So Bleeding Edge is having a closed beta this weekend.
When the game was first announced I was real excited. Multiplayer brawlers aren't exactly a popular genre, and the character designs and general look of the game are really cool. It being from Ninja Theory I was really hoping for something like DmC meets Anarchy Reigns: cool looking characters with big action-game movesets, maybe some launchers, maybe some grabs.
But yeah, I didn't get what I wanted. It's very much a third-person team-based class-based hero-thing. Yeah, it's melee combat, but there isn't much in the way of actual combos. Every character basically has one 4-hit string that you get by mashing attack, 3 abilities and an ultimate. The game was even basically a moba at one point, with creeps and lanes and such, and you can tell by the speed of the game and the look of the health bars and amount and damage you do and such, it all very much has a moba feel.
So yeah, I'm bummed. Hopefully one day I'll get something crazy and cool like Anarchy Reigns again. Or like, a Power Stone or something. Oh well.
Hmmm stick some turn-based combat on something and I’m all over it.
Good thing I got the base game from humble.
Wrath of the Righteous is a sequel, not an expansion. Also, the game will be balanced for real-time with pause, so turn-based mode will make the game ridiculously long.
I'm actually a little disappointed by the news. I mean, I'm very interested in the game (I backed the Kickstarter), but I'd much prefer the game were built with turn-based mode in mind. Fewer, smaller encounters. I guess having the option is better than not having the option.
Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
I started a new game in Satisfactory in the default grassland since I wasn't feeling the desert. Instead of the place I started my old game in I explored first and found a spot with fucking 8 iron nodes in it and close access to limestone and copper. I never found this spot before! So much iron!
Swipe right for the brand new NON-VR crazy physics-based dating simulator, Table Manners! Tonight's the night, you've secured a date and you're off to the most glamorous restaurant you know, there's only one problem - you're a disembodied hand with a knack for catastrophe!
Urtuk is an open world, tactical turn-based RPG in a low-fantasy setting. Guide your band of adventurers through the ruins of an ancient world. Recruit new followers, loot the corpses of your fallen foes, and do your best to survive in this harsh and unforgiving realm.
mosssnackYeah right, man, Bishop should go!Good idea!Registered Userregular
I’m enjoying wolcen quite a bit. I’m lvl 13 messing around with a ranged build offline while the servers are in an extended maintenance period. The hit boxes get weird sometimes, but otherwise it feels good to play. I don’t have a giant list of things I like and don’t like about this game, but I’m happy with the cash I dropped. I’d even be fine if I paid after it left EA. I was surprised to learn the studio that made this is only like 12 deep.
I’ve played a ton of diablo. Bounced super hard off of Titan quest and grim dawn, like maybe 4 hours across both. Never touched poe.
I loved saving this guy. They obviously assumed it was impossible given the lack of dialogue afterwards despite being absurdly easy to just trigger the trap before him.
Hmmm stick some turn-based combat on something and I’m all over it.
Good thing I got the base game from humble.
Wrath of the Righteous is a sequel, not an expansion. Also, the game will be balanced for real-time with pause, so turn-based mode will make the game ridiculously long.
I'm actually a little disappointed by the news. I mean, I'm very interested in the game (I backed the Kickstarter), but I'd much prefer the game were built with turn-based mode in mind. Fewer, smaller encounters. I guess having the option is better than not having the option.
My understanding is that the mod they are looking at as an example allows you to switch to back and forth between real-time and turn-based.
+1
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
Goddamn witcher gear gets expensive at the higher levels
Hmmm stick some turn-based combat on something and I’m all over it.
Good thing I got the base game from humble.
Wrath of the Righteous is a sequel, not an expansion. Also, the game will be balanced for real-time with pause, so turn-based mode will make the game ridiculously long.
I'm actually a little disappointed by the news. I mean, I'm very interested in the game (I backed the Kickstarter), but I'd much prefer the game were built with turn-based mode in mind. Fewer, smaller encounters. I guess having the option is better than not having the option.
