I want to play borderlands 3 3because I quite enjoyed 2, but I flat out do not want to hear hardwick's voice.
Does he voice a player character who you can go the game without hearing if you choose, or is he an NPC who you would have to hear no matter what?
He's not one of the vault hunters, but I have trouble seeing his Tales From The Borderlands character being like an integral part of the story. That said, you will probably hear him for some amount of time if you play the game.
Well shit.
Maybe someone could make a mod at some point to delete certain voice lines. Until then, back to wow classic.
It has lodged into my brain something deep, in a way that hasn't really happened since
well since Diablo 2, oddly enough
You'd think Path of Exile, a game which I played and enjoyed, would have already scratched that itch
But as it turns out, nah
I guess because PoE is very much aping Diablo 2 not merely in genre and style but in feel and narrative beats; it is a reaction to Diablo 3, something that tries to give you that same old feeling but from a different brand. It's nostalgia one degree removed; it works but you know something's missing
But Blasphemous is so much its own thing while still evoking that melancholia, that sadness and struggle at a world that has broken down and broken so many people with it
I want to be clear I'm not talking about gameplay here. As far as I can tell Blasphemous is not merely serviceable but quite adequate at being a Soulstroidvania
But it's everything except the technical mechanisms of combat and exploration that is staying with me. The sad piping of church organs in a ruined abbey called Mercy Dreams, the arches of a sewer system shaped to resemble the low curves of Cordoba's Our Lady of the Assumption mosque-turned-cathedral humming with the reverbed strumming of an electric guitar, the stories and anguishes and ecstasies of people warped and gnarled into inhumane forms by something they consider truly holy and the stitching of the aesthetics of Catholicism into a great and horrifying display, wood splinters and broken skin and unfathomable divinities and gilded bones and calloused hands clutched around petty icons and pain and guilt and
It's just so much
my only complaints so far are:
wish it gave a slightly better idea of where to go first.
a dedicated controls screen instead of having to shuffle through tutorial slides
um, having your resources get depleted from losing your souls or whatever on instant kill spikes and not having any way of recovering them (the game mentions someone can help you with this, but it sure isn't anyone in the starting town)
I finished Phantom Doctrine! I drank very deeply of the game because I was enjoying the moment-to-moment gameplay so I put off advancing the main story and did lots of tactical missions so I could a) afford all the best upgrades and b) have ample occasion to actually get to use them.
Completing the standard campaign once (as the CIA or KGB) unlocks the option to begin the Extended Campaign, where you play a Nazi hunter for the Mossad, and which apparently has a new take on the main storyline with alternate missions and more background on what's actually going on. I'm definitely interested but having drunk so deep of the game this go-around I'll probably wait a bit.
Overall, this game is a solid B and I'm very glad I played it and very satisfied with my purchase, and on balance, I am still somewhat nonplussed with the mix of hostility and indifference it was greeted with upon release. I feel like I understand some of the criticisms very well now, and agree with them, but others have receded even further into the distance. In particular it highlighted the degree to which I just don't trust or really take seriously RPS anymore, as their reviewer went on about how much he'd been looking forward to a proper spy game and was then disappointed at the lack of car chases, sexy women, volcano lairs etc; it was painfully clear that he was thinking "spy" meant "James Bond", and as someone who daily steams my scrotum and asshole in a tea made from pages torn from John le Carre paperbacks this made me very sad.
(Digression: I totally acknowledge there is value in matching a video game to a reviewer who may have no knowledge of the media context the game exists in, in order to see how accessible the game might be to a general audience, but I find myself growing more and more frustrated with the crippling insularity of nerd culture. I feel like even savvy, politically aware games dudes, like the Waypoint guys, just kind of elevate their game by knowing about nerd culture + the actual real world around them, but I still literally have no idea which video game critic or commentator I could ever talk to about almost any of my interests outside of video games or modern, immediate pop culture. It's weird. I feel so fucking alone in crowds of video game nerds in ways I never did with film people, or band people, or even comic book people.)
