I’m really waiting for Rebirth on Steam. I’ve been thinking about replaying FF7R, but am putting it off until Rebirth comes out.

Still World of Warcraft and won’t be stopping for a while. I’m mostly finished with the gazillion different campaigns of the Dragonflight expansion, although as I said before, I’ve skipped all quest text and cutscenes, so I have no idea what the story is. Then, I’ve run through a few dungeons, some with friends, but it’s kinda meh right now. Lastly, I’ve spent a lot of time doing Pet Battle related stuff. I’m doing the different dailies, so I can get the currency to buy more pets, or went back to old expansions to unlock some zones I’ve never been to, to capture missing pets. There are a couple of hundreds I’m missing, although I’ll have to look up how to get many of them, since it’s not just finding them in the wild or going to a vendor.

In preparation of the Mists of Pandaria Turbo Mode in like 10 days, I’m playing World of Warcraft, and catching up on all the stuff I missed in the last three years. So far, I’ve leveled two characters to 70, although I skipped all dialogue and cutscenes. I just don’t care at all about this stuff in this game.

I gotta be honest though, while the quest progression while leveling is fine, once you’re done and max level it becomes a complete clusterfuck. Since this is the tail end of the expansion, all the story content that has been released in the last 18 months, just gets dumped on you. You just get tons of new story quests. One third of which you can’t start, because you need some reputation level with a faction or something. Another third needs a previous story to be done first, and the last third you can actually do. Your quest log is full of all that useless bloat, and it becomes a nightmare to sort through. Then there are tons of quests that are supposed to introduce you to the various new mechanics that were added, but those basically drown in the sea of all the other shit. I’m not the biggest fan of the forced story and gating of everything behind it in FF14, but at least I never needed a guide to find out which campaign quest I should do next. Also, important quests that unlock stuff are usually marked with a different color indicator, so they aren’t hard to miss. That’s something Blizzard should definitely copy. Luckily I have a bunch of friends, who play the game continuously, who I can ask about the most important stuff, otherwise I’d be lost.

I’m really into collecting pets and pet battles in the game, so I’ve been spending a lot of time flying around, catching everything new, etc. I wonder why Blizzard never added pet battles to the companion app or released it separately for mobile. Back in the day, I’d definitely spent a bunch of time just doing random battles (and would probably still now). I might have to look into setting up the game on my Steam Deck and try out just exploring, catching all the pets, or do the simple quests.

Finally finished Horizon Forbidden West, only the base game though, not the DLC, which will have to wait. I definitely enjoyed my time with the game, but I gotta say, the story is complete trash and the antagonists are garbage as well. I liked the companions that hang around in your base, as well as a few of the smaller NPCs scattered around the world though.

Then, I started playing World of Warcraft again. I read about the Mists of Pandaria Turbo mode, that’s coming next month and really want to try it (since that is my favorite expansion), so I’m taking a few weeks before to play through the current expansion, Dragonflight. It’s been about three years since I played the game, so there are a ton of things I have to learn, but for leveling those don’t matter, so I’ll just go through the main campaign for now.

More Horizon Forbidden West, just exploring, killing, looting. While I think it’s the best looking game I’ve played (on a technical level), it does have some super ugly effects, mainly the water reflections and the steam that comes out of the big doors, when you open them for the first time. Those look like ass. Also, climbing is pretty much brainless like the latest Assassin’s Creed games, but has a few too many bugs to match it. Regularly you’ll get “stuck” on a cliff, because Aloy doesn’t want to get to one of the dozens of handholds in arm’s reach. Same with climbing up on top of a rock or cliff, sometimes Aloy just refuses to do so, unless you move slightly to the side. Those are pretty minor issues, but are still annoying.

Then, some Dave the Diver, although that’s been on the back burner this week, since I got really into Horizon.

I’ve been thinking about giving Diablo 4 another shot… I haven’t played since release is the new season any good?

I’ve only played the current season (season 2) and it’s very fun. However, it’s almost over and the new season starts on the 23rd, so that’s probably a better time to go back.

I was also dumb with getting higher level Sigils. The first option at the crafter was for some special thing, where I didn’t have all the mats back then, and the next one was 20-25 (incidentally my own tier, when I first looked), but I just didn’t scroll down. I can in fact craft up to tier 100, so at least that part doesn’t seem as bad. Skipping a bunch of these lower tiers should speed up leveling the glyphs at least a bit.

You mean when your seasonal characters become non-season and your items are mailed to you? In the beginning I was sorting through stuff, still keeping some items, but later I just destroyed almost everything, since I don’t play non-season anyway, so I’ll probably do the same here.

It sucks, that there’s apparently no rebirth feature, like D3 had. I liked playing essentially the same characters over and over again from level 1, and not having to delete them and make a new one.

Diablo 4: Season 2 - Nightmare dungeons galore.

I’ve only just started doing the dungeons, since I’ve only been playing for two weeks, but so far I’m not a big fan. It feels like there’s only a few environments, not enough monster density, and the occasional backtracking is also boring (pretty short though, to be fair).

Diablo 3 has technically even less variety with its rifts, since it’s just kill demons until a boss spawns, but it’s just packed, and I loved blasting through tons of enemies. Although in a multiplayer session, when one player is just destroying everything at mach 2, and you’re just waddling behind them, that’s arguably worse (I played mostly solo or some friends, doing public sessions to farm bounties or materials).

The open world events, Helltide or Blood Harvest are a bit like the D3 rifts, just not as many enemies, but still really fun. It’s a bummer that you can’t just keep doing that, if you want to keep progressing your character.

