What Games Are You Playing 2013?

[AndrewRogue]

Only in ToB, yeah.

[Grefter]

Sarevok indeed only new PC in the expansion.  Dunno if your player psychology is similar to mine or not, but I have trouble using him since it either means suddenly swapping from five manning to six manning or dumping someone I dragged through the underdark to use him.  I often struggle with this.

GTA 5 - My brothers got this and they played it last night.  They got to struggle with aiming n a controller and driving cars though busy streets.

SR4 - I played this instead and jumped around the city on foot with no effort at all while listening to dubstep.  I also gave a fanboy rights to his favourite TV show after playing his fan fiction scenario on the one condition that he never stop.

[Sierra]

Sarevok indeed only new PC in the expansion.  Dunno if your player psychology is similar to mine or not, but I have trouble using him since it either means suddenly swapping from five manning to six manning or dumping someone I dragged through the underdark to use him.  I often struggle with this.

Yeah, that has been a problem. When time comes to switch in the people I mean to use long-term in BG2, I often find I don't want to ditch the people I've had basically as placeholders since early in the game just because man it seems a shame to waste all those levels they got (I will bring Yoshimo to Spellhold just so I have no choice but to have an open slot for Imoen; gogo workarounds for personal obsessiveness). When does the ToB content become accessible? I figured it was after BG2 proper's arc...but it sounds like not.

Anyway. Went back to Nashkel after clearing the mines, dude walks up to me, he's all, "I'm gonna kill you, Homer." Three town guards within five feet of him. This game has the worst assassins outside of Childerich.

I'm not sure where the plot is right now so I'm back to dicking around. Someone told me to go scalp some bandits? I question this as a method of bounty collection. How do the authorities know I'm even turning in bandit scalps? I could be a bandit handing over trophies of my victims for all they know! Anyway, Durgal's Tower. I spend the evening hacking through the upper floors and the basement, figure I'm done after the post-puzzle ninja boss that init drops freaking Cloudkill on you, but no. It just goes on like this.

Still. This must be one of the BG1 expansion zones, because it's the first indoor dungeon I've seen that actually looks designed instead of just a bunch of random squiggles which confound party pathfinding. Cash/loot/exp just raining from the sky in there, too. I've had to leave twice to sell junk and everybody's got two levels in there without the place even being done. I uh think I might be exceeding the intended endgame level for this game well before I finish it (level cap is off).

BG1's whole enemies randomly respawning five seconds after you walk away from a tile thing is getting really fucking old.

[Grefter]

BG2 not big on respawning dudes at least (and you like never need to revisit a map outside of Athkatla anyway).

Durlag's Tower is indeed TotSC content and yes it is indeed ridiculously profitable and shovels EXP at you by the bucket load.

Watcher's Keep is available from the start of BG2 with ToB installed and is kind of Durlag's Tower parallel.  All the other content is locked until ToB itself.  Doing Watcher's Keep straight out of Irenicus' dungeon is ill advised and great fun if you know how to game the system (would be done to try and get stat ups early on level 3 or so of the dungeon and of course the shiny +5s that ToB showers you in).  Only downside to doing it early it is that for some stupid reason the first tier of enemy level scaling prevents a guy spawning with one of the upgrade items for the shinies on the first floor (upgrades only possible in ToB itself, so no +6s in SoA, you will just have to put up with +4 and +5 broke shit). 

It is for a Bastard Sword though , so it isn't really a big deal, its just a bit short sighted design on their loot tables (and I don't know of a mod that actually fixes it, for all that it should be super easy fix).  No big deal because Bastard Swords suck anyway, the only other good one outside of generic ones is like a +3 you get in the Underdark from a shop. 

Maybe they should have been left rolled into Longsword proficiency, but those didn't need more support (maybe two-handers?  I don't think that would work so great, but it could be a neat little niche to be get 2 handed weapon prof with a sword/shield or both weapon profs or something at the cost of your weapons suuuuuucking).

Anyway TotSC content is pretty fucking nuts (that Greater Werewolf Fen talked about earlier is also some of that) and super super skippable.  I legit mostly just go to Ulgoth's beard to buy spells and a cloak, loot top level of Durlag's tower and don't touch it these days.

