T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve been busy with projects in real life, so I’ve not really played much.
I did finish GemCraft – Chasing Shadows. I had fun but I’m probably not going to play it again for a while. I had settled on using a min maxed mana leeching gem in a trap until I can make a very high level critical hit gem. It worked well enough that most other gems were irrelevant.
Other than that I didn’t really play much else.
So what are you guys doing this week?
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Good to be the King?
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?
Project Button Masher
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Civilization VI
I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see what was up with this nuclear war simulator.
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
Back to Tales of Zestiria. Restarted, and discovered there’s minor variations in how things play out depending on your actions. Mostly, you can save the dog, by not going literally everywhere else before following the dog. Also if you do the stupid thing you’re forced to take a punishment quest that’s just an unveiled waste of time, it’s pretty great actually.
Watching Columbo. Made it to the first TV movie, in which a psychic murders James Randi. They call him “Max Dyson”, but then he’s got a giant poster on his wall which very prominently reads RANDI, so it’s very obvious it’s supposed to be James Randi. I like Columbo.
I finished Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Somehow I’m still missing a power even though I explored the entire map. Whatever. Uninstalled, never to be played again. 2D Plattformers just aren’t my kind of gem.
In Persona 5 after 8 hours I finally reached a point I can decide things on my own instead of going a very linear path. At least the dungeon(s) is(are) much better designed than the boring layout in Persona 4.
In co-op we ditched Bellwright to start a new session in Craftopia – the Palworld prototype. It instantly made more fun. Because Bow and Arrow are so overpowered combat outside of boss arenas is laughable easy, crafting doesn’t take ages and you have a steady progression.
In analog, yesterday Tamashii got delivered. I haven’t read the rules yet. I hope they are better than the Etherfields crap.
If I recall correctly, you’re playing Royal and not base Persona 5, correct? If that’s the case, I think that there are extra things in the first few hours that tie into the “expansion” at the end, and also the dungeons have a LOT more things to do in them. You will eventually come across things like getting certain seeds and the like. I recommend that you scour the dungeons you get them, as they restore a bit of SP when you find them and do other good things afterwards. In general, scouring the dungeons to explore every part of it is worth it in this game.
Also, at some point you will get the chance to play darts. Do it with the team members you want to use in the dungeons, because the bonus you get from doing that is really, really nice.
Persona 5, to me, started showing a potential issue with the series, because it greatly expands every single aspect of the game, both in dungeons — including the “secondary” dungeons (Mementos, the Freshmaker!) — and in the activities and Social Links. I simply didn’t have the time to explore all of them, all of them are indeed useful and things you should be doing, and all of them are more detailed and so require more attention and time than they used to. This struck me fairly hard because I am not a huge fan of the dungeons — preferring the S-links — and so making that more detailed and complicated forced me to pay attention to something that I didn’t care much for. Someone who prefers the dungeons to the S-links will feel the same way. As these things get more detailed, people who don’t care for one aspect or another will find that more “grindy” and so will be suffering more through that aspect to get to the “good stuff”.
As for me, the biggest regret I had was that the darts game was a lot of fun but once it wasn’t giving me any bonuses I didn’t have the time to do it. But Persona 5 Royal is such a long game — it took me 92 hours to finish all of it, including the “expansion” — that I can’t figure out when I’d have the time to play it again.
Yep. Playing Royal. I’ve never played OG, so I don’t know about story differences. And yes I searched every nook and cranny of that castle dungeon – within a single session. Royal gifts you some “cheaty” equipment when you examine your storage in the LeBlanc attic. ‘If you successfully ambush regain 5% HP and SP at the beginning of each round’.
Yes, that too-much-to-do-in-the-given-timeframe is a problem I had with 4 (Golden). Getting the bad ending at first try. Then I replayed it with a walkthrough – I don’t think I have the time to do so with 5. Those days of unemployment are thankfully gone.
I think I did examine the storage, but don’t really remember that equipment. Would have been useful, although for SP doing Sojiro’s S-link is INCREDIBLY useful.
I did replay the OG Persona 5 a couple of times, getting different romance options, especially since for any of these games getting all the attributes and then all the S-links you want is a pain. But then I tended to do at least the first play/replay while on vacation, which helps, which is how I played Royal, too. But with my schedule and if things keep getting bigger that won’t be an option.
This is really what’s keeping me away from the Persona games now they’re on PC. I don’t want to play them with a walkthrough open but they’re also massive and I don’t have the time to replay them multiple times to get some fancy good or hidden endings.
4 is the only one with a “hidden” ending. 3 and 5 have very clear “good ending/bad ending” choices, 4 makes you pick six or seven opaque options in a row to get the true ending.
