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Comments
^^Yes, they are. Reload your Steam Store page.
Yeah, AC3 is 25% off.
Huh. Must have had a delay.
Okay, I bought G&K as well as the GotY upgrade and Korea (which is the one DLC civilization not included in GotY or G&K). I figure that'll get me at least one or two more campaigns worth of enjoyment out of Civ.
So I bought FTL yesterday for £3.50 and its hard as balls
It's a Roguelike. It's supposed to be. Play on easy mode for your first few runs.
And don't jump next to suns. I know there's no way to tell if you're going to, but don't.
Yes I know about not jumping near to suns.
Especially when they throw a boarding party into the mix as well.
how do you people have this much time for all these games holy fuck.
I still haven't finished anything I bought at the last Steam sale.
I don't. I probably have 50-60 games on Steam that I either haven't played or haven't played much of. It's a sickness.
If I buy a ton of things all at once I often forget I even have them. I still haven't even finished Torchlight 2.
we don't play games we collect them
I still haven't even finished Torchlight 1.
I haven't either, though I doubt I'll ever get around to that one.
Yeah, I pretty much gave up on Torchlight.
On the other hand, Bastion proved to be a fine purchase.
I have heard nothing but praise for Bastion and still do not have the slightest inkling what it's about.
It's...kind of hard to explain without spoilers.
Basically, you wake up to find your civilization's been completely wiped out (to the point that your bed is sitting on a rock in the sky). You then have to travel to the Bastion, where everyone was supposed to go in case of a disaster, and from there a narrator guy with an awesome voice helps you rebuild.
Emphasis on the narrator guy with an awesome voice. It's almost as if somebody gently but softly made out with your ears and then cuddled with it until the end of time.
More seriously, you're a Kid who just saw the end of the world as you know it, and you and a survivor (The narrator) go out to rebuild it. It has a sort of Shadow of the Colossus vibe in that it's very fairy-tale-like in its outwward simplicity but there's a somewhat more complex narrative at play if you pay attention to the details and the sights around you. Though, unlike Shadow, most of that narrative is eventually explained and brought to the foreground
I can't bring myself to find much interest in Bastion after giving it a few more hours of play time. The game's aesthetics are wonderful, the narration is excellent and the game mechanics are... a thing. I guess that's one of my problems with it -- it's just not that much fun to actually play, at least for me. It's not that the game is badly designed from a mechanical point of view. Far from it. Everything is really tight and very deliberately balanced. But under all the narration, art, music and so on is a very expertly executed version of a gameplay system we've all played before.
Playing Bastion, for me, is like staring into the dread, eldritch eyes of the elephant in the room, and I almost get the impression that the very standard gameplay system was meant to be a delivery method for everything else in the game rather than designed to excel in its own right. It has the qualities of an afterthought, despite its fine-tuning and impeccable balance, as though creating a gameplay system as fresh as the presentational elements of the game was somehow unimportant.
And yet you like The Witcher. (referring exclusively to the first game)
Playism continues its Christmas sale by...instead of making people solve puzzles, limiting when you get discounts on each game.
Here's their full schedule:
http://playism.blogspot.jp/2012/12/dec26thjan6th-special-coupon-giveaway.html
I'm guessing that last one is La-Mulana.
What do people know about King's Bounty?
I've heard some good things about the gameplay of Armored Princess, but otherwise all I know is that Armored Princess has a hilariously-costumed fanservice-oriented female character on the cover.
There's more to The Witcher than the combat.
In one of the early chapters, you have to unravel a mystery and find which person out of however many suspects is connected to a nefarious cult. This investigation makes up almost the entire chapter, which itself takes place in a city. While there's not exactly a lack of combat, so as to keep things a bit dangerous, the emphasis is very definitely on uncovering information and effective investigation. So there's the hidden essence of a point-and-click adventure game in that chapter, where the whole idea is to take the information you've gained and come to a reasonable conclusion about it.
