T w e n t y S i d e d
This week is more Borderlands.
I finished up the first Borderlands with Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution, and reaching the max of level 69 (nice). The DLC was fun and I liked seeing all of the previous antagonists Claptrap themed.
I didn’t finish the quest to collect Claptrap parts for Tannis due too not wanting to spend an hour farming Claptraps. Also, last week I said The Secret Armory of General Knoxx was the last DLC released. I apparently did not look at the dates very closely and in fact the Claptrap DLC was the last one released.
But anyway, I’m now playing Borderlands 2! As of writing this I am level 44 and seeing how high of a level I am willing to get.
So far the main differences that I have noticed are, Borderlands 2 is a lot more colorful, it opens with a very bright icy tundra which contrasts heavily with the fist games brown deserts and junkyards, enemies seem to drop more loot but it’s also a fair bit more sparing about good chests, and all of the weapons are a way more stylized and distinct between manufacturers.
I haven’t gotten around to any of the DLC yet, but I probably will next week.
So what is everyone else doing this week?
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Please Help I Can’t Stop Playing Cities: Skylines
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
Spider-Man
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
The Game That Ruined Me
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
Deus Ex and The Treachery of Labels
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
I finished Tactical Breach Wizards. I was really happy with it – all of the characters felt good to use (and very different), there was a decent enemy variety, it was a reasonable length, and the writing continued to be good. There was a bit less comedy as the game went on and things were more serious, but it was still very much there.
I enjoyed some of the twists it had, like
the guy who sees hundreds of potential futures misremembering which one actually happened or the shapeshifter who did not start life as a human.And some of the plans your team made were genuinely quite clever, likegetting out of a no-win fight because all of your own abilities are technically nonlethal.I’ve also been playing Sword of Convallaria, which is a Fire Emblem-ish tactics game except it’s an F2P Gacha game. Except that, for reasons that escape me, it contains an entire game mode which is not a Gacha game (technically it gets some carryover from the Gacha mechanics but it’s minor) and is, in fact, genuinely free. I guess maybe they figure people will get invested in the game and give them money to do the other modes?
It has reasonable tactical depth to it, though it generally hasn’t been very difficult. It’s also apparently kind of Roguelite, and looking at the progression tree for roguelite unlocks is daunting because I’ve put 15 hours into the game and not yet finished a run or unlocked any of the hundreds of things it seems to let you get. I suspect that I’m going to get to the end of this run and not want to start another, but it could change my mind.
The story had some initial promise, where you’re using some kind of time power to make different decisions than you actually did and change the path of history, but I think that might be the story primarily for the gacha stuff because it really hasn’t come up at all after the introduction? It’s just been really generic, otherwise. And its attempts at twists are, uh, unimpressive, like the
girl who is secretly the princess which I called during her very first scene and then it wasn’t revealed for like 10 more hours.Not reading your spoilers, as I’m only halfway through, but still very much enjoying Tactical Breach Wizards. I particularly enjoyed how much it didn’t waste my time. 20 seconds after clicking the icon on my desktop, with a single click, or maybe two, and I’m playing the latest save of my latest game. Between the rewind ability and the autosaves, I never need to manually save. On the rare occasion that I hit cutscenes a second time, they’re all skippable. And when I quit the game it doesn’t make me go through 16 repetitions of “Are you sure? Sure sure? Suresuresure?” Granted, that would all be unremarkable if everyone else didn’t get it so incredibly wrong, but they do, so I noticed when TBW didn’t.
In Kingmaker, the scroll vendor finally upgraded their stock. Just in time for me to level up again so I’m past the level of scrolls they have available. I’ve bookmarked and now consult the page on the item “crafters” every time anything happens regarding them, because the ridiculous system they have set up is ridiculous. Each crafter has basically a small spreadsheet of the items they make, with a number of categories and 0-5 tiers. Every *two months* or so they will randomly give you an item from within the available tiers. You can specify which category, but this changes the weighting massively towards items from -1 or even -2 tiers. So that’s bad. Except you go read these items and ye gods, if you thought balance was all over the place in this game before? One of the tier 0 items, according to the wiki, is a robe which acts as a Maximize spell rod, up to level 6, with double uses per day, and it can be combined with other rods. Now, I’ve only done two “rolls” (that is, one reload after it showed up) and I haven’t actually seen this item, so the wiki (which is full of direct code references for modders and such) could be wrong. But another “tier 0” item, that I *have* found, is a rod of Quicken up to level 3. Another copy of which I paid some 50,000gp for, but is listed here as like 800.
