What games are you playing now?

First kotor with tons of graphic mods

Horizon Zero Dawn.
I really haven't give this game the credit it deserves for its graphics. I remember one time I said it looks like Skyrim, and that i wasn't impressed since this came out much later. But when playing the game i have to say it looks really stellar. There's a fidelity to the graphics that i must say surpasses anything i've played on PC. Everything looks so detailed and contained (i hate when stuff in games looks like separate assets or sometimes like different art styles). It's welded together amazingly well. Scale is also really well done (Bethesda sucks at this!). Nothing is glitchy or looks like 2D in the backdrops either, so very unlike a Bethesda game. Faces are also really well done, they have a ton of character and they actually look like actual people. 10/10 in this department for sure.

Gameplay. This plays pretty much like the standard far cry or asscreed game, i think Asscreed is way more fun here, both combat and the fluidity of it all. The quests are super generic too. The story and most of the characters (despite their huge personality when it comes to graphics) is very lackluster.. Upgrade system is rather bland, more boring than the latest two AssCreed. Don't really care for the armor or weapon system at all, it's quite bad actually. The weapons are meh, might get better (20'ish hours played)

There's no way i'm finishing this though, it's too bland, nothing that pulls me in except its wonderful graphics. The environments are nice and diverse enough, but the environment design itself is never too interesting, parts of it where they put a lot of effort into it is great, but its not as interesting to explore as e.g Witcher 3 or Gothics, quite far from it.
Glad i got it though, i love seeing graphics like this, it's super inspiring, just too bad the game is pretty meh.

First time I've ever seen someone not like HZD.

I haven't heard of this game. Is it Epic or Ubi exclusive or something? Oops, only for PS4.

j/k, I'd own one if I owned a TV set or if it was easier to setup on a pc monitor.

I was expecting a little more from gameplay or perhaps story and less from graphics. it's a very shallow game, i can dig them sometimes if everything else just clicks for me, but it doesn't here unfortunately.

One environment that absolutely sucked was that cyber underground area.. oh my god. that was a drag, glad is was over FAIRLY quickly though. Unfortunately i bet there are more of those.. i'll continue until i get totally bored with it, i do have a feeling it will happen sooner rather than later, or i'll change my mind about it (it happens).

Playing the Choose Your Own Adventure game Warlock of Firetop Mountain again.

Steam says I've now played it a total of 14 hours during my two stints with the game, once in April and once the past couple of days: And I've beaten the game twice and done run throughs with approximately five or six characters, some multiple times.

I got a 1.5% achievement tonight, and it wasn't even one I was expecting to be obscure, it was just completing a quest for one of the higher value characters that takes a lot of souls to unlock. I say a lot, but you amass souls really quickly, this character cost 550 souls to unlock but then earned over 300 in his run to victory.

So I was quite shocked that his quest has only been achieved by 1.5% of players. To be honest, I'm quite shocked this game isn't more popular generally considering CYOA games are all the vogue at the moment, considering I keep hearing people clamour for short but well polished games, and considering there is barely anything wrong with the game polish-wise.

I mean, it's not like I've had to invest heavily in the game to unlock one of the best characters and it's not particularly difficult to complete the quest of said character as a result.

The game's reasonably cheap and pretty much all the reviews are positive, the ones that aren't essentially missing the point of choosing your own adventure and complaining about dying too easily and too much RNG. Lol.

crpgnut said:

I tried Vigilantes. Absolute tons of blah blah between the fights. Does that stop eventually? I don't need 5 minutes of bad dialog and voice acting before each fight.

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Just out of curiosity and I apologise if I've asked you this before, but have you ever tried Lords of Xulima?

From hearing what you like, it has a story but doesn't wall of text you much at all, it has a hunger meter and flower picking which should suit your survival habits, plenty of old-school six-party blobber combat but with lots of isometric overwold open-world'ish exploration (gated only by combat difficulty level) and I'm sure it has an easy mode.

I love Xulima! I actually backed that one.

It starts out really well - i mean absolutely fantastic - but somewhere around 1/2 or 1/3 or 2/3 way it drags and sort of becomes pretty bad. I hope if they make a new one they stop at the 1/2 point and keep the game a lot more focused.

crpgnut said:

I love Xulima! I actually backed that one.

