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Video Games: Devils Die Twice


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6 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

Inspired by my good friend Toth I'll recount my Total War: Attila tale here.

I've become quite the Steppe Queen, and took the Alans on a ride. I dealt a few blows here and there early around the northern Black Sea before traveling east and down through the Caucus Mountains into Armenia and Georgia. I struck down Lazica, a Roman satrap, binding them to myself. And was set to strike south into Anatolia but manage to secure peace with the Eastern Romans in return for joining a bunch of their wars. So I knocked out a rebelling Pontus, and a rogue Trebizond planning to settle in North Africa but the Sassanid Persians declared war on me.

I had no choice but to march on Edessa. I besieged a moderate force with my fifteen hundred riders but a massive doomstack of Persians emerged from the mists of war. I was forced to stage a fighting retreat against this force and the formerly besieged Edessa garrison. Fortunately the Alans are perfect for such activities and over the course of about six battles I managed to whittle down the Persians from over 5,000 to just over 2,000 and delivered a death blow outside the gates of Tarsus.

Unfortunately when attempting to resume the campaign into Western Asia I was surrounded by about four stacks of Persians (I have two half-stacks as my entire society) and am in the shit now.

I must admit, I never got around to play Attila's main game... that sounds kinda cool.

... but also suspiciously like my "The Last Roman" playthrough were I was at first beaten up by the (ahistorically strong) Vandals until I suddenly didn't and then it turned into a ridiculous cakewalk where my prime concern ended up being unable to pay all the armies Justinian kept gifting me with.

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1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

I might have to pick this up then. I'm still replaying RDR2 though. The first time through I made the mistake of just racing through the missions. How would you compare the open world nature of W3 to RDR2?

Open? There is a shitload of things to do, much more than RDR2 if I remember correctly. You have secondary quests, treasure hunts, monster contracts and the main story. There are also areas of the map that have question marks that you can explore which have bandits, monster pits, power sources, all of which could make your character better with abilities or gear. One of the big differences though is that areas don't really scale with you so there are areas you won't go into until you're at an appropriate level. Think of Witcher 3 as a more classic RPG where level, gear and abilities matter.

As an aside, the different in movement speed is jarring. It'll take a little bit to get used to moving quickly after coming from RDR2's glacial movement. 

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19 minutes ago, Mexal said:

Open? There is a shitload of things to do, much more than RDR2 if I remember correctly. You have secondary quests, treasure hunts, monster contracts and the main story. There are also areas of the map that have question marks that you can explore which have bandits, monster pits, power sources, all of which could make your character better with abilities or gear. One of the big differences though is that areas don't really scale with you so there are areas you won't go into until you're at an appropriate level. Think of Witcher 3 as a more classic RPG where level, gear and abilities matter.

Would it be fair to say it’s kind of like an open world version of Diablo? I know Diablo 2 and 3 are open world in a sense, but they are still heavily narrative driven.

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As an aside, the different in movement speed is jarring. It'll take a little bit to get used to moving quickly after coming from RDR2's glacial movement. 

I actually enjoy the slow riding. It makes it easier to randomly bump into stuff.

Still haven’t found the Klan though. I want to throw a stick of dynamite at them.

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I wouldn't say The Witcher 3 is like Diablo (though I've only played Diablo 2, for what it's worth). The emphasis isn't really on loot; you will get and craft better equipment over the course of the game, but not in the Diablo sense. It's a mix of a Bioware RPG with the dodge/attack combat of many recent melee action games and a large open world (split into two main zones). It's real strength is the writing of the quests. The open world is beautiful, but not as interactive as, say, a Bethesda game; the points of interest get old fast. The gameplay can be very repetitive; just about every quest makes you go into detective mode from the Arkham games and slowly walk around following trails. But the writing in even many of the minor sidequests makes it all worth it.

I've started the Old Republic as a Sith Inquisitor. I'm only on the starting planet, but I'm having a great time with it- so much so that I decided to subscribe. It is scratching that Bioware itch and I'm enjoying playing my very sarcastic character so far. I haven't really done much with the MMO aspect and am basically just playing it as KOTOR with the ability to dance at everyone and observe everyone fighting in chat over the dumbest things, but some nice people did help me with a hero quest. Best (and only) MMO I've played since Runescape in 2005.

 

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I honestly don’t think I have any experience with dodge/attack style games. I’m just looking for more open world options though. I know I’ll get Spiderman at some point, and probably Witcher 3 too, but I’m not sure what else to try. I only own four games at this point.

Speaking of which, I’ve got a random question. Do you guys play one game at a time until you beat it and then move to the next, or do you play several at the same time, not including sports games like Madden and FIFA?

