What are you currently playing?

[BrawlMan]

Finished DMC5SE on Dante Must Die. I forgot how annoying this mode is in this game. Enemies and bosses get way too much health, and super armor at specific points that are unfair. Me playing on Turbo Mode, probably didn't help. I bummed rushed the latter half, because I just wanted it done by this point. I'll still be replaying, but I am not going to bother with Bloody Palace much this time.

 

[Worgen]

Beat the main campaign of the Quake 2 remaster, its really cool, boss is still rather easy, but the levels leading up to it feel much harder and much more interesting. I think they are levels that were redone by machine games, a lot more enemies and much better enemy placement. Started on the 'Call of the Machine' campaign and so far its incredible. You start as the commander on a station or something and each level is a different marine send down to a different location to mess up the strogg there and all the levels are very different, none of this constant machine corridors kinda thing that the main game has. The enemy placement is nice and tricky, each group of levels has a totally different theme, new weapons can show up, enemy variations keep things fresh, just so awesome and well done.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Finished my placement matches with Ryu in Street Fighter 6. At first I had a pretty good run, getting 4W2L by my sixth game. Then I lost the last four games in a row, finishing at 4W6L and being put in the Rookie tier, which is the lowest tier available. It's not like I'm trying to dispute being given that rank, considering how I lost those games and who I lost to, but since I have a fair bit of prior experience with Street Fighter, it feels pretty rough to be told I'm going in the equivalent of the swim class for toddlers who've never seen a swimming pool before, and with the only character I actually know anything about.

Heck it. Pity party isn't gonna get me out of rock bottom.

 

[gorfias]

Just got Cyberpunk 2077 (2020!) on sale on Steam.

I just got an RX 6750xt 12 Gig of DDR6 and I'm getting about 30 FPS. Plays fine to me. I just hope I didn't do something to mess up my build as I thought I'd get better FPS at 1080p. And I want to go to 1440P. May have to manually reduce the visuals when I go to 1440p as 30 FPS should be a floor.

It begins with character creation. I'm making a female character and a near photo realistic woman is shown topless. I'm praying my wife doesn't walk into my home office as she's never going to believe this was not my intention.

There is a tutorial section. It isn't too long and painful. You'll be familiar with a lot of the conventions ie left trigger to aim a weapon, right to shoot.

3 types to choose from: a Mad Max desert raider type, street thug, or corporate. I did street thug as I want to be in the city and I have no idea how to have fun in corporate. Can you imagine? "Time for a hostile takeover of that other corporation (insert evil laugh)!!!"

It is a stunningly beautiful game. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it before.

So far, a very worthwhile experience.


EDIT: Reviewing this...

EDIT: 3 things:
1) Even though my 2 available GPU slots are rated the same, they are not bussed to the CPU the same way. I moved the card from slot 2 to slot 1 and saw my FPS go up 50%;
2) It is recommending you put the game on SSD so I moved it from my 16 TB x7200 HD to my 990 M2;
3) Reduced the raytracing setting to low. AMD cards don't do raytracing like Nvidia.
Now I think I'm locked at 60 FPS now. My monitor is 60 hz so, not even seeing an issue yet.

 

[meiam]

Just got Cyberpunk 2077 (2020!) on sale on Steam.

I just got an RX 6750xt 12 Gig of DDR6 and I'm getting about 30 FPS. Plays fine to me. I just hope I didn't do something to mess up my build as I thought I'd get better FPS at 1080p. And I want to go to 1440P. May have to manually reduce the visuals when I go to 1440p as 30 FPS should be a floor.

It begins with character creation. I'm making a female character and a near photo realistic woman is shown topless. I'm praying my wife doesn't walk into my home office as she's never going to believe this was not my intention.

There is a tutorial section. It isn't too long and painful. You'll be familiar with a lot of the conventions ie left trigger to aim a weapon, right to shoot.

3 types to choose from: a Mad Max desert raider type, street thug, or corporate. I did street thug as I want to be in the city and I have no idea how to have fun in corporate. Can you imagine? "Time for a hostile takeover of that other corporation (insert evil laugh)!!!"

It is a stunningly beautiful game. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it before.

So far, a very worthwhile experience.


EDIT: Reviewing this...

EDIT: 3 things:
1) Even though my 2 available GPU slots are rated the same, they are not bussed to the CPU the same way. I moved the card from slot 2 to slot 1 and saw my FPS go up 50%;
2) It is recommending you put the game on SSD so I moved it from my 16 TB x7200 HD to my 990 M2;
3) Reduced the raytracing setting to low. AMD cards don't do raytracing like Nvidia.
Now I think I'm locked at 60 FPS now. My monitor is 60 hz so, not even seeing an issue yet.

