What are you playing right now?

Looks like they're changing war exhaustion to not force a status quo. Instead you take happiness, influence, and unity penalty until you accept.

 

After I finish Chaos;Child, hopefully they'll have a good patch out and I'll do my next game. The War Exhaustion change makes me want to do yet another Machine Empire. I could see warring through exhaustion until the enemy empire fragments from rebellion. But I think I'll just do my Technocrat empire instead, so I have an excuse to blow up all the planets.

Waiting for Titan Quest on the switch but may pick it up on the PS4 at the end of March, but recently picked up the expansion on the pc and making my way through from the start and into Act 4 and just having a good time.

 

Although I will say it’s much easier to go through with the ability to change the game speed in the options menu:)

I got stomped like 3 times from latest patch. I am unable to win my first wars, I have always feels on other side of my empire and they move SOOO SLOW

 

Both empires on my borders formed a very early defensive pact forcing me to deal with both or do nothing. I eventually defeated them both by salami slicing their empires and defeating their fleets by placing outpost and starbases with defense platforms near the borders and goading their fleets into attacking them.

 

Progress is slow and constatnly fighting on two fronts racks up war exhaustion quickly. Took me several declarations of war with enforced peace treaties in between to finally punch them hard enough so they no longer matter.

 

I just wish I could make them vassals or tributaries. For some reason while I can adpot the domination tradition it didn't unlock the options for me. Googled a bit but I still don't know if machine empires aren't supposed to be able to create vassals in 2.0 (and should have a different set of traditions in place of domination) or if it is just bugged.

There's a bug in domination. Any empire with a modified version of the domination tradition, such as machine empires, does not get checked properly for vassalization/tributary.

Not playing but testing out the FFXV demo. I shoved it over to the 4K TV and played it at 1440 everything High and max quality texture assets (4k textures I guess), to start with, out of curiosity.  It was largely like in the benchmark (even with Hairworks off) where 50-60ish fps but sometimes tanks down to 35ish. And the 6GB of GPU ram on the 980ti basically ran always maxed out with the 4k textures. Heh.

 

if I drop it down to some Average, some High settings and turned all the Gameworks off, 50-70fps became more the norm, with no drops. One notch lower in texture quality = 70% of gpu ram eaten.

 

So I think a lot of people could run it ok at 1080 with some mixture of settings, since this was on my ancient i7-920. My CPU temp didn't go up that high either, I was surprised by that.

 

At higher resolutions it looks pretty sweet graphically and lighting-wise but at 1080 with a wide mix of average or low it looks worse than the PS4-Pro, imo. Especially if you turn the AA off.

Edited February 26, 2018 by LadyCrimson

Battlefield 4. It ain't Bad Company 2 but it'll do.

I has a new computer, so I decided to stress-test it by jumping into the most graphically demanding game that has been on my "meaning to play" list for the past few years:  The Witcher 3.

 

I'm still level 1, tooling around the starting area, and trying to decide which skills I'm planning to build on.  I found one Place of Power and put the point in Axii, because the description said that it helped with conversational use, and I knew that I'd want that eventually.  I'm not much of a twitch gamer-- I made it through Witcher 2 mostly on Quen-spam.  But I'm guessing that isn't quite as hilariously overpowered here as it was in the previous installment. 

 

Is there a generally accepted way to build Geralt to get by with a lackadaisical approach to silly details like "timing dodges" and "aiming"?  I'm assuming that something Signs-heavy is the way to go, but the new system where only a limited number of abilities can be active is confusing me. 

^ Set the difficulty to easy (it's called Just The Story, I think). Signs heavy will work. You can zorch your way through many encounters. I'm a big fan of the sign that creates a circle on the ground that slows enemies, Yrden I think. The alt form of that sign places what is essentially a turret on the ground, it's stoopid useful, especially against flying foes , as it can knock them out of the air and cause them to fall.

Thanks.  I recall Yrden being too fussy to used much in the previous games (didn't it require setting 2 endpoints to make a line?), but your description makes it sound like it's definitely something I should explore here. 

 

I'd prefer to go as far as I can without dropping to the minimum difficulty.  Ideally, I'd like there to be some challenge-- I'd just prefer to meet it more with gear/talent/buff optimization than with thumb-twitching. 

