Yes, this is what I was talking about. I tend to favor lethal stealth in these games, but I feel pushed into it in a lot of these games. Lethal stealth = tons of cool toys/powers, non-lethal stealth = same thing but far fewer cool toys/powers, except the game doesn't arbitrarily call you a bad person for wanting to play with cool things they give you. The boat guy sounded the alarm to try to get me killed at the end because I had killed a bunch of guards who were also trying to kill me? And how did he even know what I had been up to? It was stupid.

So, my save file just came back. I'm still at a loss but I can't complain, was enjoying the new file either way. Steam was messin' with me.

I got Endless Legend with every expansion and DLC + two other games by the same developer which I didn't really care about for $18 yesterday because Steam. Played it way too much last night, enjoyed it quite a bit. I've tried 4X games a few times before and they never really stuck with me (except HoMM 3 + 4, because HoMM. I'm not really sure if HoMM classifies as 4X, anyways), but I enjoyed the game of Endless Legend I played. I spent most of the game at peace with everybody, then some guy got close to winning so I convinced the other two factions to declare war on him. Then I made an army with the enormous amount of resources I had from trading and just stockpiling stuff during peace time and we basically wiped out the guy who was about to win.

Then I got really close to a science victory before going to sleep and didn't save because I thought the "Quit Game" would automatically save. Like, I didn't see a save game button anywhere, and lots of games will automatically save when you quit.

don't give me that look, it was 7 am

I've also been playing Grim Dawn and Torchlight II recently. Grim Dawn is basically what you'd expect of an ARPG (translator's note: when I say "ARPG" I mean the top-down, usually isometric, hack'n'slash loot-'em-ups. I'm not including games like Demon's Souls, Darksiders, or Dragon's Crown in this. Diablo, Path of Exile, Titan Quest, etc.). It's Diablo 2, but a little bit different. Level geography isn't randomly generated, and you have two types of skill trees instead of just one. It has a Guild Wars-esque multiclassing system. Also the various magical affixes that items can roll are slightly different than what you have in Diablo 2, and the skill trees aren't identical. For example, in Grim Dawn you summon a hellhound, whereas in Diablo 2 you summon a fire golem.

Notably, Grim Dawn has some of the best tooltipping I've seen in a game. It's like the anti-Dragon Age with its tooltips. There are very few things I feel I need to look up in the wiki in order to know where I should be putting my skill and stat points, because it's all right there in the tooltips. That's really uncommon.

The basic gameplay is still, "Diablo 2, but easier," though.

Torchlight II has the nice touch of not respawning monsters between game sessions. Also, the cost of potions and other consumables is non-trivial, and the blacksmith sells items that are just as good as what you're getting as drops. So there's actually an aspect of resource management. You can't just farm infinite XP and gold to get through tough spots, you don't have unlimited free respecs, and gold has actual value.

The combat also is fundamentally also about as good as I've seen in an ARPG. Enemy melee attacks are slow enough—and your walk speed is fast enough—that you can walk into an enemy's melee range, get them to attack, then walk out of range before they hit you. There are two kinds of ranged attacks I've seen so far: regular ol' projectiles, and "hitscan" attacks. Projectiles work more-or-less how they do in any other ARPG. An enemy shoots a projectile at you, and you can walk sideways and it will pass by you and miss. The hitscan ranged attacks work sort of like the melee attacks, though. The attack animation plays, and then if you're in range of the hitscan attack, you get hit. These attacks tend to have less range than the projectile attacks, though, and you can play around them similarly to playing around melee attacks. Walk in to the tip of a ranged enemy's hitscan range, then quickly walk out. They'll fire and miss. Also ranged enemies tend to have both a projectile and hitscan attack, using the projectile attack if you're out of range of the hitscan one.

The result is a game where you can actually use positioning to avoid damage, and do so reasonably. It's not just "kite away, then shoot," though there's plenty of that, and it's not Diablo 3's bullet-hell/the-floor-is-lava frenetic combat design that is occasionally amazing, but mostly bullshit. It's just a fundamentally solid combat system.

Oh, and on the highest difficulty (which you can select from the start! Take note, D2 worshippers), the game is challenging enough that this stuff matters (at least so far; I'm only a little ways into the game, hopefully it doesn't suck later on). Spending gold wisely matters. Building your character well matters. Conserving potions by not getting hit constantly matters.