My understanding is that the mod they are looking at as an example allows you to switch to back and forth between real-time and turn-based.
It does; switching is accomplished via hotkey or menu option, and can be done mid-combat if you want. I occasionally switch when I’m in the clean-up phase of a fight and am just spamming full-attacks.
They’re also adding improvements like calling out what path you’ll take and any AoOs you’ll provoke.
Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
edited February 2020
I'm not really bothering with treasure unless it's exactly on my route, but when I'm broke I go treasure hunting.
I stupidly made all the different armour and sword sets at first, I probably should've just picked the type I wanted and made them. It's no biggie though I'm just perpetually poor.
Brovid Hasselsmof on
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pyromaniac221this just might bean interestin YTRegistered Userregular
Say I have a hankering to play Sleeping Dogs again, but only own the original version (with the HD texture pack) on steam from way back when. How significant is the visual upgrade to the definitive edition?
psn tooaware, friend code SW-4760-0062-3248 it me
+1
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BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
Swipe right for the brand new NON-VR crazy physics-based dating simulator, Table Manners! Tonight's the night, you've secured a date and you're off to the most glamorous restaurant you know, there's only one problem - you're a disembodied hand with a knack for catastrophe!
Urtuk is an open world, tactical turn-based RPG in a low-fantasy setting. Guide your band of adventurers through the ruins of an ancient world. Recruit new followers, loot the corpses of your fallen foes, and do your best to survive in this harsh and unforgiving realm.
Feb 14 - Table Manners (VR, funny, romance?)
You mixed up the descriptions and until I realized that I was so excited about the turn based tactical combat dating sim about a disembodied hand
Goddamn witcher gear gets expensive at the higher levels
Eventually you will have so much money you won't know what to do with it
Or maybe that is just because I did every little shipwreck pip on the map like a complete fool despite hating it
I also went to every single '?' on the map despite owning the hard cover strategy guide and knowing what was there. I still did it! That is how broken I am!
The new unlock flow in Satisfactory is interesting. Instead of putting stuff like plates and modular frames into the Elevator, you make specific parts out of those kinds of things, which then go into the elevator. The next tier will also ask for more of those, so you need to keep your existing factory going during this process to start feeding the next tier, while learning to make the new items you need.
Bonus, if you build it right you can put some containers in there to catch overflow, giving you a ready supply of the initial basic building materials when you need them (plates, rods, etc..). The parts for the elevator also are fairly valuable in the new shredder so when you don't need to make them anymore, just redirect them into the shredder for tickets. Or do what I did, and build a ridiculous splitter system so half your production goes to the shredder. It's ugly but it works and keeps the tickets coming regularly while I build the new stuff.
Also, supplying coal plants is way more work now. Defnitely not the most efficient system, playing around with it as I figure the new stuff out.
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
+3
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WeaverWho are you?What do you want?Registered Userregular
I've been playing that outer rim mod for blade & sorcery on VR. I hacked so many limbs/heads off with a lightsaber.
Metro Exodus is finally out on Steam, and it's on sale for I think 40% off. So that's nice.
Unrelated, I decided to run through the Mass Effect games because I wanted to try the whole "mods" thing; it's incredible. Like sure, the games look better, but mods can also restore cut content, some of which doesn't even break the game. Like the first Mass Effect has Cerberus as a guns/gear manufacturer, and their stuff is pretty good.
0
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Say I have a hankering to play Sleeping Dogs again,
this is a good start to any post imo
but only own the original version (with the HD texture pack) on steam from way back when. How significant is the visual upgrade to the definitive edition?
When the Definitive Edition came out, I recall a couple youtubers running side-by-side comparisons and claiming that the DE actually looked worse than the original + HD texture pack, or it didn't do as many frames or had fewer tri-radial mip-mapped scan traces or something.
Honestly, to me - and granted that I'm visually impaired - they looked exactly the same. Certainly the difference wasn't stark enough in either direction to make me think you'd be missing out.
