Withywarlock
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Posts posted by Withywarlock
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There's certainly potential to go there, like in a New World-esque exploration campaign, given the few other known continents and islands haven't been heard from in centuries/millenia, mostly due to extreme weather conditions, horrific beasts and ungodly abominations roving the wastes. Whether that works for an Elder Scrolls game where people are used to level scaling and total freedom, I'm not sure. Whatever the case, I'd be willing to give it a go. I'm sure the MMO will go in that direction when they inevitably run out of locales in Tamriel.
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Tropico 4 was quite philosophical, come to think of it. While the game doesn't particularly favour any one political or social ideology, parodying them all, Tropico does show you how the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. I eventually stopped caring about more costly green energy and free, high quality housing for all, devoting more to military budgeting, exports and expecting greater production from my citizens. And though it is just a video game, I can easily understand how someone in a position like El Presidente's can have the best laid plans only to be undermined by the numerous factions and voting blocs they have to contend with and satisfy.
Another game is Tyranny, which is the first game I played that did evil competently. The pitch is "in the war for good and evil, evil is winning", and you're on the side of evil. Except it's not evil, it's order taken to its logical conclusion against basic freedoms and rights. In typical Obsidian fashion it goes into no plan of action surviving contact with the enemy, internal politicking, regulations and so many other things. It's very much like another game I'd like to mention, but is more political than philosophical, which is Fallout: New Vegas, where every faction has inherent flaws that prevent them from gaining anything but pyrrhic victories.
And finally, off the top of my head, World of Warcraft. No thanks to Blizzard trying to make every line of dialogue a soundbite, but there's some really good nuggets of debate to be found in the subject of honour, judgement, the food chain and what we don't know about what we don't know. Currently I'm trying to figure out who the mysterious Arbiter character is, and what gives them the right to decide which souls go to 'Heaven' and which ones go to the Hellish Maw? If they pre-date the Titans, the 'gods' of the Warcraft universe then.... what were they an arbiter of? I'd like to say time will tell but I've long given up hope that Blizzard will satisfyingly tie up any loose ends.
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On 3/23/2021 at 8:38 PM, killamch89 said:
Are we talking about the same Mike Ashley that bought Newcastle Football Club and has done nothing but take from the club and hasn't invested anything into it? If so, he's the one that's absolutely worthless because all he does is buy businesses and milk them for all he can and once they have no use to him, he tries to sell them off.
The very same one, I'm afraid. 😞
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I'm getting Mordheim: City of the Damned vibes from this which is both good and bad. Tonally, it's good and I've wishlisted it on Steam. Mechanically is where the comparison worries me, because Mordheim is very hit and miss. The hitting and missing literally being Mordheim's greatest fault, and if a studio as talented as Cyanide couldn't get that right, I'm worried about the unknown Warcave.
I'll be keeping a cautiously optimistic eye on this one.
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In virtually all the guilds I've been a part of in World of Warcraft have I obtained an officer rank. I guess that's some sort of administrative privilege. Thankfully it's not required much in the way of drama, but overseeing guild "merges" causes me to taste sick in my mouth every time I recall them.
But as for a server admin.... not that I recall, no.
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22 hours ago, StaceyPowers said:
(not sure what that’s called)
In WoW that would be called an 'add fight', due to the additional enemies (adds). But yeah, it's not particularly fun when a boss is made invincible but I guess devs don't want people cheesing it? I've always felt minions should make reaching a beatable boss more difficult, not impossible. That's one of the things I like about Dark Souls, that even in a fight as annoying as the Capra Demon, who's only flanked by two dogs, he can still take damage if you hit him.
As for me, I really don't like stunlocking, but when it becomes a chain of stuns that just kill me I can't be bothered. The Surge is dire for this, and it happens in the first boss encounter which I'm not best pleased with. That first boss, PAX I think it's called, will leap away, and fire rockets at you which knock you down.... and then fire another barrage that will kill you, because there's no way to increase your maximum health greatly enough to survive that unless you grind unhealthy amounts of the starter zone you're in. I've since beat it, but not without the cost of health that comes with trying to reach the boss before it uses its rockets.
One last one to mention is when it's not obvious that a fight is supposed to be lost, and you waste resources trying to survive it. These fights are best left for the beginning of the game to set an expectation or develop a tone, but not in the middle of the game where I'm simply following familiar pattern recognition.
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I don't imagine many people will remember it now but.... the two campaigns in Conker: Live and Reloaded. The first one was the Squirrels and Tediz in a Second World War-like setting, and the second was in a sci-fi setting with reference to Alien and Starship Troopers. Both were incredible fun with tug-o'-war style gameplay in flag capture, Conquest/Rush style and deathmatch content, featuring flying machines, tanks, small vehicles, and a number of classes which provided a lot of utility. It was very much an unexpected but hugely popular multiplayer game, and there's not a lot I wouldn't give to have it back.
