What are you playing right now?

[Driderman]

This is also giving an urge to try Civ 6 again. Which is probably a mistake.

Expansion coming out in Februrary so I'd probably wait until that arrives

[deuterio12]

Currently? Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Absolutely up there as one of the best games I've played in a long, long time.

Spoiler: review ish thing

Show

Controls are just as tight & responsive as you'd expect from an action oriented game like this. Z-targeting for blocking and dodging allows you to lessen or avoid most any attack (barring some explosions, I'm looking at you Lynels and your "I'm in close range, time for high damage AoE!"). A well-timed parry or dodge helps you get a good leg up on the enemies, often leaving them vulnerable for a flurry of blows. You do have a stamina meter that drops when you charge up an attack, run, swim, climb or glide but the default is more then serviceable and has plenty of room to grow. As for the movement itself, Link runs, swims, climbs and glides at a nice pace and even has a jump button. It's not a big jump, but it's there and it's occasionally used and nice to have around.

Visually, it's very pretty. it's a very pastel world and tranquil to look at at times, which clashes a bit with post-apocalyptic setting of the game. Yes, this is basically Fallout: Hyrule. The GBomb fell hard on Hyrule and the Hylians are scattered here and there. The Zora, Gorons, Gerudo & Rito came out of it much better then the Hylians, who were at the epicenter of it all. But with the looming threat of Ganon thrashing above the corpse of Hyrule castle, it creates a nice clash when compared to the lush greenery of the plains that's overtaken the land. Now roving bands of moblins, bokoblins and lizalfos control the land and at night horrible undead rise from the grave to assault you. Sneaking up to these monsters allows you to actually observe them go about their tasks (or lack thereof) as they huddle around a fire roasting fresh fish or meat or sleep, as a few keep a lookout for danger, or they're just being silly gooses and dance around or decide to chase a boar or something. It's a nice touch to have them do these things and make the world feel vibrant. Also it gives you time to sneak up and shank them with a greatsword for not paying attention. Yes it has stealth kills.

Sometimes things do look a bit flat or make you go "yeah, that's a low quality texture" (see: trees) but I feel it's splitting hairs: the game looks fantastic and outside of any blantantly egregious examples, complaining about visuals in modern game sounds like sour grapes to me. Then again, I was born in the Atari/NES era, so this whole 3D thing is all a bit fancy to me.

Soundwise, it has all the grunts and squeals you'd hope to hear from Link and the monsters. Weapons have a satisfying sound when they collide with enemy flesh and adds impact to Link's powerful motions. The music is something I could listen to all day long. Kakariko village's theme is such a good calming japanese-themed "background music" with it's woodwinds and shamisen creating a very "spring day" feel for the song & and many of the orchestral remixes of classic songs will punch you in the nostalgia with how well made they are.

The voice acting is... Ok. I've heard better, but the voices do fit the characters as presented and while I did feel that some of the delivery felt a bit off, I think it might be just because it's being bounced off of Link, who is still staunchly a silent protagonist, but people react as though he said something instead of just silently gazing into their soul. It's a bit weird.

Going back to gameplay, out of the tutorial area, you're given all the tools you'll be using, barring the 4 boons found by completing the 4 main "dungeons", if you will. And every Shrine you come across is basically like a pop-quiz on using these tools, helping you get accustomed to them so you'll do better in the combat portions as you become more aware of them and their use. Even the more combat oriented ones help teach you how to deal with various weapon types or how to deal with the stupid death lasers of the Guardians littered about the landscape.

One thing I wish they would have actually mentioned, is how you can actually drop and trigger the remote bombs while gliding. Seeing a gaggle of bokoblins below you and doing a bombing run and watch as they try to figure out what exactly happened is fun.

Either way the abilities are all pretty helpful, both in combat and when exploring.

The variety of weapons is pretty cool too: one-handed swords/clubs/boomerangs, two-handed swords/clubs/boomerangs, spears, bows and elemental arrows all have their uses. one-handers allow for parrying, two handers are high damage, but a whiff leaves you open, while spears/polearms give you a longer reach and ability to more safely manage and enemy's movement. Then you have your bow for ranged attacks.

Arrows, and indeed all weapon types, also come in Ice, Fire, Lighting and generally do what it says on the package, Ice freezes, Fire does damage over time and Lighting will shock (and disarm) enemies.

