Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August 6th
Hey all! Another weekly thread is here.
This time I am also hoping for some feedback!
If anyone has any ideas for more weekly thread topics you would like to see, go ahead an leave a comment below!
Baldur's Gate 3.
I can probably count the number of games I've paid full price for in the past 15 years on one hand, and this is one of them. No regrets whatsoever.
Looking back on Steam, last time was GTA V. Prior to that Skyrim, and prior to that Portal 2.
I swear 40-50% of all dialogue, interactions, etc. reflect the character I built. It is insane. They made D&D into a video game. They actually did it.
Seen the hype, but man, I don't feel like slogging through a 100 hour RPG at this point in my life.
I’m playing Sekiro for the first time and am loving it! It’s my first FromSoftware game. Mechanically it’s quite similar to Jedi Survivor, the other game I’ve been playing lately, but is a lot less friendly and more straightforward (as far as plot and other stuff going on). However, it works really well and is very enjoyable to get good at.
Hell yeah Sekiro is one of my absolute favorites 🙏
They are absolutely lovely, though undeniably very old school. BG1 is more action-adventurey with a bigger emphasis on exploration, BG2 is very story-heavy. They have aged remarkably well, considering they're over 20 years old. The handpainted backgrounds still look pretty.
With potential increased interest due to BG3, I wonder if it would be an idea to create a community for the classic Baldur's Gates 🤔
I just started Baldur's Gate recently and beat it minutes ago. It's not the first D&D game I've played before, but I'm far from well-versed in it. I had to Google "THAC0" a couple of times to understand what the game was trying to tell me, as well as understanding certain status effects. There's a presupposition of knowledge that the game has with its players, but it's still fairly okay at initiating people to D&D.
I'm playing through Baldur's gate 1 atm as well. I tried it and didn't enjoy it back in the early 2000s but now I'm digging it. I still don't like real time with pauses combat, but I can forgive it with the party size. I do wish there were other ways around things than combat most of the time though, but early DnD was primarily a dungeon crawler so that's fine.
Baldurs Gate 3 on my linux machine runs pretty good and smooth. Already died because I failed a persuasion/deception check which led to a party wipe. It wasnt uncalled for either and didn't came out of the blue. I really enjoy it.
I'm also playing Baldur's Gate 3 on my Linux machine. Besides some frequent crashes, which I haven't confirmed if they are the game or my aging hardware, it's been running fine. I'm currently waiting for it to transfer to my Steam Deck to see how it fares there. I'd love to be able to play in bed, but I fear I may lose a lot of sleep if I do that.
I too am playing on Linux after making the switch last month. BG3, surprisingly, runs perfectly right out of the box. No settings changes, no command line parameters, nothing. Hasn't crashed once. I'm really impressed.
BG3 baybee what other game is there!?
Yaaaaaasssss!!!
Just finished Life is Strange and Life is Strange Before the Storm.
Both are great games with a really good soundtrack but I personally preferred the story of the first title.
I've tried the original Life Is Strange twice, and both times I >!failed to save Kate!< because I don't have an infallible memory and quit out of anger.
Edit: fixed the name
Reddit style spoilers don't appear to work on Lemmy. Instead use:
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Which will look like this:
Admittedly, it's not ideal for inline spoilers, but if you really want to hide for the benefit of others, that's they way you're supposed to do it on Lemmy, I guess.
For me, I just finished pikmin 4 100%!!! I have now moved on to Jedi survivor, which I am having a lot of fun with.
I got it near launch, but it didn’t run super well. I am happy I waited as the game runs much smoother than it did when it came out
Yall i was fucking with Baldur's Gate 3 splitscreen with my wife and found out that using an Nvidia graphics card and 2 monitors, I can turn vertical split screen games to broadcast to 2 different monitors so it looks like 1 screen each.
Fucking awesome.
None of my friends were half as impressed as me and the wife were. I feel like a technical God recently (all because I figured out how to enable a setting and set an aspect ratio properly for 2 screens lol)
FF6 with my wife. I was always told it's the best one but 8 has been my fav so far.
I still have to finish FF8 some day. I started it and kind of liked it, but never got into it. Maybe now some of the fan made HD graphics mods for the remaster are finished.
FF6 is peak, though. I have an emulator on my phone with the Woolsey-uncensored romhack version. Love that game.
