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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.
Have you played a game called Jusant? Your description of this reminds me quite a bit of that, I'd be curious how they compare. The main thing I was mildly disappointed about with Jusant was that it was very much on-rails, with just a few missable side areas you could explore to get bits of lore but you're pretty much locked into one path up.
Might try that after I lose interest in Palworld.
The past few weeks I've been spending the time to replace Windows 11 with Batocera linux on a Beelink mini PC that I have hooked up to my good TV, load it up with roms, and scrape metadata and images for the whole shebang to make it pretty. The last task was figuring out how to get my Sinden lightgun working (which really just involved figuring out which firmware version I needed to flash it with, after which it was just plug-and-play--I don't know who's responsible for adding that capability to Batocera but they are a true hero).This weekend was the first weekend where I'm completely done with all the tedious setup and could actually enjoy it, but I made the mistake of introducing my kid to Duck Hunt and he basically monopolized it the whole time. Still it was pretty fun watching him have a blast with a game that I grew up with, so it was all worth it. He'll probably be back to suckling from the teat of YouTube next weekend so I'll be able to really get down to business (first things I plan on tackling are the old Zelda games I skipped over as a kid--the Oracle games on GBC and Minish Cap on GBA).
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (single player FPS on Nintendo Switch)... It's fun, I play on almost easiest difficulty. Killing nazis is fun. I usually start every mission going for stealth but then just end up blasting nazis anyway I can. It's fun! I start a new save with the intention of finally getting everything, but we'll see. So far it's been fun killing nazis ;)
But is it fun? ;)
Yes! Fun is exactly what it is, thanks for asking ;)
Mewgenics: I'm a fan, but it's a brutal game. I just had all my best veterans wiped out by Guillotina in a fight I wasn't prepared for. I'm playing without looking up any strategy threads or information on the wiki; I'm sort of tired of ruining the exploration aspect of games by having all the information front and center all the time. It definitely adds to the difficulty, though. What a wild departure from Binding, though. I really appreciate the breeding/cat stable aspect of the game, rather than having a set of characters to choose from. It's adding a level of individuality to save files that I think a lot of roguelites are missing.
Melvor Idle: I decided to get back into it after a long break, starting an Ancient Relics mode. This is by far my favorite mode in the game - I can barely bother to look at my Hardcore file, and I don't even open my Standard file. Ancient Relics is just that much more of a puzzle with some tough RNG. For example, right now, I've had some really tough skill cap choices to make, so my Runecrafting is well below where it should be, as is my Mining, so I'm problem solving how to overcome the Golem Territory dungeon without the right robes, ultimately landing on melee, but needing to do Cartography waaaaaaay out of ideal order so I can get some mithril ore so I can pump out a bunch of mithril battleaxes so I can pump out a reasonable number of minotaur summoning tablets so I can stand a chance in the barrier dungeons. I just love this stupid game so much.
Rocket League: Got my champ matches complete for end of season rewards. I've been going back and forth between Snow Day and Rumble. I find myself having less and less patient with the player base, so I tend to only play two games at a time before I turn it off and switch to something less horrible.
This feels like an act of defiance, an important one!
Some of us just need to fail on our own rather than succeed with help.
Destiny 2
I talked about starting this out last week. My thoughts are slightly more refined now that I've had more time to play it.
In general, I trend towards smaller indie games, so it's rare that I play something as big budget as this. The game is dripping with dollar signs. The graphics are beautiful. The environmental design is top notch. The sound design is excellent. The animations are fluid. The gunplay feels amazing. The color and lighting are striking. It's got this very polished, very premium feel that is eminently satisfying.
The game feels like what Borderlands would be if it took itself seriously. It's got big contiguous areas with fight set pieces and bosses and lots of different guns that randomly drop for you. It's repetitive, but the core shooting play is enjoyable so I don't mind the repetition that much.
It's, of course, also an MMO, and I'm doing my best to ignore that and trying to play it as a single player campaign that other people happen to be in. I will admit that I do like joining in the random public events that are on rotation, but I like these specifically because they're drop-in and non-committal. I'm less fond of the forced matchmaking squad missions that you can't play solo, but thankfully these are few and far between.