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vurt said:

Gameplay. This plays pretty much like the standard far cry or asscreed game, i think Asscreed is way more fun here, both combat and the fluidity of it all. The quests are super generic too. The story and most of the characters (despite their huge personality when it comes to graphics) is very lackluster.. Upgrade system is rather bland, more boring than the latest two AssCreed. Don't really care for the armor or weapon system at all, it's quite bad actually. The weapons are meh, might get better (20'ish hours played)
.

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Again as HZD fanboy, I disagree with some of the point you make here

I will rate the combat on par with the latest Odyssey game. The controls for ranged combat very smooth and fluid. Same applies for melee but ranged is the main focus of the game. I don't normally play range characters in other games but I was forced to play one here and I was really surprised how much I liked the ranged combat. The games offers many different types of ranged weapons which very different abilities and situational uses. The monsters and other bosses also have different mechanics too and when you combine them altogether you get plenty of strategy opening up as to how to kill stuff.

I don't have very good reflexes maybe because of that I was forced yo use all the tricks and stuff to kill stuff but I felt very rewarded. I will setup all sort of traps in the bosses ares and lure them into weaken them, then I will hide behind the rock or go up large mountain, and then shoot off certain parts off using certain types of ammo etc to again to weaken bosses before going for the kill etc. I never had to use this kind of strategy in AC Odyssey maybe because I am good at melee and I can take down bosses without worrying about their mechanics but I found the combat in HZD more rewarding than AC Odyssey.

I found weapons with right enchants for the right boss made huge difference to the kill speed etc.

I'm currently playing Mass Effect trilogy. I'm on the second game right now. I played the first one's first half when it came out, but never picked it up again. I finally got some more regular free time and decided to try it out.

I'm enjoying the game overall, but some things are not great, compared both to the first one and to other games. The biggest one - controls. The actual shooting is OK with a mod or two, but moving, cover and UI interaction are just horrible. The streamlined inventory is better that the confusing first game IMO (not that confusing actually, but the amount of stuff you get in the first game is stupid and it took to much time to equip the team with the best stuff), but compared to other RPGs it's not that good. The worst part is I can't find any weapon statistics in-game so I have to consult the wiki on that. There might be something in-game but I can't find it.

Now, the good stuff. The story is good, the teammates are more fleshed out and enjoyable than the first game and even the recurring ones are done much better. The biggest thing that bothered me in the first game was repetitive side-missions and horrible level design in them (there was only one cave map, one space station map and so on). This time it's much better. Planet exploration was replaced with planet scanning, which is still annoying, but takes less time than the first game since I only do it when I need materials for upgrades. I am one of the few people who actually enjoy the mini games (both in the first and the second game) and they are not too distracting.

I hope the third game has better controls than the second one.

Winterfart said:

I'm playing Horizon Zero Dawn. It's pretty cool game with an awesome heroine.

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And don't forget to read the review I wrote last year

I played all three of them twice (the first one 3 times i think); the problem i had with them were two factors - the story seemed hollow - the idea of the story was pretty decent but somehow it doesn't seem to resolve well - sort of starts with a bang and ends with a whimper. Also i felt the quests were a bit annoying (esp running around the station a lot). The final real disappointment was how you make all these decisions in game 1 and game 2 and then game 3 seems to ignore it all (and no an ending like wasteland-2 would not be very satisfactory for some of these decisions which seem quite significant at the time you make them).
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As for hte changes in game play from 1 to 2 to 3 - it was ok - i adopted.
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One thing I do want to mention is be sure to play that free dlc for mass effect 1 - it is really really good - how all (or many) of the planet landings should have been done - the name is Bring down the sky - you need a key but if you can't find it on the internet you can email EA support and they will provide it (not sure why they didn't patch it out).

Ivanwah said:

I'm currently playing Mass Effect trilogy. I'm on the second game right now. I played the first one's first half when it came out, but never picked it up again. I finally got some more regular free time and decided to try it out.