The Persona games have the advantage over other games here in that to get to good or true endings it doesn’t depend on things you’ve done throughout the game, but only on choices you make at set times. Most of them are somewhat obvious or what you’d get from exploring everything. Even in the Persona 4 case, you get a decent ending if you skip the true ending. So at most you’d just need to look at a walkthrough to find the critical choices and then make the right choices (and the game is pretty clear about when the choice matters).
The issue with the Personas is more about the customization of your own playthrough. Until you’ve maxed out all the attributes — and they carry over on New Game+ — you might not have the attributes to pursue relationships and friendships with everyone you want to, since some are attribute-locked. So the issue with the Personas wrt walkthroughs is about efficiency and ensuring that you get the things you want in that playthrough, as putting aside the fact that there are some characters that you will like better than others they give different bonuses that you might want to get, either in being able to merge certain Personas or direct abilities they give you for maxing them out (most prominently in Persona 5). But I’ve never maxed out all the Social Links in any game and at least on the easiest difficulty levels have had no issues with missing out on abilities.
When I purchased SteamWorld Heist II I deliberately went for the PC version rather than the Switch one so I would “savor it”, which would be a problem if I were to have it with me at all times. I would play it constantly otherwise and be done with it in a couple days. So far I’ve been avoiding this. With how little time to play I have when I’m home at my PC I’ve been able to slowly take it in.
Except that now, after years of avoiding it, I started playing Stardew Valley and like a dingbat I went for the portable version of it. Which means I do have it with me at all times. Which means I’m becoming a bit obsessed with it and now I have very little time for anything else. I used to not really care for this sort of game, but nowadays it has exactly the vibe I’m looking for.
Exceeeeeept that now the original Resident Evil 2 was re-released for PC and this is pretty much all I’m doing now when I’m at home. I’ve been meaning to sit down and watch a movie for a while and it’s clear it’s not gonna be happening for a few days.
I’ve been playing Dungeons of Hinterberg. The overall gameplay loop feels a lot like Persona, alternating dungeons and socializing. Doesn’t seem like there’s any time pressure, though, and you could play it very low pressure if you wanted.
The combat is pretty simple, but I do like that you get different magic spells in each area. And it’s nice that they have uses both in combat and out – the snowboard is the best one out of combat because it lets you move so quickly.
The story is generally about some of the issues that can arise when you’re a small town with a significant tourist population. I’m curious whether it’ll have anything to really say about this or whether it’ll stick with generalities, but I do like the sheer mundanity of it – there’s magical portals which people go through to slay monsters with swords, and it’s treated as an amusement park ride with souvenirs and influencers and so on. Not an angle I’ve seen very often – kind of reminiscent of the Dark Lord of Derkholm book, actually, but less horrifying.
I’m nearly finished with Hinterberg. The stakes get higher as you start discovering more about what’s going on, but it stays fairly low intensity. I’m going to miss it when it’s done, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it
I didn’t have the time to play Mass Effect 2 this week, but I will focus on that on the long weekend here because I also have vacation coming up in October and know that I will have to finish the game by the end of that vacation if I want to finish all three of those games — I’m excluding Andromeda — by the end of the year.
I did play The Old Republic, starting over with my Smuggler. This might have been a bit of a bad choice because my character is supposed to be innocent goofy and when you can be goofy in that storyline it tends to be a greedy goofy, which doesn’t fit that well. That only impacts my own enjoyment of the game, though, because in the TOR Diary that I write I can obviously write that however I want.
Speaking of which, I have three classes left, counting this one, which means that I will probably finish all of this off some time mid-next year. Then I’ll have to decide what I want to do with both the game and the diary posts. The big advantage of TOR for this was that it basically had me doing what I was doing in the game anyway, which is creating a character based on some other character and acting like that character in the world. The problem is that the other MMOs that I’ve played recently — Star Trek Online and Dark Age of Camelot — don’t have a lot of freedom in their stories or characters — and don’t have a lot of story besides — and so it’s difficult to do that. But just redoing TOR would get repetitive. Then again, I might want to just keep playing TOR and then wouldn’t have time for something else. Still, I have at least six months before I have to work that out, but the end is near.
Finished Creatures of Ava (the game about rescuing alien creatures from a planet being taken over by an incurable infection) over the weekend while tropical storm/hurricane Hone went by. Overall, I liked it; it’s not afraid to make some changes in gameplay that reflect the story, and while I could probably find a few quibbles if I drilled down I found the story to generally be compelling, such that my desire for completionism and finding all the collectibles was at odds with my desire to see what comes next. (If there’s one thing I might wish was different, it’s that areas you visit become permanently unavailable later due to the story progression, so you have to find everything before leaving.) It’s a solid “recommend” from me if you want a sort of real-time open-world monster-collection game that isn’t afraid to shake the formula up a bit and examine some of the usual underlying assumptions.
