T w e n t y S i d e d
This week has been exclusively Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.
It’s like Borderlands 2, but in space! Which was pretty fun for a while, but now I’m sick of of space and I want to go back to Pandora, where there’s an atmosphere, the ground has vegetation, and Spiderants & Skags want to eat my legs.
The game is notably shorter, but the level cap is almost the same as BL2, which makes leveling up kind of tedious. The pre-sequel has 1 major DLC whereas BL2 has 5 major, and 5 small DLCs. On the upside, the one major DLC the game has is good.
I knew nothing about Claptastic Voyage, and I was pleasantly surprised. The theming of being inside of Claptrap’s brain is fun, the jokes are solid, and the level design does a lot of fun things that just wouldn’t make sense in any other context. The only bad thing I have to say is that the boss at the end has about as much health as a raid boss but without the loot of a raid boss.
So anyway, what’s everyone else up to?
Overused Words in Game Titles
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
Silent Hill 2 Plot Analysis
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
Seven Springs
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
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.
I played through the demo of Metaphor: ReFantazio. The name is kind of dumb but the game is basically Persona: Fantasy Edition (it’s by the same company too). I liked Persona 5 so I’m interested in it. Also, I’m curious where they’re going to go with humans being
unknowable eldritch abominations. I do think it’s silly that near the end of the demo, there’s a dramatic scene wherethe dead king declares that it’s time for Magically Enforced Democracy, at which point the bad guy goes through with his plan of… murdering a whole bunch of people for no reason and admitting to some of the things he’s done, which seems like a good way to lose at democracy when he already had a separate plan to play on people’s fears.Sadly, as I predicted, Balatro is taking over my life. I have not played anything but Balatro for over a week. Whenever I’m not playing Balatro I’m thinking about how much I’d like to be playing Balatro. If I keep like this I’m gonna Balatro my Balatro until I Balatro.
And, as I mentioned before, I committed the stupidity of going for the mobile version. Had I chosen the PC version instead I’d only be playing it while at home, but no. It is inescapable. I am doomed.
Oh no, you fell into the trap. I escaped after realizing that the Completionist++ achievement is waaayyy too time intensive.
Do yourself a favor: Pick a goal in the game, e.g. reach Ante X or reach Completionist+. I spent way to much time sitting on the sofa and playing this, its sooo good. :-)
Low-energy games for me. Unlocked all the upgrades in One Finger Death Punch 2 and opened Blind Survival Mode. I feel like I’m going to have to clear it just to see if they kept the stupid No Luca No Mode from the first game, where a giant cat picture obscured half the screen, in reference to an earlier Silver Dollar game where shooing the cat was the whole game.
After all the trouble I had clearing Pacifist in Brotato, I played a Random game, got Pacifist first round, and cleared Level 5 Difficulty on the first try. I don’t get it.
Run based games do that sometimes. The moment you stop trying, you get the god run. Though I expect it also has much to do with improved fundamentals and lack of fatigue.
And since there’s no button to move my comment back to the bottom: I. . . haven’t really played anything. I was going to start on Three Houses since that got some response last week, but here we are the end of my weekend and nope still haven’t. I played a tiny bit of Nova Drift while I was stuck out of the house today, but that was like one run. A run where I just stumbled into what I might call the “pacifist” (read: no attacking only passive damage) run which was going great, all the way through the first final boss and on through the second run. . . until I screen wrap into a boss’s doom vortex projectile stream causing near-instant death with no time to react. Yup, sure is Nova Drift.
Satisfactory in a solo play through. Now assembling the project parts for Tier 8. Monster Hunter: World in coop. We defeated the Anjanath yesterday – trice.
Also, I bought myself an Anbernic. A PS Vita similar device packed with tons of retro games. From arcade machines over Game Boy, SNES and GameGear until Dreamcast era. Playing,Grand Tourismo 1, Final Fantasy: Tactics, Metal Gear Solid, Pokemon Ruby, Legend of Zelda: Links Awaikaning, Tetris, Bomberman
Ooh, FF Tactics! I still say it’s the best Final Fantasy game.
