Discussion The 2026 Game Thread: You Will Own Nothing and Be Happy Edition

[mikeymikec]

With regard to the thread title - I fired up BG3 for the first time in a few months and it asked me to agree to a new licence agreement (no reinstalls of any sort going on here). Grr....

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Well that's just a goddamn tragedy if I ever read one.

Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk are on-par with one another for storytelling, but for wildly different reasons. Witcher 3 doesn't ever take itself too seriously and keeps the tone in line, not only with the books, but with itself. It's consistent across the board from start to finish and every single character is fleshed out as well as every single side quest is unique. There's none of that boring Skyrim bullshit where you have to go into the 40th copy/pasted dungeon to go do the same exact thing you've done 39 times before.

Cyberpunk has a lot of copy/pasted activities (mainly the police scanner stuff), but those are optional. The game has amazing side quests that actually have branching paths with wildly different outcomes, but it also has wildly different playstyles that can all be insanely overpowered when done right. The main story in Cyberpunk can get tossed to the wayside every now and then if you decide to start jumping into side activities, but there hasn't been another game in a long time where I took such an emotional hit at the ending as I did with my first ending and the ending of Phantom Liberty. I didn't even know I was becoming emotionally invested in the characters until things started wrapping up. They're both amazing games for storytelling and atmosphere, but from two ends of the gaming spectrum. I've replayed W3 countless times over the years and I've completed CP2077 twice and will be doing a third run this year.

-Hmm, I might have to make it a point to pick up PL the next time it's on sale then.

I figure I'll be playing CP for at least the next 3 months at the speed I play these types of games so plenty of time for a rando Steam sale.

 

[JujuFish]

I tried The Witcher 1 years ago and bounced off pretty quickly. I know TW3 got all this acclaim but I can't bring myself to play 3 without 1 or 2.

 

[Stg-Flame]

-Hmm, I might have to make it a point to pick up PL the next time it's on sale then.

I figure I'll be playing CP for at least the next 3 months at the speed I play these types of games so plenty of time for a rando Steam sale.

Phantom Liberty was just crafted to perfection with the voice actors and story; and to be fair, it's hard to go wrong when Idris Elba is voicing one of the main characters.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I tried The Witcher 1 years ago and bounced off pretty quickly. I know TW3 got all this acclaim but I can't bring myself to play 3 without 1 or 2.

- Yeah its a rough game, but honestly you can skip it and go straight to Witcher 2. W1 feels like a much more stand alone adventure than 2 & 3 do.

 

[Fallen Kell]

-Yeah DOW2 is the one that mostly got rid of base building in lieu of micro based gameplay around a limited number of squads. The campaign does involve a lot of "loot" and war gear for your hero characters.

It wasn't what a lot of people wanted after DOW1's more traditional base building swarm tactic gameplay, but is a truly excellent game in its own right.

DOW3 is when the game went full MOBA and the only units that really mattered where your heroes.

I might actually have to try DOW2 now that you described it like that. I have always been looking for games like this ever since I first played Bungie's "Myth: The Fallen Lords" (by the way, this was also one of the first games to use a 3D graphics card, and was designed for the Voodoo series of 3D accelerators). It basically invented this genre, a tactical RTS that was really attrition based combat. Your units stayed with you and gained experience between battles (i.e. getting fasters/more accurate/deadlier as they became veterans, but the new recruits were very poor replacements, if you got any replacements at all). The multiplayer though was excellent, with several different game types (capture the flag, king of the hill, steal the bacon (really a ball), etc.), and again following the same concept of attrition, unlike other RTS games where it is all about resource gathering, unit production, and resource optimization, this was all about tactical combat, using units and combinations of units along with the terrain to beat the opponents. The units were received at the beginning of the map/match, allocated with a point buy system (letting you swap certain units for others based on a set cost basis with overall max limits for certain unit types).

