What are you playing now?

[Keyrock]

I kind of miss the retarded backward flying dragons bug, though.  That one was hilarious.

Edited December 4, 2013 by Keyrock

[Zoraptor]

 

GFWL got patched out of DS and changed for Steamworks... for me the same ****, but it might be better deal for you...

 

To the best of my knowledge, no it hasn't, it's still saddled with GFWL.

 

Yep.

 

The sum total result of the petition to remove GfWL was to get it saddled with GFWL and steamworks, except for the (GfWL only) Euro retail version. That is where people thinking it has steamworks comes from as it does, but effectively only as an added DRM layer and in addition to GfWL, not as a replacement.

 

Thanks muchly, petition signers!

[BruceVC]

 

 

Yup! May I add, refrain from crafting, and add a mod that sorts your invo. You won't regret it.

 

Why should I avoid crafting? Does it make you too powerful...also when you say "invo" what exactly do you mean?

 

 

I found the crafting in Skyrim pretty consistently enjoyable, in that it was an incentive for exploration and a reason to really engage with the landscape.  There's excitement in seeing a new type of plant and wondering what you can make with it, or delving into a silver mine or Dwemer ruin to get the raw material you need for your forge. 

 

The personal balance-preserving rule I would impose on crafting is this:  Craft all you want, but never ever buy any crafting supplies.  Use only what you can harvest, loot, or steal yourself. 

 

(Also-- and this probably goes without saying-- don't look up alchemy recipies on the internet.  Discover reagent properties via experimentation, reading the in-game books and recipes you sometimes find, and/or by investing Feats in the Alchemy tree.)

 

Hunting elk for hides and processing them into Bracers for skill development and cash value is rewarding and usually quite consistent with the role-playing of your character.  Plus, it's unlikely that you'll get any game-breaking loot "too early" with just this method-- it'll help, but not overly so.  On the other hand, buying hides, clicking on a few things to upgrade them, and selling them back to the merchant is incredibly lame, gamey, and un-fun.  Parallel statements for Alchemy (find, taste, and experiment) and Enchanting (although purchasing some soul gems might be necessary to level this one up sufficiently, buy only the empty ones and go fill them yourself) are equally true. 

 

 

Those tips on crafting makes sense. Thanks

[Hassat Hunter]

The Stanley Parable.

It's... very funny.

Little annoying you can't skip dialogue if you get a convo repeatal though (and it was a long one).

Will definitely boot up later again to see what other 'choices' I can make.

[Oerwinde]

Playing State of Decay. I'm really enjoying it. The autosave only "feature" in order to avoid savescumming and make you live with the consequences of you actions in interesting. I like that a lot of newer zombie games include an element of base-building.

[Blarghagh]

 

 

 

FTL doesn't seem very balanced. I take my time, gather resources, never have problems with any of the enemies I face... then I get to the final area and I get murdalized by scouts.

 

What gives?

 

It's a roguelike so luck is intended to be a big factor and the game is weighted towards being difficult/neigh impossible. The idea is to create replayability, tension, a greater sense of accomplishment when you win and a much bigger sense of reward when something good happens.  

 

In this  case that involves what ways you can equip your ship.  If you're always getting murderized by the scouts then you need a rough idea of what changes you need to make to your ship to survive them and also beat the last boss and then spend every playthrough working towards that. I know that's obvious and probably sounds snarky but that is the core element of the genre of game you're playing and it's supposed to be that frustraiting. It's why I don't play FTL much .  

 

 

No no, I get it, I have experience with roguelikes. But consistently, over six playthroughs, I have gone through the game without trouble and getting fully upgraded. For example, on my last ship, I had good weapons, good drone systems, stealth, full shields, upgraded engines, enough crew to have expendables and more than enough resources. In the second to last area, I could pretty much kill any enemy I came across in one or two volleys. Then in the end game, the first enemy I encounter gets me or turns me into a limping wreck. I find it hard to believe that six times I have had luck throughout the entire game and bad luck in the end. Just seems like the difficulty curve is terribly balanced. It makes trying again seem kinda pointless.

 

Sorry for making assumptions. I did find this, it won't help against the scouts (although Deraldin's advice probably will do the trick) but it has a lot of very detailed information on the final boss, full of spoilers though. 

 

 

No need to apologize, I didn't give a lot of information. Thanks for the link - it gave me some stuff to work with. Turns out I woefully underestimated the effectiveness of having crew board the enemy vessel.

[Fighter]

I'm 8 hours into Skyrim now and not a single bug so far. I have no idea why you guys call this game buggy. To me it looks very polished.

 

It's a big game or maybe they did finally fix it. I still got a handful of quests I've already completed show up a active again. A few I had to fix through console commands. There is also small stuff aplenty that you may start to notice the longer you go, like NPCs talking about long over events as if still ongoing, happens often.