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1 hour ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I've started the Old Republic as a Sith Inquisitor. I'm only on the starting planet, but I'm having a great time with it- so much so that I decided to subscribe. It is scratching that Bioware itch and I'm enjoying playing my very sarcastic character so far. I haven't really done much with the MMO aspect and am basically just playing it as KOTOR with the ability to dance at everyone and observe everyone fighting in chat over the dumbest things, but some nice people did help me with a hero quest. Best (and only) MMO I've played since Runescape in 2005.

It's a good game, bordering on great in certain areas. It caught a lot of flak over the years for what it isn't (KOTOR 3, the next revolution in MMOs), versus what it actually is. It's a game that does a lot of small things extremely well, and to this day it's still the only MMO I've played that has any sort of compelling story to drive the action.

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44 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I honestly don’t think I have any experience with dodge/attack style games. I’m just looking for more open world options though. I know I’ll get Spiderman at some point, and probably Witcher 3 too, but I’m not sure what else to try. I only own four games at this point.

Speaking of which, I’ve got a random question. Do you guys play one game at a time until you beat it and then move to the next, or do you play several at the same time, not including sports games like Madden and FIFA?

I usually have at least two games at once; a story-driven one that I pay attention to and a podcast-supporting one (which is usually an FPS or puzzle game). I often play many more than that though, with games often falling off the list whenever I get bored of them. It's rare that I beat a game anymore, unless the story is engaging enough to stick with for the duration or I'm having just so much fun that I need to get through the endgame.

In the past two weeks, I've played: Destiny 2, Conan Exiles, Supraland, Operenica: The Second Sun, Baba is You, They Are Billions, Prison Architect, and probably at least one or two others I'm forgetting about. The only one I beat in that time was a game of They Are Billions and the only one I probably won't go back to is Baba is You (it's a great game, but I've reached the point where the puzzles are too complicated for me). The only one of the rest I'm confident I will beat though is Supraland, because it's really great and I think I'm very close to the end.

It's very rare for there to be a single game that is so great I want to devote all my time to it until its done. I did it last month when I finally beat Hollow Knight with the good ending, and I think the time before that was last year with Battletech.

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1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

I honestly don’t think I have any experience with dodge/attack style games. I’m just looking for more open world options though. I know I’ll get Spiderman at some point, and probably Witcher 3 too, but I’m not sure what else to try. I only own four games at this point.

Speaking of which, I’ve got a random question. Do you guys play one game at a time until you beat it and then move to the next, or do you play several at the same time, not including sports games like Madden and FIFA?

I tend to play one story driven game at a time and occasionally throw in a shooter. That being said, I still haven't finished RDR2 so I might go back and finish up Chapter 6 and the epilogues at some point but given there are so many things to do in Witcher 3, I haven't yet done that.

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2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Speaking of which, I’ve got a random question. Do you guys play one game at a time until you beat it and then move to the next, or do you play several at the same time, not including sports games like Madden and FIFA?

I can only play one game at a time(including most sports or FPS games). My friends think it’s a little weird but I like just focusing on one thing. Kinda like how I can only binge one show at a time.

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4 hours ago, Mexal said:

I tend to play one story driven game at a time and occasionally throw in a shooter. That being said, I still haven't finished RDR2 so I might go back and finish up Chapter 6 and the epilogues at some point but given there are so many things to do in Witcher 3, I haven't yet done that.

You gotta finish it man. The arc is great. 

I watched a few videos of the combat for Witcher 3 and I'm game. Haven't played anything like that in ages, but it does look like fun.

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54 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

You gotta finish it man. The arc is great. 

I watched a few videos of the combat for Witcher 3 and I'm game. Haven't played anything like that in ages, but it does look like fun.

Yea, I should finish it. I'll aim to push it through this weekend.

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8 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Speaking of which, I’ve got a random question. Do you guys play one game at a time until you beat it and then move to the next, or do you play several at the same time, not including sports games like Madden and FIFA?

One game at a time. Unless I'm on an MMO kick, though I don't play many games online these days.

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In a somewhat cynical marketing move, Ubisoft is giving away Assassin's Creed Unity in response to the Notre Dame fire: https://register.ubisoft.com/acu-notredame-giveaway/en-US

Never played an Assassin's Creed game before and don't have the time to do it anyway, but I still had a defunct Ubisoft account from back when I tried out the Anno browser game a decade or so ago. So I grabbed it and... well.

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On 4/17/2019 at 4:52 AM, A True Kaniggit said:

Edit: Dang. I was able to form Germany, but unable to liberate France. https://i.imgur.com/12UQ17p.png

A crap-ton of Austrian Revolutionaries appeared, so I made peace early. Give it a decade France. I'll free you eventually.

I'm still looking at your pic and wonder how the hell you managed to dismantle the HRE. I tried the diplomatic way, but immediately hit the road-block that catholic countries refused to become vassals. And when I try it with force, I can only take tiny advances for fear of gathering massive aggressive expansion and unlawful territory penalties. Instead my path turned out... quite unusual...

