Paul Farquhar
Legend
The update removes a lot of the tedious repetition (you only need to control three sites). Which makes the uber-weapons way too easy to get.
What videogames are you playing in 2026?
- Thread starter Ruin Explorer
- Start date
Thomas Shey
Legend
Honestly, a lot of strategy games, and particularly XCOMoids are prone to mid to end game lag.
Pale Violet Light
Adventurer
The update giveth with one hand, and with the other it taketh away.
In Phoenix Point you can push to the endgame very rapidly after you hit Antarctica. Though you will probably miss a lot of the late game tech if you do, unless you have built boatloads of research labs. Still, it’s nice to have the option, rather than giving up in frustration.
Last edited:
Paul Farquhar
Legend
What Phoenix Point could do with is a now I’m awesome auto-win this routine mission button.
Thomas Shey
Legend
I cannot tell you how many times I'd wished the old, old XCOM had that for routine missions at a certain point.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
I've been playing a bit of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, and it's sort of an acceptable in an "Played too much Dark Souls and too much Skyrim, made this" kind of way, but right now, a few hours in, it seems to have some fairly significant issues which people play down a lot:
1) It's a weird mix of highly professional and very janky. It doesn't feel like a mod, but it doesn't feel like a finished game from 2025 (when it reached 1.0). I keep bumping into things that just seem like they don't fit - for example, enemies rubberband like an MMORPG mob if you go too far from their starting location - i.e. they stop fighting and travel back to their starting location at whatever their maximum speed is, and when they get there, they auto-heal to full (but they can be killed on the way, if they don't move very fast). What on earth is this mechanic doing in a single-player Skyrim/Dark Souls-type game? Who knows! It doesn't fit, and it clashes hard with allowing archers and spellcasters as playstyles. It's also not a very long tether range in a lot of cases, like, 100 yards or less sometimes.
2) The writing is pretty bad in a very Eurogame kind of way, which is to say that it can't decide if it's trying to medieval-ish or modern-ish, can't decide it's trying to be serious or joke-y (even within a conversation), which can make it very tedious to read, and there's an awful lot of it. You can do both funny and serious but it requires talent, and actually handling the tone right, and I dunno if it had that in the original Polish (doubt it, honestly), but it sure as hell doesn't in the English. The voice-acting is also bizarre, with the usual random mish-mash of British Isles accents, a couple of random Americans, and some truly bizarre stuff like a guy with a full-on posh English accent pronouncing Graham as "Gram" (a strictly American pronunciation - it's Gray-em in British English, I'm sure I'll hear a Craig as "Creg" sooner or later too!).
3) Worse, the writing is filled with what I'd call "creeping Euro-misogyny".
Where you have some female characters, and they can be strong or brave or smart or good or w/e, but basically every male character is a misogynist and constantly comes out with misogyny, often including gendered slurs, seemingly on the conceptual basis that "that's just how life is", even though it doesn't make sense, and feels very 1980s, not 1080s. Male characters are often given somewhat ludicrous sob stories about how women mistreated them, and the women involved are almost always absent or otherwise unable to comment on this. I was going to say this is mostly an Eastern and Central European thing... but actually it isn't. Hell, Divinity: Original Sin 1 had a fair bit of this going on, and that's Belgian and fairly recent.
Generally English-speaking games (or Japanese games, oddly enough), and AAA games or games trending towards AAA in general manage to shake this off or reduce it a lot so I don't think it's like the devs can't work it out. Like, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 does this a bit but is clearly absolutely sweating as it tries to hold back on it. Each Witcher game did it a little less than the previous one (and I'd argue Cyberpunk 2077 basically avoided it and in terms of dialogue/presentation of actual female characters, is not misogynistic - in terms of in-game adverts it's a different matter but I suppose the devs would argue that's the in-setting capitalist commodification of women's bodies, and the capitalist commodification of human bodies in general is a theme of the game and the Cyberpunk setting, not sure I 100% buy it but still).