Anyway, in summation:
THE GOOD STUFF
- I love the combat. I love it. I love it! I love that it's deterministic, where you will hit (or be hit) unless the target has Awareness, a limited, quickly-depleted resource that allows them to turn a hit into an only-slightly-damaging graze. This is something I depart from some of the critics I read: I saw a frequent complaint that it took the drama away from fights because you weren't, you know, wondering if you'd hit the Muton or whatever. But for me it added drama because I knew for sure that as soon as the guns came out my guys would get shot - and since there are almost always more bad guys than you, that's not a tenable situation for very long!
(I also have to ask if those dudes just can't gel with games like Advance Wars, which are also broadly deterministic and don't have a huge amount of room for randomness but are still, to me, wildly fun.)
The thing is, the combat system rewards information and preparation. If you know where the bad guys are and where they're coming from, you can set up overwatches, you can flank (which negaes their ability to dodge), you can make the fight very one-sided in your favor: and the reverse is also true, so you don't want to just charge into rooms without a plan, because it will go horribly for you really quickly. It's also the case that your information deteriorates over time as a fight goes on and people move, civilians wander into and out of the battlefield, your powers go on cooldown etc, incentivizing you to do whatever it is you came for and get out quickly.
This all feels right to me. It feels like the same headspace I was in when I played the original Rainbow Six. I've never been in a gunfight but it certainly sounds like what I've heard about from people who have. The behaviors it encourages are ones that make sense to me as someone sitting here trying to imagine it. Certainly if I knew I was going to a gun battle I'd want to like, know where all the exits were? And not go anywhere without backup, and not wander into strange rooms on my own?
This does mean you lose some of the mad, cinematic drama of an X-COM, but, like, that's okay? What if it's okay for things to not be like a greatest hits of an action movie all the time? It pays dividends in making me feel like I'm there.
- There are extensive options for offscreen support you can bring along on missions. You can have spotters with telescopes who peer into building rooms for you, you can set up sniper nests, you can have "cleaners" who come in after the battle and tidy up, reducing attention from law enforcement. You can even pay a helicopter to be on standby, unlocking the ability to do airlift evacs in a pinch. Lots of these options are also upgradeable, too (you can buy better telescopes for your spotters, suppressors for the snipers, etc). I'm going to be sad the next time I play a tactical game and it doesn't do any of this, because it just delights me and gives me interesting choices to make beyond just equipping the best gun and best armor.
- The base managment, for me, hits the sweet spot between the modern XCOMs and the original X-COM, between being too on-rails and hand-holdy vs too fiddly. There's a worker-placement aspect I really appreciate, where your off-duty agents can be put to work crafting tools like flashbangs or lockpicks, decrypting signals traffic, training on the firing range, etc. You learn to develop your own approach to stationing agents around the globe so they can respond to situations in time (if you hear about an assassination in San Francisco and your nearest agent is in Kabul, you quickly learn why the CIA sticks guys all over the world).
- The "body engineering" system, where you inject agents with experimental drugs to improve their stats, is effectively a skin over a logic puzzle. Like, to make up an example, Anadorphin can increase their reflexes by 10 points but lowers sensory ability by 6, and it blocks the ability to take Gondorelin or Fenyxl afterward. I actually got out a pad and paper and sat down for a few hours in my bedroom trying different combinations and it felt like doing those old "Jenny was born on the same day as Brad, but before Kara" things in the back of Discover magazine. And my patience was rewarded with a squad of coked-out, gimlet-eyed psychopaths with multiple shooting and action points every round.
- That reminds me: a tiny detail I love about the way the tactical gameplay works is that additional move actions by your characters take them one square less distance. So a standard dude might get, like, two six-square moves, but a guy whose stats have been amped gets three five-square moves, or four four-square moves. I like it because it's still a clear upgrade, but it doesn't turn people into the Flash - but it wildly increases their flexibility and versatility, as they can, for instance, loot three objects in the same room in one turn instead of just moving 7 squares from the computer to the safe and then losing the rest of their movement because that was two move actions. Like I said, it's a little thing, but I dig it, and it's emblematic of the thought and care that went into the game's systems.
- Occasionally the game pops up random events with tough decisions, very much like Battletech or Crusader Kings or whatever, and these were often excellent. A couple of my agents had questionable pasts: the guy who was a former terrorist I let slide, while the woman who had worked for Third World slavers ended up in a hole in the backyard. One agent got cancer and paying fully for his treatment earned me the Loyalty perk for him (so he would never turn traitor).
