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I do not have a problem with beating the game, it seems to be much more forgiving than the ones I've already played. I am just disappointed in how samey it feels, down to animations, dialogue or and stats - reviews mentioned how it refreshes the formula but I see nothing of it, it feels like more of the same. I know there are players who buy another CoD, FIFA or Assassin's Creed every year, but I am not one of them. I wish the studio was more imaginative instead of selling the same game with just the props shuffled around.

Basically since release day, I've been on Ghost of Yotei.

It is, quite simply, an amazing experience so far. The world is stunningly beautiful, the armor/clothing options are, for the most part, great looking. At first I was "upset" that they didn't bring back/copy the stats I preferred on armors from the first game, but as I've kept playing, I've come around that this way is better.

they made some big, intangible improvements to combat over the first game.

I have seen some commentary online about this game "sucks" cuz the story is super unoriginal and it's "just" another revenge story. For me anyway, and I think there's folks on this forum who'd think the same way, there's something very nice about a "classic" story executed to a very high degree. What I'm saying is, with this game, IDGAF that the story isn't "original". It's like Tarantino taking on a Sergio Leone spaghetti western, and nailing all the things that make a film of that genre. The story of Ghost of Yotei is, so far, well put together. It has a nice flow, it makes some sense, doesn't slap ALL the details in your face immediately, etc.

Cyel wrote:
I do not have a problem with beating the game, it seems to be much more forgiving than the ones I've already played. I am just disappointed in how samey it feels, down to animations, dialogue or and stats.

Are you really complaining because you want new, unique door-opening animations while simultaneously pretending that the Ashes of War system alone isn't a massive change from Dark Souls? Why would they change animations that work? Why didn't you complain about how similar DS3 is to Bloodborne? Or how Sekiro reused animations?

You've played 16 hours of a 100+ hour game. Are you even in Altus or Caelid? Elden Ring has far more biome variety than previous titles.

Yes, I have already went through Caelid, Underground river, wetlands north of Limgrave, the peninsula at the south. I don't care about cosmetic tinkering with some buffs or nerdy insider knowledge (I play without guides to discover the game myself) , I was just expecting a different game, something new not another packaging for the same game.

About a third of the way through FF7 Remake.

Really enjoying it. Turn based, but with “get in there and smash their teeth in” combat too. And some fun puzzle solving to do.

On balance? This is just as good as my beloved Zelda games. But Zelda through sheer pedigree pips it.

just did a play through of Breathe of Fire 2 for the first time in probably 20 years
it was the game that got me into rpgs as a child, and while its not perfect and shows its age, it was a good time to go through with the characters i remember again

Kinda tired with terra invicta. I'm still doing the run as humanity first in late 2038 at least. Aliens must've been pissed for what i did destroying their troop transports with orbital bombardments and capturing another alien because they destroyed most of my space stations and like my entire fleet of ships. I ended up having to get new ship drives, weapons and other stuff and getting most of my research done with nation based research power.

I currently have the united arab league (a good chunk of middle eastern nations merged into one), most countries in the EU super nation and the usa.

I'd say more but my internet is about to die on my computer. Just getting back on my feet again in the current campaign and shooting out more ships.

 greenskin lynn wrote:
just did a play through of Breathe of Fire 2 for the first time in probably 20 years
it was the game that got me into rpgs as a child, and while its not perfect and shows its age, it was a good time to go through with the characters i remember again

I always held the way dragon transformations worked in this one against it more than I should. It's a great game with a great cast for sure and I should probably play it through again sometime. Personal rankings for the series are probably 3, 2, 4, 1, 5. Sadly not a franchise Capcom seems to care about returning to.

