Big releases you're looking forward to this month?

I’ll probably get Farthest Frontier once it leaves Early Access. Which might be many months.

I was originally dead set on purchasing Farthest Frontier when it came into EA on August 9. But that’s the same day as Two Point Campus, which I can play thru Game Pass. So I will probably old off on FF for a bit and see how it changes whilst in EA. I’m not completely sold on the humor and/or graphical style of Two Point Campus (I do NOT find it visually stunning!) so if the bloom wears off the rose quickly, I’ll swap over to FF.

Ahhh yes! That’s one of the other big one I was trying to remember. Thanks!

Didn’t realize that’s an August release. I really liked my free play time with it.

Farthest Frontier Is just releasing to EA? Boooo. Thought it was a real release.

Farthest Frontier for me. :)

Eurogamer gave it an “Essential” rating. They find it really groovy.

It might need its own thread at some point if Qt3 picks it up. It does sound cool.

This one seems to be getting reviews all over the map. Some people really dig it. Others really don’t.

I like the art style, but I never get on with trick chaining games.

Me neither. It actually looks stressful to me.

This month is going to have quite a few big releases.

Game Informer’s list:

I’m chuckling at the listing of Destiny 2: Lightfall being released for Stadia. That’s not happening anymore Game Informer! :)

I’m curious about Hogwarts Legacy - it frustrates me the issues surrounding JKR because this looks like it could be an incredible game, made by a huge team of people none of whom are JKR, and there is this percieved stigma surrounding it. Anyway, if it gets great reviews, I’m going to check it out, probably on PS5 so I can play on my nice TV.

The Settlers is finally coming out? I was looking forward to that and then it got shelved, and then when it came back with maybe a demo or something (?) my recollection was people thought it was kind of shit. I’ll try to keep an open mind, Settlers 7 was really neat.

Atomic Heart looks like it could be a lot of fun, certainly I’ll keep an eye out for reviews!

Blood Bowl 3 is something I should love on paper - I loved the board game back when I was in high school running leagues with my friends - but Cyanide tends to be kind of a trash developer. If there is a career mode with a great little sandbox/simulated league I can play with a custom team, and decent AI, sure, I’ll give it a shot. But for all I know it’s strictly multi-player only, and no thanks.

Company of Heroes 3 could be great, it’s another “wait for reviews” but I love CoH the first (I don’t know if I played more than a few hours of 2 htough, honestly RTS games that aren’t Total War Warhammer have a hard time sinking their teeth in me these days).

Octopath Traveler 2 has made a LOT of changes and updated many mechanics that made the first game mediocre, so I’m really hoping for a great JRPG here and am planning/assuming this will be day one for me.

Labyrinth of Galleria on the 14th is my biggest new game this month - sequel to Labyrinth of Refrain, a fun little dungeon crawl RPG from several years ago, and the word coming out of Japan (where it was a 2020 release) is that the sequel is even better. Just not enough good dungeon crawls out there with Etrian being MIA for as long as it has, so the good ones stand out a bit more for me than some other genres.

Also looking forward to Octopath II (first one was fine-plus, also optimistic for some relatively obvious potential improvements here), and if I have time I’ll probably get sucked into The Settlers… but I probably won’t have time.

You aren’t kidding, tons of games coming out!

Hogwarts Legacy, I am personally going into it as if the game is good, I’ll get it. It’s JK who has issues, not the dev team so that’s what makes it easier for me personally to get it.

As for the rest of the titles, oof…

Company of Heroes 3 - Already pre-ordered. Played the playtests and have over 1.5k hours in the other two titles. Just a brilliant series with devs who listen to their community.

Blood Bowl 3 - Wait and see as the dev team has been known to release jank with their previous titles. Looks fun though!

Atomic Hearts - Looks like a fun super power-ish game with tight shooting and weird/fun enemies.

Wild Hearts - Looks to be a fun take on Monster Hunter and some trap building

The Settlers - Big wait and see as this took a lot of turns and seems to have gone a different direction than previous titles.

Returnal - never played on console but heard this is good so I am looking forward to it!

Which doesn’t include the game I’m looking forward to that releases on the 3rd. Not much of a list, I guess.

Spellforce: Conquest of EO

To be fair, it’s really hard to keep track of PC releases. I tried a couple of times for the weekly wallet threat level, and there’s just too many releases every week, so it’s hard to track what is in that firehose of releases.

That’s fair. They just announced the release date last week, after all.

Did you pick this up? I’m tempted but curious and looking for some word of mouth before I pull the trigger.

I did, probably have fifteen hours in it. It is very similar to Refrain, in all the mostly good and occasionally weird ways. (I think my mind had blocked out some of the more awkward anime-trope stuff in the script, and yeah, same style writing for both good and bad.) All of the exploration/battle/item systems are there the same or better, and the dungeon design has been similarly great so far. Overall it more than qualifies for “if you liked the first, you’ll like the second”.

I ended up getting it and playing for a few hours and so far I’m super digging it! I played the demo for the previous game but bounced off when in the tutorial I fell down a pit and landed a floor down and got killed trying to find my way back up and was chided for losing all my puppets. I was already confused by shit like “Covens” and the like, so I admit I got a bit short and uninstalled the game. In hindsight, not a great move on my part - I should have dug in and figured out how the game worked.

But on the other hand, the franchise is now fresh for me and I’d already read (and you confirmed) that basically this is just a better game across the board anyway, so I am figuring things out.

Question - early on you can create your first three characters (puppets) and I did so, but then you are asked to create a brigade. My understanding is that a brigade is comprised of five covens, each containing your characters. But I only seem to be able to create three brigades each with ONE coven, giving me my three characters. I had assumed I’d have a single Brigade and five covens, and assign each character to one of thse availabel coven slots. Why do I have three Brigades each called “Witch’s Brigade”? It’s a bit confusing.

Otherwise, I think I’m understanding the game and systems better and the combat is gorgeous and very fun so far!

Are the first set of pacts named Witch Brigade just to be confusing? I don’t have it in front of me but it could just be that. The basic setup is brigade (party) → five slots for covens (in pacts, which are not exactly the same thing but the words are pretty interchangeable) → each pact contains some number of puppets. (Which are then split between attacker, i.e. participates in combat, and supporter roles, based on slots within the pact.) At the very beginning it’s one active/attacker character per pact, but you’ll get into multiples very quickly, and as the game goes on there are often choices to be made between running one attacker that gets a ton of boosts from the support slots, vs. multiple attackers.