What Are You Playing 8 (2023 Reboot)

[Zevox]

I really need to get back to it, but my understanding is yes. I had a lot of issue with it, but I also wasn't using the Guard command whenever it telegraphed it's super skill. It actually took until the next boss to crack that.

I haven't really played beyond the second boss though, physical skills eating MP instead of HP was just too much (especially as physical demons also tended to have the bloody buffs). Unlike the Demifiend the Nahobino should really focus on magic.

There's also a trick to the second boss, but I'll be shocked if you don't work it out easily.

Yeah, physical skills costing MP is an odd one for this series, to be sure. They still seem to work well though, and it's not like physical demons have many other uses for MP. I pretty much always favor magic with my main characters anyway to, so that works for me.

Not sure what trick you mean with the second boss, unless you mean how the fight ends when you get her a bit below half hp? That was the one big surprise out of her, I was worried with my team's mp nearing zero with her having so much health left, but it turned out to be because of that.

For me, it was the end boss of the 2nd zone that was my wakeup call boss. Overall the bosses are pretty challenging, and most I had to fight at least twice (once to find out who not to bring with me). Even at max level (all the sidequests and stupid minman hunting) final boss was a decent fight.

That last sounds kind of worrying, honestly, since I don't intend to grind up to max level (or hunt down all of the mimans).

Is a game being good for a single 40+ hour playthrough bad? I'm not saying Fallout 4 is good (haven't played it, have no desire to play it) but that's a lot of game.

While I agree with the point you're getting at, I will say that if it's from a series that has a history of being good enough to make you want to play through it multiple times, I can understand why one turning out to not feel good to replay would be a disappointment. I feel much that way about Dragon Age: Inquisition. Did I enjoy my one time through it? Sure, for the most part. Yet the fact that when I tried to replay it I didn't even get very far before I decided to stop is a sad point of comparison to its two predecessors.

[Sapphire Guard]

Tales of Arise Enjoying it, although I have to pause the occasional cringy cutscene. Every Lord battle pushes me enough to burn through my consumables, which is good design. As far as Thistlyn.

[Saambell]

With the last few Deep Rock Galactic sales, my friend group finally has enough people with the game to have a proper dig squad, so I have been playing that for a little while lately. Also been working on my campaign play through of base game Battletech. Its almost everything I wanted in a space game about mercenaries, after having read a little too much Schlock Mercenary. Though now I want an XCOM style game about space mercenaries where you play the captain and need to balance the pay stubs and equip and train your troops. Have a couple of alien types with special abilities or bonuses/penalties, mix in a bit of some other game for space combat, have a sense of humour about the story, and that might be the closest we get to a Schlock Mercenary game. If there is already a game like that out there, I would love if anyone can direct me to it.

Once again getting tempted by yet another run into Skyrim, really should give a conjurer build a proper go, since I have a bunch of cool spell mods. That or go healer and let my follower(s) do the fighting. Might be neat to try a build where I'm not the focus of the damage. Could also be fun to try to RP my healer as the actual follower.

[Triaxx]

First Far Harbor had the best story in F4, and the writing is basically on par with Old World Blues.

Second F4 to Skyrim is an interesting comparison. People like to call it out as a mile wide and an inch deep but that width works to it's benefit. There's a sense of space and breathing room between the encounters. There's distance and a couple small fights between Embershard and Bleakfalls but you get the chance to really see the mountain it's set on.

Compare Backstreet Apparel to Mass Fusion. There's hardly a pause between raiders, mutant dogs, ghouls and gunners. You don't wander around staring at the scenery because you're too busy watch to see what intends to eat your face off.

[Mechalich]

First Far Harbor had the best story in F4, and the writing is basically on par with Old World Blues.

Second F4 to Skyrim is an interesting comparison. People like to call it out as a mile wide and an inch deep but that width works to it's benefit. There's a sense of space and breathing room between the encounters. There's distance and a couple small fights between Embershard and Bleakfalls but you get the chance to really see the mountain it's set on.

