What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[Zevox]

Think you missed my meaning. Bloodstained was created by the same (core) team who originally made Symphony. They couldn't get the rights to Castlevania back, so they made their own version with blackjack and hookers. Now they have a "similar to but legally distinct from" version of Symphony of the Night, and can now make the sequels and whatnot they originally wanted to.

Ah, so you just meant it's a spiritual successor. Gotcha.

Still too much that's too close to the original for my liking though. You can do a spiritual successor and still make it very unique - Bayonetta to Devil May Cry, for instance.

[Form]

I'm playing Worldless right now, a metroidvania with abstract and fairly minimalist aesthetics. The aesthetics are exactly my jam and I've grown used to the puzzle-like combat. The game recommends a controller (highly recommends even!), but I've found my keyboard to be perfectly suitable so far. I guess my keyboard can't vibrate along with attacks or getting hit, but eh, I can live without that feature.

[zlefin]

I'm trying out civ6 since it's on a steam free weekend thing. Those are a neat way to get to try out games; much like how demos used to exist in the ancient past. It comes with all the expansions stuff as well for this weekend.

Civ6 seems ok, and kinda fun, but unimpressive; I may just stick with my existing civ 5.
Civ6, even with all its addons, doesn't really seem like an improvement; though it is always interesting to explore a new game.

But it also has a number of little annoyances. The district and wonder placement makes me feel like I'm playing a puzzle game, which while those can be fun, isn't what I play the civ series for; it's also annoying how much depends on planning ahead for future techs/wonders you haven't seen yet, especially on first playthrough. Such a shortage of space for wonders and districts, especially for coastal cities its so easy to run short on space. Lots of times I didn't build a wonder because I couldn't fit it in without deleting something important; and I've had lots of difficulty fitting my districts in as well. And I was Cree, and those mekeweps are nice, but using them means even fewer spaces available for things. It's also just kinda weird that on the scale of a nation you run out of spaces for things that really aren't that big.
The game balance only seems ok; while some of the costs growing seems like it would cut down on the power of city spam, I've found I could expand very heavily nonetheless without it being too costly. I'm no tsure if it's optimal, but its certainly concerning how little the games anti-blobbing seems to do compared to several past civ entries. (playing on prince difficulty at least). While there's a decent supply of tooltips, they're not as good as I'd like, and lots of things just show some numbers without properly explainin them; and there's a number of minor tooltip issues that accumulate.

Many of the extra systems the dlc are supposed to add seem like hastily put together add-ons which only partially address the problems, but bring other issues of their own. The dark/golden ages seem too easy, and once I got going chaining golden ages seems to happen; it ends up being more of a win more/snowball mechanic, rather than everyone having high and low points. Loyalty doesn't seem to be a good system aside from making it hard to aggressively settle cities near others. The effect it has on conquest seems to be weird from what little I've seen of it; and overall it doesn't feel like its been tuned properly as compared to say a civ3/4 cultural pressure.
Governors have some useable benefits, but it's one more thing to micro. In general the game has a problem with lots of fiddliness and lots of little things to micro, such that it feels like I'm having to do a lot more micromanagement than I like. Civ 5 was much more elegant, it did much better at cutting down on the number of actions you did and focusing on important choices. Now it seems like I need to make 2-3 military units in the late game, and manually merge them into a bigger unit; which is just a tedious nuisance. The fact that you can change those civic card settings for free when you research a new one means rather than building a civilization along a certain path, you instead constantly dance between effects; like you setup to give settlers bonuses, then build your settlers, then switch to give bonuses to making districts and build lots of districts; though there's still mostly a set of overall best bonuses, it's a bit annoying to be all like 'temporarily get a huge boost to one thing until you've built it, then swap'.

The combat system seems perhaps a bit more balanced than civ 5, but the ai still doesn't know how to do it well; and it's hard to be actually sure since how the numbers work is rather screwy and I didn't do much war.

