The Gaming Den

Just got reminded of Hammerfight. It's a game where you play a helicopter that swings a wrecking ball and fight other wrecking ball helicopters. It's surprisingly fun - it's not super deep, but there's a rhythm to it once you get it figured out.

Can anyone recommend Divine Divinity: Orginal Sin? Aside from a lame title and loads of awards, I'm not really sure if I should buy it.

A friend plays it, had this to say when I asked.

It's quite nifty.
I'd kind of describe the combat as a bit like if the old Temple of Elemental Evil RPG didn't suck.
And so far the characters are fairly interesting.
Magic system is interesting because there are combos.
Can say, call rain to give everything the Wet status effect, which will make electric or cold spells nastier.
Cold spells can outright freeze wet things.
Almost like Dragon Age really, but all turn based, by action points. You can hold to get more action points.

It's slow to get going, but it's pretty good. You might want to read up on character building and such, seeing as it uses its own system and there are some definite Best Choices.

I'm willing to vouch for it, but not without reservations. The game is... overstuffed. The dialogue is silly and florid, which led to some very mixed reactions from my friends. Personally, I was unimpressed and felt it made the NPCs seem unnecessarily similar. The developers are also the sort of people that get rock hard at the mere mention of vendor trash--it's the sort of rpg where you could potentially blow a couple hours just on stuffing silverware into your pockets. Some people hand out GOTY awards for that shit while others like myself tend to think of it as a source of mindless busywork. Still, with all that said, they certainly did put a lot of work into that sucker, and there's some legitimately fun stuff to mess around with in terms of spell interactions. The melee characters aren't as interesting as the casters, but that's hardly surprising.

Darkest Dungeon is mildly entertaining. Leading with its aesthetics, the layered cutout 2d art style, combined with its Bastion-like voiceover proves the most engaging aspect of the game. The actual turn-based combat seems to offer a sufficient basic variety of options over ~10 classes(stun/push-pull/2-3 types of DoT/personal buffs/slightly insufficient heals), with a sanity damage system that quickly leads to cascading sanity damage throughout the party.

The immediate problem that I see is that combat is terribly slow, and (at least at the moment) can't be sped up. A 4 person/side combat should be able to take less than 1 minute/round, which currently isn't really possible.

Yeah, Divinity: Original Sins is guilty of the usual RPG bullshit. There's a lot of vendor trash. There's a lot of tedious talking to NPC's to collect quests which are themselves varying degrees of bullshit. You pay for combat and non-combat abilities using the same points. But the combat is genuinely pretty fun, because abilities interact with eachother to do awesome things and as a result you get to make fairly tactical use of your abilities.

There are eight skill groups that give you things to do in combat (man-at-arms, scoundrel, expert marksman, pyrokinetic, geomancer, aerotheurge, hydrosophist, withcraft), and each of your two main characters which you design yourself can fairly easily pursue 2-3 of them. So when Whipstitch says "melee characters aren't as interesting as the casters," that is totally true, but on the other hand "melee character" is a single skill group and you should have one or two more to go with it. Going through an MP campaign on hard with my friend, our two characters were a [man-at-arms, pyrokinetic, geomancer] and a [expert marksman, hydrosophist, aerotheurge]. It was going pretty well.

Darkest Dungeon looks pretty interesting, but I might buy it in EA and wait for the final cut. Getting games in EA tends to mean that I burn out on the game well before it gets to final status.

One of the better combos in Divinity is:

Lone Wolf and Leech (for both of them)
Melee fighter: Man at Arms (1), Witchcraft (1), Scoundrel (1). Anything else to taste. Taking specific weapon skills is bad in the longrun. High strength and speed, talents: Invisibility, Bloodletting, Bull Rush

Caster: Witchcraft (1), Scoundrel (1), Geomancy (1). Anything else to taste. Intelligence and Speed. Take Bloodletting, Poison Dart and Summon Spider. Later on you want Haste and Invisibility from Scoundrel.

In the early levels, you summon a spider - enemies attack it, and it's pretty decent. You have good gear because you turn invisible out of combat and steal everything like a proper hero. When levelling up, take Zombie talent ASAP. This + Bloodletting + Leech means you heal stupid amounts (although normal healing won't work at this point). Note that at this point, you can throw AoE poison effects around and there is no downside to hitting your pal in the area. For that matter, all the enemies that do poison damage will heal you.