Getting better Sigils is kind of a pain, since it’s just RNG drops. I could easily do higher tier dungeons, but have to wait for them to drop. At least you’re kinda guaranteed to get at least one Sigil on your current level I guess, so you don’t have to move down. Now that I’m writing this, I gotta check if I can craft some higher tier ones, last time I was missing some materials, maybe it’s not as bad.

I’ve been grinding that Diablo 4 and enjoying it a lot.

After I finished the campaign, I made it to World Tier 4 (highest difficulty) pretty quickly, and I’m now level 97. I fulfilled my dream of becoming a bear that punches millions of demons, so that’s pretty cool. Although I can’t be a bear all the time though, which is pretty lame. In town, I’m forced to run around as a boring human.

The next season begins in 10 days, and I don’t know if there’s a short break in between. Level 100 should definitely be possible, and a few other “milestones,” but I don’t know if I manage to do everything I’d like to.

In Diablo 3, I’d usually play at the start of a season for a few weeks, and then take a break until the next one, so I never burned myself out on it. Since I started Diablo 4 at the tail end of the season, I’ll probably end up playing a lot longer than I’d usually do, so burn out is definitely possible for me. A new character should hopefully freshen things up enough, and a friend might also play with me.

Network performance was much better this week, although there are still some hiccups here and there, mainly during the Legion events.

It really sucks, that the next FF7R will probably only come to Steam in a year or two. I liked the Remake far more than I thought, but I’m not going to buy a PS5 for the sequel.

I’m on PC, decently powerful (100+ FPS with an Ultrawide resolution). I read that maybe crossplay could be an issue, so I disabled that, and just did a Legion event by myself, but it was still horrible.

It’s mainly the Legion events, since they’re the most frequent for me (World Tier 2). I barely see any other players in the world, but occasionally in one of the Vampire zones, where it’s fine. World Bosses have been alright, but I’ve not done as much of them.

Diablo 4 the whole week.

I’m near the end of the main story, and started the final act. It’s kinda whatever, it has some good moments, but the first half was a bit boring. After you get your mount, the world is much more fun to get around. It’s just massive and there’s so much shit to do, it’s pretty ridiculous. Lots is repeated of course, just like every open world game, but I still have a good time.

Gear progression is pretty lame right now, since I need to finish the main story to access the higher difficulties, and gear doesn’t drop above a certain level. So I’ve not really gotten any real upgrades in like 30 hours.

What’s really terrible though is the network performance. Running around solo in the world is fine for the most part, but some of the event areas, where you’re fighting alongside other players, it can be terrible. Constant lags, stutter, and rubber banding. I really need to check if it’s a problem on my end, maybe my pi-hole is blocking some domains or something.

I’m not really into Horror games. I played the RE2 Remake and RE7 years ago and liked them, which made me also get the RE3 Remake and Village, but I’ve yet to play them.

Lots of F2P titles making a lot of money, and GTA still selling tons of Shark Cards as usual.

Sons of the Forest really surprised me as one of the Top Sellers. There were lots of players the week it was released in Early Access and people were talking about the game, but then I barely heard anything about the game. It seems the game also doesn’t have any DLC or in-game purchases right now, so it’s all game sales, which is pretty impressive.

I was recently “burned” with Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which is still in rough shape, after all this time (I think there’s some fuckery going on with the publisher, where Owlcat can’t update the game anymore), so I’ll definitely give it some time. Rogue Trader might also be in a similar boat as BG3, where the later Acts have more bugs, since those weren’t in any playtests or betas, but that’s just what I read.

I’m also fine with not getting everything, so that isn’t an issue. All I know of 40k is basically through various memes on the internet, throughout the years, so basically nothing.

I think two or three stories briefly mention that last boss, so it wasn’t too hard to figure out that something is there, but the game just makes it so unappealing and uninteresting to actually look for it, that I just can’t be bothered.

I’ll probably eventually get the sequel. Like you said, I’ve basically only heard praises of the game, but it’s gonna be some time before I do.

I know very little about 40k or Warhammer in general, but want to give Rogue Trader a shot. I’ve read a bunch of positive comments about the game, but since it’s Owlcat, I’ll wait some months for patches to fix the game.

I finished Octopath Traveler. Same as last week, it’s really mediocre, most of the stories are boring and some are really bad, because your party basically doesn’t exist anymore, once you’ve started a chapter with a character. I just played through the character stories and didn’t do the omega secret true final boss whatever.

Edit: no ultrawide support, but there is a patch / trainer, but it messes up the UI a bit (not an issue 90% of the time). It runs perfectly on an OLED Steam Deck, locked 60fps, at highest settings.

Then I started Tunic a few days ago. You know about that story, how FromSoftware’s Miyazaki apparently made the Souls games the way they are, because he’d play games as a kid without understanding the language, so he had to just figure stuff out? That’s Tunic. The game is mainly Zelda, of course some Souls-like elements (can’t miss those in modern games) and in the end it’s also The Witness. I just beat the game and got the normal ending (maybe bad ending), but you also get a game over screen and are told you can try again for another path. I did find a lot of stuff, but I don’t know if I have it in me to go for the true ending or something all by myself. This means I’ll probably look stuff up, so I’m not sitting around for hours.

Edit: like Octopath, no ultrawide, but I haven’t looked for patches. Runs well on the Steam Deck, but needed to turn down settings a notch, otherwise it felt a bit choppy, even at 60fps.