Edit - Actually there seems to be some dispute over level effecting the spawning of the status with the Foebane on it, saying that it will always spawn.  That seems counter to a lot of user feedback (my memory of the sequence is the same) where it didn't spawn no matter how you completed the event leading into it and people using patch that forces max level enemy spawns no matter what saying that it fixed the issue.  Not really sure.

Edit 2 - Browsing changelog of a fixpack at Gibberlings 3 gives this amazing set of fixes.

Creature Sex Fixes - Various creatures were incorrectly identified as male, female, or neither.

Creature Gender Fixes - There exists a gender identifier for creatures in addition to sex. Gender has several different values beyond male and female, such as summoned or illusionary. Summoned, in particular, is what allows scripts to detect summoned creatures, the summoning cap to work, and for the death spell to work against just summons. Gender also controls the casting soundset of creatures.

I love this game.

[Nitori]

GTA5: As a Canadian I am bad at torturing, it took me like four tries

I will never be Ocelot

[Shale]

Yaaaay, I beat the first part of 17. Oscar promoted, into Bow Paladin because I like triangle attacks and no way am I raising Marcia enough to use the Falcon Knight version. Also Astrid is so awesome that she may have turned me into a mounted-archer fanboy.

[AndrewRogue]

Planescape: Torment - Since the TNO can't find Ravel's gate, and the place he's pretty sure it is is blocked by DEADLY LARVAL WORMS that wrecked his shit, he has decided to try and learn more about his past and do some sidequesting.

Several of them he'd already forgotten he'd acquired, which leads him to believe he is naturally a bit forgetful.

He is quite surprised his honesty regarding his past hasn't come back to bite him in the ass yet.

He made a new friend with some weird Gith dude. He doesn't really understand their philosophy, but his party is mostly crazy anyway. Also, not many of them like each other.

[Fenrir]

Cid, are you sure those bears weren't other kinds of bears? Some always attack / never attack.
I haven't noticed anything special and have just explored the entirity of BG1.


IWD2 being worse than BG2 about scaling still feels pretty bad. (Obviously FO3 is much worse) I dunno. Hmm.

During the Unseeing One sidequest, you could clearly see the difference between fixed encounters (One small beholder, or one big beholder) and the scaled ones (THREE BIG BEHOLDERS AND THREE SMALL ONES AT THE SAME TIME) It's obviously not something that goes well with solo challenges. The only reason I survived that is that beholders can't use their big terrible spells on summons, so I just stood back spamming Summon Spider / Summon Carrier.

[Grefter]

I don't actually think the level scaling is bad in IWD2.  It is built so you can replay it.

Also worth noting I might just be thinking of Heart of Fury encounters.  Lots of IWD2 is a blur.

[Lord Ephraim]

GTAV - First Person View Dog Fucking. I feel like Nitori made a comment about this.  Fuck the idea though you need an iOS device to train the dog or pimp your ride.

I got in a helicopter, and immediately crashed into the ground.  Flight controls are back in full force.  I'm pretty sure there's one point where I have to land a fucking plane and it's going to take over 100 tries.  I played NES Top Gun.

GTA internet is very convenient.  Call of Duty knockoffs, Republican propaganda, and anime porn are all accessible on one page.  I don't know why Rockstar thinks anime porn is a part of american culture though.

This game is very misogynistic.  Every woman is either "HATE PENIS, NEED RIGHTS" or "NEED PENIS, FUCK EVERYTHING ELSE".  There's not one single likeable female character in the game.  It doesn't bother me too much but goddamn it's going to piss off a few of my friends.

[Captain K.]

I played NES Top Gun.

You have my sympathy.

[Clear Tranquil]

Tales of Xillias- Second run. Milla side. Unknown mode/double damage/triple crit. Back at Fezebel Marsh. Screw you Gauis

[Fudozukushi]

Tales of Xillias- Second run. Milla side. Unknown mode/double damage/triple crit. Back at Fezebel Marsh. Screw you Gauis

Coincidentally this is almost what I just did.  I didn't have enough grade for DD/TC so I have Dark Seal's slapped on everyone instead.  DD/TC would have just made the battle too easy though since Jude hits the Atk. cap with his Devil Arm.

[Fenrir]

Might get IWD2 then. Heard it's pretty hard.
ToEE sounds good too.

BG2 Yattaf solo: Dead Firkraag.
I never even beat him with a party of 6!

Strategy: Summon a cacofiend so he wastes all his spells, then melee fight with constant stoneskin + mirror image + improved haste.

