big swede heart

Added a "Retract Vassal" interaction

This can be quite interesting. It’s basically the opposite of Transfer Vassalage, meaning that you can take a lower ranked vassal from one of your counts/dukes/kings and make it serve you directly. Sounds like a good way to punish those damn independance-wanting pieces of--... It’ll probably be useful.

Norse Pagans can no longer employ the coastal conquest CB against other pagans (neighboring counties can still be taken though)

Not sure how many times I’ve used this. Most of the land I take over usually does border me, but we’ll see how this plays out. It’s making the pagans a bit weaker, at least.

The Subjugation CB can now only be used once per lifetime instead of every 10 years. (Unless you have the 'Become King' ambition.)

Now this is a big one. I am not sure if the parentheses at the end means that you can still use it all the time when you have the ambition, or have to wait 10 years between every subjugation. In any way, this might weaken pagans noticeably and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

The Jomsvikings now reform if the Norse reformation takes place

This is great. I’ve felt a bit starved without a holy order for my norse Scandinavia, and tried to convert them to no avail. Will be fun to have the Jomsvikings by my side post-reformation.

Lowered the spawn rate of TOG rebels by 20%

Thank the Old Gods for this! As I wrote in my earlier post about the Old Gods, the constant appearance of rebels can be incredibly annoying. Maybe that will make the rebel events slightly more enjoyable.

Court Chaplain job events no longer restricted to men for pagans

I was wondering why my ladies never converted any counties. Good stuff!

Build cost and time is now affected by your capital tech, not the average tech in your realm

Another great change, making the Construction techonology even better.

Trade post garrisons now give less retinue cap increase

Republics are getting hit hard, aren’t they? Still, with the money they have, I guess it’s only fair.

Finnic cultures can now also form the Russian Empire

Finnic cultures can now also form the Scandinavian Empire

Good for the finns. I believe that a lot of de jure Russia is in the hands of finnic cultures, so this makes it possible for them to create it.

Will not convert to Norman culture if in a huge Norse empire

Thank goodness. I had this happen to my heir in my Scandinavia game, which ruined several generations of Housecarl-building. Pretty darn annoying, and I am glad that it is fixed.

New Leaf starts out like any other Animal Crossing game. You’re on the train, when suddenly some cat called Rover comes up to you and begins asking some rather invasive questions. Just like before, you answer questions concerning your name, gender and where you are going. For the record, I named my town “Upville”, because I was inspired by Uppsala in Sweden. What’s new is that Rover now digs up a map, which lets you pick the layout of your town. You have a selection of four different layouts, which are not randomly generated. It’s a nice addition to the game, even if it forces me to answer more of Rover’s questions. I don’t know what my problem is with him, he just creeps me out. Perhaps it’s because I don’t like talking to strangers when I’m riding the train.

As soon as you get off the train and step out of the station, you are greeted by a crowd seemingly waiting for their new mayor to arrive. To your outmost confusion, that mayor seems to be you! Even if you try to convince them that you are, in fact, not the new mayor, they won’t have it. Eventually you give up trying to sway them, and you accept your new position as mayor. Your first order of business is to get yourself a home, and who better to set you up with one than Tom Nook? Tom Nook now only concerns himself with real estate, and has left the store business to his two sons, Timmy and Tommy. After some business talk (and taking a loan from good ol’ Nook) you get to choose where to put your house. This seems to be as free as it possibly could, as you will run around town with Tom and show him where you want your house. I put mine close to the water, because that’s what a mayor would do.

Some of the other new things that I have seen is that all shops are now in the same place (except for one new store) in a secluded area at the top of town. You have Nook’s real estate place, the store run by his sons, the Able Sister’s clothing and accessories shop, post office with ATM and the museum. There’s also a photo booth where you can take a picture for your ID card, and a bunch of closed up buildings. Not sure what will occupy those buildings in the future, but one of them fit to be a police station. We’ll see what happens.

The new store I mentioned earlier is called Re-Tail, and is a second-hand shop where you can sell your old stuff you don’t want any longer and also buy other villagers furniture on the cheap. There seems to be a “flea market” system as well, where people will bid for your items if you decide to place them there, but I have not tried that out just yet. Selling things in Re-Tail makes people like you more, as you are contributing to a better enviroment.

What’s that? People liking you? You heard right, there is an approval rating that you as the mayor have to keep up. I’m not sure what happens if it gets really low, but I know it has to be at a 100% for you to recieve a “town development permit”, which theoretically should allow you to begin doing your job as a mayor, but I have not gotten that far yet.

There also are some new things revoling your clothes. Shirts can now be short or long sleeved, or even sleeveless. There appears to be short and long pants. You can also take off your socks and shoes, which leads me to believe that you can get new shoes and socks. The designing system (which is used for clothes, umbrellas, flags etc.) seems to have been evolved as well. When making a shirt for example, the front, back and sleeves are all independant parts which you can give unique designs. No more mirroring fronts and backs!

