Video Games: Doing Archaeology With A Shotgun

[TheButcherCrow]

1 minute ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I love playing monsters, but it's a hard win with them. I haven't managed to build up a decent enough Scoia deck for it to be a reliable winner vs difficult opponents. But I've played nearly everyone there is to play.

BTW is there a lot more Gwent to be played (and cards to collect) in the DLC content? I haven't decided whether to get the DLC yet but if there is plenty of Gwent to be had I think I might be sold.

For Online Gwent they need to have a lot more cards, and they should make decks have a 30 card minimum so that you are't just staking your opening hand with OP cards. But it would be fun.

Too much luck involved with the monster deck for me, if all your best pull cards are in your initial draw, you are basically boned.  

 

Tbh, I haven't played the DLC myself.

 

Online gwent wouldn't work exactly as it is but I'm remembering the bug-fighting (insectrons) from Rogue Galaxy.  They had a great feature where your buddy could load their mem card into slot 2 and you could battle your bugs.  Something like that might work, ie it's local player but your friends can play with their own gwent deck registered against their psn/xboxlive id.  That might be do-able.

[MerenthaClone]

Monster decks are easy as shit to beat: Villentretenmerth.  Oh, it's next round?  Cool, I'm medic'ing him back and frying all of your dudes again. And then i am decoying him and doing it again because you dont havr enough soies to match me and youve ran out of cards three turns ago.  And Nilf's strength is the tempo control and card control, so they can just lose a round to the Monsters/Scoiatiel decks without flinching, since they're probably at a huge card deficit. Yeah, NR can put up huge numbers, but huge numbers don't matter. Scorch will take care of that, or strategically losing a round. But Nilf's ability to delay, forcing NR to decide when to hold, means they can just keep going.  I can play all my Black Archers every round knowing that I can play them again, too, thanks to medics.  And spy supremacy means I can virtually guarantee I'll get scorch, villentretenmerth, and medics out too. Oh, and because I'm less reliant on having bonded paira for high points, I can save my medics for spies/villentretenmerth while NR needs to use them for catapults/Scorch victims.  Nilf plays the long, patient, grinding game while NR wins the battle and loses the war.  I like how the cards echo their actual philosophies in war, too.

 

NR is good too, don't get me wrong, but...Nilf is just overpowered once you get the leader that lets you take a card from the enemy discard pile (ie, one of your spies from last round.  Or a medic, awesome card, or whatever you want.  Steal a catapult so they cannot play that bonded pair again for laughs) . it putting the card in your hand instead of making you play it immediately tips it into the insanely good category.

[TheButcherCrow]

5 hours ago, MerenthaClone said:

Monster decks are easy as shit to beat: Villentretenmerth.  Oh, it's next round?  Cool, I'm medic'ing him back and frying all of your dudes again. And then i am decoying him and doing it again because you dont havr enough soies to match me and youve ran out of cards three turns ago.  And Nilf's strength is the tempo control and card control, so they can just lose a round to the Monsters/Scoiatiel decks without flinching, since they're probably at a huge card deficit. Yeah, NR can put up huge numbers, but huge numbers don't matter. Scorch will take care of that, or strategically losing a round. But Nilf's ability to delay, forcing NR to decide when to hold, means they can just keep going.  I can play all my Black Archers every round knowing that I can play them again, too, thanks to medics.  And spy supremacy means I can virtually guarantee I'll get scorch, villentretenmerth, and medics out too. Oh, and because I'm less reliant on having bonded paira for high points, I can save my medics for spies/villentretenmerth while NR needs to use them for catapults/Scorch victims.  Nilf plays the long, patient, grinding game while NR wins the battle and loses the war.  I like how the cards echo their actual philosophies in war, too.

 

NR is good too, don't get me wrong, but...Nilf is just overpowered once you get the leader that lets you take a card from the enemy discard pile (ie, one of your spies from last round.  Or a medic, awesome card, or whatever you want.  Steal a catapult so they cannot play that bonded pair again for laughs) . it putting the card in your hand instead of making you play it immediately tips it into the insanely good category.

