T w e n t y S i d e d
More Balders Gate 3.
We only played our honor mode game this week. It was going well for the most part, we started act two, and since we were over leveled, we cleared out a lot of the enemies including the three Thorm fights. Unfortunately the fight at the inn went bad, and a very important NPC got killed, so effectively every NPC died. We did manage to survive that whole ordeal, and continue for awhile longer, even clearing out moonrise. But the run came to an end, while fighting Ketheric, a combo of bad rolls, and poor choices, led to the end of a fifty hour game. Anyway we’re starting again, right after I’m done writing this.
How’s everyone else doing this week?
A Lack of Vision and Leadership
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
Charging More for a Worse Product
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Good Robot Dev Blog
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
The Biggest Game Ever
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
BG3 restart: Sounds kinda fun and kind of not.
I completed Girl Genius: Adventures in Castle Heterodyne after 9 hours. I found all the premium backer pictures, all the lore and all the artifacts but miss a single dingbot. According to a guide it should be in the heart of the caste, but half of that room isn’t accessible to me anymore.
Then I started and finished Train Mechanic Simulator 2017. Put your brain on hold and just do the tasks of repairing the same 3 locomotives over and over again. With the same song playing over and over again (and muting the game music isn’t saved!) All the car mechanic simulators had at least a dozen different vehicles to repair, but TMS2017 basically only 3. They look different from the outside, but the internal components were the only accessible and they were the same. But driving through a small map and towing damaged or derailed trains back to the workshop was kind of fun.
Yesterday I restarted Ruined King: A League of Legends Story from Airship Syndicate the makers of Darksiders and Battle Chasers: Nightwar. The game intro had almost the same render quality as Arcane, the ingame cutscenes are either in-game (isometric) or animated comic panels. Kind of a let down. But the gameplay might get very good. My first run ended after just 2.5 hours for no particular reason I can remember.
And analog I learned MINT MNGT rules. Mint Management is a hidden movement game like Scotland Yard.
In the training missions the management had no chance at all. I might have to learn the “real” game to see management and agents on an equal level.
Most of my gaming time was spent finishing Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye, the DLC.
I am torn. I love the story and the place they built for it. It’s a neat, self contained addition. It also get tedious that every time you need to do the same little run to get back. I utterly hate the movement puzzles, and cheesed them to the best of my abilities (which makes them entirely avoidable), and I have missed (or “not put together”) one important piece of information, barring me from entering a place containing more information that was needed to proceed. Getting stuck I looked up at a guide, wondered how the hell I was supposed to know that, and then remembered that place existing. After looking up how to get in there everything clicked, and I really wish that bloody thing would have been a little more obvious…
After finishing I started hunting achievements, and now I pretty much only miss the ones requiring actual skill.
Next to that I’ve cleared the first stage of Viewfinder, which has an interesting approach to spatial puzzles, namely “hold this picture and make it then an accessible part of the level”.
I am also dabbling a bit in Escape from Duckov, which so far is a delightful 5-to-20-minute-interruption when I need one. Surely the difficulty will go up sooner or later xD
I enjoyed playing Viewfinder when it released (though not enough, apparently, to have played it again). I did quite like the final puzzle, which requires you to synthesize everything you’ve learned throughout the game in a series of mini-challenges. From watching other people play it online I discovered that at least some of those challenges have multiple solutions, which is always cool to see in a puzzle game.
Brotato. Finally got an “unlimited” run going; it wasn’t quite unlimited, I died on Wave 97, but that was in large part due to not being able to see the screen anymore; there were so many explosions and particle effects that the vast majority of each wave was spent looking at a blotch of white. With that, all the itches are scratched; every character is gold, we’ve had a nearly-unstoppable build, it’s time to move on. But I’m sure I’m not actually going to; I still don’t have a good replacement.
…is that all I did this week? Man, this one flew by. I guess I watched a bunch of movies. Or was that last week? This one flew by.
