I finished my second run of Baldur’s Gate 3 with the Ghost Recon team. I made sure to finish up some major side quests I passed the first time around, and to avoid spoilers, let’s just say that my team was so effective that I got the Interfectorem Draconis achievement in one turn. This was still only on balanced difficulty, but now that I’ve played through the entire game with this team, I’m confident it would work on tactician.

I also started and finished Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty this past weekend. BG3 really illustrates you how much more freedom that game gives you compared to most AAA RPGs. Cyberpunk definitely accounts for different builds in a variety of ways, but they’re all predetermined options for you that the game explicitly allowed for, as opposed to BG3’s more systemic approach that allows you to be more creative. So it reminded me how Cyberpunk is a pretty decent RPG, but in a world where we get basically no FPS campaigns anymore, it’s just about all we’ve got on that front, and it does a better than decent job of scratching that itch. There was one mission I didn’t care for, and of the two mandatory boss fights, they mostly entailed sprinting around the room in circles until the boss gives you an opportunity to return fire. Other than those complaints though, it was solid. The story was good, the missions were fun, the presentation was excellent; I’d recommend it if you want more Cyberpunk.

I picked up Dungeons of Aether as a second-screen game while podcasts are on. I expected this to be more of a roguelike, but it’s not really. I can’t say how much procedural generation there is, because I haven’t failed a mission yet, but I’m more inclined to just call it a strategy game that uses dice. I’m totally fine with that; it’s just not what I expected. The game is pretty fun so far.