I had this bright idea to play a short run through Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire before Avowed to brush up on the lore and get in the mood… Well, that turned into another full-fledged playthrough as I got sucked into Eora again so I still haven’t started Avowed haha.
I played this on PC back in the day, but it works really well on console. Such a great game.
Obsidian 
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Finished Eternal Strands earlier this week (loved it!).
I got back to Destiny. I initially didn’t care for the Dreadnaught activity due to the lack of healing, but I followed a Mactics hunter build and it absolutely eats in there. Going to try to make as much progress on the season pass as possible before the next episode starts.
I am going to get back to Avowed this weekend as well. I’m still in the first area.
Completed Avowed. Got the best ending. Hard difficulty. 98+ hours.
Avowed looks excellent in regards to the environments, character models and overall look of the game. Obsidian nailed the atmosphere and immersion from all the various environments. Liked all the enemy designs especially nearing the end of the game. Only negative I had were the facial animations at times.
Excellent soundtrack, voice acting and sound effects. No issues here.
This category is the standout as the first person melee combat is smooth, fluid and responsive. The best I have played after Dying Light 2. The parkour/platforming is also very fluid and responsive. The exploration is a major highlight as Avowed did what no other game before it has been able to do for me which is actually get me to want to explore the world without map icons and whatnot. The rewards are pretty good majority of the time. The different combinations that you can play as during combat is plentiful. I settled on a Wand/Axe combination which outside of a few tougher enemies in the last part of the game, I didn’t have any major issues. There were pauses/stutters at times but were mostly in the first main region of Dawnshore and lessened as I progressed but I did download the current patch once it became available. There was some weird slow motion during dialogue scenes when your companion(s) or NPC’s would be at a much lower frame rate you could say while other characters in the same scene would be normal. Weird and possibly a bug but since it’s during the dialogue scenes, it doesn’t affect anything. I liked the overall upgrading systems and once you get used it all, it’s pretty easy to build the type of play style that you want. No respawning of enemies, resources or items was a huge positive for me. Would have preferred a better map that shows the environment on it as opposed to just being a radar like The Division. A lock-on option would have been nice for some of the spells/attacks from above as you can easily miss those. Overall, a few issues with none of them being major and if anything, gameplay/combat turned out to be far better than I was anticipating and expecting.
The overall story/plot is good and kept me interested throughout but as someone who will never play the Pillars of Eternity games, a decent amount simply doesn’t hit like it should and im not going to read hundreds of notes and whatnot just to understand all of it. I didn’t like “the voice” aspect at all but it does make sense and fit in with the overall story and premise. I will say that the last few story quests is where everything comes together. Main quests themselves are really good though. Side content wise, most of them are standard but it’s the combat/gameplay that entices and incentivizes you to want to do it all or at least that’s how it worked for me as I wanted to fight more. The bounties and boss fights I thought were really good, again all due to the combat. Character wise, I liked all four of them. I don’t think that any of them are amazing or anything like that but none of them are bad or poor. I see them all as good and solid. Didn’t love them but didn’t hate them either. They get the job done. Writing wise, had no issues with any of it. One character in particular is freaking funny during the companion interactions at Camp. Issues for me besides the voice aspect was mainly not knowing what dialogue option ends a conversation which is annoying and whenever I had an item to give an NPC, I gave it to them right away. I didn’t bother asking questions or anything. It was just “here you go”. Definitely the weakest aspect of the game overall for me personally but the first three aspects won me over so this category being weaker than the rest didn’t bother me at all.
Avowed for me personally is a great action RPG (emphasis on action) that isn’t hardcore at all so anyone expecting that going into the game will most likely be disappointed. The world, visuals, atmosphere, immersion, environments along with excellent music, sound and voice acting all come together with an excellent combat/gameplay system that is addictive and so much fun and enjoyable to play. Exploration is great as due to the combat, you really want to see everything and what else you can come across and find as you’re exploring each region. out of the now ten Microsoft published games that I have completed this generation, Avowed is their third best game behind Starfield and Halo Infinite campaign respectively. So yeah, I loved Avowed which I knew I was going to once I went through the prologue. Hoping Obsidian adds a new game plus mode but knowing how everything plays out, I understand why they didn’t. At the very least, im hoping for an expansion as there’s definitely some areas on that world map that can definitely be used for the future. If not, then im hoping they just go straight to the sequel. With my first completed Obsidian game under my belt, I look forward to later this year barring any delays to what Obsidian will give me with the sci-fi action RPG, The Outer Worlds 2.
Along side Avowed, I started playing Balatro and a pretty fun game. I don’t know how long I will play it as I lose interest quickly with most vard games, Solateire being one of the few I keep returning to.
But I’m doing alright in it, the 21 rounds being my current record. But I’m wondering how long a full game is.
Currently playing Towerborne. Level 28. Ace Level 13. Playing as the Shadowstriker class. Game is great, addictive and a ton of fun!!
