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Newest meaning Doom Eternal? Because I'm seeing a lot of mixed reactions, myself. Not a lot of people seem to really like the Marauder enemies, for example, and they're everywhere. So it's at least not quite that clear-cut.
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Apr 14, 2020 21:50
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The New School PC FPS Megathread: Gaming with rng-coloured guns
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Apr 14, 2020 22:21
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Yep. 2016 had enough story to stay interesting but not enough to get in the way. Eternal is just stuffed with terrible writing and it drags down the pace. I think Eternal is going to be one of those games everyone goes nuts for at release but a few months later people are gonna cool on it and remember it as over hyped. It isn't bad game but just a very uneven one. It reminds me of Diablo 3 where D2 had enough story to give everything a nice context but it wasn't particularly well written and generally stayed on the margins. D3 doubled down on the lore and flooded you with terrible writing and it made for a worse experience. Game writing almost always benefits from restraint. D3 also had an orgasmic reaction at launch (aside from technical server bugs) but is now remembered as being mediocre until it was patched for years. This is something I really appreciate about classic CRPG writing. I don't think most post-2000 RPGs have better writing they just have way way more of it. I'd like to see more games reject the contemporary structure of 'exhaust dialogue tree to get side quest, perform side quest, return and exhaust dialogue tree, get sidequest, etc' with occasionally a dialogue tree yielding a plot quest instead of a side one. I appreciate games stuffed with writing when its of exceptional quality (Disco being the best) but otherwise I'd prefer it to stand aside.
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Apr 14, 2020 22:28
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I am staring Age of Decadence later today. Anything I should know?  BadAstronaut posted:The New School PC FPS Megathread: Gaming with rng-coloured guns 
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Apr 15, 2020 09:57
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Tarquinn posted:I am staring Age of Decadence later today. Anything I should know? Save your skill points until you need them for a skill check, don't do anything fun like trying to make a fighter who joins a diplomatic guild as the game just won't allow it, be aware that you can end up in situations where choices you made an hour or two ago will lead you to a game over you won't be able to escape from and keep a lot of saves. There are neat ideas in Age of Decadence, but it's a bad game overall.
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Apr 15, 2020 10:28
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:Save your skill points until you need them for a skill check, don't do anything fun like trying to make a fighter who joins a diplomatic guild as the game just won't allow it, be aware that you can end up in situations where choices you made an hour or two ago will lead you to a game over you won't be able to escape from and keep a lot of saves. 
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Apr 15, 2020 13:13
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FuzzySlippers posted:It reminds me of Diablo 3 where D2 had enough story to give everything a nice context but it wasn't particularly well written and generally stayed on the margins. D3 doubled down on the lore and flooded you with terrible writing and it made for a worse experience. Game writing almost always benefits from restraint. D3 also had an orgasmic reaction at launch (aside from technical server bugs) but is now remembered as being mediocre until it was patched for years.
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Apr 15, 2020 13:30
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MagusofStars posted:The biggest problem is editing. If you're writing a story that you're passionate about, that's been in your head, that you really think people will enjoy? Writing words becomes the easy part and the tough part becomes cutting words - being willing to admit parts that won't matter to players, removing extraneous descriptions/information, cold-bloodedly dumping entire paragraphs, etc. Instead, a lot of video game editing falls mostly to the side of "just look for typos and check grammar". If you put a decent, professional-level editor on your average video game story, they would end up cutting three quarters of it, I'm fairly sure. On the other hand, the fact that a lot of the corpus of a video game is implicitly optional (a player can pass through the entire story without necessarily seeing all of it) also makes that approach not always as fruitful as you'd want it to be.
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Apr 15, 2020 13:34
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Arivia posted:Quake was originally supposed to be an RPG starring Quake, one of their RPG characters.
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Apr 15, 2020 15:28
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I mean, are there any pure RPGs from the past couple of decades without too much dialog? Obviously you can skip like 99% of the talking in many games if you know what you are doing. I just mean are there any games that are unarguably RPGs where even if you explore the game and meet the world's inhabitants that you do not end up forgetting the names of the people from the opening area by ten hours in?
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Apr 15, 2020 17:27
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Dr. Quarex posted:I mean, are there any pure RPGs from the past couple of decades without too much dialog?
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Apr 15, 2020 17:33
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Dr. Quarex posted:I mean, are there any pure RPGs from the past couple of decades without too much dialog?
