Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of July 30th

After buying a Steam Deck during the sale, I'm playing Civilization 6 again. Never got into it nearly as much as the previous installments but now I think I'm finally getting it.

Just finished my first playthrough of Cyberpunk last night after about 120 hours. I had 3 or so gigs left but wanted to make sure I got it done before Baldur's Gate 3 (will need to free up some disk space...).

Overall I liked it a lot, despite its many flaws. It has some moments, characters and stories that are really engaging. Judy was a standout for me, and her voice actress really killed it. I regret not choosing Female V now, but of course I had no idea at the time. And I know it's controversial but I kinda liked Keanu as Silverhand, even though his voice acting isn't always "good". The relationship between V and Johnny was the thing I enjoyed the most, and Johnny's character development.

Not sure I'm super happy with the ending I got, though, and I might go back and play out some of the other alternatives.

Started the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, after wanting to replay the ME Trilogy for a couple years. Haven't played them since they originally released.

Just started ME3 yesterday, and it is nice to experience the gameplay changes from 1 to 3 in such a short time. I had completely forgotten how terrible that Mako in ME1 was. Made it almost unbearable for me. The Hammerhead in ME2 was so much better in every way.

Final Fantasy XVI. Much more gritty than the others. Just as much angst. Still, I’m enjoying it.

Me and my spouse are getting back into Elden Ring. Created a new character and chosen a build that's enjoyable for both of us, so we sit on a couch, passing the controller back and forth, exploring, doing quests, reading lore and praising the Erdtree. Good Times!

I just finished Tunic (not 100%, but got to the "right" ending). I managed solving all the endgame stuff myself, man it was hard resisting to just look things up, but it was really rewarding to figure it out!

Remnant 2 has been a blast. I do wish there was 1 more world in it to make it feel a little more full, but I love every moment of these games.

Its crazy to find a secret area in a secret area, pick up a melee weapon, then discover that the secret secret weapon unlocks a secret area with another hidden area inside it for a super secret ability.

I was offered a month of PC Game Pass for $1, so I took MS up on it. I've mostly been playing Forza Horizon 4(my computer can't handle 5) so far, the game's really fun.

I'm open to suggestions on games in the PC Game Pass library, btw. I plan to cancel before Aug 26th, so I want to get my gaming in before then. I honestly do prefer straightforward action games and RPGs(and strategy as well). Things I prefer to avoid are puzzle solving and super open world stuff. I generally strongly prefer single-player experiences, too.

Played Dredge on the Steam Deck, which was a nice, relaxing experience.

Besides that I've been playing Blood: Fresh Supply on my beefy gaming pc. Great fun, much glee when blowing up hordes of cultists.

Just got to 1000hrs on my new Steam account. I am just playing DayZSA, modded hardcore PVE mostly. Rarely, I go back to minecraft.

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. Gotta clear those last quests before Baldurs Gate 3 release.

I am playing Jedi Survivor. Having had a blast with the original I was excited to hear people say that the second installment is similar but better in many ways. I don’t know what it is about it but I’m just not able to get into it. Maybe it’s the semi-open world feeling of some of the larger areas? I dunno it’s just not working for me, which is disappointing.

Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. It finally came out on PC and it feels so good to have a R&C game again.

I've been busy as heck at work and kind of dipped out of TotK. I keep thinking about playing sekiro again, however

I just completed fallout 4 after 4 years!

Yesterday finally bought Remnant: From the Ashes on sale after seeing the new one all over Twitch. Played 6h of coop with my brother and hell was it a lot of fun. There seem to be less and less good coop games, but this one does a good job. Of course there are many small issues though (e.g. a memory leak crashing the game every few hours on Xbox lol). Glad there is a second one already waiting after we're done.

Getting absolutely stuck into Remnant 2, such a cool sense of exploration!

I'm playing project zomboid very hard but such a detailed game.

Death loop! The game keeps warning me against direct fights, but the AI isn't great, so direct fights are the fastest way to clear anything

Played Minecraft with a group of friends until 2am, life is good

Discovering Octopath traveller II. Not a big fan for now, It’s beautiful but I’m a bit disappointed by the story. Hope it gets better 🤞

I'm deep into TOTK, though I'm looking forward to getting started with Don't Starve on my Deck.

Still grinding away at Street Fighter 6, and currently starting another run of the FFVII Remake!

XCOM 2: long war of the chosen (lwotc). Have heard about long war every now and again and finally decided to try it out. Gotta say it's pretty hard but I am starting to get the hang of it

I've started Elder Scrolls Online again after a long break and do the dailies there every evening with all my characters.

