What games are you playing and why?

I know I previously said I wouldn't do it... But I'm back playing Rift again.

A couple of weeks ago, I revisited the game, and it felt like an alien beast, not just because it had been so long since I last played it, but also because so much of the game had changed. I missed some updates (and they were MAJOR updates, not even counting the tripling in size of the already huge game world). I left the game that one day completely frustrated because somehow I had accidentally overwrote my entire build that I had carefully crafted many months ago. I felt foolish, incompetent, etc.

Well I'm back. And this time I'm hooked on it again.

There's so many things that I like about the game -- the biggest are the rifts themselves, as well as the semi-random zone-wide (and sometimes world-wide) events. I played beta, and that's what got me to subscribe in the first place. They reminded me so much of the Tabula Rasa base assaults. I prefered the TR assauts, mostly because I prefer Science Fiction. But Rift events still are helluva lot of fun. And I learned last night that they can often interact with your existing quests in interesting ways.

Also, they recently added these amazing personal dimensions (think housing on steroids). I haven't had the time or resources to do more than play with the starter dimension that everyone gets through a quest. But I've seen other people's dimensions and they can be amazing, limited mostly by your own imagination. Because they aren't homes, per se, but you can build homes there, or castles, or tropical resorts. Or almost anything you can imagine. But they can be a HUGE money pit (or so I've been told) if you are inclined to dream big.

Anyway, there's more that I like about it -- the pretty much design-your-own nature of the classes, and so on. And I actually had a really great time playing last night. So I'm hooked once again.

If anyone else is playing and you are so inclined, you can look me up on Faeblight -- I'm an altaholic, but since I've been back, I'm almost onlyl on my defiant cleric, Halifax. My other characters include: Zazi (warrior), Mordala (mage), and Ashtaya (rogue).

 

Played this quite a bit (half a year or so)... I must say... own dimensions sound intriguing...

I stopped because... Hm... you know, I don't actually remember exactly. It was with the whole epic rift war and you needing to be in a 20 man raid in order to do specific contact through some rift. It basically sucked when you didn't have a premade raid and there were too many people online for the game to properly function.

It was fun, but in the end I think I just got bored with it? I still hold quite a few server records for being the first to murder the NPC's of some starter town for the other faction (the goody guys). We also did one of their dungeons, that was pretty cool.

Darn Haldurson, you got me intrigued again, and I have too few hours each day and too many games already We'll see, maybe if some clannies fancy a return as well...

 

From what I've read, the game can vary a lot based on what server you are on. I believe that Faeblight is one of the better ones, almost always high population or even full (although it's not obvious because people may not be in the same zone, or may be doing pvp or instant adventures or dungeons and what-not).

I haven't done any group content since I'm back (well (only back a couple of days now), but back when I played, it was trivial to get involved in group content. Even when my guild wasn't running raids or 'rift nights' or crafting/expert rifts or raid rifts, there'd almost always something going on in the high-end zones, at least during prime time. And if not, you'd wait for the next zone event for disorganized chaos to ensue, and it was easily trivial to become part of a roaming band of rift-hunters.

Anyway, I guess it depends on what specifically you are looking to do. You can't always get the specific activity that you want, but you can always find some fun somewhere.

 

My friend plays that game as well, and he says it's good.

Personally I don't play it, but between my lack of time for it and abysmal skills at anything that resembles flight simulators, well, I consider it to be justified.

 

I don't like the pace of Planetside... I am very used to APB, and like the speed there. In Planetside I walk slow and feel sluggish.
I am pretty sure it's just getting used to it, and to the different strategies in that game. I just don't actually want to bother learning it and playing up to a certain cap where it becomes pretty apparent who spends coin and who doesn't. APB is still fun for me so I don't see a reason to adopt another shooter.
But, I indeed think Planetside does things right. I had a few latency issues and I found it hard to recognize enemies at first, the only difference being they lack a little blue triangle sometimes. But yeah... not going to bother with it thus far.

