#Action Role Playing Game

[acquired-stardust]

King's Field 3 Playstation 1996

[chase-omega]

Today I tried Legend of Neverland. Surprisingly solid for a mobile game! Anime action RPG where the main gimmick is you collect little fairy partners to help you fight. Cant wait to level up enough to unlock sub-classes!

[thecuddlymuffintop]

The time has come. I will be embarking on yet another Soulsborne adventure courtesy of a channel redemption.

Tonight, at 7 pm CDT, I will be streaming Dark Souls Remastered for the 1st time ever on Twitch, with the wheel of punishment being spun every 10 deaths.

You're always welcome to either watch here or join me when I'm live with the above link.

[valereth2]

Episode 20 of Let's Play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

[grinbrothers]

Nier Automata: Lets Eat A Fish! - Grin Brothers

The Grin Brothers play Nier: Automata, premiering at 9PM BST on 19/7/2024! Souldin criticises YoRHa's terrible exploration skills, Raphaham didn't read a word of Adam and Eve because they bore him.

DrParadise could do with commissions/donations: https://www.deviantart.com/drparadise/journal/I-need-your-help-my-family-and-I-are-starving-1051312258 + https://www.deviantart.com/drparadise/art/Commissions-are-open-1068493302  Nier Opening and Ending Art by WhiteNamikaze: https://www.deviantart.com/whitenamikaze/art/COMMISSION-Nanka-and-2B-1036832538 Age Warning Artwork by STARteam2017: https://www.deviantart.com/starteam2017/art/Full-color-Com-R18-Warning-Sign-for-Sould1n-722348987 Hat Avatar by Sakka-Sama: https://www.deviantart.com/sakka-sama/art/COM-Hat-925055875 Nanka Avatar by LittlePancake94: https://www.deviantart.com/littlepancake94/art/Commission-Nanka-s-new-look-926259845 Nanka With Sign Arts by ShySamArt: https://www.deviantart.com/shysamart/art/Commission-Nanka-966702081 Angelica in the clouds by DrParadise:  https://www.deviantart.com/drparadise/art/Angelica-Commission-1047497397 Haru in Buruma Commission by YoregeSacraft: https://www.deviantart.com/yoregesacraft/art/COMM-Haru-The-Sportsmate-1000784977 Nanka on Broom by YoregeSacraft: https://www.deviantart.com/yoregesacraft/art/COMM-Broom-Riding-Nanka-998986737 Endslate Nanka Artwork by Locke3K: https://www.youtube.com/@UC8Nz6G8d3MJMq7A3dvRE-3A Opening music is Bolo's Theme from Shantae series. Nier: Automata is available on Playstation 4, Xbox One, Windows and Nintendo Switch.

Date Made: 12/5/2024 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXCFgLZmjBeMCt-QbSoDhVA Tumblr: http://grinbrothers.tumblr.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/GrinBrothers

[fogaminghub]

🌌✨ Wayfinders Assemble! 🎉 Big news is coming your way on October 21! We’re launching The Crucible, a new open-world area brimming with quests and mini-bosses. Also, check out the Critical Role Supporter Pack, bringing epic items into Wayfinder! Whether you’re venturing solo or co-op with friends, prepare for an unforgettable journey! 

💥 Read all the details in our latest blog! 

[fgcstrong]

GAME: WUTHERING WAVES

DEVELOPER(S): Kuro Games (A private Chinese video game development and publishing company founded in 2017. In addition to games, the company has created various products such as animated series, novels, comics, music, and merchandise like figure).

ENGINE: Unreal Engine 4

PLATFORMS: iOS, Android, Microsoft Windows, macOS

RELEASED: iOS, Android, Microsoft Windows (May 22, 2024)

GENRE(S): Action role-playing, Gacha Game

• SUMMARY

Being an open world gacha game, Wuthering Waves has been compared to other titles such as Genshin Impact, but aims to emphasize combat more than its predecessors.

• SYNOPSIS

Wuthering Waves is set in a futuristic post-apocalyptic world after a catastrophe called the Lament wiped out most of humanity and caused unknown beings and monsters, called Tacet Discords, to appear. Humanity adapted to the threat and over time rebuilt civilization. The story follows the amnesiac Rover, who has awoken from a deep slumber and sets out to explore this new world.

