What game are you playing?

[Tinky Winky]

Finished BG1 for the first time, it gave me more trouble than I have expected, I have to resort on cheesing the endgame section in order to win, meanwhile I have multiple playthrough on ToEE and even managed to clean the ***** temple without recruiting companions. I managed to beat the final boss by buffing Ajantis with boots of speed and protection from magic, then sent him running around to trigger traps in order to weaken the final boss before my rest of the party to finish them off. Guess I'm done with Baldur's GAYte for now, gonna play Dark Sun the next.

[DagothGeas5]

Thank you for the recommendation @rusty_shackleford I am loving it so far
(game is The First Descendant for anyone reading this and wondering). There is still plenty of time for me to be stabbed in the heart, but if it only there was a way to crouch, this is exactly what I was looking for.

[1998]

. Guess I'm done with Baldur's GAYte for now

Take that back

[Roguey]

Finished yet another replay of Sonic 2. Finished it countless times when I was young, haven't touched it in over 20 years, sadly my muscle memory has deteriorated and I'm nowhere near as good at it as I used to be. Couldn't confidently go fast through all the levels, couldn't consistently stick to the top, died once on the level 2 boss, came close to death several other times. However I did finish it without a single rewind and with 14 lives left, so it wasn't entirely forgotten. Classic game.

[Rand]

Playing (among other things) STALKER Call of Pripyat.
Personally lightly modded vanilla version.

I can see why this game got that huge gunslinger mod. It's undercooked.
Also, the Xray engine is being laggy. I should see if there's an openXray replacement that runs better.

[Rand]

Playing (among other things) STALKER Call of Pripyat.
Personally lightly modded vanilla version.

I can see why this game got that huge gunslinger mod. It's undercooked.
Also, the Xray engine is being laggy. I should see if there's an openXray replacement that runs better.

Maybe this is the way to go?
https://steamcommunity.com/app/41700/di ... 402671541/

[rusty_shackleford]

Playing (among other things) STALKER Call of Pripyat.
Personally lightly modded vanilla version.

I can see why this game got that huge gunslinger mod. It's undercooked.
Also, the Xray engine is being laggy. I should see if there's an openXray replacement that runs better.

Playing (among other things) STALKER Call of Pripyat.
Personally lightly modded vanilla version.

I can see why this game got that huge gunslinger mod. It's undercooked.
Also, the Xray engine is being laggy. I should see if there's an openXray replacement that runs better.

Maybe this is the way to go?
https://steamcommunity.com/app/41700/di ... 402671541/

I don't know much about STALKER, but what about the open xray implementation?
https://github.com/OpenXRay/xray-16

[Rand]

Playing (among other things) STALKER Call of Pripyat.
Personally lightly modded vanilla version.

I can see why this game got that huge gunslinger mod. It's undercooked.
Also, the Xray engine is being laggy. I should see if there's an openXray replacement that runs better.

Playing (among other things) STALKER Call of Pripyat.
Personally lightly modded vanilla version.

I can see why this game got that huge gunslinger mod. It's undercooked.
Also, the Xray engine is being laggy. I should see if there's an openXray replacement that runs better.

Maybe this is the way to go?
https://steamcommunity.com/app/41700/di ... 402671541/

I don't know much about STALKER, but what about the open xray implementation?
https://github.com/OpenXRay/xray-16

I've been playing around with it.
One problem: not compatible with my saves.
Second: a bit crashy, but I could have poor settings.

[rusty_shackleford]

Playing (among other things) STALKER Call of Pripyat.
Personally lightly modded vanilla version.

I can see why this game got that huge gunslinger mod. It's undercooked.
Also, the Xray engine is being laggy. I should see if there's an openXray replacement that runs better.

Playing (among other things) STALKER Call of Pripyat.
Personally lightly modded vanilla version.

I can see why this game got that huge gunslinger mod. It's undercooked.
Also, the Xray engine is being laggy. I should see if there's an openXray replacement that runs better.

Maybe this is the way to go?
https://steamcommunity.com/app/41700/di ... 402671541/

I don't know much about STALKER, but what about the open xray implementation?
https://github.com/OpenXRay/xray-16

I've been playing around with it.
One problem: not compatible with my saves.
Second: a bit crashy, but I could have poor settings.

Did you grab the latest nightly build from here?
https://github.com/OpenXRay/xray-16/wik ... l-and-play

[Rand]

Absolutely, did. Yes.
Looks nice. Runs a little better. Crashed in various ways 6 times already.
One fatally (CTD) the others non-fatally.

