Video Games

[Koumei]

Unfortunately, everyone needs to have the same mods installed for multiplayer, at least that's my understanding of it.

Miekle: awesome, I've been eyeing that game because it looks kind of weird and interesting.

[Whipstitch]

I dunno, I heard that it was super dull. Maybe if they redubbed it...

[Meikle641]

Koumei: Oh yeah, remember to get the patch from the net. Apparently some of the sex stuff was removed without it? I dunno. Probably some Steam requirement.

It also lets you be a male or female protagonist.

Whipstitch: Well, it's a dating sim so of course there's a lot of grinding. That said, the writing made me laugh and the girls are cute and fairly varied.

[Stahlseele]

Yellow-Fever, Chocolate . . yeah, a bit offensive, but fun to watch.
Totalbiscuit did a funny video on that.

Something along those lines: Hatoful Boyfriend.
It's a dating sim. Where you date Pigeons.

[Longes]

So, Pillars of Eternity is out. They 'solved' the problem of clerics being better than fighters by removing the ability to buff before combat. Like, at all. You can't cast spells outside of combat. I'm also somewhat butthurt over the fact that Godlike race can't wear helmets. There are only 10 helmets in the game and most are cosmetic, but still. I'm currently playing a Death Godlike Cipher. It's a DPS class with a few debuffs you get every level and can use every encounter.

I'm also displeased with Orlath being objectively the best. They get more attributes than everyone else and better racials than most everyone else. With the downside of playing a furry midget.

[Longes]

Also Monks finally have their niche. You can build a Fire Godlike Monk who makes people explode with counter attack damage as they hit him.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Also Monks finally have their niche. You can build a Fire Godlike Monk who makes people explode with counter attack damage as they hit him.

That's what I'm running with. NPC companions cover every class but monk, rogue, and I think barbarian, and of the three I'm most interested in Wound-powered abilities. I'll probably upgrade to plate armor at some point if I can still take enough damage to count up Wounds. Cipher's cool too, I'll probably try a blunderbuss build next run to quickly build up psychic juice at the start of fights.

The backer item on the first map in PoE is great. You need to be in scouting mode to find it, in a camp on the southern end of the map.

[Whipstitch]

Orlan aren't objectively the best. They have higher caps in Perception and Resolve but pay for that privilege with a lowered Might cap. That's an OK trade if you're a tank of some sort but is a real bummer if you're practically anything else. Finding builds where wood elves, island Aumaua and humans are a better choice isn't really hard.


What is the backer item, anyway? People have been irritatingly coy about it.

[Koumei]

Is it worth the $50 price tag? I've heard that it's full of bugs at the moment, and seeing as Obsidian made it, that doesn't exactly surprise me.

[Whipstitch]

I feel like it's an "If you have to ask, then the answer is no" situation. I'm really enjoying it, but then I am a total neckbeard for this sort of game. However, that doesn't blind me to the fact that it's rather clunky and unforgiving by modern standards, which is a real shame given that it's also rather poorly documented in a number of important ways. So if you've managed to hold out this long you may as well wait until patches, mods and gamefaqs guides are in ready supply.

[Kaelik]

I think Wood elves are objectively the best mages, but meh the races are so relatively minorly different, and people are so MAD, that I feel like everything is pretty close to as viable as everything else.

[Avoraciopoctules]

What is the backer item, anyway? People have been irritatingly coy about it.

"The Disappointer", legendarily useless pistol.
http://i.stack.imgur.com/0RjKx.jpg

[Longes]

Is it worth the $50 price tag? I've heard that it's full of bugs at the moment, and seeing as Obsidian made it, that doesn't exactly surprise me.

If you like long sprawling cRPGs like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale - then yes. If you like cRPGs, but didn't play Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale - probably still yes. If you don't like cRPGs - then no.

I bought collector's edition purely because Obsidian made all my favorite games and I just wanted to support them (and DRM-free GOG).

[Archmage Joda]

Has anyone on here played a diablo-style game called Grim Dawn? It's one of the myriad games sitting in my steam library I haven't gotten around to playing, and I was wondering if anyone here had experience with it?