I've still been playing more Grim Dawn, though, because while Torchlight II is undoubtedly the better game in my mind, progress in Grim Dawn is buttery smooth. In Torchlight II, progress is a bit grating. Large health bars make each encounter take a while. There are a lot of encounters. Non-respawning enemies means that you'll want to fully clear most zones. I guess that is my main criticism of it so far.

If Grim Dawn is "Diablo 2, but the level geography isn't randomly generated (and the tooltips are really goooood)," then Torchlight II is, "Diablo 2, but an actually good successor to Diablo, worthy of the Diablo name, but for some reason it's called Torchlight. Well, mechanically, at least, aesthetically it isn't very Diablo at all. But I didn't really bring the aesthetics up at all in this post, so w/e lol."

also I guess I'm kinda interested in Gravity Rush 2 I don't know anything about it except that I think it's a sequel to a game that I saw and E3 demo for once and was really interested in, but then never followed up and eventually forgot the name of. I say I think it's a sequel to that game because, well, I forgot the name of that game so how the fuck can I be sure?

How would you say Grim Dawn compares to PoE and Titan Quest? I've kind of hit a funness wall in Diablo 3. I have complete sets of all of the barbarian armor sets so basically have almost all of the worthwhile possible builds for the class finished, so Greater Rift progress is now locked behind simply getting better min-maxed versions of gear I already have, which is not exactly thrilling to think about. I'm also bummed to learn that the only role for barbs in high level groups is support/scouting, which is not really a playstyle I'm interested in. It's also frustrating how the utility of different skills is basically totally dependent on what kinds of legendary or especially set items benefit it, rendering most of the class skills worthless in endgame builds.

Missed hours of sleep because Nioh demo

#noregrets



There's a demo on PSN if you're interested.

I tried it, and since HellBlazer got the original game (well the remastered PS4 version, the original was on Vita) for Christmas, Gravity Rush Remastered, I've been playing that a bit too.

It's a fun little game and quite original. You can revert gravity and then fly around in a city, and do various challenges and quests. Also, you have a black cat. Who is what can make you fly to begin with (I don't know, not yet at least, don't ask). But no seriously you can FLY, that should sell you on the game right there right?

I never played Titan Quest, but Grim Dawn is by the same developer IIRC, so it'll probably run pretty close to it.

It's pretty similar to PoE in terms of tone and general gameplay. It's a tad clunky, but not to the point that it bothers me much. They have similar difficulty curves of "mostly pretty easy, but then you randomly get one-shot."

IDK if Grim Dawn will have PoE's focus on endgame lootgrind barter economy. My guess would be "no" since characters seem to be shared between single- and multiplayer, which would leave the game open to hacking, thus destroying any economy that could otherwise develop. I'm playing solo self-found, as I usually do in ARPGs these days, so IDK what the online is like.

I like that in Grim Dawn, I can look at my skill trees and know what all the stuff I will have access to it. One thing that bugs me in PoE is that the skill gem system means if I want to know what skills I'll have access to later in the game, I need to go look it up on a wiki. Grim Dawn doesn't have that problem, and like I said, it has good tooltips. I was able to plan out my build from early on, and invest in my stat points with a reasonable assurance that I wasn't doing anything horribly wrong. In PoE, I was just kinda blindly futzing around on my first playthrough.

Also that means that Grim Dawn is more like a typical RPG in that class defines what abilities you use, rather than in PoE where it just determines your starting place on the stat grid.

Grim Dawn also has another nice feature I didn't mention before, which is that you get 3 skill points on each level up, until... I think level 50? At which point you gain 2 per level-up. It allows for a bit more granularity when choosing which skills to level up, and it makes the skill tree a bit more "front-heavy" so to speak. You can get your build to a complete state sooner, since you get more skill points early on. It's not big, but it's something I appreciated.

Path of Exile is free, though, and that's hard to beat.

I'd probably have a more full opinion of the game if I'd beaten it, but I'm still working my way through it. I imagine it might be like D2 and have a big difficulty spike in the NG+ difficulties.

If I'm being perfectly honest, I think D3 is pretty shit nowadays, unless you like grinding in order to slightly optimize your best-in-slot gear and farm paragon levels. I had a friend I was doing greater rifts with back in early 2016, and I kinda enjoyed that, but mostly just as a social experience. Like, "let's do this boring thing together, and commiserate when gungdo gear WILL NOT FUCKING DROP IT'S BEEN TWO WEEKS LOOKING FOR THIS THING AFSDLFKSJDFLSKDJF."

