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Randalor posted:I've been slowly playing through Age of Mythology HD, and while it's a very fun game with a nice variety of missions that differ from the "Build a base, destroy enemy base" formula (even if it's just "Destroy X-type of building in enemy base, you usually have a few ways of pulling it off) there's one mission that just pisses me off. Tug of War, where you and the opponent are fighting over a container being pulled by two camels. The problem with the mission being that it starts under enemy control, you have next to no units and by the time you get a good-sized army built up to catch up to the box and take and hold the camels, it's almost to the enemy's base. And these camels move slowly. The mission is just a slog of "Build units and throw them at the enemy waves while hoping enough don't slip by to cause you to lose control of the camels." You have the ancestors and serpents god powers at the start which you can just use on the foes at the kart and immediately retake it. You'll also resurrect the Campaign heroes, from there just spam a bunch of cheap units from your military buildings and away you go.
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May 31, 2014 20:22
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Randalor posted:The problem with that is that the enemy has almost a full wave of units ready to go at the start of the mission, and the trigger for it is "if the player control the cart, begin sending waves", so while you can retake the cart right away, you have very little time to get an army built up to defend it. I beat it with axe men spam, it's just a tedious mission with little variation for how long it takes. Not really, you can win the mission in five minutes even on the highest difficulty which is a far cry from many of the other missions that can go on for half an hour or more. You have six military buildings at the start on the mission, plop down ancestors and serpents, set waypoints near the cart and start streaming out units from all your sources. By the time the first wave of enemy troops have tramped across half the map they'll be looking at tons of chariots, camels and axes, at which point the only thing to worry about are a bunch of sneaky attacks with Rocs and shifting sands if you don't have forces close to the cart. On topic, and on the same game, holy poo poo, the second and fourth missions of Age of Mythology: the Titans absolutely kick my rear end. The enemy seems to be able to pull vast amounts of troops straight out of their rear end and on the fourth mission especially, you have such a tight amount of resources that if you don't win quickly it becomes a lost cause when you run out of gold.
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Jun 1, 2014 21:13
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Tiggum posted:I've never understood these decisions to make games more challenging by making them less convenient. Like limiting the number of times you can save. If you don't have enough time to play all the way through in a small enough number of sessions then you just don't get to finish the game. Or checkpoints being really far apart to force you to do whole sections as one rather than save-scumming, which means that if you have to stop playing for any reason before you reach that checkpoint you have to do a whole bunch of stuff again.  MY VISION wankery about those stupid plebs sullying my carefully crafted masterpiece, but artists often restrict the consumer if they feel that's what it takes to get them to fully digest the work, David Lynch, for example, doesn't allow his DVDs to have chapter stops since he feels watching his movies in chunks is an inferior experience.Restricting pauses though is too much, even for me. quote:Like that's not already the case? I don't understand why people care about stuff like performance-enhancing drugs in sports. Look at the Olympics; If you're from a wealthy country where they have well-funded programs to train and support athletes, you've got a huge advantage over the guy from the poor country who had to work a full-time job on top of training. Why are we pretending this is a fair contest? You say that, but then poor countries like Ethiopia and Kenya can often compete very well against the big dogs.
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Aug 23, 2014 17:09
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SpookyLizard posted:XCOM doesn't have any save restrictions tied to difficulty last I checked. Unless playing on Normal or Easy keeps more autosaves or something, but the game has always saved your seed (unless told other wise) and Ironman is completely seperate from difficulty. Well I kind of count that as an additional tier of difficulty and most of the community treats Ironman classic/Impossible as a distinct, more intense way of playing the game. In the thread over in games most people use the phrase I/C or I/I as the shorthand for 'Hard' mode and also those absurd long-war-impossible runs youtubers like beaglerush do are usually on Ironman. khwarezm has a new favorite as of 17:54 on Aug 23, 2014 |
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Aug 23, 2014 17:51
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Oxxidation posted:That's more the PC gamers justifying their $1500 fun machines like always. Ha, what Nerds! Unlike me, Consoles 4 lyfe. So I just finished Batman: Arkham Origins and it was obvious that they didn't have much to add to the formula of the series. Almost all of the new gadgets are pretty crappy, I only really enjoyed the remote claw, which can string people up gargoyles and pull environmental objects or even other enemies towards your foes. On the other hand the concussion grenade is totally useless most of the time, sometimes it can be an outright hindrence, and Shock Gloves basically just let you cheat through the combat, you smack every enemy regardless of weapons or armor and dudes get knocked down by them so all of the nuance and special strategies you have to devise get thrown out the window. The combat's not exactly difficult most of the time so this makes the final stretch of the game pretty dull, which is a shame since I liked some of the new enemy types.
