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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
We got Wingspan as a gift, and I’m obsessed! I also bought the iOS version so I could play on the iPad. It’s been an absolute delight.
I finished the Final Fantasy 7 Remake (PS4) during the middle of the week. Second attempt at it after not getting very far two years ago. I restarted the game two weeks ago and just went at it. I enjoyed it very much. I'm not usually a fan of action games, but I think the devs did a good job of mixing action and the traditional JRPG system. It's majority action, attacking and blocking, but I can basically pause to bring up a menu to select an action I want a character to make. At the very least, it gives me time to think about my next actions in battle.
As for the story, I guess I should lead with the fact that I played the original FF7 many times. So from that perspective, it was interesting to see how they've decided to retell some parts. The overall story so far is still there, just that some of the how's and why's and even order of things are different from the original. Like Sephiroth is introduced way earlier. He was straight up the final boss of this remake. It kinda got weird at the end, since they introduced these ghost of fate things and I ended up in a singularity (wtf?). But I can overlook that. It was a fun game, with an interesting retelling of the story, beautiful environment and characters, and good gameplay systems. I can't wait for the second and third parts!
I've restarted the Final Fantasy 12 remaster on PS4. Hoping to finally complete this game. Between the original PS2 version and the remake, I think I've restarted and attempted this game like...8 times? It's crazy, but I'll save my thoughts for next week's post.
Ha, that's a great theory!
I have a friend who's one of those fanboys. I think he enjoyed the game, is planning to play the next parts, but he definitely wasn't as open to the changes as I was. I say he's planning to complete it all, but it comes with the caveat, "if they don't keep changing it."
I'm going to share this with him! ;D
Board games:
Settlers of Catan: Cities and Knights expansion. This is a favorite among my friends and myself.
Eldritch Horror. This has become a new favorite. You team up with friends to travel around the world, fighting monsters, closing monster portals, and try to solve a big world-ending mystery.
Inertial Drift
This game is great -- one of my favorite arcade racers in quite a while. The game uses a unique twin-stick driving system where the left stick controls your car like normal and the right twists the car for drifting. It's a bit clunky at first but ends up feeling really good once you get the hang of it. Also, aesthetically, it reminds me of Ridge Racer Type 4 (which looked absolutely badass back in the day).
The game is ostensibly focused on drifting, but it doesn't feel quite like a drifting game because the controls are so tight. Your car doesn't feel like it's sliding out of control -- it feels like the sliding is completely under your control at all times.
The game doesn't have rubber banding which is nice, as it genuinely skill-gates the levels. On my first duel I got absolutely smoked -- couldn't even come close to catching the other car. With some practice however, I was able to eventually come back and be the smoker instead of the smoked which was very satisfying.
I definitely see myself putting a lot more time into this one. Mastering its controls feels great, and there's a lot of content to get through. The campaign itself is short, but each character has a different car which handles differently, so you have to adjust to each one and learn how to handle it specifically.
Dicey Dungeons
My husband is a huge fan of this game, so he's been helping me co-pilot and adjust some of my bad decisions/absentmindedness (like always forgetting to throw my extra dice when I'm the witch!). I've beat the first episode with the five starting characters and am just now diving into the additional episodes for each.
The game's brilliantly designed. Terry Cavanagh is a genius. He's got this, Super Hexagon, and VVVVVV under his belt -- each completely different from the last and each supremely well-executed. We're lucky to have him.
Dicey Dungeons update
I’ve now beat all the episodes with the 1st character, unlocked the 6th character and beat their first episode, and beat the 2nd episode with the 2nd character.
This is a great game.
I heard No Man's Sky had gotten a lot better that it was at launch, so I picked it up during a 50% off sale. I've made it far enough in that the game has started to open up, but it just feels grindy and tedious. Item management is a pain in the ass for no good reason and unlocking more storage is actually pretty difficult. It feels like they had a few decent ideas but had no idea how to execute on them in a way that wasn't deeply frustrating. I might give it another hour or 2, but I'm pretty close to giving up and calling it quits for good
Beyond that I'm continuing to play more Guild Wars 2 and am learning more and getting better. I'm getting more skilled with higher level content and it feels good. And slowly my builds are getting better too. The high level meta seems self reinforcing when it really doesn't need to be, and I personally find that frustrating, but I'm not sure what can be done about that
NMS is a lot more fun on the easiest "difficulty", where you have 10x the storage space in every slot.
At the point I was at, I was having more trouble with all the different items that each needed a dedicated slot than with filling any of them up, but that's good to know.
Yeah, there's definitely a learning curve while you figure out what's worth carrying with you, but they've also added a lot of tools to allow you to teleport resources up the chain, so to speak. From your inventory to your ship, from your ship to your larger carrier, and so on. So if it's fun enough to power through a little further, there's solutions out there.
