The currently playing and random game thoughts thread (Dec 26 to Jan 1)

[Zloth]

OK, enough Gal Civ 3. I've gotten to the point where I'm clearly going to win, and I don't feel like sitting through a couple of nights just to make it official.

Did my winter shopping and got another batch of games to play through the year. They should last until the summer sale. One of those games was the Outer Wild's DLC. Starting that game up and hearing the music again.... ahhhh, that's a nice end to the year! Then I started playing it again.... uhhhh, I've totally forgotten how to fly a spaceship! I'm starting to get the hang of it, though. I found the {ahem} new place, so I'm back to having no clue at all what's going on.

 

[Mazer]

Happy Saturnalia everyone! Hope your house slaves enjoyed their feast and your family enjoyed many games of knucklebones.

No time for any gaming at the moment, and the spree of Epic giveaways has blown out my pile of shame massively. Salt and Sanctuary and Pathfinder: Kingmaker were two amazing gets, I've been keen on Kingmaker ever since they added gamepad support, a bit of a rare feature for a tactical CRPG. And the complete Tomb Raider reboot trilogy is up today as well, another good one.

I appreciate this all the more having been unable to pick up anything in the Steam winter sale. No time off to play these games of course, but I can enjoy hoarding them for now and might get around to finishing one of them once I retire, society collapses entirely, or the current rate of COVID infection in New South Wales prompts another lockdown.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

Happy Saturnalia everyone! Hope your house slaves enjoyed their feast and your family enjoyed many games of knucklebones.

No time for any gaming at the moment, and the spree of Epic giveaways has blown out my pile of shame massively. Salt and Sanctuary and Pathfinder: Kingmaker were two amazing gets, I've been keen on Kingmaker ever since they added gamepad support, a bit of a rare feature for a tactical CRPG. And the complete Tomb Raider reboot trilogy is up today as well, another good one.

I appreciate this all the more having been unable to pick up anything in the Steam winter sale. No time off to play these games of course, but I can enjoy hoarding them for now and might get around to finishing one of them once I retire, society collapses entirely, or the current rate of COVID infection in New South Wales prompts another lockdown.

Yeah, I can't believe they had the whole TR trilogy for free. That's crazy! Shadow is the only one I didn't have. I went ahead and snagged all 3 so I could have them all on Epic.

 

[Mazer]

Shadow is the only one I didn't have. I went ahead and snagged all 3 so I could have them all on Epic.

Same and Same! Haven't even finished Rise yet.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

Same and Same! Haven't even finished Rise yet.

Same! Lol

I finished and loved TR 2013 a few years ago. It was great. Later, I bought Rise and played it for a while, but never finished it. I'll probably have to pick it back up and finish it now since I have Shadow now.

 

[Pifanjr]

Got to play a few hours of Warhammer 2 today. I started a new Vortex campaign as Repanse. I had been reading up on some strategies and one of the things mentioned was to recruit additional lords to follow around your main lord, as Bretonnia doesn't get an upkeep penalty based on the number of lords and they're very strong units. This worked very well right up until I attacked the Skaven and they ambushed the two lone lords, preventing them from being reinforced and killing both. Bastards.

Other than that, it's going very well. I killed the first generic Vampire Count faction easily and killed Arkhan by ambushing his main army. Skaven gave me one tough fight I scraped through fairly well. I took one of the Tomb King cities and a Lizardmen army took the other. Then Sudenburg attacked my Dwarven allies and taught me the lesson to always have your main army in the middle, as only three armies can reinforce and you want your main army to be one of those.

The autoresolve for that battle said it would be a close defeat and I managed to turn it into a close victory, somehow without losing a single unit, though a bunch of them had run off the battlefield and/or lost almost all their models by the end. Good times.

 

[mainer]

I've having a hard time with my current game, Neverwinter Nights EE. Not hard in a combat sense, but I just can't get as immersed as I thought I would. I haven't played NWN and it's DLCs since way back when I initially installed them from CDs years ago, and I remember loving it (or at least liking it), but most things feel like a giant step backward from the BG 1 & 2 games that I played earlier this year. There was emotional involvement on my part in the BG games, but so far in NWN I've yet to feel any attachment to the characters or story.

Some things that are bugging me:
1- There's no real detail to the world, the environment, or the maps. There's no real sense of exploration, tile sets ( I think that's the term) are repeated frequently with many areas having the same layout, and interior furnishings are bland; nothing looks lived in.

2-NPCs & Companions have almost no personality. I don't care about them, I don't even care about my own character. And companions aren't really companions that you find along your travels, as in the BG games, they're hirelings. And you can only have one, although I think that changes in the DLCs.

3-Which brings me to combat: there is really no strategy involved that I can see. There is no access to your "hireling's" inventory or equipped items, and very minimal control over them in combat. Plus having only one hireling is a huge disadvantage compared to having a party of 6, or even 4. It's near impossible to counter every combat situation with only 2 people.

