What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year

[Anonymouswizard]

My first run of SR:HK was with an orc Decker with secondary pistol skills and a smidgen of charisma: it works fine, and just challenging enough. HK is also better at balancing the run rewards: you actually need to watch your nuyen if you want to save for the best cyberware and gear.

I also felt it fit the story well, as HK has more defined protagonists than the previous game. Not extremely so, but your background before the game is roughly predetermined.

Ork deckers are pretty good even on the tabletop, you sacrifice the very peak of your potential for a little bit more meatspace survivability. I'm just worried that a troll decker having to sacrifice a third of the potential INT a human can have. Trolls make very good street samurai and shockingly good mages, but in most versions of the tabletop game at least are quite poor deckers due to the mental stat caps/penalties.


Just got to the line about dragons not taking over the world. Lofwyr might and something to say about that (and arguably Dunkelzahn).

[PhoenixPhyre]

I picked back up Warriors Orochi (probably botched that spelling, but oh well) 3. Story mode on easy of course, since what I'm really after is mindless slaughter and random button pressing. I'm still horrible at it, but...

I wish I'd picked up a speed character like Ayame earlier for my main squad. Being able to race across the battlefield really simplifies things. She's also a blender with a good weapon.

[LibraryOgre]

Ork deckers are pretty good even on the tabletop, you sacrifice the very peak of your potential for a little bit more meatspace survivability. I'm just worried that a troll decker having to sacrifice a third of the potential INT a human can have. Trolls make very good street samurai and shockingly good mages, but in most versions of the tabletop game at least are quite poor deckers due to the mental stat caps/penalties.


Just got to the line about dragons not taking over the world. Lofwyr might and something to say about that (and arguably Dunkelzahn).

Bull. I never met an ork decker.

(This may be a very obscure joke)

[Anonymouswizard]

Bull. I never met an ork decker.

(This may be a very obscure joke)

Well can you ask him if he's seen any others?

[Cespenar]

As a nice foil to Cyberpunk 2077, I've rebooted the old Master of Magic along with it the unofficial "fix", the aptly named "Caster of Magic". To summarize the work and detail of the fix -- its change list is 700-odd pages long. Anywho, I'm gonna maintain that it's still among the top 5 4x games ever, if not the best out there still. So much depth, so easy to use with its UI and tooltips (despite being a 1994 title), and the fix fixes everything you'd nitpick after you really learned the game (like balance, AI, diplomacy, etc.).

On the other hand, the fix really ups the AI as well, so along with the ironman and some other self-inflicted RP challenges, it's pretty challenging despite being on "Normal".

[Sermil]

Been playing Slay the Spire a bunch since I got it for Christmas

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The one problem is that I feel like I've got locked into a particular meta -- The Silent with super-heavy poison. It's a great combo, I've beaten Act 4 with it (here, Heart, have 95 Poison damage a turn, let's see how long your 750 hit points last), I've finished several ascension levels with it, but it's been getting kinda stale.

[Rynjin]

I think each of the starting characters ahs their own merits, but for the life of me I was never able to figure out how to consistently have a good run as Defect. I only played one run as the Watcher during the beta test though, so maybe I should hop back into it.

[Anteros]

Defect always feels like a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" type of character for me, where you're just cycling through as many cards in a turn as possible. Most of my best runs are the Silent, and whatever the warrior guy is called. I also haven't tried the new character much. I kinda got burnt out on the game before they released it.

[Triaxx]

Forget poison, infinite Shiv stacking is where it's at. I forget the precise setup but it's basically throwing Shivs lets you throw even more Shivs which then... you get the idea.

[Anteros]

Forget poison, infinite Shiv stacking is where it's at. I forget the precise setup but it's basically throwing Shivs lets you throw even more Shivs which then... you get the idea.

It's a good build, but it struggles in the endgame against the Heart and the boss that only lets you play 12 cards a turn.

[Sermil]

It's a good build, but it struggles in the endgame against the Heart and the boss that only lets you play 12 cards a turn.

The Timekeeper. Ya, poison can struggle against the Timekeeper too (I know, I died to him) because he does this thing where, when he's close to death, he heals to about half health and clears all debuffs including poison.

A lot of poison cards, especially the all-important Catalyst, Exhaust. If you're not careful, you end up with very few poison abilities left for the second half of the boss.

Ditto for the Awakened One I believe.

