What videogames are you playing in 2026?

[Distracted DM]

I usually hyper focus on an indie game, one at a time. My friend finally caught me between game fixations, at just the right time, to get me back into WoW. For years n years I couldn't imagine playing a tab to target MMO again, even games that I WANTED to like such as ESO I couldn't enjoy. But now here I am, 2-3 months later, playing wow again after dropping it mid-Lich King. Id tried a few times cuz of said friend so I saw a little of the xpacs since then but there's just so much content now and Midnight has been pretty good so far.

 

[Zardnaar]

I’m anti-barrelomancy in general, but if there’s an appropriate place for an explosives-induced apocalypse it’s a fireworks shop. I never get out of that one unscathed.

Play 1812 overture when you do it.

 

[Pale Violet Light]

Snapshot Games just released a new patch for Phoenix Point, six years after release, so I’ve been diving back into that. Very ambitious and much improved since release, though it’s still something of a flawed gem: a couple of balance issues and the late game can turn into a bit of a grind. Still, I love the free aim system and the writing is pretty strong for a turn-based tactics game, so I’m enjoying my latest run.

 

[Parmandur]

Starting d getting into Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition with my kids. My oldest son is really getting into speed running as a concept, really nice to share a little slice of 80s nostalgia with the Gen Alpha brigade.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Eh, it was probably me moaning about it. I wish they’d removed it all but you can ignore it for the most part (as I usually do). I would have preferred a tighter implementation of 5E rules (Solasta my beloved!) but it’s a great game nonetheless. My main complaint about BG3 is that it could have been relatively easily made even better by removing some of the cheese and by tightening up a couple of plot lines, especially near the end. But such is life.

Some of the rules changed were pretty weird and I assumed they were made for engine limitations purposes, but then Honour mode fixes almost all of them! You can turn on the Honour rules independently of the ironman saving now (which I would never use with multiplayer) and I think the game just plays better like that.

Re polish yes - act 1 is amazing, act 3 is solid but short and then act 3 is just... sprawling but unfinished feeling, like act 1 was in mid early access. DOS1 and 2 had the same issue (but worse, especially DOS2) and Swen repeatedly promised there was no way BG3 would be like that... Hah! I am intrigued to see if they make this error again with Divinity - my guess is yes they do (also if we're making bets re Divinity, I am putting down a marker that reviews will basically all give it 10/10 but by like 2035 it will be drastically less well-regarded by players than BG3, and later reviews will not be as kind following the old Bioshock Infinite path).

 

[TwoSix]

Some of the rules changed were pretty weird and I assumed they were made for engine limitations purposes, but then Honour mode fixes almost all of them! You can turn on the Honour rules independently of the ironman saving now (which I would never use with multiplayer) and I think the game just plays better like that.

Re polish yes - act 1 is amazing, act 3 is solid but short and then act 3 is just... sprawling but unfinished feeling, like act 1 was in mid early access. DOS1 and 2 had the same issue (but worse, especially DOS2) and Swen repeatedly promised there was no way BG3 would be like that... Hah! I am intrigued to see if they make this error again with Divinity - my guess is yes they do (also if we're making bets re Divinity, I am putting down a marker that reviews will basically all give it 10/10 but by like 2035 it will be drastically less well-regarded by players than BG3, and later reviews will not be as kind following the old Bioshock Infinite path).

Ideally, they'll recognize that the ideal design for these kinds of games is more of a funnel; you start very open-ended in Act I, and slowly tighten up in later Acts, focusing more on big set-piece encounters that are relatively unavoidable. The primary need is to let the parameters set by the open-ended play in the beginning have an observable impact on what occurs in the endgame set pieces and especially on the endings.

 

[MarkB]

Ideally, they'll recognize that the ideal design for these kinds of games is more of a funnel; you start very open-ended in Act I, and slowly tighten up in later Acts, focusing more on big set-piece encounters that are relatively unavoidable. The primary need is to let the parameters set by the open-ended play in the beginning have an observable impact on what occurs in the endgame set pieces and especially on the endings.

What they mostly need is fewer plotlines that wait until the final act to be resolved. An issue with BG3's large roster of party members and the fact that you can drag them all along with you is that almost all of them have questlines that can be progressed during a single playthrough and culminate in the final act. Add to that all the things relating to other NPCs and it winds up being a huge laundry list before you even start adding on things unique to that act.

Either they need to abandon that "boatload of companions" concept they've been having in their last couple of games in favour of focusing upon a smaller roster of party members during any one playthrough, or have at least half those characters' personal plot lines be resolved prior to reaching the final act.

I've currently got a BG3 playthrough that's in act 3 which I've been going back to occasionally for the past several months, playing for a few hours to resolve one or two quests, then abandoning again as what's left still feels overwhelming. Don't want to progress the main quest without resolving all the remaining threads, don't want to abandon it entirely.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

What they mostly need is fewer plotlines that wait until the final act to be resolved. An issue with BG3's large roster of party members and the fact that you can drag them all along with you is that almost all of them have questlines that can be progressed during a single playthrough and culminate in the final act. Add to that all the things relating to other NPCs and it winds up being a huge laundry list before you even start adding on things unique to that act.

Yup. And it's not even hard to find examples of games that handle this structure better - like ME1 and ME2 both do, for example.

