Videogames: The Sequeling

[Luzifer's right hand]

On 5/28/2021 at 7:23 PM, Werthead said:

I only completed the Tower in the Enhanced Edition run, because the level cap is removed (or much higher) so you can go in there after grinding each map screen and smash it.

With Sarevok I launched a flurry of fireballs before even triggering his dialogue; the first fireball triggered his dialogue but did a lot of damage to the whole group and by the time they were a threat in combat I'd already depleted their hit points.

The First Rule of the Infinity Engine games is equip everyone with missile weapons at all times and just go around wailing on everyone with missile fire and magic. Usually by the time the enemy get into melee range they're already half-dead.

I think the main problem is that you can't really tank Sarevok with most characters in the EE the guy with the exploding arrows is really dangerous. Going in insanely pre-buffed is the way to go. Ranged is really good though if you invest in expensive arrows. Kivan and Coran can really fuck things up and I think that might be the most reliable approach as they can melt his goons asap especially if you have a few of the dispel arrows and exploding arrows. Usually the mage dies to acid arrows after a quick dispel.

I have replayed the games way too often and my last few replays were with Sword Coast Stratagems mod https://www.gibberlings3.net/mods/tweaks/scs/ but that is kinda unplayable in parts of BG2 unless you really know the magic system. Although I know some people solo that without reloads... 

Edit: I think a lot of things were more difficult in the original BG1 engine because of the slow movement speed of the characters. I have not tried that in ages though.

[IlyaP]

1 hour ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I think the main problem is that you can't really tank Sarevok with most characters in the EE the guy with the exploding arrows is really dangerous. Going in insanely pre-buffed is the way to go. Ranged is really good though if you invest in expensive arrows. Kivan and Coran can really fuck things up and I think that might be the most reliable approach as they can melt his goons asap especially if you have a few of the dispel arrows and exploding arrows. Usually the mage dies to acid arrows after a quick dispel.

Really? I just went in with my high level paladin and crew and repeatedly smashed him over the head until he stopped moving. But that was with the original version of the game, rather than the EE version. 

[Luzifer's right hand]

49 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Really? I just went in with my high level paladin and crew and repeatedly smashed him over the head until he stopped moving. But that was with the original version of the game, rather than the EE version. 

He was really easy to kill in the base version and got buffed with ToTSC(more than 2x hitpoints among other things) but that did not change that much.

Although I think in that version you could still grind him down with infinite summons from staffs...

The EE version is rather different because of the engine changes.

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

Finished Subnautica Below Zero. It’s alright, it’s got some cool creature designs and I did actually like the voiced protagonist, but it is notable shallower than the previous game, both figuratively and literally. Still fun, and worth playing if you liked the first game.

[Toth]

To get down a bit yesterday after a really hard week I looked back into Cities Skylines. It's such a typical game where you keep failing forward. My newest city is now at 8000 population and while I have started to make rather successful use of roundabouts my industrial area seems create far too much traffic and is too close to my city entry. Now that I write that down I realize I should probably just put a second highway entry on the other side of the industrial area, at a place where I've got a solar park at the moment. I also heard when researching that it is a mistake to put all your recycling plants at one place, given that they send out a stupendous amount of garbage trucks.

... it's really just a traffic simulator, isn't it? XD

Still have to figure out how to make specialized industrial zones...

[Fez]

Taking a break before starting BG2, I decided to leap into the future and check out Solasta: Crown of the Magisters; a new game based on 5E D&D that's on PC Gamepass. It's alright so far. It's a very good recreation of the 5E rules, and more faithful than BG3 (which, at least so far in early access feels a lot more like a Divinity Original Sin game). There are a bunch of races and classes not implemented, and the game warns that some skill checks aren't used in the campaign; but what is there all works the way it should. And combat generally feels really good (assuming you like 5E combat). With one exception. Which is that the game places a very heavy emphasis on light and light sources. If your characters don't have dark vision (and to some extent even if they do) you're going to have a lot of trouble in fights if you don't have spells or other means of lighting up enemies. In small doses it's fine, but it's been so common so far that it's all a bit gimmicky, and boring to deal with. The game also has possibly the best local map system I've ever seen.

