What Are You Playing (Winter 2012-2013 / Postapocalypse)?

Persona 4 Golden (Vita): Oh my god THE TALKING. I've reached the point where it really opens up (60 hours in, of course), only to run smack into what felt like 5 HOURS of dialogue. To make it worse, I picked the wrong person as the killer, failed to save before visiting Nanako at the hospital, got the bad ending, and had to sit through an hour of unskippable dialogue ALL OVER AGAIN. ARRRRRRRRRRRRGH

This is a better game than P3 in so many ways and yet it's also worse. It's not that the story is bad per se. It's just that there's so much of it and it prevents me from actually playing the game. Also, they lay on the anime tropes SO MUCH HEAVIER.

Still, in spite of my frustrations, I gotta hand it to Atlus. They really had some balls to put that bad ending where they did. I was seriously freaking out when I saw it.

The way Torchlight II handles difficulties is a dealbreaker to me.

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Originally Posted by MechDeus

•Have to play through the game to get to harder difficulties, you can't just select harder ones from the outset. The game is designed for this since the character levels with the difficulties, but this is part of what can lead to fatigue.

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This isn't a big deal anymore due to the monster power system. Normal in pre-MP D3 was a joke.

The game is relatively short. You can make it harder in seven or eight hours.

I forgot to mention that you're also locked forever to the initial difficulty you pick in Torchlight II without using the Rapid Respec mod program or creating an online/LAN game (and the latter seems to introduce memory issues to me). Creating online/LAN games is also the only way to replay a map.

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Originally Posted by Diff-chan

This isn't a big deal anymore due to the monster power system. Normal in pre-MP D3 was a joke.

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Oh yeah, I forgot that can be applied to the lower difficulties.

Sounds like Diablo 3 is a better buy for me. I wish there wasn't an auction house though.

Diablo 3 has some annoying stuff, like the story is about 3x more overbearing than it should be. It is, though, a lot of fun to play.

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Originally Posted by MechDeus

I forgot to mention that you're also locked forever to the initial difficulty you pick in Torchlight II without using the Rapid Respec mod program or creating an online/LAN game (and the latter seems to introduce memory issues to me). Creating online/LAN games is also the only way to replay a map.

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I do realize that Torchlight 2 is appealing to the types of people who like this sort of stuff (YOUR CHOICES SHOULD BE PERMANENT!), but it sounds so horrible to me.

It is horrible, but that's also what I can't figure out. The design choices all seem to be retard hardcore ideas, like locking in stats and skills and including invisible diminishing returns which means you can put points into literally useless stats, but then they practically nullify everything by making it dead simple and stacking on percentages to make everything overpowered. It's like they went into it trying to make Diablo 2.5 and then got cold feet at the last minute and nerfed the whole thing.

Thank god for the mod community. Rapid Respec is so great.

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Originally Posted by MechDeus

Rapid Respec is so great.

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So with that mod, you can respec any time you want for free? Wow, that sounds like a great idea. An ARPG developer should add that to one of their games some time.

Diablo 3 does combat really well and it looks great but the other annoying stuff keeps me away. My biggest problem is that the game still fucking stutters when new content is being streamed in. And LOTS OF SHIT is streamed in. New monsters, areas, spell effects, sound effects, etc. So my game has an aneurysm for the first 15 minutes and continues to run like garbage. This was a bug in beta that STILL hasn't been fixed (even though several official posts said that it was fine in the finished game) and it only happens on certain computer builds. It's incredibly annoying.

Torchlight 2 runs at a flawless 60 FPS and I guess that's all it takes for me to prefer it.

That problem has almost completely disappeared for me. Not sure if that's just a lucky spot I've been in but I've only had the loading stutter happen once in the last couple days that I've gone back to it.