Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August 6th

Baldur's Gate 3.
I can probably count the number of games I've paid full price for in the past 15 years on one hand, and this is one of them. No regrets whatsoever.

Looking back on Steam, last time was GTA V. Prior to that Skyrim, and prior to that Portal 2.

I’m playing Sekiro for the first time and am loving it! It’s my first FromSoftware game. Mechanically it’s quite similar to Jedi Survivor, the other game I’ve been playing lately, but is a lot less friendly and more straightforward (as far as plot and other stuff going on). However, it works really well and is very enjoyable to get good at.

Permanently Deleted

Baldurs Gate 3 on my linux machine runs pretty good and smooth. Already died because I failed a persuasion/deception check which led to a party wipe. It wasnt uncalled for either and didn't came out of the blue. I really enjoy it.

I can't hear you over the sound of my mind-flayer parasite.

BG3 baybee what other game is there!?

For me, I just finished pikmin 4 100%!!! I have now moved on to Jedi survivor, which I am having a lot of fun with.

I got it near launch, but it didn’t run super well. I am happy I waited as the game runs much smoother than it did when it came out

Yall i was fucking with Baldur's Gate 3 splitscreen with my wife and found out that using an Nvidia graphics card and 2 monitors, I can turn vertical split screen games to broadcast to 2 different monitors so it looks like 1 screen each.

Fucking awesome.

None of my friends were half as impressed as me and the wife were. I feel like a technical God recently (all because I figured out how to enable a setting and set an aspect ratio properly for 2 screens lol)

Just finished Life is Strange and Life is Strange Before the Storm.

Both are great games with a really good soundtrack but I personally preferred the story of the first title.

I have been busy this week so I have played mostly Slay the Spire. Being able to get up and walk away at any time let's me play in my limited down time at work, or while I am working on dinner.

I've also been dabbling in a mobile game called To Arms.

I just finished Hollow Knight this week (basic ending, didn't go out of my way to find items I didn't organically come across). Metroidvanias and 2d side-scrollers in general haven't traditionally been my thing, but I was persuaded by Monty Zander's video and...yeah, it's as good as everyone says. The world is surprisingly immersive for its format and the gameplay is tight and rewarding. Abilities and enemy variety were always changing the way I played, and the different areas each had their own identities and obstacles. The sense of excitement on unlocking a new area and getting to explore it was on par with Elden Ring.

Unfortunately, I moved on to Kena Bridge of Spirits, which I think is a pretty good game so far, but it has some AA jank that I think stands out more after the fine tuning in Hollow Knight, and the combat is a lot more rote. Trying not to be too harsh though because not everything can be what Hollow Knight is, obviously.

Transport Fever 2, because I can ride da choo choos

It's super chill and relaxing, you just have to ignore the rest of your empire falling into ruin

FF6 with my wife. I was always told it's the best one but 8 has been my fav so far.

I'm playing A Plague Tale: Innocence for the first time – really enjoying the medieval flair and great graphics, though it is definitely a linear game (not my usual cup of tea, but exceptions obviously apply).

I'll be playing Baldur's Gate 3 as soon as my COOP friends have time for it... it is installed and ready to go! Very much looking forward to this.

All of them running great on Linux too, which is just amazing.

Replaying Witcher 3 for the xth time. So far only ever played the base game, now I look forward to the dlcs. So far I am mostly rushing through the main quest and am now facing the wild hunt at kaer morhen. Never before reached this state with so few side quests completed 😅.

Going through all of the Hitman reboot trilogy maps purely to take screenshots. My plan is to have a fat wallpaper folder of all sorts of locations from the trilogy. It's a beaut

My life has been completely subsumed by Baldur's Gate 3. I spend all day at work thinking about it.

My husband called it a "tactical combat dating sim" and that cracked me up.

Still Final Fantasy XVI (PS5) and Final Fantasy XII (Switch). Loving both still.

I just recently learned there was a HD remake for Freelancer. So I've been taking a nostalgia trip all weekend. Still such a good game. And free/abandonware now!

Edit: Game can be found here: https://archive.org/details/Freelancer_201807

HD Edition mod: https://www.moddb.com/mods/freelancer-hd-edition/downloads/freelancer-hd-edition-v06

Elden ring for now

I initially started Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered a few days ago, but I wasn't really in the mood for that game, so I ended up going back to The Witcher 3 to start (and hopefully finish) both DLCs (I'm part way through Heart of Stone atm and have yet to start Blood and Wine).

As for feedback, although weekly might perhaps be too often, maybe a "Show us your collection / show us your setup" kind of thread? This could generate some engagement and lead to interesting discussions imo.

