The Gaming Attention Span of a Kitten

A friend of mine once commented that it was impossible to play games with me because I rarely stuck to any one game for long.

I’d find something new and fascinating, play it for a couple hours, wax rhapsodic about it to anyone who would listen, beg and cajole for interested parties to join in, and… apparently… if said people ever did jump in, I’d be off running to another game in the next few days, while they were still getting their feet wet and figuring out the old game.

(Now, I did think this was a little unfair, because I’m perfectly game to -reverse- directions and play whatever game that required the multiplayer, or be company as needed… even if it was now several games down my list of “currently playing.”

Ultimately, I think the mismatch was more that the friend and I liked different styles of games. And said friend was more the ‘mastery’ sort of player, who liked to focus on one game at a time – often something I had already sampled in my whirlwind couple of days tour and decided wasn’t really to my taste, so ‘generalist’ me promptly dumped it in favor of something else.)

Then there was the extended period of time where I proved the comment wrong by becoming glued to Guild Wars 2 for the better part of 6-8 years, even if unhealthily so for the last couple of them with the relationship having gotten as rocky as it had, between raids, company troubles and network issues.

But of course said friend is an old friend, and old habits die hard.

Without the socio-contractual obligation of multiplayer games to lock me temporally in place, I’m free and unfettered to zip at will around singleplayer games. And boy, can I zip and zoom.

This makes blogging about games hard.

Possibly even harder than trying to catch me interested in a game for enough time to join in, learn and play alongside.

See, the issue is that if I’m interested in a game, I’m probably going to be playing it, as much as I can, for every waking hour. Blogging time? Ha! I could be -in- the game right now.

Then once I stop being interested in a game, it’s not very exciting to blog about now, is it? And there’s that other shinier game that took my attention away from the first game.

Story of my December, really.

At first, there was Hollow Knight.

I’d bounced off the game once. Platformers are not a favorite genre of mine. I am mostly neutral – I can play them, I will obligingly try 10-20 times for difficult jumps but you may dream on if you think I’m doing 50-100 repeat speedrun trials for mastery sorts of challenges. But mere neutral feelings are hard to hold one’s attention for long if there are more favorite, shinier toys lying around.

The game felt a little too big and complex for me to deal with at the time. Come the end of last year though, what with the story of the real world and all, and I was ready for a Death’s Stranding, a Souls-like wander through ghostly desolate lonely environments.

I absolutely got that with Hollow Knight and its atmosphere, with a side of bug mixed with ghostly spirit.

I went pretty deep into it for a week or two, 19 odd hours, suddenly thrilled by the depth and complexity of the world map, which unfolded like one of those oldschool Final Fantasy affairs, revealing a continent, a WORLD, with ZONES full of potential.

I suppose Metroidvania players will be shaking their heads at this. “Yes, that’s what the word Metroidvania MEANS.”

Me, I’m not a platformer player though. I’ve played neither Metroid or Castlevania (beyond a few rooms in some long ago Game Boy cartridge whose name I can no longer recall.)

Dealing with the scope of the levels required a very particular state of mind. A willingness to get sucked down the worm hole and slowly learn and explore all of its nooks and crannies. Absolutely no other distractions that might detract from the mastery of the map, its items, its bosses, its entirety.

My last achievement in Hollow Knight was dated Dec 9, 2020.

Guess what launched on Dec 10.

Yep, a big Cyberpunk distraction.

I’ve already oozed plenty of opinions on Cyberpunk 2077 in three separate blog posts, so enough said about that.

10 days later, on Dec 20, I reached the Legend of The Afterlife achievement of max Street Cred (so sayeth Steam).

It’s not as glorious as it sounds. It just means that I was in that part of the game where I was patiently visiting every marker on the map, uncovering and doing side quests, and gotten into a less new, more repetitive kind of gameplay loop. Still comfortable. Still immersive. (Ditto the crashes were still a mite annoying.)

I wasn’t ready to be -done- with Cyberpunk. So I was avoiding triggering the main quest and rushing toward an ending. Nor was my system really ready to be -playing- Cyberpunk properly – minimally, Windows 10 sounded like a good idea and maximally, a brand spanking new graphics card with a new computer everything to go along with it.

The supply chain and economics were mostly laughing at that second part, so yeah. Kinda left in limbo.

(Though as of writing this post, I see a new hotfix has dropped today, so maybe I might check it out again soon.)

In the midst of this waffling, Christmas sales waltz right along, and I’m thinking, “Eh, this year, of all years, I definitely deserve to treat myself with stuff I was putting off. Just to be grateful for being alive and being able to still afford such luxuries.”

Before you know it, I’d racked up a collection of assorted games on sale for ~$36 USD, some of which I’ve yet to get around to. What else is new?

