Last game you finished, tell us about it

I plopped down two or three bucks for a game named Chronicles of a Dark Lord, which appears to be some kind of remake of an older game. Might even be an rpg maker game, although it looks much better than most of those that I've seen. Anyways, when I bought this game I'd just finished a marathon of final fantasy games, so I was hoping to get something similar from this one.

First thing I noticed was the controller I had used for the previous games didn't work with this one. Now, I'm no controller expert, personally I really prefer the keyboard, so I gave that a whirl. My expectations were low, because keyboard functionality on these type of games tend to be really unpredictable. Imagine my surprise when not only did the keyboard work, it was blatantly intuitive. It made sense!!! I tossed the controller aside and dived head-long into the game.

The next three days were a blur. The game has an encounter metre, so you pretty much can fight whenever your choose, or completely avoid most battles. Why are not all games of this ilk exactly like this one? Once again, things that make sense!! Now me, I was picking fights all the time because that's how I roll. I also think you learn a game best by prolonged combat, and of course making your party tougher and gaining treasures. Due to the story, people come and go from your party during the adventure, so that changes things up on the fly a few times.

I don't know what this game was like on it's first iteration, and I suppose it doesn't really matter. If you enjoyed the console games from the nineties, I cannot stress just how fine a game this one it. The story is good, there is humor, fine lewts, bonus things to do on the side ( and I wouldn't pass these up!!), and I had no technical issues with the game at all. Should there be any more of these games released by this group, I will be buying them instantly.

wolfing said:

I like it because I love crafting, and these games have the most complex crafting systems you'll find in any game.

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Are any of these on the PC? I love crafting!

crpgnut said:

Are any of these on the PC? I love crafting!

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I think the last 2 games, Sophie and Firis, are in Windows. I liked Sophie much more than Firis. Also, you could use an emulator to play the PS2 ones: the Atelier Iris series and Mana Khemia series, though the complex crafting systems started in Mana Khemia IIRC.

Just finished Torment: Tides of Numenera. It was ok. I wasn't a fan of PS:T like most here, not that I didn't like it, but it wasn't my "OMG best RPG Ever!" game.

I played this in my PS4, which currently has issues (that I can name now… crappy framerate, very long 45-60 second load times, combat bugs where you have to close the application).

Took me 42 hours to finish, that's reading all the texts and doing all the side missions I found. I had a similar feeling with it's predecessor, I didn't hate it, but didn't love it either, but guess that's more because of the type of game (text heavy/combat almost optional) than the game itself.

Yay. Instead of going through TW3 in the past winter months as originally planned (I somehow got stuck in my TW2 replay and got sidetracked), I finally finished one of the big Kickstarter RPGs I backed back in 2012/2013 and 'twas Pillars of Eternity.

It took me 117 hours including The White March 1 + 2 on normal difficulty and in expert mode. I played a wizard and my party consisted of Eder (fighter), Pallegina (paladin), Hiravias (druid), Durance (priest) and Aloth (wizard no. 2) most of the time. I brought Grieving Mother for the finale instead of Aloth and I finished all the other companion quests as well so had everyone in the party temporarily at least for some time.

I was never exactly a huge fan of the Infinity games so BG is not up there on a pedestal for me and maybe that helped enjoy the game more because enjoy it I did quite a bit.

Here's my list of pros and cons:

Pros:

- Great world map with very nicely designed locations (= fun exploration)
- Decent story and writing
- A huge arsenal of abilities and spells
- A decent selection of weapons (armor etc. not so much… see cons section)
- Stronghold was quite fun for the most part

Cons:

- Some weak game mechanics related to the combat system, resting/camping, the skill system etc. (Mr. Sawyer should not have tried to create a poor man's clone of D&D… either get the license and do D&D for real or come up with your own, *improved* system rather than a mostly not-so-good clone)
- Some annoying bugs including very poor pathfinding (just like the Infinity games… they haven't fixed this in 20 years )
- Too many loading screens and pretty long loading times even with a high end system and SSD
- Poor choice of armors, jewelry, helmets etc. (only weapons offered a decent variety)
- Way too much money available (I had almost 400K in the bank when the game ended plus thousands more in loot)
- Some poorly balanced parts and poor structuring (scaling should not be required with a better game structure or the game should auto-scale to an extent)
- Tedious stronghold attacks even after maxing out defenses etc.

On a whole, in spite of some notable weaknesses, it was a very enjoyable experience, and even though I am done with crowdfunding, and have not backed part 2, I am looking forward to picking up the fully patched GOTY of Deadfire whenever it becomes available one fine day.

Cool, I like it too. Still need to play the DLC though. Someday....