Ancient weapons, arrows & shields are generally best used against the Guardians, as they have better damage VS their high armour. The arrows are a standout since it can one-shot any enemy (barring guardians, which require 3-5 shots) to my knowledge, but will also destroy any loot dropped (again, barring guardian loot).

Then you have bomb arrows. These are, quite honestly, kinda broken. I say kinda as early game, you'll probably be broke and not afford them, but later when rupees get more plentiful, these are highly effective, especially when you get the bows that spit two, three or even five copies of any arrow loaded. Buy a bunch and save them for bosses.

One thing of note is that the weapons do break and many do break pretty fast, but to be honest, bombs are a good replacement for weapons in the early game VS the weaker monsters and weapons found lying around the world will respawn. The silver 2-hander you find in the Zora's Domain or the Royal Guard gear in the Castle Hyrule, for example can be farmed, to some extent. But even then, you do get some winners from the mobs: The Dragonbone Moblin Club is relatively easy to find and is a solid weapon that can help you get better ones.

But in the end, you'll never really find yourself lacking a weapon to beat a moblin over the head with, even if some break rather quickly. I was surprised to see how much I didn't actually mind this.

The various upgradeable armours are a nice surprise. I do like me some upgrade quest and outside of a few specific instances of having to need to farm, often for the fourth and final upgrades, I had most of the material on me, or very close to it. The extra boons you get on the "travel gears" make exploring Hyrule a joy. The climbing, sneaking & swimming focused ones are probably my most used armours, quickly followed by the Barbarian and Ancient armours for their damage boosting & high defense. Seeing how some NPCs react to how Link looks in some of the armours is pretty funny too.

Currently sitting at 41.27% map completion and finishing up some of the errant side quests, hunting down the Hinox & Taluses I've missed and topping off the few armour upgrades i've got left (freakin' Star Fragments... the completionist in me dislikes hunting for them due to how boring the task is nearly as much as the idea of having to find last 780 of the 900 korok seeds is daunting). Looking at my map, littered with shrine locations, monster locations, weapon locations, "stuff I want to look at later" locations... there is still so much to do.

Early game is pretty brutal too. Three hearts is not a lot of leeway when you're still learning the game mechanics, so you have to git gud (or at least adequate/scumbaggy) to progress until you get your first few heart containers and can finally breath a bit.

My only real complaint is the final boss. I don't know if I was over-geared when I accidentally blundered and stumbled my way to him by kicking down the front door and taking what looked like a side path, but boy was the fight easy. Post-fight is largely a nice cinematic sequence. It's very pretty to look at, but the difficulty is... really not there. You'll have to actively try to fail that part to actually fail. I'll blame this on a mix of a well-stocked up Bomb arrow store, a bow that threw out 3 arrows for every 1 I used and nothing to dissuade to not explode Gannon's face off with heavy ordnance.

But it didn't harm my view the game though, it's still a joy to play. The freedom to go where you want and do the dungeons in whatever order you want, or just ignore all that and go headlong into the last area of the game armed with a stick and some gumption is up to you. Hyrule is extremely pretty and it's landscapes are a joy to trot through on your horsey. I named my first one Greenbean.

Definitely a must play if you're a switch owner.

I particularly enjoy the little secrets scattered accross the land. Several times I was passing through a supposed area for the nth time to stock up on something and then I found out something new.

Also yes archery's basically easy mode (that and abusing prepared food) once you can afford the fancy stuff. I guess part of the fun is going "with how little/how fast can I go beat this boss?"

[warty goblin]

Expansion coming out in Februrary so I'd probably wait until that arrives

It's not a bad idea for me to play Civ 6 because it'll eat a lot of hours. It's a bad idea because I find it a frustrating and cluttered design which mistakes constant busywork with interesting decisions. And then I'll get annoyed at myself for having thrown $50 perfectly good dollars at it, and ignoring all the evidence that I'd find it a frustrating and cluttered design.

[Knaight]

It's not a bad idea for me to play Civ 6 because it'll eat a lot of hours. It's a bad idea because I find it a frustrating and cluttered design which mistakes constant busywork with interesting decisions. And then I'll get annoyed at myself for having thrown $50 perfectly good dollars at it, and ignoring all the evidence that I'd find it a frustrating and cluttered design.