Just played "Into the Breach" for about an hour (new tactics game from FTL people). It's really really good. Seems like those guys have some serious design chops, not just one hit wonder.

 

 

Pillars of Eternity - PS4 edition.

 

How is it?

 

PS.  Hi, stranger.

 

Hey yourself!

 

Also, it's pretty good, though I've only started a few days ago. Reminds me a lot of Baldur's Gate.

 

 

I still need to pick it up (the PS4 version) when it drops a bit in price.

 

I never did get around to playing the White Marsh expansions on the PC version.

Thanks.  I recall Yrden being too fussy to used much in the previous games (didn't it require setting 2 endpoints to make a line?), but your description makes it sound like it's definitely something I should explore here. 

 

I'd prefer to go as far as I can without dropping to the minimum difficulty.  Ideally, I'd like there to be some challenge-- I'd just prefer to meet it more with gear/talent/buff optimization than with thumb-twitching. 

Yrden is easy to cast in TW3.  It just creates the circle with the center being wherever you're standing.  To use the alt form (after you unlock it in the skill tree) you hold down the cast button for a while instead of just pressing it

Chaos;Head

 

I came for crazy high school Steins;Gate, but now it's starting to feel like bloodless Dies Irae. Psychic swords is a bit too Chuuni for my tastes.

Axii is great in TW3, you can let human enemies kill each other and stun pretty much every monster.

I used Quen for the most part. Yrden can also come in handy if you're dealing with specters and such.

Just played "Into the Breach" for about an hour (new tactics game from FTL people). It's really really good. Seems like those guys have some serious design chops, not just one hit wonder.

Bought it right now and am currently installing. Was waiting for this since it was announced - and then forgot about it on release date! 

"I used Quen for the most part. Yrden can also come in handy if you're dealing with specters and such."

 

The sequels did make some of the rarely (if ever) used signs useful, otoh they made Aard utterly useless in exchange.

 

Just played "Into the Breach" for about an hour (new tactics game from FTL people). It's really really good. Seems like those guys have some serious design chops, not just one hit wonder.

 

Bought it right now and am currently installing. Was waiting for this since it was announced - and then forgot about it on release date! 

They dropped the RNG, which works for this type of game. Reminds me somewhat of Klei’s Invisible Inc. as a tactics game where results of your actions are 100% predictable and yet leads to some really unexpected situations.

Played it for 2 hours or so now and it's really fun. The music is also great - like in FTL. 

"I used Quen for the most part. Yrden can also come in handy if you're dealing with specters and such."

 

The sequels did make some of the rarely (if ever) used signs useful, otoh they made Aard utterly useless in exchange.

My impression was that the other signs are only useful in the higher difficulty settings. I used Igni at the beginning of the game(normal difficulty) but later on, during some of the more challenging encounters of the game I had to use Quen. Alchemy on the the other hand was never used unless the quest forced me to do so. I remember using Cat Eye a lot more in The Witcher 1.

 

I still haven't played 2 which is stupid...just 1 and 3.

In TW3 it seemed only decoctions were really worth using. I don't remember even using one oil. In the end combat was decided only by level anyway.

 

What was really lame was TW2/3 didn't even have an animation where Geralt applied the oil to his blade.

Edited March 1, 2018 by HoonDing

I wish there were more games like the original TW game. It wasn't 'open world' but each chapter had an interesting story to tell and the side-quests and the character were mostly connected to each other. This made the world feel a whole lot more alive compared to TW3.

 

Playing TW2 for the first time is going to be interesting. I have it on Steam so one of these days I'm gonna give it a go.

"I used Quen for the most part. Yrden can also come in handy if you're dealing with specters and such."

 

The sequels did make some of the rarely (if ever) used signs useful, otoh they made Aard utterly useless in exchange.

I dunno, it's useful to completely breeze through phase 1 of the B&W boss.

Done with Destiny 2, on to the new Assassin's Creed.

Oof, gave up on Overwatch. Can't deal with the pubbies. I dunno what it is but that's the most toxic game community I've ever seen.

 

Sorry to bring this conversation back up but I felt the game could have benefited from bigger player counts in a game as well as dedicated servers, bringing it in line with TF2 and made a game that I would have totally been on board with. Servers would go a long way towards building communities that regulars could come back to, and the bigger player counts would have had the effect of reducing the effect a sub-par or mediocre player would have had on the overall effectiveness of a team.