T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I am playing Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. I am also playing Marvel’s Spider-Man remastered. I don’t know what I’m doing in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, but I’m having a good time; I’ve recently discovered smithing, and so far I’m enjoying the mechanic.
What are you guys up to?
My Music
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
Diablo III Retrospective
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
Programming Vexations
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
Raytracing
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
A Lack of Vision and Leadership
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
Beat Tears of the Kingdom. Final boss was reasonably satisfying
Feels like most of the story missions in the game were about unity and cooperation, between the hand clasping motif and Tulin and Sidon’s character arcs, and the final boss battle didn’t completely ignore that but it kind of waffled on it
I enjoyed the game enough that I don’t regret spending $70 dollars on it, but it only barely squeaked in over the line there, botw was much more satisfying to me
Now I’m back to the Hollow Knight playthrough that I put on hold months ago to play totk, it’s a bit more suited to my tastes
Just beat the Dung Defender in the Royal Waterway on the first try this playthrough, which was very satisfying. My first file, I tended to focus on close combat upgrades and rush the bosses, but this time around I’m playing more cautiously and using magic more, and doing better because of it. Hopefully this playthrough I’ll actually be able to reach at least one of the endings, last time around I hit a point where all the available bosses were too far beyond my skill level to beat, and after about twenty tries to kill at least one of them I gave up
Ah, Hollow Knight is such a good game but I do prefer it when a soulslike allows me to substitute, or at least supplement, skill with some grinding. Luckily for me the “beyond me” bit was only for the
GodhomeDLC ending which is just ridiculous.Yeah, being able to just level up enough to kill the bosses at my level probably would have led to me getting the best non-dlc ending on my first play through – although the fact that I already had all the soul orbs, all the nail and spell upgrades, and all the mask upgrades I could get without killing one of the bosses I was stuck on was probably part of why I ran out of steam there. I did find changing play styles resulted in me actually being able to reach the final boss
though not the Final final bossthis time around. We’ll see if I’m able to beat it before I get too frustrated and give up again; right now i tend to die right at the start of the second phase, but i just went off and got an eighth mask and the second nail upgrade, so that will probably help, and if that’s not enough, well, there’s still two sword upgrades, another mask, and a soul orb i can get without fighting any of the other bosses that stopped my last play through. And who knows? maybe the Watcher Knights won’t be the only boss fight that goes down easier to my current buildI do recommend hunting down the resources for the remaining nail upgrades, they’ll make your life way easier. Assuming that you include the free upgrade when you say “second” I think there should be one more that you can get without fighting something major. Though if you’re already getting to the 2nd phase odds are good you can power through with what you have. Having said that I’m speaking from the position of someone who actually enjoyed the combat dynamics (and now I’m tempted to reinstall the game and give that DLC some more tries…)
Yeah, I just got the upgrade that costs 1 Pale ore
I remember from my last file the fully upgraded nail definitely helps, but I kind of want some objective measure of how easy my current play style is to pull off versus the last one; number of upgrades to beat a boss seems like the best measure I’ve got there. For example, when I used a close-quarters build I couldn’t get past the Watcher Knights even with 9 masks, all three soul orbs, and a Pure Mail, but with my spellcasting build I beat the watcher knights in three tries with seven masks, two soul orbs, and a sharpened nail (the free upgrade). Plus, I intend to go for harder endings after getting this one, so I’m leaving some upgrades to get then if I can
Played through Afterimage. It’s a metroidvania soulslike. Generally fun gameplay, kind of easy except for a few fights but the fights had reasonable runbacks and interesting patterns. It had a more or less unintelligible story but that’s standard for the genre, really.
Space Station 13 has been consuming my brain the past couple weeks now, and it’s not showing any signs of getting better. That said, it’s mostly *working on* SS13 rather than playing it…albiet by slowly turning everything on the station green. Brain wants what the brain wants, and somehow painstakingly redoing the lighting on every sprite whilst turning it into Ruggedized Olive Drab(tm) is less energy-consuming than playing…like, even mind-numbing grind games where I can just shut all higher cognitive functions off.
Still playing Cassette Beasts. I’m really digging the tone; the art and music treats it like an adorable Pokemon world, and then the characters all treat it like a Sword Art Online inescapable purgatory place. Managed to find the first
gym leaderRanger Captain after learning how tosurfSwim. Also managed to find the first non-tutorial Archangel, who was ostensibly eight levels below me but still killed 4 of my 6pokemonCassettes before I figured out its gimmick.Started up Jenny LeClue: Detectivu, a game I’ve watched people play through but haven’t played myself. Mostly a very comedic visual novel with some simple puzzles. One thing I hadn’t noticed watching it; Jenny’s voice is mechanically up-pitched, which is a little distracting. Looks like the actress playing her is also the one playing her mother.
