What videogames are you playing in 2026?

[Artamo]

Stayed up late because I just had to finish off Act 2 of Clair Obscur, and watch the opening of Act 3, and then had to stay up about a half hour after that just to think about what happened in that game. This game fills me with a sense of foreboding like no other.

 

[pukunui]

Finished my fourth playthrough of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Ended up going with a Veil Jumper elf rogue saboteur after all. That was fun. Even on my fourth playthrough, I still found new quests and new locations.

I’ve also got a low-level LoF Qunari slayer warrior, but 2H weapons are so slow. I may be running out of steam with this game.

(My daughter is up to DA:I on her first play through of the series. I’d forgotten just how plastic the characters look in that game! Veilguard’s characters look so much better!)

I’m kind of tempted to start from the beginning with DA:O and play through to DA:V again, but I probably won’t bother. These aren’t quick games.

 

[Mulciber]

I have a few kids, and setup a home server last year[dell OptiPlex/i5/15GB RAM, Lubuntu] - found a wonderful voxel game called Luanti (minetest), you can replicate minecraft, or play other games people developed. Minecraft was after my time, but my kids enjoy it, and after setting up a host on my personal server (stupid simple). We been playing as a team, building exploring - find it fun. Isleward a hosted/self-hosted roguelike mmo is next on my setup list, but finding it is more complex to do so.

Also installing a new EQ EMU game, miss EQ.. but live is meh. Not a fan of DBG, who owns it.

 

[Artamo]

I’m well into Act 3 now of Clair Obscur and I can see where the story is going but there’s one thing that nags at me:

Spoiler

What is all this nonsense about a war between painters and writers? It feels wholly unnecessary to the story and in a way, it reduces it to yet another fight. The tragedy is enough. It doesn’t need some extraneous war to explain why things happened. Bad things happen. I think that would’ve been a more powerful message.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The two genres are so incredibly different

The extreme forms are, but there's huge overlap in the increasingly large middle. "RPG" in a videogame sense is quite a complex packet of traits. Like, mechanically, FFXII (the one where you can basically "program" the characters) has the potential to appeal to exactly the same sort of person who enjoyed DA:O and DA2 (which featured similar systems - though FFXII's is actually more in-depth and tactically important) or even Pillars 1/2 (which also did), because all of them are these mechanically complex, very heavily-class-based, very tactical, real-time-with-pause, lengthy games with winding, lore-heavy stories and so on. The only big difference is that FFXII doesn't really have much in the way of story choices, and that you have character creation for the main character in those other games (there are other smaller differences, like the FFXII does a better job with most of the companions than those other games). Honestly though if FFXII had Basch as the lead (which is how the design started out), or Balthier (who is the de facto lead in practical terms, but the game doesn't quite present him as such), instead of Vaan (who feels kind of glued on and doesn't really fit imho, just someone decided they needed a typical anime teenage boy lead instead of a grown-up) I think it would have been a major crossover title, especially if they'd released on PC earlier. And that's a game from, like

The line for what is and isn’t an RPG is a fuzzy one, on both the tabletop and the computer or console.

Indeed. That's why we've spent the last 35-odd years discussing it. I think the most unhelpful approach is to aggressively gatekeep what is an RPG. That's increasingly uncommon though, and the main people who do it seem to be people who are still mad that RPGs kept changing after BG1.

On of the most fascinating developments for me over those last 35-odd years has been watching "RPG elements" infiltrate perhaps the majority (or at least a very large minority) of games on the market, particularly around stats, equipment and progression.

Your ridiculous assertion that caves of qud is an RPG just prove your willful ignorance. Just because you have fond memories of playing this primitive game, bereft of meaningful choice, while sheltering in your uncle’s basement during the Blitz, doesn’t mean it’s an RPG by any stretch! Things have moved on, grandpa! You need to play some REAL RPGs, like hidden indie gems The Witcher 3 or Arcanum - but you probably haven’t heard of those. And don’t get me started on “so-called” jRPGs - more like [redacted].

I do appreciate this as a trip down memory lane lol. There was a lot of that general sort of thing, like, 15-25 years ago. My favourite remains when someone (clearly 20+ years younger than me) tried to condescendingly explain that "CRPG" didn't stand for "Computer RPG", it stood for "Classic RPG", and always had done. He got big mad when I pointed out that wouldn't even have made sense when BG1 came out lol. Not as mad as the guy on Reddit who boldly claimed GTA 3 was "definitely the first 3D open-world game", and when me and three other people pointed out there'd been 3D open-world games since at least the 1980s (Mercenary etc.) he claimed we'd just "hacked" (his term) the Wikipedia article on open world games and that they weren't really 3D open-world. I guess it was impressive he kept responding, and even though this was long pre-AI, went as far as to claim playthrough video of a couple of these games was "faked" (again his term). Ahhhh the internet!

 

[Artamo]

Finished Clair Obscur yesterday after a friend tipped me off that you can absolutely over-level to the point the final boss fight is trivial. Glad I didn’t do that but even at where I was, it only took three rounds to finish him off. But wow, what an ending! A truly gut wrenching finale!