So, what're you playing?

[Rasix]

Grounded is still keeping my attention. This one's a longer progression than most. At least I've built an elevator and zip line system to make travelling less of an issue. I did run into the problem that one of my lines runs over a bee spawn so it's nearly useless past a certain point.  I'm just about to start killing the tier 3 mobs so I can get to the later parts of the story. I'd like to finish this one out from a single player perspective before moving on.

Next up is probably a Terraria go round. I don't think I'm good (or patient) enough to do the new Zenith seed. Still, watching streamers taking it on has me intrigued.

[Khaldun]

I keep dreaming of a procedural game where the source scripting on agent-based AI is sufficiently complicated and diverse that it feels like meeting random people rather than the same 5 NPCs over and over again and where environments are sufficiently complicated that they feel genuinely unexpected but also where that procedural content is integrated INTO a big world with a lot of hand-written content. Like Witcher 3 plus Cyberpunk 2077 plus NMS plus Fallout New Vegas plus Skyrim. I'm convinced it's not impossible but I also understand why it's hard both technically and otherwise. But that dream is the kind of thing that leads people into the madness of expecting Star Citizen to work, etc.

[Mosesandstick]

Got halfway through The Outer Wilds and then gave up. So many great things about the game, but I found the gameplay really tedious, especially with travel, waiting and all the hazards. I can see why some people rate it highly but to me it really represents a missed opportunity more than anything.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, I just could never embrace the gameplay no matter how much I loved the art style.

I noticed Bannerlord came out of Early Access. Will do another round of it. I played it obsessively for a while in Early Access but then I'd realize just how badly unbalanced or undeveloped some subsystems were, so it'll be interesting to see if they finally hit a happy place or not.

[Cyrrex]

Not gonna necro the VR thread, but Half-Life 2 now has an unofficial mod that is good enough to be hosted on Steam.  And it is damn good.  Graphically not as gorgeous as Alyx, but possibly a better game (and Alyx was basically a masterpiece).  But it does still look great, and runs like butter on my PC even at 144hz and 200% SS.  It is somehow much more intense, because they have not tried to slow it down for VR.

I have been saying it forever, but the best VR games generally are just old modded games, and this just proves the point yet again.  If you have a VR HMD, you have to get this.

[Sky]

Despite my earlier griping, I'm still enjoying NMS. They've really added some cool stuff and done some nice QoL updates over the years...but also it feels very much like they've been bolting most of this stuff on without much attention to how it interacts with other components they've bolted on. It's been decent on the Deck for just logging in to send out some fleet missions or check prices. Still much better to play on the big rig.

I found an Exotic-class ship, which I've added some nice upgrades to. The difference in handling between the newb ship or previous B-class ship (Exotics are all S-class) I had been flying is pretty dramatic. Flying is much more fun now, if a bit touchy on the controls. It's a model based on the explorer model I had previously been flying, but maxing out the shields and using the shield-regen beam weapon has allowed me to get by in most combat for now.

[Rasix]

The grind in Grounded (hyuck) got to be a bit much. I may go back and finish it at some point, but by then I'm sure my skills will have atrophied to a point where that's not possible. The last encounter just requires way, way too much prep compared with the rest of the game.

Seem to have hit a similar spot in Terraria where progressing to Hard Mode kind of made the game a bit too difficult for me as I'm not great at this game. Plus, the Crimson expanding all over the place is really quite annoying. Containing it feels more like busy work than accomplishing anything. So, who knows, I'll probably give it a few more evenings to see if I gain some momentum.

Marvel Snap is fun? I'm not going super hard, but it's enjoyable and I feel no need to actually spend money.

[Trippy]

Marvel Snap is fun? I'm not going super hard, but it's enjoyable and I feel no need to actually spend money.

Yes, but be aware it’s published by ByteDance (TikTok) via its subsidiary Nuverse so you have to assume that as much data as can be extracted about you via the app is being sent to the CCP.

[Sky]

Stoneblock 3 came out for minecraft, figured I'd check it out, as I've liked the previous releases.

I forgot what a mess the state of MC launchers are in, with both Curseforge and FTB running the infinitely shitty Overwolf.

And then I realize SB3 has a social chat component installed, at least that's an easy removal. Then I realize it's not breaking stone blocks correctly (not a great start for a mod named stoneblock). As I think about how to troubleshoot that, I hear a zombie. In the started newb cave, where I'm standing naked with only a quest book in my inventory. Figure I'll punch it out old school style and....the zombie is invisible and I just close out the game (and the overwolf spyware) and play some more NMS.

update: it gets worse tldr looking into PolyMC as an alternative but a dev went rogue and locked out the rest of the team https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/10/if-you-use-polymc-for-minecraft-you-should-switch-away-now/



I'm pretty tired of humanity these days.

