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unattended spaghetti posted:. Doing this occurred to me only a long time after I'd done it the hard way
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Oct 22, 2023 04:05
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sebmojo posted:Doing this occurred to me only a long time after I'd done it the hard way What did you do? It seemed pretty tough to deal with them otherwise.
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Oct 22, 2023 04:24
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unattended spaghetti posted:What did you do? It seemed pretty tough to deal with them otherwise. I think they've got an ability that means you have to deal at least 40 damage in a single attack (IE: not Magic Missile hitting 8 times for over 40 damage, one swing = 40 damage) or some other high number like that, so destroying them is pretty miserable. If you've got a ton of invisiblity potions to burn you might be able to sneak past them, and if you can sneak far enough to get to the tower itself, you can use featherfall and flight to get behind everything and pick up the single antimagic flower from the area behind the tower. I picked up the flowers from the other area, saw that they made Gale and my Paladin useless, and promptly stashed them back at camp. Then I went to the Wizard Tower 
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Oct 22, 2023 04:53
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unattended spaghetti posted:What did you do? It seemed pretty tough to deal with them otherwise. They’re weak to lighting damage, so you can have your wizard blow them up with witch bolt or something. Also if you have a druid, they can wildshape into a super goat that does extra damage to sturdy objects, which can smash them pretty effectively. (Can you tell my coop group just brute forced it?)
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Oct 22, 2023 04:56
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Last Celebration posted:Super Mario Wonder: I like that some enemies seem to have to be actively attacking you to do damage now, like a Goomba chomps down before hurting you and if it’s sleeping you just bump off, it’s mostly cosmetic but still. This game was giving me major Rayman Legends vibes and then I got to that level and I got so happy
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Oct 22, 2023 05:09
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unattended spaghetti posted:What did you do? It seemed pretty tough to deal with them otherwise. You can run past them on turn based.
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Oct 22, 2023 05:13
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It was probably already posted but I appreciate in Baldur's Gate 3 that Raphael sings his own boss battle music.
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Oct 22, 2023 05:35
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I've been playing Dawncaster a lot lately, it's basically a Slay the Spire-like game for mobile, and it's in portrait, which seems to be relatively hard to find in good games on mobile nowadays. A lot of the good games tend to be ports of PC games, so it's all built with PC/landscape as the focus. They just recently did a rebalance of the game, which seemed terrible at first because all the XP I had earned was changed to an in-game currency you normally spend on rerolling shops, entering the Drafting mode, and other minigames. What actually happened, though, is all the XP I've earned on trying out each individual character got put together in a big pool, so I could go through the upgrade trees on the two characters I like the most and unlock everything. A free update essentially let me fully unlock two characters instead only partially unlocking a few things from every character. I was already having a lot of fun before, but now it's become even easier to become escalatingly powerful, which unlocks more of these Shards that I can use to unlock more cards/abilities/etc. on other characters too. So now I'm fully maxed out on Warrior (red-energy deck), getting close to being maxed out on Hunter (red/green energy deck) and also working on Arcane (blue energy deck), and all of the decks can cross pollinate through buying cards at shops or finding fairly-common cards as battle rewards. I ended my last run using shuriken as a warrior, where instead of playing the weapon cards in your hand to deal damage, you can also discard them, and they count as ranged weapons. So here I am spending all my energy milling all of my basic weapons into my hand/buffing my attack stats until I run out of energy, then tapping "End Turn" to watch a boss's health bar go from 300 to 0 
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Oct 22, 2023 05:45
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Cleretic posted:Trivializing a boss fight by dunking water over the burning cage that was supposed to be a ticking timer made me feel pretty smart.
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Oct 22, 2023 15:05
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I've finally figured out how to record from my PS5 without any issues, so I can finally start recording my Forspoken videos in defense of Frey as a person/character. Yay.
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Oct 22, 2023 15:53
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Reo posted:My group did that too. It also had the added benefit of giving the prisoner the "Wet" status, so a turn later when the boss attempted to disguise itself as an illusory duplicate of the prisoner, we immediately knew which one was real because it was wet! I mean, also because the camera follows the disguised/invisible/illusion-split boss when they do it, so you can tell immediately where the real boss is. Which would be a negative that trivializes the entire fight, but that fight's kinda bullshit anyway so I welcome a way to counteract its bullshit.
