What Are You Playing 6: DLCs of Kevin Bacon

[Anteros]

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I'd honestly never considered that perspective. For me, seeing Alice go senile again when she'd already passed on was kind of horrifying. It made me question my assumptions about the afterlife the game takes place in, and left me constantly thinking "What sort of ****ed up existence is this world?!"

...Which, come to think of it, also perfectly fits the metaphor Spiritfarer is built around.

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True. I didn't realize you were referring to a senility/alzheimer's situation. I was thinking more personal failings or personality flaws. Things like senility seem more like a physical failing, which one would hope to leave behind in the afterlife.

[IthilanorStPete]

I just started playing Disco Elysium for the first time. I'm only a little ways in (just got the body down from the tree), but I'm really enjoying the writing.

[Eldan]

I just started playing Disco Elysium for the first time. I'm only a little ways in (just got the body down from the tree), but I'm really enjoying the writing.

I mean, getting the body down took me until the second or third day.

FUn fact: you can finish the game without even looking at the body. There's an achievement for it.

[Anonymouswizard]

I mean, getting the body down took me until the second or third day.

FUn fact: you can finish the game without even looking at the body. There's an achievement for it.

Huh, might have to try for that sometime.

But yeah, there's a lot to do apart from getting the body down, I didn't manage until the second day. The game's at it's best when you don't focus on the investigation and instead wander around to explore the world.

Oh, and Inland Empire is a great skill, I believe it's required for the two best scene elements in the game.

[IthilanorStPete]

Huh, might have to try for that sometime.

But yeah, there's a lot to do apart from getting the body down, I didn't manage until the second day. The game's at it's best when you don't focus on the investigation and instead wander around to explore the world.

Oh, and Inland Empire is a great skill, I believe it's required for the two best scene elements in the game.

Good to know, thanks! I'll probably start roaming around a bit more when I wrap up what I'm doing, I haven't explored much at all.

[Cespenar]

I don't think that's possible. Time pressure is a central mechanic of Spiritfarer. Constantly juggling different tasks is something you always have to do, and it gets more intense later in the game when you have a bigger variety of buildings to use and people to take care of. It doesn't look it at first, but the game purposely gets more stressful as it progresses, to fit the allegory. On shipboard, I'm pretty much always going, "OK, my ship's going to take a while to get to the next island, I can start up all the production that takes care of itself, like the kitchen and windmill, then I should have time to use one of the active crafting stations- I think the forge is more urgent right now- and if I finish that before arriving, I can spend the last bit fishing or speeding up the garden... wait, I need to make sure everyone's fed and-"

On the islands, when you're exploring and doing story segments, it's pretty calm, but on the ship you run, you rarely get the chance to rest. Despite the way it looks, Spiritfarer is absolutely not a relaxing game.

That's a shame, but thanks for clearing it up.

Okay that is just brilliantly funny. XD

All that's left is to make an alignment chart with the two axis being something like "RPG--Dungeoncrawler" and "Action--TurnBased" and then we can argue over it into eternity. ^^

I swear, we're not that far away from that future.

Oh, and Inland Empire is a great skill, I believe it's required for the two best scene elements in the game.

Which ones are those, preferably in spoilers?

[Anonymouswizard]

Good to know, thanks! I'll probably start roaming around a bit more when I wrap up what I'm doing, I haven't explored much at all.

You don't get a massive area at the start, but it's worth exploring all of it.

Which ones are those, preferably in spoilers?

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Throwing the firebomb at the Tribunal, and the conversation with the Phasmid.

[Eldan]

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The Firebomb is great, but I'd say the second greatest scene in the game, for me, is talking to la Révacholière, which is Composure and then Shivers. With some Conceptualization.

[Cespenar]

I've realized that I remember 0% of the actual dialogue lines.

Good news is that I can replay it if I also forgot all the main beats and plotline. But sadly that never happens.

[Anonymouswizard]

Finished Night Road. The actual climax takes place two or three scenes before the theoretical climax as the schemes you've actually been dealing with all game come to a conclusion.

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Then you've got to get into the SI-held Elysium, grab some computer data, and get to the roof. Which I did without issue just by sticking to options that relied primarily on Intelligence, despite having gone into this at four Hunger and less than full health.

