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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 picked up and started Arco today, and haven't been able to put it down. A totally engrossing game in many ways - its style, its story, and its gameplay all. There's a free demo on Steam, so you should DEFINITELY check it out!
So far, the basic premise seems to be that it's a love-letter to "Western revenge stories". You play a grizzled survivor of one of the indigenous peoples of a hardy land, fighting back against colonizers to eke out a semblance of justice. It oozes the grit and atmosphere of a good Western already, and has me hooked to see where things go. However, the setting does have touches of fantasy - for example, there are "arcos", bows that cast magical arrows, alongside traditional firearms.
Here's a great gameplay trailer that succintly describes what makes Arco special, but I'll write it out for folks who prefer text over video. The gameplay is a really cool mix between turn-based and action-RPG. Essentially, each 'turn' that you and enemies take is simultaneous. So for example, I might plan a 'dash and slash' attack, but have to account for the fact that the enemy I want to hit will be moving towards me when planning my trajectory, and make sure to avoid being shot by a bullet whizzing by at the same time. It's very tactical, even with just one player-character.
But wait, there's another cool twist. Though time stops while you plan out your next turn, your character is haunted by ghosts, representing guilt. These ghosts will constantly chase after you - even when time has paused for you to plan your turn. So you can't afford to think too long, because you have demons to run away from... it doesn't just spice up the gameplay, it perfectly captures the mounting anxiety and panic that your demons catching up to you might, causing you to slip up and become careless in a heated firefight, for example.
Lastly, one thing that seems to shine so far is the RPG customization. There's a very rich skill tree that seems to have lots of different gameplay styles built into it. So far, I've specialized my character into being a "run and gun" type, prioritizing moves that let me dash around and away from enemies, where I can line up powerful AOE attacks or long-distance ranged shots. However, there's also trees for being a tricksy scoundrel (throwing sand in people's eyes, backhanding them unexpectedly, etc.), as well as (aforementioned) "dash and slash" attacks, and an 'acrobatic' tree that pursues the dash skills and lets you zip around the battlefield, leaping and firing off pot-shots.
I've also heard the game has other playable characters, who each have different playstyles, but I haven't seen any of those yet!
Overall, I'm extremely enjoying Arco, and really can't recommend it enough. It's on sale right now for $18, and even just a few hours in, I can tell it's going to become one of my favorites. The game is clearly a labor of love from its developers, crafted with not just heart, but a real skill for game design so far.
This is brilliant! What a cool way of mixing thematic elements into the game’s mechanics.
It’s so cool. The way it seems to work is that some events cause your “guilt” to go up, such as killing human enemies, or choosing some dialogue choices or quest options. The more guilt you feel, the more often ghosts spawn to harass you.
So, do you choose the optimistic-but-naive options, hoping that things will work out but suffering if they don’t? Or do you resign yourself and become cold and jaded in dealing with harsh reality, but have to face your demons at some point in the future to pay the price? Super compelling!
Cyberpunk 2077 -- it's good now! Gameplay's fun, creating your build is fun, (the simplified) crafting is fun.
The amount of side stuff that directly tied to Keanu's character surprised me and the world is impressively alive with all these voiced side missions and characters. It's good.
What it isn't is the next step in the genre, it's just one of the good ones. Writing also was disjointed and a lot of the side missions were written with feel-good conclusions and generally folks were pretty unselfish in a city that supposedly either makes you an asshole or gets you killed by one.
Voice acting was also just serviceable, Keanu is Keanu, no color or emotions in his delivery. The same can be said for the female voice of V, I was cringing pretty hard a lot of the time.
Yeah, it's good open world scifi action rpg but if that's not your thing, there's not really a lot to like here. Also some weird bugginess, things just not working like I expected and at least one mod item changing quality by itself but nothing major.
I'm in the same boat. Just to ramble about it a bit:
It's crazy the unfinished state that Cyberpunk came out in, and yet that it just happened to be material that could at least be fixed later. While there's still some glaring holes in the content or design that I wish they could be given time to fix, the 2.0 patch instantly jumps the game from garbage to great.
