What Are You Playing 5: New Thread+

[LibraryOgre]

Hmmm.... Would be interesting to have you need to unlock technologies slowly throughout the game, and then occasionally have to go back to old bares several layers of tech tree behind as an added layer of difficulty.

Or just have some technologies come later. You're on an alien world; there's stuff you don't know yet. Why CAN I learn that kelko sludge can be converted into nanites in my first base, where there's plenty of iron?

[Eldan]

I found it pretty samey. Lots of encounters in a row against lizard people. I didn't make it too far into it though. Maybe 4 or 5 hours.

Sounds like the problem I've had with a lot of XCOM-alikes, then. Lots of grind.

[Anonymouswizard]

Or just have some technologies come later. You're on an alien world; there's stuff you don't know yet. Why CAN I learn that kelko sludge can be converted into nanites in my first base, where there's plenty of iron?

Sorry, that was meant to be in there by implication.

[GloatingSwine]

Hmmm.... Would be interesting to have you need to unlock technologies slowly throughout the game, and then occasionally have to go back to old bares several layers of tech tree behind as an added layer of difficulty.

That sort of interrelation of different technologies unlocking new options in old scenarios is something the Anno series does pretty well (at least Anno 2205 does, lots of "build one thing in city C which produces a resource that you can export to city A that you were playing half a dozen hours ago that lets you produce a new thing that you can now send to city B and do a new thing there").

[Cespenar]

Sounds like the problem I've had with a lot of XCOM-alikes, then. Lots of grind.

It has a lot less samey encounters and grind than both XCOM and Pathfinders, imo. But being a D&D game, the combats do get a bit overwhelming some 10 odd hours in.

[LibraryOgre]

While I am greatly enjoying Aven Prime still (almost done with the single player campaign, we'll see if this enjoyment continues once I don't have goals), another thing that REALLY annoys me is the game saves and how they are organized.

For some godawful reason, they are organized alphabetically. Maybe I'm missing a setting that makes them sort by date, but they sort alphabetically by default, which is the dumbest goddamn thing.

[warty goblin]

Sounds like the problem I've had with a lot of XCOM-alikes, then. Lots of grind.

I don't find it anywhere near as grindy as an XCOM. Except for the occasional random encounter, the battles are all hand designed and fit into the story, so winning actually progresses something. And at least so far, it seems to be more balanced around smaller numbers of more challenging fights. These are often reasonably broken up by story beats or exploration. It is fair to say that enemy variety isn't fantastic, but this is true of pretty much every crpg ever made.

[Anteros]

Re Solasta: Have you all tried Divinity Original Sin 2? I found it did everything Solasta did, but better. Not a pure dnd system, but close enough to scratch the itch.

[Spore]

The gameplay of the originals is, well, very classical CRPG. You walk around a flipscreen maze presented in first person (hope you're drawing a map on some graph paper) and get into turn based battles where the dice are king.

Huh, didnt know that. I remembered Bard's Tale on the Xbox as a "zany" RPG and thought the whole series is like this. Worth looking into, you assume? There is still Legend of Grimrock sitting in my Steam Library, which is "basically" similar gameplay, and I know it is supposed to be good.

Regardless, I bought Shingami Tensei 5 yesterday, and got surprised by the packaging being French (I don't speak French). I just hope the game language can at least be adjusted.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Inspired by watching Arcane (and a Retromation episode showcasing it), I decided to check out the Path of Champions mode of Legends of Runeterra, which is a PVE deckbuilder-roguelite. Pretty sweet. Massive freaking difficulty spike for the second mission, though; that thing is freaking impossible until you luck into a broken build (...and smarten up enough to start actually counter-playing the brutal miniboss you know is coming).

The miniboss, as mentioned, is absolutely brutal. Every round, the strongest enemy on the field gains health and power equal to the number of other enemies. That alone can snowball nightmarishly, but when its champion takes the field, she starts scaling all the enemies each time she attacks. Finally beat her by picking up a power that gave me a 1 damage spell at the start of every round, a duplicate of that power, and a reinforcement champion that could target a specific defender after the first spell was cast in the turn and negated the first damage he took after the second. Those together let me snipe most of Poppy's units each round while keeping that champion alive, preventing them from ever snowballing as I slowly seized control of the board. Still definitely would have lost if I hadn't added a couple of self-replicating healing spells to my deck, which on two occasions during the campaign brought me all the way from 3HP to 20-30.