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Oct 19, 2014 05:06
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The Moon Monster posted:What dragged this game down for me was the electrocutioner fight. I ran up to him, pressed the punch button and it immediately went to the you win cutscene. I don't know whether that was a bug or intentional but either way it was pretty lame when I was expecting a real boss fight. You see I thought that was hilarious though, and it was intentional, Electrocutioner is pretty clearly the comedy joke boss from the start. Besides you get to fight Deathstroke a moment later.
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Oct 19, 2014 19:16
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Anatharon posted:DotA 2 has items that are literal thousands of dollars but that doesn't really make it better. To be fair aren't they just things traded between the community? Its not like Valve is actually selling "sparkly hat of sperg, 12,000 USD  " at the store is it?
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Nov 13, 2014 04:55
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Sardonik posted:Don't make the mistake of falling into this mindset. New Vegas is the real Fallout 3, made by people who actually knew what the hell they were doing. It actually has a large overarching plot with a lot of interesting moving parts. How do you put 51 hours into a game you hate? Two whole days!
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Dec 24, 2014 07:27
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SiKboy posted:You didnt ever read the SA NV thread did you? I've had this arguement a lot and "shades of gray!" is an inevitable defence of NVs crappy factions. People who defend the legion deservedly get laughed out of town sooo....
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Dec 24, 2014 21:48
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Tiggum posted:The controls in Dishonored are really hard to get used to. I keep shooting people when I mean to strangle them or stabbing them when I mean to block. Having three separate attack buttons, one of which is sometimes a defend button, is just hard to wrap my head around. And it was even worse before I switched the right and left mouse buttons. I noticed Skyrim has the same weird backwards controls by default too. How is that supposed to be a good idea? Left-click to use your right hand and right-click to use your left hand? Sure, that sounds intuitive. You have the strangest complaints, left click is usually reserved for the generic 'attack' action in every game under the sun since 1999, why should it change now?
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Jan 18, 2015 19:52
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Phobophilia posted:It's quite quite strange. Traditionally, Left Click has been for the default attack. The default attack comes from the gun that is being held in the right hand. The Right Click is usually for special attack, and in this case, is the melee sword attack. Except, the sword is held in the left hand, so the two hands are being controlled by the opposite mouse buttons. Which is unintuitive to someone who hasn't been playing shooters for the last 17 years. But the melee sword attack is left click. I can't honestly say I even notice when the 'wrong' hand is being used when comparing mouse to on-screen action, but if it is a problem dishonored has a button prompt for stealth kill/knockout every time you are behind somebody.
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Jan 18, 2015 22:48
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Raxivace posted:That's what I'll probably end up doing anyways, but it irks me that this exists as a game mechanic to begin with. One of the ideas around Fez seems to be that solving puzzles like that by just changing the clock is perfectly viable and isn't somehow wrong. A bunch of the puzzles require you to look and work outside the actual gameworld itself, like the Qr codes. In addition some of them probably won't be worked out without consulting outside help on a forum or a guide, so the game actually incorporates that very process into the puzzles themselves. this video has a lot of spoilers but it explains it better than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iefXGaaVERg Its very meta I suppose but it is quite original, I like the idea of a game that doesn't have any illusions of being a completely immersive experience divorced from the rest of the world, instead it incorporates the computer you are using or the controller or your mobile or the internet in really interesting ways.