[Rasix]

Beat Terraria. Moon Lord was a bit difficult until I switched to ranged. Kind of out geared it, but it was still a pretty close fight even on a well prepared boss arena. Going to goof around a bit more in the world, but I'm pretty much done here.

Started GoW: Ragnarok. Great opening and it runs just fine on a PS4 Pro. Sad dad is sad.

[Kail]

Started on Sonic Frontiers, went in with minimal expectations but I'm having fun so far.  It feels like Sonic meets Breath of the Wild (I suppose I shouldn't find that surprising considering how much Sonic Lost World cribbed from Mario Galaxy).  I'm only a few hours in, but so far, it's a lot of fun.  It's not as deep as BotW (no towns, no inventory, no mounts, etc.) but unless it goes to shit at the last minute, it's probably the best 3D Sonic game I've played in the last decade or so.

Also went back to play some Baldur's Gate for some reason, probably related to the expectation that BG3 is maybe actually coming out in the forseeable future.  And holy shit, I forgot how bad I sucked at this game.  Sometimes I'll beat, like, Tyranny or Pillars of Eternity and go "I'm not as bad at these games as I thought, I wonder why I thought I was so terrible at them."  Now, I think I know the answer.  Walking in to the Friendly Arm inn, me and Imoen are jumped by an assassin, who casts horrify on us and one shots me with magic missile before I can even land an attack.  I was playing a cleric, so not like some d4 hit die wizard... didn't matter.  I don't know how you're supposed to win that one, it's not like I had a lot of tactical options and I was just playing bad, at level one my repertoire is "hit bad guy with stick" and "cast one priest spell" neither of which help when the enemy can just point at you and go "delete."  I ended up luring her in to some guards who beat her down, but so far it seems like the world is just clogged with high level assassins who can 1) AoE paralyze and 2) instagib my main character.  I think every fight so far that I've won has been me cheesing the game by running in and out of doors or messing around with LoS and moving outside of turn order, which doesn't feel like the way the game is supposed to be played, but otherwise these are just one turn fights where some wizard says "Hi, you must be that guy I'm here to kill" and then points at me and I disintegrate.  I don't know how I beat it all those years ago, I remember it being hard, but I don't remember it being THIS hard.

[Velorath]

Early level D&D has horrible balance, possibly matched only by high level D&D.

[Khaldun]

It's kind of hilarious how much we all put up with just insane kinds of "whoops, you went into the wrong part of that map, welcome to getting gibbeted in ten seconds by overpowered spell" things in those games. And yeah, that was 'true to the game' re: D&D in the sense that it was (and still kind of is) "underpowered fighters protecting crazy overpowered wizards" to the point that every D&D encounter is about "everyone try to kill the wizard".

Mount and Blade 2 is as addictive and annoying as ever, btw. I wouldn't play it seriously without an assload of mods that kept it from being the usual endless loop of "I captured the castle and lost a castle somewhere else, fuck it, time to rush across the map" thing.

[Phildo]

Also been playing God of War: Ragnarok.  It's really good, y'all.

[Rendakor]

D&D has never even attempted to be balanced for fighting against NPCs with class levels. Monsters with magic (outside of actual Dragons) usually have a very narrow toolkit, maybe a few spells at will or 5-10 spells a few times a day. For boss-type monsters there's an expectation that the party at least attempted some research and prepared some counters. Also the game was intended to be run by a DM who isn't necessarily trying to murder the party in every encounter (unless that's the kind of campaign everyone wants). The only balance to this in a video game is that you can reload a save after your TPKs.

[Phildo]

The devs for the Pathfinder video games (Kingmaker, Wrath of the Righteous) have spent a lot of time talking about how they had to balance the game around reloading and min/maxing because players of a video game get to approach each encounter so much differently than a tabletop  player would.

[Samwise]

I'm surprised that nobody has done a video game version of 4E.  The ruleset was designed to make that kind of adaptation easy (or at least that's what it felt like); it's a grid-based tactical game where all the classes are balanced to have similar power curves.  It's not my favorite of the tabletop editions but it would work much better as a video game than 3E/Pathfinder or 5E.

[Zetor]

The Pillars of Eternity games are pretty close to 4e imo with the heavy emphasis on resource management, per-encounter / per-rest abilities, etc. (PoE1 moreso than PoE2)

[Kail]

Also the game was intended to be run by a DM who isn't necessarily trying to murder the party in every encounter (unless that's the kind of campaign everyone wants). The only balance to this in a video game is that you can reload a save after your TPKs.

BG feels like my attempts at DMing when I was, like, 10 years old.  "Yeah, of COURSE the guy they send to kill you would be able to easily kill you, why would they send a level 1 assassin you could easily defeat, that would be dumb.  Anyways, the assassin comes in, and he's all cool and dual weilding nunchucks and he winks at you and goes 'this time, you're up next' and shoots a level 10 magic missile at you. Here's a sketch of the assassin, I based him off of like a combination of Vegeta and Sephiroth but he's also half vampire dragon which I call a dracompire.  Yeah.  So, what is your character doing now? Why are you just staring at me?"