The gameplay at high greater rifts is... not good. You need maximum clear speed, which means max DPS. That means grouping up monsters as much as possible and spamming AoE all over the place, while facetanking everything you can, because you don't deal damage while moving. Because the only rifts you can clear are the ones with huge mob density, the only meaningful fights are ones where there's too much shit going on for you to really make anything out. So you're not getting the bullet-hell dodge projectiles, navigate walls and pools of molten fire, etc. part of the game that make it actually fun. You're facetanking most trash mobs, dodging only the most dangerous effects (e.g. don't sit on desecrator for 3+ seconds), and mostly sitting still spamming your big AoEs, broken up by periods of herding enemies up into a single pack so that you can kill them with aforementioned AoEs. Survivability on a lot of builds comes from conditional buffs (Ancient Parthan's, Endless Walk, Orb of Infinite Depth, etc.) where you'll generally be fine facetanking the mobs, until suddenly you forget one of your cooldowns for half a second and get one-shot because your defensive buff ran out.

Playing through the main game sucks, because it's easy on the first playthrough, and on the 2nd playthrough you have to constantly keep adjusting the difficulty because if you're on a high difficulty you level really fast, so you're leveling faster than you're getting better gear, so then you end up level scaling everything upwards but you still don't have an upgrade on your weapon from ten levels ago so now everything is too strong so you need to turn it down a torment or two, and yeah the whole difficulty system in D3 is fucked.

I agree the builds are not very interesting. You're basically just using builds designed by the developers, with a few minor variations. Skill selection is purely based around what equipment you're using. You get the things that receive bonuses from your equipment, and then a few more skills that best support your main skills.

It's a bummer, because D3 does have moments of amazing gameplay. It's just obviously not a priority of the development team to balance the game to make those moments into the norm, rather than a rarity.

Nioh seems to have gotten harder. Or maybe it's just because it's been awhile since the beta.

Seems to be less generous with ki this time around. I'm not sure I ever ran out and went into the panting animation in the beta. Happened a bunch of times so far in this. Especially from having my guard smashed.

The boss was pretty easy though, surprisingly. But, man, fuck that samurai duel.

I've been replaying Final Fanasy Tactics for the billionth time, second playthrough with the 1.3 content mod (although I never finished it first time around). Super fun, slightly more challenging, great additions in terms of items and skill changes and whatnot. Def recommended for anyone who wants to replay with a different edge to it.

Yeah the Ogress is way easier than the ship Yokai and the succubus, but Tachibana seems to have gotten a buff. It's always an incredible fight though! Look at this gaffer perfecting him with the kusarigama (that chain-scythe weapon thingy):



(Made me realize how much I suck at this game... lol)

As for the ki they changed a few things, for example the ki-pulse dodging was an innate feature of the high stance in the beta (and low stance only in the alpha), but now it's available for all stances, except you have to unlock them in the weapon's skill tree first. Maybe that's why you often ran out of ki?

I just beat him. Came back with better equipment after doing the twilight mission. Also used the kusarigama. Might be my favourite weapon type.

I hate the tengu yokai. Fuck those guys.

Just as long as they don't know exactly where I am, it's good enough for me. It's a pretty fun way of beating European Extreme, just have to be careful not to have too much fun.

Yeah, I did the same thing. So now I fully cleared the demo. I helped a few randoms in coop too. Man I'm gonna have so much fun with this game.


It looks awesome, but I've been sticking with the uchi and dual kats for the demos, 'cause I wanna save some fun for the final game after all.

Look at this nonsense. One shotting Tachibana.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOS8M9ztP8Q

Watched another video of a guy using the bare hand parry against him. Does a lot of damage even without the buffs.

I picked at the dual swords in the beta but wasn't a huge fan of them. I mostly stuck with hammer/axe then.

This game is gonna be fantastic.

Why does the dude on the box art look exactly like the dude from The Witcher?

Because the dude from the Witcher looks a lot like a shitton of lead characters from Japanese media (e.g. Sephiroth).

Long-white-haired swordsmen are like, a staple of Japanese games and anime lol. If anything it's CDPR who ripped off JRPGs (who in turn probably all ripped off Elric so w/e)

I really wish Nioh had a customizable protagonist, but oh well, at least samurai-Geralt looks cool enough.

