So, what're you playing?

[Hoax]

I tried another run of Project Zomboid, but again couldn't find a decent working solution for displaying on my 4k monitor. It's a better experience on the Deck, except for the controls. Anyway, digging around this time led me back to the same forum thread, so I guess it's time to stop pining away to play this game. Really sucks, I want to jump back in as it's been years since I've done a decent session (it was fine on my 1080p monitor and 970 lol).

I'm dying for a casualish survival/zombie game, ended up back in 7 Days AGAIN because it's really the only game hitting it right anymore. But I've played so damned much of that over so many years that I'd reallly like something new. Look at the /played hours I had in Dismantle, just because it was something with a decent vibe and nowhere near the great games 7DtD and PZ are.

In fact, 7 Days is kind of my go-to for a minecraft-like, because modded minecraft is just so bloated at this point and ye gods the launcher drama.

State of Decay is a great game imo

[Riggswolfe]

State of Decay is a great game imo

Agreed. The second one is even better. It hits a sweet spot for me personally of having fun systems but being casual(ish).

[Trippy]

I tried another run of Project Zomboid, but again couldn't find a decent working solution for displaying on my 4k monitor. It's a better experience on the Deck, except for the controls. Anyway, digging around this time led me back to the same forum thread, so I guess it's time to stop pining away to play this game. Really sucks, I want to jump back in as it's been years since I've done a decent session (it was fine on my 1080p monitor and 970 lol).

When I was playing I had it set to 3x Font Size and "Medium" for the other font settings and that seemed to work okay at native 4K resolution, though I'm at desk sitting distance from my display (32" 4K).

[Sky]

I had a workaround that made most of the text legible, but it did run off several interface elements and didn't fix the tiny graphical elements, primarily the stats and status icons. I'm roughly 10' away from the 83" 4k monitor. They've said it was never intended to play higher than 1080p, and I'm ok running that, but the setting doesn't seem to work, keeps defaulting back to 4k.

Yes, State of Decay 2 is also a favorite, I've played many runs through it. The story mode (heartland?) is really good. I did try another run a few months back but I'm still a little burned out from my last run.

Ended up playing some Ghost Recon Breakpoint, still in the very early game on that one, maybe 4 hours in. I enjoy the game but it's also wicked stressful with the goddamned drones and patrols all over. Took a heli to a mission, then decided to hoof it to do some exploring (cough looting cough) and uhh...maybe I'll just take the heli next time :D

[Trippy]

I had a workaround that made most of the text legible, but it did run off several interface elements and didn't fix the tiny graphical elements, primarily the stats and status icons. I'm roughly 10' away from the 83" 4k monitor. They've said it was never intended to play higher than 1080p, and I'm ok running that, but the setting doesn't seem to work, keeps defaulting back to 4k.

Yeah I can understand them not wanting to redo their UI rendering to support 4K but their game also doesn't properly support running in 1080p on a 4K monitor. E.g. if Windows desktop is set to 1080p the game in windowed mode doesn't draw the window properly (it's too small) and Windows desktop set to 4k and the game in fullscreen mode it'll keep switching to resolutions other than 1080p when you try to select it.

Ended up playing some Ghost Recon Breakpoint, still in the very early game on that one, maybe 4 hours in. I enjoy the game but it's also wicked stressful with the goddamned drones and patrols all over. Took a heli to a mission, then decided to hoof it to do some exploring (cough looting cough) and uhh...maybe I'll just take the heli next time :D

Breakpoint has a lot of settings you can adjust to tailor the game to your liking. The primary toggle is whether or not you want to play it as an RPG looter shooter (Gear Level On) like The Division or as a more standard military-sim shooter like Wildlands. You can also toggle the helicopter and (big) drone patrols on and off if you want. I have those off when I'm playing cause really all they do is slow down the game play once you understand how to avoid detection.

[Sky]

Thanks for the info. I had already gone through and carebear'd up the settings when I first played a while back. I've kept the leveled gear thing on because it adds a layer of interest/compulsion to play slower and explore more. Must've missed the heli/drone ones.

