What are you Playing Now? No really, tell us more...

[Malcador]

1 hour ago, Chilloutman said:

 

Caestus Metalican > all other tracks.

[InsaneCommander]

Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2

Just like the previous games in this series, I manage to eliminate my targets unnoticed, but I can't resist the temptation of killing everyone in sight so I end up raising an alarm and killing everyone anyway.

Edited January 20, 2022 by InsaneCommander

[Malcador]

Got a frigate in Sea Dogs : CT, so combat isn't so bad now.  Wish my AI squadron weren't so useless, lost my Brig in a battle when it decided to ram my Corvette.  Maybe just need less moronic captains though.  

Definitely think signing on with the French was a bad idea though, they are war with Spain so I've pretty much locked myself out of the large islands

[Keyrock]

I finished The Good Life. In typical Swery fashion it's a game filled with half-baked clunky gameplay mechanics and bizarre characters, and with a convoluted borderline nonsensical story. As jank as the controls were, I never did tire of riding sheep, though.

It's not a game I could in good faith recommend to anyone that's not already a fan of Swery games (the same could be said of any Swery game) and any fan of Swery games doesn't need me to recommend this, they're going to play it regardless. I guess that makes this paragraph a complete waste of time. 

Anyway, I enjoyed it, but I'm a weirdo that likes weird games. Swery makes weird games.

[kanisatha]

I'm in  "Day 5" of my Disco Elysium playthrough, my first time playing the game. My inate need in my RPGs to be the world-saving hero who fixes everything is taking a beating in this game. Seems like the game provides for many different outcomes in Harry's life and in side quests. But when it comes to the overall main story, all paths lead to one outcome:

Spoiler

the union guy winning it all. Anyone know if it is possible to produce a more balanced outcome? If so, how?

 

[Zoraptor]

If you haven't played before you should just keep playing. You're better off not being spoiled.
 

Spoiler

Short answer is... kind of?

End game spoilers. As above, I'd seriously consider not reading it even if you want to know.

Spoiler

No one really gets what they wanted at the end, at least if you do a good job.

You can find out that Edgar ordered a murder in the end game, plus there's the drug running through the port and Edgar/ Evrart not getting the large scale conflict they wanted. You can't arrest them or anything though, and the chances of a successful prosecution for either is low given who the witnesses are. It's enough to put a spike in their plans though and make them feel like they've been forced to sit in an uncomfortable chair for a while. You can also do minor stuff like faking the signatures he wants or stopping the fortified food for the strikers, of course.

Might be more too, I'd guess that my second playthrough was fairly comprehensive, but it might not have been.

 

 

Edited January 26, 2022 by Zoraptor

[Wormerine]

some 10 hours into God of War. Overall I think it is a superb high quality production action adventure with very good pacing, but I have been using this forum to vent my frustrations so here it is:

Combat is not very good. It is the usual AAA's tendency to focus on presentation over gameplay. Sluggish animations, zoomed in camera do the game no favours. What the point of "immersion" and "being closer to your character" if to make the combat work you need to rely on big flashing UI arrows? And I just dispise animation lead combat - enemies teleporting to hit you even though you moved away, or your hits not regiestering, because the enemy initated some kind of action animation. With plenty of targets I find it difficult to make "the father" hit whom I need him to hit. On top of that, visuals seem to be designed to look good rather then communicate important information. I am currently fighting the elves and it is such a visual cluster**** I have trouble seeing what is going on. It feels to me like a game designed for casual, easy play, and higher difficulty levels (playing on second hardest) just dont work well. I feel like I can't use half of the skills I unlocked, unlike lets say DMC5 in which character mastery is key to succeeding on higher difficulties. 

 

[BruceVC]

14 hours ago, Wormerine said:

some 10 hours into God of War. Overall I think it is a superb high quality production action adventure with very good pacing, but I have been using this forum to vent my frustrations so here it is:

Combat is not very good. It is the usual AAA's tendency to focus on presentation over gameplay. Sluggish animations, zoomed in camera do the game no favours. What the point of "immersion" and "being closer to your character" if to make the combat work you need to rely on big flashing UI arrows? And I just dispise animation lead combat - enemies teleporting to hit you even though you moved away, or your hits not regiestering, because the enemy initated some kind of action animation. With plenty of targets I find it difficult to make "the father" hit whom I need him to hit. On top of that, visuals seem to be designed to look good rather then communicate important information. I am currently fighting the elves and it is such a visual cluster**** I have trouble seeing what is going on. It feels to me like a game designed for casual, easy play, and higher difficulty levels (playing on second hardest) just dont work well. I feel like I can't use half of the skills I unlocked, unlike lets say DMC5 in which character mastery is key to succeeding on higher difficulties. 

