Last game you finished, tell us about it

No I don't know if you played it because how can a grinder be favorite over it?
Of course I didn't play an obvious grinder with what story.
Smoking is not good for health too and while I smoke, I'd never ever suggest anyone to go that route.

The grind is good enough that you don't notice it's a grind.

I'm not sure how to best explain it.

Whatever item you want to make you usually find that you already have materials for it.

The two main weapon materials are ores and bones which you gather from the world. If you always mine ore when you see it you can take those weapons trees all the way to the end-game. The game gives you enough materials to play a few weapon types but most people will stick with a single weapon they like. (Plus you start with a metal version of every weapon type.)

Every time you kill a new monster it opens up new weapon and armour trees to build from his parts but they all branch off from the basic ore/bone trees. You can also roll back 1 upgrade and get your materials back.

But, I guess, it just has good gameplay. It's just fun to play. Great combat, lots of weapons that all behave differently. Heaps of build ideas to play with for the RPG min/maxer. It's just a really good game. No question about it. Obviously not for everyone but I think it would appeal to action RPG fans, people who like Dark Souls and people who want an MMORPG but hate MMORPGs.

SirJames said:

gameplay

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Man, when I start caring about that I'll leave this forum and knock myself with Tetris and Candy Crush Saga.

I just finished a couple of long-awaited sequels. The first one was Bard's tale IV. It had a very nice tactical combat system with a boardgame/cardgame feel. The atmosphere was classic fantasy with a celtic touch, nice but unsurprising. The companions were diverse but not very fleshed out. A lot of callbacks to the older games in the series. The dungeons were interesting and largely satisfying and very puzzle-heavy which I didn't mind. Musically there were a lot of pleasant songs and good ambient sound. Unfortunately the game was very buggy and I had at least 20 CTD. I learned to save frequently and I expect this will get better with patching. In all it was a very good RPG.

The second game was Star Control: Origins, a lighter space adventure/rpg/occasional space combat hybrid. I enjoyed the game for what it was, a cartoony space romp with some fighting. The lightweight nature of the game was a nice counterpoint to Bard's Tale. The alien species and backstory was imaginative and interesting even if it was less so than Star Control 2. I'm aware of the conflict between Stardock and the original makers of Star Control and it saddens me, but I still appreciate this game.
Now onwards to Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

I also finished Bard's Tale Four the other day, and while it started off slow, it got to a point where I was having a lot of fun. Lots of puzzles and situations where you have to spend some time to figure things out, and I really enjoy those breaks when they happen. As I stated elsewhere on this forum, I'd say I probably spent maybe seventy percent of my playing time solving puzzles mixed with extensive exploration for loots and herbs to pick.

When I first started playing the game, I spent my first hour or so wishing it was more like the first three games were. From about the fifth hour of play till the very end, I was impressed with how they melded the old school game into a hybrid that anyone now currently enjoying these kinds of products could also find joy in Bard's Tale four. The diverse parties you can maintain, the very different builds you can employ, the wildly different tactics available all ensure to me that this is a game I see myself replaying many times again in the future.

I'm waiting for one or two more patches to continue playing BT4, it crashes a lot for me.

I enjoyed BT4 until I reached the isles; since then as a gaming experience it has all been downhill. I'm in the castle now so I hope I am near the end. I have a couple of the keys so hopefully only one more.

Carnifex said:

I also finished Bard's Tale Four the other day, and while it started off slow, it got to a point where I was having a lot of fun. Lots of puzzles and situations where you have to spend some time to figure things out, and I really enjoy those breaks when they happen. As I stated elsewhere on this forum, I'd say I probably spent maybe seventy percent of my playing time solving puzzles mixed with extensive exploration for loots and herbs to pick.

When I first started playing the game, I spent my first hour or so wishing it was more like the first three games were. From about the fifth hour of play till the very end, I was impressed with how they melded the old school game into a hybrid that anyone now currently enjoying these kinds of products could also find joy in Bard's Tale four. The diverse parties you can maintain, the very different builds you can employ, the wildly different tactics available all ensure to me that this is a game I see myself replaying many times again in the future.

