In This Thread Krylo Talks About Games He's Currently Playing

[Krylo]

Because I'm bored and feel like being semi-social I figured this might be a fun/interesting thread to start. I'm probably wrong but, you know. Whatever. Fuck it.

Gonna talk about the various games I've been playing recently.*

Defiance

This game is one of a pretty small, perhaps only this game, depending on how strict you're defining it, genre of MMOTPS. You've got a persistent world, loot drops, leveling and character growth etc. etc. And it SHOULD be a really good game. It's got all the makings of one, the core gameplay is interesting, varied, and fun, it has an engaging story line, good voice actors, pretty good graphics for an MMO, etc. etc.

However, Trion horribly horribly mismanaged it. They've spent a lot of time fixing things that weren't broken while leaving things that are alone, the balance is a mess, a recent balance patch only made this worse (scaling enemies but scaling them to be just huge bullet sponges), etc. etc.

It also lacks content. There's no end game at all, other than rerunning the same things you did while leveling up (you can restart the main story line), no reason to bother with alts (classless system one character can do anything), and maybe like. . . 20 hours of content in a single go at the main story line plus all the group instances. This hasn't improved since the game was released.

The in game chat is just. . . awful in ways that are difficult to describe. It's difficult to use in every way. And, not only that, but the game makes heavy use of phasing, which WOULD be good, except it doesn't automatically move group members to the same phase as you when you enter a quest phase. All in all, it makes the game go from a good MMO to a. . . kind of subpar single player game where other people run around sometimes.

There were also serious lag issues for quite awhile after launch. I didn't notice any when I was playing again recently, but it's been an on and off thing that I'm not fully confident they've ever gotten a handle one.

There have been SOME improvements (scopes, for instance, were fixed after like 8 months or so), but it's one very slow step forward and two steps back and I doubt the game will ever be good.

That said, the core gameplay IS fun. It's a competent TPS game, and when the grouping works it's great. The instances are all fun to do, there's no holy trinity bullshit, the driving feels like GTA on a computer done right, and it's just over all enjoyable IF you can ignore all that other stuff.

If you think you can put up with all that other shit, the base game is actually pretty cheap, and you can let me know when you're planning on playing as I don't log into it TOO often as I've basically done everything I want to do.

Vindictus

Fuck yeah.

I picked a scythe video, because I like scythe, but it's worth noting that there's only one class that's really harder than scythe to play, and that video is soloing a raid boss meant to be fought with 5-8 players. It's also a few updates ago and fights are faster now. She may look a bit repetitive there, but she really doesn't feel it in practice. There's also other classes that use more special moves and are slightly less combo focused (like Hurk, or Staffie), but I like those ones less. It's less 'pure'.

This game I actually like a lot. The gameplay is more like DMC or God of War than any MMOs you're likely to have played before, as you can probably see from the gameplay footage. It's all about building attack combos, timing them between boss attacks, timing i-frames that are often only a fraction of a second, using the movement from your normal attacks to evade (so you can continue combos where you normally couldn't), and the occasional use of special moves to work in buffs, debuffs, or extra damage.

The gameplay is very deep and very varied between characters, and just a ton of fun.

It also lacks true 'Pay2Win' that a lot of F2P games have. There is a little however, like outfitters (costume slot items) that add 500 atk/m.atk (which isn't too terribly much, but. . .), and the whole enhancing/enchanting system having a chance of destroying items if you don't use protection runes--but, as that it's possible to restore a destroyed weapon once, and not too terribly difficult to get spare weapons, this is mostly just a huge waste of time if you don't pay for runes, not an insurmountable barrier. It's also something you don't want to bother with until you're level 60+ (out of 80) and are getting your complete full end game gear (60 gear is comparable to 80 for some classes, 70 is for all, only the hardest of the hardcore really get 80 gear), it's just not worth doing, and by that time you're probably okay spending a couple dollars to support the game. Still super annoying, though.

UNFORTUNATELY it's also run by Nexon NA which is just an awful terrible awful bad company. Tickets go unanswered for months, actual people get banned by autobanners meant to stop bots, communication is poor, there's almost no advertisement leading to a relatively small community, and it's just. . . it feels like no one gives a shit.

They've been improving over the last few months, though, weirdly enough.

The game itself has also improved immeasurably with updates to various class mechanics.

I'd suggest either Scythe Evie or Cestus Karok if you play, but really anyone but Kai is fun (and some people even find him fun, the monsters).


Mabinogi

Okay, so that gameplay video is shit, but it took forever to find one without some ass talking over it with the nerdiest voice possible so you're living with it.

