Video Games General

Fucking X-Com 2. I got to try it out recently, just to see what all the hype was about. My own computer is a potato, but one of my friends agreed to let me play on his computer as long as he was allowed to watch.

First impressions after a four hour binge session:

- does everyone on the Avenger speak weirdly? They all have that same dramatic pause before "... Commander". It started getting a bit annoying after a while
- the RNGesus is a cruel and spiteful mistress. I have had to watch my favorite soldier get shot in the face by an Advent Officer after not one, not two, but three separate overwatch shots missed him completely
- grenades are your best friends. They do AOE damage, destroy cover and never miss. Use them as much as possible
- the idea of swording aliens to death lost most of its appeal after the Ranger accidentally triggered another group of enemies while charging forwards to finish off that one last Sectiod
- it's really hard to resist the urge to save-scum after a failed mission
- it's really hard to resist the urge to throttle the friend who's laughing at you after a failed mission
- I did not realize that Specialists could hack from afar until after the timer had run out
- Hacking sucks in the early game. I have been told that it improves significantly around the time I start meeting more robotic enemies
- What do you call a Sharpshooter who misses a 93% shot? Alien bait.
- I have no idea who designed the Vipers, but I hope they burn in hell. Seriously, it's not bad enough that they spit poison, but they also have that horrible "yank someone into close range and hug them to death" ability. What kind of lunatic thought that was a good idea?
- Apparently the late game enemies are worse. Bloody hell.
- the combat missions are exciting, but the base building and character generation parts are also surprisingly fun to mess about with
- watching a soldier that you've spent ages creating get killed on his first mission due to RNG shenanigans is just heart-breaking (goddamned Vipers)
- it's really hard to concentrate on playing when your friend is being a backseat driver. Yes, I know that there's still that one enemy on the roof. You don't have to remind me a bajillion times!

All in all, a pretty cool game. Loved the design, though the story seems a bit lackluster thus far (Who is the Commander anyway? And why is he so important to everyone?). Would definitely play again - if I can get my own copy so that I can play it alone.

 

Creed.

Also, word of advice: If you do the Alien Rulers chain, console commands are not considered cheating by the community. The Rulers are fucked-up beyond all recognition and won't be patched, so feel free to literally cheat your way past them. Like holy hell are they poorly designed.

So everyone knows: They get an action after each action your squad takes. Reload? ACTION! Shoot? ACTION! Go into overwatch? ACTION! Move? ACTION ACTION ACTION. Throw on the fact that they have stupid amounts of health and armor, can appear in time-sensitive missions (complete X objective in so many turns), and then can run away like little bitches after killing almost everyone in the squad coupled with rewards that are 'eh' at best has generally made the fans go "Yeah, these things are fucking bullshit." I literally enable commands, kill the ruler, and then disable commands. Because fuck those things.

 

> Get an action every time any of your soldiers so much as twitch



Wat. That sounds... seriously broken. I get the idea that X-Com 2 is trying to treat its players like Dark Souls ("Git gud or you die"), but that sounds like it's crossing the line from "punishingly hard" to "fuck this, I'm modding the game to give me god mode cheats".

And this is an official DLC?! Like, I could understand if it was some optional fan modding for "hardcore" players, but when you've got story elements connected to this people kinda have to take it if they want the full game.

At least Shen's Last Gift seems to not be as soul crushingly difficult. I'm not a big fan of the robot things in the trailer, but I have to admit that they do look kinda interesting. I can see myself maybe running one mech as the squad's tank, but I dunno if they'd be viable in the later levels.

Also, in my last mission I had my first encounter with the Codex. Was not expecting that at all, though I have to admit it was a cool way to show story progression. Was that just a one-off boss monster or are there more like it?

Because seriously, who the hell decided that having a teleporting, cloning robot was a good idea? And that bubble thing that makes everyone's guns useless for a turn is just horrible.

 

The general response was, and I quote: "What the fuck were you smoking, because this is broken as fuck."

There are a rare few, but most agree that it deviates so extremely from the game's base state that it just doesn't fit.

Yep. As I said, the vast majority of players do not consider using console commands there to be cheating. Because the game is blatantly cheating against you.

There have been some mods to 'clean it up', but the general consensus is: "The bosses are too hard and too random, the rewards are shit for the difficulty in getting them, and the mechanics were created by a drunk cat rolling on the lead dev's keyboard.". The one, sole thing it did right was give you some great gear at the start. And... that's it.

It's not so much 'soul crushing' as it just long. Like holy-shit long. Something like the minimum turn count by someone knowing what they were coming into being like, 22. There is one relatively-difficult enemy, but clever play will take care of it just fine, even for a weaker squad. That said, it's not a particularly hard mission otherwise, and the SPARKS are actually very good in their niche.

