Have you been spending hours trying to pass a level? Or maybe you are completely addicted to a newly bought game. Do you have a question about a game or would like to share something else? In the Weekly Discussion Thread, you can do it all!
Please don’t forget to use the spoiler tag as soon as you start talking about a storyline.
I dug out my old Logitech Driving Force GT from the closet and blew off the dust. I haven’t gotten into a new (to me) racing game since Gran Turismo 5. The hardcore simulationist trend doesn’t interest me, I miss proper career modes and I have just had some awful bad luck with games being broken. I just occasionally revisit some classics.
So after many enthusiastic recommendations I grabbed Forza Horizon 5. My first impressions were great. The intro was a lot of fun, with the big set pieces causing me to fight my wheel as it bucked after being long out of practice.
But this was not representative of the actual game. The vast majority of the content is filled by fairly normal races with long stretches driving to them, back and forth across the same stretches of empty open world. It’s sort of like a Ubisoft game, but just cars.
This still could have been a good time. I like the driving model well enough, there is a large selection of cars and the environment, while bland, is certainly much less of an eyesore than what awaits me if I go back to play Need for Speed: Most Wanted for the umpteenth time.
I’ve got some criticisms of the actual racing (the way it generates opponents and their vehicles sucks, the tracks are boring), but what really killed it for me was this slowly creeping, eerie discomfort that built up in the back of my mind over hours until it became overwhelming. The vibes are fucked.
This is Fortnite, the racing game. It’s full of cameos and tie ins with influencers. Brands are plastered everywhere. Microtransaction adverts in most menus. Everyone talks in this creepy, corporate approved “wholesomeness” and aware of how “epic” what they’re doing is. There is a really uncomfortable tension between this huge festival that completely empties Mexico of pedestrians and how much the game fetishizes Americaness.
I wanted to scream during a sub-plot where you race a bunch of rich douche bags who are beefing with some guy at the festival. The game throws out shit like “they shouldn’t be discriminated against for their money, they can’t help the fact they are rich” and talks about fucking therapy. All the writing is this bad, I hate every single character in these inexplicably unskippable cutscenes.
The radio selection is dogshit too.
It’s absurdtpo me how basically no racing game company realizes that one of the key points to have your game be fun is to have some kind of progress. Contemporary racing games literally just throw cars at you in hope to make it fun by constantly giving you new toys.
I get that this is a thing that sells to the masses who /want/ those shiny new toys, but man. Imagine if a big studio actually took the time to improve on the vintage NFS progression formula :(
I hate that a lot of the ones with a progression settle on XP to unlock tiers of cars rather than money and buying them too. I liked going to the used car dealer ship in Gran Turismo and seeing what I could afford.
Contemporary racing games literally just throw cars at you in hope to make it fun by constantly giving you new toys.
Forza Horizon 5 is bizarre for this. It has an acquisition system, but right after the intro you pick one of three cars, all new and not cheap. Then you get a custom rally car from the next race. A bunch of unlocks are going to give even you more cars afterwards, and will keep doing so regularly.
Like hang on, maybe let me work up from one of your cheap, older cars first and work my way up?
But this is also the game that unironically calls you “superstar” from the jump and sucks you off constantly.
Dirt 5, dirt rally 2.0. I must hate myself because it’s snowing and I drive a forklift outside
We’re late but excited to roll out our dedicated Ark server! The wife and I are enjoying taming dinos and making thatch huts.
Ark is so good! Do you have any adjusted collection rates or mods? I have been looking for another friendly community server to get back into the game. I have about 2k hours on steam in Ark, but I only play on chill servers with nice people, and usually we have to form those ourselves
We’re definitely enjoying it!
We’re also barely digging into any wiki or walkthrough to keep experience super green and just learning on the fly. I’m sure we’ll start looking stuff up soon enough but for now we are woefully ignorant. No mods yet.
I’m certainly considering opening up ports if the kids start playing with us (while they’re at the other parents house), but for now I’m only running the server while we’re playing.
Any tips or tricks for the early game?
I’d be happy to provide any advice or assistance if you want to start hosting! In terms of gameplay, get some good collection Dinos! Collecting by hand is designed to be too slow. Get a nice trike for thatch and berry collection. Get a beaver for wood, and an armadillo guy for stone and flint. Then you can go out and do massive collection runs in just a few minutes to restock all your basic resources. Getting a bronto is awesome for berries but a bit overkill. Trikes do great for swiping berries up in mass quantities! Then you can get enough narco berries to tame more. It’s all about taming! Get a slingshot and shoot some low level pterosaurs for a nice quick flyer.
