Games Discussion Thread

[Rule 34]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

And is Drakensang 2 the translated title, Rule, or is that the German? I've heard of Drakengard (1 and 2) but that's a new one on me. And if it's that good, I can live without decapitations. Heck, I can live without them now *laughs*

No, the title is

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pretty much all over the world. It translates roughly into "Dragon Song."

Another thing that I remember about the first one is that there's next to no character editing, save in numbers. The second improves somewhat on that, but not by much. Also the second plays before the first, so you don't miss out on much. I'd actually recommend the second over the first, so you can give it a try if it's released in the States.

 

[Sinfulwolf]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

No, the title is

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pretty much all over the world. It translates roughly into "Dragon Song."

Another thing that I remember about the first one is that there's next to no character editing, save in numbers. The second improves somewhat on that, but not by much. Also the second plays before the first, so you don't miss out on much. I'd actually recommend the second over the first, so you can give it a try if it's released in the States.

Hey I got that game!

I didn't get very far into it, I'm not sure why. There was something about the beginning that didn't sit right with me, and the fact that I couldn't make the kind of characters I wanted to, I was pretty much stuck with a mold. It was semi-annoying. Oh well.

Perhaps I'll have to pop it back in and try again.

 

[Copper]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

Does not look familiar. Will have to poke into a little more. It obviously migrated this way, if Sin's got it, but then, still not the States, so I dunno. Also, hmm...PC. I don't do much PC gaming, but, like I said, I'll poke around and see if I can't find anything more out about it. I have so many games I have to play yet...

 

[Alias]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

Downloaded Drakensang, tried it for about an hour, concluded that it was a single-player MMO, and shelved it.

Rented Wet for PS3, tried it for about 4-7 hours (combined), and while the car scene was fun, playing a game with skittery, jumpy cameras and 90% in slow motion didn't appeal to me. Also was too easy once you learned that combat was just hold shoot and jump over and over again, even on the hardest difficulty.

Rented Assassin's Creed 2 and so far am extremely pleased. Still unhappy about how there's no way to "stealth" assassinate any of your targets, but that's more of a personal preference peeve than a game flaw. The gameplay improvements they've made over the first one make all the difference. Sidequests actually have purpose now. Feels like you're doing more than just running and holding free-run. Storyline so far has hooked me and I want to know more. Build-A-Town has always made me happygasm - I'm looking at you, Skies of Arcadia. Still wish they would have put their story into one epic game instead of three chopped-up mediocre games - well, the first one was superbly mediocre, this one seems like it might make my 'good' list - but can't really change that. Would recommend.

 

[Kusanagi]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

Eh, the town-building in AC2 is fun at first, but you eventually make money hand-over-fist - for me it was around 'chapter' 7 I believe - thanks to the renovations and quests (mostly the renovations), which makes buying weapons/armor a bit too easy in my opinion; and then, once you have the town built up and have all the weapons/armor that are buy-able, you're sitting on just ungodly amounts of money, and about the only thing it's still useful for is throwing money into the street for peasants and annoying musicians... god I hate the musicians... oh, yeah, and you can buy paintings with your money so your town generates MORE money, but about the only reason to do that is for an achievement.

ANYWAYS.

I mean, I like the game, and I would definitely recommend it to someone, but there are some things they could do differently next game.

-Make it so there's 'local' notoriety and 'global' notoriety. I mean, come on, if you murder 100 people in one town, SOMEONE'S bound to get word out to other towns. Also, fuck the capes. They look cool, but the only one I liked was the Auditore one, because it made me a mother-fucking hate-magnet.
-Make pick-pocketing the main source of income. If not, make it the best secondary or tertiary option. And no more of this 'I can just sit on my ass and get money' bullshit. If you're going to let the player rake in the benefits of an entire town, make them pay for the upkeep of the city as well. Allow them to control (to an extent) the prices of goods and the wages of the workers in the town, which will in turn affect how the people feel towards the player.
-Make it so that there's a REAL REASON for switching between Daggers and Swords.
--Addendum: Hell, make it so there's a REAL REASON to even bother using some of the 'extra' weapons, or don't have them at all. The gun was cool and all, but I never had a reason to use it in place of my daggers outside of when it forced me to. All I ever really used were Hidden Blades, Daggers, and Sword. I did like the Throw Money option, it surprisingly came in handy a few times. NEXT. Poisoned Daggers... nice idea, but I never used them except to get the one achievement. NEXT. The Throw Sand special move... nice idea, but a bit too long to execute, IMO. Just have him kick it or something, it just won't go as far. Speed at the cost of radius or distance. Maybe make it so you can either do it quickly OR charge it up. NEXT. Smoke Bombs... I'm sure if I had used them more often, the game could've been a bit easier, but I just never really had to use them at all.
-I would definitely like to see some 'Silent' kills in the next game. I want to have to reach a target, assassinate him/her, and then get out, all without having a guard manage to raise an alert. Now, I don't want it to be an instant failure if a guard simply sees me, but I do want it so that if I am seen, I have to chase down the guard or guards before they can get a large-area alarm raised.
-A bit smarter/braver AI. The guards in this did seem a bit better, and I HATED the pole-arm guards (fucking pokey mother-fuckers... yeah, I grabbed your pokey-pole, what now BITCH! I'll tell you what now, now I'm gonna poke YOU. Poke-poke, MOTHER FUCKER.), but the guards who would run off, never really seemed to run off to get reinforcements, so much as just ran off so they didn't get killed.

