Finally started the Forza Horizon 5 DLC. First up, Rally Adventure. The DLC adds a new, small, but densely filled map (at least more densely than the base game). The new races also get a new game mode, a proper Rally mode (as you’d expect from the name). It’s just you alone on the track, trying to make it to the finish as fast as possible, while an NPC reads pacenotes to you.

As someone who doesn’t play normal rally racing games or watches real life ones, it’s fine. The game also asks you if you want to disable the visual racing line, which I did. That makes it a lot harder, since you can’t just immediately tell when you’re supposed to break, but with the rewind or just trying the race over and over again, it’s manageable. I also constantly switch cars, so I don’t get a consistent feel on how a specific car handles.

Then I also started playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I wanted to get to this before all the GOTY-talk at the end of the year. I’m in Act 1, dunno how early, because I’m just running around, exploring everything, ignoring the main quest as much as possible. As you do in RPGs.

The game plays well, it’s pretty responsive, and hitting those parries feels good. The story is intriguing so far, but I haven’t seen a lot of it. Performance has also been fine for me, but I do have a pretty powerful PC.

A few annoying things are, every time you pick up an item on the ground a character has to comment on it, and there are not a lot of different voice lines, so that gets kinda annoying. Then certain parts of the game, like the cutscenes, are filled with pretty ugly post-processing effects. You can disable that stuff for normal gameplay, but then a cutscene plays that has just super heavy depth of field, chromatic aberration, weird artifacts around character outlines (that might be tied to the DOF), it’s weird. These are pretty minor complaints.

Also, in a fight it’s like Super Mario RPG, where you can hit specific keys at the correct time to deal extra damage or for the dodge/parry to avoid any damage. Hitting the offensive buttons is not much of a problem, but the game does some stylish camera angles and shakes a bit, which can make it difficult to time button presses for the defensive moves. There are options to disable these, but the camera shake option doesn’t seem to affect combat, and if you disable the camera movement option the battles look so much duller, with just a terrible, static angle. I think I just have to get used to it. It also doesn’t affect every enemy, some are definitely worse than others.

Still, I’m having fun, just gotta play more of the game.

Two weeks is ancient, when it comes to stuff like this, in my opinion.

The thing is, the article doesn’t make it clear, that this is about technically SFW games, that add NSFW content later down the line.

I don’t know if that’s a new policy because of the recent issues or if it was always a policy, just not enforced.

This is an old article BTW, and it’s apparently not really true? Or at least different than what the article makes it seem.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2343900/view/539991294395549714?l=english

Rumors are not facts

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I’m sure you’ve all heard the rumors that Steam doesn’t allow NSFW games to release free updates, only paid DLCs.

This is simply not true.

Since our game’s release, we’ve rolled out numerous free updates, with the latest major content update dropping just three days ago.

Steam hasn’t officially changed its policies, and there’s no rule in the Terms of Service supporting this claim.

These rumors stem from a handful of vague NSFW game developer announcements with no solid backing.

We will continue to release free updates in the future.

Have a great day!

(I can’t view the link myself, because of a regional block, so I’m trusting another comment, that the quote I copied is correct.)

The article talks about games that are marked adult-only with warnings, but apparently the problem is only with games that don’t have any NSFW content yet, so they are technically SFW, and they want to add it through updates or patches. Games that already have NSFW content will be able to receive patches as normal, and add more.

And since then it’s back again with Dragonflight, The War Within, going into Midnight.

WoW probably will never die.

I have no strong feelings one way or the other.

The only thing that looks a bit weird is that the top menu bar is wider than the rest of the page.

I have never used the side menu, so I don’t care that it’s gone, and have never thought the store pages should fill the whole screen, so I’m fine with the new look.

Played it for a bit last year, shortly after the 1.0 release.

It’s probably a better game than Megabonk, but I think the Auto-Shooting part doesn’t really work in first-person, if you have to do all the aiming yourself anyway.

Still fun for a while.

I just used the Wanderers Crest the whole game, mainly for the normal downward pogo.

For some reason the game forces you into a specific crest a few times throughout, which I just find weird and unnecessary.

I think flying enemies are absolutely terrible to fight, especially early game.

Runbacks are the things everyone has already been talking about. There were two in the whole game that I thought were terrible, so it could have been worse.

However, for boss runbacks especially, because your corpse is in their room, it discourages leaving and coming back later. This can of course lead to just bashing your head against a difficult section and getting frustrated even more. In Hollow Knight your ghost at least spawned in front of the room so you didn’t have to commit to fighting the boss, even if you had to make it back there again.

I guess because of how much of the game is optional and non-linear, the devs couldn’t often really plan on when players will have which ability or upgrade, so some stuff felt kinda underutilized, for long stretches of the game.

Why are so many shard drops above places, where 75% of them will fall into unrecoverable spots? For rosaries, you at least get the magnet, just add the shards to that or something.

Finished my Hollow Knight: Silksong 100% playthrough. Great game with some weird, frustrating and outright bad segments, that make you question what the devs were smoking.

