Messing around in Pillars of Eternity again, trying to decide who will be the first character I will finish a run with.
I have 228 hours in this game btw and yes this is how I play every CRPG
You would cry if you looked at my hours logged into the first Mass Effect or Wrath of the Righteous.
Anyways, I keep trying to make Paladin or Priest work, but the tricky part is that the main variants I want to use are the asshole ones (priest of Skaen and Bleak Walker paladin). This feels more like something to do in a second playthrough, way too many challenges for a completionist like me in terms of roleplaying and seeing every quest available. I do like the Kind Wayfarer but that also seems a bit, I don’t know, humdrum. I’d say the same for a priest of Wael but they really dropped the ball with reactivity with a Wael priest (there’s a quest with a priest of Wael who gets mad at you for being deceptive! The Wael priest!)
So, I’m messing around with classes that don’t have disposition mechanics. I think I’m either going to go with a rogue or a cipher. They have the necessary stat requirements for roleplaying (a focus on intelligence, it’s either that or resolve I absolutely need) while also feeling unique enough to stick out from the main companions, and are generally fun to play as (do not get me started on using a druid in literally any CRPG, they’re like a smoothie of every class but nothing works as good as more dedicated classes in practice). Rogue is just straight up fun with good stealth and damage out the wazoo, while cipher has some fun status effect nonsense and gimmick moves that really light up my brain once I realize the possibilities with them.
I might try Barbarian, because the strangeness of the stats in this game means a good Barbarian character requires intelligence, which is very funny in concept.
CRPGs are such a vibe though, I tend to make a character, play the game for an hour, then drop it for months before I finish it within a week. Halfway through understanding how all the systems work together to then have to remake my characters and enjoy the game.
I’m back on gachas as a bit of a junk food game recently with the new Zenless Zone Zero update. Glad they’re returning to reminding everyone that this is a world in the middle of an apocalypse. For something more substantial though I recently grabbed Retro Rewind and have been enjoying the fast paced craziness of running a video store in the 90s. Animal Crossing never really caught me but these games tend to catch me and hold on for just enough.
Been playing Card Forge recently. So much time disappears into it.
So it’s like the old MtG computer game where you travel around Shandalar and collect cards from fighting enemies and build your decks, blah blah blah.
It still takes place on Shandalar, only that all cards are findable in the game. And they update the game every time more cards are released IRL.
What seems to finally be my winner for my first full run Pillars of Eternity character is a rogue, partly because it’s the most fun class, and partly because it’s the last class you get access to if you never bother with custom adventurers or picking it as your character’s class.
My rogue is a death godlike dissident, specifically an Old Valla spy who turned down a sketchy job and had to leave the country since she weren’t allowed to say now. Fighting with a saber and stiletto as my melee option, and a pistol for the distance one (may switch that with a blunderbuss). Trying to stay away from passionate responses and going with a rational and stoic character who can toss out a quip when she feels like it and tries to help people when she can.
i’ve always been a big fan of Final Fantasy, since i was a little kid.
I just finished FFXVI. That was not a mainline Final Fantasy game. that was actually a spin-off. They made a mistake somewhere.
Jokes aside, it’s a fun game (Played it in French because i preferred the terminology.) I just did not like the complete absence of any and all RPG elements. Still, i can’t dislike it’s abolitionist, anti-imperialist plot.
got ranked as the 235th game of all time (out of 586), directly under Stranger of Paradise - Final Fantasy Origin. Funny how it fell in place there.
So the winner ended up being a bleak paladin, aka “if we do enough war crimes there will be no more war!” lunatics. Went with a pale elf aristocrat from the White that Wends, and have built an durable lunatic with extremely high defenses (partly because I bullied a small child, yes this did power up my defenses due to the massive bump this gave to my cruelty disposition) who slices things apart with a great sword that I can turn on fire and also a black fire that adds in corrosive damage, just to be extra mean. Focused on passives that help the party and scare the enemy when I kill while letting Palli take some support paladin skills (her sworn enemy ability that fires death orbs is all the offensive bonuses she needs).
This is pretty fun thanks to how open the roleplaying system of the game is, able to work even when I can’t be nice or diplomatic. But I did have to bully that child to get that cruelty buff and man, I feel like garbage for doing it. That was mean even by bleak walker standards (mainly because it was pointless cruelty, we’re supposed to be cruel in war, not against random kids).
I’m into retro gaming but that game is rough-looking in 2026.
I don’t remember when Bullfrog ended. That said, i have lost more than all of my respect for Molyneux by now. That guy was a real jerk. Shame he was the face of Bullfrog. The people of the studio deserved better.
Also slightly annoyed at the new update adding option turn based combat, which is always bad when stapled onto a CRPG made with real time pause in mind. While I can just ignore that, I can’t ignore the bizarre new bugs this shoved into the game, and since Obsidian is owned by Microsoft now and they’re so obsessed with AI generation from the top down, I suspect this update may have been done with generated code, and I hope I’m wrong about that but it would explain the bizarre visual bugs popping up now. Also annoyed with the discussion around this almost entirely being mindless Consumers cheering or spewing the usual angry gamer nonsense.
That said, I discovered that Druid is a fun class in this game because you can actually hit things when you turn into a bear, and the spells are fun. I think I settled on a cipher, though, which I finally got the hang of. The key to it is having good accuracy so you can drain power from enemies, and taking close note of what skills you have are just Foe AoEs and how they come out to make the most of keeping mobs out of wack.
the first four levels of Dungeon Keeper were kinda meh…
But then, i had the first level with an opponent. That was a lot more hectic. it’s interesting how this is a real-time strategy game where you can’t actually tell your folks to just walk into enemy territory.