- I love the loyalty stuff. Sometimes agents will turn mole or traitor and this doesn't seem to be just a story-mandated thing: stuff will happen. Like you'll be stealthing through a mission and suddenly the alarm is raised and you know it wasn't you who did it. It's delightful and feels incredibly appropriate.
- The main story incorporates all of the game's systems (and often introduces you to them) instead of consisting of a series of forced exceptions to the normal gameplay. None of that "your power won't work on the boss" kind of shit.
- The main story is solid, ties into real-world events in a couple of interesting ways, and was clearly very well-researched. A couple of things I thought were farfetched actually turned out to be true (the downing of KAL-007 by the Soviets due to a navigation error actually helped propagate the Global Positioning System - I didn't know GPS had even been around back them!). It hits a lot of the beats that I would want from a spy thriller, and it never goes insane. Aliens don't show up.
THE INDIFFERENT
- At the same time, the story doesn't have much in the way of interesting characters or memorable dialogue. it's mostly just plot rather than narrative as such. A lot of that's the nature of the beast (this is a tactical game with lots of randomness a la XCOM) and the fact that they didn't have the budget for lots of cutscenes. Still, I think it could have punched at least one or two notches higher than it did.
- While the plot and much of the gameplay is surprisingly grounded (nobody gets laser eyes, people who you use a "med kit" on still need to spend time in the hospital, etc) it's very Hollywood realistic. There are still magic silencers that go "thwip." NPCs don't react to characters jumping through plate glass windows UNLESS the character is now trespassing by being on the other side of a property line. These things are issues partly because of how they just defy logic or kind of fly in the face of the fairly sober, realistic tone, but also because they feel like missed opportunities. Making windows an obstacle where you either need to take time to carefully open them, or crash through and make noise, would add new wrinkles to stealth. Depriving us of the option to make quiet, consequence-free murders (or making it riskier by creating noises that people want to investigate) would make stealth more challenging. This is all to the good.
- There's definitely a tension between the fact that combat is fun and the fact that stealth is optimal but not as fun. Stealth in tactical games often means a lot of patiently waiting for people to leave a room, or creeping forward one or two squares at a time. I found myself hoping for an unexpected bad development (a passing civilian seeing me at the wrong time, or a traitor) just so I could throw down more often.
THE BAD
- There's an unfortunate choice to have lootables in the game world - classified documents on desks or in safes, racks of guns to loot, etc - and make you kind of pixel-hunt for them. Like, they only become visible when someone sees them, so even if a mission has a fairly clear objective, you find yourself taking an hour just to march a guy into every room of a base just to see if there's more stuff to steal. They're optional, you don't have to grab them, but a lot of this stuff there's no other way to get in game - you can't just buy a Dragunov sniper rifle or whatever, unless you happen to get lucky and earn a contact who sells them, you gotta find and loot it. This feels suboptimal.
- The interface is often just garbage. Like, there's a degree to which it's unavoidable, because the game has a lot of complexity and there's only so many ways you can boil that down, but it's shit like...I told you about the drug system earlier? Those drugs aren't alphabetized. You have to scroll through a menu of words like Fenaloxine and AMPYGYRL and shit like that and it's not organized sensibly in any way. Also, scroll menus have a way of snapping to a random point.
One question: can you customize and personalize your agents? Like rename them or redesign them if you want to?
Said a third, when I asked: “I haven’t experienced anything like Tyrone demanding people use racial slurs, but he likes to say ‘white is right’ often in a ‘jokey’ way.”
