What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Also tried the alpha (running for 3 more days I think) of Dark and Darker. It's kind of a cross between Escape from Tarkov and PUBG, but I find Tarkov to be miserable, and this new game is super fun. You and 2 friends form a party of standard fantasy classes and head into a random dungeon filled with monsters, traps, treasure, and.... other parties of adventurers. Meanwhile, a PUBG style circle is closing in on you to keep the action going.

The gameplay is compelling. Monsters are challenging, and combat is deadly. The ranger can set traps, which is great when you hear other players coming your way. When you get to a certain point in the dungeon (the center?) you can access a portal and escape. You sell your loot to merchants.

One really cool little touch is the mini map looks like an old school D&D map.

Fired up Elden Ring.

I do not know if this is the game for me....

jason10mm wrote: Fired up Elden Ring.

I do not know if this is the game for me....

CHEAT CHEAT CHEAT www.nexusmods.com/eldenring/mods/146

Cheese the shit out of it if you want. If you're having rough time at the start, don't hesitate to use Youtube. This is a good primer:

The first guy you see on the horse is a troll. Don't waste your time fighting him (yet).

Heh heh, I'm not totally giving up, it's just a lot of stuff uofront. There are these messages and bloidstains all over the place, how helpful are they? I used up my arrows, how do I get.more? What is that golden stuff coming off kills? Just a general lack of what a typical open world RPG hands out.

Does look good and I know this dev eschews hand holding.

Also, the hunt for a virtual pinball set up is on. I'm looking at sub reddits for this crap, this is like the soft east coast guy with glasses walking into the desperado cowboy saloon, asking for a glass of ginger ale

Ignore the messages, most of the time they are just nonsense. The gold stuff is the runes you use to level up. If you die you have to go to your body and reclaim them.

You can buy or craft new arrows. You need to buy or find cookbooks to enhance your crafting repertoire.

Bloodstains are where other players died. If you see a lot in one area, it most likely means an NPC invader will spawn when you get close enough.

Speaking of nigh-unfathomable time sinks... I let a couple friends talk me into getting back into WoW a few months back in anticipation of Dragonflight, the latest expansion, which has now been out for almost a month. Why haven't I posted about it before this? Because I've been playing WoW, of course.

Two of the major design goals for this expansion were to have flying available from the outset, so that players aren't frustrated by having to suddenly walk to everything when they can fly everywhere else in the world/universe and to make professions into an endgame activity like raiding so that there are goals with some depth other than "make as much of this one thing as possible and then make tons of gold on the auction house that you really can't do much with." How well did they succeed at achieving those goals? Hrm.

The flying system is similar to the dragon races from Mists of Pandaria. In that respect, it can be really fun. There are also race courses scattered all across the new continent, so improving your times and testing yourself against new races is an actual long-term goal for those interested. You improve at dragonriding by picking up glyphs floating in the air (usually at the highest point in any particular region) and spending the points accumulated on skills, just like the most recent iteration of the talent system (more on that later.) Dragonnriding is much more subject to physics than the typical flying ability, in that your drake (one of four you can collect via the campaign) can only stay in the air as long as your Vigor lasts. That frequently means that you end up crashing far short of the location you were attempting to get to, often dropping you into areas packed with enemies, but always leaving you on the ground for some time while you regenerate Vigor. What that means is that, when you can't get where you wanted to go, you're either walking (the not-goal of this effort) or you're sitting on the ground, waiting (e.g. not playing the game.) Consequently, that means that one of the earliest things you should do with one of your characters is find as many dragon glyphs as you can get to, in order to max out the system and minimize the annoyance that it brings. I have done this. I still occasionally find the system to be annoying and pine for the old system where I could just hover in midair as long as I wanted and land precisely where I wanted to without overshooting or aggroing something nearby. Thankfully, you only have to collect the glyphs on one toon and it gives the skill point accumulated to all of your other characters in the expansion.

