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Post by
Fwibbles
Started a FE:A Lunatic run and i'm absolutely stumped.
The sheer amount of 'fake' difficulty in the first 5 chapters (not counting premonition, and I'm stuch at ch. frickin 2) is ridiculous, and compounded with the lack of customization in those levels has all but killed most of the love of this game I got from my normal/cl and hard/cl playthroughs.
as said earlier, i'm stuck at chapter 2 (north road) and could use some pro tips.
I did the water trick on my avatar (lv. 6-8 now, can't remember) but he's still about as resilient as a sponge cake to a machete when it comes to the STEEL weapons on this chapter.
No matter what I do, as soon as turn 2 rolls over Frederick has either bit the dust, or is about to, and/or all my other squishy liabilities are about to be swarmed and are in the purple zone of double-attack.
-______-
Post by
Hyperspacerebel
My girlfriend and I have been playing a lot of The Last Remnant, which is one of the few modern jrpgs to make it to PC. We really like how we can play it with a controller, how it has adventure and story and characters we can make fun of and have a good time with, and how it doesn't have action-based combat (so we can just lie around in bed and play it at our own pace, tossing the controller back and forth). Does anyone have any suggestion for similar games for the PC? We're not at all married to that genre, and any game that we can kinda "$%^& around" with together?
Post by
Monday
Magicka is good for that (if you can get it to run).
Post by
lankybrit
Oh God. I started playing Civ 5. I can't stop. Someone send me food or something.
I'm interspersing Civ 5 with my GW2 time right now, but may be totally consumed with Wilsdstar this Saturday.
What I'm doing in Civ 5 is playing with every leader. Continents, Large, Epic. And I only play on Warlord, because I can't choose my favorite play style no anything higher.
Post by
Jkpman
My girlfriend and I have been playing a lot of The Last Remnant, which is one of the few modern jrpgs to make it to PC. We really like how we can play it with a controller, how it has adventure and story and characters we can make fun of and have a good time with, and how it doesn't have action-based combat (so we can just lie around in bed and play it at our own pace, tossing the controller back and forth). Does anyone have any suggestion for similar games for the PC? We're not at all married to that genre, and any game that we can kinda "$%^& around" with together?
Civ 5 has a hotseat mode. Outstanding game.
Thanks for the reminder about Last Remnant, I bought it dirt cheap on steam at Xmas and have completely forgotten about it.
Installing now :)
Post by
Raleandris
Last Remnant is okay. Personally, I felt the combat was super wonky, and it's one of those games that actually gets harder if you grind too much, so be careful of that. I also had a few graphical issues when it was first ported to PC. Don't know if that's still an issue or not as I haven't played in a long time. The story is neat though.
Post by
Orranis
Is there a melee thread? There should be a melee thread.
Going to a tourny made by a bunch of school friends in like two weeks, it's gonna be disgusting and I think I'm gonna make like a hundred bucks.
Post by
Hyperspacerebel
Last Remnant is okay. Personally, I felt the combat was super wonky, and it's one of those games that actually gets harder if you grind too much, so be careful of that. I also had a few graphical issues when it was first ported to PC. Don't know if that's still an issue or not as I haven't played in a long time. The story is neat though.
I've beaten the game 3 or 4 times already, and I love the combat. One of my favorite jrpg systems, and the one that keeps drawing me back. Makes me sad there aren't any more.
Post by
buttrknife
Anyone here play Dark Souls 2? I love it far more than I should.
Also, I watched someone streaming Mario Kart 8 last night. Seriously considered selling my 360 for money towards a Wii U.
Post by
Monday
Friend of mine bought Mario Kart 8. It's pretty cool.
Post by
Thror
Anyone else playing Divinity: Original Sin?
It is a pretty great RPG, released like two weeks ago or something. It has an interesting story, lots of dialogue, interesting character progression and insanely good tactical combat. At the moment, my characters are at level 7, which I suspect is fairly low, and I believe I may be somewhere in the first 15~20% of the game. Hard to tell.