Hopefully either the 3rd mission isn't as hard, or I've learned enough from this one to best it.

EDIT: Or just play as Miss Fortune, whose high-offense, constant dealing of damage play style soft counters the (initially low-health) Yordle hordes. It helps that I got some really good synergies going, but even accounting for that it was a total cakewalk.

[GloatingSwine]

Huh, didnt know that. I remembered Bard's Tale on the Xbox as a "zany" RPG and thought the whole series is like this. Worth looking into, you assume? There is still Legend of Grimrock sitting in my Steam Library, which is "basically" similar gameplay, and I know it is supposed to be good.

The first three are old enough that having any amount of non-functional text at all was a luxury (85-89, contemporary with Ultima IV), so they didn't really have that much room to be zany. They probably have roughly the level of humour of the original Wasteland (same writers).

I'm not sure about IV, but it's most likely in line with modern inXile writing humour wise (so present but not the point).

The Xbox one is an outlier tone and gameplay wise.

[factotum]

Yeah, the 2004 Bard's Tale really did try far too hard to be funny while not being very fun to play. The most recent game does have its share of silly humour but it's never intrusive and, unlike its predecessor, has good combat and is generally fun to play.

[Cespenar]

Re Solasta: Have you all tried Divinity Original Sin 2? I found it did everything Solasta did, but better. Not a pure dnd system, but close enough to scratch the itch.

Of course, Divinity is a pretty awesome all-rounder. Still, the hand designed 3D encounters of Solasta gives just a little something else, IMO.

[warty goblin]

Of course, Divinity is a pretty awesome all-rounder. Still, the hand designed 3D encounters of Solasta gives just a little something else, IMO.

Divinity is great, though I kinda don't like the exponential loot scaling, since it means a lot of time swapping stuff around in the inventory.

The encounters in Solasta are great though. And since it inherits 5E's fairly flat number scaling, it feels like you win battles through good tactical decisions, rather than because you broke the game's math in character creation. To be sure character builds inform the tactics, but terrain, lighting, cover, all these fundamental things about small unit combat matter a great deal in a way I've not really seen in an RPG before. It's not a simulation by any means, but it keeps the game feeling grounded.

Also, I cannot overstate how important this is to me, the interface is fantastic. The UI/UX folks behind this deserve a medal, because the interface delivers so much information so cleanly and efficiently I hardly notice it when I'm playing. This puts it head and shoulders above basically every other party based RPG or tactics game I've played. If/when I fire up the Pathfinder games again, their miserably cramped 1990s GUI design is going to cause me a lot of pain.

[Anteros]

Agree that the loot and the inventory are the worst parts of divinity.

Solasta just felt tedious to me. Xcom style gameplay where half your attacks miss, except you have to slowly walk up to the enemy with half your team instead of shooting across the screen. Like xcom, it probably starts to feel better as your characters get stronger.

[Zevox]

Just finished Neo: The World Ends With You - or at least its main story, it looks like there's a post-game portion for me to play. By and large, game's really damn good, a very worthy sequel to the original; even if it is still baffling why they decided to make one so long after the original. The story's quite good, with lots of intriguing mysteries and twists that kept me interested from start to finish; the characters are good, with even the one who seems like he might be annoying in how dumb he acts actually turning out to be the one with the strongest character arc of the bunch; and the combat's quite good as well, managing to keep the spirit of the first game's multitasking-oriented gameplay even though it had to do without the two screens of the DS by having each party member attack independently of each other, and timing of attacks be an important element. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it to anyone who played the original.

That said, there's some elements of the ending that do frustrate me.

