Wow. Witcher 3 is getting a DLC and now even Diablo 2 is.
I’m playing Watch Dogs 2 now. It’s pretty similar to the first one, which I liked: basically Assassin’s Creed plus hacking (a la Cyberpunk 2077). Adding an RC car and a quadcopter drone is a fun improvement and it adds some variety to the climbing puzzles and stealth puzzles. Also there have been way fewer mandatory driving missions so far (which is a good thing).
The tone is a little bit off, in my opinion. In the first game, you’re a criminal who turns vigilante after you get your niece killed. In the second game, you’re just a hipster who dislikes Big Tech…who also flat-out murders people some of the time? I guess they added some non-lethal weapons, so you could try to play without permanently killing people, but it still seems a bit violent considering the premise.
Or if you are me, you murder people constantly. Make a car run into another car, cop shows up, hack a guy to make the cops think he’s a terrorist, so they arrest him, and then hack the cops’ earpieces, the guy panics and runs, the cops chase and shoot him, then hack a cop’s info to make organized crime think he killed one of their people, so they show up, now there is a shoot-out between the cops and the gang…
I spent hours just being evil. It was so fun and it demonstrated how I am a very bad person.
I also went very heavy into the remote drone stuff in the skill tree, and rarely set foot in an area to put myself in real danger, just had my drones do it. Or, like I suggested before, I hack one of the bad guys in a mission area to get the cops and/or a rival gang to show up and let them kill each other, then stroll in afterward and loot the bodies before completing my mission without trouble.
Just finished Far: Lone Sails. Great little game, finished it leisurely in seven hours, and it may have counted time when I alt-tabbed out after being frustrated by a puzzle. The gameplay is side view 2D, but intriguing scenery keep appearing in the background and occasionally the foreground. You traverse a barren but beautifully rendered post-apocalyptic landscape in a vehicle a bit like a three-story high giant tractor, called the Okomotive according to the steam achievements. You have to keep it running by burning crates and whatever else you find on in a combustion chamber in the back, and then navigate to the engine controls in the center. Every so often you reach some ruined industrial complex, and have to exit and figure out how to fix obstructions in your way, or install some upgrade on your vehicle.
The most important of the upgrades is (per the games title) a sail, so you don’t have to worry about fuel when the wind is right, and there’s room to raise the sail.
Some years ago I played Far: Changing Tides, a sequel to this game. It had a seagoing vessel, and you had a bit more control of the sail, i.e. you had to sheet it out or in depending on the wind. I like boats but while I loved the first couple of hours here, it seems the designers thought they had to up the complexity, and I had to look up solutions on some timed puzzles. I ended up DNF’ing it.
I’ve had a good little run with survivor and factory games, with Shapez 2, Factorio and Planet Crafter all done in the last month, so I went back to a different type of game I tried and left: Horizon : Forbidden West
I paid a decent enough price for this given I loved the first Horizon game, but man, this is almost like a masterclass on how to fuck things up. The jumping is just wrong. I suspect they’ve went the way of “use a controller”, and that’s just a hard no from me. I’ve got to areas where I’ve climbed up high and just the movement keys has made me jump to my death again and again, and other times I need to jump a gap and it just fails. It’s one of the first paid for AAA games which looks like I’m going to just give up on. I suspect now I’m going to go off and watch a video telling me exacty what is wrong with it. A friend of mines avoids AAA games nowdays, I don’t go out of my way to buy them, but this is a second dud in a row for me, with Spiderman being a fail for me too (probably due to controller more than it being bad).
Maybe best stick to smaller games now…
I vapor locked on Shapez 2. It took me a few major goals (can’t remember the terminology) for me to catch up with the learning curve at which point I went through a few cycles of remodeling everything and then loading up with blueprints and by the time I was just about to unlock the penultimate major goal (the one before throwing trains right into the vortex), I got to the point where it was – Ok, time to go into finding the shapes I can use and picking out the right blueprints and now it feels like work. Time to make the donuts.
I’d like to get back into it though. I really liked those early stages where the nature of how everything works began becoming clear. Mostly I’d like to use my more efficient blueprints when previously I was Joe Spaghetti Guy.
I nearly went the same way, I was trying to fit stuff in around the vortex then I realised I could just ship trains with shapes and colours into stations near each other and ship sub trains to each set of platforms so I could scale up and configure when it changes. The crystals made me stall too, they didn’t explain them clearly enough. But it was decent enough game in the end. I never managed to really make wires work in either of the shapez games (though they really were mandatory in the first game), but really missed the 4 way splitter and painters from the first game.
I can relate this this. For me, my guess is now that I got older and have more stresses and priorities, I find it more difficult to immerse myself in giant RPGs when I only have 2 hours on a given day to play games. Whereas games that are run based or mission based have been my games of choice lately. For example Kirby Air Riders and Monster Hunter were my most played games last year, but child me/worry free me was playing open world games to sink hundreds of hours into. YMMV
Yep, time constraints are definitely a part of it.
Another thing: I also think I’ve been exposed to relatively more real-world interactions (and romances) than adolescent me. The romances in Bioware games might’ve seemed so amazing when you’re a young, ahem, inexperienced lad… but nowadays, both real people and generative AI can do so much better. “Give trinket, engage in meaningless dialogue, do side quests, repeat” just doesn’t quite cut it any more. A lot of games still seem to be written for a young adult audience (nothing wrong with that) and only a very select few seem to target more mature audiences with more adult themes, etc.