 

Wormie you need to ensure you include a score out of 100 so we understand if you would recommend it ? Any score >50 means you wouldn't recommend it ?

[Wormerine]

4 hours ago, BruceVC said:

Wormie you need to ensure you include a score out of 100 so we understand if you would recommend it ? Any score >50 means you wouldn't recommend it ?

I don't do scores. Game? Yes, so far. Combat, no so far, I find it annoying. 

EDIT: Too appease @BruceVCI will go with 5 star rating which I personally can somewhat tolerate. At this point I would give God of War 4/5 stars, and would give just combat 2/5 - there is some good stuff in it, but designs contradict each other and the whole thing doesn't come together. 

Edited January 28, 2022 by Wormerine

[Mamoulian War]

So I have decided with one other guy, that we will try to run an Endurance Race in Assetto Corsa Competizione on Spa-Francorchamps track, with driver swap in the boxes on SimGrid platform. He is pretty much pro, but I am a newbie at that game, so we signed up our team as PRO-AM and I was assigned to do the qualification and start the race as a first driver. As soon as the Qualification started, I knew the **** hit the fan It was in the middle of the night and started to rain Thankfully the track was not flooded, so it was not to terrible, but I made few mistakes, so I had to start from the last quarter of the grid of 46 cars. Of course the race would be in the night as well, so I have decided to be as cautious as possible during the first few corners. And I have made a short video about all of the experiences, which I've accumulated during this race
 

 

[BruceVC]

Im 30 hours into NWN EE and I am thoroughly enjoying it, the first time I played it was about 12 years ago so I have forgotten quite a lot of the narrative which makes it more exciting

Im loving the AD&D\D&D ruleset and as usual the Forgotten Realms lore and setting. I can see the MP design but its easy to mitigate the annoyances like I am Wizard and I have 1 henchman, Tomi, a familiar and I summon monsters so I have " a party" with me all the time which helps with this type of MP game

[marelooke]

Started playing Subnautica. Really great game. Start was bit rough, got a suboptimal location for an absolute newbie (ironically, it's a pretty great location in general, and I relocated there on my 2nd go), but got a new location after I forgot to save before exiting the game. Yep, no autosaves on this one, not even when exiting to desktop...

It ticks all the boxes: dumped in "bad situation", gotta figure out how to get out of "bad situation", gotta figure out the mystery of what even is "bad situation" and how you got into "bad situation" in the first place. To do that gotta survive "bad situation", and to survive "bad situation" gotta build stuff.

Hearing some really mixed signs about the sequel, but thankfully I doubt I"m done with this one soon

And well, "started" got quite a ways in already:

Spoiler

Encountered the Sunbeam, found the teleporter to that floating island, and found 3 of the bases from the previous expedition, and of course a whole slew of life pods.

Building wise I've got quite a base going (of course), I built the big sub (and the small one, ofc), and got all the blueprints for the Prawn suit, so that'll be the next building project. After that probably heading back to the Aurora as it seems I should be able to get in there, but I got shoo'd away by something big last time I was there.

 

Edited January 29, 2022 by marelooke

[Bartimaeus]

5 hours ago, marelooke said:

Started playing Subnautica. Really great game. Start was bit rough, got a suboptimal location for an absolute newbie (ironically, it's a pretty great location in general, and I relocated there on my 2nd go), but got a new location after I forgot to save before exiting the game. Yep, no autosaves on this one, not even when exiting to desktop...

It ticks all the boxes: dumped in "bad situation", gotta figure out how to get out of "bad situation", gotta figure out the mystery of what even is "bad situation" and how you got into "bad situation" in the first place. To do that gotta survive "bad situation", and to survive "bad situation" gotta build stuff.