Your criticisms of NMS are spot on. I've only played after that big update that "fixed" everything. It's fun for a bit, but you're right that it's tedious and repetitive. I almost wish NMS had some Satisfactory/Factorio-like automated manufacturing and storage systems in it. There's so much resource gathering and manufacturing in NMS, but none of it is managed well, IMO.
I played with a friend during my last go at NMS. He saw that there's some new expansion coming out and seemed excited to play again, but I am personally not ready to deal with all that yet.
I've found multiplayer to be frustrating. I haven't played it in singleplayer much, but there's many small issues that are introduced by multiplayer that I just can't get over. It just introduces so much friction. I remember inventories syncing in weird ways, e.g. when you die you lose items from the last checkpoint, but afaict, the items you picked up since then are just removed from the world. That is, you save, pick up item X, die. Item X should now either be in your inventory after death, on your corpse, or back where you found it. But it's just completely gone.
Then there's also that the quest log/tutorial doesn't sync, so when you skip a step because your buddy did it already (build this or whatever), you'll be stuck on that stage until you actually do it.
The in-game encyclopedia is also basically unusable for interface reasons.
As it is, I'm stuck in between liking and disliking the game. There's lots to like, so I can't get it out of my mind completely, but there's lots to dislike, so I can't actually play it and be done with it. It's kind of frustrating.
I definitely ran into an issue like that in single player. I did a quest and it brought me to a crashed ship in need of repair, so I built a base and when I teleported away and back again it was gone.
And another time I did a whole quest solo and it wanted me to go back to the anomaly to cash it in, but I tried teleporting to another base and accidentally cancelled the already completed quest because suddenly there was a pop-up in the middle of my screen.
They really need to hire someone to do UX. It feels like every time I feel like I'm getting into a groove something comes along and just punches me in the face. Just deeply frustrating
Multiplayer is definitely frustrating. There were initially 4 or 5 of us playing together, but we ran into all sorts of desync issues. Someone would build a base, definitely saved it, but then we'd come back a little later, and the base or parts of the base were gone. At least one friend quit because of that. And I get it; he spent an hour or two sourcing materials and building, only for it to disappear? Who wants to waste time like that?
While I'm glad they introduced multiplayer, it's so obvious that it was just shoehorned in.
Wait, they don't have automation? I was assuming that once I got a colony up and running with people and everything I would be able to tell the to go gather carbon or whatever.
TBH, I'm not even sure why I like NMS so much, as I hate the grinding, but I think it's the exploration mechanics that are keeping me in.
I'd recommend Astroneer, maybe. It's planet-based exploration with hops between planets and no actual flight. The only tedium is building enough research up to keep unlocking stuff, but if you're exploring it's not an issue. For some reason the two are inseparable in my mind, even if they're radically different games.
Oh, I've done a lot of GW 2. Let me know if you have a question about something.
Thanks, right now I'm working on a hybrid support mechanist build, but I'm having trouble figuring out how much healing/barrier I'm actually doing and how effective it is. Arcdps shows me damage numbers but nothing about healing. And raw metrics aside, I don't know what is or isn't helpful and how much of an impact I'm making. All my healing is AoE and I can sustain moderate area damage in the special forces training area basically indefinitely, but that's basically the only way I've figured out to test it and I have no frame of reference for if that's a reasonable amount.
My DPS build is much more straightforward to understand since it only really has 1 job and I can easily see how it's performing.
So I would appreciate any advice you have.
So, in general, GW 2 endgame pve builds fall into three main categories: DPS, hybrid boon-support, or full healing support. Hybrid boon-support focuses on doing as much dps as possible while providing full uptime of either quickness or alacrity (and sometimes some other boons), while full support do the rest of the boons and healing.
The reasons why people go boon hybrid rather than heal hybrid are twofold: first, existing gear stat combinations better support boon mixes. Second, traitlines mix healing and boon support together, so it's more effective to have a full support build+boon hybrid rather than 3 hybrids.
So I'd recommend moving to one of those three roles rather than sticking with your current setup. It'll be a lot easier to find PUGs (Pick-Up Groups, bunch of random people working together) if you are. Snowcrows.com is one of the more popular resources if you want a build for 10-man content. Some groups will go for more offensively built healers, but that's generally the type of thing done by experienced statics.
If you do want to do healing, turning on the thick party health bars option is a good idea. I know that Arcdps has a menu or two somewhere to show heaing numbers, though I can't remember where. Generally the raw numbers aren't super important though; a solidly made healing build is going to provide plenty of healing, and even in experienced groups, people go down sometimes. If people are going down a lot, it could be a problem with your healing... or the group flubbed a mechanic, or the person didn't dodge something. Boon uptime is the number thing you can plan in advance, but in general I'd say there's no better way than experience to be a better healer.