Basically, the prices on the items in this game, from any source, are not only not-tabletop-compliant, they’re all over the damn place. Quicken rods valued at 800gp. Double 6th Maxmize robe at tier 0. +6 Str belt, normally 36,000gp, costs 70k at a barbarian camp. Robes that give +1-2 spell DC for 4-10,000. A ring that gives +1 damage *per die* to spells of a given energy type, for 4,000. Holy seems to be valued as a +1 ability instead of +2- which is reasonable given the number of “neutral” marauding murderers you fight not being affected by it. But also the Speed ability, normally valued at +3, seems to be valued by this game as a +1. Again, possibly reasonable if you’re re-balancing on the assumption that the party will always be Haste-ed, which with 6 characters in the party and access to at least three who can cast it, is maybe not the worst assumption. But the Magus and Paladin classes have an ability which still values Speed at a +3 bonus. You can say that maybe some of these are True Pathfinder Balance, but I’d damn near guarantee a bunch of them didn’t come from anything close to a PF book.
I think the game gave me about a 1 month, maybe 1.5 month break after finishing the last chapter to actually grow my kingdom before it started burying me in the new “go do the main quest or else” penalties. Enough that I almost actually got some stuff done! And now the game has jacked up the DCs on *all* the Problems past 20, so even the people I have with the highest bonuses need to spend crisis point resources to mostly reliably stop things. Maybe you’re supposed to be eating a lot more failures? but if the only real way of increasing stats is passing checks (the bonuses from buildings are expensive and pitiful by comparison), and you lose stats for passing checks, and they jack up the DCs so you start failing checks, it’s a textbook death-spiral. And I’m pretty sure I’m doing at least good-average compared to most people. If all else fails they have the auto-manage button you can engage at any time which says you cannot fail (but cannot turn it back off again voids cheevos etc), but I’m pretty sure that’s another mod-based addition for the anniversary edition.
Having hit 11th level, and got a pile of new metamagic rods, and all my secondary casters finally getting their own 4th level spells on, I can actually play my Wizard like a caster. Had a great time in several encounters and dungeons just saying eff it, you get an Acid Pit, and you get an Acid Pit! Because it’s basically a death sentence for any enemy that gets near it and fails their save, and enemies will run straight into it, and it’s getting +1 per die to even the fall damage from that ring (coding!), as well as +2 DC from that robe. But since I’ve got a level 6 Maximize rod, I can also maximize spells of any level I can cast now. Which this game definitely seems to expect as the standard, see previous complaints re: ridiculous Ranger/perfect Rogue damage (I’ve kept them both on the bench, though their damage curve should start tapering off, at least against foes with actual armor class). Of course, two of these items I had to buy from the random encounter skeleton merchant, from two different pools of available items which upgraded after the chapter change it looks like.
Fought an “Adamantine Golem” which was a joke. Was somewhat concerned since this game basically doesn’t let you have weapons for DR: no adamantine has appeared whatsoever, and the selection of cold iron for all those fey you have to fight is both overpriced and abysmal (when in tabletop it’s the cheapest of them all, I suppose nerfing that for some main antagonists is a choice). But this thing had DR 15. That’s Iron Golem, indeed, I expect it was just an Iron Golem with no poison breath now that I think about it (and its model was obviously just a guy in armor with a weird texture), and I’d even fought two Iron Golems elsewhere. And while this game is suprisingly lacking in non-magical magic for bypassing magic immunity, pathfinders glorious damage model meant the melee characters just smashed through the DR on autopilot, even faster than the arcane trickster could sneak attack non-magical spell her way through it.
Game also made me murder a bunch of unicorns in cold blood. You see, your crafters won’t craft if they have a quest, and the non-murder unicorn horn is who knows how much farther ahead in the game. I’m not skipping all items from that person between now and then, nor am I going to terminate all opportunity to get the ultimate caster item, thus: go murder some unicorns. While it’s amusing that the game lets you react to many situations by pointlessly killing useful NPCs and failing quests, it is less amusing that (aside from the bespoke snowflake weapons for the ranger and rogue) all the best gear seems to be hidden behind these crafters, and the crafters want you to go kill people and/or unicorns for them. This isn’t the first time- (tiny sidequest spoiler?) another guy made me go hunt down the Inquisitor who who “murdered his whole family,” but apparently he and his family were murdering bandits? Welp, whether it’s unicorns or lawbringers, thanks to Alignment Systems I’m only a few words of comfort to one of my pre-existing firends away from patching up the tiny reduction in Good points from 95% back up to 100%.
