I’m almost done with Shadowrun Returns - all that’s left is the grand finale. Looks like my breaks for Unbeatable didn’t affect my progress as much as I thought they would.

I’m still surprised by the balance between dialogue (or non-combat gameplay in general) and combat - the former is the more interesting part of the game for me so the current state of things is right up my alley. Not that combat is bad, I actually enjoy it way more than I thought I would, but talking with characters is something I always look forward to the most. This is even more highlighted here as I also love the feeling of community in the “Seamstresses Union”, the main hub of the game - there’s not much to do there nor is there a huge amount of interaction with characters but what’s there is enough to make the place feel like home away from home. It’s great.

Writing is pretty engaging for the most part. There were a few less interesting parts but they didn’t really affect my enjoyment though I can’t say I’m a fan of the last minute swerve into the “gotta save the world” narrative. It’s “fine” but I would simply prefer the game to stay with the small(ish) personal stakes instead. I did end up liking pretty much all of the side characters at least (and even some of the random mercs which have no character or conversations at all).

I was worried about two things when I started this playthrough:

• Complexity of the game - I haven’t played Shadowrun before and I don’t really play many isometric RPGs these days so I wasn’t sure how well I’ll handle it.
• I have a bad tendency of starting games, then taking multi month breaks because I got distracted by something else. Thankfully, I managed to power through my mind goblins and finish (well, I will tonight) the game in “one go” - it’s not much but I’m proud of myself considering how big of a problem it can be.

The only issues I have with the game are the fact that some etiquette options are pretty much useless in the campaign and that for some reason game always starts on my second monitor, with a borked resolution. Both issues are a bit annoying but they not game breaking so whatever. Other than that nothing stood out in other negative ways.

All in all, I had a great time and can only hope most of my remaining backlog will be just as entertaining. Time to search for another pick.

Edit: Just finished the game. Final section was my least favourite part of the playthrough - it wasn’t terrible, just kinda “meh” compared to the rest of the game. Still liked the game overall and will be happy to play the other two I have.

Yeah, that was my main issue with the writing as well but I treat it as a remnant of the times. Not that it makes it any better mind you, it’s just where the industry (and culture at large to some extent) was back then so I can look past it, even if I don’t like it.

It is what it is, at least now I know I can safely skip the other titles when looking for point and clicks to play.

I don’t mind the writing that much since not everything has to be up my alley and, more importantly, it’s a remake of a game from 1987 - different time, different industry. I do however think they could update it a bit more in terms of gameplay at least. Maybe not completely reworking the moon logic behind some puzzles but getting rid of the option to hard lock your progress would be enough to improve the experience quite a bit, at least for me.

I’m mostly focusing on my backlog for now (except for already mentioned Unbeatable) but I’ll keep this in mind. Thanks for letting me know about it!

I’m not exactly an expert on Daggerfall but I’ll try.

First things first, Daggerfall is less of a structured game (in modern sense) and more of a life sandbox compared to later games. Some basic tips:

• Save often.
• There are no map markers, ask locals about where to find stuff/people to make things easier.
• Fast travel takes (in-game) time and has various options which will affect the cost, travel speed and whether you’ll reach your destination well rested or not.
• Quests are timed (yes, all of them).
• Most of your adventuring will be focused on randomised quests.
• Locations open and close at specific hours, you can break in if you want but don’t expect a warm welcome.
• Dungeons are HUGE, nonsensical and, sometimes, impossible - there’s an option called “Smaller Dungeons” in the settings menu on the initial launch screen, it’s a good idea to use it.
• You can train your skills in guilds for a fee (you need to join them first, I believe). This type of training costs time, money and fatigue, and has a global cooldown so you can’t do a tour through all the guilds in a city and train everything in one day.
• Item repairs have to be done at blacksmiths and take multiple days (depending on item state, if I recall correctly). This can be toggled off in the settings menu on the initial launch screen if you want.
• Diseases are a serious matter - they won’t pop up instantly but show up some time after contracted and will kill you if left untreated. They will also progressing during fast travel as moving between places does take appropriate amount of time.
• Diseases like Vampirism or Lycanthropy can be contracted at random when fighting respective enemies and have pretty significant effects on gameplay (both positive and negative).
• Buying a wagon gives you additional storage for loot, just keep in mind that personal inventory and wagon inventory are separate and the latter can’t be accessed in dungeons unless you’re near the exit.
• Some equipment has various states it can be toggled between - using a cloak for example will switch between having your hood up or down (it doesn’t affect gameplay in any way).

