May 2025 General Game Discussion Thread

[Zed Clampet]

Finally, I can make my own hot tub with capybaras!

Save 10% on Animal Spa on Steam

Run a bathhouse visited by animals! Animal Spa is a relaxing simulation game that you can enjoy while doing other tasks, as it sits at the bottom of your screen. Place baths with different temperatures and rest areas to help a variety of animal friends unwind.

store.steampowered.com

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz5lixjNYXM

Not specifically about Animal Spa, but these bottom of the screen games are just games with bad monitor support to me. I'm either going to play a game or not play it. Just let me maximize it to the whole screen.

 

[Pifanjr]

Otherwise, I've been playing Heroes of Might & Magic 2 on my Steam Deck, the old standby. Just a great game all around and with the open source port, it brings a lot of the QoL stuff over from HoMM3, without the hideous graphical style.

Hideous graphical style? Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is so much better than the hideous 3D versions!

*looks up Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and 3 to compare*

Okay, I see what you mean...

 

[Zed Clampet]

Hideous graphical style? Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is so much better than the hideous 3D versions!

*looks up Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and 3 to compare*

Okay, I see what you mean...

and @BeardyHat did you all know there is a new one coming out some time in the next month or so?

Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era on Steam

Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era is the official prequel hailing back to the origins of the genre-defining, critically acclaimed series of turn-based strategy games. Explore the map solo or in multiplayer, triumph in iconic battles and establish peace on a continent where it was never an option.

store.steampowered.com

 

[BeardyHat]

and @BeardyHat did you all know there is a new one coming out some time in the next month or so?

Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era on Steam

Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era is the official prequel hailing back to the origins of the genre-defining, critically acclaimed series of turn-based strategy games. Explore the map solo or in multiplayer, triumph in iconic battles and establish peace on a continent where it was never an option.

store.steampowered.com

I did, but I forgot!

Actually, I'm torn; it looks great, but it's also Ubisoft and Ubisoft is just such utter garbage.

Both my wife and I lost numerous HoMM 6 saves to Uplay being trash. Ubisoft also turned off the servers for HoMM6, so now it's missing content (not a huge deal to me. Far as I can tell it's just a few heroes) and yet you still need to go through the Uplay launcher to play the game, which I just don't want to do for obvious reasons. HoMM6 is a great game though and probably my favorite next to 2, so it's not like Ubi is doing the franchise dirty there, but still...

I'll probably take a wait and see approach on this one. I'm still pretty happy with fHeroes2 (the source port), as it's under active development and adding features still. I'm also hoping they one day add controller support to the Android version.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I did, but I forgot!

Actually, I'm torn; it looks great, but it's also Ubisoft and Ubisoft is just such utter garbage.

Both my wife and I lost numerous HoMM 6 saves to Uplay being trash. Ubisoft also turned off the servers for HoMM6, so now it's missing content (not a huge deal to me. Far as I can tell it's just a few heroes) and yet you still need to go through the Uplay launcher to play the game, which I just don't want to do for obvious reasons.

I'll probably take a wait and see approach on this one. I'm still pretty happy with fHeroes2 (the source port), as it's under active development and adding features still. I'm also hoping they one day add controller support to the Android version.

Guess I'm one of the rare persons who's never had a problem with Uplay for whatever reason, and I've played a ton of Ubisoft games.

The developer is Unfrozen. Their other game, Iratus, seems to be pretty well thought of, so maybe they'll do well.

 

[BeardyHat]

Hideous graphical style? Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is so much better than the hideous 3D versions!

*looks up Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and 3 to compare*

Okay, I see what you mean...

Exactly!

HoMM3 has some great gameplay improvements over 2 though and I hope one day I can get over the graphics and get more into it. I usually try every couple of years and play half a dozen hours or so before wretching and going back to HoMM2.

 

[BeardyHat]

Guess I'm one of the rare persons who's never had a problem with Uplay for whatever reason, and I've played a ton of Ubisoft games.

The developer is Unfrozen. Their other game, Iratus, seems to be pretty well thought of, so maybe they'll do well.