I’ll be honest, partway through the game I just dropped the kingdom management difficulty way down (and I did the same with the strategic aspect of Wrath of the Righteous nearly out of the bat) and I think later I even got a mod that just cut down the time of all advisor operations to either one day or made it instant, because while I feel this aspect of the game is an important part of the overall setting and roleplaying experience in the game I did not enjoy interacting with it mechanically all that much, especially once the random advisor events started repeating.
As for the rest of it… uhh, I’ll be honest, I have not looked that deeply into the mechanics, it was much more “here’s a neat item that complements this character’s playstyle” or “ooooh, this one is too good to pass up”.
Even better, game is now giving me problems that require an advisor I don’t have access to. So I’m supposed to eat automatic penalties while I try to grind up the remaining points I need to unlock that advisor, at which point they’ll be able to roll less than 50% chances to succeed at their thing. I’ve seen various posts that suggest you’re supposed to buy way more build points than I would expect, but even then I don’t think I have the actual room in the villages needed to buy out the remaining points to reach the unlock, assuming those stats don’t backslide from forced failures while the stuff is building. We’ll see.
As I’ve ranted, most of my experience with the items so far in this game is either “oh here’s an item that sure would be cool if anyone could actually use it,” or “oh look it’s another perfect item for this dev’s favorite character.” Just finally found a couple adamantine weapons: one is exotic so it requires a specific feat, and the other is at least a boring longsword. . . with the “furious” ability, which only works for barbarians. Granted, it’s still +2 adamantine for everyone else, but class-specific effects are just feel-bad. I’d rather it were a plain +2, like the boring +1 cold iron one earlier in the game. The stuff the artisans put out is likewise very polarized: some do manage to hit that “hey this seems nifty and X person could use it,” but others are game-changingly powerful. I have a whole bag of holding’s worth of just-in-case weapons, which I never use ’cause most of them are two-handed martial and there’s only one party member who uses that, and a bunch of others are one-handed martial which the only character who uses that is specialized so they’re better off just bashing through instead of changing weapons. There are weapons with various status immunities, but enemies don’t use control spells (probably because they would just run into them), and that’s what spells are for anyway.
It really would work so much better if it was using the Neverwinter Nights rule for exotic weapons, which is just one feat=all the weapons. Instead they have it as tabletop, but with no ability to go out and buy or make exactly what you want. Most of these things aren’t good enough to build a character around, but in order to use them you literally have to build the character use them. There are three sufficiently generalist classes that I could see using at least the simple and martial weapons as they come up (and many of the martial weapons have base stats like simple weapons), but the feat cost of learning multiple exotic weapons is absurd. Unless you got something endgame-worthy earl (which can’t happen because this is not random loot, and the crafting tiers take time to unlock) enough to say actually yes that’s worth a feat. But I don’t think any are.
Anyway. I can do this all night, but I shouldn’t, cause I’m already behind on sleep.
Oh, and I forgot the other big complaint. I’ve been complaining about summoning and how I should rebuild my character to lose the summon feats because they suck. Well hey we’ve got 6th level spells, let’s see how that goes. And. . . well 1, I think the Augment Summoning feat might be bugged so it doesn’t even apply to multi-summons? Haven’t re-checked.
But more importantly, summoning a whole gang of Bralani is. . . pointless. They still spend their whole first turn (which they don’t take until a full turn after you summon them because summons) casting Mirror Image, and then they spam their lightning bolts. Which you’d think, hey no-armor damage, that’s useful, right? But all the mobs of enemies you might want a mob of AoE blasters to deal with, have piles of PC-classed *Rogues* along with them. This is (one of) the problem with having your Dungeons and Dragons (mosnters, etc) game use PC-classed enemies all the time. Monsters do not have Evasion or Sneak Attack. PCs do not need special sneak attack defenses, and reflex area spells always deal some chip damage. Unless you go and make the PCs fight piles of PC-classed Rogues. Which this game does. Which is a problem in general, but in particular with these summoned Bralani who will spam their lightning bolts, *hitting your own party* because the AI and friend/foe markers can barely w+m1, while a bunch of enemies take no damage. I thought hey, these guys have bows, Holy bows even, a bunch of buffed bows would be good right? They have no Precise Shot feat, so they can’t shoot into melee, but they do have the melee feat Blind Fight, and it doesn’t matter because unless you deliberately sit there doing nothing you will finish the fight before they stop casting lightning bolts, through your own party.
