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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.
Just wrapped my time with Tactical Breach Wizards, which was great!
Actually ended up writing a whole review of it, so uh, I guess that's what I think of it 😅
https://david.reviews/articles/tactical-breach-wizards-review/
Your review site is REALLY cool! I’m impressed.
Thank you! I've put a lot into it over the years. 😁
I'm excited for this next chapter- I've got a steam
Curator and some actual articles, so it'll be cool to see what's next!
Cool reviews! I’ve put Little Kitty, Big City on my wishlist, that looks like a lot of fun.
I finally picked up Armored Core 6 last week, and have been messing around with it a bit. It seems quite fun, with a terrible story on top.
Now the Factorio dlc is out though, which changes everything..
Factorio is probably the most addictive game I've ever played.
I actually really enjoyed AC6's story. It's very simple, but I would not call it bad. Plus the voice acting is pretty fantastic.
I'm not too far in yet, maybe I judged it too soon!
I also didn't realize this, but you gotta play the game 3 times (New Game+ and ++) to get all the best story hits. And it's worth it!
Yeah AC has always had "ambitious" story telling. If you just take it at first glance you miss out on a lot of what's going on. Fromsoft only got better with the environmental story telling aspect in the souls series, so 6 has all sorts of subtext going on, in addition to just the stuff you literally will not see in one play through because it's locked out.
That said, it's not like it really goes anywhere you don't expect?
I think once you unlock the true endings in ac6 you will see the full story they had planned. It’s quite good imo. The game is just so damn fun as well. Buttery smooth mechanics and weapon combos that would make gundam fans blush.
I've had a longgggg week filled with a bunch of random stresses and stuff like that, but the only constant I've had right now is Metaphor Refantazio. It's been really good and I've dumped about 60 hours in it this week.
It's funny, I don't really like anime but I'm a sucker for the Persona games. This game is that but so much more too, and I genuinely love the heavy handed story in general. I'm pretty much on the last couple hours of the game and I'm pretty happy with it!
Just finished the game, some thoughts.
This game feels like it'll sit with me for a while. I really enjoyed the story a lot and the heavy-handedness of the themes of racism as a whole. The twists weren't the most surprising after the Shinjuku reveal, I think, but I still really enjoyed the message it conveyed. It feels like they kinda just took the strife and conflict of America and put it in this game without that much change, and the main message of Magic being Anxiety will stick with me for a while.I really loved my experience and I'm looking forwards to playing the "Royal" version in a couple of years lol.
I started playing Pacific Drive as soon as I had heard of it. It was really fun. I'm a huge sci-fi nerd and this is right up my alley. However, it seemed like the further you get in the game past roughly the 10 hour mark, the more tedious and punishing the game got. Like...not in a fun way. So I stopped playing and sent the company that makes it, Ironwood Studios, a really constructively worded email explaining my frustrations and how I wished they would make the game more accessible for people like me that don't have the time to sink into games like this.
(It's a rogue like first person sci-fi driving game where you drive a car and upgrade it as you explore the mysterious "zone.")
I'm not taking credit for this, but a few months later they released a huge quality of life patch that allows you to customize almost all aspects of gameplay. They have presets you can choose from, or you can build you own.
Fast forward, I've got just over 35 hours in and am getting close to beating it now that I took out the tedium. Highly recommend it.
This is great news. I loved the demo when it came out, but I kept hearing about the time commitment from people playing the full game and decided not to purchase. I might have to take another look, as I love the premise.
They even added a mode called something like "tourist mode" where you can enjoy the game without having to do ANY of the tedium or worry about taking damage and just enjoy the amazing graphics and story. If you liked the demo and premise, I highly recommend you give it a 2nd chance.
I just broke 300 hours in Satisfactory. I had quite a bit clocked before 1.0 but in my current run I'm about to hit phase 5. The complexity is really getting up there, and I'm finding it really helpful to have bite-sized goals to keep from getting totally overwhelmed.
Been playing a load of Cyberpunk 2077; not really sure what I can say that hasn't already been said, but I'm enjoying myself and the stories it provides.