I'm surprised that nobody has done a video game version of 4E.  The ruleset was designed to make that kind of adaptation easy (or at least that's what it felt like); it's a grid-based tactical game where all the classes are balanced to have similar power curves.  It's not my favorite of the tabletop editions but it would work much better as a video game than 3E/Pathfinder or 5E.

I don't know if this is a very popular opinion, but I've thought for a while that the D&D setting was kind of... not great for PC games?  I mean, the setting (Forgotten Realms, at least) has always seemed like bootleg Tolkien, and the rules aren't ideal systems-wise.  They work fine for tabletop, where you're working in the constraints of what a DM can work out with napkin math and a d20, but for a PC game you can do so much more.  There's no real reason to base attack rolls, for example, off an integer from 1 to 20, if you don't have to roll physical dice.

4th edition seemed like kind of the worst of both worlds, in that it was clearly gesturing towards being a "video game like" system, but still stuck in the tabletop RPG mode.  It probably would have made a better video game than a tabletop RPG, but it wasn't such an amazing system that you couldn't come up with something better without the D&D license, and since the popularity of the D&D license was cratering due to 4e being such a pain to run on the tabletop, it doesn't seem like you'd get anything out of it.  Unless you're Wizards of the Coast, who could pull a Raph Koster and go "okay, see, this is what the system was originally SUPPOSED to play like when I thought it up, it's not that bad, please stop shit talking it"

[Velorath]

I feel like during a lot of the time 4e was the current system there was maybe some licensing rights issues or something else going on that prevented more video games from getting made. Also Neverwinter was ostensibly a 4e based game when it released.

[Trippy]

Also been playing God of War: Ragnarok.  It's really good, y'all.

The built-in puzzle hint system is pretty annoying. I think I'm going to take a break till there's a way to turn it off. Also, yes I know I'm on fire, you don't have to tell me, especially since I can't do anything about it.

[Trippy]

I feel like during a lot of the time 4e was the current system there was maybe some licensing rights issues or something else going on that prevented more video games from getting made. Also Neverwinter was ostensibly a 4e based game when it released.

The video games rights to D&D are/were owned by that cluster-fuck of a publisher Atari SA (née Infogrames Entertainment SA) via their purchase of Hasbro Interactive. It's not clear if they still own the rights but they definitely did during the 4e-era.

[Velorath]

Also been playing God of War: Ragnarok.  It's really good, y'all.

The built-in puzzle hint system is pretty annoying. I think I'm going to take a break till there's a way to turn it off. Also, yes I know I'm on fire, you don't have to tell me, especially since I can't do anything about it.

I feel like as you get deeper into the game they ease off all that quite a bit. Especially by the time the puzzles start to require some actual thought.

[Trippy]

Ah, okay.

[Phildo]

Yeah, I haven't noticed the companion(s) giving puzzle hints much lately either.  They do still tell you that you're on fire, but to be honest I find that kind of handy because I'm usually too focused on the enemies to pay attention to the little icons indicating status effects.

re: D&D, I believe it's already been said but Solasta does an extremely faithful translation of 5e into a video game.  It's fine, if underwhelming.

[Cyrrex]

re: D&D, I believe it's already been said but Solasta does an extremely faithful translation of 5e into a video game.  It's fine, if underwhelming.

It is an excellent 5e combat simulator, and they have been slowly but surely adding content and classes.  Best of all is that they released their tools, so the workshop is filled with complete user campaigns.  Lots of flaws, but one of my most played games of the last few years.

[Rendakor]

I've heard good things about Solasta too, and have been waiting for them to flesh it out more before I pull the trigger.

[lamaros]

IMO Solasta isn't that great. The game systems work ok (apart from travel), but the content is pretty thin and amateur. I haven't checked out the user content, maybe it's heaps better.

The pay for extra classes thing is also really lame for a game that was supported in EA.

[Soulflame]

Solasta's primary problem is that D&D is fun with a DM and a group, and Solasta is just 5e mechanics and a somewhat interesting story.

It even has encumbrance and you need to carry rations, what's that all about.

[Mandella]

Also the game was intended to be run by a DM who isn't necessarily trying to murder the party in every encounter (unless that's the kind of campaign everyone wants). The only balance to this in a video game is that you can reload a save after your TPKs.

