Last Game You Played

I haven't played Morrowind even though a few of my friends swear by it. My parents didn't let me game until relatively late. I got a Game Boy Color when I was around six (which I used exclusively for Pokemon) and then a PS2 when I was 10. My first real open-world games didn't come until a few years later, though. That was Oblivion and Assassin's Creed. Those were huge departures from what I had played, and I fell madly in love. (This is ironic seeing as open-world games often garner an eye-roll from me today.) I've long considered going back to Morrowind, but the quality of life issues have stopped me. I suppose I could mod those out of existence, but then I'm not really experiencing the game.

Posted by: @theknightdamien

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Yeah, it would be good to see these types of games approached with passion again. I think that's why I like stuff like Elden Ring and Dragon's Dogma 2. For whatever faults they definitely have - they feel like games made and released and controlled by people that actually want to make a video game and have a clear idea of what that game should be. Bethesda, these days, very much feels like a company that isn't interested in making video games so much as they are a company interested in exploiting their existing capabilities to make as much money as possible - and that capability just happens to be 'making what technically qualifies as a video game.'

Maybe that seems like a small difference, but to me it's huge.

I don't think it's a small thing. It's exactly what we talk about in this thread all the time. As trite as it is, there's something to games crafted with love vs. those made with stock prices in mind. It's grandma's cookies vs. the plastic-packaged shit at the grocery store.

Mikey, your experience with Hollow Knight mirrored my own. A couple of years ago, I set out to play all the super acclaimed games I missed. I played the likes of BioShock, Shadow of the Colossus, Fallout 3 and New Vegas, Dragon Age, Spec Ops: The Line, Doom, The Stanley Parable, Undertale, and many more. I've crossed off basically every old game I could ever want to play. I beat most of them, but a few I tried and gave up on. Hollow Knight was a surprise retirement for me. Although I loved the atmosphere, the art style, and the music, the combat difficulty and trouble finding and filling in the map were too much for me. I even modded it and wasn't having fun. It took me a long time to realize that something can be great and not for me. Hollow Knight is one such game.

We're back!  Holy biscuits, we're back.  I've missed this thread.

Since the latest gap, I did in fact stick with and beat Hollow Knight.  It was a love/dislike pretty much the whole way but it did enough things right that it kept me invested.  I think I finished at about 84% so I definitely missed some stuff but don't have any desire to go back in and try to finish it all.  I'm happy to have stuck with it though, and I'll definitely pick up Silk Song whenever it comes out.

Next up was... Diablo IV.  I'm a huge Diablo fan.  I can still remember the day I downloaded the demo for D1 while I mowed the grass, running in to check every once in awhile to make sure it was still going (hurray for 1996 internet!).  I had a friend over for a sleepover that night and we played it the entire time.  I was blown away.  We didn't have a ton of money back then and pretty much only shopped at garage sales but I still managed to talk my mom into driving me an hour one-way to the closest store that was selling it so I could buy it that summer.  She even opened a store credit card to save me like 10%.  I couldn't guess how many hours I sunk into that game but it was definitely hundreds.  My hype for D2 was huge after that, and I have very fond memories of splitting the cost with my friend (again, not much money) so we could alternate summer nights playing it, staying up way too late to maximize our time.  Then the huge gap until Diablo 3.  I remember the announcement trailer cellphone footage, the roar from the crowd.  I remember watching the gameplay reveal trailer on a Saturday morning, just giddy that a new Diablo game was coming out.  I left for work early on release day so I could pick up the game.  I didn't even have a computer that could run it but my boss was gracious enough to let me install it on my work comp.  I still have a pic on my phone of the game on the shelf of Target: I wanted to remember that moment.  ...Turns out the game wasn't quite what I was hoping for but I still really enjoyed it, and lugged my work iMac home every night for a few weeks so I could play it until I got a new computer.  To Blizzard's credit they did end up delivering a pretty darn solid game over the years, and I've bought and re-bought it like seven times across different systems.  So yeah, those are my bonafides.  I likely have 1000s of hours in the franchise, and many more stories I could share.