One of the biggest problems with the initial game was the complete lack of any meaningful build for your character. The looter shooter style stats on guns AND clothing meant you couldn't pick something and stick with it, while the mostly lame skills felt like they barely added anything. Even worse, combat was often "you murder everyone instantly" OR "You die instantly".
What was always crazy about this, was the actual level of care that went into level design, enemy design, and weapon design. These are the hurdles that most games fail at and can be much harder to fix after the fact. Missions are often laid out super well, feeling like Deus Ex/Dishonored light style settings with multiple ways to approach your objective, enemies have all sorts of interesting mechanics that should matter, and the weapons almost all have real character and traits between them, as opposed to 60 different types of accurate machine gun.
When they finally did the 2.0 patch they nailed redoing skills to matter, ripped out 90% of the looter shooter nonsense, removed stats from your clothing so you didn't look like a clown for half the game, reworked cyberware/hacking, and suddenly there's this awesome mini deus ex style game underneath because all the hard work was already done. Now there's all sorts of crazy ways to fight, or not fight, your way through the game, and you feel like you're getting your build/identity online almost instantly rather than halfway through the game.
It's really an interesting example of just how much polish matters to the overall feel of a game, and how to take a rough system and turn it into something that allows players all sorts of fun decisions rather than boring as shit ones.
I'm still playing Tunic.
Spent the last week deciphering the runes instead of actually playing any, but I think I've cracked most of it. The plan this week is to translate the entire instructions booklet, starting with controls and tips because those are sections I've already done and have context for the language. Then it's the lore pages and the advice on the last section of the game (Route B), before actually picking up the controller and solving those last puzzles. Languages are fun and I'm so glad this one isn't just straight A-Z substitution: there's a grammar to it and I love re-wiring my brain to read some of the runes without lookup.
My hope is that
Click to expand spoiler - speculation on the last third of the game past getting the three McGuffins.
Hoping that my read on The Heir is correct, that she isn't evil and she does in fact feel grief when she kills cute little Tunic. Maybe she's stuck in an endless cycle of violence and by defeating her, Tunic merely takes her place in jail and everything begins again. I'm hoping The Golden Path sets both of them free. And put an end to the creepy screaming skelingtons in the obelisks.
Still hooked on Zenless Zone Zero.
Version 1.1 is out, and there is more content now.
I've been playing since release and gobbled up the content at a rapid pace as I was playing pretty much every day. The days where I don't feel like sitting in front of my PC, I just do the dailies on my phone. (Dailies are done super fast)
I was done all the story quest and side quests, so for me it was simply logging in and doing dailies while grinding for small upgrades and saving up for future gachas.
1.1 was introduced last week and I cannot believe how much the devs listened to the community feedback.
A lot of QoL improvements have been made and the new content is very promising as it shows that we are able to step into the shoes of other characters story-wise. (Whereas before it was just the main character you picked at the beginning)
I am still going through all the new quests and honestly cannot wait for any future updates.
Also still holding on to my in-game currency as they are drip-feeding us new characters by giving up sneakpeeks on social media, and I have seen some characters I really want.
Yeah I dropped Zenless after doing all the 1.0 content (I just don't have time for two gachas) but as a long time Honkai Star Rail player (previous game, same devs) it's genuinely hard for me to play, like, Western live service games now. Between frequent, content-rich updates that just... work pretty much perfectly, every time, and daily and weekly quests that don't feel like they're trying to torture you into playing dozens of hours between major story chapters, it seems like Hoyoverse has just about solved live service design and player retention (at least for the types of games they're making). And at the core of that solution is making games that are actually fun, well made, and relatively unique.
Was 1.1 a story patch for Zenless? How's the writing been landing for you, in general? I thought that was the game's biggest weakness (especially compared to Hoyo's previous games) but I'm curious to hear others' thoughts.
This was my exact thought about 10 hours in. They nailed live service games - the most important parts of the game are available without paying (ignoring the inevitable grinding that may be required) while having a dozen avenues for monetization, and there's a constant drip of new content and stuff to do. It also helps that the graphics, characters, story and voice acting are all competent if not great.