[Rand]

Zero crashes on GoG vanilla version in many hours.
Plus I'd lose my saves.
We'll see if I replay it using Gunslinger mod.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Last week, I played Amazing Cultivation Simulator. It plays like Rimworld in terms of being a top down 2D base building survival sim, but with a Chinese Xianxia (web novel) fantasy theme. The key difference is that you have two types of characters: normal people who like in Rimworld can build, craft, farm, transport items, do whatever, etc. And then Cultivators, who are normal people who trained enough and have awakened their Qi, and can't do peon stuff anymore, and pretty much just levitate over their bed meditating unless they need to fight. Basically Goku from Dragon Ball Z. Outside of the Rimworld base building survival stuff, the main objective is to train up your cultivators as much as possible. But you still need people to do building/crafting/farming/etc, so you do not want to promote everyone to Cultivator.

This game mechanics are extremely esoteric and requires reading through several different huge google docs to understand. Unfortunately the wiki is barebones.




At character creation, you can select between humans or Yaogui, who are animal people. Some of the Yaogui models looked pretty neat, and apparently most people you randomly recruit during gameplay are humans, so I decided to make my full starting five characters into Yaogui. Yaogui are animals that have amassed enough Qi or wisdom to become sentient, and with further Qi/wisdom they can become capable of shapeshifting into human forms. However, Yaogui have a special mechanic where because they are aberration to nature, after enough time they will face tribulation as the universe attempts to remove them. So when creating my Yaogui characters, I tried rolling for tribulation timers that wouldn't kick in until the 400+ day mark, to buy time to train them up as cultivators and survive tribulation.




Basic base building/survival sim stuff.




Every morning, everyone spends an hour or two training. With sufficient training, anyone can then go meditate and perform a breakthrough and become a Cultivator, though as aforementioned you do not want to turn everyone into a Cultivator.




At character creation, I had thought that my rabbit man would be the main character, but this bear yaogui achieved breakthrough first, so I began focusing on him and made him into the sect leader. For my sect, I picked the combat oriented Chariot law, and this bear Yaogui has really good stats for it. Everyone else lagged behind in their progression because their stats were not very good for it.




You can get a pet (can be a fox or a turtle or whatever else, I randomly got a basic dog) that can also grow its Qi and become powerful. Every now and then, the pet will randomly do something like attack strangers, eat bread, transport items, etc, and you will get an opportunity to train its behavior.




Random events. I think for this one, you would need a powerful cultivator or an artifact that would allow you to survive that area.




My bear cultivator performed further training and has to do another breakthrough to continue progressing. This is where the game mechanics can get really esoteric. The Chariot law he is practicing is affiliated with the metal element, so I had to construct a building with metal walls and roofs, and surround him with metal display stands that had earth items on them (earth feeds metal) and spiritwood (which enhances Qi growth). And then there is some Yin-Yang stuff involved that I don't grasp the significance of, but basically for metal cultivation he needs to do it at night for maximum chance of a breakthrough.




He managed his first breakthrough on his second attempt. Subsequent attempts raise your chances of a breakthrough.




The base building was really time consuming. At first I had two people per house, but once I started getting cultivators, they became proud and wanted to wear nicer clothes and did not want to share rooms with other people. So to keep their mood high, I had to construct more houses just for each cultivator. I also needed lots and lots of storage space.

After 18 hours played, I wound up putting down the game. I was around 115ish days into the game, and at around the 200 day mark a water dragon superboss can erupt out of your base, and I presume you need a cultivator who has attained Golden Core status to have a chance of killing it before it completely wipes out the map. But only my bear Yaogui had finished his second breakthrough and reached the Core Shaping tier, and was still quite a ways off from Golden Core shaping, and everyone else had a bad affinity for the Chariot Law and were making very slow progress in their cultivation. So the gameplay was mostly just me watching as the days slowly go by (even at max speed) and I would be constantly having to toggle the cultivators between meditating to progress once their mental state was high, and then toggling them to stop progressing and to improve their mental state. Over and over and over. Apparently there was an Elysium mod that automated it, but it was several years old, and there were several duplicate mods on the workshop and I could not determine which one I should use for the current build of the game. Occasionally we would get attacked by other cultivators (who had also broken through), and the combat would take a long time. It got boring, I didn't think I would be ready for the water dragon in time, and I didn't want to read through dense paragraphs of text in google docs anymore. So I hung up the game.

[derami991]

I’m playing 7 Days to Die right now. It’s a great survival game, with crafting, exploring, and fighting off zombies.
Any other 7dtd players around this place? My friends and I grabbed a private server from here, so we have some slots free. Works perfectly with no lag.

[Oyster Sauce]

I’m playing 7 Days to Die right now. It’s a great survival game, with crafting, exploring, and fighting off zombies.
Any other 7dtd players around this place?

I like it. Haven't played in many moons though.

[pol_345polex]

Venetica.
Semi decent action-rpg set in Venice. Got it for 1 euro.

[AliciaDurge]

Mostly BG3.

