What are you playing at the moment? 2011 - September 2017

[Shadoko]

I’m going to replay Tomb Raider 2013 because I feel like it’s a game I’ve kinda overlooked when it came out, as I abandoned my playthrough in the middle of the game (I had an excuse, I had just bought TW2). I remember it was quite fun, albeit Lara’s transition from careless teenager to stone-cold killer was anything but convincing and there was way too much gratuitous blood and carnage.
I’ll see if my memories are accurate or not.

(Also, I bought the small outfit DLC because no Lara, you can’t run around in the moutains with your base outfit it’s just stupid).

[L_No]

I’ve been dabbling in some old-school shooters, the No One Lives Forever series to be more specific. I started on NOLF 1, but it felt too clunky to continue playing it (although the “Are you insulting my monkey?” dialogue is an instant classic). I’ve moved on to NOLF 2, and am thorougly enjoying myself. The series really deserves another sequel.

[FunnyB]

I’ve been playing Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin. That game is truly awesome. Sure, it’s different from Dark Souls 1 (which I never finished, truth be told) but I kind of like the differences. Not having to always kill all enemies when you’ve passed through an area enough times for example…

[L_No]

I’ve been playing DS2 as well. I shared your opinion on my first playthrough, but I’m struggling with my motivation on NG+. Not sure what it is, but I don’t feel as drawn to it anymore.

[alms]

I keep trying to play Kentucky Route Zero and I keep falling asleep. Literally.
I don’t mean this as a diss on the game, it might be just playing it when tired, but 10 minutes after starting it up… zzzzz.

I’m having that problem with HotS. I bought the Welcome Bundle, thinking they would get rid of it, so I’m forcing myself to play as much as possible because of the 7d Stimpack.

They could put that in the dictionary under the word “unhealthy”

[vinraith]

I’m floating between a few games in my very limited gaming time of late:

I’m still slowly finishing up on The Witness. Still working on the castle and the sun temple, and there’s a whole underground thing I’ve not tapped. I could (I think) open up the puzzles on the mountaintop at this point but I’m trying to be (perhaps needlessly) thorough. Still, it’s a clever, meditative, wonderful gem of a game. I’m continually impressed by the sheer amount of diverse, clever puzzle-solving it’s managed to craft from a single mechanic.

I’ve just started playing some Vermintide with a friend. It’s a good time, reminiscent of Left 4 Dead but with a sense of progression and (slightly) better allied AI it seems. Still, the limitations of the bots are already starting to grate a bit. I’ll never understand why I could have voice orderable bots in Unreal Tournament in 2004 and yet it’s too much to ask in 2017.

Still playing the occasional bout of Monster Slayers but I’m beginning to see the cracks. Like a lot of “roguelike” games that have a sense of progression, success ultimately seems to be more a consequence of grind than of clever play. It’s a shame, a lot of the actual card mechanics are pretty cool - if there was a bit more ability to customize and maintain a deck between playthroughs (rather than getting reset every time you die) there could really be a lot of depth to this. As it stands, it’s a fun light game with a little deckbuilding and, sadly, a lot of grind.

I’m also back to Project Highrise, because I’m scrambling for a good builder/manager and it’s close to what I want. Picked up he DLC’s and am having a fun, easy-going time with it, but I still have a certain skepticism about the depth of the under-the-hood simulation. I honestly can’t tell whether that’s rational or not, but it is what it is.

[Tritagonist]

Played a few more games of Heroes of the Storm tonight, with Diablo this time. That thing is a monster! Very fun. It takes a bit of chaos among the other team and/or support to make the most of it, but when that happens, he can combine attacks in a rather striking fashion.

[Det.Bullock]

A bit of Privateer on PC and of Wario World 3 on Gameboy Color.
Adding the afterburner to the throttle slider script made the use of the relative throttle a tad more immersive, though I still have to fiind a balance between a center deadzone and a “throttle up” zone that’s easy to hit, perhaps I should redce the values for the afterburner a bit.

Wario World 3 is a nice puzzle platformer with some metroidvania elements, though at the moment I’m stuck at the lake level which is where I should go next but at the moment I cannot fathom what I’m supposed to do there.

