What videogames are you playing in 2025?

[jeffh]

Metaphor: Refantazio. I'm up to the second city and loving nearly everything about it so far. The hype was mostly warranted.

Don't understand the people who are now coming out of the woodwork to call it "generic" or "boring". If they're not outright trolls, the only explanation I've got is that they're the kind of players who skip most of the dialogue and cutscenes and are completely allergic to thinking about the story, world, or themes. I don't really understand why people like that would play JRPGs at all, but I am assured that some of them do.

And the voice on that monk whose chants they used as "lead vocals" for some of the soundtracks is almost worth the price of admission by itself.

 

[CleverNickName]

Well I know what I'll be playing in ten days...

 

[Pale Violet Light]

Like, personally, I have intentionally limited myself on HM by not using any builds that rely on what seem to me to be "dumb" or "annoying" - i.e. like where you dumpstat STR on a STR-based character and just use daily Elixirs of Giant Strength or similar. All characters will have a legit high primary stat! This means I have a LOT less HP from CON than I would if I didn't do that and often lower DEX as well.

Amen! I try to play more-or-less the same way.

Anything that involves antithetical or overly elaborate multiclassing is also out, and indeed, I'm trying to do single-class builds where possible

I’m addicted to multiclassing, though in general I try to avoid busted multiclasses. Multi classing in BG3 works pretty well (for my definition of well) for many class combos as long as you don’t “dip” - e.g. for a fighter-rogue there are meaningful choices to make about where to make your level split, as long as it’s somewhere around the middle-ish. Less great for casters, admittedly.

They initially wanted to design a game much closer to DOS2. Very early BG3, the spells and stuff caused way more environmental effects, especially much larger surfaces, and the surfaces did a lot more damage and/or had strong effects. And there even more barrels. People pushed back and they reduced this a lot, to levels where it was cool but not game-dominating

Thank you, nameless push-backers! 5E ain’t perfect but I dislike most of the stuff I see creeping through from DOS2 (not that I’ve played it, so this may be all in my head). Throwing water on something to double cold and lightning damage is just stupid as hell, and while I do love the use of environmental effects to spice things up, it shouldn’t dominate combat. I know, I know, balance in single player game shouldn’t matter, but it does to me.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Throwing water on something to double cold and lightning damage is just stupid as hell, and while I do love the use of environmental effects to spice things up, it shouldn’t dominate combat.

It is so I refuse to do that!

People did complain about it, and whilst I don't recall the exact changes (hopefully someone has all the game builds archived somewhere), it did become a lot harder to just casually apply these effects, I think either Swen liked them too much and wouldn't let them change them entirely, or they just overlooked it once those became harder to apply because you pretty much had to use items or full action slot-based spells.

Like it I think it'd be fine if there was a damage gain, but it should be like +1 per die or something, not double-damage.

I know, I know, balance in single player game shouldn’t matter, but it does to me.

I think it matters a ton, because if things aren't balanced it means the game is usually distinctly less fun than if they are, and gets old much faster. Especially if one non-obscure approach trivializes everything, or even worse, there's literally an entire official class (or more than one!) or spec that's ludicrously more powerful, so if you want to play that class/spec you basically have to be OP as hell. DAO's Mage being the prime example. If you pick Mage, especially if you also bring another Mage, the game is like, hugely easier. You need severely min-maxed Warrior (or god help us, Rogue) to even begin to compete with a non-min-maxed Mage (shades of Omniman's "Look at what they need..."). That could have been interesting if they'd admitted that it was how it was, said it was for lore reasons and maybe built the Mage a different path through the game where being a Mage is a big deal (rather than how it actually is, where 90% of the time it's just a class or an extra way to bully people, except for that one mission). Instead they actually went the other way and tried to pretend it was balanced before actually balancing it in later games.

 

[Gradine]

I'm still in a post-game ennui funk from Clair Obscur and that has included replaying the entirety of Final Fantasy X including getting all of the celestial weapons. Not sure what to do with myself now

 

[Kaodi]

I have passed the 1000 mark of Warhammer II. Add to this that I bought Warhammer I just after Christmas 2024 and I passed 600 hours with it. There are still four months left. I do not even have any of the paid DLC for these games.