T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I am still playing Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. I’m getting the hang of the economy, I now own a town, and done much more smithing. People like your product better if you give them what they ordered, turns out. It’s amusing to watch my small army run around with me (a man who is basically a merchant with a small army) while I do smithing quests. Seems like a good enough deal for them. I pay them, and they do very little actual fighting. Save for the few times I’ve accidently let them starve, they have it pretty good.
What are you guys up to?
The Strange Evolution of OpenGL
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
Crysis 2
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
Patreon!
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
I’ve been playing XCOM 2 Long War of the Chosen mod. It’s by people who thought that XCOM 2 was too easy, too simple, and too short. Possibly I have a problem.
I’m still progressing in my playthrough of Terra Invicta, the game by those same people, who thought “what if XCOM, but grand-strategy game that lasted decades and included literally every single one of the dozens and dozens of minute variations humankind has ever had on the idea of how to propel a spaceship going back to the dawn of rocketry?”*. I definitely have a problem.
…in that, just when I thought it was starting to go well, and I was developing drives powerful enough for even my large ships to pull >1g in combat (Orion drive!), the aliens wiped out both Jupiter Defense Force 2 and Earth Defense Force 2 in pitched battles mere days apart. The worst part is that the EDF-2 fight was supposed to be an easy victory, as I had the advantage in the “combat power” the game assigns each fleet, and they were “just” three alien troop transports. Which it turns out are up there with motherships as the strongest ships in the game, apparently, as they swatted my entire fleet from the skies above Earth without losing a single ship or even being noticeably inconvenienced.
…which led to a very tense several months as the aliens landed three troop transports with a total of 9 alien armies on them. Armies in this game have a strength, where an increase of 1 indicates a 100% increase in power. Alien armies start with 9 strength. The best Earth armies at the start of the game have 4.5, and after three in-game decades I’d managed to get that up to…~6.5 (and only for the United States of North America). I launched a frantic invasion of the Ivory Coast where the aliens had landed with the combined armies of United North America, United South America, the EU, (slightly expanded) India, and (slightly more expanded) China, and with some clever cycling of units in combat (after mixing up the deployment and leaving the vanguard to fight alone for over a nail-biting week) I managed to destroy 8 alien armies with the loss of only 3 terrestrial ones, and once they’ve all healed up I’ll be back for the last one. At least ground combat is something I generally “get” in this game, despite my repeated failures as a space-admiral.
I’ve just started unlocking plasma weapons, which I think are sort of the ultimate tier in this game, so with the recent loss of so many brave souls in the fleet weighing on me I think it’s time for a radical redesign of our combat ships to finally start to level the playing field with the invaders.
*Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: ‘Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.’
Terra Invicta devs: And I took that personally.
Oh, that game’s out now? Well, no, not really, it’s Early Access. But anyway, interesting…
…ah. The reviews are kind of what I expected – time consuming, very complex, and the gameplay often becoms exhausting busywork. So, just like the Long War mods, huh?
It’s interesting that one of the things that the Long War mods taught me was…an appreciation of the vanilla XCOM experience.
The mods are great in terms of increased tactical options, units, realism and mission types, but the game drags on something awful. You can spend tens of hours playing, doing very similar missions over and over again, only to have acheived…very little. You’re barely keeping up with the enemy, treading water.
Then, in desperation, you try make some *real* progress, and the game slaps you down by wiping out your best soldiers (or similar) and setting you back another 10 hours or so.
Vanilla XCOM was far from perfect, but at least in 10 hours of gameplay, you would damn well have *achieved something*.
