What videogames are you playing in 2025?

[Thomas Shey]

Are the graphics in Fallout 3 really noticeably worse than in Fallout 4? They don't look all that bad in the Steam previews. I've never played the original Fallout games and am not fond of turn-based games, so that's fine.

Own but have never even installed 4, so I'm not qualified to judge.

 

[Gradine]

Diving into Tactics Ogre Reborn once again; hopefully this is the time I finally do a full playthrough on all three paths and complete all of the Coda.

New update for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 dropped I think yesterday, so it's a nice time to pick up what is almost certainly going to be the Game of the Year if you haven't already.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Welp, Clair Obscur is officially both the funniest and the saddest video game I've played in a long time

True. Basically anything involving

Spoiler

the Kestrel

is really funny. And yeah, it's also sad. Two endings, and I can't tell which one is the really happy one.

Spoiler: Story Details

I guess any world - canvas or not - with Gustav, Eskie and Monoko in it is a bit better, and if Maelle and even Verso have to suffer from living in the canvas or living against their wish, maybe that's an acceptable sacrifice for all the people that get to exist?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Been playing some Borderlands 3, which was very cheap recently (I guess because Borderlands 4 is coming out next month). It's definitely more annoyingly written than previous ones, albeit not quite as clumsily, but the actual combat gameplay is clearly a huge improvement, and it's genuinely good when you're fighting people, collecting and assessing loot, and so on. The guns are more interesting and the powers are better designed than previous Borderlands, too. It is kinda let down repeatedly by excessive self-indulgent bits where you have to stand around tapping your foot whilst an NPC talks nonsense though. Especially as it's often not very punchy and there often weird delays. It can be very funny, but there's just far too much "please stand here whilst unfunny influencer-themed stuff happens slowly".

Also, I dunno who told them that the vehicle sections are good and necessary, but they are neither of those things - this is true in every Borderlands game! The strongest sections by far are when you're on foot and in combat for an extended period. I hope they've learned from that for Borderlands 4 - it does look like the improved the writing quite a bit from the trailers at least, and the vehicles they showed were at least a lot faster than BL3's slowpoke ones.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Decided to start an Honor Mode playthrough of BG3, and six hours in, got reminded of why I loathe "Iron Man" one-save-type modes in games which are anything less bug-free masterpieces (and unfortunately most* games with Iron Man modes are actually buggier than ones that don't have them). Chrome managed to lock up my PC requiring a reset, and whilst I had BG3 open (and couldn't get it to close), I wasn't worried because I'd hard-saved recently which you can still do on Honor Mode, just gets overriden by more recent saves, but that's fine, you have a save.

Now I should have been worried because the very first time I loaded into this campaign, it did a bizarre thing where it loaded the right campaign, showed it for a second, then as the opening Nautliloid cutscene started (i.e. in the in-game one, getting out of the pod), loaded the wrong campaign! I mean that's straight-up classic Larian buggy-ness, and I had to manually reload to the right campaign. The moment it did something like that I should have started backing up the save!

But I didn't!

So when I reloaded after the reset, I was a little surprised to see a different save listed for "Continue", and then I went into load save options, and they did have my actual save from the right time, but had lost the character name and image, had an incorrect time played (like 120000 hours), and said "deprecated version" for the version, which it doesn't even say for my Early Access saves! And because there's only that one save, there's no way to fix it. Great!

All of which sucks pretty bad. It's actually way worse than if you lose on Honor Mode, because that just boots you into Custom (IIRC)! Like, what's the point in Iron Man, if the game is just going to break your save or otherwise bug out, and the only way to deal with that other than potentially losing dozens of hours to corruption/a bug is to back up the save regularly, negating the point of Iron Man? This isn't a question just for BG3 to be fair, it's a question for a lot of games.

* = I exclude roguelikes as they're inherently from day one ironman and thus have to program around that, so usually handle crashes and so on gracefully by the time they reach 1.0, whereas most other games have glued on "after the fact" Iron Man and aren't stable enough to support it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, this is why I wouldn't play any of the XCOMs--or almost any game where I don't have autosaves enabled--on Iron Man on a bet.

