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I'm certainly shit at games compared to the good folks who like to do solo nightmare challenges, play competitive multiplayer, and so on. I usually play games at normal difficulty on a first playthrough. If I really like the game, I bump it up a notch for a second one, unless -- as is too often the case -- the harder difficulty just introduces more grind and more busywork.
How about you Cael? What difficulty do you usually play at when you jump into a new game?
I completed Golems of Anggarak on Nightmare to get the Cudgel in the main game. Using a rogue that completed the main game. Who started naked because she was using DLC gear and those were not supported by DLCs in DAO.
Yes, THAT fight on Nightmare using a rogue with gear found in that DLC alone.
I completed Golems of Anggarak on Nightmare to get the Cudgel in the main game. Using a rogue that completed the main game. Who started naked because she was using DLC gear and those were not supported by DLCs in DAO.
I completed Golems of Anggarak on Nightmare to get the Cudgel in the main game. Using a rogue that completed the main game. Who started naked because she was using DLC gear and those were not supported by DLCs in DAO.
Yep. Thought so. An inept fool trying to sound knowledgeable about the game he is shit at and putting it down not because it is legitimately hard or bad, but because he is useless at the game and trying to save "face" when called on his lies. Fucker's a mainlander by any other name.
Yep. Thought so. An inept fool trying to sound knowledgeable about the game he is shit at and putting it down not because it is legitimately hard or bad, but because he is useless at the game and trying to save "face" when called on his lies. Fucker's a mainlander by any other name.
What do you think of DA:O? I take it you like it if you've played it enough to finish a DLC at the hardest difficulty, nekkid. You mentioned the setting and lore earlier, but it can't be just that or you wouldn't be playing at the harder difficulties. So what is it about the gameplay that you find enjoyable, compared to other party-based RTwP cRPGs?
As a postscript, I tooled around a bit as a mage and now I get why some of you are saying that nah the game isn't hard at all. 'Cuz it isn't if the Warden is a mage. Sadly both Morrigan and Wynne have rather bad spell selections to start with. It was a lot harder with a rogue Warden.
The Glyph line plus one or both of the ice and fire lines are rather amusingly OP... and it seems the specialisations (Arcane Warrior, Blood Mage) pretty much break the game. It's still a chore to play though.
Arcane Warrior is the strongest specialization in the game and it isn't even close. It does take a bit of time to get off and running, as well as requiring a lot of stats, since its Attack is somewhat low compared to Rogue and Fighter. Its tankiness is unmatched and it can run into a room of enemies and take pretty much everything without a flinch in the late game. The tradeoff for that is minimal stamina available for spellcasting. Most fights can be beaten the exact same way too - send the Warden AW in, cast Fireball on himself, knock everything down, kill them with the rest of your party while they're down, while he gets the attention of anything big.
Rogue Warden does have one pretty large advantage over the other 2 classes however - you aren't forced to use Leliana for 2/3 of the fucking game just to have someone open locks for you. Also, controlling the Warden as a Rogue means you don't have to worry about her worthless ass warning you about the trap you just stepped on a second ago. Bows, and by extension Leliana, are absolutely worthless and by the time you get Zevran he's leveled pretty poorly to be a dual wielding maniac.
Recently finished playing the Tomb Raider first reboot series - Legend, Anniversary and Underworld. My only prior TR experience was playing the demo level of the fan remake Dagger of Xian (still being developed apparently).
Legend was okay. Bit short and platforming was fairly simple - altogether too easy. Constant annoying chatter from Lara's assistants over the voicecom. Motorcycle sections sucked donkey balls but at least there were only 2 of them.
Anniversary was much better. Best Lara design, annoying chatter got lost, platforming sequences were great, finding secrets/relics were good, way more more complex and difficult than Legend. Best combat (relative to other 2 games). My only complaints were not much level variety - always 4 sublevels in the same place makes each setting/aesthetic drag on for a long time and the repetitive objective to 'find 4 keys to unlock gate to next level' got old after a while.
Underworld, talk about a mixed bag. Performance was utter garbage until I found a fix (registry edits). Platforming received some new trick moves, but generally felt less puzzle-like compared to Anniversary and the camera was quite bad in some parts. Combat was easily worst of all 3 games. Story continued from Legend but was pretty garbage. Throwing away the interesting King Arthur stuff for Norse/Viking shit also didn't really work out for me. Natla lost her unnerving alien-like appearance from Anniversary and just become 'generic hot blonde with devil wings'. Graphics were best of all 3, but let down with some bad animations and clipping issues. Secret finding was also done poorly.
Overall I found Anniversary the most worthwhile one to play.
Playing through the FEAR series.
