[special blend]

started playing the first etrian odyssey and i have some questions i was hoping you guys could answer: 1. am i supposed to be fighting the foes or just avoiding them 2. what does the day/night cycle impact 3. is the game supposed to be this hard
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[Rud31]

SB I'm playing EO3 and haven't played EO one but I think I can field these questions.

1. the FOEs have a lot of EXP hiding in their hearty hides, and the grind is long my friend.
2. different monsters
3. yes.

Conclusion: I'm going to beat this first stratum in 3 and then say that I won because it took 10 hours of me grinding the same dungeon.
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[Deets]

Didn't FOEs stop giving xp in EO2? Did they revert that change for EO3?

[misadventurous]

yes they did

rudie the first stratum always takes forever, the game picks up a lot from there. or at least it did in EO1. i just assume it's largely the same case with 3.

[Mr. Mechanical]

Man the last five levels of the Vigilante missions in VCS are hard! Thankfully the game checkpoints the odd job missions every five levels in this one so every time I start over I start at level 11 instead of level 1. Still though, doesn't matter if you do them in a car or a bike you get shredded to pieces in no time because the bad guys have high powered weapons even early on. Most strategies on the internet recommend waiting until after the story is over when you have access to a Hunter (attack helicopter) and using that to do them but I want that 50% armor increase from the start for the rest of the game. Also because I am a super player and don't need to cheese my way through such an otherwise easy game. I'm determined to get through those last five levels today. I made it to level 14 yesterday but by then I had a 3 star wanted level and it was impossible to not get the tires of whatever vehicle I was driving spiked or shot out while trying to get the criminals.
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[CONSUME_PRODUCTS]

i try the first stratum of eo1 every few years & end up concluding i'd rather just play nocturne or something
maybe it'll stick one day but man that's an awful grind

[special blend]

i'm on the third floor now and it's sticking
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[special blend]

is exp split evenly between your party members or is it a flat rate? like, if one of my mans is dead, does that mans' experience get split between the surviving members?
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[mauve]

Experience is split evenly amongst survivors.

And yes FOEs gave no exp in EO2 but their drops were definitely worth hunting down. From a game design perspective this is sane and actually not at all problematic but a lot of people complained about it.
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twit

[internisus]

[Rud31]

[mauve]

Not Etrian.

The games are paced such that, provided you don't go back to town unnecessarily, you can pretty much just keep going straight forever if you have a decent build and spend the time to explore areas.

Helps to have a decent party build though.
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[notbov]

Fighting Big Daddies and Big Sisters in Bioshock 2 was interesting until I found out that they hadn't changed Winter Blast from the first game and that I could literally kill them by chain freezing and meleeing or drilling them to death. And then you get a tonic that makes your drill attacks freeze; the last Big Sister I fought, I blasted her once, then drilled her and the drill refroze her and she died somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 seconds. On hard.

I'm also glad they gave me the chance to teach a black woman about how bigotry is bad by not murdering her
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Got through those last five vigilante missions just like I said I would. Didn't even take me more than a few tries as well. Since then I've just been doing some side missions like the various time trials and finding stunt jumps and rampages. Almost have all the extra stuff (aside from the 99 red balloons, this game's hidden package) on the first island done. Roughly 23.5% completion.
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[special blend]

thanks to you sbrothers for all the help with EO, this game is tickling all the right spots for me

couple more: is there a way to increase your item capacity? what happens when you die?
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[Toups]

etrian odyssey is not a grind if you remember to put skill points into resource gathering skills. I had a huge problem with EO3 because I didn't realize there was a "common skills" tab that contained take/mine/chop and thought only farmers could perform those actions, so it took me forever to get enough money to buy decent equipment. by the time I figured this out I already had a specialized farmer who made me tons of money so I never bothered giving those abilities to the rest of my party.

EOIV seems to take this even further as most of the random drops are worth less than ever compared to mine/take/chop items
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[misadventurous]

oh yeah in the first game it's way easier to get by in the first stratum if you open up the shortcut to the chop point on the first floor & then make a team of 5 survivalists with their three points in chop to exploit it. good for when you need a little extra cash.