I was initially scared that, being a gacha, I'd just get microtransactions shoved down my throat, but it was the complete opposite. They stay away for the most part and don't bother me at all, compared to other games that would just show pop-up after pop-up as soon as you log on. That said, they did make sure every single time I'd unlock a feature that had microtransactions associated with it, they'd make sure I saw it. Which I don't mind, some players might want to spend money to improve faster and would probably want to know about all the avenues they have available, and Mihoyo needs to make money after all.
I'm just curious to find out if there's a clear progression "wall" where resources start to dry up and grinding ramps up significantly, because for now I just max out the Cunning Hares as soon as I unlock the options (currently all three lv30, and I'm level 24) and have been getting S-grades everywhere, which makes me think I'm still in the "new player" phase.
Sorry for the late reply!
1.1 did indeed contain new story, but it also added more sub quests (with added difficulty as a lot of people asked for apparently) and a lot of Quality of Life changes.
The story switched up and gave us control of a new character instead of the usual main character and the writing for this 1.1 story was the best so far.
For me personally, ZZZ matches my lifestyle a lot better than Star Rail. (I used to play Star Rail but dropped it as I noticed it required too much time investment than I could afford, with work and wife being priorities)
ZZZ allows me to do dailies in less than 5 mins, and if I have 10 minutes to spare instead I am able to extend that into a short burst of weeklies. Also, the music, animation, style and the urban settings suits me much better as I keep going back to it.
Ultimately, the thing that keeps me playing is the huge potential this game has.
They proved with the 1.1 patch that the game they put out is long but finished and keeps getting polished while listening to the players. I honestly can't wait for future updates as they just seem FUN!
Also, a new character gets released today!
I've setup a 1.12.1 vanilla wow server for myself with functioning bots to mess around in. It's pretty neat, and lets my wife and I progress through all the content without anyone having to rely on our schedules.
I'm using Continued MaNGOS with the playerbots module, and while it still has a few rough edges the bots are quite good and highly configurable. Basically, they use a system of strategies that define triggers and associated actions along with a priority. Strategies can be added or removed on the fly via whispers to the bot, so it's pretty easy to setup some basic macros but even out of the box the bots are quite functional group members.
And just for fun, you can have bots populate the server and run around idling, questing and grinding much like players would. I have 3000 bots playing on my server, and it feels somewhat akin to a real server although the chat system is pretty hilarious/horrendous/repetitive. I imagine someone is eventually going to hook it up to a local LLM and then it will truly be a singleplayer wow experience.
I didn't know that self-hosted WoW was a thing. When you run MaNGOS how complete is the experience compared to the official WoW servers back in the day? Do you get all of the same NPCs, quests, dialog, and other content? Do you know how much of that is hosted on the server versus coded into the clients? Seems wild to me that something like this wouldn't get struck down by Blizzard the same way Nintendo targets 3rd party emulators.
Private servers have been around a long time, the original MaNGOS dates back to 2005 or so, it’s been forked many times since then though and is no longer active. The private server community is kind of a mess because the ‘big’ servers fork the open source projects but never contribute back to them while bringing in enough money to pay several full time developers. The one exception to this afaik is Chromiecraft, which is run by the maintainers of Azeroth Core, which is a 3.3.5 open source fork of a fork of MaNGOS.
CMaNGOS is probably behind the bigger private servers in terms of polish, but I would say it’s still above 90% in terms of content. I know people are raiding classic and tbc with bots and while there are certainly bugged quests so far my issues have been minor. That’s for classic and tbc at least. For wotlk you’re better off going with Azeroth Core, which also has a fork of the same playerbot module and is overall more straightforward to setup.
I went with CMaNGOS because it’s reasonably active and imo the bots are further ahead than Azeroth Core, although the addon for managing them isn’t as nice imo.
In terms of legality they have gone after private servers before, particularly those making $$ from donations, and I’m sure they will continue to do so. However the server code is just a clean implementation of blizzard servers done from packet inspection. I don’t really think there is anything illegal about it. And to answer your other question the game world loop is all server side but the client does have a lot hardcoded like spells and talents afaik.
Finished Dredge The Iron Rig DLC over the weekend.
