T w e n t y S i d e d
This week has been a blur and I’m tired.
I played a few rounds of Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. I’ve gotten realized I can fight the statues in the angel rooms for key pieces, haven’t gotten to use it yet, but it’s someting.
What’s everyone doing?
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
The Mistakes DOOM Didn't Make
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
Batman: Arkham Origins
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
In Scrap Mechanic I build a working flyer to search for the building side quests and did the ones I found and I mad a million bucks so the end boss is waiting. Unfortunately the game got patched. So the health boost you get from burgers doesn’t stack anymore. That health boost increases your max health and prior to the patch that max health didn’t go down after death. So you could increase your health even further with each death. It made things easier after a while. Those times are gone now.
In Palworld we encountered the shrine boss big whale again. He had 4092 hp left of his 200k plus hp when the time ran out. Sooo effing close.
I’m breeding Jetdragons now to condense them and make my big boy stronger.
Forza Horizon 5: There was a community-racing series (Super 7). It had nothing to do with racing. Just run down a straight pass within a few seconds with loading screens within those 7 “races”. The next event had again nothing to do with racing, but showcasing a car. This game has so much fluff, that it is almost missing a core.
I’m guessing site was also down for everyone else too for a while. Even so, I remain stalled out on WotR at the moment: Followed a plot thread, ended up very unexpectedly trapped in a dungeon, had to go to bed just when I was getting to stuff, checked to make sure *that* wasn’t actually the end of Act 3 (apparently not), and that’s about it. Been in smeared out/hurry up and wait on IRL stuff.
So naturally it’s time to make a new Pokemon Hack. It turns out the tools I downloaded before don’t actually include the ability to alter wild lists, trades, or even game corner mons in gen3, so I can’t do anything too ambitious. But after coming to the conclusion that R/S/E kinda sucks actually? After realizing I don’t like most of the mons, or the rival (that was actually my bad, I had them confused with the gen4 rival), or the bonus rival, or the enemy team, or remember anything about the gym leaders or elite four, watching various youtubes. The natural response is to actually play it again since it’s been a loooong time, maybe it plays better than the sum of parts. I’m not even changing the learnlists of anything, but I have messed with a bunch of the moves. The idea here is hey, remember when zubats and jigglypuffs and all sorts of things were scary because of confusion and sleep? And now they’re not because it turns out those moves are a series of coin flips and you just one-shot everything while never missing? Yeah, when you’re a kid using stuff like Fury Attack ’cause it’s awesome you tend to miss a lot of attacks and not one-shot things, so those nuisance status mons have time to actually land their coin flips. Meanwhile all the most powerful moves are the ones that have zero chance of miss, even Tackle being 95% drove people crazy for ages because they hated randomly missing.
The solution of course, is that more things should randomly miss. Proportional to their power and utility, with a nod to the fact that many status moves should *never* miss, otherwise the entire mon is wasted. Stuff like Wrap was originally 85% accurate because if you were faster they never got a chance to respond, then they made Wrap into just a tiny DoT, why does it have a massive miss chance? A slow pokemon whose entire purpose in life is to put something to sleep, should really have better than 55% chance of doing that, if they manage to survive the first attack. And anything that’s strong enough to one-shot should not have perfect accuracy.
So I upped Sing/Supersonic to 75%, Sleep Powder to 85% (same as Fire Blast/etc, which people hate because they miss so often, same as original Wrap), and dropped anything with 50 power or more down to 95%. Unless it’s a recoil move, in which case it gets 100% because it already has a tradeoff. I made Waterfall into Submission, both at 100 atk (and 100%), while Surf is now Vital Throw- only 70 atk and it always goes second, but never misses. However, while I’ve reduced the accuracy, I have not reduced the ludicrous 95 atk on the ‘beam’ moves in this generation, because they’re the super expensive game corner ‘rewards’, while the standard blasts are actually just affordable picks in the department store. I don’t like this devaluing of the Ultimate moves, but it’s clearly how they meant R/S/E to play, so yeah.
