Nobody Cares: Gaming Edition

[Jolene Benoir]

It's the Game of the Year addition which includes the expansions.

That is good news. Thanks. I have no plans to avail myself of it as I already own the GOTY edition, but heck yeah, if I didn't I would jump on this one. With mods, Morrowind is a fantastic game and one in which you can see the progression of the Elder Scrolls series. I currently have my Steam version installed, have had for a very long time. I go in when the mood strikes me and continue where I left off or just wander about doing assorted side quests. One of these days I will actually progress to completion and shall miss its world.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

A couple of years ago I picked up this handsome box set which has the entire Elder Scrolls franchise through Skyrim, including all the expansions. LOL in all that time I've still never tried Arena or Daggerfall, I really ought to give those a try some time.

Morrowind is a GREAT game. The story and world are amazing. And that music is absolutely transporting; I think it's actually a very important part of the feel of the game, and not just filler. The music makes you feel like you're in the middle of a grand epic adventure, even when the game's visuals are so almost-painfully dated. I think Morrowind's main theme has basically become the Elder Scrolls theme, because the main theme of every game since has been the same music just played in a different key and/or tempo. Which I'm okay with.

By the way, watch this video - and watch the whole thing, because there's a kinda neat surprise near the end - if you're a Skyrim fan. ^^

 

[Caete]

Spoiler

So glad Shirley got put in! She's awesome.

Meanwhile over in GW2

 

[Free]

Heh.

 

[Caete]

 

[Cristiano]

I am utterly addicted to a mobile game called Rangers of Oblivion. I'm playing it on my iPad and also through Bluestacks on my computer. It's a weird mashup between Monster Hunter and Black Desert Online. It has monster hunting, crafting, cooking, fishing, housing, horse taming and breeding, alchemy, a user marketplace and more. They quality shocked the hell out of me, and so far it does not seem to be a nasty F2P cash grab.

 

[Caete]

I am utterly addicted to a mobile game called Rangers of Oblivion. I'm playing it on my iPad and also through Bluestacks on my computer. It's a weird mashup between Monster Hunter and Black Desert Online. It has monster hunting, crafting, cooking, fishing, housing, horse taming and breeding, alchemy, a user marketplace and more. They quality shocked the hell out of me, and so far it does not seem to be a nasty F2P cash grab.

I know this game. It can also be buggy as fuck. Refuses to run at all on one of my minis, and crashes at character "creation" on the other. It looked intriguing enough for me to try at least. I have Bluestacks on my tower but not my laptop, forgot all about it tbh. I'll give it a try again. Thanks Cris.

 

[Cristiano]

I know this game. It can also be buggy as fuck. Refuses to run at all on one of my minis, and crashes at character "creation" on the other. It looked intriguing enough for me to try at least. I have Bluestacks on my tower but not my laptop, forgot all about it tbh. I'll give it a try again. Thanks Cris.

It does require the 64 bit version of Bluestacks, which is fairly new. I didn't even know there was a 64 bit version until I searched for why Rangers was crashing.

They have a page specifically for it:

Download & Play Rangers of Oblivion on PC & Mac (Emulator)

Rangers of Oblivion is only available on 64-bit Android and BlueStacks is the only platform that runs 64-bit Android. Download with BlueStacks and experience the ultimate MMORPG.

www.bluestacks.com

There are apparently some newer Android games that are 64 bit only.

 

[Victorianna Writer]

There are times when the Sims devs do deserve to be reamed. To start with, they should not have lied to us about why some things haven't made it into the game when they should have been in the base game. The lies continue. They claim things can't be coded when we know damn good and well they can be. They say they can't do things because it can't be done. Bullshit. The real reason is upper management/board of directors refuse to fork out the wages for the work.

They need to stop the lies. They are NOT transparent. At all. And yes I do play. I have The Sims, The Sims 2, The Sims 3 and The Sims 4. And yes I still play all except the original. I still have all my discs though so if I ever do want to play I can. And I stopped posting on the Sims forum because I got sick of reading the lies.

I've never been fond of the Sims. I tried it and I found myself doing the same thing almost everyday. Normally I get bored with games after about 3 months or so....but here I am playing SL for 12 years. Lol

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

My Skyrim mod build got obliterated in the recent SSD failure...and I'm not really looking forward to rebuilding THAT mess right this moment. However, I decided I've never really given TES4: Oblivion a fair shake before; so I built a graphically-updated modlist for it and I'm going to do an Oblivion playthrough.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

My Skyrim mod build got obliterated in the recent SSD failure...and I'm not really looking forward to rebuilding THAT mess right this moment. However, I decided I've never really given TES4: Oblivion a fair shake before; so I built a graphically-updated modlist for it and I'm going to do an Oblivion playthrough.

You should enjoy it. I know that it's sometimes rough to go back to older game mechanics after having played newer, but you mentioned that you enjoy Morrowind so that shouldn't really be an issue for you.

Make sure to take time to stop and smell the roses and be sure to do the assassin and thieve's guild quests, alongside the others, but those are quite good.

