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Kaiju Cage Match posted:Mass Effect has a lot of inspiration from 80s and 90s scifi. I can imagine Krogans being played by dudes in cumbersome suits. IIRC the first Mass Effect had a film grain filter you could turn on specifically to make it look more like an old sci-fi show or movie. Nephthys fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 19:55
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One way in which microtransactions are such an issue is that gaming in general is a uniquely interactive medium. When someone just advertises to you about a normal product it's easy to ignore for the most part because you don't generally have a pressing need for that product. But when you're playing a game you're expected to get very invested in it for a long period of time. This puts you in a unique situation where you know that content is being locked off from something you're actively engaging in that makes you more willing to spend. But because there's no other industry like it there aren't regulations in place to make sure it isn't predatory. Movies aren't 40 hours long, easily adjustable to each individual's wants and direct-debit accessible to kids. Unfortunately I think the only way to really fight this is going to be incremental changes. If lootboxes etc can be acknowledged and then regulated as gambling this can then open up other parts of the industry to examination and regulation. Pretty much the only real way forward I think.
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Sep 27, 2020 11:28
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One thing Surge 1 has over the sequel is that the atmosphere and plot is infinitely better. The gameplay in 2 is better but I found it really hard to care about what was happening in the game because it was just nonsensical drivel.
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Oct 6, 2020 15:06
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Cardiovorax posted:Overall, it's good and I'm looking forward to playing more of it. I played through Spellforce 3 earlier this year and it was one of the most pleasant surprises I've had in a while. It's a really good overlooked game. It's solid as an RPG and while the base-building isn't as fleshed out as a full RTS it majes for a nice compliment to the party based gameplay. The story was also surprisingly competent. I'd skip the first DLC Soul Harvest though, it has a plot point that completely shits on the main games story and it soured me so much I stopped playing almost immediately. I'll be playing the new DLC however! I also got pretty into the lore from all the previous games. The game becomes a lot cooler when you know that the game is a prequel and your party member's are the villains from the first games. There are a lot of hints at how they end up where they do.
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Nov 6, 2020 09:16
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:Umineko So I'm also going through Umineko right now, midway through Chapter 3 just watching a lets play on youtube between answering phones and I have something that's kind of bothering me that I hope can be answered without spoilers: How much does the perspective actually 'cheat'? I know the outright magic poo poo can't be trusted but if the game goes out of its way to show that a character is locked in a room somewhere else while someone is being murdered, can I actually trust that the game is establishing that a character that looks like them is in that room? The guy playing seems to think that literally nothing happening on the screen has any basis in reality if it isn't in red and that just seems like a really tedious way to do a mystery to me. No problem if this can't be answered without spoilers.
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Nov 13, 2020 23:01
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explosivo posted:Hows Mankind Divided for $5 ? I liked Human Rev a lot but remember the newer one getting a lukewarm reception. It has good map design and the core gameplay is still okay but everything else is a step down from Human Rev. That's still a decent game so it's definitely worth the $5 but you may end up getting pretty frustrated at the lost potential and tediously on the nose racism allegory. I ended up dropping it as I was getting near the end and losing motivation. A sequel is also unlikely so that's even less reason to care about the plot, when it was already a super unnecessary sequel.
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Nov 25, 2020 20:47
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Anyone who has any interest in tactical turn-based gameplay should be playing Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children. It's easily the best nuXCOM game I've played, even better than the actual XCOM games being released. The gameplay is extremely addicting and the mechanics are very deep yet intuitive. The only downside is that its on sale atm and the devs deserve twice what the game is at full price for what its offering.
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Nov 28, 2020 00:19
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Det_no posted:Is that game still a graveyard of poorly translated, half-baked gameplay systems? Nah, they cleaned the translation up pretty well. There is still a bit of goofy language and phrasing but its easily understandable and often endearing more than anything. The game has had a lot of content added as well, its hard to call anything half-baked. It's easily got over 100 hours of content in it.
