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I just beat my first TW (2) campaign! It was with Grom. I really liked how his victory conditions weren't conquer the world because when the game starts to bog down and each turn takes like an hour or two I tend to give up on the campaign. I really wish Skarsnik had victory conditions like that because he is without a doubt my favorite legendary lord.

Also downloaded the tabletop unit cap mod on the suggestion of a friend and it makes the late game a lot more interesting with no more real obsolete units or the AI just spamming doomstacks.

I'm thinking about getting the Oxyotl expansion on the steam sale? I think lizardmen are great and the chameleons are super cute.

I've playing a lot of Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord. Joined the Battanians mostly for something different as I joined the Vlandians in my last play through, and a bit our of guilt as I wiped them out in said play through and made my own kingdom. Which wasn't fun because the Aserai were too powerful by then and too OP as when I was with the Vlandians when waging was against the Aserai we'd outnumber them 3 or 4 to 1 and even then it'd be horribly pyrric victory. But now they seem to be nerfed as in my new play through with the Aserai can be beaten much easier.

This play through I made damned sure to lay a strong foundation for making income before joining a faction. It also helped I made the King Caladog like me by rescuing him from prison. Fun times.

I got SF6 and ran World Tour to the final boss, but I'm stuck there until I level up/get more healing items.
I started doing combo trials and JFC, I learned swiftly why I've never played a fighting game before (I'm excluding DBZ: Zenoverse 1/2). World Tour isn't harder than Sekiro, Elden Ring, or Nioh 2, but that's only because of modern controls. Doing basic combo trials is freaking insane. I can't believe that there is actual 1 frame inputs in a game that runs at 60 FPS...

Orc's Must Die 3

yeah its more of the same but hey cartoon murderizing Orc'ss is a pleasing loop

Back to age of empires III definitive edition. Since the july update is looking very promising.

Well that and Darktide, pushing Lord-Buttons numbers up.

Went back to Fallout 4 and started properly doing the Nuka World DLC. I've had to stop at the point where I start setting up outposts in the Commonwealth because all of my settlements are really nice and I don't want to ruin any of them.
Nuka World as a location is really cool and it has so many cool details but its a bit difficult to go from being a Minutemen/Railroad main game to suddenly being a bad guy. I might have to start again and side with the Brotherhood of Steel to do the DLC properly but then that's another 4 days worth of gameplay time to get back to where I am now.

 Gert wrote:
Went back to Fallout 4 and started properly doing the Nuka World DLC. I've had to stop at the point where I start setting up outposts in the Commonwealth because all of my settlements are really nice and I don't want to ruin any of them.
Nuka World as a location is really cool and it has so many cool details but its a bit difficult to go from being a Minutemen/Railroad main game to suddenly being a bad guy. I might have to start again and side with the Brotherhood of Steel to do the DLC properly but then that's another 4 days worth of gameplay time to get back to where I am now.

the problem kinda is, that without you first establishing settlements the whole raider minigame is lackluster.

which reminds me i still have a survival run going with explosives.

Whilst transferring files over, Runescape, HOI4, and back to minecraft again....For some reason...I still love it.

 Doctadeth wrote:
Whilst transferring files over, Runescape, HOI4, and back to minecraft again....For some reason...I still love it.

Also been getting into runescape lately. Finished all the free to play quests so went member this month. It's pretty enjoyable to play in transit as long as you don't mind the grinds. Although more then that I've been playing:

Darkest dungeon 2. I've put about 20 hours into it. Unfortunately I can't recommend it. The themes, presentations and (surprisingly) animation are superior to the old game, making it excellent in all these categories. The narrator is back doing an amazing job. However this is all a beautiful coating to subpar gameplay. The game has a good "core" of ideas but they're executed so poorly that I'm amazed this is the result of coming out of early access. The first boss and run up to it's is pretty alright. Starting with the second route you'll see the cracks.

