T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’m playing Borderlands for the first time. (Technically I have played before. But I didn’t get past Firestone.) I’ve played all of the other games multiple times but for some reason I never got into the first one. But, now I have played through the game (and two and a half out of the four DLCs) while doing all of the side quests.
There are small differences, like revolver ammo and pistol ammo being separate; and grenade mods only have one modifier.
And then, there are bigger differences… I was surprised to learn that fast travel isn’t unlocked until New Haven. I thought it just was a bug until I looked it up. I’ve also been spoiled with the sequels having voice acting, so much so that I kept accidentally skipping the text.
Finally, the main antagonist Commandant Steele is vacant throughout most of the game. She talks to you for the first time about 20% in, again around 60%, and one last time at the end when she opens the vault and promptly dies, having added effectively nothing to the story.
After completing the story I went on to The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. I now know that was the last DLC released but at the time I didn’t know. It was nice for a change of scenery but I quickly learned that there is no fast travel in any the DLC, just a lot of driving. At least they gave a faster car that, if you turn at all at speed, it will stop driving and start rolling. It goes great with this DLCs primary roads (elevated highways with low walls). It’s one of my favorite ways to fall off the map.
Other than that I liked the DLC and thought the looting with a timer at the end was kind of cool.
I also played a bit of Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot. Not much to say on it. A whole DLC for a battle arena with modifiers is a bit weird, but it’s fine. It would probably be more fun with friends, but I’m playing solo at the moment.
The last DLC I played was The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. I didn’t like it very much. I probably would have liked it more but I had a fear of zombies as a kid, (I’m still not fond of them today.)
I went in expecting a goofy mystery, not realizing that it released shortly after Left for Dead 2. As a result I was constantly harassed by the zombies that would just spawn continually, with effectively no downtime.
My final gripe; GearBox recently announced Borderlands 4 and I don’t like the way they just slap an ad for it in the corner of the main menu. (I also think it just looks bad.)
Anyway, what is everyone else up to?
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
Joker's Last Laugh
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
Are Lootboxes Gambling?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
I finished up Dredge: The Iron Rig, which is.. fine? Given the state of my personal player economy when I started it I was able to just walk through it for the most part (except the DLC-specific materials) and the horror clicked even less then it did in the base game. But it introduces some new things, integrates nicely in the existing world (but not in the Pale Reach, the first DLC region), and gives a bit more play-time to squeeze out of it.
Then I fell into a rabbit hole, namely Assassin’s Creed: Origins. Which immediately hooked me with the “oh look and open world with a ton of things on the map”, which works disturbingly well on me. I like the improvements to the controls, and so far the thing seems to be decently written. We shall see how this goes on.
I finished Dungeons of Hinterberg. It’s definitely a game where you can pick how long you play, and in my case I went through it fairly quickly – I only had a couple of days when I didn’t complete a dungeon. I do appreciate that the game gave the correct stats for my playstyle and therefore I ended up with way less Relaxation than the other social stats. I also only had Amusement because every single night I stayed up late watching TV, and I can certainly empathize with a character trading sleep for staring at a screen.
One note for difficulty in the game, fairly early on I decided to remove all the potions from my hotbar and never use them. I think it was the correct choice, potions could totally trivialize any fight that didn’t one shot you.
My favorite dungeons were the ones that did wacky things with the dungeon layout. In the snow area there were dungeons where you were standing on small spheres with their own gravity, which is always a pretty cool experience. And there was one dungeon which felt very Escher, where you could walk up walls or push buttons to rotate the floor.
Last week I questioned whether it would have something to really say about the effect of tourism on a small town, and in the end
no, it ended with a clear villain who was technically fighting for tourism but didn’t feel like a representation of the real issues. I also was confused by the conversation about what magic wanted, which was apparently… a conversation?At the end of the game you get to meet all the people you befriended. Because of my approach to the game that wasn’t very many. Oh well, the edgelord who gave me a sweet sword was the only friend I really needed.
Now I’ve been playing Tactical Breach Wizards. I played the demo of this previously and liked it a lot, and that continues with the full game. It’s definitely more Into the Breach than it is XCOM, and the levels feel like puzzles to solve, but that’s not a bad thing. Being able to clearly see the impact of all of your actions and rewind them if they’re dumb is incredibly pleasant. Your various characters all play extremely differently and work well together.
