Finally started Monster Hunter Rise this week after getting it cheap, i know i’m gonna love this game when i first hear the classic UI sound. It’s a homage to the classic while retain the update World provided. Lot more monster, wacky weapon and armour design, light bow gun have better upgrade and dropped the insane recoil most high level ammo have, dropped the overly convoluted canteen ingredient combination, anime wall run, even more streamlined resource gathering. What’s not to like? Unfortunately i don’t dig the map design, it’s really bland looking, a bit of a step back compared to what World has. It’s a bit easier too, so far at 3 stars most monster doesn’t even have a chance of limping before the mission is over.
But overall it’s great, would be sad to see a lot of improvement getting removed when i goes into Wild next, as with all the spinoff often do.
On guild wars 2 after the recent news of gw3, trying the latest expansion
Playing Palia still. My shimmering riffroc grew up so I can ride him now which is cool. He’s the prettiest one. I have yet to find a jam plushie from harvesting an apple tree despite me having three of them. I’m playing Slice and Dice on my phone despite not buying it yet. I don’t have like the 9 dollars the full game wants lol.
Started Silksong finally. I loved Hollow Knight, and I don’t remember that one being especially difficult. But this one? I dunno, maybe I don’t have as much patience as I did 10 years ago, or maybe it’s because my hands keep going numb when playing on Steam Deck, but so far I feel like the frustration is outweighing the fun. The biggest issue for me is a combination of the amount of time that you’re immobile while healing coupled with the fact that getting hit during that time causes you to loose the silk without healing.
When you (hopefully) finish Sliksong you should try Ori: Will of the wisps, it’s the second and final one in the series but you are non missing that much by not playing Blind forest.
Ori games need the recognition that they deserve
Other ones to try if you haven’t yet are Ender Lillies and Ender Magnolia.
Never heard of these, I’ll be checking them out
I played and loved both of those games.
I 112%'d hollow knight this past winter and even beat the final patheon that’s like 50 some bosses, although on that one only was the single mod I ever installed which was being able to save at benches because I was not going to try and do 50 in a row without dying lol.
But I did everything the game can offer, first time I’ve gone that far in it since it came out, and then immediately started silksong over again. I got into act 2 when the game came out and kinda fell off it. I didn’t actually get stuck I think I just got distracted with other games
Anyway even after playing HK to death, yeah silksong is a lot harder. But I am at like 16 hours approaching act 3 whereas when I fell off it last year I was around 40, so that’s worth something I guess. I’m not getting stuck as badly, but the game can be pretty punishing.
I’ve always played HK and metroidvanias with an 8bitdo sn30 pro, it just feels better with a D pad to me. Highly recommend it if you’re looking for a better control feel than the steam deck. Although I did beat that crazy hard carnival boss on the switch handheld mode back in the day lol
Silksong is much harder than Hollow Knight for me too. I’ve been slowly playing through it but I agree that it’s a lot more frustrating and less rewarding.
The one nice thing is that you can heal in midair, unlike Hollow Knight. You can really use that to your advantage in some fights.
I think I’ll look to see if there’s a mod to make it more tolerable. I don’t need/want it to be much easier, I just want at least one more health point, or 50% faster silk gain or something.
its the summer event in sto and then also no mans sky. I really wish the cryptic mmos could be converted into offline/online things like is more common now a days in rpgs.
I’ve been playing Vultures: Scavengers of Death, a turn-based Resident Evil style game. I like the atmosphere, but it’s been a bit of a “best of bugs”-festival (stuff like 0 Bullet stacks that crash the game when clicking on them in the inventory, softlocks when the train you should enter disappears when leaving/reentering the room and all the good things).
I also invested in getting the addons my Rimworld was missing, and i am currently bashing my head against my inability to play it without mods - i even accepted just installing a collection instead of rolling my own, and after 17 minutes of start time it just crashed, which means reverifying the 1220 installed mods.
fucccccck i cannot focus on ff9 now that I’m on disc 3
this is where I’ve lost steam on this game every time, for decades.
damnit i need to finish it!
Fired up Desynched again for some reason. It’s a factory game, but instead of conveyor belts you have little robots that you can program to do stuff, from something as simple as pickup->dropoff to entire decisions trees and logic that fights enemies and builds stuff.
Still Overwatch. I’m really happy they brought 6v6 open queue back.
