I’m still working through Phantom Liberty. It’s so well done, a step up even from the original game.
I’m quite sad that Cyberpunk 2077 is all done now, but I’m excited that they have started production on the sequel. Say what you will about CDPR and how they botched the launch of CP2077, they game as it stands now is fantastic and probably one of my favorite games of the last decade.
On the side, I’ve been playing a fun little indy twin-stick shooter rogue-lite called “Shape Shifter: Formations”. I tend to pick up a lot of these kinds of rogue-likes… they’re generally dirt cheap so it doesn’t take many hours of fun to feel like I got my money’s worth. I’m 20 hours into this one so far… $6 well spent!
Among other things, it sounds like Cyberpunk had a lot of technical debt that they struggled to overcome, hence the move to Unreal engine going forward. With the lessons learned from the last one, they're surely on to bigger and better things with the sequel, maybe even the multiplayer they cut from 2077. I think Baldur's Gate 3 has shown how much hunger there is for a proper co-op mode in an RPG.
Just finished CP myself yesterday, with a 9 hour push through the “final day”. I had previously in my run rejected the (possible) helpful offer at the end of Phantom Liberty to find my own solution to my problem and, after spending far too much time debating over a single dialog choice, I settled on one that lead to a satisfactory, if bitter-sweet, conclusion.
The sense of finality was quite profound and pleasing. I have no wish to play my V anymore, as I think their story is done. While this means I may never revisit NC again (which makes me a little sad), I can live with that. I guess I can look forward to CP: Boston in 10 years :-).
I finally finished Baldur's Gate 3. Loved it. I immediately started again with a Ghost Recon team, where everyone is a rogue assassin/fighter battle master build so that you can get a ton of actions, create opportunities for advantage, and then get bonus sneak attack damage. It's working really well so far, and I've done more than half of the content in Act 1 with this team, though to be fair, of course the game will be easier when I know what's coming around the corner.
I also started up System Shock, a game that sorely needed that remake and shows that the difference between what made it good back in the day and what would make it good now are basically just graphics, controls, and UI.
I’ve played through BG3 around launch, and have been lurking the web, looking at what others have done. Right now, I’m also watching a streamer play through the game, and everything I’ve seen really makes me want to do another playthrough. Act 3 was a bit rough at times though, so I think I’ll wait for some more patches or a Definitive Edition, if Larian does it like Divinity.
Same, my friend and I gave up on Baldur’s Gate and will let the developer “finish” tweaking it. I like what Larian tries to do in its games, but I really, really despise the need to mash the quick save button after anything representing even minor progress because you might stumble into TPK combat while exploring. This happened to us in Divinity and when we got a whiff of the same in BG3, we wrinkled our noses and left the game.
I subsequently went on to play CP2077 v2.0 and really enjoyed myself, which I just “finished” yesterday with a satisfactory, bitter-sweet ending.
That’s awesome. I’m at the tail end of my first playthrough, but I’m already thinking about and all druid run with Halsin, Jaheira, Tav, and a respecced origin. I think druid is flexible enough to pull it off. How are you finding system shock, then? I never played it originally but have played many of its ‘spiritual sequels’ in terms of immersive sims. I was tempted to harken back when the remake came out but never bit the bullet.
I played the beginning of the original release some years back and found the controls unusable, even with a mod that "fixes" them. This new game adapts the way the original basically has a console printout for everything you look at and interact with while still allowing it to control like a modern first person video game. I'm not very far in it yet. Only about an hour. But it's one of those games where you're scouring for resources and navigating a map with keycards and turning the power back on and such, and it does all that well so far.
I loved Wuppo, but the clearly Dutch names for all the creatures threw me off a little. Their names are sometimes a little bit too literal for my taste (for example, a blusser literally means extinguisher).
Anyway, I’ve stopped my first play-through of Baldur’s Gate 3 and started over as The Dark Urge. It has been… interesting :)
Other than that, I’ve tried to get back into my play-through of Lost Judgment, but I’ve completely lost the plot.
