What game are you playing right now? #3

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That makes more sense, yeah.

 

Started a game of StarCrawlers, which was mentioned as being like Legend of Grimrock, but in space, which is a pretty good recommendation in my book. The movement in the dungeons is indeed like Legend of Grimrock, moving a team in first person perspective through a dungeon, moving as if on a grid of squares.

The similarities stop there, though. In between instances of dungeons, you return to a hub, where you can buy and sell stuff, and recruit new team members. The dungeons itself are apparently randomly generated, except for some more plot related dungeons. Combat is the biggest difference, though. Instead of moving manually around an enemy, trying to avoid getting hit too much by moving around, you enter some combat dimension and slug it out with one or more enemies in turn based combat.

There are special abilities that you can select at level ups that can help you in the combat, either by doing more damage yourself, or disabling or putting negative status effects on enemies. Normally, I tend to enjoy turn based combat, but here it just seems like a slugfest, taking turns hitting each other and the one with the most hit points, or the one doing the most damage wins. Individual battles are not much of a problem, but healing is fairly limited, and it just tends to grind you down. Especially fun are the boss battles at the end of a dungeon, where you're already low on hitpoints and items, and then you have to fight the toughest enemy in the dungeon.

I got a bit tired of that, so I started up another game of Legend of Grimrock 2, which was at least the gameplay that I like. I tried a bunch of different builds this time around (previous run through I posted here), but ended up playing pretty much the same party this time around.

Last time I played with a minotaur barbarian, who did a lot of damage, a ratling farmer, who got so much more experience through eating than the rest did through combat, that he had 4x more experience than the others. Then there was the alchemist lizardman to make the most use of stat boosting potions, and a battle mage insectoid, that just flung spells from the back. I tried to take a fighter or knight instead of the barbarian, but the barbarian was just doing so much more damage than them, I couldn't bring myself to not have one in my party. I also tried to not have a farmer, but felt like I was just wasting a good xp resource that way, with all the excess food in the game. The alchemist had been using bows, so I thought I'd try a thief with throwing weapons, but throwing weapons are strength based, and the one with the most strength would be a minotaur barbarian, because they just do so much more damage.

In the end, I just changed the battle mage for a normal mage, which is the way I used the character in my previous run, anyway.

Even playing more or less the same party, the game still has been fun for me. The base game is just pretty satisfying to play, finding secrets, dancing around enemies, finding better gear for my guys (or galls, hard to tell with a minotaur, ratling, lizardman, and insectoid).

I heard that lvl 19 was a soft cap for the game, and that lvl 20 was the hard cap, so I tried to test that with my farmer. As it turns out, lvl 20 is just as much a soft cap as lvl 19. It just takes a lot of xp to get to lvl 20, and even more to get to lvl 21. So now my farmer has about 3x more xp than the rest of the party combined, possibly pretty close to 4x, even. Oh well, time to have some fun in the last couple of dungeons of the game

 

If you like Legend of Grimrock, have you tried it's ancestor (and the creators outright said they were trying to re-create the feel of this) Dungeon Master?
Dungeon Master is probably my favorite cRPG of all time. The graphics are a bit dated, but still passable even today. I've seen worse flash games.
The CSBWin clone will work on any Windows computer from Win95 onward.

 

I hadn't heard of Dungeon Master, but I did look at Eye of the Beholder (series) and Menzobarazan when they were on sale recently on GoG. I'd probably enjoy those games, but didn't get them as I already have an enormous backlog of games that I still should play.

Which is not getting shorter when I'm just replaying older games, but oh well.

One thing that would probably be hard to match in those older games, however, is the sound and character design in Legend of Grimrock. It's really quite pretty, and the sounds are well done, too.

 

I'm most familiar with the Apple IIGS version, but the version mentioned at that link is different from mine. Mine you booted the disk and had to use a separate save game disk. Stupidly you could only save one game per 3.5" disk even though it only filled up a fraction of the disk (no more than 50K on an 800K disk. You could have fit 2-3 games on each side of a 140K 5.25" disk).

Legend of Grimrock was created by fans of Dungeon Master and was originally going to be a clone. Then they made it into
a spiritual successor to it that could be sold. They wanted to try to recreate the fun of DM on modern systems. Of course the sound of the original can't compete, it is 30 years old. Technology has progressed considerably. Although computer sound hasn't improved that much since the late '90s, there was substantial improvement from the late '80s to mid '90s. What was amazing in 1986 was crap in 1996, and what was amazing in 1988 was average in 1993 or below average in 1998. The sound in DM is limited, but well done. The IIGS version used stereo sound to give you warning of monster movement, something revolutionary at the time (but standard for the yet-to-be-invented FPS).

Anyways, all versions & clones of DM can be found on http://dmweb.free.fr

 

I may have to take a look at it.

 

The Outer Worlds. As good as I'd hoped it would be, and incredibly well polished. Obsidian have done fantastically well with this title, it's well worth anyone's time if you've enjoyed games like Bioshock or Deus Ex in the past.

 

I heard it was great. I also received Disco Elysium recently, which got good reviews. I'm looking forward to playing both.

 

I heard good things about Outer Worlds as well, sounds like a game I would definitely enjoy.

Been playing a bit of Red Faction Guerrilla lately, after playing through VtM: Bloodlines. Currently still enjoying Bloodlines as a Malkavian, the dialog with the Malkavian is great. A lot of the responses from the NPCs aren't changed, naturally, but most characters will at least have one or more times that they'll go "Wait, what?" It's great.

