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Orv posted:Outward is Morrowind meets Ultima Underworld if you enjoy punching yourself in the genitals for little to no benefit. Yeah sort of. It's one of those games though that seems very difficult but once you have some game knowledge you can break it over your knee in creative ways. I can't really explain why I like it, but my guess is that it's in a similar way as the Pirahna Bytes games.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 01:33 |
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# ? May 24, 2024 01:44 |
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I should probably clarify that my objection isn't so much the difficulty, which is there but that a lot of the game is kind of a chore, travel mostly but occasionally something else is just why are you like this, why is this forty steps instead of five.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 01:59 |
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I tried to like Outward but it's combat was too awful.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 02:23 |
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Played Here Comes Niko!, it's cute and mostly has good controls but it's quite buggy, disappointing to see from Gears For Breakfast after Hat in Time was so good. Lots of instances where I'd just bump a wall at a weird angle and be warped to somewhere completely random in the stage, or be jumping around and hit an invisible wall in the middle of the level (I think these are trees/objects that didn't load properly?). Can't really recommend it in its current state.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 02:34 |
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Is it essentially a crapshoot from game to game whether a generic controller is supported I got a wired controller for Christmas, but it's generic ("Multi-Platform Wired Controller," and old enough that it says "Support win98/me/2000/xp/win7" on the box. (A sticker on the side also says "...for Windows 7, 8, 10, 11"). It also says "Compatible with USB 1.1/2.0 interface," and my ports are USB 3.0, and "support direct-xr instruction class," which I think means DirectX, but it's unlikely to be the latest version. I don't have an optimistic feeling about this device.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 02:38 |
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it used to be a crapshoot but steam input largely fixes that. you just have to set it up once in steam and every game will see it as an official microsoft(tm) approved xbox(tm) controller
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 02:39 |
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Countblanc posted:Played Here Comes Niko!, it's cute and mostly has good controls but it's quite buggy, disappointing to see from Gears For Breakfast after Hat in Time was so good. Lots of instances where I'd just bump a wall at a weird angle and be warped to somewhere completely random in the stage, or be jumping around and hit an invisible wall in the middle of the level (I think these are trees/objects that didn't load properly?). Can't really recommend it in its current state. That’s really strange, I 100% Here Comes Niko last year and didn’t encounter any bugs. I didn’t follow any discussion around the game so I don’t know if I got lucky or something broke in the interim or what, but it definitely doesn’t match my experience.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 02:40 |
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Is it essentially a crapshoot from game to game whether a generic controller is supported I got a wired controller for Christmas, but it's generic ("Multi-Platform Wired Controller," and old enough that it says "Support win98/me/2000/xp/win7" on the box. (A sticker on the side also says "...for Windows 7, 8, 10, 11"). It also says "Compatible with USB 1.1/2.0 interface," and my ports are USB 3.0, and "support direct-xr instruction class," which I think means DirectX, but it's unlikely to be the latest version. shoulda left it on the cursed submarine
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 02:41 |
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drat Dirty Ape posted:Yeah sort of. It's one of those games though that seems very difficult but once you have some game knowledge you can break it over your knee in creative ways. Oh poo poo I just suffered through Elex II and I need something to fill that jank vacuum
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 03:04 |
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Some cool stuff about Outward (well, depending on your point of view): *When you die in Outward, you don't get a game over and have to reload your save. Instead, when you die, you get an event depending on the circumstances. Sometimes this is something like being nursed back to health by a fellow traveler, but sometimes, say, in the case of bandits, this is being imprisoned or enslaved in their camp/mines, and it becomes a whole quest to break out of there. Essentially you never die but only get KO'd. Hardcore difficulty mode, however, does makes it a gamble whether you permanently die or get a random event. *Your backpack which carries most of your inventory is not typical video game hammerspace, but an actual physical object that hampers your movement. If you get in combat, you'll need to press the button to detach it from your shoulders to be able to move swiftly, potentially even abandoning it where it is so you can run fast enough to live and recover it later. Basically, wearing your backpack in combat is the equivalent of fatrolling in Dark Souls, but even worse. *Speaking of backpacks, the game is really about long-term traveling and survival: you need to carry sleeping bags, traps, rations, tea, injury kits, cooking and crafting implements, you need to wear the right clothing and/or drink a hot/cold tea for the environment temperature (for example, I'm sure your platemail is high in defense, but it will boil you alive in the desert), you need to eat for tons of great buffs or prepare for certain monsters you'll fight, and so on. *Magic is not something you can be born with: there's a very involved quest to unlock it, and unlocking it does require sacrificing some of your health. Magic is also very involved and ritualistic: you don't just sling fireballs willy-nilly. All you can do is simple sparks out of your hands unless empowered by a magic circle: then your spark can become a fireball, for example. Think of something like Dragon Dogma's more involved magic, but more so. *Combat is very hard and dangerous due to the slowness and how grievous injuries can be: because of this, the game leans heavily on you utilizing lots of preparation, such as traps and the aforementioned magic circles. Outsmart them! I found it to be a pretty dang cool 'jank' survival RPG, similar to something like Elex. FutureCop fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Dec 31, 2023 |
