What Did You Do In Gaming Today

[Daxter]

13 hours ago, Wild Emotion said:

Maybe. I hope so. The last time I attempted to go through the game at a full party of Level 100 it definitely didn't turn out well at all. lol Though I have a grasp of the Junction system now, I'm just hoping I can get my hands one some good Spells like Ultima. I love that one. ^^

Well thankfully the game scales so your level never really matters outside of boss fights and Level 5 Death one way or the other. It is all about how you Junction that determines how the experience goes.

[Daxter]

2 hours ago, Wild Emotion said:

What do you mean it scales? I've never really understood what that meant.

For random encounters, enemy levels match your level. So if you kept avoiding experience points and ended up getting to the end of the game with an average level of 10, enemies at that point would be Level 10 as well. Similarly, if you somehow found a way to get to an average level of 100 right now, all enemies you face would be Level 100 as well. You would face the same enemies, but they will have higher stats and I believe different Draw Magic too. New characters who join match your average level too so levels are irrelevant anytime you are not in a boss fight.

This was done to make sure whether you avoided battles and gaining experience, or over-leveled, that the difficulty remains the same where how well you Junction determines how easy fights are. However, the bosses have fixed stats so staying under-leveled is common to keep those fights interesting.

So that is why when you said you were avoiding leveling to avoid a difficult situation, I was so surprised. I get your reasoning from the perspective you have but your knowledge of the game does not really match your plan. Only if you are stuck on random encounters should you avoiding leveling up so you can get a chance to optimize your Junctions. But you are doing this at the start of the game with solid knowledge of magic, items, and it sounds like a decent feel for Junctions. If you are already trying to get Ultima, that is endgame magic. Meaning if you Junction properly, you could move forward right now without ever leveling up and beat 80% of the storyline bosses. But since I imagine you will be leveling up once you truly start, no boss will be able to beat you if you even just do decent Junctions until you get to post-game bosses. Random encounters are fundamentally easier than bosses, but punish you if you are at a high level with bad Junctions. So you will always need to keep pace with that for the full game but your level does not factor into the experience at all with them.

[Daxter]

8 hours ago, Wild Emotion said:

Huh. That's interesting. I was under the impression that bosses also leveled up with your characters. At least that's been my experience.

Well they technically do but only to a point so it is not as noticeable as random encounters. I don’t remember the exact numbers but eventually bosses will stop leveling up with you while random encounters always do. However, there is never going to be a time where your level makes you unable to beat a boss. That can happen with the random encounters though.

[Daxter]

Made some more progress in Dark Cloud yesterday. The Sun Giant is built, Moon Sea is done, and final battle at the Dark Heaven Castle has been teased. I worry about a difficulty spike or swerve last level as I have only tapped into maybe 50% of what the weapon system can be. I would rather have a post game dungeon but time will tell.

[Daxter]

Started the last level of Dark Cloud yesterday. As expected, there is a final dungeon. So far so good but with how much of the game has not been necessary to optimize, I expect either a long dungeon or a hard one.

The weapon capacity issue for Toan rang true as I had to throw away one of his weapons to make room. My plan had been to use repair kits to grind with his weaker weapons and then absorb them into a stronger weapon since that is what the game wants you to do. But, since I randomize who gets the repair kits when I find them, it did not work out as Ruby kept getting picked. Because I am so close to the end now, I will press on with this plan for now. At least Ruby is very strong now.

[Sakura]

Another farming level ~ 6 to go until I max the farming skill out. 

[efaardvark]

Got 2 new mob heads... and two big holes in the front yard that will need filling in. 
 

Spoiler

 

[Daxter]

Still working through Dark Cloud. The last level does not have many weapon attachments so far which is concerning, but I will have to leave to free up inventory space anyway…again. I swear, inventory and resource management is half of the play time in this game. The difficulty of the last level has been smooth so far, but I have not gained access to any back floors yet so I am curious how that difficulty scaling is.

Based on how this level has been structured, I am expecting this to be the longest dungeon by far, but time will tell.

[Daxter]

The Dark Cloud grind continues. I am almost halfway done with the Gallery of Time, so I am hoping to beat the game by next week. Inventory management remains my biggest opponent but now, there is not a straightforward way to use up items unless I never avoid any damage. Finding weapon attachments remains a constant battle.

