Still playing Octopath Traveler, it’s alright, although with some really rough spots. I should hopefully be done soon though.

It has some neat mechanics, like hitting enemies with their weakness to eventually stun them and cause them to take more damage, but it also leads to a lot of fights (mostly against trash mobs) that take far too long, because you might not be able to exploit that weakness well or at all.

Also, as the name suggests, there are eight playable characters, with a party size of four. You might think you could easily have an A and B squad, but for some reason, one character is fixed and can’t be changed. This leads to this one character being massively higher level than the other party members at times, and because there’s no exp for inactive party members, makes keeping everyone else roughly the same level a real pain. I just had a main party and would occasionally swap in one of the lower level guys to do their story.

Speaking of story, it’s pretty boring. Every character has four chapters (dunno if there’s more for the whole group afterward) and almost all of them play out the same. Start a story with some exposition, gather intel by speaking with a few NPCs, a bit more exposition, go to a short dungeon, fight a boss, exposition, done. By the way, your whole party never shows up in the “cutscenes,” it’s always just the single character, whose story you’re doing.

They had expectations like Square Enix for their western titles. Anything below 10 million sales or something is a flop.

yes, he lied to players about that, and he’s apologized many times for that

And I’d like to see one of those apologies. With my surface level searches, I’ve found nothing.

Although I’m pretty sure there never was and never will be a direct apology, since that probably opens them up to litigation, but that’s just baseless speculation on my part.

Saying they’ll create (fantasy) earth seems like a lot, to me that’s not just some random rock in space, but who knows.

Are you pretending they didn’t lie? Sean Murray didn’t say the game had multiplayer even after it was released?

The developers literally spent YEARS adding to the game, completely for free, but they don’t “respect their players”?

They ever apologized for lying for years to the players, who they respect so much?

Since Sean Murray went right back to promising everything, it doesn’t look like it. Although from the reception it looks like gamers haven’t either.

I’m nearing the end of Crisis Core -Final Fantasy VII- Reunion. It’s still really mediocre, but I got into that mindless grind of those 300 side missions. The main story is pretty lame, the only interesting bits are those directly connected to FF7, basically when you’re in Nibelheim, although even that is a bit of a let-down.

I also played more on my Steam Deck than expected, mainly because I got sick a few days ago and would just dabble a bit here and there while lying down. I did a some Vampire Survivors runs, but it’s basically always the same, so I need to look into those unlocks I’m missing. Then I tried Boneraiser Minions, but I’m not sure about this one. It’s a Vampire Survivors-like, but here you summon different skeletons to fight for you. The first few runs felt really slow and boring, but some of the unlocks improved it somewhat. I’m still not sure about the minions fighting for you thing though, since it feels a bit too RNG, but I’ll give it a bit more time.

Isn’t DF independent, and they just publish articles on Eurogamer? In that case I wouldn’t worry too much about them, right now.

The dialogue, a lot of useless fluff dialogues that takes extra 2 seconds for the characters to animate. If there’s 10 people in the scene, then those 10 feel the need to chime in to say something frivolous.

I haven’t played the game, so I don’t know how that’s handled exactly, but I played a bunch of CRPGs these last few months and I wish the companions in those games were more like this. 99% of the time it’s just the MC talking with one or two other people, and it’s just so boring.

The constant interruption of the flow. You gained control of your character, moved to main/side quest point, cutscene, walked forward 10 steps, another cutscene. And the problem is, most cutscenes are just insubstantial.

This is just super annoying. I’m going through the same thing in Crisis Core right now, where you’re interrupted by a tiny cutscene every few steps in the main missions. Just make one longer cutscene, or tell me whatever useless thing you wanted to say, while I’m playing.

Taking it a bit slow this week after more than 200h of Pathfinder Kingmaker the last month.

More Risk of Rain Returns. I finished all the Providence Trials, that I have available, the only ones missing are for the two characters I haven’t unlocked yet. I gotta say, those trials are a nice way to unlock and get to know most of the alternative abilities.

Next I started Crisis Core -Final Fantasy VII- Reunion. I’m in chapter 3 currently, and so far it’s not that interesting. You can pretty easily tell that it’s based on a 16y/o PSP game, even if it’s a remake. The cinematics look alright, but are full of upscaling artifacts. The animations are pretty stiff at times, which is a bit disappointing, since I thought FF7R did that really well. As for the combat, it’s kinda one-note. You only have one attack button, along with four materia slots, so you can do some super basic chains. Although, since those four slots also include pure stat increases, like HP Up, you might just run around with one or two offensive abilities, so it can feel really samey. The main missions are really annoying, since you get a short cutscene every few steps, it feels like. Outside the main missions, you have tons of tiny side missions (300 apparently). So far these have been super short, like less than five minutes most of the time, four or five environments, and almost all in linear corridors. To be honest though, I like a mindless grind like this from time to time, I just wish the rest was a bit better. I will keep playing though, since the game is on the shorter side, so it shouldn’t be too bad.