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Oct 22, 2023 15:54
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Cleretic posted:that fight's kinda bullshit anyway Act 3 saying "hold my beer" if you thought that was bad
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Oct 22, 2023 15:56
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Waste of Breath posted:Act 3 saying "hold my beer" if you thought that was bad You know, for a universally beloved game, people are sure making a really consistent case for me to drop this thing as soon as possible. This includes the game itself; I've had such a poor experience so far that right now I'm half-led by 'I have a hypothesis about the core flaw of this game, I want to see how this whole thing plays out to see if it holds up'. Don't ask me to elaborate further, my evidence right now is pretty thin, but my working theory is that the game loves celebrating the player knowing things, but hates the experience of the player learning things.
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Oct 22, 2023 16:04
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I enjoyed the game, although Act 3 drug a bit and wasn't as polished. I think people are making that case for you because it seems like it isn't your type of game. The game gives you tools to break combat wide open and ramps up the challenges/gimmicks accordingly. If that's not what you're here for, well...you're gonna hate the underdark beholder fight. And the prison break. And everything to do with Orin.
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Oct 22, 2023 16:17
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Waste of Breath posted:The game gives you tools to break combat wide open and ramps up the challenges/gimmicks accordingly. If that's not what you're here for, well...you're gonna hate the underdark beholder fight. And the prison break. And everything to do with Orin. This is the biggest reason why I'm passing on BG3 entirely. I got enough of this crap when I tried DOS2 and felt like I was thrown into the deep end and expected to swim without the game ever bothering to explain how to break combat open and I didn't have the patience to watch hours on youtube on how to actually play the game.
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Oct 22, 2023 17:03
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Both dos2 and bg3 are really, really easy games to break open, even incredibly basic builds are extremely effective, the idea of having to watch hours of youtube videos to understand the idea of "pump the stat you use to do everything when you level up" is wild.
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Oct 22, 2023 17:16
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Yeah, DOS2 was especially good at teaching the systems it used, mostly by having fights that explicitly used interesting aspects of the system and had them blow up on you, then giving you the tools to do exactly the same thing to enemies. Notably, one of the earliest fights in the game is versus teleporting, oil throwing alligators that cover you in muck and teleport out of your attempts to cover them in muck, which drop gloves that let you teleport anything you can see to anywhere else you can see. It becomes easy to replicate enemy tactics and add your own, and your very much given the tools to do so. BG3 does similar things but a bit less explicitly, but the open world is very similar so people carried over a lot of tactics.
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Oct 22, 2023 17:28
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I'm glad you had that experience with the game.
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Oct 22, 2023 17:33
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Yeah i'm thick as poo poo and i managed just fine in Divinity OS and BG3, and had a great time doing so. MIght not have done so much weird creative poo poo as some people but thats fine. Looking forward to playing through BG3 again as a moustache twirling villan next time.
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Oct 22, 2023 17:33
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Isaacs Alter Ego posted:Both dos2 and bg3 are really, really easy games to break open, even incredibly basic builds are extremely effective, the idea of having to watch hours of youtube videos to understand the idea of "pump the stat you use to do everything when you level up" is wild. Yeah the game practically rolls over for you after a certain point. Multiple attacks on a martial character at level five gives you such insane damage output. Not to mention the game is very generous with consumables, all of which are incredibly powerful. And if that's not enough, one of the parasite powers is just get a guaranteed crit. Another allows you to charm anything that attacks you without a save, guaranteeing it won't attack you twice. None of this needs you to have done extreme levels of research. The game showers you in overpowered poo poo and practically begs you to put it all to use. The only thing you'd have to read are the tooltips. First few levels are pretty brutal though. But that's a Dungeons and Dragons problem, more than anything.
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Oct 22, 2023 17:37
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Cleretic posted:You know, for a universally beloved game, people are sure making a really consistent case for me to drop this thing as soon as possible. please, please do
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Oct 22, 2023 17:37
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Cleretic posted:You know, for a universally beloved game, people are sure making a really consistent case for me to drop this thing as soon as possible. I mean there's a difference between "That's bullshit (and I hate it)" and "That's bullshit (and I love it)."
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Oct 22, 2023 17:41
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It'd be helpful if people gave more specific examples of what 'breaking the game means' rather than being uselessly coy like half the people recommending you play Inscryption were.