I haven’t actually played the Long War mods for precisely the reputation you’ve outlined, and this game certainly repeats some of the same game design sins. They definitely should cut at least 75% of the options for spaceship drives and power plants, most of which are infinitesimal improvements on or side-grades to each other (with no convenient way to compare two option side-by-side to decide which is better, to boot). There’s enough flexibility in the tech tree that you can easily end up researching something that obsoletes a bunch of your other research options, and it’s up to the player to figure that out and not pursue those, which is really terrible game design. I will say that “very complex” is par for the course for grand-strategy games, and that it’s not much more complex than, say, a Paradox GSG game; it took me about the same amount of time (40 hours) to really begin to understand what I was doing in both Terra Invicta and Europa Universalis IV (though I’ve gotten >1400 hours of entertainment out of the latter).
I do think that the game difficulty curve over time is fairly good. The aliens start out with a massive tech advantage, but they have to build up their space industry same as the other factions with no cheating, and their tech is static while yours gradually catches up. Moderately early on they’ll be invading countries with you powerless to stop it, but hold on and dig in, and you can eventually come from behind, kick them off the planet, and start blowing up their fleets for a change, which has given me some of the biggest dopamine hits I’ve received from a game. The first time it happened to me I thought I was losing, but I’ve realized the game is just calibrated for that to happen and to give you your own underdog resistance story. Assuming you’re playing The Resistance, of course, maybe your faction wants the aliens to take over. Which is one thing this game has going for it, the ability to game different factions with totally different end goals and victory conditions (even the two pro-alien factions have fairly different win conditions*). I hope the ability to play as the aliens happens someday, either officially or as a mod, because I think it’d be really fun and neat way to flip the usual gameplay on its head.
*And there’s even an achievement for winning as the Resistance after both of them have already triggered their win condition!
Played a few runs of Overboard, a reverse mystery game. You’ve thrown your husband overboard, and have to avoid getting caught until the ship docks, and that means finding out what everyone else knows or thinks they know. Keep your story straight, plant evidence on other people, find blackmail material on them, or… just murder literally everyone onboard. Fun times. But quite short, and everyone’s schedules are fixed so eventually you’re going to run out of new routes.
Final Fantasy 8 continues. Got the boat and am sidequesting before running into The Scene. I’m realizing a whole lot of stupid could have been unstupefied if they’d put NORG in Trabia instead of Balamb, and had him give The Speech for The Scene. That could have solved most of the narrative plot holes of Disc 2. Not all of them, but most of them.
Not a lot of Cassette Beasts since the Zedd incident, but that’s mostly from being tired and choosing FF8 progress instead. Still exciting to complete a minigame and uncover an Archangel dungeon. That’s all I can say because that’s the only thing I did this week.
Continuing Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass, just into World 4’s first level. I consistently forget how vicious the World 3 boss is, probably because of just how back-loaded the fight is. I think it’s killed me exactly once on every playthrough I’ve ever made. You’ve got to save your resources to blitz them down once they hit half health or they will literally chew you up and spit you out. The first time through it was easy to forget because of just how nasty the World 4 boss was, but… they nerfed the World 4 boss. Now the World 3 boss might be the meanest mandatory boss in the game. …oh who am I kidding, that’s World 6. At least for first-time players.
Which scene is ‘The Scene’ in FF8? I rememebr there were quite a few headscratching ‘what?’ moments in that game. As I recall, after a bit the game just gives up and things start happening ‘just because’.
Orphanage.
Not being original, I’m playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m doing a cursed run, a warlock of the great old one, with the Dark Urge origin (which means I have in my head a mysterious urge to murder all the time, which might not be as mysterious for people who played the other BGs), on top of the illithid tadpole. The game itself, while not perfect, is indeed very impressive.
Same here, although I’m EXTREMELY slow and I’ve only really just started Act 1. XD I opted for a Custom character my first run so I can do what *I* would do without thinking about “is this what X would do?” or having the weight of a hidden background guiding my actions.
Man everyone is having so much fun with this game. I keep saying I probably won’t buy it for a year or two unless my co-op buddy pressures me into it… and boy do I wish he’d pressure me into it. Although we’re currently playing through Solasta so our DnD needs are covered for now…
For me, I hated BG1 and found the idea of a Chaos Mage in BG2 interesting but just kinda let it drop and got distracted by something else, so I’m obviously a bit hesitant to get into BG3 even if my schedule would allow for it.