Use Any Item = Yattaf can actually use Carsomyr hahahahahahah.
+ An amulet with auto-protection from evil, which makes cacofiends actually not fight back.

[Shale]

FE: C17 Part 4! Boyd is promoted, Nephenee and Soren are knocking on the door.  Parts 2 and 3 weren't bad, let's see what they have in store for m....holy crap that's a lot of bad guys.

[Sierra]

BG1: More Durlag's basement. Chessboard battle. What were they thinking?!

[Fenrir]

It makes slightly more sense than Shining Force 2's?

(In my game I just stayed in the same place and murdered everything. Neat fact: Enemy awns become queens if they get to the end of the chessboard)

[Dark Holy Elf]

Suikoden 3 - Hugo chapters done, fun times. Uneventful enough although randoms got fairly nasty towards the end, and I got hilariously owned by the optional Azzodess in the Flame Champion Hidaway. The highlight of the battle: a round in which all but one of my PCs missed, the one PC who hit drove the boss berserk, and she promptly used an MT physical (for boosted damage) which silenced every person in my party who had a rune. Thomas chapters have gone pretty well until the Zexen Marshalls fight which uh even knowing what to do was brutal. Maybe I should try to put them to sleep or use the earth rune's def buff, I dunno.

Star Ocean 4 - Beat Gabriel Celeste. So uh he resists all elements but punishes short-range attacks relentlessly by having evil short-range AoE moves. Sure was nice of him to leave an aftergame non-elemental bow lying around in his dungeon though. Bacchus was initially the star of the aftergame due to Black Hole Sphere -> rush mode combos but yeah it's definitely been Reimi of late, so much ranged offence.

[Sierra]

It makes slightly more sense than Shining Force 2's?

(In my game I just stayed in the same place and murdered everything. Neat fact: Enemy awns become queens if they get to the end of the chessboard)

I pretty much did too, but it took like half a dozen tries just to be able to nuke the enemy casters before they confused the entire team (which was the first thing they tried to do every single time, and which is pretty much guaranteed death in a map where unapproved PC movement = lightning bolts in face). 3x Fireball, don't know how else I could've dealt with that many rude enemies at once (I was lucky to have a one-time itemcast on hand for the third). Even that didn't kill like any of the casters, just brought them all to death's door and I was kind of lucky to be able to pick them off with bows before they got any spells off.

Fought the Demonknight legit. Which is to say that he got swarmed by hasted ogres. Everybody needs something like 50-70k experience for a level now so uh maybe I'm done leveling after all. I'm also sitting on something like 90k gold and there's nothing worth buying. I have no idea what the game wants to me to do at this point but I'm going to just try and smash through the remaining plot now. God that is all the dungeon I want out of this game, thanks.

[Grefter]

Once you cleave through Durlag's Tower the game doesn't want you to do anything else other than try to kill a superboss (who is lame and boring).  It drops a dagger.  Smash Sarevok and move on.

Saint's Row 4 - Dubstep Gun is pure glee now that I have it fully upgraded.

[Meeplelard]

Last Story: Lisa's reveal was totally unexpected in every sense of the word! By which I mean I guessed it the instant I saw her.  Ok, maybe not the name and I flubbed the title but that's more me botching setting details than anything else.  Still went "she's the girl going to be married in a month" when I first saw her.

Game is starting to come together better now, so yeah, mostly just the tutorial dungeon that felt like a mess.  I am noticing this is a far more plot and character heavy game than expected, so it is a good thing the character work has been fairly solid thus far.  Also I probably should mess around with customizing equipment colors a bit because this game has too much black in terms of outfits, though it does look good on some of the characters.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Characters wear CLOTHES in The Last Story? 

[Meeplelard]

Yes, yes they do!

If you're using the image of a near topless woman cutscene (that being Syrenne), namely this one:

http://www.awesomeoutof10.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/laststory3.jpg

That's one of the exceptions, not the norms.  Its a flashback where in they used Syrenne's "unequipped" skin instead of her default outfit.  I don't think any of the characters in that image are using their default outfits, possibly all are using their "Base" (unlike Xenoblade, stripping a character of all equips still keeps them clothed in more than their underwear.)

[Dark Holy Elf]

<explaining the joke>
You can customise characters' outfits in The Last Story
This includes removing clothes (within reason)
Djinn enjoys looking at sexy human flesh
</explaining the joke>

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

:thejoke: