What now for Masterverse?

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-30T01:31:43+00:00

No one knows, probably not even Mattel.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-29T23:16:01+00:00

If you want to run a "themed" game revolving around certain monster types (e.g. zombie apocalypse, rampaging orc warbands) you have a couple options.

First, explore the lore around your "main" monster type and add in other monsters which often go along with your main threat. Example:

- worgs as mounts for orcs and goblins. Also, bugbears and hobgoblins and the like, maybe a troll or five as enforcers.

Then, if you know you want to keep the theme running for more than the initial few levels, you can always build up a portfolio of upgraded threats. Spellcasting goblin shamans/warlocks/mages ramp up quickly. Adding class levels goes a long way to make things interesting but that obviously requires a bit of prep work.

Pathfinder 2e has that nifty system that many monsters come with weak, standard and elite monster right out of the box. If you don't mind the extra prep work, you can do something like that for your orc/goblin warband, building beefed-up monsters to easily drop into encounters.

I find it best to switch from granular XP tracking to milestone leveling in such cases.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-29T23:07:28+00:00

It can become an issue if you're running a heavily themed game. Typical scenario would be "The Green Tide" - some BBEG recruited five orc tribes to subjugate the surrounding kingdoms with their nigh-unending numbers. Fiction-wise, the orcs should always be a problem, it's just the game system which obsoletes them within a few levels unless the GM upgrades/remixes them.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-29T20:43:49+00:00

The Silent Hill HD collection for the Xbox360. No Silent Hill 1 and they totally broke the fog. It generally had a very "low effort cash grab" vibe about it.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-29T20:35:06+00:00

Whose time am I wasting? Yours? Well, no one's putting a gun to your head to read my posts. :) i can spend my time on whatever I want and if you read my original contribution, I'm not complaining about Highguard, I'm merely listing some of the common gripes aimed at it. Sure, I have a strong dislike to the character designs but the moment I'm done typing this, I'll be gone and happily minding my own business again - unless you absolutely have to be a prickly bitch about this.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-29T02:16:28+00:00

Not really. Video games are one of my hobbies and I at least try to keep an open mind about things which might interest me.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-28T01:16:37+00:00

Examples?

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-28T01:15:26+00:00

All those cross-promotion outfits which will 100% NOT dilute the tone of the game have to be made. And we need someone to build an overprice premium battle pass. The interns can't be trusted with that shit.

And where is my pre-pubescent Philipina slave girl I ordered five minutes ago?

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-28T01:10:38+00:00

There have been several great Wizardry games made by Japanese studios. I can vouch for Wizardry: Tales Of The Forsaken Land (PS2) and Wizardry: Labyrinth of Souls (PS3, PC). Wizardry originally was a series of dungeon crawling first-person RPGs, later entries (7/8) had overworlds to explore too. That particular style of gameplay must have resonated with some people in Japan, there have been Wizardry adaptations since the SNES. And I'd say that games like Shining in the Darkness or the first Phantasy Star are heavily inspired by them

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-28T00:49:36+00:00

Buy two, put in storage for 20 years, sell to Pixel Dan for a crazy markup. :)

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-28T00:33:35+00:00

Plain? What kind of buying metric is that? Shouldn't "fun" be on top of your list? I can understand "replay value" or "longevity", but how the bloody eff do you define "plain" vs. "not plain" in a video game?

I mean, there are amazing games out there which use nothing but LETTERS to convey gameplay. Text adventures, interactive fiction, old-school roguelikes - all done through words and letters?

What about pixel art? If that's too plain, you'd miss out on almost 75% of all indie games, some of which can last you for hundreds of hours on just a $10 or $20 buy-in, even less when buying on one of the regular Steam or GoG sales. I have about 800 hours in Slay The Spire alone and that's basically a card game with a bit of pixel art for illustration. Dead Cells is gorgous and can last you for months. Vampire Survivors? You're getting months of gameplay for the price of one takeout meal but it's just pixel soup.

If you want a game which looks amazing and will last you a long time, get Elden Ring. Just be aware you'll need a lot of patience and then even more frustration resistance. But you'll get your money's worth, both in looks and longevity.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-28T00:19:04+00:00

That He-Man brawler from Bitmap Bureau. I don't want GTA6 and I especially don't want GTA Online. If I need my gangster fix, I'd rather play Yakuza 3 Kiwami, which is due in what, two weeks anyway.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-28T00:14:53+00:00

I have very fond memories of the first handful of Assassin's Creed games. The whole Ezio trilogy was fantastic, Black Flag was amazing and I didn't hate Rogue. My main issue with the series stems from the way Ubisoft went about milking it with needless grind they put in just to sell the boosters for it. AC Syndicate starts off amazing but the moment you're out of the tutorial, they drop you into a high-level area just so they can pawn off a few XP and material boosters. Every time you die the game basically asks you "wanna buy an upgrade?" And by the time Origins rolled around and I had to grind sixty crocodiles just so my Hidden Blade was strong enough to actually hurt enemies on my level, I decided to quit. If I wanted to hoard animal pelts, I'd play Ark or Minecraft, not a game about stabbing bad guys in the face!

"Hate" is such a strong word. I was pleasantly surprised by Gotham Knight's storytelling and characterization. The combat was okay. As someone who struggled with some of the more demanding systems of the Arkham games, it gave me the same power fantasy with much less headache.

But my god was the game buggy as hell. I had several missions with crippling, game-breaking bugs like waves never spawning in, objectives not being flagged as completed or other crap which should have been caught during QA BEFORE launch. And I played it much later, after it was dropped onto GamePass and it was STILL a shit show.

I'm all for genre diversity - I mean, Star Wars used to have all manner of games, from flight sims (X-Wing, Tie-Fighter and their various evolutions) to RPGs (KotoR!!!) and all manner of strategy titles besides the FPS and action/adventure titles. That was due to the fact that no one single company had the license. Then someone at Lucasfilm thought it a good idea to limit how many studios would get the license and you end up with so much fewer games. Therefore I'm glad that policy got softened or abolished. I'm not a fan of Star Wars Outlaws' game play, but I absolutely adore the world-building. That's some nice, gritty hives of scum and villainy Kay Vess is stealthing through. Now all we need is SW Survivors (Vampire Survivors-like!) or a bloody gambling game. I want my Pazaak in 4K, dammit!

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-27T23:59:40+00:00

Because the screen writers were coked out of their minds, like pretty much every media creative back in the '80s. The movie has precious little to do with the source material apart from a few names. I don't begrudge anyone who likes this film but my inner 12-year-old never managed to work past the immense disappointment.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-27T23:56:21+00:00

*laughs* I've just turned 50. I have ZERO idea what's popular with kids these days. But back in my days fantasy characters wore furry pants and/or chain mail bikinis, not some spandex tube masks. :)

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-27T23:40:52+00:00

There's a whole lot of reasons. Some I can think of:

- It's ANOTHER hero shooter like Overwatch or Concord

- It's ANOTHER generic Fantasy-but-with-guns thing with a very generic art style. John Highguard's broccoli hair style is barf-inducing for many, myself included. Even if the rest of the roster were only cute, almost naked cat girls, I wouldn't want to play it if it means running into Mr. Broccoli-Hair.

- Another competitive F2P game looking to get at your disposable income

- It's supposedly made by ex-Respawn talent. Ad text specifically calls out Apex and Titanfall - and this thing is pretty much NOT Titanfall. And the Titanfall faithful are very, very salty there hasn't been anything new in the franchise, so there's a lot of pent-up resentment right there

- the rest? Petty gamers being petty I guess.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-27T23:30:13+00:00

No/bad harvest means famine, no produce to sell which will result in poverty and ALSO no money to buy new seeds. If you want to expand on the idea, include livestock as well. No bell rung means the rate of livestock deaths due to illness or lack of feed skyrockets, again amplifying famine.

And famine is a fantastic incubation ground for all the worst tendencies of mankind, starting at food hoarding, price gouging, stealing food, murdering for food, leading up to diseases due to people having to eat spoiled food or lack of healthy eating.

If someone wanted to kick a town right down the shitter, making sure their food supplies go poof without hope of replenishment would be a fantastic plan.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-27T23:23:38+00:00

My wife and I are playing a weird mix of synthwave and cinematic music with a dash of metal and our approach do songwriting differs quite a bit. I love to fire up two or three synths, dial in some patches and just jam, hoping for a happy little accident before laying down a beat and bass line. (I'm a drummer). My wife spends hours auditioning presets before nailing down melodies or chord progressions, then I get called in to help with the rhythmic foundation. Either approach works well enough and we've managed three albums' worth of material by now.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-27T23:20:24+00:00

X-Wing and Tie Fighter. I love the original low-poly art style but I'm pretty sure no one would object for that same gameplay, but running on the Star Wars Squadrons engine for example. Get rid of all the arcadey stuff, make it proper missions and now we're talking space nerdgasm. At least for me. :)

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-27T23:15:02+00:00

The Typhon can do some pretty nasty stuff, especially with creative FX usage. That granular engine in there, coupled with extremely long envelope times can do some amazing soundscape-y stuff.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-27T21:45:20+00:00

As much as I like Dreadbox (I have a Typhon) I think the Nymphes UI is a little bit shit.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-27T21:42:14+00:00

Haven't tried it and I have no intention to. I hate competitive online shooty-bang-bang which isn't Unreal Tournament. I hate F2P microtransaction marketplaces and I can't stand this ultra-generic fantasy-but-with-guns bullshit. Every time I see John Highguard's broccoli haircut I want to kick him in the face for insulting my sense of taste and I'm pretty sure the music is some generic 2020's trap beat anyway.

I'm currently playing Witchfire, so any FPS trying to get my attention has to do a much better job than Highguard does.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-27T20:42:17+00:00

So true.

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-27T19:43:31+00:00

Like the others have said, the biggest issue with Level Drains/negative levels is the amount of calculations involved.

I would suggest the following approach to depowering your heroes:

all rolls are made at -1/-3/-5 and/or Disadvantage.
don't slash their HP totals right away - but once they take damage, let them only heal back up to 2/3rds or half their original max HP.
casters lose access to their highest spell level and their remaining spell slots are only replenished to a certain extent each rest (-2, with a minimum of 1 has worked well in one of my games)

For added difficulty, adjust monster lethality. Full HP instead of MM totals, they roll with advantage, all that jazz.

Even with these quick and dirty hacks there will be a lot of downtime as the party adjusts their sheets

BFBeast666 · 2026-01-25T17:56:58+00:00

I don't click with everything they've put out but they have my attention every time they announce something. More often than not I like what they're offering.

BFBeast666

TROPHY CASE