General Gaming Megathread: What are you playing?

[Makta]

@Makta, give me your Dota2 inventory. I'll find it all a loving home. =D

TBH i don't have more than a few 0.03 euro items left so i would honnestly not care i guess.

 

[SnapSlav]

I noticed. 15, to be exact. ^_<

I only asked cause I figured you probably weren't dedicated enough to the game to care about keeping them.

 

[Atomkilla]

*Stares at size of aforementioned response*

You missed THAT? Really? o.o

All joking aside, it's no biggie. Take your time. =)

The only comment that left me sort of stunned was the "what retcons" question, cause uh... yeah, Blizzard retcons A LOT, and often! It's sort of mind-blowing at this point just how effort they extend into mauling their own lore to make way for newer, less interesting lore.

Well, the size itself is why I "missed" it. I saw it, yeah, but at the time couldn't type a response and left it for later...and naturally, I forgot all about it.

As for the retcons, that question was phrased badly - I'm aware there are plenty of retcons and that Blizzard is doing it (I consider whole of WoW to be one bad retcon, but that's not the question here), I just wanted to ask which were the ones which presented itself as biggest needles in the eye...which you responded.

Eh, to begin (though there's not much to say, I mostly agree).

That's EXACTLY what made them great. I never said Blizzard's writing was spectacular (in a recent Game Grumps of WC3:ROC, everyone was laughing at Ross's explanations of the WC lore because they thought he was bullshitting them, because it all sounded so ridiculous) I said their best is their single player experiences. Being able to choose between siding with the Protoss and cleansing an infested world or fighting back against the Protoss to try to save that world resulting in two vastly different missions to play, each challenging and distinct on their own, separate designs, was really great! But... on the story side, if you helped the Protoss cleanse the infested world, the character on your ship ends up tragically infested as well and Raynor needs to put her down with a heavy heart... yet if you fought the Protoss to protect the infested world and save as many Terrans as you can, the same character was always fine, and they even have a sappy ending to their character arc where she gives him a peck on the cheek, and all is well. The story goes for mutually-exclusive tales whenever the game diverges, and that hurts the story. But the gameplay ITSELF is still superb.

It's not representative of what you can expect in multiplayer, because the tech trees are COMPLETELY customized in the campaign with units never meant to be played online. It's a mash-up of both linear and nonlinear and it both works and hurts itself because of the different circumstances that brings about. It lacks some integrity because you determine the story through your mission choices rather than the story having been decided and you would only learn as much as you sought out. These are all definitive issues with the campaign, but they didn't make the experience of the campaign poorer, per se. They were problems on their own.

Mutual illogical exlusivity in mission didn't bother me that much, simply because...eh, I don't know, I didn't care at all (more on it later). I agree, that is not the best design, but SC2 committed greater sins.
The gameplay itself is great, yes, in most missions. Which was the main reason why I went along with the campaign, because 10-12 missions in I started loosing will to play anymore and found it pretty obvious what is coming next.

However, the story and the writing sucked hard. Storywise, it was obvious what would happen even from the fucking trailer. Zero twists, zero excitement. Characters were bland as cardboard. Sure, voice acting was great, but horribly written dialogues ruined it. Besides, SC1 characters, despite being far less prominent, were more in the line of different shades of grey. In WoL, not so much.

Yes and no. Yes in that, as a whole, the writing was bad. But no in the minor details. There were twists, they just weren't very clever ones. The characters had some depth, just nothing particularly special. The "unsuspected" elements were ridiculous and poorly thought out, and they were just there because it made convenience for the story. For example, Findley's "deal with the devil" which would have made zero sense, if you were in either Findley's or Mengsk's shoes. You take a con from prison, just because he has some history with one of your greatest adversaries, to infiltrate said adversary under the condition that he wins his freedom if he... a lowly human ...kills the greatest threat to the galaxy, who by the way is immortal. WHY is that supposed to make sense? The campaign develops some conveniences and makes it possible for a moment at the end of the story for Findley to aim a gun at Kerrigan's head and for that moment to have SOME level of tension, but by NO means should this have been something a dictator could have conceivably PLANNED. That's a fine example of poor writing, and it wasn't the only one. Worse was what they did to Kerrigan's character, but I'll get more into that below.....

