What are you playing right now?

[Rosbjerg]

Old thread here.

 

Batman Arkham Knight + a bit of Planetary Annihilation Titans 

[Hurlshort]

Xcom 2 - Why are all my Avatar missions so far away from my base?

[Tale]

Trails in the Sky

 

I'm rather enjoying it, thought I've only just gotten past the Prologue and into Chapter 1.

 

And a bit of Star Wars Battlefront. They finally fix Lando tomorrow!

[Fenixp]

First episode of the new Hitman game.

 

I'm enjoying it... A lot, actually. I can already see a ton of replayability in the tutorial areas and the very first map. I only got the first episode to try it out and see how it is, but it's surpassing my expectations thus far - we'll see how will it stand up to replays and then I can get following episodes too. I did think that if there's a game that'd work as episodic content, it's Hitman, and ... That turned out to be true, so hooray. The game's incredibly detailed and with a ton of options.

 

I really enjoy that, when caught trespassing, the AI won't automatically mark you as 'identified' and chase you through the whole world - if the occupation you're impersonating could have gotten lost and strayed into the area you have been caught in, the security will just say "You're not supposed to be here, follow me, I'll lead you where you're supposed to be." On the other hand, if you're really not supposed to be here and a civilian catches you, he will go ask a guard for assistance - giving you ample time to get lost. And if guard sees you and you're really not supposed to be there, they first try to catch you and confirm your identity before raising alarm.

 

All in all, the infiltration mechanics are damn solid. Then again, I may be impressed by something that's already been done in previous Hitman games - I wouldn't know, I've never really played them that much.

 

Also, the game especially shines when you disable all the helper features like objective markers, Hitman vision and whatnot - I even ended up disabling minimap. Suddenly, intel telling me where where target is or where will target be in nearby future is invaluable, while identifying target in a crowd based on a picture's challenging. I'm having a lot of fun if you haven't noticed.

Edited January 16, 2017 by Fenixp

[Raithe]

First episode of the new Hitman game.

 

I'm enjoying it... A lot, actually. I can already see a ton of replayability in the tutorial areas and the very first map. I only got the first episode to try it out and see how it is, but it's surpassing my expectations thus far - we'll see how will it stand up to replays and then I can get following episodes too. I did think that if there's a game that'd work as episodic content, it's Hitman, and ... That turned out to be true, so hooray. The game's incredibly detailed and with a ton of options.

 

I really enjoy that, when caught trespassing, the AI won't automatically mark you as 'identified' and chase you through the whole world - if the occupation you're impersonating could have gotten lost and strayed into the area you have been caught in, the security will just say "You're not supposed to be here, follow me, I'll lead you where you're supposed to be." On the other hand, if you're really not supposed to be here and a civilian catches you, he will go ask a guard for assistance - giving you ample time to get lost. And if guard sees you and you're really not supposed to be there, they first try to catch you and confirm your identity before raising alarm.

 

All in all, the infiltration mechanics are damn solid. Then again, I may be impressed by something that's already been done in previous Hitman games - I wouldn't know, I've never really played them that much.

 

Also, the game especially shines when you disable all the helper features like objective markers, Hitman vision and whatnot - I even ended up disabling minimap. Suddenly, intel telling me where where target is or where will target be in nearby future is invaluable, while identifying target in a crowd based on a picture's challenging. I'm having a lot of fun if you haven't noticed.

 

Yes, that whole opening is great. The technical side and gameplay of the levels is pretty darn great throughout. The trouble is in the lack of storyline advancement - although to be fair, that might have been because I started in from the beginning episodes and had to wait months between releases. If you're coming at it fresh with it all there, it might be flowing better.

[Labadal]

Beat my third game of the year, Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell. It's basically all just side activities with very few 3-5 minute main story missions.

 

The other two games I have completed are Rise of the Argonauts and Deadlight.

[Fenixp]

Rise of the Argonauts

How did you like it? I remember playing it back when it came out and actually really enjoying it, but most of my attempts to replay it failed horribly.

[Keyrock]

I finished mission 12 in Shadow Tactics and I managed to do it without killing anybody.  It took me some 4 1/2 hours to complete that mission and it was one of the most absurdly difficult things I have ever done in all my years of gaming (It would have been really difficult even if I did kill people in this mission, but not killing anyone shot the difficulty past ludicrous and straight to plaid) .  I pulled some ridiculously slick maneuvers to make it happen and must have had to reload at least 60 times.  Oh, and there's still another mission to go.  For now, though, I'm going to relax and celebrate with a well earned beer.  I'm so giddy right now that I could explode.

