T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’m still playing Borderlands 3, but I’ve started a new job, and I’m too tired to think of words to express my feelings on Borderlands 3, so I’ll just say I don’t like it very much.
What are you guys doing this week?
From The Archives:
Batman: Arkham City
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
Borderlands Series
A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
The Middle Ages
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
This week has been more Trails of Cold Steel 3, some Colony Ship and a little bet of the mod BTA Universe for Harebrained Schemes’ Battletech. I’m looking into co-op play of Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries with my brother, but getting your head around a new modding scene is always a lot of work.
As always I’ll be very curious to hear about your co-op experience. I have Mechwarrior (from a Humble bundle I think?) but I’m hesitant to suggest it to my co-op buddy.
Mount and Blade Warband hit a wall; I tried to support a throne claimant, only to have the entire world declare war on me and unite against me. Eventually got ground down and had to give up on the run.
Finally got back to Strangers of Paradise, restarted since it’s been so long. Made it through the first level with only one death, to a Cactuar that suddenly decided to unload on me. Thought that meant I’d improved, and then I hit the boss and it killed me very dead very often, so, no, it’s about the same as last time I played it. This really is a solid fun time, I don’t know why I’m so resistant to playing through it. Maybe because I watched a playthrough and already saw the end, with all the warts and whatnot? Maybe. But I think it’s just because I don’t like hard games, even when they’re a solid fun time.
More Metaphor: ReFantazio. I’m still liking it. The fourth hub’s major dungeon felt way too long, though.
It’s a bit odd to have more party members than you can use at once in a job based game. In theory anyone could be anything already. There is an upside to it, because you can swap party members mid combat (and you can’t swap jobs). Also, different characters have different stat spreads, though it’s an interesting decision
to give you two magic-focused characters in a row. There’s also some incentive to use the new characters, which I assume is intentional, because one of the friendship benefits is “gets more xp while not in the active party”, and the old characters will have that while the new characters won’t – it’s nice to have a soft incentive like that.Started playing Mass Effect 3, getting through the first mission and the Mars mission. I have a longer discussion of it on my blog, but so far it was a lot of cutscenes that didn’t allow a lot of room to express my character at all, although some of the forced dialogue fit. Didn’t mind Ashley’s suspicions early but didn’t like it coming up again later. It was okay, but confirmed my feeling that I will be glad to finish the trilogy and would be willing to replay the Dragon Age games — including Inquisition — before replaying this one again, despite mostly liking the first game.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses continues. I’m at chapter 5, of ~20, and my game timer reads like 26 hours, most of which has been spent sitting trying to make optimal planning decisions and/or reading wiki bits with the game open (also there is a lot of voiced dialogue), and that’s not counting some with it off.
It turns out that while all the stuff about qualifications prescribes what you must build towards and what bonuses you get, it is not in fact a straightjacket, though the skill requirements for the final tiers of classes are high enough it might turn out to be. There are magic+weapon dedicated classes, hidden in the Master tier you can’t see at first (the game even hides the names of classes you do have access to on the char sheets, even though you can see them from the goals menu!), and also for your main character unit (and in the DLC but screw that), but basically you use either any/all weapons, or any/all magic- mage classes can still wield weapons, but their strength will be so pitiful and magic focused battalions will penalize it further, that it won’t be worth the effort. One very pleasant surprise is that there are now range 3 spells very upfront, which would give magic users a cool new role- except all archers are also 3 range, so it’s more needed to keep up. Still, in game where they want you to threaten enemies with as many people as you can, extra range is very nice. It can be quite satisfying moving in with that first unit chosen for high accuracy, then piling on everyone else one by one until hit chance=yes.
One unpleasant surprise is that the more I graze the wikis, the more it looks like not only is every character’s spell list different, and learned at different skill ranks, but apparently even the abilities they learn on normal weapon skills can be different. The game says things like “what they learn is dependent on their skills,” but that implies the skills determine the abilities, when it’s actually all secret invisible custom skill lists. So that’s maddening.
But yeah, once I got through the next set of fights (I think I was on chapter 3 when I posted last week), all the mechanics finally clicked together and started working. Extra learned spells and basic classes doubling (removing the 1/2 penalty) fixed the mages, battalions plus shields fixed the frontline, etc. And then back on the downside: now I’ve got a crunch on what classes I’m allowed. I went with the magic-heavy faction, which means I’m short on other things. Pegasus Knights are gender-locked, and the character I was going to send that way apparently was meant to be a thief- something I also need. The only other character that could do that is the MC, but they’ve got their own wacky class to enter so they can’t stay thief either (I’m not switching the sniper over).
