The Video Game Thread: What are you Playing?

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Voros said:
Think I'm addicted to Downwell, need to check out the same designer's new game on Netflix. Digging the arcadey action.

Reportedly he's been hired by Nintendo?
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He did work at Nintendo until the end of 2018. When he stopped and returned to making indie games.
 
bleys21 said:
How is Everspace 2? I played the first one, but haven't laid down the coin for #2...
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So, after 2-3 months playing it off and on I now finished it.
Took me ~50 hours to play through the story (on Hard), doing all the non-repeatable side quests.

The only thing that seemed rushed to me was the last mission.
It wasn't even bad and mixed things up, but the actual bosses melted to my weapons within seconds, it was kinda funny.
I did not feel overpowered at all for most of the game, so I figure maybe they didn't adjust the final bosses for higher difficulties?

There would be a lot more if you really wanted to go for completion, but that's not really my thing and my backlog is waiting.
I'd say it is a really good game, very recommendable.
 
Team so bg3 is a dangerous thing. Dangerous dangerous. Think nevereinter nights with environmental effects, better graphics, and several hundreds of hours of game play. Kiss your family good bye. Or hold fast to your WOTC hate
 
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Raleel said:
Team so bg3 is a dangerous thing. Dangerous dangerous. Think nevereinter nights with environmental effects, better graphics, and several hundreds of hours of game play. Kiss your family good bye. Or hold fast to your WOTC gate
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Is it out of Early Access?
 
Playing Dredge. Very odd game, basically a fishing game managing your fishing boat and equipment with mini-games for the fishing, but it adds a variety of missions, mystery and a Mythos like atmosphere.

I'm having fun with it, it is very low key so easy to just chill and play the game, but it sucked me in and had me up until 3am the first night.
 
These past couple of weeks I've been playing UnEpic, a metroidvania made more or less by a single guy. It's ok, the main character is an insufferable neckbeard and a lot of the jokes are dated, but the game play's good enough.
The ending's a pain in the behind though as you constantly have to switch back and forth between 2 separate characters in realtime.

I'm not sure what I'll pick up next, but watching Tim Cain's videos on youtube has given me an awful hankering for an RPG as of late.
 
Urdlen's best boy said:
Currently iron manning BG1-2 with a gnome cleric (bloodstalker of Urdlen)/thief. Arrived at Baldur's Gate with somehow no one exploding. Crossing fingers.
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Had the nasty fight upstairs at the Iron Throne. Tiax exploded from a backstab (RIP), Xzar, Edwin and Montaron died, but I can res them. When my main got Chaos'd with only 17 hp remaining I thought it was all cooked, but Kagain, the only one holding the line somehow managed to push back 1 vs 3 thanks to a potion of speed and his magic crossbow.
Glorious!
 
Yikes that first fight in the ruins against the rival adventurers is fucking brutal. Barely survived.
 
Necrozius said:
Yikes that first fight in the ruins against the rival adventurers is fucking brutal. Barely survived.
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Definitely set the tone and got me to start thinking about situations much more tactically. What really got me was the
Oil and fireballs trap room
.

I do wish there was a way to move 1-2 people independently, lock them in, and then move the rest of the group so my frontline fighters can coordinate after I get my warlock and rogue in position for ranged attacks.
 
So after several years of it sitting in my GOG library I finally played the original Fallout. I was inspired by the many videos Tim Cain has been putting up on youtube and wanted to see some of the mechanics in action.
Pretty decent, but also old and clunky in some places. The inventory system/trading system is by and large the worst part of the whole game, and liekly gave me carpal tunnel syndrome.
Best part was when I finally got power armor and, by luck, the alien blaster. I cut through everything like a knife in hot butter.
Overall the game ran great up until the military base, where I had about a dozen ctd's. Still pretty impressive for a 20+ year old game.
The Master is also one of the coolest Post-apocalyptic villains I've seen. Not being a guy but a whole biomass that's grown out and infested a whole vault, conecting to computers. Very body horror. The corridor leading up to him is also my favorite portrayal of a psychic attack in media, with vivid and nighmarish hallucinations hurting the pc.
 
