What game are you playing right now? #3

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Playing TripleA. It's a revamped version of Axis and Allies. Actually like 25 games in one. Excellent Board game play for any who like War Games.

 

@Splunge It's a similar site called Hot Mist.

And by the way, Crap! There I go again, making poor financial decisions.

 

Well, if it's been a long time since you last played it (I know it's been for me), it feels like a new game, mingled with some good old fashioned nostalgia

 

Been trying Path of Exile on steam with friends LAN party.


pros:
1) Totally intutive and massive skill tree shared by ALL classes (Althoug they start in different areas of the map. I have a necromancer, rogue tank who converts evasion to armor, and relies on single target dps and a frost wall spell to protect my fellow adventureres from 3 sides (minions, wall and me). Anything is possible. the creativity is unparralelled compared to any other lvl- game I've seen. (and I am old ).

2) All active skills you use are from gems you find and put in sockets in items. So any toon can have any skills combos they like, some gems are support gems which alters the output of active skills. Again unparralelled creativity here. This building block of skills reminds me of other games, but never implemented this cleverly.

3) healing pots/mana pots are constant items that replenish with kills. They too can be done magicial with special effects.

4) Last but definately not least. The game features no pay to play or any pay to win. The only things you buy are cosmetics, pets or guild related stuff. All items must be found ingame or be crafted. Mostly you find crafting materials that alter basic items into anything you like. one word. Genious.

ladder races: constant ladder races with new toons, with different settings from 2 hours to 3 months. Depending on how you manage in these ladders you gain powerful items to use on your main toon. Good idea, but needs some tweaking.

Cons:
1)Messy storyline. The end boss is like out of the blue, and most of the story is like WTF.

2)Endgame = Grind, so we just play it through the 3 difficulties and call it a day, and wait for expansions. We are not into this ladder thing for more shines without any point. You find rare maps for more endgame content which is a neat feature but not sustainable.

3) Party interface and Pickup grps interface is rather unpolished.

Give (joint venture) this game's inevitable expansion to a good storyline company and magic will happened.
Many of the elements here are gonna be "mandatory" for many games to come. They are simply great.

for a free game ,this is a good fun 50-70+ hour flick, to challenge your creativity

 

Magpie, can you explain a bit more the improvements of the second Torchlight over the first game?

Been playing Torchlight a bit more and I have to say that it seems a lot more difficult with the warrior than with the rogue or the mage. The barbarian has to wade in close into melee range to do the damage and that means that he gets hit a lot as well. The only way I manage to keep him alive is to have him get all the get health on hit gear. At least that worked for a while.

He's lvl 25 now and if I go into one of those map-scroll-levels, where the monsters are my level (in the story dungeons the monsters are currently around 10 levels below my level, which makes them pretty much a walk in the park - a very violent walk in the park, but still), I can only survive in those dungeons by using an aura that reduces the damage a lot and even then I have to draw the enemies out one by one. Walking into a group is insta-death.

By contrast, my mage - who is a lvl 15 summoner currently - can handle any crowd easily and if the going gets tough, the summons go dying. But I can always summon more so there's no problem and no immediate danger - if I'm careful, at least.

So the warrior tends to die quite a bit because the monsters do lots of melee damage. The rogue uses ranged (pistols or bows) and as such also tends to stay alive more easily.

What I've noticed with the mage, though, is that when monsters manage to get close, it's often really hard to see what is going on and if there's anyone near you. Aiming can be hard too, as you have to click on a monster to hit them, but as such you need to know where to click, which can get a bit hard if you can't see what's going on...

 

Dragon's Dogma, by Capcom, on PS3.

Was given it as a gift. I play offline mostly. I like the idea of creative pawns (NPC assistants) and sharing them online for others to quest with them. Haven't had a chance to do it yet.

A great game in the vein of Oblivion/Dragon Age/WKC and so on.

On the downside far too much running from one end of the map to the other, and I'm a bit disappointed in the variety of weapons and armour. I'm lvl 37 atm. However, there must be a whole bunch of stuff I had not yet explored judging by the outfits the bots (non main Pawns) wear.

I really enjoy the special moves. They are imaginiative and the sound and graphics for them is first class. Like my archer mage fires 11 arrows simultaneously that lock on to individual targets. Now that's cool!

 

Played Torchlight some more, mostly as the mage, and definitely he has an easier time of it than the warrior. The only way I manage to get him killed is if I don't pay enough attention and he attracts too much attention to himself (and it can be very hard to actually see if those blobs of colour around you are your own minions or an enemy).

He is also much less dependent on gear than the warrior. Where the warrior needs his gear to give the best protection, the highest damage and leech just to stay on top of things, the mage just casts his spells and sits back while his minions do all the work. I just put all the magic find gear on him as he doesn't need his gear (bonuses to elemental damage is nice, though, to augment his spells).

I also installed some mods, one which allows me to change the drop rates of normal items vs rare items vs unique/set items. I don't have the patience to grind until I find decent gear. It also allows me to change the increase in price for enchanting. It breaks the game according to some, to me it's more like the easy of use mod.

Aside from this one I also installed a mod that adds several custom classes. Haven't really tried them much, although even from a cursory glance it's apparent that some of them have been made with more attention to detail than others.

 

@ henkie: well, I haven't played warrior-types much in either Torchlight, tbh. Although I do notice that the Berserker in TL2 has life leech built into his skill tree, so that may help. That said, ranged/summoner types having an easier time of it in isometric ARPGs is such a dominant trope of the genre, I can't help but wonder if Blizzard were onto something with the pre-eminence of life/mana leech in D2 v1.09.