Unlike newer games, most of the action happens at POIs, with travel taking place via world map - moving between locations manually isn’t particularly interesting due to lack of random (or any, really) encounters, simple terrain and huge landmass the game is set in. If you want to travel by yourself then check out some mods to make it a bit more worthwhile.

If you’re interested in a vanilla experience then the base package is fine as is. If you want more (better graphics, random encounters outside of towns, new quests or gameplay additions) then Nexus Mods has you covered. Here are some neat ones that don’t affect the gameplay much:

• World Tooltips - adds basic tool tips when aiming at objects (item or character names, level transition destination, location opening hours etc).
• Quest Offer Locations - quests can take you to various parts of the world but don’t inform you about where you’re suppose to go until after you agree - this mod changes that.
• Convenient Quest Log - makes quest log more readable, adds quick actions to cancel non-story quests and travel to the required location.
• Lively Cities - adds various NPCs to dwellings to make them feel more lively, like the name suggest.
• Basic Roads - adds roads between towns and cities. Useful for navigation if you’re interested in manual travel.
• Wilderness NPCs - adds random NPCs (friendly and hostile) outside cities, also useful when travelling manually.
• No Rush Main Quest - removes timers from main quests. Dunno how useful it is since I haven’t used it (nor did much of MQ) but adding it just in case.

That’s all I have for now, I’ll update the post if anything else comes to mind.

Yup, something like this or simple sliders would be an ideal solution for what I’m talking about - preferably both, depending on whether the setting is a numerical one or not. It doesn’t have to be a completely granular access to every value, I just want enough control to adjust the experience when things are close but not exactly right.

Jose Pavli, composer for Project Wingman, (re)created music for this project. It’s available on his Bandcamp page.

I’d be down with that. Or at the very least give us modifiers like skulls in Halo games - dunno if that’s just Master Chief Collection addition or if they became a thing after 1 but it’s better than nothing.

I completely agree that accessibility/assist modes are more important and if I had to choose I’d go with that. Since we’re in a fantasy land however I’m still going to advocate for customisation because, let’s be honest, most of the difficulties (besides “the main one”) are usually not that great.

I’m speaking from a perspective of someone who tends to go for the higher difficulty options which extremely often go with the laziest possible decisions like turning enemies into damage sponge and increasing their attack power. That’s it. Stuff like improved enemy awareness, faster reaction times, smarter tactics aren’t exactly common and that’s my main pain point when selecting difficulty. There are also other things like ammo/loot scarcity, need drain in survival games etc.

Having an option to tweak at least some of these things could help folks like me who often end up in a situation when one difficulty is piss easy and the other feels like a drag. Peoples skills and expectations vary way too and there’s simply no way few basic difficulty settings will be right for everyone. And if someone damages their experience? Oh well, let people make mistakes and take responsibility for their choices. Inform them that changing this stuff will affect their experience and leave them to their decisions. We can’t (and shouldn’t) baby-proof everything, in my opinion.

It’s a quick and simple loop that’s easy to get into - just show up, do some super basic tasks and move on to other thing. Definitely a good fit since most of the quests take a few minutes to clear.

These 2 hours would be enough to make some decent progress, especially after unlocking Wayshrines to teleport to.

I’m not sure what I want to play at the moment so I thought I’d jump into Elder Scrolls Online for a bit. After spending a lot of time trying to play as a pacifist character I decided to make a new “normal” one instead - that took a while.

I ended up remaking my character 3 times as I couldn’t decide on who exactly I’d like to play as. Started with my usual choice, Warden, but I wasn’t really feeling the beast master skills and eventually settled down on Nightblade - the class of choice for my very first character, I believe.

I’m having fun so far though I do have some serious issues with the game. Both story and levelling feel WAY to fast, like they were made for someone with neither time nor interest in playing an MMO. Another big problem has to do with movement speed - my character feels like she’s constantly sprinting (even walking and sneaking are sped up) and the worst part is, this only affects my new, dark elf character. Jumping in as an old wood elf Nightblade has her moving like a normal person instead of an arena shooter protagonist. I don’t know why that is but I’m not a fan.

Main content is extremely easy and the writing is… not great for the most part. It’s not like I require some high art from the game but if it could be a little less generic and basic, that would be great.
While of the voice acting is pretty solid there are some real stinkers in there as well - you could tell me few of the characters are voiced by a decade old text-to-speech software and I would believe you.

I don’t know if the game changed so much since my last proper stint or if I didn’t really notice it back then (it’s been years since I played as a combat character). Either way, I might be going back to playing other stuff faster than anticipated. Oh well.

