T w e n t y S i d e d
This week is just Rimworld.
I got past having to use biofuel generators, and am now just using bioferrite, generators with a few toxifier generators.
Since my base is exclusively underground, I have a growing collection of sun blockers, Climate adjusters, and one Weather controller. outside of my base is a dark, toxic wasteland, void of any life. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Sorry this one is a bit late, and thrown together. I was busy all day, and forgot what day it was.
So what’s everyone else doing?
Denuvo and the "Death" of Piracy
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A Lack of Vision and Leadership
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Object-Oriented Debate
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Fable II
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
Control
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
I’ve been playing Dredge, a horror fishing game. I was a bit skeptical of the idea at first but I think it really works. Each type of fish you can catch has freaky mutated versions as well, the various areas have different hazards and if you go out at night to catch the fish that don’t show up in the daytime there’s a whole host of freaky stuff that can happen, degrading your sanity meter and causing hallucinations.
The story is relatively barebones but intriguing. I’m near the end and there are some hints that all is not as it seems. The lighthouse keeper clearly knows something and the collector whose quests are the driver of the main quest is definitely a bit dodgy.
Reached an ending in Cyberpunk 2077; I assume there are more than one, and this is presumably the worst one. I guess that’s what I get for doing whichever quest was closest; lazy approach, bad rewards. But, hey, postgame gave me giant fists, which means combat now consists primarily of giant fisticuffs.
My strongest feeling is that the game is a missed opportunity. I was looking forward to several narrative threads, but almost all of them were resolved in a single mission, and sometimes not even that. The intro makes a point of showing multiple intimidating combat factions, that then never showed up in the main plot. Not even
the mercenary taxi service that provides heavily-armed-and-armored cars and drivers to anyone who pays, to use for any purpose against any target.Surely you’ll be fighting THEM at some point. But no, never. You get, like,a psychiatry quest instead, where you help them as they argue with their kids.I do not understand what they were thinking.Combat is generally fun, with fast movement and nice ragdolls, but in the grand tradition of games like Deus Ex and Vampire The Masquerade, the boss fights are miserable dogshit, and just kept finding new ways to become worse. Oh, we’ve already used the wall of meat that can’t be stunned and never misses? Well,
this one also heals itself. This one also has unlimited reinforcements. This one isn’t even real, fight it anyway.I’ve considered downloading an Invincibility Mod and turning it on specifically for boss fights, because goddamn I don’t want to fight any of those ever again.(They’ve also borrowed the grand tradition of Villain Has One Large Man Around Them With No Actual Character Of Their Own, like the Sheriff from Vampire or the big guy from Fallout 2. So now the endgame boss has zero narrative weight behind it, while the real villain dies in a limp, post-meat cutscene. Ugh. This is why I like JRPGs instead.)As the first playthrough, I’ve had a bad build; it was going to be a Small Arms character, but seeing all the cool stuff I branched out and made a big old Jack of all Trades, except I didn’t pay attention to what Technology did and used it as a dump stat. Turns out Technology gives you more stats, so this is, like… maximally weak, I guess. Next run will be more focused. But, hardly matters; it took a long time for the game to reveal anything that was actually dangerous, and apart from the miserable dogshit boss fights, all the dangerous stuff was also optional.
Is it unreasonable to want to customize the clothing colors? I don’t think any other games have let me do that either, but dammit I’m trying to make a Rydia, and I’ve got the voluminous bright green hair, and I found a bright green jacket, but I can’t find any bright green pants, and so the entire cosplay is a failure. (Also the only bright green car for purchase is a horrible boxy van with low speed and bad controls, but… I mean that’s fine. Would like to use the bright green armored car that I’ve seen riding around town and have stolen before, but the unstable square deathtrap still gets from point a to point b as greenly as possible. The RydiaMobile doesn’t have to look cool, canonically she can’t drive anyway.)
Not the best game for cosplay anyway though, considering your character spends the whole time slowly dying.
Clair Obscur has neared endgame again, but after defeating the latest boss with all their minibosses still alive and thus at full power, I feel like I’ve done enough for now. I’m sure I’ll come back to it eventually, but probably as a New Game= playthrough, trying to find an actual build. See if it’s like FF8 and you can make the game easier by just powerlevelling one character and leaving the rest unequipped.
Brotato is so frustrating. You need defense, but the best defense is a good offense, and most runs the game isn’t going to give you enough of either one. (The obvious solution is “stop playing on the highest difficulty”, but… nah, I’d rather complain.)
