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Blog Your Current Game

My latest obsession, one of the great games to fail, fail, fail again until you finally learn how to do it, then you can start failing at the next thing and never be bored, Oxygen Not Included. It aggravates me that it took me so long to get this game due to the cartooney graphics. I now love the graphics and animations.

 
I've been spending what little game time I have had the last few days playing No Man's Sky.

Is the game better? Absolutely. But is still has a lot of things that are still weird or broken.

I got my capital ship yesterday to find out that, absurdly, the launch tubes were not sized to fit most of the spacecraft in the game. all of my ships other than the starter craft launches me through the wall and registers a collision on the way out. How does it happen that nobody exchanges design parameters to basic ship hit boxes to make sure the designers give enough room for the launch tube?

It is so polished in some aspects and in other places the elements mesh like they were created by estranged spouses who refused to talk.

All in all the capital ship is a great idea poorly executed. It's great that I can collect 6 separate ships... I now have one ship that is my Go-Bag ship that is full of everything I need to build a quick base on a planet, then I have the high capacity, stripped down ship for space mining and resource gathering, another for combat, and a few just for the added storage space.

The most questionable decision, and one that really has taken up all of my time, is the inclusion of some economy breaking trade goods. I found out about it when I ran a scan on planet pretty early on and it showed a resource "Ancient Bones". I was intrigued and went down to find some. To my suprise the first one I found was worth 150,000u! Even more surprising was that when the scanner showed a burial site, there were as many as 6 to dig up... even more surprising that 150,000u isn't any where near the most valuable. There is a fair chance that you will find older bones that are worth between 300,000u and 850,000u, and a very rare bone that is worth 900,000u to 3,000,000u! In a few hours of digging, selling and digging more and I had 30,000,000u and I can pretty much buy whatever I want.

I built a base on that planet along with a teleporter and I now rarely fly anywhere other than around this gold mine of a planet since I can now teleport to any space station I have visited. The capital ship has become more of a nuisance given that it has relatively small storage and you can't really access it when you are ... well, anywhere but on the capital ship. Given the option I'd rather my purpose-built spaceship method. Granted, that isn't possible without the docking bays in the capital ship.

Anyway, the game scratches the mining itch that I developed long ago in WoW, so I will just get stickin' rich digging up and selling old bones.
 

I found two various ancient treasures early on the new game I started, selling for over 1,000,000 units each, and bought a nice C class multi-tool with enough slots for everything I need till I find a really nice A class.

I wasn't looking for those ancient sites, found four of them. Only the two out of four paying nicely. Maybe I should look more? I just got my warp blueprints, still early in this new game.
 

The ancient treasures planets are apparently the most lucrative, ancient bones being the second most lucrative. The only down side to the ancient treasures planets is that the ancient treasures can spawn protection drones when you start chipping at its locking mechanisms.

If you remember where you found them, I'd suggest building a base on it with a teleporter. Fly around and occasionally jump out and do an F scan of the horizon.
 

I'm still on the first solar system, and I have only been attacked by sentinels at operations centers and manufacturing facilities.

I may have recorded the coordinates.
 
Lord of Planar said:
I'm still on the first solar system, and I have only been attacked by sentinels at operations centers and manufacturing facilities.

I may have recorded the coordinates.
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Oh, I mean if you remember the solar system. If you are still in that solar system then you can scan using the "F" key and look for yellow shield/sound wave looking icons, those are the valuable trade goods, bones or alien relics... on your planet it would be relics. Keep digging them up until your ship and exosuit are full then go sell them. Repeat until you are rich.
 
I've been sinking a LOT of time into Star Traders: Frontiers, though I wasn't familiar with the franchise before.

It's turn-based, sandbox space captain sim. You whistle up a ship and crew, and then you're left to you own devices in an adventure that spans a couple centuries of game time (space travel extends your life, but not due to time dilation.) The world can be the default layout, or you can randomly generate a new universe of your own.

Apart from managing and customizing the ship, there's a variety of multi stage missions involving ship to ship combat, close combat between your crews or the variety of card-based minigames when you need to patrol, explore, block, or spy, and your crews skill directly impact the outcome. Getting your crew butchered by aliens is a distinct possibility.

There are storyline missions you can take or leave. You can thrive as a merchant, diplomat, mercenary, spy, and more or any combination of them at the same time. In addition to your captain, you are in control of your entire crew (20-60 members drawn from 30-40 character classes) and can fire/hire and guide their training to produce the desired mix of skills in your crew. Run the crew wrong, and they'll start deserting.

There is a series of eras that occur over the decades, with rises and falls of governments, plagues, invasions, etc. In each, you can become instrumental in changing things if you want. There's apparently a massive backstory, but I can't get into it, myself.

