13
votes
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.
About 100ish hours of play later, I finally got bored of Humankind (which is "free" with XBGP₄PC). It lacks a bit of polish, and there are still a few major issues in the late game (e.g. endgame strategic resource distribution is broken AF), but it was still quite good, and I absolutely love its core gameplay mechanics. However, once you can consistently beat the AI there unfortunately isn't all that much replay value yet, since the game is still a bit too new and lacking in strategic/thematic diversity. I will very likely be buying this game once some DLC comes out, or the mod scene has time to develop some total conversion mods, since it has a ton of potential and I can see it getting really good eventually.
Afterwards, I was still in the mood for a 4X/Grand Strategy game though, so I tried getting back into Civilization VI again... but quickly remembered why I dislike it so much; City placement is way too important in the early game, city/district management is incredibly labour intensive/tedious (especially in the mid-late game once you have multiple cities), and the game's overall pacing is absolutely horrible. So I installed the Take your Time mod, and that helped a lot with fixing the pacing issues (so you can actually get some use out of new units/Wonders/buildings before they become obsolete), but even with the mod the game still felt incredibly tedious, and after a short time I uninstalled it once again. I really need to stop buying the new DLC for this game in hopes it makes it more enjoyable for me, since at its core Civ6 is clearly not for me.
Even after that I still wasn't done with 4X/GS yet though, so I went hunting for another to play, and stumbled upon some videos of a brand new one: Old World, which just came out of Early Access, and was made by the lead designer of Civ 3 & 4. It looked really interesting so I immediately bought it (despite it being an EPIC exclusive), and at ~20 hours in it's really awesome so far! It feels like the perfect marriage of Civ 6 and Crusader Kings.
Like in CK you play as a dynastic head (who actually ages and eventually dies), so raising your heirs and securing (or blocking) their succession, managing internal and external politics, and dealing with random events is an integral part of the game. Speaking of which, there are apparently over 3000 unique events in the game so far, some of which are purely for flavor, but many of which can have a dramatic effect on your characters and Nation... so there is likely lots and lots of replay value there.
And from Civ it takes most of its strategic elements, but all of which have thankfully been tweaked/refined to avoid the majority of the issues I have with those system in Civ6. E.g.
There are a bunch of other unique mechanics in it too, and the game is quite complicated... moreso than Civ, but a bit less-so than Crusader Kings. However, the in-game Tutorial and Encyclopedia is very very good, and the Tooltips system is especially amazing too; You can hold down Shift to prevent tooltips from minimizing, which allows you to then hover over any keyword in a tooltip to bring up another tooltip which explains that new keyword... ad infinitum. All of which has made the game way easier to just jump into and play than I expected, despite its complexity.
It does still have some issues (e.g. essential diplomatic roles locked behind 50+ turns of tech is annoying), but all my gripes so far are pretty minor TBH, and so I still highly recommend checking it out if you like 4X/Grand Strategy games.
cc: @MimicSquid & @Kenny, since I know you both played Humankind too so might be similarly interested in Old World.
I tried Old World when it had just entered EA, and it was nice but incomplete. Glad to hear that it developed well; I'll have to try it out again.
I agree that Humankind is still a little shallow; both culture and religion spread are underdeveloped as methods of interacting with the world, but it's still a stop better than Civ VI, especially when it comes to combat. I'm looking forward to where it goes.
Well, I did it. I achieved
in Kingdom Come: Deliverance. There are a handful of other achievements I can try for, but I think I'm done with this game, at least for now. Next time I need to wander about a forest and take in the peaceful sights and sounds, I'll return. Over 500 hours recorded in Steam.
The above achievement seems to be the 3rd rarest achievement, according to Steam. 0.6% of players have achieved it.
This is possibly my favourite game of all time, and I'm not being hyperbolic. Go check it out if you are at all interested in history, medieval settings, RPGs, and the like.
La Mulana. It’s an Indiana Jones themed indie metroidvania with a focus on puzzle solving and following obscure clues (which is rather unique). There’s also more traditional combat and a stubborn commitment to ca. 1990 game design conventions which makes it infuriating to an almost comical degree.
Being a puzzle game nerd, I’m trying to apply my usual rules of not looking up clues/guides so I don’t spoil myself a nice ah-ha moment. It nearly broke me, though. Think spotting a slightly differently colored block in the wall you need to hit to unlock a door. Applying a clue you read in some random corner on the other side of the map. Things like this.
Honestly, though, it’s the combat that hurts the most. Movement is awkward, touching an enemy catapults you back 3 tiles and the only way to heal is either collecting dozens of green orbs to fill up your healing bar (can take half an hour) or going all the way back to the starting area to sit in a hot spring.
