The Currently Playing & Random Game Thoughts Thread (21 August to 27 August)

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I haven't been playing a lot of the PC side of things. Played a bit of Deep Rock Galactic with a friend recently and that's always a good time, though. I've been mostly playing Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition on my Switch and it's a really great game. I'll still be playing that for awhile. Luckily, summer should be winding down here relatively shortly, so hopefully I can start to make some progress on my PC backlog. Red Dead Redemption 2 has been in my backlog for ages and I'd really like to get to it this winter.
 
After the first race, the game offered me a great deal on a pack of something. I could pay $19.99 if I really wanted to, but $49.99 was the better deal. I thought WWWD (what would @WoodenSaucer do?) and decided not to buy anything.
I'm glad I could be a positive influence and save you some cash. :D

BTW, if you want to tell your story, private message me. I won't judge you.
 
Aug 23, 2022
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Playing Forza, but I may be getting to the end of that. I'm finding myself less and less motivated. I may stop playing for awhile (or maybe not) until the last DLC comes out.

Playing Solasta and really enjoying that. I need to check the difficulty because last night I one-shot a mini-boss. Of course, he was flying, and my Wizard hit him with his best spell, which not only did a lot of damage, but caused him to fall, and he took a lot of fall damage. Still doesn't seem right to me. I just started to play since this was my second time with the game, and I never did check to see what difficulty I had it on. I must be on some sort of "story" mode or something. But I had to quit right after the fight, so I haven't checked it yet.

@Brian Boru has previously recommended that I check out Gas Station Simulator and Lawn Mowing Simulator because he knows I like boring games, and as luck would have it, both of them have been in Humble Choice within the last 6 months, so I'll probably go ahead and try them, although I did previously play demos for each, and they were too boring even for me.
So for some reason, Windows no longer recognizes any apps as being on my D: drive. Everything shows up in File Manager, but if you try to run or uninstall an app, it doesn't show as existing on that drive. Mostly the drive just has secondary backups and Game Pass games. I guess I'm just going to manually delete the games, reinstall them and see if it works.

Edit: It won't let me delete the games. Just going to format the drive. My backups are already mirrored elsewhere.

wow! awesome
 
This looked promising right up until the MMO part:

View: https://youtu.be/anZtoPo2Fpw
Just damn. When they said they were making a Dune survival game, I got all excited. Now I couldn't care less.

They need to make a new SP/Co-op survival game. Conan Exiles is excellent, but everyone wants that sweet PvP money. Funcom has this listed as MMO/Online PvP on Steam. Ugh ugh ugh. Welcome to Rust with spice,

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Playing some no-mods Total War Warhammer 3 Immortal Empires campaign. We're playing on Hard, and I'm playing a new faction and screwing it up royally. These new Chaos guys are going to struggle for money, that's for sure. I played for 2 hours and had one sub-20-unit army (not a great one, either) and, of course, I have my one city that I can do anything with. It's tier 3 now and protected by two generals, two heroes and the garrison. I'm at war with Naggarond and every Kislev faction. One decent army could come in and end the game at any time by attacking my non-garrisoned general with lightning strike and then taking the city. I guess if I were quick I could get my main army back and retake it, but that seems unlikely. The real problem is that my main army isn't good enough to supply steady income. That could be changing in about 10 turns.
 
Want to know why EA pulls the crap they pull? Here's a copy/paste of an angry review of Madden 23:

spent about $600 and i dont have ♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥ madden meanwhile my buddy spends $200 and has an 87 ovr power house of a team

They release essentially exactly the same game as was on PC last year but with different rosters. It even has the same bugs as last year's game. And these two clowns spent an extra $800 buying players. But this is necessary if you want to play against other people, so we can assume the real cost of this lazy cash grab is $460 (taking an average of just these two players, and one of them is likely to keep spending). But that's only on PC. On console it's $470 because
game prices have stayed at $60 for so long that the long suffering publishers are finally raising the price to $70. I mean, $470. It's confusing because they say that game prices never increased despite going from $60 to $460 during that same period of time.

But what about other EA games? It's not as bad as with Madden and FIFA? Hey, The Sims 4 only costs $19.99 (plus $900 in DLC which I'm sure many have bought since it's been drip-fed over the years). Sure, Battlefield only had $40 in DLC--if you wanted Year One. That's right. The first season was extra. And it's only a multiplayer game. You can't tell me that game wasn't flat out $100.

But yeah, games have cost $60 for so long that I feel sorry for EA. They deserve more.

