Calling all lurkers (Yes, I do mean you, and yes I can see you)

[LennyLen]

I'm tired of hearing about politics. Let's talk games!

Who's playing what? What's good about it, or what isn't? What's going for a good price a the moment?

I bought SC2 Legacy of the Void a few days a go, as I had some days off. I think it's my favourite campaign so far as nearly every mission so far (I've just released the purifiers) has been centered around base-building rather than missions with limited units or heroes-only missions.

When I finish this I have to decide whether to play PoE or Grim Dawn.

[kandrathe]

I'm playing some Total War: Warhammer. Reminiscent of my old college club days of all day Napoleonic war gaming battles.

[Jester]

I'm tired of hearing about politics. Let's talk games!

Who's playing what? What's good about it, or what isn't? What's going for a good price a the moment?

I'm playing:

Darkest Dungeon: I've recommended this here before, and it's only gotten better since. Intense, strategic, well-balanced, and *gothic* in a way that really makes you feel for the mortality of your heroic-yet-frail adventurers on their fool's errand to purge your family's manor of eldritch infestation.

Overwatch: What's to say about Overwatch? It's corny and ridiculous, but it's the best multiplayer team FPS thingamabob going.

Hearthstone: Still Magic: The Gathering Lite, but very addictive. Strategic enough to be interesting, but light enough to be casual.

Batman: The Telltale Series: Good use of the IP, solid telltale game, but still well short of their masterpieces (The Walking Dead, Tales from the Borderlands)

Stardew Valley: Harvest Moon for people who don't own consoles.

80 Days: Can't recommend this enough, especially on mobile. An extraordinary piece of video game writing, and a truly open world storybook adventure. Filled with an absurd level of historical research and steampunk imagination.

-Jester

[roguebanshee]

Who's playing what? What's good about it, or what isn't?

Stuff I'm playing these days:
Terraria: It's my main go-to game when I just want to play something without having to focus too much. I have spent 1200ish hours playing it so far, with multiple worlds and characters.

Street Fighter V & Street Fighter X Tekken: I may not be good at fighting games, but it's a genre I've always liked and these two are decent representatives of the genre for Windows.

Hearthstone: MtG lite is how I treat this, it may not have as much complexity as MtG but on the other hand it is also much cheaper to play. It fulfills my desire to play ccgs at the moment.

Overwatch: Solid fps gameplay with the usual Blizzard polish.

Games I've completed recently:
Shadow Warrior 2: Shooting and stabbing in first person at its best. Also dick jokes, which is to be expected when the player character is a nerdy ninja-wannabe called Lo Wang.

Shantae: Half-Genie Hero: The Shantae games are platformers with a decent amount of backtracking whenever you get new abilities and the newest installment is as solid as the rest. The characters are fun, the mood is positive and the music is great. The only downside to the series is that the final level of each game is basically 10 times as tough as anything before it.

Stories: The Path of Destinies: A game about choices, consequences and how at least the protagonist can learn from that. It's a game that literally can't be successfully completed the first time you play, while you'll get an ending it's not going to be the actual ending.

What's going for a good price a the moment?

My main method of checking for good prices is seeing if Steam, GOG or Humble Bundle have something about once per week.

[Archon_Wing]

Just Guild Wars 2 and I bought Legacy of the Void for 19.99 when it was on sale! The campaign's pretty damned hard on brutal and I stalled. ;;

Also this brings up the chance to shill my Wings of Liberty playthrough that I'm doing alongside: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf97zDum...ue0jtAX_q5

I plan to do one for LOTV but I'm not sure how to do it if I can't get past certain missions. :p No I never bought HOTS

For Guild Wars 2 I play quite a bit of World vs World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1oNUmDc...C&index=31 (warning: coarse language); I like the chaotic. big scale fights. The PvE is also quite swell if not the most engaging content and I do that with the great folks at the Amazon Basin, a group most of you should be familiar with!

[SpazBear]

LennyLen: You can see me? Damn. That's not how it's supposed to work -- when you lurk.

