Anybody here play Crusader Kings II? I've had immense fun with it these past few months, racking loads and loads of hours on steam. It's really an unbelievably wonderful story generator. Right now in my game I'm playing as a (custom created) Chinese dynasty of Irish Kings, and thanks to some convenient marriages, my dynasty is posed to control not only Ireland and Sicily (which I somehow managed to win through the Crusader), but also have cadet branches ruling over Wales, England, France, Poland, a vassal of Byzantium (in Anatolia, I think), and Naples. I had a relative in Aragon, but things got messy there and the kid died. Hopefully I want to have the majority of Europe controlled by my Chinese dynasty by the time the century ends, enough that I can take down the HRE blob with my superhordes of allies. Although other games have been quieter and comteplative in a way.
I want to check it out- I like Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron, but for some reason I could never get into the first Crusader Kings. Sadly my video card died and I haven't gotten around to replacing it yet, but when I do this and Torchlight 2 are at the top of my list.
Dota 2 is amazing. I got into the beta, (i don't know why... I am not particularly skilled) and it is great. It's like League of Legends without all the annoying parts!
Put in 'The Testament of Sherlock Holmes' in my Gamefly que list! Looking forward! Did attempt 'Resident Evil 5', but thought the controls were worse than 'Resident Evil 4', personally.
Dividing my already-cut-down gaming time between Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and Borderlands 2 at the moment.
Playing a lot of Empire: Total War as the Swedish Empire. I started playing the Total War series with Rome, and then Medieval 2, but I skipped Empire and played Napoleon which quickly became my favorite RTS of all time. Now that I have a better computer I can run Empire (Since it was less optimized than Napoleon). I couldn't be happier with the title, though I know a lot of people don't like it for whatever reason. I also own Total War: Shogun 2 and Rise of the Samurai. These games are incredible, but I am having trouble getting into them. They're just so vast and so foreign to me now that I've been playing games set in the colonial and Napoleonic eras. But yeeah. Empire: Total War is one of the best investments I've ever made. Well, besides the money I put into my relationship.
The Total War I've spent the most time with was Medieval II, for whatever reason. Empire's fun enough, I suppose, although it didn't seem as immersive to me for some reason as the other games. Playing as the Marathas and conquering colonies in the Americans was pretty funny, though. I have to say my favorite Total War is probably Fall of the Samurai, because 1) it's the only time period of Japanese history I'm actually interested in (I hate Japanese history before the mid-1800s), 2) I can blow things up real fun, and 3) on a related note, I can blow up them overrated samurai and their overrated katana.
I can't wait until I can do the same. Blowing the hell out of feudal, isolationist Japan and their petty power-struggles and eradicating the old breed should be amazing!
I picked up Resident Evil 6 to tide me over until Dishonored comes out. I've heard it described as the Michael Bay of video games, and that's pretty accurate. It's big, dumb, and loud, rips control out of the player's hands way too often, and feels unpolished. It's also pretty fun, if only because it's so ridiculous. It's not even close to being my favourite game of the year, but I don't regret getting it. I'm much more excited for Dishonored. If not for Silent Hill 2, I'd consider Deus Ex the best game ever made. Last year's Human Revolutions was a very welcome return to the series, but like RE 6 it had a disappointing tendency to rip control away at critical moments. Dishonored promises to be a truly emergent game, it's my most anticipated game of the year and early review make it sound even better than I was expecting.
Playing Borderlands 2, mainly for the wub-wub. Currently enjoying gunzerking, and vandalising Opportunity,
I've been playing mostly iOS games. Dragon Island Blue is a fantastic pokemon spin-off, Kingdoms of Camelot is my main game since my alliance is going through a merger, and DragonVale is always exciting ha. I haven't played any hardcore games since Max Payne 3, I can't wait to get some Xbox360 time sometime soon. I've gotta get my hands on Dishonored soon!
