What are you playing right now?

[Rosbjerg]

There needs to be an arial bombardment option, kill it with no benefit after its shot down.

[Flouride]

Dying Light and Armored Warfare

[Humanoid]

There needs to be an arial bombardment option, kill it with no benefit after its shot down.

 

Well shot-down UFOs aren't actually a problem, there's no penalty as such for leaving them alone besides not getting the loot from it. But landed UFOs if left alone will increase the research and/or resource level of the aliens.

[Keyrock]

*sigh* [rant] Two things I desperately want to see die a painful fiery death in RPGs: Gathering/fetch quests and filler battles against trash mobs.  I guess some people find this stuff to be valuable content, but I sure don't.  I don't play video games to do menial labor.[/rant]  As to what prompted my little mini rant, it's gathering quests in Xenoblade Chronicles X.  Granted, in terms of the game world and story, gathering quests make perfect sense.  Earth is gone and you're stranded on an alien planet.  This is now your home, like it or not, so you need to scavenge and gather to survive and create a sustainable future.  Still, as a player character, I'd much rather be doing more exciting stuff than gathering freakin' berries or whatever.  Anyway, I don't mind gathering quests as side quests.  I can pick those up, forget about them, and they'll sort of get completed automagically while I do more important stuff.  In fact, what I do is accept as many of them as I can (the game limits you to 20 active side quests at a time) and forget about them.  Occasionally I get a pop up on my screen that I completed something and got some money or experience or whatever for essentially doing nothing.  Cool beans, I guess.  It bothers me, though, when gathering is part of an affinity or main story quest, because you can't just forget about those, you can only do one affinity or main story quest at a time and you have to finish said quest before you can continue on with the story, so you are literally stuck picking berries or whatever until you finish before you can continue the game in a meaningful way.  Luckily, gathering has been the exception rather than the norm in main/affinity quests, so I haven't had too much to grumble about.  Let's hope it stays that way.

[Vaeliorin]

Wizardry 8, a game that's largely all about Keyrock's hated filler combat.

 

Trying a 4-person party for the first time ever (never done less than a full 6 before.)

 

Honestly, it's one of my top 5 (maybe top 3) favorite games of all time, but I kind of hate whenever I start playing it again.  I get obsessed with different party combinations and ways to play, and spend hours thinking about it.  Then I spend hours searching through old archived Geocities sites and trying to find anywhere the game is still being actively discussed to see if anyone has tried this or that and how it worked.  I end up losing sleep over it.  Occasionally I'll come across a 10 year old discussion that teaches me something I don't know about the game (like how the critical hit skill actually functions) and that will shake things up all over again.

 

Still don't know if anyone else has ever gone Bishop 11 -> Hybrid (Lord/Ranger/Samurai/Monk) before.

[Keyrock]

I kind of wish RPGs would implement what some strategy games do, that is, give you an option to auto-resolve battles.  So, every time you would come across what would qualify as a filler battle a prompt would pop up giving you the option to manually resolve the battle or auto-resolve the battle.  If you chose auto-resolve 2 seconds later a screen pops up telling you whether you won or lost, how many potions you used, how much exp you got, and what loot you found.  Obviously, this option should not be present for meaningful/boss battles, those should be mandatory manual resolve.  To some degree, JRPGs have done this for decades, allowing you to set your party on auto and the battle plays out automagically.  If you crank up the battle speed to max the battles often play out in 10 or 15 seconds and you can move on with your life.  Considering how much grinding traditional JRPGs tend to include, this is a godsend in those games.

[Vaeliorin]

Yeah, I'd certainly be glad to have something like that in some games, but others where the combat is something I really enjoy, I'd skip it.  That said, I'd only really want it if it was efficient.  There's nothing I hate more when playing a strategy game with auto-resolve than when hitting auto-resolve ends up with you losing units (sometimes many units) and resources that you would have kept easily if you actually played the battle out.  Often, even when I don't want to play the battles, because I know they're trivial, I end up playing them because the auto-resolve is so awful.

 

So, you've got my vote, as long as the auto-resolve plays at least as well as I would (which, depending on the game, could be anywhere from terrible to great. )

Edited December 19, 2015 by Vaeliorin

[Keyrock]

Yeah, the auto-resolve is pretty bad in some strategy games.  It's not a perfect solution, I'm just spitballing here.    TToN will supposedly be the game that answers my prayers as InXile are promising no filler battles and all combat is avoidable if you're really clever.  Hopefully they deliver, we'll see. 

 

As for Wizardry, those games were dungeon crawls.  It's pretty much understood that dungeon crawls are 98% combat.  They were really good dungeon crawls, though...  once you got past the beginning, anyway.  I remember I used to spend like 3 or 4 hours on character creation in Wizardry games because everything was random and you could, and would more often than not, get saddled with garbage stats and like 2 hp to start.  After finally rolling a good party, the first couple hours of the games would be frustrating save scumming sessions as your character were so ridiculously weak and vulnerable at very low lev and you'd get party wiped constantly.  The games got MUCH better once you leveled up a bit, but those first few hours were BRUTAL.  I guess I had a lot more patience when I was younger because there's zero percent chance I could make it through those first few hours to get to the good stuff now.

[ManifestedISO]

Was working hard for Cassandra's approval until I noticed a big update available for The Golf Club ... snow-covered courses! 

 

Except I can't start either game, I'm hypnotized by this tropical dynamic theme with real-time day/night cycles. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt_KCfk64EQ

[majestic]

Was working hard for Cassandra's approval

 

Careful, we don't want Luzianus to come back. Better not to talk too openly about this.