It has lodged into my brain something deep, in a way that hasn't really happened since
well since Diablo 2, oddly enough
You'd think Path of Exile, a game which I played and enjoyed, would have already scratched that itch
But as it turns out, nah
I guess because PoE is very much aping Diablo 2 not merely in genre and style but in feel and narrative beats; it is a reaction to Diablo 3, something that tries to give you that same old feeling but from a different brand. It's nostalgia one degree removed; it works but you know something's missing
But Blasphemous is so much its own thing while still evoking that melancholia, that sadness and struggle at a world that has broken down and broken so many people with it
I want to be clear I'm not talking about gameplay here. As far as I can tell Blasphemous is not merely serviceable but quite adequate at being a Soulstroidvania
But it's everything except the technical mechanisms of combat and exploration that is staying with me. The sad piping of church organs in a ruined abbey called Mercy Dreams, the arches of a sewer system shaped to resemble the low curves of Cordoba's Our Lady of the Assumption mosque-turned-cathedral humming with the reverbed strumming of an electric guitar, the stories and anguishes and ecstasies of people warped and gnarled into inhumane forms by something they consider truly holy and the stitching of the aesthetics of Catholicism into a great and horrifying display, wood splinters and broken skin and unfathomable divinities and gilded bones and calloused hands clutched around petty icons and pain and guilt and
It's just so much
my only complaints so far are:
wish it gave a slightly better idea of where to go first.
a dedicated controls screen instead of having to shuffle through tutorial slides
um, having your resources get depleted from losing your souls or whatever on instant kill spikes and not having any way of recovering them (the game mentions someone can help you with this, but it sure isn't anyone in the starting town)
If you go to where you died, there will be a ghostly blue image of yourself with the 8 symbol thingy (it will show up on your map too as a red 8 symbol) and you can interact with it to remove guilt. There are also occasionally huge statues you can interact with that remove guilt (they have their own room, like the mea culpa room). Those also show up on the map once you find them.
Also, as far as I can tell you don't lose anything on death, I just see thorns creep up the fervor meter.
Maybe it reduces your max fervor until you remove all guilt? I'm not sure exactly
Wow, he's not just being racist/anti-Semitic, but he's got that special brand of bigotry where he scapegoats minorities for the ills in his life. :razz:
If you go to where you died, there will be a ghostly blue image of yourself with the 8 symbol thingy (it will show up on your map too as a red 8 symbol) and you can interact with it to remove guilt. There are also occasionally huge statues you can interact with that remove guilt (they have their own room, like the mea culpa room). Those also show up on the map once you find them.
Also, as far as I can tell you don't lose anything on death, I just see thorns creep up the fervor meter.
Maybe it reduces your max fervor until you remove all guilt? I'm not sure exactly
Yeah, I know about picking up the ghosts, but if its on instadeath spikes there's no way to get it (until you get something that lets you survive that, I guess).
I went east from the starting town and eventually found that statue that you can pay to remove your guilt so that fixed that.
It has lodged into my brain something deep, in a way that hasn't really happened since
well since Diablo 2, oddly enough
You'd think Path of Exile, a game which I played and enjoyed, would have already scratched that itch
But as it turns out, nah
I guess because PoE is very much aping Diablo 2 not merely in genre and style but in feel and narrative beats; it is a reaction to Diablo 3, something that tries to give you that same old feeling but from a different brand. It's nostalgia one degree removed; it works but you know something's missing
But Blasphemous is so much its own thing while still evoking that melancholia, that sadness and struggle at a world that has broken down and broken so many people with it
I want to be clear I'm not talking about gameplay here. As far as I can tell Blasphemous is not merely serviceable but quite adequate at being a Soulstroidvania
But it's everything except the technical mechanisms of combat and exploration that is staying with me. The sad piping of church organs in a ruined abbey called Mercy Dreams, the arches of a sewer system shaped to resemble the low curves of Cordoba's Our Lady of the Assumption mosque-turned-cathedral humming with the reverbed strumming of an electric guitar, the stories and anguishes and ecstasies of people warped and gnarled into inhumane forms by something they consider truly holy and the stitching of the aesthetics of Catholicism into a great and horrifying display, wood splinters and broken skin and unfathomable divinities and gilded bones and calloused hands clutched around petty icons and pain and guilt and
It's just so much
my only complaints so far are:
wish it gave a slightly better idea of where to go first.
a dedicated controls screen instead of having to shuffle through tutorial slides
um, having your resources get depleted from losing your souls or whatever on instant kill spikes and not having any way of recovering them (the game mentions someone can help you with this, but it sure isn't anyone in the starting town)
If you go to where you died, there will be a ghostly blue image of yourself with the 8 symbol thingy (it will show up on your map too as a red 8 symbol) and you can interact with it to remove guilt. There are also occasionally huge statues you can interact with that remove guilt (they have their own room, like the mea culpa room). Those also show up on the map once you find them.
