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[Akura]

Diplomacy is Not an Option is out of Early Access. An RTS not unlike the Stronghold series, or at least the older ones that were actually good.


Main complaint is that my units prioritize attacking enemy huts over their troops. Apparently there is some kind of target priority setting, I just haven't found it yet.

[Yoink]

Future Breach 64 seems like a classic in the making. Apparently it comes out on Halloween. The graphics are gorgeous and the tutorial made me laugh out loud - I kinda hope the full game has more dialogue in a similar vein.   

[Folly]

Just finished playing Dragon's Dogma 2.

Massive disappointment.
This is not a sequel, it's a remaster. Exact same story points, same locations, same enemies. It's the same game, with overhauled graphics and a bit of class rebalancing, but essentially the same game.

The graphics on low settings look absolutely terrible. Like way worse than the first game, and worse than any game I've played in the last 30 years. Turning up the graphics only barely looks decent, but forces TAA which causes everything to get blurry any time the camera moves, literally hurting my eyes from the strain. Also many people with high-end rigs have reported terrible performance even on medium settings. This game is honestly emblematic of all that can and too frequently does go wrong with modern graphics technology.

Throughout the game, more than half of the large bosses have been cut, greatly reducing the variety. In the endgame the popular Everfall has been cut, replaced with a bullshit time-attack mode that offers far less content. It's just a lot less game than what we got the first time, even before the DLC.

Lots of crashing, quests bugging out and becoming impossible to complete, strict keybinding limitations, sloppy conversion of console GUI to PC. Every part of this game is lacking.

And at the core, the balance just feels off. Like I get new skills and I'm eager to try them out, I go out and find some monsters, line up my attack, only to have a pawn 1-shot the enemy before my attack can land. And then that happens again, and again. I finally find a boss that will stay alive long enough to test my skills on, and the boss chains status attacks that keep me completely disabled for the entire fight. Find another boss and actually use my skills, then the boss flies away before I can finish the job, leaving me with no loot. The whole time playing this game was frustrating, and never fun.

I loved the first game, but this abomination has done nothing but smirch it's legacy.

[nenjin]

Glad I didn't run out to buy it. There were all the warning signs.

Maybe it will get a "remaster" edition.

Although TBH, every time I think about it, I think I didn't put enough time into the 1st game's end game content and should go back and play that instead.

[McTraveller]

Has anyone played The Last Starship? I keep looking for a good starship builder and keep getting disappointed.  I know it's limited to a single deck (I'd love multi-deck...) but otherwise how is it?  How abstract are the build systems?

My "dream game" would be building a multi-deck ship, with air, fluid, and power system mechanics like in Oxygen not Included where you get to route everything...

[MCreeper]

Being a jerk in Refind Self.

Cleaner bot tries to "clean up" a collapsed woman on the street.

Stop it from cleaning her up
---> Disassemble her
Leave them be

Hopefully it wasn't a real woman.

Litlle robots want to take a battery to not die. Bigger robot also wants to take a battery to not die.

Give battery to the former
Give battery to the latter
---> Destroy the seed of strife

4 pacifist points gained.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A letter from the Doctor has something like this: "If you want to ressurect me, take care of the sheep." I looked at it properly after passing halfway point.
Spent the very last action on "take care of the sheep" minigame. Gained small change and nothing else.
After the end MC remembers: "I need to smash the sheep for Doctor to ressurect!". Smashing ensues. I never found out why the sheep needed smashing. 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Would probably be a very nice little game if not for "personality test" nonsense and harsh time limit. Instead it is just nice.

EDIT: Ah, three playthroughs...

[Sirus]

Why does that UI look so much like classic X-COM? The font, the cursor, the buttons, the layout...

Even the "Aye" button looks like it came straight out of the Xpiratez mod.

[MCreeper]

Because it is a screen from the Xpiratez, inserted for snark purposes. The actual game is an anime side-scrolling adventure.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Akura]

Just played through the normal difficulty of Awaria, another freeware game from the same guy who made Helltaker. Which should probably clue you in to what kind of game it is, except this one is yuri-focused.