# ? Dec 31, 2023 03:27 |
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kazil posted:You should buy Hades anyway. I did and it owns bones
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 03:41 |
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K8.0 posted:IMO VS, HoT, and Holocaust are the only games in the genre really worth playing. SPELL DISK It even has a free demo and is unlikely to be autocorrected into a crime against humanity. Jack Trades posted:NMS still has the depth of a puddle. They just made the puddle wider and wider with each update. NMS more like amirite
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 03:42 |
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I wish I could get into Spelldisk because everyone loves it and I like it conceptually, but every time I've tried it just felt really stiff and unexciting, and way too visually busy
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 03:47 |
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Anno posted:This popped up on Steam yesterday and looks worthy of a follow for any Kenshi or similar game enjoyers: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2724650/The_Bustling_World/
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 03:49 |
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FutureCop posted:Some cool stuff about Outward (well, depending on your point of view): Great post. Yeah, I like that crafting is actually super useful and very accessible. Potions, elemental 'rags' (consumables that like, light your weapon on fire or cover it in poison for a set period of time), traps, are all incredibly powerful and useful. Cooking is really important with lots of different buffs depending on the meal and recipes for food/drinks/potions can be figured out through experimentation or buying the recipes from vendors (or cheating and checking a wiki I suppose). Do you load up your pack with tons of stuff to make fighting easy, or do you leave most of your stuff at home so you can carry more loot? Combat is not great, but once you realize that impact is almost more important than damage it becomes easier and the game gives you lots of ways to noob your way around things (like the skill that lets you throw the lamp and have it explode is actually really powerful and lamps are cheap and easy to purchase or craft). Dungeons are dark as hell without a light source. You can get colds, infections, fevers, etc and need to craft items to fix them. But yeah... there is a shitload of running around... just constant running. Oh and not only does it have coop but it actually has split screen coop which is not something you see very often.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 03:51 |
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Mordja posted:I tried to like Outward but it's combat was too awful. that's me and most euro jank. Difficult and jank are not a great combo. I kept dying to dumb poo poo in Outward because the combat sucks. At least something like Gedonia is chill.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 03:55 |
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Outward makes traveling arduous by design, so the moment a quest NPC told my co-op partner and I to go right back to a distant location we just came from, we both said "gently caress this" and never went back.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 04:37 |
Ghostlight posted:I saw that and it has all the signs of a game that is trying to do way too much, especially if it's only two people working on it. The scope is like five games large, and one of those games seems to be Romance of the Three Kingdoms while another is the Sims. Oh for sure. A lot of indie(I think?), early access Chinese games seem to. But they’re usually at least interesting even if all the stuff never comes together.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 04:44 |
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Yeah, Outward skewered too far towards the tedious nonsense route for my Gothic brain. You can get away with running between the old camp and swamp camp because it's like 2 minutes of running, tops. You also get teleport runes later on. It works less in Outward when the zones are really big and you have to worry about cold/hot weather gear, thirst, hunger, encumbrance and all that garbage. It definitely has Gothic vibes but the character progression and all the "survival" junk in it was negative fun. In Gothic when you learned new skills in whichever path you took it felt wholly unique to that path, like you became part of a community in doing so, especially in Gothic 2. That and while the unlocking of mana in Outward was really cool, it still stunk to lose max health over it and the actual magic you could cast was either not good or overly complicated. A neat idea of a game but it was not my cup of tea whatsoever.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 04:59 |
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:it used to be a crapshoot but steam input largely fixes that. you just have to set it up once in steam and every game will see it as an official microsoft(tm) approved xbox(tm) controller Well, that's good to know. Also good, on further inspection, it seems like Steam's controller settings allow for turning them off when exiting Big Picture mode, which is good because I don't want to use a controller for all games. kazil posted:shoulda left it on the cursed submarine As I said, it was a gift, not my choice.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 05:18 |
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A lot of valid points about Outward. There is a mod that allows you to pay to fast travel using a caravan. There is also a debug menu you can bring up to do it yourself (obviously this is not really satisfying since it is cheating, so I would prefer the mod).