It's not actually too bad, just had a couple ridiculious case scenarios last night and wasn't in the mood to deal with them, made me gripey 

[Trippy]

There’s an entirely separate settings screen from the main menu screen for setting the “world parameters” like little drones, big drones and helicopters.

Edit: also Terminators, heh

[Sky]

Yeah I can understand them not wanting to redo their UI rendering to support 4K but their game also doesn't properly support running in 1080p on a 4K monitor. E.g. if Windows desktop is set to 1080p the game in windowed mode doesn't draw the window properly (it's too small) and Windows desktop set to 4k and the game in fullscreen mode it'll keep switching to resolutions other than 1080p when you try to select it.

I forgot to try the oldschool high dpi settings. Oops.

[Trippy]

Oh yeah I kind of assumed you were running at > 100% scale on your Window desktop.

[Sky]

250% actually. For PZ I had to override the high dpi scaling using the compatibility tab on the PZ exe itself. I think that's only come up maybe once or twice for me ever, which is probably why I didn't occur to me sooner!

[Riggswolfe]

I decided to finally try out Borderlands. Started with the first game and it's fun, a bit repetitive and mindless but fun. I suspect it'd be more fun co-op but I'm soloing it. Randomly chose the siren and she's pretty cool so far. I think I'm a bit over half done then I guess it's time to play the Presequel. I got games 1 and 2 and the presequel in a bundle on sale for $10 and figured why not?

[Rendakor]

Borderlands 2 is the peak of the series in my opinion, with the Pre Sequel mechanically similar* to BL2 but with a significantly worse story. I would say play 2, then Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep DLC. If you like that kind of vibe, pick up Wonderlands.

*The low gravity and air mechanics introduced in TPS are both just annoying, and do not add any fun to the game.

[Khaldun]

I cannot explain why but Borderlands 1 and 2 give me a headache and no other game I play does. I feel deeply ill every time I try to play them.

[Trippy]

Have you tried messing around with the FOV setting? There's a bunch of other stuff as well that might be causing that like "UI Sway", Depth of Field, Motion Blur, etc.

[Riggswolfe]

Borderlands 2 is the peak of the series in my opinion, with the Pre Sequel mechanically similar* to BL2 but with a significantly worse story. I would say play 2, then Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep DLC. If you like that kind of vibe, pick up Wonderlands.

*The low gravity and air mechanics introduced in TPS are both just annoying, and do not add any fun to the game.

I'm playing the Presequel now. It's one hell of a step up from the first game. There's more story and the characters are far more memorable. The oxygen and low gravity is...ok but I do appreciate the different enemies from the first game. I geeked out a bit randomly seeing Lilith in a bar along with Roland.

[Rasix]

I cannot explain why but Borderlands 1 and 2 give me a headache and no other game I play does. I feel deeply ill every time I try to play them.

I had to adjust the FOV to not feel like I was coming down with the flu. A lot of FPS games do this to me, including both Half Lifes and every Borderlands game.


Currently playing the new PoE league. The new mechanic, passive trees for weapons (yep), has produced probably the stupidest, over powered build seen in the game. Allow me to write the dumbest synopsis describing an ARPG build ever: there's a weapon passive that makes your totems explode for 600% of their own life worth of damage when they die. Normally, you have a limit of one totem that can be expanded through various mechanics. Well, you can make a totem into a trap with the trap support skill. You can throw multiple traps before they explode and have around 25 traps (or more) on the ground at once. So, when these traps trigger, they summon totems. These totems check the totem limit and say "hey, too much" and the excess totems disappear. To be more precise, according to the game, they die (and explode for a shit ton of damage).  It's physical damage that you can convert. If fire damage, you can scale hits and use Herald of Ash to do some screen wide explosions. You can convert to cold for freezing, Herald of Ice shennanigans, and further convert to fire. You can can also convert to chaos damage and have a nice way to apply 30+ poisons at once and have that prolif in various ways. Your gear barely has to scale this, so you can buld as tanky as you possibly want. I killed a pinnacle boss on a 5 link with a white (base item type with no mods) weapon and almost no skill tree changes from my Righteous Fire Jugg.

