What game are you playing right now? #3

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Not actually playing but still rolling IWDEE could use some help in my latest threads

 

As I mentioned in my previous post, I haven't even played the original IWD, so can't help you much there.

Though I did start a game of Arcanum. I wanted to go for a technologist, and a dwarf seemed a natural choice for that, as did using guns. Turns out that is actually a pretty hard build in the early game, but after a restart and a bit of rethinking of stat distributions (some more CHA for more followers, for instance), I did manage to get past the thugs in Shrouded Hills. Or at least my followers did.

I didn't get that far yet, just preparing to set off to the isle of despair, but I'm liking the game a lot so far. I made an elephant gun and handcannon for myself, so I'm pretty much set in the offensive department, and currently I'm debating whether or not to go for more smithy and mechanical (and to ultimately be able to build an automaton as another helper), or to go for something else.

The plot development seems pretty good so far, though I'm still a bit fuzzy on why my character would be so motivated to get to the bottom of this case with the crashed blimp. It's not like trying to get a waterchip to let the people you've known your entire life survive, so to say. Not that it matters much, and the comparison with Fallout seems quite apt, in terms of how the game world feels. If you'd take Fallout and replace the post-apocalyptic setting for a steampunk setting, and perhaps made the game world even bigger, you'd get pretty close to Arcanum. Or at least that's my impression so far.

 

I'm currently playing Overwatch and Baldur's Gate II EE!

 

Currently trying hard not to suck at X-COM UFO Defence (so far 3-4 New Games in a weekend) and also playing Fire Emblem: Binding Blade (like one mission in a week or two)

 

Just Overwatch for the past... year :/

 

Picked up an old game I still had running in Jagged Alliance 2. I'd already taken over Drassen, Alma, Cambria, and Balime, though I couldn't train any militia in Balime yet, so I lost that again. No matter, there is not much of importance there. So I made my way to Grumm instead, just with my core group of three mercs (created myself, courtesy of the unofficial 1.13 patch). First ran into a group of 20+ guys, no big deal, then ran into another group of 31 guys, still not a big deal.

Finally arriving in Grumm, the first area was guarded with another 28 guys. Business as usual, and it was a night assault, so not too troublesome. I'd gotten them down to 16 guys, when I look at the map to check how many guys there were left, and suddenly there are 60 guys in the area. As I mentioned before, only 32 guys can enter one area at a time, so the others were waiting to arrive until I got rid of some of guys there. It's not quite as bad as that one time in Drassen, where they tried to take it back with 94 guys, but 72 guys in a single battle is still quite a lot.

Anyway, I have a metric crap ton of loot to sift through and organise, and that's without even having most of the loot from the two groups that I encountered on the way to Grumm. Those are waiting to be picked up by some other mercs, probably Shank will be picking up the humvee and then be picking up some loot (the humvee was the main reason to go to Balime, actually).

 

TOEE/Co8. But having a lot of trouble trying to find monk weapons that aren't exotic other than the quarterstaff - gave up on using that and just using fists so I can use Stunning Fist sometimes.

 

Currently going super retro and again playing Wizardy 1 (I was a tween when it first came out). Also playing DC Online on PS4 - and I am blown away about how awesome this game is even when playing for free. It's not a new game, but if you haven't checked it I so recommend it. Plus I'm playing Gems of War. Anybody know it. I'm the guild master. My guild is 'KittyCave' and we're currently ranked 260-ish worldwide. That's awesome.
On a side note my 18 year old son is smashing it out retro style with his online buddies playing Age of Empires 2 and Heroes of Might and Magic III (HD improved version). As well as Overwatch, and Warcraft 3 online with all these crazy missions. Plus CounterStrike.

 

Currently starting a NG+ of Mass Effect Andromeda - i'm glad i waited until they patched out most of the bugs and fixed some of the animation problems before i gave it a try - I'm enjoying it for what it is, though i'm still a bit salty on how much they dropped the ball on it - there's so much more potential here if only if the devs had been able to polish it up just a bit more.

 

Been playing Fallout New Vegas for the past few months. It is pretty much the game you'd get if you added good story, characters, and characterisation to a Bethesda game. Or, it's pretty much the game I'd wish I was playing if I'm playing a Bethesda game.

