What game are you wasting time on?

[Jvegi]

All games are boring and none give joy. System Shock is floaty, Shitmaker is bloaty, MM7 is a fucking Tamagotchi bullshit. Curse of Monkey Island is not funny.

Risen shit. Factorio shit. Superhot shit. Arcanum is broken. Diablo is boring. Pathologic is Russian. Ori is too much work. Every FPS ever is trash.

I might play the HotA campaign.

 

[Darth Roxor]

dammit men jupiter hell is addictive as shit

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I'm playing Mount & Blade Warband for the first time, though I dabbled in the original M&B back in the day and found it frustrating and lacking. But Warband is a different thing. I'm playing it with the Bannerpage mod which effectively makes it the remastered edition and sticks close to vanilla but with some really nice additions. Still frustrating (had to restart 3 separate times with 3 different characters until I started to get the hang of it) but not lacking at least. It's more RPG than most RPGs. Good stuff though if you save scum it sucks some of the joy out of it and makes it feel procedurally generated and cheap at times so I should probably stop doing that but I'm considering my first playthrough a tutorial. Pathfinder Kingmaker prepared me for the Kingdom Management aspects a bit otherwise I'd still be lost.

 

[gurugeorge]

ffs, I just lost 3 hours to Dungeon Siege. Just ... one ... more ... bit

 

[Jack Of Owls]

dammit men jupiter hell is addictive as shit

I like the official Steam video for it. "Play tactically... or FAST AS FUCK!" I prefer to wait for games to be out of EA though.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I prefer to wait for games to be out of EA though.

Me too, but I had it from KS, and it seemed feature complete, so I figured I'd just check it briefly out of curiosity.

'briefly' didnt quite cut it in the end

 

[Fenix]

JH could easy contain ~150 hours of play before ran out of builds to try.

 

[toro]

Crazy Taxi is pissing me off. The Steam version ALWAYS crashes by two hours and fifteen minutes or at slightly over two hours. Never before. Almost like the game is trying to tell me not to play with the time set to maximum/easy, like all the world record holders do. It just happened again.

Spoiler

No responses on Steam about it. Might just have to move on to something else.

Edit: It occurred to me after typing this out that it might be the Nvidia recording that is somehow interfering, since the duration is always fairly close. I'm gonna try it one more time, maybe tomorrow, and pause to start a new recording after an hour. If it happens again, then I'm done with the game. Probably.

Edit: Nope, recording it as two parts didn't help. It's not ShadowPlay. Just happened again at around 130,000 dollars, as usual. Screw it. I'll just watch some cartoons.

Memory leak. Check the memory consumption in the Task Manager.

 

[Gamezor]

Finished 13 sentinels and started axiom verge. Will write more n 13 sentinels when Im on a laptop.

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

melee build in fallout 4

max STR and 8 LCK + Ripper = holy shit

 

[JDR13]

Finished 13 sentinels and started axiom verge. Will write more n 13 sentinels when Im on a laptop.

Interested in hearing about Axiom Verge once you've had some time in it.

I've owned it for awhile now but haven't got around to playing it yet. I love the old-school Metroid vibe it gives off.

 

[fork]

Axiom Verge is pretty good if you like the style and music.
Well worth playing.

 

[Strange Fellow]

Finished Hellpoint, the newest Souls-clone on the market, this time in SPEHS! More specifically, you're on a space station gone bad, Dead Space-style, tasked by the local mysterious AI with figuring out what happened.

At first it seemed rather uninspired, with just a veneer of sci-fi stretched over bog-standard slashy-dodgy Souls. It's faster than regular Souls, too, with the roll replaced by a sidestep like in Bloodborne or Nioh, which I wasn't too happy with, since I always thought these games are more fun when they're strategic endurance-runs rather than l33t action games.