Still working my way through Mass Effect 2. I’ve cleared off all of the recruitment and loyalty missions and almost everything else except for some assignments, so it’s pretty much time to go get the Reaper IFF. My “not nice” character is still pretty much balanced Paragon/Renegade. although there have been some moments that really fit her like when you’re interrogating the guy at the top of the building in Thane’s recruitment mission and he says he has nothing else to say to you, and the Renegade interrupt is to knock him off the building and say “How about goodbye?” which is indeed something my character would probably do at that point. I’m finding parts of it enjoyable and parts of it less so, and still like both Mass Effect and the Dragon Age games better. But I should finish it sometime this week, which was my goal, so I’m feeling good about that.
I’m playing the latest enhanced edition, and it seems like they did change things, or else I can’t trigger certain things in the same way. I’ve already talked about the IFF mission coming up before I finished recruitment, but it also didn’t let me try to recruit Morinth, which I was SURE I had as an option the first time around. There are just enough things that I don’t remember to make me wonder if things were changed or if my memory is at fault. Not that big a deal, just something noticeable.
You can’t recruit Morinth unless you’ve earned either full Paragon or full Renegade points. No, really. You can only resist her mind control if you’re a fully good or bad guy – as determined by the game, not based on what *you* think.
It’s almost like a punishment for roleplaying; the optimal strategy in almost every situation is to not think about what your character would do and just click the colour-coded option every time. If you don’t, you end up unable to pick certain options later in the game.
(It’s also true in Mass Effect 3. Want to make peace between the Quarians and the Geth? Make sure you’ve earned enough Paragade points to unlock the Red or Blue conversation option, otherwise you just can’t get the best result.)
It was…not a good system*, and I’m not surprised that it didn’t outlive Mass Effect 2/3.
*I mean the standard system of buying an ‘intimidate’ or ‘diplomacy’ skill as a character choice was a feature of Mass Effect 1, and it worked fine. It’s a classic case of someone changing something and breaking it in the process.
I didn’t manage to resist her completely (although I did better than I did the first run with the non-Legendary version), but I recalled from that one that while Samara and Morinth were fighting you could intervene and choose which one survived and so which one joined you, at which point if you chose Morinth you could get a scene where she eventually kills you with her mind draining powers. I got the line that said you could choose her, but no dialogue option came up. At all, so it’s not like it was available and I couldn’t select it, which would have made sense. It just skipped it as if I had chosen Samara directly.
Which was fine, since I was going to choose Samara anyway. It just was weird to have the dialogue hint at the choice but not be able to choose at all.
As for the system, in Mass Effect 1 you were still blocked from some options and scenes unless you had sufficient Paragon or Renegade levels, although I think it was less direct in that you needed to max out Intimidate or Charm and you only gained the ability to increase those levels by gaining more Renegade or Paragon points. I was Renegade enough in my first playthrough to take Saren into committing suicide, but not enough this time around.
The nice thing about the system, at least that I noticed this time, is that if you had enough points to select the blue or red option it would always resolve the situation in your favour — useful for keeping Miranda and Jack and Tali and Legion loyal during their interactions — but if you didn’t have them available you still might be able to fix things through the normal dialogue. For example, here I resolved Jack and Miranda by using the Renegade option to tell them that after the mission they could go out and kill each other for all I cared but right now they needed to shelve it for the mission, and they both were fine with that.
I mean, if I put Experience / Skill Points / [insert resource here] into into my Persuade skill and it didn’t allow me to use words to get favourable outcomes, I’d be wondering what the hell the skill was for…
My point is about how you earn your Paragon/Renegade points – that’s what changed in the game. At least, in the pre-legendary version. It might have changed.
In most RPGs (and ME1), ‘speech’ is a skill like any other, that you spend XP on. The higher the skill you buy, the better you are at it. Standard.
But in 2 and 3, you only earn Paragon/Renegade points by *doing* Paragon/Renegade things – there’s no skill to ‘buy’.
So to have the ability to resist Morinth, you need to have been consistently Paragon or Renegade throughout the game, gaining red/Blue points – and if you didn’t have enough, it couldn’t happen.
I was talking more about the ME2 approach without having the explicit skills. Since that gives you points, it could be allowing you to gain more points or to roleplay your character better, even if selecting the option screwed some things up for you (ticking someone off, for example). Here, what I was impressed with was that selecting it resolved the loyalty clashes in your favour, instead of having to select the right options and actions to make that work.
In this playthrough, at least, in Mass Effect it wasn’t as simple as simply putting XP into Intimidate and Charm, as options in them only opened up as you increased your Paragon and Renegade scores. If you had somehow not increased them at all, you’d only get the ability to put a few points into them, not enough to do anything interesting.
