Weekly "What are you playing" Thread || Week of July 9th
Hey all!
Figured we’d try something like this. Let me know what you all think, and if you have any feedback on what you would like a weekly thread like this to look like. Thanks
What are you all playing? Anything you got from the steam sale you’re enjoying?
It had been on my radar for quite some time. Partly because it’s gotten such great review and partly because it’s from Annapurna, they seem to release pretty sweet games.
Kinda found that the game falls away somewhat around the final third. Don’t want to spoil anything for you, but I’ll say that I found the games moment to moment a bit lacking. Real shame as the first hour or so is genuinely pretty good.
For me, I am playing through Oblivion for the first time!
After seeing the starfield trailer I figured it was time for me to fill in this gap I had in the bethesda library. I am using some mods from the “through the valley” mod list and have been having a great time so far. The game is really goofy, but the exploration has been great so far. Also got the mods set up on my steam deck, and its been working great!
I found it way too late and couldn’t get over the dated graphics, but I LOVE Skyrim. I’ve put 300 hours into it just exploring, haven’t even finished the main campaign.
Just started playing Hollow Knight again and I’m HOOKED. I love almost everything about the game so far from the music, the visuals, and the gameplay. Although it gets mighty frustrating when trying to platform through those fucking thorns or off the bouncy purple mushrooms but I take my break and then I’m back at it again :)
I beat my head against Hollow Knight when it was released and set it aside after a while. I recently went back and somehow was able to get through it (I’m convinced they made it easier vs me getting better).
Make sure to explore and find all the story and world building tidbits. It’s definitely worth digging into, and I love some of the little side stories and character interactions as you go deeper into Hollownest.
Definitely, I’m doing my best to try and do everything I can without a guide (unless I get stuck). Plus, if I miss anything I probably will do another play through or something because I find the game to be very comfy especially when you get into a groove.
As I understand it, the initial release of Hollow Knight had some absolutely awful input lag and other performance issues. If you first played in the initial patches, you likely experienced this.
Hollow Knight is one of my all time favorite games. I replay it via randomizer quite frequently.
I picked it up again this week, too! The ambience is perfect, really on point for immersion.
Not sure if those mushrooms you mention have been in my way, but at the moment I cannot beat those damn explosive jellyfish in a reliable manner. Breaks definitely help; after a while I’m filled with determination.
I hear ya on the determination part, playing last night I was hit with the realization of truly how big the in game world is and I want to know all about the L O R E. But I’m trying so hard to restrain myself from watching a YouTube synopsis like I usually would for something like Dark Souls.
With those jellyfish, if you’re talking about the ones in Fog Canyon my tip is to kill the little ones and just avoid attacking the bigger ones altogether. The explosives the big guys have are so powerful and I don’t think I have been able to avoid said explosives except maybe a couple of times. But keep on chugging my fellow knight :)
Just picked up Terraria and I’m loving it. I played Starbound a while back and read that it was more or less a spiritual successor to Terraria. Terraria has all the things I wanted to see from Starbound. The crafting system is so expansive. The difficulty is real though, I travelled through 2 biomes and hit something with large beetles and cave worms that chomped me to death. Zombies, floating eyes, and slimes were no problem. Same for the mobs in the desert, easy…but once I hit that 3rd biome I was in trouble, even with my metal armor.
Been playing Assassin’s Creed Odessey lately. It’s fun and big, but I think, ultimately, Origins was a better game. There was a lot more cultural diversity present and they changed some mechanics for the worse imho. But it’s kinda cool how smooth it runs on my Linux machine!
I played a decent amount of Odyssey (didn’t get close to finishing it) but bounced off Origins pretty quick. What mechanics did they change in Odyssey that you miss? Might be worth going back to play it if I know what’s different!
I had been making steady progress in Expedition Rome from the sale, but then the siren song of RimWorld pulled me back again. My melee moleperson cult is going strong!
Currently playing Horizon: Forbidden West. I love it but it can get somewhat tiring after a while. It’s my third open world game in a row and I definitely feel the need to play something smaller and more focused.
I’m paying through Skyrim for the first time. I had tried it once before as a teen but didn’t really know what I was doing and gave up… Now I’ve got it loaded up with mods and am thoroughly enjoying myself!
It takes awhile for Path of Exile to truly click. I think it’s the best ARPG ever made, but the initial learning curve is pretty steep. Things really open up in the endgame. And we have Path of Exile 2 right around the corner which is awesome.
So once you complete the campaign you will begin maps. There are 3 tiers of maps, you have white, then yellow, then red. I consider mapping to be the endgame.
If this is your first build, the endgame will be rather punishing and you might not make it very far. It took me until my third character roughly before I was able to successfully push into red maps and beyond. There are special bosses to hunt down, and all the side content like Heist and Delve are very rewarding and fun.
Additionally you get another passive tree that allows you to customize your mapping experience however you want. Zizaran has a really nice video going over the endgame. It’s quite long, but very helpful. youtu.be/uf4wnvkS-mI
That’s exactly why I stopped playing that. I realized it was addictive rather than fun, and I could no longer stomach the business model based on annoying the player into paying (by deliberately making inventory management a living hell and then selling stash tabs to alleviate the problem).
Pokemon Violet. I’m trying to complete the Pokedex as much as I can, as I try to ignore the blatant perfomance problems of the game 😅 But I really like the game and its open world nature.
It’s so irritating that S/V could have been the definitive Pokemon experience but it ended up being what it was. I guess I can’t really blame them for not putting the effort. I mean why should they when everyone bought it anyway (I did too, I’m part of the problem)
I guess for me there was so much fun to be had grinding out an optimized team by breeding and training them up, and the new games sort of trivialized all of that. Totally understand why, but it took a lot out of it for me.
The open world in them is nice initially, but imo they failed to make exploration rewarding enough, so really it’s like… What’s the point.
I still like catching 'em all but it even seems like they’ve de-emphasized that.
Sorry to rant just an old Pokemon fan who can’t really move on.
I’m playing a heavily modded Fallout 4. I got a mod where you can start more like a regular RPG and choose your backstory and where you start, and all of the dialogue relating to Sean has been taken out. It’s great, way more fun. My character is a drunk who washed up on Nordhagen beach and is living with the settlers and killing raiders for them and building them a nice house :)
Grinding through nightmare dungeons in Diablo 4, and because I fell down a YouTube tutorial hole I’m retrying Frostpunk. Hopefully I can stave off the guilt from slapping makeshift prosthetics on orphans long enough to finish it this time.
All the hype around the My House Wad last month got me interested in playing Doom II so I'm working my way through it this week. I played through the first Doom ages ago, but just never got around to the sequel. Looking forward to diving into the Doom 2 modding scene when I've played through it.
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