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Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden wants you to pick off stragglers with silent weapons before combat starts, then regularly gives enemies more HP than you can deal in one ambush turn if you could even guarantee you hit every shot.
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# ? Aug 12, 2019 23:40 |
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 00:26 |
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Seedge posted:Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden wants you to pick off stragglers with silent weapons before combat starts, then regularly gives enemies more HP than you can deal in one ambush turn if you could even guarantee you hit every shot. Yeah, I had to drop the game very early on due to this problem, I think it happened in this big encounter with enemies about level 5? there was a medic bot, a few pyromaniacs, a bunch of guys that just shred you down no matter whether you're in cover or not, i dont how the gently caress they expect you to get over such a hump in the road like that so early into the game. Also, like right across the map from that encounter was an encounter at some gas station where this bigass sign I was trying to sneak around stayed in the foreground and completely obscured my character. I had no camera control and the sign was completely opaque. No blue outline on my guy or nearby enemies. Get your poo poo together if you're gonna make a game like this.
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 01:09 |
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Yeah gently caress that game, it had so much promise and they just made it stupid hard because we're in the age of Dark Souls. I want to feel like a badass when playing games, not stress myself into breaking my controller/mouse out of frustration.
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 02:34 |
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New Leaf posted:Yeah gently caress that game, it had so much promise and they just made it stupid hard because we're in the age of Dark Souls. I want to feel like a badass when playing games, not stress myself into breaking my controller/mouse out of frustration. Isn't MYZ an XCOM-like? I haven't played it so I can't comment on difficulty, but if it's that kind of game I'd expect a certain different inspiration for them making the game punishingly difficult.
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 07:19 |
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The weird thing is the difficulty curve is all over the place. Once I got some armour, I've regularly fought bad guys who literally cannot hurt me. I no longer even bother to kill Marauders until last because they can't actually damage my characters, now. There's also the fact that levelling up your characters means sod all for making combat encounters easier, as it takes forever to gain useful skills.
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 08:11 |
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Speaking of xcom, is there any way to tell what the turn order will be, or how many moves the enemy will take before I'm back in control? It seems to be totally random whether the enemies move first or I move first in combat cycles. Sometimes the enemy moves in what seems like the middle of my turn and I don't really get how it works.
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 08:50 |
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CJacobs posted:Speaking of xcom, is there any way to tell what the turn order will be, or how many moves the enemy will take before I'm back in control? It seems to be totally random whether the enemies move first or I move first in combat cycles. Sometimes the enemy moves in what seems like the middle of my turn and I don't really get how it works. Normally enemies only move on your turn if you reveal, and activate a pod of them. Which X-Com are you playing? 2 has some enemies who break those rules (of nature)
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 09:16 |
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Seedge posted:Normally enemies only move on your turn if you reveal, and activate a pod of them. Which X-Com are you playing? 2 has some enemies who break those rules (of nature) AND YOU RUN TILL THE SUN GOES DOWN WITH YOUR LIFE ON THE LINE
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 09:23 |
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Seedge posted:Normally enemies only move on your turn if you reveal, and activate a pod of them. Which X-Com are you playing? 2 has some enemies who break those rules (of nature) I was speaking of 2. A thing dragging it down for me I guess is that there are enemies who can essentially take two full turns but it seems like sometimes they don't? It's hard to plan around enemy turns when they seemingly don't make use of the whole thing. I dunno, maybe I'm misunderstanding that too.
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 10:07 |
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bad uis really drag a game down for me. recent example: age of wonders planetfall, which by all rights should be exactly the kind of game i love, but the interface is an absolute mess to try and get anything done. numbers and symbols all over with little explanation, unit orders sticking to your mouse even after you confirm them, little poo poo like that that adds up and just makes me want to play something else
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 10:56 |
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As far as 4X games go, Planetfall has one of the most readable UIs I've seen.
