Results 31 to 60 of 1486
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2020-11-26, 06:40 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2017
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Thread of the Year Edition
The Everyman's Guide to Taking Up Arms - A Guide to Fighters
Practical Magical Gadgetry - A Guide to Artificers
Avatar courtesy of the webcomic Aurora, drawn by Red
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2020-11-27, 01:33 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2007
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- Manchester, UK
- Gender
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Thread of the Year Edition
With good reason, from what I've seen. OK, you could maybe cut them some slack on not doing a great job on the cel-shaded visuals that were such a major feature of the original *if the rest of the game worked*, but it simply doesn't. It's broken, buggy, with absolutely ridiculously bad AI.
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2020-11-27, 11:35 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2007
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- Tail of the Bellcurve
- Gender
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Started my second Galactic Empire planet in AoW: Planetfall, and it's tremendously glorious pain in the ass. One of the many minor factions in the game is a collection of genetically and cybernetically modified animal people, apparently created during the heyday of the Star Union as pets and for, ahem, other purposes. Now they've got shotguns. This planet is holding some sort of gathering for the wee beasties, and they aren't happy about me being there. Then there's the enormously aggressive wildlife, which wants to eat everybody. Between the interstellar militant furry convention and the infectious bioweapon combat forms, and the occasional batch of crystal monsters raining from the sky, I'm basically just running around stamping out fires left and right.
Which is great. Like most strategy games, AoW is most interesting when things are going pear shaped. For instance I just had a really great battle with the space rabbits. They attacked one of my sectors with a 6-stack and a 3-stack, easily crushing the militia. I counter attacked with my own 6-stack and 3-stack, but that battle went very badly, and I retreated after losing 2 units and only inflicting a single loss on the enemy. Next turn the AI attacked my stacks again. However I was able to use one group of units to bottleneck the enemy, so my assorted ranged units could shoot them a lot, while the two fliers that remained from my 3-stack hauled ass over to the rest of my army. I barely edged out a victory, thanks to bad terrain, but I lost a huge pile of units doing it.Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.
Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman, 1906.
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2020-11-28, 01:32 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2007
- Location
- Manchester, UK
- Gender
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Been playing a bit of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, and there's one aspect about the story that bugs me. At the beginning, you get to choose whether you're female (Kassandra) or male (Alexios). Whichever one you choose, you'll meet up with the other one at some point during the story. What I found quite annoying, though, is that which one of the two is the elder depends on which one you pick! I've watched some cutscenes as the other character on Youtube, and basically the only difference is that the two characters are swapped around, with the dialogue etc. being largely the same.
That is such a lazy way to do it. I would have been much more impressed if they could have figured out a way to always have Kassandra be the elder even if you were playing as Alexios, or vice versa. You know, make the choice of character be an actual substantive one that changes more than what's in the centre of your screen during the gameplay.
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2020-11-28, 02:22 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2016
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Makes sense. From what I understand, having Alexios as a playable character was never intended to be the case in the first place, until some suits decided nobody would want to play an AC game with a female lead.
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2020-11-28, 02:50 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2007
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2020-11-28, 02:53 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2010
- Location
- California
- Gender
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
I mean, isn't that true of most games that let you choose a gender? The Reapers are going to come, someone is going to die on Virmire, and you're going to save the galaxy whether you choose Fem!Shep or Man!Shep. You're going to join forces with Chrom, fail to save his sister, and find out you're the avatar of the dark dragon regardless of whether you're Fem!Robin or Man!Robin. The only real difference is some of the romance options and, as you say, who's in the center of the screen during the gameplay.
Persona 3 Portable is the only non-romance-focused video game I can think of where there seemed to be significant story (and music!) differences between the male and female leads. And that felt more like it was a expansion pack, a released-later add-on which allowed you to replay the story with a significant set of changes, for people who had already played it once.