This is a bit of a conflict of thought here - I personally believe that if a twist is a bad one, it is hardly a twist and all - and therefore I don't consider it as such. SC2's twist came in two varieties:
- one are these poor ones - like the Findley you mentioned - which, as I've said, I'd hardly consider twists. And yeah, speaking of Findley it really isn't a twist. In the opening cinematic you see him released from the prison and you hear Mengsk's voice telling him...whatever he told him. That he is "wearing his prison" until he does his job. Sure, that is setting a basic groundwork for what should have been a twist, but due to a string of illogical events (the first illogical event being this one, as you pointed out), it got so bland. But still, this particular one is only a minor issue among the sea of greater ones (I have to admit though, entrapping Findley in the armor suit is a neat move).
- second "twists" are poor retcons, but I will come to that later.

Trying doesn't makes the efforts automatically successful. For instance, during the WOL days, Terran were WOEFULLY overpowered. Like, ridiculously so. At its worst, the Zerg in SC1 days were NEVER as abusive and OP as WOL Terran were. The Terran Ball was widely and infamously reputed for being an excessively unstoppable "strategy", with the best players in the world at Zerg and Protoss getting regularly crushed by far less skilled players simply utilizing the Terran Ball. Those days were Hell. Blizzard didn't so much "address" that as much as they waited for HOTS to make any changes to fix the problem. Back in the 90s they didn't wait for an expansion to fix problems, they patched them then and there. They applied TONS of balance fixes that actually resolved many issues, whereas they basically left the Terran Ball be for all the years leading up to HOTS. It was only with the units they introduced in HOTS that made particular abusive strategies harder to pull off. Hell, even in the WCIII days, they didn't wait too long to apply fixes to the "mass x" strategies running rampant. They even invented a new armor type JUST to engineer a solution to players massive Huntresses and Shaman.

I guess you have a point there. I do remember the Terran Ball. Yep...
Still, compared to some other titles on the market, patches are at least regularly applied. They may be just minor fixes before the next expansion sets in, but still, that is something.
In any case, HotS' multiplayer is, in eyes of this lowly noob, way better balanced than WoL... Then again, I'm not sure if you've seen what kind of changes are we to expect in LoV. Massive, to say at least. Some radical changes to the gameplay of the SC games in general, not just compared to HotS, but on the other hand, new units seem okay, at least on paper. I hope they will finally be able to nail the balance. It is not impossible.

This is the big one...

For starters, SC2 (and WC3 and WOW, for that matter) was RIFE with retcons, and terrible and massive ones, at that. SC1 established that the Xel'Naga were the most advanced race in the universe that sought to create new races that would be an "ideal", and in their tampering with the Protoss and the Zerg, they ended up causing their own extinction. It firmly set that the Overmind was a cunning entity that saw through its creators' intentions and engineered their downfall, then set its hungry eyes on the Protoss to become "perfect". The backstory concerning the Protoss and the Zerg and the Xel'Naga was very rich and, SC2 tossed it to the wind. Suddenly the Overmind did everything not out of its insatiable thirst for perfection but out of a fear of its creators and that it was, the entire time, a slave to the Xel'Naga (even during the events of SC1). Suddenly the Xel'Naga didn't accidentally manufacture their own extinction but contrivingly and absurdly orchestrating the meticulously apocalyptic doom for the whole universe..... just because. Suddenly the Overmind's goals wasn't to embed itself in Aiur and something something "become complete" but rather it was ALWAYS to find the perfect entity to infest to create a method to combat the Xel'Naga, and that entity was conveniently Kerrigan, and Kerrigan was the key to everything, and killing Kerrigan would doom the universe to the Xel'Naga's planned apocalypse of everything. Suddenly Kerrigan was never a power-hungry omnicidal psychopath who murdered her way to the top of the food chain JUST because she could, and she had the power to do so, but now it turns out that was just the Zerg DNA creating a "different Kerrigan", and that somewhere buried deep inside her subconscious she's still a good-hearted person, cheering Raynor on to end her own tyranny.

There's more, but let's just stop with that for now. It's ridiculous! These things were all done to manufacture circumstances that would allow for the campaign Blizzard ended up making, and that's nothing new, as they've done that before with their previous works. But at least they did it WELL in previous decades. When WCII came out and they had to take a story divided between 2 campaigns that were mutually exclusive in the original game and find a way to decide which one was canon, they took the best ideas from BOTH and made them all canon. The Orc ending was the canonical ending, but events from the Human ending were also canonical. Likewise the Beyond the Dark Portal expansion for WCII determined that the Alliance ending was canon, but kept details from the Horde campaign intact, such as Gul'Dan's betrayal and the invasion and destruction of Quel'Thalas. By stark contrast, WCIII UNDID many of the established lore to make way for the possibility of its campaign. Suddenly Medivh survived his slaying AND was purged of Sargeras's spirit so he could redeem his actions from the first game by saving Azeroth in the third. Suddenly it was Sargeras' INTENTION to lose to Aegwynn so he could infect her unborn child millennia later (again, just like the Findley plotholes, this was just ridiculously contrived) and so on and so forth. You get the idea, I hope.