So, Diablo IV.  When they announced that it was online only I pretty much wrote it off then and there.  I hate that shit.  I don't ever feel like I own my save file, let alone the game, when it's online-only.  I've had too many saves screwed up or deleted in other games when there's an update or the servers go offline.  Plus, the Diablo II remake was coming out first so I convinced myself that that would be good enough, that would scratch my Diablo itch.  And it did!  I loved that game, played it into Hell, then put it down for awhile to play other new things (but that save is still sitting there, waiting for me to come back and keep going!).  Fast forward to a month ago when Walmart put D4 on sale for $20... AND I found out you don't actually have to have Playstation+ to play.  FINE.  I'll give it a shot.

It's good.  Not great, but good.  There's a TON to do, it's way bigger than previous games.  I think I saw that there are like 38 side quests to do in the first region alone, and side quests aren't even the only non-story thing to do: there are strongholds, dungeons, mini events, etc.  It's actually fairly intimidating.  The skill tree is pretty cool, though a bit overwhelming and confusing to plan out.  Thankfully there are very cheap respec options (so far), so experimentation is easy.  Before yesterday I would have said the looting is kind of broken, but they actually released a giant patch yesterday that pretty much solely addreses how loot is handed.  It apparently focuses a lot of the affixes, and from what I saw in my brief play last night it's definitely better.  But I'm still getting rare drops probably 75% of the time, which is broken IMO.  In D2 (when rares were introduced) you'd get base or magical items probably 95% of the time until you geared up with some magic find.  In D4 I find rares waaay more often than base or magic.  Heck, base, unmodified items are probably the equivalent of D2 rares, they almost never drop.  Also, before the patch I found three Legendary items in my ~20 hours of play.  I played for about two hours last night and found four.  That's fun, but if that rate continues then they'll have kind of broken that as well.  I want them to drop more often than pre-patch but post-patch is too much.  And I know once I get into more end-game stuff the drops will skew even more in that direction and I'll be swimming in Legendaries.  It's possible end-game introduces new stuff though, I know very little about this game.  It's been pretty fun though, and though the enemy scaling is really frustrating I think I'm starting to gear and level up enough to where I'm getting ahead of it a bit, even though I still think it's dumb (if I got back to the starting area I shouldn't be running into enemies that are the same level as me!).

/end essay.  I told you I missed this thread.

Same, honestly. I know there are only like four of us who regularly post here, but it's the perfect place for a gaming hobbyist.

My Diablo journey is much shorter. A few of my friends are huge Diablo/PoE fans and finally convinced me to try an ARPG with the Diablo II remake. It was fun, but decidedly not my type of game. I was somehow convinced to buy Diablo IV anyway, and I put probably 50 hours in. I played a summoner necromancer (severely underpowered at launch) and didn't have much fun with it. I'm glad to see you're back to a game you love, though. That's been my journey with the Halo franchise. They somehow have me back playing competitive multiplayer shooter in my 30s.

A few weeks ago, I found myself looking for something to play. The bug got the best of me, though, and now I have way too much. I bought the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Baldur's Gate I and II, Hades II, and Fallout New Vegas. My job has been crazy, so I haven't put much time into any of them, but my immediate takeaway is that Hades II is phenomenal and Baldur's Gate is very old.

interesting, I just discovered Diablo Immortal while it is rather simple it is also cross platform so I could continue to play my character from PC on my phone!

I'll echo this being a great space for the gaming crew. Maybe -because- there's so few of us? It just feels very chill. There's room for our conversations to breathe, and we haven't been infiltrated by any GAMUR-BROS or other dipshits that ruin the space with overt and very targeted negativity. I genuinely ONLY talk about gaming here, with you guys. Besides, of course, talking with my son and my wife - also both gamers. No interest in going anywhere else for this kind of talk.

During the blip I finished Dragon's Dogma 2 and I still have kind of mixed feelings about it, but I lean towards the positive. That being.. the negative didn't affect me enough to hamper my ability to have fun here. I had a LOAD of fun playing the game, despite frustrations and problems with how they handled certain elements. I definitely wish they would make certain changes. But I had a great deal of fun and looked cool doing it almost the entire time.