I play Dragons Dogma DA for weeks now and I still love how fresh the combat feels everytime you change vocation. Right now I am a magic archer and I pretty much spend all the weight I can carry on blast arrows. This plus the skill where I can double zoom in on enemies from far away and do A TON of damage makes me the biggest danger in all of gransys at the moment. I can't stress this enough: the combat in this game is just so good and varied it's absolutely insane!

But!

I just can't stop thinking about how great it would be if Dragon's Dogma had lore and quests like the third Witcher! I feel like Capcom tried with a handful of quests like the one with the dude from the village who constantly gets lost and you have to rescue him. Or some main storyline quests also can be exciting. And yet, most quests are kill quests with just a little textbox explaining who wants what killed.

Dragons Dogma made me realize how much of Witcher 3 is actually carried by the writing, the lore, the world and the interesting characters interacting in it and how bland, almost bad the combat is.

So now I wish CD Red would hire the people responsible for the combat in Dragons Dogma for the next Witcher! Sounds like a perfect game in my book!

Factorio again. Maybe one day I'll move on.

Playing Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on the PC. Bought it on a whim and it's quite a good game with gorgeous graphics. Lacking polish in some areas though, for example there are many oddly placed invisible walls as well as points where the character can get stuck. Anyway, trying to finish the game before Baldur's Gate 3 comes out.

Started playing InFAMOUS 2, i played the first one maybe 10 years ago and now just getting to the 2nd one lol.

I'm playing Team Fortress 2. It's my comfort game.

Persona 4 mostly, I really like it although I'm tending to prefer P5 from what I've played so far.

Discovered Car Mechanic Simulator and it’s so so so satisfying. I know (knew?) absolutely nothing about the mechanical systems of cars, but it just clicks.

Still Final Fantasy 14, I'm near the end of the Stormblood base story (some general spoilers in the comment).

This expansion has been a massive disappointment so far, and this time it's not even about all the time-wasting (of which there's still plenty). It's about a war to end the occupation of two different regions / nations, but it's just not executed well at all.

The scale of the fights, that are supposed to drive out the invaders, have like a dozen people on either side, so they are just really lame. The villains are not compelling at all and have a really dumb reason for fighting you. Some of your companions, that should play a bigger role, basically don't matter at all. It's just not interesting at all.

I can't wait for this to be over, hopefully the post-game patch content can improve things somewhat. I should at least get a bunch of dungeon unlocks, probably a raid, maybe more, which will most likely be a good time.

As for jobs I've played this week, at the start all Summoner, to get it to 80, afterward I switched to Dancer. Both are really fun and I liked them. I want to check out Red Mage a bit more, and have done some duties with it, but I need more practice with it. I leveled Dark Knight to ~50, but I'm just not really that much into playing tanks. I'll do some duties here and there, but not much more for now. Same with healer, which I'm leveling a White Mage a bit, for now slowly trying to get it to 50.

I got sucked into playing Witcher 3 again. I swear I'll finish it this time! I've also been playing an early access indy game called Inkulinati, and when I need some mindless kick-ass action, I have my go-to TMNT: Shredder's Revenge.

Hades. I bought it a few months ago and finally installed it yesterday. Only played about 30 minutes, but love it so far. I didn't even know it was a roguelike -- I thought it was more like Diablo from the screenshots. I just bought it because everyone said it was amazing, and I think I'm going to agree with them.

Finished what is available in Techtonica, so went back to Dyson Sphere Program for a bit to work on missing achievements. DSP is definitely my favourite of the Factory-Automation games at this point.

I still have a Factorio (Industrial Revolution 3) game going too, but am feeling DSP more at the moment right now.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, a game that hooks a lot.

iRacing... I only ever play iRacing

I've just finished FF XVI, and while it's certainly not a perfect game, I really had a fantastic time with it.

Now onto either of Soul Blazer, Parasite Eve or Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, I've yet to decide which to start with.

I've got a brand new intel nuc 12th gen i7, 4070 graphics, 32 gig ram, Samsung 990 hard drive.

Cost me a pretty penny, and a lot of time to put together. Not to mention all the time spent researching parts and agonising over choices. Then the wait times for deliveries and redeliveris of the orders I messed up (had to return ram twice, once because I accidentally ordered the wrong ones, and once became a stock was faulty).

Eventually have everything set up.

So of course I'm using it to play ksp1.

Just finished Marvel's spiderman (main storyline) and it was really great. Loved the graphics, the story telling and especially this view from the top of the Empire State building

Still playing Diablo IV (just hit level 72) and Puzzle Quest 3 (because functional addiction, which probably applies to Diablo IV as well).

Oh, and Cookie Clicker -- 459 days and counting.

Still deep in Tears of the Kingdom, but I am close to 100% of shrines and light roots. Have not even tried fighting Ganon yet, but with my power level it shouldn't be that tough. Gonna finish it this week and then hop back to Final Fantasy 16, which I binge played release weekend and got over 50% through according to the PS5 progress indicator.