• GAMEPLAY

Wuthering Waves is set in an open world. The player controls protagonist the Rover, as well as recruited units called Resonators, which are split into 4-star and 5-star rarities. The endgame content features modes where characters can be used in a series of combat challenges.

The game's combat system features Intro and Outro skills, Intro skills are triggered when the characters enters the combat mode and Outro skills are triggered when the characters leaves the combat mode. Both skills are triggered when the characters are switched.

The game's gacha system features banners known as Convenes, where Resonators and weapons can be obtained. There are three types of Convenes: novice, event, and standard. A pity system guarantees that 5-star items are obtained within a set amount of pulls.

The game features Echoes, an ability that transforms characters into monsters briefly or summons monsters briefly.

• DEVELOPMENT

Wuthering Waves was revealed on May 23, 2022 on Kuro Games' social media accounts. It was announced for iOS on March 25, 2024.

The game underwent two closed beta tests, with the second concluding in March 2024. After the first closed beta test, the story content was largely reworked in response to player feedback that it felt "uncomfortable".

On March 29, 2024, it was announced that Wuthering Waves was to be released on iOS, Android, and PC via the Epic Games Store, on May 22, 2024.[8] In May 2024, it was announced that Wuthering Waves will be released through the Mac App Store in the future.

• FINAL THOUGHTS

Myself and a close friend are currently playing through the game so we can engage in the multiplayer together. The only reason I’m aware of this game is because of them. I didn’t finish or get far through Genshin Impact, but this game caught my attention and I’ll say, while their is quite a bit of dialogue to get through- this game is definitely fun and there’s quite A LOT to do within this game as it is open world. I’ll probably update this when I finish, but for now it’s a go in my books.

[ruporas]

trigunned the hades or hadesed the trigun (id in alt)

[8bitsupervillain]

8-bit reviews: Diablo Immortal

Probably the only review of Diablo Immortal you'll see that actually talks about gameplay and not just the villainous monetization.

TL;DR: A thoroughly miserable free to play ARPG that actively fought against me trying to derive any sort of enjoyment out of it. There are a couple of enjoyable things buried somewhere deep into the game, but it really really isn't worth the effort it takes to get there.

Diablo Immortal is a game that in theory I like quite a bit. I genuinely like the story that it has, and I can even really enjoy some of the somewhat simplistic combat systems on offer. The problem I find with it is that if you are invested in the story the free to play nature of the game seems to be actively working against the game at times. The combat can be enjoyable until the game forces you to engage in the same repetitive tasks over and over in an attempt to wrangle as much of your play time for its often times aggressively monotonous and uninteresting MMO style tasks. When the game is about the story dungeons the combat loop is a pretty decent affair, nothing mind blowing, but some nice straightforward combat arenas. These have issues sure, if you decide to have a look around the rather sparse environments and then engage in conversation with the NPC of the day you do run the risk of the enemies you cleared out interrupting the conversation and having to do it all over.

It's not a particularly deep action RPG, most of the story dungeons are simply hold down attack until everything between you and the map marker is dead, but that's fine, it doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. I know this is sold primarily as a phone/tablet game, so I don't know how much gameplay innovation that crowd is looking for. On the PC side of things it feels like a weird hybrid of mechanics from Diablo 2 mixed with Diablo 3. It lacks the skill tree you've seen in games like D2, and instead has a more varied move list like what was on offer from D3. It doesn't go quite as mechanically deep as D3 did, instead of offering variations to whichever skill you choose to use you just unlock slight upgrades at set levels. The class I played for instance, The Crusader, has an attack that is a flail attack that attacks in an arc in front of the character. As you level up you eventually unlock additional perks for that move that includes knock back, or at the end of your leveling it turns from a front-facing arc to a complete 360 swing. It adds the facade of depth, but it's honestly pretty straightforward. Heck, there's even an option on the inventory screen where the game with change your move loadout to fit into one of their pre-defined playstyles.

It's not like Diablo as a series has the most elaborate of control schemes, but this kind of feels like a further simplification of the combat from the bigger more feature rich entries. Perhaps it's simply because of the fact I played this entirely mouse and keyboard, maybe playing it with a controller or on a mobile device I wouldn't have noticed it quite as strongly. A lot of the moves are dependent are moving an in-game indicator to highlight the area where the attack is going to occur. It could be the semi-circle of death as mentioned above, or moving so an arrow engulfs whatever hellspawn you're currently fighting.