[Disclaimer: Large portions of this was written before a large patch hit Crusader Kings II. This might make some things in this text irrelevant, but I will comment on the patch in a later post.]

Sleeping Dogs is one of those games I’d never thought I would get the chance to play. Originally the game was supposed to be the third game in the True Crime franchise, but was dumped by Activision in early 2011, reasons being that it was simply not good enough. Square Enix came to the rescue and picked the title up, releasing it under its new name. Either Square Enix managed to turn this “not good enough” game around in a year plus time, or we can sincerely doubt Activision's eye for good games. 

You take on the role as Wei Shen, a Hong Kong born cop just returning from San Francisco and its police department. After being arrested in the early stages of the game, the player gets to realize that he is an undercover cop, on a mission to infiltrate the Sun On Yee in an attempt to take down this notorious triad.

What’s really interesting about the story is how it actually makes you, the player, feel like you’ve become one with the triad, forgetting the reason why you are there in the first place. In the middle of the story, I felt more inclined to do the triads work than being undercover, and the game responded nicely to this, having Wei say things that I wanted him to. You begin to feel a little for the criminals in your gang and I at least began to feel like taking down those other asshole branches of the Sun On Yee. I mean, they are douchebags! Why won’t you understand that, police?! Shit.

I only have two negative things to say about the story. One, the ending felt a bit rushed, making me not feel so satisfied when dealing with the antagonists of the game. Second, the game throws out names at me that I’ve never heard before, but apparently Wei has. Not a huge problem, but it sometimes made me feel like I had missed something.

The combat in the game is mainly focused on hand-to-hand fighting. The entire fighting system reminds me a lot of the Arkham Asylum style, very fluent and just feels and looks so incredible. It’s just this big storm of martial arts, seeing Wei fly between enemies, punching their guts out and going into slow motion whenever something truly awesome happens. I did not get bored of the fighting at all during the game, since each fight was just a pleasure both to play and watch. One truly magnificent thing about the combat is the ability to grapple and then throw this person into environmental hazards, resulting in an instant kill. These hazards will light up as red as you grab someone, and can be a variety of things like a car with its hood open, where you can stuff the head of enemy into and subsequently drop an engine block on his head. Brutal.

Sometimes, you do get to shoot a little. It’s pretty standard cover-based third person shooting, but there is a nice weight behind the firing, but nothing too special about it.

There are five different categories to level Wei up in; police, triad, fighting, face and health. For each story mission, you will get triad and police experience, determined by score. Police score is at max at the start of every mission, but reduces if you do non-policey stuff, like running people over and destroying property. Triad score starts at the bottom of every mission, and builds up as you do brutal things like, shove someone into a fan or shoot someone in the head. When you gain enough experience, you will level up and be able to place these points into different perks, for example the ability to get guns out of the trunk of a police car.

Face is leveled up by doing favours for people, and for each level of face you gain new perks when your “face meter” is activated. Filling up the face meter is done by punching and shooting people. Favours are side-quests found across Hong Kong, and are usually quite quick to deal with, and can be as simple as throwing a drunk out of a store. Fighting and health are leveled up by finding collectibles. To get new fighting moves, you find jade statues and bring them to a teacher, and he’ll teach you how to punch more fiercely. Health is leveled up by finding 5 health shrines, neatly hidden across the entire city.

There’s a slew of side activities in Sleeping Dogs; street races, gambling, karaoke, fight clubs and probably a little more, but the most involved would be the drug busts. Drug busts are, as the name would imply, Wei’s shot at taking down some drug dealers. You do this by beating up some thugs at a location, hacking a nearby camera and then going back to your apartment to watch the area through the camera, and then pointing out the dealer so that the police and run in and grab that dude. A good way to get police experience, but perhaps not the best.

Giving Wei some clothes is an important factor in the game. Having a set of clothes gives you bonuses to certain stats, like maybe more Triad experience or that your punches pack more... punch. Besides clothing stores, there are normal super markets and vendors, which sell you items that give you timed buffs, like more melee damage, more face meter gain or health regen.

There are a few mini games that can occur during missions and other activities, like hacking a camera, picking locks, bugging an area or tracing a phone call. All of these felt like they happened kind of rarely, making it a fun occurrence rather than a boring inconvenience. 

Having played through this game on the PC, I must say that it is a graphically stunning adventure. Every time it rained in the city I felt so good, because the wet pavement looked so good, especially at night where the bright neon lights would reflect off the wet ground. It’s also cool how fighting had almost a Dragon Age-style on the graphics, meaning that Wei would be covered in blood if he had taken some hits. It just looked neat, and I do not write that in a creepy way at all.