In that case, let me point out that Dominions 5 just came out and fills a similar niche - but with much less constant busywork and much more interesting decisions. It's also exactly the sort of fantasy I suspect you'd enjoy.

[Von_Derpington]

Finally downloaded The Escapists after having been meaning to forever. It's really fun so far. Strangely immersive, for a game that's this pixel art-y.

[warty goblin]

Speaking of Star Wars Battlefront, I wrapped up the singleplayer yesterday, and got in some decent hours with the multiplayer.

The singleplayer is weird, in that it alternates between these gorgeous cutscenes that add up to about 3/4 of a good story, and utterly mundane shooting levels. When I say 3/4 of a good story, I don't mean the last 1/4 is bad, so much as they just forgot to make some necessary connective tissue. Add that, and it'd probably be my favorite bit of post-Disney Star Wars (including the movies) by a country mile. The protagonist feels rather like an official fan fiction character, not because she's absurdly good at everything (that's being an FPS protagonist) but because everybody immediately considers her the coolest thing ever. This is actually more true in the within-level VO bits than the cutscenes. The shooting is a series of corridors full of dumb enemies who are extremely easy to shoot in the head. All of your special abilities are on cool down timers, which I don't mind enormously in MP since it (in theory) eliminates grenade spam. It's silly in singleplayer, because sometimes I want to spam grenades, and me doing so doesn't exactly ruin anybody else's fun. At least the mission objectives have a sense of humor.


The multiplayer is solid. The progression system remains a swollen boil, sensitive to the touch, in an otherwise solid system, but that can be mostly ignored. The more unexpected disappointment is the big forty player battles, which seem to always come down to some grind to take one last objective, which will be in one very small room. Inevitably, this room will be 90% grenade explosion by volume, and, because the attackers have limited respawns, will very likely result them losing. Even if they played a really good game up that point, and took all other objectives flawlessly. Which isn't to say that there isn't a lot of good stuff in there, because the first parts of the maps are huge and gorgeous and well designed. And there's vehicles and aircraft and special units which you get via points you earn for being good. It never quite adds up to feeling like a big battle the way original Battlefront 2 did, since the aren't usually cool things like tank duels, so much as there are occasionally tanks.

Weirdly enough then, the 10 v 10 team death match ends up feeling way better, and closer to OG BF2. Sure it can be totally obvious that team A is going to beat team B by three minutes into a match, but that's fine because you can still have a good time running around shooting battle droids in the face. Really, this is all I ask for. Battle droids to shoot.

[oxybe]

Just downloaded the backer preview for Indivisible.

Indivisible is an Action RPG made by Lab Zero games, the people behind the fantastic fighter Skullgirls.

Gameplay gimmick is that you control each of your 4 party members using the appropriate XABY face button and a directional input as their ATB-styled command pips fill up. these attacks have various uses, from single to AoE attacks, multi hits, buffs, debuffs or healing. Comboing your characters attacks together will fill up your special gauge, which is shared between the party and used for both guarding & unleashing specials, all while traversing areas in a metroidvania style platformer using weapons and abilities you unlock through play. enemies are clearly shown on the map and can be engaged at your leisure, which will cause a chrono trigger style fight, in that it uses the game's environment as the backdrop for the fight rather then a seperate area. this can mean it's also technically possible to push enemies off ledges.

Rather then being strictly european a lot of the game seems to draw a lot of level, character and monster designs from south asia. Even the lowly slime-tier mob is reminiscent of a bowl of rice with two vertical chopsitcks sticking out of it (a general faux-pas since it kinda looks like funeral incense). Then there's the flying intestine monster that spits digestive juices at you and tries to eat you (the Malaysian vampire, the Penanggalan). But you also have some characters like Vasco who's inspired by conquistador/cowboys or Naga Rider who's basically a Kamen Rider expy with a magical mortorcyle. The will boast a pretty huge cast of playable characters to mix and match your party.

The backer preview differs from the free demo in that it has a new level to traverse, 3 new characters to play around with (in addition to the ones from the free demo), some collectables that currently don't do anything in the build but will have use in the main game and some new monsters to fight.

And the dreaded reoccurence of Mike Z's (badly drawn) Cat boss.

