Blog Your Current Game

[jmotivator]

I have undertaken a long project in M&B:BL to rid myself of foot soldiers and field only cavalry of all kinds. To do this I am not releasing my foot soldiers outright. Those who can be promoted to a cavalry job are, and cavalry prisoners, when recruited, are replacing a foot soldier 1-for-1.

Essentially I am making a Hun army. My goal is to build a hella fast strike force to tool around enemy territory picking off individual lords and then locking them in the nearest dungeon while jumping in on sieges as I come across them.

I have no idea how long the prisoners stay in the dungeon, or if I am just giving their ransom to some other lord, but I am tired of ransoming them only to have them show up on the other side of a battlefield a few days later, but I don't want to just execute them.

Also, Tactics skill is OP. Seriously, 100+ in tactics with an army that is archer-heavy is nearly unstoppable.

 

[PoS]

Guys, you'll never guess what they decided.

They decided that you should destroy xeno scum for a living?

 

[Deuce]

They decided that you should destroy xeno scum for a living?

Yes! Although not so much the "for a living" part. A "temporary leave of absence," officially. At least unemployment is pretty easy these days.

 

[PoS]

Yes! Although not so much the "for a living" part. A "temporary leave of absence," officially. At least unemployment is pretty easy these days.

Ouch. Sorry to hear that. It's a paid leave of absence I hope.

 

[jmotivator]

More M&B:BL -- I'm starting to think that it's impossible to defeat an enemy faction without the prodigious use of executions. It turns out that sticking royal prisoners in the dungeon just means the lord of that castle gets the money for selling them back. I have one faction with one castle, but like 40 heroes in it, each with 20+ troops, meaning every time I try to take it they have 1000+ troops. I beat the crap out of them, take them all to a dungeon and Poof, they are back at the castle raising armies again.

THat's it... if I can't recruit them then off with their heads.

 

[Deuce]

Ouch. Sorry to hear that. It's a paid leave of absence I hope.

No salary, no. But I do keep my health insurance, which is pretty big these days. And it's a very good insurance plan.
Unemployment will keep the bills paid.

 

[Redress]

No salary, no. But I do keep my health insurance, which is pretty big these days. And it's a very good insurance plan.
Unemployment will keep the bills paid.

Hope everything works out well for you!

 

[Redress]

Final Fantasy 7 Remake: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly.

I will start with the ugly, since that won't take long: Character hair. With the highly detailed character models, the horrible looking, and even worse moving hair looks creepy. "Creepy" is not a word you want associated with a character like Tifa, but hair does not move like that, or even kinda like that. It is really noticeable with some characters, and kinda noticeable with them all.

The Bad(this will take a little longer, but still not long):

Character animations: not the fighting animations, but the standing around having a conversation animations, which are weird, nothing like how people actually move, with gestures not one makes, and they make them constantly. Once you get to the third chapter it is really noticeable due to the busy residential section it takes place in.

English voice acting: using the word "acting" to describe it is being generous. This is a remake of FF7...spend the money to get real actors!

Combat: I have gotten it figured out, and am not bad at it(I still suck at dodging and blocking tho), but it just really is not terribly good. You start a fight spamming the square key to attack. Each attack builds the ATB bars(there are two of them) Once you fill a bar, you can use a potion, or a spell, or an ability, or every so often a limit break. Then you spam the square key again. You can dodge and black, but usually it is better to just keep attacking. You control one of the characters in the party, and can switch characters at will. The characters you are not controlling will be doing very little useful. Watching Barrett shoot at a mob with his shots blocked by the corner of a building is frustrating.

The good:

Visuals: with the exception of character hair, and the occasional weird design choice, the game looks just incredible. Despite being a console game, the graphics are up there with the best of PC gaming. The character designs are simply nearly perfect, bringing the old, blocky pixels to life. Hats off to the art team, they knocked it out of the park.

Story: Well, it is FF7, so you knew it would be good, but it is still worth raving about. Early on, Cloud has a flashback to Sephiroth in front of Cloud's home village, which is aflame, with Sephiroth talking about having killed (presumably in context) Cloud's mother. Cloud's shocked expression suggests strongly that like the original, his memories have been altered. Little touches like that are really great.

3:00 mark:



There are some changes and rearangments, but the main story looks to be sticking very close to the original, as it should. Side characters get a little more attention and help with the world building(I have fallen head over heals for Jesse...)

Quests: To flesh out the run time, a bunch of side quests have been added, they range from meh, to kinda cool. Overall a nice addition, but not great.

