So, what're you playing?

[Zetor]

Started Wrath of the Righteous. Pathfinder character creation makes me sooooo paranoid because some of the things that I think sound cool I'm aware are likely to turn out not to actually be cool.

That's Mathfinder for you   This is the game where the theorycrafting meta itself has a meta. That said, on Core and below, most character build options should perform OK without the need for crazy multiclassing min-max antics. Also, you get infinite respecs to fix build problems (on your party members too, I think), look for an NPC called 'Hilor'.

I think it also helps that the party members are statted / optimized MUCH better than Kingmaker -- honestly I think there are only two that are kind of average-to-meh in combat, everyone else is pulling their weight one way or another without deviating from their main build/class.

[Rasix]

I think Kingmaker might be the first RPG that I've ever installed "cheats" for. I did Phildo's suggestion of making every kingdom activity take 1 round and auto succeed. Then I turned off skill checks for that quest in act 2 and haven't turned them back on since. BP costs are still kind of absurd for some things. Are you just supposed to be pumping your cash into that, because I have a lot of extra.

Turn based makes this all go a bit too slow, so I mostly just keep it in real time. I haven't had too much of a problem with difficulty outside of a couple of fights. I'm sure I've yet to hit any sort of difficulty spike, so that'll be interesting once I do. This one's worth what I paid for it, but I'd be hesitant to get Wrath of the Righteous at $60 unless the writing is significantly better. Even the narrative structure is complete ass, which apparently Chris Avellone contributed to? Still, it's a very competent outside of a couple bugs here and there. And they've got the feel of this game down.

[Zetor]

Well, I got it for $28 (kickstarter), which is good enough for me.  

If you don't like the HOMM-like minigame, you definitely want to get the Toy Box mod for Wrath too, and just make your armies massive / invincible (or even better, make overland travel speed 15x faster, so your armies and party can zoom between places without having to rest or wait extra days to move again). That said, the Wrath crusade difficulty options are much better than the ones in Kingmaker, since they just straight-up boost your army by x% (and there aren't any hard time limits like in the original game, at least none that I've found so far).

IMO the writing is better. Not sure it's significantly better, though, even if some of the crappiness may be due to the pen-and-paper adventure path this is based on. I also play 100% turn-based (except when fighting enemies who cast pit-type spells because of a recent bug... yep, that's the Pathfinder games for you) and it's definitely slower than RTWP, but waaaay more enjoyable imo. edit: I think it'd be even better / more efficient to just go into RTWP mode for the easier / trash fights, but I'm too used to TB at this point...

[Khaldun]

The Kingmaker narrative structure was definitely frustrating, yeah. There were things I liked a lot about the story at the overall scale, and a few characters that were good, but also a lot of annoying ones.

[Sky]

Finally getting around to playing Risen 3. I think I was so burned out on pirate stuff that I needed a break after 2. Glad I took it, nice piranha bytes jank. So dated it plays like a cartridge, crazy fast loads...which is nice for that savescum enjoyment. Elex was a pretty big step forward imo but it's nice to chill out with some oldschool gothic style.

[Khaldun]

Ok, this is an incredibly small thing about Wrath of the Righteous but it drove me NUTS. You're in a tower in the early game, there's a feat marker. If you do it, it causes a column of stone to move and if any character is on the wrong side of it and fails a check they die. They have the Death's Door debuff afterwards.

That is a really bad idea in an isometric game where most of the terrain cannot be interacted with and you have no way at all to gauge what will happen on a permitted interaction with the environment. That is a game designer shooting a signal up into the sky that they're a fucking idiot. If it was pen-and-paper, you'd have a GM describing the environment to you in a way that might give you some intuition of what's going to happen. If it was a first person environment with a lot of interactivity, you might have an idea. If it was a game with destructible terrain like X-Com, you might also say "hm, maybe move the team back". But here? Goddamn it.

