What are you playing now?

[Majek]

Speaking of difficult, I started Arcanum with the intent of playing a charismatic gunslinger type of character and learned the hard way that it's basically a melee/magic combat game.

Dafuq? I've only played the game through once but i never ever used melee or magic. Just guns, especially the sniper/scoped rifle and the elephant? gun.

[pmp10]

Speaking of difficult, I started Arcanum with the intent of playing a charismatic gunslinger type of character and learned the hard way that it's basically a melee/magic combat game.

Dafuq? I've only played the game through once but i never ever used melee or magic. Just guns, especially the sniper/scoped rifle and the elephant? gun.

Those are available later in game.

Trying to play technologist with firearms from the get-go is a complete nightmare.

[Nepenthe]

I've been playing Baldur's Gate. I'd forgotten why I had a generally low opinion of it but now I remember, its low level D&D mechanics and encounter design is just about the most annoying combination in the history of gaming. Maybe my enjoyment will improve now that only one character can be chunked by a single ranged missile crit hit.

There's also the relatively "open" design and steep power curve in low level ad&d. Not only are you vulnerable, but a single level makes a massive impact on your efficiency... and with the different challenge levels seeded all over the maps, it gets a bit, well, boring.

[WorstUsernameEver]

Oooo so the sniping game is good? I love taking out the baddies from a distance like that. So far away they don't even know you're there. Darn you, stop tempting me to get the game now. Must...wait...for...sale.

 

I was just doing these missions where you clear out certain camps/villages of enemies. You gotta kill a handful of them without being noticed or setting off an alarm, otherwise they have reinforcements come in. You don't "fail" if that happens, it just gets more difficult with a dozen bad guys shooting at you rather than the 6 or so that you first have to take out.

 

The sniper rifle with silencer works like a charm, especially since even if they notice one of their comrades down, they sort of look around trying to figure out where you are, giving you time to take them out.

 

My last mission didn't go so well. I unlocked the bow and tried to take back a village using it, but they saw me and a bow isn't very effective when you've got multiple enemies rushing you. I was able to dispatch them after picking up one of their AK-47s, but then a giant friggin' tiger jumped on me and mauled me. I guess it was stalking me when I was sneaking through the bushes.

 

I once completed one of those outpost missions "stealthily" by bombarding it with an RPG-7. Hey, no one noticed because everyone exploded before they could know it was me! Flawless.

[Majek]

Those are available later in game.

Trying to play technologist with firearms from the get-go is a complete nightmare.

Hmm maybe i really should replay it then to see if you're right. Because i remember getting some good blueprints quite fast maybe even while raiding trashcans for parts. ( And then i remember that the master gunslinger had his trigger fingers removed or destroyed so that he can't shoot anymore. Is that right? )

[Oner]

I've tried a marksman when I played Arcanum. The problem was hitting stuff with my abysmal hit chance to gain proper xp. Doing non-combat quests helped of course, but sheesh.

[mkreku]

Some aspects of the game are surprisingly deep for your actions as well. Killing the crew of a ship (whether by boarding it or using your weapons to do so), for instance, increases your salvage.

Maybe, but I had a fully upgraded ship and 500 salvage and nothing to spend them on when I reached the mothership. Because there was nothing to buy in my randomly generated stores.

 

It's also still fun to learn of the alternative ways to solve things, based solely on your current equipment and crew. Find a story mission where a ship is on fire? Well it's a good thing you have a rockman on board (they're immune to fire). Or a system repair droid.

You don't need it. With an upgraded oxygen generator, you just open the doors for a few seconds. Works every time.

 

The combat can be very tactical depending on what types of equipment you have as well. The enemy ship has 3 shields and I have 4 shots, but it's midgame so his dodge chance will be better. I can try to get 4 shots past and cripple his weapons (hopefully giving me more time and less damage against). I could take out the pilot room to remove the dodge chance, but if I'm unlucky the room is upgraded that won't work (of course, if I have enhanced sectors, I will have this information to help fuel my decision making process). I could try taking out the engines, which even if upgraded will at least reduce his dodge chance. Or I could try the shield itself, which would make the future attack waves easier to get past the shield generator.

I won every battle (and had the mothership down to 3 bars of life) by always attacking the shields first, weapons second. Never anything else. If I could get through the shields, I won. If I could not, I lost. You can probably make it more 'tactical', but what's the point?

 

It's also the most negative game I have ever played. It's a universe filled with bad experiences. Find a lone survivor on a planet? Rescue him and he blows a hole in your ship, without any chance of interaction from your side. Find a distress signal? 90% traps. A sun? It burns you. An asteroid field? It hurts you. Almost every encounter you find is a bad experience that usually takes something from you (money, ship hitpoints, even team members). After a while you realize there's no point going for those things, you're wayyyy better off without them.