 

[Incubus]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

od I hate the musicians...

Do what I did; pickpocket them. Gets them to fuck off real fast.

Smoke Bombs... I'm sure if I had used them more often, the game could've been a bit easier, but I just never really had to use them at all.

Didn't use them myself easier, but they're apparently the easiest way to take down groups of heavies quickly; which would have realyed helped in a certain sidemission.

but the guards who would run off, never really seemed to run off to get reinforcements, so much as just ran off so they didn't get killed.

Well, yeah. I actually really liked the morale system improvements they implemented. In the first game, they only broke and ran if there was 1 or 2 left; in this it seems to actually keep track of how the fight is doing, and after three or four guards go down without one of them touching Ezio, the others start to think they might be outclassed.

You have to realise that this isn't modern day military, these are city guards, and while the Italian militia of the period were fucking hard (Strong patriotism to their city state and constant fighting between them) they are still just militia. They're town guards, not super-soldiers, and when faced with a killing machine, their first thoughts are not to go and get help, but to run for their lives and pray they're not chased. I like the nice dose of realism rather than the usual fearless soldiers who'll happily fight to the death in any circumstances you tend to find in games.

Make pick-pocketing the main source of income.

This would really piss me off as well as needlessly lengthen the game. I rather like not having to grind up to get new gear; it's why I don't play MMOs.

 

[Rule 34]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

Downloaded Drakensang, tried it for about an hour, concluded that it was a single-player MMO, and shelved it.

*puts on the smartass hat* If you take the Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) out of an MMORPG, it becomes just an RPG. Also, did you burn it on a DVD just so you could put it in said shelf?

In other news, Mass Effect 2 is fucking awesome. The orchestration is so much better than it was even in ME, and even more importantly it runs stable without any fucking crashes.

 

[Copper]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

Games not crashing is always good. Imported any characters in to ME2 yet?

 

[SirOni]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

In other news, Mass Effect 2 is fucking awesome.

I second this. Completed ME2 a while ago so now I'm replaying ME1 as Fem Shep with the intenion of romancing Garrus in ME2. I'm making her a complete douchebag though, the only Paragon option I've done so far (not including the conversations with Garrus) is save the Rachni Queen.

 

[Alias]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

did you burn it on a DVD just so you could put it in said shelf?

Now I did.

 

[Tassadar]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

Halo Reach Beta = Meh. They aped too much from the craptastic Modern Warfare multiplayer, the armor powers are completely unbalanced, the new weapons are outright terrible, while the old ones were made to be even more terrible to compensate and force people to use the shitty needler rifle thing, the new game types are bland, and everyone always votes for fucking slayer in the little vote boxes anyway. They also managed to maim the controls so that the classic shoot + melee combo is now awkward and useless. That, and they somehow broke the aiming and impact detection so that you can't tell where you're being shot from or if you're hitting someone that you're shooting at them. In other words, I'm not buying the game when it comes out.

 

[SirOni]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

Meh? I'm enjoyng the hell out of it, and I'm enjoying the new guns, though I agree with the battle rifle now being shit. The needler's increased rate of fire is awesome though I believe it does less damage now. And I've only been able to play Slayer by choosing the Slayer Arena option, everyone in Grab Bag always seems to choose either single flag CTF or the one where there's lots of flags you can grab to get points. I dont really like the Sword Base level, it forces me to use the Jetpack power because all the other powers are worthless on it. At first I didn't like what they did to the Active Camo power, though now I'm really starting to enjoy using it. I even managed to survive a whole Team Slayer match without dying by using the starter rifle and the grav hammer. Got a really high kill spree and I got the Hammer Spree kill tag.

