What game are you playing?

[wankerness]

I guess it's sort of like.... to what end? Now I've unlocked the best character and optimized my play style and balanced the cooldowns and really got into the rhythm of things, so now I'm prepared to.... uh..... do the same quest again....? But easier? Or harder? With a cool hat this time? I understand it, it's a sort of intrinsic goal for a lot of people, there's an audience for it, so I'm glad people get something out of endgame content, but to me it feels like a waste of time once all the major extrinsic goals are accomplished. Borderlands games aren't really short campaigns - that's a lot of content to burn through. I think I've completed the BL2 story twice, and Steam puts me at almost 100 hours. BL3 has about 100 hours and I only played through it once. Then again, I don't trust play timers on Steam for a bunch of reasons, so I dunno if that's accurate.

Fun, I guess. If I'm having more fun at the end of a playthrough than I was at the beginning, I'm not going to stop playing the game just cause it ends, if going into NG+ continues that increased fun level from the beginning of the game. I viewed NG+ as the reward for slogging through the clunky gameplay of those first playthroughs. Again, if your goal is to see the end credits and stop as fast as possible then there's no reason, but otherwise I think that the reason is just that if you're playing the game for fun purposes and think the gameplay is improving as your character level increases, and the enemy scaling isn't outstripping your character power level to an annoying level (like usually happens in games with NG+), that you should by all means keep playing until you stop having a good time.

 

[TedEH]

I'll give some games the credit that what entices me to do end-game content is when the world itself is just a joy to inhabit. In BotW (and TotK to some extent) I wanted to finish the shrines because exploring the world is like taking in an art piece. Elden Ring is kinda similar - it's like an art piece (that wants to beat you to death).

 

[p0ke]

Goddamned Sekiro I love how fluent it is, but I'm still having a hard time getting used to the deflection stuff. Right now I'm stuck at bosses in two different places, one is the gatekeeping guy on horseback and the other one is drunkard yuozo or whatever he was called. I read that the horseback guy would be easy with the firecracker prosthetic, but I haven't found the place to purchase the part needed for it... One place to get it is apparently right after the boss, so that's not very helpful, but the other one seems to be somewhere that can be reached before the battle.

 

[p0ke]

Now I'm finally getting somewhere. I acquired the firecracker prosthetic, and even thought that actually didn't help that much in the fight, I did manage to defeat the horseback guy now. Turns out my strategy was a tad off for that fight - once I realized it's actually better to just hit him every chance you get instead of trying to counter attack all the time, I managed to kill him in 2-3 attempts. It was incredibly satisfying to get that finishing deathblow in.

 

[Werecow]

Now I'm finally getting somewhere. I acquired the firecracker prosthetic, and even thought that actually didn't help that much in the fight, I did manage to defeat the horseback guy now. Turns out my strategy was a tad off for that fight - once I realized it's actually better to just hit him every chance you get instead of trying to counter attack all the time, I managed to kill him in 2-3 attempts. It was incredibly satisfying to get that finishing deathblow in.

Yeh, some bosses are posture based (as in more easily broken than health), and some are health (just because of their huge posture). Once you get good at deflecting, the "health based" bosses are really a case of getting their health down far enough so their posture becomes vulnerable. Once an enemy's health is down around half, they start getting severe posture recovery problems.

It's still best to always hit them as well, when you have an opening of course. But learning a fight is basically mainly knowing how to deflect their move set.

 

[TedEH]

Super tangential, but I recently inherited an old laptop, and since I didn't want to pay for another Windows license on a free computer, I chucked Debian on it. It's a bit of effort, but between Steam and emulators, Linux is feeling pretty viable for some gaming. Getting workable video drivers wasn't nearly as big a headache as I remember. Modern desktops are just as usable as Windows for most menial tasks. Less bloat. No weird AI nonsense going on. Anyway - Linux is alright, as a Steam+RetroArch+Browser machine. I was pleasantly surprised.

 

[Werecow]

Super tangential, but I recently inherited an old laptop, and since I didn't want to pay for another Windows license on a free computer, I chucked Debian on it. It's a bit of effort, but between Steam and emulators, Linux is feeling pretty viable for some gaming. Getting workable video drivers wasn't nearly as big a headache as I remember. Modern desktops are just as usable as Windows for most menial tasks. Less bloat. No weird AI nonsense going on. Anyway - Linux is alright, as a Steam+RetroArch+Browser machine. I was pleasantly surprised.

I'm seriously considering Linux after Windows 10 reaches end of life, as Win11 has removed features i use constantly (like additional toolbars on the taskbar). Everywhere i look, people are either saying Linux is amazing, or ends up being a total nightmare due to random issues cropping up though.
I'll probably end up trying to dual-boot with windows solely for gaming and photoshop, and Linux for everything else.

 

[TedEH]

Realistically, I still think Windows wins in terms of being full-featured out of the box, and getting up-to-date drivers, being a little more user-friendly for the non-tech-savvy, etc., but Linux is much better than where it was at years ago, IMO.

 

[gabito]

Super tangential, but I recently inherited an old laptop, and since I didn't want to pay for another Windows license on a free computer, I chucked Debian on it. It's a bit of effort, but between Steam and emulators, Linux is feeling pretty viable for some gaming. Getting workable video drivers wasn't nearly as big a headache as I remember. Modern desktops are just as usable as Windows for most menial tasks. Less bloat. No weird AI nonsense going on. Anyway - Linux is alright, as a Steam+RetroArch+Browser machine. I was pleasantly surprised.

