Endgame Viable

Way back in May I was looking for an easy game to play*, and I found the Remastered editions of BioShock and BioShock 2 in my Steam library. They appeared there for free when those editions were released, because I owned the original games. My original plan was to play BioShock 2, because I have owned it since the Christmas sale of 2010 and have yet to play it, but I didn’t remember the original story very well so I started up the first game instead. (831 words.)

News and observations from the week. In The News It’s been another dead week, as far as I can tell. One of these days I’d love to do a statistical analysis to see just what percentage of news articles are about games still in development. I bet it would approach 50%. Last weekend, Tennocon, the Warframe fan conference, happened. The biggest news I remember hearing was Warframe coming to the Switch. That wacky Switch thing seems just crazy enough to work. It’s slowly but steadily gaining momentum month after month. (334 words.)

As I wait for my hands and fingers and thumbs to regenerate themselves, which is taking forever-frankly at this point I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever be able to play an action game with a controller ever again-I thought I would try to injure my hands more by typing up a bit about Demon’s Souls. If nothing else, The Nexus has a lot more artistic style than Firelink Shrine. (978 words.)

Belghast is rebooting Blaugust, so head on over there for all the details (and here for more details). All the cool kids are doing it. I probably won’t be able to participate formally, but I’m sure I’ll post something during the month and I’ll cheer everyone on from the sidelines. This is a screenshot of a cryptic book from Secret World Legends, which is supposed to sort of vaguely remind one of the topic of blogging when one doesn’t have any better images around. (243 words.)

In The News Of course the big controversy of the week was that whole thing with ArenaNet and the influencer and the two writers, which I won’t rehash here. I kind of wish I hadn’t said anything yesterday, because it was “too soon.” I only meant to say I felt kind of guilty about having just written a scathing post about the game. Maybe I’ll revisit it in a few weeks, because I do think there are a lot of different lessons to be learned from the entire catastrophe. (502 words.)

Given recent unexpected events at ArenaNet, I feel pretty awful about my last post on GW2. I’ve expressed displeasure over ArenaNet’s handling of story and gameplay plenty of times here which is exactly the kind of thing that led to the firing of two ArenaNet writers. So I wanted to say a couple of things. Oddly contrite-looking Commander screenshot seems appropriate here. First of all, I absolutely respect any game writer or developer’s right to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that I don’t understand the challenges associated with writing for a game, etc., etc. I don’t know what it’s like to write for a game, and I’m quite sure it’s entirely different from writing a book or writing a blog. I try to keep that kind of thing in mind when I’m commenting on games but sometimes I forget. (772 words.)

After finishing the first part of Living World Season 4, Episode 3, Seized, last week I said that everything had already been said about GW2’s Living World and nothing had changed. I muttered under my breath a lot about that first part-both the story and gameplay-but to be far it was far better than the first part of LW4 Episode 1, which was the video game equivalent of riding in a hot car with a screaming toddler. (2236 words.)

Games Played It’s true, I have a nearly limitless supply of images from Dark Souls to put into my posts. Dark Souls Remastered, 65 hours. It feels like I’ve played a lot more than this, actually. I now know this is beyond the limit of how much I can play a controller game in a month. (I remember once thinking that controller games were easier on my hands than WASD mouse-and-keyboard games, boy was *that* wrong.) The Walking Dead, Season Two, 9 hours. I finally played this Telltale game, some four years after buying it, and some five years after playing the first season, because I was looking for something to do this past weekend that didn’t require much hand activity. The Walking Dead, Season One (400 Days DLC), 2 hours. I realized I never got the 400 Days DLC for the first game so I played through that, too. I *should* have played it before Season Two, but of course I didn’t. Dark Souls III, 2 hours. I started trying to make a new character so I can finish my The Ringed City DLC playthrough, but I abandoned it to rest my hands. Fallout 1, 1 hour. Another game I tried to play because it required only mouse clicking and no WASD movement, but despite loving the game in 1997, it’s a bit of a snooze-fest in 2018. Guild Wars 2, 1 hour. I played the first part of the Living World Season 4, Episode 3, which was the entirety of my MMORPG gameplay for the entire month. I found yet another disadvantage of console gaming because I can’t track anything I play there. I just have to guesstimate that I played a few hours of Demon’s Souls on the PS3 this month, which I also abandoned to rest my hands. (331 words.)

Weekly news and observations. In The News In surprise news, Trion acquired Gazillion’s assets. It’s not all that surprising, actually. After their implosion, I would think Gazillion was selling everything at a deep discount, so why not pick up a whole library of a competitor’s source code? Trion also seems to be trying to turn themselves into something like SpatialOS, which, again, why not? It sounds like they’ll be renting out the technology they already use and maintain for their own games. The gaming industry is more about building game engines now than building games anyway. It’s turning into another record industry, where the artists (the game makers in this case) are the least important part. (Note: That might be a cynical viewpoint.) (672 words.)

To the dismay of I’m sure most people on the Internet, I could write for days about how much Dark Souls pitches exactly into my wheelhouse as a game (mixed metaphor used intentionally because it’s funny), but I’ll try to keep this post focused on just what is different in the PC version of the Dark Souls Remastered edition. In short: There aren’t that many differences. But there are some. As a caveat, I haven’t completed the entire game just yet. But I’m pretty close. I have just three bosses remaining at the time of this writing: Kalameet, Manus, and Gwyn. I’ve spent over 50 hours in the game now and I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the changes. (1368 words.)