What Are You Playing 6: DLCs of Kevin Bacon

[Cespenar]

I think there are a number of other games which let you play around with the enemy spawn/reward/difficulty, which affects a 'difficulty' multiplier which is applied to your score at the end of the game.

Most examples that I vaguely can think up are in dungeon crawlers or other procedurally generated games where doing so is easy as changing two variables in the procedure.

I think what we meant was more to be used in games like traditional RPGs: where you'd still fight the relevant encounters, but the filler encounters would go. Which is tougher -- still would be barely a dent in a AAA budget -- but no one would care about the minority of people wanting "less content" anyway.

[warty goblin]

Most examples that I vaguely can think up are in dungeon crawlers or other procedurally generated games where doing so is easy as changing two variables in the procedure.

I think what we meant was more to be used in games like traditional RPGs: where you'd still fight the relevant encounters, but the filler encounters would go. Which is tougher -- still would be barely a dent in a AAA budget -- but no one would care about the minority of people wanting "less content" anyway.

Yeah, traditional RPGs/tactics games is pretty much what I meant. Weirdly, open world games pretty much do this in a sort of backwards way, since ignoring vast swaths of filler content is entirely possible, but for something like Pathfinder WoTR or similar you pretty much just have to wade through the huge number of non-optional combats, to say nothing of random encounters.

[Anonymouswizard]

Yeah, fewer more engaging combats is, IMO, the better model. The issue is that generally either 90% of fights aren't challenging because they're meant to sap resources, or they're meaningless because you just regenerate MP after the fight.

I should get back to the Divinity: Original Sin games, but in 1 I ran out of quests before I hit the levels for the areas outside the city, and in 2 I just had trouble finding quests I could complete. The games are just turned a little too much into 'RPG nerd' territory for me, which is a shame because I like how they haven't simplified character advancement into nothing like some games have.

Might go back to Pillars of Eternity instead.

[Cespenar]

Yeah, traditional RPGs/tactics games is pretty much what I meant. Weirdly, open world games pretty much do this in a sort of backwards way, since ignoring vast swaths of filler content is entirely possible, but for something like Pathfinder WoTR or similar you pretty much just have to wade through the huge number of non-optional combats, to say nothing of random encounters.

I think this problem is exacerbated even further in games with tactical combats, since you can at least just leg it if you don't want to fight in a 1st/3rd person RPG. But in tactics games, for some reason, you're stuck with the encounter whether you like it or not.

I should get back to the Divinity: Original Sin games, but in 1 I ran out of quests before I hit the levels for the areas outside the city, and in 2 I just had trouble finding quests I could complete. The games are just turned a little too much into 'RPG nerd' territory for me, which is a shame because I like how they haven't simplified character advancement into nothing like some games have.

OS2, despite being a good game IMO, veers too much into the mikado/pick-up-sticks mentality in its encounter design, where you have to find the perfect order of encounters that match your levels, or you just get toasted.

[Anonymouswizard]

OS2, despite being a good game IMO, veers too much into the mikado/pick-up-sticks mentality in its encounter design, where you have to find the perfect order of encounters that match your levels, or you just get toasted.

I will be very disappointed if the order isn't:
-pestilential nuisances who wrote for autographs
-people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs
-childten who are up in dates and floor you with 'em flat
-people who when shaking hands shake hands with you like that

And so on.

[Anteros]

OS2, despite being a good game IMO, veers too much into the mikado/pick-up-sticks mentality in its encounter design, where you have to find the perfect order of encounters that match your levels, or you just get toasted.

That's really only true of the early game where you don't have many skills or gear and each level is enormous. You're still better off doing level appropriate encounters later, but the difficulty can be easily overcome with good tactics.

[warty goblin]

I think this problem is exacerbated even further in games with tactical combats, since you can at least just leg it if you don't want to fight in a 1st/3rd person RPG. But in tactics games, for some reason, you're stuck with the encounter whether you like it or not.

Very much so. Xenonauts remains completely outstanding in the genre because it included an auto-resolve option. Since the fiction was you just carpet-bombed the UFO, you couldn't lose soldiers, but couldn't gain XP or items either. Was a real godsend, both strategically when all the best dudes were in the hospital, and psychically since not every single UFO required a 30 minute tactical slog.