[probably fine]

The iOS Rayforce port didn't really click with me the way that the Cave ports do, but recently I've been giving it another chance. It might have been growing on me, but it seems that one of the last few iOS system updates released since I bought the game has rendered it really sluggish.
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[Rud31]

Y'all enjoy that Etrian, I'm bailing. Shrug, Rude, Booji, Toups, and Persona can all remain dead at the flippers of a cybernetic catfish.
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[probably fine]

[Ymer]

Mr. Mech, GTA3 Liberty City is way better then Vice City, right? Going by foggy memories here but I think this is my canon.

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

personally, I always felt Vice City had a lot more character (even outside of, you know, having a lot more characters), but it was designed to be more like a real space where you can go cruising around and find that everything kind of contextually exists in relation to each other as actual places, whereas GTA3 is pretty clearly designed as a "video game" space that is more actively fun to navigate and explore (for the purpose of mastering it, not finding new things). Vice City is a more interesting place for things to be happening, but Liberty City is a more interesting place to actually be doing things.

I guess I have no idea how this holds up in the Stories games (SINCE THEY NEVER CAME OUT FOR PC GOD DAMN IT).

I wonder if people who stopped liking the series when it went 3D experience this distinction...

[Mr. Mechanical]

In terms of one city being better:

It's kind of a wash for me. There are things I like and dislike about each. I agree with DAIS that VC certainly has more character than LC in terms of it being a more defined space since it's based on a specific city whereas LC is based on more of a region (it's a weird mix of New York, New Jersey, Pittsburgh/Philly, upstate suburban areas, etc.). Vice City is Miami In The 80s and you'll never mistake it for anything but.

Since GTA 3 all the cities have been basically sketches. GTA 3 is a rough sketch of an general region that works really well as a game space. It's just big enough to feel big but not too big that you can't learn your way around it after a while. It never takes more than a few minutes to get from one end of the city to another, for instance, so the things you are tasked with doing never drag on longer than you want them to.

Vice City is a more filled in sketch of a single specific place. It's bigger and hangs together better in the sense DAIS spoke about. It really feels like more of an actual place than GTA 3's Liberty City does. I think they both work equally well as game spaces though the larger the space gets the more strained and involved by necessity the mission design must become. So while with Liberty City you could get away with most missions being basic escort missions + maybe some combat in Vice City and later games it has to be more involved so a mission will start out as a basic escort task and then after you get there things happen during cutscenes that morph the mission into a car chase/race/combat arena/etc. usually with a timer and a goal to reach at some other part of the map. What makes it strained is that it becomes transparent after a while unless you're just really enamored with the setting enough that you don't notice or care that the narrative in the cutscenes is really designed around pulling you through scripted scenarios that are gradually unfurled for you as you go through them.

What is interesting in the later games, and particularly the Stories games that I'm playing through now, is that the designers keep to the same formula for the mission structure and side missions but change things up by filling out the context more. This means that story missions are more scripted to have more stuff for the player do and in more variety and side missions have little tweaks as well, like the taxi missions I spoke about above. These aren't really big changes, mind you, and they do mean that the story part of the game is increasingly scripted and therefore less free form and with less of a sense of player agency than GTA 3, but the tradeoff is with better writing with weirder yet more humanized people and characters getting into increasingly odd and darkly amusing situations for themselves.

But to get back to the cities themselves again, they are basically sketches of real places as I said before. San Andreas was a sketch of a geographical region spread out across multiple cities while GTA IV went back to doing just a single city. Each sketch is more filled in and completed than the last. It's interesting that GTA V is going back to doing a bigger, seemingly more detailed sketch than ever of a broad yet constrained region. By which I mean it's one city but with surrounding countryside/small towns which is probably easier to simulate than multiple cities and countryside in between. It's a good balance if the trailers/screenshots are anything to go by but we still don't know exactly how big the game is or how much of it we've seen so far. Maybe we've seen a lot maybe we've only seen a bit, can't say for sure at the moment.

Bringing this back around to GTA 3 Liberty City and Vice City and how they compare I like the variety to Liberty City but I like Vice City's overall sense of place and character more. LC is grey and grimy and gloomy while VC is bright and vibrant and hopeful. I don't like how flat VC is but I guess Miami is pretty flat in real life? In the Stories games both cities benefit from increased color palettes so the green grasses and trees in gloomy LC are greener and the orange/purple sunsets of VC are that much more orange/purple.