I'd never really thought about that, I most likely have a pretty much full-powered Nilf decked just never played them.  Always found I had no problems with NR as long as I kept my deck small (I said DECK, stop smirking) then I always got a good draw, don't get me wrong, till I'd finished Skellige I would still lose the odd match here and there but I would never lose two in a row, odds of a great draw were too high.  I always found the best way to beat the Nilf's (and pretty much any other deck tbh) is to let them beat themselves, you give them just enough rope to hang themselves where they think they are far enough in front that they pass then for, maybe for 2-3 cards you can win the round.

1-0 right, the opposition now has to win this round, I don't so I can make him play everything he's got and with good NR draw I've got him on toast decoy.  Even if I lose this round, I can do so in a way that cripples him for round 3.

 

edit

just thinking know, "dude, that's because he's playing a Nilf deck like a human, not the shitty AI in the game"  hahaha

[MerenthaClone]

Yeah, basically, a Nilf player should never, ever be ahead in points until the very end and have the ability to delay like crazy.  And they're practically guaranteed to lose a round too.  That's totally fine, rounds don't matter either.  Against the AI an absolutely ideal game goes like this: play all of my spy cards to catapult them to an early lead.  They have to play four cards during that time.  I now have 14 cards, they have 6.  The AI will often pass here, because I have 0 points on the field compared to their 20 from my spies plus whatever they played.  If I have something like Ciri+Geralt+Vil and can win without eating into my card totals too much, great.  If I don't, whatever, those odds are fine for me.  (Note that if we spammed decoys at each other, we're almost the same place, at 17 cards and 9 respectively).  Either way, if they don't pass, I can keep playing my relatively weak cards.  My goal isn't points, but to force them to play cards until they pass because their totals are way up.  I'm burning trash, they're burning higher cards.  Okay, round two.  Either I won that round and have card advantage, or I lost the round and have a bigger card advantage.  Assume I'm roughly 6 cards up (ideally more) and lost the round.  They go first.  They play a card.  I activate my leader card and get my 4pt spy back.  They play a card.  I play my spy.  I am at least 8 cards up, and they are, at best, holding 7 cards with two on the field.  This is how every single game against Monster and Scoia'tael decks go, by the way, because they don't have spies.  Monsters get it even worse because sometimes they're forced to play multiple cards from their hand same-turn.  If I won the first round thanks to heroes, awesome, I have more than twice as many cards in hand as they do, plus medics.  If not, round two is won by weight of numbers. Finish them off and I'm good to win round three, sometimes just passing right off the bat because they have zero cards to play and Nilf wins ties.  Honestly one of the bigger problems is that I have more medics than I have people to resurrect, so if I get a lot of them off the bat I make sure to play Black Archers early so I can rez them later. 

Against NR its a bit harder because they have spies to match, but it plays out similarly.  After the initial flurry of spies/decoys, we're even cardwise.  I have five medics to NR's two, though, which means that second round, I can rez all of the spies you dumped in my graveyard and still match you medic for medic.  Which means that at the start of round two, I can be a round down but have five more cards in hand (counting the one NR gets for winning).  I can scorch to my heart's content and be basically immune to counter-scorches (a lot of my high-point cards are heroes).  Sure, the highest point card I can get is a 10pt Black Archer, but they can be played every single round thanks to my massive medic spam.  Catapults you can bring back once (for the pair) and I can just scorch them again, and I can be almost guaranteed to draw this combination every game because of how much of my deck I'll be playing.  Remember, in ideal play, I can have 21 cards in hand.  That's almost my entire deck, which means that happens very often.  Nilf should never, ever be able to be baited into being higher pointwise because the entire reason their deck is overpowered is that they are always behind in points but with more cards to play, and therefore in control of the game.  

And that is way, way too many words about a card game inside of a really good RPG, especially since a lot of the cards involved don't start coming together until really late in the game.  

 

[Talleyrand]

Just finished Life Is Strange, really enjoyed it. Think it might draw with S1 of Walking Dead for my favourite episodic game yet.

It just had a unique feel and atmosphere, story was good and I liked the main cast. Very few games manage to actually provoke an emotional reaction from me and  this was one of them so it gets high marks.

Even just the moment right at the beginning of the  first episode when the MC pops in earphones and listens to a song as you walk down a corridor just made it feel unique and special for me in a way I can't  quite explain. 

 

EDIT: Without much hesitation I can easily say this is likely my favourite game to have come out in 2015.

