Quick Look: Massive Chalice

Yeah we doing this!!!

This is free on the Xbone I think isn't it? I'll have to remember to download before it expires.

Austin's first Quick Look! :D

I was having a sip of coffee when Vinnie said "that's the cup of a carpenter" and almost spit it out laughing. Vinnie was on his game for this one!

Probably pick this up on a sale, I was real gung ho about it ( i mean :D and SRPG should be my jam) for a while but Invisible Inc has captured me and is giving me my fill of tactical turned based strategy. What a time to be alive for someone who loves these kinds of games though!

Austin Quick Look! Been looking forward to this one. I too decided when I bought it in Early Access (after the last video on it) to wait for the full release before diving in. Still pretty excited about it.

I seem to remember Brad Muir :D discussing on the Dota Today podcast that they internally always spelled MASSIVE CHALICE in all caps. That's still true for the game in my Steam Library, should it be treated that way in coverage (and the database) or is that considered confusing?

My favorite thing is when it says "MASSIVE VICTORY" at the end of battles.

Really enjoying this game so far.

Another one ?

Another what? They've only done one Unfinished of this, and now it's out so they're doing a QL!

Or, another Double Fine game?

No no no, the Bulls came out to Alan Parsons Project "Sirius".

If this is indicative of what Austin brings to the table, then I am very, very happy. Austin clearly knew what he was talking about with this game, which is great. He was great at explaining aspects of the game, and he answered questions that both Alex and Vinny had as they played. Very cool.

@amyggen said:

Another Quicklook. I was sure they had done one Unfinished and one Quick Look before.

This looks like a satisfying way to scratch that XCOM itch I've been having lately.

It was a QLEX. So both, kinda.

Also I played some of this in early access and... Ehhh... Brad Muir made Double Fine's best game, and this was a big disappointment. I'll give it another shot now that it's in full release.

this game doesn't seem very good, and i'm disappointed tbh. i wanted to like it. maybe there'll be a dlc or a mod that lets you make your own bloodlines. that'd be a nice start. their idea of only using ones made by backers was really weird, especially since gamers are notorious for their shit sense of humour/taste in general

I pretty much turned it off when I discovered that. The naming of characters in XCOM was such a minor thing that totally made the experience for me. All of my soldiers were named after friends, and it kind of made for some good running jokes throughout my time with the game.

No matter how many times I see this game it always makes me think it's still using placeholder graphics.

For some reason this grabs me way better than it did on the EX. I'll give it a shot for the low low price of free.

So glad this is finally released. I played some of the beta as a backer, but I've pretty much sworn off playing games until they're finished at this point.

It was really an Unfinished EX, just that they named it QL EX. So this is the second video of the game on the site.

It's all very confusing. They need a EX version of Unfinished!

Man, Austin's a natural. It's like he was always here.

This hasn't grabbed me as much as XCOM did, but it seems really neat.

@amyggen: Aren't QL EXs always unfinished?

No no, the EX just refers to it being a Quick Look with the dev(s) present. What made naming the Massive Chalice video a QL EX was that it was in early access at the time, so it was an Unfinished video. So it probably should've been named Unfinished EX instead.

Three people? This is a... Massive Quick Look.

But weren't QLEX's just Unfinisheds with developers, before Unfinished was a thing? I don't think there have been any post-release QLEX's anyway, so no need to get redundant.

Are we in Westeros?

@quantical: [download reminder notification] yes it's part of June's Games with Gold.

Game looks too shallow.

Sadly I've had this experience playing and after a while just couldn't be arsed to care anymore and uninstalled.

Austin in the houuuuuse!

:D

Does this game have salutes?

Wasn't there a Ryan Davis (character) in the EX QL of this? I seem to recall the super positive guy from Double Fine presenting it.

@blacklab: a Ryan Davis?

I love turn-based tactics and I love Double Fine, but I just can't bring myself to care about this.

I enjoyed the Quick Look though. Austin seems to fit in nicely :)

Between this and the Brad/Mary stream from yesterday, I'm watching way more Massive Chalice than I ever expected to.

I need to get back to this. When I played it a few months ago in EA it was far too hard and lacked a sense of purpose.

@blacklab: Yep there sure is. I remember that as well. Brad loves everyone at Giant Bomb. I hope this game sells well for it. It does have some faults but is a good game with alot of content for its price point. I hope it sells well!

Can I say how Austin just killed his first quicklook? Really knocked it out of the park. I was very impressed with his knowledge and how he very subtlety let Alex know about some of the gameplay elements that he didn't know about or were readily apparent. I know I'm not the only one that has been frustrated during quicklooks when integral gameplay elements and controls are ignored by the GB crew at times during quicklooks. I really liked Austin's input and commentary as well! He's got a unique perspective that brings something really fresh to giant bomb. Welcome aboard duder!