[1998]

Infinity Nikki, BG3 with my partner, just got Skyrim and Escape from Tarkov so gonna play them too and Hogwarts Legacy.

in 2025? how is that even possible?

[AliciaDurge]

Infinity Nikki, BG3 with my partner, just got Skyrim and Escape from Tarkov so gonna play them too and Hogwarts Legacy.

in 2025? how is that even possible?

I joined the PC gaming community recently and I’ve always wanted to try Skyrim lol. The year when a game was done doesn’t really matter to me, I’m a fantasy nerd. I’m planning on to play other stuff too.

[rusty_shackleford]

Infinity Nikki, BG3 with my partner, just got Skyrim and Escape from Tarkov so gonna play them too and Hogwarts Legacy.

in 2025? how is that even possible?

I joined the PC gaming community in 2024 and I’ve always wanted to try Skyrim lol. The year when a game was done doesn’t really matter to me, I’m a fantasy nerd. I’m planning on to play Elden Rings and Dark Souls too and I have Dragon Age Origins.

Skyrim has a really good 'total conversion' mod you can grab on Steam for free


It's a new game made in the Skyrim engine.

[1998]

Infinity Nikki, BG3 with my partner, just got Skyrim and Escape from Tarkov so gonna play them too and Hogwarts Legacy.

in 2025? how is that even possible?

I joined the PC gaming community in 2024 and I’ve always wanted to try Skyrim lol. The year when a game was done doesn’t really matter to me, I’m a fantasy nerd. I’m planning on to play Elden Rings and Dark Souls too and I have Dragon Age Origins.

Just skip Elden Ring and Dark Souls and stick to RPGs

[Breathe]

in 2025? how is that even possible?

I joined the PC gaming community in 2024 and I’ve always wanted to try Skyrim lol. The year when a game was done doesn’t really matter to me, I’m a fantasy nerd. I’m planning on to play Elden Rings and Dark Souls too and I have Dragon Age Origins.

Just skip Elden Ring and Dark Souls and stick to RPGs

[Vergil]

Infinity Nikki, BG3 with my partner, just got Skyrim and Escape from Tarkov so gonna play them too and Hogwarts Legacy.

in 2025? how is that even possible?

I joined the PC gaming community in 2024 and I’ve always wanted to try Skyrim lol. The year when a game was done doesn’t really matter to me, I’m a fantasy nerd. I’m planning on to play Elden Rings and Dark Souls too and I have Dragon Age Origins.

Please play Morrowind people like you really like it.

[Gunnar]

I tried Keeper RL but I didn’t like it that much. it takes a long time to get going building a base and mining out all the ores you need, even if you put it on the fastest setting. Then if you die, you have to start over from scratch and watch your imps mine out all that rock again. You start with only 4 imps and to get more costs gold, which can be found on deep x levels. I suppose I prefer roguelikes where each session is shorter with less prepatory work needed, so I can immediately pick it up and try again when I die.

[AliciaDurge]

in 2025? how is that even possible?

I joined the PC gaming community in 2024 and I’ve always wanted to try Skyrim lol. The year when a game was done doesn’t really matter to me, I’m a fantasy nerd. I’m planning on to play Elden Rings and Dark Souls too and I have Dragon Age Origins.

Skyrim has a really good 'total conversion' mod you can grab on Steam for free


It's a new game made in the Skyrim engine.

Thanks, I'd rather play the base game first tho. ^^ My principle is to play the base game first always before mods lol, but I'll check that later.


@1998 Thanks but I also like combat/strategy heavy games and I want to play Elden Ring with friends.

[Roguey]

Finished Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong. Every other character is black or *****, but I liked two out of the three main characters. Emem was awful, but

► Show Spoiler

at least you get to turn on the fat lesbo who sired you at the end.

Leysha and her daughter are all right; yeah the codex all but spells out one of the twists, but there are more of them. Galeb was my favorite character with the arc I liked most.

► Show Spoiler

Loyal to a fault to vampires who don't deserve it, fucks up all his attempts to build a positive legacy, decided to just say **** everything and die in the middle east at the end.

Also the one with the best theme.

Some of the gameplay at the end got pretty obnoxious. Didn't care for the stealth section (yeah you can avoid it by making better choices) or the scenes with time limits. Probably won't play it again, but I liked going through it the once well enough.

[wndrbr]

Some of the gameplay at the end got pretty obnoxious. Didn't care for the stealth section (yeah you can avoid it by making better choices) or the scenes with time limits. Probably won't play it again, but I liked going through it the once well enough.

leave it to Roguey to find """""gameplay""""" in a cinematic movie-game, and then find it obnoxious.

[maidenhaver]

I started Parkan 2, killed the droid pirate, but I'm not sure what mission I want.