[BruceVC]

 

I'm 8 hours into Skyrim now and not a single bug so far. I have no idea why you guys call this game buggy. To me it looks very polished.

 

It's a big game or maybe they did finally fix it. I still got a handful of quests I've already completed show up a active again. A few I had to fix through console commands. There is also small stuff aplenty that you may start to notice the longer you go, like NPCs talking about long over events as if still ongoing, happens often.

 

 

Maybe those NPC's talking about events in the game that are finished is by design, it could be sort of Time Elemental that has cursed the NPC's and its a separate quest to convince the NPC that the incident has occurred....you never know

[Malcador]

 

Finding I am terrible at Raptor, shifting along to Re-Volt and Uplink. Well at least while I am at work. Funny bug in Re-Volt where the language selection does not indicate the currently selected language, so it took some trial and error to figure out how to get English picked, heh.

re-volt will eat you alive. :D

 

 

Oversteer ahoy.  Granted I'm always terrible at driving games, but getitng better with a bit of practice.

[HoonDing]

It was high time for me to finish up Skyrim, because in my last playthrough I was attacked by three Companions for unknown reasons even though I was the Harbinger and had to take them down (though normally they should have been essential NPCs), Karliah somehow had cloned herself and the fight with Miraak kept bugging out and had to redo it three times.

[Amentep]

Tale - thanks for the information; I thought that'd be the case.  Still might be fun to be a low level trainee again (particularly since I understand the classes a lot better).

 

And I hit the level cap (I played the game a whole lot before Dark Arisen came out and had never restarted) while hunting Death to finally kill and decided, what the hell, I'll start over from scratch.

 

If nothing else it makes my storage area a lot...cleaner.

[WDeranged]

Bethesda did a pretty good job fixing the bugs people reported (though the Dragonborn patch broke lipsync) but I'd still install the unofficial patches which fix most of the smaller bugs that start to annoy you after several hundred hours 

 

I find that a bit of wilful ignorance goes a long way in enjoying Skyrim but you can pick it to pieces if you want.  Useless perks, linear dungeons, plot railroading and a lack of truly interesting antagonists (Morrowind...) are my biggest issues but I can still sink an unhealthy amount of time into it without getting bored, they did a good job turning everything into a goal, proper OCD fodder.

 

I'm currently playing through Dawnguard and given my playstyle it'll take me ages to complete, they added way more than I expected and it's got Bethesda's first attempt at a New Vegas style companion...the writing is ham fisted to hell but it's still nice to have more talkative company while exploring.  Something I'm finding especially cool is how it allows you to do the Blackreach portion of the Alduin quest ahead of time, breaks up the monotony on a fourth playthrough.

Edited December 4, 2013 by WDeranged

[Blarghagh]

The crew of The Mighty Pooh just failed their mission in FTL in the final stage of the Rebel Flagship.

 

So sad, but much closer to the goal.

[Tale]

Virtue's Last Reward

 

This is somewhat bizarre. Okay, it's 90% the same tone as the last game, 999, but the final 10% is just wacky enough that I don't know how to feel. So it's a game about people who got kidnapped and are forced to play a game in a complex with puzzles or die. But this time, the guy who's giving instruction is a CGI bunny with a fondness for puns...

 

He's too adorable to take seriously.

[marelooke]

 

Easy to miss the Dark Brotherhood questchain? The only way it could've been made more obvious is if they stopped you and handed you a flyer... How obvious it is to find and join all the secret-y organizations is one of the things I found rather irritating in Skyrim. It seemed a lot harder to pull of in Oblivion at least...

 

I know of only one way.

 

 

You have to accept killing a teacher for a kid in Windhelm who is trying to summon DB or something

 

 

To me that did not seem like an obvious path to get there.

 

 

Well, it's broadcasted all over Skyrim... (spoilers about accessing the Dark Brotherhood questchain below)

 

...that a young boy is trying to summon the Dark Brotherhood. So to me it seemed like the most obvious way to start the related questchain. The one thing I did miss at first was that I had to sleep before anything really happened. There's not much reason to sleep in Skyrim if you are a Vampire, except for speeding time along...

 

 

I'm 8 hours into Skyrim now and not a single bug so far. I have no idea why you guys call this game buggy. To me it looks very polished.

A lot of them got fixed, but it's still a good idea to grab the unofficial patches though as suggested above by WDeranged, quite a lot of bugs only show up later even though they are *caused* early on, and by the time you run into them it's too late to fix them. (for example there are many unfixed bugs related to the randomly generated generic sidequests clashing with major questchains or DLC quests, which obviously only show once you get to that point).

 

And afaik the achievement to acquire all Daedric artifacts still breaks very often, depending on the order in which you acquire them (it's one of two I don't have for Skyrim, even though I should have received this particular one). Of course, assuming you care about these things.