Then the boss of the local SI turns out to be a rogue ghoul and soundly beats Julian while barely taking any damage. She's armed with a flare gun and a flamethrower and is practically unhurt, and has just soundly trounced a vampire full of blood. Surely this is going to be an epic confrontation where we trade attacks and try to break each others will.

Maybe if I'd played another Clan. As it was I walked into that fight starving but with 3 Strength, 3 Combat, 3 Celerity, and a high quality Wakizashi. She didn't even get a chance to aim before I cut her in twain.

[NeoVid]

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The Firebomb is great, but I'd say the second greatest scene in the game, for me, is talking to la Révacholière, which is Composure and then Shivers. With some Conceptualization.

Hold up.

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When did you get to talk to Revacholiere? I only got dialogue from there during the dance-off.

[Zevox]

I wrapped up Paper Mario the other day. Absolute delight of a game, very happy to revisit it after of these years. I hope Nintendo properly re-releases it someday, rather than just leaving it on their new, more expensive online subscription.

After that, decided on a quick once-through of Star Fox 64, which is also part of that. Wasn't getting the high scores I did regularly when I used to play it, but I went through the full hard route, and still remembered a lot of the game's little tricks. Also a fun game - though in retrospect, dang, there's not much to it. It's maybe an hour, hour and a half to play through it once. Good thing it's fun to re-play. It does have a bit of an issue with the Switch pro controller controls, in that it was really designed with the six face buttons of the N64 controller in mind, since each of the four C buttons does something. With the Pro controller you hold ZR to turn the four face buttons into the four C buttons when playing these N64 games, which works, but feels awkward for certain things - and means you can't fire while using some of the C buttons (luckily the ones assigned to boost and break are also standard as X and Y). So that's a small issue. Also, unintuitively, while the N64 R button is mapped to the Pro controller R button, the N64 Z button is mapped to the pro controller's ZL button, so the bank/barrel roll buttons in each direction are on reversed shoulder buttons on each side, rather than the one, which is also annoying.

After that, because the upcoming DNF Duel got me curious, I gave Dungeon Fighter Online a try. Briefly, because while the core beat-em-up combat of the game seems fun, everything else about it doesn't. You can really tell it's an old game at this point with the clunky, information-overload UI it has, it has waaaay too many stats for my liking in an action game, and it has free-to-play BS. As in "you have fatigue points which go down every time you enter a room, and if you run out, you can't do anything more until tomorrow, but we'll sell you potions to restore them" level free-to-play BS. I didn't play enough for that to matter, but it just being there was a crimson flag as far as I was concerned, so I got my brief taste of the game and set it aside. I'll just enjoy the fighting game it's spawning instead.

Meanwhile, continuing to enjoy BBTag, now with rollback. I'm getting my ass kicked less and doing more ass kicking, which is nice, though I usually challenge some stronger players each night, resulting in an ass kicking, but I'm improving from it. And goddamn I just love playing Yang. Her semblance activating and her theme song overriding whatever music was playing before is just the most satisfying thing.

[Eldan]

Hold up.

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When did you get to talk to Revacholiere? I only got dialogue from there during the dance-off.

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I mainly mean the dance-off, yeah. Depends on what you mean by "talk to", I guess? It's mainly a monologue.

She also has a few voice lines here and there earlier in the game.

[Gyro89]

Hmmm, I've started and played Dark Souls 2 for a bit, and I can see why its the black sheep of the series.
The world isn't as interconnected as before and oh my God, the bosses are so terrible "hey let's just throw 3-4 dudes at them, that's fun, right?"
And who thought of tying the dodge roll to a stat you have to level up!?

I'm still having fun but its a very mixed game.

[Razade]

Dark Souls 2 has the unfortunate distinction of being made by From's B team while their A team was working on Bloodborne. The world not being as interconnected is a thing that just happens moving forward but it's hardly what makes Dark Souls 2 the black sheep. That mostly falls on the staggering amount of cut content that Dark Souls 2 has, along with how they compensated for roughly 40% of the planned material being cut. The stats of almost every enemy were doubled or tripled and this makes most Poise breaking monsters, all the gear that was intended that got cut was never fixed so it leaves for a fairly poor pool of gear, and the bosses we were meant to see were either put in places that didn't highlight their abilities or had to be dumbed down because there wasn't enough time to give them all the animations they were intended to get.