Dishonored was pretty much what I was hoping for- at times even better, at one particular point worse. Any game that attempts to recreate the classic style of Looking Glass/Ion Storm first person hybrid games is going to attract my attention, doubly so when the creative team is stacked with veterans from Half-Life and Deus Ex itself. In recent years there have been a few attempts to either redefine or recreate this genre, most notably with BioShock and last year's Deus Ex prequel. However while both Bioshocks and Deus Ex: Human Revolution are excellent, most-play games that offer the player a wide variety of choices, they also come with their own set of problems. Bioshock is one of the most compelling pieces of interactive storytelling to come out this console gen, and its combat is almost uniquely deep and satisfying. But ultimately your biggest choice in Bioshock is deciding with which array of tools you will dispatch your enemies- the game is largely linear and combat driven. Last year's Deus Ex prequel was a significant step in the right direction. It offered a surprising number of alternate routes and play style approaches, and it was even possible to make it through the game without killing. Well, except for the awful, completely unnecessary boss fights. The alternate routes were clever and reward exploration... but in light of what Dishonored offers, they feel gamey and unnatural- every building in Deux Ex: HR's future hosts a massive network of vents. But HR's biggest flaw was its reliance on out of game cutscenes to advance the plot, occasionally wrestling control from the player just long enough for lead character Adam Jensen to make some idiotic blunder. Related, it featured one of the least satisfying endings that didn't involve magic star children completely negating your every action (hey Mass Effect 3!) as everything you had done to that point proved irrelevant, and aside from one or two lines in the cut scene, the game's ending was literally decided by which of four buttons you chose to press. While this can be justified as a throwback to the original Deus Ex, it's still disappointing to see a game which, on the micro level, relies so much on player's choices, completely abandons it in the big picture. Which brings me to perhaps the most striking feature of Dishonored. There are many ways in which the city of Dunwall is remarkable. Thanks to the game's unique artistic design, Dunwall bursts with colour and character. It is brimming with life, and beauty, and death, and terror. It is a masterpiece painting set outside in the rain, the rat plague afflicting the city slowly dripping into even its highest places, making squalour of splendour. But let's go back to the beginning. Dunwall is the game's setting, and while it is clearly modeled after London, in terms of atmosphere it bears a much closer resemblance to the cursed, nameless town of Ice-Pick Lodge's remarkable (and terrible) Pathologic. Dunwall, the greatest, most advanced, and wealthiest city in its world is on its death bed, and indirectly the player will determine whether it will recover or fade back into the ruins upon which it is built. Unlike Human Revolution, with its predefined paths, or Bioshock with its (beautiful) straight forward corridors, Dishonored gives you free reign in Dunwall, several blocks at a time. The only routes are the ones you blaze yourself, whether through crude force, or ingenuity, observation, and skill. All of this is enabled by the single most entertaining skill I've ever encountered in a game, the ability to teleport short distances. The rest of the game's skills are also fun, for example freezing time makes lethal playthroughs almost effortless, while the ability to possess rats, fish, or even other people, provides a unique and satisfying means of infiltration. But at least for me, Blink is the most essential and irreplaceable skill, enhancing both exploration and combat. It's at this point I must stress the importance of playing this game with the objective markers off. Blink is such a powerful tool that with objective markers on, if you're patient and skilled enough it's possible to just string together carefully placed and timed teleports and eliminate a target without anyone even knowing you were there. Don't worry, the game provides just enough clues you can figure out where to look for your target. Without an arrow point you forward, you're free to breathe in Dunwall's tainted atmosphere and get a feel for its people. Through a combination of audio and written clues, you can uncover the identify of your target, but also you will stumble on alternate approaches, and even ways of eliminating a target without killing them. Indeed, it's possible to make it through the game without taking a single life, and in almost every case the nonlethal method of eliminating a target is significantly more interesting than just walking in and killing them. They are also often just as cruel, because again in almost every case, the nonlethal means of eliminating a target uses something about the target against them- you learn about the characters on a personal level, expose their vulnerabilities, and exploit them to remove them from public life. Whether your Corvo lives up to his reputation as one of the finest assassins in the world, or you choose to show your mission targets mercy, you will want to be aware of the degree to which you rely on lethal means. Early