i got a bad cold followed by an ear infection so i switched from my lifestyle of playing rhythm games and halo to playing really chill low-spec pc games so i can just lay in bed with my laptop
ftl: really nice menu music, gameplay was easy to pick up and after giving it a few run-throughs i can see how there are tons of different ways to approach the combat. i wish there were more ways to approach other parts of the game, though. i haven’t beaten it yet – i always seem to be pretty dang low on fuel by the time i get to sector 5 or so. i’m trying to learn how to balance “explore lots of places to accumulate hella scrap and make yr ship stronger” vs “hurry to the next sector and don’t waste tons of fuel”
sunless sea: was really hoping for more horror from the writing or the imagery, but i can tell that outright spookiness isn’t what the game is going for. it’s all kinda goofy and 100% up my alley but latching on to the different plotlines you can unveil is pretty neat. i really enjoy the exploration aspect, too – i’ve explored a good chunk of the map, just missing a big chunk in the middle-south and the northeast. the permadeath is the scariest part but after two failed runs i’ve been playing for 5-6 hours on a single captain without too much trouble.
hammerfight: this game is a mess but it has some really satisfying physics! you control this little flying box with a weapon attached to it and you spin around to get momentum and swing yr weapon and hit enemies with it…there’s some weird plot that i’m not paying much attention to, i’m just bashing my way through everything and loving it. one of those games that’s good in short bursts.
morrowind: wow uh so far this is super complex and dense and there’s some fun in that but i dunno if i’m up to the challenge of learning how every system in the game works just to survive. so far i made a sneaky character that got owned in a fight and then i tried making a really charismatic thief that never fought anyone but then i accidentally stole from a chest when i thought no one was around and then there was somebody around and they beat the shit out of me. prob gonna start a more straightforward warrior today as i imagine that’ll be easier to play.
Combat in general just isn’t really Morrowind’s strong suit, and it can be very brutal in the early game. One of the goodbad things about it is you can very easily get into a fight you are not really capable of winning.
I would take no shame in lowering the difficulty level, assuming you haven’t already. And I would also suggest you invest well in whatever stat makes you more accurate, because fights generally come down to who can successfully land the most blows.
The point I was trying to make is that balance does generally mean that everything is viable, but, as in the fighting game example, nobody wants to play a game where everyone’s good at the same things. So what balance does not mean is making sure that everything is equally viable in every situation, which is what they tried to do. There was no real variation in how you approached situations based on what weapon you chose, since they all followed the same pattern regardless of if you picked a light weapon or a heavy weapon. (In PvP the differences between weapons and fighting styles was seriously apparent and I was so sad that this was not conveyed in the PvE at all.)
In the original Dark Souls, there’s a tiny handful of ‘good’ weapons. For PvE, Gravelord or Black Knight Anything-Not-UGS is all you need. For PvP it’s katanas, straight swords, or why are you even trying to pvp like this you’re going to get roll-stabbed you dummy. Fit the setting, but a bit lacking.
can confirm from poking around on the dev forums that there is almost no chance of a stable/near-feature-complete release happening this year, as much as i want one.
there’s a good chance of most of the terrain and environment stuff getting done this year, at least, which is why it’s getting shown off the most. at this point most of what they need are programmers and rigger/animators; content creation like voice acting, music and concept art is a lot easier to crowdsource
Openmw is basically almost completely feature complete now. I cant see any reason to use morroblivion or skywind now that there is a not garbage modern cross platform option that keeps the vanilla experience intact.
A good water shader (it has one, it just mysteriously kills framerates on my computer which can otherwise handle most games at max settings)
Ridiculous view distance
All the bells and whistles one associates with MGE, Morroblivion, etc.
What OpenMW has:
It runs mostly bug free with zero hassle (I have a weird thing where the lighting flickers off occasionally and I see fullbrights of any objects or characters on screen for a moment but that’s the only noticable bug)
by far the best mod management of any Bethesda engine (You can unzip every single mod into a different directory and just have them sorted in the order you want them loaded and they will load sequentially without conflict or overwriting any files from the base game or each other)
Built in UI scaling and truetype fonts
Most of these require at least a little delving into the settings cfg files but they’re cleanly written and straightforward to edit.
It is good Gears of War fanfiction. It’s better then Gears 2, but not as good as Gears or Gears 3.
The controls have been changed. It’s a two gun system like most modern games.
The old ‘check where you’re going’ button is now the grenade quick throw button. : (
The Judge and the Soviet are both entertaining new characters.
The establishment of a group called The Onyx Guard is a really wierd boring story detail that doesn’t go anywhere.
COG trooper Sofia Hendrik is kind of contradicting the original games COGS ARE FASCISTS theme, and definately is treated more MALE GAZE-Y then the ladies in Gears 3.