It’s weird. About 70% of the story in Cyberpunk 2077 is in the sidequests, and almost all of the other the endings occur after long quest chains. I remember seeing memes about the quest that initiates the endgame
Meet Hanako at Embers, mocking the fact that a certain key NPC spends the majority of the game just waiting for you to meet them, ostensibly about that time-critical condition you have that’s killing you…Curious how you’d fight
Delamain the taxi AI, or why they’d want to fight you. It’s an AI mercenary, why would it care? I suppose someone would hire them to, but then what – attack of the killer taxis? (Sounds like a fun B-Movie)Personally, I was a bit miffed that
the game seemed to think Delamain was friendly with V. Is this an AI or not? Why does it give a shit beyond getting paid for a service?That’s exactly how you’d fight them.
They even set it up IMMEDIATELY, when a Delamain taxi runs over your car and the network is like, “oh, that was DEFINITELY a glitch, come into my heavily armed factory to discuss your… fate”. And I say to myself “cool, Arasaka bought off Delamain and they’ll be recurring boss fights from now on.” Seriously, you’re fighting the most powerful man in the world, plus a dozen street gangs, and NOBODY hires the mercenary to deal with you.(If anyone knows how to disable that endgame sidequest, I’d like to hear it; the game currently defaults to it any time I finish anything, and the button to change quests is not the same as the button to look at quests and I keep failing to actually change them.)
I don’t think you can change the ways that the game prioritizes quests. Part of where the meme comes from, I guess.
I ended up finishing a side-quest about buying a dodgy BD from a back-alley dealer, (it’s a terrible idea, don’t do it) just because the game kept automatically sending me to him before I realized it had changed objective markers.
Maybe there’s a mod for it?
I 100% agree that CP2077 is one huge bag of missed opportunities. All the factions, all the areas, so much in there feels like groundwork for a GTA-like system that then got scrapped. That stupid street cred rank, only used for unlocking gear, could have been so good for “this type on enemy runs when it sees you after rank x” or something. I could go on. And it makes me so sad.
So after deciding that I’d try to play Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds in my normal gaming time and slide Conception Plus to when I had a couple of hours to spare … I ended up doing more things on that day and so ended up without enough time to play a longer game and so put “Conception Plus” in there. It did work a bit better since I managed to get a couple of other runs in during the week, which will make things go faster, and I maxed out a couple more Star Maidens, including one arc that was mostly just interacting with a sleepy, shy, socially awkward artist that ends with finding out that she has a disease where her life force gets drained when she sleeps, and so she will eventually die in her sleep, which is why she sleeps in a coffin. So, yeah, that hit surprisingly hard. The combat is still boring, but I do think going through the Star Maiden arcs will be worth it.
Also got in another session of The Old Republic, finishing off the short section of Quesh with my Imperial Agent. I’m closing in on the end of this run of all eight classes.
Working through Blue Prince – the “act 1” was very good, but I’m starting to chafe at the intersection of Cyan-style puzzles and roguelike room generation. (To be clear, I *love* me the Cyan games – but solutions that parse to “hope the RNG is nice to you” gets a bit wearing after a while.)
Still enjoying it as I go, but def. looking towards some light mods to ease up on the RNG.
FWIW, the game gives you a fair number of tools to tame the RNG, especially relating to the couple of puzzles that require drafting multiple rooms in a specific layout. There’s a particular (albeit uncommon) item that helps with these puzzles and in general, there are a few ways to a lot of rerolls, and a particular room that helps control the RNG in general.
And there’s specific drafting mechanics for specific puzzles that makes it easier than it might initially appear:
Puzzle: hooking the
laboratoryup to theBoiler Room. Hint:Hold off on drafting the lab, start at the boiler room because when drafting through a powered door you’re more likely to draw rooms with conduits, and prioritize rooms that give connections, even if they have drawbacks: a weight room, archive, or dark room can be very helpful.Puzzle:
Sanctumkey#8 “last of eight doors”. Hint:the Mechanarium skips doors that connect to walls of other rooms – if you draft it in a ‘dead end’ you only need 4 other mech rooms, which is significantly easier.It’s still one of the trickier things to do, but you’ve also got lots of other stuff to work on at the same time.As part of Rimworld’s Biotech DLC, I’ve started a new colony. It’s part of the ‘story’: someone buys out your colony in exchange for a magical macguffin that does – well, I don’t know yet, but I’m interested enough in finding out.
It was also necessary, since I’d reached the end of the research tree and had all the rooms/capabilites that I needed, all the defenses necessary to see off attacks…and was kind of bored.
The only issue I had was that I needed to reach a certain ‘colony wealth’ before I could make the change. I spent a few hours making art statues, building uneccesary devices and growing drugs to sell, only to realise it was all progressing waaaaaay too slowly.
So I just opened up the dev console and spawned a massive pile of gold in my base. There, arbitrary limit reached, game.
