What are you playing now?

[Fighter]

Kind of cheesy, but I just lob a molotov into their midst and see them burn from afar without even engaging in combat.

 

I did the exact same thing.

[Labadal]

Fallout: New Vegas - Dead Money

 

I'm in the casino right now and doing the thing with Dean Domino. The transmitters are driving me crazy. They weren't that big of annoyance before, but in here, I hate them with a passion.

[Keyrock]

I finally found my first gun in Dying Light.  A pistol inside a cabin where an old dude killed himself.  It's only got a couple of bullets though, so I haven't bothered to use it.

 

I've picked up some stronger melee weapons after setting some bandits on fire at air drops.  Kind of cheesy, but I just lob a molotov into their midst and see them burn from afar without even engaging in combat.

With a few exceptions, I almost never use guns against zombies, I save my bullets for fighting Reis' thugs.  Once you get stronger melee weapons, you'll be slicing through most zombies (not the really big ones like Demolishers) like a hot knife through butter.  I use guns for Demolishers, (sometimes) Goons, and Reis' thugs (also those spitting dudes if they're in a hard to reach spot), and basically nothing else.  My electrified and flaming bastard sword makes short work of anything else.  Outside of Demolishers (and Volatiles at night), combat is a piece of cake at higher levels.

Edited February 21, 2015 by Keyrock

[Fighter]

The gunplay in Dying Light isn't the best. But I kind of like how tight the hitboxes seem. They won't give you a headshot if your aim is off unlike some games.

[Darkpriest]

I am playing wolfenstein new order. It s been a while since I touched an FPS and this is kind of fun even challanging at times.

[GhostofAnakin]

Found my first assault rifle in Dying Light.  It came out of nowhere, too.  I was about to "unlock" a safe house when I heard gunfire and realized belatedly (after taking some damage) that there's a guy on the roof with an assault rifle.

 

No problem.  One molotov ****tail later and I had myself a new gun.

[GhostofAnakin]

This site censors c-o-c-k-tail?  Really?

[Lexx]

Yes, say no to alcoholism!

 

 

Kind of stopped playing Dying Light. The performance is kind of... not so good, which kills my mood.

[Valsuelm]

This site censors c-o-c-k-tail?  Really?

 

And numerous other non profane words.

[LadyCrimson]

Early Access, Medieval Engineers - I am so tempted. Build for hours, destroy in 10 minutes! But maybe it'll be a little too "techie" for me...*finger hovers over the buy button* ... can't decide.

 

Still haven't really played with Space Engineers, but I'm a lot more into building castles/buildings/catapults then I am vehicles/ships/sci-fi machinery...

[ManifestedISO]

Was supposed to get paid today, thereby playing The Order: 1886. Neither of which happened. 

[Bokishi]

Medieval Engineers plays great, but pretty bare bones in features compared to Space Engineers

[Raithe]

I woke up this morning and realised I both wanted to kill something, but also wanted to enjoy breathy female noises. Since I can't spend time with the girlfriend, I decided to meet my desires halfway, and replay Tomb Raider for a laugh.  Now I kill things, skin animals, and hear breathy female gasps.

[Tale]

I'm really liking Dangan Ronpa, but... the mysteries so far seem kind of dumb. I had the first murderer figured out before the trial even started, just not the motive. But I did figure out the motive once a couple of details fell into place.

 

Now I'm about to start the second trial and I'm positive I know what happened. Let's see if I'm right, spoilered for later verification.

 

Byakuya killed Chihiro in the men's workout room. I still don't know if there was a motive. However, he swapped evidence into the girl's workout room to pin it on one of the girls. In specific he wanted to pin it on Toko. He was already aware of the Genocide Jack case and had figured out that it was Toko, if Toko had not confessed it herself. So he thought she'd be the perfect patsy. He also knew where the dead student's handbooks are, so he could have gone into the girl's workout room at any time. And I strongly suspect the broken one is Chihiro's, not Leon's.

