Following the high of Fallout 4’s world building and the low of Witcher 3’s combat, I needed to get something moving again.  I like action RPGs, where numbers mean something, tactics have an application and character progress means choices.  I’m somewhat saturated on Diablo 3 since the most recent season (with 2 GR60 geared players and a few in the wings), and Marvel Heroes suffering from too many superheroes, I’m back to Path of Exile.

PoE had an expansion this summer which added a new act, which is about 25% more content.  It tweaked a lot of the underlying numbers for balance, added some new items (jewels and trading cards), added some skills and just put a huge amount of polish overall.  PoE takes D3’s seasons and puts it on steroids.  It’s like every month there’s a new ladder going on, and each with an interesting twist.  The ladder that started on the weekend is a talisman ladder.

Random enemies (1 or 2 per map it seems) will have a talisman that boosts some of their stats.  I think there’s 9 base versions of it, and they roll just like any other amulet (normal, magic, rare).  There are stone circles found in every 4^th map or so, and if you put in 5 different talismans of the same rank, you fight a boss with a random talisman of the next rank.  The quality of that talisman is randomly selected from those you sacrifice.  Only rank 1 talismans drop in the world, so you need to use the stone circles to upgrade.  There are 4 ranks available.  To get that last one will take 125 rank 1 talisman.  My Witch is level 37 and is just shy of her first Rank 3 talisman.  So there’s certainly a long game for this league.

I’ve gone over the Path of Exile mechanics a fair bit in the past.  I find that the balance today is better than ever, in that there are no crystal clear OP builds.  It’s also harder to gimp yourself as scaling has been improved, and skill gem drops seem higher.  All in all, it’s a smoother curve.

There are only 3 drawbacks I see to the game, currently.

• You nearly always require the overhead map to be active. You can change the opacity (press “O”) but it’s still an eyesore
• The zones themselves are quite dark and large, making navigation difficult at times. It is very much like Diablo2, and a big split from Diablo3 and Marvel Heroes.
• Loot progression is slow. If you’re used to upgrading gear 2-3 times per zone, this game is not for you.  Gear is meaningful, and crap loot is plentiful.  It’s comparable to D3’s legendary upgrade pace, pre-season 4 (without Kunai’s cube).  Your mileage will vary.

But again, there are huge positives.

• Choices matter in the passive skill tree, as you can’t “reset” your choices past a certain point.
• There’s a ton of replay value through maps and gem upgrades
• Skill synergies can be customized. Want a fireball that chains, summons a zombie and weakens the group?  You can build that.
• The barter system, and item customization is the best in the business. You can take a crap item and turn it into an amazing rare item with perfect stats and gem slots, if RNGsus loves you.
• The combat and equipment art is amazing. Every character looks unique.
• The cash stop (since this is a F2P game) is entirely cosmetic. Has been since the start.  It’s probably Syp’s dream come true.

I’ll be leveling up the Witch a bit more, finishing up Act 4 tonight and then posting a bit on the character progression in future posts.  I’m enjoying using my brain for combat again, both in strategy (what skills to build/select) and in tactics (when to use them).

I wanted to give it another shake.  I dropped down the difficulty to rank 2 of 4.  This has 2 effects, the first of which is that enemies are apparently easier.  The second is that I now heal 24/7, whereas before I needed a “talent” to heal during the day.  I figured maybe it was the combination of load times and death in combat that was my problem.

Well, that’s not the issue.

Combat is just garbage, pure garbage.  Every fight is 4 on 1 or more.  You can’t see half the folks because they surround you (which is neat mind you) and they all attack in a staggered fashion.  Blocking either doesn’t work, or does and you get stunned.  Get 2 hits in, take off 10% of the enemy’s HP and then have to roll around like a gymnast to avoid everyone else swinging at you.  The entire combat feels like I’m avoiding 10 people continuously throwing knives at me.

And even if I manage to whittle them down to a single foe and just hammer them with blows, they end up blocking a third of them.  And once combat is over I’ve got damaged equipment, and no where to repair it.

But wait, there’s more.  The first “main map” is pretty big.  But I’ve yet to find a single enemy my level, most are 2-4 levels higher.  Heck, one town slightly off the main quest path had 10 enemies, 5 of which were level 16.  They killed me in 2 hits.  And it’s not like I can sneak up and take a couple out.  No, it’s 10 vs 1.  Why does that even exist within spitting distance of the main quest road?