 

I guess this is what people that are really into Dark Souls must feel like when they beat a super difficult boss.

Edited January 16, 2017 by Keyrock

[Labadal]

 

Rise of the Argonauts

How did you like it? I remember playing it back when it came out and actually really enjoying it, but most of my attempts to replay it failed horribly.

 

It was fun but flawed. I'm a sucker for Greek mythology, and there is no difference this time. (Despite them not giving a crap about how accurate they were with stuff, almost nothing!) Combat was serviceable. Voice acting was decent. Music was solid. The game is linear, like you know. I basically treated it like God of War if it was leaning more towards role playing game.

 

I found the three weapons distinct enough, and liked to use them all. I wasn't really impressed with enemy variety but the bosses were fun. I liked some of the companions. I had Hercules and Pan with me whenever I could. About the story, I saw what was coming after like ten minutes, but I don't really care.

 

I'd like to see more games with mythical characters, even i the game is very free with the implementation of said characters.

 

What I thought was cool was the perk system. In reality, it might not be any different from any other games, but how you got aspects was cool, and choosing which God to "align" with in dialog was another part that could raise your affinity in said aspect.

[Fenixp]

Oh yeah, that pretty much aligns with what I remember of it. I think they had a nice take on Medusa. I think?

[BruceVC]

I am  having a really frustrating time with new games simply not working for me, so 

 

• Dishonored 2  :  Waiting for patch 1.4 as the game plays for 10 minutes or so and then crashes, this is something many people are experiencing and has something to do with low framerate
• Assassins Creed: Black Flag :  This is even worse, my framerate is consistent yet the game just crashes to windows. According to Steam forums this happens to some people and has never been fixed

End of last year I finished Witcher 3 and all the extensions and clocked 200 hours and that whole time the game crashed maybe 3-5 times 

[Fenixp]

Finished Dishonored 2 on high chaos, playing Emily. I'll preclude this by saying that it was still a ton of fun and pretty much everything I said about the game still applies, but all in all, my first low chaos, clean hands playthrough was more enjoyable.

 

First of all, the game is nowhere near as reactive as the original was. I didn't notice neither details nor big things changing based on my different approach to various situations, nor based on my decisions. Some things changed, mostly completely inconsequential, but nothing remotely as major as the difference between low and high chaos version of the last level in the original.

 

Guard AI, while significantly improved when you're trying to ghost your way through your game, got rather dumbed down for direct combat. While they can hear you skulking about, they're somehow capable of not only ignoring loud gunshots and carnage happening pretty much nextdoor, they'll sometimes notice nothing amiss when they're far enough, yet looking straight at you killing their friends! This stops applying when somebody rings an alarm tho, for some reason. AI in Dishonored 1 was a good deal better in this respect, albeit far from perfect either.

 

And lastly, it was just... Incredibly easy. Even in spite of Emily's powers being generally less powerful than Corvo's ones and in spite of me playing on the highest difficulty, I have rarely encountered a situation where I'd feel too threatened and whenever I did, I just teleported away.

 

All in all, the high chaos aspects just feel rushed. Which is a great shame.

 

However, the game is still carried by its rather ingenious level design, and I'll do another ghost Flesh and Steel playthrough soon enough. (Flesh and steel means you refuse your powers and play the entire game as an ordinary human.) I wonder what kinds of opportunities will this playstyle offer, considering developers had to account specifically for it.

[the_dog_days]

I heard about the AI issues for Dishonored 2 back when it first released. I thought they were supposed to fix it in a patch.

[Labadal]

Oh yeah, that pretty much aligns with what I remember of it. I think they had a nice take on Medusa. I think?

It's a boss battle. I quite liked it.

[melkathi]

Started playing Torn Tales. An action rpg a la Van Helsing, Victor Vran etc, in which you control a party of three characters: Robin Hood, Snow White and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. You control one character through the usual mouse clicking, while the other two follow your example with basic AI similar to Katarina in Van Helsing - with the difference that here you can freely switch between them.

The idea is that a heartless old man tried to write stories nobody wanted to read, and in revenge he is rewriting the existing tales and thus Snow White and Dr. Jekyll end up in Sherwood.