Okay, what about the new single-summon at this level? It’s the same thing. Except its bolt does 9d6 damage instead of 6d6, it doesn’t waste the first turn casting mirror image, and after its used up its three lightning bolts (again, blasting your own party) it then. . . spams through three hold monster spells. And hell, fine, pre-cast a mass resist against your own summon, a gang of *these* could maybe be useful, they have a bit higher DCs and that’s a lot of dice vs a 7th level spell. But these are literally the only options. I don’t know if the “boogeyman” for single summon at 7th does anything useful, but I seriously doubt it.
The Summon Elemental spell has had some use, most effectively in the fight where I summoned a fire elemental as a distraction which happened to be the perfect counter for a Hydra, burning itself to death while killing the fire elemental. But you’re never allowed to summon more than one, I think because their function select system of teeny tiny tabs just doesn’t have room. Neverwinter Nights had this in the bag ages ago with their nested radial menus, but Kingmaker is like nope, you can only have one set of choices: either choose how many and not what it is, or what it is but only get 1.
I need to test if the Animate Dead skeletons, which have a “summoned” effect on them, count as summoned enough to get the Augment Summoning buff. Because the way this game works I would not be surprised if they do. Which would make them superior to the Summon Monster line in every respect. There’s a higher level Create Undead coming up at 7th, but sadly it only summons one thing. On the other hand, even now the enemies often have such low AC, and the skeletons can be so numerous (and even benefit from bard buffs which they absolutely should not), that this 3rd-4th level spell summons more goons of greater combat power than you can get with SM 5-6. Oh, and the wyvern figurine, should see if that counts.
Bottom line: I still haven’t rebuilt my main character because moving just one feat around seems like a waste of effort (but this is also keeping me from expanding my spellbook, because rebuilding nukes your whole book and I have very limited copies of most scrolls to rebuild with), but personally testing and finding at each new spell level that yes, summons still suck, is very, very tiresome. And will never be worth an arcane spell known when the game gives you *two* Clerics who know *all* the summon spells (aside from the druid version). Really, considering how little damage the party takes anymore, if it didn’t take three feats whilst Cleric is the only class in the game that *isn’t* getting bonus feats left and right, I’d just rebuild one of them into a summoner to do the testing.
There is a part of me that would like to see the druid summons. Which would almost certainly mean playing literally everything else the druid does (mostly having an Animal Companion, since most of the druid and cleric lists actually suck, a hilarious change from tabletop where they’re renowned for knowing all the spells forever and thus being able to do anything), after casting the summon once or twice before giving up. Sigh.
Played a bit of Mass Effect 2, finishing off the Grunt quest and doing the Horizon mission. I’m finding the fact that you have the option to talk to people but have no idea when they’re ready to talk to you really, really annoying, mostly because of the other factors in the game (such as not being able to figure out what counts as a mission that might advance it, but having to spend so much time mining that it seems like a longer or larger set of missions than it really is). But I’ve now triggered a few loyalty missions and still have a leftover mission or two from the last session, as well as the new recruitment missions, so I have lots of stuff to do. I would have kept playing but since I like mining out all new areas I really didn’t have the time or patience to do that and then run some missions afterwards.
I’m also finding that while the game is a bit linear it does seem to try to give you that sense of things being your choice (except when TIM is directly involved, like in the story missions). With Grunt, for example, pretty much everyone from TIM to Miranda tells you that it’s completely up to you what you do with him (I let him out). With the mission with the Hammerhead, the message from TIM says that he didn’t really support what his scientist did and that he’s okay that you send the kid off to the Alliance, even if it will set back their project. So there is a bit more of that kind of “You’re the one who has to make the calls” here than one might expect.