[GloatingSwine]

I have hopes for Indivisible. Since they're unlikely to stick Valkyrie Profile 2 on the PS2 classics, it's as close as we're going to get.


Currently playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 though. Temporary break from moon collection to inhabit a gloriously bonkers world with giant cathedral cities inside of whales. It's more like the first one than X too, more varied location design, more satisfying combat which feels weightier, and plenty of meaty systems to get your teeth into.

And Yasunori Mitsuda knocking it out of the park for music.

[Drasius]

Picked up Civ VI the other day when it was on sale and while I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't as bad as I feared, I'm also glad I didn't pay full price. A lot of really good ideas mixed in with a lot of unfathomably bad design choices and terrible pacing.

Factorio continues to eat up a bunch of my time after the initial "oh god it's suddenly 3 am" of the first couple of plays.

Playing through fallout 4 again as pistol/melee and going BoS and finding a bunch of new stuff that I never saw on my other playthroughs when it came out.

Will probably binge on PoE for a week or two when the new league starts in a couple of days.

[Cespenar]

Picked up Civ VI the other day when it was on sale and while I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't as bad as I feared, I'm also glad I didn't pay full price. A lot of really good ideas mixed in with a lot of unfathomably bad design choices and terrible pacing.

I don't think it merits the flak it got. It was pretty playable, though admittedly my earlier exposure was vanilla Civ 5. I can understand those coming from a fully expanded Civ 5 would dislike it, but still, eh.

[Drasius]

I don't think it merits the flak it got. It was pretty playable, though admittedly my earlier exposure was vanilla Civ 5. I can understand those coming from a fully expanded Civ 5 would dislike it, but still, eh.

Don't get me wrong, there's a decent amount to like and I'm quite pleased with it for what I paid, but I would have been disappointed if I had paid full price on release as there's too many little things that are annoying. Civ has been a staple of mine from 2 all the way through to brave new world and 6 was the first time I'd waited instead of blindly buying on release, though part of that was due to their ability to screw up Alpha Centauri 2 Beyond Earth so badly.

I think there's some great ideas here, especially the idea behind the eurekas to punish severe beelining (like being able to make riflemen without knowing how to read or write for example) as well as lifting stuff like the district mechanics from other similar 4x's like Warlock and Endless Legend while putting their own twist on it, the housing/amenities feels a lot smoother and logical compared to corruption/health/happiness limiters, the cards and government slots are a nice touch that gives each one a use, dimplo has been improved and espionage feels better and the balance (after a few patches) is actually pretty reasonable, but the growing cost of various things with increased tech feels off and kills the pacing, the civilopedia is easily the worst effort of the series for actual mechanical explaination, hotkeys for basic, common actions have been removed (especially galling is the removal of the numpad movement shortcuts), most of the great people are near worthless, the wonders are mostly lacklustre for the effort required and limitations they have, the districts aren't implemented as well as they could have been (especially since the other games generally did it better), the tech pace feels too slow at the start and too fast at the end, everything hinges on the first ~50'ish turns (or equivalent for differing speeds) even more than previous games, faith seems pretty lacklustre compared to the other victories and the AI seems even worse than 5 which I didn't think was possible. Not a huge fan of the more ... cartoony I guess, though you could go with stylised if you were feeling charitable, leaders, but that's neither here nor there.

It's definately not unplayable, I'd even go so far as to say that it was enjoyable, but there's so much there that should have been spotted and fixed in beta that it feels rather rushed and just a little bit more polish would have turned a mediocre effort into a great one. Hopefully it follows tradition and gets significantly better with expansions, but at the moment, it's not bad for half price but I would have felt cheated on release.

[warty goblin]

With Civ VI, the thing I found frustrating about it was how messy everything was. It felt like every single aspect of the game had been feature-creeped most of the way to death. I figured once that, playing as Egypt, there was something like four distinct ways to build religious buildings (city, district, tile improvement, wonder). Which was ironic, because the game's mechanics argue that nothing in Pharonic Egypt actually counts as a religion. But aside from that, does this make the game any deeper? It seems to me that the interesting decision should be whether I want to make a lot of religious buildings or not, having a zillion different ways to do it is just unnecessary bloat surrounding that key concept.