 

Sadly I found the game rather disappointing so far. The graphics are very much sub par. While I am not a graphics whore, when it is the setting that is supposed to draw you in, I want it do exactly that. Torn Tales so far has been simply bland even on the highest settings, leaving me to wonder how there can even be lower settings.

Gameplay has also not been too impressive. On the one hand, while skills show some promise down the line, the combat is, at least early on, not engaging. In other action rpgs you often have a left click and right click skill plus whatever hotkeys. Here you have a left click autoattack/move to attack and a right click move while ignoring enemy - more akin to rts units than an rpg. The real problem here is that your left/right click commands all three heroes, so while Dr. Jekyll is tanking the Huntsman for example, and you right click for him to evade the powerful chop attack, this also disengages the other two who run after Jekyll. When you try to run Robin Hood out of the path of the Big Bad Wolf's charge, this will also cause the other two to run. And AI pathfinding is not great, neither is aggro. According to Steam I played 45 minutes tonight. For a new game with a theme right up my alley, I had hoped for more on the first night before I quit.

[Vaeliorin]

Still playing XCOM2, though I had to start a new campaign because I can not get Additional Mission Types to play well with A Better Advent 2 (either empty missions or messed up maps...I had a Rioting City mission that dumped me in the map for the final mission.)  Added some other new mods, so now I have 14 classes to choose from (makes it hard to decide what classes should make up your A Squad.)  Spec Op Throwing Knives are awesome.  They let your stealth units actually participate without breaking stealth (when you throw one, as long as it kills the enemy, you don't break stealth) so they don't take forever to level up (because normally I don't want my stealth units to attack, because then I won't have stealth later, obviously.)  Only 2 uses per mission and they count as a grenade, so they're relatively balanced (and late game they likely won't do enough damage to one shot things...they only have a 67% chance to one shot trooper types right now.)  Given I've got ABA 2 with default settings (so pods of up to 6 by mid-game) I don't mind a little bit of OPness.

 

Also, mission names are still awesome.  Had Operation Chicken Wagon the other day.

[Humanoid]

Today I heard about Overcooked for the first time and immediately bought it for some four-player co-op insanity while I'm still on holiday. It's a blast with the full complement of players, pretty good with two players, and while I didn't try it solo, probably would suck single player. Shame it's local co-op only so it's not something I can play when I get home next week. Best co-op game since Monaco, which I absolutely adore.

[Keyrock]

I finished Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun.  It took me nearly 35 hours to do it (I play slowly, the reports I've read from most people is around 25 hours).  My full review of the game follows (giant wall of text alert!):

 

For the tl;dr crowd: This game is awesome and I feel amazing after finishing it. GotY 2016.

 

 

Many years ago there was a genre of gaming where you controlled a small squad of characters in real time from an isometric perspective and led them through levels where you must employ stealth since you are heavily outnumbered and stand no chance in a straight up battle.  The most well known series in the genre was Commandos, but there was also the Desperados series and Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood.  These games were tactical and hard as nails.  Then, nearly 15 years ago, the genre mostly disappeared and it seemed it was dead.

 

 

Along came Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun in 2016.  Would this mark the revival of the genre?  Also, could Shadow Tactics live up to the standard of excellence set forth by the Commandos series (the first two games, at least)?  Only time can answer the first question, but the answer to the second question is a resounding YES!

 

 

Shadow Tactics takes place in Japan around the Edo Period.  In the game you control a group of 5 characters, each with their own unique set of abilities.  As is customary in this genre, you are always heavily outnumbered and must use stealth, planning, timing, and deception to achieve your goals.

 

 

The campaign is divided into 13 missions and it took me just under 35 hours to complete it.  Keep in mind that I game slowly so my completion times tend to be longer than the average.

 

 

The game is played from an isometric perspective and you can rotate the camera freely to get a better view of things.  Patience, planning, and timing are key here.  This is not a game you can rush through unless you have the levels memorized and you are extremely good at this sort of game.  You will need to use your team's full complement of abilities to lure, distract, separate, thin out, or bypass the ranks of the enemies on the way to your ultimate goal.  As you get further into the game the challenges get tougher and tougher, requiring many moving parts and increasingly razor thin timing to overcome.  To help you along, the team at Mimimi Productions included Shadow Mode, a tool where you can queue up one command for a character that you can execute later by pressing Enter.  You can assign a Shadow Mode command to as many characters as you like and when you press Enter they will all execute their commands simultaneously.  It's a great tool and very necessary to bypass some obstacles.  This is a game where you will fail a lot.  To that end, you can quicksave (or manual save, for that matter) at any time and as often as you like.  The game even includes a timer near the top of the screen that changes color after a while and warns you that you haven't saved in a while.  You can, of course, turn this timer off, but it's a great reminder to save often, very often.

