Eclectic Taste: Activate!

I’ve put Outriders to rest for the time being. And since then, I’d been sort of flitting game to game to find something to stick. Welp… Found some things! The resulting list of things I’m ‘Currently Playing’ makes me laugh. Whoever would have thought that Elden Ring and Stardew Valley would’ve found themselves existing together on such a list?

For posterity’s sake, I decided I simply must keep a record of the combination:

As amusing as the mix on display there might be — mostly, I’m just glad to be enjoying gaming again and being able to work it (multiplayer as well!) in amongst everything else going on in life. :)

Elden Ring

I’m closing in on the end. I’ve beaten Malenia, Blade of Miquella, who I was holding as the last bit of optional content that I especially wanted to finish before beelining toward the end.

Well… Last optional bit that I am aware of.

I actually have no idea how big Crumbling Farum Azula is or how much might be left to explore off the beaten path here. After I beat her, I journeyed back to the Forge of the Giants and set fire to the Erdtree. By way of myself as the kindling.

Yep… I went the Lord of Chaos route. At least until this point, as I didn’t like the alternative option for getting past this particular barrier very much.

However, with Millicent’s questline completed and having beaten Malenia, I should be able to reverse the decision around becoming the Lord of Chaos by the end. At least, that is how I’ve read things so far! Hope I’m right.

Guess we’ll see soon when I jump in again!

Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak

I’m still very early in my Sunbreak expansion and Master Rank journey in Rise. Barely scratched the surface, even. I’m sitting at Master Rank 2 right now, but far enough along to do the MR3 key quest when I next jump in with my friends.

Returning to Monster Hunter is always a bit of a daunting experience for me. After months away, running through the very first Sunbreak mission consisted of a lot of unmanly-squeal-pitch queries, such as, ‘What does this button do?’ or ‘How do I put my bow away?!’. Especially in light of the fact it was against a monster entirely new to me. My first real experience with the series came with World, which didn’t have the crab bois in it.

For all that, I think the difficulty delta between High Rank and Master Rank is not as large in Rise as it was with World. Although my perception of that may be skewed somewhat by the fact I’d gone right to the very end of the optional content in Rise before the expansion landed, which I never quite achieved in World.

In any case, I’m having fun with it. Maybe it’ll prompt some more cohesive thoughts when I’m done with it. In the meantime, Asmiroth has some early impressions up if you’re keen to know more.

No Man’s Sky: Endurance Update

There is a certain pattern to No Man’s Sky update releases.

First, Sean Murray tweets a single emoji with some loose connection to the theme of the coming update. In this case, it was the muscled arm-flexing emoji. It caused a lot of speculation that perhaps it would be in some fashion related to Strongholds. I thought maybe we’d finally get to take over stations, which has clearly been in the works for a while with the station override items and control panels already in the game.

Second, the game goes on sale. Everywhere, pretty much — but Steam discount usually lands first.

Once the sales land, you know it’s close. Days away, generally.

Third, the patch itself comes out! Brief update notes are available in the game, but these are generally just broad-stroke hints at some larger items. The full detailed patch notes and trailer are often many hours behind.

Initially, I had planned on holding off playing until the expedition for this patch came out. Buuut… After logging in ‘just to see’… Well; there I still was a couple of hours later, with a freshly built base and on a hunt for upgrades.

I still don’t have a Freighter in this game yet, so I haven’t been able to see firsthand just how good the updates in this space are, but from what I’ve seen in impressions videos so far… Rather exciting stuff ahoy!

Stardew Valley (Expanded mod + Co-op)

I’ve acknowledged liking Stardew Valley in the past, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually played it since starting the blog. Not in any significant fashion at least.

I played it most extensively on the Switch in 2018, finding it quite suited to the hand-held device.

This time around, however, I’m bringing friends! And mods! Lots of mods. Enough mods that it actually makes the initial load of the game quite a challenge. Hah. But with new towns added, new NPCs, new items, new everything — it certainly has a lot of potential to freshen up the game even if you’re super experienced with it, which I’d not venture so far as to say is true for myself.

We’ve had only limited time with it so far as we’re playing exclusively co-op but I’ve been having enough fun with it that I’m rather tempted to start a single-player run as well. The only thing holding me back from doing so is the concern of burning out doing the same stuff twice over back-to-back. Well… That and that I’m playing No Man’s Sky when solo at the moment.

XCOM 2

The XCOM 2 Succession Game is still rolling onward, more than a year after it commenced! We’ve lost a fair few players over the way, as I suppose one might expect for a game taking that long to run through but I’m still enjoying it immensely.

I played through my last turn at the end of June and now it’s over to Kluwes to playthrough his turn and hopefully earn us some more progress toward defeating the ADVENT.

I haven’t really been playing it outside of my turns, but the itch has certainly come up from time to time. I’ve also been reminded by way of playing this game just how much I enjoy the base game, sans all DLC. The War of the Chosen xpac was really good, don’t get me wrong — but the base game has a certain purity of focus to it I’m finding refreshing in this playthrough.