 LunarSol wrote:

 greenskin lynn wrote:
just did a play through of Breathe of Fire 2 for the first time in probably 20 years
it was the game that got me into rpgs as a child, and while its not perfect and shows its age, it was a good time to go through with the characters i remember again

I always held the way dragon transformations worked in this one against it more than I should. It's a great game with a great cast for sure and I should probably play it through again sometime. Personal rankings for the series are probably 3, 2, 4, 1, 5. Sadly not a franchise Capcom seems to care about returning to.

yea, the dragon spells in 2 are.....not great outside of getting a single solid hit in given it drains all your AP, and there isn't a good way to stock the decent quality items to recover it during a battle

i would also rate 5 last in the ranking, i've tried to play it multiple times and just always bounced off it hard

i think there was actually a 6th, but it was like a mobile game or online thing or something

Haven't had a whole lot of time for gaming lately as this uni course I'm doing has really ramped up, but I finally finished the Blood and Wine expansion for Witcher 3 last night. I enjoyed it much more then Hearts of Stone, which I found to be kind of dull.
There's quite a bit do, and while I left no given quests unfinished, I'm fairly sure I missed some stuff. So I'm sure with some thorough investigation next time, I'll likely turn up a few things I didn't do this time around. The tougher enemies were a pleasant feature and made a few quests nicely challenging.

I look forward to doing it all again when the fourth game comes out.

 greenskin lynn wrote:

i think there was actually a 6th, but it was like a mobile game or online thing or something

Yeah. It's a free to play, online multiplayer microtransaction laden mobile action RPG that was shut down in about a year and only released in Japan. Definitely not a highlight of the franchise.

And onto FF7 Intermission, having completed Remake earlier.

Really into this game. Is fun.

Signalis my beloved, though I did get the sad ending again.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
And onto FF7 Intermission, having completed Remake earlier.

Really into this game. Is fun.

What are you playing it on? I'm waiting for the whole thing to come out on Xbox but there's something weird where only like 2 of them are or something.

Been playing more Terra Invicta but the game is at a weird standstill. I lost so many ships i have a noble metals issue so i need to alleviate that. Also the aliens get pissed whenever i make ships which leads to them sending ships to fight me and back and forth with them out-matching my ships. Worst case i had was the dreadnought spam they did where i had no ships survive and didn't get through any of their point defense leading to a total destruction of my fleet without even scratching the enemy's paint job. Anyway it'll probably take many months to alleviate my noble metals problem.

The game is at about 2040 somewhere now and my usa, super EU and united arab league are doing fairly well atm. I also grabbed Iran recently. I'm hoping to be able to take all the major nations with militaries and nukes from opposing ideologies (except the servants because they have a lot of the other powerful nations: russia, india and china) so i can just run them over in a war which should be easy once turkey or south korea or something gets out of there.

Doing a second playthrough of Mechanicus. The intro is still epic and the binaric choir and organ music is still a bop.

My first playthrough I got the upgrade that gives stealth really early and basically broke the game. The AI doesn't know how to handle untargetable enemies for the most part so my dudes could just run around, get cognition points and set up optimal firing positions.

Now I don't have that because rewards are random, so I have to actually work for my wins.

Battlefield 6.

I am honestly surprised that they managed to make an actually good game.

Like... that is so fething out of leftfield for EA and DICE that i barely understand how, seeing as the last two battlefields were.... lets just say very bad for a long time in bf5 case and gak in 2042.s

Oh don't say that... I had convinced myself that I wouldn't have to buy the stupid thing. But if its good, I might actually enjoy it

Playing Starfield on the Xbox. I bombed out first time round, found it boring. I went back to it probably a month or two back and have been focusing more on the various story-lines and having much more fun this time.

I've also managed to get a laptop that will play vaguely modern games, so I'm playing through Warhammer: Total War 3 (Chaos Dwarfs) and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.

TW3 is great, although it does seem like the campaign map looks a little more cartoony than TW2, which I'm not a massive fan of.

Pathfinder, I'm only a few hours in and it's good so far but my word is there a lot to it, even as an RPG veteran I feel a little overwhelmed and like I'm going to need to play through about 10 times to experience everything I want to. You can end up as a lich? As a dragon? As an evil sentient insect swarm? Well, damn...

 Flinty wrote:
Oh don't say that... I had convinced myself that I wouldn't have to buy the stupid thing. But if its good, I might actually enjoy it

The only grudge i have is the maps are too small. But larger maps would confuse the cod newbies. Also i want bf3 suppression back but that would traumatise most newplebs.

Downloading the free weekend playtest for Arc Raiders. I got to play it earlier in the year, I figure they've improved it since then.