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 11:01 |
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i guess i don't play many because it's a gross mess
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 11:01 |
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CJacobs posted:I was speaking of 2. A thing dragging it down for me I guess is that there are enemies who can essentially take two full turns but it seems like sometimes they don't? It's hard to plan around enemy turns when they seemingly don't make use of the whole thing. I dunno, maybe I'm misunderstanding that too. Bad aliens mostly run off the same rules as you: two action points on their turn, one can be used to move, one to shoot or other things. If you move into range of an inactive group, they get a free move to get out of the open, then their two actions the next turn. sebmojo posted:AND YOU RUN TILL THE SUN GOES DOWN Dang tootin'
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 12:00 |
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I bounced off of Xcom 2 a couple of times until I got used to how enemy actions work. It's not in any way random so once you get the hang of it you can keep the aliens locked down pretty easily even with them getting a slight turn advantage.
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 12:21 |
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Although I love XCOM(/2) dearly, they definitely have key mechanics that are really unintuitive for newcomers (free alien movements and certain cover mechanics to name a few). Another questionable decision is including several small newbie traps (oh, you tried to hit a muton with sword, take damage).
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 12:56 |
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one thing ive thought about with xcom is that maybe people might be more amicable to a "1 in y" style odds rather than "x% chance to hit" after shoving my face into some combat math for games i came away deciding percentages, in all forms, are Evil. we really badly want to think of them as linear values but instead they scale in really outrageous ways and in different contexts but overall don't really offer much depth to the systems since the scaling means that you really always want to get things to outrageous highs rather than trying to even things out. But you have to slice the data a real weird way to understand why. Like if you have Bob, and he has a 100% chance to get hit if shot at, and Beth, who has a 50% chance, and you have a -50% chance to be hit defensive ability to throw on either of them, its better to put it on Beth. It doesn't matter in terms of "overall chance to get hit" (assuming you don't know who is going to get shot at), or "expected incoming damage", but it matters a ton if you read it as "expected incoming hits required to kill both of them", since putting it on Bob increases that by like, 25% or something, but putting the bonus on Beth improves it by plus infinity since nothing can hurt her. Even in less extreme values, like a -2% chance to be hit, can oscillate in value wildly depending on the context. Going from 100% chance to be hit to 98% is going from "1 in 1 chance to be hit" to "1 in 1.02", but 20% to 18% goes from "1 in 5" to "1 in 5.56", which may not be as accurate in some ways but at least presents the relative increase in survivability in a more appreciably linear fashion. Anyways my pyf little thing, is that xcom 2 hacking sucks and im too lazy to mod it to something less annoying. percentage chance to hit something is fine, but when its "percentage chance to make a robot stunned, or chance to waste your turn and make the robot even more of a lethal threat" it makes it the only thing i still savescum like a big baby because fuuuuuuck
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 13:01 |
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i might have mentioned it before but the proper feeling to have when playing the xcoms is you want to tear out your hair at all times
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 13:25 |
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I just started playing Days Gone and I'm both plesantly surprised because I really didn't expect anything at first and disappointed because enough people told me it was worth picking up on sale that I started to get a little hyped. I'm a couple of hours in, so maybe this changes as the game progresses, but one of the most annoying things is how the game really manages to make you feel like a scavenger in a post-apocalyptic world (you want to use stealth, you want to save bullets, you want to avoid using gas, you want to srounge for melee weapons), but it does it in the worst loving ways. Yes, the game will make you think twice before using precious bullets, but not because bullets are rare, rather because you can only carry 2 extra magazines. You want to save gas, but not because it's hard to find, because a full tank will carry you about a single mile. There's a LOT of gas and bullets to go around, you just can't carry them with you. Instead of making the world seem hostile it makes your character seem weak. The zombie apocalypse also made a bunch of ramps just pop out of nowhere...
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 13:37 |
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Honestly the thing that bugs me most in XCOM is the weird "If you can't see them they can't see you" rules for enemy activation. I get why they do it and I know the game would have to be dramatically redesigned to get rid of it, but the fact that being able to see more of the map is a bad thing, and high level play requires carefully limiting what you can see until you're ready is so awkward and counter-intuitive.
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 13:58 |
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Snake Maze posted:Honestly the thing that bugs me most in XCOM is the weird "If you can't see them they can't see you" rules for enemy activation. I get why they do it and I know the game would have to be dramatically redesigned to get rid of it, but the fact that being able to see more of the map is a bad thing, and high level play requires carefully limiting what you can see until you're ready is so awkward and counter-intuitive.