 

[TwoSix]

All of which sucks pretty bad. It's actually way worse than if you lose on Honor Mode, because that just boots you into Custom (IIRC)! Like, what's the point in Iron Man, if the game is just going to break your save or otherwise bug out, and the only way to deal with that other than potentially losing dozens of hours to corruption/a bug is to back up the save regularly, negating the point of Iron Man? This isn't a question just for BG3 to be fair, it's a question for a lot of games.

I backup my honor mode saves every few hours just in case. Never had a save glitch myself, although it's such an enormous game it doesn't surprise me at all.

The reason for ironman saves, for me personally, is that it makes save-scumming painful to the point of not bothering. The temptation to F8 through important checks is really high, especially if it's a narratively important check.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The reason for ironman saves, for me personally, is that it makes save-scumming painful to the point of not bothering. The temptation to F8 through important checks is really high, especially if it's a narratively important check.

Yes that's the main reason - in a lot of games I have more fun if there are no redo-s (not all, some are built around them or just work better with them, esp. slightly unreliable games). I have more fun on Honor mode than Normal or Tactician - when it's not breaking!

I do think they need to lighten up with randomly giving extremely low-level monsters multiple attacks (or attacks with multiple hits) each of which does 10+ damage, for no apparent reason and with no ability to predict it, though. I don't remember that being an issue with my last Honor run which got Act 3 before I took a few months off and forgot what I was doing (hence starting a new one), so I wonder if they've tweaked it. So far I've survived them (by running the hell away as soon as enemies start doing stuff like 10, 10, 9 damage in a single attack - these are low level Gnolls and Goblins with 20-28 HP for god's sake - very easy to kill but they can basically one shot you, which is ludicrous - it's all ranged who can do it too, the melees don't) though damned Jergal made some cash off me reviving half the party once!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Evil DM simulator!

I’m not a fan of anything “hard” in computer gaming. I play to relax, not get my ass* handed to me on a plate!


*Actually a fat Blackpool donkey.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Evil DM simulator!

I’m not a fan of anything “hard” in computer gaming. I play to relax, not get my ass* handed to me on a plate!


*Actually a fat Blackpool donkey.

I dunno, I get it but I feel like a lot of games which get a reputation as "hard" are merely, well, more engaging? There are games where it's like, fun to play them brain-off and they're easy but feel rewarding in non-technical ways or because the story is the main thing, but some games, like, it's way more fun when they at least force you to actually engage with the mechanics and think about them and so on.

Like, I can't play ME2/3 on lower than Insanity difficult, because the combat is so boring and easy on easier settings, but actually gets really fun and engaging on harder ones (for me). But ME1? Oooof, I think after what like, Hard or maybe the one up from that it just becomes entirely tedious and annoying because instead of requiring tactics and clever ability use and so on, it's just about spamming OP stuff as much as possible and enemies are just insane damage sponges (part of this is also down to ammo in ME2/3 vs. heat sinks in ME1 - ME1 rewards largely stationary, passive play with a ton of hiding behind cover and waiting for heat to dump, ME2/3 rewards active, aggressive play - enemies in ME2/3 are also much more prone to flanking etc. than ME1).

I do seem to play a lot of games my less game-oriented friends are horrified by though lol like Elden Ring (it's really not that hard, people! It just kills you a bit! You can work around almost any problem! Worst case you can overlevel!). My brother, who has far less gaming time than many of them due to having four kids aged like 8-13 actually plays more similar games/settings to me though, so I suspect personality is a big issue here (we've always liked a lot of the same games, been adept with game mechanics/synergies, etc).

With BG3 the Honor Mode difficulty forces you to actually, like, think about what you're doing and optimize positioning, movement, spellcasting order and so on in ways you just wouldn't in Normal or even really Tactician except as flourishes/showing off. This is partly due to being Iron Man, partly due to rules-changes to be MORE like actual 5E (i.e. no OP Haste, damage riders aren't applied multiple times, etc.), and partly because you know you can't just go "Ugh" and hit F8. But you are dealing with the bugs then, and whilst a lot of them have been squished, it's not all of them by a long shot. Misclicks are your greatest enemy - I feel like every turn-based game should have an "undo" button for like, one click, that applied at all times (something you'd definitely need to plan into design from day one though). I've already had several fights be MUCH harder than they should be simply because I pressed "End Turn" on a character by accident (the "take action" button in Cyber Knights is the "end turn" button in BG3) and then combat moved on and I couldn't go back and un-end their turn.