Pepyri

The load times at current are pretty ridiculous. I'm getting the same thing.

I'm really enjoying it. It does feel more fair, usually, but the opportunity to get totally hosed is pretty unfun. I had a Sniper in Full Cover get hit by two people who were in the worst possible position to hit with. I'm talking a sub-20% chance and both hit in the same turn, taking out one of my best. Yeah, that's just how the rolls go, but it makes me feel really sad 'cause I worked so hard keeping everyone safe.

So yeah. Grow Home. It's a short-ish(took me ~5 or 6 hours to beat) game from a small team in Ubisoft Reflections that is just innocent climbing, exploration, and putting animals into teleporters. The premise is, you're B.U.D.: Botanical Utility Droid, and you've been put on this planet that has a Star Plant on it. Your job is to help grow this plant(by connecting its Star Shoots to energy rocks) beyond 2,000 meters, so it can finally flower and bloom. It's got charming music, a nice art style, procedural animation, and just feels super original, fresh, and lovely. It's also $8, and does not require UPlay, so if any of the words in this post appeal to you, you really oughta play it. I 'beat' it today, but have a ton more to do, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it all day.

No? They're just getting rid of the $20 price on getting the cash card with it.

I'm beginning to think having a multiplayer networking thingadoodle is more hurtful than helpful on these boards. I often don't see community until it's too late.

That fits, but still I'm not as enthused at how disassociated the system is from the game world otherwise.

There's a new menu item on your left-side(navigation) menu(the one you get to by hitting 1 on your keyboard by default). It's the yellow one at the bottom. From there, you can read GalNet, look up the leaders vying for power, and choose which one you want to fight for. Each will gain what is effectively political control of an area. You can perform actions, specific to each leader, to reinforce control of an area or gain control of a new area. These actions, far as I've seen, fall effectively into two camps- either "Go kill X number of dudes", or "Deliver these here pamphlets". The delivery things differ for each type- if it's Control(protecting already-held areas), you pick them up from your faction's HQ, and drop them off at the area you want to reinforce. If you want to expand or prepare, you pick them up from somewhere you control and drop them off where you're wanting to expand/prepare. The only time this changes is in the case of espionage, which is the reverse- you instead pick stuff up at a prepare area, and drop it off in a control one. You have a quota of 10 things per 15 minutes, and if you want more have to spend 100k credits(which seems really weird to me). Then, every week, everything gets tallied up and the political layout of the universe changes. From there on out, and how it further changes the universe, is something for the future.

So, I've got two problems. The first, is that Elite is back to crashing me again, but at least this time it's not a full-system crash, but a driver-level crash. So that's fun. Second, is that Powerplay seems more than a bit bland. So I can use my 16-slot hauler to carry 10 pamphlets from one part of space to another, repeatedly. Okay. And even though Aisling's method for expansion is Financial, as opposed to Social(which her Preparation and Control options are for), you do literally the same thing. Uh, what? Wouldn't it make more sense if Financial had you selling resources that businesses in those stations needed? It's like Powerplay wants to be off in its own corner, not affecting the wider game world. Why?

Haven't preordered but I'll definitely be getting both when they come out.

Far as I can tell, you restock anything made in alchemy by meditation. Even just one hour does it.

I also have no self control(I even complained to Tegan my lack of it). See, I hated Witcher 1 and 2. Awful writing, awful gameplay, awful seemingly everything. Even with the mods on the second one to fix the completely asinine difficulty issues, it was still a bad caricature of fantasy political storytelling that seemed more concerned with looking legit than actually telling a good story, or having any understanding of political motivations. Childish, I guess. Here however, it seems like they've just learned so much. The actual political storylines going on here are smart, well done- they show how a political personality is formed, and how it fails: Traditionally, a poltical personality is perfect, it's the ideal- but as humans, maintaining that position is obviously impossible, especially considering the history and burdens involved. The Bloody Baron, for example, ends up being a genuinely interesting, complex character. Trigger warnings about in the spoiler below, but it's The Witcher so you should expect it at this point. This post is already way too long in the tooth, so I'll stop there, and say "Also this game is easily the prettiest game I've ever played in my life, good God."

Ex Machina really mindfucked me for a few days, I haven't been that unsettled in years. Also, quite possibly the second most beautifully shot filmmaking I've ever seen, after Planet Earth. Really something.

