What are you playing right now

[WDeranged]

Using your pack mule -- I mean housecarl -- as a damage sponge makes combat so much easier in Skyrim.  The enemy pounds away at my servant while I shoot them from afar.

 

Get yourself some conjuration spells too 

[Orogun01]

 

I don't have The White March, but if it's the same way, I won't be getting it.

 

It's very Icewind Dale and I personally like the companions a lot more.. Although many seem to have found them a bit too wacky for the setting.

 

I thought so too but then I also got vibes of PS:T, which after knowing about the internal turmoil at Obsidian seems like this game's design was a tug of war between a lot of people.

[the_dog_days]

I have an grass owl in my pocket named 'Que?'. Bless you, Pokémon, bless you.

[Malcador]

Pushing along in Tropico 5. The overall plot is....kind of bonkers, to be honest, but what can they do.

[redneckdevil]

Been playing killing floor 2 on PS4. Damn they did a good job, playing on normal and think I've only beaten the boss I think once lol. Nice and intense, great game to unwind to after working lol

[GhostofAnakin]

 

Using your pack mule -- I mean housecarl -- as a damage sponge makes combat so much easier in Skyrim.  The enemy pounds away at my servant while I shoot them from afar.

 

Get yourself some conjuration spells too 

 

 

You know, I keep forgetting to even bother with those.  I stick with my fire spells and just go into a routine.

[HoonDing]

I always kill Sapphire when entering Riften. Funny how no one ever reacts, likely because she's Thieves Guild member and she's part of a scripted event.

[CoM_Solaufein]

Playing Skyrim at the moment, visited all of the Dwemer sites and starting doing stuff in the Civil War. Getting bored.

[Orogun01]

I have an grass owl in my pocket named 'Que?'. Bless you, Pokémon, bless you.

The actual word for who is Quien so that joke almost happened.

[Nonek]

Temple of Elemental Evil, with the (excellent) Circle of Eight and Temple+ mods, still the best combat in a fantasy RPG but it's a pity they couldn't have gone with one of the better Greyhawk adventures. I know this is near heresy to some, but i've never had much of a fondness for most of Gygax' adventures, and there were some really brilliant modules released that garnered none of the fame the legendary Oerth ones did.

 

The Falcon trilogy, especially when integrated with the Greyhawk city setting, was a fantastic experience. Indeed one could craft an almost entire campaign in the Jewel of the Flannaes, I know as I did, with ocassional forays into the Gnarly, the Cairn Hills, Abbor Alz, Mistmarsh etcetera.

Edited November 19, 2016 by Nonek

[Malcador]

Finally got around to trying Tomb Raider. Fun game, I like that enemies aren't bullet sponges, even if Lara's SAS training has been awoken

Edited November 20, 2016 by Malcador

[Fenixp]

Continuing with Dishonored 2. I have found some minor annoyances, like when you're trying to ghost the game on your first playthrough, there are some sections where I'd never expect to get detected - but that might just be on me being careless.

 

On the other hand, I dig the non-lethal options Arkane has added since the first game. There's a bolt with neurotoxin which makes a guard lose his short-term memory, forgetting he's seen you and making him flee in terror. There's a bolt with a serum that makes guards blind for a few moments. There are of course sleeping darts. ("So why should I blind guards instead?" - Well, doing so will allow you to slip past for the price of alerting a guard, but it won't create a discoverable body). Then there are stun mines that you can place on patrol paths and which'll zap a guard, knocking him out.

 

Of course, then there are skill-based non-lethal options - You can choke them out as in the first game. Jumping on a guard from height doesn't need to be finished by killing him, you can also knock him down. If you time your parry right and knock guard off-balance, you can knock him out (this takes time tho and also involves choking them out, so you can't do it in an encounter with multiple opponents)

 

Generally, non-lethal playstyle is a lot more fun and offers many more options - but as opposed to Mankind Divided, it's not the same thing as lethal, just pressing different buttons, it's genuinely the more challenging way of playing the game.