From a design perspective, I think you could safely pick anything from V to XII and say it's the best one, honestly. VI and Chrono Trigger really stand out as the most refined in terms of game design and systems from that particular era.
Without spoiling anything, the episodic storytelling style is taken to its limit in the game's "part II", and it allows for some really clever writing. VI is one of those games that kept me thinking long after I finished it.
I have been busy this week so I have played mostly Slay the Spire. Being able to get up and walk away at any time let's me play in my limited down time at work, or while I am working on dinner.
I've also been dabbling in a mobile game called To Arms.
Transport Fever 2, because I can ride da choo choos
It's super chill and relaxing, you just have to ignore the rest of your empire falling into ruin
I just finished Hollow Knight this week (basic ending, didn't go out of my way to find items I didn't organically come across). Metroidvanias and 2d side-scrollers in general haven't traditionally been my thing, but I was persuaded by Monty Zander's video and...yeah, it's as good as everyone says. The world is surprisingly immersive for its format and the gameplay is tight and rewarding. Abilities and enemy variety were always changing the way I played, and the different areas each had their own identities and obstacles. The sense of excitement on unlocking a new area and getting to explore it was on par with Elden Ring.
Unfortunately, I moved on to Kena Bridge of Spirits, which I think is a pretty good game so far, but it has some AA jank that I think stands out more after the fine tuning in Hollow Knight, and the combat is a lot more rote. Trying not to be too harsh though because not everything can be what Hollow Knight is, obviously.
You've convinced me to start Hollow Knight next.
I agree about Kena, which I finished a couple months ago. I liked it, but IIRC I didn't enjoy the parrying in particular, especially compared to Sekiro. Didn't feel as polished.
I'm honored! I do hope you enjoy Hollow Knight, it really is a standout.
That's the thing about Kena, everything feels slower and less responsive than I've come to expect from other games. Parrying is weird too because it does this camera...jolt to focus on the enemy you parried, but it's more like a cut than a pan, so it's really jarring for my brain and requires a moment of readjustment each time.
Love Hollow Knight! I know you said Metroidvanias aren't your thing, but if there are two that I would recommend it would be Hollow Knight and Environmental Station Alpha. ESA has graphics that not everyone will like, but you get used to them, and the gameplay is great. Well worth checking out if you want to see more of the Metroid inspiration coming through in the genre.
I just recently learned there was a HD remake for Freelancer. So I've been taking a nostalgia trip all weekend. Still such a good game. And free/abandonware now!
Edit: Game can be found here: https://archive.org/details/Freelancer_201807
HD Edition mod: https://www.moddb.com/mods/freelancer-hd-edition/downloads/freelancer-hd-edition-v06
Nice, this is definitely going on my list. Have not found a space combat game that got close to the level of freelancer. Everspace 2 comes close, but did not have the same spark so far.
Thanks for the tip! Looking into it, I don't see the game files anywhere, just mods. Do you have to pirate it? I owned it 20 years ago, but I don't exactly have the CD's sitting around anymore.
My life has been completely subsumed by Baldur's Gate 3. I spend all day at work thinking about it.
My husband called it a "tactical combat dating sim" and that cracked me up.
Still Final Fantasy XVI (PS5) and Final Fantasy XII (Switch). Loving both still.
I'm playing A Plague Tale: Innocence for the first time – really enjoying the medieval flair and great graphics, though it is definitely a linear game (not my usual cup of tea, but exceptions obviously apply).
I'll be playing Baldur's Gate 3 as soon as my COOP friends have time for it... it is installed and ready to go! Very much looking forward to this.
All of them running great on Linux too, which is just amazing.
Hypnospace Outlaw. I'm not old enough to have been using the web in 1999, but I like to think it was exactly like this.
I got a ttrpg itch recently (unrelated to bg3) and started looking into pathfinder 2e and will probably pick up the core rulebook in the next few days.
Elden ring for now
Replaying Witcher 3 for the xth time. So far only ever played the base game, now I look forward to the dlcs. So far I am mostly rushing through the main quest and am now facing the wild hunt at kaer morhen. Never before reached this state with so few side quests completed 😅.
Going through all of the Hitman reboot trilogy maps purely to take screenshots. My plan is to have a fat wallpaper folder of all sorts of locations from the trilogy. It's a beaut
Still playing Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds and 0 A.D. See this comment for details.