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Jan 20, 2015 00:24
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1stGear posted:Bethesda doesn't actually make good RPG's, they make decent dungeon crawlers. Everyone claims they make good RPG's because of stuff Michael Kirkbride wrote on a cocaine bender fifteen years ago. I didn't even get this out of Skyrim, all I remember when crawling through Skyrims dungeons was fighting the same loving zombies the whole game except they changed their names from 'Draugr lord' to 'Draugr Ultra-Death-Hell-Overlord-Alpha' or something. It all felt the same, its like the red queen problem where as I level up and get better gear the enemies perfectly match my abilities and all still look and act the same to boot. There's a lot wrong with New Vegas but I found it much more gratifying the way they had clearly marked out high level dungeons (i.e. Quarry Junction, Dead Wind Cavern, Vault 34) that you may discover but would usually have to come back to at a higher level with better gear before you could clear them out. That created a satisfying sense of progression when you could go in and level a place that would have annihilated you 20 levels ago. khwarezm has a new favorite as of 21:55 on Feb 28, 2015 |
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Feb 28, 2015 21:42
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Tiggum posted:Where do people even get this idea? Skyrim is not like that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wujJnlsJh4&t=57s Skyrim half-assedly pays lip service to this in its main quest. (also the rest of that video fits in this thread nicely).
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Mar 2, 2015 13:37
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zidane13 posted:Who cares if it curves? It can be any shape it wants, as long as its fun. And he doesn't find it fun, where are you going with this?
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Apr 26, 2015 01:55
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Sleeveless posted:
The Alice in Wonderland stuff went further, follow the man in white for example, or Bucks initially ambiguous, mischievous presence and proclivity to appear and disappear in unlikely situations while sending the PC on a confusing journey he fills with mind games. khwarezm has a new favorite as of 02:40 on May 8, 2015 |
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May 8, 2015 02:32
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Screaming Idiot posted:
The visuals on the Darkness 1 have not aged well, as does most 'photo-realistic' stuff after some time, and honestly I'm glad they tried to be more visually interesting.
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May 12, 2015 00:30
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Oxxidation posted:Jackie's model in the first game was embarrassing to look at. Seriously, its the most DARK AND EDGY crap I've seen in a long time. At least in the second game he cut his hair and got rid of the stupid trench-coat.
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May 12, 2015 00:35
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Len posted:Because people like the "realism" that's why there's entirely too many mods that add hunger/thirst into games like Skyrim and Fallout 3/New Vegas. Gotta have that realism! They are playing the game WRONG!!
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May 24, 2015 00:42
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swamp waste posted:I guess that's another thing dragging down Fallout for me, that they tend to justify things by explaining them. Ironically the doof warrior actually does have an elaborate backstory explaining how he came to be. (maybe that was the joke I don't know  )E;FB Zaphod42 posted:No its not; that's the whole point. He's not saying "things should be simple" he's saying that things don't need to be explained. That's literally what he said. Create the back story but don't tell us, we just need you, the author/director/developer, to know what it is. Which is how Mad Max works. They created things like bullet farm that they don't even show us, but they clearly put thought into it. gently caress that noise the Survivalist's logs in Honest Hearts are the best things to ever come out of the fallout games and they involve extensively explaining everything that happened in Zion Valley. khwarezm has a new favorite as of 02:58 on Jul 1, 2015 |
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Jul 1, 2015 02:53
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John Murdoch posted:It's really obvious from the pre-release material that what we got is not the game they intended to make. I'm really curious about what exactly went wrong. People are quick to crucify Levine for the lovely storytelling, but I'm left wondering if perhaps their original vision was too ambitious for last-gen consoles. Overall, it comes off like they spun their wheels for too long so 2K came in and had them gather up all the scraps they had lying around and release something playable. Similar to what happened with The Bureau, which ironically elevated that game somewhat, but certainly sunk Infinite if that was the case. I'm convinced that if they had the choice they would have cut out a lot of the 'special' enemy types (the Sirens, Handymen and boys of silence) or at least redesigned them so heavily that they would unrecognizable. But they made special trailers hyping up those enemies so when it came to it they likely felt forced to include even though none of them felt fun or interesting to fight, they weren't as well developed as stuff like the big daddies and didn't inhabit the universe and the plot nearly as comfortably. The boys of silence in particular show up briefly near the end, don't do much except show that the game was hopelessly ill-equipped to attempt stealth and provide one (pretty good TBF) jump scare. Also songbird, I remember reading in previews and stuff that he would show up at certain points and force you to adopt a much stealthier approach, but in the actual game we got he's entirely limited to scripted sequences with no actual involvement in the game play in any way until five minutes before the end when they turn him into a boring power-up. Ugh, the game has all the signs of being a disaster in development with too many jumbled, half-baked ideas that weren't executed at all well, what a disappointment, it had the basis of such an awesome game.