Admittedly I can't say this applies to all of the classes. I assume it does, but I only played as the Crusader for the length of the campaign. I can confirm it happens with the newest class: The Blood Knight, but as for the rest of the roster this is just speculation on my part.

Still, when the game was just advancing the narrative I didn't have much of an issue with the gameplay. It's fine to cruise through a game now and then, indulge in the simple pleasure of wholesale murder without needing dedicate your entire brain to the affair. It was when the game decided it needed to introduce, and force me to do some of the free to play MMO side-activities I felt the game was getting worse. Fair play to Blizzard they tried to make me care about the side-story of the shadow war between the Immortals and the Shadows, but it wasn't a thing I strictly needed to do to be able to advance the narrative so it got shunted off to the side. The Helliquary sure did have big-ish plot significance using cutscenes to set up a rogues gallery of ever-stronger demons who will one day rise to take over and destroy the world of Sanctuary. But that's post-game stuff that doesn't factor into the plot so the story of Lassal the Flame Whip and his cohort of other big demon nasties went largely unchallenged. Also they require you to play with other players, and I don't think my works WiFi was up to the challenge of trying to host seven other players. Which is unfortunate, if the Helliquary stuff, or the shadow war didn't require other players it could've made for an interesting subplot when the main plot slammed the brakes and made me do other stuff for way way too long.

There are several points when you're cruising along in the story when the game will throw up a wall to stop you from advancing any further in the narrative until you reach a minimum level. This happens way too much, I get why they're there, you got to try to entice the player into playing the other modes and so on you worked so hard on and put in your game, but it just started killing any enthusiasm I had going for the game. Because the interesting side-plot stuff I mentioned, the stuff with the Immortals, or the Helliquary don't give you any experience you need to be able to advance the story. Sure you unlock special rare super ultra fancy armors and titles and so on, but that's irrelevant if you just care about advancing the story.

What you do instead is you have to either go into "Challenge Rifts" which are special timed dungeons where you just massacre your way through a bunch of demons until profit. The problem with these is you require a special Diablo Immortal currency to even be able to do these Rifts, and as far as I could tell during my time with the game there is no actual way to earn these Diablo funbucks in game. In addition to the Challenge Rifts there's a variation of the Rifts that's harder, and allegedly offers better rewards, but nothing that really helps XP gain. So instead what you wind up doing is doing bounties, which are MMO inspired tasks that require you to go into one of the zones you've been to and then kill X amount of a given enemy type, or farm their loot. The problem with this system is that in addition to the gameplay being rather thin and pretty dull the amount of XP you acquire for doing these is a pitiably small amount. For reasons I can only speculate about Blizzard limits the amount of bounties you can do in a day, twenty-four of them. And you will more than likely have to do all twenty-four to get even slightly close to being able to get that level up. I assume this is here to pad the numbers and make player times look much more impressive than they would otherwise. It's maddening having to stop playing the story just to go do this MMO daily-grind hornswoggle, because it can take you literal days to be able to continue the story from where you left off. If you are a strictly free to play player that is.

I don't want to focus entirely too much on the monetization aspect of this game. There are plenty of other reviews, youtube videos, and just general muckraking over the monetization aspect of Diablo Immortal. Besides depending on your individual pain threshold you could in theory play this game to story end entirely free. If you decide to give in and feed the machine upwards of five bucks you get a battle-pass that gives you a slight edge in terms of being able to level up. It doesn't just throw free XP at you, but it gives you items that fill a meter in the battle pass that then gives you XP. But then that's how these free to play RPGs get you isn't it, make it just fun enough and just annoying enough that eventually it wears you down. I admit that it wore me down enough that I broke and spent a collective ten dollars on this, and even then the constant roadblocks of trying to go through the story kept showing up. If they just had a straight up option to buy an XP boost I would whine and wail about how this is what gaming has become, but towards the end of the game I would've bought it. I admit this, like I said I spent ten dollars in an effort to try to get more XP out of the game.

I don't know what exactly the six or seven in-game currencies even do in terms of gameplay. I looked at a list that had the various currencies in the game, and I got thoroughly confused trying to read the explanation for which platinum buys you what cosmetic, or which purple obol lets you buy which moon coin which does something in theory. At the very start of this before releasing Immortal on PC maybe it would've been beneficial to Blizzard to have a paid option where you can just start with some XP boosts or lower the absurd XP requirements for leveling, although I doubt that would happen because of the massive amounts of work that would require.