• Morphblade – not tried
• Heat Signature – not tried
• It’s a Wipe! – amusing indie that lets you manage an oldschool-feeling MMO raid group by yourself, complete with spammy, scrolling text. Bit primitive and clunky, but is what it is on the cover.
• NEO Impossible Bosses – same idea as above, except with RTS/DOTA controls, and impossibly hard bosses with different raid phases and all. Given that my grasp of RTS controls is about as skillful as a first-time FPS player managing mouselook and keyboard, this moved the difficulty level from “Impossible” to “Inconceivable / Died Repeatedly to Tutorial Boss.” 18 minutes and as many deaths later, I finally gave up. Refunded.
• Mini Healer – yet another spin off with the same idea, except you play the MMO healer keeping your four character party alive against ever more difficult bosses. Best gameplay loop of the lot; captures the action of combat casting and juggling heals over time, instant heals, buff/debuff/dispels, group movement, boss phases, etc. while still simplifying it enough that a single player can manage and find it fun. Recommended.
• Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition – not tried (I’m sure it’s lovely. Stop screaming already.)
• D&D Lords of Waterdeep – have the iPad version, so I knew what to expect, just wanted it on PC to overheat the iPad less. Basically port of the board game. Worker placement, collect resources, spend it on quests, accrue points, sabotage other players in an attempt to earn the most points. Mix of randomness and strategy, I just like the setting and theme.
• DOOM – not tried (yeah, yeah, I know, I’ll get around to it. Some day.)
• West of Loathing – not tried

I -was- going to give West of Loathing a spin next, as I’d really missed Kingdom of Loathing and have been pining away for its standalone sister game for several years. (Just you wait, it’ll show up in a bundle now that I own it.)

Except that I got really really antsy staring at the Hades banner on the Steam store every time I logged in.

It is an EXCELLENT game. Everybody says so. It looks like polished perfection. It has that glossy cel shaded Supergiant aesthetic.

It was nowhere near my usual rule of 75% off for Steam games, nor even 50% off for stuff I know I will play immediately.

Then again, it is a low priced indie game, so the -absolute- value is not exactly prohibitive. The Steam regional price at 20% off put it at around $17 odd SGD, which is around $13 USD, so that’s already very reasonable and quite a bargain…

… BUT it’s not at the discount that I -swore- I’d stick to for most games. It’s the only way I control my Steam purchases and my predilection to amass the most ridiculous Steam games library of all time.

By the way, not interrupting the argument between you two parts of the same brain, but did you know that you can also find Hades on the Nintendo Switch store? It’s also on the Sales and Deal page, but not as cheap, of course. It’s $19.99 USD. Guess Nintendo has to take their cut, and there’s that whole non-regional pricing thing. But you know, just sayin’.

The Nintendo store is not the Steam store. Your sales discount rule doesn’t hold there. We acknowledge that console games are pricier. Do you think we might ever want to play Hades in a portable format? Like on your bed or sofa? It’s an action game. Maybe gamepad controls are better than keyboard/mouse?

But we -are- better at keyboard/mouse controls than gamepad controls… so I dunno… And $19.99 USD is undeniably objectively more expensive than $13 USD.

But then it’ll be portable! And if Hades ever turns up in a bundle, you won’t curse and swear and you’ll ALSO get it on Steam eventually.

Hmm… Hang on, did we ever check whether Hades supports super ultra-widescreen? We always have that spectre to deal with on PC.

Hrm. I dunno. Let me google and find out… Funny, there’s not that much mention of yea or nay. Maybe it doesn’t? But wait, there’s some bits here that says there is some kind of widescreen support. Maybe?

But is it super-ultra widescreen support? Some games are okay with the 2560×1080 resolution, but we have that chonkingly ridiculous 3840 x 1080 that we still very much like, but is admittedly quite nonstandard for some games to cope with.

Oh, oh wait. Oh. Apparently Hades copes with widescreens by putting these decorative skull pillars on either side of the screen where the black bars are…

An unremarked aspect of Hades is the odd skeleton ladies who fill up the edges of widescreen monitors. pic.twitter.com/QtW2OSyfqd

— Matt Boyd (@3PSboyd) November 23, 2020

… WHHHAAAAAT. Are you SERIOUS?!?!

I mean, I guess it’s not so bad on 2560×1080. It’s kind of pretty… if a bit distracting. How about this Redditor who has a 3440×1440 screen?

So, I bought Hades on the Epic games store. What with the art assets and such, I really didn’t expect Ultrawide support. While the game defaulted 3440×1440, I was pleasantly surprised by how well this was implemented – artwork covering the black sides. More non-Ultrawide games should do this! from ultrawidemasterrace

A BIT? We have a 3840 x 1080. We’re going to have the WIDEST chonkiest decorative skull pillars (admittedly, the art is pretty, but it doesn’t mean I want to look at them forever), and about 50% of the screen actually moving at any one time. There’ll be more skull pillar than actual game.

We could play on Windowed mode?

Give me the browser. Let’s go to the Nintendo Switch Store. $19.99 it is. It’ll be portable. It’ll blow up to our monitor resolution without skull pillars and just plain non-distracting black bars. Done.

And that was the longwinded story of how my brain persuaded my brain to buy myself Hades for Christmas.

