Getting the year off right by forgetting to post this on Sunday, but better nate than lever. Anyway I watched the Fallout show so I am inspired to play Fallout 4 on survival difficulty. It’s been slow going so far as I’ve died numerous times, often losing ~30 mins of progess. Hope everyone’s new year has gotten off to a strong start.
Cassette Beasts! I finally burnt out on Pokemon and had the time-slot for another monster collector. Great music, story, art direction, etc… It officially dethroned Darkest Dungeon as my favorite game.
Still on my anime games kick but I took a break from Dragon Ball on the famicom to read some comic books.
I got further into Dragon Age: Inquisition after posting my mini-rant/review of Dragon Age 2. I’ve gotten over the movement feeling like a slog after a couple more hours. It’s so far significantly more compelling because of one of the things I commented, which is that I love games where you put together a ragtag band of bozos like Mass Effect 2 and have to muster up support and resources for some sort of cause. I haven’t met too many of the companions yet, but they’re also more interesting than most of the Dragon Age 2 cast after even just a short amount of time.
The decision to make you travel to individual locations between missions to talk to each party member in 2 was SO bad because it meant having to sit through 5 loading screens to check in on each member. Having an excuse for them all to be at a campfire or in this case at our castle is way better because it means talking to them more often is not a chore. Which probably contributes to my feeling like they’re better written and caring more about them sooner because I actually get to interact with them regularly.
It’s pretty clear some abilities are more OP than others. Like the healing poison on rogues, since your health doesn’t naturally regenerate and you have to rely on potions and resupplies at camps. Instead I can just hit stuff and keep myself topped off forever. I’d say I’m having fun so far.
How does the series develop as it goes along? I battled through half of Origins a couple of years ago, found it borderline unplayable on console so restarted after a few hours on PC, but eventually fell off. I just couldn’t enjoy the combat or the controls, in either style. Does that sort of stuff get better in the later games?
2 is pretty similar to Origins but maybe a bit faster, Inquisition is more streamlined for better and for worse (there are some optional “don’t stand in the red circle” fights where the companion AI doesn’t recognize what a red circle is). I’d say if the gameplay in Origins was a dealbreaker that you probably won’t enjoy the other games in the franchise, except maybe Veilguard which I haven’t played.
Each game is pretty different so far in what they do well and what they do poorly. Like the combat in 2 isn’t ‘great’ as far as video games go, but I do think it was better than 1 because of the faster pace, smoother animations, more fluid character movement. It’s the encounters that are worse though, which in my other thread, I mention is mainly just the game throwing dozens of enemies at you.
Inquisition feels more like a very slow MMO because it’s an open world game with large maps full of Ubisoft collectibles. The combat is simplified even further in that it’s balanced around only controlling a single character instead of micromanaging your entire party like in 1 and sometimes in 2. Which you can still do, but isn’t really necessary, at least in the early game where I’m at.
If you didn’t like the first one, I think I’d agree that you wouldn’t like the later entries either. I also haven’t played Veilguard though, so if it that has more modern action combat like someone else described as being something like the new God of War games, it might be a better time.
It’s not like I don’t enjoy CRPG or tactical combat, I just thought it wasn’t done very well in DA:O. It felt like it was in a weird spot, where it was halfway between a modern version of that type of game and a retro version. Like I can go back and play Fallout 1 which is much clunkier, but you kind of expect that. I really wanna enjoy Dragon Age because I want to see how the story plays out and how your decisions carry over, like in Mass Effect.
I think that’s kind of consistent throughout is that the gameplay never really comes together to feel ‘good’, just ‘okay’. It’s definitely clunky all the way through, at least up to Inquisition.
Inquisition ties directly into Veilguard, but Veilguard only lets you import like 4 big decisions from Inquisition. Inquisition has dozens of flags for what you did in Origins and 2. So worst case is maybe Veilguard plays way better and you can watch some lore videos on YouTube to at least get an idea of what was happening. You’ll definitely miss the small references to past decisions, but I think there’s relatively fewer of them than in Mass Effect outside of the big decisions.
I’m playing Potion Craft and I love it, it’s the perfect relaxation game
Finished ac6. Game fun, occasionally bullshit.
Those fuckin’ sunflower wheels.
Them, the invisible snipers, the several fights where they gang up on you. Enemies cheating on stagger
most egregious was
Having to kill Michigan and his whole squad. Like unless you have the right loadout you will just run out of ammo.
