Whats games have you been playing of late? Exclusive Beta Edition.

[Brys]

You can get tattoos for annah as well, can't you? I think I managed to. Annah was a little weaker than Morte for me, but I found she was far less likely to die than Dak'kon. Dak'kon could do a lot of damage, but only for a few rounds, whereas Annah did less but was likely to survive the combat. I'm so tempted to play again - I never had Nordom in my party as I didn't realise he could be until after I finished the game.

I've just finished Thief: The Dark Project. I have to say I'm a little disappointed - it's not that it was a bad game, but it wasn't a great game either IMO. Too many zombies, burricks, bugbears etc, not enough ordinary thief type missions. The level design also seemed to get gradually worse as the game went on. Lord Baffod's manor was easily the best mission in the game (though Undercover and the Sword were pretty good as well), but there were a load of pretty dull missions as well. The last level was incredibly boring - pretty much entirely linear with no real challenges in it. If they'd focused more on robbing mansions than on fighting/avoiding zombies, it would have been a much better game. The story wasn't great either - not too bad, at least by game standards, but not brilliant. In the end, I much preferred Thief Deadly Shadows. The only thing TDP had that was better really was rope arrows. I still enjoyed it, but it could have been so much better. I may just be expecting too much, having already played Thief 3 and a few of the Splinter Cell games - stealth isn't a new concept any more, and it deserves credit just for creating the genre.

[The Pita]

You can get tattoos for annah as well, can't you? I think I managed to. Annah was a little weaker than Morte for me, but I found she was far less likely to die than Dak'kon. Dak'kon could do a lot of damage, but only for a few rounds, whereas Annah did less but was likely to survive the combat. I'm so tempted to play again - I never had Nordom in my party as I didn't realise he could be until after I finished the game.

Annah and Dak'kon are the two most death-prone characters in the game. However, when Dak'kon is close to low life, I move him away from harm's way and use him as a Magic Missile Launcher.

[Jon AS]

I got Annah the best armor I could get for her and it still sucks. At least I can get tattoos for Dak'kon, and Morte and Vhailor already have ridiculously low AC. Nordom has a lot of HP and he's a range hero, so his armor doesn't matter, but I found an item that increases his AC by 4. And I like healing too much to let go of Falls. I have three damage machines (Nordom, Vhailor, and Dak'kon), two meatbags (Morte and Vhailor), and a healer. Annah doesn't deal nearly as much damage as anyone else with the exception of Falls. The only mildly questionable decision I've made was to get rid of Magic Missile Machine Ignus, because my big brother told me he betrays me at the end.

I've actually forgotten whether thiefs in Torment can backstab properly, but I imagine so. I really like all characters in this game, so being forced to leave some of them out of the party is annoying.

RE: Ignus. That actually depends on how you play through the game...

[Mackaxx]

I'll bite!

This is debatable in the early games. Personally, I thought the Mario games beat the pants of the Sonic games. I hate that you have two options in Sonic games: run too fast, can't see anything, die; or run too slow, none of the stuff that depends on speed works; die. Super Mario World is a gem.

Post-3D transition, absolutely no contest. The first Sonic Adventure was kind of okay; none of the Sonic games after that were worth a damn. Mario still continues to feature in pretty good, if not amazing, games.

You're absolutely right. With the benefit of hindsight even in his heyday sonic was a poor second to mario.

The sega character I'm most fond of is the sword wielding version of wonder boy in monster land/world/etc. These games were great.

