What game are you playing?

[maidenhaver]

Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen, been meaning to return to it ever since the first trailers for Dragon's Dogma 2 were released. In this playthrough, I opted for a mod pack that, among other changes, adds infinite stamina for sprinting, unlimited carry weight, and a higher jump. This makes the experience a whole lot better in my opinion, cuts back on the needless waiting during travel, and stops your character from moving slower than an overweight redditor after picking up a few items. This means more time spent engaging in combat, and getting quests done quicker.

As a result, the game is more enjoyable to play than I remember, but the typical open world design issues rear their ugly head as in most games of this type. Despite the scale being more compact and dense then a Bethesda affair, you find yourself just wanting to get to more of the action and experience more of the story, rather than the busy work the game pushes you to do via the quest boards, and the long treks you have to do in-between (even moreso without the mod). The natural scenery can still look pretty nice, but as it's AA-tier in terms of polish, a lot of the houses in the main city of Gran Soren are just set decoration, which can break the immersion you expect from the genre. That, and the game looks like it has a permanent blur filter applied that muddies the image considerably, regardless of your resolution and AA settings. A very puzzling choice, no doubt the fault of the PS3 and Xbox 360 which were the primary platforms the game was built for. Still, as of writing this I'm about 14 hours in, and I find myself encouraged to continue.

I hate ingredients and crafting, so of course the first quest was find ingredients for crafting medicine. 0/10 game.

[Nemesis]

Playing Palworld on PC

...why?

[maidenhaver]

Playing Palworld on PC but I need something to play on the train on my Chinese emulator Gameboy clone, any suggestions? Plays everything up to ps1

GBC has good games.

[Oyster Sauce]

Playing Palworld on PC but I need something to play on the train on my Chinese emulator Gameboy clone, any suggestions? Plays everything up to ps1

Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons

[rusty_shackleford]

Friends of Mineral Town is one of the last good harvest moons before it became weird weeb ****.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Granblue Fantasy Relink. I'm a couple hours in. I had to try out different alternatives to using the Steam screenshot key, as whenever I took a screenshot the game would stutter for a few seconds. Currently using Nvidia GeForce's screenshot functionality, and used AntiMicrox to set my controller's back button to take screenshots.

I got noticeable framedrops in the forest and town areas even though I am using a 3070ti.

It's nice that so far, the music is new arrangements of the gacha soundtrack rather than a straight up lift of stuff I've already heard for hundreds of hours before.


EDIT



Gallanza feels like a rehash: Draph male who is one of the chief lieutenants of the empire who wants fights. Already seen him two times before with Ghandharva and Baragona.





I am investing into Gran for now. I've built him to reduce the party's incoming damage, using Phalanax (reduce incoming damage by 40% to 70%), Substitute (redirects all of the party's incoming damage to Gran, increases Gran's defense by 20% to 50%), and Stall (slows' the enemy's actions by up to 50%ish). Due to the long cooldowns of these abilities, I am trying to rotate through each one rather to maximize defense uptime, rather than popping them all off at once.

Unfortunately, while Gran has access to a wide assortment of skills, his unique mechanic, Skybound Arts, works against rotating abilities like this. Gran has to build up to four stacks of Arts for his abilities to activate at maximum effectiveness (ie Phalnax at 70% reduced incoming damage). You build up stacks of Skybound Arts by finishing combos. The shortest combo is three moves. That means to build up four stacks to fire off an ability at maximum effectiveness, I need to use 12 moves, which takes a while. When I am fighting trash mobs, I usually can't even finish the short 3 move combo because they either die so fast, or there are so many mobs attacking that I have to interupt my combo by evading or blocking. Against bosses it is much easier to do combos and build up stacks of arts, but it still takes time, and I might be sitting on a cooldown that is ready to go because I haven't acquired four stacks yet.

For my fourth ability, I keep switching back and forth between using either Armor Break for its mobility and short cooldown (which means I'm not waiting until I reach 4 stacks of Arts to use it) which is great on trash fights for getting me to a living mob so I can do combos and build stacks, or Panacea as my AoE heal on boss fights.