The White March was really good. Nice story, lore and beautiful maps and locations to explore. My only complaint would be the scaling. I just find it even more immersion breaking than auto-scaling (auto-scaling can be done well) when the game asks you whether to adopt the difficulty to your level.
Since the rewards do not change, I chose not to scale even though I was overlevelled. It's not my fault that they can not provide a better structure so why should I punish myself?
So the WM was a little easier than the rest of the game but that made up for getting my ass kicked in the early game so it was OK to kick back some . There were still a few challenging fights even w/o the scaling so it wasn't totally boring either.

Yeah, that's what I'd do too.

How did you put up with the dungeon combat? I found that particularly hard to deal with.

Love most of the game other than combat, though.

Finished The Technomancer after 29 hours, overall enjoyable and positive game. For positive parts i would say the story, the main char and party members, the quests with different solutions affecting the 6 different factions. As for negative parts, the level design, enemy respawn for every area loading, the loot.

porcozaur said:

enemy respawn for every area loading,

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Yuck, really? How bad is this respawning?
I've had this one on my wishlist, but if there's respawning I might have to remove it...

You'll have to backtrack through areas and then you'll fight same old trashmob group over and over because it respawned. It's still not Skyrim/FO4 so you'll pull to the end without norespawn mod.
Don't remove the game from your wishlist.

Technomancer respawns are way worse than skyrim imo. Sure in skyrim every 30 game days stuff will respawns but once you clear a dungeon there's very little reason to go back so that's not a big deal and outside of dungeons enemies team so it doesn't feel bad at all to me.

In technomancer you'll be forced to go back and forth through the same area with the same monsters in the same spots and to make it worse combat is a nibbling affair meaning lots of hp and little damage make fights long. ( it's possible that it was just my build but not sure)

Anyway I quit playing technomancer because of the respawns, long combat and poor combat imo. This is from someone who beat and enjoyed mars war logs and who's favorite game is dark souls so I'm no stranger to respawns. Difference with DS is combat is fun and quick.

I played as a warrior and the tornado skill is very good and makes good work fast of the mobs, actually i think its very op But even with this crap respawn i did every sidequest since i liked the areas and vibe from them, and ofc the quests too.

Just finished my Wizard's campaign run on Diablo 3 and I started another wizard on adventure mode and did bounties till level 70. I'm not sure that I care for rift running, so I may move to something else or just roll another wizard and play on a harder difficulty.

I really enjoy the mix and match of legendaries and gem slotting. Sometimes a very low level legendary has a wonderful unique skill that can really boost my wizard. My favorite so far is an off-hand etched sigil. This skill will fire another Arcane Power skill when you fire one. For instance if you have disintegrate as your right click skill and blizzard on your hotbar, blizzard processes every time you fire disintegrate for zero extra arcane power. Unfortunately the stats on this suck, but the process is just vital in clearing areas fast Love the trade off.

I've played 5 or 6 wizards and I've had one rainbow goblin/whimsydale in all that time. I've even looked at supposed good maps and played those over and over and the RNG kills me. I've never been to the greed world either. I have had several of the newer gelatin goblins which is kinda cute and fun.

I finished Valley over the weekend. It's just a short, easy game with pretty sights and nice music. Not bad except for the save system. $20 is a bit much but it goes on sale from time to time. I posted a review on Steam.

NewDArt said:

How did you put up with the dungeon combat? I found that particularly hard to deal with.

Love most of the game other than combat, though.

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How do? It's been so long that I can't remember any issues.

Thrasher said:

How do? It's been so long that I can't remember any issues.

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I had a ton of issues with AI pathfinding/ZoC - and I had to constantly manually adjust the movement of characters to get them to do the most basic movement tasks.

Even the more trivial fights were extremely frustrating in dungeons with a full party.

I played on Hard (or whatever it was called).

Much of the pleasure I get from tactical party-based combat comes from defeating challenging fights, so I didn't want to play on Easy. I might as well not play, in that case.

Oh I didn't find the pathfinding any worse than the IE games, which I agree is annoying. You'd think the technology would have advanced in 15 years. I played it turn-based, probably normal difficulty, so that helps to remove the frustration, somewhat. Can't imagine playing it realtime.

Thrasher said:

Oh I didn't find the pathfinding any worse than the IE games, which I agree is annoying. You'd think the technology would have advanced in 15 years. I played it turn-based, probably normal difficulty, so that helps to remove the frustration, somewhat. Can't imagine playing it realtime.

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Turn-based? Didn't know that was an option. I guess you mean constant pausing? Yeah, that doesn't work for me in a real-time combat system.

IE games didn't have this particular problem after a certain version of it. The scripts will take care of 90% of the trash fights without much player input.

IE D&D rules don't have zone of control and they don't have players take up nearly twice their physical size in that way.

So, you don't really need to manually control the trash fights.

I don't mind micromanaging the "big" or "important" fights - but the trash fights really aren't too interesting to me, and I hate micromanaging them.