Started up Way of the Samurai 3 again, long enough to remember how irritating the camera is; it’s in that phase where the camera gets stuck on physics objects so you can’t turn it in tight spaces. Other than that, it’s a combat game centered mainly around flag-hunting and replays; you’ve got various members of three different factions, and you wander around until you bump into one, at which point you either help them or fight them depending on who you want to side with this run. May or may not come back to it, it’s certainly not fun enough to knock anything else out of rotation.
Played a bit of Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass again, getting past the end of World 2. Tried to manipulate which Job class got the boss xp, and ended up with the boss knocking me out right before it died and giving that xp to none of them. Oh well. I’ve dug this game since it came out; it’s the one that reminded me I could just go and buy things I wanted for money. Realizing Cassette Beasts shares a fair bit of blood with this game, in terms of art and tone; I’m eager to see which one holds up better in the end.
Just passed the dumbest part of Final Fantasy 8. No, not that part. Not that one either. Nor that… actually I forgot about that one , that is dumber isn’t it. No, it’s Garden Master NORG, and the giant vortex of plot coherency that is his encounter. I’m doing a write-up on this game in an attempt to scrape the bones clean, and I really do love this mess; the art, the characters, the pacing, the combat, even the Bad Lip Reading fever dream that comprises the plot. This has got to be playthrough 20 or so, and it’s still competing favorably with Cassette Beasts. Even Jimmy isn’t doing that.
Ha, I did just say in my comment that Jimmy comes highly recommended so it’s on the list for possible next game to play and here it is! Also, where could one read that FF8 write-up? It was a very formative game for me and even if it is chock full of anime BS I remember it fondly.
One can’t, I’ve just got a Google Doc. Would need some pretty solid editing first anyway, I’m on page 52 having not quite gotten the boat yet. Very stream-of-conscience.
Very sadface. If you ever decide to show it to the public anywhere I would definitely like to have a look.
…well, the Captain Zedd fight has knocked a whole lot of charm out of Cassette Beasts. His whole gimmick is he brings an add, and turtles up in front of it and then heals. Every. Round. And I had multi-target attacks, so I could just bypass him and kill the add, but now I have to kill a turtling enemy that heals. Every. Round. And I finally whittle him down to zero, and he pulls out the evolved form of the same thing, and proceeds to continue to heal. Every. Round. No attacks coming at me any more; he’s got a 1% chance haymaker he uses three rounds in four. But you’ve got to hit him hard enough every, single, round, to keep up with his healing. You can’t even leave; you can’t flee boss battles. Even the ones where the boss doesn’t attack, just heals. Every. Round. If you can’t keep up with his healing, you’re basically softlocked.
He’s got a hard counter, that shuts down the healing. I didn’t have one in the party. That shouldn’t be an option for a boss fight.
Finished The Council during the weekend.
The finale was half interesting, half disappointing. There’s a lot of variations and a lot of different things can happen, with the game not afraid to punish you with very bad endings if you’ve made a lot of bad decisions along the way.
On the other hand, maybe because of the number of variations, narratively the finale is worse than all other episodes. It’s just, “Ok, make a couple big decisions, check whether you have done the right things during the previous episodes to survive the mess you put yourself into with these big decisions, ok you made it bye”.
Gameplay-wise, it’s one of the best narrative-driven climaxes I’ve seen. Too bad they lacked the time or the budget to turn all these possibilities into narratively satisfying scenes.
Now I’ve restarted Pyre.
I played it a bit a long time ago, and the quality is top-tier as I remembered. Love both the characters and the gameplay. The gameplay can become a bit boring, but the game uses a lot of tricks to encourage/force you to swap your active team very often, which keeps things interesting for longer.
I had commented on my own blog in the past that I would like these things — and the fans — to think less of these things as “bad ends” and more as “the reasonable consequences of your actions”. For a lot of cases, I think I’d be okay with purported “bad ends” as long as it follows from what the character would do. So the ending right at the beginning of “Akiba’s Trip” where the big bad gets annoyed at you continually asking for the figurines is technically a bad ending, but it just fits so perfectly with what would happen in that case that I couldn’t get mad at it. And the tragic ending in Shadow Hearts if you didn’t go to the guide for the “true ending” is another example, where even though it’s a Downer Ending it works for what the character could have known (and is the canonical ending going forward … kinda. It’s complicated [grin]). So in a game like this getting endings that are “bad” for you but follow from what you actually did and what you could reasonably expect to happen would still lead to a satisfying ending.