[Shryke]

I've just finished Thief: The Dark Project. I have to say I'm a little disappointed - it's not that it was a bad game, but it wasn't a great game either IMO. Too many zombies, burricks, bugbears etc, not enough ordinary thief type missions. The level design also seemed to get gradually worse as the game went on. Lord Baffod's manor was easily the best mission in the game (though Undercover and the Sword were pretty good as well), but there were a load of pretty dull missions as well. The last level was incredibly boring - pretty much entirely linear with no real challenges in it. If they'd focused more on robbing mansions than on fighting/avoiding zombies, it would have been a much better game. The story wasn't great either - not too bad, at least by game standards, but not brilliant. In the end, I much preferred Thief Deadly Shadows. The only thing TDP had that was better really was rope arrows. I still enjoyed it, but it could have been so much better. I may just be expecting too much, having already played Thief 3 and a few of the Splinter Cell games - stealth isn't a new concept any more, and it deserves credit just for creating the genre.

Play Thief 2. Seriously.

Thief 1 is largely experimental. No game like it had ever been done before. Alot of the levels are them trying stuff out. Mansion Robbing, Grave Robbing, Infiltration, Stealing from Ancient Cities and so on.

Most people, like you, preferred the mansion robbing stuff, so that's what like 90% of the second game is. The levels are also bigger, better and more sprawling. It is, gameplay wise, the apex of the series (and stealth games in general really)

The story isn't quite as good as T1 though.

[Shryke]

So, I figured I'd post this here. My most recent undertaking has been Warhammer Online. My thoughts:

WoW. And not "WoW this is amazing" but "World Of Warcraft". This game reeks of it.

Ok, not a bad thing necessarily. The problem is, it's like a much much much less polished version of WoW.

I'll be fair, this game has some damn good ideas in it. Some interesting design and class decisions and stuff. But it's simply so .... unpolished. The graphic design, the levels, the animations, the menus, everything is unslick. Unrefined. Unpolished. Unprofessional.

I'll start off with the good though. Fuck it, the good keep leading naturally into the bad. Stream of Consciousness, here we go!

Interaction

The Interface is ok. It's serviceable I suppose. Not the best designed imo. Stuff is hard to notice sometimes, although I will chalk that up to my WoW-trained eyes. But there's many other issues too. Menus are sluggish and don't always work properly. Information is difficult to locate. And everything feels like I'm using Windows 3.1 again. It's like I'm using an OS rather then navigating through a GAME.

The graphics are kinda ugly. Technologically, I suppose they are better then WoWs. But the art style and such is dull and boring and it all blends together and looks unappetizing. Nothing POPS. It's hard to tell where stuff is. It all kind of blends together into an ugly whole. The art palette is dull and uninspired. It's just "Standard Brown" really. And many of the animations are hideous. The whole thing is so .... generic.

And sluggish. The game really felt sluggish. I'd fall and it would take ages for the game to notice. Attacking multiple mobs became a crazy exercise in obfuscation, as I couldn't tell what spell or ability had gone off yet or who I was targeting or what.

And this whole graphics things leads us into another point:

Setting

Warhammer. Great Setting. Right?

Eh. Not for an MMO it seems. I mean, it seemed like a great idea to me too. But playing the game, I came to the opinion more and more that Warhammer is great for ATMOSPHERE. But that's all it's got in some ways. The stories within it are so ... boring and generic. On the small scale, there's not much interesting there.

I mean, in the end it's all "Rarr, I hate these good guys cause they suck" and "Damn these evil people. We must throw them back." and THAT'S IT. There's nothing really to it beyond that. Bad guys are hilariously Hitler-evil and good guys are stoic and only kinda evil (mostly dickish and authoritarian). Which is all great for big scale clashes between armies, but when it's just you, the individual, it gets kinda boring to be "murdering those pathetic gooders" in one generic area after another.

There's a lack of personalities among the various sides. They all blend together. Dark Elves are X, Empire are Y, Greenskins are Z and so on. There's nothing individual about what your doing at any one time. I eventually had to force myself to read the quest text because it all just became so repetitive.

And the actually world itself. Dull looking. "Oh look, another brownish tree, just like the last one I saw. Or the ones I saw when I was playing for the other side in a different zone." It's all so samey and dull. WoW's graphics weren't the best, but they were evocative and stylish. You could tell which zone a picture came from everytime because each area looked and felt different. WAR's zone are very samey and generic.