Everything else around the game is pretty weak though. All the character models are pretty bad, and the game uses 3D snapshots of the model faces as your character portraits. Background graphics are generic but acceptable enough, same for spell effects. The biggest issue is the writing though, it's really weak so far. The game does try to do something interesting with the party members. You create all 4 of them (there's a handful of prefabbed ones as well, but they aren't pre-established characters like say in DOS2), but the game actually has a written script for the characters and all 4 are fully voiced. It seems to make some adjustments to what's said, and the tone its said in, based on the personality info you setup in the character creation. It's a neat idea, and with enough effort could be really cool. The problem here is that it results in all 4 characters mostly all having the same characterization, since the script requires certain things to happen and be said and there wasn't enough budget to record dialog covering all the possibilities of getting to there. Beyond that, the plot is very generic and all the NPCs are completely forgettable.

[IlyaP]

22 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I think the main problem is that you can't really tank Sarevok with most characters in the EE the guy with the exploding arrows is really dangerous. Going in insanely pre-buffed is the way to go. Ranged is really good though if you invest in expensive arrows. Kivan and Coran can really fuck things up and I think that might be the most reliable approach as they can melt his goons asap especially if you have a few of the dispel arrows and exploding arrows. Usually the mage dies to acid arrows after a quick dispel.

At what level of difficulty did you play? I remembered that BG: EE features a Storytelling mode, which doesn't let players die. Which might be an alternative to minimise player frustrations. 

[Luzifer's right hand]

5 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

At what level of difficulty did you play? I remembered that BG: EE features a Storytelling mode, which doesn't let players die. Which might be an alternative to minimise player frustrations. 

I'm not saying that I have any problems. 

I actually play it with difficulty enhancing mods mysely. 

But it is definitely a difficult game if you don't know the mechanics. Sarevok is not the worst offender in BG1. Aec'Letec is imo. 

[IlyaP]

18 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Sarevok is not the worst offender in BG1. Aec'Letec is imo. 

Is that the battle that's preceded by a blurry knight, a wizard, and....a rogue of somekind with more knives than is humanly possible? 

[Luzifer's right hand]

15 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Is that the battle that's preceded by a blurry knight, a wizard, and....a rogue of somekind with more knives than is humanly possible? 

The demon you fight at the end of the Durlag's Tower storyline. https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Aec'Letec

 

[IlyaP]

1 hour ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

The demon you fight at the end of the Durlag's Tower storyline. https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Aec'Letec

 

Had a check - I was confusing Durlag's Tower with The Watcher's Keep in Baldur's Gate II. Clearly it's time for me to revisit these games.

[Fez]

And I've moved on to Baldur's Gate 2; that Solasta game was just too lacking to stick with it, even though combat itself was fun. I think I only beat BG2 once, shortly after released it; but I've realized I must've at least started it again more recently than that. Maybe around 2005-ish (more recent than that and I'd hope I'd remember). The opening dungeon and promenade area seemed so familiar to me, but then everything after that was a much more vague memory.

I'd forgotten just how much more fun BG2 is to play than BG1, having a higher level makes all the difference for spellcasters. There's just so much more you can do. And it's kinda amazing just how similar BG2 feels to more modern CRPGs in writing. I was worried the game wouldn't live up to my memory of it, but it really does.

[IlyaP]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

And I've moved on to Baldur's Gate 2; that Solasta game was just too lacking to stick with it, even though combat itself was fun. I think I only beat BG2 once, shortly after released it; but I've realized I must've at least started it again more recently than that.

Is the world at least interesting? Or is it Fantastica Generica? 

[Fez]

9 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Is the world at least interesting? Or is it Fantastica Generica? 

