Fozzy The Bear posted:

Can someone photoshop Elon and Zuck heads onto this image for their fight?

Plank Walker posted:

Arsenic Lupin posted:

My Lovely Horse posted:

I vaguely recall it became a whole Thing that fizzy had sampled just about anything you can imagine/survive

RandolphCarter posted:

No game should be over 100gb.

John Murdoch posted:

I get what you mean, like my earlier post said I never got this far in the game before and I too had imagined a much better game waiting just around the corner. But on the other hand, a lot of my complaints and issues extend further and further back into the earlier parts of the game. Ironically, despite being smaller and less developed, I've almost kind of liked Chinatown as a hub more because it hasn't wasted my time and overextended itself. (Which I guess I forgot to mention - I have to assume the hub areas are built in the most time wasting, maze-y way they are so the game could maintain a functional framerate on PCs of the time, but goddamn am I so, so tired of pacing all the way from one rear end end of Downtown to talk to the Anarchs and then going all the way to the other rear end end to get to my apartment and check my email.)


Anyway, I really don't like the way Bloodlines executes on its RPG mechanics.

Skill increases follow an escalating amount of XP cost. Think 4-6-10-16. Quests for 3/4ths for the game give a trickle of 1-3 XP for various objectives (not every objective, just, y'know, sometimes if they felt like it you get +1 now followed by +3 for fully finishing the quest), only finally being raised to 3-6 towards the endgame. This leads to a bottleneck and a lot of needless anxiety as it forces you to really examine if blowing a whopping 12 points on a major increase from rank 3 to 4 is worth it in the immediate vs. spending 4 and 8 points on separate lesser skills. In general, I've never been a fan of the "here's a pile of XP, you figure it out" approach to leveling up in RPGs. Bonus complaint, there's a special item 80% of the way through the game in a main story location that tacks on a free point of XP every time you earn 3 or more in a lump sum. If you wait to do the immediately available sidequests you can apply that bonus to them, if you did them first, gently caress you, less XP. I don't think it's a lot of XP because the number of side quests at that point drops way down and I don't remember the amount of XP they provide baseline, so it's maybe only 5~ extra points but still c'mon. The worse news is if you miss that item entirely and go through the entire endgame run, then you're probably missing 10-15~ XP in total which is a lot more significant.

Combat skills are fundamentally boring. Guns might have it marginally better because I'm assuming a better ranged stat improves the Deus Ex-style reticle bloom and the actual guns themselves are more varied than melee weapons, but otherwise everything is a broadly linear progression with no depth to optimizing your character. If you shoot things you want to put 10 points into the two skills that improve that stat. Same with melee, same with unarmed. Defense stats are lopsided because of how vampires work, basically. You can get physical impact resistance aplenty (which covers bullets somewhat oddly), you get a meager amount of stabby protection from armor and otherwise need to rely on a catch-all dodge stat to automatically roll to avoid hits, and then there's aggravated damage which you can't really get any protection in because it's the nasty anti-vampire stuff like fire. I mainly bring them up because I've never really heard any consistent statement on their worth as stats to spend points on. I've felt reasonably tanky with some points in both defensive stats, but the dodge one carries the most obvious issue of being unable to know how much it's actually helping or potential issues of with streaks of bad luck. I happen to be playing a combat class, so I'll mention it now, but my active abilities are similarly boring. This isn't the case for other classes, which do get increasingly divergent effects at different ranks of abilities, but for example for me level 1 Potence adds +1 Aggravated damage to my melee attacks, cool. Level 5 adds...+5. Adds to the dullness of building a character and leaves me further unsure what's worth my fairly limited and restrictive point pool at any given moment.