Giganotosaurus said:
So after several years of it sitting in my GOG library I finally played the original Fallout. I was inspired by the many videos Tim Cain has been putting up on youtube and wanted to see some of the mechanics in action.
Pretty decent, but also old and clunky in some places. The inventory system/trading system is by and large the worst part of the whole game, and liekly gave me carpal tunnel syndrome.
Best part was when I finally got power armor and, by luck, the alien blaster. I cut through everything like a knife in hot butter.
Overall the game ran great up until the military base, where I had about a dozen ctd's. Still pretty impressive for a 20+ year old game.
The Master is also one of the coolest Post-apocalyptic villains I've seen. Not being a guy but a whole biomass that's grown out and infested a whole vault, conecting to computers. Very body horror. The corridor leading up to him is also my favorite portrayal of a psychic attack in media, with vivid and nighmarish hallucinations hurting the pc.
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It's been decades since I played either, but Fallout 2 is worth checking out. The did a good job of refining the mechanics. The thing that sticks with me the most about the original Fallout games was the way your dialogue options were shaped by your stats and skills.
 
Baulderstone said:
It's been decades since I played either, but Fallout 2 is worth checking out. The did a good job of refining the mechanics. The thing that sticks with me the most about the original Fallout games was the way your dialogue options were shaped by your stats and skills.
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Yeah! It took me forever to realize that certain dialogue options wouldn't even show up if you didn't have the stats/skills for it, notably when I was trying to get the ZAX computer in the Glow to turn off the security, but couldn't find the option due to not having the intelligence. Luckily I had mentats. Fallout 2 is next on my list, followed by Arcanum. I'm on a bit of a CRPG phase right now.
 
Giganotosaurus said:
Yeah! It took me forever to realize that certain dialogue options wouldn't even show up if you didn't have the stats/skills for it, notably when I was trying to get the ZAX computer in the Glow to turn off the security, but couldn't find the option due to not having the intelligence. Luckily I had mentats. Fallout 2 is next on my list, followed by Arcanum. I'm on a bit of a CRPG phase right now.
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It's the same for the Infinty Engine games btw. Tons of stuff you can miss on a Planescape Torment or Baldur's Gate playthrough because the options don't always appear unless you got the prereq. For exemple, you can make a pact with a lesser demon lord in the Underdark in BGII but most people who played the game to completion don't know because if your main isn't Evil-aligned you simply don't have the option.

I think it has to do with the design philosophy of the time - being that dialog should reflect your stats. Thus if you had low Int, your character would not have access to what a high Int character would say. NWN still carried that with low int chars speaking in "dummy speak" (the exact triggers being 8 and less, 9-14 and 15+), but the practice fizzled out afterwards. To my knowledge Fallout 1-2 and Arcanum are the undisputed kings of integrating stats into dialog.

Speculation on my behalf but I blame 3D for shifting priorities away from intricate dialog and towards graphical representation and animation. At least with my limited modding experience I know sprite-based design is so much less time consuming.
 
Urdlen's best boy said:
Speculation on my behalf but I blame 3D for shifting priorities away from intricate dialog and towards graphical representation and animation. At least with my limited modding experience I know sprite-based design is so much less time consuming.
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I don't think it was 3-D as much as voice performances being required for dialogue. That made dialogue both more expensive and take up a lot more space.
 
Giganotosaurus said:
Yeah! It took me forever to realize that certain dialogue options wouldn't even show up if you didn't have the stats/skills for it, notably when I was trying to get the ZAX computer in the Glow to turn off the security, but couldn't find the option due to not having the intelligence. Luckily I had mentats. Fallout 2 is next on my list, followed by Arcanum. I'm on a bit of a CRPG phase right now.
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One cool feature of Fallout 1's dialogue system was the Tell Me About button. It was fun to ask the NPCs questions this way. Sadly it was cut from Fallout 2. I don't remember any other similar games implementing this.

Arcanum is a great game. My first playthrough I never finished. I ran into a bug near the end where the game would just crash. So I would recommend using the Unofficial Arcanum Patch. Just to fix some of the bugs.
Also while the games music does fit the setting. I found it a bit monotonous, samey and also depressing after a while.