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Bards Tale IV --

I have mix feelings on this game. I can't really break it into cons/pro but rather just describe what I liked/disliked.
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I thought the game started fairly well and much of the early complaints (other than those who had trouble running the game - which I did not - did not match my experience). I think the classes and class build options are fairly diverse. As you can get quite high level - i reached level 26 but the limited mastery you can choose puts has you using one set of skills at a time (which I think is reasonable - you can switch - for example from axe to sword and use the sword skills you took but you can't optimize both at the same time though you can use sword skills with axe and axe skills with sword - what I mean by optimize is that some masteries work better with one or the other).
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Having said that weapons and items also have skills attached to them and then the mastery (I prefer to call them skills) selection is more complex but also much more limited - i.e, if you have too many from items then you can be limited to only picking two (not sure if it can get as low as one) but on the other hand then you have more than 4 to use during combat so it is a trade off. The maximum skills you can have in combat is 6 broken down between the ones you selected and the ones granted by items.
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I think the mechanics are quite decent and reject the complaints people who did not play the game made in this area. The difficulty curve is another matter - i played the entire game on normal because at some point when combat became easy i just wanted to finish (a bad sign). I mostly enjoyed the puzzles and did most of them on my own but i needed help with two lava (flow) puzzles; 1 gear puzzle because i didn't understand the objective and quite a few but not all the cryptex puzzles and ALL the bell puzzles. I had a lot of problems with the bell puzzle and never understood how to solve some of them. Even the ones I knew exactly what to do (such as copy the sound the raven made) the sound was too narrow for myself and i had a great bit of difficulty reproducing it (not sure if others had diffculty but I think the game should have done a better job on that one).
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I enjoyed the puzzles ('cept the bell puzzles) and early combat until it became old. I felt the later middle of the game - from the time you sail the isle till you return to rabbie the game was just not very complete and very buggy. I suffered 4 or 5 crashes in one small area (sewers) which was quite annoying and ran into some serious annoyance bugs (one of my characters chosen skills kept resetting and I couldn't figure out why so I would enter combat with the wrong assigned skills).
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After you return to Rabbie - and the city is on fire - I encountered no more serious bugs and that section of the game felt very complete but the combat difficulty spiked way up. This wasn't a bad thing but it caught me off guard
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Starting with the isle forward all i get was coins from very difficult to find chests and combat reward (but on the way out of the castle i did get one very nice item) - when I say just coins this is not strictly true i also got some bones and seeds ….
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One person speculated the loot in the area was set up wrong with regards to character level and so it oculdn't properly select treasures but who knows. There was also a game breaking bug which patch 2 fixed.
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My general feeling about the game is the design was decent but the implementation was somewhat poor and I felt at least some of the areas creator (not the design the person who actually implemented the design) lacked experience or talent. There were also numerous technical issues such as combat actions that when issued would take a long time to actually execute. You could execute 3 or 4 commands and suddenly they would stop showing graphically (no feed back) but actually happened. To me this is strictly technical and something is broken or poorly implemented. Given the suppose budget they spent i would sum it up as lack of talent or experience in the team. As a coder I would never have allowed a lot of this garbage.
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Unfortunately the technical issue and some of the map issues really took their toll on the enjoyment of the game and overall I wouldn't recommend it. I suppose if they actually fully patch it and clean up some of these middle sections I might consider replaying but given suppose lack of sale I have my doubts it will happen.
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As for playtime I think it is plenty long. The last save I have said I spent 49 hours in the game; gog galaxy said I spent 80 hours in the game but sometimes I go idle - and some of the puzzles took me a while to figure out so I would guess around 45 or 50. I think if i replay it could do it faster but still it takes a while to cover the areas. Also I did not do 100% of the game. My guess is i was closer to 85% or 95%. I had 3 uncompleted quests (4 if you coun't review board but i don't think that one ever closes) and one area I found but did not explore. Also I never figured out how to get any of the quest weapons to level 3 - i know the basis of what I need to do but did not see the obvious way to match weapons to specific thingy (I know there is a riddle on the thingy but when I examine the weapon i don't see a riddle).
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anyway it is what it is - with a more talented team I think it would have been a much better game given the design.

you said:

Bards Tale VI --

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You are one fast dude! While most people are still trying to finish Bard's Tale IV, you've already finished Bard's Tale VI !!