Games that fall a bit more into the strategy department are generally better about having an auto-resolve, probably because if something like Pillars of Eternity or Pathfinder and let you auto-resolve fights there'd hardly be a game left. Which is a pity, because they sure do love to stick in pointless fights with like two bandits or wolves or whatever, where there's no chance of losing, and hardly any real resource attrition and they they just need to stick something in that space. Since combat encounter or dialog are the only things people know how to put into isometric style games, and dialog encounters are a lot more expensive than taking a room and adding three goblins, you get a lot of rooms with three goblins.

[Triaxx]

I always feel I missed something about Pillars. It was fun and all but I seemed to be just behind the power curve in every fight I got into. And walking around looking for Sidequests never seemed to yield any rewards.

[Sermil]

I think this problem is exacerbated even further in games with tactical combats, since you can at least just leg it if you don't want to fight in a 1st/3rd person RPG. But in tactics games, for some reason, you're stuck with the encounter whether you like it or not.

On the other hand, in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, there were 0 filler fights. Every fight was scripted and pretty much every fight was difficult.

[tonberrian]

On the other hand, in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, there were 0 filler fights. Every fight was scripted and pretty much every fight was difficult.

Sure there were filler fights. Most every not end of month fight is a filler. Not all of them, the paralogues weren't, but even the ones that just send you on a sidequest fight were. Fights against rare monsters in particular were filler.

It's just all the filler fights were optional as well.

[GloatingSwine]

I always feel I missed something about Pillars. It was fun and all but I seemed to be just behind the power curve in every fight I got into. And walking around looking for Sidequests never seemed to yield any rewards.

I generally found Pillars' sidequests pretty easy to spot. Does a character have a full name and not one of the backer backgrounds on their nameplate? Talk to them. Quests are your main source of XP. You only get XP for monsters until you have completed the bestiary for that monster and none for kith IIRC.

Keeping the party relatively close together and dropping buffs and debuffs helps a lot in combat. (I generally played as a Resolve Paladin, 18 Resolve to start and use the Outworn Buckler shield that gives +5 to all defences in a radius around the user). You can buy it in the shop in the first town.)

Any big enemy suffers a lot from the Wall spells, especially Wall of Many Colours once you get it.

[Triaxx]

I guess I'll have to go back and give it another go. i felt way under level for the final fight. So I had to cheese it pretty hard.

[Cespenar]

That's really only true of the early game where you don't have many skills or gear and each level is enormous. You're still better off doing level appropriate encounters later, but the difficulty can be easily overcome with good tactics.

The range of doable fights open up a bit, sure, but it's still there. Fight a level 15 encounter with level 12 dudes and you're doing peanuts for damage, never mind the tactics. Sure, the inevitable 1% of players will use that skill along with that combo to stunlock and murderize everyone even at low levels, but that's besides the point.

I mean, I can't fault them too much -- if you're putting non-linear encounters and insist on a 1-to-20 leveling system, the mikado style is pretty much unavoidable.

[Eldan]

Got a nice little game calle Shotgun King on Steam for five bucks. It's roguelike chess. Kind of. Turn-based puzzle/strategy, anyway.

You're the black king, your army has been defeated, and you're facing the white army alone. Luckily, you have your trusty shotgun. Meaning, you can move like a king, but you can also fire a somewhat inaccurate shotgun that kills enemy pieces at a distance. There's re-loading, which makes it a bit more tactical, and you can only defeat enemy models by shooting them, not the normal way. After every battle, both you and the enemy get a new ability, like new weapons and new pieces for the enemy.

It's quite fun. Not long, I already played through it on normal, but I like it.

[Cespenar]

Got a nice little game calle Shotgun King on Steam for five bucks. It's roguelike chess. Kind of. Turn-based puzzle/strategy, anyway.

Tried it already -- not bad for five bucks, nice gimmick, but it gets old quicker than you think. Don't expect something like Into the Breach, even as a 5 bucks version.

