Sulphur on 11/3/2019 at 07:17

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With Supergiant's games, I've always found that while some of the individual gameplay elements aren't particularly compelling (Bastion's combat and upgrade Skinner box loop was okay, but didn't particularly stand out in the world of ARPGs; Transistor's tactical brawls could be difficult to parse at times; Pyre's... magical basketball is interesting even if it faces immediate resistance from my brain, as my cerebellum generally rebels at the idea of co-ordinated sport), the entire package of music, art, story, gameplay, and sound design is what transmutes their games into something truly special.

Hades seems like an interesting idea, what with the Sisyphean analogies and Greek culture's rich store of mythology to lend resonance to the underlying structure, but I'm hesitant to try it in EA for the very same reason as above. I'd rather the whole thing comes together instead of being occasionally underwhelmed by components that are blocked off by an UNDER CONSTRUCTION sign.

Thirith on 11/3/2019 at 08:04

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Talking of Hollow Knight: I'm just before the end, and once again I wish they didn't make you fight the Hollow Knight every time before you can fight the Radiance. Sure, the HK is pretty easy, but it still means several additional minutes for each attempt to beat the Radiance.

Ostriig on 11/3/2019 at 12:47

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After 130 hours sunk in since it came out in September, I finally completed Pathfinder: Kingmaker's main campaign last night. Excellent RPG, prickly software. Great character progression, combat and agency, good plotline, exploration and soundtrack. Visuals are ok, the game can show beautiful scens, but spends too much time on dull outdoors and the stylised art direction didn't do much for me.

The game's standout feature is ostensibly the Kingdom Mode, a management sim component which runs on a clock and takes up quite a bit of your time. In actuality, both the CRPG and the management sim parts of the game are interwoven and wrapped around a core calendar which, in conjunction with a rather nebulous network of other variables, will generate events to drive the plot forward like a tree spawning branches along its trunk.

As a general thing, I hate timed quests and I expected to hate all of this too, but I found it to be quite solid, surprisingly. It's a worthwhile concept which gives structure to your progression and a third dimension to your strategic resources - you're not just running on gold and XP, time is an ever-present factor. It has its problems in execution on balance and interfaces, and it can be extremely frustrating at times, but it's a fresh take and does its job as a framing mechanism. Oh, and random encounters, provisions, cooldowns, all of those things designers have tried to wean players off rest-spamming? Yeah, forget about it, Kingmaker's clock is like the aversion therapy scene in A Clockwork Orange.

On the tech side, its seedy reputation is well-earned, the game rolled out a couple of months too early with edges rough enough to cut and enough bugs for service to guarantee citizenship. Now patching a live product is much harder and, while I'm certain the high complexity makes for a QA nightmare, it's clear that Owlcat's processes aren't up to it and it's common for an update to fix two things and break a third. There's also a curious mix to Quality-of-Life features, you have some great implementations (e.g. party formations, area loot, difficulty), others inexplicably missing (edit appearence, gear visibility), and some designs which are downright frustrating (the suspiciously slow walking spead). For what it's worth, the devs have put in a lot of effort to mend their product, even improving load times and distribution, but while my slow playthrough was mercifully free of game-breaking bugs there's still the odd horror story popping up on the forums.

Anyway, I didn't mean to write so much. It's a great game and a mechanically better Infinity Engine successor than NWN, Dragon Age or Pillars of Eternity, but if you're interested arm yourselves with patience, both for its clunkier ideas and its technical shortcomings. I just picked up the DLC last night, I enjoyed the novelty of the kindgom mechanics but I'm eager to see how the game plays without them in Varnhold's Lot.

Malf on 12/3/2019 at 20:21

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Also Ostriig, while I haven't yet completed Kingmaker, I put a lot of time into it, and while I really have enjoyed it, once turn-based mode for POE2 was released that game completely stole Kingmaker's thunder for me.
If you haven't played it, I can highly recommend it. It really does feel like a true successor to the Baldur's Gate series, and is nowhere near as bogged down with stuffy lore as the first game.

Tony_Tarantula on 15/3/2019 at 15:23

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Am I the only one who thinks that 40k would be a great setting for a good CRPG? The setting is so massive that you could do quite a bit even with something generic like a Rogue Trader themed RPG. It would be dark and depressing as hell but that seems to be all the rage these days.