It was a blast. I love Dredge, and it was more Dredge. For anyone wondering if it's worth it, I would say if you enjoyed everything the game already gave you, you'll love the DLC as well. Everything is on point.
I am heavily back into MMOs as of the last few weeks. I've been on and off playing three different ones trying to decide which one I want to dedicate time to, though there's no reason I can't just play them all casually.
Lord of the Rings Online. I saw that they have progression servers now with upgraded tech, so I decided to pay the $15 for a month of game time to check it out (you can play a ton of the game for free on the non progression servers though). The game is dated, but still has a lot of things going for it. The combat is pretty fun and makes me feel like a badass, the graphics, while heavily outdated in terms of fidelity, have an aesthetic that still makes the game beautiful. The vistas are simply amazing and the scale of the world is wild. The characters and story thus far are pretty interesting, too! I started as a human from Rohan (though all humans have the same starting area/quest) and got quickly wrapped up in a plot involving bandit gangs being used by Nazgul to sew discord in the area. It was a pretty wicked opening to the story and I'd like to try more!
However... the UI is absolutely horrendous and may prevent me from playing much of this until it's updated (the devs say it's in the works, but might be a while). The issue is that the UI wasn't designed for anything over 1080p, so while the game itself looks great on my 3440x1440 monitor, all the text in the UI is just tiny and near unreadable. Most of the UI elements, like your action bar and map, can be scaled up, but tooltips and bags cannot, so I'm having to lean forward to just read what's in my inventory. I could play in full screen and lower my resolution to 1080p or lower, but the game takes approximately 2 years to alt tab out of it from fullscreen, so I don't like that either. So out of the three MMO's I'm playing, this may see the least time until it's updated (and then probably the most time once the UI is updated).
The second game I tried was Guild Wars 2. I did buy this on release all those years ago and never got very far. I've tried it at least a couple times since then and it never clicked, but it did somewhat click with me this week for whatever reason. I'm not as big of a fan of the aesthetics as other MMOs, but the game looks good enough, doesn't have the UI issues LOTRO has, and plays very well. The combat system is a lot of fun and the entire vibe of the MMO is a bit more relaxed. You don't have 30 quest markers shoved at you at a time, you can kind of just go at your own pace and even just exploring the game map gives you a big chunk of XP. I'm only level 25 so far, but this has been fun as a mindless MMO, where I don't have to think too much about my build, I can just go beat up bears or bandits or whatever.
The third is that I resubscribed to World of Warcraft, my on again off again somewhat abusive partner. A new expansion, The War Within, is coming out and it looks somewhat promising! I played WoW pretty much every week from 2007 to 2018, after I did everything I wanted to do in Legion. I did try BFA and Shadowlands, neither of which stuck, and Dragonflight did stick with me for enough weeks to make it worth having played the story of the expansion, at least.
Until yesterday, I wasn't aware of the Mists of Pandaria Remix going on. For those unaware, it's a pre-patch event where you can play through the MoP expansion and get bonus XP and earn lots of raid/dungeon cosmetics from MoP before your character transfers back to a normal server when the event ends tomorrow. Well, the bonus XP system works in such a way that it's possible to get a new character to level 70 (current max) in about 2 hours by just queuing for heroic dungeons. There's a way to get such broken damage that you one hit kill all bosses and do a dungeon in about 2 minutes, so if you queue up and someone in your group is like that, you can just stick with them for a few hours. So I ended up getting a priest, warlock, and another mage to max yesterday.
That said, I'm not sure what class I want to main or at least start with in TWW! My long time main was a rogue, but I haven't played her really at all since Legion or maybe WoD. I did play a mage primarily in Legion and BFA. I then played warrior in Dragonflight. So I have to choose from rogue, mage, warrior, warlock, or priest, I have all of those classes either at max level or close enough to main them. So I'll be spending a few hours today looking at class changes for TWW to see what vibes. It will probably be mage since I'm familiar with them already, instead of having to learn warlock or priest (never played them before), but learning a new class might be fun, too, and I was leaning priest a little bit because I want to start to learn roles besides just DPS (and shadow priest is cool anyways if I did just play DPS). Back when I did raid in WoW, I was only playing my rogue, and since then I learned to play and heavily enjoy support roles in other games, but healing in WoW might be a bit stressful for me with having to click on all the raid frames and all that, so idk.
