T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I am waiting impatiently for the Phasmophobia update. I’m still playing Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord but it’s nothing interesting, it’s just biding my time till I get get my hands on the cool new equipment they’re teasing for Phasmaphobia: Ascension.
What are you guys up to?
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
The Biggest Game Ever
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
The No Politics Rule
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
The Best of 2016
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
Like before, Diablo 2: Resurrected, still using the old graphics. On my tablet I play Legends of Runeterra, where I made Platinum in Ranked just casually playing a Neeko Garen deck. Also playing Golden Roll, which is basically Yahtzee.
Playing a few games with my 6 y/o sister. Apart from the usual of Minecraft, Plants vs Zombies and Half-Life, we started playing Dredge which she’s really liking because she’s very much into horror games. We’ve just got the crab pots and we’re about to set sail and start seeing more weird stuff. And she’s absolutely loving it!
You don’t like the new graphics? I thought they were both very good and very respectful of the original’s mood.
Well, in almost every single case, I find I like the old graphics much better. The censorship in the new look really sucks, especially the significantly reduced gore and body horror. Monsters die in less gory ways, the corpses littered around the levels are darker so they stand out less, the colour palette is less saturated than the original…
And the new look is just so… generic! It’s like a cheap Path of Exile reskin. Not to mention that the particle effects look downright anemic with the new graphics – fire, lightning, poison… they’re barely noticeable now with how wispy they are. And the new look just displays much less attention to detail.
All of this makes the remaster lose so much of the atmosphere the original has, which is pretty much why I even play the game. Atmosphere and story are basically all I’m there for. The combat and loot is just the cherry on top.
So I caved in to overwhelming internet pressure and bought Baldur’s Gate 3. Just to be clear affording it was not an issue, I just feel a bit guilty buying a game full price on release when I have a massive backlog, on the other hand it’s nice to be part of a current conversation. Furthermore I’ve decided not to wait for my co-op buddy and start it solo, we can always do a playthrough with him as a main and me just tagging along. Anyway, I’m still on the first map (past the strictly tutorial one) so these are relatively early impressions. Mechanically it’s very Larian, which is a good thing, I can already see the multiple solutions to problems thing and people I’ve talked to pointed out some I wouldn’t have thought of. On the other hand playing this and Solasta effectively at the same time means I’m trying to learn DnD 5e mechanics in two variations (Solasta is an almost 1:1 conversion, BG3 is much more homebrew) which is occasionally a bit confusing. There are also slight quality of life annoyances like the way I can’t compare gear for non-present companions with store content, or I’d like to be able to see the difficulty of checks before I decide to commit to them but these are absolutely not a deal breaker. The game is also strongly convincing me that I’ll need to upgrade my PC if not this year than probably next year at the latest, even on medium details it’s chugging a little bit and without the SSD the loading times are perhaps not atrocious but definitely above making the use of quicksaves comfortable.
Now writingwise the game has been a delight. I don’t know how well it’ll hold down the road, especially as I assume the main story will add some gravitas over time, but just hanging around the first hub I literally laughed out loud several times. Being able to speak to animals is a gift that keeps giving and the
thiefling kid gangwere a joy. From the origin characters introductions I was not expecting to like Gale but he’s growing on me quickly, Shadowheart has been at least inoffensive and I haven’t met Karlach yet but I love her visual design and I’m looking forward to seeing what character angle they’ll take with her (at least she’s a Tiefling who is not a rogue or warlock so that’s already something) on the other hand Astarion is a whiny little s**t that I’m keeping in the party primarily due to a need for rogue, he may redeem himself but I’m not holding my breath (not to say that he’s necessarily badly written but we do not mesh).Other than that kinda floating between games, put some hours into Two Point Hospital that I haven’t touched in months but in later stages it’s definitely a game to play while doing something else, like watching a movie or a stream, as it on the one hand requires a bunch of waiting for certain goals to kick in and on the other sprinkles in just enough emergencies that you can’t just leave it running. Finished all the achievements in Nomad Survival (it’s so-so, got it in a bundle and it works in a jiffy) and looking for a new VampireSurvivorslike to be able to play in short bursts before work.
I’m still in Act 1 myself but I’ve thoroughly spoiled myself on several Youtube videos. I would say that BG3’s companions (the Origin companions, at least. Not sure about the non-Origin ones) have a remarkable capacity for growth based on your approach in the game and the way you treat them. You can really steer them towards redemption and a better path, or convince them to indulge in their darkest desires, and it all feels very well-written and believable. Astarion is indeed an insufferable little sh*t at the start of the game, but the way he behaves and talks to you if he has high Approval/trust in you is like night and day. He never does quite lose his snarky attitude though. ;)
Not much gaming this last week, for a variety of reasons, but I did start playing the recently-launched Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands, a turn-based RPG by the creator of the Deathbulge webcomic and let me tell you: this game is great. It’s hilarious, for sure, but there are also some very interesting game mechanics at play here. I went in just for the writing, expecting a run-of-the-mill JRPG, but the gameplay is quite strong.