If I have one complaint it's that the world is pretty much completely lifeless: I loaded a save the other day and walk out of a shop only to see 4 of the exact same NPC within steps of each other as an example; another is a conversation with an NPC in a Ramen shop and looking at the other NPC's that just sit in one spot and play the same canned animation repeatedly while the people "taking orders" just stand behind the counter doing the same. I don't necessarily mind this in most RPGs, but in Cyberpunk it just feels weird given the general detail of the world, as well as feeling kind of lazy, considering 20-years ago Gothic had NPC's with routines and schedules, places of work, homes, etc, etc. Granted, they were simulating a lot fewer NPC's, but it seems like Cyberpunk ought to have had the resources to do a little bit more with the NPC's local to the player so that things don't feel so dead.
In spite of my complaints, I actually am enjoying myself; focusing on doing quest after quest has made everything so much better than simply wandering around the world.
Today, I downloaded a demo for this game: Erenshor, weird as it sounds, it's a "Single Player MMORPG". It simulates other players who you can group and trade with, while feeling like Everquest (using a similar interface and playing similarly) back in 1999, except much faster both in general gameplay and leveling. You absolutely need to group to do some things and it's nice to basically be able to just call NPC's to you and group with them (though not all of them are willing to group with you.) I spent about 3-hours with the demo today and am enjoying myself quite a lot; looking forward to a full release or even just Early Access, as I think I'm going to run out of demo stuff to do pretty quickly, though I may start new characters...
Elite Dangerous: I just wanted to play a spaceship game. Installed. Loaded up initial tutorial. Follow commands and it's okay. Continue going through the other tutorials, on-screen key bindings frequently don't work. Haven't changed anything except graphics settings. Go to options to see if I can find the setting and bind it if it's missing.
Can't find any of the settings for the commands it's asking me to use.
Hit reset to default, exit game, restart.
Same thing.
Change to a controller, despite it being obvious that there's far fewer buttons on a controller than a keyboard.
Same thing.
UI and menu designs leave much to be desired, not worth the effort. Uninstalled.
Getting up to speed with Elite Dangerous is not trivial. I think they really failed at introducing people to systems, which is unfortunate. I say this as someone who loved the game, and played a lot. I ended up never getting my engineering fully up to date, and I never got good at dogfights.
It's unfortunate because the idea of the game is cool as hell, the exploration is awesome, and there's so much great about it. But they really screwed the pooch on introducing new players, and also the UI.
I don't mind a steep learning curve, but I have to draw the line somewhere and when the default layout both doesn't actually have the bindings it tells you to use in the tutorials and doesn't use the same naming in the keybinding settings to change it then that must be where the line exists for me.
Glad I got the game for free.
I also don't mind a steep learning curve, but I feel like the game gives most of the learning curve to not-in-the-game which I don't particularly like. And I think that the key binding stuff is also remarkably annoying. I feel like that tutorial came out with the game, and the UI has gone through some updates, and now it's not relevant, but maybe that's not it. Regardless - I have had nearly the exact same complaint
I played a ED a few hours, restarted a save more than once, and never had a binding issue with the controller.
The default bindings were enough for all most common tasks, and I actually found them quite smart in their use of combinations to map different actions on the same button. Though I admit that a few keyboard bindings are necessary once you're getting more confortable, a controller is enough 95% of the time.
This week has been a bit of a bust for me.
I broke my rule for Early Access and picked up Cosmoteer which is actually pretty cool, but after 2 hours I wanted to play it coop and noone wanted to play it. So its now lost in the list of "to play" coop games with my friends.
I also picked up a new game called Drova. Its a really neat ARPG and I'm trying really hard to get into it with my Deck, but man I SUCK at Dark Souls dodge roll combat. It seems really good and I'm pretty driven to find out what's happening and explore the world, but the enemies are kicking my ass.
Lastly my friends bullied me into getting Factorio Space Age which I'm honestly not desperate to play, but I'll try it out if the gang all wants to play it.
I think it'll be a interesting experience to see what I post about next week!
I'm playing The Plucky Squire and while it is very charming I'm fairly lukewarm on it. Combat is really shallow, enemy variety is non-existent and the switch to 3d doesnt really do anything crazy. Its neat when you play the minigames but i feel like the novelty of those took away from the core gameplay. Like, the recent zelda gb remake was similarly charming and the combat was simple but i feel like the enemy variety and placement was much more thought out so it felt more fluid and fun.