Voice acting might be the weakest part of this game. The spoken words are primarily English with a few phrases of Chinese now and again. The english of some of these actors is sub-par, but I didn’t really feel like that ruined the experience for me. Not having been to Hong Kong, I cannot say this for a fact, but maybe this is how some of these street vendors would talk to me if I came there..? Maybe?

I've not finished yet, but the Activision dumped True Crime: Hongkong turned Square Enix Sleeping Dogs is quite the game. It is fun to play, has a story that is exciting to follow and looks absolutely stunning on the PC (I can't speak for the console versions). 

Definitely pick this one up if you are in the market for a GTA-style game, or if you want a good start on the forthcoming season of new releases.

I've been feeling kind of out of video games lately, not in the sense that I have nothing to play, but more in the way of not wanting to play anything. I have a good ol' backlog of presumeably great video games, but haven't felt like buying and playing them. But today, I got Sleeping Dogs, and it's downloading right now so I think I'll have a good friday evening, and on the 21st, it's Darksiders II time. If you have not played the first Darksiders, I highly recommend doing so. It's an amazing game, and I guess could be lazily described as a "darker legend of Zelda".

Maybe this disinterest in buying video games comes from me quitting me job, and subsequently realizing that I might have to manage my funds a little bit better as I going from having a steady income to well... university. Or maybe it is because I spend all my days watching StarCraft 2 and playing hours upon hours of Civilization 5. I mean, if Alexander (that douchebag) denounces me, I have to destroy him, right? Right? Oh look, four hours passed, that must be the reason why I am feeling dehydrated.

But, I guess we are moving into the video game season. Madden will be out by the end of the month, and that means that the floodgates are open until about Thanksgiving (whatever that is). Friends keep telling me that Guild Wars 2 will be out in a matter of days as well, but what little interest I had for that game went away when I realized that I'd much rather be playing Sleeping Dogs and Darksiders II. I might try it out later, but I am fairly certain that it won't make me switch from World of Warcraft. Not because I have some kind of ability of knowing what games are good or not by just hearing about them (as a vocal minority sure as hell does), but because I think I am very much the one MMO kind of guy. I've been "playing" WoW for so long, it'd be stupid to change now.

Speaking of WoW, Mists of Pandaria is out soon. I bet that'll be good. Trailer is here. September is when that'll be hitting.

Other than that, IEM is on, so if you want to go check out some pro-level StarCraft 2, you have more than ample oppertunity this weekend. Check out http://esl.tv/iem/ for broadcasts.

After spending nearly 60 hours in Amalur and finishing the main quest story, I feel myself sated with the game. I really enjoyed my stay, but there are certain things that could have been different to make the experience even better.

First off, there are a lot of side quests in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Like I have mentioned before, some of these are great but a lot of them are just sub-par quests that really only feel like a terrible grind. Sure, the game can now be called a 60-hour title, but those 60 hours might just have been better as 20 or 25 hours with fewer, but more intense quests.

The other direct “consequence” of doing all those side quests were that I was mostly overleveled for anything. Nothing was really challenging in the game for my might/finesse hybrid, because I had gotten such a advantage in level after doing all those quests, that I only died once or twice throughout those sixty hours. For the record, I completed the game on normal.

There are also some great things about the UI, and some things that could have been made better. For instance, being able to compare and equip looted things as soon as you loot them is great. It takes away some of that slowness of trudging through menus to find your new piece of loot, and it keeps the momentum up. On the other hand, one of the bad things are the sagecrafting menus. Not saving the “schematics” of gems that you have already created is a big downside, making it incredibly boring and just plain obnoxious to craft gems. The “funny” part is that alchemy actually saves the potions you have discovered, but not sagecrafting. I wish it had.

The combat is still real good, and you feel powerful as all hell. The problem is that the combat does get boring after a while, and once again this is an instance where a shorter Kingdoms of Amalur would have been better. The combat does not really evolve that much throughout the game, seeing as you unlock your last weapon abilities far from the highest level. The opponents you face are also the same throughout the game, only with a higher level in different zones. I reiterate, a shorter game and the combat probably would have been spared from creating repetitiveness.

Now, it might sound like I don’t like Kingdoms of Amalur at all, but that’s not the case. It’s still a great game with responsive combat, beautiful landscapes and music that could be called “epic” if you wish. It’s just that the game overstays its welcome a little bit, and perhaps that is some direct link to people feeling ripped off if they pay full price for a short game, especially when this game does not have a multiplayer component.

You can save yourself from my problems with the game (except from the UI issues, I mean) by doing some very simple things. Do the quests that you feel like doing, and focus on the main story. The main story is still great and really well written, and I think you will be able to enjoy it more if you are not fatigued by endless side quests.

Hey all.

Games have been finished and new games have come out to write about! Who knew the start of the year would be so jam-packed with exciting titles, except from Mass Effect 3?