 

I also really dislike the way it cuts off the universe behind you as you go through jumps (rounds?). Way to make a really short game even shorter.

[AGX-17]

Speaking of difficult, I started Arcanum with the intent of playing a charismatic gunslinger type of character and learned the hard way that it's basically a melee/magic combat game.

Dafuq? I've only played the game through once but i never ever used melee or magic. Just guns, especially the sniper/scoped rifle and the elephant? gun.

 

Even with above the standard perception and points invested in gun skill, i'm still getting around 37% hit chance with a flintlock (at point blank range, the combat system also makes it nigh-impossible to maintain distance from enemies,) bought from the starting merchant interface. I'm running out of ammo because of all the classic D&D era missfests. And the critical miss rate is ludicrously high.

 

Everything I've read up on about the game on the internet says basically what I've experienced, that the gameplay balance is decidedly skewed in favor of melee and magic. It doesn't help that it's totally stacked against non-combat builds. You can't run from combat or random encounters, and sometimes your companions will be missing from random encounters so you're completely ****ed. I'm starting to understand why Chris Avellone doesn't want to play it.

 

 

I'd love to see the concept done with a better ruleset/more modern game design, because the whole tech vs. magic setting is what got me to buy it in the first place (also the $2.99 price on GOG.) I also liked the idea of physical attractiveness being a seperate concept from charisma, though it could have been implemented with more depth in both NPC interaction and combat (i.e. if you're a really attractive woman, male enemy combatants would suffer combat penalties proportional to their Reaction to you, rather than reaction dropping to 0 upon entering combat.)

 

I've tried a marksman when I played Arcanum. The problem was hitting stuff with my abysmal hit chance to gain proper xp. Doing non-combat quests helped of course, but sheesh.

 

This. Combined with ammo limitations and the fact that you get a niggardly one point per level to invest in both primary attributes AND skills it's close to unplayable, and with such a limited capacity for character growth you're basically wasting points for half the game. It would would have been a lot better if it had used the SPECIAL system and Fallout-like combat mechanics.

 

Looks like this is now the "Why Arcanum isn't a very good game" thread, at least for the moment.

Edited January 4, 2013 by AGX-17

[alanschu]

You don't need it. With an upgraded oxygen generator, you just open the doors for a few seconds. Works every time.

 

That has nothing to do with the story missions (the ones where you aren't actually fighting you know. I know you've seen these, you bitch about them later). The fire is on the other mission and you have options

 

1. Go help

2. Do nothing

3. (Rockman) Send in the rockman to help out

4. (System Repair Drone) Send the drone to help out

 

I won every battle (and had the mothership down to 3 bars of life) by always attacking the shields first, weapons second. Never anything else. If I could get through the shields, I won. If I could not, I lost. You can probably make it more 'tactical', but what's the point?

 

Because I like to have fun and I probably could have taken your situation and actually been successful? Maybe you would have actually won had you taken out its engines and reduced its ability to evade your weapons on future waves. Though I'm sure you would have raged up a storm on the second and third phases of the mothership.

 

 

It's also the most negative game I have ever played. It's a universe filled with bad experiences. Find a lone survivor on a planet? Rescue him and he blows a hole in your ship, without any chance of interaction from your side. Find a distress signal? 90% traps. A sun? It burns you. An asteroid field? It hurts you. Almost every encounter you find is a bad experience that usually takes something from you (money, ship hitpoints, even team members). After a while you realize there's no point going for those things, you're wayyyy better off without them.

 

Yes, a lot of bad stuff can happen if you aren't equipped for it. It's random (sometimes the bad lone survivor has no issues at all. Sometimes he's gone insane and there's a few other random outcomes that he can do). Sometimes he can outright kill a random crew member. Sometimes he joins your crew.

 

Check out the lone survivor with an upgraded medbay (you only need level 2) or with a slugman on board. Medbay can heal the lone survivor if he happens to be insane. Slugman can use his telepathic powers to assess the lone survivor's mental health and decide to let the man on board or to leave him. The sun does burn you (and usually your opponent). Of course, if you have the long range scanner, you can detect such things and completely avoid them. Same goes for battles in asteroid fields.

 

Or are you referring to the story mission asteroid fields? Because those ones can frequently hurt you, unless you have things like the scrap recovery arm (you can safely use it to gain a load of scrap from the asteroids).