I have heard that Vaseraga can be turned into a tank (presumably he has access to Phalnax and Substitute). If he doesn't have a mechanic like Skybound Arts that incentivizes firing off all of your abilities at once then he might be the better pick.


The white armor Rolan gave to Gran is quite nice. I hope it is added as a skin to the gacha soon.

[KnightoftheWind]

The more I play Dragon's Dogma the more issues I see with it, especially when it comes to pacing and the flaws of it's combat. The best class is the Strider, by far. You gain access to rapid melee attacks as well as a bow to attack flying enemies. If you dare play as a Fighter or Warrior, you will have absolutely no aerial range to speak of, which is essentially a death sentence when facing the Dragon. How the devs missed this flaw during development I'll never know.

The game itself is fine overall, average at best for an open world RPG, and far below average at it's worst points. I like that it's more true to classic High Fantasy than yet another piece of edgy Souls slop, although some of the same thematic elements are there. What kills the game for me though are the quests, a lot of them are unsatisfactory and basically revolve around going back and forth multiple times, across vast distances. Had I not been using the Ferrystones (fast travel), and had not modded the game to give me unlimited sprint, this would have been agonising to go through. In that sense, it's one of the worst open world RPGs I've played. You know a game is bad when you feel like you're just wasting time playing it, and I hope the sequel addresses these concerns. Every quest should be significant, and be resolved on location without needing to backtrack to the main hub to talk to some NPC, or have a villain escape in a cutscene while he's inch away from death in-game. It is games like this that remind me why Todd feels the need to add fast travel, because open world games have this fundamental design problem of being very fatiguing to play, and extremely bloated. Sure the idea of a massive, living world is appealing on paper, but it needs to be fleshed out to the max. There needs to be NPCs with quests and interesting things to say around every corner, and the sense of adventure has to be there to even be worth playing. The story in Dragon's Dogma is nothing special, the potential is there but it is never explored fully, likely because the developers didn't have the time or budget, and had to design and map out an open world. Had this game been a linear character action game, or even a Diablo-like, it would've been more fun and fulfilling to experience. The developers could have put more time into the story and characters, and fleshing out 'parts' of the world rather than a complete map. These are just my personal thoughts on the matter.

There is more to see after beating the Dragon, but at this point I'm not sure if I'll actually get around to finishing it. It's wore out it's welcome as far as I'm concerned, and I hope Capcom does a better job with the sequel. I may not end up even playing it after this, I must have been looking at this game through rose-tinted glasses, and it's a shame.

[Vergil]

Playing Palworld on PC

any suggestions

Lobotomy immediately

[aweigh]

I'm about 20-21 hours into Like A Dragon 8: Infinite Wealth.

[Magick]

Finishing Doom Eternal atm.
It's...alright. It's definitely a labour of love with a lot of homage to the original games / series, however unlike Doom 2016 it's very "on rails" in that the fighting is too rapid and too much "simon says". Having to shoot "weak points", use certain weapons on certain enemies, blabla. Feels like I'm playing EXACTLY how the devs demand I play, rather than them just giving me ammo and letting me have at it (Doom 2016 and the originals).
I do like how Doom 1 & 2 are embedded in the game though and playable on an old PC in Doomguy's mancave lol. Was fun playing through them both.

It is a shame, without the "Simon Says" stuff it would have been quite alright. Too many games do that "play my way" **** nowdays. I remember grumping at portal 2 for that, so many non-portalable surfaces that it felt like I was finding "the" solution, rather than free to work out my own.

[Oyster Sauce]

If you dare play as a Fighter or Warrior, you will have absolutely no aerial range to speak of, which is essentially a death sentence when facing the Dragon. How the devs missed this flaw during development I'll never know.