I’m savoring every moment of this game, playing it slowly in my spare time. Having a blast with my bard character.
I did a Custom character my first go round in D:OS 2 and regretted it due to how much content there is the for the standard characters. So, I chose the Dragonborn Sorcerer for my first play-through. It’s….a little nuts.
Don’t you get all that content in D:OS 2 if you have the standard characters as your companions anyway?
Slime Rancher 2 is…a perfect example of a sequel. Did you like Slime Rancher? Well, here’s more of it! We didn’t even change the name that much. Sure, there’s more slimes*, and a new map, but it’s fundamentally the same experience.
Not to say that there aren’t improvements or that it’s not fun. Rather than gaining items and upgrades by farming and spending ever-increasing amounts in-game of money at your ranch, all the best resources are out found outside, in the world. Oh, you want me to explore, game, instead of sitting at my base farming things? Why, that’s what I want to do too! How convenient.
Sadly, it’s also Early Access, and I just hit the end of the current content. Arrgh, I was *just* getting into what story there was!
Other than that, there’s The Void, which is a 2009 game about, erm, farming magical color in an inhospitable wasteland and giving it to imprisoned women called the Sisters, while horrifically-mutilated creatures called the Brothers give deranged rants about how you don’t know what you’re doing and they’ll have to kill you if you don’t stop.
Well…no, actually, it’s about resource management, where the one resource you have (color) is simultaneously your health, your weapon, your defenes, your transport, your one means of escape, and the thing that is dooming the world around you.
Well, maybe. It’s all a metaphor for someone waking up from a coma, anyway. Or about the cost of creativity. Or about the horrific choices people make in times of hardship and how they harm others and themselves. Or the…
…um…
…I guess the main appeal is the sheer difference of it. It’s clearly the product of someone (or some people) very imaginitive, from a vastly different culture. Which is fitting, since the developers Ice-Pick Lodge are Russian and ‘non-standard’ games is kind of their thing. It’s a truly fascinating experience.
Sadly, though, they also like their games to be really hard, and the game’s learning curve and (unecessarily punishing) combat are *almost* a dealbraker, This game is fantastic at drawing you in with its obscure dialogue, dreamlike nature and beautiful visuals, creating an unique atmosphere…
…only to kick you straight back out when a randomly generated void predator gives you a jump scare, kills you and sends you back to the loading screen.
GOD DAMMIT
It’s exactly why I couldn’t get into Ice-Pick’s other, more famous, game Pathologic. So far, the thing that’s saved the Void for me is that it autosaves regularly, and the availability of fan-made easy mods.
*Personal favorite: the racoon slimes with the shifty eyes and evil smile. I live in hope that one day I’ll come back from a trip outside and they’ve somehow escaped confinement and locked me out of my ranch. I know they’re planning it.
The Void was very cool (once I found a guide), but I never finished it. It was really stressful managing resources while still trying to make progress on the plot and I kept worrying I was going to end up in an unwinnable spot if I made the wrong play. However, I do like the way the Color-to-Nerva mechanic works – you’re at your most powerful when you’re about to starve to death, which is always a fun time.
(Also, I was a little uncomfortable playing it with other people around due to how much time you spend talking to almost-naked women.)
I can’t recommend the Easy Mode mod / patch enough for this game. The selling point of this game is the atmosphere and story, so having that stunted by needless difficulty is like immersion kryptonite.
Especially since the game’s NPCs deliberately miss out key details of game mechanics when giving you instructions!
Even the ‘medium’ patch frees you from the fear of dying because you didn’t know that thing *the game didn’t tell you* about planting trees, or because you wanted to try out that glyph you just found – and replaces it with…the freedom to explore and try out new things.
