What are you currently playing?

[NerfedFalcon]

I finished 'act 1' of Returnal, and then died immediately at the start of act 2 because I was locked in a room with a miniboss I couldn't even conceive of defeating with the resources I had left. That's how it goes some runs, though. And next run's definitely going to be something.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

I'm gonna play Returnal soon, too! Looking forward/terrified

But this morning I started a little game called Persona 5 Royale.
2.5 hrs in and I'm just reading text. I was warned that the game starts slow but honestly this is just offensive.
The style and music is cool and I'm intrigued to get into the combat when this f'n game will let me so I'll keep sleeping through this epic intro. But, man- this sort of thing shouldn't be accepted/defended.

Dialogue if fine but we don't need characters repeating the same thing over and over. Do you know how many times I was told I have to not got in trouble at school? A million. It feels like it, anway. Ugh, JRPG's....
Music is hella cool though and the few fantasy creatures I've interacted with look awesome.

That his game is infamously long is one thing but the suspicion that it doesn't NEED to be anywhere near that long because of pacing is messed up.

 

[BrawlMan]

I finally managed to get to Level 38 in Mr.X's Nightmare! I had to use Shiva. I regret nothing. The new high score I achieved is 733,133.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

Well, so much for Persona 5. Lemme paint you a picture:
I had gotten about 3 or 4 hours in. The first like, I dunno, 5-10 hrs are huge tutorial? Mostly talking and understanding the world. I told myself if I appreciate that for Witcher 3, I'll excuse it for P5. I was kinda bored but was interested enough in the battle system and the idea of splitting time between character building and dungeon fighting. So I was gonna keep going. As I played of course I saved my game every time I was prompted to. Well, at least I thought I did....

Last night was gonna watch TV with my wife but she got a call from her sister and sometimes they can go on for a while god love 'em so I booted up the XBox to mess about in P5 while I wait for her and the only save available was an hour in. I lost about 2 hours of progress, including a the actual tutorial about how to use the titular persona, introduction to a cat character and antagonist.

Quit, delete game. Wtf is this bullshit, a slow intro is bad enough but I'm not doing it again, without the confidence that my progress will even be saved. I'm just gonna keep staying away from JRPG's I guess, with Scarlet Nexus, Genshin Impact and Immortals Fenyx Rising being the other three such (or inspired heavily by such) I tried out and dropped off.

So I'm gonna dust of the PS5 and believe it or not I wanna start another Elden Ring run, despite all my griping, lol. FromSoft fans are masochists what can I say. Considering a strength build.
Also found a used copy of Returnal that should arrive Monday.

 

[Dreiko]

So I just started Yakuza Kiwami, first time playing one of these games, but there had been a couple for free up on PS+ that I grabbed and decided to give em a go. Damn thing is instantly captivating with both the story and the gameplay, hard to imagine it's the remake of a ps2 game, they clearly did their best to modernize and upgrade it. I played up to chapter 4 in 1 sitting and never got bored for half a second. I especially love the crazy combat system, beating a yakuza with a bar stool in a host club will never not be amazingly fun.

Well, so much for Persona 5. Lemme paint you a picture:
I had gotten about 3 or 4 hours in. The first like, I dunno, 5-10 hrs are huge tutorial? Mostly talking and understanding the world. I told myself if I appreciate that for Witcher 3, I'll excuse it for P5. I was kinda bored but was interested enough in the battle system and the idea of splitting time between character building and dungeon fighting. So I was gonna keep going. As I played of course I saved my game every time I was prompted to. Well, at least I thought I did....

Last night was gonna watch TV with my wife but she got a call from her sister and sometimes they can go on for a while god love 'em so I booted up the XBox to mess about in P5 while I wait for her and the only save available was an hour in. I lost about 2 hours of progress, including a the actual tutorial about how to use the titular persona, introduction to a cat character and antagonist.

Quit, delete game. Wtf is this bullshit, a slow intro is bad enough but I'm not doing it again, without the confidence that my progress will even be saved. I'm just gonna keep staying away from JRPG's I guess, with Scarlet Nexus, Genshin Impact and Immortals Fenyx Rising being the other three such (or inspired heavily by such) I tried out and dropped off.

So I'm gonna dust of the PS5 and believe it or not I wanna start another Elden Ring run, despite all my griping, lol. FromSoft fans are masochists what can I say. Considering a strength build.
Also found a used copy of Returnal that should arrive Monday.

