Poopfeast420 @ Poopfeast420 @kbin.social

[https://kbin.social/u/Poopfeast420](https://kbin.social/u/Poopfeast420)

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2 yr. ago

Diablo 4 the whole week.

I'm near the end of the main story, and started the final act. It's kinda whatever, it has some good moments, but the first half was a bit boring. After you get your mount, the world is much more fun to get around. It's just massive and there's so much shit to do, it's pretty ridiculous. Lots is repeated of course, just like every open world game, but I still have a good time.

Gear progression is pretty lame right now, since I need to finish the main story to access the higher difficulties, and gear doesn't drop above a certain level. So I've not really gotten any real upgrades in like 30 hours.

What's really terrible though is the network performance. Running around solo in the world is fine for the most part, but some of the event areas, where you're fighting alongside other players, it can be terrible. Constant lags, stutter, and rubber banding. I really need to check if it's a problem on my end, maybe my pi-hole is blocking some domains or something.

He's pissed that Mother 3 was never released in the west and is now on a mission to destroy Nintendo from the inside.

The praise comes after he gets asked about the UK regulators on a UK show. Like I said, the CMA initially also tried to block it, just like the FTC, so it wouldn't make sense to me to single one of them out.

I'm mainly associating Pepe with all the Twitch emotes.

They blocked the deal at first, because of concerns with Cloud gaming. Microsoft made concessions and made a deal with Ubisoft, and it got approved.

Started Diablo 4 a couple of days ago and alternate between the Deck and PC. Performance is much better than I would have thought, and even as a KB+M elitist I like the gamepad controls.

Then there are also some Vampire Survivors-like games. VS itself, with the latest DLC (Among Us collab) and Soulstone Survivors.

I also got Dave the Diver and Enter the Gungeon in the Winter Sale, but I don't think I'll get to those any time soon.

There were some stories going around, after the Overwatch 2 launch, that Kotick would sometimes interfere with the development on that game, which would cause them to just lose or waste tons of work. There's more that went wrong with that game, but if those stories are true, that certainly didn't help.

The levels / balance in Pillars can be a bit weird. If you do all the side content, or you're doing the DLC, when it's available, you're going to be overleveled. However, the game asks you once or twice, if you want to raise the enemies to your level, so they're still challenging. I didn't do that (I didn't help all those old ladies over the street, just so that some random bad guy gets some free exp), which meant a lot of the story fights were pretty easy by the end. There are still some fights designed for (near) max level though, which were really hard.

I've been playing a bunch of games this week.

First, I did go back to Tunic and got the good ending, and I'm glad I did, because now the little fox was happy. I had to look up hints or the solutions to some of the puzzles though, some of those were just too cryptic for me.

Then I tried two Vampire Survivors-likes, Pathfinder: Gallowspire Survivors and Soulstone Survivors, both of which I played on my Steam Deck. Also, both are in Early Access.

I only did a few runs in Pathfinder. I might just be bad, but maybe the game isn't really suited for the Deck right now. There are tons of enemies that shoot small projectiles, that are just a pain to see on the small-ish screen, so dodging everything can be a pain. It also felt like the hit boxes aren't that good right now, but again, that might just be me, I didn't play the game for too long. I'd have to try the game on my desktop PC to check out how it plays there. One thing of note though, this game has local multiplayer, which might be interesting to some people. When you're playing alone, the second character sticks to you as a companion and just deals some extra damage. I also have to mention the menuing in this game, on controller it's complete garbage. Sometimes you select some menu category with triggers, change sub-categories with bumpers, sub-sub-categories with the D-Pad and then the actual thing you want to select with the stick. I had to constantly check where I was and what I had to press, which sucked.

The other, Soulstone Survivors, was a lot more fun for me. You get up to six weapons, and also upgrades for those weapons and generally for your character. In this game, weapons can have "tags", like melee, area, electric, whatever, and upgrades can affect one specific weapon, all of them or everything of a certain type, which can be neat. There are also tons of small QoL details, like highlighting which weapons get upgraded, a summary for your stats in a run or how much damage your weapons are doing. That last point is neat, because you can keep replacing your weapons, even when you already have all six, and if you don't want to, you just get a normal upgrade. When not in a run, there's just tons of meta progression with a gazillion different materials. You can unlock characters, weapons for those characters, a skill tree, something called runes, which I have no idea what they are, and maybe more. Menus also suck, although mostly because everything is just crammed full of stuff and a bit too small on the Deck. It's not as bad as Pathfinder though.