Ah, yeah, the spoiler was total bullshit, but I really enjoyed it just because my build was juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust riding the line. Think I had like 5 shots left when it ended.
I decided to replay Green Hell but it’s been so long since I played through it I’m having to relearn stuff
I’m replaying The Witcher 3, after finishing Cyberpunk 2077 last week I decided to replay TW3 to see if my nostalgia was wrong and TW3 wasn’t that much better than Cyberpunk and no TW3 is much better than C2077.
Picked up Mass Effect trilogy remastered on a lark because it was cheap and I didn’t know if my computer could run it. Turns out it does. However, I can only muster the motivation to play it late at night and stumbling into ridiculously deep dialogue trees when I want to sleep is really having an impact on my enjoyment of the game.
I hope you can find time to play it in a more awake state of mind. I really like the ME games. I haven’t played the remasters but I might do it later this year after I finish all the Dragon Age games. Mass Effect 2 is probably in my top 10 games.
It’s strange, I played through all three pretty much back to back about ten years ago, really enjoyed them. But I’ve never had the slightest desire to replay them. Not sure why.
I get that. I think it’s probably because the outcomes are all known. I don’t usually replay games except like decades apart because it’s pretty easy to see how certain decisions will play out. Like few games with narrative choices are willing to truly let you fail unless you do something obviously disastrous, but if you do the ‘right’ thing, then everyone is going to survive. You’re still going to win, you just might also be a prick to the other characters in the process. So like there’s not really that big of a difference between a Paragon vs. Renegade playthrough to justify the length of all 3 games again. Which is also like 100+ hours.
Been playing lots of UFO 50, the dino tower defense mostly and enjoying that.
Been continuing my persona 5 playthrough, and it has really grown on me, the mechanics and plot have gel’d nicely and I’m happy to do either. Just finished the summer break. Just met the gamer kid who teaches us how to shoot better lol.
Played a decent bunch of Brotato’s new DLC. The second map seems quite a bit harder, but I’m having fun.
Just finished a Total Warhammer 3 game as Chaos Undivided, in the Realm of Chaos campaign. The RoC campaign SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS. Worse than TW2’s Vortex. I don’t know how CA keeps doing this, but the completely randomly spawning armies is still just as infuriating. Guess I’ll just play Immortal Empires from now on because goddamn.
Also been playing a good chunk of Darktide. Ogryn good, throw rock at specials and laugh.
I need to get back into Total War soon. I sort of dropped off during Warhammer 2 because I didn’t like the direction they were going (give me back Three Kingdoms
) but it seems like canning that hero shooter put them back on track. I keep seeing good things about the newest DLCs. They finally learned to stop making mini-campaigns nobody cared about.As far as I’m aware they’re still adding new special campaign mechanics for every character in the new DLCs. The last proper mini-campaign IIRC was for Khazrak One-Eye in TW1.
Yeah, the faction and character mechanics are good and help keep things fresh. Mini-campaigns are part of what killed Three Kingdoms because they kept making them about characters nobody liked instead of expanding the main map and adding those unique mechanics like Warhammer.
I also hear they turned around the Pharaoh game, but I haven’t played that one or Troy.
I’ve been at the new Project Zomboid build. I’ve settled into one of those big houses with tall fences in the south of Muldragh and I’m trying to set it up for long term. The late game stuff seems a lot more developed now with significantly more complex agriculture, smithing, and crafting. It’s kind of all too much for single player though, like it could take months if not years of ingame time to master all of it and it’s also easy enough to loot that it’s like why bother?
Idk I’m having fun at least.
Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2005), I found this cool mod that adds in new eras based off The Clone Wars. Commando droids are overpowered and it’s cool to have a magnaguard with a proper shock staff instead of the weird grenade launcher that vanilla swbf2 has.
Trails of Cold Steel. Compared to the other games in the series the writing is closer to light novel slop, but I am still enjoying the worldbuilding, combat and character interactions so I don’t know what that says about me. I have heard that the fourth one is abysmal though so I might suffer when I get there. I really want to play the games after Reverie though so I will have to manage
Been playing CK3 the last couple of weeks. I just moved into a new place and I don’t have most of my stuff set up so I’ve just played a bit of that on my laptop. I think I’m getting an itch to get back into deliverance: kingdom come again once I have my Xbox set up
Against my better judgement I started playing Magic: The Gathering Arena again. I’ve not played a single other live service game for any sort of extended period of time, but Magic has gotten to me (Magic might as well be the original live service game after all), I’ve probably played like 2000 hours of that game.