It's not very often that I play a game that I think could be a genuinely good time, but the game itself seems dead-set on fighting me tooth and nail to make sure things suck. It's not just the roadblocks in the plot or the game forcing you to engage in the free to play MMO crap, it's just riddled with small annoyances. The constantly respawning enemies, ensuring you never have a moment to just explore the environments, some of whom will be elite enemies who can really put you through the ringer. The boss fights with enemies with massive health bars that aren't exactly a challenge, they're just damage sponges, and if you die during a fight there's a greater than non-zero chance that that life bar will be reset to the start of the fight so you have to do that all over again.

The fact that sometimes your character will just get stuck an a seemingly impassable bit of air and be stuck trying to walk through the section while getting sniped by a little bastard demon just out of your field of vision. The fact that in the PC version at least the game had a very common habit of crashing the game to desktop with no warning. It happened the most during dungeons, but this game was extremely prone to crashing. Didn't matter if I was playing it on my computer with the 3090, or my laptop (that it ran surprisingly well on), trying to do things was often a coin toss about whether the game was going to crash or not.

Despite this however I do have things I actually like about Diablo Immortal. The relative pointlessness of the plot aside I did genuinely like the story. Even the optional stuff that I didn't really engage with, the Helliquary and the war between the Immortals and the Shadow seemed very well-written, and I'm curious to see where those plots are going (eventually, in a youtube video, I'm not playing this game any more). Also it's an extremely minor thing but I do appreciate the fact that you can actually move your character around using WASD instead of just clicking around on the map to move your character. It's basically the only feature I wish got taken from Immortal and put into Diablo 4.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

All he knows is flirt with men and lie.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[n64retro]

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo Game Boy Advance 2003 Gif by VJJunk. Source: Pinterest

[lizzybeeee]

Inquisitor: "Is there any way Solas can be reasoned with?"

Me after Solas has killed Varric, used blood magic on me, trapped me in the fade, created the blight, made the titans tranquil/fucked with the dwarves, started the chain of events that led to Southern Thedas being destroyed, and stealing all my good gear from Inquisition:

[silver-horse]

bioware really said "let's release it on halloween... it's so terrible... it's gonna scare the shit out of everyone...the perfect halloween"

[thecuddlymuffintop]

Tonight, at 7 pm CDT, I will be returning to Eastward over on my Twitch channel.

You're always welcome to join me when I'm live by either watching here or clicking the link above to connect with the Chubby Checkers.

[valereth2]

Episode 19 of Let's Play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

[grinbrothers]

Nier Automata: Passive-Aggressive! - Grin Brothers

The Grin Brothers start Nier: Automata, premiering at 9PM BST on 1/7/2024! Souldin knows of 2B only because of Soulcalibur, Raphaham doesn't put anything past Yoko Taro.

Nier Opening and Ending Art by WhiteNamikaze: https://www.deviantart.com/whitenamikaze/art/COMMISSION-Nanka-and-2B-1036832538 Age Warning Artwork by STARteam2017: https://www.deviantart.com/starteam2017/art/Full-color-Com-R18-Warning-Sign-for-Sould1n-722348987 Hat Avatar by Sakka-Sama: https://www.deviantart.com/sakka-sama/art/COM-Hat-925055875 Nanka Avatar by LittlePancake94: https://www.deviantart.com/littlepancake94/art/Commission-Nanka-s-new-look-926259845 Nanka With Sign Arts by ShySamArt: https://www.deviantart.com/shysamart/art/Commission-Nanka-966702081 Endlate Nanka by Locke3K: https://www.youtube.com/@UC8Nz6G8d3MJMq7A3dvRE-3A To Be Commissioned Raffle: https://www.deviantart.com/sould1n/journal/To-Be-Commissioned-Raffle-2024-Winner-Announced-1008589875 Opening music is Bolo's Theme from Shantae series. Nier: Automata is available on Playstation 4, Xbox One, Windows and Nintendo Switch. Tea Sampled: Revitalise Tea

Date Made: 16/4/2024 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXCFgLZmjBeMCt-QbSoDhVA Tumblr: http://grinbrothers.tumblr.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/GrinBrothers