 

 

What impressed me most about this game is the level design.  Simply put, Shadow Tactics has the best level design I have seen in any game in many years.  The level environments are expertly crafted and enemy placements and patrol routes are cleverly designed to present challenges that seem impossible at first but nevertheless have multiple solutions.  The enemy AI is also quite solid and they respond in a fairly logical manner when they discover a missing guardsman, or that they've been knocked unconscious previously, or that they see tracks in the snow.

 

 

Visually, the game looks great.  While it's not going to win any awards for visual fidelity, the game has a really nice aesthetic that's consistent and well executed throughout.  There are also a lot of little details in both the visual design and the animations that are not essential but really great to see.  Mimimi Productions put a lot of attention into the game's design.

 

 

The game also sounds really good.  You have the option to use English or Japanese voice acting.  I can't comment on the quality of the Japanese dialogue, since I don't speak the language, but the English voice acting is all quite solid.  The soundtrack is high quality and perfect for the setting.  Nothing truly memorable, but everything of high quality.

 

 

The story is nothing to write home about, but it does it's job decently enough of giving your characters an excuse to go on the adventures that they do. There are some twists along the way and some emotional moments.  Nothing that would win an award for writing, but competent enough.

 

 

True to its predecessors, Shadow Tactics is very hard.  There are 3 difficulty settings: Beginner, Normal, and Hardcore.  I can't speak for Beginner or Hardcore, since I played through all the missions on Normal, but I can say that Normal difficulty is extremely hard, as it should be.  It's hard, but it's fair.  I never felt like the game was using cheese tactics to cheat me.  When I failed, and I failed A LOT, I failed because I either made an execution error or my plan was faulty.  There were challenges where I failed and reloaded over a dozen times until I got the execution and timing just right or I went back to the drawing board and came up with a better plan.  There are also extra challenges you can, but are not required to, achieve.  Plus, I added other challenges of my own as I role played my characters.  For example, at the very beginning I told myself I would kill no civilians ever.  There was a level I decided to kill every single soldier, even going out of my way to do it.  There was a level I decided to kill no one, not even soldiers.  I had reasons for all of these which I will not reveal because spoilers.  You don't have to follow these rules, you can kill civilians if you like and that will make some challenges a little easier, though the game will still be quite hard.  I do intend to go back and try some of the missions on Hardcore difficulty, just to see if I can crack the puzzles on the ultimate level of difficulty, but that may be beyond my abilities.  I was quite proud of myself for just being able to beat the game on Normal.

 

 

Overall, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is a triumph.  This game not only brings back the real-time, isometric, stealth tactics genre, it does so in style.  I came into this game hoping it could be nearly as good as Commandos and Desperados.  Shadow Tactics blew all my expectations out of the water and cemented itself as a classic all its own.  I would wholeheartedly recommend this game to anyone that played and liked the older games I mentioned and to anyone that likes tactical stealth gameplay and ruthlessly hard but fair challenges.

Edited January 19, 2017 by Keyrock

[ShadySands]

More LOTRO. I finally got around to pre-ordering Andromeda so I guess I'll have that to look forward to in a couple more months. Hopefully the new CK2 DLC drops soon

[Vaeliorin]

