What Are you Playing 7: Deadly Sims

[Zombimode]

Finished the Vilitch the Curseling campaign on the Realms of Chaos map.

Some thoughts about Warriors of Chaos in general and Tzeentch in particular:
- Tzeentch warriors are tanky - high armor, protoss shields, and technology and skill bonuses tuned towards defense* and being Chaos Warriors they still packed a punch. It is not often in TWWH that your melee infantry actually carries the battle but it definitely applies here.
- the feeling of commanding the Sorcerous Host of Tzeentch really comes across - at least from a flavour standpoint Vilitch and his Puppets of Misrule have really nailed it.
- Vilitich is a great lord. Very good caster, pretty decent melee warrior - a great hybrid. His unique skills are also pretty fun. My only complaint would be that he is quite the 4th wall breaker. Although if anyone in the WH universe has the right to be "meta" it would be a Champion of Tzeentch.
- I welcome the changes made to Vassals and diplomacy in general
- Minor Settlement Battles really are too frequent
- I concur to what Anteros has said about the battle AI: it is really not good. It is not that case that it is as good as it was 20 years ago - no no, it its actaully much worse that what we had in RTW or MTW(2). And I can say that with confidence since I've never really stopped playing Medieval 2, so I know what the battle AI of the game is capable of.

I will wait for at least the 2.1 patch until a start the next campaign. There are still a lot of thing to be ironed out.


Since I had no other plans for this sunday and to get away from the bloodshed of Total War, I've jumped into Life is Strange: True Colors. So far I'm having a great time

Some remarks:
- I'm glad that the series has finaly moved away from the Coming of Age genre. Nothing wrong with that in general, but we had this now three times in a row. A change of perspective was needed. Personally I would have prefered an even older age category (like, playing an actual adult for a change), but twenty-somethings are also fine.
- with the 4th entry into the series it may be a bit late to lament this but I'm still not a fan of the "supers" worldbuilding. Max'es timewarp abilities would have worked perfectly as a one-time occurance for the simple reason that it is so interconnected to Life is Strange 1's story. You can't tell this story without the time loop abilities. Max wasn't born with those powers and regardless of the specific ending Max "looses" her powers in any case at the end. It allows for several intepretations and doesn't really point to a X-Man or Marvel style setting. Before the Storm followed suit with the only supernatural element being the implied connection between Rachel Ambers state of wellbeing and the forest fire - hardly a superpower. But with Life is Strange 2 it is now cemented that in the Life is Strange universe superpowers are a thing, in a X-Man style fashion with no room for interpretation. And this was superfluous in Life is Strange 2 as a very similar story could have been written without any superpowers and a I get the same feeling from True Colors: at least for now the story could have been written without any supernatural abilities in place.
- having said that, Alex' super-empathy powers are quite interesting.



*although some technologies and skill bonuses are bugged - as usual unfortunately. I cant remeber having played a Warhammer Total War campaign where all skill and technology bonuses counted for all units they ought to count
Reminds me to make a bug report about it in the official forums.

[Anonymouswizard]

Well DMS is proving to be much shorter than I expected, got 3AP only a couple of hours in. Playing a troll Street Sam specced primarily into melee with a small amount of shotguns (which I'm going to be boosting soon). Although TBH I've mostly been dumping my karma into Body rather than Strength.

Still at 6 Essence, because there's basically nothing I want in the basic cyberware selection. Cyberarms only give hp at this stage, when I'm walking around with about 90 already, and even though I'd like the bone lacing I know I'll just rip it out when the better version comes along. In Hong Kong I'm certain I'd have picked up SOMETHING by this point, instead I'm just sitting on ~10k nuyen waiting for the good stuff.

[Zevox]

I've continued playing some Persona 4 Arena Ultimax since its rollback update last month. Finally pretty pleased with where I'm at with my main, Rise, I've decided to start learning a second character. I decided that would be Margaret. Oh boy, is that a struggle. The biggest immediate issue, aside from some of the normal unique oddities that make her different from the rest of the cast, is that on defense, she pathetically awful. Her Furious Action - a universal invincible reversal move in the game - is a grab. A very slow, for some reason techable grab, which won't hit airborne foes if done on the ground, and lets the opponent recover in the air afterward at an angle that it is very awkward for her to anti-air them from, so even when it hits, it arguably leaves the opponent at the advantage. To top that off, her guard cancel is a sliding low attack, which actually makes it pretty bad if the next move the opponent is performing hops them up into the air even slightly. Which means her best defensive option is probably to spend 100 meter on a reversal super into One More Cancel. So in other words, I'll be doing even more learning to just block everything the opponent does on offense than I was already doing as Rise.

Besides that, after a day of getting my ass kicked, I feel like I'm starting to get a bit of a handle on her basic neutral game and hit confirms. She's definitely got some powerful options, albeit most feel a tad slower than other characters', so that'll take some getting used to as well. But I think I'll like her, as long as I can get past her awful, awful defensive options.

