GAMES!

I'll never return to that mansion.

 

Having just bought it from GOG, I think the Ocean House sound restoration is actually in the basic patch there (my own mac is currently broken, so I'll have to wait to test it out). So yeah, enjoy the ruined ambience if you buy it from GOG - you're probably just better off getting from Steam. I'll go whine on their forums about it to see if there's way to remove the shitty restored sound effects.

 

Did I tell you all about AErena before? Search results suggest not. It shut down its servers recently.

It was a turn-based online-only strategy game set in an Aetherpunk world. It's reward structure was similar to Hearthstone.

Be sure you let me know how cool this story was.

 

Was pretty cool. I think dragons would of been overkill.

 

I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but you could have told us about this game before the servers shut down.

 

I'm sure the folks at Cliffhanger Games would echo this sentiment. No doubt we could have kept the servers afloat, lively bunch that we are. Those blokes are also responsible for Shadowrun Chronicles so be sure to check that out if you hate to see online multiplayer games go the way of the dodo.
You all may check out Planets Under Attack. I have it, haven't played it, and I can't recommend it, but it is also a multiplayer game with a steampunk setting. The gameplay appears to be on the cosmic scale so I don't know how much the steampunk actually contributes to the experience.

 

Too little too late.

 

Apparently, Bethesda is working on a couple new titles similar in size and scope to Fallout or Skyrim. Maybe Zanza will finally get his wish of a Bethesda-made Arcanum 2.

 

Fallout 4 sorta destroyed the hope that Bethesda can make the kind of games I like playing.

 

I would hope for many things, but Bethesda touching the Arcanum IP isn't on that list.

Anyone touched AoE2 HD or AoM HD? I'm tempted to buy the bundle off Steam, but fear I'll disappear into them forever... more so than I have recently been with replays of NWN2. However, that, "hm, maybe my next character should be a druid" moment made me realize it was time to put down the keyboard, and find something else to do, less I truly commit a sin, and not just think one.

 

I've played AoE2 HD and enjoyed it quite a bit. It does show it's age compared to modern RTS games mostly in form of quality of life issues, but the core game is still as awesome as ever.

 

Aoe2 HD is nice. They updated it a bit, one can actuually go MP if one would wish *preferably with friends) and the released a new expansion. Don't know about that one though.

 

OMG you guys, did you see that Breeding Season has been abandoned? Now it will never make it out of alpha!

This is the end of an era...

...for my penis.

 

Yeah, Adam and Gray told me all about that. You'll have to yiff and fap to something else.

I just finished Mars: War Logs and I recommend it. It is a third-person action RPG set on Mars and I think the world building is really good. The sci-fi setting is a welcome departure from the fantasy settings that dominate RPGs, so while I appreciate that, I hear this developer's fantasy-set games are stronger so I'll check them out as well. People complain about the combat, but apart from the typical camera issues, I rather looked forward to fights and testing my character build. The Drill Worm is a genuinely terrifying creation and kudos to the developers for dreaming it up and putting it in a game. Downsides include unintentionally creepy character models and stroke victim quality voice acting. The Technomancer was recently released and is set in the same world.

 

Bethesda seems to have moved away from classic RPG mechanics and more towards softer-core, broad-spectrum simplified mechanics that add at least a skin-layer depth to adventuring. (not saying that's wrong, mind, it's just less RPG and more Action Adventure, and heck, it's still enjoyable)

It works though, they can still be alright to play, I loved FO1/2 by Interplay, and loved Bethesda's FO3 and the co-op with Obsidian's New Vegas, (NV being my favourite of the newer ones), but FO4 is very much /NOT/ a successor to Vegas in my opinion, it lacks a certain combination of characterful-ness, world/narrative consequence (like the older titles had) and some hard-to-describe sense of progression I liked more, for some reason.

The more Bethesda simplify/reduce-complexity in their games, I tend to get more bored of them really,
I wonder, "why is this not a linear game?" when the choices I could make in an open world are so limited to "be a hero"
Dumbest thing is, I like being a hero, I like making "for the greater good" choices in games, I guess those lose meaning when it's so common or intended

I loved how in Arcanum, there was always these options or temptations of being a complete douchebag to the world's inhabitants,
Same goes for older Fallout games I guess, FO3 and FO4 follow a very ElderScrolls "be the hero" railroad as far as progression goes, you kinda
/can't/ be the bad guy, you can't insult people and outright refuse, or betray anyone, they just sort of say "maybe later you'll do my quest, protagonist"
It's even worse when you top that off with essential characters

Virgil has how much dialogue and whatever, character writing, and so on, and it's possible to kill him or abandon him within a few minutes of play?
That's a true player choice

 

Yeah Fallout 4 sucked balls. What got me, as I mentioned earlier in the thread, is the limitless character levelling. What's the point in a role-playing game where you don't play a role because in the end your skill set fits every role? It's completely moronic.

The introduction of their survival mode also sucked. I like playing on the hardest difficulty, and while survival mode is the hardest difficulty it's also coupled to tedious features like no fast travel and limited saving. Those are more immersion/realism features rather than adding difficulty (and I never find crap like that more immersing in the first place - people who are like, "I'm such a pro because I make my character eat three square meals a day and walk everywhere." No, you're just a douchebag), yet Bethesda in their grand wisdom decided to pair two more or less mutually exclusive concepts of realism and difficulty together giving a crap sandwich for everyone.

As you mention, while the be the hero archetype may work for the TES series, which are meant to be high fantasy romps with the focus on adventure - but for a much darker franchise like Fallout that just doesn't work, you need a player character of similar complexity to the setting you're trying to produce.

All that said, I will be throwing my money at the Skyrim Special Edition when it's out on PS4. Skyrim I thought was a vastly stronger game compared to FO4.

 

I never really thought about it that way before..... and you're right. Skyrim was like that too, though less extreme.

 

They patched the ability to role-play into Skyrim eventually. For those who don't know while at first you had to level every skill up to 100 to get all your perk points, with the patches they made it so you could make a skill "legendary" indefinitely (when you get it to level 100, you can make it reset to it's base level liberating all the perk points you put in it). This allowed you to only focus on the skills relevant to your character, so you no longer had to do anything stupid like take heavy armor on your robes-wearing mage.

Further, Skyrim still kept the maximum number of perks set to 80 regardless of how high you level, while FO4 placed no such restriction. While Skyrim in no way had a perfect system, I appreciated the streamlining of the mechanics to make it focussed more on the high fantasy adventure in the game and building a legend for your hero/villian. The Fallout franchise, with its darker tone, needs to have an outward focus on the ramifications of a post-apocalyptic society and so offer a different kind of story and setting driven escapism, but somehow with FO4 (and to a lesser extent, 3) still became an insubstantial adventure romp centring inwardly around an awesome hero doing as they please. Having floppy, over-diluted mechanics just amps up the fact that nothing you do in that game matters.

Ranting about how Fallout 4 sucks aside, I think I'll be set for games for a while. Pillars is now, finally, mostly, bug free (though there are still some semi-significant class specific bugs, unfortunately) so I'm currently plowing into that. Afterwards the remasterings of both the BioShock series and Skyrim will keep me occupied for literal ages. For anyone who hasn't played any of the BioShocks, in terms of offering a meaty dark setting and story like Fallout used to, they are the real deal - with Infinite in particular offering both a story and a setting that rivals semi-decent literature and film, and with enjoyable gameplay thrown on top. I'd strongly recommend it, and for people put off by the whole FPS aspect, I find that fundamentally feels quite different when you're not playing multiplayer.

 

Been playing a lot of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead lately. It's a survival roguelike in which shit hits the fan. Pretty good.