Games You Played Today Oratorio Tangram

[Felix]

like it is just not at all the equal of dragonfall or original sin or numenera in writing or even in systems. it isn’t terrible and the welsh-y setting is actually a nice choice but it’s pretty literal in its nostalgia and gains nothing from it

I do like what they did with this infinity-engine-in-unity thing graphically – I pretty much love all combinations of 2D + 3D scene rendering, I guess – but numenera made better use of that too

let’s see if I actually want to play it enough to have a save to import into the sequel I guess

I can’t believe the combat isn’t hotkeyed better

[Felix]

picking spells at level up also reminds me significantly of planescape torment in that there’s a bunch of creative-sounding debuffs which I have no reasonable way of telling apart from one another so I’m going blind and my wizard who is characterized worse than the average bioware flack will probably cast whatever the hell he feels like

obsidian are so overrated

[jsnlv]

God, Pillars. I bounced off that game three times despite my excitement for it. I dismissed Wasteland 2 with barely a second thought, but I really wanted to like Pillars, and it killed me a little bit that I just… didn’t.

I still need to give Numenera a try, but after the 1-2 punch of Wasteland 2 and Pillars, I had to step away from the genre for a while.

[jsnlv]

Can’t decide if I might actually have stuck with it longer if you could have kept going with the caravan guard and the wounded merchant from the opening, but I definitely liked them better than the next two recruits you meet.

[Felix]

honestly every other isometric RPG from the past few years apart from those two is fantastic, it’s very aggravating that they had the pedigree

[idiot]

what was the deal with wasteland?

[Felix]

it was no fallout, basically. Lots of bland combat and not much really remarkable about it. Felt like an adequate enough effort at a throwback CRPG, it just happened to coincide with the genre being genuinely interesting again

seriously the difference between this and the new torment is night and day in terms of the quality of the prose, what it does with the scale, the characterization, etc. I’m gonna have to go to bat for that one for as long as I did fight night champion and just cause 3 I bet.

[jsnlv]

To add on to Felix’s response, I’ve read a little bit which suggests that Wasteland 2 is a very uneven game as a consequence of some development woes. It starts real rough—the opening cinematic is live-action video of folks outfitted by your local community theater, or a really talented LARP crew; you’re then thrown unceremoniously into character creation for an arbitrary number of characters. The initial NPCs are functional, but flat, which does not inspire confidence as they appear to be major lore figures from the first game. The map navigation which follows is unintuitive and off-putting.

Again, it’s my understanding that as the game goes on, it improves. It’s got kind of the opposite problem as Pillars of Eternity: where Pillars looks confident and slick, but quickly started to feel hollow, Wasteland 2 felt like it had heart, but lacked the skill to pull anything off. If I’m ever inclined to go back and give either another chance, it’ll be more likely that I revisit Wasteland.

[km]

I beat Pillars not long after its release. You’re not really missing anything. The weird priest guy is maybe a little interesting, as is the cipher, but neither are worth the rest of the game. It wasn’t awful or anything, but if you’re not super into it now you’re not going to be more into it later. There are better ways to spend your time if you’re interested in anything else right now.

[disestablished]

I didn’t care for the combat in Pillars. It just felt like I was doing the same thing, every time on every enemy.

[Tulpa]

This is pretty much correct, but I want to emphasize that the game does a lot of complex things with how the narrative is structured, it’s got more choices and consequences than any of the fallouts but it made the big misstep of announcing its choices and consequences very early on and in a really clumsy way. Fortunately it picks up quite a bit in the second half of the game (the half that was most heavily revised and altered according to player feedback)

Swap Numenera and Wasteland 2 in my estimation compared to felix’s. Numenera I think had horrible writing and nothing at all to merit its praise whereas Wasteland 2 was clumsy but well meaning and eventually became interesting.

[ferrets]

why am i playing this game? i hate it

[loki]

wasteland 2 is the videogame i’ve played that most felt like dnd. though it’s dnd with a shithead dm who is constantly killing your characters

i just played a monkey ball game for the first time. it’s pretty good, and not like a crap little plastic ball in a maze like i expected.

dustforce is okay too, it’s kind of like n+ but with a little bit of combat and also cleaning.

the other night i came to the realisation that the ps vita is probably the best handheld for arcade games (excluding things like the gpd win that can run mame etc.). like on mine i currently have ports of street fighter alpha 3, power stone 1 and 2, strider 1 and 2, last blade 2, super monkey ball, money puzzle exchanger, arcana heart 3 love max, the darkstalkers games and dariusburst chronicle saviors. i’d probably have more too if you could have more than one account on a memory card, since then i’d have access to jp ps1 classics