If you just want to slap some group healing on a regular engineer build, using healing turret and then detonating it will provide ~3800 health, which is solid. Also, the copper-fed salvage kit is the best convenience gemstore purchase in the game, though IIRC it's not always available.
Diablo 3, of all games. I played it when it first came out on PC with a couple of friends but I had never played it on a console, so when I saw that there was a deal (around five bucks), I snatched it and been playing it since the past few days. It's pretty fun. I'm taking things slowly by talking to every NPC, listening to every story and absorbing it all. The game's difficulty is a bit weird in that often times you're easily overpowering creatures and, mostly, mini bosses, but sometimes you run into a creature that can easily kill you in a couple of seconds. I don't know if this is intended or not, but whatever the case may be, I find it more enjoyable as I never know what to expect, so it keeps me on my toes. I'm on ACT-II now and once I'm done with my first character (Monk, as it was back in the day), I plan on trying out other classes until the next season. Although Blizzard have introduced new systems like Paragon which I don't know much about, so maybe it will keep me playing my leveled-out character instead of starting afresh.
Red Dead Redemption 2. I finished its first installment a few months back and I'm slowly playing through this one now. I keep up with the gaming world, as you can see! It's a gorgeous looking game despite its age and there's hard to find much fault in it. I'm about 70% done with the story and it's getting interesting. The story is tad cheesy but my limited experience with games thought me not to expect too much and RDR2's story is passable at worst anyway, so I can't complain. I'll need a replacement for this when I'm done and I'll probably get to Psychonauts (1 & 2) which's been on my queue for so long.
As a seasoned Diablo player (1, 2, and 3 - all starting on launch day) that difficulty "curve" of there being single random creatures that are OP compared to their compatriots is very much by design for the exact reason you stated.
Ah, then it's working as intended. The difficulty settings are very granular too, but the hardest choice available to me right now is Master, which is what I'm playing on. I do wish bosses were harder though. The Butcher and Maghda were complete snoozefests. I'm sure they will be more challenging as I move on to harder difficulties, but I do hope harder difficulties introduce additional or completely different mechanics too.
Diablo isn't known for different mechanics on higher difficulties, they just scale up the enemy damage and health so that the mechanics go from "you probably shouldn't stand in the fire" to "you're going to die if the fire looks at you sideways" at least in the standard storyline. Once you finish the story you can get into the cursed chest, uber, and rift fights where mechanics do change from the story fights, along with Torment difficulties that have mechanic changes based on the enrage timers. That said, Butcher and Maghda are the early bosses where most games are gentle on the player.
Seasons are where the main global mechanic changes or special events are done in Diablo and what drives the most of the replayability.
D3 is one of those games that while I haven't touched it in over a year now, is still installed on my machine despite the fact that I'm diligent about uninstalling any game I've finished/am done with. However, I'm familiar with the Diablo formula enough, and like the extra challenge, that I've only played hardcore (permadeath) since D2 and will undoubtedly do the same when Diablo 4 drops.
That's disappointing about the mechanics, but it's great to hear that the game is replayable. Honestly, I needed a game that I can play while listening to podcasts and sounds like this one will fit the bill just fine.
Hardcore sounds fun but I remember watching so many heartbreaking videos back in the day where people just lose their characters. I don't think I can handle it and I'd hate the fact that I can't handle it 😄.
I'd be interested in D4 as I've always been interested in Blizzard games. I think the only Blizzard game I haven't played is Overwatch. (WoW being the one I played the most.) I remember them hitting a lot of issues with D4 though, as well as the game lead leaving the company not too long ago. I hope that doesn't affect the end quality of the game. Given the recent releases from Blizzard, I'm sure it will have its share of issues but as long as they course correct, it should be fine. I remember a lot of people complaining about D3 when it came out too, especially about some auction house related stuff and the game "not being dark enough" and they seem to have fixed that, at least the former. (D4 seems to address the latter.)
No Man's Sky. I bought it in November, got into other stuff after six hours, and finally came back with the new update. I decided for a shorter game experience I'd do the expedition. The following happened:
Nice person gave me a bunch of chromatic metal after they saw me plop down a portable refiner.
I got attacked by pirates.
I didn't read the UI right and started doing unnecessary side missions. I had to join my brother who went and found a planet to get me a Storm Crystal after I'd built hyper-warp fuel and used it to... warp, but I finally got the freighter up and running. I went to board a freighter and a helmet blocked the door.
I got attacked by pirates a bunch more.
I got to the Phase 1 rendezvous point and pirates attacked, killing me because I ran out of sodium and power packs. I got my ship up and running.
I went to do the freighter objective for Phase 2 and the ends of the freighter halves, and so the objective, was in the middle of a friggin voclano. I'll take any advice on this, but my brother suggested just doing other missions and finding another freighter.
