What are you playing?

[AEmer]

It's a good idea to play games together, in theory, but considering we're not regularly doing it in specific games, we'd need to set up times and dates for it, and it'd be a bother.

I'm sure a fair number of players would be interested if someone wanted to organize, though I've no idea how many could sync up to play within the same games at the same time.

[Jonas]

I'm a little surprised that this community (as in Off Topic Productions) doesn't get more involved with games and events.

It's because we all hate each other.

Except Bobby.

[Jaedar]

No, it's because no one can be bothered to set it up. I mean, you'd have to find a game to play, and a time to play it on.

Sooooo much work

[EER]

Clearly, OpenTTD is the best game to play in a case like this. Where it doesn't really matter when you enter, as long as the server is running. I'd argue it's the best game to play in all cases where you have a mouse and keyboard available and a computer that runs OpenTTD.

That said, I think I played DXMP once with someone. With JSL perhaps? If not, I can't remember. I do remember getting killed a lot, but offsetting that by killing the other player with throwing knives.

[gamer0004]

Playing L4D2 together would be might fun... If my internet connection would hold. Which it probably won't. But hey, you have to take chances. Living on the edge right here.

[AEmer]

@Jetset Lemming

There's currently a group called NoobTube Server. It apparently looped around and connected up with me by itself a couple of weeks ago, and that's how I remembered the podcast. It has 50k members - more than the podcast had subscribers. I bet you'll be able to hook up with decent players there, if the community is anything like what my impression of it was.

Anyway, anybody can set up a steam group; OTP even has a group already, but that's invitation only, so maybe we're not all in that for a reason, but anybody can do it and we can play.

Or we can all play openTTD. That'd be pretty fun too.

[EER]

Or we can all play openTTD. That'd be pretty fun too.

That makes two players

[bobby 55]

Or we can all play openTTD. That'd be pretty fun too.

That makes two players

A railshooter? Hehehe...ahem. Back to bed.

[Jaedar]

So, kingdoms of amalur.

It is a shame. The game gets the combat right, and so really right, but gets so much wrong.

I mean, the combat is really good. It's flashy, it looks good, its fun. It's even fairly varied. I mean, there are recycled enemies but most of the time it's actually done in a way I'm ok with. Playing on hard, and it's a bit too easy at times, but more on that later, first enemy recycling!

For example: wolves. You'll face them within the first few minutes of the game, and throughout the first 2 locations. Then they'll disappear for a while only to come back. But they're not back alone, see instead, they come as support for ogres. Which is awesome because the wolves mainly have dashing attacks which all stagger you, and they're not scaled much at all so while they could do 1/4 of your total health at level 1 they'll do maybe 1/10th now. Of course, the ogres carry fuckhueg hammers which can kill you in 2 or 3 hits but they're kinda slow. Of course, that doesn't matter when there's two wolves dashing around, staggering you so you can't dodge or block the blow. This is good encounter design, not only because it makes for interesting fights but it also does some worldbuilding about the ogres namely that they are apparently quite good at domesticating and training animals. It's coo, it's good and its been so long since I saw a game do encounter design this well.

It's not all good though, sometimes some enemies are way too common and drag out their welcome(fucking spiders man, who thought it would be a good idea to have an entire zone with nothing but spiders to fight? and there's only 2 kinds of them as well) but generally the game keeps itself interesting and very rarely blatantly recycles fights throughout the world without adding some twist to them.

On the PC side, there's tons of weapon types, and they all handle quite differently(at least the mage kinds do, can't really tell you if daggers and faeblades are very different, or if there's a difference between a 2-handed hammer and a 2-handed sword). There's also quite a bit of customization. The combat specs are quite good with decent talent trees. It's a shame you have to buy almost everything at each tier to advance to the next though especially since a tier 1 maxed out attack spell is often better than a tier 4 attack spell at level 1. Either way it's solid enough and better than I would expect from a cRPG this day and age.

On the non-combat specilization there's 9 skills each with 12 levels, you get 1 point to allocate per level up there are also skill books(which are really rare, I've found one in total so far) and trainers(who cost a lot of money) so you have to specialize. 3 are crafting(equipment, potions and gems for socketing), 2 are chest unlock minigames and then there's persuation, mercantile, detect hidden(everything from traps to loot) and stealth. Most specializations seem fairly viable. Very solid for an action rpg.