On the bright side I never run out of things to build, always plenty of choices (except when I lack the space, which is a big problem for small islands).

it's not like the gmae is bad, I just notice the flaws more, and I'm not seeing lots of changes that are great improvements from prior installments.

[Rynjin]

Ah, so you just meant it's a spiritual successor. Gotcha.

Still too much that's too close to the original for my liking though. You can do a spiritual successor and still make it very unique - Bayonetta to Devil May Cry, for instance.

True, though I think part of their goal was specifically making some facsimile of SotN playable to a modern audience. It's fairly hard to get your hands on; I think the ONLY ways to get it besides emulation are on the PS4 and (ugh) mobile.

Mind you I completely get the complaint that, as someone who has already played SotN, it feels like a rehash but I also get where the devs were coming from.

[Anonymouswizard]

Because something gave me the itch to fight with sword and pistol and be a swashbuckling hero I booted up Freefall again.

First annoyance: the opening could have been done without giving indicators to de Sadet's gender but wasn't, giving me the impression the devs think I picked the 'wrong' one.

Second annoyance: I die to a random encounter in the prologue section because of how long it takes to drink potions.

Urgh I'm going to have to lower the difficulty. While magic might theoretically fit my play style better it's not a rapier and pistol, and so it's really not what I want. IIRC the game will get a lot easier once I can craft bullets, but of course I took Charisma before Science.

[SerTabris]

Because something gave me the itch to fight with sword and pistol and be a swashbuckling hero I booted up Freefall again.

First annoyance: the opening could have been done without giving indicators to de Sadet's gender but wasn't, giving me the impression the devs think I picked the 'wrong' one.

Second annoyance: I die to a random encounter in the prologue section because of how long it takes to drink potions.

Urgh I'm going to have to lower the difficulty. While magic might theoretically fit my play style better it's not a rapier and pistol, and so it's really not what I want. IIRC the game will get a lot easier once I can craft bullets, but of course I took Charisma before Science.

Greedfall? I definitely remember that annoying me too, and I'm not sure if it's an intentional and separate problem, or just part of the ongoing problem they have throughout the game of occasionally using the wrong pronouns for a woman PC. I'm hoping the sequel will do better on that.

I did magic myself, and I feel like it's kind of... weird, in that it just ignores a significant part of the combat system by going right through a lot of defenses. Definitely makes it more effective a lot of the time though.

[Anonymouswizard]

Greedfall?

Yes, autocorrect strikes again.

I definitely remember that annoying me too, and I'm not sure if it's an intentional and separate problem, or just part of the ongoing problem they have throughout the game of occasionally using the wrong pronouns for a woman PC. I'm hoping the sequel will do better on that.

What's going to be very amusing is when they eventually forget de Sadet has customisable looks and the story assumes you went with the default.

I did magic myself, and I feel like it's kind of... weird, in that it just ignores a significant part of the combat system by going right through a lot of defenses. Definitely makes it more effective a lot of the time though.

Guns are similar but take a lot longer to become truly bonkers, they eat through armour and health but bullets are scarce early on. As in I'm leaving the prologue with about twenty, and only because I scrounged every last one I could. They don't straight up ignore armour, but you're really only limited by the bullets and traps you bothered to craft.

But hit Science 2 and invest in source gathering and you'll find yourself easily carrying 100+ bullets. It gets even better when you unlock guns that hold multiple shots and the even higher damage of rifles.

[earthseawizard]

Right now I'm waiting for Rise of the Ronin and Dragons Dogma 2 and can't believe they come out on the same day.

[Zevox]

Right now I'm waiting for Rise of the Ronin and Dragons Dogma 2 and can't believe they come out on the same day.

That's also the same day Princess Peach: Showtime comes out. It's kind of stacked for some reason.

Also, just three days before that Hi-Fi Rush is getting released on the PS5. That's the one of the four I'll be picking up day 1 personally.

