What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[Cygnia]

Cracked open Cult of the Lamb in my backlog and have so far been enjoying it.

[Anonymouswizard]

Picked up Warhammer 40,000: Mechanics. Which I have very mixed feelings on.

Mostly that it says it's going to let you experiment, and then insists on explaining 90% of things anyway. Specifically it teaches you the things that would be fun and rewarding to figure out, but not the actual basics of the turn based combat.

Like the 40k strategy games have had pretty bad tutorials since at least the first Dawn of War, but a trend I've noticed in a lot of turn based games recently is an assumption that you know how they work. The game would have been a lot better if it explained it's basic mechanics and then let me figure things out like enemy scanning and CP generation, instead it expects basic familiarity but can't wait to explain how it hides it's numbers. It would have made the final tutorial mission a joke if I hadn't forgotten to check the map for the Necron Lord, and even then I managed to beat it without thinking.

It's a shame because the setup is really good for a 4X/Turn Based Tactics game.

[Rodin]

I must concur that the developers are clearly listening and improving on the game. When it comes to a pure Motivity build, I bring the tried and true Pipe Wrench Head + Krat Police Baton. Short range, but devastating when you pull off the Patient Smash fable art coupled with Conqueror and Extreme Modification amulets. Ideally with 5 fable slots to capitalize on the damage.

Pure Motivity builds were always good, the problem was that everyone wound up using the exact build you describe - heaviest blade + lightest handle. You could get away with other stuff, particularly with the pure Technique weapons, but you were deliberately nerfing yourself in most cases and the heavy handles with heavy blades were just unplayable. They used a light touch on the OP weapon combinations but brought a lot of the other combinations up so that they're a viable choice now.

Strangely enough I've never liked the Krat Police Baton moveset - it's undeniably a DPS monster but the moveset itself kinda sucks. It's a straight jab at very close range with no side-swing to deal with multiple attackers. My first playthrough I think I used the Electric Coil Stick handle for most of the game in order to benefit from the swingy moveset and the excellent charging Fable Art. My damage was a bit lower since I had no Advance, but the utility of the moveset more than made up for it.

I'm looking forward to trying some of the other really heavy weapons to see what they're like - the Coil Mjolnir in particular looked fun but was painfully slow prior to this patch. I also kind of want to try a heavy-blade Advance run, although I suspect that will still have problems due to how elemental damage build up works.

Edit: Can now confirm that Coil Mjolnir is in the "massively improved" column. You can actually get hits in now without getting absolutely bodied by anything you didn't kill, and you have enough time to get the two-hit combo in. It's still not as good as my previous weapon, but it plays entertainingly different. It hits so hard that it interrupts the hell out of large enemies and easily staggers them. On the flip side, anything with a spammy attack will eat your lunch.

[Rynjin]

Picked up Warhammer 40,000: Mechanics. Which I have very mixed feelings on.

Mostly that it says it's going to let you experiment, and then insists on explaining 90% of things anyway. Specifically it teaches you the things that would be fun and rewarding to figure out, but not the actual basics of the turn based combat.

Like the 40k strategy games have had pretty bad tutorials since at least the first Dawn of War, but a trend I've noticed in a lot of turn based games recently is an assumption that you know how they work. The game would have been a lot better if it explained it's basic mechanics and then let me figure things out like enemy scanning and CP generation, instead it expects basic familiarity but can't wait to explain how it hides it's numbers. It would have made the final tutorial mission a joke if I hadn't forgotten to check the map for the Necron Lord, and even then I managed to beat it without thinking.

It's a shame because the setup is really good for a 4X/Turn Based Tactics game.

I feel that. Games like Mechanicus wear the "XCOM-clone" label proudly, to the point that I guess they just ASSUME the only people willing to buy it are people who played XCOM?

[Zevox]

So aside from wrapping up my second time through Baldur's Gate 3, I've been playing two things this weekend: the beta test for Under Night In-Birth 2 Sys:Celes (yes, that's actually the name) and Persona 5 Tactica.

