I learn the whole party consists of furries, who proceed to mock me for choosing playing a human.
I'm told my character wasn't smart enough to have packed for the temperatures of Icewind Dale, and am forced to pay all my money to replace my gear for "heavy weather gear" that mechanically functions the same as my starter gear.
The DM introduces a cast of NPCs to assist us in a quest, gets bored of having them around halfway through their introduction, and unceremoniously kills them off with an avalanche that almost kills the party.
Let me tell you what happened during my second and last session with this particular group. So I spend the rest of the following week reflecting on my experience with this group. I've been a regular of this subreddit for awhile, but I was truly mystified a group this dysfunctional could possibly exist in reality. The DM is not only egotistical with his Fursona DMPC bossing everyone around, but is so lazy he can hardly be bothered to run encounters and play NPCs that aren't his avatar. I try to rationalize it away as the typical awkwardness and slowness of the first few levels while the party is squishy and trying to get to know each other. I tell myself that next session will be better, because the party will be spending it in town. That should give me a chance to roleplay my character and get to know everyone a little better. In short, that doesn't happen, and I end up getting so frustrated that I get up and leave two hours into the session. I'd already learned how much of a lazy, disorganized jerk our DM was, but I didn't truly recognize the depths of his disinterest in running his own game. This session can be best described as a slow moving train wreck of venom, disorganization, and boredom that ultimately became too much to bear. So, let's start at the beginning of the session. So, we're currently travelling back to town on the back of our tabaxi ranger's pet bison. DM decides it's time for a random encounter. Suddenly, the ground starts rumbling beneath our feet. A massive monster comes over the horizon and stomps past our tiny group. It's the tarrasque! Everyone freaks out for a little bit, but the DM tells us we're beneath it's notice, and it passes us by. He tells us both in and out of character that he's going to lead us back to kill that thing when we're Level 20. My level 3 warlock jokes that if someone told him they were going to fight something that big, he'd tell them good luck and sit in the tavern, which gets a few chuckles from the rest of the group. DM audibly scoffs at me and calls me a coward. Now, maybe it was him trying to be in character, since his DMPC avatar Marty Stu Were Polar bear is supposed to be this wise and valorous leader, but the raw contempt in his voice and what he ends up doing later makes me strongly suspect he was serious. I'm caught off guard and more than a little irritated, and consider it strike one. We get to the next town, and get stopped by the gate guards. Apparently there's a serial killer going around that's a were-bear like our party lead, and they're hesitant to let him through the gates. More guards come out and surround him, and his DMPC goes into some melodramatic speech about how he will not resist these noble guards who are only doing their duty, but please don't arrest his beloved friends. I should point out that the DM has a very flat, droning voice. When he tried to speak in his DMPC's voice, I think he was trying to sound all lofty and wise with this weird airy lilt to his tone. All it managed to do was make him sound like he was a fat man out of breath, panting every word. Not interested in hearing this speech, the party scatters. Some of us just bolt away, while one genius gets the idea in his head to somehow climb over the wall and jump down into the village using his furry powers. He fails and takes massive fall damage falling over the wall. DM sighs, and utters a line that will be burned into my mind forever "well, out of character, I'll let you know..." He goes on to explain that this isn't how he wanted this encounter to go. He just wanted to "add some flavor" (while totally hogging the spotlight) and hype up an encounter with this were-polar bear he plans on hitting us with later. In contrast with their suspicion of just a few seconds ago, the guards suddenly lower their spears and I quote straight from the fat man's mouth: "Uh, we're just guard dudes. If you say you won't cause trouble, it's not our business what you're doing here." So they open the gate, and DM declares we all head to the tavern. No explanations, no roleplay, no player agency. The guards just let us through and we magically appear in the tavern with the DMPC. How immersive. Does the guy that tried to skip the cutscene and jump the gate get his missing health back? No, of course not, he shouldn't have tried that. Moving on. So, we get the bounty for killing the yetis, and it's at this point he pulls strike two. The tabaxi ranger gets her share of the reward, and starts celebrating. I've mentioned the tabaxi before, because she's really the only other member of the group that stood out as memorable. We barely interacted, but she was probably the only person in the group I'd care to play with again. In contrast to the edgelords and generic guys we were playing with, she liked to crack jokes and brightened up the mood by not really taking things seriously. What little I could glean of her backstory was that she was some sort of nomad that lived out in the tundra alone, and so got really excited and cheerful when she got to interact with people. When she gets her share of the pay, she describes how her character does a little happy dance and crawls up on our Werebear leader's shoulder to give him a hug. "Well, out of character, I'll let you know..." DM pauses things to tell her not to try that with him again. That he works a long job before taking the time to come and DM this game, and how he's got all sorts of issues with physical contact and why it's unnecessary. "I've been through too much shit to deal with stuff like that. Trying that with me IRL would result in a lot of trouble for you." The only time an edgelord sounds cringier that he already is, is when he's a furry and tries to growl like a bear after saying it, and only manages to sound like drunk Chewbacca choking to death. Nonetheless, the tabaxi apologizes and gets really quiet the rest of the time I'm there. We move on, the mood thoroughly killed. DM declares it's time for the party to handle any business we have in town. I'm surprised that the DM doesn't do downtime activities like Xanathar's explains. Rather than have us just say what we're doing and do it offscreen, or roll a few dice, he has everyone do effectively a one-on-one RP with him for whatever shopping trip or activity we want to do, which results in everyone else standing around being bored. And every time someone does something that would acutally require some roleplay, he sighs and chimes in "well, out of character, I'll let you know..." Every single time. Don't get attached to this NPC, the book says I'm supposed to be helpful while playing him, but he's a spy for a cult. No point asking that kid questions about the murders, the book says he doesn't know anything. That's right. This bad DM is somehow simultaneously dedicated to being as lazy as possible in his storytelling, and "committed to maximum realism" at the same time. On the druid's turn before they can declare what they're going to do, the DM declares the druid's pocket was picked. The druid declares he's going to track down the thief. Cue fifteen minutes of asking around where the thief hideout is. Going into the thief hideout, and finding five thieves standing around counting out the stolen coin purse. Druid loudly demands to have his money back. DM starts sniggering. DM asks why the druid went to get the coinpurse... when it was the paladin who was pickpocketed. Everyone was confused. "No, that's not what you said, you clearly said it was the druid." Everyone backs the druid up on this, saying the DM must have misspoken, can he just change it so it was the druid that was robbed, or just have the paladin be there instead. He ignores everyone, and starts laughing like he's pulled the funniest prank in the world on the druid, loudly wondering why he chose to waste his turn on a sidequest that wasn't even his. You... you're the one who literally told him to do it. You chose not to correct him at any point you were making him RP this investigation. You're the one at fault for this, you fat gaslighting fuck. But it's okay, because he forgives the druid for "his mistake" and has the thieves give the coin purse back without a fight, going to the next player's turn. Eventually, we get to my turn. If you read my previous post, I mentioned that I'm playing a warlock in Icewind Dale to do a service for my patron. I'm waiting for my patron to reach out to me to give me instructions on what quest I'm supposed to do for him. This is the backstory the DM agreed to give me, on the understanding he'd be expected to give me a hook at some point to go along with what the party is doing. "Ok warlock, what do you want to do?" "...What?" "What's your character's motivation? He came to Icewind Dale for something, right?" Awkward silence. Did... he seriously forget my character's backstory, or does he seriously expect me to RP me interacting with my own patron? I ask him what he means, and he and other members of the party get more and more annoyed I don't embark on a massive mini questline doing mundane chores in my room at the inn or opening a business. Apparently, and I kid you not, the tabaxi took up a ton of time in the session before the one I joined opening and operating a fishery business, and is expected to check back in when we head back to that town to see how its running. "Look, are you going to do something or what?" I finally come up with something after a minute. "Uh, I'd like to go to the bounty office." I figured I'd check and see if my family had a bounty on my head due to some backstory stuff, or at least kill some minor enemy and get some money to spend since I lost all mine in the first fifteen minutes of last session. The fighter chimes in, "I'd like to go with him." Sure. Might as well get this "Downtime" session done quickly so we can actually go on adventure together and interact. "Okay, fighter. Your backstory secret is that a group of bandits killed your family, right? Out of character, I'll let you know, I'm probably going to have the next group of bandits we fight be those bandits, so I can get it out of the way." The fighter goes quiet. They hadn't gone into any detail at all about their character. That's right, the DM just so lazy he was just openly spoiling player backstories to get them out of the way. Anything to avoid having to work on DMing the story, right? And that was strike three. Something goes down at the bounty office, but I'm not paying attention anymore, just seething at the DM's blatant disrespect to roleplaying and having wasted my time with this game. Someone else's turn comes up, and he wants to buy a particular item from a shop in town. "Sure, um... Look, I don't really understand the part in the book about this shop, could you guys just sort this out for me?" And just starts uploading shaky phone camera shots of pages from the Icewind Dale Book. At that point, I just left. Left the discord, deleted the invite, and a moment later the DM blocked me. It was honestly just a disaster, from start to end. It honestly felt like the DM wanted to godmode run Icewind Dale with his Self-Insert, but couldn't find someone to DM for him. So he effectively wanted us to play as NPCs for him to interact with (and occasionally psychologically torture) outside of dungeons. Potchka the Were-Polar Bear, if you ever read this, please get stepped on by the Tarassque.
2020 report - 83 down! Full list and comments on each.
2019 report 2018 report 2017 report Despite working from home for much of the year, and thus saving two hours a day of commute time, plus having months of lockdown, I couldn't crack the 100 mark. I did make some good progress on my backlog mainly by not buying any bundles since February, though this was somewhat countered by subscribing to the Xbox PC Game Pass when it was $1 (the games in the table with uncertain hours are from it). It was a bit of a mixed year; I did encounter some gems, but was hugely disappointed by other games which I expected to like.
Games I completed
Game
Hours
Override - Mech City Brawl
2
Do Not Feed the Monkeys
6
The Journey Down chapter 1
1.4
The Journey Down chapter 2
2
The Journey Down chapter 3
2
Children of Morta
??
The Deed
1
Night Call
8
Middle Earth: Shadow of War
32
The Mooseman
1.8
Beat Cop
6
Beholder 2
12
Wandersong
10
Deep Sky Derelicts
16
Sinless
1.6
Disgaea
50
Torment: Tides of Numenera
22
Gas Guzzlers Extreme
11
Whispers of a Machine
3
Unavowed
??
Iratus: Lord of the Dead
28
Phantom Doctrine
30
Late Shift
3
Book of Demons
14
Eliza
6
Just Cause 4
19
Analogue: A Hate Story
2
Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition
17
What Remains of Edith Finch
2
Kentucky Route Zero
7.6
911 Operator
10
Wasteland 3
??
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
8
Mass Effect: Andromeda
61
Costume Quest 2
6.5
Neighbours Back From Hell
5.7
Loren the Amazon Princess
11.5
Night in the Woods
??
Yes, Your Grace
??
Spiritfarer
??
Other games
Game
Hours
Observer
3
Kingsway
??
Two Point Hospital
20
Star Trek: Bridge Crew
2
Mind: Path to Thalamus
2
The Darkness II
4
Bounty Train
6
Crypt of the Necrodancer
2
Deponia
1.5
Company of Heroes 2 + DLC
5
Castlestorm
5
This is the Police 2
6
VoidExpanse
4
Totally Accurate Battle Simulator
2
Legends of Eisenwald
3
Door Kickers
1.3
GOD EATER RESURRECTION
5
Sentinels of the Multiverse
4
Pathfinder: Kingmaker
50
Martial Arts Brutality
6
Train Valley 2
10
Love is Dead
3
Joe Dever's Lone Wolf Remastered
7
Underrail
6
Final Dusk
2
War Tech Fighters
6
Aegis Defenders
2.4
Crusader Kings 3
??
Hatoful Boyfriend
??
Reigns: Game of Thrones
??
Super Sanctum TD
3
Xenonauts
1.6
Wuppo
2
The Long Journey Home
2
Valhalla Hills
3.1
Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered
3.1
Out of the Park Baseball 21
??
Total Extreme Wrestling 2020
??
Football Manager 20
~12
Greedfall
~7
NBA 2K20
140
Cook, Serve, Delicious 3
46
Slay the Spire
??
Top & bottom 10s
Favourite games 1) What Remains of Edith Finch 2) Unavowed 3) Wandersong 4) Book of Demons 5) Iratus: Lord of the Dead 6) Middle Earth: Shadow of War 7) The Warlock of Firetop Mountain 8) Mass Effect: Andromeda 9) NBA 2K20 10) Cook, Serve, Delicious 3 Least Favourite games 1) This is the Police 2 2) The Darkness 2 3) Deponia 4) Greedfall 5) Mind: Path to Thalamus 6) Underrail 7) The Long Journey Home 8) Joe Dever's Lone Wolf Remastered 9) Beat Cop 10) The Journey Down
Comments - warning, wall of text follows!