I'm also getting late into my New Game+ run of Triangle Strategy - chapter 16, so almost at the decision point for the ending. Angling for the Golden Ending, of course.

Spoiler

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I'm honestly not sure why I needed to go to see Serenoa's father in chapter 15 to qualify for the Golden Ending. I didn't learn anything that I didn't just from Benedict telling me what had happened last time. Really wish I could've gone with Roland, especially since I know you get to recruit Cordelia doing that. Milo is not so interesting a character by comparison. Though I did appreciate getting to kill Patriate, at least.

For earlier choices, I did go for turning Roland over in chapter 7 this time - and oh boy, do I much prefer the other route in that regard. The only positive consequence there is that Roland got to see Cordelia briefly, but then you get the stupidity of her choosing to remain behind rather than escape with him in chapter 8, which is clearly only done because the consequences of your choices in this game only really last for a couple of chapters before things converge back to a universal story point. Which is kind of one of the reasons I'm not normally a big fan of games trying to give you a bunch of decisions that are supposed to alter things - you either need to do like Bioware does and have all of the decisions isolated to their own subplots, which fractures the story, or make them only so impactful, even if it requires awkward decisions to like that one to be made.

On a similar note, I was not expecting Sorsely Ende to still have his illicit dealings discovered and be killed for it in the route where you choose to work with him rather than expose him, but I guess they absolutely needed Serenoa to be a made a member of the Saintly Seven for some reason, even though that really doesn't make much sense at all in this variation of the story. If it weren't for the fact that getting in touch with Svarog in Aesfrost is obviously going to be important to the Golden Ending, I'd say the other route was the better one there, too - and I'd still say it's better written, in that the consequences at the end of it make considerably more sense.

Anyway, game's still good, but I am admittedly getting tired of it at this point. Honestly it would help if New Game+ didn't bump the levels of the enemies up, forcing me to continue using the same team as my first time around unless I want to do a bunch of grinding to bring the others up to par, but oh well. I look forward to seeing the Golden Ending, and then to moving on to some other game to fill the time until Bayonetta 3.

[Anonymouswizard]

Finished Dead Man's Switch. It's okay, but suffers from severe pacing problems with advancement. When I finish a mission and have 28 Karma to spend something's gone wrong. Thankfully though I could get just enough Shhottgguns to make it tthhrrrough the last mission relatively painlessly.

So finishing up with a replay of Dragonfall. I decided I wanted a character who'd round out the group and went with a human Rigger, adding a little bit of decking skill after the first mission. I can only use the very worst deck at the moment, but it should be okay until I can increase my skill after another run or two. Hoping I can get those couple of storylines I missed out on last time.

[Cespenar]

Anyway, game's still good, but I am admittedly getting tired of it at this point. Honestly it would help if New Game+ didn't bump the levels of the enemies up, forcing me to continue using the same team as my first time around unless I want to do a bunch of grinding to bring the others up to par, but oh well.

I can't fathom why some RPGs still pull this individual levels bull, but I had the same experience as well.

[Zevox]

I can't fathom why some RPGs still pull this individual levels bull, but I had the same experience as well.

On that note...

Spoiler: Golden Ending route

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Hold the phone, I have to split my party into three for this route? So they're basically going to force me to grind my lower-level characters up to par in order to complete the next few missions, since my main team can only cover 1/3-1/2 of each squad? Oh, I don't know about this. This might be a SMT4-esque "no, getting this ending is too tedious, screw it" moment.

[Razade]

On that note...

Spoiler: Golden Ending route

Show

Hold the phone, I have to split my party into three for this route? So they're basically going to force me to grind my lower-level characters up to par in order to complete the next few missions, since my main team can only cover 1/3-1/2 of each squad? Oh, I don't know about this. This might be a SMT4-esque "no, getting this ending is too tedious, screw it" moment.

Yeah.

Spoiler

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This was really frustrating getting it the first time. You get everyone in the final fight though. The three levels with the split party are tough though.

I did try to warn you without spoiling it though.

[LibraryOgre]

Taking a slight break from Wrath of the Righteous and playing a little bit of Temple of Elemental Evil. Just got to Nulb, having cleared the Deklo Grove, the Moathouse, and Emiridy Meadows. Had one of my hardest fights in a long time against Lareth... previously, I've been able to kill all his guards and deal with him alone, but this time, after a couple tries, I was able to get everyone down.

Team is:
Melee Bard/Ranger. Only going to pick up 3 levels of ranger, put the rest into bard.
Dwarven Fighter, going to go Paladin
Human Cleric (Pelor)
Halfling Rogue 1/Wizard x

NPCs:
Fruella, so far straight fighter
Meleny, straight druid, going to get Augment Summoning at 6th
Furnok, going to throw in a bit of Ranger
Elmo, fighter

[Cespenar]

I'm trying the Midnight Fight Express that I've heard here some days ago, and it's good. Kinda plays like if an isometric Oni would meet with Hotline Miami in the middle and sort out their problems? Pretty hard at times, but also pretty enjoyable.

