GAMES!

Ah that is why. I played the trilogy on the PC. I too hated the online mode till a friend of mine ran me through a mission for about an hour and I gained like 30 levels. Unfortunately you don't get the same experience rewards anymore.

 

Re: Re:

Despite Zanza's wanton display of glibness (actually I'm sure his response was sincere but did undersell the game) I'll give you a quick rundown.

First off, tonally it's a marvel. It blends horror and often gallows humour (as an early example watch out for a guy telling you matter-of-factly he cut off his own arm to improve his prosthetic limb business, like it's as ordinary as picking up groceries) extremely well. The pen and paper roleplaying game I always felt was bombastic, so the well paced and clever humour perfectly compliments the over-dramatic tone and more importantly feels designed to do so. Honestly, a credible horror RPG game is all I could have ever wanted.

Secondly, for the most part, it has good quest design and a decent leveling/improvement system. It boasts a higher proportion of unique voice actors than plenty of current triple AAA games (90% of characters are voice acted uniquely), which makes each character feel distinct and - linking back to the point - makes all the side quests (of which there are very many, often with alternate solutions and hidden ways to gain experience) easy to take an interest in. You also have access to different dialogue options granted by certain feats, really branching out what you can do.

Characters are classless, and don't level per se; you get a fixed amount of experience for each quest you can complete - not allowing you to grind and giving you a finite amount of improvement you can achieve (for example leveling early skills costs you 3 experience points, early side quests boast 1 to 2 for completion) which I think makes for great replayability. Each of the vampire "clans" (don't get too bogged down in the lexicon or lore, both of which are well explained but can feel hokey to new players) offer a more or less unique experience (which I'd describe as a combo of the supernatural powers you have and unique dialogue - with some powers affecting dialogue) - where only the Toreador and Brujah feeling slightly less unique.

Lastly in terms of what unspecific elements it features, in no particular order, it has: snuff films, a crazy mafia boss, zombies, a character who pines for the insane asylums of the good old days, a sociopathic blood bank worker, a supernatural serial killer, a guy who cuts off his own arm (yeah I know, I mentioned that one), an animate gargoyle, disgusting Lovecraftian abominations, a demon shark creature, an invisible man who toys with the idea of killing you, a sarcophagus containing something interesting, a sleazy sex shop owner, a cannibalistic monster, more prostitutes than you can shake a stick at, a doomsday cult, an assassin stripper, a stripper vampire, five separate faction orientated endings, a ship where lots of people got murdered, an alleged pirate vampire, a haunted house guaranteed to make you shit yourself using high volume and low lighting, and much much more.

I'm not going to say it's the best game ever, but for me it's the most enjoyable game I've ever played. This has now prompted me to have another shot at getting it working on my mac; I've now got it playable but it needs some fine tuning.

 

Good pick up Jojobobo my man. Bloodlines is an amazing game and worth at least two playthroughs for the story alone. Just remember to grab that patch so you don't get stuck behind a couple of bad bugs.

Oh and fuck that house. Just... fuck you!

 

Re: Re:

In spite of the tone of your post, I have this to say in an out of context rebuttal;

A game being described as "AAA" doesn't automatically mean it's a great game. It simply means it should be great because of the sheer amount of money spent on development and promotion. That said, I've played some really enjoyable AAA games, but I've played more that made me wonder where the production budget went. This really boils down to what I find enjoyable in a game, but I'm sure each of us have had some stark disappointments when comparing how a high budget game is described in promotion and how it plays.

 

I concur that expenditure doesn't equal quality whole-heartedly. What is very nice is when those two go hand in hand, which according to several reviewers (well, okay, only those on Escapist) encapsulates Alien: Isolation and Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor.

Something I wasn't aware of is Dead State that we've discussed previously had a Kickstarter campaign that entirely slipped me by (in all fairness, it was in 2012), and that the main creator is someone from Trokia who worked on Vampire. Here's a recent interview. From the interview, we can expect a very nice RPG style survival horror, but also I find it disheartening that they had a new World of Darkness setting in the pipelines that they never capitalised on (the new pen and paper World of Darkness was a complete reboot, one that did away with the bombastic nature of the original and focussed of the suffocating horror of a city as a gilded cage - vampires who like to lay down roots and not travel thereby enforcing claustrophobia and infighting - with a focus on five equally likable factions as opposed to two or three diametric opposites).