Either they need to abandon that "boatload of companions" concept they've been having in their last couple of games in favour of focusing upon a smaller roster of party members during any one playthrough, or have at least half those characters' personal plot lines be resolved prior to reaching the final act.

That was the original plan, and they only backpedalled on it because of extreme negative feedback about even the idea of it, and possibly due to internal testing.

Specifically, from the launch of early access until most of the way through early access, Larian were saying "Look, Act 1 is when you'll get all your companions, and then the companions you take out of act 1 with you will be the only real full companions for the rest of the game". They kept saying this, and they kept getting told "That's a bloody stupid idea, nobody is going to like it".

When they pulled it was a bit after they'd done some non-open playtesting with NDA'd testers (still mostly volunteers rather than paid QA it seems), and it's unknown if it was connected to that or related to other decisions.

Particularly, what might actually have made them change their mind was that they stopped thinking they were going to introduce all the "real" companions (which used to include Minsc and Jaheira as in act 1 and romanceable) during act 1. That seems to have happened around when they restructured the act 2 and 3 plot significantly to de-emphasize "how much will you become an illithid/will you oppose or aid the Dream Visitor/Daisy" and make it more about significant moral decisions in the plot and to do with the characters. This is also when the the Dream Visitor/Daisy stopped being a sort of tempting figures and became more of a businesslike one and got renamed to the Dream Guardian (some content was cut in the process including pretty significant stuff, like the area was the whole reason for the game's "Down by the river" main theme!), as well as changing it so the Dream person now always supports you whatever you choose, just with more whinging in some cases, and also you have to support them too, no matter how evil and insane you think they are, because you auto-lose the game in some kinda-contrived ways if you do any of the things that directly oppose them before the very very last bit of the game.

Hell it could be that all of the reasons are true and interconnected, but whatever the case, most of the way through the early access they said they'd changed their mind and you'd be able to take all the companions you'd recruited with you. This is also probably why camp-based stuff in Act 2/3 was buggy and weird for quite a while after the game came out, because they likely hadn't smoothed out all the issues caused by suddenly going from just one party of companions to potentially all the companions being in camp. It's also why one of the events act 3 tends to be a bit of anti-climax (kidnapping a companion - usually now it's someone you don't care about).

Long-term I think it's always better to have a "boatload of companions" because there will always be some companions people are absolutely psychotic freaks about (in a good way), but who are probably quite deeply off-putting for other people (Astarion and Marazhai for example), and you don't want to only have likely boringly mass-appeal characters, or even worse, enough annoying or boring companions that someone can't even fill a party without including them (I've played games like that, it sucks). So with a 4-person party you probably need 8-10 companions. But yeah resolve some of the main stuff with those companions BEFORE the final act! Sure have small bits of content for all companions in the final act, but not major-ass stories!

 

[Pale Violet Light]

Some of the rules changed were pretty weird and I assumed they were made for engine limitations purposes, but then Honour mode fixes almost all of them! You can turn on the Honour rules independently of the ironman saving now (which I would never use with multiplayer) and I think the game just plays better like that.

My gut feeling is that Sven/Larian like gamey, exploitable systems where you can “break”
the system. I hate systems like that and think tight balance is a sign of good game design, though that is clearly not a universally-held opinion. I always use the Honour mode ruleset; I agree that it plays much nicer (though I occasionally regret it come bossfight time).

What they mostly need is fewer plotlines that wait until the final act to be resolved.

Call me a narcissist, but I think the companions get a little too much screen time in general (except those that don’t; poor Wyll), which exacerbates the issue. It should be about me, me, me, not some stupid goth girl. Nonetheless, many of the issues with Act 3 could have been ameliorated if there was a proper Act 4. The city is a second hub area: it needs something to follow it! I recall that was actually the original plan, but it was cut for time. I should add, though, that arriving at the titular city 2/3 through the game and being totally overwhelmed is a fine Baldur’s Gate tradition, and as such this may just be a loving homage.

 

[MarkB]

My gut feeling is that Sven/Larian like gamey, exploitable systems where you can “break”
the system. I hate systems like that and think tight balance is a sign of good game design, though that is clearly not a universally-held opinion. I always use the Honour mode ruleset; I agree that it plays much nicer (though I occasionally regret it come bossfight time).

I don't particularly want to 'break' anything (I've never seriously employed barrels en masse to tip the result in fights, for instance) but I do appreciate a game that rewards outside-the-box thinking and nonstandard solutions.

Call me a narcissist, but I think the companions get a little too much screen time in general (except those that don’t; poor Wyll), which exacerbates the issue. It should be about me, me, me, not some stupid goth girl. Nonetheless, many of the issues with Act 3 could have been ameliorated if there was a proper Act 4. The city is a second hub area: it needs something to follow it! I recall that was actually the original plan, but it was cut for time. I should add, though, that arriving at the titular city 2/3 through the game and being totally overwhelmed is a fine Baldur’s Gate tradition, and as such this may just be a loving homage.

The issue there is that in any given playthrough you may choose to be that goth girl, and it'd be weird if they were less concerned with their fate when they were an NPC.

Maybe one solution would be that you only get to explore a companion's questlines in detail when playing as them, and get an edited-highlights version of it when they're an NPC. DOS2 kind-of did it that way as I recall.