On a slightly different note… I like to listen to game soundtracks - old or new, action packed or mellow, there is something about many of them that just makes me want to put them on as a background for whatever I’m doing at the moment.

I decided to go back to albums from old Maxis games: SimCity 3000 and 4, The Sims and its expansions etc. They all have this atmosphere that makes them stand out and keep you feeling chill and happy. Well, after putting them on I noticed a serious problem - I can’t really listen to them any more, not as a whole anyway. Despite not having such problems in the past, nowadays some of the songs with higher tones sound extremely grating and unpleasant to listen to. I can do it for a bit but but things get painful rather quickly and it makes me sad. I love these soundtracks and not being able to enjoy them really sucks.

I have no idea why that happens but it’s not only limited to these old title. There are some newer games where I end up turning the music off completely since they end up being more annoying than atmospheric. I hate it.

I agree to an extent but there’s a difference between “we made a specific design choice because it fits with what we want the game to convey” and “well, normal mode works like X and feels super easy to anyone experienced with gaming but on hard all the enemies are bullet sponges with 5x HP and player dies in one hit”. The latter approach brings nothing to the table and that’s what I’m against. Plus already mentioned accessibility options for those who need them.

Besides, many games ALREADY HAVE easy modes - giving me ability to adjust things manually (which in my case is usually up, not down) wouldn’t affect their vision any more than it’s already possible.

Oh totally, I’m mostly focusing on solo and co-op titles like Terraria/Minecraft/Raft or whatever is popular for multiplayer these days. That said, it’s not like Souls games have to by played with online functionality even now - it’s already off when not in human form after all.

It’s not a perfect choice for every single title but a good chunk of games could support it without worrying about matchmaking and the like.

Customisable difficulty. Have a single or multiple presets balanced to what you’d like your players to experience but give me an option to adjust some of the stuff to my liking. There are SO MANY games I’d love to play way more than I do but none of the difficulty options feel “right”, bringing the whole experience down.
It’s also a great feature from an accessibility standpoint - pretty important thing for those who literally can’t play your game for reasons that could be easily worked around if such customisation was there.

“But my artistic integrity and vision!”

No, shut up. Your vision doesn’t mean squat if my experience with the game is annoying to the point where I don’t even care about the lore implication of an enemy placement or how gameplay systems intertwine with themes and story of the game. It’s important, sure, but it shouldn’t be more important than player’s enjoyment of your product.

Balance your game how you imagine it but let me play with the sliders to make it feel how I want it to. Just drop a scary message about it not being the intended way to play and it’ll be fine.

It was also an unfortunate victim of the time when IOI struggled with figuring out how to transition from “classic” way of making games to the modern, high budget approach. I’m glad they managed to get back into the rhythm with new Hitman games but it’s still a little disappointing K&L had to serve as a stepping stone towards better times.

The worst part is there’s no “full” version since each beta added new features and removed other ones. I’d give a lot for a build which combines all of the lost mechanics into a single package.

I knew I forgot something! Fantastic style and soundtrack, engaging gameplay and a bit rough in execution - it was great.

Can’t say I feel guilty about liking these but if we’re talking about mediocre games I love that would be:

• Drakengard 3 - simple, repetitive gameplay, huge amount of asset reuse and terrible performance if you’re crazy enough to play it on PS3. It also has a really engaging and tragic story, full of weirdness unique to the series (well, the first game anyway, haven’t played D2 yet).
• Kane & Lynch (both games) - they’re rough, gritty and don’t pull any punches. Pretty divisive in terms of gameplay though I personally think it’s thematically consistent and adds a lot to the atmosphere. My favourite games from IOI despite not being as well designed or polished as the Hitman series.
• Oni - 2001 action game by Bungie. Really cool hand-to-hand combat system, huge empty levels, simple story with wannabe Ghost in the Shell elements.
• Starbound - lots of hype about Terraria in space, lots of wasted potential and cool features that didn’t make to the final release. I tend to prefer beta versions (mainly “Glad Giraffe” beta) but the final one also seemed alright based on what little I played of it. Definitely not as good as it had chance to be during development.
• Scarface: The World is Yours - budget GTA clone based on the 1983 movie with Al Pacino (it’s actually a sequel). It looks bad even for the time but it plays well enough and has some neat mechanics which made it stand out, if only a little.
• Tresspasser - the infamous Jurassic Park game with full control of your arm and focus on physical interactions with the environment. It’s a bit clunky and far from polished but it’s an interesting experience nonetheless.

That’s all that comes to mind for now, I might update the post if I remember anything else.