What are you playing? (2023 Edition)

WingedKagouti on 1/12/2023 at 11:50

Quote Posted by henke

edit: oh geez I literally forgot that I played several hours of Starfield as well. Did the first 2 Constelation quests. The space travel quickly just devolves into "Fast Travel everywhere and never even see space". Run around shooting dudes in lacklustre combat. Stealth don't work. Become overencumbered. Don't give a hoot about artifacts. Get bored. Stop playing.

Stealth is definitely not easy, seemingly being balanced towards having at least 2 ranks in the skill, and to get that you need to play sniper or get lucky with melee. They probably did this to differentiate the game from the stealth bow stuff in Skyrim.

The good parts of Starfield to me were the major faction quests, which have interesting storylines with some minor choices at the end. The Constellation questline is there to push players towards NG+ as well as turning them into space dragonborn.

Anarchic Fox on 3/12/2023 at 05:39

I'm still playing Dragon Warrior VII, which is absurdly long.

I also played, um, can I make myself say the name? *deep breath* (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1532510/Purrfect_Apawcalypse_Love_at_Furst_Bite/) A Purrfect Apawcalypse: Love at Furst Bite. It takes about ten minutes to reach an ending. You find someone cute, befriend them, and then die horribly. Despite this premise, it's the most wholesome game I've played since Undertale. I doubt many of you are into furry stuff, but maybe you'd get a kick out of seeing them die?

There was also a game which I made myself stop playing out of self-preservation, (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1628610/Paquerette_Down_the_Bunburrows/) Paquerette Down the Bunburrows. It's a puzzle game based on pathfinding. I bought it thinking it would be a lovely afternoon romp, but instead it was mindbending and expansive, and I realized unraveling it would take alertness I didn't have.

Oh yeah, and there's Shadows over Loathing, a stick figure RPG by the makers of West of Loathing. Solid RPG mechanics and great humor. I'm too tired right now to say more.

vurt on 3/12/2023 at 10:40

STALKER GAMMA (500'ish mods on top of STALKER Anomaly - which is all 3 games combined). Very difficult, maybe too difficult (on Easy), i'll get gud eventually... btw these are free to download, so probably among the best free games available.

Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront. Takes a good while to learn all the stuff, but those games are often the most fulfilling to play.

Sulphur on 4/12/2023 at 02:44

Quote Posted by Anarchic Fox

Sounds fun, that title makes it sound like some sort of vampire furry disco party though. Also, Undertale is kinda really... dark, even in the true pacifist route, but I get what you mean. Gotta stay determined!

Anarchic Fox on 4/12/2023 at 03:01

Quote Posted by Sulphur

Yeah, "wholesome" is the wrong term. I need a word that represents retaining idealism in the midst of darkness. Though then that would kinda overstate the depth of, oh dear, can I bring myself to write it again? sigh A Purrfect Apawcalypse. It leans into the humor angle, just not the kind of humor that subverts its premise.

Sulphur on 4/12/2023 at 07:02

Well, it sounds fun, really, so I'll check it out at some point. I'm trying to wrap up AssCreed Origins right now, but it keeps going. And Odyssey has that problem too, from what I hear, just 3x worse, so... well, at least the holiday season's around the corner.

Thirith on 4/12/2023 at 07:27

For me Odyssey was the worst of the modern Assassin's Creed games in terms of just going on and on and on, but it's really the same with all three of these. Origins benefits from having been the first of the new kind of AC games and from being a bit smaller, but they're all too big and cannot possibly maintain enough of a focus IMO. There are people who play these until they've squeezed every single bit of content out of them, but that content and the gameplay itself simply aren't particularly compelling for me, and the stories and characters are, well, Ubisoft-style stories and characters. You get nice moments and the occasional engaging character, but most of it is mediocre at best and repetitive to boot. Origins benefits from having the strongest main characters of the modern games.

Some people got a boost of enjoyment out of the mythological DLCs, but I found these to be rather meh, once you get past the shallow novelty of different-looking landscapes.

nicked on 4/12/2023 at 07:30

I've been playing some Mosa Lina after it was mentioned in the imsim thread. It's a bit rough round the edges - I still haven't been able to figure out how to get a controller working, and actually starting the game is kinda obtuse, but it is a fun concept. Essentially it's a puzzle platformer where the puzzle solutions are completely open ended. This means it's very hit or miss by design. Sometimes you literally cannot complete a level with the current tools and have to wait til it comes round again and you can reroll your inventory. But when your bizarre solution to a problem works, it really clicks.
However, there's one decision which I find really odd and somewhat aggravating - each time you play you get a random set of 9 levels - every time you win or die, it loads up a different one randomly, and completing a level removes it from the pool. Except that when there's just one level left, the game doubles it's size and challenge and gives you extra tools, like a final challenge. Good idea in theory - the problem is that the reason it's the last level in the pool is because it's already frickin hard and I've died on it multiple times. So in practise it means that after completing 8 levels, there is always a vast and insurmountable difficulty spike.
Still, it's a fiver so well worth checking out for the novelty alone.

Sulphur on 4/12/2023 at 07:46

Quote Posted by Thirith

I find myself enjoying the recreation of old Egypt much more than anything else in Origins, and even though the main quest is very transparently constructed to have Bayek carve his path through some of its most picturesque locations, I can't begrudge the game for that when the construction and presentation of all of that is just a pleasure to travel through. My single biggest criticism of the game isn't the story or the unending side quests (some of which are actually quite fun, though almost none have as much depth or nuance as The Witcher 3's more involved side quests), but that the gameplay just isn't deep enough to sustain an experience this broad. There's some interesting systems, a fair bit of cribbing from Far Cry, and the weapon system is actually quite broad, but the traditional Ubisoft problem remains: a spread of approaches to encounters, all of them too simple by half. Poison people, arrow-snipe them, make them go berserk, poison corpses, set them on fire, set an animal on them, stab them from behind, or just slice or bash them up - great ideas, but almost all end up with one-note implementations that mean you just use them to soften up targets before you slice and dice, which is the simplest and most effective approach. The actual combat had more promise, but again the implementation is half-hearted at best, trading depth for flash. Is it an indictment of the game's priorities that the small bits of tomb puzzling were more fun than anything else, gameplay-wise? Probably.

Still, I'm enjoying my time in Origins, and I'm looking forward to the DLC if, for nothing else, more gorgeous places to set on fire.

Thirith on 4/12/2023 at 08:11

Since you mention Far Cry: I sort of wonder what an Assassin's Creed game would be like that follows what's interesting about Far Cry 2 (though ideally with better implementation) rather than the later games. A version of the formula that leans into the more jagged edges rather than adding more and more shallow systems that work but aren't even particularly interesting the first time.

I think I'd be more okay with the shallowness of these games as games if the writing (both on a micro and a macro level) was better on average and if the worlds felt more alive. These can compensate for a lot with me. And I would definitely be less annoyed by the shallowness if they didn't try to hide it behind that abomination of a skill tree they're using in Valhalla.