There are other things, but those are my major annoyances at present. I've only got about 18 hrs invested so far, so maybe things will change. I'm going to try to stick with it for the rest of the year (Ha! That's easier to say when there's only about 11 hrs left), as I really hate giving up on a game.

I've noticed several of you mentioning Dishonored 1, and I noticed that's sitting in my TPB pile from a Steam Sale a few years ago. I might end up trying that out.

 

[Zloth]

Tomb Raider 1: Fun action game, but really didn't play like a Tomb Raider game at all. It's fun. Just pretend it's somebody who happens to have the same name as Lara Croft. Story is by-the-numbers generic action stuff, though the island and its effects are interesting.

Tomb Raider 2 (Rise): Best of the 3, IMHO. Good game play, good story, Lara starts becoming more Lara'ish (that is so a word, quit underlining it in red, spell checker!), and you get to toss some chickens around as a bonus. Great set-up for the mysterious Trinity organization.

Tomb Raider 3 (Shadow): Excellent game play, fun area to explore, and easily the stupidest story in any game. Not the worst - the story is still somewhat entertaining - but it's also a story showing that the authors didn't know/care about the ramifications of the setting they created. The game is very much worth playing but be prepared for some epic facepalms.

@mainer Yeah, the first NWN was kinda meh. That was the one with the plague, though, wasn't it? You should be much better at handling that then we were at the time!

 

[Mazer]

I've having a hard time with my current game, Neverwinter Nights EE.

The lack of party control (or a party) makes combat in NWN feel a bit chaotic at times. And the overly simplistic combat encounters in the base campaign certainly don't help matters.

I'd actually recommend ditching the OG campaign entirely, seeing as it was mainly a showcase of the content in the editor, and instead concentrating on the DLC campaigns which are much better put together and do a great job of taking a level 1 character up to level 40, as well as implementing some basic control over your henchmen in terms of equipment and combat AI. Emphasis being on basic. Some of the newer official DLC campaigns are pretty decent too, Darkness Over Daggerford feels like a fully fledged RPG on its own, with an overworld map and everything.

If you're able to find your feet and get more comfortable with the systems and combat, I'd also highly recommend one particular fan made campaign, and a contender for my favourite RPG of all time: Swordflight. Using a traditional forgotten realms setting, and based mainly in the underused region of Calimport, it has the best encounter design I've experienced in NWN, hard as nails but so finely tuned and deeply satisfying to play through. It also has better writing than most professionally developed games, is packed with reactivity that acknowledges your class and race as well as plot choices, class specific quest lines and rewards, and is four chapters in so far.

I also had a great time with The Aielund Saga, another big multi chapter campaign set in an original world that the modder has actually since made into a series of fantasy novels. It's also much easier than Swordflight, and if not quite as polished then extremely close. Some quality of life mods are also packed in which help it to feel distinct from other NWN content.

 

[Ryzengang]

Right now I'm mostly just trying to tie up some loose ends. Currently focusing on Psychonauts 2 as I have been at partial completion for quite a long time now. Overall it is a great game that has a lot going for it. The writing is very good and the art style is good and consistent. Ironically, I think the platforming is probably the weakest part of the entire game.

Death Stranding is another loose end but it is a weird one and I'm not sure how I'm going to proceed with it. I enjoyed playing it and I appreciate how unique it is, but when I boot up my computer I simply never feel like going back to it. I can't really explain why exactly; it is a strange situation but I just can't get back to it. I don't know if it's because I appreciate the game moreso than actually liking or what the case is. Nonetheless, I am considering just dropping it all together because I need storage space and I have a huge number of games to get to. Not sure yet.

 

[Zloth]

I enjoyed playing it and I appreciate how unique it is, but when I boot up my computer I simply never feel like going back to it. I can't really explain why exactly; it is a strange situation but I just can't get back to it.

I get that a lot (maybe even every time) if I leave a game I enjoy for another game I enjoy even more. I finish the other game, look at the game I was playing before, and.... meh. If I start the game up and play it, though, the feeling vanishes in a few minutes, and I'm hooked again.

 

[mainer]

@mainer Yeah, the first NWN was kinda meh. That was the one with the plague, though, wasn't it? You should be much better at handling that then we were at the time!

Definitely, "meh", to me; and also a disappointment in immersion compared to the BG games. Weird how the whole "plague" scenario in games, as well as movies, has a bit more meaning today with all the BS the world has had to deal with in the past 2 years.

I had to bail on NWN yesterday, though I left it installed (it's only about 10gb), and I may take @Mazer 's advice and try the DLCs or the mods he mentioned. Before I do that though, I just feel I need a change of pace. I downloaded Dishonored (and was surprised the game was less than 8gb) so that's a possibility. It's not quite time for a Skyrim SE or Fallout 4 replay (though I feel them calling), or I might do a replay of Elex, which I planned on doing before the release of Elex 2 on March 1st anyway.