What are you Playing Now? - the man sez Video games are bad for you - fight the man!

[BruceVC]

Im about 40 hours into King Arthur and its going really well

I like how the economy works and how your Camelot upgrades really become significant 

I am at the part where I have chosen the Fairy Knight over Gawain 

I love the combat mechanics but I have one criticism 

I wish I could change the combat  difficulty before battles. Its a QOL  change 

I tend to play on Normal and Moderate and I have had 1-2 end boss battles on Moderate where I couldn't win but I could on Normal 

But you can only be at  Camelot to change the combat difficulty, you cant do it during quests,  and then you have to do the whole quest again

And if I leave it on Normal then combat becomes a  little easy 

Moderate is my preferred setting 

 Anyway its more a QOL change because when you redo quests it doesn't take long 

[melkathi]

I think they made it a bit more lenient with recruiting heroes. At first you had to recruit them the moment they became available or they were gone. Basically punishing players for not having characters die. They wanted this to be the "hardcore your heroes perma-die every other mission" experience. The game is a series of a lot of dumb design choices. It is a surprise they still managed to produce a fun game - it happened completely by accident and counter to all efforts by the dev team

 

Faery Knight was among my top choices.

Balan, Guinevere, Morgawse, Faery Knight, while Leodegrance, Bedievere, Geraint, and Boudicea got swapped in whenever others were healing.

 

I mostly missed out on trying Morgana because of her just not filling a spot that wasn't covered by my other heroes.

Edited Tuesday at 01:59 PM by melkathi

[LadyCrimson]

So, Tainted Grail did release "mod kit" - although they have limited "official" access to Discord app members, which irked me (and a few others) to no end. I found it uploaded on GitHub however. **** dev's and their Discord exclusivity these days.

But it appears there is no actual .exe type editor function. It's just the asset bundles/directories that one is allowed to alter. I assume one needs an asset tool. I believe it's Unity. Is there a current (free) Unity tool for this kind of situation, that most would use? A perfunctory tutorial says stuff like "In Unity, on the top toolbar, select Window/Asset Management/Addressables/Groups to open Addressables Groups window"  - what does "In Unity" mean? Would one need more than a Unity asset access/recompile tool?

Bah humbug.

Edit: I know there was something called UABE/A that ppl used but it hasn't been updated in almost a year. Many asset extractors but most of those supposedly cannot repackage. Perhaps now one simply has to make a Unity account and download the free version of Unity itself, which seems like a lot of trouble just to make small game mods. Double pfft.

Edited Tuesday at 10:22 PM by LadyCrimson

[BruceVC]

15 hours ago, melkathi said:

I think they made it a bit more lenient with recruiting heroes. At first you had to recruit them the moment they became available or they were gone. Basically punishing players for not having characters die. They wanted this to be the "hardcore your heroes perma-die every other mission" experience. The game is a series of a lot of dumb design choices. It is a surprise they still managed to produce a fun game - it happened completely by accident and counter to all efforts by the dev team

 

Faery Knight was among my top choices.

Balan, Guinevere, Morgawse, Faery Knight, while Leodegrance, Bedievere, Geraint, and Boudicea got swapped in whenever others were healing.

 

I mostly missed out on trying Morgana because of her just not filling a spot that wasn't covered by my other heroes.

Thats interesting

I can see how the Aspirant Heroes must have been added because you dont lose any Knights now but once you reach 12 active knights  you need to dismiss a Knight. Or you find the occasional item that lets you add an active Knight  back to Aspirant Hero 

And I have done that a few times 

My active Knights are Balin, Kay, Lanval, Yvain, Ector, Brunor, Leodegrance, Merlin , Guinevere and Fairy Knight 

And I swop then around due to healing

I also like to keep them on more or less  similar levels and I swop them around to give different Knights a chance  to gain XP on quests even if they not injured

Because they have  different combat  strategies which helps once I am familiar with them 

Its really is a fun game, the combat grows on you quickly 

 

Edited yesterday at 05:59 AM by BruceVC

[melkathi]

One mission, because of healing, I ended up with three knights on the team who can give extra action points to others. That made for an interesting run, with one knight supercharged, running around like speedy gonzales. 

 

My Balan got an artifact pretty early on that let him teleport to the next enemy on kill. Love items like that.

 

Waiting to see what you think of the stand alone roman expansion.

[BruceVC]

30 minutes ago, melkathi said:

One mission, because of healing, I ended up with three knights on the team who can give extra action points to others. That made for an interesting run, with one knight supercharged, running around like speedy gonzales. 

 

My Balan got an artifact pretty early on that let him teleport to the next enemy on kill. Love items like that.

 

Waiting to see what you think of the stand alone roman expansion.

I found the same teleportation ring but I gave it to Balin and its probably the most useful item I have ever used

His Vanguard skills and backstabbing have been the deciding factor in several battles, it really makes a difference 

 

How is the Roman expansion, is it worth playing?

[melkathi]

Same gameplay with new characters and a few different abilities.

It only has one morality axis - you either do good or do evil. That is a bit disappointing. 

It also has a very small cast of heroes. You recruit the full team and that's it. They can't die though.

 

About 20+ hours of gameplay. A bit more compact, but since you like the original you will like this. And the characters have different enough gameplay to the original classes that it doesn't go stale.

[melkathi]

I played the Cthulhu Keeper playtest.

It is a buggy proof of concept. But there is a fun game in there. 

You build a hidden temple to the elder gods, staffed by cultists, protected by shoggoths, mi-gos, deep ones, shambling horrors, etc. And you travel the world with missions in the line of Commandos and those other stealthy games.

 

Verdict:

the proof of concept proves the concept.

[Serrano]

I've been juggling three different games lately;

Aliens: Dark Descent which is a creative take on an RTS/Xcom/hide and seek hybrid. I had a lot of fun playing this, it does a good job of making you care about your soldiers and mourne their loss in the same was as Xcom, and the missions play really well. There are a lot of good mechanics from several game genres blended together in a way that works. I really hope they make a sequel because the game built a great foundation to grow from. 

Avowed was great. I liked the combat a lot and all of the areas were gorgeous. For me, I much prefer a game like this that is similar to Skyrim (I know it's not trying to be Skyrim) but is smaller and more focused than a big sandbox where after a certain point I feel like everything I'm doing is pointless. It took a little while before I was invested in the plot and the characters but once the story got moving I really liked each of the hub storylines as well as the overarching plot. The companions were great too, the banters at camp were a really good alternative to long branching conversations with characters to give them personality and depth.   

The last game I played through was a VR horror game called Wraith: Oblivion. It's a world of darkness game so it's the same setting that Vampire: The Masquerade takes place in. I really enjoyed this title, it was a murder mystery/hide and seek horror that takes place in a big modern day mansion. The mansion itself was beautiful and I actually really liked just exploring this amazing house, I wish once you beat the game there was just an option to freely explore during the day with no threats. It's also genuinely a whole different experience playing a game like this in VR, there were moments where the game became super creepy. I hadn't read any of the source books for Wraith when I started playing so this was a really good introduction to that IP. They don't tell you when they're lifting mechanics from the book but if you play the VR game and compare it to the rulebook for Wraith: 20th Anniversary edition, the devs did a fantastic job of incorporating the lore and some of the more interesting Wraith specific ideas about ghosts and hauntings. 
 

Edited 19 hours ago by Serrano