• Category Archives Video Game Related
  • Divinity: Original Sin II – Definitive Edition

    For one reason or another I decided to finally see what all the fuss was about regarding Original Sin II‘s “Definitive Edition” update (having never bothered to play Original Sin‘s Definitive Edition).

    As it turns out it’s nothing but a glorified balance patch, the kind a game like, say, Grim Dawn releases regularly without any sort of fanfare. Which isn’t to say it’s worthless, since the changes are welcome enough even if they don’t actually affect how the game plays in any way, but the re-branding is pretty misleading.

      I ended up playing through on Honor mode using a group of Steam Guide builds:
      Necromancer (insanely powerful)
      Elemental Conjurer (summons are always good, but lacks finishing power)
      Fire Fury (weakest link, garbage against a single target)
      Ranger (great at eliminating single targets)

    That was actually my second attempt, as the first used an Elemental Archer instead of a Ranger and died during the Lost & Found quest because I had forgotten the game’s cardinal rule: Never, ever, fight fair. Fittingly, toward the end of this successful run I switched over to a barrelmancy strategy to guarantee I’d get all the ending achievements.

    Now I think I’ll play through it again to try out some Fextralife builds that look interesting and grab a bunch of miscellaneous achievements I’m still missing (not on Honor mode though… I’m quite through with that).


  • Eschalon: BOOK I

    Similar to the Spiderweb Software games, Eschalon is a throwback to much older titles. Though sadly, it doesn’t feature the same graphical upgrades those do; 800×600 is the only resolution option.

    The gameplay here is also turn-based, albeit with just a single controllable character, while the plot and dialog is significantly more sparse. Health and mana both regenerate, but they do it at such a glacial pace that progress through any dungeon area ends up a tedious stop-and-go affair… even when using a save editor to fully restore the mana pool between fights. I’ve read that the sequel significantly increases the regen rate, so I think I’m just going to stop playing this installment now (~5 hours in at 6th level) and jump to that one.

    If you do decide to play this, here are a few tips:
    – Pressing F3 displays the various hotkeys.
    – Right-click on the map area to show the fast travel menu.
    – Closing a portcullis on a monster instantly kills it.
    – Loot is randomized the moment you open a container, so save beforehand and then reload until something useful appears.


  • Darkest Dungeon – Update

    Two possible solutions came to mind to address my main issues with the game:

    A) Mod the inventory/provision system to be less nonsensical.
    B) Refuse to buy any provisions besides food/torches and retreat the moment further progress became impossible.

    As it would happen, modding the relevant parts of the game is beyond simple; the inventory files are in plain text. Even better, it’s also pretty simple to remove/reduce the ridiculous hunger checks.

    Those changes helped quite a bit. I still have to treat every adventurer as disposable meat, to be dismissed the moment they return from a failed quest, but at least some tangible progress can be made toward building up the Hamlet facilities. Can’t say I enjoy the game though… since having to face near-constant failure/retreat is more than a little exhausting… but at least it’s now tolerable as a periodic diversion. Sort of like an actively antagonist Rezrog (which is far more stable today than it was at release) in a way.


  • Darkest Dungeon – First Impressions

    After having long ignored this game‘s existence, as I’m not fond of difficulty for difficulty’s sake and don’t play games with the intention of dying/failing, I finally broke down and picked it up during the most recent sale.

    The idea was that it might be tolerable if I went into it as an adventurer torture/death simulator rather than a conventional RPG. And, honestly, in that framework it delivers in spades; lost three of them on the second quest after the triple-threat of starvation, insane stress generation, and a hateful random number generator that thinks a 75% chance to hit should be more like 10%. It wasn’t anywhere near as frustrating as I thought it would be (as new adventurers are always arriving).

    No, the frustrating thing is the provision/inventory system. Rather than a weight system or individual character inventories you just have a universal set of slots. Every type of item takes up a single slot, and the slots have strict stacking limits. So 1 Bandage and 1 Antidote take up exactly as much room as 8 Shovels and a 1-person party can carry just as much as a 4-person party. Gold takes up a slot (and can only stack to 1750), each individual type of gem takes up a slot, each individual resource type takes up a slot (there are 4), and… each journal page takes up a slot. Care to guess how many slots you get? A mere sixteen.

    That, right there, is the most bullshit of bullshit examples of fake difficulty and honestly just makes me not want to bother continuing. What’s the point of dungeon delving if you can’t carry any loot?


