What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide:
I bought this near where it came out and had a lot of fun playing with my friends, but as happens so often with games like this, they got distracted by the next shiny thing before barely scratching the surface of the game. I recently started playing it again, and I really like it, with a few caveats.

1. Class differentiation: this is an issue I had with both vermintide games too. Every class has a primary weapon (Melee weapon) and a secondary weapon (ranged weapon, almost always a gun). There are differences in the classes, they have different talents, an active ability that they can use, and they're different sizes, but they all basically play the same. The differences don't become hugely apparent until you have a lot of hours in the game. The talents are subtle, and there are just so many of them that it's hard to tell wtf is going on and why you're doing so much or so little damage. A lot of these talents are auras that you have a very tough time telling where they're coming from.

The classes all pretty much look the same too, except for the ogryn. They're just... Guys, and there are so many cosmetics that it's hard to tell what class is what.

2. Systems/currency/etc: This is a problem with basically every live service game, so I'm not singling out this one. There are just so many currencies in the game. There are "ordo dockets" which is the basic currency, there are "aquilas" which are the real money currency, there are "ingots", which are a special challenge currency. There's plasteel, which is used for upgrading weapons in some way, there's diamondite, which is also used for upgrading weapons. There's probably others I'm forgetting, but engaging with this kind of stuff is just exhausting to me. It reminds me of credit card churning where people spend all this time researching transfer deals and stuff, and that kind of thing really just turns me off and feels like work. I know that they do this because these types of games are intended to be fueled by cosmetic purchases on an ongoing basis, but to me, at this point, its to the detriment of the actual game. I wish devs just had one currency if the game needs it, and then they had cosmetic items available to purchase with dollars/euros/whatever your local currency is outright. Its to the point that when I hear the newest games made up currencies it makes me feel second hand embarrassment. "Collect more Eldritch Shards to get this cloak" or whatever just makes me groan now.

That said, the gunplay feels really good with most guns. The melee combat feels satisfying, and I'm bad at it, but I know there's a lot of hidden depth with it, and good god there's a lot of stats to look at if you really want to min/max your character (I don't).

The voice acting is incredible and the writing is generally very good, although I will admit to not actually paying attention to any of the overall story. The dynamic inter character banter has always been the best part of the writing of left 4 dead-like games anyway, and I've never really cared to engage with the overall stories much anyway.

I've been playing Project Zomboid with a ton of mods, and having a mostly good time. But looking for new mods has become a slog. AI has come for game modding in a terrible way. People turn cool ideas into mods, and then put them out for the public to use seemingly without ever having actually booted up the game with their own mod installed or doing the smallest bit of QA on the output. It used to be that a big mod was one that someone had been carefully growing and tending for months or years, showing a commensurate care about and cohesive vision for the game. But now the quality signal between size and effort has been broken and I'm wading through dozens of vibe coded cool ideas to find anything that comes from a person with something interesting and cohesive to say.

Like, a mod with a whole additional level of quests and scavenging, searching for arcane relics and strange beasts? That sounds amazing, if a tonal shift from the base game. But when the 3d models are thirty times larger than anything else, the equipment cannot actually be equipped, and the five new skills are entirely unbalanced... why did you put this out in this state? It feels like the person who asked AI to create it in the first place now wants other people to do their basic testing to ensure the mod is usable. Sure, being the idea guy is fun, but that's only the first 5%. It's unreasonable to outsource all of the rest of the process to AI and other people.

Still on Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Send help. Lord knows if I'll ever find myself finished