Basically, SPARKS are very good early-mid-game units, which can serve very effectively as the backbone of the squad. However, they become outpaced as your soldiers level up. All in all, they're decent, but not super-shiny extraordinary.

XCom 2 has a lot of gameplay flaws, tbh. The Advent troopers are good enemies, as are the Sectoids and the mechs (in general)... but the Andromedon is more annoying than a clever foe (Oh look! It's enraged damaged now! Melee time!), the Codex is a caster-type that moves like a rogue-type and fights like a soldier-type, Vipers should have been split into "Abduction" and "Venom" variants... yeah. I honestly feel XCom: EU/EW was much, much better, because it wasn't overloaded in the same way. Enemies had their niche that they fit in and performed well, but that same niche could be exploited. XCOM 2 forgot that.

It's still a decent game, the devs just need to get their heads out of their asses. Which they are, slowly.

 

If it helps any you can play the entire game without them by just not going on the mission that makes them activate. The only thing you lose out on is 3 unique (as in 1 per game) armors that you can make with their corpses. Even the story elements aren't all that big a deal, since you can easily look up someone playing the mission on youtube.

Anyway in my opinion, I think the main problem with the rulers is they seem like they were designed to try and make you scout more. I know that sounds kind of weird, but the thing is if you know the ruler is coming up you can overwatch your entire squad before you set it off, and so long as you get decent luck you will tear it apart before it even gets a shot off. If you stumble onto it by accident though, well I'm sure you've noticed just how easily they tear your squad apart instead. Keep in mind of course this is from the point of view of someone who primarily watches XCom 2 Ironman legend playthroughs on youtube, rather than playing it myself.

 

Fair enough. Though it is still a bit disappointing - if I paid for an entire DLC, I'd expect more usable content then just a few shiny guns at the beginning of the game.

By the way, I've heard that there's a new expansion pack coming out. From the trailer on Youtube, it looks pretty cool. I probably won't buy it myself (cause my computer is kinda crappy), but can anyone who's actually played the game let me know what they think of the War of the Chosen? Good? Bad? Wait and see?

 

Another thing you can do vs rulers is equip a ton of repeaters and hope they work. For all that rulers are the boss type enemies, and as such you would think they would be immune to repeaters, they aren't. When they were first released the youtuber whose playthrough I was following got an execution on the viper queen, before installing a mod to disable repeater kills on rulers. He has used the mod ever since too, which kind of sucks in my opinion. Those things are hard enough where handicapping yourself against them is just stupid.

And on that note, he has a video of the War of the Chosen story mission up as well. Haven't watched it yet myself, I need to find time to do that. Stupid 11 hour work days taking all my free time.

 

And more news on the rulers front- it is mentioned in the video I linked that they are getting nerfed when War of the Chosen comes out. The youtuber wasn't sure how exactly, but he said he thought it was going to be that they can't attack you after every action you take, only move. So sounds like they will be closer to avatars than the killing machines they are now. Which is still hard, but much more reasonable.

If you want to see the part where he talks about it it is at the 43:00-44:00 timeframe, approximately. That said there will be spoilers in the video, although that should go without saying.

 

I'd take them being able to move and attack twice a turn rather than their current state. It's not hard to downgrade them, really.

 

I picked up Dex a little while ago because it was on sale and looked interesting.

You're a regular wageslave lady in cyberpunk town when you get woken up in the middle of the night by some dude talking in your head warning you that the cops are coming for you and you need to get out now. What follows is semi standard cyberpunk - you dodge corporate cops and psychotic gangs while linking up with quasi-anarchist hackers, you do odd jobs to scrape together the money for cyberware and equipment to get tough and reveal why your life has been turned upside down. Fully voice acted, and mostly well done too.

Played around with it last night during a bout of baby-enforced insomnia and liked it. It has controller support, which is good for a side scroller like this, though the hacking bits are a bit wonky, and the melee combat is a bit unresponsive, though I'm not sure if that's because of the game or because I'm a low level, unskilled scrub with no cyberware as of yet.

It's still on sale til August 21st, if it sounds interesting. I think its easily worth $5.

I also have my eye on Valley, as it's also $5 til the 21st, but haven't picked it up yet and I'm not 100% sure I will.

 

It's definitely worth it. Go pick it up.

 

I probably can't run it at max settings, but it's good to see a rec. I'll probably pick it up then.

 

Looking at the recommended specs, you probably could tbh. The GTX 660 is getting rather long in the tooth, even an RX 460 is faster, and it's one of the slowest cards this gen.

If you can run Fallout 4 on max, you can probably run this game as well.