Dying is one thing if you can avoid it.  I can’t avoid half the hits I take in this game due to the inability to cancel an action and inaccurate hit boxes.  In other words, while I’m in the middle of a swing, I can’t stop to block, even after I connect, until the sword animation is complete.  I also have no idea how big enemies hit boxes are so I end up missing my swings even though my sword goes through their characters.  And they manage to hit me by their combat animation causing them to take 3 steps forward in a swing.

Oh practice you might say.  Well, I can’t block or parry a downer or a ghoul, and that just leaves rolling around all over the place.  Really, that’s what people think are good combat mechanics?

I don’t mind a challenge, I really don’t.  I’ve played my fair share of hard games all the way through.  I think the hardest in mind was Ninja Gaiden Sigma on the hardest difficulty (that was batcrazy, and awesome at the same time).  But there was some sort of reward for it.  I didn’t end up with 2 monster teeth and a broken sword.  I progressed some story element.  I actually felt myself get stronger as I progressed.  After nearly 10 hours in the game, I feel  I’ve made no progress at all from an RPG-stats perspective, and just a dent in the main story.

I’m more confused than anything.  How a game gets this much praise, seems to fit my style (action + RPG + open world) yet so thoroughly hits bad vibe after vibe is a head scratcher.  I want to play the game people are fawning over.  Cause it just can’t be this.

After completing Fallout 4, and checking my mail, I noticed that Witcher 3 was on sale, something like 60% off.  Figuring it was a good deal for a good game, I gave ‘er a go.

I’ll be honest, I don’t get what people are all bonkers about.  The art/dialogue is pretty neat but the actual RPG mechanics are garbage.  Leveling doesn’t seem to imbue you with any concept of power.  Items are just numbers, the skills are bland and the combat is atrociously long.  To top it off, the saves are so far apart that you’ll have crossed half the map when you reload.  After what feels like 30 seconds of reload screen.

I’ll give an example.  In the starting zone there’s this one spot that’s defended by a bear.  A bear that can kill you in 2-3 hits.  A bear that has near a thousand hit points and your sword does 5-6 damage per swing.  So you need to use a fire spell to damage him.  Ok, but that thing takes time to recharge, so you’re dodging the bear while it does, which slows down the recharge.  And then you end up under a tree, the bear swipes you and you get to reload.  From start to finish it was a 5 minute fight.  And that wasn’t even the boss of the zone (a griphon)!

The story is neat, I’ll grant that.  The lore is clearly well thought out, the various characters are interesting.  Music is top notch.  The first load screen reminds you of where you are in the story.  Plenty of quests around, or at least areas of interest.  But those areas usually have 3 enemies and are over in 30 seconds.

I’m guessing it’s mainly due to coming from Fallout 4, where each area was unique and took a few minutes, or even 30, to clear out.

I’ll give it a few more sessions to wear in but I am quite disappointed with what’s here.

I think I’ve completed about 80% of the quests in Fallout 4 now, maybe a bit more.  I wouldn’t say I’ve played through 80% of the content though… I’d put that closer to 25%.  And I think that’s really the kicker for Bethesda games, in that they build a massive world to explore and the story is just an excuse to move around.

If I take the Fort Hagen portion of the main quest as an example, you’re tasked with finding the person who started the whole thing.  You find the building, he taunts you a few times and eventually you make your way to him.  The dialogue isn’t much, and the combat against the synths isn’t exactly mind blowing.  What is super cool is the actual fort.  And that goes for every other spot in the game, each completely unique.

Each room was designed, by a real person.  Each tin can, box of macaroni, each chair and table was put there by a person for a reason.  You might find a few corpses in a corner, surrounded by their old possessions.  You might find a terminal with someone’s logs, explaining how they tried to find a lost loved one.  There’s more story in the actual world than there is in any given quest or dialogue.

It’s even more contrasting when you look at the other games that have open world content.  Some of them have plenty to do but little to see.  Other it’s plenty to read but nothing to hear.  For all the fun had in GTA5, you can’t enter most buildings, so it’s just a bunch of roads to do stunts in. Mad Max is meant to drive through at full speed.  MGS and Just Cause are a lot like GTA5.  They aren’t bad, far from it, but they are different.  And I’m thinking it has to do with the RPG aspect.