I really wish it wasn't so terrible, because I'm also a fan of the Anno series, though I've not had any issues with uPlay concerning that, though I've played it considerably less.

But uPlay has been so bad for us, even my wife, a non-gamer, sours at the name Ubisoft. I don't think she could name a single other gaming company...

I edited my previous post, but I'll say it again: HoMM6 is a good game, my favorite next to 2, so it's disappointing it was spoiled by uPlay, as I still want to play it today.

Also actually the only Heroes game I could beat my wife at...

 

[Pifanjr]

I played a bit more of Baldur's Gate 3. I wanted to quickly grab an item, but got ambushed by a bunch of enemies. Of course I hadn't rested in a while and was low on HP and spell slots, but luckily I had plenty of potions left and the enemies weren't particularly strong.

I did get enough XP out of it to level up to level 6, so that was nice. Only one more level until I get level 4 spells.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Crap. I got a normal person's amount of sleep last night for the first time in ages, and it seems to have made me bored.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I really wish it wasn't so terrible, because I'm also a fan of the Anno series, though I've not had any issues with uPlay concerning that, though I've played it considerably less.

But uPlay has been so bad for us, even my wife, a non-gamer, sours at the name Ubisoft. I don't think she could name a single other gaming company...

I edited my previous post, but I'll say it again: HoMM6 is a good game, my favorite next to 2, so it's disappointing it was spoiled by uPlay, as I still want to play it today.

Also actually the only Heroes game I could beat my wife at...

I don't understand why there are so many people who have no trouble with it, but then there are a few people who have nothing but trouble with it. For instance, there's no mention in the AC Shadows user reviews of Uplay that I found looking through some reviews. How long ago did you have the problems?

 

[BeardyHat]

I don't understand why there are so many people who have no trouble with it, but then there are a few people who have nothing but trouble with it. For instance, there's no mention in the AC Shadows user reviews of Uplay that I found looking through some reviews. How long ago did you have the problems?

It's been awhile, several years now, but I had it and my wife had it on a separate PC and then it reared it's head again a few years after that, having gone back and thinking it must have been solved by now.

I kind of suspect that it's dependant on the game. As mentioned, HoMM 6 did this to both of us multiple times, but since then I've played a lot of Watch Dogs 2 and never had an issue, as well as haven't had the problem with my Anno save, though I did lose all my Driver: San Francisco saves, though I can't recall if it had cloud saving at the time or not. I also don't recall any issues with Might &Magic X.

So it's not been all bad, but I've lost a couple hundred hours of save time between my wife and I and as the saying goes, "once bitten, twice shy." So I've been pretty reticent to go back to it, outside a few games I'm enthusiastic about.

Given my love of HoMM, I probably won't be able to resist the new game, but I'll likely still wait at least a little bit to see what people are saying on Steam about the game itself, as well as uPlay integration.

 

[Zed Clampet]

It's been awhile, several years now, but I had it and my wife had it on a separate PC and then it reared it's head again a few years after that, having gone back and thinking it must have been solved by now.

I kind of suspect that it's dependant on the game. As mentioned, HoMM 6 did this to both of us multiple times, but since then I've played a lot of Watch Dogs 2 and never had an issue, as well as haven't had the problem with my Anno save, though I did lose all my Driver: San Francisco saves, though I can't recall if it had cloud saving at the time or not. I also don't recall any issues with Might &Magic X.

So it's not been all bad, but I've lost a couple hundred hours of save time between my wife and I and as the saying goes, "once bitten, twice shy." So I've been pretty reticent to go back to it, outside a few games I'm enthusiastic about.

Given my love of HoMM, I probably won't be able to resist the new game, but I'll likely still wait at least a little bit to see what people are saying on Steam about the game itself, as well as uPlay integration.

They need to use Steam cloud saves, but I don't know anything about their system or how using it can lose your saves, so I don't know what I'm talking about

 

[neogunhero]

Guess I'm one of the rare persons who's never had a problem with Uplay for whatever reason, and I've played a ton of Ubisoft games.