Classes

Some interesting classes. SOME. Each class had it's own special mechanic. Some worked, some just feel tacked on or useless. I did try every type of class though.

I liked the Archmage/Shaman thing where heal spells made your damage spells better and vice verse. Was lots of fun and made healing very interesting. Soloing was kinda dumb though. I found myself spamming my instant HoT on myself for no reason other the to make my nuke better for the next pull. Swordmaster/Black Orc system of one set of abilities unlocking a 2nd tier which unlocks a 3rd tier and then resets was fun too.

On the other hand, I found the Bright Wizard Combustion mechanic (and the Sorcerer's analogue) rather underwhelming. Didn't seem worth paying attention too really. Build it up fast and try not to get low on health and you can just ignore it. Rune Priest/Zealot were dull as shit to play. Magus/Engineer were interesting in concept but felt just unfocused.

And that, in the end, was the problem with most of them. They were ... unfocused. They felt like they had their skills because someone said "Hey, this class should have a skill for X" rather then because they all fit together. Playing WoW, every skills felt like it was there for a reason. Even if that reason almost never (or occasionally didn't) happen. In WAR, especially with some classes (Magus was REALLY bad for this) I felt like someone had thrown a collection of spells at me and said "Go nuts". There was no design to it. No flow. No obvious interconnection between my skills that made one build off the other. I had multiple skills that did the exact same thing, but in different ways. But for no reason. There was no reason for 2 copies of the same sort of thing because the difference between them made no actual gameplay difference. It's like someone told me to dig a hole and gave me a blue and a red shovel. I guess it's nice to have the choice, but there's no reason I need a choice of 2 identical but differently coloured shovels. Most of the classes skills sets and such just felt like a hodgepodge.

Another issue was that they trickle out your skills so slowly it's annoying. Some classes can spend the first like hour of the game with literally only 1 skill you hit over and over and over again till stuff dies. I had to level up quite a few characters quite a bit to get any sort of feel for the class because it took ages just to get a basic skills set for most character.

Gamplay PvE

PvE wasn't bad. It just wasn't very GOOD either. It follows WoW's lead (in a good way) with the quests and all that jazz. Works well enough.

The UI had some great improvements, like showing the area on your map where every quest was sending you. Hell, it shows you EVERYTHING on the map. All the vendors and quest givers and trainers and everything are there, each with a little icon or whatever. This was a blessing in helping me navigate around, but also a curse in that it made it even harder to keep paying attention to the story as the game went on. Eventually, I gave up. The story got so dull and generic I just stopped paying attention after awhile (I did try to pay attention for a LONG damn time though). And you really can play the game without paying attention to anything. Grab all the quests from the Green circles you see on the mini-map, then open your map and head towards the red areas. Do what the quest says in the red area, move on to the next red area.

Not too bad I guess, but it feels really empty. No one is around. No one groups. No one even talks in chat. You wouldn't even know you were playing an MMO. Which causes problems with one of their good ideas.

Public Quests are a great idea. Go to a zone and "Guess what, your on a quest with everyone else in the area. Do what the quest says and you'll win shit!". Great idea. In practice though, with so few people around in many of the areas, you can't complete most of these. And even when you can, 90% of them are just dull. There's a few with some genuine spark (like the one where you've got to get a giant drunk so he bashes a door down for you), but most are just a generic "Kill x number of easy enemies. Now kill Y number of harder enemies. Now kill Z number of boss enemies." and that's it. And then it all resets. A pretty good idea, but they do nothing with the concept (this is a common thing I was noticing with the game).

Each public quest or set of them also has it's own influence to build up (ie - reputation). It's not a bad idea either. Single-player is divided into "Chapters" and each Chapter has influence. You build it up doing that Chapters Public Quest(s) and you get items. Some actually useful too. A decent idea, although unfortunately you end up having to grind out Public Quests (many of which are REALLY fucking grindy) to max it out. And those grindy public quests are the only source of said influence. Another good idea not implemented super well.

