2024

4 March, 2024. 984 words.

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 02/26

11:39 # By the way I changed my mind and returned Nightingale yesterday. I logged in to play, looked around at the empty map and all the things I needed to build for the quest checklist, and just logged out and said eh I’ll play Nioh instead. So in the new survival game class of 2024, I’ve returned Palworld and Nightingale. Enshrouded is by far the best of the three. It’s just that Enshrouded is more RPG than Survival, so there’s a frick-ton of mental downtime while playing it.
23:36 # Nioh, Lords of the Fallen, and even Lies of P NG+ have all annoyed me greatly tonight. If you thought you’d be overpowered and actually have some fun at the beginning of Lies of P for a change in NG+, like literally every Souls game ever, you’d be wrong. My enthusiasm for Lords of the Fallen has fallen off a cliff in the Sunless Skein with all these crazy OP fire sword dudes every 10 steps. And Nioh is, well, it’s Nioh. I got to the Invitation from the Warrior of the West sub-mission and came to the same conclusion as I did in my first attempt a few years ago: I walked away saying no thank you that’s not for me, but thanks for making my buttons not do anything when I press them, it was really enjoyable and really increased the fun of dying in seconds over and over again as the enemy just chops through all my defenses like butter and I can’t even swing back.

09:14 # Yay an extra day to finish the end-of-month blog post!
09:20 # In Lords of the Fallen I fixed/got/interacted with/clicked on the second of the five skybeams. (I genuinely don’t know what I’m doing to these skybeams in lore terms. Cleansing them I guess?) The second skybeam wasn’t guarded by a big boss, it was just kind of there waiting to be clicked on. A bit of an anticlimax. But then you have to get through all the successive groups of enemies populating the burning streets of Calrath to get there.

09:30 # One problem with Lords of the Fallen is that there aren’t very many hard soul currency drops, so whenever you need to buy something, instead of just going into your inventory and breaking some souls, you usually have to run around farming some souls for a while. Kind of annoying. But great for catching up on podcasts I guess.
21:06 # It has occurred to me tonight that playing a Souls-like game is roughly similar to completing a digital obstacle course.
21:16 # Lords of the Fallen is getting on my nerves tonight because the enemy placements and density are incredibly annoying at the Path of Devotion Memorial vestige. Archers placed to hit you from range from any angle. Strong melee fighters placed to attack you if you get near the archers. Dogs accompanying all enemies, the ones you can’t hit from the front. Umbral Parasites placed to protect huge groups of enemies. The whole works. The optimal strategy for making progress is to run past everything, because it’s impossible to actually kill all the enemies in your path without running out of healing and having to restart every 10 steps. Unfortunately when you run past everything and have a train of 20 enemies following you, hitting and stunning you with random arrows and random teleport attacks constantly, it’s impossible to stop and pick up any items or, you know, look at anything.

08:34 # So apparently the Path of Devotion in Lords of the Fallen is totally optional and not even the path forward in the game. So yeah. Spent all that time being annoyed by enemy placements, scratching and clawing in the mud and trenches for every inch of progress, for nothing. There was literally nothing there except a path back to Skyrest Bridge. Had to go to a wiki to find how to actually get to the next part of the game, which is a door way back toward the beginning of the game. (Apparently I’ve been missing a lot of side quest stuff, which is apparently what the Path of Devotion is for? Something like that.)
11:04 # So the idea of putting a skinny console table behind my gaming desk so that I can attach a mic arm to it has failed. Console tables are extremely light and skinny and this thing will absolutely fall over with a single microphone attached to it. Also the way this one is constructed, the clamp doesn’t fit on the edges of the table anyway. Back to the drawing board.

22:51 # It may shock you to learn that I didn’t care for The Hollow Crow boss very much in Lords of the Fallen, given that it was 90% composed of dodging randomly and hoping you survive. However, it isn’t the worst one of the game. That one could be the one that was before it, Kinrangr Guardian Folard, whose design made me more angry than any boss I’ve seen this year so far. Whoever approved that aggravation simulator should be fired and banished from the gaming industry.

09:10 # My biggest nerd pet peeve with Actual Play D&D shows is when they say “okay that’s double the damage so roll X*2 dice instead of X dice.” I’m not really a math guy but I’m from GenX, which is the first generation that gave us calculators so we stopped learning how to do math, but more importantly the last generation that knows what the concept of math even is, so I have just enough generational math knowledge left to emphatically say that rolling twice the number of dice is definitely not the same thing as doubling the numbers from one set of dice.