The story starts off really simple, you play a duo of "Source Hunters", people who dedicate their life to hunting evil "Sourcerers" (Magicians that draw power from a "Source". Basically you hunt evil wizards.), you are dispatched on an island and are told that there is an evil Sourcerer somewhere on the island. Find him, kill him, all done. If only it was that easy. The story gets more interesting when you find out the world is about to end, an ancient evil is about to wake up again, a murder has occured in the first town and the place where it happened reeks of Source magic. Oh also the town is under siege by Orcs from the left and Undead+Necromancers from the right. Huzzah.
There is plenty of dialogue, but it really isn't all that good. With 95% of NPCs you get generic dialogue that is the same for all of them except for slightly different (in flavour) answers. The other 5% of NPCs are quest-bound people, but even with those you are often fine if you just spam 1 to roll through all the dialogue options and then check your Journal on what you are supposed to do. The writing in dialogue is alright. There is a perk that lets you talk to animals, and it is a really fun perk, because the animal dialogues are actually pretty funny. A dog mentions in every sentance how his master is awesome, a cat tells you that it is she who is really the boss in the house of the town Mayor, and so on.
Character progression is fun. It's quite similar to Fallout 1&2. You have your base stats, that determine how good you are at some things. Then you have "skills" that determine how good you are at specialized things. You have weapon proficiency skills (with 4 categories: single handed, two-handed, bow, crossbow), social skills (charisma, bartering, and such), crafting skills (crafting, blacksmithing, telekinesis and such), thief skills (sneaking, lockpicking, pickocketting), and then the important ones... not sure how t hey are called in the game. I guess just "Skills". It's basically a category of skills that contains what you would consider "class defining". If you go into the Skills category and put 1 skill point into "Scoundrel", you get the ability to learn 3 scoundrel spells (basically rogue spells). If you would invest into Pyromancy you can learn 3 fire spells. There is also a warrior skill that you can put points into that gives you warrior spells, but I don't remember the name. The fun thing is that you can mix and match these. If you want a warrior with self healing, you pick warrior and water magic. If you want an earth/fire mage you, well, pick earth and fire magic. If you want to roll a rogue, you pick Scoundrel, or maybe Ranger (or both). The abilities in the "class skills tree" do one thing in all cases: increase your amount of spells you can learn that belong to that "class skill". Also there are perks, you start the game with 2 and you get a new one every few levels, not exactly sure what the interval is. The perks are alright, but there is not a lot of them. The game is moddable though, so I am pretty sure some new will come out sooner or later.
And now the combat. Man is it fun. It is action point based, like Fallout 1&2 was. Basically, moving like 1,5m depletes 1 action point, and any action that you do in combat, whether it's switching a weapon, attacking, or casting a spell, requires a certain amount of action points. There are some special features that make the combat really fun though. For a start, I like how positioning is very important. If you have a warrior blocking a path to one of your mages, enemies can not just ignore the warrior guy and go after your squishies, or they would be asking for a nasty attack of opportunity (free attack you can do when someone tries to walk around you) from the warrior, and an interrupted turn. It is really nice to have a way to functionally tank without having to bother with AoE threat generation and stuff. Also, walking up behind your opponent gives you a flanking bonus, and even a backstab bonus if you use a dexterity based weapon. The best feature of the combat though is the elements, the tactical use of elements, and the way they interact with each other. You can spill water to create a water surface. You can electrify the water to stun everyone that stands in it. You can hit it with fire to vaporize it and create a mist cloud that can be electrified to create a deadly trap, or freeze it to make everyone trip. You can spill oil, set it on fire, and end up with a fiery surface that burns everyone. Put it out with the Rain spell and you get "smoke" that hides you from ranged attacks. It is really fun guys. You can set your enemies on fire, of freeze them. Heck, you can freeze your own allies too. Sure they will not be able to act... but they will have greatly increased physical resistance! I have actually been using a Summon Spider spell in combination with Chill to create an icy statue that attracts enemies and is extremely durable. Also there are enemies that interact with various elements in different ways. Exploding bomb skeletons? Their fuses go out under rain, making them unable to suicide attack, and basically harmless. Fire elementals can heal when they stand in fiery terrain... but you can put out that terrain with Rain, and it also weakens the stats of the fire elementals. Fun stuff.