The new profession systems are cool, but remarkably complex. When they decided to make it an endgame activity, they did so by requiring a long list of ingredients for each item you'd like to craft, much of which are made up of ingredients that will only come randomly when killing specific mobs, but also made finding new recipes more weighted toward said random drops, rather than going to a trainer. Fairly soon, you'll have exhausted your trainer's knowledge and have to hope to find new things... somewhere. That effectively gates the system to control advancement, but also makes it far more effort than it's often worth if you're really interested in being a blacksmith or a leatherworker. My main, a Shaman, is an alchemist. That has easily been the most frustrating of any of the professions, as it's dependent on "experimentation" which is costly to undertake and frequently fails, leaving you with nothing; not even the experience or gold from killing stuff hoping for a random drop. You're just standing in a required spot in the capital city and rolling dice. I like the intent of the system and, as with everything else in this expansion, there's an absurd amount to explore and discover, but progress seems stilted and so demanding of time that unless you're committed to each profession, I can see a lot of people shrugging their shoulders and moving on to other, less time-consuming things.

And it's the time sink that is the overarching aspect to the game, just as it's always been. Way back in the vanilla days, the time commitment was because everything moved so slowly and the requirements for advancement were ridiculously high. Now it's because there's SO MUCH to all of it. One of Blizzard's guiding principles from the beginning was "easy to learn, hard to master." They've basically chucked that first part out the door and contented themselves that their current audience is their current audience and they're better off making things complex enough to hold the interest of that audience, rather than trying to recruit a bunch of new people. The new/old talent system is a great example. The old trees disappeared in Cataclysm in favor of just level-gaining your major abilities and getting a choice among three options about every dozen levels or so. The trees have returned, in that you get one point per level, alternating between your class tree (Shaman) and spec tree (Enhancement, Elemental, or Restoration.) That means there's a TON more variety in paths and options, but it also means that there are some of those choices that were the downside of the old system, where you're enhancing a main ability by 1% (damage, healing, whatever) and noticing an actual change to your performance is occasionally difficult. It also means that you'll be spending some time hovering over the talent screen, figuring out which path is "better" for you. Thankfully, the choices aren't permanent like they were back in the day, and you can change them at anytime, except when you're in combat, so experimentation is easy.

I've leveled four of my characters to the top (70) and have, obviously, spent a ton of time playing in order to get there. Despite my criticisms above, I like a lot of what's going on. I think there are still a lot of rough edges that need sanding, but there it is. Also, despite having acquired all of the dragon glyphs (the final one, at the highest peak in the entire game, took about a half hour) and making the ability far easier to employ, I'm still kind of hoping for the moment when they decide that dragonriding is optional and reintroduce regular flying. Probably as a random drop...

Re: WoW - Until Cataclysm, the problem with the WoW skill system was that there were a ton of skills in the skill tree, but only one or two paths through the skill tree to maximize whatever you were trying to do. And that dot releases would sometimes monkey with the tree enough that you'd have to change your skill set. "You're a Marksman Hunter? Now you're a Beastmaster unless you want a big DPS drop."

Good point. I think they've tried to avoid that by presenting a lot more options, so that you can try interesting stuff/new abilities and not take a huge hit to whatever you're trying to maximize. One of the interesting things that I've run into involves one of my favorite activities, which is healing 5-mans (and occasionally raids.) At the beginning of an expansion, mana used to be a thing for healers. You often needed cooldowns and abilities (like Water Shield for shamans) to compensate for your lack of gear. Now everyone gears up so quickly that mana is not an issue in the slightest. I think I have Water Shield on my shaman because I didn't feel like putting a point anywhere else and I can have two shields with another talent. I haven't been in any raids, but in all of the raiding trees I've seen places like Icy Veins suggest, mana talents are almost entirely avoided in favor of healing output. It's weird. Mana is historically supposed to be a constraint; a resource to manage. Now it's just something that's there...?

My oldest beat me in a Mario Kart Wii Grand Prix.

I took a header into a car to let him pass in the first race. I refused to pass him on a late blue shell in the third. But the fourth race win was legitimate and scored him the points for an overall first.

Good for him.

I keep coming back to WH40k: Chaosgate Demonhunters.

It really is the best xcom successor. It doesn't *look* like it's straying too far but in reality it's completely changing your old xcom play incentives. Really well put together game---pretty challenging but ultimately breakable in ways that make you feel really good.

My friend and I tried the seamless co-op mod for Elden Ring yesterday, and it was awesome! It did crash twice but in general it is what it says it is... you can play the whole game co-op with no trouble.

I also installed a mod that removes rune loss on death, which is my absolute least favorite part of the game. I think we will have a ton of fun with this.

I probably long missed my moment in asking this, but is anyone playing Splatoon 3? I've been a bit obsessed with it since release, but I need to learn the rules of the non-Turf War games are, and playing with randoms in TW results in a very uneven experience, to say the least.