You may want to read up a small bit about how leveling up works in the game so that you don't end up underpowered, though I never had that problem. I ended up quite overpowered, but early on take care in what skills you level.

Enjoy! It's the one that doesn't get a lot of love, but it's good, imo.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Speaking of TES and older game mechanics, lol....I just found out earlier today that a bunch of people have been spending the last couple of years rebuilding Daggerfall in Unity - and they're very close to done with it.

Here's a couple of videos to watch. This first one is like a basic demo and a short discussion about what's in the game and what's left to be finished - basically just some spells and some NPC reactions:


And then there's this guy who a month and a half ago livestreamed playing the game-so-far, which apparently you can download and play even though it's not 100% complete yet (because yeah, Unity and it's an open-source project).


That video is like 4 hours so I don't expect anyone to watch the whole thing, lol, but it's worth poking through a bit to see how things look. I think it's funny that the first 28 minutes of that video are spent on character creation - and it's all stats; The Elder Scrolls was originally aimed at hardcore D&D nerds - you could fast-track through character creation in all of these games if you wanted to but taking the time filling out your character sheet is really part of the whole experience. Skyrim was a huge departure from that. You can spend a half an hour creating your character in Skyrim too, but it's all spent working on his/her face.

Since this new game is being built in Unity that means it will be highly moddable. The characters and creatures are still 2D sprites; but the art has been modernized a fair amount without getting away from the original style very much.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Zarf Updates: All of Infocom's game source code

 

[Caete]

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I run a DnD club in my school that sees all types of students from sports kids to theater kids and AP to special ed. The school is predominately Hispanic, and one student comes to me explaining how she was really quiet during the game because she didn’t know how to say certain phrases in English. I thought about this for a second and asked her questions about her (Elf Fighter’s) background. She said that she was a Noble High Elf, and I suggested that as part of her background her family didn’t allow her to learn Common which explains for why she only knows so much Common (English). I then proposed to the game if we made Elvish Spanish so that she can express questions in the game in Spanish and have one of our Half-Elven or Elven Spanish speakers ask the question in English to the group so that I’m helping my student learn English while also giving them something unique and special about their character. The last thing I want is a kid thinking they cannot play because of a language barrier. This is a game for everyone.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

What does anyone here think about Conan Exiles? Is it a pretty decent game? Will it still be a pretty decent game if I only ever do single-player and never join any clans (or whatever the game's version of them are)? I'm assuming since the game costs $40 if I bought it I'd be able to play the whole thing single-player if I wanted to...or is there some material that's locked away unless you join multiplayer despite buying the game?

 

[Caete]

No idea Cody, I never played Conan.

In other news:

 

[Erich Templar]

In other news:

I'm in. I never played the original, but I've heard very good things about it, and I'd like the chance to play in a good superhero game.

 

[Caete]

I'm in. I never played the original, but I've heard very good things about it, and I'd like the chance to play in a good superhero game.

It was a lot of fun. At the low levels it is kind of a pain as you don't have super speed or flight or super jumps so getting across zones seemed to take forever. The teaming system was kind of unique. Say you were the higher level person and your friend just started, you could sidekick them up to 1 level below yours OR you could exemplar down to their level. Certain conditions apply.

PVP (if that's your thing) was both fun and frustrating. Certain zones are PVP so the villain players and hero players do meet. Each zone has a set level and you are pumped up to it or deleveled to it while in the zone. Drawback is if you are bumped up, you did not gain new abilities as you would get actually being that level. Also a lvl 50 with duos equiped (buff medals fo your abilities) would not lose the power of those. So even if you both were now level 25, for example, the 50 player had an advantage thanks to their buffs. I had a running 60 minute battle with my 19 stalker (villain assassain type) against a 50 brawler. They couldn't keep me stunned enough to defeat me (no one dies, you're just defeated) before I'd super leap away, stealth up, heal and come back. Likewise my assassain strike big hit wasn't enough to one shot them but would drop them to 20-33% health but my other abilities were too weak to out DPS their regen. Still was a huge ball of fun reading zone chat with them raging and me taunting and then finding out the next day just how triggered I had made them since my friend and the brawler were in the same supergroup and they were still raging the next day about the villain who wouldn't stand their ground and fight face to face lol.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Okay....I'm done a bit more research about Conan Exiles and I think I might end up getting it after all.

I was concerned at first, because most of the intro/beginners-guides I read or watched to begin with, concentrated on clothing your character and getting started building and crafting. You have to gather a number of resources which allow you to build certain things and create new tools, which in turn allow you to gather harder-to-get resources that you can eventually use to craft more advanced things, and so on. Everything I'd been watching gave me the impression that this was the totality of the game - you craft more advanced things and you just build more stuff, and although the game DOES have offline single-player, it seemed to me there wasn't much point in crafting all the things and spending time building amazing structures that nobody besides you would ever look at.

But I finally found a webseries that explains there IS questing to be done in this game; there's lore and at least a main story to go through, although from the look of it it seems one would likely want to spend significant time leveling and gearing up before trying to take these on.