+1
Options
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
edited February 2020
Tonight I finally finished off Witcher 2, after a few weeks off while I was out of town and doing other things and, frankly, not in a huge hurry to get back to the game.
As my previous posts on the subject suggested, I wasn't very taken with the game for a great deal of its length. Cambat is both punishingly difficult and also opaque, where you can do the same thing five different times and four times you get unceremoniously killed and the fifth time you just slay everything without taking a scratch. Geralt has an unfortunate and frustrating proclivity to fetch up against inch-high steps, tiny bumps in the terrain, or other obstacles while rolling, at which point his reaction (naturally) is to stand and begin doing a run animation full-tilt into the offending object, leaving his back exposed for every monster to eviscerate you in about half a second. This happens over and over.
It was only in the last area, equipped with the best swords and armor in the game and a level or two shy of the cap, that I finally felt like the combat wasn't just me rolling the dice on quickloads over and over.
The fact that the middle portion of the game is essentially two completely different storylines is very cool in principle and I can see why people were taken with it, and I do want to try the other path (I took Vernon Roche this time)...someday. Maybe. Because in practice, I..found it kind of frustrating? The Witcher 2 has a very involved, gnarly plot with tons of previously-existing character relationships and seven or eight competing factions, some of which are secret factions unknown to the others, and you and Geralt, at ground level, essentially only ever see about the top five percent of the pyramid.
This was also the case in Witcher 1, and was something I loved about that game. Witcher 1 has a very traditional-fantasy-RPG narrative at first glance, with Geralt investigating a mystery that leads him to a villainous criminal organization and a sinister cult and you fight progressively tougher monsters culminating a satisfying throwdown against a boss; it's only if you're paying attention to sidequests and overheard bits of dialogue and various texts you stumble across that you figure out the true scope of what's going on,
that Radovid planted the Order of the Flaming Rose in Temeria to fire up racial tensions and create disorder to weaken King Foltest, making the King more amenable to Radovid's help and a marriage bid to the Princess that would peacefully grant Temeria to Redania,
and nobody ever spells it out for you or Geralt in a cutscene. It's just there, waiting for you to figure it out by inference. But it's okay if you don't figure it out, because the surface-level events of the story, the actual A to B to C, traces a complete, satisfying arc in its own right and is populated with interesting and likeable characters and cool setpieces and big revelations, even if it's not """important""" in the context of The Lore.
That's a cool, commendable approach to storytelling, and reinforces that Geralt tries to keep his feet firmly on the ground and not think too much about the politics swirling around him; a conspiracy to conquer a realm is the backdrop, but Geralt's just out in front fighting the monsters and villains that are the visible outcome of that conspiracy.
The problem in Witcher 2 is that the plot is so complex, and there are so many actors, and so few explanations in the course of the main game, that events are largely opaque until the very end. Like, I'm not exaggerating: the end of the game is largely taken up with a twenty-minute conversation between you and the titular Assassin of Kings where you quiz him on every single inexplicable or contextless thing that's happened to you since the game began, which is a lot.
It's impossible to get all the information in one playthrough, which is fine in and of itself and lends more weight to the big choice of which path to foillow in the middle act; however, because so much of the plot is kept doggedly obscure up till the end, the actual lived experience of playing the game is that you go to a place, are given a bunch of quests - most of which are, however well-written and fleshed-out, largely incidental to the overall plot - and check off boxes in your quest log until a bunch of big, catastrophic events begin occurring for unclear reasons, characters shout at you to FOLLOW ME! or GET OUT OF THE CASTLE AND MEET ME AT THE RIVER! and then you're chivvied off to a new place to start the process over again.