Completed
Override - Mech City Brawl Mildly entertaining mech battling game with a very short campaign. Do Not Feed the Monkeys Not bad as time management/puzzlers go. It can be a bit repetitive and obscure at times, but there are some rewarding surprises. The Journey Down chapter 1 The Journey Down chapter 2 The Journey Down chapter 3 I didn’t particularly enjoy these; the puzzles were a bit obscure at times and the story didn’t interest me much. The Caribbean setting did make for a decent change of pace at least. Children of Morta This was high on my wishlist, but I’m glad I played it through the Xbox pass rather than buying it. It’s a “story-driven roguelike”. Unfortunately, the latter is not that strong. It comes with a variety of distinct characters, but funnels you into playing as them even if you don’t want to through a combination of bonuses (you have to get each character to a certain level to earn their universal bonus) and cooldowns. While thematically appropriate, it becomes grindy and frustrating to play a character who is not enjoyable. The cooldowns in particular are irritating, especially against the final boss. Having to wait for a cooldown to play as your preferred character feels like something out of an FTP mobile game. Then there’s the story. It’s delivered with such melodramatic gravitas, such ponderous self-importance, that it would serve better as a parody. There’s no nuance to it - as if the baddies being called the Corruption and being frightfully ugly was too subtle, they are also shown picking on animals, a pregnant woman and cute bots. It even spells out the (obvious) moral of the tale at the end. It’s like a pre-teen cartoon, delivered as if it’s a literary masterwork. Utterly cringeworthy. The Deed A fairly neat concept – an extremely brief story where your actions all relate to the ending, thus allowing for it to be replayed a number of times. It’s not especially good in any respect, but it’s a mildly interesting diversion. Night Call As a set of vignettes, Night Call is perfectly fine. It might make for a decent short story collection. As a game, it's a shambles. The design is awful. In the map section, you can click on potential passengers or investigation locations. The former are identified by one of 70 small black and white portraits, the latter are not identified at all. The former tend to blur together (a problem, as you cannot access your suspect list from this screen), the latter are just infuriating when you want to follow up a particular suspect but have no idea what each location is. There's a money system which I simply ignored, apparently without effect. Conversations are the game's high point, but there's no way to fast-forward through them. Even on your second investigation you'll get repeats, and they quickly become a chore. The time limit and randomness mean you may be unable to complete some storylines (which involve multiple conversations), so you are forced to sit through the same conversation time and again in an effort to get through the storyline. The investigation screen is worse, a mess of haphazardly gathered clues of a few words. Some have automatic connections to suspects; all you can do with the rest is drag them around or fade them. In each of the three investigations I wound up with several clues pointing to each suspect. I simply picked the one with the most clues linked to them and was right each time. No thought required. Then there are the bugs. First, it tried to melt my CPU with 450fps. Counter-intuitively, turning VSync OFF resolved this; I had to go to a nine-month old thread for this tip. A particular conversation broke movement for a night (frustrating as the investigation only has 6 nights - and another previously-reported bug). The game simply became unresponsive after another conversation, forcing a quit to the menu (losing the day's progress). Clicking on some passengers doesn't work at all, for no apparent reason. Some dialogue options are cut off by the edge of the screen. In short, it's a mess. The writing's quite good - frequently entertaining, often amusing, sometimes even touching - but the game around it is so poor that I couldn't force myself through another investigation even to complete the storylines which interested me. Middle Earth: Shadow of War I loved the original. While this was fine, it fell a bit short. The sieges were an interesting concept, but wound up being pretty tedious to do in practice – most of my time was spent running around healing my allies, and they never had the grand or chaotic scope I hoped for. The nemesis system also seemed a bit overshadowed by the scale of the game. I may have had some interesting history with a character, but I’d easily forget it after having jumped back and forth across various regions, all with their own set of characters. A decent game, just not one which blew me away as the original did. The Mooseman Reminds me a lot of Never Alone; a gorgeously presented game based on ancient myth, with some light puzzling. Enjoyable for its brief span. Beat Cop Busywork with mild variations, amid a parody/homage ‘80s backdrop, all leading to an abrupt single-screen ending so shallow that I wondered why I bothered to get there. Moderately interesting in a mindless way, but eminently missable. Beholder 2 The original Beholder was a taut, tense experience. The sequel's attempt to expand its scope has, sadly, led to an inferior experience. The padding through poor minigames is a major problem. The second and third are particularly bad. The former feels like an attempt to ape Papers, Please - deal with a series of applications in accordance with an ever-changing set of rules. However, the rules often don't apply, in which case you can choose one of several options - all of which are meaningless. There are no consequences. Perhaps the intent is to capture the cold bureaucracy, but it feels more like mindless busywork. Worse is the latter. The minigame itself is bland enough, but every act comes with the same fifteen-second (I timed it) animation. You have to complete ten for a paltry reward - that's two and a half minutes while the same animation plays. Need to do a few more sets? You'd better have a book handy, because you're going to have a lot of idle time. These dull minigames break up the momentum of the story. Other aspects break the immersion. Sneaking into somebody's home in Beholder was a dangerous experience - you ran the risk of being caught and facing consequences. Here, you can break into somebody's office, hack their computer and search their desk right in front of them without any issue. Stealing something from their desk will be captured by security cameras and will get you fined, but planting something in their desk goes unnoticed. It's nonsensical and detracts from the atmosphere the game tries to create. The story is...there. I didn't care by the end, either because I'd been worn down by the minigames and obtuse objective paths, or because it was never interesting in the first place. Quite a letdown after a good first game Wandersong Heartwarming, full of character and genuinely enjoyable to play. Deep Sky Derelicts A solid little tactics game. I wish it made more of its concept – the ability to rotate party members (rather than being limited to three, and having to permanently remove someone to make a change) would make a big difference, and it gets a bit grindy – but ultimately it’s pretty satisfying. Sinless A generic cyberpunk tale with no real challenge (it’s essentially a VN, with very light puzzling). The writing isn’t especially good, so there’s not really anything to recommend it aside from moderately interesting music. Disgaea I played this many years ago on an emulator, but never finished it. It didn’t hold up quite as well as I remembered – while the writing is surprisingly good at times, the story goes off a cliff mid-way through and the voice acting ranges from entertainingly bad to just bad. I didn’t mind the grind too much, but it overwhelmed me when I started Etna mode – shame, because I was interested enough in the new perspective to give that a go. Torment: Tides of Numenera Planescape Torment was one of my favourite games as a kid, but for some reason it took me years to get on to this. As it turns out, it wasn’t anything particularly special. There were some definite highlights, with interesting stories and imaginative characters. However, the game design was a bit lacklustre. Combat was unnecessarily convoluted, while party design was strangely limited – for some reason I couldn’t obtain one companion, which left me with a very one-note party sorely lacking in might. The game promises that interesting consequences can come from failure, but that never seemed to be the case for me. Interesting enough, but far from a classic. Gas Guzzlers Extreme I thought I’d lost my love for the road-battling genre after poor experiences in Mad Max and Road Redemption, but this was a lot of fun. Whispers of a Machine Not as good as I’d heard – the detective elements are underplayed, and neither the writing nor voice acting are particularly good. Not bad, but forgettable. Unavowed I’m not normally one for P&C, but this was great. Maybe it’s because it leans a little more to the RPG side of things, with party selection (and banter!), impactful choices and quite light puzzles. Well written and entertaining throughout. Iratus: Lord of the Dead This is an example of Early Access done right. I first played mid-way through the EA phase, then came back for the full release. The differences are significant - not mere rebalancing, but fundamental changes to mechanics - yet it all works cohesively thanks to the devs' attention to feedback and detail. The game itself is an excellent example of the roguelike tactics genre. It was rewarding to find effective combos of minions, and challenging to have those combos negated by a different set of enemies which functioned in a very different way. Despite the wide variety of minions and enemies, the game does a fine job of keeping that variety within readily understood mechanics. While new enemies might throw out my old strategy, I understood how they did so, which allowed me to work on new counters to them. It's a well-presented, well-balanced, carefully designed game with plenty of content - well worth a go. Phantom Doctrine Mediocre tactics/spy game. The story is dreadfully dull – I stopped paying attention mid-way through – and while the tactics aspect can be fun, it does suffer from repetition. Late Shift I’m always a sucker for FMV games, and this was decent enough. There was surprising variety in branches of the story, though it was frustrating that you couldn’t skip or even speed up portions you’d already seen. Book of Demons Very solid ARPG/roguelike. The card mechanics and variety of enemies made this consistently enjoyable and challenging. Some of the mechanics were quite clever, though perhaps a little too clever. It may be fun to have to catch spinning stars and replace your cards after being stunned the first few times, but when the AI spams stun moves at you every few seconds it can be a bit irritating! Eliza An enjoyable VN. While the choices are very limited – indeed, the only real choices come quite close to the end – the story and its delivery (the voice acting is surprisingly good) were engrossing enough that I was invested when the time came to shape the story. It also has a quite addictive and challenging card game! Just Cause 4 Perfectly fine for a couple of dozen hours of mindless entertainment. It got a bit repetitive, but the sheer silliness and bombastic nature of the gameplay prompted a few laughs. Analogue: A Hate Story A brief and fairly forgettable VN. The writing and presentation are decent enough. Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition A solid GTA-like. The story was predictable, and the gameplay surprisingly easy, but it was fine. What Remains of Edith Finch Was a bit sceptical about whether this would live up to the hype, but it did. A remarkable, moving experience. Kentucky Route Zero I’m not sure that I ever really understood it, and it annoyed me at times, but it remained intriguing and strange enough to stick with it to the end. “Floor three: bears” did make me laugh much more than it should have. 911 Operator 911 Operator is a good concept with a wobbly execution. Worth a go if you can get it cheap. First, the positives. - It is quite accessible, partly because it simply isn't very deep, but it is cleanly presented and has a useful integrated tutorial. - The variety of staff, vehicles and equipment offers a sense of progress and strategy. - The operator is reasonably well voiced. - Branching calls with random elements provide some variety and the occasional surprise the first few times. - You can download a vast array of maps. It's fun to play in your own town. - Above all, the concept is fun. It's not without its flaws, though. - After playing through the career mode (4-5 hours), you've pretty much heard it all. The replayability is thus limited. - The English is a bit off at times, seemingly translated from another language. Most of that is in written form, but it was amusing to hear a voice actor utter the word "bursted". - Some of the calls unfairly penalise the player. Looking at you, Kitchen Fire, where you'll be punished for not sending emergency services despite the caller successfully putting out their fire on your correct instructions. It's a nice idea overall; hopefully lessons have been learned for the sequel. Wasteland 3 It’s…okay. Not bad, but lacking anything really special to set it above the pack of decent RPGs. Combat’s quite good, with a nice variety of skills and strategies. Writing is generally decent, though it does try a little too hard to be wacky at times. The best bit were the songs, from some genuinely eerie backgrounds to battles to a surprise cover during the post-game recap. These are balanced by some flaws. Performance is poor, with frequent framerate drops in combat on a system with an i7 9700 and GTX 1080, running off an M2 drive. One early battle was so bad as to be almost unplayable. Character balance seems off. Brawling is overpowered, and battles got much easier as the game went on. The final portion of the game was unsatisfying. While nowhere near as bad as Wasteland 2, where it felt like they just ran out of money and tacked on a clumsy ending, this is more a product of questionable writing - not least the late-game "twist" of a nature which is fast becoming a gaming cliche. Oh, and quests with unclear timed fail states are just evil. All up - fine, but nothing special. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain Much as I loved Fighting Fantasy books as a kid, their digital adaptations have tended to be uninspired and/or poorly executed. This, however, is a pleasant exception. The highlight is the range of characters to choose from. They each have their own backstory, skills, traits and quests. While you are making your way through essentially the same dungeon, the experience is different each time. One character might avoid an encounter altogether, while another will charge in headfirst. An encounter which is entirely insignificant for one character may be the quest goal for another. It makes for plenty of replayability and strategy. The combat, unlike many Fighting Fantasy games, is well implemented. While dice rolls still play their part, it's mostly about identifying enemy patterns and utilising character skills - each character has different attacks which can greatly change the approach to combat. Add in nice presentation and solid writing, and this is a gem. Mass Effect: Andromeda Certainly did not make a good first impression, with its jankiness (Skyrim-jumping up mountains is bad enough, but doing it in a vehicle is beyond the pale) and often clumsy writing (the hamhanded attempts to explain game mechanics in story terms stuck out), but the characters grew on me much more than most games and I found myself genuinely enjoying a lot of their dialogue. Costume Quest 2 A neat if forgettable experience Neighbours Back From Hell Surprisingly appeared in my library; apparently I activated the original two games from a bundle years ago. They are quite clunky (notably one section which was unplayable with a controller as there was no prompt to use an item) and plainly low budget, but it has its moments of amusement and challenge. Loren the Amazon Princess A reasonably good tactics/VN game. The former is stronger than the latter - I found the writing rather trite - but it's not too bad overall. Night in the Woods I was a little torn on this. While it was genuinely funny at times, and reminded me a lot of Oxenfree (which is one of my favourite games), I never quite connected with some of the characters - frankly, I didn't like the main character much at all, and it was only late in the game that I came to at least understand her. Yes, Your Grace A lot more enjoyable than Reigns, at least, with a decent enough story carrying me through some often difficult supply management. Spiritfarer Gorgeously presented (the music in particular stands out) and good-natured, but it never quite connected with me as much as some other games which cover similar themes of dealing with death - Rakuen, To the Moon, Finding Paradise and Last Day of June, for instance. I think the problem is that it veils its characters too much - much of what I know about them came from wikis than the game itself - and it requires a fair bit of grinding at times. A tighter and less obtuse story would have been more impactful.