[Endie]

Ok, this is an incredibly small thing about Wrath of the Righteous but it drove me NUTS. You're in a tower in the early game, there's a feat marker. If you do it, it causes a column of stone to move and if any character is on the wrong side of it and fails a check they die. They have the Death's Door debuff afterwards.

That is a really bad idea in an isometric game where most of the terrain cannot be interacted with and you have no way at all to gauge what will happen on a permitted interaction with the environment. That is a game designer shooting a signal up into the sky that they're a fucking idiot. If it was pen-and-paper, you'd have a GM describing the environment to you in a way that might give you some intuition of what's going to happen. If it was a first person environment with a lot of interactivity, you might have an idea. If it was a game with destructible terrain like X-Com, you might also say "hm, maybe move the team back". But here? Goddamn it.

Isn't it kinda symptomatic of the radical emphasis on the C part of CRPG that Owlcat adopt? They constantly stress in load screens and in online commentary that the player should be saving often and reloading to try different options, as they specifically do not offer the information up front to allow informed decisions on risk.

On the tabletop, most players would quickly tire of a campaign full of fairly arbitrary Tomb of Horrors-style surprise deaths and failures - and would reject do-overs - but the saved-game fallback encourages us to accept it. It feels like a lazy way to introduce difficulty and to pad out game length.

[Tebonas]

Yeah, Wrath of the Righteous definitely has an old school vibe to it. Realizing days later you blocked yourself out of content in one of the previous chapters by not visiting  some off-the-track place or using the wrong option when talking to somebody. So you either role-play and take the loss or you flip around like a pinball.


I definitely have to replay this game a second time, not the least because I turned off that broken Crusade management part of the game and hope they patch it to enjoyable in the future.

[Mosesandstick]

Playing through Baldurs Gate 2 is definitely reminding me about how much "old-school" CRPGs are easier with pre-knowledge. One of the reasons why I actually prefer Baldur's Gate 1's combat in parts - it's easier to steamroll and there's less fights with obscure, specific mechanics.

[Sir T]

Started playing Earth Defense Force 4.1 as it was on sale on Steam. Having an absolute blast with it as it focuses on massive amounts of explosions and violence. Who does not love a hoard of Giant Ants destroying Tokyo (as well as your own airstrikes and rockets leveling buildings *cough*) I'll be picking up 5 when I finish this one out.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, I started a BG2 replay and I was like fuck me, some of these trash fights are just so aggravating.

[Samwise]

Picked up Outer Wilds last weekend (I forget what even made it cross my radar, it came out ages ago) and just finished it.  What a fantastic ride.  It felt "slow" for the first hour or so as I got my bearings, and then I had trouble putting it down.

Flying from planet to planet and exploring is the bulk of the gameplay, so it reminded me of No Man's Sky in that respect, but unlike NMS each planet is hand-crafted and wildly different (down to having different rules of physics).  Instead of collecting resources you're solving minor puzzles and collecting clues to unlock more areas to explore and ultimately solve an overarching mystery.  In that respect it's more like, I dunno, Firewatch?  Worth checking out if you like that kind of thing.

[Hawkbit]

I think it just had DLC released, too - if you're up for more. I haven't tried it, but heard it was more 'scary', whatever that means.

[penfold]

Started playing Earth Defense Force 4.1 as it was on sale on Steam. Having an absolute blast with it as it focuses on massive amounts of explosions and violence. Who does not love a hoard of Giant Ants destroying Tokyo (as well as your own airstrikes and rockets leveling buildings *cough*) I'll be picking up 5 when I finish this one out.

Love the EDF series. Number 5 defeated me on the PS4 (well, control pad did) so bought in a Steam sale too and finished it on that. There are some special forces aliens that are really tough opponents. Its weird fighting what is essentially a pretty standard CQB spec forces AI with lots of dodging, rolling, using cover etc when they are skyscraper sized aliens and the buggers were tough as nails.

