Personal Gaming Thread

[BoomerSooner (Banned)]

28 hours into Avowed. Still have not been to the final area and completed the main story. In the three main areas of the map, at least 50% of the map has not been touched. They use a fog of war style map that only shows places you have traveled. I plan to fill it up as the world is a joy to explore. The only reason so much has been unexplored is my desire to level up my armor and weapons and you have to progress the story to go to new areas that have access to better gear and crafting materials. You can still level gear up in the early areas but it takes longer.

The most impressive thing is it has been mostly bug free. One side mission is bugged for me and sometimes a companion gets hit with a shock attack and will stay in that state constantly zapping you until you get into another fight or move to an area that has a loading screen or fast travel.

The minor complaints are the NPC's are pretty lifeless and the enemy types are pretty limited. Plus they only use half of the overworld map. They are planning DLC so I assume that is the reasoning.

[Ted]

I uninstalled it after about 3 hours.  It was completely bland to me.  And the combat just sucks.

Back to Rival Stars Racing.

[Jason]

I've been in a bit of a gaming rut, but I decided to download the PGA 2K25 First Look demo and while the graphics do look much better, it's the new swing stick that I enjoyed the most. I'll definitely grab this when it goes on sale.

I almost bit on Star Wars Outlaws for $35 last week, but my son convinced me to wait until it drops into the 20's.

[Ted]

I almost bit too, but I just can't bring myself to by Ubisoft titles that require me to install Ubisoft launchers and shit on my PC.

Maybe I'll play it on Xbox one day.

[Jason]

I think I'm bored of current games. This is my most anticipated game at the moment:

[Brad Company]

I reached Prestige Master in Blops 6😎

[Ted]

Currently enjoying Sifu.

[Jason]

Currently enjoying Sifu.

It's on my Wish List and just went on sale today for $12 during Xbox's Spring Sale.

I also got a "Just for You" deal on the Xbox Store to get Star Wars Outlaws for $28. It's the first time one of those deals was actually good for me. I'll probably grab it if my son wants it too.

[Ted]

I bought it for $15 on Steam even though it's free on gamepass.  It's good enough that I want permanent access to it.

[Jason]

Been playing a ton of Marvel vs Capcom 2 with my son. I've won 1 of about 40 fights, but I'm still enjoying it. I would have kick his ass back in the day, but those days are long gone 

[Ted]

Been playing (sort of) Dungeon Crawl Classics as a solo RPG, but using ChatGPT as the collaborator.  It's sort of the GM.  In reality I collaborate with it on the creative stuff and fleshing out the story and characters so I guess I'm kind of the GM too?  I'm pretty blown away by what it's come up with.  It's akin to reading a choose your own adventure story, except I'm not adventuring, the 4 NPCs are.  I also don't always pick what they do.  I ask the GPT what the characters are probably thinking based upon their condition and previous experience.  I've made the combat really brutal and deadly so trauma is a factor and a concern.  These guys aren't typical murder hobos.  I don't know how else to describe it.  I will say that the group has had exactly 1 combat encounter, and that went a little rough.  The rest has been a lot of sleuthing and exploring, and figuring out how to survive on the edge of society.  So far the village that they're in has been tolerant of them because they helped clear a barrow, but they have no money and are living as daytalers working for room and board at an widow's homestead.  They were able to sell a sword they got in the barrow, but there was nobody to sell it to in the village until a trader came in (as usual) on the market day.  They got 22 silver for it, but again, there's nothing much in the village.  Most of the residents just make a subsistence living and barter.  The next closest town that has anything is 40 miles through wilderness. 

I will say the GPT is really bad at accounting though.  It plays really fast and loose with facts and chronology and dice rolls.  I got really frustrated after awhile, but as soon as I realized its blind spots things got a lot better.  Now I don't expect it to do what it can't.  What it does well though is pretty amazing.  Although with the fantasy stuff it leans a little to heavy on the woo-woo.  I have to remind it periodically that this is a gritty land grounded in realism and magic is rare.  The most dangerous things are wild beasts, low men, and infection and disease.

So today since I didn't feel like fleshing out any story I decided to try programming a random character generator.  And I did.  In python.  GPT wrote all the code, but I directed what I wanted it to be and after about 3 hours I have a pretty slick little 0 level character generator for DCC.

It's been an interesting few days.

[Jason]

That's awesome. What are you using the edit and run the Python code? MS Visual Studio Code.

My younger son is going to be taking Python programming in high school this fall, so I'm going to get back into programming with it again too.

There's still not much going on in the gaming front, but my younger son wanted to buy Hell Drivers 2 so he could play with some of his friends from school, so I ended up getting it last night. There's supposed to a PS Plus sale this upcoming week, so I'll get a year of the cheapest plan.

If either of you guys still play, maybe we can try it online sometime.

[Ted]

I'll have to check out MS Visual Studio Code.  The first iteration GPT just had me run it in my cmd line.  so I just type something like python dccchar15.py and it spits out an ascii table that I copy paste into the GPT and it  creates a backstory based upon the output.

Then I thought it would be cool if I could waste time playing with it on my ipad or phone so the GPT had me code it on replit and that worked too.   I'm in the process of making it have an html style front end to just click a button and also save a txt file for export.  During the replit process there were some errors in the code when I decided to add random language rolls (part of DCC char creation) that were tricky to overcome.  So GPT wrote some debug code that I pasted in and then when we figured out what was tripping it up and solved that.  That was a bit of actual fun too, the troubleshoot and solve.  I know this must sound like a kindergartner explaining coding to his coder dad, but I actually got a lot out of the experience.

I'm prob getting the terminology wrong, but whatever. 

I'd totally reinstall Helldivers 2 to hang with you guys and fight for democracy.  Let me know!

[Ted]

Oh shit. The download button works. lol

[Ted]

Thalrûn

This is just some of the stuff I've used the GPT to create.  It's all over the place right now, but I thought I'd start to put stuff down to save for later use.

This was the first character GPT created.  When I saw it do this I was kinda hooked.