What are you Playing Now? - Back to the Grind

[LadyCrimson]

Caesar 4:

--I found/remember the UI button that turns off the Advisor speech lines. Phew.
--I am remembering all the things I didn't find enjoyable re: C4, which includes some UI usefullness irritations (not the speech) and the terribad army/combat stuff and glitches.
--I used a cheat (these are dev-built into the game, not 3rd party mods) to "unlock" all campaign scenarios to be visible under the "custom scenario" tag so I can play any whenever I want vs. forced campaign order.
--I then used a cheat code to give myself denarii at start of map and have been using every mission map as a freebuild map. This might make me play C4 for longer than two days.

 

Edit: I miss Prima's paper game guides. I still have C3 and C4's, which I have been using to remind myself of stuff like housing stage requirements. So much more useful then some random YT video or poorly organized/used wiki. >.>
 

Edited March 18 by LadyCrimson

[Malcador]

17 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

Caesar 4 - every time I open the advisors panel to check something: (animated group of people doing verbalized voice lines)

"Our city needs more workers.
We do not have enough jobs for all of our workers.
More attention must be paid to the city's prosperity.
Rome considers your efforts ... mediocre.
Our city needs more workers.
We do not have enough jobs for all of our workers.
Our city needs..
Rome considers...
We do not have..
More attention must be..
Our city.."

OMG SHUT THE HECK UP, I just want to check how much grain is in the granaries. 

My bug bear is the stupid equites needing to lived in walled off areas

[LadyCrimson]

5 hours ago, Malcador said:

My bug bear is the stupid equites needing to lived in walled off areas

Yeah if you needed high safety rating that was a pita. Although I remember if you were by a river you could just build a bridge and mini-wall off the far side of the bridge, then draw walls around your actual city to the edge of the river on the other side (had to go to the water, not a river-rock). That counted. And there were a lot of buildings (farms and such) that most of the time you didn't have to wall off, but I don't remember if you had to wall in almost every single thing (farm workers included) for 100 safety. 

Once you have cash rolling in you can wall off practically the entire map sometimes, leaving several edge tiles open for invading armies to spawn, but that just gets silly.

[Malcador]

Dune (logo read like DUNC) Spice wars is ok so far, went through tutorials, so doing a learning game for now.  Gone back to Overwatch 2, I miss the loot boxes, at least I'd get occasional skins, going DPS and essentially throwing - I will try but I am awful so the team fails.  But at least I get to giggle at the people raging.

[Humanoid]

I never gave much thought to the pronunciation of Dune with or without a hidden 'y', but hearing it a few times lately and all I can see in my mind's eye is "Doon". I'm no linguist but it kinda feels American. Is it?

Edited March 19 by Humanoid

[xzar_monty]

On 3/19/2024 at 6:32 PM, Humanoid said:

I never gave much thought to the pronunciation of Dune with or without a hidden 'y', but hearing it a few times lately and all I can see in my mind's eye is "Doon". I'm no linguist but it kinda feels American. Is it?

In UK English, it's unequivocally not "Doon" and can be either dju:n or dʒu:n, the latter essentially being a homophone with June. In North American English, it can be either "Doon" or dju:n.

Bear in mind that this pertains to the language as it's described in written sources, and as everyone knows, by the time language gets described in written sources, it has already changed.

Edited March 21 by xzar_monty

[Hurlshort]

Wartales - I picked up the pirate expansion, but I still want to start a new game, since I have no idea what to do with my massive warband that I had before.

[MrBrown]

Goblin Stone.

A nice, bit more cheery version of Darkest Dungeon. Goblins don't level up, but if they die they give souls which you can use develop the goblin's den and make them all a little bit stronger.

[Mamoulian War]

I have today one day off at work, so just before my lunch, I have started to play Encased, which I have bought yesterday on sale on GOG. Got through the character creation and traveled by the lift

It looks like it will be pretty text heavy game. For now, I have a guy with max Charisma and very high Psyche and Intellect and I am member of the Silver Wing. But I have a very big urge to restart the game with the Woodpecker pregen, which has 2 Intellect, despite being the member of the white wing

[Keyrock]

Dragon's Dogma 2

That was dishonest and downright shameful of Capcom to have the online shop conspicuous in its absence in review copies only to release the game with an online shop. They are not the first to do so, I'm sure they won't be the last, but it needs to be called out when it happens, that's for sure. I'm not a lawyer so I have no idea if there's any sort of legal recourse that can be taken, but from a moral standpoint that's blatant purposeful dishonesty and should be punishable in some way.