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Nov 28, 2020 00:31
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Trickyblackjack posted:Question about Battle Brothers and Troubleshooters in terms of how they handle the Tactics Game Death Spiral: In Battle Brothers if your guys get very low in battle then they will get injuries like losing a nose or a wound which impacts their ability to continue fighting. If they actually die they have a chance to survive with an injury or they do just die. You can buy replacements easily, but expect to pay a lot if you want something more than a peasant. A total wipe means game over. So there is totally an element of a death spiral where some runs will be abandoned. Troubleshooter has your characters with a motivation bar and getting knocked out will lower their motivation. But this just means that you can buy them a beer afterwards (or a soda for the underage character, lol) to perk them up. There is no other penalty to losing a mission or abandoning it halfway through other than losing some items collected in the mission which you can still buy back. You're encouraged to try out new builds or jump into missions specifically to farm one enemy. The game gets really tough as even though the skill system allows you to make your characters into nigh-immortal superheroes, the enemy design and AI will get better through the game at almost the same rate to still be able to challenge and surprise you. So there being functionally no penalty for a character getting knocked out is great imo. Nephthys fucked around with this message at 10:55 on Nov 28, 2020 |
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Nov 28, 2020 10:52
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Yikes, yeah the AI in Empire of Sin seems to be pretty dreadful. I'm watching Quill18 streaming it and he tried to suicide attack another boss day 1 of the game for fun and actually won because the AI decided to just do nothing for a few turns before trying to run up and punch his characters through overwatch. Such a shame, the game looked really cool up until that point. I think I'll put it next to Necromunda on the list of games to check out in 6 months. Nephthys fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Dec 1, 2020 |
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Dec 1, 2020 21:27
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Azran posted:I'm loving Troubleshooter but some of the mission design is baaaaaaaaaad. Like, I can forgive some jank due to budget constraints, but there's a mission in the late-late game that's basically the equivalent of Ramza's duel in FFT - you need a very, very specific build and some RNG to win or you're stuck. For more non-spoilery details: Yeah the game isn't afraid of getting hard. It's honestly one of the few of these kinds of games where the enemies are able to keep pace with you throughout the game. You can expect more of those fire support guys in the future btw. Are you doing the mission with Albus and Isaac?. I also had to retry that mission a few times. I think the way I managed to do it was to go south and make heavy use of upgraded smoke grenades. If you don't get some of those on the NPCs you can craft them and stick them on your MC. Maybe check if there's a way to make your MC more resistant to ranged fire too, it's going to get more important the farther into the game as you fight more snipers and Bicrons.
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Dec 6, 2020 10:50
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Azran posted:Something else I don't like about Troubleshooter: no mid-battle saves, just checkpoints. You either restart from a checkpoint that may or may not be useful or you start over your 30-40 minute fight. If you exit the game, it does save wherever you are though, which is something. But given this game absolutely loves one-shotting your units (there's no way to revive downed units mid-battle) and throw at you the ocassional mid-mission surprise? It sucks. Yeah that can be tough. At least you get to keep all the masteries and can buy back the gear you get. You can also radically speed up the combat in the options menu so that everything moves very fast. Guess who only figured that out after 100 hours of the game!  If I remember you're basically at the end of the game. Don't be afraid to check out some endgame builds in the steam discussions. I have to admit to copying a lot of my set up from people with more free time than me figuring it out. It's a great game for making you feel like your characters are really strong but also you're up against incredible odds.
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Dec 6, 2020 12:07
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God drat, did everyone just forget how to handle bugs or something? Nobody freaked out this much when Fallout 4 or Witcher 3 released buggy as hell so these bugs in Cyberpunk better be some real game-breaking stuff or this is looking like another gamer meltdown moment for the history books.
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Dec 13, 2020 00:30
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Hwurmp posted:are there ninjas that don't murder Naruto.