[factotum]

Well, I most definitely wasn't expecting *that*. A bit over 30 hours in to DQ11 and:

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The bad guy just won. Destroyed the Sword of Light and the World Tree. I now appear to be going through a number of separate "what happened next?" scenes for all my party members--done Sylvando and Jade so far. (Was the blue bunny suit really necessary in the latter case?).

I can see now why people say it changes so abruptly halfway through!

[EDIT] Oh, think I've just run into a bit of a plot hole, unless I missed something?

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When the Lord of Shadows attacks you on Yggdrasil he drains the main character's Luminary powers, a physical symbol of which is the birthmark on the back of his hand--so the mark vanishes. However, later on in Heliodor Castle you're still able to use an Yggdrasil root to investigate old memories to show you how to proceed, and the symbol is back on the Luminary's hand with no explanation of why or how it returned.

[Zombimode]

I'm close to 100 hours in Outward. Needless to say I am enjoying the the game.

But it is also frustrating, not for any mechanical reason though. The game presents a rather rich world: many different cultures, a strange fauna & flora, this whole averted apocalypse setting, etc.
This world intrigues me. I want to explore its lore. I want to know why the Vigil Pylons are industrial steam beam constructions. I want to know what the ring around the moon is and what those orbital debris comes from. I want explore the cultures, politics and histories of the different human cultures. You know, like in an Elder Scrolls game.

But yet the game offers soooooo little in terms of exposition and lore, it's frustrating.


Sure, you can say "small team" but I don't buy it. Text is cheap. Spiderweb Software is a one man show and those games are full of exposition.

So either the people at Nine Dots really hate writing... or there actually isn't all that much to say. Maybe the lore actually isn't all that fleshed out

[Spacewolf]

Got Greedfall free on PSN so I've been playing through that, and it's ok. Main issue is that it wants to hold your hand the whole way through so even though you get objectives that make it sound like you can fail them I've never seen it happen. For example there's one mission that wants you to sneak into an office but then says you could make it easier by drugging the people guarding the place. I didnt have the drugs at the time so just snuck in there, only turns out you have to drug the people otherwise the item doesn't spawn so you have no choice. There's quite afew bits like that I've noticed that make me wonder how divergent the story actually is or if it's going to be a button before the last mission asto who I side with.

[Rynjin]

Greedfall is a game so mediocre that I bought it for work (reimbursed, thankfully) and everyone on the team collectively decided it wasn't worth the time to play to make guides for.

[Lord Raziere]

I've found myself playing KOTOR again. its real interesting coming back to this game after so long. last time I played it I was purely light side so I'm trying to go for something more mixed, my character is a scoundrel so I'm basically roleplaying as that so that I can keep myself from getting too good, but allowing myself to be sympathetic to others so I don't get too evil, because the real fun of morality like this is not to optimize your alignment but to make decisions based on the situation so that you end up being a person not a flawless unfailing paragon of this or that. its also interesting to see how videogames have developed since then: I found it a bit unsatisfying for example that my scoundrel doesn't even get the option of protesting against the Jedi Order just deciding to recruit her out of the blue, the closest being to lie about upholding their values- and since she has an incredibly high persuade, this works. Jedi: can sense the feelings in people almost to the point of mind reading but something with enough persuasiveness you can literally pull the wool over their eyes.

At the same time there is a certain freedom to your choices: I can make dark side choices and somehow Bastila and the Jedi won't even notice that I'm using force lightning and drain life or dual-wielding two red lightsabers. But maybe I haven't reach the point where they will react to my decisions yet, because I'm pretty neutral so far despite going down the normally "light side" route like going hidden bek.

[Spacewolf]

Greedfall is a game so mediocre that I bought it for work (reimbursed, thankfully) and everyone on the team collectively decided it wasn't worth the time to play to make guides for.

Yea so far it's been fine and that's about it, there's some potential but nothing really outstanding.

[Cygnia]

The potential that Greedfall had...as a writer, I weep how much better it could have been.

[Zevox]

Just finished up Avengers' main story. That was a lot shorter than I expected. And kind of a mixed bag.

What I said earlier about everyone feeling kind of same-y definitely does wear off after playing more, and unlocking/noticing what they can do beyond the basic light and heavy attacks. There's honestly some nice touches on some of them to make them really feel like the character should. Hulk can grab human-size enemies and hit other enemies with them, or throw them at other enemies, and he can yank up a chunk of rock (or metal) out of the ground as his ranged attack, but if he doesn't throw it he can also smash on someone with his next melee attack. Iron Man can cycle between three different special ranged weapons for his heavy attack (repulsors, lasers, and rockets), each with its own different properties. Thor can pin normal-size enemies to the ground or walls when he throws Mjolnir. There was definitely some care put into this to make each of them have the kinds of abilities you'd expect them to.