[Fez]

Been jumping around playing a bunch of things, which has actually been the case for the past year or so. Every time I think I've found a game to get into for the long haul I end up beating it faster than expected or get bored and put it aside.

I have put 45 hours into Darkest Dungeon at this point, and I've beaten all the Lvl 1 and Lvl 3 bosses. Lvl 5 dungeons are so incredibly hard though, and I'm concerned its going to be an enormous grind trying to get through them, so I may be getting close to being done. I could try my hand a couple times at the final dungeon before putting the game aside though.

Still been playing a bit of Grim Dawn and Warframe, but I really would like to play something more story-based.

I thought FFXIII-Lightning Returns might be that, which I got on sale on Steam, but I'm not sure I want to deal with the pressure of a game-long countdown clock a la Majora's Mask.

There is the free bonus campaign to Shadowrun Hong Kong. I should love that, since the game was one of my favorite's last year, but progress has been very slow; I just haven't been in the mood to play that style of game. The campaign appeared out of nowhere, and I was mentally ready for it to be a thing that I'd be doing.

I have gotten sucked into Stardew Valley. I'm not usually one for simulator games, especially farming simulators, but there's something very satisfying about that game.

I should go back to MGS5, just haven't been in the mood. And sadly I've realized I can't go back to Homeworld: DoK. Ever since I got my new TV (which is my computer monitor) I've only been able to play games on the couch. That's usually great, but something like Homeworld, the text resolution means I need to be sitting in a chair right up close to the TV. Problem is, this new TV is so large that sitting right in front of it means I end up with a big headache after 20-30 minutes.

Whew. I think that's everything. There are a bunch of new short, story-driven games I want to play (Firewatch, Oxenfree, Super Hot, etc.) but they are way too expensive for the number of hours they last. So I'll be waiting for a sale. 

[Sullen]

Some of the new gameplay footage from Bannerlord that came out this weekend in case anyone is interested, can't find any footage of the hour-long stream they did yesterday though.

Looks like it'll stay my most anticipated title of the year.

[Corvinus85]

 

1 hour ago, Sullen said:

Some of the new gameplay footage from Bannerlord that came out this weekend in case anyone is interested, can't find any footage of the hour-long stream they did yesterday though.

Looks like it'll stay my most anticipated title of the year.

That looks great, and I can't wait. Are we sure it's coming out this year?

I really liked the battlefield commands, how positioning your troops works. Of course, without actually being able to understand the guy, I don't know at this point how well it will work on PC, but I doubt this will be primarily a non-PC game, so hopefully it will be good. Also, the look of the town streets and the battlefields impressed me. And definitely loving that you can craft your weapons. Can you craft armor, too?

This video came at a good time for me, because I'm in M&B mood, and I've been playing the Clash of Kings mod for the past week. I really enjoy it. I'm playing the 2.1 version, which is the latest. It's far crazier than the previous version I played (1.5). The wars in Essos are more frequent and back-staby than the ones in Westeros. Already Lorath, Norvos, and Lys are gone. On the Westerosi side, the Iron Islands bought it, completely conquered by the Riverlands.  The only thing I miss from the previous version I played are the massive outlaw bands with a leader, and the mercenary companies.

[Sullen]

7 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

 

That looks great, and I can't wait. Are we sure it's coming out this year?

I really liked the battlefield commands, how positioning your troops works. Of course, without actually being able to understand the guy, I don't know at this point how well it will work on PC, but I doubt this will be primarily a non-PC game, so hopefully it will be good. Also, the look of the town streets and the battlefields impressed me. And definitely loving that you can craft your weapons. Can you craft armor, too?

This video came at a good time for me, because I'm in M&B mood, and I've been playing the Clash of Kings mod for the past week. I really enjoy it. I'm playing the 2.1 version, which is the latest. It's far crazier than the previous version I played (1.5). The wars in Essos are more frequent and back-staby than the ones in Westeros. Already Lorath, Norvos, and Lys are gone. On the Westerosi side, the Iron Islands bought it, completely conquered by the Riverlands.  The only thing I miss from the previous version I played are the massive outlaw bands with a leader, and the mercenary companies.

They said that they hope to give the players the game in some form to the players by the end of the year.... whether be it alpha, beta, or final product.