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Aug 9, 2015 01:22
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EmmyOk posted:2 has the worst story and the majority of the gameplay i.e. protecting little sisters which was the worst part of the first bioshock. Then regardless of killing or saving a little sister a big sister might attack you, it was very bad. This makes me feel awkward since I loved protecting the little sisters in Bioshock 2, it was great fun setting a little fortress of turrets, mines, tripwires, various plasmids and trap rivets. Oh man the trap rivets were great, if you put them on a ceiling a splicer could walk under and get headshot immediately  I felt it actually gave you the tools and enough time to make use of said tools when it came to protecting the little sisters against the onslaught, that was the bioshock combat at its best.
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Aug 9, 2015 03:31
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Curdy Lemonstan posted:System shock 2 > all of your stupid 'shocks so play that and never waste your breath again on the lovely watered down bioFucks. SS2 is quite overrated and has the single dumbest ending I have ever seen in a video-game. It still baffles me that nobody ever brings it up when that game is mentioned which makes me suspect that quite a few people(particularly those who claim its the best thing ever) never bothered to actually finish the game. spectres of autism posted:i think that was what daisy sold the vox dudes on, but thats not really what she believed. she just thought booker coming back was inconvenient to the martyr narrative. Your right, and in any event you see a bunch of populi before they turn being all 'Holy poo poo, Booker Dewitt! This is so awesome! Its an honour to fight alongside you, I thought you were dead' then they all flip around and desperately try to kill you on Fitzroy's demand with no dissent, its so badly done. khwarezm has a new favorite as of 15:55 on Aug 10, 2015 |
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Aug 10, 2015 15:48
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:I've seen it brought up a lot. I enjoyed aspects of the last part of the game, especially the upside down ship with the inverted church, that felt very Ken Levine, and the body of the many was effectively creepy (if godawful to explore). That ending though, it fucks up the tone and gravitas so much that I can't play the game now without thinking 'Thats where this is all going to end up', it even has a crappy cliffhanger that won't ever get resolved to cap it all off. Its kind of incredible. I'd probably also complain about the ending being way to quick but honestly it'd likely get much worse if it went on any longer if the quality of the rest of it is any indicator.
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Aug 10, 2015 15:59
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Gestalt Intellect posted:
If you think that's bad you should look at the new gunmettle weapons.
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Aug 12, 2015 22:44
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Your Gay Uncle posted:
The worst one is the high overseer, being humilated, ruined and disgraced after you brand him he gets thrown out of the abbey to squalor and you find him reduced to a zombified weeper in a horrifying, disgusting slum later in the game so he's as good as dead anyway. If I was him I'd way prefer getting a knife in the throat then that. I actually decided to do the, uh, 'Non-lethal' options on some of the main targets since they seemed so ghastly they actually fit in with the situation I was creating in my High Chaos run.
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Sep 7, 2015 13:53
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sticklefifer posted:Well I mean this comes after 4 where a major plot was intensely suffering PTSD victims doing a slow cat crawl so they can hump you to death while you zoom in on their camel toe with the alt camera, so maybe it's also fair to say Kojima's just got some weird as gently caress women issues. No actually its clever satire because whenever something I like has something stupid or embarrassing in it its always actually clever satire.
