What are you playing currently?

!g*mers

Previous Iterations:

2024

2023

Other rDrama vidya content

Last week's game: Touhou

Final Score: (10*6+9*3+8*7+7*3+6*1+5*2+4*1+3*1+2*1+1*1)/(6+3+7+3+1+2+1+1+1+1) = 7.31

All Previous Games:

Game to Discuss?

Broforce! A tribute to 80s action movies, it's a cut above the average pixelslop, with a worryingly destructible world, and a giant cast of characters. The story, inasmuch as there is one, is a bog standard "america bad" parody. Even though you might be in a jungle, the enemies are still terrorists who hate our freedoms. Despite this, it's in no way "woke," the love for the source material is clear, and the terrorists make for uncomplicated bad guys who you have to kill, with no whinging about their humanity. Vote below in the pinned comment.

Future Game Discussions

December 1: The Stanley Parable

December 8: Nethack

December 15: FFXIV

December 22: Call of Duty (2003)

carp, capy, geto, donger pin please

Imo the game still lacks a lot of depth but at least they did it for free.

I agree. They've widened the pond but it's still an inch deep. And the procedural generated creatures are still generally kind of...boring.

The gameplay loop in general just doesn't do it for me. It's the same issue Starfield has, I think...the idea that you're exploring a galaxy is somewhat undercut when there are outposts and trash everywhere you go. You're not braving a few frontier, you're playing interstellar janitor.

(EDIT: A name)

I've never played, but that's the general consensus I've seen. The game itself is still fairly shallow, but the fact that they actually bit the bullet, did the work, and did all of this shit for free is very commendable. They could have stopped way before this, but they've gone above and beyond the amount of free updates

I gotta tell you it's an inattentive ADHD 's dream game though. You can drop it and pick it right back up a year later. The lack of depth means I'm ok to play for an hour or less. I have no worries about forgetting the story, forgetting what I was doing. I can do anything I want to at the whim of my silly brain. Just chefs kiss for this very particular kind of brain.

Still not a game for me but, them not giving up and putting out as much content as they did is honorable.

They still need to hire someone from iD Software to revamp their entire ground combat, then dump a full expansion that makes 100s of procedural side quests to do while in space.

My biggest issue has always been the gunplay feels god awful, the UI is god awful, the tedium is still there, and the story and side quests are terribly bland.

Once they fix those things it may go down as one of the best games ever made, but until then it's still a 7/10.

Idk why it's popular as it is. It really is just still super empty and tedious to do everything with a horrible ui.

I guess I beat the main quest of the game but I still have no clue what the frick is going on or what the point of anything is.

Good for Hello Games. I'll still never forget Sean Murray straight up lying about multiplayer prelaunch tho. Kinda crazy how they weren't sued into oblivion for that. Definitely not buying their next game at launch. I'll wait at least a year or two.

But Sean Murray lied up to launch, during launch, and post launch, and never has actually apologized for this. There's no excuse, he was on Stephen Colbert on Launch Night and said the game had multiplayer and you could see other players, though the chance was small.

That turned out to be a lie entirely, as the game has no netcode at all, no way to do what he claimed it could do. And it didn't, for a long time.

Besides the fact that he said the story was really interesting and the secret at the center of the universe would "Blow everyones minds", when in reality all it was is the same STARTED OVER in a new universe, it really felt, even for a few years after launch with updates being added, that the game had no real purpose.

!g*mers !enemiesofcarp !friendsofcarp

So, this is a bit late, I celebrated Thanksgiving a week early so didn't have time to play, so let's pick up where we left off.

So it's well known that, at some point, this game was planned to be a live service title. You can see a bit of that in the faction areas.

You earn rep, there are rep grinds, and unlock rep tiers, to get new items from rep merchants. Kinda like Destiny.

The Veil Jumpers want us to find their missing remembers a check in on a town that's gone dark. All your current party members (4) come with, which makes me wonder why they reduced the party size to 3 . On the way to the village the game takes the opportunity to show case 1 of the only 2 thing your party members are good for. Puzzles, kinda, will get to that later.

I'll say this about the art direction of it really does take the bite out of the mysticism and grandeur of a lot of thrse places we've only heard about in the previous games [emphasis on games]. I guess that's an inevitability when it comes to AAA soulless slop

The blighted village segment is another talkie hallway, I guess they were trying to build atmosphere here m, but the lighting is too bright and the cringe writing prevents anything from seeming eerie like blighted infestation used to be.

It ends with what a lot of people are calling a moral quandary, it's not really as rook is hard coded as good in their background, but yeah you get to choose to either free the mayor or leave him to die.

We return to the Veil Jumpers to report that the mystery neighbors have control of and are spreading the blight. Nostalgia then makes a cameo

I saw a crow flying around throughout arlathan and suspected it was her. As one would imagine, since near not a darn thing carries over from the previous games her appearance boils down to "Remember me tis I Morrigan, witch of the wilds, I'm important!"

We're nudged to return to the ritual site to find a mcguffin. At this point the skill tree is made available to me.

