So, what're you playing?

[rattran]

I'm sure your well written steam review will do wonders for sales. It saved me from buying it.

[Ironwood]

Honestly, if I thought anyone was interested, I'd give you a proper review.  The game is stinky.

It's strange though, I really, really liked the first one.  It had new fresh ideas and it was clever and at least some of it worked.  But this one just tries to reinvent a wheel that doesn't need it and ends up coming off the axle.  I'm sick fed up of RPG's that have a wealth of systems and history to draw from and people just keep saying 'Hey, let's make it really different!' and all they end up doing is making it SUCK.

What I wouldn't give for a proper multi-player D&D that just works and is fun.  I can't think of a single one.  Probably the closest we came was either Baldurs Gate or Neverwinter and, let's be frank, neither of them were particularly user friendly.

And then you decide you'd quite like to get into Pen and Paper again, except digital, only to find out there are 2 things that will do that and both of them are also shit and just an excuse to stick your credit card details in and have all your money sucked out.

I think I'm just angry at everything these days.

[Bunk]

There's some really good mechanics and ideas in the game, but once I got past Ft Joy I just kind of lost any interest.

[Soulflame]

I thought Icewind Dale was pretty good for digital D&D.

[Teleku]

I got fallout 4 and I think I'm in love. However, being me I think I screwed myself. I did a maxed out luck and Intelegence build with a bit of charisma, and I have the experience galloping up but I cant really use VATS as I've not much AP nor hit stuff reliably or carry much. I'm probably going to finish out the Minuteman line and then go for a more balanced build for my next playthrough. Its pretty fun though. Though I didnt appreciate bieng sent into Lexington and then finding myself chased in circles by waves of Ferals and then saying hi to machine-gun turrets and a guy in power armour tossing Mini Nukes.

Life is cheap in the wastelands...

In about 300 hours, I can count on two hands the amount of times I actually used VATS in Fallout 4. It is drastically less useful compared to previous iterations, and I detest how criticals are tied to it.

Heh, thats interesting.  Every single fall out game I’ve played from 3 onwards, evertime I need to shoot, its vats.  If I don’t have the energy to go into vats, I run around in circles trying not to die until I do.  No matter what.

[Ironwood]

I thought Icewind Dale was pretty good for digital D&D.

Yes, but I put it to you that Icewind Dale is just Baldurs Gate.  

(Seriously, all those games are just one big lump in my mind labelled 'Good Stuff', wish multiplayer was easier.)

Also, how fucking long ago was that ?  Why don't we have a BETTER one now instead of shite parade ?

[HaemishM]

MMOG's. After BG2 was the period in which MMORPG's were big and everyone who wanted to develop an RPG had to shoehorn it into an MMORPG to print EQ/WOW money hats whether that made sense or not. Japan was still making good ones, but everybody else was chasing the lotus.

[Ironwood]

Yeah, but not only were they not what was wanted, WoW came along and killed them stone fucking dead.

[Rasix]

Feel free to disagree.  Since I got knocked back for the refund.

I liked D:OS 2 a lot more than the first. Never ran into any quick save issues. You can even save mid combat.

Didn’t really care for the armor changes, but I didn’t seem to have the miserable experience you did.  Overall it was an improvement but they still have a way to go on their difficulty curve. 

I returned Farcry Primal. The first hour just didn’t click for me at all. The weapons felt crappy and the gameplay loop just wasn’t appealing.

[schild]

d:os was dreadfully slow, clunky and just kinda bad

we're never gonna relive the original release of planescape or icewind dale or whatever your grail is

we need to just soldier on

[Phildo]

Ironwood, I take it you didn't care for Dragon Age?

[Ironwood]

Nope. I tried it.  It was clichéd and a bit shit.  Which was a shame.

Witcher 3 was awfully good though.  Haven't finished it yet, but it was awfully good.

[Phildo]

I liked the first Dragon Age a lot.  I missed Baldur's Gate the first time around, but have played through the enhanced edition a few times and DA always felt to me like a good update.  Lots of quality of life enhancements while still maintaining the tactical difficulty.

Pretty sure we've already dissected Divinity: OS 2 before but my takeaway was that the difficulty curve was a bit much and I had to restart most encounters multiple times.  It got frustrating and I eventually walked away from it without completing.

[Khaldun]

I actually got to the end but I was sort of bored with it from midgame onward. It was an OCD completion for sure--I feel no retrospective warmth toward it.

[Surlyboi]

Farcry 5: Branch Davidian Boogaloo.

Fighting a doomsday cult of evangelical christians in the hills of Montana is a bit too on the nose, but the shooting is crisp, the scenery is beautiful and the map is absofuckinglutely massive.

[Jeff Kelly]

I have no nostalgia for Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. I never particularly liked either.

Both have the same flaws a lot of RPGs at the time did. They were following D&D rules too slavishly were it really didn't matter and didn't realize that AD&D isn't really suited for CRPGs if you don't modify it.

The weird pseudo real time battle system wasn't helping either.

They were also those kinds of games were you could easily use the wrong party or Level them up wrong and only notice after 40 hours when you finally hit a wall and couldn't progress. I quit IWD 2 60 hours in when I couldn't progress any more because my party had the wrong setup for the last third of the game. Not due to unfamiliarity but simply because I could only have known that in my second playthrough or due to clairvoyance.

PIllars of Eternity, Divinity and others try to relive a "golden age" of 2D/isometric RPGs without the critical distance. So they don't really see what didn't work about Baldur's Gate and others and what Needs to be changed/updated. With two decades of distance between our teenage fascination with 2D CRPGs they feel bad and not well designed even though they mostly recreate older games.

