I remember in the past you crying because Souls was mean to you. Pillars of Eternity will leave you with a gaping arsehole.

Nope. I said I bounced off of it and it wasn't because it was too hard.
Still, I like getting hammered in certain ways in games. I sometimes like seeing everything go to shit in games like FTL, Banner Saga, Xenonauts, CKII or Mordheim. It's not even that I need to have perfect control over what's happening. I can live with the occasional RNG gamble going wrong.

Beyond the wonky port, I can't even tell you specifically why I bounced off of DS. I just didn't enjoy it.

Oh, is Mordheim in a playable state now? I thought that looked quite interesting when you talked about it before.

ETA: Thumbs up on pillars of eternity. It's incredibly faithful to the concept of Baldur's gate or a similar game, lots of freedom, interesting cast and stat system. It's been modernised of course, with a certain amount of the more dubious design decisions changed and updated for 2015.

On the other hand it's only going down in price in future steam sales if you're unsure about the price now.

Bought it some three weeks ago. It's feature complete and it rocks.
Lots of costumisation in visuals and stats, although honestly more in stats than in visuals. As far as I can see there's no best way to build that breaks the game, there's just good ways, ways that still let you play and win the hard way, or ways that suck. It's not perfect, but they're tweaking a lot. Many people say the AI is a joke, getting stuck on pebbles and losing their shit over pathfinding, but it's not that bad. Sure, it's an AI and this isn't checkers. It's not a solved game and the AI does cheat a bit in stats. I'm not gonna say it's good, but all things combined (positioning, pathfinding, prioritising of targets, randomisation of the battlefield and enemy warband make-up) a couple of wrong moves can still fuck you up in a battle and that one battle, depending on how you stand in the campaign overall, can still set you back big time or just effectively end the campaign right there. The farther and better you and your warband get, the rarer those kinds of battles are, though. If you pick your missions conservatively and play smart, you could - with a bit of luck - coast through the whole thing with not many losses after the first couple of missions.

No, if you're nit-picky about your perfect combat system you're not going to like this game. I love the Warhammer world and aesthetic, though. That lore alone sold me. The fact that I can do turn based combat with dudes that can lose their eyes, legs and arms, or grow new ones (because Chaos!) and gain stat effects from that is just the shit! The RNG will fuck you over on occasion, though. I don't know if it's rigged. I don't think so, but it feels like that some games. Missing three 70% hit chances in a row is entirely possible, but for my ape brain it happens a bit too often.

I haven't even touched multiplayer after 35 hours with the game. I suspect it gets rid of the AI impairments and substitutes that with human skill and RNG luck. That's also why I probably won't ever try it. That said, that's what they built it for. I mean, Mordheim the tabletop game is meant to be a multiplayer game.

As I said, to be fair, I like Warhammer a lot, so the fluff makes up for a lot of the flaws. Getting to steer a Warhammer ogre with big feathers he wears as piercings on his forehead, because he doesn't have a helmet to stick them in like his human Empire buddies, is just too precious a thing to pass up on.
Say something about PoE, man. You were one of my big hopes here.
ETA: Go ahead and make me look stupid. So you said something about PoE...
ETA2: I almost forgot. The loading times didn't get better. I have a pretty powerful rig and the game is installed on an SSD. I still wait a minute or two before every battle. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it is when you're in the flow of the game.

PoE:-

It is incredibly faithful to what they call the "spirit" of the old infinity engine games - Baldur's gate, BG2, planescape torment and so on. So you have a very stat heavy character creator with a lot of different class types, based loosely around old D&D classes - priest/cleric/warrior/rogue type archetypes and various hybrids like druids. Each class has at least one unique mechanic. Spell casters are generally more powerful offensively, but they take a long time to ramp up as they gain additional spells each time they rest, so early on they can only do a battle or two before you have to rest, but later they get much more diversity of spells and a much larger number of casts. Parties generally benefit from diversity though, you're going to want at the least a tank and an offtank, a healer and some ranged dps. I seem to remember ranged DPS working better (so you don't get AOE bombed by enemy casters), although I think you can come up with some cleaving AOE melee monsters too, although you probably can't afford to have anyone else around them on higher dificulties.

