I also dabbled in the monster hunter wilds beta. It was what I expected and I’ll be happy to play the full version when it’s released. I think I bonked every monster available, both large and small. I tried out the weapons I’m likely to use.
Gunlance felt ok, light bow gun was interesting but more complicated than I expected. Bow was mostly the same but with some friendly additions. Switch axe ended up being my favorite of the beta. That thing just hits so quickly and wounds to easily that I don’t know if they oops’d the damage on it, or if I was just getting lucky. There were times when I’d break and make wounds in such a way that the monster would be basically stunned for a decently long period of time. If I had been partied up it would have been much too efficient. The other thing about it is the mobility of certain slashes. It took a bit getting used to, but it covers a lot of ground for a heavy blade.
After all that, I discovered the capture net would give both the insects and their essences, so I ran around hunting for endemic life and found a lot of little critters I otherwise would have missed. There’s a hornet that was endemic but could also poison you!
And I spent some time fishing. They really changed it up in this one. You need to reel in the line slowly to actually entice the fish to bite. I wasn’t completely comfortable with it at the end of the beta, but it also feels like they’re going to work on it a bit more.
As for other stuff I played. I continue my usual dedication to a few missions a week in helldivers 2. It’s a very fun game made by some very dedicated folks, and I’m down to blast some things every now and then. I finally got my nerve up to continue playing satisfactory. I usually stop right around coal power because it’s at that point that you can really automate the world… It’s just the amount of math and just waiting on materials to build so you can finally get exponential with your growth. I’m still very much in that stage currently. I need to upscale everything but I’m waiting for materials and to make sure my power situation is handled before I go nuts.
It was the sheer quantity of dlc stuff along with the second one having potential performance issues that kept me way and away from it for now. I’ll check back in at a 50-90% off sale.
I fell off from the game for a number of reasons back when deimos was released. I went back to it to catch up on quests and a lot of original gripes of why I left in the first place were still firmly in place.
Mostly random indie titles, such as nova drift, rollscape, and peglin.
Nova drift and peglin both recently came out of early access, both are rogue lite games that offer unique scenarios each time you play, one is a top down shmup with loads of customizations and interesting builds to try out, the other being a bit of a deck builder with interesting setups to keep the ball bouncing.
Rollscape is a relaxing random number generator with some decision making guesses along to the way to attempt to get further. It’s way too random to be truly skill based, but knowing more of the game does diminish a bit of the random.
On mobile it has been egg, inc. and idle cave miner.
Egg, inc. used to be a very player friendly idle incremental game that offered years of play time in a very relaxed setting. It didn’t require spending money on it unless you really wanted to speed things up… Until a bit ago when they took away one mission a week, which was the catch up mission players kind of need to progress and locked it behind a subscription service. I’m still playing because as much as I don’t appreciate that change, I’ve been playing long enough that I don’t need the catch up mission. I still don’t suggest it for new players though.
Idle Cave Miner is a basic incremental idle game, you set your little dudes to mine a cave and see how deep they can get. It does have a bunch of micro transactions, including premium characters that probably mine harder than the rest. I don’t really care about that though. Spending money really isn’t needed on this one, but since it’s a single dev and I’d rather not deal with ads, I’m happy to toss a few bucks to remove those and help out.
Otherwise, I’ve been enjoying helldivers 2 every couple days to keep the medals rolling in, and the samples collected. The latest patch has been quite game changing. It’s nice to have more options to handle the opponents, but I finally had to change armors as my paper thin light armor wasn’t doing the job it had been from previous versions of the game
And it’s the perfect fit for a VR game as well. The top down towering from the heavens over your domain would make the island feel like a table top game… And you could give your pet proper scritches.