And honestly, other than showing the. . . antiquated graphics, and that, yes, this is a hotbar MMO, a video's not doing much for showing off the game.

Now, like I said it's a classic hotbar MMO which. . . I don't generally like UNLESS they do something I like, and oh man does Mabinogi do things I like.

Firstly: They manage to make basic MMO combat interesting by changing it from maximal rotation to a game of RPS. Attacks mostly fall into normal attacks, smash attacks, AoE attacks, and counter attacks, and every character also gets the defend ability.

A normal attack gets staggered by defend, and countered by counter, but uses the least stamina, and interrupts smash attacks. Smash attacks are interrupted by normals, and countered by counter, but break through defense. Counter will counter normal and smash attacks (dealing a portion of your attack damage + the enemy's attack damage depending on your rank), but are broken by AoEs and can't stop ranged attacks. Defend can greatly reduce damage from normals, ranged, AoE, and. . . really anything other than smashes. Etc.

Add in that every attack applies a small amount of stun to most enemies (and you), with some applying more (taking longer to recover) and some less, and enough stun will knock an enemy (or you) down, and you come out with a very tactical combat system that actually requires you to stay awake when you play it. It's honestly pretty great.

There's also extra mechanics on some classes, like Fighter's (brawler) combo attacks, but I'm not going to explain every single class.

Further, a single character can do EVERYTHING. Every combat class, every gathering profession, be either gender, every crafting skill, whatever. There's really no need for multiple characters, but the option is there and IS rewarding--but costs money.

But I'll get back to that in a minute, first, lets talk about crafting briefly: Crafting creates the best equipment in the game outside of gachas. Hands down. Most gacha equipment can only tie crafted as well. This is a game where crafting actually matters.

Not only that, but you can level up through crafting, or doing daily jobs for NPCs or exploring ruins or cooking or trading between cities as a merchant, even attending parties. Mabinogi likes to call itself 'Fantasy Life' because of this. Now, I don't know how well they accomplished that as, well, I mostly still just want to go out and kill shit, but it's really nice that they have all this other stuff you can do.

Let's also take a second to talk about the rebirth system. Your character has an age, you set it when you start the game, and every week on saturday (samhain, in game) you go up one year. Minimum is 12, if I remember right, maximum is. . . well infinity, but your character stops changing visibly at 20. When you reach 20 you can 'rebirth' which sets your character/exploration level to 1 but retains all the skills you've learned.

This is important because character (and exploration) level is actually a really really small portion of your character's ability. You get more stats from raising skills than you do from leveling up, and, on top of that, your skill ranks determine your damage and what not. Character level ONLY gives stats and. . . AP.

Your AP is not reset when rebirthing either, as you use your AP to raise skills. A skill has an EXP bar that goes up by using it, and then once that gets far enough you can spend AP (low as 1, high as 20, depending on skill and rank) to actually rank it up to the next level, increasing your abilities permanently.

As that it's much faster to level up from 1-30 than it is from 30-40, this is a pretty important mechanic.

You can also change your core class at rebirth (or calling, as they call it) which makes skills in that class raise twice as fast.

It's a pretty robust and interesting leveling system which I ALSO like.

Now to get to the negatives and why I don't ACTUALLY recommend this game:

Firstly, there's the super dated graphics, and the uh. . . community is about what you would expect from a game that looks like this and is mostly free.

Secondly, it is Pay2Win as fuck. You need to buy reforges to get the best possible weapons (not technically necessary, but you know), which, to clarify you still MAKE the best weapons by crafting, but then you apply these reforges to the good base weapon you've already made. You only get one character slot for free. Extra characters cost money. Which wouldn't be so bad in and of itself, except when you make a new character (and when you rebirth them) you can pick another character on that account to 'support'. The character you support gets 1 AP every time you level up the character supporting them, to a maximum of 50 per week.

In other words, it allows you to more or less double your AP gains on your main.

But that's not all! Rebirthing is free once a day up to cumulative level 300 (get to 30 and rebirth 10 times, or whatever other combination to hit 300), OR once you hit 20 years old in game. The oldest age you can rebirth to is 17. So after cumulative level 300, you get one free rebirth every three weeks.

Leveling turns into a complete and utter slog after about level 50 (I managed to get 1 or 2 levels a day at that point) until you're strong enough to do high end shadow missions (cumulative level 1000 or so probably) where it probably doesn't turn into a slog until 70. Getting TO 50 takes a couple days.

Seeing the problem?

But not if you buy a character card! (Same cost as making a new character) Then you can apply that card to your character and rebirth whenever you want.

