TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Tag: RPG

  • Disappointing night in The Division. Going back to Witcher 3

    I had a decidedly un-fun night in The Division, so I rage quit and went back to playing Witcher 3. The first problems were glitches, while the final straw was people.

    After being unable to get to Manhattan on Monday night due to Ubisoft’s servers being melted into puddles of goo, when I started the game last night, I was stuck in Brooklyn without any obvious way out. The missions were all done, so there were no pointers to get me out of the map. Luckily, I found a guide on YouTube that showed the way to go through the streets to activate the final cut scene (and why did that Osprey blow up, anyway?) and get me moved on to Manhattan. So that was the first glitch, but not the most annoying.

    Next, I set up my Base of Operations and started the first mission in Madison Square Garden. Then I got bitten by a bug that also bit me in the beta and has obviously not been fixed: I got glitched into a wall. In this case, as I was evading some enemies, I glitched inside a wall and furniture. No movement I did could get me out, so the baddies walked right up and killed me. In the beta, I glitched into a column in a subway station, and that state persited even after reloading the game (luckily I had grenades so I could kill myself and respawn). So the night started on a negative and got worse.

    Then a friend and someone else joined me in the game, and we quickly proceeded to start the second mission (one that wasn’t in either beta). This was a pretty hard mission, but we were going along pretty well. Then the other guy separated from us to do who knows what, and he was higher level, so he was practically carrying the other two of us through the mission. So my friend and I started dying, then my friend went AFK for quite a while. There was no communications during this time. so I had no idea why everyone abandoned me. So I punched out of the group, decided I wasn’t having fun, quit the game, and went and played Witcher 3 on my PC.

    I presume I’ll try The Division again sometime soon, but I’m pretty sick of it at the moment.

  • Getting towards endgame in Fallout 4 and I’m not exactly pleased

    This post contains spoilers for Fallout 4, though because I haven’t finished the game, it doesn’t contain endgame spoilers. If you don’t want spoilers, go back to Twitter and read about Blade and Soul and its boob physics.

    I have been really enjoying Fallout 4, but I think I’m getting near the end. I’ve spent the game recruiting settlements to the Minutemen, grabbing Technical Documents and Viable Blood Samples for the Brotherhood of Steel, killing synth enemies of the Railroad, and, in general, hating the Institute for kidnapping my son and killing my wife. Now that I’ve finally made my way into the Institute, I think they’re a bunch of misguided dopes that need to be stopped, but not necessarily to all die. Unfortunately, based on the way I see the upcoming conflict, they and perhaps some of my other current allies are going to have to be killed.

    It looks to me that the game isn’t going to give me a way to make peace between all the factions. Hell, I’m the General of the Minutemen, I hang out with the leader of the Railroad, I am the father of Father of the Institute (there was a helluva spoiler, so don’t say I didn’t warn you), and the Brotherhood of Steel likes the cut of my jib. If anyone could preserve the peace and make all factions get along, it would be me. But as far as I can tell, I’m going to be forced to choose a faction, and that will make me some enemies. Already, both the BoS and Railroad are a little pissed that I chose to enter the Institute with the help of the Minutemen. I’ve been asked to undertake missions against the Railroad for the Institute. The Battle at Bunker Hill had me going in with an Institute tough guy to recover some synths from the Railroad that was trying to hide and protect them. This turned into a huge battle between the BoS, the Railroad, and the Institute with lots of deadies and lots of loot to be collected. I managed to stay neutral by not shooting anyone, so I haven’t ruined my reputation with the factions yet, but clearly I didn’t like to go up directly against the Railroad and BoS.

    In the long run, I’m going to have to betray the Institute, since I think they are the worst of the bunch. That dick at the head of the BoS may make me go up against them too. So all in all, I’m not happy that the game is forcing my hand to make war, when I could be a peace maker..

  • Enjoying the Heck out of Fallout 4

    Since I last wrote, I played a lot of Destiny. I would even say too much Destiny, with the terrific Sparrow Racing League (getting all 3 characters a Class S license, but never getting any 320 gear), followed by Iron Banner where I got all 3 characters to rank 5. And that’s pretty much the last Destiny I played (other than getting the nifty Warlock helmet from Xur this weekend).

    I’ve been playing a lot of Fallout 4 and enjoying it quite a bit. I loved Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and I’m enjoying this just as much. The combat is pretty good as are most of the missions. One of the things I most appreciate about Fallout 4 is the writing. I love finding notes and holotapes from people that survived the war but were then trying to find each other or get home. Some of the stories are quite convincing and moving. The developers didn’t need to add so much flavor to the wasteland, but I’m sure glad they did.

