What are you playing right now?

[Niahak]

While I've been continuing UFO 50, on vacation last week I grabbed my Switch for the road instead. Sailing Era remained in the back of my mind and the $6 DLC had been calling to me for most of a year.

While it's mostly "more of the same", the DLC story gets going faster and doesn't tutorialize as much. Most features are available almost immediately and you're thrown into some tough encounters (although the permanent NG+ upgrades make up for it). The game flow is still great, very relaxing but still leaves you wanting to do just one more thing (land exploration, discovery, character recruitment, trade, boat-building, whatever). And actually knowing where to go and how to recruit characters doesn't change that. Somehow the minor random elements make the first 10-ish hours - where you're working to get established and build up a crew - less boring, even the 5th time I'm doing it! It's a bit reminiscent of Europa Universalis, where you're functionally doing the same things just in a different context, so it exercises your brain but is mindless, if that makes sense. It tickles the spreadsheet-loving part of my brain.

The additional DLC content is interesting conceptually - although the first couple of chapters are kind of boring, it integrates one of the weirder quest chains (Tulip mania) into the story and the focus on the Hanseatic League is interesting both as a backdrop and in terms of what happened to it in this era (though that is certainly not an upstart trader bootstrapping Iceland into a manufacturing and trading powerhouse). Mechanically building up a port is a bit boring - it's mostly fetch quests and many are totally unmarked, the game doesn't do much to help you keep track of it. But it works well with the existing game flow and thematically it's pretty fun.

I'm actually a bit surprised at what things haven't been fixed in the game. There are large blocks of text that are unreadably small during events/dialogue (dialogue box will change font size based on content, and some things didn't get broken up - this is unreadably small on any screen). But it runs reasonably well on the Switch, so I'm glad I'm not tempted to double-dip on the steam deck.

[Sharecrow]

I haven't been playing very much at all lately. Distractions... Anyway, I did start Grandia recently and it's lovely even if it is a bit clunky. The tone reminds of me of Skies of Arcadia, which is a good thing. I haven't gotten motion sickness yet, but I've just now started it!

Visage ended up being too haunting but will get back to it. It's not the first horror game that's lingered through an October for me. Alien Isolation ended up doing it several times and it became one of my favorite horror games later.

This has been one of the best years of my life. Third best, probably. Anyway, it's been really great. I've got some really exciting things coming up in the short-term and next year is looking to be fantastic. I'm so excited and there's so much to do. I'm blessed and happy.

[Niahak]

Been playing a bit more UFO 50. As I've dug deeper into Grimstone, I can appreciate what it does but it is still a bit too tedious for me.
My fighter/tank, Bull, is just not very effective anymore. Shotguns are not great as they can't crit, haven't seen a good pistol in awhile, and rifles are trickier to get the timing right and limited to one target. While Maria is better, she's starting to struggle a bit too! Umbra has become my best group attacker AND my healer, which makes her turns (and MP!) most constrained. Rufus is... still Rufus. Periodically useful, mostly mediocre. I was hoping for more from the dog.

While I've found a set of weapon upgrades, they're in a town that's not on the train network (and I think doesn't have horses either). Since I can't access the bank easily, it's a bit trickier and more annoying to grind. Not to mention dangerous! The enemies around here are tough - skunk apes are probably the easiest and they hit like a truck.

I dipped my toes into Lords of Diskonia. It's an interesting idea, but so far it seems a little basic.

But more recently, I picked up RTK8 Remake and it's been a lot of fun. The way historical events have sets of prerequisites and can only be triggered by the player, no matter where the player is, makes it feel even more sandboxy. It's not particularly challenging, and I feel like I've seen much of what it has to offer in only 7 hours, but... it's a sandbox game, so you kind of make your own challenges.