Regarding DAIS's distinction between one being a more interesting place for things to happen and one a more interesting place to be doing things: I think they're both pretty fun environments to "master" if we're talking about mastery of the city being things like learning all the shortcuts and locations of weapon spawns, police bribes and body armor and stuff. Maybe you're talking about something else though!

Anyway, I can't really say I favor one or the other or that I think one is better at being a "game space" than another. I have too much nostalgia and mushy feelings wrapped up in both games by this point to really think about them in those terms. I sure do like revisiting them and talking about them though. I think it all depends on what you're looking for in the game, either a gamey-ness aspect or a general being-there-as-an-experience aspect, because both games (and all the games in the series for that matter) offer each to varying degrees. The earlier games are definitely more gamey than the later ones, though Gay Tony was way more gamey than IV. It had a mission replay feature with various general and mission-specific tasks to complete in order to get 100%, for instance, which none of the others had. Really hope that comes back in V because it was pretty neat and gave the game some actual legs that don't just rely on you being so enamored with the setting that you're content to just exist in it and not have anything else to really do.
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[Rud31]

Hey everyone was right, GG Collection does kind of suck.
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[Loki Laufeyson]

why i oughta
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[CONSUME_PRODUCTS]

hooked up the ps2 and got the first few hours of nocturne (just past matador) done, might finish it this time!!!! also obtained a copy of dragon quarter after like 7 years of sb hype

[Rud31]

[Swarm]

[The King]

Played the first 3 chapters of Mother 3.
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[Loki Laufeyson]

[owl]

[GrimmSweeper]

Continued onward into Dishonored. Once you get a couple more 'magical' powers it becomes a lot more open ended and thankfully they do this early on in the first mission. Then you get this epiphany that you don't have to wait for someone to have their back turned to gank/choke out because of Blink, the one and only power forced on you! It's been a blast once I got used to the movement mechanics and realize that the rooftops are readily available for a quick getaway.

Still on the non-violent route, even though I did lead a couple soldiers into a natural rat pack that ate them up. And uh, instigated spreading the plague still further among the criminal underworld.

[Felix]

does Dishonored actually require 1GB of vram? it's the first game I've seen to claim that, which is why I haven't bothered trying to play it yet.

[parker]

It played fine for me
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[ionustron]

Restarted my Tactics Ogre play last night. It was an odd feeling after a number of days of an internet outage during which I didn't feel right about playing anything seriously (I tried starting up an Uncharted Waters 2 game over the weekend but it's hard to take in even with a pdf manual and I can only enjoy it in very short plays so far.) This was the first thing I played in any sort of old extended habit in a few weeks.

Basically, I like the idea of a force of persuasion. Makes stuff even slower, but I'm satisfied trying to kill as little as possible, and hope they're thankful that I just disarmed them and they still got their miserable lives or whatever. Then I remember that all the animals go to slaughter anyway so =/

Chaos frames yo. Much easier to manage when you can finally persuade phantoms.

[misadventurous]

i have been playing the hell out of some Alien Soldier and i think i finally have my head around the controls! i can reliably get up to stage 9 now, which is p. cool considering that a month ago i'd be dying horribly at the first boss. it is a really, really damn good game; i wish i had a proper controller to enjoy it with. or better, an actual copy on an actual Sega Genesis...

the turning point came when i realized just how useful the block/deflect command (B+B) is.

[scratchmonkey]

RE: The Liberty City vs. Vice City discussion, my major issue with Vice City is that's really flat. I really enjoyed how the hills in Liberty City affected driving around, which has always been my favorite part of GTA games, to the point where I think of on-foot sequences as tiresome time-outs that I have to sit through between being behind the wheel.

[Geo Mantle]

Played Lost Planet E.X. Troopers on my new Japanese 3DS today.

Maybe my favorite portable game ever. Maybe my favorite third person shooter? I don't know, I like the first 2/3 of Vanquish a whole whole lot.

[Guillotine]

There is a demo for Dragon Dogma Dark Arisen on JP PSN, but it's just the old adventure demo with jp voices and a few minor changes, no new areas or anything. there are quite a few new hairstyles in character creations, the menus seem a lot faster, aaaand not sure what else, not gonna play through it.

[special blend]

lost $30 to my friend playing tony hawk 3 64
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[muteaid]