First game is pretty good. Great gunplay, unique aesthetics, good mind trips and a surprisingly open level design that encourages level exploration and stealth mechanics, allowing you to ambush replicas.
The expansion packs are alright. I prefer Perseus Mandate, as for once the main enemy aren't replicas and there are some impressive mind trips. A lot of people give it hate because it is more action packed and it doesn't have as much atmosphere as Extraction Point and the base game, but it is nice seeing the events of the game from the perspective of someone else, and it still does it better than Fear 2.
Also Extraction Point is buggy as fuck and it corrupted my save near the end of the game, so fuck that then.
What surprised me is just how good the lighting effects are, even by today's standards. It gave the game a real atmosphere, and there was a lot of down time, where you would just traverse dark hallways, watching your flashlight's meter going down. Even though most of the game takes place indoors, it doesn't feel confined and you can still traverse through vents and offices.
Fear 2 is popamole shit. They took everything good about the first game, removed it and replaced it with wannabe COD gameplay and babby's first horror cliches. Its so uninspired it hurts, and there's so much artificial difficulty bullshit that its aggravating to play through. The levels are basically tight corridors, so you can't sneak around and ambush enemies like before, and the game WILL funnel you towards the enemy. You can't lean out of cover, so you have to expose yourself fully to the enemy, and on higher difficulties they will drain your health and armor quickly. The only way to really progress is to hide, wait until slo-mo is full, shoot, and repeat. This is boring as fuck. The game also has a nasty habit of spawning dudes on top of you before you have a chance to react, which of course kill you in 1 second. There are a lot more scripted events and the game will instant kill you if you go somewhere it doesn't want you to be.
The horror sequences are overall pretty dull and lack the atmosphere and subtlety of the first game, accompanying every supernatural event with flashy vignetting and a stinger.
Oh, and there are mech sequences. Because I wanted those in an atmospheric horror shooter.
Aesthetically speaking its generic, looking like every other popamole shooter and it doesn't even have the nice particle effects and destructible terrain from the first game.
Overall a shit game and a huge disappointment.
Played Fear 3. Its complete shit. Its somehow worse than Fear 2 and does even more to water down horror. The cover system is even worse than in FEAR 2's as you now "stick to cover", which significantly reduces your already slow mobility and its a pain in the ass to get out of it. You do this clunky lean over cover animation with your mouse and it feels like crap. The weapons feel like shit to use and there are even more scripted events. FEAR 2 is at least memorable in how bad it is and it tries to be like the first game, taking some parts from the expansion packs and retaining health packs and armor. Fear 3 does away with that and tries its hardest to be a generic popamole FPS. The only good things about it are more Paxton Fettel (whose a damn good villain) and the ending cinematic where you see
The synchronicity event mentioned in the first game and Fettel just killing a bunch of ATC soldiers with his psy powers before finally being sedated.
It's really sad how shit the series has become. I blame Warner Bros. They probably forced Monolith to make it more like CoD for "muh wider audience."
Playing Diablo 2 again after about 15 years I've noticed that the rogue hireling seems to be invincible, and that Set Items and Uniques seem to be rarer (none have spawned so far, having reached the Monastery gate).
On Wizardry 2, but I'm also taking breaks and playing City of Heroes: Homecoming with my brother. So if anyone else is playing and sees Duke Nukem and the Doom marine running around in a team, wonder no more.
I got it in a bundle ages ago. It's kind of like the video game equivalent to a B Movie. I'm like 3 hours in and I'm enjoying it well enough, I kind of just wanted to play something simple and on the short side because I've been reading a lot and had the itch to play something. As far as I know at this point I'm some orphaned chosen one on a quest to avenge the death of my boyfriend and unlock the mysteries of my past
Cheesy as fuck, but I do think I'll finish it
Edit: Had to bail on this after around 5 hours because of frequent crashing and a couple of quests breaking. Not dealing with that. From what I gather online, it's a complete gamble whether you have these issues or not. Some people report a flawless playthrough. Oh well.
I'm installing Divinity 2 now because it's fucking great
The best part of playing games in a given series in chronological order is that you get to see the improvements. The worst part is seeing the decay.
The original Megami Tensei is a dungeon crawler for the most part. Sometimes you will find NPCs and safe zones, but other than that the gameplay is about travelling around big, mazelike dungeons, though it is my opinion that the existence of an automap and the lack of genuine challenges (other than enemies being stronger than you) make this a dungeon crawler that shouldn't appeal to western fans of dungeon crawlers.
By comparison, Megami Tensei 2 mixes story and dungeon crawling to a great degree. The dungeons are much smaller, and are dungeons in name only, as they consists of buildings and underground tunnels as opposed to the temple-like structures of Megami Tensei 1. There's also far more interaction with NPCs and a more story-based tone to it, though so far the story could be described as a "strong" beginning, followed up by quests of sorts that make the story progress. Unlike the original, Megami Tensei 2 is a post-apocalyptic game which lets you visit many real-life locations, even if "real life" means "in name only", as so far I've came across only one recognizable landmark.