[Tale]

Finished my first run of Tyranny. I'm liable to wait on a second run until there's some news about DLC. Battlefront has a 4x XP weekend, so hitting that up now.

[SadExchange]

Continuing with Dishonored 2. I have found some minor annoyances, like when you're trying to ghost the game on your first playthrough, there are some sections where I'd never expect to get detected - but that might just be on me being careless.

 

On the other hand, I dig the non-lethal options Arkane has added since the first game. There's a bolt with neurotoxin which makes a guard lose his short-term memory, forgetting he's seen you and making him flee in terror. There's a bolt with a serum that makes guards blind for a few moments. There are of course sleeping darts. ("So why should I blind guards instead?" - Well, doing so will allow you to slip past for the price of alerting a guard, but it won't create a discoverable body). Then there are stun mines that you can place on patrol paths and which'll zap a guard, knocking him out.

 

Of course, then there are skill-based non-lethal options - You can choke them out as in the first game. Jumping on a guard from height doesn't need to be finished by killing him, you can also knock him down. If you time your parry right and knock guard off-balance, you can knock him out (this takes time tho and also involves choking them out, so you can't do it in an encounter with multiple opponents)

 

Generally, non-lethal playstyle is a lot more fun and offers many more options - but as opposed to Mankind Divided, it's not the same thing as lethal, just pressing different buttons, it's genuinely the more challenging way of playing the game.

Are you playing it on the pc or PS4? I've put in a few hours and have really variable performance on the of. Can get 60 on ultra settings but out of nowhere the performance will drop to 30ish however right before it'll tank to single digits for a quick second completely jarring the experience. Seems there's a lot of people with the same experience. Looking forward to their next patch next week that'll focus on performance as it appears the pic version was released a little early. Love the mechanics and stuff he early levels are gorgeous and varied in paths and missions.

 

Just want a more solid experience and no, lowering specs do not change any performance issues sadly. Seems to be an engine issue.

[Fenixp]

I'm not a great person to ask about performance because my rig's CPU doesn't meet minimal requirements, has only 8 gigs of ram and I don't even have SSD. That said, Dishonored 2 runs well on high preset with some stuff bumped up to ultra for me - 'well' as in at above 30 frames per second, which is better than what I expected, considering. And yes, it does happen that occasionally framerate drops down for a second or two, but we're talking about this occurring like once per a few hours? Due to fairly low RAM and crappy HDD tho, I'm ... Kinda used to games doing it so I never really give it a second thought.

 

Performance is certainly a concern, still is - it runs better for me after some NVidia driver updates, but it never seemed to run terribly in the first place. I hope Arkane fixes their game as soon as possible tho so that I can recommend it to anybody without hesitation - then again, optimization work is never trivial and if it was a week's worth of work, they'd just delay the launch. If id tech 5 can be fixed to run well at that fidelity at any rate. Having poor performance staining an excellent title like this until it's massively overpowered by computers running it would be a massive shame.

[SadExchange]

I had 8 GB at the moment for RAM, however don't believe that's the problem because when it's running, my memory usage generally doesn't go past 5.5 GB of the 8.  I'm not a computer expert by any standards, but I also don't think the SSD drive would help with the stuttering.  What I'm thinking is it might be the VRAM, my card has 6 GB, but from what I read, when putting graphics on very high or ultra, the game actually using 5.8 GB of that and that might be causing some stuttering, but not sure.  I'm thinking and hoping it has more to do with the engine.  Those problems aside, as I said before, the level designs and atmosphere are superb and once these issues, including some audio issues as well, get resolved, this game is an easy recommendation to most gamers.

[Malcador]

Played way too much Tomb Raider. Almost at the inevitable boss fight with some Japanese statue. Fun game so far, I am being lazy and not doing the collectable grind.

[Fenixp]

On the upside, generally speaking, it seems that if you think you can do something in Dishonored 2, you totally can. The game's incredible in giving player crazy amounts of agency.