Still, it's hard to call gameplay more than mediocre. It really feels heavily designed around the multiplayer. The enemies feel largely generic and bland, designed to come at you in huge waves and get mowed down. Even a lot of the story missions have fairly repetitious gameplay where you're defending certain areas until a bar fills up, or just destroying generic pieces of tech to fulfill an objective - it felt a lot like I remember Mass Effect 3's multiplayer feeling. But that's really not what I want out of the main story of a superhero game. Much better has already been done with the Batman and Spider-Man games, I don't see why the Avengers can't as well.

Further, it's just kind of slow for an action game. Everyone aside from maybe Black Widow and Miss Marvel feel like many of their attacks are kind of sluggish, and often movement feels that way too - especially Thor and Iron Man's flight, for some reason. It's weird that it feels like Black Widow can run faster than those two can fly. Plus, there's some very noticeable framerate and motion blur issues when too many enemies are on screen (playing on PS4), which makes dodging or parrying attacks basically impossible when it happens.

It does have a few good boss fights though, and I liked that the final mission included segments where you used each of the six different heroes - thought for a while there that it'd be strictly a Cap mission.

Story-wise, yeah, it's a generic "something goes wrong, heroes blame each other" story married to a generic X-Men story. Nothing special whastoever. But they definitely nail the characters, with everyone's personalities just feeling right, and get some good moments throughout with the heroes just interacting with each other as a result, so it's not a total loss.

Don't know that there's going to be much more for me to do with it, though. I really have no interest in its multiplayer, and the character-specific side-quests have annoying prerequisites to unlock each of their levels (i.e. Iron Man's wants me use his Unibeam super move a certain number of times, and headshot a certain number of enemies), for reasons I can't fathom, so even doing those is going to require grinding in random meaningless levels. It's sad, it feels like this game could've been so much more, if only they hadn't decided that for some reason its focus should be on a multiplayer mode.

[Anonymouswizard]

I must be reaching the end of Act 2 in Dragonfall, because I've got one run left that I can do.

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Aztechnology.

I guess I'm prepared as I can be, I've done the run to mess with Knight Errant comms, I've done all four loyalty missions I can find (brought Dietrich along for Humanis, did Blitz's run to clear his debt, took down the Engineer with Eiger, and helped Glory rescue the kids), I've cybered down to 1 Essence to boost my Quickness, Dodge, and Accuracy as high as I can. Will run by the weapon merchant again to see if I can pick up a better gun or armour, but I expect nothing is going to beat this assualt rifle+grenade launcher combo.

Now I guess the only thing to do is to get in, blow up the reactors, and get out before they start shooting...

One of the things I have noticed is that, built right, your main character can easily take down enemies twice as fast as your teammates. I guess it comes from the fact that I feel little need to build broad instead of going deep into Quickness with a slight step into Body. I know not investing into Strength will leave me unable to use arguable the best 'rifle' in the game, but I looked into the required Strength and it'll require so much Karma I might as well just pump more points into Dodge and Body instead.Because so far what matters most seems to be keeping Full Auto hit chances as high as possible.

[Brookshw]

Decided to fire up a Total War Warhammer ME Beast man campaign and realized something. If you crank the Choas Invasion up to legendary difficulty the campaign is pretty much a cake walk, you're just running the clock til Chaos shows up, then you get such massively strong reinforcement rolling through you can pretty much sit back and mess around.

[Aotrs Commander]

Finished a run through Dragon Commander.

Yeah.

As expected, the RTS aspect was kind of rubbish. I did not feel sorry for playing it on Easy. In the end, I just auto-resolves all the combats.

It's almost like the whole idea of fixed building slots is a feature of not-very-good RTSes isn't it?



The political aspect wes better. Id perhaps trying a bit too hard to through contemporary issues, and perhaps a little bit too obviously divided down the lines. And being, like thinly veiled comtemporary issues, I couldn't even see any fun to be had for Doing An Evil playthrough, since the decisions are ones I'd have made as an Evil Equalist ANYWAY.