Suffice to say the PC didn’t get very much use for the next week or two.

Hades is exactly as excellent and polished as they say.

As long as you’re okay with, or won’t freak out over action style combat in the vein of Bastion or Cat Quest, you will very much like Hades. It has self-contained endless replayability down to an iterated science.

It took me 49 attempts to finally reach victory point #1 and escape the Underworld, and surface from my intense love affair with the entire game. The core combat, the atmosphere, the elegance of its roguelike mechanics and loops that unveil that aphrodisiac of game content – story progression – by also losing and dying, not just saving it as a drip fed reward for victorious gameplay.

Apparently, one has to escape the Underworld ten times to maybe exhaust the entire main story. Let alone the side stories. Not to mention, there’s the item / weapon / skill / decoration unlocks. And set-your-own-difficulty challenges. Plenty of gameplay left. Possibly the most worthwhile $19.99 ever spent game-wise.

Absolutely no regrets. Highly recommended.

That landmark day of victory was the 9th of January. Surfacing from the depths of the Underworld back to the land of the living, that is.

For some inexplicable reason, I started to think about Path of Exile.

One Google later, I learned that my internal alarm clock was surprisingly, frighteningly accurate. Heist League, which I’d skipped, was ending. The new Ritual League was beginning on Jan 15.

Perfect timing. One week or so of build research, plotting and planning, and we would be off to the races. (That’s only a metaphor. I play super relaxed SSF.)

I wanted to play a summoner, as it’s one of my easier, favored ways to push deep into the Atlas. But then three days before launch, there was word about lots and lots of necromancer / spectre nerfs or something. So I pivoted to MELEE summoner. Dominating Blow, whoo. Seems to be doing okay so far. Ahh.. the pleasures of screen covered in minions actually doing the dirty work of fighting.

One week later, we are back in the early maps endgame, tinkering along at a comfortably slow and steady pace. It’s getting dangerously close to that stage of “fun, comfortable, still good to play, but maybe there’s something even more interesting on the horizon?”

We’ll see. There’s always a shinier, newer, distracting game at some point.

Without anyone to reel me in or anchor me down, I have the attention span of a kitten. That’s where the “wandering worlds” part of the blog byline comes from. Proud to give it full rein.

Tapas All The Things

Over at Time to Loot, Naithin penned a post about Genre Burnout. It’s something I’ve been idly pondering over recent months.

On one hand, it’s undeniable that I’m off MMOs as a concept, possibly for good.

Nearly 5 years ago, I wondered what would come out the other side of playing a Guild Wars 2 (now with NEW raids included!) after bitterly railing about the toxic divide that introducing raids would cause.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can answer that question. Frustration, definitely. Sometimes at the game, sometimes at myself, sometimes at other people. Mostly the annoyance of having been proven Cassandra-like correct at the gaping social divide amongst players.

Fortunately, drama was mostly averted, save for one incident where boundaries were trod upon and some workplace skills in mediation, crystal clear communication and compromise had to be hastily yanked out and practiced. Players, by and large, do this really poorly, which feeds into the frustration above.

I’d like to think I avoided most elitist prick-ism, but I confess to being reluctant to join public encounters that exceed a certain level of challenge, on the assumption that the average player group is -not- going to succeed at it, or if I do give it a try, I’ll do the silent “drop out without a word” maneuver after a few failed and obviously-not-going-to-make-it attempts. I’ve watched others be far more elitist than me and simply been silent witness or just quietly thankful that I made it past the ‘barely acceptable’ threshold because I know without a doubt that I’m not investing the time and effort to ‘git gud’ to the point which would make these other people deliriously happy.

Burnout? I’m still raiding twice weekly without fail, barring the odd RL engagement. By any dev metric, surely that is not burnout.

But I feel like I’ve lost my rose-colored glasses on what GW2 could have been, and have accepted that it just wanted to blend into the MMO crowd and appeal to the whole spectrum of MMO players, raid-lovers included. That it is just one MMO among many. That traditional MMO gameplay doesn’t actually do much for me, in terms of being a forever game or tick many of my boxes. (If it did, I’d probably already have been playing Everquest, or World of Warcraft, or Final Fantasy XIV, or The Elder Scrolls or … whatever.)

Been there, done that.

With the last couple years of GW2, been there, done that -again-.

I’m done with main games, primary MMOs, or the one virtual world to rule them all.

I cannot conceive of ever starting over in some brave new world (pun intentional.) What would be the point? To get bigger numbers? To ‘win’ over someone else? To make friends and play with others? To collect all the things and show others that you did?

I’m not sure I ever much had that great enjoyment or use out of Multiplayer, and if the former doesn’t quite do it for me, I think we can safely dispense with the Massively prefix as well.

—

On the other hand, I am still occasionally finding reasonable levels of amusement playing parts of individual MMOs.

The actual beat-by-beat combat of fighting a raid boss with a character I’m comfortable playing is smooth and relaxing flow.