But generally, I would sum the improvements as:

• More, better defined classes. Half of TLs skill trees were the same passives, at different level requirements. Those passives now live as spells, and every class has unique skills.
• More variety of locations. OK, they're still not Earth-shatteringly original, but it helps.
• Multiplayer! ARPGs do benefit from a sense of teamwork, whether that's with friends or if you're brave or patient enough to play with randoms.
• Integrated Steam workshop, for hassle-free modding. Yes, Steam may be DRM, but at least it gives you some convenience for its slightly wobbly offline mode. Who can actually play these games without an expanded stash? And why the hell do the developers not just give us shedloads of inventory space to start off with?

 

Thanks for the explanation. Once Torchlight 2 becomes available on GoG (and is on sale), it sounds interesting enough to get.

And as far as I have seen so far some of the custom classes do add life leech for melee characters, so you might be right. I feel that the classes were definitely more balanced in Diablo 2, but then again, they patched that for so many years they should've gotten the balance right even if only by random chance.

 

I finished Crysis:Warhead a couple of days ago. Short, but a lot of fun.

I tried getting back into Far Cry 2 again (I stopped about halfway through about a year ago), but it didn’t take long to remember why I dropped it in the first place. The missions were good, but the travel – long, boring drives interspersed with repetitive re-spawning enemy checkpoints and patrols. Ugh. And how the heck does this game qualify as a sequel? Aside from being a first person shooter, it has absolutely nothing in common with the first game – completely different characters and setting, different style (FC1 wasn’t mission-based), etc. FC2 is as much a sequel to FC1 as Diablo 2 is to Baldur's Gate.

So next up is Fear 2.

 

Elder Scrolls online this weekend. So far it's pretty meh.

 

^
Really? What would you say is missing?

 

Better graphics for one. has a lot of low resolution textures, which makes it look sort of washed out; although I suppose this might get improved upon before release.

It basically plays like a bastardized version of Skyrim. It's the same basic attack manoeuvres (right click block, left click attack, hold for power), and it feels just as clunky (for lack of better word) as it does in Skyrim.

The story hasn't really managed a grab a hold of me either. You just sort of get thrown out there and then told to do whatever you want to (although to be fair I've only played 3 hours or so. it might get better down the line).

I guess you can say I am left with the feeling that if I wanted to play Skyrim, I'd rather play Skyrim, and if I wanted to play an MMORPG, I'd rather play Wow.

 

The Simpsons Tapped Out. I am on level 22. I need more money so I can build the Shuttle to Krustyland.

 

I need to finish my master thesis at the end of this week, so I installed Minecraft!

 

Xenonauts.

Giving the latest stable a go.

 

How are you liking Xenonauts? Been keeping my eye on the development of the game, as it sounds quite interesting and like a game I would enjoy.

---------- Added 1 hours, 59 minutes and 50 seconds later... ----------

I wrote down some of my thoughts on Evolva a while back. Actually, almost exactly a year back.

I actually got stumped on the game not long after I wrote that, due to me dying a lot when fighting a boss. Most levels actually don't have a boss, and the one that I encountered in an earlier level could be dealt with without really having to fight it directly. This one I had to fight face-to-face, which got me in a bit of a spot.

I'm not great at micro-management, not in RTSes and not in quickly switching between geno hunters (the four creatures that you control) and picking the correct weapons, judiciously picking up health for those who need it most. And as it happens, that's what's needed to keep my geno hunters alive and to kill the boss.

Additionally, the typical combat involves me trying to pick off the enemies in small groups and using hit and run tactics. This worked best for me, because my geno hunters tend to get hurt a lot if I just run and gun.

Except for this boss you have to fight inside a small enclosure - which you can get out of if you want, but there's no real point as health is a long way away and this game is of the generation where regeneration didn't exist.

Anyway, tl;dr, long story short: I died a lot fighting boss, stopped playing.

Recently, though, I picked it up again, because I did and do like the game quite a bit. The aesthetic, the gameplay, the upgrade mechanic, I like it. Watching them absorb the flesh of the fallen, incorporate their DNA to make themselves stronger, faster, better, to watch them change appearance as they do so, it all makes me feel like the geno hunters are actually my geno hunters.

So I picked up the game again, tried to fight the boss, and of course died once again. Especially since now any proficiency I had developed in playing the game had gotten rusty. Tried again, died again, then hacked the game to give myself invulnerability and got past the boss.

I feel no shame, I don't play games to frustrate myself. Afterwards I finished the remaining quarter of the game. Still fun to play, and glad I could finish it, because I feel the game deserves it. Even if I cheated to make it happen.

 

Sadly, very little time for gaming in recent months. I still haven't finished by BG2EE runthrough. I also have an Empire Total War runthrough that I haven't finished....

Things ought to slow down... eventually.

 

Personally, I love it. One of the two games I-alpha-funded.
The other being Project Zomboid.

Well, Xeno is how i would have made a new X-Com had I any say in it.
If you ask me, everything fits: Art; Design; UI and Music Sweet 2D and Turn-Based.
Gameplay needs no mentioning...it's X-Com all the way.
Mod and editor support are some of the fringe benefits.

Base-Management is as you would expect.
The X-Com-ish Difficulty is there, and the losses in personnel are mounting witch each mission.
It's a race against time...or rather the Aliens.

This game I made for the X-Com fanbase...who helped fund it on KS. And X-Com is what you basically get.
Don't expect the Average Jo to like it.

If you don't mind waiting, wait for the final release.
Shouldn't be long.

 

I never played X-com, but from what I've seen and heard, it seems like a fun game. Except that the first X-com had a really horrible user interface. In that respect Xenonauts can only be (and hopefully is) an enormous improvement.