Unofficial Arcanum Patch

Baulderstone said:
I don't think it was 3-D as much as voice performances being required for dialogue. That made dialogue both more expensive and take up a lot more space.
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Your right. Is it indeed the requirement for all dialogue to be voice-acted, that puts a limit on the amount of dialogue in games. Although, I also think it would look a bit weird if it wasn't. Simply because of the cinematic way dialogues are often done in games.
One compromise could be, that the protagonist is silent and all the NPCs are voiced. Which some older games have done.
 
The Mad Hatter said:
One cool feature of Fallout 1's dialogue system was the Tell Me About button. It was fun to ask the NPCs questions this way. Sadly it was cut from Fallout 2. I don't remember any other similar games implementing this.
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For me the Tell me about button was great in theory, but kinda weak in practice as it only works for specific topics and is also spelling sensitive. So I got a bunch of NPCs drawing blanks when I asked about the "regalators" only to find that only a couple had any information when I corrected to the "regulators".
I think it could work better if instead of requiring you to type in specific words it instead pulled up a list of topics your character had come across, sorta like the Morrowind system.

The Mad Hatter said:
Arcanum is a great game. My first playthrough I never finished. I ran into a bug near the end where the game would just crash. So I would recommend using the Unofficial Arcanum Patch. Just to fix some of the bugs.
Also while the games music does fit the setting. I found it a bit monotonous, samey and also depressing after a while.

Unofficial Arcanum Patch
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I've been looking into the patch and apparently the later versions are buggy? I was wondering if you knew anything about that and had any recommendations?
 
Baulderstone said:
I don't think it was 3-D as much as voice performances being required for dialogue. That made dialogue both more expensive and take up a lot more space.
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I think you've right but so was I. It's not so much 3D as the push for more and more detail. There's a massive trend towards "cinematic" games in virtual RPGs, with intricate facial animations and so on, which are obviously huge money sinks. In BG3 even your main has cinematic reactions.

Further NWN2 didn't voice all dialogs but they didn't have a dialog that's as bespoke to characters either, they instead had more in-dialog skill checks. So maybe there's that too.

In general there's also a general trend towards "everyone should have every option" as a philosophy. I get why, but IMO, it makes the games more shallow and less interesting.
 
Urdlen's best boy said:
I think you've right but so was I. It's not so much 3D as the push for more and more detail. There's a massive trend towards "cinematic" games in virtual RPGs, with intricate facial animations and so on, which are obviously huge money sinks. In BG3 even your main has cinematic reactions.

Further NWN2 didn't voice all dialogs but they didn't have a dialog that's as bespoke to characters either, they instead had more in-dialog skill checks. So maybe there's that too.

In general there's also a general trend towards "everyone should have every option" as a philosophy. I get why, but IMO, it makes the games more shallow and less interesting.
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While I agree that 3D and the heavy animations can be a big sink in development time/money, I'm also reminded of how a staggering amount of disk space for TES: Oblivion was dedicated to voice lines, to the point that a lot of stuff like the Arena quest lines and even the whole town of Sutch was cut to save space.
I think it was a hybrid of the 2 that led to the CRPG deficiency in the early to mid 2000's. Only now with the rise of digital downloads are we starting to see the best of both worlds.
 
Urdlen's best boy said:
In general there's also a general trend towards "everyone should have every option" as a philosophy. I get why, but IMO, it makes the games more shallow and less interesting.
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You also have vocal gamers who get upset if they can't see all the content in a game on a single run. The only way to make them happy is to make everyone sees the exact same things on their playthrough, meaning the there are no real consequences to player actions.
 
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Giganotosaurus said:
For me the Tell me about button was great in theory, but kinda weak in practice as it only works for specific topics and is also spelling sensitive. So I got a bunch of NPCs drawing blanks when I asked about the "regalators" only to find that only a couple had any information when I corrected to the "regulators".
I think it could work better if instead of requiring you to type in specific words it instead pulled up a list of topics your character had come across, sorta like the Morrowind system.
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Yes it had a lot of issues. But that is why I think it would have been great, if it had been improved and iterated upon rather than just dropped.
Morrowind's system also had it's issues. The main one being, that after playing a while the dialogue choices simply became too many. Most NPCs in Morrowind didn't have anything to say about most of those topics either.