Thing is... there is kind of a big unexpected negative for me. I was actually sort've excited to go into New Game+ upon beating the game. Got to keep all the gear and levels and vocation upgrades and everything, so I got to basically redo the game looking awesome and having super cool gear and all that stuff. But also they did NOTHING with New Game+.
So like... I'm massively overlevelled for practically every aspect of this game now. There's zero challenge. Hell, my PAWNS are now high enough level that I don't even need to fight to win in almost every instance. So the only thing to do in NG+ is grind for money and the occasional crafting piece to finish upgrading/buying every piece of gear in the game. And like.. why? I quite literally have gear, at this point, for every Vocation, that's leveled to the point where I'm virtually unbeatable anyway. What's even the point?

I'm generally not one to ask for a 'hard mode' or anything. But .. something? The base game does not have any difficulty slider and the default difficulty is, even for a kind of novice gamer like me, pretty easy within a couple of hours of starting up. So if I can breeze though -most- enemies at level 30, what the FUUUUUUCK am I supposed to do when playing against the -same- enemies at level 90, with fully upgraded fuck-off-end-game gear?

Huge bummer. But we'll see what they do with any potential DLC to make this more interesting.

I want to get back into Elden Ring for the DLC but I just.. can't yet. I'm still butthurt about it. So I re-downloaded GR: Breakpoint and I've been playing that a bit on Immersive Mode and it's definitely a lot more fun than the base game was. Still, I'm sorry to say, the worst Ghost Recon game possibly ever, and definitely of the last three console generations. But it's something relatively mindless I can cruise around in while deciding which game I want to take seriously next. There's quite a few options either already out there or coming soon.

I didn't go back to Days Gone because I realized I didn't give a single shit about that game, and I don't have time for games I just feel nothing about.

Also.. my PS5 is NOT old, and my main controller already has developed drift. The spare controller I bought refurbished from EB Games a few months ago dies after about 45 minutes no matter how long it charges for. So I can barely even play my PS5 right now, which is what I have Breakpoint on. Pretty upset about that. I don't remember having this many controller problems (I've had loads of problems on both my systems) in any previous generation.

After beating Rise of the Ronin, I went and played Stellar Blade. Although I had issues with Rise’s game mechanics and  overall game play feel, I was so happy that it taught me how to counter moves like crazy because that is also an absolute must in Stellar Blade. Perfect counters and perfect parry is the name of the game for Stellar Blade.  It’s been awhile since I’ve died numerous times against bosses trying to figure their attack pattern but Rise and Stellar shoved that right in my face. And this is on Normal mode  I’ve never heard of Shift Up or what other games they made, but Stellar Blade was a nice surprise. Overall it feels like a mix of Rise if the Ronin and Nier Automata. The main character Eve has some close similarities to Nier’s 2B

Hoping for a sequel as there were obvious loose ends. Also and despite the controversy about her alt outfits, I am hoping the next game makes her alt outfits actually affect her stats so the player may be incentivized to use different outfits in certain situations or environments. As of now her alt suits don’t affect anything at all except being eye candy….but at least Shift Up didn’t lock most of her suits behind micro transactions or whatever although there may be a couple.  I’m into new game plus which unlocked Hard Mode and still having fun because I’ve now upgrades that I can use to bully these earlier bosses that made me spend hours trying to beat them. Muhahaha!

Nier is one of the only all-time great games I haven't tried. It's not exactly up my alley, but it is adjacent to it. I'll probably break down and try it at some point.

@theknightdamien 

I have had stick drift with my Switch. Even sent it in for a free repair to Nintendo. Amybe 6 months later that drift has returned. These things are made so cheap now. I haven't had this issue with my XSX yet. Looking forward to NCAA 25 

@ibentmyman-thing

@shadmann Yeah, it's gotten pretty bad in my experience. So far one PS5 controller that's only like 8-9 months old or something? At least 4 controllers from my XBox One/X and now a controller for my XBox X Series as well.