Also checked out SWTOR but I couldn't get past the clunky controls and camera, so considering dropping it. Also checking out Star Trek Online for the first time, and it's looking promising. The combat is a bit weird, but I like the controls better than SWTOR.
I bought Disco Elysium during the Steam Summer Sale. I'm only on the second "day" (in game time). It's OK. There's lots of attention to art and fleshing out the NPCs. I'm not blown away yet, though.
I honestly didn't like it. There just isn't a lot of game in that interactive book.
I love Disco Elysium but I'd never try to sell someone on it by saying it's a CRPG. It's literally an interactive novel, and it's really only rewarding if you want that and approach it as such.
It rewards you for being weird and wacky, for failing checks and for clicking every dialogue option (as opposed to thinking certain ones are "traps").
It's a weird product that claims to be a CRPG detective game about a murder case, when in the end it's really neither.
I do really like it, it's a very interesting world and the variety of characters are so fun to interact with.
I initially started Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered a few days ago, but I wasn't really in the mood for that game, so I ended up going back to The Witcher 3 to start (and hopefully finish) both DLCs (I'm part way through Heart of Stone atm and have yet to start Blood and Wine).
As for feedback, although weekly might perhaps be too often, maybe a "Show us your collection / show us your setup" kind of thread? This could generate some engagement and lead to interesting discussions imo.
Omg thank you for answering the second part of the question 😆. I think I'll make another post highlighting this question as it clearly wasn't looked at super closely, but your suggestion is great! I'll add it to my list :)
Hogwarts legacy
I picked this up a few weeks back to see what the hype was about. Did nothing for me. Might be because I'm sick to fucking death of the "open world adventure" genre... they all feel like reskins of the same game I've been playing since, oh I dunno, Assassin's Creed 1?
Hogwarts does nail the feel of Harry Potter but that's not enough to keep me interested in a genre that's played out.
I’m excited for starfield so I started playing through Fallout 76 to scratch the bethesda itch which led to me starting fallout 4 again, which led to me staring new vegas again too, and then committed to finally 100% achievements for Fallout 3 after all these years.
Have you ever tried Daggerfall? It's really cool seeing how much influence it's had on so many different games.
You should check out fallout 1 and 2 while you're on a fallout kick, I played them for the first time after playing the Bethesda games and they have become my favourites in the series
Back on the old Bloodborne. I meant to finish it years ago, but ran out of time with exams so restarted just there with a brand new save. Loving it so far although I'm not too far into it.
What build are you going for? I keep gravitating towards Skill because I love doing visceral attacks.
I've always done the souls games with a quality build for my first playthrough, not sure why but thats what I'm doing again.
Restarted the Demon's Souls PS5 remake. It's going much better than my previous attempts. Not quite back to where I was last time but got there aot faster.
Right now I'm waiting on the new PoE league as well as the GW2 expansion. For now it's either a MUD, The first Skyrim save I've kept long enough to complete the main quest, or Yakuza: Like a dragon.
It really just depends on mood and if anyone else is active on the MUD.
I'm glad to have finally found a Skyrim build I enjoy. I've always appreciated the game but never managed to stick with it. This Illusion/Thief/Assassin combo is a great time. Calm + backstab for life.
Yakuza is a delight. It's a lot like FfXIV in that it's a pretty fun movie that is sometimes interrupted by RPG game play elements. Loving the humor.
Well I just picked up Last Epoch last night / Monday! It's an Action RPG so follows the same format as PoE / Diablo. Haven't been super impressed with the post-campaign experience of D4, and immediately after jumping into Last Epoch I already feel like it has exactly what I was looking for from D4 in terms of power fantasy and buildcrafting potential.
Its still Early Access which I generally don't pickup, but someone here on Lemmy recommended it and I have to say, so far I regret nothing!
Currently playing Nier: Automata. It's incredibly hard to talk to people about this game without spoilers. It's all about the story, but the gameplay is pretty good too.
IKR! You do want to recommend the game and talk about it, but you can't really do so without spoiling it for other people... SkillUp's review was pretty good in that regard IMO.
Minecraft (as usual), just finished Wolfenstein New Orden again. Just started Breath of Fire (GBA version). Nonogram (picross, android). Maybe I'll get back to ToTK (what a drag, that game is huge). Not touching my huge backlog yet.
