My copy of the Witcher 2 has finally arrived and I'm absolutely loving the game at the moment. However, I do find combat a bit irritating due to the witcher constantly locking onto targets I do not want to fight and thus allowing for enemies to get brutal strikes upon my back. Perhaps I'll be able to over come that with time, but even with that annoyance the game is supurb, runs EXTREMELY well and is a tonne of fun.
Yeah the 150% and 100% back stab reduction skills seem to be critical. Once you get those the one hit kills should stop and all that dancing around will keep the enemies at bay. You played through in 2 days? Damn. Did you like the magic path better? I've been concentrating on sword and my magic is about useless at this point.
I took a very different path in the story as well as a different upgrade path for my character in the second playthrough. In addition to spellcasting, I also spent a lot more time with dwarves and elves. I think I did enjoy my "spellsword" type build more than strictly melee combat. I did not do a straight mage build, though. I focused on just two signs, and powering up Quen lets you do plenty of swordfighting. The trick to getting power out of your casting is to upgrade the sign power with Moon runes and the like for all your gear, especially gear that already gives sign bonuses. You also need to make the right upgrades, which include sign intensity and anything to do with Heliotrope. You'd be amazed at how much havoc you can wreak on crowds of soldiers with my build. I can put them in slow motion with Heliotrope while blasting them with area of effect Igni, and by the time my Heliotrope runs out, it has charged up enough to launch it again. I've controlled continuously respawing hordes of soldiers this way. There was so much commotion from the soliders and my magic that it eventually crashes the game. No way would I take on a room of 12 to 15 soldiers at once with a melee character. It's quite easy with my mage character, though. I can wipe out 5 or 6 harpies in roughly 5 seconds with Igni at lvl 35. I can take out a couple of guards within a few seconds as well, and a good bit of the time they get trapped in the incinerate animation, letting you take free shots with your sword.
I used Igni in the first game along with the stick bombs. It was really affective for large groups. I think I need to dump some more into my magic. I haven't placed anything in that path. Recommendations for a direction? I think I'm still under lvl20.
I tried IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 and it's too much effort for me to learn. Perhaps if it was a little newer I would take the time.
Have finished the storyline in AC2. Since I miss only 6 trophies to get the platinum (including the damned "find 100 feathers"), I am still playing the game. I must say that at the end it was much better than I thought it would be. The plot finally started to make sense and had an acceptable pace. Even the ending was not bad, after all these warnings I was expecting something so bizarre that I hadn't even raised my eyebrows. It's a solid game, 9/10 for me. I start to rethink my initial decision to skip Brotherhood. There are no good games to play till late autumn and the game is discounted.
I am playing AC: Brotherhood, finished the 3rd sequence (the one where you regain access to mercenaries, thieves and courtesans). I am positively overwhelmed with all the changes they were able to make. The game is so much better than AC2 that sometimes it's even hard to believe it's the same generation of hardware. It starts with the city, it's just huge, I would say it's at least few times bigger than Venice but still if you climb high you see it all around. With much better textures and 3d models it just looks much better than AC2. Then the plot, as for now it's quite diverse, not only find-kill but quite balanced between killing, stealing, hiding and other stuff. What I think is rather recommended is to play AC2 first, as you would miss some niuances of the plot - the way people talk to each other is influenced by their relations from AC2, for example when Ezio meets Bartolomeo, Bartolomeo wants to introduce his wife and Ezio asks if he's gonna search for her beneath the table - it's a reference to the moment they first met in AC2. Also, in AC2 you are introduced to various weapons one-by-one thus having some time to get used to them and in ACB you can use most of weapons just from the beginning which could possibly be tricky for newbies. Anyway, although I've been skeptical at the beginning of AC2 and I've changed my assessment at the end, I just love ACB from the very beginning. I only keep my fingers crossed for keeping such opinion to the very end.