 

The game is much smoother and prettier than I had imagined. I have no idea how they make it look so good, yet run so flawlessly (I don't think I ever go under 60 fps).

You might want to look into ENBSeries and other graphical mods, the Skyrim defaults even with maxed out settings and high-res pack really don't bring out full the potential of the game. (I also really liked the aMidianBorn retextures of various things in Skyrim, mostly armors and weapons but he's worked on other things as well)

 

I've killed my first dragon, but I failed to report back to the jarl yet. Too much to see and do everywhere! Oh, and the game sure as hell isn't too easy for me. I've been wandering around exploring and some of the enemies have kicked my butt. Brutally. Not at all like Oblivion.

Difficulty is fairly brutal early on, but once you get some essential skills under your belt for your chosen playstyle it gets much easier very quickly.

[BruceVC]

Bethesda did a pretty good job fixing the bugs people reported (though the Dragonborn patch broke lipsync) but I'd still install the unofficial patches which fix most of the smaller bugs that start to annoy you after several hundred hours 

 

I find that a bit of wilful ignorance goes a long way in enjoying Skyrim but you can pick it to pieces if you want.  Useless perks, linear dungeons, plot railroading and a lack of truly interesting antagonists (Morrowind...) are my biggest issues but I can still sink an unhealthy amount of time into it without getting bored, they did a good job turning everything into a goal, proper OCD fodder.

 

I'm currently playing through Dawnguard and given my playstyle it'll take me ages to complete, they added way more than I expected and it's got Bethesda's first attempt at a New Vegas style companion...the writing is ham fisted to hell but it's still nice to have more talkative company while exploring.  Something I'm finding especially cool is how it allows you to do the Blackreach portion of the Alduin quest ahead of time, breaks up the monotony on a fourth playthrough.

 

Thanks for the unofficial patches link, that will be a definite for me

[Katphood]

Shadow Man(PC)

Think of it as a Zelda game with a dark & creepy atmosphere. It's pretty awesome if you can get past the terrible controls(it was ported from the N64 to the PC...can you ****ing believe it?!).

 

Deus Ex: HR+The Missing Link(PS3)

Decided to go on a easy/non-stealth playthrough since I didn't really get to use any guns in my last playthrough. It's a lot of fun actually, Deus Ex: HR is simply a must-play for everyone. Gotta get my hands on the directors cut someday.

Edited December 4, 2013 by Astiaks

[BruceVC]

Shadow Man(PC)

Think of it as a Zelda game with a dark & creepy atmosphere. It's pretty awesome if you can get past the terrible controls(it was ported from the N64 to the PC...can you ****ing believe it?!).

 

Deus Ex: HR+The Missing Link(PS3)

Decided to go on a easy/non-stealth playthrough since I didn't really get to use any guns in my last playthrough. It's a lot of fun actually, Deus Ex: HR is simply a must-play for everyone. Gotta get my hands on the directors cut someday.

 

I have Deus: Ex HR on Steam, I just haven't got around to playing it yet.

[entrerix]

HR was a great game, didn't quite reach the heights of the original, but it's still one of the best games of the past few years imo.

[HoonDing]

Replayed a bit of Alice Madness Returns and ran into a game-stopping bug.

[BruceVC]

HR was a great game, didn't quite reach the heights of the original, but it's still one of the best games of the past few years imo.

 

I have all three on Steam, so I'll start with the first one and work my way through 

[Guest Slinky]

Check this site out before starting the first one, I highly recommend the Deus Exe launcher and Direct3D 10 renderer. Use the launcher to disable GUI scaling, otherwise it's so small on modern resolutions that you need a magnifying glass to see it. Disabling mouse acceleration is also a good idea as one could imagine. Direct3D 10 renderer allows better graphics and runs smoother.

 

Enjoy playing one of the best games ever done.

 

 

Edit: Or did the gui scale to horrifying size when not disabled? Can't remember anymore.

Edited December 4, 2013 by Slinky

[JFSOCC]

I've finished X-com: Enemy within, I thought it was alright, not great.

 

Yesterday I started Mark of the Ninja, which today I finished. Tomorrow I'll start new game plus and get those last few scrolls. Ton of fun, wholly recommended. Stylish, maybe a little bit too easy, but that's perfect for me since this isn't generally my type of game.

[GhostofAnakin]

I found a magical sword that's constantly dealing fire damage.  Seems it's one of the better weapons available at my current level, since it's superior to even the priciest weapons available in stores.

 

I need to upgrade my mage pawn.  It seems like every single battle, I spend half the time trying to revive her after she dies right away.  It was actually pretty funny because a Gryphon was chewing on her even when she was already "dead".  I was like, "I'm coming to save you ... oh, you're in his mouth".

[Keyrock]

Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse.  I just started so I can't comment on the story or puzzles yet, but I can say that the game looks downright gorgeous.