Bioware used to build amazing worlds, with neat lore and cool characters.  The stories were amazing but the world’s themselves had interesting characters.  I preferred Pillars of Eternity to Dragon Age because the former had more charm.  Dragon Age just felt like an MMO without people.

And that’s a solid jab at MMOs by the way.  You’d be hard pressed to find one today where the world had any meaning to the players.  TESO and SWTOR are prime example of how the story and world are lost when you add 10,000 other players and everything has to respawn now.  You can’t appreciate the items on the table because JimBob#2828 has just finished looting it to buy a new leather thong.

World building is near entirely in the realm of single player games.  I find it completely fascinating to play through, and I really enjoy seeing neat little items that have no bearing on the greater game outside of providing context.  It’s really impressive what the tiniest of details can have in the big picture… if you have enough of them.

Well, more specifically with the endings, so spoilers ahead I guess.

I’ve completed the game with both the Institute and the Railroad, since both of those are pretty close together.  The Institute is an interesting organizations, very technocratic.  There’s a severe lack of empathy for anything not within field of view but they are also the only faction playing the long game.  They live in the shadows and are appropriately called boogeymen in the game.  It takes a very long time before you see an actual member, rather than just a synth.

The Railroad is a weird one.  One part underground railroad, one part freedom fighters… but against an oppressor no one understands.  While they want to stop the Institute, they also want to free all the synths.  And this is the really messed up part.

The Institute treats synths as objects, though they do have borderline sentience.  The Railroad thinks all synths should be free, though mostly for the gen3 versions, who look just like humans.  But the methods to get there are just…stupid.

Somehow, the Railroad thinks that by destroying the Institute that will free all the synths.  But the Institute continues to make synths.  So the Railroad is in effect preventing any future synths from being created.  Kind of a weird moral jumble.  But they talk about it.

There’s the 2nd to last mission for the Railroad and it’s to take out the Brotherhood of Steel.  Not once in any quest do they talk about the BoS, never do you cross paths.  But all of a sudden, you need to take them out.  And ALL of them.  I didn’t get that.

While I didn’t necessarily agree with the Institute all the way through as many of their justifications were flawed, at least they were consistent.  Find the smartest people in the commonwealth, offer them a padded and secured job to help humanity.  Hide as much as possible.  The Railroad was just “free the synths, kill everyone else”.

Time to load an earlier save and try the BoS path.  I’m not much of a fan of them in this game compared to others.  Maybe there’s some redemption to be found.

It wasn’t the best way to end last week.  Work’s insanity level has been steadily rising lately, and sort of blew it’s top.  Work-life balance isn’t working out as much as I’d like.  I got a message at 9pm on Thursday for an emergency meeting the next morning, fully across town.  For a problem that’s in no way my own to solve, it’s just that I have a reputation for fixing things.  Sunday night was more of the same, and my anxiety wasn’t being very cooperative.

The good news is that stress relief now comes in multiple forms.  Gaming, obviously.  Though Fallout 4 lately has been hitting the feels more than I had expected.  Hockey is another and I’ve been well enough to keep that going steady.  Painting works well.  Last night I was able to put the first coat of white on my E-web engineers.

The last item, and the one I seem to have more and more fun doing, is baking.  It’s one of those things where you need to take your time, be somewhat precise and it can take a long time to finish off. Oh, I like cooking too, but a 4 hour prep for a 45 minute meal isn’t the same.  I can make a pie that’ll last the week, muffins that can be frozen for longer.  And who’s ever said no to dessert?

Since there was a birthday part for my wife’s grandmother on Saturday, we got slotted for desserts.  My wife made some cupcakes with the kids, sprinkles and all.  I made my life harder.

Lemon Meringue tarts and a Maple Syrup pie.  Turned out great and didn’t bring a single one of them home.

Dang good tarts!

The Story is Important

I did get some Fallout 4 in over the last few days.  I’ve finished up the Minutemen and BoS quests, at least enough to get to the infinite-random-quest parts.  I’ve unlocked all the companions, received Mcready’s perk and started work on Deacon.  I’m about half way through the Railroad starter quests and got a nice Gauss weapon.  That thing is un-modded and deals over 200 damage, making me wonder if I should replace my Overseer’s 2x sniper gun… We’ll see.