Anyway, controversy aside, the game is a freakin' blast so far. The combat is great and the pawns have some of the best companion AI I have ever seen. You have 4 commands you can issue them: Go, wait, to me, and help. The pawns have personalities, albeit ones that fall neatly into a small number of categories, and thus they will respond differently to your commands, so the first thing you should do after hiring pawns is to learn how they react. They'll point stuff out to you "look, a treasure chest, we should figure out how to get up there", they'll lead you to locations if they know where it is, it's a really great system.

I just started so I obviously can't tell you yet whether the game is purposely made to entice players to buy items with real money. I mean, you don't put in a monetization system without also taking steps to steer the player toward said monetization system. Time will tell how pressured I wind up feeling to spend money in the online shop (I won't), I'll report back once I'm much deeper into the game.

[melkathi]

2 hours ago, Mamoulian War said:

I have today one day off at work, so just before my lunch, I have started to play Encased, which I have bought yesterday on sale on GOG. 

That game had so much potential. Completely ruined for me by the extremely stupid rest/healing. Devs who's approach to development is "lulz we iz hardcore lulz" deserve a punch on the nose.

[HoonDing]

Thought ppl were trolling when I read dragon's dogma 2 doesn't even have a "new game" button

[Humanoid]

20 minutes ago, HoonDing said:

Thought ppl were trolling when I read dragon's dogma 2 doesn't even have a "new game" button

It sounds like an April Fools joke one week early, but they've just released an official statement:

"We are looking at adding a feature to the Steam version of the game that will allow players that are already playing to restart the game. "

[Mamoulian War]

2 hours ago, melkathi said:

That game had so much potential. Completely ruined for me by the extremely stupid rest/healing. Devs who's approach to development is "lulz we iz hardcore lulz" deserve a punch on the nose.

Have not rested yet, we’ll see how it plays out

[Zoraptor]

I can't remember any issues with resting/ healing but I didn't like the loot/ experience system being linked as there was just far too much trivial loot.

Encased was clearly a very high effort game, though they'd equally obviously done certain things one way because that was different from how others had done them. Which would be great, if the old way wasn't done as it was for a good reason.

[Humanoid]

Encased has the most ridiculous stealth system I've ever seen.

[Mamoulian War]

Sigh, I am stuck at battle simulator. I would like to attempt a pacifist run, but I am unable to get over the battle simulator without killing the "images". Anyone has an advice how that can be done? Or to skip?

[Keyrock]

Dragon's Dogma 2 is ****ING AWESOME. The combat feels so good; it's chaotic, visceral, has great feedback, plus nothing says badass like climbing up the back of a cyclops and stabbing it in the neck while it's trying to fling you off and a mage is blasting it with fire. Then to top it off, after a thrilling 10 minute long battle with a cyclops your pawns will high five or fist bump you, it's the best. I also like that there are climbing and platforming puzzles to get to hidden treasure chests, those are fun.

For anyone picking this game up, keep in mind that this game has timed quests. Not all of them, mind you, but there are timed quests. It's pretty obvious which quests are timed. For example, if a guard tells you that one of the rookies is out on patrol and they just got word of harpy activity in that area but he can't abandon his post to aid the rookie and you accept going to find the rookie and helping him out, if you instead go do something else for half the day you may find a dead body when you finally find the rookie. It's probably not a good idea to just pick up every single quest in a town all at once, that's a recipe for failing some of them.

[Keyrock]

7.5 hours in I can confidently say that Dragon's Dogma 2 is the current front runner for GotY, I don't even need to wait to find out if they stick the landing. It's been 7.5 hours of pure, unadulterated, military grade bliss. I can't get over how ****ing awesome the combat is and how great the pawn system is. The thing is, this game breaks no new ground, the original Dragon's Dogma is the game that broke the ground, all the systems were put in place in that game, but they were kinda jank. In this game all that stuff is refined and upgraded.

I mean, I was walking along a path following a hired pawn that was leading me to a quest location. I was a little tense but still feeling good as I was fairly weighed down (weight is VERY important in this game) and beat up and I was out of camping kits, but the 3rd and final objective for a quest was nearby, so rather than head back to the city I decided to press on. I ran into a small group of saurians, under ideal circumstances this would be easy peasy, but when sorta beat up it makes the battle more tense. Just as our party was dispatching the last saurian I heard and felt the sound of rumbling rapidly approaching. I turn and a freakin' ogre is charging me! Ogres in this game are not slow and lumbering, they are VERY fast and explosive. My desperate bid to outrun the ogre failed and it snatched me up and carried me off to create distance between myself and my companions. 

The ogre then began slobbering on me as it prepared to presumably eat me.

What other game can this happen in? I'm not talking about a cutscene, everything I described was emergent dynamic gameplay. That $#!+ was wild! I was panicking as this ogre was running off with me then preparing to bite my head off. 