There was a certain level of RNG lottery fun in joining random PUG strike missions at various timezones during the first two weeks of the Eye of the North introduction – sometimes you luck into a really smooth competent party, sometimes it’s rougher but still manageable, and sometimes it’s utter carnage that is best left wordlessly.

The act of deciding on a small, achievable goal and then following through on it to completion is always going to have a certain ‘click’ of satisfaction at ticking a checkbox, regardless of the game I do it in.

And the same ‘what’s the point?’ argument could be made for singleplayer games as well. Does any progress or learning in a game matter? Is it just about the journey and the experience? One could also have a journey and probably -multiple- experiences in a multiplayer game too.

It’s becoming all equivalent, as I mentioned in my last (now ancient) post four months ago.

I am behind in Warframe. I am always behind. I play it solo singleplayer and like it that way. I have not made a Railjack; I have not yet played Scarlet Spear. I’ll get to it when I get to it.

Instead, I have been chasing the mini goals of relic grinding and building Prime warframes, because I couldn’t be bothered going for ‘lesser’ versions when a Prime one is available. I am super slow because I do it all by my lonesome and never join others in relic sharing missions. I get my Primes anyway, in the end, some gazillion relic farms later. Oberon Prime and Ivara Prime have been on my to-do list for the last month or two, and I just finished popping the last piece today. Now there’s Titania Prime to go.

Path of Exile Delirium League is out and I am not actually playing it. I missed the start because I was busy doing something else, then in the middle, I thought, maybe I’ll give it a go, and somehow I got diverted down the track of attempting to solo self farm an Oni-Goroshi unique.

For those not in the know, this mostly means repeat farming the very first map, Twilight Strand, over and over with multiple characters. I idly thought that this reminded me of Guild Wars 1’s Ascalon Defender achievement where one stayed in Pre-Searing Ascalon, and decided to try it once, just for the experience.

Two level 7 characters and one level 8 later, it’s turned into a sort of begrudging grudge match in slow motion. I -refuse- to do anything else but try to pop the sword, and because I’m not actually insane, I don’t farm for more than half an hour at a time. Lately, it’s been just try a few runs and then quit and play another game. The league might end before it drops. So be it.

My Steam recently played games looks like this:

All the red X’s I marked are stuff I’ve not even installed, let alone played. Mostly they are last month’s Humble Bundle Choice games and a free game.

One green tick games are stuff I played a bit.

At my level of no-discernable-skill, Dota Underlords is an amusing RNG gamble that I mess around with Hardcore difficulty bots. It offers me the ability to learn how to recognize various DOTA heroes and what they vaguely do, and the relaxation of letting AI beat on each other. It gives me the realization that it makes no difference to me whether I wind up in sixth place, fifth place, third, second or even, rarely, first. Should it matter? Win some, lose some, it’s a game, it’s fun for a few rounds, and then I put it down.

Ever so slowly, I have been attempting to finish SOMA. I’d like to complete it, and then delete it off my hard disk because that’s 9gb of valuable disk space I’d like to reclaim, and someone, somewhere, said it was a classic game worth the playthrough.

Honestly, it’s one of those games that is not really doing it for me. It’s a slooow as molasses walking simulator that utilizes a bunch of horror tropes (which I don’t really scare or react easily to, or feel much about). I turned off all the actual danger because the one thing that would make me ragequit without ever completing it would be dying repeatedly to some dumbass monster because I didn’t have the patience to hide in shadows until it went away.

I end up wandering in circles because navigating in murky water is not my forte and it is not scary, it is just frustrating and makes me pull up a walkthrough trying to match my steps with the instructions until I’ve figured out where the game wants me to go next. My game session progress is measured in walkthrough pages. I’m about 50% into sunk cost and I’ll get around to a little more progress someday… just not today.

Battlechasers Nightwar is a fun enough JRPG-like game, if a little slowly paced. Played it for a couple hours, then had enough. Eliza was an interesting visual novel experience that I played for a session, then put down and never quite got back to.

Every now and again, when I crave a walk in the woods, I go back to comfort game theHunter: Call of the Wild and tromp around slowly, hoping to bag a virtual deer.

Two green tick games are games I deep dived into:

Stardew Valley – made a new character and played nonstop until Year 3 and grandpa’s ghost came along to tell me I did a fantastic job. Then lost steam because the next couple of goalposts were far away in terms of money and would clean out the bank. So it goes. Maybe someday I’ll get back to it.

Don’t Starve – got into Shipwrecked obsession for a while. A nomadic explorer lifestyle is not really me in survival games. I love to bunker down in a base. Shipwrecked almost explicitly disrupts this playstyle. Kept dying of some cause or another before making it into the next season. Going for yet another roguelike run gets addictive, until one day, they are suddenly not.

Risk of Rain 2 has no ticks. It’s on current free weekend trial. So I trialed. Not quite for me. The difficulty is a little beyond me, and I can’t quite get my head around the scavenge-all-the-items-and-hope-for-good-RNG playstyle. Maybe it’s a carry over from Battle Royales. Maybe it’s why I could never really get good at Binding of Isaac.

