What are you playing RIGHT NOW?

[Keyrock]

I've been going hard on La-Mulana 2 and have made a ton of progress. I like to play hardcore 2D platformers with the D-Pad, as opposed to an analog stick, and the D-Pad beats the **** out of my thumb after prolonged play, so I'm going to give the game a rest for a couple days and hop back into Judgement.

[Hawke64]

Wandersong
I don't know what else I could expect, but the game is a collection of QTEs without any player's agenda. Turning off sound and trying to ignore the plot made the game less irritating, but if nothing changes, I'm going to refund it.

[Tale]

3030 Deathwar Redux

The main plot was 75% other characters talking elsewhere while the main character just did his own thing, but it was a fun game that ended right before things got too tedious. I'd say that's a win.

It bills itself as an adventure game and 2D space exploration hybrid. But I'd say the only thing it owes to adventure games is a Monkey Island joke and a side perspective on stations. Running around blowing up pirates was fun enough. That and a fantastic soundtrack.

[melkathi]

75%?

Defiance story was 100% that. NPCs talking and the PC standing around waiting to shoot stuff.

I enjoyed that story.

[Mico Selva]

I've finished Torment: Tides of Numenera yesterday and it is a pretty good Planescape: Torment's successor. Not as great as the original (nothing is  ), but closer than I expected.

I heard it was boring and overwritten, so I postponed playing it for a long time, but when I finally dived into it, the game turned out very enjoyable. I liked the characters, the world, intertwining quests and crazy items. Combat is probably the weakest aspect (mechanically - encounters are varied and interesting overall), but still serviceable (so similar to PST).

Next up, a game I never really gave a real chance, abandoning it after a few hours of play years ago.... Fallout: New Vegas. Already got my character up and running around Goodsprings.

[melkathi]

Torment I get as far as the first city and always quit there. Modern games have me worried that I might not be able to rest whenever I like. So I don't rest, which means I don't replenish my whatever.

I don't even know if Torment has an issue with me resting, but since so many games seem to do, I get fatigued with all RPGs nowadays before even finding out if they have a system that would fatigue me.

[Katphood]

I've been playing Sonic Mania and good god am I enjoying this. If you like 2D Sonic, you're gonna eat this one alive.

[Mamoulian War]

Started my second playthrough of Tales of Symphonia. This time with walkthrough to go for allmof the sidequests and trying to do most of the titles. It was almost exactly 5 years, after, I’ve beat it for the first time.

[Hurlshort]

So Conan Exiles is my game of the year. I mean, they just nailed so many different types of games in this thing. The world is engaging and hits the Conan vibe, the character development is well balanced, and then it is just this amazing building/survival game on top of it all. I am surprised it isn't getting more positive buzz.

[Malcador]

New WoW patch, basically just doing dailies over and over - though complaints that all we do is grind this patch have me puzzled as to what genre people have been playing for 15 years.  Nazjatar has some the best music WoW has ever had though, and is a cool zone.  Sort of shame it's not a fully fleshed out zone though, given it's importance to lore events.

[Hurlshort]

Today I decided to make a trebuchet in Conan Exiles, because it was a mission or something. I've been building my little fortress on a small cliff overlooking a beach, and I found a good place for it. Once I had it all ready to go, I cranked it back and let it fly towards the beach. It didn't go very far, but it did manage to disturb the Shaleback King hanging out on the beach. It just ticked him off, so he came charging up the slope to show me what is up. I retreated a but with the use of my elevator and fired some arrows down on him, but that just seemed to make him grumpy. Then I managed to get my thralls in on the act, and jumped behind him to finish him off with a warhammer. It was my first boss battle! 

[daven]

15 hours ago, Malcador said:

New WoW patch, basically just doing dailies over and over - though complaints that all we do is grind this patch have me puzzled as to what genre people have been playing for 15 years.  Nazjatar has some the best music WoW has ever had though, and is a cool zone.  Sort of shame it's not a fully fleshed out zone though, given it's importance to lore events.

Everyone is going to complain wow classic is slow and boring and not as good as they remember even though everyone has been saying that's the best version for years. Nothing is good enough.