I stumbled back here about a month ago, don't know how, but took the opportunity to re-connect with DeeBye, hockey geeks that we are.

I don't game much anymore, but I'm limited to playing Civilization (IV, V, VI) on Steam these days. Anyone interested in that game, PM me.

[Archon_Wing]

Always liked Civ IV; how's 6 anyways?

[SpazBear]

I'll try to be brief....but TL;DR Civ VI is a completely different game from its predecessors.

The biggest change is things you build in a city have to be placed on the map. The map is the familiar hex grid, and in old Civ you would build everything in the city and as the city's borders grew you would mine/farm the surrounding territory. Now, you have to build a 'district' on a hex to house buildings, and the number of districts is dependent on city size. Founding a city automatically gives you a City Centre district, where you can build the basic stuff like a monument or granary. A Commercial district would house the market, bank, etc. Military, Science, Culture, Industrial, Harbor, Religion -- all have their own districts needing to be built. Another big wrinkle is Wonders also have to occupy a hex. Thus, you can't go Ramses II and build every wonder under the sun in your capital anymore. You to manage your geography. A good motto to learn: Can't Build 'Em All.

Secondly, the Civics tree is now laid out like the Science one. You make choices on which branches to follow, and get boosts from performing actions / reaching achievements. Civics, along with form of government, opens up a vast plethora of Policy choices. You get to apply a certain number of Policies based on your type of government, and as your Civics advance the number/combinations become quite large.

City-States are handled differently; you just can't buy-them-off with cash anymore. You have to earn Envoys (by gov't type & policy choices) which you then send to the city-states. Most envoys wins. City-States are militarily tougher, and if you are in control of them you can press-gang their units for a period of turns to quickly boost your own military when fighting wars against major civs.

Barbarians are a bitch. Period. They are Always Raging in this game.

Games seem to drag a bit at standard pace. I play Quick.

I've not won a Science or Culture victory yet, still cycling thru the various civs to get a feel for them.

[Taem]

I still feel Civ 3 is the best, with nice improvements over Civ 2. After that, ever cared all that much for the new overworld view and larger-than-life figures on the map, nor the gods and random crap they brought in Civ 5.

---

I'm playing:

Darkest Dungeon: I've recommended this here before, and it's only gotten better since. Intense, strategic, well-balanced, and *gothic* in a way that really makes you feel for the mortality of your heroic-yet-frail adventurers on their fool's errand to purge your family's manor of eldritch infestation.

I've heard fantastic things about this game. So, well worth the $20 I take it? Question, isn't it more of a "rogue-like", i.e. permadeath?

[Jester]

I've heard fantastic things about this game. So, well worth the $20 I take it? Question, isn't it more of a "rogue-like", i.e. permadeath?

I think it would be easily worth the money. I've gotten almost 100 hours of good gameplay out of it, and that's just one run through.

Characters can die permanently, and the effect is very well done - scares the hell out of you, creates a lot of tension. But you have a substantial roster of adventurers, and none are unique (except for one acheivement, to keep your first two alive until the end). Training new ones up isn't the end of the world. It gets easier as you progress, though initially the loss of a key character is quite punishing.

-Jester

[LennyLen]

It gets easier as you progress, though initially the loss of a key character is quite punishing.

When I tried the game several months back, I felt that it was a bit too punishing for how invested I already felt in the characters by that point compared to a normal roguelike.

Apart from that, I absolutely loved playing it.

[Saxywoo]

How's this for a blast from the past.... It's been 7 years since I last logged in.

Shockingly, I actually retired from gaming. I doodle with Vega Conflict on my phone, but that's pretty much it. Stopped playing WoW about 5 years ago, and then nothing since.

BTW, I still have all of the old Diablo characters in my data archives. Might fire that up at some point, but life has kept me busy.

-Saxywoo

[Ashock]

I'm playing vanilla WOW on Elysium and enjoying myself immensely. For those that don't know, Elysium is an offshoot of Nostalrius. For those that don't know what Nostalrius was, it was a private WOW server, the largest ever.