Hypnospace Outlaw. I'm not old enough to have been using the web in 1999, but I like to think it was exactly like this.

I got a ttrpg itch recently (unrelated to bg3) and started looking into pathfinder 2e and will probably pick up the core rulebook in the next few days.

Right now I'm waiting on the new PoE league as well as the GW2 expansion. For now it's either a MUD, The first Skyrim save I've kept long enough to complete the main quest, or Yakuza: Like a dragon.

It really just depends on mood and if anyone else is active on the MUD.

I'm glad to have finally found a Skyrim build I enjoy. I've always appreciated the game but never managed to stick with it. This Illusion/Thief/Assassin combo is a great time. Calm + backstab for life.

Yakuza is a delight. It's a lot like FfXIV in that it's a pretty fun movie that is sometimes interrupted by RPG game play elements. Loving the humor.

I’m excited for starfield so I started playing through Fallout 76 to scratch the bethesda itch which led to me starting fallout 4 again, which led to me staring new vegas again too, and then committed to finally 100% achievements for Fallout 3 after all these years.

Currently playing Nier: Automata. It's incredibly hard to talk to people about this game without spoilers. It's all about the story, but the gameplay is pretty good too.

Well I just picked up Last Epoch last night / Monday! It's an Action RPG so follows the same format as PoE / Diablo. Haven't been super impressed with the post-campaign experience of D4, and immediately after jumping into Last Epoch I already feel like it has exactly what I was looking for from D4 in terms of power fantasy and buildcrafting potential.

Its still Early Access which I generally don't pickup, but someone here on Lemmy recommended it and I have to say, so far I regret nothing!

Restarted the Demon's Souls PS5 remake. It's going much better than my previous attempts. Not quite back to where I was last time but got there aot faster.

Back on the old Bloodborne. I meant to finish it years ago, but ran out of time with exams so restarted just there with a brand new save. Loving it so far although I'm not too far into it.

I bought Disco Elysium during the Steam Summer Sale. I'm only on the second "day" (in game time). It's OK. There's lots of attention to art and fleshing out the NPCs. I'm not blown away yet, though.

Hogwarts legacy

BG3, this game is awesome!

I think I'll take a break from Final Fantasy 14 for a while. The story was just so uninteresting for so long, that I just don't want to continue right now. Everything else was good enough, the different jobs I tried were fun, but I just need to do something else.

Other than that, I started Baldurs Gate 3 with a friend, we are still relatively early, exploring the first region.

Quadrilateral Cowboy!

I played the Pikmin 4 demo and had a ton of fun with it, but I have to wait for a sale to pick it up.

So instead o got Brotato because I saw it was $5 on switch, having a lot of fun with it! Will probably get Vampire Survivors when it comes out on switch, I hear it has more interesting maps than Brotato

Still Elder Scrolls Online. Tried to pug the new hard mode last night in an old instance, wouldn't recommend. Did ball group stuff in Cyro Friday night.

After having beaten The Pathless yesterday I started playing Uncharted 4. I'm a couple hours in and I have to say, it feels a lot more like an interactive movie than an actual game. I'm hoping it gets more interesting

Playing a lot of factorio with the space exploration and Krastorio mod. I've increased science costs 10x to slow the game down and force me to build properly. However after getting to space I spent 9 hours handfeeding machines to get the logistics bit research.

I told someone in one of these threads that I do a base tour. I think pre bots is a good milestone to make a base tour. I tired to make a short video but it's actually much harder than I thought, filming and talking is hard and editing is hard.

Finished my first playthrough of valheim this week as a duo team. Yagulath and the Queen boss were pretty crazy. I'm hoping the Ashlands comes out soon, not really sure what to do with the game until then.

Caves of Qud. Kitfox picked it up to publish recently and I figured it was time to play it a bunch again. Truly an incredible game.

i just finished spider-man miles morales 100% and don't know what to play next

i started streaming and this week i have the time to go all in with it, im playing one game a day this week in this order Super mario world links awakening (second stream for it) baldurs gate enhanced edition nightmare creatures twilight princess (on gamecube, also second stream already)

good times

I'm finally at Disc 4 of Final Fantasy 8 Remastered. Tried playing this game several times, but never finished it. I decided to use all the QoL options (combat boost, 3x speed, no-encounter) to avoid being frustrated by the gameplay (junctioning, drawing, etc), and I've been enjoying the story, even post Disc 3 twist.

