Yiazmat

just finished FF7 Rebirth a few days ago and really loved it; I think it’s probably gonna be my personal GOTY. Now I’m working on Stellar Blade and eventually I should have some time to finish Dragon’s Dogma 2, right? …Right???

As for the question I stopped playing Helldivers 2 because I got kinda bored with it. It’s a good game but eventually you get burned out. I might pick it back up when they release some more stuff to do.

I really enjoyed it. The best parts of the game are the characters and the spectacle of fighting the different eikons (summons). It’s not really much of an RPG though, more like an action adventure game. The combat is alright albeit pretty button-mashy (but I’m an old cranky boomer who prefers turn-based FF games so ymmv).

As for the story, I know it’s kinda polarizing among fans but I thought it was pretty good. It was more coherent than 15, at least. IMO the main draw is the eikon fights, some of which actually made my jaw drop. It feels like they took inspiration from games like Asura’s Wrath, if you’ve ever played that.

I’m looking forward to Stellar Blade next week and I think I’m like ~80% done with FF7 Rebirth so I should be finished by then. I still need to finish Dragon’s Dogma 2 and try the FF16 DLC that just recently came out as well… I wish there were more hours in the day.

Other than that the main thing I’m looking forward to is the “totally not E3” announcement shows this summer to see what’s coming out later this year.

I just beat Pacific Drive earlier tonight. Cool game with a really fun and addictive gameplay loop. Love the creepy vibe of the game, the music, researching and crafting new parts to put on your station wagon, the rush of trying to beat the instability as it closes in around you, the eerie feeling you’re being watched when you walk around the zone outside your car, the weird quirks your car develops as it takes damage, all of it kicks ass.

Although now I’m glad I can finally put more time into FF7 Rebirth and eventually Dragon’s Dogma 2 when it comes out. No idea how I’m gonna find enough time to play them though. Edit: I forgot I’ve been playing Helldivers 2 with my friends, too. I feel like it’s one of the few games to get “live service” right in that they focused on making a good game with fun content first and the live service elements came second. Those elements are barely even noticeable too, which is nice.

I don’t have the game (not really into superhero stuff) but from what I understand it’s a combination of being repetitive/having barely any content and being a really shameless live service game (battle pass, microtransactions, etc.)

For once I think gamers are (mostly) justified in being mad because this $70 game just isn’t very good and pretty openly wants to extract as much money as possible from them

I’m excited to see new stuff from death stranding 2 and that new game from Ken Levine. Also god please give us a release date for silent hill 2 remake

I’ve been replaying Nier Replicant but I’ll probably take a break to play some of that roguelike mode in the last of us part 2 remaster that’s coming out this week. I’m also looking forward to playing the persona 3 remake, FF7 rebirth, and dragon’s dogma 2 but it’ll probably take me a while to get to all of them.

For the past ten years… I don’t think I ever ended a session of a player vs player match - “happy.”

Yeah I had this same realization a while ago when I used to almost exclusively play competitive games. When I lost a match, at best I just felt bad, and at worst I was pissed because I got my ass kicked by some little shit taunting me over voice chat or something. When I won I just felt okay or maybe relieved, but not really good or happy. Either way when I stopped playing I was usually in a worse mood than when I started.

Now I mostly play single player games and have a lot more fun. After I close out of the game I feel satisfied and like I genuinely enjoyed the time I spent playing it. No more getting needlessly stressed out or having my day ruined because of a game. Also it helps that when I need to answer my phone, get a package at the door, etc. I can (usually) just pause the game and come back no problem.

the r/games thread on this has no less than three comments calling it “aUtHoRiTaRiAn” lol

god this gives me flashbacks to a few weeks after elden ring released when I got downvoted into the negative triple digits for daring to criticize the game in r/eldenring lol

yea the original game was scary as shit back in 2008. I played the remake earlier this year and while I like the new side quests and quality of life stuff they added, a lot of the things that were novel back then are pretty played out in 2023 so it wasn’t nearly as scary. Motive still did a good job remaking a beloved game though.

trailer looked good but my interest kinda dropped when it said 2025. when it’s that far away my brain is just like “well there’s no reason to care about this for another year or more, then” because you know they’re just gonna drip feed you the smallest bit of info at a glacial pace until then.

same thing happened when Bethesda announced ES6. I hate when these companies announce projects super early. I wish more games would follow the Fallout 4 route where they announced it in the summer and it released like 4 or 5 months later.

Owlcat makes some damn fine CRPGs so I’m excited for Rogue Trader to come out this week. While waiting for it I finally got around to finishing FF13 for the first time since it released. I’m actually kind of mad at myself for waiting so long because everyone kept saying how much it sucked. It’s not the best FF game or anything but I liked it a lot and will eventually play its two sequels as well.