In my most recent struggle for Ru Nan, my spouse Zhou Yu was slain by a stray arrow (I remarried ~3 months later...). Although I failed in my initial assault, a revenge campaign was more successful and now I'm in a province adjacent to 3 enemies with little allied support. But at least I have several good supporting officers (Jiang Qin, Cheng Pu, Huang Gai, Zhou Tai, and Lu Xun).

Yuan Shu's single province, which he hasn't expanded from, has 23 officers and is a great target for expansion as it'll make for another adjacent entry point to Dong Zhuo's territory. That'll probably be my next target once I'm done consolidating.

[Niahak]

I've finished two rounds of RTK8R after the one noted above. In only one of them did I actually clear the map - Remake has "regional endings" and "officer endings" so once you reach a certain point you can effectively wrap up the game and get any carry-over rewards (mostly new scenarios, but sometimes features like editing historical officers).

Round 2: Supporting Gongsun Zan (underdog of the north) as a strategist. Relatively uneventful / easy.
Round 3: Creating a new force as a fictional officer. Hard mode, starting stats 65 LEA, 88 WAR, 30s-40s CHA/POL/INT. This took a long time to get going, I was teetering on the bring of getting invaded as I started in the Yellow Turbans scenario. He Jin dominates the map, and historical events take a long time to trigger, so I couldn't split him up (by the time I triggered his assassination, the map was full and no new forces spawned). Dong Zhuo replaced him, which dropped a lot of loyalty values but I never really got many great officers (Xiahou Dun, Zhang Ren and Jia Xu were my best). But my ruler eventually became a battlefield powerhouse as he gained ranks, since 8R favors troop numbers heavily into ATK/DEF values.



I worked my way from owning just Shu, to leveraging a coalition to conquer the Northwest, taking down Shi Xie in the south (accidentally executing him because it was translated "Judge" ). By the time I called it Dong Zhuo had six cities left, I dominated everything west of Luoyang and all of Jing, and I felt it was just busywork.

Round 4 is supporting Liu Bei in a bit of a pickle (is there another kind of Liu Bei?) in the "Sun Ce marches" (IIRC) scenario. Bei's surrounded. Events put him in charge of Xiaopei, but he's strapped for cash. He's more or less out of that situation a few years later; although he has 4 fronts, he has 3 provinces and a plethora of useful officers. Sun Quan joined Wang Lang (!) instead of the burgeoning Sun Ce force. Now he's working for us!

I think Hard mode mostly just slows down player progress as it seems that it makes the player gain renown slower and the player's city generate less gold. The battlefield AI is pretty bad, since you can really easily lure enemies into a trap and the AI takes unnecessary risks (if the "starting attacker/defender" army is eliminated, even if reinforcements exist, the attacker/defender loses - so if your starting army is weak but reinforcements are strong, just stay put / get out of danger!). Of course, being an RPG-styled strategy game you're likely to have tons of links to other officers and they're relatively rare among pre-sets, so that works to the player's advantage as well. The AI also has other major issues (for example, it'll trigger a coalition fight with 100,000 troops from other forces and... beeline to the enemy and lose before those reinforcements arrive). Might need more time in the oven.

As a "story generator" it's still pretty fun though. I feel the RPG entries are more focused on building out the story of your officer in a fictional/semi-historical situation. Some events get very repetitive (you get asked to chat by rando officers a lot, and even skipping them takes 15-20 seconds or so all told - even on steam deck which had virtually no loading times otherwise), and some interactions are more frustrating than flavor (your nemesis will always flee from battlefields, making it feel a bit like "Dr. claw" shaking their fist at you and just increasing their morale/your morale whenever you interact). Rearing kids is an interesting feature but the 16 years it takes for them to mature is just glacial in RTK8R. If the game isn't wrapped up by the time they grow up it's likely a deliberate decision on the player's part.

Hoping patches improve balance a bit, but they've been a little slow in coming.

[Sharecrow]

So, I grabbed and started the latest LiS game. It's pretty good but I'll reserve overall judgment until I'm done with it because, with that series, it's tough to know how good it'll be until it is finished. The others I have played have been really strong, though, so I'm optimistic.