There's also the design decisions outside the cut time and quality the game got. The change to PvP rules rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, the netcode was admittedly crap and even Scholar of the First Flame and the three DLC did little to address the above issue (and gave us some truly awful level designs on top of everything). There's also the changes on rolling, the i-frames from Agility but the speed tied to ADP, it was just a mess. That's what happens when you have two directors working on a project with two entirely different visions and also give the work to an entirely different team whose primary role in the company was Armored Core.

[Cespenar]

I'm almost finishing up Telepath Tactics, and it turned to be much better than I expected.

It looks really low-cost and indie, but depth-wise, it's at least FFT level. So many characters, so many skills for all the characters, creative map designs, it's got all. With 8-12 characters in every battle, you can actually hold some semblance of a battle line as well, unlike FFT. It's somewhat closer to Fire Emblem, in that regard.

Sleeper hit in the tactics genre, IMO. I've noticed some low-to-medium level bugs, one save-related and one "undo button" related, but as long as you save often, it doesn't look like a big issue.

[Lord Raziere]

have finally come back to play bloodstained ritual of the night again and now I remembered why I stopped: the underwater area. the obstacles in it I think are harder than any boss. its a combination of factors: the default mechanic of swimming underwater is floating to the surface, convenient when your moving normally, but then you acquire the actual ability to go underwater which.....ugh....works very weirdly. see you have to use an ability to blast water to propel yourself behind you underwater so that you can move around, meaning to use it you have to point in the opposite direction to the one you want to go. this is hard enough to do.

but then you have to go through this weird underwater area where there are these spike-things that go up and down that take off like, 20-25% of your health every time you hit them and they are blocking your path, and if you die to them the closest save point is rooms away, so you have at most 4 tries to get through even one. so imagine trying to do that with the weirdest water movement I've ever seen while whenever I stop, I automatically float to the ceiling. its dumb, why did they design the underwater movement to be like this is, this is the worst. is there a mod or something to fix this? or some way of doing this that I'm not getting? wo thought this was a good idea in a game thats otherwise very good?

[MinimanMidget]

There's a shard that improves your water movement...at the end of the underwater area. The whole thing really is a huge flaw in the game - you already found it, but locking progression behind a random drop from an enemy with no apparent significance is just bad design.

[Lord Raziere]

There's a shard that improves your water movement...at the end of the underwater area. The whole thing really is a huge flaw in the game - you already found it, but locking progression behind a random drop from an enemy with no apparent significance is just bad design.

Yeah, Aqua Jet shouldn't have been a random drop

I've gotten past it, killed a boss. yeah the ability to sink like a stone vastly improves movement more than Aqua jet and amphibian speed combined, simply because I can just....play normally in water now. I'm not sure why they decided to make us go through that torture of those spikes going up and down even once though. like its shorter than I expected, but I still really don't like it.

[Rynjin]

have finally come back to play bloodstained ritual of the night again and now I remembered why I stopped: the underwater area. the obstacles in it I think are harder than any boss. its a combination of factors: the default mechanic of swimming underwater is floating to the surface, convenient when your moving normally, but then you acquire the actual ability to go underwater which.....ugh....works very weirdly. see you have to use an ability to blast water to propel yourself behind you underwater so that you can move around, meaning to use it you have to point in the opposite direction to the one you want to go. this is hard enough to do.

but then you have to go through this weird underwater area where there are these spike-things that go up and down that take off like, 20-25% of your health every time you hit them and they are blocking your path, and if you die to them the closest save point is rooms away, so you have at most 4 tries to get through even one. so imagine trying to do that with the weirdest water movement I've ever seen while whenever I stop, I automatically float to the ceiling. its dumb, why did they design the underwater movement to be like this is, this is the worst. is there a mod or something to fix this? or some way of doing this that I'm not getting? wo thought this was a good idea in a game thats otherwise very good?

I'm playing through for the first time and just got here as well. I took a break from playing it yesterday after I saw there were multiple consecutive rooms of this ****.

There's a shard that improves your water movement...at the end of the underwater area. The whole thing really is a huge flaw in the game - you already found it, but locking progression behind a random drop from an enemy with no apparent significance is just bad design.

