Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of May 5th

I bought Stardew Valley last Wednesday. There's so much more than I expected. I thought this was like a farming simulator with pixel art. Boi I was wrong.

Started Cyberpunk phantom liberty. I’ve played the game before the DLC and 2.0 and felt it was ok but nothing amazing. Now it’s just awesome, the rebalancing made my smart smg netrunner fun and the new story is way better than the base game.

I’ve dropped fallout 4, it’s just so shallow and gutted, it makes the mass produced Ubisoft stuff deep. I don’t get why they removed all the RPG elements and dialogue to replace with meh crafting and the story is just so mediocre so that doesn’t help either

Gave up Dragons Dogma 2 at 120 hours.

Played a shit-ton of Vampire Survivors this week and I'm thinking I may pick Jedi: Fallen Order back up. Jedi: Fallen Order was hard for me to get into because, while it has a fantastic opening act, normal difficulty was too hard and easy was way too easy, which made it tough to get into.

I'm still working on Lies of P. I'm starting to feel like Jack Torrance in The Shining, but I am just half a chapter away from the end. Currently working on getting past the mid-chapter boss.

We just had our second kid so any games have to basically be on the phone right now. Luckily, someone mentioned Wildfrost in the same breath as Slay the Spire and it has been awesome to play while holding the little one.

It’s a card/deck builder rogue like, but you’re deploying units into one of two lanes and positioning them for maximum effect. Each unit counts down until it attacks, but you have a handful of cards to directly attack as well. You run until you fight the final boss, unlock more stuff along the way, etc…it’s been a blast. The art style is cute (how big can Yuki’s snowball get? Try and find out!) and I love the soundtrack.

On iOS at least, the game is free to download and try out before purchasing (think it was $7). If you like Slay the Spire and similar games, well worth looking into!

Finally after many many years I have gathered my friends together and played divinity original sin 2. The first session was very fun and we all had a blast. We couldn't complete any storylines because someone kept aggroing every npc and by the end of the night we had killed every npc in fort joy and used about 20 rez scrolls and many reloads.

After we got out of fort joy and agreed to put our muderhobo ways behind us and keep a good standing with the traders. It lasted about 5s before someone threw a bucket at the lvl 8 skeleton trader and he killed us all. After a reload to previous save we managed to sell our loot and have 1 npc who doesn't hate us.

I’ve been playing Balatro and No Man’s Sky.

Still on New Vegas, but going to take a bit of a break.

Last time I played (over a decade ago, at this point), I only did the Dead Money DLC. So, over the last couple of days, I've been doing some of the other DLC and ignoring much of the main quest.

Old World Blues was super fun (and reminded me of Outer Worlds a lot; I wonder if they took inspiration for OW from their earlier work here), but it kind of took a fair amount of energy out of me.

I probably should have taken a break there, but decided to try Honest Hearts. I really didn't enjoy it, but at least it wasn't too long.

After that, I realised I'm burning way out here, so I'm going to get back to the game in a few days.

Replaying Fallout: New Vegas. I wanted to do a tale of two wastelands, but I couldn’t get the mods to settle out. It’s a much better game than I remember from my first play through!

Still playing Shining Force 2, almost at the end. I read somewhere that Peter is the real main character and kind of agree.

I also started playing Sonic Adventure 2 because it looked cool and was less than $2, and omg, it might be the worst game I've ever played. I looked it up and it apparently was rushed, had a small team, and was made during a turbulent time at Sega. But it's just bad. The controls are garbage, camera is even worse and sometimes does not let you move it to see where you're going. The dialogue is thrown together poorly so the characters are often talking over each other in cutscenes. It's a shame too because I can see the wasted potential. At least the chill Knuckles levels are still fun to play, and the music is memorable. I really hope the "Dark" path is better than the "Hero" path.

Been playing The Finals. It's a competitive FPS that my friend says is similar to R6 Siege, but I've never played that so I can't say if it's really accurate. Regardless, I've been having fun

A little bit of Crash N. Sane trilogy and starting a new run of Fallout New Vegas on hard difficulty hardcore mode, alongside more slogging through Baba Is You.