BG feels like my attempts at DMing when I was, like, 10 years old.  "Yeah, of COURSE the guy they send to kill you would be able to easily kill you, why would they send a level 1 assassin you could easily defeat, that would be dumb.  Anyways, the assassin comes in, and he's all cool and dual weilding nunchucks and he winks at you and goes 'this time, you're up next' and shoots a level 10 magic missile at you. Here's a sketch of the assassin, I based him off of like a combination of Vegeta and Sephiroth but he's also half vampire dragon which I call a dracompire.  Yeah.  So, what is your character doing now? Why are you just staring at me?"

I'm surprised that nobody has done a video game version of 4E.  The ruleset was designed to make that kind of adaptation easy (or at least that's what it felt like); it's a grid-based tactical game where all the classes are balanced to have similar power curves.  It's not my favorite of the tabletop editions but it would work much better as a video game than 3E/Pathfinder or 5E.

I don't know if this is a very popular opinion, but I've thought for a while that the D&D setting was kind of... not great for PC games?  I mean, the setting (Forgotten Realms, at least) has always seemed like bootleg Tolkien, and the rules aren't ideal systems-wise.  They work fine for tabletop, where you're working in the constraints of what a DM can work out with napkin math and a d20, but for a PC game you can do so much more.  There's no real reason to base attack rolls, for example, off an integer from 1 to 20, if you don't have to roll physical dice.

4th edition seemed like kind of the worst of both worlds, in that it was clearly gesturing towards being a "video game like" system, but still stuck in the tabletop RPG mode.  It probably would have made a better video game than a tabletop RPG, but it wasn't such an amazing system that you couldn't come up with something better without the D&D license, and since the popularity of the D&D license was cratering due to 4e being such a pain to run on the tabletop, it doesn't seem like you'd get anything out of it.  Unless you're Wizards of the Coast, who could pull a Raph Koster and go "okay, see, this is what the system was originally SUPPOSED to play like when I thought it up, it's not that bad, please stop shit talking it"

IIRC 4e was supposed to launch with a companion Virtual Table Top. Yep, they were trying that back then and that is one big reason the rules for 4e were so "video gamey." Of course the VTT was dropped and that left 4e to try to stand alone.

And I thought the dracompire was cool.

[Khaldun]

Man, I'd almost forgotten the incompetence of that whole launch--force your long-standing RPG into a rule revision meant to smooth its adaptation into a virtual tabletop app only forget to hire anyone who can develop the app. Hilarity ensues!

[Falconeer]

After being pulled back into Vermintide 2 thanks to it being given out for free to all of my friends, now I'm obsessed with Warhammer 40k Darktide. I would not recommend it to everyone, but if you have a stable group of online friends and you are looking for a new coop game, this is fantastic. Granted, if you skipped Vermintide 2 that is fantastic too and in many ways, even better because it has tons of content (Darktide isn't even out yet), but it costs a fraction of it even if you didn't get it for free.

They are basically Left4Dead evolutions, with a little less mindlessness and very good production value. Compared to L4D it helps that they have spme progression, so builds, weapons with random stats, story. Hell, Vermintide 2 even has a completely free roguelite expansion that is almost like a separate game.

[Trippy]

One thing is that the *tide games are much more melee-centric than most of the others in their genre and they are first person games which makes judging melee combat distances more difficult than 3rd person. Darktide is more shooty than the Vermintides but given the general ammo scarcity and the way the game director will mob you with trash mobs you will need to be good at melee combat to survive. Also Darktide is dark AF so if squinting at the screen to see stuff is not your cup of tea you might want to watch some streams / videos to see how bad it is before committing to it.

[Rendakor]

Darktide is also coming to XGP at the end of the month, so if you already have that it's less of a commitment.

[Sky]

Fell down a bit of a hole playing Outward over the weekend. It's been on and off my wishlist for years, but the itch was strong for a janky explorer, so....

It's basically a jankier Gothic combined with survival elements. It forces a slower pace, which oddly reminds me of RDR2 at times. Really cool 'chill carefully' type game, where you can die quickly if you're not careful...in a lot of different ways. All the little stat buffs are almost required, combat is pretty brutal and similar to the way the Gothic lineage does things (block and dodge both somewhat viable, learning animations is necessary), and adds in what the Witcher was trying to do with stacking pre-adventure and pre-combat buffs.

No hand-holding, my first character is basically to learn the basics of fucking up...but even death (unless you play perma) is a story element, depending on where and how you died. Once I woke up haflway across the map in the cave of a seemingly beneficent demon and scored a nice helmet (which I stole from him).

Encumbrance, limited inventory, auto-save only, lots of conditions, but somehow it doesn't seem very repressive, it just feels like an old-school rpg. I'm trying to decide whether I need to get out my pen and notepad to keep track of things. It only tells you the main quest, not side quests (with no icons for quest givers). No mini-map, there is a zone map with a couple things marked on it (just a couple vendors and few major locations), but no player marker. You have to navigate the map and know where you are, definitely possible to get lost, though it's good about giving you landmarks if you pay attention).