Overall score: 4 3/4 stars

 

[PoS]

OK, I finished Star Control Origins. Being a die-hard SC fan since my college days, I was initially reluctant to play this because of the politics behind the scenes on how it was made, but with the virus thingy making me bored, so I gave it a shot...

Well, its better than SC3, thats for sure. Still inferior to SC2 with regards to the universe and the aliens. but all in all, it was the most I could hope for after a long absence of God knows when.

It's still basically the same game as SC2, which is good because the original was a classic right up there with X-COM, thought I feel the story and the aliens are kinda lackluster, most of them are goofy to a fault, and it makes you wonder how these idiots ever managed a stellar empire with all these powerful fleets.

Some of the stuff is cringe worthy, like the annoying commander of Star Control who nags you every time you dock with the base. And a number of too cutesy aliens bugged the hell out of me too. The bad guys are also nowhere near the complex tragedy of the Ur-Quans from SC1 and 2, so in a sense their stories just feels really shallow, and at times derivative.

All in all, I did enjoy playing it, but I'm still longing for a return of the original designers of the game to finally satisfy me. This game I just played quenched my thirst for a bit, but I still need that big gulp Ive been waiting so long for. Rating 6.5/10

 

[jmotivator]

Mount & Blade 2 hit a wall with me in teh late middle game. The AI is busted at the extreme fringes of Trade skill, for instance. They might have patched it now, but for a while, if your trade skill was over 225, your fellow faction lords would pay your to take their castles and towns. Like really, you add all of their castles and towns to a barter, and they will just accept. You can actually charge them tends of thousands on top of that, which means your skill reduces the value of land in the game to less than zero.

It's a fun game, but it held me for about 60 hours before I burned out.

That left me in a position where all the games I have purchased recently had run their course and I was burned out on buying new games (first world problems) so I decided that I would start back on MMOs I have played previously until one struck my fancy.

Champions Online? No... it's dated and controls are a mess. The market realy needs a good Super Hero MMO...

Guild Wars 2? Eh, it really is a good game, but it felt like I had a mountain to climb to get back to being on top of the game. Plus, while pretty. it was still.. I don't know.. I just couldn't get back into it. Maybe it was that the dungeos are just stupidly difficult, making the gear grind a PITA.

WOW? No, I didn't even install it. I have done that soooooo much I don't think the burn out will ever end.

The Secret World? Considered it. I liked it very much once upon a time. But I decided that it would be my go to if nothing else grabbed me.

Rift? Arguably Rift is the MMO that I am best at. I enjoy playing it, and the Rift mechanic meant that I could pick up and play pretty much anytime... so long as other people were playing. I played for a little while and the server I was on was dead, at least in the level I was playing.

So I loaded Elder Scrolls Online and tooled around for a bit. I realized that I had royally screwed my build of my main toon when I first played the game, and quickly found a bunch of weaknesses in my skills build that were likely causing me so much frustration before, and set about rebuilding the toon into something that at least made sense. It turned out that I was a mad genius before and just hadn't seen it... well, sort of. Maybe I was ahead of my time.

My original build was disjointed. I was playing a Breton (geared to be good mages) as a Nightblade (assassin) using a Bow... the three just didn't quite mesh. But as I was running through the rebuild, I realized I could scrap the bow for a Destruction staff which would make me essentially the same utility player, but my sills would then be spells rather than bows. Moreover, after I had successfully skilled up the Destruction Staff skill so that I was kind of useful in a fight I started running random group dungeons to get my Breton some descent light armor (Bretons get bonuses to learning light armor) when I had a boss drop a piece of set armor for the "Ice Forge" armor. I was Magika focused, built for mages... and it was plate armor. Good plate armor. At that point my plain changed again and I decided I would be a Mage in Plate armor.

The Ice Forge gear, it turns out, is highly prized. Not only does it give you the protection of plate, but it also has a bitching full-set bonus that essentially doubled by damage passively and made all of my spells AOE, essentially. When you use a Frost Wand while wearing this gear there is a proc when you hit an enemy with frost attacks that splashes a high damage fire on all surrounding enemies. So I went from being a descent single target sniper DPS to essentially firing rockets.

the game got so fun at that point that I haven't stopped playing. I even bought the Elsewyer expansion so now I get to waste time between dungeon runs going on large zone-wide dragon hunts.

ESO is good as an action MMO, where you have to aim your attacks... ish. Not quite The Division, but closer than the competitors. And the ability to be a member of 5 Guilds at once means you have a lot of freedom to glide in and out fo guilds as you need without feeling left high and dry.

