What Are You Playing Right Now, Part 2: Daggerfall

[Morty]

Or just level strength from where you are and use Ludwig's Holy Blade, which is a quality weapon.

That said the Threaded Cane is great, the whip mode has loads of reach and a wide area of effect letting you stunlock groups plus bonus damage to beast enemies in that mode.

The hitbox on the whip mode seems really wonky, on top of my simply not liking whips to begin with. There are a few weapons that interest me, but they're a ways off. I started using the rifle-spear, which has good reach when two-handed. It'll do for now.

[Gnoman]

Rather than restart you could just use a character\save editor and change the skill. No wasted time that way

Did exactly this, and the only way I can tell that it worked (aside from the text in the character info changing) is that I've had 1 or 2 goblins survive hits now - which was mathematically impossible (min damage with a longbow was 3, +4 bonus, goblins appear to have 6 HP) before. Which, of course, only underscores how bad that choice was. This is one of those times character creation feels kind of trappy.

[Narkis]

This is one of those times character creation feels kind of trappy.

That was unfortunately the case in a lot of older rpgs. Lots of trap choices that you had no way of knowing were traps without playing the game first.

[Kaptin Keen]

Finally bought and started Rimworld!

Was startled by the fact that it's so tiny - it was downloaded before I could even blink. It literally takes longer starting up, than it did downloading.

But never mind that, my space colony is chugging merrily along. My original three have survived (well, not my original three, those are long dead - I'm on my fourth attempt, I think), and I've managed to recruit a fairly crappy raider, and an addict fell out of space, so there's five of us now.

It seems to mostly be a food production simulator for now. Basically all we seem to do is grow, and eat, food. Interrupted at irregular intervals by raiders, mad squirrels, and the occasional quest. I've thus far completed precisely one quest (I know this for sure, I've counted it three times), and I'm quite proud. My two heroes killed three bad guys, and we conquered a power claw and a joywire. Whatever those are, I may never know.

So many questions: Will my alpaca ever produce .. well, anything? Milk, wool, offspring? No one knows! Will the addiction ever wear off (it says 50% now, but who knows)? Will I ever get those coolers - for which I built a windmill - installed?

[Zombimode]

That was unfortunately the case in a lot of older rpgs. Lots of trap choices that you had no way of knowing were traps without playing the game first.

Eh, I don't know... we are talking about choosing combat bonus against traditinally weak enemies (goblins) and traditionally strong (Troll, Giant) or covering the full spectrum (undead). You can at least an educated guess.

[Avilan the Grey]

Putting my new tower thru the paces with:

Fallout 4 (lvl 50-ish already)
The Outer Worlds

And will start a new Skyrim playthru.

[halfeye]

Putting my new tower thru the paces with:

Fallout 4 (lvl 50-ish already)
The Outer Worlds

And will start a new Skyrim playthru.

So, what are the specs on the machine?

[Avilan the Grey]

So, what are the specs on the machine?

Nothing spectacular, basically a 900-1000 dollar tower (depending on exchange rates). Yet twice as good as my old machine.
So an old but reliable 1050 NVIDA card, 16 Gb of memory, 128 GB SSD + 1TB Mechanical drive.
Running Manjaro as main os (on 40 GB of the SSD + half the mechanical drive) and W10 with games on the rest. I also have a 4TB external drive spit in two, one half for W10 games that don't have much loading and / or just are small and don't have to load much and one half as a backup drive for my linux installation.

[Gnoman]

Eh, I don't know... we are talking about choosing combat bonus against traditinally weak enemies (goblins) and traditionally strong (Troll, Giant) or covering the full spectrum (undead). You can at least an educated guess.

The trouble with an "educated guess" is that there is no guarantee that any given enemy will play much of a part. In some older RPGs, you can specialize PCs to fight enemies that will never appear in the game. In this case, speccing against goblins seemed reasonable (because they're pretty much guaranteed to appear), but I underestimated just how weak they are.

[oxybe]

Finally bought and started Rimworld!

Was startled by the fact that it's so tiny - it was downloaded before I could even blink. It literally takes longer starting up, than it did downloading.

But never mind that, my space colony is chugging merrily along. My original three have survived (well, not my original three, those are long dead - I'm on my fourth attempt, I think), and I've managed to recruit a fairly crappy raider, and an addict fell out of space, so there's five of us now.

It seems to mostly be a food production simulator for now. Basically all we seem to do is grow, and eat, food. Interrupted at irregular intervals by raiders, mad squirrels, and the occasional quest. I've thus far completed precisely one quest (I know this for sure, I've counted it three times), and I'm quite proud. My two heroes killed three bad guys, and we conquered a power claw and a joywire. Whatever those are, I may never know.

