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.
I got mine smack in the middle of a boss fight in Remnant 2 lol, but my build is stupidly tanky enough that I was able alt-tab close it fast enough to not even die. Felt a little proud of that.
There’s a section under the “read more” split where it complains about over-tutorialization. The game hits you over the head with puzzle solutions and intended routes and leaves nothing for the player to figure out.
Check out Shapez 2. The first game was pretty basic but I really enjoy S2 as a Factorio lite. It’s much much less complex, but there’s still plenty of room to build crazy contraptions as you unlock more stuff to build with. Most major upgrades will make you want to refactor your whole base, but after you finish delivering a certain type of shape you no longer need to make more (except sometimes as components for new shapes). So I’ll pretty regularly knock out like half my factory and make a new and improved assembly line for the new shape I need to deliver.
It’s good, give it a look. I get quite sucked into it and it doesn’t have as much mental overhead as Factorio does. There’s also no biters, which makes it a much more relaxing factory game.
Bethesda tried this when they attempted to monetize mods. You can’t stop the signal on truly user-generated content. At best they might have a copyright claim on official DnD lore or monsters, which can be sidestepped with a custom setting, which is pretty much the whole point of user generated content.
I remember being 11 and playing Super Mario World and a couple Zelda games about a hundred times each. I came back to them over and over, I remember the maps and layout of Ocarina of Time better than I remember some of my childhood homes.
Now I have a steam library with 750 games in it and I can barely finish with the game I’m currently playing before I’m back on the store pages looking for more novelty. I think the average play time of items in my library is something like 2 hours.
I hate what I’ve become but I’ve lost what I had in the past. When I only had like five games I had no problem coming back to them over and over and over, but now that I’ve got my own income and no oversight I’ve flooded myself with options to the point that I don’t even want to play any of them. It sucks. I take solace in the fact that I pretty exclusively buy things on sale, so the total money pile is roughly half the size it would have been otherwise, but even so I don’t really want to know how much money I’ve spent on steam over my career. That’s cursed knowledge.
Same, I haven’t even slightly enjoyed any other MOBA I’ve played except for Smite, but I’ve fallen in with Deadlock like it’s an old friend. And we’ve come back and won from a couple really depressing looking matches. Just the other day I was at 0/12 running Bebop with a 25k team soul deficit and once I actually got my head in the game, and got a little lane assist, we came back and won it and I finished with a 10/14 K/d.
The comeback isn’t easy, and it shouldn’t be, but it’s doable. Especially so if your opponents get cocky. I’ve been on the other side of that coin as well, going 10/0 with Vindicta and fly out to snipe without a care in the world, to discover that every enemy is suddenly paying attention to where I am.