Compare Backstreet Apparel to Mass Fusion. There's hardly a pause between raiders, mutant dogs, ghouls and gunners. You don't wander around staring at the scenery because you're too busy watch to see what intends to eat your face off.

FO4 compares most closely to FO3, which should not be surprising. Both have a series of wide spaces that are fairly sparsely settled where the player can mostly just wander around, and also a post-apocalyptic urban hellscape where attacks are constant. The big difference is that, because of the way FO4's leveling and XP systems work it continually channels the player toward areas of maximum enemy density with as many level-appropriate enemies as possible (FO:NV, notably, was very generous with XP, especially for surprisingly non-threatening animals like bighorners, which allowed the player to wander about far more casually). The leveling system in FO4 also means the unlike Skyrim, where the Dragonborn gradually ascends to the status of broadly unkillable living god, level-appropriate enemies can be shockingly deadly even in the late-game.

[Anonymouswizard]

Yeah, physical skills costing MP is an odd one for this series, to be sure. They still seem to work well though, and it's not like physical demons have many other uses for MP. I pretty much always favor magic with my main characters anyway to, so that works for me.

Not sure what trick you mean with the second boss, unless you mean how the fight ends when you get her a bit below half hp? That was the one big surprise out of her, I was worried with my team's mp nearing zero with her having so much health left, but it turned out to be because of that.

Physical skills costing MP wouldn't be an issue, but Phys demons also tend to have tiny MP pools. I think IV also had them use MP but I remember it not being as bad (although that might have been due to the MP recovery app).

As to the second boss I mean that

Spoiler

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she uses the element the Nahobino starts out weak to, so if you've already shuffled their resistances the fight isn't that difficult.

Also I'll note it was really unexpected for Atlas to make the main character trans, especially after how they treated gay characters in P5. But I like that they went for it.

[Wookieetank]

That last sounds kind of worrying, honestly, since I don't intend to grind up to max level (or hunt down all of the mimans).

It was more I couldn't get lazy, than super hard at max level. Was feeling pretty sassy going into the fight, until 3 turns in the game reminded me I was still playing an SMT game and I went scrambling for the buffs and the like I should've started with.

[LibraryOgre]

First Far Harbor had the best story in F4, and the writing is basically on par with Old World Blues.

See, I didn't like Old World Blues, either. It's not the level of drek that Lonesome Road was, but wasn't a fan of it's writing.

[Wookieetank]

See, I didn't like Old World Blues, either. It's not the level of drek that Lonesome Road was, but wasn't a fan of it's writing.

Would you say, it gave you the blues?

[Batcathat]

My least favorite New Vegas DLC was Honest Hearts. It had some cool parts but mostly felt rather eh.

[LibraryOgre]

See, I didn't like Old World Blues, either. It's not the level of drek that Lonesome Road was, but wasn't a fan of it's writing.

Would you say, it gave you the blues?

I don't even have the right to eye roll, because it is 100% a joke I would have made.

My least favorite New Vegas DLC was Honest Hearts. It had some cool parts but mostly felt rather eh.

I rank it behind Dead Money, but in front of Old World Blues, and MILES ahead of Lonesome Road.

[Triaxx]

I'm not quite as fanatic a hater of Lonesome Road, though I do find it my least favorite FNV DLC. I do like Dead Money aesthetically, but it drags on a bit longer than I'd like. I play Honest Hearts after DM for the refreshing break from the closed-inness of DM, then I get to run OWB because high level OWB is awesome.

[Taevyr]

I enjoyed Lonesome Road, but mostly because I could treat it an interesting exploratory expedition as I played on survival mode (or whatever it's called), and considered the writing secondary. Not to mention I consider it to have some of the best visuals in NV. Lonesome Road's main problem is that it has to take itself too seriously or the very concept of "Literally travelling down Apocalypse Road" wouldn't work; OWB's as fun as it is because it gets to fully lean into its brand of crazy.

Dead Money's my favourite though: turning NV into survival horror for a while was brilliant.