 

[LadyCrimson]

Medieval Engineers plays great, but pretty bare bones in features compared to Space Engineers

Yeah, I understand that. Which I don't mind/accept, but I think I may wait a week or so and see what their first update/patch holds ... assuming they put one out in that time. The discount for already owning Space Engineers makes it more tempting, too. :D

[500MetricTonnes]

A few months back, I decided I was going to play through Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Throne of Bhaal, Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2, and Mask of the Betrayer with the same character.

 

So having finished Throne of Bhaal, I went directly to Neverwinter Nights, and then I remembered why I can keep coming back to Baldur's Gate again and again...and why I never touched NWN for years after finishing the original campaign:

 

- The OC is bland and banal. It consists almost entirely of fetching MacGuffins (Waterdhavian creatures, words of power, etc) via quests that are totally straightforward, and without any alternate means of solving them. With the exception of the Charwood quest, nothing in the campaign is particularly memorable and compelling. Worst of all, the game never really establishes any sort of motivating factor to your character. In BG, you had the murder of Gorion and sorting out the iron shortage to compel the PC. In the sequel, you had Irenicus torture you and abduct Imoen. In NWN, on the other hand, your character is just some random academy student with no background and no personal stake in the conflict.

 

Another thing that bothered me was just how frequently the solution to your quests involves mass slaughter of human beings. For instance, there's one sidquest wherein your character is tasked with stealing pieces of an artwork from noblemen who have offended the local whorehouse madam. Each nobleman's estate is guarded by someone who says that he really doesn't like his job and won't stop you from entering. Since my character is a wizard with no real stealth skills, but with good Charisma and several ranks in Persuade, I thought I might try to bluff my way past the interior guards.

 

Nope! The only real solution was to violently murder all the guards. And these people weren't evil, they were just doing their jobs. The most ludicrous example had to be the quest where you must free some animals from a zoo because the local druid believed they were being mistreated. The only solution offered to me? Kill all the guards in the zoo and murder the proprietor!  There's this odd dissonance in the game where my character is 100% good-aligned, yet I've racked up a body count in the hundreds, with many of those deaths coming under circumstances of extreme moral dubiousness. And no one ever calls you on it!

 

- What? Do you mean to tell me that the character who was incredibly rude, abrasive, condescending, and unhelpful in every single conversation with me....is EVIL? My god, I got whiplash from this UTTERLY SHOCKING AND COMPLETELY UNEXPECTED PLOT SWERVE!

 

- Playing as a mage is highly tedious. As in Baldur's Gate, a low-level wizard has a pitiful amount of HP and can only cast a few weak spells per day. They need some sort of melee support if they are to survive. In BG, this wasn't a problem, because the game gave you decent melee fighters near he start (Khalid and Jaheira in the first game, Minsc and Jaheira in the second). Not only that, you had full control of your party members.

 

Not so in NWN. Instead, you are allowed to have one "henchman" who is completely under the control of the AI. Unfortunately, the AI is utterly brain-dead. For instance, they can only attack targets that they have a direct line of sight to, otherwise the target may as well not even exist. So imagine my character is standing in front of a door to a room filled with monsters who could tear through her puny amount of HP in a heartbeat. In BG, I could order my melee fighters in first to deal with the enemies, while my mage stayed back and cast spells from a safe distance. In NWN, my henchmen will often stand just to the side of the door, meaning he can't see the monsters inside and will thus ignore my attack orders. The only way to get him to attack is to walk into the room first and hope he follows me inside, which is far more dangerous, especially if there are archers in the enemy ranks. You could cast invisibility on yourself, or summon a creature inside the room to aggro the enemies, but I should not have to waste spells just to do something that would be trivial if I had full control of my party!