Others
Observer As a straight cyberpunk detective game this would be great. Amazing atmosphere, stand-out characters, compelling work from Rutger Hauer. Unfortunately, the horror aspects constantly drag it down. The mind sequences are tedious and frustrating. Fumbling around a gloomy area in a pixel hunt while "spooky" sounds play on a loop is not in any way an enjoyable or interesting experience, and the horror fast loses its edge. Add in some bugs - I never managed to properly finish the Divided Minds quest because it crashed every time I made a choice - and I'm not going to waste any more time on it. Kingsway A nice throwback to old-school RPGs – not just in gameplay, but in its Win95-aping interface. Not interesting enough for me to push through its challenging difficulty, but fun for a time. Two Point Hospital Cute enough, and with a reasonable level of strategy, but the campaign is a repetitive drip-feed which fast becomes tiresome. Having to start a whole new hospital every time just for one minor new feature is mere busywork. Star Trek: Bridge Crew The selling points of this are VR and co-op. I didn’t have access to either, so was left with a dull game. Mind: Path to Thalamus Looks gorgeous in screenshots, but not nearly as impressive in action (juddery on a i7 9700K and GTX 1080) and riddled with infuriating puzzles (invisible staircases are the WORST). The Darkness II The Darkness II feels like it was written and designed by a committee of 13-year-old boys. I imagine it went something like this: “Hey, what if our character was in the mafia…and had demon arms…that could rip people in half! And he had a little demon companion…who pees and farts! Hahaha! And we can have a level in a brothel, and peek in the doors! Oooh, we’re so edgy!” It’s just a constant cringefest - the laughable attempts at philosophising, the constant clichés, the dialogue, the characterisation… Decent gameplay might have salvaged it, but its one mildly interesting trick – light sapping your power – is run into the ground at a rapid rate. Add in some clumsy kb&m controls, and it’s painful to play. Bounty Train Dull and repetitive with sharp difficulty spikes in its convoluted combat. Crypt of the Necrodancer Nice concept and great music, but a bit too tough for me. Deponia Utterly unintuitive puzzles and unfunny humour with horrible characters. Company of Heroes 2 + DLC I spent half an hour stuck in the sole tutorial because something failed to trigger, which pretty much summed up the game. The campaign is a painfully drawn-out paint-by-numbers extended tutorial; I lost interest after a few missions. Castlestorm Decent enough castle-battling game, but the castle destruction is pretty wonky and it feels a bit repetitive after a while. This is the Police 2 Pure, unadulterated rubbish. Ahem. Deep breath, step back. I play a lot of games. Most fade into the realm of decent to mediocre. Once in a while, something breaks into the extreme end. A beautiful, inspiring experience, perhaps, or something so bewilderingly bad as to sear itself into my memory. This is in the latter category. It opens with interminable cutscenes amid a tutorial. Other reviewers have remarked on that point, so I was forewarned. I was willing to bear through it in hope that, once past that hump, the game would improve. Perhaps, I thought, they were too quick to judge. That hope was misplaced. Let's return to the cutscenes. Toe-curlingly, embarrassingly, painfully bad. It's not just the opening, but persistent through the six hours I managed to stomach before giving up. Bizarre caricatures spouting nonsense which just goes on and on. Frye's introduction in particular was just so jaw-droppingly stupid that I half expected that the game was an elaborate hidden-camera show and the devs were going to pop out of my wardrobe laughing any moment. The art is, frankly, ugly. If the scenes weren't long enough as it was, I'd be tempted to rewind just to see what the hell some frames were meant to be. Then there's gameplay which can be broken into two aspects, dispatch and tactical. The dispatch stuff could have been interesting - I loved Emergency back in the day, and 911 Operator is great. However, it's mostly shallow choose-your-own-adventure stuff, with so much nonsense from your crew (won't work with women, won't work with lower-rated partners, drunk, etc) that it's more annoying than interesting. Sidenote - what tone is this game going for? It seems to bounce all over the place. Tactical is even worse. It's done far better in other games, from XCOM to Phantom Doctrine and many others. It's clumsy, slow, often unfair (with potentially big consequences for failure) and the tutorial does stuff-all explaining it. Oh, and there are fail states which just pop up willy-nilly - as if the game wasn't bad enough, get ready to replay chunks of it. In a word - ugh. VoidExpanse Solid enough space ARPG, but not enough to keep me grinding. Totally Accurate Battle Simulator Fun concept and briefly amusing, but not something I felt inclined to play for more than a couple of hours. Legends of Eisenwald An extremely slow and dull adventure/tactics game which made no impression on me. Door Kickers A tactics game which was well-optimised for repeated playthroughs of levels but otherwise unremarkable. GOD EATER RESURRECTION Yeah, this didn’t do it for me at all. Tedious and very brief battles over and over, amid grating anime tropes. I own the sequel but won't even bother trying that. Sentinels of the Multiverse Fun little superhero board game. Pathfinder: Kingmaker On paper (apt, given its origin), sounds great - party-based CRPG plus kingdom management. What could go wrong? As it turns out, a few things. Combat is not enjoyable at all, and there's a hell of a lot of it. The difficulty spikes have been pointed out in other reviews, and I can only echo them. It is not helped by the way that characters start off overloaded with abilities; when combined with the difficulty and limited party AI, the micromanagement involved causes combat to drag on interminably. Kingdom management is even less enjoyable. It's built around a quite specific meta - fail to make certain choices (including, unforgivably, story choices) and progress in a certain manner, and you'll be beset by problems. As much as I hated making story choices to suit kingdom management, the pile of inaccessible options without those choices was even more infuriating. Even then it's replete with frustrations, and you can't delegate to the AI because it's dreadful in this respect. The sad thing is that I actually enjoyed the writing enough to try to push through. Some of the characters are endearing, and I found some of the side quests engrossing (the main quest not so much). Even then, I couldn't bring myself to finish the game - the final quest seemed to drag on forever, and it got to the point where I couldn't force myself ahead any more. Sidenote, the magical lantern mechanic is the absolute pits. Apparently there's a sequel coming; even if it improves the combat and kingdom management, I'm not going anywhere near it if the accursed lantern is back. Martial Arts Brutality Not bad for a free game, and surprisingly generous with its campaign and the cards it grants, though its mobile origins are obvious. Train Valley 2 A neat twist on the original, quite distinct mechanics in a familiar setting. It did get a bit much in the later levels, though. Love is Dead Nice concept and well presented, with particularly good introduction of new mechanics, but it gets way too fiddly given the sluggish controls. Joe Dever's Lone Wolf Remastered Joe Dever has featured on my bookshelves for decades, along with the likes of Steve Jackson, Ian Livingstone and co. A digital adaptation of his work is a fine idea, taking the strong core of the book and expanding it with greater inventory management and the like. Sadly, it's all let down by a truly awful combat system which first dampened my enjoyment and eventually proved an impassable barrier. It's a clumsy combo of turn-based and real-time, with quick-time events. The QTEs are a mere irritation - they are so simple that they become tedious, but complacency can lead to errors. The main issue is that it's heavily dependent on RNG. While this is not necessarily untrue to the books, given the reliance on dice rolls, it is often flagrantly unfair. This works both ways - success can feel flat because it often depends on pure luck. If you happen to get a debuff, or they have a few moves in a row, you'll soon be reloading. It has nothing to do with player skill, and often not even player choices - the tipping point for me was, late in a long battle, when the one remaining enemy took my entire (full) health bar with two attacks, neither of which I had the opportunity to block. This is a particular problem given there is a hell of a lot of combat in this game - most of it against the same few types of enemies. Even the most basic enemies can take a large chunk of your health early on. The presentation doesn't make the experience much more enjoyable. The transition from a stylised book page to combat is nice, but it's the same few enemies, animations and sounds over and over, and the player character would be booted out of the Uncanny Valley for looking too damn creepy. In short, nice idea, rubbish combat. Underrail I played plenty of RPGs in the early ‘90s, including the original Fallout which this game plainly takes inspiration from. Great as some of those games were, UI and general game design have moved on a lot since then. The limits of my patience likely changed too. There might be a great game in here, but it’s buried under a poor interface and some unforgiving difficulty to the extent that it felt like a slog. Final Dusk A puzzle game with an interesting concept - distinct planning and action phases - but it quickly became repetitive. War Tech Fighters Oddly, this space mech game reminded me a lot of my absolutely favourite game as a kid - Wing Commander: Prophecy. Launch from a cap ship, visit waypoints, give orders to your wingmen, return to defend your ship from attack, etc. However, it all felt very low-budget - the same objectives and the same few voiceovers over and over to the point of tedium. Aegis Defenders A co-op game which doesn't seem well-balanced for a single player - boss fights were frustratingly difficult. Crusader Kings 3 I thought I'd love this game series, but none of them have managed to capture my attention for long. Hatoful Boyfriend Some decent moments in the couple of playthroughs I tried, but it felt like it would need many more to make much of the story. Reigns: Game of Thrones Absolutely no idea what was happening. Super Sanctum TD Decent enough TD, but does nothing that other games haven't done better. Xenonauts Unpleasantly difficult and ugly. Wuppo Cute but boring and lacking in direction. The Long Journey Home Sounds great in concept - a space roguelike where you’re desperately trying to get home with dwindling resources from an unfamiliar part of space. Unfortunately, it’s inexplicably built around a clumsy Lunar Lander style minigame with controls so clunky that it’s like playing QWOP. To have that in a roguelike where errors can quickly wreck your playthrough makes for unbearable frustration. Valhalla Hills City-building split into tiny chunks so that you have to repeat the same initial building steps over and over again. Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered Some nice ideas, such as switching between a number of different characters, but the horrid controls and constant QTE events made it an unpleasant experience. Out of the Park Baseball 21 I've played each version since 2017, and my playtime in each keeps declining. It just doesn't seem to offer much improvement to the core gameplay - much of the focus seems to be a clumsy tacked-on card collection game - and it has long since grown stale for me. Total Extreme Wrestling 2020 A disastrous launch where pretty much every main system of the game was broken did not bode well. After over 30 patches, what's left is...boring. While I spent countless hours on previous games in the series, this has just not clicked with me at all. Progress seems much slower, which may be more realistic but it turns the game into an outright grind. It may be enjoyable if you're roleplaying, but if you're playing it as a strategy/management game there is, like previous versions, little challenge, but it's now also stagnant. Football Manager 20 I spent thousands of hours in past instalments in this series, especially 99/00 and 2005, but it has long since become grossly bloated with features and far more focused on tactical nuances than the squad-building which interested me. Greedfall This was high on my wishlist, but I'm thoroughly unimpressed so far. After seven hours it was already becoming repetitive, and the turgid dialogue with florid delivery didn't inspire me to push through that. It's written like a radio play for children. "Ah, a note. It tells me I must find a chest." [you can read the note yourself, mind you] "There must be a key around here somewhere." [look for five seconds and find the key] "Ah, a key. This must open the chest that I read about in the note. There is nothing else here, I should go and open the chest." Companions are dull as bricks and have a similar level of intellect. They throw themselves headfirst into boss fights and die in seconds, but that's okay because you can just keep running away and firing shots until the boss dies. They also repeat the same few combat lines over and over again, which is maddening. NBA 2K20 Much of the criticism of this game has been centred on its predatory microtransactions and multiplayer aspects. I never touched those and enjoyed it thoroughly as a single-player experience (though I confess to skipping the MyPlayer story pretty much from the outset - MyLeague is where I spent most of my time). I am finding it a lot harder than the last version I played (2K17) though - either the gameplay has changed or I'm just getting old. Cook, Serve, Delicious 3 A somewhat bold new direction after a very solid but unambitious second game. It's a mixed bag; autoserve is a godsend, the food truck setting removes a bit of investment for me, difficulty is all over the place and the voice acting ranges from somewhat endearing to awful. Generally good, but I didn't enjoy it as much as the last two. Slay the Spire Perfect for short game sessions, and a fine example of a game being easy to learn but hard to master.
What I've Learned Transitioning to Roll20 + a little advice
This is some stuff I’ve learned using Roll20 (my best practices) plus a little free GM advice. Basically my gaming group had to transition to this quickly when Covid struck, but this has really allowed me to get my weekly game in and I’ve learned a few things that might help you do the same. My tech setup: Laptop, $20 Craigslist 2nd monitor, ancient Bamboo Graphics Tablet/ Mouse, Roll20 free account, Discord for Voice, Pinterest for monster tokens/maps Discord Setup I create 2 channels in Discord: general and an information one with links to cheat sheets, any google drive content etc. If you plan a long running information heavy campaign with lots of places, characters, plots, items etc setting up a Wiki on something like DokuWiki can be very helpful. This DOES mean you and players need to maintain it, however. (Also, don’t be grandiose if you are a first time DM, run a single session with the option to renew LATER, go ahead and be coy about it - this will save you the headache of committing to do 52 weeks of unpaid labor you come to resent AND kick people out of your game who are lousy players or you just don’t like - I cannot stress this enough - manage expectations up front, it prevents a lot of hurt feelings and awkward or confrontational conversations later) I have Roll20 open on the 2nd monitor in chrome as well as Pinterest, A google doc with names for NPCs, Interesting sounding places, items etc - this is my Improv tool for DungeonWorld, but I use it for all games because no one I ever met can make up names on the fly. If you have people who like to eat chips into the mic or have a lot of background noise tell them to enable “Push to Talk” in settings or tell all players to enable this BY DEFAULT. Roll20 There are a ton of videos on getting to know roll20 on youtube. Manage your game settings - these are presets before you even create a map, etc. I use a default page size of 40 wide x 25 tall to mirror screen aspect ratio. I also like a 30% grey as default map color - easier on the eyes than bright white. Fog of war is enabled - more on this later. With DnD the default character sheet is nice, you might want to know the “always roll with advantage” check box is in there - it confuses a lot of people that it is on by default. Once you have a game set up, go into it and go to settings on the right (gear) I recommend: • Set voice + Audio options to NONE • Set your display name (save) • Check Enable 3d dice • Dropdown “Scroll to Zoom” (you can pan with a right mouse click) • Player Video/Avatar set to “Name Only” Give out your link to Roll20 for players at 1-7 days in advance. Getting a character sheet with a functioning token set up can take a little bit - you do NOT want to be stressing over this wasting 4 other people’s time on game day, though it is inevitable to a point in your first game. They will need to set up the same settings or you will suffer terrible audio feedback. To help this, the first board they enter on login is a blank map with these instructions pasted as a graphic in the middle of the screen (hard to miss). If players have DnD Beyond there is a Chrome Extension called Beyond 20 to import characters a lot of people like, though I personally have not used it. I tell players to also put there name as follows in settings: “Drizzt (Bob) AC 15” This saves me having to ask their AC over and over in game. If you want you can also have them put “Elf Ranger” at the end or anything else you find helpful. Getting Players I tried Roll20 boards and other websites to find gamers. Facebook groups were most effective by a long shot. A lot of RPG gaming systems have Discord groups as well, which is nice because those people are already fans of the game system. It’s a good idea to build in expectations as much as possible if you are doing this (6-9pm CST weekly for 3 weeks, grimdark game tone...etc). I like to identify who my solid players are too - a mix of some people I know and like and maybe a few newbs. That way you are always meeting new people, and if you have a few new ones that you can’t count on you don’t need to call off the game because you have 3 solid players. Minimum Viable Setup Some people think you need 15 full color maps, spell effects, etc. This is not true - while those can be impressive and evocative, this is a game of IMAGINATION, and sometimes having those beautiful graphics in my opinion detracts from the active use of imagining the action. The key point of maps is so everyone knows who they are standing next to, threatened by, where they can move, etc. The smallest, fastest set up is a SINGLE page with hastily drawn maps pointing out key items - most rooms will be squares. I have the advantage of having a very old Bamboo graphics tablet, and can quickly draw on the fly (it helps to go into settings and have it map to a single monitor - the one I am using for Roll20). I think the roll20 initiative tracker takes forever for the GM to manage, so instead I use a graphic strip for 5e - at the top is 25 (then 20, 15, 10, 5, 0) at the bottom -5. Once you have player tokens set up, you can duplicate them and have the PLAYERS manage their own initiative by placing their 2nd token on the strip in order of initiative (you can copy a monster to track yours