Every time this goes on sale, I’m debating on whether to buy it or not. Like you, I’ve never played one of the Ace Combat games before, but some arcade style gameplay could be fun.

I’m currently going through Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which is my first experience with the Pathfinder system.

While I do enjoy it right now, the beginning was kinda rough (super long rant incoming). Right after the short tutorial, I went to pick up some berries in a spider-infested cave, which wasn’t too bad, just that the spiders have poison that reduce your stats. In hindsight, this wasn’t that bad, just some missing information on my part and maybe bad tooltips, because the poison was supposed to go away after resting, but it didn’t. What the tooltip fails to mention, the stat penalty can stack and every 8 hours of rest removes one stack, so you might have to wait around for a day or so, before you’re back to normal.

Then, while I was still recovering from that (mentally and in-game) I stumbled on a text-only event, where you’re going through some marshes and find a seemingly evil idol. Me, being the Lawful Good monk that I am, of course decide to destroy it, but get cursed in return (-2 constitution). Curses are of course permanent, until you can start to remove them at level 5. I was level 2 at the time. Consumable items to remove them exist, but for some reason, drinking a potion can fail. I guess your character just spills everything over the floor. These potions are also super expensive and the vendor had just two of them, while I had four or five people in my party. Thank god my character is also a time wizard, so I cast Quick Load, and was good as new.

After those two experiences, like an hour into the prologue or act 1, I was ready to get fucked at every turn, but that was basically it. No idea why the devs chose to put these quests and events super close to your starting base.

My only other gripe with the game is the Kingdom Management. After you become a baron, you have to start managing your lands, which is fine in general, but I don’t think the devs have found a good balance, because there are just so many events that are constantly popping up, and I felt like I was making no progress with the actual CRPG part of the game. Regularly I’d leave my capital, just to get a notification that something happened, after like five seconds. So I go back to check it out, and it’s always some unimportant stuff. Experienced players might know that you can ignore these things for a bit, but as a new player, this was just super annoying. Then you also have some projects that force you to skip 14 days of in-game time, while your character is busy, and a few times, when I did that, I got notifications for like eight new things that happened. That’s when I called it, pulled out the mods and basically nerfed the shit out of that mechanic. Events now take only a fraction of their normal time, I can’t fail, and most importantly, I can manage most things, while out on the road. I’ll probably have to skip a ton more days manually, but I take that over the default implementation. FYI, you can turn down the difficulty of the management stuff in-game or even completely automate it (that way you lose some throne room events and interactions I think), I just had the mod installed already, because of a different reason, so I just used that.

Anyway, I still enjoy the CRPG part of the game. The combat is fun, although for a complete beginner to Pathfinder (and little experience with DnD) some tooltips are really lacking information. There are tons of keywords and mechanics getting thrown around, that I have no idea what they do. On your character sheet you’re presented with tons of different scores, and for half of them I don’t know how they got there (the others list a neat breakdown for each bonus you get). I think there are also some bonuses that only apply in certain cases, but aren’t reflected on your character sheet, but I wouldn’t know, because it’s not explained. I’m playing on normal or whatever is the recommended difficulty for newcomers to Pathfinder, and it’s not that difficult, so you can get by.

Other than that, I did “finish” Wolfenstein 3D and killed Hitler. There are more episodes and an expansion, but I’ll skip them. Like I said last week, I found the game kinda boring, it’s just too basic for me nowadays. Just a handful of different enemies, just three weapons, and the levels look all the same.

Now I’m deciding on the next retro shooter, that I want to tackle. Right now I’m thinking either Ion Fury or Doom 64, but something else might catch my eye.

Just on the topic of demos, I feel like they are making a comeback these last few years (speaking as a PC gamer).

Steam has their Next Fest, which is all about demos, and I’ve found a few games there I bought later or put on my wishlist.

As for Talos 2, while I haven’t checked out the demo, I really liked the first game, so I was gonna get the sequel anyway eventually, unless the reviews thrash it for some reason.

I’ve been playing a bunch of CRPGs the last couple of months (BG3, BG1 Enhanced, Pillars 1, Divinity 2, Pathfinder Kingmaker currently) and games like this need keywords highlighted in texts and tooltips. Some of the newer ones do this a bit already, but it’s pretty inconsistent and not enough in my experience.

BG3 could use some lore popups, so you can learn more about the world, the gods, races, etc. Also, even some really basic mechanics could use it, if you just have very little experience. What does Save or Saving Throw mean exactly, which stat matters for specific spells, etc.

Pathfinder does the lore popups already and some stats get an explanation, but not nearly enough for me as a complete newcomer to the system.

Eh, I don’t (Edit: corrected) think the big review sites can survive if they get blacklisted by one or a few publishers. It has happened in the past already. There are so many games getting released, that missing one game or even a whole publisher probably doesn’t really affect them. Same for the publishers, they get more eyes on the game, for pretty cheap probably, so it’s also advantageous to them as well.

From what I’ve heard over the years, the marketing departments on both sides know this as well, so most don’t take a bad review personally.

It’s the small, one or two-man channels that are probably more prone to lying about a game. If JohnNintendoFan69 on Youtube manages to get some early copies for upcoming games (or a sponsorship, whatever), they want to ride that wave for as long as possible, if their livelihoods depend on these things.

I finished Quake 2: Call of the Machine. It’s definitely my favorite of the Machine Games campaigns, for Quake 1 and 2, and probably my favorite Quake campaign in general. It’s still the same formula as the others, a hub that connects a bunch of different levels, where you need to collect items to unlock the final boss. This campaign is a bit more challenging than the other Q2 ones, but not that hard. It’s also not as confusing, so that’s a plus for me as well. I think I’ll skip Quake 64 and Quake 2 64, since they seem to just be kind of remixes of the PC game. I’d rather play Doom 64, since that’s a whole different game.

