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

[Lexx]

Don't have any of the reported stuttering in Elden Ring so far - runs pretty good actually, even though my pc is god knows how old. However, I think it's been a long time since my graphics card was running this hot.

[Malcador]

Finally got CP2077 updated, my 46 ninja nomad was a bit of a mess to restore as I forgot how to build her, heh.  But replaying as a corpo, is nice to not see the map all cluttered with NCPD hustles and the like.

[Lexx]

I completely forgot how much I suck in the beginning of every Souls game. What's funny is that I am barely using my shield... thanks to Bloodborne. Now I have to relearn the combat again, and once I switch back to Blooborne at some point, I'm going to completely suck again.

[Wormerine]

6 hours ago, Lexx said:

Don't have any of the reported stuttering in Elden Ring so far - runs pretty good actually, even though my pc is god knows how old. However, I think it's been a long time since my graphics card was running this hot.

Yeah, soon after release they released a small patch that made things better. I do get occasional stutters, though honestly the only place I had an issue that would affect gameplay was Sentinel right at the start of the game. I would get stutters if I fought him at the base of the hill, but not if I fought him around the church.
 

1 hour ago, Lexx said:

I completely forgot how much I suck in the beginning of every Souls game. What's funny is that I am barely using my shield... thanks to Bloodborne.

I started as Samurai and rolled without the shield for a while. Turns out it's really helpful, more so then in DS3 I believe. Guard Counter is really powerful (heavy attack right after blocking). 

[Lexx]

I started as the knight guy. Rolling is extremely inefficient, which feels so wrong after grinding Bloodborne for 100s of hours and being able to jump out of the way of almost everything. Though I do seem to be getting a little more agile now. I remember that back in DS2/3 I constantly used the shield and barely dodged at all. In hindsight, I feel like the Bloodborne system ... does feel somewhat better. Also I'm really missing to regen some hitpoints when quickly attacking enemies after getting hit.

Not sure yet what to think of the open world... it feels so extremely big and overwhelming. Half the time I'm just running through the landscape but can't really find anything of interest. In the games prior there was always something interesting around every corner. Now I'm just looting whatever plants I walk over and haven't really found anything fancy at all.

Couldn't help myself and looked up some armors on the wiki. There's some stuff that looks super fancy and I need to get my hands on it. But outside of that ... I really want to play Bloodborne now.

[Calax]

On 3/3/2022 at 4:23 PM, majestic said:

That's pretty much every open world game I ever tried. Dragon Age: Inquisition's Hinterlands was already too large.

One of the things I've heard said about the Souls games, and other open world games, is that sense of "holy crap" when you see a cathedral on the far side of the world, and a few hours later you're fighting bad guys in that cathedral.

Personally I think things have gotten almost to open world, where plot points are basically ignored because you decided to wander off and fight rats in the sewer for five levels. This is most obvious in Cyperpunk.

 

 

Still playing Super Robot Wars 30. Am debating trying Souls games again, I just hate that sense of banging my head into a wall, I get enough of it from Raiding in WoW.

[ComradeYellow]

On 3/4/2022 at 11:37 AM, Lexx said:

Don't have any of the reported stuttering in Elden Ring so far - runs pretty good actually, even though my pc is god knows how old. However, I think it's been a long time since my graphics card was running this hot.

I did not at first but am having stuttering problems now for some reason.

I found a killer farming location and am now leveled pretty high and already beat two of the main bosses in the game.  I think  there's like 5 or 6.

Love this game quite a lot and the fact that it has been released at this particular time period is a great incentive to play it to keep your mind off of other matters.  I started off as a Samurai and found a killer katana that adds magic damage and  ran into the first four types of sombering smith stones so I got lucky that my particular discoveries have netted me quite the buffing.

Many will probably disagree but I think this is better than anything CD Projekt Red has to offer, Witcher 3 for instance is too fast paced and the plot is too soap opera for my liking, whilst everything in ER is more nuanced, relaxed, tougher, and more leisurely.

Edited March 5, 2022 by ComradeYellow

[HoonDing]

Glad I dodged the Elex II bullet.

[Wormerine]

3 hours ago, ComradeYellow said:

Many will probably disagree but I think this is better than anything CD Projekt Red has to offer, Witcher 3 for instance is too fast paced and the plot is too soap opera for my liking, whilst everything in ER is more nuanced, relaxed, tougher, and more leisurely.