So far though this is pretty non-stop. Visiting the first (only?) town with a lot of NPCs, almost all of them are male, and pretty much all the ones who even mention a woman have something weird and misogynistic to say to be point where I started really noticing it. And not really setting-linked misogyny either, more generic 1980s-ish drivel.
I think I am very early on so I will keep playing a bit to see if combat and exploration get a little more interesting and less janky at least, but I'm a bit less impressed than I expected to be, oddly enough. At least it's fairly upfront about mechanics and precise numbers (in contrast to Skyrim or Dark Souls!), which makes comparing spells/weapons/spec options etc. a lot more reasonable than is common in the genre.
1) It's a weird mix of highly professional and very janky. It doesn't feel like a mod, but it doesn't feel like a finished game from 2025 (when it reached 1.0). I keep bumping into things that just seem like they don't fit - for example, enemies rubberband like an MMORPG mob if you go too far from their starting location - i.e. they stop fighting and travel back to their starting location at whatever their maximum speed is, and when they get there, they auto-heal to full (but they can be killed on the way, if they don't move very fast). What on earth is this mechanic doing in a single-player Skyrim/Dark Souls-type game? Who knows! It doesn't fit, and it clashes hard with allowing archers and spellcasters as playstyles. It's also not a very long tether range in a lot of cases, like, 100 yards or less sometimes.
2) The writing is pretty bad in a very Eurogame kind of way, which is to say that it can't decide if it's trying to medieval-ish or modern-ish, can't decide it's trying to be serious or joke-y (even within a conversation), which can make it very tedious to read, and there's an awful lot of it. You can do both funny and serious but it requires talent, and actually handling the tone right, and I dunno if it had that in the original Polish (doubt it, honestly), but it sure as hell doesn't in the English. The voice-acting is also bizarre, with the usual random mish-mash of British Isles accents, a couple of random Americans, and some truly bizarre stuff like a guy with a full-on posh English accent pronouncing Graham as "Gram" (a strictly American pronunciation - it's Gray-em in British English, I'm sure I'll hear a Craig as "Creg" sooner or later too!).
3) Worse, the writing is filled with what I'd call "creeping Euro-misogyny".
Where you have some female characters, and they can be strong or brave or smart or good or w/e, but basically every male character is a misogynist and constantly comes out with misogyny, often including gendered slurs, seemingly on the conceptual basis that "that's just how life is", even though it doesn't make sense, and feels very 1980s, not 1080s. Male characters are often given somewhat ludicrous sob stories about how women mistreated them, and the women involved are almost always absent or otherwise unable to comment on this. I was going to say this is mostly an Eastern and Central European thing... but actually it isn't. Hell, Divinity: Original Sin 1 had a fair bit of this going on, and that's Belgian and fairly recent.
Generally English-speaking games (or Japanese games, oddly enough), and AAA games or games trending towards AAA in general manage to shake this off or reduce it a lot so I don't think it's like the devs can't work it out. Like, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 does this a bit but is clearly absolutely sweating as it tries to hold back on it. Each Witcher game did it a little less than the previous one (and I'd argue Cyberpunk 2077 basically avoided it and in terms of dialogue/presentation of actual female characters, is not misogynistic - in terms of in-game adverts it's a different matter but I suppose the devs would argue that's the in-setting capitalist commodification of women's bodies, and the capitalist commodification of human bodies in general is a theme of the game and the Cyberpunk setting, not sure I 100% buy it but still).
So far though this is pretty non-stop. Visiting the first (only?) town with a lot of NPCs, almost all of them are male, and pretty much all the ones who even mention a woman have something weird and misogynistic to say to be point where I started really noticing it. And not really setting-linked misogyny either, more generic 1980s-ish drivel.
I think I am very early on so I will keep playing a bit to see if combat and exploration get a little more interesting and less janky at least, but I'm a bit less impressed than I expected to be, oddly enough. At least it's fairly upfront about mechanics and precise numbers (in contrast to Skyrim or Dark Souls!), which makes comparing spells/weapons/spec options etc. a lot more reasonable than is common in the genre.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
He is, in fact, the only famous Belgian who isn’t fictional.
Gradine
🚫🧊🚫
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