Unreal World has been a current tapas game poison of choice. I think I’m getting back into turn-based roguelikes – might veer back to Angband and TOME next.

Unreal World is very simulationist, you play an Iron Age Finn and mostly try to live a low tech lifestyle without dying from one thing or another.

My current run lucked into a bear very early on, which I somewhat foolishly chucked a javelin at. That wound up with the bear charging me and a duel to the death of mad dodging and stabbing.

It broke one arm, which left me crippled on doing various activities for many days until the fracture healed, but hey, I lived, and it died!

Set up a little log cabin before winter set in. I love the bunkering playstyle in survival games, I may have mentioned.

Doing well through winter. A reindeer actually blundered into the pit trap that surrounded my log cabin, something that felt really lucky. I usually spend days checking on all the traps I’ve set up with no returns.

So it goes. I’ll play it till it gets boring or I get distracted, and then I’ll move on to something else.

Ever since mentioning Master of Magic to Syp in a comment, I’ve been thinking of giving that a replay at some point.

My Epic Games list is filling with free games. This months Humble Choice Bundle has arrived. Super Adventure Box is coming. Who has time to play just one game?

Who has time to play -all- the games?

I’ll set a goal, play one game a little. Set another goal, play another game a little. Don’t bother with a goal at all and play yet another game for a while on a whim. Rinse and repeat.

Playing Catch-up

Where did September go?!

You know it’s a busy month when you sit down and can’t even remember half of the things you were doing then. Either that, or I’m getting older and my brain cells are depleting even further.

Part of it has been real life – peak periods at work, visiting relatives, trying to cultivate more of an actual book reading habit back into my life, and part of it is too many games releasing content at around the same time.

The primary game has been Path of Exile this season.

Blight League has a tower defense schtick going, which mostly means hordes of enemies coming in waves for you (and some towers) to kill before they reach a central point you’re guarding. The loot for succeeding is plentiful, incorporating both drops from the mobs you kill, as well as special treasure chests to open once victory is attained.

The build focus for buffing this time around are minion summoners.

This is a match made in heaven because I’ve always enjoyed the PoE summoner – a wave of plentiful minions that engulf enemies, tangling them up and giving them the death of a thousand paper cuts from multiple sources.

Except now the minions can be buffed to be faster and attack more quickly, and those paper cuts are now significant sword slashes in their own right. Plus more seems to scale based on the gems themselves, skill traits or more craftable gear, instead of requiring specific unique drops.

All in all, it makes my staunchly SSF playstyle a little more viable, pushing up the power potential of such builds, while possibly capping the more traditional “trade for perfect gear to reach insane heights” type of build. Those folks might have something to complain about, but the beauty of being SSF is that I don’t have to care – there is no competition, economic or otherwise, between them and me.

My game becomes simply about progressing further than myself in the past, as well as enjoying myself in the present.

The former is a definite. I hit level 90 the other day. This unlocked an account achievement for doing so. Progress milestone for sure.

Between spectres, zombies, vaal skeletons and carrion golems in an adapted Speaker for the Dead build, the power potential is quite off the charts in my limited experience. I did a normal Atziri at a super fast pace with no deaths – something I used to struggle with, often dying several times to flameblasts. I did a low level Shaper stronghold, I did a low level Elder fight, taking out the Elder Guardians for the first time ever. (More achievement unlocks.)

I don’t know if I’ll ever reach the Uber boss levels. The necessity of unlocking so many maps may be a stopping point, given my time constraints. We’ll see. From a build standpoint, it doesn’t seem like the limiting factor right now.

I’ve been enjoying the latest iteration on Master missions as well. It’s become less random, storing up the dailies into a sort of “banked storage” system, so that you can miss days and then crank through a bunch of them at once. You can also choose to concentrate focus on one type.

So if you feel like romping about the Omnitect’s temple, you can bank up a bunch of Alva missions and then feed maps into it, guaranteeing you Alva encounters per map, and quick progress towards a temple visit.

Or if, like me, you feel like exploring the depths of Delve, then you’re running Niko missions non-stop in between mine explorations, in order to get sufficient voltaic sulphite to go even deeper.

Presumably, if you’re an 18 hour a day streamer, you might actually run dry on all the master missions and have to go back to the randomness of whatever a map decides to offer.

As someone who can only play PoE for 1-2 hours a night, that is absolutely not a problem I’m running into – quite the opposite, the specter of “wasted” potential when a to-be-banked daily hits the storage limit is far more possible for me.

Fortunately, I’ve developed an immunity to this sort of perceived “loss” already. One has to. I play GW2 (have you seen its dailies tab these days?) I play Warframe. I play Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and Pokemon Go. All of them have dailies for their more engaged, hardcore players to chase. If I attempted faithful completion of all of the dailies -daily-, I’d probably have to be a student, a streamer or unemployed. Not to mention, go nuts in short order because I’m not that innately obsessive-compulsive or to-do-list-manic.