[Rand]

Still alternately playing and modding stalker: Call of Pripyat.
It's a decent game, but not as good as the first two.
I'd say it has a mild case of Xbox-itis. Dumbed down and smaller.

It has some pretty serious bugs remaining, and I'm finding lots of typos and mistakes in the weapon and armor control files I've been editing as I go.
Eventually, I guess I'll post my vanilla (slightly) + files here as a mod.
Some of the things I have done so far is make all artifacts worthwhile and rationalized the upgrade trees so it's not gamified (as in bizarre either/or choices).

I can't easily fix the main balance problem, however. The economy, if not messed with, sucks.
It also sucks if messed with, but at least it's not annoying.

The issue is the carrying weight. you can't haul back much to sell, and you can only sell weapons and armor with 70% durability or higher.
But the durability is shown as a bar, so you can never be sure if that rifle you've been lugging is 69% and therefore a waste of space.
(You CAN repair stuff not too damaged for a bit less than you'll make when you sell it after repaired).
In the design of the game, you're expected to just dump 95% of the items you loot. This would be fine if the quests gave you decent rewards, but they don't.
A load of loot can sell for 4k to 10k. Most quests, and there are few, give you 1000 to about 4000. A new stalker suit can cost 8000 or more. The good stuff costs 20k to 40k.
The cost of ammo, if not scavenged (and it's kinda heavy) will cut deeply into the player's funds, but repairing weapons and armor every day can cost 1500 to 4000, depending on how valuable the items are (the repair cost is based on the base item cost).
And guns can break down quick. 100 shots from a good sniper rifle (where it takes at least two hits to kill a lightly armored enemy) will degrade the weapon to 55% or so, and it costs well over 1000 to repair it. No partial repairs either. Fix it totally or don't.
Then there's the upgrade system. It's pretty expensive as well, especially for the better weapons and armors.

So the player is constanly tring to keep enough cash on hand to repair while saving for the rare upgrade, and will rarely if ever be able to buy a special weapon or armor from the dealer.
A player playing the way the game wants him to is constantly on the verge of annoying poverty unless he gets lucky and finds an artifact that is requested and sells it. These artifacts only spawn infrequently and are randomized. And the requested ones can change between when you go out and come back.

The solution is to give the player a more generous backpack. This has some economy side effects as well.
Now the player is incentivized to follow NPCs around and loot steal. Because the mutants, bandits, and stalkers will fight each other, but only mutants are (normally) hostile to the player.
The NPCs will pick up loot, so if you don't want to kill them yourself (ruining your reputation), you just follow them until an enemy kills them, then grab all the loot and bugger off home to sell and/or repair and sell it all.
Now the player has too much money. Which is less bad because there's not a lot to buy anyway except for special items that are slightly better than the regular ones.
It saves the running back and forth to base nonsense with tiny amounts of loot/artifacts. You still do that, but not constantly.

This is a first draft and a stream of consciousness rough overview. I'll add to it and clean it up and probably make a thread when I'm done in a few weeks.

[Kowe]

Spent playing and finishing a few games this and last month.

Tarzan (PSX): Good platformer. Licensed games tend to be ****, but not in this case. Finished it on Normal difficulty. All inputs are made use of in the level and game design.
The Smurfs (SNES): Had it for PC when I was very young. Doubt I would have finished it back then. It isn't a bad platformer either but at times quite brutal and therefore asking for save states to be used. Has a few questionable design choices. Can't really recommend as it will more than likely be a frustrating experience.
Doom II: 100 % UV run. Besides map 30 with its timed secret, it wasn't so bad and quite enjoyable instead. Double-Barreled Shotgun makes a stark difference in gameplay compared to Ultimate Doom. In general, it is the better one of the two.
Ultimate Doom: Currently doing a 100 % UV run. In Episode 2, at the moment. Last time was a normal run. Got the impression that the quality went down from E1 to E2 to E3 before it increased with E4 again. Will be interesting to see if this still proves correct with a 100 % UV run.
Cyberpunk 2077: This one has been a pleasant suprise and the non-PL playthrough isn't finished yet. Still have to 100 % it. My Panam and a few other mods have made it a better experience. It's a degenerate dystopia, yet can still be played prudishly. Pretty nice that the ******* from the Voodoo Boys all die during the main story. Same with some other characters. Looked a bit into its mod tools. Good chance I pick it up for the purpose of modding, next to BG3.

[Tinky Winky]

Playing Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl right now, and it makes me appreciate the simplicity the original trilogy has; much smaller, yet the progression feels more fluid. The game has scripted CoD-like encounters, but they are over quite fast so they weren't as much of a problem as in Stalker 2, and the game feels more polished once you obtain your first AK. I'm about to reach Brain Scorcher, which is late game where they start spamming enemies at you but it should be ending soon.