Last week I talked about being baffled because new player onboarding is terrible. I'm less baffled now, but that's basically because I do a lot of looking things up while I'm playing, essentially giving myself my own tutorials as I go. To its credit, the game does explain some mechanics to you, but it's not great. There's still a lot I don't know though. Like, I still have no idea why all gear is at 300 for me and doesn't change. I'm just kind of rolling with it in hopes that eventually it'll make sense or I'll unlock something higher.
Now, if the game isn't great at onboarding you to its mechanics, it's absolutely terrible at doing it narratively. Early on I got a cutscene that seemed to be a rapid summary of the game's major plot points. It had all these seemingly "big" moments that I had absolutely no context for. I then learned that, if you travel to different planets, you get cutscenes for the expansion associated with those planets. So, in my early game "hmmm, let's go here and see what it's like" experimentation I managed to ruin pretty much ANY potential narrative payoff by hitting expansions out of order.
This is to say nothing of the fact that you literally can't play the beginning of the game anymore, so it's nearly impossible for me to get invested in its world and lore because its exposition has been completely excised.
It's a shame, because, as previously mentioned, the game's polish and quality are quite high. The cutscenes I've watched (well, the ones that aren't a series of tiny clips frankensteined together into a summary reel) are really quite good. Beautiful art direction. Striking imagery. Good voice acting. Cool sci-fi concepts. I would have loved to be able to start from the beginning and work my way through.
I intended to start with the Shadowkeep campaign, which is the oldest one that's still available, but in attempting to do this, I think I somehow ended up playing the closing mission of the previous one, Forsaken. I met a fast-talking, Deadpool-ish character named Cayde who was in the middle of some big prison riot, played through the mission, and quickly realized that it was definitely the end of a story arc.
It was very cool, but it was also very disorienting to essentially play only the final mission of a campaign. I was finally able to actually start Shadowkeep, but figuring out how to do this took me way too long. I really shouldn't have to be searching for online tutorials about how to start the game off, but Destiny 2 is, uh, rather averse to letting you play old content. Like, it's there in the game (well, some of it š), but it's kind of buried and the game does its best to push you towards its current expansions. At one point the game just straight up dumped me into the opening mission of the most recent Renegades campaign and I had to manually exit out from it.
If the core gameplay weren't so good, I probably wouldn't put up with this nonsense, but I really do enjoy the gunplay. Fights are fun. They're often quite intense. I'll beat a boss only to feel every muscle in my body fully relax at the end -- I hadn't realized how tense I was until it was over.
I also love the setting. I'm a sucker for sci-fi, so planets and space and alien ruins are absolutely my jam.
This is a admittedly a weird comparison to make, but the game reminds me of my car (a Chevy Bolt).
I utterly love my car. It drives amazingly. I genuinely have zero complaints about it. But, I kind of hate Chevy. They push OnStar relentlessly and sell my driving data and are just generally sort of an uncomfortable, partially predatory umbrella under which my amazing actual vehicle sits. Destiny 2 feels a lot like that: an amazing game underneath the partially predatory umbrella of a live-service, free-to-play MMO.
Inspired by this post, I decided to play Jesus Christ RPG from my backlog. I have to say: the most surprising thing about it is that it is almost entirely inoffensive, and suitable for the faithful and non-faithful alike. And then I would have to say: the second most surprising thing about it is that this game follows hundreds of years of Christian symbolism, emphasizing its legitimacy as a bonafide entry into Christian art.
This game smartly adapts the New Testament by using the vocabulary of RPG mechanics. Jesus is a magic user who can perform miracles, you know the thing. More than that, instead of having to write things out, Jesus Christ RPG uses Christian symbols that refer to other Bible stories and meaning. For example, Mary Magdalene uses a jug for a weapon, while Judas uses a whip/rope; Simon Peter has a special ability called "Rooster", while Judas can call "Kiss" during battle that summons Roman soldiers, as only he can.
It's a short game made in RPG Maker with pop culture references, so let's not call this the Second Coming. But, it's quite amazing how well integrated the Bible fits into a video game, way better than Wisdom Tree or even I Am Jesus Christ* as mentioned in the post in the beginning.
And, thanks to @aphoenix, I've been playing A Plague Tale: Requiem, a sublime work that artfully balances game and story for a gut-wrenching emotional take on the acceptance of grief. It's a shame this got overshadowed by the eventual Game-of-the-Year winner God of War Ragnarok, but with Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 taking the prize last year and Quebecois studios miles ahead of their contemporaries in Canada, APT:R-maker Asobo Studios is the latest example to show how masterful the French are at making video games.