Practically nothing this week. Killing Tonberrys in Final Fantasy 8, because obviously the most boring sidequest with a boss they expect you to tackle near endgame (if at all) is the ideal starting point for midgame sidequesting. I’ve been in this metal diamond for a week now. I’ve learned so much about Tonberrys. Did you know Tonberrys in 8 do not deal unlimited damage when they attack, but instead deal moderate damage? Really defeats the point of being a Tonberry. Did you know Tonberry is a fun word to say? Tonberry.
Tonberry
Scarf – the latest in my series of pretty-looking indie games. A Journey-esque sort of thing in that the scarf gives the player mobility powers. Not as pretty as I’d have hoped for, and strangely power hungry – I’m using a GTX 970, which (while old at this point yes) should be able to handle some pastel-ey low fidelity indie platformer with tremendous ease, but only gets a decent framerate without abundant screen-tearing at 2560×1440 in windowed mode, so I’m playing it in a smaller window on my UHD TV. Had to turn off shadows etc – the usual happy situation where turning the settings down either makes the game look better or at least not worse. Instead of shadows made crisper and then softened, just lower resolution shadows. And instead of a blurred hazy screen, a nice clear one. Same situation arose for Raji, in terms of having to run it in a smaller window. Very strange – I ran Recore at 4K perfectly fine and it’s a much sharper game graphically than either Scarf or Raji.
But the gameplay and story? Another morose/hopeful/uplifting/sad atmospheric thing with English (as in, from England) narrators who sound like they have nothing to do with the game somehow, halfway between listening to a cassette book in the car in 1998, and BBC Radio 4. So quite similar to Unfinished Swan. I think I would have preferred no narration at all, or words on the screen.
Gameplay is fairly fun, jumping and gliding and so on. Imprecise 3D platforming due to a large turning circle for the character when running. Finding how to progress by relatively simple mechanics. The usual fare. A very cool thing I’ve not seen before though where you can go underwater by using something that repels water Moses style, giving you a bubble to walk in – looks great but no real mechanics to it.
I found a fun shortcut right at the end of a level and ended up having to re-do the entire level because it allowed me to exit the level into the hub world, and upon trying to re-enter the level put me back at the start. No taking shortcuts by finding places where the developers haven’t accounted for platforming shenanigans…
I had to skip The Old Republic this week, but did manage to get in at least one other session of Dragon Age 2. The interesting thing this week is that for at least one session I decided that I’d get a few quests in before having to quit for the night to get a couple of episodes of “Veronica Mars” in, and the addictive nature of the quests meant that I went from thinking that I might quit a little bit early to ending up running a bit long … and I still could have played a bit longer and had to deliberately stop to get those episodes in. Sure, it was the case that I was trying to figure out how to solve the last Herbalist’s quest when that can only be done in Merrill’s companion quest, but the nice thing about DA2 compared to the other games is that you don’t end up running late because any one quest or area is too big, but more because you always have small quests that you could be doing. That makes it feel a lot more like a game like Star Wars: Rebellion, where time flies by because you’re always occupied, and not just because you’re slogging through an area (the longest slog so far was the Deep Roads, and even that wasn’t that long a slog).
I had guests over for PC VR last night, and we tried some games I hadn’t launched yet. Ash tried Stride which is VR skyscraper parkour, and while the heights didn’t bother her at all, she found the controls a little confusing. I did somewhat better in Against, a rhythm game where you’re a 40s pulp hero with sword, revolver, and brass knuckles. Mynah tried her hand at Beat Saber again, playing some of the custom levels which are such a pain to load onto a Quest. I wrapped it up with a bit of goofery in Alyx, showing off the interactivity of the environment and surprising Ash with her picture on the cardboard case of an old VHS videotape.
Finished Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. A mighty fine RPG, major combat and presentation updates to the already fantastic first game. I really appreciate how the factions were written, there are no good guys and bad guys, only a series of self-interested rational actors fighting amongst themselves. I get a bit irritated by modern games, even ones that TRY to be shades of gray, clearly having a specific way they prefer you to think and play. This skirts that preference in a very pleasing way, and I adore the feeling of disgust the game triggered in me when my preferred faction went “sure, we’ll help you save the world – as soon as you screw over our rivals for us, we do have priorities you know”. It’s gloriously petty and I would imagine would have played out similarly no matter which of the four I went with.