[warty goblin]

Gave Steel Rising a whirl. It's a soulslike by Spiders, the developer of Greedfall, the Technomancer, and other odd games whose reach exceeds their grasp. I generally like Spiders' work, if nothing else they aren't afraid to try things, and they're consistently weird in a way too few developers are.

Steel Rising is right on brand, by which I mean weird. You play as Marie Antoinette's personal robot bodyguard, on a mission to stop Louis from killing everybody with his army of murder robots.

Certain historical liberties may have been taken.

This works surprisingly well as a setup. The traditional awful soulsalike AI is fine, they're dumb robots. The bit where you meet the same types of enemies all over the place is also sensible, robot come in makes. Stamina is recontextualized as overheating, and in a pleasant twist, you actually start to glow red when you get close to overheat. So you can actually see of you are low stamina without looking at some silly little bar in the corner of the screen.

The animations are fantastic too. You are humanoid, but you don't move or fight like a human. All your movements are a bit too sharp, your arms rotate back too far as you swing them when running. And in classic Iron Man robots are volume-free magic fashion, all your weapons fold up inside you. So you don't hit dudes with a big hammer, your arm turns into a big hammer. The weapons are odd too, chains and razor blade fans, even something as basic as a sword is a sword for a robot. I've long wished more games imagined the player character as something distinctly inhuman, and this does just that.

Also, most wildly, it has difficulty settings. Oh they call them assists, but they're modular difficulty settings. If you don't want them, you don't use use them, but I do want them and they make the game flat out better.

I turned off dropping all my souls on death, because if I wanted to do corpse runs I'd be paying Blizzard $15 a month, then upped stamina regen by 25% and cut enemy damage by 25%. This turns the combat from the usual plodding tedium into something fun and dynamic. Like what being a hot French assassin maid robot should feel like.

[Rynjin]

Is it generally more fun than Greedfall? I always felt like that was a game that was ALMOST there, so if it's like 10-20% more fun it might be worth picking up.

Greedfall felt low on mobility and general character options for my taste. At least as a magic user.

[Zevox]

Well, I've made my way through the initial endgame Golden Route missions in Triangle Strategy.

Spoiler

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By which I mean the three where your party is split, of course. There's really only two reasons I wound up doing it:

1) The game has a level cap, 50, which I was just reaching upon getting to these missions.
2) Anyone who is more than 2-3 levels below the recommended level of a mission instantly gains 100 XP - a full level - from any action they take in combat. Those within that range still gain a healthy boost to how much XP they gain, more the further from the recommended level they are.

Combined with the fact that the highest level mock battle I unlocked at this point had a recommended level of 49, it only wound up taking two times playing it with each squad to bring the weaker characters up to par - either all the way up to 50, or at least 48-49. So thank heavens for those bits of the game's design. And on the plus side, now I can experiment with more of the characters.

Although a few of of them really don't warrant it from what I've seen. I think I have to nominate Lionel for Worst Character in the Game*. Maybe he'd be much better if I had promoted him to his tier 3 class or had his tier 3 weapon move unlocked, but as-is, he's slow, not that durable, doesn't do that much damage, and all of his special abilities except his defense debuff are really unreliable. I mean, my next-closest candidate would be Picolletta; she seems like a one-trick pony with that Decoy ability, and even leveled up, was squishy and weak like Lionel. But Decoy is still much more useful than Lionel's abilities. Medina also feels like them, but mainly because I don't want to just drop all of my money on items for her to use, she'd pretty clearly be great if I did do that.

By contrast, Best Character in the Game* is almost undoubtedly Ser Maxwell. He's amazingly mobile thanks to Traverse, has high stats all around, gets multiple AoE abilities, a solid ranged attack option, a powerful single-target melee attack for only 1 TP, TP recovery whenever he hits more than one target with the same attack, and to top it all off, a free heal to full the first time his HP hits 0 in every fight. I can legitimately send him off doing things that would be suicidal for anyone else and get great results. Runner-up candidates there: Serenoa (unsurprisingly, main character privilege) and maybe Avlora. Haven't used her much yet, obviously, but she's quite the powerful bruiser, and that super move of hers is potent if the enemies line up right. She does feel like mostly a pile of high stats, though, not nearly as versatile as Serenoa or Maxwell.

*That I have - I'd need to play through twice more to unlock the last two characters I don't have, Cordelia and Travis. I can't imagine either of them being worse than Lionel or better than Maxwell, though.