Under Night is one of those fighting games I know I probably should've tried a while ago, since it seems like it should be right up my alley, but just haven't gotten around to; now that the sequel is getting rollback netcode and crossplay though, feels like the time to give it a shot, and the beta was a free chance to do so. Didn't take much to realize I'd need to stick to just one or two characters though, because wow, just messing around with the game, it has a lot of mechanics and a lot of options for you to wrap your head around at all times. I wound up picking Nanase (schoolgirl with a big sword and wind magic) and Wagner (warrior woman with fire powers) for my two, and I think I wound up liking the former more than the latter, her extra air mobility and the reach of her normals felt better to me, whereas I struggled more with how to handle Wagner in neutral. Though honestly, struggling was most of what I was doing, as it was pretty clear there weren't a lot of players like me playing, mostly veterans who clearly knew how to handle the game much better than I could learn it playing for a couple of hours a day over just a few days, even if I wasn't getting paired with the best of the best.

Main takeaways for me were basically that yes, it is very much up my alley in a lot of ways, but there are some caveats to that. Notably, I was quite frustrated by just how very many attacks were air unblockable. I'm used to fighting games that have air blocking but make dedicated anti-airs air unblockable, or sometimes grounded attacks in general, but in this one even air-to-air attacks couldn't be blocked in the air, which just felt super frustrating. Projectiles and I think some grounded attacks were air blockable, so the game clearly has air blocking, but it feels a lot more limited than any other game with air blocking I've ever played. And there's also certain characters I greatly dislike playing against in the game - most notably Hilda, a character defined by having the dumbest giant-sized screen-filling normal attacks ever put in a fighting game. I already fought and hated her in BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle, and she's no better, and possibly worse, in her native game - she can teleport in this one, after all, which they blessedly left off her moveset in BBTag.

All that said, the reverse beat mechanic in particular is something I was quite enjoying - getting to freely chain normal attacks not just from lighter to heavier, but from heavier to lighter as well, so long as you don't repeat the same attack twice in the chain. Both for combos and pressure that creates very unique options compared to other games that I quite enjoy. So I still might have to pick this up once it comes out - although its release timing, coming only a week before Persona 3 Reload, is quite bad for me.

Speaking of Persona, Tactica. I've only got a handful of hours with it thus far, but it's quite promising. It's clearly based on the Mario + Rabbids combat system at a baseline - there's clear full and half cover that visually looks a lot like it does in that game, explosives that can act as cover but obviously aren't smart to stay near, free movement without your movement range until you decide to take an action that ends your character's turn, the only things that are missing really are the dash attacks and team jumps. There are plenty of differences though: for instance, rather than cover giving a 50% chance for a shot to miss if it's half cover and 100% chance to take the shot if it's full, being in cover covers the "resist" status. While you have that, you take less damage from any hits you take, regardless of what angle they come from. Full cover also blocks all standard attacks that don't come from behind you - even side shots that would be flanking shots in Mario + Rabbids (or X-Com) can still get blocked by it if they're not sufficiently behind the cover. However, you can force an enemy to lose their "resist" status with melee attacks or Persona spells/special attacks. Doing this functionally negates the cover as well (although you still need to get around full cover to hit them with basic gun shots), and any enemy that doesn't have cover/resist will be critically hit and knocked down if attacked, conferring a One More extra turn to the attacker. Once you've knocked someone down like that, the character that did so can set up an All-Out Attack that affects all enemies within a triangular area in between the three active party members, doing massive damage (even to enemies that aren't downed). And that's just the basics.

Interestingly, while you can only have three party members out at once, you can swap in other party members if one of your active ones is KOed, which feels like a nice way to let you use more of the party while still maintaining the party size they want the game balanced around. Though thus far, I've not had to use that, as the early missions I've done have been very easy, at least on the normal difficulty. Hope that picks up; if not, I might need to bump the difficulty up.

The game does seem like it might be a lot shorter than is usual for a Persona spin-off though. I'm only five hours in and I'm already level 15, which is a blistering pace compared to not just the normal Persona titles, but spin-offs like Persona Q as well. Maybe that'll slow down as I go, but if it keeps up, this might be a much smaller game that I anticipated, given the typical Persona game ends with your level in the 70s if you don't go deliberately grinding for higher levels.

[Sapphire Guard]

Spoiler: Dragon Age: Inquisition full game spoilers

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Not sure what to make of this still, I literally finished it about half an hour ago. 79 hours to clear data, which is very similar to Origins, but I was very much not a completionist on this one, I fairly quickly decided to do as few quests as I could, especially avoiding all the 'collect X amount of item' ones unless I did them accidentally. Also I've done no DLCs, including the one that goes into Corypheus' origins. I missed whatever backstory was there, so maybe that's why he didn't engage me.

