What are you playing at the moment?

ToomuchFluffy 2020-12-31 08:11:07 UTC #6771

No more! I’m getting Subnautica flashbacks…

Spacewalk 2020-12-31 10:05:20 UTC #6772

I’ve been enjoying SPOLOUS, a Gradius fan game for sure. One of the better Gradius fan games it offers up three routes that largely match the first three games in the series, a good amount of unlockables like extra ships that are just more powered up versions of the existing ones which you’ll want to get as soon as you can since the initial ones don’t have options that mirror your shot type which is something that takes a lot of getting used to if you are a fan of the games and are wondering why you’re getting sniped from behind when your double shot should be getting the trash off the street. It’s got a very clean visual style and the most danceable tunes I have heard in a while. Playable in a browser but there’s also a downloadable version.

ToomuchFluffy 2020-12-31 16:20:56 UTC #6773

I’m done with Shadow Warrior 2 after about 50 hours. I did most if not all of the side missions and probably something like half of all Bounties. But as I have already pointed to before, a lot of my time was spent with managing the gems which are used for upgrading. So that’s the big negative. But I was surprised about how much freedom the game gives the player in regards to movement. The result was me jumping and dashing and jump-dashing around constantly and it’s also easy to get to higher ground and if you simply want to skip parts of the map then sometimes it’s possible to jump-dash long distances. There is no fall-damage whatsoever.

The story however was unfortunately far worse than in the first game. That one somehow managed the unlikely feat of having protagonists that were constantly quipping about everything while still managing to have a serious background story that actually worked. Probably because plot and background lore were separated in a number of ways and the latter was only told as part of beautiful cutscenes which had a completely different tone to them. SW2 on the other just tries to mix both into normal in-game story progression. It doesn’t work. Aside from the fact that Lo Wang is sometimes really, really annoying to a point where I simply skipped some of the dialogue, which I usually avoid if at all possible. At least on a first playthrough. Lo Wang’s sidekick this time around is even worse as far as I’m concerned. The story had its moments and the humor also worked at times, but a lot of it misses the mark.

But it’s an FPS and aside from the movement being quite enjoyable the guns and the action also were great. As said before, there’s way too many guns and melee weapons, thus making them less distinct, but many of them still feel enjoyable to use. So, overall I definitely would still recommend it.

sonson 2021-01-01 22:52:01 UTC #6774

Mafia 3. Just finished it.

Too tired to say much now but suffice to say on the doorstep of 2021 after a year working as a health worker in which profoundly insincere people have overseen the most serious moment in my country’s post war history, where tens of thousands have died as a consequence of their profound incompetence and indifference towards the people they govern, I have been glad for a profoundly angry game, which screams with confusion and fury and with a demand for righteous deliverance in a way I didnt know videogames could.

Absolute fucking masterpiece.

Sarfrin 2021-01-02 01:31:44 UTC #6775

Onto the wishlist then. You’ve also made me realise why I’ve increasingly just straight up murdered people who were messing me about in AC Valhalla.

“Sure, I’ve betrayed you and tried to kill you but I had my reasons. Give me a second chance!”
“Nope.”

icemann 2021-01-04 02:43:34 UTC #6776

BillButNotBen:

DeekyFun:

My reading of it is that your team mates barely like you, so whole they’ll tolerate you ordering them about on the battlefield they’re not about to let you decide what guns to bring to the party on their behalf.

I think more games should call you out on these types of shenanigans. “I’m sorry, you want me to wear what shoes when we take on the forces of evil?”

I think some of them like you, but they’re professional shadowrunners, not 5 year olds, so I guess they want to choose their own gear.

The thing is, the way companion gear works is totally different to how it has worked in other RPGs I play. They each have their own gear, and consumables etc… refresh between missions. So, for example, Glory will always start a mission with x number of medpacks.

As such, you don’t have to worry about shuffling around equipment between team members, and basically all the equipment you get is for you and you alone.
Also, you can select better equipment as part of the upgrade perks, so you might get a chance to ensure she starts each mission with a better medpack.

In theory, this, plus the lack of pickups, means a lot less busywork. But because i was expecting busywork I wasted a lot of time trying to work out how to do it.

I think it is possible to temporarily assign other weapons etc… to them, but it’s very limited and I think they lose it at the end of each mission (not sure if you get it back or not, so it’s a bit of a gable to try).

I suspect this was partly done to make development easier for the devs, but it’s not a bad idea. If it was explained better and earlier.