I'm still subbed to retail though, but I've not logged in for a few months.

[FireIceTalon]

I concur with the original post. Tired of politics as well.

Recently made a new purist character on D1. New rogue, clvl 32 so far. I figured I'd start a fresh one since all my mains are basically perfect at this point. I got really lucky at clvl 18 when Gris randomly offered me a Massive Swiftness SWB so I didn't have to take time out to shop one before leveling up, and I found an RC relatively quickly from Witchmoon. It will be fun trying to find a nice Dragon's Zodiac trio all over again

[Tal]

I'm tired of hearing about politics. Let's talk games!

Amen.

Who's playing what? What's good about it, or what isn't? What's going for a good price a the moment?

I'm only really playing WoW at the moment. A few years ago I made the commitment to get as healthy as possible. Between my work-out routine, reading, and life in general I only have time to focus on WoW.

This past weekend I fired up D3 because I had forgotten about the 20th Anniversary event and I wanted to see what it was like. It reminded me why I stopped playing D3 in the first place. While I love the way the Crusader class plays, it was a frustrating slog that yielded no loot that was an upgrade...again. I just can't seem to find a difficulty setting that allows for a chance at upgrades, without being a long drawn out campagin or worse yet, multiple deaths.

I'm playing:

80 Days: Can't recommend this enough, especially on mobile. An extraordinary piece of video game writing, and a truly open world storybook adventure. Filled with an absurd level of historical research and steampunk imagination.

-Jester

Oh man I'll have to check that one out as I love just about everything Steampunk. Thanks!

[EspyLacopa]

Right now, main game I play is also WoW. Been enjoying the raiding so far.

Other than that, various single player games like that new Shantae, a bit of Stardew Valley (still need to finish up the main storyline of the second year), and just finished playing through that 2013 incarnation of Tomb Raider.

[Jester]

When I tried the game several months back, I felt that it was a bit too punishing for how invested I already felt in the characters by that point compared to a normal roguelike.

Apart from that, I absolutely loved playing it.

The balance has swung back and forth; early in the beta, it was too easy, especially for stompy AoE parties. Then, they cranked the tuning way up, and it became punishingly difficult, especially at the beginning. Now it's in the middle, and I think it's a good place, though it does suffer a tiny bit from a backwards-bending difficulty curve. You can get hit pretty hard early on by a run of bad luck, which takes patience to get through.

-Jester

[Alram]

I currently play Elder Scrolls Online. I just started it this past week, and so far it is very enjoyable. For years I have played Hearts (playing against my computer), Spider Solitaire, and Minesweeper daily. I keep trying to beat my all-time best Minesweeper score of 130 seconds, but I haven't been able to do it.

I bought Civ V a few months ago, but I haven't been able to get into it, and now that I am obsessed with ESO, it will be a long time before I try it out again.

[DeeBye]

I'm playing vanilla WOW on Elysium and enjoying myself immensely. For those that don't know, Elysium is an offshoot of Nostalrius. For those that don't know what Nostalrius was, it was a private WOW server, the largest ever.

I disliked the direction retail WoW went when Pandaria launched so I stopped playing. My favourite expansion was Wrath, so I started playing on Dalaran-WoW.

I also play heavily modded Minecraft (Allthemods right now - though I change it up quite often), and I'm still a big fan of Hearthstone.

[Ashock]

I'm playing vanilla WOW on Elysium and enjoying myself immensely. For those that don't know, Elysium is an offshoot of Nostalrius. For those that don't know what Nostalrius was, it was a private WOW server, the largest ever.

I disliked the direction retail WoW went when Pandaria launched so I stopped playing. My favourite expansion was Wrath, so I started playing on Dalaran-WoW.

I also play heavily modded Minecraft (Allthemods right now - though I change it up quite often), and I'm still a big fan of Hearthstone.

The last x-pack that I played through was Wrath, and since then I buy every new one and quit within 4 months or so, until the new x-pack. Vanilla though, is still my favorite.