I am having a blast, and I recommend Divinity to all rpg-lovers.
pro tip: The first two companions that you recruit are a fighter and a water/lightning mage. To make a well-rounded party, start with a rogue/ranger and a fire/earth mage. (To make the tip less confusing, I'll explain a bit more. You create 2 characters when you start the game and you can recruit 2 more characters as companions, like within an hour of playing the game. The ones I mentioned. When the characters you make during the initial character creation are a dexterity guy and a fire/earth mage, you will end up with a very well rounded party.)
edit: I forgot to add that the combat is not only fun, but also
difficult as balls
. If you do not use the environment (as in, the elements) against your enemies, you will have a hard time. Luckilly you can get a lot of spells with great tactical impact early on, and there are oil/poison/water barrels everywhere. Sure they do not make much sense, but they are really useful.
Post by
Interest
I heard about that and saw it on the summer sale but opted for a different game: State of Decay. While I've long since finished the game, the general impression I got was it was a rather open worldy zombie survival sort of game. There's plenty of these in the market apparently (I mean DayZ is a thing, for instance), but this game is single-player and it will constantly throw small objectives at you (in a way it reminds me somewhat of Mount and Blade: Warband) and resource gathering (like Don't Starve) that will keep you playing for hours and hours on end. The problem is the game is definitely a tad on the repetitive side and will likely turn some players off to the game. In addition, the main story was kind of about but for some reason didn't seem to flow too well after a certain point. It felt like the quests to continue the story were slow in coming and in the meantime I had to help allies kill zombies or gather more supplies for the home base.
On the other hand it was satisfying to build and maintain a home base (that can apparently also fend for itself since the game uses a real-time system where it keeps "playing" until you next open up the game), gathering supplies to ensure you're well-stocked against any zombie attack. Combat was also very satisfying. There was enough of a challenge to it, particularly in the form of Stamina management (especially early on) that it felt reasonably realistic in terms of fighting off such enemies in a somewhat real life scenario, since it's quite possible to tire after smashing the heads of zombies a few times, causing your character to swing weakly and be very vulnerable to attacks. Thus, there is a bit of a balance between using firearms and melee attacks (incidentally, melee weapons can break if used excessively, meaning one may want to bring around replacements) to keep from getting overwhelmed, particularly as the game goes on and hordes of zombies get larger.
Cars are also effectively a weapon in the game, though they, too, have limitations and will eventually explode if they collide too much with solid objects or get flipped over (though they can be repaired with the correct home base upgrades), removing them from the game permanently and making cars a non-renewable resource (technically almost everything in the game is non-renewable, though there's more than enough to beat story mode).
Overall, I'd say give the game a try if you like survivalist elements, open world games, and first/third person shooters/brawler style games. It's a potentially good week of fun, if not more and the game may pop up on a 75% sale again sooner or later...
Post by
Izichial
Anyone else playing Divinity: Original Sin?
Got it a few days ago, bit late to the party I know.
It's a fun game but I miss the freedom of other, similar rpgs. You kinda have to have a party of four because there's no xp split and combat with a smaller party is suicide (okay, you can also roll with the Lone Wolf talent, but it's not really enough compensation - I hear it used to be overpowered during the beta and was overnerfed leaving it very lacklustre). You can, theoretically, go to a lot of places right out of the gate but in practice you'll get slaughtered if you try and you end up going through a fairly set path through the areas available. You have to do sidequests because you'll need every scrap of XP you can get. You have to have certain skills in order to be able to create combos or manipulate the environment.
I haven't gotten that far yet though (still in first area), so maybe things get better later on.
It seems to be a very solid RPG, otherwise. I particularly enjoy the skill system, I'm really happy with the kind and range of characters you can build with it.
Edit:
Another example of how versatile the environmental combo system is was something I ran across early in my current playthrough. Gas clouds poison you if you walk through them but explode when they come into contact with fire. A gas cloud was blocking my path, but neither of my characters had a fire spell and I wanted to save the fireball scroll I had picked up.
Near the gas cloud was a large torch, but it wasn't possible to move the torch (a lot of objects can normally be thrown) so I couldn't chuck it into the cloud. However, near the torch was a barrel, and by summoning an oil puddle that covered both the torch and the barrel the oil caught fire from the torch which then spread to the barrel. Then I teleported the now burning barrel into the gas cloud causing it to explode, clearing the way.