I also didn’t have as big a problem with the Ashley encounter as I might have expected. It is a little bit inconsistent, but was more friendly for me than portrayed in the retrospective, and ended with Ashley basically saying that she doesn’t trust Cerberus but seeming to at least understand why I was doing it, and wishing me luck. The difference might depend on how antagonistic you are towards Cerberus, and my character isn’t that antagonistic but isn’t the sort to just go along with what they say either.
I still like the first game and Dragon Age better, but amazingly with this mission I enjoyed the game a bit more.
I liked DA2’s system best, of explicitly showing ‘this person has a big thing to talk about’ as a mission. Though now that I’m playing BG2 I see this is something Bioware has experimented back and forth on for a while; they really had no sense of timing and just start talking in any area but some dungeons. (Even more when you’ve modded out the romance restrictions and Aerie, Anomen, Jaheira, and Viconia all line up alphabetically to talk to you with no wait between whatsoever.)
I’ve just discovered that ME2 does that for the loyalty missions, where there’s a trigger to talk to them about something that’s bothering them. Which means that I don’t know if I can just talk to them about anything anymore, but I suspect that that will open up a bit more after completing the loyalty missions.
I finished Bloodborne, which was a very strong experience despite my general aversion to games known for their difficulty and for punishing death with lost progress. The beautiful world and the way it changes over the course of the night were the stars of the show for me more so than the gameplay, but there were a lot of gameplay elements that made BB a better first (and probably only) Souls game for my particular taste: the fairly simple build options, the notably faster combat pace, and the aggression-promoting Rally mechanic. It didn’t single-handedly make me a Souls person but as its own thing I’m glad I made the effort.
Replaying Dragon Age Inquisition, which as always is a study in contrasts between the excellent cinematography and decent writing of the main quests and the extremely copy-paste open-world content. My goal going in was to resist my baser urges and attempt to play only the quests that sounded fun. “How’s that going, Glide?” Well, I’m currently at 21/26 shards in the Hinterlands so you tell me.
I’ve put about seventeen and a half hours into new game (it only released on the 2nd) Starcom: Unknown Space. It’s a 2D space-exploration game (similar to the old Escape Velocity games) where you get thrown into a new universe in the first few minutes of the tutorial and have to explore your surroundings to find a way back, while navigating the various alien politics there. Much of the game involves going around scanning planets and investigating anomalies on them, which give you research points toward improving and unlocking new ship parts, since you also get to design your ship (on a hex grid). I find I have less patience for designing spaceships as I get older, but S:US’s system nicely allows meaningfully different and interesting builds without becoming “starship sewage line placement simulator”. Sometimes you get into combat, which has room for different ship builds (with different weapons loadouts) without feeling too involved or complicated; it makes a pretty good “chill out” game for after work. I could go on about it, but I’ll just say (and it’s high praise indeed from me) that it reminds me of my first time playing Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters. The alien races you meet don’t have quite the same personality (no animated portraits or voice-acting), but the general feeling of exploring space between a patchwork of alien polities while slowly unraveling bigger mysteries about the universe and the threats it contains definitely gives me similar vibes.
With the film coming out and watching some fun reviews tearing into it, I got the urge to play Borderlands, I’ve haven’t ever played it before. There was a good deal on the PS4, the Legendary Collection, but I wasn’t sure if it would look a bit blurred on that console. I’ve ended up getting the physical copy of Borderlands 2, coming across it by accident. Will I miss out on much if I start there?
Not really. The events of the first game are summarized in the opening, and Most of the dialog referencing it has a bit of context already with it.
Also, the first game is a bit janky, even with the QOL improvements from the enhanced edition.
I also played the first game before the second, but I basically forgot it, it was so forgettable. The second is so much better and there’s barely any through connection, it just eclipses it entirely. The characters from the first game are the big NPCs of the second, but the stuff they do/have revealed as in-between-story in the second game are so much more interesting than the actual events of the first game. I would recommend skipping the first entirely unless you feel you absolutely must play them in order for historical purposes. But since you’re asking, nah you won’t miss out, just skip it.
I loved Borderlands 2, and I never played Borderlands. Take that as you will.
Been playing a lot of Mad Max on the PS4 (to which I am still quite new.) First-person shooters with a controller are awful, but driving games suit one quite well, so I’m enjoying hooning around the desert in an indestructable self-healing car.