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Apr 15, 2020 17:34
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Souls also doesn't really have dialogue trees. It may have a tiny menu with a couple topics here and there but nothing like the usual post-2000 labyrinthine dialogue trees.MagusofStars posted:The biggest problem is editing. If you're writing a story that you're passionate about, that's been in your head, that you really think people will enjoy? Writing words becomes the easy part and the tough part becomes cutting words - being willing to admit parts that won't matter to players, removing extraneous descriptions/information, cold-bloodedly dumping entire paragraphs, etc. Instead, a lot of video game editing falls mostly to the side of "just look for typos and check grammar". Yeah aggressive editing would improve game writing. Road Not Taken was an interesting puzzle game with a nicely subtle story and the dev said he had actually written lots of dialogue to tell the story but he spent a long time polishing the game and over time ended up removing most of it. The result still tells the same story but is far more interesting and fits the austerity of the mood. Unfortunately a lot of games don't get that extended polish phase where you can ruminate on the writing and remove the extraneous. It's a shame because even games with good writing could usually lose half their word count and be improved since it would emphasize their best writing rather than bury it. RPGs have a problem in general with chasing quantity at the expense of quality but its particularly bad for writing (having 3 normal novels worth of dialogue is not a good thing when its sub licensed fiction quality).
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Apr 15, 2020 22:05
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Cardiovorax posted:Speaking as someone who is into creative writing, I can really confirm this. When you edit for someone, the hardest thing to do is to make them get rid of something that shouldn't be there or even just doesn't need to be there. A common writing aphorism is that a well-written story shouldn't contain a single word that is not needed. Would the absence of a given sentence or paragraph make your story meaningfully worse? If not, then remove it. Yeah it's tricky in RPGs especially since often side content can be as if not more memorable than the main story. That's kind of The Witcher's whole thing. It also gets complicated because in the really good RPGs, side content often has thematic resonance to the main story even if it doesn't have narrative significance. Like for a recent example you can look at Disco Elysium, where a ton of that game is just meandering around doing anything but trying to solve the main case, but it works to build up the world of the game and lets you see how everything in the world is connected, which is ultimately something that is relevant to the main story even if none of that information is actually used in the resolution.
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Apr 15, 2020 22:22
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JustJeff88 posted:I tried the newest Doom recently and I did not like it. Firstly, it was phenomenally hard in my experience, and secondly the focus on melee range and minimal ammo was not fun. To each their own and all that, but the fact that this thing is getting such good player feedback (I put zero stock in "professional reviewers") is baffling to me. play it like first-person Devil May Cry, not like a regular shooter, and you'll have way more fun e: like, the way 2016 was pretty noticeably influenced by Brutal Doom, I feel like Eternal is similarly cribbing from Demonsteele
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Apr 16, 2020 00:50
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Chev posted:Not quite! It's been discussed multiple times elsewhere, but it's more than since someone had a RPG character called Quake the name would end up popping up in multiple projects. But the RPG-like thing starring Quake wasn't Quake, it was The Fight For Justice, a 2d thing which never came out. It's kinda like how several Bullfrog games were named Creation while being worked on, or how Demitri was both Lionhead's Black & White and Milo & Kate. Oh whoops! I remembered the synopsis screen with Quake on it, but had the title wrong I guess. Thanks.
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Apr 16, 2020 00:57
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:play it like first-person Devil May Cry, not like a regular shooter, and you'll have way more fun I never much cared for DMC, which might explain why I did not like Doom Eternal. Mind you, original Doom, brutal doom, Doom 3 etc I have enjoyed one and all.
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Apr 16, 2020 02:38
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:Save your skill points until you need them for a skill check, don't do anything fun like trying to make a fighter who joins a diplomatic guild as the game just won't allow it, be aware that you can end up in situations where choices you made an hour or two ago will lead you to a game over you won't be able to escape from and keep a lot of saves. Thanks again. I find the game to be quite enjoyable actually.  Though I might have modded it to give me triple the normal XP rewards. 
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Apr 17, 2020 20:33
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It's a really fun game if you cheat in some skill points so you have more than one option in any given situation. If you don't, it's basically just a very overtuned wind-up toy where you create a very interesting character and watch them go through the one story that works for them
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Apr 17, 2020 21:15
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I'm finally playing Voidspire Tactics, I'm not sure how much it belongs here since it's heavily FFT influenced but (a) it's also heavily Ultima 7 influenced and more crucially (b) I don't care. I'm like half an hour in and already getting anxiety about how much I should be subclassing/changing class, it seems fairly generous with exp but I have no idea how long the game will be, how much/if at all I can grind up classes to experiment with, how I should be branching out my characters... this is a stupid quibble for what seems like a great flexible game but I wish I had six characters  there are 18 classes! I definitely feel like it favours magic users, at the moment I have a brawler/warrior, a rogue/scout, a scholar/scout and a scholar/warrior. The latter two were just to... give them subclasses really, assuming that doesn't have any downside.