It feels...more generic... than the first two. Corypheus is standard unhinged mage, protagonist is standard blank slate, who everyone keeps calling Qunari even though my game backstory makes clear that I'm Tal-Vashoth, not Qunari.

The idea of building the Inquisition's power is great in concept, but mechanically, 'you need X amount of power to unlock the next story mission', could be very frustrating. The last big mission, the one you need 40 power for, meant spending literally hours doing sidequests I didn't care about because all the ones I was interested in I'd already completed by that point.

There was one room you had to unlock by collecting shards, and then you do that, and one empty room later you encounter three more doors that require more shards to unlock. I turned, left, and never came back. There was the Grey Warden questline that involved 'unlock crestwood, find contact, have one cutsence, build power to unlock western approach, one cutscene, one small fight, than build more power to unlock the real mission, because there is no possible way to catch the mage with five minutes head start in the middle of a featureless desert.

Spoiler: Mage v Templar

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I sided with the mages, mostly because it seemed more urgent and rogue mages are much scarier than rogue templars), but took them prisoner, because clearly Fiona couldn't be trusted to make decisions since she got usurped by a Tevinter Blood Mage, who is screwing around with timetravel, thereby wrecking Corypheus' plans by spilling them ahead of time. It's strange to just casually introduce time travel like that and not even have it come up again

Spoiler: Fort Defence

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Defending Haven was a good mission, although where were all my assembled mages and why weren't they doing anything? It would admittedly wreck the game to just have my giant army of mages (who are combat veterans and were specifically assembled nearby to close the breach) instantly squash the invaders. Seems like the story just decided it was hopeless even though it shouldn't have been

Spoiler: Adamant Questline

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Didn't enjoy this one much, Corypheus ability to control Wardens seems odd and arbitrary. If he can do this, why can't the archdemon do it? If he can control them, what does he need to persuade the knight commander for? How does this work and what are the limitations? It was an easy decision to sacrifice Stroud. I just didn't believe it would be so easy to persuade all the Wardens to participate in this ritual, demon mimicking the calling or not. Seems more likely there would just be a Warden Civil war.

Spoiler: The Ball

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Really enjoyed this one. Usually this kind of thing is pretty simple, but there is actually a fair amount of political scheming that had decent complexity and took a fair amount of time, with considerations like 'you can't disappear for too long.' It was also one of the occasions where I could believe Florian would do this. I saved Celine, but was a bit sad I couldn't keep Gaspard alive as well. Morrigan is the court adviser, so her promise to never be seen again didn't last long.

Spoiler: Marching South

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Allied with the guardians. Seemed a bit unnecessary to randomly destroy the Well, but there wasn't an option not to do it. Once Samson went down, it would be Corypheus and his dragon alone against the armies of Orlais, the Inquisition, and the elves, did we really need to flee through the Eluvian? I drank it, could not trust Morrigan to do it, from the Inquisitor's perspective she is some random mage who may or may not have any idea what she is talking about.

Spoiler: Family Reunion and Endgame

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Was not particularly expecting Flemeth or the Solas reveal, not sure what to make of that. Dragon was fairly easy, and Corypheus fight itself I got through first time thanks to helpful supply crates. Nothing much of note. My plan was to dissolve the Inquisition once Corypheus was dealt with, but the game didn't let me. Vivienne somehow ended up the Divine, even though I didn't support any candidate. I kind of treated the Inquisition like XCOM, our mandate was defeating the demons, everything else was not my concern.

Spoiler: Notably still unexplained

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Red Lyrium. Dagnas discovered that it is normal Lyrium with Blight, which doesn't explain much, because it was rare until recently, and if it was just blighted lyrium the deep roads should be full of the stuff. Templars who ingest it get superstrength and super toughness, but you don't need to ingest it to be corrupted as per Varric. By the endgame, all my party have been exposed to a lot of red lyrium, why aren't we corrupted when Bartrand fell instantly. What determines who gets corrupted and who doesn't?

Spoiler: Overall thoughts

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It's above average, but narratively this one doesn't hang together quite as well. I just don't believe most of Corypheus' plans could work. My favourite is still origins, while DA2 had some story issues but made up for it with its character work. It's a good game series, but I don't know if this was worth the 200 hours it took.