[RelentlessImp]

If you don't mind or even like 4th Edition D&D, then you will like Pillars of Eternity. If you hate the idea of per-encounter, per-rest abilities and never getting any interesting abilities, then Pillars of Eternity isn't worth your money. Pillars of Eternity takes everything wrong with cRPGs and everything wrong with D&D 4th Edition and throws them into sharp relief. I'm trying to stomach playing the game but I get sick of it every hour or so and have to stop.

Also, if you don't like stories about reincarnated souls, this game will turn you right the fuck off.

EDIT: I also want to say I find its handling of moral and "mature" issues to be extremely childish, but that's nothing new.

[Koumei]

I've played a little bit - two hours total. It's decent - the world is pretty big, you're able to wander into tougher areas for more challenge and rewards if you find the basic areas to easy, there are plenty of side-quests.

The levelling mechanic is... acceptable? You choose one class. Each level, you can spend some small number of points on your base stats, and some small number of points on class skills. In the skill tree, you have one bar across the bottom, which is your base class proficiency I guess - it gives you big stat bonuses with every increase. Now the further you increase that base proficiency, the more things in the tree can be purchased.

So it does the annoying thing where you choose between big numbers and new abilities, except it sort of gates the abilities via the base numbers so you have a good idea of what you're supposed to be doing there.

At a later point you can choose a secondary class if you want access to more abilities, but you are splitting your skill points if you do that.

There's a lot of item socketing and "combine three X to get a Y, which is a bigger X" going on, like every Diablo clone. It's certainly not a bad game though, so if you've already bought it, definitely jump in and give it a shot.

[Whipstitch]

. Pillars of Eternity takes everything wrong with cRPGs and everything wrong with D&D 4th Edition and throws them into sharp relief.

This is vexing and true but I can tolerate it given that in CRPGs all the really awesome shit is typically off the table anyway. The fact that this game dumbs magic down even compared to games that came out in the late '90s is really grating but it doesn't sting quite so bad as 4e ditching all the cool spells that actually took advantage of having a Dungeon Master instead of a machine.

What gives me the worst 4rry flashbacks is the reviewers and twitter dip shits that are still happily crowing about old Sawyer interviews that denigrated trap options. Only featuring decent powers and talents is a laudable design goal and all but now that the game has been released it's possible to load that baby up and see if they surpassed other CRPGs in that regard. Spoiler alert: they fucking didn't.

[Stahlseele]

why is it that todays game makers, despite vastly increased technical abilities, fail to do stuff that games like fallout did 20 or more years ago? x.x

[RelentlessImp]

I'm going to bitch about Pillars of Eternity til this Nostalgia Critic review is over.

First off, let's talk about the Recovery mechanic. This is a period of time that is in between your actions. Every attack, spell, and movement you make engages your Recovery time. We're never given any base numbers for recovery, but instead every modifier for Recovery is given in percentages. Heavier armor inflicts a negative Recovery time - even mage's robes inflict one (-15%!). Weapons inflict their own sort of Recovery time but we don't get numbers for those either, just vague weapons speed of Fast, Normal and Slow. Your Dexterity gives you a bonus to recovery time, too.

Furthermore, there are Four types of defense targeted by every attack, three of which are modified by armor, the fourth modified by your Resolve. And I do mean every attack - spells target each defense pretty much equally.

Combat is not especially tactical; the whole "real time" thing has never lended itself well to tactical combat, and the Recovery mechanic just makes it even worse, as MOVING triggers your Recovery time cooldown. You could possibly do some crazy bullshit with manipulating recovery but that's a lot of effort for minor gain.

Area of Effect abilities are weird. They have two targeting reticles - one red, one yellow. Everything in red gets hit, in yellow they become enemy-only areas. Area of Effect size is affected by Intellect. As are durations. This is sort of neat, and adds a sort of interesting targeting skill to area of effect abilities, but this is about the most interesting thing there is.

