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 BrookM wrote:
Playing as a dogmatic former Commissar myself, it's a fun ride so far, but playing it on easy, so I can focus more on the story and less on the combat.

From what I've seen, a lot of people are playing that character, which is fair enough. It seems fun and pretty much epitomises 40k a lot. I've been very even-handed and caring, and I have suffered some bad consequences for it so far. It'll be interesting to see if my character's kindness will lead to worse consequences down the line, and it should, being a 40k game.

Anyway, back OT, still playing Rogue Trader. It's a damn addictive game. It's a shame, though, that Argenta's quest has seemed to have bugged out on me, and it seems for quite a few other people too and the more I get through the game, the more bugs there are, such as Abelard's granddaughter standing in a purple square like she's missing a texture or something and as well as a few other things.

But otherwise, fun times!

More void crew, this time with a full roster. Had way too much fun running around as an engineer, especially on a small ship variant (CQB?) which comes with two minigun pods and a point-defence turret, also equipped with a minigun. There was something really satisfying about having three miniguns go off at the same time and spitting brass everywhere in the interior of the ship as I was running around fixing damage and shoving fresh bricks into ammo hoppers. It's not quite there for me as with Deep Rock Galactic, but the game manages to tick off some of those "rule of cool" boxes nicely for me.

For the first time in over two years, I actually not only properly played a video game (Injustice 2), but I lost a good chunk of the day to it, occasionally looking over at a nearby clock and seeing that hours had passed without me noticing.

It's nice to have a PC that can run things...

Monster Hunter World had a peak of over 124,000 players today on Steam, putting it at number 14.

I'm suddenly feeling a hankering to go do more in the Waking Lands...

Finished Phantom Liberty.

Quite a lot of Dwarf Fortress. Got stuck trying to pick my way through magma layers in my previous fortress, so started a new one in the same world.

Quite a different set up, as I hit the first cavern layer early, and set up wooden walls around a fairly sizable cavern for safety, which turned into terraces for the fortress proper.

Unicorns have been an ongoing annoyance. They don't attack my dwarves, but they do attack my dogs, so I've been catching and slaughtering them.ww

Now one of the children got possessed and created Rashobir a unicorn-bone crossbow (decorated with unicorn bone and bands of tin.

It feels sufficiently spiteful to make a big deal out of. I may give it to my broker, so he can annoy elven caravans with it.

I spent 5 hours solid yesterday completely losing track of time and playing Arkham City.

It was pure bliss.

I simply adore that game, haven't played it in years (crashed on PC all the time, PS3 hasn't worked in years), so it was fun to go back to it.

played most of the way through shin megami tensai 5, got close enough to the end game that i decided good enough and looked up the endings, since i have no desire to ng+ multiple times

Back on a lot of Stalker anomaly, just roaming around the Zone.

And my Dwarf Fortress of Thikthogkulet- the Drenched Abbey- has fallen. Was digging out temple spaces and accidentally breached a wall out into the cavern. I hadn't yet set up a door into the temple, so had no way to block off the area (those assigned to build a new wall kept running from the enemy)

The rodent men came in their dozens and overwhelmed the monster hunters (who wandered out into the caves and drew them to the breach) and then my spear dwarves (who were well armed and armored, all in steel, but alas, never properly trained).

I never got a real count of how many rat men came through, or how many we killed, but they seemed endless.

Finally getting around to Jedi Survivor. Really excellent game that definitely leans more on the Metroidvania elements of the Dark Souls formula than the "you die now" stuff the first was fond of. It's almost too in love with secrets to the point where you can't flow through the levels because every platform might have something behind the camera like so much Donkey Kong Country screen left bananas.

Just adoring it overall though and unlikely to get anything else done until its complete.

Edit: wooops wrong thread.

Playing Swarm on the Meta Quest 2. Aboslutely brilliant game. Swinging about I. A full 3d environment with basically no motion sickness blasting nasty alien robot death machines out of the sky.

I've started playing Valheim. It doesn't run super great on my very badly outdated PC but it is playable at least, and very fun at that.

Ok, 100%'d Arkham City (those last two Riddler Trophies gave me too much trouble - I thought one was bugged!) and now onto Arkham Knight.

Congrats!

Unfortunately, City is the highpoint of the series.

I've been playing and enjoying the Rogue Trader game. I'll admit i've never been massively knowledgeable on the 40k lore but i still think the Sister Argenta character probably would've BLAM'd the psyker by now. I've seen some complain there's no way they'd let an unsanctioned psyker early on deal with a Sister of Battle and i imagine even sanctioned ones would bother them.