Ballistae in the arena + you can just hit him with your sword

[Roguey]

Finished with Kirby Super Star. I was initially going to give this a pass, but krokodil convinced me to give it a chance, and it's a good thing he did because it was pretty fun without any elements that were overly-obnoxious like in Adventure and Dream Land 2. It broke some ground in terms of accessibility by including optional in-game tutorials, though it took me a bit of getting used to the different floating controls. I gave The Arena mode a pass of course, I'm not interested in fighting the same bosses over again in a row, and I don't feel compelled to unlock a sound test.

[maidenhaver]

Dominion. You should borrow this one from a friend, if you like deck builder games.

[Mondain]

If you dare play as a Fighter or Warrior, you will have absolutely no aerial range to speak of, which is essentially a death sentence when facing the Dragon. How the devs missed this flaw during development I'll never know.

Ballistae in the arena + you can just hit him with your sword

The massive dragon towers over you, it is as if a mountain was given wings. Its roar is so powerful, so terrifying that it can kill lesser beings, the gale produced by its wings capable of destroying villages. its terrible hooked claws are razor sharp and capable of shredding an ox effortlessly. Its eyes focus on you as he lets out a snort strong enough to knock down trees.
What do you do?

"I boop it on the snout with my sword."

[KnightoftheWind]

The Dragon is perhaps my favorite villain in any RPG. The voice actor did an impeccable job, and the developers also did a great job making him appear menacing. I'm glad he's returning in the sequel, it wouldn't be the same without him. The battle against him felt epic, even though it was fairly easy by the time I got to him and switched to a Ranger class.

[Oyster Sauce]

If you dare play as a Fighter or Warrior, you will have absolutely no aerial range to speak of, which is essentially a death sentence when facing the Dragon. How the devs missed this flaw during development I'll never know.

Ballistae in the arena + you can just hit him with your sword

The massive dragon towers over you, it is as if a mountain was given wings. Its roar is so powerful, so terrifying that it can kill lesser beings, the gale produced by its wings capable of destroying villages. its terrible hooked claws are razor sharp and capable of shredding an ox effortlessly. Its eyes focus on you as he lets out a snort strong enough to knock down trees.
What do you do?

"I boop it on the snout with my sword."

It's more like "I leap onto the dragon's legs and climb across to stab it in the heart while it attempts to shake me off" but that's a pretty well established mechanic if you've been playing a melee class

[KnightoftheWind]

Gran Soren could've benefited heavily from Oblivion's guards

[maidenhaver]

I patched Wiz Empire for gbc, but Dominion is more fun.

[rockheart13]

I can say whatever you want, but I find Palworld enjoyable. It feels like a fresh start after so much time.

[maidenhaver]

Refunded Domshition. Looks like they went out of their way to put women and ******* on everything.

[gerey]

Doing another playthrough of VTMB for the first time in about 9 years, but with the Clan Quest Mod.

To preface this post, don't mistaken what I am writing as a criticism of the game - I am well aware of the challenges Troika was facing - that they delivered a product as good as VTMB1 is nothing short of a miracle, and a testament to the potent vision and passion behind the project.

VTMB1 is one of my top 5 games of all time. I played the game on release, back when you needed to use the console to actually progress the game (since it would keep crashing in one map). I've spent the past 20 years looking for another game that could tap into whatever creative goldmine Troika dug out, and have yet to find anything that comes close to it. Anyone playing the game for the first time is in for an unforgettable experience.

Also a warning - severe autism ahead.

Nostalgia is a funny thing - I remember the game being much larger than it actually is. The writing remains unmatched to this day, no other cRPG has managed to create such a compelling fantasy of modernity as Bloodlines 1 did, but being older (if not wiser) I can see the cracks in the foundation. The combat is something you must suffer through, selecting your powers is a very clunky process (even with key bindings), and the powers themselves range from overpowered to useless. That being said, at least the Camarilla Edition mod included in CQM tries to alleviate the issue - now being a Tremere requires a modicum of thought, and investing in Dominate actually is useful (besides getting Sleep to trivialize every stealth section) - since your Thaumaturgy spells are on a cooldown it's helpful to have alternatives like Command and Sleep to use while you wait for Blood Theft and Blood Boil to cool down.