On the fighting game end of things, I've wound up deciding I need to drop Rumbleverse - whether temporarily or not, I'm not sure, but I'm questioning whether Battle Royale games are for me after getting frustrated with it. In a lot of regards it has elements that I like from fighting games, but the 40-player aspect wound up being a source of frustration, as getting surprise-attacked by a third (or fourth, or fifth...) person while in the midst of a fight with one, or ganged up on by a couple until I die because I simply can't defend against attacks from multiple people at once if they're doing things right, is extremely frustrating. It leads to me feeling like what I need to do is just avoid fighting as much as possible and let everyone else kill each other until there's just one foe left standing, and that's not fun. Leads me to believe I'd best stick to normal fighting games, where there is only one opponent, even in the team games.

On that note, been sticking it out learning Margaret in Persona 4 Arena, and slowly growing more confident with her. Her defensive weakness is still plenty pronounced, but I'm getting better at using the tools she does have there, and a lot better at playing her neutral game and offense. Wouldn't say I'm as good with her as I am with Rise, but I'm pleased with my progress - at the very least I can now run over players who clearly don't know what they're doing, which actually wasn't the case when I first started playing her a few days ago. Feels good to pick up a second character in this game. And to still have people to play in it a month after the rollback update dropped. And to just be able to play it with good online at all. I kind love the game, is what I'm saying.

[Razade]

Well, I've made my way through the initial endgame Golden Route missions in Triangle Strategy.

Spoiler

Show

By which I mean the three where your party is split, of course. There's really only two reasons I wound up doing it:

1) The game has a level cap, 50, which I was just reaching upon getting to these missions.
2) Anyone who is more than 2-3 levels below the recommended level of a mission instantly gains 100 XP - a full level - from any action they take in combat. Those within that range still gain a healthy boost to how much XP they gain, more the further from the recommended level they are.

Combined with the fact that the highest level mock battle I unlocked at this point had a recommended level of 49, it only wound up taking two times playing it with each squad to bring the weaker characters up to par - either all the way up to 50, or at least 48-49. So thank heavens for those bits of the game's design. And on the plus side, now I can experiment with more of the characters.

Although a few of of them really don't warrant it from what I've seen. I think I have to nominate Lionel for Worst Character in the Game*. Maybe he'd be much better if I had promoted him to his tier 3 class or had his tier 3 weapon move unlocked, but as-is, he's slow, not that durable, doesn't do that much damage, and all of his special abilities except his defense debuff are really unreliable. I mean, my next-closest candidate would be Picolletta; she seems like a one-trick pony with that Decoy ability, and even leveled up, was squishy and weak like Lionel. But Decoy is still much more useful than Lionel's abilities. Medina also feels like them, but mainly because I don't want to just drop all of my money on items for her to use, she'd pretty clearly be great if I did do that.

By contrast, Best Character in the Game* is almost undoubtedly Ser Maxwell. He's amazingly mobile thanks to Traverse, has high stats all around, gets multiple AoE abilities, a solid ranged attack option, a powerful single-target melee attack for only 1 TP, TP recovery whenever he hits more than one target with the same attack, and to top it all off, a free heal to full the first time his HP hits 0 in every fight. I can legitimately send him off doing things that would be suicidal for anyone else and get great results. Runner-up candidates there: Serenoa (unsurprisingly, main character privilege) and maybe Avlora. Haven't used her much yet, obviously, but she's quite the powerful bruiser, and that super move of hers is potent if the enemies line up right. She does feel like mostly a pile of high stats, though, not nearly as versatile as Serenoa or Maxwell.

*That I have - I'd need to play through twice more to unlock the last two characters I don't have, Cordelia and Travis. I can't imagine either of them being worse than Lionel or better than Maxwell, though.

Not sure if I should spoiler this because it's mostly post-game stuff but

Spoiler

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Lionel is really good if you want to break the economy of the game wide open. Like, generating gold. I didn't really have a problem with money or supplies by the end though so I'm not really sure what his purpose is. He's certainly got some oomph with Charm but I rather just kill enemies and there are better crowd control characters.

Quahaug is probably the best character but you only get him post game and he needs a lot of ranking up to get him there. His ability to mess with turn order and just outright being able to redo a turn is brutal for all the reasons you can expect. It really makes me wish Triangle Strategy didn't keep your level when you start a new game. I wanted to play around with a new team from Level 1, try out different strategies and such. Cordelia is the best healer but that's really all she brings to the table. Travis is just another frontline fighter. Nothing bad but also just sorta mid-tier.

Hassbrassa is objectively one of the worst given she's an all-rounder that isn't good at being an all-rounder like a few of the other people who straddle the various role lines without serious commitment and even then she's just kinda flimsy in every major department. She'd be the worst though if not for Giovanna, another of the basically post-game characters. Taking all the worst of the Geomancer from Final Fantasy Tactics and adding variability with TP cost. So you have to get the right terrain, a tricky thing in the game, and have huge TP or she's the weakest of the mages or the weakest of the healers.