But ye gods, that was a bigoted game, though. Leaving aside the outrageously silly bigotry-on-purpose for said political angle¹, it was unintentially HORRENDOUSLY humanocentric, quite impressive for a game where basically only a few of the cast were ACTUALLY humans (and I wasn't entirely sure Scarlett wasn't a dwarf to start with). It made me wince every single time they called a non-human "man" - especially the dragon commander himself - and the height of cringe was an elf proclaiming about how everyone should not lose their "humanity." Oof.

I have questions. The females lizards have boobs. The female SKELETONS are shown with clothing that Has Boobs. No, seriously, that one skeleton barmaid in the background. And the lipstick of Mrs Imperial-Skeleton-Wife (not EVEN, like, over everything, just like around a bit, and she has clothes-boobs as well). WHAT EVEN.

Also, speaking of Undead - you give me a game with Undead in it, and I end up having to disagree with them on nearly every-point, since they were basically a strawman for zealotry... Only the Dwarf was worse. I did take a significant bit of pleasure in shooting down every single bit of his ker-triple-AAA-pitalism, though.

I sort of expected the whole marriage thing to be deeper than it was. Not enough there (I went with the Undead lass, lipstick-on-bone-aside) for me to bother doing a replay, though.

16 hours wasn't long, but honestly, given what it offered, I'd had about enough by that point, honestly.



Now the difficult job of decidign what I want to play next...



¹That one female geneal was the one I wanted to punch the most and could unabashedly called a feminazi - heck, EVEN THOUGH I pretty much agree with her complaints and saw them through ever time, her "male/men are scum" attitude so very nearly tempted to do otherwise.

[GloatingSwine]

Decided to fire up a Total War Warhammer ME Beast man campaign and realized something. If you crank the Choas Invasion up to legendary difficulty the campaign is pretty much a cake walk, you're just running the clock til Chaos shows up, then you get such massively strong reinforcement rolling through you can pretty much sit back and mess around.

The downside is you're still playing as Beastmen....

Beastmen used to be better with the old Chaos invasion because you could confederate the Warherd of Chaos armies if you defeated the Warriors of Chaos each time they spawned, and the armies you got from doing that kept their ludicrous AI cheats.

The latest patch just ruined that, and Chaos will burn itself out in the end even on Legendary because the AI can only autoresolve.


In other Total War news, I've started properly getting into Troy. Having watched AdmiralPrice's very good series of tips videos and getting an understanding of how battles really work (flank, flank, and flank some more) and what the options are to boost economy I reckon I'm ready to try a proper campaign as Achilles. (Despite what the game says Achilles has one of the harder campaigns because he's in the middle of lots of people who barely tolerate him so has to worry about basically every front).

[Thomas Cardew]

The downside is you're still playing as Beastmen....

Beastmen used to be better with the old Chaos invasion because you could confederate the Warherd of Chaos armies if you defeated the Warriors of Chaos each time they spawned, and the armies you got from doing that kept their ludicrous AI cheats.

The latest patch just ruined that, and Chaos will burn itself out in the end even on Legendary because the AI can only autoresolve.


In other Total War news, I've started properly getting into Troy. Having watched AdmiralPrice's very good series of tips videos and getting an understanding of how battles really work (flank, flank, and flank some more) and what the options are to boost economy I reckon I'm ready to try a proper campaign as Achilles. (Despite what the game says Achilles has one of the harder campaigns because he's in the middle of lots of people who barely tolerate him so has to worry about basically every front).

Honestly, the beastman hate seems a bit overrated to me. I did a legendary campaign right before T&T dropped. Admittedly only one campaign is really playable, the Estalia start one, and it suffers from a whole lot of negative consequences in the early game. But Minotaurs and Cygors are great and you can rush the growth pretty easily with the moon events by giving up replenishment, just merge units to heal if something gets super damaged and keep razing.

I'm honestly struggling to get into Norsca more than beastman. At least beastmen were full horde and can recruit anywhere. As Wulfrik or Throgg, I'm stuck schelping around the stupid mountains in the wastes instead of being able to just go straight into the Empire and start carving a path through the realms of men. I make it 5-15 turns and drop it for a more interesting campaign. I'll suffer through it at some point since it's my last SP ac.hievement. But dang. I can not get started on it. I've finished a second Vortex Sisters (I wanted to try not exterminating the DE since um I didn't realize that was an option the first time through), a ME Eltharion, and a ME Drycha campaign already instead. And honestly, I'll probably do a Snitch vortex next

[Resileaf]

Honestly, the beastman hate seems a bit overrated to me. I did a legendary campaign right before T&T dropped. Admittedly only one campaign is really playable, the Estalia start one, and it suffers from a whole lot of negative consequences in the early game. But Minotaurs and Cygors are great and you can rush the growth pretty easily with the moon events by giving up replenishment, just merge units to heal if something gets super damaged and keep razing.

