New thread!
This week I am hopelessly addicted to starfield. I have not been this into a game for a long time…
Trackmania. It’s always what I go to when I run out of things to play
Woah, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. Are they still developing new games, or are you just playing the classics?
A new one was released in 2020 on epic games and I think it’s on steam now. It’s a remake / remaster the TMNF/TMUF games. It’s just called Trackmania but most people call it TM2020. It’s a subscription based game with tiers, which sounds shitty but the prices are pretty normal. Like the best tier is $60 for 3 years and that’s how long most people play $60 games anyway…
anyway I’m currently mostly playing TMUF.
Is there enough people to play against to make it worthwhile? Over just playing one of the older games I still own on Steam…
Player numbers aren’t that great daily on steam (considering most owners bought the epic version anyway), but all of the developer tracks plus most of the community tracks have leaderboards in the tens of thousands, even the hundreds of thousands for the seasonal track releases. There’s also a daily community highlight where players can race and compete on a community track hand-picked by Nadeo staff, so that really bolsters numbers on community tracks.
Multiplayer is kinda dead compared to the older games, but I also don’t think a lot of players play the game for the multiplayer anyway. There are even community playlists of tracks that you can play in singleplayer that go up to I think 50 tracks in size. So you can just pick one of those and play through a bunch without ever having to connect to a community server.
Started playing RDR2 after playing almost all games from the top of my backlog. Folks kept telling me RDR2 would ruin other games for you, so I saved it for the last. I’m still in the first chapter and I like it a lot. I like how it’s slow paced, feels more like a simulator so far. I’m also bit worried as folks told me you can miss certain side quests if you advance too fast, so I want to ignore all the main quest missions as much as possible. This caused my horse to die due to harsh winters right in the beginning coz I thought I should venture out a bit :p
I’ve also started playing Metro 2033, it’s a slow start and the controls are a bit wonky, but seems like a simple linear game so far.
I’m also bit worried as folks told me you can miss certain side quests if you advance too fast,
Yeah if you’re wanting to do as many side missions as possible, it’s best to do all the white colored missions first. The yellow one’s aren’t going anywhere and they are sometimes chapter milestones that can lock you out of side missions. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it. A. There are so many quests that are only available at a certain time/place or after certain events, you’ll never hit them all in one play through. and B.
spoiler
You can play a lot of the side missions you missed in the epilogue. Albeit with different dialog.
Take your time and enjoy it, definitely worth it.
Now I’m going to have to fire it up later just to spend a couple hours roaming the wilderness camping, hunting, and fishing with my “Never leaving chapter 3 Arthur”
Playing:
Remnant 2, really fun!
Doorkickers 2, a new update came out with new missions I have to conquer!
Hell Let Loose got better again with the latest update, so I play that if I have the energy to shout orders into my mic (because no-one wants to be squad leader).
Sons of the Forest is coming along nicely.Stopped playing:
Gave up on Starfield. What a mediocre janky game with generic story. Frustrating and time consuming menus. It’s not massive at all. It’s just big empty rooms behind loading screens. There has been like 5% technical development since Fallout 4. They didn’t even bother to fix the mannequin NPC faces for their game “that has been in development for 12 years” or whatever.
I cannot fathom how some people swallow that stuff and goes “10/10 game of the century” and pay 80€ for it.
Sorry for rant.Looking forward to:
Cyberpunk 2.0
The infantry combat overhaul for Squad.I absolutely love your description of the game being ‘big empty rooms’. I think I’ve come to the same conclusion in the last 24 hours. The space stuff and the on-planet stuff feels disjointed and unconnected. The way you traverse the universe is incredibly underwhelming (so many menu’s) and the actual game design just feels so 2008.
After more than thirty hours and hours of discussions with a friend who knows Pathfinder and stuff, I’ve finally beaten the first boss of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous!
My character finally created, I got through the intro cutscene thingle, threw a dart, saved, and am in bed waiting to become asleep 🤣
(The joke is that the character creation is so interesting, involved, and/or difficult that it counts as a boss fight just choosing a character class to start with 😅 Also yes it did actually according to Steam take me nearly forty hours to defeat said boss 😅)
Apart from my oxygen that is Factorio, I play Heretic’s Fork. The game desperately needs a manual, but I’m enjoying it.
Still Snowrunner
My main game continues to be Overwatch.
I’ve also been playing some Diablo IV. I’ve been taking my time - there is a lot to enjoy in that game. I just teamed up with my brother to finish the last act of the main story.
Mostly waiting for Lies Of P to land in a day or two. I have spent more time with Starfield, but as I mentioned in a previous comment, I think I’m reaching the end of my time with that one.
I don’t think it’s ‘bad’, but I do think it’s a severely compromised game that underwhelms more than it should for a game of it’s budget and the team behind it. There’s moments where you can see so much potential but it is always somewhat hidden by this mid 2000s design that I thought we’d moved past.
Starfield. I love it and I don’t care what anyone else thinks. Fallout 76 was a bad game, Starfield is amazing comparatively.