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Sep 30, 2015 00:38
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Sleeveless posted:New Vegas doesn't let you keep playing after the ending either. If you look into the deleted content for New Vegas it seems that post-ending gameplay was planned at some point, but it quickly became clear that they couldn't possibly account for all of the variables that the various endings would have brought about with the budget and development time they had available. Just imagine how much the overworld would have changed in the ending where Lanius becomes Caesar and conquers Vegas. For fallout 3 the main plot was much more self contained and had less variation so it was more feasible there.
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Dec 1, 2015 02:26
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Jobbo_Fett posted:I really enjoy the time I've put into Age of Empires 2, and "The Forgotten" was a neat return to a classic game getting an HD remake. I disliked some of the levels, like one where all you do is wait to be attacked for 30 minutes and then you win. (And that seriously drags down my experience with that expansion) I don't think this option is there for the campaigns but when you look at the options for making a single player game click on the box that says 'AI', it will have a dropdown list that gives you the option of setting it to the original, dumb as pigshit 'Conquerors' AI. A lot of the people playing AOE2 these days are very well acquainted with the game's mechanics due its age, the multiplayer scene gets a lot of play and if you play that regularly most of the campaigns and single player games, even on hard, are a bit of a pushover. Word of advice, try to be aggressive when you can, the new AI is meant to play as much like a real human as possible, especially compared to the old one, and it also does not cheat so its dependent on the same resources as you are. Deny resources and kill villagers and just generally keep them them tied up and away from your base while also pumping out villagers constantly and tasking them on resources, never let your Town Center fall idle!
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Jan 2, 2016 05:10
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Alteisen posted:Yea ever since SA they've tried to turn the protagonist into a some poor victim of circumstances instead of just being a crazy sociopath like Vercetti was. I thought that was the idea with Trevor?
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Jan 20, 2016 23:38
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Krinkle posted:Darkest Dungeons seems obnoxious for a rogue like. If you complete the easy missions, they're gone forever. If the guys you spent all your money on die, well, gently caress! Now have to throw level 0 scrubs into the meat grinder with no torches or food so they will 100% get hosed up and die and keep you in debt. Yeah I just don't 'get' darkest dungeon anymore. I generally enjoy modern roguelikes (FTL, Spelunky, Crypt of the Necrodancer) but DD is the one where most of the time I died it felt like it was because of endless lovely RNG rather than my own fuckups. Its like its trying to appeal to the hardcore demographic by just piling on ever higher amounts of random nonsense and aggravating mechanics to just add difficulty for difficulty's sake, though to be fair they at least made corpses optional (though its still a nonsensical, infuriating mechanic). And the weird thing is that it doesn't really have any explicit failure state so it doesn't even have the 'stakes' that I enjoy in games like XCOM where you have situations where everything hangs in the balance and if you fail the aliens conquer earth or something. In DD you can get everyone killed and you just send in another goon squad in the next day to try to grind through it again. I liked the concept, and early on when the game was in EA I found it really fun but now I'm just completely done with it.
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Jan 24, 2016 03:57
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Byzantine posted:
Spinosaurus was a chump that clearly spent most of its time eating fish, people only like it because it's big. funnily enough I've heard that some scientists think its odd straddling of crocodile and predatory dinosaur features was so that it could move between lifestyles and habitats to avoid competing with Carcharodontosaurus or Giant Crocodiles depending on the location. So it was specifically designed to avoid conflict, which I just find brilliant since so many people are obsessed with it fighting other giant dinos.
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Jan 24, 2016 05:41
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Dr Christmas posted:Didn't Michael Chriton take the Deinonychus and give it the name of another dinosaur because Velociraptor sounded cooler? Sort of, I believe that he also called them Velociraptor because of a controversy at the time regarding their taxonomy. If you want a dinosaur very similar to Velociraptor but which were even larger than the ones in the film you could alternatively use Utahraptor or Dakotaraptor (the latter lived alongside tyrannosaurus for extra cool points). Byzantine posted:And Velociraptor was two feet high, Mosasaurus was nowhere near big enough to eat a great white shark whole, Tyrannosaurus couldn't keep up with a Jeep and Pteranodon couldn't lift a full-grown human, but for some reason people are suddenly really, honestly concerned with scientific accuracy when it comes to Spinosaurus. I was being a bit facetious, but as a dinosaur nerd I find it a bit silly to treat Spinosaurus as emperor badass of all the dinosaurs just cause it was really big. It would be like if in 60 million years the dominant race of mutant squid people start making movies about the prehistoric animals of now, and they have the most dangerous, kickass animal of them all be a panda bear.