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Apr 27, 2020 12:46
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:I'm finally playing Voidspire Tactics, I'm not sure how much it belongs here since it's heavily FFT influenced but (a) it's also heavily Ultima 7 influenced and more crucially (b) I don't care. Voidspire is pretty good about experience, if you really feel compelled to grind some encounters will respawn eventually. The only classes that I remember being important to "rush" were brawler, blade, or shiftcloak depending on if you wanted to be dual wielding knuckles, knives, or crossbows respectively. If not then you can just branch out wherever at your own pace, the games balanced around the idea that experience is going to get spread around on a first playthrough. Theres no penalty for taking a subclass, all it does is let you use abilities you've already unlocked. Your main class is the one that effects your player sprite/stat bonuses. A subclass doesn't do anything if you don't actually have any abilities unlocked in it though, unless I'm horribly misremembering.
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Apr 27, 2020 13:29
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Why am I playing NES Pool of Radiance again?
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Apr 27, 2020 21:12
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Halloween Jack posted:Why am I playing NES Pool of Radiance again?
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Apr 27, 2020 21:18
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Halloween Jack posted:Why am I playing NES Pool of Radiance again? I think that is called BDSM in Place.
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Apr 28, 2020 06:08
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Lately I’ve been playing Underrail, which is a more modern game very much in the vein of Fallout 1 and 2. It has sunk its hold in deep, so much so that when I got to an area about a quarter of the way in that kept stomping my teeth in, I rolled up a new character instead of shelving it. Like Fallout, you have a wide pool of stats, skills, and feats (perks) to pick from at creation and level up. My first character was spread too thin and eschewed psychic powers, but he was a scrub who had to cheese fights with solo dogs. My new character is a tank with some psi power and I don’t don’t know if I’ve been lucky with loot rolls but this time I’m coasting through encounters. Found a sniper rifle and had the stats to use it, which has turned into a click-to-kill button for most encounters. I know I’m still very new to the game but I feel inspired to write up some early game guide or expand on the Before I Play entry. Pick a handful of skills and master them, don’t spread out. Grenades are cheap and clean up early encounters with multiple people easily. Always try to engage multiple enemies through a bottle neck. I just hope I don’t finish this area and get somewhere new only to find that I’m still not quite optimized and start having problems again.
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Apr 28, 2020 13:35
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You likely will. I gave up after three poorly optimized attempts.
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Apr 28, 2020 19:47
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I don't know much about that game, but I know by osmosis that PSI is something you either go all-in on or are better off ignoring. No middle ground.
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Apr 29, 2020 21:51
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LawfulWaffle posted:Lately I’ve been playing Underrail, which is a more modern game very much in the vein of Fallout 1 and 2. It has sunk its hold in deep, so much so that when I got to an area about a quarter of the way in that kept stomping my teeth in, I rolled up a new character instead of shelving it. the before you play for underrail tips were wrote by me (if you mean this one https://beforeiplay.com/index.php?title=UnderRail ). I'd strongly recommend waiting until you go all the way through the game to see how good your build is. Things get extremely harder as you go, and the game will poo poo on you without previous notice. Once I was done with my struggling first go around with the game, my second playthrough build completely trivialized the game (and just shits all over the expansion), the key points are in the before you play section. Basically have a shitload of electronics, get the electronics perk and create the strongest shield you can and that will increase your survivability immensely. If you need tips I'm around. I'd also recommend not skipping the plot spoilers section. They spoil little, and only things you'll be super pissed off to figure out on your own. For reference my build was (trying to remember here since I don't have the game installed right now): stats: maxed out dex and agility, almost maxed out int, middling STR, very low in everything else. all in on dex on level ups skills: melee , stealth, hacking, lockpicking, all the crafting skills besides bio and chem. forgot the perks but the most important ones are the extra battery capacity, weakness exploit, expertise, fast punches, that one that buffs damage on causing bleeds, combo and a ton of crit based ones (vile weaponry and others) initial strategy: craft a taser with electronics for the cheapest and best cc in the game. get the mats to craft some pneumatic bladed gloves and a cloaking device, you can get them super early on. you'll be able to fight decently and also have a lot of CC which is the key here. But stealth will get you through some hard parts until you reach core city and start getting shield parts. Now you have to get the best quality shield pieces and have enough electronics to build a fully kitted out shield with all optional pieces. You'll get like effective 1500HP or something, which will trivialize a ton of combats and make combat "fair" besides some unavoidable BS that you can savescum through. Being a tank is meaningless in my build since the shield will do everything for you survivability wise. Eventually you get access to super good tailoring materials to build armor that massively enhances your crit chance. This build allowed me to one round all enemies in the game and usually kill 3-4 per turn while keeping everyone CCd. nerdz fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 23:51
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I played a full on Psi character and had an absolute blast with it; if I ever hit a brick wall I could just go somewhere else and find an easier way to level up. I could imagine hitting a brick wall near the end if you pass the point-of-no-return without being ready, though.