There's also a brutal diplomatic model, where making friends will automatically make their enemies hate you. Being a friend to all factions at the same time is just about impossible. You can win factions over, or pay them off, but until they like you enough to let you refuel your ship, they're perfectly happy stranding you in the backwoods of space, and their people will attack you on sight.

If you've played that sort of thing before, it doesn't have much new compared to others, but it combines the best features of the rest into what for me is the ultimate expression of the genre.

/rant
 

Similar to FTL?
 
Redress said:
Similar to FTL?
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Only on the surface, though I love FTL, also. Beyond the hopping from system to system and random encounters, there's not much similarity. Frontiers is much big and deeper.

It's not an action game, everything is turn-based. It's true sandbox, whereas in FTL you have the overarching mission, in Frontiers there's a variety of optional missions to choose from. Your ships are bigger, with a massive variety of customization. You can even buy a new one if you want. Each member of your much larger crew has a bit of personality and you pick perks for them as they level, and if they don't like how things are going, they'll leave when you hit the next spaceport.

It's the closest thing to an open world space-based RPG on PC I've ever seen. It rewards a variety of play styles. In theory, a captain of a relatively tiny ship\crew can be just as successful as a larger ship with three times the crew, depending on what sort of jobs you want to take.

There's no way to win AFAIK, you just play until you die. They also ramp up the difficultly over time, so eventually the universe will catch up with you.
 
I have continued playing No Man's Sky, trying to earn an honest living. That is hard in a game that seems hell bent on providing endless you alternatives to actually playing the game.

I was fresh off of a run that netted me 25m credits, and was closing in on 100m credits, a price point where the end game ships start to approach affordability. As part of the turn in process I had picked up some data that you can trade in for building blue prints so I was in the multi-player hub just to cash those is.

As I was at the console I saw some messages pop up on my screen that I dutifully ignored because I wasn't there to chat. After finishing my business I saw another pop up "Bruce Jenner gave you a.." and I can't remember what the item was, but he gave me 5 of them. I then checked my chat log and saw that he had given e 10 of them.

... whatever they were, they were worth 18m credits each.

Some rando on the space station gave me 180m credits. I was still in my earning mode, and dreaming of big ships and fancy weapons, so I happily sold them and had all the credits I needed for get an end-game freighter and a spaceship.

And then lost interest in the game.

I'm still playing a bit, going through the motions to find the ships to spend the money on, get them kitted out... but it's not as fun as it was when it was harder.
 
Replaying the Mass Effect trilogy. Overall still pretty solid games by today's standards. Good overall story. FemShep best Shep. (better voice acting by far imo) Paragon this time, last time I played was Renegade. Renegade is pretty hilarious sometimes. Paragon is... well, standard RPG Superman Protagonist. I think the Mass Effect trilogy does this better than most RPGs that try to do this "you can be good or evil" thing. It's essentially impossible to write a satisfactory good and evil story into the same overarching plotline and have it work out, except by making all the good/evil choices ultimately meaningless. Elf Saint and Dwarf Hitler still end up in the exact same dungeon facing down the exact same Big Evil Monster. Mass Effect doesn't go for "good and evil," but more "good soldier vs. loose cannon."

The gameplay was definitely in rough shape for the first one. Who the **** thought driving that stupid tank around mountainous planets with janky-ass physics to chase down meaningless collectibles would be fun? The inventory system is similarly garbage. You're inundated with randomized weapons as loot that have virtually no distinctive qualities between them. Even the damn stats barely differ. So you sort through literally hundreds of assault rifles looking for the one that is slightly better. I did like the unlimited ammo explanation though. I don't know why they reversed that in the other two games. Stopping after every fight to poke around for the Conveniently Universal Ammo Packs is jarring, and I've yet to encounter a game where ammo scrounging is fun.

ME2 and ME3 definitely streamlined things a great deal, and ME3's gameplay is very polished. I think the Reaper Invasion in ME3 was mishandled slightly, though. The game starts with a massive, overwhelming invasion of Earth. Half the planet is on fire before anyone can react. The end of the human race is nigh.... but don't worry you have plenty of time to go **** around with sidequests. Somehow. Also, the entire plot of ME1 became irrelevant. You stopped Sovereign from activating a portal that would summon the Reaper invasion force. Left them trapped out in deep space. This delays them... six months, apparently? (they are shown in the end scene for ME2 and they show up at the start of ME3) If you're generous and give the "two years dead" part to them also, you're still talking under 3 years of a delay for a race of sentient murderbots that are millions of years old.

I think the better option would be for the fleet to be detected at the start of ME3. They're still a long way out, you've got time to gather these resources for the first couple story points. Plenty of political intrigue, various governments aren't accepting this is really a Reaper invasion force. It's just a cluster of heat signatures in deep space! Large, sure, but it could just be remnants of an ancient galaxy that got torn apart in a collision. THEN you do the big set piece with Reapers landing on New York City.