    I mostly like the four factions (though I have not met the Institute yet – more below), though some of the missions get a little tedious. Some of the escort missions from the Brotherhood of Steel are annoying, because the escortee tends to like running up to Deathclaws and the like. [Spoiler alert – don’t read the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want a minor spoiler.] While looking at the Fallout 4 Wiki, which is a good idea to make sure I don’t miss anything in the buildings I explore, I saw evidence that in the endgame, the factions will turn hostile to each other and, for example, try to attach the Prydwen, the BoS’ airship. I’m disappointed that I’ll be forced to make a choice to attack or protect one of the factions if I want to see the endgame content. I’m pretty happy being the General of the Minutemen, a Knight of the Brotherhood of Steel, and a Railroad operative. Having to choose and making enemies isn’t something I’m looking forward to.

    I like the voice acting quite a bit, especially Tim Russ (Star Trek’s Tuvok) as the captain of the Prydwen. Some of the NPCs, especially the guards on Diamond City, have too limited a phrase list, so it gets a bit tedious. It’s almost as bad as the “arrow to the knee” of Skyrim. But overall, the voice acting and behavior of the NPCs and the player’s companions is good and convincing. The background stories are well done too, though I heard Cait’s story last night and it was quite disturbing and sad.

    One of the things I don’t like about Bethesda games, and this one is no exception, is that enemies attack on sight, even if I am so much higher level that they are but gnats to be squashed. I remember in Oblivion when I was the Champion of Cyrodil and had braved Oblivion, but stupid bandits would attack me everywhere I went. So tedious. LOTRO has a nice system where if you’re several levels above the enemies, you can walk through and they don’t attack unless you attack them. Freelancer, from way back when, had a neat system where you could hear the radio chatter from other pilots, and I remember a bunch of baddies scanning me and saying “Nope, not gonna mess with that guy” or something similar, followed by them steering away. Why a modern game can’t do such things at least as well, I have no idea.

     

  • Really enjoying Dragon Age: Inquisition; Not so much for Divinity: Original Sin

    These two games with three-word names with colons in the middle are RPGs I bought last week on sale. both are set in fantasy worlds where you fight baddies using swords and magic. Both have a player character and companions to help the fight. Both have made up BS names for bad magic stuff, like the “fade” or “source.” Both also have seemingly high production value and look pretty good. But the combat is very different, and that makes all the difference for me.

    Divinity: Original Sin is an old school-looking game, with isometric views, but of a real 3D environment, so the camera angle, position, and zoom can be changed if desired. The game world looks good and the story seems about average. The problem is that it is way old school in the combat as well. The combat is turn based, so everything must be micromanaged. Every attack, every movement, every healing potion, all of it. I guess I’ve been spoiled since Dragon Age: Origins where your companions had AI and rules that you could make and change, so they could participate in the combat productively and without micromanagement. Sure, you could micromanage if you wanted, but it wasn’t required. Because I can’t be bothered with this level of micromanagement at my advanced age (and I wouldn’t have bothered much when I was younger as well), Divinity: Original Sin will be put on the back burner. I won’t be asking Steam for a refund, because it isn’t the game developer’s fault that I bought a good game that I just don’t like.

    Dragon Age: Inquisition, on the other hand, is very compelling and good fun. The combat system is significantly simplified from the Dragon Age: Origins rule making, but it works very well and I rarely have to micromanage. My biggest problem was with the keyboard and mouse control (I’m playing on PC). The right button view controls were awful, and when you’re trying to close a fade rift that’s above you (and all of them are), getting a view on it to be able to affect it was a real challenge. Luckily, the game was also designed for controller support, and that works fine. The views and movement work great, and I can still pause the action (called “Tactical View” now) to select targets or issue commands. The biggest problem is that they’ve created a beautiful world that is much more open than in any of the previous games, but I’m usually so busy looking with a slight downward angle that I don’t get to take in its beauty.

    The other problem I have with DAI (and with another EA game, Titanfall) is that it is really stupid about resolution settings with my 4K monitor. My graphics card isn’t powerful enough to play smoothly at 4K, but is great for 1080p. So when I set 1080p/60 in the game, the game (both DAI and Titanfall, in this case) decides that I really must have meant 1080p/24 and sets the monitor for that. Well that’s a disaster in Titanfall, but even DAI looks jerky and the voice sync goes out of whack at 24 frames per second. So I have to manually set the resolution to 1080p/60 then start the game. Titanfall would let me play at 1080p/120 with no problem (yes, the monitor supports 120 Hz at 1080 resolution), but DAI is very confused by that and refuses to go into full screen mode.