All in all, the PvE is serviceable. There's nothing special here though. If you want top quality PvE of this sort, play WoW. Or look elsewhere. There's just nothing here that hasn't been done better elsewhere.

Gameplay PvP

On to PvP, the selling point of this game. I didn't get to participate in a ton of this at higher levels. But so far what I've seen was ok. But really, nothing about it screamed "Way Better Then WoW!!!!!!!!" to me. It was just pretty standard stuff. Nothing awe-inspiring.

Sure there's tons more Scenarios (ie - Battlegrounds). But most can easily be grouped into categories. In Tier 1, for example, you can play 3 different scenarios. All are simply Arathi Basin with a slightly different map. I suppose it keeps it from getting boring or something, but it's just a small number of ideas repeated over and over again on different maps. But since you can levl all the way to 40 in multiplayer, I guess this would help.

Open world stuff was kinda neat, with the goals to capture in each zone and such. But it was really empty (most everyone is in scenarios). And largely, was just standard open world stuff.

I guess it's more of the same. In the end, I found PvP a wash. Not bad, but nothing spectacular. Maybe the Castle Sieges and such make it more fun? I don't know. But in the end, the games selling point ... wasn't. The PvP couldn't sell me on the game and I don't think anything about it (except maybe the keep siege stuff) could. I mean, it wasn't bad. But it wasn't good enough to make me want to play through the parts of the game I didn't like for it.

Conclusion

Well, really just a restatement of the start (that's deliberate for those of you with short attention spans btw :P). The game was ... ok.

I don't wanna make it sound like I hated it. It's got quite a few things going for it. Alot of the gameplay stuff was good. I really WANTED to like it. It replicated some of the things I liked about WoW and added in some great ideas on top of it. But it just wasn't as good.

It's just very unpolished. And generic. It's like a less high quality version of WoW. In some ways, it really makes it obvious how good a studio Blizzard is. Just like when you'd play another RTS that was like Starcraft and realise how much better Starcraft was. It's like they took everything WoW did, added on some great ideas of their own, and yet ended up with a worse product because they simply aren't as good at designing video games.

Maybe the whole top tier PvP thing could make up for it, but I doubt it. The UI and graphics and classes and everything are still not that great. You'd play it for that stuff IN SPITE of the rest of the game.

In the end, the game has alot of great ideas, but the whole thing just isn't as good. It's uninspired. It lacks polish. That finishing touch that makes great game just so playable.

So if your really after that high level keep battle stuff like in DAOC, this is probably your game. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend it. It's not bad, but it's just not that great either.

[Muttering Bill]

So I picked up the Fallout trilogy and Medieval II (Gold pack). Of my list of things to check out, that was all they had at Best Buy - not too suprised though.

I had a little trouble getting Fallout to install, but it went in eventually. Started up the first game, and it had some nasty graphical issues during the opening movie - the colors weren't displaying properly. I don't know if there is some setting I can change to fix it, or if that's just what I get for running it with Vista. When I got to the actualy game it was alright. But I got killed by some rats right outside of the vault. If they aren't going to have an in-game tutorial, then they should have given me an instruction manual!

I also tried out Medieval II, seemed alright. Didn't get very far into it because it was late. Had to turn the graphics down a pinch to get a decent frame rate, but that's fine. I don't like that it make me have the disc in the drive to play though. Any way around that?

[Max the Mostly Mediocre]

No CD files are your friend, as is GameCopyWorld (mods? That alright? The site claims that NoCD stuff for games you own is legal, but they could be lying).

[Brys]

Play Thief 2. Seriously.

Thief 1 is largely experimental. No game like it had ever been done before. Alot of the levels are them trying stuff out. Mansion Robbing, Grave Robbing, Infiltration, Stealing from Ancient Cities and so on.