So, unbeknownst to me, A Better Advent 2 adds some mission variants into XCOM 2. So, color me surprised when I drop into a Retaliation mission, and there's like 8 civilians in visual range. So I blue move my scout to grab a civilian, and lo and behold, it's a Faceless. Just bad luck I assume, and move my scout away to grab 2 more nearby civilians. Just my luck, I trigger a squad of Advent, and, surprise, one of them's a Faceless. At this point, I figure something's got to be up. So I kill the two Faceless and two of the four Advent. Enemy turn comes, and what do I behold but another civilian turning into a Faceless, who runs up and dings one of my soldiers, while another takes 5 damage from an Advent Kommisar (a captain variant that returns fire.) So, I kill the Faceless and the Advent, and begin cautiously across the map, killing an additional 5 Faceless (for a total of 8 so far) before I encounter another Advent patrol. I kill two and freeze the other two, because I have to figure there are more Faceless around and I need guys on overwatch. Amazingly, no Faceless get revealed, and the next turn I kill the remaining two Advent, at which point 7 more Faceless reveal themselves. I'm kind of worried at this point, because no way do I have enough guys left with actions to kill 7 Faceless, and one of them is definitely within range to attack me. So I move everyone I can as far away from the bulk of the Faceless as I can, kill the nearby one, overwatch, and pray. 6 Faceless charge me, 2 of them getting killed by overwatch (I've got mag weapons, and one of my soldiers that uses a cannon got Lethal from the AWC, so he does 8-10 damage, and he one hit a Faceless with his overwatch), and fortunately none of them manage to reach me. Now it's just a matter of cleanup, so I drop an Incendiary grenade on 2 of them, and manage to take out all 4 of them thanks to every shot hitting.

 

So, mission accomplished. 23 aliens dead (which is a pretty typical number for a mission at this point), 15 of which were Faceless, 14 civvies saved (Advent didn't attack them...I'm guessing so as not to make the Faceless obvious) and if I used mimic beacons (I don't) I'd be set for the rest of the campaign. I was pretty freaked out when I started finding all the Faceless, but honestly, it was probably easier than a typical Retaliation (which are honestly my least favorite missions in the game, but this one was really fun.) Now I just have to deal with the fact there's only 5 days until the Avatar project completes and 2 of my top soldiers are in the infirmary. At least I have access to the Blacksite.

 

I'm loving this campaign.

Edited January 19, 2017 by Vaeliorin

[ShadySands]

Has anyone played or heard anything about WH40K Sanctus Reach? Considering getting it but trying to get the scoop on it first

 

PS do you guys run any other mods with XCOM2 or just Long War 2? Reinstalling that now

Edited January 20, 2017 by ShadySands

[Katphood]

I might pick up Yakuza 0 later on, seems to be a decent game and the perfect place to start the series.

[Vaeliorin]

PS do you guys run any other mods with XCOM2 or just Long War 2? Reinstalling that now

I'm running Gotcha (Flank Preview), Additional Icons (with the loot icons turned off), Perfect Information, CapnBub's, and UIKillCounter along with Long War 2.

 

There are things I like about Long War 2 and things I really, really hate. The changes to the attack formula are so annoying (a 113% shot shouldn't give me -3% to crit because the hit chance is "too low" and it shouldn't freaking graze.) I hate some of the new sidearms (my gunner definitely is gonna use that knife a lot...), but love some of the other ones (Arc Thrower ftw.) I don't get the Holotargeter at all (am I really gonna want to give up my sniper's attack for a 10% bonus to hit that often?) unless you take the free action every 4 turns perk, which means you have to skip Snapshot (and given the Squadsight penalties in XCOM2, I much prefer a Snapshot sniper.)

 

Also, I'd kind of like to punch whoever decided rocket scatter should be a thing in the face. My one use per mission item/ability shouldn't cause more harm than good when I use it (I may be bitter that the first time I used it, instead of hitting the 3 Advent I was aiming at, it blew up the building containing the people I was trying to rescue and killed one of them.)

 

Kind of hoping there's an ini setting to turn off the rainbow colored ability bar, as well.

 

There seem to be a lot of good things, too. The Geoscape seems interesting, though I'll have to see more of it to know for sure. I like the Infiltration mechanic, and some of the new missions I've encountered (it was kind of cool to do a mission without a shot fired. Never broke cover until I hacked the cell doors of some resistance folks, and a turn later we were on the Skyranger...although I may have accidentally thrown a grenade while trying to evac...) It definitely feels more like a Resistance/Guerilla War now, and funding seems hard to come by (no more having almost a hundred trooper corpses by the time the Black Market opens ) Definitely looking forward to playing more of it (and hoping some more mods get updated with compatibility...I really miss True Concealment.)

[melkathi]

Bah, just install the nude mod and be done with it

Edited January 20, 2017 by melkathi

[Mamoulian War]

I might pick up Yakuza 0 later on, seems to be a decent game and the perfect place to start the series.

Prepurchased today :-P I really loved Yakuza 4, but still hating Sega for making Yakuza 5 digital download only in EU :'(

Edited January 20, 2017 by Mamoulian War