Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of February 4th

Just started a Valheim server and beat the first boss last night with my girlfriends. We've got room if any queer friendly folks want to join in.

Otherwise I've been playing FFVIII and Dave the Diver on Deck.

Currently juggling Enshrouded, Frostpunk, and Remnant 2. Enjoying all of them for very different reasons.

It’s pretty unusual for me since I don’t have as much time to enjoy games as I used to and I tend to remain pretty focused on a single title on my list at a time.

Diablo IV season 3

Replayed Uncharted 4 for the millionth time. Now on The Lost Legacy. Not enjoying it as much (it's harder, for one thing). Interesting to see the developments that would go into The Last of Us 2 though (e.g. experiments with more open-world levels, and the attempt to redeem a character that's previously been portrayed as a villain).

I just finished up Divinity Original Sin 2 this week! I enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3 immensely, so I thought I would check out something else from Larian Studios, and it had been on my wishlist forever. Loved the combat system in this one, and how you could mix and match different skills and abilities to make interesting combinations. The battles were so much fun to play! I had a hard time keeping track of the story and all the different factions and their motivations, though, and went into the final act of the game not exactly sure what my character should choose. (Especially compared to BG3 I had a harder time keeping track of what was going on for some reason.) Still had a ton of fun playing this one and will probably replay it with a new character and all new party at some point!

I’m also working on my second playthrough of Disco Elysium and playing Cult of the Lamb. And then sometime soon I’m going to start Cyberpunk 2077.

APE OUT

XCOM: Enemy Within. Finished a game over two days because everyone kept missing their attacks, even the planes. Even the enemies.

Gonna do a second wave marathon and then maybe move on to XCOM 2.

Finally got around to Yakuza: Like a Dragon, so I've been making my way through that. Enjoying the turn-based RPG game-play a lot more than I was expecting. Focused on the main story right now, but the side-content I've dabbled in has been pretty fun. Feels like one of those games I'm going to be chipping away at for a while.

I've also been playing Dread Delusion and absolutely loving it. I don't tend to pick up Early Access games, but hearing it described as a "Morrowind-like" RPG caught my interest and it is the perfect way to describe the game. It really captures that feeling of playing Morrowind for the first time, of being a nobody in a strange land. The game doesn't even give you a map when you start out. You have to get by on directions and landmarks until you complete the side quest that gives you a map. And even then you have to fill it out as you explore the world. More than that, it's that sense that you never really know what you're going to encounter around the next corner. You can wander into a town looking for your contact to continue the main quest only to end up accepting a quest from the atheistic Inquisition to help them hunt down a rogue god and their followers.

Like I said it's still Early Access so it is a little rough around the edges. There's more than a handful of bugs and the combat is...fine, but not much else. Then again there's such a focus on sneaking, talking, and magicing your way around problems that that might be intentional. Still, what I've played so far has got me excited for when the finished product releases.

Enshrouded and Old School Runescape

BG3 still. Just started Act 3 for the first time. Astarion as my main.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Currently playibg Hogwarts Legacy. I don't like the Harry Potter universe but I was curious what the hype was about. My lord is that game good. The visuals, the sounds, every little detail oozes magical whimsy. There's a lot of standard open world collecting but the world is so cozy and fun I don't even wanna use the quick travel.

After playing through Mass Effect 1-3 (LE) I needed to go back home... To Skyrim.

My Breton Farmgirl visited her Boyfriend Lund only to find out he was killed by Forsworn robbers. They will pay for this.

Spent most of my time this week, as per the ushe, playing Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition and doing setup for the Saturday campaign I run every week using the game's DM client.

Great fun.

If anyone out there is into D&D and has free time on Saturdays, the game is cheap and you'd be welcome to join us. The server name is ALFA Sea of Swords 034: Daggerford.

https://discord.gg/JD9bqDf6

https://store.steampowered.com/app/704450/Neverwinter_Nights_Enhanced_Edition/

Also picked up Sands of Aura, which is an indie soulslike and I'm just starting on that today. The reviews speak to excellent level design, and I love a game I can explore.

More Diablo 4, but I'm like 95% done with the season. My Barbarian is level 100, I've completed the Season Journey, did Tier 100 Vaults, killed all the Uber Bosses (except Lilith) at least once, etc. I could of course min-max even more, to kill enemies 10ms faster, but I won't focus on that. I'll still do some runs here and there, but will try to focus on other games for now.

There is a time-limited event, that's starting in a few days, that I'll check out, but dunno how much there is to do.

The Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster games are on sale at last, so I've snatched those up on Steam and played through the first game. I was surprised how much of the typical FF DNA was already in this. Some of the mechanics and game design are somewhat antiquated, which is to be expected for a 35+ year old game, but the QoL additions really help, to make most pretty much a non-issue.

I played Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin previously, so seeing / reading all those familiar names and locations really make me want to go back to that game.

I want to play through FF2 next week, but we'll see if the D4 event hooks me, or I find anything else.

I think I might play the Tomb Raider Legend/Anniversary/Underworld trilogy. Just to get ready for the I - III remasters.

As much as I enjoy the newer trilogy, I really miss old campy Lara. The fun adventures that don't take themselves too seriously.

Edit: Man, I forgot how finicky the controls of these games can be.

Edit 2: No, seriously, fuck these controls. Anniversary feels like a nightmare to play. Legend had its control problems, but at least there wasn't platforming in literally every room. I can appreciate that it's got waaaaay more puzzles (I mean, it's a remake of the original), but that doesn't matter if the controls make the puzzles unnecessarily frustrating.