    So despite the technical glitches, Dragon Age: Inquisition is great and has at least partly broken my obsession with Destiny. Divinity: Original Sin looks like a neat game, but the combat system isn’t my cup of tea.

  • Fretting about what games to play!

    I have an odd problem, though probably not so unusual these days when people have Steam libraries that number in the hundreds of games as well as consoles full of PS+ and Games with Gold “freebies”: I can’t find a game that I want to play.

    I’m still playing Destiny more than is healthy, and I sometimes dip into LOTRO and Star Trek Online, all of which I enjoy, but I feel like I want something different. I don’t think I want another MMORPG, and if I did, I have Guild Wars 2, but never got into it. No, what I really want is a space game.

    Some of this came about because Elite: Dangerous became available on Steam, so that got me thinking about the genre. I love the X games from Egosoft, from X2 through the various incarnations of X3. I bought X: Rebirth some time ago, but just couldn’t get into it. I started it again last week, since many patches and expansions have claimed to have “fixed” and improved the game. As far as I can tell, nope. X: Rebirth’s universe seems at once more crowded, yet more tedious than those of the other X games. Travel is done via space highways, which seems restrictive compared to the time-accelerating travel mechanism in the other games. I presume they want to make the universe more connected and continuous than before, but so far, I have the opposite impression. And since stations are now massive conglomerations of modules, you have to hunt for places to dock rather than just approaching the station and asking to dock. Even after I’ve visited a station, finding the docking areas is still a huge pain. Maybe it gets better when I add more gear to the ship, but so far, the game remains almost unplayable.

    So looking through my enormous Steam library, I saw that I had bought Galaxy on Fire 2 HD when it was on sale some time ago. I also have it on my iPad, but the controls were pretty bad, so I hoped the controls and graphics would be better on my PC. Well sort of, but it is still a tedious and not fun game. It is basically a space dogfighter with little to no aim assist, with a little bit of trading and mining thrown in. In essence, not much fun. And, frankly, that’s what I’m worried Elite: Dangerous will be like. I would hate to spend $60 for a game that is by all  accounts half baked and have it not be much fun either. The reviews are suggesting that I’d like it, but who knows?

    So for a change of pace, I figured I’d try Baldur’s Gate 2 EE that I also bought on sale on Steam. I never played BG2, but I loved Neverwinter Nights, so I figured it would be good. Well, no, I don’t have time to manage the spells and attacks for a whole party through a tedious interface. In Dragon Age Origins, your party members act appropriately for the role you assigned, but in BG2, they seem pretty useless unless you micromanage them. Well, since computers are better at tedious micromanaging than I am, I think the computer should have done more.

    So I will not be continuing with BG2 or GoF2 since they are bad at letting the computer do things it should be doing. I may end up giving X: Rebirth another shot, but I don’t think I can justify $60 for Elite: Dangerous when I could hate it.

    Oh well, Destiny is calling, as always.

  • Finally arrived at Dol Amroth in LOTRO

    After a bit of questing in West Gondor, my Lore Master finally made it to the city of Dol Amroth in LOTRO. The city looks great with tremendous detailing on the stonework and the doors. Swans and statues of swans are present everywhere. The city has a number of districts, and you are given a quest by a grumpy guard to visit all of them (I say the guard is grumpy, because he didn’t have nice things to say about elves, the race of my LM). When I got to the dock area, I was given a couple of quests regarding fishing. So while I was sent off to collect fish and to fish from a pier, nobody even mentioned the Corsair ship blocking the harbor entrance, nor the Umbar fleet in the surrounding waters. Nope, far more important for me to collect crates of fish than to worry about the blockade…

    Other areas of the city have similar nuisance quests, yet there are some serious quests, as well. There is a quest line to join the city guard, which seems like a lot of work, but I’ll do it, most likely. Overall, Dol Amroth seems like it will be an okay place to stop and quest for a while.

    The amenities are all present, but somewhat spread out and inconvenient. The LOTRO designers made such brilliant crafting halls in Forlaw and especially Aldburg, where crafting stations, vault keeper, auctioneer, and forge/relic master existed in a small, convenient space, yet here they are spread over a wide area and in different buildings, etc. So not great for crafting, but I can always jump to Aldburg when I need crafting time.

    Dol Amroth in LOTRO’s West Gondor is a treat and looks so good it isn’t to be missed. I’m glad I made it.

  • Destiny is KILLING me!