F1 Manager 2024
I discovered that there is a 2026 season mod so gave it a go this week. It a great mod (updated teams, drivers, personnel & assets to add Cadillac) but the gameplay in general is just so broken I gave up. I remember now why I stopped playing last time as the fun quickly disappears as you literally have to work around the flaws but by doing that it ruins the experience.
It’s such a shame, I love the presentation but the gameplay just isn’t there. I got it for free on Epic last year and played some, but the improvement from 2023 (while it is there) is just not substantial enough. Maybe if they got a few more years to improve they would have ended up with a decent iteration eventually, but I can’t say I’m surprised they won’t be given the chance to.
At least we’ll always have Motorsport Manager.
I have been slowly playing Darkwood, still. We’ll see if I finish it or not, but if I do this will be the world’s slowest playthrough probably. I think the game is very good, but it does stress me out quite a lot. I have a hard time playing it for extended periods of time between the tension, the occasional confusion of what to do and the general difficulty. A lot of the time I will play through a single day/night cycle, save during the time freeze the next morning after having survived the night and exit and do something else.
Regardless of whether I finish it myself or watch a playthrough of someone else though I am glad to have played it. I really love the atmosphere, the writing and characters. I love the gameplay design that manages to make a top-down survival game without jumpscares both generally unsettling and even genuinely fucking scary at times. And as I’ve said last week, the sound design is just some of the best I’ve heard, and such a huge part of what makes everything land.
Still playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly. Before anything else, I’d like to get one thing out of the way: I’m an idiot. Descriptions for (most?) Anomaly mods aren’t as bad as I thought they were, it’s just that ModDB has no indicators there’s anything beyond the initial sentence or two if you browse the site with JavaScript disabled. So yeah, that was a fumble on my part but also why the heck does ModDB show all of the text on normal mod pages but doesn’t for Anomaly addons?!
I was expecting to write something like “I didn’t do too many changes since last week, mostly just started using modded exes and made some further gameplay options tweaking” today but… yeah, no. While my mod list is far from the behemoths I tend to play with in something like Bethesda titles, my Anomaly collection grew way faster than anticipated. Here’s my current mods list if anyone’s interested:
Full mod list
- Arti and RavenAscendants Mags Redux - detailed magazine and ammo management.
- Blindsides Weapon Reanimation and Rebalance - dependency for other stuff.
- Boomsticks and Sharpsticks - dependency for other mods, improved weapon animations are a nice bonus.
- Dark signal weapon soundscape - dependency for other mods.
- Food, drug and drinks animations - should be self explanatory.
- FDDA Enhanced Animations - Food and Drinks - animation improvements for the above.
- He’s with me - prevents friendly factions from attacking your companions, even if they are from opposing force. Not sure if I’ll stick with this one but it’s on for now.
- HTS Bars - hunger and thirst status bars. For whatever reason base Anomaly doesn’t show them even though both are tracked and affect gameplay experience (I don’t mind the latter but I like to have information about such things).
- Inventory Anrifreeze - lazy loading for in-game containers, helps with the hitching when opening things with lots of items.
- Ladies and Sister Stalkers - female player character.
- LASS Population Addon - adds female stalkers to the NPC pool.
- MSBS Grot - cool gun that doesn’t really appear in games often. The only titles I can think of that use it are ARMA 3 (technically it’s a fictional gun based on bullpup version of Grot) and Girls’ Fronline (just a 2D art).
- Tactical Movement Speed - change movement speed depending on weapon status (holstered, lowered, drawn, aimed).
I’m sure this list will grow as I spend more time with the game but even these additions make for a fun return to the zone. I’d like to once again thank @[email protected] for their help with figuring out a good starting point with modding Anomaly. I still need to check your base list and your alternative LASS population addon but I’ll get there.
As for the game itself, once I got my bearings it turned out to be somewhat easier than I initially thought it would be. I’m currently playing on medium difficulty and progression settings (with previously mentioned custom tweaks) so I might have to play around with those a bit more. I don’t mind though, it’s suppose to be fun not feel like a punishment.
Besides that, I decided to give The Elder Scrolls Online another go. Its latest update included difficulty setting, a feature intended to tackle one of my main issues with the game (everything being a cakewalk).
