What game are you currently playing?

[Xzarloxara]

@Skatan cool that you are playing NWN:EE.I haven't played it in quite a while either, but I definitely plan to return to it some time. I usually prefer spellcasting classes myself, especially the sorcerer. Bards are ok, but they are really hard to start out with, and, with only a few exceptions, have a fairly poor selection of spells iirc.

Never heard of that bridge module before, but I do know about the "deck of cards" item. It honestly isn't worth playing with imho.

 

[Xzarloxara]

Until recently I have been spending most of my time with BG3, but, last week, part two of the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet DLC, The Indigo Disk, came out and I have switched to playing that for the most part. It is a lot of fun so far.

 

[mlnevese]

I'm playing CP 2077 again and I should say after the patch and DLC it's a different game. I'm actually enjoying it much more this time.

 

[OrlonKronsteen]

You folks are so much more interesting than me, what with your varied gaming repertoires. I only ever play the BG games anymore, and I haven't even done much of that this fall/winter, due to some really crappy stuff that happened. Having said that, it's probably time to roll a blackguard, being Christmas and all.

 

[OrlonKronsteen]

P.S. - I hope you and your families are all doing well. I raise a toast to you all.

 

[BelgarathMTH]

Currently and over the past month or so, I've gotten pulled back into World of Warcraft. I wanted to try their new "Season of Discovery", which was interesting to me up to about level 20, but then I got more interested in re-doing Loremaster in Wrath of the Lich King Classic. I found a nice guild there with some nice new online friends, and when I joined, they gave me four netherweave bags and 50 gold as "welcome gifts". Ever wanting to start new characters as I do, I leveled a paladin to 20 there, and now I'm leveling a priest just because I felt like starting a priest and experiencing the different gameplay style.

WoW really knows how to do Christmas right, with "Winter Veil" decorations in every zone and "Greatfather Winter" in Ironforge with some fun sidequests. I've done them in all three game versions I'm playing, including leveling a discipline priest to level 20 in "retail" just to do the Christmas quests and play with collectible holiday-themed toys I've gotten over the years. I have a "Rudolph" deer mount, a "Rudolph" cosmetic pet, and a chest I can drop on the ground that lets me and/or other players put on a Santa suit. I even rode Santa's sleigh around Ironforge and played in the giant snowglobe outside the Ironforge auction house.

It's become a personal holiday tradition of mine to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas in Azeroth.

 

[Antimatter]

I agree MMOs seem to be really good for this time of the year. For me, it's ESO, for you, WoW. I understand the vibe you mention. Have fun, and happy holidays to you!

 

[Skatan]

@Skatan cool that you are playing NWN:EE.I haven't played it in quite a while either, but I definitely plan to return to it some time. I usually prefer spellcasting classes myself, especially the sorcerer. Bards are ok, but they are really hard to start out with, and, with only a few exceptions, have a fairly poor selection of spells iirc.

Never heard of that bridge module before, but I do know about the "deck of cards" item. It honestly isn't worth playing with imho.

The bridge modules was apparently made during a fan-event where people could create smaller modules to "bridge" the time between SoU and HotU and then people could vote on their favorites. I asked the community in reddit which one they preferred and got recommended Shadohaunt even though that one wasn't the winner from back in the day. It was very good and well-made, even adding some fun stuff to dialogues that could help you roleplay your character. It did end up making the character a bit too strong in the end due to the massive amount of items you could sell for gold. So you didn't get that much extra EXP and still start HotU on basically the correct level, but with a massive bank that I used to upgrade my weapon very high once I reached Chapter 2 and the smith that let's you customize your weapon there. But up until then it was basically the same experience as if I had just gone from SoU to HotU.

I saw the dark dreams of furiae (sp?) was on discount in the GoG sale so will pick it up and play it next. I believe I read, although I never kept tabs on NVNEE news, that it got pretty good response.