Stuff like this just happens in this game. It's not scripted, it just happens dynamically. I'll be fighting some goblins when a griffon happens to fly by and think to itself "you know, I could go for a snack" and suddenly the battle turns into something else entirely.

Edited March 23 by Keyrock

[LadyCrimson]

Caesar4 - I think the biggest advantage it has as a city builder is that (I think) population doesn't age, in terms of available labor aging itself out of the workforce. In C3, after about 10 game years your workforce seemed to age almost overnight and suddenly you didn't have enough workers on a massive scale, even if your population # was the same. There were ways to mitigate/fix it but its a limit you had to remember re: taking too long or on freeplay maps. It's also nice in C4 to be able to have houses here but put industry buildings on the other side of the map if you want, because walker-employment access isn't a thing.

Still, C3 is the much better game. C4's pace can also feel tons slower (downtimes) and I still dislike its early 3d map size/building size/other restrictions etc.

Edited March 23 by LadyCrimson

[Hawke64]

11 hours ago, Mamoulian War said:

Sigh, I am stuck at battle simulator. I would like to attempt a pacifist run, but I am unable to get over the battle simulator without killing the "images". Anyone has an advice how that can be done? Or to skip?

The holograms seem to count towards human kills (at least one of the guides says so), but a full pacifist/stealth run should take about 4-5 hours when you do only critical path and know exactly what you are doing (there is a step-by-step guide on Steam written and tested by me).

Death of a Wish. Defeated 3 out of 4 main bosses. So far so good, though I liked the silent MC in Lucah more.

Spoiler

A cut-scene. Happens to all MCs sometime, but still annoying.

 

[Raithe]

Kicked off Horizon Forbidden West on pc...

I have to admit, starting it up and it going into Lance Reddick's narration of "what had gone before" was a weird emotional gut punch.

[Mamoulian War]

1 hour ago, Hawke64 said:

The holograms seem to count towards human kills (at least one of the guides says so), but a full pacifist/stealth run should take about 4-5 hours when you do only critical path and know exactly what you are doing (there is a step-by-step guide on Steam written and tested by me).

Death of a Wish. Defeated 3 out of 4 main bosses. So far so good, though I liked the silent MC in Lucah more.

  Reveal hidden contents

A cut-scene. Happens to all MCs sometime, but still annoying.

 

Thank you for the advice, I have already seen it, but did not knew it was your guide  

The issue is, that I wanted to attempt pacifist run, right out of the bag, without the knowledge of these critical path, and didn’t knew I would get stuck so soon, because I thought, I will be able to talk out of everything, like in most of the different games  And the battle simulator proved me wrong right at the start of the game. I do not want to restart the game, I never do this when I play my first playthrough, out of stubbornness to see how far I can get with suboptimal build. But I ma pretty sure my build is not trash this time, I just have not expected, that you will have to invest heavily into combat skills, if you want to go non-lethal way

 

so it looks like, I have to find a way, how to skip the battle training altogether. Is that even possible?

[Mamoulian War]

Anyway,

Spoiler

the key person to achieve this, is Anna Leroy, but she allows you to skip all the tutorials, which is not the optimum solution for that, but for now, it has to suffice. Unfortunately, there is no way how to persuade the Black Wing guy in charge of Battle Simulator

 

[BruceVC]

On 3/18/2024 at 6:08 PM, Gfted1 said:

@BruceVC Are you sure youre clearing all the story missions? If Im reading this article correctly, even the lowest amount of missions (Jacob 41) rewarding the lowest possible value (600 points) should yield enough resistance points to advance the hardest region (24,600/13,000): Far Cry 5: Fastest Ways To Get Resistance Points (gamerant.com)

I  finished  FC5  after 50  hours  and  you were right in the  sense my issue with Resistance Points was about a mod I   loaded, it  wasnt a bad  design. I was able  to  clear  Map  3  by mostly completing   quests  and I  did very little   grinding

But overall the game gets  a 53/100 on the  globally endorsed  " BruceVC game rating system ",  many people  may be surprised by its low  score  but anything over 50 is still fun and  has  some  worthwhile  mechanics ...its  just not  a great game and there  is lots  of  repetition. But one distinctive positive is the  music, its  evocative. They selected   really applicable background   music for the main parts  of  the game  

Before  I uninstall  it I decided to  play a DLC  called Hours  of Darkness  which is set  in Vietnam and its  great fun

 

I am  now  also playing Hogwarts,  early days and  I am just  on  the first  classes  in the Academy but I can tell its going to be good experiences and I do enjoy the lore that exists  in the  Harry Potter  universe 

I have loaded  some recommended  mods and Im  looking forward  to my Hogwarts  journey