The Halloween game from Google today is a lot of fun.

https://g.co/doodle/fs36bv

Was looking through my PS4 back-catalog, and saw that I apparently grabbed Deus Ex: Mankind Divided when it was free at some point. Looks cool, and the DE love in the game tourney has me intrigued. Am downloading now, will give this a world this weekend.

Nice! I plan to get back to Red Dead tonight or later this weekend after a week away from gaming.

I'll tell you what I'm not playing. Oregon Trail

The finalists had great teams, Ruddo. C'mon bruh.

What's a good retro old school lookin Xbox rpg??

Just got Return of the Obra Dinn last night and sunk a coupla hours into it - having a lot of fun so far, though the music is pretty grating.

Played this for about 45 mins last night. Into story is basic AF, and your character's beard styling is ridiculous; I think this is a game targeted at 13-year olds. But things got more interesting once I actually started interacting with the environment. Looks to be some crafting, some fighting, some exploration, some inventory management -- but it all looks pretty balanced and not too big in scope, so I'll keep at it for a little while.

But also, the game tourney rekindled my love affair with Rocket League, and I am loving it.

Upgraded to the Xbox One X today. Also got FIFA 19, Gears Of War 4, Tekken 7, Battlefield 1, Dirt 4, Forza Horizon 4, Forza Motorsport 7, Dante’s Inferno and Race The Sun, and I recently bought Destiny 2. Should be interesting. Moving the saves over now.

My goodness, that's a lot of games.

Battlefield V (new one set in WW2) just launched and it's like a half-finished game. Based on their past support cycles, I know they can sort this out, but it's going to take a while. It's so frustrating to play.

Bargain as well. The Forza games came with the machine, FIFA was half price at the store, three of the games were free downloads, and Gears, Tekken and Dirt were all heavily discounted for black Friday online.

Nice finds.

What's wrong with it? Have you played many of the older installments, or only Battlefield 1?

Got Hollow Knight Voidheart Edition and Steam World Dig 2 for $17. Only played Steam World Dig 2 so far. I'm really into it.

Great deal. Both games are well worth it.

Only played Battlefield 1, it's my favorite game of all time. I've also played Star Wars Battlefront (also from EA/Dice).

Where to begin? These are all my thoughts, but plenty of people over on r/Battlfield_Live (bug and patch tracker for the series) agree with everything I'm saying here:

Visibility
They went super detailed with this one, to the extent that you can't see anybody until they shoot at you. EVERYTHING is super textured and detailed, and then on top of that they've continued to build on the visual FX that were in BF1 -- so you've got Motion Blur, Chromatic Aberration, Film Grain Effect, Vignette, and Lens Distortion. The lightning is also totally broken, all sorts of weird extreme shading things happening depending on how the light is falling on your play zone. So at a basic level, it's extremely difficult to see anything; you've got to turn all those effects off, then crank the brightness up very high so those shading bugs don't cast an alleyway into total darkness.

Text and icons are also invisible, both from being extremely small, and with no anti-aliasing. Good luck identifying where the objective is, where an ammo crate is, where an enemy is, and even the text on the weapon unlocks is often illegible because there's no contrast between the text and the background.

All of this adds up to effect the overall gameplay: Now players will just hold totally still, because they know you won't see them. First one to move gets killed, because TTK (time to kill) has been dialed waaay down, though they say there's a fix coming for TTK in December.

Audio
Oh my gosh, it's really awful. Battlefield 1 had some of the best sound design I've ever heard. For BFV, they've introduced "3D Audio," basically binaural processing that is horribly broken. There are no footsteps or vehicle sounds to be heard until a player is right on top of you, and that's no exaggeration.