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Oct 22, 2023 19:09
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RareAcumen posted:It'd be helpful if people gave more specific examples of what 'breaking the game means' rather than being uselessly coy like half the people recommending you play Inscryption were. A quick example is specializing Karlach into a throwing goddess. There's an feat that gives bonus damage for thrown weapons, a ring that gives bonus damage with thrown weapons, and when she rages she can throw heavier things harder more often. Then just give her a bunch of heavy stuff, and have her throw three things a turn, including enemies into other enemies, and watch damage numbers fill the screen.
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Oct 22, 2023 19:30
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Cythereal posted:This is the biggest reason why I'm passing on BG3 entirely. I got enough of this crap when I tried DOS2 and felt like I was thrown into the deep end and expected to swim without the game ever bothering to explain how to break combat open and I didn't have the patience to watch hours on youtube on how to actually play the game. This is very silly, I mean play what you want but you're missing out on a p good time for very theoretical reasons
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Oct 22, 2023 20:01
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You really don't need to be guided to play BG3. Like yeah there's Super De Duper Optimal Builds but part of what makes the combat fun is that if you come up with an idea it probably works or is at least viable. You have a bunch of tools and are given options to use those tools.
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Oct 22, 2023 20:03
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I always like when a game has non-tutorial teaching tools, like an achievement for triggering certain conditions with an attack that you might not have thought of [spoilering lategame mechanic](FF16 for instance has a thing where if you perfect dodge with Shiva equipped and using her circle dash move instead of the usual trigger button dodge, it encases enemies in ice in a Permafrost status effect) or a powerup where to make it stronger you have to use a move in a certain way like Forspoken's thing where the challenge for the earth shield attack is killing enemies with the automatic counter that it does if they hit the shield, which until doing that I didn't actually know how to use the earth shield, and after doing that I did.
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Oct 22, 2023 20:08
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RareAcumen posted:It'd be helpful if people gave more specific examples of what 'breaking the game means' rather than being uselessly coy like half the people recommending you play Inscryption were. For me, it started with realizing that I could abuse stealth + invisibility spells to clear the entire goblin camp with Astarion + Sneak attacks. Literally one shot every trash mob like I was playing Arkham Asylum or Spiderman. Thrown objects (smoke powder barrels in particular) are incredibly OP. Many times there are opportunities to yeet someone off a cliff with a spell or a shove (including a boss, Orin, before the fight even starts). You can preposition your characters ahead of obvious fights so that you have folks in advantageous positions. Hold Monster allowed me to stunlock what is regarded as one of the most difficult bosses in the game and thats just a spell that they give you, it's not even creative thinking. Like I don't even play CRPGs and haven't played D&D since 3rd edition and I figured this stuff out. It's a power fantasy, but one that rewards thoughtful planning and trial and error. Not just blindly mashing your way through a fight.
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Oct 22, 2023 20:14
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sebmojo posted:This is very silly, I mean play what you want but you're missing out on a p good time for very theoretical reasons its no use Seb. youre arguing with a goon. i gave up ages ago
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Oct 22, 2023 20:15
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RareAcumen posted:It'd be helpful if people gave more specific examples of what 'breaking the game means' rather than being uselessly coy like half the people recommending you play Inscryption were. I played a sorcerer and just for basic rear end class features that could break the game, I could use twin spell to twin haste and basically give my group two extra turns, or use quicken to fire off two fireballs and detonate the map, or use heighten to repeatedly stun the boss. Those are just super basic abilities, don't require any amount of complex strategy or deep understanding and yet can make fights absolute cakewalks. No multi hour youtube video requires to know "use abilities given to you by your class". As for DOS2 as long as you stayed to one or two skill types and focused on them, you were golden, none of the skills were bad. And the easiest way to break the game was just to take summoning.
