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MisterDee
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Post by MisterDee »

So, is there anything more satisfying in EU4 than seeing a large chunk of blue province switch colour?

(Now back to eating small Reformed provinces in the HRE while manpower recover. The Grande Armée died HARD. :) )
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Orion
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Post by Orion »

Is Pillars of Eternity good?
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Avoraciopoctules
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

I think so, but I'm a kickstarter backer and sunk cost fallacy might be talking.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

No.
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Post by K »

I always check Let's Play's of games I'm not 100% about whether I'd like them.

I watched a Let's Play of Pillars of Eternity with Felicia Day and it looked tedious.
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Avoraciopoctules
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

http://www.somethingawful.com/video-gam ... ty-review/

Pillars of Eternity is a new fantasy setting with its own languages and folklore. There's several actual supplementary books outside the game, such as an in-character almanac and a slightly larger out-of-character guide to the campaign setting. If you enjoy reading RPG campaign settings, Pillars of Eternity is really cool.

But it's also kind of ridiculous to expect someone to do supplementary reading before they play a video game. Some of the Infinity Engine legacy mechanics are kind of clunky, and I'm not enjoying the combat as much as I'd hoped. And all the backer NPCs sitting around doing kind of mess with my immersion.

Play the game if you liked the old infinity engine games or reading RPG setting splats. But it isn't for everyone.
Last edited by Avoraciopoctules on Sat Apr 25, 2015 8:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Shady314
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Post by Shady314 »

Good? Yes IMO. Great? No IMO. I did back it but only for 50$. I backed W2 for more and that game was a clusterfuck so I can admit when my money was wasted.
It helps to think BG and NOT BG2.

With the very reasonable price taken into account I think it's worth getting.

Watching POE is boring as fuck, especially if you've never played it as you will have no idea what is going on. But I find it boring to watch most RPGs. The only thing visually impressive about it are the backgrounds.
Last edited by Shady314 on Sun Apr 26, 2015 2:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

Tim Schafer is a retard. You can't just start playing Broken Age Act 2, you need a save from part 1.
Last edited by Longes on Sun Apr 26, 2015 1:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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maglag
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Post by maglag »

So in case you missed it, about a week ago, Valve announced that they would add the option of Skyrim modders selling their mods through Steam instead of making them available for free, with the possibility of expanding this model for other games in the future.

Today they abandoned the whole idea and Skyrim mods are again free. May have to do with a massive backlash from the community, or perhaps that the modders would only get 25% of the money (and even then only if their mods made at least 400$), or perhaps with several modders threatening to abandon steam, or the start of litigations between modders about using each other's contents between mods, or perhaps all of the previous combined.
Last edited by maglag on Tue Apr 28, 2015 12:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
8d8
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Post by 8d8 »

It seemed odd to me that Valve thought it would be a good idea at all, considering how much better Mod Organizer or even Nexus's Manager do at handling mods for Skyrim. I mean, if you want half a dozen mods that just add followers or armor then sure, use Steam. But the people who are serious enough about modding their game to pay for a mod are not going to even consider Steam for that, because it does it poorly - and the best modders aren't publishing through Workshop because of that.

I want to know what amount of drugs it took Gabe to think that the community's working and rather wonderful thing should be replaced with something bad that relies on his busted, not-working thing.
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Post by name_here »

What exactly is wrong with the Workshop? It seems to work pretty well for me, but then again I'm not all that much into serious modding. It admittedly doesn't work with SKSE because apparently it can't deliver executable files, but I haven't encountered problems beyond that.
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Post by Longes »

8d8 wrote:It seemed odd to me that Valve thought it would be a good idea at all, considering how much better Mod Organizer or even Nexus's Manager do at handling mods for Skyrim. I mean, if you want half a dozen mods that just add followers or armor then sure, use Steam. But the people who are serious enough about modding their game to pay for a mod are not going to even consider Steam for that, because it does it poorly - and the best modders aren't publishing through Workshop because of that.

I want to know what amount of drugs it took Gabe to think that the community's working and rather wonderful thing should be replaced with something bad that relies on his busted, not-working thing.
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Post by Koumei »

That comic reminded me of the lockboxes in the Neverwinter MMO (100% the same as in there), and now I have a bitter taste in my mouth.