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 05:29 |
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Free key for Roadwarden for a lucky goon N3TNY-IKMME-VXIH9 Happy New Years Eve
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 05:33 |
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Minotaurus Rex posted:Free key for Roadwarden for a lucky goon Its my lucky day! Ill try it out, thanks!
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 05:37 |
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I enjoyed NMS as a "cool early 80s sci-fi art" style screenshot generator at least. It was definitely a puddle, but it could be a very pretty puddle.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 05:44 |
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Galaga Galaxian posted:I enjoyed NMS as a "cool early 80s sci-fi art" style screenshot generator at least. gently caress yeah, NMS still owns imo. Really excited for Light No Fire.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 06:23 |
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explosivo posted:Orcs Must Die 3 is a good time and like $10 right now. Thanks
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 06:34 |
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The Orcs Must Die series is really good! I didn't like OMD3 nearly as much, some of the later missions were a bit annoying and slow, but overall I have enjoyed all of the games.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 07:03 |
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Steam has decided to stop launching games through the client for me and just hangs at "synchronizing cloud" forever, thank you steam edit: changing download server worked after awhile
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 07:03 |
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I think one of the most impressively bizarre things in Outward is its enchanting system, where you have to manually arrange candles around an enchanting altar based on a recipe of near/far NSEW.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 07:20 |
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Not sure why people call Outward's Fast Travel "combat", but whatever. D'yall actually try to kill the NPCs who kindly teleport you around the map?
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 08:05 |
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Holy poo poo it's been a while since I saw a game do something like that but Midnight Suns has an "upgrade" that you research, that turns the training room from an easy and practical way to level your low level characters once a day, into...a bad way to level your characters. Just a straight up downgrade with no way to reverse it. Incredible. It's just a nitpick though. The game's good otherwise.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 12:01 |
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After an amazing initial impression, Jagged Alliance 3 drops the ball so hard with one of the most massive difficulty spikes I've ever seen in an XCom-like. It went from an easy 10 and GOTY to something I don't think I'll ever replay. You go from fighting numerous but poorly-equipped mooks to excelently-equipped enemies with skills and equipment like yours, but who are still just as numerous as before. Most of the new enemies get to shoot as soon as the battle starts, their snipers can crit-kill your less resilients mercenaries from behind cover, at night, from off-screen, and even if you take full cover half their squads are equipped with AoE stun grenade launchers who reduce your action points and force you to wait a bit on the campaign layer before continuing on your way. It all starts with an ambush battle where your team is betrayed and left in a wide open position surrounded by these enemies unless you reload after the betrayal and open fire first before talking to the NPC that triggers the ambush. Cheesing the fight is the only way to have your team in any sort of advantageous position. The story fight before the ambush is a siege against 30 or so of the previously mentioned badly-equipped troops so it's very likely you're low on supplies. And the main port away from that area of the map is where the ambush happens so unless you manually maneuver around it, the autopathing will dump you straight into the ambush. But the bullshit doesn't stop on the strategic layer either, because at this point you might hold over half the map, you may have trained militia to defend it from enemy attacks and items you purchased have to arrive from off-map and into a port so you might even have supplies in one or two places. Plus, you also have your diamond mines, which have been providing a steady income supply which you need to keep your mercs hired (they will leave if you can't pay them). As soon as you win the ambush fight, a dozen squads of these enemies spawn and start taking the entirety of the map, effortlessly dealing with the militia you trained and barely suffering any casualties in the process (8 militia will at most kill 1 or 2 guys out of a squad of 8-10). Training militia costs you time and money which you won't have a lot of at the beginning, so it makes that whole side of the tactical layer a trap choice unless you know what's going to happen. These squads will capture every single mine, city and outpost you may have had, essentially cutting you off from supplies and money unless you retake them, which is an ordeal unless you know this is all going to happen and made a safety net in advance and left another squad of well-armed mercs to defend it. I have 25 hours into the game and easily fought over 50, and the last 5 hours are just from endlessly reloading these 2 fights to avoid getting half my team crippled beyond recovery. It's like someone looked at the Riovannes Castle fight in Final Fantasy Tactics and went 'nah, I can do better'.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 14:23 |
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And here I was annoyed when the game went "Hey here is a thing that is happening and you have until the enemy squad arrives to this square to show up yourself or else you'll fail a quest. Whats that, you're on the other side of the land? Well too loving bad!"
