What is it that you’re currently playing?
I’ve recently got Peglin, and I’m playing ESO once again!
Peglin’s cute! Gave it a spin some time ago and it is really satisfying to get those insane combos going.
Currently, I’m captured by the Pillars of Eternity series. Replaying through 1 for the first time in about a decade, to get back up to speed with how the system works and, of course, to experience the story again. I’m really excited to move on to Pillars 2 and its more nautical theme. The sea shanties are top notch.
On a commentary level, I really appreciate how the series as a whole (Avowed too) tackles the subject of colonialism. The maturity with which the games present the world is really refreshing too; Pillars 1 is definitely a pretty dark game, but it never feels “edgy” or gratuitous, which is something I haven’t seen too often in my video game diet.
If I want a game I want to play as opposed to read, I’ve also been having a great time with Robo Quest - it’s an insanely fast-paced FPS roguelike, where you’re a big robot shooting up all sorts of other robots. The soundtrack is phenomenal, and the flow state you can get in while in the middle of combat is insane. I sometimes catch myself forgetting to breathe.
I just looked into Pillars of Eternity and the screenshot really invite me into the game, it makes me wanna try it out.
I have bought Divinity Original Sin some tome ago, played a bit, liked it, and then kind of … stopped. I should pick it up again. I like me some RPGs.
It is the most direct successor to the Baldur’s Gate series (1 & 2) and the other CRPGs developed by Black Isle. Not exactly to a fault; the most PoE 1 could be accused of doing is not being innovative enough. In 2 they really let loose with their creativity and the game really benefited from it greatly, in my opinion.
It’s nice if you like more text-heavy games. That’s the main medium for the exposition. Characters are nice and fleshed out, there’s a million and one books on the lore of the world, how you build your character is fairly important, and so on.
The game system itself is sort-of-D&D-but-not-really. The annotation and glossary systems are very useful, maybe even vital, to understand and be successful at it. The main sticking point is that Josh Sawyer, Mr. No Fun Allowed Lead Game Designer developed a system where all characters benefit from all stats in some way, so if you’re used to the D&D way of optimizing characters, well, it’s a bit different here. Stop me before I ramble all day.
I did try Divinity Original Sin 2 at one point in the past, but I bounced right off it. The fact that I was playing it on console probably didn’t help, as control was less intuitive to me than I was willing to overlook, but I also had a hard time coming to terms with how involved it was. The environment was crazy rich, combat had a lot of systems to keep track of, and I didn’t have the mental overhead needed to get into it. Maybe at some point, after I sort out the Baldur’s Gate 3 situation, which makes me feel somewhat similar emotions.