This game is much better than I remember.

 

[jmotivator]

For those interested, my final build for leveling:

I used a free Race-change token to switch him to High Elf... all the magic skill, no wasted racial skill for light armor (a skill that arguably becomes pointless in late game)

I then respecced Nightblade to the Siphon tree. It has a lot of good debuffs, and the Ultimate skill basically does massive AOE damage around your toon and marks up to 5 enemies with Soul steal. Between the high rate of empty soul gems that drop off of mobs, and making sure I finish with that skill, I am swimming in full soul gems. I have, at any given time, 90+ full soul gems... which can be used as a self-Resurrection in combat. So I am basically immortal.

I Specced the Destruction staff to maximize damage and size of the AOE attack and then use a Frost staff so that all spells hit with frost, and therefor splash fire on other targets.

My ultimate goal will be to, if possible, gather 5 pieces of the Light Armor Ice Furnace set and 5 pieces of the Plate armor 5 piece set and get both full set bonuses going at the same time.

.. I have too much time on my hands....

 

[jmotivator]

Guys, I am way too far down the Elder Scrolls Online rabbit hole...

This morning I created a spreadsheet to track my crafting progress... :shock:

I think the nice think I've learned about ESO over the last few days is that crafting isn't useless. That is a refreshing change of pace from my experience in WOW.

 

[PoS]

Well with my keyboard out it seems my games are unplayable. :roll:

Anyone know of a good game you can play with just a mouse? :doh

 

[bomberfox]

Resident Evil 3 remake. Ive got mixed feelings about this. Its kindd of a shame they put so much focus into a needless multiplayer experience that they had to resort to needless distance scaling tricks which would not even have enhanced the game on a friggen console. There was no need for them to degrade the quality of enemies to the extent they did at a distance, to the point where enemies look like more pixellated imposters. I liked the extended Carlos segments and the final fight against Nemesis but this 4 v 1 multiplayer idea.... wtf?

 

[Redress]

The Coronavirus is doing terrible things to my hard drive. M&B:B, Industries of Titan, Stardew Valley, FTL, and now Panzer Corps 2. I thought I had plenty of storage space...

 

[Lord of Planar]

The Coronavirus is doing terrible things to my hard drive. M&B:B, Industries of Titan, Stardew Valley, FTL, and now Panzer Corps 2. I thought I had plenty of storage space...

LOL...

Mine's been very active to, but it doesn't thrash around. It's a 1 TB SSD.

 

[Redress]

LOL...

Mine's been very active to, but it doesn't thrash around. It's a 1 TB SSD.

I actually have a 2T HD and a 500G SSD. My problem is I usually spend most of my disposable income on new books, but with the whole COVID thing, publishers are not releasing books right now, so that is 30 + dollars a week going from the book pool into the game pool. Not a bad thing, and there are some really good games I have picked up. Stardew Valley, MB&B, and Panzer Corps 2 are really awesome(spend this evening on PC2, so much like the great classic Panzer General, but better...if you like wargames, it is so worth getting), so no complaints really.

 

[jmotivator]

For the King is on sale for FREE through the Epic Games store. It's a fun RPG board game to share with two friends.

It's easy to pick up, and seemingly impossible to win.

It also has a fun solo mode where you control all three characters, but it is at its best in multiplayer with all three players working together to defeat the map.. and eventually fail.

 

[Mr Person]

Guys, I am way too far down the Elder Scrolls Online rabbit hole...

This morning I created a spreadsheet to track my crafting progress... :shock:

I think the nice think I've learned about ESO over the last few days is that crafting isn't useless. That is a refreshing change of pace from my experience in WOW.

It takes a long time to be able to craft the best sets. Gotta keep researching. Once you've learned nearly everything, it'll take roughly a month for each research to complete.

But, like WoW, I hear the very best sets are found in the toughest trials. I haven't bothered with much group stuff yet. I may get around to it, but I'm never going to chase gear like I did in my WoW days.

 

[jmotivator]

It takes a long time to be able to craft the best sets. Gotta keep researching. Once you've learned nearly everything, it'll take roughly a month for each research to complete.

But, like WoW, I hear the very best sets are found in the toughest trials. I haven't bothered with much group stuff yet. I may get around to it, but I'm never going to chase gear like I did in my WoW days.

Yeah, I am only 4 deep in research in most of the heavy armor pieces, it's going to take forever. Right now I am just working on my interim set.