So just in the end of the last generation and current generation, I've got through 6 or 7 controllers. I don't know what it's like where you guys are - but to bring these controllers to a store to have them fixed costs about 40 dollars. To buy a refurbished controller at EB costs about 45 dollars. So there's basically no point in trying to fix them.
Not sure when the fuck GAME CONTROLLERS became disposable, but it's pretty bullshit if you ask me.

Total BS for how much these cost. My PS5 is still sitting in the closet waitng for the jb. I hope mine lasts once I start using it. Never had an issue with previous ps controllers. But things seem so cheaply made now.

I've been neglecting my favorite thread.  I apologize, life has been busy and my video game time (and forum time) has been in short supply!

@tsi I'm assuming you've tried the two Divinity: OS games, right?  I've not played Baldur's Gate 3 but I think they'd scratch that same itch much more than the classic BG games.  They are indeed quite old 🙂  I want to be excited about Hades II but having just given up on the first game I just can't.  It looks like more of the same.

@theknightdamien yikes, that's some rough luck with controllers.  Maybe I've been lucky with my PS4 controller but I've had zero problems with it despite putting probably 1000ish hours into it.  My Switch on the other hand... those controllers are pretty garbage.  Joycon drift isn't an "if", it's a "when".  Thankfully Nintendo still offers free repairs, they even cover shipping.  I've got two on the way back to me right now in fact.  My Pro controller has terrible drift too though, and I'm not sure they offer free repairs for those (even though I think the cause is pretty much the same as with the joycons).

As I mentioned, my own gaming time is pretty limited right now.  As such it was extremely frustrating to be greeted by a mandatory update (online only, yay!) for Diablo IV not once.  Not twice.  But THREE TIMES out of four that I sat down to play.  That's three updates in about a two week span, each of which took long enough for me to not be able to play at all in my short window.  I was already struggling to stay interested and that was finally enough for me to just give up, at least for now.  The patch I talked about in my last post did fix some things but it made the game waaaay too easy.  I went from dying to big mobs or bosses fairly often to dying once in probably 8+ hours, and that was because I simply wasn't paying attention.  I started joining mini raids (of a sort) even though I'm nowhere near end game geared just because I knew there was basically no chance I was going to die.  So the game became a very monotonous slog of walking into a group of enemies, activating the same 2-3 skills, and then rinse/repeat for every single encounter.  There was zero tactics or fear of dying, I could just run through everything.  I'm playing on the hardest difficulty available to me, too.  They've got the higher difficulties gated behind either beating the campaign or choosing to ignore it completely.  Great job Blizzard.

I went ahead and played TMNT Shredder's Revenge after that because I just needed a quick palette cleanser.  And it was definitely quick, I beat it in a couple days.  It was great, though beat-em-ups are never at their best when played solo.  The fan service was fantastic though, and I look forward to hopefully playing it with my son some day.

Now I'm playing Steamworld Dig 2.  I enjoyed the first one last year and the sequel is supposed to be more of the same, just better and expanded upon.  So far it is as advertised, which is fine.  It hasn't gripped me but it should be short enough for me to see it through to the end.

There are a bunch of games coming in the next month that I'm really excited about so I'm hesitant to get invested in anything big.  Grounded, Dave the Diver, Gothic... if these live up to my own personal hype levels then I'm going to be eating good for a bit!

Someone needs to grab the Elden Ring DLC so they can report back on how it is. 

I've heard great things about Steamworld Dig, and my fiance is about to start Dave the Diver. I've got you covered on the Elden Ring DLC.

I played about half of DOS2 with some friends before we gave up. It's not as forgiving or polished as BG3, which makes it a tough sell. Still, it's a great game that I want to return to one day.

I probably game for about 20 hours per week on average. That's down to five per week for the last few months, so I haven't had much to remark on here.

Half of it is that my job's been hectic. The other half is that I've spent a ton of time playing (or planning for, really) a game much older than anything we talk about here. KD will likely be pleased to hear that I've been obsessively planning my first D&D campaign for later this year. My friends and I got serious about D&D last year, and since running my first one-shot last month, I went from someone who likes D&D to someone who loves it.

For anyone curious, the campaign is a political assassination plot set in a homebrew world. It's mostly a journey from one side of a continent to another, so I'm running it as an old-fashioned point crawl. I'm looking to blow my player's socks off, so it's required an intensive amount of research. Despite a ton of writing and researching, it never feels like homework.