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Oct 22, 2023 20:17
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Sally posted:its no use Seb. youre arguing with a goon. i gave up ages ago Some wisdom right here. Haha. Thing about BG that kills me, especially as someone who hasn't played Dungeons and Dragons since third edition, is when people were going on about how easy it was. I generally adjust difficulty up in my head because the kind of people who crow about ease are the self same people who're already prone to break things. I figured as someone who's okay at turn based games, but out of practice on this particular system, that I'd struggle initially especially because of the huge range of options. But no. The game really is that easy. Even if you don't get inventive, even if you play straight single class focused on main stat, even if you play it like final God drat fantasy and roll through with four martial characters and just attack constantly, you'll probably do fine. The power is tilted that hard in the players favor in the game. It just goes from a pleasant time to a face stomping if you go the extra mile and try to understand how the non rpg portions of the game work. Manipulating sight lines, positioning people in advantageous places like high ground, stealing everything that's not nailed down, making use of all the consumables, running the cursor ahead and scouting, and generally being observant. On top of that, just being thorough in exploring will always get you useful information or items. And the game has literally no filler content so you'd want to do that anyway because everything is so cool. unattended spaghetti has a new favorite as of 20:31 on Oct 22, 2023 |
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Oct 22, 2023 20:21
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Reo posted:My group did that too. It also had the added benefit of giving the prisoner the "Wet" status, so a turn later when the boss attempted to disguise itself as an illusory duplicate of the prisoner, we immediately knew which one was real because it was wet! At least in an earlier patch, there was also one factor that allowed you to tell the prisoner and the boss apart: The real prisoner is visibly pregnant. The fake one is not. This could be seen by examining the character models.
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Oct 22, 2023 20:32
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I just hovered the attack button over each target until I saw the hit probability drop because the boss had the higher armor class.
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Oct 22, 2023 20:49
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Prisoner is also level 1 and the clones are not.
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Oct 22, 2023 21:15
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BioEnchanted posted:I've finally figured out how to record from my PS5 without any issues, so I can finally start recording my Forspoken videos in defense of Frey as a person/character. Yay. Sorry, you'll have to solve a series of FFXIII-2 clock puzzles before you can do that. Anyway, I've been playing Skyrim, and Serana is following me because I'm too lazy to finish Dawnguard. I ran across the little quest with Valdr, the hunter who was injured outside of the cave full of spriggans. I went in to clear them out, and while I'm fighting the spriggans, Serana raises and gets both of Valdrcs friends rekilled, so they crumble into ash. When I leave the cave, Valdr is like "Thank you for helping recover my friends bodies." Oops. 😅
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Oct 22, 2023 21:24
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Honestly, DOS had incredible encounter design that built on top of the environmental combat system, and had some of the most incredibly memorable encounters because of it. DOS 2 had a system of about 8 or so elemental effects, poison water oil fire etc, that were attached to most combat skills and weapons which, as per RPG convention, had a range of affecting enemies ranging from hurting them extra hard to healing them depending on the enemies type. The twist in the DOS system is that all of these effects also had an environmental effect attached, a little poison arrow would leave a tiny poison puddle, a fireball would leave a fire, which would eventually burn out and leave a cloud of smoke, and a low level spells would call a rainstorm to flood an entire area in water. Now, what made this system interesting, is that all of these little environmental affects could interact with each other, and change the battlegrounds. Fire hurt to walk through, so you could put it out with water, which you could freeze to make a slippy slidey ice world. A necromancers blood altar could make a mighty fine conduit for a lightning bolt, and a pile of poison might suck for a living character, but your skeleton man would actually heal by wading through it to hit someone. All of this comes together in one of my favorite battles in the game, a fight with an evil inquisitor to prevent an execution on top of a wooden oil derrick. The derrick is a windy square design of ramps and ladders, littered with oil barrels that can be broken to make oily areas that slow the enemy down, and the encounter typically begins on the top, the central raised platform in the middle of the derrick. The place is absolutely swarming with the inquistors minions, who will beeline towards you as you fight the boss, who's no pushover himself and doing his damndest to kill the man you've come to save. A turn or so into the fight, oil blobs begin to spawn on the outer areas all around the derrick, slow balls of oil that leave trails of oil wherever they step. They're hostile to everyone, and will give an oily slap to any minions they run in to, leaving more and more oily goop. They're slow, but they have a lot of HP and slowly circling their way towards you in the center as you battle it out over a few turns. Hilariously, when the blobs reach a ladder or a player made obstruction, they'll simply make a giant, blobby leap over it, leaving yet more oil wherever they land. After about 3 turns, they'll be on top with you, angry blobs that have left a big oily mess all over the place, and that's when the fire elementals show up. The fire and oil interact instantaneously and explosively, and everything in, near, or around the oil trails explodes into fire. Enemies explode into the fire, your characters explode into fire, your graphics card explodes into fire from rendering all the fire. The new fire blobs make everything they touch into fire, and there's just so much oil to burn. Your battle against the inquisitor quickly gives way to a battle for survival, and the odds are stacked against you. It's an awesome moment in the game and did a ton to make me appreciate how cool the environmental system is, of which a lot carried into BG3. Mostly, you gain an eye for just how many explosives are ready at any given time, and that's a beautiful little thing in games Onehandclapping has a new favorite as of 21:32 on Oct 22, 2023 |