[efaardvark]

Finally got around to detailing my city's walls.  I'd wanted to get away from the traditional stone-brick look so I started with white concrete but the huge expanses of flat white walls made it a bit more of a challenge than I was prepared for.  I've never been great at making things look good either.  It did look a lot better once I got the crenels / merlons on the top and the embrasures in the walls however.  I bought a bunch of normal lanterns from the town's librarian and liberally placed those on top as well, then crafted up a bunch of soul lanterns to hang under the merlons.  All that distracts enough from the otherwise blank exterior that I think it turned out ok.  This being minecraft I'm sure I'll continue tweaking things as new ideas occur to me but at least for now I'm calling it "done".  It's functional and looks halfway decent.

 

Spoiler

 

I also went back to the "Complementary" shader, which resulted in a cool visual while collecting stuff from my allay habitat.

 

Spoiler

 

Edited December 2, 2023 by efaardvark

[Daxter]

I made some more good progress with Dark Cloud. I have yet to gain access to a back floor in the Gallery of Time so I expect a large difficulty spike to happen in those areas. I am being burned with Toan’s weapon inventory now but I do not have enough weapon attachments to stop for weapon leveling, and so close to the end I do not want to make a 10 hour detour to restock and grind. 

[Sakura]

Been hanging out doing fishing on my game with some friends all day and it's been really nice and relaxing. 

[EnviousEnvy]

Dinkum

Just got the game over the weekend and spent about 4-5 hours on it total. It’s fun — gives Mine Craft and ACNH vibes. A bit slow in the beginning but after that it’s pretty fun.

DDLV

Spent a few hours on this over the weekend. Tearing apart all of the biomes and redecorating them to get ready for the new DLC. I’m stoked!!

[Daxter]

8 hours ago, Wild Emotion said:

I'm still playing Final Fantasy VIII Remastered on Switch: After collecting more Elnoyle, Trauma, and Jumbo Cactuar cards I've started actually playing cards in Balamb Garden. Since it's still before the Fire Cavern where Squall acquires Ifrit, Quistis is waiting by the Front Gate of the Garden. She'll be waiting quite a while. lol I've collected 2 good cards: MiniMog and Quistis. They definitely make playing cards a lot easier, but for the moment I'm still going after some easy pickings as far as which NPCs I play cards with. A lot of low level cards can be refined into really good items, like Gayla and Tri-Face. That's basically all I'm doing in the game right now since I've collected the 2 of strongest cards I can get at this point until I start playing cards outside of Balamb Garden. To get Zell's card from Ma Dincht though I need Zell in my party, so I clearly can't get it just yet. Using the MiniMog, Quistis, 2 Trauma, and 2 Jumbo Cactuar cards as my total hand in Triple Triad really gives me an edge. I don't like constantly hearing the Triple Triad theme though, so I'm just listening to the music from my iPod while I'm playing the game for now until I'm ready to progress the story.

I respect the commitment to the card grind.

[Daxter]

The end is near in Dark Cloud. Only one of Seda’s memories remains to rebuild in the Gallery of Time. However my fear in there being one floor for each character to have to solo seems to be coming true as Xiao just had one. If that happens, I will have to take a detour for more repair kits and weapon attachments though, it may not need to be for too long. But between that and potentially having to fish to free up space, this goes from me feeling the game could be done this week, to it potentially taking until next week. Really, the resource management is the only difficulty I have but bosses prove difficult. As long as the final boss can be damaged by anyone, it will not be an issue.

[efaardvark]

Added the Distant Horizons mod to my Minecraft setup.  It eats memory and CPU cycles (all of them  ) but now I can drop my render distance to below 10 and get a nice FPS boost while still enjoying the view.

 

[Daxter]

In the tail end of Dark Cloud but it has played out as expected. Every character seems to have a floor they need to clear and as a result, I had to make a detour for weapon repair kits. That being said, only two characters are left to do with only one that would be a big problem. I just hope his weapons are strong enough to proceed as is. We will see. I foresee being stuck with one more detour to fish to free up inventory and get more weapon repair kits.

[Daxter]

Adventuring in Dark Cloud has been tedious, but I still continue. So far everything has played out as expected. I had to take a fishing detour and try and build up more weapon repair kits. I am down to the final character’s solo level so of course his weapons are not strong enough. So I will have to grind this out by getting more weapon repair kits. After this floor I expect one more floor to finish Seda’s memories and then the final battle. If Ruby can consistently deal damage, it should not be an issue. I may need to get some healing items at that point though. For now, finishing the final solo floor will be the focus.

[Daxter]

I finally finished up the character specific floors in the Gallery of Time in Dark Cloud. The amount of time it took was outrageous. But, everything after that was simple so I am now up against the Dark Genie. I only did one attempt but made it to his second phase. I will get some more healing items but since Ruby can be used, this should hopefully be his last week.