 

Now, this isn't a hard game by any stretch, but playing as a wizard who has to rely on her henchmen more so than other classes at low levels is incredibly frustrating. Clerics blowing their Turn Undead spells on weak zombies that they can kill with one swing of their mace...clerics trying to heal themselves in close combat and get murdered by Attacks of Opportunity...a melee fighter who decides to ignore the five guys trying to hack him to pieces and run after that archer in the distance and thus get murdered by Attacks of Opportunity...you get the picture. There's a henchmen AI mod that does a bit to ameliorate the issue, but it's not enough.

 

- The graphics are as bland as the OC. Being 2D, the pre-rendered graphics of Baldur's Gate hold up fairly well more than ten years later. NWN's 3D graphics have not. The areas are visually uninteresting and very obviously constructed with tilesets as opposed to the more organic locales of Baldur's Gate. And bloody hell, who designed the armour for women in this game? Elder Scrolls modders? You know you've got a problem when this is the most reasonable thing any female fighter wears:

 

 

- So I gave up on the OC and started with the first expansion pack, Shadows of Undrentide. The story itself is nothing special, but there are some definite improvements here, such as being able to adjust your henchman's inventory, and the fact that the game offers multiple quest solutions depending on your class and abilities (such as the bit with the kobolds holding a woman hostage in the local tavern). But the henchmen remain an issue for spellcasters, because none of them are good melee fighters. You've got a Cleric/Rogue, a Barbarian/Sorcerer, and a Bard (there's a Paladin, but she doesn't join you). And this expansion likes to throw relatively tough opponents at you, and in larger numbers than what you faced in the OC. Later on, you start facing opponents who are not just spell resistant, but spell immune, at which point a wizard better hope that her summons and henchman can take them down. Otherwise, you're SOL.

 

Now I realise that the main draw of NWN was never its campaigns, but in the toolset and online play, which is a fair point. But surely BioWare must have realised that there would be a good number people coming into this game from Baldur's Gate who would be completely disappointed that it lacked almost everything that BG so good.

 

Tonight I'm going to try out Hordes of the Underdark, which I've never actually played before. I've heard it's the best part of NWN...we shall see.

[Starwars]

Playing Crusader Kings 2 with a bunch of the DLC.

 

Took a while to get going (claims, titles and such still kinda confuse me and screw me over because I apparently missed something) but now I'm into it. It's pretty fun, certainly extremely addictive. Think I was hoping for something more though, not sure what I feel is missing. It feels a bit silly. I guess that's part of the fun, to screw around in a sandbox. But I dunno, kinda wish there would've been more "weight" behind certain things. Can't quite explain it.

 

The UI also confuses me to no end. I had betrothed two characters and once they could get married, there is a little alert allowing you to marry them. I had accidentally clicked this away and it turns out that there was no way to marry the two betrothed characters through any other part of the UI (that I could find anyways). After looking on the internet, turns out the only solution was to activate "hidden messages" through a rather obscurce and hard to find option buried in the UI somewhere.

Just a small example of how bad the UI is in certain instances, there really should be more ways to access such a thing as marrying two betrothed characters than only having the alert.

[Labadal]

Finally finished Fallout: New Vegas - Dead Money. There are some good ideas but the whole hologram and emitter idea was bad. It made everything about the gameplay less fun. I'm all for an Obsidian game with that kind of atmosphere, but it could have been so much better without those two annoyances.

[GhostofAnakin]

Hope I haven't run into a bug in Dying Light.  Every time I go to buy ammo for my handgun, it says I have no free slot for the ammo.  My assault rifle is down to like 20 bullets and my pistol only has 2 or 3.

[mute688]

Playing Crusader Kings 2 with a bunch of the DLC.

 

Took a while to get going (claims, titles and such still kinda confuse me and screw me over because I apparently missed something) but now I'm into it. It's pretty fun, certainly extremely addictive. Think I was hoping for something more though, not sure what I feel is missing. It feels a bit silly. I guess that's part of the fun, to screw around in a sandbox. But I dunno, kinda wish there would've been more "weight" behind certain things. Can't quite explain it.