I can't see what the complaining is about for why this game is mostly positive rather than very positive other than bugs and around chapter 3 or 4 the game starts being weird. I'm in chapter 1 and i haven't had many bugs so maybe that's why i enjoy it so much.

Eumerin wrote:
Congrats!

Unfortunately, City is the highpoint of the series.

Eh, Knight is only a small downgrade and honestly there are bits I prefer:

- The Arkham Knight itself was a total marketing lie, but a really good retelling of the story regardless
- There are WAY WAY too many Riddler quests and they're a huge downgrade from the prior two games and required to see the secret ending
- The game has this weird structure where it spends a ton of time introducing sidequests in what feels like a slog of an early game
- That same slog is loaded with a ton of Batmobile content that is okay at best.

Unfortunately, the problems are all pretty frontloaded in the beginning of the game and take a long time before you start feeling comfortable enough with the way the open Gotham is put together for it to feel good. Once you get past the first Act, I feel like the game really picks up and flexes its strengths. Also just ignore side missions you don't like. There's too many of them and while a few pay off in the end pretty spectacularly, there's also stuff like the Riddler which is just a grind.

Arkham Knight is a fantastic game saddled with far, far, far too much Batmobile combat. If they'd cut out 75% of the tank battles, it'd've been fine (and maybe a few less car races!). The gliding through the city is faster and more responsive than ever.

By the time I'm done with this run I'll have maybe over 200 hours in this game. And this is the first time I've done the DLC side-missions (they came out after I'd stopped playing last time). I've done 3 of them so far. The Croc one was interesting. Cool setting. Still got the Freeze one to go, and I only just did the airship/cloudburst section. About half-way through.

I'm not saying it's better than Arkham City - that game is one of my fav games of all time - just that I don't think it deserves the bad rep that some gave it.

I love Arkham City though. I know that game off by heart. I know ever riddle without needing to look it up. How to get every trophy (other than the ones I thought had bugged, as I experienced some other weird bugs on the PC that weren't present on the PS3 version I played through originally). It's the only open world game where I know the map completely and how to get anywhere from anywhere. Hell, I even grind XP, getting several levels 'banked' to use them when upgrades become available. During the playthrough I just did I had max armour before I had even gone into the Steel Mill. I clear the map of thugs every time the map reloads to get every single XP point I can get. Knight doesn't let you do that, as general rioters aren't worth anything.

Yeah, I really love Knight. I think its strengths far outweigh its negatives. It's just a bit too much.

On that note, finished Jedi Survivor which I have similar feelings about. I adored more or less every minute of it, but its packed with tiny secrets to the point where they stop being exciting and become a chore. Fantastic combat that was a joy to experiment with beginning to end. Would have loved a third stance button just to make it easier to experiment. Loved the story and excited to see where they go with it next. I just hope the next one doesn't focus on even more tiny secrets everywhere.

We've entered a strange era in video games where we're getting too much content in games. There's just too much stuff to do. We're getting too much bang for our buck! I suppose it's great if you can only afford 1 or 2 games a year but it's daunting trying to pick which 50-200 hour experience you're going to pick up next.

I don't think its a 'strange era' as much as a matter of preference or practicality.

Some may find they've got scheduling conflicts with family concerns and those take priority, others may find that disposable, shallow games aren't worth getting into.

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:
We've entered a strange era in video games where we're getting too much content in games. There's just too much stuff to do. We're getting too much bang for our buck! I suppose it's great if you can only afford 1 or 2 games a year but it's daunting trying to pick which 50-200 hour experience you're going to pick up next.

Even if you have all the time in the world, content for content's sake doesn't make it worthwhile. Eventually you hit a point where its just repetitive busy work and not really engaging or fun. That's not a new problem, but I think now that we've seen the death of so many "forever" games, people are starting to be more aware that grinding this stuff out doesn't ever really pay off. Plus, if you want to grind there's like, a billion mobile games that let you do it on the toilet.

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:
We've entered a strange era in video games where we're getting too much content in games. There's just too much stuff to do. We're getting too much bang for our buck! I suppose it's great if you can only afford 1 or 2 games a year but it's daunting trying to pick which 50-200 hour experience you're going to pick up next.

I had this thought a while ago playing Life is Strange: True Colours. Fantastic series by the way.

Biggest complaint was 'the game was short'. The original life is strange had maybe 15 hours, plus or minus in it. You'd get through it in a few evenings. True colours had maybe 10, plus or minus.

And that was my first thought - too short. But on immediate second thought, after playing 100+ hour games (typically open world) like skyrim, days gone, witcher 3, horizon zero dawn and forbidden west, ghost of tsushima etc etc, did I need another 100+ hour game? Truth was, no I didn't. Shorter games with less content aren't necessarily 'bad' games.