[Zombimode]

Gave Steel Rising a whirl. It's a soulslike by Spiders, the developer of Greedfall, the Technomancer, and other odd games whose reach exceeds their grasp. I generally like Spiders' work, if nothing else they aren't afraid to try things, and they're consistently weird in a way too few developers are.

Hm. I'm, too, a fan of Spiders and had interest in Steel Rising. But as soon as I learned the game is a "Souls-like" my interest dropped to zero.

But, this term has been misapplied in the past. For instance, I remember Dont Nod's Vampyr being described as "Souls-like". Well, let's say if Steel Rising is a Souls-Like as Vampyr was, I would be on board!


On other news: I finished Life is Strange: True Colors
While I do not regret my stay in Haven I have to say that for me it was very clearly the least engaging Life is Strange game, by a wide margin even.
It was too nice, too happy. It's structure was entirely to familiar - which would be OK if the content is great, but for me it was just ok.
In general the game lacked ambition and daring. I felt it too short to really pull of the character developments.
And then there is the somewhat jarring disconnect between Alex, the Problem Foster Child to Alex, the "Make the world a better place" psychological super-genius.

[Cygnia]

While Steelrising is on my wish list, I've got way too many games to play on my queue right now to buy it.

[warty goblin]

Is it generally more fun than Greedfall? I always felt like that was a game that was ALMOST there, so if it's like 10-20% more fun it might be worth picking up.

Greedfall felt low on mobility and general character options for my taste. At least as a magic user.

It isn't a Bioware style RPG like Greedfall is, it really is a full on soulsalike. The combat however is pretty mobile for one of these. Even when using a heavy weapon I felt quite fast, and the mace and chain weapons are blisteringly quick.

Hm. I'm, too, a fan of Spiders and had interest in Steel Rising. But as soon as I learned the game is a "Souls-like" my interest dropped to zero.

But, this term has been misapplied in the past. For instance, I remember Dont Nod's Vampyr being described as "Souls-like". Well, let's say if Steel Rising is a Souls-Like as Vampyr was, I would be on board!

No, this is full on soulsalike, which I also normally at best sort of tolerate. However, the difficulty options mean you can turn it into a more or less regular third person action game like they used to make 10 years ago. This is basically what I've done, turning off dropping all your XP at death makes exploration feel fun and interesting instead it being a stupid and penalized thing. It also avoids frustrating metaphysical questions about why everything respawns and so forth, dying is now just dying in a normal videogame. Start over at the checkpoint and try again. Cranking up stamina regen by 25% makes it much less of an issue and gets rid of most of those annoying bits in a soulslike where you swing your sword three times and have to stand there wheezing for 30 seconds; if you really never wanted to care I think the modifier goes up to +100% regen rate. And turning down damage to the player by 25% turns boss fights from needing to learn every move and hoping the boss doesn't proc any of the dumb overpowered ones 4 times in a row to just like, a boss fight. You need to pay attention and dodge and stuff, but it isn't the misery that most soulsalike boss fights are. If you want totally easy mode you can turn off player damage entirely, but 25% feels pretty much like Normal on most games, which leaves full player damage as an intriguing sounding hard mode, rather than obligate suffering.

Some annoyances remain; enemies respawning when you take a nap and so on, but with the worst of the souls nonsense pruned out these are much, much less bothersome.

[Cespenar]

But, this term has been misapplied in the past. For instance, I remember Dont Nod's Vampyr being described as "Souls-like". Well, let's say if Steel Rising is a Souls-Like as Vampyr was, I would be on board!

I said "come on!", opened Steam to check, and voila, the tag is there. /facepalm

[Zevox]

Not sure if I should spoiler this because it's mostly post-game stuff but

Spoiler

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Lionel is really good if you want to break the economy of the game wide open. Like, generating gold. I didn't really have a problem with money or supplies by the end though so I'm not really sure what his purpose is. He's certainly got some oomph with Charm but I rather just kill enemies and there are better crowd control characters.

Quahaug is probably the best character but you only get him post game and he needs a lot of ranking up to get him there. His ability to mess with turn order and just outright being able to redo a turn is brutal for all the reasons you can expect. It really makes me wish Triangle Strategy didn't keep your level when you start a new game. I wanted to play around with a new team from Level 1, try out different strategies and such. Cordelia is the best healer but that's really all she brings to the table. Travis is just another frontline fighter. Nothing bad but also just sorta mid-tier.

Hassbrassa is objectively one of the worst given she's an all-rounder that isn't good at being an all-rounder like a few of the other people who straddle the various role lines without serious commitment and even then she's just kinda flimsy in every major department. She'd be the worst though if not for Giovanna, another of the basically post-game characters. Taking all the worst of the Geomancer from Final Fantasy Tactics and adding variability with TP cost. So you have to get the right terrain, a tricky thing in the game, and have huge TP or she's the weakest of the mages or the weakest of the healers.

