The Gaming Den

Path of Exile's recent patch added a turn-based combat mode to the game. Going to try it out later, but apparently it takes a lot from Divinity Original Sin 2.

I just got KotOR on sale from steam. I'm playing a scoundrel because every guide said not to. Eat it, nerds

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:I just got KotOR on sale from steam. I'm playing a scoundrel because every guide said not to. Eat it, nerds

As a nerd who's played the game several times, scoundrel is actually a really good choice. They get Persuade as a class skill (which is amazing early game), and Sneak Attack synergizes really well with several force powers.

I played the game several times and played a scoundrel each time because they get enough skill points to put everything I needed on the main character so my dudes could be selected for fun and not for anything I actually needed. Both in 1 and 2 I never had a problem getting through the game.

I also did scoundrel when I played it. I think the first major boss battle was sort of difficult / tedious because of fragility, but the skills you get make the game a lot more enjoyable. Neither KotOR is all that difficult.

I had some difficulty with the duelling side quest but then I found out how cheap stat buff consumables were. Much like Fallout 4, taking all the drugs seems to make things easier. Wish I had realized my dude did not have repair or computer use before blowing all my parts and slices though, either mission, the astromech Droid, or both were in my party at pretty much all times after recruiting them. I don't care if everyone says the astromech Droid sucks, it's an astromech Droid.

saithorthepyro wrote:Path of Exile's recent patch added a turn-based combat mode to the game. Going to try it out later, but apparently it takes a lot from Divinity Original Sin 2.

I am pretty shure, you are talking about the other PoE, not Path of Exile.
If i am wrong please tell me more.

Yeah, isn't Path of Exile the PoE that's sort of Diablo-ish and generally online and has the big FFX sphere grid for advancement? I think Pillars of Eternity is the PoE that's sort of Baldur's Gate-ish. But I can't remember, even "There are two PoE games, which is which?" is too much for my dumb reptile brain.

Koumei wrote:Yeah, isn't Path of Exile the PoE that's sort of Diablo-ish and generally online and has the big FFX sphere grid for advancement? I think Pillars of Eternity is the PoE that's sort of Baldur's Gate-ish. But I can't remember, even "There are two PoE games, which is which?" is too much for my dumb reptile brain.

No, you got it right.

I think I played a Scoundrel too in KoToR. Initially I wanted to specialize in guns and be like "why the hell would I use a light saber when I can just shoot you?" but finally decided to use the lightsaber because it was easier this way.

I still killed the final boss by running away and laying traps behind me which was both ridiculous and anti-climatic.

What I remember from back when we bought games on CDs was the dark side bonus was strength and the light side was wisdom. If you want a fightingman you play dark side and if you want to stunlock the end boss of a game with your huge mind, you play light side (with a few dark side spells). If you're cool with cheesing the ending, you do you.

Also, you could hold off on levelling up until after the cut scene that makes you a jedi, so your starting class matters less, but that's kind of a pain in the ass without much benefit.

KoToR 2 had some interesting crafting, and also a story that made sense to someone.

Remember Artifact, the card game from Valve for which they hired Richard motherfucking Garfield to help development and released just last winter?

Its been bleeding player population so fast that even MA Ermor would go "wow dude", now down to just some hundreds all the way from tens of thousands at launch and basically dead on the water.

Valve haven't officially given up yet (like the DoW 3 devs did), but a complete lack of communication, very limited patches and no money tournaments in 2019 heavily hints that they're probably just trying to forget the whole mess.

Really, how the hell do you get Richard Garfield on your team and still fuck up a game so badly? Plus Valve have created some pretty good games like Half-Life (2) and Team Fortress.

Many reasons have been pointed out. Claims that the game was too complicated, with the whole 3 lanes thing. Too random, with not only random card draw but random effects and units choosing targets randomly all over the place. Too unfun plainly put.