Got my Deck back from RMA, so doing another run of Neurovoider. Then, I'll probably finish Dragon Age Inquisition on Desktop.

I played a few hours of Palworld, and it's serving the role of a podcast or second-screen game quite well. It's still early goings, and I'm around level 10 or so, but it's doing for me what Pokemon hasn't done in decades while simultaneously combining it with aspects I really enjoy from Factorio.

I'm also coming close to the end of Pillars of Eternity, I think. I'm in the second DLC, and I hit a huge difficulty spike, as quests available around my level have seemingly started to dry up, but I ended up grinding a few bounties and got to level 14, which got me over one difficulty spike and hopefully paved the way to keep me moving.

Besides that, I picked up Tekken 8. This is the most I've enjoyed Tekken since the third game, and I also think I'm done with it. A lot of the game makes sense to me in a way that Tekken 7 didn't, and I've come to respect it more than its predecessor for that and other reasons, but I don't think it's for me as far as being a fighting game I'd like to compete in. I can see the path to improving from here, and it looks like a lot of memorization rather than application, where I just need to know what each move or string looks like to be ready to defend it, and until I reach that point, it's just a lot of frustration. So instead, I choose to avoid that frustration and go back to fighters that I enjoy more. It's a lot of fun at a casual level and in single player mode though.

I thought after playing Star Trek: Resurgence, which I adored, that I'd follow up with The Expanse: A Telltale Series. I'm a fan of both series and The Expanse seems just as well suited to the format, I've enjoyed the other Telltale games I've played and I really like Camina Drummer. Recipe for a slam dunk.

Off the bat, The Expanse has a lot of advantages over Resurgence. It's far better on a technical level - it never crashed, I didn't have any visual bugs, I didn't have any performance problems and there were no input issues. All things Resurgence was rife with.

But here's where the problems start. The Expanse, in a technical sense, is better graphically. It doesn't look better though. It's just creatively kind of dull. This is going to be a running theme with the game - it suffers any time an artistic choice had to be made.

There's only a brief moment in the first episode - of five - where we escape the uninspired industrial corridors. You might point out those industrial corridors are part of the show's aesthetic, but they don't convey the same details about how these machines work and how the people live in them. They miss details like how the decks are laid out in relation to the direction of thrust, and are weirdly wide rather than that utilitarian claustrophobia. The show also had no problem finding spectacular space vistas that are largely absent here.

But visuals are not why we are here. It's the story, right? But for the first time in any Expanse media - from the books, novellas, show, etc - I was incredibly bored. None of these characters are remotely interesting. The Camina I know is intense, driven and decisive. This Camina is unsure, anxious and just all around unimpressive. The politics are gone - not that the faction don't get a lot of lip service, but everything said is incredibly surface level and dull.

The game is blatantly obvious in how it forces outcomes regardless of choice. I was particularly frustrated when I shot a mutinous crew member multiple times, saw him floating limp in space, only for him to teleport mere moments later and have a gun pointed at another crew member again. I had these whiplash moments pretty often, where it felt like there needed to be an intermediary set up scene but instead we just awkwardly jump to something.

More important than decisions in story outcomes is stuff you find while exploring. People live or die based on these. Except you have no idea whether clicking something or walking somewhere is going to trigger a cutscene that'll push you past a threshold where you can't return to find something. Locations of items rely on moon logic - you don't find meds in any of the med bays you go through, you them on a random crate floating in space. The result is an anxiety over whether you'll miss something, and butchered pacing as you aimlessly walk around trying to find these things that could be anywhere.

The voice acting is sadly sub par. I really liked Camina's actress in the show, but she sounds like she is phoning it in here. The others aren't any better. The belter accents were particularly awkward.

It feels weird to talk about game play in this genre, but with dialogue choices this weak I couldn't help but notice how much worse The Expanse's were. There is a lot of tedious filler walking, jarring video game-y avoiding patrolling "drones" with comical red laser beam search lights and holding a button until a thing is collected. Resurgence had plenty of issues in this regard but, to it's credit, it mostly just cut to the next scene (at least in the first half).

The one puzzle I remember was moon logic. You need to work out a password, which is connecting a series of shapes, and are encouraged to look around the environment for shapes that might have been important to the previous inhabitants. Is it any of the pseudo-religious iconography? Anything of sentimental importance? No, it's the path of the silly connect the power lines chore you did earlier.

Ugh, I could go on. This is already way longer than anyone should read. The TL;DR is The Expanse gets a 3/10 for me, compared to Resurgence at a 9/10. It should have been an easy passing grade given my investment in the series and it's suitability for this format but it's just so creatively bankrupt.

Diablo 3: Season 30 - Still working on the Destroyer chapter. Thinking about trying out a different build for my Monk, so I'm farming Nephalem Rifts and gambling blood shards at Kadala for specific legendary items.

Alan Wake 2 - Finally finished The Final Draft aka new game plus. Very happy that I replayed it immediately, because the ending made it worth it. Even with all the problems this game has, I'm eager to see what comes next. There's been a patch that just came out that apparently fixes a lot of bugs, but I finished the game too soon to see any of it.

Diablo 4: Season 3 - Working on Chapter 4 of the season journey and my endgame Barbarian build. Finally moved myself to World Tier 3 because things were getting too easy. I did have a little trouble until I got better gear, and now things are back to being easy again lol. If I get too comfortable, I might have to attempt the capstone dungeon for World Tier 4 to humble myself. Either that or face one of the endgame bosses on my own.

Vampyr - Been having a shit couple days and decided the best way to combat it was by being a moody vampire doctor running around London.

I am currently one of the scrubs you beat in Tekken 8 on your way to the red ranks