Also, as far as I can tell you don't lose anything on death, I just see thorns creep up the fervor meter.
Maybe it reduces your max fervor until you remove all guilt? I'm not sure exactly
Guilt actually frequently increases your religious fervor, in my experience.
Straightzi on
+3
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KwoaruConfident SmirkFlawless Golden PecsRegistered Userregular
He sounds like a high school aged southpark fan who just never grew up
Oh my god PDP is just the worst sort of trainwreck fuckhead.
I honestly think he's worse than being openly racist, because he's so clearly dumb and thoughtless and lacking conviction and dragged by the tongue by his racist ass fanbase that it's super easy for those same racist ass fans to say "he's just a dude who makes mistakes" as they hound him to keep doing racist shit
on the one hand, Pewdiepie sucks, and it is entirely unsurprising that he would pull this kind of stunt
on the other hand, the ADL is one of those groups whose definition of "antisemitism" includes "any and all criticism of the Israeli government," and they shouldn't be getting that money anyway
on the one hand, Pewdiepie sucks, and it is entirely unsurprising that he would pull this kind of stunt
on the other hand, the ADL is one of those groups whose definition of "antisemitism" includes "any and all criticism of the Israeli government," and they shouldn't be getting that money anyway
He's not pulling it because of that though. He's pulling it because a large and loud portion of his fans were very angry about the donation to the point* of aggressive anti-semitic comments everywhere they interact with him
*as if this is a big departure from their usual behavior
Zxerolfor the smaller pieces, my shovel wouldn't doso i took off my boot and used my shoeRegistered Userregular
Regardless of the ADL's extremely questionable politics, the optics of PDP rescinding the donation after grandstanding about how hip his with The Jews is just *chef's kiss*.
In today’s video, Kjellberg explained his decision not to donate after all. “When we were planning the collaboration, we thought it would be nice to donate to a charity as a way to celebrate. I made the mistake of picking a charity I was advised instead of picking a charity I’m personally passionate about, which is 100% my fault,” said Kjellberg in the video.
“When I uploaded the video talking about the charity, it was very brief. People could tell something was up. The whole internet just didn’t believe it. ‘Why is he donating to this charity? Look at his face.’ Full conspiracy mode. It was very interesting to watch that unfold,” laughed Kjellberg.
“I saw it as an opportunity to put an end to these alt-right claims that have been thrown against me. It wasn’t to try and clear my name or say grace. If it was, I would have done it years ago. But after the Christchurch tragedy, I felt a responsibility to do something about it, because it’s no longer just about me. It affected other people in a way, and I’m not okay with that. I’ve struggled to figure out how to do that, but this was not the right way to go about it. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I also didn’t know a lot of things that surfaced throughout this whole thing about the charity that doesn’t fit at all. So I understand why people had concerns about it. These are things I would have known myself if I had just taken my time. . . It really doesn’t feel genuine for me to proceed with the donation at this point, and I instead wanted to actually take my time and keep the intent that I had, but do it with the right charity and doing it properly. I just wanted to make that clear. I’m sorry for all the confusion, and I’m sorry for messing this up. That’s what I do!”
Over the last couple of days, Kjellberg’s fans and followers have spread the claim that the ADL was blackmailing him after threats of “censoring” or, ironically, “defaming” him. The backlash against his donation to the ADL was fueled by conspiracies that the well-respected, 100-year-old anti-hate organization could somehow shut down Kjellberg’s YouTube channel, which had just hit 100 million subscriptions. In a recent video, Kjellberg himself described the ADL as an “organization that fights bigotry and prejudice in all its forms.”
How is his reason for doing it not a way to clear his name?
Couscous on
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HiT BiT🍒 Fresh, straight from Pac-man'sRegistered Userregular
I finished Phantom Doctrine! I drank very deeply of the game because I was enjoying the moment-to-moment gameplay so I put off advancing the main story and did lots of tactical missions so I could a) afford all the best upgrades and b) have ample occasion to actually get to use them.