I mean, it’s a pretty poorly designed game. But it’s unique. It reminds me of games from the 80s when there were no rules of how to spoon feed ideas to the player. Like the original Zelda or Metroid on the NES. I’m weirdly enjoying it, in a masochistic way.
I take issue with the idea that La Mulana is a poorly designed game. It’s a very intentionally designed game. Everything is an intentional throwback to the MSX and some of the games that came out for it. The action gameplay is based off of The Maze of Galious, whereas the role playing and puzzle elements come from games like Hydlide and The Tower of Druaga, and a number of the secrets you come across are references to other MSX games. The game is hard in exactly the same ways as these other games were hard. It’s basically a less twitchy Dark Souls.
I mean, even if you intentionally imitate bad game design from the 80s, it's still bad game design. There's some stuff in there that's complete and utter bullshit, lol.
Like, I just beat a boss and after it, it throws you into a room with no exits and a 30s death timer running down. If you die, you have to beat the boss again. There's plenty of situations where the solution to a puzzle could either be insanely hard or literally impossible because you don't have the right item yet. The only way to find out is trying a potentially impossible task 50 times in a row. That kind of stuff just wastes my time, I get nothing out of it except, maybe, a chuckle at the sheer absurdity of it.
Just because you don't enjoy it does not mean that it's designed badly. The Witness is full of obtuse puzzles that require you to think differently, and yet it's an extremely popular video game. Sudoku is a game where you are forced to try solutions hundreds of times over, and yet it's also an extremely popular game. It's also extremely common in video games to have bosses heal themselves at the last moment if you didn't pull off a certain type of manouver. High difficulty is not the same as bad design.
That being said, there's no shame in giving up. Lord knows I spent a lot of time playing that game and barely managed to finish the first dungeon. Heck, I don't end up finishing most games because I easily get fed up with difficulty spikes. La Mulana is a game made by fans of those brutally difficult early-to-mid 80s games, and it's meant to be played by people who feel the same way. Nobody is going to think less of you for not being part of that extremely specific group; it just makes you normal.
But I enjoy it! I enjoy a lot of badly designed games!
I just like to think about why I enjoy games. Maybe I like overthinking this too much, which is why we're in this thread, lol. I like the game because of a lot of little things embedded in an overall bloated exterior. It being a homage to a certain kind of MSX era game preserves a lot of random, disjointed ideas that were actually good and which have since been streamlined out of better/more successful games so they're no longer part of a modern game blueprint. The interesting part is the "lost in translation" type of discovery, the bits that make you go "hmm, why haven't I seen a single modern game even attempt this in recent years?". And it's got a lot to do with the willingness to let players fail or get lost. I like failing for not noticing a pattern in a room that corresponds to a hint given earlier. I hate failing because I haven't encountered a health refill in 30 minutes and a fucking fish jumps into me within 0.1 seconds of entering a new room. Or because I press a button that just triggers a trap with no way of knowing beforehand. I'm sorry, that's not a challenge, that's just the game randomly resetting your progress every few minutes.
What I find interesting is that this, as an idea, could be done in a much more focused way and I don't think there's a game like that out there, currently. Most metroidvanias are near 100% focused on combat. In this game, exploration, following clues and paying attention is actually a much bigger part of the game than combat. I like that a lot! It's just doing it in the clumsiest way.
I actually think we're kind of on the same page. The things you think about La Mulana are the same things I think about Dark Souls. I hate playing them because they seem too focused on trying to punish the player instead of encouraging them to get good; I can't stand walking into the wrong place and the only way I get told is by dying and having to go back to a checkpoint that's 20 minutes of mundane combat away.
Do not even think about doing this until you absolutely give up, but after you get to that point you should look up some guides and lore about the game; there's a surprising amount of stuff that actually is told to you but is done in such a subtle way it's extremely easy to miss, as you have already surmised.
La Mulana is a game that I love in theory, but in practice, I don't have the patience, skill, aptitude, or character required to enjoy it to the fullest extent.
One of these days I need to play this game. But it's in a place where I think to myself "First Person Shooter" and just instantly lose my interest immediately.
I don't know why I'm like this; it's not like there aren't FPS games I've enjoyed in the past.
It's a first-person RPG! Much more so than even Bioshock, for example, which had a focus on action. Even the combat sections don't necessarily involve much shooting.
I was shocked (heh) how much this is Systen Shock 3 in everything but name. Like, except for literally licensing the name, it's System Shock. It got psi hypos! It's like the AAA games industry decided to have one last hurrah for a genre long abandoned and I loved every second of it. We won't get another game like this for a very long time.
