What are you currently playing?

[sXeth]

Wild Hearts

The (very) early impressions this is definitely got a clunky feel. Moreso then Monster Hunter or Dauntless ever had, even early on.
(also the production values on whats attempting to be cutscenes are pretty woeful for a 2023 AAA game, but whatever, you don't play thes games for that sort of thing).

Its definitely going for more of an impression of size in its monsters then those other 2, so I assume the building mechanics are very much needed (you don't really seem to be able dodge and weave as you might in those, or even Souls games. I'm not sure there actually is an iframe), but its also not doing a great job of introducing them,.

 

[BrawlMan]

Word Tour Mode got me in the mood to play Final Fight again. Still masterclass brawler that set a new standard in the beat'em up genre.

 

[Hawki]

FIRE EMBLEM HEROES

Spoiler

So, I keep waiting for Book VI to disappoint me storywise. Chances are it will, because I still remember how 5 just wheezed out towards the end, but so far, things are solid. On some random points:

-There's a solid interaction between Veronica and Leitzia that while not unique to the game, is still well done. With Veronica waiting for execution, Leitzia comes to gloat. The convo can basically be summed up as:

Leitzia: You'll be executed soon.

Veronica: Then what?

Leitzia: Then I'll usurp the throne and become empress.

Veronica: Then what?

Leitzia: What?

Veronica: After you've killed me, and taken the throne, once you rule all of the Emblian Empire, what will you actually do?

Leitzia: ...your mind games won't work on me.

Yeah, you can probably get the gist from that. Thing is, it isn't hard to see why Leitzia despises Veronica given her backstory, but it's made clear in this moment how wounded Veronica is by her friend's betrayal, but also that Leitzia has absolutely no idea what she's doing beyond getting revenge. She's basically the Robert Baratheon of Zenith - an excellent tactician who knows how to get the throne, but has no idea how to actually rule, let alone plan for it. To be clear, this is nowhere near GoT-level politics (it's not even on the level of Fire Emblem politics), but credit where credit is due, the writing's much better in previous games. Similarly when Veronica is comforted by a guard in a cell. To be clear, Veronica's not exactly an in-depth character, but she's definitely matured from the irritating brat she first appeared as way back in book 1. Did manage to stir some of "the feels" in me as she waits for death and hopes that her people don't suffer under Leitzia's rule (though as far as I can tell, most Emblians seem to be shits, so meh).

-So, the Order of Heroes rescues Veronica, and while it isn't the most eloquent writing in the world, Bruno reveals just how badly Veronica has miscalculated in portraying Veronica as a traitor. Basically, spread the claim of treachery so far and so thin that people stopped believing it. However, things aren't that simple, as Embla's now on the verge of civil war. The vassal houses are mustering their armies, but there's no way of knowing who'll declare for Veronica and who'll declare for Letzia, as they'll simply choose the leader they believe most likely to win the upcoming war. So even though many of them know that Veronica isn't a traitor, they'll still hapily side with Letzia if they think she's the winning candidate.

-Haven't had much time to play much beyond this point, but it's mentioned that Litzia's attacks have become more intense, the implication being that as Veronica can rely on both Emblian loyalists and the Order of Heroes, she's outnumbered, at least in this part of the empire. I'd have thought that Veronica relying on Askr might lead some to question her loyalties, but unless I missed something, I don't think it came up.

So, yeah. So far, Book VI continues to not disappoint, which is more than I can say for 4 and 5.

DIABLO IV

Spoiler

I managed to get an hour of D4 in (this time with only one disconnect) last night, so don't have much to say - least not without repeating myself. The only thing of note is that I did a side quest where a father tells a Cathedral of Light member that his son's been possessed by a demon, and her reaction is "okay, but you (the player) are going to help me." My thoughts were "well, this is bunk, we all know the Cathedral is untrustworthy, but nup, turns out the kid IS possessed (apparently it's Cathedral M.O. to simply burn people who are possessed), the priestess exorcises it, and you're forced to kill it. Um, yay?

Alright, that D1 and even DI had the guts for child murder aside, only bring this up because it at least shows some moral ambiguity for the Cathedral of Light. Yes, Inarius is an assholes, yes, the Cathedral's on the verge of fanaticism on their best of days, but on the other, Sanctuary is still a demon-infested hellscape, and there's still people in the Cathedral who provide a net good to the world around them. Not exactly deep, but like I said, don't have much to comment on.