Honest Hearts just... forgettable, if I'm honest. Sure, it has Joshua Graham and that one survivalist's log if you're the exploratory type, but that's about everything that's interesting about it.

[Zevox]

Physical skills costing MP wouldn't be an issue, but Phys demons also tend to have tiny MP pools. I think IV also had them use MP but I remember it not being as bad (although that might have been due to the MP recovery app).

Eh, smaller than magic-oriented demon's, sure, but still enough for their purposes I'd say. And in exchange their free basic attack doesn't suck like a magic demon's does. Feels fine to me.

Don't honestly recall how things worked in SMT4. I technically played through it a bunch of times, but they were all in a row, so I may as well have only done so once. (Was trying to get the neutral ending. I never did because after taking numerous attempts to even get on the path for it, I ran into the fact that it wants you to complete every side-quest in the game, and I of course wasn't doing the side-quests after re-running the game so many times to try and even get that path.)

As to the second boss I mean that

Spoiler

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she uses the element the Nahobino starts out weak to, so if you've already shuffled their resistances the fight isn't that difficult.

Ah, right. I did have to take care of that, true. Guess it just didn't occur to me as something I'd refer to as a "trick" to the boss.

Also I'll note it was really unexpected for Atlas to make the main character trans, especially after how they treated gay characters in P5. But I like that they went for it.

Does that actually come up at some point, or is that a headcanon thing? Because I would not expect mainline SMT to go much into the characters, especially the main one, and as far as I can tell so far the main character is just an androgynous-looking guy, which is hardly unusual for a JRPG.

It was more I couldn't get lazy, than super hard at max level. Was feeling pretty sassy going into the fight, until 3 turns in the game reminded me I was still playing an SMT game and I went scrambling for the buffs and the like I should've started with.

Still, unless it's different from other games in the series, the normal level you'd be at when hitting the end boss is what, low to mid 70s? If you're not steamrolling him by level 99, that seems concerning for what the experience will be for someone who isn't grinding.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

See, for me, I'd rank OWB as probably the number one slot as far as DLC, with Honest Hearts a distant second, Lonesome Road a very distant third, and Dead Money... well, I mostly try to pretend it doesn't exist, really.

OWB leaned into 50's nostalgia by being the campy sci-fi double-feature, then dialed up the ham, the camp, and the chewing the scenes all up to Tim Burton levels. It's a blast, both figuratively and literally.

Honest Hearts is... uncomfortable. You've got a lot of dated Native American tropes, you've got not one but two White Saviors (Graham and you), and the entire conflict is because Caesar ordered it for the glory of his ego and to make sure Graham actually died after he had the bad manners to survive his previous execution (honestly, there's times I could use Handsome Jack's voice in place of Caesar's). Still, it is at least gorgeous scenery with relatively few actual threats for someone who has survived the Mojave, which makes it a nice and pleasant vacation.

Lonesome Road is... well, there's no other way to say it. The writing is atrocious. Ulysses comes off as a Galaxy Brain Truther, I half expect him to spout off 'Aliens!' randomly (which was probably avoided only because there actually, canonically, *ARE* aliens in this world, which would make him accidentally correct). Between his constant nattering, so far 'round the bend that there's no way to tell what actually happened and what he's managed to convince himself happened, and the intentionally depressing ruins, it's just not fun. The best part is getting ED-E some upgrades and maybe the Elite Riot Gear if that's the sort of gear you were leaning into.

Dead Money. Hmm, what to say about Dead Money. Generally I sum it up in one word: Nope. Or two words: No thanks. It is the DLC I regularly skip in my playthroughs. The instagib mechanics are boring and rote memorization, which is the only unique thing about the DLC, there's so much that could have been added with the resolution to the Mojave that wasn't (I mean, Elijah is one thing, but Christine was Veronica's girlfriend for goodness sake, you'd think she'd at least like to hear that Christine's still alive). They reused 'The Pitt's shtick of 'cutscene ambush and strip of gear', which makes even *less* sense within the context of New Vegas, especially if you've already been to Old World Blues and have an artificial lungs and heart that render you immune to gasses in the first place. Two of the three support characters would be better off dead, with Christine so traumatized that she's effectively checked out. Just... every single aspect of this DLC has been mishandled in some way. It was like the team actively went in and asked 'okay, this feels pretty enjoyable, how can we fix that and make it as painful or boring as we possibly can while removing ANY sense of agency or continuity with the base game'.