on, as I was adjusting to the overwhelm degree of options available to me, I killed almost every enemy put in front of me. This had immediate consequences- in Dishonored, if you aren't careful a single act of violence can lead to protracted engagements with full squads of guards, and while Corvo is capable of dealing with enemies quite handily, he is still very vulnerable to damage and it doesn't take much to kill him. Much more interesting are the long term, more subtle effects. As its name would lead you to believe, Dunwall's rat plague is spread by the rats who haunt its alleyways hunting for food in swarms. If you stick around to watch, you'll often be subjected to the grisly sight of a pack of rats feasting on the remains of slain enemies- they will strip them almost to the bone. In a larger sense, this has the effect of spreading the plague, leading to more rats, more victims, and a greater need for your wealthy and noble targets to bolster your security. Specifically, the mechanic that tracks this is 'chaos,' and the more chaos Corvo spreads, the closer Dunwall comes to succumbing to the plague. This is borne out in the game itself- you return to the site of an earlier mission, and if your chaos level is high the streets will be dirtier, more dangerous, and more infested by rats and plague victims. Probably my favourite example of the chaos mechanic in action comes in the game's most striking level, a masquerade ball at the estate of the wealthiest family in Dunwall. The ball is an excuse for the Dunwall elite to revel in their excess, pretend to themselves they are still safe, their city still the greatest in the world, and that another golden age awaits once the plague is dealt with. In truth, the plague has already taken root in the city's heart- if you look in the estate's darkest, most hidden places, you will find nests of rats. The building next to it is already condemned and overwhelmed with the infected. However, for all that it builds on the city's atmosphere and allows you to shape Dunwall's destiny, the actual mechanics of chaos are quite opaque. Once I got a feel for the game, I completed levels without killing anyone, but the game still progressed as though I was going high chaos, and comments from the characters around Corvo seemed to imply that he was becoming more of a killer- it seems that after a certain point your prior actions lock you irreversibly into either a high or low chaos path, and it doesn't seem that this can be undone. I'll have to play through the game again to see if this is the case, or if my early, fumbling attempts at the game were so bloody they completely broke the system. Another way Dishonored reminds me of Pathologic is its handling of scripted events. Throughout each mission, there are a number of conversations or events that automatically trigger when you enter certain areas for the first time. With one awful exception, all of these involve other characters. You are free to listen to them, ignore them, bypass them by going elsewhere, or even interrupt them, whether by throwing an object out to draw attention or just blinking behind a speaker and assassinating them. This feeds into the sense that Dunwall and its environments are a living, breathing, place, which you are free to interact with however you choose. More than any other game in recent memory, Dishonored provides you a number of tools, and turns you loose to experiment and play with them however you'd like. You can create your own paths, uncover as much or as little of the narrative as you desire, and through your actions you can shape both the city and Corvo into whatever image you choose. There is only one critical moment in which the game steals control from you, and it is the one moment which left a bad taste in my mouth. The rest of the discussion of this sequence is spoilers for the late game: Spoiler I don't mind how the betrayal of Corvo was handled mechanically especially with the on-screen effects of his poisoning. Because they so closely resemble the visual effects used when the Overseers use their music boxes to seal Corvo's powers, I even for a moment though it was supernatural, resulting from Corvo's chaos level. It's just deeply disappointing that something which was immediately obvious to me- that the Loyalists were merely using Corvo and planned to betray him- could not be acted on in game. It's probably the only moment where it felt like the game was cheating in order to further its own narrative, and combined with the loss of Corvo's gear I found it extremely frustrating. It's too bad, because in terms of design the level that followed is probably the most interesting in the entire game it's just brought down by the means through which you're directed to it. And those damned plants. It doesn't help that the level that follows features the only part of the game design I not only didn't enjoy, but actively disliked: those infuriating spitting plants. I have no idea how a game that does so much right managed to sneak those little bastards in almost at the last moment. It makes up for it with the ending. Not that the ending itself is anything remarkable. Indeed, depending on how you handle a certain Very Big Moment, in a high chaos setting the ending is either dissatisfying but thematically potent, or very satisfying but thematically... weird. On my first play through I failed at the Very Big Moment, and didn't even know it