For Samurai Warriors 4, I am continuing to train characters. I made some progress in Nightmare mode with Toyohisa and Yoshihiro, and got Munenori some growth in Hard mode.

I also got some more progress in My GM mode in WWE 2K23, though Dakota Kai refused to resign with one of my brands which was annoying.

[Daxter]

Dark Cloud is finally done. Three total attempts to beat the Dark Genie and I tried out the post game dungeon and completed a floor. Looking back on the game, I would not go out of my way to play the sequel but if I came across it,  I would play it.

Dark Cloud is the most tedious game I have played in a while. It has had the most resources to manage for sure. Weapons can break, you can lose health from thirst, and have limited inventory space. The story is very bland as the core story is very basic and uses time travel to make it interesting. This does not happen until the end of the game though. None of the party members are relevant to the overall story minus the main character and even his role is small. Meanwhile characters like Xiao and Ruby only get a couple of scenes. Not good.

The battle system itself is fun and customization is expansive but not user friendly. There is no way an enemy should be able to block my attack and take 15 weapon health making me lose a weapon I worked on for 40 hours unless I reload the save. The scaling of how many weapon attachments are provided is not to scale with the weapons found. This does force using multiple weapons, but enemy scaling is unforgiving for this.

The environment building mechanic is a fun idea, but wastes a lot of time as towns have to be built a certain way to get the reward and that would not align with how a player would build the towns. Fishing is frustrating too with finding specific fish.

But I had some fun with the game, it was not all bad. Tales of Graces is up next.

Edited December 12, 2023 by Daxter

[efaardvark]

Built a mud pond in minecraft for making mud and then turning it into clay.  In my case I'm thinking of making bricks for a fireplace & bbq pit.

Spoiler

On the bottom is a 2-deep pond of water.  You put down a layer of dirt then take a bottle and just move over the dirt filling the bottle from the upper layer of water and applying it to the dirt to turn it into mud blocks.  Once you've turned it all into mud then you take the mud and spread it out on top of the dripstone blocks.  After a while it dries into clay and you can break the clay for clay balls or clay blocks.  The blocks can be run through a furnace to make terracotta.  The balls can be turned into bricks.

 

[Daxter]

10 hours ago, Wild Emotion said:

In Final Fantasy VIII Remastered on my Switch I've collected the necessary items to get Squall's Punishment weapon which is the next to last weapon of his in the game. For Quistis, I just need one more item to get her Save The Queen chain whip which is her strongest weapon. I do plan on getting Squall's Lionheart gunblade on disc one, but I won't be able to get the last items until later on in the story. Right now I'm just playing a bunch of cards with people to collect cards I can refine into necessary items for the weapon upgrades for each character, or the ones I'll be able to get as soon as they join my party anyway. Probably the most time consuming will be the 12 Pulse Ammo needed for Squall's Lionheart ultimate weapon upgrade. Thankfully I can refine 10 Elnoyle cards into 1 Energy Crystal using Card Mod to turn the cards into items, then I need to use Ammo-RF to refine those Energy Crystals into 12 Pulse Ammo. It takes a while to even get 10 Elnoyle cards though just for 1 Energy Crystal, but it's not like I've got anything better to do with my time. lol

It is good to hear the grind is still going well!

[Daxter]

Started Tales of Graces F yesterday. A lot of fun up to this point. I started on the third difficulty as I felt optimistic and early on, it seems easy to break the game. There is a mysterious girl in the party whose identity has not been revealed, but I spent so much time experimenting with the battle system that she learned a skill that references her name.

There seems to be a lot to explore in a player friendly way, and customization seems expansive and meaningful which I like. A perfect start!

[Daxter]

2 hours ago, Wild Emotion said:

I've been wanting a Tales of game for my Switch. I don't really know if it's even available for that system, but would you recommend Graces F if it was?

So far, absolutely! It seems that each title is standalone so you don’t have to worry about prior plot. For this one in particular, combat is very forgiving and straightforward, exploration is easy, and customization is expansive but transparent. Plus, multiple difficulty levels that can be changed at any time.

[FaintStain]

Pc - (Nothing fancy just a cheap old bulid with a donated gtx1070)

Operation harsh doorstop (not bad for a free to play fps) 
Ghost Recon Wild Lands - campaign - trying to play on extreme difficulty with no hud and perma death, which is fun but hard.
 
really looking for recommendations for mmorpgs anime or fantasy style games for an ageing noob like myself.