Endgame Viable

It’s been another odd gaming month. I thought I would be playing a lot of Sekiro, but it turns out I’m just not in the mood for it, or any games really. I’ve gotten much more enjoyment from consuming plain old non-interactive video content in my free time (ie. mostly Critical Role). Sekiro, 28 hours. I am currently on the “Guardian Ape” boss and not terribly interested in putting in the repetitive practice needed to get past it. I’m also recording my playthrough so I not only have to be in the mood to play the game, but also in the mood to record and talk about it, so it’s doubly difficult. Honestly I’m not enjoying it as much as the previous Souls games. 7 Days To Die, 16 hours. I’m pretty surprised I played for this long actually-I feel like some of this might be AFK time. Anyway, this is the game I’ve turned to when I want to do something with my hands while listening to Critical Role. The newest version (17.2 I think) seems to have a lot more difficult survival mechanics than previous versions. Albion Online, 3 hours. I tried out the free-to-play release. I found it was surprisingly interesting in the first hour but it became apparent in the second two hours that the gameplay would probably never change, so I felt like I’d seen everything the game had to offer. Conan Exiles, 2 hours. I tried it again for the first time since the Early Access launch. I thought more would be different, but it’s still pretty similar. The new combat didn’t seem like much of an improvement to me. Anyway, since the map was the same, I didn’t really want to repeat what I’d already played before. Elder Scrolls Online, 2 hours. Continuing the search for the elusive hook to get back into that game. Just can’t find it. No PS4 games. I didn’t even turn it on in April. (327 words.)

MassivelyOP asks: “How obsessively do you plan your characters?” At first I thought they meant the *appearance* of your character. So I tweeted my usual I-can-say-everything-that-needs-to-be-said-about-MMOs-in-one-sentence-and-hoo-boy-does-that-make-blogging-hard response to most discussion topics: Honestly these days I just click randomize a bunch of times and then "Enter Game" … I've been burned so, so many times spending an hour in character creation only to find that everyone looks exactly the same from the back. (797 words.)

Literally the only superhero-related screenshot from a game I have. This is Colossus from Marvel Heroes. The big story in MMORPG news lately is about City of Heroes, the second-most talked about dead game after Star Wars Galaxies. Apparently, somebody has been working on (yet another) City of Heroes emulator in secret. There’s a lot of drama around it, because of course there is. I don’t know all the details and it’s tiresome to read through the articles about it. (742 words.)

I’ve had nothing at all to write about for the last month except Critical Role and Sekiro. I can’t write about Critical Role because a) most people don’t care and b) any discussion of it would basically be 100% spoilers and c) D&D isn’t really my thing anyway. I can’t write about Sekiro because there’s nothing much to say except “I’m playing Sekiro.” It’s not the kind of game that lends itself to a lot of discussion. It’s a bit like Pac-Man-you either play it or you don’t, there’s not much to say during the process. (Unless you want to start a Big Internet Fight about whether games should be hard or not. That was just one of a billion different links provided for context.) (1195 words.)

March was a veritable explosion of gaming variety for me. I dropped Dwarf Fortress like a hot potato (just when people were starting to like my videos, oops) and picked up Souls again in anticipation of Sekiro. Not that there’s anything wrong with Dwarf Fortress, but nothing compete when the From Software fever hits. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, 16 hours. The new game from From Software. I just love writing “from From Software” and do it every chance I can. I’m not sure what I think of it yet. Dark Souls III, 12 hours. This time was spent re-playing the The Ringed City DLC to get back to where I left off when my SSD crashed in 2017. Then Sekiro arrived and I stopped. (I also love writing “the The Ringed City DLC.”) The Division 2 Open Beta, 2 hours. It was kind of fun, but not worth a full price purchase for me. Dark Souls Remastered, 2 hours. Finishing up the Dark Souls Remastered Casual Nostalgia Tour video series. Maybe I’ll get to Manus and Kalameet in New Game+. Lord of the Rings Online, 2 hours. A somewhat generous rounding-up. I finished Volume II, Book 7, Chapter 8 “The Secret Road” and I’m back outside again! Still haven’t gained a level though, holding steady at 62. ANTHEM Open Demo, 1 hour. A generous rounding-up of time played. It just didn’t appeal to me. Considering that even the superfans are giving up on it already, it’s probably just as well. The rest of the month’s time was taken up watching or listening to Critical Role hehe. Which was, in fact, more entertaining than playing most games. (276 words.)

