The "What Are You Playing Now?" Thread

[Wool]

Picked up a couple things I wanted to play from 2017 and just never made time for. Right now I'm playing Mario+Rabbids XCOM. A lot of people seemed to lose interest in this fast once it came out, but I think it's pretty good. Very solid design, my only complaint is how expensive the weapons are.

That's not what I'm back in this thread for though. Last month I played Nier Automata. The previous Nier was an interesting game in that it had a great story, but the presentation and gameplay were poor. They fixed that (mostly) this time around, and I feel like their sails got a gust of wind when Mass Effect Andromeda failed. This game's popularity blew up in ways I did not expect and people raved about its story all year.

Perhaps as a result, I spent most of my own playthrough very mildly disappointed and waiting for it to "get good". That isn't to say it isn't good, I just wanted it to be so much more. It's got a really good premise but it always fell just short of delivering a good story. All the ingredients are there, they just aren't cooking them long enough. And each new ending you get is actually less satisfying than the one that came before.

For anyone not aware, most (all?) of this guy's games have a heavy emphasis on multiple playthroughs and multiple endings. Each time you play through the game it is very slightly different, and you keep your levels and upgrades so each playthrough is faster. It wasn't until I got the final ending that I think I really understood why people raved about this game so much. It was extremely clever, and I am going to spoil it shamelessly below.

Spoiler for for the curious:

Without getting into specifics, the story is set up as a tragedy. The main characters are androids fighting a never ending war against machine invaders and die over the course of the game. You grow to like the characters though, so this naturally makes you feel bad. No matter how many endings you get, they still die.

But when I got the final ending, something interesting happened. While the credits are rolling, the AI helpers your characters utilize throughout the game start talking to each other. With their ward's gone, it was now their duty to erase all data of their existence so that future androids could repeat the cycle. Part of the tragedy is that the fighting is cyclical and pointless.

Before data deletion can begin, one of the AI refuses to comply and states he/it cannot accept this resolution. "You hoped they would live too, didn't you?" The AI gain a sense of self and rebel against their creators by trying to restore the androids' memory from backups. At this point the credits turn into a top down schooter and you have to protect the AI from bullets fired by the credits. In the opening monologue the main character wonders if she will ever get the chance to kill the god that cursed her to her fate, and here you are doing exactly that, shooting the names of all the people who made and are responsible for the game (and by extension, her fate).

This sequence gets harder and harder, until it starts to seem impossible. Every time you die the game asks you if you want to quit. Every time you die, it starts to taunt you more and more with the hopelessness of your situation. Just stop, why waste your time, games are just silly little things, etc etc. And every time you die, a different message appears in the background. A message from another player who has already beaten the game giving you encouragement to continue on. The excellent credits song, originally in Japanese, switches to English.

Eventually you have an entire background of people cheering you on, and then the next time you die you receive a message. Another player wants to help you, do you accept? The soundtrack erupts in a chorus of multiple voices, a half dozen other AI "ships" surrounds your own as you continue to shoot the credits. But this time, whenever you get hit by a bullet, instead of respawning and starting over you continue at the cost of the "data" of another player. Their ship explodes, and you get a message that "Soandso's data has been deleted", before another takes its place.

And then when it's all done, you come out victorious and you receive a cutscene that is easily the closest thing to a happy ending a Yoko Taro game has probably ever had. It's not guaranteed, but at least you have hope now. The AI then talks to the player and asks if you too would like to leave a message for anyone else struggling with the game. You are then told that the person who rescued you did so at the cost of their own save data. You can now choose to make that sacrifice yourself if you so wish.

I'm not sure if words alone can express how exciting and uplifting this entire sequence is. I personally don't really feel any attachment to other people who happen to play the same games as me. But this sequence made you feel like you were all fighting together against the same hopeless (though fictional) fate. It was very powerful, in its way.

P.S. I do begrudgingly agree that the music in this game is probably better than the music in Persona 5. It hurts to say, but it's very, very good.

