Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[quinnr]

I've been yearning for a MUSH community lately, but unfortunately while my old homestead is online it's super quiet. PennMUSH's website went offline this year, and now that particular community is sadly a collection of Internet Archive links on Reddit.

I stumbled across AresMUSH, a "next-gen server platform that brings modern features to MUSH games: a fully-featured web portal and wiki, automated scene logging, [and] web-based character creation" and looks like fun for those who are into free-form text roleplay in an online group setting. The interface is super smooth. You can poke through people's game logs, which satisfies my urge to internet lurk. I like the heavy theming. All the scheduled roleplay scenes are collected into a game-wide calendar.

I really like the traditional MUD/MUSH room/object structure more than the freeform text roleplay aspect. (I'm not complaining, their FAQ warned me.) But this looks like a neat tool for those who enjoy typing.

[Frumple]

Oh hey, I remember seeing that in mud trawls, like, uh, twenty something years ago? Ares's been around for a while, I think.

Never actually poked at it, though, always had a lot of trouble getting into the more freeform MUSH games. Had a fair bit of fun with more structured MUDs, but MUSHes I sometimes couldn't even figure out how to get the bloody command system to work, ha. Was somewhat amusing when my preferred client back in the day was MUSHclient, heh.

... also not really huge on RP in general, I liked MUDs mostly for the hack and slash stuff, especially when they used to the low-graphics environment to get kinda' wild with the actual mechanics. Been a long damn time since I've played one, though. Almost got around to firing some up again a few years back, but the one I was thinking of having a go with to break back into it (some variety of Angband MUD, i.e. a roguelike functioning as a particularly involved *band variant... there were actually more than one, back in the day) had shut down at some point and I stalled out.

Decent amount of nostalgia, though. Some of my earliest interactions with scripting involved making travel macros for MUDs, ha.

[None]

Oh, if you've got recommendations for the hack and slash stuff, I'm all ears. I've got a small list going.

I've been playing Morrowind through the OpenMW adaptation; there's a mod that configurably randomizes the destinations that doors or door-like transitions to, and it's fucking me up man

I've got a reusable teleporter to a house mod that is entirely inner cells and each of its several dozen doors takes you to some entirely different interior cell and you end up with this massive hypothetical snarl of a path through eight radically different (and maybe dangerous) rooms to get back to that other cell that had something useful behind it, like a merchant with a fat wallet or a supply of throwing knives

but otherwise i was making a little home base in the interior of some tower, which served as the connection point for two entirely different cities, and with each city having dozens of doors on their own, you'd pivot through town trying to figure out if the fletcher door takes you to some ash cave or the mage's guild or, or some entirely different guy's house

i'm also playing primarily with the intent to fully decorate/occupy the big house mod from above with all the goodies I find in the world. The collecting and the displaying of random junk and treasure is actually kind of the only reason I'm playing Morrowind, now that I think of it, but i frigging love it

[Frumple]

Oh, if you've got recommendations for the hack and slash stuff, I'm all ears. I've got a small list going.

I wish I did, but I just checked on the only I remembered that I hadn't already noticed it had shut down (Ivalice MUD) and, well, it closed doors about a decade ago :V

There were a handful of others (beyond the mentioned Angband ones) I fiddled with, but I can't recall names and I'd be pretty surprised if they were still running... playerbase was already small when I stopped doing mud stuff much. Only thing I can super easily recall is I gravitated pretty heavily towards ones with, well, auto/mini-maps, mostly with color support. It took a while before I wrapped my head meaningfully around travel macros, back in the day, and prior to that the ones without some sort of navigation assistance were... daunting.

Do wish I could remember whatever that RTS one I tried for a while was, though. There was a hecka' neat one that was, well, an RTS instead of normal RPG stuff; base building, minions, research, etc. Heavy ASCII integration, especially in regards to the map. It's probably less innovative these days, but like 15-20 years ago it was pretty damn amazing, ha.

[n9103]

EmpireMUD?

[Robsoie]

It has been a long time i wanted to give the Evil Within 1&2 games a try since they were given away by the epic store last year, but didn't found the time and completely forgot about them

So i tried the first Evil Within game. And so far it's rather awesome and nicely atmospheric if you like horror games with some stealth elements.
But what amazed me was the performance. On my potato after the usual "drop everything to low and see from there if i can increase things here and there" , i found the game on low is running very smoothly and despite being on low is still looking very impressive visually.

