been enjoying this lately. let’s talk about this game which is definitely a lot better than fallout 4
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Parvati is the Hindu goddess of fertility, love, beauty, marriage, children, and devotion; as well as of divine strength and power.
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i don’t seem to be able to easily take screenshots in this game? xbox (beta) doesn’t have the functionality so i guess you’re supposed to use game bar? but i couldn’t figure it out
i still need to finish this but i figured i’d link the bit i wrote about it after the first third or so of the main story
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i’ve gone full pacifist in my playthrough thus far, although i did shoot an explosive barrel next to someone once. i feel like my character thinks that way, and thus it’s fine. she’s a manipulative, smooth-talking thief who abhors combat. she won’t even shoot at the robutts, she’s been letting parvati do all the heavy lifting.
i’ll try and upload all the segments as portions of a let’s play!!! and link them in this thread! there is some hilarious shit in there haha
but yeah i’m only 6-ish hours in, need to play more.
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my only real issue with the game thus far is the inherently hostile marauder faction. it just doesn’t seem necessary in this game. i feel like i’m missing something. maybe the game is missing something. i didn’t like enemies like this in the fallout games, either.
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Parvati is wonderful
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oh, shit, i had been assuming this was bad
I picked this up because everyone said it was a New Vegas spiritual sequel where you fight evil corporations in spaaaace! and i wanted that kind of comfort food game, which is really not usually my thing at all. So far it’s hit the spot. This game is a good cheeseburger from a beloved local staple
i got unreasonably excited when i realized Parvati is Ashly Burch i <3 her
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btw while being semi-competent in 1 kind of weapon is probably a decent idea, i highly encourage speccing for literally anything other than combat. i’m further in now than i was when i made that post and it really doesn’t get much more complex than “shoot a lot” or “slow time and shoot weak points, then let your party clean things up.” a lot of the humor in this is from the ridiculous ways you can talk your way through problems, steal things to just wholesale skip big rooms full of guards, and otherwise scam your way through the galaxy, and you’re gonna miss a lot of the script if you take the quickest and loudest way thru things. it’s a very good han solo simulator, but all your friends are gay and/or have anxiety
also there are real interactions between your NPC pals and everyone else you meet, so it’s actually worth considering who you’re taking with you. they’re not just interchangeable weirdos spewing the same 5 canned lines every couple minutes like bethesda stuff
also also while i haven’t done it, there’s apparently a ton of dialogue hidden behind being a Big Ol Dumbass thru lowering your intelligence at character creation, so if anyone picks this up & feels like being The Space Genious please let me live vicariously thru yr screenshots
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put in another little session last night. finally got the Unreliable running and am currently sitting in orbit. i am shocked at how well this game is keeping my disbelief suspended with all these dialog trees. every conversation has felt off-the-cuff, the choices i’ve made feel like they’ve mattered, there have been so many wonderful dialog options, it feels like most relevant conversations have alternate responses based on your build… it’s just so good
@physical, what did you do with Edgewater and the Botanical Labs? I impulsively routed the power to Adelaide’s band of deserters despite Parvati’s reticence and the writing in this game is so good I want to see how everyone reacts in the other timeline
the writing in Pillars 2 was so far improved that from their earlier work that I would expect this to be worthwhile on that basis alone unless you hate Bethesda fallout gameplay as much as I do
of course I’m livid that everyone played this and not that
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The gunplay in this game is very boring and as stated above luckily can be largely avoided/abbreviated by judicious specialization and reliance on companions. Knowing what I do now I would have even more aggressively focused on non-combat stuff.
Parvati is the only party member I truly became invested in and her questline is the most rewarding. S.A.M. amused me very much, though your mileage may vary. The rest ranged from alright to forgettable. In fact I don’t even remember their names and I only played this shit like 60 days ago.
I think the descriptions of a lot of the consumables are sort of confusing and this lead me to not use them a lot of the time other than in a few emergencies.
Overall, pretty good game, but also I am glad I got it at reduced cost via Xbox Game Pass rather than paying full price for it.
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yeah, i got the immediate and unshakable impression that, of the rootin’, tootin’ and shootin’, only the former 2 are particularly worthwhile
this is why i sell or break down all the guns i get and otherwise just keep feeding rounds into Parvati’s enormous elec-type minigun
i really wish there weren’t just hostile marauders everywhere though. i really, really, really hate that.
urgh
i made the same decision, also somewhat impulsively!
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This is very much a Bethesda style first person wander around and hoover up items/kill trash mobs of bandits action rpg. Ymmv but i like those kinds of games just fine when Bethesda isn’t writing them!
I don’t want to defend the combat necessarily because it’s merely adequate, and i would like it to be better. But it’s adequate. The time dilation mechanic takes the most interesting part of VATS (crippling limbs to basically put status effects on enemies) and hones it, and that’s sorta neat at least
The real meat of the game is definitely that good ol Obsidian fun dialogue with lots of options to be clever and lie and be a shithead. I looove that there’s a Fallout 1+2 style “stupid mode” but i didn’t have the guts to use it. instead i went full standard fallout diplosniper lol (small guns/lockpicks/speech 4 lyfe baybeee)
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see i feel like it’s almost something way fucking better than that and that’s why i’m calling it out. why did they make this decision? is it literally just vestigial shit from bethesda? then that sucks and it should have been removed… or does the game really need that? i don’t think so. i think it’s a failure of imagination.
but idk, maybe it gets worse! i’m not that far in as i said
e: also i can’t really speak on the combat at all other than i’m getting shot at
i don’t have much use for the slow-mo either
I think they knew it was a reasonably-successful template that they could build a game on. I always got the impression that Obsidian is most interested in building worlds & stories atop existing game paradigms; as long as that car goes, that’s as far as their ambitions go.
I could get on with the mediocre combat but the level design was really aggravating me. Putting exactly one treasure chest in every single alley and open-world dead end both aggravates my existing compulsion to poke around and is the worst possible implementation.
Shoutout to the designer who put stuff on the barely-traversable ledge underneath the opening city’s landing pad, though, the only interesting spatial geometry I saw.
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