Same here. The only issue that Uplay/Ubisoft Connect gives me is that is occasionally logs me out and I have to go through the whole 2FA process which is just minimally annoying. I've used their program for well over 10 years and never have any of the issues that so many people have, and it's so strange to me. As you guys already said it's like a portion of users are unaffected while the rest have tremendous issues with it. Hell, I've even used their in-game overlay countless of times, and for someone who has issues with the app to begin with, the thought of opening that overlay may give them nightmares.

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Tamriel Rebuilt is kind of unreal. The writing, locations, scenery, everything fits so perfectly in with the main game that you'd think it was an official expansion. The only issue is that some of the major cities are giving me major performance issues, and I haven't even been to the newest city added, Narsis, which is supposed to be the largest city in the entire game, perhaps in all TES game according to the mod developers.

To fix this, I downloaded a mod that is a Vulkan translation layer, it takes the old DX9 renderer and changes it to Vulkan. I won't pretend that I know everything I just said, but it is rather incredible that we are at a point where we can have mods like this that completely alter how a game is ran. It improved my frames in problematic areas quite significantly. Along with that, I'm now using another mod called Project Atlas, which simply put compiles all the separate textures used on a model and combines them into a single texture, to help improve performance drastically. Again, this is pretty much black magic to me, mods like this could not have been conceivable when the game was brand new.

Performance in one of the mod's major cities Old Ebonheart still sits around 45fps in densely populated areas, but it's a major improvement over the 25fps I was getting in the same alleyway. Other parts can hit 60 now. In case anyone is wondering, the main game runs at over 200FPS for me no matter where I'm at, it's just the new Tamriel Rebuilt areas that are a lot more crammed with buildings and people compared to vanilla cities that is giving me performance issues.

Also, I seem to have accidentally sold another quest item... this time it could have been hours ago into my playthrough, it won't be as easy to track down as the first quest item I sold. That one was sold in the starting town so it was no issue finding it again, but I've held onto this other item for many hours, and have met many traders since then, I don't know if I'll even try. Maybe it will come up unexpectedly one day.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Orcs can be tricky

We (Guido and I) got murdered by some mid-game orcs in Rainwylds who were especially tricky orcs. We were standing together building a new base in the new area, when they suddenly charged us, and the first thing they did was destroy the foundation that we were both standing on. We were just standing there in a hole completely helpless. Our magic just slammed against the next foundation and didn't do any damage to the Orcs. Guido, thinking faster than me, immediately switched to 'build mode' and started destroying a path out of the foundations, but their attacks were too strong. It only took them a few hits to kill us, and he was dead after only destroying one foundation. I quickly ran out of stamina from blocking and died shortly after he did.

But the main thing I want to get across is that the RuneScape developers released an unfinished game into early access. Don't they know how this is supposed to work? Seriously, though, it's a bit more unfinished than most EA games. For instance, you can't level up your magic yet. I think we're going to put it aside for awhile.

Meanwhile, Nightingale has been greatly expanded since we played, so we may go back to that.

 

[Colif]

Plagiarism is bad
No matter how big you are

 

[Zimbaly]

Dead Island 2 baby woooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Between that and the killer photographs I've been taking the past few days. It's been a mildly mehcceptable week. 🤘

 

[Zed Clampet]

Well I found out something about COE33. I'm not sure if it's a spoiler or not, so I'm not going to mention it except that I consider it a cardinal sin. In this case, however, I'm pretty happy about it.

 

[neogunhero]

Finally made my way to Narsis in Tamriel Rebuilt. What a massive city.

Spoiler: Narsis

It took me a long while to get there. I had to use UESP to find out how to travel there, and it involved a lot of boat rides and Mages Guild teleportations. My map isn’t even working in this city so I have no idea where I’m at in the world, I think it’s an issue with a certain mod.

Anyways, I finally entered the city through a Mages Guild teleport from another city that took so long to find. I was greeted by a fellow student, who immediately gave me a task to find someone in the city and retrieve a certain book. I thought that would be a good way to explore, so I set foot out of the guild and into the streets of Narsis. What I then found was a massive sprawling maze filled with seemingly thousands of residents.