Commendably, it doesn't merely carbon-copy System Shock, it has its own fresh ideas. I love the mimics, the goo gun and the zero gravity space walk sections. It's all so good that I no longer need the actual System Shock 3 to live up to my sky high expectations (on the one hand, they got Warren Spector, on the other, they were bought by fucking Tencent), I'm satisfied. If SS3 turns out terrible (I'd say there's a 60% chance it will be), I'll shrug it off and recommend people just playing Prey instead.
Still a bunch of Elder Scrolls:
Morrowind (OpenMW): Chipped away at the main story again, am now stuck on a quest where I need to find a specific thing in the map only described by characters. The lack of quest markers makes it interesting. I've been using Magebane, an enchanted glass sword, which seems overpowered even with the difficulty turned up something like 15 clicks to account for a mod that modifies stamina depletion. I'd swear it's almost as good as my bound broadsword if I could only cast it.
Oblivion: Just finished the Thieves Guild questline. That last heist was a real doozy, but it was a blast to get through. I'm tempted to do some armor collecting, as I'm trying to finish an Elven set (just need a helmet).
Skyrim: I banged out a bunch of Thieves Guild radiant quests to become the Guildmaster, but have otherwise been just running around doing side quests for fun. I've been exploring some glitches like the alchemy/restoration loop to build some OP gear, like a ring that gives 150 punch damage, or superpowered smithing gear, but I don't actually like using that stuff, as it just feels cheap.
I've all but abandoned FNV because either the RP is too hardcore or my levelling is off: I dumped a bunch of points into Speech, but don't have much in my attack/defense, and don't know how to get any decent armor, having used stuff I grabbed early in the game. I may have to actually hit the books to make sense of it, because these systems seem radically different than what I'm used to in my limited RPG experiences.
The Witness is reminding me of my puzzle-related inadequacies: There are puzzles I simply can't wrap my head around, but I keep plugging away a puzzle at a time, maybe a bunch if I get a good streak going. I've looked up solutions to know how a puzzle type works because I haven't found the basic forms of many advanced puzzles I keep running into, and that only works some of the time.
I don't have much of a background on how you're playing FNV but it is very different from a Bethesda-made title, despite otherwise looking and feeling like one. Obsidian designed it more in line with the original cRPG Fallouts, not like Fallout 3, 4, or any of the TES games,
FNV's approach to stats is actually very different under the hood. It was made by Obsidian and designed to be closer to the original games, which have a fairly more unforgiving approach to RPG character design. The flipside is that more items are useful in FNV than in the other games, especially explosives.
Of course one thing they also changed is that Speech isn't the stat for talking your way through all the situations in the game, as it is in every other Bethesda RPG. I'm sure you've noticed there are checks for all kinds of other stats in dialogue now. Speech gets you only so far, the game is effectively checking that you're not just a talker but that you are also a do-er.
Decent armour can be found all over but dying in FNV happens a lot more than in Fallout 3 or 4 in general. You're a lot weaker in FNV than the others by design. Good armour can be found by exploring but it may take a certain level of Strength to equip some of the more protective ones. You don't need a lot but it can't be less than 4. It's generally good to pay attention to healing items and the copious amounts of drugs in the game to give yourself a boost through harder spots.
Also I'm not sure if you've settled with travelling with companions but they're very useful to have and are fleshed out quite well in this game compared to the others. A lot of time and effort has been put into the companions available to you, and they really ease the game up since you're more fragile in it than the others.
I'm sort of treating it like I treat TES: Playing whatever feels right. I've got the advantage of being more used to roleplaying, which helps with long-term character planning, but I think the biggest weakness on my part is some part of me is expecting it to be fun in the same way TES are. I'm not going to write it off, but part of my "hitting the books" is figuring out where some better gear is, what it is, and how to get it, while also probably learning more about the skill and attribute systems.
The biggest issue is I simply don't know how to play. I shoot the bad stuff, and try to talk my way out of trouble when I can simply because I prefer that to pissing off the entire desert. In fact, I'm trying to avoid choosing sides/factions entirely because I think it's more interesting that way, sort of a rogue traveller. I can get away with it in the Elder Scrolls, but I'm not sure if it's viable in Fallout.
The biggest shock was honestly how difficult FNV is. I expected something more like the power fantasy of Skyrim, and was definitely in for a surprise when I realized how steep a curve FNV seems to have. I think a lot of it is simply learning the ropes and not trying to play like it's an Elder Scrolls game.
After my thread about having a hard time with the setting I started using a companion and they do make it easier by far. I especially appreciate that they don't die (I think? I've had them go unconscious), so if they go down and I can tie up a fight, I just need to wait for them to come back. It also just helps knowing somebody's got my back in that world.
I think the biggest thing is I just need to learn Fallout. I'm tempted to start a new save, or even just continue 4 or start 3, so I can do what I did with TES: Learn how the series works in other entries and cross-port that knowledge to other entries.