Of course, YMMV, these are purely my own opinions, and I freely acknowledge that others may differ. But to me, it is OWB as an actually enjoyable and playable DLC and a fun campy sci-fi double feature romp, Honest Hearts which is awkward if you think about it too much so let's just enjoy the scenery, Lonesome Road which feels like getting trapped in a lecture hall with someone more interested in pushing their agenda than teaching their subject, and Dead Money which tries as hard as it possibly can to be painfully uninteresting as it possibly can.

[MCerberus]

I think you can reverse engineer what Fallout is to people by asking them about the NV DLC. About whether its tones and commentary are reflective or forward thinking, where the themes of the series are leading, what makes the core of the writing.

I mean if fallout is a melancholy exploration of trying to survive as the person you want to be among the unchanging instincts of humanity, the final showdown of Lonesome Road buys itself a lot more forgiveness. As does the backstory in Honest Hearts with the survivalist. If you're into the bleak exploration of humanity, OWB I can imagine would be insufferable. Meanwhile if Fallout is essentially a dark satire you can bathe in the Venture Brothers of it all.

but, like, Dead Money is bad.

[LibraryOgre]

Honestly, you should have been able to bring Veronica to Dead Money, and Rex to Old World Blues. Dead Money is practically Veronica's story, and OWB would have been a great chance to give the backstory to Rex that otherwise just lives in wikis. I'm not sure who you should have been able to bring to Honest Hearts.

[Batcathat]

I mean if fallout is a melancholy exploration of trying to survive as the person you want to be among the unchanging instincts of humanity, the final showdown of Lonesome Road buys itself a lot more forgiveness. As does the backstory in Honest Hearts with the survivalist. If you're into the bleak exploration of humanity, OWB I can imagine would be insufferable. Meanwhile if Fallout is essentially a dark satire you can bathe in the Venture Brothers of it all.

Yeah, the backstory of the survivalist is probably the most interesting part about Honest Hearts and the fact that that's something mainly experienced through text and only tangentially related to the actual plot seems like a missed opportunity.

I'm kind of split regarding Dead Money. The game play can get quite annoying with the deadly cloud and even deadlier speakers but I rather like the story and the characters (but yeah, bringing Veronica would've been nice).

[Rynjin]

I'm not sure who you should have been able to bring to Honest Hearts.

Cass. Honestly, rather than getting a random radio ping, Honest Hearts would have been more interesting IMO if it required (or at least had some benefit from) completing either (or both of) Heartaches by the Number or Birds of a Feather and then getting introduced to Jed Masterson by either Cass or the Van Graffs as part of a job.

One of the rare bits of praise I'll give Fallout 4 is how NATURAL the start of Far Harbor feels because of a similar weaving of Valentine's Detective Agency into the start of the DLC.

[Cygnia]

Finished INMOST...


...


...it's a gutpunch, emotionally. Dealing with grief.

Spoiler: Spoilers as to why

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1. A bullied child kills herself in the backstory.
2. Parents, already on shaky ground, adopt/foster a daughter who's lost her parents. Dad is always away, trying to earn enough to provide, so foster daughter starts to resent him for being gone. Mother blames father for 1st child's suicide and resents foster daughter in general. Marriage fractures.
3. Mother then kills father and herself so they can "join" their first daughter in death. Calls her father-in-law after she kills his son, then kills herself in front of the foster daughter. Father-in-law is too late to do anything.
4. Grandfather and foster child are left to deal with all this.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Honestly, you should have been able to bring Veronica to Dead Money, and Rex to Old World Blues. Dead Money is practically Veronica's story, and OWB would have been a great chance to give the backstory to Rex that otherwise just lives in wikis. I'm not sure who you should have been able to bring to Honest Hearts.