Of course, if I download that gen3 type chart modifying program I found on a search (which is actually incredibly recent), then I can do a *lot* more messing with the Red/Blue remakes Fire/Leaf, ’cause I have *Ideas*. Primarily fixing Ice, and even Bug, by making them resist Normal: Rock and Steel resist Normal and are weak to Fighting because they’re ‘hard bodies’, and Ice has the same weakness for the same reason with none of the benefit. Meanwhile trying to Tackle a bug isn’t going to work any better than punching it, and Bug is already weak to Fire. Every time they add a new type, the things it is weak against are being buffed by adding that new ‘strength’, and Steel did that for Fire. But Bug was already weak to fire, it just didn’t matter ’cause bugs suck. Giving Bug resistance to Normal should make it just as useful as Rock, or updated Ice, and it doesn’t actually overpower the early game because of all the birds- in fact it actually gives you a *reason* to always have a bird! But those changes don’t much matter if I can’t get Ice types into the game early enough to matter (in the basic Blue hack I did I put Seel in the game corner, not that I played far enough to use it). So I’d still need to find some more tools. And I have Kanto basically memorized.
So today I’ve played a few minutes of Emerald with modified move data.
I know of a dungeon in Act 3 where you get trapped, where it’s not so much of a problem if you happen to have the right party (which can inflict damage of a specific element). I didn’t have the right party when I hit it and it was a right pain.
That said, the ending sequence of Act 3 was rather frustrating to me as I couldn’t quite figure out what the game was asking of me (I believe I backtracked when the game wanted me to push onward or vice versa and it counted against me).
Hey, the certificate thing got sorted.
Baldur’s Gate 3 continues, very slowly. It only took until the very end of Act 1 to realize I can see how many spells my characters have left, and the opening of Act 2 to realize my clerics’ innate flame attack is not actually a spell, but a repeatable action just like bow attacks but stronger. This revelation by itself has raised Porom and Shadowheart’s combat value from “dead weight” all the way up to “pretty underwhelming”. Good stuff, as we step inside the githyanki soylent green factory that commenters have said I should gain another level before attempting, but they’re not here and they’re not my dad.
We’ve had a development in the romance plotline. While camping, the githyanki tsundordgirl challenged Porom to physical combat. Except she did so before the camp’s healing took effect, and the whole reason I was camping was because the party had been mauled by angry cats so badly that everyone was on the brink of death. So the romance combat consisted of Laezel casting Haste upon herself (which I didn’t even know she had), triggering Porom’s reactive psychic attack, hitting Laezel for 1 hp and ending the battle instantly. A fitting addition to tsundordgirl’s character arc.
Metaphor re: Fantazio inexplicably returns. I forgot how mean this game is. Or maybe it just wasn’t this mean on Normal. But Hard is dangerous, an ambush attack can just flat out kill you. Cleared the Dumbest Idea main quest, where we sneak into the invincible villain’s lair while he’s away by first loudly fighting our way into his lair while he’s still in it, and the main dungeon after, with most of the month to sit around and level up relationships. One thing I’ve learned;
Barton’s quest is not locked to plot advancement, you can unlock his boss fight a full thirty levels before you’re ready for it and have it wipe your whole party in one gloriously half-assed attack.I still like the Job System, and the game continues to be fun.Brotato continues. Nice to get back to Level 5 difficulty and play old funsies like Gangster.
4TheWords continues. I think the “finish what you start” mantra is coming around to bite me; the bad ideas have no obvious direction forward, so they meander and bramble and I put them off on top of it and that means a story that by all logic should have been abandoned the day I started it instead has been taking up time and effort for eight months, until it’s finally sloshed out from start to finish into a full narrative soup and NOW can be abandoned. That brings the active writing projects down to… twelve. With a couple more poking at the edges trying to get in. I still haven’t finished any of the four I started with, and indeed am nowhere close.