The worst thing I can say about this game is that my Steam Deck can't handle it (so the fault must be elsewhere), and that this game sorely needs a Mercenaries-type mini-game, but that would detract from the narrative, which does something that only video games can do, putting this in the realm of unique examples like Bioshock, Braid, and The Stanley Parable.
End Spoilers: Don't read unless you've finished this game
Amici loves her brother so much that she won't stop fighting for him, against all odds and even when her own brother requests it. So to finish the game, Amici must essentially stop being herself; as the player must do the same, we're tasked with rejecting the conditioning we've built up in the game. After requiring us to beat a room full of enemies throughout the game, the final "boss" does the same to us, and so, on instinct, we start fighting, but we can't win.As the game shows us, to overcome grief, we need to stop fighting, betray our instincts, be everything that we're not.
Recently played Project Zomboid for our podcast on roguelike/lite games
Yes, I know PZ isnāt a roguelike or really marketed as one. But the Zomboid community had some good argument in favor of inclusion. The map is static, but the stuff in the map is sufficiently random and thereās so much run to run variance that if you squint hard enough it couldāve considered.
One of my cohosts LOVES the game and desperately wanted to talk about it on the podcast. I think he has close to 200 hours in it now lol. Iām not into zombie survival games at all, and PZ is insanely popular so it felt like a nice change of pace for me to be the negative Nancy for once.
I can see why folks who like early access open world zombie survival crafting games would like this one. YouTube is certainly overflowing with wild content about PZ specifically. The crafting system is very in depth, avoiding zombies is stressful and tense.
I just wish there was a more compelling goal to the game than āsurvive as long as possibleā which, to me, ultimately felt like it boiled down to just a farming/yardwork simulator that happened to have zombies in it.
Yeah, with any sort of sandbox game the goal is what you make of it, which is I think one of the major points of difference between them and roguelikes. They can both have a significant degree of randomness to them, but the goals are very differently defined.
Finally got around to Mario Odyssey. What a game. The music, the homages to past games, the attention to detail in everything. There are so many things to do. 10/10.
Hear, hear! Itās the ultimate example of how to design a game that can be enjoyed by the very young but also scales all the way up to challenge serious veteran gamers. Itās masterful in the way it reveals its depth without overwhelming those who arenāt ready for it.
I recently moved and in doing so, moved my Switch and a new TV there. I thought I would reinstall Monster Train 2 on my Switch (I only played PC). Boy, I'm having a blast just replaying through it all.
I think the game is absolutely fantastic and would put it ahead of Slay the Spire based purely on enjoyment. I think StS is the more polished one but MT2 is the better game. I used to get easily stuck at Covenant 4-5 but I really felt like I "unlocked" some strategy that made it way easier to beat at least Seraph on higher covenants. Now, I regularly find myself going deep into the runs at Covenant 10, with any combination of setups. Mind you, I only play random (random first, second clan and random pyre). I'm slowly unlocking everything with the fresh start on my Switch and it's really a blast just executing a perfect strategy.
I feel like I'm kinda stuck in StS... I'm at A20 on all characters but I only win maybe 1 out of 50 runs or something like that. It's still fun to do runs and go deep into act 2 or 3, but I never feel like I can materialize a win out of it. And every win feel like luck, whereas every win in MT2 feel like deserved.
Anyways, it's been maybe 4-5 years since I've found another game that I really liked beside these two (Monster Train 1 before). I tried some other deckbuilder roguelikes or just other roguelikes and they are the only two games that I feel I still want to play again and again, all others, after some time, I felt like "meh". At least there will be a StS 2 soon so there's that.
Hell yeah, random everything on Monster Train is the way to go. Never know what you're going to get and what your deck will end up looking like.
Are you looking for more suggestions of roguelike deckbuilders or not really? If not, that's totally cool, but you may want to check out a few roguelike dice-builders if you haven't already. They scratch a similar itch for me to deckbuilders like MT and StS (though I agree that not much comes close to those two in terms of quality and staying power).
Roguelike dice builders sound interesting! Could you share some suggestions?
Sure!
My two favorites are Slice & Dice and Dicey Dungeons.