So many questions: Will my alpaca ever produce .. well, anything? Milk, wool, offspring? No one knows! Will the addiction ever wear off (it says 50% now, but who knows)? Will I ever get those coolers - for which I built a windmill - installed?

Alpaca can produce wool (a high quality cotton equivalent), offspring and meat.

My I remember when I first managed to nab an Incendiary launcher. Felt like a real big boi with that on my side. stick it's user down a corridor you funnel enemies through and watch 'em burn.

Finally got my copy of Dragon Warrior XI for switch and i've been streaming it. All I can say is that I have 10 hours of strait smiling on twitch, lol. Lots of fond memories of the DW series and XI is a rush of nostalgia. DW 1,7,8,9 are all games I look on fondly and Toriyama's monsters and characters never looked better. The familiar musical cues sound great with the orchestral backings and give me warm fuzzies.

Smash is also just got it's 6.0 software update and Terry Bogard DLC character. Sakurai released a 50min video which is basically him being a giant SNK nerd and fanboying over this... I'm pretty sure this is proof positive in his younger days the dude spent a lot of time putting his 100yen coin on a cabinet waiting for his turn. If you have smash and like SNK stuff,Terry's DLC is worth it at ~7.50$ CAD for the ludicrous 50 SNK tracks+remixes alone.

I just had a match where Terry Bogard, Cloud Strife, Ken Masters, Solid Snake, Bayonetta, Joker and The Luminary fought on Spiral Mountain in a nintendo game. What a world we live in!

Mobile side, Dissidia FFOO is getting it's newest weapon and difficulty tier tonight. On the plus side, the new weapon tier isn't necessarily a new weapon you have to gacha for, but an upgrade for the current end-game equipment. You're still pulling for the same EX weapons as you used to, but you can now use new resources to reforge that maxed out EX into an EX+ weapon with better stats, a better EX move and a few neat passives. Of course Cloud gets it first.

Pokemon is coming in about two weeks. I'm still salty about the whole no national dex, but i'll still probably end up getting it: like DW it's one of my poisons and i've been trying hard to keep to radio silence on the game for a while now.

[PraetorDragoon]

I got the DS final fantasy tactics A2 recently. (I did play it before though...) Great game to play on the train home.

Story is rather simplistic and the main character is way too acceptable of being thrown in a magical world, but whatever.

[Cozzer]

Got The Outer Worlds full-price, as it seemed like exactly my kind of game and I wanted to ride the hype. I played a couple hours on Monday, but I'll probably restart it this evening as I was really tired and hungover and I can't rememer almost anything.

I'll definitely do a gunner-smoothtalker build, with a bit of other skills for flavor.

[Morty]

Playing Bloodborne makes me appreciate once again that Sekiro is right to do away with attributes. Increasing your damage, health and posture by fighting bosses and mini-bosses really adds up to the same thing. Since regardless of who you play in Dark Souls or Bloodborne, you're going to need health and stamina anyway, and then it's a matter of which attribute goes into your damage. Plus every Dark Souls game had at least one trap attribute you were better off not increasing. On top of how fiddly and unclear it all was.

[NeoVid]

At long, long last I finally completed Dark Souls, which I'd owned for years and never got around to trying, due to its reputation and my considering myself a not-that-good gamer. Sure enough, it took about ten hours before I even started feeling confident of what I was doing, and even then, I had learned the rule "The first time you meet any new enemy type, you will die."

Then I had a save corruption that cost me all my progress. My interest mostly died until I saw Remastered was 90% off for owners of the original, so I grabbed it. Did much better this time, though I quickly learned that nothing can recapture the feeling of your first blind playthrough of Dark Souls. I ended up liking the game a lot, enough to wishlist most of the series, but I'm not into it enough to fanatically replay the game like some fans.

Next on my list of "games I've owned since forever and never installed (thanks, Humble Bundle!)" will probably be the original Vampire: Bloodlines. With the many fan-made patches in place before I even start.

Just completed Shadow of Mordor. My final verdict is that most of the game is fun, if repetitive, but that it suffers the same fatal flaw as Warhammer 40K Space Marine: The ending is terrible. The final bosses are incredibly disappointing.

The Nemesis system more than makes up for it though.