I'm not sure how Xbox works but doesn't it upload your saves to a cloud type thing? PS4 does this. Maybe your system has issues cause I never heard of persona 5 having issues with saving in any way.


Also keep in mind you can skip/fast forward parts you've already seen and blast through most cutscenes so you wouldn't have to replay most of the prologue (it's about 8 hours until the game proper opens up). You may need to spend like 10-20 minutes at most skipping through cause early game it's a lot of tutorials and not much combat.

 

[Gergar12]

Guess the game that parodies this.

U.S. Strike in Iraq Kills Qassim Suleimani, Commander of Iranian Forces (Published 2020)

Suleimani was planning attacks on Americans across the region, leading to an airstrike in Baghdad, the Pentagon statement said. Iran’s supreme leader called for vengeance.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Dreiko]

Guess the game that parodies this.

U.S. Strike in Iraq Kills Qassim Suleimani, Commander of Iranian Forces (Published 2020)

Suleimani was planning attacks on Americans across the region, leading to an airstrike in Baghdad, the Pentagon statement said. Iran’s supreme leader called for vengeance.

www.nytimes.com

Fortnite?

 

[Gergar12]

Fortnite?

MW2 remake.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Still Darkest Dungeon. This game is my personal purgatory. I hate so much about how the game is structured. I'm on week 58 of Bloodmoon difficulty. I've been save scumming a bit before champion level dungeons and the Crimson Court ones because they are all BS, but I've still lost 6/16 heroes half of which are Occultists for some reason. It was actually 4 Occultists, but one came back to life through a town event. The game just hates them and loves to deathblow them on the first death's door. I have over 400k in the bank, which is not bad and I have close to 8 level 6 heroes so I should do a DD run pretty soon to free up some room for new guys, but I don't have exactly the party composition that I'd like since I have a bunch of guys at the very edge of level 4 that I've been saving for a veteran boss that I haven't unlocked yet.

This is one of the things I hate the most about the game. The game is very unforgiving and requires you to have specific party compositions. You cannot just take any selection of heroes to any area and expect to do well. However you have a limited roster of heroes to choose from, replenished by a completely random selection each week. This is made worse by the fact that heroes refuse to do dungeons below their own level. You can only do apprentice dungeons with levels 0-2, veteran with 3-4, and champion with 5-6. You can of course bring lower level heroes to higher level dungeons, but this is obviously a bad idea. So your roster of 12-29 heroes is split in 3 and it's not always possible to keep good party compositions together at the right times. The missions that appear have random difficulty and you must do a mission every week, so you might be forced to do an area that requires one party composition and because they level up it will break your party composition for other areas or bosses. And of course you always will want to do a boss with the highest level characters possible for that boss, which means that you need other similar leveled characters to do missions to unlock the boss. It's all very frustrating and means you will be constantly hamstrung through no fault of your own. You might wish to level up some apprentices, but get no good missions to run them through, or not get the new recruits you want. Or you might want to run a boss with a particular party, but have nobody to do the missions to unlock the boss. Or you might lose an important hero from a run of bad luck and suddenly have 3 heroes ready to go that need to have a new guy run up from level 0 that needs to have 3 other level 0 guys with him which needs 4 more spots on the roster which is full which requires dismissing heroes that you already have hours of investment into and aaaaaaghghg! Who thought this was a good system!?

 

[meiam]

Still Darkest Dungeon. This game is my personal purgatory. I hate so much about how the game is structured. I'm on week 58 of Bloodmoon difficulty. I've been save scumming a bit before champion level dungeons and the Crimson Court ones because they are all BS, but I've still lost 6/16 heroes half of which are Occultists for some reason. It was actually 4 Occultists, but one came back to life through a town event. The game just hates them and loves to deathblow them on the first death's door. I have over 400k in the bank, which is not bad and I have close to 8 level 6 heroes so I should do a DD run pretty soon to free up some room for new guys, but I don't have exactly the party composition that I'd like since I have a bunch of guys at the very edge of level 4 that I've been saving for a veteran boss that I haven't unlocked yet.