But I think what's going on is that building a lot of religious buildings isn't actually the interesting choice anymore, because you choose most of how you're going to play when you choose Civ in the first place. Going religious isn't so much a strategic choice made in response to the geography or the AI, it's a playstyle you select at the beginning of the game. So the game needs to support that playstyle by giving you lots of fiddly little gubbins to play with. It's much less a strategy game, much more an RPG that happens to be played on a big map. I suspect the fiddly little gubbin proliferation is also why the AI is as horrible as it is. And also why it's such a low priority; RPGs are much more concerned with chooing which sets of numbers you're going to increase than they are about decent AI.

(Incidentally, I think very much the same thing could be said about Firaxis' XCOM; it's not really a strategy game so much as an RPG with a slightly strategic gloss. Except it's a lot more honest about it, and does a rather better job of focusing in on the major gameplay loop of making your squad even better alien murdering machines)


Which is a real pity, because I'd definitely be game for a non-bloated bit of quasi-historical strategy gaming.

[Zevox]

So, I finished Nier: Automata.

Early in the game, I thought I knew where the story was going. And boy, I could not have been more wrong if I'd tried.

Spoiler

Show

I figured that the story about aliens creating the Machines was a lie used by Humans to motivate the Androids. In reality, the Machines were the first AI Humans had created, and essentially a Geth-Quarian situation had occurred, and Humanity, being stupid and not having learned their lesson, created the Androids as still more AI quasi-slaves to take Earth back from the Machines, and you'd wind up turning on the Humans by the end. It would've explained the Machines immediately appearing to be more intelligent than 9S kept indicating they should be, plus the weirdness you occasionally got from your commanders, the actually kinda creepy "For the Glory of Mankind" catchphrase they instilled in all the Androids, YoRHa units sometimes deserting, everything.

Yeah, wow, nearly the reverse was true. Gotta say, completely blindsided me there, so kudos to them on that one.

Still, I'm not sure everything about the story adds up by the end. I mean, I actually have no clue what was up with the endings - what the hell even happened in A2's? What was with the whole Ark thing, Adam and Eve still being alive, and 9S's final words in his ending? Why were the YoRHa Androids designed to fail like that - and by who, exactly, if Humanity was extinct before the aliens even invaded? And the real final ending, well, guess it's sequel bait, since it's just "we repaired everyone, maybe things won't end up the same this time," but no option to play on to a different ending, which is kind of unsatisfying, but oh well.

Still, for all that... wow, what a good game. Despite not everything about the story really working, some of those emotional beats hit hard. Especially what happened with Pascal. If only more of them weren't depressing...

Should say, I originally compared it to Dark Souls crossed with Metal Gear Rising, and I don't think that's all that true by the end. The Dark Souls similarity is largely in the need to recover stuff from your previous body when you die - and I guess in the more RPGish leveling elements and the game being more open-worldy than Platinum normally does, though the overall areas aren't as large as even a Dark Souls game all told I think, much less real open-world titles where the game areas being oversized as hell is a selling point. But what defines the game is definitely the combat, which is very distinctly Platinum's work (not as hard as Dark Souls, at least not on normal, but very good and fun), and the storytelling, which, well, actually exists and is emotionally affecting, unlike in Dark Souls. And the comparison to MGR is principally in the Platinum-style combat (which isn't MGR exclusive) and the aesthetics (I swear, the design of 2B is basically just Rule 63 Raiden). So, it's more of an action RPG by Platinum in the end, I suppose, and damn if it isn't pretty good for their first go at such a thing, ending issues or not. Second-best new game I've played all year, after Persona 5.

[Sian]

Slow-rolling my way through Europa Universalis IV (still on 1.22, and not the 1.23 which was released a month ago, since I'm still in the same campaign), poking a bit around in Rimworld (although my perfectionism-ocd keeps be from truely enjoying it since I don't want to run a kludge) and ADoM (been having an on/off relationship with that game for some 15 years), and recently gotten back into Path of Exile with the new patch/league

[warty goblin]

I find myself sort of losing patience with Battlefront 2. Mostly because the maps just feel horrendously over-designed after a while. Unless you're playing team death match (or maybe Heroes vs Villains which interests me exactly zero) they're all extremely linear, objective based slogs. One side is always attacking, one is always defending, the objectives are always the same, so it just disintegrates into grenade spam around the same damn points again and again.

