What are you playing?

[rabidtictac]

I never played dragon age origins' expansions. So I've been doing that, starting with Awakening. I like it. It's definitely an expansion rather than a full game, with a smaller scope. But that's fitting since the entire DLC is kind of an epilogue to the ending of Origins. You're doing all the rebuilding that fantasy tropes don't like to show after the big baddy has been killed. I like the idea of being the one to recruit more Gay Wardens, although it's kind of bullshit that certain party members that swore up and down they'd be palling around with me for life suddenly are gone, and the only one who stuck around is the drunk burnout who had nothing better going in his life.

Difficulty is a lot smoother on Awakening. Too smooth, actually. I've hardly chugged a healing item since the start. Enemy arrangements aren't even as tough as in Origins and your characters are probably a good 2x stronger than they were in that game, if not more.

I vastly prefer the allies you get in the DLC. Alistair is a whiny bitch and I'll take Justice aka frank castle demon over him any day. The two mages are fine. Neither of them are total CUNTS like Morrigan or up-their-own-ass, preachy, possessed bitches like Wynn. Anders becomes a cunt in DA2 but he's fine here.

The two rogues are a straight upgrade from Leliana aka "let me lie to you about everything for the entire game because I'm a piece of shit" and the bisexual elf who was bait for rApril gurl gaymers. A dwarf rogue from the Legion and the son of the biggest asshole in Origins make for an interesting party.

If this expansion had about twice as much content and a lot more companion dialogue, I'd rank it above the original game. But it's obvious there were budget constraints. # of encounters, # of locations, complexity of quests etc are all inferior. But it's way less bullshitty than Origins. No fuckoff ambushes or clearly unfair mob spam, where you have to go against 100 enemies (literally) in a constant wave until you either kill everyone or finally go down.

[Some Sick Fuck]

Oh yeah, I've just remember one of the reasons why I put origins down and never returned - despite the claims other people made, I found most of the characters either dull, unsympathetic, or downright annoying. How am I supposed to play a so called RPG with emphasis on characters, when I don't want to hear what most of them have to say?

From my experience, expansion packs are often better than base games. Which is why I'm grateful any time nowdays a publisher decides to do a proper expansion, not just tiny DLC.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

I think they just got too autistic about their "You can date everyone in your party" gimmick that they missed the mark and turned everyone into an extroverted autist.

[Guest]

RPG characters should die virgins like their players.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

They should have your main protagonist suddenly run into a childhood friend, who has turns out to have gottem himself a useful profession with a loving waifu and family.

[Kugelfisch]

I've been playing Trials Rising over the last two weeks. I've played every single Trials game (except for the browser game) and I'd say that it's the best one yet. Fusion was pretty great as well and I really miss the quad from that game. I do however like that you can progress without getting gold in everything and also that there's additionally platinum and diamond times so once tracks get really tough you can still go on if you only get bronze or silver and there's reason to come back to easy tracks for those plat and diamond times if one wants to.
Furthermore, occasionally you'll get a challenge to defeat three ghosts in a row on certain tracks for a champions box. That has pushed me to get gold on a very difficult track I've previously not even gotten bronze on.

Speaking of boxes, they are basically loot boxes. You get one normal box per level up and the contents change over time. The challenger boxes contain different stuff. I don't see how they make money from them, though. Every item in them can easily be bought with in-game currency but more importantly people can design their own stuff which you can also buy with in-game currency and it's usually much cooler stuff.
There are very few things you can only buy with acorns, the actual money currency, but those are just the few official things and only about a tenth of them and you can earn acorns as well.
So really, I have no idea why anyone would ever spend money on micro transactions in the game. Even whales won't really find something to buy in the first place.

Besides that, it's typical Trials. It's got tutorial levels now to teach you the basics and those get really difficult if you want to A+ them. Easy levels are easy, medium are medium, hard are mostly hard and Ninja are approaching impossible. Good old standard Trials fare that'll kick your ass.

[Kugelfisch]

I've also been made aware that Mordhau is finally out and played that for a bit.
So far it's pretty good. Thankfully, one can forego that mouse direction stuff and just bind the strikes to buttons so I've done that. It may sound odd to have 8 different attacks bound to mouse buttons but I'm used to that from Chivalry.
What I didn't expect was me mostly getting my ass kicked. I'm a beginner but I was actually very good in Chivalry and would've expected to do better.
One massive gripe: There is no Lucerne hammer! What the fuck, devs? All kinds of weapons are there but none of these bad boys:

SpoilerShow

A polearm on a roughly 2m long stick.

The pole axe (that's actually more of a halberd despite proper halberds being in the game as well) having the hammer part on the back and being usable when you switch hold slightly makes up for it but it's still not the real deal.

[mad bum]

Mordhau makes me annoyed that I bought the beta AKA chivalry.

[rabidtictac]

I wish consoles had some decent roguelikes on them. All the shit the consoles tout as "roguelike" are rogueLITES and mostly garbage ones.

I prefer playing on console because it's more comfy for a lazy faggot like me. It'd be awesome if a game like ToME got released for consoles. About the only way to play a console roguelike is to run Powder on homebrew. I've been in the mood for a nice roguelike but there aren't any outside of PC. Except Shiren which I've already played and which doesn't have classes in it or character building really.

[Some Sick Fuck]

Mordhau looks very interesting, like better Chivalry - which I've enjoyed a lot in the past, but I wasn't exactly crazy about it. I was thinking about getting it, but now I have another phase where I went back playing Battlefield - it's just the gunplay and combined warfare of BF3, BF4 and BF1 that really is a perfect fit for me - if only those games were better and didn't have big flaws that you run into from time to time, and braindead playerbase that most of the time doesn't care about teamwork.

Still not buying BFV, even if they keep teasing me with discounts. Fuck that game.