Last Game You Played

Recently got a retro handheld. Been reliving the classics. The Super Star Wars trilogy on SNES.

I promised an Elden Ring DLC update. Honestly, I've played just a few hours. While the environments and level design are on point, the difficulty is not. This is the first time in a long time that I've considered shelving a game I paid decent money for.

While I could grind my way up in the base game, that doesn't seem to be as much of an option in the DLC. Your defense is directly correlated to a new DLC-based currency. They're hidden throughout the world like flask upgrades in the base game. The simple solution is to search the map for the currency (Scadutree Fragments), but exploration is such a chore that I haven't been able to force myself to do it. Even the most basic enemies can kill me in three hits, and I'm level 160 with 60 vitality. I've also skipped multiple optional bosses because they were kicking my ass. That's not how I played the base game, and I'm frustrated that the game is pigeonholing me into that playstyle in the DLC.

I'm still playing Balatro. I'm almost 60 hours in and don't intend to stop anytime soon.

I've also been playing two D&D-based roguelikes: Baldur's Gate 3 with the Trials of Tav mod and Stolen Realm. Both are absolutely fantastic. I wouldn't have guessed that D&D-style turn-based combat would lend itself to a roguelike, but it's surprisingly fast-paced, strategic, and addictive.

I'm maybe a little over halfway done with the Elden Ring DLC. It took me a little bit to retrain my fingers to cooperate with my brain, but since it hasn't even been a year since I beat the base game it didn't take long to fall back in. It still wavers between dick-twizzling hard and oddly simple.

One thing I've done more than I did in the base game is switch weapons/talismans/tears way more often. I stayed with Bloodhound's Fang and the Ghiza's Wheel for most of the base game and it worked fine, but this game seems to want you to tailor your weaponry to the bosses more. I was getting brutally murdered over and over by one particular boss and feeling so much rage my head felt like a ketchup bottle full of aneurysm before I realized that I needed to switch to a thoroughly bleed heavy build--with a much further reach than Bloodhound--and then the next time through was the end of that assbutt. Dragons all require specific weapons, one of which you get in this DLC that makes dragons your bitch.

It's infuriating, but it's fun. Not like, fun fun, but the kind of fun that makes you rethink your choices in life.

I've recently gone back to playing Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, I forgot how frustrating some parts get, when going through it. lol

I finished Shadow of the Erdtree. The final boss,

was, as they said in biblical times, the biggest sack of syphilis-infected drunken lizard-tit that has ever been put into a game. It's like it actively eroded my ability to recognize simple mechanical patterns while also impregnating me with enough stroke-inducing seizure lights to populate an entire small city with babies made out of frontal lobotomy. I died more to that boss than I have to anything ever and that's including the ghosts in Pac-Man, and I have played more games of Pac-Man than I have blinked my eyes.

 

And then...

 

 

AND THEN

 

After playing for 8 straight hours Friday night (yes, you heard right, I played for eight hours and died for eight hours before giving up, because I got dizzy and actually thought I was going to have a brain hemorrhage because after playing for that long my brain felt like it was too big for my skull, and I was pretty sure I could smell colors. but I kept thinking I was going to beat him in the next playthrough...and then the next, and next...fuck) I woke up the next day and watched a tutorial where the person used rot pots.

 

AND I BEAT THAT LITTLE SPHINCTER-LICKER IN FIFTEEN MINUTES.

 

As soon as I beat him a guy popped out of the Playstation and handed me the Biggest Idiot Alive Award.

 

So yeah. Done.

 

Can't wait for the next From software game, because masochism.

I didn't know who the final boss was. Others might appreciate a spoiler tag on that.

Sorry, I didn't know it wasn't common knowledge.

No worries, I'm not precious about spoilers.

@basil-elks have you seen the growing buzz about a Soul Reaver 1 & 2 remaster?  This is my favorite game series ever, I'm SO EXCITED about the possibility of new content after all these years.

@fuzzybluedemon Yes, I can't wait, and also yes, same, Soul Reaver is my 2nd favorite game, ever, the 1st being "The Saboteur", but the franchise/series is amazing. Hopefully they will also remaster the Blood Omen games, and also Defiance.

I have complex feelings about Soul Reaver getting a remaster. On the one hand, that's really cool and that's an amazing game series. On the other hand, I don't play them because I hate puzzle games so I've actually only ever watched them being played. On the other other hand, Soul Reaver 1 and 2 are, to my mind, basically worthless without the rest of the series. It's like an announcement that they're going to do a remaster of just Mass Effect 2. Like.. okay..?

I'm interested to see what they do with it. Though I'm not convinced a remaster does lots for it because even the gameplay is very dated. Feels like the kind of thing that needs a remake, not a remaster.

Again, though, the entire series has an amazing story and I'm all for it getting back out there for new and old fans to enjoy.

I'm still picking at Ghost Recon: Breakpoint whenever I have time. Sort've committed to not starting anything else until Dragon Age comes out, which I am absolutely stoked for. And my other MUCH-anticipated game, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 got pushed to February. I'm actually a little relieved about that because it will give me time to actually enjoy Dragon Age before my next obsession hits.