Another positive side effect of companion equipment resetting at the start of each mission is that you can actually feel free to use their equipment, instead of doing what I usually do in games and ending up hoarding all the consumables and almost never using them.

This is also in Hongkong if I remember right, with gear leveling up over time, rather than you having to do the purchasing and equipping for them. Speaking of HK, if you enjoy the talking and getting to know party member stuff + leveling them up and specializing them - This was expanded on in HK.

Hope to see more Shadowrurn games in the future. Been a love of mine since I was a kid, and first played Shadowrun on the SNES. A VERY different game to Shadowrun Returns that one.

BillButNotBen 2021-01-04 09:46:51 UTC #6777

Yeah, I loved the SNES shadowrun game, but I don’t think I ever got all that far in it due to being too young at the time. I was well into Shadowrun novels at the time as well.

I think Harebrained Schemes called it quits on games, which is a shame. But given that and the shadow of Cyberpunk, I’m kinda surprised no-one has picked up the license for a bigger budget game.

Not had much time for Dragonfall over the last few days. But i did have time for one run which was a shady ‘prove yourself’ mission for a shadowy organisation with a crew of really annoying runners who were forced on me.
Walked out of that mission with the objectives complete, but the rest of the crew all dead. Seemed like a good result to me, and I didn’t even have to kill them myself.

icemann 2021-01-04 10:44:40 UTC #6778

Yeah it’s looking that way sadly. Seems to be the way with Kickstarter based companies (as in, companies which do all their projects via crowd funding). Do a few successful games, get bought out by some large mega corp, and then that’s the end.

Kiril 2021-01-04 12:35:46 UTC #6779

Harebrained are part of Paradox, since Battletech and were hiring at the end of last year. I think they are working on something new and big. It would be great if they did a new Shadowrun game on Pillars of Eternity scale.

BillButNotBen 2021-01-04 13:12:29 UTC #6780

Oh, that’s cool. I thought they quit, so I must have mixed them up with another small company.

Rath 2021-01-04 15:11:47 UTC #6781

I tried Space Haven (Early Access) today.

I like the sort of “The Sims In Space” building aspect of it, but there are things that I saw as needlessly frustrating. I didn’t progress very far through the tech research tree so these things may be solved by tech unlocked later, but it seems to me that if space aboard a ship is at a premium, why do I need to build a wall section, then allocate one square of it to a wall mounted power node, then another to a wall mounted light, etc, in front of which you can’t build anything else?

Why not just have a section in the walls menu for powered walls with conduits running through them, rather than linking the wall nodes/floor/nodes/generators through the eventual spider-web of connections you have to make in the power grid menu? Why not have a wall section that’s specifically got a light built into it, that you can then build something else in front of? And for that matter, why couldn’t you just have lights come on automatically when you build a new powered wall, because ceiling lights would be better?

LexW 2021-01-04 19:48:03 UTC #6782

Yeah, I was really confused by hearing they “quit”. They got bought by Paradox, and whilst it’s been longer than usual since hearing from them, I thought I’d heard they were working on something. I imagine Necropolis being a complete flop hurt them a bit, but, frankly that was on them for putting out a game which was basically missing a bunch of what people would expect from that genre. And Battletech was after that and seemed to be very successful.

In fact, digging around, I see in February this year, they said they were working two, new “non-Battetech” projects. I see a lot of people hope one of them is Crimson Skies, which was also a FASA board game, and an excellent Xbox game, back in the day (which, in a weird connection to recent games, Mike “Cyberpunk 2020” Pondsmith worked on).

Personally, I’ve been playing Hades, which continues to be almost sickenly good. I am slightly disappointed to hear they plan no more major updates or DLC for it (though these things can change), but also slightly relieved. I think it could use a couple more weapons and stuff but the structure means anything else would be difficult to put in. It’ll be a hell of thing if their next game is anywhere near as good (they showed pretty steady improvement, but it’s quite a jump from Pyre to Hades, from all angles of quality).

I also was given Baldur’s Gate 3 for Xmas, which is interesting, because I’d never have bought it at this early stage. I played it a bit, and it seems to be pretty well-done generally, but still has that unfortunate Larian “all your companions are jerks” deal, rather than the Bioware “all your companions are a bit jerky but ultimately BFFs vibe”, though maybe that’ll change (it didn’t in DOS1/2 though, they just became jerks with depth). Also Lae’zal or whatever the Gith’yanki’s name is, is quite clearly the main character, so I’m looking forward to when they let us actually play the “fixed” characters. The only major disappointment (slightly surprisingly) was the 4-character party size limit. Weird because 5E is designed for 4-6 characters, and works a lot better with 5-6 than 4 (speaking from years of running it). Minor disappointment was that the visual design is as boring as it looked in screenshots, but maybe that’ll improve as things go on. It does have a bit more of a BG2 vibe than I expected, and some actual crunchy Forgotten Realms lore despite some questionable elf-related decisions.