The game also had a rudimentary physics engine, allowing objects to become shrapnel (mainly from the dwarven molatoves and satchel bombs). Things like unexploded molatoves could be re-ignighted and then explode (and things like wind, rain, wet ground/river/lakes would play a role in this, so you could intentially instruct a dwarf (or multiple) to aim at the edge of a riverbed to ensure the bottles did not explode and pickup the unexploded bottles with a certain other units, and then drop or throw the unexploded bottles and then aim a live bottle near the un-exploded ones to have it set those on fire and flying away in the explosion to hit other enemy units). The map a 3D terrain played the most important part, as it was the first game to my knowledge using a real 3D map, such that an archer at the top of a hill would be able to shoot farther than say one at the bottom of the hill. All the items were proper objects tracked in the game (i.e. firing an arrow meant an arrow object was pulled out of a quiver, held in hand, notched into the bow, fired, existed and flew threw the air, hit a friendly, enemy, some other object, or the ground (and broke on the ground, but the arrowhead/front end still remained) and could be picked up and thrown or blasted out of the air, altered with wind or lightning, etc.... Basically the objects all interacted with one another with proper hit detection. Even a head from a dead body could be used as shrapnel from an explosion, or thrown at somebody. All this lead to some fairly complex interactions between the various units, allowing for more complex tactics when people understood how to create or produce certain combos, as well as cries of cheating from people who did not know how certain combinations worked or the various interactions that could be done.

I loved the online play, and was actually ranked number 1 for a few weeks in the world rankings (well bungie.net rankings, which was the only official ranked gameplay at release). And there was no way to hide your ranking when you were in the top 10, as the top 10 players had a special rank icon applied next to their name (well everyone had a rank icon, just that the more generic ones just gave you an idea that someone was a newbie/novice, fairly skilled, a veteran expert, or number one rank in the world, either number 2-3, number 4-6, or 6-10... something like that). And it was a pain as losing or even just doing poorly in a fight against a lower rank would drop your rating. But the best thing I think they did was have a game replay system, where-in anyone who was in the match, could then save off the match and then see what everyone else was doing in the replay (removing all fog-of-war/viewing distance issues and letting you free-roam the camera as well as pause/fast-forward/rewind/play the match to see exactly what was done and said/communicated between the various players or teams as it happened). Still remember a tournament that was done and my team had been practicing some new strategies after testing some concepts. We realized we could drop dwarven satchel charges under the river (where they would disappear and not be seen), but we figured out we could still set them off if we fired one or two bolts of lightning at the river over top of where we planted them (normally the main way of setting off the charges was just by throwing a flaming molatov cocktail that the dwarven units used as their main attack, but this wouldn't work as it would hit the water first and be extinguished). We are pretty sure we were the first to ever figure out this could be done and used it in the final round of the tournament, absolutely devastating the enemy team, as they lost 20-30 units rushing across what seemed to be an unguarded river crossing point, as they only saw two units called "fetch" (which shot lightning, and alone would not normally do a lot of damage to a full rush of bezerkers and knights), until they fired at the water and everything exploded, and then the cries of cheating/cheaters couldn't be screamed loud enough from the enemy team, while the officials said, no it was all setup via tactics/strategy, with the replay showing exactly what we did and how..... Man, can you see I loved that game....

 

[bba-tcg]

I already own nothing, and I am mostly happy.

 

[Stg-Flame]

I'm guessing I'm close to finishing Stalker 2 and for all the frustrations I've had with the game, it is extremely beautiful at times. I think if I play this again, I'm going to go full modded and I will not be playing on Veteran again. I will admit that most of my frustrations come from starting the game on Veteran and not knowing that they change the damage/health values based on what difficulty you're on. I also fully admit that I turned the difficulty down to Rookie twice already because certain mutants will one-shot you and some of the later areas will not allow you to bypass Burers and Poltergeists like you can in the earlier parts of the game, so you have to get insanely lucky for the AI to go full retard, or you have to tank the hits and you can't tank any hits on higher difficulties because of the enemy damage scaling.

Spoiler: Screenshots

Edit: Guess I won't be playing DoW2 since it locks my entire PC at launch. I've tried several different workarounds and it simply won't work. One time I was able to get audio, but I'm left staring at my desktop with my mouse disabled, but I can still use my keyboard. Terraria just got it's latest massive 1.4.5 update so I guess I can mess around on that between Stalker sessions.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I might actually have to try DOW2 now that you described it like that. I have always been looking for games like this ever since I first played Bungie's "Myth: The Fallen Lords" (by the way, this was also one of the first games to use a 3D graphics card, and was designed for the Voodoo series of 3D accelerators). It basically invented this genre, a tactical RTS that was really attrition based combat. Your units stayed with you and gained experience between battles (i.e. getting fasters/more accurate/deadlier as they became veterans, but the new recruits were very poor replacements, if you got any replacements at all). The multiplayer though was excellent, with several different game types (capture the flag, king of the hill, steal the bacon (really a ball), etc.), and again following the same concept of attrition, unlike other RTS games where it is all about resource gathering, unit production, and resource optimization, this was all about tactical combat, using units and combinations of units along with the terrain to beat the opponents. The units were received at the beginning of the map/match, allocated with a point buy system (letting you swap certain units for others based on a set cost basis with overall max limits for certain unit types).