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 14:40 |
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Yeah the game basically went 'oh you didn't craft AP ammo in advance and lots of explosives in advance for this untelegraphed event? whoops lol' After the middle point there is no point in any other weapon type except for snipers and explosives, which is wild for a game this inspired in 80s action flicks.Leal posted:And here I was annoyed when the game went "Hey here is a thing that is happening and you have until the enemy squad arrives to this square to show up yourself or else you'll fail a quest. Whats that, you're on the other side of the land? Well too loving bad!" In games with a focus on post-battle loot like this one, you might look at a situation like this and go 'sweet, better loot'. But the drop rates are VERY low (like, low tens) for most stuff and most of the armor you might loot is going to be in tatters since you had to shoot it in the first place. The worst are the marksmen - as snipers every time they get a turn they will either cripple or outright down any of your mercs and there are 2-3 per squad and from what I can tell have no penalty modifiers, even at night. I had a fight where all 6 mercs were up against a single marksman a whole screen away at night and he dropped four of my guys and killed one straight up before I was able to get close to him. And even then the marksmen are fully armored so it'll take multiple turns of shooting to kill them unless you go for a headshot with a high-powered rifle. Going from the Legion troops to this is kind of night and day, it's absurdly overtuned. Azran fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Dec 31, 2023 |
# ? Dec 31, 2023 14:57 |
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Azran posted:After an amazing initial impression, Jagged Alliance 3 drops the ball so hard with one of the most massive difficulty spikes I've ever seen in an XCom-like. It went from an easy 10 and GOTY to something I don't think I'll ever replay. You go from fighting numerous but poorly-equipped mooks to excelently-equipped enemies with skills and equipment like yours, but who are still just as numerous as before. Most of the new enemies get to shoot as soon as the battle starts, their snipers can crit-kill your less resilients mercenaries from behind cover, at night, from off-screen, and even if you take full cover half their squads are equipped with AoE stun grenade launchers who reduce your action points and force you to wait a bit on the campaign layer before continuing on your way. I had high hopes for this, but apparently the designers came up with something truly moronic. One Youtuber did a deep dive review of it and explained how, after a certain point, every battle devolved into a single working solution. The whole Player team would lie down in permanent overwatch, just waiting for the enemy to pop their head out into the line of fire. Thrilling action it was not, but any other choice would lead into getting their mercs turned into mulch.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 15:08 |
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seems like someone would've caught that in qa. or maybe it's a metaphor for the grotesque tedium of war
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 15:34 |
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Azran posted:XCom-like Quill posted:The whole Player team would lie down in permanent overwatch Sounds like a success!
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 15:41 |
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It's the same thing that happens in JA2
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 15:46 |
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Mostly it sounds like the usual issue of a tactics game pretending to be symmetric (the enemy follows the same rules and has the same abilities as the player) while simultaneously having every fight be at terrible odds yet expecting every fight to end with zero casualties. Instakill snipers are a lot more fun to use than to fight against, vastly more so when your soldiers aren't disposable. Embracing the asymmetry (while also allowing for more casualties than basically any other modern tactics game, though not the original x-com) is a big part of what makes the Firaxis xcoms so great.
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# ? Dec 31, 2023 16:11 |
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# ? May 24, 2024 01:44 |
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Has anyone else had issues with Invisible Inc straight up not booting anymore? I just get a black screen, no mods or anything. It's been like this for months - I last played a couple of years ago.KNR posted:Mostly it sounds like the usual issue of a tactics game pretending to be symmetric (the enemy follows the same rules and has the same abilities as the player) while simultaneously having every fight be at terrible odds yet expecting every fight to end with zero casualties. Instakill snipers are a lot more fun to use than to fight against, vastly more so when your soldiers aren't disposable. Yeah I'd already restarted once much earlier on since every injury is a drain on your med supply and it's easy to get into an unwinnable situation unless you try to minimize damage as much as possible. Which is doable early on - if you take cover and play it safe you'll make it out of a battle with only minor injuries on some mercs. But at this point it's just a game of rocket tag - full auto bursts from 40 squares away by a random mook shouldn't be stripping away half your merc's HP bar when he's prone and behind cover, especially since your much more accurate single shots will miss that same enemy due to all the negative modifiers at play. And for reference, I don't mind difficulty spikes in games - the ambush was weirdly designed but by itself was fine. It's just the combination of factors, the way you're punished for engaging with the game's systems and not reading up what happens in advance and how you can see the wide open toolbox of the game constrict to the point of only one or two viable approaches. Azran fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Dec 31, 2023 |
# ? Dec 31, 2023 16:20 |