 

I'm afraid to play Planetside... or any shooter for that matter. I just have no hand-eye coordination to play games like that. But the in-game footage I've seen certainly looks great to me.

The nice thing about non-action/non-shooter MMOs are that they are more forgiving of bad aim, etc. And the best ones reward careful thoughtful play over frantic button-mashing. I don't need perfect visual focus, as much as good mental focus. Tab to aim may be lame, but then again, so am I lol.

 

Been trying planetside 2 for a while (I've got 14 hours play). It's not horrible, but it's not really good either. Faction imbalances, poor performance(fights often degenerate into pure spray & pray luck who wins in larger battles due to slideshow and jerky movement), air being OP if you can use it(but the KB+Mouse controls are horrible and unfixable, roll on mouselook and pitch on keyboard, really? Dumb****), it's more rewarding to attack than defend, who wins battles depends on who amasses the larger zerg, follow the zerg to win. Oh and it's pay 2 win (or spend your first month+ being wtfpwned by those who did), the most directly pay2win being rocketpods for aircraft(completely OP, strong VS ALL), but you'll need to use a joystick to fly it properly because the unfixable KB+Mouse is the most horrible controls ever thought up for flight. (Can't rebind mouselook from roll to pitch ie turn, you turn with keyboard, which isn't just counter-intuitive, it means poor precision. Note that pitch up/down is still done with mouse... so you have this sort of half-and-half abomination, oh and the axis on that can't be reversed, mouse back looks down, mouse forward looks up).

Overall I'm very unimpressed.

Sorry about the wall of text.

 

They didn't always, though. The appeal (to me) of the original Elite was that it DIDN'T have much of a learning curve, at least to get started. certainly you could get into tough situations, run into combats that surpassed your abilities. But it was still, a very intuitive game, because there wasn't a lot to it. It didn't try too hard to have real-world physics, or an overly complex market simulation, and so on. It was a VERY easy game to pick up.

Personally, that's very appealing to me. I want to feel like I'm playing a game, not like I'm playing a UI, always afraid that I'll press the wrong hotkey, etc. this may seem blasphemous to some, but too many choices, too many buttons, too many options can be a really bad thing in a game. What I always look for is something which is simple, but elegant. Elite had that.

 

X3 is like Dwarf Fortress in space as far as the controls go.

 

Well... what do you want to know? I love X3:TC and am very willing to answer any and all questions you have.
There are youtube tutorials, the egosoft forums are full with friendly helpful people and there is a wiki, Roguey's site, and lots and lots of info and resources.
And the manual is pretty good imo, I enjoyed reading it.

Also, I find the controls pretty easy overall. And you can modify your control scheme and even save it, so..

 

Might & Magic Heroes VI, And I'm playing the campaign.

THIS IS UNHEARD OF.

(And it seems pretty good so far)

 

I just tried ToME Beta 44. (They are calling it RC1 for some reason.)

It was plainly awful. It crashes anytime I alt-tab. Beta 43 works fine for me and is stable too.

Be very careful if you try it. You may benefit from b43 more if you have yet to play it.
Here is the link to the game downloads. You can try the bleeding edge RC1 if you like, but b43 is what I suggest.
http://te4.org/download

 

I've tried Beta 44 and had no problems. Then again, I didn't live that long so that may have something to do with it .

 

Played through RAGE, it's a nice post-apocalyptic fps romp, but short(~10-30 hours depending on your pace), and the ending is abysmal.

Tried Hawken, very pay to win(literally as well, there's plenty of things you can only get with real money, like oh say any alternate mech parts, so customizing your mech is for real money only), not all that great gameplay, but it's pretty and wee giant robots.

Started up Borderlands(1) again...

 

Tome RC1 did have problems with alt tab but that's fixed in RC2/b45 (already out).

 

Ah! Thanks. I expected another month or so before they released a fixed version. I will grab it immediately.

I just donated 5€ (Euro) and that comes out to 6.7$ USD (US Dollars). This unlocks the Stone Warden class. I bet I could have just duplicated the class as an addon since it is just a zip file anyway. But I did it the legitimate way.