Again though, it is a very cute game with great little characters and a couple of fun, memorable scenes. I think maybe a sequel would let them focus on stretching the mechanics rather than implementing the tech. Like, why does the book have to stay on the desk the whole time? Why not mid-bus ride or at the library and incorporate other book characters? I dunno, just feels a bit wasted. The Pedestrian did a really badass job of those 2d levels in a 3d environment type of thing.
Edit: also wtf is with the sword damage power up? It definitely doesnt do anything because the same enemies from the start of the game take the same amount of hits. Idgi
I had some extra spare time over the past week, so I went looking around at some more mods for Diablo 2 and found another one I really liked, called Merciless.
This one attempts to rework the game into a slower, more difficult experience by completely transforming how you go about getting better gear. Shops don't buy things for more than 1 gold piece, and don't sell new gear as you go along. You have to use what you find, and utilize a bunch of new options to upgrade/change those pieces as you move along. Gems are primarily used to change rarity/reroll affixes, and jewels can be unsocketed for use with multiple gear pieces. Skills have been reworked a bit, and there's been some changes to how some of the weapons work. I think the modder was successful in what they were trying to do - it makes D2 feel like something from an earlier period, as if it came out sometime in the early 90's. It's especially good when playing a hardcore/ironman character, because the new setup feels much closer to a more traditional roguelike game. The drop rates were not touched, so in playing through it really drives home how well that system was put together, imo. Overall I've really enjoyed playing this one, because I feel like it makes me pay better attention to every piece I find, and make more deliberate choices about when to craft/what to craft. I've only gotten to Nightmare thus far, because a run in Normal actually took a good bit of time/was not as easy. Nightmare is a much bigger step up too. I'm excited to see how Hell goes. I'm not sure just yet whether I prefer it over the original/reimagined, but I can say for sure it's a very well done mod and I'll be following its updates for a while.
I also tried out another project called ReMoDDed that feels like having done the exact opposite of something like Merciless. Remodded feels like cranking everything up to 11 - tons of enemies, new enemies, more dungeons, new dungeons, new skills, crazy skills, tons and tons and tons of gear. It's not really a vision of the game I think works for me but I definitely see why some folks would like it. Within an hour I had a barbarian who could smash whole groups with big AoE attacks and summon a decked out barbarian companion to just completely overwhelm everything. Feels closer to a bullet hell style ARPG, just tons of stuff everywhere and you blast through super fast. I think it's one of those where it's really about the endgame, because Normal feels like a complete joke/halfway broken lol. My biggest gripe with it is that it does more class-only items, which means finding tons of stuff you can't use and what you do find, can't be given to a different character as you progress up to new stuff. You could trade to the same class of course, but I like playing as everybody/trading stuff between all the classes. There are a lot of new crafting options and things to enhance gear, that again seem best suited for when you're in Hell really building up the stuff you have. Since it goes really fast I'll probably see what that's like a bit, but overall I've enjoyed Merciless much much more.
I've been playing Balatro the last few days. Wish I could tag the person who mentioned it here on Tildes but they deleted their post so thank you to whoever gave me that final push to try it haha. I've put on about 10 hours in 2-3 days, which is a lot for me. It's a pretty addictive single-player game with luck and strategy being important. Definitely recommend people check it out!
I actually bought the game thinking I'd play it <2 hours and then refund it but after purchasing it at 11pm I only put it down at 2am haha. It helps that friends and I have been playing poker IRL recently for the last 2-3 months so that definitely helped me get into Balatro quicker. Still haven't won a run yet but have gotten upto Ante 7 so I hope my first win is coming soon.
EDIT: Of course, just a day after I post this I win 3 different runs haha.
I have been feeling very high anxiety this week. I've been playing the first God of War game with my recently created ROM library, but put it aside for my ultimate 'turn brain off' game: Pokemon.