Then I have Dicefolk and Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles on my wishlist, so I can't comment too much on them other than that they look interesting to me.
Slice & Dice and Astrea both have demos, so you could always check em out first to see if you like them. The Slice & Dice one in particular is basically just the whole game minus some missing features, so I played the crap out of that before actually deciding to get the game, lol.
And besides those dice games, figured I would mention a deckbuilder or two: Dancing Duelists which is by the same team who made Slay the Spire. Not as deep but free and fun. And then Balatro is the other I figured I'd mention in case you haven't gotten around to trying it. In my opinion it's the only deckbuilder that rivals MT and StS in terms of quality. And I've been playing a lot of Ring of Pain recently and have been surprised by how much it's hooking me. But it's no Balatro/MT/StS.
I've tried both Slice and Dice and Dicey Dungeons, they don't really scratch the itch like StS and MT do.
I really enjoyed S&D for a good while, but I thought some classes were way better than other ones and it kinda threw the balance off. I also didn't like that it was too RNG heavy. It felt very good to hit some insane dice rolls, but it felt frustrating when it didn't. I thought Dicey dungeons was fine but didn't offer the same depth as the others so I dropped it fairly quickly.
I'll try the other two you mentioned!
Oh, and I did enjoy Balatro too but I feel like some runs are just limited too much by RNG. You can play "optimally" and still hit subpar jokers in your shops and it just sucks. Whereas sometimes you hit insane early jokers and the run feels awesome. I guess I just dislike strategy being tied too much on RNG.
I still try it from time to time because I know how loved it is, but it hasn't really clicked for me.
Last night I finished Dragon Age: Inquisition -- shout-out to whoever it was who told me not to waste my time in the Hinterlands, you definitely saved my ass from my self. But man, after three games: I've never seen so many cool, interesting narratives in a compelling world just get completely squandered by baffling gameplay choices. I was not a fan of Origins's tactics system, but at least that was a unique choice. It didn't work for me, but I know that the people who loved it really loved it. By the third game, combat is completly unrecognizable. Their approach to just hold down left mouse and then spam abilities when your stamina recovers is... Odd.
Now that I'm through all the Dragon Age games I own, I think I can move on from the series. I don't feel any pull to play the new one, which from what I understand even watered down the world which was the only thing interesting about the games by this point. Disappointing.
Well, now that I've finished my big game, I'm turning to smaller ones for palette cleansers. I'm halfway through Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania, a few levels into Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3+4, and I've got these games installed and ready for me to dip my toes in as I finish the others up:
Some great games you've listed. I too got lost in the vastness of the Hinterlands and eventually got bored of the game only to look up some info online and see that the number one advice for the game is to leave the fucking Hinterlands, lol.
Super Monkey Ball, THPS, Mad Max, and Lego Star Wars are all pretty chill games so they should definitely work as palette cleansers. I'm sure the others do too, I'm just not as familiar with them.
I've just hit 36 hours played on my Fallout 4 save, in the Magnum Opus modlist... It's really fun, though my session tonight got interrupted by me dying and my last save being close to 30 minutes back
I'm playing Trails Beyond the Horizon. I'd say its prologue and Chapter 1 is not good, especially that they want me to patrol all of Edith several times. I'd say the story start picking up at Rean/Kevin's route at the end of Chapter 2 and then it only get more interesting from there.
I'm in the process of playing all the "Trails" games (currently playing Trails from Zero, but I've played Cold Steel 1 and part of CS2, out of order) and for sure some of the starts are a bit boring and slow.
Skyrim Immersive& Adult
It's pretty breathtakingly good. Some graphics overhauls, gameplay tweaks, and UI enhancements. Sound design has been altered. I need to play more.
Iām a huge Skyrim fan but Iāve always been limited by PlayStation as my platform of choice. Sony only permits a tiny set of hamstrung mods to be available to me, so Iām in the dark about whatās happening in that scene these days.
I just looked up the Immersive mods, those look pretty ambitious. Iād love to hear some more detailed highlights and a firsthand review, if youāre up for sharing?
I typed up a whole thing, but lost it! Oh well.
Lockpicks:
Picking a lock in a Dwemer area: gears spin along next to the lockpick
Picking a lock of a box in a City area: a row of number dials similar to that of a briefcase rotate and spin as you adjust the lockpick
Etc: lockpick aesthetics are revamped to be more than just a static lockpick interface.
