T w e n t y S i d e d
This week, I’m tired.
I’ve been filling all of my days off with trying to catch up with cleaning that’s been building up, and unfortunately I’ve been having little success making a dent. On the up side Terraria had an update.
I haven’t gotten to play much, but as far as I’m aware, there’s new accessories for summoners, and a rework of all of the early game gem staffs.
What’s everyone else doing?
Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
Crysis 2
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
Ludonarrative Dissonance
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
Baldur’s Gate 3 continues. I have successfully explored the first area’s map, through the powerful technique of “jumping on jumpable rocks,” and have collected a new melee party member, meaning I now have TWO contributing party members, and also two clerics. The new recruit is supposedly too dangerous for physical contact, lest they incinerate us through sheer proximity. This does not prevent them petting the camp dog. Who’s a good boy.
I was told Level 5 was a big power increase, but was not expecting “literally double the damage of Level 4”. Combine that with the new party member already providing double the damage, and fights have gone from harrowing to trivial in a flash. I’m sure they’ll crawl back upward the farther in I get.
Didn’t actually make a lot of progress this week. Encountered a burning building, and got the wonderful animation of four grown men failing to open a door, and then a carrot-topped hobbit girl giving it a kick and blowing it open like a piston. Grade School Play energy intensifies. (Turned out there was a rescue mission behind there, which… well I won’t say we had “maximum casualties,” because we survived.) Also got a bit farther into the Underdark. Was asked to find someone’s husband, which… well I won’t say “maximum casualties”…
Eeeeeyyyyy, you finally found Karlach! Yeah she’s just out in the middle of nowhere unless you have the quest to go find her (and get a quest marker), which I think from your choices you might have missed. Personally I found managing daily rage quite annoying with how much 5e short rest stuff is around, but still brought her for like half the game.
And yeah, that 5th level damage spike is pretty unabashedly bad game design. If a CR 4 monster is meant to still be useful against Lv5 parties, it needs to have twice the hit points it would for 4th level parties, and 5th level monsters used as bosses when you’re lower is crazy. 5e tries to have less damage multiplying with more 1/round stuff, but in the end this is still a videogame full of Epic Loot and geared to be easy for people who just want to melee smash. Aside from Paladins there’s not much 1/round stuff at low levels, and the Paladin smite is just broken the other way. I’ve been sitting on the same problem in WotR where oh look, all the characters that have multiple attacks kick ass, and the characters that don’t get any extra attacks until 6th or higher are. . . refusing to take anything that would ameliorate that.
I always make Karlach a monk. Her special soul coin ability works all day with unarmed attacks (no rage necessary for unarmed).
Played some Starless Abyss. It’s a roguelite deck builder where you control several spaceships. You move them around on a hex grid and try to kill the enemies that show up. It seems fine, no problems but also nothing special.
I’ve also been playing The Message from Deep Space. It’s a game that I suspect is targeted at a pretty niche audience and I fit the heck out of that niche. The premise is that a meteorite with an antenna on it lands on Earth in the 70s and you are one of the people tasked with figuring it out. Basically, you’re going through first contact with an automated alien system starting from nothing. So they start by communicating numbers, and then you’re able to figure out that some numbers are special and map meaning onto them (as in, you get to choose the label used for them). There’s a lot of communication based on universals – math, physics, chemistry, etc, and it works toward more abstract things. For each transmission you need to figure out the appropriate response to let you continue. New concepts get introduced and sometimes you don’t actually get what they mean but can progress anyway from other context clues in the hope that later it’ll make sense. There’s also a programmer on your team who periodically updates your interface and he’s the best.
Last week had the Spirit from the Street Festival going. So mosching, drinking and listening to all kinds of Punk, Oi! and Ska instead of playing video games. One highlight were The Real McKenzies. They had real good fun on stage and so did the audience. Other highlights: Mutabor, Oxo86, Jenny Woo plus The Choices A bad performance, but still fun concert was delivered by Berliner Weisse. They forgot lyrics, sang away from the mic and were mixed badly. The crowd sang along, burned flares and smoke bombs and had fun none the less.
On Monday I had time to play Scrap Mechanic and Palworld.
Scrap: In underground level 2 I cleared out the facility and rescued the other mechanics and on my way back, the one explosive bot I missed ran into my car, destroyed a chest, a battery container, a sticky wheel and the upgraded turret seat. … So mad. I need to do the next grow lab to get orange seeds next – to craft sun shakes.
