What games are you playing and why?

Today I was stressed out because of a bunch of stuff from both this morning and (spent most of yesterday doing stressfull stuff -- over 2 hours at a lawyer's office, another hour or so at the bank, working on mom's problems, an hour on the phone with DirecTV yelling at them, etc.)

So I was finally able to relax in Rift. I did something today that I hadn't done before, and that was look at what a couple of other players had done as far as their pocket dimensions. I wanted to attach a few screenshots from two different dimensions. They were huge, with over 900 individually placed objects (objects, btw, can include npcs).

The following 3 are all from the same dimension (they are huge)

 

Here's a different dimension. BTW, that's my cleric, and that orange thing on the bottom of the first picture is a fireball being shot by a huge gun (it's suspended in mid-air -- yes you can place objects floating in air). You can't quite see the huge gun though (my bad).






You can't quite see it, but in front of the lounge chairs is a swimming pool.

 

Been playing around a bit with Torchlight 2... tried all the classes, done some crazy builds, used resets and experimented. So far my favorites have been a strength/cannon engineer and, somewhat oddly, a focus/wand berserker.

 

I think melee is really boring in the game, therefore I use bows or shotgonnes. There's so much choice.

 

Wands are how I made it through TL2, magicking is all kinds of fun (and probably a tad overpowered).

 

There is some nice synergy for a berserker to go akimbo wands, but lack of good spells for it until lategame(but then, from what I gather, it absolutely wrecks). Berserker has a dual wield passive that boosts execute chance(thus you will attack with both wands simultaneously more often), and when it has full charge(which it builds very quick) it crits with all attacks... and wands get aoe when they crit.

 

I play Wurm Online because quite simply it has the best crafting system in any sandbox MMO I have ever played, and full terraforming. You make the land do what you want, and what you can do is skill based. Then you do whatever you want on that land.

I take breaks for a few weeks or months at a time to get away from Wurm now and then. It's an indy game and Rolf, the developer, sometimes makes incomprehensible changes that anger large parts of his player base, but in the end I've returned every time because the backbone of the game is quite simply the best sandbox game in existence.

Anyone who has played Wurm before a couple months ago might tell you that the graphics for avatars is awful. That's no longer the case. They are now fairly solid, with real animations, even if they aren't up to high end first person shooter standards.

I also play Dwarf Fortress, and (somewhat obviously) Dungeons of Dredmor.

 

I've read other good things about Wurm Online, though I've never tried it (I'm not really the sandbox kind of guy).

I will say that, for all of its flaws and non-mainstream appeal, Fallen Earth has a really great crafting system. It's the best I've personally encountered. Essentially, nearly anything in the game, either you can craft it yourself, or you can use it to craft something else (there's no garbage drops). Also, what I like about it is how it handles huge crafting projects. You can craft vehicles, if you have the time and knowledge and willingness to do the research to do it. Even once you've accumulated all of the pieces, assembling an advanced vehicle can take weeks real time. But generally, it's worse than that, because, unless you purchase the intermediate parts in the AH, you have to build up from raw materials (everything from scrap metal to scrap pieces of rubber for tires, plastic, etc. -- remember this is a post-apocalyptic setting). If you are a crafter, you'll likely spend lots of time going through piles of garbage, rooting through abandoned vehicles, and so on.

Even training horses can take research (if you don't have the appropriate books) and uses the crafting interface (even though, technically you don't craft a horse, it's in there for simplicity's sake).

 

I played the beta of fallen earth, yeah it was great, had some problems, but on the whole, decent game. I haven't come back after retail though because at first I didn't want to pay $15/month, and then it went Freemium+cash shop, and from the looks of it, it's the super mega greed deluxe version, where free players are extremely crippled, AND you have to pay for basically everything(character slots, backpack space, vault space, mount slots, pet slots, chest keys, etc).
In short, I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

In other news, I bought Far Cry 2 today because cheap in steam sale and I felt like playing a sandbox shooter.

 

I really haven't looked at Fallen Earth in ages. I didn't play in beta, and I also had stopped before it went freemium. The changes they were making while I was playing were pretty good, overall (though it was still a flawed game). A lot of good ideas in the game, though, and they had a really good help staff (some of them unpaid, I understand) that took it upon themselves to host so many fun in-game events.

If I were trying to design my perfect post-apocalyptic MMO, I'd certainly want to borrow a lot of ideas from the game, because there's a lot good there. But yeah, overall, it's got some problems.

 

ToME 1.0 is released. It has a trailer now. It plays almost exactly the way the RC4 build did, and that is not surprising since it was only a day or two between them.

http://te4.org/

 

Thanks for the news -- just downloaded the new version.
I haven't really spent much time playing the game, but I've been meaning to forever. I don't think I've ever gotten very far, and I certainly don't know what I'm doing in the game (yet). I do like what I've seen, despite not quite understanding much of it. One of these days, though I'll be sure to try to focus (getting harder and harder lately, though).

 

I just finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the DLC The Missing Link. I really liked it but I played the stealthy way my first time through. I restarted the game for a second playthrough and this time I wanted to use the guns and have fun with explosions. The only problem is that you don't get a quarter of the experience per takedown that you get for being stealthy. For example, if I shoot someone with the tranq gun or the stun gun, I get 30 experience points while a regular gun only gets me 10 points. If I do a hand to hand takedown that leaves them unconcious, I get 50 experience points while doing the hand to hand takedown that kills them gets me 30 experience points. Basically, you are penalized just because you want to play a different way than the designers have decided is the best way. This doesn't even take into account the special bonus experience points that you get at the end of missions for not getting seen or such. Basically there is extremely limited replay value of the game. My recommendation is to only get it when it is at least 75% off as you will likely only play it once.

 

Debug Menu
And you may want to consider using Cheat Engine to boost your experience up to something reasonable if that does not have the options you want.

 

For ToME, I suggest trying the Spellsword addon. It is a nice class. I linked the forum thread in the comments of the addon page.

The Infinite 500 addon is still a guaranteed crash as it chews up gigabytes of memory for some reason. There are a few other addons that are nice, but Spellsword is the only one I am using at current.

 

I might go back to Minceraft tonight. Finding moon logic in adventure games a bit annoying right now, and I can't be fussed with much else.

 

Okay, I just now finished the Rage game. It was fun but I really don't like driving sims and such games and quite a bit of this game was driving. It's a straight shooter in that you can't really make any choices that change the game and you can't play except in the run and gun style (at least that is all I could do, I could only very rarely sneak up on someone to kill them). All in all, I would have to say it was a good game despite the driving sim aspect.

Oh and for those that want Deus Ex Human Revolution, Steam currently has it 75% off.

 

Unreal Tournament 2004 because it's The Best Game Ever(tm).

 

For an FPS with mutiplayer and vehicles, UT2K4 is amazing. Even now, eight years later it is the best by far.

Vehicular Capture the Flag rules! Period.

 

Boom, bitches.