Weregamer's Game Musings

The highest quality (both game quality and code quality), best supported game I've ever played, is 100% free to download and play - they survive on cosmetic and convenience microtransactions (as in, extra stash tabs for those of us who hoard in ARPGs, extra character slots for us altoholics). I don't think their financials are public, but I'm sure I'm not the only player who feels guilty for the number of hours I've enjoyed this game compared to the mere dozens of bucks I've spent. The game started out as a far better replacement for Diablo II than the Blizzard one, and they just keep adding freshness and tuning things - and i don't recall a single heavy nerf because they beta test well and are not enslaved by a PvP focus. If you haven't tried Path of Exile yet, do yourself a favor.

This sounds really amazing - something like Eternal Darkness only not horrific, in that the game reaches out from the screen to interact with the player out of character. In ED that deepened the horror and provided comic relief simultaneously; this sounds like it might feel differently to different people but still very cool I don't need to repeat the RPS article, I'll just link to it. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/12/12/oneshot-review/

I backed a project called "A House of Many Doors" a while ago on Kickstarter, and it now has a "Coming Soon" store page on Steam. This only matters because, unlike the normal case where every KS update seems like a "don't forget us please" marketing spiel, the ones on this have been insights into the author's ideas for how the game will be different and why he is making it. The backer update that accompanied the announcement about the Steam page is a great example, and I think maybe other folks might find it as intriguing as I do: "Without going too much into spoiler territory, the way to advance the main quest is by exploration itself. You need to gather a resource called 'Apprehensions,' representing your knowledge of the House and all its secrets and oddities. You can collect Apprehensions by writing poetry, discovering new locations, or completing side-quests. (Why did I choose this design? Well, I was fed up of the thing you g...

I have mixed feelings about Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. I like a lot of the ways the mechanics have been refined from DXHR; I like that Eidos Montreal paid attention to how stupid the idea of "boss fights" in a Deus Ex game is. Overall, mechanics-wise, this is a great sequel to DXHR. But there's something just plain missing, and that's, for lack of a better term, the heart. I'm anticipating more hours of a fun stealthy choice-of-options game, but I'm already convinced that there's zero chance that it will give me anything to chew on, mentally, and isn't likely to even keep me attached to the character I'm playing. With only mechanics and no heart, this is simply not worthy of the Deus Ex name; it's just cyberpunk Thief. The original Deus Ex was a masterpiece in many ways - and notably, the stealth gameplay and shooter aspects were not high on the list: for example many shooter and stealth game fans rag, accurately, on the stupid guard AI. ...

The Witcher is one of those titles that has gotten a lot of positive writing from thoughtful folks, not just hype. But bits mentioned in that positive writing tend to put me off; things that suggest that it eschews"wimp" features that will make the game playable despite having a life and only playing a few hours at a time. "Oh no, we can't have quest objectives on the compass, that would Break Immersion!" But then I also keep reading things like this, that show a quality of worldbuilding that might make it worth the frustration of a UI designed for people who have nothing else occupying their brains. I'm on the fence, still. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/06/17/the-witcher-3-folklore-rpg

Well, I've put quite a few hours into the game, and it's still a mixed bag. It definitely has the Bethesda addictive magic, with always something to find over the next hill or in the next ruin. I'm warming to the settlement subgame to some extent. There are some UI/UX pain points with the way it's shoved into a completely different game engine. Most notably, there is no way to see what your actual stocks of a resource are except when you are about to build something that uses it. The feature to "tag" resources that you need to build something so junk that would yield them is highlighted during exploration is decent (especially if you take the otherwise unexciting Scrapper perk, or use the console to cheat it on) - but there's no fine control. Certain rare resources I'd always like to see highlighted, and some common ones I don't really want highlighted except when I'm actually low on them. I think the mods available on the PC are also a mus...