Palworld: I upgraded my gear from steel to Hexolit. Trice the defense value. And we defeated Bellnoire Libero relatively easy. Firebreak Tower is the next target.
Wildlanding the Reckoning Ghosts predictably continues in the Last Rites… add-on bonus thingy.
The gameplay looped hooked me right back in, the content stays “Warcrime-Simulator: Bolivia”. It’s a Clancy-game, it’s what you get.
However, my bloody PC that worked fine on Monday does not today: no BIOS beeps and a permanently-on HDD-LED.
I will check the debug LEDs of the Mainboard later and maybe try swapping around RAM, but my guess (and hope) is that this is the power supply acting up *again*. So if there’s nothing conclusive on the debug I’ll just order a new one and try that first, but I also really did not need this…
Oof, that’s no fun. Here’s hoping it’s an easy fix, at least. I had to replace the original power supply in my PC a few years ago after it started slowly failing, manifesting as crashing when playing too-demanding a game…with what was “too demanding” slowly decreasing over time, until I finally realized it wasn’t the games crashing my computer.…
I managed to get in another run of Knights of the Old Republic, and despite skipping it for a week because I was afraid of how long it would take me to get through the Leviathan sequence … it only took me about an hour. It also highlighted how this battle with Malak was kinda fumbled, because with my high Dexterity character he couldn’t even hit me, but then Bastila needs to run and hold him off so that we can escape when he was almost finished off. And the game REQUIRES us to get his health down that low. It would work as I think was intended where the fight was close and you had to heal a number of times, but again he hardly ever hit me so I didn’t have to heal once the entire fight. It really drives home that you could have just finished him off here if Bastila didn’t get in the way. You COULD argue that you couldn’t take the risk of his having something up his sleeve and so killing you off and so you not being able to get the Star Forge, but that’s reading a lot into it.
Also got in another run of Suikoden V. This was spent mostly recruiting characters, but I needed to advance the plot once and it cut to the main antagonists who noted that after breaking with the other noble most of the nobles in his camp abandoned him and either struck out on their own or joined with you, and they commented that the influence of your tactician worked exactly the way they predicted, tearing the whole thing apart. While from your perspective that’s not really what happened — the noble was a traitor and only wanted to use you as a puppet — it did raise some concerns for me about this being the tangential effect of having someone really smart who puts her view of her own principles ahead of everything else. The protagonist is, of course, a very ethical person, but the question then is: will SHE think that that’s the case for everything we do? Again, I don’t recall that being the betrayal in the game, but it does raise an interesting question to follow up on.
Besides the DiRT Rally 2.0 dailies I also managed to complete Crow Country over the week-end. While I’m usually not big on survival horror (they tend not to work so well if you don’t get scared), something about CC’s simplicity managed to keep me hooked through the entire game. 1 puzzle I needed help with (octopus), the rest was doable once I used my eyes as well as my poor overworked single brain cell.
Tropical storm Moke’s followup this weekend thankfully didn’t add much to hurricane’s Lala’s devastating swipe the week before, but the fall semester has started at the university so I’m gonna start getting busy with teaching soon. In my free time before that happens I:
– Played a session of PEAK with friends (we continue to learn and improve).
– Continue to work through Manic Miners, having finished the remastered campaign and now working through a community-created one. It’s a lot slower going due to the energy crystal targets being higher across the board; it’s what I thought I wanted as a kid, and now that I actually get it I’m not so sure. It does have some entirely new levels and interesting ideas.
– Finally beat the new scenario for the latest DLC for Terraformers (about Martian politics) on the hardest difficulty level after multiple attempts. The secret seems to be to ultra-hyper-exclusively focusing each city on what it needs to be doing to maximize generated political influence; I tend to build most of my cities towards two outputs for coverage, so this took some rewiring of my usual playstyle.
– Tried out En Garde! a light-hearted Souls-like which I’d originally gotten for my brother. Had some fun with it, though I got stuck in the first real boss fight, and then about an hour of playtime in it completely froze my PC. Haven’t been back yet, but will probably continue to give it a go.