I also decided to keep up with the main quest line. I headed out to the Glowing Sea (very appropriate name) and ended up finding the Synth courser through another quest.  I’m finding that story line very bland compared to all the sidequests though.  Virgil… when I met him I thought it would be an interesting chat.  Nope.  Just another fetch quest.  Which brought me to the USS Constitution, an actual boat stuck in a building, controlled by robots.  They had me fix their ship (various INT checks and one piece found in another building) and I eventually had to make a moral decision.  There are some scrappers around, and the ship looks like a gold mine to them.  And who’s to argue that robots are more important than food on the table?  I am, that’s who.  There was a neat couple battles on the side of the ship, shooting the canons no less.  The entire quest line had humor and gravitas, with a decent sprinkling of combat.  Aside from the Fort Hagg portion, the main quest line just seems to pale in comparison.  There’s certainly some neat sections – like exploring memories and whatnot – but for a “find your lost son” it sure had issues with pacing.

I think I’ll finish off the Railroad quests before getting back on the main quest trail.  I’m only a few steps shy of the Deacon perk anyhow.

Since my teenage years, I’ve been rather fascinated by miniatures.  I guess even when I was smaller, little toys allowed me to build big worlds.  When I moved out, I started picking up some Warhammer figures and then started painting.  The price point then, as now, was pretty crazy. The figures themselves were of high quality, certainly, but it was the paints that didn’t make much sense.  Paying $8 for a ½ oz pot of paint is crazy.  Finances and time pushed me away from it.

With boardgames making a rather interesting comeback to the social front, I’ve found a few that have miniatures within.  Oh, what I’d pay to have my old copy of Hero Quest back again!  It feels like I’m watching an ant farm, where the little peons move around in a larger context.  Oh, I’ve had my fair share of D&D but it is rather hard to teach someone to imagine a dragon.  If I put one on the board though, pow!  Dragon.

I decided to pain my Star Wars Imperial Assault figures.  While it’s not the game I play the most, it’s the one that’s the easiest to paint as the Imperial color scheme is monochrome.  When I looked at the options and it was either painting 10 stormtroopers or 10 zombies, the troopers won.  The real problem was about finding paint. After more time than I care to admit, I found some options.  My local craft store had a rather large selection of acrylics and washes, and all for extremely affordable prices. I finished up the troopers and started working on the e-web scouts.

I didn’t paint this.

I sprayed a white base coat, and then went to work on the first coat of black.  You can see that nearly 75% of the thing is black, so this should have been relatively quick.  I used 2 drops of paint (and some water to thin), and then took an hour to get all the nooks and crannies of a single piece.  I’m happy I started on the troopers, as they helped refine my hand work on painting.  While the scout took longer, it was a cleaner job too.  The next steps are a drybrush, some extra coating, a dark wash then finally highlights.  If my math is right, that’s about 90 minutes more work per figure.

As time consuming as it is, it’s also very calming.  You get in a zone and concentrate on something the size of a hair.  The kids are also rather enamoured with the prospect of painting tiny little things and then getting to play with them.  I was hesitant to get back into this hobby but I think I’ll stick with it for a few more weeks and see where it ends up.  I’ll just keep Vader as the final model, that’ll motivate me!

Building a Fake World in Fallout

I decided to take on the Silver Shroud quests recently.  Goodneighbour has a ghoul called Kent that runs a radio station, pushing out stories of what seems to be a bronze age comic hero.  Eventually you get pulled in to that that character’s costume, then go around giving vigilante justice to the nearby land.  It’s not terribly engaging, and aside from 2 characters, there’s really not much going on story wise.  The mechanism, getting your mission over a radio station, that’s pretty cool.

Anyhoot, I get to the last mission which send me to the southern edge of the map – not yet explored.  So I start moseying on down, taking care to unlock the nearby quick travel points for future use.  Along the path I find a junkyard.  All junkyards in this game feel like death traps and this one is full of super mutants.  Ain’t nothing I like more than to clear me out some super mutants.  A suicider nearly hit me with their nuke but otherwise it was a fun romp around old cars to get things cleared.  I ended up in the nearby house, looted some more and then found a computer.

There are 2 types of interactive computers – those that are locked and provide access to some information, door or safe, and then those that are unlocked and only provide flavor.  This was the latter one.  It was a log of the junkyard owner, a family man.  He talked about a bunker and how he had to teach his kids to find it.  I found it.