The Witcher is versatile like that, and not only in quest design. There's also the potion-brewing mechanic, which I find rewarding and fun because of how it lines up with the lore and therefore the narrative. One of a Witcher's special traits is their capacity to drink potions that would kill, cripple or infect a regular human being, so they tend to know a thing or two about brewing them as well. You can buy these ingredients or find them yourself, so you might find yourself on the lookout for certain ingredients to face a particular challenge. Pretty much like a Witcher would. Both games put you in direct control of the means by which you brew these potions, which potions you make and which challenges you use them on. A lesser developer might have made the potions part of cut scenes, might have generalised their effects or cut any number of other corners, but the potion-brewing here has a special detail and emphasis.
The Witcher kept me engrossed because there was so much vibrance in it, despite its imperfections. Even the combat system. If you take into account that CD Projekt Red were using the Aurora Engine, what they accomplished with it wasn't half bad, and managing to actually get a dodge mechanic and a timed combo mechanic out of it says a lot about how far they went with the tools they had. There's a lot of love and passion in that game, but also a great deal of focus. Every quest is designed with clear goals, but there's also strong diversity in the quests you're given. Find the cult. Uncover the identity of the werewolf. Lay the wraiths to rest peacefully. Dispel the spectral hound.
So yeah. The Witcher is held together by spit and gum, but I can't not love it for the way it commits to its own goals and its desire to try new things. Even something as simple as changing weapons from damage bonuses to percentage modifiers of core skills made a huge difference, and displayed a lot of understanding in player psychology. Or the way the leveling system encouraged branching out with diverse skills rather than committing to a single path by rewarding the player with different kinds of leveling resources. And so few games tackle the idea of different kinds of good rather than a good/evil dichotomy that I'm willing to give The Witcher favour for that as well.
The difference here between Bastion and The Witcher is that Bastion's gameplay is largely restricted to moving about the levels and fighting enemies. This isn't true of The Witcher. Gameplay is also choosing a dialogue option that could change the course of the event, but by extension, it's also the thought process of coming to your decision. And since there's no system that easily incentivises one option over another (such as the one in, say, Mass Effect), that process is much more thoughtful than it is in most games. Both Witcher games are fantastic at preventing you from being an observer by this method, because by providing the depth they do, they ensure that your thought processes are as much gameplay as pressing the buttons.
My point, though, is that the combat in The Witcher is more-or-less several hours of mindless clicking in between the good bits. And yeah, the good bits are quite good for the most part; otherwise I wouldn't have finished it.
At least something interesting is happening during the bulk of Bastion, in the form of narration.
I guess it depends on how good you find the good bits to be, and whether they outweigh the not-so-good bits.
Combat isn't as much the overpowering bulk of The Witcher as you say, though. Most of the combat is a ferrying device between narrative beats, that bloody swamp excepted.
You spend a huge amount of time in The Witcher engaged in combat, though. There's definitely narrative there, but you still spend upwards of 75% of the time playing the game either running around between areas or engaged in combat.
A ferrying device that takes up the majority of the game.
just like transportation does in real life!sorry
75% is a push. I'd say that's accurate for the final chapter of the game, when everything reaches its climax, but the rest of the game has too much moving about in "safe" areas (or at least areas that are contextually safe) to reach that kind of intensity. There are "dungeon" areas (like caves and hideouts) which are composed almost entirely of combat dotted about, but with the exception of those, field combat is pretty light outside of the swamp.
Most of the game's content is contained within the first three (of five) chapters, all of which throw emphasis on investigation and social interactions over combat. They also take place in relatively safe areas during daylight hours, and even at night, combat isn't particularly intensive. Even then, only the final chapter makes the true bulk of its content the combat, as is fitting for a climax. So most of your time is going to be spent working things out in a more pedestrian context unless you actively seek out dangerous areas, or find yourself in them for some other reason.
This may have been the case for you. But I found that I was fighting as the exception outside designated "dungeon" zones, and those dungeon zones weren't a massive part of the game's content.