I'm honestly struggling to get into Norsca more than beastman. At least beastmen were full horde and can recruit anywhere. As Wulfrik or Throgg, I'm stuck schelping around the stupid mountains in the wastes instead of being able to just go straight into the Empire and start carving a path through the realms of men. I make it 5-15 turns and drop it for a more interesting campaign. I'll suffer through it at some point since it's my last SP ac.hievement. But dang. I can not get started on it. I've finished a second Vortex Sisters (I wanted to try not exterminating the DE since um I didn't realize that was an option the first time through), a ME Eltharion, and a ME Drycha campaign already instead. And honestly, I'll probably do a Snitch vortex next

The main issue with the Norsca campaign is that it was balanced around the first game's campaign, where all you really had to do was raid the Empire and/or Bretonnia and/or Kislev once in a while while also building up your power in Norsca. In the first game, it was fine. You only had to worry about your direct neighbors and your goal was to wait for Chaos' invasion while you strengthened your connection to one of the four gods. Even if the forces of Order got an army to attack you, the weather attrition would quickly reduce their numbers, and in the off chance they got a poorly defended town, they couldn't colonize the place and would have to leave after razing it because of the attrition. In ME, anyone in the world will attack Norsca and colonize it because the AI doesn't care about climate compatibility. The lack of walls, once not a problem because it's not like anyone could take over Norsca in the first place, was now an awful disadvantage that made the faction that much more unfun to play.

Hopefully, Norsca gets a good rework for game 3 since CA wants to give sieges in general a rework.

[Cespenar]

I'm trying the free prologue of something called "Fights in Tight Spaces", and it looks pretty fun as a concept. Like a mix of Into the Breach and Slay the Spire, you push, grab, elbow and whatever your way around numerous opponents in very small (grid-based) rooms, and the rest of the system is pretty much Slay the Spire, (enemies telegraphing their next turn, deck building, 3/3 action points, branching paths, etc.).

The shoving and pushing people into each other is so fun, actually, that I'd ideally opt for a non-deck system, but that's really nitpicking at this point.

[LibraryOgre]

One day, I need to play through Dragon Age as a Mage... partially to see that story, but also to free up my mage slot in the game. Right now, every team needs Wynne, so I have dedicated healing support, and I seldom play with Leliana, only only rarely more with Zevran, because my MC covers the rogue aspect so well.

[GloatingSwine]

In DA:O there is no upper limit to the useful number of mages you can have in a party. Having your MC be a mage just means you can have more mages.

[Anonymouswizard]

One day, I need to play through Dragon Age as a Mage... partially to see that story, but also to free up my mage slot in the game. Right now, every team needs Wynne, so I have dedicated healing support, and I seldom play with Leliana, only only rarely more with Zevran, because my MC covers the rogue aspect so well.

Yeah, while I've not played it in a while I remember you had to either have Wynne, spec into healing yourself, retool Morrigan into a healer, or rely heavily on potions. As much as I hated it at the time Inquisition moving away from in-combat healing and using the Guard/Barriers stuff was a good move.

But yeah, the general strategy for DAO is more mages, although in DA2 and DAI I found myself relying on two Warriors more. Never had multiple Rogues unless the mission forces me to,

Really need to replay the DA games, but last time I installed Origins on my laptop it wouidn't boot, and my laptop isn't powerful enouugh (or in possession of a big enough drive) to run Inquisition. I mean, it's only missing memory and storage, but upgrading it is going to be a pain (and if I want to play more modern games I'm going to have to either replace the CPU in it or just bite the bullet and get a desktop, and the latter is the more attractive option seeing as I have a £100 offer for a two to three years out of date* one).

And to me playing on PC is required because of how hilariously large the weapons are. I remember playing DA:I on consoles and noticing that Cassandra's sword had a hilt as long as her forearm. At least the PC has the option of modding the weapons to be smaller (at least for DAO).

* As in 'modern games will be low to medium graphics for 30FPS', which I'd be fine with for a first desktop).

[LibraryOgre]

Who's the Hero of Fereldan? I am. My little Duster is now a Paragon, and Bhelen is starting to loosen caste restrictions. Alistair and Anora are married, Morrigan has run off with a demon baby in her belly.