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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.
I got to play a few games of one of my favorite board games of all time this weekend, DungeonQuest.
The gameplay is extremely simple: try to get to the treasure in the center of the map. You draw random room tiles and cards as you move to a new space and hope they take you in the right direction. Occasionally you test you abilities with dice rolls or fight monsters.
Usually I'm not a huge fan of games that are mostly reliant on luck, but most of the fun in DungeonQuest is laughing at your friends' misfortunes as terrible thing after terrible thing happens to them. Stuck in a dead end hallway because the rooms rotated? That's DungeonQuest! Fall down a bottomless pit on your first turn? DungeonQuest!
It's easy to learn and usually takes less than 45 minutes for a game and it's a good one for people who have friends that aren't really into games that require planning 5 moves ahead or book keeping.
It's apparently NextFest on Steam, so I'll probably respond with comments if I find more demos to check out.
FO3 via Tale of Two Wastelands is a ton of fun now, my Heavy Incinerator is making things interesting, which is nice, and I'm picking up fun perks, like "Child at Heart" which I used to get into Little Lamplight.
Ashes 2063, a Doom TC I'm tempted to play through on GZDoom. It's sort of Fallouty, with radiation hazards, post-apocalyptic setting, etc.
Something I've been waiting for: Casette Beasts, from the mind behind Lenna's Inception, another great game. You wake up on an island with dangerous monsters, record their essence to tape, and fight to progress a story. The demo is worth checking out, and frankly has me excited for the whole game. It's very Pokemon, but they also fuse like Digimon, the "trainer" takes damage as well (it's the characters whose bodies go into battle with the essence of the monsters). It was also made entirely in Godot, which is freaking awesome, and the game combines 2d and 3d in a way that feels great.
Update, but not one I expected. Not much in NexFest beyond Casette Beasts has spoken to me, but I may go through it tomorrow.
I finished FO3's main story but was unclear about how the Broken Steel DLC tied into the original content until I got there and looked it up. The DLC provided a much better ending than what I understood to be the default ending (you don't have to make a pointless sacrifice when you've got a goddamn supermutant immune to radiation to deal with exposure for you), and was fun to go through as well. I sorta accidentally powered through The Pitt DLC as well in a few hours which was definitely an interesting piece of content. It was basically Fallout with Doom Imps everywhere, and the important stuff was dealing with them in tight spaces. The "long" part was getting all 100 steel ingots from The Steelyard. I also shot Ashur in the face for no good reason as my decision to tie up the DLC, but it told an interesting, but satisfyingly unsatisfying story in how everything shakes down, and how it just leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
With all the buzz around Diablo 4, I got a little hyped and played a bunch of Diablo 3 on the Xbox. As everyone knows, it's a pretty great game. I tried a barbarian character, but in the Expert difficulty, it takes ages to kill mobs and felt kinda boring. So I went for a seasonal necromancer, which is so OP is ridiculous. To make things interesting, now I'm playing in the Torment 1 difficulty.
I really like the game, but the mentality of "Diablo really starts at level 70 in Torment 2000" is bollocks, I wanna enjoy the entire journey. Around level 30, the gameplay and RPG elements are a bit superficial. Ideally, Diablo 3 should be a bit more complex at this level, but still less complex than Path of Exile, because even PoE should be less complex than PoE.
I'm really excited for Diablo 4, the idea of being kind of an MMORPG worried me at first, but it will be great if that online focus facilitates playing with friends. I've had great times playing Diablo 3 with friends, both online and locally, but some things are problematic. For example, if there's a mage in the party they'll explode all the mobs before the others characters can even get to them. It will be great if they balance things so that every character party has a bit of fun.