Thread of Relentless Gaming Positivity and Gratitude

[warty goblin]

'Tis the season to be grateful for stuff. Games are stuff, so we can be grateful for them, as a pleasant break from our usual nitpickery. Or at least my usual nitpickery. So this is the thread for things we really like; maybe a favorite game, maybe just a really cool part of an otherwise not so great title.

For instance, I'm glad that CI Games has kept making Sniper Ghost Warrior titles, because with Contracts they've finally got the aim assist dialed in just right. Not having wind in a game about (semi) long distance shooting would be lame, but judging wind speed in a videogame is kind of a pain. So previously they just gave you a red aiming dot that automatically adjusted the wind out, which unfortunately also meant you didn't really need to care about distance. Now however you just have a magic scope that gives you reference lines for different distances which show the impact of wind at that distance; but you still need to manually figure range to target. It makes you feel like a badass sniper, without the work of actually knowing how to adjust for windage.

I'm glad that Gears 5 exists, because there's something enormously satisfying about playing a shooter that's quite happy to be a straightforwards shooter. And the shooting is goooood.

I'm glad for basically every single thing about Age of Wonders: Planetfall. I've been dreaming of a sci-fi AoW since I played the first AoW, and figured out I could use houses for cover, then thought about how cool it would be if there was like tanks and stuff. I didn't even dare to dream it could involve biologically engineered Amazons riding laser-dinosaurs, but there we are. Sometimes the future is way more badass then we could have ever imagined.

[Morty]

Planetfall is definitely amazing. It's like a distillation of what's great about Age of Wonders, fixing various problems with AoW III (like the relative lack of racial diversity and overemphasis on high-tier units), then wrapping it all in a sci-fi setting.

I'm also grateful that the PlayStation streaming service has finally allowed me to play God of War 4 on my PC. It's really as good as I thought it would be.

[Zevox]

I'm glad for last year's trio of fighting games that have remained my favorite multiplayer titles of choice for two years now: Dragon Ball FighterZ, BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, and Super Smash Brothers: Ultimate. From DBFZ's crazy pressure and lengthy combos into the flashiest supers in the genre, to BBTag's general ridiculousness and roster full of characters I find fun to play, to Smash Brothers' much tamer gameplay but roster absolutely full of some my favorite video game characters ever (especially after this year's DLC - still amazes and delights me to have Banjo & Kazooie in Smash at long last, and Joker was an incredible surprise too). Those three have been wonderful fun for more hours than I'd care to try and count.

Also, in that same vein, I'm thankful for the existence of ArcSystem Works as a company. Not only do they make some of my favorite fighting games (see the above Dragon Ball and BlazBlue games), but even the ones I'm less of a fan of are utterly gorgeous and have amazing music, basically at a bare minimum.

I'm also thankful for Hearthstone's new mode, Battlegrounds, which is a breath of fresh air at a time when playing the game normally is pretty miserable. It's actually making it hard for me to even care about the upcoming expansion, outside of wondering how Battlegrounds will be updated when it comes out. Especially since Battlegrounds is a mode where I don't need to worry about having a card collection, at all, which also costs no gold to play the way only other such mode in the game, Arena, does. It might have just rescued that game from losing me due to the other things they've done with it the past couple of years that I haven't liked.

[IthilanorStPete]

I'm glad that Paradox has kept developing and producing good content for Crusader Kings II for seven years, and I'm really looking forward to CK3.

[Man_Over_Game]

I am thankful that, despite all of the crap that Blizzard has (and probably will) put them through, the Heroes of the Storm team is still putting up the good fight.

I am also thankful that Borderlands 3 has pumped out 2 great, free DLCs and about 6 major patches by the 60 day mark. Looking forward to what's coming next, Gearbox.