Gaming

Still working through Stardew Valley. Burnt out on it as I reached a point where the only thing missing from finishing the community center was waiting for autumn and I was at the end of Spring so a whole season of just busywork kinda killed the mood for the game. But I ended up reaching autumn and clearing the community center bundles so I've got new things waiting, but I need to take some time off from the game to have the desire to continue.

Meanwhile decided to give Helldivers 2 another chance. I had forgotten how enjoyable the core gameplay loop of Helldivers 2 is. There's something so satisfying about calling in airstrikes to blow up a bunch of bots (Since the action is happening primarily on the bot side I haven't fought bugs or whatever the third faction are called) and it's amazing how naturally cinematic the game is. You can easily end up in cinematic moments without any of them being scripted. But it's not without flaws. I've ran into game breaking bugs (objectives that can't be completed, extractions where you can't enter the ship, stratagems that bounce indefinitely) which are things that should be fixed considering the game has been out for 2 years now. I also don't particularly enjoy the macrogame aspect of it and I hoped they had figured it out by now. There was a major order to "liberate" the bot homeworld but the order had limited reinforcements that for whatever reason were galactic-wide (so anyone dying to bugs also depleted the reinforcements) and the liberation progress is the same regardless of the difficulty which means playing on lower difficulties was actually better for the goal as the rewards are the same but you die less so you waste less of the reinforcement budget. The galactic-wide budget just creates division in the community because some people will never fight bots and continue fighting bugs and those players will get blamed for wasting the budget (even if the budget might account for their deaths) and the progress being same for all difficulties puts the order at odds with fun because higher difficulty is more fun but also more deadly so you're going to waste more of the budget on higher difficulty but still get the same outcome as if you had played the lowest difficulty. Overall, it's pretty fun if you don't care for the wider galactic war.