What are you playing right now?

[White Slaad]

I need to blogpost about The Witcher 2. The first Witcher game was janky but enjoyable: some fun quests, a combat system that tried to emphasize preparation (read: drink Swallow), and boobs. Having just finished the first chapter of the Witcher 2, I feel the need to grab the nearest Pollack and ask him how they fucked up so bad. The Witcher 2 is an impressive microcosm of everything bad about games released at its time:
𠈡 Horrible UI clearly meant for controllers
𠈡 Unskippable walk-and-talk sections
𠈡 An overall focus on looking pretty over being actually fun
𠈡 Quick-time events (these can be turned off)
𠈡 Stealth sections (granted, this game lets you hack through most of it to little ill effect)

The worst part of the game is how Geralt controls. It seeps into everything and makes the game an absolute slog. Garbage console games now do this thing where if your character faces one direction and you move them another, instead of just moving in that direction that character has to manually turn in that direction. It's like turning with tank controls, except even games with tank controls had quick turns and strafing. I'm sure if you're used to scripted boredom simulators like The Last of Us or Red Dead Redemption this seems fine, but imagine playing a real action game where your positioning and facing matters. In combat, what attack you make is determined only by the distance between you and the enemy you're locked on, which can make John Witcher unpredictable. Given that Geralt is now made of paper and dies very quickly even to trashmobs, and you're almost always tossed into groupfights, it doesn't make for a great experience. It's like they took the RPG fighting system of 1 and then went halfway to making an action game. I'll accept that some of it is a skill issue on my part, and maybe I'll figure out how to approach things down the line.

And no, I'm not skipping it because I don't do that. If I'm playing Witcher 3, which everyone promises me is really good, then I'm playing Witcher 2.

 

[Max Free]

Tried FTL with the Multiverse Mod and was brutally reminded why roguelike games are the absolute worst of any genre and need to be curbstomped into the ground.

 

[Mrs. Sai Moon]

I need to blogpost about The Witcher 2. The first Witcher game was janky but enjoyable

big agree. Witcher 1 is so fun if you're into that style of jank. Had so much fun with the "who dun it" detective quest. And the swamp. Love a good swamp. Witcher 2 was a shitshow when it first came out for good reason. Huge downgrade mechanically. UI is cancer. Witcher 2 = Dragon age 2

Spoiler

Witcher 4: Ciriguard will be dragon age: veilguard levels of bad.

 

[Monkey Shoulder]

Bought myself a monster custom battlestation, and realized I don't really like any games.
Playing Space Engineers and Factorio. Both will run on a good calculator.

I did the very same thing when I bought my computer, which at the time was peak performance for the home gamer.

Got it set up, installed steam, and... Meh.
It did get better though. And it is nice to play Cyberpunk or RDR2 on max settings.

 

[Blue Miaplacidus]

Playing through elden ring, again. But, my stereo has custom configs that you can setup to pass multiple signals to certain speakers etc. While I was setting it up to pass audio to both my headphones and my OBS recording PC, I decided to try passing audio to just my subwoofers and my headset. It's really interesting, it's like a giant rumble force feedback. I'm looking forward to playing something spooky/atmospheric.

 

[Orange Rhymer]

I did the very same thing when I bought my computer, which at the time was peak performance for the home gamer.

Got it set up, installed steam, and... Meh.
It did get better though. And it is nice to play Cyberpunk or RDR2 on max settings.

I'm thinking about playing Cyberpunk. I love the genre and Keanu.
But I know the source material - and how it's been butchered. So I'm one the fence.

Worth it?

 

[Monkey Shoulder]

I'm thinking about playing Cyberpunk. I love the genre and Keanu.
But I know the source material - and how it's been butchered. So I'm one the fence.

Worth it?

Yeah, I like it. Might be worth mentioning that I don't know the source material at all.

 

[Asian tech support]

I'm thinking about playing Cyberpunk. I love the genre and Keanu.
But I know the source material - and how it's been butchered. So I'm one the fence.

Worth it?

The base game isn't that good imo but PL is dope. PL definitely feels more akin to the source material, though there's whiplash when going back and forth from Dogtown into the rest of Night City. PL is genuinely sick and it's a massive shame the rest of the game doesn't measure up. There's also the problem of there not really being anything that can threaten the player once your build is off the ground. For the first maybe third of the game, you're super fragile but once you've got a couple key perks and a good weapon, you're Night City Jesus. The game could have gotten away with it if there were a some turbo hard encounters scattered throughout the map but there isn't really anything like that. This isn't exclusive to Cyberpunk as most contemporary open world games fail to add truly difficult late game encounters but I digress. PL is very much worth your time and if you pay attention to what's going on, is quite disturbing.

On topic, I picked up Realm of Ink from the steam sale. I enjoyed the demo from a while back. It's a better Hades 2 with an ink aesthetic and anime girls instead of race swapped Greek gods. I could do without the anime but it's not offensive or anything.