This is one of the things I hate the most about the game. The game is very unforgiving and requires you to have specific party compositions. You cannot just take any selection of heroes to any area and expect to do well. However you have a limited roster of heroes to choose from, replenished by a completely random selection each week. This is made worse by the fact that heroes refuse to do dungeons below their own level. You can only do apprentice dungeons with levels 0-2, veteran with 3-4, and champion with 5-6. You can of course bring lower level heroes to higher level dungeons, but this is obviously a bad idea. So your roster of 12-29 heroes is split in 3 and it's not always possible to keep good party compositions together at the right times. The missions that appear have random difficulty and you must do a mission every week, so you might be forced to do an area that requires one party composition and because they level up it will break your party composition for other areas or bosses. And of course you always will want to do a boss with the highest level characters possible for that boss, which means that you need other similar leveled characters to do missions to unlock the boss. It's all very frustrating and means you will be constantly hamstrung through no fault of your own. You might wish to level up some apprentices, but get no good missions to run them through, or not get the new recruits you want. Or you might want to run a boss with a particular party, but have nobody to do the missions to unlock the boss. Or you might lose an important hero from a run of bad luck and suddenly have 3 heroes ready to go that need to have a new guy run up from level 0 that needs to have 3 other level 0 guys with him which needs 4 more spots on the roster which is full which requires dismissing heroes that you already have hours of investment into and aaaaaaghghg! Who thought this was a good system!?

Any interest in last spell, sorta similar that you do mission with random hero, but every mission is self contained and the hero don't carry over from mission to mission, which aleviate a lot of problem.

 

[Bartholen]

After burning out on Elden Ring yet again, I've gotten back to Witcher 3, playing through the DLCs currently. I didn't even remember that I'd finished this game a second time. But the DLC is still excellent, and it's a nicely varied experience: you can delve into it for 10 hours straight, or you can do some smaller quests that take like half an hour. Now that my new PC can fully flex this game with Ultra settings, good god is it still gorgeous 7 years later. I for one can't wait for the Witcher 1 remake, since it's likely going to blow this game out of the water graphics wise, and the story in that game (what little I can remember from it) is genuinely one of the most complex and multilayered I can remember in gaming. I just hope they improve the pacing of it, it's just dogshit.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Was going to start a GMGoW playthrough on NG+ but figured shit, there’s Forbidden West sitting there yet. So off I went to the Brink, clearing the daunt and getting that shithead Ulvund to blow his whistle. I hope Ragnarok doesn’t have a character as sufferable as him, because there’s no way Kratos would put up with that shit.

Anyways, rummaging around some ruins highlighted a couple of my biggest complaints with the game. Platforming in particular can be very unintuitive, as there are several things like beams, ledges, etc. that Aloy should be able to grab, but since they’re not *yellow* or highlighted with focus it’s no-go.

Tying into this is a lot of geometric clutter in areas where platforming is the only way through. So you end up jumping around like a rabbit on crack trying to find a actual place to grab onto. I can see why, in this respect, the jumping in GoW 2018 was made more contextual so as to lead Atreus to thinking dad is losing his shit. The ruins where you need to pull metal braces off of rock walls and move crates around feel like 6th or 7th gen holdovers for puzzles. Hopefully that stuff too is limited to non-existent In Ragnarok.

Having said that, the game of course really shines for the actual machine combat. It’s just so fluid feeling, especially with the precision effect when concentrating on weak points. I really end up wishing at least 90% of the game was just comprised of this, because everything else (besides the visuals of course) kinda pales in comparison.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Any interest in last spell, sorta similar that you do mission with random hero, but every mission is self contained and the hero don't carry over from mission to mission, which aleviate a lot of problem.

Seems interesting, but it's my policy not to play games in early access.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Flinthook

It's a roguelike from the Scott Pilgrim/Shredder's Revenge people. Mechanically this is tons of fun, you get a grappling hook and the ability to slow down time, and for movement it doesn't really get any more fun than that. You go around a bunch of rooms - combat rooms, gauntlet rooms, treasure rooms - until you hit the big chest room and then on to the next space ship. Once you raid a ship you pick the next one and repeat; 3 to 5 ships later you put together the map for the boss. Rinse and repeat.

So the two big things in roguelikes are working death into gameplay and variation per run. I feel Flinthook is kinda average on both counts. After death you cash in XP and level up, which unlocks Black Market tiers and you get to upgrade something if you have enough tokens. Once you've unlocked all 4 subweapons you pretty much only ever upgrade your HP, XP rate and perk slots. Perks are gameplay modifiers but the most useful stuff will always take most of the slots and for me I never get a reason to change the loadout, so this whole process became moot pretty quickly.