I got to the start of 2041 in Terra Invicta now. Aliens started to spread out with their armies and mostly their servant human proxies were having nations federate with their alien nation and then joining it. I also destroyed one of their armies with a nuke and another with my armies fighting it. I may launch a nuke at i think sri lanka (the island off India) once the last of the 3 alien armies conquers it.

My space fleet is also pretty good now but i need more money coming in and a better research rate wouldn't hurt either along with more mission control. I could also use some more noble metals to make ships more regularly.

Vanquish beat me rather than the other way around. It gets pretty crazy in the late game. Just throwing two bosses at a time at you in an enclosed space. Had to turn the difficulty down to finish it.

Next up on the old game list: Batman Arkham Origins.

Ok so in my game of terra invicta i got up to like 2042 or at least a bit later in the game. I managed to destroy some alien armies and their human puppets armies as well as a bunch of alien mega-fauna. I killed a couple of their human servants councilors too. I also fought off a bunch of alien ships around ceres (i lost the fight but made them basically immobile so i'll re-engage when i have more stuff) and some other area around mars and grabbed a lot of mining sites with noble metals. I'm going to need more mission control however and probably a more steady supply of money and other goodies. My space resources and boost income are really good right now so it's not a huge problem (except noble metals). The alien nation absorbed china and india as well as afghanistan. The idea the taliban are fighting for the aliens now is kinda funny to me.

I am grinding 200 m headshots in BF 6. Now i always was a decent recon, but the unlock is nuts and activly making players play worse in a squad based shooter....

No seriously who though 150 headshots over 200m are a smart add on to the game to unlock a rifle..

Felt the need for some enjoyable punishment, so I booted up Dark Souls. Gonna chase the last few achievements I'm missing.

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
And onto FF7 Intermission, having completed Remake earlier.

Really into this game. Is fun.

What are you playing it on? I'm waiting for the whole thing to come out on Xbox but there's something weird where only like 2 of them are or something.

Only the first two parts of the FF7 remake are out currently (Rebirth and Remake). Part 3 is still in the works.

 LunarSol wrote:

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
And onto FF7 Intermission, having completed Remake earlier.

Really into this game. Is fun.

What are you playing it on? I'm waiting for the whole thing to come out on Xbox but there's something weird where only like 2 of them are or something.

Only the first two parts of the FF7 remake are out currently (Rebirth and Remake). Part 3 is still in the works.

Ah I see. Well I bought that re-release of I-VI that came out on Switch so I've got those to catch up on till they finish the VI part III.

In terra invicta i think it's late 2042 now and i managed to free most of India and Ukraine from the Alien nation's control. I feel really bad for Ukraine in my game's timeline since it was invaded and conquered by russia, then peacefully annexed by the alien nation (likely through mind control) and then i had to conquer it and add it to the EU. In my game ukraine is probably as war torn as europe after ww2 esp. poland.

Also since we got UV phasers most of my colony defenses have been able to neuter a lot of alien ships for me in both weaponry and fleet speed so i can usually just get my ships to fight and destroy them after they fail to destroy my off earth colonies.

My space resources are doing fairly well and money income should be coming soon so i'm not forced to put some nations on spoils priority for money.

The aliens sent more assault carrier troop transports on their way to Earth but if i can build a space station above Earth i should be able to fight them off before they even become an issue for my militaries on Earth.

I'll also need to build up more mission control because my limit on that is honestly a much bigger issue than anything at this point.

It is nice though that i'm mostly fighting back the aliens and they are now starting to struggle against me. I am a little scared if they hit total war against me soon because they'd really send in the fleets of ships and might start targeting my national mission control which would be bad.

It's been 11 days and I just can't put down Battlefield 6. As a series veteran since the original, I'm delighted to be enjoying this franchise again. I didn't like V much and I stayed far away from 2042 the moment they revealed operators.

6 has arguably the best gunplay in the series. The combat just feels so good. I like the maps, Sobek City and Iberian Offensive are my favourites. The challenges though... absolutely insane. Class perks and gadgets should be rank unlocks instead of the absurdity we have now. I gave up the Recon 2 challenge because sitting back for those 150m+ headshots is just now how I like to play recon, and I really don't think the developers should be encouraging that style of play either.

Looking forward to the new map next week and pleased to see its so popular, I anticipate the game will be getting good post launch support because of that.