I mean combat and exploration, definitely. World building - yes. Story and characters in true FromSoftware fashion is barely there. Apples to Oranges

[ComradeYellow]

Yup you won't find strong character archetypes in a From game.  Everything is deep and subconscious and on a different plane of existence.  Labels suck anyway.

[Hurlshort]

6 hours ago, HoonDing said:

Glad I dodged the Elex II bullet.

Huh? I've enjoyed it tremendously. Although I have literally dodged a few bullets in the game, so that must be what you mean.

[LadyCrimson]

...on the PS4 version of Diablo3, I'm still having a fair bit of fun again grinding rifts and the Adventure quests a couple hours a day. I still need to get past Rift70. Nothing like Diablo's for mindless passing of time occasionally. That's about all I have time for tho...probably be another month or two before I feel like I can spend more devoted time on screenshot obsession checking out other/PC games again.

[Zoraptor]

2 hours ago, Hurlsnot said:

Huh? I've enjoyed it tremendously. Although I have literally dodged a few bullets in the game, so that must be what you mean.

Could have Vega graphics, game ain't exactly fun with that at the moment.

[the_dog_days]

I've confirmed Jax's son, Dex is the Chosen One. Where we mere mortals have to use jetpacks, Dex is capable of unassisted human flight. Have you ever seen an angel fly? Or at least a filthy child?

[majestic]

10 hours ago, Wormerine said:

I mean combat and exploration, definitely. World building - yes. Story and characters in true FromSoftware fashion is barely there. Apples to Oranges

I wish I could like this post ten times over. While I enjoyed playing Dark Souls, it's fandom fandumb also caused it to be one of the bigger disappointments for me. I was looking forward to a dark, excessively hard game with this supposedly amazing story... and it ended up being all right in terms of difficulty (even accidentially gimped my character pretty hard) and the story is basically just you being the chosen one who can either keep the world alive as it is, or let it start over. Such wow, much awsome, <more meme stuff goes here>.

Sure, the world building in the game was pretty good and the way you can unlock shortcuts is fantastic, and you could read item descriptions and look at the world design to gather a lot of the history of the setting, but that's just not what I was looking forward to. Not the game's fault.

Fandumb's gonna fandumb:

10 hours ago, ComradeYellow said:

Yup you won't find strong character archetypes in a From game.  Everything is deep and subconscious and on a different plane of existence.  Labels suck anyway.

QED.

Edited March 6, 2022 by majestic

[Wormerine]

4 hours ago, majestic said:

I was looking forward to a dark, excessively hard game with this supposedly amazing story...

I must say that so far ER doesn't click with me DS1&3 and Sekiro clicked with me. Overwhelming similarity to DS makes it a bit awkward, and tone and gameplay isn't as tonally tight as they were in DS. Vagueness was part of the charm in DS, in here with brighter to tone, bigger guidance and lesser difficulty - I feel like I could have used something more concrete ala. Sekiro.

I am just dipping outside opening green areas and exploring some cooler environments. Finally enemies are catching up with my power level. Last couple hours were a snooze fest.

[Bartimaeus]

4 hours ago, majestic said:

I wish I could like this post ten times over. While I enjoyed playing Dark Souls, it's fandom fandumb also caused it to be one of the bigger disappointments for me. I was looking forward to a dark, excessively hard game with this supposedly amazing story... and it ended up being all right in terms of difficulty (even accidentially gimped my character pretty hard) and the story is basically just you being the chosen one who can either keep the world alive as it is, or let it start over. Such wow, much awsome, <more meme stuff goes here>.

Sure, the world building in the game was pretty good and the way you can unlock shortcuts is fantastic, and you could read item descriptions and look at the world design to gather a lot of the history of the setting, but that's just not what I was looking forward to. Not the game's fault.

Fandumb's gonna fandumb:

I think we've had this discussion before, but yeah, FromSoftware is pretty good at passive storytelling and world-building - not plot or traditional storytelling, of which they largely make no attempt to really even do outside of Sekiro (...and even that pales in comparison to most other games in terms of directness and quantity).

DeS, DS1, and BB all drew me in from a world perspective - the rest were somewhere between "eh" and "nothing". I have not tried Elden Ring yet, and I probably won't for some time to come...open world trash, .