I was originally planning on getting Shadow of the Erdtree to keep me busy until Dragon Age. But all the comments about how hard it is ended up convincing me not to spend the money. The base game is already hard enough for me and I don't actually like spending money to make myself stressed and angry.

Thread hasn't been active so hopefully you guys will forgive me a little rant.

Dragon Age is one of my favorite game series of all time, given that DAO and DAI are two of my favorite video games of all time. And I'm struggling because I really, really don't know how I feel about DAV. There's a lot of stuff that looks great. Some stuff that I'm ambivalent about like the art direction and the overly-cleanliness almost AI appearance of characters. They definitely look too clean and smoothed out, but it doesn't necessarily bother me.

I get why they wanted to do some redesigns to things like Darkspawn, and also they're using the world state as a narrative explanation for why things look different rather than just 'we wanted to pay an artist to redo stuff.' So that's fine.

But as a Warrior-player in basically ever RPG, I'm SUPER disappointed and actually kind of angry at the direction they took that class specifically.

First of all, I fucking hate dodge-rolling. I FUCKING HATE dodge-rolling. It's quite literally, and I mean this sincerely, one of the worst mechanics ever to be introduced to video games. It's fucking stupid and so incredibly hyper-unbelievable that it annihilates my suspension of disbelief basically all the time. I get that it's a staple of FromSoft games, but there's literally zero, fucking zero, reason why it needed to be imported into Dragon Age, of all fucking games. And guess who gets the dodge rolling? Warriors.

But that's not all folks.

A sword-and-boarder gets another one of the stupidest fucking things ever: shield throw. Yeah, just what I've always wanted in a medieval fantasy RPG - to play as Captain fucking America. Idiotic. Just, on every level, that's so stupid.

Also, based on all the gameplay previews, it really looks like Warrior has the honor and privilege of being the one class where basically all of the special abilities ignore your actual fucking weapons - a defining characteristic of your class, in favor of STUPID bullshit like Hulk-style ground pounding and foot slams, magic weapons that are not your weapon materializing in your hands for a single attack, etc etc.

I don't get it. It's like they made every possible shit decision for JUST the Warrior class and sidestepped the whole reason people play warriors by making them just another goofy dodge-rolling dumbass with magic powers where your actual chosen weapons are practically ancillary to your purpose instead of a major part of your actual build and style.

I hate it. I hate it so much. Especially when none of it is even remotely necessary or even in keeping with the choices or style of the 3 previous games.

(Obviously, these are judgements I'm making based on gameplay reveals, skill and ability reveals, etc, and not on actually playing the game - although it seems pretty obvious from the reveals that some of these things are deeply integrated and not exactly optional unless you just turn the difficulty down so you never have to use any abilities.)

I also hate that the specializations are tied thematically to factions instead of just being specializations in and of themselves. Instead of just being really good at sword-and-shield, you are good at sword-and-shield because of Grey Warden style combat, or some shit? That's fuckin' dumb as fuck and implies things about the game world and your character that I don't like.

The skill trees look pretty extensive, so it's possible that stuff like the shield throw is optional.

A friend of mine is a huge fan of old-school-style TTRPGs—Dungeon Crawl Classics, Old-School Essentials, Shadowdark, etc. As we play more modern RPGs (both tabletop and video games), his love for that stuff feels more and more anachronistic. D&D is basically a straight-up power fantasy now. It's less Conan and more Final Fantasy. It's about flashy moves and big abilities. D&D been moving in that direction for a while now, but video games have followed suit (or perhaps been trendsetters for D&D).

It seems like some games will have options for traditional sword & board and the flashier stuff. Off the top of my head, Elden Ring, Dragon's Dogma, and Elder Scrolls (as janky as it is) offer both. I think most games will be forced into a lane. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is obviously on the grittier, more realistic side, while Dragon Age is moving toward pure fantasy. If I had to pick, I'd pick the latter, but the flippy animations were the first thing I noticed about the new Dragon Age game. Honestly, it turned me off. It's one reason why I'm far more excited for Avowed than DAV. (The other is that I now trust Obsidian more than BioWare to deliver a great story.)

Speaking of Obsidian and old-school games, I'm trying to play through Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 before Avowed hits in February. I'm a big reader, so this is somewhat ironic, but I don't like much text in my video games. For that reason, it's been difficult to force myself to play it, but I have enjoyed the little I've played so far.

On my continued quest to play the most significant video games, I also picked up the Metal Gear Solid remaster. My only experience with MGS is MGS5. I thought MGS5 was great, but I don't think it represents the series well. I'm interested to check out the series' roots.

I generally only commit to one game at a time, but I might play MGS alongside Pillars to break up the reading.

@tsi But the skill trees aren't like.. THAT diverse when you really start looking at them. And between all the different breakdowns and gameplay videos, we've seen quite a lot of the skill tree. There's only so many special/big abilities present, and so far -all of them- are like what I described. I just hate it so much. At least with DD2, your abilities legitimately felt tied to your weapons if you were a warrior, rather than independent of them.

