Man, I managed to completely forget about that. My dad was really, really into that game. Like, that’s about all he did for most of 4 years and ended up leaving my mom for someone he met in game.
I guess SL wasn’t really any worse about that than any other game, plenty of people meet and get married in MMOs, but I think the raging custom-content sex parties in SL probably didn’t help matters at the time.
Wonder how that game is doing these days. Cursory web search says it’s still alive. I probably would have found it to be pretty interesting if I wasn’t so turned away from it by my family experience.
On machines that were actually strong enough to run it, it was mostly fine. I played on PC and while I admit the later balancing update was probably necessary, I didn’t run into most of the real nasty bugs people liked to talk about. I had a great time putting in 100 or so hours in version 1.
A solid 80% or more of all the problems Cyberpunk had at launch stemmed from trying to launch it on last-gen consoles. It absolutely was not intended for PS4 or XB1 and targeting those platforms was a mistake. Once they pulled availability for those and buckled down on getting it prettied up for next gen, the quality jumped by a mile within the next year and a half of updates.
The launch was rough, I grant you that, and maybe I’m just simping for CDPR but even at the time I was in the vocal minority saying, hey this game really isn’t that bad if you give it a chance and run it on hardware that it was intended for.
And of course now with its updates and DLC it’s just genuinely a great game.
Roboquest actually kind of kicks ass. It’s a way better game than I expected it to be when I picked it up. I think those guys deserve more attention than they’ve been getting.
Also, shout out to Gunfire Reborn as well, I’ve been a big fan of that one for a couple years. Similar style to Roboquest. It’s a Chinese game and some parts of it are a little poorly translated but the gameplay is very fun and solid.
It can be charitably described as above, and uncharitably described as “Hold down S and LMB for an hour at a time”. I kind of bounced off these. They aren’t bad games, in fact they were pretty popular but most of your gameplay loop is going to revolve around getting the attention of a horde of goons and then backpedaling while you whittle the group down from 80 dudes to none.
Solasta’s campaign feels a little half baked in some ways, especially if you’re coming from Baldur’s Gate, but where it really shines is in building your own campaigns to run your friends through. It’s a perfectly reasonable platform to host online D&D 5e in, especially with mods to expand the content. And there are plenty of user-created workshop campaigns to download, but in general, I wouldn’t recommend it as a single player experience if that’s what you’re looking for. I absolutely do recommend it for group play.
I was holding out hope that the modding scene would help support the game, because traditionally speaking Bethesda modders have done some incredibly amazing work on other titles. But no, alas, Starfield is such a fuckin’ trash fire that not even the modders are willing to put in the work to unfuck this heap of shit. Somebody might release a killer overhaul for it after they’ve had a couple more years to basically rewrite the entire engine, but frankly I don’t see anyone caring that much about this game to make it happen. I know of at least one guy who rather than getting involved in the mod scene, instead got on Steam and said fuck you, I’ll make my own fuckin’ Starfield, and started whipping up Spacebourne 2, and even this half-baked early access alpha jank has clear signs of being the seed of a better game than Starfield was. I’m sure that others have had similar ideas.
Ah, fair enough, suppose I could have checked that myself. For some reason I thought I remembered the old version being delisted and replaced. Suppose I’m just going crazy.
That’s what the difficulty settings are for. No joke. Nearly any trash build can cruise through the easy difficulties with no more than a basic understanding of how turn based combat operates, and you’ll need to be a sweatlord with three spreadsheets open to reliably pose a threat to the hardest difficulty. Personally, I like to play in the middle but still overoptimize my party, so the early game is a challenge and then I just completely steamroll the final third of the game once we really get cooking with mythic levels.
If you already know DnD then you can play pathfinder with minimal confusion. An hour’s worth of reading a couple good build guides will give you a good idea where the differences lie and why certain choices are commonly made (Point-Blank/Precise Shot feats for instance). If you don’t already know DnD and you’re coming from something like Pillars of Eternity or Divinity Original Sin, you might have a little bit of a rough landing. But that’s what a wiki is for, or just straight up following a build guide if you’re timid.
Wrath of the Righteous is hands down a better game than Baldur’s Gate 3 in every observable metric except for graphics and I will gladly die on this hill.
Starfield has fundamental issues that no amount of modding or DLC is going to repair. I don’t think I’ve ever been less excited for a content update for a game I own.