Honestly, there’s way too much in this game to go without the wiki IMO. Not that you can’t have a good time without it, but it definitely opens up so much in the game.
Stuff like which dinos are good at gathering which resources, some have weight reductions for some materials, etc. Some dinos have passive abilities that are nice to know about.
If you’re all about the grind and randomly discovering things, that’s definitely an option, but there’s stuff that you’re likely to never find accidentally, like boss battles and the means to unlock them.
Roboquest! It’s a combination of DOOM and Borderlands, but in roguelike form. Super smooth gameplay, well optimized, and it looks great.
Shame that it’s only 2 players!
I olayed that as well. Really fun. When i started i thought that it would be a nice way to kill an hour or two. Suddenly it was 5 hours later and 3 in the morning. Have you played crab champions? Really smooth gameplay and like roboquest on crack
Baldurs gate 3 on my steam deck. Great game so far though I wish it ran a bit smoother on the deck. Maybe I’ll try to tweak it some more.
I’m in my third play through of it. It’s such an amazing game, so many emotions and amazing storylines.
Where are you up to?
In the goblin camp first playthrough. I’m a human bard, been interesting
Oh man, you’ve got sooo much to go! It’s great. I love that whole starting area. It’s so much fun.
My second play through was a wood elf bard. She was pretty fun to play. Considering I’m a barbarian player usually. First play through was a half orc barbarian, she was really cool.
in my experience, you can get pretty smooth gameplay at the cost of graphics, or pretty decent graphics at the cost of smoothness and fps.
I have mine set to pretty ok-ish settings for both. but then I tend to swap between handheld and docked for most games. so I’m kinda used to the graphics by now.
hope you find a setup you like <3
I had okish graphics at 45fps, dropped it down to 30 and it feels overall better now
Been playing a lot of Valheim and Trailmakers this week to get myself in the mindset for the upcoming Enshrouded EA release
Just tried the portal: revolution. Obviously missing GLaDOS’ voice, but the puzzle are neat so far.
Been playing this too, it’s great.
Unfortunately am hitting some hard lockups in the last chapter or two on Deck so have put it down for now - seems to be a common issue based on some forum posts and ProtonDB.
I played through Portal Reloaded just before this which was excellent too, the puzzles are SUPER hard though, way harder than Revolution.
Doesn’t the game run natively on Linux? Surprised the Deck would run into issues.
the puzzles are SUPER hard though, way harder than Revolution.
I feel pretty rusty just doing the puzzles in revolution, not sure I would have the time for even harder ones 😬
Yeah it does. Apparently running in Windows under Proton is less problematic but performs a lot worse, so I didn’t bother. I’m sure it will get fixed, guessing the end of the game probably just isn’t as well tested as the first 80% because that was pretty flawless
Guitar and a bit of ukulele since a few months
lots of pokemon here! I’ve got a randomized version of Black on my phone, trying to shiny dex Moon and am slowly going thru the story of Violet
Have you played Pokemon Unbound? Always hearing good things about that one but never tried myself
I am still getting through Red Dead 2, just got back into it recently. Playing some Red Dead Online with a buddy too. Roleplaying an outlaw is loads of fun!
I’m addicted to Grand Turismo 7 right now. I don’t play anything else which is rare with me. I even got to the point where I bought PS VR2 just for this game.
I have yet to pick up a PS5, but when I do, GT7 is the first game I’m picking up! What are you enjoying the most from it?
It’s the sense of speed and degree of realism is higher than in Forza games. GT Sophy AI is also amazing. It adds personalities to the AI cars so they no longer follow predefined lines but they block, attack, crash or spin from too much throttle.
Age of Wonders 4! So good. The the art, the lore, the game play, the everything.
I’ve been playing some Terraria recently with friends. I still don’t really have too much of an idea what I am doing to be honest. Seems like a game that would be hard to beat without the wiki. It is fun though since I have some help, hope I can continue learning.
Enderal. Went in blind. So far, lots of screaming and running from spiders when my mana runs out. Story and dialog actually has some meat, so am enjoying.
(With Factorio in the background) I’m having a lot of fun with Against the Storm. Excited to play the 1.1 update that arrived today!