Or it might just be the coffee we have here. It's a toss-up, really.
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Archmage Joda
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Post by Archmage Joda »

So, has anyone here played the PC remake of Gauntlet (the one on steam, by arrowhead studios)? If so, is it good? Worth $20, or should I wait for it to eventually go on sale?
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

Archmage Joda wrote:So, has anyone here played the PC remake of Gauntlet (the one on steam, by arrowhead studios)? If so, is it good? Worth $20, or should I wait for it to eventually go on sale?
If you have friends to play it with - it's good. Quite meh otherwise.
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

karpik777
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Post by karpik777 »

name_here wrote:What exactly is wrong with the Workshop? It seems to work pretty well for me, but then again I'm not all that much into serious modding. It admittedly doesn't work with SKSE because apparently it can't deliver executable files, but I haven't encountered problems beyond that.
The automatic update system can cause loads of trouble (unless you constantly run Steam in offline mode - but then you can't get new files from the Workshop) - from losing some of your items (if you stored it in a mod-added house that got updated), through being unable to play your character (when some mods rely on other mod and the latter got updated in a way that requires the former to do the same) to actually corrupting the file (most likely with big perk overhauls and such). Sure, you're not guaranteed to run into those, but it is an actual risk. With manual installs, you can choose whether you will update or not and can prepare (ie. by emptying the modded house) - often modders actually give instructions on what you should do before installing the new version.
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Count Arioch the 28th
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

I really cut down on my CTD when I unsubscribed from the steam workshop mods.
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Post by Koumei »

For all fellow Skullgirls players:

IT'S TIME, IT'S TIME, IT'S... BEOWULF TIME!

Fresh out of beta, Beowulf is downloadable for the regular game, and free for a limited time. So if you have the game, go add him, even if it'll be some time before you play again.

Also, I dare you to count the references to pro wrestlers. And Internet memes. THREE WOLF MOONSAULT!
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Leress
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Post by Leress »

I really like the alt colors and the fact that his chair is call "Hurting". Also he has a mic drop move.
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MfA
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Post by MfA »

Orion wrote:Is Pillars of Eternity good?
Combat is tedious, class balance is absolute crap (summons, charms and AoE for the win, not too different from D:OS in that respect). But who expects balanced game play in party based western RPGs?

It's the buggiest RPG release in recent memory ... made worse by the fact that's it's an almost unmoddable mess (it's C#, so yeah in theory you could decompile it but fuck that shit). So no quick script or global variable fix supplied by the community for whatever ails you. They make Troika look good.

Story isn't grabbing me.

Only played the first act though, I refuse to play it in it's present state.

PS. as expected going with D100 flat RNG resulted in some horrible design choices ...
Last edited by MfA on Fri May 01, 2015 1:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Shady314
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Post by Shady314 »

MfA wrote: It's the buggiest RPG release in recent memory.
:rofl: Nope.
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Count Arioch the 28th
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

Yeah, I'd say if you can play it at all, it would be less buggy than DA:I's release... Pillars might be much, much worse but I literally couldn't play DA:I until the first patch. YMMV, of course.
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RelentlessImp
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Post by RelentlessImp »

Stahlseele wrote:@#PCMasterrace
So, GTA V dropped.
And it is pretty damn good and of course, we get much better graphics (FHD+ at 60FPS+) than the console peasants who got the game almost a year before us . . but we also get something that we don't want and that console lusers usually do not have to worry about:
Problems!
1.) If your windumb lusername has a special character in it (umlaut ÄäÖöÜüß or something else that is not a-z A-Z 1-0, it simply won't install properly.

2.) nVidia and AMD both got new drivers out for this game and the first thing the game did for me was to crash the display driver, which crashed the game itself and made me lose about 45 minutes of progress i had made . .

But they included all the Graphics Settings and proper mouse and keyboard support and of course proper 1st Person perspective (which i use exclusively outside of vehicles, because fuck driving in 1st person and if you can master it, i salute you!)

Combat is surprisingly hard and very lethal very early on.
And there are alway instant fail conditions in the missions.
Mainly the player character ending up dead, but letting somebody get away on a chase or being cought by the popo or failing to stealth properly. can also be instant cut-scene fail.

