What game are you playing right now? #3

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Grid, if anything at all. Played Robin Hood a while ago, the Commandos clone.

 

Almost done my first run through Torchlight 2 (just have the final boss left). I'll probably do another un next, but I need to decide what to do - existing character on NG+, new character, or try out Synergies mod. I think I'll leave Synergies for later. I'm leaning towards a new character.

And thank god for bagmod - hauling stuff back to town every 5 minutes to sell it or put into stash was getting tedious.

 

How's Sheets and Filings 57: The Mad Deadline going, Splunge?

 

I'm playing Dishonored and BG2ee both are good so far

 

My approach is different. I play games for fun - if there is something annoying about the vanilla game that is interfering with my fun, and there is a mod to eliminate the annoyance, I have no problem installing that mod during my initial run-through. I see no reason to suffer through something I don't enjoy in a game just for the sake of, well... I'm not sure what it's for the sake of. After all, it's just a game.

Anyway, that's enough pulpit-pounding from me. I decided to play an embermage in Torchlight 2. I think I might install Synergies - with the items I'm able to use from the shared stash in my first run, the game is just too easy.

 

In the case of NWN2 there might be some background to the NPCs that you might miss, I don't know how well they're written. My main issue with NWN2 is the controls, it just never seems to work the way I would like it to.

As for mods, some games just need it. Like extra stashes in Torchlight, or a complete GUI make-over in Oblivion (and some tweaks on the leveled master list, and some hide out mods, and... well, you get the point). I wouldn't play ToEE without the Co8 mod either, nor do I think you'd get a much altered game experience by installing EoU and G3fixes/Baldurdash for BG2.

Started up a skirmish game in Supreme Commander the other night. Still a great game and one of the few RTSs that I still enjoy playing. I'm not good at RTSs, but I do like a bit of base building from time to time. I especially like to hijack engineers from all of the other factions on the map and that way give myself all the building options offered by all the factions. It's great fun. And wholly overpowered. But that's part of the fun

Also with regards to NWN2 controls: If you're going to implement a top-down/isometric view, do it like in Supreme Commander.

 

Ah, I see. My comments were more for the situation where you can install mods mid-game. That doesn't appear to be the case in your situation so yeah, if I was far enough into the game, I'd probably just carry on as well.

Yep, in TL2, Bagmod (or something similar) is a definite "must".

 

Controls and AI are the Prime-Evils of NWN2. TonyK AI mod bolsters NWN2 a great deal in that department.
Fine tuning them for each Companion might take time but it works.
Not to mention the smarter spell/item/skills usage.
It also adds auto-pause per rounds and is as helpful and TB as it gets.

The controls is something you have to suffer though.

 

And talking about games that we mod, I'm currently (re-)playing Morrowind. I think it's a few years after the "sweet spot": few new mods appear, but some of the older ones seems to have disappeared from the net. Maybe people aren't playing it anymore =/. (The IE games may be here as well, although the EE releases might keep people interested a while yet.)

In my book, essential mods include something to hide the attribute multipliers - and preferably the entire leveling screen, some of the fixes in the Morrowind Code Patch, and some fix for the cliff racers.

 

Morrowind is not a game that needs mods, only a hide-out is what I would consider a must. But there are a lot of great mods out there and the game does benefit from them hugely.

And on the topic of having lots of unplayed game, I started a game of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time a week or so back since it was still on that list. It has a good atmosphere, likeable characters that are quite unlike the action heroes and girls that are so prevalent nowadays. But the controls are rather finicky and after a while I just get really tired of all the jumping puzzles. There's a reason I don't like platforming games - I'm not very good at them.

 

I generally feel the same way about platformers. And in the case of PoP:SoT, what did me in eventually was the automatically-shifting (and uncontrollable) camera angles - I found that a lot of times during fights, my view would end up getting obstructed by pillars or other items in the environment and I'd end up losing the battle because I could see what I was doing. IIRC, there was one particularly confined area that became exceedingly frustrating because I kept dying, and I gave up. I was kind of disappointed because, as you say, the atmosphere was good and the story was interesting, but it just wasn't worth the aggravation.

 

The camera movement in this case falls under the category controls for me, as it makes the controls rather harder to use in some cases.