(Can’t help with the naked women, though. But to me that’s part of the game’s fascination. There’s just…nudity in this game; unashamed and not necessarily sexual nudity. Something that a western developer simply wouldn’t do, or it would be censored by someone.)
Dammit, the Spam Filter ate my comment!
…but only because I tried to edit it, in order to correct the grammar.
That’s just mean, Spam Filter.
Rescued! :)
Thanks
Played The Old Republic with my Bounty Hunter again. It’s interesting how they let you deal with the main rival from the first act, where you can basically decide that you can’t be bothered with actually finishing off yourself and the character that most wants revenge on him is completely in favour of that, but it also drops in a point before that about needing to find something to live for or else you’ll turn into a brute, so it’s a bit deeper than you might think.
Also played Dragon Age 2, finishing off the Deep Roads expedition that’s basically the first act. What’s interesting here is that the game often gives you the choice to pass something off to your companion if they’re in the party, so earlier on I let Varric talk the slaver into returning the elf child so that we could avoid a fight, and in the Deep Roads you come across a demon that says that you need a key to get through and offers to tell you where it is if you deal with a problem you have. I asked Merrill about it and I had the option of having her just kill it, but I didn’t know if I really needed its help and so my character wouldn’t have taken the chance, but later when you find the treasure hoard of the thing it wanted killed it insists that you leave the treasure for it, which Varric opposed and since the whole purpose of the expedition was to get rich my character didn’t care for that idea either, so I took the option to have Varric deal with it and so he one-shot killed it. While some might complain about that not fitting into the world — it should have started a fight since it shouldn’t have been that easy to kill the demon — it’s actually neat that you can avoid some fights and get some things simply by asking your companions to deal with it, which was certainly more rare in Dragon Age Origins (there, you could ask for opinions but it was definitely the case that you couldn’t really get them to solve issues for you, except in very specific circumstances). Add in that there are a number of cases where your companions will add in asides if you bring them to the right places and this game does seem more companion focused than the first one, even though the companions aren’t as interesting.
I like the companion interactions in DA2 a lot. It always drives me nuts in RPGs when companions who could clearly be heroes of another story based on power level get put into a box where they’re functionally just weapons for the player character to point at their enemies. There’s a fine line to walk when giving them their own agency, because most players don’t like an NPC disagreeing with them or overruling their choices, but I think DA2 toes the line pretty well in making it clear that these are unique people with unique talents that sometimes trump what Hawke can do alone.
We don’t talk about Anders*.
*For the record I like Anders.
I was neutral towards Anders until I finished the game for the first time. After that, all of his actions are coloured by that and now I can’t stand him in any subsequent replays. Then again, that things look a lot different once you’ve seen how it ends is a good thing in a story.
Yeah, DA2 really went in on each of your companions having their own goals and agendas that they pursue on their own and that you can help or hinder them with. One of the best things is that at the end you have to make a choice of who you support and your companions align based on what fits with their personality, but you can convince them to side with you by making reasonable arguments (and probably having a high enough friendship level with them). Really, replaying it this time I feel that there are a lot of good things here that I think were mostly dropped or at least lost by being swamped under by the open world when it came to DAI.
DA2 had some of the most amazing features that I have seen in an RPG, and some of the most aggravating. The reused assets were really unforgivable, but now that I’ve had a decade to reflect I think that the unique story arc (NOT a heroes journey for once) and the interesting companion interactions make it a “very good game”.
The reused assets are still unforgivable, but the other factors make me glad that I played it anyway.
In my previous two playthroughs, I never really noticed or cared about the asset reuse. This time, I ended up running two quests back-to-back that used the exact same warehouse layout and thought “Okay, yeah, I can see the issue here.”
Like many, I’m playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I really loved Divinity: Original Sin 2, and so far Larian has done a fantastic job of using the 5E ruleset to make a fun game, and the story direction seems like a great mash-up of D:OS 2 and Dragon Age: Origins (they now do a lot of close-up shots for dialogue and narration).