EDIT: And I dunno why you're not going to buy it when it comes out, this is only the beta which means they'll most likely alter/balance most of the stuff anyway.

 

[Tassadar]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

I don't like either of the levels to be honest, though I prefer Sword Base over the other one. The quality of the mas seems lower compared to Halo 3, but that could just be me getting pissed off at the other problems with the game. As for the armor powers: The Jetpack power is the only useful power in non-slayer games, and the active camo is the best one to use for Slayer, as it stands right now. Armor lock is too situational to be useful on a regular basis, and the sprint power is outright worthless. (At least they are on the Beta maps, maybe things will balance better on the full game.)

So far, from what I've seen, the best weapons seem to be the sword, the pistol, and the needler. The AR is weaker than it was in Halo 3, the plasma rifle is a piece of crap, the plasma pistol is much less powerful without an effective melee button, the beam weapon is pathetic, and the new BR can barely kill someone in with a full clip to the head. I haven't actually gotten a hold of the rocket launcher or the gravity hammer yet, but they seem about as good as they were in Halo 3. I've only used the new grenade launcher thing a couple of times, but it doesn't seem too bad yet. The needle rifle at least has potential, since it's better than the carbine was, but they need to fix the hit detection first.

And the reasons I'm not buying it are:
1) The main characters are almost all Spartan III's, which are fucking worthless. I'd rather be an ODST again.
2) The writers of Halo have progressively gotten worse since Combat Evolved. 2 and 3 were god awful as far as story goes, and ODST was only saved by the fact that the voice actors were mostly from Firefly, so they were allowed to come up with their own dialogue. The only reason I even bought 3 was to finish the main storyline and have something to play online or with friends.
3) The interface, multyplayer, voice acting, weapons, and storyline all reek of some idiot executive saying to the developers; "Make a Halo game that's exactly like Modern Warfare, it'll sell like hotcakes!" Granted, Bungie can take the series in whatever direction they want, and change isn't necessarily a bad thing, but they're copying just about everything from another game series. More importantly, they're copying everything from a game series with shit for multyplayer, so I'm going to be without a decent FPS to play online until something else that's reasonably balanced and mildly entertaining comes along.

 

[Alias]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

rant on town-building section

Yeah, but I still like it because all of the money you sink into it graphically reflects. All the paintings go in the gallery. Weapons go in the armory. Renovations make the town look cleaner. Etc etc. I love stuff like that.

-Make it so there's 'local' notoriety and 'global' notoriety. I mean, come on, if you murder 100 people in one town, SOMEONE'S bound to get word out to other towns.

You have to put your mind back in the times. First off, the only people looking for Ezio are guards (unlikely to be traveling from city to city, considering they have a steady job). Back then, there was no way for a guard to know what a certain person looked like unless he'd seen him or one of the wanted posters, and back then, wanted posters were a poor likeness at best. Travelers back then were extremely rare (because of bandits and the like), and even if one of the few travelers HAPPENED to be a painter or artist of some sort and HAPPENED to get a good look at Ezio after murdering a hundred people (unlikely again), and scrawled it down, and showed it to the guards of the new city, what are the chances that those particular guards would happen to see Ezio and recognize him from that portrait? I could totally buy one city being completely oblivious to a mass murderer in another (or at least the particular person not being instantly recognizable to the city's guards). News back then didn't travel around the globe at instant speed like it does today.

Also, fuck the capes. They look cool, but the only one I liked was the Auditore one, because it made me a mother-fucking hate-magnet.

*shrug* I wish you were able to dye them like you can the rest of your clothes. Although the Medici cape with Florentine Crimson looks fucking sick.

-Make pick-pocketing the main source of income. If not, make it the best secondary or tertiary option. And no more of this 'I can just sit on my ass and get money' bullshit. If you're going to let the player rake in the benefits of an entire town, make them pay for the upkeep of the city as well. Allow them to control (to an extent) the prices of goods and the wages of the workers in the town, which will in turn affect how the people feel towards the player.

Some people don't like grinding for hours and hours just to get money. I'd rather leave the game on, go hang out with some friends, come back and find myself rich, and keep repeating ad nauseam. More micromanaging of the city might be nice, but that's just a side part of an already large game. No need to put Civilization II inside of Assassin's Creed II.

-Make it so that there's a REAL REASON for switching between Daggers and Swords.

Agreed.