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 15:57 |
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Cleretic posted:Isn't MYZ an XCOM-like? I haven't played it so I can't comment on difficulty, but if it's that kind of game I'd expect a certain different inspiration for them making the game punishingly difficult. It is and it isn't. I mean, yes, it's a tactical turn based cover shooter, but you don't have a big squad like XCom with other people that cycle in. With this game you have 2, maybe 3 characters at a time (at least in the early going) and you're fighting groups of 5-10. Plus, there's a lot more stealth and positioning involved rather than the XCom style of just clashing in the middle and hoping you have cover. I played XCom and XCom 2 to completion and didn't have nearly this level of difficulty or frustration.
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# ? Aug 13, 2019 16:06 |
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I've put about 200 hours in Stellaris and I realized something: I have never actually managed to research mega engineering, which is a perk of one of the DLCs that I got. Typically I start snowballing and get bored and restart. I have decided to cheat just to get the drat tech, but I didn't cheat for the tech itself, I used cheats to finish researching my current research which will reroll my choices. It took 25 rerolls before the mega engineering tech showed up. This is with the ascension trait that increases rare techs, having a ruined ringworld in my sector, having voidborne ascension, and a voidcraft scientist. Its also an expensive tech in itself to research so that would take forever if I wasn't bored and just cheated. So finally I get mega engineering research... and then I gotta wait for mega constructions, which are also rare techs, to finally pop up in my research tree so I can spend a long time researching those, then finally get the massive amounts of alloys needed to finally build one, which also takes a long rear end time to build. Oh and if you want to build certain other mega structures, you need to build one of the ones you can unlock with mega engineering and then use an ascension slot to There is so much time and waiting going on that I struggle to see the point of even pursuing them cause by then you'll have the entire galaxy conquered. Cybrex went from my most wanted precursor start to dead last because whats the point of an extra ring world (oh btw you are only limited to 1 of the mega constructions) when it comes so late in the game any perks from it can be made up by everything I've done up to that point? E: Oh and because they come so late, all the other empires are running around blowing eachother up and moving their fleets all over the place which slows the game down, making it take even longer. Leal has a new favorite as of 17:05 on Aug 13, 2019 |
# ? Aug 13, 2019 16:46 |
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Ducktales Remastered: Got this one before it was legally banished to the moon. Was it really necessary for every level be punctuated with cutscenes? Couldn't they have had an option to disable cutscenes before-hand for speedrunning and better game-flow? I guess it's amusing they could reunite the original voice-cast, most of whom have since died since the game's release, but it does sort of make you feel sad at the passage of time. Imagine if Sean Connery was forced to play Bond in every movie; growing visibly older, balder, fatter, and tanner with every installment. Firing at henchman with rockets with his high-tech zimmer-frame. Inspector Gesicht has a new favorite as of 02:52 on Aug 14, 2019 |
# ? Aug 14, 2019 01:34 |
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I appreciate the note-for-note remake quality of that, but I wish they'd included (or had a mode with) those kinds of options and tweaked mechanics, it feels kind of incongruous with the new looks but the aging gameplay. Also, along the latter lines, never play the GC-era From Russia With Love
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# ? Aug 14, 2019 01:52 |
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Snake Maze posted:Honestly the thing that bugs me most in XCOM is the weird "If you can't see them they can't see you" rules for enemy activation. I get why they do it and I know the game would have to be dramatically redesigned to get rid of it, but the fact that being able to see more of the map is a bad thing, and high level play requires carefully limiting what you can see until you're ready is so awkward and counter-intuitive. I can almost appreciate mid-turn pod activations as a kind of thing that adds some tension and randomness (though even then you get weird and obnoxious edge cases like activating pods because a random thing exploded or burned down and opened line of sight), but the fact that you can accidentally move one square too far as the last action of your turn, which then reveals and activates a bunch of enemies you had no way of preparing for or reacting to...yeah, that blows. The fact that line of sight in general is such a huge deal in those games but they never found a way to actually communicate that information is a real problem. See also: Moving a soldier to a piece of cover and then it turns out that due to some arbitrary nonsense they can't actually see the giant gently caress-off Muton standing a few feet away. John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 02:48 on Aug 14, 2019 |