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Dec 21, 2020 15:19
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Angry Lobster posted:It's Mordheim good enough for five bucks? I'm familiar with the setting but I remember hearing it was bad/janky at release. I'd term it as good/janky now. It's not a particularly pretty game and some of the mechanics are questionable but if you can look passed that its a compelling game. I've been trying to play Necromunda again and man is it a stark difference between that and Mordheim. The new DLC adding the Van Saar brought me back because they looked cool and I heard that the AI had improved. The Van Saar are indeed just about cool enough to get me to keep playing. It feels like I'm playing as a sci-fi spec ops squad going up against a bunch of mad max gangs. The games visuals are great compared to Mordheim. Also the actual skill and ability system in the game is good, I've started to work out various synergies with the classes unique abilities which is pretty rewarding. But holy poo poo has the AI not improved nearly enough to be passable. It still gets stuck on objects, wastes its turns applying useless buffs and rushes the objective to stand right in the open. It is exceedingly rare that I get attacked at all. To make it in any way challenging I went up against gangs twice my level with equipment 2-3 times better than what I have and I still won the first battle with some difficulty and then I've smashed them ever since since I stole a bunch of their weapons. The problem isn't just the AI. Mordheim has a great and challenging campaign where you fight random warbands to get loot and exp in between each factions story missions. Necromunda has a boring campaign with set characters which they locked cosmetics behind. If you want to run your own gang you start an Operation. You go up against 2-3 gangs each Operation you start and you fight them over and over until the Operation is over. Which means that if you win a fight and steal everyones weapons then at least a few will have to go into the next fight without a weapon which means you win even easier and steal even more of their poo poo. You need to purposefully limit yourself to not doing that to allow the AI to compete which it still can't do because it just cannot handle the game mechanics. Mordheim has a great system where a character getting downed has a good chance to be crippling or lethal but with the morale mechanics you can still lose and continue and the AI can keep up with the player because you can't steal all their weapons before they run away and its rarely worth stealing their weapons anyway. Necromunda is way less lethal but with the game being so easy and no morale in play that really just gives the player more of a chance to loot and snowball out of control. They even give you a looting round which just means you win even more easily. If they could fix the AI a lot of these problems might get better but I'm really not sure they can. I want to like the game but between the terrible AI and the fundamental flaws with the game the only real joy in the game is in playing dress up and optimising your guys which is fun I'll grant you. Mordheim sidesteps all of these issues and has decent AI which is why its fundamentally a much better designed game even if it is showing its age. Nephthys fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Dec 22, 2020 |
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Dec 22, 2020 18:37
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Helical Nightmares posted:Owning both Necromunda and Mordheim, I highly recommend Mordheim (particularly at $4) but I cannot say the same for Necromunda because the enemy AI doesn't bother attacking most of the time. The maps for Necromunda are really creative though, I will say that. Honestly I half-suspect that the creativity of the maps is part of the problem with the AI. They're too open and vertical for the AI to work out how to navigate it while staying safe from the ranged fire. Especially with how wonky movement is in the game.
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Dec 22, 2020 20:30
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MarcusSA posted:Anyone have any opinions on One of my Top 5 games ever. It's the real Baldur's Gate 3, whether that's a good or bad thing depends on your tastes. It's a real level 1-20 epic adventure that gives you the experience of founding, building and running a kingdom on top of the 3.5 D&D (which is essentially what Pathfinder is) gameplay. The writing is strong for the genre too. Looking up some character build guides and installing the Bag of Tricks mod is highly recommended. It's also amazingly progressive for a russian developer. Even Bioware has never let you pursue a bisexual polyamous relationship like this one does.