It also fits narratively – I started with 5 colonists, they had / adopted 5 kids, and once those kids all hit 18 years old, they struck out on their own. Fun! This game is good for coming up with your own stories like that. Though in a very odd twist, the game tracks your current colonists relationships with the colonists that you left behind…
…and apparently, instead of just retiring in a high-tech, very comfortable base with its own gold mine, my original settlers joined other factions. At random.
You know how it goes. You build a home, raise some kids, the kids all leave once they’re old enough, and you don’t know what to do with all your wealth and a house that’s too big now. A mid-life crisis.
What’s the next step? Why, clearly you join that tribe of cannibal pirates that constantly attacked you in the past, that you killed on sight, that hate you because you used to lauch toxic waste at their settlements in retaliation for their raids.
I’m sure they were overjoyed to have you join their faction.
I’m kind of hoping that one of the previous generation turn up in a raid in the kids’ colony, because that’s kind of hilarious. What the fuck, Aunt Erin.
I broke my foot in a stupid accident and thus have to hang out in a different city for the last two months with little to do, but also little I can do. So I’ve been restricted to my Switch Lite and whatever my girlfriend’s laptop can run (which isn’t much).
So I’ve gotten Subnautica for the Switch, having already played it extensively on the PC. I’m surprised at how well it runs (though don’t trust the reviews, they actually absolutely did downgrade the graphics and the pop-in is, at times, seriously impacting gameplay). While the game really re-grabbed me for a while, I can’t bring myself to take my Cyclops and do the endgame – I already know all the story beats and somehow, that really robs it of my prime motivation.
And I’ve been playing a lot of Monster Train 2, but there’s not much to tell. It’s very well-designed, very fun. Balancing is a bit weird in places.
Big same on Subnautica. Every repeat run I’ve done I basically get to the Cyclops and go “oh, that’s it then, just a quick nip down to the bottom and we’re done here, eh.”
Rise of the Golden Idol released its third DLC and it was pretty snazzy. A look at the past, when they had incredible technology and the same jerks as any other time period.
I have begun Baldur’s Gate 3. And spent many, many hours learning unmentioned mechanics (mostly via precision wiki-diving, have managed to avoid all but a few out-of-context references) and details and banging my head against walls. It’s kinda hilarious how despite this being the least tactical edition of DnD, this crpg adaptation is the *most* tactical of any DnD adaptation I’ve played. Because it actually does run its combat turn-based at all times, no exceptions, and indeed you can do out of combat stuff in turn mode for precision. But dear hells does this game have a bunch of bullshit going on.
-For starters, I would have been perfectly willing to not bother picking things for my party members’ levels, just take the defaults and focus on me. But this game, presumably because 5e has so many “fewer” choices, does not fully supply recommended options. It serves up a suggested subclass, but you have to make all the choices: every spell known for every character that wants spells, which is most of them, and their feats, etc, and because leveling is slow and there are few choices to make in total, each choice is even more important. And the spell descriptions leave out half the spell, saying things like it blinds creatures for 10 turns but then actually it turns out that, mentioned nowhere in the spell description, they get a new save every turn to remove that effect. So basically an entire new edition (because there are many changes from 5e as well) to learn every class up through at least level 5, from the beginning.
-The difficulty meter and customizer uses vague terms that don’t actually tell you what they do. A massive part of the unfun I had for the first dozen or more hours was that hey, this is a vaguely open world game, everyone makes it sound like you can do whatever, great, I’ll go this way: and now I’m fighting a gang of enemies that outnumber, outgun, and out hit point me to absurd degrees. And it turns out that one of the so-called “tactical” changes just gives every foe 20-30% more hit points and +2 on all their attacks and DCs. So lo and behold, no wonder foes supposedly equal to my level kick my ass around in circles, because they are in fact not my level, they’re like +2 levels give or take. I turned “power levels” down to “balanced” and left everything else on “tactical.” Exactly the same as I had to do for Pathfinder: Kingmaker actually, but they were more open about it.
-And there’s a particularly massive change to fundamental 1st level gameplay compared to 5e: death and dying. Oh, they have the same death save system, but in 5e when you get healed you just take your turn as normal, so that bonus action 1st level healing spell means you can, and I’m quite sure the modules expect you to, use that death save as a shield because you can fight at 1hp and just be picked up and keep fighting. Not so in BG3, where if you drop, when you stand up you lose your action. And then they just shoot you again, having done nothing. It took me several hours to catch on that this was not some weird confluence, but just how they made the game (I haven’t tested to see if it’s part of the ‘extended combat mechanics’ or whatever, because that’s linked to other things I don’t want to turn off, because true granularity is for suckers I guess).