FYI there's a massive patch coming out next month along with the DLC that will redo most of the game system, I don't know how compatible it will be with save made before it.

The starting character background has sadly almost no impact on the game beyond the first 1-2 hours.

There was a lot of talk about bug/stability, but playing it about 6 months after release and in 140 hours I had one crash and no critical bug, so either the poor state at launch was overblown or they really fixed the game since.

 

[gorfias]

FYI there's a massive patch coming out next month along with the DLC that will redo most of the game system, I don't know how compatible it will be with save made before it.

The starting character background has sadly almost no impact on the game beyond the first 1-2 hours.

There was a lot of talk about bug/stability, but playing it about 6 months after release and in 140 hours I had one crash and no critical bug, so either the poor state at launch was overblown or they really fixed the game since.

I'll have to risk it! I hope I don't lose my saves but I don't want to wait 50 days to play.
Glad to read it is running well for you. So far, no bugs here either but I'm very early in the game. I hope to mod the living heck out of it. I read there are a lot of them out there but I'm not finding many at Moddb.

 

[Bartholen]

So after the Eye of the Storm campaign in Total Warhammer 2 spawned three ultra-beefy chaos armies right at my doorstep to absolutely rail my ass, which I had no reasonable way to prepare for, I decided to ditch that shit and try out the Mortal Empires campaign with the Beastmen. And hooooly moley is it a whole load more enjoyable. There was definitely a learning curve since the Beastmen playstyle is so different, but once I got into grips with it I've been whittling the ours away like it's nothing. The Beastmen have a very engaging, active playstyle that constantly pushes you forward, because pretty much the only way to accrue currency reliably is to raid foreign provinces. But that won't last forever either, so you're pretty much constantly on the move, raiding provinces and leaving them desolate in your wake. It really captures the feeling of a roving, rampaging barbaric horde. It's really fun.

But good god, I do not understand how I'm supposed to do the real-time battles. I've been using auto-resolve pretty much exclusively, because how the fuck am I expected to handle these fights? It is the single most overwhelming thing I've ever seen in at least any strategy game I've played. The units are so teeny tiny that there's essentially no way to tell them apart from size, and even that's a slim help. A lot of the time they just fade into the background completely and I'm left staring at a whole load of murky nonsense. The minimap is shit and too small, there's close to no feedback on who's getting attacked and where and how hard, high-level heroes have so many abilities that it's like playing Diablo on top of an insanely overwhelming RTS. The banner icons are no help either, because units often get broken up and mush into each other, so the icons swifly disappear beneath each other. Some units benefit from having them charge, disengage and charge again which is a whole lot of micromanagement with armies as vast as these. And all of this just makes me sad, because there's so much care and attention put into the animation and detail of these units. But I can never look at it for more than a few seconds before I'm back to managing other units. Sad, man.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

I freaking hate combat in Wonderful 101. It's just a big chaotic mess and I hate it more the further I get into the game. Most enemy attacks are unblockable making the block button almost completely useless, and the ones that can be blocked are used so infrequently and so quickly that most of the time I don't even realize it's time to block. I also hate how your guys all go flying and need to be collected every time you take damage or attack when the enemy is doing something that breaks your weapon. It's so tedious. I'm on operation 7/9 and some of the fights are taking upwards of 7 minutes to finish. There's probably some specific move that makes the fights faster but I have no interest in methodically testing every attack against every enemy (there's a lot) to figure out what works best. It's awful and I hate it and I wish I was done playing it.

Conversely, I've also been replaying Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney which is great and I love as a break from W101. I can play Ace Attorney for hours and still not feel like putting it down, but I'm sick of W101 before I'm even finished one mission. AA is not the best detective game, and sometimes it's easy to get a bit ahead of the logic and present evidence you know you need to present just a little early, but mostly it's just a fun story. The localization is really weird in that they pretend the game is set in America when it very clearly isn't. For one, most people look Japanese. For two, there's some really Japanese stuff in the game, like you go to this one guys shack which is floored with tatami mats and has a kotatsu in the middle. Kind of wish they had gone with a more direct translation of the game. The court system is just totally bizarre as well. When I'm finished I might play the next games in the trilogy since all I've every played is the very first one.

I will say though, I think changing the characters that are American or dress "American" to German makes more sense with the way they look, which is a more old style European look.

 

[laggyteabag]

I've still been playing quite a bit of Overwatch 2. The new hero is a lot of fun, and I just really enjoy this game.

That being said, Im terrible when it comes to live-service games, and I feel like im going to have to go full cold-turkey on this game soon. I don't do very well in the face of battlepass FOMO, and being worried that im missing my daily/weekly quests. This is why I tend to stay away from modern multiplayer games, but I do allow myself to indulge in them every once and a while.

