Actually it is the 5th tutorial that is a slog. Are they necessary? Good question, I think so though, as I don’t think I would have figured out a lot of the systems in the game without them.
FIVE tutorials… I admire your fortitude with this, Ken! I mean, at this point in my life, if I can’t get to playing the actual game after one tutorial or get tiny tutorials as I go along, I am not sticking around for that game. The game may be great, but there are just too many other great games I want to try that I will not sit down for five tutoring sessions before I get to just play the thing. This isn’t Calculus. (which I dropped after a few classes) (does this make me a quitter?)
in most cases tutorials are nothing but a pain. often even confusing and disturbing.
i prefer reading the fucking manuals/rulebooks or the CIVilopedia.
but i guess you are not into CIV 6 or similar games?
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Lol, I have over 1000 hours in Civ6. Normally I might have just jumped in, but I had read that these would be useful because there are things that won’t be intuitive to a Civ player, and sometimes even counter intuitive. But now, I don’t think that is actually the case.
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i’m ready for learning-by-playing when we will start a MP game 
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I saw that you have been clocking up some hours… thoughts?
I am trying to decide if I want something like that, or solatsa crown of the magister.
Anyone had any experience in Solasta? Seems like 5e S&OP rules which I have never played. But the tutorials make it seem okay
There is a lot going on, and yet not? It is ok. I am glad I picked it up on sale. I was going to get it eventually, so now is as good as any time. Because of the designer being one of the leads from Civ4, there are certainly similarities, but enough new to make it fresh. I am going to finish this game I started out, but my guess is that I won’t want to dive right back into it.
I’ve milked Pokémon Scarlet to the point where I think I’m done for a while (I’ll fire it up for special Pokémon raids). As a quick diversion I fired up Ori and the Blind Forest because I quite like the Metroidvania genre. What the heck was that gut punch of an intro? It was like watching Pixar’s “Up.” Maybe I need to toughen up. Dead Space releases soon, I believe…
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I’ve been chasing the high of Hollow Knight through various Metroidvanias for years now unsuccessfully. While I enjoyed playing the Ori games, I found the combat in both pretty unfulfilling.
Since I’ve pretty milked every last ounce out of Hollow Knight, I’m clinging to the “Silksong by June” hope.
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Hitman’s new Freelancer mode is Pretty Good and has got me hammering the game again. Dropping you back to basics, it gives you some randomised targets and objectives/methods, and without any pre-existing tools or weapons, you have to go in and acquire what you need and carry out the necessary assassinations. This is good, ramping up to great occasionally, but there are a couple of quibbles. Starting position and objectives are randomised, so they’re not calibrated at all to your current gear (if you have any), so you can end up with a bunch of objectives that are impossible to fulfil. You can always complete the mission, but certain conditions that you simply cannot carry out feels bad. This is marred further by optional objectives you can choose for big rewards, which again are randomly generated and may contradict yor previous objectives. So you can take a mission to kill two targets, conditions: one using a sniper rifle, one an assault rifle, and the optionals might be something like timed/silent/no firearms. Tmed feels bad for a game all about patient exploration, silent basically requires you to have silent weaponry (much rarer), no firearms is simply outright impossible.
Needs more refining, but the game is still incredible, and this mode turns the focus from the 2-3 scripted kill methods per target, to the unscripted, “I just had this great idea!” methods that were always where the fun was.
Forward: Escape the Fold, a quick dungeon crawler/roguelite that came out on mobile last week after being on PC for a year. In each of the 13 stages per run, you’re presented with 3 lanes of cards representing enemies, shields, potions, coins, or other buffs/debuffs and must continue moving forward toward the exit each step of the way. Lot of depth packed into a relatively straightforward idea, with a ton of interesting heroes and abilities to unlock.
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Battle Brothers. I bought some DLC, trying to ration it because I’m back into it relatively heavily, and playing something 20+ hours a week can wear it out, so I’m trying not to go fucking mad. I’ve had some frustrating games. My mercenary company coming to a miserable end after a string of battles that should have gone better. An epic last stand in the snow against a necromancer and his personal retinue of undead, as he brought my fallen soldiers back to life one by one to crush my remaining troops. A horde of ghouls eating every single man. A troop of orcs battering everyone to death in an ambush in moonlit woods. And so on.
But I’m taking a break, because I’ve just been fucking done over by the world’s most professional caravan guards. A relatively new company, yes, but surprisingly tough. Not any more. Fuck this game, and I’ll see it tomorrow.
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I have all of 8 hours into Battle Brothers when I realized the developers said “Oh, you think Darkest Dungeon is brutal and unfair? Hold my beer!”
Those two games are the Souls-likes of their tactical genres.
I used to love hard games, but after a long day of work and life, I need a challenge, but not one that drives me to cry in my beer.
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The sick thing is I get absolutely fucked off with it, swear I will never play it again, and an hour later I am rolling a new start and going “Maybe this time will be different.” The wins, especially if you play on ironman, are incredibly rewarding, but fuuuuuuuuuuckkkkk some of those battles right in the eyes. One soldier folds under pressure and your entire line collapses. I had a sergeant rally the troops only to fail his own Resolve check and run away, leaving his men to face the music. After a few hours I found it funny, but at the time I had to remind myself not to break my brand new gaming laptop in half and put it through the window.
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I might give battle brothers another nudge. I’ve always promised myself one day I’ll swallow my pride and play on easy to actually finish a game.
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There’s an enormous amount of stuff in it to discover; I’ve had a better time recently doing my own thing and chasing ambitions than I had lurking around waiting for the crisis to happen. I recently discovered a goblin city and set about destroying it, while the noble war was in the background, and I barely took part in it. I was also busy burning orc camps and dodging undead on the way.
I love Battle Brothers. I just hate it when it insists on torturing me before killing me.
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Recently picked up Fantasy General II on the PS5 on sale, because I am apparently incapable of learning that Slitherine make PC games. It’s giving me wonderful vibes, moving units around a hex grid and such, but they obviously decided to foist off much of the tutorial into mouseover tooltips. I think I’m enjoying it enough to go to the Internet to learn what all these icons mean and whether there’s a way to see those tooltips on console, but that sure seems like a thing that ought to have been explicit in the game within the first minute, and easily discoverable in every minute thereafter.
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Currently quite enjoying my nth playthrough of FFT (probably somewhere between 26th and 28th). I had done randomized jobs a few years back, where I stuck with what I rolled up the whole game. I did something different this time: before each story battle, I randomize the job and secondary ability for Ramza and four generics. It has been delightfully difficult. Dorter, the first Wiegraf battle, the fight where you find Mustadio and the execution site all took 2-4 tries, and some others saw me die once before conquering them or winning by such a slim margin I didn’t even have time to loot chests and crystals at the end. To keep it tough, I am not using unique characters and not bumping up JP by doing errands or a lot of random battle grinding. I am also doing it where locations with multiple fights all use the same jobs from the first one, because you can only save after the previous fight ends and not before the next one begins, and it takes a while to do the job changes and I’d rather not do it each time I die.
Between my poor luck in rolling up Knight and the no magic or supernatural abilities of any kind run I did last time, I have really been missing Monk powers. I only have one or two party members who have even unlocked the job by where I am in chapter 3, and none of them have much JP in it since it has only been used in one battle.
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I love FFT so much and thought I’d played through a lot, but you totally blow me out of the water with your number of play-throughs : ) I’ve always found the execution site battle to be tough if you’re just playing generics and Ramza–the way you’re doing it must have been really challenging!
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Would love to do a run like that, but just thinking of the Delacroix battle gives me the shits.
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