Edited March 6, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Lexx]

20 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

FromSoftware is pretty good at passive storytelling and world-building

I dunno. Usually the only way for me to figure out the story in their games is if I read it in a walkthrough / wiki article.

[Bartimaeus]

32 minutes ago, Lexx said:

I dunno. Usually the only way for me to figure out the story in their games is if I read it in a walkthrough / wiki article.

Yes, because they by and large do not bother with traditional or direct storytelling, and what little there is of the latter is so incredibly basic that you'd be forgiven for not having it even register as being part of "the story". Instead, you get lots of passive storytelling for all sorts of different elements of the game where you have to try to connect little details and sometimes make assumptions if you want to try to weave together micro-narratives - why an item is found in a certain location, what's the deal with this NPC, how did this area get destroyed in this particular manner, etc. It's an especially appropriate type of storytelling for stuff that doesn't really matter because it doesn't waste your time on unimportant nothings when you don't want it to...but FromSoftware applies it to a lot of stuff that would matter in other games, so I get why it isn't for everyone. I do think it serves heavily action-based games pretty well when they're trying to have more of a low-key and less in-your-face approach, especially with consideration to how terribly obnoxious more 'cinematic' action games in recent years have become (e.g. the Horizon games). The main 'plot' may still ultimately culminate in the bog-standard "you are the hero...because you were able to do what everyone else couldn't", but the style and framing of how you get there is very different.

Edited March 6, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Wormerine]

27 minutes ago, Lexx said:

I dunno. Usually the only way for me to figure out the story in their games is if I read it in a walkthrough / wiki article.

Agree, but there is cohesion to their worlds. I really didn't get much of the "story" of DS1 but uncovering each layer of city build upon city, delving deeper and deeper into hellscape and arriving into deceptively pristine city of Anor Londo were unforgettable. Creepy, sad little NPC stories. I never felt DS needed anything more then that. Not so sure about Elden Ring just yet. It feels static and dead in the way previous games never did, even though they are mechanically identical. 

Edit. I find FromSoftware games thematically rich - more like an arthouse film, rather then traditional plot and action driven entertainment. 

Edited March 6, 2022 by Wormerine

[Bartimaeus]

41 minutes ago, Wormerine said:

Edit. I find FromSoftware games thematically rich - more like an arthouse film, rather then traditional plot and action driven entertainment. 

I like it just because it doesn't waste my time. The "tutorial" was them writing a few messages for basic controls on the ground...that the player can choose to read or choose to ignore. 99% of dialogue is the player choosing to talk to NPCs. Trying to make sense of anything is up to the player and their ability (and desire to) interpret details. In a way, it's kind of a "have your cake and eat it too" style, because if you want to just play some damn video games, you can totally do that - if nothing else, Souls games are definitely the kind of game where you can just start up a new game and jump right into it without many annoyances or obstacles artificially getting in your way...but you can also engage with it to try to figure out the world to a degree. It's such a different kind of style from the more ham-fisted "PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU NOTICE EVERYTHING WE MADE AND WROTE" approach that is endemic to so much modern (triple A) gaming. It's not always appropriate for every type of game (and it's certainly not always what I want!), but I think it works for Souls.

...Now for the SonicMages of the world who say that it's all so totally deep and unique, that's a different discussion entirely that I won't engage with because of how patently absurd it is.

Edited March 6, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[ComradeYellow]

10 hours ago, Hurlsnot said:

Huh? I've enjoyed it tremendously. Although I have literally dodged a few bullets in the game, so that must be what you mean.

From what I have seen it does seem like an improvement over the original, which had boatloads of issues.  The fact that they fixed the broken attribute system is a huge sigh of relief.  May pick it up on a sale later down the line.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

the SonicMages of the world

There's more than one? OH NO!

Somehow I have never played a DS or Bloodbourne game. Should I get into them?

Edited March 6, 2022 by KP the Torque Dork

[ComradeYellow]

Glad to see I triggered the CD Projekt Euro jankers that inhabit this domain.  Oh yes, you will be agonized!

Edited March 6, 2022 by ComradeYellow

[Wormerine]

1 hour ago, KP the Torque Dork said:

Somehow I have never played a DS or Bloodbourne game. Should I get into them?

I can't say if it's your cup of tea, but considering how influencial Dark Souls was I would say yes. 

Edited March 6, 2022 by Wormerine