Doors:
When you activate a door and it simply opens and you enter, you're playing vanilla Skyrim. But with some of these mods, gears and bars sort of tumble a bit and you see them react to you activating the door. It's a small animation, but really adds to the effect that you pushed that door open yourself.
Weather:
Rain storms aren't like happening everyday, but they happen often enough and in downpours strong enough to make you almost blind to where you're going at night. There are also tiny artifacts in your view that make it seem like water is in your eye and moisture ran through something in the distance. Generally I have to really squint to see where I'm going in those rain storms and it really makes it a satisfying traversal experience.
Environment:
The trees and the brush seem to have been wholly remixed. Where there might have been drab and dreary lanes and hills full of Rocky mountain Stone in the vanilla game, there is a lot more colorful and lively greenery. Some trees are just more scattered, but some also take the shape of something like a Japanese cherry tree, which makes you feel like the ecology is actually that much more varied.
UI:
I never played Oblivion, I did play the remastered Oblivion for like a day. The menu feels a bit more attuned to Oblivion? I dunno. There's manilla backdrop and sorting is easier and it just feels a lot fresher and easier to filter/see.
The start menuā¢ is also refreshed, displaying red, green, and blue northern lights and stars similar to the skill trees menu -- opposed to a black screen and Dovahkiin logo -- and there is a song that replaces the Dovahkiin theme that is basically a cover sung by some Nordic duo (I think) and it's absolutely gorgeous.
The map you open (menu+down) is no longer a trite mix of white snowy mountains and white barren hills that feel dreadful and similar. The actual foliage of Skyrim seems to color coordinate with the map menu. So you're looking at lots more browns and greens in their respective territories and the mountains of snow remain the same. As well, location map markers on your map that you have not been to yet are Blizzard white, locations on your map that you have been to are darkened with bronze and black. Just a simple difference in UI like that communicates so much more ease on the eye!
Etc:
More gold in each wardrobe/end table/urn
Followers go past 5 (I haven't checked how many you can actually keep)
Books can be set to auto glow if you have not read them yet. You can adjust this even more to only have them glow if they're skill books. Note: sometimes I do wish I only had books glowing for me that increased my skills, but I've noticed that some books that I haven't read yet give me quest markers and I'd rather read an unnecessary book than miss a necessary one.
Adult:
You can enable wenches that will often travel between cities and hang out in the squares and taverns. There is a fledged out intercourse system that can flirt, hire, and/or seduce them, and switch between sex positions at a keys stroke. There is a hotkey system that can be used to set outfit presets or custom outfits that can be found online. Female body types that have been tweaked and mastered to be thick, thin, strong and bodacious in the modding community have been added and randomized throughout tamriel. Nearly everything has a mod configuration menu found under system settings that you can use to adjust to whatever preferences you have.
Many NPCs who are romancible have been outfitted with small but impactful quests to their backgrounds that result in romance interactions that can lead to its own naturally coursed marriage. (Spoiler: example, Ysolda asks you to track down a mammoth tusk owned by a khajit she was sleeping with - the khajit tells you he thinks she's using it to pleasure herself, and gives you permission to be her partner if you're interested.) It's all very "take it where you want it" and though it's horny coded, the roleplay of it all means you can walk right by it if you want.
In that vein, male NPCs generally look the same, but most female NPCs look gorgeous, or at least chad-ified (interpret that how you will).
I find myself most enamored with the smallest details, like looking at my hands coated in the flames spell as they crackle with fire, or seeing a storage backpack on the back of my armor (added mechanism that expands your inventory if you equip it) displaying scroll, soul gem, and a potion if i own them.
I clearly haven't exhausted the scope of where these mods have taken me and enhanced the vanilla Skyrim experience. There are over 500 mods that I am using in this collection and I feel like a lot of them have contributed to my lightning fast enjoyment without me even knowing they're there.
I may keep coming back to this comment, but overall: I'm using an RTX 2060 that I bought from a friend and there is little to no performance issue so far! Hope this kind of helps informs your perception of PC mods :)
Edit: forgot, there is a nemesis system that I'm not sure is legal but is there anyway: if you die in a dungeon, it may spawn you a quarter mile away and ask you to go back to retrieve your inventory while the dungeon enemy may have a few enhancements. Sometimes I just be reloading a save but I can see how satisfying this might be others.