I did finally beat Hyper-5 so I got a shmup platinum, which I haven't done in a while. I've got a couple of other shmups I'm in the middle of (Rogue Flight and Image Fight) but am not playing them frequently.

And a day or two ago I started Trails and Traces. It's a lot of fun if a bit easy and linear...but that's not a bad thing, it's just a trait. I'm still early in it, though (maybe just a quarter of the way through?). You're this private detective and, at least initially, are looking into the disappearance of Wayan, the son of your client. It had a cute little nod to Indiana Jones early in the game, too. It's a point-and-click style game with crummy graphics, but it works well, and the characters are likeable.

[Kong Wen]

In typical Kong fashion, I have a couple things on the go in addition to my casual fare (Final Fantasy XIV on PS5 and Langrisser Mobile on ... mobile).

For even more casual fare, I've downloaded the new Pokémon TCG mobile game. I don't really battle, I just use it as a cute card collector and open the two free booster packs each day.

Semi-casual PS5 fare is Balatro, probably my pick for personal GotY 2024 because I didn't play any of the serious heavy-hitters for the year yet. I've advanced to blue stakes with one deck. I'm still working on unlocking everything before I really buckle down for challenges.

For what I would consider true "progress" gaming, I'm working my way through the various endings and modes of Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (after which I will move on to the sequel) and the various included games in the Capcom Beat 'Em Up Bundle (finished Captain Commando and Battle Circuit, will do others later (and pick up the online trophy with Sharecrow, hopefully)).

I have a couple more puzzle games I want to work on over the December-January holidays. But that may also be a good time to tackle either God of War Ragnarök or RTK8R, depending on how the family I'm visiting feels about watching (the former) or not watching (the latter).

[Niahak]

I've been continuing on both the games I last mentioned.

In UFO 50, I have finally started every game except Night Manor (I'm mostly playing in front of kids now, while I think it's not graphically intense like Fist Hell, it's likely too atmospherically intense).

In RTK8R, I made a Liu Shan analogue (60 CHA, ~15-20 other stats) with custom difficulty to have high stat growth. The statblock after 18 years speaks for itself.



Serving Liu Yu was quite the challenge early on even on (mostly) normal settings. He's not in a great position. He starts with some great officers (including the peach garden brotherhood) but he loses several to historical events (which you probably want to trigger to diversify the map, so Yuan Shao doesn't immediately bulldoze everything).

Once we recruited Zhao Yun and I improved to ~70ish INT (through debates mostly) we managed to take out our neighbor to the Northeast, giving us a non-border city which is crucial for troop production (as troop "max" means you hardly gain any after a point).

After 40+ hours in RTK8R, I'm getting ready to set it down. Horizon's Gate is on sale, so that's likely my next pickup although I may be playing PlateUp! with family as well.

[Claytone]

I've had a panel pitch accepted for MAGFest, so I've halted all gaming unrelated to that so I can put together the best possible talk between now and late January. It's a topic about which I feel I know about 60% as much as I'd like to feel qualified to discuss it, so I'm shifting gears to play relevant games and learn as much as possible in the time I have left.

Although my Game Clear Thread updates may give up the topic a bit, I'd rather not share many more details now. The panel should be recorded and uploaded to YouTube post-convention, though, so I'll surely share it then.

[Kong Wen]

I've had a panel pitch accepted for MAGFest, so I've halted all gaming unrelated to that so I can put together the best possible talk between now and late January. It's a topic about which I feel I know about 60% as much as I'd like to feel qualified to discuss it, so I'm shifting gears to play relevant games and learn as much as possible in the time I have left.

Although my Game Clear Thread updates may give up the topic a bit, I'd rather not share many more details now. The panel should be recorded and uploaded to YouTube post-convention, though, so I'll surely share it then.