 

The UI also confuses me to no end. I had betrothed two characters and once they could get married, there is a little alert allowing you to marry them. I had accidentally clicked this away and it turns out that there was no way to marry the two betrothed characters through any other part of the UI (that I could find anyways). After looking on the internet, turns out the only solution was to activate "hidden messages" through a rather obscurce and hard to find option buried in the UI somewhere.

Just a small example of how bad the UI is in certain instances, there really should be more ways to access such a thing as marrying two betrothed characters than only having the alert.

 

They recently changed the UI in one of the patches and I think it is much worse now than previously.  Many of the interactions that were previously on the main character pop up screen seem to have been moved to obscure locations.  Some can be accessed by right clicking the character portrait such as the betrothal options you were looking for.  I hope they undo most of the UI changes in another patch.

[Tale]

My suspicion for case 2 was incorrect, but not entirely. That was a red herring.

 

 

For case 3, I suspect Celeste. Let's see how it goes. Why Celeste? Because she's the first witness at a couple of places and she's demonstrated an ability to manipulate Hifuna, the victim that looks not so innocent.

 

[marelooke]

A few months back, I decided I was going to play through Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Throne of Bhaal, Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2, and Mask of the Betrayer with the same character.

 

So having finished Throne of Bhaal, I went directly to Neverwinter Nights, and then I remembered why I can keep coming back to Baldur's Gate again and again...and why I never touched NWN for years after finishing the original campaign:

 

- The OC is bland and banal. It consists almost entirely of fetching MacGuffins (Waterdhavian creatures, words of power, etc) via quests that are totally straightforward, and without any alternate means of solving them. With the exception of the Charwood quest, nothing in the campaign is particularly memorable and compelling. Worst of all, the game never really establishes any sort of motivating factor to your character. In BG, you had the murder of Gorion and sorting out the iron shortage to compel the PC. In the sequel, you had Irenicus torture you and abduct Imoen. In NWN, on the other hand, your character is just some random academy student with no background and no personal stake in the conflict.

 

Another thing that bothered me was just how frequently the solution to your quests involves mass slaughter of human beings. For instance, there's one sidquest wherein your character is tasked with stealing pieces of an artwork from noblemen who have offended the local whorehouse madam. Each nobleman's estate is guarded by someone who says that he really doesn't like his job and won't stop you from entering. Since my character is a wizard with no real stealth skills, but with good Charisma and several ranks in Persuade, I thought I might try to bluff my way past the interior guards.

 

Nope! The only real solution was to violently murder all the guards. And these people weren't evil, they were just doing their jobs. The most ludicrous example had to be the quest where you must free some animals from a zoo because the local druid believed they were being mistreated. The only solution offered to me? Kill all the guards in the zoo and murder the proprietor!  There's this odd dissonance in the game where my character is 100% good-aligned, yet I've racked up a body count in the hundreds, with many of those deaths coming under circumstances of extreme moral dubiousness. And no one ever calls you on it!

 

- What? Do you mean to tell me that the character who was incredibly rude, abrasive, condescending, and unhelpful in every single conversation with me....is EVIL? My god, I got whiplash from this UTTERLY SHOCKING AND COMPLETELY UNEXPECTED PLOT SWERVE!

 

- Playing as a mage is highly tedious. As in Baldur's Gate, a low-level wizard has a pitiful amount of HP and can only cast a few weak spells per day. They need some sort of melee support if they are to survive. In BG, this wasn't a problem, because the game gave you decent melee fighters near he start (Khalid and Jaheira in the first game, Minsc and Jaheira in the second). Not only that, you had full control of your party members.

