The All New Bargains Thread

Get a tame Westerner to gift you the bundle?  I'd be happy to help.

Fuck ya then! Ungrateful git. ;-)

Release Date is "2023" supposedly.

It does have the same wacky combat system as The Banner Saga though, where the enemy gets a turn for every character of yours that has a turn. So if you have a team of 6 and you've whittled down the enemy team to one guy, that guy gets to go 6 times every turn And even worse, if you follow the usual pattern of picking off the weaker mooks first, you are left with the enemy tank/primo dude, and he is quite capable of murdering half your team at that point.

You could mitigate that a bit in The Banner Saga by knocking down all the enemies' health bars to 1 or 2 and leaving them alive. Because health = strength, you then had a bunch of guys who couldn't do any damage, and could kill them off at your leisure after you'd dealt with the main threats. However this game doesn't have that link, so all the dudes hit just as hard when they are at low health. So I dunno yet how to deal with that. Instead of a separate Armour health bar in TBS, they have Energy here, and that affects their mobility I think, so maybe the idea is to cripple them that way. I inadvertantly skipped the tutorial bit about Energy so I dunno. Early experiments of hitting their energy doesn't seem to slow them down or have much effect.

The idea behind this system is that you can make viable smaller parties for role playing purposes - you can go with a lone wolf, or choose two or three guys, rather than fielding the full team of six. But there are potential issues here for sure.

God damn, that's a wall of text, and doesn't even explain the system that much.

The combat system of The Banner Saga is brilliant. The fights are very challenging and rewarding, not like in most other tactical games where you just try to isolate and swarm one enemy after another to slowly but inevitably tip the scales.

In The Banner Saga, each fight is more like a puzzle, and feels challenging and rewarding at the same time. But yes, it does take some understanding of the mechanics and a certain adaptability to the unexpected situations the game likes to throw you into.

I'm really hoping they pull what they did 3 years ago with Doom 3 and last year with Quake by dropping Q2 on consoles in the next day or so.

Yeah, I didn't mind it, it was different. However there was some dissonance caused by leaving all the enemies alive on 1 health until the end. Though on the other side of the coin, it was just another abstraction on combat which is abstracted anyway.

I played the series on console. I keep meaning to pick it up on PC but in sales the first two games are dirt cheap and the final chapter seems to always be quite expensive.

Ash of War, which I'm playing now, and which borrows almost every creative idea from The Banner Saga, is even more puzzley for some fights unfortunately. It took me six or seven tries to win a single fight over the last couple of days. All enemies had 2.5 times the health of my dudes apart from one of my dudes who could activate defence that was almost made him immune to damage - if you time it right you can make him immune for almost two turns based on turn order. So the whole thing was about leveraging that ability (which has a cooldown of 5 turns so could really only be used once given everyone else's low health) and was unpleasantly puzzle-like. That's one out of three fighting groups you control though, and the others seem more straightforward. Well, one of them hinges on a single ability too, now I think of it :/

I wonder if they couldn't convert the ray traced version instead? Unless Nvidia owns the rights to it (I don't even think it runs on AMD cards, does it?)

I'd rather have the original, but getting the ray traced version on consoles would probably make it easier to justify the port for them. Quake 2 never really had the same modding community as the first game, so there would be far less chances to add new content to a remaster. Maybe it was the competition from Unreal.

Speaking of which... why isn't Epic remastering that either? It would be pretty nice indeed.

As autumn arrives in the UK who doesn’t love a board game bargain?

Small World of Warcraft £20 @ Game UK - £10+ cheaper than anywhere else I could find…

www.game.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product2?msg=&searchCount=1&showResultsPage=true&predictiveSearchURL=&beginIndex=0&langId=44&productId=2865036&sType=SimpleSearch&pageSize=48&resultCatEntryType=2&pageView=image&searchBtn=z&searchTerm=Small+world+of+warcraft&catalogId=10201&DM_PersistentCookieCreated=true&storeId=10151&ddkey=http%3AAjaxCatalogSearch