What Are you Playing 7: Deadly Sims

[Yora]

How am I already level 30 with several maxed out skills in Morrowind and still have not even visited a quarter of the world? From what I read, level 25 is when the enemies stop getting stronger or something like that.

And at the same time, my strongest weapons is still the fire short sword you get at one of the first mage guild quests in Balmora.

Not sure if this game is even meant to be completed in one playthrough, or set up to have three or four completely different runs without having to repeat a lot of quests already done in previous ones.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Not sure if this game is even meant to be completed in one playthrough, or set up to have three or four completely different runs without having to repeat a lot of quests already done in previous ones.

Given that a number of the faction quests are mutually exclusive (or at least difficult to do at the same time)? The latter.

[LibraryOgre]

How am I already level 30 with several maxed out skills in Morrowind and still have not even visited a quarter of the world? From what I read, level 25 is when the enemies stop getting stronger or something like that.

And at the same time, my strongest weapons is still the fire short sword you get at one of the first mage guild quests in Balmora.

Not sure if this game is even meant to be completed in one playthrough, or set up to have three or four completely different runs without having to repeat a lot of quests already done in previous ones.

The Great Houses, and the end of the Fighters Guild and Thieves Guild quest lines, are mutually exclusive, so if you want to experience everything, you'll need to play through at least 3 times, which means a lot of repeated quests.

Related: My favorite Morrowind build puts Conjuration as a Major skill, because it gives immediate access to the Bound Dagger spell, which is a fantastic early-game weapon. Call it up, and for 30 seconds, you have a weightless chopper, comparable to a Steel Broadsword (dagger is 8-12 damage in everything; steel broadsword is 4-14... lower max, higher minimum)

[Zombimode]

the end of the Fighters Guild and Thieves Guild quest lines, are mutually exclusive

It is quite interessting how this particular rumor is still being told even though Morrowind was released almost 20 years ago

To elaborate: the Fighters Guild and the Thieves Guild are NOT NECESSARILY mutually exclusive - though they can be if you make certain choices.
Just don't be a Camonna Tong pawn and everything works out fine

[Divayth Fyr]

It is quite interessting how this particular rumor is still being told even though Morrowind was released almost 20 years ago

To elaborate: the Fighters Guild and the Thieves Guild are NOT NECESSARILY mutually exclusive - though they can be if you make certain choices.
Just don't be a Camonna Tong pawn and everything works out fine

Note the quote says "the end" of the two is mutually exclusive - which it kinda is, since the heads of the two guilds basically give you orders to

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kill the leadership of the other one

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Isn’t there some shenanigans you can pull to be part of House Hlaalu and one of the others at the same time too?

[Zombimode]

Note the quote says "the end" of the two is mutually exclusive - which it kinda is, since the heads of the two guilds basically give you orders to

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kill the leadership of the other one

That's what I was talking about with "don't be a Camonna Tong pawn"

Isn’t there some shenanigans you can pull to be part of House Hlaalu and one of the others at the same time too?

That's a bug: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:G...e_Great_Houses

[Resileaf]

If I recall correctly, the Telvanni and Mages Guild also go to war and are also mutually exclusive.

And technically the main quest is incompatible with the Redoran and Telvanni if you do the former first.

[Divayth Fyr]

If I recall correctly, the Telvanni and Mages Guild also go to war and are also mutually exclusive.

Nope, while the conflict is mentioned, and some quests relate to it, joining both is viable, and basically negates the one drawback present (lower disposition from people in opposing faction).

And technically the main quest is incompatible with the Redoran and Telvanni if you do the former first.

Sounds like a weird technicality (and also not one I remember) ;P

[Resileaf]

Sounds like a weird technicality (and also not one I remember) ;P

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At least one of the Telvanni councilors must die (up to all of them if you're particularly bloodthirsty or trollish), and one Redoran councilor is necessary to kill as well.

[Divayth Fyr]

Spoiler: Main quest spoilers

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At least one of the Telvanni councilors must die (up to all of them if you're particularly bloodthirsty or trollish), and one Redoran councilor is necessary to kill as well.

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The Telvanni don't care. It will cost you two quests from his Mouth, and skip the quest to kill him anyway. Don't remember the Redoran side of things, but i think you also get autopromoted at that point.

And I think killing literally all of the Telvanni councillors only work if you're one yourself.