Or close to, anyway. There are some gripes I have with the game, though I believe much of that is inherited from Fallout 3 (which I've not played). The GUI of Oblivion was so painfully geared towards consoles, I actually had to stop playing and find some mods to fix it. Those gigantic icons and fonts taking up so much space that any overview is quickly lost. FNV suffers from this as well, though to a lesser degree. Rather than burning my eyes, it merely made me want to sit back a meter or so from my desk everytime any text came upon the screen.

Also, the movement speed is slow as molasses. This was the first thing I wanted to mod, until I found a console command that I could use to increase the movement speed. While looking for that, I found a mod to improve the GUI, and then of course some hide out mods, because that's always needed. For Morrowind I made my own hide out, but nowadays I don't have as much spare time to put into that.

After that was sorted, I was ready to restart the game. Even with the movement speed increased, the game is still pretty slow. It took me about 1.5 hrs to get through the first tutorial quest and character creation. By comparison, I'd already gotten past several areas in Legend of Grimrock 2 in that same time, solved some puzzles, and leveled up a few times.

So, it's a pretty slow game, and being basically a Bethesda sandbox, it's also a massive time sink. But the characters you meet are much more interesting than in a typical Bethesda sandbox, as are the quests, which helps a great deal to stay involved in the game. I took quite some time to save the starting town, then to save the next town, the second involving more combat than the first.

Combat is pretty dangerous at low levels and with starting level weapons. There are some enemies that will straight up murder you, and some (perhaps the same) that your weapons just cannot even touch. It also means that if you were thinking of running straight towards New Vegas (against all in-game advice), you're gonna have a hard time. Or, more likely, you'll get murdered, and then reload and try a different road.

Up until you get the better weapons, the combat feels a bit meaty. To my idea, most enemies are just too bullet spongey. And that's at normal difficulty. Even with the better weapons, it often takes several bullets to the head to kill a human enemy. That just doesn't feel right to me, especially if those bullets are large calibers, like 5.56 or even .50. Especially in the beginning, I often felt like I'd prefer playing any Stalker game, which have better combat gameplay, to my idea. And a better post-apocalyptic feeling.

There are some companions, which are pretty well characterised, and generally have some sort of quest, which also determines which kind of ending they'll get. It's not Bioware level of companions, but it's still pretty good.

It seems almost a blasphemy in such a sandbox game, that some routes through the mountains are blocked off by invisible walls. And it's not that hard to get stuck behind such invisible walls. It makes one wonder why they didn't keep the 'fixme' command from Morrowind, which would move you a set amount of units in the direction you were looking at, in case you got stuck in geometry.

I stuck with light armour the whole way through, because it doesn't give penalties to movement speed, and there are a few perks that give benefits when wearing light armour. I also specialised in guns and melee weapons, though that choice was not really based on anything other than wanting to have a melee option, as well as being able to use an anti-tank rifle.

Not that the specialisation really matters much, by lvl 48 I had all skill maxed out, but that just gives more options for trying out different weapons in the late game.

I've finished most side quest so far, and finished all the DLCs, but I'm getting a bit tired of the game. Well, I started the game in August or September, so it's about time for something else. I didn't get very far into the main quest, didn't even finish act 1 so far. The thing about the main quest is that I'm not sure which side I'd want to support. They're all kind of assholes, really. The legion are the most obvious ones, and though I've managed to keep a neutral disposition towards them (as counted by the game, anyway), I've killed most of them on the Mojave side of the river.

The NCR seem ok, but they're a bunch of expansionist, greedy bastards. In the words of one of the NPCs (Marcus, perhaps): "If you've got land, they want it." Even though they can't protect it. At least after Ceasar's legion enslaves you and rapes your wife, they'll keep your town free from raiders.

None of the other two factions are much better either, so I'm not feeling overly motivated to help any one of them, which sort of stalls the main quest for me. No harm done, I've had my entertainment with this game already, and even without the main quest, it's still a great game.

 

Played some Saint's Row 3, quite fun as usual. I've played SR2 and 4 before, and SR3 is more of the same. More or less, anyway, since SR4 introduced super powers, which makes it a bit different in terms of gameplay compared to the others.