180 hours into Star Ocean TLH. Does anybody waste time like I waste time?? lol well I'm at the last place, switching discs like a mofo as I backtrack. I'm just being anal trying to get the best equipment I can before I finish the game... though it does continue end game for a little bit. Enjoyable RPG for sure. Not nearly as good as Last Odysee, but it DOES scratch my RPG itch. It's pretty stereotypical, though it might be a little long... at least the main quest isn't quite as boring as the Tales series :/ Again the disc swapping is only if you take part in the typical sidequest fest most JRPGs give you time to do towards the end (FF7 disc 2). Than you might have to swap discs every time you go to a new area. It's not like it's part of the main story and it's not like it's gonna do it when your not expecting it. I don't like getting up much, but it doesn't really annoy me as much as some make it sound :/. Instaling the game to HD didn't help anything... you still need to swap discs though.
Symphonia 1 (like Phantasia) bored me to tears. Seriously by the 60-80 hour mark I couldn't finish it, its just another elemental battle. I was on the last one (dark) too. What kept me in this one was all the intrigue in the synthesis and item production systems. I'm a collector like that. I have yet to play the other tales tales though.
than again if I was in as much of a hurry as I was before I might have curttailed this one a bit too... just didn't enjoy symphonia, couldn't wait to turn it in into gamefly for something else (so a lengthy rpg wasn't part of the plan). I now have till Madden 12 comes out to play the 360 so I am in a similar rush really.
Fallout: New Vegas I like it, but not as much as I thought I would. I loved Fallout 3 but there's some things in New Vegas that I'm not really a fan of, minor things really. 1. I've not seen a single fully automatic assault rifle yet and I'm level 13. 2. Some of the beasts are far more deadly that I thought they would be/they used to be. Giant radscorpions are now to be feared and don't get me started on the Cazadors. 3. The whole ammo type situation is too deep now, instead of having 1 type of ammo for each gun they now have loads, plus the reloading benches have gone unused by me so far. 4. Caravan is so complicated I had to use several youtube videos to learn how to play it, and now I know how to play it I'm still not using custom decks. I just use the cards it selects automatically and if I don't win I just reload the game. 5. There's no clear distinction between good and evil anymore, too many factions whree you have to choose whether they're good or evil. 6. Only one perk every two levels? Gay. 7. Too many quests relying on speech or barter, forcing you to waste your points on those skills instead of ones you want (guns, lockpick etc) I'm still enjoying the game but I was expecting more. A friend of mine who's had the game for ages now says he prefers Fallout 3, I might be heading that same way.
Agreed with most of your complaints. The only exceptions are 5. and 7. - both brought something fresh to the F3 formula. Also, I've completely scorned this Caravan game, it's even hard to believe that such twisted game would be so much popular when plenty of easier games exists. After finishish both games I also prefer F3, however New Vegas was still a solid one. My biggest complaint concerns all this casinos, suits, gang of Elvises. I know it's Vegas but still, it does not play well with the postapocalyptic setting.
That was one of my biggest concerns too. After watching several of my friends play the game I couldn't help but notice all the Elvis impersonators/funny looking enemies(geckos)/super mutants with wigs and glasses. The whole game just looked like a parody of Fallout 3 rather than a sequel. It looked like it didn't take itself seriously and now I've played it I can say to some degree that seems true. It's better than it looked but worse than I hoped.
I also bought Bioshock 2 when I got New Vegas on the 2 for £20 deal (poor developers) but I haven't played it yet. I don't want to get into it yet as New Vegas is my time consumer of the moment.
I started playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution on PC. So far, it's been very good. It seems like it's going to have lots of depth, and you can immediately recognize the similarities between HR and the original game. It's too early to make broad judgments about it, but I've found it to be quite immersive and fun to play. One odd aspect about the game is that the graphics seem to be composed of a rather inconsistent mix of high and low end elements. On one hand it has DX11 support and has some nice lighting effects. On the other hand human faces range from mediocre to downright horrible, and the textures often appear to come from a lower budget game like Hydrophobia. At times it looks very impressive, including stylistically: Then there are the times that it looks like this: However, the game itself appears to be of very high quality in terms of gameplay and story, and I can very confident that most will find this to be a much more pleasing entry to the series than the second game. From what I've played, I'd definitely recommend it.
Let me know how it goes with Human Revolution. I loved the first game, but after the huge disappointment of Invisible War, I was a bit skeptical about this one. I was holding off on a purchase until I heard more about it from real people rather than just bought and paid for reviewers. You know, the same bought and paid for reviewers who gave IW good reviews despite that game sucking goat testicles.