Never completed a single run on the games I've played in the Fallout series, yet for some reason I decided to start another playthrough and do hardcore mode for the first time because clearly I hate myself. Currently maybe 5-6 levels in and it ain't easy compared to the really cool melee build save on my desktop.

Still playing Forbidden West. I’ll probably finish soon. I don’t have a ton of time to play but I’m about 110 hours into it.

I am on Ravenswatch and Dead Cells

I'm playing the ninja platformer N++. I'm probably not good enough to 100% it, but I'm having a blast with it.

Shot for cheap Phantom Liberty and thus my seventh run of Cyberpunk 2077 has commenced. This time, well it's the second time actually, as a Lucy (female V, Netrunner with Monowires)

Been super patient since 2015, so I'm finally playing fallout 4. Installed a few just-for-fun mods that don't otherwise break the story or flow of the game. So far I'm super into it!

In preparation of the Mists of Pandaria Turbo Mode in like 10 days, I'm playing World of Warcraft, and catching up on all the stuff I missed in the last three years. So far, I've leveled two characters to 70, although I skipped all dialogue and cutscenes. I just don't care at all about this stuff in this game.

I gotta be honest though, while the quest progression while leveling is fine, once you're done and max level it becomes a complete clusterfuck. Since this is the tail end of the expansion, all the story content that has been released in the last 18 months, just gets dumped on you. You just get tons of new story quests. One third of which you can't start, because you need some reputation level with a faction or something. Another third needs a previous story to be done first, and the last third you can actually do. Your quest log is full of all that useless bloat, and it becomes a nightmare to sort through. Then there are tons of quests that are supposed to introduce you to the various new mechanics that were added, but those basically drown in the sea of all the other shit. I'm not the biggest fan of the forced story and gating of everything behind it in FF14, but at least I never needed a guide to find out which campaign quest I should do next. Also, important quests that unlock stuff are usually marked with a different color indicator, so they aren't hard to miss. That's something Blizzard should definitely copy. Luckily I have a bunch of friends, who play the game continuously, who I can ask about the most important stuff, otherwise I'd be lost.

I'm really into collecting pets and pet battles in the game, so I've been spending a lot of time flying around, catching everything new, etc. I wonder why Blizzard never added pet battles to the companion app or released it separately for mobile. Back in the day, I'd definitely spent a bunch of time just doing random battles (and would probably still now). I might have to look into setting up the game on my Steam Deck and try out just exploring, catching all the pets, or do the simple quests.

There was some random video on YouTube about the original fable and I had the urge to play it again. At some point had received the anniversary edition on steam so I loaded it up. 30 minutes and a bit of motion sickness later I uninstalled it and went hunting for my actual original disk. Found it, installed it, and the options and controls are so much better... It's amazing that they ported the Xbox version for the anniversary edition and didn't bother to include things like mouse sensitivity, smoothing, acceleration, or really any pc specific options.

The main issue is that the camera seems to be connected to more than just character location, it seems to also be connected to orientation of some part of the character, like the hip. Combat is jittery as all hell, movement isn't pleasant, and everything else hardly matters.... I will be playing the original.

Sekiro on the steam deck. It's difficult since I never bother with parrying in action games but it's quite fun.

Booted up old Killing Floor again during the whole Helldivers debacle.

Smaller in scale but similar in concept.

Cyberpunk 2077. I just finished Act 2 last night and I'm (probably) about to begin Phantom Liberty.
Really enjoying most of the story and side quests so far!

I've got an amazing group of online friends, and we've been doing a big mix of Content warning, DnD with rotating DM's, and of course a shit load of helldivers!

As I have plenty of time due to reasons, I decided to continue Red Dead Redemption 2 after not having played it for a year or so. Damn, that thing just looks great.

Found a nice gem on the App Store called Golden Soul

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/golden-soul/id6499178439

Free (so far). No ads, neat story and mechanics so far. Tree stumps with knives