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2020-11-28, 03:17 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2007
- Location
- Manchester, UK
- Gender
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Thing is, it doesn't matter whether Shepard is male or female because the two versions of the character aren't related to each other? The problem here is that Alexios and Kassandra are siblings, ergo, one has to have been born first (them not being twins), and I would just like that aspect to have been consistent regardless of who you were playing. It would have required some dialogue modifications in cutscenes, but the meat of the story could easily have remained the same.
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2020-11-28, 03:52 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2010
- Location
- California
- Gender
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Oddly, I used to almost always play as opposite gender. I'm male and from Ultima VII through Mass Effect Trilogy, I would almost always play as a female if given the choice. I like the feeling that I was roleplaying a different character, not myself.
Recently, though, as romance options have become a bigger and bigger part of RPGs, I've started to play as male more and more. I'm a straight male, and I generally get much more invested in the romance options if "I" am romancing someone I'd be attracted to in real life. I just can't get invested in romancing Akihiko, but I was very invested in "my" relationship with Chie.
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2020-11-28, 07:37 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2008
- Gender
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Because that's exactly what that was. Original Persona 3 had only the male protagonist, just like the other Persona games, as did the first expanded version of the game, Persona 3 FES. The female protagonist route was added specifically for Persona 3 Portable. And yeah, it remains a wonderful example of writing such a change, with lots of great, subtle touches.
I do the same, though for different reasons. I tend to pick female protagonists because games that don't have a choice in protagonist almost universally have male protagonists, so I prefer to even things out a little when given the choice.Toph Pony avatar by Dirtytabs. Thanks!
"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -C.S. Lewis
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2020-11-28, 09:05 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2007
- Location
- Tail of the Bellcurve
- Gender
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Personally I kinda like the thing where you play as one of a small number of set people in the game world, and the others are just there in some capacity. Gets away from the notion of a fixed 'canon' sequence of events. Something I'm somewhat interested in with games that narratively respond to player choice is the idea of player-as-author, rather than player-as-character. This sort of starts to edge in that direction.
Wrapped up my second AoW: Planetfall Empire world this morning... and also this afternoon. Basically it turned into a giant clusterhump all over the map. The militant mutant rabbits and squirrels (pure freaking evil those squirrels) were just everywhere, which made getting a toehold outside of my starting landmass a real mess. And just when I finally got them stamped out, half the AI declares war on me for some reason. Surprisingly, they were actually able to mount a credible invasion effort - rare for AI! - with multiple powerful stacks acting in concert to strike right at my empire's soft underbelly.
Fortunately the alternative victory condition was to conquer two Therian (the mutant rabbits) settlements. I already had one, and by the time the AI's invasion got really swinging, my massed doom armies were on the doorstep of the second settlement. Which was one reason my empire's underbelly was so soft, I was throwing literally everything I had at that last settlement; this was one battle that definitely did not come down to the wire.
Next up, I think it's a dimensionally unstable planet infested with pure evil attack penguins. How can you say no to that?Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.
Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman, 1906.
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2020-11-29, 08:39 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2014
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Good luck! I too just finished my world war. I had to secure a ton of cosmite nodes while allying with 2 Dvar factions, one xenophobic and the other xenophilic. While they despised each other, they both liked me and the three of us bonded over war with the Amazons, Syndicate, and Assembly. Since I was Syndicate, my people were pretty upset that I kept fighting my own kind, but the Dvar loved me haha.
My current game is on a geologically unstable Pangea floating in a lava sea. Every city is perpetually unhappy due to all the lava oozing about, and every other combat turn hits the entire battlefield in AoE fire damage. And food is so hard to find! I’m going to fight some Vanguard just for the nice valley of food they found.
What difficulty do you have the AI at? I found normal AI were pretty adept at launching invasions but had no clue how to hold or push their advantage. After the first conquest they’d just hunker down until I could launch a counterattack.
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2020-11-29, 10:33 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2013
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
One notable difference in Fire Emblem Awakening is that a female Robin is able to marry Chrom. That's the only way to get my favorite story scene in the game, where Lucina has to turn on her mother instead of just a person she deeply admires. The alternate scene is far more powerful than the regular version.