Giganotosaurus said:
I've been looking into the patch and apparently the later versions are buggy? I was wondering if you knew anything about that and had any recommendations?
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It's been quite awhile since I last replayed Arcanum, but I didn't have any issues. It was the GOG version I played. Had to rebuy it, because I lost my physical copies at some point. Still have the most important thing though; the manual.
But try this installation guide. Yes it's from reddit, but that hellhole can be good for some things once in while.

Installation guide for Unofficial Arcanum Patch

Urdlen's best boy said:
In general there's also a general trend towards "everyone should have every option" as a philosophy. I get why, but IMO, it makes the games more shallow and less interesting.
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It's because a lot of gamers only play a game once. So they get upset if they don't get to experience everything the game has to offer in that one playthrough.
One other reason for full voice acting in games these days is streaming and gameplay videos. It simply isn't entertaining to watch someone else reading text outloud.
 
The Mad Hatter said:
Yes it had a lot of issues. But that is why I think it would have been great, if it had been improved and iterated upon rather than just dropped.
Morrowind's system also had it's issues. The main one being, that after playing a while the dialogue choices simply became too many. Most NPCs in Morrowind didn't have anything to say about most of those topics either.
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I actually liked the Morrowind system more than most branching dialogue systems. Even if a lot of topics were listed for a NPC, I could scan through them quickly to see what was new in the same time it would take me to find out what one NPC knew about a single topic in a game where I had to navigate a voice maze.

In Oblivion and Skyrim, approaching a new city would sometimes fill me with dread at the thought of having to engage with tedious conversations with everyone in town to extract useful information.

It helped that in Morrowind, you would see everything someone had to say on a single screen, as opposed to clicking through line by line.
 
Giganotosaurus said:
A big part of this I think is that the general gaming audience has gotten older, and as such has less time to spend on playing games.
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You are probably right, but I take the view that I have less time left in my life to play games, so I'd rather play games where I feel I am actually affecting things rather than clicking through a 40-hour movie.
 
Baulderstone said:
I actually liked the Morrowind system more than most branching dialogue systems. Even if a lot of topics were listed for a NPC, I could scan through them quickly to see what was new in the same time it would take me to find out what one NPC knew about a single topic in a game where I had to navigate a voice maze.

In Oblivion and Skyrim, approaching a new city would sometimes fill me with dread at the thought of having to engage with tedious conversations with everyone in town to extract useful information.

It helped that in Morrowind, you would see everything someone had to say on a single screen, as opposed to clicking through line by line.
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I actually do like the Morrowind system. It a better fit for a game that wants to an rpg, than later Tes games. Although, I'm one of those weirdo's who likes the Persuasion mini game from Oblivion.

I think you should make a dialogue system that fit's the style of game your making. For example, I think the Mass Effect games would have benefitted from having a dialog system like Alpha Protocol instead of what they had.

Giganotosaurus said:
A big part of this I think is that the general gaming audience has gotten older, and as such has less time to spend on playing games.
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That's something some of my friends have said too. One of my friends have never played Witcher 3, because he simply doesn't have the time. Having real-life responsibilities can be a bitch sometimes.

Baulderstone said:
You are probably right, but I take the view that I have less time left in my life to play games, so I'd rather play games where I feel I am actually affecting things rather than clicking through a 40-hour movie.
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I just feel, I've gotten a lot better at knowing my own tastes. So I don't waste time on things I don't like. I'm also lucky to have a lot free time, so there's that too. But I still think a lot of modern games enjoys wasting your time. After I played Assassin's Creed: Odyssey I decided I was done with the Ubisoft Open World type games.
 