Oh, a tip, if going gets hard go back 10 levels and farm it a bit on Hard and get some decent weps.

[penfold]

Despite the addition this weekend of a bloody queue (albeit a few mins), D2R is still taking up most of my time. Up to Act 5 NM now with my zon and spent the last few days farming Meph for goodies to get me through to Hell but all i seem to get is armour and 1h stuff to give to my pally. Funny how you can just pick it up and carry on doing exactly what you were doing 20 years ago and the addictive hook is still there.

[Khaldun]

So the bad writing with Wrath of the Righteous is almost all at the level of character interactions/dialogue, which are just woeful a lot of the time. The narrative flow is better than Kingmaker (so far, I'm at Drezen). Gameplay is sometimes tedious, though, but that's a thing with this style of Western RPG: lots o' trash fights. I'd love to see something in this genre that was closer to X-Com 2 in its mechanics. That would mean a narrower range of character classes etc. but if it's gonna be tactical, let's highlight the tactical.

[Riggswolfe]

Picked up Outer Wilds last weekend (I forget what even made it cross my radar, it came out ages ago) and just finished it.  What a fantastic ride.  It felt "slow" for the first hour or so as I got my bearings, and then I had trouble putting it down.

Flying from planet to planet and exploring is the bulk of the gameplay, so it reminded me of No Man's Sky in that respect, but unlike NMS each planet is hand-crafted and wildly different (down to having different rules of physics).  Instead of collecting resources you're solving minor puzzles and collecting clues to unlock more areas to explore and ultimately solve an overarching mystery.  In that respect it's more like, I dunno, Firewatch?  Worth checking out if you like that kind of thing.

Outer Wilds is among the best games to come out in the last few years. Genuinely made me emotional when it ended.

[Zetor]

So the bad writing with Wrath of the Righteous is almost all at the level of character interactions/dialogue, which are just woeful a lot of the time. The narrative flow is better than Kingmaker (so far, I'm at Drezen). Gameplay is sometimes tedious, though, but that's a thing with this style of Western RPG: lots o' trash fights. I'd love to see something in this genre that was closer to X-Com 2 in its mechanics. That would mean a narrower range of character classes etc. but if it's gonna be tactical, let's highlight the tactical.

I mean, there's an entire subgenre like that (tactical party-based RPG), and it has a *lot* of games. If we're only talking about games that implement existing pen-and-paper RPG systems, we have Solasta as a recent-and-decent example, but there's Knights of the Chalice 1-2, Temple of Elemental Evil, Blackguards 1-2 (they both have a faithful representation of the Schwarze Auge RPG system). And of course all the Gold Box and Dark Sun games from way-back-when. Maybe Baldur's Gate 3 will be like that too (I haven't played it yet, want to wait until it's ready). The Pillars of Eternity games fit in here too... Deadfire is the more polished of the two, though it gets way too easy even on the 'hard' difficulty after the first island unless you're specifically turning on one of the 'super hard' options (and many of those just make the game hyper-obnoxious to play). The PoE games are also worse than the Pathfinder games when it comes to encounter design and itemization for the most part, it's a bit like playing a d100-based 4th edition D&D where each upgrade adds 1% damage to ability x or whatever.

If you are OK with jrpg influences, there's Horizon's Gate, Troubleshooter (this one in particular is basically 'what if XCOM but anime and an in-depth materia-like character building system'), Fell Seal, Voidspire Tactics, Telepath Tactics (wait until the rerelease though), Fire Emblem Three Houses (Switch), etc.

edit: I just picked up 'The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk' (40% sale on steam) which got good reviews about its tacticool combat, but it's also supposedly based on a French D&D parody franchise, so I'm expecting a wild ride one way or the other

[Rendakor]