Specifically I am starting all the way back at Pokemon Blue with the plan to play all the mainline games through to Scarlet/Violet. Its the ultimate low-stakes game series, though the early generations are more difficult then what is to follow (Before Special/Physical split, no auto XP share, requiring an HM slave, box limitations, and a million glitches). I am generally playing with x3 speed as I have played these games a million times before, but the one thing that is negative about this is missing the music. The game just hits harder, probably the nostalgia portions of my brain specifically, when the music plays.
I will also say that I super adore the art of the first two gens of Pokemon. I can't tell if it's that is simply a childhood thing or the aesthetic of such a low-res game. The style also feels different from how Pokemon are designed today, though it's hard to express why. There is just something less 'cute' about them and more 'strange creature', though inherently one style isn't better than an other (nor is this meant to say Pokemon aren't sometimes alien-looking today). Kind of before they 'refined' how Pokemon look through the generations.
I had similar plans to go through all the Pokemon generations a while ago (skipping remakes). I got through Red, Crystal, and Emerald using some QoL rom hacks that eliminate some of the pain points you mentioned, and started Platinum on my DS, but by that point the games had been so samey and the stories and characters are so bland that I was no longer really having fun so I stopped. May pick it back up some time, but probably not soon.
Any suggestions for romhacks that just do things like remove forced HMs, or split physical/special, XP share, etc? I'm not looking for new content, nor difficulty/nuzlocke changes. Basically vanilla + QOL improvements.
I used this Reddit post which lists mostly vanilla QoL hacks for all the generations to find the ones I ended up using.
Keeping in mind my actual experience with vanilla versions of the games is limited-to-none (so I can't really compare), here's the ones I picked:
edit to add--The reason I just went vanilla is because I'm not a fan of the thing where your first pokemon follows you around, and if I'm remembering right you still needed HM slaves so it didn't really add enough to make it worth it.
Thanks! This looks like a good place to start
First two gens are definitely a distinct "era" of art style. Less cutesy and cartoony, more naturally complex and conservatively colored.
I miss fat Pikachu.
After red and blue Pikachu feels over designed. Like Mikey Mouse popping up on screen.
Started my second Persona 5R run, it is nice seeing all those stuff you missed when replaying. Combat also flows better because I actually understand team synergy now.
Completed Hellblade II yesterday.
Visually, it's stunning. Probably the most photorealistic game I've played so far. More emphasis on story and walking this time - gameplay felt a bit lacking compared to Hellblade I. Also have to agree with another review I read that said the game rushed its ending in the final chapter.
I finally finished Watch Dogs 2 last week after having bought it 6 years ago. After a bit of a lull, I've finally gotten absorbed into another game: Red Dead Redemption. I am loving it so far, although having to make a campfire that ISN'T in a town, settlement, or occupied area just to fast travel is stupid. I'd prefer being able to go to the map and selecting a location and being able to fast travel.
I also don't see much of the story so far. I'm doing what seem like side quests as I wait for more of Bonnie's bullshit to open up. I hate her missions because most of them are dumb shit like herding cows or capturing horses. But the last mission with her had me rescuing her from a gang that tried hanging her. That was interesting, but I want to do more of the main story quests. Having a choice rather than doing what I think I have to with other characters (an old guy who scams people and a crazy guy named Irish) would make me feel better.
I'm still enjoying the game though.
Without spoiling anything, As far as story-driven games go, RDR2 may be the best to ever do it. Certainly the most immersive game world I've ever had the pleasure of "living" in.
It starts as a romanticized Western crime simulator and turns into something else entirely. It explores some deep themes and made me experience some profound feelings.
One last thing: RDR2 single player has, on top of the main campaign, about 200-300 hours of side content. A lot of it is obvious stuff like hunting and side missions with map markers. But then there's the deep side content. The deep side content is mostly scary and supernatural.
If you only plan on playing this game only one time, feel free to click the spoiler tag below. I'm not spoiling any main game or important stuff. I'm just giving you a super condensed and simplified look into the type of deep side content I mean. The stuff the game won't ever show you if you don't know to go looking. So maybe this could give you an idea of what you want to experience on your playthrough beyond the main story. If you could see yourself playing twice, then just do all story for your first playthrough and do all the side stuff (use an online guide to get a list going because there's a LOT) on your second playthrough. If you do too much of this on your first playthrough, you'll forget what's even happening in the story.