Oh dang, I didn't realize this was happening. Dragonflight didn't stick with me at all. I keep getting bored about 40 mins in. This would've been a nice way to avoid Dragonflight before TWW. Maybe I'll have to grind out a max level character before TWW.
Well, the event is still going on today, but this is the last day. You can probably get a character to max in at most 6 hours no matter what, but more likely 2-4 hours through heroic dungeons.
Cosmoteer!!!
It's been out a few years. Despite its "overwhelmingly positive" reviews, it has racked up 200k sales, I think? Per Steam charts. Unsure if reliable.
The mod scene is great. Pushing hard to get C# modding. Currently, it's declarative rule-based modding. It's powerful but still lacking as it's not Turing Complete. You are limited to the existing rules, are unable to define new rules, and so unable to define the complex behaviors that could be possible.
Still an amazing game. So much so that I started working with a mod team to bring Star Trek to it!
It's been a fun week!
Dark Souls
Started the OG Dark Souls on Steam Deck. Historically I bounced off at the Asylum Demon because I didn't realize there is a door directly to his left. Now that I've actually built up my Souls-skills in other games I'm having a lot of fun. These games are much more approachable and enjoyable when you have the built the knowledge base. It's also fun to see how they iterated from Demon's Souls up through Elden Ring.
This game feels like it was made for Steam Deck.
Demon's Souls (remake)
Cleared level 2-1, made a couple attempts on the Armored Spider. I really like Demon's Souls and this remake is beautiful. The world-level system is a nice way to break up the flow of the game. I could see something similar coming back in their next game.
EDIT:
Cult of the Lamb
Picked it up at 50% off. Don't have much to say but I enjoy the dungeon crawling and town management style. It's a nice break from these ARPG style things I've been playing.
I still have to go through Demon's Souls myself, so I don't have much to say on it, but ENJOY DARK SOULS! It's one of my favorite games and I usually play through it at least once a year.
I really am enjoying it, it's been excellent to play on the Steam Deck while watching the DNC. I'm right up to the Bell Gargoyles, I hope to do them tonight. I can already see how this is a great game to play through regularly.
What I appreciate about these games after committing to learning their systems is how relaxing they are. I used to be anxious when playing these games so I'd bounce off. Now they're comfortable and hit the right balance between repetitive but not mindless.
There's something about shapez that stresses me out, I don't know if I'm weirdly a perfectionist about some things, but at the same time, I'm just too lazy to math everything out and just go by "feel" when my production lines have backups. It's strangely stressful but at the same time extremely addicting.
I get that with Factorio as well. Shapez eases it by production being the only stake at least.
yeah, I think Factorio feels a bit worse in terms of destroying everything, but I always just destroy everything I do after every milestone to rebuild.
Honestly, don't. There's enough space on the infinite map to just let your old factories run and slowly raise numbers for secondary objectives. It's best to focus on the current main objective than to rebuild everything each time you unlock a new object or have new layout idea.
At worst you'll have to do some belt management near your center.
As much as I want to agree with you, I feel like there's just something nice about having a fresh map to think about things again lol. I feel like I'm not great at the spacial reasoning planning part in my brain, so I just end up spaghetti-ing everything.
There's an official mod that shows the % usage of objects, and I found it helps a lot more than placing counters everywhere to know if a factory is efficient.
Baldur's Gate 3. Act III baby! Act II was a hell of a finale, and I'm eager to get to the end of it. I'm taking time off however because I'm getting a little obsessive, which happens when surround myself with a piece of media for too long.
Shapez 2: It's in early access, plays like the first one, runs like a dream, and is quite fun. It starts with a tutorial to get you used to the layers and reveal all the features, which is helpful. However, it pushed me to the first one to finish the predetermined shapes, which is convenient as I wanted something more meditative after crushing BG3 for a week.
Treasures of the Aegean
This is an outstanding hidden gem! It's criminally overlooked, in my opinion - only 68 Steam reviews and it's been out for 2+ years.