Another advantage of alts is you get a bank tab for each species you have (Elf, Giant, Human), which effectively triples your inventory space which IS very limited.

Then you've got pets. Pets in this game include mounts--which you get a flying and ground based mount for free--AND combat pets. Pets cost real money. You can get them for free through events but it's pretty rare, and the first two mounts you get also lack an inventory. Most event and paid pets do have inventories meaning you can store items on them. Which, again, your inventory is limited so this is huge. It's also important to have a couple of pets for soloing due to a couple of cheap strategies.

AND THIRDLY: It's also a Nexon game so. . . that.

Over all, it's a lot of fun if you can get past or ignore the Pay2Win, maybe only play it a couple times a week or so.

Rift

That one's not a gameplay video but there's no point. The gameplay is basic hotbar MMO. Basically just like WoW or SWtOR or Perfect World or LOTRO or GW1 or whatever other game like it.

There are, however, a few things that, I think, make Rift stand above the other Hotbar MMOs.

The first thing is the Soul System, there are four classes, with 9 souls each, and you pick 3 souls for each build. That's 84 possible soul combinations, and that's without even going into different builds within those combinations.

There's still a bit of 'this build is best' here and there for various roles but it's much less strict than you tend to find in other games, because there's just so many possibilities that it doesn't seem anyone gets around to really fully exploring all of them between balance updates. They're also, all, for the most part pretty balanced.

As that character builds is the one thing I actually like about this type of MMO, gameplay wise (and why I'll never touch WoW again), this is. . . pretty huge for me. Just tons of depth to it and lots of neat little synergies and stuff you can use, which even change as you level (low level rogue, tanking, for instance, benefits from having a good amount of tactician for easily accessible AoEs, but later game you pretty much want pure riftstalker with some bard and minimal tactician).

Also means you can customize a build to make the game less awful--like infinite stealth + 2 saps = minimal fighting and maximum getting shit done.

So that's good for me.

Secondly is the Lore. It's also got a lot of depth, and the whole ascended dynamic reminds me a lot of exalted in a lot of good ways. The quest writing is actually quite good, usually, and the odd cutscenes are well acted, with well presented characterizations on both sides of the Guardian/Defiant conflict (though I tend to think the Guardians are a bit dumb due to some of their quests).

I don't know, it's hard to go into this much without giving a bunch away, but suffice to say I actually enjoy reading quests.

Thirdly is the Rift Mechanics and enemy factions. These are great because they add a level of unpredictability to your standard questing. Sometimes it's a bit annoying--an outpost you need to quest at is taken over by elemental forces that are a bit difficult for you to take on alone--but mostly it just gives you the option of taking a break from the questing and vary up your game play a little bit.

But not only that, enemy groups are factioned. They aren't just all working together. If a life rift opens up in an area full of goblins (aligned to fire), the goblins will attempt to fight the planar incursion themselves. They'll usually lose, but that's beside the point--which is that the enemies in fight. Sometimes invasions from different forces will meet each other on the road and duke it out, sometimes an elemental foothold will be assaulted by the surrounding wildlife, sometimes two rifts open next to each other and battle it out for dominance. . . and all of this can make your life either easier or more difficult depending on what you're doing.

But the main thing that's great about the enemy factions is it helps suspension of disbelief when you see this death rift pop out, and the creatures inside it start to fight for their lives instead of just chilling next to these undead terrors. It makes the world feel that much more real and alive, which is one of the things that most MMOs fail at.

Beyond those things it also has a very nice LFG feature, customizable player housing, pretty decent guild benefits (if you're the social type, I'm not), and the option to completely skip questing and do the much faster (but somewhat more repetitive) 'Instant Adventure' feature, which teleports you around in a raid group of other people doing the same thing, and gives you various tasks to complete with immediate rewards that are about on par with questing. It ends up being much faster due to the lack of dealing with quest givers, or long walks, though.

As for the negative. . . Well, it's just. . . it's very much the same game we've all played multiple times. I happen to feel it's one of the best iterations of this type of game, but that is what it is.

CDNF (Dungeon And Fighter)

To anyone who played DFO this probably looks super familiar. That's because it IS DFO, which was closed down stateside due to poor financial gain, which was due to being Nexon.

This, however, is the Chinese version which is actually run by a competent hosting company (Tencent) and is basically fantastic. It's updated, it's populated, it's got few bots, it runs well, it has events going on constantly. Just over all fantastically hosted.