Completing the standard campaign once (as the CIA or KGB) unlocks the option to begin the Extended Campaign, where you play a Nazi hunter for the Mossad, and which apparently has a new take on the main storyline with alternate missions and more background on what's actually going on. I'm definitely interested but having drunk so deep of the game this go-around I'll probably wait a bit.
Overall, this game is a solid B and I'm very glad I played it and very satisfied with my purchase, and on balance, I am still somewhat nonplussed with the mix of hostility and indifference it was greeted with upon release. I feel like I understand some of the criticisms very well now, and agree with them, but others have receded even further into the distance. In particular it highlighted the degree to which I just don't trust or really take seriously RPS anymore, as their reviewer went on about how much he'd been looking forward to a proper spy game and was then disappointed at the lack of car chases, sexy women, volcano lairs etc; it was painfully clear that he was thinking "spy" meant "James Bond", and as someone who daily steams my scrotum and asshole in a tea made from pages torn from John le Carre paperbacks this made me very sad.
(Digression: I totally acknowledge there is value in matching a video game to a reviewer who may have no knowledge of the media context the game exists in, in order to see how accessible the game might be to a general audience, but I find myself growing more and more frustrated with the crippling insularity of nerd culture. I feel like even savvy, politically aware games dudes, like the Waypoint guys, just kind of elevate their game by knowing about nerd culture + the actual real world around them, but I still literally have no idea which video game critic or commentator I could ever talk to about almost any of my interests outside of video games or modern, immediate pop culture. It's weird. I feel so fucking alone in crowds of video game nerds in ways I never did with film people, or band people, or even comic book people.)
Anyway, in summation:
THE GOOD STUFF
- I love the combat. I love it. I love it! I love that it's deterministic, where you will hit (or be hit) unless the target has Awareness, a limited, quickly-depleted resource that allows them to turn a hit into an only-slightly-damaging graze. This is something I depart from some of the critics I read: I saw a frequent complaint that it took the drama away from fights because you weren't, you know, wondering if you'd hit the Muton or whatever. But for me it added drama because I knew for sure that as soon as the guns came out my guys would get shot - and since there are almost always more bad guys than you, that's not a tenable situation for very long!
(I also have to ask if those dudes just can't gel with games like Advance Wars, which are also broadly deterministic and don't have a huge amount of room for randomness but are still, to me, wildly fun.)
The thing is, the combat system rewards information and preparation. If you know where the bad guys are and where they're coming from, you can set up overwatches, you can flank (which negaes their ability to dodge), you can make the fight very one-sided in your favor: and the reverse is also true, so you don't want to just charge into rooms without a plan, because it will go horribly for you really quickly. It's also the case that your information deteriorates over time as a fight goes on and people move, civilians wander into and out of the battlefield, your powers go on cooldown etc, incentivizing you to do whatever it is you came for and get out quickly.
This all feels right to me. It feels like the same headspace I was in when I played the original Rainbow Six. I've never been in a gunfight but it certainly sounds like what I've heard about from people who have. The behaviors it encourages are ones that make sense to me as someone sitting here trying to imagine it. Certainly if I knew I was going to a gun battle I'd want to like, know where all the exits were? And not go anywhere without backup, and not wander into strange rooms on my own?
This does mean you lose some of the mad, cinematic drama of an X-COM, but, like, that's okay? What if it's okay for things to not be like a greatest hits of an action movie all the time? It pays dividends in making me feel like I'm there.
- There are extensive options for offscreen support you can bring along on missions. You can have spotters with telescopes who peer into building rooms for you, you can set up sniper nests, you can have "cleaners" who come in after the battle and tidy up, reducing attention from law enforcement. You can even pay a helicopter to be on standby, unlocking the ability to do airlift evacs in a pinch. Lots of these options are also upgradeable, too (you can buy better telescopes for your spotters, suppressors for the snipers, etc). I'm going to be sad the next time I play a tactical game and it doesn't do any of this, because it just delights me and gives me interesting choices to make beyond just equipping the best gun and best armor.