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The World of Warcraft novels by Christie Golden, most of which are tie-ins between expansions. While her works are often criticised compared to other authors, I do enjoy her content as it's easily digested. I especially like how she's the first person to describe Grommash Hellscream as gaunt (his namesake roar being what makes him so intimidating), meanwhile Samwise does a Samwise and makes Grom look like this.
I've also bought the Warcraft tabletop RPG supplements for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Edition if they count too. As it turns out Pandaren had a fair bit of lore to before Mists of Pandaria, to say they were originally a "joke race".
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I very much like the idea of summoning, but I've seen it done poorly and incredibly well over the years.
In games such as The Elder Scrolls summoning is done mostly well, because on the one hand you're typically limited to a single summon, but on the other hand your magical power is limited by mana rather than cooldowns. In games like World of Warcraft, Demonology-specialised Warlocks can periodically summon up to 12 Wild Imps in addition to four other creatures to control, but a lot of these are limited by cooldowns rather than resource management. Other WoW classes can summon pets and minions but they're glorified damage-over-time spells thanks to the lack of maintainance required with them (see the Happiness removal for Hunter pets in Mists of Pandaria).
Gothic is one of the few games that gets summoning right: you're limited only by how much mana and processing power your computer has. You can summon virtually infinite hordes of skeletons and destroy any semblence of balance with magic. That's what I call wizardry, none of your sterilised 'balance' malarky.
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Much as I love Oblivion, I am loathe to do its tutorial dungeon. On top of tutorial message interrupts and how much mucking about there is (i.e shooting a bucket with a bow and arrow, which admittedly was an impressive demonstration of the physics engine), enemies are spaced out, some are particularly slow to kill (i.e the zombie), and the treasure isn't really worth the extra seconds it adds to exploring. To be honest it's not that part so much as what might as well be forced walking sections with the Blades and the Emperor, which are way too numerous.
Other than that, there's few dungeons in Oblivion I didn't like. A lot of them are repeated layouts, sure, but I still enjoy what's inside.
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10 hours ago, StaceyPowers said:
I never even thought to click on them =D Thank you!
Aye, you either click on the stone or there's a button that says enchant/use sigil stone on the item you want to change the properties of. I'm not sure which, it's been years since I last played it. ^^
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1 hour ago, StaceyPowers said:
I haven't figured out yet what to do with the Sigil Stones. what are they for?
They're like weapon/armour enchantments. I think if you click on them, they'll open up a menu of the items you can use them on, and then you can apply a new effect to them. Here's a full list of what they can do. ^^
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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was great for this. You could have Martin Septim, the Adoring Fan, the Knights of the Thorn, among other quest NPCs who might consist of powerful spellcasters to mostly light-armoured guard-types.
I don't do this for very long because the NPCs might blow my cover in stealth, or I'm too conscious that their quest needs doing and finally give them some respite. I do so enjoy summoning creatures or pets though, it makes single player RPGs all the more bearable. ^^
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4 hours ago, DanielStone said:
Currently the streamer job is a very hot job
You've answered the question in the title. So, yes, gaming can be a job. Whether it's a lucrative job depends on some measures within your control such as charisma and choice of game, and others not in your control like your audience and algorithms.
4 hours ago, DanielStone said:It can be said that playing game can be considered a job because it brings money to everyone.
This is where it gets tricky - is it enough money to quit your day job, even if it may end up requiring more hours?
It doesn't have to be a job to generate revenue. It might be enough to get 'beer money', which as the name suggests, is enough to buy some beers while your wages elsewhere pay for the rest of your living costs.
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10 minutes ago, Patrik said:
holy moly, that's a lot of DLC's, but for $900 only? what's the average price of each DLC?
Well that's some back-of-a-cig-wrapper math done on Reddit, so it could be more. Just having a quick glance, a lot of the songs in UK prices are £2.69 so it probably amounts to a whole lot more than $900 in US dosh. 😞
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41 minutes ago, Crazycrab said:
There it's a bit more understandable, you pay a couple of pounds or whatever for each song that you want to learn. That's not the same as chipping off parts of the gaming experience and selling them seperate.
Correctamundo. Plus there's licensing fees to cover, which is why CDLC isn't recognised as officially supported because the artists aren't being paid to have their tabs featured in the game.
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Rocksmith has 1,545 DLC, all of which are useful to some extent in learning how to play electric or bass guitar. It costs approximately $900 US in total.
