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GuyWTriangle [none/use name] @hexbear.net

2025 Will Be The Year of Gaming: What Are You Playing Weekly Thread

Getting the year off right by forgetting to post this on Sunday, but better nate than lever. Anyway I watched the Fallout show so I am inspired to play Fallout 4 on survival difficulty. It's been slow going so far as I've died numerous times, often losing ~30 mins of progess. Hope everyone's new year has gotten off to a strong start.

38 comments

  • I got further into Dragon Age: Inquisition after posting my mini-rant/review of Dragon Age 2. I've gotten over the movement feeling like a slog after a couple more hours. It's so far significantly more compelling because of one of the things I commented, which is that I love games where you put together a ragtag band of bozos like Mass Effect 2 and have to muster up support and resources for some sort of cause. I haven't met too many of the companions yet, but they're also more interesting than most of the Dragon Age 2 cast after even just a short amount of time.

    The decision to make you travel to individual locations between missions to talk to each party member in 2 was SO bad because it meant having to sit through 5 loading screens to check in on each member. Having an excuse for them all to be at a campfire or in this case at our castle is way better because it means talking to them more often is not a chore. Which probably contributes to my feeling like they're better written and caring more about them sooner because I actually get to interact with them regularly.

    It's pretty clear some abilities are more OP than others. Like the healing poison on rogues, since your health doesn't naturally regenerate and you have to rely on potions and resupplies at camps. Instead I can just hit stuff and keep myself topped off forever. I'd say I'm having fun so far.

    • How does the series develop as it goes along? I battled through half of Origins a couple of years ago, found it borderline unplayable on console so restarted after a few hours on PC, but eventually fell off. I just couldn’t enjoy the combat or the controls, in either style. Does that sort of stuff get better in the later games?

      • 2 is pretty similar to Origins but maybe a bit faster, Inquisition is more streamlined for better and for worse (there are some optional "don't stand in the red circle" fights where the companion AI doesn't recognize what a red circle is). I'd say if the gameplay in Origins was a dealbreaker that you probably won't enjoy the other games in the franchise, except maybe Veilguard which I haven't played.

      • Each game is pretty different so far in what they do well and what they do poorly. Like the combat in 2 isn't 'great' as far as video games go, but I do think it was better than 1 because of the faster pace, smoother animations, more fluid character movement. It's the encounters that are worse though, which in my other thread, I mention is mainly just the game throwing dozens of enemies at you.

        Inquisition feels more like a very slow MMO because it's an open world game with large maps full of Ubisoft collectibles. The combat is simplified even further in that it's balanced around only controlling a single character instead of micromanaging your entire party like in 1 and sometimes in 2. Which you can still do, but isn't really necessary, at least in the early game where I'm at.

        If you didn't like the first one, I think I'd agree that you wouldn't like the later entries either. I also haven't played Veilguard though, so if it that has more modern action combat like someone else described as being something like the new God of War games, it might be a better time.

  • Cassette Beasts! I finally burnt out on Pokemon and had the time-slot for another monster collector. Great music, story, art direction, etc.. It officially dethroned Darkest Dungeon as my favorite game.

  • Picked up Mass Effect trilogy remastered on a lark because it was cheap and I didn't know if my computer could run it. Turns out it does. However, I can only muster the motivation to play it late at night and stumbling into ridiculously deep dialogue trees when I want to sleep is really having an impact on my enjoyment of the game.

    • I hope you can find time to play it in a more awake state of mind. I really like the ME games. I haven't played the remasters but I might do it later this year after I finish all the Dragon Age games. Mass Effect 2 is probably in my top 10 games.

      • It’s strange, I played through all three pretty much back to back about ten years ago, really enjoyed them. But I’ve never had the slightest desire to replay them. Not sure why.

  • Been playing CK3 the last couple of weeks. I just moved into a new place and I don’t have most of my stuff set up so I’ve just played a bit of that on my laptop. I think I’m getting an itch to get back into deliverance: kingdom come again once I have my Xbox set up

  • I'm replaying The Witcher 3, after finishing Cyberpunk 2077 last week I decided to replay TW3 to see if my nostalgia was wrong and TW3 wasn't that much better than Cyberpunk and no TW3 is much better than C2077.

  • Just started playing Pacific Drive. I'm not really a car person but I am enjoying taking care of my jalopy. Also tourists are the worst.

  • Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2005), I found this cool mod that adds in new eras based off The Clone Wars. Commando droids are overpowered and it's cool to have a magnaguard with a proper shock staff instead of the weird grenade launcher that vanilla swbf2 has.

  • Trails of Cold Steel. Compared to the other games in the series the writing is closer to light novel slop, but I am still enjoying the worldbuilding, combat and character interactions so I don't know what that says about me. I have heard that the fourth one is abysmal though so I might suffer when I get there. I really want to play the games after Reverie though so I will have to manage

  • I'm still playing wow, cataclysm classic specificly. Nothing quite like gathering up a crew of 24 other dumb nerds and fight big bad evil things.

    If it wasn't for being able to buy game time with in game gold I probably would've stop playing forever ago. Blizzard will never see a dollar of my own money again, but fuck me the game they built just tickles my brain in all the correct ways

  • Echo Point Nova showed up on my radar. I watched a few vids with my kid and we were both like, "get it."

    EPN is a game that even the devs describe as Titanfall/movement shooter mixed with Tony Hawk Pro Skater. You get wall running, a hover board, a grappling hook, and about 25 different guns to play with. You also get a perk system to modify how the game plays. For example, shooting the ground launches you in the air, wall riding refills ammo, last bullet explodes, shooting airborne ememies make them explode, etc. The guns also level up as you use them, so you get like a double shotgun with a silencer, for example. The game world is huge, the bosses are huge, the enemies are plenty and the gunplay and combat feels really good.

    The game has an accessibility menu where you can turn stuff on and off on the fly too. If you need auto-aim, it has that. It also has an extra auto aim option that does leading shots, so you shoot where the enemy is going instead of where they are currently. You get infinite bullet time and a few others. It's a bit cheaty but for a game like this, it's really nice for a crappy gamer like me because I can just have fun.

    Oh, also you can grapple your own RPG rockets when you shoot them to fly across the world. You can use this to reach the stratosphere of the game world. I tested last night but at a certain height, the game physics starts to mess with the rockets and they sort of just lob out instead. But yeah rocket grapple. Also the speed runs of this game are insane.

    So yeah, Echo Point Nova.

  • Managed to get cities skylines 2 to stop turning my computer into the elephant's foot by throttling the cpu to 95%. It also only usually crashes after a while except when it does right away now.

    I've got pretty nice little city now, with what I think is a pretty natural and pleasing density gradient - mostly midrises. Spent a while to retrofit an elevated highway and interchange along one of the city's axes and it works pretty nicely now. Not even a monstrosity except for a pretty suspect bridge and a truly terrifying merge scheme that has merges immediately before and in-line with exits.

    The tools for drawing roads etc. definitely work and can achieve nice results with a little forethought, but they remain cumbersome and fiddly (especially if you have OCD). Moveit is basically indispensible as a tool to scooch things around if you want things to look a particular way.

38 comments