And the dialogue is genuinely and consistently funny, which is wonderful. It makes me think about the whole Defenestration series, and how Gunpoint had good writing and Tactical Breach Wizards has good writing and Heat Signature… basically didn’t have any writing at all. Kind of a shame, in retrospect.
The party “healer” is probably the most entertaining take on the archetype that I’ve ever seen.
As for what you played – Borderlands 1 is just going to feel weak after you’ve played Borderlands 2. 2 is very clearly the high point of the series. That being said, I completed 1 and I never finished 3, but that could just be a difference in my attention span rather than a clear marker of game quality.
This can happen with hilarious results in Persona 4. You will tend to focus on links with your team members, but at the end when you’re leaving all of your team members have a separate scene with you, and there’s a scene where all of the non-team members come by to see you off. I don’t know if it happened to me once or if I just saw it somewhere, but I recall one scene where I only had maxed out the link with Yumi, and so when the game pointed out all the people other than the team and family that you had connected with, she was standing there rather awkwardly all by herself. I don’t know what the game does if you haven’t maxed out anyone outside of the team and family …
In Persona 3, they all cheer you on at one point, but at least you get the team cheering you on, which helps with that.
I’ve just gotten through the first few levels with them – it is indeed quite funny!
I haven’t had time to play anything. A little of Craftopia on Monday in coop. But I bought and downloaded Dustborn. The new game of Red Thread Games, the creators of Dreamfall. The preview I’ve read in PC Games magazine was promising.
Analog my family and I played The White Castle for the first time. A rough teach made it a 4 hour game, that was quite enjoyable in the middle section and stressful at the end due to time constraints. I lost 30-ish points behind.
Speaking of Borderlands, I’ve been playing through 2 and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands with two separate friends named Kira. I also started a playthrough of Victoria 3, going from the Khedivate of Egypt to a (more liberalized) Arabia with influence from Morocco to Indonesia.
I’ve also been running a game of Worlds Without Number (a game inspired by older editions of DnD). Our heroes (a psychic necromancer, an elf who knows a lot of stuff, and a tiefling with swashbuckling and healing powers) have gotten themselves involved in a civil war, and next Saturday will be raiding a ship containing evidence of some kind of plot.
I’ve put The Old Republic on hold for a couple of weeks to catch up with the diary entries on the blog, but I made an effort to put time into Mass Effect 2 so that I can finish the trilogy up by the end of the year. While it has some decent moments — I liked that when you bring Kasumi to the mission to get Okeer when you meet the shady scientist from Saren’s lab she comments after the scientist has run off that she seems nice, in that mad scientist kind of way — I don’t think I like anything about it more than I liked the first game. I’ve managed to come up with a serviceable method for mining, where I mine completely any area with a Mass Relay and fuel depot and then mine the richest planet in the nearby areas that don’t (because I don’t want to waste time and money running back to the fuel depot for probes and then having to top the tanks off) and after picking up a number of upgrades I have over 100,000 units of everything except Element Zero, which is at about 16,000, so I should be okay for now. Might have to go find specific Element Zero planets later.
The main issue with this method, though, is that in any new area it takes me a lot longer to do the mining than it does for me to run the missions, so most of my play sessions are filled with mining. That will get better later as I’ve mined more places out, but for now it’s dull and uninteresting.
I also hit one mission with the Hammerhead, which is the one with the autistic person who Cerberus has been training to communicate with Geth in their hivemind. One area, at the Geth ship, is the epitome of DIAS, as you need to take down the shield generators while getting fired at by the main cannon, and if you make one mistake you have to start the whole mission over (from the briefing from the contact). The thing is, it seems like there’s a pattern — for me, it seemed to be that when it says to take evasive action you jump in the air and move to the left or right away from where the beam is angling — but since you die if you get hit once it’s really, really hard to figure this out. This can be compared to the Thresher Maw’s in the first game which are also tough and where figuring out how things work is important, but one hit won’t kill you and you can repair the Mako as well, so if you screw up it isn’t the end of it, which means you can get things wrong. I REALLY hated that area which coloured the whole mission for me.