While I was waiting for the Quake 2 patch the past few weeks, I tried out Wolfenstein 3D and finished the first episode, but it was kinda boring. This week I played through the second episode and it’s pretty much the same. I think the game is a bit too basic for me. It’s crazy that Doom came out not even two years later and is just such a massive improvement. I’ll probably play through the third episode as well, just to kill Hitler, and then I’m done with the game. Since the Steam release just used Dosbox, I swapped that for the ECWolf source port, which has a few more modern features and QoL improvements.

I’m also done with Pillars of Eternity: The White March, the two expansions to the game. I wasn’t really that into it, but I knew if I didn’t play through them this week, I’d probably never do it. Taking that break for Divinity 2 just killed all my enthusiasm I still had for the game. There were some good moments, but I’m not a fan that this was just slotted in the middle of the base game. While you’re on the clock and deal with some world ending threat, you just take a few months off and do the same somewhere else. Still glad I can finally put this game down and eventually play Pillars 2.

Lastly, I started Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It’s my first time with the Pathfinder system, and I had a really tough time deciding on my character. In the end, I went with a Scaled Fist Monk, because I want to punch people. I’m still really early, I made it out of the tutorial yesterday and saved the merchant from the Bandits earlier today. I’ll take it slow for now and get used to everything.

The mining itself is pretty simplistic, you just run into the minerals and auto-mine. It still adds a bit more variety to the game, since it’s not just collecting XP to level. You also get some secondary objectives, like collect X flowers, mushrooms or Morkite.

For me the game works on the Deck, but the launch videos are broken. I just get some kind of test pattern and after 5 seconds it loads me into the main menu.

So far, I only checked out the demo for Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, A Vampire Survivors-like.

My first few runs were a bit boring, but you unlock more items to find on your runs, which can spice things up in the future. I beat the first stage twice, and the second time it was a complete breeze and I just mowed through the enemies.

The game is somewhat similar to Brotato, it’s wave based, although the waves are longer than in Brotato and in my runs I only had to do five, no idea if it increases on higher difficulties.

Like you’d expect in a DRG game, you won’t just kill the bugs, but also mine Gold, Nitra, whatever else. In between rounds you can buy upgrades with Nitra and Gold, and between runs you can spend the other resources for permanent upgrades.

I look forward to the Early Access release, and if it’s in the same ballpark as many other Survivors games, so about 5€, I’ll probably immediately buy it.

I’ve played through BG3 around launch, and have been lurking the web, looking at what others have done. Right now, I’m also watching a streamer play through the game, and everything I’ve seen really makes me want to do another playthrough. Act 3 was a bit rough at times though, so I think I’ll wait for some more patches or a Definitive Edition, if Larian does it like Divinity.

Por que no los dos?

Games you played last week makes more sense in my opinion, since you can potentially talk more about that (since you actually played them already), but you can of course also just say what you plan on playing next, and maybe others can give tips or answer questions.

Finished Divinity: Original Sin 2. Beast became a god and everyone loved him. Some of the fights in the final act were kind of bad, and I wasn’t a fan of the “twists” at the end. Still good overall, and I’m glad I finally beat it after over six years.

Quake 2 got patched and the game-breaking bug I had got fixed (constant CTD in a specific room in a level), so I can finally play it again. I mopped up the rest of the levels for the second expansion, Ground Zero, which had a disappointing final boss. The levels also got a bit more confusing for me, but the remaster added a compass, which shows you where to go next, so it wasn’t a big deal. Now only the new campaign, that was made for the remaster, is left, and I’ll try to finish that this week.

Now I’m debating whether to start Pathfinder: Kingmaker or go through the Pillars of Eternity expansions. I kinda want to play Pathfinder more, but I just put 150h into D:OS2, so going straight into another one of these massive RPGs might just lead to some burnout (I did want Divinity to be over by the end, but that was also because parts at the end weren’t that fun for me). The White March expansions for Pillars 1 might just be different enough to serve as a pallet cleanser (even though it’s still a CRPG).

When was the last time Mario Maker killed a man?

Almost done with Act 2 in Divinity: Original Sin 2.

I went (semi on purpose) in the wrong direction in the beginning, so I was level 10-11, fighting against level 14+ enemies, while still mostly wearing my Act 1 gear (level 8 max). Some fights were a huge pain and I abused those quicksave and load buttons. Now that I’m almost done, I’m completely destroying those weak enemies, while I’m like five levels above them.

While some quests don’t really account for the “sequence breaks,” it was mostly fine, except I should have at least done a little bit more of the main quest. Because of that, I didn’t have some basic spells you’d get and lacked a way to recharge my Source (a resource, to power your strongest spells and abilites). If I just spent five mintues, going into a house and talking with an NPC, I probably would have had a much easier time with some fights.

I have no idea how long Act 3 is going to be, and I read there’s an Act 4, so finishing the game in the coming week is probably not realistic, but I still enjoy it, so I’m in no rush.

OW2 PvE was never going to be free, and whether people find whatever mode was added fun or not should not matter.

Dota 2 changed their engine and that was handled in an update, we didn’t get Dota 3.

You do however have a point with previous CSGO versions still being accessible, if that still works.

Do you know what OW2 changed, since you call it small and meaningless?

Imo the gameplay updates with a move to 5v5 were pretty significant. The engine stayed the same, afaik, but some things were overhauled, although I don’t know if it was just visual changes.

According to some comments I’ve read, CS2 feels somewhat rushed. Some game modes and maps are missing, and the subtick server stuff also seems like a mixed bag.

So, why is it fine for one of these games, but not the other? For someone who hasn’t played either game in years, it feels like a similar level of change for either game.