- The base managment, for me, hits the sweet spot between the modern XCOMs and the original X-COM, between being too on-rails and hand-holdy vs too fiddly. There's a worker-placement aspect I really appreciate, where your off-duty agents can be put to work crafting tools like flashbangs or lockpicks, decrypting signals traffic, training on the firing range, etc. You learn to develop your own approach to stationing agents around the globe so they can respond to situations in time (if you hear about an assassination in San Francisco and your nearest agent is in Kabul, you quickly learn why the CIA sticks guys all over the world).
- The "body engineering" system, where you inject agents with experimental drugs to improve their stats, is effectively a skin over a logic puzzle. Like, to make up an example, Anadorphin can increase their reflexes by 10 points but lowers sensory ability by 6, and it blocks the ability to take Gondorelin or Fenyxl afterward. I actually got out a pad and paper and sat down for a few hours in my bedroom trying different combinations and it felt like doing those old "Jenny was born on the same day as Brad, but before Kara" things in the back of Discover magazine. And my patience was rewarded with a squad of coked-out, gimlet-eyed psychopaths with multiple shooting and action points every round.
- That reminds me: a tiny detail I love about the way the tactical gameplay works is that additional move actions by your characters take them one square less distance. So a standard dude might get, like, two six-square moves, but a guy whose stats have been amped gets three five-square moves, or four four-square moves. I like it because it's still a clear upgrade, but it doesn't turn people into the Flash - but it wildly increases their flexibility and versatility, as they can, for instance, loot three objects in the same room in one turn instead of just moving 7 squares from the computer to the safe and then losing the rest of their movement because that was two move actions. Like I said, it's a little thing, but I dig it, and it's emblematic of the thought and care that went into the game's systems.
- Occasionally the game pops up random events with tough decisions, very much like Battletech or Crusader Kings or whatever, and these were often excellent. A couple of my agents had questionable pasts: the guy who was a former terrorist I let slide, while the woman who had worked for Third World slavers ended up in a hole in the backyard. One agent got cancer and paying fully for his treatment earned me the Loyalty perk for him (so he would never turn traitor).
- I love the loyalty stuff. Sometimes agents will turn mole or traitor and this doesn't seem to be just a story-mandated thing: stuff will happen. Like you'll be stealthing through a mission and suddenly the alarm is raised and you know it wasn't you who did it. It's delightful and feels incredibly appropriate.
- The main story incorporates all of the game's systems (and often introduces you to them) instead of consisting of a series of forced exceptions to the normal gameplay. None of that "your power won't work on the boss" kind of shit.
- The main story is solid, ties into real-world events in a couple of interesting ways, and was clearly very well-researched. A couple of things I thought were farfetched actually turned out to be true (the downing of KAL-007 by the Soviets due to a navigation error actually helped propagate the Global Positioning System - I didn't know GPS had even been around back them!). It hits a lot of the beats that I would want from a spy thriller, and it never goes insane. Aliens don't show up.
THE INDIFFERENT
- At the same time, the story doesn't have much in the way of interesting characters or memorable dialogue. it's mostly just plot rather than narrative as such. A lot of that's the nature of the beast (this is a tactical game with lots of randomness a la XCOM) and the fact that they didn't have the budget for lots of cutscenes. Still, I think it could have punched at least one or two notches higher than it did.
- While the plot and much of the gameplay is surprisingly grounded (nobody gets laser eyes, people who you use a "med kit" on still need to spend time in the hospital, etc) it's very Hollywood realistic. There are still magic silencers that go "thwip." NPCs don't react to characters jumping through plate glass windows UNLESS the character is now trespassing by being on the other side of a property line. These things are issues partly because of how they just defy logic or kind of fly in the face of the fairly sober, realistic tone, but also because they feel like missed opportunities. Making windows an obstacle where you either need to take time to carefully open them, or crash through and make noise, would add new wrinkles to stealth. Depriving us of the option to make quiet, consequence-free murders (or making it riskier by creating noises that people want to investigate) would make stealth more challenging. This is all to the good.
- There's definitely a tension between the fact that combat is fun and the fact that stealth is optimal but not as fun. Stealth in tactical games often means a lot of patiently waiting for people to leave a room, or creeping forward one or two squares at a time. I found myself hoping for an unexpected bad development (a passing civilian seeing me at the wrong time, or a traitor) just so I could throw down more often.