 

I played the original Apple II version at a friend's house. I never could beat it, but I did watch him do so.
Having played the original, which was essentially one big jumping puzzle maze after another, it strikes me as odd that somebody who dislikes platform games would buy something called Prince of Persia, given that it was for many years considered one of the finest in the genre. Then again, it's possible that you wouldn't remember the original as it was released between 25 and 30 years ago.

I too am not into platform games or action games. I haven't owned a joystick, game pad, or similar device for any computer I've owned since my Apple IIGS. The Windows 98SE system I got in '99 lacked a port to hook up the "IBM" side of my Kraft III "Apple/IBM" joystick. Although I do admit I did enjoy some of the Megaman games on the Gameboy (and NES at friend's houses), and Super Mario Land I and II back in the day.

 

I'd heard about the good story and characters, so got curious about it. I've played the original one as well, though I never did finish that. The 3D ones look completely different than the original, and I expected perhaps somewhat more different gameplay as well, I suppose. Oh well, live and learn.

I got it on a deal so it's not that bad. The soundtrack that I got with the GoG version is pretty good as well.

 

Got Jade Empire on GoG summer sale, and decided to start another play through, since my previous one was years back.

I always thought it was a good game, but playing it again after all this time, it still surprised me how good it still is. It does a great job of pulling me into the story. You start out with the simple desire to rescue/avenge your master, but somewhere along the lines, the job transforms into rescueing the empire and then even the world (well in as far as the eastern mythos is concerned, anyway). And it does so quite naturally, without any obvious deus ex machina. Wonderful example of good story telling.

There's lots of conversation, sometimes it seems to me a bit too much, as I suspect nearly half of my play time was spent going through conversation.

While fed-ex quests sometimes seem to be the bread and butter for side quests in RPGs (and in the case of some RPGs, also the main quests - I'm looking at you, TES games), there's actually not that many like that in Jade Empire. And those that are, are usually of the variety to go talk to person x, but at least the conversation tends to be interesting and they don't send you running to and fro, going from one NPC to the next, just talk to the one guy, then if you need to go back, there's usually the option to just teleport there (totally unlike a lot of quests in the TES games). No unnecessary padding.

On the first playthrough, I found the combat to be rather clunky. You start with the martial style, but they don't flow very well. Always the same three light hits or the single hard hit, it gets boring after a while. Another problem is that hits push your opponents back, but depending on the style, you don't move much forward. In some cases you just stay in the same place. This means that usually a couple of hits in the three hit light combo miss, or even all of them.

This problem stays throughout the entire game, though at least you'll get more styles to swap between as you progress through the game. Some not so useful, some quite broken. On the whole, it works fairly well, though it's only once you get to chapter 3, more or less halfway through the game, that your options really open up.

A lot of the NPCs you meet will tell you of how you are stronger than any or most they've seen so far, and this is well mirrorred in the combat itself, where you generally feel stronger than your opponents (though there are many more opponents, evening things out somewhat, of course). It's nice that it's balanced so well, a lot of games either make you feel like there was no progress at all, or they make no reference to it in the game world itself (through NPCs).

The companions are well written and occasionally surprised me by referencing something I said earlier, even though it was only a single option to pick from. Bioware seems to have made it their default in later games to have exactly three love talks with which to complete the romance by the end of the game, but Jade Empire is still of the old school. And it appears fairly easy to break one of the romances if you respond neutrally at the wrong moment. There's no obvious wrong answer, though the right answer is usually quite blatant.

The alignment system works fairly well, though it hardly matters for getting the good or bad ending. You can be 100% good by the end of the game and with one decision you become completely bad. Or vice versa. But at least the evil choices in the game are not stupidly evil - just evil for the sake of evil - but mostly revolve around the idea that everyone should be strong enough to conquer their own problems.

Even the good options seem not too sickeningly good. At least I can imagine my character to be a Zen master or devout Buddhist who wants nothing in return for some help. It seems to mesh better for me that the standard good options in the standard fantasy setting.

What I remembered about making Jade Empire was mostly that the setting it had was a strong departure from the so-called standard-fantasy-setting. It makes it different, but it's not what makes it a great game, that comes from the many other aspects.