I finally got around to launching my VR install of Firmament, the new game from the makers of MYST.
Got completely stuck on the first real puzzle and felt like a complete idiot when I looked up the solution. This does not bode well.
It’s pretty and immersive so far, though.
A lot of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. There’s a mode I get into when I’m playing a really good game where I’m planning my days around maximizing how long I can play it, and POE2 is the first of the year that I’m wholly in that mode. I like the main quest, I love the sidequests even more, and after giving ZERO craps about the Pillars 1 companions, I’m also finding the companions here very enjoyable to get to know. I’m playing it turn-based and it makes a lot of crowd control/damage over time/area healing abilities useful: they probably existed in some form in Pillars 1 but it was very unwieldy to pause for them when playing real time.
A little of Death Road to Canada still. Flawed game but fun to play in 30 minute chunks a few times a week.
I’ve been playing an entirely reasonable and healthy amount of Baldur’s Gate 3, which is to say all my free time is being devoted to it. Still trying to decide how I want to play it, I’m tempted to try an evil run just because they were asking for feedback on it in early access, and I’m curious what all they’ve done with it.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with the gameplay though, running a blade pact warlock and it’s definitely been fun, it’s one of my favorite setups on tabletop and I’m glad it’s also enjoyable in the game.
Well, I finished my playthrough of Crime O’ Clock and I gotta say: that game seriously overstayed its welcome. It started very promising and fun but halfway through it all started crumbling down under the weight of easily avoidable issues. It’s not enough for me to call it “bad”, as I still had fun with it, but I switched to play it in very short bursts in the last few days to avoid frustration.
I’m now playing Marvel’s Avengers, which I got for dirt cheap in its complete state now that it’s a month or so from being delisted. I’m actually having fun with it. They clearly worked a lot of its starting problems and since the live-service element is no longer at play that’s one annoyance I don’t have to deal with. I’m also liking the story and characters quite a bit. I almost regret not getting it earlier, then I remember it was designed to constantly suck money out of the player and I feel better about having waited.
Also going through The Room games in succession. I took a liking to these “Escape the room” puzzle games after playing Escape Academy and now I’m trying to see how many I can find.
Loved all the Room games except the last one, which apparently has multiple solutions to certain puzzles and therefore “bad” endings. I wasn’t ready for that and don’t think I like it. OTOH, I still wish they’d make more. Their VR game is much fun!
I should look into those since I love Escape Rooms but can’t do them in real-life, but after playing through “The Nonary Games” I think there’d have to be an interesting plot for me to really get into it.
Escape Academy has a story. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but it does have some interesting characters. The Room games have barely a plot that’s merely just an excuse for the gameplay, though.
I’ve been playing Loop Hero (after getting it free on the Epic Store).
I saw ManyATrueNerd play it a while back and though it looked like something I would enjoy. And I was right.
I like the automation-planning/rpg gameplay of each loop.
I like the rogue-lite/rpg-ish aspect of growing in power between loops.
I’m optimistically intrigued by the surreal setting and mysterious backstory (although it’s possible that it could fall flat when answers come out)
Get it while it’s free! (i.e. until tomorrow)
Another game I should finish. I got to the third boss but had to fall back and do some grinding for the more exotic resoures and then kinda let it fall by the wayside. It’s definitely got great atmosphere but I don’t 100% love how indirect the progression feels and it sits at that not entirely comfortable spot where it’s enough idle that I want to look away and do something else but also active enough that I need to keep my eye on it.
Supraland:Crash which is the DLC for the original game. I got both the original and the DLC years ago and played the base game then after which it just sat on my hard drive waiting for me to remember about it. The DLC is basically more of the same: open world first person puzzling with a sprinkling of light humour. I have by now reached the second half of the DLC where a lot of the puzzles either require me to think a bit outside the box and I have multiple tools making it a bit challenging to get the correct solution when I get stuck on trying a particular one… or I overthink them horribly and create a multistep Rube Goldberg machines for something that only requires me to do a thing or two. So yeah, it’s fun.
