Another week another thread. Whatcha y’all playing? And why is it Baldur’s gate 3?
While everyone has been talking about Baldur’s Gate 3, I decided to cave in and started a replay of Divinity: Original Sin 2. Well, yea, I got a ten years old PC and a Ps4!
Still, what an excellent game. The easy mode goes well since the battlefields are chaotic, there’s not a single combat that I go through that doesn’t involve 1)Setting everything on fire 2)Shocking a large portion of the characters 3)Poisoning a large portion of the characters 4)Mixing all that because elemental interaction exists (Poison + Fire makes NECROFIRE which is a harsh and often deadly punishment)
But the questing and adventuring still stands out well. This is a game that has a somewhat large map, but unlike most open world fillers its a dense map. Every corner has a named NPC with a little trouble to solve, and there’s no “random cave with nameless mobs” to venture into; Every single place you can go has a little lore, a little story, something important that makes the world feel alive.
Its no surprise Larian has been taking the world by storm lately, and I’m glad this has aged so well so folks can try an original setting whenever the BG3 hype cools down.
While everyone has been talking about Baldur’s Gate 3, I decided to cave in and started a replay of Divinity: Original Sin 2. Well, yea, I got a ten years old PC and a Ps4!
I’m sure your PC could run Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2… 😉
I would not wish Advanced D&D THAC0 mechanics on my worst enemy
all these years later and i still cant fathom why they went with an inverted dc scale
Inherited from naval wargaming, where it came about because first rate ships of the line had better armor than second rate etc. so armor class scaled inversely. That meant THAC0 was the best way to figure out what you needed to roll to get a hit.
It’s also not functionally that complicated (your THAC0 minus target AC), just weird and confusing if you try to understand why it works that way.
I can kind of get that, if they kept 1 as the hard cap on AC. But they have 0th rate as the reference point, and then bizarre instances of negative AC. A minus third rate ship reads like a dingier third rate ship, not better than a first class ship.
I only had to Google it like 7 times to get it straight.
I’m playing BG3 right now, and am thinking about giving D:OS2 another shot. I played it around release and got off the first island, but stopped after that. Although, maybe I should wait a bit more, so I don’t get burned out so soon on this type of game.
Continuing my first time playthrough of Apollo Justice on my way through the rest of the Ace Attorney series.
And returning to Death Stranding since I beat the game to max out the prepper shelters (mission givers) and to slowly work towards Legend of Legends (completing every single repeatable mission on “hard” mode).
Now that the story is over Death Stranding is a fantastic “throw on a podcast and grind” kind of game. Very soothing.
Still working through side quests in Borderlands 3 as well. Really enjoying the shooting in this one. As acclaimed as 2 is, I just couldn’t stand the shooting model until at least Pre Sequel, but 3’s shooting genuinely feels quite good now.
I hope you enjoy the Apollo Justice series! Will you be playing the Investigations series with Edgeworth too?
I played all the Ace Attorney games for the first time during the pandemic and had an absolute blast! The Great Ace Attorney duology is definitely my favourite of the bunch by far, but they are all so charming!
As a kid I endlessly replayed the original trilogy and never wanted to try Apollo because “I thought his hair looked dumb”, so after trying it now and realizing that even with a new character it’s still Ace Attorney I won’t be skipping any other games.
So yes, I’ll be doing the Edgeworth Investigations next! I’m excited. Eventually I’ll make my way through the 3DS titles and then to Great Ace Attorney too.
I loved Death Stranding, it’s one of my few platinum trophies on Playstation. looking forward to the sequel that I just recently heard about.
I’m a PC player so I probably won’t get to play the second one for quite a long time, but I’m excited as well. Kojima doesn’t usually iterate in a straightforward manner in sequels, so it’s hard to know just quite what we’ll get out of it.
Death Stranding was already one of the most novel and interesting games I’ve ever played in both story and gameplay, so I’m glad we’ll get to see some more of it.
Is there a way around the stealth / hiding from the black fog thingy or does it get less as you progress? This is the only thing that held me back playing further. And I was so impressed by everything else in the game. It is a bit sad, I really want to continue playing.
They won’t go away, but you will eventually learn and see where they are. Sometimes you’ll have to engage them, a lot of the time you can get around them.
They’re not in all areas, but you will be able to understand how to deal with them and once you can fight back you can handle them.
I was terrified by them in the beginning and didn’t want to have to deal with them, but now I really think they’re cool and enjoy taking them down. You really go from helpless and confused to knowledgeable and prepared.
Thank you very much. I guess I just have to pick it up and get through this. I loved everything else of it, so I am sure it is worth it :-)
Don’t worry, once youre given equipment to deal with them it’ll start to demystify them and you’ll feel more confident.
Don’t be afraid to save before you deal with them too. If you walk into their radius (your odradek will pop up in a dramatic fashion and start tracking them) then you cannot save, but if you just walk back until youre out of their range again you can make a save and then take however many attempts as you want to handle them.
Their behavior can be hard to figure out, so feel free to message me or something if you want more info on how to best handle them.
Awesome, Thank you very much for all your tips! It is smoking hot outside at the moment, so I try to prevent heating up my room even more with the GPU fans spinning, but when autumn / winter comes I will welcome a nice warm breeze under the desk and reinstall it again. I am really looking forward to it now after your comment :-)
You do get a way to combat them fairly easily later on, but it’s still usually best to avoid them unless they are very dense or blocking your path directly. It does not become less frequent, it gets more frequent, but you can actually engage them
Thank you. Knowing that I am able to deal with them other than trying so sneak around them will make things easier :-)
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I don’t know how to do spoiler tags, so I deleted that comment 😵💫
I am just now playing The Stanley Parable on Switch and am having a great time with it. I’m not a PC gamer, and rarely a console gamer, so I missed when it first came out.