And that's about it for the actually good stuff. The setting has a lot of promise. In a world where fate decides everything, and every village has a fateweaver who can tell the future fairly well you'd think it would be fairly interesting to be the one individual who can change and unmake fates. Likewise, the setup for some of the guilds are really cool too.

There's a society of Fae called the House of Ballads dedicated to forever reenacting their stories. The actors change, but the stories are always the same and they hexed all the bad guys(who don't get to change actors) to never die and always be forced to reenact their plans and eventual defeat. That's an interesting premise, a group of people so caught up in their previous acts that they spend all their time reliving the heroics of old instead of actually doing anything. Unfortunately, all it ends up being are a bunch of railroaded quests. There's a choice in the very last quest of the faction, but it doesn't amount to anything other than an opportunity to screw yourself out of some xp and a unique set piece.

And that's how most things turn out story-wise. Cool and interesting premise, shitty execution. Highly unfortunate.

The game world is... well I think it looks pretty cool even if there's a bit too much forests and grasslands. Unfortunately the maps are quite problematic in that they are filled to the brim with chests and plants to loot. And it wears thin quite quickly. Looting, opening locks, dispelling wards, it all becomes a chore after a few hours. It just doesn't work, especially not with such limited inventory space. Most of the loot is going to wind up as vendor trash anyway, so you're tempted to just skip it all, but you do actually need to get new gear and you will need money to repair your equipment and buy health potions. Looting really should never turn into a chore, but it has here. It's probably the main failing of the game. You can skip/skim through the dialogue, keep to the somewhat interesting quests but you can't really fix this problem with loot currently.

The UI is also pretty bad, but it could easily be fixed by adding some more keyboard shortcuts. It would also greatly help the loot problem if there was a way to automatize junking and destruction of items. Junk all swords and daggers please, and automatically destroy the lowest value items junked if I run out of inventory space. That would be such a great addition.

I almost forgot this but here's my problems with the difficulity. I play on hard, as mentioned and early game it felt too easy, but it has scaled up nicely. Problem is that there's essentially an automatic win button with reckoning mode. Not only does it make all the enemies go slow-mo, it also amps up your dmg to the extreme. It also increases the xp you gain by a bunch, so you want to use it in tough fights to get the biggest gain. I understand what the developers were going for, but making certain enemies immune would have probably been a good idea.

TL:DR. Game could have been really good, but is mediocre.

[AEmer]

To be fair, the biggest problem of most RPG's is loot. The drag it puts on the player, how useless of a task it is...how it completely devalues the sentimental value of finding awesome stuff because there's soooo much of it that it mostly all seems like the same, and how games get really bad difficulty variations due to the random nature of loot.

When was the last time you had fun with loot in a game, Jaedar?

[Jonas]

I actually think the one RPG I've played where loot was most fun was Fable 2. The weapons you got there were all unique, named, and had some sort of special power. You didn't get a lot of them of course, but when you got them, they were always special. And sometimes you'd keep using them for quite a while before the next upgrade came along.

I do like the way SWTOR handles it though - its orange and purple items are very clever for an RPG. It's their mods that determine their power, so if you have an outfit you really like the look of, but you find an ugly one with better stats, you can just strip its mods out and put them in your favourite outfit. That's quite clever.

[Hassat Hunter]

It's because we all hate each other.

Doesn't that make it an even better idea to digitally murder each other?

[Jaedar]

When was the last time you had fun with loot in a game, Jaedar?

I think I'm gonna say MotB. It's magic items were limited enough for it to be nice when you got them.

[bobby 55]

Thief II and Thief Gold are now on sale at GOG. Roll on Thief 3. [-o<

[AEmer]

That's remarkable. I wonder if everybody finds that loot is as hit and miss a mechanic as we do...I don't recall having fun with Loot since the beginning of Dragon Age...I think...and I hated it before the end.

I hated loot in Skyrim, too...same with the fallouts, mass effect 1, and in neverwinter nights 2 I hated with an absolute passion.

The only game I can recall enjoying loot from beginning to end in, was diablo 1...unless we're talking RTS's, in which case I liked it in both king arthur games, and in warcraft 3...

And of course I enjoyed it in Deus Ex and the detroit part of human revolution.

It seems to me that I mainly enjoy loot when something interesting happens after you pick it up, and for most RPG's, that's a very rare thing. You mainly just get crap to sell.

But if there's crafting, and that crafting involves loot in interesting ways, suddenly I enjoy it a ton. Buying stuff is also cool, and I did enjoy the emblems in Tor.