Then I also beat Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. I was pretty close to the end two weeks ago, before I took a break because of Silksong. Only one small boss and the final boss was left, but hunting for the rest of the secrets still took a while. It’s definitely better than Circle of the Moon, which I played before this, just because it doesn’t play like absolute cheeks. Graphics and Music are a major downgrade though.

Next up is the final Castlevania GBA game, Aria of Sorrow. I’ve played the sequel, Dawn of Sorrow on the NDS years ago, and I remember it being great, so I have high hopes for this one.

Then I started Megabonk. It’s Risk of Rain 2, but as an ASS game (Auto-Shooter Survivor game, like Vampire Survivors). Each run is 1-3 loops of a single map, and there are only two different maps in total. Characters, weapons and leveling are like VS, so your choice is for a starting weapon and each characters innate passive. Then you also earn money during a run to open chests for different items, like in RoR. While I think the game is solid, you have to like the gameplay enough to be fine with just not much variety in the visuals.

I believe you’re vastly overstating the importance of this game and franchise. As I said, I think it’s a terrible series of games (and I’ve played them up to CS3), so there’s absolutely some bias here.

Also, what do other people’s reviews have anything to do with how impactful or important something is to the medium? Does this mean that the Hentai game Mirror with ~96% positive, 85k+ reviews on Steam is even more significant than Trails?

And if you look at modern RPGs built around serialized storytelling and grounded politics—Disco Elysium, Baldur’s Gate 3, even the way Persona 5 structures its arcs—you can see Falcom’s fingerprints everywhere.

Please show me where those fingerprints are, because I don’t see them.

Your only arguments for your statement in this thread are, that there are a lot of Trails games, and that the games are all connected. Comparing this to FF7 seems like a real stretch.

If these games are so important, how about some examples of how they influenced gaming and their impact, either to devs or gamers.

BTW I think the Trails series is garbage and has only one good game in it.

Been playing Hollow Knight: Silksong. I’ve seen credits twice, and am now in Act 3. Currently going through the world again, looking for stuff I missed.

While I do have a good time with the game, I can’t say I love it, because it has a few too many frustrating sections and maybe a few parts that were a bit too difficult for me to really enjoy.

That’s what I was thinking myself.

Nintendo might have still tried something, even with just the mod chips, just to try and strongarm someone into submission. However, distributing the games just seems incredibly dumb to me, and might be the main reason they were able to get this settlement.

So looks like I forgot about at least one bench.

Dunno which one of those you mean, that can be made permanently free, or if there’s even others I forgot or haven’t found myself.

Worst bossrun so far was probably the judge which was only like 2 screens when you think about it.

I think you can theoretically get the fleas to move in right before the boss room, but I don’t know how many of them you need to find for that to happen. Maybe killing the boss is also a trigger, so in that case this won’t work.

I do feel that the game was created with players like me in mind, someone who did all pantheon, steal soul mode as well as all achievements in hk but is a little bit rusty from the long wait.

I feared they might do something like this, but don’t think they did. I finished Hollow Knight twice, last time was almost six years ago, never did any Pantheon or challenge stuff, same with other Metroidvanias. The game is difficult, but don’t think it’s unreasonable (I’m also in Act 2, maybe the beginning).

like benches that are locked behind a paywall, which you have to pay every time you want to access the bench

I found this in one small area, which was probably done for the flavor, since it makes thematic sense there, but otherwise it’s always been permanent unlocks.

I think the game is difficult, probably a bit more difficult than the first game (which I haven’t played in over 5 years, so I might be wildly off), but I don’t find it unreasonable.

I know a lot of the time it’s my fault that I died, because I’m someone who likes to trade damage with enemies, which just isn’t really possible in this game, but I can’t stop doing it.

As for runbacks, I think there are a few weird ones, that can be terrible, depending on if you found/unlocked the nearest bench, but otherwise I don’t remember anything truly awful.

Started Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, after I finished Circle of the Moon last week. It looks and sounds worse than CotM, but it’s a lot better than that game, because it doesn’t play like ass.

Some other meh stuff is still there, like the game is kinda easy, and exploring the map is an absolute chore for the first half (maybe two thirds), until you finally get the means to open up all the blocked paths and get access to proper teleporters. Still better than double-tap to sprint though.

I haven’t finished the game yet, I might be near the end, but didn’t make it before Hollow Knight: Silksong, which I gotta play first.

I’d say get Hollow Knight first, just because you can probably get it cheaper. After you’re done with that, and you like it, get Silksong. It’s very unlikely if you don’t like one you’ll like the other or vice versa, the games are pretty similar, and they have a couple of things that could be called “polarizing” (like the map).

Unless you want to be part of the “current discussion”, exploring the still new game, maybe you have friends who also play, and you can talk about things you find, then get Silksong.

The Steam Store has gone down every time they do a major sale for over a decade or something. They don’t care about these temporary problems, because they are just that, temporary. Increasing the server capacity for like an hour or something is just not worth it (most likely).

Also, it’s not like the rest of the Steam network is affected when this happens. You can still play your games or download stuff at full speed.