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Dec 31st, 2015 at 09:52:04 - The Banner Saga (PC) |
I didn't quite know what to expect from The Banner Saga. It looked like some sort of viking themed strategy RPG also consisting of leading a caravan from one place to another. I guess that's a decent description in actuality. The caravan gives it a distinct Oregon Trail feel. There's no dysentery, but some of my rations were poisoned, there were fights among caravan members, I ran into bandits, I did ford a river (chose that option as a nod to good ole Oregon Trail!), found lots of cities and ruins, and tons of other events. In that sense it reminded me also of Faster Than Light, or other roguelikes with various events that can happen on the journey. So...Oregon Trail + Faster Than Light + narrative Telltale Games + Shining Force II. If you like all those games, then The Banner Saga will gel with you.
The setting is distinctly bleak. It's set in a viking/Norse inspired fantasy world with rich history that you can explore by reading location descriptions on the map. There have been two great wars. Humans and varl (like viking giants) allied with each other against the dredge (a heavily armored race of humanoids who reminded me of white walkers). Like white walkers, the dredge invade from the frozen north and are relentless. They've got a leader like Night's King (Bellower). Bellower has a key weakness, just as the white walkers (not sure about Night's King), and I haven't read far enough in the Game of Thrones books to know if there are more big similarities. They're different enough, but I got a familiar feeling from the dredge.
You play as several different characters in the first chunk of the game, then it settles you into the role of a human named Rook for most of it. Simply put, the dredge are invading (supposedly) and you are trying to make it from A to B, and then when things go inevitably wrong, to C to D to E, etc. The flow of the game is nowhere as simple or predictable as "go from A to B, event happens, go from B to C, event happens, go from C to D..." You might pass through a town on the way to your main destination and find that there is a little civil war going on within its walls. Will you deal with that or leave them to their fighting? Depending on your choices, you'll gain or lose followers, gain/lose rations, morale, renown, etc. So you eventually leave, and are quickly set upon by a faction from that town who, for example, is pissed off that you intervened. Do you fight them, convince them to come with you, run away? Again, more consequences. Then maybe your scouts spot a huge dredge force ahead. Do you charge, go around, camp out for a while to see what they are doing, try to split their forces, lead them back to the other town? Again, consequences. And so on.
All of these choices and consequences feel very significant. You have a lot of resources to think about when making decisions. You have some number of regular caravan travelers (like normal townsfolk), human fighters, and varl. These can fluctuate. Have a lot, and you go through rations faster. Don't have enough, and some of the larger "war" fights will be tough and you'll incur more losses. Did you run out of rations? Great, then every day people in your caravan will die and morale will drop faster. But hopefully that next town has a market with some rations. Or oh! I'm stumbled upon a small farm with some animals. Do I pillage it or be nice and leave the farmers alone and starve until the next town. When I get to town, I can spend renown (global experience points basically) on rations, on promoting my warriors, or on purchasing equippable items. Which is more important? Should I starve more to promote that varl to level 5? Is not starving and having higher morale better for the caravan than promoting my warriors? If I have high morale, then all my units in combat get willpower bonuses (essentially more extra attack power or actions). Or I can let morale drop so they get no bonuses or even take penalties, but purchase a nice new item or promote a character or two. AAAAAAAAAAAH!
I would literally sit in front of the screen for 10 minutes at a time weighing options. These decisions are brutal because there isn't enough of any resource to go around. You will starve. Your morale will drop. You will not promote all your warriors as much as you wish you could. You will not buy many of the items. It is a fact of life in The Banner Saga.
Combat is of course a huge part of the game. It's familiar grid-style strategy RPG combat like your Shining Force II, Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea, etc., but is fresh too. Every character has 5 stats: armor, strength, willpower, exertion, and break, plus one passive ability and one active special ability. Strength doubles as attack power and health. So the more strength you lose, you are not only closer to death, but you don't hit as hard. Losing strength can severely weaken a character and make things difficult. So to counter that, get armor! Usually, you have to whittle down an enemy's armor to do much strength damage. So for example, I have 12 armor and 12 strength, and an enemy has 10 armor and 10 strength. If I make a strength attack against him, I will do 2 by default (my 12 strength - his 10 armor = 2). If he attacks me at full strength, he will do 1 (10 strength - 12 armor = a base damage of 1; you'll always do 1). Or will you? If I have more armor than he has strength, he gets a 10% penalty on chance to hit (which is otherwise always 100%). So really, he has an 80% chance to hit me for 1 strength damage.
