What are you Playing Now? - What doesn't kill you, gives you XP

[majestic]

Blizzard's solution to keep people engaged longer in the season journey is to make it grindier. Le sigh.

Had a good laugh at the season journey including becoming Hatred's Chosen. A long time ago, a prominent member of the German World of Warcaft community said that Blizzard's motto is "Konsequenz heißt auch Holzwege zu Ende zu gehen" (to be resolute means following even the wrong track to its end) which never felt more appropriate than here. There is just no way to become Hatred's Chosen in the state the game is at.

With most of you not playing the game, well, Hatred's Chosen is something you can become when killing enough players back to back, for which players obviously need to be in the game's designated PVP zones (imagine a desolate area with tumbleweeds being blown about here). At best you can kill one or two players more by accident than anything else, like it happened to me when I grinded out the Seeds of Hatred requirements for the season and a barbarian thought it would be a good idea to leap on top of me while I had Unstable Currents on, fighting the PVP zone boss.

Lighting sorceror wrecks everything at the moment. Better enjoy picking the right class for once before the nerf hammer falls.

[Bartimaeus]

@majestic Did D3 have an active PVP scene? For as informal/unorganized and unemphasized as it was, PVP was a pretty big and lasting part of the Diablo II online community, so the thought that D4's PVP scene is completely dead on arrival seems...less than ideal.

Edited October 28, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

19 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

@majestic Did D3 have an active PVP scene? For as informal/unorganized and unemphasized as it was, PVP was a pretty big and lasting part of the Diablo II online community, so the thought that D4's PVP scene is completely dead on arrival seems...less than ideal.

I honestly don't know. I played Diablo 3's campaign and then pretty much quit.

Shortly after launch the PVP zones were decently populated, but the problem is that level scaling between players plays an immense part in damage numbers, and there is no gating. It did not take long for level 100 chinese farm bot barbarians to show up and one-shot everyone in the zones on the lower difficulty levels (well, they're called World Tiers in D4 - Normal, Veteran. Nightmare and Torment). Blizzard nerf-hammered the barbarian class to a point where it still sucks months later, but the damage was basically done already, never mind the gating issue. I could just as easily switch to Normal and kill players 50 levels lower with no hope of them ever fighting back. Well, if any players were in the PVP zones, that is...

Well, and then 95% of the player base disappeared. Prior to the new season the tumbleweeds were the only inhabitants not just of the PVP zones, but also the large hub cities.

Edited October 28, 2023 by majestic

[MrBrown]

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

@majestic Did D3 have an active PVP scene? For as informal/unorganized and unemphasized as it was, PVP was a pretty big and lasting part of the Diablo II online community, so the thought that D4's PVP scene is completely dead on arrival seems...less than ideal.

Don't think D3 ever got PvP.

[BruceVC]

I have decided  to play Arx Fatalis  next,  I have never completed  it  and I  configured some recommended  mods like Arx-libertatis which is more a game  overhaul  

https://arx-libertatis.org/

It should be  fun and I  remember  it has  a unique  magic casting system where you use  Runes and you have to follow a pattern with the mouse .Further updates to follow    

 

 

[Wormerine]

3 hours ago, BruceVC said:

I have decided  to play Arx Fatalis  next,

One of those games I watched video about, sits in my library for what must be years, but is yet to be launched. 

Edited October 29, 2023 by Wormerine

[HoonDing]

I got that game around the time it was released together with Morrowind.

It crashed literally every ten minutes and Morrowind every thirty minutes. Guess which game of the two I then completely ignored until this very day

Edited October 29, 2023 by HoonDing

[Keyrock]

7 hours ago, BruceVC said:

I have decided  to play Arx Fatalis  next,  I have never completed  it  and I  configured some recommended  mods like Arx-libertatis which is more a game  overhaul  

https://arx-libertatis.org/

It should be  fun and I  remember  it has  a unique  magic casting system where you use  Runes and you have to follow a pattern with the mouse .Further updates to follow    

 

 

I played Arx Fatalis many years ago. It's almost a great game. Almost. I'd write that Arkane flew too close to the sun, but it's a game set on a planet without a sun, soooo... The game has some interesting ideas not necessarily executed particularly well. Whether that's due to hardware limitations or developer inexperience or lack of time/resources I don't know. I remember it being jank as ****, and this is coming from a guy that goes out of his way to play jank games.

Edited October 29, 2023 by Keyrock

[Wormerine]

Finished Jedi Survivor.

Yes, the port is still pretty horrific, and would advise waiting for deep, deep discount just on account of that, but even ignoring that I wasn't too impressed with the title.