 

[Arthur Morgan]

Decided to replay GTA 5 just for the hell of it. Still a lot of fun but I forgot how much bullshit Rockstar put in that amounts to nothing. As if they were trying to do a "Crime doesn't pay" deal. You collect a bunch of submarine parts for a lady looking for the life insurance claim, you get nothing out of it. You pick up some weed for a big smoke in, the dude you do it for smokes it all and forgets about it. Even in the main campaign, your characters get screwed over. It isn't until the very end that you get a decent pay day that makes it worth the effort.

I hope they cut out that shit for GTA 6 because it got annoying after a while.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

God of War OG. Never played the original series and only play Dad of War. Wow I really missed out. Because this game is alot of fun.

 

[Pale Empress]

I'm thinking about playing Cyberpunk. I love the genre and Keanu.
But I know the source material - and how it's been butchered. So I'm one the fence.

Worth it?

It's worth it. As previously mentioned, once you get through about 2/3 of the game you more or less plateau in terms of becoming ridiculously OP. They've done a better job in the subsequent patches of distracting from this, but it's still a real problem (I usually end up playing netrunner and jfc, the enemy encounters are embarrassingly brief unless I take my time and get creative). But the setting, world building, quests, etc, make up for the shortcomings. Phantom Liberty was also mentioned as being the main draw, however I enjoy the base game still.

I'm not very familiar with the source material or the tabletop, but I know some of the key differences in terms of aesthetic and setting, I think it's different enough that as a fan you could separate them as two distinct "imaginings." Also, Keanu as Johnny is based.

I'd give it a shot, worst outcome is that you don't like it and you get a refund.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

More Battle Grounds III and War of Rights.

Battle Grounds III has shaped up to be a real gem, with one of its best features being how sometimes people actually do voice chat. Unfortunately, it's almost always annoying high school kids or mystery meat foreigners with thick accents. But it feels really close to the old COD days. It really is amazing that it proved you can do a fast paced arcadey shooter, a COD-like shooter, around muzzleloaders without having to twist the reality that much. I wish there was an attempt to do a Battlefield-like version of it with cavalry (analogous to tanks) and artillery (analogous to aircraft).

War of Rights was about what I expected. I got it beecause I figured the Winter sale would draw in people in what's likely a game on the verge of death and because of my spike in interest in gunpowder games. Unfortunately, it's what I expected in terms of gameplay. At the very start it was harrowing and a novelty to be under fire in lines (like Battle Cry of Freedom initially was, but without the action or sense of agency). That wore off quickly, though, and degenerated (mostly when I fell in a trap of being assigned to the Union, ie always outnumbered and incompetent, faction). One of my big gripes about it was lack of cavalry. People claim it's actually more realistic to not have them at all than to have them be running around everywhere, but I don't care; I'm not interested in simulation so much as just creating the feeling (Battlefield-like version) of this stuff, which cavalry charges and bayonet charges are a big part of.

It's interesting to have all the movement and stances and stuff and two modes for use of the rifle (bayoneted as a spear or non-bayoneted as a club). Shame there's no variety to moves/melee, but there never is in these things (can't be that hard to include parries). Experience largely consists of hugging a treeline or fence and shooting at shit I can't see until I randomly die. It's not too bad until I just draw the short straw and get gunned down repeatedly. It's actually exactly like playing Rising Storm, but without any feeling of agency.

 

[There Is Light At The End]

Downloading SW KotOR 2 after finishing first one on my Android console. Yesterday finished first one

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

War of Rights is getting better. I'm somewhat decent at bayonet charges (take down several). I had two matches today where there was unit cohesion, volleys, one of them the officer clearly knew what he was doing as we won by a large margin. I still have trouble with the shooting, I almost never know what the fuck I'm shooting at.

There was an aphid ranching mission, but it was just a "defend this fixed resource-generating asset" thing. I wish it had aphid ranching as a stock mechanic where the aphids have to be herded from "pasture" (plant) to "pasture" - eats faster than they regenerate - and can be culled for food themselves. Ants do that, they know to slaughter for meat without killing off faster than they can replace.

I was totally wrong on this. The campaign mission was as I described, but there ARE aphids in random maps and they're awesome.

You know livestock herding from Age of Empires II (but not III)? This is like that, but with the livestock being capital, a continuous food generator, that you can actively rustle back and forth. Actually, come to think of it, that makes it more like relics in practice (fight for its gold trickle), but thematically livestock. I won a match as Gene Thief (I feel to play it to have fun, otherwise you have literally no unit variety; this is a game of micro until you snowball and it becomes a deliberately passive game) rustling and hit-and-running. I learned to tell my ants to not attack (just beeline for food) and, if rustling, not harvest food. Aphids are scattered around the map and "aphid relocation" mode (the game basically has four modes that are on by default and can be turned off, food harvesting behavior, offensive behavior, aphid rustling behavior and "mounting" - jumping on the backs of big hostiles - behavior, I assume the only significance of the last one is perhaps that they can't disengage until its dead if they ride its back).

