Steven Messner has been playing the Elsweyr expansion for The Elder Scrolls Online, which has added dragons to the MMO as well as a nation of cat-people. He's found those dragons underwhelming (opens in new tab), at least compared to the ones in Skyrim. It was always amusing to climb a hill and find one of Skyrim's big lizards in a drawn-out battle with a bear.
Joanna Nelius has been playing each new episode of Life is Strange 2 as they come out, and spoke to lead writer Jean-Luc Cano about the series' take on parenting (opens in new tab). I'm planning to play the whole series after it's done this time, so I'm avoiding spoilers like I'm dodging bullets.
Octopath Traveller is a JRPG with eight characters and eight storylines, though it sounds like it doesn't really bring them together in a satisfying way (opens in new tab) according to Chris Schilling. The retro art does look neat, though. Maybe this is another game to add to the list of things to play in retirement.
Tom Senior's playing Lornsword, an Early Access RTS game that's designed for split-screen co-op with controllers (opens in new tab). It's an unusual idea and I'm intrigued to see if they can make it work. Sounds like they're part of the way there at the moment, with a few frustrations to get rid of and rough patches to smooth over, but that's what Early Access is all about.
Jon Bolding has been playing Cliff Empire, a post-apocalyptic city-builder (opens in new tab) where the remaining cities stand on towering plateaus that rise above deadly nuclear fog. You've got three cities to look after, each specializing in different products and trading with each other while resisting raids from below. It's another Early Access game but damn if it doesn't sound promising.
Samuel Horti has been playing a city-builder as well—Anno 1800. It's got him interested in the history of the New World during the Industrial Revolution, so he spoke to some historians to find out how its vision lines up with actual history (opens in new tab).
I've been playing Outer Wilds, a game about exploring a cute little solar system. I'm a four-eyed alien and so are the other friendly explorers dotted around these dinky planets that are only a bit bigger than the one from The Little Prince. I'm not into the way my spaceship controls, or the first-person jumping bits. Every time you die in Outer Wilds you loop back to the start and, even if you don't fall into a hole or drown, every 20 minutes the sun goes nova and you're killed anyway. Puttering across space to get back to the puzzle I was trying to solve before I died is a bit of a chore. Everyone else seems to like this game, but to me it feels like an entire game of MMO corpse runs.
Enough about us. What did you play last week? Anyone replaying the Baldur's Gate series in anticipation of the third one (opens in new tab)? Still playing Mordhau, or Total War: Three Kingdoms? Let us know!