# ? Aug 14, 2019 02:45 |
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God eater is doing a incredibly good job reminding me why certain things are the way they are in monster hunter. Having very fast and fluid controls means that most things dont feel threatening and the fact that it costs barely anything to make a new weapon fights are like, 5 minutes at most, 10 if its one of the actually dangerous ones that show up once a tier. Things die really fast in a tiny zone and i swear i have spent more time in the game listening to the inane story than actually fighting things and its really hitting home just how important it is to make your monster dangerous in the context of what your player can do. Even dauntless does this better than god eater and i would easily recommend it over it as a lighter, quicker to go monster hunter game
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# ? Aug 14, 2019 02:47 |
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A bit of a weird one, linked to the other thread: I really wish that Soul Calibur was either a little bit less horny, or a little bit more horny. Right now it's in this weird valley where the sexual undercurrent is too strong for you to possibly ignore, but they never actually address it directly, and it gives those games a weird feel of someone who's trying to sell this genuine product but can't help but fill it with things that you can tell were mostly there to appeal to them sexually. Like Tarantino's foot stuff or Chris Claremont's interest in mind control, only instead of niche fetishism it's just straight-up straight male vanilla horniness. It makes talking about those games very weird and difficult sometimes, because it's always the elephant in the room. I could handle if they scaled it back to the level of most of the other big fighting games, where they've clearly got some female characters made to appeal to men but it's not overwhelming (I think Soul Calibur left that when they released, like, 3; it feels like Tira and the create-a-characters pushed them over the edge). Either that or we let them spend just one game letting it all flow over and sexualize things all they want, there's definitely an audience for that too, and it might get things out of their system. Right now it's all just kinda creepy, and I'd feel a lot more comfortable if they either stepped back or just went full-force instead.
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# ? Aug 14, 2019 11:08 |
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Ducktales Remastered: Got this one before it was legally banished to the moon. Was it really necessary for every level be punctuated with cutscenes? Couldn't they have had an option to disable cutscenes before-hand for speedrunning and better game-flow? (twin peaks season 3 is an incredible work of art but christ)
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# ? Aug 14, 2019 12:14 |
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Zoig posted:God eater is doing a incredibly good job reminding me why certain things are the way they are in monster hunter. Having very fast and fluid controls means that most things dont feel threatening and the fact that it costs barely anything to make a new weapon fights are like, 5 minutes at most, 10 if its one of the actually dangerous ones that show up once a tier. Things die really fast in a tiny zone and i swear i have spent more time in the game listening to the inane story than actually fighting things and its really hitting home just how important it is to make your monster dangerous in the context of what your player can do. When you say God Eater, are you referring to the first one, or the series in general? As a huge Monster Hunter fan, I've always been interested in the God Eater series (as well as other ones like Toukiden) but I never made the leap yet due to fear of your mentioned problems. Just wondering if the problems are prevalent even in the latest entries, or if they've got better at it.
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# ? Aug 14, 2019 15:02 |
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FutureCop posted:When you say God Eater, are you referring to the first one, or the series in general? As a huge Monster Hunter fan, I've always been interested in the God Eater series (as well as other ones like Toukiden) but I never made the leap yet due to fear of your mentioned problems. Just wondering if the problems are prevalent even in the latest entries, or if they've got better at it. I have played all three and they never fix this, they just add more systems and subsystems but theres always a underlying current of bad writing and bad gameplay design. In fact its even worse in the more recent one because all those subsystems make you very powerful and they have steadily removed more interesting subsystems, like bullet creation, which while still there is so neutered you cant do anything interesting while still being capable of making a bullet that can instantly kill anything in one shot, although you only get one shot. They also removed the devour bullets that let you copy a move the monster does and shoot it back, presumably because it shared ammo with link bust bullets that could power up teammates and nobody used it because its really boring to use them for that. I would very much not reccomend the series because compared to monster hunter it really doesnt have anything going for it. The reason I brought up dauntless is because its a example of how to fit in alongside monster hunter as it at least has a niche being free to play and way easier to get into. God eater has being very anime and a sorta interesting world but its filled with people so incomprehensibly stupid and inhuman that it undermines that, with some really lame writing.