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2020-11-29, 01:54 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Apr 2011
- Gender
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2020-11-29, 02:18 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2013
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
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2020-11-29, 02:56 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2010
- Location
- California
- Gender
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2020-11-29, 05:05 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Apr 2011
- Gender
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2020-11-29, 06:26 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2014
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Chewed a good way through Sakuna now. Pretty sure I'm at the last area. Some of the platforming and controls continue to be...frustrating. You don't have a huge range of control on your Divine Raiment, which acts as a grapple hook, your dodge and some special powers. The latter are finicky as all get out and when you're fighting against bosses that becomes a problem when you want to use your debuff powers and you twist yourself around to dodge an attack that wasn't there. Like a lot of side scrolling beat'em ups, combos are key except if you knock an enemy prone you can't hit them until they stand up. When you get knocked prone, the enemies can combo you for a massive amount of damage.
The rice growing, which is how you get stats, gives you new things every year but it's beyond repetitive. Part of that is fun, hulling and processing the rice have fun little mini-games. Planting and managing the rice in the paddie is not. Weeds grow and lower your fertilizer and they grow whether you're at the house or out in the field hunting. Which means if you're getting food, which you need for buffs and how you heal damage, your crops are taking damage. A lot of really grand ideas in the game but all the executions are just short of great.
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2020-11-30, 12:56 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2010
- Location
- California
- Gender
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2020-11-30, 08:55 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Apr 2009
- Location
- Germany
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
I currently have Starcraft, Diablo 2, and Pharaoh going. Though I think I'm done with Pharaoh. I keep restarting levels over and over, as every couple of hours I discover new unknown mechanics or the objectives changes several hours into a map, which reveal that my whole setup for my city is unworkable. And there's no feature to draw planned constructions before committing to building them and spending money and you can reverse only the last action you made. Making a new save every 30 seconds and trying to figure out how many saves you have to go back to unmake a mistake just isn't practical.
We are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but on very tall tower of other dwarves.
Spriggan's Den Heroic Fantasy Roleplaying
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2020-11-30, 09:49 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2010
- Location
- Gridania, Eorzea
- Gender
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Picked up Satisfactory in the current round of cowardly sales, and there went my free time for the foreseeable future. Put 8 hours into it yesterday alone. The ability to have multitier conveyer belts is more fun than I was expecting, and leads to delightfully chaotic factory designs. Started working towards having more specialized factories to try and tame the clutter, but so far I've only managed to setup off site ore smelting.
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2020-11-30, 12:15 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2007
- Location
- Derby, UK
- Gender
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Been dancing about between BattleTech Advanced 3062, Civ 4 Caveman2Cosmos and the Longest Journey. Currently in C2C.
One feels, Montzuma of Japan, while you are indeed the world's second most powerful nation, picking a fight with the Tuozin Empire who are literally ten times your size and fifteen times your score (okay, so maybe I thought that C2C would be harder and set my usual difficulty settings, but who cares I'm playing this more like a city-builder only for a country anyway) might not have been the best idea, y'know? Especially with you're stumbling around with first-stage archers (and having numerous revolts) and up again the might of the Tuozin's mighty mammoth ballista and giraffe archers. And never mind the legions of light crossbowmen and composite bowmen recruited from the ranks of the captured barbarians...
But I'm sure this won't completely blow up in your face or anything, mate, I'm sure it won't.
You'll totally win, I'm sure, even before the Great General mammoth rider gets shipped around to hit the road network from literally the other end of the contient. Totally.
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2020-12-01, 05:35 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2009
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Fortnite just ended it's latest season, the Marvel crossover one.
It culminated with Galactus coming to Fortniteland, trying to eat the giant amount of temporal energy that was created at the end of last season when everything kinda a'sploded. this caused Iron man to soup up the Battle bus with freaking laser cannons and we played through a rail-shooter section, first in open space a la Star Fox and then one reminiscent of the Star Wars death star bombing run. It ended with Galactus eating the battle buses like a giant space hoover vacuum only moments after the character jumped out... and began the detonation of the spacefuturebombs Stark had setup in the bus.
