Still playing Luma Island Pirates with twin and the game is getting super grindy now even on the no energy setting. Looking at other games.
Whenever Long Trip North (or whatever that rv game is called) we’ll play that, but I’m also trying to look for yet more farming games.
I’ve had Airship: Kingdoms Adrift for a while and gave it a go. It’s got neat broadside naval combat in the air and you can customize components in ports. There’s a small chance to capture enemy ships under certain conditions and make yourself a fleet or send trade convoys on their own from port to port.
It has a main mission though and kinda acts like a tutorial so, not sure how far along one has to follow it to unlock everything.
Butt the mission rewards are kind of silly. Gave me some warehouse plans to increase port storage, but no idea when I’ll get to use it or where, if at all.
Need resources probably, but i didn’t get that far and the costs are way above what i can poach.
Then gave me a piece of equipment too big for the ship I have, so again, useless at the moment.Anyway, feels off. Maybe I’ll get back at it, maybe not… Who knows.
Halo 2: Anniversary
The further into the series I get, the less enjoyable my Heroic playthrough becomes. I’m currently doing the first halo mission as the Arbiter and the amount of shotgun-totting floodlings who can one-shot me while running and jumping around like they’re on speed is… tiring, to say the least. I actually ended up taking a break for a few days for the first time since I started playing MCC due to this very level. Hopefully I’ll be able to start fresh once I’m back.Other than that I still like the game - not as much as Reach but it’s fun for the most part. Gameplay has a nice mix of on-foot and vehicle combat, levels are pretty varied (both visually and in terms of design). New weapons are alright, can’t say I like them more than anything I used in other games.
I’m still not sure how I feel about the story, will have to wait until I’m done before I decide on that.I mentioned it before but boy do I appreciate the presentation when using remastered graphics. All the colour, details and updated art style make the locations look appropriately sci-fi, otherworldly (when needed) and just overall beautiful and pleasant to look at. It’s a fantastic upgrade, one that hits even harder if you play like me - constantly switching between the two versions.
I’ve got another small but annoying problem to mention this week: why does my flashlight turns off randomly? Sometimes it’s after a few seconds, other times when moving between the rooms. Either way, it’s making it pretty much useless. Why? What possible reason could you have for that? It’s not like I’m running out of battery or anything, just let me use it when I want to.
I’m waiting for Ruby’s Reblanced Halo 2. Based on the quality of the Halo: CE rebalance it will probably fix many of those issues. I hope, but maybe shouldn’t expect, that mod includes the proper shading. Part of the reason Halo 2 looks so strange is it was designed for a full dynamic shading system which was pulled late in development for XBox performance reasons. What’s left is baked shading and very limited and scaled back dynamic shading, but in a world and art style that was designed with full dynamic in mind.
I recently played though Halo 2 partially with another restored content/rebalance mod and it was alright, though it didn’t have the skill of the Ruby Rebalance in making new/restored content feel organic to the game.
I heard about the dynamic lighting situation but completely forgot about it until now, thanks for the reminder!
I didn’t dive into Halo modding yet so I wasn’t aware of rebalance patches, makes sense. This is my first playthrough of the series (sans 1 and Spartan Assault) so I wanted to play them vanilla anyway but I’ll keep that in mind if I ever decide to play them again.
If you’ve played Halo CE, playing the Ruby Rebalance is still worth it. You’ll probably appreciate it more with the vanilla experience fresh in mind.
The Halo: CE mod is very tastefully done and improves the game. There are a lot of invisible tweaks like making the assault rifle more accurate in short bursts and tweaking spawns (the Library level is much better) as well as visible changes like adding ODSTs where it makes sense, adding new enemy types, and a few new to CE campaign weapons like a usable energy sword.
The new enemy types include a lot of new flood forms which makes them less of a slog to play against. There’s elite zealot flood still carrying energy swords, which are terrifying.
I still have 2.5 games ahead of me so I probably won’t be doing a full playthrough of H1 but I might take a look. It does sound promising and a bit more involved than I expected to be honest. Thanks again for letting me know!