Character generation is very "D&D feel" although the system is custom built and (importantly) you get a fixed number of stat points to allocate rather than rolling the dice. Along with class you choose race, subrace (like whether you're an island giant or a beach bum giant - note that may not have been the "exact" in game description), profession and gender. Some races obviously match classes and some work against them (e.g. taking that pro -1 str on your warrior ). There's a perfunctory amount of customisation of appearance too. But if you like stats and planning characters this is a gold mine, you can make a monster (stack str and speed) or totally bollocks yourself up. All the stats have their uses though, especially for casters, as they all contribute to at least a few different things including one defence (depending on attack type you roll against one of four? different defence stats, with physical being the most common by far for ordinary attacks and will? for magic).

There's a lot of narrative freedom, outside of a few early story railroads the world opens up FAST and you can go to a large number of different places and resolve quests in a number of ways in some instances. I think the story is even proofed against murdering EVERY SINGLE PERSON EVER if that kind of thing floats your boat.

I actually never finished the game, getting distracted by I don't know what and never coming back, I doubt I even got half way, but I really enjoyed the time I did put in and keep meaning to fire it up and start over (part of the issue being that the game had a couple of weird bugs that meant I redid the first 5-10 hours like 3 times over, but they are long fixed now).

The game is challenging on harder difficulties so lots of save-loading is likely to occur if you want to play it that way and if you want to min-max to extreme degrees you can get fully customisable hirelings from inns instead of the story companions (I wouldn't though, some of the writing on the companions is really good).

Overall it's very much a classic CRPG experience, lots of detailed systems and writing. Graphically it's not an eyesore like the old Infinity engine games, but it's not a great beauty either.

That was a tit-for-tat thing right now, wasn't it?
You didn't sell me, but you gave me a better idea of what to expect. Once more I could depend on you for video game knowledge. Thanks.

Recently played some Hard West:-



It's quite interesting. 8 separate scenarios (stats and items don't carry over) consisting of 5 TRPG battles and some overworld story shennanigans in between the fights. VERY cool "weird west" aesthetic and a lot of interesting ideas.

I'd recommend it (on sale) to any TRPG fans, but it's fairly short and the lack of choices and consequences definitely makes it feel overly episodic and underwhelming in the immersion department. But for what it is I really liked it, fun, some good, genuinely creative ideas and systems and very much treading the path less beaten despite it's transparent lifting of the basic combat system from the 2012 XCOM game (2 actions/moves per unit per turn, directional cover based on half/full height and so on).

One of the most interesting features is that there's virtually no randomness whatsoever in combat. Each character has a luck bar and health points. Most guns do 1 damage if you're hit in cover, 2 if you're hit in half cover and 4-5 if you're flanked or hit in the open. But instead of aim denoting a % chance roll on a 1-100 virtual dice when an enemy fires at you it deducts their aim from your luck exactly. So if you have 100 luck remaining then you know that you can afford to be fired at once or twice in the open and won't take damage. Of course if you misjudge and do get hit out of cover it's going to wipe out almost your whole health in one go.

Mechanically and systematically interesting and the art/voice acting is great fun. You don't see a lot of wild west games (presumably because people find genocide and mass theft distasteful or something, which probably explains why there aren't a whole lot of native americans featured) so this one stands out.

SafeAsMilk wrote:MattHunX, what is an example of a game that you think is competent, is of the same size/scope as Fallout 4 and was completed in the same length of time or less?

None, because the only games that are the size and scope of Fallout 4 are other Bethesda/Obsidian games and none of them feel complete and competent. And I do think that the size of it plays a significant part in it. They wanna do too much and none of it is done to its full potential. That's why comments say it's average or sub-par, because it has a lot of stuff in it, but none of it is what it should or could be. Oh, sure, they have content and a sizable world. Well, none of that matters if there is no cohesion with other elements that make a strong whole. None of their titles make a strong whole. Everything is mediocre. Without extensive modding, none of their titles are anything special. Certainly not the kind of special that some critics and fans so are nauseatingly fawning about it for. But, they're satisfied with it, because none of the things that negative critics take issue with are issues to them.