This game also finally revealed the limits of my GTX 1060 from 2019, as I get about 50 fps upon startup, but then it rapidly declines over the course of half an hour or so down to about 10, so I had to play in short sessions.
I also picked up Tactical Breach Wizards on release a few days ago. I haven’t started it yet (I’m thinking it’ll be a good Steam Deck game for playing at lunch at work), but I really enjoyed the demo and am looking forward to it.
I’m surprised that a game that looks like that taxed a 1060. Like Scarf and Raji taxing my 970 somehow, despite e.g. being able to play Shadow of Mordor at 1440p, or ReCore at 4K. It’s not like these games have high resolution textures or particularly intense particle effects, reflections, shadows or anything like that. Unoptimised indie games perhaps?
How was the open-world exploration aspect of it? My friend is excited about it because he sees it as a decent one-up on the disappointment of Pokemon in that respect.
Have you seen Flock? https://store.steampowered.com/app/1472930/Flock/ I like the look of the open world in that one.
There might be something like a memory leak going on, maybe; might explain why it consistently started perfectly playable (albeit on the lowest graphical settings) and then dropped over time. It says Steam Deck Verified, maybe I should give it a try there.
For open-world, there’s an initial hub area in the grasslands, then three additional biomes (jungle, swamp, desert) which you visit in order. Within each area you can explore freely, and there are old teleporter stations (fast travel points) and shortcuts that can be activated, making it relatively quick to get back to anywhere once you’ve reached it once. I hesitate to call it truly open-world since the narrative means losing places to the withering as the story progresses, but within each area I enjoyed the exploration aspect a lot; there are what feels like a good number of secrets to find in each one. I don’t generally play a lot of similar games, though, so I might be finding myself enchanted by things that are old hat to others. :) It does sort of recover that Pokémon feeling of exploring new lands and discovering cool new creatures, and I like that taming them involves learning to replicate each species’ unique little fanfare on a flute.
I hadn’t seen Flock before, thanks. I’ll give it a look.
Nice one! I’ll pass on that little rundown to my friend.
I’ve just started this and got an error about running out of video memory after about half an hour, using a 980. I figured it was my dodgy aging hardware but maybe it’s just not optimised for a video card of that era
Kingmaker got considerably more enjoyable once I hit 3rd level spells, though it remains a sometimes baffling mish mash of competency/styles. And then even easier when I finally got the Ranger, since this is still an easy mode game in terms of ranged attacks (no soft cover rules), so you just buff the railgun and hide behind the even more overpowered than usual animal companion. Damage from busted magic-item-maximized spell: 48 if they fail the save, maybe 60 with no save if you spec’d into the most powerful option. Damage from ranger full attack: 60-100, with some variance depending on active buff spells. They did a great job of making the different animal choices equal, but that just means they’re equally busted: automatic stat scaling clearly aimed at equaling where your characters should be including their magic items, for free, and since they’re not enhancment/deflection/resistance bonuses, they stack with all your buffs, so the animal goes even higher, and if they do manage to get killed they just get back up in the morning, in a game that makes a point of needing Raise Dead to fix that problem. The Ranger is the only companion so far besides Tristian who doesn’t have at least one major flaw- and Tristian is even debatable if you want your Clerics to have armor (but with 6 party members plus animals, the caster-focused cleric is actually better).
I’m almost 9th now, just finished clearing out the trolls and nearly all the stuff in the marches. I like where the story is obviously going
some big fey have decided they don’t want anyone setting up shop anymore and are obviously behind everythig, making good use of some enemies that just don’t really work in normal DnD (by slapping a bajillion class levels on them of course, as is Pathfinder/char-op’s wont, though the Will ‘o Wisps are disguising some of their spells as differently named abilities). They managed to make the kobolds cute and derpy without being annoying, and they properly go squish once you’ve got a few levels (because they’re given the fewest class levels of course) Learned that for some reason they removed the ability for spontaneous casters to change a very small number of spells as they level up, so literally any choice that’s not made to last the whole game is wasted, which is baffling- read a comment that suggested it was ’cause they couldn’t figure out how to do it/it was intentional because you need to make the right choices, but the former is bogus and the latter is petty.It’s an almost, dare I say it, Dark Soulsian level of take what you get. The game has rules changes and content or lack thereof that benefits some and hurts others. It makes perfect sense that there would be few magic item vendors with little choice of stock out on a frontier, but this also goes completely against the standard “magic item mart” expectation of 3.x/PF. So instead of building perfect specialists that do exactly what you want with the perfect items and spells from across the whole of the published landscape, you have to use what you’ve got. Using ridiculous animal companions and railgun rangers is perfectly fair, since it’s what the game gives you. It’s just rather annoying that yeah, that’s what it gives you. I thought by PF’s time we were supposed to be aware of those problems. And it only makes it more annoying when you’re given party members with specialist style flaws- bastard sword proficiency, tower shield specialization, bad domain choices, etc, which make them less fit for the generalist found item approach. PF’s weapon training ability applies to groups rather than specific weapons, but the fighter they give you explicitly does not have that ability. I guess it stops the game’s companions from overshadowing your own build if there’s duplicates, but I shouldn’t be drowining in ridiculously specific weapons that fail to suit anyone but a player-made character.