So you can basically do these raids to secure your long-term food supply, the aphids being brought back to YOUR designated pasture outside of YOUR hill. But I actually saw the successful colony (these colonies kill each other rapidly) dart in and steal MY aphids.

It's not the aphid mechanic I had in mind (involving active plot management, guarding against NPC bugs and an ability to grow or cull stock), but it's got the core point that aphids are loot down.

I came to realize that leafcutter behavior maybe doesn't really describe "agriculture" in a video game sense anyways. It's absolutely agriculture in real life, but what is farming in a strategy game? In strategy games where you have choices between food production methods, farming is usually associated with slowness but security and being on your terms. Usually renewable (although potentially at the cost of another nonrenewable resource), usually can be done where you want to.

In real life you could generally say that hunter-gathering is land-intensive while farming is labor-intensive. Framed as a matter of food per minute - labor efficiency - that means fast and slow. It also implies that hunter-gathering requires a greater space, either interpreted as intense harvesting that depletes the resource (Age of Empires has always interpreted it this way, huntables are nonrenewable) or as requiring ranging over a further territory. If huntables respawn somehow it can be done both ways.

The thing about leafcutters is that they don't just happen to irrigate or fertilize crops to make the yield bigger. The fungus REQUIRES the leaf to grow. It HAS TO have it. This makes the primary resource constraint of the leafcutter how many leaves it can go out and gather, thus making it mechanically identical to a hunter-gatherer in practice. Now, there is a big difference in that leaves are everywhere. Mechanically, leafcutters seem to deal with being clunky; they have food in abundance, but they have a throughput to how much can be brought in (even though that too can be expanded). They also don't benefit materially from combat; engaging big bugs is at best a necessary evil to get them out of the path, but they never score food off of them. I suppose they couldn't exploit drops of food like carcasses, either.

So then it's not farming in the same way a farming/hunting tradeoff appears in other games, but it's a different style of play that makes them good boomers but finnicky and vulnerable in the early game.


Edit: So many design choices that are fine for babby's first RTS but would have been much better if they'd hammered out a sequel to this. You can loot the enemy hill, but only after killing everything in it. Only one access point and no barricades, things ants do IRL. I think they missed a huge opportunity to just have digging take some time, have barricade construction be a thing and multiple entrances, suddenly there's way more strategy as to how to crack the nut of an anthill. Really missed the opportunity to have the larvae of enemies be food (like anything else).

Missed explosive suicide bomber ant (if it's not in the campaign somewhere as a gimmick enemy). Haven't quite figured out what the proper "tactics" are with soldiers vs majors, but seems like majors would make sense as being able to carry back huge pieces of food that otherwise would require being cut up and carted off by several minors.

 

[The Ugly One]

People claim it's actually more realistic to not have them at all than to have them be running around everywhere, but I don't care; I'm not interested in simulation so much as just creating the feeling (Battlefield-like version) of this stuff, which cavalry charges and bayonet charges are a big part of.

I'm gonna be that guy. Cavalry charges didn't happen in the Civil War because the effective range of rifled muskets was so much longer than smoothbores that you couldn't line up your cavalry for a charge without either being cut to ribbons or being so far away that your horses wouldn't make it.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I'm gonna be that guy. Cavalry charges didn't happen in the Civil War because the effective range of rifled muskets was so much longer than smoothbores that you couldn't line up your cavalry for a charge without either being cut to ribbons or being so far away that your horses wouldn't make it.

But I don't care
I want the Hollywood version of it
Along with 10-minutes of flynning with the bayonets

 

[SP:OP]

If anyone is playing PoE2, I am lvl 55 and looking for people to finish cruel with or something.

 

[I Know 孤独のせい]

Still playing Marvel Rivals grinding achievements, though waiting for the new season to continue ranked. And put a couple of hours into Path of Achra.

 

[Deus Exica]

Recently been playing Stardew Valley with my wife from time to time. I was really astonished to learn that this game is one of the best selling of all time, then I went hunting for more farming/adventure games thinking there was bound to be something a bit closer to my style by now and they all suck ass in comparison, and Stardew is pretty fucking basic.

Oh well, it's fun, the beach farm is cozy and it's nice to see my wife invested in something new to play.

I also tried to play Wartales but refunded it. I really loved the premise and the ideas. I yearn for a game a lot like this, but the character customization sucked ass, your mercenaries are totally void of personality, and the combat was annoying with buggy animations.

I went back to Darkest Dungeon instead. Having fun, but I don't think I'll ever finish this game. It takes too long. Maybe I should download more mods for greater variety.

 

[Asian tech support]

I went back to Darkest Dungeon instead. Having fun, but I don't think I'll ever finish this game. It takes too long. Maybe I should download more mods for greater variety.

Class mods are fun but I'd avoid anything chinky looking as those tend to be overtuned or otherwise unintuitive nonsense. Most of the good ones are the popular ones on the workshop. You might ask the DD thread for specific recommendations as there are users who are quite knowledgeable.