It creates the illusion of depth, lots of increase by 5% and all that crap, not much in the way if actual abilities and what little there are pretty underwhelming, and doesn't nothing more than scratch the enemy. I suspect this is largely due to me playing rogue. I felt all the promotional materials leading up to the game and the stylistic choices when it comes to abilities were encouraging to player to play a mage. The mage, from what I've seen, seems to have the most thought put into it as well. You get 3 mage party members in this game though so frick that.

We encounter more new darkspawn, look how they massacred my hurlock boi. At this point enemies become more spongey, particularly the Hurlocks that engage in spear chucking. The bow is this game low key kinda shit. It's like a shitty version of the Kingdoms of Amalur bow, particularly because Veilguard combat is largely dueling, like stellar blade, where as Kingdoms of Amalur is more action packed and the bow is meant to integrated into combos with other attacks, same can't be said for the Veilguard which results in one-sided sniper battles. The ranged units aren't any softer upclose either, and the game's parry system shits itselfif a ranged enemy is compelled to shoot you point blank.

After traversing the rest of the ruins we finally corner the ghoul who to Solas' mcguffin. This boss fight was kinda tedious, not a fan of bosses dipping out for a bit and summoning henchmen to distract you especially in multiple phases. After the first phase Harding pick up the mcguffin and turn into bullshit. I DID like how she girl bosses you out the way though.

This is when the game introduces the only other feature that companions are good for, combos.

This pretty much the extent of the combat usefulness of your party members, which is what I suspected would be the case when I saw the companions didn't have health bars in the gameplay reveal. I really hated this aspect about thw mass effect games, squadmates by and large just felt like dead weight compared to party members in other RPGs and you have even less control over your party in the Veilguard, and not only that their abilities are a on a global cooldown as well, so you're resigned to watching the spectacle of your party member leaping around launching impotent attacks dramatically while doing something actually worthwhile once every 60 seconds or so. Rook's abilities are fortunately not constrained in this manner, at least on the rogue.

So we beat the boss, retrieve the mcguffin get a scene with tge mystery neighbors, which I got to say, Ghilan'nain looks pretty cool. With the mcguffin in hand you now can use it to emulate any unlocked companions unique puzzle power, making them even more useless We return to the lighthouse and I decide to change my Rook's hair.

Have another conversation with Solas and then set off following leads on the mystery neighbors around Thedas this leads us to the crossroads

which is a sort of hub area between the various zones in the game. It has side content of its own, which are mostly flashbacks of Solas' rebellion against the gods

He had hair back then. These are kinda shit, narratively, so far, they do really portray the world Solas described at the end of trespasser and as of now are only focusing on the two currently free mystery neighbors and not the rest pantheon. From the crossroads we can unlock Treviso and Dock Town for now.

Treviso is

Seems they didn't completely nerf the cake in this game The Qunari military has invaded Treviso for some reason. Antiva has now standing army, just the reputation of it's infamous assassin's guild, a reputation that's changed for the altruistic. This once pragmatic league of assassins have now take on responsibility of protecting the citizens from the qunari and disturbing le heckin' wholesome shelter and welfare.

The crows tell you of Lucanis one of their mage killers that's locked in a underwater prison. Like most underwater sections in my experience, this place kinda sucks, it's boring and tedious to navigate through (yes I'm aware it is a circle, but it's a lumpy disjointed circle. Lucanis doesn't preform any better as a melee character than the, thus far range party members I've been working with so far. The final boss of the area is the most bullet spongy enemy I fought so far and he's protected by a barrier which I'm apparently supposed to use my rubber band arrows against. After about 25 minutes of peppering this dude I finally beat him and get lucanis as a companion.

Next stopDock Town

I get Dock Town is a slum but it really doesn't live up to the hype of tevinter that the 2018 showed off with all the magical neon signs and such.

Here you help the shadow Dragons fighting off venatori and learn they can control the darkspawn courtesy of the mystery neighbors.

This mission ends in another mage boss fight, though thankfully not as bullet spongy, just henchman spamming. With these two missions complete the game opens up and let's you engage in side missions.

I decided to help out neve in Dock Town. This turned out to be another talkie hallway mission, and there's a pattern here, as all companion's first missions are like this.

Decide on ripping the bandaid off of the black character immediately, and went on the mission to recruit Davrin.

So far he's okay on his own, and I really like his interaction with shrimp fried rice, a good depiction of elves from the sane culture, but different clans and circumstances in life, for this game at least. I didn't realize however that recruiting Davrin would immediately railroad me into a major choice involving the fate of two major cities and the side quest with in them .

I spring for Neve's city and was confronted by the spongiest most bullshit boss fight thus far.

After finally chipping away at enough of this b-word's hp to trigger her retreat the gang heads back to Treviso to find it fricked up. Lucanis is surprisingly level headed about things, but leaves the party for a bit and is hardened. I'll pause her for now and hopefully pick up sometime later next week. So far the game suffers from the same slow start inquisition did, but doesn't have the mechanical depth or the filler to experience it in of that game. There are few plot hooks however the motivate me to keep on trudging along.