1711: https://s16.directupload.net/images/190421/3kn79pgb.jpg

Denmark was in the most tragic position of being stuck between Prussia and Russia before... so the inevitable happened and we both ganged up upon it, finishing dividing the Baltic up between us and then my Prussian army marched up north and took the first parts of Scandinavia.

1733: https://s16.directupload.net/images/190421/rlyvfi3x.jpg

Of course that course brought me at odds with Sweden, resulting in yet another messy and hilariously one-sided war. Amusingly, with Bohemia almost gone, I was bordering to Hungary... which was allied with Sweden. So my armies marched back and forth between Sweden and Hungary, but always defeating both at once. Amusingly, after I carved large chunks of Hungary up, the Ottomans came for it. I already expected Hungary to disappear the same way Poland did, but much to my surprise they utterly thrashed the Ottomans, that's why it looks like Hungary moved to the south. It gained as much territory from the Ottomans as they lost to me.

1740: https://s16.directupload.net/images/190421/hwhmi4kx.jpg

Now feeling pretty much unstoppable, I turned my attention back to the HRE. I tried out the Nationalism and Imperialism casus belli in order to drag Austria into wars without alarming England or Spain. The results... were lackluster at best. Also my best king that I ever had immediately died two years after I got him, now I'm stuck in a 6 year old, waiting for my fourth bloody regency in this game to end.

Since Russia is now guaranteeing the independence of Sweden and Hungary, my paths for expansion are very limited. It doesn't help that I'm still allied to Hesse and Bavaria. I'm still trying to figure out whether it is worth risking a bloody world war with just me and Russia against everyone else in order to unify Germany... but as of now, probably not.

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Uncharted 4

Finished this yesterday.  Fun game.  If you've played any of the other Uncharted games, it's pretty much the same thing.  You kill the population of a small country's worth of nameless mercenaries while searching for a lost city and untold treasure, with several stops along the way.  I'd say this one was probably my favorite of the series, though, because it stays mostly grounded in reality, with no evil zombies or the like at the end, which was refreshing, as that was always my least favorite aspect of previous games.

This game tells the story of the hunt for pirate Henry Avery's treasure, which transitions into the search for the mythical pirate city of Libertalia.  I enjoyed the direction the story took and there's a twist or two in there.  Nothing ground-breaking, but unlike the Tomb Raider games, Uncharted never takes itself too seriously and has much better writing and voice acting. 

I think the gameplay in the new Tomb Raider games is superior and more in-depth, though.  Uncharted's platforming is fine, and the puzzles in this one are solid.  I wish there were more of them and less shooting, though, as has been the case in every Uncharted game.  The most recent Tomb Raider game seemed to find the best balance between the two, as it went much heavier on actual tomb raiding and less on murdering scores of enemy soldiers.  Uncharted still seems to want to be more shooter than anything else, and at times the gun fights just get tedious.  It does seem like they did tone down the amount of fights where you have to fight wave after wave after wave of enemies, which was always really goddamn annoying in previous games.

The story is the best part, as the characters in Uncharted are actually interesting, unlike in the Tomb Raider games, which seem content to just physically punish Lara Croft in place of actual character development.  I thought this one had probably the best story in the series, even if they had to retcon Drake's past to add a brother that is conveniently never mentioned before.  It did a really good job of wrapping up the series while still leaving the possibility of spin-offs, of which there has already been one (which I am gonna play next).  

Overall, it was worth the twenty bucks I paid for it.  It's pretty and fun enough and tells a solid tale.  I wish we could merge the writing of Uncharted with the gameplay of the most recent Tomb Raider.  I think that would be a damn near perfect action/adventure game.  

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I beat Supraland and if anyone's looking for a solid puzzle game, I definitely recommend it. It takes its time ramping up, but has such a charming look I didn't mind the easy start, and once its going I got stumped quite a few times. It's all the more impressive considering it was almost only one guy that developed it.

It's also a long game. I beat it at 19 hours and only had 51% completion. There's a lot of secret areas I missed apparently; there really is a strong metroid heart to the game.

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8 minutes ago, Mexal said:

Do you need to have played the other Uncharted to play Uncharted 4?

Not really.  Might want to watch a YouTube video summary of the previous games so you get the relationships between Nate and Elena/Sully, but the bulk of the story is self-contained, as it's largely about Nate and his brother, who was never mentioned in any previous game and Nate thought was dead until the start of the fourth game.

If you're in the market for a reasonably short (15ish hours) linear action/platformer, this one will do you just fine.  

I finished it and then immediately bought and downloaded Lost Legacy (the spin-off), so I guess that means I enjoyed A Thief's End.

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