Guns too aren't completely useless early to mid-game (thanks to the Arsenal Overhaul mod), so it is actually viable to invest in them.

In terms of vanilla quests, you can feel them getting progressively simpler and simpler as you near the end of the game. That's not to say that most quests are particularly involved - since it's usually just going from point A to point B to either talk to someone or pick up an item, with combat or mandatory stealth to spice things up. This wouldn't be an issue if the game maps had been structured like those in Deus Ex, allowing for a myriad of ways to achieve the objective.

The game is already set up for this, usually just rewarding the completion of the goal (with extra XP thrown in if you go above and beyond), but the map design and powers at your disposal don't lend themselves to emergent gameplay. As a big Tremere fan, looking at the source material, and the many Paths available to them, it's really disappointing that there's no spells or rituals to discover.

It's also disappointing that there's very few ways to use your vampiric powers outside of combat and dialogue. Sometimes you can use Suicide to kill an NPC without triggering combat or a masquerade breach, and the use of Obfuscate/Sleep to sneak around is obvious, but that's about it. The game would have benefited far more if Troika had stuck less closely to the tabletop and "gamified" the various powers to better work in the context of a video game. Many skills are useless too - there's no point to investigate, seduction is very situational and intimidate is just a shittier persuade that doesn't even work half the time.

Also, the game relies far too heavily on hacking and lockpicking skills, to the point they're nearly mandatory to get ahead in the game. The PC is a supernatural vampire that can enhance his physical attributes with viate, some clans can boost their strength even further with disciplines, so why can't I smash doors and containers open with brute force? I think there's exactly one instance in the whole game where you can use strength to open an alternative path (in Santa Monica, when tasked with destroying the paintings). The game is equally lacking in verticality, there's a few instances where you can take the high ground to avoid combat, but they're rare.

As I mentioned before, the game involves doing a lot of walking, which gets tedious since there's really not much to do in the hub areas and when you do get to a location and enter it, you realize just how barren of interactivity they are. I remember one of the early quests, trying to find the bounty hunter, involved entering the tattoo parlor, walking down to the basement and answering the phone - and that's it, that's the sole purpose of that location. There was nothing else interesting in it, no NPCs, no loot, nothing to interact with. Once you have visited that building there is no reason to ever come back again. And yes, I'm aware lots of other cRPGs work like this, but when the number of locations in the game is so limited already, it's disappointing to see so many of them are "one and done" and solely exist for the benefit of a single quest.

This becomes even more painfully obvious when you are forced into a combat dungeon - besides the odd trinket you can find you just mow down braindead enemies via a poorly designed combat system - there's very few ways to synergize your powers, and many of them are redundant (why do Tremere have Brain Wipe and Blood Purge?). I tend to compare them to the more militarized maps in Deus Ex, and it becomes obvious how much richer DX is in terms of player agency in the moment-to-moment gameplay.

Quest solutions are also very limited - you do have 4 separate speech skills, but they usually lead to the same outcome, and even then Persuasion (or Dominate, if available) lead to the most optimal outcome. It's the usual problem with cRPGs, the skillcheck dialogue option is the "YOU WIN" button, just press it, no thought necessary.

I think a lot of this, outside of the obvious troubles with the engine and publisher fuckery, comes down to the fact that Troika got too ambitious. It's nice that they give you 7 clans, even nicer that some of them play so radically differently from one another, and that Malkavians have all those neat extra interactions or insightful dialogue choices, but I think the game would have been better served if they had trimmed down the number of clans. Either have Gangrel or Brujah, Venture or Toreador. Nosferatu should have been some other stealth-based clan because spending most of the game in the sewers is not very fun. Tremere are little more than ranged Venture.

Having so many clans, on top of all dialogue being voiced, leads to content being spread very, very thin. Few quests have multiple outcomes or ways to approach them, most of the game is very linear, each clan only has one or two quests exclusive to them and there's nothing to do in the game outside the quests. And even with the quests, they're nearly all either investigating (which I did enjoy a lot) or combat (which I did not).