Sounds fun! And you have a good topic that'll be interesting to a lot of people, especially for MAGFest. I'm not going to give you too much input, as I suspect one of the reasons you're playing the cards close to the chest is you don't want to be too bogged down by information overload, but I will say one thing: the urge to know everything is strong, but for a conference talk, it's more important to have a focused topic than a really wide breadth, so don't feel like you need to go down every rabbit hole. You'll do great.

[Niahak]

I've officially shelved RTK8R although I may return to it later.

As planned, surprisingly, I picked up Horizon's Gate and have been really enjoying my time with it. It's a blend of ship-based exploration (Uncharted Waters style) and land-expeditions ("simple" JRPG/CRPG exploration with tactical combat; oddly exploration feels like Ultima 7 as there are environmental/crafting concerns as well).

In towns, you can trade goods, buy new ships, find missions/sidequests and unlock jobs. The trading system is simpler than Uncharted Waters. Each town produces only one trade good, and those goods are more valuable the further you get from a producer. So generally, if you buy trade goods in each town and sell them in the next, you make some profit, usually around 10-20% (although the real money comes in where you find further cities to trade it - keeping in mind most goods are produced multiple places).

Ship combat is also a thing. It's more common in my experience against sea creatures (which live in deep water - easily spotted/avoided), but pirates also start emerging at some point in the game and will aggressively target you. Ship combat is mostly a simpler version of tactical combat (where, as is typical, ship facing matters quite a bit to aim cannons), but ship to ship boarding pits the crew you've assigned to that ship against the enemy boarders / defenders - so you can load up a ship with your top team, but you'll want other ships to keep their distance.

Tactical combat is relatively easy to understand, at least at the base difficulty settings. I haven't had to heavily tweak my character builds, and the guidance for each class/tooltips are enough to puzzle together builds. Each character can assign a main class (for which they'll gain XP), a subclass (whose abilities and innate proficiencies get added) and three passives (learned skills that can be from any class). Since you'll generally want to focus on specific proficiencies / styles, it's intuitive to understand that e.g. a monk can be a breaker, but probably shouldn't be a sharpshooter. Classes are organized visually in a tree which makes it easy to understand which classes tie into others, and that also helps visualize which go well together (barring some classes that merge ex. fire magic with swordsmanship).

Exploration is a pleasure, it feels like the developer is on the same page I am with respect to dungeon dives in an exploration heavy game. Exploring new ruins/groves are usually one or two tactical encounters, with a small reward (useful equipment, crafting materials, or a "discovery" which can be traded for cash later). Some rare areas involve 3-4 encounters, with some areas being repeatable for the more hardcore combat fiends.

I think there are something like 35 classes in total, and they generally seem well balanced. So far I've got a dual-wielding crossbow specialist (strong single target damage, decent AOE), swordsman/blade (jumps into combat and hits like a truck, or can also AOE for less), magician, healer, and monk.

Horizon's Gate does seem to expect you to train up more than just the core party of 5, as you can found a port and assign characters to work there (and then there are boarding fights...) but you can get away with just the 5, as I have so far.

Overall (or tl;dr as I didn't expect this to grow so big) the gameplay loop is just really satisfying. Something crunchier like more frequent tactical combat is something I didn't realize Uncharted Waters was missing; while the chill trading/exploring loop of UW still has value to me, Horizon's Gate riffs on it in a more interesting and exciting way than Sailing Era's "Oregon Trail" exploration, although it's less chill.

I've had a panel pitch accepted for MAGFest, so I've halted all gaming unrelated to that so I can put together the best possible talk between now and late January. It's a topic about which I feel I know about 60% as much as I'd like to feel qualified to discuss it, so I'm shifting gears to play relevant games and learn as much as possible in the time I have left.

Although my Game Clear Thread updates may give up the topic a bit, I'd rather not share many more details now. The panel should be recorded and uploaded to YouTube post-convention, though, so I'll surely share it then.

Awesome! Hope things go well with the talk. MAGFest seems like one of the cooler gaming related events and I would love to make it out to one someday.