Endgame Viable

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.)

I tried the open beta this past weekend, because it was free. First, in marketing terms, it was a far better game demo than The Division 1 Open Beta, because you got into the action much faster, and didn’t spend your first 30 minutes just wandering around trying to find where to start. So in that sense, it’s much better. Other than that, there’s nothing much to report. It’s basically identical to the first game, except it takes more CPU and GPU power to run. I’m sure there is some minutia in there that is different and/or improved, but it’s not apparent to me, whose only experience with the game is playing The Division 1 Open Beta. (895 words.)

I think I’m getting a little weary of Dwarf Fortress. I’m starting to detect some repetition in how each game plays out. The outcomes aren’t exactly the same, but the events that happen along the way are starting to feel a bit routine. There’s always artifacts, there’s always a cavern system, there’s always goblin invasions, there’s always forgotten beasts and titans and ettins, there’s always unhappy dwarves, etc. It feels a little like if I build the same fortress plan every time, I’ll get the same outcome every time. If I prepare for goblins using *this* method, I’ll always be able to handle them. If I put *these* things in my fortress, I’ll always be able to make my dwarves happy. If I approach the caverns *this* way, I’ll never have a problem with them. (1676 words.)

Bhagpuss’s recent post and also one of his older posts that I can’t remember-because for some reason I never, ever bookmark things I want to refer to later-remind me of a theory I’ve had for a while now but I haven’t quite been able to articulate, so I’ll give it a shot now. This also touches a little bit on “Gevlon’s final post,” which I haven’t read yet, but Bhagpuss quoted some of it. (875 words.)

I can’t stop chuckling about this so I have to mention it. I got an email. Someone saw my Dwarf Fortress videos on YouTube and sent me a Steam code to try their game. I’m an INFLUENCER now. Live image of a YouTuber becoming an influencer. This is hilarious to me. After 4 years of putting videos on youtube, someone thinks I'm an influencer and sent me a code to try their game… all it takes is 4 long years of punishing work, a thousand hours of video editing, and you get a free game! THE DREAM IS REAL (510 words.)