The CQM tries to show an example of what could have been done differently. It adds a quest involving a donutsteal Kuei-Jin NPC that you can go on a wild night across LA with. Suffice to say that the execution is horrible - it's nice to learn more about the ***** bloodsuckers since the base game doesn't really do a good job of explaining what they are exactly, but for that you have to suffer being forced to kill an innocent stripper and getting into a gunfight with hunters in the middle of Downtown, on top of doing all manner of degenerate ****. It just feels very out of place compared to the rest of the content the mod introduces. Great idea, but very flawed execution.

As for the rest of the mod, it's a mixed bag. The voice acting ranges from good (nearly indistinguishable from the vanilla actor), passable to "kid with ****** mike in a windy corridor" bad. Mercifully the quest adds an option to skip the Nosferatu warren combat dungeon, and another option to skip the Fu Syndicate bit, but does not do a very good job of telegraphing you what you should do. The clan quest for the Tremere is interesting, but also suffers from poor instructions - though at the very least at the end of it you can gain either Obfuscate or Celerity. Haven't yet arrived to the meat of the mod, the new hub, so can't comment on its quality.

[Roguey]

Finished with Kirby's Dream Land 3. This one had quite a difference in tone from Super Star. That one was fast-paced with bright colors, this one was leisurely paced with pastels. I liked the new friends and the absence of difficulty spikes. Once again I didn't bother to collect all the stars for the true ending. This has been fun, but it'll be nice to have a bit of a Kirby break before I try out 64.

[maidenhaver]

Dragon Warrior 3 for gbc.

That was the last one I played due to losing my save. Some day I'll go back...

I lost my save. I think I'll revisit Ambermoon, instead.

[Vergil]

The CQM tries to show an example of what could have been done differently. It adds a quest involving a donutsteal Kuei-Jin NPC that you can go on a wild night across LA with. Suffice to say that the execution is horrible - it's nice to learn more about the ***** bloodsuckers since the base game doesn't really do a good job of explaining what they are exactly, but for that you have to suffer being forced to kill an innocent stripper and getting into a gunfight with hunters in the middle of Downtown, on top of doing all manner of degenerate ****. It just feels very out of place compared to the rest of the content the mod introduces. Great idea, but very flawed execution.

Don't forget the reveal that it is actually unironically a ******

[gerey]

Don't forget the reveal that it is actually unironically a ******

Didn't get that far with the thing. After the shootout in front of the church I was done. All I learned is to be thankful my PC wasn't a ***** vampire.

[Lich]

I'm playing Cultic. Got to the corpse cave with the chainsaw guy. The game is excessively morbid and monotone so far. I like the way the wapons feel, though the pistol feels too effective at long range. Visuals look better without the filter.

[1998]

Kuro no Kiseki II, so far with an excellent English patch. Probably the best in that series.

[Roguey]

Finished Sin and Punishment. A weird rail shooter for the Nintendo 64 that was originally only released in Japan but inexplicably has (terrible of course) English-only voice acting. Treasure made some fine shooters, and this was no exception. I particularly liked the sinister and androgynous-looking character designs, though the story was incomprehensible even in English. I almost got brickwalled because I mistook the number on the credits screen for an arcade-style countdown timer and not the number of lives you had left, but I was able to make it through with a bit more use of save states (no rewind for the N64 on the Switch). I played on easy of course, though this would be "90s fast-paced action game easy" so not a cakewalk, died plenty of times.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have finished the main story of Granblue Fantasy Relink.