Maybe a combination of the above. But above all else, I would say it was the disgustingly greedy monetization. Pay to buy the game. Pay to get the cards in-game. Then pay again to just to get to play a match. Players just decided they had better things to do with their money and time.

So really glad it's dead/dying, because if it had succeeded then all the other big companies would be trying to copy the style just like they started adding lootboxes and whatnot.

maglag wrote:Remember Artifact, the card game from Valve ...But above all else, I would say it was the disgustingly greedy monetization. Pay to buy the game. Pay to get the cards in-game. Then pay again to just to get to play a match. Players just decided they had better things to do with their money and time.

That's the connection I would have made. They're known for selling broken games on Steam, and refusing refunds when you discover the games don't work.

They want 40 fucking bucks for the Civ6 Rising Seas AddonDLC . . .
Meanwhile, the base game Civ6 is available for 14 bucks on Steam.

So in better news, the Nintendo Direct was pretty sweet:

-Fire Emblem 3 Houses confirmed as even more Anime with avatar character being a fantasy high school teacher, and you get to mentor the heirs of the surrounding kingdom/empire/oligarchy, each corresponding to their own student house. And then take them in deadly battles under your command like any good teacher should do. Alas mandatory dragon girl doesn't seem to be one of the students, but instead directly appears in the protagonist's mind? Should come out in July.
-Daemon x Machina demo out, with the devs explicitly wanting feedback! Personal favorite is that you can spend upgrade points in your pilot instead of your mecha, which actually changes the pilot's looks to something more cyberpunk as you replace the weak flesh with strong metal, providing both bonus while piloting (like faster recovery from landing) and bonus outside the mecha. Yes, you can eject when your Arsenal blows up and keep fighting!
-Dragon Quest Builders II, Dragon Quest XI with exclusive extras, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy IX already out, plenty of jRPGs coming to the Switch.
-Astral Chain, new IP from Platinium where you play a futuristic sci-fi cop with a robotic Stand buddy seems quite promising.
-Bloodstained Ritual of the night gameplay plus character customization!
-Bayoneta 3 still being worked on.
-Link's Awakening remake coming too, with extra cutesy art.

My only problem with the Direct was that the Smash info was too scant. Like, they just said, "Yo, there's gonna be a 3.0 patch coming out" and that Joker was coming out "before the end of April". I wish we could've gotten something just a little more substantive.

On the other hand... DRAGON QUEST IS COMING TO THE SWITCH! I literally came when they revealed that in XII you can switch to the classic sprite-based mode, which previously was only on the (Japan-only) 3DS version of the game.

But I'm most excited about Dragon Quest Builders 2. I really love the female protagonist's design. Another Toriyama win.

I really hope FE3H has the "characters don't perma-die" mode from the last two games...

Shrapnel wrote: I really hope FE3H has the "characters don't perma-die" mode from the last two games...

Three games, since casual mode started with Awakening then Fates and Echoes both had it too. Not counting Fire Emblem Heroes for what it's worth.

So yeah "optional perma-death" pretty much a given at this point.

Still the heir kids should be vital characters like the avatar/lords in that if they drop it's an instant game over.

Although it would be interesting if there's some mechanic where if one of the heirs dies the game continues but their nation declares war and then you just have to roll with it.

I kinda feel like the whole waifu focus has diluted the writing a smidge. Supports have never been great literature or anything, but the whole bit where everyone has to be able to pair off rather implies that you're either dealing with a rather cumbersome constraint or your treating the whole thing in such a perfunctory manner that I sometimes wonder why they bother--I get that people like optimizing their kids and all, but that's largely endgame bling that I'm generally not too interested in.

But that's kinda one of the main selling points for Fire Emblem and one of the things that made Awakening turn the franchise around. People just loved that you could create your own self-insert character then marry them to their favorite prince/princess/king/queen/dragon/whatever. And/or pair up the remaining characters as they wished. The kid mechanics made it even better, but just getting your favorite characters together actually in-game already was pretty popular.

Of course now that our character is a teacher and the rest of the crew are students, things may get somewhat awkward/creepy.

