What are you Playing Now? Volume XIX: The New Beginning of the End of the Middle

[marelooke]

On 9/25/2025 at 1:06 AM, Theonlygarby said:

I kinda get it from a creative standpoint.  It would be like making a movie and then having people want an option to remove parts they don't like.  Not a perfect example but i could see people wanting their creation to be experienced as intended.

You can already pick a specific crisis to happen, so I doubt that's much of a concern, I just want the inverse option: the ability to exclude certain crises without turning off the entire DLC they are in.

Cetana is also very different from every other crisis. Most crises shake up the galaxy with their rampages, as generally by the time they spawn borders are kinda entrenched, and the crisis forces the galaxy to take action, shaking up borders and the political landscape. As far as I can tell that's their whole point.

Cetana is just "there", and unless you, as the player, do a bunch of stuff, and set up very specific fleet compositions to deal with her insane difficulty (compared to every other crisis out there) there's really nothing happening until she presses her "I win"-button. The AI won't lift a finger, not even when she declares war on the entire galaxy (not that, given her power levels, they'd be much help anyway), and until she does it's pretty much business as usual. 

She may be fun once, or for some challenge run, but by and large I'd call her boring, as there's a whole lot of nothing, then a single massive fleet battle that you hopefully win, and...that's kinda it... If you beat her the game is basically over as there's probably not a whole lot left to do until the victory year as I'd be rather surprised that anyone able to beat Cetana would be having any issues beating up the rest of the galaxy after, if need be.

Honestly, design-wise she really feels more like an elaborate event-chain than an endgame crisis.

Maybe in a game with multiple crises having her mixed in, I can see that being more engaging, but on default settings with only the single major crisis? I'd rather not have it be her.

[melkathi]

 

On 9/25/2025 at 9:45 AM, Lexx said:

Damn man, doesn't that just mean the kid is too young for it? They don't even grasp the story, just watch flickering images. 

Nope, it just means that Disney are lazy. They think they need to add one very scary scene into almost every movie because it is their shortcut for emotional responses.

Just as they so often kill off a family member to make the audience bond with the protagonist - they use shortcuts.

 

The Lion King is not so complex a story that a five year old can't understand it. But a lot of five year olds get scared at that one scene. 

[Hawke64]

Finished Hollow Knight and strongly disliked it. Thus, I can safely skip Silksong. 

Currently playing Promise Mascot Agency. The game is incredibly enjoyable in both story and gameplay and feels like Saints Row without combat (the car can climb like a Tamriel horse and glide) and with every gang member having their own sub-plot. The main character is not customisable, but having an ace vegan who can and does beat the **** out of everything on his way while talking about the joys of the chosen family is quite welcome. 

Also this:

Spoiler

 

[melkathi]

I finished the main plot in Hogwarts Legacy.

 

Overall I think it is a good game. A bit too Elder Scrolls like perhaps and a bit too collection focused. I think every bit of content overstays its welcome just a tad. 

The good thing is, for the bonuses you don't need to do everything. Just over half the Merlin Trials unlock max inventory. You can ignore the other forty something trials. The game doesn't force you to do every repetitive thing.

The writing works. The plot works. The endless hordes of enemies do not work for a game that is focused on such a small area. The hundreds of poachers you kill mean you basically depopulated the wider area around Hogwarts and Hogsmead.  

Some comments the characters make are very on point. When your character wonders why nobody has looted the chests in the dungeon, even though you known it has been explored before. When you wonder why your professor has very specific ingredients for a potion on hand. Whoever wrote the story has felt those plot quibbles themselves and isn't above some self irony when they find themselves in that situation. It's the exact type of little thing that wins me over. 

 

The combat is fun. It is far more involved than a lot of action rpgs. The different spell combos and the way different spells may uniquely interact with different enemies are great. I still need to figure out how to hit a troll with their club.

 

I don't like all the voice actors.

 

I understand criticism that it is less a game about going to wizarding school and more a run around kill stuff game. I don't know how a school simulator would have been fun though.