I think the blueprint of "long white-haired swordsmen as heros" was just a coincidence that both anime/jRPGs featured them and so did Sapkowski's series that started in 1986, and that included the cool 2007 look of Geralt from the first Witcher, who is a wan, scarred and sallow creature with cat eyes. But with Witcher 2, I think CDP-R took a lot of inspiration from Japanese art (especially for Geralt's hair) and Nioh seems to have taken a good bit of inspiration from Witcher 2/3 (like the scars next to his left eye as well his combat stances and expressions in promotional material).

Mike Resnick's 1986 novel, Santiago, also featured an intimidating white-haired bounty hunter called The Angel who used all kinds of weapons including throwing knives. There must've been something in the water in the 80s.

There was, it's called Cocaine.

The Witcher is older than JRPGs. They both ripped off Elric independently.

Ah, I didn't know those novels were that old.

Speaking of who copied who... this is a real post I read today:



..............................

Pshhhh, everyone knows it was George Lucas who invented combat stances when he invented sword fighting.

saber dueling*

What the hell, Resident Evil 7 is looking fantastic. I haven't been this excited about a RE game since... uh... er... ever? Ever.

What type of games are RE games now, turn-based strategy?

Alien Isolation knockoffs, and given that that game was made by Creative Assembly, you're not far off.

I more month!!

Not even. Out in two weeks. Shits gonna rule.

Damn straight. Really keen for this, but I'm not too sure about when the Australian release date is. Should've paid more attention to that. Anyway, yes, it's my most anticipated game since the Dark Souls series.

Speaking of Dark Souls, maaaan did I get owned like a million times by that bastard Fume Knight.

Any games about being a necromancer?

I don't mean RPGs that give you a "summon skeleton" spell, I mean like a game that focuses heavily on necromancy, or makes it a major part of the game's narrative. So far I've heard Arcanum does this pretty well by having the narrative respond to you being a necromancer (e.g. you can solve a murder mystery by summoning the soul of the victim), but most other recommendations I find are like Guild Wars or Diablo 2 or something. I've played Necromancers in both those games. They're fun, and they're necromancers, but playing them is fundamentally the same as playing any other class, it's just a different set of combat abilities.

Yesssss

Sadly, I start a new job next week so I won't be able to binge-play like before


Are AU release dates typically the same as EU ones? You guys have PAL versions right? The NA date is Feb 7 and EU is Feb 8 (for some reason).

And EB Games Australia lists the release date as Feb 8, so I guess it's the same as EU.

Soooooon

I hear ya. I work all night shifts. My days off are pretty much just sleep. I only really get to play when I don't have to go in that night. Makes playing through rpgs a huge hassle.

I dunno about Nioh, guys--Rory gives it a resounding thrashing:



No microtransactions, so I can't buy my way to win, so what's the point?

resident evil 7 is fun imo, i am not saying its not creepy but imo if the game had more but so far i have enjoyed it a lot i have a feeling i am 70% through the game

Went to boot up CSGO today for the first time in a year, and it is taking over two hours to update.

I mean, I already have the game, so what the fuck? This was after I waited thirty minutes for Steam to update as well. Grrrr.

Recently I am having a lot of nostalgia for the Metroid Prime Trilogy. I love the themes and stories of these games as well as the exploration.

My favorite thing in the Prime Trilogy was how the games kept getting darker and darker.

Huh. Is your internet fast?

On the subject of CSGO, I've gotten really into watching professional matches/tournaments lately. Not something I expected to hold my fascination, but there it is! SK Gaming and the American teams (Cloud9 and Team Liquid) are lots of fun to watch.

Nope, got cable.

Just like classic 1.6, I never cared about playing it competitively, just deathmatches. I also get frustrated extremely easily when playing and actually took the last year off because of it.

Well the only thing I know about competitive CSGO is that Virtus.pro (who I follow for their Dota 2 squad) have a player who might very well be the most ripped man in eSports.

Some years ago I got the PS3 re-release of Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus. I had Shadow for the PS2 and really enjoyed it but never got to play Ico. Last night I dusted it off and played Ico which was quite a bit of fun. The graphics are quite dated and the camera view is a bit obnoxious sometimes, but otherwise it's a great game (so far).

Man, I wish I had time to play games competitively these days. Comp TF2 is awesome.