In mid-chapter 2 of HotU now, so a bit over halfway. The games are quite short but that's not a bad thing sometimes.

 

[Chronicler]

Been playing some more Final Fantasy 5. I'm pretty much always playing it on and off these days. It's become a persistent standby.

Playing with a white mage, a berserker, a ranger, and a dragoon this time, and honestly I think this party is garbage. It'll get the job done. They all do. But my characters are all weak and their abilities don't interact in any interesting ways and it doesn't really feel like there's much I'm doing that I couldn't do with just about any other group configuration.

I've been beating myself up thinking I'm doing something wrong. These dudes looks pretty solid on paper. But it's really not coming together and I'm starting to think it's not my fault.

I think the ultimate thing that might be hurting me is that none of these guys have any good mid-game weapons though, except the berserker. We'll see how everybody looks once we make it to the sealed castle and pick up some legendary weapons. Maybe it's just that they come together in the end game.

 

[shmity72]

play money? rng hits and you win 7 million. real life? rng hits and you lose your wife/house/dog.

moral of the story: I'm glad my wife convinced me not to do this outside of fantasy.

 

[Skatan]

Playing The Outer Worlds now, the free copy from Epic called Spacer's choice. Not the greatest from a optimization point of view, it's a bit laggy for some reason but it's casual fun. Have spent around 10 hours so far in the last couple of days and having a blast.

 

[Chronicler]

My brother got me Tears of the Kingdom for Christmas. Zelda used to be a huge obsession of mine, but I haven't played a new Zelda game in a very long time. Life kind of got away from me after highschool.

I am having a blast. I'd heard all sorts of things about the turns the Zelda franchise had taken, and it sounded like it had grown pretty strange, but this pretty much still feels like a Zelda game to me.

One thing I'd heard is that in the open world games, the map doesn't really get to be a puzzle, because you can access it all at once. But if anything I've found the opposite. It's so much more a puzzle than it ever was. There's a huge amount of verticality to the map, with sky islands, and a huge underground world, so you're constantly trying to figure out how to get up there or down there, and it's a bit more forgiving once you have the hanglider to deal with fall damage, but still a pressing concern. And I just spent 3 days trying to find a piece of fire resistant armour so I could get inside these hot caves. It was really well hidden! Never had to search that hard for anything in any previous Zelda. I technically could've just bought a piece of fire resistant gear by selling some of my stuff, but I wanted to keep my stuff.

 

[Alesia_BH]

Happy new year, everyone!

I'm still playing Mass Effect. I almost -almost- completed my first Mass Effect Trilogy no reload recently. My adept, Alex, older sister to Jack, made it to Rannoch before succumbing to a reaper beam. Aside from that she was reload free. That was my first success in ME 2 and my first trilogy near miss. I'm confident I could make it with an adept if I tried again. For the curious, she was a Bastion with specialization in sniper rifles in ME1. In ME2, she took Barrier as her special ability, sniper rifles for her advanced weapon training. In ME3 she went with Defensive Matrix as her special ability. She wielded the Geth Plasma SMG and the Acolyte. She partied with Wrex and Tali in ME1; Grunt and Zaeed/Thane in ME2; James and Javik/Ashley in ME3.

I'm currently running an engineer, Arvada Sheperd. She's approaching the end of ME1 now. I don't expect any difficulties there- that has become routine, even on Insanity. I'm curious to see how she fares in ME2.

Once again, happy new year, everyone! Best wishes!

 

[Antimatter]

I've continued to have a blast in ESO. My main character reached ~800 champion points (aka the 800th lvl), which is pretty far in terms of power progress. My another character reached the minimum to get to the champion points territory as well, so now it doesn't matter which of them I play, everything works for the progress of the whole account. I went from a semi-tank to a damage dealer, and the gaming experience changed substantially. I'm trying a new character concept on top of that, so eventually I'll have 3 different characters for different purposes.