(Another note: if you're traveling with followers, and they kill the enemy in the room that merked you within a certain time limit, you will respawn in the room with no consequences! So for example, if you died by a draugr and Lydia finished him off for you, you may be lucky enough for her to save you before having to reload/come back.)
And on that note, most dungeons have a final "boss" that have a big boss health bar that appears at the top of the screen. It's just... More satisfying. Makes you feel like you are more often dealing with a bigger threat, even if it's just a dragon that landed on you in the rift, or a vampire that led a bunch of vampire assistants.
Wow! Thanks for taking the time (twice, no less). This sounds pretty cool. I would love all the QoL improvements like the glowing books, map recolorations, boss health bars, and higher follower limit. The weather changes and nemesis system are very interesting. I donāt expect to take up PC gaming in the foreseeable future but itās great to see the Skyrim mod community is still alive and well after all these years. I continue to play with a pretty decent slate of Sony-approved mods on my PS5 and I still get a ton of enjoyment from that.
Absolutely, friend! Thanks for appreciating it haha!!
I too am simply bewitched by all the great mod content that is still maintained.
If anything, it worries me for elder scrolls 6! Like if Skyrim has the bones to make a game into whatever you want, then I hope sequel delivers something on par.
Purchased Diablo IV a few days ago and completed all of Act 1. Very good game, even despite the glaring performance issues. I heard a lot of complaints about the game's story and went in with low expectations, but what I've played has been surprisingly good. This feels like one of those titles where I'll enjoy it more when I get through the story and actually reach endgame.
On the subject of competitive multiplayer shooters, I installed both Highguard and Overwatch 2. I don't know whether this is due to me royally sucking at shooters or if the game has a genuine cheating problem, but my first and only multiplayer match in Highguard involved me waiting 10 mins in a 5v5 queue, dying in 2 to 3 shots in almost every skirmish whilst my gunfire does virtually no damage, then dying at the start of a raid, respawning next to the siege tower and immediately getting headshot with a sniper rifle within the same frame that I land. Genuine aimbot precision that made me ragequit and outright uninstall.
Overwatch 2 hasn't been that much better for me, and I genuinely think this time it is down to shoddy netcode. My last Stadium match (playing Zarya) I noticed I wasn't doing any damage to opponents with my beam cannon despite literally standing next to them with full energy firing my primary beam right into them.
I really want to like Sonic Lost World but I've only mustered the ability to play the game for 27 minutes since purchase. It is somehow both the slowest and worst-controlling Sonic game I've played. The controls are ass and incredibly unintuitive, the cutscenes look blurry like they were recorded in 480p, the user interface looks even kiddier than a Fisher Price toy, and I've so far not even gotten past Act 4 of the very first world. Not sure whether to tough it out or just uninstall and move on to Superstars, which I also semi-recently purchased.
Never understood those who say that D4's story sucks. Obviously it's not particularly deep and it just serves as an excuse to make us visit the whole map, but it's more than serviceable and there are interesting characters and events. In comparison, Diablo 2 was literally "try to catch the corrupted hero of the previous game", and Diablo 3's was so bad it was comical.
Anyway, Diablo 4 has a fine campaign. I'm personally not a fan of the endgame, as it feels a bit too "game-as-a-service-y" for my taste, but I always enjoy leveling up a character once in a while.
I think the story characters are nowhere near as compelling as the likes of Deckard Cain, Leah, Tyrael, Adria, Tal Rasha or any of the other characters from past main series titles.
The hardest hitting moment for me so far was actually
Spoilers:
Vigo's death. A mysterious knight shows up to help you out with the Act 1 final boss fight. After defeating it, the knight is revealed to be Vigo, stuffed inside a suit of pentient armour (with inward spikes more akin to an iron maiden) to repent for the previous bribe he took to let Neyrelle's mother through the gate. He bleeds out, but not before returning the trinket Vhenard used to bribe him.I have months of gaming at the time, and then my mood changes and right now my time is occupied by 3D printing and Rust... so I can't say much at the moment... Maybe more in a couple of months.