Speaking of “finish what you start,” Castle is leaving Prime Video at the end of September so now I’m trying to watch the last eighty episodes in nine days so I can have seen the whole thing before it stops being free. So that’s this week’s plan.
Oh dang, you’ve been running this whole time without cantrips or the ability to tell how many spells are left? Yowch. 5e is very much “spellcasters want to always cast spells therefore they should suck at everything that’s not casting spells and only cast spells,” supported by their scaling ‘cantrip’ system. (Specifically, Firebolt is Shadowheart’s Half-Elf racial cantrip, which uses Charisma instead of Wisdom, so she’s still not very good with it but better than nothing, unless you were just talking about the Cleric’s Sacred Flame cantrip which throws a reflex save instead).
I did notice the tick boxes at the bottom for spell slots right away myself, but I had to install a mod to fix the colors because I couldn’t tell the difference between “grey” and “light greyish blue”. Maybe that’s the TV I use as a monitor, but I don’t think they should be close enough for that to be even close to a problem. It was a simple asset replacement that didn’t even trigger any zomg mods turn off the cheevos alert.
Having Lae’zel’s relationship scene go that way is just, chef kiss. As for her casting Haste, nah I’m pretty sure she shouldn’t have that unless you reclassed her down to 1st- did you put a Potion of Speed (or Scroll of Haste) on her for emergencies? ‘Cause they’ll absolutely use consumables in their inventories against you. Rocket arrows and potions stayed in my personal inventory until the last act when I was fairly certain there wouldn’t be any (more) betrayals, after that initial attempt at killing me. There’s also a bow with a 1/day Haste ability you might have put on her.
No one has scrolls for emergencies, everyone has scrolls for vendor trash. I did make Laezel an Eldritch Knight, which gave her some spells, but I never use them and have forgotten what they are. I think one was Magic Missile.
Shadowheart’s Firebolt does slightly more damage, but I’m finding Sacred Flame more useful because it doesn’t require line of sight, so Porom and Shades can stand well behind the damage dealers and do pokey fire annoyance.
One nifty feature of eldritch knight is that you can become a throwing specialist. One of the class features is that your weapon will return to your hand after you throw it… You can throw any weapon this way. No need to buy a special returning weapon.
Take tavern brawler if you opt for this scheme and you will do hilariously broken damage with throwing (you can do this with other classes/subclasses too, but you need a weapon that does return to pull it off in that case).
Oh yeah, I saw that weapon return ability and said “that looks cool, I should try that.” And then I never used it and forgot she had it. Next time, surely.
Tavern Brawler feat means that she applies strength bonus twice for both to-hit and damage for thrown weapons (and unarmed). This totally breaks the game and means that you will pretty much always have 90% chance to hit (and do loads of damage).
Besides the DiRT Rally 2.0 daily rallies, where the payout for the dailies has been fixed, I played a good bit of Nioh 2… until yesterday when I hit a boss who is literally impossible for me: a spellcaster whose main attacking spell shoots both a fast water shot and a slow-moving triple fireball. The triple fireball sticks around for a long time and has pretty decent tracking so he’s got pretty good field control. You may think that in that case it would be a good idea to close the distance and keep pressure on him, but the problem is he’s also a master swordsman. Hits fast, hits hard, has insane ki (stamina) regen, and has an attack which basically instantly breaks through your guard.
Eventually I managed to make decent progress by using the kusarigama’s ranged knockdown attacks… until he started using a buff which reduces the damage I did to 0. And started using a ranged wave attack which instantly kills me (it might only do like 95 percent of my life or something, but it just killed me any time I got hit).
So I think I’ll put Nioh 2 down for a while and do some other stuff.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous continues. I’m almost at the end of act 3 and oh man, are the ‘facets’ of the Pathfinder system showing.