[Eldan]

Yeah, played it one afternoon, am kind if done.

[warty goblin]

Messed about a bit in Vampie the Masquerade Swansong, the new I guess we're calling it narrative RPG since it's got stats and stuff for the conversations but no combat.

I'm modestly intrigued. It has three main characters l,which the game cuts between when cinematically or narratively appropriate, which is the sort of thing I like, and apparently a moderate amount if detective/puzzle elements as well. When its firing on all cylinders, it feels like playing a movie, but a character drama instead on an action film. This is really cool and I'm down with it; there's a cool method of spending energy to boost skills bit also escalate the intensity of the conversation so the other party is more likely to boost their skill that sells the whole narrative tension really well.

Tragically, it runs into one substantial problem: you still move around like a third person game, but at the strolling speed appropriate to black tie dinner parties. You spend a lot of time walking is what I'm saying. This makes it feel like a movie directed using some weird art house gimmick where we get lots of very tight shots of people walking to convey claustrophobia or loneliness or something. Which in a movie could work, you do a five second shot and get the point, but in the game you're still like halfway across the room so it just causes boredom. It also means you get these really bad cuts from the walking camera to the cinematic conversation camera when you enter a new room or talk to somebody or whatever. Game feels like a movie but with bad cinematography is what I'm saying. I feel like for sections where your precise location doesn't matter a node based telephone system would have worked way better.

[Cespenar]

Messed about a bit in Vampie the Masquerade Swansong, the new I guess we're calling it narrative RPG since it's got stats and stuff for the conversations but no combat.

Sounds similar to "The Council", which had gone way under the radar of many people. I aim to have a look at it soon.

[Form]

Sounds similar to "The Council", which had gone way under the radar of many people. I aim to have a look at it soon.

I've seen a playthrough of The Council and seen some of Swansong. Looks like they've improved the faces of characters. I remember in The Council some characters had faces with somewhat strange proportions. They just had a habit of looking a little bit... off, even when keeping mind not every game needs to go for a nigh photo-realistic representation.

[warty goblin]

I've seen a playthrough of The Council and seen some of Swansong. Looks like they've improved the faces of characters. I remember in The Council some characters had faces with somewhat strange proportions. They just had a habit of looking a little bit... off, even when keeping mind not every game needs to go for a nigh photo-realistic representation.

The characters in Swansong generally look pretty good, and are mostly let down by some really genuinely bad hair animation - Emem has lots of braids that hover and/or writhe around about three inches above her shoulders all the time suggesting some wonky collision boxes - and not great lip synching. That could in part be due to a bit of audio lag from my cheap ass Bluetooth earphones, but even allowing for that the facial animation is just decent at best.

I can't say it really bothers me though. It clears the threshold where everybody looks distinct, and you can recognize what emotion they're showing.

The voice acting on the other hand is rough. Mostly it's fine, but there's a couple times where the direction is way off, or in one case somebody's entire tone and delivery change for absolutely no reason in the middle of a scene. Since the game basically is conversation, this is a bit disappointing.

[Saambell]

Picked up Little Witch in the Woods. Cute little stardew valley like game, but the (I assume) translation is a little wonky at times, as the dialogue can be a little awkward. I appreciate there's basically no combat at all, just sneaking up on birds and chasing walking bushes. Basically an apprentice witch ends up moving into a shack near a run down village and then devotes her time to helping rebuild the village by way of making various potions with ingredients found in the area around the village. I'm still very early on, but have caught a glimpse at how long the game might be. I am a day or two off from having 6 villagers, and a character mentioned there once was 20 people in the village, which the player is trying to get all of them to move back. So I guess at 6 out of 20 is a good start for a first play session, though it started at 3. The game is still early access, but its a quite fun good start.

[Taevyr]

Started a replay of Wrath of the Righteous a while back. Just picked azata path, started act 3, and well.


I've had Aivu for about 10 minutes now, and I'm already convinced this is the best path out there.

[Rynjin]

Started a replay of Wrath of the Righteous a while back. Just picked azata path, started act 3, and well.


I've had Aivu for about 10 minutes now, and I'm already convinced this is the best path out there.