Spoiler

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Gameplay-wise, a couple of the final bosses feel very frustrating to deal with due to how they're designed, and in one case it's definitely just poor design. For Shiba's fights it's the way he can just fade into intangibility at random times, making it near impossible to tell when you can actually hurt him, which makes his fight a slog. But worse is the Phoenix, because it plays havoc with the camera due to its size. It winds up so zoomed-out that the pin icons at the bottom of the screen can completely obscure your characters, and between that and the weird angles it will orient at to keep the feather-tendrils front and center, plus the way the Phoenix itself can shoot at you while you're focused on them, really makes noticing and avoiding attacks damn near impossible. If it were for 300% Groove supers full healing me, I'm not sure I could have won that fight without turning the difficulty down (from hard, granted, but who plays TWEWY on less than that?), and I was in the mid-60s of levels with some quite powerful pins.

Story-wise, as much as I like most of it... dude, Joshua, what the hell? I assumed something must have happened to him in order for the Reaper's Game to end up the way it did and the city in danger of erasure, but nope, he was apparently just watching and doing nothing the whole time. And yeah, he says he considered intervening, but you seemed like you had things handled... except that on the final day alone, the first timeline does end with Shibuya getting erased, and the second only doesn't because what appears to be a(nother?) literal god intervenes to stop it. It's not until that third time that you come up with a plan that even can succeed, and even then the most Joshua does is show up to watch. I mean, I know the dude's weird, what with him orchestrating the whole first game as some kind of test, but Shibuya is still his city, you'd think he would at least have been the one to intervene in that second timeline. Hell, one of those Reaper Reports seemed to imply that it was Joshua, not this new god, that Rindo got his time-traveling powers from, calling him the "Composer's Proxy." So why was it that other god instead?

Speaking of, what is that god-guy's deal? Is he Shinjuku's Composer? Someone a rank above even that, perhaps the guy Joshua answers to? Or is he not even a part of that hierarchy, another god-like being of a separate type altogether? Why didn't he intervene sooner - if not just plain before things got so out of hand, at least before Rindo's friends were all erased? Hell, why didn't he intervene in the first timeline of the final day? He just raises so many unanswered questions, and he's annoyingly essential to how the ending plays out due to the second timeline of the final day requiring him to pull a deus-ex-machina just in order for things not to end in total failure. I don't know, maybe the post-game stuff will answer some of this, but it really feels like it shouldn't be left so completely up in the air given his role in the ending there.

Also, minor point, but I'm not sure why they repeated the "change the game's name to 'The World Begins With You' as the final screen" thing at the end of this one. Rindo wasn't like Neku, he wasn't a self-centered, closed-off jerk who needed to learn to open up to others, so that doesn't really work this time around. The game just kind of has to keep the name in order to make it obvious that it's a sequel to the original The World Ends With You.

[Cespenar]

By the way, time for another three indie games that I've tried recently.

Lacuna: A Sci-fi Noir Adventure: Quite a well-written small old-school adventure game. The setting is somewhat reminiscent of Expanse, which is a good thing overall. The puzzles/conclusions use an Obra Dinn-like "fill in the blanks" mechanic and can really blindside you if you miss a small detail hidden somewhere, but still, it's pretty enjoyable.

The Vellescian Gambit: Played half of it so far, but it looks like a short trading-themed visual novel/RPG with some interesting renaissance-Europe-like setting and a non-anime style. It also seems to make good use of some classical music/classical art combo as well. It being not a regular anime style visual novel (in both art and writing-sense) also appealed to me, for some reason.

Sable: Looks like a pretty well-made minimalist Breath of the Wild/Journey love child with sweet rotoscope-ish(?) graphics. Seems to be non-combat and mostly exploratory.

[Cazero]

Neo: The World Ends With You

That game is not available on Steam and it infuriates me.

[factotum]

That game is not available on Steam and it infuriates me.

Any game on a platform only being available through one distributor infuriates me, regardless of which one it's exclusive to...

[Lord Raziere]

Any game on a platform only being available through one distributor infuriates me, regardless of which one it's exclusive to...

Yeah, I'm not a fan of playstation keeping Bloodborne and the Spiderman games away from me. but I have the Switch, so I'm willing to drop some to get Neo Twewy, I loved the original when I played it.

[Zevox]

That game is not available on Steam and it infuriates me.

Honestly, I'm surprised to see that it has any form of PC version, being a JRPG that's not even close to one of the big names.

[Anteros]

Any game on a platform only being available through one distributor infuriates me, regardless of which one it's exclusive to...