Lol I actually just had another one today where I was doing a mission on Neon and told my companion to wait in one of the air ducts because she kept alerting the guards when I was trying to sneak around. I totally forgot about her in there and during the next mission I was talking to an NPC and my companion interjected with something… from a totally different floor, partially obscured by shadows of an air vent she was standing near. Gave me a good laugh imagining her standing in a dark air duct for hours and then somehow hearing our conversation from multiple floors below us and giving her thoughts on it.

yeah I guess the delay from last year helped out a lot

my thoughts after about a week of playing:

• It’s definitely one of the least buggy Bethesda games I’ve played at launch, but it’s still a Bethesda game so you’ll see the usual “npc vibrating into a wall” type bugs. An amusing one I just encountered was my companion getting stuck talking with that spacesuit filter on her voice, so even though she’s standing right next to me and we’re not wearing spacesuits her voice she still sounded like she was talking over a radio lol.
• I’ve seen a lot of complaints about performance, and I don’t know if I just got really lucky with my PC config but the game runs really well for me (max settings, 1440p with FSR2 enabled and it never goes below 60fps).
• Loading screens galore. I’m playing on an SSD so they only take like 1-3 seconds max but it’s still annoying to see so many. I feel like Bethesda needs to just bite the bullet and create a brand new engine from scratch (which would take a ton of time and resources so it will probably never happen).
• The “fast travel everywhere” system is strange. I agree that it’s a little immersion breaking to fast travel light years away with a short loading screen. I don’t really know how you’d get around it though because manually traveling everywhere in a space game would get boring very quickly.
• I like the ship builder. They make it pretty easy to snap parts together and it’s really satisfying to design a cool looking ship that actually has useful features on the inside (like the workshop for the crafting stations or the armory for showing off rare weapons). I just wish the ship builder controls were a bit better. It’s also pretty neat to put windows on your ship and then go out in space and look through them at a huge planet or other ships flying around you, or come back to your ship and see members of your crew hanging out in the living area or engineering bay.
• I like customizing guns too but it’s really easy to make guns that are super overpowered, especially if you start with one that has really good effects. That’s kinda expected in a Bethesda game though.
• I’m not sure how I feel about the procedural generation on planets. On one hand, a lot of the “random” structures you can walk to are actually pretty detailed and some are WAY bigger than they look from the outside. In fact some of my best pieces of gear came from exploring them. On the other hand, the longer I’ve played the more I find reused set pieces. It’s also strange that even on severely inhospitable planets there are still NPCs living there or ships landing and taking off.
• After I did a specific side mission, I now see a random encounter related to it all the damn time and they have the exact same dialogue every single time. I don’t know if it’s a bug but if not it’s a really strange design choice.
• Visually the NPCs don’t look that great, and the environments are okay, but the items like guns and miscellaneous objects are very detailed. The ships also look (and sound) incredible. At one point I climbed on top of my ship and noticed there are a ton of small details all over it that most players won’t even see
• I haven’t played a ton of the main story, but the side quests are usually pretty interesting. IMO they’re the best story-related parts of the game. However I agree with another comment here that Akila city is weird because it’s like the 24th century and they still have dirt roads.
• The companions are okay. I like Andreja and Vasco.
• I think people will make some really cool mods for this game. Once the creation kit is released I plan on making a few myself (I really want to add an infinite-volume storage container near the crafting stations on my ship).

Overall I don’t think this game is GOTY material or anything, but I usually have a good time with Bethesda games (with the exception of Fallout 76) so just like Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallout I’ll probably come back to it every once in a while and have fun, especially once more mods start rolling out.

Dead Space has that really cool diegetic “locator” system so if you come across multiple paths you can see which way points toward the story, and take your time exploring the other direction, knowing you won’t accidentally start a story cutscene that locks you out of explorable areas

I think probably like a 7 or 8. No idea if it’s true or not but there was that leak at the beginning of the year that said Redfall and Starfield were both delayed because they were in pretty rough shape, and they were right about Redfall so that doesn’t really bode well.

I used to pre-order a ton because I like collecting physical games and some come with special launch versions but now that I’m older I do it a lot more selectively. These days I pretty much only pre-order a game if I’m 100% sure I will love it (like I pre-ordered the Death Stranding collector’s edition because I love Kojima’s weirdass games and it ended up being one of my favorite games ever). Sometimes I’ll pre-order a game if it’s from a smaller-ish studio and I really liked their previous work (like Larian’s DOS/BG3, Owlcat’s Pathfinder games, Guild Wars 2 expansions, Yoko Taro’s stuff, etc.) because I’m familiar with the kind of work those studios do and know I’ll be getting it anyway.

Yeah as long as you’re exploring, the game throws camping supplies at you so you can rest a bit more than you think. Also resting is how you see a lot of story cutscenes with your party so it’s a good idea to rest every once in a while and talk to your party members.

I have the same problem with hoarding items/spells (probably from playing old RPGs where you needed every advantage you could get) but recently I’ve just forced myself to use them if I need to and it usually works out fine.