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Oct 22, 2023 21:29
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Larian doesn't make trash encounters. That's my favorite thing about their games. When fights are crafted from environment to thoughtful composition of enemy types to variety of tools at the players disposal, you get individually memorable conflicts. They also do a neat thing with their area designs where no single location ever has just one entry point. Add that to the complex encounters and now you get a big array of possible jumping off. Points for the fight. Add in variability of party composition and now we are in rpg heaven. 2023 is an excellent year for games, but imho the big trend, one highly unlikely to be easily reproduced, is a sense of simulation blended with genuine craft. Tears of the Kingdom, BG3, Octopath 2, and probably other games from this year all demonstrate these traits exceptionally well. BG3 offers a relatively linear experience with enough wiggle room and enough simulated elements to reward player expression. ToTK also does this, though with a great deal less linearity. But openness within certain constraints, player ability to express themselves using the tools at hand, all of which open onto little arenas of possibility, which when combined offer a staggering amount of variability. Octopath II, while not nearly as open as these two games, gives the player a combat system with tons of ways to break it, tons of options for creative expression inside the constraints, and on the part of craft, you’d be hard pressed to see a game more devoted to clever reconfiguration of all its constituent parts. I’m thinking of the towns here, and how multilayered and fussed over they are. No bit of fluff is there without a purpose. If you steal from a kid, they’ll have candy. If someone is appearance-obsessed, they’ll have a hairbrush or a mirror or some such, if someone’s important, their possessions will reflect their character. Combine that with the text blurbs, and you get a tapestry of details. What all these games have in common are a dedication to enabling player expression, and a slavish attention to detail. OT2 may not have any simulationist elements in its design, but I still credit it for the loads of party comps and synergies available to a player. I suspect that Mario wonder will exemplify similar virtues. The badges, the bespoke wonder effects, the range of options offered in character choice, and the care commmon in Nintendo’s designs make me feel pretty comfortable saying that. It makes me wonder if other games this year have emphasized these traits. I can’t help noticing it. I suppose AC6, though not really my bag, probably does this too, what with the freedom afforded to mech construction and the generosity of opportunities in changing up your build. Woo got a little carried away there it’s just been nearly the best drat year for games in almost forever, to me.
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Oct 22, 2023 21:51
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Agents are GO! posted:Sorry, you'll have to solve a series of FFXIII-2 clock puzzles before you can do that. How did you know that was the workaround? Good guess.
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Oct 22, 2023 21:52
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unattended spaghetti posted:2023 is an excellent year for games, but imho the big trend, one highly unlikely to be easily reproduced, is a sense of simulation blended with genuine craft. Tears of the Kingdom, BG3, Octopath 2, and probably other games from this year all demonstrate these traits exceptionally well. hmm, that all sounds pretty good. but where's the space for bioware-esque dialogue where you get to pick from clearly-signposted Good option, Bad option, Start Fight option, or Leave? freedom and "i can't believe that worked" is nice but that's what i'm really after
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Oct 22, 2023 22:02
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Cythereal posted:This is the biggest reason why I'm passing on BG3 entirely. I got enough of this crap when I tried DOS2 and felt like I was thrown into the deep end and expected to swim without the game ever bothering to explain how to break combat open and I didn't have the patience to watch hours on youtube on how to actually play the game. I'm playing BG3 on the balanced difficulty and at no point does it feel like this. (edit: not to me, anyway) I've been able to facetank pretty much all the big fights with a melee party, and haven't been doing anything complicated to break it open. Haven't multiclassed, don't really understand how some of the complicated minmaxing interactions that people use to great effect happen and so haven't bothered with them, but it's a good time. It feels way more fun than D:OS1 did to me. Edit: there's a ton of stuff you can do to break the game open and make everything super easy I'm sure, and maybe you need to on the higher difficulty but it def doesn't feel required to me on the regular difficulty. Danger - Octopus! has a new favorite as of 22:27 on Oct 22, 2023 |
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Oct 22, 2023 22:23
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