[Errorname]

Dragon Age Inquisition is frustrating because Trespasser is kind of mandatory content that they sold and released separately, and the game as a whole suffers because it feels like it's just laying the foundation for the story they want to tell in the next game that's definitely going to come out eventually.

[Anonymouswizard]

Spoiler: Inquisition

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The game really suffers from having the open world zones and useless horses. The story missions are amazing, the open world zones are padded and I don't feel the same attachment to the side quests as I did in the first two. I feel like the story would be a lot less divisive of they'd focused on it, like actually having to smooze up to the Orlasian nobility to get a ball invitation rather than being able to do it with the sheer prowess of your flower picking.

There's one non-story area I really like, and it's the linear one where you recruit Sky Watcher.

I'll also note that unlike Origins where they were out of focus and 2 which shuffled every reasonable one out of the way before they took centre stage I like how Inquisition treats the Templars. They're more specialised compared to the mages, but they're incredibly effective at dealing with Fade stuff, and there's members who actually live up to the ideal. Considering that one of your big issues is spirits breaking through and becoming demons the main reason to go with the mages is that nobody really believes Cullen that they could suppress the rift, but he's 100% right.

Found all six orbs in Dragon Quest 11, partially because once you reach Nautica the game basically throws up it's hands and tells you were they are. I'm clearly only halfway through the game at best, being in my low-30s level-wise, but I strangely do seem to have explored about 80% of the world. So clearly there's either a second world map or I'm going to have to later hunt down another set of MacGuffins hidden in dungeons.

[Cespenar]

Found a sleeper hit in the aptly named Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane.

It's Phoenix Wright but with D&D magic. Really. And it's well written.

Picked up Warhammer 40,000: Mechanics. Which I have very mixed feelings on.

I'd suggest sticking with it, it's really one tier above all the other XCOM clones out there, so much so that it might not arguably be considered one.

[WritersBlock]

Just picked up Heroes of might and magic 3 on Gog thanks to early black friday sale, will give it a try when I finish my playthrough of the might and magic 6,7,8 merge mod. (finished the 8 part, one quest left in 6 and a few quests left in 7)

[Anonymouswizard]

Quests in Dragon Quest XI are either fine or annoying, especially the 'initiate combat with enemy A to hopefully find enemy B' ones where the required enemy appears less often than metal slimes (which I can nearly semi-reliably kill by now, so grinding has been replaced by slime hunting). Hard enemies are fine as at worst I'll just grind and retry, but such quests are just tedious.

Also finished Act 1, and yep that's definitely not what I was expecting. Well played game, you've a less basic story than I'd assumed.

[Alabenson]

I've started playing Elden Ring. So far I've taken down a bunch of the early optional bosses including Agheel, and I'm about ready to head off to the Weeping Peninsula.

[Wookieetank]

I've started playing Elden Ring. So far I've taken down a bunch of the early optional bosses including Agheel, and I'm about ready to head off to the Weeping Peninsula.

Watch out for the furry murder mountains bears. They're flipping everywhere.

[Sapphire Guard]

Spoiler: More Dragon Age Inquisition mage templar stuff

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I went back and did the 'recruit the templars' mission, and their defence of Haven. Missionwise. it's not as fun, and they don't helpfully spill Corypheus' entire plan.

The templars are interestingly much more repentent than the mages were, and you can rally them to fight once they understand the threat. The mages don't help against Alexius at all, and Fiona is much less repentant about her choices in letting some unhinged Tevinter mage take over despite being of relatively sound mind.

Haven defence was much easier. Maybe I'm just more familiar with the combat system now, but the Red Templars are a much bigger problem. Most of the attackers were just ordinary soldiers. I was expecting them to summon Shades and demons as meat shields like they usually did before, but they didn't for some reason, and Fiona didn't put up much of a fight.

So far, the ideal mage templar relationship was probably in DA:O. Gregoir seals the tower when it is overrun by demons, but he doesn't panic, and he is willing to accept Irving's word that everything is safe. Kirkwall is a bot of a hellhole, it has a strong templar presence, but you also trip over blood mages every time you go outside.

I think a Bioware protagonist isn't really the best way to explore this, as every time they encounter them there has to be a protagonist shaped hole in their problems.

[Ignimortis]

Just picked up Heroes of might and magic 3 on Gog thanks to early black friday sale, will give it a try when I finish my playthrough of the might and magic 6,7,8 merge mod. (finished the 8 part, one quest left in 6 and a few quests left in 7)

Quite literally thousands of hours of fun. Though I do think that a major part of that is custom maps, but the base game is still excellent.