Fortunately, the bad first impression faded once the game got going. The structure is quite different from the other big games in the genre: it's not a seamless open world like Dark Souls, nor a strict level-by-level affair like Demon's Souls or Nioh. Rather, there's a small number of levels, something like ten in total, separated by load screens. Each of these is huge, and contain a multitude of pathways to adjacent levels, probably more than even Dark Souls 1. A big part of the reason why the game grew on me so much is that as you go along and unlock more of the gameworld you discover all these paths that loop back to areas you've already been to, and in more than a few cases lead to sub-areas that are only accessible from particular entry points, making the act of navigating the station and remembering which route to take to get to particular locations a fun challenge. I was even tempted to draw a map. In addition to that, there's also the usual keycard-scavenging leading to backtracking to locked doors and such, and since this game has actual vertical jumping, there's a fair bit of platforming now and again, which literally adds an extra dimension to the whole thing. The result is that out of all the Souls-likes I've tried, this is by the far the one that gets closest to the exploration of Dark Souls 1, even more so that 2 and 3 despite those worlds being continuous and this being full of area transition load screens.

There's a lot to say about the story and the systems and the bosses and all the rest of it, but suffice to say that they range from good enough to very cool. The only other thing worth mentioning is the only thing about Hellpoint that is unique as compared to the rest of the genre, which is the orbit system. The game is set on a space station orbiting a black hole, which moves in real time. Depending on the station's location relative to the black hole, stuff happens in the game, like new enemies spawning, doors opening, and so on. Unfortunately, it feels a bit underutilized, and most of the time you won't notice any difference between the times when the station is in a significant orbital position and those when it isn't. Even so, it's a neat idea, and it ties into some of the game's more obscure secrets.

Really though, it's the world design that makes the game. If you want more of those "oh, so THAT'S how you get to that!" or "wait, I'm back here?" revelations that were almost entirely absent in Dark Souls 2 and 3, I can highly recommend Hellpoint.

Oh, and the free standalone epilogue sucks. Don't bother with it.

 

[4249]

Finally finished Divinity: Original Sin 2. I think that'll be the last Larian game I'm gonna be playing, unless something fundamentally changes about them. The biggest gripes for me:

• The writing was just downright terrible to be honest. Some characters felt like literal edgy teenagers. I've never minded the less-than-stellar writing in Larian games and even enjoyed their brand of humor. But this was just... bad.
• The combat system. While at least initially I could understand the proposition of having different armors so you have to react differently, in the end every encounter just played out the same. Burst that shit down, so you can kill them outright or take them out with cc. I went with a mixed party, but the later the game went the more I regretted that. If an enemy has 2k physical armor and 1k magical armor, having a split party is just worse in any situation. And the CC was way more reliable with physical stuff too. On tactician the armor of my party seemed not to matter much at all, since the enemy could usually get it destroyed in a single turn anyways. So I had to try and burst even more.
• The hard as fuck scaling of stats between levels and randomness of loot. This feels like such an anti fun decision. I could understand if I had at least some kind of agency in regards of getting somewhat good stats on loot, but it just meant that I had to either reroll rewards or scour through trader inventories in hopes of getting a proper upgrade. And these were already complained about in the first DOS (and even before that)... now they just turned the shittiness to eleven instead of addressing it. How can they not understand that this works in Diablo clones because of the constant supply of enemies to mow down, not in a RPG with a fixed amount of enemies and looting opportunities.

Otherwise, the character tags were somewhat of an interesting system. The character development was bland as fuck with +5% to this or +5% to that... But it's a Larian game so I didn't mind too much. I felt a bit flabbergasted when my loremaster just basicly stopped working in Arx. I had 4 and everything required 5. No ifs or buts, doesnt matter if it's of uncommon or divine rarity, get the required skill level or fuck off. I just had persuasion maxed on the main character, so that skill and it's "choices" were basicly not relevant any more.

I did enjoy the music at times, but it wasn't Kirill level either.

I don't think Larian actually want to fix the things I care about, but think that they're somehow good gameplay elements, so I don't think I should be giving them any more money.