Click to view the hidden text
There is a very hidden vampire in Saint Denis. Yes, you'll need an online guide.
There is a ghost train that only comes at a certain time and in certain weather.
You can manipulate the weather to create a never-ending thunderstorm. Great for photo mode.
There are aliens.
You can collect rare hats, but only from specific NPCs and locations at specific times. They'll stay in your wardrobe.
There are rare horses that you can only get at specific times and places.
There are secret talismans the game never hints at. Time/location/mission specific.
There are a ton of super creepy encounters that are never given a map marker. They're hidden everywhere.
You can hunt a certain animal to extinction.
Speaking of hunting, filling out the compendium is totally addicting. You have to observe, kill, and then skin each one.
Hidden lore. People have connected a lot of one-off, random NPC interactions with items/notes to figure out some pretty obscure details. Usually spooky or unsettling.
Ghosts. Several.
Bigfoot! Sort of.
Witches.
Rare camp conversations. Spending enough time in camp, performing certain actions or making certain choices at specific times can trigger extremely rare dialogues with the gang at camp. This applies to a lot of NPCs actually. Oh, and camp songs too. Worth hearing as many as you can if you are feeling immersed in the world.
Again, this barely scratches the surface. These are just some of the ones that come to mind. I spent 400 hours playing that game during COVID and there is still stuff I didn't do or find. My wife actually watched me play a lot of that time, and she doesn't particularly care for games. She says she wishes every game was like RDR2.
I'm playing the first game...
Well, my reply certainly becomes funnier knowing that information. Enjoy!
Still very casually playing Trackmania aiming for Silver medals on each TOD. Feels like I'm lacking skills on ice and with drifting, but I`m slowly learning it, judging by the fact that its become more easy to get silver on next tracks.
Tried Neva (I had really-really high hopes for it, because GRIS).
Citing announcement:
And I really really don't love it.
Rant: I definitely have too much hopes that Neva is a GRIS-2
For me Neva is shallow, with boring gameplay elements scattered without any logic, with shallow story, shallow bonding with Neva, second-hand fights and too repetitive scenes. Reviews on Steam is generally positive, so, thats probably just my personal opinion.Still slowly playing Dave the Diver from time to time and have plans to start again Stardew Valley.
Also on Android playing Idle Tale, grinding for next prestige is slow, but I love it.
Besides grinding my way through different stakes in Balatro, I recently went back to Rimworld for my yearly-ish weeklong session where I play nothing but Rimworld for a bit until it gets too tedious and I drop it for another year or so. Great game, but I still haven't cracked how to make it more automated and hands-off as the game progresses. Instead I find it requires more and more of me babysitting my pawns to make things flow how I want them to flow. And eventually it gets to a point where I'm not having as much fun as I was, so I restart a world, tell myself I'm going to keep things small this time and not expand too quickly.... and then find myself in the same situation some 5-10 hours later.
I've been way more sucked into this Destiny 2 season than I thought I would. The new dungeon is fantastic, even on repeat runs, and I'm still having a lot of fun with seasonal activities. I think it helped that I switched mains from warlock to titan, so I'm able to explore a lot of new builds that I haven't played before. I have over 1,000 hours on warlock, so I've pretty much played that class to death, ha.
Thanks @Randomise for mentioning Halls of Torment in the prior thread! I picked it up and it's a fun time waster! At $5, it's well worth it. I love the visuals and the gameplay is neat, I like that there's an armor system to give you additional perks, it does indeed feel very diablo-esque (gameplay is very different, though).
I did pick up UFO 50, but I haven't started it yet. I may not start it for a bit since I'm still on Destiny and Black Ops 6 comes out this week, which I'm incredibly excited for! I have Friday off from work and my usual CoD launch snack of Dr Pepper and sour gummy worms, which I can only do about once a year anyways, ha.
I just reinstalled Chivalry 2 recently. To sum it up, it's kind of like a medieval version of Battlefield or SW Battlefront. You fight other players with swords, axes, bows, etc. on a relatively big map. I last played maybe a year or two ago, but I've never been a real devoted player. On one hand, there are ongoing player complaints about monetization, lack of significant updates/bugfixes, and probably other stuff that I haven't noticed. On the other hand, it's uniquely satisfying to play.
