I have some exciting news, I decided to replay Gothic 3

I know this Gothic game gets criticized but I have a real nostalgic connection to this game because I stopped gaming from 1995-2007 because of work and Varsity pressure and when I bought my first gaming rig in 2007 the first 2 games I played were Gothic 3 and Morrowind.

And you always have fond memories of first time fun things you do, you tend to be bias and never forget the experience

Anyway I installed patch 1.75 which is the main community patch and I enabled Alternative Balance which makes the game much harder and more fun IMO

The game obviously has some of the same silly quests, some hilarious AI issues and the repetitive NPC comments but its still great fun. The best part of it is the open-world design. You can explore where you want at anytime and you constantly find hidden caves or resources. There is no map hand holding around quests objectives like other Gothic games and you have to follow general directions from NPC which I love

You can align with either faction as usual and do the myriad of side quests whenever you want. Im joining the humans. But the exploration is the best part of it and Im loving it

Here are the main changes the Alternative Balance adds


Key Changes in Alternative Balance

• Stat & Skill Costs:

  • Learning skills and spells no longer have a flat cost (which was typically 5 Learning Points [LP] in vanilla). Instead, learning costs scale dramatically depending on the skill tier and attribute requirements.

  • Once core attributes (like Strength or Ancient Knowledge) cross certain thresholds (e.g., above 250), they require significantly more LP and gold to raise, forcing specialization rather than allowing a "master-of-all" build. [1, 2, 3]

• Blocking & Combat Mechanics:

  • Permanent/infinite blocking is removed for both the player and enemies.

  • Enemies block more frequently, fight more strategically, and use improved AI behaviors.

  • Shields are required to block certain animal and monster attacks, and some heavy beast attacks (like minecrawlers, ogres, or demons) have strict parry/shield skill prerequisites.

  • The hero no longer auto-blocks attacks while in sneak mode. [1, 2, 3, 4]

• Weapons, Armor, and Gear Requirements:

  • Equipment requirements for high-tier weapons and armor are heavily rebalanced and raised, delaying access to endgame gear.

  • Dual-wielding mechanics are adjusted so that the Master of Two Blades skill acts as a proper higher tier for one-handed swordfighters. [1]

• Economy and World Items:

  • Trader inventories and rare items (such as stone tablets or ancient knowledge sources) are adjusted or made dynamic/rarer, making early stat-maxing harder

I picked up Underkeep on GoG. Looks like a very good Lands of Lore/M&M style game.

Underkeep's indeed out!

Underkeep - Official Trailer!

Underkeep is my favorite old-school dungeon crawler since Legend of Grimrock, and yes that includes Queen's Domain | PC Gamer

Played the demo a good while back . Looks pretty lovely.

Also, whilst it is an oldschool dungeon crawl, it plays pretty snappy. Like only a single right-click required to place items into corresponding slots, ranged weapons require no ammo cache too.
Projects like this make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. It's like the glorious early days of home computing are back, where a handful of people could make something fun. Like the perfect antidote to the corporate boardroom and shareholder engagement metric bloat. And the only numbers pushed to go up here are for your xp, mana/health bars and enjoyment.

Edited Saturday at 08:55 AM3 days by Sven_

On 11/4/2026 at 7:46 PM, LadyCrimson said:

Is there some tech (or other) consideration re: dev's not wanting to put true-LAN into their games most of the time these days? Maybe it's not just tech, but platform-drm option methods, or something? Or is LAN something a lot more complicated to include than I think?

Not enough demand in this day and age, and forcing people to be online allows them to verify ingame purchases, especially when they build their own store so they don't have to give Valve a cut (looking at you, Funcom, retroactively adding "always online" to Conan Exiles)

Anyway, finished my first play-through of Cronos: The New Dawn and saw the first two endings. Final boss was annoying, but nowhere near as hard as "the interwebz" had led me to believe. As I already mentioned, I thought it was mostly just annoying. Having to do that fight twice just so I could pick both ending options initially available also did not really endear me to it.

Liked the setting and premise, not sure I felt we learned quite enough about what was actually going on though.

The third ending is hidden behind NG+, so that's next on the menu (on Hard, because all upgrades carry over, so it should be doable, fine, right?), and a DLC is supposed to drop soon, so hopefully well get some more closure through those.

Edited Saturday at 08:10 PM3 days by marelooke

Finished Miasma Chronicles.

It was not great.

The writing is very off putting and the combat becomes very rote rather fast, especially after the third character joins.

There is a story twist towards the end which was unexpected, but the characters are so unlikeable that I couldn't care.

Maybe if someone else had written the sameish story it would have been an enjoyable one.

Meh

Underkeep is indeed a fun game and I've played through a couple dungeons.