--Addendum: Hell, make it so there's a REAL REASON to even bother using some of the 'extra' weapons, or don't have them at all. The gun was cool and all, but I never had a reason to use it in place of my daggers outside of when it forced me to. All I ever really used were Hidden Blades, Daggers, and Sword. I did like the Throw Money option, it surprisingly came in handy a few times. NEXT. Poisoned Daggers... nice idea, but I never used them except to get the one achievement. NEXT. The Throw Sand special move... nice idea, but a bit too long to execute, IMO. Just have him kick it or something, it just won't go as far. Speed at the cost of radius or distance. Maybe make it so you can either do it quickly OR charge it up. NEXT. Smoke Bombs... I'm sure if I had used them more often, the game could've been a bit easier, but I just never really had to use them at all.

Minor disagreements, but overall yes. Poisoned daggers are fantastic for killing someone without gaining notoriety though.

-I would definitely like to see some 'Silent' kills in the next game. I want to have to reach a target, assassinate him/her, and then get out, all without having a guard manage to raise an alert. Now, I don't want it to be an instant failure if a guard simply sees me, but I do want it so that if I am seen, I have to chase down the guard or guards before they can get a large-area alarm raised.

More preferential than a game flaw, even though I agree with you. Unfortunately the majority of the gaming market is twitchy FPS Doug-esque kids, so that's what the designers cater to.

-A bit smarter/braver AI. The guards in this did seem a bit better, and I HATED the pole-arm guards (fucking pokey mother-fuckers... yeah, I grabbed your pokey-pole, what now BITCH! I'll tell you what now, now I'm gonna poke YOU. Poke-poke, MOTHER FUCKER.), but the guards who would run off, never really seemed to run off to get reinforcements, so much as just ran off so they didn't get killed.

Incubus already stated my thoughts on this. Realism > needless game mechanics.

 

[Kusanagi]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

I like seeing all that money I put into the town reflect graphically as well, I just don't like how easy it is to simply sit on your ass and get rewarded for it.


I don't mean that they'd instantly recognize you, or that word of a hundred murders would instantly reach the ears of another town, but I would like to see NPCs get more... jumpy. I want to see them be less trusting of others. I want to see paranoia to some extent. They don't know it's you, but they know SOMEONE just murdered a group of people last night, and they had heard a few days ago about someone murdering lots of people in the neighboring town.



Now that I think about it, it's not really the whole 'you can do nothing and get gold' I hate, so much as it is the fact that I have nothing to buy with it. If I'm going to have a steady source of income, I had damn-well better have a reason to use it. Like in Fable II, you kept getting money, but there always seemed to be something new to buy.
I just hate having money burning a hole in my pocket.

 

[Alias]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

I can see that. I've always found it obnoxious when I had oodles and oodles of money and nothing to use it on too. Every game needs some sort of money sink, and this game's sink happens to be your main source of income, which sort of defeats the purpose of having the sink in the first place. Twilight Princess had the armor that would take money instead of health, for example. So even though you had a cap of 1000 rupees, you always felt like there was some use for them. In AC2 once you've gotten all the armor, there's no real big purchases you can make so you end up sitting on a whole pile of money.

 

[Kusanagi]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

You know what they need, if they won't have a proper money sink? I WANT MY SCROOGE McDUCK TOWER. I want to be able to swim in my money if I don't have any other use for it.

 

[Alias]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

That would be awesome, and I heartily support this idea. We should hire a team of hackers just to put that in. I would totally go for it.

 

[Sinfulwolf]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

To add to the Halo: Reach beta discussion.

I'm enjoying it, and will more than likely buy the game when it comes out, even if just for single player (still curious, and hoping that I'll be able to have a female Spartan to play as). I like pretty much all the new weapons, except I feel the shotgun is rather underpowered, though this has been so in Halo since number 2. I really like the DMR, and I've been able to kill people fairly easily with it, just gotta wait for the reticule to retract. I also love the sprint, if only because of games like Battlefield, CoD, and Borderlands (especially Borderlands) where Sprinting is rather helpful.

Though I'm kinda "meh" on the control switches, I LOVE that they put reloading back to X. Though you can switch the controls to hit on "B" again.

It'll be interesting to see what's changed after the full game is released.

 

[Tassadar]

Re: Games Discussion Thread

Ehhhh. I think they changed something, because it actually seems to work now. The needler rifle is still way better though, and all that is negated by the homing plasma rocket launcher of complete annihilation. I don't know what it's called, but the gun that shoots a bunch of homing plasma rockets that stick to things. You know, that one that regularly wipes out entire teams with one shot if they stand too close together. I'd like to shoot the guy that thought that thing was a balanced addition to the game.