Hmm, for me a satisfying ending is one where the characters mostly complete a character arc.
So: “You’ve been a jerk to everyone so in the end they betray you and you get killed” is a satisfying ending for me, as is “You’ve been too trusting of everyone so in the end they betray you and you get killed”, depending on the tone of the game.
On the other hand, “You missed a crucial item because you weren’t good enough at solving a puzzle, so you get killed” isn’t an ending, it’s just a game over.
The council has both types of bad ends, and it’s fine! Since in this kind of game choices and puzzles are the gameplay, it’s fine that they can lead to narratively unsatisfying game-over style bad ends. But it’s definitely not like every possible combination of events is a satisfying ending, even if they do follow from what you did.
Yeah, I agree that for a satisfying ending it has to be the case that at the end it’s clear why you got that ending, even if it’s something that you overlooked in game but makes perfect sense at the end. So one example would be the ending in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines when you open the box or stay when the other guy opens it. Lots of people tell you that it’s a bad idea, so you really should have known that doing it is the wrong choice, even if you couldn’t know what the precise bad thing that happens is. An example of just doing the game-mandated “wrong thing” would be the ending with the Chinatown vampires, since while they aren’t necessarily trustworthy once you side with them you are railroaded to that end and they aren’t necessarily less trustworthy than any other group you have to deal with.
And then just forgetting to pick something up or do one particular thing in one particular room when you have no reason to think it matters would fall into “Guide Dang It!”, where you have to follow a guide to get anything like a satisfying ending.
I will say that how you described the endings here makes me more interested in playing it, even though I have a long list of games to play.
I will say that the items or puzzles that strongly influence the ending are clearly marked as such by the narrative.
You just don’t know whether you’ve made the correct choice until the ending comes, which can be 2-3 episodes after the moment you need to choose.
Anyway, hope you like it when you do get to play it!
So I’ve mentioned before that I’ve played VtM-Swansong by the same studio and was curious about your opinion on The Council. I find it interesting that, while there may be some variations to where individual protagonists in Swansong can end up (including dead) and there are also some alternate paths through which certain endings can be reached, you technically only get a couple (I think 4 or 5) of distinct “end states” for the world. If you say there’s a lot of possibilities in the finale of The Council I’m wondering if the studio is still experimenting and figuring out how to pace and balance the ending sequences. Still, between what you’ve said of The Council and my experience of Swansong I’ll definitely put the game on the shortlist.
As I said in my comment above, some of the endings are actual endings, good or bad – as in, they follow from the conscious behavior of your character and give a sense of closure to the story; other endings are just “you goofed up, do better next time” style bad endings.
The number of variations is fine for the scope of the story, I think the studio was just a bit rushed because of the release schedule of the various chapters: you can see things getting a bit sloppy even in the second-to-last chapter.
I just got my horse in Lord Of The Rings Online. I picked it up once years ago and put it down again because I was still heavily into WoW, but I just re-read the books for the bajillionth time and then happened upon Shamus’ Lulzy playthrough, so I was in the mood. I’ve been having a good time with my hobbit hunter!
Shamus’ Lulzy playthrough was responsible for me starting my first Lotro playthrough.
Played a bit more of Dragon Age 2. I’ve made it to right before the expedition to the Deep Roads. I still do really like the structure of the quests, as it gives you lots of things to do and the best way to play is to do everything else before doing the story quests.
Also played my Bounty Hunter in The Old Republic. I finished Alderaan, which finishes the two-set of planets along with Tatooine. So I’m making progress there. Now I just have to write about them.
Still playing My Time At Portia. The day length is just right for putting me off from playing too long into the night, and it’s just so chilled. The grammatical errors on some of the loading screen tips do wind me up a bit though.