Spoiler: Triangle Strategy character strength talk.

Show

If Lionel's main combat application is his one ability that induces Tempt, I think my assessment of him stands, because he seems to just be worse at that than Milo. As in, has notably lower odds of actually inflicting it (45% seems to be his standard, where Milo's main move that inflicts it is IIRC 70%, and her big AoE Tempt is 100%, but only applies for one turn). Again, unless promoting him to tier 3 increases those odds, but I don't think that's how it works, pretty sure it's level-based.

Quahaug is situationally good, no question there - I've had Turn Back Time be a full heal + restore the hit of invincibility that Benedict had given someone before, which is very potent, and his ability to teleport people can be good at the right time. But for the Best Character in the Game title I'd think you should be more capable as a stand-alone character, and he's really not, he's a support unit that's situationaly powerful. Stand-alone he's got Time Compression, which is a good buff, and his delayed damage move, which is alright, and that's it.

Hossabara I've been using as sort of my last pick for my main team (put her back in when Benedict left during my first run), and I think she's fine. She's a decent backup healer and damage-dealer, her Trekking for TP ability makes her reasonably independent, and it's always nice to have that pushback ability she shares with Roland and Erador. Her main problem is that the first half of her life bar just seems to melt in one hit all the time, and only Desperate Defense keeps her from feeling super squishy - and that's somehow despite her actual defense stats being perfectly fine, strangely enough, on par with Serenoa. She's probably the weakest member of the team I've been using, but I'm far more skeptical of some of the others than I am of her.

Giovanna I can't possibly see as the worst character, just another situational one like Quahaug, except she's map-dependent instead of specific combat situation dependent. From what I've seen of her, her problem is that if you use her on a map where its mostly just flatlands, all she gets to do is throw rocks, in which case yeah, she sucks. But bear in mind that she needs other types of terrain and only use her when they're available, and she's fine. Heck, for the split-party missions I made a point of putting her in the same squad as Ezana, so that no matter what terrain she got she would have puddle squares to fuel her healing ability, and she made a decent healer because of that. Not nearly as good as Geela, but reasonable. And she gets the same Trekking for TP ability as Hossabara, and a high movement range, so she can generate that TP she needs.

[Anonymouswizard]

[QUOTE=warty goblin;25576679]Gave Steel Rising a whirl. It's a soulslike by Spiders, the developer of Greedfall, the Technomancer, and other odd games whose reach exceeds their grasp. I generally like Spiders' work, if nothing else they aren't afraid to try things, and they're consistently weird in a way too few developers are.

Steel Rising is right on brand, by which I mean weird. You play as Marie Antoinette's personal robot bodyguard, on a mission to stop Louis from killing everybody with his army of murder robots.

Certain historical liberties may have been taken.

This works surprisingly well as a setup. The traditional awful soulsalike AI is fine, they're dumb robots. The bit where you meet the same types of enemies all over the place is also sensible, robot come in makes. Stamina is recontextualized as overheating, and in a pleasant twist, you actually start to glow red when you get close to overheat. So you can actually see of you are low stamina without looking at some silly little bar in the corner of the screen.

The animations are fantastic too. You are humanoid, but you don't move or fight like a human. All your movements are a bit too sharp, your arms rotate back too far as you swing them when running. And in classic Iron Man robots are volume-free magic fashion, all your weapons fold up inside you. So you don't hit dudes with a big hammer, your arm turns into a big hammer. The weapons are odd too, chains and razor blade fans, even something as basic as a sword is a sword for a robot. I've long wished more games imagined the player character as something distinctly inhuman, and this does just that.

Also, most wildly, it has difficulty settings. Oh they call them assists, but they're modular difficulty settings. If you don't want them, you don't use use them, but I do want them and they make the game flat out better.

I turned off dropping all my souls on death, because if I wanted to do corpse runs I'd be paying Blizzard $15 a month, then upped stamina regen by 25% and cut enemy damage by 25%. This turns the combat from the usual plodding tedium into something fun and dynamic.[QUOTE]

Sounds great, especially the addition of assists that should have been in Soulslikes since like Demons Souls. I'll need something more like game speed tweaking or timing leniency to get me to buy it now though.

Like what being a hot French assassin maid robot should feel like.

Huh, norms that sounds like a good reason for a purchase.

[warty goblin]

Sounds great, especially the addition of assists that should have been in Soulslikes since like Demons Souls. I'll need something more like game speed tweaking or timing leniency to get me to buy it now though.

Just FYI you can at any time change it it so you literally cannot take damage from enemies, and then back to a different setting if you prefer. Sort of a toggleable nuclear option for difficulty.

Huh, norms that sounds like a good reason for a purchase.

It totally is. All games now need to have hot assassin maid robots in them.

