New Diablo 4 season started, so I'm playing that. I'm a Barbarian this time, level 80, trying out a Thorns build.
The beginning was extremely boring, and I was thinking about stopping altogether or switching characters, but after I got some items, it became less miserable.
As for the new season mechanic, it's kinda whatever. It's not as bad as I thought, but last season was definitely more fun.
Oh man, you may regret that work order. Incoming cliff face of (hopefully) -Well-Crafted- engravings:
So I’m redoing an old project where I turned a volcano into an obsidian caster and casted a 20z level solid obsidian fortress with the lava tube at the center. Reddit ate the original post and I can’t find the original files anywhere.
My original was chef’s kiss perfect embark, 3 biomes haunted forest, mirthful grass, and wild forest, a brook running right by the volcano. This time wasn’t so lucky, it’s just a Mirthful forest but the need for a Haunted biome was covered by the fact that I am in range of a Tower (more later). This embark also has Humans, Elves, and Goblins as neighbors, my original was a super evil world where only goblins and kobolds existed, so I guess that’s an upgrade.
My first task was to strip the volcano of trees and bushes, and setup my temporary fort where everyone will live til the casting is complete, and underneath that began digging out my water reservoir. The process is ridiculously water intensive and brook tiles refill so slowly that I’m going to need to literally just let it run while I sleep so the reservoir refills.
My next steps (tomorrow night) is to complete the reservoir and start filling it while I build a giant 4 lane water pump stack and build a huge faucet emptying in the middle of the lava tube. This will turn the middle blocks to obsidian and drop them down to the destructive surface at the bottom of the magma tube, draining it. I have to be careful on this, too much water will plug the tube and that is a MAJOR pain to clean out. Once I’ve drained the lava tube down below the level of the 1st cavern, I will build 2 double magma pumpstack and 2 double water pumpstack columns running up the middle of the fort.
The idea is to provide both RED HOT MAGMA and water to every floor without taking up the main floorspace.
Once that is complete, with the lava tube still drained, I will dig out the mountain leaving pillars at every level and hollow out belowground the radius of my fort down to 1 Z above cavern layer 1 and that will be the first floor of my obsidian casting.
As I’ve (hopefully) improved my casting process, my previous limited size (the limiting factor was that drawbridges are max 10x10 and need at least 1 anchor) of about 18x18 walls around a 38x38 lava tube should no longer be an issue and I BELIEVE that with my new style of caster that I can make arbitrarily large obsidian slabs.
My original caster had 2 levels of drawbridges surrounding the lava tube, the bottom filled with lava spilling out from the Z level of the volcano top (volcanoes in DF are weird), and the top drawbridge structure held water pumped up from a reservoir below.
Each level looked like the top of a crenelated tower, I don’t have the pics anymore so it’s hard to explain. It was cool but very very small.
My new caster is the above mockup, delivering 4x lava and water stacks straight into the casting area and allowed to spread out, unlike my original model which was filled then dropped all at once. This is how I am hoping to make larger slabs as the water pours out over a sea of 5-6 high lava at the casting floor. It may not work, this is experimental and I may have to go in after each cast and manually fill in a few gaps but the benefit of making very large slabs is worth the extra annoyance.
Once I’ve casted enough levels to about 20z above ground, I disassemble the mould used to hold in the lava and start digging my lava moat. In my original version the moat just drained off the map above 3z deep, and was a risk for lava-safe intruders so now it’s all going to be recycled through the pumpstack system leaving just enough lava in the moat to deal with sieges.
When it is all said and done, this fort should be a lava defended obsidian monolith where every surface is carved with the story of my people. It will be my greatest work to date and I can’t wait to see what I learn building it.
The Need for Necromancers
It is critical to my fort to have a pit of undead butchered animal parts for my archers to practice on, and in my original fort the animation force was the part of my fort in the Haunted biome, and it worked so much better than trying to convince militadwarfs to train archery. Nowadays we have necromancers, so I plan on capturing a necro from a raid and walling him in to a little booth where I can lift a lever and let him see the corpse target pile, reanimate them, then get shuttered again till my crossbowdwarfs finish the random pile of torsos and intestines wobbling about.
Lol don’t call it ☼Masterful☼ till it works! I could be very mistaken about lava flows here though I hope to post my updates to lemmy so we can all see how it goes together.
My inspiration was, in a roundabout way,: how to find a FUN way to dispose of kings who keep making insane crafting requests like weapons made out of soap. I envisioned a room suspended over a lava tube with a hanging pillar holding it up and drawbridges providing access. If the king got silly I could pop the pillar and drop his whole royal suite into the tube.
And of course I had to keep his subjects near him so I built the fort into the volcano side but I was annoyed about how irregular the floor size and mineral patterns were. I had just learned about obsidian casting in industrial quantities (the reason for the initial volcano embark) so as I was playing the thought kept coming back: 'Well, obsidian is a really valuable mineral when carved, and obsidian mechanisms are an amazing trade good, so… what if I made a whole fort out of obsidian?