[spoken_starfish]

Finished Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. Have you played it? You should play it. Revives the “stealth real-time tactics” game pioneered by the Commandos and Desperados series. (I’ve never played them). You are given sizeable, lovingly crafted stealth levels to pick your way through and unravel. You do a lot of quick-saving and quick-loading, which may sound frustrating, but that’s never the case. It’s part of the flow of the game, and progressing is very satisfying.

I have a hard time choosing my favourite of the 5 characters you control, but it would probably have to be Mugen the samurai. It has a lot to do with the way he says the word “strategy”.

I like the little touches that make you feel like you’re observing a real word: civilians doing work, soldiers hunting through long grass for survivors of a massacre, samurai ordering soldiers in the heat of battle.

[TheDreamlord]

Finished Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. Have you played it? You should play it. Revives the “stealth real-time tactics” game pioneered by the Commandos and Desperados series. (I’ve never played them).

Indeed a lovely crafted game! I spent 13 hours with it and reached the half way point and got distracted by other games. Need to get back to it. The missions do seem to get more difficult from that point, requires thought and planning. Excellent game if you are a fan of the genre.

[Blackice]

Eh, I enjoy the space travel itself, gives the universe a nice sense of scale and seamlessness (and occasionally allows for unconventional tactics), but it just isn’t very well fleshed out. Is there even a point to boarding ships you aren’t contracted to board once you’ve acquired the Everything Gun? I don’t think there is, which is really a shame because it could in theory provide some really cool optional challenges, like boarding an arms hauler and risking life and limb for nifty high-end gear, or having little gunships flying around which are really hard to dock with (souped up sensors and weapons) but have a skeleton crew and better ship-to-ship weapons so you could use them to indirectly attack hard targets (this is predicated on better weapon targeting mechanics, obviously).

I like the space travel too, for the same reasons; a nice bit of scene setting, giving the missions a sense of place in the galaxy. As for boarding random ships, I’ve been doing it to see if they have any cool gear. Dock, pause, use shift key to look around the ship - if there aren’t any containers, I just undock. Found a few nice toys this way.

[alms]

I dunno, whilst some games are definitely deserving of their own thread, especially something like D:OS2 that has a lot of detail to it, it can be nice to see that discussion as part of this thread. I imagine more than a few purchases have been made from people browsing this thread and being encouraged by the discussion, something that likely wouldn’t happen if that automatically went into its own thread.

Possibly, but at this point WAYP is just too large and the rest of the forum has slowed down to a trickle, so as a mod, I’m seeing the opportunity of splitting “hot topics” into, well, their own topics, so that users skimming the forum are more likely to notice and get engaged than with mega-threads.

So, next up is Heat Signature, which can be found here.

[Shadoko]

Ain’t that going to split the forum users into more and more separate threads that are going to live their own life without much in the way of communication ? I mean, one of the interesting features of the “WAYP” mega-thread was that small discussions about specific games or gameplay features would spontaneously emerge from it. I fear we might lose that with smaller threads, though I understand the rationale behind them.

(Like, I don’t own D:OS2 nor Heat Signature, and I don’t plan to get them in the near future, so I won’t be interested in this threads. WAYP, however, is a thread I’ll always check.)

[alms]

It’s a delicate exercise for sure. Am I doing the right thing ? I sure hope so: the priority, IMO, is catching the attention of users that are not actively posting at the moment.

My FL has been literally teeming with Heat Signature activity, as well as D:OS2, so those seem the safer bets to spark attention.

We have to lower the threshold for engagement (or push non-posters past it, if you prefer), and Graham suggested that the sheer size of Mega-threads might not be helping. The WAYP? thread still has and can serve its long-time purposes, which is hosting discussion for all of those games, whose fire no longer burns with a lively flame, but still release plenty of heat, as well as all short-form and backlog discussion.

[BillButNotBen]

Without going too far off topic, if we’re trying to lower the threshold then what happened to the “sign in with google, etc…” options? Surely that’s the entire point of those.
Plus some promotion on the main site, on the podcast, on twitter and facebook wouldn’t hurt.
The writers could even create a few threads about particular issues/games/reviews/podcasts.