Pretty generic. I think they made up their own setting, rather than use one of the bog standard D&D worlds (though I only know the Forgotten Realms, so I could be wrong), so that's something. But they didn't do much of anything with it.

Also, I can't stress enough how shallow the dialog is in this game. There could be an amazing backstory to the world and its just never come up. The tutorial itself is really neat the way its narratively structured, and it gave me high hopes at first; only to later realize there just isn't anything to the game besides the combat. 

[RumHam]

This is random, but can anyone think of any games where you explore the human body Inner Space / The Magic School Bus style? 

I just had this idea for a weird multiplayer game where one player is playing an FPS campaign or whatever, and the other player(s?) are the tiny "auto-heal" nano-bots inside him managing resources and desperately trying to keep his body alive and patch up the bullet holes. Probably wouldn't be fun due to the disconnect between what the two players were doing. But it got me wondering about games set inside the human body. 

[felice]

1 hour ago, RumHam said:

I just had this idea for a weird multiplayer game where one player is playing an FPS campaign or whatever, and the other player(s?) are the tiny "auto-heal" nano-bots inside him managing resources and desperately trying to keep his body alive and patch up the bullet holes.

Interesting idea! I think the trickiest part would be ensuring that there's always something for the micro player to do; if the macro player's actions determine when and how much they get damaged, a skilled or excessively cautious macro player could make things too easy/boring on the micro scale. One possibility - give the micros the ability to modify the body's abilities, not just keep it functioning. Macro could request heat resistant skin if they see fire up ahead, or increased lung capacity if they need to hold their breath to get through a section, etc, and Micro decides what they need to sacrifice from other systems to get the needed boost.

[RumHam]

2 hours ago, felice said:

Interesting idea! I think the trickiest part would be ensuring that there's always something for the micro player to do; if the macro player's actions determine when and how much they get damaged, a skilled or excessively cautious macro player could make things too easy/boring on the micro scale. One possibility - give the micros the ability to modify the body's abilities, not just keep it functioning. Macro could request heat resistant skin if they see fire up ahead, or increased lung capacity if they need to hold their breath to get through a section, etc, and Micro decides what they need to sacrifice from other systems to get the needed boost.

 I love the idea of a bunch of midochondira doing Civ style research before their human can effectively wield an AK or disarm a trap.

 

[IlyaP]

5 hours ago, RumHam said:

This is random, but can anyone think of any games where you explore the human body Inner Space / The Magic School Bus style? 

Yep. Project Remedium and Virus Remedium. 

[briantw]

16 hours ago, RumHam said:

This is random, but can anyone think of any games where you explore the human body Inner Space / The Magic School Bus style? 

I just had this idea for a weird multiplayer game where one player is playing an FPS campaign or whatever, and the other player(s?) are the tiny "auto-heal" nano-bots inside him managing resources and desperately trying to keep his body alive and patch up the bullet holes. Probably wouldn't be fun due to the disconnect between what the two players were doing. But it got me wondering about games set inside the human body. 

It might work better if the nano-players were antagonists to the character rather than working with him.  Like, a multiplayer game where the regular-sized character is working to accomplish an objective while the nano-players try to sabotage him in a variety of creative ways.  That would ensure the interior players always have something to do and aren't relying on the main character's actions to guide them completely.  

And the main player could have some interior defenses too, if you want to make the game more challenging for the nano-players.  That could be in the form of real players whose job is to stop the intruders or just automated security measures.

[RumHam]

47 minutes ago, briantw said:

It might work better if the nano-players were antagonists to the character rather than working with him.  Like, a multiplayer game where the regular-sized character is working to accomplish an objective while the nano-players try to sabotage him in a variety of creative ways.  That would ensure the interior players always have something to do and aren't relying on the main character's actions to guide them completely.  

And the main player could have some interior defenses too, if you want to make the game more challenging for the nano-players.  That could be in the form of real players whose job is to stop the intruders or just automated security measures.

Yeah that would probably be more fun. The way I planned it if the big player was really good the other players would have nothing to do.