[Zevox]

Finished up Persona 5 Tactica this morning. Definitely a much shorter game than I was expecting - other than Persona 4 Arena, definitely the shortest of the Persona spin-offs. But a pretty darn good game anyway.

Plot-wise, it's pretty much what you'd expect if you've played a Persona game, especially one of the Persona Q games, before. You have the group getting stuck in the cognitive world, meeting new characters that need their help, and needing to resolve the world's and those people's problems in order to find their way out, ultimately facing off against the entity responsible for them being trapped in the first place. What makes it different is that it's ultimately built around the story of one character: Toshiro Kasukabe. For the first time the series, an adult (age isn't specified to my recollection, but I got the impression he's probably in his early 30s, certainly at least late 20s), and a politician of all things at that. Unfortunately any details about his story are spoilers since he starts the game with a hefty case of amnesia, but it's really quite good, definitely the best of the spin-off Persona titles, and I say that as someone who really liked Labrys' story in P4A. And the way he plays off the Phantom Thieves works great too, basically all of them get their moments where their own personal stories from P5 connect to his in some way, and yet it never feels artificial, like they were going out of their way to do that. Doesn't seem to matter how much time passes, the Persona team just has really damn talented character writers, and somehow that's remain true from Persona 3's development 20 years ago until today. That said, it is definitely a game that assumes you've played Persona 5 itself, and is not going to explain the Phantom Thieves' backstories or references in any great detail to you, so there is that; but then again, that tends to be true of all Persona spin-off titles.

Gameplay-wise, it's fun, but definitely very easy. Maybe I should've cranked the difficulty up at some point, but I wound up leaving it on normal the whole time, and I think I had a character hit 0 hp once, because I got very careless. Otherwise, I never felt in any real danger, even against the final boss, and effective use of All-Out Attacks could clear entire stages with ease. Finding ways to set those big AoAs up using the game's varied mechanics was still fun though. For a first try at a tactical RPG instead of their usual ordinary turn-based ones, they did pretty good at I'd say.

Though one other criticism that I have of it however is that the boss fights are not great. A couple of them work well enough, but with one exception, they all suffer from the boss mainly being a big wall of HP you need to blast down through attrition, which isn't very interesting in a game that's otherwise heavily focused on positioning and exploiting powerful extra-turn mechanics. The exception is the second boss, who plays out more like an obstacle course - you work your way through the stage before him, fighting standard enemies while he fires his own attacks at you, until you get a character to the end where they can approach the boss and attack him; after which he'll blow them away, the stage will reconfigure and repopulate with enemies, and you'll repeat the process a couple of times before you'll have done enough to finish him off. Though it's kind of telling that that's better than the other boss fights, since it's basically just a few stages in a row with a slightly non-standard objective instead of the normal ones. The final boss also isn't too bad - still kind of a slug-fest, but his unique mechanics do create more interesting scenarios for you to deal with during the fight than the other such bosses at least.

Still, all in all, very enjoyable game, glad I played it, and it continuing to show just how damn good the writers for this series still are makes me that much more excited for Persona 3 Reload, and hopeful for Persona 6 whenever that finally comes.

[Razade]

Gameplay-wise, it's fun, but definitely very easy. Maybe I should've cranked the difficulty up at some point, but I wound up leaving it on normal the whole time, and I think I had a character hit 0 hp once, because I got very careless. Otherwise, I never felt in any real danger, even against the final boss, and effective use of All-Out Attacks could clear entire stages with ease. Finding ways to set those big AoAs up using the game's varied mechanics was still fun though. For a first try at a tactical RPG instead of their usual ordinary turn-based ones, they did pretty good at I'd say.

One point of contention here. This isn't Atlus's first go at a Tactical RPG. That was Atlus's bread and butter for a while, and they've got a big one coming up here in 2024 with Unicorn Overlord. The team's express intent for Tactica was to leverage Atlus's Tactical RPG experience and fame specifically with the Persona series. They had a number of veteran Atlus people join the project with some serious chops in the genre to help. It's also not the first Tactics style game in the SMT franchise. Both Devil Survivor games are Tactical RPGs for instance, and the original Persona game and both versions of 2 (if I recall, pretty hazy on 2 and its sidequel) were grid based combat. Hell, even the options for characters harken back to the original Persona game with Use Gun, Use Persona, and Use Melee. Tactica is just more modern with a way more smooth UI. So if anything, Tactica is a return to form for Atlus in a lot of ways, rather than breaking or treading new ground.