I feel no doubt that a new World of Darkness RPG at that stage (they've now switched back to the old canonical "bombastic story-lines" approach to make money instead of the great almost-blank canvas they provided people with before, with a significant drop off in writing standards) would have been a complete knock out RPG.

To round this off with a good point: Dead State, as we've all said for a while, will be very very good - and is definitely progressing towards release.

 

I've run and played in a longstanding (approx. 20 years) parlor larp of Vampire: the Requiem. nWoD is great, but doesn't actually convince anybody to stay in town. The only thing enforcing that is some flavour in the books.

A couple of our players randomly had their characters fly to Monte Cristo one time. For absolutely no reason. They just felt like it. It wasn't even something they played out. They used up all of their between-game actions to do it, with the reward being a paragraph-long e-mail summing up what a fun time they had.

Claustrophobia, pfft.

 

Anyone played Dragon Age: Inquisition yet?

 

From what I'm reading, it's getting the typical breathless praise from critics while getting shredded by user reviews. The Metacritic page for the PC version is pretty telling. Critics: 25 positive reviews, 2 mixed, 0 negative, aggregate score of 87/100. User reviews: 177 positive, 40 mixed, 195 negative, aggregate score of 5.4/10.

Apparently it is nigh unplayable on PC due to performance issues and laughably bad user interface. As to gameplay, some are going so far as to call it worse than DA2, and that's about as harsh an insult as you can give a game IMO. Sounds like a lousy port of a mediocre console game.

 

My girlfriend is a big Dragon Age fan. She plays it on the Xbox 360 and claims it's great.

 

I figured I would wait before getting this one given EA's last three releases that basically fucked me over. Looks like I will probably wait till the complete edition.

By fucked over I really mean disappointed.

 

I, too, have heard nothing but bad word-of-mouth from friends about the new Dragon Age. I had planned on skipping it.

 

I have heard many a great things about the DA:I game. I looks amazing. But I have heard a lot about bugs and crashes some I think I´m gonna give it some time to patch it before I pick it up.

 

I'm playing Far Cry 4, at the moment. The landscape is breathtaking, and the soundtrack is incredible; you sometimes forget that you're playing an action game.

 

I would be playing FC4, but I didn't realize it was releasing so soon, and I blew my gaming budget on CoD:AW. So no more full-price games for a while.

 

Playing CoD: AW right now. Didn't bother with the campaign even though the game "strongly suggested" I play it before getting into Multiplayer, but that's because I bought a digital copy on the 360 and downloaded 7.4 gigs of platforming FPS goodness only to find out I have to download the campaign separately to the tune of 4 more gigabytes. I think that's really dumb. Still, it was partly developed by fps giant Raven Software and ends up playing pretty smoothly.

Gameplay wise, I'm finding it close enough to earlier installments to be familiar, while also sufficiently different in a way that makes it exciting.

I've also been playing Minecraft with my nephew a few times a week online. It's just about as difficult as you can imagine to cooperatively build something with a 6 year old.

 

My brother bought Inquisition so I got a chance to try it out. While certainly not unplayable it's got a hell of a lot of defects. Here are my major complaints consolidated into a few points.

