Tag: Pillars of Eternity

State of the Game: Recent Updates

Izlain

Hello everyone, and welcome back to our once in a while round up post. A few different things came up that I wanted to talk about and didn’t feel like they’d flesh out a whole post so here’s a mash up post instead. The first game I want to talk about today is Clash Royale.

It’s still been my go-to mobile game, though I’ve found a few other games that I’ll play here and there from time to time. Clash is still going strong, and my clan is still plugging away at the leaderboard. I finished my 2nd season in the challenger league, this time with my highest trophy count yet at 4139. Last season I made it into challenger but dropped out before the reset and my highest trophies then was somewhere around 4010 or so.

A big update dropped within the last week or so, revamping things for clans. There used to be a clan chest once a week where everyone in the clan had to grind matches so that you’d earn crowns towards a grand total. There were 10 levels of chests, and we’d get the level 10 chest most of the time, providing more cards for the clan. That feature has since been removed, and Clan War has been introduced. Instead of mindlessly grinding for crowns, you now have 3 matches to play on “collection day” and depending on your results of those rounds, you’ll earn cards for the clan. The following day is “war day” and you’ll build a deck out of the cards earned and fight one round. Wins are tallied up against four other clans and whoever comes out on top gets better rewards. Clan wars end after the two days and can be then started immediately again. Apparently the season is monthly, and you’ll earn trophies to work your way up the leaderboards again. As of now we’ve worked up to Bronze 1, but we’re not far off from breaking into the Silver tier. I like this version better because there’s less of a grind but also because it encourages skilled play rather than just throwing yourself against the leaderboard and your crowns counting for a cumulative chest. The game is constantly improving and I still love it.

My best friend and I have been plugging away at Dying Light in our spare time, or more appropriately when we can meet up. It’s a great game and we’ve progressed through about half of the storyline, not counting the little side quests and errands we’ve participated in. At this point we finally got some proper guns, rather than the stupid bats and pipes we’d been using, and it seems that we might be able to hang onto them for the foreseeable future.

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Here’s hoping that this is the case, because the game is much more difficult without them. We did end up getting them taken away again when we had to fight in the pit, but after completing that mission the gear was given back to us. It seems that despite being sent in by a government organization, they are just using you and now it’s coming to a point that you’ve got to be the hero and save all these innocents. Too bad everyone you come into contact with seems to be dying left and right. We’ll see how the story unfolds and I’ll report back once we’ve finished this one up.

I’ve played some more Pillars of Eternity only minimally, as I mentioned in a recent post I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately and haven’t been focused enough to finish up any one game. Spreading my time around has been fun, but that means little to no progress on most games. So I’ve cleared a couple more pieces of the map, but haven’t progressed the story any further, still looking for some spirit or old lady or something from a vision, clearly I haven’t been paying close enough attention. I enjoy the game, but I guess I should hurry up and beat it since the sequel is out now.

Lastly, one of the Playstation Plus games this month was Rayman Legends. I’m not a huge fan of cartoony platformers, but games like this don’t maintain a following for so many years unless they’re pretty decent.

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So far it’s been entertaining… it’s sort of along the lines of Crash Bandicoot and other games in the genre. I’ll say I’m pretty impressed by the graphics and smoothness of the animations. Nothing feels wonky, the game controls great. It’s not the most ambitious game, nor is it something I was dying to play but a good little time waster. Beyond Two Souls was the other freebie for the month but I haven’t gotten around to trying that one yet, so I’ll report back on that once I do.

That’s all for now. Just wanted to jot down some notes. Until next time, happy gaming!

Pillars of Eternity: Blind Playthrough

Izlain

Despite owning Pillars of Eternity for a long while, I’ve just recently gotten around to trying it out. I’m a big fan of isometric RPGs — both the action and party based varieties, and have been since the early days of Diablo and Baldur’s Gate. Obsidian was involved in the creation of some of these old school RPGs, and their experience shows! This isn’t the action RPG variety, but rather the party based kind, where the action is more strategy based than how fast you can mash buttons. Most gamers will know all about this sort of game, and most RPG fans probably ran through this title more than once by now. Pillars of Eternity 2 is already on the horizon as well, so this was a good time to dive in and try to strike one of the deeper games off of the backlog list. I have plenty more to go as far as the backlog goes, and plenty more to explore in Pillars as well. I’d like to notate that despite knowing about the game and knowing that it was similar to cRPGs of old (along with reading good things around the blogosphere) I’m basically going into this playthrough blind. I’m going to attempt to not look up anything and just play through naturally.

After firing up the game and watching a short into movie, I was greeted by the character creation screen, and I was surprised by how feature full it was. The cRPGs of old that I keep referencing made use of AD&D rulesets and so the character generation would reflect that and though this feels similar, there are races and classes that aren’t D&D specific. The stats and skills for each character feel fairly original as well, but that old school feel is still present. It’s just a prettier version of the tried and true, and sometimes that’s all the Old Guard needs. I was taken aback initially by the amount of race and class combinations possible, but assumed that it wouldn’t really matter as you tend to pick up a fairly balanced party in these types of games. I ended up settling on playing a Druid.