The worst of SCII's retcons turned the Xel'Naga from a naive but well-meaning race of demi-godly aliens into a race of purely malevolent assholes for no apparent reason, and trurned the Zerg from an endlessly voracious and destructive race bent on consuming the galaxy into a misunderstood race led by a fearful arbiter trying to save the universe from destruction at the hands of its creators, and so on and so for. It WILDLY mutilated the established lore of the series that was very creatively and colorfully established back in Starcraft, and more's the pity. The lore used to be rich, now all the details that made it so interested have been tossed to the winds to make way for new and silly ideas just to excuse an audacious series of campaigns. This is where Blizzard's really lost their touch. They've grown too large, they've lost their way with what made their games so great. Yeah, they patch pretty frequently, but pardon me if being spoiled by Icefrog has left me unimpressed with Blizzard's efforts. I've seen far better, far more meticulous, far more dedicated efforts, so while Blizzard certainly hasn't been brushing off issues, I just can't see them in the same complimentary light as I once had.

They aren't manufacturing failures as far as multiplayer experiences go. I was simply saying that that's not what they do well anyway. They make great cinematics and great single player campaigns. The rest of their creations are varying degrees of successes and failures, but the common thread they all share is that they don't hold a candle to the quality of the campaigns and cinematics. That's not a terrible thing, but it's neither a necessarily good thing, either. =|

I feel kind of bad here, since I don't have all that much to add to this massive post. Saying just "I agree" is dumb.


So...

I DO agree with most of the stuff you said here, but there's this thing I've mentioned before - I never really cared much about SC lore. The original game was relatively okay, if poor on details. Brood War, well, I guess I'm one of the few who consider it a clusterfuck of an expansion storywise. (UED? What? )
Kerrigan's rise to power, or as you put it, top of the food chain, was done neatly and yes, it's a sad thing what they did to her in SC2 but...I didn't care about it much. By the time I reached that point in the campaign, by the time I realized that Xel'Naga were not retconed, but fuckconed into a regular Saturday morning cartoon villain, by the time I realize that Overmind was turned from a great villain into...whatever they turned it into, I just couldn't nor did I care anymore. It was all really bad. I've seen much, much worse, mind you, but this was immensely bad.
Then again, it was mostly my fault - I literally played through SC and BW several days before playing SC2, so it was a lackluster from the start. SC2 might not be that bad as I'm making it to be, but my personal experience of it is what matters the most to me, in the end.

However, I think one thing really ruined it for me - the aforementioned comical Terrans. "Comical" is a ill-used term here, but it's really a way to describe. It's not just Terrans. Everybody has become a parody of itself. As I've said before, each character was a certain shade of grey. You could see that motives behind their actions had some logic in the original games. Mengsk, Raynor, Kerrigan...every major recurring character has been so much revamped and made much more one-dimensional that it is absurd.
Terran crew aboard Hyperion...I don't know, not for a second did I get the feeling that this was a team that could take the tyrant down, unless again, this was a Sunday morning cartoon. Which it is, because that's what SC2 turned into.


Also, I hate what they did to Zeratul. Turned from a baddass alien ninja assassin into alien master Splinter. Fuck that.

 

[zegh8578]

Also never heard of the above title, so unfortunately I cannot comment at all on it. =/

Mount and Blade are first person combat games but with a realistic medieval approach (can switch between 3rd and 1st person view. Its the only game I know where you can see your body, in 1st person view). The xp-curve is steep, equipment is expensive as hell, and character development is tricky to optimize, perfect nerd-game. Weapons and gear are realistic, so, no potions or magic swords. It takes a long time of patient grinding to elevate yourself from riding scoundrel, to a knight to be reckoned with. Needless to say, once you ARE a powerful warrior, the game simply feels ten times more rewarding still. It is completely open world, in terms of what your ambitions are, and there are many possible ambitions to go for.