on there too). This is MUCH faster in my experience and maintains more excitement when you say “Roll for initiative!” I use Pinterest to get all my token pics, there are a fair amount of great map boards on there as well, though in my experience you are better off being inspired by a map and building your encounter around it than conceptualizing the perfect encounter and then trying to find a perfect map for it. I have a degree in design and am quite skilled in photoshop and could modify found maps, and I have yet to find a situation where it is worth my time - it most likely is not worth yours either. I have drawn things on graph paper in the past scanned but it is a pain to scan and align. Lately for basic custom maps I’ve been using https://dungeonscrawl.com/, which is amazing. As a side note, sometimes when I’m stuck on ideas, just flipping through monsters or fantasy art on Pinterest inspires a fun encounter. If you are ever uninspired, remember 3 dollars gets you a helluva lot on DMs Guild - pick a 5 star adventure and go. I think a lot of new DMs want to be writers and world builders and view writing a custom adventure as part of the fun, which is fine. But if you’ve never read a good adventure in your life, how do you expect to do this? Watch a few movies before you decide to become a director. Run a few great adventures before you decide to become an adventure designer. For token creation, I try to do a closeup on faces - I do NOT try to get the whole body, though might for something like a horse and carriage which is more important as a map item in a fight. It helps to know how to screengrab Windows+Shift+S on a PC, keep your selection as SQUARE as possible. You can then paste into Photoshop, Paint etc and save a token. Irfanview is a free program for viewing graphics that I use for this. If you are using a map, it’s better to just right click the image and “save as…” to your desktop. Sometimes they list dimensions on maps (23 x 22) I try to save this in the file name as it is VERY useful to set up in Roll20 later. You only get so much space on Roll20 for graphics, so don’t save 20 MB image tokens, no one will see them anyway. My goal for a 1 square token is a few hundred KB tops. If you want to have all the players see the gruesome closeup of the zombie when it appears in game, click it and hit Shift+Z to pop it up on their screen (they can click it off to continue to play). I have never exceeded my image space on Roll20 What is an Adventure? To me 5e is a high prep game. That means the players OWE the DM to either go along with his plot or tell him their plans a week in advance. This is not railroading, it is courtesy to the person doing more work than anyone else in the game. If people don’t like it, they should play something that is lower prep, like DungeonWorld or Fate. We typically play for 3 hours (6:30 to 9:30, people log on Discord and chat a bit starting at 6). My goal is to have 2-3 combat encounters centered around a plot. With low levels and few players things go fast so I might plan 4-5, at high levels with lots of players I would plan 2 fights and a role play scene or skill challenge. This means my prep is: Roll plot around in my head for 6 days - What do they expect? What is fun? What would be surprising or shocking? What would happen in a movie or TV show? What character moments would be fun? What would be most dramatic? Can I actually do this idea in a 5e game? Examples of things that do NOT work well: Hostage situations, chase scenes, players deciding to kill goblin babies, torture… The night before I round up maps and tokens. I paste monster stats and spells into a google doc (once again, google and screen grabs are great for this, you can also create 2 columns in a google doc by inserting a 2 cell table). I also write up short lead in descriptions for encounters. In my experience a lot of GMs try to do this on the fly, but often forget an important feature important to the encounter. 3 sentences summing up the scene, what they see and setting the tone usually works better. I also write up any important bullet points of fun things villains or NPCs might say, or important things they know and tell the PCs after the encounter that will lead to the next encounter or advance the story. If this is the end of an important arc, I write up a dramatic “cut scene”. The key is to have 30% more content than I need in case they tear through prepped material but to NOT overprep. The game the next week will almost always be better if I react to events this week, what players seemed interested in, what they seemed bored with, etc. Page/ Map Setup As mentioned previously, I usually have a 40x25 page with fog of war enabled. The page should already have an initiative strip and player tokens on it. If it is a dungeon that I will reveal as they go, the monsters should be placed, and I use the 3 circles to enter the AC/ HP in advance. If it is more of an “ambushed by enemies” situation I have the entire map visible (or just draw a few trees and road) and have a fog of war strip on the right hand of the map 3-4 squares wide where I hide my monsters. It is very easy to copy and paste monsters so I usually have 2x what i need JUST in case. I also don’t want to have to construct a goblin army from a single goblin while the players sit bored. A nice thing is you can copy/ paste all the player tokens and initiative strip BETWEEN pages, so those are pretty fast to set up on all your pages. Table Rules I think it’s a pain in the ass to punch in monster stats into Roll20 for 5e (it was easy though for Shadow of the Demon Lord, hats off to Schwalb) so I roll actual dice for most of the game on my desk. I will roll on Roll20 for something very dramatic (a villain saving throw or something) but usually I keep it fast with real dice. Players on the other hand will ALWAYS be expected to roll using Roll20 as a default and that expectation is built in. You can loosen this up if it’s your trusted group for 10 years, but it’s worth addressing up front especially with a new group you don’t know well. Why even give someone the temptation to fudge a roll? Save yourself a difficult conversation later... Game Day Schedule 6pm (players log in to discord, BS, chat, catch up) 6:30 I read a short recap, summing up what happened last week, reminding them the context of the plot, what quest they were on etc. I have seen people post these, but 90% of the time players don’t read it, and reading this helps focus people and stops me from wanting to murder players an hour in when they can’t remember why the hell they broke into the Thieves’ Guild last week. 6:40-8:30 play 8:30 this is about where I should start the last encounter. If there are a lot of moving pieces (fighting a goblin army of 30) I might drop half the monsters just so they can chew through it faster. 9:30 end of game. Thanks for Reading I hope this is valuable to some and would love any feedback or to hear your experiences. RPGs have become my best social outlet during the last many months. I already loved them as a lifelong GM, but they have really kept me from cracking up in my apartment as well as my players I suspect. Having watched the tools to do online gaming I will say we are blessed to live in a time where this is viable, I feel the technology just wasn’t there 10 years ago. It can take some fiddling but once you have a few games under your belt it’s almost as good as meeting the old group down at the game store every Wednesday, and you don’t even need to drive home after!
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition - Updated Modding Guide
This modding guide is written for The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition version 3.5.0.26 (A) from GOG. It should be compatible with the steam and retail versions as long as they're patched to patch 3.4. This guide's main goal is to provide a balanced experience by fixing gameplay bugs, introducing secondary gameplay mechanics and other quality of life features. It also includes lore-friendly character textures and additional animations as optional files. Modding The Witcher 2 can be a slow, boring and even difficult process, especially if you have never done it before and you need to manually update, and combine outdated mods. For that reason, I've combined all conflicting mods and packed the edited scripts into one main mod compilation. That's why there's only 1 mandatory mod in this guide. 99% of the code in this compilation is other people's hard work, so I'll go into details about the fixes and I'll link every mod that has been used. I'll appreciate it if you take five minutes of your time and like/endorse the work of the modders that made this possible. This modding guide is divided in three steps - 1 mandatory and 2 optional. The optional steps cancel each other out, so you must pick one. If you don't like either, you can just ignore them. The first optional step introduces only minor texture and animations changes. The game stability is identical with the vanilla game, so if ANY crashes happen, it's not mod related. The second optional step replaces the vanilla environment, character, weapon and armor textures with 4k textures. It also increases the vegetation rendering distance - an engine limitation the game has been suffering from since release. The downside is that its stability is hardware dependent. Crashes can occur, but its tough to say if you'll experience them until you do. I did my testing on a couple of pcs and I'm satisfied with the results, but your mileage may vary. I'll provide instructions that should work for most people. To prevent crashes, I advise you not to use the launcher and launch the game straight from witcher2.exe located in The Witcher 2\bin folder via a shortcut. Ubersampling makes the game less stable, and I can't recommend it unless you have a beastly pc. If you keep it turned off, you'll double or even triple your frames depending on the resolution you're playing on. Even if you have a strong graphics card, RTX gpus have some problems with the game, so keep that in mind.
[ MANDATORY STEP ]
[ MANDATORY ] - Yet Another Mod Compilation 1.1 - Extract the 2 .dzip files to The Witcher 2\CookedPC folder. Start the game's launcher, go to 'Options', click 'DLC Settings' and make sure that 'yamc.dzip' is enabled at the very bottom. - https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/942/
Here's a complete list with a short explanation of what each of the mods added to YAMC does: Enhanced Mod Compilation - Minimal 0.6.5 by QuietusPlus. This wonderful mod serves as the base for the compilation. The 'Minimal' version comes with several features, some of them notably overpowered. To keep the in-game balance some of them were cut, those that made the cut include:
Detailed Descriptions - Fully displays Level 2 descriptions and shows available mutagen slots on unacquired talents in the character level up screen, so you don't have to do guess work in which ability to invest if you want to use a mutagen.
Item Tagging - Items are tagged and categorized in groups by similarity when sorted alphabetically for easier inventory management.
Respec Potion - You can reset your talents by buying a special potion from certain merchants.
Reduced Weight - The encumbrance mechanic in The Witcher 2 is annoying and punishing to the player. This solves the issue by removing the weight from recipes, alchemical ingredients, and junk items. Everything else stays the same.
Dead Body Delay Timer - Increases the time before corpses de-spawn. They can stay up to 5 minutes.
Dark Mode Effects Tweak - The annoying visual effect for dark outfits during combat is removed when Geralt is wearing a complete set. It's still present for equipped, incomplete sets.
Improved Targeting - Decreases attacked enemy importance. The player can switch targets easier.
Leveling Up Tweak - On higher difficulties, Geralt no longer needs to meditate in order to level up.
Draugir Trophy Fix - A fix for a small bug which prevented draugir trophy loot drops.
Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/696 Mutagenology - 0.3a by kamilius - This mod introduced craftable mutagens long before TW3 did it. You can pay craftsmen to combine for you lesser mutagens into more powerful ones. In order to do so you have to buy formulas from specific merchants. The mechanic is available at the start of Chapter 1. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/75 Junk Dismantling - 0.2 by Barrodin - This mod is expanding the crafting by allowing Geralt to dismantle all of his useless junk items to raw materials. The action can be performed by any craftsman for a small fee. The mechanic is available at the start of Chapter 1. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/85 Circles of Power Vigor Bug Fix - 1.0 by WutTheMelon - Circles of Power with the hexagon symbol now give the vigor regeneration effect. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/323 Melitele's Heart As It Was MEANT to BE - 0.8 by thebunnyrules - Fixes a small bug that was preventing the talisman's passive bonuses from working properly. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/799 Medallion Cooldown Reduced - 1.0 by shiki00 - By default the witcher's medallion has a 10 seconds cooldown before it can be used again. This tweak reduces the cooldown to 3 seconds. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/722 Grass Color Fix - 08B by Diegog5 - A fix for a texture bug in Chapter 2 on Roche's path. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/274 Grass color fix for Vergen - 1.0 by roggan - A fix for a texture bug in Chapter 2 on Iorveth's path. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/303 Market Prices Tweak by menyalin (code) and Paul_NZ (original idea) - In The Witcher 2 you're constantly strapped for cash. Geralt has limited opportunities to earn money and if you want the best gear, you have to go dumpster diving or farm harpy feathers. The unfair 24:1 buy/sell ratio doesn't help either. In comparison, the ratio in The Witcher 1 was 5:1. This mod applies the older ratio and makes sure Geralt doesn't get taken advantage of by greedy merchants. The changes are balanced, so don't expect from him to be swimming in money. Link to original solution: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/67?tab=posts Whirl Oil Hotfix - 0.2 by Kindo - Fixes a problem with whirl oil's recipe that prevented the player from creating it. The problem was first introduced by CDPR with the Enhanced Edition and left unpatched. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/218 Increased Maximum Dice Poker Wager Amount - 1.0 by zdanman - Increases the maximum bet in dice poker from 10 to 100. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/702 Radovid Persuasion Fix - 1.0b by TGirgis - Fixes a small bug that prevented Geralt from passing the check to persuade Radovid. The mod restores the persuasion level to 3, as it was in the original game, before the Enhanced Edition update. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/763 Prologue Archpriest Axii Fix - 1.0 by Liudeius - Fixes the scene with the archpriest in the prologue. Geralt can successfully charm him with the Axii sign. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/845 Story Ability Bug Fixes - 1.0 by MidnightVoyager (mod) and menyalin (code) - Fixes for several bugged abilities tied to story progression and specific gameplay decisions (like destroying 10 training dummies in Flotsam). Geralt can gain them as permanent character bonuses. Most them were bugged after the release of the Enhanced Edition and left unpatched.. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/823 Wild Hunt Fix - 1.0 by Klubargutan - Restores bugged journal entries and conversations about the Wild Hunt with Dandelion and Roche in Flotsam and Vergen. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/885?tab=description Walls Have Ears and Suspect Thorak Fix - 1.0 by Klubargutan - Removes the bug that marks the two quests as failed after a certain point in Chapter 2 even if they were previously completed. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/886 The Scent of Incense Fix - 1.0 by Divius666 - This mod provides a fix for one of the paths in the 'The Scent of Incense' quest. Link to original mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/908
[ OPTIONAL STEP 1 ]
[OPTIONAL ] - Hiuuz's The Witcher III shaved Geralt for The Witcher 2 1.0 - Extract the 'CookedPC' folder to the main game directory. This mod ports Geralt's face from TW3. Good for continuity - https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/919
[OPTIONAL ] - Hiuuz's The Witcher III Triss Merigold for The Witcher 2 1.0 - Extract the 'CookedPC' folder to the main game directory. This mod ports Triss' face from TW3. Good for continuity - https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/920
[OPTIONAL ] - Blue eyes for Triss (Lore-Friendly) 1.0 - Extract the 'game' folder to The Witcher 2\CookedPC folder. This mod changes Triss' eye color. - https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/824
[OPTIONAL ] - Pirouette Dodge 2.0 - Extract the 'characters' folder to The Witcher 2\CookedPC folder. The mod replaces the default rolling dodge animation with a custom made piroutte animation. It s how the witcher fighting style is described in Sapkowski's books. The only downside is that the pirouette animation is equal to the upgraded default one, so the 'footwork' talent in Geralt's talent tree does nothing with the mod installed. - https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/697
[ OPTIONAL STEP 2 ]
[OPTIONAL ] - Extreme Vegetation Rendering Distance 1.0 - Extract the 5 folders to The Witcher 2\CookedPC folder. The mod provides increased rendering distance for over 250 vegetation models. - https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/898
[OPTIONAL ] - AI Upscale Textures 1.73OPT - Download the three 'OPTIMIZED' main files. Also, download the 'AI Upscale Hiuuz's The Witcher III shaved Geralt for The Witcher 2' and 'AI Upscale Hiuuz's The Witcher III Triss Merigold for The Witcher 2' miscellaneous files. Extract the folders from each of the main files to The Witcher 2\CookedPC folder. Then extract the folders from each of the miscellaneous files to the same CookedPC folder. Overwrite when/if prompted. Now navigate to C:\Username\PC\Documents\Witcher 2\Config, prepare a text editor and follow the detailed instructions I've written in this pastebin. - https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/889
If you experience issues and want to get rid of the mod, navigate to CookedPC folder and delete every folder with 'movies', 'sounds' and 'globals' being the exception. Don't forget to delete the two edited .ini files from the Documents folder, too.
[OPTIONAL ] - Pirouette Dodge 2.0 - Extract the 'characters' folder to The Witcher 2\CookedPC folder. The mod replaces the default rolling dodge animation with a custom made piroutte animation. It s how the witcher fighting style is described in Sapkowski's books. The only downside is that the pirouette animation is equal to the upgraded default one, so the 'footwork' talent in Geralt's talent tree does nothing with the mod installed. - https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher2/mods/697
If you used only the mandatory file or the mandatory file + the optional files from step 1, you don't have to do any testing. If you've installed the mandatory file + the optional files from step 2, it will be a good idea to walk around the maps in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 for about 30 minutes and see if you're going to crash or if the textures are loading properly. I also posted The Witcher: Enhanced Edition - Revised Modding Guide a couple of days ago. Here's a link if you're interested.
