EA as in early access, sorry for invoking electronic arts. AOW4 and Spellforce aren’t RTS… they’re more 4x, with turn based combat. Check out some videos on them and you’ll see how they play.

I ran into friends online who were playing, and I complained. $70? Cash shop? Battle pass? Ignore everything but the $70. The battle pass and cash shop shit is all cosmetic, so if you’re like me and can’t stomach paying for horse armor… just play the game. One time $70, and if you’re into this kind of game, you can get years of enjoyment. Or at least a few months. What really irked me though was having to install battle.net again, and the month it took to install that fucking client. The game moved faster (once I found the settings to uncap download speeds).

Oh boy. Firstly Pathfinder: WotR was awesome. Lately I’ve been on cozy/sim kicks for some reason. Lots of EA games too. I’ve played most of Travellers Rest (decent, EA), Sun Haven (awesome, complete), Roots of Pacha (cool/different, complete). Waiting on some updates for The Ranchers (kickstarter - EA soon). Also played some tech tests for Palia (Cozy MMO? NDA active!) For strategy/4x games, I put some time into Spellforce, Against the Storm, Age of Wonder 4, and fired up Thea 2 again. All solid games. When I want to suck at games I hit Noble Fates, Dwarf Fortress, Necesse. If I want to be a rock star I fire up Vampire Survivors, or the EA for Starship Troopers. However, the other day I picked up Diablo 4, all seventy fucking dollars of it, because some friends from across the country were digging it, and now I’m level 30+ already because games are addicting.

The struggle though - Startfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 coming out within like a week of each other (or a day if you preorder). Fortunately at least Starfield is going to be on Xbox PC Game Pass, so I won’t have to shell out for it until it’s on sale and I want to play through it again with a whole new set of untagged achievements on steam. Like I did when I completed Skyrim, and got the special edition as a separate install for a fresh set of cheevos. Ugh.

Great time to be a gamer, but not enough time to be a gamer. :)

The first game was fun, but admittedly I played it through once. Mostly I wanted to support them because I played the absolute hell out of the web game back in the day.