 

[DeepOcean]

Finally finished Divinity: Original Sin 2. I think that'll be the last Larian game I'm gonna be playing, unless something fundamentally changes about them. The biggest gripes for me:

• The writing was just downright terrible to be honest. Some characters felt like literal edgy teenagers. I've never minded the less-than-stellar writing in Larian games and even enjoyed their brand of humor. But this was just... bad.
• The combat system. While at least initially I could understand the proposition of having different armors so you have to react differently, in the end every encounter just played out the same. Burst that shit down, so you can kill them outright or take them out with cc. I went with a mixed party, but the later the game went the more I regretted that. If an enemy has 2k physical armor and 1k magical armor, having a split party is just worse in any situation. And the CC was way more reliable with physical stuff too. On tactician the armor of my party seemed not to matter much at all, since the enemy could usually get it destroyed in a single turn anyways. So I had to try and burst even more.
• The hard as fuck scaling of stats between levels and randomness of loot. This feels like such an anti fun decision. I could understand if I had at least some kind of agency in regards of getting somewhat good stats on loot, but it just meant that I had to either reroll rewards or scour through trader inventories in hopes of getting a proper upgrade. And these were already complained about in the first DOS (and even before that)... now they just turned the shittiness to eleven instead of addressing it. How can they not understand that this works in Diablo clones because of the constant supply of enemies to mow down, not in a RPG with a fixed amount of enemies and looting opportunities.

Otherwise, the character tags were somewhat of an interesting system. The character development was bland as fuck with +5% to this or +5% to that... But it's a Larian game so I didn't mind too much. I felt a bit flabbergasted when my loremaster just basicly stopped working in Arx. I had 4 and everything required 5. No ifs or buts, doesnt matter if it's of uncommon or divine rarity, get the required skill level or fuck off. I just had persuasion maxed on the main character, so that skill and it's "choices" were basicly not relevant any more.

I did enjoy the music at times, but it wasn't Kirill level either.

I don't think Larian actually want to fix the things I care about, but think that they're somehow good gameplay elements, so I don't think I should be giving them any more money.

Last truly great game Larian made was Ego Draconis, if it wasnt for the decent to good encounter design, their modern games would be complete garbage with zero redeemable qualities.

 

[Puukko]

Yeah, I wouldn't play the game anymore without copious mods to fix the armor system and introduce build variety. 2 was a definite upgrade on the writing front compared to 1 which holds the title of being the only game to date that I've quit due to the writing.

 

[DeepOcean]

Playing Settlers 2 Anniversary edition, really interesting to contrast this game with other economy/city building games, many other games on the genre are all about survival with things having a cost in currency or resources like food with a real possibility of you going bankrupt. Settlers 2 anniversary has a design mentality of not punishing players activelly in terms of losing what they made but by having less stuff in the future because of bad optimization.

Things dont have a cost, your settlers dont starve to death, you also cant run out of of money and lose. Not having food, means lower and lower productivity, not having money means not being able to pay for upgrades on your military units. Technically, this means a zero pressure while you are building stuff and also means a very fast rate of expansion as you arent bog down by expenses. Technically, you can still lose by failing forwards, I mean, lower productivity + shitty military units, means the computer can have more and better soldiers than you. They tried to avoid failing backwards by not having expenses in favor of a failing fowards approach by having less stuff than the enemy because of bad planning.

I'm enjoying myself but I'm not so sure if this philosophy of not punishing the player backwards instead punishing the player forwards is something all that good. One side effect is that the building phase doesnt have much in terms of interesting choices to make and can get boring, the road system tries to compensate for the lack of interesting choices on early game by being a little convoluted. You need to optimize road placement to avoid congestion and slow delivery of resources, also, they limit the amount of economic buildings you can have by having professions dependent on tools, with no tools, you can place a building but a worker wont go work in there. This makes earlier game phase less tedious as some maps have rare iron and you need to scout alot to find iron ore deposits, on others, you are limited by space, there is a complexity but I dunno if it is enough for me.