IIRC at some point I used a mod that allowed for a complete respec of characters, I definitely did for Wrath even if not because of some inherent brokenness of any character but rather due to class/build preferences. Also, again IIRC as it’s been a while, magic items will do become much more available with time ranging from your typical vendor +X boosters to some uniques with fancy specials.
If you’ll go into modding I also recommending something that increases movement speed out of combat.
Already tried a character editor- wouldn’t run on my windows rig, linux version didn’t open on steam deck, decided I’d redo the preceding couple of hours for that little mistake rather than spend who knows how long getting it working. I would also question if mods work on this version- the nexusmods pages makes no mention of the anniversary edition, but some of its features were mods of the original version and it’s entirely possible they could have broke compatibility with plenty more. There are plenty of little things I’d love to change, if I could be sure they would work, and more importantly if you could get mods x y and z without r, p, an q baggage attached to them.
I’ve been fine with out of combat speed, but then, that might be one of the integrated mods. The party definitely shuffles along real slow if you’re clicking relatively nearby, which helps you not blunder into things as much, but they speed up if you click way far away. In particular, just popping open the map and ordering movement from there when backtracking.
I’ve soured more on the Ranger the more I’ve thought about it. There are just so many layered buffs it’s ridiculous and I’ve benched the guy so the rest of the party matters more than just buffing and tanking for him (the animal companion tanks without overshadowing, though it’s a boring obvious dire wolf reskin). The game has no soft cover rules, so you never have to get a clear line of fire (or take another effective -4), which means no movement just full attack every turn. But they also took Manyshot, which was a tactial move+double shot (at -4 penalty) option, and instead turned it into just a free attack with no penalty for all intents and purposes (rangers do not care about it not doubling sneak attack and your first two shots would always be at the same foe anyway) whenever you full attack, on top of the extra attack you can add from Rapid Shot by taking -2. And then there’s also the Pathfinder Deadly Aim feat that effectively gives scaling level based damage to all your bow attacks exactly the same as Power Attack.
Any *one* of those buffs is already significant. The first is a common enough simplification because video games, which was not a problem in NWN2 because there weren’t a bunch of extra damage sources: the ranger was constant reliable support fire, not a blowout. Pathfinder added damage to everything because they like exponential damage: Deadly Aim is inherently sketchy because the defining difference of bows is supposed to be less damage, because range. Kingmaker added a free attack because they *really* like exponential damage, I guess. Oh and the ranger gets a special bespoke super bow with 2d6 bonus damage, when as mentioned, all the other characters are making do with awful mismatches (except maybe the barbarian, since there’s also a corrosive greataxe- but only 1d6, not 2d6).
Having only played a little of Kingmaker, I’m surprised about the weapons; seeing the characters joining me in the first chapter and some of their unusual builds, I figured I’d be more likely to find the things that they chose so they could get equipment upgrades. It’s too bad if that doesn’t happen.
I think the main low-level problem that I had with ranged attacks was that when someone got knocked down by Grease or something, I kept missing them, due to the ‘easier to hit with melee but harder to hit with ranged’ effect. But one of the most effective combatants I had in the first chapter was Regongar, with the ‘cast a spell by hitting with your sword and then get to hit with your sword again’ Magus stuff. He’s a bit worrying, but for being Chaotic Evil he’s surprisingly well-behaved. Less blatantly evil than Jaethal, at least, and much easier to heal.
Tactical Breach Wizards is a fun, pared-down-to-the-essence tactical puzzle. You can play it in little gobbets of 10-20 minutes, or burn through a few hours in a row. It doesn’t waste your time, and I like the story and characters. Reminds me a bit of XCOM Chimera Squad, and a bit of Into the Breach
Finally got Celeste. I’ve only played through two levels so far, but the combination of high difficulty with low penalty for failure produces the sort of meditative experience I normally associate with much easier games.