Note that it was always the case the Paragon and Renegade points and Charm and Intimidate were separate in the original game. You could not buy Paragon and Renegade points, but you could still gain them and they had an impact on some scenes independently of Charm and Intimidate. You could have a lot of Renegade points and spend nothing on Intimidate and not be able to do some red options, but you might be able to do others. In ME2 and going forward, it looks to me like they just buried that under the Paragon and Renegade points themselves. I think even one of the loading screen messages in ME2 flat out says that the more Renegade you are, the more Intimidating you can be.
That is not entirely correct. In Mass Effect your charm/intimidate skill is capped by your morality. You need at least 25% paragon to spend 10 out of 12 point on the charm skill. For the full 12 points you need 75%. The same goes for renegade/intimidate.
The great thing about this system was indeed that it allows you freedom in what kind of character you play. Only 25% was required to get almost all options. (There are less than 5 checks for charm/intimidate at 12)
Mass Effect 2 botched this as the percentage is measured as against the total you could have gotten until that point. Meaning that when you play a more mixed character you miss out on a lot of options.
Mass Effect 3 was better than 2 in that you got an independent “reputation” meter and as long is it was high enough you could freely choose between charm and intimidate. In that sense 3 was similar to 1 in terms of freedom… But 3 severely pruned the dialogue tree, destroying the neutral options, so ultimately it wasn’t as much fun to roleplay.
Huh, I actually did not realise that about ME2, I assumed it was a matter of flat score. I’ll be honest, on paper this is actually not the worst idea because there’s a lot of things you can do in different order in that game and this solution would rewards consistency, which narratively could be translated to the strength of your character’s convictions. That is if, you know, the paragade score was consistent…
I would think the solution would be a third meter, say “conviction,” or general “reuputation” I suppose, which fills up when ever you take either paragade option. Thus giving a total of four “alingments”: blue enough, red enough, big enough, and not enough. Where you could then have subtlety requirements for certain objectives where a person who throws their weight around all the time can’t walk small enough to skate by. Then you build the game mostly on choice of bombast vs meekness, with red vs blue more a side flavor.
And you don’t even need to present all options for every thing. But you’ve still increased the complexity and those AAA think tanks can barely handle the binary paragade most of the time so. . .
I think it would be better to make Paragon and Renegade choices more flavour choices and less mechanical choices. If you can take them, then you do and things work out the way they should for those choices — and so not always good — and you get more points for those choices, which lets you act more like a Paragon or Renegade later. If you don’t have enough points, you have to choose one of the blander options. For big choices, triggering based off of events rather than points makes more sense anyway.
Dragon Age 2 did a really cool thing with this, in general giving you a choice of being Good, Snarky or Greedy, which let you shape your character, and if you tended to choose one option more than another cutscenes where the game makes the choice of what you say for you tended to be that way, and some options later are available based on what you’ve been doing, including some options to resolve some situations. Since my DA2 characters are all snarky, I’ve seen those scenes, but I’ve read about other scenes depending on which you choose.
Morinth recruitment
is literally a one line opportunity when she is Force armwrestling Samara, she just sort of out of the blue tells you to side with her. I am about 99% sure it is available whether or not you are paragon or renegade but it is possible it only becomes accessible if you succeed in impressing her in earlier dialogue options.I’d be very, very surprised if they removed it in the legendary edition.Yeah, that’s what I was expecting, and the line plays, but the dialogue wheel never appeared at all to give me a choice, which was weird. I might have been too dominant or too annoyed with her to let me choose it, but something was a bit off here. I don’t mind because I was taking Samara anyway, but it was a bit weird and worked out differently than my first run.
It might have changed – but I remember looking it up at the time, and there’s a particular moment in Morinth’s apartment, right before Samara bursts in, when she actively tried mind control on you. You get three choices:
– [Paragon Line]
– [Renegade Line]
– Say ‘Yes Morinth’ like you’ve been hypnotised.
…and you can only pick the Paragon/Renegade line if you’ve got a high enough score. Otherwise you’re locked into ‘Yes Morinth’ and the rest of the scene plays out without your input.
I looked up a 2021 guide, and that’s what it says, too … but I remember not having the points to resist Morinth my first run — annoying, because my character would have wanted to — and still getting the choice. And Morinth appealing to me is still weird.
For me, I was able to select the Renegade options for the first two but not the last one. That might have done it, as per the guide.