Most people, like you, preferred the mansion robbing stuff, so that's what like 90% of the second game is. The levels are also bigger, better and more sprawling. It is, gameplay wise, the apex of the series (and stealth games in general really)

The story isn't quite as good as T1 though.

I'm planning to. Just found a copy on amazon for £0.01. Pretty sure it'll be worth that.

Despite all those criticisms, I still enjoyed the game, and I like the genre. I much prefer the Thief style gameplay to the Splinter Cell series.

[emberling]

The one thing I loved about Warhammer was that they made hybrid classes that are actually hybrids, rather than the WoW policy (starting with TBC) where a hybrid class just means you can respec into a different role if you want. I loved playing Warrior-Priest, particularly in PvP.

The game had no soul, though, and WAY too few players after the level 1-10 zones (this was the month of its release; I expect now that people have had time to realize that the game is shit, those zones are deserted too).

[kungtotte]

WAR was the ultimate love-hate thing for me. I really wanted to like it, because I think the IP is bad-ass like nobody's business, and I much prefer PvP over PvE and that was something that WAR promised to focus on. But, there were just too many issues.

Some classes just did not work at all without a proper team infrastructure to build on. I rolled a Witch Hunter only to be saddened by how ineffective it was unless the rest of your team played well. If you're by yourself you can't a healer with it because the healer will self-heal and out-pace your damage output. You might kill one of the ranged characters if you're lucky and he's not being healed. You can't do shit against a tank or a melee offensive character, even if they aren't being healed they will still kill you by virtue of unbalanced armour and hit-points (you do more damage, but you can't take nearly as much). But if you have a decent team going where tanks are tanking, healers are healing and casters are casting, you'll stand a much better chance of actually getting the job done. I found that you only got teams like that in one out of ten scenario fights.

My second character was an Ironbreaker tank, and I felt way more useful in that role since I had the staying power to actually affect the outcome of a game. I could protect my team-members by physically standing in the way of the enemy, by knocking the enemy on their asses or even knocking the enemy back. But once again, my ability to protect people doesn't help if the rest of the team doesn't do what they're supposed to to win the scenario.

It was OK when I played it because each tier was fairly well populated, so whenever you moved up you knew there'd be people there for you to play with. I was right in the middle as far as levelling-pace went, so I never felt like tiers were deserted. The whole thing just felt so much like unnecessary work. I mean, good idea making tiers so it felt like there was some purpose to lower levels as well, but let's face it, everybody wanted to get into the final tier for those big battles that we'd heard all about. And the process of getting there was kind of slow and arduous, forcing you to slog through endless amounts of PvE quests and hoping for good scenarios that you could make an XP-killing off of. Much like most other MMOs, I suppose.

I don't think I will re-up.

tl;dr version in smileys:

:) :D :huh: :angry: :D :angry: :o :thumbsdown:

[Knight of the Wineskin]

I've being messing around on the closed beta of Heroes of Newerth, while its all shiny and stuff, it just doesn't offer anything that I can't get without just doing dota using Wc3.

Same. I'm beta-testing League of Legends. It was kinda neat until I realized that it was a whole bunch of effort to re-invent something that already existed and worked just fine.

[Serious Callers Only]

So I picked up the Fallout trilogy and Medieval II (Gold pack). Of my list of things to check out, that was all they had at Best Buy - not too suprised though.

I had a little trouble getting Fallout to install, but it went in eventually. Started up the first game, and it had some nasty graphical issues during the opening movie - the colors weren't displaying properly. I don't know if there is some setting I can change to fix it, or if that's just what I get for running it with Vista. When I got to the actualy game it was alright. But I got killed by some rats right outside of the vault. If they aren't going to have an in-game tutorial, then they should have given me an instruction manual!