  • THE SURGE 2

    Ended up grabbing this game during the initial GOG sale on a whim, having neither played the prequel nor been aware of the developer connection with Lords of the Fallen.

    Gameplay and character progression is very similar to LotF, as can be expected from a Soulsborne game, but the environment is quite different in both appearance (sci-fi to its fantasy) and layout (far closer to the hub experience of Dark Souls). The weight and attribute systems meanwhile have been simplified into a single ‘core power’ rating which increases automatically as you level and a basic Health/Stamina/Energy split which can be customized and respecced as necessary.

    There’s nothing much to note about the combat beyond a frequently hostile camera (make sure to raise the FoV to at least 60) and the addition of a ‘directional block’ system, which despite having just beat the game I still don’t understand properly. At first I thought you just had to pull off the block just before the incoming attack hit you (which is how it works in most games), but then while fighting Celeste blocking only seemed to work against her charging attack if done the moment the indicator appeared on the screen… which was at the very beginning of the charge. I never managed to parry it in the 10 or so times I faced her (no trouble parrying her counterattack though). Probably best to just stick to dodging in most cases.

    The most interesting aspect of the game though is one it apparently shares with its predecessor, which came as welcome relief after the frustration of Labyrinth of Lost Souls‘ anemic drop rate. I’m of course talking about the loot system. Want a new weapon, piece of armor, or upgrade component? Target the relevant part of an enemy and cut it off; guaranteed drop. Incredibly refreshing. Less refreshing is the change that occurs after the Metal Armor boss fight. There are just too many enemies clustered together far too often and they all seem to do far more damage than they should. Killing a PC in one solid combo even when they’re 1-2 tech levels lower in equipment quality seems very wrong, particularly when it requires 3 combos to take them out.

    Ultimately, it’s an initially fun game that unfortunately wears out its welcome partway through.


  • Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls – Conclusion

    Having just beat the the main storyline with two characters (one for each of the ‘good’ endings), and having fully mapped both the Shiin and Trials dungeons, my main takeaway from this game is that the item drop rate is just too damn low.

    It takes forever to farm the weapons you need in order to handle the notable difficulty jumps on Shiin floors 4 and 9, and even with good equipment the last two Shiin levels (and the later Deep Dungeon levels) are just a slog filled with enemies that do 200+ damage to the entire party, regenerate, and dodge a chunk of your attacks besides. It’s not fun in a conventional way… just a masochistic one.

    Good for one playthrough, but no more unless you’re in the market for a mindless timesink.


  • Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls – First Impressions

    Having only played Wizardy 8 before, my only hopes going into Labyrinth of Lost Souls were that it not be as overtly antagonistic as Elminage: Gothic. Fortunately, that is indeed the case.

    Which is not to say that it’s user-friendly… because it’s emphatically not; nothing is explained or documented. Nothing. Want to know what attributes do? What the class requirements, abilities, or spell gain rates are? Which spells affect a group, all enemies, or have a permanent duration? Well, you’ll have to just use them all yourself and figure it out. It also has similar annoyances to Elminage regarding overly complicated item-related menus, equipped items mysteriously taking up inventory space, and party members in the back row being dead-weight for quite some time.

    It is however better than that game in three ways that make all the difference in the world: An easily accessible map feature, no character aging system, and class changes not resetting attribute points. At the moment I’ve fully mapped the first three floors of both the main and Trials dungeons (alternating between them, Trials # -> Shiin #, appears to be the best way to proceed) and am at level 11-12 with a party consisting of a Thief, Lord, Samurai, Mage, Priest, & Bishop.

    Some advice:
    – The bonus points you get at character creation can allegedly range up to 40 (the highest I’ve gotten is 30, and over 20 is quite rare).
    – Everyone can use Agility & Vitality (and Luck affects drop rates).
    – Immediately buy the two available maps (later ones are loot drops).
    – Buy 2-3 short swords for your front-liners as soon as possible.
    – Be on the lookout for armor that increases magic resistance; magic deals crazy high damage.
    – You absolutely need both a Thief and Bishop in every party.
    – Save after every (successful) battle, before opening any chest, and before trying to resurrect anyone.
    – Levitation, Battle Aura, & Advanced Reflex all last indefinitely (until you either leave the dungeon or hit an anti-magic area).
    Item Drop Chart someone put together.
    Alternate text version sorted by dungeon level.


