What Are You Playing Now: The New Beginning Thread

[Malcador]

37 minutes ago, Keyrock said:

Is there a story to Hardspace? Are there quests or is it just a sandbox where you space hard?

So far it just seems like you work as an indentured labourer for a heartless megacorp.

[Keyrock]

36 minutes ago, Malcador said:

So far it just seems like you work as an indentured labourer for a heartless megacorp.

Like 75% of the US work force these days. 

[Malcador]

6 hours ago, Keyrock said:

Like 75% of the US work force these days. 

Worse, I have to pay to rent my own equipment from them!

[Keyrock]

3 minutes ago, Malcador said:

Worse, I have to pay to rent my own equipment from them!

We'll get there, give it time...

Not even joking. We already pay a monthly fee to be spied on and have out data sold to other companies.

Edited June 22, 2020 by Keyrock

[Hurlshort]

Phoenix Point - I had some technical issues back when this was released, so I gave it time to marinate. Now that I have gotten into it, it is a pretty fun game. I am enjoying the story, and the squad level combat has a lot of variety.

[Deadly_Nightshade]

28 minutes ago, Hurlshot said:

Phoenix Point

I just started that as well!

[melkathi]

7 hours ago, Hurlshot said:

Phoenix Point - I had some technical issues back when this was released, so I gave it time to marinate. Now that I have gotten into it, it is a pretty fun game. I am enjoying the story, and the squad level combat has a lot of variety.

I can sell you a sealed collector's edition box

[Malcador]

In a grind between levels in Hardspace, repeatedly cutting up Mackerels until I can get to bigger ships.  Guess I will take a break for a bit, may go back to catching up to where I left off in Homeworld DoK when my SSD died and took my savegame with it.  Only on mission 2 though, gah, long slog back to 9.

[Sarex]

11 minutes ago, Malcador said:

In a grind between levels in Hardspace, repeatedly cutting up Mackerels until I can get to bigger ships.  Guess I will take a break for a bit, may go back to catching up to where I left off in Homeworld DoK when my SSD died and took my savegame with it.  Only on mission 2 though, gah, long slog back to 9.

Did you like Homeworld DoK? I was kind of disappointed that it was not a space game. Did not get pass the first few missions.

Edited June 23, 2020 by Sarex

[Tale]

I'm onto Stormblood in Final Fantasy XIV. I enjoyed Heavensward a good deal.

[Lexx]

Funny, I'm still with FFXIV as well. I never got into MMOs, because their mechanics bore me after 2 to 3 weeks at max, but this game... Man, the story has some real heights. Started Shadowbringers two days ago and IT'S SO GOOD. It looks great, it's fresh, it's theme is mostly new to me, etc. etc.

Stormblood had some good moments, but generally wasn't as good as Heavensward imo, especially Lyse is so god damn annoying, I hate her so much and was happy whenever she was not around ...... but Shadowbringers so far is simply blowing it away.

What sucks a bit is that since I've hit level 70, the bonus experience was disabled, so now I stopped outleveling the quest requirements and have to do some grind. Also switched from Archer/Bard to Gunbreaker, so now I'm a super cool heroic dude with a knife that has a gun build into it.

Edited June 24, 2020 by Lexx

[Humanoid]

Gotta admit I crashed out of FF14 towards the latter stages of Heavensward. Thinking it was probably a mistake to not take a break after finishing the base game, but then that's the nature of subscription games and trying to maximise the value of sunk costs. In the end I lost out on the price of Shadowbringers because I paid for it but never got near its content. The other factor I suppose was that the complexity of basic gameplay was going a bit beyond what I'd like, especially with Australia-Japan latency, just executing my basic rotation became the biggest demotivator by the end of my time with the game. Related to that, the inability to bind commands to the mousewheel really sucks.

In some theoretical future, the biggest motivator to revisiting the game might be if they add local servers. It was, after all, what brought me back to WoW after a 2.5 break way back when WoD released. Not that the reunion was particularly long-lasting, mind you. But they've offered a couple of week-long passes to revisit the game in the ~9 months since I left and I haven't bitten yet.