While SR3 keeps more or less the same gameplay as SR2, it improves the gameplay in some areas, though others seem to have gone downhill a bit. Vehicle control seems a bit better, and I do like that the upgrades allow you to improve your weapons, give your gang more health, and even (eventually) to have infinite ammo and become immune to certain types of damage. Some of these upgrades were already in SR2, though there you'd unlock them by completing certain activities, whereas in SR3 you need to unlock them by getting a high enough reputation, and them you need to buy them.

One of the first things I always do in SR2, is to complete the activity that gives me immunity to fall damage, but in SR3 you can only unlock this with a very high reputation, and that is typically end of game. Same with infinite ammo for a weapon type.

To get reputation (and money) in SR3, you complete missions, do activities, and you can do certain other things as well. The missions are pretty much only the territory of the main storyline, not much in the way of side missions, except a couple that are intended to show you the first of an activity type in an area. The activities are largely the same as in SR2, one where you throw yourself in front of cars to ragdoll in the most spectacular ways, one where you create havoc on foot, another one where you do the same in a tank, then creating havoc in a heli, one where you defend an NPC from lots of rival gang members. Unfortunately, some of the more annoying ones also got copied over, like the one where you do a race, but get extra time for hitting things under way (which is the one activity that made me never 100% SR2), or one where you have to escort someone around in a car, or one where you have to pick up NPCs while fending off attacks by rival gangs.

So some of the activities I'll never complete, but since they don't really give much benefit for completing them (more money per hour, basically), it doesn't really matter anyway.

The story is more or less what you might expect from Saint's Row. It lies somewhere in between the outright over-the-top sillyness of SR4 and the more serious (but not very) tone of SR2. It seems a bit patched together, though. The guy I figured would be the main villain for the game gets killed pretty early in the game, though I only figured this out afterwards, as it wasn't really shown in the cutscene, but is referred to later on. The secondary main villain then at least gets a proper boss fight, but you don't finish him off there, and in the final mission, you finally have to chose between stopping him from getting away, or saving some of your friends, but there is no real wrap up at the end, it just kind of ends abruptly (and weirdly).

Of the three Saint's Row titles I've played, I'd rate the third installment in the series as the weakest, there are just too many loose ends in the main story, and too much of the additional activities are just not that fun.

Mind you, if I want some mindless mayhem, I know I can start up this game, take one of the activities where you defend one of your friends driving around, but instead of taking the intended car, I'll just take a tank to the activity and blow up lots and lots of rival gang members.

 

Just done a rerun of BG EE after Tyranny and Pillars. Had been down the Icewind EE, Torment and Icewind before that. Nothing on the market at the moment I would play, but looking at options - Torment - Tides of Numenera, Divinity 2 Original Sin II or an old on elooking good Lords of Xulima?

 

I'm finishing up Wasteland 2, while also playing Banner Saga, Vermintide, War in the North, Rogue Legacy, and probably a couple others.

I wish my vacation had been more productive. I haven't finished a single game...

 

Playing Total War Warhammer. Trying to get into it.

 

Just pick one and finish it, then

Anyway, just finished Singularity. Been a while since I played an FPS, and it's been a fairly entertaining ride. The game reminds me somewhat of Bioshock, though instead of super powers, you have time manipulation powers. Inevitably, these powers to manipulate the fabric of reality are mostly used to throw barrels and to solve box puzzles.

The game starts of with a bit of a survival-horror feel to it, first without any weapons at all, then only with a pistol and a pretty limited amount of ammo. Until you get your first assault rifle, after which it's mostly just a shooter. Which is fine with me.

It's fun how the game world changes (initially) in subtle ways, after you are thrown back in time the first time. There is some inevitability about trying to fix your initial changes in the past, which don't seem to fix anything at all. It's almost like going back in time and blowing that thing up to fix another thing you did was not such a great idea.

Compared to Bioshock, it does without the memorable plot twist, and seems somewhat bland at times, but at least it has decent endings. It doesn't require much to replay the last checkpoint for getting the different endings, but I found them quite entertaining to watch. Aside from the two endings presented by the game, there's also a third option that I'm happy that they put in, in which you sort of go your own way.