I mean, there's an entire subgenre like that (tactical party-based RPG), and it has a *lot* of games. If we're only talking about games that implement existing pen-and-paper RPG systems, we have Solasta as a recent-and-decent example, but there's Knights of the Chalice 1-2, Temple of Elemental Evil, Blackguards 1-2 (they both have a faithful representation of the Schwarze Auge RPG system). And of course all the Gold Box and Dark Sun games from way-back-when. Maybe Baldur's Gate 3 will be like that too (I haven't played it yet, want to wait until it's ready). The Pillars of Eternity games fit in here too... Deadfire is the more polished of the two, though it gets way too easy even on the 'hard' difficulty after the first island unless you're specifically turning on one of the 'super hard' options (and many of those just make the game hyper-obnoxious to play). The PoE games are also worse than the Pathfinder games when it comes to encounter design and itemization for the most part, it's a bit like playing a d100-based 4th edition D&D where each upgrade adds 1% damage to ability x or whatever.

If you are OK with jrpg influences, there's Horizon's Gate, Troubleshooter (this one in particular is basically 'what if XCOM but anime and an in-depth materia-like character building system'), Fell Seal, Voidspire Tactics, Telepath Tactics (wait until the rerelease though), Fire Emblem Three Houses (Switch), etc.

edit: I just picked up 'The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk' (40% sale on steam) which got good reviews about its tacticool combat, but it's also supposedly based on a French D&D parody franchise, so I'm expecting a wild ride one way or the other

I couldn't get into Voidspire Tactics because the overworld gameplay was immediately offputting. Is Horizon's Gate any better in that regard?

[Endie]

I got bored of spider after endless spider in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. At about the same time, I was playing Wasteland 3 and it was noticeable how hugely different the encounter design was. Although arguably more restricted by the setting in the range of plausible antagonists, I felt that each fight in W3 was far more engaging and memorable.  You could probably, with a bunch of work, implement each game in the other's engine, so it comes down to the quality of writing and level design.

[Zetor]

I mean, there's an entire subgenre like that (tactical party-based RPG), and it has a *lot* of games. If we're only talking about games that implement existing pen-and-paper RPG systems, we have Solasta as a recent-and-decent example, but there's Knights of the Chalice 1-2, Temple of Elemental Evil, Blackguards 1-2 (they both have a faithful representation of the Schwarze Auge RPG system). And of course all the Gold Box and Dark Sun games from way-back-when. Maybe Baldur's Gate 3 will be like that too (I haven't played it yet, want to wait until it's ready). The Pillars of Eternity games fit in here too... Deadfire is the more polished of the two, though it gets way too easy even on the 'hard' difficulty after the first island unless you're specifically turning on one of the 'super hard' options (and many of those just make the game hyper-obnoxious to play). The PoE games are also worse than the Pathfinder games when it comes to encounter design and itemization for the most part, it's a bit like playing a d100-based 4th edition D&D where each upgrade adds 1% damage to ability x or whatever.

If you are OK with jrpg influences, there's Horizon's Gate, Troubleshooter (this one in particular is basically 'what if XCOM but anime and an in-depth materia-like character building system'), Fell Seal, Voidspire Tactics, Telepath Tactics (wait until the rerelease though), Fire Emblem Three Houses (Switch), etc.

edit: I just picked up 'The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk' (40% sale on steam) which got good reviews about its tacticool combat, but it's also supposedly based on a French D&D parody franchise, so I'm expecting a wild ride one way or the other

I couldn't get into Voidspire Tactics because the overworld gameplay was immediately offputting. Is Horizon's Gate any better in that regard?

It's different, but not THAT different. The core of the overworld gameplay in Horizon's Gate is like Uncharted Waters (or Pirates! if you haven't played UW) with age-of-sail exploration, trading, ship combat, etc. The focus of both games is on the flexible character advancement system and tactical combat, which has been refined twice at that point so it's pretty well balanced. Horizon's Gate also has steam workshop functionality and a whole lot of mods with new dungeons / classes / etc (some of them are even good)

[Rendakor]

Voidspire just felt like playing an old NES game or something on the overworld and I refunded it within minutes. I haven't played either UW or Pirates! unfortunately.