[Mamoulian War]

After the terrible terrible terrible Shrine of Amana experience (i've died there almost 40 times...) and a day of break, I've decided to give DS2 one more chance. The rest of Shrine of Amana is much less stupid, so I was able to traverse through the area with much less issues than in previous section... I've started to use Lightning Shortbow with Hawk Ring, which helped me to get to the boss without eating dirt. I also met one NPC invader, which made me a bit nervous, because he was not willing to get out of water, so I had to "kite" him around some pillars in there, which kind of made him less dangerous (he was a caster, and I was not able to run around in water, I am missing Rusty Ring from DS1 )

Anyway, when I visited the boss, as Hawke said, he was extremely easy, I have just sometimes jumped to late after his divebomb, and he obliterated me with it. Thankfully for my lack of reflexes was enough Ring of Steel Protection, which raised my physical defense enough to survive this attack. It took me 5 attempts to defeat him. The final try can be found below
 

 

Edited June 24, 2020 by Mamoulian War

[Malcador]

15 hours ago, Sarex said:

Did you like Homeworld DoK? I was kind of disappointed that it was not a space game. Did not get pass the first few missions.

I've liked it, I am just awful at it for some reason but have only played the single player campaign, where my time tested tactic is just being a hawk and using strike craft and bombers repeatdly.

[Sarex]

Heh, my tactic in Homeworld 2 was to rush Battlecruisers. Hard to do in a 1v1, but oh so easy in FFA (then everyone hates you and quits the game). Best match I've had is when a regular I played against, in a 1v1, decided to rush BCs too. We had 3 fights with over 20 BCs and after each fight we would mine the resources from the wreaks as we exhausted every asteroid on the map, by the final fight we had so many ships we crashed the game...

Really hope HW3 turns out good.

[Skazz]

Majesty Gold HD actually still MK11.

I'm not a fan of the decision to include Robocop as a guest character, but I won't deny that there's something oddly heartwarming about hearing Peter Weller in the role again, in 2020, and in an AAA game no less.

Hell, the only thing missing to completely knock the fantasy out of the park is the theme song. NRS WHY

 

[marelooke]

On 6/24/2020 at 12:52 AM, Tale said:

I'm onto Stormblood in Final Fantasy XIV. I enjoyed Heavensward a good deal.

The main downside of HW was Alphinaud, in my opinion. It's rather clear that SE was trying to figure out storytelling, throughout the base game and the first expansion you can really feel how your character really doesn't have much in the way of personality and just does as (s)he is told, and in HW it's mostly Alphinaud bossing you around, very little of what you do feels as if you have any say in it. I find that gets a lot less pronounced starting with Stormblood, and with Shadowbringers especially my Warrior of Light actually seems like a person of her own.

While obviously you don't have much of a choice in anything that happens, you don't *feel* it as keenly (except where SE breaks the 4th wall and pokes fun at the Warrior of Light for being unable to say "no", and silently nodding all the time). I think that the fact that you're just swept up in events, makes it far less obvious, since well, events are kinda out of your hands, and it clearly works a lot better that way.

On 6/24/2020 at 6:12 AM, Lexx said:

Funny, I'm still with FFXIV as well. I never got into MMOs, because their mechanics bore me after 2 to 3 weeks at max, but this game... Man, the story has some real heights. Started Shadowbringers two days ago and IT'S SO GOOD. It looks great, it's fresh, it's theme is mostly new to me, etc. etc.

Stormblood had some good moments, but generally wasn't as good as Heavensward imo, especially Lyse is so god damn annoying, I hate her so much and was happy whenever she was not around ...... but Shadowbringers so far is simply blowing it away.

What sucks a bit is that since I've hit level 70, the bonus experience was disabled, so now I stopped outleveling the quest requirements and have to do some grind. Also switched from Archer/Bard to Gunbreaker, so now I'm a super cool heroic dude with a knife that has a gun build into it.

The transformation of into Lyse was kinda unnecessary, the events leading up to it also were rather...meh. Might be different for other starting locations, but Yda and Papalymo were my introductions to the Scions, having started in Gridania. Not being able to deal with

Spoiler

Ilberd (and friends)

in a satisfactory manner to wrap up Heavensward kinda sucked as well. That said, I did enjoy Lord Hien and the entire steppe section. Though it becomes abundantly clear there that the player race is just window dressing since it's almost never even acknowledged (I play Xaela and one of the party said something along "Never had much contact with Xaela, don't know much of their culture", I was like "Dude, I'm right here!".

That made it all the more surprising when during one of the Beast Tribe quests my WoL was referred to as "You, with the horns!", but that was only one of a very few times race got acknowledged.

On 6/24/2020 at 8:37 AM, Humanoid said:

Gotta admit I crashed out of FF14 towards the latter stages of Heavensward. Thinking it was probably a mistake to not take a break after finishing the base game, but then that's the nature of subscription games and trying to maximise the value of sunk costs. In the end I lost out on the price of Shadowbringers because I paid for it but never got near its content. The other factor I suppose was that the complexity of basic gameplay was going a bit beyond what I'd like, especially with Australia-Japan latency, just executing my basic rotation became the biggest demotivator by the end of my time with the game. Related to that, the inability to bind commands to the mousewheel really sucks.