You have 11 characters in the game. 10 are from the old game and 1 is new. The removed characters from the first game is crusader, houndmaster, archeologist, arbalest(/musketeer), abomination and shieldbreaker. Not a complain but I'm surprised they removed the crusader since he was one of your starting characters from the first game. A minor complain is that I'd have liked to see more new characters. Preferably a whole new setup of characters but that's just my opinion. These characters all come with 5 skills. 5 more can be unlocked for a total of 10 skills per character. Now here is where problems start. Your characters can get roles which makes some skills stronger and other weaker. For instance you can make a highwayman into a gunfighter or swordfighter, making him stronger at range skills or melee skills respectively. Then you pick the skills that he's strong with and you're got to go... Kind off. See to unlock the skills you need to enter shrines with your character. On a good run in a region you might encounter 2-3 shrines. A bad one might mean no shrines. Going through a region takes roughly 30 minutes, depending on fights. Iv'e had a region take an hour. That means unlocking all skills for all characters would take a minimum of about 27 hours. Add more because you will get unlucky and boss fights will take a long time. So let's say 40 hours. And then you will not be taking the paths that might optimize you actually winning the game. You have to do this in order to get a strong party. Even if you go for just a few characters you specialize in you're still looking at maybe 20 hours of gameplay before you get a strong party going. That's not quite how it works either though. See your characters have relationships. If they get negative relationships a skill will get locked with a debuff. This can be a skill you where not using, and you can not unlock it or swap it. Meaning a character can get 1-3 skills they don't want to use and those skills get weaker. The game also apparently randomly picks skills to fill the others when this happens. So your team can have completly different skills from what you set out with and what you specialized in. Yes there are ways to work around this, like focusing on positive relationships with certain items. But the number one negative relationship provider is stress. Sometimes you will get unlucky, especially when you start out the game and you don't know it very well. Then you will have stressed out characters make relationships plumit. Then you won't get to pick your skills and that means two things. Either you give up and start over or you avoid combat as much as you can. Except you can't avoid combat because the game forces you to fight and you don't always scout what you're facing.This is not unfair RNG, it's just bad design.

The game is exceptionally time consuming. The first boss takes two regions to go through. A region takes roughly 30 minutes to get through if you fight alot (which you have to because of a mechanic called loathing). So that's about an hour. Fair enough. The second boss takes 4 regions. That's about 2 hours. Plus a mandatory boss fight on the way and the final boss fight itself. Adding maybe an extra hour. So that's 3 hours for a succesfull run. Now let's say after 2 hours of gameplay you have a run of bad luck but manage somehow. Your bad skills that you've not specialized in might get locked and you've suddenly lost any chance of winning. Go back and repeat the grind.

Each run through a region adds a currency you use at your base. This currency is used to make your characters linearly stronger, unlock new trinkets you find in the world, unlock new characters, unlock various upgrades or add cosmetics. So you having a tough time? Then get grinding. You need those candles.

Each character has a backstory. It gets told to you when you find the shrines to unlock new skills. Except that the characters change between each run. It's not the same dude you started out with that you learned the backstory of 4 runs ago. I find this very perplexing. The game gives you a new charater that looks the same but has a different name, quirk and goal. So why am I told a backstory? Are we pretending it's the same person? It's really weird.

Oh and there's no way to save up on characters or items. They are scraped with each run. Oh and there's no multiple characters, only one of each. If you win a run and defeat what's at the mountain then the same character takes up that characters slot. It remains there until you use it again. So let's say you have a few chars with good quirks and you send them on a run and win. You can't really save them in a box for a grind run to because every run is win or lose all chars. I find this odd since the chars have a bunch of mechanics tide to winning. They lose all relationship points they'd built up but their quirks are locked and they get to chose a memory buff. Making them overall stronger. One more thing about characters, I was going to pick a team but noticed every char had very weak perks. So I started the run and immediately abandoned it. Turns out that did not re-roll a new set of characters to chose from. You have to go to the first inn to abandon the expedition and re-roll your characters. This takes maybe 10 minutes. It feels like such a waste.

TLDR: The game seems mostly designed to make you grind and waste your time. The overall design feels not thought out. As if the various systems are clashing and the game can't quite decide what it wants to be. If you like the theme then play the original darkest dungeon. If you liked the first game and is curious about this one then don't bother. It's quite sad because I did beat the first game and really liked it.

Lost the last several days to FF16. Despite being far more of an action game than prior entries (though one clearly built on the systems that have evolved since the move to MMO gameplay in 11) I have to say this is probably the most any game in the franchise has FELT like a Final Fantasy since 10.

It's not even the return to a more medieval, crystal based setting so much as the structure of the narrative itself. The way the game kicks things off with a big opening only to slow things down and give you some time getting to know the eventual cast in a more relaxed setting before throwing you out into the world to join a resistance group has that same flow that made 4 and 6 so great. The plot, this time taking a little influence from Game of Thrones and way more from Attack on Titan is one of the strongest full stop, at least from what I've seen out of the 2/3rds I appear to be into it.

The combat itself is good. I suppose every other genre has stolen RPG elements, so it makes some sense to take some gameplay back. There's a lot of ways to mix it up and adds and they let you full respec whenever you want so its well worth spending time trying out a bunch of different skills to see what clicks.