What's odd is that DICE are clearly smart designers. Battlefield 1 maps don't all work this way. Hell, their 2015 Battlefront had Walker Assault, which did a brilliant job of setting up an advancing series of objectives that caused alternations of attack, defense and simultaneous assault to seize in the first place.


So for no particularly obvious reason I redownloaded Tom Clancy's The Division this afternoon. It's nice to play a co-op PVE game that's actually bloody *hard*, even on normal. Scratches sort of the same itch as Destiny 2, but feels much more like a cohesive world, at least for the story mission stuff. It helps that the environmental design does a much better job of feeling like it's actual place, and the objectives are a bit less of the 'go do glowy space magic' nonsense. Also, it's got the best damn cover shooting mechanics ever devised by humans.

[Deakins2658]

im playing amnesia and hitman

[Knaight]

Opus Magnum just left early access, and I broke my usual rule about getting games near release for it (Zachtronics gets an exception for the Spacechem like games). It's excellent.

[thirsting]

Path of Exile. I'm lost in this passive-skill jungle. Liking it a lot, except for the fact that if I want to change my build, have to start over...

---

Also, NOT playing Elder Scrolls Online, because of needing 66gb of hard drive space for the game, and THEN 80gb free space for the installer to do it's work. Wah?? Yes, my 150gb laptop hard drive feels ridiculously tiny

[Deakins2658]

Path of Exile i think it good but i don't try it and i will try it comming soon thx

[Drasius]

Path of Exile. I'm lost in this passive-skill jungle. Liking it a lot, except for the fact that if I want to change my build, have to start over...

There's a thread here in the playground for it and those of us with experience are more than willing to help provide guidance for the skill tree or anything else you might be having issues with.

As for changing build requiring starting over, that's what Regret Orbs are for, in addition to the ~24 or so respec points you get from quests.

[AlexBlade]

I am a big fun of ps4 games and I am playing Dying Light now. However, I also try to win spinning gaminators. Well, December is time for new experience.

[Anthony222]

I've just finished the Witcher 3 and I really liked it! Also I've recently started playing online. I tried several casino games and really enjoyed mr.bet table games, especially poker and baccarat. Does anyone like these games? It would be great to find more sites.

[rooster707]

Finished E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy. I really wanted to like it, since it was vaguely reminiscent of Deus Ex, but... well, it's a broken, confusing mess.

[SirJ0ey]

Well, I'm finishing my third playthrough of DS3, because I never played the Ringed City DLC, and discovering that I now kick ass at it, apparently. I beat the Nameless king on my third or fourth try, Sister Friede on my second, and the Demon Prince on my first. So that's a thing.

I'm also playing Bloodborne again because Arcane builds are fun and Bloodborne is fun, as well as Nioh.

I've been starting to play Rivals of Aether again, which for those of you who don't know is like Super Smash Bros Melee but with elemental animals instead of Nintendo characters.

And I just finished Bravely Second, the sequel to Bravely Default, which is basically a traditional Square Enix RPG but with a twist.

Spoiler: The twist

Show

In addition to HP and MP, characters have an additional resource, called Brave Points(BP). At the beginning of every battle, characters start with 0 BP, and gain one per turn. Attacking or using most abilities costs 1 BP, but you can also Brave, which allows you to perform up to four actions in one turn, requiring 1 more BP per extra action, or Default, which reduces damage taken by 50% and costs no BP, so you'll start the next turn with one more BP than you had this turn. You can Brave into the negatives, but you can't act on any given turn if you start the turn with negative BP. Oh, and enemies can Brave and Default too.

Additionally, the games use a job system, which, combined with the Brave system, gives the game a bit of a 3.X feel, where you spend a lot of time coming up with broken ability combinations, so if you're the type of person who writes optimization guides, you should try them.

It has a good story, too, so that's nice.

I play games a lot, if you can't tell.

[D20ragon]

... perpetually replaying Dark Souls for the... somethingth time

Simultaneously slow-rolling Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, and enjoying it (more than I enjoyed the original Dark Souls II anyway) but nothing beats Dark Souls I.

Also working my way slowly through Hollow Knight, which I'm adoring.

