Playing other games

[Alan Phipps]

@ KarlSten: I think the idea is that you also describe Hellpoint a bit and say what you think of it so far for the benefit of other posters who may be interested. There is a free Hellpoint stand-alone story/chapter/sequel free on Steam at the moment if anyone wants to dip their toe into that gameworld, but it doesn't really appeal to me and so I cannot say anything more.

[euclid]

Came across Last Epoch and whilst still in beta mode (early access via Steam) I'm quite hooked atm. If you like Hack & Slash games (Diablo, Path of Exile, Wolcen, Grim Dawn etc.) you may want tot check it out.

Cheers Euclid

[Alan Phipps]

Steam aren't doing Last Epoch any favours. Although it is a single player game, it gets filtered out as if a multiplayer game if players set their preferences to exclude purely multiplayer games.

[Ezarkal]

I recently noticed that Aragami 2 is coming up on steam at the end of summer.
I really liked the first game, and ran through it again recently. I highly recommend it if you like stealth games with a nice story.

I'm very eager to see what they came up with for the second title.

[Warenwolf]

Highfleet.

The game cant be put in exact category since it is a mix of genres. You are fighting in a civil war in a future where an event you as player are not told much about much of know society and accumulated historic knowledge is gone.

It is a wargaming game since you are leading a group of ships which each of them has a function in your task force either solely in strategic sense like missile launching ships or tankers or in battle screen as air superiority airships. There is signal intelligence, radar, ecm, etc. On other hand it is a roguelike game often compared to FTL where you cant save where you want but are expected to restart the campaign if you find yourself in a impossible position. Controls are bit off and can mean different things on same screen (like RMB), display resolution is fixed, you cant change control keys and frequent flashing is epilepsy inducing.
But still the game has piqued my interest.

[Ezarkal]

Anyone played Orcs Must Die 3?

I played quite a bit of OMD2 back in the days, and I remembered the multiplayer servers were notoriously unstable. I'd like to know if they fixed this for the 3rd game.

[matthewfarmery]

If anyone is iinterested, there is a neat game called Lifeslide coming out. you control a paper plane, and its coming out on August 6th. Thee is a 30 minute demo on steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/956140/Lifeslide/

Music is awesome, if you like flight sims (it supports joypad and keyboard. the full game will feature an endless mode (confirmed by the dev) I will certainly be picking it up when its comes out. already impressed by the quality of the demo.

[Redvers Ganderpoke]

As usual I'm getting around to play games that every one else played years ago. Just started Oblivion and have Skyrim to play after. (Bought in a Steam sales).

[Alan Phipps]

.. and then play Enderal Forgotten Stories (Special Edition) which is a Skyrim total mod.

[felter]

If playing Skyrim there are a few mods I highly recommend you install.

Achievements Mods Enabler
For some reason, Bethesda turns off the achievements in steam if you install a mod this turns that feature off and allows you to install mods and get the achievements, of course if you don't care about the achievements you don't need to install it.

Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch
This mod is a must install, as the game is buggy as hell and with it being Bethesda and for some insane reason they take pride in not fixing bugs in their games, and that includes any game breaking bugs. This mod fixes a lot of the bugs. Of course, if you don't have the previous mod installed, this mod will turn off all of the achievements in the game.

Unread Books Glow SSE
There are a lot of books in the game and more than one copy of each book, while there is no way to know if you have read a book or not. Some books start quests, while others will give you a boost to certain stats, and some tell you parts of the story of quests and are pretty easy to miss. This mod lights up any books you have not read, once you have read them they go back to looking normal, it's not an essential mod, but it makes things a lot more easier in game. And helps you not miss out on books.

There are plenty of other mods of course, but I recommend these three, they don't change the game in any way apart from fixing bugs and a quality of life feature. One other point, these are for the SSE edition not the original, to be honest there is not much difference between the two version, just some graphical tweeks I think, because Bethesda never fixes bugs.

[pjknibbs]

For some reason, Bethesda turns off the achievements in steam if you install a mod this turns that feature off and allows you to install mods and get the achievements, of course if you don't care about the achievements you don't need to install it.

It should be pretty obvious why they do that, and pretty much everyone else does it as well. A mod can change the game in any way it wants, *including* making it easier to gain achievements. If you care about achievements at all (which I don't, personally, but ymmv) then you presumably also care about getting them on an level playing field with everyone else, or else what's the point?

[felter]

For some reason, Bethesda turns off the achievements in steam if you install a mod this turns that feature off and allows you to install mods and get the achievements, of course if you don't care about the achievements you don't need to install it.

It should be pretty obvious why they do that, and pretty much everyone else does it as well. A mod can change the game in any way it wants, *including* making it easier to gain achievements. If you care about achievements at all (which I don't, personally, but ymmv) then you presumably also care about getting them on an level playing field with everyone else, or else what's the point?

It's the only game I have played that does it, even fallout 4 didn't do it. I don't care what anyone else does if they cheat to get those achievements then it does not affect me in the slightest, at the end of the day the only person they are cheating is themselves, we are talking about single payer games here. Normally I don't bother with achievements, but when a game gets to a certain point and I may have done everything, I may do the achievements for the hell of it or in some cases like Oxygen not included, where the challenge is to do them all in a single gameplay, preferably in the first year. But as I said, I don't give a toss about anyone else's achievements.

