Endgame Viable - Gaming

Observing The NFT Wars

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 13:11:50 -0500

The first post of the year is about … sigh … NFTs.

I have no interest in NFTs* or the outrage surrounding them, but I feel like I need to write a post about NFTs anyway. Everyone else is talking about it**, and it’s a rare blog topic I haven’t written about. But I’m approaching it like a homework assignment.

It all started barely a month ago with the Ubisoft Quartz trailer. Has it only been a month? It seems like we’ve been talking about NFTs in gaming for years, but that trailer is indeed dated December 7th.

Come to think of it, NFTs were a hot topic all last year, but it was mainly in the context of the art world.

But now, as we begin 2022, Square Enix’s president launched another firebombing campaign on this Dresden of discussions by declaring they want to make blockchain-based “play to earn” games.

That’s what really pushed me over the edge into investing effort into a blog post.

Ugh I'm going to have to write a blog post about NFTs aren't I
— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) January 2, 2022

That, and … well, it might be hyperbole to say that the gaming community is getting hysterical about this, but that’s how it looks to me.

Personally, I’m against hysteria. I’m planting my flag on the side of non-hysteria.

My general feeling on NFTs, as of this moment, goes something like this: a) I don’t really care, because I won’t be buying any NFTs (except maybe for educational purposes), b) I don’t really care if other people waste their money on NFTs, c) I know one artist who wants the money that NFTs might bring to their career in the gaming industry, so I hope it works out for them, and d) I can’t discern how NFTs might significantly change the existing direction of gaming in any way. NFTs strike me as the next logical evolution of a factory entertainment industry that has been becoming bigger and more corporate and more dependent on revenue for decades.

Why So Serious?

Just to be clear, I don’t want NFTs in my games. I recommend everyone avoid NFTs, the same way I would recommend avoiding risky behavior like, you know, hitting yourself in the eyeball with a hammer.

I should also mention that I don’t want cosmetic cash shops in my games. I don’t want to log in and see a gigantic splash screen of extra skins and emotes I should buy with gems and bits and bobs, while the “play game” button remains a teeny tiny afterthought down in a hidden corner. But that ship sailed a long time ago.

I’m not an expert in NFTs, but based on what I’ve read so far, when you put it in terms of its impact on gameplay functionality, I don’t see much difference between the introduction of NFTs and the introduction of cash shops, so I’m struggling to understand why everyone around me is suddenly alarmed about something that I perceived to have happened a long time ago.

Maybe the thinking is that we didn’t push back enough against cash shops, so now we really need to push back against NFTs? I guess that makes sense, but it seems overly optimistic.

A Rapidly-Evolving Conversation

One of the reasons I don’t particularly want to get involved in this NFT discussion is that it’s evolving so rapidly that I can barely keep up with what anyone is talking about anymore.

We were talking about NFTs and Ubisoft Quartz. But now, thanks to Square Enix, we’re suddenly debating the relative merits of “Play to Earn,” which doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry yet.

It’s supposed to be the same discussion, but on the surface, those two subjects don’t sound remotely related (to me). One, I think, is about collecting collectibles, the other is about selling player-created content. But they’re both tangentially related to “blockchains,” the foundational technology around which all of this crypto and NFT hubbub revolves.

I take this rapid conversational movement as a sign that the discussion has already devolved to the point of conflating disparate topics together into one mass glob of emotional outrage with the trigger word “NFT” attached to it. It’s already become too much work for me to try to separate it all out into individual topics to analyze.

More importantly, it’s become too much work to try to convince anyone else that it’s more complicated than just “yes to NFTs” or “no to NFTs.” As of now I view “NFTs” as a very big topic composed of a lot of smaller sub-topics that I may or may not have differing opinions about. Same as pretty much every other societal issue in the entire world.

Pulling the Ripcord

I had thought to go on into a deeper discussion of my research into the pros and cons of NFTs and blockchains in a neutral and informative manner, but it’s been several days now and I kind of don’t care anymore. Everybody’s just going to fight about it and yell past each other anyway, so why bother? :)

My basic point at the end of it all is something like: NFTs aren’t great, but I’m not yet convinced it deserves the level of righteous fury on display lately. Just … don’t buy them. But if you do buy them, congratulations, you’re probably more affluent than the majority of the planet. You should be proud.

* Normally I would write something like “NFT (Non-Fungible Token)” but the words “non-fungible token” don’t add any additional meaning to the letters “NFT.”

** I couldn’t find another link for “it.”

Image: Sugar cane fields in El Salvador. It might have made more sense if I hadn’t deleted some two thousand words from this, the fourth major revision of the post.