The improved graphics look great for H2A, especially cutscenes, but it always bummed me out that it also changes the soundtrack. The original OST is just worlds better, with works from known artists (Incubus, Hoobastank, Breaking Benjamin), and the new music is just much more generic and mid.
I think the new versions of atmospheric tracks are pretty decent alternatives. Better? I can’t say I compared them this way but I’d say… a bit different and fitting with the new visuals for the most part. Dunno about the licensed stuff as my only experience with classic releases was playing the first game a few years ago.
I did find a few spots over all the games I played so far where I felt like the music was lacking a bit but I’m not sure if that’s just a normal experience or something exclusive to MCC/updated versions of the games. It wasn’t something that affected my enjoyment too much so I just moved on and focused on the good.
Yeah, admittedly I did play the originals on release so nostalgia is certainly a factor for me. I did have the thought “maybe it’s a licensing issue?” Until I realized the tracks are still in the game, just only if you’re using classic visuals. I would have liked the ability to shift between classic/remastered visuals and audio separately (though I think with the remastered cutscenes at least, this wouldn’t have been an option)
May be worth noting that, for the licensed music, in the game it’s all instrumental versions, regardless of whether the track has lyrics or not. Searching for the tracks online will probably provide versions with lyrics where applicable.
Speaking of cut scenes, I was a bit bummed there was no option to switch art styles during those (the in-engine ones at least). It would be just as, if not more, interesting comparison (depending on how much they changed) so I was really curious about that but alas.
Yeah, I THINK the reason this was cut is because some of them are shot a little differently and actually have slightly different run times
I’d still like to have that option but it’s completely understandable.
I don’t think I had this issue with H1 (or at least not to such extent) so I didn’t even think of it until now but I finally realised why I’m leaning towards remastered soundtrack as much as I do - original is more muted/less audible for some reason. I’m not sure if it’s the compression of old audio files or something else but when switching between both versions, original just doesn’t pop up as much. I might have to play around with sound levels.
Thanks for making me think about it, it actually made me stop to figure it out.
Finally playing through Cyberpunk 2077. It still has some bugs but nothing that prevents me from enjoying it. I picked up the game and dlc like 40% off recently.
Seems like it was worth waiting for, it’s actually really fun!
Doom 3 on the Steam deck. 20 hours so over the average playtime but I keep getting lost 🧭
Great game. I’ve played it through several times and now am struggling to finish it on nightmare. It’s just so hard when you get down to like 2 health and have to creep around until you can find enough health to be bold again
😰 I’m just on normal difficulty and it’s hard enough!
Victoria 3 , its 3rd year aniversary and it has a nice balkan update , so im playing a bit having some dumb fun
Does No Man’s Sky count? I just got it a few weeks ago on sale and have been having a blast!
I’ve seen it mentioned a lot on lemmy recently, I’m pleasantly surprised. I haven’t played it in a few years but really enjoyed my time with it. It had a really rough launch but even after they fixed it I felt it was quite under-appreciated. I’m glad it’s getting more attention now.
I’ve been playing Tactics Ogre Reborn and just got to act 4 and… Man I really want to enjoy this game, but it’s difficult, and the board is rarely even in a way that’s frustrating. For example, casters are clearly stronger than martial units, but they need mp. Pretty typical. But, during combat your units can pick up cards that give buffs like increased mp generation or increased activation of automatic skills (which do things like generate mp, cause buffs/debuffs, one of them fully doubles healing done for the turn). I like the card system, somewhat, because it pressures you to move up as opposed to bottlenecking and defending set points whenever possible. But, once you’re a little way into the game, enemy casters come in with four cards, one of increased magic damage, one of increased auto skill proc, two of mp regeneration. Now your casters are weak as shit and need to run to the front lines to get the buffs necessary to cast high level spells more than once every few turns, while the enemy casters are goddamn artillery pieces that can attack from across the entire map. Your martials need to run through artillery fire and break through enemy tanks to target the back line (oops there are skills that tanks have that restrict movement so you have to kill them) and your casters can’t cast more than once every handful of turns, and can’t consistently benefit from the “your spells have longer range” auto skill, so in some fights you’re just beholden to rng of your enemy skills procing and cards you want/need showing up in places your casters can access without ending in a meat grinder.