[Bunk]

Decided to look at Shroud of the Avatar for the hell of it (free trial).

Its buggy, performs mediocre on my beast of a system, uses generic hot bar combat, and had character creation out of 2003. Oh, and due to a bug, I couldn't open the gate back in to town to turn in my quests, and I was the only person playing in the entire zone from what I could see, so I would have had to run all the way around the entire zone to get back in from the other side. That's when I turned it off.

To try to be positive - I like the UO reminiscent skill system, and the crafting looked to be quite in depth.

[Yegolev]

This Is The Police

[Ironwood]

Woop Woop ?

[Sky]

Finished a milestone in minecraft Awakening, got my zivicio armor set. Kinda took the wind out of the sails actually finishing it, this pack is structured pretty hardcore.

Figured I'd take a break and get another game going. Ran a quick mission in SWTOR, not feeling it. Booted up Kingdom Come, getting a bit of nauseau off the graphics and then immediately hit a story wall (I've boosted conversation, can't talk a guy into paying, need the money to progress to the next step of the quest, don't want to steal or beat him up...). Tried Eisenwald, but it crashed trying to load the map.

Back to old faithful Project Zomboid for a bit. Just a nice isometric relaxing apocalypse. It has a charm I wish I could find in other games like it.

[MisterNoisy]

Farcry 5: Branch Davidian Boogaloo.

Fighting a doomsday cult of evangelical christians in the hills of Montana is a bit too on the nose, but the shooting is crisp, the scenery is beautiful and the map is absofuckinglutely massive.

I'm having a ton of fun with this so far - I particularly like how they handled doling out missions instead of just dumping quest icon vomit all over the map as in previous games.  I wanted to try co-op with my brother last night, but Ubi's servers weren't having any of it.

[Khaldun]

The Kotaku review (yeah, I know), gave me pause--I suspect I'd be annoyed by the same thing (that there's a cult that alternatively doesn't matter all to the locals or that is everything). Far Cry 3 so fucking annoyed me in every respect with its ham-handed thinking about politics that I don't know I can ever trust the people working on the series.

[Rasix]

Multiple outlets have mentioned the AI and spawning to be big issues. Well that and not liking my first taste of Far Cry with Primal have given me pause. Does look like a good time otherwise.

[MisterNoisy]

Multiple outlets have mentioned the AI and spawning to be big issues. Well that and not liking my first taste of Far Cry with Primal have given me pause. Does look like a good time otherwise.

The AI is pretty similar to other recent FC games.  I haven't run into any weird spawning issues in about six hours played, though.  I did find it amusing that the first patch included a nerf to turkeys.

[Surlyboi]

Holy shit, one of my sidekicks FREAKED. THE. FUCK. OUT. And emptied an entire assault rifle mag into a turkey yesterday, yelling, “Get that fuckin’ turkey away from me, man!” Laughed so loud, the wife came in from across the house to see what my damage was.

[Sky]

I may have to make my first steam refund with Far Cry 5. I was good for a couple hours and then simulator sickness hit me HARD, even though I had bumped up fov to 90... Sucks, as I was really enjoying it.

[Sky]

On the other hand, I can report it runs at a solid 60fps+ on a 970 at 1080p ultra settings. Looks and sounds great.

[Bunk]

Yeah, been playing it all day, its got to be the pettiest game I've played.

I suck really bad at not getting hostages killed.

[Khaldun]

Pretty or petty?

[Sky]

Playing in half hour stretches is working much better, main thing is anticipating when you lose control of the camera (climbing ladders or getting into vehicles), since the camera whipping around is a bit intense on the old estomago...

Sticking with it because it's a fun and beautiful goddamned game. It did get a bit nutty when I got the first fishing pole and went out back in the dark to fish. Cougar jumps my buddy, I send it on its way with some buckshot, but a few peggies hear it from across the river...nice visuals as they scan with the laser sights. Go back to fishing, but I guess it's time to put down that damned cougar. Then a couple good ol boys come whuppin it up over the hill in a pickup, take them out and a drug zombie shows up, then the drug sister lady wanders around talking smack and goddammit I'm just taking my chopper back to Dutch's island so I can fish.

[Bunk]

I just watched a herd of Buffalo stampede down a mountain road, flip two pickups full of Peggies, and then keep on stampeding by.

This game is bizarre.

Also, don't get run over, your buddies can't revive you if you are under the truck. 

[Khaldun]

It's really kind of strange in a way that is half good and half bad. It's kind of like the Kotaku reviewer says: the weird combination of hyper-concern and nonchalance that the local people show about the Peggies is a bit off-putting. But on the other hand, just wandering around and having a CIA agent tell me to get on an ATV and recover a tape that might incriminate President Trump was a good weird. I'm not sure if it has any consequences that I put a couple of rounds through him--he doesn't die, but he's sort of incapacitated. Reminds me of repeatedly killing the racist store owner in Red Dead Redemption. There's some interesting shit that happens by accident in the game, for sure.

[Bunk]

I was riding along in the back of a pickup being driven by a fellow named Hurk. Someone messaged me on Steam so I jumped out to respond. When I jumped back in, I accidentally shot Hurk through the back of the head with a .44

Hurk fell out of the truck. I walked over, helped him back to his feet (he thanked me) and we got back in. We drove off and eventually completed the mission of retrieving his Daddy's campaign truck.

Hurk drove us back to Daddy's house. Jess and I got out and walked over to tell Daddy about our success. Hurk then drove the truck off of a cliff and exploded. We failed the mission.

[Sky]

That's what I love. It's beautiful insanity.

[Yegolev]

We have stopped Fortnite again and are playing Warframe.  I'm also playing AC Origins and tiny bits of random things.