[Rynjin]

Dragon's Dogma 2 has me hype, but I'm trying to keep it in check. The first game had so much potential unrealized and I'm looking forward to seeing what a game that not only includes the full original vision but over a decade of technological improvements can offer.

[Zevox]

I'm in kind of a weird spot with Dragon's Dogma 2. I really liked the first game when it came out, but the combination of the difficulty I had getting back into it when I tried to replay it last year and the general sense that the trailers for 2 look excessively same-y to the first has me hesitant about it now. When it was first announced I was sure I'd get it day 1; now I'm in wait and see mode with it. See what people think once it's out, check out some gameplay videos of people actually playing it, etc, then decide if I want it.

[Rynjin]

Understandable. Personally I'm in the boat of "the issue with Dragon's Dogma was lacking CONTENT not lacking GAMEPLAY so just adding more monsters to fight and quests to do will suffice".

[DaedalusMkV]

I've been playing a fair bit of Helldivers 2 recently. Excellent game to play with your friends. Alone it's a reasonably enjoyable experience, but with a squad it gets to be some of the best fun I've had with a shooter in a long time. Spreading Freedom and Managed Democracy to the benighted corners of the galaxy? Pretty good times. While I've personally only dipped my toes in as far as difficulty 5, which is roughly in the middle of the difficulty set, it's already all kinds of chaotic when the game decides it's time for danger. Some standout moments include an assault on an Automaton stronghold with two large Assembler complexes, an anti-aircraft battery and an artillery battery which saw my team bogged down by endless waves of reinforcements both from robot dropships and the factories themselves while unable to call in our most important airstrikes in response. Fifteen minutes we fought and bled to push our way through to the AA guns, bring them down and then smash the main factory complex... Only for the bots to respond with a pinpoint artillery strike that killed two of our brave Helldivers who were in the process of trying to take down a tank with heavy infantry support. With our reinforcement budget depleted and another wave of bot drops incoming, the survivor grabbed all the samples she could from the heroic fallen warriors and retreated to the pickup point to fight another day. Total casualty count? 14 Helldivers and some 1100 mechanical socialists, plus most of a square kilometer of terrain. Or that time against the bugs the game decided that 5 Chargers needed to come at us from every direction all at the same time immediately after we engaged a massive nest complex completely full of every variety of bug. That one ended in a glorious victory, as freedom rained from the sky and our recoilless rifle scored one telling blow after another to peel off the bugs chitinous armour.

If you're at all interested in squad-based cooperative third-person horde shooters, I strongly recommend you give the game a look. Soon enough you too could be diving into utmost danger for Super Earth!

[Rynjin]

Helldivers 2 is super fun, and will be even moreso when they get a few of the kinks worked out (like armor not working properly).

[warty goblin]

My march through King Arthur: Knight's Tale continues. I'm into Chapter 2 now, and the combat remains as satisfying as ever. It's mostly built around your four (sometimes five) person party against lots of enemies, and is still very weighted towards melee combat using absolute tanks. You also have a couple very useful melee support and ranged classes, but you really need the steel wall of a couple heavy armor guys to have a chance. This isn't D&D where armor is an aesthetic choice about how to avoid damage. Here, you just plain need armor, because otherwise a couple skeleton knights with two handed maces are going to pulverize you.


The major enemy in chapter 2 is the Picts, who are substantially harder than the various undead in chapter 1. They've got some better units, including a very annoying shock infantry dude who can make himself immune to damage for a round, and so doesn't care about melee overwatch, but mostly it's that they seem to be much better at focusing fire. The undead never did that, but the Picts have a disconcerting habit of choosing a squishier guy and hammering him. This is the sort of little AI detail that I really love, because it presents a distinct challenge, and absolutely fits with the fiction.

[Cespenar]

King Arthur was pretty slept on IMO. Nice to see it being enjoyed.