Access skills come in the form of Lockpicking and Hacking. These are subtly infuriating. First of all, no minigames, for better or worse. You just press a button and wait a certain amount of time and you either cleared the difficulty of the pick/hack or you didn't. Hacking borders on being completely useless, except when it isn't. The grand majority of computers offer little more than inconsequential emails or maybe a tiny bit of backstory you otherwise wouldn't be privy to. The exceptions being when they randomly decided to have computers control certain locks that are therefore unpickable or when an email contains a vital clue found nowhere else. There's shockingly few computers across the game as a whole. The tutorial and early game imply that computers will generally have some kind of hint, clue, or just outright spoiler for their password to find somewhere, but this is a complete lie. Immediately past the early game, there's not a single computer, at all, that you can find a password hint for. Thereby making hacking completely mandatory to interact with computers past a certain point. Maybe if you're godlike at Wordle you might be able to guess a password or two because they tend to be thematically relevant and you can see the number of characters on a failed hack. If you don't mind doing a bit of cheating, every single computer has an assigned password (revealed when you successfully hack it) so you can always just look them up and skip wasting points in the stat entirely. Some classes get a buff skill that happens to affect the mental stat(s) that govern Hacking, which means your ability to hack a given computer can be variable, which is a bit awkward.

Locks meanwhile are much more frequently seen and usually bar physical access (duh) but with the payoff being that physical access means more access to Stuff and in an RPG more stuff is more good. On the other hand, what you actually get is a complete crapshoot. Sometimes it's nothing more than a storage room with some spare ammo, money, a sellable item. Sometimes it leads to a stealth route that may or may not matter to what you're actually trying to accomplish. Sometimes it leads to a completely empty room. Sometimes it lets you skip finding a key, other times absolutely not, because doors can and will be locked by quest script instead. Also, this isn't Fallout where everyone universally agreed to use one single type of lock. Plenty of doors in the game that use electronic locks of varying kinds, which makes them unpickable. You'd think they would provide a much needed use for Hacking then, but nooope. You can only hack computers. Lockpick has the added wrinkle of being partly governed by Dexterity, which is a physical stat that gets boosted by the universal Blood Buff ability. The end result is that points past 8 are effectively wasted because Blood Buff can get you to 10 anyway. Assuming you'll even need 10 in lockpicking... In the opposite direction, heavier armor subtracts 1 from Dexterity so makes it harder to pick locks while armored up, forcing you to swap clothes in order to match a lock's level. This is in no way particularly risky, difficult, or interesting, just tedious.

The real trouble comes from quest design. Far, far too often quests will outright hinge on your ability to pick a lock or hack a computer. (With an added third "do stuff without being spotted" that obviously punishes anyone who can't literally turn invisible...or doesn't want to waste points on the generic sneaking stat.) This is tabletop RPG 101. You never make something hinge on a single stat check. But it gets worse. In Fallout 3/NV/4, if you lack the 50 lockpick skill necessary to crack a safe, there's nothing preventing you from putting it aside and coming back later. In Bloodlines....well, it's all over the goddamn place. Side quests tend to die on the vine if you don't get to them before progressing the main story. Both types of quest are liable to send you to bespoke areas or whole maps which you can't return to afterwards. They seemingly compensated for this by just...not putting very many locks or computers in main quests and when they do they're extremely optional. Or they directly hand over a password or leave a key lying around. Regardless, it creates a real Catch 22 where you need to put quests on hold until you can get enough XP from quests to raise the right stats allowing you to finally complete quests and get their XP. (Don't forget this all butts up against the whole awkwardly limited XP pool/rising skill costs thing.) A bigger problem is that in several instances the two skills are combined as one. You pick a door open only to find a computer you then have to hack into. It ruins any sense of reward for investing in lockpicking and restricts access to things to hack, making the skill even harder to get value out of. Deus Ex had largely figured this poo poo out already - multiple separate approaches leading to the same objective. Also worth throwing in that those are the only two access options, ever, period. You can't sneak past obstacles, you can't bash things open with pure strength, can't pickpocket keys/keycards/literally anything off NPCs, nothin' else.