Still playing Solasta with a friend in co-op and it remains solid even if our going is slow due to our schedules not overlapping much these days, having said that while it is absolutely not fair to Solasta it does feel a bit like “we could be playing BG3 right now”. Also still Destiny 2, we’re in the late stage of the season where there is not much going on essentially letting people catch up on their grinds, do their quests or chill, I’m mostly doing the latter only doing a couple runs a week.
Apart from the usual mobile stuff, I’ve been playing Diablo 2: Resurrected. I’m having fun with it, because hey – it’s Diablo – but I find myself constantly switching between the new and old graphics.
And in almost every single case, I always find I like the old graphics better. The censorship in the new look really sucks, especially the significantly reduced gore and body horror.
And the new look is just so… generic! Not to mention that the particle effects look way more anemic with the new graphics – fire, lightning, poison… they’re barely noticeable now with how wispy they look.
All of this makes the remaster lose so much of the atmosphere the original has, which is pretty much why I even play the gam. Even though I’ve got hundreds of hours in D2, I’ve never cared about the endgame. Atmosphere and sotry are pretty much all I’m there for. The combat and loot is just the cherry on top.
I want to play more Darkest Dungeon but I’m finding it a little dull now. I’m churning through to get to bosses. But the longer more arduous missions are more money intensive and make me spend more money afterwards on personnel repairs, and so then I have to do more low level missions, which are dull now. Just to try to reach a boss which is essentially a copy of the previous version of itself. To be honest I’ve not really done many Veteran dungeons at all, so I should start doing them to see the different enemies. Thank goodness I didn’t get the Crimson Court (or is it Curse) DLC.
Also playing Baldur’s Gate 3 here. I’m running two campaigns, one with my spouse where we’re just finishing up Act 1. He’s a wizard and I’m a bard with a 1 level dip into life cleric. We’ve kinda split the companions between us, which is interesting because they do have separate degrees of friendliness and they’ll speak to one of us about certain things but not the other.
In my solo game I’m running as a rogue on easy mode so I can be a bit more mindless in combat (especially appreciated when I have our new baby in my arms). Multiclassing isn’t allowed on easy mode, though, and I have to decide if I want to stick with that or not.
Still Street Fighter 6.
I’m also playing Metroid Prime 2 for the first time. Back when I finished Metroid Dread, I felt like some more Metroid, and I never played the FPS Metroids, so I got a WiiU and bought the trilogy in the e-shop. I’ve finished Metroid Prime, and then again the remaster on the Switch, and now I’m continuing the trilogy. I like it! Navigating between the light and dark world is fun! The one thing that annoyed me about Prime on the WiiU was that turning was too slow, but now I found out that you can set the sensitivity for the Wiimote to “Advanced” it feels a lot better.
Though right now, I’m completely stumped after getting the Grapple Beam. The hints aren’t helping me at all. I have three hint markers on the map right now (I don’t think that ever happened in Prime) and they seemed to appear in the wrong order. Like, the first one shows me a location that I don’t have the equipment to enter. I’m wondering if I did some accidental sequence breaking, but I doubt it.
Hey, Metroid Prime 2, the one no one else seems to acknowledge! Oppressive survival horror atmosphere segments combined with beam weapons that are both different and actually matter beyond “you must have X to fight Y!” A badass ancient species that *isn’t* the Chozo, nor completely wiped out so your actions actually mean something!
It is still a metroidvania, so it is possible you did a sequence break/missed a turn somewhere. I’d just check a guide, if the map isn’t directly showing grapple beam markers. The “go that way” hints not being very useful does sound familiar, telling you more end goals than where you actually need to go next.