What are you playing now?

[GhostofAnakin]

Still moving along in DA:I.  The companions don't seem to have much to say after the initial "so tell me about yourself" options you get when you first meet/recruit them.  At least so far, they don't seem to have additional stuff to talk about.

 

I still miss DA:O's companion interactions.  They always had something to say, and as the game progressed, they always opened up and had even more to say.  I also miss being able to chat with them any time I want.

[Guard Dog]

I downloaded Daggerfall from Bethesda's website, reloaded and modded up Morrowind & Oblivion. Now I'm going to play them all back to back all the way through Skyrim. Only this time I'm going with all magic user PCs. I've never used that kind of character in any game so I've never done any of their specific guilds or quests.

 

Hopefully by the time I'm done:

 

1) DA:I will have all it's DLCs out so I can play that (probably will)

2) Fallout 4 will be out (Possible but unlikely)

3) Elder Scrolls VI will be out (Almost no chance)

[HoonDing]

You should start with Arena. It doesn't take that long to beat compared to Daggerfall due to less exhaustive dungeons and no learn-by-doing mechanics.

[Guard Dog]

Not sure it would work. Daggerfall doesn't work either. Apparently it won't play nice with Windows 8.1. Morrowind does though.

Edited November 23, 2014 by Guard Dog

[Bartimaeus]

I played 10 minutes of Dragon Age II and I'm taken aback by how horrible the graphics are. Everything is dark and muddy and low res.

 

This is on Directx11 with everything on the maximum.

Yeah? It's a BioWare game: does anyone remember how terrible Mass Effect 3 looked when it came out? All the stupid close-ups they did of the super low-res character textures...bleck. And that came out two years later...

Edited November 23, 2014 by Bartimaeus

[HoonDing]

Not sure it would work. Daggerfall doesn't work either. Apparently it won't play nice with Windows 8.1. Morrowind does though.

Yeah, you need Dosbox for the old games.

[Drowsy Emperor]

 

I played 10 minutes of Dragon Age II and I'm taken aback by how horrible the graphics are. Everything is dark and muddy and low res.

 

This is on Directx11 with everything on the maximum.

Yeah? It's a BioWare game: does anyone remember how terrible Mass Effect 3 looked when it came out? All the stupid close-ups they did of the super low-res character textures...bleck. And that came out two years later...

 

 

Yeah the first Mass Effect looked great at the time, the second one still looked good at release but by the third one it aged very badly. 

 

I'm surprised that Bioware is so behind in the tech race, the Witcher series flat out crushed anything Bioware has done since the first Mass Effect. Particularly W2 which looks about 5 years ahead of the entire DA series, including Inquistion.

Edited November 23, 2014 by Drowsy Emperor

[Volourn]

Meh. of all the things to compliant about graphics isn't one of them. The DAs and MEs have damn good graphics 9despite some hilariously awful closeups for certain characters plus their hands). Unlike the ES series which is literally just green puke.

[Lexx]

I remember quite good graphics in ME3 too. ME2 didn't looked bad either. But if I now look at this new DA game and the clunky animations... well...

[marelooke]

So I am *not* playing DA:I

 

I'm still going through Wasteland 2 at my truly glacial pace. I've just settled the Rail Nomads dispute (and took care of the Rail Thieves, of course). My first character hit level 10 (Rose, I'm not counting Angela Deth) so it looks like I'll have to start thinking on where to spend those extra stat points as the rest of my characters isn't all that far behind...

 

I think I'll have to go looking for a pause option though as quite often I inadvertently trigger encounters while I'm still trying to  place my squad. It's kind of annoying at times.

 

EDIT: typos...

Edited November 23, 2014 by marelooke

[Keyrock]

I thought the Mass Effect games looked pretty good.  I did find the texture pop-in to be quite jarring at times, though.

[Gizmo]

Currently back and forth between DA:O, WL2, Menzo, and LoG2; mostly Menzo.

[HoonDing]

^Menzoberranzan is a bad game, but at least one gets to fight (ridiculously underpowered) aboleths.

[Malcador]

Still plodding on in WoW, healing people in dungeons is fun. Got a crappy group for one but we soldiered through it, remarkable lack of bile in it - but we are all new so it's not that big a deal. Also as a healer my queue times are a joke, so I can easily laugh at the other party members if they do get uppity - they need me, but I don't need them.

[Drowsy Emperor]

Tried a bit more DA2.

 

EA really butchered this game. I just got to Kirkwall and half the city is made of the same repeating texture. Basically, what little quality models they made they used up on characters and armor because of the constant close up shots, everything else is straight out of 2003. 