So, I had a hankering for some first-person murder hoboing the other day just when Steam put Fallout 4 on sale, so I gave up my plan to wait for the GOTY edition. It's mostly living up to my expectations, good and bad, based on reviews and on previous Bethesda games. The ostensible plot hook (lost baby) is completely underwhelming (sorry, clicking a blob of pixels a couple times can't compare to bonding with a real baby) but irrelevant to the game anyway. The main plot sounds potentially less stupid than the one for FO3. The settlement stuff is not quite as bolted onto the side of the game as I expected - taking time and perks to improve your settlement network can pay off in upgrade mats. But the thing that surprised me most pleasantly was remarkably simple. If you choose a somewhat common name for your character, the voiced robot butler will actually call you by name (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Codsworth/recognized_names). I didn't know this going in, and my first ...

After two plays through XCOM 2, in giving that a rest, just in time for the release of Grim Dawn. I kick-started this one, and though it failed to pull me away from Path of Exile while in beta, the complete game is more satisfying. Also, PoE league endings (which dump all your characters and stash contents into the base league) generally flush most of my interest, it's so anticlimactic to see the cool bestest loots, fruits of your labors, suddenly just drops in the bucket of what you've seen throughout the life of the game. Back to GD: The influence of the folks who worked on Titan Quest is very obvious, especially in the class and skill system which is pretty much a straight port. But the interesting addition of a Wild West flavor, and a bit of effort into various types of storytelling makes it more appealing to my current tastes, and the clean integration of firearms with magic is cool. Despite the similarity in the shallow high concept description, the setting is not muc...

The first week or two after Heart of Thorns went live, I was a bit disappointed. Playing on, first because four of my friends and I always play together on Mondays, I got a little more of a philosophical handle on how the expansion changes the game, and I'm no longer ambivalent about having bought it - I love some parts, and I just had to learn that the "different kinds of fun as you feel like it" game design is now painted in broader strokes - especially you should only go into one of the new zones if you feel like the activity that is going on in it. Roughly speaking, HoT adds four things to the game: A new character class, a new "elite" subclass for each class, a new form of progression at L80, and a bunch of new zones with their story. Of these, the zones are the most visible and important, and the mastery tracks are the most novel and IMO successful, so I'll leave those for last. In thinking about these changes together, I think I see a philosophica...

I've put a little time into this this week, and although the changes seem like little tweaks, the sum is a huge change in how fun the game is. Except for a few buggy places which probably involve uniquely scripted objects, switching characters to use a skill has been smoothly automagicked, and during character generation and leveling up, tooltips and shading help you see which skills are already in the party at which levels. So while your party is still basically a bucket of skills, you spend so much less time tracking who has what that it doesn't break immersion. The traits and quirks don't have a huge effect, but they are sufficient that you can have two characters with the same weapon skill who feel distinct in a fight, and some pairings of skills (combat and non, in all three combinations) yield interesting synergies. A lot of tuning also shows. There are no longer runaway best and worst choices in NPC recruits, and some of the more tedious, less interesting "pu...

It's pure luck (or maybe karma) that I even looked at this game, but I'm really glad I bought it for more than one reason. The day it came out, Tess had just that morning asked me what I had been playing, and I answered "Path of Exile". Her response was "Don't you ever play things with non-depressing titles?". If that conversation hadn't happened, I probably wouldn't have looked very deeply at the news of the release on Steam, and I might have missed a game that is both fun and innovative. Before I get into the ways in which the actual game design is innovative, I should mention two things. First, it's a really fun little game . I don't expect to be playing it fanatically, but it doesn't require a huge time commitment yet has some strategic depth and fun storytelling. I'll likely have it installed for a long time, playing it in short spurts when I haven't the time for a deeper game or am just taking a break. Se...

The elemental series has (with the exception of the totally broken War of Magic) been a series of "great almosts". Each game in the series has gotten more finely tuned in gameplay and balance, but they've just never gotten the UX elements to the point that the game stopped being annoying to play. I bought Sorcerer King (with the loyalty discount for having tried all the others) expecting that the fresh take on the 4X genre would be worth playing, even if the long term replayability was still a mess. I was thus very happily surprised to discover that this time around, the game is as playable and engaging as it is conceptually interesting and balanced. There are several elements to this, but the one I'm astonished by is how much finally cleaning up the graphical appearance of the game world mattered. This is the first game in the series where figuring out what something is on the map - be it a wandering enemy, a visitable location, or a mountain (!) no longer require...