Yes, I'm a parent and patient gamer, how did you know?
BG3, this game is awesome!
I think I'll take a break from Final Fantasy 14 for a while. The story was just so uninteresting for so long, that I just don't want to continue right now. Everything else was good enough, the different jobs I tried were fun, but I just need to do something else.
Other than that, I started Baldurs Gate 3 with a friend, we are still relatively early, exploring the first region.
If you can get past the UI, I recommend at least trying FFXI. The stories are so good, the XIV writers spent half of SHB and EW adapting them. Kato did the scenario for the vanilla game and the first expansion, Rise of the Zilart, and his world building brilliance is at its best there. The world is so real and immersive, and there are all kinds of connections between world events and characters both big and small.
I'm good for a while, but I'll probably go back to WoW eventually. It's the only other MMO I've played (far more than FF14) and it's basically comfort food for me. A bunch of friends also still play it, so that's a plus as well.
Quadrilateral Cowboy!
I played the Pikmin 4 demo and had a ton of fun with it, but I have to wait for a sale to pick it up.
So instead o got Brotato because I saw it was $5 on switch, having a lot of fun with it! Will probably get Vampire Survivors when it comes out on switch, I hear it has more interesting maps than Brotato
Still Elder Scrolls Online. Tried to pug the new hard mode last night in an old instance, wouldn't recommend. Did ball group stuff in Cyro Friday night.
Playing a lot of factorio with the space exploration and Krastorio mod. I've increased science costs 10x to slow the game down and force me to build properly. However after getting to space I spent 9 hours handfeeding machines to get the logistics bit research.
I told someone in one of these threads that I do a base tour. I think pre bots is a good milestone to make a base tour. I tired to make a short video but it's actually much harder than I thought, filming and talking is hard and editing is hard.
After having beaten The Pathless yesterday I started playing Uncharted 4. I'm a couple hours in and I have to say, it feels a lot more like an interactive movie than an actual game. I'm hoping it gets more interesting
Finished my first playthrough of valheim this week as a duo team. Yagulath and the Queen boss were pretty crazy. I'm hoping the Ashlands comes out soon, not really sure what to do with the game until then.
Man, I liked a lot of what Valheim offered, I just couldn't sink the hours into it. Felt like doing work after work.
Yeah it does feel a bit grindy at times for all the iron and coal, but taking it slow can be fun if you don't have much time for it. I really liked building and trying out all the different weapons.
I dug up my old 3DS in the past weeks, installed some custom firmware to play my backups of DS/3DS/GBA games. A bit of Zelda Minish Cap, some Metroid Fusion... But mostly I find myself playing various Pokemon ROM hacks lol.
I've been getting into "Pokemon Elite Redux", which is a difficulty/challenge game centered around each Pokemon having up to 4 abilities at the same time in battle. And there's tons of new abilities that make each pokemon uniquely useful. It's certainly challenging, even on the lowest difficulty. It's happened to me several times that I have to get together a whole new team to beat a single trainer. But, there's zero grinding involved, and there's SO many quality-of-life changes that it's super easy to get a whole new team squared up in just a few minutes. That makes it really easy to jump in for a few minutes when I can, without feeling like I'm wasting my time
Caves of Qud. Kitfox picked it up to publish recently and I figured it was time to play it a bunch again. Truly an incredible game.
Spongebob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated. Wanted to play something silly and and stress-relieving. This fit the bill.
Battlebit Remastered
Waiting for POE 2 ಠ_ಠ - the new POE league
Some Cities Skylines while I wait for Cities Skylines 2
Some Chivalry
Playing Danganronpa v3 and FF7 Crisis Core Reunion, both on Steam Deck.
I started Danganronpa a couple weeks ago. And so far, it's definitely the weakest of the main trilogy. I really don't like any of the characters. They're all just too edgy, weird, and/or outright dumb. And not in a funny endearing way often seen with characters in the first two installments. I just finished the the second class trial; the twist there was pretty stupid. The first trial and murderer at least made sense and was unexpected. This second murderer, while also unexpected, just had the dumbest reason; totally unbelievable. That said, the game itself isn't terrible. And the story is just interesting enough that I wanna see where it goes.
I started FF7 Crisis Core Reunion last week and I'm still in the early stages of it. Don't really have any opinions on it so far. After finishing FF16, I was in the mood for another action-based FF game, so tried this out.