[Wool]

It's me again. It took awhile, but I finally finished my backlog of old PS1 classic games. I've now played almost every old Playstation game I regretted missing when I was younger. I've got one last Vita game and then I can retire it. (Persona 4 Golden, saved the best for last)

Those last three PS1 games though. Breath of Fire 4, Chrono Cross, and Xenogears. The latter two being fairly legendary in the genre.

I have the least to say about Breath of Fire 4. The character sprites were fantastic, but everything else about the game was dull. At best. The longer it went on, the less I liked it. I might have been more receptive to it when it first came out, but now? Not so much.

Chrono Cross was extremely disappointing for me. I had always heard it was a divisive game. People either loved it or hated it. I thought I would love it, because the things people said about it (that it was a good game, but not a good Chrono Trigger sequel) were things I thought I could appreciate. It turns out it's bad for a whole separate set of reasons. It's ambitious, I'll give it that, but so much of it feels flat out bad to me. The plot was so bad that I feared Xenogears would be similarly disappointing. I want to say it's preachy in ways that it does not deserve, and that it isn't as smart as it thinks it is. This was months ago now, impressions have faded a bit.

Xenogears on the other hand, ended up being one of the better PS1 classics I've played. The story is all over the place and kind of sloppy, but it's still pretty impressive for its time. The tone of the story shifts dramatically between disc 1 and 2, and it's very long. It almost seems like it should have been two games. In disc 1, the religious imagery seems fairly shallow, but it finally means something in disc 2. This is particularly noteworthy to me having played Xenosaga first.

I should point out one thing I found fairly amusing. Xenogears is infamous for an unfinished disc 2. They ran out of budget. I've always heard people saying it's mostly just characters sitting around talking in chairs. I took this to meant that there were a lot of standard dialogue sequences of characters talking to each other.

But no, they were being literal. A significant amount of disc 2 is literally a single character sitting in a chair and narrating the story, while screenshots of what they are talking about are shown in the background. It's pretty funny.

[PPatty]

For the past couple of weeks I've gotten back into LoTRO after not having played it since 2007 or 2008. I think I'll stick with it as a casual gaming thing for awhile, although it's essentially a single-player experience until you hit level 120, but I knew going in that it would be that way, given the age of the game. Fortunately, they created and fleshed out such a rich and detailed Middle-Earth that it actually makes for a pretty good open-world single player RPG, and although the graphics are dated by today's standards, they still look pretty in my eyes. All things considered, I'm impressed that it holds up as well as it does.

Anyone here still play this thing?

[Wool]

I only ever played the beta. I don't remember anything about the gameplay at all, but I remember being impressed by the phasing world. It and FF14 are two games I thought about trying time and time again, but ultimately there are too many other things I want to play more.

[Silverblade-T-E]

Fallout 4, again. lol

never yet managed to finish the main quest line, always too busy enjoying exploring and settlement building, or the game got bugged hopelessly
so decided to comeback to almost done game and....it bugged out and crashed as I'd added the superb "Settlement ambush kit" mod, sigh
thus re-started for the umpteenth time, lol

had to re-learn using my fingers a bit as neuropathy has fubared me so much but that was kinda helpful physio
4838 hours clocked up in it, yeesh!
but since I can't grab my air rifle or fishing rod and dog and off we'd go roaming, or run D&D games, or paint/build miniatures/dioramas as I once did, I damn well need to somehow and this does it in a way.

[Silverblade-T-E]

The Settlement Ambush kit for Fallout 4 actually fixes one of the games most annoying damn bugs:
the bed/water problem
sometimes a settlement will show zero beds, water or food, dropping happiness etc into the toilet
not good when you spot this in your Pipboy when your on the other side of the damn Commonwealth

however
the Settlement Ambush Kit add "security cameras" and TV monitor you can build
when you use the security cam video screen it actually kinda of "virtually spawns you" temporarily in the chose settlement, which resets the settlements beds/production etc and thus, fixes the bug at that settlement (until it happens again of course)

also lets you run a minigame that spawns enemies you can beat in successively harder waves
success = flags for each stage of the waves, put the flag up it ensures if you start the minigame again it starts at that particular wave and adds an increasing happiness boost to the settlement
pretty damn tough by the way, huge numbers of enemies and turrets over heat and shut down as it gets harder tooffset making it too easy against melee mobs who couldn't reach properly positioned turrets


note
I use the "scaffolding" constructions to build "flak towers", with 3 or 4 layers of turrets one above each other
put those in right places, right heights, and you get huge coverage of your settlement!
the layers also provide some protection to the ones below/above from explosions/grenades