The combat is goofy, can be janky, but is also deep and sandboxy. Someone on the casual side like me will never run out of weapons/techniques to try and learn.
But additionally there's something about the online play that reminds me of the old internet. There is a server browser for one. You can win and lose, but the stakes never feel that high. A lot of players don't seem to care that much about winning as much as having fun fights and getting into hijinks. There is off-topic text chat during the battle that can be toxic but isn't always.
A lot of contemporary online games feel impersonal and so culturally focused on meta-chasing/winning that fun is like an optional side effect. Chivalry is a game to hang out and mess around in, and there's something nice about that.
This week we played Terminus: Zombie Survivors for our podcast on roguelike games.
One of my cohosts LOVED this game. I think the rest of us were mildly positive on it for different reasons, but he is very drawn to the zombie themed open world survival horror base building genre. For me, the complete opposite.
One aspect of Terminus I liked was that there are multiple victory conditions, so I was always focused on just bee-lining straight to the end, which was fun enough.
It feels like there's a lot of potential with Terminus and that future content updates will add a lot. Something to keep an eye on over time for sure.
Midnight Fight Express
Take a top-down beat-'em-up with decent mechanics. Add a skill tree where you gain a skill point after every level for a sense of customization and progress until the tree is maxed out after finishing the game. Mix in a typical plot about the main character being guided by a drone into going after underworld figures with bits of humor sprinkled in and finish with a ton of optional challenges for replay value.
Now ruin the entire recipe with hitscan guns and the occasional instakill in a game with zero health recovery. All they had to do was not do that or make the bullets a projectile or even just add more warnings on gun enemies to make them noticeable. Instead, it's a lot of unavoidable chip damage and the solution against gun enemies is to eliminate one and take their gun to shoot the other gun enemies. In a beat-'em-up. I dunno, the game isn't bad, but this is a pretty big sticking point for the entire thing and it's hard to look at it favorably for it.
TOEM
It has the vibes of an "explore and help people out" game with a photography focus, but I don't think that's quite accurate which is making me biased when I was thinking it'd be more A Short Hike. Instead of being open world, it's split into regions and rooms within those regions which lead to a much different feel on account of the backtracking and riddle solving in order to get places instead of wandering wherever. This region splitting also makes it feel like disconnected levels rather than an actual built up world since there are few characters that actually travel between them. In addition, the quest system shows up as a checklist with the total quests for the area and the amount needed to head to the next region which makes the vibe more about 100% completion and talking to quest givers rather than leisure exploration. Certain quests also reward gear or new locations that is necessary to progress in the zone so you're tough out of luck if you can't solve it; case in point, I've beaten the game, but still don't have access to the 2nd half of the second zone because I can't find the last spinely brother who went somewhere warm apparently.
Again, it's not bad, I did get a few hours of chill gameplay (with the occasional frustration over quest hints), but I went in with the wrong expectations, kinda like how my mom used to tell kid me that durian tastes like ice cream and I refused to eat it for quite a few years because of that superficial comparison.
Got into OpenTTD after a year of not playing, and after looking at some tutorials to better manage freight and passenger lines (one-way rails are a boon), I've fell in love with the game. I've been working with some more complex Industry mods like FIRS and they really do feel extremely worthwhile and satisfying to play once you get the hang of them. Not a huge fan of the stock music and graphics so I switched them out with the original game's music.
TTD as a whole was just ahead of it's time - not many games from that era dealt with logistics in a very in-depth and real way, minus A-train. Obviously base TTD / OpenTTD has a very basic supply chain to follow, with the most complex one being one for factories. Mods like FIRS add extraneous cargo like supplies which you must deliver to guarantee that production lines don't go stale - refineries don't produce goods, they produce chemicals which must be delivered to other supply chains. And that doesn't even go into the supply chains to produce food, which requires packaging (which is again, generated from similar factories which require chemicals or lumber). Point being, the game can be very simple just like the original, or get very complex.