"Warband" is the sequel, I haven't tried the first, because the two games are so similar, with Warband being mostly improvements on the engine.
When people talk about "Mount and Blade", 90% of the time, they talk about "Warband"

"With fire and sword" takes the setting from 1250s to 1650s, and moves to a real life Eastern Europe, introducing gunpowder with muskets and pistols.

 

[Atomkilla]

Got a free Heroes of the Storm beta key. Anybody want it, shoot a private message my direction.

 

[gordog_frohman]

Finished up Fallout: New Vegas. Anyone ever get kind of a lack of enthusiasm to play games after beating a really big one? I found that after I got through New Vegas I didn't feel like starting a new game. Either way, it has worn off by now and I'm on to playing Sniper Elite V2 (Which I got for free on Steam many months ago but never got around to playing) and Star Wars: Jedi Knight Dark Forces II

 

[SnapSlav]

That usually happens, to me. I felt quite drained after finishing a difficulty run on Ninja Gaiden Sigma. I don't feel like playing anything else when I finish a string of Dota2 matches. I put one game down, and rather than start another, I just wanna take a break. Not every time, sure, but quite often.

 

[Makta]

Finished up Fallout: New Vegas. Anyone ever get kind of a lack of enthusiasm to play games after beating a really big one? I found that after I got through New Vegas I didn't feel like starting a new game. Either way, it has worn off by now and I'm on to playing Sniper Elite V2 (Which I got for free on Steam many months ago but never got around to playing) and Star Wars: Jedi Knight Dark Forces II

Think i got it at the same freebie tour It gets really repetitiv so i never finnished it.

Went trough Fear 1-2 with all the dlc's and now i just installed the third one.. Not sure if i CBA this one again but i will give it a shot. Thinking of buying Dreadout but i'm in a big save spree so not sure if i will buy it now.
Might install Dishonored now that i've had it for ages without playing. Or farcry 3!

 

[Makta]

Fear 3 is done and i really hate the console/codification of the game but it is not bad besides that.. Sure it's not a great Fear game but if you can see passt that it is worth a playtrough or 2.

Bought Dreadout even if it wasn't on sale.. If you could buy cs-go keys and trade them asap i would have traded for another game but steam hates people trading it seems.. Not expecting to much from this game but i did love Fatal frame 1-2 so it can't be that bad.

 

[UniversalWolf]

A long time ago I got a free copy of vanilla Sword of the Stars (possibly from the Paradox newsletter, I can't remember exactly). I played it a bit, then set it aside.

A few weeks ago, I started it up again, and I enjoyed it enough to buy the whole collection with all the expansions. I now consider it the best 4X space strategy game I've ever tried. I've been playing it exclusively for about three months. It's a masterpiece. It has six different races, and they're all very different and very entertaining to play in their own ways. The AI is impressive too, in my opinion. It's not that you can't beat it, because of course you can, but it puts up a decent fight, it adapts to counter your tactics, and it does this without cheating. I appreciate that.

One of the reasons the AI can adapt is that there are counters to almost any technology. You can develop really powerful energy weapons, but there are defensive technologies that will completely nullify that, and you'll have to switch to something else when fighting an enemy who has them.

It's really a shame SotS2 had such a disasterous roll-out, beause SotS1 is superb.

 

[Super Mutant]

Bloodeborn and I've been replaying Fallout 3. I stopped playing Fallout 3 years ago and now that I've waited so long it's even funner than it used to be. I'm also playing Dragon Ball Xenoverse.

 

[zegh8578]

Doing another Skyrim, half a year or so since last. It begun well, but with any Beth game, the longer you play, the more bugs you collect, and after a certain time, the whole game will feel like an ocean of bugs, and then there is the city destruction events
Markarth - the Forsworn quest, which ends with Forsworn pouring into the city, killing everyone and everything. This event I always have to end with console commands, by killing the immortal forsworn-fighters. I have no idea how this quest is supposed to be played out, other than accepting the end of Markarth.
Windhelm - the killer guy, once you decide to confront him, he apparently goes on a spree and massacres the marketplace.
Whiterun - vampires attack. I fast-travelled to the castle, and while I was there, vampires managed to fight their way through most of the lower town, slaying merchants. I got 3 inheritance letters after having killed off the vampires with console commands, cus fuck that shit. I then loaded a previous save, cus fuck that shit.
Any outdoors town, such as Dawnguard - dragons kill every living thing.
Winterhold - those ice-wraith ghost things AND vampires together - kill everyone.
Riften - vampires and thieves, everybody dies.