Considering the amount of time the original Mount and Blade stayed uncompleted, I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with an unfinished version of the game first, but I wouldn't mind. The little we've seen of Bannerlord so far has me positively hyped.

[Fez]

Anyone played Black Desert Online? Against my better judgment I'm thinking of picking it up.

I know the original Korean version of the game was free-to-play (and possibly pay-to-win), but the new North American release is a straight-up buy-to-play with no subscription. Although there is still a cash shop, and I'm in unclear if its just cosmetics or not.

[Sullen]

5 minutes ago, Fez said:

Anyone played Black Desert Online? Against my better judgment I'm thinking of picking it up.

I know the original Korean version of the game was free-to-play (and possibly pay-to-win), but the new North American release is a straight-up buy-to-play with no subscription. Although there is still a cash shop, and I'm in unclear if its just cosmetics or not.

Honestly, the incredible character creator is the only reason I'd ever see anyone preferring it to any other MMO, but I'm pretty sure you have access to it for free on the MMO's official site.

[GallowKnight]

I just finished up the second of two straight playthroughs of Shadowrun: Hong Kong. I really liked it and so far I'd say it's my favourite of the Shadowrun games. Although I never quite finished either Returns of Dragonfall due to some crashing souring the experience.

[briantw]

Been using Shadowplay the past few days to record Team Fortress 2 footage.  Here's one result:

 

[Independent George]

After burning myself out on the game a year ago, I purchased the expansion packs for Pillars of Eternity, and am now regularly forgoing sleep to play during the busiest time of year for me at work.

1. It's amazing how much fun I'm having after such a long hiatus. Plus, I notice they rebalanced quite a lot since I last played.

2. Were monks always this awesome? I never played one before, and now Zahua is just wrecking the crap out of people.

3. Between simply forgetting most of what I'd previously known, gameplay tweaks with the expansion, and just trying out different builds, I'm astounded at how many viable tactical choices you can make, and still have it be rewarding. This game definitely gets better on a re-play.

[A True Kaniggit]

On March 7, 2016 at 3:14 PM, Fez said:

Anyone played Black Desert Online? Against my better judgment I'm thinking of picking it up.

I know the original Korean version of the game was free-to-play (and possibly pay-to-win), but the new North American release is a straight-up buy-to-play with no subscription. Although there is still a cash shop, and I'm in unclear if its just cosmetics or not.

I haven't tried it yet, but my housemate started playing it a week ago. He seems to be enjoying it. The biggest complaint I've heard so far is that it has gender specific classes. 

[Rhom]

Apparently, Blizzard released their first patch for Diablo 2 in over five years.

It doesn't address content, but it allows for the game to be playable with much better ease on current platforms.

[Jack Bauer 24]

What's the verdict on The Division?

[RumHam]

1 hour ago, Jack Bauer 24 said:

What's the verdict on The Division?

It's fun if you've got friends to play with. Destiny is the closest comparison, though I don't know how they compare in terms of stuff to do once you've beaten the game. The Dark Zone PvP area is supposed to be the best part but I haven't gone in there yet. They did a good job replicating Manhattan, but like most (every?) open world games set in a big city you can't enter 90% of the buildings which sucks. 

[Jack Bauer 24]

Just now, RumHam said:

It's fun if you've got friends to play with. Destiny is the closest comparison, though I don't know how they compare in terms of stuff to do once you've beaten the game. The Dark Zone PvP area is supposed to be the best part but I haven't gone in there yet. They did a good job replicating Manhattan, but like most (every?) open world games set in a big city you can't enter 90% of the buildings which sucks. 

Thanks for the info. Will we ever see a big open world with all open interiors?

[RumHam]

22 minutes ago, Jack Bauer 24 said:

Thanks for the info. Will we ever see a big open world with all open interiors?

I think the problem is probably the amount of effort that would be required to design all the interiors without repeating them too much. Plus then they'd have to put interesting stuff in these hundreds of buildings for there to be any point. Maybe they could use procedural generation? Or even crowd-sourcing. Some of the massive city builds in Minecraft are quite impressive, including the one based on Westeros. 

I don't really need to be able to open every door, but more would be nice. And more verticality. They could make a nice level out of one of the skyscrapers where you keep going up and can look out across the city from the windows or roof. Hopefully they did but I haven't seen anything like that yet. Though I'm not far in the game.