Hearing some really mixed signs about the sequel, but thankfully I doubt I"m done with this one soon

And well, "started" got quite a ways in already:

  Reveal hidden contents

Encountered the Sunbeam, found the teleporter to that floating island, and found 3 of the bases from the previous expedition, and of course a whole slew of life pods.

Building wise I've got quite a base going (of course), I built the big sub (and the small one, ofc), and got all the blueprints for the Prawn suit, so that'll be the next building project. After that probably heading back to the Aurora as it seems I should be able to get in there, but I got shoo'd away by something big last time I was there.

 

In my first playthrough, I remember that I put a couple of hours in before restarting for whatever reason, and I was super confused upon my restart because I couldn't figure out where anything I recognized was. Took me a bit to realize that the starting position, although it stays in that safe shallows area, can move around a bit - I am not a smart man. Yeah, it's a good game. I put a few hours into the second game before I died and realized I must've accidentally chosen hardcore instead of normal, because it erased my save game...but before that, it seemed fine - sequels to games that had mystery/surprise elements rarely have the same mystique as the originals, though.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Back to Disco Elysium.

I helped some kids start a club and discovered a sound so powerful it almost took down a building. Hardcore.

[Malcador]

Rome 2 TW.  AI is truly genius, was outnumbered 2000 to 3000. I lost but left them with 800 men as they decided to run their infantry the length of the map to ram themselves against my line.  Almost conquered France, Spain is next then I move east.  Probably should take a break and kill off the other parties though.

 

[Oner]

5 hours ago, KP the Torque Dork said:

Back to Disco Elysium.

I helped some kids start a club and discovered a sound so powerful it almost took down a building. Hardcore.

HARDCORE

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

29 minutes ago, Oner said:

HARDCORE

HARD CORE TO THE MEGA

[melkathi]

Re-evaluation of Expeditions: Rome

 

The tooltips continue being bad and the tutorial pop up information straight up wrong.

Archery continues being overpowered. If you have high ground.

The legion combat mini-game is meh and extremely random, without tactical choices having any true, predictable impact. The battles have 4 phases: Forming up for the fight, two complications, and a conclusion. At the start of each phase you pick one of three random stratagems from a pool of stratagems for that phase. These have various effects such as increasing your legion's defense or aggression, increasing survival rate of casualties, outright killing enemy troops (and sacrificing some of yours to do so), as well as how the fight ends (chase down fleeing enemies, plunder corpses, do a last stand...). You also assign a centurion as commander for the fight and his skills and perks will affect things. Reloading the battle will give completely different outcomes. The same centurion who before had a survival chance of 69% and no chance to get any loot, may suddenly have a 100% survival chance and great loot chance. You may have already effectively beaten the enemy, so go complete defensive in the second complication to mitigate your casualties and end up with an additional 500 dead, when a stratagem that actually sacrificed legionarii has you lose a quarter of that. It is meant to represent the chaotic, unpredictable nature of combat, but it breaks immersion once you realize that you do not have to use any tactics, instead just quicksave before the battle then click random buttons and load until you get a desirable outcome (few casualties and a common loot chest (the higher two tiers of loot chests are actually not worth it)).

While you are traveling on the map random events will trigger. Some are good, some are bad. Some are good in the effect they have for you, such as giving you loot, some are bad in the effects they have for you, such as injuring party members. Some are bad in how they are conceived. A random event that gives you a choice of ignoring the slavers, buying slaves from the slavers or attacking the slavers, is a good event as it is interesting. An event where you just read some text about happening upon a temple and getting a blessing from the priest is a bad event, because it is simply a wall of text to give you a boost. An event that gives you a wall of text to describe that while crossing a river a companion slipped and broke their arm is very bad - it simply interrupted your gameplay experience to give you a penalty. An event that has a pack of foxes raid the camp of armed soldiers, and even injure a praetorian... seriously? Are game devs competing into how much idiocy they can cram into their brains before gamers call them out on the sheer stupidity?

 

That said, if you are into Expeditions, it is a good "Expeditions" experience. Miles ahead of Vikings. While the legion gameplay is meh, having that legion gives you a proper expedition feel - you are not just a glorified adventuring party.