THE BAD
- There's an unfortunate choice to have lootables in the game world - classified documents on desks or in safes, racks of guns to loot, etc - and make you kind of pixel-hunt for them. Like, they only become visible when someone sees them, so even if a mission has a fairly clear objective, you find yourself taking an hour just to march a guy into every room of a base just to see if there's more stuff to steal. They're optional, you don't have to grab them, but a lot of this stuff there's no other way to get in game - you can't just buy a Dragunov sniper rifle or whatever, unless you happen to get lucky and earn a contact who sells them, you gotta find and loot it. This feels suboptimal.
- The interface is often just garbage. Like, there's a degree to which it's unavoidable, because the game has a lot of complexity and there's only so many ways you can boil that down, but it's shit like...I told you about the drug system earlier? Those drugs aren't alphabetized. You have to scroll through a menu of words like Fenaloxine and AMPYGYRL and shit like that and it's not organized sensibly in any way. Also, scroll menus have a way of snapping to a random point.
One question: can you customize and personalize your agents? Like rename them or redesign them if you want to?
Yes. Like I say, it's an AA game with AA graphics so don't expect something quite on the order of XCOM, but there are different body types, a dozen faces, lots of clothing options ranging from military/paramilitary to casual street clothes to early-80s fashion (I had a femme fatale lady who wore big sunglasses and a big floppy sun hat) to dark g-man suits. There's also a decent amount of very late 70s/early 80s permed hair.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Listen if I can dress my folks up in suits and early-80s fashion then the character creator is already blowing XCOM's out of the water
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Well shit.
Maybe someone could make a mod at some point to delete certain voice lines. Until then, back to wow classic.
my only complaints so far are:
Only from the still, yeah.
I watched the video and the illusion crumbled pretty much immediately.
One question: can you customize and personalize your agents? Like rename them or redesign them if you want to?
And the hits just keep on coming
sigh
*It does not, in fact
If you go to where you died, there will be a ghostly blue image of yourself with the 8 symbol thingy (it will show up on your map too as a red 8 symbol) and you can interact with it to remove guilt. There are also occasionally huge statues you can interact with that remove guilt (they have their own room, like the mea culpa room). Those also show up on the map once you find them.
Also, as far as I can tell you don't lose anything on death, I just see thorns creep up the fervor meter.
Maybe it reduces your max fervor until you remove all guilt? I'm not sure exactly
Yeah, I know about picking up the ghosts, but if its on instadeath spikes there's no way to get it (until you get something that lets you survive that, I guess).
I went east from the starting town and eventually found that statue that you can pay to remove your guilt so that fixed that.
Okay even the slightest ghost of a facade of PDP being anything less than an outright Nazi has been stripped away fucking hell
Guilt actually frequently increases your religious fervor, in my experience.
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
I honestly think he's worse than being openly racist, because he's so clearly dumb and thoughtless and lacking conviction and dragged by the tongue by his racist ass fanbase that it's super easy for those same racist ass fans to say "he's just a dude who makes mistakes" as they hound him to keep doing racist shit
on the other hand, the ADL is one of those groups whose definition of "antisemitism" includes "any and all criticism of the Israeli government," and they shouldn't be getting that money anyway
He's not pulling it because of that though. He's pulling it because a large and loud portion of his fans were very angry about the donation to the point* of aggressive anti-semitic comments everywhere they interact with him
*as if this is a big departure from their usual behavior
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sounds like it's too far along to pull the plug on but after that edmund m is done with nicalis
McMillen seems like a good dude, which I find amusing because based on Binding Of Isaac/Meat Boy you figure he'd be a massive edgelord scumbag.
I've never found Endless Space 1/2 to be the deepest 4x games, but man if they aren't some of the most gorgeous 4x games I've ever played.
Yes. Like I say, it's an AA game with AA graphics so don't expect something quite on the order of XCOM, but there are different body types, a dozen faces, lots of clothing options ranging from military/paramilitary to casual street clothes to early-80s fashion (I had a femme fatale lady who wore big sunglasses and a big floppy sun hat) to dark g-man suits. There's also a decent amount of very late 70s/early 80s permed hair.