What videogames are you playing in 2025?

[Reynard]

I failed my save and went ahead and purchased Atomfall. The Fallout games are my favorite games, and while I know this isn't an RPG, I could not resist.

 

[MarkB]

I've been replaying Mass Effect 2, but finding some occasional frustrations with bugs. Like, in the Normandy Crash Site mission I spent about 20 minutes digging up dogtags, reliving memories etc., all without saving the game because there's no combat involved, then I got inexorably stuck on a bit of terrain. Saving and reloading didn't help, and I just didn't have the will to go through it all again.

Maybe I'll pick it back up tomorrow.

 

[Pale Violet Light]

This year I'm working on my 8th playthru (4th Honor) of BG3, my first playthru of Solasta (fun! and very very strict 5e implementation)…

I vastly prefer solasta’s take on the 5E rules in terms of combat, though it falls short of BG3 in almost every other respect. I do wish the items were a little more interesting: BG3 is crazy Monty-haul-D&D-meets-DOS2 overpowered nonsense, but Solasta’s just a little too bland. I’m sure there’s a happy medium there somewhere!

 

[Reynard]

I failed my save and went ahead and purchased Atomfall. The Fallout games are my favorite games, and while I know this isn't an RPG, I could not resist.

After the first couple hours I am enjoying it. It is a different experience than Fallout, and I have to adjust my playstyle and expectations accordingly, but it is polished and a unique take on the FO themes so far.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I had exactly the same thing at the same age! Suddenly going from can't read to voracious reader a couple of years late. Looking back, I suspect it was because at that age I could understand the meaning from a few clues, and then the brain went back and worked out the missing words from context.

Oh wow that is interesting! Damn, I'm not the only one huh.

When I touched on dyslexia in my Master's, I favoured a phenomenological approach: dyslexia is a label used for a range of different things, not just one thing. Which is the danger of labelling things. Once something is labelled, it's natural to assume everything with that label is the same. Whilst a label of dyslexia/ADHD/dyspraxia is clearly preferable to slow/lazy/retarded they can still lead to siloed thinking, when it would be better to view them holistically.

I think that's almost certainly the right approach yeah.

Back on games, I've been playing more Elden Ring. I've played primarily Faith builds, as well as an Arcane build and an Intelligence one. They all worked pretty well. I decided to finally give Strength a go, people had always said it was very good, and really easy to play, but I'd been really skeptical, because without my precious spells - nasty ranged damage, buffs, debuffs, healing and so on, how could it really do much?

Oh how wrong I was! Strength absolutely wrecks face in the way you'd kind of hope it would!

Using a moderately armoured character, primarily two-handing a weapon called an Iron Cleaver (Heavy for maximum STR scaling), a sort of brutal sword-axe, and using the Ash of War "Endure", which gives you 3 seconds of taking 45% less damage and being very hard to knock down/interrupt. That lets you keep getting in damage in tricky situations. The Cleaver has two really good attack animations - light is a series of extremely rapid mostly vertical chops, and heavy is wild - you run at the enemy raising the cleaver and it automatically targets if you have a lock, so even if they move it turns with them, and hits really, really hard.

I've gone through the game in about a third the time or less I have with any other character, casually defeating bosses I'd normally skip or come back to many levels later. General Radahn was an incredible joke. I've got pretty okay at him over time, but he usually takes a few tries at a minimum. Here? Nope. One attempt, I didn't even come close to dying, just ran up to him and started hitting him.

Due pretty much entirely to the very vertically-oriented (i.e. no horizontal sweep) animations, it does have one weakness - dogs! I've been killed more times by dogs this run than any run since my first, which is wild because I've one-attempted easily 70-80% of bosses!
Just goes to show how incredibly important the actual, specific attack animations of the weapon you're using are. Also Endure is not great against dogs because you can't "trade" (i.e. hit whilst getting hit) with something you're not even managing to hit! Tempted to carry another, more horizontal weapon just to deal with them.

Overall though great!

Haven't really changed my outfit since Limgrave!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I've been replaying Mass Effect 2, but finding some occasional frustrations with bugs. Like, in the Normandy Crash Site mission I spent about 20 minutes digging up dogtags, reliving memories etc., all without saving the game because there's no combat involved, then I got inexorably stuck on a bit of terrain. Saving and reloading didn't help, and I just didn't have the will to go through it all again.

Maybe I'll pick it back up tomorrow.

Did you try crouching, entering /exiting cover/vaulting/kinetic blasts? ME2 does not handle uneven terrain well and I have been stuck on that map, but always managed to unstick myself.

 

[MarkB]

Did you try crouching, entering /exiting cover/vaulting/kinetic blasts? ME2 does not handle uneven terrain well and I have been stuck on that map, but always managed to unstick myself.

Yeah, none of that worked unfortunately, but it turns out I should've had more faith in the autosave. Although it placed me physically back at the starting point, it kept my progression in the mission and I only had a couple of tags left to locate.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Yeah, none of that worked unfortunately, but it turns out I should've had more faith in the autosave. Although it placed me physically back at the starting point, it kept my progression in the mission and I only had a couple of tags left to locate.

The tags aren’t hard to find once you realise you need to kill the evil crates.

 

[trappedslider]

my current outside garden area and the inside of my house on ACNH

 

[Zardnaar]

Beat Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri with University on one of the higher settings.

Tried playing tall but ended up with a few more cities due to war with Hive.