[Resileaf]

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The Telvanni don't care. It will cost you two quests from his Mouth, and skip the quest to kill him anyway. Don't remember the Redoran side of things, but i think you also get autopromoted at that point.

And I think killing literally all of the Telvanni councillors only work if you're one yourself.

Well I imagine that's more me thinking that if you were to join a House, you'd want to do all their quests so missing out on some makes their questline feel less complete, so to speak.

[MCerberus]

It's splatfest weekend. It's actually really interesting if you take a step back how Splatoon passively builds community. All the levels turn into a rave, the artists are passively encouraged to hype up their team, and the city has neon-color coded hype billboards everywhere. This is on top of the normal NPC lines that really drive home the primary goal is FRESHNESS instead of getting kills. Spatoon has shocking low amounts of actual player interaction but it feels like you're partying with all the other cephalescants.

[Anonymouswizard]

While trying to work out what to play I saw that Inquisitor: Martyr was on sale for under £10. So I grabbed it and I've now played the first handful of missions.

Now a Diablo-clone isn't how I'd have imagined an Inquisition-focused game to go, but it turns out it's exactly the kind of 40k game I didn't know I wanted. Currently on the easy difficulty because yeah, I'll do another run on normal when I've started to learn the mechanics, but it's just great. I love that skills are tied to your weapon, it means that carrying around a second set feel more sensible. I've gone for a shotgun assassin build, and dodging in to fire off a bunch of shots before retreating is fun.

Although seriously, only one female option out of four classes? I know that Warhammer is for teenaged boys, but can we have some ladies in power armour as well please! I'll take a Sister of Battle corset.

It's being played very serious, but the inherent comedy of the setting shines through. I've got a smile on my face the whole time due to how silly this all is, like the ineffective super soldier corpse you find early on, defending the Imperium about as effectively as they did when alive. But hey, at least it won't steal credit for my work like I'm some kind of Guardsman.

God, why did it take them so long to make an Inquisition game. This is ten times as engaging and fun as Space Marine was.

[Rynjin]

It's being played very serious, but the inherent comedy of the setting shines through. I've got a smile on my face the whole time due to how silly this all is, like the ineffective super soldier corpse you find early on, defending the Imperium about as effectively as they did when alive. But hey, at least it won't steal credit for my work like I'm some kind of Guardsman.

The inherent comedy of hitting Warp overload and spontaneously generating demons or exploding is pretty great too. Martyr's a fun game.

[warty goblin]

Martyr is a good time. I appreciate how Neocore always comes at things like 25 degrees off of the standard approach. A cover system in a aRPG? Weird, but delightful.

Still ambling through King's Bounty 2. I don't fully understand why I like this game so much. Sure the combat is good, but combat is not that much of the game, as in I can easily play for an hour and not fight anything. Mostly it's just pretty low key questing, in that B-grade RPG way. Some of them are pretty involved, in the sense of using a lot of stages and information gathering, and they often feed into each other, but there's very little in the way of choice.

Honestly maybe that's why I enjoy them. Choice has never been my favorite part of RPGs, and losing most of it honestly is more a relief than a cost. It also helps allow the PC to be an actual character with a personality, the Sorceress character I'm playing is a sarcastic noble with a massive sense of entitlement and a healthy disdain for the usual hapless RPG quest givers that litter her path. She kind of a horrible person and I love it.

[Zevox]

Just wrapped up Majora's Mask. And wow, I thought I remembered that the Fierce Deity's Mask made the final boss fight easy, but I did not remember the half of it. It cuts through Majora's Mask like a hot knife through butter in all three phases of the fight. I almost feel like I should redo that without using it just to have the fight not be so easy that even the easiest mini-bosses of the game were harder.

Anyway, game's good, as nearly all Zelda games are. I did remember more of it than I thought as time went on - only needed to check a guide for a few hearts worth of pieces of heart before going to the final boss (though I wound up not getting them all due to missing one somewhere along the way that I thought I got, and not being willing to go back and double-check all of them to find out which one it was), and managed to collect all of the Stray Fairies in each dungeon without too much trouble. I do still feel like it's on the weaker side of the series personally, though. It's so short, and ending resolution is pretty underwhelming, with Skull Kid just learning "oh, I guess my Giant friends hadn't forgotten about me after all... woops." A lot of the many masks the game gives you to collect don't do a heck of a lot, either. The transformation ones are great of course, and there's some good ones among the normal ones, but a lot are just used for one side-quest for a single piece of heart, and a couple you can't even say that about. Probably the most useless is the Circus Leader's Mask, which is literally only useful for an event you need to complete without it in order to obtain it in the first place.