They also have an annoying system of you having to build barracks to expand your territory everywhere, the problem is that it is a simple mechanical no brainer thing instead of being an important choice to expand territory or not. Yes, technically, the few resources used to build the fort could had been used on another building but it isnt an all that interesting choice that gets more and more annoying as the game reaches the end game phase. Anyway, I'm a sucker for those building games, for me, I play pretty much all of them but this one is definitely on the simpler side of things so dont recommend for people wanting a more complex economic game.

 

[Puukko]

After a long break from MP FPS, I've been playing some again.

Hunt: Showdown is a very unique PvPvE game that focuses on methodical gameplay and immersion. You're in a southern state sometime in what appears to be the early 1900s and there's a serious case of a zombie apocalypse going on. You want to go in, look for clues to figure out the location of a boss, kill it and banish it, take a trophy and survive to an extraction point while other teams are doing the same and will take every opportunity to kill you. You play as different characters until they die at which point you must hire and possibly outfit a new one. To my knowledge the only real differences between these aside from looks are their health bars, which are split into differently sized chunks which comes into play when determining how well you can recover from damage.

It's not a modern ADHD shooter where you're zooming past corners while leaning back and forth like a spastic - you've got period appropriate guns and tools, meaning revolvers, bolt action rifles and shotguns. Reloading and shooting again takes its time and you've got to worry about zombies in the meanwhile. The usual approach is to take out as many zombies with melee weapons as you can to minimize noise and using the correct tool for the special ones. Knives and bayonets work for the armored ones while shooting the flame zombies is a big no no due to them combusting.

Banishing a dead boss makes your location a prime target for other teams and shootouts become a game of psychology. Oftentimes you have only partial knowledge of the enemies' locations and number, and vice versa. If you've prepared, you will have set up traps around the location and left zombies alive to hamper other teams. Defending a rackety farmhouse is different from a civil war era fort or half collapsed church. Add to this the excellent audio design and you'll be sure to have some tense firefights in most matches.

Gunplay is very solid for the most part and the speed of operating the different guns adds both character and balance to them. The one thing that led to some frustration for my mates was that movement had a far more adverse effect on accuracy than the crosshair would have you think.

 

[Abu Antar]

I resumed my playthrough of Dungeon Rats. Put in a few hours over the Easter. Everything has gone smoothly, until I reached Democritus. I got smashed so hard. Time to bring out the bolas and nets.

 

[NJClaw]

I am replaying Sekiro after more than a year, trying to use prosthetic tools and combat arts I'm not familiar/comfortable with. When everything clicks together, combat is so much fun and satisfying in this game...

 

[Farewell young Prince into the night]

I went on a three day Dwarf Fortress splurge. Fun game.

My dwarves absolutely refused to change their tattered clothes even though I had tons of new outfits in stock and plenty of refuse piles - wish I could figure out what I was doing wrong.

 

[Cael]

I went on a three day Dwarf Fortress splurge. Fun game.

My dwarves absolutely refused to change their tattered clothes even though I had tons of new outfits in stock and plenty of refuse piles - wish I could figure out what I was doing wrong.

Nothing. The little bastards just love to gripe and moan, and that is just another reason for them to do so.

I have masterwork giant spider silk clothing made from masterwork cloth, and they still refuse to grab them. Literally bins and bins of them.

I think I will have to use the work around and assign them all to the militia and force them to wear armour all the time.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Outriders and narita boy, both on gamepass and good fun. Gamepass has been the best thing to happen to gaming in recent memory, bunch of people are playing games that they would have never bought otherwise.

 

[Catacombs]

I've been on a 4X kick and have been jumping between CKIII and Master of Orion II.

I went on a three day Dwarf Fortress splurge. Fun game.

Very fun game indeed. I'm still waiting eagerly for the Steam release that includes the new tileset.

 

[pakoito]

I'm playing Enderal: Forgotten Stories. A total conversion mod on the Skyrim engine with a decent story, much better dungeon design, and no level scaling.

It's the continuation to Nehrim, which is Oblivion's counterpart.

I have very fond memories of Nehrim's dungeons and ambiance, which I'm not fulfilling in Enderal yet. I'm still in the early game and the quests are entertaining enough, so we'll see.