The game is hard, but not unsatisfyingly so.

The game is free, but like Helltaker, there's a DLC of artwork that you can also unlock for free in game by playing through hard mode. Which, given the difficulty of normal, sounds like it's going to be painful.

[Frumple]

i just... spent a half hour doing optional jumping puzzles in the first zone of crystal project

it's a jrpg-ish thing and i've spent like two minutes of battles and the rest of it jumping

none of this appears necessary for progression

i still haven't completed the like third step of the tutorial, but at one point i accidentally bypassed the entire area by going over the surrounding cliffsides and almost got eaten by enemies like 2-3 times my level

the verticality in this game is wack, i don't think i've chased random jumping shit like this since the super mario rpg back on the snes

E: Seriously though, your first impression of the game is probably going to, reasonably, be that you're going to have to backtrack with an extra movement ability to get all the stuff even just in the first zone.

Except the game's jumping puzzles are not, in fact, reasonable. As far as I can tell nothing in the first zone requires more than your starting jump to access. There's one fight that's basically level locked but that's it. Dev apparently has a pathological obsession with jumping puzzles. So much jumping ;_;

[lemon10]

Yeah, that was my issue with the Jedi Survivor games. Loved the sekiro-ish combat, couldn't stand all the dungeons and jumping involved with it.

[Frumple]

I mean, I'm actually kinda' digging it? It's genuinely giving a SMRPG vibe, so far, which isn't a bad thing even a little.

Just about all of it's optional, if you want to go from point A to point B and just fight fights without worrying about all the side cruft it looks like you're entirely able to, so far. You miss out on some loot and maybe optional side content but that's all. The actually necessary jumping seems pretty straightforward, at least in what I've gotten through so far.

It's just. If you want. There's stupid amounts of jumping puzzles off to the side. Convoluted jumping puzzles spanning several what-amounts-to-Z-levels and jumps you probably think you can't make. Like, dozens of them even in the tutorial zone, and from what I've seen of the second if the pace lets up it's further in that that it happens. Chests and weird stuff tucked all over the place (that half hour saw me climbing trees in odd places and jumping off mountains for the ultimate reward of a literal pile of squirrel shit that roughly doubled a character's luck when equipped, ferex). Hidden caves and more. Lots of stuff that you'll look at and think "okay, you can't reach that, right" and just... be wrong.

Can't seem to jump into the waterfalls, though. At least not yet, for the ones I could reach. Maybe eventually...

[Akura]

Palword just released the Felbreak update. There's a lot of new features, many of which are available at lower levels, so it's not just a case of "push the endgame back a little more".

Expeditions: An expedition building can be built to send your boxed Pals out on an adventure to gather resources. This seems to include some rarities that otherwise requires dungeon-diving or hard boss fights to gain. Up to 100 Pals can be sent out. Expeditions require a certain amount of "firepower"; my weaker, lower-level Pals provided only a couple hundred points of firepower while a fairly high-leveled Xenogard added around 1.7k. Sending below the requirement gives <100% chance of success, above reduces the expedition timer. The easiest expedition had a firepower requirement of 25k and a timer of 30 minutes(I got it down to 19min). Different expeditions are locked behind tower bosses. Beware, the expedition building is massive, and is meant to be placed on the ground.

Research: A research structure can be built, allowing you to employ Pals in performing research. Research costs resources and uses tens of thousands of points of work effort(to start with), but permanently improves work rates of each labor skill. Additionally, most, if not all, the labor boost structures are locked behind both tech points and research. Somewhat irritated that I'm fairly sure that I lost my TP investment into those from before.

Outside dungeon: A new Syndicate Oil Barge was added, serving as a lower-leveled version of the oil rig. It's located in the bay NW of the starter Plateau of Beginnings. The patch notes mention a new oil rig, but that might have been the one previously in the game.