My 2020 game report - 83 down! Full list and comments on each.
I've posted this and past reports in another sub, but it's a lot of work and seems to fit the theme of this sub, so hopefully it will be of interest here too. Only two of these 83 games (NBA 2K20 and Total Extreme Wrestling 2020) were individually purchased; the rest are from bundles, the $1 Xbox PC Game Pass deal or, in one case (Iratus: Lord of the Dead) a gift. Please excuse those few from breaking the theme of the sub; the rest at least should fit! I haven't bought a bundle since February, and don't plan to buy any individual games in the near future. Between that and continuing to work from home for at least a few more months, hopefully I can keep making progress on the backlog.
Games I completed
Game
Hours
Override - Mech City Brawl
2
Do Not Feed the Monkeys
6
The Journey Down chapter 1
1.4
The Journey Down chapter 2
2
The Journey Down chapter 3
2
Children of Morta
??
The Deed
1
Night Call
8
Middle Earth: Shadow of War
32
The Mooseman
1.8
Beat Cop
6
Beholder 2
12
Wandersong
10
Deep Sky Derelicts
16
Sinless
1.6
Disgaea
50
Torment: Tides of Numenera
22
Gas Guzzlers Extreme
11
Whispers of a Machine
3
Unavowed
??
Iratus: Lord of the Dead
28
Phantom Doctrine
30
Late Shift
3
Book of Demons
14
Eliza
6
Just Cause 4
19
Analogue: A Hate Story
2
Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition
17
What Remains of Edith Finch
2
Kentucky Route Zero
7.6
911 Operator
10
Wasteland 3
??
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
8
Mass Effect: Andromeda
61
Costume Quest 2
6.5
Neighbours Back From Hell
5.7
Loren the Amazon Princess
11.5
Night in the Woods
??
Yes, Your Grace
??
Spiritfarer
??
Other games
Game
Hours
Observer
3
Kingsway
??
Two Point Hospital
20
Star Trek: Bridge Crew
2
Mind: Path to Thalamus
2
The Darkness II
4
Bounty Train
6
Crypt of the Necrodancer
2
Deponia
1.5
Company of Heroes 2 + DLC
5
Castlestorm
5
This is the Police 2
6
VoidExpanse
4
Totally Accurate Battle Simulator
2
Legends of Eisenwald
3
Door Kickers
1.3
GOD EATER RESURRECTION
5
Sentinels of the Multiverse
4
Pathfinder: Kingmaker
50
Martial Arts Brutality
6
Train Valley 2
10
Love is Dead
3
Joe Dever's Lone Wolf Remastered
7
Underrail
6
Final Dusk
2
War Tech Fighters
6
Aegis Defenders
2.4
Crusader Kings 3
??
Hatoful Boyfriend
??
Reigns: Game of Thrones
??
Super Sanctum TD
3
Xenonauts
1.6
Wuppo
2
The Long Journey Home
2
Valhalla Hills
3.1
Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered
3.1
Out of the Park Baseball 21
??
Total Extreme Wrestling 2020
??
Football Manager 20
~12
Greedfall
~7
NBA 2K20
140
Cook, Serve, Delicious 3
46
Slay the Spire
??
Top & bottom 10s
Favourite games 1) What Remains of Edith Finch 2) Unavowed 3) Wandersong 4) Book of Demons 5) Iratus: Lord of the Dead 6) Middle Earth: Shadow of War 7) The Warlock of Firetop Mountain 8) Mass Effect: Andromeda 9) NBA 2K20 10) Cook, Serve, Delicious 3 Least Favourite games 1) This is the Police 2 2) The Darkness 2 3) Deponia 4) Greedfall 5) Mind: Path to Thalamus 6) Underrail 7) The Long Journey Home 8) Joe Dever's Lone Wolf Remastered 9) Beat Cop 10) The Journey Down
Comments - warning, wall of text follows!
Completed
Override - Mech City Brawl Mildly entertaining mech battling game with a very short campaign. Do Not Feed the Monkeys Not bad as time management/puzzlers go. It can be a bit repetitive and obscure at times, but there are some rewarding surprises. The Journey Down chapter 1 The Journey Down chapter 2 The Journey Down chapter 3 I didn’t particularly enjoy these; the puzzles were a bit obscure at times and the story didn’t interest me much. The Caribbean setting did make for a decent change of pace at least. Children of Morta This was high on my wishlist, but I’m glad I played it through the Xbox pass rather than buying it. It’s a “story-driven roguelike”. Unfortunately, the latter is not that strong. It comes with a variety of distinct characters, but funnels you into playing as them even if you don’t want to through a combination of bonuses (you have to get each character to a certain level to earn their universal bonus) and cooldowns. While thematically appropriate, it becomes grindy and frustrating to play a character who is not enjoyable. The cooldowns in particular are irritating, especially against the final boss. Having to wait for a cooldown to play as your preferred character feels like something out of an FTP mobile game. Then there’s the story. It’s delivered with such melodramatic gravitas, such ponderous self-importance, that it would serve better as a parody. There’s no nuance to it - as if the baddies being called the Corruption and being frightfully ugly was too subtle, they are also shown picking on animals, a pregnant woman and cute bots. It even spells out the (obvious) moral of the tale at the end. It’s like a pre-teen cartoon, delivered as if it’s a literary masterwork. Utterly cringeworthy. The Deed A fairly neat concept – an extremely brief story where your actions all relate to the ending, thus allowing for it to be replayed a number of times. It’s not especially good in any respect, but it’s a mildly interesting diversion. Night Call As a set of vignettes, Night Call is perfectly fine. It might make for a decent short story collection. As a game, it's a shambles. The design is awful. In the map section, you can click on potential passengers or investigation locations. The former are identified by one of 70 small black and white portraits, the latter are not identified at all. The former tend to blur together (a problem, as you cannot access your suspect list from this screen), the latter are just infuriating when you want to follow up a particular suspect but have no idea what each location is. There's a money system which I simply ignored, apparently without effect. Conversations are the game's high point, but there's no way to fast-forward through them. Even on your second investigation you'll get repeats, and they quickly become a chore. The time limit and randomness mean you may be unable to complete some storylines (which involve multiple conversations), so you are forced to sit through the same conversation time and again in an effort to get through the storyline. The investigation screen is worse, a mess of haphazardly gathered clues of a few words. Some have automatic connections to suspects; all you can do with the rest is drag them around or fade them. In each of the three investigations I wound up with several clues pointing to each suspect. I simply picked the one with the most clues linked to them and was right each time. No thought required. Then there are the bugs. First, it tried to melt my CPU with 450fps. Counter-intuitively, turning VSync OFF resolved this; I had to go to a nine-month old thread for this tip. A particular conversation broke movement for a night (frustrating as the investigation only has 6 nights - and another previously-reported bug). The game simply became unresponsive after another conversation, forcing a quit to the menu (losing the day's progress). Clicking on some passengers doesn't work at all, for no apparent reason. Some dialogue options are cut off by the edge of the screen. In short, it's a mess. The writing's quite good - frequently entertaining, often amusing, sometimes even touching - but the game around it is so poor that I couldn't force myself through another investigation even to complete the storylines which interested me. Middle Earth: Shadow of War I loved the original. While this was fine, it fell a bit short. The sieges were an interesting concept, but wound up being pretty tedious to do in practice – most of my time was spent running around healing my allies, and they never had the grand or chaotic scope I hoped for. The nemesis system also seemed a bit overshadowed by the scale of the game. I may have had some interesting history with a character, but I’d easily forget it after having jumped back and forth across various regions, all with their own set of characters. A decent game, just not one which blew me away as the original did. The Mooseman Reminds me a lot of Never Alone; a gorgeously presented game based on ancient myth, with some light puzzling. Enjoyable for its brief span. Beat Cop Busywork with mild variations, amid a parody/homage ‘80s backdrop, all leading to an abrupt single-screen ending so shallow that I wondered why I bothered to get there. Moderately interesting in a mindless way, but eminently missable. Beholder 2 The original Beholder was a taut, tense experience. The sequel's attempt to expand its scope has, sadly, led to an inferior experience. The padding through poor minigames is a major problem. The second and third are particularly bad. The former feels like an attempt to ape Papers, Please - deal with a series of applications in accordance with an ever-changing set of rules. However, the rules often don't apply, in which case you can choose one of several options - all of which are meaningless. There are no consequences. Perhaps the intent is to capture the cold bureaucracy, but it feels more like mindless busywork. Worse is the latter. The minigame itself is bland enough, but every act comes with the same fifteen-second (I timed it) animation. You have to complete ten for a paltry reward - that's two and a half minutes while the same animation plays. Need to do a few more sets? You'd better have a book handy, because you're going to have a lot of idle time. These dull minigames break up the momentum of the story. Other aspects break the immersion. Sneaking into somebody's home in Beholder was a dangerous experience - you ran the risk of being caught and facing consequences. Here, you can break into somebody's office, hack their computer and search their desk right in front of them without any issue. Stealing something from their desk will be captured by security cameras and will get you fined, but planting something in their desk goes unnoticed. It's nonsensical and detracts from the atmosphere the game tries to create. The story is...there. I didn't care by the end, either because I'd been worn down by the minigames and obtuse objective paths, or because it was never interesting in the first place. Quite a letdown after a good first game Wandersong Heartwarming, full of character and genuinely enjoyable to play. Deep Sky Derelicts A solid little tactics game. I wish it made more of its concept – the ability to rotate party members (rather than being limited to three, and having to permanently remove someone to make a change) would make a big difference, and it gets a bit grindy – but ultimately it’s pretty satisfying. Sinless A generic cyberpunk tale with no real challenge (it’s essentially a VN, with very light puzzling). The writing isn’t especially good, so there’s not really anything to recommend it aside from moderately interesting music. Disgaea I played this many years ago on an emulator, but never finished it. It didn’t hold up quite as well as I remembered – while the writing is surprisingly good at times, the story goes off a cliff mid-way through and the voice acting ranges from entertainingly bad to just bad. I didn’t mind the grind too much, but it overwhelmed me when I started Etna mode – shame, because I was interested enough in the new perspective to give that a go. Torment: Tides of Numenera Planescape Torment was one of my favourite games as a kid, but for some reason it took me years to get on to this. As it turns out, it wasn’t anything particularly special. There were some definite highlights, with interesting stories and imaginative characters. However, the game design was a bit lacklustre. Combat was unnecessarily convoluted, while party design was strangely limited – for some reason I couldn’t obtain one companion, which left me with a very one-note party sorely lacking in might. The game promises that interesting consequences can come from failure, but that never seemed to be the case for me. Interesting enough, but far from a classic. Gas Guzzlers Extreme I thought I’d lost my love for the road-battling genre after poor experiences in Mad Max and Road Redemption, but this was a lot of fun. Whispers of a Machine Not as good as I’d heard – the detective elements are underplayed, and neither the writing nor voice acting are particularly good. Not bad, but forgettable. Unavowed I’m not normally one for P&C, but this was great. Maybe it’s because it leans a little more to the RPG side of things, with party selection (and banter!), impactful choices and quite light puzzles. Well written and entertaining throughout. Iratus: Lord of the Dead This is an example of Early Access done right. I first played mid-way through the EA phase, then came back for the full release. The differences are significant - not mere rebalancing, but fundamental changes to mechanics - yet it all works cohesively thanks to the devs' attention to feedback and detail. The game itself is an excellent example of the roguelike tactics genre. It was rewarding to find effective combos of minions, and challenging to have those combos negated by a different set of enemies which functioned in a very different way. Despite the wide variety of minions and enemies, the game does a fine job of keeping that variety within readily understood mechanics. While new enemies might throw out my old strategy, I understood how they did so, which allowed me to work on new counters to them. It's a well-presented, well-balanced, carefully designed game with plenty of content - well worth a go. Phantom Doctrine Mediocre tactics/spy game. The story is dreadfully dull – I stopped paying attention mid-way through – and while the tactics aspect can be fun, it does suffer from repetition. Late Shift I’m always a sucker for FMV games, and this was decent enough. There was surprising variety in branches of the story, though it was frustrating that you couldn’t skip or even speed up portions you’d already seen. Book of Demons Very solid ARPG/roguelike. The card mechanics and variety of enemies made this consistently enjoyable and challenging. Some of the mechanics were quite clever, though perhaps a little too clever. It may be fun to have to catch spinning stars and replace your cards after being stunned the first few times, but when the AI spams stun moves at you every few seconds it can be a bit irritating! Eliza An enjoyable VN. While the choices are very limited – indeed, the only real choices come quite close to the end – the story and its delivery (the voice acting is surprisingly good) were engrossing enough that I was invested when the time came to shape the story. It also has a quite addictive and challenging card game! Just Cause 4 Perfectly fine for a couple of dozen hours of mindless entertainment. It got a bit repetitive, but the sheer silliness and bombastic nature of the gameplay prompted a few laughs. Analogue: A Hate Story A brief and fairly forgettable VN. The writing and presentation are decent enough. Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition A solid GTA-like. The story was predictable, and the gameplay surprisingly easy, but it was fine. What Remains of Edith Finch Was a bit sceptical about whether this would live up to the hype, but it did. A remarkable, moving experience. Kentucky Route Zero I’m not sure that I ever really understood it, and it annoyed me at times, but it remained intriguing and strange enough to stick with it to the end. “Floor three: bears” did make me laugh much more than it should have. 911 Operator 911 Operator is a good concept with a wobbly execution. Worth a go if you can get it cheap. First, the positives. - It is quite accessible, partly because it simply isn't very deep, but it is cleanly presented and has a useful integrated tutorial. - The variety of staff, vehicles and equipment offers a sense of progress and strategy. - The operator is reasonably well voiced. - Branching calls with random elements provide some variety and the occasional surprise the first few times. - You can download a vast array of maps. It's fun to play in your own town. - Above all, the concept is fun. It's not without its flaws, though. - After playing through the career mode (4-5 hours), you've pretty much heard it all. The replayability is thus limited. - The English is a bit off at times, seemingly translated from another language. Most of that is in written form, but it was amusing to hear a voice actor utter the word "bursted". - Some of the calls unfairly penalise the player. Looking at you, Kitchen Fire, where you'll be punished for not sending emergency services despite the caller successfully putting out their fire on your correct instructions. It's a nice idea overall; hopefully lessons have been learned for the sequel. Wasteland 3 It’s…okay. Not bad, but lacking anything really special to set it above the pack of decent RPGs. Combat’s quite good, with a nice variety of skills and strategies. Writing is generally decent, though it does try a little too hard to be wacky at times. The best bit were the songs, from some genuinely eerie backgrounds to battles to a surprise cover during the post-game recap. These are balanced by some flaws. Performance is poor, with frequent framerate drops in combat on a system with an i7 9700 and GTX 1080, running off an M2 drive. One early battle was so bad as to be almost unplayable. Character balance seems off. Brawling is overpowered, and battles got much easier as the game went on. The final portion of the game was unsatisfying. While nowhere near as bad as Wasteland 2, where it felt like they just ran out of money and tacked on a clumsy ending, this is more a product of questionable writing - not least the late-game "twist" of a nature which is fast becoming a gaming cliche. Oh, and quests with unclear timed fail states are just evil. All up - fine, but nothing special. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain Much as I loved Fighting Fantasy books as a kid, their digital adaptations have tended to be uninspired and/or poorly executed. This, however, is a pleasant exception. The highlight is the range of characters to choose from. They each have their own backstory, skills, traits and quests. While you are making your way through essentially the same dungeon, the experience is different each time. One character might avoid an encounter altogether, while another will charge in headfirst. An encounter which is entirely insignificant for one character may be the quest goal for another. It makes for plenty of replayability and strategy. The combat, unlike many Fighting Fantasy games, is well implemented. While dice rolls still play their part, it's mostly about identifying enemy patterns and utilising character skills - each character has different attacks which can greatly change the approach to combat. Add in nice presentation and solid writing, and this is a gem. Mass Effect: Andromeda Certainly did not make a good first impression, with its jankiness (Skyrim-jumping up mountains is bad enough, but doing it in a vehicle is beyond the pale) and often clumsy writing (the hamhanded attempts to explain game mechanics in story terms stuck out), but the characters grew on me much more than most games and I found myself genuinely enjoying a lot of their dialogue. Costume Quest 2 A neat if forgettable experience Neighbours Back From Hell Surprisingly appeared in my library; apparently I activated the original two games from a bundle years ago. They are quite clunky (notably one section which was unplayable with a controller as there was no prompt to use an item) and plainly low budget, but it has its moments of amusement and challenge. Loren the Amazon Princess A reasonably good tactics/VN game. The former is stronger than the latter - I found the writing rather trite - but it's not too bad overall. Night in the Woods I was a little torn on this. While it was genuinely funny at times, and reminded me a lot of Oxenfree (which is one of my favourite games), I never quite connected with some of the characters - frankly, I didn't like the main character much at all, and it was only late in the game that I came to at least understand her. Yes, Your Grace A lot more enjoyable than Reigns, at least, with a decent enough story carrying me through some often difficult supply management. Spiritfarer Gorgeously presented (the music in particular stands out) and good-natured, but it never quite connected with me as much as some other games which cover similar themes of dealing with death - Rakuen, To the Moon, Finding Paradise and Last Day of June, for instance. I think the problem is that it veils its characters too much - much of what I know about them came from wikis than the game itself - and it requires a fair bit of grinding at times. A tighter and less obtuse story would have been more impactful.