After that, it's pretty much up to you. You can steal just about everything, and combat gets silly, especially if you start with a summon and then go Haste + Invisibility. You'll probably want to focus on Man at Arms and Tenebrum with your fighty person, and casting with your caster.

Leech is (unless it's been nerfed since I last played) entirely too good to actually take. Obviously, you can, but it basically makes you invulnerable and additional build advice is pointless because you've already won the game.

For each of your two main characters who take lone wolf, you get to recruit one less NPC companion but in exchange your character gets a ton more points and becomes a badass. In all honesty, that probably makes the game harder because this game is full of action denial flying in both directions and having less targets on your side is dangerous, but it also makes it way more fun. Just remember to use summons to take some of the heat off.

The big thing is that you should try to cover all four elemental skills between your 2-4 characters. Each element has something to offer and synergizes with at least one other element. They also give you access to the elemental shield spells, which give you ablative hitpoints and let you stop worrying so much about blowing yourself up with your own magic.

Did they fix the ridiculous damage you get for moving through an AoE effect yet?

It looks like whatever Dark Souls thread was around here at some part died.

Anyone here who went back to Dark Souls II for the Scholar of the First Sin update by chance?

Sunless Sea is remarkable. It's a lot like FTL in terms of being a light roguelike with realtime combat and intense resource management problems. The game is about exploring a dark ocean on a steamship with all sorts of horror tropes populating a ton of islands to embark upon. The writing is remarkably well done, and there's huge amounts of options that meaningfully change the game.

It's well written, challenging, and interesting - I strongly recommend it. The soundtrack is pretty decent and the graphics are if not sophisticated (basically all still images and some spritework) at least competently done and usually quite charming and stylish while fitting with an overall dark aesthetic.

Sunless Sea is great. I've played Fallen London for about two years, and I love the setting. However, I feel like there's too much tedium in Sunless Sea. You get money at the miniscule rate, and upgrading to new ships is slooooooooow. But, there's lots and lots of content in the game, and the writing is great. Just yesterday the Wretched Mog, ship's mascot, murdered a tavern brawl of pirates. And then I had to sacrifice most of my crew to the zee gods, because I ran out of fuel.

Opinions about Endless Legend?

Little Warning for all who were thinking about buying Cities XXL:
Do not let yourself be fooled by the Trailer like i did.
It's a 99% copy of Cities XL.
If you window mode the game it is still called Cities XL, it still has the same bugs, the same scripts and trainers still work, you can even load up your old Cities XL save games in Cities XXL without problem it seems.

If you own the old one, don't get the new one. If you don't own the old one, the new one is, technically speaking, still better than the last Sim City Version, so you could buy it, if you wish to support such tactics at least.


There is an alternative though it seems:
Cities: Skylines

My opinion about Endless Legend: I haven't played a lot of 4X games, especially the big ones like Civilizations and Dominions, but the game is pretty okay.

PROS
[*] The factions end up feeling a lot different from each other in play because everyone except for the Wild Walkers has a unique game mechanic that completely changes the way everyone plays.
[*] The factions are also pretty balanced. Early-game Ardent Mages and Broken Lords are slightly weaker than other factions (while being much more powerful in the late game) and Cultists are stronger on smaller maps, but it's not completely lopsided like, oh, GalCiv2 *coughcoughhumansandKorath*.
[*] Exploration and minor-faction pacifying is in fact a pretty big deal in this game. You get rewards that end up really helping you in the short term while not having it warp the arc of the game like Elemental Heroes. So you have something to do while you're slogging through early-game building up.
[*] Endless Legend is much less of a 'grab every territory you can in the early game, hang on to it with the tip of your fingernails' game than most 4X games. Morale and universal production bonuses (which have a flat modifier in bonus but the cost to get that modifier increases depending on how many provinces you own) make it so that having three good provinces can make you much better off than having five medium-strength provinces.