So I don’t like Mass Effect as much as I liked Dragon Age, but I should be able to finish it, and then will have to pick up something else next year.
Kingmaker continues until morale improves. So having finished chapter 3 I think it is (Season of Bloom), I’m pretty sure I was supposed to have somehow been at town level before I even started it, even though there really wasn’t enough time for that (maybe if you take the extra loan- which you can’t do until you’re significantly through chapter 2 stuff and actually have a treasurer, and/or if you skip all the curse research I did which the game made it sound was important). So I’m finally getting some magic items in- not from vendors, but apparently you have to annex places and build stuff for artisans who will eventually start giving you stuff periodically. And the first item I get is. . . . basically a bane axe for a particular dungeon I cleared like two and a half levels ago. And I get exactly one item out of the other person before oh no, now there’s a quest about their stuff causing problems (haven’t gone over to see if that’s solvable without booting them or not, we’ll see).
That curse research is particularly annoying, because apparently the main way your stats go up is your advisors solving problems, every time they do their stat goes up. So they make it sound like the land is cursed you need to research curses, which means that you spend a bunch of money putting your high priest on hold, instead of getting free divine points. Which you need to upgrade divine, so you’ll eventually be allowed to upgrade arcane, which from what I caught on the store/dlc page is what you need for the scroll vendor improve, so your wizards can be wizards.
On the adventuring front, killing so. fucking. many. goblins. Now the game has shown its slog. As many of y’all are probably aware, 3.x DnD has around an average of 13.3 “encounters” per level. Which is rather a lot if you’re not college kids spending literally all day gaming, and is probably one of the big reasons why all these crpgs are real-time: slogging through that many mooks is a slog. It was reasonable with the spider caves back in the beginning, it was tiresome when there were lolmany trolls everywhere at all times, and finally it’s just a damn slog as we hit this chapter. Remember the stupid bandit camps with their armies of level 6 people? The goblins have more people at higher levels! At least when the game swaps into monsters it’s not spiders- no, just hydras with permanent miss chances in a game where those can only be suppressed by a druid spell and you have no druid, and owlbears with so many hit dice they casually hit the uber tank. Meanwhile the OP Ranger is replaced by a similarly OP and also much more bespoke snowflake goblin Rogue, who gets like four perfect weapons while the rest of the team continues to have squat. Oh and when I said hey at least it’s not spiders- until the finale, which is caves full of spiders. Including the triumphant return of spider swarms, after I stopped carrying the weapon which would have been most useful against them (and oh they have Evasion so your area spells are liable to fail entirely). And it locks in your party with no warning after the goblin fort, and then point of no returns you with no warning after the spider cave, so I hope you like the party you had active.
Used save reloads and the rebuild NPC to check some of the recommended builds. Side note: the language on the various buttons regarding auto-builds is far too spicy, for what is basically “if you change something you can’t turn it back on and also for some dumb reason we decided having to guess your own builds is part of the difficulty so this is easier so doesn’t count for cheevos.” Which is funny, because with all the miss chances you’d think Blind Fight would be used, but nope, no one takes it, and the flanking sneak attack blender rogue is taking faster sneaking in a game that will 100% script trigger you out of stealth so you can’t actually scout away from the party. Found out yes, they do early entry for Arcane Trickster, so rebuilt her to be less deadweight. Indeed, now she’s only one level behind me on spells while being able to do multi-touch sneak attacks that effectively double the damage of those spells (and will apparently cap out adding sneak to even area spells), while I. . . have free extend 1/day (and two different extend rod items so who cares) and access to abjuration and necromancy, most of which still suck at this level. And I’m still down two feats from trying to do summon stuff in a game that for all its summoner class variants really seems to hate summoning. I tried the 5th level summon, finally an outsider instead of an animal and. . . it spent its first two turns casting Mirror Image and then a Lightning Bolt which dealt 8 damage. I have not summoned it again.
Story reveals went both as expected and a dash of unexpected, ‘s fine, ‘s good.