I'm at 86% main story progress of ff16 and the game is such a letdown after reading people hyping it up so much... feels like a chore at the moment but I'm so close to the end I'm just gonna power through it

Baldur's Gate 3, naturally. I was enjoying it until I reached the zone border and I got a warning I was underleveled. I was like, really, Larian? We're doing this again?

My biggest complaint with Divinity: Original Sin 2 was that the level differences were so stark and the XP was so tight that it felt like the game was forcing me to comb through the entire map. Absolutely kills replay value, and BG3 is a game I'd really, really like to save something for a replay.

This ended up being a constant issue in D:OS2 but turned out mostly okay in the first D:OS after a really tight first act. I hope this ends up being more like the latter. Or there's some way to grind this time around.

Continuing the PSO2:NGS grind. Leciel is extremely fun, just the right amount of tension and challenge, and constant novel boss "twists". Yesterday we had a boss with breakable parts and a breakable bomb, as well as buffs to damage to breakable parts. The strat was to stagger him by breaking his legs then do a mad rush to break the bomb before it wiped the entire party.

Beyond that, continuing my journey through .hack//IMOQ. It's immediately clear how special this series is. Not just for being the seminal story about an imaginary game, and being fairly unique in actually looking at how people interact with games as a third place, and the queer potential of video games; but also for actually providing a playable version of the imaginary game. Including an MMO version of the MMO!

I really want .hack to come back. Log Horizon rules, and I like the more heroic, legendary, and optimistic tone and theming, but there's something really appealing at how realistic .hack is without being dark, gritty, or cynical. The sense of romance in the game's backstory is great too. All this weird background fabric about genius programmers singlehandedly changing the course of the world, people overhwelmed by emotions; meanwhile the spotlight is on real people.

Spongebob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated. Wanted to play something silly and and stress-relieving. This fit the bill.

Playing Danganronpa v3 and FF7 Crisis Core Reunion, both on Steam Deck.

I started Danganronpa a couple weeks ago. And so far, it's definitely the weakest of the main trilogy. I really don't like any of the characters. They're all just too edgy, weird, and/or outright dumb. And not in a funny endearing way often seen with characters in the first two installments. I just finished the the second class trial; the twist there was pretty stupid. The first trial and murderer at least made sense and was unexpected. This second murderer, while also unexpected, just had the dumbest reason; totally unbelievable. That said, the game itself isn't terrible. And the story is just interesting enough that I wanna see where it goes.

I started FF7 Crisis Core Reunion last week and I'm still in the early stages of it. Don't really have any opinions on it so far. After finishing FF16, I was in the mood for another action-based FF game, so tried this out.

Continuing to play FF14; still in Shadowbringer expansion (SHB). I've been taking my time with it as I had to level up a Machinist so that I can take advantage of the experience gained from MSQs. I finished the Titania trial over the weekend. I am enjoying the level of difficulty with SHB; I felt like Stormblood was a walk in the park. Admittedly, I was massively overleveled through most of Stormblood, but even with level adjustments, it felt easy. So it's nice to see some challenge again.

Also I've gotten back into Eve Online after taking a few months off again. Idk; null blob fleet stuff is something to do, I guess.

Battlebit Remastered

Waiting for POE 2 ಠ_ಠ - the new POE league

Some Cities Skylines while I wait for Cities Skylines 2

Some Chivalry

Minecraft (as usual), just finished Wolfenstein New Orden again. Just started Breath of Fire (GBA version). Nonogram (picross, android). Maybe I'll get back to ToTK (what a drag, that game is huge). Not touching my huge backlog yet.

Yes, I'm a parent and patient gamer, how did you know?

I dug up my old 3DS in the past weeks, installed some custom firmware to play my backups of DS/3DS/GBA games. A bit of Zelda Minish Cap, some Metroid Fusion... But mostly I find myself playing various Pokemon ROM hacks lol.

I've been getting into "Pokemon Elite Redux", which is a difficulty/challenge game centered around each Pokemon having up to 4 abilities at the same time in battle. And there's tons of new abilities that make each pokemon uniquely useful. It's certainly challenging, even on the lowest difficulty. It's happened to me several times that I have to get together a whole new team to beat a single trainer. But, there's zero grinding involved, and there's SO many quality-of-life changes that it's super easy to get a whole new team squared up in just a few minutes. That makes it really easy to jump in for a few minutes when I can, without feeling like I'm wasting my time

Baldur's Gate 1 single player, Divinity: Original Sin 1 in co-op. I was playing through Colony Ship which is another isometric RPG, but I didn't want to get to the end of the early access content before release later this year. I figure if I play through the originals of BG and D:OS I'll have a good amount of time to wait for BG3 to be in sale and have some updates maybe. That or Colony Ship will be released.