So I’m good. I’m just chugging along, doing a couple maps nightly, aiming for short master mission goals on a whim, enjoying the present and the churn of hundreds and thousands of mobs meeting -my- personal tens of mobs and dying.

At nigh unto the same time, GW2 released the Prologue of its newly renamed Living World Season Icebrood Saga.

It seems to have been warmly welcomed all around. (I mean, if you can evoke a cautiously optimistic response from Endgame Viable, you gotta be doing something right.)

Mind you, the GW2 subreddit is still variously on fire from a subset of the raider subset, unhappy about ‘easy mode’ strike missions, their ‘challenging content’ preference being ignored, class balance being effected with a sledgehammer… on the wrong targets entirely, being potentially forced to pay for worse functionality on in-game build templates when they’re already used to a far better free third-party option, and so on.

(Not all of their unhappiness is off base – I am personally really pissed off about my already weak-in-raids Scourge being made even weaker and clunkier to use, to the point where I don’t think I dare risk teammate unhappiness any further, while the top of the line condi option remains an unaffected outlier – but there’s a definite echo chamber effect going on.)

Before October’s skill “balance” patch though, there was Grothmar Valley. And it was good. 

The Metal Legion concert has been a spectacular example of an open world meta event that harnesses the dynamic event system to superb effect, uniting everyone – hardcore, casual, mid-core alike – in one goal and giving everyone warm, fuzzy community feelings instead of “lol, your dps is 10x less that of mine.”

The golden fields of Ascalon has always been a sight near and dear to any GW1 fan. It’s the first thing you see in the tutorial. It’s what you promptly lose post-tutorial in the Searing. It is the Shire equivalent in Tyria. It is where you begin. It is where you’d love to come back to when your journey ends. It is home.

Grothmar Valley being right smack in Ascalon gives a massive nostalgia homecoming kick to those of us with enough history to remember it.

(As an aside, I was amused by a Redditor’s comment that GW2 officially now has players with a longer tenure than the developers. Maybe not quite yet, I assume GW1 had -some- amount of development time, possibly years, before opening up beta weekends to players. But I do remember playing those beta weekends. We’re getting there.)

At the same time, Grothmar Valley being populated with charr, and a very dangerous sort of discontented charr and a Hitler-esque leader to follow (this from a charr main player) pushes us into the future, hinting at the direction of the saga’s story.

It’s…promising. (Alas, given prior track record in executing, that’s about all we can say for the moment. We’ll believe it when we next see it.)

In the meantime, I was content to mess around doing all the things in Grothmar Valley. Catching up on crowd-necessary achievements while events were still populated. Playing around with races. Wandering the open world like how GW2 used to be from lvl 1-80. Jumping in on a whim for quick and painless public strike missions. Getting caught up with Ascended cooking to 500, which I’d neglected in the off-cycle.

As is usual, something in the games line-up had to give and the loser for the month was Warframe.

Though frankly, they’re laughing all the way to the bank.

I’d finished Nightwave series 2 early, getting the outfit I wanted, so I felt happy enough to drop it for a binge in Path of Exile.

I’d heard about Saryn Prime and Valkyr Prime unsealing from the Prime Vault, but having just come off a relic grind for Wukong Prime and wanting -both- unvaulted Primes really badly with none of the time investment, I took a hard look at what was offered in the joint package.

Nothing was a repeat. I kinda needed to restock some platinum. The whole deal was “only” $60 USD, as opposed to the more premium $80 or $140 Prime Access packages for new Prime warframes.

The ending of this story is predictable.

Some rationalization later, some clever brain trickery promising myself to work hard on real life matters I’d been procrastinating on for a reward, I gave Digital Extremes $60 to not play their game for September.

Maybe in October I’ll enjoy the fruits of this. Atlas Prime is out and I’ll probably relic grind for that. But I’ll have to finish up a bunch of other things first to make time for Warframe again.

Then there’s single-player games. I’m racking up an alarming number of “want-to-plays.” My computer is nearly out of disk space on three hard drives. I need to make myself sit down and sort through installed games and so on, but seriously, who has time for that?!

I can’t even sort through my Path of Exile stash, my GW2 inventories and my Pokemon Go critter collection.

I took a few days “vacation” in Factorio beginner land. The learning curve was prohibitive. Eventually I gave up any hope of potentially making something resemble anything close to efficiency and embraced a train of thought that ran ‘if it actually connects and makes a circuit and -runs-, it’s good enough.’

I have come to the conclusion that my brain works in convoluted ways and what one sees on the screen is a reflection of this. I am not an innately ordered or orderly sort of person.

Other assorted September snippets:

Still watching Critical Role faithfully and enjoying an additional game from a vicarious standpoint.

Re-discovered (one year late, again) a stunning Portal inspired song from Youtuber Harry101UK and TheStupendium – The Android Hell Blues. Did wonders for the couple of days I was in a blue mood to have it on repeat loop and wallow in jazzy, dark humourous, clever wordplay while nose to the grindstone.