Yeah. I think I can understand the complaints people have. But dang I’m just so into it. It’s hitting all the right notes for me. I absolutely adore everything about it. I wish space stuff was more important. But that’s really it for me. I love surveying planets. Going all around and exploring different places. I love the aesthetic. So far for me all the quests have been interesting and cool, and do a great job showing you places you may not otherwise have come across.
Lies of P. So far so good on boss #3
I got into Voices of the Void recently and am enjoying it. I love sims and the idea of a sim about looking for signals from alien life grabbed me.
Tf2 and rimworld. I started playing tf2 very recently and I enjoyed heavy and medic. Then I played some 2fort and now I can’t stop playing sniper
Doing a rerun of the Mass Effect trilogy, and just started ME3. Mass Effect is my comfort game, I swear.
How do you feel about/have you played Andromeda? I love the ME trilogy, and I was a quarter through ME2 doing a trilogy replay as well, but then Starfield released. I’ll get back to it eventually though. I haven’t played Andromeda myself, but I feel like it couldn’t possibly be as terrible as the kickback it got on release.
I’ve played Andromeda - quite a lot, actually, because before I started PC gaming, and after my PS3 broke, the only way to get my Mass Effect fix was to play Andromeda.
I think Andromeda got a bad rap. Or rather, people were a lot harder on it than it deserved, because the game was rough and, more importantly, Ryder wasn’t Shepard. Ryder is a very different character and folks wanted Shepard in a different skin. They wanted Paragon and Renegade when BioWare went with a more Inquisition feel to developing how Ryder can react. Add to that how the beginning act was easily the least polished section of the game at launch, and so people just dragged it. And once The Gamers as a collective decide a game is only fit to be made fun of, that’s it.
Now, Andromeda wasn’t perfect at all. The facial animations are not the best, and I still have no idea why they thought Ryder’s running animation was ok. I also really think the writing needed at least another two rounds of editing. But. The game play is really solid, easily the best of any Mass Effect game, and there was something there in the story (it just needed some rewriting). BioWare also made the mistake of putting in more for the sake of more - Inquisition was too big, and they decided to try to make Andromeda bigger, and there’s a lot of filler quests that shouldn’t be there.
I actually really enjoyed playing Andromeda, for all I got really irritated by a lot of the things I mentioned here - and I got irritated because I could see how close they were to something really, really special, and how they needed more time to get there, but didn’t have because of the mess they made of early development. There were enough things and decisions that I really wanted to see how they played out down the line, and I’m sad I probably won’t get to.
The best way to enjoy Andromeda is to go in thinking of it as less of a “Mass Effect” game, and more as a game set in the Mass Effect universe, if that makes sense.
It seems like it was cursed with “how the heck do you follow that up?” Syndrome. And sadly the facial animations seemed at the time to be the critical anchor that all the general issues surrounded and were exemplified by.
I hope in the future Bioware steps back from adding those “MMO side quest” style side content they began including for Inquisition, it did really change the feel of the whole game having those there.
Interesting to hear about the first act dragging, I actually think this is a problem echoed by Starfield, whose first 12 hours are confusing as you don’t understand where and how to access the different types of gameplay at will, and it’s too early on in your character’s development to be able to really fully engage and figure out the ship and outpost construction. By then the people who don’t have patience or weren’t interested in the game to begin with have likely already had their opinions begin to solidify.
I wonder if Bioware will try an Andromeda 2 down the line, I think that universe deserves another shot.
I wonder if Bioware will try an Andromeda 2 down the line, I think that universe deserves another shot.
Sadly, with the closure of BioWare Montreal and them deciding to go back to the Milky Way for 5, I don’t think we will. Which is a really shame, because I still think Andromeda 2 could have really been special, because the Montreal devs said they learned a lot from Andromeda and had big plans for 2 and improving things.
A lot of people also compared Andromeda to the entire ME trilogy, which really wasn’t fair to it.
BioWare had a good idea with trying to do something new, but sadly, often times True Fans don’t want something new; they want the exact same thing. They couldn’t - or wouldn’t - let Andromeda be Andromeda.
That’s sad news about the studio. I suppose some people forgot that the original Mass Effect had quite a few issues and it wasn’t until 2 that it got real good, and having that bar set at a payoff that was only possible through three games of narrative choices and carryover was impossible to hit for Andromeda.
Finished up my time with Starfield for now. If you’d told me a month ago that it would be the main story that would keep me playing, I wouldn’t have believed you. The story was way better than I was expecting and far and away my favorite one in a Bethesda game. As for the rest, ehhh. There are a lot of steps back here, and I really don’t like the visuals. Felt like my character was smoking inside her helmet or something. Having framerates regularly dip into the 40’s even with DLSS and tons of other tweaks really didn’t help.
I will say this: aside from some sounds with oddly harsh high frequencies (there’s a mod for that), the audio team really nailed this one. The voice acting is phenomenal, and I’d love to hear this soundtrack performed live.
Feeling non-committal at the moment. Was considering replaying Disco Elysium, but really I’m just waiting for the new Cyberpunk content.
My wife really wanted me to play Lost Ark again with her, so I am playing that.
Also while at work I usually play The Binding of Isaac.
When holding my son’s hands until he sleeps I play bloons TD6, as it only requires one hand.
And I also returned to League of legends