Others
Observer As a straight cyberpunk detective game this would be great. Amazing atmosphere, stand-out characters, compelling work from Rutger Hauer. Unfortunately, the horror aspects constantly drag it down. The mind sequences are tedious and frustrating. Fumbling around a gloomy area in a pixel hunt while "spooky" sounds play on a loop is not in any way an enjoyable or interesting experience, and the horror fast loses its edge. Add in some bugs - I never managed to properly finish the Divided Minds quest because it crashed every time I made a choice - and I'm not going to waste any more time on it. Kingsway A nice throwback to old-school RPGs – not just in gameplay, but in its Win95-aping interface. Not interesting enough for me to push through its challenging difficulty, but fun for a time. Two Point Hospital Cute enough, and with a reasonable level of strategy, but the campaign is a repetitive drip-feed which fast becomes tiresome. Having to start a whole new hospital every time just for one minor new feature is mere busywork. Star Trek: Bridge Crew The selling points of this are VR and co-op. I didn’t have access to either, so was left with a dull game. Mind: Path to Thalamus Looks gorgeous in screenshots, but not nearly as impressive in action (juddery on a i7 9700K and GTX 1080) and riddled with infuriating puzzles (invisible staircases are the WORST). The Darkness II The Darkness II feels like it was written and designed by a committee of 13-year-old boys. I imagine it went something like this: “Hey, what if our character was in the mafia…and had demon arms…that could rip people in half! And he had a little demon companion…who pees and farts! Hahaha! And we can have a level in a brothel, and peek in the doors! Oooh, we’re so edgy!” It’s just a constant cringefest - the laughable attempts at philosophising, the constant clichés, the dialogue, the characterisation… Decent gameplay might have salvaged it, but its one mildly interesting trick – light sapping your power – is run into the ground at a rapid rate. Add in some clumsy kb&m controls, and it’s painful to play. Bounty Train Dull and repetitive with sharp difficulty spikes in its convoluted combat. Crypt of the Necrodancer Nice concept and great music, but a bit too tough for me. Deponia Utterly unintuitive puzzles and unfunny humour with horrible characters. Company of Heroes 2 + DLC I spent half an hour stuck in the sole tutorial because something failed to trigger, which pretty much summed up the game. The campaign is a painfully drawn-out paint-by-numbers extended tutorial; I lost interest after a few missions. Castlestorm Decent enough castle-battling game, but the castle destruction is pretty wonky and it feels a bit repetitive after a while. This is the Police 2 Pure, unadulterated rubbish. Ahem. Deep breath, step back. I play a lot of games. Most fade into the realm of decent to mediocre. Once in a while, something breaks into the extreme end. A beautiful, inspiring experience, perhaps, or something so bewilderingly bad as to sear itself into my memory. This is in the latter category. It opens with interminable cutscenes amid a tutorial. Other reviewers have remarked on that point, so I was forewarned. I was willing to bear through it in hope that, once past that hump, the game would improve. Perhaps, I thought, they were too quick to judge. That hope was misplaced. Let's return to the cutscenes. Toe-curlingly, embarrassingly, painfully bad. It's not just the opening, but persistent through the six hours I managed to stomach before giving up. Bizarre caricatures spouting nonsense which just goes on and on. Frye's introduction in particular was just so jaw-droppingly stupid that I half expected that the game was an elaborate hidden-camera show and the devs were going to pop out of my wardrobe laughing any moment. The art is, frankly, ugly. If the scenes weren't long enough as it was, I'd be tempted to rewind just to see what the hell some frames were meant to be. Then there's gameplay which can be broken into two aspects, dispatch and tactical. The dispatch stuff could have been interesting - I loved Emergency back in the day, and 911 Operator is great. However, it's mostly shallow choose-your-own-adventure stuff, with so much nonsense from your crew (won't work with women, won't work with lower-rated partners, drunk, etc) that it's more annoying than interesting. Sidenote - what tone is this game going for? It seems to bounce all over the place. Tactical is even worse. It's done far better in other games, from XCOM to Phantom Doctrine and many others. It's clumsy, slow, often unfair (with potentially big consequences for failure) and the tutorial does stuff-all explaining it. Oh, and there are fail states which just pop up willy-nilly - as if the game wasn't bad enough, get ready to replay chunks of it. In a word - ugh. VoidExpanse Solid enough space ARPG, but not enough to keep me grinding. Totally Accurate Battle Simulator Fun concept and briefly amusing, but not something I felt inclined to play for more than a couple of hours. Legends of Eisenwald An extremely slow and dull adventure/tactics game which made no impression on me. Door Kickers A tactics game which was well-optimised for repeated playthroughs of levels but otherwise unremarkable. GOD EATER RESURRECTION Yeah, this didn’t do it for me at all. Tedious and very brief battles over and over, amid grating anime tropes. I own the sequel but won't even bother trying that. Sentinels of the Multiverse Fun little superhero board game. Pathfinder: Kingmaker On paper (apt, given its origin), sounds great - party-based CRPG plus kingdom management. What could go wrong? As it turns out, a few things. Combat is not enjoyable at all, and there's a hell of a lot of it. The difficulty spikes have been pointed out in other reviews, and I can only echo them. It is not helped by the way that characters start off overloaded with abilities; when combined with the difficulty and limited party AI, the micromanagement involved causes combat to drag on interminably. Kingdom management is even less enjoyable. It's built around a quite specific meta - fail to make certain choices (including, unforgivably, story choices) and progress in a certain manner, and you'll be beset by problems. As much as I hated making story choices to suit kingdom management, the pile of inaccessible options without those choices was even more infuriating. Even then it's replete with frustrations, and you can't delegate to the AI because it's dreadful in this respect. The sad thing is that I actually enjoyed the writing enough to try to push through. Some of the characters are endearing, and I found some of the side quests engrossing (the main quest not so much). Even then, I couldn't bring myself to finish the game - the final quest seemed to drag on forever, and it got to the point where I couldn't force myself ahead any more. Sidenote, the magical lantern mechanic is the absolute pits. Apparently there's a sequel coming; even if it improves the combat and kingdom management, I'm not going anywhere near it if the accursed lantern is back. Martial Arts Brutality Not bad for a free game, and surprisingly generous with its campaign and the cards it grants, though its mobile origins are obvious. Train Valley 2 A neat twist on the original, quite distinct mechanics in a familiar setting. It did get a bit much in the later levels, though. Love is Dead Nice concept and well presented, with particularly good introduction of new mechanics, but it gets way too fiddly given the sluggish controls. Joe Dever's Lone Wolf Remastered Joe Dever has featured on my bookshelves for decades, along with the likes of Steve Jackson, Ian Livingstone and co. A digital adaptation of his work is a fine idea, taking the strong core of the book and expanding it with greater inventory management and the like. Sadly, it's all let down by a truly awful combat system which first dampened my enjoyment and eventually proved an impassable barrier. It's a clumsy combo of turn-based and real-time, with quick-time events. The QTEs are a mere irritation - they are so simple that they become tedious, but complacency can lead to errors. The main issue is that it's heavily dependent on RNG. While this is not necessarily untrue to the books, given the reliance on dice rolls, it is often flagrantly unfair. This works both ways - success can feel flat because it often depends on pure luck. If you happen to get a debuff, or they have a few moves in a row, you'll soon be reloading. It has nothing to do with player skill, and often not even player choices - the tipping point for me was, late in a long battle, when the one remaining enemy took my entire (full) health bar with two attacks, neither of which I had the opportunity to block. This is a particular problem given there is a hell of a lot of combat in this game - most of it against the same few types of enemies. Even the most basic enemies can take a large chunk of your health early on. The presentation doesn't make the experience much more enjoyable. The transition from a stylised book page to combat is nice, but it's the same few enemies, animations and sounds over and over, and the player character would be booted out of the Uncanny Valley for looking too damn creepy. In short, nice idea, rubbish combat. Underrail I played plenty of RPGs in the early ‘90s, including the original Fallout which this game plainly takes inspiration from. Great as some of those games were, UI and general game design have moved on a lot since then. The limits of my patience likely changed too. There might be a great game in here, but it’s buried under a poor interface and some unforgiving difficulty to the extent that it felt like a slog. Final Dusk A puzzle game with an interesting concept - distinct planning and action phases - but it quickly became repetitive. War Tech Fighters Oddly, this space mech game reminded me a lot of my absolutely favourite game as a kid - Wing Commander: Prophecy. Launch from a cap ship, visit waypoints, give orders to your wingmen, return to defend your ship from attack, etc. However, it all felt very low-budget - the same objectives and the same few voiceovers over and over to the point of tedium. Aegis Defenders A co-op game which doesn't seem well-balanced for a single player - boss fights were frustratingly difficult. Crusader Kings 3 I thought I'd love this game series, but none of them have managed to capture my attention for long. Hatoful Boyfriend Some decent moments in the couple of playthroughs I tried, but it felt like it would need many more to make much of the story. Reigns: Game of Thrones Absolutely no idea what was happening. Super Sanctum TD Decent enough TD, but does nothing that other games haven't done better. Xenonauts Unpleasantly difficult and ugly. Wuppo Cute but boring and lacking in direction. The Long Journey Home Sounds great in concept - a space roguelike where you’re desperately trying to get home with dwindling resources from an unfamiliar part of space. Unfortunately, it’s inexplicably built around a clumsy Lunar Lander style minigame with controls so clunky that it’s like playing QWOP. To have that in a roguelike where errors can quickly wreck your playthrough makes for unbearable frustration. Valhalla Hills City-building split into tiny chunks so that you have to repeat the same initial building steps over and over again. Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered Some nice ideas, such as switching between a number of different characters, but the horrid controls and constant QTE events made it an unpleasant experience. Out of the Park Baseball 21 I've played each version since 2017, and my playtime in each keeps declining. It just doesn't seem to offer much improvement to the core gameplay - much of the focus seems to be a clumsy tacked-on card collection game - and it has long since grown stale for me. Total Extreme Wrestling 2020 A disastrous launch where pretty much every main system of the game was broken did not bode well. After over 30 patches, what's left is...boring. While I spent countless hours on previous games in the series, this has just not clicked with me at all. Progress seems much slower, which may be more realistic but it turns the game into an outright grind. It may be enjoyable if you're roleplaying, but if you're playing it as a strategy/management game there is, like previous versions, little challenge, but it's now also stagnant. Football Manager 20 I spent thousands of hours in past instalments in this series, especially 99/00 and 2005, but it has long since become grossly bloated with features and far more focused on tactical nuances than the squad-building which interested me. Greedfall This was high on my wishlist, but I'm thoroughly unimpressed so far. After seven hours it was already becoming repetitive, and the turgid dialogue with florid delivery didn't inspire me to push through that. It's written like a radio play for children. "Ah, a note. It tells me I must find a chest." [you can read the note yourself, mind you] "There must be a key around here somewhere." [look for five seconds and find the key] "Ah, a key. This must open the chest that I read about in the note. There is nothing else here, I should go and open the chest." Companions are dull as bricks and have a similar level of intellect. They throw themselves headfirst into boss fights and die in seconds, but that's okay because you can just keep running away and firing shots until the boss dies. They also repeat the same few combat lines over and over again, which is maddening. NBA 2K20 Much of the criticism of this game has been centred on its predatory microtransactions and multiplayer aspects. I never touched those and enjoyed it thoroughly as a single-player experience (though I confess to skipping the MyPlayer story pretty much from the outset - MyLeague is where I spent most of my time). I am finding it a lot harder than the last version I played (2K17) though - either the gameplay has changed or I'm just getting old. Cook, Serve, Delicious 3 A somewhat bold new direction after a very solid but unambitious second game. It's a mixed bag; autoserve is a godsend, the food truck setting removes a bit of investment for me, difficulty is all over the place and the voice acting ranges from somewhat endearing to awful. Generally good, but I didn't enjoy it as much as the last two. Slay the Spire Perfect for short game sessions, and a fine example of a game being easy to learn but hard to master.