Yeah, I installed a distro called Zorin on a pretty old (2013-ish) laptop and it works just fine. The only upgrade the computer had in his life was changing the original hard drive to an SSD. That and swapping Windows for Linux... You can play Windows games on it, and this is an old i3 CPU with an Intel HD3000 graphics card. You're not playing Cyberpunk 2077 on this hardware, obviously, but you can play SOME Windows games on it nonetheless.

Also installed ChimeraOS on my Rog Ally a few months ago because Windows 11 (or just Windows in general) was ridiculously cumbersome to use on a handheld and it's been mostly fine. I had to fine tune some stuff, but I'd do that in Windows anyway and the end result is pretty good.

I can't claim 1:1 performance with Windows (I have no idea, I'm not counting frames), but I can play Starfield on it just fine using medium settings. I could go for high settings too, but it becomes a little too hot and it's too much for the little machine.

It's been a while since I installed a Debian distro, but ChimeraOS' and Zorin's installations have been painless.

 

[p0ke]

Super tangential, but I recently inherited an old laptop, and since I didn't want to pay for another Windows license on a free computer, I chucked Debian on it. It's a bit of effort, but between Steam and emulators, Linux is feeling pretty viable for some gaming. Getting workable video drivers wasn't nearly as big a headache as I remember. Modern desktops are just as usable as Windows for most menial tasks. Less bloat. No weird AI nonsense going on. Anyway - Linux is alright, as a Steam+RetroArch+Browser machine. I was pleasantly surprised.

It takes a bit of effort like you said, but I've found that Wine also runs many games surprisingly well. I think the last game I played on it was Borderlands, and that ran better using Wine than using Windows on the exact same PC. Probably because of the lack of bloat. It's been a very long time though, but it's probably just gotten better since then. And of course emulators run natively these days, back then I had to run ePSXe using Wine so basically an emulator running an emulator But it ran really nicely, nonetheless.

And by the way, Wine is pretty good at running older games too. Stuff that won't run on more recent versions of Windows even.

 

[wankerness]

I finished Robocop. It's pretty fun, but it definitely is way too plot heavy with a lot of one of my least favorite things in videogames - having to slow walk while characters talk at you. Garbage mechanic, really overused in narrative games.

I got "Asterigos" after hearing about it on some lists of overlooked indie games. It's a 3rd person action game with some soulslike elements ("bonfires" and enemies respawning when you die), but it's easier and you don't lose anything on death. It has sort of a cutesy aesthetic like Kena Bridge of Spirits or Torchlight 2. However, I did not get grabbed by it in the first hour.

I am now trying Tiny Tina's Wonderlands cause it was on sale for 80% off and I heard the base game is pretty fun. I'm a little torn on it. The Tiny Tina DLC was always my least favorite DLC pack in previous games - something about the fantasy aesthetic and enemies just really did not do it for me in Borderlands combat. This takes it further and gives you a dedicated spellcaster button and makes a lot of the guns "fantasy themed" (ex a lot of pistols are crossbows). It's pretty fun, but I still just don't really like the aesthetic and think the humor is mostly annoying. But, the gameplay is good. Probably about tied with Borderlands 3 for best in the series.

I also am left wondering if Gearbox tried to pull a Hideo Kojima by intentionally not including any characters from other games, in sharp contrast to the earlier Tiny Tina fantasy DLC. There's weird generic new vaulthunters that are playing the game with you that are voiced by Wanda Sykes and Andy Samberg, and so far I've only encountered two characters from other games besides Tina (Torgue and Claptrap) and everyone knows the drama that went down with this being the replacement claptrap after gearbox screwed over the first VA. Oh, and the bad guy is Will Arnett. They blew all the VA budget on new characters to be voiced by real celebrities! It's David Hayter all over again! (Well, not nearly that bad, at least they're not voicing the same characters).

I need something else to grab me like Rise of the Ronin or Elden Ring! I think I'm just getting turned off to other gameplay styles like FPS games, or even similar ones if they're not to my exact preferences.

I'm still chipping away very slowly at Like a Dragon: Isshin, but it feels like a chore to play compared to almost all the other Yakuza games. I guess cause it doesn't have the same characters (well, sort of).

 

[Bloody_Inferno]

Put Thousand Year Door to a hault for the inevitable... new Trails game and I'm back in fridge, locked from society for a month or more again.

New combat system is nice albeit weird. The field battle is a rather bare bones hack n slash, but optional to go to turn based where all the extra options are kept. It's at least more simpler and more intuitive than say the first Ni No Kuni game. I like that there's a tactical aspect to jump from field to turn based. But I guess I'm still early in the game.

I'm still iffy on the whole alignment system. Every game with a moral choice system always tend to lock the best rewards by going hard on one alignment, forcing you to do multiple playthroughs. And Trails, or modern JRPGs in general, being as long as a Marcel Proust novel isn't exactly the kind of games to do multiple rounds. Again too early for me to judge.

 

[TedEH]

I should probably try Wonderlands again at some point. I tried it a while back, but in a context that I couldn't really take it in properly - was couch co-op on a PS4 in short bursts with someone who got distracted pretty easily, so I feel like I played the game in the same way that I feel like I've "experienced a game" after watching a handful of letsplay clips. It did, at the time, seem like it was trying VERY hard to be funny - like when you invite someone new to a party and they desperately want to be liked, but they're being received kinda awkwardly. Like yes, we get it, you know nerd things and can yell very loudly. I'm not sure the humour of Borderlands is enhanced by the D&D theming. You liked those poop jokes?! WELL NOW THEY'RE RAINBOW DRAGON POOPS!!!!111!!!!