Oh and I hate whoever designed the Goht-masked kid's mini-dungeon in the Moon. Goddamn that thing was a pain. The rolling Goron does not control nearly well enough to make a course like that for it.

Still, there's some really good dungeon design, the transformation masks are fun (especially the Zora), some of the game's mini-bosses were surprisingly kind of challenging (thinking mainly of the bubble-covered eye monster especially), and there's a lot of fun ideas all around. It just feels like it adds up to less than the sum of its parts to me somehow. Maybe the fact that it's kind of doomed to always be in Ocarina of Time's shadow plays into it, it's hard not to compare the two given it uses so many of Ocarina's assets, and Ocarina just feels like so much more of an epic adventure, and provides so many more places to explore and dungeons to complete, and a more fun villain to fight against, which are more what the series' draw is to me than the myriad side-quests that Majora's Mask offers instead.

[Zombimode]

Finally picked up Solasta

Pretty fun so far
Probably my favourite feature is the emergent characterisation and party dynamics out of the tag-dependent responses. Must have been quite the effort of recording all those lines.
I also didn't expect anything like this. In most party based rpgs where the player creates the party from the ground up (like Icewind Dale) the characters have NO characterisation in game. The only instances that does something similar as Solasta that I can think of are the games of the Nordlandtrilogie (uh.... Realms of Arcania in english I believe) - a series of DSA (uh... The Black Eye?) crpgs from the 90s that where very much ahead of their time and are still unmatched in some aspects.


Solasta has sadly also been the source of some frustration - all of them can be attributed to one thing: D&D 5e.

Normally rpg systems that I don't like for tabletop don't bother my when used for crpgs. The reasons why I dislike a system may be irrelevant within a crpg and/or the system gets changed to better suit the needs of the crpg.

But it turns out many reasons why I dislike 5e are in full swing in Solasta! And the by a large margin worst offender is... Concentration! Gah, I hate Concentration.
It makes spellcasters feel miserable. It takes away options: "Hm, a Sleet Storm on that ramp could be nice. 'That would break your Fly spell.' What? Ok, fine, another round of shooting a Cantrip, I guess."
It's the worst for Clerics. Offensive, defensive, reactionary - doesn't matter, EVERYTHING has Concentration. What I'm supposed to do in a fight? Twiddle my thumps? Because that is exactly what my cleric has been doing for 90% of the fights after the cast of Bless in round 1.

And don't get me started on Skills. I'm now convinced that D&D 5e doesn't actually has a skill system. Instead it has tags that work as a conversation starter between player and GM. I would not be suprised if that fact that you're a level 10 elven ranger with proficiency in Survival is much more important than the piddly +5 modifier you might have.

All in all, D&D 5e is the worst D&D-like system for a crpg. I sincerely hope that Larian takes some big liberties for Baldurs Gate 3.

[Anonymouswizard]

The inherent comedy of hitting Warp overload and spontaneously generating demons or exploding is pretty great too. Martyr's a fun game.

40k works great when you can sit back and laugh at stuff like that. Did you know that Terminator Armour is actually a radiation suit? (Hence the Invulnerable Save.)

Martyr is a good time. I appreciate how Neocore always comes at things like 25 degrees off of the standard approach. A cover system in a aRPG? Weird, but delightful.

Yeah, it's interesting. I don't use it, but I suspect I would of playing any other class. There's quite a few decisions here different from the norm that just work, I think it was actually designed for a controller rather than keyboard+mouse, but even if not using a controller is just really fun.


As to Solasta, I ended up dropping it due to a couple of major 5eisms. A big one was bounded accuracy, because it just made everything too swingy (a lot of low rolls in an investigation section can leave your characters looking like idiots) and the way spellcasting monsters are designed. If a spellcasting monster has a decent selection of spells they can decimate your party due to getting higher level slots than you. Say hello to having to tank 8d6 damage at level 3!

It's a shame, because it's a good turn based tactics game in every way except the use of D&D5e.

[Eldan]

Oh, 5E definitely doesn't have a skill system. Never had one.

[Anteros]

Something about 5e in general just doesn't translate well to games. Every attempt I've seen has been super lackluster.