could be completed successfully. It seemed this Moment was pre-scripted and out of the player's hand, as punishment for taking a high chaos path. I was so dissatisfied, and bewildered after what had been such a strong gaming experience, I immediately replayed the last level, and it turns out if you're careful even with high chaos you can do it successfully.. Spoiler I absolutely loved that it's possible to save Emily, but takes a lot of skill to do so. I managed to do it by hiding on the landing just past the admiral's office, before the stairs leading to the top of the lighthouse. I shot the admiral with a sleeping dart because of its delayed effect, which I believe gave me a few extra seconds. Assuming you make it in one shot, you'll have time to blink up the stairs, blink to the end of the catwalk (just be careful how you aim it- with fully leveled blink it's actually possible to overshoot and blink yourself into the air) and catch Emily. I did find it odd though that after the game spent so much time hyping up how violence was warping Emily, the ending cutscene implies she actually turned out to be, if not a great ruler, at least the best she could have possibly been. That one moment aside, my only complaint about the game was a want for more. I became interested in parts of the city not included in the game, as well as the world beyond Dunwall. In particular, a conversation in a later level hints at the existence of a place where people like Corvo are more common. I also became very invested in the story of the Outsider, and went out of my way to find all of his shrines and find more backstory for him, and was a little disappointed by the fact that despite being the most compelling character in the game, his story never seemed to have a payoff. Hopefully he'll be explored in greater detail if the game gets a sequel. I was also disappointed that while the plague looms throughout the game, and its effects can be seen, it's always an external threat to Corvo. It's understandable why the game does not make it possible for Corvo to catch the plague, as the threat of infection would be a massive game changer- but it's disappointing that and the people around him are seemingly immune. If someone close to Corvo had been infected, the game could have internalised the plague's threat and made it more personal. But any game where one of my biggest complaints is that I want to see more of it is something special. It's hard to quantify, but the game feels right- though it is as beautiful as only a game made with modern technology can be, it feels like a Looking Glass or Ion Storm game. While Human Revolution is an excellent game in its own right and a good addition of the series, Dishonored is the most worthy successor to Deus Ex. With the year's release calender winding down, I feel confident in calling it my game of the year for 2012. Maybe Far Cry 3 will prove me wrong...
The Stigma of Video Gaming It seems there is a stigma attached with playing a lot of video games in general. For the purpose of this post, I am not referring to playing countless hours of shooting up online players in pickup groups of Call of Duty or blowing up friends in Halo. I am referring to the community of players that play role-playing games, whether solo or with other players. It seems to me that video games has become a medium for storytelling, be it a highly interactive one that, today, uses top of the line multimedia (sounds and graphics). Readers seem to harp on movie-watchers for indulging in what they sometimes view as cheap storytelling. It seems that there is a non-supportive group of individuals that would say that people playing a role-playing game are wasting their time. If someone spends several weeks reading through a series of books that are interesting, they typically don't get much flack--perhaps the occasional "OMG, you are such a nerd." If someone spends a week watching a TV series, they typically don't get much flack--in fact, many people do. If someone spends a week playing a role-playing game on the computer or console, there seems to be quite the opinion that they are wasting their time. At the end of the day, all that the three mentioned groups really are doing is entertaining themselves vicariously through storytelling via different mediums. What are your thoughts on this?
I think you're right on the money. They are all different forms of escapism and entertainment. I think that a lot of the hate against video games is because they are a relatively new form, but as they get more advanced and widespread, they're starting to become more mainstream. I think that in time they'll be just as well respected as any of the other recognized time sinks!
More mainstream? You know how many gamers there are in the world? The game industry is bigger than the film industry! If someone is spending a week playing a role-playing game (or watching TV and movies for that matter), I seriously wonder where they are earning their money. And if they have the means to support themselves while doing it, great. The OP's message sounds like a bit of self-reassurance to me. -- edit: this got merged from another thread so the OP message I am referring to is NOT to this thread but to the thread this was merged from. Oh, and the following sounds a lot like 'role-player' snobbery to me It's the exact same bloody thing! 1st person shooter gamers are also a community! Get off your high horse.
