Started on SimCity 4 but wonder if I should start with that or one of the earlier ones

1 hour ago, Malcador said:

Started on SimCity 4 but wonder if I should start with that or one of the earlier ones

Still the superior city builder game. Skylines never quite scratched that itch.

Finished BG3 and started on Civ 5. Still my favorite Civ game. Need a break from cRPGs after hundreds of hours slogging through BG3. 😛

Lord of Hatred.

Blizzard's update to the games turned it into a zen exercise simulator. Pretty good one though. Click this button here to create a new character. Wait five minutes. Pick class. Wait five minutes. Pick from presets or customize your own character, but the assets aren't loaded in. Wait five minutes. Click play game, wait five minutes, pick difficulty (huh?) then "Reconnecting...", wait five minutes... "Lobby Server Not Available"

They should give Obsidian to make an RPG in the Diablo setting.

I am eager to fish in Diablo

So, now that it works, uhm...

Why do we spend the entirety of Vessel of Hatred saving Neyrelle, only to begin the new addon with Mephisto killing her? This is narratively as unsatisfying as un-zerging Kerrigan to only re-zerg her five minutes later. If you wanted the player to feel angry along with the characters in the story, it would have been much better to simply end Vessel of Hatred with Mephisto infesting Akkarat and killing Neyrelle. Bah.

Edited April 28Apr 28 by majestic

1 hour ago, majestic said:

So, now that it works, uhm...

Why do we spend the entirety of Vessel of Hatred saving Neyrelle, only to begin the new addon with Mephisto killing her? This is narratively as unsatisfying as un-zerging Kerrigan to only re-zerg her five minutes later. If you wanted the player to feel angry along with the characters in the story, it would have been much better to simply end Vessel of Hatred with Mephisto infesting Akkarat and killing Neyrelle. Bah.

I think the playerbase hated her or something.

Makes sense. Player base probably cheered for Urivar.

Crimson Desert - still playing my version 1.02.00

--every play session I go "Most current Faction quests done, time to do another MQ section, if I get to early Chapt. 11 I can probably ignore the MQ forever (for me) then!"
Then 5 minutes after loading save, I'm distracted by something (I need to get more poison/ore/whatever) and go running off into the wilderness for 2.5 hrs. My "knowledge" entries are now around 1400 and I'd guess 65% of map exposed.
--Kliff has this one, er, spell, called nature's snare. I just love this thing, the visual and animation of it. It's not actually really useful/needed most of the time, outside of certain boss types, but man I love using it. I so wish the game had had more "magic", even just a little more. Mostly it's socket-gems to give your weapons PoE-like ranged attacks. Effective, but I wanna Mage a bit here and there, not spam-fire lighting or mystical orbs or crows out of my sword.

And I still keep kinda wanting to create a new start save folder, mostly to create a "perfect" Chapt 4-5 save as a starting point if I ever want to replay whole thing again, that sort of thing. Of course, it's unclear (or somewhat dubious) that I'd replay this game, so then I think it'd be a waste of tedious time. But my brain still wants to.

And I still have a serious love/hate for the game. I'd say it does "get better" - if the sandbox aspects appeal to you - but man still so much to aggravate at the same time. yet I keep turning it on. :D :D

Edited Thursday at 05:32 PM4 days by LadyCrimson

Forgot - I tried swapping the DLSS 4+ .dll in CD with a DLSS 3.5 .dll. No clue why, but it seems to work better for me. Less pixelated image noise (foilage/grass, shadow/light noise, no more ghosting, and increased FPS by maybe 10fps. Image is maybe a tad softer but I increased sharpness on my monitor a small amount and it's fine. It's not perfect but it's better than default game DLSS.

Maybe older nvida gpu's don't like 4+, or DLSS 4 sucks, or the fact I only install nvidia driver (no nvidia app with all the new ABCD options etc) affects something - who knows.

Finished the LoH campaign, that was a fun experience. Not sure why the music seems to be not normalized, Mephisto was assaulting me with the discordant strings They did a decent job making Lilith a bit more grey. Inarius not only sucks as a character but his boss fight was a pain

Spoiler near the ending

Glad Tyrael didn't die, was expecting some great purge as they kill literally all the major characters bar us or something. That said, I guess we'll have a "Somehow Diablo returned moment".

Other than that, the changes seem fun, nice to not have to chase affixes for my flurry rogue, trying to be a frost rogue - can get a good bit of Overpower and Ferocity there, and the barrier and fortify help with certain legendaries. I've always been poison as I dislike change.

Edited Friday at 04:27 AM3 days by Malcador

Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era. Seems like a very solid, if budget HoM&M installment. I enjoyed the demo they released a while back, and this already feels stronger. Only spent a bit time in a custom match, and I am a very casual HoM&M player - very little multiplayer experience. Still, I really like it so far, especially for £25. Looking forward to seeing how it develops.

Edited Friday at 01:56 PM3 days by Wormerine

Debating with myself whether I want to deal with 30-35fps in CD to use Ray Reconstruction/Max Lighting. On old CRT's 30fps was fine but heavy modern games at 30fps on modern display tech is too sluggish. 45ish is my usual limit.