[tonberrian]

Even relatively recently we had the Devil Survivor games that I know you played, Zevox. They were quite good. Enough so that I bought both Devil Survivor 2 and then Break Record again.

[Zevox]

One point of contention here. This isn't Atlus's first go at a Tactical RPG. That was Atlus's bread and butter for a while, and they've got a big one coming up here in 2024 with Unicorn Overlord. The team's express intent for Tactica was to leverage Atlus's Tactical RPG experience and fame specifically with the Persona series. They had a number of veteran Atlus people join the project with some serious chops in the genre to help. It's also not the first Tactics style game in the SMT franchise. Both Devil Survivor games are Tactical RPGs for instance, and the original Persona game and both versions of 2 (if I recall, pretty hazy on 2 and its sidequel) were grid based combat. Hell, even the options for characters harken back to the original Persona game with Use Gun, Use Persona, and Use Melee. Tactica is just more modern with a way more smooth UI. So if anything, Tactica is a return to form for Atlus in a lot of ways, rather than breaking or treading new ground.

True, I was thinking specifically within the Persona series, which has stuck to turn-based RPGs until now, aside from a couple of games that they partnered with other developers to make (Persona 4 Arena, which was ArcSys, and Persona 5 Strikers, which was Koei Tecmo). Persona 1 and 2 were a very different thing - grid-based, yes, sort of, but not like a tactical RPG at all. I don't really know how much crossover there is between teams within Atlus on these games. I must point out that Tactica works very differently from Devil Survivor though, which used tactical RPG style maps, but had combat work much more like in a normal SMT game, switching to the ordinary turn-based combat when you attacked, just with a limit on how many turns you got before it backed out to the map. Tactica works considerably closer to other strategy RPGs, with clear inspirations from Mario + Rabbids in particular.

Even relatively recently we had the Devil Survivor games that I know you played, Zevox. They were quite good. Enough so that I bought both Devil Survivor 2 and then Break Record again.

Hate to tell you, but those were not recent. Even Devil Survivor 2 was 2012 for its original release, and 2015 for the 3DS re-release. And while I liked those, I never felt like I needed the re-releases since the 3DS could play the originals anyway, so I haven't played them since around when their original releases occurred.

[tonberrian]

Hate to tell you, but those were not recent. Even Devil Survivor 2 was 2012 for its original release, and 2015 for the 3DS re-release. And while I liked those, I never felt like I needed the re-releases since the 3DS could play the originals anyway, so I haven't played them since around when their original releases occurred.

*ages to dust*

[Zevox]

*ages to dust*

I know, right? It's weird that more time has passed between Devil Survivor 2 and now than passed between Persona 4 and 5.

Heck, for that matter unless they surprise us with Persona 6 next year somehow (and between P3 Reload and Metaphor I think we all know that isn't happening), it's going to be longer between Persona 5 and 6 than it was between Persona 4 and 5, and was already an 8 year wait. Not that I want them to rush it, mind, I'm happy to give them as long as it takes to make games as great as mainline Persona has been since 3, but still, it's quite surprising for the gap to get even longer than last time.

[tonberrian]

I was actually surprised how close persona 3, P3P, P4, and P4G were all together. Somehow I managed to miss all news of P4 original flavor. I picked up P3 FES when it must have been just out, but I had picked up a cheap ps2 used so I thought FES was much older when I got it.

[Anonymouswizard]

Picked up both Dawn of War 2 and Smurf Marine in the Steam sale, and booted up DoW2. As I immediately remembered it's good but gives me a hankering to play some Imperial Guard. I've got Retribution though, so I might just skip to that.

As for Space Marine, it's good but the interaction between the health system and the enemy design is annoying. You're encouraged to get up close to make use of Executions, only for the game to very quickly start throwing multiple squig bombs or Nobs at you. I'm going to have to turn down the difficulty, but at least unlike Fire Warrior it wasn't trend chasing and tried to be it's own thing.

Even if it is annoyingly effect to hang back in cover and Bolter Orks to death.

I think I'll definitely be playing a lot more DoW2 though.