The game also had a rudimentary physics engine, allowing objects to become shrapnel (mainly from the dwarven molatoves and satchel bombs). Things like unexploded molatoves could be re-ignighted and then explode (and things like wind, rain, wet ground/river/lakes would play a role in this, so you could intentially instruct a dwarf (or multiple) to aim at the edge of a riverbed to ensure the bottles did not explode and pickup the unexploded bottles with a certain other units, and then drop or throw the unexploded bottles and then aim a live bottle near the un-exploded ones to have it set those on fire and flying away in the explosion to hit other enemy units). The map a 3D terrain played the most important part, as it was the first game to my knowledge using a real 3D map, such that an archer at the top of a hill would be able to shoot farther than say one at the bottom of the hill. All the items were proper objects tracked in the game (i.e. firing an arrow meant an arrow object was pulled out of a quiver, held in hand, notched into the bow, fired, existed and flew threw the air, hit a friendly, enemy, some other object, or the ground (and broke on the ground, but the arrowhead/front end still remained) and could be picked up and thrown or blasted out of the air, altered with wind or lightning, etc.... Basically the objects all interacted with one another with proper hit detection. Even a head from a dead body could be used as shrapnel from an explosion, or thrown at somebody. All this lead to some fairly complex interactions between the various units, allowing for more complex tactics when people understood how to create or produce certain combos, as well as cries of cheating from people who did not know how certain combinations worked or the various interactions that could be done.

I loved the online play, and was actually ranked number 1 for a few weeks in the world rankings (well bungie.net rankings, which was the only official ranked gameplay at release). And there was no way to hide your ranking when you were in the top 10, as the top 10 players had a special rank icon applied next to their name (well everyone had a rank icon, just that the more generic ones just gave you an idea that someone was a newbie/novice, fairly skilled, a veteran expert, or number one rank in the world, either number 2-3, number 4-6, or 6-10... something like that). And it was a pain as losing or even just doing poorly in a fight against a lower rank would drop your rating. But the best thing I think they did was have a game replay system, where-in anyone who was in the match, could then save off the match and then see what everyone else was doing in the replay (removing all fog-of-war/viewing distance issues and letting you free-roam the camera as well as pause/fast-forward/rewind/play the match to see exactly what was done and said/communicated between the various players or teams as it happened). Still remember a tournament that was done and my team had been practicing some new strategies after testing some concepts. We realized we could drop dwarven satchel charges under the river (where they would disappear and not be seen), but we figured out we could still set them off if we fired one or two bolts of lightning at the river over top of where we planted them (normally the main way of setting off the charges was just by throwing a flaming molatov cocktail that the dwarven units used as their main attack, but this wouldn't work as it would hit the water first and be extinguished). We are pretty sure we were the first to ever figure out this could be done and used it in the final round of the tournament, absolutely devastating the enemy team, as they lost 20-30 units rushing across what seemed to be an unguarded river crossing point, as they only saw two units called "fetch" (which shot lightning, and alone would not normally do a lot of damage to a full rush of bezerkers and knights), until they fired at the water and everything exploded, and then the cries of cheating/cheaters couldn't be screamed loud enough from the enemy team, while the officials said, no it was all setup via tactics/strategy, with the replay showing exactly what we did and how..... Man, can you see I loved that game....

-I started on Myth 2 Soulblighter and then went back to Myth The Fallen Lords.

Can still remember installing some long forgotten video card and being able to activate the DirectX renderer. It was light night and day. Glide was still far superior, but anything was better than software renderings.

Fantastic games, and the now long forgotten start of Bungie (wild how far they deviated from their beginnings).

I wouldn't say DoW2 goes all the way back to something like Myth, but it's a very heavily scaled down RTS game that rewards tactics over meatballs of doom.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

With regard to the thread title - I fired up BG3 for the first time in a few months and it asked me to agree to a new licence agreement (no reinstalls of any sort going on here). Grr....

Did you buy it on GOG?

 

[mikeymikec]

Did you buy it on GOG?

Steam.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Steam.

I was highly confident of that, just confirming, as I don't own the game. I have not even finished Divinity 2 all these years later. DRM free is worth paying extra for IMO.

 

[Ranulf]

I got it on Steam mainly for the ease of multiplayer support with friends. I think it is cross play but not sure. I wish I had bought it on GoG though.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I got it on Steam mainly for the ease of multiplayer support with friends. I think it is cross play but not sure. I wish I had bought it on GoG though.