Although this is Fire Emblem we're talking about, with characters such as Nowi "I'M ACTUALLY OVER 1000 YEARS OLD" every couple lines and Elise "she's a legal adult already, just keeps acting like a kid".

As long as we don't get the main character slipping a potion into a girl's drink without her knowledge that makes her see women as men , I think we'll be fine.

Fire Emblem Awakening is one of my favorite games but I absolutely loathe school settings in general so I'm gonna have to pass on Three Houses. Damn.

Whipstitch wrote:I kinda feel like the whole waifu focus has diluted the writing a smidge. Supports have never been great literature or anything, but the whole bit where everyone has to be able to pair off rather implies that you're either dealing with a rather cumbersome constraint or your treating the whole thing in such a perfunctory manner that I sometimes wonder why they bother--I get that people like optimizing their kids and all, but that's largely endgame bling that I'm generally not too interested in.

I think an equal problem here is that in games before Awakening, characters were limited in the number of supports they could achieve. In Awakening though, that limit was removed.

That was, imo anyway, a rather poor decision. It's led to weirdness like how, in Awakening, Yarne's character was pretty cowardly but through his various supports he showed himself growing as a person in the progression to A-rank. But then if you go and C-rank someone else, you're back to the original personality. That's really jarring and uncanny-valleyish, but the script is already really large so it's not as if I expect the writers to create more supports for different states. The only reasonable way to avoid that is to just limit the number of supports a character can obtain.

Awakening was such a great smashing success that the follow-up games have tried to duplicate it in ways that didn't necessarily make sense. Some of that is duplicating its mistakes (imo: the lack of a support limit), but some of it is in duplicating the things that worked but only worked for Awakening-specific story reasons. The kid characters made sense and were an integral part of Awakening, but in Fates I was just a useless deadbeat dad and they felt tacked on for no reason other than they were popular in Awakening. That actually annoyed me so much that I stopped playing Fates as soon as I married my waifu and learned about the deadbeat parent mechanic. Ugh!

Anybody tried out Wargroove? Feel like they've really done a good job of capturing advance war's charm in fantasy form. Also some nice mechanics like every non-commander unit has a unique condition where they'll do more damage like "attack while adjacent to the commander" or "attack whitout moving". Plus infantry squads will randomly have some of their members be women and/or brown people which is purely cosmetic but still feels like a nice touch, in particular because it's not directly pointed out by any of the characters.

Surgo wrote:

Whipstitch wrote:I kinda feel like the whole waifu focus has diluted the writing a smidge. Supports have never been great literature or anything, but the whole bit where everyone has to be able to pair off rather implies that you're either dealing with a rather cumbersome constraint or your treating the whole thing in such a perfunctory manner that I sometimes wonder why they bother--I get that people like optimizing their kids and all, but that's largely endgame bling that I'm generally not too interested in.

I think an equal problem here is that in games before Awakening, characters were limited in the number of supports they could achieve. In Awakening though, that limit was removed.

That was, imo anyway, a rather poor decision. It's led to weirdness like how, in Awakening, Yarne's character was pretty cowardly but through his various supports he showed himself growing as a person in the progression to A-rank. But then if you go and C-rank someone else, you're back to the original personality. That's really jarring and uncanny-valleyish, but the script is already really large so it's not as if I expect the writers to create more supports for different states. The only reasonable way to avoid that is to just limit the number of supports a character can obtain.

That reminds of Charlotte in Fates that flirts with every man she meets and hardly hides she's doing it for money/power (heck, the first time she appears Charlotte's literally "Hey that's most of the royal family in one place, this is the best chance to make myself closer to them so I can increase my status!"). And even if she S-supports Xander, aka the heir apparent which explicitly means Charlotte's now in the way to become the queen and thus there's nowhere else higher to go on the status quo, Charlotte will keep flirting with all the other male characters in the other supports while secretly complaining she needs more money (to send her family). Girl, Xander aready told you your parents won't have any more worries about money, why are you risking his love like that?

