Been playing a lot of The Finals lately. Normally my time would be spent in Destiny 2, but the current D2 season is gonna last for a looooong time, so I’m not in any hurry to grind it out just yet. But The Finals has absolutely blown me away so far. It can be buggy and unbalanced at times, but it’s so damn fun. Demolishing an entire building to bury the cashout station in rubble and prevent a steal is so satisfying.

Embark has also recently said that they’ve got a lot of updates in the works, so I’m really excited to see how Season 2 plays out.

Monster Hunter World

Stardew Valley

Dark Age of Camelot (Eden free server)

I tried a couple of demos from Steam Next fest. Without writing up an essay:

• Aden: Quirky game with reasonably difficult combat (when played in hard), cool music, and a story I ended up being surprisingly interested in. I was in it for the unique aesthetics and vibes and ended up being invested in whatever was happening.
• Until Then: Lovely little visual novel set in the Phillipines (which I love, as most games centered around Asian culture tend to be Japanese or Chinese focused). The dialogue is fun, the pixel art presentation is incredibly good and even has some beautiful animated scenes, and there’s enough intrigue and curiosity that really piques my interest in terms of the setting. It’s modern day, set about a decade ago, but with a twist of paranormal worldwide happenings in an otherwise normal world.

Curious about something, I installed Dragon’s Dogma since I had it from sometime it was given out free. It wasn’t what I thought it was. I must’ve confused it with this other game because I’m actually getting into DD here. Still no clue what the name of the game I was confusing it for is though.

I finally finished Pillars of Eternity. I’ve got lots of criticisms for it, but mostly I really enjoyed it. I do wish there was less combat and that there were more opportunities to talk your way out of combat, for instance. The combat is very good, but there’s so much of it that you can easily get decision fatigue. I’m going to take a slight break from Pillars of Eternity before I start the sequel.

So I moved on to replaying Planescape: Torment instead. I last played it about 12 years ago, and there’s a good amount of it I’ve forgotten since then, but at the time I felt it was the best writing I’d seen in games to date. As poorly aged as it was then, even on the enhanced edition now, it’s perhaps aged even worse now, so I’m not sure if I’ll finish replaying it this time, but we’ll see. At least it’s not particularly long.

My friends and I are continuing our co-op playthrough of Quake II since we don’t live in a timeline where we’ve got a plethora of modern FPS games to play instead; not the traditional campaign variety, at the very least. The indie scene is mostly replicating Doom/Quake 1 sorts of games, and Quake II is surprisingly much more modern in its design…at least when you use the compass built in to the remaster.

EDIT: Changed my mind. Moved on to Pillars 2. There are already a lot of great improvements.

Helldivers 2. After a somewhat rocky launch, the game is good and enjoyable. It’s missing a lot at the moment in terms of what the first game offered, but the third person shooting is very refreshing from the top down game it once was. I was planning to spend my whole weekend on it, but seeing how quickly I’m progressing through the ranks and knowing how the difficulty curve is, I’ve decided that taking my time and waiting for further updates is preferable.

Edit: seems I missed out on login issues yesterday from literal hundreds of thousands of people joining in.

Baldurs gate 3. I started when it came out, but then got distracted by a few games. It took like 200+ hours, but I finally got my fill of factorio. So now back to bg3-it’s very good.

Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader Story is cool, but you basically have to be bad. I prefer the combat over other types like BG3.

I gave some attention to World of Warcraft Classic - Season of Discovery. It is certainly enjoyable to have a lively world with plenty of people interacting everywhere, but the nuts and bolts of Vanilla are largely the same. The slow leveling, the 1-hour cooldown for my Hearthstone (the item that takes me back to the Innkeeper I set), the fact that I must be physically at the dungeon location to enter an instance, and the demands for being highly social for a bunch of basic stuff feel exhausting. A lot of time I need people for group quests and runes, and the mere thought of talking to strangers is discouraging. I realized that, while I enjoy social interaction, that is not necessarily true for the majority of my playtime. Classic Wrath always feels like a good compromise for me – it is still Classic and the open world is still relevant, but it has a lot of QOL that makes it manageable for me. The Hearthstone cooldown is 30 minutes, I get my first mount at level 20 instead of 40, and the Random Dungeon Finder puts me in an instance automatically. Granted, there’s not a lot of people on Wrath right now, but I still enjoy leveling my character, leveling mining, getting ready for Cataclysm, and making money on the auction house. I found a nice wholesome guild, but it seems that most people are just playing SoD.

CLeM

really neat puzzle game

Diablo 3: Season 30 - Gave up on the new Monk build since it had very precise stats that I’m currently too lazy to works towards. I’m still progressing with my current build, so I’ll keep it for now.

Diablo 4: Season 3 - Played around with the Lunar event that started this week. It was surprisingly easy, and I got through all the rewards in a couple nights.

Vampyr - I forgot how long this game is.

The original NES version of Legend of Zelda! I want to (slowly) work through the whole Zelda chronology, barring like, the CDi ones. I’ve had the NES Zelda games on my 3DS for ages but I always found them difficult to play and pretty bad at telegraphing where I was actually supposed to go.

This time around, I just bit the bullet and used a walkthrough, and collected a whole bunch of power-ups before the first dungeon. And now a couple dungeons in, I’m actually having a lot of fun with it! I even kind of like how completely open it is. I stumbled across the eighth dungeon, took one look at the four-headed bullet-spitting plant thing, and turned right around. But it’s cool that I can go there pretty much from the start!

I finished Hellblade and am feeling ready for the sequel that’s coming soon. It wasn’t a perfect game, but I really appreciate what they tried for and I think a lot of it was successful. The visual and (especially) audio design was stellar and the narrative is really interesting and touching and the presentation was mostly great. The trials were my favourite part, in particular the blind one where you have to navigate by sound and controller vibration and ignore the scary enemies. I almost wish they went all in on that sort of thing. Or if not, that they tuned the combat encounters differently. I actually quite enjoyed the combat system but there wasn’t much of a reason to fully explore its nuances.

After that, I finally started Red Dead Redemption 2, which is my current game. So far it’s mostly living up to the off-the-charts hype, though as usual I had to tweak some things to taste through mods (yes even on a first playthrough). I’m really enjoying it so far and can see myself either spending 400 hours on this game or get completely burned out (as I was by Ghost of Tsushima). Curious to see which it will be. I also sadly got the ending spoiled for me (way back) and I’m really sad about it because I can already tell the impact it would have had on me and I’m deeply sad I’m never going to get to experience that.

I’ve been really enjoying racing in Automobilista 2 with several friends recently. A bunch of us went from using a controller to having a wheel and often a wheel stand in a short period of time, because we all got so into it.

I think there is a lot going for AMS2 (as it is commonly abbreviated): lots of variety in the cars and tracks, it is easy to set up casual races with friends, it is very dynamic (like in varying track and weather conditions), works well with a controller or a wheel, looks good and performs well, etc.

En Garde!

Short, but fun. Sometimes a little frustrating, but I’ve played too many games recently which either take themselves too seriously or randomly try to hit “poignant” emotional beats.

This is just straight up swashbuckling cartoony fun that I totally need right now.