I am wondering if we are on the precipice of the great divide the title alludes to. Where it is open source and indie vs corpo subscription models. I read GOG is hiring a dev for native Linux support.

As to games I am playing; stuff that runs on a potato. Despite having high end kit. Fallout 4, Shadow of Mordor, AC: Black Flag. I dip into Spider-Man games for an hour or 3 just for the beat em up aspect of it. At least those let me pretend I need this level of hardware. Same for Arkham games on dipping in for the beat em up action. Still need to finish RoboCop. And commit to a Divinity 2 play through. When BG3 came out, I saw many comments saying it was D2 reskinned. 😀

 

[Stg-Flame]

Finished Stalker 2 and I'm really interested in seeing the other endings (I'm guessing there's at least three), but I cannot bring myself to play it again anytime soon. Most of the burnout was my fault for exploring everything and insisting on maximizing my profits through carrying everything worth a certain amount back to traders, but in my defense, armor upgrades and equipment repairs on Veteran are incredibly expensive. The last armor I decided to use and upgrade cost around $400,000. Still, the enemies will detect and shoot you through walls in the end of the game (basically starting at Pripyat) and other than a handful of other minor bugs, the game was a lot of fun. The story was all over the place at times and many times I was thoroughly confused as to why I was being sent to one place or another, but overall it's a great game. Supposedly there's another big patch or free content update releasing soon, so when I pick it up again there should be more to do.

I will say that they did boss fights somewhat well except for one part where it's just "Hey, this guy is important so his (plot) armor has a special field of magic that you have to break before you kill him in a cutscene. Meanwhile we'll throw 45 enemy soldiers at you who are going to aimbot you the entire time. Do that twice. Cool? Cool."

 

[Fallen Kell]

-I started on Myth 2 Soulblighter and then went back to Myth The Fallen Lords.

Can still remember installing some long forgotten video card and being able to activate the DirectX renderer. It was light night and day. Glide was still far superior, but anything was better than software renderings.

Fantastic games, and the now long forgotten start of Bungie (wild how far they deviated from their beginnings).

Funny you say that about Bungie. These games were actually a wide departure from what Bungie really began with, which was FPS games on the Mac (specifically Pathways into Darkness and then the Marathon series, which is getting a new installment as we speak). They came out with the Myth series mainly to try something different as ID had recently released Quake which really covered just about anything they were looking to possibly do innovation wise with FPS games and wanted something that would be more unique on the market. They went back to FPS games obviously with the Halo series....

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Alright, Psychonauts 2 is a wrap.

Fun, goofy game overflowing with personality. Was refreshing to play a pretty straightforward platformer again.

While the visuals and production value was fantastic (that M$ money hard at work) and each of the characters minds had a very unique visual style, the level design was overall good but never reached the same highs of the first game (Milkman Conspiracy and Goggolor levels spring to mind).

Unfortunately the fellow interns didn't play as much of a role in this game, and the cast was a bit overstuffed, so characters didn't get the same opportunity to shine.

Great psychology puns abound however.

I'll probably noodle around for a bit longer doing some cheevo hunting before moving on to something else.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Most of the burnout was my fault for exploring everything and insisting on maximizing my profits through carrying everything worth a certain amount back to traders,

Same here. But burned out before it was over, never finished. I will watch all the endings on Youtube if I care enough, at some point. Game hooked me hard at first, but by the time I bailed, I had no idea why.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Same here. But burned out before it was over, never finished. I will watch all the endings on Youtube if I care enough, at some point. Game hooked me hard at first, but by the time I bailed, I had no idea why.

It was the swamps for me. Just traversing the area was irritating with the six foot tall weeds that completely obscure your vision and the ankle-deep water that slows you down constantly. Just going artifact hunting there was irritating since the fields were either really far away, underground, or left you trapped in a maze. I stopped playing for a few weeks when I was given the objective to go find the Clear Sky base and when I came back to the game, I decided to leave the swamps and go explore the entire west part of the map. Weeks later when I finished up all the side quests everywhere else, I went back to the swamps and immediately remembered why I didn't want to continue playing the game.

 

[JujuFish]

Alright, Psychonauts 2 is a wrap.