-And yeah, this game is not about going your own way. They tell you to go after the goblins, and anything that’s not goblins is too strong to seriously contend with. And so after running into basically all the walls I finally just start clearing goblins, which the game is going out of its way to show are capital E evil and I should kill, but actually no look at all these dialogue checks you can just walk past them, but no, I’m clearing them out damnit.
-Meanwhile I spent most of yesterday trying to figure out how to steal stuff. The tips are constantly saying it’s a good idea, but this game has no tutorials, the sight lines are blatant lies, and darkvision breaks the entire concept of hiding in the shadows. The only reason I bothered at all is because oh look here’s an obviously evil goblin merchant with stuff I want, but because merchant all his gold an inventory magically disappears if you kill him (except for the “three most valuable trade tagged items”, according to wiki). But hey, they’ve got like Disguise Self and distracting illusions and stuff, right? Well I finally trial-and-error’d my way into pulling it off with Invisibility, and then later figured out a more expedient method, but jesus christ. I suppose you could say that I’d need to bring in a rogue to find the loot later, but the game makes you do it first thing. And thinking for a second, uh, there is literally no reason they couldn’t have just *done* that, put a very difficult chest right there which would require a similar level of rogue-ness to get into. Or indeed, use the exact same mechanics for the ‘pickpocketing’- stealth (say for unstable/collapsing building), followed by multiple sleight of hand. But hey, shouldn’t we let some other skills work?
-Speaking of other skills, yeah this isn’t “oh you can solve things in so many ways.” It’s “we put a bunch of social skills in every dialogue and actually wrote lines for them,” which is good but nothing crazy, combined with “walking in the front door will always get you killed so find a side door,” which is reasonable but also gets annoying when it’s every time.
-I don’t actually mind Mage Hand being a summon, but that does completely change what it does. Similarly, Disguise Self apparently changes your actual size, which means it should not be an illusion, or at least actually mention that incredibly significant ability. There are crawlspaces that I presume Small characters can fit into, but Reduce is 2nd level.
-And in fact, that’s another massive change from normal 5e: everything makes puddles and all weapons have extra 1/rest skills, which are critical at level 1-2 before you have actual abilities, particularly as foes will use them on you. This also makes mainstay spells such as Grease and Web far less useful, as any random spark will set them off. Including apparently something as little as throwing a rock. Oh, and there’s a bug where a powerful grenade type double-expodes, so there’s an entire fight that’s just not playable unless you gank that guy from surprise, that was another ‘fun’ couple of hours.
Despite this, I’ve got interesting emergent story stuff going on. Everybody’s like “oooh Astarion” and I’m like, that asshole put a knife to my throat, the only reason I didn’t kill him is because I might have needed more party members. But, as I’m trying to figure out how to steal stuff from the bad guys, I finally have a job for him. Then another character
the gith woman I’ve been expecting won’t last ’cause I’ll have to choose between her and the cleric, or something, decides to try to kill me, and goody-two-shoes helps her, while Astarion is the one full of hp who takes her down. This is the sort of natural just go with it cool roleplaying stuff I would love to just roll with. However, it then immediately turns out thatI can rez goody-two-shoes Wyl and he says absolutely nothing about the incident, so I’ve an excellent moment that I want to keep, marred by a massive plot-hole. While I would like to just say cool, their story ends here and I’ll pick it up on another playthrough, that plot hole says nope gotta reload.So yeah. There’s some good stuff wrapped around a whole bunch of untutorialized opaque bullshit. I wouldn’t be surprised if they basically had an entirely two-tiered testing environment, where some people were just gallavanting about on “balanced”, and the only people on “tactician” were those who already knew all the ins and outs of not only the game, but their changes and bespoke mechanics. It’s a cliff, not a curve.
After, Inc: Revival Simple resource management, pretty relaxing even on high difficulty. Once one gets to population 2 it’s literally impossible to lose, even the worst blunders won’t result in losing more than 1 pop, and authority is easy to keep above 0 (the actuall lose condition).
That being said, high difficulty and stress is not what am seeking in relaxation games, so am perfectly happy about it.
Unrelated, my comments are getting eaten over on the previous post about computer troubles, just a heads up.
Still idling the territories in Territory Idle; nothing really new there. One of the higher-level achievements did pop a little unexpectedly, so that’s nice, I guess. I’ve fired up Spelunky 2 to try my hand at speedrunning and made it to the water levels a few times; it’s actually weirdly mesmerizing to just sprint through and entertaining even when dying to something like an enraged lizard that I dodged managing to throw itself down multiple layers and rebound into me out of the blue a second or two later.
Other than that, a few Battle for Wesnoth skirmishes. After playing Wargroove, it’s really nice to get back to such an un-clunky interface for my tactical wargaming.