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# ? Aug 14, 2019 15:42 |
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I play a number of what I've seen dubbed 'action-hunter' games. God Eater has a neat world, but the combat is too fluid and lacks the weight that fighting giant monsters should have. It's like some action-packed anime, but without cool moves, and you of course just have to fight the monsters over and over again while dealing with inane characters and plot beats. I played the second one for a couple months and all I really remember is some bloody rain and swinging a giant scythe around like it was a baseball bat. Dauntless is basically stripped-down Monster Hunter that really boils down the game to its essentials - there's a weapon of each type for each monster, and one armor set for each monster. Barring single pieces of unique equipment called 'artifacts' gained in the late-game, that's it. It's simple, gets some of the elements right, but the combat design isn't very good and just deals with dodging through monster attacks for half the battle and running after the monster for the other half. Seriously, the worst monsters in that game have you spending all your stamina simply running after them. Also they included the 'search for the monster' pre-fight part from MH without any of the fun stuff to do while hunting for the monster, like gathering useful materials and finding new areas. Toukiden is one of my non-MH favourites (never played the sequel, been waiting for it to go on sale on the Vita in vain) for the style and combat mechanics, but the monster design is pretty weak. It's been a while since I've played it, but I remember fighting a number of bipedal 'monsters' that just felt weird to fight. Also some of the weapons require incredibly rare drops from monsters that almost never show up (unless, of course, you buy the DLC missions), which is frustrating. Soul Sacrifice is one of the best due to style alone, but even after beating it I never felt like I had a lot of fun with the combat - it's hard to tell if you're doing any significant damage to the monster, or even if you're striking the weakpoints correctly. I always felt like the battles went on for too long without me feeling like I made any progress, despite having what should be the monsters weaknesses equipped on some high-level attacks. But there are some really cool mechanics to the game and the design is top notch. It's funny how none of the games in the genre have been able to match up to Monster Hunter, especially MH World. I feel like MH encapsulates what makes the genre really excellent, and no one wants to be too similar to it in case they get dubbed MH clones, but since it's kind of the ideal for the genre, moving away from it makes for a less-than-optimal experience. Maybe that's my personal preference, but I don't think I've ever seen a game dubbed as something better than MH.
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# ? Aug 14, 2019 15:56 |
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What about toukiden? e: well timed post
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# ? Aug 14, 2019 15:56 |
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drat I'd love a new Soul Sacrifice on Switch.
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# ? Aug 14, 2019 16:02 |
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The radio guy in Farcry 4 is really annoying.
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# ? Aug 14, 2019 16:30 |
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Soul Sacrifice Delta is great. I was iffy on the original but Delta fixed a lot of my issues with it, although the backstories for all the new monsters were reeeaaaaaallllly bad, which is unfortunate because I did enjoy reading the ones from the original even though they were very grimdark. Or maybe because they were very grimdark. The trick to truly enjoying soul sacrifice is to equip one of the spells that turns your roll into a blink/teleport thing and just GO NUTS with that. You can move insanely fast all the time once you get the higher level ones.
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# ? Aug 14, 2019 16:44 |
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Whenever I played Soul Sacrifice I felt like I was constantly running on empty well before I was able to kill the monster, with all the moves being ammo based. At least when it was a monster I was on the right part of the exp curve for. Maybe I just sucked at that game, idk. Other than that SSDelta was a pretty amazing game.