I have found that i have very big problems actually utilizing the weapons, because the crosshair is TINY as fuck and gets lost in the background clutter . . The enemy AI, while not that smart, makes use of cover and concealment actually, which makes finding the bastard shooting you with an AR again and again a bit hard in cluttered areas . . and most areas are cluttered, dear god the level of detail (meaning stuff put in, not detail on stuff) is insane compared to most other games out there right now . .

And either i just haven't found out how to yet, or you do not get the little achievements or rewards you get on console for things like headshots and driving really recklessly really close to other participants in the traffic.

Police-Presence is seemingly a bit scarcer than what i have seen in youtube videos of the console versions, but that might be due to some difficulty setting i have not found yet as well . .

The asking price is fucking insane at 50 to 60€ or your regional equivalent currence on steam . .
And then you have a 60+GB Download to do and THEN you need to create a rockstar social club account to play the game . .
But if you buy the boxed copy, you get much in it. A foldable map of the Los Santos area . . and 7 DVD's, because fuck Blu-Ray right guys?

And now my biggest complaint:
FUCKERS RELEASED IT AT 1 IN THE MORNING ON A FUCKING TUESDAY!
Because lol fuck people like me who have to go to fucking work! -.-
I've been having a lot of fun with the PC version of GTA V. I bought the boxed copy because I have a 1.5Mbps connection so it would have taken me literally four or five days to download it, more because I have to kill my downloads when someone else in the house has to use VPN to work which is frequent. I still had a 5GB download and 353mb download for the day one patch, which failed the first time due to insufficient space on the C: drive, which for me is a 60GB SSD that normally has only my Windows install, drivers, and a 32GB page file. I had to downgrade it to 16GB for the install to go through.

What the fuck is this bullshit where you need sufficient space on C: to install shit in this day and age of casual user RAID arrays and multi-drive systems? I have my games and movies and shit on a 1TB HDD so having to have space on a tiny SSD for installs to go through is terrible bullshit. Having game saves in My Documents/Horrible File or My Documents/My Games/Horrible File is also backwards bullshit that, based on my understanding, is required by fucking MICROSOFT of all people, and isn't even fucking properly standardized either as evidenced by three or four places where the fucking folders can even end up. (Username/My Documents/Game Folder. Username/My Documents/My Games/Game Folder. Username/My Documents/My Games/Company/Game Folder.)

Anyways, beyond that bullshit, GTA 5 is pretty fun. The loading screens are kind of unforgivable but at least in story mode they're few and far between. It takes forever to load into Story Mode but beyond that you'll almost never see a loading screen once you're playing. My complaints about Story Mode stem from the fact that, while Franklin is presented as the PC stand-in character due to being rather bland and whiny, it's really Michael's story, as pretty much all of the motivation for the story to continue comes from Michael. And oh my god is he a horrible, lying, dumbass piece of shit. The story also suffers from backfill problems - between the prologue and present day you're left til halfway through the story to fill in the blanks and that's just fucking lazy storytelling, because it happens in dialogues that you can seriously miss by driving too fast. That said, the people at Rockstar have this sort of thing down to a science so dialogues that take place during driving sections are JUST long enough if you don't drive like a madman/crash everywhere (causing dialogue to restart on the last line). I still wound up having to park in the middle of the road to wait for a dialogue to finish sometimes, but I've had to do that in every GTA game anyways so it's not a BIG deal, and most of the time the dialogue timing is perfect for the distance you have to go.

My most outraged complaint is how much you have to use helicopters in the story, because I am godfuckingterrible at flying helicopters with both the controller and the keyboard. I like the flying controls (WASD+8456 on the numpad) but I know it's not for everyone but they did include an option for you to fly with WASD+Mouse if you really wanted to (buried in the keybindings for flight I think). But that's a complaint about my inability to cope with having to constantly adjust for current momentum and overadjusting like the flying noob I am. I much prefer flying planes and jets, because they actually go where you tell them.

GTA: Online has been discussed to death elsewhere but I'll add my two cents here. I really fucking love GTA:O. The half-million stimulus package you get is nice for when you hit Rank 12 and you can jump right into heists by buying a high-end apartment. I've met some really nice and hilarious people playing heists, which require above-average levels of coordination and communication. The heists are... some of them are better than others. Humane Labs Raid is by far my favorite because the setups are varied. One mission you'll be boating out to an aircraft carrier, killing military, and stealing a VTOL and three other jets, then having to shoot down private security jets sent to kill you, and then once they're done the radio switches itself on and you get to listen to Danger Zone while flying to Sandy Shores.