This winter holiday I explored some tough areas (had a few encounters in the PvP zone, also played some of the strongest PvE content as a duo). What this game offers is a big variety of things, so no day feels the same: one day I'm exploring Deadlands (an Oblivion plane), another day I'm doing the main quest in the Cold Harbour (another Oblivion plane), the following day I'm doing some tough PvE content for new armor motifs (aka skins), then I'm focusing on furnishing my house thanks to all the schematics I've found, then I'm trying out new companions (each of them has different personalities and stories). Add that I can mix between opposite playing styles of my characters, and you can imagine it feels really good.

I'm enjoying roleplaying and thinking about backstories for my characters, but also enjoying the power curve increase. This game rewards persistent players who try and try again, and eventually gather items they targeted.

The best aspect is learning stories and getting more familiar with The Elder Scrolls lore. I didn't expect to find an old Argonian settlement in the Cold Harbour. The quest explained Argonian lore to me a bit.

 

[Nimran]

Replaying Dragon’s Dogma in preparation for DD2. Since the devs are apparently cutting mystic knight from 2, I’m going through it with MK. Perfect blocking with the magic shield’s counter spells is so satisfying! I’m going to miss it, assuming MK doesn’t come back.

 

[Alesia_BH]

Still playing Mass Effect no reload style.

My engineer, Arvada Shepard, met the same fate as her predecessor: killed by a reaper beam on Rannoch. Aside from the Rannoch mini-game, I have the trilogy down now, at least on Veteran.

Since my engineer seemed capable on higher difficulty settings, I let her try Mass Effect 1 & 2 on Insanity. ME1 was a successful no reload. ME2 required reloads, but it seems feasible now that I have more experience with the class and the difficulty setting. I’m almost -almost- at the point where I can make a legitimate attempt at no reloading the trilogy on Insanity.

If people are interested in my Mass Effect play, let me know, and I’ll start a thread. I didn’t feel a Veteran no reload was worth sharing but if I amp up to Insanity there should be enough tactical intrique to warrant posting. Mass Effect is old, and it doesn’t have a no reload scene, but who knows: maybe some of you find this interesting? If so let me know!

Cheers,

A.

Btw, here’s Arvada with her insanity endgame squad. Thane, Legion and an engineer is super solid for the final stretch. Double sniper rifles fix the collectors, double drones solve Harbinger and the scions.

 

[WarChiefZeke]

I always enjoy hearing about peoples playthroughs, particularly with as much roleplaying justification and exposition as possible.

 

[Antimatter]

The original Mass Effect games might be old, but not old enough like BG for example, which still has a no-reload scene. And especially with the next game in the series in production, the actual Mass Effect brand is pretty relevant, I would say. I've always enjoyed your and other people's stories and strategy discoveries (Pillars of Eternity, Diablo, Pathfinder games, Baldur's Gate 3, The Elder Scrolls, etc), so I would welcome such a thread. Also, the games still provide excellent screenshots.

 

[m7600]

I always enjoy hearing about peoples playthroughs, particularly with as much roleplaying justification and exposition as possible.

*cough, cough*

 

[Chronicler]

In Granblue Fantasy, there's this period event named Unite and Fight, but everybody just calls it Guild Wars.

In it you're matched against another guild. You each kill a bunch of monsters, with bigger and powerful ones being worth more points, and whoever has the most points at the end of the day wins.

My guild scored high enough to move up a league this Guild War. We were put in the C League in the preliminaries, but then on Round 3 we were one of the 600 highest ranked C League Guilds, and got to move up to the B League. Thought it was super cool! We've almost done that a couple times but this was the first time we've actually done it.

Mind you, we usually just get put in the B League in the preliminaries. This guild war turned out to be a lot more competitive than most because of some stuff going on in the game, so even though we had a pretty strong showing in the preliminaries we ended up in the C League this time. But once you're in there it's very hard to get out so I'm still pretty happy about it.