Yesterday I had an interesting struggle playing Dune. I wanted to unlock the 2nd sword-master level, and I needed to kill a particular bandit the get a hilt to give to the blind sword-master guy. This bandit had a flamethrower and a shield, which is no fun for my sniper/sword character. One interesting thing Funcom has done is introduced some sort of rival bandits to a lot of the bases. So you show up to a base, and oftentimes there is already fighting going on between the two factions. This makes it a bit easier to thin the ranks while they are duking it out.

But I still got killed by the flamethrower. So I hoofed it back from an outpost to the base and tried again. And died again. I did this 4 times before I decided to build a base nearby. That meant I didn't have to hoof it back from far away. It also gave me a place to hide out from sandstorms. Of course, as soon as I built it, I managed to succeed in killing the bandit leader. Aw well, now I have a bunch of new sword-master skills unlocked and it is time to work on tier 4 gear.

I am level 54 at this point. I hadn't actually died until that point. Flamethrowers suck.

In my quest to find more games like Menace and while waiting for JA3 to go on sale, I got Mutant Year Zero - Road to Eden. I finished the main game and am doing the expansion now. While it's an unpolished game that is rough around the edges, the gameplay, story and world building are pretty solid. I was apprehensive if I would like the game, but I ended up enjoying it it. I wonder how the rest of the games from this dev are, because the reviews are not great.

I also got the Dyson Sphere Project, but I guess I'm still full from Factorio. The game is not bad, just not in the mood for it.

4 hours ago, Sarex said:

I got Mutant Year Zero - Road to Eden. I finished the main game and am doing the expansion now. While it's an unpolished game that is rough around the edges, the gameplay, story and world building are pretty solid. I was apprehensive if I would like the game, but I ended up enjoying it it. I wonder how the rest of the games from this dev are, because the reviews are not great.

Mutant Year Zero was their best game.

Corruption 2099 does away with plot, story, characters with personality and all that. It is just three different soldiers and the combat. It is bland and gets boring very fast. Basically a game to get on sale if you want more Mutant Year Zero combat unburdened by anything but the combat.

Miasma Chronicles returns to having a plot. It isn't very good. I skipped a lot of dialogue. Difficulty wise it is heavily front loaded until you get the stealth sniper. Then everything just becomes a sneaking around to see how you can pick off opponents one by one while avoiding the writing.

Other tactics games by small dev studios I have in my list:

Showgunners - a running man style story. I enjoyed it but it is very short (about 16-17 hours). They did add 5 more missions, integrated into the main story, as a free DLC. I have not tried those, and they may add another couple of hours. It scores a 68/100 on the widely recognized BruceVC* scale.

Stirring Abyss - an underwater, cthulhu style xcom. You have to find oxygen on the maps to keep you going and your soldiers can go mad. A lot of good ideas, but I did not finish it as it rubbed me the wrong way after a while. 65ish/100 according to the internationally used BruceVC scale.

Void Marauders - space pirates xcom. The reviews sadly are correct: fun ideas, but the maps are too large, too few, and all are just kill everything objectives, so after a couple of hours you have seen everything. 40/100 in the globally accepted BruceVC rating system.

NORSE: Oath of Blood - viking combat on the lines of Expedition games. I like this one a lot. Like with Showgunners, I would have liked more of the game. I'm rating it 65/100 on the BruceVC scale due to the many bugs at launch.

UFC Counterforce - do you believe most games have way too much handholding, are way too simple, and you shouldn't touch the game's campaign until you have spent at least 100 hours on skirmish maps learning the mechanics? UFC Counterforce is for you. The game that unlocks everything right from the start and says: we warned you you should have gone learned to swim before diving in the ocean. Unrated in any system due to complexity.

Bonus:

Band of Crusaders Demo

I am not listing Every Day We Fight because it has real time action aiming for overwatch, which pulls you out of the turn based pace. If that doesn't bother you though... I hated that.

* All rights to the BruceVC scale belong to its creator. Ratings in this post not actually official BruceVC scale ratings.

15 minutes ago, melkathi said:

Band of Crusaders Demo

This looks interesting. I'll give it a spin once I'm done with Mutants

I'll also grab Showgunners once it's on sale.

USC Counterforce I'm iffy on. The game style is not my cup of tea. Not a big fan of the retro design.

The rating system does not inspire confidence, but since it's widely internationally global I guess I have to trust it.

Edited 20 hours ago20 hr by Sarex

Showgunners was fantastic for me. Way more entertaining than I expected. It pairs well with a watch of The Running Man (new or old.) I think the story was even better than Mutant: Year Zero. How did we not get a Mutant Year One? It seemed like it did well enough.

UFC Counterforce hasn't grabbed hold of me yet...but it is sitting there waiting for me.