Cordeos

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Posts posted by Cordeos

  1. Posted

    Yes, and this minute-and-a-half of narration is a bad thing while me reading Cyrodiil history for hours on a wiki is a good thing.  Your Oblivion character is just some cat/elf/lizard/human person who runs around stealing sweetrolls and shooting fireballs.  Patrick Stewart's narration about the oncoming end of the Third Era means nothing to your immediate goals of escaping prison and running around.  It's just some dude telling you that this game is meant to be epic.

     

    Your second paragraph is a great description of this—I think as long as designers have that spectrum in mind lore can be healthy for everyone except obsessives like me.

     

    Re Oblivion: It introduces who he is and hints at the main quest that you will be set on when Emperor Patrick shows up in your prison cell. I agree it isn't directly applicable, to your situation, but long intros rarely are. I think Morrowind did pretty much the same thing. Part of the issue with having a more descriptive intro is that your character in TES games is a blank slate, Skyrim was the first one to even say where/why you were arrested. The intro to your characters in Oblivion would be "You are in jail" because everything else is decided by you.

     

    I prefer lore that I can experience or not at my leisure which is why I like the lore in TES games. It also helps that their lore is interesting, there is all kinds of lore I wouldn't touch in the Assassins Creed series. I can barely stand the required cinematics. I also love when lore is build in game series since its fun to know the background of things introduced in new games. One thing that drove me nuts about Final Fantasy game lore is that they build these really complex worlds you will never return to, so there is less of a reward for learning the lore since a sequel will not expand on it.

  2. Posted

    The "Lore" that always gets to me is the long text intro filled with names, dates, events that have little or no context and might not even matter in the game (bonus points for made up day and month names for extra confusion). The Oblivion intro is only about a minute and a half before you get control of a character. I am having trouble thinking of a really heinously long explanatory intro (probably because I stopped playing JRPGs :) ) But I know I have read paragraph after paragraph of confusing history before ever getting close to gameplay. 

     

    I think there is also style choices in how you introduce lore to the player. Sort of a spectrum between assaulting them with required novellas, sprinkling it around the world in books, flavor text and dialog, and having the story being totally optional.

  3. Posted

    I know I'm being a party pooper, but the writing in that trailer. Please... no. Am I old? Is this marketed at 14 year olds? I was younger than that when I played Deus Ex and I liked it because it partially went over my head and didn't pander. I hope it's still a cool systems driven game, but I wish it could be intelligent and subtle too. Not "this is our theme our game is about this isn't it thought provoking also it's a war so you can kill stuff".

     

    Dues Ex has always been a world so chocked full of over the top conspiracy and villains it always falls into lame action movie trailers and dialog. You can't have FEMA death camps and the Illuminati and not just throw subtlety/intelligence out the window.

     

    I found the story and lack of choice in the missions to be really off-putting in HR. Really seems like CoD (silly story and railroad levels) with some RPG elements. I had hoped for something with more open levels with augmentations to accent your playstyle instead of essentially requiring stealth.

     

     

    There's innocents and then there's willing soldiers / terrorists / murderers, to be fair.

    But if the Illuminati control the media, then those soldiers/terrorists/murders mostly just sheeple being tricked into following. Aside from bosses, it wasn't clear how many true believers there were in HR. How many of the people you kill in HR would have made the right choice if they knew the truth? 

  4. Posted

    All weapons caches will have the upgraded guns, but enemy guns will still be unreliable rustbuckets. The game is actually pretty good about telegraphing the degredation to yue player via visual cues; as the gun wears, it will become more scratched and rustworn.

    *enemy guns will still be unreliable rustbuckets for you, they will never really jam or ever break for the enemies.

  8. Posted

    (Feel free to touch htis post up however you want for the blog)

     

    May 1120

    Finally a chance to rule. I want nothing more than to show my military skill to the emperor, perhaps he will make me his Marshall.

    2015-04-03_00003_zpsvrhyngh6.jpg

     

    19th June

    My wifes failure to produce a son is a continuing source of  shame for me and my family. I knew the electors wouldn't support my daughter as heir forever.

    2015-04-03_00011_zps6w6xwxhz.jpg

     

    2nd November

    A son! I have a son!

     

    29th April 1121

    Finally a war! I can lead my troops to battle in the name of the Emperor.

    2015-04-03_00028_zpsxfc3ohnb.jpg

     

    10th September

    I will take Paris on my own if I have to.

    2015-04-03_00030_zpscnojkcv5.jpg

     

    22nd May 1122

    The war ends without even a thank you from the boy Emperor.

     

     

    26th November

    I have the pox, probably due to those mongrel Frenchmen we fought in the dirty streets of Paris.

    2015-04-03_00037_zpsk6vykkhd.jpg

     

    10th December

    My thirteen year old daughter has become uncontrollable. Nothing is going as planned.

    2015-04-03_00038_zpsm42jlmxw.jpg

     

    18th August 1123

    Still no recognition from the Emperor, my family is beyond my power to control and no wars to be fought.

    2015-04-03_00042_zpsdz8inev0.jpg

     

    29th August

    Perhaps this will take my mind off my troubles.

    2015-04-03_00043_zpseyd1nfuf.jpg

     

    26th May 1124

    After almost a year of preperation and travel we have arrived at Kent and laid seige!