So I tried that with that existing fort, not a fancy fort with a lava tube, more like just a giant cube of solid obsidian cast off to the side from the volcano.
It worked magnificently! The rooms were all lavish with just bare stones engraved, and I had unlimited material for stonework and mechanisms.
Smiling in satisfaction I said “This is cool… but it could be cooler.”
And that’s when I came up with my ‘volcano base with a live active lava tube in the middle’.
The original took about three months of damn near every moment I wasn’t working or sleeping, hopefully my experience since then will cut that time down a bit.
I’m really excited to see how this goes, and can’t wait to share my updates.
Fun Fact: If you dig out each floor and drop them all at once, the game registers the internal hollowed out tube as being ‘outside’, meaning even after you cast the obsidian tower, all internal areas are considered in sunlight, so your dwarves never get sunlight sickness when defending raids and you can grow aboveground crops in the safety of your mountain home.
God of war Ragnarök - kinda meh, unskippable cutscenes, pseudo cutscenes, mediocre story, worst/laziest difficulty design (enemies are damage sponges at higher difficulties), playable Atreus. Glad I got a used copy for relatively cheap and can regain most of my money.
Sonic games, I’m referring specifically to the first one and that era.
My friend and I rented a Genesis I believe it was, specifically to play this, we thought the graphics were awesome, the speed was amazing, the t3ch show off was cool, the game had novelty.
But really from a gameplay perspective, I simply do not understand what people like about it.
The whole thing was just run as fast as you can down this path, you have no idea what’s coming up. There will be multiple opportunities to take different paths but you don’t really have time to make a judgment call, so you flail at the controller and end up hitting a hazard. You start the level over and over and over again and you repeat it until you understand which way to go and then you complete the level.
Now you’ve run into every single gotcha and you figured out some optimal routes, now you can play it all without dying a lot.
That is part of why people like sonic games i think. Replaying a level over and over again to get the fastest possible route to complete the level (usually the top path, which is also the hardest as it’s easy to fall down to the bottom). It should also be noted that the games don’t like the players holding right all the time and will punish the players if they didn’t react in time.
This is not simple platforming, the classic games are a little… different? Idk the word for it, but compare sonic and tbe other platformers like mario, it is extremely different, which is why not a lot of people “get” sonic. I’ve had some people looking over my shoulders when i play a sonic game and was told “i don’t get sonic” which, all things considered, is understandable.
I think the problem is that the old Sonic games are kinda contradictory. “Gotta go fast”, but you’re punished if you don’t know the whole level layout. It promises speed, but it fills levels with so many speedbumps that end up making the game feel hella slow. Plus, water levels. Fucking water levels in Sonic are the worst.
I’ve played it a bit on the Xbox and it’s even laggy on that. It may just be too much for the switch to handle ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
If it’s warning about too many buildings you may have too many things for the switch to track and display, so best bet would be to remove some things. It sucks, but that’s always an issue with open world games like that.
I love Metroidvanias, 2D platformers, and generally even games that came before them that were similar in style but don’t meet all the Metroidvanias criteria. But I really really kind of dislike pretty much all of the Mario games. There’s a delay in the control scheme that makes timing difficult for me, and I can’t seem to get over that. I actually gave away Mario Odyssey because I couldn’t really play it well at all after about 10 hours. For me it’s not intuitive despite my like for both 2d and 3d Metroidvanias style games.
Cuphead.The art is very beautiful, but I think the gameplay uses just plain repetition to achieve the difficulty, and I’m not a fan of doing the same thing again, again and again.
I don’t actively dislike it, but for me RDR2 is also the main one. Apart from competitive shooters etc which aren’t really my thing either. The thing is, I like the type of game that RDR2 is. But I just have nothing with the setting. I played it right after Cyberpunk, which I loved for multiple reasons. One major thing is that I controlled V, and thus could create my own story. In RDR 2 I was forced to play someone I have nothing in common with, who does exactly the things I wouldn’t do, and who lives in a shitty time period where basically every woman basically has the same rights as cattle. That may not be inaccurate, but it just didn’t vibe with me. I just got so frustrated with the main character talking shit to people who were right, or drinking a lot and getting into trouble in a very predictable way. Despite the beautiful and interesting world I just couldn’t feel anything but frustration.
I do get why people like it though, I don’t think it’s a bad game. Its just not for me.
I love Japan. I love Samurai, and old times. Fired up the game and found out it has some dark souls mechanic bullshit, that makes it a grinder.
I am an adult. With very limited time for games. I have to have quick saves I can’t be grinding shit. I simply don’t have the time nor the desire waste time grinding.