• Horrendous UI - That shit is consolized like a motherfucker. Where everything in Origins was just one click away (even going from inventory to stats or quests) in Inquisition there are about 3-4 if you want to go from switching your gloves to switching your boots. If it's the same character that is...
• Clunky Gameplay (but especially combat)
  1. You can now only point-and-click move using the tactical camera (which thankfully is brought back) meaning if you want to re-position a character in combat you either have to switch camera mode or control it yourself.
  2. You no longer continue to attack a target you've selected, you have to keep clicking or hold down the left mousebutton to make continuous attacks.
  3. They've added an about 3-4 seconds looting animation that plays whenever you pick something up. It gets old really fast. You also have to manually position yourself next to the chest/corpse/plant you want to loot; otherwise the command won't work and your character just stands still like a buffoon. This is especially jarring considering one of the most popular mods to DA:O was an autoloot function.
  4. And those goddamn fade rifts you have to close. Imagine obligatory oblivion gates that you can't sneak through. Admittedly, they're a lot shorter (there's just continually spawning enemies your party have to fight while the PC closes the gate using their special ability) but that's a minor relief since there are a lot more of them.
• Tons of stuff to do - none of it interesting - They deserve a little credit for creating a really big and beautiful world. In fact they deserve a lot of credit. But they've just haven't been very good at filling it with interesting stuff. Side quests are very poor almost "MMO/hack-'n-slashish". Find ten pieces of wood, find twenty flowers, kill fifty bandits, collect a billion grains of sand (yes, that one I stole). There's almost nothing else to it. Often the items you have to gather and the bandits you have to slay are scattered all over and it makes exploration, something that should be fun (especially in a game as pretty as this), an absolute chore. It's awful. There are also too many enemies in the wilderness; you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a bandit.
• No level scaling - I realize that I must come off as a heretic to complain about something like this. It sounds great, but all it means is that you must do at least half of the boring side quests.

With all these complaints the game must sound irredeemable. It's not. The main quests seem decent, the characters are talkative and fun, the dialogue is adequate (although I dislike the wheel), and my god it's pretty! PRETTY! Also, something that might seem minor but is absolutely fantastic: There are no loading periods! I mean of course there are loading when you travel from one city to another and the map changes entirely, but each region is one entire map. There are no cave maps, no cabins that are detached from the world as in previous installments (and indeed, as in most other games); it's all part of one big map. So there is no magical impervious cave gate, you can stand outside and toss in fireballs. And the caves are really dark and looks real damp. I can't stress this enough; everything looks great in game - much better than promotional materials.

All in all, I'd say it's lots of surface and little depth. Still, the surface is so great that you really can force yourself to forget the flaws. Actually, you're better off comparing it to Skyrim than Origins. It's a large world (although the early maps are a bit railroaded) with lots of exploration. It's prettier than Skyrim and the UI is just as bad. The story seems to be better and the characters are definitively better. And the dragons are cooler...

 

I had problems of some weird reason that prevented me from passing the first video for two days. After I solved that (not sure how, did a ton of stuff at the same time) I have had no problems. While I can agree with Ruda on all the above I just have to say , DRAGONS. Whatever I thought about the game, the moment I met my first dragon I fell in love with the game. While this might pass, the Dragons really feel like Dragons, not high level mob in the shape of a dragon.

 

I just ordered a new video card, and Farcry 4 is included for free. So I'll be sure to share some thoughts on the game when it arrives.

 

Speaking of which, I finally got around to finishing Far Cry 4 two days ago. It was a fantastic game, although I'm a little embarrassed that I spent over forty hours in total playing it.

 

FC4 was a lot of fun, though I found the story and setting slightly less compelling than that of FC3. The gameplay is quite similar to FC3, with enough improvements and additions to keep it interesting. There are still plenty of frustrating moments, like when you're stalking through the underbrush to stealthily eliminate an enemy and you're suddenly ambushed yourself by an angry rhinoceros.

I'm now playing Divinity: Original Sin, about halfway through I think. Fun game, though I wouldn't put it on the level of the great story-driven classics like Baldur's Gate, Arcanum, etc. I would say it's more like a newer, prettier Might and Magic VI/VII. It is unashamedly cheesy, the story is pretty weak, and the characters are instantly forgettable. But it does enough to keep you interested while you fight and loot your way to higher stats. Certain aspects of gameplay could stand to be more fluid, and the UI and camera will cause you some headaches, but for the most part it plays well. The loot system isn't very exciting, and the crafting system would be better if the UI was better. You start the game with two main characters, and I went with two mages. Character generation and progression are totally free form, so there's no class restrictions or anything. The magic system is fairly simplistic: four elemental schools, and witchcraft thrown in as a wild card of sorts. Combat is turn based.

Bottom line: good game, but not life changing. Would recommend.