Re-reading the Blades in the Dark tabletop RPG and pondering in sporadic intervals over interrupted days if I can actually get some solo RP gameplay going, to actually enjoy story-based gaming that video games can’t seem to get quite right yet.

Bought a bunch of Dave Graffam papercraft models at $1 each, on DriveThruRPG sale, in the hope of getting crafty again and making a mini-medieval city. Maybe in November. It’s a really hectic time at work this season.

Also recently watching CohhCarnage play through AI: Somnium Files, a visual novel-esque detective anime game with more interaction than a standard VN, and being somewhat drawn to it. The current price is a definite not-now though, so the craving has been displaced to “How about actually playing through some of the other older games of the same developer that you -actually- own but just haven’t gotten around to?”

Aka Spike Chunsoft’s Zero Escape series, Danganronpa, Steins;Gate, 428 Shibuya Scramble, et. al.

If wishes were fishes…

Bleh. Back to squeezing in productive “survive life” to-dos for a little longer and playing catch-up on everything else.

Path of Exile: Designed to Be Played Forever

Watched Chris Wilson’s GDC2019 talk the other day:

A lot of eye-opening insights in here:

• the standard population decline of any online game when they first launched and how they got it to spike consistently and even grow over time through their league seasons
• a quick look at their custom tool for procedurally generating interesting map levels in really short time frames
• the importance of marketing and having enough content to market to different subsets of players to make a big enough impact to prompt returners to return
• the importance of consistency and predictability to cultivate a customerbase (or else they will look elsewhere and get distracted and then you’ve lost them.)

A couple of his points I don’t necessary agree with, or think might work for -every- game out there, but perhaps are more game and population specific:

1. The idea of investing time to design aspirational content for the 5-10%, knowing full well the majority of their customers will not reach it, but creating this content for the 5-10% to feel special because no one else can get there, and those 5-10% tending to be the more hardcore influencer types who stream and thus draw in hopefuls and additional player numbers
2. Economy resets so players can start on a fresh playing field periodically
3. Layers and layers of randomness to create interesting variability
4. Avoiding day-night cycles so that assets can be re-used
5. Designing spare assets to sit around in a warehouse/library so that they can be pulled out when there is a need
6. Avoiding pipelining releases so that people aren’t distracted working on two things at once, or tempted to avoid dealing with a tough problem in favor of something easier

Point 1 always raises my hackles. My opinion is that it works for games that start out designed that way, so they attract a playerbase that accepts that premise from the get go.

Something like Warframe apparently attempted large group raids and later removed them because apparently too few of their playerbase was interested, they seem to be doing better investing effort into content that both groups and soloists can do.

As for GW2, well, their “little” u-turn and about-face during Heart of Thorns introducing aspirational raid content lost them the better part of their initial playerbase, and attracted a newer, more competitive, and hostile sort of player in lieu. Hopefully they pay more. Else it was a really really bad strategic decision, no?

Path of Exile on the other hand is built around the idea of competition, of races, of getting to level 100 and feats of getting somewhere “first” broadcast to all and sundry. It has a hardcore permadeath league mechanic for the challenge seekers. So yes, logically aspiration works for a primarily competitive, challenge-seeking, numbers-crunching playerbase that can deal with that PoE skill tree. Somehow, I don’t think playing PoE to “relax” is a majority motivation here.

The solo self-found playstyle was more of an underground subset of players who chose to remove themselves from this competitive economy and create their own fun – it’s only recently they gave a nod towards it by delineating a separate group to declare oneself that way. The stated rationale is for bragging rights, and they are very careful to assure players that you can jump back into the economy any time you want; separately I suppose it is also a way for them to keep tabs on just how large or small this hermit-like player subset is. (SSF all the way, huzzah. Fuck yo’ aspirational content.)

In theory, I really like the idea of Point 2. I was first introduced to the broad principles of resetting in MUDs that had something called ‘remort.’ You reach max level (ie. near immortality), then you ‘remort’ (become mortal once again) to level 1 and get to level up again, but with some bonuses for choosing to reset yourself that way.

For some games, this works and comes as part of the game. Kingdom of Loathing is a browser based game that uses the remort mechanic. A Tale in the Desert has an extended long reset with new Tellings. There’s that One Hour, One Life game I never tried, but the reset concept is right there in its title. You can choose to reset almost every single piece of gear in Warframe with forma and level it up again so you can cram in more and better mods to make it even stronger.

For other games, I don’t know if their playerbase would recoil in garlicky vampiric horror at the concept of being set back to square one and starting anew. I understand that World of Warcraft tries to reset gear every expansion – from an outsider’s POV, it seems to be a 50/50 mix of acceptance and frustration among its populace. GW2 resets WvW in varied intervals and it seems most players have gotten numb to the resets over time, as winning means very little. Still other games are all about the collection and character/account progress, and I doubt those players would be happy with a reset – does Monster Hunter World or Final Fantasy 14 reset anything?

Point 3 I also like on a personal level, it’s a very roguelike foundational concept, and I love me a whole bunch of roguelikes that can offer me procedurally generated layouts that allows me to have a different and strategically interesting time each playthrough. Playing through City of Heroes near identical and unvarying tilesets and fixed predictable spawn size for 4 years will do that to you.