And that's not as stupid as it can get. You can also get a tree passive that has 70% chance to spawn 2 totems (this would take some work). You can add multiple totem support. You can use Spiritual Aid to scale your damage (allows for minion damage mods to scale your damage). The damage they do can leech life to you. It's just gloriously stupid. I hope they don't hot fix it. I think the theoretical max damage is somewhere in the billions with poison versions hitting the dot damage cap rather easily.  

[Riggswolfe]

Have you tried messing around with the FOV setting? There's a bunch of other stuff as well that might be causing that like "UI Sway", Depth of Field, Motion Blur, etc.

It defaults to 70 on consoles at least. I considered adjusting it (for more view, no headache problems for me thankfully.) but it seemed like it quickly went to a sort of fishbowl look. I'm almost done with 2 now I think and it's far better than the Presequel IMO in pretty much every way. I doubt I'll get 3 started before my Xbox is suddenly in New Zealand and I'm playing Jedi Survivor.

[Sky]

Shadows of Doubt is pretty nifty. Just running the tutorial and figuring out the basics, but it looks like a decent exploration sandbox.

There are some stiff performance issues, I'm running at 1080p/60 right now to keep the heat down. The dev has noted that it's tied to resolution and they're working on it, but since it has a chunk aesthetic, it works for me at 1080p so improvements there are just gravy imo.

Early access, so a long way to go, I just really wanted to get in and mess with this and so far it's what I was hoping for. It's a pretty nutty sandbox toy.

[Samwise]

I saw an article about that the other day (link) and haven't picked it up yet but it sounds really interesting.  The promise of "procedurally generated but not boring" is always very alluring and as all this AI stuff keeps getting better I have a lot more hope for that kind of thing than I used to.

[Sky]

Shadows of Doubt is such a cool little game. I hope to see more stuff like this in the future. It's pretty bare-bones at this point, but I'm still enjoying it over 17 hours in and I've only solved 2 murders because I found a loophole where I can basically freeze the murder timers and just explore and build out my apartment, stock it up with spy stuffz and grub. I basically became a thief, the citizens are trapped in here with me. I guess maybe a murderer since I also enjoy setting security systems to Not Player for the extra chaos. Potential is off the charts, hopefully they continue to groove on this theme for a long time. I don't normally buy games on potential, but this has already delivered a great experience for me.

Finally got around to installing the Interworlds mod for X4. Still going to take a while to get comfortable with the janky controls, but Star Wars ships and factions help make it a lot cooler!

I was also playing a bit of UFC 3 on my PS4 (really wish it was available on pc!), and dipped into a few games I had bought for it but never gotten around to. Ended up really digging Yakuza 0's vibe and there was a decent sale on the lot (except the newer turn-based one, I like the beat-em-uppiness of the other ones anyway).

[Velorath]

Final Midnight Suns DLC drops on the 11th. A shame the game underperformed and they probably won't make more because I actually liked the DLC story quite a bit.

[Trippy]

Sometimes it's best to stick with what you can do well.

[Sky]

I wish Elder Scrolls Arena had rebinding. Moving with cursor keys is soooo weird now.

[Rendakor]

Started playing Honkai Star Rail, aka Genshin in Space. It's not bad for a gacha (though the 5* rates are fucking awful), and has high production value as expected from MiHoYo. Gameplay is more of a traditional JRPG with turn based combat, as opposed to the BotW-style from Genshin Impact. For a free game, it's not bad at all. The terrible pull rates actually sort of help me avoid spending money, since it doesn't feel like you can guarantee a specific character.

[Mandella]

So after trying out several tedium generators in a row, I finally found a builder/sim that has a good mix of managing and pace for me -- Frostpunk. It's not nearly as hard as some of the tales told about it imply, as witnessed by the fact that I did a successful first playthrough without checking any online guides or spoilers.