Otherwise, i've picked Borderlands 3 back up, and im just trying to finish it now. I feel like the game is just a little too long, and really runs out of steam as soon as you hit Nekrotafeyo. I found this during my first playthrough of the game too, where I just ended up cheating to give myself superpowers to just blitz my way through that section, and finish the game.

Im still pretty interested to play the DLCs though, because Ive never actually touched them, but im pretty done with the main story, and ready for it to be over.

Afterwards, I really want to give Baldur's Gate 3 another go, but I also don't really feel like paying £50 at the moment (even though I am under no impressions that it wouldn't be worth it). So I might just give another CRPG a go, and maybe try Divinity Original Sin 1 a try.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I will say though, I think changing the characters that are American or dress "American" to German makes more sense with the way they look, which is a more old style European look.

They changed the American characters to German? Wow.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

They changed the American characters to German? Wow.

The Von Karma's are supposed to be Americans in the original Japanese games. I... think they may have confused America for England or something.

 

[Bedinsis]

I'm sure everybody gets stuck on this part of the game because it makes absolutely no sense to do this and there is no advantage in doing so.

I actually did that the first thing I did. At that point the game had taught me that you cannot really make mistakes in the investigation sections; you can only make mistakes when objecting in the trials sections; otherwise it's super linear. So I didn't really think of it in terms of what the smart thing to do would be, I thought of it in terms of how the story should progress. Besides, if we look at the other cases: in case 2 you directly confront Redd White during the investigation once you've found the one clue Mia left you and in case 3 you directly confront Dee Vasquez during the investigation, after gotten the relevant clue from Oldbag, so it's a running plot point.

 

[gorfias]

Played some Medal of Honor (2010) on PC. Only getting 60 FPS. Locked somehow?
COD: MW2 (2009) is my all time favorite combat FPS. It got very high ratings. Battlefield 3 (2011) came after, got better scores than MoH but I don't like it as much. The campaign anyway and maybe that is what makes all the difference. Because the campaign in MoH is very fun and playable and looks better than BF3. Not as good as COD:MW2 though. And I haven't played Warfighter much on PS3. Gotta give that some more attention.

 

[Silvanus]

Playing through Celeste and Thymesia, both pretty difficult. Really loving Celeste but I don't think I'll be able to hack 100% completion. I've got 100% on some damn hard platformers in the past, but the B-Sides and golden strawberries in this seem beyond me. Might have to settle for main story completion and maybe a bit more I can manage.

Thymesia is fun, but pretty shamelessly copying Demon's Souls and Bloodborne.

 

[Worgen]

Played some Medal of Honor (2010) on PC. Only getting 60 FPS. Locked somehow?
COD: MW2 (2009) is my all time favorite combat FPS. It got very high ratings. Battlefield 3 (2011) came after, got better scores than MoH but I don't like it as much. The campaign anyway and maybe that is what makes all the difference. Because the campaign in MoH is very fun and playable and looks better than BF3. Not as good as COD:MW2 though. And I haven't played Warfighter much on PS3. Gotta give that some more attention.

I remember liking the campaign in Medal of Honor 2010 well enough when I originally played it, but on trying to play it a second time a few years after, I couldn't even get past the 2nd level, it was so dull and played so much worse then I remembered and just, blegh. Every now and then I'll get the urge for CoD and replay the campaigns in a bunch of those games (I really should do that again since I've wanted to replay Infinity anyway), but MOH... just super weak compared to even the worst of CoD... well mainline cod anyway.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Playing through Celeste and Thymesia, both pretty difficult. Really loving Celeste but I don't think I'll be able to hack 100% completion. I've got 100% on some damn hard platformers in the past, but the B-Sides and golden strawberries in this seem beyond me. Might have to settle for main story completion and maybe a bit more I can manage.

Did you finish that last level after the credits that's pretty much as long as the rest of the game combined and 5x as difficult? I think it was chapter 9. I stopped about halfway through that one after 3 or 4 hours, and haven't been able to bring myself to go back to that and learn all the glitchy exploit moves required to make progress.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Playing through Celeste and Thymesia, both pretty difficult. Really loving Celeste but I don't think I'll be able to hack 100% completion. I've got 100% on some damn hard platformers in the past, but the B-Sides and golden strawberries in this seem beyond me. Might have to settle for main story completion and maybe a bit more I can manage.

Thymesia is fun, but pretty shamelessly copying Demon's Souls and Bloodborne.

Celeste is the last execution based platformer I'm ever going to play. I knew then that my hands just won't tolerate me playing another game like that.

 

[Silvanus]

Did you finish that last level after the credits that's pretty much as long as the rest of the game combined and 5x as difficult? I think it was chapter 9. I stopped about halfway through that one after 3 or 4 hours, and haven't been able to bring myself to go back to that and learn all the glitchy exploit moves required to make progress.