…4TheWords? Has it been long enough to bring that up again? Closing in on month 5, but I’ve bogged down pretty badly there; it’s barely been above the minimum wordcount for the last two months, and a few days of just writing diary entries to keep it, which is a soft failure. I think I’ve got too many long projects running, they’re crowding together and triggering my claustrophobia; and all of them are outside the exciting opening phase, into the bit where I’m pushing through an unformed mass of semi-filler with no end in sight. I don’t want to drop the game, but feel like maybe I need to for recovery. Or maybe I actually need to avoid doing that and just keep sloshing forward. The process itself is in unformed semi-filler territory.
I played another session of Suikoden II. I have to give it some credit for having some real emotional hits early on, with the character of Pilika who is the daughter of the couple who took the protagonist’s best friend in and who asks you to go to the city to buy an amulet as a gift for her father and then when you come back the entire village has been burned to the ground and everyone except her is dead and she saw the killings. But the game does not do a good job of telling you what you need to do to advance to the next story section (I ended up doing some recruiting and then stopped in that town and things advanced for the first one, and then happened to go inside the oddly placed tavern and triggered the next one after the battle) and for the most part still prefer Suikoden III. I will say that it was nice to get some characters from the first game, as strategist Apple returns to warn the mercenaries about the attack by the main villain and gets a side comment about Flik and Viktor not telling anyone that they had actually survived the end of the previous game, with it being revealed that Viktor was supposed to tell them but didn’t. Also, the villain here is established much earlier and is a direct participant, unlike the first game where both main villains didn’t really interact at all until the end, so that’s nice. Ultimately, it’s like the first game: I will almost certainly finish it, but I’ll also likely be constantly thinking about playing Suikoden III instead.
I’m on game #7 of 100 for this year’s objective. It’s just about game completion, it doesn’t have to be start to finish, so I’m allowed to count completed games that I’m already part-way through.
Papetura
Magnetic: Cage Closed
Shards of God
The Pedestrian
Pang Adventures
Golf Club Wasteland
Ancient Enemy
It’s a solitaire-type card game where you go between puzzle rooms, where you have to try to pick up all of the cards to obtain items (e.g. health potions), and fights, where you use the solitaire game to charge / recharge your attack cards to inflict damage or protect against it. With a few upgrades, passive ability cards, and active ability cards. Getting towards the end I believe, maybe 20% left. It’s not bad really, quite fun, just gets a little old after a long session.
Last week college classes started, and for the first time in my life I am the one teaching them rather than attending them. So that’s been chaotic, getting everything set up. I don’t have fixed hours and yet I feel busier than when I was on the clock. In the moments I have, it’s mostly been RimWorld. I’ve finally worked out a mod set and premise that I’m happy with and am finally exploring the Odyssey expansion that released back in July and am having a blast. Being able to take your base and travel around the gigantic planet rather than wait for stuff to happen or send out painfully slow caravans is just such a game-changer. I’ve seen a lot of people ranking it tied with Biotech for the best expansion, and I generally agree.
I thought I’d be done with my latest playthrough of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but I decided to do all the content and go for all the missing achievements. Since I’m trying to do this without a guide it means exploring every nook and cranny of the entire game, finishing every bit of content and in search for missing records, which is very time consuming. Also, they seem to have nerfed a few of the pictos in the last update, so I can no longer cheese a couple of the hardest fights, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean things take longer.
Felt the itch for some fantasy RPG stuff, so I’m trying Avowed. I’m a few hours in and enjoying my time with it so far. I’ve heard some mixed things about this game, but since a lot of negativity came from the usual crowd that protests everything (look at them right now trying to pretend that Sophie Turner doesn’t look exactly like Lara Croft) I’m taking it with a grain of salt. Combat is fun and exploration is a treat. The only thing that’s a bit of an issue right now is how NPCs are portrayed. Conversations are a bit heavy on the worldbuilding and make no mistake, worldbuilding is good, but I feel like every character I talk to is more interested in talking about the world than about themselves. I’ve been traveling with a few different companions these few hours and I could not tell you what their personalities are supposed to be. Also, I feel it’s kind of annoying how no one ever reacts to me stealing their stuff right in front of them. We’ll see how it evolves.
I liked Avowed, though I didn’t finish it (got to the end of the second region, took a break, never came back). The big stupid complaint I was hearing from people is that you can’t open every single thing that even looks like a container and knock around everything that could possibly be a physics object. Which is a perfectly fair trade for looking great and *not* having to click on every little thing could could conceivably be a container. If you can use the ray tracing I would suggest doing so, it looks much better than the baked-in.