 

To make matters worse, the game seems to be terribly optimized. Its strangling my laptop quad core CPU (intel i7 3632QM) , taking it all the way to 95c and beyond leading to throttling. By comparison a few weeks ago I was playing Alien Isolation completely maxed out at around 80 or so degrees.

 

The people that control EA must really hate computer games. Anything that can't be made on FIFA's schedule seems to be beyond their comprehension.

 

So I'd rather stop playing it than to potentially slaughter my CPU/GPU. 

Edited November 24, 2014 by Drowsy Emperor

[Keyrock]

Tried a bit more DA2.

 

EA really butchered this game. I just got to Kirkwall and half the city is made of the same repeating texture.

 

You think that's bad?  Just wait until you visit the same cave for the umpteenth time.  Not an extremely similar cave from a cookie cutter mold (ala Oblivion), not even a mirrored version of the cave, the same exact cave.  Trust me, you are going to be intimately familiar with said cave before the game is through.

[Drowsy Emperor]

Yeah I was just talking with a friend over the phone about DA2 and he said the same thing. Apparently everyone is still having nightmares about that cave.

 

While I'm familiar with EA's policies, and somewhat certain that Bioware wouldn't have released it in this state if it were up to them, it is the game journalists who should be most ashamed. The scores are embarrassingly high for a game in this state. 

Edited November 24, 2014 by Drowsy Emperor

[Majek]

Bioware=EA <_< Don't try to separate the two ever again, it has been one big pile of **** for years, so Bioware is just asresponsible for all the **** it creates if not more than EA.

[Keyrock]

Who's got two thumbs and a Samus Aran Amiibo is his hand?  This guy.  I don't even have a game to use it with yet and I don't care.  I picked up the Amiibo's I got and will get based on liking how they look and liking the character.  Any in game functionality is just gravy.  For anyone curious about what these look like in real life, and not just on a promo shot, here are some pictures taken by a crappy photographer (me) using my crappy camera phone:

 

 

 

 

Hard to tell with the glare from the flash, but the detail work is solid.  The person or machine that painted this was good at "staying inside the lines".

[Gfted1]

Whats up with the surface of your coffee table?

 

How does that help "in game functionality"? What does it do?

[Keyrock]

Whats up with the surface of your coffee table?

That's one of my tables at work.  If it looks beat to **** that's because it is.  Hammers and box cutters and tools of all types have done their thing on that table.

 

The game functionality is game specific.  In Smash, they will enter as combatants that can fight on their own, either with you or against you.  They grow and get more skilled and supposedly pick up their fighting style from yours.  I can't comment from personal experience as I don't have Smash yet.  In other games they will do other things, whatever that turns out to be.

 

[Humanoid]

Still plodding on in WoW, healing people in dungeons is fun. Got a crappy group for one but we soldiered through it, remarkable lack of bile in it - but we are all new so it's not that big a deal. Also as a healer my queue times are a joke, so I can easily laugh at the other party members if they do get uppity - they need me, but I don't need them.

I got to 100 but had no desire to use the LFD tool - I'd quit doing pick-up groups altogether some years back - so it's just kind of a holding pattern while waiting for a critical mass of level 100 guildies to be able to run stuff regularly on our own. One week in and I'm pretty bored to be honest, a lot of the things that led me to quit first time around are largely unchanged.

 

Doesn't help that my guild is still broken into two, the people that transferred to the Oceanic servers during the free migration, and those who either opted not to, or missed out on the free period (which ended literally one minute prior to the WoD launch).

[LadyCrimson]

Not playing, but I took another look at the progress of War for the Overworld. It almost looks like a game, now. A little too much DK2 influence (vs. mixing DK1 and 2 a bit more maybe) for my tastes re: the likely campaign format, but still looks kinda nice. The one video I watched that showed the available campaign map (probably the 1st, tutorial one) wasn't too impressive, however. Especially the sound. "We burn with the glory of (someone's) favor" over and over and over...lol. Not quite ready to purchase yet...in a few months maybe.

 

I might like the sandbox and if they have them, skirmish. Probably won't do the MP. Not sure about the "sin" stuff for getting new rooms and spells. Could be good, tho. At least they're trying something a bit different and not a direct clone in that area.

 

[GhostofAnakin]

About 30 hours in to DA:I.  At this rate, I'm looking at at least 50 hours or so, maybe more.  Certainly seems closer to Origins' length than DA2's.

[Volourn]

DA1 and DA2 were about the same length. *shrug*