I quickly started to regret my decision thanks to a launcher issue which prevented me from downloading files with speeds above 5MB/s. Anything higher would leave it in a perpetual cycle of downloading at max speed for a few seconds followed by freezing for a couple minutes. Thanks to that I got the “pleasure” of experiencing internet speeds I didn’t have to deal with in years. Can’t say I missed that.Thankfully, things were better once I finally got into the game proper though I can’t say much yet as I only played for 2 or so hours last night. There are 3 new difficulties available and bumping it even by 1 makes a noticeable difference in combat. I’m not sure yet if I’ll stick with that (I didn’t want to go too crazy before checking out the new balancing and remembering how to play) but it’s a good sign.
One thing I’m not fond of is the fact that one of the skills I use with my Nightblade adds permanent passive movement speed increase as long as it’s equipped. I’m sure it’s cool for people who like to sprint everywhere but for me, someone who likes to act like part of the world, seeing my character move like I’m watching a video at 1.5x speed is a little jarring. Looks like I’ll have to keep (un)equipping it if I want my experience to feel right. Oh well…
I might have to play around with those a bit more. I don’t mind though, it’s suppose to be fun not feel like a punishment.
Well, that’s the thing - STALKER players are generally masochists who hate themselves and love misery! The punishment is the fun! How else would mods like Fatal Error be so popular?
I’m only halfway in that camp, though, even though I do enjoy the loot/survival/scavenging based gameplay. I don’t play the G.A.M.M.A. modpack myself, but I do use a similar design philosophy to that in my own custom list where traders don’t sell guns or armour, everything drops in low condition and you need to scavenge stuff for parts to progress (I forgot to mention Weapon Parts Overhaul probably).
Oh, I totally get that. My own preferences lean heavily towards style of gameplay that most people would call tedious and annoying, I’m just not into “1 hit death, enemies spot and attack you from the other side of the map and you dehydrate in minutes” type of thing. That’s why I usually start with medium difficulty settings and bump up from there as I get the feel for how things are balanced.
Punishment IS fun, over tuning on the other hand can be less so. Since everyone has their own preferences, that sentence is purely subjective for every player and what they see as too much.
Yeah, I totally agree with you. It’s a fine balance between immersion (which to me is one of the main draws of STALKER) and enjoyable gameplay. I tried playing a Call of Chernobyl-based modpack called A.R.E.A. as a counter example, and that shit is just pure pain. Way too much “realism”, way too little fun. It was certainly interesting but… yeah.
Though actually on the note of spotting you from half the map, there are a ton of helpful AI mods that are pretty much standard that I should probably also dig up for you…
The video you sent me pushed me into another marathon of mod browsing so thanks for that… Nah, seriously - thanks! I found another 5 or so mods to try out already, though most of them are gameplay related rather than graphical ones.
I was actually planning to try out the Alife collection for AI changes as they seem like a promising set of improvements. Have you tried them? Are they any good or are there others you’d recommend over (or in addition to) those?
Which is the Alife collection? (EDIT: I see in the description that this is indeed the Alife collection. No idea how it is but I know from Discords that this is very popular atm). I think what most people are playing with now is Alife+, although that got released a few months after I stopped playing the last time so I have no first hand accounts of it. I do have a couple of good AI mods in that sheet I linked, like Semi-Radiant AI and rank-based travel.
Otherwise like ReDone Combat AI, RE:Vision, Stealth are popular mods. Probably also want Decreased Enemy Bush Hearing Distance, Zone NPCs Can’t See Through Bushes and Zone Mutants Can’t See Through Bushes and Ghillie Rework. Some of these mods probably need some minor compatibility work for script merging or at least load order management.
Useful Idiots that I already recommended is in my opinion essential for companions (and includes the functionality of the He Is With Me mod you already have installed, I would just replace that with it). Companions Disable Headlamps In Stealth is also good, I’m trying to remember if there is a newer version somewhere though. There might be.
These were just some off the top of my head, I’m probably forgetting something.
Yeah, by collection I meant all of the modules, including Alife+. According to the description it’s more of an extension to the vanilla system rather than an override so it should be compatible with at least some of the stuff you mentioned (probably, we’ll see). Thanks for the links, as always.
I don’t really care for playing with companions to be honest, not at the moment anyway. The only reason I downloaded “He Is With Me” was to test it with a specific situation during a rescue quest. That said, I’ll keep those mods in mind if I start longing for a party.
I completed Under The Waves. I’ll play the Gothic remake next. I recently played the original Gothic and Gothic 2 - The Night Of The Raven with mods.