I don't know that it's so much a stigma on playing games, as it is on those who define themselves by their playing of games. Like, I enjoy games and I play them a lot, and have pretty strong opinions on them, but to me it's just one of many interests. If treated like any other hobby, gaming is a good way to spend time, socialise, and experience a completely different take on story telling. If you're talking to someone who doesn't care for games, then so be it, their loss, there are still lot's of other things you can talk about. There are always going to be people who don't care for gaming, there will always be people who don't care for movies, or tv, or sports, or, as hard as it is to imagine, even music. It doesn't diminish the enjoyment of those things or make them less valid. Edit: To expand on my last point, just like some people think gaming is pointless and a waste of time, throughout history (or even today) people who enjoy each of the things I've mentioned have been ridiculed. It's just the way some people are, they criticise people who enjoy things they don't care for. And even as a fan of each of those things, I've met people so obsessed with them, it became problematic. Life is about balance, enjoy what you like, and who cares if someone else doesn't like it. Just remember to try new things so it's not always Final Fantasy 7. Or Buffy. Or Star Wars. Or guy who starts fights with Canadiens fans at Leafs games. Or... I guess music as an example falls apart here. Juggalos?
You're acting like playing a game for a week = playing a game 24/7 for a week. Only people with an unhealthy addiction do that.
It largely depends on the specific game, movie, book, or television show you are viewing. I don't view entertainment as a waste of time if you are actively engaged, and your mind is being challenged. Tight dialogue, breath taking cinematography, intricate plot outlines, or phenomenal acting are qualities that can make a given medium challenging to the viewer. Put very simply, something high quality is going to force me to interpret and speculate what I'm seeing/hearing. If you can follow a program while only half paying attention, likely it is not the most challenging program. This is why reading has such a good reputation for challenging the mind. Because your mind has to interpret each word and forces you to visualize. Of course, there are books that are complete garbage. They don't force your mind to do much work. They're simply providing cheap thrills. However, there's so many good works out there, that when you say, "Hey, I've spent a whole week doing nothing but reading," most people aren't going to judge you too poorly. Role playing games do not possess the same quality as most good novels. I find it interesting that you say "video games (by the rest of your post I'm assuming you really mean role playing games) has become a medium for storytelling." Actually, I would argue that video games used to (in the 90s and early 2000) in some cases be a medium for storytelling. But as video games have become more mainstream, and therefore made more accessible to a larger audience and as a result lowering the lowest common denominator of gamer, I think games have steered away from this if we hold storytelling mediums to some sort of standard. Older games like baldur's gate series, Ice wind dale series, torment, chrono trigger, had decent stories and, in the case of baldur's gate at least, surprisingly good dialogue. Moreover, the gameplay required strategy and computing. Today, games like Dragon Age or Mass Effect 3, while possessing superior graphics (so you can ogle at girls instead of having to look for one in the real world), lack any real sense of grandiosity in their stories. I've played the games, and the plots are basic. The dialogue is sub par. The characters are mildly interesting. The need for strategy is simply not there, not compared to some older games at least. Yes, the special effects are nice. Yes, the graphics are nice. Yes, the action is sweeping. Yes, the music is epic. Yes, I felt a thrill playing it. But if anyone asks me if I thought it was time well spent, I would say "I had a good time, but no, it wasn't enriching, or if so, just barely." Video game designers even allude to this deterioration of gameplay and story line as being deliberate when they say in interviews, they want to focus on the game "being more accessible." Physics is not nearly as accessible. Neither is gymnastics. Do either of those for a week and I guarantee you mostly no one will make fun of you for it. People are confusing modern mainstream roleplaying game's illusion of letting you "make choices" with quality storytelling and game play, and that's a shame. To reiterate my above points, entertainment can either challenge you or be a form of escapism. Something that requires no or little effort is escapism. And sadly, that's what most role playing games fall under. However, you're right that people will get less flack for watching a week of real housewives than for playing a week of roleplaying games. I think that stigma is due to the fact that when you play a roleplaying game, you're pretending to be some make believe badass. Some people probably see that as an admission that your own life is not that interesting.
I've been playing Assassin's Creed 3. Love the concept and setting, and it is fun, but some of the writing comes off as lazy at times.