Next, a small game I saw while going through the Steam Discovery Queue, Froggy's Battle. This is a Roguelike, where you're playing as a frog on a skateboard, that's going around in a loop. You kill enemies by bumping into them, or with weapons you might get at the end of a level. The game is really short, I beat the boss after a bit more than ten runs, about 90 minutes, although there's a hard mode, which I didn't do. The main difficulty, in my opinion, comes from the controls, since you're riding a skateboard in a loop, so you'll end up upside down, which flips some of your controls. When the loop is filled with enemies, it can get pretty chaotic. The game has a bunch of different control schemes, so you can try to find whatever works best for you, so it isn't terrible. Doing sick kickflips, while wielding a magic wand, is pretty cool.

Finally, I started Diablo 4. I'm playing a Druid, because eventually I hope to punch everything as a werebear, although right now I'm punching stuff with stones that I summon from the earth. Even though I'm almost level 40, I'm still pretty early in the story, because I just run around in the world, doing side quests, going into the dungeons and whatnot. I'm trying to focus a bit more on the main story, just so I can get the mount and get around the world faster. While I am a KB+M elitist and mainly play on my PC, I also installed the game on my Steam Deck, and it runs really well on there. I turned everything down, expect like textures, so it doesn't look as bad in closeups, but I'm basically always at 60fps, with room to spare. Only in the bigger city do I go below 60 sometimes, which is also pretty much the only time when I hear the fan turning up. Playing on controller is also pretty neat, except for the menus (again). It's also a game with native ultrawide support, it's nice to have a modern game, where you don't have to look for patches or fixes, to fill the whole screen.

As for my favorite game of the year (that was released in 2023), it has to be Baldurs Gate 3, not much really came close.

It's close between Baldurs Gate 3 and Nioh 2.

BG3 is just that good, but Nioh 2 is one of my all time favorites, and I finally cleared everything in the game, early 2023.

Were they? Their three releases since Saints Row 4 ten years ago weren't that well received. It's not like they were releasing smash hit after smash hit (lately). Maybe they killed themselves.

It's all those DLC. You don't just stop buying them, after you're already 20 DLC deep.

I'm not really into Horror games. I played the RE2 Remake and RE7 years ago and liked them, which made me also get the RE3 Remake and Village, but I've yet to play them.

Lots of F2P titles making a lot of money, and GTA still selling tons of Shark Cards as usual.

Sons of the Forest really surprised me as one of the Top Sellers. There were lots of players the week it was released in Early Access and people were talking about the game, but then I barely heard anything about the game. It seems the game also doesn't have any DLC or in-game purchases right now, so it's all game sales, which is pretty impressive.

I played that on Game Pass, when it launched, and really liked it. Although some of the movement could be a bit frustrating, since you are just a blob of meat.

I was recently "burned" with Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which is still in rough shape, after all this time (I think there's some fuckery going on with the publisher, where Owlcat can't update the game anymore), so I'll definitely give it some time. Rogue Trader might also be in a similar boat as BG3, where the later Acts have more bugs, since those weren't in any playtests or betas, but that's just what I read.

I'm also fine with not getting everything, so that isn't an issue. All I know of 40k is basically through various memes on the internet, throughout the years, so basically nothing.

I think two or three stories briefly mention that last boss, so it wasn't too hard to figure out that something is there, but the game just makes it so unappealing and uninteresting to actually look for it, that I just can't be bothered.

I'll probably eventually get the sequel. Like you said, I've basically only heard praises of the game, but it's gonna be some time before I do.

I know very little about 40k or Warhammer in general, but want to give Rogue Trader a shot. I've read a bunch of positive comments about the game, but since it's Owlcat, I'll wait some months for patches to fix the game.

I finished Octopath Traveler. Same as last week, it’s really mediocre, most of the stories are boring and some are really bad, because your party basically doesn’t exist anymore, once you’ve started a chapter with a character. I just played through the character stories and didn’t do the omega secret true final boss whatever.

Edit: no ultrawide support, but there is a patch / trainer, but it messes up the UI a bit (not an issue 90% of the time). It runs perfectly on an OLED Steam Deck, locked 60fps, at highest settings.

Then I started Tunic a few days ago. You know about that story, how FromSoftware’s Miyazaki apparently made the Souls games the way they are, because he’d play games as a kid without understanding the language, so he had to just figure stuff out? That’s Tunic. The game is mainly Zelda, of course some Souls-like elements (can’t miss those in modern games) and in the end it’s also The Witness. I just beat the game and got the normal ending (maybe bad ending), but you also get a game over screen and are told you can try again for another path. I did find a lot of stuff, but I don’t know if I have it in me to go for the true ending or something all by myself. This means I’ll probably look stuff up, so I’m not sitting around for hours.

Edit: like Octopath, no ultrawide, but I haven't looked for patches. Runs well on the Steam Deck, but needed to turn down settings a notch, otherwise it felt a bit choppy, even at 60fps.