I just finished Tears of the Kingdom last week. No spoilers, the final boss fight felt like a dragon ball Z episode. The health bar busting out of its usual bounds and hitting the edge of the screen was a "shit just got real" moment for me and the kids, lots of hype. I didn't think I would see anything top Breath of the Wild in this generation but glad to be wrong.

FFVIIR and enjoying it. I’m getting the hang of the hybrid battle system, it’s a good balance of the two, curious about other titles that mix action and almost turn based style commands. Still a little annoyed at the camera and target locking, but have gotten used to it after switching to d-pad targeting.

Also just escaped fort joy in Divinity Original Sin 2. Such a great game.

I've been mostly playing Risk of Rain 2, but over the weekend I finally beat it after about 30 hours lol. I honestly didn't even try to beat it, I was just having fun killing a bunch of things. I think it's one of the only games where I don't feel bad losing a 1hr+ run

After finishing this game, I think I might have the confidence to go back and try to finish Enter the Gungeon. This time I might just look up a guide on how to finish it since I've been strictly trying to beat games without outside influence in recent years and I have no idea about anything outside of what I have discovered in the 15+ hours of gameplay I have so far

Ar Tonelico (the 1st one on ps2).

I've played this when I was a younger but never finished. Was bored and picked it up.

It's still a fun jrpg, the song magic amd reyvatail mechanics are a neat twist to the basic turn-based action.

And "Diving"/dating sim mechanic of the game is a fun way to add some social aspect (besides the story).

Slay the Spire, Mini Metro

Deep Rock Galactic

Beat Saber

Factorio (space exploration) coop

Looking back at this list, I gotta say that it's a pretty diverse selection.

I just bought Sun Haven to play with my girlfriend. I'm enjoying it so far, we kinda lost track of time playing lol. Though it seems like whatever job the host has, the players that join will have that job too which kinda sucks. Maybe I messed something up though. It doesn't seem to matter much because you can kinda just ignore your job and do other things.

I've been playing a couple of neat games.

Time Bandit is a really unique mix of genres focused on real time-based interactions. There's puzzles you solve that take hours and you have to leave machines running and check back later, people you meet at certain times, stores that have different schedules. It's a dystopian setting where you work in a factory, and there's this guy you meet early on who's with a rebellion group that teaches you about communism. It's really neat, and less of a time commitment than it might sound like, most of my sessions have been like 10 minutes just checking in on stuff, sort of like a very weird animal crossing. It's pretty cheap and getting a criminally low amount of attention for how cool it is.

The Void Rains Upon Her Heart is a roguelite boss rush shmup. Really approachable for that genre. I got interested in it because the dev got hired by the Revita team (one of my favorite games from last year) to work on the expansion for that, and it definitely has some similarities to that, also kinda reminds me of Undertale combat. It's got a ton of content and does a great job at pacing the unlocks and stuff.

Last, Pseudoregalia is a 3D movement focused metroidvania. It's very N64 inspired in style. You're exploring a big castle, with a lot of platforming and interesting movement abilities. There's no map, so it definitely requires some patience with that, but it's a really neat game overall. Seems to allow a lot of sequence breaking. It's looking to be fairly short as well, which is nice.

I just finished replaying the Arkham games. Thinking about not moving to the Uncharted series since I’ve only ever played the first game, a tiny bit of the second, and half of the fourth. Want to experience the series / story in full.

Snowrunmer. Something about dragging big trucks through mud is just very relaxing and satisfying.

I saw Timberborn getting shilled a bit on here so I've been checking that out. Lots of fun so far. The droughts keep absolutely wrecking me, though.

Satisfactory. Been progressing my last save for a few weeks. I'm in the last (but largest) phase. My factory took a lot longer before turning into spaghetti comparred to my previous attempts. Now it's slowly getting complex to the point of considering going mass dissassembly and make something more pretty.

I am playing Time Wasters on the Steam Deck and Final Fantasy VII Remake on my main rig for my game club.

Just finished Yakuza 3, started Yakuza 4. Enjoying the visual bump, and some refreshing changes to the combat, though I loved the story of Y3. Also playing through BotW for the first time (very late to the party).

Trying not to get sucked in too deep by my return to OSRS on top.

The House of Da Vinci. I got it in the Steam summer sale and needed something like The Room games. I had no idea it was so much like The Room games. I'm glad I bought it with a huge discount. It's not worth the full price, which is the only difference I see between The House of Da Vinci and The Room. The Room is definitely worth full price on Steam and a huge value if you get it on sale. Anyway, I'm happy. I get more of The Room, but it's in The House of Da Vinci. Great puzzle game to play clicking on stuff with your mouse and feeling relaxed.