I play mostly single player games and when I finish them I usually do not replay them. As for the multiplayer games... I play now and then some co-op with my friends, like Satisfactory or the latest one was Star Rupture. I have to say that I lately dislike MMO games, but I fell in love with Warframe, especially I am fond of the gaming studio, DE and Warframe under the lead of Rebecca Ford is phenomenal. Really nice that in the year of 2026 not every gaming studio lives for all of your money.
What is your main in Warframe? Or are you literally just starting out?
And I agree with you that DE's whole thing of "let us earn your money" is really refreshing in the current climate for gaming in regards to monetization of games (especially for single player games).
And Space Mom is great.
I am just over 1400h into the game, and I would not say that I have a very specific main... I tend to get bored of one single Warframe, but I guess first more played frame was Khora, after the rework last year I went with Valkyr, now days I have Uriel. Beside that, I love to recreate builds that others make on YouTube and Twitch if I find them useful enough. Although I play Warframe since 2018, I am more of a casual player, I do not know every secret of the game and rarely play steel path - maybe I should do that more...
Fair enough. And the reworks for the frames are really good, especially for my main, Oberon. He was my main back in 2016 (before I took a break from the game for 9ish years and he still is), and I very rarely used any of his abilities besides his third ability. And after his rework, I am actually using his other abilities more often. And from what I had heard Vauban's is pretty good too,
to the point people want over 100 plat for his Prime version.I had tried Uriel in the Circuit when the current cycle had populated, and that had convinced me to actually finish gathering the mats for him and actually build him. Because I had so much fun of just flying around the map.
I am currently playing Minecraft. I rarely play singleplayer anymore and instead spend all my time either on Hypixel or 6b6t. This has been the routine since 2022. There are a multitude of very fun games, Sheep Wars, Housing and Disasters are my favourite. On 6b6t, an alternative to 2b2t which does not have a queue, I wander around and set forests on fire. I play Super smash Bros and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with my friends everyday.
I used to play a game called NaissanceE. It is one of the most unique games I have played. You are basically forced to wander a minimalistic mega-structure filled with a bunch of weird halls, stairs, puzzles and phenomena. Throughout the game the style is consistent but how this place manifests is not. I stopped playing it because I completed it and went to all the secret locations. Thought it is easy to get lost, I recommend playing it.
Expedition 33. I had just wrapped Divinity: Original Sin 2 and figured if I was going to pick up another game, it would probably be shorter than the first Divinity: Original Sin, so it made sense to go in that order...
I'm in the second act, and it surpasses expectations. It's full of beautiful and surreal environments, with an interesting and mysterious story. It reminds me heavily of Persona 5 and Dark Souls in terms of gameplay and level design, with some Final Fantasy in there as well.
I am not fond of the dodge mechanics, which are unforgiving even on the standard difficulty. (Rather than Story Mode, which nerfs damage taken but still has other disadvantages, I'd rather just have an option to remove dodging entirely.) I'm very much an MMO player when it comes to that sort of thing: a tell triggers an instinctive move to GTFO from an area. Waiting for a narrow window to actually happen, where pressing the button early means you've failed a rhythm game like challenge, is stressful and nearly physically impossible for me.
But so far the story is holding my attention, and I like seeing the environments and hearing the cool music. The fights feel really good, complaints about the accessibility of dodging aside, and it also adds rhythm game like QTE markers on spell casts (which I don't have a problem with), which is neat when it synchronizes with the fight music.
There's mods out there that broaden the dodging windows beyond the defaults in the game. I highly recommend them.
I play on PS5, so that's not really an option.
It's kind of odd that there's an accessibility setting to auto-QTE on attacks, which have wider windows, a consistent indicator and a single button instead of lots of variation, but not something for dodging.
Some tips that might help mitigate the dodge issue if you'd like:
If you return to the Stone Waves Cliffs after Act 1, there's a picto past where you fought the Lampmaster called Defensive Mode that burns 1 AP when hit to reduce damage by 30%. If you combine that with Energizing Pain from the same area, you take 30% less damage at no AP cost.
Maelle can be a pretty good tank with the Egide skill. If you combine that with the Duenum weapon and the above pictos, she'll tank single target hits for the whole party and give everyone else AP every time she gets hit.