You do get to make Roxy in OWB, which canonically becomes Rex's mate, so there's that. But yea, there's SO MUCH that Veronica would need to process from Dead Money aside from Elijah's 'message'. Like, that Christine is alive, and she completed her mission finally. Furthermore, you should be able to tell Christine that you've met Veronica, and she misses Christine, possibly with an alternate ending for her that has her return to the Mojave to reunite with Veronica.

For Honest Hearts, Cass as mentioned fits best, at least as a tie-in instead of just picking up a want ad being broadcast.

For Lonesome Road, just bring ED-E with you instead of 'finding' him. That part never made sense anyway, but then nothing about Lonesome Road makes any sense whatsoever so... at least on-brand for the DLC?

[Mx.Silver]

So, ended-up restarting the Deadfire part of my Pillars of Eternity, as the ranger subclass I'd initially picked (Ghost Heart) while it made more narrative sense, wasn't the ideal choice for the build.
In so doing, I decided to give turn-based combat mode a shot, which I have not previously touched before and, yeah... It's such an improvement to the overal experience I can't really see myself wanting to go back. Not only does it open-up more tactical depth (and it really does) but, oddly, combat actually ends up taking less time¹ since you're not having to micro-manage an entire party's worth of activated abilities at once (which was the big downside of the decision to "give every class things to do").



¹aside from the inconsequential 'stomp' fights, which Deadfire still has, albeit less of them than its predecessor did.

[Anonymouswizard]

I've started another attempt to play Ultima VII, because apparently I hate modern games or something. Only just got out of Trinsic so far, because Exult was a pain to get running fullscreen for some reason and getting used to the controls and the fact that the game is meant to be running at sub-10FOPS is a strange process. But honestly the visuals at least have aged like fine cheese*.

Now it's off to Britain! Which I'm already in, hmmm....

Honestly the more I think about it the more Ultima seems to have the same setup as your standard Japanese portal fantasy, just with travelling back and forth and a lot more people going over. There's what, maybe a dozen Earth humans in the recurring cast? And compared to them all that makes the Avatar special is their tendency to hope back and forth (I'm fairly certain British is meant to be more powerful even without his crown, at least while magic is working).

But it's nice to see the idea of an open world RPG being 'here's an area, here's a quest, off you go, you did remember to grab some scrap paper and buy some mutton' and not 'here's six septillion objective markers, be sure to visit them all'. Maybe if I get on with 7 in the long run I'll go back to the earlier games.

* i.e. not everybody will like them, but I do.

[Lord Raziere]

Spoiler: Outer Worlds

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completed it again, this time getting the golden ending by making Sophia Akande stand down and making MSI and Iconoclasts join together, for an ending where Halcyon pulls together and does it best to survive. and now....I'm done with it. still like Outer Worlds, even if no one else does. Personally I think this games underrated. it handles a lot of things with more nuance, choice and freedom than others would and the combat is fun, full of cool weapons and such. it makes a lot of things optional and non-vital which more games should do- making multiple valid paths to the same objective, make this or that not matter as much as you think, that sort of thing.

but now that I'm done with that again, I'm finally going to play a game that every rpg player under the sun has said is great, a game that everyone recommends, a game that I'm most certainly late to the party on.....

....Disco Elysium.

[Ignimortis]

In regards to NV DLCs, I personally think that Honest Hearts is by far the weakest of them all. OWB leans into the fun campy side of Fallout (and succeeds, unlike Bethesda's takes) and is probably the most "default gameplay" of the DLCs. Dead Money makes the game into a survival game for a bit, but personally I'm not a fan of "your head asplode" radios. Everything else is fine, they really did try to nail the "being good at shooting won't save you now" aspect. Lonesome Road is decent, IMO - while Ulysses is memetically dumb, I don't find the core gameplay nearly as boring as it is in HH.

In a way, I think that somehow NV DLCs align with F3's DLCs, and kind of form the complete picture with their counterparts through both similarities and contrast.