ToomuchFluffy 2021-01-05 15:12:08 UTC #6783

I put a few hours into Homesick and I liked it well enough. A narrative game with some puzzling and very nice looking environments. I mean as far as a crubmling desolate house can look “nice”. I had some issues with the puzzling where at one point I was just too dense to realize that these strange blinking letters on some wooden cubes could be replaced with proper letters, simply by using the keyboard… That’s the only time the keyboard is required for a puzzle solution, but it admittedly shouldn’t have stumped me. It’s not much of a leap after all.

After that I invested some time into my third playthrough of Dungeon Siege III and then I decided that I should really finally give The Void a try. I have only played for two hours, but so far I have little reason to complain. Harvesting colors and seeing it converted into useable nerva is quite satisfying.

Internet 2021-01-06 03:19:14 UTC #6784

After a severe bout of unemployment, the Void made me wake up screaming. Repeatedly. Till my now wife refused to let me play it any more. The second harvest is what did it.

Similar 2021-01-06 09:39:40 UTC #6785

ouch. I don’t think I’ve had anything that bad involving games (although Devil Daggers reminds me quite a bit of a deeply disturbing nightmare I had once so I don’t want to play that).

I’m back to Warframe. Got to Mastery Rank 30 (current highest rank) last night, after only playing for 3565 hours.
Mostly been doing the current event, which is something you don’t want to think too much about or you’ll realize how insane it is.
“To buy all Arcanes available through the event to max rank, players will need 218,400 Phasic Cells.” You usually get from 1900 to 2200 per run and a run takes about an hour, so… that’s a bit of time (granted, you don’t need all arcanes, and a lot of people probably have a good few maxed already, but I didn’t).
Still, arcanes do make quite a difference, so it’s sort of somewhat kind of worth it. Maybe. -ish.
Though, there’s quite a risk of burning out completely.

Also, doing 95% of the squad’s damage for the nth time in a row gets a bit tedious. People either don’t have mechs, which is understandable because it takes quite some work to get them, so low level players haven’t really had the opportunity, and of course they still want the event stuff, but there’s also a lot of high level players who must be using really bad builds or are using the event to level their mechs, which is not helpful.

BillButNotBen 2021-01-06 13:11:20 UTC #6786

I’ve had The Void on my wishlist for years now… but maybe this year isn’t the best time to try it.

ToomuchFluffy 2021-01-07 06:26:02 UTC #6787

Hmm, well I already had to start over once. I ran out of color, probably because I had failed to infuse trees with as much color as possible. Then, yesterday, I had to go back to an old save since it had happened again. On revisiting one map (Fireflies reservation) there suddenly were significantly more flowers to harvest then before. Apparently there is a certain amount of randomness? In any case, at the moment I’m not threatened with starvation. Met some of the Brothers and I am apparently now considered an apprentice…

Similar 2021-01-07 10:11:18 UTC #6788

I vaguely remember something about an update that made the game less hard. Apparently it was a bit much at first. Maybe you’re seeing the effects of that update. (I haven’t played the game myself).

Naramsin 2021-01-07 10:30:37 UTC #6789

CP 2077 100 hours in. Act3, clearing the map before final missions.

Gave up SW:Squadrons for now, after one time where I was tasked mid mission to fend off tie-interceptors, gave a chase after one for about 30 seconds and 2 km from main battle I was greeted with “Return to battle” flashing like in old Call of Duty game.

Started Tie-Fighter instead and it feels so much better, I am very fragile in my Tie-Fighter, one stray shot can destroy my sensors, or engine and that’s death or mission restart but I am also nimble and agile.

ToomuchFluffy 2021-01-07 14:40:55 UTC #6790

It’s an unofficial diffculty patch which I’m not using.

It’s certainly hard, but I went in expecting exactly that and I want to at least give it a proper try without the patch. I can see why people claim that it is harder than Pathologic. That one mostly puts you under pressure, but even when I had to go back a day or some hours (which didn’t happen a lot), I usually knew what I could do better. With The Void on the other hand I’m not always sure where the mistakes happened and what I should do differently.