Fontaine just opened in Genshin, so I put Baldur’s Gate on hold for a bit to do the new stuff. I also went back to play a bit of Mass Effect 2, since I was in the middle of a trilogy run when BG3 came out. I’m sure I’ll be back to BG3 soon, now that I’ve got all the Fontaine areas at +65% exploration.
Funny, I've been replaying the Mass Effect trilogy as well (through Legendary edition), and I'm also on Mass Effect 2. ME 1 holds up more decently than I expected with the LE changes, but ME 2 is just such a better game in almost every way. Really enjoying spending time with these characters again. Even with other games going on you can always hop back in and do a mission or two in ME 2, the save system lets you make some good progress even if you don't have a ton of time. Femshep for life.
Ironically, ME2 is my least favorite of the trilogy, because plot-wise, it’s worse than just being a plot cul-de-sac because it undoes everything set up in 1 and sets ME3 up for failure by introducing more plot lines that have to be resolved. I know everyone loves it because of the characters and BioWare changing a lot of mechanics so it’s more fun to play, but I like the trilogy for the story, and ME2 really fails, story wise, as the middle part of a trilogy, because it doesn’t advance the story set up in ME1 - it ends with us in the exact same place, story-wise, only with more baggage. It’s got a great series of individual stories and is good as an anthology, but hurts the overall story of the trilogy.
I really love this video on it, since it really explains how ME2 wasn’t actually good for story of the trilogy: Mass Effect 2 Broke the Franchise.
Fontaine has been really great, honestly. I had gotten burned out of Genshin and had only been doing dailies and none of the events for a while now (I did the bare minimum of the summer event then didn’t touch it again), but Fontaine has gotten me back in. I really like the underwater mechanics and just swimming around and exploring.
They iterated on how you controlled the pari in Sumeru, and they really nailed it. It’s very smooth. The only thing that can be rough is when you have to do underwater combat, because suddenly you’ve got up and down thrown into the fight, but luckily fighting underwater is pretty rare.