Galactus gets a major tummy ache from the hundreds and hundreds of bombs, spacetime rips apart again. we see "real world" Agent Jonesy's office in massive disarray as he wakes up on the floor and the servers go down for maintenance.
Also, I took this screencap.
Spoiler
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2020-12-03, 05:29 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2009
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
So, I've just finished Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager
All in all a game with some strong good aspects and some very weak aspects. It is less polished then the predecessor which sadly results in some rather frustrating sequences.
The first Dark Sun game, Shattered Lands, managed to impress with the design of the areas. Each new adventuring site provided something new, often an interesting situation, new types of challenges etc. Often there was a good degree of freedom in the way of solving these situations. This part of the game was so good that, for me, more than made up for the games glaring weaknesses: Shattered Lands was an absolute mess on the technical side and provided rather weak gameplay especially compared to contemporary and earlier games.
In Wake of the Ravager the brilliance of the first game is still apparent: it follows the patterns of the first game in that each adventuring area has its own unique design (in game design and narrative design, not necessarily visually). But I suspect the game was rushed to the finish line and never got playtested in any serious matter. The game is very unpolished in many areas. There is one area in that you practically have to follow a walkthrough just to be able to proceed (otherwise the quests will just break) but even then nothing makes any sense. Other parts are ridiculously frustrating (I will NEVER do the lava rock puzzel ever again!).
The game runs even more poorly then the first game. And the gameplay is rather weak, but not horrible. And the good parts are good. I don't regret playing it and overall I enjoyed my time in Dark Sun.
Spoiler for the ending:
SpoilerIn the end your are actually fighting the Tarrasque. That makes Wake of the Ravager, to my knowledge, the first and only game or mod in that you fight Big T.
It came pretty much out of the blue. For most of the game I was expecting to fight the Dragon in the end. But nope, the dragon does not appear at all, but just right before the endgame you learn that the Lord Warrior tries to unearth the Tarrasque.
How did I beat it? Well, if you know anything about the Tarrasques weaknesses throughout all editions of D&D, the fight went pretty much as you would expect: my wizard casts a Force Cage arround Big T effectively taking it out of the fight. Force Cage in AD&D 2e lasts for ages so there was no pressure. After mopping up the other combatants (including a bunch on Skeleton Warriors each with more hit points then the Tarrasque...) I peppered Big T with arrows until it died (because you can shoot into the Cage just fine).
I actually got lazy in the last stages of the game so I missed stocking up on arrows before entering the final dungeon. I did not have enough normal magic arrows to finish off the Tarrasque. But while waiting for my 5 Potions of Healing to be finished in the Volcano I stocked up on created Heartseeker Arrows, like 40 of them. They do crap damage and I suspect their insta kill effect was simply not implemented since it never happened but they still count as magic weapons and thus are able to wound the Tarrasque.
Last edited by Zombimode; 2020-12-03 at 05:33 PM.
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2020-12-03, 06:36 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2007
- Location
- Derby, UK
- Gender
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Not played yet (nor likely will I for a bit), but I picked up Phoenix Point Year One. I was moderately interested in getting it eventually anyway, but at a 50% sale for a bit over £20, I figured now was as good a time to get it (on Steam thought I could have gone for gog as well, Steam happened to be handy and I did it before I thought about gog for once. Steam was, like 12p or something cheaper as it happens. *shrug*)
Still got loads of stuff to play (largely because I pick at BTA 3062 and do stuff like start obscenely long Civ 4 games...)Last edited by Aotrs Commander; 2020-12-03 at 06:39 PM.
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2020-12-03, 07:09 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2010
- Location
- Inside
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Trying to learn how to mine in Elite:Dangerous. It feels like a real job. Can easily spend 6 hours a day in there.