Forgotten Battlefield notes
Egide does run into an issue where you can't permanently maintain it and defensive stance unless you get an extra turn. If you got the Exposing Attack picto from the gestral in the water zone, then Verso can use the weapon from the Forgotten Battlefield, Dualiso, to easily apply defenseless, allowing Maelle to chain Breaking Rules -> Egide every turn. The Benisim weapon from that location's merchant for Lune can also be quite good.
There are a variety of pictos available that boost healing skills, or apply a different type of buff if you apply a buff. If you explore, you can get to the point where healing skills provide tons of AP and several buffs.
Sciel's skill that instantly gives another turn to a party member is extremely useful for setting up combos.
The First Strike picto gets a bit weird if everyone has it. The first turn order is the order people were added to the party, so if you want to set a specific order, remove everyone but who you want to go first, then add party members in the order you'd like them to go. IIRC, everyone First Strike makes blasting enemies to initiate combat counterproductive; if you have high speed, you can potentially get two turns if you just run into enemies instead.
Burn is weird. You get diminishing returns for each stack, and the higher the defense stat of the character applying it, the lower the damage it deals. IIRC, the whole burn stack also seems to use the stats of the last person to apply it, so if you've got someone specialized in burn it can be counterproductive to have anyone else use it.
I didn't try this myself on my run, but I'm guessing you could get pretty far with a full glass cannon approach. You could even combine this with a more conventional approach by sending any extra party members in first as glass cannons to do as much damage as possible before your more sustainable main party comes in to mop up anything that survives.
If you've made a new friend
The train station Monoco's at has 3 exits; think of it as a Y where you come in from the bottom, and the story tells you to go left. If you go right, you can find the Frozen Hearts area. Everything there will kill you easily, but if you avoid fights you can run around and pick up an upgrade component or two that will allow you to level a weapon to 20.
If you've unlocked the ability for Esquie to break coral
If you do want to give parrying a try, there's a weapon in there that gives Maelle a shield for each successful parry that makes things much more forgiving, especially if you combine it with the picto that heals a bit on a parry.
If have any questions or want someone to pass on some information from the wiki sans spoilers, just let me know.
That all is very helpful, thanks! That pictos setup sounds very useful, and I'll have to investigate that. I also had no idea Burn worked that way...and I base my setup around Lune doing burn, lightning and occasionally popping Mayhem.
I have started doing more parries now that I realized how effective counter attacks can be, especially on enemies that end up playing more often than you.
My weapons are probably under-leveled too, since I have already met the character in question an am running in the level 12-15 range on most of them still.
You're welcome! I find it annoying how obtuse and sometimes counterintuitive the mechanics in the game can be. What's the difference between Lune's Hell skill's 'very high' damage and Elemental Genesis' 'extreme'? (Elemental Genesis does 24x a base attack, Hell does 10x baseline or 30x with appropriate stains. Fully charged Mayhem is 7.2x for context) Do modifiers stack additively or multiplicatively? (It depends) IIRC, burn only starts hitting the serious diminishing returns around 40 stacks, so probably no problems on that front yet, but something to keep in mind for later on. And if you ever want to know the actual numbers for anything just let me know; I got a mod that gives the details.
A good counter attack is the most satisfying thing in the game IMO, but in my own play through I mostly ended up eating dirt when I tried for them; between that and my going with a setup that pumped out AP, I stuck to dodges. After finishing though, I reconsidered things and made some builds that allowed the leeway to try for the fun option instead of the safer one.
Your weapons sound good for your point in the story I think. Normally, level 20 weapons are gated until much further along; Frozen Hearts is a way to sequence break if you've got a weapon with a build defining level 20 ability. Something to keep in your back pocket in case something catches your eye.
Starting at the end of last year, I've had access to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and so have been experimenting with different styles of games than I've played in the last decade. The first game I tried was Hollow Knight. The last Metroidvania-style game I played was one of the Castlevanias on SNES, so it's been a long time and took me a while to get into the game's rhythm, building "reflexes", and adapting to the mindset of "failure is learning". The art style originally drew me in, but the music and story were unexpectedly quite moving.
I started Elden Ring last week, my first Souls game. I'm 45 hours in and am just now leaving the first map area. Side quests and map filling/exploring I enjoy most in games and tend to leave main quests for last. This has worked against me like when I played Fallout 3 and accidentally skipped several steps in the main story by finding an area and NPC early, but is very rewarding in ER so far. I am dying a lot, but finally beat Crucible Knight so feeling pretty good!