 

I'm trying my best.

 

I finished the Saboteur a while back. It's more or less a GTA clone, but set in WW2 Paris. As such, it's not surprising that the main story and pretty much all side missions, including pretty much all side activities revolves around shooting nazi's and blowing up nazi stuff.

The main character is apparently loosely based on some english bloke, but apparently someone on the dev team thought irish would be more likeable than english, so he's an irish bloke instead. And not likeable at all, as are most of the other characters in the game, in fact.

So while the characters are unlikeable, the storyline is pretty forgettable, but still the game is quite enjoyable. Most missions are to either kill some guy or to blow something up, and the gameplay is quite satisfactory. It's possible to steal someone uniform, stealth around, taking out guys with quietly, or at least without being seen. It works quite well.

And as the game title suggests, blowing stuff up is quite a big part of the game itself. You have timed dynamite, triggered dynamite, and grenades. Or if you know where to look, you can get yourself a tank. Stealthing around, blowing stuff up, it plays quite well. Most open world targets are stuff for you to blow up as well.

Blowing stuff up indiscriminately will quite quickly see you swamped with nazi's trying to kill you. Though you'll die quickly if you get caught in a bad spot, it's not that hard to escape the alarms, either, though the higher level alarms will make it a lot harder, until you unlock an upgrade that makes it just as easy as on the lower difficulties.

There were also some bugs, most of them apparently revolving around my either having a 4 core CPU, or having an older AMD graphics card, both of which apparently can cause bugs. My most noticeable one was that the textures would load slowly in some areas. Most of the time not much of an issue, except when you're driving a fast car. Unfortunately, there are some races in the game, which are made somewhat more difficult by this bug. Not too much, but the time trial would've been impossible to beat on higher difficulties, as the timer continues while the game hangs while the textures load. Also, in one of the races I fell through a bridge a couple of times, as I tried to cross it before it was loaded.

All in all, it's a somewhat flawed game, though I still enjoyed it quite a bit.

 

Played through Satellite Reign a while back. It's main attraction was that it profiles itself as a spiritual successor to Syndicate. And I mean the original one, not the more recent FPS remake. I enjoyed Syndicate a lot back when, and even when I replayed it more recently (though probably still 10 years back), it was still an entertaining game to play.

Satellite Reign does remind me somewhat of Syndicate, but the permanent night setting makes me feel more reminiscent of Syndicate Wars, the sequel to Syndicate. Gameplay takes some aspects from Syndicate, like the isometric view, controlling four agents on a mission, research to get better weapons.

Some things are pretty different, though. Instead of going through various maps for different missions, you have an open world that you can explore and do missions in. And instead of having four agents that are pretty much indistinguishable, you have for distinct agents. Or rather agent roles. Like the original, if an agent dies, you can replace them with another body that you usually acquire by taking over agents from the hostile factions. Whereas in Syndicate this was mostly felt in needing to outfit a new body with augmentations, in Satellite Reign, the augmentations and everything are retained, but the newly cloned body will lose some special bonuses, if it had any (like extra health, extra speed, extra energy).

There are four agent roles, and with experience, you can unlock and upgrade skills and abilities. Changing body doesn't affect equiped items, augmentations, skills, or experience. If an agent dies and you can't recover the body, you'll lose the items it had, though. The agent roles that you have are soldier, support, hacker, and infiltrator.
Predictably, the soldier has skills that gear it towards being more deadly with weapons, and being more versatile with weapons. The soldier also gets some skills that back up some of skills that hackers or infiltrators get.
The support agent doesn't really do anything special in combat, but can boost energy, give you a time slow mechanic (which can be pretty important), and he can scan around him to find interesting people, or use that same scan to find how cameras and security things are connected.
This last bit is important, especially for the hacker, as you'll then know which terminal you need to hack to disable cameras, or turrets, or open doors. The hacker can also hijack people, essentially fullfilling the role of the persuadertron from Syndicate, and hijacked people can in turn fight for you, or can be sent back to the cloning vats to get agents with better bonuses / stats.
The infiltrator has skills that help the agent infiltrate compounds. Most important is the cloacking he gets without needing to spend a gear slot on a cloacking device. Also he's the sniper, though that use is more limited.