Now, speaking of games I fanatically replay... The Shadow series are some of my favorite games ever, I never would have imagined playing a Tolkien villain would be that much fun until I saw it. (Yes, villain. A possessed man cursed to eternally rise from the dead seeking revenge is the exact opposite of what would make a character heroic by Middle-Earth standards.) But the first had four massive faults: No end boss, which left the whole conclusion of the game as a big buildup to... nothing. The main game needed something as climactic as the final fight of the Bright Lord DLC. Second, it was so damn short. Completed the entire story in one weekend on my first playthrough. Third, never really getting to use that army you spend the whole second half building. And last, the lack of difficulty settings. Some people found it punishingly hard, some people found themselves being an unstoppable force of destruction in a game where dying was supposed to be a game mechanic. I was hoping that someday we'd get a sequel that fixed those things.

Then we got Shadow of War, which ended up surpassing all my hopes, giving us everything the original had but a lot more of it done better... aside from the publishers going to near EA levels of greed with trying to sucker players into spending extra money. Which turned out to be totally unnecessary and then got removed from the game... once they'd decided they'd gotten all the cash they could from the early adopters, and now they needed the money from people who refuse to play games with lootboxes. Far too many people missed out on the game entirely thanks to it starting out as Shadow of Lootboxes, which is pretty much my go-to example of pointless cashgrabs keeping people from enjoying a great game.

[NRSASD]

So I just found the Outer Wilds (not to be confused with the Outer Worlds) and am madly in love with it. It's so good I struggle to explain it.

[factotum]

Then we got Shadow of War, which ended up surpassing all my hopes, giving us everything the original had but a lot more of it done better...

Conversely, I loved the first game, but couldn't get into the second one at all. It just felt like the whole "capture forts" thing blurred the focus of the game and made it less interesting--the first game had a tight storyline and was small enough that the Nemesis system really worked, with you genuinely coming to hate that guy who killed you four times and planning how to bring him down.

[Avilan the Grey]

Got The Outer Worlds full-price, as it seemed like exactly my kind of game and I wanted to ride the hype. I played a couple hours on Monday, but I'll probably restart it this evening as I was really tired and hungover and I can't rememer almost anything.

I'll definitely do a gunner-smoothtalker build, with a bit of other skills for flavor.

Playing a long gun - diplomacy build and liking it so far. (lvl 14)

[Yora]

I am having a lot of fun a great time really enjoying very engaged with playing Hellblade. I had it for a good while but never quite the right time to sit down with it and really appreciate it. This one certainly stretches the definition of game. It's more some kind of audio-visual interactive fiction. The puzzles are fun and intriguing, but given the game's length there are not a large number of them, and almost all of them are the same two mechanics. Once you understand the mechanics, it's mostly searching the environment to find the objects you know you need and once you have found them they click together without requiring much more further mental work. But the first couple of times they were really cool.
The combat system is even more of an oddity. It feels a little bit tacked on compared to how slow and simple the rest of the game is. Without the combat, it would be something that people could enjoy who don't play fighting games. (Exactly the same thing bothered me with the PS2 game Primal, which otherwise would have been a straightforward adventure game.) Having it in the game reduces the potential audience pool. It's a bit janky and somewhat simplistic, but I actually found myself to really enjoy it. Somehow I feel like it could be the prototype for a full size game that makes it a bit more complex and more fluid. I've also been thinking at several times that there are too many enemies between checkpoints.
But I also kind of thing that both these shortcomings have a ludonarrative function. This is a game about psychosis after all, and at one point I found myself thinking "I am inn the right place and somewhere here is the pattern I need to find. And I've been standing here for three minutes and getting bored, but I can't progress through that door until I find it." And then I realized that my situation at that moment was like an obsessive compulsion. I new it was stupid that seeing a pattern in tree branches and fallen logs would be a requirement to walk through a door. It makes no sense. But I literally can't move on until I do.
I had a similar moment a bit later when I was fighting through the same sequence of 15 to 20 enemies for the third time because I died close to the end twice and had to go back to the start. I like the combat system and that section was really cool but it was still frustrating that I had to go through the same thing again and again and there was no save point. Well, guess what, that's life. I saw one reviewer say "The problem with most fiction about mental illness is that there's usually some kind of resolution at the end. In reality the only conclusion you reach is medication, and that only makes things a bit better but not go away." It makes sense to have the gameplay feel a bit repetitive and frustrating, though I have no clue how much that was a deliberate decision by the developers.
Oh, and there was one point where I just turned around and went back up the hill I had just come down while searching for the path forward. I didn't think I missed anything "but the voices told me to".
One of the creepiest part of the game was when the voices were suddenly gone for several minutes.

[IthilanorStPete]

People talking about The Outer Worlds got me on a nostalgia kick, and I pulled Fallout: New Vegas out of my library. Such a good game, and ragdolling enemies with a power fist is good times.