I've given this thing what I feel is a good college try, as someone who plays a lot of League, and in the past put several hundred hours into DotA 2. I feel like I want to write an essay about all the clear misunderstandings of game design present in the Lords Management genre, which HotS exacerbates, without ever actually making the game interesting in a long term capacity. I know that sounds harsh, but it's kind of meant to be. I was really hoping this would take the direction where they attempted to simplify different aspects of the genre in an attempt to move it forward. Instead it just kinda feels like a neutered, overly cautious experience with absolutely no desire to leave a strong impression. Like they're more afraid of offending people than being memorable at all.

A turn-based tactical RPG in the vein of Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics, against just one enemy with abilities just as powerful as your own, with only one character for yourself. I'm wanting to both speed up and smooth out what tactical RPG gameplay is like.

Joining in on the fun soon as I have some sleep and free time. I'm 100% sure my art will be literally the worst things ever(or just straight public license stuff), but hopefully the gameplay will be nice and fun. Woo~ Still deciding on an episode title. TBH I'm already decided on the kind of game, so it's more about finding something that fits a theme.

The original Icarus trailer was one of the best game trailers ever made, if you ask me. I still watch it occasionally even though it didn't resemble the game very much in reality, but I found that forgivable because I loved that game. Also, I feel like a lot of you guys are kinda misremembering what the marketing push for Human Revolution was. It was a lot of guns, shooting, stabbing, etc. Not as much as the new trailer, for sure- but it also had to do the setup of who Jensen was, and that's done now. Now, it's how he moves forward- which if you notice, from the moment they're "done" with his introduction to his new body, the trailer went into "lol kill" mode. And as to dialogue, yeah it could be better for sure. Then again, the original Deus Ex's dialogue was pretty awful too. So I dunno. Maybe I've been around too long, but at this point I watch trailers for implied features, art style, soundtrack, and otherwise to hold my attention. Games take a long time to make, and are not nearly as straightforward as movies to reach the conclusion of their development. So making a trailer that is more specific, less generic in a story-dominated game, just sounds like a bad, bad plan to me. Remember, it isn't uncommon for AAA games to have entire levels dropped late in development because of changing story beats. Um, what? The game entirely explained both sides, in what was effectively an allegory for economic systems. They help people by allowing humans to accomplish more, be more effective, and thus be able to help more people. Augs are bad by creating an underclass who don't want augs but are effectively punished because they are less effective than those with them, but they think it should be valid to not want your body invaded by technology. This was explained at length, multiple times throughout the game.

It gets a lot less grim after the first town/area. Defiance Bay and on is only grim for occasional major sidequests and the mainquest.

My issue with DS2 is how seemingly every enemy lives on a swivel, and how the development team took shortcuts in enemy design by just plopping more enemies down to call it 'hard'. It's missing the point of Dark Souls' innovation- that you had to learn the enemy, where here you learn a few enemies, then crowd control. Despite putting hundreds of hours into DS1, DS2 I got to maybe 30 and said "Yeah, this isn't at all what I wanted." and dropped it.

I wholeheartedly disagree. Getting rid of trap builds merely gets rid of trap builds- it makes no difference in what sort of skill ceiling you have. In fact, oft-times having trap builds or trap playstyles in fact introduces *less* ability to a game, because you spend so much time figuring out how to simply not be bad that it takes the community longer to figure out how to actually think ahead or strategically. Not to mention, here we have a game that with Path of the Damned shows that it's entirely possible to have both.

