Well, I’ve downloaded and started Outer Wilds and … it’s not really grabbing me yet, and piloting the ship is definitely a big part of that. Even with the autopilot, I’m finding it way too hard, which is causing me to have to do things over and over, dampening my enthusiasm. In fact, I haven’t picked it up again after my first play. I’m not giving up yet, but if my piloting skills don’t improve soon, I don’t see myself playing for long, despite being a sucker for a good mystery to solve.
I remember the old mod Gentlemen of the Row made the game more stable and added music and other features. Are there any other mods you would recommend?
The most important one is Juiced. It basically uses the built-in patching system to override buggy code. Vastly reduces the number of crashes. This is the only mod that’s truly needed.
Second is Gentlemen of the Row. Still adds lots of gameplay options. And third is Made 2 Measure, which adds a lot more clothing options.
Links…
https://www.saintsrowmods.com/forum/threads/saints-row-2-juiced-patch.21627/
https://www.saintsrowmods.com/forum/threads/gentlemen-of-the-row.24/
https://www.saintsrowmods.com/forum/threads/made-2-measure-seabounds-clothing-patch.21560/
Has anyone played Atomfall? Reviews are mixed to positive, but it looks kind of cool.
I’m between Avowed and Atomfall for my next game after Ghost of Tsushima. I mean, I think I am unless something else catches my eye.
Playing through Lego Horizon Adventures with the kids. A typical Lego game, fun to co-op play, but nothing standout special, you get what you expect. I loved the full Horizon games, so there are plenty of grins and laughs poking fun at the original games.
Chipping my way through Elden Ring still, about 50% through I think. I’ll definitely be getting the DLC as I get closer to completing it.
Curious what you consider 50% through. I gave up at one point and am wondering how far I made it.
I’ve completed most of the map leading up to the city of Leyndell, have finished the city, and am up to the great erdtree. Having looked at the names of the major map regions, I’m about 70% through, but I’ve heard they go a bit more slowly and many of the early map regions are quite small. I’m in no rush to finish it, since it is open world I’m having a great time just exploring all of the nooks and tracking down all of the loot I can find.
I posted about it a few days ago. I enjoyed it. Avowed is a better game, but Atomfall hooks you quicker. And it also ends quicker at only about 20ish hours. Both are definitely worth the price of game pass.
Has anyone tried Assassin’s Creed: Shadows yet? Very Positive on Steam, 80 on PCGamer.
It’s set in feudal Japan, during the rein of Oda Nobunaga. I was intrigued by footage of the few minutes of cinematics and gameplay. It reminded me of the TV show Shogun, about an English sailor shipwrecked in Japan. I love those “trapped in a foreign land” stories. Similarly, Shadows follows the story of a semi-historical slave-turned-samurai, loosely based on the real-life Yasuke.
That was part of the draw for me — I wanted to see how a French company (Ubisoft) would interpret the adventures of an African (possibly Mozambican) warrior in historical Japan, adapting that for a largely Western action-gaming audience with an ever-decreasing attention span. (Here’s a related article about the process of bringing history to life in a video game.)
It piqued my interest enough to earn a one-month subscription to Ubisoft+ (their equivalent of Gamepass, which lets you play all their games on a Netflix-style subscription). I did enjoy the cinematics more than I thought I would, especially in the “immersive mode” that forces Japanese and Portuguese voiceovers instead of English dubs.
Unfortunately, within a few minutes, the story was quickly overtaken by, well, the Assassin’s Creed part of it. I never particularly enjoyed the series’s gameplay, which is mostly jumping around rooftops along predetermined parkour lines, hiding in bushes, and then pushing a button to cause an automatic assassination animation. It was novel the first time around, but I have no idea how it survived so many spin-offs of the same formula… I guess that’s why the series is getting partially sold to the Chinese mega-publisher Tencent.