I have some nitpicks, but overall I feel like this is a game I've been waiting 20 years for. Easily in the top half of the franchise and really just a question of where it sits once the credits roll.

 LunarSol wrote:
Lost the last several days to FF16. Despite being far more of an action game than prior entries (though one clearly built on the systems that have evolved since the move to MMO gameplay in 11) I have to say this is probably the most any game in the franchise has FELT like a Final Fantasy since 10.

Yoshi P's influence, no doubt. FFXIV, the game that has made him indispensable to SE, is a massive love letter to long-time Final Fantasy fans. You can tell that giving players the right vibes when they play is important to him. It's also almost certainly the reason why the higher-ups trusted him with XVI after the beatings in reputation that the single-player franchise games have taken over the last several years.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of 14. Probably my second favorite MMO of all time after City of Heroes and easily the best experience out of the franchise since 10, IMO. It does a really great job of feeling like more than an MMO with a Final Fantasy reskin, though some elements of that are unavoidable where 16 is able to fully capture the pacing and storytelling vibe that gave the series a legacy that has endured without a truly great game in quite a long while.

Still addicted as frig on Mount and Blade 2. Now with my help, the Battanians have expanded hugely. We've reduced the Vlandians to a single town (I've tried to wipe them out a couple of times, but before I can manage it, the Battanians make peace with them), and we've expanded so much that the other factions are declaring a new war on us every five minutes or so. We just had a brief war with the Aserai, where I beat them back and defeated a few of their armies. Then we had another brief war with the Southern Empire, where I managed to take a couple of their cities—now I'm besieging a town rebelling against us.

Diablo 4 is still doing it for me. Highly entertaining rocking up with my sorceress and nuking large groups of mobs. I am currently at the stage of using internet maps to find all the shrines. I do not have sufficient Time in my life to find them all myself!

Still playing FF16. Just hit the sidequest dump before the point of no return. Going to finish them all because its just that good.

My best man and brother-in-law put together a gaming PC as a joint wedding gift. Since then I've discovered the absolute fething beauty that is Cursed Halo.

So far it's only on H1 but the sheer amount of fuckery this guy's added is mind-blowing, such as new weapons like the Blunderbuss (recoil literally shoots you across the map), the Detexturising Rifle (removes the texture of what it hits), and Minecraft Jackals. My favourite has to be the D20 grenades, which could do anything from just play an ABBA song, to spawn half a dozen Flood armed with the Blunderbuss, to spawning an orbital strike.

Has to be the most fun I've had gaming in years.

Got a big system upgrade sorted out, so naturally I finished up a full(ish) Baldur's Gate 1, 2 and Throne of Bhaal run. No better use for an up-to-date system than a 20+ year old game.

Throne I finally finished for the first time. Still hating it for being linear junk with no choices and overtuned enemies. It just isn't fun. Still love the original and like the sequel, but the final DLC is hot garbage. Finishing it was more an obligation to do so before BG3's early release than fun.

----
But, as part of the system update, I got Diablo4 as a bonus (which was a surprise to me). Finally dipping my toes into it and its... ok.

Its fairly relentless about not explaining anything about its systems or piles of different currency types, and has a grand indifference to the actual campaign or leveling experience (Endgame, endgame endgame! Blizzard's desperate mating call at this point). But there might be a game hiding somewhere behind the collections and unlocks. It definitely wants you to work before letting you see it, however.

 LunarSol wrote:
Still playing FF16. Just hit the sidequest dump before the point of no return. Going to finish them all because its just that good.

Finished it last night. Easily one of the best in the franchise. In my top 3 along with 6 and 9.

Adrassil wrote:I've playing a lot of Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord.

Is this all single player or is there mp campaign? I need to try it still.

Flinty wrote:Diablo 4 is still doing it for me. Highly entertaining rocking up with my sorceress and nuking large groups of mobs. I am currently at the stage of using internet maps to find all the shrines. I do not have sufficient Time in my life to find them all myself!

Nice to hear.

Voss wrote:
But, as part of the system update, I got Diablo4 as a bonus (which was a surprise to me). Finally dipping my toes into it and its... ok.

Its fairly relentless about not explaining anything about its systems or piles of different currency types, and has a grand indifference to the actual campaign or leveling experience (Endgame, endgame endgame! Blizzard's desperate mating call at this point). But there might be a game hiding somewhere behind the collections and unlocks. It definitely wants you to work before letting you see it, however.