 

 

It's a roguelike. It has random elements. You can either laugh at the game the same way you laugh at XCOM when you miss that 99% chance to hit on that Chryssalid beside you, or you can go "WTF this super cheap indie game is like random and stuff, and because I almost beat the mothership (phase 1 I'm guessing to boot!) doing the same thing (even though had I done different things differently in earlier battles I might have actually stood a chance)." Sure, it's not predetermined so that you can ultimately metagame, and given that the game takes what, 30-60 minutes to actually reach, it's not like you lost a whole lot.

 

You scratched the game and it's not for everyone, but if you're going to give it a single go on a game that's meant to be replayed (like a roguelike, where you eat that food and oops, your poisoned... piss off game!), then yeah you're not going to fully understand why so many people actually like the game.

 

 

You asked why I liked it, and the random element is what I enjoy. It's like Nethack in space.

Edited January 4, 2013 by alanschu

[Tigranes]

Speaking of difficult, I started Arcanum with the intent of playing a charismatic gunslinger type of character and learned the hard way that it's basically a melee/magic combat game.

Dafuq? I've only played the game through once but i never ever used melee or magic. Just guns, especially the sniper/scoped rifle and the elephant? gun.

 

Even with above the standard perception and points invested in gun skill, i'm still getting around 37% hit chance with a flintlock (at point blank range, the combat system also makes it nigh-impossible to maintain distance from enemies,) bought from the starting merchant interface. I'm running out of ammo because of all the classic D&D era missfests. And the critical miss rate is ludicrously high.

 

Everything I've read up on about the game on the internet says basically what I've experienced, that the gameplay balance is decidedly skewed in favor of melee and magic. It doesn't help that it's totally stacked against non-combat builds. You can't run from combat or random encounters, and sometimes your companions will be missing from random encounters so you're completely ****ed. I'm starting to understand why Chris Avellone doesn't want to play it.

 

Magic is overpowered, but a well built gunslinger becomes more than adequate once you start getting medium-tier guns, and then extremely powerful in late game. You're complaining about 37% with a dusty old flintlock pistol from the very first merchant. Fallout, a game where you don't even have guns as an option - do you remember the Very First Pistol you'd find (e.g. at Vic's) after a couple of hours of running around? How useful was that? Guns are an investment that take a while, but go do a few quests or pick some pockets in Tarant, the first major city, to get yourself some nice guns and level up a bit, and you're already doing fine.

 

You can run from random encounters, though I can't remember this exactly. Yes, they are quite difficult at early levels, and can be a pain. Always save before traveling on foot. (You don't have to travel on foot a lot of the time.)

 

Magic is definitely more powerful than guns and there are many balance problems with the game, but it's flat-out false to claim that the game is unplayable for gunslingers or that they are not worth it. I wouldn't recommend them for your first playthrough precisely because that's how you will be feeling, but if you persevere and work things out a bit in terms of gear, or if you play a second time through, it's easy to see how guns players do more than fine, and have their own appeal - they have some fantastic schematics, and most players don't appreciate the use of the various explosives, potions and other consumables you can craft to up your chances, as well.

[AwesomeOcelot]

Fallout, a game where you don't even have guns as an option - do you remember the Very First Pistol you'd find (e.g. at Vic's) after a couple of hours of running around?

 

That's Fallout 2, guns are hard to come by at the beginning. In Fallout, guns are really easy to come by, it's energy weapons and big guns that come later.

[Oner]

In Fallout 2 if you tag small guns, you can have around 50-60% hit chance on geckos in the beginning.

 

Killed the first boss in Dark Souls. I feel no gratification. Juggling running, dodging, attacking on a limited stamina bar while trying to collect my previous bunch of souls, with the horrible controls marked with console buttons, space bar not reacting, long animations.. I wasn't fighting the boss, I was fighting the mechanics.

Then I sat down to level up and realised I have no idea what the stats give, what kindling is and why I have 0 Humanity when the boss gave one, so I quit and googled the wiki.

[Tigranes]

Depends on what AGX did with his skill points, but 50-60% in practice meant geckos were killing you. Very often. And you were running out of ammo. All the time. You couldn't realistically be a gunslinger shooting everything down for a while, and the gameplay was built to make sure you 'got by' on a mix of solutions while cobbling together resources and skills. My point is that it is more or less the same in Arcanum, and that gunslingers are disadvantaged early, but are by no means unplayable, and have their own pleasure once they get going. Whether that is worth it for you is your own decision of course.

[pmp10]

Depends on what AGX did with his skill points, but 50-60% in practice meant geckos were killing you. Very often. And you were running out of ammo. All the time.