I'm mostly having fun, to be honest, but I'm concerned about that Phase 2 freighter objective, and may try a way to reset it that involves a black hole.
EDIT: I just reset it the mission, and it's a built-in mechanic: Go through a black hole, select the mission in your log, and follow the prompt to reset it. Apparently it's intended to not tie you to a mission if you're sufficiently far away to not be able to complete the specific one. I finished it and laughed at how stupid easy the mission was when my ship wasn't in the middle of a volcano.
Second Edit: I tried to finish Phase 2 on the other side of the black hole, I jumped like twenty systems (3-5 systems in a jump) before I realized I was basically trying to cross the galaxy back to the objective after checking for a teleport in a space station.
Death Stranding: I'm actually at a point where I'm forcing myself to play up to two hours at a time, because I want to see the end of the game, but No Man's Sky is getting in the way of that. I'm headed up to the distro center north of Mountain Knot, and this is where the game starts to get really spicy if what I hear is correct, so I'm looking forward to it.
Video Games: Satisfactory - playing with my son and daughter, and we have made an unholy and yet delightful mess. My kids like to make games within games in any kind of sandbox game - we've got them in Terraria and Valheim and Hydroneer - and in Satisfactory, we've made a place to duel, and an enormous slide. We've mostly completed Tier 5 / 6 other than unlocking the next Tiers.
Beat Saber - I picked up the Linkin Park pack, and it's quite good. I haven't picked up Fallout Boy yet, but likely will. I've got a handle on Expert, and have tried out Expert+ but I'm still not at that level.
Board Games - Smash Up has been the game of the week. My younger daughter and son both enjoy it, and we've been played 3 games this week. It is... not the greatest game, but at least it's something other than Catan and Splendour.
Elden Ring
It is so well made and so much fun, but I am absolute trash at it.
I'm back to playing videogames after a hiatus with Deliver Us The Moon, a quasi walking simulator I got from GOG's indie game sale. Reviews on steam are good.
A few decades from now, humankind has exhausted Earth's raw resources and global climate change driven storms are turning swathes of the globe into deserts. In order to provide for our energy needs, a facility is set up on the moon to produce power from (I gather) Helium-3 fusion and deliver it to the surface of the planet using Microwave Power Transmission. Everything goes well until one day the transmissions stop and the moonbase goes silent, leaving us stranded and powerless in a rapidly devolving planet. The game tells the story of a last ditch effort by a small group of scientists to send on a final rocket to the moon the daughter of one of the leaders of the MPT project in order to find out what happened and presumably restart the facility.
It's a fairly good looking game, especially for a small dutch studio. It can make use of raytracing if you have a RTX card to display real time reflections on windows and metallic surfaces. It can also make my CPU reach 90 degrees Celsius (independent of raytracing) - the first game ever to accomplish that - which is a little scary, even though everyone assures me this is still the upper bound of what's considered safe for a Ryzen 7 5800X.
Technological considerations aside, the game's sets are good. The rocket is modelled realistically. The space station's interiors are reminiscent of the ISS and realistic astronaut media. The game generally seems to attempt to be scientifically accurate, with changing gravity (including zero G areas where you have to manipulate using your spacesuit's thrusters), limited oxygen sections and limited power. Obviously tasks have been simplified and gamified, but I'm still satisfied enough with this aspect of the game, so far.
Less satisfying is the overly linear nature of the game. Sure, it's a narrative game at the core, but... It feels like such a wasted opportunity. It's fun to manuever in zero G, it feels great to bust things open with the plasma cutter, and it's cool that you have to go through the rocket launch's checklist to launch, but the game holds your hand at every step. Failure is almost impossible and when it happens it sets you back only a few seconds to a minute. Even though you have cool, realistic, nonlinear environments, artificial barriers of junk and such have been put in place by the developers to ensure you can't go anywhere other than exactly where you have to go next. Why?? There are floor plans on the walls. I'm not a baby. Having to navigate the sets and discover things on my own would make the game a lot more fun. Less simplistic computers likewise (all we get is 'press next to continue' style interactions). And I'm also not crazy about how story is delivered through "audiolog style" collectible moments that become available when you reach certain locations for handwavey reasons (something to do with how the base's companion robot system works, I think). It makes the story feel detached from the action.
Still, it's a pretty cool project with great potential. The developers seem to be working on a sequel, something to do with Mars. Maybe they'll be able to improve on these points.
(Note: I have not finished this game yet.)
Cities Skylines got me recently. It is something I find mindlessly enjoyable and since I work two jobs my free time is definitely limited. Being able to play a game that doesn't require thinking, and that I can leave on for hours while I work and then go back and go full ham on spending is a blast. I have been watching a bunch of youtube videos on road ways and how to better use them as well as mods to help with it. Before that it was OpenTTD but that got to be too much like work so I stopped with it. Still a great game though.