I’m either winning fights really easily or dying horribly. On a standard fight I regularly skip my caster’s turns (no point wasting a spell slot on this, just roll on to Sosiel’s turn and he’ll beat them to death for free) and it’s practically auto-win. But then I get to a boss or random tough enemy and suddenly I’m having my ass handed to me. The game helpfully gives you an indicator on attack rolls, telling what the attacker needs to roll in order to hit: fighting random mobs, I can only miss if I roll a natural 1. Then, suddenly, I’m in a boss fight and the same character can only hit with a natural 20? Huh?
It’s what this kind of system inevitably leads to: the numbers just get silly and you end up in what I call ‘war of the broken bullshit’.
Example: I turned Nenio the wizard into an intelligence-based sorcerer (because the spell system is far better) and – after getting some mythic abilities and magic items – her ability with Enchantment spells is ridiculous. Any other spell she casts is ~DC 20, but with a spell like Hold Person, it’s ~DC28: irresistible to most ordinary foes, except the ones who are just immune. Meanwhile, she doesn’t bother with defense at all, because there’s no way anyone with an AC under 35 can reasonably expect to dodge an attack at this point.
And so on. There’s endless examples of similar effect, and the game has given me a visceral hatred of the Dispel Magic spells. See, when a boss has a list of combat buffs so long that it fills the entire screen, the logical thing to do would be to try and dispel, them, right? That’s what the spell’s for…
…when it works. Which it doesn’t, 95% of the time. Usually, the spell’s REAL effect is to waste my caster’s turn, dooming the rest of my party to flail ineffectually at the boss’s impenetrable defenses for another round, until initiative rolls around again and my casters get to waste their turn again, in the desperate hope that they get a high number on the one dice roll that will actually have an effect on this fight.
I’m pretty certain that the game has actually made it impossible to roll too high on these checks, in the name of challenge or something. Do I have any proof of this? No*. Not beyond how f*****g annoying it is to have your main character get turned into a dog that can’t do anything, and then watch 7 ATTEMPTS (including much-vaunted mythic abilities!) fail to dispel this over and over again while the enemy boss murders my party with impunity.
Ugh. Anyway, the story is still fun. Despite all my complaining about it, I went with the Aeon mythic path. Ironically, the thing that made me get over my dislike of its choices was the knowledge that the Aeon’s eventual endgame is to
go back in time and make it so that the Worldwound never happened, then remove itself from existence – you’re becoming a completely alien entity as you progress.Plus it’s funny to angrily demand that random people – mostly strangers – confess their crimes all the time.
“Seelah! I see your criminal aura! Confess to me about the laws you’ve broken!”
“IT’S PART OF MY PALADIN BACKSTORY! I TOLD YOU THIS WHEN WE MET!”
“Oh yeah. Sorry, I forgot.”
*I do highly suspect it, though, at least when it comes to de-buffing bosses. I rolled a suspiciously large number of dispel checks that were just 1 less than I needed against a certain boss recently…
Ah yes, Baleful Polymorph. It’s actually a curse, so if you have Remove Curse that works better than Break Enchantment or Dispel Magic.
I kinda like Aeon for role-playing purposes (I went with it in my first playthrough but was forced off it so I kinda just went the Legend route), but in Midnight Isles I found Trickster to be pretty good, so next time I play through the main campaign I’ll give that a try.
Speaking of Baleful Polymorph- did I mention that I found that in this game undead are *not* immune to polymorph (I may have)? Instead it just kills them instantly. So Slay Living/Finger of Death/etc do ineffectual damage, but Phantasmal Killer, Dismissal, and Baelful Polymorph are still functional instant kill spells.
Dispel magic is a caster level check. If the boss you are fighting has an elevated caster level for some reason (maybe it just has more levels than you because its a boss?) then the math will work against you. Incidentally, this is one of the 5063 reasons angel and lich are the best paths (from a min/max point of view). Their caster level is the sum of their actual caster level and their mythic rank, plus any other factors that may raise caster level.