Interesting that you’re not getting any personality out of the characters, ’cause I found them spamming their single personality traits quite frequently. But I also had that thing where it looks to me like I should be doing X before I talk to Y person, but the game actually expected me to talk to them first, so I clear an entire act of the game without the character I was supposed to have the whole time. I also did not enjoy the second region as much as I would have liked- I found the forced italian-ish accents annoying, the magipunk assets didn’t quite strike a chord with me, and the underlying moral question of the sub-setting
oh look, zombies for cheap laborI’ve already seen a million times before with more analysis. I also spoiled the location you’re supposed to find at the end of the act as literally the very first cave I went into. That said, I’m told that my expectation of what is very obviously going on is not in fact correct, so it might have had some more surprises left.But I’d also reached a level where I had access to all the magic I was interested in, which means unless I deliberately change my entire build it’s basically done for the game.
If you haven’t already been made aware, take note that the upgrade system is very weird. Actually combining materials and upgrading items isn’t complicated, but unique magic items will auto-level to match your highest level weapon or armor, as appropriate, and this includes those found in *the shops*, which check only the first time you access them. You can save right in front of the shop or chest to reload if you don’t like the price or want to come back to the chest after you’ve upgraded so it will match. Making efficient use of this system is pretty critical, if you try to upgrade multiple items that use the same materials at the same time and shop and loot everything immediately, you’ll be far weaker- and have no money to buy your way out of it because the loot you’re finding is *also* lower level and doesn’t sell for squat.
More Grounded. I have explored the Haze zone, located in the fog around a broken can of weed killer, and completed the Haze lab. The fungus-infected “Larvae” (not sure what bug that enemy type is supposed to be) swarming the various trenches were insufferable, and apparently completely incidental to the actual lab itself- they’re guarding rare resources out there, but the lab itself was quite easy to get into. Especially if I’d explored a certain area first and could have brought bombs (which also might have helped against the mobs of mobs outside). This one actually *did* have a boss fight, which was a nice change of pace. I’d already brought tons of healing just to brute force my way through the fights in the area outside, so I had just enough to get through. After I was done and got a further equipment upgrade from some black ant parts, I patched the weed killer can, so now the zone should be clear of poison gas, which is. . . good? It was actually a pretty solid source of free resources from bigger bugs just wandering or spawning in and dying, but that also meant you needed specific equipment to enter and had reduced visibility.
The game gave me a manual turret schematic for base defense which is. . . something? It doesn’t look like it’s much better than my normal ranged weapons if at all, and I basically can’t shoot out through the perimeter fence anyway. And since I finally directly scanned an early game resource I assumed all recipes had been unlocked for automatically, I have after 30 some hours put spike strips around the fence like I’d been wishing had been around all game. Which should have smaller bugs die or get thinned out on the way in, and big bugs are big enough I can shoot them from the mostly pointless tower I made. The turret has a health meter, so the only thing I can think of is that it’s mostly for protecting you from swarms of fliers. But so far the only bugs that have sent a “revenge” attack at my base are those “Larva”, because the attacks seem to be triggered by killing a large number of bugs in a short time and the Larva are the only ones that exist in large groups on the map which will just aggro you constantly.
I’ve also finally found a BURGLE chip, as opposed to the SUPER chips that are these main quest objectives, and thus I can now decipher what those icons on the map mean. These chips also unlock new crafting recipes and things, so I think it’s time to take another dip in the pond and build a tower up to the picnic table, see what else I can unlock before I progress further. I still haven’t been given the crafting recipes for the materials needed to the next tier of items and yet more new materials I’ve never seen are showing up in new recipes, so there’s clearly a whole chunk of game left after I do the black ant lab.
Still playing Dungeons of Dredmor and a smidge of Silksong. In the latter I managed to beat the Cogwork Dancers and then did some random faffing about here and there. Most recently, I somehow manage to beat Trobbio, who is the biggest asshole I have encountered in any game ever, and I will be perfectly happy to never have to do that fight again.