It does all come together at the end, and I'm satisfied, at the end of the game, that the plot is actually pretty clever and not total nonsense, but the moment-to-moment experience of play is disorienting; it doesn't tell a complete worthwhile story in its own right the way the first game did. It didn't give me enough breadcrumbs in the actual course of play to keep me motivated. I found myself taking long, long breaks from the game and the only thing that pushed me to come back was hearing people talk about the third game. It was like having to eat my vegetables before my ice cream and sitting there kind of sullenly chewing on the broccoli very slowly, with only a flicker of motivation to carry on.
BUT
I'm glad I did, because I downloaded and installed W3 and I've just gotten the griffin contract and it's Very Good. Geralt feels fluid and limber, the combat feels fun and forgiving, the environments are gorgeous, the weather effects are something else. I think I'll be happy with this.
Jacobkosh on
+15
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
I got used to the combat in Witcher 2 so it stopped annoying me, but I can understand if it never clicks for you it would make that whole game a slog.
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SnicketysnickThe Greatest Hype Man inWesterosRegistered Userregular
edited February 2020
I played it on easy so aside from the boss of the second act it wasn't so bad, if a bit sloggish. The game should give you a lot more crit effects a lot earlier though, they go a long way towards making things fun.
Anything above easy I bet is a massive pain in the arse though, given you have to sit down to swig potions etc
Say I have a hankering to play Sleeping Dogs again,
this is a good start to any post imo
but only own the original version (with the HD texture pack) on steam from way back when. How significant is the visual upgrade to the definitive edition?
When the Definitive Edition came out, I recall a couple youtubers running side-by-side comparisons and claiming that the DE actually looked worse than the original + HD texture pack, or it didn't do as many frames or had fewer tri-radial mip-mapped scan traces or something.
Honestly, to me - and granted that I'm visually impaired - they looked exactly the same. Certainly the difference wasn't stark enough in either direction to make me think you'd be missing out.
The one nice thing about definitive edition is the dlc is integrated so you get them at balanced times
Say I have a hankering to play Sleeping Dogs again,
this is a good start to any post imo
but only own the original version (with the HD texture pack) on steam from way back when. How significant is the visual upgrade to the definitive edition?
When the Definitive Edition came out, I recall a couple youtubers running side-by-side comparisons and claiming that the DE actually looked worse than the original + HD texture pack, or it didn't do as many frames or had fewer tri-radial mip-mapped scan traces or something.
Honestly, to me - and granted that I'm visually impaired - they looked exactly the same. Certainly the difference wasn't stark enough in either direction to make me think you'd be missing out.
The one nice thing about definitive edition is the dlc is integrated so you get them at balanced times
oh shit that is pretty nice
EDIT: that reminds me, I just realized I never did Year of the Snake. I need to do that
Jacobkosh on
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
I played it on easy so aside from the boss of the second act it wasn't so bad, if a bit sloggish. The game should give you a lot more crit effects a lot earlier though, they go a long way towards making things fun.
Anything above easy I bet is a massive pain in the arse though, given you have to sit down to swig potions etc
I played on normal and didn't really use potions much, only for fights I already died on and had to try again. It wasn't that hard, just had to somersault a lot. Like that game is basically a somersault simulator with RPG elements, at least the way I played it.
Brovid Hasselsmof on
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David_TA fashion yes-man is no good to me.Copenhagen, DenmarkRegistered Userregular
I bought the new Dead Cells DLC and fired up the game for the first time in, oh, months. Just a quick run, to see what was new, get the controls back (even though I forgot to change my Xbox controller with the wonky d-pad for my PS4, so had to play stick rather than pad).
In other news, I just beat Dead Cells for the first time. Wasn't really expecting that. I hope you can get that last weapon back again, that looked fun.
(Dead Cells was made a lot easier about 6 months ago)
They added more difficulty on the back-end, and removed a lot of the enemy scaling. So now it's a game everyone can enjoy, and you just have to find your peace when you are not consistent enough to progress further. For me that happened at 2 boss cells. Didn't want to "get gud" for that.
Steam: SanderJK Origin: SanderJK
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David_TA fashion yes-man is no good to me.Copenhagen, DenmarkRegistered Userregular
Yeah, there were a few boss encounters that I ended by just button mashing and I remember enough of old Dead Cells to know that, nah, that wouldn't have worked then.