I went heavy on Intelligence because I figured if this game was anything like other modern RPGs I’ve played (such as the Dragon Age series), having a bevy of spells at your disposal is rather useful, and sitting in the back with your main character while your AI controlled party beats on things tends to be the best approach. However, it seems that the druid is more about shapeshifting into bigger animals (I chose boar form) and diving into the fray. Whatever the case, the choice doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference as I suspected.

The story unfolds in a similar fashion to most isometric titles, with some in-game dialogue scenes, and then other more animated cutscenes. The graphics are crisp and the animations tight and the lighting effects are excellent. Combat flows well, though I have to get used to only being able to cast spells a certain amount of times per day… but it’s such a throwback and tugs on the right nostalgia strings nonetheless. Apparently you’re a traveller who’s sick and trying to find out what’s going on, but there’s a shroud of mystery that has yet to be lifted. I’m still fairly early on in the campaign, travelling a modest distance to this point.

Earlier this evening I reached Magran’s Fork after being turned away from the Gilded Vale, but I did pick up a wizard buddy. We were clearing the zone when a pack of wolves overwhelmed us and I called it a night. Overall I’m really enjoying this title, it feels really good to have the nostalgic feel in a modern title that still shows its roots. The Dragon Age and Mass Effects were true to their roots in a similar way but still upped the graphics and brought the gameplay in the 3D realm so they were good but this is good in a different way.

It’s refreshing.

Summer Oxymoron Sale

Izlain7 Comments

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Is it just me, or is the title of this year’s Steam Summer Sale a little bit of an oxymoron? They’re promoting picnics and outdoor activities in the advertising, yet all of the games that are on sale would encourage one to stay indoors. I just thought it was kind of funny, not really a big deal though. I’m a sucker for a sale as you guys probably know by now, and not just counting this particular sale, I’ve come up on a metric shit ton of games in the past couple of weeks.

Somewhere a few weeks back, the daily deal was on Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin (the 64-bit version of the game). As of now, I own every souls game besides the latest (Dark Souls III). I really need to make it through some of the older ones before picking up 3, and it’s likely that one will be cheap when I finally get around to buying it. I’ve also downloaded the latest Humble Monthly early unlock, which is called Hurtworld. It’s a survival sandbox-y type game, and it looks semi interesting but with my experience with other survival games it’s likely I won’t spend much time on it. There’s just a couple of days left before the rest of the bundle unlocks, so I’m hoping for a couple other decent titles that I’ve thought about purchasing, rather than what’s been the case where it’s part “meh” and part “gifts for friends.”

The Summer Sale started this week, and I told myself I wasn’t going to go crazy. There were some games I had in mind to look for when the sale hit, because they were still selling for more than I wanted to pay for them, or would just be on a deep discount so I could get more bang for my buck. One of those games was Wolfenstein: The New Order, which Bethesda put out a couple of years ago and I skipped over thinking it wouldn’t be all that great. Then I played the new DOOM and realized that this Wolfenstein would probably be pretty awesome. I haven’t confirmed this just yet, but getting the game for $10 was nice. I also sprung for Pillars of Eternity for $18, and the expansion for that as well. It’s one of those titles I’ve had on my wishlist for a very long time but very rarely goes on sale. I loved all of the Infinity Engine games from back in the day, so I have a feeling I’ll enjoy this one as well. I also sprung for the Baldur’s Gate enhanced editions as well only because of the new content that’s been added pretty recently, but I decided against it. I may change my mind again before the sale is over.

Lastly, I picked up the Legendary bundle of Skyrim for PC. I played the shit out of that game but at the time I had a crappy laptop, so I ended up picking it up for my PS3. I also bought all of the expansion content and finished my playthrough a couple of years ago. However, with the announcement of the new special edition and the fact that it would be free for those who own the original game and all of the content for it, I thought it was a good idea to pick up another copy. I have a feeling it would be too hard to prove that I own all that stuff on PS3 in order to get a PS4 copy of the special edition. I realize too, that I could easily download the game and install a bunch of mods to essentially replicate the new features of the special edition, but I might just wait for the upgrade in October to play through one of my favorite RPGs of all time, once again.

Speaking of favorite RPG series, I finally picked up the GOTY edition of Dragon Age: Inquisition. I’ve been meaning to buy this game for far too long, and having owned and played the shit out of the first two games in the series, I know I’m going to enjoy this. I saw MMO fans complaining because of it’s side quests and similar busy work, but since I don’t play MMOs very often, this shouldn’t faze me. I loved the first two, I’m sure I’ll love this one as well. It’s on sale for $20 on Origin with all of the extras, so it’s definitely worth it for fans of the IP.

All told, I ended up spending about $100 on games. I got some awesome stuff, even if I won’t be able to play it all right away. My wallet was happy that I managed to contain myself, but my backlog has begun to gently weep. More on these titles as I get to them.

What did you pick up so far in the Summer Sale?