But not every game can be a roguelike/sandbox type of game where the player is expected to react with the resources available and create their own story. Some games are more linear, more dev-created story-oriented, and handcrafted, hand-placed content still has that level of uniqueness that can break the pattern recognition of players reacting to procedurally generated stuff. It’s just that handcrafted stuff takes a lot longer time to create.

Some games do try to mix the best of both worlds. Don’t Starve has handcrafted set pieces mixed in with procedural generation, and a bunch of Minecraft mods also do the same thing, sprinkling in handcrafted stand-out pieces and allowing the general landscape to be procedurally generated.

Which I suppose point 3 also covers, this idea of mixing and overlaying random stuff atop of random stuff, so that it is harder for players to discern predictable patterns.

Point 4-6 sound very much studio-specific and game-specific decisions, so I won’t comment there.

Still, it is interesting to learn what he feels works well for Path of Exile.

And I really want to sit in on a three hour talk to hear what he thinks about loot and itemization.

Wide Screen, Narrow Focus

The biggest piece of news for me on the games front has been the upgrade of an ailing six-year old monitor to something about three times as ludicrous. Literally.

As in, super-ultra wide.

I had the opportunity to pick up one of Samsung’s 49″ CHG90 monitors for 25% off and decided to go for it. You only live once and all that.

It’s currently being powered by my new-old PC (that is, it’s still new in my mind but objectively old by now) and putting the then-awesome GTX 980 through its paces (eh, it’s about time it gets a workout.)

Any further upgrades will have to wait a little, as the monitor, even discounted, costs about the same as an entire PC, but damn, is it glorious.

Naturally, I’ve been doing very little with it beyond playing the same old games.

But in a whole new way.

It’s not been all smooth-sailing. One of the sticking points that are nigh immediately surfaced is the fact that very few games and developers have thought about ultrawide displays as an important consideration until recently, so UI can be a major problem.

Resizing it, moving it, not having it so far away in your peripheral vision that you can’t see any health reports and thus immediately die because you have no idea how you’re actually doing. Each game can be a whole new exercise in tweaking and customizing the UI until it becomes acceptable.

For someone who really values immersion as a motivation while playing games though, that feeling of being lost inside a wholly different world, and revels in the awe and inspiring nature of a fantastical landscape, the experience of playing on an ultrawide is something not to miss.

If VR is about wrapping a screen around your face so that you feel like you’re there in a different environment, then a super-ultrawide is about having a screen attempt to take up as much of your actual field of vision as possible, while still giving you plenty of room for air.

It is strangely sating.

I can play less, and feel completely satisfied. A couple of Warframe missions and I’m bowled over by so much visual spectacle that it’s hard to crave more.

Which is all very well because I’ve been splitting up my time into Path of Exile’s Synthesis League. Being SSF blissfully insulates me from any dissatisfaction of the general population.

The Spectral Throw claw-wielder I’ve been attempting is a bit of a slow bloomer, reliant on gear I probably don’t have, so it’s been a little more challenging than usual. Something I was quite aware of going in, so I don’t have any complaints on that front, but it’s slow going and tempting me to make a second character to try another build.

PoE is one of those games where going super-ultrawide does NOT do survival any favors, thanks to putting UI way beyond any visibility. So I’ve been playing it in a more sedate windowed “wide” view that expands my field of vision some, but not absurdly.

It does, amusingly, provide enough room for me to have Path of Building up in another window right next to it, so that’s a nifty bonus when I want to refer easily to it.

You’d think one of the best games to be messing around with a super-ultrawide display is Guild Wars 2, and you’d be right, from a visual spectacle standpoint… except that I’m still struggling with overall veteran burnout – it all feels pretty boring doing the same old thing.

I did get a few cool screenshots while doing the same old thing:

These are in the middle of raids, so graphics have been cranked down to middling to eke out every last drop of FPS.

I got a WvW screenie for kicks, even though I don’t WvW much at all.

If there’s one thing I figured out right quick from the above, it’s that there can be very much hardware-related reasons as to why person A might perform differently from person B.

I felt like I had a noticeable amount of greater situational awareness just from the wider field of view, though smaller detailed nuances (like where your feet might be standing) might be harder to spot as a result.

If some WvW person seems to have a better grasp of their surroundings, it may very well be that they’re not looking through a porthole and do indeed have a broad overview of the entire field of battle, as it were.

Ah well, I suppose that’s life.

I certainly wouldn’t advise picking up an ultrawide display just to be competitive – if only because the words GW2 and competition go together laughably, if at all.

Eventually, I’ll get tired of Path of Exile and maybe that will bring enough time to broaden out to testing other games. Minecraft, Shadow of War, and others. But for the moment, slaughtering hordes of mobs in pretty surroundings is checking all my boxes.

I did take five minutes of random touring in order to leave you with some “proper” GW2 screenshots as I sign off till next time…