     

    9th August 1125

    News has reached us in the seige camp of the fall of Constantinople and the utter collapse of the Greek Empire, god preserve us in these troubled times.

    2015-04-03_00047_zpsmcx1mgiy.jpg

    28th August

    Not even a soldierly death for me.

    2015-04-03_00048_zpsvsqs0azb.jpg

     

    Here is the next save:

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/w5745hjdk1enyr1/Duke%20Gilbert%20of%20Provence.ck2?dl=0

     

    And a zip of all the screenshots I took, not a lot happened in my five year reign:

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/zo4p16sv0inizoz/CKIIscreens.rar?dl=0

  10. Posted

    I quit Talos Principle recently. I found the puzzles more irritating than fun. There seems to be one very specific way to complete each puzzle and I was just not getting it over and over again. Its a cool looking game, but the puzzle design just felt sort of bland and repetitive, I didn't get too far so maybe it gets better later on. 

  11. Posted

    The naming of the game's covered in the documentary. The game didn't have a moment where Schafer was clear that he'd found the perfect name; he made a big list of potential names, pared it down to the least worse ones, and Broken Age was the least worst of those.

     

    That is really sad, it was the least horrible option.

  12. Posted

    The more I listen to Idle Thumbs the more I realize I have totally different taste in games than the hosts. The discussion of Ori really drove this home for me. I have never really liked platformers, but the story of getting stuck and trying every little thing to advance sounds terrible to me. When listening I just kept thinking that it sounds like a game design problem, not a player misunderstanding problem. The basic difference seems to stem from my desire to relax when playing games. I find platformers and super unforgiving games like the early Ghost Recon's and Dark Souls to be really frustrating. 

     

    As the amount of time I have to game has decreased and my ability to buy more games has increased, I have found myself gravitating towards the lowest difficulty level in games. I have a giant pile of unplayed games and don't want to get stuck on some fiddly bit of a game and waste a bunch of time. The only games I have really enjoyed the highest difficulty on were the Rainbow Six Vegas games and the Ace Combat series, I have no idea why these are the games I love the highest difficulty on.

     

    This is totally not a criticism and I actually think it is a strength of Idle Thumbs that I don't care about a lot of the games discussed, but still love to listen every week. 

     

    P.S. This article made me so happy because it let me know I wasn't alone: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/03/24/easy-mode-guilt

  14. Posted

    Interesting! Did you start in the Old Gods start point?

     

    I had a similar thing happen to me in a game I played after the Old Gods expansion came out (I think). I'm pretty sure it was between patches so they were working the kinks out of Old Gods. The Norse religion reformed and then all of its followers united under basically one empire. In the process of forming their empire and picking apart Europe, they fought a bunch of little holy wars against outlying Catholic dukes and counts who had escaped the Karlings. Every time they won, I'm pretty sure they took 5% of Catholicism's moral authority. Within the span of two generations, that moral authority was so low that the entire Catholic religion had broken into heresies and almost vanished.

     

    It was a fun game and an interesting narrative - it was cool to watch my rulers' religion fade away and picture them as the last stubborn believers in a world that had moved on...but it also felt like a failing of the game mechanics. What sucked about it was that once those holy wars started it felt like there was no escaping a total degeneration of moral authority. The Karlings were too stupid to unite against the Norse, so every war ended up a loss. Plus, there were a few Great Holy Wars thrown in.

     

    Anyway, thanks for sharing your map! Sorry to hear it didn't work out so well!

     

    I did the Charlemagne start actually. I am going to try Shattered World again as either a pagan or hindu to avoid heresy. 

  16. Posted

    I need to look into which religion has the least problems with heritic uprisings. I tried, but due to the fractured nature of the map, Catholicism quickly drops to zero authority. I was spending way to much time putting down religious uprisings. I didn't even play that long, can't imagine what it would be like after more time. Here is the religious makeup of my game before i quit.

     

    A_203770_screenshots_2015-03-29_00001_zp

  19. Posted

    I am worried about this with my PS3, i have a big library of PS1, PS2 and PS3 games. Backwards compatible PS3s are pricey used. So I might have to give up on the old games when my system dies (It already has overheat issues with Bluray movies) and buy what  I can on steam.

  23. Posted

    I know this thread is more about the whole Gamergate thing, but I figured this was the best place to post this:

     

    http://www.rferl.mobi/a/how-to-guide-russian-trolling-trolls/26919999.html

     

    Its an interview with someone who was a paid Russian internet troll. Its something I became interested in after encountering several of these accounts across Facebook and Twitter. Usually the accounts have super generic profile pic and if you look at their post history/tweets all they ever do is post Pro-Russian comments/posts. Its very strange to live in a world with such an Orwellian institution.

     

    I also think this relates to Gamergate stuff as it is an example of real paid trolls, as opposed to the people who are accused of being paid shills for SJW or whatever. 

  25. Posted

    I just started a game using the Shattered World Mod, where only counts exist. I'm really excited to see what kingdoms and empires form. I started in Navarra because its one of the easiest kingdoms to form and I like playing as Basques to get absolute congic succession. I Will probably post a screenshot when the map has stabilized a bit, right now its a mad scramble to see who can grow the fastest. Its kind of fun just to watch the AI get really aggressive. I might set up another game to run while I'm at work, let the AI play by itself and see what world they make.