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Jan 24, 2016 23:40
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Josef bugman posted:I'm kind of wondering how you guys are managing to get so badly hosed over by DD. I mean the fights are sometimes hard and tricky but its not impossible. Didn't they make it so that you couldn't put certain classes in the same party because they synergised too well? I mean come on.
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Jan 25, 2016 00:15
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RareAcumen posted:Is all this buffoonery documented in the DD thread in games? They seem to enjoy it there so probably not. The whole thing reminds me of the long war mod for Xcom, which similarly got derailed into absurd difficulty and randomness to appeal to a certain type of hardcore demographic. In both cases there's tons of cool things and ideas you can't get elsewhere but its just such a pain in the rear end to play that the whole experience is soured. But for long war it was just some mod on the side you can get rid of anytime, in Darkest Dungeon we're talking about the actual game which you pay real life money for.
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Jan 25, 2016 02:53
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Krinkle posted:Which characters were too good together? A lot of people won't play with the accursed beastman in chains. Like two or three maybe more of them? Abominations and 'holy' characters like vestals and crusaders. To be fair I suppose it kind of works from a world-building point of view.
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Jan 25, 2016 03:23
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Horrible Smutbeast posted:It doesn't, because the Occultist has literally made a pact with an old god and summons tentacles to bash on people inbetween doing blood sacrifices to heal absurd amounts, the Leper is a walking rotting corpse of a man and the Plague Doctor loves hacking apart bodies and experimenting with flesh melting blight potions. No other character has an issue partying with literal old god summoners. They couldn't balance that poo poo properly so instead of reworking it they just locked out the ones with the best synergy. Yeah now that I think about I can't come up with a particularly good narrative reason why Lepers wouldn't fight alongside Abominations.
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Jan 25, 2016 03:45
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Dewgy posted:How many Jonathan Blow games are there? Apart from being that guy who blew all his money making Braid I didn't know he did anything other than that and the Witness. One, there is an entire one game that Jonathan Blow has made before the Witness and it was called Braid. And you know what? It is actually a good game, fun puzzles, unique mechanics, nice art and music and some interesting secrets if you look for the stars. Just ignore the plot if you don't care for that sort of thing. Also, wouldn't blew all his money imply that the game was a financial failure? i'm pretty sure he made money back on it.
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Feb 2, 2016 23:31
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Strategic Tea posted:Isn't the plot about a Nice Guy rescuing his beloved except it turns out she's running away from him and prefers some DUMB JOCK? I guess if you want to see it like that you could but I took it to be that the main character is a horrible creep who ruined his relationship, can't take no for an answer and breaks into her apartment. Like the last part of the game first presents itself as her running from the knight (jock) into the main character's open arms in her room until it turns out that this is an inversion of the event, she was running away from a creeper who breaks into her room, tries to prevent her from getting away and forces her to run to the arms of a noble knight. The whole thing is that the protagonist's perception of reality is literally rear end-backwards.
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Feb 2, 2016 23:58
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Sleeveless posted:The lack of scenarios/missions also feels like a big oversight for Cities: Skylines. The core city building is great but just plopping you down in an abandoned lot and having you make your own fun instead of even having basic stuff like taking over an existing town and having you meet X objective in Y time meant it didn't hold my attention nearly as long as the classics of the genre. Its a shame because Sim City 4 didn't have them either(beyond tutorials), I don't know about Sim City 2013 but given everything else I would be surprised if they splashed out for that given all the other problems in that game. And they were really good in Sim City 3000 at given the subject cities a sense of character and challenge.
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Feb 20, 2016 19:52
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