Damage reduction is provided by armor and provides different levels of damage reduction against different attacks. Let me just say this right now - the additional damage granted by Rogues more than overcomes what you might get out of Two Handed attacks later on, but involves fucking with the tactical "system".

Furthermore, if you think the idea of per-day, per-rest, per-encounter abilities would favor the Fighter type classes, you'd be wrong. Okay, they get more types of per-encounter abilities but they kind of suck. They engage directly with the tactical combat system and the real-time aspect kind of neuters them entirely.

You can play the game at three speeds, which is nice, and set up autopauses like you could in Baldur's Gate, but this is a game that cries out for a legitimate turn-based system and a grid. There is no getting around this - this game would be one million times better if it was done in the style of Troika's Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. Perhaps two million. You could still have the bullshit 4E-style abilities and the neat targeting system, and nothing would be lost over real time. In fact, you'd have made the tactical system all that much more engaging, and I wouldn't currently be ignoring it and cheating my stats to 1 million to play this game just to see how deep down the rabbit hole this story goes.

Let's talk about the characters. So far, I'm not invested. At all. The voice acting feels cheap, subdued, and not at all interesting. I long for a Minsc (which you almost have in Alvor but he never turns into a Scottish prick when you really want him to), an Irenicus... hell, I'd settle for a fucking Viconia.

I think where the story really falls down is that it's throwing a shitload of proprietary terms at you and never bothers to do anything to make you care about them. Within the first twenty minutes you hear at least eight proprietary terms and it's like hearing it all out of context. Maybe on a replay this shit would make more sense but it's especially jarring as a newcomer who is sitting down to play this for the first time. At least in Baldur's Gate you could wander around Candlekeep and learn as much as you needed to within the first hour of the game if you talked to everybody and read everything. That way when you wind up alone (spoilers: You wind up alone pretty quickly in PoE) you feel at least a little confident in your ability to fucking understand this world.

I get the feeling they were going for the Fallout feel where you're a Vault Dweller dropped into a world you can't possibly comprehend but they didn't invent a thousand new words to make you feel that way. There's a major difference between the character not knowing something and the player not knowing something. While the equivalency of both character and player being lost can be done well (see: Tales of the Abyss), it's hamfisted and clumsy here, mainly because nothing is ever explained. EXPLAIIIIIIIIIN!

I blame Mass Effect. The Codex introduced in those games has basically made writers lazy - they shove everything into this out of the way area so they don't have to write any sort of dialogue that clues you in to what's going on. Don't know something? Check the Cyclopedia! And chances are the explanation's going to be just as obtuse and leave you wondering.

Having to learn a whole new lexicon has never been fun, especially if that lexicon has no origin in a language your expected player base will be familiar with. The Planar Cant, while cute, had its origins in real language. On the other hand, Sindarin was written by an actual linguist, and learning it was like learning an entire new language. That's what the language used in Pillars of Eternity feels like - studying for your final in High School Spanish. Using common language helps immerse the player because they fucking understand what you're saying - inventing new words to help immerse you into the world isn't a bad thing, but when you run across seven or eight terms in the first twenty minutes that make you go 'What the fuck?' without proper context clues to help you along, that just jars you out rather than pulling you in.

Just fuck this game. It's been uninteresting, it's been actively trying to turn me off to it, and I can't find myself giving a shit about any of the named NPCs in what I've interacted in with them.

What would make it better? Well, context clues when you're introducing new terms so a person isn't completely fucking lost would help. More interesting NPCs in the spirit of the company that wasn't afraid to go off the rails with their writing. Less pretentious bullshit by naming things that could have been perfectly explained in English with your bullshit language. Having discarded the real-time battle system and gone with a turn-based grid-based combat system so that people give a shit about tactical options. Failing that, giving whole numbers instead of nebulous descriptors and percentages for your fucking Recovery mechanic so people can make more informed decisions. What is it about hiding your fucking mechanics behind a wall of obtuse bullshit and games these days? Trying to get rid of number crunching doesn't fucking help when your combat system still runs on those numbers and we would really like to know the goddamned numbers so we can make better tactical decisions, especially when everything you choose to equip affects those fucking numbers.

