What video games are you currently playing?

There's a reason it's the first (and to date only) Playstation game I've achieved 100% completion on.

--- Double Post Merged, Jun 29, 2017, Original Post Date: Jun 29, 2017 ---

I picked up Return to Castle Wolfenstein in the latest GOG sale and I've been working through it over the past couple of days. It's funny because it all feels really dated but I remember playing it when it came out and thinking how fresh and new it felt.

 

I will probably start a new one because my old one is stuck at a save point I can't get out of. Sigh. I have played several different kinds of characters in the past.

 

There's forethought. I enjoy melee fighting in Skyrim, which is different from my preferences for other games. But I don't like tanking, so I'm all about the DPS. I also like characters that can steal well... This next one might be a Khajit.

 

Haven't gotten around to rolling a new character yet. My husband made the proviso that I have to clean my old backups off of his computer before I can do so. I've got about 60 GB worth of music to move to my online backup. :/ Admittedly, I didn't check to see if Skyrim was installed on this PC or not...

 

Lately (as in yesterday and today) I've been playing Subnautica. I'm not hugely into the whole survival genre but this one has an interesting enough hook that I'm kind of digging it. The whole thing takes place on an alien world made up almost entirely of water. You, the player, are fortunately equipped with diving gear. Swim, collect stuff, build bases, solve mysteries. It's neat.

I picked it up earlier in development (since it is, like almost all of these games seem to be, early access) but after a couple of hours decided to bail until it was more mature. Too many bugs, too many issues, not enough content. I feel pretty comfortable coming back to it now. It's much more fleshed out and the UI is more refined and it seems much less buggy. So that's good.

My first undersea base is unimpressive. Must learn to build rooms.

 

I mean, there are dozens of these games. ARK was kind of neat because of dinosaurs but not very many others stand out to me. Subnautica is nice because the underwater aspect puts a new spin on it. It also opens up quite nicely as you get better tech that lets you travel not only faster and further but also deeper, giving a nice sense of progression. And something about going all Jacques Cousteau in an alien sea is immensely satisfying, even if a fair portion of the wildlife is trying to kill you.

Fair warning, it's pretty technically demanding. My little lappy is pretty capable as far as laptops go but it struggles occasionally. If you don't have a proper gaming PC you might find the game is prone to occasional stuttering or lagging.

 

I was reading some developer stuff last night and apparently they're expecting to do an optimization pass prior to final release, which is scheduled to happen some time in the fall. So you might just need to hang on for a couple of months until they make it more playable.

I'm setting the depths aside for now because @Magpie has suggested I should stream it and I am undecided as to whether I want to. I'll probably start a new game (maybe on hardcore) if I do decide to go that route. For now I'll play something else. I've decided to give Fallout 3 another go since I've gotten fairly far into it but never actually beaten it. This time I'll be using the Tale of Two Wastelands mod to port it into the Fallout: NV engine, which in turn leads to some nice improvements (including actually being able to run it on Windows 10). And maybe after that I'll do New Vegas again, just for shits and giggles. That ought to keep me busy for a while.

 

Turns out the tale of two wastelands mod is somewhat imperfect. Supermutants seem to be affected by a bug that causes them to be unusually quick. Combined with the changes to the damage system in New Vegas that make them much tougher they become irritatingly difficult to fight. Given that they're crawling out of the woodwork in 3 this is something of a problem.

So now I'm left with a dilemma. Do I soldier on with a buggy unbalanced mod? Or do I abandon ~8 hours of progress and try to get vanilla fallout 3 running? Not really a fan of either choice.

 

New Vegas is fine. It's just the FO3 content that's weird. But on the other hand if I'm not using it to play FO3 the mod has no purpose so I can just uninstall it.

I think I'm going to try to get Fallout 3 working normally and if I can ill just start over. It's not that bad. Gives me a chance to reconsider my perks.

 

Honestly, the way the Bethesda games are designed there are really only a few go-to builds worth playing. Fallout 3 and New Vegas both benefit from high intelligence for more skill points, and high agility for more ap. Fallout 4 doesn't have skills so charisma is a better spend than intelligence. Most of the other stats don't have enough of an effect on the game to be useful unless you're doing something unusual like a melee build. Luck is a dump stat across the board, since its main game effect is on crits, which aren't reliable enough to be useful anyway unless you're building around it from the start.

Usually I'll do 8 or 9 intelligence, 6 or 7 agility, and the rest 4-5. For skills I'm looking at small guns, repair, science, and lockpicking. Speech I'll boost early to 50 or 60 but there's diminishing returns in all games for taking it much past that (granted this is true for all skills really). So my characters tend to end up sort of jack-of-all-trades. I don't really like to focus on combat skills to heavily because the combat in Bethesda Fallouts isn't that interesting to me, which is why I find overpowered supermutants so aggravating. Usually by mid-late game I'm a fix-it-all science-it-all do anything kind of guy (or gal) and only really need the NPCs for the shooty bits.

My biggest complaint this time around is that I took the small frame perk, which adds an extra point of agility at the cost of more easily crippled limbs. I'm playing on hardcore mode as well, and the crippled limbs are far more annoying than I remembered them being. So I probably won't take that perk again if I redo it.