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Dec 22, 2020 21:35
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Cardiovorax posted:Gotta admit, you're not really selling me on this. If there's one thing I'm really not looking for in an RPG, it's "Bioware 'romance' writing, but even more like a smutty dollar store novel." Not really sure why you assume a poly relationship has to be smutty, but it's really not. There's nothing explicit, just innuendo and fade to black's and then the 3 of you get married in the end. I mentioned Bioware since they tout their progressive-ism so much. You don't have to romance anyone of course, I just like mentioning it since it was such a pleasant surprise. There is a raunchy romance in the game but it's kind of unintentionally so and I still don't think it's explicit. Nephthys fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Dec 22, 2020 |
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Dec 22, 2020 22:45
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Cardiovorax posted:Sorry, that might be a bit of personal sore spot. The stereotype of the oversexed and shallow bisexual who can never be faithful to a single person because he always wants to be with both men and women is older than I am, and I'm not very happy about how much your description resembles that prejudice. Understandable. The romance is actually with 2 characters who start in a long-term open relationship before meeting you. You can romance either of them or both in a 3-way relationship and you can end up married so it's not a frivolous depiction. It's not perfect representation but I found it pretty refreshing.
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Dec 22, 2020 23:16
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Ragequit posted:Regarding Pathfinder You can adjust it in the menu whenever you want. The difficulty isn't nearly that bad anymore. I had to increase the difficulty even. Anything you fight that seems super hard can be fought later if you level up and come back. The only exception is an early cave where you fight a swarm for a timed sidequest. Swarms only take 1 pt of damage unless you use aoe's so that cave tends to mess unprepared people up. Bring alchemist fire and its fine.
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Dec 23, 2020 19:57
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Volte posted:I like both PoE2 and Kingmaker and the writing of PoE2 is clearly more thoughtful and complex, but playing Kingmaker made me realize that for a CRPG that I might play in fits and starts I actually appreciate the simplicity and straightforwardness of Kingmaker and it's characters. Every time I go back to PoE2 I have to start over because I can't remember who anyone is or which moral grey areas each faction occupies. Both games are good and they're pretty different games tbh. Pathfinder is an epic large scale adventure that stays very true to the Baldurs Gate formula even with the modernisations. You found a kingdom, make sweeping decisions about how its run and who lives there and have long-term relationships with your companions over actual in game years. There really isn't many games that go that far anymore.
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Dec 24, 2020 21:36
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As someone who very much enjoys vancian magic systems and the per rest mechanics of classic isometric games I found PoE1 to be more my style than PoE2.The companions are also way better imo which is a big draw in any RPG for me. Deadfire has the better setting and isn't near as dry as PoE1 is but tbh both games have pretty garbo main quests. Considering the near obsession with game balance it's also really surprising how easy Deadfire is in general too. You can get near level 10 with barely any combat and the per fight mechanics made combat a cakewalk if you know what you're doing. I didn't even use the empower thing since it was so unneeded. Nephthys fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Dec 25, 2020 |
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Dec 25, 2020 17:19
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Cardiovorax posted:I'm personally more and more convinced that Planescape was a fluke, not a sign of any actual talent, so I'm putting my money on it just being a Chris Avellone thing. He was also lead writer for Kotor 2 and Alpha Protocol. Oxxidation posted:at his best avellone is great at turning a phrase and maintaining strong thematic consistency in his writing, planescape bloviated a fair bit but was still decent overall and dead money was even better Not entirely. You can own the character he wrote for Pillars so hard that he has an existential crisis and decides to murder the god he'd dedicated his life to. The best part of having Durance in the party is dunking on him constantly. Also rather than resenting the rest of the game the writing in Kotor 2 has some of the most organic instances of being meta I've seen in a game. The scene where you learn that your character has literally been leveling up through killing people and completing quests like some sort of exp-vampire and the 'influence' system in the game is actually an in-universe thing of you quasi-mind controlling your companions into being liking you more blew my mind when I played it. A big part of the writing of the game is centered on examining rpg mechanics. Nephthys fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Dec 26, 2020 |
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Dec 26, 2020 17:51
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Cardiovorax posted:It's honestly a lot more tolerable in-game and doesn't come across as nearly as heavy-handed as that might make it sound. It's more like 'didn't you notice your strength growing as you killed way your way across the worlds, the way you wove ties of sentiment and Force to the people around you?' or something to that effect.  Also the entire set up of the game is essentially 'you have to start again from level 1, discover why.'