Aside from the agents, the research is also a bit different. Where in Syndicate you could just choose a research tree and if you happened to find the gun or item you were researching, it'd give you a boost to you research. In Satellite Reign, by contrast, you can only research an item if you've already found it once. Apparently your researchers can only reverse engineer, or something.

Actual gameplay feels a bit more different than Syndicate, and not just because of the open world. In the beginning of the game, combat is generally something you'll want to avoid, because without armour and shields that you simply don't have yet, your agents will die quickly. Also you'll get swamped pretty easily, as discovery leads to an alarm, which leads to more troops, which continues the alarm. You see the pattern, I'm sure. Stealth is your friend in the beginning, and in many of the later missions as well.

Ironically, you get more experience from fighting than from silently infiltrating, so those skills that would help you survive, you will have to do even more stealth for in order to get the required experience.

But stealth can be pretty finicky. It's hard to micro manage all four agents at the same time, trying to stay out of line of sight, or trying to make a silent stealth kill, but immediately needing to go to cover after you've shot that guy in order to avoid detection. This is why the time slow down skill for the support agent is very useful. Getting cloacking devices on everyone is also very useful, but first you'll have to find one, then research it, then buy it.

Though it's somewhat finicky, the gameplay is fairly rewarding. You infiltrate other faction's compounds to get either money, prototypes (for research), or gain some bonuses (slower camera movements). It's pretty satisfying, if sometimes neigh impossible to pull off, to infiltrate a compound undetected.

The game world feels pretty small, though. There's five parts of the city you start in that you can explore and do missions in, infiltrating all the compounds. They're pretty big maps, but it's still only five maps. In Syndicate you conquered the world, here you conquer just this one city. Playtime is alright, I'm guessing about 15-20 hours, so it's not that short a game overall, it just feels small.

 

Played through Darksiders a while back. Quite enjoyable. I recall reviews saying that the game stole a lot from other games, Zelda, God of War, Portal even. For me, that makes no difference, though, as I've never played any of those games. And even if I had played those games, the gameplay of Darksiders is still enjoyable, which is really all that matters.

The story seems cobbled together from any even vaguely biblical related references, it gets a bit silly at times.

The gameplay is pretty solid, even though the main weapons that you use could use some more variety in combos. There are some combos, but I don't use them much, and they're hardly necessary. Mostly it's just normal attacks, or a charged attack. But there are three different weapons, and some spells, and then there's some ranged gadgets, which could be used as weapons, though their damage output is pretty weak.

I enjoy games that have an option for faster travelling as well. Think bunny hopping. And in this game that is possible, at first with just dashing, then later you can combine it with dash attacks, then dodge attack, cancel with jumping, and another air dash. I like it.

I did have some technical issues with the game, though. First of all, the controls really seem laid out for a controller. You can change the controls, but there are so many things to assign, some of which are selected with a combination of keys. And, unless you have a mouse with a lot of buttons, you'll have to somehow select multiple buttons, during combat, while also trying to keep moving around. It can be made to work, but it's not very convenient.

The real technical issue, though, is the framerate drops. Well, I'm not even sure it's framerate drops, but there is a tendency of the game to start stuttering when too much is going on. It's actually not that much of a problem during normal gameplay, but sometimes you have to manually aim something, and that can be difficult if your cursor is jumping all over the screen because the framerate is horrible. Especially some bosses are made more difficult that they should be due to this issue. Graphical settings don't even seem to affect the issue, even with the lowest settings, it will still stutter at certain points.

Also, the cutscenes have a tendency to get the audio and video out of synch. Takes away some of the impact, and is just generally distracting.

But, all in all, I had fun playing through the game, even got most of the collectibles and such.

 

Detroit: Become Human. I don't know, I wasn't planning on picking up this game, but the trailer intrigued me. Now, I'm hooked. Indeed, your choices would branch out into different scenarios throughout the game. It also reminds me a lot of that Will Smith movie (I Robot) for some reason. I definitely recommend this game. Great story, great gameplay, countless outcomes of the story.