I always thought one thing is mostly that in story driven games, is that replayability is not that good. So if the game is short, the experience out and restarting the game won't give you nearly as much enjoyment. I put this in contrast to a Day of Defeat, I mean, you can hardly make a game simpler than this, but since it's a "competitive" shooter, it's easier to get your fun technically for as long as the game lasts without sinking absurd efforts in it.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
I always thought one thing is mostly that in story driven games, is that replayability is not that good. So if the game is short, the experience out and restarting the game won't give you nearly as much enjoyment. I put this in contrast to a Day of Defeat, I mean, you can hardly make a game simpler than this, but since it's a "competitive" shooter, it's easier to get your fun technically for as long as the game lasts without sinking absurd efforts in it.

It depends. If a story-driven game has branches that significantly change the story, then there's replayability in going back and making different decisions.

On the other hand, real decisions (as opposed to, "Which button do you press at the end?") mean adding significant content that can't be obtained in every playthrough as the branching nature of the story means that certain content is blocked off by the player's decisions.

That's true. That's a two edged knife to me, it can also get frustrating to never really know if you actually have had "the full experienced"

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:
We've entered a strange era in video games where we're getting too much content in games. There's just too much stuff to do. We're getting too much bang for our buck! I suppose it's great if you can only afford 1 or 2 games a year but it's daunting trying to pick which 50-200 hour experience you're going to pick up next.

I uhhh don't know what to say with that. If by too much content you mean paid DLC then yeah. I've seen some total up to several hundred dollars in DLC. I'm not sure if this is on sale or not but still that's a lot of money. It's funny i say that i suppose since we're all war-gamers for warhammer which is one of the more expensive of the tabletop gaming spheres and i want to play admech which is considered the most or one of the most expensive 40k armies.

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Back to the topic I played Rogue Trader a bunch. You know for all the tool tips they gave they never told me how to Warp Jump and i had to find the button myself. I really loved this game in the first couple chapters and the prologue but i'm finding injuries and stupid stuff like the speaker intercom things in that one space hulk were far worse enemies esp. the injuries. I hate how even if you have a crew with solid skills in most things if you fail one or two checks and are forced to drag your dudes through some area you will get wounded again and again forcing loads of wounds on you that you'll never had enough med-kits to heal and then you'll need to jump on your void ship to fix all injuries. Some of these have some nasty debuffs that you can't get rid of without being on the void ship too.

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A friend and i also played a co op game of Hearts of Iron 4 with me as the british again and him as the French. Oddly Germany and some other countries went democratic and Italy was in a big union that i decided to declare war on with my faction. Surprisingly the infantry battle in italian east africa went well as a pure infantry force required no supplies or nearly none. If i had to go at it again i'd have probably added cavalry or camel forces in africa for a few spearhead units. The forces in egypt got overwhelmed and i used the France's Syria as a base to retake egypt and i encircled and destroyed a lot of the enemy force after some initial issues. France, Commonwealth forces and Germany were a big help. We eventually ended up winning that war with France pushing through Italy and actually succeeding really well at it. He did wait till longer to do it but still. I think there's still a war going on with the communists that we'll eventually get dragged into but the Italy and its other factions have been carved up quite nicely. I took the islands of italy because i felt it appropriate as an island nation but i probably should've taken more land and i gave ethiopia back to its owners.

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Finally i played a couple sessions of Endless Space 2 with 2 really slow players (it's frustrating but worse when there's multiple people) and one person that was playing an invisible hacker faction that i've never played against before because i never bought that DLC. I haven't played since 2019 so i don't think i'm doing so well at the moment. That said i started right next to the hacker faction which has one invisible planet which i can't find which isn't funny because i have no idea how to find him or to extract Holy Points as Vodyani if he keeps sending various fleets at me to prevent me from harvesting essence from prey worlds. It's insanely frustrating since his faction seems wildly unfair and weird to fight against.

In a non-historical game of HOI4, Germany has an even chance of overthrowing Hitler at the start of the game. If France is computer-controlled, it will always find an excuse to attack Germany, thereby triggering WW2 in Western Europe. This happens even when Hitler is overthrown and Germany goes Democratic, which is what makes it so blatant. But since your friend was controlling France, that didn't happen.

I've been going 50/50 dogmatic and iconoclast in the Rogue Trader game. Something that bugs me is the lack of companion interaction after their initial conversations. I chose the Cassia (navigator lady) romance but i think it'd have been fun to go for the cute rogue girl too. Oh well maybe next playthrough. I do find Cassia to be nice at times but rather highborn and obnoxious in that regard. I don't like her view of the peasants but it is 40k after all and that's just how things are. Maybe i should get into character a bit better.