In Fallout 60% hit chance in ranged combat meant 90% hit-chance to the head point-blank plus a decent chance to score a critical.

And that's assuming you could not kite the monster.

Arcanum was far worse than that - largely thanks to it's critical miss system that would get you regularly killed.

Edited January 4, 2013 by pmp10

[GhostofAnakin]

I also lost out on bonus XP on a bounty because right when I was about to kill the target, my allies came raiding his camp and got into a firefight with him and his men, killing them before I had a chance to.

[Starwars]

Just finished up The Walking Dead. Jesus Christ what a tearjerker that game was. It's been a very long time since a game has managed to touch a nerve with me like this one did. Very, very impressed with the realtionship between Lee and Clementine.

 

Again, the QTE type of gameplay was not exactly engrossing and the "puzzles" were... well, not really puzzles at all. But if you like interactive story-telling, I can't say enough good things about this game.

[Keyrock]

I agree that Arcanum definitely has major balancing issues and playing a technologist is decidedly more difficult than melee or magic, especially early on. It is, however, definitely doable.

Edited January 4, 2013 by Keyrock

[Nordicus]

My renewed eagerness to play Torchlight 2 is slowly starting to diminish, I'll probably be playing my other games more in the future (Indigo Prophecy, Frozen Synapse, Bard's Tale, Guild Wars 2). I learned a surprising amount of new things though

 

- According to Steam achievements, only 2% of the people who've beaten the game, have beaten any Hardcore mode.

- Even when playing on Casual difficulty, the last half act of the game is very vicious and likely to kill you at least once. I only survived thanks to my extreme range.

- On Veteran difficulty, you can run into having your giant 2-handed sword deal 0 damage for some of the blows, as early as Act 2. Granted, my character (Shadow Berserker) has her attribute points rather spread out rather than pure Strength, but this was still an alarming thing to see

[Hurlshort]

Lord of the Rings Online - This game is massive, and they made some pretty nice changes since I played last. I just got a pretty awesome legendary trait that allows me to call on a ghostly herald for help, instead of my typical squire I've had for the last four years.

 

Kind of sad, actually.

[LadyCrimson]

Borderlands 2 - mostly making item mules, since they refuse to give people a bigger bank stash and I don't think any inventory hack works with the current version of the game. It would be nice if it didn't take 2 hours to make a single mule (it's not just getting to Sanctuary, it's getting the eridium to buy the slots). But with the weekend, will probably do some more co-op with hubby. It's our thing.

 

Just don't understand why they don't give more bank stash. I'm fine with the backpack space....but c'mon, bank stash ... it's not like you can access that while out in the middle of a boss fight or something. Give players more room there.

[Gorgon]

There is a bug that gives you unlimited gold keys. Or rather it doesn't count down when you use your keys. You need two active profiles though. One to work the bug and one to open the chests. Easier to do that than swap equipment between chars.

[Oerwinde]

Jumping between Crusader Kings 2, Victoria 2, Company of Heroes, Walking Dead, and LA Noire. Wow the facial animations in LA Noire are amazing.

[Tale]

I'm playing Napping Canids. But I think I'm going to take a break before repetitive burnout sets in.

 

What to play, what to play. Maybe Chains of Satinav?

[Deraldin]

Back to my Civilization game.

 

The Islamic Roman Empire currently has 5 cities. Rome, Antium, Cumae, something I don't recall and Hong Kong. Hong Kong has now switched hands 4 times. They were initially conquered by the Germans and several turns later were taken by Roman Legions. As my legions pushed west into Germany proper I was knocking on the doors to Berlin when Greece declared war on me and liberated Hong Kong before retreating. Hong Kong was severely pissed off that I hadn't liberated them, but that was soon solved by a good reconquering. My Legions are back in Germany though they are starting to stall.

 

Also, you know something has gone wrong when Montezuma is the only other civilization that actually likes you. Thankfully he's sitting in first place so at least I have a strong ally. >_>

Edited January 5, 2013 by Deraldin

[LadyCrimson]

There is a bug that gives you unlimited gold keys. Or rather it doesn't count down when you use your keys. You need two active profiles though. One to work the bug and one to open the chests. Easier to do that than swap equipment between chars.

Unless the last patch negated it, I'd find taking advantage of the bin file glitch/cheat easier than using two profiles.

Not that I found that town chest very useful. Too random. I find enough blues and purples killing enemies anyway.

 

P.S. - Siren/Commando make a good team, Gunzerker/Commando makes a good team ... who else? I don't think Zero is much of a 2-player team player, not for hubby and I's playstyle anyway. Can you get the Mech's robot cooldown to be fairly short?