This also baffled me. It's not even a common drop. I had to look up how to get it, and it took like 20 kills for it to drop.

[MinimanMidget]

It's weird timing, I actually replayed it recently with the new Aurora mode. (I tried Zangetsu and Bloodless when they came out, but neither of them seemed to warrant a full playthrough.) Aurora breaks the map over her knee, but it was kind of nice to replay this game without having to do most of the work.

[Anonymouswizard]

Went back to Divinity 2, remembered exactly what the issue with late 2000s ARPGs was, and put it down again. It's a decent game, but the combat is kind of dull.

Then I picked up Greedfall while it was on sale and set it to install while I'm at work. Trying to decide what kind of build I want to have, I'm definitely going for a sabre (or closest equivalent) but do I want to pair it with guns or magic?

Whatever I decide priority one will be to ensure I locate a hat.

[Taevyr]

Went back to Divinity 2, remembered exactly what the issue with late 2000s ARPGs was, and put it down again. It's a decent game, but the combat is kind of dull.

Then I picked up Greedfall while it was on sale and set it to install while I'm at work. Trying to decide what kind of build I want to have, I'm definitely going for a sabre (or closest equivalent) but do I want to pair it with guns or magic?

Whatever I decide priority one will be to ensure I locate a hat.

I've been enjoying Greedfall sporadically over the last few weeks: I'd give it a 7/10. Not quite great, but fun enough: Kind of a poor man's "Old" Bioware RPG (e.g. poor man's dragon age: origins), which still makes it better than current Bioware in my book.

Depending on which "starting class" you pick, you can start with

1) both types of one-handed melee weapons (blades and heavy weapons) & firearms

2) Firearms, Blades, and Traps

3) Heavy weapons, offensive magic, and stasis

After that, you can invest in whatever you want. I went with magic and heavy weapons, and a minor investment in firearms so I could use a basic gun. Combat was kind of slow at first (might be due to playing on hard mode, though), but once I got some advanced skills (mass stasis is ridiculous), it got better. I got the impression that firearms can get OP quickly once you invest a bit and can craft bullets, but am not quite certain.

Can't say the RP options are that impressive (though having Deadfire and Disco Elysium as benchmarks tends to skew one's impression of that), but the worldbuilding's good, and exploring the island's been quite fun. It's nice. And the hat selection is quite impressive

[Anonymouswizard]

I've been enjoying Greedfall sporadically over the last few weeks: I'd give it a 7/10. Not quite great, but fun enough: Kind of a poor man's "Old" Bioware RPG (e.g. poor man's dragon age: origins), which still makes it better than current Bioware in my book.

So it's better than Dragon Age: Inquisition?

Honestly 'worse DAO successor' is kind of exactly what I want right now, and being able to ditch the longsword for a sabre is just icing on the cake.

Depending on which "starting class" you pick, you can start with

1) both types of one-handed melee weapons (blades and heavy weapons) & firearms

2) Firearms, Blades, and Traps

3) Heavy weapons, offensive magic, and stasis

After that, you can invest in whatever you want. I went with magic and heavy weapons, and a minor investment in firearms so I could use a basic gun. Combat was kind of slow at first (might be due to playing on hard mode, though), but once I got some advanced skills (mass stasis is ridiculous), it got better. I got the impression that firearms can get OP quickly once you invest a bit and can craft bullets, but am not quite certain.

No blades and magic option makes me sad, but I suppose it can be rectified later.

Went Technician, so blades, guns, and traps. It feels like I made the right choice. Seeing half an enemy's health disappearing in a single shot is so satisfying, although I have to ration my bullets for now. Traps I'm not used to but they seem simple enough here, lure enemies into them to destroy armour and then bang!

So I guess this is the first RPG where I'll heavily use the crafting system.

I am playing on normal though. Anything with a lot of parrying and dodging isn't the kind of thing I can bump up to hard on the first run.

Can't say the RP options are that impressive (though having Deadfire and Disco Elysium as benchmarks tends to skew one's impression of that), but the worldbuilding's good, and exploring the island's been quite fun. It's nice. And the hat selection is quite impressive

Yeah, you've set some pretty high benchmarks there. Would be nice to meet them, but expectations are tempered.