  • AVADON 3: the WARBORN

    Ah, now this is a proper successor to Avernum. Good enough that I’d suggest completely skipping the first two Avadons to avoid the issue of retcons, if nothing else.

    No wild swings in difficulty, smooth leveling progression, Fatigue now regenerates automatically (so no more battles consisting of 90% basic attacks), a sensible selection of skills without any bizarre cross-tree requirements, a varied assortment of companions with relatively frequent commentary, quite a number of choices to be made, far better integrated (non-PC) Tinkermage content, and no main quest related backtracking. The only real negatives are a couple of bugs (e.g. Healing Turret won’t work if it’s the first one you place), the game once again being blind to playing as a Tinkermage, and the persistent oddity of everyone acting like the other Hands in your party are just random mercenaries.

    If you liked Avernum or anything about the earlier Avadon games then definitely pick this up, and if you haven’t played any Spiderweb Software games before then consider giving this one a chance (so long as you like turn-based RPGs).


  • AVADON 2: the CORRUPTION

    The follow-up to Black Fortress features a couple improvements alongside a few notable steps backward. First the good and/or neutral:

    The backtracking issue isn’t as bad here and the skill trees aren’t as rigid, which while seeming like minor improvements, combine to result in a game that only falls apart in the very last mission rather than two-thirds of the way through. A new class has been added (bringing with it an additional companion)… but it appears to have been invented out of whole cloth and isn’t integrated into the setting well… which is particularly glaring if you play the class yourself since no conversations will recognize it. More minor things would be the slightly improved environmental textures and poison now working correctly on enemies.

    As for the bad: The companions aren’t quite as fleshed-out as the previous game’s with noticeably less comments/banter, and the encounter difficulty is wildly unbalanced.

    Wildly unbalanced. While traversing an area you can go from fighting a group of enemies that deal ~20 damage a hit and take 2-3 basic hits to kill to one that deals 50+ damage and takes concentrated ability use to defeat. Or a main mission throwing hordes of enemies at you followed by one that has a relative handful. In a non-linear game that sort of thing would make sense, but this game is quite linear as far as exploration is concerned. Another related issue is the abundance of gimmick battles; there’s a lot of them and most either don’t make any sense or feature infuriating railroading.

    So. Worth playing? Not if you couldn’t stand the prequel. Skipping the prequel and starting here could work though.


  • AVADON: the Black Fortress

    Released around the same time as Escape from the Pit, this first game in a new trilogy is a strange mix of better and worse attributes.

    Graphically it’s superior in both the visual effect and texture department, but switches are much harder to see and it lacks any secrets/containers highlight keys. The roleplaying options are greatly expanded, but it’s incredibly linear (somewhat similar to chapters 2 & 3 of Crystal Souls) and fond of railroading you into specific actions. It features full-fledged party members with their own stories/goals, but they’re mechanically/visually just clones of the available PC classes.

    Speaking of, rather than the ‘build your own class’ sort of thing Avernum has going on, this one adopts a rigid class system with specialized skill trees (and no Talents). There aren’t really any character development options beyond choosing whether you want to max out the left or right side of the tree. The skills themselves are mostly assorted combinations of the ones found in Avernum shackled with a linked cooldown system and a ‘fatigue’ (i.e. mana) cost. Abilities can’t be spammed as they can there. Which sucks and results in tiresome, same-y, basic-attack-heavy slogs instead of engaging combat. Why can’t I cast Icy Rain after Firestorm? How could anyone think putting them both on the same cooldown was a good idea?

    Which brings me to a related bad idea: The endgame encounter design. What the hell is going on there? Fire-immune ‘trained’ Hellhounds that breath ice and poison? Bosses and mini-bosses that get 3 actions per turn and can spam abilities to their hearts’ content? Perpetually-respawning reinforcements? It’s horrible on every level. But wait, there’s more! Backtracking. It features backtracking, backtracking, and even more backtracking. I thought GreedFall was bad in that department (it is) yet this is so much worse.

    The first pass through each main location is good, the character development is pretty good, and the early to mid-game roleplay options are good despite them having next to no effect on event development. It gave me a vibe quite similar to Tyranny… so honestly I shouldn’t have been surprised when the enjoyment level fell though the floor ~2/3rds of the way through.