[Zetor]

Oh yeah, the super pixely NES aesthetic is intentional. If graphics are a make-or-break thing for you, Horizon's Gate won't be much better I think (though the animations look nicer compared to Voidspire). Maybe check a gameplay video or the demo video and see if it's something you can stomach. (I mean I'm happy with a @ beating on a Ö as long as the tactical gameplay is fun, so I don't mind :p)

[Mosesandstick]

I mean, there's an entire subgenre like that (tactical party-based RPG), and it has a *lot* of games. If we're only talking about games that implement existing pen-and-paper RPG systems, we have Solasta as a recent-and-decent example, but there's Knights of the Chalice 1-2, Temple of Elemental Evil, Blackguards 1-2 (they both have a faithful representation of the Schwarze Auge RPG system). And of course all the Gold Box and Dark Sun games from way-back-when. Maybe Baldur's Gate 3 will be like that too (I haven't played it yet, want to wait until it's ready). The Pillars of Eternity games fit in here too... Deadfire is the more polished of the two, though it gets way too easy even on the 'hard' difficulty after the first island unless you're specifically turning on one of the 'super hard' options (and many of those just make the game hyper-obnoxious to play). The PoE games are also worse than the Pathfinder games when it comes to encounter design and itemization for the most part, it's a bit like playing a d100-based 4th edition D&D where each upgrade adds 1% damage to ability x or whatever.

If you are OK with jrpg influences, there's Horizon's Gate, Troubleshooter (this one in particular is basically 'what if XCOM but anime and an in-depth materia-like character building system'), Fell Seal, Voidspire Tactics, Telepath Tactics (wait until the rerelease though), Fire Emblem Three Houses (Switch), etc.

edit: I just picked up 'The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk' (40% sale on steam) which got good reviews about its tacticool combat, but it's also supposedly based on a French D&D parody franchise, so I'm expecting a wild ride one way or the other

I'm not sure I'd mix in Pillars of Eternity with the rest of these. While it has tactical elements I think it's clearly been designed by default to try and maximise the real time with pause elements, especially with its gameplay systems that are more suited to computer number crunching than the kind of specific, deterministic gameplay that's usually associated with tactical games as a genre.

I was tempted by a recent good sale on Pathfinder: Kingmaker on fanatical, but I'm not sure I want to spend 50+ hours on a game with a half decent story.

[Zetor]

I'm not sure I'd mix in Pillars of Eternity with the rest of these. While it has tactical elements I think it's clearly been designed by default to try and maximise the real time with pause elements, especially with its gameplay systems that are more suited to computer number crunching than the kind of specific, deterministic gameplay that's usually associated with tactical games as a genre.

Yea, it's true that the PoE system was designed for RTWP, with turn-based being an afterthought (which is the opposite of D&D or Pathfinder, which is why these games always felt weird in RTWP). PoE2 (Deadfire) did get a turn-based mode, but it feels a bit clunky (and also contributes to the game just being way too easy unless you want to specifically turn on the dickpunch challenge options - though most of that is just due to player power creep in general).

Also, I'd not consider PoE1 (before the expansion) to be very strong in this field even when compared to the low-end of trash fights in Kingmaker... vanilla PoE1 encounter design is pretty much groups of trash mob after trash mob with a very small number of boss battles and very little variance in tactics needed. The really memorable setpiece battles were all in the expansion (I remember some of the bounty targets being pretty fun, and there was a big fight around defending an anvil/forge somewhere that was pretty cool too) and the sequel. Everything else was 'send in maxed deflection tank to a chokepoint, use hard CC on highest enemy threats, then focus fire and kill them in order until they all fall over, spam summons as needed to tie up extra mobs' as I remember it.