In some theoretical future, the biggest motivator to revisiting the game might be if they add local servers. It was, after all, what brought me back to WoW after a 2.5 break way back when WoD released. Not that the reunion was particularly long-lasting, mind you. But they've offered a couple of week-long passes to revisit the game in the ~9 months since I left and I haven't bitten yet.

Heh, due to how "slow" the game already is (slow tick-rate, very long global cooldown) I imagined it'd be easier to play with higher latency. Shows what I know...

For me (but I don't have high ping...) pulling off rotations feels easier than in most other games (eg. WoW) since there's an actual skill queue, so you can "pre-load" your next skill. Hell, "slide casting" is even built into the engine (it allows you to either pre-cast, or even move during the last ~15% of a cast), unlike in other MMOs where it's more a property of latency, and thus variable. The very long global cooldown also helps with this, at least until you get to the point where oGCD, off-global cooldown, skills become fairly commonplace (Stormblood, for most classes, iirc).

The game also has a rather slow tick-rate, so if you're used to other MMOs where you can maximise efficiency by "standing in the circle" until the very last second: you'll die. It's something I've had to unlearn. It's just how the game is designed (also, dying to stuff you clearly were no longer standing in, and not just on your screen, either...yay, dem slow ticks)

And indeed, rotations can get quite complex, depending on the class, but most of the ones I got to a high level have 3 action bars worth of skills, most of which at least see situational use.

Edited June 25, 2020 by marelooke

[Malcador]

17 hours ago, Sarex said:

Heh, my tactic in Homeworld 2 was to rush Battlecruisers. Hard to do in a 1v1, but oh so easy in FFA (then everyone hates you and quits the game). Best match I've had is when a regular I played against, in a 1v1, decided to rush BCs too. We had 3 fights with over 20 BCs and after each fight we would mine the resources from the wreaks as we exhausted every asteroid on the map, by the final fight we had so many ships we crashed the game...

Really hope HW3 turns out good.

I used to rush weapons platforms, worked sort of well for a while. 

[Humanoid]

3 hours ago, marelooke said:

Heh, due to how "slow" the game already is (slow tick-rate, very long global cooldown) I imagined it'd be easier to play with higher latency. Shows what I know...

Part of it is just dumb (bad) luck I suppose in that I played a rogue - because I always play a rogue - but the FF14 rogue is particularly bad for this. At least, so I was told, because I barely touched any other class making it hard to compare. I did try a bit of Samurai towards the end but I was already well on the way to burnout at that stage. It did seem a fair bit simpler though and I'd probably go that way should I return to the game in the future.

That said, the most complex rotation I've ever had the misfortune to try was the WoD-era Demonology Warlock. I tried it in a raid once and gave up after a single boss. It was a humiliatingly bad display, and I've played just about every spec of every class over the years. Except mage, for some reason the mage is the one class I've never played seriously.

 

EDIT: Oh right, just remembered that the actual class is Ninja, I think.

Edited June 25, 2020 by Humanoid

[marelooke]

1 hour ago, Humanoid said:

Part of it is just dumb (bad) luck I suppose in that I played a rogue - because I always play a rogue - but the FF14 rogue is particularly bad for this. At least, so I was told, because I barely touched any other class making it hard to compare. I did try a bit of Samurai towards the end but I was already well on the way to burnout at that stage. It did seem a fair bit simpler though and I'd probably go that way should I return to the game in the future.

That said, the most complex rotation I've ever had the misfortune to try was the WoD-era Demonology Warlock. I tried it in a raid once and gave up after a single boss. It was a humiliatingly bad display, and I've played just about every spec of every class over the years. Except mage, for some reason the mage is the one class I've never played seriously.

 

EDIT: Oh right, just remembered that the actual class is Ninja, I think.

Rogue turns into Ninja at lvl30 (like most base classes specialize into something else at 30), so either is correct as far as I am concerned.

Didn't play during WoD, but I remember kitty Druid being extremely hard to play well during Wrath of the Lich King, there was even an add-on that was borderline required for most "mere mortals" to get anything resembling decent performance out of it.

Mage in current day WoW isn't fun, not glass, and not a cannon either. Then again, "not fun" is my opinion on WoW in general nowadays. I guess I really miss how you had to be on top of your positioning in "old" WoW, whereas now you can pretty much cast everything on the move. FF XIV really does bring some of that back, come to think of it.