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Dec 26, 2020 18:02
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Cardiovorax posted:"I am a vile, suppurating wound in the fabric of creation and I consume everything around me" was not the answer I was expecting to that, I'll admit. It's super thematic, though! Nihilus, but backwards. Lol, but isn't that how the hero in an rpg basically is though? You murder hundreds and steal all their money and loot all so you can become stronger and get more loot and more power etc etc. All while essentially making a group of formerly independent people aka companions become obsessed with you because you picked the right dialogue options. It's like how the Elder Scrolls have PC's canonically be reality-breaking psycho demigods but even more cynical.
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Dec 26, 2020 18:15
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Strategic Tea posted:The problem us that "gotcha ur in a video game lol" isn't insightful beyond the first time someone does it, and that art about art is almost always insufferable Kotor II was one of the first ones to do something like that though (probably was the first to do it with rpg mechanics) and the thing that stands out about it is how well integrated and organic it is to the story. I'd wager half the people playing wouldn't even have cottoned on to what the writing was alluding to and still enjoyed the twist.
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Dec 26, 2020 21:53
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pentyne posted:That's a different character. Yeah the actual canon lore about Kreia is that she was just a super duper evil Sith and was also in love with the Sith Emperor somehow. Also she becomes a sith spirit and her soul gets enslaved by the fat rear end in a top hat villain from the Sith Warrior storyline in TOR. It's not explicitly said that its her but the description is exactly her so its obvious who they wanted it to be. Why, you ask? Well: CarlCX posted:The ongoing KOTOR lore is extremely not kind to KOTOR 2.
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Dec 26, 2020 23:17
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You can come back to that quest when you have a better set up to do it or buy additional alchemist fires. You can also kill those spiders by equipping the everburning torches you start the game with if you don't have any spellcasters.
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Dec 27, 2020 01:13
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I really wish they'd have patched that quest or something just because of how many people have died once to it and immediately quit forever. Swarms are very rare in the game, its not really that important to teach the player about them that early when they have limited ways to beat them.
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Dec 27, 2020 01:32
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pentyne posted:So, dumb question, if there are all these traps/tricks in Pathfinder, is there a "optimal" class to play the game as, as well as certain NPCs who are just better then others? People are exaggerating how many 'traps' there are but: The optimal class to play the game as is probably some kind of tank. Monks are incredibly good tanks that sidestep a huge issue people have with the games endgame, you can also do this with Sword Saint and Duelist iirc. Alchemist's are pretty great as they get strong buffs, bombs are very versatile and Vivisectionists get sneak attack. You can break the game with Kineticists if you know how. Any class that gets a pet is also strong just because of how good pets are in the game. Rogues are the dps kings. If you pivot Jaethal over to being a tank she's excellent since as an undead she can ignore almost all of the worst status effects in the game. Level drain and poisons are killers otherwise. Octavia is amazing as Arcane Trickster because she gets unlimited lockpicking attempts, safe trap disabling, sneak attacks on spells and is only 1 level behind on being a full caster. Nok-Nok and Ekudayo are absolute murder machines. Linzi is good because Bards are just naturally good support, debuff and buff engines. Whether you prefer Harrim or Tristan as your Cleric is a matter of taste so I'll say having either is essential unless you play as a Cleric yourself. Also the sequel, Wrath of the Righteous, is going to be better about this since the main character gets incredibly strong Mythic abilities so its going to be hard to screw up your build unless you try. Nephthys fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Dec 27, 2020 |
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Dec 27, 2020 01:49
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Psycho Landlord posted:It's neat but falls apart at the high end. I'd say 8 bucks is more than fair though, you'll get your money's worth of enjoyment out of the early parts of the game. Agreed but I'll add that you shouldn't expect to get much X-Com from the game. It's so easy to have your guys walk around undercover and go completely unnoticed that it was super duper rare to have a real fight. By the time a fight starts you've usually won already. The rest of the game makes it worth the 8 bucks though. Though I remember that you should probably read a guide to the chemical upgrade system because it's easy to screw up the order of upgrading. Nephthys fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Jan 2, 2021 |
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Jan 2, 2021 22:53
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srulz posted:The Surge chat, again: Iiirc that's probably a good time to go do it. The real metric is basically just if you go there and can kill the enemies. You can get a gear set there that I ended up using for the whole game because its so good. That set is super strong for injectible builds. In terms of Single-rig weapons the PAX is one of the best ones, you only get one that's objectively better than it in endgame. There are others that can compete with it though. I don't really like single-rig so I never really used it anyway. There are some good 1-handed and staves in CREO world.