I'm only on chapter 6 atm-- just finished the Mirror Palace.

Is chapter 9 the one that requires crystal hearts (or something) to unlock? Think I read something about that being a requirement somewhere.

 

[meiam]

So after the Eye of the Storm campaign in Total Warhammer 2 spawned three ultra-beefy chaos armies right at my doorstep to absolutely rail my ass, which I had no reasonable way to prepare for, I decided to ditch that shit and try out the Mortal Empires campaign with the Beastmen. And hooooly moley is it a whole load more enjoyable. There was definitely a learning curve since the Beastmen playstyle is so different, but once I got into grips with it I've been whittling the ours away like it's nothing. The Beastmen have a very engaging, active playstyle that constantly pushes you forward, because pretty much the only way to accrue currency reliably is to raid foreign provinces. But that won't last forever either, so you're pretty much constantly on the move, raiding provinces and leaving them desolate in your wake. It really captures the feeling of a roving, rampaging barbaric horde. It's really fun.

But good god, I do not understand how I'm supposed to do the real-time battles. I've been using auto-resolve pretty much exclusively, because how the fuck am I expected to handle these fights? It is the single most overwhelming thing I've ever seen in at least any strategy game I've played. The units are so teeny tiny that there's essentially no way to tell them apart from size, and even that's a slim help. A lot of the time they just fade into the background completely and I'm left staring at a whole load of murky nonsense. The minimap is shit and too small, there's close to no feedback on who's getting attacked and where and how hard, high-level heroes have so many abilities that it's like playing Diablo on top of an insanely overwhelming RTS. The banner icons are no help either, because units often get broken up and mush into each other, so the icons swifly disappear beneath each other. Some units benefit from having them charge, disengage and charge again which is a whole lot of micromanagement with armies as vast as these. And all of this just makes me sad, because there's so much care and attention put into the animation and detail of these units. But I can never look at it for more than a few seconds before I'm back to managing other units. Sad, man.

You can control time in battle, good idea to set it to slower than real time and use the pause feature a lot.

Never really played beastman so I can't really comment on them, but the most basic strategy in total war is hammer and anvil, leave a line of infantry, let the other side crash into it, then smash into it's behind with cavalry. Cavalry need a bit of a run to be considered charging so give them space, let them crash into their target, then have them retreat so they can charge again. Cavalry does require a lot of micro, but the rest of your army should essentially require 0 time, so you can just focus on controlling them. Your goal isn't to kill every unit, its to break the units moral, which greatly decrease when charged from behind. But if you really don't want to use cavalry, there's plenty of army that don't rely on them (Skaven and dwarf for example), instead they focus more on...

The other important aspect to learn about is long range dictate the pace of the battle, if you have a long range artillery piece, you can sit back and the enemy will have to charge you, in that case don't even move, let them come to you, especially if you have a lot of archer. If you have to charge them, try to use forest to protect your unit from range fire. If you don't have artillery, you can use mage character instead.

If you need to tell unit apart, mouse over them to have an arrow show what individual unit (called "entity" in game) is part of what unit. If you need bigger minimap, you can zoom out to have a bird eye view of the fight. Don't worry too much about ability, start early game and most hero have 2 at most with long cooldown so you'll use them maybe twice in an average fight, and almost all boil down to either buffing your character or attacking the enemy like a magic. You can rotate the map to see icon better if you have a hard time seeing them. Fight looks complicated, but they're far simpler than RTS since they require very little micro management and you can always pause to queue a bunch of order.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

But good god, I do not understand how I'm supposed to do the real-time battles. I've been using auto-resolve pretty much exclusively, because how the fuck am I expected to handle these fights? It is the single most overwhelming thing I've ever seen in at least any strategy game I've played. The units are so teeny tiny that there's essentially no way to tell them apart from size, and even that's a slim help. A lot of the time they just fade into the background completely and I'm left staring at a whole load of murky nonsense. The minimap is shit and too small, there's close to no feedback on who's getting attacked and where and how hard, high-level heroes have so many abilities that it's like playing Diablo on top of an insanely overwhelming RTS. The banner icons are no help either, because units often get broken up and mush into each other, so the icons swifly disappear beneath each other. Some units benefit from having them charge, disengage and charge again which is a whole lot of micromanagement with armies as vast as these. And all of this just makes me sad, because there's so much care and attention put into the animation and detail of these units. But I can never look at it for more than a few seconds before I'm back to managing other units. Sad, man.

I ended up getting the game for myself as an intro to real-time strategy warfare after watching a YouTuber make the mechanics look easy, and I slammed into many of the same problems myself. It didn't help that units seemed to take my commands as gentle suggestions.