What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Vysetron wrote:

Gary Sax wrote: More Obra Dinn. The plot is starting to be unraveled for us, which is cool, but we're reaching the point where you have to do some very brow furrowing work to figure out who is who. It's tough.

Bought Obra Dinn last night knowing I was only going to be able to play a little of it. That was a mistake; I'm already VERY hooked. I won't get into spoilers but there's been at least two HOLY SHIT moments in the first, like, 40 minutes. I can't wait to dig deeper.

Seriously, this game does better than any medium I've ever seen. I think it's the investigation/partial information after the fact part.

Still playing GW2. I think I've gotten most of what I remember about it (lvl 80 Engineer) to mesh with today's reality. Lately I'm playing a Ranger, because bow + pet is one of my favorite MMO classes. Once I get one of the toons I'm messing with to 80, I might buy the expansion(s). If hard-core raiding isn't your thing, I think I'd recommend it over WoW. Rank heresy coming from someone who used to raid a lot, but there it is.

I fired DESTINY 2 back up last night to veg. I finished the Main Quest of chapter 1 or whatever the hell. LL around 200, Level around 20? Is that the max? I don't know. Anyway, as noted, the game is gorgeous and shooting is so good. I wish Scout Rifles were good like in D1 (I miss you Hung Jury!) I was way way waaaaay into the game before they let me run Strikes. That's where I want to be. Sometimes I just want to shoot easy stuff for 20 minutes. PVP is hard because I suck and Story sucks because it's just me. Like hotseatgames, I want other folks and I want PVE.

If you just got the free base game, then it's a max of level 20, soft cap of 200 power, probably hard cap of 300 power. If you like what you're seeing, I'd sorta say that grabbing the expansions for forty bucks is a good investment. I'm super casual, and stopped the base game after hitting max level about a month and a half in, and got back in with Forsaken. The two earlier expansions are pretty blah (Warmind is better than Osiris for sure, but still not amazing), and Forsaken adds a ton of really cool stuff. The two new zones are great, and Gambit is a really solid way to mix PvE (which I like!) and PvP (which I'm awful at).

Post game, they also add the ability to do a daily heroic adventure and story mission, which lets you do slightly-less-easy PvE if you don't feel like messing with other people on a strike.

I just read that Destiny 2 did away with Heroic Strikes. Damn, those things were hard. They meant that gear level requirement - I went in the minute I could, and got my ass handed to me.

I am LL 191, and it showed yesterday in my first strike as we went to take on the Vex.. Guy-that-is-tall? Huge Vex Hobgoblin, basically. I didn't know my way around, so I stumbled here and there, and my strike team didn't quite know how to tune abilities, leaving us with a Wall-building Titan which is not great when the bad guy spews Void Flame all over the place. I am not sure if they don't _know_ about the whole shoot-Vex-in-the-gut critical hit thing or if they didn't care, but like every Vex they shot turned into a psycho random runner shooting everywhere. It was a shit show and we got rolled like five times until someone quit.

Strikes might have been more fun with friends, but none of my gaming friends bit on Destiny 2. They all have no problems with MMO and MMO-lite, but don't seem to like FPS-like combat. So strikes for me were two random strangers and me tearing though the Strike, with me driving around lost about half the time. I got to the point that I knew some of them pretty well, but by then I was ready for something else.

Sooooo... Diablo Immortal is the dumb video game news if the end of 2018.

The best news during this period, is that Blizzard has virtually handed Path of Exile all the monies, to it's free-to-play strategy. Mostly because once it finally comes to PS4 in December, I'll likely be shelving Diablo for the foreseeable future.

I'm chuffed.

Heya CC - Have you played Path of Exile? I'm a loot-game junkie* and I found I would rather play hours of match 3 games than the Retro mess that was PoE. Maybe the story gets really good. But there wasn't anything in the first 6 hours of play that got me past the following fatal flaws that shouldn't be in games made in 2018 :

1. The inventory system - size and shape based storage - every bit as charming as it was in the games we played in 1998. Dumb dumb dumb. Who the F$%^ wants to play Tetris to figure how much loot I can carry in a loot game.

2. The system is so opaque - They tout how customizable the characters are but it's a red hot mess - and like many needlessly complex mature games like this, good luck on the game itself telling you how to play it - You are going to need to do some homework, only to find that the character you've put a ton of time in to isn't going to be viable for any serious progression because THERE ARE NO CHEAP RESPECS. In fact the masochistic old schoolers on the PoE boards will tell you that that is part of the fun of the game...spending hours on a broken character is part of the learning experience they say.

3. THe materia-like skill system is for the birds too.


PoE is like the off-publisher clone of AD&D with all the manuals married to the d100 charts and systems bolted on from some Palladium game for added comlexity, whereas Diablo 3 is like 5th edition.







*Borderlands (1, 2, PS they are all great) and Diablo 3 as my main squeezes for the last year - I also enjoyed Marvel Heroes Omega before shady mobile style shenanigans got the license yanked and tanked the company.

I put on my wizard robe and hat

I look at Kotaku once in a while, and they had a pretty good article about how Diablo fans at Blizzcon freaked right the hell out over Diablo Immortal. I guess if I was a big enough Diablo fan to attend Blizzcon, I might be a tad bit disappointed to find out that Diablo is getting its name slapped on top of Evony.

A coworker tries to sell me on Torchlight II and/or PoE every once in a while. For me, both are okay, but I'm kind of with Boothwah on that. For me personally, I don't want to apply skill tree calculus to a game where I just run around and kill everything that moves.

It is an old game series, but Fate is still one of my favorite kill and loot games. I prefer it to the grimdark Diablo unless I want to do multiplayer.

I haven't yet played PoE, Bootwah. But I hear the story mode is pretty good. Opaque skill trees suck, but if I can just mess around and not be required to make a Rock solid numerical character, I think I'll be fine.

I'm still gonna try this shit. I've made it as far as I can with Diablo. There are three hardcore trophies I could get before I go platinum, yet the game has gotten so boring that I can't play anything more than a rift challenge before I have to turn it off.

I'd go Pillars of Eternity or some such. But I want a lighter experience.

I too miss marvel Omega. That was a nice Diablo analogue. Enough of a story without being bogged down and not be able to progress. Easily my fave free game on my PS4. R.I.P.

I’m perplexed at the notion of playing an action RPG and being concerned with a story. I just bash the monster piñatas.

I've been playing Diablo 3 on PS3/PS4 off and on for years. Currently been enjoying online play with a group of friends 1 night a week for 2 hours. We're doing Seasonal Mode which they like and I'm ambivalent about. As long as I get to destroy stuff I'm happy. Still haven't crafted a Hellfire Ring so when I play D3 by myself now I'm grinding towards that.