The updates also cure some of my problems with it (being impossible to rank high with some classes because of ranking being based entirely off of how many combos you land, so any class that one shots trash a lot is fucked, for instance), balances classes a bit better, and introduces a few new classes that are great fun. Like female slayer.

As for the game itself, it's basically somewhere between Streets of Rage and Golden Axe with cutsey animesque sprite graphics. The gameplay video should tell you everything you really need to know about it, other than that it is actually pretty challenging at mid to high levels, though it starts out pretty easy.

The negative? It's a chinese game and there's no good way to get translations on it. The AH is, therefore, a huge pain in the ass to use, you're going to be playing in groups pretty much exclusively, good luck contacting support, annnnd you aren't even supposed to be playing it unless you're a Chinese citizen.

Which means going through a bunch of stuff like downloading the QQ messenger, spoofing a Chinese citizen ID and a bunch of other stuff that's detailed here. Luckily none of it is illegal in the US, to the best of my knowledge, but it might be a little bit slightly illegal in China, so if you're going there don't tell anyone you did this, if you do it. Not that I think they'd really care.

That forum also has methods of using the AH (which requires typing in Pinyin) english soundpacks, a (very) incomplete English patch, how to get your account locked to your smart phone (allowing you to unlock your account if it gets locked), a method of using the cash shop to purchase things, and all kinds of other things.

But it's a huge pain in the ass. Just massive.

And on top of all that there's some frame skipping issues that make the game harder than it has to be for some reason. I'd say it was lag but. . . using a VPN apparently stops it? I haven't tried because once you've been on one IP for awhile the game registers that as your home IP and if another IP starts getting used regularly it locks your account and, well, language barrier to contacting support (though with phonelock I guess you can unlock it). Which, a VPN should add MORE lag, so it's just weird.

But yeah, huge pain in the arse to get running, but hey there's how to do it.

iRO/Ragnarok Online

No youtube for this one 'cause fuck you is why.

Really I don't have a lot to say about this, other than that I only play it on rare occasion due to nostalgia for RaiRO. That said, it went free to play and it's kinda nice having all the official updates and stuff, but then kinda shitty having the much lower drop rates and the much larger population that means I'd have to actually put in effort to own a castle or whatever.

You all should pretty much know the shitty/good things about this.

From here on out, SINGLE PLAYER.

Pixel Piracy

This game is blatantly blatantly unfinished but shows some real promise. It's kind of a combination of. . . side scrolling RTS, roguelite, a block building game (but only for your ship), and I don't know what else.

There's a lot of neat stuff you can do with your ship designs, both just to look cool and to make them more combat viable, and with your crew and equipment, as well as decisions on leveling.

Right now balance is kind of awful, and it's blatantly unfinished and unpolished, however. It's also really cheap on Steam, and maybe worth a look if you don't have anything else to do with your time, and you know, you'll still own it when its done and you can play the complete game.

Plus, cannons. Unbalanced as hell (an enemy has them and you're pre-much fucked, you have them and, well, the same really) but fun.

Ultionus

I got this on one of MuMu's game give aways, when he was holding it on SP. Like I said then, I usually don't go in for those but it seemed super super sexist, and I figured no one else would want it, and at the time I had nothing better to do, so what the hell, right?


But, Uh. . . what to say about this game?

Guess I'll start with the positives. The plot starts off with the main character (the woman from the banner, and the video) deciding to murder someone for telling her she should be in the kitchen, and the space ship portion feels a lot like Gradius. Those are both pretty sweet.

Oh and the sprite work is pretty much gorgeous, and it earns a few points by neither starting with the audio blasting on high nor in fullscreen by default (what the fuck is up with games and doing this? And then you have to wait until you can get to a settings screen to turn the volume down to a reasonable level, god, fuck that). So that earns it some points.

The soundtrack is also pretty good, speaking of audio.

It's not quite as sexist as I was expecting, either. I mean, there's the main character's costume and obvious ridiculous sex appeal, but when you see that you really expect it to go way further than that, and it doesn't really seem to. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much of that is due to just. . . there's no story to speak of so I can't say she 'owns' her sexuality because, maybe she does? The little we see of her being an actual person she seems to, but then, maybe she doesn't? Who knows! I haven't beaten it yet (if I ever will) and I don't know if she talks at the end, but she doesn't talk between or during stages or anything like that. Just in the opening so far. So, fuck who knows about her characterization. Not me!

And really, honestly, given the intro 'not as sexist as I was expecting' certainly doesn't mean a whole lot. Especially as I still miss a lot of things regarding that, so maybe its worse than I think. I'm not inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt, though.