Just some quick spoiler-free bullet points about the first five-ish hours of Sekiro, the latest game from From Software. It looks like a slightly-improved version of the Dark Souls 3 game engine. It has basically the same bleached-film aesthetic. I’m playing with mouse-and-keyboard to save my thumbs. The implementation is slightly better than Dark Souls 3, which was better than Dark Souls, but it’s still probably going to be “best” with controllers. I’m regularly cursing how inefficient it feels to find the right keys and buttons, and this is after spending a good 10 hours practicing with mouse and keyboard in Dark Souls 3 The Ringed City. There’s no character creation and very few stats. There’s only one weapon and combat style (so far). The combat is very different from Dark Souls. There’s a focus on “deflection” which seems to be a hybrid of blocking and parrying. I’m terrible at parrying in Souls so this is not good for me. There’s no stamina management, but “posture” management. Timing is everything, and there’s very little room for error. I don’t quite have a handle on it yet. Experience with Souls is not necessarily helpful here. There are no player messages or multiplayer components (yet?). I get the sense they simplified the UI from the Souls series in a deliberate attempt to make it more accessible. There’s only one equipment “slot” to manage, as opposed to the four (item, spell, left and right hand) in Souls. There’s more “environmental storytelling” (in the form of overhearing conversations and such) than any Souls game. There’s a very prominent stealth component that isn’t in any Souls game. It’s skating around the edges of being a full-on stealth game, if you want to play it that way. You can also charge headlong into every fight if you want to (and frankly I have more success that way). The grappling hook is a bit more limited in its use than I expected. It works like what I remember of Far Cry Primal, where you can only grapple to pre-determined points around the environment. Sometimes you’ll see places you *should* be able to reach, but can’t because the game didn’t put grapple points there. The death penalty seems more forgiving than Souls, because there’s a limited-use resurrection-in-place. You don’t necessarily have to go all the way back to the last checkpoint. (But there’s still a cost.) I don’t quite have a handle on this system yet either. In general, it seems like they made a conscious effort to pick and choose some but not all of the elements from the Dark Souls gameplay formula, then sprinkle in some elements from games like Assassin’s Creed, to make a new game that would have a more “mainstream” appeal. The default voiceovers are Japanese, and the Japanese voice actors sound more professional and interesting than the English ones. The combat is pretty frustrating for me so far with mouse and keyboard. I’ve hit a pretty hard roadblock merely 5 hours in. I get killed over and over and over again, I’m early or late on every deflection, I dodge right into every attack, and I feel like my Wolf is hitting with the strength of a wet noodle. I think my Souls experience is getting in the way of doing well in Sekiro. (629 words.)

Google announced a new gaming “platform” curiously named Stadia. It’s a lot of things, but in simple terms I’d call it a cloud gaming service, similar to that OnLive service that died a horrible death some time ago. But it’s more than that. On first glance, I’d say it has about as much chance of long-term success as OnLive did. It sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. But it does have a few things going for it. (497 words.)

My 2013 MacBook Air died recently. Don’t ask how, because it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever done with an expensive piece of electronic equipment. Okay, I dropped it in some water. It wasn’t in the water for more than a second, and only the keyboard part was submerged, but that was enough. It continued to work while wet, surprisingly enough, but I immediately turned it off to let it dry out, and it hasn’t powered back up since. (Probably because laptops are never entirely “off.”) (1209 words.)

Last week there was a sudden burst of attention for that media juggernaut known as “Critical Role,” the Friends of the RPG community. They launched a Kickstarter to fund an animated show, and smashed through their goals and stretch goals and super stretch goals somehow within a negative amount of spacetime (or so it seemed, without actually paying that much attention), and the tabletop RPG corners of the Internet rejoiced. (3635 words.)

Oops it’s over a week into March and this post is still sitting here waiting for me to attach a picture to it. Hey guess what? I played Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress, 118 hours. ANTHEM Open Demo, 1 hour. I don’t think I turned on my PS4 at any point either. Why did I buy that contraption again? Well, there was a sale. And it’s the only way to play Bloodborne. And oh yeah, because I didn’t realize the PS4 controller was a thumb-destroying device that I’m now actively frightened to touch. (92 words.)