[Vaeliorin]

As for Wizardry, those games were dungeon crawls.  It's pretty much understood that dungeon crawls are 98% combat.  They were really good dungeon crawls, though...  once you got past the beginning, anyway.  I remember I used to spend like 3 or 4 hours on character creation in Wizardry games because everything was random and you could, and would more often than not, get saddled with garbage stats and like 2 hp to start.  After finally rolling a good party, the first couple hours of the games would be frustrating save scumming sessions as your character were so ridiculously weak and vulnerable at very low lev and you'd get party wiped constantly.  The games got MUCH better once you leveled up a bit, but those first few hours were BRUTAL.  I guess I had a lot more patience when I was younger because there's zero percent chance I could make it through those first few hours to get to the good stuff now.

Actually, Wizardry 8 doesn't have random rolls, and is much better for it, in my opinion. They also got rid of the massively exploitable multi-classing system from 6 and 7. No longer does it let you keep everything, but reset your experience required to the same as any first level character when you change classes. Now you still need the same xp as if you'd always been that class (not total, but if you'd say need 1000 xp to go from level 4->5 fighter, you'd need 1000 xp to go from Valkyrie 3/Fighter 1-> Valkyrie 3/Fighter 2.)

 

It's still apparently pretty brutal for new players, but I played Wizardry 7 enough that I didn't find it too bad when I first started playing it.

[Wrath of Dagon]

I bought a steam controller recently and then a bunch of games I always wanted to play but not with a keyboard and mouse were on sale. So I loaded up, Thief, Stalker, Vampire Bloodlines, Brothers In Arms. I had to try all the new toys of course, but soon decided taking turns playing them all just wouldn't work, so I went back to my original plan and started with Thief. So far so good, it helped a lot when I figured out it highlights where you are on the map.

[CoM_Solaufein]

Thanks to the new Star Wars movie, I broke out Kotor 2 and started a game.

[HoonDing]

Lightning Returns has the biggest cluster**** ending since End of Evangelion.

 

Entire game feels like Lightning fanfiction at any rate. Still best FF since FFIX.

[Sarex]

Lightning Returns has the biggest cluster**** ending since End of Evangelion.

 

Entire game feels like Lightning fanfiction at any rate. Still best FF since FFIX.

 

I though Evangelion continued with the Rebuild.

[Humanoid]

Having a serious "that's XCOM" series of events in the last day. Or more accurately I guess, "that's Long War". I have my first casualty of the campaign, which happens to be me (that is, Cpl. Humanoid, I use a custom namelist) to a suppressed, 1hp Red Fog debuffed Muton who had a literal 1% chance to hit*. Then my best Scout gets crit for 10 damage on a 4% shot on the next mission: fortunately had 11hp, but she's out for 42 days.

 

That was on the first mission of a chain of four that will happen over the course of two in-game days: I had a small UFO come in low to land, which I let it do, but just as it did, another small arrived over the same country, this time scouting for my satellite. I shot that down. I did the landed UFO first since there's a smaller timeframe in which to do them. Then as I'm flying back from that mission, a medium UFO now lands, so I have to divert to do that now, but all my good troops are fatigued - I was going to send a weak group to the crashed small, but that group would in no way be prepared for the medium. So yeah, that was three UFOs on the same day. Finally as the icing on the cake, I have an Exalt mission due within 24 hours. Good god.

 

 

* One of the new Second Wave option is to see the hit chance of every shot fired.

[Gizmo]

Pillars of Eternity.  Fantastic... One peeve ~ Much as I like the Watcher insight stories for all the NPCs, it really burned me out on them as I discovered that most NPCs in the game have nothing to say.   I eventually just stopped bothering to read them ~despite every one of them I'd read being well done and fun to read.  Each was a treat ~not unlike like marzipan or chocolate covered cherries, but imagine being force fed a couple of crates of these... One gets sick on it rather quick, no matter how good they are.

Edited December 22, 2015 by Gizmo

[Rosbjerg]

Most were written by kickstarter backers actually.

[Fenixp]

I have read all of them that I managed to find, and I'm quite a completionist so I don't think I have missed more than just a tiny fraction. That being said, they add very little to the game and there's no real point to reading them, so if you skip them, nothing'll change about the game. I sure as hell won't read them again.

[Lexx]

It took me a while to realize they are backer npcs. The first few confused the hell out of me, because I thought there would be a possibility to further interact with them.

[Fenixp]

At first I thought their stories are somehow going to be tied to the game's sidequests, possibly main quest as well - you know, as means of getting more background information, possibly give you more options in some conversations on account of having that information. I thought that would be really cool. Well, they weren't and it wasn't.

[Tale]

I finished Fallout 4.

 

 

Desdemona, you're the best, but asking me to nuke some people I'm poised to be the leader of isn't cool. Like seriously uncool. I could have changed things! There were little children there! You forced my hand.

 

[Wrath of Dagon]

Most were written by kickstarter backers actually.

Yeah, I quit reading them once I realized that. Just a waste of time, although some of them were kind of cool.

[Darkpriest]

Did anyone of you tried the new baby from Mr. GOLLOP? I heard its pretty good but hard to master and fairly complex even for starters

[Hurlshort]

Did anyone of you tried the new baby from Mr. GOLLOP? I heard its pretty good but hard to master and fairly complex even for starters

 

Chaos Reborn?  I pledged it and have it on Steam, but I've never actually played it.  I don't know why.