This pretty much leaves Solitude as the only place with anybody left. Fitting name for such a town, also! In the next Elder Scrolls I want much more of that, random events where everybody dies.

 

[SnapSlav]

Speaking of Skyrim, aren't Bethesda overdue for a shitty sequel they can release so they can siphon off the filthy casuals from all the good games? Cause Bloodborne has been out for a bit... I think it's about time, no?

Jokes aside (and for those unaware, that was a prod at what happened with the release of Skyrim shortly following Dark Souls back in 2011, where many players vacated the servers of the former for the latter) I freaking LOVE Bloodborne. I tried to reaffirm that my position on the PS4 will be "wait until Arkham Knight at minimum, then decide if I get one", but watching videos ofBB was just too much for my patience to handle. It looked SO DAMN PURTY!!! I couldn't resist anymore and I grabbed a PS4 and a copy of BB and have been plugging away at it for a while now. I'll say more about it in the thread dedicated to the game, but for now, it's worth noting that it's what I'm playing, and it's a damn fine (unforgiving) time! =D

 

[zegh8578]

Speaking of PS4, I might actually go and buy one. GTA5 - 65 GB!? D:
You win, console-world. You win

 

[I eat supermutants]

If you do hit me up. I need some friends for heists. None of my friends or family have a ps4.

 

[BigBoss]

I've been going through the old Sim games again:

SimCity 2000
SimAnt
SimEarth
SimLife

It took me a minute or so to re-remember how to play all these games. I also remember how back in the day, you had to read the manual to figure out how to play the games, where as these days you pretty much already know an entire game after five or ten minutes of play.

Also, for the whole StarCraft argument, I can only say one thing:

Spoiler

Blizzard turned a once rich universe into one giant fucking love story

 

[zegh8578]

If you do hit me up. I need some friends for heists. None of my friends or family have a ps4.

I'm not much into online-gaming, but a friend of mine will probably nag me to death about it, and I will find myself online eventually. I'll drop you a pm when I've gotten more into the game itself, and find myself ready to try out some of the online features.
I'm a complete noob with consoles, I'm that guy who shoots repeatedly into the ground - then adjusts aim - then shoots repeatedly into a light-post, and so on

 

[Zerginfestor]

Also, for the whole StarCraft argument, I can only say one thing:

Spoiler

Blizzard turned a once rich universe into one giant fucking love story

As a Starcraft fan, this has hurt me pretty hard. I loved the whole dark twists in SC1 and Brood War, and how nearly everyone in the campaign was not exactly 'perfectly good' character, each with flaws and all open to a healthy backstab.

Now? Bleh.

Anyways, on topic: Killing Floor, and soon in three days, Killing Floor 2. I've also been trying out this Korean MMO called Vindictus. Seems okay, though a bit...'odd', in my opinion.

 

[BigBoss]

Also never heard of the above title, so unfortunately I cannot comment at all on it. =/

Mount and Blade are first person combat games but with a realistic medieval approach (can switch between 3rd and 1st person view. Its the only game I know where you can see your body, in 1st person view). The xp-curve is steep, equipment is expensive as hell, and character development is tricky to optimize, perfect nerd-game. Weapons and gear are realistic, so, no potions or magic swords. It takes a long time of patient grinding to elevate yourself from riding scoundrel, to a knight to be reckoned with. Needless to say, once you ARE a powerful warrior, the game simply feels ten times more rewarding still. It is completely open world, in terms of what your ambitions are, and there are many possible ambitions to go for.

"Warband" is the sequel, I haven't tried the first, because the two games are so similar, with Warband being mostly improvements on the engine.
When people talk about "Mount and Blade", 90% of the time, they talk about "Warband"

"With fire and sword" takes the setting from 1250s to 1650s, and moves to a real life Eastern Europe, introducing gunpowder with muskets and pistols.

This game got some pretty mixed reviews according to Wikipedia. I haven't tried it yet, is it download only or can you buy it and play it off the disc?

 

[Gizmojunk]

Mount and Blade are first person combat games but with a realistic medieval approach (can switch between 3rd and 1st person view. Its the only game I know where you can see your body, in 1st person view).

Arx Fatalis is another [quite good] one, where you cab see the body in first person. It also has the best jump (most plausible) animation/mechanics of any FPP game that I've played.

• http://www.gog.com/game/arx_fatalis
• http://arx-libertatis.org/
• http://forums.bethsoft.com/forum/149-arx-fatalis-general-discussion/