It's got a few extra maps to try, plus of course DLC, so I'll probably revisit it again, although I imagine it'll get a bit samey after a few games.

[Riggswolfe]

I've been playing the Long Dark again along with Divinity Original Sin Enhanced edition. The Long Dark has its first paid expansion and it's neat. I'm also realizing I've never actually played the story mode for that game.

[Sky]

I've been playing a bunch of Underrail on GOG. Didn't click the first time I tried it, but I kept to a very simple build this time and tried to stick to it and that's been much better. Still a tough game, even on "easy", but it's got a nice early fallout vibe.

Hit a bullshit mission (read: npc escort) in GR Breakpoint and rage uninstalled  so I was happy to see Far Cry 6 pop up on Steam at $15. I like the gameplay loop of GR Breakpoint a bit more so far, but it's still pretty early in FC6 (and I know what I'm getting there, since they just keep churning the same games out, right down to the menus). I guess that Epic store exclusive thing worked against them? Don't remember the last time a Ubi title debuted on Steam at $15, or even hit that price point in a few years (Valhalla has been $20 iirc). Anyway, really nice island vibe with decent graphics. Crazy oversaturated but that fits the setting.

[Trippy]

Hit a bullshit mission (read: npc escort) in GR Breakpoint and rage uninstalled 

Yeah those can be kind of rough. If you get the urge to reinstall at some point just lower the difficulty to get past it and continue on.

[Sky]

I have it about as low as possible while still being a game, heh.

It was the old 'spring scientist out of facility' gag, still pretty early in the game...but she took a scripted leg wound to add 'in 15 minutes or fail'. I normally use a scout helo for exfil but there were only two gunboats on the pads. Clean getaway then sudden drone attack, missile lock, ded before I could even land it. Restart mission that took me well over an hour...or...Far Cry 6. 

I'll likely reinstall, Breakpoint is more fun than not. But it's weird how much more punishing Underrail is yet is still a much more fun game overall.

[Zetor]

Underrail is amazing, was my GOTY 2015 easily (yes, over Witcher3 and Undertale). Should replay it sometime, haven't tried the expansion yet...

Been playing a few recentish adventure games. Overall impressions:

• VirtuaVerse: was an impulse buy, it's a demoscene-adjacent cyberpunk point-and-click published by BloodMusic of all things (Perturbator and friends). Overall it's a C+ or B-: good production values and music (obv), some fun puzzles, some less-fun puzzles, weird ass nihilistic plot that could've benefited from an editor to cut back on the crazy retro computer self-indulgence after like the third puzzle involving 386-era sound cards and mobo jumpers. Though I guess that's the point...
• Psychonauts 2: really really good. Some parts / characters are a bit underdeveloped, platforming still a pain, still not going to do the collectathons... but the level design is great and thematic (I'd even say better than the first game, though a bit less edgy), and it's just a ton of fun. Recommended.
• Broken Age: another Double Fine / Schafer game, this one feels a bit too... sparse? stylized? Like there just isn't that much to it, gameplay feels trivial. Though I may eat those words, just got to a part with a pretty tough dialogue puzzle, but that was still just a bunch of multiple choice questions with extra steps. Story isn't bad, though some of the twists feel a bit obvious / too heavily telegraphed.

[Falconeer]

I am obsessed with Monark.

Yes, it's known to be a cheap Shin Megami Tensei/Persona crossover from some devs who actually worked on the old originals, but the combat is more Valkyria Chronicles than any MegaTen game. That was a surprise. Still 100% turn based, the game waits on you and there's non active real time bullshit, which I loathe in JRPGs.

And while everything looks bad and feels undercooked, the atmosphere is precisely what I am constantly chasing. 120 students and teachers are locked up by a magical dome inside their school, where the 7 Capital Sins lent their powers to 7 people, and chaos and murders ensue. Everything is vague, unclear, Japanese and unsettling, and most importantly each and every one of the 120 trapped individuals has a name, some lines, and a database entry. I love this shit, it's exactly what I did as a tabletop DM: there are no nameless NPCs, everyone has a backstory no matter how tiny.