If they wanted to make a pirate game they probably should have invested in making an isometric version of Black Flag combat; the text-based ship combat game is boring, simple and too long, but luckily very skippable.
Started Yakuza 4. No judgment yet, it’s very early; it was a very risky move to open up with a new protagonist and no familiar faces to shepherd him in, but I know Kiryu’s in this game so I’m not sweating a little exposition to put new pieces on the table.
Out of curiosity, were you playing turn based or real time with pause and what is your take on how that worked for the game? I want to play it turn based when I get to it because I’m not a fan of RTWP but I’ve seen some people claim that the game was clearly not designed with that mode in mind and it turns it into an awful slog.
I played turn-based. I thought it was good, much better than Pillars 1’s impenetrable wall of high-speed dice rolls in RTWP.
I wouldn’t call it a “slog”, but if you play that way you will have to be okay with the fact that some relatively minor fights can still take 5 minutes. To be honest I never noticed it that much because I was having a good time, but once in a while I’d be playing right before I had to leave the house and I’d set a timer for 20 minutes and be shocked when it went off after 2 fights and some minor wandering.
The game is not that long to start with relative to the genre, and the number of fights is not high enough that it wears you out. So I think it worked well for my tastes.
I think I’ll be fine. Like I said I was mostly trying to verify stuff I heard on the internet as I much prefer turn based myself.
Reminds me of a story, Pathfinder:Kingmaker has one, I wanna say late-mid game, encounter that’s a massive group of low level and at this stage not very threathening enemies (I honestly think it’s mostly for flavor). That room took something like 20 minutes alone. Admittedly I should have just switched to real time since the danger was fairly negligible, or used AoE (I tend to be overly conservative with spells) but it honestly didn’t really occur to me at the time to do something else than just wade through.
I quite enjoyed Deadfire, though it certainly had some flaws. The ship combat was absolutely a mistake, and apparently the devs agreed, they said it was an unworkable money pit and wanted to cut it entirely, but were forced by higher ups to implement it in some way, and we got… that.
And the factions were great, there are really no good options and it’s up to you to pick one you can stomache based on their ideals, or at the very least, pick the one that disgusts you the least. It definitely managed to make the pirates attractive as a “fuck all these guys, actually” option.
I’ve been getting back into The Planet Crafter.
I haven’t played it since the update that added frogs. So there are frogs now. And trade rockets.
The frogs are cool enough; they are functionally not that different from the butterflies and the fish… except that they are frogs. The fact that ponds full of wild frogs are starting to appear does add to the impression that I am not terraforming a barren world so much as I am awakening a dormant ecosystem. Faintly disappointing.
The trade rockets I’m worried could turn into a grind. Maybe the thing to do is to find things for myself to do while tradeable resources accumulate over time, rather than dwelling too much on the nect big purchase.
Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters is a game that exists because someone said ‘Hey what if we made XCOM, but in the 40K universe?’ – and then they did, and it was pretty good.
It’s a solid game, engaging in a lot of the same ways that the new XCOM games are. I had to unlearn a load of my XCOM instincts, like sticking to cover, trying to flank people, and thinking ‘shooting people with guns’ is a useful thing to do.*
It’s far more effective to run at the enemy and hit them with melee weapons than it is to try and tactically take them down, but hey, it’s 40K and you’re the space marines. Par for the course, on reflection.
My main gripe is that it focusses on the Grey Knights, who are my least favorite chapter – if I had to guess, the lore for these chumps was written by an insecure 13-year-old who couldn’t bear the thought of his precious soldiers being worse than anyone at anything, ever.
They’re (*deep breath*) the most elite and secretive of all the space marines! Every single part equipment is a better version of the stuff normal space marines get! And they’re all psychic! And they fight Daemons all day, but not one has ever fallen to Chaos, ‘cos they’re just that great! And anyone that meets them – friend or foe – has to be either killed or mindwiped, because of secrecy!
*Sigh*. Well at least you don’t have to deal with their infamously-awful Named Character, Kaldor Draigo, who makes your average Mary Sue look like a –
– oh, fuck me sideways, he’s in this game too. In fact, the story goes out of its way to include him. Otherwise sensible support characters fawn over him and over time start making terrible decisions, and the actual story of the game starts to fold in on itself – all so that he can be more involved in the story. In fact, the story stops being about the player, at all, and was in fact actually kind-of about Kaldor Drago all along.
Anyway, this bullshit coincides with a final mission that’s so egregiously hard that I haven’t beaten this game. Which is sad, because it was great up until a certain point.