Got Murder By Numbers free off EGS, and wife played it before so I thought I'd give it a go. It's an interesting mash-up of visual novel and nonograms. Interesting trivia, the dev's next game was Fall Guys.

I'm playing FreeDoom: Phase 1, and downloaded some wads that work perfectly with FreeDoom, like D2TWWRI, Plutonia 2 and TNT Revilution.

I finally got my PC up and running and I am playing a hell of a lot of BattleBit Remastered. It's what Battlefield 2042 SHOULD have been. It's basically if Squad and Battlefield 4 had a Roblox Baby made by literally 2 developers.

Its absolutely the BEST shooter on the market right now, and it's dirt cheap. Please, this isn't an advertisement, but GO BUY IT NOW.

I was playing red dead 2 a few weeks ago and picked it up with my steam deck. Now I'm playing uncharted 4 and realizing how rockstar and naughtydog built very similar games between the two. Rockstar is far more slow and frankly full of themselves. Not respecting the players time. Meandering through the story with no real semblance of player respect. I put 26 hours into red dead 2 and I feel like I've literally done nothing and feel very under accomplished. I've put 8 hours into uncharted 4 and feel extremely accomplished and invested in the characters.

Even though I'm pissed at Nathan. He's such an idiot, I hate him and can't wait to play him more. Author Morgan is just a bland cowboy that tries so much to just get by. Red dead 2 introduced more main characters than uncharted 4 has in side and main characters. Yet in red dead 2 they've developed none of them part the point of the basics. I'm uncharted they've developed all of their characters. Even the side ones that barely show up.

Likewise in red dead 2, they kill one character I only liked because their accent allowed me to actually tell them apart from the rest of them. The other character the big baddies kidnapped and I've played like 2 hours waiting to go get him back. It's like wtf, let me go rescue the damn character already. Yet the game keeps saying we'll do it as far as possible. We gotta track down all this shit. It's clearly like this filler content because during it another random main character gets kidnapped, they find her right away and it's rescued in one mission. Like what universe is this?

In conclusion, red dead 2 is trying hard to do what uncharted 4 did extremely well. The open world system does not help it one bit and it's turned me off of open world games altogether for a while.

My friends and I just started playing Last Train Outta' Wormtown last night and it's a blast with a group. One player plays a worm who can only detect players while they are standing on the ground. The goal of the worm is to kill all the players before they can fix a train and escape.

We've also just started playing Gangbeasts which is also a lot of fun with a group. I'm sure most have seen this one by now though.

Hopping between Remnant 2, Destiny 2, Honkai Star Rail, and Nexomon Extinction.

Loop Hero! It's free on Epic right now and I've been really enjoying it! A nice blend of procedural generation, deck building, and roguelike allow it to be a very rewarding and engrossing experience overall where I feel I'm consistently progressing.

I still haven't been able to beat The Lich yet, but little by little I'm knocking his health down that much further to make the loop (heh) feel rewarding!

Diablo 4, hopelessly addicted to necromancer. 93 main and 87 seasonal. add Lyreli if you're around the same lvl

Currently playing 'Brotato' on the Switch! Super fun quick game,.

Each round you have to survive and then spend money on weapons/items to survive the next round until Round 20 (unless you do endless).

You unlock difficulties (by surviving the rounds) and characters with different perks/attributes.

Still playing Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds and 0 A.D. See this comment for details.

Also checked out SWTOR but I couldn't get past the clunky controls and camera, so considering dropping it. Also checking out Star Trek Online for the first time, and it's looking promising. The combat is a bit weird, but I like the controls better than SWTOR.

my husband and I are playing Diablo 4 still. we made our third each character a few days ago and are enjoying the seasonal content. my best friend and I are currently doing her first playthrough of all the kingdom hearts games. it was my first time beating KH1 myself. i finally made it to a world in kingdom hearts 2 after the endless Roxas prologue. we only get a couple hours every weekend, but it's been really fun. and in between on my own I'm playing pikmin 4.

Having finally had a few days off, I recently finished Crysis 1 and Warhead. I'm currently playing Crysis 2. Great games. I can't believe I've never played them before

100%ing hogwarts legacy is not very fun, and im also burnt out from the game. playing gtav now

I've been playing little bits of Aven Colony, a straightforward and fun space-colony-themed city manager. However, mostly I've been watching my wife play Baldur's Gate 3 and thinking "We should really buy another beefy gaming PC before Starfield launches so we can both play games simultaneously... "

Genshin Impact has consumed my life. Send help. Looking forward to Fontaine!