I started the game wanting Gold Dragon but I couldn't let go of Aivu to do it.

[Anonymouswizard]

Maybe I should pick up WotR next time it's on sale. I probably should finish Kingmaker first, but I kind of don't care about the kingdom management portions (which caused me to stop playing originally as soon as they appeared).

Although having picked up the game again I have to say that swarms can just piss off. I'm going to have to stock up on alchemist's fire just in case I meet them again, because none of my physical attackers do damage to them and every spell I tried missed. It's a shame, because otherwise the turn based combat pretty much makes it the best modern CRPG on the market (because the D:OS games have issues).


Maybe I should pick up Baldur's Gate 3, but I can't really afford to drop £50 on a game. Although Solasta is currently £15 on Steam, I might check it out.

[warty goblin]

Maybe I should pick up Baldur's Gate 3, but I can't really afford to drop £50 on a game. Although Solasta is currently £15 on Steam, I might check it out.

Solasta's definitely worth that, it's one of the more enjoyable TTRPG implementations I've run across. It's got some really well designed encounters with interesting terrain that matters, and is generally built around fewer more meaningful fights. Still reuses enemies a bit too much, some of the fights are still kinda just monsters in a room*, and there's definitely a feel of reach exceeding grasp about it, but the basic mechanics are very good, and when it is firing on all cylinders it's legit awesome.

Just so long as you don't want to have any human male characters. They all look like irradiated mutant potato people.


*Notably it has random encounters. 98% of these are utterly pointless and because there's like 2 random encounter maps, extremely repetitious. the remaining 2% are actually interesting and challenging - occasionally genuinely brutalizing - fights. As is usually the case with random encounters, life would be better without random encounters.

[Anteros]

Solasta is...fine. It just lacks depth. Especially compared to something like Pathfinder. Not a lot of customization options or interesting encounters, but it's fine for a bare boned by the numbers tactical rpg.

[Taevyr]

WotR is pretty good, but balance-wise it's definitely worse than Kingmaker. The latter I could beat on Core on my second playthrough, to the point of nearly trivializing the true final boss. It was tough, but proper builds for the companions and making certain you have a well-balanced party did the job quite well.

WotR, on the other hand has more than a few ridiculously unbalanced/stat-bloated enemies, especially when compared to their tabletop equivalent. Went kineticist to deal with it easier, and it does help, but still. I distinctly remember looking at the stats of a random aasimar boss from a minor quest and figuring out he technically had to have 52 dex or something.

[Cespenar]

Maybe I should pick up Baldur's Gate 3, but I can't really afford to drop £50 on a game.

On a not even half-complete game, by the way.

[warty goblin]

Solasta is...fine. It just lacks depth. Especially compared to something like Pathfinder. Not a lot of customization options or interesting encounters, but it's fine for a bare boned by the numbers tactical rpg.

I think it kinda comes down to what you want in an RPG. Personally I find varied and creative encounter design built around a solid and impactful set of basic actions are much more valuable than build diversity giving me 800 ways to break or ignore the rules. The first when done well can keep a game fresh for its whole run length, the second I find tends to get less interesting as the game goes because more and more situations are solved by hitting whatever my build's "I win" button is.

Solasta isn't perfect in this regard by any means, 5th Ed. D&D is not really a robust enough base rules etc for really truly top notch combat, but it has some really well designed encounters, including a fair few fights that took me a few tries to work out. Wrath of the Righteous in particular barely felt like it had encounter design, and got old extremely quickly for me. Maybe it improved later, but literally every fight I ground through was just some barely contextualized dudes in a flat, featureless room devoid of interactivity or really any distinguishing features at all.

[Anteros]

I certainly don't think the Pathfinder games are anywhere close to perfect, but at least the customization, characters, and plot give you a reason to care about the fights. Solasta just felt like endless hours of "surprise, here's another dimly lit room full of generic lizard people" over and over. Granted I never finished it, so maybe the end game was more diverse, but the first part of the game is incredibly generic and repetitive. None of your characters had any character, and the plot was just "hey, lizard people are invading. Go fight them"