Kingmaker was so frustrating. The adventuring and party side was good fun, but it doesn’t really tell you that there are actual deadlines for some things on the kingdom management side, and if you don’t get them done your game is not going to end well…and if you set your advisors on the wrong project then they won’t be free to deal with the important time-sensitive stuff when it comes up. I got about two thirds of the way through before I found out any of this, and had to install a couple of major game-mechanic-changing mods to be able to finish the game at all.
Hmm. Well if it’s crippling I suppose I ought to ask for at least the mechanical spoiler. I’ve had no problems with keeping the Problems under control with the advisors, stats are going up and the main bottleneck is the game just not proccing the rank up projects until it feels like it. I’ve got some half of the curses researched. That and how it keeps giving me decisions that cost BP which it seems bad to skip but which are in turn slowing down acquisition of land.
It sounds like you’re already doing better than I was! It was a good few years ago that I played it, now, and I don’t remember the specifics…just that I failed to spot some big it impacted my game in ways that I didn’t feel were clearly signposted at all. Keep some save games before making big decisions on projects, I guess, and at least if it all goes wrong you can reload and change your mind?
The honeymoon period with Fallout:London is over and it has shown some rough edges. Several dialogue trees and quests (particularly the ones relating the Trafalgar Square and the surrounding area) are just plain broken: dialogue options are swapped, conversations end abruptly, one character simply does not have dialogue and the only way to finish a quest they’re essential to is to skip quest stage using console command. I’m hoping it’s just some sloppy design in this area for whatever reason and the main quest doesn’t explode in my face at any point. The exploration itself is still fun enough but it is mired byt the absolutely godawful loading times, which I am blaming on the Creation Engine rather than the mod team but that doesn’t change the fact they’re there especially as the games has several instances of “the princess is in another castle” quests which typically means going through three loading screens per location (fast travel to the door, then loading the location as you enter it, then reloading the outside map as you exit it). I also just plain cheated and gave myself like 10000 carrying capacity because I got tired of constant inventory management and juggling items between myself and my companion.
I’ve also encountered some random stupidity in the writing that I think Shamus would love to hate. To be fair this first bit may be a case of me sequence breaking, or broken quest flags, but as soon as I arrived at Trafalgar Square
I ask the first person who the local leader is, she says there is nobody official but they unofficially defer to this one guy because he’s reasonable and smart. The quest this triggers guides to go to the guy and absolutely insist that he needs to become an official leader of this community even though our character has no vested interest in this whatsoever (this, I imagine, is the sequence breaking part as I’ll probably need some kind of support from various settlements/factions at some point). Now get this, the guy is tire salesman. 170 years into the war he is selling tires, to a bunch of people who live within the confines of Trafalgar Square, in London where there are no working cars and it wouldn’t even matter if there were because literally not a single road is not blocked by piles of rubble, makeshift walls or barricades. But wait, there’s more! You convince the guy to “run” for the local mayor (there are no other candidates) but o he can’t do that without city’s official voting ballots, which can only be obtained in a ruined, murdermonster infested city hall! Also, the moment he is elected he makes a pronouncement about “the return of The Good Samaritans” which is something that has so far not been mentioned once and seems to have no real consequence thus far (might be another instance of me doing things out of sequence but you’d think maybe this quest just should not trigger until I encounter the proper circumstances).Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a very impressive project for something done as a mod, the exploration is a lot of fun when it’s not broken by three minute long loading screens and I’m still kinda hoping that when I properly get into the main quest it will not be a dumpster fire. I also can’t fully blame the mod team from inheriting concepts from the setting as Bethesda Fallout is characterized by people stupidly clinging to pre-war concepts and customs even if they make no sense whatsoever. On the other hand stupid is stupid no matter where it comes from and the combination of What Do They Eat with a severe case of Gamedevs Don’t Understand Scale still breaks my immersion on a regular basis.
I have been playing **House of Hours**, the sort of sequel to **Cultist Simulator**, it’s a game about being an occult librarian. It’s pretty good, probably what I would recommend over CS because it’s less frantic and more approachable.
And the other day I started **The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante**, it’s like a choose your own adventure game where you play the whole life (from child to adult) of the titular character. The setting of the world is pretty interesting, a country dominated by extremely rigid theocracy, people can revive 3 times before having a true death and the society is dividid by rigids Lots.