I'm enjoying the game overall, but some things are not great, compared both to the first one and to other games. The biggest one - controls. The actual shooting is OK with a mod or two, but moving, cover and UI interaction are just horrible. The streamlined inventory is better that the confusing first game IMO (not that confusing actually, but the amount of stuff you get in the first game is stupid and it took to much time to equip the team with the best stuff), but compared to other RPGs it's not that good. The worst part is I can't find any weapon statistics in-game so I have to consult the wiki on that. There might be something in-game but I can't find it.

Now, the good stuff. The story is good, the teammates are more fleshed out and enjoyable than the first game and even the recurring ones are done much better. The biggest thing that bothered me in the first game was repetitive side-missions and horrible level design in them (there was only one cave map, one space station map and so on). This time it's much better. Planet exploration was replaced with planet scanning, which is still annoying, but takes less time than the first game since I only do it when I need materials for upgrades. I am one of the few people who actually enjoy the mini games (both in the first and the second game) and they are not too distracting.

I hope the third game has better controls than the second one.

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you said:

One thing I do want to mention is be sure to play that free dlc for mass effect 1 - it is really really good - how all (or many) of the planet landings should have been done - the name is Bring down the sky - you need a key but if you can't find it on the internet you can email EA support and they will provide it (not sure why they didn't patch it out).

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Yes, Bring Down the Sky was my favorite quest in the first game. It's much, much better than other quests in the game and I agree that is what side quests should have been like.

Running around the station was annoying and the stupid Keeper quest was the one of the worst along with the other fetch quests, but a completionist in me had to do them. Good to see there were no such quests in the second game. There is planet scanning but like I said, I only do it when I need resources. I know there are some quests that can only be started by scanning, but I think I'll google what planets to scan for those instead of wasting time and scanning all planets.

henriquejr said:

And don't forget to read the review I wrote last year

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Read it and I agree with every word you wrote

"I came for the prettiness, and I stayed for the great game it is."
Yep, same.

I was playing Greedfall over the past weekend, and enjoying it, but it's on the bench now in favor of Disco Elysium. I wasn't sure how motivated I would be to keep playing Greedfall, based on reviews and watching some videos. It looked to be similar to games like Risen, which are imo decent but unexceptional. But after 15 or so hours, I'm interested enough in the setting and quests (if not the writing, particularly) to pick it up back up later. The gameplay/combat is repetitive and not very interesting, but also isn't too clunky or frequent, and it breezes by pretty quickly when it happens. So I'm okay ping-ponging back and forth between NPCs and (occasionally) other tasks.

I've had a toothache this week, so that's kinda screwed up Disco for me. But I love what it's doing and attempting to do, and I love the writing and skill system. Not unlike the way a person probes a tender area with their tongue to test it, I'm kind of slow playing it, testing its limits. It feels like a shorter game than I've heard it is, since there's no filler, just wall to wall conversations/interactions. I hope it's as replayable as it seems, because I'd like to feel motivated to wring out every bit of this prose.

… and now for something completely different.
Tried out Ring Fit Adventure as a curio. And well… it is not all that bad!
In fact, it is quite fun in a silly way.

For the uninitiated: this game is a simple skill/cooldown-driven jRPG, where the gimmick is that all skills are simple workout routines: do squats, pressups, etc.

Yeah, it sounds silly, and doing it is even sillier, but still…
… As Guitar Hero gave you the impression of being a virtuoso drug addicted rock star on stage by hammering a cheap plastic guitar, then Ring Fit Adventure may pass too as Silly but Fun Entertainment.

Nintendo, you did it again!

Played Eschalon I and am tackling Eschalon II at the moment. I think the hunger/thirst mechanic is pretty lame in this game so I generally disable it. I haven't done that yet this time, but I probably will eventually. I'm spoiled by real survival games, so a half baked attempt just irritates me

Hum. Played 1 and 2 myself years and years ago - but heard 3 sucks so i skipped it.

crpgnut said:

Played Eschalon I and am tackling Eschalon II at the moment. I think the hunger/thirst mechanic is pretty lame in this game so I generally disable it. I haven't done that yet this time, but I probably will eventually. I'm spoiled by real survival games, so a half baked attempt just irritates me

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Only played Book three and from my understanding it was pretty much the same as Book two.