But those dang space pirates are annoying. Mistargeted, and ended up shooting a law-enforcement ship that was already chasing the bugger..... ended up getting ship exploded and sent to jail. Thank goodness I wasn't completely broke right then.
Is there a way to surrender, in case that happens again? (it's something as simple as going out of combat mode, isn't it?)Well that was awkward.
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2020-12-04, 01:23 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2019
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Started Phoenix Point today after getting the Year One key in (backed it on Fig awhile ago, just haven't gotten to it until now). It's fun so far, I like that the terrain is a lot more destructible than in the newer XCOM games, the vehicle rockets aren't very precise, but good enough to knock walls down.
Also going to have to force myself to play the rest of Telltale's Walking Dead Season 4. Played the first two episodes a few months ago, and it's not that I haven't enjoyed it, it's that for some reason I've gotten a lot more attached to Clementine than most other game characters, and I'm really worried that she's going to end up dead by the time it's over.
Glad I managed to get through the last week's sales without adding another bunch of games to the backlog.
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2020-12-04, 02:45 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2010
- Gender
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Played more stellaris, won another war against my neighboring corporate nation, now capturing two planets unlike last time, and even two habitats. My quest to expand Omni-Corp is going well, but my energy credit gain rate are at a like, -900 now, which is an alarmingly high loss rate. and I'm not sure how to fix it, since I've gotten all the energy stuff I can get in my borders, and have been trying to maximize all planets generator stuff as much as I can. I think there is stuff thats energy-guzzling all this that I need to get rid of, but I'm not sure what.
meanwhile my two long time rival empires for being the biggest powers in the galaxy , the Tendrakkian Federated Regions and the Tebazoid Star Union are getting their behinds handed to them by the Fallen Empire that has awakened, the Tendrakkians despite being stronger than me were basically utterly destroyed to the point where they have no actual planets left, only pockets of lifeless systems and their outposts waiting to get conquered, while the Tebazoids have already lost major parts of their empire to the Fallen Empire's advance. I'm just glad that the reawakened empire hasn't gone after me yet, though I'm like the fact that I'm basically well on my way to becoming the last real superpower that isn't the reawakened empire in the galactic UN. Like its clear that the reawakened empire will be the only thing that will be able to able to stop me soon, and so I'll have to play my cards right because if my two rivals on the galactic stage are getting destroyed? I stand no chance against that. especially when I have an energy crisis to deal with. plus side, I've gotten a few minor nations to become my subsidaries.
Also played Act 2 of Hiveswap. good story as always. Joey is such a good character, she is like the hero that the Homestuck universe actually needs because she actively sets out to fix problems and correct injustices while the kids of homestuck proper I'll be honest, constantly felt that they were too passive or apathetic to the stuff happening around them though that might just be a lack of good execution because of earlier writing and I doubt they were intended as such. like Joey Claire just cuts through all the nonsense to state and do whats right, is what it feels like.
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2020-12-04, 01:42 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2020
- Location
- Michigan
- Gender
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
Doing stuff in Genshin Impact, mostly just farming weapon ascension materials before doing another run on Spiral Abyss to get Xiangling (I need a good Pyro character and Xinyan just is not doing it for me).
Outside of that, I'm checking off the last few boxes I need filled in Monster Hunter World before Rise comes out. As much as I like the quality-of-life stuff in World, I'm not going to miss tenderizing with the Clutch Claw or how World's armor skill system created an environment where there was unambiguous "best at all times and in almost all situations" armor like Drachen in High Rank and Fatalis in Master Rank. It makes for a really unhealthy game environment when most of people playing at your rank use the exact same armor as you.
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2020-12-04, 02:31 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2007
- Location
- Manchester, UK
- Gender
Re: What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year
If you hover over the energy meter at the top left it will tell you exactly what your sources of energy income are and what's using it all up? What do those numbers show? Although, TBH, to have let it get to the state where you're losing 900 a month is pretty darned bad--it'll be hard to recover from that position, and just selling stuff to the market to make up the shortfall isn't a viable long-term strategy.