I just finished Elder Scrolls 9. It was ahead of its time

Glad you appreciate my vision of the future - maybe one day you will get off your arse and catch up.....

JDR13 said:

You are one fast dude! While most people are still trying to finish Bard's Tale IV, you've already finished Bard's Tale VI !!

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Well...I didn't want to brag or anything, but I just finished Fallout 6: Detroit.

Talk about brutal. It was like the apocalypse had an apocalypse.

Also finished Bards Tale 4.

To keep it as brief as possible:
Riddles are a majority of the gameplay. They work fine, but it's not everyones cup of tea.
Technically pretty bad.
Balance pretty much destroys all game systems about half way through. Character system becomes pretty meaningless, including talents, attributes and any new items which are then near the end almost completely replaced by money of which you have unlimited anyways. Combat is accordingly broken at that point as well.
Final boss was able to do one attack until he died.

Would only recommend at all to players who like riddles. And even to them I'd recommend to wait for an inevitable Directors Cut Version which fixes technical issues and smoothes balancing problems.

Finished Pillars of Deadfire

Pretty good overall, has many improvements over the first one, especialy on the story part which i really liked here; in the first one, found it uninteresting. Havent played any of the dlcs, will probably play when the wizards one comes in november.
I hope part 3 is in the Living Lands, that area sounds very cool.

Bards Tale IV

Great game with some flaws. Admittedly not finished, but 40 hours in I feel familiar enough with the game mechanics to comment thus far.

The bad.

Poor optimization. Game loading and game section loading takes literally a couple minutes.
Save locations. What gamer likes theses????
Battles. Near the mid game you encounter foes who take no physical damage and yet the vast majority of character builds involves those skills. You don't have to restart but its a pain to get party members or new members the right skills.
A lot of treading over and over again over the same ground



The good

Its a fun game.
While there is a lot of retreading, the game adds (updates) new features to old places and keeps the area fresh.
The puzzles. Are fantastic. Great job with new types of (appropriate) puzzles
The Music…OH MY GAWD. IT IS SO AMAZING. The battle music is fantastic and so far has gotten better with each area. I usually don't like vocals in my game music but Celtic music in the celtic tongue is just tonal to me and its just literally music to my ears. This game could flop going forward but I will continue to play just to see this revolutionary take on game music.

Curiously, One of the more memorable games to blow me away with a fresh take on game music was Magic and Mayhem (1998) by . . . the Afro Celt Sound System

Vampyr - goty so far for me

Great game overall, best with vampires for me. Presentation is top notch, characters, voice acting, story, investigations, city design, music, atmosphere, everything is high level. Loved the way you evolve regarding leveling and its consequences, very good idea. I played on normal and finished it at lvl 27 and managed to not kill any citizen . Xp is pretty scarce if you dont mesmerize anyone but luckily some skills are OP like coagulation or abyss.

I would like to play it again and kill everyone this time to see what happens to the city but no ng+ .

porcozaur said:

Vampyr - goty so far for me

Great game overall, best with vampires for me. Presentation is top notch, characters, voice acting, story, investigations, city design, music, atmosphere, everything is high level. Loved the way you evolve regarding leveling and its consequences, very good idea. I played on normal and finished it at lvl 27 and managed to not kill any citizen . Xp is pretty scarce if you dont mesmerize anyone but luckily some skills are OP like coagulation or abyss.

I would like to play it again and kill everyone this time to see what happens to the city but no ng+ .

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Is the combat as bad as they say?

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Combat is pretty easy, dont know if its bad; its like in bloodborne, you dodge a lot. No need for real tactics as there are only a few skills/weapons and when used in the right combo/time, even bosses are easy. The bad thing about it is that mobs respawn but you can run from them if you dont want to fight them; also something else annoying, they level up as you progress through the main story; this might a pain if you want to be a good guy; good guy = harder gameplay.

Anyway, combat is not the focus of the game, you spend 3 quarters of the game in dialogues.

Nooooooooooooooooo, you ruined it for me.
Bloodborne=DarkSouls. I'll hate the game.

There's no "rolling" at all in Bloodborne.
And Vampyr is the RPG (lite) with the less grind of all time.
In fact grinding in this game is considered downright Evil... You'll like it