• Dead Money and the Pitt are both about a potentially very resource-rich remote toxic location where people turned into unique mutants. You also can't leave before resolving the main conflict, take away all of your gear and put you in forced servitude to the main antagonist. The difference is that F3 makes the main conflict of the DLC about basic "freedom at any cost vs order through slavery" and implies that no matter what you choose, nothing goes well. It also doesn't really stick to its' guns of "you no longer have your gear" all that well. FNV instead focuses on very few characters and what ties them to their past, rendering them unable to leave the Villa. And gameplay-wise, you don't get your stuff back for the entirety of the DLC.
• Honest Hearts lines up with Point Lookout, both being about a remote location full of locals who have been living here for many generations and have thus formed their own societies. I also find that Point Lookout is probably the best F3 DLC in terms of plot and setting, while HH is the weakest.
• OWB and Mothership Zeta obviously pair up as "the most sci-fi DLCs", with wacky 50s' tropes. However, Zeta locks you in a maze of alien corridors that you run through in a couple hours with no real antagonists (aliens don't even have any personality) and no plot beyond "escape the spaceship and stop aliens from blowing you up", while OWB is an open-world romp through the set of a campy sci-fi movie with memorable characters and a silly plot about getting your brain back in your brainpan.
• Lonesome Road and Operation Anchorage are both linear combat-heavy adventures, but while Operation Anchorage is probably the most impersonal and unimportant (you personally have no stake in it, aside from being promised a share of the stored supplies, and the ending changes nothing about the world even theoretically), Lonesome Road is clearly made out to be very important to whoever the Courier was before Benny's impromptu brain surgery.

I might be missing some details, but it did seem to me that NV DLCs might be unintentional responses to F3 DLCs, just like NV itself turned out to be an alternative to F3 that fixed most of F3's problems.

[Triaxx]

Honest Hearts is more of a DLC sized sidequest than the others I think. And it pokes sufficient fun at itself that while I get Shneekey's problem I also see that it's attempting to show that whether you side with Graham or Daniel neither one is the correct answer because both are pushing themselves onto their respective tribes.

It's pointing out 'this probably isn't good' while not being so Anvilicious that the message gets missed.

[Eldan]

Spoiler: Outer Worlds

Show

completed it again, this time getting the golden ending by making Sophia Akande stand down and making MSI and Iconoclasts join together, for an ending where Halcyon pulls together and does it best to survive. and now....I'm done with it. still like Outer Worlds, even if no one else does. Personally I think this games underrated. it handles a lot of things with more nuance, choice and freedom than others would and the combat is fun, full of cool weapons and such. it makes a lot of things optional and non-vital which more games should do- making multiple valid paths to the same objective, make this or that not matter as much as you think, that sort of thing.

but now that I'm done with that again, I'm finally going to play a game that every rpg player under the sun has said is great, a game that everyone recommends, a game that I'm most certainly late to the party on.....

....Disco Elysium.

It's a great game (I'd call it the greatest of all time, but that's a very biased opinion) and it'as a great roleplaying game, just be aware that it is very much not what people expect when they hear computer roleplaying game.

[Anonymouswizard]

It's a great game (I'd call it the greatest of all time, but that's a very biased opinion) and it'as a great roleplaying game, just be aware that it is very much not what people expect when they hear computer roleplaying game.

Yeah, it's a game about roleplaying (specifically as a detective with no physical strength or coordination), not a wandering genocide simulator. On the plus side it's tense scenes are really tense with only your words and the occasional die roll between you and failure, on the downside it's only your words and the occasional die roll between you and failure.

It has my favourite game climax since Planescape: Torment.

[Eldan]

Also the occasional 360 spin kick.

[Batcathat]

Also the occasional 360 spin kick.

Yeah, I was about to say. The Detective may not be a D&D character but he's capable of some occasionally rather impressive physical feats if he's built that way.

As for the game itself, I can only agree with what basically everyone else is saying about it. I was afraid of it being over-hyped (because at some point, how could it not?) but it actually lived up to my very high expectations.