Post by
Thror
I don't think the whole "you have to be with 4 people" is that bad, because... show me an rpg where it is optimal (or possible, even) to play with less than the maximum amount of party members, even in games with XP split.
The problem I would point out with the 4-member group system is, that you only get 2 very defined companions at the start of the game, and there do not seem to be any other companions nearby, so you really do not have much choice with character creation, if you wish to make your group well balanced. I wish there was a pool of characters to choose from. Or an option to customize them to some extent (there are mods that do that though, hallelujah).
The world is certainly built so that there are certain "optimal places to go", but I still prefer that over a world that is absolutely linear. Getting stomped by an army of monsters that is 4 levels above me and returning later to finally conquer them is much more amusing then always fighting enemies that are scaled to your level and having no choice. The world feels a lot more hostile in Divinity. Also, I did happen to kill a bunch of really powerful level 7 guys as a group of level 6's, and even though that wasn't a huge difference, it felt pretty good.
And yeah, the environmental combos are awesome. I have a fire mage in my party now, so it is easy to just pop a flare into the gas cloud, but before that, I used to throw lit candles into the clouds (like you tried with the stationary torch).
By the way, if you would like to know about my findings so far about how it is best to create your first two characters and build your group, I'll post it into a spoiler below (I am not really gonna talk about the story of the game though, so its a pretty safe spoiler):
So, the most important thing is: The game always chooses your SECOND created character for all automatic dialogues, no matter where you move him in your party composition. Therefore it is good to have skills like charisma on the second character, and avoid traits that decrease reaction of NPCs to you on the second character.
With party composition, you will cover all the bases if you pick:
Fire/Earth/Witchcraft on your number 1 character (the best trait for mages decreases reaction of NPCs to that particular character, so it is best to put the mage into slot 1). Good side skills for a mage character are... mostly Telekinesis. I also like to have Leadership on my mage. The thing with Leadership is, the person that has it does not benefit from the leader buff... and the leader buff seems to be much more beneficial for melee characters than it is for mages. So do not use melee's as Leadership guys. You will still be using your mage mostly for wicked elemental combos and summons. As for starting spells, I would go for Flare from Pyromancy (best starting attack spell for the enemies you will face), Summon Pet from Geomancy (the spider is amazing, helps a lot), and Oath of Desecration from Witchcraft (great damage buff).
The second created character should be a rogue specialized either in Bows or Daggers. You will have enough points to make him proficient with both of those weapons later on. Daggers appear to do a lot more damage than bows, but you are risking death as the rogue is always pretty squishy, and you have to stick him out for backstabs. Leech is a pretty amazing trait to pick, it makes you heal whenever you stand in a pool of blood, but you also heal a bit every time you get hit with an attack. It is not enough to keep you immortal, but it is a nice compensation for the otherwise low armour. Make the rogue charismatic for amazing dialogue advantages. It is nice to have a rogue with a high bartering skill, because most of the expensive items will probably end up on him. The only starting skill I recommend is the Hasten one from the Scoundrel, and the (self) teleport skill from Ranger.
The third character will be Jahan who is a Water/Air mage. I really like to make Jahan into a Crafting materials pack mule, and to spec him really hard into crafting (you only need to get 2 skill points in Crafting, you can get 1 more from a trait and 2 from gear). It is really good to not neglect crafting. Look up a list of craftable items, especially weapon enhancements, and use them.
The fourth character will be Madora, who is a warrior specced into Two-handers. I consider the two-handed skill points a waste and respec her into shield+one handed instantly. Do not worry about losing on "potential damage" by making her a tank... she is still able to dish out tons of damage, especially if you focus your crafting endeavors on her one-handed weapon. I really do not go into any side-skills on Madora, just a straight up warrior with One handed, shield spec, armor spec, willpower (to resist magical debuffs), bodybuilding (to resist physical debuffs) and man at arms. I would recommend deleting the skill of hers that "helps a knocked down companion up" and replace it with the insanely powerful men-at-arms heal.
Post by
Izichial
I don't think the whole "you have to be with 4 people" is that bad, because... show me an rpg where it is optimal (or possible, even) to play with less than the maximum amount of party members, even in games with XP split.