[LibraryOgre]

Picked up the expansions to Civ VI because they were on sale less than my remaining birthday money. Played a little, but I'm not depressed enough to full immerse myself.

I also played some Frostpunk, which I got free from Epic at some point in the past. That thing is HARD. Last time I played, I was able to get over the first hump (kept most people after the Londoners), but the second, when you're getting waves of refugees, just before a massive temperature drop? Holy cow, but that is brutal, and I think I'm too compassionate to do what needs to be done.

[Zevox]

I was actually surprised how close persona 3, P3P, P4, and P4G were all together. Somehow I managed to miss all news of P4 original flavor. I picked up P3 FES when it must have been just out, but I had picked up a cheap ps2 used so I thought FES was much older when I got it.

Ah, we had similar experiences there. I picked up a cheap PS2 in mid-2008 and got Persona 3 on recommendation of a friend, so I actually wound up getting P4 on release as a result of that. I also didn't realize P3 was as relatively new as it was at the time, I just sort of assumed that since we were a couple of years into the 360/PS3/Wii generation already that all PS2 games were older at that point.

But yeah, P3 and P4 were much closer together - but both were also very late-life PS2 games, with P3 releasing mere months before the PS3 came out (and that only in Japan, the rest of the world got it after the PS3 was already out), and P4 two years after the PS3 was already out. They no doubt benefited from Atlus already having plenty of experience developing for the system, and from reusable assets, especially in P4's case. Plus development times were just shorter back then for various reasons, not the least being the fact that hi-def visuals weren't standard yet.

[Form]

I also played some Frostpunk, which I got free from Epic at some point in the past. That thing is HARD. Last time I played, I was able to get over the first hump (kept most people after the Londoners), but the second, when you're getting waves of refugees, just before a massive temperature drop? Holy cow, but that is brutal, and I think I'm too compassionate to do what needs to be done.

The first time I played it I aborted my run fairly early on. It was not going well and I could see the writing on the wall. The second time my people lost hope and banished me to the frozen wastes. After all I had done for them, those ingrates! I gave them child labor and amputations and when someone got stuck in the sawmill I didn't stop opera-....., oh yes, I see the problem now.

The third time was the charm and I made it all the way through. I, uh, had to make some severe moral compromises though. The fourth time I managed to pull through with clean hands, so it is possible, but unlikely at first.

[LibraryOgre]

The first time I played it I aborted my run fairly early on. It was not going well and I could see the writing on the wall. The second time my people lost hope and banished me to the frozen wastes. After all I had done for them, those ingrates! I gave them child labor and amputations and when someone got stuck in the sawmill I didn't stop opera-....., oh yes, I see the problem now.

The third time was the charm and I made it all the way through. I, uh, had to make some severe moral compromises though. The fourth time I managed to pull through with clean hands, so it is possible, but unlikely at first.

I am having a horrible time balancing food. Just... never enough, and never able to feed people.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Tried to play Borderlands 3...got to a (very early) point where it would crash going into a particular cutscene no matter what settings I toggled. Sigh. Uninstalled.

[warty goblin]

As for Space Marine, it's good but the interaction between the health system and the enemy design is annoying. You're encouraged to get up close to make use of Executions, only for the game to very quickly start throwing multiple squig bombs or Nobs at you. I'm going to have to turn down the difficulty, but at least unlike Fire Warrior it wasn't trend chasing and tried to be it's own thing.

Space Marine is very much built around both very rapidly switching between melee and ranged combat, and tanking damage through murdering orcs right in their stupid faces. It takes some getting used to, but once you work out the rhythm, and find a couple power weapons, you turn into an absolute blender of death. The closest thing to it is either Doom 2016, or possibly Bloodrayne 2, but honestly for simple mayhem unleashed it probably outdoes them both.

Though you can't suck the blood out of some club punk all sexy-like, then backflip off him and cut him in half lengthwise, so Bloodrayne 2 gets a point there.

[Eldan]

Getting to the end of Phantom Liberty now, and I'm having my first serious bug.

Which is hilarious, because I played through Cyberpunk when it came out and it was a totally bug free, awesome experience.

Anyway... I have a stealth build, and enemies can see me through walls now. ALl of them. Even when I'm invisible and sneaking. So, stealth is dead now. Reloading didn't help. Loading old saves where I know the bug didn't exist doesn't help. It's just there.

Refunded my skills. I'm just a normal melee tank build now, V is done playing nice.