[Anonymouswizard]

Just FYI you can at any time change it it so you literally cannot take damage from enemies, and then back to a different setting if you prefer. Sort of a toggleable nuclear option for difficulty.

I mean it's a great setting, but I won't personally get on with it. I need consequences for ****ing up, but many Soulslikes put them too high with too tight timings.

I personally stopped playing Jedi: Fallen Order because I couldn't get it to a reasonable level of difficulty. I needed Easy level parrying with Normal level damage, or vise versa. So if timings are relatively tight in Steelrising I'll likely spend most of my time at high damage reduction.

But yes, customisable difficulty is great, and should be something you can do at any time outside of a battle. Literal invincibility modes are also a plus, just not my personal thing.

Okay, there's one exception. The Lego Star Wars games don't need difficulty customisation, because in practice they're more about competing with the other player.

It totally is. All games now need to have hot assassin maid robots in them.

I live in England, the French part is non-negotiable

[Zevox]

And I've finished the Golden Ending of Triangle Strategy.

Spoiler

Show

Honestly, for how bleak the rest of the game is, this ending almost ties thing up a little too tidily. Sure, the Roselle being freed and Roland and Glenbrook choosing to share the salt of the mines with all of Norzelia works. And what's left of Hyzante wouldn't have much choice but to accept Glenbrook's rule if they wanted to do that, and given the alternative is leaving the people of Hyzante leaderless and ruined, it makes sense that they would. But Aesfrost just kind incorporating as a Glenbrook territory instead of its own nation as well? Really? Even if Svarog is fine with that for some reason (and it's bizarre to me that he would be), you'd think basically everyone else in Aesfrost is would be against it. Also, he somehow reconciled things with Gustadolph's most ardent supporters without bloodshed? Really? Stretching belief quite a bit there, guys.

Layla's survival and acceptance of things is iffy too. Given her reaction when Serenoa and the other refused to kill her after their battle I half expected she'd commit suicide at the first opportunity. Bleak, yeah, but again, so is most of the game. And with the way she was talking about not being willing to stain the new world you wanted to build with her bloody hands, well, it would make sense.

Still, they did avoid something I was afraid they'd do, which is having Roland abdicate the throne to Serenoa. After Roland's comments about that during one of the final battles I half expected it, given the big secret of Serenoa's parentage, but I'm glad they let that pass. Serenoa's reaction to learning his heritage was basically what I felt it should be given his characterization, and his straight-up refusing when Roland does offer to let him take the throne after telling him his heritage feels right as well. And of course, nice to see Serenoa and Frederica finally have their damn wedding.

Honestly, while this is obviously the best ending by a long shot, it almost feels like the more bittersweet result of Frederica's ending is more appropriate to the game's overall tone. Can't speak to the other two endings, but it wouldn't surprise me if the same was true of them. It was satisfying to confirm my suspicions that the Hierophant was a lie and Idore was the real power in Hyzante, though. And to get to kill him, but you do that in Frederica's ending too, just without him going all giant monster on you. Come to think of it, since Benedict's ending is about siding with Aesfrost to defeat Hyzante, you probably kill Idore in three of the four endings of the game.

Anyway, good game, if not without its flaws. Don't think I'm doing more runs to see the other two endings though, at least not for a while. Not sure what I'll play next for single-player games right now. I'm still sitting on SMT5, but I'm not sure if I want to jump into another game with a bleak moral system and (I presume because it's SMT) only one, difficult to achieve route to a good ending right now.

[Anteros]

Been playing some No Man's Sky. It's definitely a lot better than it was on launch. Gameplay loop is still a bit shallow, but exploring and building reminds me of Subnautica, and that game is good enough to carry this one too.

[AlanBruce]

Picked up Death Stranding yesterday from PS Plus. Visually, the game is absolutely stunning. Kojima certainly pours his demented heart and soul into it. The addition of known actors with a bang up job in line delivery make this game as spectacle to watch.

Unfortunately, the gameplay was just not doing it for me. I had heard awhile back it is a “walking simulator” and sadly, it is. My best take out of this other than the stunning visuals is that I didn’t pay for it.

[tonberrian]

Playing Valkyria Chronicles again. Hopefully this time I won't bounce of Selvaria Bles in that first encounter.

[GloatingSwine]

Playing Valkyria Chronicles again. Hopefully this time I won't bounce of Selvaria Bles in that first encounter.

Smoke shells. She can't murder you if she can't see you.

[Rynjin]

Picked up Death Stranding yesterday from PS Plus. Visually, the game is absolutely stunning. Kojima certainly pours his demented heart and soul into it. The addition of known actors with a bang up job in line delivery make this game as spectacle to watch.

Unfortunately, the gameplay was just not doing it for me. I had heard awhile back it is a “walking simulator” and sadly, it is. My best take out of this other than the stunning visuals is that I didn’t pay for it.