That's why I was annoyed when I read about the development of Dragon Age Inquisition. That Bioware said they took cues from Skyrim and stuff. Don't! And it didn't/doesn't work or even matter. Did it need those huge areas, stretches of land that you can ride along and circle around for the spawns. NO! Half of that would've been enough. Meanwhile they needed patches to fix abilities that didn't work properly from the get go. Oh, a patch came out! What, that ability wasn't even working up til now!? Great. Couldn't even do proper shading for character's hair, to make it look less like wax or just less disgusting. Needed a ReShade tool, that is like SweetFX, to override the lighting, anti-aliasing, color...etc. effects, because surprisingly a lot of big name developers can never get it right. But, they gave the players a big world to run around in endlessly, until they were either tired or bored. Or both. And I could also mention the loot system, loot pool and chance that often makes for an unrewarding loot system in a lot of games. When you, as the player, are often left wondering why you should even bother if they're giving you weak or useless items for your adventuring and efforts, that's not a good system. And the mandatory inflated prices you can sell your loot for, that they purposefully do the same way, every time. So, in this case, it isn't even incompetence, but the developers being dicks and totally unfair, on purpose. Something that also has to change to make the games better and feel more rewarding. They either can't learn, or don't want to, because they can't think and see things through the eyes of players. They just can't. And no other developer is more of a proof for this than Bethesda. After a decade they make the same system, same elements, with the same mistakes, with the modders having to correct or tweak that same things to make it right. If they'd learn from feedback or if they'd think like gamers, they would improve. And they just don't.

The Witcher 3 was a game with the size and scope of a Bethesda game which was highly competent and looked the part graphically, as in looks like it's from 2015. I don't think much of Fallout 4's graphics at all from what I've seen and some of the time stopping animations look awkward.

I haven't played it myself yet because I waiting 'til the price is so low it's not going to sting if I think it sucks like every other Bethesda game I've played. Their games tend to be clunky, the acting terrible, the fighting mechanics rubbish, and the worlds uninteresting. I don't really get their popularity at all. I would've been more inclined to give Fallout 3 a 6 and Skyrim a go in a clay pigeon trap.

I don't want to get dragged too much into this, but my side is closer to Matt's. The difference being I've never played with mods and don't think I could be bothered.

How does PoE stack against Divinity: Original Sin?

I can't help there, I haven't got around to getting past the tutorial in D:OS yet. I keep getting distracted before I can get absorbed.

They were both well received, I think D:OS is probably more innovative from what I can tell, the combat system is quite cool, whereas the PoE is more or less lifted from Baldur's gate.

I'm playing D:OS on PS4 at the mo'. It's really good. I like the way there are set enemies and a set level you can reach if you do everything. You can't grind. You have to plan your game out.

Animavore wrote:The Witcher 3 was a game with the size and scope of a Bethesda game which was highly competent and looked the part graphically, as in looks like it's from 2015. I don't think much of Fallout 4's graphics at all from what I've seen and some of the time stopping animations look awkward.

I haven't played it myself yet because I waiting 'til the price is so low it's not going to sting if I think it sucks like every other Bethesda game I've played. Their games tend to be clunky, the acting terrible, the fighting mechanics rubbish, and the worlds uninteresting. I don't really get their popularity at all. I would've been more inclined to give Fallout 3 a 6 and Skyrim a go in a clay pigeon trap.

I don't want to get dragged too much into this, but my side is closer to Matt's. The difference being I've never played with mods and don't think I could be bothered.

Oh, I'm gonna be spending more time with compiling all the necessary god damn mods than with the game itself.

One thing I actually liked about Bethesda's games, is that at the character creation, you were a blank slate with minimal backstory that you could fill in with whatever you wanted. But, here, with this married couple with a child nonsense, it's already ruined from the start. What if my character's gay, or hates kids, or doesn't have army connections, like protagonist guy is said to have, or what if I don't want to start off as a mid 30's or 40's home-loving American with a ball and chain? Because even at the farthest end of the slider, the character faces always still look like middle-aged, as in previous games.

So, not only are they incapable of learning, they have managed to screw up the only element in their games that I actually liked very much.


Here is what they should have done. Just one simple idea.

At the beginning, it starts off with the player character standing in line as they're herded into the vault. Yeah. Like fucking cattle. We know the game's story. We know what the fuck's happening. And wool ain't radiation-proof! Here, before you can even see a reflection of yourself in a guard's either steely or sympathetic gaze, you choose a fucking class. Low, middle, upper...etc. and then, you'd be dressed as such, as you walk along and get some story, until they freeze your ass or whatever. And when you're thawed out, all you have is your cloths, drabs, suit, trainers...etc. that reflect your former social status. From there, you'll probably end up with a guard's lightly armored uniform or something, by the time you crawl out of the vault and be blinded by sunlight that instantly fills your retina's with the 200-odd years of photons you missed out on.

The Homeworld remastered collection is on the Steam sale for under a tenner. Couldn't help myself.

Me neither.
Also, I caved and bought PoE. So far, so absorbing.

I was given Bloodbourne for Christmas.....See y'all later.

Picked up Wasteland 2. Enjoying the crap out of it so far!