Yes, that caught me off guard as well. FNV was definitely designed to be a more difficult and therefore a more mechanically thoughtful experience than Bethesda usually aims for. Their games are power fantasies whereas FNV aims to be the opposite. FO3 and 4 are not at all like this, it is most definitely an outlier in the modern Fallout series as its style of slowly powering up the player by forcing them to grind out against weak enemies until they get tougher is definitely from the older titles. FNV was constructed using the plans of the original "Van Buren" version of Fallout 3 back in the early 2000's, and some things still show.
It took me a long time to get used to the difficulty as well. Even by the end I was never as comfortable as some kind of in-universe god as I would have been in FO3 or 4. But there definitely is a feeling of better reward because the flipside is that combat never loses that edge that I found it lost in 3 and 4. Still, there's nothing wrong with knocking the difficulty down a peg or three to a more comfortable experience. It's a hard game and I would consider dialling it down on future playthroughs myself just to avoid that initial slog of a few hours of trying to level up past molerats.
Fun fact: the lead designer for the game, Josh Sawyer, released a rather famous FNV mod of his own personal tweaks that couldn't be put or made into the final consumer product, and it's closer to his vision for the game.. It makes the game significantly harder by lowering the level cap, increasing how much time it takes to level up, lowers health and carry weight, and more tweaks.
If you're interested, Josh Sawyer did a playthrough of the game using his mod on Twitch recently. He goes in-depth throughout about a lot of the design, the philosophy behind it, and the choices made compared to both previous Fallouts and Bethesda's style of design. It explains a lot about why FNV is so different from FO3 and 4 despite seeming like the same kinds of game as them.
First things first, I had set the game to Easy, and must've fumbled in the menu and clicked "Defaults" on my way out one time because it was at Normal. I went back up to Black Mountain to test my mettle, and it was better.
That's comforting. Knowing I'm in for a rough time, I can accept it. Even with the Elder Scrolls I've got no problem turning things down. As an example, my Oblivion run is currently at -10 (2x damage out, 1/2 in) because I was tired of getting rocked by zombies, but I still have to run from cougars, bears, and minotaurs. After setting New Vegas to Easy I was able to waste a couple Nightkin on Black Mountain without too much difficulty while still having to be smart about how I fought, which still feels like I'm earning my win.
I didn't know New Vegas basically picked up where Van Buren left off, but I guess that makes sense with it basically going to the same company, and the same team of RPG devs. When I bought the series, the more I read about how it came to be the more excited I was to start it, frankly, because I'd already liked the Elder Scrolls RPG elements and figured something deeper in a similar format would be a blast.
I've seen parts of Josh Sawyer's streams, but didn't know he was playing his mod in them. I think I'm going to watch that all over the weekend, because the pieces I've seen were cool, and I love learning what makes complicated games tick. I don't know if I'll play the JSawyer mod, though, but we'll see how I get on with the rest of New Vegas.
I played through ES:III and beyond last year as well. Did them sequentially and also went with OpenMW -- it's a really good recreation -- I didn't notice any differences although it had been quite some time since I had played through it previously.
I definitely am biased by nostalgia but I enjoyed MW the most with Oblivion a distant third. I just couldn't get into that game at all. It's also in this weird graphical uncanney valley where its textures and lighting might be a bit nicer than Morrowind's but the pop-in is so extreme it takes away from your ability to put yourself into the world.
I sort of hold the three games in equal regard, and just view them as different balances of mechanics, with Oblivion even being in a nice middle ground, Morrowind being the more hardcore story-oriented RPG, and Skyrim being Grand Theft Tamriel. I can forgive the graphics jank because the gameplay feels good, except for those super-airy jumps when you level up.
Purchased Sonic Colours Ultimate on the Switch.
I see why it's regarded as the greatest 3D Sonic game. Everything from the story, the humour, the game's overall length, the (lack of) additional characters and the gameplay are on point.
A few things that do annoy me about this port though:
The song remixes aren't that good. This wouldn't bother me much if I could toggle between original & remastered soundtracks. Instead the remixed soundtrack is forced upon the player and the original tracks are kept way back as Act 4, 5 & 6 music.
I don't like how the UI switches off during certain auto run sections of a level. Totally kills the immersion that I'm playing the game.
Tails Assist is an annoying addition because of how scarce extra lives are. It's made extra lives almost meaningless and has killed much of the challenge this game would have originally had. Would have preferred Tails to be playable with alternative cutscenes.
The Switch version is 30FPS and has very long level load times. Cutscenes load instantly and the game starts up fine but it feels like there's an extra 15 second wait to starting a stage... Why?