I will say this for it, while it is literally a walking simulator, it does have game mechanics and traversal options that let you choose HOW you walk.

[MCerberus]

Splatoon 3 is like Splatoon 2, except there's inexplicable obsession with random pieces of media everywhere and it seems half of all messages have art of their fursona.

So it's exactly like Splatoon 2. Which to be clear, I signed up for more splatoon, so all is well. Currently attempting to find the sound test jukebox.

[Zevox]

So, tried a couple of things today. One is a game that was a PS+ freebie a couple months ago, Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time. I've never played a Crash Bandicoot game before, but I figured hey, I like cartoony platformers, and this is a classic series for that genre. Besides, it was free.

To my surprise, I'm really not feeling it. One part of it is that Crash and Coco, the main characters, are kind of dull to play. Their only abilities are their spin attack, jump/double jump/high jump, crouch/slide, and a ground pound. That's it. Mario had more default move options in Mario 64 than that. They do get other abilities, but even once they're unlocked, they only get them during specific parts of stages where you're intended to need them - once you pass that point, they go away. Quite abruptly, actually, I've more than once been surprised to find that I'd lost one of them. The one other character I got to play, a burly girl named Tawna, was actually more fun, just because she got wall jump and use a grapple gun style ability, on top of most of Crash and Coco's moves (she lost crouch/slide, but those are little used even by them anyway, so they're not missed). But unfortunately she's only playable in her own dedicated stages, which seem to be one per world - and even there you switch back to Crash/Coco half to 2/3 of the way through to finish the stage, and their part is repeating a portion of another stage you already did.

More so than that though, I think my big issue is that the game feels like it's created specifically to appeal to perfectionists. The most basic reason being that you do not have a health bar, at all. One touch form anything = you die, back to the last checkpoint. Hell, there's a "classic mode" where you'd also have limited lives with which to finish each stage at all without needing to restart from the beginning, though thankfully that's optional. Still, even without that mode, you effectively have no room for error. To top that off, like most platformers, a big part of this one is collecting things as you play through it: in this case, it keeps count of how many crates you break along the way, and the fruit that you collect (a lot of which comes from breaking crates...). The thing is though, the rewards for doing this are diamonds at the end of the stage - three for collecting 40/60/80% of the stage's fruit, and one for breaking 100% of its crates. What do these diamonds do? Nothing, unless you also find the one hidden diamond in each stage, and complete the stage with 3 or fewer deaths (which I have never done), to get the other two diamonds. If you collect all six of those diamonds, you get an alternate costume for either Crash or Coco. If you fail to get any of them, the ones you do get are useless, because you're not spending them to unlock these costumes, you're getting awarded the costume for collecting all six diamonds from that specific stage. That's really unsatisfying. If you're not going for near-perfect runs of 3 or fewer deaths and collecting everything possible, you may as well just ignore all of the collectibles entirely and just try to get through the stage, because that's all you'll accomplish anyway. It's surprising how much that makes the game less fun than other platformers, where collecting things as you go has more of a purpose (usually to unlock later areas, sometimes to spend as currency for something, etc). It just feels empty by comparison.

So, deciding that game wasn't for me I picked up one that I watched a youtuber I like play recently, Cult of the Lamb. A game where you play as an adorable little lamb who gets ritually killed to prevent the return of The One Who Waits Below, and is instead resurrected by that same entity in exchange for a promise to start a cult in his name. Which is fun. Combat's kind of a much simpler version of Hades', but probably more important than that is building your Cult to power yourself up. Which, admittedly, has aspects I could do without - why do my followers need to take dumps around the camp, which I then have to clean up? Is that really making the game more fun for anyone? - but building up the camp and declaring doctrines and holding rituals for the Cult is a good time. I named mine the Cult of Fighters, and have been basing all of my cultists on characters from Street Fighter. Had to sacrifice Ryu, my first cultist, already because he had turned into a dissenter and I wasn't equipped to deal with that any other way yet. Amusing enough, Chun-li asked me to do it, too, and I got big boost to her loyalty for dealing with the dissenter. Guess she decided that with him out of the way, she could be the main character.

[Cespenar]

Unfortunately, the gameplay was just not doing it for me. I had heard awhile back it is a “walking simulator” and sadly, it is. My best take out of this other than the stunning visuals is that I didn’t pay for it.

I actually liked the walking sim parts, since they were closer to the description of a walking sim than where the term is usually used for, i.e. there were actually walking mechanics for you to master. The problem was for me that there weren't enough economic challenges to actually care about not screwing up.

Also, the ghost parts are as if from a different game. Honestly, if they were to make the world more full and put more variety and sense to the fetch quests, the walking parts could have been its own game.

Also, writing. I know its kojima, but really, DieHardman? Just embrace the absurd comedy and go full, at that point. No need for a plot or anything.