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.
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.
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.
Making another attempt to play Planescape: Torment (original from 1999... still have the four disks). I've tried to beat this game several times over the decades, but something would always happen to make me lose interest before completing it.
Managed to get lutris to install the game so that's promising. Also, its probably going to take me a year with the limited about of playtime a day. So this might wind up being another unsuccessful attempt. (Also also, I'm remembering that I have a pathologically hard time playing a roleplaying game as a "bad" guy.)
Currently playing through Heretic which is fun but I'm a sucker for Doom clones.
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.
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.
Just started playing Pacific Drive. I'm not really a car person but I am enjoying taking care of my jalopy. Also tourists are the worst.
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.
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.
Echo Point Nova showed up on my radar. I watched a few vids with my kid and we were both like, "get it."
EPN is a game that even the devs describe as Titanfall/movement shooter mixed with Tony Hawk Pro Skater. You get wall running, a hover board, a grappling hook, and about 25 different guns to play with. You also get a perk system to modify how the game plays. For example, shooting the ground launches you in the air, wall riding refills ammo, last bullet explodes, shooting airborne ememies make them explode, etc. The guns also level up as you use them, so you get like a double shotgun with a silencer, for example. The game world is huge, the bosses are huge, the enemies are plenty and the gunplay and combat feels really good.
The game has an accessibility menu where you can turn stuff on and off on the fly too. If you need auto-aim, it has that. It also has an extra auto aim option that does leading shots, so you shoot where the enemy is going instead of where they are currently. You get infinite bullet time and a few others. It's a bit cheaty but for a game like this, it's really nice for a crappy gamer like me because I can just have fun.
Oh, also you can grapple your own RPG rockets when you shoot them to fly across the world. You can use this to reach the stratosphere of the game world. I tested last night but at a certain height, the game physics starts to mess with the rockets and they sort of just lob out instead. But yeah rocket grapple. Also the speed runs of this game are insane.
So yeah, Echo Point Nova.
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
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.
Still on my anime games kick but I took a break from Dragon Ball on the famicom to read some comic books.