*end angry old man rant*
 
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Random thoughts:

What good does it do anyone to trap a player in the difficulty they chose when they started the game? I'm playing F1 2020. I just finished my third race (each race has 5 stages) and my average margin of victory has been somewhere in the neighborhood of 24 seconds. That's not fun. But can I raise the difficulty? Not without starting over, which is ridiculous.

______________

Creative Assembly's perpetual strategy of screwing up their launches by releasing partially finished games doesn't appear to have hurt them at all with TWW3. Last night they had close to 100k concurrent players when I checked and they even have 77k this morning. They were also 3rd and 4th in Steam's global sales chart.

I still say that TW Troy was killed by this practice.


___________________

The map of TWW3 is huge. The funny thing is that I don't know anything about Warhammer except what I've learned from playing the Total War games, and last night I finally saw the entire map and saw that it's essentially a map of Earth, which is kind of cool. 275 factions. Wow.
 
Creative Assembly's perpetual strategy of screwing up their launches by releasing partially finished games doesn't appear to have hurt them at all with TWW3. Last night they had close to 100k concurrent players when I checked and they even have 77k this morning. They were also 3rd and 4th in Steam's global sales chart.

I still say that TW Troy was killed by this practice.

I follow the Total War subreddit and I was very surprised to see that the release of Immortal Empires wasn't a complete dumpster fire, considering the release of the base game. It seems there's plenty of little things that were overlooked or should be tweaked, but it also seems they're acually on top of it now.
 
I follow the Total War subreddit and I was very surprised to see that the release of Immortal Empires wasn't a complete dumpster fire, considering the release of the base game. It seems there's plenty of little things that were overlooked or should be tweaked, but it also seems they're acually on top of it now.
There's a couple of things they've tweaked that I don't particularly care for, in particular the bottom row of the Lords' skills (where Lightning Strike is). This has completely upended my usual plan for leveling. The only bug that I've noticed so far (and I've only manually fought one battle) is that Felix and Gotrek showed up and I tried to recruit them, but it didn't work.
Thanks, that's a better response than I got from the "tech" people on Spectrum Support (and that was from just doing web searches, nothing like what they actually told me to do). I think I may already have a GMail account that I haven't used in a couple of years, so I'll dig up my old user-name/password to see what happens.

It's not that I love Windows Mail, I just like the convenience of logging onto my PC, and with one click I can check all my emails then get on with my life. No complications, no logins. Maybe it really is a Windows issue, but my last Windows update was back on 8/10, and the problem didn't manifest until 8/17. But thanks, I'll give it a shot, probably tomorrow, as I'm too burnt-out to deal with it today.
Speaking of crappy tech support, we have a company in town that people outsource their tech support to, and they will literally hire anyone who wants to work there, regardless of how tech savvy they are. All they do is look up your question in their tech manual and read off what it says you should do. I don't know what they do if that doesn't work.

Nvidia had great tech support the one time I contacted them, but that could have just been the guy I talked to, but he was extremely knowledgeable and helpful.
 
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Email convo split off to:

 

Zloth

Community Contributor
What good does it do anyone to trap a player in the difficulty they chose when they started the game?
Depends on the game and how they make it harder. If the game's hard mode is done by giving you weaker starting equipment, there's no point in changing it. If it's like FF7RI, then hard mode has major feature changes (xp earned faster, items don't work at all...) that you can't just switch on and off at will because it would mangle the balance. If they do it just by making more enemies per encounter, then changing difficulty outside of battle should be do-able but you couldn't do it mid-battle without making a mess.
 
Depends on the game and how they make it harder. If the game's hard mode is done by giving you weaker starting equipment, there's no point in changing it. If it's like FF7RI, then hard mode has major feature changes (xp earned faster, items don't work at all...) that you can't just switch on and off at will because it would mangle the balance. If they do it just by making more enemies per encounter, then changing difficulty outside of battle should be do-able but you couldn't do it mid-battle without making a mess.
Those are two very rare cases, and really don't apply to racing games. There's zero reason for most games not to let you change your difficulty, even it it does involve more than just more enemies.
 
Really, really random thoughts:

A woman from what is apparently a reality show friended me on Instagram and asked if I wanted to book her for any events. I told her I'd let her know. The only events I'm involved with that I can think of are things like showering, making myself a sandwich and picking Guido up from school. Do you think she would make me a sandwich?
 
So there I was, thinking: "How can I make Zed's life better?"
"Why?", you ask. Well, he's admitted recently that it's merely blessed.

@Brian Boru … knows I like boring games
Aha, inspiration! And guess what, it DOES ACTUALLY EXIST!! Zed, dear oppressed being, it gives me great pleasure to present to you:


PS read the review by Malutar :)

PPS comments re huge GPU usage, so possibility of some mining going on in the background. :(
 

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