[Wool]

So one of the games that came up when I did the release thread this month was Persona Q2, a dungeon crawler where you map out floors yourself. I had an urge to try it, but I still had the first Persona Q, so I played that instead. It was convenient because as a handheld I could play it while watching/listening to all the E3 stuff this month.

I liked it more than I always thought I would. When I was a kid I played a lot of freeware PC dungeon crawlers, but I sort of figured mapping out dungeons yourself was something I wouldn't have patience for anymore. It was good though, and I enjoyed the story as well, which is a surprise for a Persona spinoff game.


Before E3 started I played Sonic Mania. It's the most faithful adaptation of a classic series I have ever seen. I'm very impressed, unfortunately that also includes all the things I never liked about Sonic.


And then yesterday I played Battle Chef Brigade and had to force myself not to binge through it. It's so good.

It's a Match 3 puzzle rpg with simple action combat. The central premise is that you live in a world where monster meat is prepared as food, and an elite order of chefs hunt the monsters for society. The main character is trying to join this order, while also discovering the cause of an epidemic.

When a match starts, you run off and fight monsters for a couple of minutes and collect their ingredients. You then run back to the kitchen and mix them together in a puzzle game. Each match has criteria to meet, and you can upgrade your cookware in interesting ways. One pot might let you match 2 instead of 3, but only of a single element. One might upgrade elements automatically while you are out getting more ingredients, etc. It's great.

[Wool]

4838 hours clocked up in it, yeesh!

Woah, those are some mmo numbers there.

You never said anything about The Outer Worlds by the way, the new Obsidian thing. Are you looking forward to that?

[Silverblade-T-E]

Wool
5056 hours now
yeah used to play Everquest a LOT


sigh I don't fancy The Outer Worlds, much as I love Obsidian's work
(well, I found the Pillars of Eternity series BLAND! ugh, nice touches, good art etc but...bland)
Scifi doesn't really do much for me compared to fantasy, Fallout being an exception and even then its much more than typical "scifi"
really wish they could have done Fallout New vegas 2 or whatever

be a while afore Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2 is out but that's one to look forward to!

been playing some pathfinder kingmaker and went back to Icewind Dale 2 (which is easier on me)
real shame Beamdog said the IWD 2 original files were all lost so they couldn't do an Enhanced Edition of that

[Wool]

I finally started playing Breath of the Wild after owning it for like two years. I kept putting it off for various reasons, including thinking I would need a pro controller for it (and wanting headphones that work with the switch). Never got either, but I decided I've waited long enough.

It's very good. The scale of the world is very impressive, especially for Nintendo. They just don't make games like this. Didn't? The two things people complained about it (rain, breaking weapons) don't bother me, but I am surprised at how weird and awkward the controls are.

[Nerkahia]

I picked up Wolfenstein: New Order and Wolfenstein: Old Blood together for $15 on the Steam sale. Pretty cool so far!

[Wool]

I haven't posted in here awhile. I blame WoW.

After Breath of the Wild (fantastic) I ended up playing the rest of the Dark Souls series (2 and 3). I enjoyed both of them a fair amount, but playing them back to back really drained my energy. I thought 3 was probably the best in the series (though 1 still did certain things better) but I quit playing it almost immediately after beating it because I just couldn't take it anymore.

For what it's worth, 2 was also good but I was often frustrated with it. It fixed a lot of my technical problems with 1 but a lot of the other changes didn't feel very good to me. I also got invaded in it more than in every other Souls game combined. Like, constant invasions. It was pretty crazy.