On the actual video game side, I'm still hopelessly obsessed with Balatro.

@mikeysee  The problem with beat-em-ups is that they can be good and reasonably short, or long and awful. Seems like a truly good one always wraps up right around that time where you feel like you could go one or two more levels. (And the bad ones feel like they should have ended one or two levels ago.)
It's the weirdest little trick of the mind. I remember finishing up Shredder's Revenge and really feeling like I wanted to keep playing, but I also kind of knew that I'd end up turning it off and not finishing it if it had gone on too much longer. Even when they announced the DLC (which ended up being kind of shit, actually), I was excited about maybe more levels and also worried that it would stretch things just a bit too far.

Like TSI, I'm also getting the Elden Ring DLC. And I've beaten Mohg (sp?), so I'll have access to the content immediately. Buuuuuut.. I haven't turned the game back on yet since I rage-quit. So while I will buy the DLC immediately, I don't actually know how fast I'll get to it.

@tsi  I am legitimately stoked about your D&D game and I want to know more about it as it progresses. I'm tempted to caution against putting too much work into it since most games don't last long and most players are so resistant to railroading that half of what you prepare will end up in the garbage. But you know your players so you probably have your reasons. I hope it goes well!

For video game stuff... a month later and I'm still chipping away at GR: Breakpoint and I'm still convinced it's the worst GR game ever. Definitely way better than it was at launch but.. yikes. There's just so many things that aren't good. Even simple things. Like this is supposed to be the same protagonist as in Wildlands, but you actually can't (necessarily) make him look like your Wildlands character. Why? Just... why?

I will also go to my fucking GRAVE screaming the opinion that Ghost Recon games do not need to be open world games, and in fact suffer from it. Traversal is time-consuming, boring, and janky. There's no interest set-piece battles because there really can't be. The sections that are forced feel SO MUCH WORSE because of how obvious they have to be about it in order to stop you, in an open world, from doing open-world things. The bloated map is Ubisofted with worthless busy work - including actually locking content like weapons and weapon accessories behind said busy work.

I liked Future Soldier okay. But the best GR game was GRAW2. I will not accept any criticism of that statement. Tight, controlled missions that were actually crafted for you to experience, rather than something that kind of looks and feels procedurally-generated to keep you grinding away.

I'm shitting on it a lot, and rightly so, but it's not like Breakpoint isn't fun at all. It's just not nearly as fun as it could be, and probably would have cost -less- to make if it were MORE fun. And the open world nature has caused all kinds of issues that just make it so much less fun. Like, at one point, I had to do an escort mission involving getting into a helicopter and destroying caches from the sky at various glorified bandit camps.
I clipped a tree at the last place (because you have to fly super low to avoid SAMs) and my helicopter.... turned completely sideways, crashed into the side of a building, and stuck to it. All I could do was just exit, but then I fell between the building and helicopter and my team couldn't get to me to revive, nor could the enemies get to me to kill me until they -eventually- blew up the armored helicopter.
But hold on, it gets better... because I had made it to the last location, I was really far away from the starting point of the mission. Which is where the escort-person respawned and where the attack heli respawned. But it was not where I respawned. I respawned close to the area I died, which is just what this game does.

So, because I'm in immersive mode without the ability to call vehicles from wherever I happen to be... I had to trek like 5km back to the beginning of the mission. That's the kind of dumb problem created by forced open worlds.

That being said, I am SO FUCKING EXCITED that Dragon Age will not be an open world game. It looks like it's going to be a LOT of fun and everything I've seen from developer Q&As has me more and more excited about how good this game might actually be. Fellas... no micro-transactions. No EA connect to play. No multiplayer. It's just a turn it on and play it RPG. Fuck yeah.

Also.. we're finally getting Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and I am wildly excited about that as well.

Hearing that you like Kingdom Come: Deliverance is the least surprising thing imaginable.

I forget that we can talk about upcoming games here, too. The June video game trade shows have been losing steam since E3 was on its way out the door, but I did see some stuff to get excited about.