Red Faction Guerrilla doesn't seem to have much to do with the original Red Faction anymore, except for sharing some form of destructible environments. Where in the original you could destroy quite some environments, including buildings, but often more limited to ground or cave walls, in Guerrilla the ground is indestructible, but all buildings are destructible. Great fun to take a truck and just plow right through a building, or to blow buildings up with explosives, or to just use your trusty Mjolnir to hammer your way through any building. It sometimes makes things a bit difficult, when there's missions where you have to be on an upper floor, but the stairs may already be destroyed. Or half the building. Or you may have hit that guy a bit too hard, and his body demolished a significant part of some wall.

Fun as it is, any time you want to demolish something, the EDF, the main antagonists of the game (and saviours of the first game) will come running for you, and things can get pretty lethal pretty quickly. Just going in somewhere to randomly destroy stuff can be pretty challenging that way. Until they bring out the tanks, which you can naturally hijack, though only if you have a specific weapon that can target the driver in the tank, and kill him. But if you thought to bring that weapon, you can then have tons more fun and blow everything up. Until they roll out the missile tank, and then of course you'll want to hijack that tank as well.

Open world games like this are definitely at their best when you can just go on a rampage whenever, and Red Faction Guerrilla does deliver in spades.

 

Starcrawlers was fantastic, I finished the whole game. Had a real horror/Lovecraftian vibe to it that grows stronger the further you get in the game. I was surprised a small dungeon crawler game had such depth and decent characterisation and role-playing.

 

To each his own, I suppose. Like I said, the combat couldn't really charm me much. I feel it's also a bit too zany to be anywhere near Lovecraftian, though I suppose that also depends on the way you look at it, to a degree.

 

Ah, you must have stopped early before the alternate dimension started creeping in, where some horrendous tentacled things started appearing and chasing you, and you had to jump in and out of dimensions on the same map. Combat got much better later on when you had to use clever debuffs, DoTs and target prioritise.

 

I didn't see that happening, no. I got pretty disenchanted with the combat after maybe three dungeons, maybe also because I wanted to play something like Legend of Grimrock, which StarCrawlers is definitely not.

The combat in StarCrawlers reminds me more of something like (one of the earlier) Final Fantasy, where you're teleported to some alternate dimension while doing combat, and then statically slug it out until one of you falls over. Except that everybody has a ton of HP, and doesn't do a lot of damage, so it takes forever to get anywhere.

But maybe I'll give it another try later, to see if I can drag myself through those first levels in the game.

 

Bard's Tale Trilogy Remastered.
I'm at Mangars Tower lvl 5 now so I'm almost done and ready for Bard's Tale 2.

 

I’m playing through Blue Bytes "Albion" again (the game originally from 1994) with the GOG version. And I have to say that after seeing "Avatar" (the one with the blue cat-humanoids, not the one with the teenage airbender) I understand how Albion could be seen as an inspiration to that movie...

 

Replaying Pathfinder: Kingmaker while I await patiently for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Baldurs Gate 3...

 

Warhammer Armageddon, with all its add-ins. Reminds me of the original Panzer/Fantasy General games. I love a good slugfest. Thought all was lost but the Space Marines just landed to help save Armageddon. Love the story and the battles.

 

Finished a second playthrough of the Witcher 2, following Roche's path this time, which is quite a bit different (at least from what I remember of my first playthrough, many years ago). With that finished, I finally felt ready to start up the Witcher 3, so currently playing that.

Not getting that much time to play it, and by the looks of it, it's a massive sandbox game, so will take a long time to complete. But that's fine, I'm enjoying it so far, although the armour and weapon degradation seems a bit annoying, so I disabled that with a mod.

Combat is also a bit different than in the previous games, mostly in that, at lower levels at least, everything can kill you really, really fast.

 

So still playing the Witcher 3. As expected, the game is massive. There's so much to do and so many little quests that I probably missed a couple, even if I did go out of my way to find a lot of them. Aside from that, there's quite a few quests that will give you a choice, and I definitely haven't seen all the different possible options.

But it's cool. For instance, there's a quest somewhere to help save some mages that are being prosecuted, and if you do save them, next time you get to that city, the biggots have found a different scape goat than the mages and are now prosecuting the dwarves and elves. The game is full of those little (and not so little) consequences of your choices.

By now, I've finished the main game, did the main story and all of the side quests, witcher contracts, and treasure hunts that the main game had to offer, including the stuff from the hearts of stone expansion. I've enjoyed the game a lot so far, though it makes me feel that I miss a lot of information on the Witcher world, even though I've played all three games and even read a couple of the books, but they throw a lot of characters and information from the books at you, and I've little idea who most of them are.

The combat in the Witcher 3 is again different than in the first two games. Arguably the biggest influence on how well you do in fighting monsters (and humans) is your relative level, though. Everything more than 5 levels above your current level is very tough to fight and will take a lot of hits, and anything more than 10 levels above your level will take very little damage from you, but will likely kill you in one or two hits, even if you've got very good gear. I've had an encounter where a couple of thugs were 4 levels above my level and they died in 3-4 hits, but a couple were 5 levels above my level, and they took probably 15-20 hits before going down. The difference was quite jarring. It's not even necessarily much harder, but it just takes so long to take some enemies down that I'd just ignore them to come back in a couple of levels, if for no other reason than that it's kind of a drag to fight a single enemy for 5-10 minutes.

A couple of things I quickly modded out of the game, though. Like the weight restriction on the inventory (did the same in the first and second Witcher games), and the armour and weapon degradation just seemed like a lot of micro management and money sink, so I found a mod to disable that, too.

But hey, currently still playing the Blood and Wine expansion, very nice south of France vibe it has going, nice and vibrant, especially after the dreary swamps that were most of the game. I've finished most of the side quests so far, and cleared the points of interests off the map as well. It's nice, and, even though I'm severely overleveled at the moment, some of the fights are still pretty challenging.

 

I decided to play Pathfinder: Kingmaker as well and am enjoying it thus far.