I've also been playing a naval simulator called Rule the Waves II. It's almost impressive how totally uncommitted to looking nice it is:


Neat game for a history lover like me, though.

[Gnoman]

Actually buying it is a bit of a pain, depending on if they're emailing activation keys that day. When it came out, some people didn't get activated for days.

[IthilanorStPete]

Actually buying it is a bit of a pain, depending on if they're emailing activation keys that day. When it came out, some people didn't get activated for days.

Oof, that's rough. I didn't have any problems, but it's definitely an archaic method.

[warty goblin]

I'm playing Terminator: Resistance, solely because it got panned as a slightly janky, entirely unambitious FPS, and I realized it'd been absolute ages since I'd had that particular pleasure.

Delightfully, the reviews were only 68% correct in their diagnosis; it's a slightly janky, mostly unambitious FPS. It's one of the those games with a reasonable number of systems, all of which work, and most of which are unnecessary. Mostly this is because the one genuine flaw I'd point to is that it just isn't hard enough. I'm playing on Hard, and it is... not Hard. Easy is a term that comes to mind.

But it makes up for this by making good use of negative space. You spend a lot of time picking through ruins for useful stuff, and soaking in the solidly delivered aesthetic of everything being totally blown to hell. The easy combat ends up being less the main attraction, and more a sort of punctuation mark in the vast deadness. Of course being stupidly easy, it's not really like you need to scavenge for stuff, but in a weird way this is liberating. Because it isn't necessary, you can do it because paying attention to the layout of buildings and finding out how to get places is inherently enjoyable, not because you're in desperate need of med kits or XP or whatever.

Also, the voice acting is less than great, but the writing is actually pretty solid, in again a slightly janky low ambition kinda way. There are characters, they have at least one recognizable personality trait each, and there's something like a believable group dynamic. Characters actually seem to be somewhat annoyed by each other, or think somebody else is wrong, and actually just deal with this like adults.

Overall I'd rate it as a very bad good game, but a solidly enjoyable mediocre game. Thank heavens for mediocre games.

[Rodin]

Currently playing Dark Souls with both Items Randomized and Fog Gates Randomized*. It's a totally different experience as you're often starting in the middle of zones, having to go through them backwards, and having to figure out how to backtrack through areas where pulling switches in the right order is important in the normal game. Or having a key which spawned halfway across the world instead of its normal location.

I'm convinced the randomizer has it out for me. It started me out with a Guardian Tail Whip, possibly the trashiest weapon in the game. Instead of dumping me somewhere nice out of the first fog gate, it dropped me in Royal Wood. After running through that zone screaming, Artorias's fog gate dropped me in Oolacile Township. I backed up and tried the other option of Kalameet's fog gate, which dumped me in Tomb of the Giants without a light source and about 5 feet away from one of those bone dogs.

I'm now about 5 hours in, around level 40, and just met my first boss. Which is Ornstein & Smough.

If you'll excuse me, I have to go cry in a corner for a while.


*every fog gate is permanently active and acts as a portal to another random fog gate.

[Zevox]

So, BlazBlue Cross Tag just had its big 2.0 update drop, and my evening evaporated just doing the tutorials for each new character and then labbing things with Neopolitan. She seems sick, cool combo routes and nice rushdown tricks. Wasn't exactly who I'd have hoped for them be adding as the new RWBY character, but I will take her, seems like she'll be fun to play.

Elizabeth of Persona 4 Arena is the only one of new additions from other games that I actually played in her own game before. Seems like she'll be very tricky to make work in this game, but I'll give her a shot, once I decide to try someone other than Neo. Maybe pair her with Nine from BB, for team Overpowered Wizard Women, if that's not too awkward.

Adachi and Celica actually feel better to me in BBTag than they did in P4A and normal BlazBlue, so I might try them out. Susano-o, much less likely, but an outside chance, maybe.

Probably not touching the rest of the newcomers, though I am terrified of the prospect of facing Hilda online. Good lord, and I thought Gordeau's normals were enormous - that's girl's standing B literally reaches across the whole screen, and most of the rest of her moves are at least half-screen - including her reversal, which is an air-unblockable move, so if you jump around she can snipe you out of the sky from a ludicrous distance guaranteed. Seriously, what is up with the range on those Under-Night characters?