[Keyrock]

15 hours ago, Hurlshot said:

So Conan Exiles is my game of the year. I mean, they just nailed so many different types of games in this thing. The world is engaging and hits the Conan vibe, the character development is well balanced, and then it is just this amazing building/survival game on top of it all. I am surprised it isn't getting more positive buzz.

I think the game was a victim of timing. It came out just as the survival game craze had ended and I think people were just really burned out on survival games because about a billion of them were "released" in the span of a couple years, and by "released" I mean put out in perpetual early access. It doesn't help that 99% of these survival games were, quite frankly, not very good. They'd come out in early access and people would say "well, it's missing a lot, but there's potential" then 2 years later the games would be barely closer to reaching said potential. I think that left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. Then Conan Exiles came out and it got overlooked by a lot of people who just assumed it was "yet another survival game" (I include myself in that group) and they were just done with those games.

Turns out Conan Exiles is more than yet another survival game and it's also quite good.

[melkathi]

All survival games sound like work.

[Tale]

Played through J.U.L.I.A: Among the Stars

A first person point and click adventure game with a variety of puzzles. And overall just kind of meh. You're uncovering what happened to a lost expedition, but the problem with that is the majority of the interest in that story is played out in the tutorial. The rest of the game is a dragged out and vague telling of what lead up to that point. And where the tutorial intrigues you with a whoddunit mystery, the rest is 90% alien history and myth. I don't recommend unless you're hard up for a sci-fi adventure game.

 

And since I'm on a SPAAAAAACE kick, I'm also toying with Space Pirates and Zombies and Rebel Galaxy. SPaZ being a game I tried playing twice before when it first released and got stuck on a boss. Rebel Galaxy being a 3D graphics on a 2D plane space sim where you're using broadsides. And it is pretty engaging so far.

[Malcador]

1 hour ago, Tale said:

Played through J.U.L.I.A: Among the Stars

A first person point and click adventure game with a variety of puzzles. And overall just kind of meh. You're uncovering what happened to a lost expedition, but the problem with that is the majority of the interest in that story is played out in the tutorial. The rest of the game is a dragged out and vague telling of what lead up to that point. And where the tutorial intrigues you with a whoddunit mystery, the rest is 90% alien history and myth. I don't recommend unless you're hard up for a sci-fi adventure game.

Was going to start that next week.  Good to know I've wasted my money, now, though!

[Humanoid]

On 7/10/2019 at 1:29 AM, Malcador said:

New WoW patch, basically just doing dailies over and over - though complaints that all we do is grind this patch have me puzzled as to what genre people have been playing for 15 years.  Nazjatar has some the best music WoW has ever had though, and is a cool zone.  Sort of shame it's not a fully fleshed out zone though, given it's importance to lore events.

I was flip-flopping on whether to try 8.2 today since it marks the actual proper launch of the new content, and idly started the launcher so I could at least have the game up to date. Noticed I had a gift of 3 days gametime, which was super convenient (and clever of them I guess, I've only been away for about a month and a half) so I decided to check in and see if my guild was up to anything these days.

The answer was not really, and I couldn't be bothered checking out the new solo content, so I just idled and socialised a bit. Ended up going to the new dungeon later on though - fortunately there were no unlock requirements - and it was pretty fun actually. Okay the trash is just random stuff scattered over the map and the landscape is just whatever, but the bosses were interesting. Cut the night short halfway through but it's probably enough to get me subbed for a month at least.

And no, I still haven't even unlocked Nazjatar. I don't really care all that much about unlocking flying at the moment.

 

P.S. I'm still active in FF14 at the same time, so the comparisons between them will be interesting. Still only level 60 there though, so I can't really compare like-for-like in terms of new content. I really did miss the feel of WoW mechanically though, it's just so much crisper in terms of engaging in combat. Part of it is obviously the latency difference: I'm connecting to WoW servers in Sydney at about 12ms, and to FF14 servers in Japan at about 120ms, but it's also the simple and to-the-point attack animations so you know exactly when your attack has hit, as opposed to seeing your character perform a series of pirhouettes and having to guess at which point of the animation your damage actually lands.