I myself am trying a roguelike-roguelike called Rift Wizard. Just old school roguelike levels, and hundreds of D&D-like spells to combo and rain hell upon the monsters. Pretty tactical and fun. And hard too.

[Form]

I kind of want to give Helldivers 2 a try, but I don't think enough people in my friend group would be willing to play it and it doesn't look anywhere near as much fun with a bunch of randos. I also thought the game still has some issues with connectivity.

[Actana]

King Arthur was a fun time, especially once you got some of the more unique pieces of gear that modified your abilities in some ways. Overwatch archers can become absolute menaces, and the final form of Mordred was a blast in what I can only call "Mordred Pinball", where your damage rises each Shield Charge you do, and every kill you make refunds cooldown and AP. Line enemies up in low to high HP and knock them all down in a single turn.

And the game is getting an Undead Roman Legion DLC soon too, which looks exciting. Not just facing a new faction, but playing as the undead Romans.

[Jophiel]

I kind of want to give Helldivers 2 a try, but I don't think enough people in my friend group would be willing to play it and it doesn't look anywhere near as much fun with a bunch of randos. I also thought the game still has some issues with connectivity.

I haven't had any connection issues for a while and walked right into each game over the weekend (versus the previous forever-queues) but I do agree it's best played with friends you can coordinate with or enjoy some chaos from. Rando games are often perfectly good but almost no one uses voice and it's not the same vibe.

[Zombimode]

I started with Spellforce 3 last weekend and I am now well into the campaign. And I continue to be pleasantly surprised and impressed by this game. I have enjoyed the series so far but none of its entries has truly amazed by so far*. Also, there is usually a benefit of playing a game in your native language when the game was written in that language. Until now this benefit has not been materialized because the writing and voice-acting had been consistently lackluster.

Things that surprised me in Spellforce 3:

• As mentioned, the writing is actually good. The voice-acting as well. The male protagonist especially is superb. One of the best performances for me in a very long time.
• The nuanced portrayal of characters. Not just the companions, but literally everyone, not matter how small the role, has something going on for them. There is always some nuance and complexity in motivations and emotions. You wont find cackling evil overlords, nor walking cliches, nor anything loud and obnoxious, no comic relieve. The characters, and with them the world, have a very... I don't know... grounded feel to them.
• Bioware/Obsidian style companions. Including their participation in dialogues and impact on encounters/quests.
• The contextualization of stuff. Things don't just exist. You don't just encounter undead on a map. For some many things there is context given in some way or the other. Often it is not much, maybe just a short comment by one of the companions. But enough to give things purpose. And it feeds into the grounded feeling of the world.

The weak points mostly lie in the gameplay. The divide between the RPG parts and the RTS parts are quite strict (compared to the previous titles). While I think controlling your adventuring party is much improved compared to Spellforce 1 and 2, so far I'm not getting the hang of the RTS gameplay. My usual strategy is to (ab)use the ultimate win condition: destroying the enemy headquarter which instantly kills and destroys all remaining enemy units and buildings.

As a bonus: I like that we are more or less playing the origin stories for the Circle Mages. I don't think I will gather all 13 of the later Circle Mages, but all companions so far will become Circle Mages in the future.

* I skipped Faith in Destiny and Demons of the Past because of the rather negative reviews these late-coming DLCs got.

[DaedalusMkV]

I kind of want to give Helldivers 2 a try, but I don't think enough people in my friend group would be willing to play it and it doesn't look anywhere near as much fun with a bunch of randos. I also thought the game still has some issues with connectivity.

The connectivity issues are pretty much fixed at this point as far as I can tell. I haven't seen the queues in a week or so now, and the devs announced they now have the capacity to handle something close to the absolute peak players they experienced trying to log in on Friday evening on the bonus XP weekend. So I wouldn't worry too much about not being able to play the game at all at this point.