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Apr 30, 2020 02:07
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Just use something like Cheat Engine to cheat your status/skills up if you play Underrail, there's no shame in it. The balance is so terrible it'll just be an exercise in frustration otherwise, unless you read a guide to min-max your character to extremes. And even then there's no guarantee.
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Apr 30, 2020 03:56
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I was a psi punchmaster and it was fine, I beat most of the super tough fights by locking the enemy in a psi... cage... thing? and keeping them in one place while I beat the gently caress out of them
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Apr 30, 2020 14:22
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the biggest advice I can give about underrail though: don't get the dlc. repetitive dungeons (as in, literally the same facility tileset/floor plan/enemies 4 times in a row), very small enemy pool of super annoying enemies and travel by sea mechanic that just makes the slow rear end movement and long transition load times 10 times worse. You'll spend 5-10 mins just getting to any mission at all since they're 15-20 blocks away from where you are (15-20 blocks of nothing but open water maps), and there are special missions that force you to stop whatever you're doing and head back the base for defense. There are extra levels but the enemies don't get that much harder as you go so I kept going with like 5 banked levels. I didn't finish and I don't know if I ever will. They are working on another, probably final expansion though. If they'll take the feedback on this one who knows. Edit: they actually decided to work on a standalone game with engine updates. I think that's a good move, we'll see how it goes 5 years for now or so nerdz fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 15:26
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The DLC was so disappointing, it seemed like the kind of game where an expansion could be really great and focused. I do hope we get a sequel because I'm interested in where they could have gone with it
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Apr 30, 2020 16:56
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:The DLC was so disappointing, it seemed like the kind of game where an expansion could be really great and focused. I do hope we get a sequel because I'm interested in where they could have gone with it their proposal is a new campaign set in a different region of underrail (probably upper underrail) with a new MC. That could work if they decide to advance the plot
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Apr 30, 2020 18:24
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Alright, this question has probably been asked a dozen of times, however the proper thread is 5 years dead. What's the recommended party build for Wizardry 6?
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May 2, 2020 00:39
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As with every Wizardry game, 6 Bishops is the way to go
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May 2, 2020 00:51
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quantumfoam posted:Alright, this question has probably been asked a dozen of times, however the proper thread is 5 years dead. I think the proper advice is "make a party that seems like it would work in any generic fantasy game and keep in mind that optimal party composition means switching classes once levels start taking too long to advance." Or something like that. But yes six bishops (I never did that; hell, the party I won and took through to VII did not even change classes)
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May 2, 2020 00:57
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Skip 6 and 7 and go straight to 8 (I could never get into 6 I just found it annoying)
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May 2, 2020 02:18
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quantumfoam posted:Alright, this question has probably been asked a dozen of times, however the proper thread is 5 years dead. Because the class change system in 6/7 is so flexible, the secret about Wizardry 6 is that what you pick as your starting classes (and to a lesser extent, races) is largely irrelevant because you'll end up changing classes at some point anyway. What's more important than starting classes, though, is starting equipment because some of the stuff some classes start with is nearly impossible to find elsewhere. The best example of this is the Bard, who gets a Lute (Poet's Lute in 7) which not only is really hard to get otherwise but is a fantastic item for the early game. Honorable mentions include the armor a Ninja starts with, and the helmet a Bishop starts with. Losing the Bishop mitre is no big deal, Ninja armor is more annoying if you ever want to use a ninja, but definitely start with a Bard for the Lute.
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May 2, 2020 03:08
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I really, really wanted to like Underrail. The appeal of Fallout like games to me is robust options for character building that go beyond their role in combat, and flexible/reactive quest decisions. Underrail seemed like it was going for that, but everything about the game it seem like a chore to play. As I recall, the user interface required you to select say, an individual lockpick from your inventory to pick a locked door, rather than being able to right-click a door and select "pick lock" from a drop down menu. Perhaps I missed something. And merchants were extremely picky about which products they would buy from you. Not just "doctor's won't buy guns" but weapon merchants will only purchase specific types of guns. There's promise in the game for sure. But I suspect these annoyances were deliberate design choices out of a misguided sense of what constitutes "hardcore" or "deep" gameplay. I don't really see the depth that these features add. More like tedium. Also, following the beforeiplay guide, i was able to make a character that could survive most fights, but the fights were slow slogs. ATOM RPG has its flaws, some of which overlap with Underrail's, but I still had a lot of fun with it. Anyone tried out the Encased Early Access? It looks interesting and I bought it throw the developers some cash, but am curious as to whether its worth diving into yet.
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May 3, 2020 15:50
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