0
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
Maybe I should pick it up again. I didn't stop because it was too hard, but it'd be interesting to see what it's like now.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
I decided I didn't like how my starter coal power setup looked. I think I found a much neater way. (mid-build here)
Although coal is an ENDEAVOR now. I've got two normal coal nodes, with Mk2 Miners, Overclocked to 200%. To take full advantage of them took 32 Coal Plants, 12 Water Pumps, and 8 Pipelines (visible below). But now I have a grand total of 2400 MW of power which should be more than enough for me to unlock and expand to oil, with plenty left over. Good lord that took a lot of work though.
MuddBudd on
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
+7
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Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
Fuck me. Coal might be slightly too difficult now.
Fuck me. Coal might be slightly too difficult now.
I mean, I kind of went crazy there because I am a perfectionist about the aesthetics.
You can just start with just 4-8 generators and expand as needed. But the lynchpin is nearby deep water. Even if I upgraded to Mk3 miners, I don't think I have enough water in convenient distance for another 12 pumps (desert yall). So I think this is where this power plant caps out. After this I'm switching to oil if I need more power.
-edit-
Oil also takes water now but I believe the process creates byproducts like plastic and such.
MuddBudd on
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
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Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
I guess it does reduce the desire to blow up all the coal plants when switching to oil since they took so long to set up. I haven’t made it to coal yet. I’ve been taking my time building up slowly but organized.
Posts
Hmm
Good thing I got the base game from humble.
When the game was first announced I was real excited. Multiplayer brawlers aren't exactly a popular genre, and the character designs and general look of the game are really cool. It being from Ninja Theory I was really hoping for something like DmC meets Anarchy Reigns: cool looking characters with big action-game movesets, maybe some launchers, maybe some grabs.
But yeah, I didn't get what I wanted. It's very much a third-person team-based class-based hero-thing. Yeah, it's melee combat, but there isn't much in the way of actual combos. Every character basically has one 4-hit string that you get by mashing attack, 3 abilities and an ultimate. The game was even basically a moba at one point, with creeps and lanes and such, and you can tell by the speed of the game and the look of the health bars and amount and damage you do and such, it all very much has a moba feel.
So yeah, I'm bummed. Hopefully one day I'll get something crazy and cool like Anarchy Reigns again. Or like, a Power Stone or something. Oh well.
Music is pretty dope though.
This is about their currently in kickstarter sequel, est. 18 months from release
There is a turnbased mod for Kingmaker though, which is pretty good. It requires a few hoops, since Unity is not super mod friendly.
Wrath of the Righteous is a sequel, not an expansion. Also, the game will be balanced for real-time with pause, so turn-based mode will make the game ridiculously long.
I'm actually a little disappointed by the news. I mean, I'm very interested in the game (I backed the Kickstarter), but I'd much prefer the game were built with turn-based mode in mind. Fewer, smaller encounters. I guess having the option is better than not having the option.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
It’s actually pretty easy to get up and running using the Unity Mod Manager, and yeah, the turned-based mod for Kingmaker is fantastic.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I’ve played a ton of diablo. Bounced super hard off of Titan quest and grim dawn, like maybe 4 hours across both. Never touched poe.
bnet: moss*1454
I loved saving this guy. They obviously assumed it was impossible given the lack of dialogue afterwards despite being absurdly easy to just trigger the trap before him.
My understanding is that the mod they are looking at as an example allows you to switch to back and forth between real-time and turn-based.
It does; switching is accomplished via hotkey or menu option, and can be done mid-combat if you want. I occasionally switch when I’m in the clean-up phase of a fight and am just spamming full-attacks.