It’s fun ! You can play solo if you want (waiting for proper matchmaking though) and you can play a couple missions a day, which can take a few minutes each, and feel like you’ve made progress. I hope they have some endless content ready because what they have is pretty great. It also, weirdly enough, would be a great game to play on the go. I could see me playing on the cloud regularly if it really lifts off and got serious content and updates.
Agreed and I do!!! lol 
Playing Avowed still. Looks like I might finish that today though!
Nice. How are you liking the game?
Still playing Clair Obscur, even started a new game before the end because I was curious if I had improved at all and after running around a bit, I noticed that yeah, I have definitely improved and we can power level pretty quickly in this game just by doing a one fight over and over again.
Wrote about it in the backlog thread! 
I haven’t posted here since November last year so I’ll do an update…and it’s a good one I think. My gaming schedule since the last post (in which I was writing about beating Alan Wake 2) it’s this:
Black Ops 6 → Metaphor: ReFantazio → Neva → Indiana Jones and the Great Circle → Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess → Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii → Yakuza 0 → South Of Midnight (throw some Ridge Racer 6 bits in there as well) and right now I am playing Mafia Definitive Edition which I am planning to beat before DOOM hits next week.
To say that this is a freakin’ awesome streak of games and I am having a ton of fun is an understatement…between the great 1st party releases, game pass being completely insane quality wise, lots of awesome 3rd party games releasing as well and having a huge backlog (that goes back to the 360 lol) I think that this is the best Xbox has ever been IMO and I’ve been in the Xbox journey since 2003. If playing good videogames is what you care about (and not the BS surrounding the games) Xbox is the best console/ecosystem in the console space by far. 
I am playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and I just reached Act 2. I love this game! Amazing story and music! The dodging, jumping and parrying is fun and so satisfying. The building and leveling up your characters is amazing and seeing the strength of my team is amazing and the synergies of skills and abilities! I think I am learning the mechanics of the Dark Souls genre with grinding and leveling and saving and the enemies respawn. I might take a crack at Elden Ring on Xbox! I didn’t understand the moment to moment of Elden Ring but now I get it after playing CO: Expedition 33. My only negative is the lip sync in the beginning was not good. When you are in caves it is way too dark and I have to turn down the contrast and increase the brightness.
Man I’m playing Khazan right now and this is by far the hardest souls game I have ever played.
I’ve beaten all from games, lies of P, lords of the fallen, surge 1 and 2, wo long, nioh 1 and 2, the final fantasy souls game. Probably some others I’m forgetting about. No problems whatsoever. Khazan is absolutely kicking my ass.
I’m just about ready to finish with Clair Obscur, I have embravlced the Maelle can one shot a lot of things. Well everything, but I don’t know how to build her to do more than 20 million damage with some set up.
Currently trying my luck at the games optional bosses and I have cleared all but 1. I don’t know if I will defeat this boss without lowering the difficulty, even then I have my doubts, but I’m not going to linger on for too long. If I can’t win, I just going to finish the game.
I don’t usually try to hold to a rigorous “backlog” but now that South of Midnight is done, I am finishing up Black Ops 6 and Vessel of Hatred campaign before digging into Clair Obscur. I can tell this game is gonna kind of take over. Except for when I occasionally pop into Cyrodiil…
On my Ally, just finished Steamworld Dig 2 and now starting to make some progress in Bug Fables.
Absolutely nuts that every game I just mentioned is Game Pass, minus Bug Fables which I bought after it was on the service.
That’s it for Clair Obscur, loved it and it was a ton of fun.
One thing though, for anyone still wanting to have the same feeling of challenge towards the end.
Don’t use painted power, as that ability is intended for side content/super bosses that can get nutty with how much health they have.
Speaking of, I gave up in that last boss I was fighting because while I felt I was making progress in both damage and surviving. He if I do too much damage and he gets a turn he just removes my party from the game.
So the only way I will beat him, is to look up how to minmax Maelle into do8ng over 50 million damage in a one shot.
Jumped back into Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey after a long break. This time I will tackle all the DLC and wrap this awesome game up.
Currently Playing South Of Midnight!
The game looks great, the music is fantastic and for what it is the combat is very good. It’s all about using those three skills to kill enemies quicker, with so far I’m on chapter 5 and have gotten all available upgrades and everything is going mostly smoothly.
The downsides are the traversal not allowing us to combo somethings together like making platforms as we fly, the camera felt pretty blah until I went into the settings and upping sensitivity to 150 and camera smoothing down to 10. That allowed for me to feel like I have much better control of the Hazel, as well as turning off camera follow.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t solve the issue with the camera when climbing because it tends to want to be in a certain position to hide some hazards, or move into a position that feels awkward, but at least we can tilt the camera to give us a little more visibility.
My last issue is again, the camera, I don’t enjoy when Hazel says something, and I lose control of it to see what she’s pointing out. To me, whenever that happens, I generally start looking around on my own to spot it and just having the camera grab turn on its own is annoying. But camera issues aside, I am enjoying my time with the game.
edit: Just wanted to throw more shade at the camera, because I was in the middle of a jump when I lost control of the camera and almost fell into the water.
But how’s the camera?