Saturday Morning Gaming: Added Value

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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15 Responses

  1. jason says:

    No Man’s Sky had yet another big update: this time you can find derelict freighters to loot and even change the colors and storage capabilities of your capital ship, so I’ve been playing that. Also, the fancy edition of Shadow of War was on sale for fifteen bucks, so I bought it. I’m not sure why; I still need have a LOT to do in RD2. I blame you, Jaybird, for the glowing review you did a while back. Lol.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to jason says:

      Anything I can do to help people quarantine I see as a good deed.Report

    • Reformed Republican in reply to jason says:

      No Man’s Sky has been my main focus for the past few weeks (and also fits really well with Jaybird’s “games that have improved with updates” theme). I had been curious about it since launch, but I was not playing a lot of games on the computer, so I never got around to getting it. I finally got it from Steam’s Summer Sale, and I have really been enjoying it. There is just a lot to do, with lots of little distractions from whatever I am actually trying to accomplish. “I need to mine some cadmium. Oh look, something shiny! Oh, look, something else shiny! There’s a building! What happened to that ore deposit?”

      There is currently some discussion of getting bonuses at work. If that actually comes through, I might be getting an Occulus to play the game in VR.

      I still haven’t tried out the derelict freighter yet. Just finished the Atlas quest line, then going back to the Artemis quest line. I also have a bunch of base building quests to do.Report

  2. DavidTC says:

    I started playing VTM:B Thursday, as a mental prep for the new one coming out.

    I actually find the game slightly frustrating in a lot of weird ways. Mostly because it’s very easy to secretly miss thing.

    I had forgotten that you actually didn’t get directed towards quests, except the main one. The way the game works is…you just randomly talk to people. If you don’t talk to one person, you can miss out on entire chains of quests. Also…the quest descriptions tend to be very bad…the game is good at giving you very good directions, and then vaguing them up for ‘let me check my notes’. It’s like…I know I was told exactly what to do…and I don’t seem to have that information anymore. What, am I supposed to remember things now?

    This is my first time as a Tremere vampire, and I have somehow missed my upgraded safehouse…I think. (You can’t get the normal upgraded one as a Tremere, you get one in their building instead.) I keep going to the Tremere guy, to check in, but he doesn’t seem to want anything from me, or have anything to say. And I haven’t been rude to him or anything.

    Tremere’s a lot of fun, though, once I figured out how they were supposed to work. You almost _have to_ use magic (Um, is it technically magic? I guess it is?), because your physical stats can’t get above three.

    The easiest magic is…the one that just makes them vomit blood, which uses very little power. So many boss fights I just make them do that, wail on them with a sword while they’re doing that, stop when they recover, run off so that I finish recharging which happens like five seconds after _they_ recover, and hit them again. It’s a crazy playstyle, but, apparently, that’s sorta how you do it.

    I just finished the stupid Warrens thing and was sent to Chinatown but haven’t actually gone there yet, and I’ve been doing the quests as they came along, so…I’m pretty close to endgame.

    And it’s my first time playing an actual modded version (As opposed to just the patched stuff.), I’m doing Camarilla Version. It actually added a cloud minds-type aoe spell, I forget the name, but…it works way better than ‘trance’ spell, which annoyingly breaks if you walk near them and only gets one person at a time, and they can annoyingly block things. This just makes them sorta ‘reset’ and wander around confused, and it’s such an interesting spell I sorta think it was built-in but one of those things that got diked out in the release.

    I’ve noticed that every time I’ve played the game, I sorta walk the middle path, which I guess…next time, I’m full Anarch, probably as a Brujah or a Gangrel. And then full buttkiss.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:

      Have you ever played Malkavian?Report

      • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

        No, and I haven’t played Nosferatu either, which I’m sure changes the game even more. Honestly, Nosferatu sound really annoying, and I might never do that…but Malkavian, I do plan to play that at some point.

        I guess I could try it on my planned anarch playthrough…although I don’t actually know what happens if you just outright keep arguing with LaCroix, at the very start of the game, and keep it up the entire game, so maybe I need to try that normally first before trying it Malkavian.

        Oh, and FYI: I hadn’t missed out on the Tremere safehouse, I just got it earlier today…apparently you get it really late game. At this point, I’m randomly wandering around collecting posters and other silly loose ends, until I jump into endgame…and I don’t actually know how I’m taking that. I don’t think I’ve cut any path off at this point, so I might just…save and try them all.

        Next time I play, I’m going to look for other mods, too. But an interesting thing about this game is…you can only use one mod at a time. Basically, they create their own subdirectory and that subdirectory has a bunch of changed game files in it, and then you just start the game with that directory as an option.