If you're interested in game development documentaries and have a lot of time on your hands, Tim Schafer (founder of Double Fine) had 2 Player Productions involved in the entire thing. It's a series 33 episodes and amazing (if that's your thing) and on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIhLvue17Sd70y34zh2erWWpMyOnh4UN_

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Ok, two new games to play:

Cyberpunk: Finally getting around to this one and so far I am very... Whelmed. It's not a bad game, and it is slowly growing on me, it just feels like another game I've played before. It's early in the story, but already I'd say that Deus Ex did the whole transhumanism thing really damn well and I'm struggling to see CP2077 do it better.

CDPR also really kneecapped themselves insisting on the whole "it's first person, cannot have third person cutscenes" thing. The Witcher games had such dynamic character interaction during cutscenes thanks to the cinematic framing it used. CP feels like a huge step backwards with its insistence on staying in FP mode at all times.

Also for all the noise about the visuals they're... Ok? Everything but PT is cranked to max (all post processing turned off cause it was like a vaseline smear all over the screen) and the visuals feel kinda all over the place. The lighting is spectacular at night after rain, or in the interior of some poorly lit buildings, but in the middle of the day the game looks very mid. Lots of low poly objects, lighting is remarkably flat, visuals are really cluttered and hodgepodge looking.

A lot to say about the game and I look forward to playing it through, it's getting it's claws in me for sure, but it's not what I expected after the masterpiece that was Witcher 3.

Guardians of the Galaxy (aka we have the MCU GOTG at home): So I had absolutely no expectations for this whatsoever and it's been a very pleasant surprise. It's just a linear narrative driven shooter. Got your standard weapon upgrades, collectibles, etc.

I appreciate that the titular characters have thus far avoided the flanderizarion from the movies. Star Lord is the butt of some jokes, but he's clearly the leader and begrudgingly respected by the team. Drax is definitely on the more literal side and has taken cues from Bautisa's character from the movies, but he's not a complete idiot and is The Destroyer for a reason. Rocket isn't just "Hahaha he's a raccoon and he's ANGRY ALL THE TIME" get it see how funny it is hahahah. And so on.

Game looks good, plays good, promises a straightforward 15-20 hour adventure, has good pacing between action set pieces and narrative downtime, and most importantly is FUN. Much better than I anticipated.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

2077 is a good game. Overrated for graphics IMO, as textures are nothing to get excited about. Flat and shiny wears off on me. Realistic lighting is yawn worthy for me. I concede I have not even tried PT as it was not supported the last time I fired the game up. Everything else is fine. The thing that messed me up, that has never happened to me in a game, and that elevated it from 7/10 to 9/10 was my romance with Panam on the only play through I have finished. Was not expecting to get invested in her like that, where I cared about her fate. My first Waifu? 😝



GOTG is one of the best Marvel games in a long time. They were not among the titles I read, but I understand the game is more comic accurate than the movies. I liked it well enough, but not enough to fire it up in 2 years?

 

[Stg-Flame]

The thing that messed me up, that has never happened to me in a game, and that elevated it from 7/10 to 9/10 was my romance with Panam on the only play through I have finished. Was not expecting to get invested in her like that, where I cared about her fate.

I'll avoid spoilers for @GodisanAtheist's sake, but my first ending wasn't a "good" ending and I reloaded a very old save just go back and pick a different one. I felt absolutely gutted and hollow after seeing that first ending I picked and I couldn't let that shit slide. I also learned just how many different endings there are, so on my next run through, I'll be picking a different one.

That being said, I picked up Space Marine 2 after finishing Stalker 2 and I'm honestly surprised the game runs as well as it does maxed out. At a distance, the game is gorgeous, but there's many instances where I looked really close at the textures and I quickly realized why the game runs so well. The Rippers look like they came straight out of an N64 game since they are basically eight polygons that slide around the floor. I'll be honest with the fact that I didn't really care for the combat at first, but it's definitely grown on me now that I have access to better melee weapons. Dodging red circles and countering blue circles brought me back to the Castlevania Lords of Shadows games from almost 15 years ago and I wasn't really on board with that at first, but it's definitely a lot more fun now. I wish we could customize the weapons and armor in the main campaign like we can in the Operations, but that feels like something mods will fix. I also love the Operations for the fact that you get to actually see all sides of a mission instead of just hearing about it happening on the radio.

 

[JujuFish]

I'll avoid spoilers for @GodisanAtheist's sake

 

[Racan]

The thing that messed me up, that has never happened to me in a game, and that elevated it from 7/10 to 9/10 was my romance with Panam on the only play through I have finished. Was not expecting to get invested in her like that, where I cared about her fate. My first Waifu? 😝

Best quest objective. Follow Panam 🤣