What is on your PC Gaming plate right now?

Niner51 said:
Playing PGA Tour 2K21 a lot lately. Just a relaxing game. May fire up Doom Eternal one more time to see how it looks on the new monitor.
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PGA Tour 2k21?? I've been looking for a golf game to replace the old EA Tiger Woods series. How good is it?
 
I always loved the Tiger Woods games, but couldn't find anything close. This game is definitely the closest any game has come to them. The swing mechanics take some time to get use to, but they aren't that bad. I have been using an Xbox controller to play and it's been great.
 
Niner51 said:
I always loved the Tiger Woods games, but couldn't find anything close. This game is definitely the closest any game has come to them. The swing mechanics take some time to get use to, but they aren't that bad. I have been using an Xbox controller to play and it's been great.
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It's part of the Steam Summer Sale so I picked up a copy for $20.. Let's see how long it takes for me to get used to the swing mechanics..
 
ESO is one of those games that got a lot better over time. I played through the main campaign solo, but never was able to get in with anyone to explore the MMO parts of it.

It may be sacrilege to admit, but I liked it better than Oblivion and Skyrim. Close to Morrowind, but not quite.
 
Brian_B said:
ESO is one of those games that got a lot better over time. I played through the main campaign solo, but never was able to get in with anyone to explore the MMO parts of it.

It may be sacrilege to admit, but I liked it better than Oblivion and Skyrim. Close to Morrowind, but not quite.
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Looks pretty allrite too all cranked to full at 4k
 
Brian_B said:
ESO is one of those games that got a lot better over time. I played through the main campaign solo, but never was able to get in with anyone to explore the MMO parts of it.

It may be sacrilege to admit, but I liked it better than Oblivion and Skyrim. Close to Morrowind, but not quite.
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Not sure how it is these days, but I found the main story quests to be pretty brutal at times compared to the more generic quests, it's part of what made me quit the game. At start it was ok-ish but where I was I had to outlevel the content by half a dozen lvl's orso to be able to get the stronger dudes killed at which point the xp was useless.
 
Denpepe said:
Not sure how it is these days, but I found the main story quests to be pretty brutal at times compared to the more generic quests, it's part of what made me quit the game. At start it was ok-ish but where I was I had to outlevel the content by half a dozen lvl's orso to be able to get the stronger dudes killed at which point the xp was useless.
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Some stuff can be hard to solo for sure, it's very class dependant. I tend to stay out of range and kite so usually not very problematic for me.
In the latest DLC they introduced companions and that of course makes a big diff.
www.elderscrollsonline.com

The Elder Scrolls Online: Blackwood

Continue your Gates of Oblivion saga in The Elder Scrolls Online: Blackwood.
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I want to add that I play ESO with my Conan Exiles community friends and belong to a discord clan with quite a few players so I really dont have to solo anything unless I choose to. ESO is a MMO after all.
 
Denpepe said:
Not sure how it is these days, but I found the main story quests to be pretty brutal at times compared to the more generic quests, it's part of what made me quit the game. At start it was ok-ish but where I was I had to outlevel the content by half a dozen lvl's orso to be able to get the stronger dudes killed at which point the xp was useless.
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They changed it a couple years back so levels don’t mean nearly as much. All the conte t scales to your current level now, and it’s much easier, and the XP curve leveled out as you were able to get quests done easier
 
After finishing Cyberpunk I have been bouncing between things like a pinball trying to find "the next one". Actually I have been playing a bunch of pinball on ps4 but that's another topic.

So last weekend for some reason I found myself reading about the Yakuza series (maybe a deal thread for the PSN summer sale). But before I spend money on older games I have to check my infinite PC game backlog so I don't buy things twice. And lo and behold, the first 3 Yakuza games were already in the backlog (thanks to Humble Bundle monthly deals). So I fired up Yakuza 0 and played that for a few hours. The subtitles are kicking my ***, you have to pay attention.... that might be the thing that kills it for me. Yakuza 0 alone is rated for 40-80 hours, and there are 7 of these things so far in the series. But the wackiness of it all, the Japan inspired nightlife and cities, the crazy combat. Maybe I can make it work.

Angry Joe loved it but makes the point that you have to suffer through the first slow part then it gets better.


And on another side note, I wasted spent a good 2 hours getting Steam Link to work on my Sony TV in the living room. You just install the android app from the play store and you're mostly good. Not sure how exactly I am supposed to link a controller to it, but my pc is just in the other room so the xbone controller worked ok via wireless. There is probably some way to get it to work with bluetooth but I didn't have to. Now, getting audio from my TV back to my AVR was a chore and a half, but I did eventually get it working... that's a different story. The Steam Link app actually worked pretty well for Yakuza, totally playable. I'm glad that worked out, I used to have a physical Steam Link device and I was never happy with that experience.
 
So, got Hammerting in a Humble Choice pack this month, decided to try it.

First, I'll start off by saying it's in Early Access, but it's also for sale, so ... My feeling is if they are asking for money, they are ready for reviews - no "It's Beta" or "that will be in later" excuses, but others may differ. I didn't actually plunk out cash directly for the title, but I did indirectly pay for it.

To start with - it's a rogue-buillder sim, kinda like Dungeons, only with dwarfs. You can't control the dwarves directly, only issue build/destroy commands and some very basic AI scripting tools to help shape their behavior, and you just hope the dwarves do what they should be doing. Your given a mountain and 3 dwarves and a dream to start with and build your fortune and name. You earn renound and cash by exploiting the mountainside - digging tunnels, finding treasure and mining minerals, building your infrastructure, and crafting various objects. There are some enemies and other natural pitfalls along the way. You can trade with the "Overworld" for items you can't make directly, or for straight up cash.