        While I’m sure this is annoying for modders, it’s good for me, because a lot of times, I end up spending a hell of a lot of effort trying to figure out what mods I should play with in various games. But here…I just have to pick one, and that’s all I can do. (There are some ‘merged mods’ though. Like…every mod starts with the unofficial patch in it, and a few of them try to put together some of the bigger unrelated ones.)Report

        • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:

          Okay, you inspired me to start playing it again (as Malkavian). I went through the prologue and got my new apartment.

          I think when you play Malkavian, you’ll have a blast. The first time I played the game, I trusted the personality test and it gave me Malkavian and… well, the second time I played the game as Brujah and had fun with it… then I played Malkavian again and I said “HOLY CRAP THIS VERSION OF THE GAME IS NOTHING BUT OBFUSCATED SPOILERS!!!”

          So if you sigh happily and think about playing it again, play again as Malkavian.Report

      • Reformed Republican in reply to Jaybird says:

        My first playthrough was Tremere. My second was Malkavian. Both were many years ago. I quit the Malkavian playthrough before I got to the end game where it was just killing your way to the obnoxious final boss. I did not have the willpower to do it a second time.

        Have they fixed the endgame with the new patches? That would be something that might entice me to try again.Report

        • That’s a great question. I last played a few patches ago and stopped playing somewhere around the Malkavian Maze.

          This time I *WILL* get through it. I have started the game with 510 skill points, thanks to the console.

          I’m certain that this will make some of the sloggier parts less sloggy.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:

            Okay. I beat it. It remains an amazing game.

            Of course, gaming has advanced somewhat since then… fetch quests are obviously fetch quests now (and they didn’t *FEEL* like fetch quests at the time…) and part of the game that were terrifying and amazing the first time lack any tension whatsoever this time around (e.g., the haunted hotel).

            BUT. It was an awesome game.

            And, yes, you’ll want to use the latest version of the unofficial patch.

            And you’ll want to start the game by going through the tutorial to find your feet again, then, once the tutorial is over, opening the console with tilde (~), typing in giftxp 255 and then doing that again.

            Then give yourself 510 xp to play with.

            The sloggy stuff (apart from the aforementioned hotel) evaporates.Report

            • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

              I didn’t mention it, but on my play-through I actually picked an Ending I didn’t even know existing: the Camerilla ending. Where you basically just tell the Camerilla what’s going on and they come grab LeCroix and the sarcophagus.

              I didn’t realize there was a way to beat the game without anyone opening the sarcophagus.

              That would, weirdly, be a very strange ending to have without having already played through the game once. You get no solution to what’s going on at all.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:

                Is that the one where you replace the Ventrue leader with the Tremere one?

                The first time I played, I picked that one. Like, but this was before the Unofficial Patch. They were still working on the official ones at that point.

                This time around, I picked the Anarch ending for the first time and was delighted by it.

                (I understand that there is also a Kuei-Jin ending that is spectacularly unfulfilling. I’ve never pursued it… and googling tells me that there’s a Sabbat ending? What the heck?)Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

                Yes, that is what functionally happens, but…you don’t really ‘do’ that in any real way. You just go tell the Camerilla what’s going on with LeCroix working with the Kuei-Jin, and they apparently run it up the chain and say ‘Well, he’s out’. You’d think you need to gather evidence or something, but nope.

                The interesting thing is there’s a dialog place in the cab where there’s a list of people can side with, but that’s not one of the choices! So it’s not an obvious ending.

                You have to talk a bit more to the cab driver and realize that telling the Camerilla what is actually happening would, in theory, solve most of your problems, and then you realize you can tell the Tremere leader, who seemed to be a loyal Camerilla follower who nevertheless wasn’t that enamored of LeCroix. (Presumably that’s only there if you haven’t seriously pissed him off..although I wonder what would happen if you did. Like…it’s still true.)

                Like the ‘no side’ ending, you still have to fight all the boss battles. I don’t particular remember _why_ I ended up having to fight LeCroix, I think it was basically ‘Officially, he’s out, but he’s still got the stupid thing and he’s going to open it, and we don’t have the army it would take to defeat him.’

                I’m probably going to take a break and then, I dunno, go another round next month. VtM:B 2’s release date has apparently been bumped to 2021.

                The Sabbat side of the game was apparently _really_ cut back before release, and I think you can’t actually _do_ it in the original version, you have to have the plus version of the unofficial mod.

                If you are going to do it, go get a mod that vastly expands it. Like the Clan Quest Mod, that’s the one I’m using next time.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to DavidTC says:

                “That would, weirdly, be a very strange ending to have without having already played through the game once. You get no solution to what’s going on at all.”

                It’s the one where the DM is like “well, you weren’t supposed to fight that guy, and if you did you weren’t supposed to win, so, I guess you all just go back to the inn and, that’s it, that’s the campaign…”Report