And not gaming related, but I also took the opportunity while writing syllabi for my classes to try out Typst, a markup language that looks to build upon the strengths of LaTeX while learning from its weaknesses. I see why people like it! I was able to create a ~3.5 page syllabus that looked good and matched ~95% of the functionality of the LaTeX template I was using before in just a couple of hours. It definitely requires some relearning (it feels like it has an integrated CSS-like functionality, which is different), but it’s overall very easy to learn and I look forward to using it more in the future.
Cyberpunk 2077 continues. I took my Corpo Netrunner V through the Phantom Liberty DLC; it managed to be very good, a bit odd, and briefly very, very bad.
The good is, predictably, the story. It feels a bit weird to just take a break from the main story of *V’s Impending Doom* to go mess around in a new area with a load of new sidequests, but that’s a complaint about the game in general. As I’ve said before, CDPR do hard choices well, and Phantom Liberty is a great example: you’re presented with an impossible situation that has no easy answers, and it’s so hard because of other character’s choices.
You can even say to one of the key NPCs ‘Hey, you know this entire situation could be resolved if you two could talk, right?”….but they can’t. The trust is long gone.
The odd is that they got famous actor Idris Elba to voice this one of the characters; you can tell because they put loads of effort into recreating and animating his features in-game and – just like Keanu Reeves in the base game – it was heavily advertised. He emotes! He’s got depth! There’s loads of expressive animations!
…it’s just a pity about his accent, really. Classic ‘English person trying an American accent and failing’, throughout the entire story. Not terrible, by any means – but distracting.
Could they not have a) hired an American actor to play the American NPC or b) found an excuse for the character to have an English accent?
Ah, Stunt Casting.
The bad was a particularly awful gameplay section in the ending. I made the final big choice of the DLC, choosing to
help Reed try and capture Songbird, which I’d heard eventually leads to a new ending for the base gamewhere you get a guaranteed cure for the malfunctioning shard that’s killing you. Thing is, the denouement of the story takes a really long time, and ends in a…oh man… a classic Awful Forced Stealth Section.Picture this: you get to sneak around an abandoned facility, activating various mechanical doodads while being stalked by an invincible enemy monster that climbs in and out of air vents in the ceiling. If it catches you, you can’t fight back; you just get a gory first-person death animation and sent back to the nearest checkpoint. Your only option is stealth.
Wait, this feels familiar…
Hey devs! I ALSO liked Alien: Isolation. It was a good game. Atmospheric. Scary. But that doesn’t mean I wanted to stop playing my Cyberpunk RPG to play a jankier, worse version of it.
See, in Alien: Isolation, the lethal stealth was the entire game, and was worked in a system. It gave you options: traps, distractions, weapons (eventually), and a bit of freedom in how you evaded the threat. But here, none of that works. Cyberpunk’s existing stealth systems don’t apply – instead you get some good old scripted DIAS sections where you slowly creep around enclosed spaces with instant death as a punishment if you don’t do it right. No, you can’t do that, you were supposed to do it another way. Try it again from the start. No, not fast enough – you’re dead. No, too fast – you die. And so on.
It was such a disconnect between ‘the emotional climax of a story I’d got invested in’ and ‘gameplay so frustrating and flow-breaking I was shouting insults at my screen’. Because sprinkled between infuriating ‘guess the one way the devs gave to you survive THIS challenge’ sections, there’s a lot of backstory and context being delivered. It soured the whole experience. And then, to cap it all, I ended up not getting access to the different ending to the base game because I chose
to kill Songbirdat the very end.Nonetheless, the story was still good and stuck with me. I just heartily recommend making The Other Choice and
siding with Songbird instead.Anyway. I’m now pretty high level, and not really interested in doing all the side quest stuff. It’s so odd; the game does a great job of telling you that *V’s time is running out* and *you’ve got to get cured before it’s too late* as you do the story missions, then – once you’ve got the final mission unlocked – all the side content (over 50% of the game) becomes available. So you fart around for ages, with your health condition barely coming up.
There are mods which trim a couple lines here and there (and it really is just a couple) to try and reduce that hurry up vibe in the giant open world quasi-sandbox game. There are also two different mods for the placement of Phantom Liberty: one that thinks it should clearly be done ASAP, I think actually even a bit earlier, and so sets up the flags to allow that, and another that basically sees it as the actual final act and so sets it up more like that.
I myself didn’t pick up the dlc until unlocking the final mission string, and last time I tried to actually play the game ended up bouncing off thanks to a different mission I decided to try and clear out first. But I’ll get back to it eventually.