[Taevyr]

Yeah, the swinginess is my biggest pet peeve in 5e. Bounded accuracy isn't a bad idea, but not with the swinginess of a d20 attached.

[Cespenar]

Something about 5e in general just doesn't translate well to games. Every attempt I've seen has been super lackluster.

That's only 1% about 5e. 5e is just a polished, simplified 3.5. It's mostly about there not being a Black Isle or early Bioware in 2016 forward.

Solasta works perfectly well, for example. Slap on some English-speaking writers in there, and you would get a 8+/10 game.

By the way, I agree with most criticisms about 5e, what with bounded accuracy and skills and whatnot, but they are <1% of why a CRPG succeeds or not.

[Yora]

I mean, Baldur's Gate was an incredible success, despite using AD&D rules.

[Anonymouswizard]

I mean, Baldur's Gate was an incredible success, despite using AD&D rules.

Yeah, but going back to it now, BG1 is kind of dull. Maybe BG2 is a lot more engaging, but the first game suffers from Bioware still finding their feet.

Like gameplay-wise it's fine, but it needed something more built on top of it. Maybe it gets better after you reach Baldur's Gate itself, I never managed to get past Naskell.

[Yora]

I replayed Baldur's Gate many more times than Baldur's Gate 2, though.
I think I probably replayed it start to finish four more times in the last 20 years. But I still have never managed to finish even just Baldur's Gate 2 since I played through Throne of Bhaal when it came out.

I still have my save from the last time I made it to Spellhold. Which according to the file information was in March 2020. Since I finished everything except the main quest already on that save, I still plan to continue it eventually and finally finish my second playthrough of the whole series.
But while I can totally see myself replaying Baldur's Gate another time or two in the coming decades, I'm pretty sure I'll not be picking up BG2 again after this is done.

Currently, games that I have been actively playing this months are Anno 1404, Morrowind, Homeworld, and StarCraft.
And the games that I have already lined up to play soon after are Command & Conquer 1+2, Thief, WarCraft 3, Spellforce, and The Longest Journey. (I also want to replay Metal Gear Solid 1-4 and Witcher 2+3 eventually. Oh, and maybe Commandos?) With a replay backlog like this, I think I might be good for the next 25 years before I have to start looking for new games.

[Batcathat]

Aside from the obvious differences in character power level, I feel like the main difference between BG1 and BG2 is how the game's content is distributed. BG1 has a ton of more areas on the map, but a lot of them are fairly samey with mostly random encounters, while BG2 have fewer areas, but they feel — to me, at least — filled with more content. Potential party members are the same way, BG1 has more, and BG2 have fewer but with a lot more dialogue and such.

[LibraryOgre]

If I recall correctly, the Telvanni and Mages Guild also go to war and are also mutually exclusive.

Never actually had the problem. Played through as a Telvanni and Mage's Guild, wound up in charge of both... as much as anyone can be in charge of the Telvanni, I suppose.

[Eldan]

Return to Monkey Island is a disappointment.

Actually, of the five acts, the first four are quite good. A few funny jokes, a few decent puzzles, even if they are all a bit easy, all I want from a Monkey Island, really.

Then... nothing. The last long series of puzzles is annoyingly bad. Not well designed or interesting and then the story just ends with a big nothing. And the worst thing is, there were a few interesting story threads that were never adressed again, it just ends.

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I was waiting for Le Chuck's crew to do something, mainly. You befriend them, they are increasingly unhappy with what Le Chuck is doing, they don't really dare to say it, I was expecting in the end you were going to turn his crew against him, or they would convince him to leave the secret. Then there's this entire thread about how obsessed Guybrush and LeChuck are with a probably meaningless secret. That... doesn't go anywhere either. No one learns anything, there just isn't a secret, and no one even reacts to there being no secret. Everyone hates how destructive Guybrush is? Yeah, Elaine mentions it, then says "Oh well, that's fine", and that's never mentioned again. It just feels like the team gave up halfway through the last act, roll credits. It's extremely unsatisfying.

[Mechalich]

The way the AD&D 2e power curve works BGI hits its conclusion right as the characters start to hit the sweet spot of interesting options, while BGII opens there. Consequently BGI begins with a numbing slog, while BGII ends there (especially if you actually get all the good stuff in BGII and transform the final chapters into a cakewalk). Arguably its Siege of Dragonspear that takes place right in the sweet spot of character power, unfortunately its story is rather weak and unmemorable.