Do we get more rewards from the new update, or did we get more before the update. A Full Mathematical Rebuttal.
UPDATE REDDIT POST BELOW TAKING INTO ACCOUNT EVERYONE's SUGGESTIONS Old Rewards Vs New Rewards, Part 2. A Much better Statistical Analysis -------------------------- BIG EDIT. At the bottom I've included solutions that I think will fix things and included an apology to Drew for the general tone that this post may have unintentionally presented to him. ------------------------ After Drew’s Post I decided to see if the new update gives us better rewards or not. For those that can’t be bother reading all the calculation I will give a SPOILER ALERT….. We get WORSE rewards now. Essentially the things we lost compared to the new system evens out except one major thing. The new clan wars chest gives at best scenario -200 gold per day, and a realistic best case scenario of -1200 gold per day. A few things to clarify. I am speaking from the point of view of a level 13 player who has been in an established but casual clan that is in Legendary League. We finished clan wars 1 with just over 24,000 war trophies. As such, we always got at least one and usually multiple first place finishes in clan wars every 2 weeks. This guaranteed the best clan war chest each time. Now to run all the calculations I have converted everything into gold. This is done as follows: Common Cards = 5 gold Rares Cards = 50 gold Epics Cards = 500 gold Legendary Cards = 20,000 gold The reason for the above is that whilst cards are all worth twice this amount in the shop, if you have maxed these out, this is the amount of gold you will actually receive for them. Also, if you want to trade out a maxed card for one you need, you will spend your token plus the amount above per card. So if I want a legendary card, I ask for one I need, and offer one I have maxed out already. This will then cost me 20,000 gold plus the token. So this is why the above amounts have been used to calculate the gold conversion not what they are worth to buy in the shop. These above figures are also used to calculate the minimum gold each chest is worth. In each case, I haven’t included the chance you can get a bonus epic or a bonus legendary. The calculated amount only includes 100% guaranteed cards. Now I realise people won’t agree with me here but this is what I value Gems to be. 1 Gem = 275 gold. This is actually a very high amount. I could make that 1 Gem = 200 gold and that would still be considered very high for some. However, this is the conversion I use when considering if I should spend Gems on continuing challenges or cashing out my prizes in the Global tournaments. The best offer Supercel has ever offered in the shop involved spending 1000 gems and getting something like two Mega Lightning chests and some gold and tokens. At the time I calculated the deal to give 192 gold per gem spent. For the sake of the calculations used here, I didn’t need to convert Tokens gained. However if I did need to do it they would be worth: Legendary Token = 2000 gold Epic Token = 1000 gold Rare Token = 500 gold Common Token = 250 The above amounts are the total gold you receive once you have 10 of each type of token and then receive another one. OK so lets get to the nitty gritty. I will use Drew from Supercel’s format to see if things are better now or before, and you can decide for yourselves as some of this might be subjective. For those inclined you may wish to check my calculations as I have done these very late into the night/morning and typos or errors may have crept in. Removed Daily Gifts X3 https://preview.redd.it/njnf7v2hysk51.png?width=1345&format=png&auto=webp&s=4b5c305ecae8e8872c793bd5177f545e3863a42d NOTE on average a free chest nets you 233 gold. However there is always a chance for an epic, or even a legendary from this. Chance for a Legendary card from the free chest is currently 0.24%. It’s not much but we’ve all had it happen from time to time. So the average not taking into effect chance of epics or legendary cards in the free chest is 3 x 320.75 = 963 (rounded up) / day. Also Removed Periodic Free Shop Gift https://preview.redd.it/lkvpghboysk51.png?width=1345&format=png&auto=webp&s=a5a16dca9450d46a971611e3bf1d9e39e7058d34 OK so I’ve assumed we got one of these prizes offered in the shop weekly. That is certainly the case with the Epic card, the rest I am not sure of. This means the 3,778 becomes 540 gold per day. Adding the two removed methods above means we used to gain 963 + 540 = 1,504 gold per day from these. So Drew has said the above prizes got replaced by the following. https://preview.redd.it/lksrsqyqysk51.png?width=1569&format=png&auto=webp&s=99917c29ac7f85b2158fcf11749aed3f5c6339de This is where it gets tricky. It’s hard to know the likelihood of getting any of these (bar the epics that only occur once per week and what Drew said about gems (that we will all get 100gems per 30 days). So the 30 day totals above include 4 days getting gems, and 4 and a bit days getting Epic Sunday epics. So this means the remaining 22 days in those 30 days will give a random assortment between Common cards (500 gold), Rare (1,250), Gold Chest (1,165) or 1,500 gold. The Average from these is 1,104. So in a 30 day cycle this means 1,104 x 22 + 27,500 + 10,714 = 62,502. This gives an average of 2,083 gold per day. In summary the new system gains about 500 extra gold per day over the old system. However this is heavily weighted by the fact I use 275 gold per gem as my conversion. Many would lower this, and you’d find the gold gained per day figures of the before and after get much close to each other. Removed From Old Clan Wars Legendary League On average I would have got around 2,000 – 2,500 gold per day doing card collection. Lets say 2,000 gold to be conservative and not taking into account the chances you sometimes get lots of gems. As an example, if I won one card collection battle (500 gold) , the final war day (1,000 gold) and the clan came first (1,000 gold). Here is 2,500 gold. When you opened your war day chest the final item was a chance to either double your gold, or get between 10-50 gems or a token. This collection occurred once every 2 days. Currently War Day Daily Gold To be on par with above the old clan war, you must be able to win 2, 1v1 battles. You can roll your dice and try duels. If you win your duel you will get 3,500 gold however if you lose it you will only get 350 gold. Potentially you can win it and then get 1 or two more attacks and if you win those get yourself another 1,000 or 2,000 gold. You could also choose to do the passive attacks that pretty much guarantee a win (ie repair the boat or attack someone else's boat) this will give you a guaranteed 500 gold (as all you need for this 500 gold is to do the simple task of destroying at least one of the towers). So 4 attacks of this = 2,000 gold per day guaranteed. So you can take the risk, or you do the guarantee. Either way, I think the average is around 2000 gold per day and this is on par with the old clan war daily gold. Now for QUESTS! I enjoyed these and never found it hard or a task to actually have to complete them. They simply got completed from normal play. Removed Quests 1 Per Day https://preview.redd.it/neeks10vysk51.png?width=1345&format=png&auto=webp&s=f7a31ef7ac4182c4547b45c71f060733289b5a2f This is tricky to calculate because each person had a chance to re-roll one quest each day. Most would try and re-roll until they got gems, or got one of those double rewards (ie 1,000 gold, 20 rares, 2 epics and occasionally you even got a 20 gems one). I for example never collected common quest so I’ll take the 250 gold this represents out of the equation. So lets say a typical week, I am able to re-roll the quests and I would get Gems only 1 time, the 1,000 gold quests 2 times, and 4 times I get the 500 gold quest. This will equal 6,750 gold. So this is close to 1,000 gold per day. I think this is being conservative since I know I got the Gems quest more than once per week simply by always re rolling quests to try and get it. Verdict = 1,000 gold per day gained from daily quests. Now this is the fun part. We also used to have the 41 day chest cycle attached to doing the quests. Quest Chest Cycle = 9,850 Quest Points Quest points per day = 35 Total quest cycle completed in 281.4 days https://preview.redd.it/oedlveuyysk51.png?width=897&format=png&auto=webp&s=d494a51a5e0c00572393a1624247d8db9ac38244 This means that the 41 chest cycle yields a minimum of 448,127 gold (not taking into account that you can gain extra epics or legendaries in the above chests). For example the odds of getting a legendary card from a magical chest is nearly 20%. That 448,127 gold used to be earnt over 281.4 days. So this is an average of 1592 gold per day. Verdict = Add this 1,592 gold with the 1,000 gold above gives around 2,600 gold per day that we used to get for quests and the quest chest cycle. Drew also lumped the following in that we lost: Also Removed Old Clan Wars Chest In Legendary League the old clan war chest for first place chest was worth 45,060 gold. So the old war day chest was given once per 14 days. We got to battle for it 7 times. This guaranteed that our clan and many others got at least one first place finish during this time. From the moment we got to Legendary league, we never missed out on getting a first place legendary chest (I even kept all the screenshots of the collections). So the old clan wars guaranteed an average of 3,219 gold per day from this chest. Added with the 2,600 gold this makes 5,819 gold per day. Verdict from all these things removed, we used to get a guaranteed 5,819 gold per day. So the question is, what replaced all this? Drew has said that the new clan wars chest that is given to us every 7 days (instead of every 14 days) replaces all this. However is this actually better? Prizes in Legendary League are as follows: https://preview.redd.it/eqtvafi1zsk51.png?width=672&format=png&auto=webp&s=4bef93d909bc79556bea2e64948bce40eaf83fb7 So if the clan comes first or second every week the prizes are about the same. Averaging out a first or second place finish will equate to about 39,773 gold per week or 5,681 gold per day. However if you throw in some third place finishes (I won’t even throw in fourth/fifth place ones) this drastically drops this amount. Lets assume your clan is good and in three weeks you finish First once, Second once and Third Once. You get unlucky and you don’t get the legendary card from the third place chest (remember in all those quest chests above, I never included chances of getting extra epics or Legendary cards). From this first, second and third clan placing you have earnt a total of 96,195 gold over 3 weeks or an average of 4,581 gold per day. This is a lot lower than the old guaranteed 5,819 gold per day. So the unrealistic best case scenario is that your clan never finishes lower than second place or when it does finish third you get lucky and win the legendary card anyway….. At best this will get you around 5681 gold per day. This amount is far from guaranteed. Even this best case scenario is actually worse than the old clan wars calculation that gave me a guaranteed 5819 gold per day. So overall this system is WORSE. I think assuming a 3 week cycle of getting one first place, one second place and one third place is actually a best case scenario and even that means we get around 1,238 gold per day less from this scenario. In a normal scenario when your clan gets put in the river race in a “Group of death” match up, your clan could finish really low. It only takes one or two bad bad results per month to skew things to a much worse scenario than just losing 1,238 gold per day on average. If you have read this far well done. What do you think of all this analysis? The rest of Drews’ post highlighted the monthly tournament and I didn’t see much difference from before, besides it always costs us Gems to get these rewards, I did one of these a long time ago when the original clan wars replaced the clan chest. Back then Supercell was telling us the new rewards were better and myself and some others posted showing them how it actually wasn’t. They ended up revising things and giving us more. Hopefully they look at this post and do the same. They may say that they will now compensate by giving more away in challenges but I’d rather the daily grind that never costs gems to do a continue, will at least be raised a bit to match or actually be better than the old system. Also I actually want to thank Drew for his post. I think it shows that he cares about us and that he cares about the game. Drew’s post would have taken a long time to construct and many things were explained well and with details. This made my post easier to research. NOTE EDIT 2 below is suggestions to improve the game EDIT 1---- I have had some very good comments question how I came to certain conclusions and I replied to some of you individually but I thought it is better I put it here too. Some of the calculations are a little subjective and so I will explain them further.
How did I come up with this ridiculous conversion of each gem being worth 275 gold?