Continent: The new Felbreak continent, supposedly six times the size of Sakurajima, with plenty of new Pals to enslave BEFRIEND. I haven't actually found this continent yet, so I don't know what it's like. Also has a new tower boss, and new endgame resources.

Sphere mods: You can unlock modifications to your Pal spheres, tweaking how they throw yet improving capture rate. For example the Heavy Sphere mod reduces throw range but increases capture rate.

Other tweaks: I've found that Pals actually repair things now, that's great. Game also runs a bit smoother. One tweak not mentioned in the patch notes, but I've seen complaints about, is that when you send out a Pal, they appear right next to you instead of you throwing the sphere. Probably due to pressure from Nintendo, though Pocket Pair has otherwise shown to give little concern about that lawsuit. They've started their collaboration with Terraria, and this update has Meowmere in it.

[Frumple]

Somewhat of an update on crystal project, I fairly immediately got sidetracked by mods (the ff rework in specific) and... now I'm like 70 hours in and I'm not even in the end-game yet.

One: Turns out there are movement techs (mounts) involved! Like. At least five.

Two: Game is huge, like holy shit it's gigantic and it lets you crawl over basically all of it, it's one of the wildest bits of game design I think I've ever seen. It doesn't appear to be procedural, the thing seems to be hand crafted and the overall map design feels like a voxel metroidvania had a baby with a JRPG. Little nooks and crannies full of stuff all over the place, stupidly interconnected, you can climb the highest mountain in the game and then jump off it headfirst and land in entirely different areas, there's an entire ocean layer I haven't even been able to access yet that looks large enough to add like another 20-25% to the game's space, it's just absolutely nuts.

Three: There actually is mainline progress gatekept behind platforming. It's not bad (the worst of the platforming I've seen so far definitely seems to be optional-ish _{fuck off shadu and your damn ladder thing}), but it's definitely there.

Four: The first proper (you can parkour your way into it way earlier than you'll survive parkouring your way into it) encounter with the desert is just goddamn miserable. It's broadly your first encounter with what becomes a theme with the game: Technically encounters are on the overworld and you can avoid them, but that technically does a lot of heavy lifting and enemies start getting really goddamn fast as you get further into the game. Dodging encounters is possible but it becomes very, very difficult about mid-game, and regular encounters are also regularly pretty friggin' miserable (fuck offf oversoul you're not even hard you're just super annoying aaaahhh).

Five: I basically skipped the vanilla game so I'm not sure what balance is like it in, but the FF mod? Even on normal difficulty (one above lowest, two below highest) it feels a bit overtuned, enemies pretty damn spongy, basically everything hits like a truck, and gimmicks are very, very common and often pretty punishing. Party wipes happen regularly, I actively have to adjust party composition occasionally in a way you don't see very often in JRPGs (and especially FF themed ones ). I'm enjoying myself but I'm also fairly regularly putting the game down and walking off for a bit when I encounter something particularly frustrating. There's a lot of really neat stuff going on but I'd probably recommend just playing on easy, or turning on some of the assist options (there's a pile of them).

Could probably talk more but it's midnight and that's my effort tapped out. Would pretty strongly recommend if you want a heavily exploration focused JRPG on the cheap. Game's a bit of a blast.

E: Just hit me, what the game's exploration is reminding me of? Morrowind, right down to there being weird dungeons in strange places and jumping over mountains to get places faster. It's kinda' like a mix of morrowind and the super mario RPGs in general design.

[Zangi]

Haven't been here for years, kek.

Currently looking at games that have a recruit/kidnap randomly generated NPC to build a village/town/base with component.  Kinda extended from wanting something similar to Metal Gear Solid's MotherBase.

Medieval Dynasty
Sengoku Dynasty
Bellwright
Aska
Necesse
Soulmask (This one is recruiting via kidnapping, bought this one and currently playing it.)

Though, they are all Survival/Crafting games similar to... Minecraft and Rust?  I haven't played those.

Anyone have further recommendations?