I have my issues with this game, issues I had with its predecessor. In Megami Tensei 1 & 2, getting genuinely stronger is a matter of fusing the different demons you are able to recruit during fights. At the beginning of the game, you have a party limit of seven demons. Eventually demon fusion is made slower and slower as you refuse to get rid of your stronger demons, meaning you fuse at a snail pace as you must fuse a demon, opening a party slot, before recruiting another demon. Because a fusion can't result in a demon that is higher leveled than you, you need to level up in other to fuse stronger demons. But the level ups themselves don't feel rewarding unless said level ups allow you to unlock a stronger fusion.
The demon recruiting process is a hit and miss. Without knowing the underlying mechanics, it feels very random at times. This is somewhat paradoxical, as the system encourages the idea that "demons are individuals", and yet you are unable to recruit two demons of the same kind. Other than that, it's a fun (if tedious, when trying to recruit a particular demon) process, where you can offer money, magnetite (that which demons run on; should you lose all your magnetite, which is earned in combat, your demons will lose health with every step you take), or jewels to recruit these demons.
I appreciate the evolution towards a more traditional JRPG structure, with the ability to visit proper towns (even then, "proper" is an exaggeration, as these towns usually consist of about 4 NPCs giving you some info on your quest or the setting of the game). There are certainly story set pieces, which were (almost) completely lacking in Megami Tensei 1. I'm not even halfway through the game and I've seen more interesting things than in my over-halfway playthrough of Megami Tensei 1.
Underrail for the last two weeks.
I think my character is fucked I can't beat Tchorty boi. He just reks me even with only 3 Tenticals, don't have stealth high enough to blow up all the mutagen canisters and don't have a min-maxed build. Just a bit of everything build which was fine (with some serious cheesing in the temple of Tchort - because I was stuck) but now I have to fight the last boss can't do it.
Might have to grind out another level farming the endlesly respawning minions to get another 40 points of stealth. I would be fucked if 25 was max level.
Played Remnant:From the ashes last weekend with two mates. If you have two friends it's worth a look, I imagine it's deathly boring solo.
Playing Diablo 2 again after about 15 years I've noticed that the rogue hireling seems to be invincible, and that Set Items and Uniques seem to be rarer (none have spawned so far, having reached the Monastery gate).
OK, so the rogue was not invincible after all, and I've had to resurrect her several times.
But after completing the first two acts I still haven't found a single Unique (except the required quest items) or Set Item. I used to have found a couple of Uniques and several Set items by this stage back in the days.
And Duriel was an even worse bastard than I remembered.
Playing Diablo 2 again after about 15 years I've noticed that the rogue hireling seems to be invincible, and that Set Items and Uniques seem to be rarer (none have spawned so far, having reached the Monastery gate).
OK, so the rogue was not invincible after all, and I've had to resurrect her several times.
But after completing the first two acts I still haven't found a single Unique (except the required quest items) or Set Item. I used to have found a couple of Uniques and several Set items by this stage back in the days.
And Duriel was an even worse bastard than I remembered.
The Rogue hireling is definitely not invincible. However, she tends to stay further away than you, so she is targeted less. When you get to Hell, you will see how fragile she actually is.
I finally got around to playing Planescape:Torment after having put it off all this time. Now that I beat it over the course of a month I feel a little silly to have put it off for so long.
Reached Kurast, Act 3, in Diablo 2. Finally started finding Set and Unique items.
Either I've been very unlucky with the drops or these items start dropping much later with the latest patch. I'm almost tempted to try some SP mod.
Just played through Tex Murphy: Mean Streets. Dug it, tho the overkill flight sim stuff and shooting segments were pretty lollerskates. But the act of questioning people and pursuing leads and shit was legit. What are some other good detective adventure games? I kinda want to do a deep dive on this kind of shit so I can start fantasizing about and working on my own detective game. Played Blade Runner on release and again relatively recently, but haven't really played much else. Have Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel ready to go, and the rest of the Tex Murphys of course, and the Gabriel Knight games.
Just played through Tex Murphy: Mean Streets. Dug it, tho the overkill flight sim stuff and shooting segments were pretty lollerskates. But the act of questioning people and pursuing leads and shit was legit. What are some other good detective adventure games? I kinda want to do a deep dive on this kind of shit so I can start fantasizing about and working on my own detective game. Played Blade Runner on release and again relatively recently, but haven't really played much else. Have Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel ready to go, and the rest of the Tex Murphys of course, and the Gabriel Knight games.