I've always liked fighting the meta in these games and building characters I like to play rather than what is optimal, which is pretty weird as a degenerate min/maxer at hear.

As far back as Daggerfall I have played a self designed class I called "Soul Hunter".. a class that made a lot of sense in Daggerfall, but has been increasingly pointless in later iterations of the soul stealing mechanic, but he kind of works in ESO... sorta.

He's a Heavy Armor Siphon that uses Destruction staffs. He does OK as a DPS and on tough fights high can tank until the tank is rezed. But mostly he isn't great at anything.

I am working on my interim gear which will be, eventually, 5 Ice Furnace, 5 Rattlecage and 2 Monster.

I am loving the Ice Furnace 5-piece set bonus when wielding a frost staff. I'm told Rattlecage isn't worth it, but I don't believe it.

 

[Mr Person]

Yeah, I am only 4 deep in research in most of the heavy armor pieces, it's going to take forever. Right now I am just working on my interim set.

I've always liked fighting the meta in these games and building characters I like to play rather than what is optimal, which is pretty weird as a degenerate min/maxer at hear.

As far back as Daggerfall I have played a self designed class I called "Soul Hunter".. a class that made a lot of sense in Daggerfall, but has been increasingly pointless in later iterations of the soul stealing mechanic, but he kind of works in ESO... sorta.

He's a Heavy Armor Siphon that uses Destruction staffs. He does OK as a DPS and on tough fights high can tank until the tank is rezed. But mostly he isn't great at anything.

I am working on my interim gear which will be, eventually, 5 Ice Furnace, 5 Rattlecage and 2 Monster.

I am loving the Ice Furnace 5-piece set bonus when wielding a frost staff. I'm told Rattlecage isn't worth it, but I don't believe it.

I've only been going since last October, and that's on/off. Have five up to level 50, others on their way up. The ones I play the most are a dual-wield/bow nightblade and a 2H/bow dragonknight. Both are pretty glass cannon-y, but that works fine if you have a bunch of skills spec'd to self-heal and good AOE for groups. Just have to pay attention. I can easily solo public dungeons (but I wish you could make them instanced so it's only you; I hate when a group blows through).

I've started playing around with builds, but nothing too off the trail. ie, 2H melee sorcerer (sorc skills for AOE, mainly). 2H necro. Not sure where that will go. Etc.

I mainly approach it as a single-player game that happens to have other people running around in it, but eventually I'll get into dungeons. It'll probably be odd. There are taunts, but apparently no aggro system. Maybe I'll spec one out to try the battlegrounds.

 

[PoS]

After starting Halo: MC Edition (I only played Halo I prior to this), Ive come to realize Im not a fan of these shooters anymore so I uninstalled the game. Too tough on my hands, and the repetitive gameplay of massacring hordes of bad guys just doesnt appeal to me any longer.

Switched to Panzer Corps 2, and I got my butt whupped in the tutorial lol is it supposed to be that tough?

 

[Redress]

After starting Halo: MC Edition (I only played Halo I prior to this), Ive come to realize Im not a fan of these shooters anymore so I uninstalled the game. Too tough on my hands, and the repetitive gameplay of massacring hordes of bad guys just doesnt appeal to me any longer.

Switched to Panzer Corps 2, and I got my butt whupped in the tutorial lol is it supposed to be that tough?

In the tutorials? You must have done something wrong, I did not find them bad. Poland was a little harder, and then it gets much harder.

 

[PoS]

In the tutorials? You must have done something wrong, I did not find them bad. Poland was a little harder, and then it gets much harder.

In the second tutorial I was attacking a bunch of enemies, but my own units steadily degraded to the point where they were so weak I couldnt attack anymore. Then the enemy counterattacked and wiped them all out. Can you reinforce your depleted units during the mission?

 

[Lutherf]

Guys, I am way too far down the Elder Scrolls Online rabbit hole...

This morning I created a spreadsheet to track my crafting progress... :shock:

I think the nice think I've learned about ESO over the last few days is that crafting isn't useless. That is a refreshing change of pace from my experience in WOW.

Crafting is pretty much a necessity in the game. The good news is that the most useful skill line, consumables, is also the easiest to max out. If you're a completion fanatic then you're screwed. Enchantments and jewelry take forever to max out. The Nirnhoned trait is also totally impossible unless you play Craglorn group events and even then it's a long haul unless you join a crafting guild.

The good news is that most sets can be crafted or discovered as a single player and will be fine for PvE play.