The solution is to recruit someone from another house to fill that empty deployment slot I’ve had sitting there. . . which requires you to grind up skills and stats similar to theirs, as well as friendship ranks. So to get the one who would be a good peg knight, I have to. . . suddenly start grinding my own flying skill, to an unknown level (the low-spoiler guide said it wasn’t consistent), which comes out of the same pool of time I would use to boost their friendship, and is also needed to keep my own students’ motivation up so they can grind their stats.
They also seem to have made some actual tradeoffs in class choices. The last couple games you picked up all abilities permanently, so you’d just pass through whatever classes to assemble the skills you want. In Three houses you do get a permanent ability after mastering a class (by fighting enough to fill up yet another dedicated xp bar), but that takes forever and most of the class is only there when you’re in the class. Only archer style classes get extended bow range, you don’t get to keep the extra spell from Mage or the +5 sword damage from Swordmaster etc. And there are plenty of Intermediate-tier classes that I just don’t care about the mastery abilities- I don’t like the “+6 stat when attacking” stuff. They’re powerful, but make your power swing wildly and conceal when they’re being a crutch on a bad character, and I definitely don’t want to spend a bunch of time grinding for them. Which means I can stay in the lower classes and get their mastery instead, and when Advanced become available bail immediately instead of waiting to master the middle tier.
They’ve also hauled way back on the importance of strength. Not for damage- if anything the gauntlet weapons that double all attacks (with tiny base damage) have made that more important. But for normal double attacks. You take a speed penalty equal to your weapon’s weight, which determines whether you, the enemy, or neither get a followup attack. In previous games, that weight was offset by your strength value. In this game, it’s offset by *1/5* of your str value. Which means aside from the two amazon goddesses (see below), most people are not getting very much phantom speed from their str. Very often in the past, high-str units would be faster simply because the speed units were weighed down by normal weapons. That problem’s pretty well fixed now. Combine this with the passive equipable shields which add both weight and defense, and at least in the early game you don’ need to be a tank class to dump speed for protection.
And at least for now, weapon triangle seems to be back in. I remember it quickly becoming superfluous in the last few games, eclipsed by personal bonuses and high tier weapon-slayer abilities. Only a couple of those still exist, and if anything the triangle seems to have been more powerful than it should be, could swear changing from axe to sword gave me like +30 avoid one fight and it wasn’t even a sword character.
Hilariously, even though this game goes and gender-locks the Brawler and Hero classes, because of course only men can punch things and be heroes, all the guys on my team have terrible Str. Granted, Edelgard is the heavy lord so she has crazy starting Str, and so does the MC who I made female, but that prospective peg knight/thief also has higher str than both of the str-crazy boys.
Started the VR game “Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom” on my Quest. It’s a little dissonant at first. There’s a 2D intro to the universe, then several minutes of 3D cutscenes where the camera bounces between points-of-view like a traditional show or movie. The interactive bits have been very limited, but it’s early in. The voice acting is good and the 3D animation is very nice, and DAMN Gundams are big in 3D.
Well, my relationship with Balatro ended prematurely due to my cancelation of Apple Arcade and the withdrawal has been though. Even though I’m not playing it anymore I’m still thinking about playing it all the time. The “Purchase” button is enticing, but I must resist for now, for my own sake.
But again, nothing much played this week. I’ve dedicated most of the time to demos.
I had an educational journey last week with bad internet, so I had just the AnberNic to entertain me with Zelda: Links Awakening and Pokemon Ruby for the most part. Was Pokemon always that dull?
When I was back and had my PC I continued Satisfactory and started Goat Simulator 3. Funny quests and a lot of “features”.
Factorio: Space Age is out, and I’ve managed to eke out about four hours of playtime. So far I haven’t hit the space part yet, just getting started on blue science, but there’s a little bit more polish on a lot of things. Ghost blueprints got prettied up, train controls got fancier, and the tech tree has some “milestone” techs to point new players in the right direction. Rockets have been moved to blue science, so I should be pretty close to actually launching my first spaceship.
Between the Next Fest demos and desperately trying to catch up on the mobile gatcha game I’m playing (which I was playing rather casually until earlier this year it suddenly decided to lock new event participation behind main story stages completion) haven’t played all that much “real” games. Having said that:
Just started The Evil Within yesterday. I’ve only finished chapter 3 but was somewhat surprised how much more it is focused on mechanics than jumpscares so far. Thank goodness I’ve followed advice from online pals and started it on casual because it’s not an easy game. Will probably have more to say once I get further into the game.
And in co-op we were going to check out Escape Simulator or the fourth We Were Here game but got derailed by my friend getting Planet Crafter. It is a relatively gentle survivocraft, the environment is hostile but no spiteful creatures coming in to wreck everything we’ve built makes it much more my speed. Watching the terraforming progress is also a lot of fun though it feels like we’re rushing through the game very quickly so far.