After finally breaking from WoW a month ago, I decided to play a bunch of my PS+ games. I played Darksiders 3 and Nioh. I liked both a lot more than I thought I would. Both took mechanics from Dark Souls like bonfires and lost experience but were still very largely their own thing.

Darksiders 3 suffered from some pretty mediocre reviews when it came out, and then was quickly forgotten. I thought it was a pretty solid action game personally, but it had some serious performance problems which would have made buying it at release a bitter pill.

Nioh on the other hand has become fairly popular. It sort of plays like a halfway point between an action game like Darksiders and a more methodical game like Dark Souls. I did not like the constant loot drops and felt like they slowed the game down too much, but the weapons and the base mechanics were fantastic. There are less weapons than in Dark Souls, but the movesets are more advanced and each weapon can switch between high, medium, and low stance which expands combat options even more.

Aside from the loot grinding, my only other complaint is the difficulty scaling. It felt broken to me at times, but I guess that's what people expect from Team Ninja (Ninja Gaiden is also notoriously hard).

[Nerkahia]

I had to start replaying the Witcher games after that fantastic TV series!

They still hold up pretty well!

[Wool]

I bought Thronebreaker for similar reasons, but haven't played it yet because of Red Dead. Very good incidentally, I don't understand why everyone griped about it so much. From the way everyone complained I thought it was going to be some kind of ridiculous hard core simulation.

[Silverblade-T-E]

I had to start replaying the Witcher games after that fantastic TV series!

They still hold up pretty well!

yeha back playing Witcher 3, lol never did get beyond starting in Skelligie before (though always cleared velen)
with the 2 DLCs much more to do
kills my hands though, all the dodging but ye gods, it's so beautiful to roam around!!

[Wool]

Red Dead Redemption 2 was good but way too long. I'm fairly certain they are obsessed with making the biggest worlds possible and then find themselves trying to justify how big the world is with sometimes lackluster content. It was an amazing game but the longer I played it the more the flaws and poor design decisions drove me batty. They also tried to do too much with the story, which also negated the impact personally.

Anyway I spent all of January playing that game and nothing else. That's one month off my 3 month Game Pass subscription that was going unused, which chaffed so I spent all of February playing as many games on the service as possible. I was planning on playing certain games ahead of Ori's March release, but on a whim tried two other things that consumed most of my time.


The Outer Worlds - I was in the mood for an rpg with perks and whatnot, and I heard it was really short (20 hours). It was not. Anyway, this is a very good game. Extremely well polished, no hideous bugs or anything. Aside from my personal disinterest in "loot everything in sight" gameplay, the only bad thing I have to say about it is that nothing about it really blows me away. It's solid but not amazing. The most impressive thing about it is simply how much better made it is than any of Bethesda's Fallout games.

Two Point Hospital - The Outer Worlds was taking me longer to finish than I liked and I needed a break. I figured this would be a good couple hour diversion. It was not. I was obsessed with this for weeks. I'm technically still playing it, but the AI problems in this game have got me frustrated as does the insane amount of time it takes to 100% each level. This is still a very impressive game though, designed far better than I initially assumed.

[Ackar]

Two Point Hospital recently released a teaser for their fourth expansion, so I'm looking forward to that. (It's on prerelease sale on steam at only ~$9, So I'll probably pre order.)

I just checked and it comes out in two days...

--

I bought Founders Fortune a few days ago and am still working on getting my colonists to survive their first winter.

Last night I got them to survive until the second spring's tomatoes were ready to harvest. But by then none of them had the energy to work the field, and they died with a field full of food rotting on the vine.

[Nerkahia]

I've never played any of the Batman: Arkham games before. I just finished Asylum; it was pretty cool! Will probably do City next, then Knight.

[Milton Finkelstein]

I'm playing through Doom Eternal now, and it's a nice game but the amount of jumping puzzles really drags down an otherwise good game and makes it not near as great as the previous Doom.

[Nerkahia]

I'm playing through Doom Eternal now, and it's a nice game but the amount of jumping puzzles really drags down an otherwise good game and makes it not near as great as the previous Doom.

That's depressing. I really loved the last one! Was looking forward to this one.