[Setanta]

Bought a Switch Oled and have Hotwheels Unleashed and Mariocart installed on it, plus Monster Train. The last time I (my family) owned a console was in 1977 and it was a Monarch CTX-4 Color Video Sporter.

Any thoughts on good games for it. I almost bought a copy of Darkest Dungeon for its portability.

[schild]

Bought a Switch Oled and have Hotwheels Unleashed and Mariocart installed on it, plus Monster Train. The last time I (my family) owned a console was in 1977 and it was a Monarch CTX-4 Color Video Sporter.

Any thoughts on good games for it. I almost bought a copy of Darkest Dungeon for its portability.

With the Steamdeck coming out, I've slowed my Switch purchasing, but like, you've kind of got it figured out. Weird console stuff + indie PC stuff is the place to be.

[Velorath]

Bought a Switch Oled and have Hotwheels Unleashed and Mariocart installed on it, plus Monster Train. The last time I (my family) owned a console was in 1977 and it was a Monarch CTX-4 Color Video Sporter.

Any thoughts on good games for it. I almost bought a copy of Darkest Dungeon for its portability.

Heard good things about Metroid Dread, although I guess really the recently released Castlevania Advance Collection might be a better value for that sort of game. Uh... you could get Diablo 2 on the Switch also. Maybe look into Dungeon Encounters and see if it seems like your kinda thing.

[MrHat]

Bought a Switch Oled and have Hotwheels Unleashed and Mariocart installed on it, plus Monster Train. The last time I (my family) owned a console was in 1977 and it was a Monarch CTX-4 Color Video Sporter.

Any thoughts on good games for it. I almost bought a copy of Darkest Dungeon for its portability.

Good picks.

Hades times a thousand though.

[Soulflame]

I would suggest Hades for sure, but also Breath of the Wild.

Other than that, what sort of games interest you.

[Rasix]

Yeah, I played a ton of Hades on my Switch. Started to mess with my arm after a while, as I mostly played it in handheld mode. Lots of button presses.

Switch is how I primarily played Darkest Dungeon. Great way to play it and a pretty flawless experience. Game really lends itself to being played on the go. In a similar vein, I played a lot of Stardew Valley on the Switch as well.

Xenoblade Chronicles X 2 is fantastic, but unless you can stomach cheesey JRPGs, I'd stay away. Mario v Rabids is a lot of fun if you can find it on the cheap if you're into XCom like games. Breath of the Wild is probably my favorite Zelda game ever, and I found it to be a lot of fun.

[Trippy]

Bought a Switch Oled and have Hotwheels Unleashed and Mariocart installed on it, plus Monster Train. The last time I (my family) owned a console was in 1977 and it was a Monarch CTX-4 Color Video Sporter.

Any thoughts on good games for it. I almost bought a copy of Darkest Dungeon for its portability.

With the Steamdeck coming out, I've slowed my Switch purchasing, but like, you've kind of got it figured out. Weird console stuff + indie PC stuff is the place to be.

You are looking for Switch Nintendo exclusives plus any games you could play on a PC but would like the option of handheld playing. One thing to note about playing on the built-in screen -- depending on your eyesight many games that weren't developed for the Switch will have text / graphics / UI that is very difficult to read on the screen.

Edit: that's Nintendo exclusives not Switch exclusives -- some of the decent games for the Switch are Wii U ports

[Rendakor]

The Mario game on it was really good, too; Odyssey, maybe?

[Setanta]

Cheers - I have Hades on PC and enjoyed it, and didn't know Darkest Dungeon was a port - that's a definite for me as I'm looking to get away from the PC for a bit. I'll go digging through the exclusives. I was thinking Steam Controller but wanted game time with the daughter who already had a Switch

TY all

[ezrast]

Mario Maker is fantastic if you find a community that curates the kind of levels you enjoy, or if you can make friends/family be audience for your own levels. Don't bother if you're not going to do one of those things though.