I don't want to call this game a complete failure, but it really approaches it. It really does. I hope these guys go back to the drawing board and give us a true spiritual successor to the games they made rather than something predicated on failed design and mechanics they refuse to explain. At least in BG/BG2 you could figure out what Speed Factor 7 meant if you could get access to an AD&D book. Here, Recovery time = ? and subtracting percentages from that still equals ?.

[Longes]

You can play the game at three speeds, which is nice, and set up autopauses like you could in Baldur's Gate, but this is a game that cries out for a legitimate turn-based system and a grid. There is no getting around this - this game would be one million times better if it was done in the style of Troika's Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. Perhaps two million. You could still have the bullshit 4E-style abilities and the neat targeting system, and nothing would be lost over real time. In fact, you'd have made the tactical system all that much more engaging, and I wouldn't currently be ignoring it and cheating my stats to 1 million to play this game just to see how deep down the rabbit hole this story goes.

No, you can't have Troika's style of combat. The design goal is to emulate Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale as much as possible, and this is the design goal people pledged money for. Having something different is impossible.

In terms of characters, I kinda like Durance so far. He has yet to impress me with anything, but at least he has a character and is more important to the plot than Sand Aloth smartass elven wizard Sand and Sergeant Meatshield are. And Sergeant Meatshield has at least provided interesting information about the setting, Eothas' faith and the Saint's War. Not-Sand has just insulted some peasants once.

[RelentlessImp]

I said it'd be better. I didn't say it was what they wanted to do. But they provided all the tools that would make it a better experience, Infinity Engine games be damned.

[Kaelik]

Things:

1) Fuck, the Trokia ToEE stuff is still a goddam infinity engine thing, so who cares. Like, it is literally exactly this, but with turns, so you can target your aoe abilities in non stupid ways. Which I guess doesn't matter, because they gave you the red/yellow easy mode.

2) So that is what those red/yellow things are. I was wondering why my Druid seemed to be completely immune to all my own spells. (I don't have companions, because fuck those guys.)

3) Story wise, it is even dumber, because your character isn't a fish out of water. If you have Int and Lore you literally just go around spouting out previously unmentioned terms out of your own mouth every thirty fucking seconds.

[RelentlessImp]

There's still the problem of the obtuse recovery time mechanic that has no numbers attached to it that you can interact with outside of percentages. Turn-based is superior to it in every way because there's no question as to how long something will take and how long a turn is, while the recovery is straight up "I dunno". That's not something you should put into a game advertised as a strategic real-time game.

Examine Starcraft 2 as a comparison: What would happen to it if Marines took between 20 and 30 seconds to build, randomized, instead of 25 seconds? It would pretty much skew any strategic thinking you could put together as a Terran in the early game, and could potentially cripple the late game. Replace Marine with Zealot and Stalker for Tossers and Marine with Zergling and Roach for the master race as appropriate.

If you could nail it down with hard numbers, that'd be great. I'd have no problem. I'd know exactly how long Action X takes to do and how long the character will be incapable of doing Action X again or Action Y. That's perfect for planning tactics and strategizing. This "Green bar counts down til you can do something" is just obtuse for the sake of being obtuse - or worse, for the sake of being 'pretty'.

[shau]

Has anyone on here played a diablo-style game called Grim Dawn? It's one of the myriad games sitting in my steam library I haven't gotten around to playing, and I was wondering if anyone here had experience with it?

I picked this up to support the studio since I liked Titan Quest, but have not done much with it. It's still in early access, and seems like it has been in there forever.

I think Blademaster (basically the new conqueror) used to be the master class, but that might have been fixed somewhat recently.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I remember asking this before, but I forgot and/or am too lazy to search back through this thread, so I'll ask again:

I'm doing a clean re-install of Skyrim (as opposed to the last one where I uninstalled the game but didn't do anything else and had lots of stuff still in various folders all over my computer. Hopefully the 6,000+ files I just deleted are all of them...). Anyway, after having lots of CDT errors that caused me to stop playing, does anyone recommend a program that helps clean up your load order and whatnot to prevent that?