For times when I want a bit more mindless violence than harvesting colourful fur from llamas, there’s Crackdown 3. I like that exploring the sandbox and doing whatever looks interesting all helps you advance the main goal, whether it’s improving your stats, clearing mini missions that weaken the bosses or gaining territory
Oh man, I need to finish a Portia playthrough one of these days. It is just Stardew (or I guess Harvest Moon if you’re oldschool) enough to make me enjoy it but different enough so that I want to explore it. The problem is if I stop playing it for a while I completely forget what I was doing so I’m currently technically on my third approach but I think I’ll have to restart it again from scratch…
I’m in the first summer and still playing daily so I don’t know what it would be like to pick back up after a break, but it seems like it would follow on OK. You’ve got the missions giving you short term goals, the relationship meters to remind you who you’re attempting to romance, and if you’ve left anything on the assembly area it’s pretty clear what you need to craft to finish it
Mostly spent the week trying to finish out emulation on a couple of consoles, but in my spare time I’ve literally just being playing some clicker idle games: Endless World, Cell to Singularity, and Realm Grinder.
Just biding my time until tomorrow when Baldur’s Gate 3 is released.
Does anyone? M&B is one of those titles where I love the emergent storytelling of it, and I love watching people faff about in it (especially if they’re learning the game and making amusing mistakes) but I don’t have the patience to play it myself.
So as I’ve mentioned in my belated comment to the last post I just got back from vacation so between that and jumping back into annoyingly intense schedule at work I haven’t played much except for Fate/Grand Order and CIFI on my phone (don’t judge me!). Currently I’m in the process of catching up with things I play on a regular basis so I’ve grinded a little bit of Destiny 2 solstice event though I don’t think I’ll do a whole lot of it. The event armour is admittedly quite pretty so I’ll probably turn it into a transmog but pushing it to the point where it rolls good and then rerolling it to get something close to the most desirable stats sounds like work, and seeing how I’ve missed most of it and I’m busy at my real job this week I don’t feel very motivated.
If anything I need to decide which game from my massive backlog to take on next. Overall this year has been pretty good with picking titles I’ve enjoyed and the pattern I’m noticing is that I’ve stayed away from AAA so I’m considering sticking to the AA-to-indie range. I could finally do the Crash DLC for Supraland and then tackling the sequel, and people, including here, have recommended Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass though I have a suspicion that is not going to be somewhat on the heavy side, and I do have Ghostwire:Tokyo from one of the previous Humble bundles which my friend says she greatly enjoyed… Speaking of Humble, Disco Elysium is in the current one and I can’t recommend that game enoough though I think you can get it cheaper on a good sale. Still if the rest of the bundle looks like something that might interest you DE is worth the price alone (heavy themes and writing heavy game warnings apply).
Still fighting off the aliens in Terra Invicta, though I think I passed the darkest hour a while ago and am becoming increasingly stronger*. I control all of North America, most of the EU (a federated “country” in the game that can be built up from its real-life members), China, India, and a bunch of random smaller nations (Indonesia, Australia, Saudi Arabia, much of South America after finally kicking the aliens out of it…). I’m up to 2052, and I know what my final mission is, but it’s going to be a long way of building up my industrial base in the solar system before I’m strong enough to do it (I just got a fleet to Jupiter in order to gain a foothold there, and the alien base with their wormhole is in, like, the Kuiper belt somewhere).
*I noticed today that all the other factions have a monthly research output of ~1.5-1.7k. I’ve got ~6.5k. I’ve also got control of all the strongest armies in the world and (crucially) navies, allowing me freedom to move about the globe. (While I’m still learning a lot about space combat, ground combat was refreshingly easy to pick up after my 1400+ hours in Europa Universalis IV; it’s nice to feel competent at something in this game.)
Death Road to Canada, playing around with some different combos. It was interesting, it took me over a dozen tries to win the game but once I did, I immediately won three out of four tries. It seems like a game where RNG would preclude that, but it also quietly has the Half-Life thing where if you’re low on [resource X] you’re more likely to stumble into some [resource X], so I pretty much never die anywhere but in siege mode, and siege mode is fairly skill-based.
Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is pretty fun so far. I’m always a sucker for role-playing with huge amounts of class/skill interactivity in the dialogue trees, so I already loved Pillars, but switching it to turn-based mode is a pretty big value-added that the first game was missing.
I am… mostly playing TTRPGs lately. If I’m not playing in either my Ironclaw or D&D 5e games, I’m thinking about them.’
Games, though… I’m on a bit of a break from Age of Wonders 4, waiting for DLC 2 to come out. Dragon Dawn really didn’t do much for me. Waiting on the 8th to pick up Diablo IV again.
I’ve been meaning to play Total War: Warhammer 3, but I get hit hard weith decision paralysis in Strategy games. Hell, it even gets in the way of Deep Rock Galactic!
I have postponed getting further Total Warhammer games until I finish even a single campaign in the fist one, these things are looooong, especially if you enjoy actually watching the battles, and I have a short attention span.