 

Dude, IIRC I have an A8 chip, a Radeon HD 6000 series graphics card, and minspec RAM for Valley. 'Current gen' my system ain't. 'Can't run it at max' was sarcastic. Guess I shoulda stuck a smiley there to signpost it.

 

*Considers that his solution to a processor failure was to upgrade his processor*

Heheh. Yeah...

 

Yeah, turned out that a massive problem with my computer was my water cooler failing.

O boi, thermal throttling ftw.

 

I know that feel. My rig was originally an off the shelf Dell, and I just slowly replaced it part by part as they failed. Case getting too hot, big new case, extra fans. Need a better graphics card - pick it up, buy new power supply to keep it powered. Mobo fails, buy new mobo and processor. Hard drive fails, buy new SSHD. Everything's been working okay now for a while, but the whole rig is aging and I'm gonna have to start replacing bits again at the end of 2017/beginning of 2018.

Mostly waiting for the Ryzen chipset to get the bugs hammered out and for the cost to come down a bit, I'd like to get a 7 but I'm probably just going to get a 5.

 

Planning on getting Risen 2 soon. Played Risen 3 and I enjoyed it, now to get its predecessor. And yeah, super exited for ELEX.

 

Definitely worth the 5$. Decently long game for that price, plot is well-handled, and the ending is deliciously cyberpunky.

Melee is a game of patience and timing, but not difficult. Points in melee just speed the process. Ranged is kinda crap, she takes too long to pull off the gun.

One thing I would suggest is invest heavily in hacking. Like, massively. Max lockpick because duh, drop one point in the AR whatever that lets you hack flesh and blood people, then max hacking.

Reason is first, because hacking is unavoidable and you do a lot of it, second, because you can leverage it to make pretty much everything else a breeze. Hacking lets you sneak-kill nearly everything that isn't the big brute enemies or some later enemy variants you won't see till near the end, and by that point, you've long since completed hacking and are putting points elsewhere, probably even maxed a second thing as well, and you've run out of slots to install implants.

 

Good to know.

I picked up a gun early on and was disappointed with how long it takes to draw even a pistol and how annoyingly fiddly it was to fire. After a couple fights I had already decided it was just going to be an extra tool to occasionally pop dudes I could physically get to and I wouldn't be putting points into it.

Hacking I'm just starting to invest in after picking up Convince, Lockpicking, and a couple melee picks. The leg sweep is actually less than helpful - it knocks people down but you can't hit them while they're down (unless you draw a gun and shoot) and the sweep itself does no damage.

 

Yeah, the leg sweep sucks, so does the high kick. The extra hits on the combo, knockdown and extra damage on said combo are nice tho. Still, hacking is plain better.

Convince, you don't really *need* it to complete anything, and you only need, like, the first level for the best option in a couple quests I think. Not sure of that. Still, 2 points is hardly costly.

Drop a single point on AR hacking or whatever the fuck it's called, it's so damn worth it.

The drawing speed doesn't get better, but the recoil and finickiness of aiming does. There's also an endgame gun that is fairly decent. Not great, mind you, but decent. It punches through foes and hits hard, so if you start somewhat far enough to draw the gun before they get to you, it lets you rush through a few multiple enemy fights. Still, nothing really *required*, and I don't recall it needing points in ranged either.

 

*shrugs*
Should still run if it was a higher end GPU you got.

 

Eh, no big. Like I said, I'm planning on picking up a Ryzen CPU/Mobo at the end of the year, and probably a RX550 or some other new-ish graphics card. Not gonna jump on Vega, but I have heard interesting things about Navi, so I'm waiting to see what comes of that next year before going in on a shiny new card.

I'll be able to run Valley once I've finished Darkest Dungeon, Dex, and the tail end of Pillars of Eternity.

 

Don't go for the 550, at worst get a used 750ti or 760. Both are much faster.

 

Eh....I'm basically looking at this as a stopgap card to fill in until I can see how the Navi architecture that's supposedly due in 2018 pans out, and AMD has made a LOT of rapid strides towards greater Linux support over the last couple years so I'd like to reward that.

Besides which, I have beef with Nvidia going back to my high school days, so I generally avoid their cards when I can. Between that and my great disapproval of Intel's shady as fuck compiler shenanigans and benchmarksmanship tactics, my systems tend toward AMD mono-builds.

 

See if you can't find a 560 or 460 for 100-120 bucks then, more than twice the performance.

 

I spot a RX460 at $120 on Amazon, and a RX560 at $130. RX560 seems to be awfully low on available 4GB versions though, there's only the one.

 

The 4 gig versions are being eaten by miners, thankfully the 2 gig cards are safe from that. Can't really use 4 gigs of vram anyway.

 

WELP. Graphics card died. Guess I'm leaping right at that 4GB RX560.

 

Do tell us how that works out for you.