Most of the fun comes from linking each industry up and finding the most effective way to generate goods or food, sometimes trains aren't always the answer due to being unweildly - trucks are oftentimes more simple to maintain but very low in cargo count. Ships are massive cash crops, but only work for carrying bulk cargoes - planes are a fast way to deliver people and mail, but only that.
I eventually want to get into this one. I keep jumping in and making attempts to figure it out, but then start feeling the call of Transport Fever instead, mostly just because I like the first person camera stuff you can do in it and because I already know what I'm doing.
But OpenTTD is always installed on every computer I have and especially my low power Surface Go 2, because I know it'll run. I'm secretly hoping that someday I get stranded somewhere with just my Surface and OpenTTD installed, because then I'll have no reason not to figure it out.
It's actually very simple to get into to be honest, granted you're playing the base game and not the expansive Industry mods. Just watch this to understand signaling and always make sure vehicles only leave with a full load to ensure you get money.
I was always into old-fashioned isometric stuff so openTTD scratches a specific itch, much like simcity.
I'm continuing my Morrowind / OpenMW run. I'm around 40 hours in and it still feels like it did back in the days - I'm almost nobody, I haven't accomplished much, I haven't seen almost anything from the world etc. It is so big, alien and unique and even though I know quite a lot about it, it still feels like I know nothing.
I love this game. I loved Oblivion (the next one in series for the youngsters reading this) when it came out and later found out its drawbacks and what it lacks in comparison with Morrowind. I loved Skyrim when it came out as wel but I looked through it quite fast and see all the drawbacks it has over Oblivion and Morrowind. I never came back to Skyrim, I came back to Oblivion many times and I keep coming back to Morrowind all the time.
I could talk about Morrowind all day, but I will make it short - if you don't know Morrowind and want to try it out, fee free to do so. Be ready for very rough ride though, there are many things that are chance based - although there are mathematical formulas making it precise calculation, you percieve it as failing to do action (hit enemy, unlock door, cast spell...); you walk SLOW and if you run, you are fatigued thus lowering all of the chances; there is no fast travel (click on map and be there) but there are paid fast travel options between some places and some limited teleportation available. It is very different game to ones we know from modern era and you should know that before you try it. Or maybe don't even try? It's up to you.
The sheer raw passion and original writing and art direction in Morrowind is staggering. The difference is night and day to modern Bethesda games.
I mean sure Michael Kirkright was probably smoking some strong stuff while raving about slaver wizards living in giant mushrooms, but the end result was really a modern classic.
You've got to go hunting, but Indies today still do manage to capture the same charm. I'm phone posting right now so I've not got anything to hand, but I'm sure there was a really promising looking game called Monomyth for example.
I'm glad you're enjoying Morrowind in TYOOL 2024. I miss it dearly!
Well, we probably know what he was on, don't we? It's right there in the game - Skooma! You wouldn't probably be able to release such a game today, I mean slavers, drugs, racism... But it is part of the game world and it is just a game! We can shoot people in GTA but themes from Morrowind won't probably get greenlit anymore. And the hardcore mechanics wouln't get big fanbase today as well. I'm glad I got my hands on this game. It is weird in all the ways, but that's what I like about it. I play Morrowind on and off all the time since I got it in my hands, this is more than 20 years already.
You could absolutely release a game with that type of content these days, it's just that big AAA studios (which Bethesda now is) are more risk-averse than ever, because all they care about is making the most money possible by appealing to the broadest possible base of consumers. This unfortunately goes beyond themes like this and even into gameplay, which is why games from AAA studios are more or less always extremely safe and have absolutely nothing experimental.
This is so true. And it is also why I don't buy games from big studios that much anymore. They are just too bland, not many big games go deep enough. There are exceltions, of course. But there are also so much small(er) or indie games that are worth the time and money...
Bopl Battle and Factorio: Space Age.
Bopl Battle was a game my son asked for after seeing someone talk about it on YouTube. I was suspicious of that but it is pretty decent. Works on Linux, supports couch/shared screen multiplayer, and rounds are short so it's approachable. It's just surprisingly good.
Space Age. I haven't gotten to space yet because you have to start a new play-through. I was just starting a new play through when Space Age dropped so I ditched that started on the DLC instead.