I'm a big BioWare fan, but I'm not a big Dragon Age fan. I only played Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age: Inquisition a few years ago. Origins, though extremely dated, has great worldbuilding and story. I liked Inquisition even more thanks to marked gameplay improvements. It's probably one of my 50 or so favorite games. Nothing about it blew me away, though. I'm cautiously optimistic about Veilguard. That said, I wish they'd come up with another enemy type. I'm sick of fighting demons in every game.

I'm a huge Obsidian fan for the same reasons I like BioWare. I've had my eye on Avowed since they announced it forever ago. Skyrim-lite with a great story and real voice acting? That one can't come out soon enough.

My only experience with Doom came in the 2016 reboot. It was another game that I liked but didn't love. I'm fucking pumped for Doom: The Dark Ages, though. Who knew the franchise just needed an Army of Darkness-style setting shift?

While I have less patience for walking sims now than I did even a few years ago, I can't wait for Mixtape. The vibes are immaculate.

Finally, I grew up playing the Fable series. With Soulslike games taking over the action RPG space, Fable is a breath of fresh air. Imagine laughing while playing a video game. Just imagine it.

As a quick aside about my D&D campaign, you're right. I'm trying to keep player burnout in mind. Our group seems pretty committed to playing--we've been playing for almost a year now and more members of our group have expressed interest in DMing going forward. I hope that's a sign of dedicated players.

I should be clear that when I say research, I mean learning how to run a fun game. I'm not writing a textbook of in-game lore. I could probably explain my homebrew religions and world history in less than three minutes. I was initially planning an 18-month odyssey, but after watching some YouTube videos, I learned that finishing stuff feels awfully good, too. Now I'm planning to run it for 3-6 months. It's a lesson I wish our current DM would learn.

I'm hoping the point crawl gives them enough freedom to choose their own adventure. We shall see.

@tsi Yeah, the Dragon Age franchise, for better and for worse, really screams its roots of basically being a video game of a D&D campaign. I love that we're basically playing one disjointed story, in a way. It very much feels like every game is you and your buddies sitting down at the table again together and doing your best to pick up where the last campaign left off. It feels properly connected in a way that a lot of sequel/legacy games do not.

Hooowever... yep; part of that is that you're basically always fighting the same bad guys, because these are the bad guys that inhabit this world. So I'm torn. It's repetitive, but it also reinforces the idea of a living 'realistic' world rather than the typical fantasy world inhabited by ten thousand different types of monsters where you can fight a new thing every 300 feet of forest trail.

Then again, I'm also pre-disposed to defend Dragon Age because I genuinely love the series and the world so much.

I have no interest in Avowed, and I think it's specifically because of the Skyrim comparisons. I, very famously, despise Skyrim. I'm also not stoked about Fable, but I think it's just because I was never blown away by the previous ones. The only thing I really remember is that you're basically always forced to be born with the same hair color and you have to dye it to change it, and I thought that was a really fucking stupid way to do character customization rather than just letting someone.. do it. And within an hour or so I turned that game off and never went back to it.
In short; It's really easy for me to get excited about a game, but it's also really easy for a game to lose me forever.

Doom: Dark Ages looks awesome. I never beat the last Doom, because I fucking hate 1st person platforming traversal SO much, and I also have grown to hate when games have grappling hooks because grappling hooks, 99% of the time, are fucking stupid as fucking fuck. But I enjoyed the hell out of Doom right up until I didn't, so I'll definitely play this eventually.

For D&D: If you don't already, I HIGHLY recommend watching Matt Colville's Running the Game videos on YouTube. That guy is an absolute legend of the industry and his advice is always excellent. Sounds like you're on the right path, though. Totally agree with shorter adventures with actual endings. That constant feeling of progression is so much better than whatever you might get out of actually completing some sweeping, massive event that takes so long to finish that half of your players have stopped showing up. I don't think there's enough of us left on Fwoosh for anyone to police how we use this thread so like.. feel free to keep updating us here.
Only because I can't imagine it's worth trying to have a D&D thread. Although feel free - I'd read it and participate as much as a person that doesn't actively play anymore can.