I got Destiny 2 to play with my friends, but I sort of bounced off of it after I'd worked my way to having all the gear I wanted, and especially after all the nonsense surrounding it these days. I'd really like to find another multiplayer shooter that I can just sink a bit of time into when I've got an hour or two. I bought and played a fair bit of Overwatch way back, but for whatever reason I sort of fell away from it after a few seasons.
I'm interested in PUBG, but I've heard a lot of bad things about it also. Rainbow 6 Siege also seems interesting, so if people have opinions about either of those games, I'd love to hear them.

[rooster707]

... perpetually replaying Dark Souls for the... somethingth time

Simultaneously slow-rolling Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, and enjoying it (more than I enjoyed the original Dark Souls II anyway) but nothing beats Dark Souls I.

Also working my way slowly through Hollow Knight, which I'm adoring.

I got Destiny 2 to play with my friends, but I sort of bounced off of it after I'd worked my way to having all the gear I wanted, and especially after all the nonsense surrounding it these days. I'd really like to find another multiplayer shooter that I can just sink a bit of time into when I've got an hour or two. I bought and played a fair bit of Overwatch way back, but for whatever reason I sort of fell away from it after a few seasons.
I'm interested in PUBG, but I've heard a lot of bad things about it also. Rainbow 6 Siege also seems interesting, so if people have opinions about either of those games, I'd love to hear them.

I've been thinking of getting into Dark Souls, but I'm waiting on the next Steam sale. Is the first one the best place to start? (Also, which is better for a complete newbie, regular II or Scholar of the First Sin?)

I don't play multiplayer shooters as much as I used to (I still haven't played Overwatch ) but Titanfall 2 is a ton of fun. It's got a great campaign, too.

[SirJ0ey]

I've been thinking of getting into Dark Souls, but I'm waiting on the next Steam sale. Is the first one the best place to start? (Also, which is better for a complete newbie, regular II or Scholar of the First Sin?)

I'd start with 1, then 3, then SotFS if you really feel like it. There's no reason to get standard 2, it and SotFS cost the same amount (I think) and SotFS is more or less objectively better. You can start with 1 or 3, though. 1 eases you in more, but 3 is harder to get lost in and lacks some of the really annoying design quirks 1 has. Or you could just start with Bloodborne, but that requires a PS4.

but nothing beats Dark Souls I.

That's an odd way of spelling Bloodborne.

[D20ragon]

I've been thinking of getting into Dark Souls, but I'm waiting on the next Steam sale. Is the first one the best place to start? (Also, which is better for a complete newbie, regular II or Scholar of the First Sin?)

I don't play multiplayer shooters as much as I used to (I still haven't played Overwatch ) but Titanfall 2 is a ton of fun. It's got a great campaign, too.

Start with 1 for sure, it's the epitome of the souls experience. I'd actually recommend playing SotFS because at least for me, I feel like the return to the original locations from Dark Souls 1 in Dark Souls 3 would have felt more like a return if I'd allowed SotFS to serve as an interlude. But yeah, SotFS is objectively better than standard 2. It's a lot of fun, but it feels very different to play than 1 or 3. I actually hated the feel of the movement for a solid chunk of time, but once I got used to it, it was fine. (essentially, Dark Souls 1 lets you turn on a dime and Dark Souls 2/SotFS controls a lot more like a standard action game. It's way better for PvP tho.) Anyway, if you want more advice on souls, feel free to ask.

I'd start with 1, then 3, then SotFS if you really feel like it. There's no reason to get standard 2, it and SotFS cost the same amount (I think) and SotFS is more or less objectively better. You can start with 1 or 3, though. 1 eases you in more, but 3 is harder to get lost in and lacks some of the really annoying design quirks 1 has. Or you could just start with Bloodborne, but that requires a PS4.



That's an odd way of spelling Bloodborne.

leave me to clip through my jagged, beautiful game in peace

But actually I adore Bloodborne, Dark Souls just has a special place in my heart since I played it first.

[Havelocke]

Still enjoying Persona 5, I can see why it won best RPG.

[rooster707]

Anyway, if you want more advice on souls, feel free to ask.

I'm sure I'll be back in a few weeks, crying because I can't beat the second boss or something.

Right now, installing Path of Exile because what the hell, it's free. (Turns out my Steam backlog wasn't as big as I thought, and I needed something new to play until after Christmas.)

Edit: Oh boy. This is an MMO, isn't it. I promised myself I wouldn't get sucked into any more of those... but it's too late now...