I haven’t seen anyone mention Kenshi, so I guess I will.
Kenshi is a post-apocalyptic, RPG, RTS, city-builder hybrid. You can play as one individual character, or you can build up a squad to roam an entire continent full of towns, people, and everything else that wants nothing more than to push your face into the dirt and watch you squirm. It’s an intensely brutal game, but one with an aesthetic that I can’t get enough of.
There are different races of playable characters (from humans, to hivers, to shek, and skeletons) all with their own different stat bonuses and handicaps. If you lose a limb, you can either find someone who sells prosthetics or just leave that character crippled for the rest of the game.
There’s kind of a story, but the game is mostly just you existing in this world and learning about it. There are plenty of different factions you can join or help out, and there will be consequences for choosing a side.
It’s also incredibly moddable, with the steam workshop having thousands of mods already.
There’s a 2011 game called Before the Echo (previously called Sequence before the board game maker decided to get pissy about it) that’s a basic rhythm game but you play on a screen with three boards where rhythm arrows drop, and you have to manage swapping between all of them. One board you clear arrows to prevent enemy damage, one generates mana for you, and the third is where you cast spells (that do damage, heal you, etc). There are a few different items you can get and there’s some light crafting/leveling systems as well.
As someone who doesn’t usually play rhythm games (largely because I’m bad at them) it was pretty fun. The story is amusing as well, and the main critique I had was that it’s very slightly on the grindy side and there aren’t enough songs to support it, so you start hearing the same ones over and over. The music is decent but it can get a bit old.
I’m in the minority, I know, but I have mostly negative memories of playing Subnautica. I enjoyed exploring new areas, and the progression of the story, but the hours spent looking for one more resource so I could progress just made me mad. I don’t like save-scumming, but after
spoilerlosing my seamoth to a leviathan for the 3rd time, I said fuck it, and save-scummed regularly.
I had just finished playing Outer Wilds and my friends said “oh, then you would love Subnautica!” No, not the same kind of game at all. I say all of this so that anyone thinking of playing it has the right expectations: if you can’t find the one thing you’re looking for, I recommend just looking up a guide on where to find it. I don’t think the game funnels you to the correct areas well enough for you to find everything you need naturally.
When I think of Subnautica, I just remember having to drink water like every 5 minutes or so. I would have loved to explore, but I was busy getting basic resources all the time.
That was another reason, yes. Apparently you’re supposed to find the parts to the water filtration system relatively early in the game, and it will regularly spit out large bottles of water that help a lot. I didn’t. So yeah, for 90% of the game I’m having to periodically chase Bladderfish for 5m so I can spend 2 minutes spam crafting a bunch of waters, so i can carry several around with me, taking up valuable space in my inventory.
You can play on a mode without survival mechanics, or find the water filtration system and grow plants from the islands on your cyclops to trivialize them. Before you get there though they’re kind of a pain.
Yeah, I really liked it but I wish the devs would’ve implemented one more skill mode at a slightly easier level. I was OK with losing whatever inventory I’d collected during the single trip if I died, but I really wanted the “sea moth doesn’t explode you just have to start from base again” mode. Especially since I lost one of them because I couldn’t figure out which key did the electric charge zap thing.
We’ve proven that we can find the blueprints and materials necessary to make the thing in the first place, so having to collect all that metal again (with limited inventory space) just felt like busy work.
Yeah, I think I can only tolerate busy work games when played in a group. Because then you can delegate the work, and at least you’re still hanging out. Like the Forest.
The former is a masterpiece and the latter I’m having fun with but required a massive perspective shift and 3 play attempts to do so compared to previous Fallout games (even FO4).
So, I really wanted to like Pyre. I love all the rest of Super Giant’s games, and I put maybe 10 hours into Pyre. But I think it was just too much Visual Novel for me. I wanted to spend more time playing the actual game (the rights?), but they only lasted maybe 5-10m and then it was back to reading and flying around.
But yeah, the art, sound, writing, and world are all beautiful. Just couldn’t get into a groove.
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Aktywne