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It seems that for every good thing in this story like the year's medical coverage and three months' severance pay, something else has to come along and screw it up, like Blizzard having the audacity to sell a World of Warcraft pet for charity purposes when Kotick could pay 0.5% of his bonus to cover the amount Doctors without Borders are asking for, and still not have to worry about running out of money. A pet which will remain on the store even after the charity drive is over, and won't be added to the game people pay a monthly fee for, I should add.
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Yes and no. On the one hand there was no other big repeatable activity in the previous games, so Oblivion gates can be excused to an extent. They also don't interfere with NPCs, bug out or fly away but keep you in combat like Skyrim's dragons, so that's good too. On the other hand they are tedious after a while, especially if you're playing the game for the first time and don't realise there's such things as optional gates and mandatory gates, such as the ones outside of each province.
Were it not for the fact that so many of them are required to progress, I'd enjoy doing them because the rewards within are so great and the Sigil Stone at the end is a very nice reward.
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I like Cyanide & Happiness and I think of all genres an adventure game is the right fit for their kind of humour. Their previous attempt, a Battle Royale game, didn't do the job. £15.49 is a price I might be willing to pay for this seeing as it's on Steam. ^^
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I think I was too young to really get this, which was a shame because I tried so hard to like it. I kept hitting a wall in terms of the puzzles or which form I needed to get to which place, so now I'm older (and wise enough to use Google-Fu) I may well give it the chance it deserves.
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1 hour ago, m76 said:
No, not another multiplayer game. It looks 99% like the division. If I didn't know I might mistake it for that.
That's just it: what about this isn't The Division besides the absence of PvE? I'd say there's room for competitors to these games, but I'm not sold on the very limited gameplay that's somehow more questionable than The Division's painfully scripted E3 reveals.
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11 hours ago, Crazycrab said:
I remember it, I thought it was a total farce in which, if we're being honest, both sides were mostly full of crap. Yes, there is corruption in game journalism but it's also true that there are a lot of gamers out there that are bullying, misogynic, white privlige dicks. The #Gamergate "movement" (notice that I use the term very loosely) made a lot of noise but nothing productive got done which is why I personally refused to have any part of it then and certainly not now, there's more important things in life.
This is essentially the best roundup I've seen so far, and am likely going to see. Nobody won from this; journalists involved call today a post-Gamergate industry implying we've moved on, and Kotaku-In-Action (ironically abbreviated to KIA) is struggling to come up with new accomplishments to add to its questionable list.
For all the talk of ethics in journalism, it has been since its inception unethical because its inception was advertisement by the makers of video games. It still is whether or not you believe Gamergate is still alive and kicking. Most journalism that goes on is second-hand reporting on leaks or press releases, essentially anything a developer/publisher wants people to know. Jason Schreir's reporting is unique because it's actual journalism, not just parroting what developers come out with. Even when I write for HubPages I'm still guilty of it, it's just that I add a cynical spin.
To improve the ethics in journalism you have to either be a journalist who can regulate themself, an editor who can regulate their staff, or someone with the legislative pull to regulate the industry at large (the lattermost is especially difficult, because those with said pull can't be at all blogs/magazines/papers at once). While I will give credit to Gamergate for highlighting the lack of ethics in games journalism, the movement has also encouraged a lot of piss poor behaviour from people who, ironically, don't make the investigative leaps to find out what games journalism is like.
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The reason why lootboxes are dangerously close to - if not worse than - gambling is because of the flashy lights and sound effects that encourage habitual behaviour exhibited in (perhaps to a greater effect than) slot machines, moreso than their financial cost (which in this game's case is nothing). Pokémon GO eggs are lootboxes because they have those exact same problems. There's a slow build up, chimes, a flash of light and the contents are revealed, just like any loot box ever made for the chemical rush. Compare this to the trading card game (TCG) where contents didn't change in the packet [no tampering from the manufacturers' end, and there's a papertrail to prove it], and simply rustled in tightly packed sellophane.
This is like arguing Mann Co. crates (GO's eggs) aren't lootboxes because you purchase the keys (GO's incubators) to unlock the crates you get free, which before 'lootbox' entered the lexicon was an argument.
I'm aghast that the editor didn't look at this and think "nope" unless it's to cash in on the upcoming game's hype. But then, they also approved this.
Why is there so much hate for BioShock Infinite?
in Video Games
Posted · Edited by Withywarlock
I'll admit I didn't 'get' BioShock Infinite. Just everything about it. I was too young and dumb to really appreciate its storytelling and messages, and focussed more on the decent combat. But I don't see much hate for it, at least not since about ~2020 when people had more time to catch up on games they'd not yet played. It was an absolute blast at the time though, and the shockwave of its fandom was on going for years afterwards, so it must've done something right. Or perhaps like me they didn't get it until now. /shrug.