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What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?
- hotseatgames
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- D12
The gameplay is compelling. Monsters are challenging, and combat is deadly. The ranger can set traps, which is great when you hear other players coming your way. When you get to a certain point in the dungeon (the center?) you can access a portal and escape. You sell your loot to merchants.
One really cool little touch is the mini map looks like an old school D&D map.
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I do not know if this is the game for me....
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- hotseatgames
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- D12
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jason10mm wrote: Fired up Elden Ring.
I do not know if this is the game for me....
CHEAT CHEAT CHEAT www.nexusmods.com/eldenring/mods/146
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Does look good and I know this dev eschews hand holding.
Also, the hunt for a virtual pinball set up is on. I'm looking at sub reddits for this crap, this is like the soft east coast guy with glasses walking into the desperado cowboy saloon, asking for a glass of ginger ale
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- hotseatgames
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- D12
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You can buy or craft new arrows. You need to buy or find cookbooks to enhance your crafting repertoire.
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- Disgustipater
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- D8
- Dapper Deep One
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- Jackwraith
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- Ninja
- Maim! Kill! Burn!
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Two of the major design goals for this expansion were to have flying available from the outset, so that players aren't frustrated by having to suddenly walk to everything when they can fly everywhere else in the world/universe and to make professions into an endgame activity like raiding so that there are goals with some depth other than "make as much of this one thing as possible and then make tons of gold on the auction house that you really can't do much with." How well did they succeed at achieving those goals? Hrm.
The flying system is similar to the dragon races from Mists of Pandaria. In that respect, it can be really fun. There are also race courses scattered all across the new continent, so improving your times and testing yourself against new races is an actual long-term goal for those interested. You improve at dragonriding by picking up glyphs floating in the air (usually at the highest point in any particular region) and spending the points accumulated on skills, just like the most recent iteration of the talent system (more on that later.) Dragonnriding is much more subject to physics than the typical flying ability, in that your drake (one of four you can collect via the campaign) can only stay in the air as long as your Vigor lasts. That frequently means that you end up crashing far short of the location you were attempting to get to, often dropping you into areas packed with enemies, but always leaving you on the ground for some time while you regenerate Vigor. What that means is that, when you can't get where you wanted to go, you're either walking (the not-goal of this effort) or you're sitting on the ground, waiting (e.g. not playing the game.) Consequently, that means that one of the earliest things you should do with one of your characters is find as many dragon glyphs as you can get to, in order to max out the system and minimize the annoyance that it brings. I have done this. I still occasionally find the system to be annoying and pine for the old system where I could just hover in midair as long as I wanted and land precisely where I wanted to without overshooting or aggroing something nearby. Thankfully, you only have to collect the glyphs on one toon and it gives the skill point accumulated to all of your other characters in the expansion.
The new profession systems are cool, but remarkably complex. When they decided to make it an endgame activity, they did so by requiring a long list of ingredients for each item you'd like to craft, much of which are made up of ingredients that will only come randomly when killing specific mobs, but also made finding new recipes more weighted toward said random drops, rather than going to a trainer. Fairly soon, you'll have exhausted your trainer's knowledge and have to hope to find new things... somewhere. That effectively gates the system to control advancement, but also makes it far more effort than it's often worth if you're really interested in being a blacksmith or a leatherworker. My main, a Shaman, is an alchemist. That has easily been the most frustrating of any of the professions, as it's dependent on "experimentation" which is costly to undertake and frequently fails, leaving you with nothing; not even the experience or gold from killing stuff hoping for a random drop. You're just standing in a required spot in the capital city and rolling dice. I like the intent of the system and, as with everything else in this expansion, there's an absurd amount to explore and discover, but progress seems stilted and so demanding of time that unless you're committed to each profession, I can see a lot of people shrugging their shoulders and moving on to other, less time-consuming things.
And it's the time sink that is the overarching aspect to the game, just as it's always been. Way back in the vanilla days, the time commitment was because everything moved so slowly and the requirements for advancement were ridiculously high. Now it's because there's SO MUCH to all of it. One of Blizzard's guiding principles from the beginning was "easy to learn, hard to master." They've basically chucked that first part out the door and contented themselves that their current audience is their current audience and they're better off making things complex enough to hold the interest of that audience, rather than trying to recruit a bunch of new people. The new/old talent system is a great example. The old trees disappeared in Cataclysm in favor of just level-gaining your major abilities and getting a choice among three options about every dozen levels or so. The trees have returned, in that you get one point per level, alternating between your class tree (Shaman) and spec tree (Enhancement, Elemental, or Restoration.) That means there's a TON more variety in paths and options, but it also means that there are some of those choices that were the downside of the old system, where you're enhancing a main ability by 1% (damage, healing, whatever) and noticing an actual change to your performance is occasionally difficult. It also means that you'll be spending some time hovering over the talent screen, figuring out which path is "better" for you. Thankfully, the choices aren't permanent like they were back in the day, and you can change them at anytime, except when you're in combat, so experimentation is easy.
I've leveled four of my characters to the top (70) and have, obviously, spent a ton of time playing in order to get there. Despite my criticisms above, I like a lot of what's going on. I think there are still a lot of rough edges that need sanding, but there it is. Also, despite having acquired all of the dragon glyphs (the final one, at the highest peak in the entire game, took about a half hour) and making the ability far easier to employ, I'm still kind of hoping for the moment when they decide that dragonriding is optional and reintroduce regular flying. Probably as a random drop...
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- Jackwraith
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- Ninja
- Maim! Kill! Burn!
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I took a header into a car to let him pass in the first race. I refused to pass him on a late blue shell in the third. But the fourth race win was legitimate and scored him the points for an overall first.
Good for him.
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It really is the best xcom successor. It doesn't *look* like it's straying too far but in reality it's completely changing your old xcom play incentives. Really well put together game---pretty challenging but ultimately breakable in ways that make you feel really good.
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- hotseatgames
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- D12
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I also installed a mod that removes rune loss on death, which is my absolute least favorite part of the game. I think we will have a ton of fun with this.
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