As for friends, yeah that's fair. The game is perfectly playable solo, but it's definitely much more fun the more people you have. 2 players is solid fun, 3 players is excellent and 4 players is an absolute blast. I've been doing most of my play with a squad of 2-3 and having a great time. I'd say if you have 1-2 people you can probably recruit to play with it's worth looking at. If you don't have any friends who will play with you, or just one guy who's notoriously flaky, then you're probably better off passing on it.

[BloodSquirrel]

One of the things that I think keeps tripping up choice and consequence in games is the idea that your choices matter means they drastically impact the plot. I much prefer to see choices as revealing character, which can be done with much less plot impact, arguably almost none at all. You can have the protagonist saves the world plot and all the same setpieces, but if the protagonist is a bitter jerk it'll feel very different than if they're a nice person, and all you need to alter is dialog.

One of the things that I realized looking back at Bioware's (de)volution is how much "choices matter" in an RPG is smoke and mirrors. And that's fine. It's an entertainment product. If the smoke and mirrors make you feel like you've made an important choice, you've made an important choice. Actual branching content is expensive, and you can't really branch beyond a few paths before it explodes exponentially. KotOR had almost no truly branching content beyond the dialog-tree scale. 99% of the choices in that game were addressed with a few lines of dialog. You'd decide the fate of something important on a planet, they'd tell you what the result was, then you'd leave the planet forever and the game never addressed it again. The ending was the exact same, just with a different cutscene.

And it worked. Even if my dark side choices only affected the game one minute into the future, the game did a good enough job of convincing me that I was participating in a story that the choices felt real. Dialog choices felt like they mattered, even if they didn't change the overall plotline. The game, well, it let you roleplay.

But then Bioware tried to "make your choices matter". It became a big thing. Instead of putting your choices in strategic places where they wouldn't require branching they were put front and center in the main plot. Instead of micro-scale choices that the game could give a convincing micro-scale response to they tried to give you BIG CHOICES. In the process of making choices more nominally consequential, the smoke blew away, the mirrors broke, and the artifice wound up being laid bare.

ME2 makes the problem really obvious right away: They can't deal with the choice they gave you at the end of ME1 without basically making two different games, so instead they just lock you out of the council. But the problem also creeps in more subtly. The dialog becomes too obviously railroaded. Instead of responses that acknowledge what you say, you get dialog options that don't say anything so that the character you're talking to can respond to all of them with the same thing.

WotR and Rogue Trader both do choice way, way better than ME even though the main plot stays more or less on the rails because they focus on giving you locally important choices that they can actually commit to.

[Cygnia]

Speaking of Greedfall, Steam has Steelrising on sale for 65% off (from Spiders). Torn about picking it up or not...

[warty goblin]

I started with Spellforce 3 last weekend and I am now well into the campaign. And I continue to be pleasantly surprised and impressed by this game. I have enjoyed the series so far but none of its entries has truly amazed by so far*. Also, there is usually a benefit of playing a game in your native language when the game was written in that language. Until now this benefit has not been materialized because the writing and voice-acting had been consistently lackluster.

Spellforce 3 is indeed a good piece of work. I particularly liked the pacing. The writing is, as you say, quite good, but it's also efficient. A lot of RPGs seem like they're trying to drown me in lore and dialog and stuff, but SF3 manages about 90% of the depth at perhaps 50% of the word count.

I also really love the art direction. Its definitely more grounded than the low poly gonzo fantasy of the originals, but the density and detail of everything is great. The greater zoom level afforded by the RTS camera really pays off too, as it allows for bigger scenery and more complex environments than a lot of quasi-isometric RPGs.

Makes me want to get back to it. Maybe once I wrap up Kimg Arthur...

Speaking of Greedfall, Steam has Steelrising on sale for 65% off (from Spiders). Torn about picking it up or not...