Then the other surprise is how fast it actually load, seriously with that level of visual quality and sound i was expecting long loading time on my good old HDD but no it's fast, even more puzzling when some other games with much less assets and much less visually/soundly quality can takes minutes.
I guess really not all engines (Evil Within is using the id Tech 5 engine) are equal at all without mentionning that the devs of that Evil Within had some rather high coding optimisation skillset.

Anyways, that first  Evil Within a lot of fun if you're not repelled by horror themes in a videogame (the horror atmosphere feels like a mix between Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill) and the stealth elements are not bad at all so far.

I'm only at chapter 3 (there are 15 of them) , clearing that little village trying to help the doctor while collecting the green goo things to upgrade my skils and fetch more items (recently got a shotgun and crossbow from one of the houses).
Definitively recommended if you like the genre

[Frumple]

EmpireMUD?

Mm... no, I do recall checking that one at some point, but the one I was remembering was more sci-fi, and much less cooperative and whatnot. More RTS than city builder. From a poke around some of the old sites I think it might have been some variety of Assault: High Tech Wars. Doesn't seem to still be running, though.

[Robsoie]

In Evil Within, Sebastian Castellanos has such nerves of steel that he will bravely face even the worst nightmarish horrors.

Spoiler: so it's not surprise a harpoon wound doesn't impress him (warning : not for the faint of heart) (click to show/hide)

[Robsoie]

Not to necromance the old CK2 thread, so i'll put it there.
For a change of game, i"ve been trying to use the Historical Immersion Project, HIP (https://ck2.paradoxwikis.com/Historical_Immersion_Project) + the VIET Events Reborn (https://github.com/cybrxkhan/VIET-Events-Reborn) to add a lot more events and flavor to my dlc-less base CK2 (by the way the base CK2 game is permantly free on both gog and steam if you didn't knew)

The Latest HIP download location is defunct unfortunately :
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/historical-immersion-project-download-faq.748775/
but fortunately it can be found there on one of the last page of the related thread : https://www.mediafire.com/file/7oq5r2vakkh53de/HIP_2020-07-10_Frosty3.7z/file

there's a bugfix/balancing patch for HIP
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/frozen4-hip-bugfix-and-balance-patch-for-frosty3.1456679/

Not installed the new map of the component (SWMH ) of HIP as i want to keep my performance good (SWMH is great but adding a lot more areas, regions etc.. and related characters increase the load obviously)
Hmm, let's check with a minor zone, this corner of Sardinia named Arborea that seems perfect to start and has that nice fantasy realm name to it.

The Guidice  ambition is to improve his martial abilities, Abisatu is not young anymore but is still willing to get better at commanding his army.

Spoiler: so how about giving it a try (click to show/hide)

Looks like his wife Joanna decided to make fun of her husband Abisatu improving his strategy skills..

Spoiler: she should have known better (click to show/hide)

[Kagus]

For as much as I've been digging up the dead recently, I figured I could still leave the old Cultist Simulator thread in its grave for the time being...

Wound up snagging the DLCs, and had my first victories as Priest and Ghoul. Priest was kinda weird, and I feel like it should probably be called "Jester" given how much juggling you end up doing to get things going... But it's still an "open" legacy and has some cool mechanics and such baked in, so I rather dig it and will be poking it a bit more later.

Ghoul... Man, the early/mid-game was way simpler and more pleasant than I'd expected, to the extent that I'm kinda sad I sorta "pre-loaded" my run instead of doing it "authentically"... But I am really struggling to understand how on earth you were supposed to know where to get what you needed to get beyond just doing a hysterically completionist run. If it weren't for the grind of getting the one singular victory that legacy allows, it would definitely be my favorite.

Also had a win as Dancer. Dancer is also weird, but in a different way. I'm glad the endings can be accessed by other legacies, because that is waaaay too much content to go through for that flimsy-ish beginning to support replaying with.


After passing 150 hours playtime, I can comfortably say that I'm entering the stage of player life where I'm quite comfortable with the mechanics, but still have no fuckin' idea about the lore

[Robsoie]

Thief 4 is a good game, it's only a pity it is called Thief and ditched the Thief lore, the era atmosphere (as while Thief was based on medieval fantasy, Thief 4 feels like it's a bit past renaissance time) or the character (you're playing as Garrett but it's not the same Garrett as he does not even have the mechanical eye by example)

I'm sure Thief 4 would have been renamed anything else or the devs would not have been using the Thief franchise just because they had bought it (and so making Thief 4 into its own unrelated to Thief game) it wouldn't have run into so much (often deserved) critics, because the game itself is not bad at all.
Though from what i played so far it feels a bit more linear in how to go through a mission (i guess to have all those forced cinematic cutscenes playing right) than old Thief games were (or at least the Fan Missions that often had a lot of different way to tackle the objectives as i think i played those even more than the default campaigns). 

