Restartitis OVERCOME!

Your thoughts?

I mean I played the hell out of it - and liked it, and then found it buggier and buggier, and felt pretty betrayed investing time in a game like that considering they were offering granular IE RPG difficulty and then fundamentally shitting their mechanics up so much on a consistent basis it interfered with 60-70% of characters I tried to play in an optimised fashion.

As such, I vocally unbacked PoE2. I mean I think they refunded me, but I still have access to the game (duh on them), but I'm literally not playing it. PoE is salted earth territory to me now, especially after putting so much effort into their forums and contributing to the community for a while.

At the same time, I was recently playing FO:NV and am very much looking forward to Outer Worlds (though I wouldn't be playing that either but for the connection to Troika).

In other words: Jojobobo here, casting his dark cloud of unhappiness on other people's fun.

 

I really need to complete that game. I fear I will have to start all over again as I don't remember what I was doing or why.

 

Any mods to recommend? The list on PC Gaming Wiki called "essential improvements" is fairly long. I've tried JSawyer and New Vegas: Uncut in the past but haven't finished a game with either. Project Nevada seems pretty interesting too.

 

Well while I do like role-playing, I usually pick characters who are good at specific weird things rather than being truly optimised in the way that steamroll a game. Or in games like Bloodlines and Arcanum, I'll also play characters that are poorly combat orientated but socially optimised instead. As far as I know in Pillars, I'm the only play to have solo-ed the whole game and extra bosses with guns only on the hardest difficulty non-dead-is-dead difficulty, which I think is an achievement enough.

In terms of the story I thought Pillars was okay, but was disappointed at the end all your character seems to be able to say is, "ZOMG, what?!?" In seems like some RPGs have a hard time delivering a story on par with other styles of games or even other styles of media, and a lot of Pillars feels like a bit of a gotcha in that respect.

What I thought they did a particularly good job of White March Pt. 1 in pretty much all respects, I like how they had a legacy of crafty dwarves that had gone missing and how it was a big reasonably big area for you to explore through the different maps. I thought the soundtrack was pretty great too.

I guess I look for an RPG to have both a good story and a good/interesting mechanical system behind it, as in that way I can get more from it than a book or a movie because I'm engaging my analytical half as well. For Pillars the story was okay, if a bit un-organic in places, but the delivery of the good/interesting mechanical system was shit for anyone waiting for them to repeatedly bug fix things and not wildly alter mechanics in and between each patch iteration.

I still play it on Xbox360, and wouldn't sully any game designers' borderline genius with mods!

I still think mods are a little bit of a weird idea. No one would ever "mod" a book, as in write in their own passages about improving the scenery/story or have it set somewhere else entirely - tearing out pages and/or gluing others in.

I guess I didn't improve much on my dark cloud of unhappiness from my previous post.

 

Some day, someone is going to make a sequel or remake of Arcanum, and I'm going to shit my pants.

 

If the spelling mistakes aren't fixed before they hit the printing press, I would be thrilled if fans would proof read the book and re release it, free of charge. Especially if the author gets involved (as is the case with JSawyer patch/mod).

Including the UAP and Wesp's mod?

"Oh, you silly Ruda. The Unofficial Arcanum Patch is a patch not a mod. The clue is in the name. And Wesp's patch is disgusting!"​

Well, any user made content, including patches, are mods surely? And while you're certainly right about Wesp's mod, hypothetical Jojobobo, there are plenty of mods listed at PCGwiki about New Vegas that are just that: patches. Yukichigai Unofficial Patch for instance, fixes loads of bugs. All of the "essential improvements" are basically patches.

That's were I've been stuck for the last year or so. There is some vampire chick there that my party can't beat.

...what?

 

Um... fan fiction?

Also, for music, you have Variations on a Theme of Paganini, plus all the remixes and sampling in modern music.

So, I don't think modding is much stranger than any other artistic endeavour, really.

 

NOT tubgirl, honest.

 

I'm glad someone speaks drunk Jojobobo. Definitely one for the CV, I would say.

And yeah that build is pretty close, but in the end I didn't use the reload chant as Dragon Thrashed is way stronger and Silver Flash consistently debuffs with Blind - making them more susceptible to Dragon Thrashed crits so long as you can keep alive.

I went for Wild Orlan as they get consistent defence buffs in key battles, and you can use things like the Mind Grub/Whiteleaf to buff much more than you would normally. You do only get Silver Flash like 50 hours into an 80 hour game however, so it is more of a patience trial up until that point.

EDIT: And here's the build that I was meaning to post...

It was fun, but very challenging, and every character up to that one and since was usually bugged in some way - and the patching cycles to fix those bugs took months when they could have often got hotfixes out sooner for the really problematic issues.

I don't mind restoration patches as they are stuff that was cut from the game. I'm really not a fan of Wesp's patch because it went way beyond the mark after a point, and some of the things he thought of as fixes he he incorporated into the base game.

I need to go back and figure out at some point where the line was with VtMB where there was a lot of cut content put back in but not a lot of the mod content was there (i.e. going so far as to have things like, "Oh there were one or two textures for library wall and the devs cut a library level, so here's my own library level with subpar voice acting and writing for you to all enjoy." I heard the voice acting got better for these bits, but it just really wasn't my cup of tea).

Beyond that I not a fan of all unofficial patches to be honest for things like Skyrim where it (still?) has active support. Quite a bit of the time, someone makes arbitrary choices about what is or isn't a bug when the devs could have patched it out but didn't - alongside genuine bug fixes. I think it's frustrating and I never install them on that basis, though there is a good case to be made for New Vegas given it was a messy release.

I think you're assuming I read fan fiction - which I never have and never will. I can see your point with remixes, etc. but personally I find a good remix brings something fresh (i.e. changing to a whole different genre of music) whereas I've yet to play a mod that didn't feel for me like it was bastardising the original content.

I did like the Third Age: Total War mod back when it was a thing for precisely that reason - it was an entirely different and worthy game to Medieval 2: Total War, and didn't feel like it was ripping it off or just lazily rehashing material without much real inspiration.

And I know, "real inspiration" is a bit spurious given the whole, "There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope" etc. However there is also the we "give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations" part of that quote too, and for me mods are usually critically lacking in the new and curious combinations department.

In any case I hope you all go and enjoy your filthy modded games, and I'll endeavour as always to be a less obnoxious drunk. I was only attempting at some slightly rougher joking around, I wasn't intending to cause particular offence.

 

I'm very glad I'm not the only one. I really don't get people's obsession with modding the hell out of sandbox RPGs these days.