So what you do is get their armor down by choosing an armor break attack (modified by your armor break stat). So if you're only going to do 1 damage to an enemy's strength, you might want to hit him for 3 armor instead, which will make it easier to do more strength damage later. This all makes perfect sense once you are playing! Willpower comes into effect because it allows you to modify damage. If I have one willpower, I can use a special attack (costs 1 for each level, up to 3), or I can add a damage to a regular attack. To add damage though, I need points in the exertion stat, which determines how much willpower I can use during an action. So if a character has 3 exertion, and has the available willpower, he can really clobber an enemy. If he would only do 1 strength damage normally, for example, he can use willpower to do 4. Yay! Exertion and willpower will save you a lot and are very useful. All the stats are very useful and, like the other resources, you will not be able to max out all the stats even if you promote the character all the way. You always have to choose wisely!
Finally, the art and music are fantastic, and I enjoyed the story, even though it didn't really resolve. Apparently there is another Banner Saga game in development and these will be just parts of a larger story or something. I dunno. I could have kept playing this for a long time so I was a little bummed when it ended. It doesn't end abruptly or anything. It is very climactic. But it is obvious that the story isn't finished. I really want a sequel.
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Dec 30th, 2015 at 08:53:10 - The Walking Dead: Season Two (PC) |
Played through this with A over several days recently. Like the first one, we thoroughly enjoyed it. Plenty of extremely tense parts. Clementine has grown up a bit and is tougher and more weathered. The main difference we identified between the two is that the first season was more about interpersonal drama and this season is more about surviving. There were far fewer dialogue decisions where saying one thing would alienate someone or make them like you and treat you better, where giving or withholding information would impact something meaningfully down the line. I remember in the first season constantly trying to manage others' impressions of Lee. It was more of a character development journey and a journey to help Clem. Decisions in this one are more likely to be about how to best not die. And Clem's group gets into some serious situations! Also, much appreciated improved action sequences, yay.
One cool thing is that there are 5 endings and some of them are vastly different than the others. Season 3 is going to be interesting because it will have to deal with such diverse beginnings. I have no idea how they will weave these endings together. I hear season 3 is on the horizon.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Dec 30th, 2015 at 09:02:08.
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Dec 26th, 2015 at 10:45:03 - Child of Light (PC) |
Really cool RPG! The first thing you notice is how beautiful the art is. I stopped for screenshots several times throughout when I was particularly impressed with some background or another. This is a fairy tale, sufficiently dark and light-hearted at the same time. A cast of interesting characters with good back stories that motivate them to fight alongside you make the game charming and thoughtful. For example, your first companion is a jester who was left by her brother and the circus she wants to be a part of. She's sad about being abandoned, but you promise to help her find the circus. Later on, you find her brother. You expect this to be a happy reunion, but her brother is perpetually sad about life, has lost the circus, but does get excited to put his jester skills toward your cause of saving the world.
Everyone talks in rhyme. The entire game, it's all in rhyme...except the first jester you get, who humorously does not or cannot rhyme, and is always being corrected by another character. The rhymes aren't always clever or clear, but they work, and after getting used to this style of dialogue, the story becomes easier to follow.
Gameplay wise, Child of Light is different than many RPGs. It's a 2d sidescrolling game, no different there necessarily, but you end up being able to fly around, which gives nice verticality to all the environments. Check high, check low. There are a lot of treasure chests and things to find, so item hunters will be happy there. A big mechanic is using light via a little elemental character whom you control with the mouse (while controlling Aurora with the keyboard). You're in this world with "dark creatures" who dislike light, so you can move the elemental over them and then touch them to get a surprise attack. I got surprise attacks on enemies probably 98% of the time. That just means you begin earlier on the timeline. You also use the elemental to shine light on objects to create shadows and solve some (easy) puzzles.
So, engage an enemy and enter combat as normal in an RPG. You can have two characters out at any time, and the enemies can number up to three. There is a "timeline" and each character's portrait moves along it. When it reaches a certain point, you can input a command, then that character will take a specified amount of time (short, medium, long, etc.) to execute the command, then return to the beginning of the timeline. If a character is attacked while they are in this "casting" phase of the timeline, they get interrupted and bumped way back. If you defend, then an enemy won't knock you back and you'll go like 70% faster through the timeline until you act again. This becomes very strategic, trying to manipulate enemies on the timeline and interrupt their attacks while not being interrupted yourself. This is made easier by your elemental, whom, like outside of battle, you may use to blind enemies. Hover the elemental over enemies and hold down the left mouse, and they will slow down on the timeline. In this way, you can make enemies move slow or normal (in addition to all the spells you have to slow them down and speed you up), and can really master characters' movement across the timeline. It's fun.