This is what will be coming up on Big Swede Heart this week:

Finishing Words: Kingdoms of Amalur. Finished this game tonight, and will be writing my concluding thoughts on it. The short story is I liked it, I liked it a lot.

First Impression: Syndicate. Syndicate dropped into my mailbox yesterday, and has been installed to my 360 earlier today. Will be playing it for the first time later today!

Things that might get uploaded:

My plans for the far flung future.

Something exciting about Starcraft 2.

I was interested in Amalur as soon as I saw some of its gameplay, mixing more intense combat with deep RPG elements. It also helps that I am a sucker for big swords. But after playing the demo one month (?) prior to the game’s release, I was a bit worried that my expectations were not going to met. The audio seemed to be busted in parts, the conversations would sometimes auto-skip to the end and the models of monsters would get stuck in the ground and proceed to stretch over the screen. I was crossing my fingers that issues like these would get solved until release.

I am pleased to tell you that they have indeed made the game... unbroken. The combat is responsive and fast-paced, making fights quite enjoyable instead of a necessary hurdle to get to the next story element. Though, I cannot say that I have seen too much of the main story of my almost 25 hours played, because I have been deeply invested in side and faction quests. Of what I have played of the main story I can only say that they have something interesting going on, and it has given me a want to find out what is going to happen next. The faction and side quests have been hit and miss so far. Some of them have been great with interesting story twists, other seem like mindless missions coming out of an MMO, i.e. go fetch 15 of these and come back and I’ll give you a compliment and some money.

Some quest givers will give you some equipment, which is found aplenty in Amalur. If you’re like me and enjoy finding new equipment and gearing out your dude/dudette, then Kingdoms of Amalur will abide. The loot has been color coded for convenience; white for common items, green for uncommon, blue for rare and purple for epic-- sorry, unique items and yellow for armor that is part of a set. If you find that the quest rewards and random drops doesn’t quench your thirst for lootage, do not worry! There’s crafting to be found, where you can forge your own armor and weapons, and I’ve found that the blacksmithing can give you some really nice, long-lasting gear.

Now, what makes this game slightly more special than its friends in the RPG genre is that they have made an effort to create a very open class creation, or perhaps “lack of class” would be more appropriate (for once). You do not pick a class right out of the gates, instead you allocate the talent points you get from leveling up into three different categories; might, finesse and sorcery. As you might have figured out, might is for the big, bulky warrior, finesse is for the slippery rogue and sorcery is for the... sorcerer.

Now, any experienced RPG player knows that spreading out your talent points thinly might cost you dearly. Jack of all trades, master of none, right? What KoA has done to prevent this from happening is through “destinies”. Destinies are permanent stat boosts to your character, unlocked by having enough points in the different talent trees. If you go full out might, you will get the might destinies. If you go a mix of might and finesse, you will get the might/finesse destinies and so on and so forth for the rest of viable mixes.

Kingdoms of Amalur has a wide variety of different weapon types of which you can have two equipped at the same time. Your weapon is mapped to a button, and that button is all you need to press to be happy and commit slaughter. This makes the combat a lot less dependant on different button combinations for combos, and instead relies on timing and defense. I’ve spent most of my time playing through the game with either Faeblades (glaive-like weapons) or longswords, accompanied with a longbow. This has worked out well.

The game does have some UI problems, which can make certain tasks a bit annoying to deal with. What comes to mind first is Sagecrafting, one of the professions which let you create and socket gems into your gear. Unlike alchemy, where discovered potions can be selected from a menu and get made instantly, creating gems will force you to pick the shards from your inventory every time, making the entire process quite obnoxious. It’s not something you really think about at first, but when you have found the gems that you like the most and you want a shitload of them, it becomes a nuisance. 

Kingdoms of Amalur has been a really easy game so far. Whether this is because the game is easy in general, or because I have been doing every single quest I can get my hands on, and thus became over-leveled, I do not know. I think you might have a better time if you just go do the quests that you want and don’t have the mentality that you need to see everything. Like I mentioned earlier, some of the quests have great writing, some are just plain boring. Go play the quests that you want and I think you will still have a high enough level to beat what you want, only with a bit more of a challenge headed your way.

The world of Amalur is incredibly beautiful. The art is fantastic and the landscape is just colorful and vibrant. It almost reminds of World of Warcraft-- from an art standpoint. Venturing into new areas is really quite enjoyable, as they seem to differ quite a lot, at least from the few locations I have been in.

Hey all!

There has been quite a bit of inactivty on the biggest of swede hearts since the Game of the Year, which quite frankly was some time ago. This is about to change!

Starting off this new year of writing will be my thoughts of Kingdoms of Amalur, a week after its release. Following that will be a pledge for season 6 of the SC2 ladder. I have more plans, but nothing amazing to announce at the moment.