But really the biggest problem is one that applies to basically all of the major skills - lazy scaling. Nothing in the game is custom tailored, tweaked, or carefully considered. If a door, computer, enemy, whatever appears 70% of the way through the game, then you can readily assume it will be set at a difficulty of 7, with maybe a fudge factor of +/-1. As the game progresses the difficulty rises in a bland, predictable, nonsensical way. I like to call this the Wolf Problem, because it usually crops up solely in relation to RPG with iffy combat systems. Basically, how level 1 wolves of equal level are a fair fight, but level 10 wolves will atomize your character on contact. As soon as you reach level 10, those wolves are back to being a fair fight with nothing distinguishing them from level 1 wolves. Now apply that problem to every core gameplay system and take a dump on immersion and believability while you're at it. If the Illuminati have hidden their power pyramid inside the omega vault at the start of the game, well, maybe it'll cap out at level 4. If you want to get into the gas station bathroom at the end of the game, well hoo boy you better have pumped points into lockpicking motherfucker. I realize that games need to have some degree of upwards scaling, because otherwise it would create the opposite problem and points would feel wasted when all you find are lower level locks, but ultimately the RPG mechanics in Bloodlines make me feel like I'm treading water and having the opposite problem, being punished for not regularly paying the skill tax and stressing out about every last point buy choice as I second guess where the game expects my stats to be. Ultimately it feels a lot like if you took Fallout 3/4/NV, kept SPECIAL and skills...but removed perks entirely. No exciting "aha" moments, no involved build optimization, just slow, steady, measured incremental improvements to your stats.

Just to cover the rest of the RPG cruft.... Social skills are wildly lopsided and badly implemented. Persuasion, Seduction, Intimidation. If you picked anything other than Persuasion you hosed up. Seduction has a few specific uses, but by and large it rarely ever accomplishes anything and particularly doesn't work well if you're playing a male character. Because why would a man ever want to (or be able to) seduce someone?? Intimidation just completely sucks, struggling to find uses past the early game, and said early game uses often amount to "gimme more money". The rare times either of them can actually help...are the rare times a quest is testing for any of the three, so Persuasion still wins. Apparently there's two more alternate options unlocked by flavors of mind control, but I honestly have no idea how good or useful those are. These carry the same scaling problem described previously and also smack into a classic issue which is that it's impossible to know ahead of time what options unlock at what stat thresholds. Did you fail to persuade your way through an argument because you needed 8 but only had 6, or was there just no persuade option available at all in the first place? Or was it hidden behind some other dialogue branch? Another classic problem is what I'll pompously call the Silver Tongue Paradox where being able to talk your way out of a situation can be a satisfying payoff to investing in that skill, but it can also lead to anticlimaxes as you short circuit entire quests or other more complex situations by just nipping the problem in the bud with a stern word. Plus the whole standard "if you see a skill-related choice you should basically automatically pick it 100% of the time" problem. Final bonus gently caress you, there are no Persuasion checks past 8 with the exception of a single solitary extremely optional and missable 9 towards the end of the game.

Then there's the more esoteric skills. First we have one of the all time classic useless RPG skills, Haggle, which is your bog standard mercantile skill that is never worth worrying about. Money in Bloodlines is generally no object unless you're obsessively buying up a whole armory worth of weapons and ammo or endlessly sucking down blood packs (read: combined health/mana potions). Or completely ignoring money rewards from quests, never finding sellable loot, etc. The amount of discount/extra money you get from it is unsurprisingly granular and hardly fits the pace of the game. Then you have Inspection which is uh...a weird one. Inspection may as well amount to paying in-game skill points in exchange for a strategy guide. Or maybe just a basic quality of life feature. Basically, the higher the stat, the more likely it is for objects to aggressively sparkle to announce their presence, thereby making it easier to notice and find them. This concept maybe makes a bit more sense in the likes of Arx Fatalis or Dark Messiah (I think Dark Messiah had it too?) where there's secret doors and switches and poo poo that might be legitimately hidden and non-obvious. In Bloodlines, items are almost always just strewn about and missing them is more because they're a needle in a haystack of non-interactable objects. 90% of the time items are both obvious and of minimal value. Then the last 10% of the time they're one of a kind, extremely missable pickups that are the only thing justifying this stat that otherwise is competing for points with things like making your guns actually deal damage.