They’re also adding improvements like calling out what path you’ll take and any AoOs you’ll provoke.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Eventually you will have so much money you won't know what to do with it
Or maybe that is just because I did every little shipwreck pip on the map like a complete fool despite hating it
I stupidly made all the different armour and sword sets at first, I probably should've just picked the type I wanted and made them. It's no biggie though I'm just perpetually poor.
not sure that's the right link, goes to an empty YouTube channel
If you click "read more" on the comment it will reveal the URL for the store.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
You mixed up the descriptions and until I realized that I was so excited about the turn based tactical combat dating sim about a disembodied hand
I also went to every single '?' on the map despite owning the hard cover strategy guide and knowing what was there. I still did it! That is how broken I am!
A good start.
The new unlock flow in Satisfactory is interesting. Instead of putting stuff like plates and modular frames into the Elevator, you make specific parts out of those kinds of things, which then go into the elevator. The next tier will also ask for more of those, so you need to keep your existing factory going during this process to start feeding the next tier, while learning to make the new items you need.
Bonus, if you build it right you can put some containers in there to catch overflow, giving you a ready supply of the initial basic building materials when you need them (plates, rods, etc..). The parts for the elevator also are fairly valuable in the new shredder so when you don't need to make them anymore, just redirect them into the shredder for tickets. Or do what I did, and build a ridiculous splitter system so half your production goes to the shredder. It's ugly but it works and keeps the tickets coming regularly while I build the new stuff.
Also, supplying coal plants is way more work now. Defnitely not the most efficient system, playing around with it as I figure the new stuff out.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Unrelated, I decided to run through the Mass Effect games because I wanted to try the whole "mods" thing; it's incredible. Like sure, the games look better, but mods can also restore cut content, some of which doesn't even break the game. Like the first Mass Effect has Cerberus as a guns/gear manufacturer, and their stuff is pretty good.
this is a good start to any post imo
When the Definitive Edition came out, I recall a couple youtubers running side-by-side comparisons and claiming that the DE actually looked worse than the original + HD texture pack, or it didn't do as many frames or had fewer tri-radial mip-mapped scan traces or something.
Honestly, to me - and granted that I'm visually impaired - they looked exactly the same. Certainly the difference wasn't stark enough in either direction to make me think you'd be missing out.
As my previous posts on the subject suggested, I wasn't very taken with the game for a great deal of its length. Cambat is both punishingly difficult and also opaque, where you can do the same thing five different times and four times you get unceremoniously killed and the fifth time you just slay everything without taking a scratch. Geralt has an unfortunate and frustrating proclivity to fetch up against inch-high steps, tiny bumps in the terrain, or other obstacles while rolling, at which point his reaction (naturally) is to stand and begin doing a run animation full-tilt into the offending object, leaving his back exposed for every monster to eviscerate you in about half a second. This happens over and over.
It was only in the last area, equipped with the best swords and armor in the game and a level or two shy of the cap, that I finally felt like the combat wasn't just me rolling the dice on quickloads over and over.
The fact that the middle portion of the game is essentially two completely different storylines is very cool in principle and I can see why people were taken with it, and I do want to try the other path (I took Vernon Roche this time)...someday. Maybe. Because in practice, I..found it kind of frustrating? The Witcher 2 has a very involved, gnarly plot with tons of previously-existing character relationships and seven or eight competing factions, some of which are secret factions unknown to the others, and you and Geralt, at ground level, essentially only ever see about the top five percent of the pyramid.
This was also the case in Witcher 1, and was something I loved about that game. Witcher 1 has a very traditional-fantasy-RPG narrative at first glance, with Geralt investigating a mystery that leads him to a villainous criminal organization and a sinister cult and you fight progressively tougher monsters culminating a satisfying throwdown against a boss; it's only if you're paying attention to sidequests and overheard bits of dialogue and various texts you stumble across that you figure out the true scope of what's going on,
and nobody ever spells it out for you or Geralt in a cutscene. It's just there, waiting for you to figure it out by inference. But it's okay if you don't figure it out, because the surface-level events of the story, the actual A to B to C, traces a complete, satisfying arc in its own right and is populated with interesting and likeable characters and cool setpieces and big revelations, even if it's not """important""" in the context of The Lore.