[Bartimaeus]

On 6/24/2020 at 4:18 AM, Mamoulian War said:

After the terrible terrible terrible Shrine of Amana experience (i've died there almost 40 times...) and a day of break, I've decided to give DS2 one more chance. The rest of Shrine of Amana is much less stupid, so I was able to traverse through the area with much less issues than in previous section... I've started to use Lightning Shortbow with Hawk Ring, which helped me to get to the boss without eating dirt. I also met one NPC invader, which made me a bit nervous, because he was not willing to get out of water, so I had to "kite" him around some pillars in there, which kind of made him less dangerous (he was a caster, and I was not able to run around in water, I am missing Rusty Ring from DS1 )

Anyway, when I visited the boss, as Hawke said, he was extremely easy, I have just sometimes jumped to late after his divebomb, and he obliterated me with it. Thankfully for my lack of reflexes was enough Ring of Steel Protection, which raised my physical defense enough to survive this attack. It took me 5 attempts to defeat him. The final try can be found below
 

Shrine is a stupid, unpleasant area...but at least it wasn't another crappy swamp area that seemingly every Souls game has. Barely remember the boss.

Edited June 26, 2020 by Bartimaeus

[BruceVC]

Im close to completing my absolutely enthralling and entertaining experience with RDR2 Online, I am on level 80 and the maximum level is 100 for meaningful gaining of things. So I have started thinking " what next " and I have decided to play Divinity : Original Sin 2 ....I have heard only good things about it and Im excited to start playing fantasy RPG again as I havent for about 6 months 

[Lexx]

Finished the FFXIV Shadowbringer storyline with my Gunbreaker. The last section had some super boring walk-around-some-more moments, but the actual ending was fantastic. Very well done, especially for an MMO.

Honestly, I find this game to be a quite pleasant experience all around. You don't really have to grind super hard, you can switch your character class at any time, the characters are likable (except for Lyse, god I hate her), and the story / quest design is mostly well done. The other people in the raids, etc. are usually not toxic either, even if you f- up a bit, which is also something I don't really know from other games.

 

Will probably start with the post-Shadowbringer content now. 20 quests have been released already, and the next batch will arrive in the new patch next month.

[Gorth]

Playing War in Russia these days... as the Soviet Union taking on Nazi Germany, full campaign 1941-1945

 

I love the game, even if the interface shows its age. Bring your own dos-box to run it

 

It's originally made by Gary Grigsby, a name that some old wargamers might recognize. The current owner of the game after SSI's demise is Matrix Games, who offers it as a free download from their website (i.e. fully legit). For those who prefer the Pacific War, that game is also there for free. Warning, if WIR was big, PW is humongous, not byte wise, but in scope and time investment.

Edit: Link for any fellow wargamers out there who might be curious/interested

 

https://www.matrixgames.com/game/war-in-russia-matrix-edition

 

[the_dog_days]

I'm about 50 hours into Elex. Finally sided with a faction (berserkers). Siding with a faction wasn't the big boost in power that it was the first time I played Elex. I think that's because I was around level 35 by the time I did all the other content that I wanted to engage with before joining. A weird thing I noticed due to the way I'm played this time is that I found out the 'secret' location of an important NPC by moving the main plot too far forward and and forgetting to follow up on a few B plots. I, as a player, already knew were this guy was, but it was really fourth wall breaking that another quest giver was like, "we need a hero" and then I magically knew where this guy was. Also, the first time I played I found Nasty very amusing. This time, though, she's just annoying mostly 'cause . . . She. Won't. Stop. Complaining. The first go around she was novel in that her character was prickly. But her personality really wears on you a second time. Besides, I'm trying to romance Caja anyway. 

There are five other games I'm playing on and off. Chief among those are Bard's Tale 4 and Avernum: Escape From the Pit.

Bard's Tale 4 is great once you get past the poor quality graphics and really dive into the game. It's part rpg and part puzzle game. Neither part is great but the sum of those parts is much better than it has any right to be. I had to, of course, play as a bard. My character is using the Brian Fargo portrait and uses the bemused voice. You don't have a whole lot of dialog trees and you can't really role play. Instead voices are determine what your character will say in ambient dialog--usually observational stuff. My character says some incredibly dumb things which fits as I get him hammered every fight. I suspect even if Ned the Dead survives Skara Brae, his liver won't.

 Snow in summer.

Ice in my heart.

Death's cold fingers.

Tear us apart. 

P.S. It also has one of the best soundtracks in resent years.