However in the other hand limited supports felt, well, limited. Needing to worry about who to get together in each playthrough. So I'm willing to handwave it in the basis that Yarne's that much of a coward that the moment you take your eyes off him he'll forget everything he learned and Charlotte's been a warrioress thot for so long to feed her family she can't stop herself from flirting with men to try to get to their wallets (and her husband loves her enough to look the other way). Old habits die hard and stuff.

Surgo wrote: Awakening was such a great smashing success that the follow-up games have tried to duplicate it in ways that didn't necessarily make sense. Some of that is duplicating its mistakes (imo: the lack of a support limit), but some of it is in duplicating the things that worked but only worked for Awakening-specific story reasons. The kid characters made sense and were an integral part of Awakening, but in Fates I was just a useless deadbeat dad and they felt tacked on for no reason other than they were popular in Awakening. That actually annoyed me so much that I stopped playing Fates as soon as I married my waifu and learned about the deadbeat parent mechanic. Ugh!

Now that I kinda agree, the Fates children were really shoehorned.

Still there's some nice moments in there.

Like mommy "don't kill anybody, let's all try to be friends" avatar going full Khorne for her son.

I'll forgive the time-displaced children feeling shoehorned into Fates because I liked it more than Awakening in just about every other way (and I liked Awakening.)

I haven't been able to get into earlier FE titles than those (barring the Japanese-only New Mystery of the Emblem, a.k.a. Nintendo Hates Money) because random stat growth+permanent character death is not a winning combination in my book.

I couldn't even finish Fates, which should be sobering because I'm the guy who's been buying these games since they only made it overseas via Gameboy Advance.

And yeah, it's not that I don't see the appeal, it's that the appeal is contingent on characters remaining just barely interesting enough that you have favorites to glom onto in the first place. None of my favorite characters were favorites for waifu specific reasons and likewise some of the supports I've found most entertaining were largely unrelated to romance. E.g., I'm one of the many people who liked Owain's goofy humor and hyper caffeinated voice acting but I'm skeptical of the series going forward if we're going to keep running back so many of the same jokes while shoehorning the characters into supports that struggle to find a gimmick to work with. I readily admit that it's a tough job and as a longtime Fire Emblem fan I'm definitely aware that callbacks and carrying over personality archetypes is a hallmark of the series. I'm just not convinced that blowing it out so you're going Bigger and More Betterer will be sustainable.

FUCK Nintendo, now and forever. I want Nintendo to catch cancer.

I just spent FIVE FUCKING HOURS trying to play Roll-chan 4, a ROM-hack of Mega Man 4. I downloaded four different emulators, fifteen downloads of roll-chan 4 .ips files - which, I found out, are NOT the same thing as roms, which then led to going to no less than FIVE different sites looking for a Mega Man 4 ROM to download so I could patch the game via Lunar IPS... but every site I went to DIDN'T HAVE THE FUCKING FILE AVAILABLE because of FUCKING NINTENDO taking down EVERY FUCKING SITE because they are a bunch of FUCKING [EDITED] that DESERVE to be PUNCHED in the FUCKING DICK forEVER!

THEN I finally find a site that has a rom of it, but it probably infected my computer with AIDS but it didn't matter because now I could play the game! BUT NO! The ROM is all FUCKED UP because FUCK. This is what I get when I play the game on Mesen:

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?!

ALL the PIXELS are FUKCED UP! Because NINTENDO is run by a bunch of FUCKING [EDITED] who can't let people PLAY FUCKING ROMS BECAUSE THEY WANT TO CHARGE YOU THIRTY FUCKING DOLLARS A FUCKING MONTH TO PLAY NES GAMES THAT NO ONE WANT TO FUCKING PLAY

In case I wasn't clear...

FUCK. NINTENDO.

I would not shed a single tear if Japan sunk into the sea tomorrow.



fucking hell.