--Game just looks so much better with RR on, even using DLSS Ultra Performance and some of the effects settings turned down. The noisy pixel/shadow-lighting, ghosting, too-soft, etc.
--The reason why you can play CD fairly well on older systems seems to be because they decided only RR-On gets the modern-day clarity/refined image treatment.
--game still looks good (most of the time) without RR, but the difference is quite stark, at least to me.

🤔

I have finished the Symphony of War DLC missions. There was quite a decent variety of missions and new units - the ones accessible earlier were noticeably easier while the later ones provided a decent challenge. The new units generally enhanced the performance of the existing squads, as I did not want to create a full necromancer squad and could not find enough War Cats.

I guess, the main appeal of the DLC would be the NG+ mode. While it does not allow to carry over everything (the units are possible to repurchase for the new currency, Memory Crystals, but they start from level 1), it allows to customise the experience further than the base difficulty options.

In terms of story, it provided some interesting lore, but it did not anyhow affect the main game or the ending.

I have also found a guide which explained what I suspected - same units attack the same row, so having mixed squads is preferable to the single-type ones.

I have completed the main quest of AC Valhalla and it took me about 190 hours

I finished the main quest where you end up in the machine with Siguard  but I was still having fun so I  decided to complete the last few quests like killing all the Order and the Asgard quests

The Order assassinations were all easy to find, I had most of the clues and it was just about finding the last few. And the Asgard quest  was different and entertaining  with all the ties to Norse Mythology like fighting Fenrir and the Jotun magic

And then the game ends after you find the last memory shards 

I found some interesting stats on Steam around overall completion of this game 

• 6.6 % of players  killed the entire Order

• 5% of players got the settlement to level 6

• 6.4 %  of players finished the Jotun quests

So the majority of people never finished this game. I was a little surprised by these low overall numbers?

But great AC game overall, its gets a solid 68/100 on the globally respected "BruceVC game rating system "

Its your quintessential AC type design and mechanics but you cant play these types of games all the time but they definitely fun every now and then 

Really good value for money 

Edited Sunday at 07:47 AM1 day by BruceVC

War plans in D4 LoH seem incomplete. I need JIRA and a end of list retrospective with Tyrael.

Got Timberborn and put a couple of hours in to it. Overall I don't think I'm going to put a ton of time in to it but I'm having fun so far. May be a tad too expensive for what it is and how much gameplay it offers, but I shall see once I'm done with it.

So, finally reached D4 endgame now. Until getting to level 70, I liked the changes to the game, like how the skill tree contains the modifiers you'd usually have to farm gear for in the past seasons, instead of a whole bunch of passive nodes that were cookie-cutter build filler. In general I also like the idea of the war plans giving you a pre-defined path through endgame activities. That's a load off my inability to choose from activities.

Kinda hate all the rest though. D4 was a fun, silly game where you'd reach endgame and were doing high level progression two days later. Now it looks like that's going to take... more work and time than I want to commit.

Edited Sunday at 10:02 PM1 day by majestic

I'm now playing Hero-U : Rogue to Redemption, its an adventure RP game where you are a rogue learning to become a hero in a school for adventurers

Its from the same developers that created the iconic Quest for Glory so it has very similar narrative humor and mechanics

Initially I thought I would get bored but its really fun especially how you increase your skills, explore and solve puzzles and quests

Im only 8 hours into it so its early days but so far so good 🐉

CD - 150ish hours now. I probably have another 200 hours + to go! At least according to the posts from people who play for 8+ hrs a day claiming 350-450 hrs to do "everything"/near 100% it (I have zero intention of 100%). I only play an average of 2.5-3 hrs per day so I still have a few months of content. Perhaps.

eg, it's been "worth the money" for me, at least. I still wouldn't "recommend" the game outright to anyone tho, because of the "it takes this many hours to get-good" or click, if it ever clicks with one at all, factor. Maybe that's ok for online-only/MMO's, but eh. It really is a sandbox more than anything else. Anyway, probably going to stop yapping about it now. Finally got a little more ahead in the MQ - which technically does get a tad (tad) more comprehensible as time goes on, but it's still not good or cohesive/immersive, even from my "don't care about story" perspective.

There is apparently book-lore in the game you can get/read post-game that explains tons of story stuff, like why Kliff is so silent/blank, why the heck the sky-Abyss exists, who these beings are that keep yanking Kliff around, etc. Sounds like the intended background is more interesting than what was put/shown in gameplay.

But between this sandbox and maybe one day Death Stranding 2, I may not need another "big"-new game until I build a new rig in 2-3 years. :P

Edited 6 hours ago6 hr by LadyCrimson

Goal nr. 3/2026

May 4, 23:00 – Having no mood for games in the last 6 weeks, I stumbled upon Hero of the Kingdom: The Lost Tales 1 on sale at GOG, and decided to find out if easygoing game like this one, will bring back that lost mood. And I think it was a good choice. As the three previous games in the series, it was again chill experience, although a little bit shorter. After a little bit over 5 hours, I have already found the main villain and unlocked all achievements in the game. This part of the series went back again to the way, how the materials and quests have been handled in the second part. Some busywork was still present when getting closer to the game finale, but the grind as experienced in the third game completely disappeared.