Then, I also got me one of those new Steam Deck OLEDs, and sold my old one for cheap to a friend. I haven’t played a lot on it yet, tried Crisis Core and Risk of Rain Returns, and did like two runs in Peglin, but I quite like it. I barely used my old one (I found the fan to be super annoying), and this OLED model might end up the same, but the improvements are really great. Even during Crisis Core, which had the GPU at 90%+ and the chip at 20W TDP, it was pretty quiet and a more pleasant frequency, same with Nioh 2. Maybe I should replay Ori and the Will of the Wisps on it, since everyone’s always saying how great the HDR is in the game and how beautiful it can look on an OLED screen.

I got one of those new Steam Deck OLEDs today and am thinking about getting some casual games for that (even though I got a ton of stuff in my backlog).

Dave the Diver is currently the forerunner, and maybe Mega Man Battle Network. I might just wait until the Steam Winter Sale though, since the prices won’t be worse, and maybe even a tiny bit better.

Same, I really hope they can survive.

Finally done with Pathfinder: Kingmaker. This is a bad game, that nobody should play. The last third was a complete slog and not fun at all. Far too many fights and just full of enemies with bloated health. The post-game epilogue cards, where you get told what happened with your kingdom and companions, was pretty nice though.

I will give the developer, Owlcat, another chance with Rogue Trader, that’s getting released soon, although I’ll wait for some early reports of the game first, since buggy / broken launches seem to be par for the course for them.

Other than that, I also played more Risk of Rain Returns. I managed to beat the game a second time, but I’m just far too inconsistent. I think I’ll do some of the Providence Trials next week and unlock more skills and try some more characters.

Scores are just too engrained in this whole review thing at this point, not even just in video games. There was a small movement a few years ago to get away from scores, but not enough big publications joined in, so it didn’t catch on.

just go play the games that interest you, stop caring about scores

Sometimes it’s not that easy, mainly if you can’t just afford every game that catches your eye.

Still Pathfinder: Kingmaker, but I should be able to finish it this coming week.

It feels like I’m always complaining about the game, but it just does have a lot of issues. The gameplay (meaning combat and exploring) is still good enough for me to put up with it though.

The story kinda picks up now, a shame it only happens after I’m already 100h into the game. Even then, there are a bunch of things that don’t make sense. Some parts that your character should know about, but you can ask about it again and again at different points, as if you’re hearing it for the first time. The DLC I did after the third act was ok. The pacing for the quests continues to baffle me. After a cool 200-day gap between Act 3 and 4, now you don’t get any downtime at all. Everything is happening at once, with new notifications for events popping up constantly.

So, the game was originally just RTwP, and turn-based combat was added later via a mod, which was then officially implemented by the devs (I think). Because of this, I’ve been giving the game a pass for minor issues in combat, but this week was just bad at times. The game loves to eat parts of your turn constantly. I think it happens when you’re right at the limit between a normal move action and a double move. The game shows you’ll be able to attack, but then you’re just one pixel too far away and your attack just gets skipped. You can’t even use it for something else, like cast a spell. There are also some other small things, that wouldn’t matter by themselves, but when something small happens all the time, it starts to get annoying.

ESPECIALLY when the general triat of capitalism allows these review companies to have their bias and subjections swayed by not wanting to bite the hand that feeds their comapny’s existence

And my argument is, that a site like IGN, Gamespot, whatever, doesn’t care if they don’t get the latest Ubisoft game prior to release anymore. There are so many games coming out, that they are picking and choosing anyway. One less game on the pile, big whoop.

I mean, Kotaku apparently has been blacklisted by Sony, Bethesda, Ubisoft, and Nintendo at some points (not all at the same time), and they still exist.

Also, with how many freelancers run reviews for all of them, you’d have heard something credible over the years, that scores get artificially inflated to keep the publishers happy, but the only thing I remember is the Kane & Lynch thing at Gamespot, which lead to Jeff Gerstmann getting fired, because he didn’t change his score.

Review scores and review sites are dumb

You could argue that scores are outdated, because too many people just look at the number and don’t read the review and how this rating came to be. However, sites dedicated to reviewing games, still have a place out there.

Still playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker. I’m about halfway through, and right now doing a small DLC side campaign. This DLC campaign runs parallel to the main story, in a neighboring barony, so it can maybe add some details and flesh out the world a bit.

Speaking of story, I think this is by far the weakest aspect of the game. Including the prologue, there have been four small story lines so far, that have been pretty much separated for the most part. While there are some small inklings here and there about some grander plot going on, there’s nothing concrete, so who knows. Act 3 was pretty good, there’s some shit going down in your kingdom, and I was really invested and felt like I was racing against time, but that just meant I blasted through the main quests in about a week or two in-game time, and then had like 200+ days of downtime until the next big thing happens. Yes, there are some (really basic) side quests, you can explore, and of course manage your kingdom, but it just doesn’t feel good. You need these long timeframes, because the kingdom management just has all these small time-skips (if you don’t use mods), but like I said last week, I don’t think the developers found the right balance here.

Don’t know if you can see my edit, but I removed the “don’t.” The big review sites can easily survive getting blacklisted by a publisher or two.

Also, reviews are never objective.

I’m definitely not a RTwP kinda guy. If the Pathfinder games didn’t have a turn-based mode, either mod or official, I’d probably have skipped them.