*It is, actually, but only as a way to soften the enemy up for when you rush them with melee weapons.
I’m not saying this makes it a bad game on its own, or that people should stop playing it because of this, but MOST of the lore of 40K reads like it was written by 14-year-olds. Same for the art direction. I think that’s the tone that GW is specifically striving for, because it’s worked for them: don’t think about any of this too hard, just let your inner child run around shouting “Cool!!!” a lot.
You’re not wrong, by any means. When the most iconic weapon of your setting is a chainsaw sword being wielded by a 9-foot-tall supersoldier, it’s not really…highbrow.
Thing is, even if 40K’s lore comes across as being written by teenagers, it’s not always this bad. Some of it can even be good.
For instance: “This chapter of space marines are generally good guys, but are always at danger of falling into a bezerker rage that can overtake them in battle. In some cases, it ends up being permanent, and those individuals have to be locked up when not fighting for everyone else’s protection” is still something a teenager would come up with, but it’s nevertheless interesting. It’s got flaws, and conflict, and potential for growth or storytelling.
“These guys are better than everyone else, at everything” just…isn’t interesting. It just makes the writer seem bad.
Well, to me. Some people probably like it.
(I actually had a seperate paragraph rant about the art style, that I took out of my original post because there was already enough rant in there. I think it’s a sign of 40K’s age – in a constant need to come up with new ideas and miniatures to sell, something gets added to ideas and units that were already there…over time, so much stuff gets added on that the original clarity is lost.)
Yeah, W40k is a tough franchise to like. When it’s good it’s good, but when it’s bad it’s awful. The constant need for one-upsmanship generally doesn’t help the setting.
Still playing Terra Invicta, though my enthusiasm has fallen off a bit in the last few days. I’ve researched all the technologies, have the best end-game weapons and drives, know my final objective, and it’s now entered the realm of tediously waiting for enough ships to build that I can wipe out the alien’s main battle fleet, then begin mop-up operations around the Solar System.
Actually, I’ve known my final objective for over half the campaign length at this point, but since part of it involves the aliens’ combined fleet power being no more than something like 30% of all the fleets in the Solar System, and they kept blowing up my earlier, weaker, fleets, it’s taken a while to get to a point where I can actually realistically go for it. And the game definitely falls down a bit now. I’ve essentially taken over Earth (I control countries covering something like 70% of its land mass), and none of the other factions can reasonably threaten me, so as my fleet action in the wider Solar System becomes more important it’d be nice to transition away from a mostly-unified Earth into inter-planetary space. While there is an “automate” function for your council members, it’s a bit simplistic and the game still stops ever mission cycle, which is two weeks in a game where it takes months — minimum — to move between planets, even with the best drives in the game. I’ve got bases on the Galilean moons, but the alien’s wormhole is out in the Kuiper belt, so I’m looking at a prolonged, (in-game) years-long campaign to whittle alien fleet power down and get a strong enough attack fleet out to where I can end the game, and I don’t have much else that can challenge me in the meantime. Except boredom, I guess. Maybe that was the final boss all along…
As an astronomer whose first love was the Solar System I can appreciate realism up to a point, but there’s a reason games deviate from it in the name of fun. I think there’s a good game in there struggling to get out through a load of necessary balance changes, so here’s hoping for someone to come along and make the Terra Invicta: The Short War overhaul mod it so desperately needs.
Also Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew releases in about 12 hours, so I’ll probably be playing that for a while.
Oh man, I feel this. The last thing I remember about my Long War-modded playthrough of XCOM was that I needed to shoot down the late-game Overseer UFO – so I sent out my best-equipped Interceptor with my most experienced pilot out to engage it…
…and it got shot down almost instantly. Couldn’t even return fire.
It was the realization that I’d need to play for at least 20 hours before I’d be able to rebuild the firestorm interceptor and replace the pilot I’d lost – let alone improve on them! – that caused me to finally give up* on the mod.
The final boss is boredom indeed.
Here’s hoping for someone to come along and make the Terra Invicta: The Short War overhaul mod it so desperately needs.
I LOLed. The irony of that is beautiful.
*Though the dodgy aerial combat ‘minigame’ in XCOM was as much of a problem as anything else. Long War did so much to take away the randomness of those games, but there were some things that simply couldn’t be modded out.
Like many others, playing Baldur’s Gate 3. Glad my wife persuaded me to get the game. Random note: I’m amused by the Dragon Age style cutscene close-ups where your characters are having detailed dialogue all the while drenched in their own blood.
Like a lot of other people, I’m playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and enjoying it quite a lot. Considering its length and the amount of gaming time I’m going to have during the next month, I think this acion log will be valid for quite a while. :p