Splitting threads out of WAYP seems like both a good and a bad idea, for the reasons @alms and @shadoko mention.
(just trying out these @ mentions)

[alms]

Without going too far off topic, if we’re trying to lower the threshold then what happened to the “sign in with google, etc…” options? Surely that’s the entire point of those.

Plus some promotion on the main site, on the podcast, on twitter and facebook wouldn’t hurt.

The writers could even create a few threads about particular issues/games/reviews/podcasts.

I second all of your suggestions: however, I am not staff myself and cannot do much more than ask.

In short, my suggestion is just ask the right people. Make a thread with your instances, point staff people towards it. Ask them to make changes, to get more involved.

[ToomuchFluffy]

I have mostly been playing Gemcraft - Chasing Shadows the last few days. I guess as far as Tower Defense as a genre is concerned I’m pretty conservative, since I had a very easy time getting into it in comparison to Space Run. It’s nothing special in regards to mechanics for the most part. There’s a levelling system and skills and spells are unlocked through advancing through the game, as you would expect with these kinds of systems. The most interesting aspect is the management of what kinds of gems to put in towers, traps and amplifiers. Combining gems before putting them into buildings weakens their specials, but strengthens damage. Traps amplify specials (poison, armor-degradation etc.) while cutting most of the damage. The campaign is pretty long though, so I’ll likely slow down with it now and turn back to Pathologic.

Which is the other thing I have been playing. I got back to Day Eight on Sunday and barely managed to successfully solve the day quest. I was completely exhausted, quite hungry and my infection was out of control somewhere in the 60 %-range. But the main issue - as so often - was time. I was quite relieved when it became clear that I didn’t have to make it back from the Apiary/Abbatoir, since it already was close to midnight (usually the deadline for the main quest of the day). Thankfully the game teleported me straight to the city council right after some cutscenes. I woke up 14 o’clock the next day and the army is now in control of the city. Which quickly turned out to be a problem because all the infected districts are now guarded by soldiers and flamethrower-wielding disinfectionists. The latter just burnt me to a crisp when I was getting too close (my infection-level is too high), so getting safely back to a bed to take my medicine and lie down for a few hours posed a bit of a challenge. I eventually made it back to my initial home where I put on some bandages, threw in some Feromycin to get rid of most of the infection and some Meradorm to make sleep more “effective”. So, now it’s 18 o’clock and I haven’t even started on the day quest… Good luck me. Well, at least it will be a short day :o)

[Shadoko]

Tomb Raider 2013

Ok, let’s do some math.

So far I’ve killed roughly 200 people (that’s a guesstimate, probably a bit more) and I’ve come across something like ten times this number of bodies (mummified stuff notwithstanding : I’m talking about freshly sacrificed bodies).
The average amount of crewmen on a cargo ship is 15-20 people ( and I’m being generous).

…how many ships were lost around this island, again ?

(Oh and stop teasing me with hidden clues about a CIA/KGB operation on the island, game, you’re not cool nor confident enought to do this).

[ToomuchFluffy]

Pathologic: Day Nine went more or less as expected. It might have been doable with better planning, but while side quests kind of let you stumble on part of the solution of the main quest (getting five rifles for the children in the Polyhedron), the fifth rifle I would most likely have had to buy. Problem was, the gun dealer of the town is sick and I would have needed strong antibiotics to be able to temporarily speak to him. But I don’t think I did have enough money anyway. I certainly wouldn’t have had enough after buying the antibiotics. Well, since one of the side-quests promised to yield one dose of Panacea for the plague, I made sure to finish that. It’s basically a fail-safe for the main-quest. If you fail one day, you might still have been able to acquire some form of Panacea for the infected adherent. Of course, there’s always the temptation to use it on yourself. So, rather short Day Nine, let’s see how number ten turns out.

[Imaginary_Llamas]

I have been messing about in Tekken 7 and Mother Russia Bleeds while I wait for Total War: Warhammer 2 to release. I may only be slightly better than a button-masher when it comes to fighting games (especially if there isn’t a tutorial glares at Tekken), but that doesn’t mean I can’t find them satisfying and fun.