I stumbled into a cramped underground bazaar with people selling nearly everything you could ever want. I spoke to everyone, even the bookseller, and no one had any idea who the person I was meant to find was. The questgiver mentioned this person was poor, so I traveled north up the city to the working class borough.

Still no dice. I talked to dozens of people and couldn’t find this person I was looking for. I eventually gave up, but was happy I got to see so much of the city. It’s as detailed and grand as the developers make it out to seem. They did a great job of matching the lore of the city as well. Can’t wait to explore even more.

 

[Pifanjr]

I played a bit more of Baldur's Gate 3 and I ran into a bit of an issue because I've taken a 3 month break. I encountered a guy who was suspicious of me, but I got a dialogue option to say a code phrase to him. I had no idea where I picked up said code phrase, but it allowed me to get some directions to a hidden cave.

In said cave, I found a group of questionable characters, but they also turned neutral when I said the code phrase. So I thought I must have done something right, until I tried handing over a package that I'd apparently had for them and they got mad because they saw I had opened it, which was apparently a sin punishable by death.

Of course, attacking me is also a sin punishable by death and I got some good loot out of it, so it wasn't too much of an issue, but I wonder if I could've solved the situation better if I had remembered what the code phrase or package were about.


A little bit later I encountered a group of people when Lae'zel suddenly came running up out of nowhere. She never joined my party/camp and I wasn't even sure if she was still alive, but apparently it was important for her to show up there. However, a fight broke out and afterwards her lifeless body was on the ground. At first I figured that she must have gotten attacked by one of the enemies, but thinking back on it I realised that I didn't remember any of the enemies attacking her, but I did start the fight by throwing a fireball in the middle of a group of them...

I considered whether I should try to revive her, but it's not like I have room in my party for her anyway, so I decided not to bother.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I could've solved the situation better if I had remembered what the code phrase or package were about.

Did it give you options on what to pick and none of them sounded familiar?

I live in fear of the forgotten code phrases

 

[Pifanjr]

Did it give you options on what to pick and none of them sounded familiar?

I live in fear of the forgotten code phrases

No, luckily I didn't have to guess from a bunch of different code phrases. I've seen that happen in some games where they quiz you to see if you've been paying attention.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I'm very disappointed. I bought Blacksmith Master thinking I had played the demo for it at one point, but this is not the same game. You don't actually do any blacksmithing. You hire people, instead. It's basically a management game. I'll probably still like it, but that's not what I thought I was getting.

 

[DXCHASE]

Current run of games are Diablo 4 because im hopelessly addicted to it (but i tell myself its that i want to get the rest of the free Berserk event stuff before it goes away forever)

Helldivers 2 because they just had a "weapons customization update" where you can now do stuff to only your primaries. New monsters too and insta-kill flying planes we have to somehow dodge while fighting them.

And Doom the Dark Ages because, well...i paid 200usd for it. NO RAGRETS

Plagiarism is bad
No matter how big you are

As much as Bungie is good at making amazing trailers for their upcoming expansions, its stuff like this as to why i left Destiny 2 and will continue to stay away.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Current run of games are Diablo 4 because im hopelessly addicted to it (but i tell myself its that i want to get the rest of the free Berserk event stuff before it goes away forever)

Helldivers 2 because they just had a "weapons customization update" where you can now do stuff to only your primaries. New monsters too and insta-kill flying planes we have to somehow dodge while fighting them.

And Doom the Dark Ages because, well...i paid 200usd for it. NO RAGRETS





As much as Bungie is good at making amazing trailers for their upcoming expansions, its stuff like this as to why i left Destiny 2 and will continue to stay away.

I'd say it was just one bad employee except that Bungie appears to have a history of doing this. It's very strange.

 

[Colif]

Their excuse is its one artist... but the art is everywhere, its even on their website. So that one artist did a lot of the games art.
Several Bungie people follow the artist they took "inspiration" from and this isn't the first time they been caught borrowing... so its not just one person.