The other thing that leaps out at me is that the sound design that's so, so much better compared to FF14 bosses which are almost all mutes. I could play an encounter in FF14 with the sound turned completely off and it wouldn't make a lick of difference to how I perform. Now to be fair, WoW mods means there's a lot of additional explicit feedback that you don't get with the game natively, but even without any mods, the bosses yelling cheesy taunts at you corresponding to whatever's happening makes a huge difference.

On the flipside, I am swiftly reminded how obscure and indistinct WoW ground effect abilities are, especially since bossmods still have to catch up with the mechanics somewhat. It's like they're intentionally trolling you with where the edge of the 'fire' is, which may vary between two identical looking fires in different encounters..

[Keyrock]

I'm on Chapter 12 of Judgment. This feels like I'm near the end of the game, since then identity of killer has already been revealed. I'm proud to say I had the killer figured out since that character was introduced the first time... well, I wasn't sure whether they were the killer or the person that hired the killer, but I was confident they were one of the two.

[Tale]

Hit the second system of Rebel Galaxy and finally opened the sector map. Ahh, so it's going to be one of those games. Only a handful of systems to play in and a very linear progression. Like I progressed out of the first system thinking I was hot **** and the system map tells me that my new system is HIGH and every other system is EXTREME.

I like the game, but I fear I'm just going to doing a slogging grind to be strong enough to go to the next system. Over and over and over again.

[Mamoulian War]

Just released the second seal in Tales of Symphonia. The game is very hard if you don’t grind. I am already curious how much I will get ass kicked, when I’ll go for the Gung Ho title next playthrough

[Keyrock]

I finished Judgment on normal difficulty. It took me 65 hours to complete, though I still have plenty of content to explore in premium adventure mode. Great game with terrific writing, I expected no less from Ryu Ga Gotoka. If I have 1 criticism of the game is that it's too Yakuza, which seems like a really weird criticism given that I love the Yakuza series. If they make a sequel, I hope they depart from the Yakuza series a little more.  I hope they set the game some place other than Kamurocho. I understand why they went with Kamurocho for the setting and why the game was so Yakuza-like, it was the safe play, the game would be instantly familiar to all Yakuza fans. Still, I hope they take some risks for the follow up. Have the sequel take place in a new setting and spend more time making the detective aspects of the game a bit more in depth and challenging. I know some people didn't like the detective aspects of the game, like tailing and scene investigation, but I was into those, I just thought they were way too easy. Furthermore, during interrogations choosing wrong dialogue options didn't really come with any consequences. Maybe on the higher difficulty settings detective aspects are more challenging, but I suspect that the difficulty setting mainly just makes combat more difficult.

[ShadySands]

I'm playing nothing

I want to play something but nothing I have is appealing to me right now

[melkathi]

City of Villains.

Started an Arachnos Soldier and trying to get her to level 20 so I can go rogue, betray Arachnos and turn hero.

The character is called Spider from Mars. She'll start her path towards redemption out of lingering guilt over smashing Ziggy Stardust's sweet hands.

[Keyrock]

14 minutes ago, melkathi said:

City of Villains.

Started an Arachnos Soldier and trying to get her to level 20 so I can go rogue, betray Arachnos and turn hero.

The character is called Spider from Mars. She'll start her path towards redemption out of lingering guilt over smashing Ziggy Stardust's sweet hands.

Be wary about the Thin White Duke coming after you for revenge a few years down the line.

[Hawke64]

Wandersong
Completed the game, got all achievements. Encountered one progression-stopping bug, had to skip that part with a cheat.
I still don't understand how this game got 98% positive reviews. The platforming part lacks precision, but has bugs. The adventure part requires only the ability to memorize 3-5 numbers (or directions or colors). The ending somehow reminded of Okami (excluding any sort of catharsis), the "singing" mechanic was more meaningful in Aquaria, the subversion of the "Hero" trope was more engaging in NeiR: Gestalt (or Replicant).

BattleTech
Acquired my first heavy 'Mech (Dragon).

Edited July 13, 2019 by Hawke64