Campaign Creations

This thread is intended to speak, show videos and so on about recently new or upcoming games of any sort.

Hijacking the thread from game to game is to be expected.

Yes, I am a fan of Disgaea series.

Disgaea 4 : A Promise Unforgotten (for the PS3)
To be released on September 6th.

In short, it's a niche Strategy RPG (more for the main story), mixed traditionally with humor (also often parodies other games). The setup this time is a of political nature.

Here's quite a few videos.

Trailer : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EbghemGI1I

Opening (HD) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Ahbahc ... re=related

10 first minutes video (More story-oriented), minor spoilers :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYZa8c5DomM


10 first minutes video (More combat-oriented), minor spoilers :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... fgHj4QKKtc#!

Class introductions (JP text), non-important spoilers :
Remainder - game is of politic nature thus many try to convince.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tgmAA9w37M


Some key features of the Disgaea series (in general) :

*) Item World, enters randomized worlds towards boosting your items and such.

*) Having an interresting (and optional) post-game to spend a lot of time (beyond the first 25-40 hours for the main story) to level up your characters to reach additional and optional story bits, beat ultra-powerful bosses and so on.

*) Probably one of the few series managing to make grinding (only the post-game, not required for the main story) interresting for a very long while.


Pros (Disgaea 4 specific) :

*) Game is worth it even without the post-game.

*) If you care about the post-game, it's an excellent "time waster" (can reach between 50 to 700 hours).

*) Both English and Japanesse voices (in case you dislike the English ones).

*) While it has online features, you can turn them off without having to unplug your Internet cable.

*) Optional DLC and pretty much only for post-game. You can easily compensate for not having DLC.

*) DLC tend to feature returning characters from older NIS games all for nostalgia.

*) Also Have SD (Pre-Disgaea 4) graphics mostly for nostalgia.


Cons (Disgaea 4 specific) :

*) For the post-game, it essentially requires you to check FAQs (ex : http://www.gamefaqs.com/ ) or having a strategy guide if you don't want to waste too much time leveling finding oddies that can help you tremendously.

*) Expensive DLC (likely to hit 100$-140$ US for about 2 story expansions, 15-20 unique characters, extra maps, pirate ships,etc. after many months later).

*) Even with their HD change in Disgaea 4 (from 3rd), many might still not like the graphics.

*) While still very functionnal, the Map Editor only allow pre-fixed blocks to be placed in the US version (instead of JP's 1x1 blocks) due to copyright reasons and stuff.

*) If you want a strategy game with decent and intelligent AI, Disgaea 4 is NOT known at all for that.

*) Unlike the videos implies, there is no real multiplayer aspect for pirating or anything (unless a future DLC does that).

I have no idea what game that is..

And I might be turning into Isk because I don't see what all the craze is over Deus Ex.. It's nothing unique in comparison to something as old as Fallout 3.

I never thought highly of fallout 1-2 to begin with. If I wanted turn-based games I was gonna play HoMM3...

That's why I said three! THREE!

3 was just a gimmick from what I have seen.

3 and NV sucked.

I liked Fallout 1, 2, 3, and New Vegas, as well as Heroes of Might and Magic 3, AND Deus Ex, 1 and 3.

Jeez, why do you people have to hate everything.

As a quick note to Lavachu, Disgaea 4 is turn-based strategy (although much more of the "grinding" style), see the second 10 minutes gameplay video to see concrete combat in it.

For Deus Ex, are you speaking of the newer one (human revolution) or even the plain one? Anyway, while I would probably liked the original Deux Ex more, I guess I got more interested in other games at the time (thus never went too much into it). Thus Human Revolution is not really on my radar.

For Fallout 1 & 2, I did like them greatly although I was fortunate enough to play the patched versions to greatly minimize issues with bugs. For Fallout 3, while not perfect, it does a fairly good job to switch from 2D to 3D (a step that quite a few games can fail horribly). Didn't play New Vegas yet although I heard it was much more buggy for essentially a game directly based on Fallout 3's engine. Not sure of any of the concrete new features in it.

For the HoMM series, I guess the big problem is it have a gameplay we really want to love a ton (that HoMM3 with 2 expansions got the most right) but newer HoMM games always seem to have major flaws to prevent us to get the true magic of the series.

I guess it's more disheartening when older equivalent games got similar features (simultaneous multiplayer, Random Maps Generation, etc.) done right and natively in their times while newer HoMMs still lack a proper implementation of them.

Although for HMM6, it COULD end up being a reasonable game after its expansions. However, I do feel too "milked" when simultaneous multiplayer will probably only be included in an expansion again. For RMG, I could understand much more since it's a thing that can honestly take time to program right (and not HMM5-style).

Finally, I guess we got much more cynical in general after Activision-Blizzard became too greedy which still leave Starcraft 2 custom maps in the dust and Diablo 3 seems to heavily rely on your credit card. After all, we did get raised on Blizzard games and we do feel abandoned by Blizzard.

So in the close future, obviously I will like Disgaea 4 since it's one of the rare companies that still produce games I honestly like without reserve (enough to buy a PS3 JUST for Disgaea 3 and to pay considerably for Disgaea 3 DLC). In the longer term, possibly Path of Exile and probably Guild Wars 2.

Emu > I wouldn't say I hated Deus Ex or Fallout, only that I found them very uninteresting. Hate is something I reserve for stuff that is genuinely bad like Starcraft 2 or any given console port.

IskatuMesk wrote:Emu > I wouldn't say I hated Deus Ex or Fallout, only that I found them very uninteresting. Hate is something I reserve for stuff that is genuinely bad like Starcraft 2 or any given console port.

By 'console port', does Darksiders fit into the genre?

I have my eye on some more untraditional stuff like End of Nations, which may be the second successful MMORTS ever, or Of Orcs and Men.

Guild Wars 2, Skyrim, Gears of 3, and Battlefield 3 are all definite things to watch for me but I'm willing to wait for a few reviews on those before I jump in.

Star Trek Online is going F2P this year and Natural Selection seems nice so I may try those soon.

Darksiders deserved to be a PC title. It was a decent game but being a console port held back a lot of its design, including open levels and the controls. Also, no graphics customization.

The very act of making a console game and shitting it onto the PC offends me.

I'm hoping Guild Wars 2 will be good for solo play. I am not much of a team player. So far it looks to be that way. I will likely buy it. GW1 was good but very difficult to do end-game solo. Although I have not tried since they enabled 7 heroes.

Also, I fucking hate farming. GW1 is incredibly difficult to get any money in without farming using cheese builds and spamming trade 24/7.

IskatuMesk wrote:Emu > I wouldn't say I hated Deus Ex or Fallout, only that I found them very uninteresting. Hate is something I reserve for stuff that is genuinely bad like Starcraft 2 or any given console port.

Fair enough. I can see how plenty of people could dislike all of those games, anyway. I'm just the kind of person who can look past 135246246 bad things and find the one good thing to like about a game. That's not to say that I think that the games I listed have 135246246 things wrong with them, but I do recognize they're not perfect.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a game I had been looking forward to for a long time. I was a little disappointed in it, by the time I got to the end, but I had tremendous expectations of it from the beginning, so overall, I think it was a good game. Compare it to the original Deus Ex, and you'll see lots of ways it has improved on it (stealth, shooting, streamlined augmentation system, sidequests, level design), and a few ways it couldn't live up to it (Less control over how the story plays out, nothing as memorable as Icarus/Daedalus, super repetitive enemies/gameplay). Then if you compare it to Deus Ex: Invisible War, it becomes a brick of solid gold on a pedestal.