GAMES!

Posting this here rather than have it be buried in the Good Morning thread. Found out yesterday that GOG recently remastered Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, which I highly recommend (previously I've played I've only been able to play it on DOS emulators). It's a fully voice acted point and click adventure, with multiple endings depending on your actions (not all of them good), a healthy injection of Arcanum-esque humour at points (telling people you think their wives are a pain in the arse, or having a Samie White-esque insultathon with a below decks worker) and best of all it has the entire virtual Titanic explorable in all it's glory (which I know some of you, especially Smuel, have been wanting for years)!

It's pretty cheap, and doesn't actually come across as dated despite releasing in the 90s, with the characters moving through a range of poses with lip-synching for them to feel suitably animated (and looking more or less like photocopies of the voice actors themselves). I'd also say the puzzle solving presented is pretty tricky, and getting the ideal ending is challenging, so it does have worthy gameplay and doesn't feel like just an interactive story.

I highly recommend it.

 

Anyone have/played Deadfire yet?

 

I'm gonna save it for the end of the month. Going on another business trip, and I'll need something to pass the time. Meanwhile, I might give the first game another playthrough to refresh my memory.

 

I worked on pretty much this build with a guy on their forums a while ago, here. I would taken it entirely upon my shoulders, but when people like me insist on playing solo you can't get through too many builds (plus the fact that I was finding Carnage was hitting several times with a Bash shield, so it didn't feel like a fair challenge, and I had to wait ages for them to patch that out), and Boeroer on their forums was always very keen on weird ideas I had, so developed it nicely for party play whereas I would have gone for a solo build.

As for Pillars II, I probably mentioned, but I refunded my pledge after encountering another bug which ruined a playthrough about 6 months ago (after encountering about 10 or so similar previously, literally every interesting combination I wanted to try, like the Barb Carnage combination above, was always bugged in some way). I think honestly, I never once play Pillars and didn't encounter a mechanistically gameplay altering bug (I made a big thread about it on their forums, where I posted the email with the refund, and got slated for saying Skyrim special edition doesn't have mechanistically gameplay altering bugs - which is completely true - which are the entire opposite of what someone who wants to sink their teeth into a mechanics heavy game would want. Of course people are like, "Skyrim, bugs? Mammoths drop from the sky!"... but that really isn't a mechanistic bug that permanently alters gameplay, so to speak). The amount of bugs in Pillars, and their somewhat crappy attitude to patching at times, and their slow patch release cycles, and their constant rebalances, really put me off Pillars 1 when I really tried hard to get into it 20 or 30 times with separate builds.

The funny thing is, despite Fig saying they refunded my pledge, I don't think they actually bothered. I don't really care to be honest, I'm happy for Obsidian to have it and it somehow trickle into the Cain/Boyarsky indirectly, but I'm sure going to still boycott Pillars 2, even if it is a stellar, bugless awesome game, because even in their Pillars 1 patch release less than a year ago (the so-called "definitive" patch) it was still a total and utter balls-up. I guess extremely optimistically my little bit of public humiliation might have prompted them to get their shit together (thought I can't even find the thread on their website now, I think it's been archived possibly - or just deleted), but realistically it probably did nothing.

Let me know what Pillars 2 is like anyway, I probably played Pillars 1 more than anyone here I think (probably 500+ hours so total, I would say). Obviously I will be getting the Cain/Boyarsky game with bells on, even if it is still the same kind of buggy mess.

 

Guess I need to start a new game in Pillars 1 and actually get past the keep.

 

So apparently Chris Avellone has been going bananas at Obsidian over at Codex (I didn't bother reading their thread, this article seemed to curate the most relevant points and provide appropriate links to posts). If he's to be believed, Feargus Urquhart is quite a douchebag, and seems to have adopted a number of shady practices at Obsdian over the past 10 years or so (threats to de-owner several senior staff so they wouldn't receive royalties on games, when Obsidian started making money again he had to be fought down on reimbursing staff who had forgone wages in the bad period, preserving the jobs of relatives during lay-offs, having screaming matches with potential publishers only to hang up on them and boast about it afterwards, trying to force Avellone to sign an NDA after his departure so he wouldn't be able to discuss any sketchy shit as well as a non-competition agreement so he would no longer be able to work on RPGs, and more).

Thought it was quite an interesting read, and while it could be all fabricated it seems like a lot of effort to fabricate a story of this size (there's pages and pages of detail in that article). He does still say that the development team (J E Sawyer, Cain, Boyarsky, etc.) are all cool guys and he's still in contact with all of them, possibly most fans wouldn't care about the company on a managerial level so long as Obsidian keeps that kind of dev talent. Still, it probably wasn't the kind of revelations Obsidian wanted just before the release of Deadfire.

 

Anyone care to speculate on what Fallout 76 will be? MMO? Single-player with co-op? Post apocalyptic Sim City/Civ?

Based on the teaser, it's not going to be a classic style isometric RPG with turn based combat. Maybe next time.

 

House of Cards has taught me to be distrustful of people whose initials are F.U.

 

I mean I really have no idea. I didn't pick up on the little details in the trailer (such as the Pip-Boy reading 2102, meaning it's set between Fallout 1 and 2) and only found them in a trailer discussion (here) - could be that they're going back for a single player game? Would certainly avoid the dense plotting involved in setting a new game close to the timelines of 2, 3, 4 and New Vegas - which you'd imagine they'd still want to do at some stage, rather than the more significant time jumps in the TES series which avoid that problem. I'd love for it to be a Sim City or Civ game, but I can't really see that happening - particularly with the dissection of the trailer above implying something centric on a single player. I guess that doesn't rule out MMO though.

Or K.S. for that matter.

 

An extremely credible source (some guy on 4Chan) has said that at this year's E3 Bethesda are going to announce a new Arcanum game. I mean it's probably just the same guy on the Arcanum sub-reddit who posted it and then reposted it there, but it's been confirmed/denied I think we should all take it as a verbatim fact that Bethesda are making a new Arcanum! Whooooooooooo!!!!

 

Haha I remember saying Bethesda should make a new Arcanum game as a joke because it always got a reaction. Now I actually want them to just because the modding community will make it the game we always wanted even if Bethesda can’t.

 

True, I normally shy away from mods being seeing as Arcanum has always been modable and a triple AA company might not exactly do a good job with the world or lore (Bethesda with FO3 and 4 I would say) then mods would balance that out.

Seems like a IP that the industry would be mad not to use eventually. While the combat mechanics would need an overhaul, the lore, setting and ability to use a load of races and have a load of customisation would presumably mean a lot less creative legwork needs to be taken by the developers.

 

It would be interesting if it were made by Bethesda and they went with the first-person/third-person style like they did with Skyrim etc. Quite exciting to imagine how guns would feel in a Skyrim setting where you already have bows, melee and magic. Imagine a sword in one hand and a flintlock pistol in another.

One moment I just need to clean up.

 

So that's like six A's?

 

I mean, that's just the level of content Bethesda produces Smuel. Deal with it!