From a draft written somewhere around October 2016… I finally got around to watching Amazon’s teaser video, thinking that it would erase my earlier skepticism and soften my opinion about their upcoming games, and maybe even start to get excited about the possibilities. Unfortunately it only pushed my skeptical buttons even harder. “What if a game was built for Twitch,” wonders a voiceover 12 seconds into the video. Instant buzzkill. The video goes on to mention Twitch about five times in the first 60 seconds, before anything about games. If we go with the assumption that what they put into the very beginning of their video is the “hook” and therefore the most important message they want to deliver, we have to assume that Twitch integration is the most important part of their design philosophy for these games. And if Amazon making games to target Twitch viewers is not a corporate-synergy-driven game design, I don’t know what is. It’s as if they accidentally put the video meant for their shareholders out to the public. (317 words.)

Another post rescued from my drafts… Book 14 begins with Laerdan preparing for a journey south. He asked me to collect a bunch of gear for him that he left strewn around Eriador, because the hero’s journey always involves fetching stuff. It was a lengthy, boring scavenger hunt. When I returned to Rivendell, Laerdan was gone. In a note, he said he sent me away so I wouldn’t interfere. I spent all that time collecting his gear for nothing. But I wasn’t bitter about it. Much. (628 words.)

It’s a heart. Valentine’s Day? February? A perfectly logical picture for this post. Games played in February, according to ManicTime. A pretty strong survival game theme here. :) 7 Days To Die - 67 hours Conan Exiles - 62 hours* Rise of the Tomb Raider - 9 hours ARK - 4 hours The Secret World - 2 hours ESO - 2 hours * Conan Exiles approximated since ManicTime counted every new version as a different game. (76 words.)

Bust of Janus, from Wikimedia Commons. Get it? Janus? January? Hey any picture is better than nothing. Better late than never, here are the games I played in January, according to ManicTime: Final Fantasy XIV <td> 76 hrs </td> Elder Scrolls Online <td> 15 hrs </td> Lord of the Rings Online <td> 12 hrs </td> Morrowind <td> 7 hrs </td> Novus Inceptio <td> 2 hrs </td> Star Wars: The Old Republic <td> 2 hrs </td> (Only games played 2 hours or more shown.) (117 words.)

_Rescued from the drafts folder…_ Blatantly stolen from therepopulation.com because I don’t have any screenshots. I was initially glad to hear that The Repopulation will be coming back. I splurged in a moment of weakness and bought it for $20 on Steam back in February 2015. I don’t remember why I bought it. I think I had heard some positive feedback about it, and I had heard also it described as being heavily inspired by Star Wars Galaxies, and I was curious to see what a SWG-like game looked like. (I’ve never even seen SWG, let alone played it.) (465 words.)

So I’m going to write some more about 7 Days To Die since it’s all I’ve been playing lately, and there’s this weird expectation that bloggers are supposed to post things occasionally. I gave up on Conan Exiles because I already feel like I’ve done everything in the game, or I should say I’ve seen all the game mechanics that are in the game. Those mechanics are: Gather stuff, build stuff, and kill stuff. Everything you gather is gathered the same way: Either pick it up by hand, or hit it with a tool. Everything you build is built the same way: Put the component in your hot bar and place it where you want it. (This includes thralls.) Everything you kill is killed the same way: Shoot it with a bow or crossbow, or hit it with a melee weapon. (Or hit it with a club if you want to drag it back to base and make a thrall out of it.) (1387 words.)

Stolen from their web site because I don’t have any pictures for a post about this game. As I was catching up on MMORPG news story titles in my feed reader, I noticed that Revelation Online had started Early Access on February 27. For all intents and purposes, this is what we would normally call a game launch. You have to buy a Founder’s Pack to access the game “early,” but supposedly there will be no more character wipes, which sounds a lot like a launch to me. Certainly plenty of other MMORPGs have made a huge deal about this kind of event (eg. ArcheAge). (360 words.)

I played a large amount of 7 Days To Die this weekend. I finally discovered some things to make the game more enjoyable beyond the 7th day. A trip to the market. I bought 7DTD way back in February 2015 for $25. That must have been before my $10 rule or a random exception, because I don’t think I’d heard about the game beforehand. I didn’t play it very much in 2015 because it was still early, but it was fun, and I liked what they were doing with it. It’s been on my desktop pretty much all the time since then. (3025 words.)

You might be wondering why I’m still talking about Conan Exiles after trashing it for two posts in a row. Welllllll, see, it’s still kind of fun. :) Some random shrine of some random priest. It has that same sort of addictive crafting progression treadmill that ARK has: I want to see everything you can craft, so I have to keep leveling up and unlocking new recipes and finding more and more resources. And every time you craft something new, it helps speed up the leveling and searching for more resources. And there’s always something cool to craft just out of reach. So it’s kind of a vicious cycle that will continue until I either run out of things to craft and/or can safely walk anywhere on the map. (I quit playing ARK after I could craft winter-weather protection and a rifle which could kill any dinosaur I encountered.) (851 words.)

My recent test drive of Conan Exiles and a comment from Jeromai reminded me of a topic I once started writing about but never finished, which I will now take up again: What makes a good survival game? What defines a survival game? The Forest (way back in 2015) What prompted me to visit this topic was a comment from Jeromai: That he became more interested in Conan Exiles after hearing you could play it solo. I think it highlighted one of the current problems with the survival genre: There’s a perception that survival games are defined as PvP last-man-standing games like H1Z1 King-of-the-Kill, ARK Survival-of-the-Fittest, Rust, etc., where your only goal is to log in and try to murder everyone in sight, basically like Quake Deathmatch in 1997, only using stone knives and bear skins instead of rocket launchers. (1275 words.)