of the voiced dialogue is...I mean, quite clumsy and ungood (that introductory cutscene was a real "holy crap, just what am I playing here" moment), but in such a way that is now largely amusing and charming to me, so I think I've come to terms with it and it's fine

Edited May 27, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[uuuhhii]

4 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

the fact that they have 'them' argue in front of you the second time you meet her and it's literally just the same voice back to back arguing against itself and then jeanette 'disappears' in a room without any other entrances/exits besides the one you're already standing in surely does not help conceal the mystery

a lot of the voiced dialogue is...I mean, quite clumsy and ungood (that introductory cutscene was a real "holy crap, just what am I playing here" moment), but in such a way that is now largely amusing and charming to me, so I think I've come to terms with it and it's fine

some just assume that is video game jank

npc doesn't move at all unless quest demand it and they can disappear into wall when they walk away

[melkathi]

12 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Double posting here, but I got absolutely clobbered by the werewolf in the diner like five times before I realized yeah, okay, I just don't think I can fight this guy right now. Not that I really wanted to, because there's (currently) no reason to fight him in the first place, but he just straight up Wolverines me. Doesn't help that my combat stats are absolute trash, since I keep putting all my points into...well, non-combat stuff. It's a 'final death' speedrun trying to kill that guy, though.

I thought you were a malkavian.

Did Nines not tell you to run?

And didn't you say to Damsel that you ignore other numbers but to nines you listen? 

 

Or is that line later?

[Wormerine]

13 hours ago, Hawke64 said:

Weird West (demo).

I have been playing it on and off (mostly off) since it released. I think I am on the 4th protagonist now.

The game isn't terrific, but I can't help but be fond of it. I heard WW was initially meant to be more procedural than handcrafted, which explains a lot of generated content. I enjoyed my first protagonist well enough, but I feel game gets stale quickly. There really isn't much reason to interact with sandbox, and combat is a bit too hecktic to take advantage of each character's unique abilities. I try to vary upmy playthrough, but too often I default to what seems to work the best.

It's a messy title, but I find it very pleasant to play every once in a while. I am probably on a verge of jumping back and doing another storyline.

 

edit:

 

Edited May 27, 2023 by Wormerine