All the gunfire and explosions are horribly neutered, and there's no reverb processing like in BF1 -- so bullets sound exactly the same whether you're in an open field, or in a library. Seriously some amateur hour audio choices. And the 3D Audio is also bugged, so that not only does it cut in and out, switch to mono for a second, then all of a sudden sound super muffled, before returning back to "normal," but the bullet direction audio is broken too, so bullets passing from left to right may sound like they're being fired from another direction entirely. Identifying enemies and vehicles via sound location was vital to success in BF1, and it's not even applicable to BFV right now.

I think they'll sort out all the visual stuff in good time, but I'm pretty worried that even once it's fixed, the audio will continue to underwhelm.

General Bugginess
Lots of graphical looping: You try to enter a tank and get stuck in an entry loop, forever climbing into the tank until you finally just go to the menu and Respawn. Same thing with climbing over certain objects. TONS of asset overlap: You'll get killed in a second story building, and your dead player's feet will be sticking out through the wall into the air above the street outside.

There's also some bad draw distance bugs, depending on how many visual FX you have turned on, and how fast your connection speed is. But imagine running through a field of tall grass, and you can literally see the blades still being rendered about 20 yards ahead of where you are currently running.

Menu trees are broken. Want to change your main weapon, your secondary, and your gadgets? You'll have to enter/exit the customization menu a different time for each item.

Gameplay Changes Are A Mixed Bag
Some core gameplay changes are smart, and could improve the series if they sort all this other crap out. Attrition is a good change -- you now start low on ammo, but with one med pack for all players. You have to find a resupply right away, and there's no more ammo/medical pouch spamming; you can only toss pouches to players who actually need them. But while resources are limited, you can find ammo pouches on players you kill, which is pretty great.

The vehicle system is good, I think. Now the squad leader gets to keep track of in-game points, and you get an alert every time you can call in a different reinforcement. I wish I could spawn in a plane sometime and tell you if the dogfighting is still great, but I have yet to see an open plane, or if it's available, I can't find the icon on the spawn map because everything is so tough to see.

The Fortifications mechanic is awesome, anyone can now build walls, barbed wire, stationary weapons. It might be tedious for some, but I really enjoy the extra layer of strategy it adds.

Weapon choices are...weird. Assault players get a single action rifle with a scope very early on, while Medics get sub-machine guns. Recon and Support are (so far) still in the same wheelhouse with Bolt-Action and LMG, respectively. Grenade choices are limited when you start playing: Some classes get incendiary, others get impact grenades. I unlocked smoke grenades for the Medic, but have yet to see them available for any of the other classes. This will probably open up as I progress, but initial choices don't all make a ton of sense.

Overall
I'm familiar with the Dice support cycle by now. I expect a big patch once a month for the next two years, with occasional hot-fixes for game-breaking bugs. I suspect they'll have the bulk of the issues ironed out in 3-6 months time, but am worried that the sound will forever suck, and that if BF1 is any indication, these lighting issues are going to stick around for a while.

The game has a TON of potential. Maps are great, and gameplay changes are smart. But unless you're a die-hard who wants to level up your character early, I'd say wait for 2-3 months to see the status of the game.

Hey, everybody, help me pick which game to play next. Here's what I have lined up and the pros ans cons of each in my mind:

Horizon Zero Dawn - Excited about everything I hear about this game and its world. But would have to learn a whole new play system, which takes some getting used to.

The Witcher 3 - Excited about how deep this game is, but also wondering if the limited amount of time I have to play--an hour per day if that--will make it hard to scratch the surface.

No Man's Sky - Always been intrigued by this game and got it on sale for $10. I've heard all the knocks against but it seems like it might be fun to lose myself got 45 minutes each day eith some exploring.

Bloodborne - This was on PS+ and I'm not sure I would've bought it otherwise. I know it's very highly-regarded, but I've never played any games of its ilk and am a bit intimidated by its difficulty.

Thoughts? I am sure I have more games in my catalogue, too--anything that's ever been on PS+, for starters.

HZD is incredible, so that would be my vote. Of the others I've only played The Witcher (boring and overrated) and Bloodborne (fun but you'll spend 30 of your 60 minutes per day dying/restarting).