That's a cool, commendable approach to storytelling, and reinforces that Geralt tries to keep his feet firmly on the ground and not think too much about the politics swirling around him; a conspiracy to conquer a realm is the backdrop, but Geralt's just out in front fighting the monsters and villains that are the visible outcome of that conspiracy.
The problem in Witcher 2 is that the plot is so complex, and there are so many actors, and so few explanations in the course of the main game, that events are largely opaque until the very end. Like, I'm not exaggerating: the end of the game is largely taken up with a twenty-minute conversation between you and the titular Assassin of Kings where you quiz him on every single inexplicable or contextless thing that's happened to you since the game began, which is a lot.
It's impossible to get all the information in one playthrough, which is fine in and of itself and lends more weight to the big choice of which path to foillow in the middle act; however, because so much of the plot is kept doggedly obscure up till the end, the actual lived experience of playing the game is that you go to a place, are given a bunch of quests - most of which are, however well-written and fleshed-out, largely incidental to the overall plot - and check off boxes in your quest log until a bunch of big, catastrophic events begin occurring for unclear reasons, characters shout at you to FOLLOW ME! or GET OUT OF THE CASTLE AND MEET ME AT THE RIVER! and then you're chivvied off to a new place to start the process over again.
It does all come together at the end, and I'm satisfied, at the end of the game, that the plot is actually pretty clever and not total nonsense, but the moment-to-moment experience of play is disorienting; it doesn't tell a complete worthwhile story in its own right the way the first game did. It didn't give me enough breadcrumbs in the actual course of play to keep me motivated. I found myself taking long, long breaks from the game and the only thing that pushed me to come back was hearing people talk about the third game. It was like having to eat my vegetables before my ice cream and sitting there kind of sullenly chewing on the broccoli very slowly, with only a flicker of motivation to carry on.
BUT
I'm glad I did, because I downloaded and installed W3 and I've just gotten the griffin contract and it's Very Good. Geralt feels fluid and limber, the combat feels fun and forgiving, the environments are gorgeous, the weather effects are something else. I think I'll be happy with this.
Anything above easy I bet is a massive pain in the arse though, given you have to sit down to swig potions etc
D3 Steam #TeamTangent STO
The one nice thing about definitive edition is the dlc is integrated so you get them at balanced times
oh shit that is pretty nice
EDIT: that reminds me, I just realized I never did Year of the Snake. I need to do that
I played on normal and didn't really use potions much, only for fights I already died on and had to try again. It wasn't that hard, just had to somersault a lot. Like that game is basically a somersault simulator with RPG elements, at least the way I played it.
In other news, I just beat Dead Cells for the first time. Wasn't really expecting that. I hope you can get that last weapon back again, that looked fun.
(Dead Cells was made a lot easier about 6 months ago)
They added more difficulty on the back-end, and removed a lot of the enemy scaling. So now it's a game everyone can enjoy, and you just have to find your peace when you are not consistent enough to progress further. For me that happened at 2 boss cells. Didn't want to "get gud" for that.
Although coal is an ENDEAVOR now. I've got two normal coal nodes, with Mk2 Miners, Overclocked to 200%. To take full advantage of them took 32 Coal Plants, 12 Water Pumps, and 8 Pipelines (visible below). But now I have a grand total of 2400 MW of power which should be more than enough for me to unlock and expand to oil, with plenty left over. Good lord that took a lot of work though.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
I mean, I kind of went crazy there because I am a perfectionist about the aesthetics.
You can just start with just 4-8 generators and expand as needed. But the lynchpin is nearby deep water. Even if I upgraded to Mk3 miners, I don't think I have enough water in convenient distance for another 12 pumps (desert yall). So I think this is where this power plant caps out. After this I'm switching to oil if I need more power.
-edit-
Oil also takes water now but I believe the process creates byproducts like plastic and such.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.