Well, that makes sense if you only have that platform. It makes less sense to be upset when it's available on a free launcher that's available to everyone. Steam is a store/drm. It makes no sense to be loyal to them to the point of missing out on other products. In fact, helping them maintain a monopoly on the pc game market is actively hurting yourself.

[factotum]

I thoroughly agree that Steam needs some substantive competition. Cobbling together a minimum effort storefront and then paying developers to make their games exclusive to that is *not* the right way to create that competition. Epic easily has the money to create a decent launcher and store, they just don't bother because why do they need to?

[Anteros]

I thoroughly agree that Steam needs some substantive competition. Cobbling together a minimum effort storefront and then paying developers to make their games exclusive to that is *not* the right way to create that competition. Epic easily has the money to create a decent launcher and store, they just don't bother because why do they need to?

I mean, their launcher works fine. It's not awful like the Ubisoft one or something.

I don't really care about any of these publishers though. It's like getting mad at Target because you're more used to shopping at Wal-Mart. I'll buy the product from whoever gives me the best price and doesn't install Spyware on my machine.

[Rynjin]

Well, that makes sense if you only have that platform. It makes less sense to be upset when it's available on a free launcher that's available to everyone. Steam is a store/drm. It makes no sense to be loyal to them to the point of missing out on other products. In fact, helping them maintain a monopoly on the pc game market is actively hurting yourself.

Most people aren't pro-Steam, they're anti-Epic. There are a lot of good reasons to be so, some of which are appropriate to discuss on the boards (like the lack of basic functionality in their storefront and library system) and some which aren't.

[Cazero]

Most people aren't pro-Steam, they're anti-Epic.

Even ignoring that. I already have enough trouble with accounts and passwords with important real life administration stuff. I need my game library centralized so I can actualy use it.

[Anteros]

Most people aren't pro-Steam, they're anti-Epic. There are a lot of good reasons to be so, some of which are appropriate to discuss on the boards (like the lack of basic functionality in their storefront and library system) and some which aren't.

There are absolutely lots of people who are Steam fanboys. Im also not really sure why anyone dislikes Epic other than their country of origin or the association with fortnite. It's not as good as Steam, but it does the job. I'm only using it as a launchee, not spending my free time there. If it's installing malware or something on my computer then let me know, but paying a developer for exclusive content isn't the egregious crime gamers make it out to be. For that matter, Steam has way more exclusive content than any other launcher.

Even ignoring that. I already have enough trouble with accounts and passwords with important real life administration stuff. I need my game library centralized so I can actualy use it.

Just....tell it to leave you logged in? Or use the same password as you do for steam? It's not like your video games need to be secure like your bank account. It's literally two clicks of the mouse.

[Rynjin]

The country of origin, or more specifically major corporate backer is an important factor with a lot of deeper implications that, again, veers into a discussion we cannot have here.

What I can say is that Epic's business practices are not ones that make me comfortable contributing to giving them the monopoly on the gaming market over Valve. Even in the absolute best case scenario giving Epic distribution supremacy would be similar to giving control to EA or another scummy major publisher.

I'm all for there being rival distributors, and if a service like GOG were to rise up and be the dominant distributor I'd have no issue.

I will not, however, contribute to Epic specifically becoming the top dog in the market.

Just....tell it to leave you logged in? Or use the same password as you do for steam? It's not like your video games need to be secure like your bank account. It's literally two clicks of the mouse.

This, by the way, is a supremely irresponsible mindset for security and a big reason why identity fraud becomes more and more common every year.

[Lord Raziere]

This, by the way, is a supremely irresponsible mindset for security and a big reason why identity fraud becomes more and more common every year.

I mean the amount of things that require that sort of thing at this point is a bit ridiculous. I have passwords on more sites than I can count, which I don't always use daily. I might come back to something after a long time and have completely forgotten the password in the first place. To get proper passwords for all the things I do would probably require writing them all down in a notebook and consulting it each day to log into multiple sites every day. It would be a minor project in of itself to set that up, and hassle to keep to it every day. The concerns of security always inevitably, fall to the entropy of convenience.

[Rynjin]

At the very least you should be using different passwords on any site or service that has your credit card information...which these gaming service do, unless all your purchases are made via gift cards?