When you play a fighter in D&D, you get abilities and feats that make you better at using your weapons - not abilities and feats that completely bypass your weapons and just have you do weird magic attacks. It's fuckin' dumb.

Yeah, I totally agree that Dragon Age has been moving in the GOW direction for a while now - getting more actiony and flashy over the classic dungeon crawl griminess. But again.. DD2 already did big flashy moves without sacrificing the identity of the classes.

I tried Pillars of Eternity a long time ago and just couldn't get into it for reasons I can't even totally figure out myself. Maybe it was the reading? I'm also weird that way. If you print an actual 600 page book detailing a fantasy world just like an encyclopedia - I will read it without hesitation. If you break it up into little codexes for me to read during a video game, I'll mostly ignore them.
I'm seriously considering the MGS remaster. I love that game. I also really want to pick up Space Marine 2, but I don't really have the budget right now to grab an 80-dollar game (Canada) and then at the end of the month grab a 120-dollar game (Deluxe DAV). Also still want to play BG3 - but again, that's an 80 dollar game, minimum.

I have been enjoying, to some extent, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (super sale on GOG is why I picked it up). I feel like the storyline and enemies were more interesting to me in Kingmaker (but I never played more than a couple of hours of that for non-game reasons). WotR seems to lean way too hard into being 'you can play anything you want -- as long as it's a lawful good Paladin-type character' by shoving the holy/good stuff down your throat so hard. It feels like there's just DRASTICALLY less freedom here to be a character you want to be in order to further the utterly trite demons v. angels storyline.

I went Chaotic Good for my playthrough and I always end up choosing 'Good' options but never 'Chaotic' options because the 'Chaotic' options are fucking psychotic. It's like playing Renegade in Mass Effect. They've missed -ENTIRELY- what being a rebel is about and instead made Renegade/Chaotic just 'a complete fucking prick for no reason and also sometimes a sociopath.'

Also the Heroes of Might and Magic mini-game they insisted on putting in this game sucks. It's boring and it bogs the game down so hard by blocking progress until you wait arbitrary amounts of time to hire more goobers to put on your chess board against the enemy goobers. Who wanted this in a computerized version of a TTRPG?

Also also.. the game can be really unclear in explaining how the game rules translate to functionality. I ended up turning it to Turn Based mode because the real time mode was a chaotic fucking nightmare of having to incessantly pause the game. Which made it just a turn-based game but worse. Making it turn based helped a lot and things started to make more sense, but there's still things that happen which are extremely unclear and the game doesn't offer any explanations for things like why I can't Charge right now or why a character can't use a certain action, or why randomly at times I'll take a five-foot-step and now I can't make any attacks.
I haven't played Pathfinder (the actual TTRPG) in a long time so maybe this is glitches or maybe there are actual rules here making an impact. But fuck if I know because the game isn't interested in telling me. Which can sometimes make it feel like the game is just screwing with you.

Also also also.. I'd kind of forgotten how much I hate D&D/Pathfinder combat RAW. It can get SO bogged down in utterly pointless rounds of almost nothing happening. Needing a mythic ability for EACH CHARACTER to make it so 1s are not automatic misses fucking sucks. Made me realize how much my friends and I used to tweak the rules to make the game more fun and fluid.
About 20 hours in, I got into a fight in a cave helping some Hellknights against some Gargoyles (anyone that's played the game will know this one as it's a main story mission). That fight can fuck all the way off. There's like 30 people involved at any given time so turn-based takes absolutely forever, and everyone sucks so no one is hitting anything. I was just the right gear level, I guess, that even my own party was constantly missing attacks but also being missed by attacks. So it was just rounds and rounds of MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS MISS even with buffs. Horrible game design to not have played D&D/Pathfinder before and thought maybe we should fiddle with the back-end to make sure the worst case scenario of bad rolls by everyone involved doesn't happen?

I dunno. I don't hate the game. It can be fun. But none of the NPCs are particularly engaging, so in some ways it feels more like a looter-shooter than an RPG, because at this point I'm almost interested more in just finding out what the next cool magic item or piece of gear is going to be to slap on my silly little cavalier.

I didn't see the DAV skill tree reveal. I'm trying to avoid the trailers where I can. That's a "wait for review" situation for me, anyway. Especially after Mass Effect Andromeda. I liked Andromeda more than most, but that's not a game I needed to spend full price on.

I refunded MGS after 15 minutes. I didn't realize it was a full-on stealth game. I hate to struggle in games so stealth is a genre I avoid at all costs. The mechanics and gameplay were also janky as fuck. Not super surprising for a 1998 game. Halo: Combat Evolved was my first real gaming experience, and I have trouble going back much further than that. If they ever do a proper remake, I might give it a shot.

I haven't played the Pathfinder games and don't have much interest in them. Ironic because I'm playing Pillars of Eternity right now. Also ironic because I'm running my TTRPG campaign in Pathfinder second edition. After three months of play, I came to the same conclusion about the game system. It's so crunchy and rules-heavy that it detracts from the fun. D&D has its problems, but at least they aren't related to spending five minutes trying to figure out how the stealth rules work.