Heading in, it was basically a sunken rail car.  The front end had some shelves and a ham radio, which was broadcasting a distress signal.  The mid part had a mattress with 2 skeletons in a final embrace.  And then the back of the car had the wall knocked down a bit, so I went looking.  I didn’t get it at first.  Then I stopped and paid attention.  There was a baseball glove on one side and a teddy bear on the other, with a shovel in the corner.  Two little mounds.

Something inside me clicked, I saved the game and shut down for the night.

The wife and I played some Shadows of Brimstone over the weekend.  I have the Swamps of Death starter pack.  I’m looking forward to getting some of the expansion stuff mind you, though I realize it’s also in the last steps of delivering on the Kickstarter pledge.

Brimstone is a cooperative RPG miniature boardgam.  The co-operative aspect is really important.  My wife is not a boardgamer, whereas I was practically raised on Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit.  While I can certainly get behind competitive boardgames, that requires more than 2 people.  If it’s just my wife and I, then co-op it is, otherwise it’s just not really that much fun for either of us.

The game is set in a wild-west horror theme, very Cthulhu in nature.  Most missions have you gradually exploring tiles, ever expanding a map to your target.  There’s exploration and events on every tile, often times more than one.  The map itself is completely random, based on a set of card and die rolls.  The setup is actually pretty quick, though by the time we ended our last game, the entire kitchen table was full of stuff.

There’s a core mechanic of holding back the darkness that gets progressively harder to achieve the further you progress.  Failure here is pretty bad.  You could end up drawing more cards or unlock darkness itself, which usually boosts enemies.  One card we pulled added an extra attack die to an enemy type.  One that spawned in groups of 4+.  Still, it’s a fairly neat mechanic that pushes the whole risk vs reward mentality.  That extra draw may be the final one.

And then there’s combat.  There’s nothing terribly fancy here.  To Hit, Attack, Damage, Armor, limited skill usage…all staples.  The differences are in the number of enemies and the duration of combat.

I’ve played my fair share of combat games.  In games where there are a lot of enemies, they typically aren’t very strong.  Few enemies (say, parity or less), then the enemies are tougher.  D&D 3.5 had fewer enemies but more strategy, while 4^th had tons of enemies and everything was AE everywhere.  So if a board game should be completed in 2 hours, combat feels good around 1 hour total.  Maybe that’s just 3 fights the entire time, or it could be 10 times.  You just need more than combat and at least some light at the end of that tunnel.

Brimstone is an odd one.  The weaker enemy types usually start off by doubling/tripling the amount of players on the map.  Players are forced to “funnel” the enemies in tight tunnels to avoid getting swamped.  AE attacks are fairly limited, and difficult to pull off, so when it’s 2 players vs. 8 undead, it can be a grind.  Thankfully combat is quick in those scenarios.

The final fight of the run is different; it uses a much higher difficult pool for enemies and is compounded by a separate set of cards (related to holding back the darkness).  We decided to use a limited resource to eliminate those cards, but we cheated any took a peek anyways.  Had we flipped the card, we would have been ambushed by 2d3+4 undead – so, you know, lots.  On top of the 4 weak flyers and 3 strong tanks that were already on the board.

The flyers took a few rounds to drop, due to bad rolls.    My wife and I swapped rolling duties throughout, where we each played for the enemy.  She continually rolled 5/6 when playing as a bad guy and 1/2/3 when she was her PC.  For at least 30 minutes.  (Side note, she rolled so well, she killed my guy outright for more damage than he had base hit points).  We looked at the clock on the wall and realized at this pace it was another 15 minutes of combat, with our current luck streak.  So we invented some house rules to assist with rolling.  It worked out and we finished up the dungeon run.

I like boardgames that rely more on strategy than die rolls.  Pandemic is a good example.  Risk, to some degree.  Monopoly for sure.  The random element in gaming has its place but I’ve played enough snakes and ladders for my life.  Brimstone straddles that line something fierce.  The very limited resources in combat require you to think strategically, but a set of bad rolls can ruin your fun.  Having more players at the table certainly offsets that, and you gain more synergy between the various players.  I like Brimstone and certainly want to get an expansion.  I’ll just see if I can’t get another body at the table to help us out for the next round.