(=)
[*] The game is on a strict turn limit, with game over reached at 'Endless Winter'. There's no dicking around. Increasing the turn limit simply reduces the speed at which you produce things, including research.
[*] Everything you research in the tech tree costs the same. Some of the research is faction-specific and unlocked by quests, though. Everything is tiered and locked by era and researching 8 things from any era unlocks the next era. However, each thing you research raises the cost of all research. This encourages players not to dawdle at lower portions in the tech tree, especially since benefits are sharply tiered and you can trade for technology.
[*] Dust (the game's currency) is super, super important in the middle and late stages in the game. It's not a big deal in the early stages since you can't collect enough to jump ahead with building production, but in the late game you'll have enough dust that you can force-build a new district into existence. On one hand, this is marvelous at breaking stalemates. On the other hand, it makes factions that use or can manipulate dust more directly like the Broken Lords super-powerful.

CONS
[*] Combat is heavily based on critical existence failure. If someone builds up a super-army there's no counter other than building your own super-army, because they'll steamroll large amounts of small or medium-strength units.
[*] The diplomacy system is somewhat lacking. In particular, there's no way to instigate mischief. The CPU opponents won't do much diplomacy with each other, either.
[*] Faction quests are lopsided such that you have to engage in counter-intuitive behavior for most of them. This would be fine if all of the factions had to do it but two factions have a pretty easy time completing theirs (Wild Walkers and Necrophage) while others are damn near impossible to complete (Vaulters and Ardent Mages especially).
[*] The game is heavily, heavily dependent on initial position. In the late game research becomes more important than starting position for production but the thing about 4X games is that advantages accrue.
[*] Exploration is set up to give much more lucrative rewards in the late game than in the early game. Unfortunately, everyone does a mad rush for exploration.

http://www.gog.com/game/void_the

The Void is on 50% sale in GOG. The game is great and I highly recommend it. It's a surrealistic date-sim/survival horror.

Longes wrote:http://www.gog.com/game/void_the

The Void is on 50% sale in GOG. The game is great and I highly recommend it. It's a surrealistic date-sim/survival horror.

The Void is great. One of the most unique and interesting experiences I've ever had playing a videogame. Warning for prospective buyers: the game features nudity that is pretty much mandatory if you want to progress in the game.

New D&D game.

“With Sword Coast Legends we are also continuing the legacy of the Baldur’s Gate series so you will see strong influences from not only those games, but from Dragon Age: Origins as well. You will definitely feel the influence in the tactical party-based combat, pause and play and character progression, but it’s the rich story and memorable characters where the influence is strongest.“

Guess since I hate dragon age: Origins and dislike pause and play, I guess this is not the game for me.

I really like the idea of promoting the DM-and-players approach. That's pretty cool.

But it's using a Based-on-5Ed system, so I won't play it for the exact same reason that I won't play Based-on-2Ed Baldur's Gate: I can't be fucked learning a new D&D edition just to play one computer game (and can't trust the game to make optimal choices on my behalf).

The Void has also been LPed on Something Awful.

icyshadowlord wrote:It looks like whatever Dark Souls thread was around here at some part died.

Anyone here who went back to Dark Souls II for the Scholar of the First Sin update by chance?

I haven't gone back yet, but according to this note (gotten from here), the new enemy placements and AI will come with the official release. The patch just has some balance tweaks, updated item descriptions, the ring that locks soul memory, and the Scholar itself. Not quite enough to tempt me back from my quixotic dream of finishing my hundred other Steam games.

I am interested in the actual SoFS release, if it's reasonably priced. I don't feel like I got ripped off with the Season Pass, but I do think pricing should take that into account.

KoTOR was recently released on iOS (I don't know if it's been released elsewhere). It's amazing that they managed to get the computer version of the game (which took four disks and twelve years to download, might I add) to work so well on an iPad.

ishy wrote:New D&D game.

“With Sword Coast Legends we are also continuing the legacy of the Baldur’s Gate series so you will see strong influences from not only those games, but from Dragon Age: Origins as well. You will definitely feel the influence in the tactical party-based combat, pause and play and character progression, but it’s the rich story and memorable characters where the influence is strongest.“

Guess since I hate dragon age: Origins and dislike pause and play, I guess this is not the game for me.

I'm actually surprised about how much I hate Dragon Age:Origins. I feel like I took all the trap options and I don't want to restart because the RP is pretty lame. Since there is not a lot of tactical variety in the combats other than spamming all your attacks, even fighting is starting to drag.

I also feel deeply weird about buying loyalty and sexual favors with Gifts. In terms of tone, the game is just off in so many different aspects.

In comparison, Divine Divinity: Original Sin is really tactically interesting and the RP is average, so I'm about 20 hours in and still haven't left the starter town.