New thread!
What y’all playing! I’m almost done with blasphemous 2. And will be starting starfield soon! Very excited
I’m taking my time with my first play through of Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m enjoying it a lot, the way it interweaves characters you’ve met before into the narrative later one is really good.
Command and Conquer 3. I’m not very familiar with the series but I’m enjoying it, at least now that I figured out why the campaign was so hard. Apparently they patched the game balance after release with multi-player in mind and didn’t consider the consequences for single-player. So after a small mod to restore the original resource gather rates, the game is a great time.
I am about to finish Starfield. I did not enjoy my time with it. Luckily, I played it on gamepass, so very little monetary value was lost.
Might revisit once creation kit is up. That was the only way Fallout 4 was enjoyable for me.
I will head back to finishing my bg3 evil play through, filling the gaps with Darktide.
What’s sad is that Starfield was expected to be the next big RPG. The next Skyrim but in space.
Instead, most people are likely going to come out of their experience with the game with a “meh” opinion about it. It’s solidly middle-tier.
If there’s anything to be said, the visuals are incredible, but everything else is a retread of mechanics pulled from other games (most notably, half the ideas are taken from No Man’s Sky).
I’m trying Starfield again.
New playthrough, got some .ini tweaks which seem to help performance quite a bit so far, not screwing myself with traits and character background like I did initially, and making gameplay priorities.
I was too overwhelmed the first time with all the different mechanics and forgot to do what I do with most Bethesda games: focus on a few select areas and ignore the rest, so I’m not going to bother with a lot of the mechanics I’m not interested in.
If they draw me in at some other point, might give it a shot. Otherwise, unimportant to me.
Other than that, I’ve been on a FIFA kick for a while. Still messing around with that. I really wish women’s football was more popular. I’d honestly pay for a game specifically focusing on it and ignoring the men’s side of things.
I’m on Starfield this week. About 12 hours in.
Have to admit, I’m struggling to have fun, which I really didn’t see coming. I have hundreds of hours in Fallout 4, probably over a thousand each in Fallout 3 and Skyrim, and I adore space settings, so this was my most anticipated game for years. Seemed like it would be a slam dunk.
Another huge surprise is that it might be the main story that’s keeping me going. I’ve never come close to being this invested in one of Beth’s stories.
I feel you. I just hit 20 hours and I probably didn’t start to fully realize how to find different kinds of content deliberately until about hour 15 after I’d got some of the faction stuff started and explored enough planets to understand how to find certain side quests.
For the first while my natural instinct just had me exploring all of the cities and stations, just talking with people and picking up masses of side quests, then I hit a point where I started actually doing them, because I was burning myself out on walking and talking.
The non-scaling level of systems is interesting, figuring that out helped me to be able to do quests that I was leveled for and weren’t super spongey, I figured out the structure of the random quest board quests so I could partake in FPS shooting, ship shooting, cargo running, or more narrative driven side quests depending on my mood.
Figuring out that the trade authority (only the manned shops, not the kiosks) is your stolen goods fence meant I could really start stealing in earnest, and the decrease in environmental items that are lootable, along with the decrease in lootable homes and apartments means stealing opportunities are harder to come by.
Even still, after being pretty cheap at level 20 I’m at about 120,000 credits, which seems close to enough to fully build my own ship, which I’m about to eagerly do in my next session. Once I’ve got a ship built I’ll want to start and get into landing on less colonized planets and figure out the outposts and such, where I can pivot to hiring people from the taverns and getting into that whole side of the game.
I think because of the amount of things you could do, the amount of them that are basically impossible to do from the outset due to money (ship and outpost building), and the way the game doesn’t guide or explain things well, it was really easy for me to create my own boring rut where I just walked and talked and ran away from tough enemies because I didn’t realize I picked up a quest that was in or lead to a high level system.
For instance, I knew you could board ships, I had no idea that I needed the systems targeting skill to target engines to even do that at all, the skill description didn’t mention it, and the early game mission that forces you to board doesn’t require you to have the skill, you just board when the ship is supposed to “die”. I was also initially upset random items couldn’t be broken down into materials, but then I realized some materials can just be found as lootables, same for some craftable components.
All told, as I play more I’m coming around to it all more, but it’ll probably take another ten or 20 hours before I fully understand all the systems and can make a judgment on if I like it more, less, or the same as Fallout 4, which I also loved.
Playing Starfield, very fun so far but man it is demanding on my graphics card, barely holding 30 fps.
Also playing project zomboid with friends making our way to louisville.
All starfield, all the time. Been extremely enjoyable, can’t wait to do a modded new game plus.
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood! It’s a really good visual-novel-style game, but with the added element that you craft your own tarot-style divination deck and then draw cards from it during some conversations, and which cards you draw influence what kinds of readings you can give for people. It is established early on that since you were a kid your readings have never been wrong, and fittingly the game warns you early and repeatedly that your answers will affect your fate, dramatically. Well, no kidding! When I was playing yesterday I had a choice that I’d made hours earlier come back and bite me in the ass, hard. Almost made me want to quit and start over, but I’ve decided to see this play-through through and if by the end I still feel like I need to fix my mistakes I’ll maybe play it a second time.
tl;dr if you like beautiful pixel art, enigmatic beings from outside of space and time, witches, tarot, and/or choices that actually matter in your games, do give this one a go! I’m not done with it yet but I’d already love to chat with someone else who’s played it!
Still on a space game kick. Finished up Freelancer and started playing No Man’s Sky’s recent “Voyagers” expedition. It’s still got over a month left so I highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t played the game in a while. Just to see whats new; It’s come a long way.
And picked up Hardspace: Shipbreaker on sale for when NMS starts getting monotonous.
Ooh, was this your first time with Freelancer? It’s amazing that it’s twenty years later and it might still be the benchmark for non-HOTAS space sims.
I enjoyed Shipbreaker much more than I thought I would. Not typically my style of gameplay, but the setting is fantastic.
No, I played it at release and was HOOKED. I remember clearing a 3 day holiday weekend so I could play through the whole thing (for the second or third time) in one sitting.
I had somehow missed that a HD remaster was released a couple years ago, so I gave it a shot and got sucked right back in. Still a fantastic game, even if the cut scenes and voice acting are a little dated.
For anyone who hasn’t played it, it’s abandonware now.
Game: https://archive.org/details/Freelancer_201807
HD mod: https://www.moddb.com/mods/freelancer-hd-edition/downloads/freelancer-hd-edition-v06
I’ve picked Dead Cells back up on Steam Deck, playing on custom mode to always get the gear I want. Not the “proper” way to play, but it’s just fun to spend a bit flying through biomes killing things for a while. It’s why I love games that build in all sorts of extra features like this; I get to enjoy the game on my terms.
I’m on my second playthrough of Baldurs Gate 3, this time with a Dragonborn Fighter ( Half Elf Gloomstalker was my first ). I’m still not sick of the game even if I already have 100 hours in it.
Also picked up Remnant From the Ashes to play together with my SO. So far it’s a fun game even if the story is still very confusing and we had trouble joining each others session. Had to set the session to public, Friends Only didn’t work. Thankfully it is possible to change it back to Friends Only afterwards.
Wow hardcore has consumed my life. HARDCORE HYPE HARDCORE HYPE
Playing Sea of Stars. It’s so fun and beautiful to look at
I just got into Factorio, and I’m lucky I have other stuff going on in my life, because it’s such a big rabbit hole I don’t think I’d come out! I never played it or even knew what the game was about, but the announcement last week about the space expansion got me to download the demo.
Playing starfield, having fun with it, it’s basically like an extended fallout 4 with spaceships. I just wish I had more time to play