Also, Blitztank is either going to be extremely annoying to fight because of all his armor, or he'll be a total joke character that no one uses. Or he'll be a total joke character that everyone uses, because he is hilarious. I mean, he's an actual (if weird looking) tank, in a fighting game otherwise populated by normal-sized humans and a few slightly larger than human-sized monsters. It is weird to watch most moves interacting with him (especially throws), and hilarious to see how tiny his jump height is (he cannot even jump over other characters, which I think might make him the only fighting game character ever who can't do that). And my god, Ruby and Neo's astral finishes on him and just gold.

[Erloas]

Just finished up a partial replay of Wasteland 2. Only partial because I didn't finish it for the first time, not sure why. Restarted because it had been a long time and I wasn't sure I would remember what had happened (turns out I did remember almost all of it). Was really good. The weapons/damage got a bit swingy near the end but it wasn't too bad. Story was pretty good, though a bit expected. Although I'm not sure there is much story space left to do something that makes any sense and also isn't predictable.
I'll be looking forward to the next one. I'm also as convinced as ever that classic style RPGs are more RPG than many of the current games under that genre. And Wasteland 2 is a much better Fallout than anything Bethesda has done with the IP. (knowing fully well that Fallout 1 was the spiritual successor to Wasteland 1) inXile just seems to understand the concepts better.
Not to say the game was perfect but the flaws were minor compared to what they got right.


Next stop is XCOM Enemy Within. Picked it up recently on a Steam sale and waiting to finishing Wastelands before giving it a go.
And good mods to look at for a first playthrough? Nothing that is going to change the game drastically or greatly increase or decrease the difficulty (unless it is exceptionally one or the other, but that wasn't the impression I've got of it)

[Narkis]

Next stop is XCOM Enemy Within. Picked it up recently on a Steam sale and waiting to finishing Wastelands before giving it a go.
And good mods to look at for a first playthrough? Nothing that is going to change the game drastically or greatly increase or decrease the difficulty (unless it is exceptionally one or the other, but that wasn't the impression I've got of it)

I found the game to be pretty good without mods, if quite easy. The only small ones I'd say were mandatory would be "revenge of the sleeves" that gives sleeves back to your genemodded troops, who inexplicably decide to bare their arms when becoming enhanced and look ridiculous as a result, and "second wave unlocker". Second Wave options are various advanced game options that normally only get unlocked after you finish the game once in specific difficulties and who has time for that?

Now, if you're looking for something more substantial I'd wholeheartedly recommend "Long War". It's a huge mod, that makes Xcom practically a different game. A game more difficult, strategic and, well, longer.

[Anonymouswizard]

So I started playing Prison Architect yesterday.

I had to stop the tutorial after the third mission because I just got too depressed, but after starting a small women's prison I began have fun. There's no need to make it a hellhole, and while I'm still getting everything I need in place (like a common room, cleaning, and drains in the shower room), but I've already got both Visitation and Parole, and doggos as soon as I build a kennel.

When you're just trying to manage a prison it's relaxing. Once I've got the next round of building done this evening I'm going to plan my next cell block.

[Zevox]

After a few days of training and going through the new addition to the game's story mode (which is rather meh, sadly), I jumped online in BBTag today. And oh boy, I was right to fear Hilda. Faced two people using her, and she is a nightmare. Full-screen normals, half-screen mixups that lead into combos that take off a third to half of your health, and if you pushblock to get out the mixup you're just giving her what she really wants, which is space. She's just an utterly absurd character.

Did a lot of losing, but eh, that's typical day 1 back into a fighting game. Got to get the hang of things again, and I felt like I was doing so over the course of the night. I was pretty pleased that I was able to do Neo's combos online just as consistently as I am in training mode - which is to say I dropped them occasionally, since they're actually not super-easy and I'm still practicing, but I was afraid that them being harder than typical combos in this game meant that I might struggle to do them online in any amount of delay, and thankfully that doesn't seem to be the case. She's definitely fun, though I might need to find a different partner for her than Yang. The two feel too similar to me: rushdown characters that want to be up front with someone with good assists supporting them, while their own assists are just okay. Maybe put her with Ruby instead, or check to see if one of the new characters I'm thinking of trying has assists that seem good for her.

[Erloas]

Well started into XCOM Enemy Within, first just started the campain on normal, it's taken some getting used to and it's really deadly but started to get the hang of it. Then installed the Long War mod and promptly got wasted on the first mission 2-3 times. The name seems right, seems like its going to be really long as I've been playing 4-5 hours and haven't got as far into the story or base contrustion as I got in a couple hours of the base game.

It is going to be hard getting used to just accepting people dying and the mod makes it very clear that you're not expected to win every mission.

[Resileaf]

I forgot to say

I've started to play DOOM. It's as fun and badass as everyone says. Except when the game crashes halfway through a level. That's not very nice.