I played up to the final boss on hard difficulty. Then my troubles began. The AI party members can't/don't jump over/dodge through/shield through the incoming dark waves during phase 1, nor do they run away from the big AoEs during the final phase, so they go into a downed state and bleed through the party's shared downed state bar very quickly. When the shared downed state bar runs out, it is a game over, even if only one out of the four party members is downed and the rest are still standing and fighting. I actually managed to kill the final boss, with the slowmo cam and my characters levelling up, but since Io was downed and the bar apparently ran out at the exact same time time, the gameover music played and I got stuck on an infinite black screen and had to reload. I wound up having to do the final boss 5 times, which feels bad when it's a 10 minute long boss scripted boss fight. It doesn't matter if you lower the difficulty and burn through his health; you can't hasten the dialogue or the cutscenes, and again most of your party goes down during the final phase, so it feels bad to slog through all that only to lose inches from victory.








I had a really bad time as Gran. I prefer to play through the story with the canon characters, but I had a bad time as Gran. He has useful abilities you want to rotate through to maintain maximum uptime rather than blowing all at once (ie, the two party wide damage mitigation skills, Phalnax and Substitute), but you have to do four combos to build up four stacks of Arts to use skills at maximum effectiveness, which is difficulty and wieldy and frustrating. I wound up biting the bullet and trying out the noncanon characters. Percival is my favorite character and MVP in the gacha game, but in Relink he is one of many characters that are too fast paced for me. I don't like fast paced action or fighting games as I can't keep up. I wound up sticking with Vaseraga, as rather than quickly mashing buttons or memorizing long combos, you instead just press X and hold down Y for 3 seconds to charge up his heavy attacks. Very easy to play. Just wish I could customize the other characters to play like him, or there were more options for slow characters besides Io and Vaseraga.














The character models (when properly lit in cutscenes and certain battle areas) and the visual effects look fantastic. I'm hard press to think of other anime JRPG with characters and VFX that looks this good. Trails and Valkyria Chronicles come close in the character department but this is really something else, and nothing comes close to the VFX quality. The environments also look good, though Xenoblade probably has the edge in more imaginative and grandiose JRPG environments. The Granblue 2D illustrations look superb as usual.

Much of the soundtrack is remixes of Uematsu's original GBF OST by Narita. Not my favorite renditions but still good. It sounds like the final boss song was sung by Taro Kobayashi. Will have to wait for the soundtrack release for confirmation.

Story wise, I'm a little peeved by there being a third Bahamut. The foundational lore of the setting in the gacha is that the god of the GBF setting, Bahamut, was split into two and the universe was split into two: the Sky realm which GBF takes place in, and the Astral realm which is never visited. Gran's sidekick Vyrn is the reincarnation of the Sky half of Bahamut, and the Astral realm Bahamut is over in the Astral realm which is inaccessible to the Skydwellers. No one has managed to cross the boundary between worlds since the Astrals retreated at the end of the War 2,000 years ago, and the Astrals who were left behind (Loki, Lucilius, Beelzebub, etc) have been unable to return home. It is highly unlikely that this is the Astral side Bahamut. So where did this Third Bahamut come from? It's never satisfactorily explained.

It's bizzare that Lilith somehow knows about Lyria and knows that Gran is the Singularity, despite Gran hailing from a completely different Skydom than Lilith has been operating in, and the Church of Avia was said to be localized the Zegagrande Skydom rather than spanning multiple skydoms. The True King identified Gran since he heads a global superpower that spans multiple Skydoms with many nations and organizations serving him and feeding him information, but Lilith appears to be a small time local actor.

With the main story over, what is left is to grind quests on harder and harder difficulties to progress Vaseraga and get him ready for the Lucilius superboss that is being patched in April. The online matchmaking is very frustrating, though. I queue for a quest, and then the game spends one minute searching, and then after that it reloads the area and takes another minute searching (during this time you can't cancel the queue), and then you find out whether or not you got taken to the quest or if you're still in town and have to repeat the process again. And then once you finish a multiplayer quest, you have the option to press X to repeat the quest (ie the survival exp farm quest), and I have had multiple people where all four players pressed X to repeat the quest, but then the game sends me back to town rather than repeating the quest.

[Tweed]

I'm iiiiiimmmmsiiimmming!! I finished Shock 2 and went on to Deus Ex.