The only reason I rail against this one, is that nothing else is really going on. No one comes to power, no one really does anything. You're in a world full of incredibly vibrant and diverse mannequins- it's alright here, but if I were to play an expansion and find it again I know I would get the "samey" feeling very quickly. I also like that not every quest is interesting. There are truly some 'dumb' quests- which is exactly how it should be. It introduces doubt in the characters you meet sometimes. For example(DEFIANCE BAY TEENY SPOILER), there was a kid who said he saw people hiding a thing. I thought, "Oh, cool, it must be pretty good. Oh, this kid wants an expensive dagger? Shit, this must be really good." So, I go find the folks, expecting a big fight, a big issue. Nah, we talk for a minute, they're an adventuring group like us, they try to sell us the dagger for 2k, we argue them down to 1k, and everything's good. I go back and give it to the kid, and he tells me the location of the stuff- I'd literally already found it just walking around with Tab vision on. I did the quest for nothing. I spent 1k gold and 20 minutes of my time for nothing. Then later on, the kid gets a talking to by his Dad, and I hang him out to dry. It was dumb, it was pointless, and it's the exact sort of quest that reminds you, "Hey, you're an adventurer in a group full of badasses. Why are you running some kid's errands?" Exactly what a game should do. I've yet to find systems that don't interact with conversations. Seriously, I've seen it all: Race Class Combat Stats Secondary Stats Items Choices made in earlier quests The KINDS of choices made throughout the game Whether I inspected something in the environment It's absurd. And this is why it's acceptable that the game is a theme park- because it isn't a theme park for you, or a theme park for a friend of mine, or a theme park for people just like me- it's a theme park for ME. ME ALONE. Every choice I have made, from the large to the small, from 20 hours ago or 2 minutes ago, will both come back to haunt me AND come back to help me. It's so consistently on top of treating MY behavior in the game with respect and priority, that when combined with the bloody brilliant writing it is impossible to be that disappointed in the lack of background movement. It's just remarkable. Also, the fact that it's entirely possible to have a "Kill everyone" run of the game is great. I'll never see this, but when I got an assassination mission at one point in the game, and had no way to kill the guy by default(like I was expecting), I had to remind myself "Oh right, I can manually kill him." And that suddenly became a potential future for everything again. Squeeeeee and a half. As to Divinity, it's honestly a place where the balance of abilities and how you structure an area makes it impossible to recommend even as a hack and slash. You don't know what all you're going to encounter over your 50+ hours of gameplay, and the fact that you can be forced to go through a very sudden lesson in fisting that is also going to last 5+ hours each time you encounter it is pretty bad. Despite being 2 levels above one section, for example, I still, after 5+ tries, couldn't defeat a group of enemies required to progress. Once again, because of lack of fire. I had to restart the game, guarantee I had some fucking fire, and go back. When you can see that, and compare it to PoE's combat- which even with its flawed pathfinding, and relatively few options for melee(though I guarantee you this isn't universal or permanent, depending on how you play those melee characters) allows for huge variety in party makeup, and still makes even the common battles riveting affairs(there are several instances of "I can't imagine I'll survive this" leading to real moments of teamwork and heroism that I'm sure I'll remember by the end of the year in the first 15 hours alone, let alone some of the epic set pieces I've had since), it's hard not to look at Divinity and say, "Why in God's name would I ever play this while I haven't exhausted Pillars?" It was timed well, for sure. I also see a rich future of mods making Divinity a much better game, and more ambitious mods making other worthwhile experiences, eventually, which Pillars will never have. That's commendable on its face, if it even gets half of the content of something like Cities: Skylines has in its first month. But the combat angers me so much. My issue is, I am one of those people. I was one of the best Enhancement Shaman on my server in WoW, and spent thousands of hours perfecting everything I possibly could. Similarly, my favorite part of many games is slowly tuning myself to such a ridiculous point of power that I'm able to break the game in other ways- it's what has defined me, to friends in the past. It's something I even do when I program. But the trick, is to allow for a wide variety of ways to get there. PoE also manages to achieve this fantastically, by making it truly impossible to fuck yourself up too badly. My Monk is high resolve, and only middling everything else. This might be one of the most sub-optimal ways to actually make a Monk- Monks thrive off of taking small amounts of damage, that stack upon one another, to kill people. My monk is built to effectively never get hit by anything unless it might take a third or more of her health in that hit. Yet, I was able to combine it with high DR armor to create a potent tank and debuffing monk. Even then, if I really fucked up her or any other character, I could always just make some more at the Inn. They let me have that. That's pretty nice too. I know I'm bashing on Divinity a lot- which is funny, because I actually really liked the game. But it's more just because when stood up next to Pillars, it's hard to remember why I liked it, really.