 

[Bartholen]

I started playing the PS5 remaster of Nioh, after (again) remembering that I'd bought it like a year ago. I'm a few hours in, and it's really good. The combat hits a nice sweet spot between the Souls games and Sekiro, and there's certainly tons of variety. Can't say too much about the story or the level design yet, but this game gives me the weebiest fucking vibes, what with the player character meeting Hattori Hanzo and Tokugawa Iyeasu being at the center of it. I'm 100% sure people who hang katanas on their wall had some happy accidents playing this game.

But once I got to the world map and discovered how you're supposed to spend money, my eyes basically started weeping blood. This game has a serious case of mechanics overload. Not just in how its combat is even more complex than of the Souls games, but the blacksmith menu alone feels like something you need an university course to make sense of. You can buy weapons and sell them, but you can also upgrade weapons with materials, you can break down weapons to get materials, you can do something called Soul Link which I didn't catch what it does, and I think there was something about magic as well. It also has a Diablo-style loot system, and the game vomits new equipment at you at such a rate that even Torchlight would go "timeout, timeout!" I have zero clue what even 30% of this shit means. Weapons have levels, but also "familiarity" which increases the more you use the same weapon, which presumably gives some kinds of buffs. Then there's different accessories with properties I didn't even bother to check, I just looked at their level.

Maybe it all makes sense with a 300-page strategy guide, but I'm here to kill bandits and demons, not do fucking accounting.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I've been playing theHunter: Call of the Wild, and, well, blah. It's much closer to a sim than a game; if you really want to replicate the frustration of spending ten minutes belly-crawling towards a herd of deer only to have one randomly spook and send the whole bunch running, then this is for you. All the "fun" of hunting minus the chiggers and ticks.

 

[Worgen]

Just beat Supplice on the hardest mode. Didn't have much trouble, but I did have a lot of fun. The game is still brilliant, fantastic Doom style fps gameplay with really good writing for the terminals you find and fun enemies and weapons. Not to mention a killer sound track. Still eagerly awaiting episode 2 (out of 6), but the new secret level and weapon they added are pretty Doom cool.

 

[Bartholen]

Well, turns out my assessment of Nioh being somewhere between Dark Souls and Sekiro was quite prescient... and not in a good way. If this bat ***** in the cave is any indication of the overall boss design of this game, I might just cut my losses and chuck this game out a window. Because holy fuck is this boss unfun. It's like fighting a Sekiro boss, but as a Dark Souls character. It has all the hallmarks of a shitty souls boss: next to nonexistent tells, check. Zero time to react, check. Stunlocking, check. Learning the boss being possible only through essentially trial and error, check. Extreme aggression forcing you to play entirely reactively, check. Grab attack that slices off 75% of your health, check (and remember, no tells or time to react), check. Insane tracking that makes dodging next to pointless, triple check with whipped cream on top. Oh, and her grab attack can interrupt your mega super kamehameha mode, which so far has only found use for me in boss fights.

And the level leading up to her was super boring and bland too, which has me worried considering the things I've heard of this game's environment design.

 

[Worgen]

Well, turns out my assessment of Nioh being somewhere between Dark Souls and Sekiro was quite prescient... and not in a good way. If this bat ***** in the cave is any indication of the overall boss design of this game, I might just cut my losses and chuck this game out a window. Because holy fuck is this boss unfun. It's like fighting a Sekiro boss, but as a Dark Souls character. It has all the hallmarks of a shitty souls boss: next to nonexistent tells, check. Zero time to react, check. Stunlocking, check. Learning the boss being possible only through essentially trial and error, check. Extreme aggression forcing you to play entirely reactively, check. Grab attack that slices off 75% of your health, check (and remember, no tells or time to react), check. Insane tracking that makes dodging next to pointless, triple check with whipped cream on top. Oh, and her grab attack can interrupt your mega super kamehameha mode, which so far has only found use for me in boss fights.

And the level leading up to her was super boring and bland too, which has me worried considering the things I've heard of this game's environment design.

That was pretty much what I ended up doing with it. It wants to be souls, but more complicated and with bs.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Playing Rogue Legacy 2. This game's fantastic. Everything I liked about the original but better and then some. The hand-drawn cartoon art style goes great with the sense of humor, and the game has much more diversity in terms of enemies, enviroments, classes and randomizer elements to make each run fairly unique. There was a lot of palette swapping in the original but here each enviroment has its own asset-rich look and a features a bunch of different gimmicks involving traversal and getting the boss door open. Starting area is fairly classic RL but after that each biome does its own thing, which I like a lot.