The point is though, with Bethesda, is that the only way to play the game is with mods because the game is broken. I tried it without mods just to end up at a certain point where you can't proceed because of a bug and the answer to fixing the issue, one that was reported on release day I may add, was to use the unofficial patch which is one of the mods I linked and that turns off the achievements. If they are going to turn off the achievements, then fix the game breaking bugs, so players can actually achieve them if they so desire. By the way, as far as I'm aware, the vanilla version at release didn't have them turned off, when the game was modded.

[euclid]

I don't care about achievements but it does bother me (a little) that the Steam info claims I've played for 5 minutes while the truth is more in the range of 1000 hours

Cheers Euclid

[SepticTooth]

It should be pretty obvious why they do that, and pretty much everyone else does it as well. A mod can change the game in any way it wants, *including* making it easier to gain achievements. If you care about achievements at all (which I don't, personally, but ymmv) then you presumably also care about getting them on an level playing field with everyone else, or else what's the point?

This actually really bothered me on Xbox because while achievements are disabled by mods, the "Stats" page is not, so the two friends that decided to play and mod up their saves when Special Edition came out, who both had level 250+ characters and every discoverable location shown on their map before getting off the wagon in Helgen, completely ruined the stats for me because I was looking forward to our group of 5 or 6 friends who all bought the game and some of us were trying to complete the game/dlc/every achievement and now some of the stats only showed who cheated the most lol.

-

As for what I've been playing recently, I just finished going back to an old Playstation classic JRPG called Legend of Legaia, a game I loved when I was a kid after stumbling across it on sale used in the mall but never truly finished. Actually I never even progressed beyond the first kingdom of the game without a Gameshark because back when I was a kid I didn't understand gameplay concepts like "grinding" for levels and money that are so prevalent in Japanese RPG's of the time period so when you reach the games first "boss", which is a rather big difficulty spike compared to the jabroni's you've been beating up to that point, you just get wiped out and I never understood why I couldn't beat him so I cheated lol.

It was actually refreshing to return to it and finally beat it now, without any cheat codes. It has a kind of simplistic story if you compare it to the likes of Final Fantasy 7 which is regarded as one of the best JRPG's of the time, but Legaia, unlike FF7 or Xenogears, was a single disc JRPG so there wasn't as much disc space to go off the rails and completely convolute the storyline like those other two games notoriously do. What I really enjoy about Legaia though, as opposed to FF7, is the gameplay/combat. Unlike FF7, you don't just select a generic attack to do over and over until you build your limit break, or sometimes use an item or cast a materia spell. Legaia has items and spells similar to FF7 and other JRPG's but attacks had so much more nuance to it.

Legaia, I believe, may be one of the first JRPG's to have more than one defensive stat, having both an upper and lower defense stat to your characters as well as every enemy, in addition to elemental strengths/weaknesses enemies would be strong/weak in their upper/lower bodies or even completely immune to high/low attacks if they were either flying (immune to lows) or too short (immune to highs). In addition to that you also had a "Combo" system to the combat, so when you decide to physically attack an enemy (this is turn based JRPG style combat, akin to all the other JRPG's with random encounter battles and dungeon boss fights) you could string together attacks in a specific order, for example High Low High, to unleash a special move, or "Art" that would then spend your Attack Points to unleash a more powerful attack on the last input, in this case a high kick, low kick, and then special attack somersault kick.

The sense of discovery in not only exploring the world and the story but also finding new combos that will unleash more powerful arts was a very fun part of the game for me, and you could learn new Arts from NPC's you talk to in the different towns, or simply from trial and error in combat. It's a cute little game and if you're a fan of classic JRPG gameplay I would certainly recommend trying it out, I would even say the simpler story as compared to games like Xenogears is more of a strength than a weakness, Legaia was well received when it came out and as much as I like and look back upon Xenogears fondly, Disc 2 of Xenogears sucked and the story was a chore to follow.

Having finished that I actually have been in the mood for a game like Ark or Conan Exiles, but unfortunately my group of friends I used to play games like that with fell apart over the past 2 years, now attempting to play games like that alone just isn't very satisfying so I've been watching other people play them on Youtube instead.

[segmentationfault]

Star Citizen (Alpha 3.14 PTU)

Alpha 3.14 was yet another interesting release so this has became a game I test/play mostly. My joysticks just starts to be so worn out that it is probably time to buy new ones - Virpil possibly(?)
Alpha 3.15 is already behind to corner which keeps me playing SC upcoming months. Physical inventory and healing gameplay/profession should be in Alpha 3.15 which are kind of "game changer" features to me although I doubt to become any sort of medical personnel in a game.

Starbase

I'm not huge fan of "building games" but I wanted to give this game a try since it provides lots of freedom and emergent gameplay giving it change to become very interesting space game. Unfortunately currently it is way too grindy for my taste and I'm not very interested in its gameplay mechanisms either. As being MMO it is disappointing it is still lacking VoIP functionality but fortunately it is in roadmap to be added in upcoming releases.
Devs are working hard and roadmap looks interesting so I'm definitely going to test each of its upcoming releases.