games you played today: winning eleven

[Mikey]

@u_u

the added third wife option negs you constantly

Sold

[villain]

Then don’t play it.

[Tulpa]

@winterk

It’s extremely doofy when some subjects arise, such as its pantheon of gods. Forgotten Realms is built with so much Tolkien in it that it falls apart if you don’t approach some aspects of it with a similarly reverent and mythic tone. Larian have a clear preference for stories with more modern sensibilities, so you can feel the license grating against their work in many places. I feel this game and the recent D&D movie both highlight how moribund this setting has become, and how people mostly don’t know what to do with it other than lampshade it with jokes.

Forgotten realms has always been a boring setting and turning it into a joke is the only thing that can be done to inject some excitement into what is otherwise a derivative pastiche.

Now if only they could have done a full mystara rpg. Still a kitchen sink fantasy setting but brimming with actual ideas

[jujotech]

it was a general observation, i’ve always found locked down qol especially aggravating, more gratuitously predatory

[winterk]

They probably wanted to eventually dig into Spelljammer and Planescape with maybe lil forays into stuff like Ravenloft and Dark Sun but stepping away from the task of making Hasbro’s IP more interesting for them was a respectable move.

[Tulpa]

One thing I noticed about bg3 and the dnd movie is that they both implicitly understood that dnd in general, and the forgotten realms in particular, is not a medieval fantasy setting. They treat the game like a genre pastiche set in a swords and sorcery version of the 20th century instead of some sort of ivanhoe fantasy. DnD characters are more like superheroes than any characters out of fantasy literature. It is this understanding of the implicit genre of the game that enlivens what could have been extremely dull otherwise

[Mr_Mechanical]

@Mikey

Do you have the ice spell?

Yeah I got the ice spell and the staff but I just beat him after 40 minutes of dodging and running around in between rushing in to get a few hits before going back to dodging and running.

Back to the fun part of the game!

[Sykel]

was so sick of boss fights in metroid dread by the end

in the end i dont think its very good. feels hollow and bland, too much boss fight padding, the joy of exploration and discovery just isnt there, everywhere feels the same, there is no atmosphere, so much backtracking for the sake of backtracking

i did like some of the QOL stuff added and actually enjoyed the horror bits a fair bit (even if they were too scripted in places) but thats about it. mediocre at best

[Grandpa]

Finished Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Really, really enjoyed it. I’ve complained about the Spider-Man games being sort of frictionless set piece affairs, and maybe this one isn’t too different, but I think “fun little levels” wins out over “empty open world activities.”

Insomniac…ya gotta find a way to do some more of these…for me…

Edit: Was also really surprised that Kit was voiced by Debra Wilson. I shouldn’t be (she’s versatile, she’s got range!), but it’s just so different from the game roles I’m used to her voicing.

@Sykel

the joy of exploration and discovery just isnt there, everywhere feels the same, there is no atmosphere, so much backtracking for the sake of backtracking

One thing I hated about Dread (and didn’t care for in Fusion, for that matter, but at least there they’ve got a lore explanation for it) is that there’s just no…segue into areas. Super Metroid was so good at blending the edges of areas. You knew what you were coming up on, one way or another.

I spent Dread desperately consulting the map because how the hell am I supposed to remember one bland area from another?

[captainlove]

@Grandpa

Insomniac…ya gotta find a way to do some more of these…for me…

If you have the energy, I recommend some of the older ones. 3, Crack in Time, and Nexus are what I’d suggest. The original is good too but comes before they figured out lock-on and nicer balancing of prices and health.

Avoid the PS4 reboot like the plague

[Grandpa]

I tried to go back to the original via an emulator and woof. You just…you can’t go back, on some of these games.

I never did play 3 (I played the hell out of Going Commando, don’t ask me anything about the plot though). And I’ve got all the PS3 games…I might just, but probably not right away.

[Tuxedo]

Ladybug’s new game Blade Chimera is definitely a « ah man, the map says I’m already 48% through the game » game.

It’s a total audiovisual treat all the way through, probably sets a new standard for pixel art, and the protagonist definitely feels like the ridiculous super bishie Alucard with an autorifle suggested in the trailers. The yokais just crumble

It’s a little thin as a Metroidvania… but less so than their previous game Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth. Level design has also improved (nothing special but Luna Nights and Deedlit had very subpar level design) and there’s more freedom left to the player than expected

QoL is out of control in this one, you can teleport anywhere on the map from anywhere, barring small exceptions. No cost!

I’m almost embarassed to enjoy such an obvious power fantasy, but maybe it’s ok when the protagonist is a middle aged guy with beautiful long flowing silver hair

[winterk]

Actually the best thing in BG3 is the boss fight where the music is basically a Disney villain song by the boss over the dungeon melody you’ve been hearing for the past hour. More stupid shit like that.

[Felix]

yeah I actually feel like the two optional superboss fights that you have to kind of break the game a little to win are them at their absolute best, like the challenge level in the mid-late game isn’t always what it should be to avoid frustration or tedium but they somehow made the squaresoft principle of “leave a couple in there for the real heads” totally sparkle

[Father.Torque]

Swing & roll me

Lohse Song | Divinity: Original Sin 2

[offalynne]

finished the extra stages of fire n ice, fun little game, gone looking for more levels and

i have been played for a fool >:-\

[username]

@Tuxedo

It’s a total audiovisual treat all the way through, probably sets a new standard for pixel art

Wow I stumbled upon the store page for this today when scouting random games and if true they picked the worst screenshots they could as my overall impression of its aesthetic was the color gray.

[tacotaskforce]

I am curious if, somewhere in all the candid video taken of Double Fine, they talk about where they dropped the ball on Costume Quest 2. There’s two fatal flaws in the game, but I can only make a working theory for one of them.

For one the battles are miserably long, and I suspect that is because they prototyped the combat as a tabletop game, and didn’t account for how long animations would drag everything out.

The other problem are the ability cards, which make up the majority of player choice in combat. You can bring 3 cards, which each have different abilities, into a fight, and after you use a card you have to complete 2 more fights to make it usable again. Where this breaks down is that after a fight you can go into your menu and swap your cards on cooldown for new cards. Like battle animations this process also drags the game out, and has very little mechanical value because of how minor card abilities are, but if you aren’t using cards then you’re just pressing the same 3 buttons 3 times in a row every single battle.

I can trivially think up a better system for the cards, which means they only went with what they did because they were out of time. Considering how the current system itself had to be an iteration to solve an issue with with a previous system I would love to know how bad a flaw the card system had to start with.

[Tulpa]

@Felix

like the challenge level in the mid-late game isn’t always what it should be

this is also largely a problem with the total lack of playtesting that D&D 5e had before release. There’s a good reason why larian limited the max level to 12 instead of 20. They should’ve probably limited to level 9. Already at level 12, it is almost impossible to produce a stimulating challenge without totally ignoring the rulebook. The devil boss fight you’re referring to has stats and HP on par with a Tarrasque, the highest challenge rating in the book. And you aren’t just fighting that guy by himself, you’ve got a whole combat puzzle to solve, and its still only a little challenging for a group of level 12 characters.

D&D is a shitty set of rules and Larian performed miracles by making those rules work as well as they did.

[Tuxedo]

@username

Wow I stumbled upon the store page for this today when scouting random games and if true they picked the worst screenshots they could as my overall impression of its aesthetic was the color gray.

There’s great attention to detail and it looks fantastic in motion. They drew all the frames. There’s enough color for me but you do need to have a taste for the Front Mission Gun Hazard j-industrial military look with desks, labs, metallic scaffolding etc.