The problem with the movies is most likely that your "gold pack" probably installed a version of the high resolution mod with the wrong settings. Yesterday i could have told you the settings that worked for me. Anyway check the installation directory for some cfg or ini files. There is also a ingame way to configure in somewhere inside "options" in the main menu. The problem is most likely a directshow setting vs opengl or something stupid like that. There are quite a lot of patches for fallout 1 & 2 you have to install in a definite order for the best experience and it's easy to fuck it up.

BTW, you suck at turn based. Play Jagged Alliance 2 on impossible for some training.

You can play a char that runs away from all combat encounters - i just played fallout 1 without killing a single thing in combat (well i killed, but not in combat).

[Serious Callers Only]

Reply instead of edit...

[Werthead]

Spent the afternoon revisiting Far Cry. Oddly a bit patchy performance-wise, and it gave me a CTD. I upgraded the graphics card a few months back, but nothing major (nVidia 7600 GT 256 to an 8500 GT 512), they even use the same drivers, so it shouldn't be that.

I'm thinking it's less the hardware (never had a single problem playing Far Cry before, on this or my previous PC) and might be the patches. I usually play Far Cry on vanilla but this time around decided to patch it up. After looking it up on the Internet I realised this might have been a mistake, as apparently the 1.4 patch is prone to screwing up something rotten. In particular, if a wall or environment is permeable to bullets (tents, wood) bad guys can now 'see' you through it and fire at you even if you even if they shouldn't be able to see you. That's definitely happened a few times.

Annoying. I can't really be arsed to go back, uninstall, reinstall and de-patch or whatever. Might continue the BioWare Grand Replay Project by leaping into Jade Empire, but I did want to play a relaxing shooter that wouldn't take too long to polish off between giant RPGs. Maybe it's time for that long-planned FEAR replay? Not sure if that still qualifies as 'relaxing' though...

EDIT: Manned up and pressed on. Whilst the enemy spotting you through walls is annoying, the main reason for sticking in the 1.4 patch - the HD lighting engine and the upgrade from pixel shader 2 to 3 - makes it totally worth it. The new smoke and haze effects are impressive, even today, and some of the new lighting effects are really cool.

[Mackaxx]

So, call of duty 4, modern combat or whatever its called has finally graced my system. I've got to say that 4 acts into it and I'm pretty underwhelmed. Hopefully a bit more excitement is coming my way. In regard to online stuff the only servers i managed to get onto last night were low ping ones, I did manage one with a decent connection once though and did ok. Still, again it was all a bit seen it before as well.

One thing that really grates on me is all the ooh rah business and the fact that I can't help but feel it's a bit of a propaganda piece with all the military wankery. Then again I am only 4 acts into it and maybe its all a bit tongue in cheek.

[cjfshaw]

The online experience for CoD4 is pretty great, its really similar to MGS4 online. You get skills that you can level up and stuff. But once you get high enough in the rankings its just people 1 shotting you in the head, which is no fun.

[Shryke]

maybe its all a bit tongue in cheek.

It is.

Well, maybe it's more that your kinda supposed to step back a bit and look at these guys and say "You guys need to think a little more and 'Ooh Rah! Let's kill some Ay-rabs!' a bit less".

[Mackaxx]

I did find the level where your up in the spy plane thing blowing the crap out of everything pretty funny. The navigator/spotter and gunner seem to be a bit pissy with one another throughout the whole affair.

I'm playing the game on hardened as well and am wondering if maybe I should breeze through it on easy first just for the experience and try the more challenging levels later in the piece.

[Mackaxx]

Also, I bought the game of the year edition which came with the map packs for free. So, I take the code and go to enter it at the xbox marketplace and find it doesn't work.

Righto, this code has to be entered at the following website link, great, I go there and it appears they arn't giving out codes because they need refresh their xbox marketplace token supply. It's been like this for a few days now and when I check online (the COD4 online forum community is a hilarious mix of 11-18 year old internet tough guys incidentally) it seems it's been like this for quite some time.

I've sent an email so I'll see how I go.

Nice one activision.