The game is masterfully balanced and designed. There's a tactical tradeoff to just about everything, from which room you explore next to which challenges you take and what reward you choose for yourself. Weapons and armor get set bonuses, but these tend to weigh more, which lowers your resolve meter, which lets you pick up less relics while playing, which affects your loadout dramatically in terms of stat effects and gameplay mechanics. Lower your resolve enough and your HP is encumbered. And so on.

It has a more metroidvania feel than the original game. Biomes and boss gates are usually gated by abilities that you get from completing certain challenges (sort of mini dungeons). So exploring isn't just doing stuff in the order of rising number and difficulty ratings. There's a more organic sense of progression involved.

There's a bunch of quality of life improvements. You can no longer get knocked out of a room by an enemy attack (resetting enemy health and erasing loot), even if you're free to leave whenever. You don't just gain gold from each run but XP as well. There's a banking system that means you no longer have to lose 100% of your unspent cash upon starting another run. There's a lot you just "keep" between runs. And you can unlock portals to each unique biome in the game, which is super convenient. But because the starting area is the one with fixed spawn points for relics, it means there's still good reason to play the "classic" way and replay the whole thing rather than jumping ahead to the area you were last exploring when you died. Up to you.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

The hand-drawn cartoon art style goes great with the sense of humor,

Fun fact: Those are actually 3D models, but rendered in a way that makes them look 2D and hand-drawn. But it's done really convincingly, isn't it?

 

[BrawlMan]

@Worgen, I've been replaying some DmC: DE (2013). I managed to beat my old high score on Mission 12, Gods Must Die [Hardcore]. I got into 3rd place on the leaderboards with 27,021,100 points. It's hard to go back and play on lower difficulties on this game. The furthest I go down is DMD mode, if I want to chill.

 

[Worgen]

@Worgen, I've been replaying some DmC: DE (2013). I managed to beat my old high score on Mission 12, Gods Must Die [Hardcore]. I got into 3rd place on the leaderboards with 27,021,100 points. It's hard to go back and play on lower difficulties on this game. The furthest I go down is DMD mode, if I want to chill.

I really need to replay DMC 5 and buy the collection on steam. Just have so much to play and so much coming out.

 

[Hawki]

FIRE EMBLEM HEROES

I love how Gustav is just randomly resurrected by Hel and no-one, not even Alphonse or Shareena reacts. I know he's just the random enemy hero for the mission, but come on, really?

 

[Bartholen]

I went and got Fear & Hunger after being exposed to it through some Youtubers. It's an indie horror RPG made in RPG maker. I was probably spoiled too much for it to have its maximum impact, but it's pretty damn effective nonetheless. Because this game is dark as fuck. As in, the game's title screen literally has a character slicing their wrist open -dark. Committing suicide is a gameplay mechanic. And it only gets darker from there. Which is the reason this game likely won't even show up on your Steam search, because it's rated Adults Only, which you have to specifically toggle to show in your Steam settings.

I'm not too far into it, but what I've seen seems very compelling. What has me worried is the amount of repetition involved: save spots are very limited, and parts of the game are randomized, which makes it a pseudo-roguelike in certain respects. The game takes a very Souls-esque, hands off approach, so you're expected to explore and discover things for yourself. Which is fun when you're delving deeper and getting immersed into the atmosphere, and not so fun when you unwittingly stumble into a hard fight and lose half an hour's worth of progress.

 

[meiam]

Well I tried star ocean 6 a bit more, but in less than one hour play time it crashed on me (after the two previous crashed in the previous 4 hours) and the writing somehow got worse. The main quest is to find some guy, lets call him Bob, the game stubbornly refuse to give any reason for why you're doing so. To find him, you have to ask some doctor about this, but the doctor refuse because Bob was exiled from the kingdom and you travel with the princess of the kingdom, whose father exiled him. This is where thing go downhill fast. You end up having to go to this other town to get some medicine, there you find out that the neighbouring country has instituted a blockade and so the medicine are... in supply, you just pick them up, no big deal, they even comment on this just to assure you that you won't have to do anything, god forbid our hero do something heroic. But obviously the point is to introduce the information of the blockade to the party... but no, never mind, nobody react to that, you literally travel with the princess of the kingdom and she can't be bothered to even utter a single line of dialogue about this. See the real reason you go to that village is so that one of your character can fall sick! Oh no! The local doctor examine him and declare that... nothing is wrong with him, he's just a bit tired. Oh but he should get checked up by the previous doctor you talked to. In the meantime, the assistant of the first doctor you saw is travelling with you and is hoping the doctor will give his okay for her to go study at the university to be a doctor herself, it's never mentioned why the doctor would be against this. So you trek all the way back to the first town to see the doctor so he can examine the sick companion, who tell you, actually he's sorta sick because the prosthetic he use is broken, in a nondescript way, and that prosthetic was made by Bob, so he finally tell you were Bob is. Oh and his assistant is tagging along, lets just forget about her wanting to go to the university and the doctor opposing this. And this is where the game crashed for me, literally and figuratively.