Yay Austin! :D

Some of the concepts remind me of Oreshika tainted blood lines! It was a PS1 game that had a sequal/remake on the VITA!

@blacklab: @amyggen: There's an easter egg in the game where there's a house named in tribute of Ryan Davis (House Davis with motto "Hey everybody it's Tuuuuuuuesday", I believe).

I think it's in the final game as well, but it's random as to whether you get it or not.

The "super positive guy" is Brad Muir. :D! Love that guy.

As for the game itself, I just finished it. I would say that it was a very enjoyable experience, but it seemed to have some issues with game balance. For example, my first game, I was completely destroyed when I went into a battle with only alchemists + caberjacks (due to poor choice of bloodlines), then my alchemists ran out of flasks, so I essentially had to go up against exploding enemies by hitting them and then getting exploded on. Everyone died.

I restarted and had a much easier time using mostly hunters (exclusively hunters, by the end). Hunters have excellent damage (maxed hunters can kill the biggest enemies in the game in one shot), excellent accuracy (98-100% in most cases with maxed hunters + steady hander), and excellent range (14 tiles), and they can cloak. The Trickshot subclass even has explosive arrows, so there's no need for Alchemists either. My strategy was to inch forward and kill one enemy at a time from as far away as possible; in many cases this would enable me to go through the map without any enemy even attacking me, let alone damaging or killing a hero.

Another possible issue was that the strategy level seemed relatively simplistic as well. In theory you can spend tons of time in this menu optimizing your choices for heirs and such. Indeed, I'm not sure whether or not doing this could be very important (especially in harder modes). However, personally, I found that the most important thing was to not run out of fodder, and to keep the Guild + Crucible working well. To this end, I generally assigned random 15-year-olds as heirs + partners in order to keep them boning each other for a long time, and also assigned random 15-year-olds (or old heroes who were past their prime) to the Guild. There wasn't a lot of deep decision-making and it got a bit tiring being interrupted every 10 seconds in order to execute a very straightforward sorting algorithm. Other aspects of the strategy portion also felt like the best strategy was very simple.

It seems like the most important thing is to make sure you have high-level heroes with relics, which is easily assured if you staff your Crucible with the heroes you've used and leveled heavily (two Crucibles with level 10 heroes will make all your new ones come out level 10 as well, so you can bootstrap an infinite stream of max-level heroes). Traits and so on seem to matter less (they can't be obtained as reliably and aren't as effective), so I ignored them most of the time. I mean, yes, maybe a maxed-out Shadowjack with +accuracy and +speed trait would be viable since it can kill a bunch of dudes every turn with Kill Rage, but - why would I investigate it when my Trickshots can kill any enemy in one shot with almost 100% reliability, and kill multiple enemies when they're bunched up (which happens reasonably often when you're getting swarmed)?

That being said, I still enjoyed the game a lot. Even XCOM had issues like this (the safest strategy was to spam snipers and gun down enemies from across the map, which I note is pretty similar to the strategy that seems to work well here). It's often exciting and satisfying to pull off a good run, even if there's not very much danger of it going bad. At its best, I felt like a military commander commanding some top-secret futuristic black ops team, with my stealthed guys rushing up and eliminating enemies with precision. It was fun!

I think this is a fantastic overall design and applaud Brad Muir for making a very promising run at XCOM with his first entry in the series (whereas Firaxis has been making strategy games for much longer). I'm really excited to see how XCOM 2 improves on XCOM, and I would also really like to see to see if Double Fine can improve the balance and other things with a Massive Chalice 2: Live Free Or Die Massive.

@thankyougiantbomb: Oh yeah, I know about the easter egg. I was just confused by the sentence is all!

Carry on :)

As a kickstarter backer, I played through the game a few weeks ago, and I want to say a few things:

• Yes, there need to be more enemies, as the combat can get a bit stale towards the end.
• The most engrossing part of the game is the management of the houses and various aspects of your kingdom.
• Clicking that time forward button comes with a rush of adrenaline almost every time, as you watch it count down and hope nothing terrible happens.
• The decisions you have to make randomly throughout your rule are often difficult, and really cool.
• It's addicting as hell. I was actually sad when the 300 years were up (although I'm going to play through again for sure)

If i had a lot of money I'd finance some cinematic camera into this game.

You're in Austin's house now.

This game looks great!

I'm down with this Austin Walker. Welcome dude.

@thankyougiantbomb: I'd just like to say you did a really good job of encapsulating my feelings on this game. Excellent potential, hopefully they either expand the content in the future or make a sequel, but MC isn't quite all there yet as it is.

As someone who is still playing through the game in fits and starts, I currently concur with this assessment. There doesn't seem to be enough meat on this game's bones yet.

FACT! Same thing happened to me!!