Baulderstone said:
You also have vocal gamers who get upset if they can't see all the content in a game on a single run. The only way to make them happy is to make everyone sees the exact same things on their playthrough, meaning the there are no real consequences to player actions.
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Paladin playthrough in BG 1-2 : fall and you've got 1 chance to atone. Fall late SoA and you're fucked. Paladin in PF:WOTR (which I liked despite this sort of things) : fall and buy one of the 700 atonement scrolls available at capital. I believe that's a loss.
The Mad Hatter said:
It's because a lot of gamers only play a game once. So they get upset if they don't get to experience everything the game has to offer in that one playthrough.
One other reason for full voice acting in games these days is streaming and gameplay videos. It simply isn't entertaining to watch someone else reading text outloud.
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That's very true. It's all rational and understandable on the offer side. Most players, depending on games, don't even finish them once so it really makes sense to frontload your game/marketting with shiny.

That said I don't think the complain is reasonable on the player side. Seeing is as "missing content" strikes me as horribly shortsighted when it used to be that there was more content and that the content you get was more tailored to your character and therefor interesting. Quality games aren't produced by the race to the bottom, lowest common denominator design. But games which do, sell, I suppose.

Although BG did sell well for it's time so who knows, maybe that's just marketting bullshit.
 
Speaking of reactivity / c&c, I must remember that Lights going Out is coming next wee. It's a sequel of King of Dragon Pass and has the player controlling a clan trying to survive the Glorantha's Age of Darkness. The original is one of the most unique games I've seen mixing RPG, Strategy and CYOA genres. Hope the sequel is as good.
 
Giganotosaurus said:
Yeah! It took me forever to realize that certain dialogue options wouldn't even show up if you didn't have the stats/skills for it, notably when I was trying to get the ZAX computer in the Glow to turn off the security, but couldn't find the option due to not having the intelligence. Luckily I had mentats. Fallout 2 is next on my list, followed by Arcanum. I'm on a bit of a CRPG phase right now.
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I bought up a bunch of the classic crpgs on Gog.com after getting sucked into BG and Planescape Torment but then found I had burned out on that gamestyle when I started to play BGII. It's been a big enough of a break though that I'm getting the itch to dive back in.
 
Lessa said:
Speaking of reactivity / c&c, I must remember that Lights going Out is coming next wee. It's a sequel of King of Dragon Pass and has the player controlling a clan trying to survive the Glorantha's Age of Darkness. The original is one of the most unique games I've seen mixing RPG, Strategy and CYOA genres. Hope the sequel is as good.
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I loved KoDP but really sucked at the resource management so my village kept starving to death.
 
Voros said:
I bought up a bunch of the classic crpgs on Gog.com after getting sucked into BG and Planescape Torment but then found I had burned out on that gamestyle when I started to play BGII. It's been a big enough of a break though that I'm getting the itch to dive back in.
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If you got bored w/ vanilla BG, one mod to highly advise installing is "Deities of Faerun". It has 50 cleric (and cleric multiclasses) kits from AD&D 2e Faerun, that are pretty faithfully transcribed and really add to gameplay variety & depth. Since I've installed it Clerics are 200% more engaging to play with.

For exemple Painbearer of Illmater has +2 Con, +4 saves vs Deaths, NO ARMOR but can cast Martyrdom of Illmater at level 10 or something, becoming immune to damage, but unable to move, attack or cast spells. Dweomerkeeper of Mystra/Mage is incredible too, with +2 spellcasting speed, which is game changing for a spellcaster - the only character I've yet been able to no reload to ascension was an elf DKM/Mage. Halfling Truesword of Arvoreen has week long haste+immunity to fatigue for ultimate support & utility.

Super flavorful, super gameplay changing. Also gives ingame clerics their fitting kits.

www.gibberlings3.net

[Kit Pack] Deities of Faerûn (BGEE, BG2EE, IWDEE and EET)

Link to Download (version 1.9.8.1) Hi, Deities of Faerûn is a bold project that aims to bring all the (active) deities from Faerûn to IE as close to PnP as possible.. So far it has the following components: 1) Basic Changes Those are some under-the-hood changes that need to be made so the mod wor...
www.gibberlings3.net www.gibberlings3.net
 
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