Really sucks because the game looks gorgeous and I liked the start of the story…
I did finish one of the Uncharted series but they mostly go into interactive movies genre which I don’t find that interesting. The same with LoU but lost interest and never finished. AC (maybe II) was just annoying, the blending, erratic climbing/jumping mechanics… RDR, I should give them a chance, but the wild west setup inherently doesn’t do much for me. The same can be said about the “samurai style” games like Nioh, Sekiro etc. And I say that as a huge Souls games fan.
God I hate the “Interactive Movie” genre. Uncharted, Last of Us, God of War. Pretty much most of Sony’s exclusives. They’re all the same boring 3rd person mechanics, and uncultured “gamers” will go off about how “amazing” the story is because they haven’t read a book since high school and only watch blockbusters. If you’re not going to do anything interesting with the game mechanics or add any actual interactivity to the story then whats the fucking point of making it a game? They just seem like a refuge for hack screenwriters that couldn’t make it in film and lazy game devs who are out of ideas.
The Witcher 3 is just… so god damn boring, it doesn’t help that weapons break too easily, yet the oppurutunities to get gold are so few that you’ll do several sidequests worth of monster genocide, sell EVERYTHING you own, and just barely afford to fix your weapons… It got so bad I had to hack my save to bypass the constant scrunging about for repairs… then I realized the story is so complicated that you NEED to play the other two games to understand what’s going on
I went back and played Witcher 2, and found it to be vastly superior, far more fun, far more immersive, and just an all around better time
I have been warned never to touch Witcher 1
the Netflix series was pretty good, though I only saw the first season
Witcher 1 is a very hardcore RPG designed in the style of the old bygone era of RPG games, so depending on your interest in classic gaming you might not even understand what the fuck the game is even asking of you
Also there is pretty much no handholding so some quests are a removed
My recommendation for Witcher 3 is to not buy weapons, exploration and combat should net you good gear to carry you
I can’t stand Witcher 3 but played Witcher 1 not long ago and I really loved it. It is very oldcore and the controls are a b***h sometimes but it is a really great game with a great story. I hope Witcher 2 is as good too, it is on my next to play list very high.
Witcher 2 is the most underrated entry in the series, and has by far the most interesting story to tell. I’m shocked you find 3’s story complicated as its pretty simplistic in comparison. Yeah it has more characters from the books involved, but the game tells you pretty much everything you need to know about all of them. Overall I enjoyed 3, but as a followup to Witcher 2 its pretty disappointing story-wise. Both games have shit combat, so if you’re not invested in the story/world they aren’t worth playing.
I think the explanations are the problem, it’s overloading me with information… I feel like every cutscene is a wall of text that I’m barely able to follow… Witcher 2 felt like I was learning about the world in a more natural way
I see what you mean and can get down with that. The writing in 2 is in general much tighter then 3. It’s a shame that compared to 3 relatively few people have played it.
Personal opinions aside as an open world RPG by itself Witcher 3 is pretty good, it’s was a breakout success and remains a popular game for good reason. As a follow-up to Witcher 2 though it’s pretty disappointing. Switching over to an open world does the storys pacing and stakes no favors, and it feels like CDPR is limited by following up the book series and trying to utilize its characters. As evidenced by Witcher 2 and the Hearts of Stone expansion for 3, it seems like their writers are much more comfortable writing their own original stories and characters. 3’s main storyline doesn’t introduce anyone nearly as interesting as Letho, Roach, and Iorveth, except for maybe the Baron, who like the others is an original character.
Additionally everything 2 spends time building up for 3 has pretty disappointing payoffs. The Northern Realms politics were a focus for 2, in 3 they are overly simplistic and somewhat nonsensical. Radovid is depicted as a cunning, competent, and ruthless king in 2, but goes blubbering mad off-screen between games. The Wild Hunt is barely a presence in the games storyline despite being it’s namesake and Eredin is a flat and boring antagonist. I understand why Witcher 3 is so popular, but as someone who was a big fan of 2 and was incredibly hyped for it, I found it to be incredibly underwhelming.
Funny, I was told to stay the fuck away from Witcher 2, but played Witcher 1. xD Witcher 1 has some odd controls (from a modern perspective) but an engaging story which actually forced me to stop playing on my first playthrough because I just couldn’t make the choice between pest and cholera. Of course I eventually dipped my toes in Witcher 2, but the 3rd one has spoiled me so damn hard with its fancy graphics, controller support and familiar controls, that it just didn’t click.
I played all three, watched the series and am in the process of reading though the 8 or so books.
The first witcher, as was mentioned, is very old and a little clunky for todays standards but it was great fun. I can neither understand why you liked the 2nd one - which I found bland and forgettable - nor the dislike for the third one, which was like 3 games in one imo.
I guess if you really like walking/riding a horse and have the hardware to crank it up to eleven, the third one is awesome, otherwise probably not.
bin.pol.social
Najnowsze