Then finally we have Research which a perfect little wrap up to the main stat block. I can't cleanly judge if it's unfinished, badly implemented, or just a stupid loving design to the core. In Fallout, you have skill books. Read one and you get a free +2 (or +4 with a perk) bonus to the appropriate skill. These are seeded all over the place and usually act as a useful collectible to keep an eye out for, and finding at least a few of each usually isn't an ask because there's a handful of copies of each. Bloodlines also has skill books. Except there is exactly one skill book of each type across the entire game. (With a specific exception that's either a bug or a gimme to new characters, I have no idea which.) I guess in fairness the game is proportionally smaller so the number of books is proportionally smaller too. But when the game flow is so aggressively linear...you can't just happen across one book a little sooner than another. The melee book is behind that level 10 lock I mentioned last post, at roughly the 80% mark of the game. So okay whatever, no big deal, time to read the skill books for those juicy free points. Nope. Each book has a Research requirement to even begin to read it. Like, literally, if you don't meet the stat threshold then in your inventory the book will have a title of Unknown and better still you won't even be allowed to know what stat it raises. Despite the fact that mousing over the physical book object in the world already tells you its title (which just like Fallout will obviously correspond to its stat) but I guess that information isn't canon and my character is too loving stupid to know how to read the cover of a book. So fine, I'll waste some points on the stat. Congratulations, gently caress you. Not only does every single book have its own Research requirement, but every single one has its own bespoke minimum AND maximum range at which you can actually apply the knowledge contained within. A novice can't learn from a book that's too advanced and a master can't learn from a For Dummies book. Considering this is all in service to +1 to a single skill per book, and any given build is only going to be making effective use of a smaller specific range of skills in the first place, and that the scaling renders having lots of +1s spread out across many different skills largely pointless, the entire thing is bewilderingly stupid. Again, this costs the same XP you could just take and put directly into the things you're trying to raise via skill books in the first place. The only time it could be beneficial is if you meticulously min/max to a truly ridiculous degree and manage to eke out a slight advantage from spending marginally less XP on Research than it would cost to level the skills normally, at exactly the right time and exactly the right place. Which sure seems like is exactly why all these dumb restrictions even exist, to prevent you from getting too good of a deal out of Research. AAAAAAGHGHHH. Relatedly, sometimes certain characters will also give you a bit of free training to a skill, and the exact same sort of restrictions can apply. Some of these free points are seemingly meant to be rewards for digging deeper into dialogue with those characters.

I'm thinking two more posts, neither as long.

The Wicked ZOGA posted:

No post should be over 100gb

Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:

Doom Mathematic posted:

You can't just call your band "The Band"!

DontMockMySmock posted:

Costello: So what's the lineup for the classic rock festival?

Abbott: Well, The Guess Who is playing first, then The Who, then The Band.

Costello: Can you just tell me their names?

Abbott: I just told you!

Costello: Who's playing first?

Abbott: No they're on second, The Guess Who's on first.

Costello: Just tell me, I'm not going to guess the band that's playing first.

Abbott: They're playing third; we're not talking about them.

etc.

DrankSinatra posted:

"Cognition Engineer," what a loving dildo.

grittyreboot posted:

No. This man has never pleased a woman

Pope Corky the IX posted:

He also wants an apology. And she’s still cooking herself a meal when she comes home while he’s on strike so technically she’s a scab.

mllaneza posted:

I don't think she's gonna be in that union much longer.