So the game spends one hours, introduce 2 towns and 3 new characters for something that could have been resolved right away (just tell the doctor about the prosthetic and he tell you were Bob is). Our character didn't accomplish anything, we just went back and forth between 2 towns. And nothing about this world was explored (there's a blockade, but no discussion of this happens). This is so incredibly strange, it's like the writer knew the player should do something and they have a general understanding of the construction of JRPG quest structure, but stubbornly refuse to make it work while still having the barebone structure be present. This is really the closest equivalent I've seen to one of those so bad its good movie, where the plot makes no sense and there's weird decision everywhere because the original story is too short to make a full movie and so they have waste time with pointless scene, except a movie is 90 min long and this is like 40 hours, so you can't really enjoy it in this way.

Here's another just for funsy. You have to do a quest for this character, the quest she gives you is incredibly easy, gather a couple of item that are incredibly common, it would actually be far harder to reach that point in the game without having picked any. 99.9% of player will literally turn in the item right after they obtain the quest, without even moving from in front of that character. And yet the cutscene where you give the item to the character has her acting incredibly angry at you for being too slow at getting the item. Maybe that game was entirely made by an AI as some sort of experiment.

Anyway, point is, whoever is in charge of star ocean now seems to have a ranging hatred of good writing. Here's hoping they literally change nothing about the SO2 script for the remake.

 

[jojithepainter]

Summers always get me nostalgic for the good old times, so I think I'll be revisiting Banjo Kazooie in the next few days...

 

[laggyteabag]

I visited my parents, and took my Steam Deck with me, so I decided to see how well Spider-Man (2018) worked on the device. It works pretty damn well.

With a mixture of high, medium and low settings, you can get the game to run at basically a locked 30FPS at native res (800p), and compared to the game cranked to ultra on my PC, the only noticeable differences were Ray Tracing, lower hair quality, and obviously the framerate. Other than that, it looked fantastic, with very few noticeable visual compromises, and is probably not too different to the original PS4 version.

I remember when the game originally came out on the PS4, and I immediately had to catch a train to visit my girlfriend for a few weeks, so I just swung around in the intro for about 30 minutes, before having the abandon the game for the weekend. I would have killed for the Steam Deck back then.

Otherwise, I decided to spend a whole £4.49 on the ill-fated Marvel's Avengers game. I've not heard fantastic things about it (though the campaign is supposed to be alright), but for less than £5, im sure I can find something about it to enjoy. Also, as the game is being delisted for good later on in the year, I think I just wanted a copy for preservation reasons.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

I heard it said, once upon a time, that nobody ever quits Runescape; they just take long breaks.

Anyway, I'm resubscribing today.

 

[BrawlMan]

I heard it said, once upon a time, that nobody ever quits Runescape; they just take long breaks.

Anyway, I'm resubscribing today.

​

 

[Dalisclock]

Finished Act 2 of Pathfinder WOTR. Act 2 introduces you to crusade mode which is a lot like the exploration in Kingmaker but now you're moving armies around the map and fighting demon armies. But you still need to take your adventuring party to visit locations so the army also scouts and basically clears the path. Occasionally you run into places where you actually need to use your party to clear the path for the army, like an choke point that is a perfect ambush location.

It's not too long and it's basically a march to the fortress city of Drezen, which fell to the demons decades before, and the act finale is basically assaulting Drezen because it's a vital keystone to retaking the rest of the worldwound(basically a big demon infested wasteland with a hell portal in the center). Once taken(and it took me like 3 days to take it), it acts as the home base for the rest of the crusade, which is meant to push the other 80% of the way to the center of the worldwound.

But yeah, it's a lot better paced then kingmaker and while the crusade battles aren't particularly great, it does feel like I'm actually managing stuff. Which is more then I felt in DAI.

I also got to pick my mythic path and went with Azata which I guess is like a superhero of sorts, like a chaotic version of an angel I guess?