Too bad, can it be modded? Not sure how much of things the devs lock down of it these days. I'd love me a 40k ARPG.

Have you tried Inquisitor:Martyr? I found it to be pretty much the 40k Diablo experience.

Finished the D4 story now and into the endgame. Made it to Nightmare mode and trying to bump my kit up a bit now. Lots of different grinds are now available

Might be about time to roll up a different class and give that a go.

Not yet, but I'm planning to. Hopefully there's some good melee.

 Flinty wrote:

Finished the D4 story now and into the endgame. Made it to Nightmare mode and trying to bump my kit up a bit now. Lots of different grinds are now available

Might be about time to roll up a different class and give that a go.

Well, the new 'season' kicks off next week, so that's a pretty good place to start over.

I'll probably focus on the campaign this weekend, but not sure I'll hit all the shrines, all the zone unlocks and visit all the subzones on the world map before the season starts.

Its definitely going on the shelf August 3 to make way for the BG3 release.

Larian has gone to crazy town on the depth of that game. The only big complaint (at this point) is their marketing spoils way too much, and I'm not totally sold on the big villains or metaplot.

But the ground-level interactivity is unbelievable and jaw-dropping, and they're very happy to let you fail at things, even companions.

Got DS3, only played like 30-45 minutes (at High Wall of Lothric).

Elden Ring is literally the same fething game. Yes, I know not "literally", but it's so similar on multiple levels that I again question all the praise for ER.
What are the actual new features? You could crouch in Sekiro, so that's not new. I think it's jumping, mounts, and Ashes of War. That's it. Sekiro uses the same underlying systems, but somehow it feels dramatically different from the Souls/ER line.

I don't know. It's just weird to me that Fromsoftware gets so much praise for releasing what amount to pallet swaps with one or two new features. It's not even that the games are bad, but why aren't they trying more creative things like Sekiro and Bloodborne?

They got a well-known author to write the backstory for ER?

Picked up some games during the last sale, mostly horror.

Carrion! Still playing through it in bursts, but a fun game where you play as a fleshy abomination trying to escape a facility, eating everything along the way.

FAR: Lone Sails! The only non-horror game, about someone traversing a wasteland in a massive "okomotive", which is a steam and wind powered contraption, whilst solving small puzzles. Played through it a few times, enjoyed it a lot, great atmosphere and visuals.

No one lives under the lighthouse! A slow burn horror game about.. something that may or may not be living under the lighthouse. Played through it twice, bit tedious at times, but still a lot of fun.

Paratopic! A short game, played through it three times, as this is a trippy one that's hard to really define. A fever dream as dictated by David Lynch maybe? Be seeing you friendo.

Scavenger SV-4! You operate a salvage drone from high orbit, controlling it through a grainy visual feed, while keeping an eye on radiation levels and bringing in enough cargo to make the trip a worthwhile one. Just make sure you don't bring back any of the less than friendly locals.

Subnautica. This is horror for me, I've got thalassophobia. 😅 Slowly playing through this as the game isn't really holding any hands and holding any punches either.

 Adeptekon wrote:

Adrassil wrote:I've playing a lot of Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord.

Is this all single player or is there mp campaign? I need to try it still.

Not a multi-player campaign (that could be frigging awesome, though. Your character has siblings so one of them could be another PC) but a multiplayer mode which I've heard is good, but I've never played as I started with Mount & Blade which was purely single player and I'm...not much of a multiplayer gamer anymore. I don't think it's due to excessive misanthropy. Or at least, I hope, lol.

Still waiting for the AOE 3 De update...

I want to drown the map in wardgelders.

@BrookM - Subnautica is an amazing mixture of calm and utterly terrifying.

I played through on easy mode, and it kept me rapt right to the end. Reaper leviathan calls still cause significant emotional events though.

 Flinty wrote:
@BrookM - Subnautica is an amazing mixture of calm and utterly terrifying.

I played through on easy mode, and it kept me rapt right to the end. Reaper leviathan calls still cause significant emotional events though.

I got the Cyclops just now, but not feeling any safer whatsoever. 😅

The reason to get the Cyclops is to go to where even nastier enemies are located.

The lack of real weapons in that game is good in some respects, but annoying in others. On the one hand, it means that the developers didn't include any required boss battles with the various leviathans.

On the other, it also made it really annoying when a juvenile ghost leviathan decided to camp an important exit point. I had to kill it, but was only able to do so by taking advantage of some terrain oddness that the leviathan's AI couldn't cope with, and poking it with the PRAWN suit drill. It took forever.