 

On the neutral side, I spent like 15 minutes brute forcing a 3 digit lock combination just for the game to praise me for finding the hidden code at the end of the mission. Thanks, game.

 

On the downside, the mission I just played gave even my generally well-running game routine stutters. It might have just been something my OS was doing in the background, I wasn't monitoring my HW at the time, but this time it bothered even me. The next mission runs fine again.

[Guard Dog]

You know, the first sequence in Skyrim, the carriage ride into Helgen. That is a pretty awesome way to start that game. It hooks you in, gives you a sense of what's going on and does it with a minimal amount of exposition. From a story telling perspective... well done.

[Lexx]

You know, the first sequence in Skyrim, the carriage ride into Helgen. That is a pretty awesome way to start that game. It hooks you in, gives you a sense of what's going on and does it with a minimal amount of exposition. From a story telling perspective... well done.

 

Yeah, but you can never skip it, which makes it a huge pain in the arse if you ever think about restarting the game. Then it suddenly becomes long and annoying to slog through.

[Agiel]

Is there not a spot before the actual character creation where you can save the game? And isn't there an opportunity to change your appearance a bit before the opening sequence ends?

[Tale]

Played a good deal of Battlefront over the weekend. I really enjoy this game. I'm sort of pre-emptively missing it for when I stop playing it.

 

Trying to familiarize myself with RPGMaker MV, too. I kind of wish it came packed with a strong sample game to take apart. That's how I'm used to learning these things. Taking apart Morrowind, Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2, even Shadowrun. I wanted to take apart Dragon Age: Origins for a mod project, but then I found they won't even let you access most of the core games assets or scripts. But it's probably not time efficient to try the old methods.

 

I'm challenged by the desire to learn aspects of the tools that aren't really relevant to what I'm doing now. Played briefly with the character generation system, found things it was lacking and almost went around hunting for ways to get what I want. Fought the urge to fill the database with items, set up classes, equip the placeholder characters with equipment analogs. I also tried seeing if their Javascript system had a built-in editor. It doesn't look like it. I have no need of scripting my own plugins yet... Distractions...

 

Took a look at their event system to see how I can apply triggers and am a bit lost already. That's precisely where I'd go to dissecting existing content to figure out. But maybe youtube tutorials will get me the same results with less trial and error.

[Guard Dog]

Is there not a spot before the actual character creation where you can save the game? And isn't there an opportunity to change your appearance a bit before the opening sequence ends?

Well you can use the "showracemenu" console command. There is a mod that puts a barber in whiterun that runs that script for free (rather than paying to do it in Riften).  

[Fenixp]

Or you can just play with Alternate Start.

[Guard Dog]

 

You know, the first sequence in Skyrim, the carriage ride into Helgen. That is a pretty awesome way to start that game. It hooks you in, gives you a sense of what's going on and does it with a minimal amount of exposition. From a story telling perspective... well done.

 

Yeah, but you can never skip it, which makes it a huge pain in the arse if you ever think about restarting the game. Then it suddenly becomes long and annoying to slog through.

 

There are a couple of alternate start mods. Two of the ones I've tried were well done and you avoid the Helgen attack sequence all together. One actually randomized where you start. You literally begin the game in the middle of you character's life. I did this one twice. Once I was a miner in Dawnstar, the other I was in the Inn in that town near Solitiude. Dragonbridge. But this mod has one flaw; to trigger the main quest you have to ask an innkeeper about rumors to find out about Helgen BEFORE going to Helgen if you don't do it right away. If you wait too long and the bandits spawn in Helgen then there is no main quest, no Alduin and you'll never know why Helgen got trashed and why Balgruf keeps talking about a dragon attack no one saw.

 

The other one, Live another Life, has you starting in true Elder Scrolls fashion... in jail. But not in Helgen. Like the other you find out about the main quest through rumors or by going to Helgen but it keeps Helgen from spawining bandits so it's ready whenever you are. There are no bugs on that one that I ever saw but there are a lot of compatibility conflicts with some of the other big mods. Nothing unusual about that though. Lots of game overhauls don't play nice together.