Not sure I'm going to replay Andromeda. Andromeda was clearly rushed out the door. Just didn't capture the magic of the trilogy.
 
I tried playing Titanfall 2 but all the wall running and **** just about pissed me off. I want to shoot and kill things, not run sideways along walls. Sheesh. I deleted the game after 30 minutes. :roll:
 
If I get nothing else of value from Borderlands 3, it will always be appreciated for teaching me that a better term for a sewer is a "Fart Cave".
 
My brief review of Borderlands 3... first the pros and cons:

Pros:

* Same sense of humor. I think it might actually be a bit funnier than the predecessors.
* While hit and miss, the enemy animations and AI seems considerably better
* New intriguing and bizarre weapon attributes, like a gun that allows you to spend the ammo in the clip and drop a turret version of the gun
* The game contains my new favorite class of all time: The Hunter. His pets are very great and I like his one liners on kills "Have fun rotting.."
* The aforementioned "Fart cave"
* Bosses can be very very difficult
* A variety of locations to vary the art style.
* The plot characters are funny and plentiful.
* More of what made Borderlands fun, less of what didn't.
* They have an interesting patch system that will alert you in-game when there is a patch available and can apply it without fully exiting the game.
* Difficulty settings are individual and don't effect teammates... I really don't understand how that works, but it sounds interesting.

Cons:

* No Handsome Jack
* Ammo seems to be even more a scarce commodity than previous games. While it is everywhere, I still run out regularly,
* Some weird omissions at launch like a mouse sensitivity bar for hip fire/walking, but not one for Aim-down-Sight... that one was fixed with an almost immediate patch
* The more smaller maps makes tracking some missions rather tedious,
* While Pandora was all interlocking maps that you come to know, the new system of only one Entry/exit point in rather large maps means a lot more walking to farm bosses.
* the difficulty of the bosses creates a "Cheese it" or Rock/Paper/Scissors paradigm for a lot of boss fights. You have the right element or you lose.



Ok, so the actual game play is very good. Once I was able to set my aim-down-sight as I like it the game was smooth insanity. The Hunter class is just a whole lot of fun. The three skill trees each have a pet and a primary action that are designed to benefit the pet's play style. I settled on the Skag dog who's tree specializes in radiation damage and pet melee. The Skag tree action skill is a teleport that allows you to drop your pet anywhere within eye sight and it causes a grenade size explosion when it arrives. Augments to that action skill give the pet a huge rad aura damage buff. Progressing down the tech tree unlocks more action skill buffs and more advanced pets. My iridium armored, irradiated Skag essentially wins fights by itself right now.

You can really assign any action and any tree's skills to any pet, but some of the actions don't make sense without the associated action buffs. So it is mix-and-match in the same way as there was a DPS tree for Warrior in Classic Wow. :lol:

I'll let you know if I play any of the other classes...

All told it is a good addition to the game. Gearbox seems to know a good thing when they have it and haven't seen the need upend the game style for the sake of being new. It is just good Borderlands but more of it.
 
The oter game I am playing right now... well, "playing" is probably the wrong word, is Madden 20. I've mostly lost interest in the real NFL, but have long wanted a Football game for the PC that allowed you to play GM and just watch the PC play the actual games. You used to be able to do that in 2k NFL titles... but Madden finally has a PC version AND a spectator mode.

I'm still playing around with it to find the level of GM involvement that I want, but I am enjoying the franchise team building mode for the most part.

One interesting thing that has happened, though, is that since Andrew Luck retired, the updated rosters in Madden 20 just dump his toon into the Free Agency market, giving any fantasy GM a free pickup of one of the better QBs in the game. Purists have been editing the Luck character and giving him horrible stats and changing his name so that he is essentially out of the game.... but I am only a man... and I manage the Washington Redskins. :lamo
 
What? Boo! This probably kills my enthusiasm for it. :thumbdown

Though I'll probably play it in the coming months once they get all the bugs sorted out...
 
PoS said:
What? Boo! This probably kills my enthusiasm for it. :thumbdown

Though I'll probably play it in the coming months once they get all the bugs sorted out...
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Well, if it helps, there are really two Handsom Jack-like characters in the game; competing megalomaniacal megacorp CEOs... the CEO of Atlas, and the CEO of one of the new weapons manufacturers in the game, Maliwan. But, while they play a major role in the mid-game narrative, they are not the primary antagonists.
 