Collapsing Farts posted:

Ive been to america and everything is gross there, from the food to the politics and the circumsized penii - and i saw a lot of dongs when i was there, an almost unfathomable amount of cock

B-Rock452 posted:

I broke my tailbone after I slipped setting up a rappel for a climbing course. Two weeks later I was helping with a rafting trip and some moron kayaker wasn't paying attention and hit our raft and the front of his kayak hit my broken rear end and I threw up from the pain

Subjunctive posted:

whyyyyyyy

B-Rock452 posted:

I was a poor college kid and was offered 40 bucks to tag along on some rafting trip. In hindsight it was not worth it

canyoneer posted:

If you had some better hindsight you would have dodged the kayak

Blackula Vs. Tarantula posted:

I don't think I can post this in the form of a meme but sodium citrate isn't just for cheese, anything you make that is a mixture of polar and non polar ingredients that you want to mix smoothly and not separate benefits from a teaspoon of the stuff. If you don't want the oil to separate out of a curry, pasta sauce, stew or whatever it's like magic.

Lobok posted:

*silently sobbing, sprinkling sodium citrate on mom & dad while they sleep after they fought again*

pangstrom posted:

the year is 2028 and the cover of Time's Spiderman of the Year issue is a reflective surface labeled "Spider-You"

Haptical Sales Slut posted:

maybealabia posted:

Tree Bucket posted:

He rose in a halfshell, turtle power

Jedit posted:

That's disrespectful. Don't they know that he died for our din-dins?

axman667 posted:

So I have been lurking for a while, and finally decided to pony up due to this thread:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2076657

axman666 posted:

The storie of how my grandfather destroyed the bears!
Ill tell you guys a story of how my grandad survered the days in the bear infested north east minnasota.

See my granpa lived in this shed and there were loving bears outside,like they would gently caress hes poo poo up whenever he tride to leave,so one day he went outside and shot one and brought its corpse inside,and from it he made anti bear armor,first he skinned it,then he used the bones to make some loving shoulder pads,then he put on the skin,sort of like a cape so then he took the skull and tied it to hes chest while singing,then he covered himself in the bears blood,ALL THE BLOOD,he was all red and poo poo right? then he went to the kitchen and he grabbed all the knives he could,then he tied the knives to hes hands to make like some claws.

and so with hes full battle bear armor on,my uncle went outside to take care of the bears outside hes house,he rushed out,got in hes loving truck,and ran over all of those mother loving poo poo head bears before they could even see it loving coming,then when he was done he went to get more gas becouse he ran out of gas,but then he came back and owned more loving bears,then he went back inside and lived happy and good forever.

I can't remember if my grandmother was the gas attendant or a hooker he picked up,but him in hes full battle armor glory could of attracted any woman anywhere.

But now that I have, I totally miss the replacement words/phrases for the swear words. At first I thought they were just inside jokes (seriously, who says drat?), but then I started to get used to them and enjoy them. Now I have lost them, and I miss them . Anyone else?

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

Captain Monkey posted:

He pied for our sins, heathren.

BOOTY-ADE posted:

Whoso eateth my crust, and drinketh my sauce, hath eternal life

BOOTY-ADE posted:

Whoso eateth my crust, and drinketh my sauce, hath eternal life

Baron von Eevl posted:

Realtalk I'm pretty sure I registered well before the wordfilters were a thing but also I literally never read the forums before registering so I dunno, maybe they were there.

Carthag Tuek posted:

hth => "im a huge prick" or something like that, i remembrer fishmech got got by that a bunch

Karate Bastard posted:

I miss an rear end in a top hat.

Also my sexuality was turned into a meme by idiots was a good one.

venus de lmao posted:

what the wordfilters did to forums poster cuck cuck im gay will never stop being funny to me.

Karate Bastard posted:

What was cuck?

Carthag Tuek posted:

abraham putting isaac in a pizza oven