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Sunday is Gaming Day: What Are You Playing Weekly Thread
(hexbear.net)
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
3rd International Volunteer Brigade (Hexbear gaming discord)
Rules
I haven't played much helldivers 2 since the major gameplay changes sort of removed what I loved about the game but I did load it up to try out the m1903 springfield they released to celebrate Liberty Day and it is delightfully inadqueate for fighting hundreds of communist laserbots.
It doesn't even have stripper clips you have to reload each round by hand it's great.
Blade of Galadriel for Shadow of War is somewhat disapointed. I'm not sure what to make of the "light" mechanic and abilities. Most of the side bosses are immune to everything, including the light mechanic, which makes the fights tedious at best while also perplexingly preventing the player from using the core new gameplay mechanics of the update.
The characters are delightful though. I like the ancient orc Archer who decided to join the fight against Sauron purpley because he used to work directly for Morgoth and thinks Sauron is a punk ass kid who needs to be put in his place. Olog-hai Leonardo DaVinci is also cool. A gigantic war troll waxing poetic about the wonders of evil architecture in a completely friendly and good natured way to an elf who has been the enemy of his people since the world was new is just so unexpected and goofy.
I wish you could take Eltariel and Baranor and their skills and equipment in to the main game. I wish games in general would do more to integrate new systems, items, and enemies in dlc content in to the core game. Like the Iki Island expansion for Ghost of Tsushima introduced a bunch of cool, challenging new enemies but once you finish the dlc you'll never see them again.
I've been really enjoying Helldiver's 2 now that they finished all the much needed buffs. It just feels more fun now. Still punishing if you fuck up but it feels recoverable most of the time now.
Mostly though I've been rocking Factorio Space Age.
My complaint is that the change to the armor system fundamentally changed the nature of the game. You no longer need heavy weapons to fight tanks and armor. There's no real need to think about the niche and role of the weapons in your loadout. There's no need to really cooperate with your team and work together.
I didn't need buffs. I was really, really good, understood all the weapons and strats, and knew when and how to use them efficiently.
Now it just doesn't matter what you take. Which is what people wanted. They wanted everything to function the same way and not have to care about differentiating squad roles or taking a balanced loadout. But since it doesn't matter nothing has any character. Everything feels the same.
Chargers and bts have been made a complete non issue. For me, not speaking for anyone else, they were never a serious threat. I was able to dance around them and mostly ignore them much of the time, and drop them quickly with eat17s or ops or whatever if they were causing problems. Bts are just a complete non-issue now. Since they die in one shot to most heavy weapons i rarely see them survive their spawn animations.
Most area denial strats can kill everything now so it's not uncommon to just wipe out entire patrols and wipe out breaches and drops before they finish their animations, so there's often nothing to do. The buffed artillery strikes can wipe out entire bases reliably so you don't really need to go in to bases if you don't want to. A 500kg can wipe most of a medium or even large bug nest.
All of this means that a huge amount of gameplay is just gone. With chargers and bts neutralized they can't run interference for small and medium bugs. Hunters were nerfed in to the ground too. So now muchs just die without ever really presenting a threat. The heavies were needed to draw player attention until mediums and lights could get in to range to be a threat and they can't do that anymore.
With bots everything has been nerfed so hard. Rocket devs rarely manage to get shots off, so many things can kill hulks with 1-3 shots to the front they're not a threat. All the bots have left, sorta, is heavy devs and they've been heavily nerfed. Gunships went from an absolute nightmare you had to plan around to skeet shooting.
It's so streamlined and simple now. All the complexity and systems interactions that turned each fight in to a fun little tactics puzzle are gone. You (well, I) just walk in a straight line to the objective killing everything. They even removed the 4x patrol modifier after mission complete so you're not even pressured to evac.
Everything I loved abouit the game has been removed. Like I'm