The Baldur's Gate series? You could play through all of them with 1-6 characters, with any combination of classes and they
still managed to provide challenging fights for "optimised" parties.
There was also at least one enemy that was explicitly designed to instantly wipe out your entire party if you attacked an NPC that was integral to the main storyline that was defeated using entirely legit means. And you could access a significant portion of the game as soon as you got out of the starting area for each game. Was it advisable to go to all places when low level? No. Was it possible to go there and actually complete the content? Yes.
The problem I would point out with the 4-member group system is, that you only get 2 very defined companions at the start of the game, and there do not seem to be any other companions nearby, so you really do not have much choice with character creation, if you wish to make your group well balanced. I wish there was a pool of characters to choose from. Or an option to customize them to some extent (there are mods that do that though, hallelujah).
Yap, was rather disappointed when I found out there are only two "real" companions. Read a couple of posts mentioning that they plan to patch in more, but no clue if that is just a rumour or something they've actually said they're going to.
I really like to make Jahan into a Crafting materials pack mule, and to spec him really hard into crafting (you only need to get 2 skill points in Crafting, you can get 1 more from a trait and 2 from gear). It is really good to not neglect crafting. Look up a list of craftable items, especially weapon enhancements, and use them.
Get a henchman exclusively devoted to crafting instead if you aren't rp-ing it.
My character stuff:
+ Lone Wolf Shadowblade with air / scoundrel / witchcraft, adding fire later
+ Cleric with water / earth / man-at-arms
+ picking up Jahan and planning on adding fire to his arsenal
Obviously not covering things like getting Ranger just for Tactical Retreat etc., just the main stuff. I'm still of the opinion that Lone Wolf doesn't compensate enough for losing a companion, but Madora just rubs me the wrong way. Some extra attribute points / talents would be nice. The extra ability points do allow you to pick up utility skills (lockpicking, loremaster, charisma etc.) early without sacrificing combat skills, however.
Only issue I have atm is Cleric being fairly short on action points, but I imagine that can be sorted out eventually. Jahan is getting Glass Cannon at some point, so he shouldn't have any problems. As for the Shadowblade, let's just say self-buffing haste + Oath of Desecration leads to a severe outbreak of suddenly corpses the following round.
PS. Summon Spider + Fortify. Learn it, love it.
Post by
Thror
The Baldur's Gate series? You could play through all of them with 1-6 characters, with any combination of classes and they
still managed to provide challenging fights for "optimised" parties.
There was also at least one enemy that was explicitly designed to instantly wipe out your entire party if you attacked an NPC that was integral to the main storyline that was defeated using entirely legit means. And you could access a significant portion of the game as soon as you got out of the starting area for each game. Was it advisable to go to all places when low level? No. Was it possible to go there and actually complete the content? Yes.
I expected Baldur's Gate to get mentioned, but still. Solo run-throughs were mostly a thing of re-imported higher level characters (I have completed BG2 solo 4 times, every time with a character that has already completed the whole campaign once). And while BG1 had an awesome open world where you indeed could stroll into a high level area right off the bat (and farm some sweet sweet XP on Ankhegs), BG2 was quite a lot more linear. The most choices you had were in Act 2, where you could really choose to complete a billion of various sidequests of epic proportions, and some of those side-quests were more difficult than the other, but at the end of the day, the entire, fairly massive, remaining part of the game was basically linear.
Look at something more recent, like Dragon Age. Was it even possible to pick less than 4 characters? I am not sure, but I think not.
Yap, was rather disappointed when I found out there are only two "real" companions. Read a couple of posts mentioning that they plan to patch in more, but no clue if that is just a rumour or something they've actually said they're going to.
Get a henchman exclusively devoted to crafting instead if you aren't rp-ing it.
Don't wanna use henchmen :-/ Madora and Jahan do not have a whole lot of character, and in most of the chats with Madora, I end up going in the manner of "just STFU Madora", but at least they are not completely soulless mercs. There is enough spare points on Jahan to go for Crafting/Blacksmithing.
