What games are you playing and why?

I thought Warlock was alright, though it has the same problem as a lot of other Civ-esque 4X games in that there's not much incentive to finish a game, after the midgame winning or losing is already a foregone conclusion and you'd be better off just restarting. Which is unfortunate because the tech tree/unit leveling becomes more interesting as the game goes on. I got about 35 hours out of it before getting bored of it, which is okay in a bang-for-buck sense but pretty bad compared to other 4X games. I've got 53 in SotS2 and literally hundreds in the original SotS.

 

I played Warlock right after release, and found it was far, far too easy to get bogged down by conflicts with monsters, so that you ended up completely stagnant. Some elemental right near your starting castle would simply drive you to distraction and before you know it, it's turn 50 and you still have no army, the map is completely unexplored, and you are no further along in the game as you were at the start. In fact you'd be worse off because you'd be surrounded.

So it doesn't feel ANYTHING like a civ game to me, it felt more like I was at the Alamo than building an empire. And this was without ever actually meeting an enemy civ.

 

Civ varies by what kind of world you build. Playing on a bunch of small islands plays much much differently than playing on a huge continent or two. While I love the real world maps, I also prefer taking over cities from the sea (it's just a lot simpler and far less messy, at least until you get real artillery, air power and tanks).

 

It's certainly an interesting concept for a game, anyway. I'm surprised that Firaxis or another big studio actually hadn't tried to do it as an AAA title.

Isn't that Fallen Enchantress roughly the same kind of game?

 

Elemental is... similar, but completely different. If Warlock is Civ 5 with some RPG components, Elemental is an RPG with Civ 4 components. I've dumped inordinate amounts of time into Fallen Enchantress, it's a massive improvement on War of Magic. That said it's a total balance clusterf*ck and it's much harder to just drop in, play for a little while, and take a break from than Warlock. It might just be a personal problem (I believe it's called being scatterbrained) but I find that if I step away from FE and come back later I'm completely lost because of the sheer amount of crap you're managing at once.

 

Fallen Enchantress, much like Elemental, was this game that I want to like... but just can't. I know that both games wanted to be like Master of Magic (and as far as balance is concerned, it's actually a whole lot better than Master of Magic, which never even TRIED to be balanced). But they totally missed the boat, and it's pretty clear how they did it. MoM was such a simple game with simple graphics and lots of color (both literally and figuratively). It was the kind of game that you could dive in, and get lost in the GAME instead of in the game's systems, like you have in FE. They took a colorful strategic romcom and turned it into a black and white melodrama with lots of tears and micromanagement. That's basically its problem.

 

The open Beta for Paths of Exile starts today and I'm thinking of taking it for a spin this evening.

And the beta signup for The Elder Scrolls Online just began, for others like me who are interested.

 

I am already running the install...

 

It's soo sloooow!

 

Yeah the 0.10.0 patch is being slow... good thing I installed the client and previous patches before this...

 

Wow omeg. You must be downloading on an OC3 or higher connection. That is crazier than any speed estimate I ever saw.

No doubt it is erroneous. The server farm combined could not handle 17179869184 GB/s bandwidth. Hell, that would be enough to transfer all the entire Internet in a second!

Still, it looks nice. Good work screenshotting that in the fraction of a second before it was done.

 

OK, well I'm home and patching. It started out very slow, but looks like it's speeding up now.

Still, I don't want to sit here in front of my computer watching the progress bar, so I'll check on it later.

 

Mine's already been done for an hour but I'm heading to bed, I'll play tomorrow.

 

I can't complete the installation. It died with some error unable to download a file from the server. So I restarted it and it fails after a couple of minutes. Trying again now. But it's disheartening that it's back to 0.6%

 

I'm online finally . I have a level 3 Shadow named Haldurson (actually tried about a dozen different names before I settled on that one).

 

So I haven't been following this at all! How long does PoE open beta last?
The game looks confusing and exciting.

Reviews here as soon as you get it shot at it

 

My very brief review is that it's a fun diablo-like with some cool and clever twists to it as far as skills and items are concerned. I made few errors (such as not realizing I could remove a gem from an item so easily -- yep just call me a noob lol).

Here's some of the key differences between a game like Diablo and PoE:
1. Skills come from gems, so instead of being learned, you can get them from completing quests, or finding them as loot. You insert the appropriate gem into an item with the right colored slot (if you meet the level and stat requirements), and you can then start using that skill. Gems can level up just like your character can.
2. The game DOES have a skill tree, but it's actually a lot more like this really huge and complex spider web for passive skills and bonuses. Because my character class is 'Shadow', who's a kind of hybrid class (Intellligence and Dexterity). Initially I can choose to get dexterity bonuses, bonuses to one-handed weapon damage, movement speed, and/or intelligence. But I can spread into other areas as well (that's just where I start on this huge web). Right now I'm simply playing it by ear, but I suppose if I decide to stick with the game, I'll have to study that web a bit more closely and set some goals.
3. Selling items is very different. The currency consists of fragments of wisdom scrolls, and similar items. If you get a certain number of those fragments, it converts to an actual usable item. So, for example, some items you purchase using wisdom scrolls. But the items serve another purpose -- Wisdom scrolls, for example, instead of being used to purchase, can be used to identify items you find. There's other currency items that will turn a non-magical weapon or armor into a magical kind, an other that simply randomize the stats of an existing magic item, and still others that improve your general armor quality by a very small amount.

The system seems complex at first but once you start using it, you realize that, it's not at all difficult to get a handle on. There's some complexity to the passive skill web I mentioned, but the paths through the web seem (At least for now) to not be all that difficult to choose (as a hybrid, I guess part of it is deciding whether I want to concentrate more on physical combat or magic, and since most of the gems I've gotten are for special weapons attacks, that's the direction I'm going. I do want to increase my intelligence though, since even my special physical attacks depend on mana it seems.

Also, the game seems really polished to me, but I haven't gotten that far into it to know for sure. I'm still kind of a noob (just hit level 6) so I'm no expert on that.

One last thing, it's free to play, and there will NOT be a character wipe at the end of the beta, so I'd just give it a try if it sounds like anything you might be interested in. I was a little bit intimidated by some of what I saw (particularly that huge skill web), but once you start playing it, it's just good fun. So don't let that stop you. There will NOT be another character wipe, so there's no big risk in starting to play.

/edit btw. I'm not sure if this will be a main character or not. I may take a couple of others for a spin.