Answer: Each person can value gems to be whatever they want. I personally only ever spend them if I have a good chance or guarantee of getting a minimum of 275 gold per gem spent. I usually get more gold per gem spent than this. I have the pass on my main account, but my other account doesn't. In the last two challenges, I worked out that I got over 700 gold per gem spent for one, and 600 gold per gem spent for the other. For example in the last challenge, in the final phase I lost after 3 wins. So I spent 25 gems for a continue and got the last 2 prizes (5,000 + 10,000 gold). This means I got a return of 600 gold per gem spent. Had I lost again and needed to spent another 25 gems I still would have got a return of 300 gold per gem spent (higher than my assumption that each gem is worth 275). But again this is my personal benchmark that makes me spend my gems, others would have their own. In my gems calculation, I am talking from a free to play perspective. The thing is I have never bought gems and the only thing I buy is the royale pass each month for my main account. I have a second account that I haven't bought anything for. As such due to the limited free gems I get, I use them vary wisely (hence my 275 gold per gem rule). Some have posted that I should use a calculation on how much return we get for a classic or grand challenge. To spend gems on these first of all doesn't guarantee what you get in return (unless you a pro who can get 12 wins every time). Secondly if I were to spend gems on these, and then also need to spend gems to complete challenges too, I would have to buy gems at some point. In this case by buying gems, it becomes a calculation of how much money is spent converts to how much gold I get for that money. 2) How did you assume that in the old clan wars that you always got on average 2,000 gold per day? In your example unless you are a CRL pro you aren't going to win your final war day every time, so you have skewed the figures here. Answer: Don't forget the old CW1 system would occasionally give the war day prize as anywhere between 10-50 Gems. I can remember a few times getting the full 50 Gems (worth 13,750 gold in my calculations). From my calculations even 10 Gems = 2,750 gold on its own. So even if you were given 10 or 20 Gems every now and then makes the average daily gold won from CW1 go up. Getting those gems as a prize was independent of how well you did that particular clan war too. So this would offset occasions where you lost the final battle or did bad on card collection too. This is why I believe 2000 gold won daily from clan wars 1 battles was a fair estimate at least for me. Overall this average of 2000 gold is a bit subjective and each person can conclude that it was slightly higher or lower for them. 3) How do I then say clan wars 2 gives on average only 2000 gold daily gold for attacks especially given in my example above I assumed I won the final war day in old clan wars? Shouldn't I just assume I'd win all 4 1v1 battles too? Answer: Firstly in my example of the old clan wars I put down that I won half the battles. In that example I put down winning 1 card collection battle, losing 2 of them and then winning the final war day. This amounts to 1500 gold in itself. You would also get the same gold from winning 3 card collection battles and losing the final war day attack too. Also as explained in point 2, when you factor in that you could also win gems in clan war 1 this makes the average gold won per day go up. In regards to Clan Wars 2. So far my results from the 4 days of clan warring is as follows. On my main account all did was 1v1s. Every battle has been against people with a minimum pb of 6000 trophies and in most cases above 6500 (my pb is around 6000). I have won roughly 50% of these matches, definitely no easy matches at all at least for me. Best result was 3 wins one day, worst result was just 1 win (average 2000 gold). I have another account too that is almost as strong as my main and two days in a row I tried duels. Day 1 I lost all 4 1v1 matches. On day 3 and 4 I tried to do duels. One duel I lost 2-1 and the other I won 2-1. So for the duels I won 3850 gold over two days for those 2 duels with one attack with my worst deck remaining to try and win in 1v1. You could adjust these daily average figures slightly either way to say the average should be a bit higher than 2000 gold for the new system. Also you can again take the safe approach of just attacking players boats for a guaranteed 2000 daily gold. So either way I feel the 2000 gold per day average for the new clan wars is a fair figure. Also some have commented that for their circumstances it is even worse than old clan wars since they have lower accounts that don't have 32 maxed card. So their match ups now make it nearly impossible to win more than one 1v1 game per day. So they would probably just be forced to do the boat battles to get that guaranteed 2000 daily gold. 4) You have failed to include the free tokens you get from tournaments in your calculations. ANSWER: In terms of what tokens themselves are worth when converting them into gold, you don't get much for them. They say they are giving us more of them, but by giving us more of them, we get less of something else. As such regarding Tokens given to us in the free global tournament prize pool, to be honest I think this worsens the gold we used to get. As explained above if you purely convert Tokens into what they are worth for Gold Legendary Token = 2000 gold Epic Token = 1000 gold Rare Token = 500 gold Common token = 250 gold. These are the amounts of gold you get for these tokens if you max them out and then collect another. In the global tournament they now boringly always give 2 sets of these you that need to win at least 8 matches in the tournament to get them all. So for 8 matches you win a free 7500 gold. I'd rather more random prizes like they used to give for free in the global tournament such as chests that were easily worth more than a single trade token (or in this case 8 trade tokens worth 7500 gold). 5) You assumed you won all clan war 1 final attacks, yet assume you will only win 50% of your new clan war 2 attacks. Answer : My example of clan wars 1 stated winning 1 card collection battle then winning the final war day. That also means losing 2 card collection battles. This is actually a 50% win rate (that is 2 wins from 4 battles). Also in my case I invested spending gold to make cards war day ready ie making them level 12 (at the expense of perhaps delaying maxing out decks for ladder). This actually skewed results to tailor me winning more final war days. I viewed spending gold in this way as an investment that if I won war days, I would get gold returned. As such I finished off clan wars 1 winning 300 war days at 70% win rate. I'm not a good player by any means, but my gold investments meant I got a better than 2 out of 3 win rate for final war day matches. The other thing not included in the calculations is that occasionally you also use to get a second war attack too. From data I have gained from my clan website I have worked out that I got the second clan attack 5.6% of the time. EDIT 2 https://preview.redd.it/o7ut61nsvxk51.png?width=682&format=png&auto=webp&s=840e60105ba4af46fcbd69eab29d09e54172b630 Dang it. After posting my response below, I now realise you didn't want solutions for improvements but wanted feedback in how to make the reward posts not give misinformation. I hope you appreciate some of the ideas written below that would make a huge difference in the communities reception to the update. Also to anyone that may disagree with any of this information, or would have gone about calculating things a different way, please do so. I will be happy to read. I'd be interested if other systems for calculating what every item is worth produces similar results. Hi Drew. You have called me out here and I like it. Too many people simply criticize stuff without having a solution. Well boy you are wrong here as my solution will involve you reading another novel. :) Let me say I wrote my original posts because I care about the game and I also think you are doing a great job in your roll. I always enjoy all your videos and I enjoy your communication style to us all. I'm sure these sentiment are shared among the entire community. Whilst I am not a heavy cash spender as such, I always buy the royale pass which costs $7 here per month for me. That is $84 a year and even this yearly amount is more than I have ever spent on any single game. However I think it is worth it as I enjoy the game so much and want to continue to do so and support it. Hopefully the ideas shared here will even in a small way help make the game succeed more. First let me say I don't think in any way that you or Supercell was trying to be untruthful in this new update. If that's how my post came across I do apologies. As can be seen it is actually quite a complicated process deciphering between the rewards we used to get and all the new ones we get now. So much has been changed all at once from this update. On the surface it did appear we get more now and initially this is what I thought until I dug deeper. The reason I thought this is mainly due to the excellent clan war chest being offered every 7 days instead of every 14 days. The main problem occurs in the value of legendary cards. These heavily skew the daily gold value, so if you don't finish 1st or 2nd in each river race, you have a high chance of not getting that legendary card and your daily gold suffers greatly. Previously most clans could guarantee at least 1 win every 7 war days to ensure they got the top prize in the clan chest every single time. This would then guarantee you getting that legendary card (worth 20,000 gold). I realise you may not agree with some of my calculations used such as what each card is worth. I explained my use of these. As a primary free to play player, I never buy cards in the shop as gold is too precious. If I do buy cards, I always make sure to do them with a trade token by trading out maxed cards to ensure I get my cards at the half price value (ie I buy all my legendary cards with a token and 20,000 gold). Also whenever a card is maxed, this same "half gold price" is given to you when you collect more of them in a chest. So really that gold amount is what they are worth when you are essentially the seller. If I maxed out a certain legendary card by spending 40,000 for each card, when I get an extra one in a chest, I will only be given 20,000 gold and not the 40,000 gold I spent on each one. Its like that old rule, you only know what something is worth when you try to actually sell it. OK so how to fix things. Firstly I think Clan Wars 2 is exciting. I however fear for the longevity of the game mode and the game itself to be honest. I also fear for what will happen to a lot of clans. Using my clan as an example, we got 24,000 war trophies under the old clan wars. However despite it being full, we always have members that never preferred to do clan wars and these have not even attacked at all in the new clan wars 2 either, however they are active. On average we used to get around 23-27 people attacking each war but this was alright in the old clan wars. Others that didn't attack included some really great players in the clan that wanted to focus solely on ladder and would only occasionally do a clan war. SOLUTIONS TO FIX THE PROBLEMS CREATED: Step 1) I would at the very least give people winning any clan war game the ability to unlock a chest slot. Right now we can unlock chest slots via party mode games or ladder only. Lets give that ability to clan war games too. This will give some people an extra incentive for doing clan war attacks every day. Some people might only have 20-30 minutes of play each day. As such they want to quickly log on, and have chests ready to unlock. Allowing clan war wins to also do that would be great. Step 2) Allow as many people to attack in clan wars all at the same time. In the old clan wars, this wasn't a problem. On war day we had one attack and that was it. When everyone has up to 4 attacks a day, sitting through and waiting for others to finish their attacks is annoying. I am a clan leader and when midnight strikes, despite me wanting to attack immediately, I sit back to allow other clan members to attack first. Each person could spend around 20 minutes to finish their attacks. I allow them to do it because I don't know if they will only log on once per day and I want to make sure they can do their attacks, Now multiply that by a potential 50 players in each clan and that could be a lot of time sitting around waiting to try and do all your attacks. Also due to not actually knowing how many attacks others have left, I will often sit and wait till that person logs out. We don't need to actually know how many attacks each person has left if you simply allow us all to attack in clan wars whenever we want too. Step 3) The above two ideas will hopefully help more people want to do attacks in clan wars and maybe keep it alive and well for longer, however rewards are still lacking. I didn't consider this in my example but a lot of people have been pointing out that their clan and others in their race will not even finish the river race. If they can't even get that interest in the first week of this new update, then imagine later? I have noticed this in my race too. It seems 2 out of 5 clans won't finish and the 3rd clan will barely finish and this is in legendary league where you would assume more of the clans are established. Previously it didn't matter how many in each clan wanted to do the clan war. Whether you got 20 people or 40 people in the clan doing clan war you would be matched up with 4 other clans that have the same amount of players. An idea to fix things would be whilst it is a team game, lets perhaps reward individuals a bit more. The fame tally could continue to count even if the river race is completed (currently this fame count stops when you finish it). At the end of the week you as an individual would get a little bonus based on your total fame. Instead of a separate bonus for the individual fame earnt, I would do the following. Do not reward the clan wars chest the moment your clan crosses the river. Instead use the players personal fame for the week to help decide what chest you get given. If your clan finishes 1st, then no problem, every member in the clan that participated will get that 1st place chest at the end of the week, as this is the best possible. However if your clan finishes 2nd or lower (or even doesn't finish), then it counts your individual fame for the week. You would then set goals for this and each goal equates to a chest. So 4000 fame in a week might equate to a 1st place chest, 3500 might equate to 2nd, 3000 might equate to 3rd etc. (I use these numbers as examples, these could be tweaked of course). So in my above example lets say your clan came 2nd, but you got over 4000 fame for the week, you are then given the 1st place clan chest as that is the greatest result out of the two. If your clan didn't finish the race but you got 3100 fame for the week, you will get the 3rd place clan wars chest. You do not get 2 chests, but you get the best result out of your personal fame for the week and the clans final finish. Another advantage to this is that someone might have missed out on initially participating in the clan war due to the clan being so fast at completing it. In this case, they could still grind their fame during the week and will get a clan war chest that corresponds to that. I would love these ideas because I then don't need to keep barking instructions and convincing my clan how good clan wars is (I actually do think it's good btw), and that we should be attacking all the time, or contemplating kicking some that doesn't want to do them. I would know that I could just earn the chests by individually play. I think this change would save a lot of smaller clans stay together too because generally we stay in the clans we are in because we have grown with the people together. Many people in my clan have been with me for 4.5 years since this game came out and that would be the same with other clans. This would also encourage people to not lose courage or interest in the game because their clan is not pulling their way. Step 4) Someone replied to this post and made an excellent point I never thought about. He said that some clans will be forever stuck in one league and I would hate to think about the slow progression of a new clan. Currently the progress of clan trophies is way too slow and most are going to fall back. So the current system is that when you win a clan war, your clan only gets 20 trophies. 2nd place gives +10 and even 3rd place makes you lose 5. You also lose 10 trophies for 4th place and lose 20 for fifth place. I would either increase theses a little or better yet incorporate a way to get more. On the old clan wars, we used to be able to get 100 clan trophies every 2 days but on top of that every individual war day win gave more clan war trophies too! The only way I can think of incorporating more trophies into this current system is by using each players individual fame to add some trophies in. As an example, all people that got at least 3000 fame for the week give the whole clan they are in 1 more clan trophy point. You could award 2 points for over 4000 etc. This would be in line with the original clan wars that gave extra clan war points for every single final battle win that occurred every 2 days. While I have you attention. Other ideas to improve the game include..…
Allow us to cancel a chest opening. We've all been there. It's 11:00pm and we are feeling great. We have the choice of opening the 3 hour chest or the 8 hour one. We decide to do the 3 hour one. It then gets to midnight and we are all of a sudden really tired. We now wished we opened the 8 hour one instead. We should be able to cancel opening the 3 hour chest (with confirmation button) and open the 8 hour one instead. Progress from opening the 3 hour one is simply lost but you now go to bed satisfied the bigger chest will open while you sleep.
Lets have Ladder ranking modes based upon the party modes. I would have these run run for a week and keep swapping. It would bring interest and keep the game fresh, and you could even tie some sort of watered down trophy road system for them (it wouldn't have to give much, people would play this mode because it is fun).
Ladder mode for duels (this is a very cool feature in clan wars 2). Again this could run for just a week.
I enjoy the quirky modes such as touchdown or 2v2. Allow more party modes to run daily. Touchdown and 2v2 are a way to take the game less serious and watch all the BM's fly in a free for all. Many a time I am laughing at some of the clever BMing even when it is directed at me.
Star points should be able to be used to upgrade emotes. How good would it be to have special effects with emotes.
On the preview screen, we want to be able to see all the different previews of how different levels of star points will make that card look.
Have a way to manually change a cards star point level to either remove them all together, or to switch from star point 3 to lower. This one is not really a big deal but someone might just want a chance of look in a card, and want to switch to one of lower tier star point levels for certain cards.
Not sure if this would ruin the game again but stop blocking a majority of emotes from spectators. Currently if you are lucky, 1 in 3 of your spectator emotes go through for everyone to see even if you think they are all going through. I don't see a problem with all emotes going through if there is only 1 or 2 people watching the game. Start blocking most of them again when there are too many people watching the game.
I have so many ideas to tweak this game. These are just ones I thought of now, but if I put more time I could come up with a lot more. I don't want this reply to get longer than the original post which was already a novel. Thank you Drew for asking for my feedback. I would be happy to talk to you directly about anything if you need clarification about anything I've said here or about these ideas. Also one other thing. These are hard times we are living in and the fact you guys are still putting in time and energy updating the game is great and very much appreciated.
instructions for don't you forget it dice game video
Or actually, don't: with Pressman's game Don't You Forget It, players keep tossing the dice trying to collect nine-of-a-kind before spelling out ""For Get It."" They can stop at any time, though opportunities to double, triple, or even quadruple their scores increase the more dice they match. Forget It (Don’t You Forget It) Dice Game Vintage In Tube Jumbo Games. Item information. Condition: Used. Price: £10.99 . ... Go For Broke Board Game 1985 Vintage MB Games *MISSING 1 DICE & INSTRUCTIONS* £14.99 + P&P . The Compendium Of Games Over 100 Favourite Card Dice and Board Vintage Book. £19.99 Don't You Forget It is an exciting game that is easy to learn. All you have to do is shake the dice and get them all to be the same. Sounds pretty easy right? Well, there is a condition. If the words "For", "Get", and "It" become visible on the dice you won't be finding yourself the winner of this fun game. Don't You Forget It is a fun game ... Keep them entertained and engaged using the Pressman Don't You Forget It Dice Game. It is designed for 2 or more players and contains 9 dice and score pad. This dice game also comes with easy to follow instructions and a storage pouch. Enjoy game night at home or when you travel with the Don't You Forget It Game from Pressman. The object of the game is to try and roll nine dice and get them all to match before the words For, Get and It appear face up. Package contains nine special game dice, game rules, a score pad and a handy storage pouch. Suitable for ages 8 to adult. If you get at least one of each of these, you spell FORGET IT and immediately lose your turn. You score no points and the next player goes. The Point Dice: Choose ONE number from the dice (1 through 5) that you've rolled at least two of a kind of (ie: two 3s or three 5s, etc). The dice with the number you choose are the only point dice you put ... Instructions: Players roll the 9 dice and score points and keep rolling and making points as long as they don't roll the three dice that spell out FOR, GET and IT. Players can stop any time and collect their points, but watch out. As soon as you spell out FORGET IT, you lose everything you've collected for that round. How far will you push you ... Uno Dice Rules Overview: A popular, two-player variant of the Uno card game, Uno Dice is a fast-paced race to zero dice. Don’t forget to yell out “Uno!” when you reach that last die, or you will get stuck drawing more, just like in the classic card game. With Pressman’s game, Don’t You Forget It, players keep tossing the dice trying to collect nine-of-a-kind before spelling out “For Get It.” They can stop at any time, and have opportunities to double, triple, or even quadruple their scores the more dice they match. The basic premise of the game is this: you roll six dice. Some combinations of dice will score points, while others don’t. You take out the dice that have scored points and then decide whether to keep that score, or re-roll the remaining dice to try to score more points.
instructions for don't you forget it dice game top
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