The rest of battle is fairly standard. You have spells, physical attacks, buffs, debuffs, items, defend, blah blah. Child of Light uses a rock-paper-scissors system for what elements are strong and weak against others (fire is strong against earth, weak against water; water is strong against fire, weak against lightning; etc.) One of your characters is an elemental magic user, and I used him and Aurora for the majority of the game to exploit magic weaknesses. Oh, and you can also refill some health and mana during battle by moving the elemental over these plants from time to time. All that said, combat is generally very easy and becomes routine, although I never got to the point of tedious. Some of the later boss battles were a little challenging. I'm not sure I ever died.
There are standard skill trees. You go far through these because you level up constantly. There's also a nifty little crafting system. You get these things called oculi, little crystal fragments, and you mix and match them to create better ones, then equip those for various effects. I never really bothered equipping anyone with anything at all except diamonds, which increase experience gain. You find so many of these oculi fragments that it becomes a lot of management if you're equipping, unequipping, crafting, all the time. Just toss on +XP diamonds, craft diamonds, and go on your way.
SO, I recommend. It's not long. Took me 11.5 hours, and you can play in short spurts. I'm glad Ubisoft has been making some neat little games aside from their mega-hits. I've got Grow Home in my library, which also promises to be an interesting little experiment!
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Dec 19th, 2015 at 16:25:39 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC) |
Been playing lots of Skyrim the past couple weeks, and I think I've almost exhausted it. I've put in 79 hours according to Steam, systematically exploring Skyrim and doing quests along the way. I've worked most of the way around the map and basically have the lower left quadrant left. I've done some of Markarth and the only other hold is Falkreath. Tons of cool little stories collected over these 79 hours, but I am getting tired of all the "side" stuff and want to just finish up the main quest lines and call it. There must be hundreds of locations on the map. If you are trying to walk from A to B, it is inevitable that you'll find like 2 caves, a barrow, a watchtower, and about 3 other interesting things along the way. Needless to say, for the explorer, it can take a long time to get places!
I've still got the Companions, the Thieves Guild, the Dark Brotherhood, and then the main main stuff about the Dragonborn and the Stormcloaks. The Companions and the Thieves Guild I have to record for a project, which is why I've put them off. Anyway, I think I will do the Companions next, do my work in the game, and otherwise set it aside for a little bit and get through another couple games during the break, and pick Skyrim back up later.
I've gotten most of the achievements, except for those related to quest lines that I've mentioned, and a couple randoms like "Escape from jail" and "Get a 10,000 septim bounty in every hold" and "Have 100,000 septims" (I'm relatively close on that one, which is crazy.) My character is an absolute badass by this point. She's a one-handed sword and shield master, heavy armor master, high restoration and destruction, and I'm currently leveling archery for fun when I'm fighting easier enemies. Alteration is also over 50, pickpocketing is over 50 for the second time. I made that one Legendary (oooh, ahhh) which just means I got it to 100, and then reset it so I could keep using pickpocket to level. I'm not doing that for one-handed swords, blocking, or heavy armor because I need those to survive!
I will say that one of my favorite things is my constant stream of followers and companions who die in funny ways (falling off a cliff, splash damage from my fireball, stepped in the middle of a fight between a dragon, mammoth, and giant, etc.). One of my least favorite things is hands down the dragons. These were super cool at first, but now they are annoying. Dragons seem to spawn fairly randomly outside small towns and will begin terrorizing them, strafing fire breath and whatnot. When a dragon comes, you just have to deal with it or run away until it leaves you alone. They're not hard to kill, but they are tedious because you can't do much to damage them until they land. So you just mill about healing yourself and tossing the odd fireball at the dragon until it decides to land, then hack at it until dead or until it flies up again, and repeat.
I will also say that I don't use many of the shouts. Every now and then I'll use the force one that stuns enemies. Then I realized that I don't use the other shouts and I started trying to use the other shouts. One slows down time and isn't that useful because you slow down too. Another makes your weapon attacks faster, but doesn't work on enchanted weapons (and why wouldn't you have an enchanted weapon?) so that is useless. I dunno, I thought the shouts would be cooler, but they're really not. Meh.
Companions, here I come. Werewolf time!
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