It’s the kind of game I wish I had a friend who had beaten it a couple times to give me advice on. I’m open to looking up builds and strats online, but since it’s a remake of a game that was originally on SNES and then PSP, a lot of balance changes have occurred and sometimes you’ll find a forum post going on about how good xyz build is, only to later find someone else remarking “oh yeah that worked amazingly on the PSP version but it doesn’t work at all anymore”
I recently started playing Revenge of the Savage Planet. So far I really like it. I’ve never finished the first release Journey to the Savage Planet, but it was a nice game.
I’m back in skyrim VR but i’m using VRocker that let’s me walk or run in place to move in game. It’s been pretty fun. :)
I just got back into modding Skyrim again. It’s my first time modding on Linux, it’s been far smoother than I was told it would be. I’m using ModOrganizer2, it’s been great for the most part. It’s a little iffy to start up, sometimes it forgets I’ve used it before and I need to reboot a couple times which is pretty annoying, but as long as I don’t fully close MO2 it works as expected.
For The King 2
It’s definitely got some issues, especially with camera angles, but my friends and I have been having a good time with it. The campaigns are shockingly short, but that makes it way more doable with friends. We all know coordinating time is difficult
Going back to Spider-Man one because I remembered I have a lot of DLC I hadn’t done.
I’m getting to the time of year I do my superhero binge. Right now is my Bethesda binge and then I’ll do the Batman Arkham games followed by the Spider-Man games.
Jump Space
Playing with a mate and it’s a lot of fun. It’s a new game so not quite “patient gamer” but it’s cheap enough that I’m fine with it and looking forward to updates.
Football Manager
It got a hold of me these past couple days. I wanted something chill to do while I drink my coffee but then time just flies by… and it’s suddenly 3 hours later :/
Football Manager
God, I don’t miss sinking time into this monstrosity. Biggest time drain in existence.
final fantasy 12
I have barely been playing any games at all this week. I have managed to finish a grand total of one chapter of Alan Wake 2: Final Draft I think.
Instead I’ve been spending pretty much all my time modding and fiddling with STALKER: Anomaly. Yes, I’ve relapsed. I can’t help myself. I said I shouldn’t do this anymore and should focus on finishing complete narratives instead of playing around in the Chernobyl sandbox but I just got the craving again. And tweaking your modlist until it’s perfect is just an addiction in itself - making everything work together and throwing together patches in WinMerge.
Maybe when I feel my modlist is finished and ready to play my hyperfixation will give out a bit and I can at least finish AW2.
I’ve relapsed too, I’m back to modding Skyrim again. It’s been a while for me, but after talking about it on lemmy a few days ago I got the itch. I’m currently running an evil mage build. Used Alternate Start to start with Windstad Manor, which actually comes fully furnished aside from the add-ons. It’s in the swamp which I think adds to the vibe of my character. I’m also messing around with the Ordinator Perk Overhaul and Apocalypse Magic mods, along with a bunch of graphics mods and smaller gameplay mods. I’m going to explore Bruma again soon too, haven’t played with that mod in several years.
I really need to get into modding Skyrim at some point. After playing and modding Morrowind and Oblivion heavily back in the day I just never got into it with Skyrim. I never played Skyrim much at all frankly. I was too invested in playing and modding New Vegas at the time. And then later on I found other games, and recently over the past years it’s been STALKER Anomaly filling the craving of “heavily moddable sandbox game”.
You should really give it a shot. It’s the most modded game on Nexus by a very large margin. To give you an idea, there are 18.7b downloads and 766.5k mods on Nexus. Skyrim Special Edition is in first place with 9.2b/118.9k. Fallout 4 is number two with 1.9b/68.4k, and Oldrim (Skyrim non-special edition) is at third with 1.9b/72.5k. SSE alone is just under half of all downloads, and combine the two Skyrim versions and you’re at nearly 60% of all mod downloads being for Skyrim. Pretty crazy.
Do you have any large and complete modpacks to recommend? I don’t know that I have it in me to learn the lay of the land from scratch.