I have recently finished Hollow Knight, Deaths Door and Fire watch.
Hollow Knight was great, and I was pretty sad when I finished it.
Deaths Door is really good, but it felt a little lacking of content to me. But it’s a small game and is a good introduction to more complicated games in similar genres.
I liked Firewatch, but I remember being disappointed by it for some reason. I can’t remember why exactly.
I have recently finished Hollow Knight
Did you finish it finish it? Have you battled The Radiance? (9000 times lol)
Well… I didn’t finish it finish it. I didn’t:
- Complete the path of pain
- Beat Nightmare Grim
- Complete the Pantheons.
I felt like I was missing out on other games, so I opted to shelve Hollow Knight. I was spending so much time trying to complete the path of pain and defeat nightmare grim, I didn’t even want to attempt the Pantheons. I instead just moved on, lol.
I think I was at 107% completion or something
Oof, I couldn’t get through the Pantheons, they’re just nuts.
I started playing Vampire Survivor on mobile last week and I’m so addicted. I know I’m late to the party. I had heard about it many times but I never played the Desktop version because I wasn’t a fan of the 16-bit graphics. But a few days ago I saw it in the Play store for free and decided to try it. Wow! I’m so impressed by this little game. The game play is fun and satisfying. There are plenty of unlocks and secrets in the base game to keep you busy. Well worth a try. Once you get powered up a bit and you unlock some new characters it’s really addictive.
I come back to finish off a few more unlocks every so often, and it seems like the list keeps growing. Great little game, very trippy towards the end of the “story” as well.
It really does get pretty trippy. I’ve been working through the secrets to unlock all the other characters. Some of them are pretty funny, others have curious quirks.
It just came out on switch so I’ve been playing too, it’s really fun! The maps are much more interesting than Brotato
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I’ve been trying to finish some games that I always wanted to play. So I just completed a first run through of NieR: Automata (WA complete). Now for the second!
Fontaine just opened in Genshin, so I put Baldur’s Gate on hold for a bit to do the new stuff. I also went back to play a bit of Mass Effect 2, since I was in the middle of a trilogy run when BG3 came out. I’m sure I’ll be back to BG3 soon, now that I’ve got all the Fontaine areas at +65% exploration.
Funny, I’ve been replaying the Mass Effect trilogy as well (through Legendary edition), and I’m also on Mass Effect 2. ME 1 holds up more decently than I expected with the LE changes, but ME 2 is just such a better game in almost every way. Really enjoying spending time with these characters again. Even with other games going on you can always hop back in and do a mission or two in ME 2, the save system lets you make some good progress even if you don’t have a ton of time. Femshep for life.
Ironically, ME2 is my least favorite of the trilogy, because plot-wise, it’s worse than just being a plot cul-de-sac because it undoes everything set up in 1 and sets ME3 up for failure by introducing more plot lines that have to be resolved. I know everyone loves it because of the characters and BioWare changing a lot of mechanics so it’s more fun to play, but I like the trilogy for the story, and ME2 really fails, story wise, as the middle part of a trilogy, because it doesn’t advance the story set up in ME1 - it ends with us in the exact same place, story-wise, only with more baggage. It’s got a great series of individual stories and is good as an anthology, but hurts the overall story of the trilogy.
I really love this video on it, since it really explains how ME2 wasn’t actually good for story of the trilogy: Mass Effect 2 Broke the Franchise.
Fontaine is looking pretty nice. I need to start the quest headed there now that I finished the main story in Sumeru.
Fontaine has been really great, honestly. I had gotten burned out of Genshin and had only been doing dailies and none of the events for a while now (I did the bare minimum of the summer event then didn’t touch it again), but Fontaine has gotten me back in. I really like the underwater mechanics and just swimming around and exploring.
Cool! Few games can get underwater movement right, I need to get to it
They iterated on how you controlled the pari in Sumeru, and they really nailed it. It’s very smooth. The only thing that can be rough is when you have to do underwater combat, because suddenly you’ve got up and down thrown into the fight, but luckily fighting underwater is pretty rare.
I had a nice daliance in Palia and now I’m feverishly prepping for the next season of Destiny 2. I have until Tuesday to get my vault under control.
Just finished Link’s Awakening and now I’m in the middle of Oracle of Ages! I’ve just been playing gameboy games on the switch for months lol I used to dream of playing this stuff on a backlit screen when I was a kid 🥲
Same I’ve replaced finishing pikmin with blasting through the oracles games
My partner and I started playing Palia this week and like it so far. It has some issues and I wish there was more co-op, but it’s a nice relaxing game that’s been fun to explore.
It’s not Baldur’s Gate 3, because it’s Baldur’s Gate 2. I think I’m past the halfway point, and I’m hoping to have it beaten before this thread comes up next week.
I also started a co-op playthrough of Quake with a friend of mine, and I play a few runs of 30XX here and there.
Other than that, it’s Street Fighter 6, and there’s a patch coming for Guilty Gear Strive soon that I’m excited about.
Factorio. I’m playing a space ex and Krastorio modded run with the science costs increased by 10x. It’s slowing down the progression a lot which is forcing me to design things smartly instead of getting by with jank. I’m about 71 hours in and I’m getting crashes which is devastating because I really don’t want to restart.
Uber modded Skyrim and a Minecraft world with friends we called HIV
Fallout 4, since it released on GOG this week.
Do you usually wait for the DRM-free release for games?
Yes. I am old and patient, and have a lot of games to play. I also really dislike DRM.
I’m trying to beat Final Fantasy Tactics - I never got past Act 1 as a kid. I’m currently up through Golgarion Execution Grounds. Turns out the secret is to not bomb in all-offense and get nuked into the ground. Who knew?