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Jan 10, 2021 01:09
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It's a real shame that they kind of tanked Shadow of War by making it so toxic with the microtransactions. I was watching a few compilations recently and that game had a lot of creativity and charm in it if you could get past those aspects. Also goddamn these ads were amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvmM5V_-M2s
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Jan 20, 2021 01:43
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Gorn Myson posted:When Bloodlines 2 was announced I remember thinking that its going to be great seeing people learn from the good and the bad from the original and give us a polished, modern version of it, and yet everything about the production since the middle of last year has only hinted that its been a complete disaster lol Right, wasn't it basically a few months away from release at some point? The footage released for it really didn't make the game look that bad, so I'd be interested to know what the actual state of it was at that point and what exactly they've spent so long redesigning. It can't just be story revisions and some tech issues at this point.
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Feb 23, 2021 10:21
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pentyne posted:I think sales from Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous hit 250k within the first week. Dungeons and Dragons has had a revival lately and Pathfinder is almost certainly benefitting from it as well. Baldurs Gate 3 sold a million in the first week of its beta, theres clearly a demand for these games in the market now. Unlucky7 posted:I had been on the fence about Pathfinder. Is the newer one worth getting? I think I might already have Kingmaker as part of a bundle. If you enjoy CRPG's like Pillars, Baldurs Gate, Dragon Age Origins etc then it definitely is. It's one of the finest examples of the genre. Nephthys fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Apr 25, 2022 |
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Apr 25, 2022 23:37
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Luckily we have a good case study for this since the first PoE used Vancian casting and then Deadfire ditched it for per-encounter spells and abilities, so you can pretty much directly compare how the two systems turned out and decide which you like better. Personally, I like considering the cost-benefit analysis of using spells in Vancian casting. I know some people hate it though. Deadfire letting you freely cast spells in theory should allow players to use them tactically without worrying that they're a limited resource and feel your classes abilities more strongly, but in my experience it often made the combat less strategic and in some instances narrowed your experience with the classes. Since you can freely cast spells without worrying combat usually amounted to just using the strongest ones in every fight, casting the same buffs every time and spamming the same ability on your martials. Since you never have to worry about limited resources you can find a strategy that works and just use it over and over (it didn't help that you got very overpowered in Deadfire past a certain point). Some people like that and dislike limitations on casting so I think its fair to say that there are positives and negatives to each system.
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Apr 26, 2022 10:39
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Feels Villeneuve posted:I think some of those issues were part of Obsidian's quest philosophy which to some extent likes having Difficult Choices between two factions where there's no easy answer except it kind of sucks when that means you have to come up with reasons that the non-corporation ones are "bad" IIRC, they went back and 'balanced' the choices so that it wasn't purely "corpo = bad". I think the Edgewater Mayor genuinely caring about his employees was something added as part of this.
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May 8, 2022 00:07
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I said come in! posted:I wish Bioware could leave EA. I wish Dragon Age could leave Bioware.
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May 29, 2022 00:17
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