Also, have you used the Mantella mod any? It’s actually a similar mod that got me back into STALKER Anomaly. Really fun immersive use of AI for roleplaying and forming attachment to your companions.
I’ve never used a modpack before, I actually like doing the research and finding which mods to use. In general I actually quite like the look of vanilla Skyrim so my graphics mods tend to be pretty tame.
Here’s some mods I like to use, with links to their Nexus page. A lot of these have prerequisite mods so you’ll need them too obviously, but I didn’t bother writing them out here. The mod pages will link to their required mods.
Absolutely necessary mods for every playthrough, even vanilla:
Skyrim Special Edition Unofficial Patch - fixes many, many bugs and exploits in the game.
Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE64) - not really necessary if you’re just running the mods in this section as all it does is allow certain mods to work, but I always keep it enabled anyway since it doesn’t hurt at all.
SkyUI - if you’re using mouse and keyboard. The original UI is great if you’re using a controller but it’s definitely not designed with M+K in mind. SkyUI makes playing Skyrim with M+K so much nicer. I’m sure it also works well with controller too.
Mods I always use:
A Quality World Map - makes the map much nicer to look at. There’s a few versions, pick your favourite. I like Vivid with Stone Roads personally.
Realistic Water Two - self explanatory. Makes water look way better.
Alternate Start - definitely necessary to me, lets you choose how to start the game. It’s the main reason I’m able to have so many playthroughs of the game.
Immersive Patrols - adds patrols for different factions, and they can interact with each other too.
Cutting Room Floor - adds cut content to the game.
Blended Roads - fixes weird visual problems with some roads.
Footprints - adds footprints when walking in the snow and ash.
Open Cities - makes cities part of the overworld so there’s no load screens when entering/exiting, similar to Morrowind.
JK’s Skyrim - improves cities.
Some mods I’m using right now:
Obscur’s College of Winterhold - vastly improves the college, which is by far the most underdeveloped major area of the game in my opinion.
Lightened Skyrim - removes some objects you can’t actually see (rocks under the ground and stuff) which makes the game run a fair bit smoother without a noticeable difference in the landscape.
Magic Sneak Attacks - using magic while sneaking counts as sneak attacks. Not sure why this isn’t in the base game but it’s getting used on all future magic runs for me now.
Apocalypse - Magic of Skyrim - adds a ton of new spells to the game, great for a mage playthrough.
Ordinator - Perks of Skyrim - overhauls the perk trees. Works really well with Apocalypse.
Remember Lockpick Angle - when lockpicking, if your lockpick breaks, the new one starts in the position where the previous one broke, making it much less annoying.
Instantly Skip Dialogue - lets you skip unskippable dialogue. Most dialogue is skippable but some of the annoying monologues aren’t. This fixes that.
Beyond Reach - content expansion. Haven’t used yet, so I’m not sure what’s involved with it. I’ve got it loaded on my current character but I haven’t explored there. It’s supposed to be really good though.
Beyond Skyrim - Bruma - adds Bruma from Cyrodiil to the map. It’s so cool to see what the city (and surrounding area) looks like post-Oblivion crisis. It’s been a long time since I’ve used it, I’m really looking forward to going back again. It’s probably my favourite content mod.
Medieval Markets - vastly improves the markets in the cities.
Glorious Doors of Skyrim - new door designs. They look way better than vanilla to me.
I’d recommend getting an ENB, as well as Lux. I don’t usually, since I like the vanilla look, but ENB+Lux definitely looks objectively better.
Thanks, I’ll definitely save this for some day in the future!
I also tend to enjoy the process of setting up your own custom modlist, but after being deep in that rabbit hole before with Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout: New Vegas, Baldur’s Gate 2 and STALKER (all 4 games + Anomaly) I don’t know if I have it in me to learn the ins and outs of another mod landscape 😅
Glad I could help! Hopefully in a future Weekly Recommendations Thread I’ll see you saying you’re modding Skyrim and I can ask how it’s going.
I get what you mean, Skyrim can especially be a bit daunting to mod with just how massive the modding community is. Like I mentioned earlier, nearly 60% of all mod downloads are for Skyrim, it’s crazy.