This very much is a thing in Cyberpunk 2077 and it is really just a timewaster (weirdly I stalled a lot in that game waiting for something so they were the only missions left) and so… PG rated. I remember there being a lot of nudity in a Witcher game (I remember definitely 2, but probably 3 its been a while), but these people in the Cyberpunk one are fully clothed, and almost “roll over to reveal a fireplace” level of avoidance, and they wake fully clothed.
But yes, I could do with a “no romance” option in the game, just so I’m not going “Oh shit, not another ones of these”.
That’s odd - who did you do the romance with? I romanced Judy, and it was about the most explicit thing I’ve seen in a video game that wasn’t specifically marketed as porn.
Judy. Weird, just seemed like a teenage boy fantasy.
I think Cities Skylines 2 is pretty playable now with the recent updates and the new developer taking over.
GTA 6 should be out by then!
My son (age 12) has got really into GTA 4 and 5 on my old XBox360.
It’s actually kind of funny to watch because he has this penchant for old videogames from like 15 years ago. His interest in videogames started maybe 5 or 6 years ago.
He’s really into Lego which led him to play Lego City Undercover (basically Lego GTA for kids). Then Lego Worlds (a discontinued game like Lego Minecraft), then Lego Fortnight (kind of the same open world Minecraft style game) to actual Fortnite to actual Minecraft to now actual Grand Theft Auto.
Agreed. The first update from the new developer is impressive, and gives me hope that they are going to breathe a lot of new life into this game.
I’ve been playing the release version of Towerborne lately - a close friend was involved throughout the development of the game before being subsumed by Microsoft. It’s an fun little battler, best played with controller, and has a fun, slightly cartoony style. Think of the side scroller battlers of years gone by with a ton of avatar customization.
It’s a bit thin on content, IMHO (I know why, but that’s not mine to share), and quite different from the original version and pre-release play (leading to mixed reviews) but at the release price (or if you have an Xbox pass) it’s worth some light pickup/put down fun.
[ not a paid endorsement, and I have no stake in the game, but I am mentioning it because it’s basically the swan-song of the company due to Microsoft being… Microsoft and it deserved more than it got ]
I wouldn’t want to argue against that. That’s a pretty common accusation tossed at a lot of rpg romances that feature lesbian sex. But your specific complaint was that is was PG and I have to agree with Miller - full nudity and cunnilingus (not super-graphic, but still obvious) isn’t PG 
. It’s a hard R at worst.
Cyberpunk77 does have this weird thing (graphical bug or a half-assed concession to modesty after initial game design that functions like a graphical bug) where it can force your character to wear underwear when it’s not supposed to. However that is pretty easy to defeat without any modification at all (it involves some exact sequence that I forget of using the closet to create and equip an outfit, backing out, then going back in to edit out the pants on that outfit - you have to use the closet outfits specifically to clothe your characters and it will disappear if you equip any clothing outside of that). Which I will sometimes do not out of prurience but because I think that imposed panties graphic for the female character looks awful - very unnaturally digital. The nude textures ARE already in the game, it’s just that bug covering them with that weird strappy underwear thing.
And I always prefer playing a female character in C2077, both because I much prefer the voice actor AND because Judy is far and away the best romance as far as I’m concerned.
You should double-check that you turned off any “nudity” censorship settings.
V. is female in Pynchon’s novel, I believe?
I played a cold and distant character who hooked up with Judy one night because why not; Judy subsequently could not deal with the lack of romance and left town. It was all very cyberpunk.
Panam and Kerry are not into women, and as for River, as Johnny Silverhand puts it, are you really going to fuck a cop…
It’s interesting that none of the romances in CP2077 are designed to last. They’re moments of passion (or otherwise, depending on your internal roleplaying like @DPRK), but NONE of them last. Any ending you pick is largely going to end up with all parties moving on - especially if you look at the PL Tower ending. You’re gone, and apparently no one did you a solid on informing people you were undergoing emergency treatment despite everyone involved being told “I’m dying and I am searching for a way to live” repeatedly in most playthroughs. And they move on.
V themselves are generally scripted to be living for the glory despite any moments where you’re allowed to say otherwise. Yes, it’s all a consequence of the funneling towards a set piece of a final scenario, I get that. But it means none of the passion is going to work itself into a commitment.
River, Panam, Judy, Kerry - they’re all well made characters in that they all have their OWN passions and priorities, and just like V they’re not going to abandon them just because they care about you as well. Fair enough, that’s a good choice for storytelling - they’re characters in their own right, not just targets to be captured.
That graphics bug still shows up regardless, at least on my and many other’s PCs.
Panam and Judy will stay with you in the Star ending. Romancing Judy ends with you riding off into the sunset with Judy and your buddy Panam, which is why it is the best ending combo IMHO. Your long-term survival prospects aren’t great, but it leaves open the very faint hope for a cure. It’s certainly the most optimistic (or very slightly less pessimistic) of a rather bleak bunch.
IIRC, in my first playthrough I ended up going with Panam and her nomads as they left Night City. So that certainly seemed like a long-term relationship. As long as V lives at least. There seemed to be some kind of “maybe we’ll find a cure out there” expression of hope, but that came across as wishful thinking. But still, Panam didn’t dump V in that ending.