For variation Flinthook doesn't offer much. The ships get repetitive fast and that's fine, I guess the gameplay carries the brunt of it. There's a bunch of things you can grind and each run will take after that. And it is a VERY grindy game even of most of the stuff you get for it doesn't feel very useful.

The strength of the game is in the fact that ships take like 7 minutes to complete and you can be done with a run in like 20, making it a fun game to dip into, cash in and leave. Except it's easy to get hooked for another run, and then another, and then another. Luckily the game saves between ships so you're never obligated to "die" to save your progress.

 

[meiam]

Seems interesting, but it's my policy not to play games in early access.

Last patch is almost out and can be played on beta branch.

 

[Chimpzy]

Uncharted Lost Legacy

I've played the first three games and remember liking them, but i'm just not feeling tis. Was Uncharted always this stiff? I feel like I'm constantly fighting \game for control, railing against the animations and getting frustrated when the game fails me because what I want to do is not what the game wants me to do for like the fifitiheth time.

got a solution tho. I enhanced the game.

Drunk Uncharted Lost Legacy

Same game, but I'm drunk so the annoying stuff dont bothe me

 

[Worgen]

Beat Uncharted 4 in the lost legacy collection. Was pretty cool, had some neat set pieces and played pretty well. Took a bit for me to get into it since the start feels... not really hand holdy compared to how cod can be, but it did feel like it was rushing you and had specific ways it wanted problems dealt with, a bit more so then later on... I don't now, but it was still pretty cool.

Also beat Hedon Bloodrite on Bearzerker difficulty. Holy shit that game is still awesome, I don't think Bearzerker is as well balanced as it was in the Crystal Heart chapter, but its still a lot of fun and I want nothing more then just starting a new normal run with the game since its awesome.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

Considering I’ve gone everywhere else I can see up to this point, I guess I now need a “giant hand”, said no one in particular, ever. Wherever I go is a locked door or trap now, and I’m not going back into the underground water level and the ugly fish yet either.

 

[laggyteabag]

Well, so much for Persona 5. Lemme paint you a picture:
I had gotten about 3 or 4 hours in. The first like, I dunno, 5-10 hrs are huge tutorial? Mostly talking and understanding the world. I told myself if I appreciate that for Witcher 3, I'll excuse it for P5. I was kinda bored but was interested enough in the battle system and the idea of splitting time between character building and dungeon fighting. So I was gonna keep going. As I played of course I saved my game every time I was prompted to. Well, at least I thought I did....

Last night was gonna watch TV with my wife but she got a call from her sister and sometimes they can go on for a while god love 'em so I booted up the XBox to mess about in P5 while I wait for her and the only save available was an hour in. I lost about 2 hours of progress, including a the actual tutorial about how to use the titular persona, introduction to a cat character and antagonist.

Quit, delete game. Wtf is this bullshit, a slow intro is bad enough but I'm not doing it again, without the confidence that my progress will even be saved. I'm just gonna keep staying away from JRPG's I guess, with Scarlet Nexus, Genshin Impact and Immortals Fenyx Rising being the other three such (or inspired heavily by such) I tried out and dropped off.

I've just started playing Persona 4, and I really feel this. I am enjoying myself, but I really don't like that you cant just Save whenever you want, and you actually need to use save points. It is even worse in the prologue, because you don't have autonomy yet, so you only arrive at a save point, when the extremely linear prologue gets to one (which is normally at the end of one in-game day).

Never been a big fan of save systems like this. Not sure why a lot of Japanese games use systems like this.

Thankfully the Steam Deck has a really cool suspend mode, so unless the Steam Deck runs out of battery on standby, I can pretty much just stop playing whenever I want, but the fear of losing progress keeps the device perpetually fully charged.

 

[Silvanus]

Well, I was playing Moonscars, but have just encountered my second progress-preventing bug. This shit is sapping my interest in continuing.

First time, I got stuck in a wall, and nothing could get me out. Reloading doesn't help, because the game loads you exactly where you were, and seemingly only keeps a single save.

That was a known issue, and they patched it a couple of weeks later so I could continue. Played for about 40 more minutes, beat a boss.... but because the boss and I died about the same time, the cutscene didn't trigger, the door didn't open, and I'm stuck again.

It's also the crashiest game I've played in a long while.