It's very ambitious. There are a lot of interconnected systems in play - not all of which are actually working quite yet.

Dwarven behavior is extremely difficult to contain - they love to shop and mine, but past that, they will mine themselves into lava and die, mine overtop a dead dwarf that needs healing, mine themselves into a hole and not be able to get out, etc. Give them a big sell order, and they will ~all~ happily traipse around the overworld selling your goods and collecting coin - to the point of starving because no one will stay home and cook. There is the beginnings of a priority tool for behavior, but... it's not quite there yet.

Same thing goes with inventory. It's very easy to screw up inventory management because the AI isn't scripted very well and it's hard to tune with the given tools. More than once I would find myself out of stone or metal, only to find that my stonesmith had a build order for 20 stone pillars, but a Hauler dwarf kept pulling them out of the building and tossing them into storage, and they weren't getting counted toward my inventory, so I would have hundreds of stone pillars pookahed away... I did figure out some work arounds to make this behave more or less like normal, but seems like it should be a lot more intuitive, or smarter out of the box.

That said, around some rough edges, it is a fun game. It runs relatively smoothly, with low resource requirements. Exploring the mountain is fun, there are some neat surprises tucked here and there. You get some cool toys to help out, like a rail and elevator system that are fun to play with.

There is an entire overworld faction system that doesn't seem to do anything quite yet. You can see where the nation states all have various relationships, but it isn't clear what they intend there -- do you help them go to war? do you get certain favors? I don't know. The infrastructure is there for something deeper though.

There is a relatively short skill tree - it takes a three or four hours to max it out right now, and the game more or less dumps you off once you finish a few crafting quests and find a handful of hidden locations in the mountain.

For about 10-20 hours, the game is pretty engaging. It's lacking a bit of depth -- that will probably / hopefully come as they finish out some of their ambitious systems that aren't quite there yet. But they aren't quite there yet.
 
Rift:

This is the old original "WoW-Killer" MMO by Trion (their first game) from back in 2011. The game has had 3 major expansions since, and Trion has since been acquired - it's operated by Gamigo now. Since the acquisition by Gamigo 2018, it's been mostly on life support.

So, why am I playing a game that's operating on borrowed time?

I've been around MMOs for a while now - the vast majority of my gaming time spent in one virtual world or another, in various capacities - everything from filthy free-to-play casual to hard core raiding. I can absolutely say, without a doubt, the two absolute most fun times to be in an MMO are when it first opens and everything is new and no one knows jack squat... and when they are on life support, everything is so well known it's old hat, and the devs don't GAF any longer and the loot and platinum flow like milk and honey.

Rift is definitely in the latter category. In a good way, actually, because despite the status of Dead-Man-Walking, it actually still has a very active player base who keeps things moving right along, despite the lack of content updates for 5 years now.

I won't go into all the various mechanics of Rift - the game has been out long enough to have been so well and thoroughly detailed by others I won't even bother to go into it. I will speak to it's current status.

The community is actually thriving, which is hard to believe. It's not huge, you see a lot of the same people over and over, but it's definitely active. Guilds are still recruiting, lots of people are still leveling new characters, and people are still raiding end game - despite it's have been end game for 5 years now. It's one of those games where there is really no lack of something to do, there is always something going on, and well over half of it is player driven.

Rift has a handful of shards (servers), which are loosely geographically based. But, fortunately, in the "Don't GAF" status it's in, the devs have opened it up and you can freely hop between them, the only real distinction being that guilds and auction houses are still per-shard. The players have organized a cross-shard chat channel for events (CrossEvents), and the devs wisely made it so upon hitting L65 you are auto-joined to this channel. This has kept the game alive. People use the channel, a lot, for everything. It's used over the in-game dungeon queues (which are pretty well abandoned). It's used over many server's Auction Houses for rare or crafted items (which, again, on some shards have been pretty well abandoned). It's used to rally folks to get into PVP events (which still has to be queued, but generally is only used when people start up an event and get others to actively que for it).

There is a bit of P2W aspect to the current cash shop - I don't know when that came in, but my best guess is that it was probably a last-ditch effort by Trion (along with the Prime server experiment) in order to save themselves from the inevitable swallowing up by Gamigo. That said, the game is free-to-play with cash shop, and the cash shop is entirely optional. What is on there is totally optional, and apart from Patron (their version of a monthly subscription) is largely extremely overpriced hoping to cash in on some whales - of which I'm not sure any are left. There is an avenue to gain Patron status with in-game currency (REX), so the old-timers do that, and the meager flow of Patron income (people paying the sub fee outright, as well as people trading REX for in-game trade) is probably the only thing keeping the game around at this point. You ~could~ open your wallet and get a decently geared character out in a hurry - with just a bit of work get a character almost ready to tackle end game. But everyone would question your sanity, because all the events to gain that gear are freely run by the community often, and it's mostly welcome to newer and returning players on the rare occasion that one wanders onto the scene.

People playing realize Gamigo isn't putting any money into the game. There are still plenty of glitches - they will never get fixed, and are exploited in dungeons and raids to the point they have become the de-facto strategy. Player builds and equipment are so well and thoroughly researched that there are a handful of very well established player builds for various encounters and purposes.

And the player base keeps right on playing. Knowing the ax is over their head and could fall at any moment. There was a big scare when Gamigo shut down Defiance - Rift was rumored to go as well at that time. But it didn't. They did lay off the entire development team though. So the game is frozen in time, at least until Gamigo unplugs the servers.

It's an interesting time to be playing.
 
I don’t disagree with any of that, and in fact, when the game first released I did exactly the same thing: played for a few weeks and went back to WoW.

It’s not any different today, the animations still suck, the jumping physics drives me nuts.

But for a new comer there is a ton of decent and available content, and it has a good community.
 
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