The story is absolutely messy but engaging by my screwed standards, the main characters stiff as hell but not bad at all, and the combat and progression are confusing but eventually quite rewarding.
 
It's one of those games I'd give an objective 6 out of 10, but a personal 9 out of 10. Like with Soul Hackers 2, which I greatly enjoyed, I would not feel comfortable recommending anyone to spend money on it, but they touch some chords im me that other, better games (cough, Zelda, cough cough, Dragon Quest) don't get nowhere near to.

Ard hated the demo of Monark, while to me it made it go from "*yawn* a SMT imitation" to "here's my CC take the money!" I wish it were a better game, but even as it is I can't put it down.

[Khaldun]

I was going to start on Zelda this week, but then I noticed that I'd never actually played Fire Emblem: Three Houses which has been sitting on my Switch all this time and that grabbed me pretty hard once I started.

[Zetor]

The more I get into Broken Age, the more it is eroding all that Double Fine goodwill I got from Psychonauts 2 (and Brütal Legend). Jesus christ this game is a mess. Like, some parts almost work, but then they don't. And that parts that don't work really don't work. I can't even say Schafer lost his touch with age because Psychonauts 2 is much more recent than BA and it's actually good, what the hell happened here?

edit: finished it, but won't make another post, the game is just not worth it imo. It seems to be very highly rated, which is crazy to me -- sure, the graphics and VA are nice, and some IDEAS around the plot are interesting (it'd make a fine short story, it would hide the weak points better), but the execution... eh, it's just mediocre to bad in all aspects from QOL to puzzle design to characters and writing with some M Night-tier ~twists~ that just made me roll my eyes. Maybe point-and-click adventures are just graded on a curve... which means I was probably a bit too harsh on VirtuaVerse and should upgrade its C+ to a B. It's DEFINITELY better than Broken Age.

[Cyrrex]

I got around to finishing Fallen Order late last week, and I am glad that I fired it up again and stuck it out.  A good Star Wars game, and a pretty good Star Wars story.  Will eventually play Survivor when it hits the bargain bin.

Moving on to the new Zelda game.  I recall being frequently annoyed over the past years that it takes them so damn long to make a Zelda game...but goddamn.  Breath was, IMO, an unmitigated masterpiece.  I was a little wary about jumping into the same world without it already feeling stale, but holy shit they still have the magic.  A bunch of new powers, physics, mechanics and a new world that is still the old world.  I have barely scratched the surface, but there have already been a bunch of "holy shit, these clever bastards" moments.  It isn't that the physics-based tricks are themselves so mind-blowing, it is just how they manage to perfectly integrate that shit into the world.

It is a no-brainer for anyone who even moderately enjoyed the first one.

[Mosesandstick]

The more I get into Broken Age, the more it is eroding all that Double Fine goodwill I got from Psychonauts 2 (and Brütal Legend). Jesus christ this game is a mess. Like, some parts almost work, but then they don't. And that parts that don't work really don't work. I can't even say Schafer lost his touch with age because Psychonauts 2 is much more recent than BA and it's actually good, what the hell happened here?

edit: finished it, but won't make another post, the game is just not worth it imo. It seems to be very highly rated, which is crazy to me -- sure, the graphics and VA are nice, and some IDEAS around the plot are interesting (it'd make a fine short story, it would hide the weak points better), but the execution... eh, it's just mediocre to bad in all aspects from QOL to puzzle design to characters and writing with some M Night-tier ~twists~ that just made me roll my eyes. Maybe point-and-click adventures are just graded on a curve... which means I was probably a bit too harsh on VirtuaVerse and should upgrade its C+ to a B. It's DEFINITELY better than Broken Age.

I played Broken Age pretty recently and from memory the first half got really good reviews but the reviews for the second half were pretty bad, citing everything from random puzzles to the plot going off the rails.