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# ? Aug 14, 2019 21:58 |
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A few years ago, around when it came out for Wii U, I played Bayonetta and thought it had some pretty bullshit design decisions for such a well received game. Mainly the way it laid out combos and how its enemies are infuriatingly just this side of too quick and able to gang up on you much too readily and its incredible stinginess with health. Eventually I dropped it partway through, moving on to Bayonetta 2 which was much better designed in all those ways. All this time I distincly remembered one of the early two-elemental-claw-guys fights as the point where I finally went gently caress this. Something like level III? Some days ago I dug it back out and gave it another go. Played up to that fight, beat it fairly easily, realized I dimly recognized the area after it. And the next level. And cutscenes, and the following encounters with even more bullshit enemies, and I'm at level X or XI now and have been waiting for the other shoe to drop for 3/4 of the game because every time I think now I must have hit the fight that actually did make me quit, it turns out not to be the one, but they're all still bullshit and it's gotta be coming up any moment and I'm really apprehensive about it.
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# ? Aug 15, 2019 12:39 |
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My Lovely Horse posted:A few years ago, around when it came out for Wii U, I played Bayonetta and thought it had some pretty bullshit design decisions for such a well received game. Mainly the way it laid out combos and how its enemies are infuriatingly just this side of too quick and able to gang up on you much too readily and its incredible stinginess with health. Eventually I dropped it partway through, moving on to Bayonetta 2 which was much better designed in all those ways. All this time I distincly remembered one of the early two-elemental-claw-guys fights as the point where I finally went gently caress this. Something like level III? Platinum gives different enemy spawns on different difficulty levels, so it's entirely possible that you're just playing on a difficulty level without the fight you're thinking of. But I don't think that's it. If it's the fight I'm thinking of, and I think it is, it's still in store. There's another fight against upgraded versions of Grace and Glory, the claw enemies, on a staircase. And you don't get to use Witch Time against the upgraded versions.
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# ? Aug 15, 2019 12:48 |
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I got XCOM 2 and all of the DLC packs while they were on sale a few days ago. I'm still fairly early into the game, having enough game time to research a few corpses, start building the Proving Grounds room, and raise a couple soldiers to Corporal rank. When I got a DLC mission to track down Dr. Vahlen, the head scientist from the first game, I took it eagerly. The mission went pretty smoothly. It was essentially a long corridor with a lot of easy enemies and a special XCOM soldier who was more powerful than anyone else on my squad by far. Once I got to the final room in the corridor, an ice filled cave just inside of a desert location in North Africa, I figured it was time for a boss fight. Out comes the Viper King, a new type of enemy called a Ruler. Unlike normal enemies, who only move on the alien turn and get the standard 2 actions per turn, Rulers get "Ruler Reactions," a free action every time an XCOM agent takes an action. now, by this time, I had the DLC weapons with a high stun chance, so I was able to hold him off until he ran away. I still don't like that kind of action economy fuckery, since, to me, unlimited automatic free actions in a turn based game breaks it completely, but, hey, it was a DLC fight with more missions in that DLC telegraphed, so I figured, that's fine, I'll hold off on DLC missions until I get better equipped to deal with him, since one character made it pretty clear I'd be seeing the bastard again. A couple missions later, I'm down to a couple of grenadiers and a handful of rookies due to other agents getting wounded. A couple of event missions popped up, both of which needed to be handled or I'd face additional challenges in further missions, only one of which I could choose. I take the one with the penalty I'd most like to avoid, and since it's ranked as easy, I'm pretty confident sending in my mostly rookie squad. After all, I've already handled easy missions with fewer and worse resources. It goes pretty well. I push my way to the object point by point, luckily avoiding being seen by a mech and advent officer on an overpass when I climbed up to them. The objective gets cleared and I'm down to one viper, who ran away to the back of the map. I follow him to clean up the mission, and then... The Viper King appears with reinforcements. I don't have any DLC weapons with me on this map. After all, I wasn't expecting this fucker to show up in a non-DLC mission. Even with a strategy of hunkering down and just shooting, limiting the amount of reactions I gave him, he still singlehandedly wipes my team in three rounds. Not even save scumming helps. I wouldn't mind it if reactions were randomized, or were reactions to attacks only, or something like that. Letting a character break the game's own rules by giving it off-turn actions after every enemy action, though, is pretty bullshit.
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# ? Aug 15, 2019 15:32 |
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 00:26 |
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now you know - the rulers are each assigned to a facility to guard. They wont pop up on random missions (though the Chosen will)
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# ? Aug 15, 2019 15:43 |