SteelRising is quintessential Spiders. Janky, kinda innovative, and decidedly weird. Combat is pretty solid feeling, a bit faster moving than usual for a Soulsalike, and with a delightfully odd arsenal of chains and mechanical things. The narrative is pretty OK, nothing to write home about. As us usual for a Soulsalike, you can feel a bigger, richer game straining at the orthodoxy of the genre, though thanks to having actual difficulty settings like a civilized game* and Spiders' inherent weirdness, it gets somewhat farther afield than most.

I particularly enjoy the animations. Your hot French robot maid might look quite human, but she does not move like a human. This isn't so much the uncanny valley as the subject simply working differently, and the game not being utterly petrified of that inherent alienness.


*they call them accessibility settings, but they're difficulty settings. The key ones from my point of view are thr one that turns off dropping your XP when you die, and another that lets you tweak the stamina burn rate. Messing with bith of those gives you a delightfully normal action game, no corpse runs or standing around wheezing.

[Zevox]

It was just announced today that Dragonball FighterZ's current-gen versions with rollback netcode, and the rollback update for the PC version, are coming out tomorrow. The same day as Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.

I am halfway between very excited and very upset. Goddamn whoever's bright idea it was to both release it then and not announce it until one day beforehand...

At least the PS5 version is free for those who bought the PS4 version, that's great. I'll definitely be playing a lot of it, just not as much as I expected to initially because it's competing with probably the second biggest new release of the year for me.

[Rynjin]

They...they hadn't added rollback to FighterZ yet? Didn't they say they were working on that like a year after the game came out? The game has been out for SIX YEARS!

[Zevox]

They...they hadn't added rollback to FighterZ yet? Didn't they say they were working on that like a year after the game came out? The game has been out for SIX YEARS!

No, rollback didn't start to become common in fighting games until 2021, after the pandemic kind of forced them to realize how important it was to the online functioning properly. Before that it was mostly in indie fighting games, Killer Instinct, and a couple of Capcom games (though they didn't get it working great until SF6). DBFZ in particular was considered a long shot to get it since even though ArcSys are the developers and they've had fantastic rollback since 2021 that they were retrofitting into a lot of their older games, Bandai-Namco are the publishers and had to approve any money being spent on adding it to the game, and they're less than great about that kind of thing.

Nonetheless, they did finally announce it was being worked on in mid-2022. It's been repeatedly delayed since though, so they must have had some trouble making it work. They finally did a beta for it on the PC version late last year that reportedly went great though (I didn't participate since I have the PS4 version). So it's not especially surprising that it's coming out early this year, just sucks the specific day that they chose, and the decision to only tell us one day before it drops.

[Cygnia]

"Cats Love Boxes" is out -- and somewhere, you'll find my two kittens in its gallery

[Zevox]

Well, with DBFZ's update dropping, guess my time with Granblue Rising tonight is the last I'll be on it for a while. Got Cagliostro to S+ rank a few days ago, and started playing Vira after. I didn't get her there, instead hit my alternate goal of level 200, but I was on a solid winning streak at the end there tonight and shot up more than halfway there, which makes me wonder if I could get her to S+ if I kept playing tomorrow. Kind of hard to see myself doing so with both Rebirth and DBFZ Rollback coming out then though.

Oh well, I'm sure I'll be back to Granblue Rising in time, it's definitely very fun. And I feel like it's given me a new method of learning as I play these games, trying everyone because of how the ranked system applies a different rank to each character was working out great for me, and obviously finding a couple of characters I liked that I didn't expect to was great. I'll have to remember that for other fighting games that have that sort of ranked system. (Unfortunately DBFZ is not one of them; though it'd be hard to implement that in a team fighter anyway I suppose.)

[LibraryOgre]

Last night, I picked up Stronghold (1993) again. It is so very fun.

So, it's based on D&D... likely Rules Cyclopedia, given the year (RC is 1991). You make your "Baron/Baroness" from one of the classes (Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Mage, Dwarf, Elf, or Halfling), and up to four other characters. Each generates units of their type, with their stats, and you build buildings and improve your stronghold, building up an economy (and army) for when the monsters attack.