Also note that part of my choice in Mythic abilities was influenced by the Fandom wiki mentioning one of the Aeon’s dispel abilities is actually bugged and *says* it has X caster level but actually has like nothing. So unless there’s a bug patch to fix it installed, yeah. They also said that True Seeing doesn’t actually see through most of the stuff it’s supposed to, just Invisibility and Mirror Image (but not Blur or Displacement), though I haven’t been able to test this since the moment I get access to True Seeing suddenly all the enemies stop spamming Blur and Displacement. I have confirmed that “Blindsight” (via Lifesense) is not Blindsight at all, because that should let you ignore invisibility, and it does not.
I too get extremely suspicious the number of “skill check to climb a ladder” rolls I fail by exactly 1, though after the various rebuilds I made my wolf less Mobility more Athletics to handle that. Certainly wouldn’t be the first time a game straight cheated, not that quickloading isn’t basically a cheat of its own . Sometimes when I reload I get the exact same roll, sometimes not, and sometimes it changes only if I do something else first- I’m pretty sure I’ve seen initiative perfectly duplicated on reload as well.
Also it’s hilarious that you’re almost done with Act3 in this amount of time when I’m. . . well technically also almost done, I just have to wrap a few sidequests before I go for the Ivory Tower (which I’m pretty sure is the end of the act, already spoiled myself on several narrative possibilities just trying to check that simple question, sigh). But you’ve played the game, are probably not agonizing over your levelups nearly as much, and not running nearly every single fight in turn-based, so yes obviously you’ll go faster.
Though when I do get back in I’m probably going to run the rest of the dungeon I’m in at real-time until boss. Pretty sure I’m at least one, possibly two levels above, and this one either isn’t autoscaled or the particular foes don’t have scaling that can hurt me.
Yeah, failing a skill roll by 1 feels like the universe telling me that I have to cast Guidance more often.
The group skill check thing can be deeply weird. On the one hand, it absolutely makes sense for me to defer to Nenio when looking for historical context or when I need to understand a weird magical object. On the other…how can Seelah’s horse Cookie climb a ladder at all, let alone do it *for* everyone else in the party?
(This has conjured the mental image of a horse climbing a ladder with six humanoids clinging to its saddle, which is just wonderful)
I suspect I’m ahead of you because a) I’ve done a lot of the game before, and b) I’m also cheating – several times I’ve just used toybox to activate “party only ever rolls natural 20s and enemies only roll natural 1s mode”. In particular, there’s an optional dungeon called Blackwater (added at a crowdfunding backer’s request) that’s pretty infamous for being really irritating, with very high AC enemies.
I assume the idea is that the one person makes the climb, then helps everyone else over, like with a rope or something. Which makes even less sense for a ladder and still doesn’t fix the problem of the horse, of course.
It’s also inconsistent, or at least, interacts strangely with mounted status. After several bogus failures where it simply didn’t have the right person/animal make the check I’ve taken to specifically selecting only the person meant to do the athletics/mobility check before clicking
Regarding tmtvl’s mention of Guidance: IIRC it’s a tiny Competence bonus, so standard skill bonus items overwrite it anyway. I did cast it a couple times in the very early game, but it was more effort than just reloading.
Can confirm blackwater is terrible. I’ve done it without cheating on unfair, but it felt kind of like stabbing myself in the kidney over and over.
Easier if you know ahead of time to show up with electricity damage though, so my second playthrough was less painful than the first.
After a bunch of PC problems and a bunch of Other Things Happening, I had made an impulse purchase on steam, namely The Last Gas Station, in which you play a Red Panda finding herself in the business of running a gas station in Bumfuck Nowhere, Appalachia. Of course a whole array of strange things are happening in the region, and I am not yet at any point to see how any of that will work out.
It’s an array of repeating actions, but it’s cute, and so far it’s fun, but let’s see about the longer-term retention.