[parker]

wasteland 3 is going to have a co-op campaign

[Felix]

@Tulpa

Numenera I think had horrible writing and nothing at all to merit its praise

As far as I could tell it was semi-panned most places…

Anyway, the big points I’d make in its favour are:

• like final fantasy 9 relative to the other ones, the individual sentences really sparkle and the script has a ton of personality that doesn’t feel like games writing at all, which is a huge departure from the original

• the main plot arc doesn’t overburden you with lore – conceptually it’s pretty straightforward – but the individual NPCs and the dialogue puzzle trees you encounter now and then contain such oceans within them, it’s really a treat

• the game is very visually distinct and bright and interesting and weird; there are maybe like 30 maps in the whole thing (of which the first town alone spans 5) and they all feel like their own semi-3D matte paintings in a way that threatens not to hang together at all but the dreamlike atmosphere really makes it work

the systems are admittedly kind of bad – there are like 5 non-optional fights in the entire game and you might enjoy 3 of them, and the way that dialogue skill checks are handled isn’t much better – but there’s still the threat of failing encounters purely through a lack of close reading, and the characters are sharp enough that it’s fun to build them up even though you’re trying to avoid having to use their actual combat abilities. I loved it.

[Felix]

also, the UI is consistently thoughtful and deliberate and attractive, which can’t be said about very many unity games. And the “torment” part is so much more understated than the original in terms of the people you meet relative to their dealings with the player, despite the game very elegantly taking on the role of a thematic successor. I think I’m like the only person in the world who thinks it’s way better than the first one in every way.

and it’s so short-but-dense and it’s works so well as an RPG that’s basically an adventure game, much better than it’d have worked if it was actually an adventure game.

[Felix]

To contextualize it a little bit… remember that prayer wheel thing from the fighter mage guy in the original that you could take apart and read to him to level him up? Compared to Numenera, that reads like extremely bland, almost insultingly sketched allegory for his supposed warrior race. Every single NPC in Numenera is more humanized and has had their own depths better drawn than that.

[botagel]

My favorite Discourse feature is the lack of “are you sure you want to do that, idiot” confirmation prompt when you fat-finger the Delete Post button.

[ferrets]

Okay, I take it back. The dungeon mode is pretty fun. I also like Arena way better than the normal playmodes, because it makes drafting a very simple and streamlined process. Still, Hearthstone just feels so uncomfortable.

It’s one of those games where you don’t really see the effects your cards have on the game until several turns after you play them. Every turn is like its own hindsight minigame where I go “well I guess that wasn’t the right card to play” because the entire epithet of Hearthstone is “DPS RACE!!!”

It’s not fun how everything is taking damage and dying at some point or another. It’s anxiety-inducing that card advantage and boardstate aren’t as clear indicators of how the match is swininging as in other games. Everything on the board is losing life constantly which makes nothing feel permanent. Not having the security to just sit quietly while waiting to pull a big counter–or heck, even interrupt cards in general, and the ability to respond directly to your opponent instead of passively by doing what you were going to do anyway–that’s what’s really missing from this game.

Blizzard made this a very clearly intentional design decision, to have most matches come so close to the line. They wanted the game to feel exciting on all levels of play, and the only way they know how to make the game exciting is to have each player’s winstate inch closer and closer. This is so painfully obvious, especially when “control” combos, i.e. massive burst damage or armor (since that’s like, all you can really do in the game), are extremely powerful and intended to be balanced out.

I’ve played a lot of CCGs, I’d like to think. In high school I picked up YGO and Pokemon TCG, and dabbled in Vanguard (what a weird game), and all of them offered unique playstyles and archetypes for me to utilize my own ideas in some way. Now recently I’ve gotten back into MTG and Netrunner, and in each of these games having a lot of board control is a genuine playstyle that can be countered and balanced around, and that’s really fun. Heartstone by design can’t allow for that, and it blows.

Maybe I just haven’t seen any experienced Hearthstone play, and maybe I’d enjoy it if I unlocked more cards, but I shouldn’t have to slog through Blizzard’s horrible play-to-pay lootbox model just to enjoy myself in a card game.

Edit: I’m not trying to pretend as if I have any idea what I’m talking about. I’m just making observations based on first impressions of a game that I kinda?? like

[Bee]

Play Qwent lol