The premise, inserting your character into the historical what if timeline isn't bad. And they tried to get it all historically accurate. The voice acting is often bad. Any non-roman characters were just given the brief: "Sound foreign. We don't care what that accent is supposed to be, as long as it sounds foreign." This is jarring at times. For Archelaus and the random Greek soldiers I had to turn the sound off. But without VO, the game improves a lot.

I read somewhere that the game starts with the worst part of the game. This may be true. Especially the first fights are meh. I disagree with a reviewer who waxed on about how amazing map designs are for other battles after the first. Though I have to admit they tried to make some fights stand out.

 

So:

The game tries to do a lot of things. It tries to learn from the mistakes made in Vikings. It is definitely a better game than Vikings. So if you inexplicably thought Expeditions: Vikings was a good game worth your time, the only reason you shouldn't play Rome is a rare allergy to all things Roman. Or having better things to do with your life, like playing board games with your children.

If like me you weren't a fan of Vikings, possibly wait for a sale. While it tries to do a lot of things, somehow the devs manage to not get anything really right or at least enough things not right enough to create this impression.

 

They tried to get Bruce interested in the game and have added companion romance options.

They have also tried to lure LadyCrimson, by having a sidequest involving cats.

There is even an early game over involving cats.

They really tried to make this game special. And if you look past the early game and hear past the voice acting for the Greeks, it shows.

[Hurlshort]

I'm back at Conan Exiles. I decided to strip out all my mods and start a new game fresh. Funcom has done a good job of implementing a lot of quality of life stuff since I last played it plain. Just having fun in single player mode and starting my new empire from the ground up.

I have more hours in this game than anything else I have ever played.

[marelooke]

10 hours ago, Hurlsnot said:

I'm back at Conan Exiles. I decided to strip out all my mods and start a new game fresh. Funcom has done a good job of implementing a lot of quality of life stuff since I last played it plain. Just having fun in single player mode and starting my new empire from the ground up.

I have more hours in this game than anything else I have ever played.

Haha, the latest Conan Exiles update is why I started playing Subnautica, as it broke my private servers something fierce for quite a few days Fact that they released the patch while I was messing with the docker image didn't help, of course, so wasn't entirely clear whether the breakage was mods, or my changes.

Found this server tuning guide that improves quite a few aspects. Especially looking forward to how combat will feel, especially once the server's been running for a while (got really "NPCs teleport around"-y for me after a week or so. Then usually crashes with out of memory). I imagine much of it is applicable to single player too (since it just runs the server locally), though performance might be a consideration depending on the gaming hardware (one of the reasons I started running my server on a separate machine in the first place)

Currently building a massive base/city in Siptah. Really enjoying the changes they made to the Island after the beta. It's also kind of interesting how things sort of make sense from a continuity perspective even if you played before these major changes that added the NPC camps etc.

 

As for Subnautica:

Spoiler

Found three alien facilities so far, not counting the emplacement: the research facility, a secondary research site near a fossil with scanners, and some sort of tomb near the meteorite.

Progress does seem to have slowed somewhat. Guess I'll have to start digging into the cave systems below given the depth at which my targets appear to be located. Might need to build a base down there...somewhere, to make that more convenient.

Ran into one really nasty situation involving 3 Reaper Leviathans and a sub. Got a bit complacent around these guys while exploring. Got thought a lesson...

 

[kanisatha]

17 hours ago, Oner said:

HARDCORE

Haha, as soon as I read KP's post I was going to post exactly this! You beat me to it.

[ShadySands]

18 hours ago, Oner said:

HARDCORE

This is how I'm picturing it

Edited February 1, 2022 by ShadySands

[Malcador]

Ooof, civil war did not go well, they took all the food producing provinces Think I had a turning point, Senate loyalists sent 4 legions into Italy, met them with 5 of mine in a series of grinding battles but smashed them overall so can counterattack.  Sadly the damn Gauls retook everything I earned in the last campaign, bah.

 

[BruceVC]

55 hours into NWN EE and Im right at the end. I really have loved my gaming sojourn back to the Forgotten Realms and reminded me how excited I am about BG3

What I also  am really enjoying is the usage of the D&D ruleset, I love using spells like Spell Breach and Protection of Alignment effectively in combat 

[Keyrock]

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. It's been so many years since I played this game that I forgot where everything is. I do remember that the cross is the best sub-weapon, but frankly the cross is the best sub-weapon in most Castlevania games.