My character stuff:
+ Lone Wolf Shadowblade with air / scoundrel / witchcraft, adding fire later
+ Cleric with water / earth / man-at-arms
+ picking up Jahan and planning on adding fire to his arsenal
Obviously not covering things like getting Ranger just for Tactical Retreat etc., just the main stuff. I'm still of the opinion that Lone Wolf doesn't compensate enough for losing a companion, but Madora just rubs me the wrong way. Some extra attribute points / talents would be nice. The extra ability points do allow you to pick up utility skills (lockpicking, loremaster, charisma etc.) early without sacrificing combat skills, however.
Only issue I have atm is Cleric being fairly short on action points, but I imagine that can be sorted out eventually. Jahan is getting Glass Cannon at some point, so he shouldn't have any problems. As for the Shadowblade, let's just say self-buffing haste + Oath of Desecration leads to a severe outbreak of suddenly corpses the following round.
I don't really want to roll hybrids that would require more primary stats (Str, Dex, Int), because I like to heavily max those. A Str/Int character really doesn't strike me as a very powerful combo.
PS. Summon Spider + Fortify. Learn it, love it.
Man, against the undead in rain. Summon Spider + Chill (on the spider). Result? A Spider ice statue that can not move, but attracts the attention of undead like a giant magnet, and has an extreme resistance to melee damage due to being frozen. I came up with this combo accidentally, but then I actually used it intentionally a couple of times. Too bad it doesn't work on enemies with fire attacks. Also, Haste + Fortify + Oath of Des. on Madora = total carnage. Up to a certain point, she really isn't all that tanky, but a bit later on she can really stand through some heavy punishment and dish out some too.
Post by
Izichial
A Str/Int character really doesn't strike me as a very powerful combo.
It isn't . :p The only real synergy I can think of would be being tanky enough to wade into melee combat and get off those short range touch spells, but a dex / int character already does that better. Still, I'll just roll with it and see how it turns out. Planning on having her focus on buffs / debuffs / summons / utility in terms of spells (limiting her int reqs to just having enough to land them reliably), acting as a bodyguard to Jahan who is going to be pretty squishy with Glass Cannon and still being a competent enough melee to get some hammertime out. Literally, since I have her using blunt weapons to go with the cleric theme (which turned out to be a good habit with the amount of skeletons around).
Half the fun of these kinds of games is making something work, anyway.
Solo run-throughs were mostly a thing of re-imported higher level characters
For you perhaps, but fairly rare in the communities I've spent time in (sorcerers.net (which was a great resource site when the original games were a thing) and the official forums which were rebooted with the EE releases). Variants of solo runs are a fairly popular challenge - some of the more impressive I've seen include soloing BG1 without ever leveling up and doing a no reload solo run with a character on a minimum stat roll.
Man, against the undead in rain. Summon Spider + Chill (on the spider). Result? A Spider ice statue that can not move, but attracts the attention of undead like a giant magnet, and has an extreme resistance to melee damage due to being frozen.
Fortify is a pretty massive armor boost though, it basically accomplishes the same thing without the drawbacks. Perhaps chaining Fortify into frozen would be best? Can't remember how many rounds summons last, though.
Post by
Thror
I must admit that I haven't really been using Fortitude a lot, because the mage that had it also happened to be one of my best damage dealers. So I rather spend her action points on wicked elemental combos and summons than buffs. The only buffs I do regularly are self-buffs, like the scoundrel haste. I was also considering 1 point into Witchcraft on Madora, so she could cast Oath of Desecration on herself.
Also, I have never had a summon "end" during combat. They either die to enemies, or disappear right after the combat ends.
And I guess I am green as grass when it comes to solo playthroughs of BG, but there had to be some serious cheese involved in that solo runs of BG1. BG1 had terribly unfavourable mechanics for combat (being a low level character in the DND ruleset, your THAC0 sucked balls and no matter what you did in BG1, most melee attacks failed to hit the target... most early game combat scenes look like whiff-fests where the participant that manages to get a lucky streak of three landed attacks wins the fight).
Post by
Skreeran
Anyone seen trailers of The Forest? Looks like Minecraft meets Far Cry meets Amnesia.
Post by
Monday
Anyone seen trailers of The Forest? Looks like Minecraft meets Far Cry meets Amnesia.
It looked interesting. Pewds did a playthrough of it a little while ago, so you can watch that if you want to see some gameplay.
Personally, though, I'm looking forward to the Evil Within as my horror game of the year.
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