Diablo III -

It's not new by a long shot. It's not a new concept. The graphics aren't amazing. The story line is incredibly simplistic. The battles on lower difficulty levels quickly become quickly become little more than an exercise in left click. At higher difficulty levels they become an exercise in patience as all that happens is that the enemies gain more and more HP and more and more elemental resistance. There really isn't much in the way of strategy. If you like solving puzzles then forget about it. There are very few objectives which make the player do more than retrace their steps to find another passage. The game is little more than a dressed up version of the old, OLD ASCII game, Rogue.

So why play the game?

One word, "Loot".

Diablo, as it always has, produces prodigious amounts of loot and there's always a possibility of finding some ultra rare, uber powerful armor or weapon. That's what the game is all about and no other similar game has done it better. You kill and you loot. That's it. You don't really need to think. You don't really need to worry about how to handle a battle. You just need to kill and loot. It works.
 

I think Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, Torchlight 1&2 and the Borderlands 1,2&3 do a better job, really.

I also love Warhammer 40K Martyr, though it really lacks real boss fights, so is really just a pure Mix/Max grinder.

Wolcen, which is approaching release, will also be a very good ARPG Loot-based game... it certain has some rather intense boss fights in the beta.
 

I've played POE (though not in a year or more) and it has a better story but I don't really know that it's a better game overall. Last I played the skill tree was ridiculous and the way that gems or runes or whatever they are that go into weapon and armor sockets didn't seem to have as much impact as they should. The other thing that frustrated me was stupid long load times for getting into the damned game.

I haven't played the others but might check out Borderlands because Steam seems to REALLY want me to get it.
 

Borderlands is a fun FPS take on the loot RPG. They pride themselves on their random weapon generation. Essentially all bonuses on a weapon are tied to in game 3D model items tat are snapped to the weapon when it is generated, so not only are all weapons numerically different, they mostly look different too.

In Borderlands 3, however, that doesn't appear to be the case as the new high tech gear has a bit of sameness to it in appearance... but it appears to be an artistic/narrative choice rather than a laziness choice.

Regarding PoE, the socket system and the skill wheel are pretty much the whole game. You have to pay close attention to gem descriptions to know which gems will work together and which won't. I always felt that the limitations that place on the gem usage was a bad one since I think half the fun of a complex system like that is finding the game breaking combos.
 
I haven't had much time to play lately, so I have been stalled for a while in mid game. The nice thing about Borderlands games, though, is that even when you don't have a lot of time to play you can still put in a productive 15-30 minutes grinding bosses.

Anyway, since respeccing in this game is so very cheap, and since I had just gotten my ass handed to me on a boss that seemed designed to defeat my FL4K pet build, I decide dto start experimenting with the other skill trees. I would respec, jump down to a boss fight, test it, rinse and repeat. It was at that point I specced to the "Fade" tree, which is a tree in FL4K's skills dedicated to stealth.. ish gameplay. The base skill gives you invisibility for a short time, and while stealthed you have a 100% crit chance. The invisibility ends after 3 crits are scored.

But, there is an augment skill that no longer caps the number of crits, but shortens the invisibility time by 50%. So, I was thinking, I am never a shotgun player in any game, ever... but this Fade skill seemed taylor made of shotguns since with no cap on crits, every pellet would crit. My goal was then to start looking for a shotgun with high fire rate, high pellet count, and whatever extra ability seemed a best fit. I settled on a 9 pellet shotgun with a bonus that every crit generates a "ricochet" pellet that then tracks and hits the nearest enemy.

.. and yes, that means that in most boss fights, that closest enemy would be the boss you just shot. So 9 pellets critically hitting the boss then became 18 pellets.

I went back to the boss that had ruined my day the night before and the fight took about 15 seconds. I just ran up to him, faded, emptied the magazine into him, reloaded, and then emptied the magazine into him again. Done.

I'm guessing this combo will be nerfed at some point. It's made the game hilariously easy.

Oh, also, I have a skill in a different tree that is augmented by a class mod, that gives me 1 bullet back on a critical hit 60% of the time, and a shield that adds 1 bullet per shield hit 30% of the time. So in one respec I solved my ammunition problems and, well... my boss fight issues.

The build also is absurd against crowds of mobs too since I can fade, and empty a magazine into the biggest mob is a sea of mobs and every hit on him hits everyone else nearby as well with ricochets. At this point I have gone from hating shotguns to considering equipping every slot with a different elemental shotgun. But then that isn't necessary anymore since they now have weapons that allow you to switch between two elements in the same weapon.

Good times!
 
Planet Zoo went into beta this week. Just saw a video from it, and I might have to buy the deluxe version(which includes beta access) just to OO and AHH over the graphics of the animals.

Edit: Not my screenshot, but...

 
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Hey! Maliwan has always been around! When you absolutely positively need to light someone on fire!
 
What if...? said:
Hey! Maliwan has always been around! When you absolutely positively need to light someone on fire!
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Yeah, I realized that a couple of days ago. It's just been so long since I played Borderlands.
 
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