I am also playing Terraria, along with the Calamity mod with my son. In the former, I finally picked up the Book Worm achievement, after much annoyance and even multiple trips to the wiki to see e.g. what weird edge-case rare zombie type (or blood-corrupted penguin, etc.) I was missing. The biggest pain was having to carefully engineer multiple new biomes.
In the latter, my son is almost treating it like a boss rush. He’ll get a new piece of equipment that’s also a material, look at what’s needed to make the upgraded form, and then immediately want to jump ahead to getting all the components of that upgraded form. Meanwhile, I’m doing all the background work needed to make a Terraria run go smoothly: building homes for the NPCs and furnishing them with pylons, setting up fishing spots, partitioning off the evil zones, clearing all the extraneous spikes out of the dungeon, etc. I’m glad he’s having fun! But it can also be a pain when I’m trying to get a task done and can’t teleport, or an NPC has gotten killed, because he’s farming bosses near the home base. ^_^;
Forgot to come back and post about Wrath of the Righteous ’cause I was playing Wrath of the Righteous. Short version: just hit level 7, recruited a character because I recruit characters and I’m sure I can just kick him later if it’s actually a problem, finally gave up and started taking control of people’s builds. Seelah is now a TWF-shield basher on a horse, which is hilarious because the horse lets her move and full attack, and while most of Woljif’s build is fine but he (and the wizard) are skipping tons of spells that can’t be bought in the shop, so I’ll be assuming direct control there. Particularly so I can get Keen Edge to combine with Bless Weapon for many crits. Camellia pretending to be some sort of divine gish rogue continues to be ridiculous, but she’s one level away from all the things showing up at once that are supposed to make it work.
I’ve once again given up on even bothering with the normal summon spells due to the completely bass-ackwards power levels between them and “Animate” Dead, so now I’m an LG trending Oracle of Nature who summons skeletons and (chaotic) Azatas from my magic beer mug. Having a billion spontaneous spells known is nice though.
The fight right before recruiting that last character (the evil gnome), I actually redid to make use of more abilities. The Lillend from the beer mug proceeded to stun my paladin off her horse, but giving Lann holy for his bow and my wolf the amulet of mighty “fists” made up the difference, even as several spells failed the second time.
Ah, Regill. I quite liked him, although it was a bit annoying how Owlcat didn’t really know how to write a Lawful Evil character when they did so far better in Kingmaker (e.g. Irovetti), and just made Regill a Lawful Neutral character who sometimes put on his stupid cruelty hat. It’s a bit like if a player absentmindedly plays the character in an LN way when suddenly someone goes ‘you ARE supposed to be Evil, right?’ and then Regill’s player just blurts out the first ‘Evil’ thing they can think of.
I thought Regill was pretty good, as Lawful Evil goes: the Ends Justify The Means in all situations. And the End is – at all times – winning the Crusade, whatever the cost. Whether it’s feeding a baby to a demon as a distraction so his troops can get into position, purposefully killing civilians because they’re not useful and it forestalls the possibility of them becoming zombies, or sacrificing his own life in a rearguard action because it preserves the rest of the army’s fighting capacity….everything he does is decided by cold, hard logic.
(Not spoilers: none of those actually happens in the game)
Sure, I guess he could be more evil and enjoy hurting people (as opposed to just not caring) – but he’s not stupid, nor wasteful with resources. It always struck me as a good take on Lawful Evil, because it’s consistent, understandable and worthy of respect. In particular it avoids the issue that some of the other Evil characters in the game have, which is that they’re often liabilities and/or dangerous to keep around.
I made a point of executing some characters in WOTR (and good riddance), but Regill I genuinely respected.
I finished a mage playthrough of Terraria on master difficulty a couple of days ago, and I’ve gotta say, the new update made mage WAY less of a pain in the ass to play. I practically never had to actually drink a mana potion, even during boss fights. (For those who don’t know, drinking a mana potion in Terraria gives you a debuff that significantly cuts your magic damage for a few seconds, in order to discourage spamming mana potions.) The new mana regen mechanics let you regen all your mana by just laying off the attack for a few seconds, especially with a mana regen accessory and a mana regen potion. I previously rarely ever touched magic in my playthroughs, and now it might be my favorite class. What a turnaround.