Just an early warning: Neither of those games are apparently anywhere near as good as Pillars is, at face value. I didn't play Wasteland 2, so look at someone else's opinion there. But for Divinity: Original Sin, you're racked with moment after moment of it only being slightly different than the CRPGs of yesteryear, with all of their mistakes fully intact. For what it's worth, the combat system is competently developed, and the class variety would be amazing if not for how poorly it's implemented. Within the first 5 hours of the game, you will be made painfully aware of just how royally fucked you are if you do not have someone who can create fire in your group, and furthermore how out-of-control in love the game is with its environmental effects. You, by contrast, are nothing short of worthless- your best attacks early on will damage the enemy for 1/3rd of what a single environmental effect does in one turn, let alone the following 5 turns where it continues. This doesn't make it impossible- it's still entirely possible to get through this, you just won't have any fun doing so. And you'll find the quest design both needlessly opaque and stupendously boring, as the story is poor and poorly written, and the quests themselves often are only able to be solved by talking to literally every single person in town after each step of the quest. I lost track of the number of times the resolution of a quest didn't make sense in D:OS. It's quest/story writing is to D&D what recent Call of Duty is to serious war media. For what it's worth though, if you do play the game the 'right' way(which it illuminates you to), you're given what is the best co-op experience that a CRPG has ever managed, and a surprisingly well-thought-out one at that. Not only is combat co-op, but every decision in every quest can either be agreed upon or fought over, and the ways that changes your gameplay experience is really, really remarkable. If you have a significant other, I'd nearly say it's a must-play experience, because you'll get as much time out of it as you would watching 8 seasons of a TV show, but you'll really get to know each other better in the process, too. Just uh, dial that difficulty down if you're gonna do that. But back to how D:OS compares to Pillars of Eternity. In contrast, PoE continually feels like the best game writing I've experienced in years. It doesn't feel like a throwback in terms of mechanics(even though it is) because of smart design constraints around combat and enemies within the game. The story is intelligent and nuanced, with truly a wide variety of personal choice being shown in its portrayal. On top of this, the class variety is remarkable(the only class I've found lacking is the Hunter, who has the ability variety of the Fighter, without the intricacies of enemy management via serious CC and the engagement mechanic), the side quests are capable of both being small and personal, or deceptively huge and complex. The locations are well-realized, with each having its own distinct culture within its own world, which is funny in the face of the near-complete lack of culture defined by the races themselves(who more or less are all the same culturally, aside from small moments of visual recognition for certain races). Honestly, the only major criticisms I have been able to offer toward the game after 50 solid hours (with taking 5 days off in between the two halves) is that the world feels very static- nothing moves or changes without you, you feel like the only driving force introducing time to the denizens of the world. Your exploits are what the town crier yells on about, you solve everyone's problems, you are in the unique position of being exactly what this quest needs right now. Oddly, this doesn't come off as a power fantasy, but instead as simply a theme park of a great CRPG. Which, like WoW was in its early years, still means you're going to have a damn good time with a game that for all of its simplification and lack of obfuscation doesn't actually treat you like an idiot, but instead like an intelligent being capable of making choices in what kind of experience you want to have. Which is pretty neato. At times, yes. But you'll get a few jokes every few hours, not commonly. They're usually pretty funny though, and not in a "it is supposed to be funny, but really isn't" way, either.

I appreciate the encouragement! I definitely would be willing, but I also feel like having a few dry runs may not be the worst idea to weed out my conversational tendencies that don't really fit into a podcast well.

Part of me really wants to be on this, and then I remember that I have an awful memory about storylines, and also, a giant stick up my ass about what anime are 'good enough' for me.

Thing is, the new Fire Emblem sold gangbusters. In North America, it's likely sold more than 400k units, and in Japan it sold over 450k units. No numbers have been released about it since September 2013 either, and the tail implied on it through what sales data we have shows that it didn't seem to be falling off. None of this is counting europe either, so it easily could've beat out 1m units, or a good 20m for Nintendo. Nor does it count DLC, blah blah blah I think as we get closer to the date, people will mind less. For one, they're not playing off the DLC like it's gonna be $40 again, so I could see it being like another $5-15(depending on if it's just a little different or a lot different). And again for the 3rd campaign. Personally, I'm excited for this one because it isn't a last-ditch effort like the last- Awakening is in my top 10 games of all time despite being my first Fire Emblem, it's significantly impacted me to the point that if I ever get around to making a game, it's almost certainly going to have extremely heavy influences from it. This is them saying, "Oh, hey, you really like this- then lets show you what Fire Emblem is really about.", with the enhanced animations(similar to how great they were in the GBA games), noticeably amazing music, etc. I might be overhyping though, the trailer has me over the moon.

I understand that, but someone else directly put forth the question in their post. I agree with everything that you said, however. But then again, you and I and everyone has the subconscious shit to varying levels. This isn't to needlessly equivocate- it's just why I try to focus specifically on what people do and discourage certain behavior there, instead of making a determination of people's real beliefs, especially when I feel like they probably just haven't given it a lot of thought(likely from a lack of situation, circumstance, or empathy).