On the negatives, you get one life on the space shooting section and I have no idea if it even affects anything as I only started the game twice and didn't get that far either time as it's pretty difficult. After your ship gets shot down you land on the planet (in a snow field for how far I got, no idea if you can land elsewhere), and then the game starts and it's. . .

Well it's NES era as fuck. Both in all the good ways and all the bad ways, and that means mostly bad ways. You can't move while shooting, and you can only shoot at straight, and diagonally up left/right, and at very specific angles. This makes fighting a huge pain in the ass especially with the amounts of infinitely respawning enemies they throw at you.

Which is too bad, because the level design seems fairly robust and kinda metroidvania-ish, but with the way the gameplay works out I just. . . want to get to the next stage. Exploring feels much too painful, the game just pushes you to move forward as you get fewer infinite spawns if you keep moving. So it mostly goes to waste, at least for me.

The jumping is also a bit awkward in a castlevania kind of way, and yeah.

So, really I can't recommend this game unless you a) Really really want an NES style metroidvania and don't care if the gameplay is a bit shit by modern standards, b) don't give a shit about the ridiculousness of the main character's tits/outfit, c) find it on a really good sale.

And even then, I'm not so sure. Maybe if someone is giving it away for free.

Starbound

Basically, Terraria in space.

They're working on making a much more robust combat system and advancement system with multiple paths to end game, but none of that is in yet, so for right now. . . just Terraria in space.

It's a clearly unfinished game, but the lore is interesting and fun, the building is already pretty great, there are methods of sharing entire planets between players, and just a lot of really good/interesting things.

But, like I said, clearly unfinished. And the updates aren't coming as quick as you might hope from something that's in 'early beta' (more like alpha) with development being slowed down significantly by the devs trying to keep it stable for players as well as moving offices.

I don't know, I don't really have a lot to say about this one, there's already a thread here, and a TON of information online about it that you've probably heard all about it. Mostly just including it for completeness sake.

And also I just downloaded Jade Empire, so I'll probably be playing that soon for the first time.

Disclaimer: Most of these games are not great. Some are even bad. Unless I actually suggest that these games are worth looking into, don't take this as a suggestion you go and buy them.

[Aldurin]

You're telling us you didn't scout out Scarlet Blade for us? Man you're slacking.

Probably best to not watch this on a work computer.

Props for trying Defiance when it was more or less a given that it was a shitty MMO pushed to fail at least equally with the shitty show it's based on.

[Ryong]

I tried Rift again since I tried it back in the beta and for whatever reason it looks like shit now and I can't actually pick the souls I want, only specific builds?

[Revising Ocelot]

I got some stuff today. I am also reminded I need a not god-awful camera.








So what will I play first today?



The Answer

[Krylo]

Originally Posted by Ryong

I tried Rift again since I tried it back in the beta and for whatever reason it looks like shit now and I can't actually pick the souls I want, only specific builds?

On that screen in the lower right hand there's a 'close' option. This brings you to the normal customization.

You can also just click on one of the souls and change it to break the build and get custom, or put in one of your own points.

[Revising Ocelot]

I do believe my 3DS friend code is 0920 1728 6376.

---------- Post added at 11:03 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:38 PM ----------

Mostly approve of the 3DS XL, but my left thumb at the middle joint gets sore quickly, from having to bend the thumb. The circle pad in particular does not agree with it. Any suggestions?

---------- Post added at 11:51 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:03 PM ----------

Pikachu actually SAYS Pikachu now. Worst game in series confirmed.

[BitVyper]

and if another IP starts getting used regularly it locks your account

For the record, I've switched IPs like three or four times at various points before I did the account binding to get my security rating up, and I never got tradelocked. Also tradelock TECHNICALLy only lasts for like, so many days. I forget exactly how many, but less than a month IIRC, but I've heard of people getting stuck on it.

It's not really THAT hard to set up, but probably like an hour of fucking around. You're best to join the QQ chat room right off the bat so that you can hassle people for help if you hit a stumbling block.

The AH is helped a lot by the fact that HP and MP potions both have the characters "HP" and "MP" in their names. Honestly, once you get the hang of using it, doing Pinyin really isn't that bad.

[Krylo]

?????????

Edit: Forgot the forums don't have support for chinese/japanese characters.

Guess that was pointless then.

[Aldurin]

Originally Posted by Revolving Ocelot

Pikachu actually SAYS Pikachu now. Worst game in series confirmed.

Would have been partially redeemed if Nolan North voiced that part.

[BitVyper]

Pikachu actually SAYS Pikachu now.

Didn't he do that all the way back in Yellow? I think he did.