Continuing to play FF14; still in Shadowbringer expansion (SHB). I've been taking my time with it as I had to level up a Machinist so that I can take advantage of the experience gained from MSQs. I finished the Titania trial over the weekend. I am enjoying the level of difficulty with SHB; I felt like Stormblood was a walk in the park. Admittedly, I was massively overleveled through most of Stormblood, but even with level adjustments, it felt easy. So it's nice to see some challenge again.
Also I've gotten back into Eve Online after taking a few months off again. Idk; null blob fleet stuff is something to do, I guess.
i started streaming and this week i have the time to go all in with it, im playing one game a day this week in this order Super mario world links awakening (second stream for it) baldurs gate enhanced edition nightmare creatures twilight princess (on gamecube, also second stream already)
good times
I'm at 86% main story progress of ff16 and the game is such a letdown after reading people hyping it up so much... feels like a chore at the moment but I'm so close to the end I'm just gonna power through it
I'm finally at Disc 4 of Final Fantasy 8 Remastered. Tried playing this game several times, but never finished it. I decided to use all the QoL options (combat boost, 3x speed, no-encounter) to avoid being frustrated by the gameplay (junctioning, drawing, etc), and I've been enjoying the story, even post Disc 3 twist.
Continuing the PSO2:NGS grind. Leciel is extremely fun, just the right amount of tension and challenge, and constant novel boss "twists". Yesterday we had a boss with breakable parts and a breakable bomb, as well as buffs to damage to breakable parts. The strat was to stagger him by breaking his legs then do a mad rush to break the bomb before it wiped the entire party.
Beyond that, continuing my journey through .hack//IMOQ. It's immediately clear how special this series is. Not just for being the seminal story about an imaginary game, and being fairly unique in actually looking at how people interact with games as a third place, and the queer potential of video games; but also for actually providing a playable version of the imaginary game. Including an MMO version of the MMO!
I really want .hack to come back. Log Horizon rules, and I like the more heroic, legendary, and optimistic tone and theming, but there's something really appealing at how realistic .hack is without being dark, gritty, or cynical. The sense of romance in the game's backstory is great too. All this weird background fabric about genius programmers singlehandedly changing the course of the world, people overhwelmed by emotions; meanwhile the spotlight is on real people.
Baldur's Gate 3, naturally. I was enjoying it until I reached the zone border and I got a warning I was underleveled. I was like, really, Larian? We're doing this again?
My biggest complaint with Divinity: Original Sin 2 was that the level differences were so stark and the XP was so tight that it felt like the game was forcing me to comb through the entire map. Absolutely kills replay value, and BG3 is a game I'd really, really like to save something for a replay.
This ended up being a constant issue in D:OS2 but turned out mostly okay in the first D:OS after a really tight first act. I hope this ends up being more like the latter. Or there's some way to grind this time around.
Im in act 3 and only encountered the "you're underleveled" message once at that same point. I havent scoured the areas for everything nor speed run the main story. I think act 1 is tight like you said, but it seems to be much looser as you progress.
That's good to hear, thanks. I'm not gonna say I did a speedrun on the first area but I was definitely skipping around.
I'm going to finish up these two quests and just leave from that point. If it's too hard, I can always drop down to Explorer difficulty. As much as I'm enjoying the challenge right now, I'd rather do that than stop roleplaying because I'm XP hunting. I felt like I had to do that a lot in D:OS2 and it was one of the few major negatives in the game.
Got Murder By Numbers free off EGS, and wife played it before so I thought I'd give it a go. It's an interesting mash-up of visual novel and nonograms. Interesting trivia, the dev's next game was Fall Guys.
Genshin Impact has consumed my life. Send help. Looking forward to Fontaine!
Baldur's Gate 1 single player, Divinity: Original Sin 1 in co-op. I was playing through Colony Ship which is another isometric RPG, but I didn't want to get to the end of the early access content before release later this year. I figure if I play through the originals of BG and D:OS I'll have a good amount of time to wait for BG3 to be in sale and have some updates maybe. That or Colony Ship will be released.
Currently playing 'Brotato' on the Switch! Super fun quick game,.
Each round you have to survive and then spend money on weapons/items to survive the next round until Round 20 (unless you do endless).
You unlock difficulties (by surviving the rounds) and characters with different perks/attributes.