It does continue the trend of COGS being weird judemental idiots
SHE WAS SLEEPING WITH HER PROF OMG!
RICH PEOPLE HAD SECURITY SYSTEMS, THE BASTARDS!
Is this juvenile political commentary stuff standard in AAA games? I kind of only played Gears.
The game taking place as a reenactment of events got old real fast, but it was interesting that the game gives the player some control over the difficulty of individual sections.
There is a weird section where you storm and then defend a beach.
Gears of War: Normandy
morrowind update: made a new character, cranked it down to easy, started walking to balmora. heard a shout and a wizard falls out of the sky and splats to the ground in front of me and dies. i loot his corpse and he has three “scrolls of icarian flight”. i take them and forget about it. i get lost walking to balmora and find some cool ruins so i explore them. i see some big warrior dude walking around and i go up to see what he’s up to and i try to talk to him and it says “this character is in combat” and i’m like “who is he in combat with?” and then he turns around and slices my face open and takes 3/4 of my health. in a panic, i equip the magic the dead wizard had and cast it and jump. suddenly the map disappears beneath me in a fog of draw distance. a couple of seconds later i land in the ocean and it is thunderstorming and i am currently alone in the ocean very far off-shore
i can’t put too much stock into the “vanilla experience” outside of critical re-evaluation. i have to put a lot of caveats on that, obviously, but i would enjoy coming back to that world with current-(or last)-gen textures and world geometry, and maybe even game mechanics that didn’t tell me to stand in front of a bunch of rats for 5 minutes to increase my Armor skill
using an engine that isn’t tied to bethesda is a really good long-term choice though
I’m in favor of modding in better mechanics where available while still allowing for the mechanics that make Morrowind distinctively entertaining (I will never use a rebalance mod that ‘fixes’ Alchemy or spellmaking or basically anything about the magic system because how absurdly broken it is is metanarratively part of the point of the game)
All the later Elder Scrolls games still have the same use-based skill advancement system that doesn’t work well in Morrowind, so I don’t know what you can possibly gain from using one of those engine ports. Skywind, for all that I can tell, would play basically like Morrowind sans exploits (also known as Morrowind but with only the boring parts of the mechanics left)
To be fair, there’s already loads of graphical asset mods that basically do bring Morrowind textures and such up to about last gen levels or close to it. In some cases it’s not even a matter of resolution or anything but just plain looking better, some of MW’s default stuff does seem a bit sloppy, probably in part due to having to create so much content. Of course, some of the mods are the lame “up resolution add noise filters” variety too.
Although personally I like a lot of the default stuff, particularly the the Hlaalu and Redoran buildings. Character/clothing models and textures are probably the main thing that I basically have to replace no matter what, especially since they go hand in hand with mods that increase the visual variety in NPCs.
just installed and played a bit of OpenMW on here. this is great, it really does work simply/well (I just booted up wine steam to install the game and then pointed the native launcher at the game asset directory), we’re talking like Ur-Quan Masters level of preserving a classic.
anybody feel like listing some recommended mods? it’s been years, I’m not up on this stuff. feel free to do it in another thread. I need to figure out UI scaling too but I’ll get to that later.
The Steam Lunar Corporate Appropriation Sale has rekindled my love for Helldivers and spreading managed democracy throughout the universe. Appropriately, the first multiplayer game I joined, we set off a bomb and all three of us preceded to run in opposite directions, trapping us on the screen edges and killing all of us.
I liked helldivers enough when I got it (I played it and diablo 3 with a Dualshock, a Dualshock 2, a Dualshock 3, and a Dualshock 4 simultaneously on my PS3, which was kind of cool; the first two were USB-dongled and the last two connected wirelessly), but it still doesn’t really seem like an improvement on magicka – the game progression isn’t that interesting and it’s not quite as zany in the first place.
I always imagined helldivers as a step sideways as opposed to forward when compared with magicka – it’s definitely less zany, but helldivers seemed to me an interpretation of objective-based co-op that removed all of the failsafes other co-op games usually have
the ability to easily kill your teammates isn’t used as an impetus for interesting play so much as a way to force skillful play out of players in ways that don’t directly involve the enemies. that’s what I think makes helldivers so great! being really skilled at helldivers is just as much about not screwing over your team as it is about dealing with challenges brought about by the enemies themselves
the fact that they managed to make a game that ALSO has room for dynamic situations with its procedurally generated missions is even cooler
so to me the progression curve is more about the players’ ability to contribute to a successful mission whether that be through personal skill or through the equipment/abilities unlocked. it’s a lot more nebulous than other progression curves
helldivers is basically the e-sports version of magicka oh god what have I done
I usually play this with a dedicated group though so that might be altering my opinions