For context - in spite of it's faults, I really liked Fallen Order. I think youtuber, Monty Zander got it right calling it Lipstick on a Pig, but what a good lipstick it was.

The sequel is very much the same - but more and bigger. And while Lipstick isn't much worse, I also feel there isn't more of it this time around, to cover the pig that's grew to be much, much bigger. That, as well there law of diminishing returns, made it much harder to look past game's poor aspects.

So allegories aside: combat is still pretty ****. There are more stances, but I didn't feel they contributed much to gameplay. Platforming is still very stilted and scripted. I also found enviroment very difficult to read, and found myself relying on map a lot - those have been rather detrimental as most of the open world content revolves around collecting things. Having to rely on map to see where you can go, and later on where collectibles are (really some of them blend so much with the enviroment, even knowing something is there, I struggled to locate it) just doesn't make for an engaging game loop. The game in general felt more unfinished and janky than FO.

Fortunately, story is still alright. Character writing and interactions are a highlight but while story/plot eventually get good it takes a long time and a lot of padding to get there. I also felt the game came near finding an interesting second arc for Cal, but I don't think it quite gets there. Too much time gets wasted on chasing McGuffins and one dimentional antagonists, to make enough space for actually good times. Action setpieces also felt more vapid this time around.

[Mamoulian War]

Anyone here has some experience (positive or negative) with ATOM RPG and the standalone expansion Trudograd?

[melkathi]

4 hours ago, HoonDing said:

I got that game around the time it was released together with Morrowind.

It crashed literally every ten minutes and Morrowind every thirty minutes. Guess which game of the two I then completely ignored until this very day

Freelancer?

[majestic]

23 hours ago, MrBrown said:

Don't think D3 ever got PvP.

"Brawling" was added in 1.0.7, actually. The "proper" PvP mode with arenas that Blizzard promised was cancelled.

[Wormerine]

Like a Dragon: Ishin! Now that's a spin on a shirtless fight:

[Fionavar]

Doing another play through of KOTOR II ... 

[Mamoulian War]

12 minutes ago, Fionavar said:

Doing another play through of KOTOR II ... 

I have to do that some day as well. Shortly after I have purchased it on a release day, I played it a lot, but at some point, I just ended up playing Pazaak all day long, and then some new games have been released, so I’ve never actually finished it

[Hawke64]

Started Black Geyser. Increased the World Greed by 1 by accepting a side quest reward. Then had killing a non-hostile fox as the main quest objective, so stopped there.

Started Serpent in the Staglands. Spent 2 hours slaughtering the aggressive wildlife and 3 bandits in the starting area. The game looks very nice otherwise (like BG1).
The PC is the Moon God trapped outside of their domain and seeking to return there. Can't say that I understand the gameplay systems well, but clicking LMB on the red-outlined NPCs gives XP and the text notes as inventory items have different descriptions and content. Found 2 manuals on the official site.

Finished Grime. The setting and the trait system (available after parry-killing some number of a specific enemy type; e.g. healing 4% HP on hit or increasing the damage after pulling) seem unique, though the difficulty spike (caused by not utilising the above-mentioned system) mid-game was unpleasant. I would say that multi-stage boss battles usually are more engaging, but not when the moveset changes too significantly and every major boss has at least 2 stages. Not sure if the starting sword/axe was the most effective melee weapon, but looked like it (some traits increase the damage regardless of the stat scaling, making the stat investment irrelevant; others scale with the stats). The final platforming sequence was fine.
There are NG+ and boss rush modes, but I am going to skip them (the NG+ exclusive boss battle was rather painful to watch on YouTube).

[BruceVC]

16 hours ago, Keyrock said:

I played Arx Fatalis many years ago. It's almost a great game. Almost. I'd write that Arkane flew too close to the sun, but it's a game set on a planet without a sun, soooo... The game has some interesting ideas not necessarily executed particularly well. Whether that's due to hardware limitations or developer inexperience or lack of time/resources I don't know. I remember it being jank as ****, and this is coming from a guy that goes out of his way to play jank games.

So I'm  using 3  mods,  Arx Libertatis   and Arx  Extended  and Arx Neuralis and I have had no crashes or bugs so far

Im  really enjoying the CRPG  design  and mechanics.   I just  reached  Arx City  

 

[majestic]

Blizzard logic:

Enemies can have a suppression field. Meaning that all damage coming from outside the field is negated. You need to attack or cast from within the field to do damage. Now, with certain gear the ball lightning spell rotates around you, and that is pretty hilarious because the damage that can put out once you break past a certain gear threshold (i.e. once you have enough gear to support chain casting a spell that normally costs half your mana).