On the other hand, Series A is my least favorite because they somehow made Trevor BORING and the Heist Finale is seriously driving down a road in two vans and a pickup with a HMG on the back that shoots down helicopters and everyone you've stolen from in the setups. So it's just a driving precision/skill finale. The ending cutscenes are appropriately amusing, from Trevor playing with Impotent Rage dolls to escaping an FIB sting, and the heist completed screen shows Trevor in the most amusing light. But the setups are fucking boring as shit.

Fleeca Job sets up false expectations as the first heist, but it does unlock the Armored Kuruma which completely destroys any difficulty in any heist you can take your personal vehicle (after spending 525,000 GTA bucks on buying it) as it's completely bulletproof and AI NPCs can't really shoot through the narrow holes.

Now I haven't talked about loading screens here but they bear mentioning. There's a LOT. There's loading screens for practically anything. And the online service is entirely peer to peer with one person serving as a host to up to 30 people. That's fine for people that have good internet, but like I said, I have a 1.5Mbps connection (down, 876Kbps up) so me hosting is pretty fucking miserable for everyone else involved. And you have to host to progress the Online "story" through heists otherwise they don't count for your personal progression. Loading screens serve to hide you connection to peers, which can take anywhere from half a second to five minutes, on which you can find out that the job is full and you get to sit through another loading screen as it dumps you into your previous P2P session. You load for pretty much anything that isn't free-roam, and you load into free-roam every time you're not doing an activity.

But despite all these problems, GTA Online is the most fun I've had in a GTA game in forever. The return of the skill system is one of the best things because it gives you a sense of progression across the protagonists and your online character, even if you can AFK-level Flying and Stealth. My biggest complaints about GTA Online are the clothing selections - they're both gender-locked and there are a great number of outfits NPCs wear you can't have. Despite every character of a specific gender having the exact same body shape and type, so modeling them shouldn't be a concern because one size fits all. The rest are problems that would be solved if I lived in an area that lived in the 21st century and had modern broadband, or if the game wasn't developed for P2P connections and instead had actual fucking servers.

The story mode commits a couple of grievous sins that you can overlook; the backfill nature of the story, the forced helicopter sections requiring precision flight, and the PC stand-in character being a whiny bitch. But I think it stands as a pretty decent addition to the GTA franchise if only because Los Santos is a fuckhuge area, though about 1/3rd of it is full of mountains and desert. There's still 2/3rds that is chock full of shit to do in both story mode and Online. And there are a surprising number of callbacks to previous games in the series - Niko Bellic is referenced at least twice to my knowledge (Lester mentions a Eastern European guy in Liberty City that's gone quiet, and Packie McReary shows up as a random encounter for you to save and he talks about the diamond heist in GTA4) and other characters are referenced in lesser ways (Online has both Misty from GTA 3 and Niko Bellic as possible parents).

The biggest sins the Online mode makes are obviously P2P and the chargen system consisting of parental choices and identical bodies for genders rather than being free to make your own monstrosity, though you can make some pretty hilarious looking characters by adjusting the inheritence sliders (females who fully take after their ugly fathers can look pretty hilarious, guys who take after their moms fully can look pretty). And the Online story mode takes place (X) years before the Story mode which puts it in the same fucking awkward position that Star Wars games had before the EU blowup/KOTOR at being set during the official timeline, severely limiting what stories they can tell in the future.

But yeah, overall, good addition to the GTA franchise in content and intent. It's the full-length story we want and the online game we didn't but still has high points and fun and an okay-enough progression system between rank unlocks and skill leveling with a very obvious ceiling. If anyone on PC wants to hang out and kill shit add my rockstar social of RelentlessImp.
name_here
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Post by name_here »

My experience so far has been that Pillars isn't actually buggy, much less anomalously buggy.

The only bug I can actually remember running into is a timing issue with dialogue, where the voiced lines play a good while after appearing in the dialogue box. I pretty much invariably finish reading any dialogue before the voice plays. There was also some weird display issue with bonuses if you swapped gear in a certain way, but it was promptly patched out.
Last edited by name_here on Sat May 02, 2015 1:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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