[Malcador]

On 9/23/2025 at 4:38 AM, melkathi said:

While they are both called sumthin Colony, they are rather different games.

I had a suspicion they were...

Space Colony is an interesting premise though becomes too chaotic and annoying with 8 or more crewmen (mostly the same 3 voice lines over and over and over, especially Billy Bob)

D4 started so played that to satisfy the urge to kill after each work day.

[melkathi]

I have started New Arc Line.

There are currently three races to choose from: Human, Elf, and Dwarf. Humans and Dwarves can choose between Diesel Tech and Voodoo Shaman as classes. Dwarves choose between Steam Tech and Hellfire Mage. I am trying out a human Dieselpunk Gunslinger. 

The writing... has some problems. On the one hand, a lot of writers, they try too much. Lots of words, lots of fancy words, all to prove "Look ma, I have a vocabulary." I do not like that. Other people do.

The writers seem to not have English as their mother tongue. The odd mistake here and there. The attempt to write "British" characters, with slang and all, without understanding the slang - thinking they do because they watched Austin Powers.

We'll see though how the story goes. Mr Simon made a great first impression as NPCs go. Unlike Mick... who is a bit boring. Why is it so often in RPGs, that the first character to join your party is boring?

I hope the story works out as interesting. Somehow other than Arcanum, there hasn't been a good tech vs magic RPG - Silverfall fell a bit short and was also a long long time ago.

 

The game is a bit unstable. Trying to load a previous save can crash the game for me  That's Early Access I guess.

[Malcador]

My rogue in D4 is maximum ADHD, with the unique helm that gives me 20% movement and uses health to sustain Flurry, Flurry modification to warp to nearest enemy and with a lot of lucky hit that grants energy, I just ping around the screen causing Chaos flashy orbs and a shockwave that comes from some ability I don't know. 

But at least I'm on T3 now.   Chaos armour kind of sucks, though.

[majestic]

10 hours ago, Malcador said:

Chaos armour kind of sucks, though.

There are two big problems. The first is the most obvious one. Every build only ever needs a very small amount of uniques out of a huge list of them (even with them dropping from the reputation grind), and having them randomly drop with better stats in another equipment slot makes for such a small chance that you'd probably end up decking out your character in all the mythic items you need well before you find a useful chaos unique (although I did find a Fists of Fate chest armor with an almost 400% damage range, which I ended up actually using to finish the season journey).

The other one is that implicit modifiers that should be a base part of the item they're on get transferred as well. Meaning none of the boots that drop as chaos armor are really interesting because you automatically lose the boot's inherent evade modifiers unless you also have a boot unique item in some other slot and actually need it. Inverse it also makes amulets in other item slots much more interesting as they always come with very generous +all resistances, more than you could get on the item slot otherwise - and armor pieces that can roll defensive affixes seem to be set to having a 0% chance of actually dropping with a resist all affix. They also get a 50% bonus on the aspects painted on them, so moving an amulet slot around is almost always a huge boost.

[Bartimaeus]

...Wait a second, they took the ancient fused uniques from Diablo 2 and made it into an actual mechanic now?

Supposedly, Mephisto had a bugged drop table in the initial release of Lord of Destruction that limited how many uniques could drop at the same time, but it was coded badly and it made it so that in the extremely unlikely event of too many uniques dropping, you'd get the base item of one but the properties of another, hence the monstrosities above. Wizardspike Gauntlets in particular were duped to all hell and back, but there were a few others.

I say "supposedly" because there's no video of this ever actually happening despite the fact that someone could go (dis)prove it if they really wanted to, those old versions of the games still exist and it's not at all difficult to change the drop mechanics to force only uniques to drop - it could just as well be that they were hacked items. Though unlike all the hacked items that were mass-removed from everyone's characters like twenty years ago never to return, fused uniques still exist on the official D2 servers, so maybe there's something to it after all.

Edited 2 hours ago by Bartimaeus