    Destiny has been out for a few weeks, and while the critics kind of hate it and the shine is wearing off because of all the grinding, it still has me in its clutches. Whereas LOTRO or Star Trek Online used to be my “comfort games,” now Destiny fills that role. I always felt like playing LOTRO or STO, even if I just has a little while. I could blow off steam, accomplish something, and complete a mission or two. I didn’t touch either LOTRO or STO this weekend, but opted for Destiny in every moment I could spare. I’m a little sad about this. I have a lifetime subscription to STO, so I’m not wasting money by not playing it, but there are still places to see and aliens to kill. I do pay yearly for LOTRO, so if I’m not playing it, I’m wasting money. Besides, I still haven’t even finished the new story that came with the latest update. So I feel guilt over my choice in how to waste my time.

    Destiny, on the other hand, has a very short story that I’ve finished. Everything else PvE is just replaying the same things over and over, with the exception of the Raid, which I won’t be able to tackle maybe ever. But the gameplay mechanics are so comfortable and natural and satisfying (note that I didn’t say “rewarding” – more later) that it is easy to jump in and do a couple patrol missions or even a short story mission when I have a few minutes available. If the infernal and interminable loading could be reduced or eliminated, the game would be even better and less annoying.

    The game isn’t very rewarding, however. Most missions give no reward or perhaps some random crappy reward. The Queen’s Wrath missions are a great way to get good gear, but they are very hard and often give the same damn helmet over and over! Random loot drops are all we can hope for, and I got very lucky yesterday when my first and only Legendary Engram turned into an Exotic sniper rifle. Yay!

    And then I went into the Crucible (PvP) and got my ass handed to me.

  • Finished Destiny’s Story Missions

    I finished the “story missions” in Destiny last night after nearly 18 hours of play. So all the people that claimed the Destiny world is small (myself included in previous posts) are both right and wrong. It turns out that we only get a small region to explore on each of the game worlds (Earth, Moon, Mars, Venus), but those areas are pretty big, detailed, and complex. Also, if you think about it, 18 hours is a lot longer than it takes to finish most games other than RPGs and MMOs these days. It’s way longer than The Last of Us and Tomb Raider, to name a couple.

    So now that I’ve finished the story missions and reached the level cap (20), what’s next? Well, now the game takes on a new life. I haven’t even touched the PvP Crucible, nor have I put much effort into maxing out my reputation with any of the various factions. I’ve only played one Strike mission (twice, though). I’m not even high enough level to play the current raid nor some of the harder mission difficulties. The game changes into a lot more grinding, which could be bad if it weren’t for the good game mechanics and nearly perfect feel of the action. There is a lot more to do, much more to explore, and more fun to be had. Places to go, things to see, baddies to kill…

    I haven’t even tried out all three character classes (only the Warlock so far). In addition, each class has two different skill trees that are apparently quite different, but I haven’t touched the 2nd Warlock skill tree.

    Now that I’ve reached this milestone, however, I will try to obsess over Destiny a little less and get back to LOTRO, STO, Diablo III, and more. But Destiny certainly offers more compelling future fun than Titanfall does, in my opinion, yet the costs the same (at release).

  • Glitches in the Destiny matrix

    I played the first 4 missions of Destiny last night and enjoyed them, even though they were exactly like the beta, as far as I could tell. I got the slight impression that thing were a little harder than the beta, but that may just have been my lack of practice. But I did notice some glitching that wasn’t in the beta: Some enemies were glitching between a couple of different spots, much like laggy play in other multiplayer shooters. Except these were computer controlled enemies, not players, so it wasn’t due to someone’s crappy internet connection. These were also very low level enemies (level 2), so it wasn’t some special ability – it was a glitch. It wasn’t a terrible problem, but it sure messed up my aim as I tried to kill them. It also messed them up, too, so at least the disadvantage went both ways.

    Other than that glitch, all seemed just as good as the beta, and it was good fun. I played the 4th mission with a friend (who was much better than I am), so that was great fun.

    One of the things I like about Destiny is that the enemies are not omniscient. They can be surprised if you sneak up on them, and some of them can even be a little cowardly if you knock down their shields. Overall, the feel of the game is great, so I’m looking forward to playing more.

  • Fellow Guardians, I did buy Destiny for PS4

    Despite my previous plans not to buy Destiny, I did pre-order it at the last hour, so now my PS4 surely has it all downloaded so I can play tonight.

    I didn’t succumb to the hype, but I bought it because some of my friends pre-ordered it, and I decided that if I wanted to play with them, I’d better get the game. As with so many games (Titanfall, anyone), my friends and I have a burst of playing, then the interest fades. Since I’m not a big multiplayer shooter player, I have skipped all the Battlefields and CODs, but because I enjoyed the Destiny Alpha and Beta, I knew I would enjoy playing the game to some extent. Let’s hope my $60 was well spent…