Not got to the island yet, but the city in the prologue has been fun to explore, so I can't wait to get to it.

With regards to hats I have already upgraded to a tricorn, and now the objective is to locate either a bicorn or the hat with the biggest feather I can.

[NeoVid]

Greedfall didn't grab me enough for the amount of time it clearly would have taken to finish it, but it certainly wasn't bad. I got pretty interested in some of the side plots, like the covert military operations you start uncovering, but the days when I was willing to put in a huge amount of time on a game that I think is decent are long passed.

With regards to hats I have already upgraded to a tricorn, and now the objective is to locate either a bicorn or the hat with the biggest feather I can.

Capes are also critically important. The charisma upgrade they give you isn't just metaphorical!

As a side note, if you want more resources and easier combat in Greedfall, you can easily farm gear by fast traveling to various open world areas that are guaranteed to spawn bandits at night. Helped a lot with getting to learn the fiddly combat for the fights that counted, also taught me the ultra-OP qualities of good guns and traps.

[Yora]

Being done with Elden Ring for now after some 150 hours played and who knows how many more still to come, I am now playing Anno 1404. A lot.
I played the first Anno 1602 back when it came out and it was pretty huge here in Germany, but being 12 or so and still quite new to strategy games, I never gor very far with it. This week I thought about giving it another go, but just seeing a screenshot of it made me start taking a look if there are any later games in the series I might like. 1404 is still pretty old and so my computer can run it reasonably well, but it also is leagues above 1602. And I think early 15th century is a really cool period, still mostly medieval in contrast to the other games in the series.
It still seems to be mostly the same game, but I am now having a much better grip on it. (I recently replayed Settler 2, the other big strategy game in Germany back in the day, and it turned out to be a really easy game now. And I've not even played other similar games in the 20 years between.) In some ways, I think the game could really have used some features that were a big part in Settlers 2. Prioritizing which goods should be transported first when a storehouse has to make multiple deliveries with a limited amount of carriers would have been nice, but it's not really become a real issue yet. But setting a minimum stock level that automated trade ships never touch would be a really nice feature. I can tell a ship to always take 20 of an item when it is in a port, and then sell it all off when it stops at an ally's port. But I can't tell it to take everything that is in excess of 40. That would have been really useful and I am sure I've seen it in much older games than this.

Economy and City Builder games have always been the most German of all videogames. Back in the 90s, it was a huge genre around here, both in player interest and also massively dominant among German game companies. We don't even care about the cliches. Micro management and spreadsheets are fun.

[Zevox]

So it's better than Dragon Age: Inquisition?

Dragon Age: Inquisition is getting close to a decade old; does it even count as "current Bioware" anymore? Even Mass Effect: Andromeda just passed 5 years old. The only particularly recent game they have at this point is Anthem.

[Lord Raziere]

Dragon Age: Inquisition is getting close to a decade old; does it even count as "current Bioware" anymore? Even Mass Effect: Andromeda just passed 5 years old. The only particularly recent game they have at this point is Anthem.

probably doesn't. but neither does it really count as "early" or "good" Bioware.

like DAO and Mass Effect 1 I'd say is the probably the point most people will agree upon Bioware still being good before it went downhill. Mass effect is a little better handled than Dragon Age so you probably get more people liking ME2 than Dragon Age 2, and you will find people who say "I like all of ME3 except for the ending and the child dream parts" but I don't remember anyone speaking well of Inquisition.

[MinimanMidget]

I'm making my way through System Shock 2. It's fascinating to experience the common ancestor of Deus Ex and Bioshock and see what they each took from it. One thing neither of them did is scarcity. My resources are constantly running out, and although it's frustrating, it really adds to the vibe of the game.

[Rynjin]

I'm making my way through System Shock 2. It's fascinating to experience the common ancestor of Deus Ex and Bioshock and see what they each took from it. One thing neither of them did is scarcity. My resources are constantly running out, and although it's frustrating, it really adds to the vibe of the game.

It's spiritual-spiritual successor Prey (2017) nails that down pretty good, at least until mid-endgame. And even then I think that was only because I just stockpiled ammo for the big boy guns all game and mostly used the pistol (which has relatively plentiful ammo since you can craft it easily) and wrench.