You only got to play as Yasuke for a few minutes before the story shifted to the other main character, a young woman ninja who’s a drop-in for any of the other Assassin’s Creed characters, just in a different outfit. I think you do get to play as Yasuke again after many hours (Assassin's Creed Shadows fixes Valhalla's biggest mistakes | PC Gamer), but I don’t have that kind of patience. I really just wanted to enjoy the story, but I couldn’t get myself to go through many more hours of the tedious open-world infiltration-assassination stuff. The moment Yasuke was replaced by the ninja and took out her wrist-dagger and jumped onto the first tutorial victim, it immediately felt familiar, and not in a good way. It felt exactly like every other Ubisoft game ever made 
I’m just jaded, I think.
I wish Ubisoft had a film division where they could make these games into well-acted historical dramas instead… and by that I mean NOT the video-game based 2016 film abomination, but just regular period pieces without all the time-travel AI-simulation stuff (which I never really understood or cared about).
Guess I’m just not the target audience for this type of game? It has Very Positive reviews on Steam (probably well-deserved), but it just feels like such a tedious grind, having to pointlessly button-mash through set pieces in order to get the next little tidbit of story. I’ll probably just finish reading the Yasuke entry on Wikipedia instead, lol.
I’m playing it, but… it’s just not doing much for me. It doesn’t resemble Fallout in the slightest, IMO. Not really open-world, few RPG-like elements, and the world-building is not particularly fun. Combat kinda sucks, with just a handful of weak, boring weapons. Sometimes it looks like you’re expected to use stealth, but the stealth mechanics are weak. Enemies are mostly dumb and boring. There’s not much opportunity for solving problems in different ways.
Plusses are story vibes that remind me of The Prisoner and a mission system that isn’t just going from waypoint to waypoint. There’s no fast travel, which would be a lot nicer if the environment were more interesting.
I think I’m about halfway through and I’m not sure I’ll finish it.
The most recent Assassin’s Creed game I played (Valhalla) had a significant number of cases where assassination was infeasible and it turned into a more typical combat action game (like Dark Souls, etc). I’m not sure that was an improvement, though. I gather they’ve been trying to go back to the game’s roots recently (the “same formula” you mention).
I’m leaning towards playing Avowed next, but I am also considering Blue Prince, a game about to be released that I am hearing raves about.
I really wanted to like Atomfall but it utterly failed to catch my attention. I have seen that’s it’s a very short game (in a good way) so a perfect Game Pass offering for people who enjoy the genre.
I am sad to hear the faint praise for Atomfall. I’m a huge Fallout fan, and was hoping it might scratch the itch, but everything in-thread indicates it would be a disappointment. I guess I’ll wait a few years until it’s in the $20 range on steam. Or of course, it could have a ton of dlc and changes in the same time that could give it a recovery round!
I’ve been considering Avowed, after all I could buy it with my Blizz bucks, but was definitely waiting for the first sale of note. Diablo 4, similarly bought with WoW gold via tokens, was disheartening especially considering it’s premium price.
I haven’t played Sniper Elite, but I get the sense that the Atomfall mechanics are similar. It’s not a sniping game by any stretch but just as Bethesda, Valve, Rockstar, etc. games have a certain “architecture” to them, I suspect the same is true here, so a fan of one might like Atomfall as a change of scenery.
I do like the “Metroidvania” aspects. That is, a map that you progressively unlock parts of, which then open up new parts. A lot of what amounts to 1-way doors, where it takes some effort to go in one direction, but once you have you can then go in both directions.
It’s certainly worth trying if you have Gamepass. Otherwise, yeah, maybe wait for a discount.
No. I consider getting it every other month or so, but my time is limited and I have a huge number of Steam games I bought and intend to play. By the time I do so, I’ve accumulated more (bought on discount) Steam games, and the cycle continues.
A First World Problem that I can live with. 
Have you tried it at all since release? It’s gotten a lot better. A new season is coming out the end of April if you wanna give it another shot.
IMHO it hits a good balance of complexity and playability. Loot and classes are much better now than at release.
I played through the third season. I did get better, I will grant. But not enough to offset the disappointment for the game at the price point, especially considering the cost for the DLC.
Hey, on the bright side, at least Microsoft hadn’t tried to monetize it with a Copilot subscription… yet.
“It looks like you died from the same boss for the 27th time. Have you considered upping your armor? It would look great with our new cosmetics!”
Having hundreds of hours in sniper elite I can say you are 100% correct. It definitely feels like it was made using the sniper elite engine, but in first person.