However, when you teleport into the supression field, all your orbiting ball lightnings disappear. Because, well, they were cast outside the suppression field. Can't blame the game for working that way, after all, it is doing exactly what it was programmed to do.

Anyway, build is so busted powerful it breaks game mechanics to the point they become a joke. Can completely skip boss phases.

 

[Hawke64]

49 minutes ago, majestic said:

Blizzard logic:

Enemies can have a suppression field. Meaning that all damage coming from outside the field is negated. You need to attack or cast from within the field to do damage. Now, with certain gear the ball lightning spell rotates around you, and that is pretty hilarious because the damage that can put out once you break past a certain gear threshold (i.e. once you have enough gear to support chain casting a spell that normally costs half your mana).

However, when you teleport into the supression field, all your orbiting ball lightnings disappear. Because, well, they were cast outside the suppression field. Can't blame the game for working that way, after all, it is doing exactly what it was programmed to do.

Anyway, build is so busted powerful it breaks game mechanics to the point they become a joke. Can completely skip boss phases.

 

I have no idea what is happening there, but looks impressive.

 

Started Eternal Threads. The writing is plainly worse than Tacoma (also the scenes usually feature smaller groups of characters in the same location), but there are choices. The objective is to save 6 people by altering small decisions they made within a week before dying. There are also some doors to unlock. The background story (too much time travel to be fixed by more time travel and the story is the first test mission for the MC) so far does not seem to matter for the objective. Who are these people and why are we saving them?
Edit. In order to launch the game, I had to manually block its internet access. In that moment, I missed my old antivirus, which was (still is on the other PC) giving me a warning window when anything not on the Allowed list was trying to connect.
Also, the screen resolution settings don't seem to work at all.

Edited October 30, 2023 by Hawke64

[Lexx]

What's the point of floating damage numbers if they are so big and so fast and so many that nobody is ever able to read them?

[Mamoulian War]

I have entered the post game content of the Star Ocean 5 for teh first time in current playthrough. The funny thing is, that you can unlock it, without beating the final boss all you need to do is to reach the last savepoint before final battle, and you automatically get into chapter 13 and unlock the post-game content. This allowed me to go little bit further with the equipment craftng for the trophy, as I was able to get some of the impossible to get items from the Ex Dungeon. I am over level 100 already, but I feel how much harder the game is on Universe difficulty compared to Galaxy. We’ll see how far I will be able to go into the Maze.

[majestic]

One more season journey item left. That is either equipping eight ancestral uniques or grinding out five max level glyphs or the max level Hunter's Acclaim seasonal mechanic, then I'm done with the game until January 24th or so. Grinding five glyphs to level 21 is out of the question. It is either farming Hunter's Acclaim or killing Duriel often enough to gather eight equippable uniques. I already have six, so grinding out uniques is probably faster, just a lot more random.

Guess I'll just grind Hunter's Acclaim for a while and call it quits. Kinda low on materials to summon Über Duriel. The sum total of time spent playing the game might be higher with grinding Hunter's Acclaim, but it can be done in one go, unlike farming Duriel which requires waiting for Helltides.

Edited October 31, 2023 by majestic

[LadyCrimson]

Still NMS, just less frequently now. Started doing the freighter fleet expeditions just to get all frigates to "S" class. They seem to level up fast, won't take too many rounds of missions. I'm at 500,000 LY away from center of galaxy. Slowed down on that, would rather wander planets.

OH OH OH just now looked and Ghostwire Tokyo is finally on sale again, for $20. Time to buy!

[Hawke64]

Played more Eternal Threads. There was one interesting plot twist*, though I am unsure if it gets any continuation, as it certainly does not have anything to do with the "main" characters. My issue is that I find them mind-numbingly boring and the story surrounding them almost non-existent. Probably will drop the playthrough.

*

Spoiler

There was another time-traveller in the area who left a time-travelling McGuffin.

 

[Theonlygarby]

On 10/29/2023 at 9:47 AM, Mamoulian War said:

Anyone here has some experience (positive or negative) with ATOM RPG and the standalone expansion Trudograd?

I have played for about 15 minutes so I pretty much know everything about the game. 

 

I remember everyone looking the same, and even though graphics aren't important, art style is, so I didn't get far.  I believe the only thing I did was head to some outpost where I was killed very quickly.  It seemed like one of those games that I was just too dumb (or lazy) to figure out.