The game is a sort of 2D Tomb Raider x Mirror's Edge with movement that reminds me a little bit of Dustforce. There's a big sprawling map with collectibles and puzzles, and you have to run and jump and climb to navigate everything.
The game has a time-loop mechanic where you delve into the world, and then, on the following loop, the areas that you explored will be filled in on your map. This only reveals the topography though -- you actually have to manually add points of interest to the map yourself. This is pretty neat -- they've got a big icon set and you can freely choose what to put down and how to log things. Definitely adds to the game's archaeological feel.
It's got great artwork, and it feels really good to play. I'm a few hours in and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. It scratches an exploration itch that I haven't had scratched in a while.
This week we played the turn-based colony sim dotAge for our podcast on roguelike games.
I think there's a lot to like here from the graphics to the writing. A solo dev effort, you can really tell a lot of hard work went into the systems in place. There's a lot of clever UI/UX design here which is much appreciated.
It feels very much like a solo PVE board game similar to Agricola or Keyflower. Population as a resource that you place on things is very meeple-inspired. It is very nice to not have to micro all your units around.
I think my cohosts and I were mixed on the late game though. dotAge is LONG. It takes maybe 10 hours or so for a run by default. There are options to shorten the game length considerably, but the games curses you have to overcome become crazy punishing in the end, many times in an unfun manner.
One of my cohosts put it that the game is very fun to beat once, and after that you've sort of seen everything. dotAge hasn't been out for a super long time though and I could certainly see how the infrastructure in place would allow for all sorts of new elders, systems, and wacky writing.
If you're a fan of Against the Storm, you'd likely be a fan of dotAge as well.
I'm playing Pokémon Emerald Rogue. The techno-wizardry of the ROMHack community never fails to impress me - there's so much shoved in here. DS audio? Every Pokémon, including every Form, and every move, with physical/special split, and Fairy types? Multiplayer? Extending the system to do quick ball throwing, type effectiveness, and modulating the speed appropriately for both convenience and dramatic effect? Making an entirely different experience within a 16-bit engine? It seriously boggles my mind. And more than anything, it's so damn fun. I bounced off Pokérogue, but something about playing this on my Pocket is so engaging and great to pick up and put down when I feel like it.
The community knows Pokémon best.
Need to check this one out! I've heard such good things but haven't had the chance to sit down and play it. Truly sounds mindblowing!
Last time I posted I said I'd get back to Soviet Republic but I got home from holiday and I couldn't face diving back into such a crunchy game, I think that's for another time.
Instead I picked up Colony Ship after seeing a video on it. I'm a sucker for that kind of doom and gloom scifi, especially when they are using old tech that's really incredible but they can't produce it any more so it's like lost artifacts.
Anyway, the actual game started strong. I played the demo which includes the entire first act which took me around 6 or 7 hours to complete. A very chunky demo!
I was a teeny bit upset to find out my achievements didn't fire retrospectively when I got the full game, but otherwise the demo was excellent and I would recommend it to anyone.
As for the rest of the game, it was a bit of a rollercoaster
Act 2 and beyond I had a rougher time, because I started to notice the format and realised my character was not designed correctly at all.
Non story, mechanical only spoilers if you're interested in buying the game and want a heads up
Essentially content in the game is split into 2 categories, content with lots of choices which any character can do, much like a lot of RPGs. And content that's totally locked off unless you are either a combat, stealth or diplomatic character.
Give the demo a go if you like CRPGs I'd 100 percent recommend it.
Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga - a turn-based strategy game with a solid enough story. The gameplay consists of creating and equipping squads of up to 9 units and then guiding them through varied scenarios progressing through the campaign. The main part of the strategy is making the squads both resilient and specialized to then be able to counter, survive and maneuver around the enemy, the actual combat part is then simply an animation.
It is technically made in RPG Maker but it is completely unrecognizable baring some idiosyncrasies.
The developer also has several older games, this time RPGs and also doing interesting things with RPG Maker.
Signus: The Artefact Wars - a very old(~2000) turn based strategy game. Is now free on Github. It has excellent localized enemy ai for the time but the later missions can drag a lot due to the control scheme.