 

Not so in NWN. Instead, you are allowed to have one "henchman" who is completely under the control of the AI. Unfortunately, the AI is utterly brain-dead. For instance, they can only attack targets that they have a direct line of sight to, otherwise the target may as well not even exist. So imagine my character is standing in front of a door to a room filled with monsters who could tear through her puny amount of HP in a heartbeat. In BG, I could order my melee fighters in first to deal with the enemies, while my mage stayed back and cast spells from a safe distance. In NWN, my henchmen will often stand just to the side of the door, meaning he can't see the monsters inside and will thus ignore my attack orders. The only way to get him to attack is to walk into the room first and hope he follows me inside, which is far more dangerous, especially if there are archers in the enemy ranks. You could cast invisibility on yourself, or summon a creature inside the room to aggro the enemies, but I should not have to waste spells just to do something that would be trivial if I had full control of my party!

 

Now, this isn't a hard game by any stretch, but playing as a wizard who has to rely on her henchmen more so than other classes at low levels is incredibly frustrating. Clerics blowing their Turn Undead spells on weak zombies that they can kill with one swing of their mace...clerics trying to heal themselves in close combat and get murdered by Attacks of Opportunity...a melee fighter who decides to ignore the five guys trying to hack him to pieces and run after that archer in the distance and thus get murdered by Attacks of Opportunity...you get the picture. There's a henchmen AI mod that does a bit to ameliorate the issue, but it's not enough.

 

- The graphics are as bland as the OC. Being 2D, the pre-rendered graphics of Baldur's Gate hold up fairly well more than ten years later. NWN's 3D graphics have not. The areas are visually uninteresting and very obviously constructed with tilesets as opposed to the more organic locales of Baldur's Gate. And bloody hell, who designed the armour for women in this game? Elder Scrolls modders? You know you've got a problem when this is the most reasonable thing any female fighter wears:

 

 

- So I gave up on the OC and started with the first expansion pack, Shadows of Undrentide. The story itself is nothing special, but there are some definite improvements here, such as being able to adjust your henchman's inventory, and the fact that the game offers multiple quest solutions depending on your class and abilities (such as the bit with the kobolds holding a woman hostage in the local tavern). But the henchmen remain an issue for spellcasters, because none of them are good melee fighters. You've got a Cleric/Rogue, a Barbarian/Sorcerer, and a Bard (there's a Paladin, but she doesn't join you). And this expansion likes to throw relatively tough opponents at you, and in larger numbers than what you faced in the OC. Later on, you start facing opponents who are not just spell resistant, but spell immune, at which point a wizard better hope that her summons and henchman can take them down. Otherwise, you're SOL.

 

Now I realise that the main draw of NWN was never its campaigns, but in the toolset and online play, which is a fair point. But surely BioWare must have realised that there would be a good number people coming into this game from Baldur's Gate who would be completely disappointed that it lacked almost everything that BG so good.

 

Tonight I'm going to try out Hordes of the Underdark, which I've never actually played before. I've heard it's the best part of NWN...we shall see.

 

NWN was one of the biggest disappointments I've ever had with a game and it seems I got the worst of it too by trying to play a wizard (as I generally do).

 

In other news, I picked up my year old XCom: Enemy Within playthrough, the game's still fun though I think I really should have started my second playthrough on Classis or so because after the initial few months the difficulty rather plummets. Now I'm trying to decide whether to drag it out to get the "shoot down 40 UFOs"-achievement or just use the Gollop Champer and get this playthrough over with...

[Keyrock]

Hand of Fate, a weird combination of deck building, choose your own adventure, and brawler from Defiant Development.  Also, this is an opportunity for me to shamelessly plug my first ever Let's Play video. 

 

 

As it's my first Let's Play, it's a learning experience.  I definitely need to work on my audio levels and using better codecs, also, just getting more comfortable commentating while playing.

[GhostofAnakin]

Gah.  They're actually forcing me to play at night in Dying Light.  I hate Volatiles.  Especially when there's more than one.

[Orogun01]

Was supposed to get paid today, thereby playing The Order: 1886. Neither of which happened. 

The universe has conspired to prevent you from playing a horrible game. God exists and he is a PC gamer.