Interesting video very informative about what happened to this game as it looks like it went through some development hell with lead, vision and direction switching too often  :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqN-C5pWyYQ

Anyways, after setting things to low to fit my old system, i'm surprised how smoothly it run while still looking very nice.
But it made me reinstall the 1st Thief game (Dark Project), because i just learned of the existence of a phenomenal fan mission (well a 10 mission campaign) for it that i need to try : The Black Parade
https://www.thiefguild.com/fanmissions/26275/thief-the-black-parade

[nenjin]

I got it on sale and put 10 hours into it. It's not that it's a bad game or even super dissimilar to the originals. It just felt formulaic, and a product of its time. Repeating the same 1st person animations over and over and over. I remember feeling constricted by the movement and the animations and the FOV.

I think what broke me though was that stealth often felt "arena-based" in its design. The levels did feel a lot more linear. Initially it didn't bother me so much, but as I hit yet another outdoor section, be it a square or a garden or something, with 4 blokes patrolling around it just started feeling like work. Compared to my rose-tinted view of the older games where the stealth and the action felt better integrated into the environment.

It's one of those games I never even think about going back to try again. It just wasn't all that memorable to me and ultimately failed to draw me in. But I suppose if I was like, retired and had time to play all the things I've never finished, it definitely would get its due. I had the slight impulse to fire it up based on your post, and it was immediately quashed by "no way I'd put off other games for it." When the remake or the leaves you feeling nostalgic for the originals just a few hours in, that's a pretty telling sign.

I'm on the fence about how it would have performed without the Thief name. It was so much like its peers coming out at the time, and with the development hell delaying it even further, I think it just didn't do enough things really well to stand out.

[Robsoie]

The atmosphere in Thief 4 additionally feel very different, from the costumes, from "newGarrett" dressing like some goth boy in bodysuit with a corset and wearing mascara around the eye for some reason (while the rest of his face is very pale so it's not even for hidding), the architecture everything feels like mid-18th century .

While everything felt occuring toward the end of medieval era in the other Thief games.

After progressing more, the linearity become more of an annoyance as you start to feel very "blocked in" , the mention of "arena" is accurate too so they can integrate those cinematic cutscenes regularly, as there's mostly only 1 path toward an objective the player can't accidentally miss triggering those cutscenes.

From my playthroughs Styx Shard of Darkness and Dishonored felt a lot more Thief-like than Thief 4 is.
Again, it's a good game but it's not really a Thief game or at least it does not "feel" like one.

[Kagus]

We just wanted to go see the bear fights tomorrow, mang ;_;

[Robsoie]

I remember the bear pit discussion, it was on the Bafford mission if i remember well.
That was the mission of the 1st Thief demo, i think i played it so much time i knew the layout by heart once i got the actual game, mission was slightly edited for the retail version.

Anyways, on Thief 4 i ran into a frankly ridiculous thing on chapter 4, i don't know if it's a bug or some broken design decision though

Spoiler: spoiler if you haven't reached that chapter end (click to show/hide)

There's a point in this mission in which a cutscene will play and the devs decided it was time for a forced chase and no more stealth for some reason because you need action guys and stealth is boring or something according to whoever coded that.
Ok, let's forget about trying to hide, just run in the open on the roofs while archers shoot at the then obvious you.

Arrows are raining around you, hinting that you indeed need to run to not end into a pincushion.

And if you logically ... use the run key ... at a specific point of the chase your character stop by himself, look at his hands and just die despite you don't see why or didn't missed a step or a jump, and you're on the actual right path.

Googled the answer :
At one point of the chase the character fall in a room full of guards but will manage to still escape and continue to run.
And that's the thing : ifyou still continue to press the run key because it's logical due to arrows flying around you : bam you reach a specific point of the path and newGarrett will stop and look at his hands and die .

So at that point you have to stop pressing the run key anymore, just use the regular move forward one (with some sliding regularly as after all those arrows may hit you at such lower speed) and  you'll notice that when reaching the specific place the character will not stop to look at his hand just to die and you'll complete the chase and the chapter ...