FFXIV - Shadowbringers 5.5/5, Death Unto Dawn

Thu, 09 Dec 2021 11:39:19 -0500

Notes on the Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers Patch 5.5 and 5.55 Content, Death Unto Dawn, which I finished more than two months ago at the time of this publication.

Oh hi. Remember when I was going to finish posting these before Endwalker? Well, it doesn’t matter, because nobody can play Endwalker anyway. Their entire antiquated server infrastructure imploded overnight. The only people playing are the ones who can log in at 6 AM and avoid idle timeouts all day. I imagine it’ll be at least a month before it settles down.

I myself have completed a whopping two quests in the Endwalker story so far (the “we’re on a boat” one and the “we’re touring a new city” one). It turns out I experienced a sufficient amount of Final Fantasy XIV with Shadowbringers a few months back, and don’t feel like playing, even if I could play. I can discern almost no changes in the game between Shadowbringers and Endwalker with the first two quests.

Anyway, enough of that. Here’s the last Shadowbringers post.

5.5 Main Scenario Quest

Surprisingly short, there are only nine quests over the course of two patches. The fifth one sends you to a Trust dungeon and the last one is a Solo Duty.

The Scions are off to fight the Scary Dark Towers that have popped up all over the world. (You can actually see them all over the game world, which is pretty cool.)

Fordola’s back! One of my favorite character’s from Stormblood is sent off to see what’s going on at the Dark Towers, along with her pal Arenvald, one of the original Scions we met way back in the Waking Sands. They casually mention that the two of them have been going on adventures all this time, and annoyingly, don’t tell us anything further about that.

Then the Scions contact Hair Estinien to help fight Crazy Fandaniel’s Lunar Bahamut dragon primal. They decide to fight dragons with dragons, and free Tiamat, a big dragon that was imprisoned in Azys La for … reasons? I’d have to consult a wiki to remember that from Heavensward. It doesn’t really matter anyway.

Then Crazy Fandaniel’s dragon forces are spotted attacking the yellow fields of Paglth’an (a place I’ve never heard of before), and we rush there for a Trust dungeon, where we take down Lunar Bahamut with some hot dragon-on-dragon action.

If only every location was as colorful as Paglth’an, I might not complain so much about how dull the colors always are in Final Fantasy XIV.

Continuing in Patch 5.55, we’re saddened to see Arenvald was injured so much that he’s comatose. But we’re not saddened as much as Alphinaud, who for some reason is frantic with worry and somehow feels personally responsible. Fordola yells at Alphinaud to grow up and walks away. Fordola, the most awesome character in FFXIV, lives the fantasy we all wish we could: Yelling at Alphinaud.

There’s a shocking twist when Alisaie’s and Alphinaud’s much-talked-about-but-never-seen father arrives from Sharlayan and delivers a stern message of non-intervention in the war against Crazy Fandaniel, and gives the twins a cold shoulder. So daddy issues will surely be tackled in the Endwalker expansion, because everyone was clamoring for more backstory from Alphinaud and Alisaie.

Then there’s another shocking twist when we see Arenvald has recovered from his coma and lives but … gasp! … he’s in a wheelchair! It’s a fate worse than death! Or so they seem to be trying to say. What is up with Japanese culture?

Anyway, then we go beat the forces of Crazy Fandaniel in a very annoying solo duty instance in which we have to control a lot of different characters that aren’t ours and curse at the screen a lot because that’s not very fun and it’s a horrible way to end an expansion.

I don’t remember much of the details now, but after the battle, we’re supposed to go to Sharlayan, and that’s it until Endwalker.

Oh, and Zenos has a scythe now. A very important plot point apparently.

YoRHa Alliance Raid: Tower at Paradigm’s Breech

The last YoRHa Alliance Raid was a doozy. I don’t really remember it now, that was two months ago. Was it the one with the Red Girl? [Reviews video.] Yes, that was it. Great music, again.

I did it a bunch of times but I never got much of the gear. I just bought the regular Tomestone gear.

Unfortunately the YoRHa story didn’t quite end after the last raid, because it went into a weekly quest rotation, and I only did a couple of them before drifting away to play other games. I guess I’ll never know what happens with the dwarves.

Death Unto Dawn Soundtrack

I bought the Death Unto Dawn soundtrack, which is a “Blu-ray Music Disc,” something I had never heard of before. It’s a pain in the butt, and a terrible way to distribute music. The only device I had in the house that could even read it was my PS4, which had been unplugged for some six months or more.

Somehow I got a Japanese version, or at least a version where all of the MP3s have Japanese titles, which I didn’t really intend to do. But it’s got some six hours of Final Fantasy XIV music on it from patches 5.1 through 5.5.

But the main reason I bought it was for the wind-up Lyna minion, which is one of my favorite characters from Shadowbringers, who I felt was criminally underutilized.

FFXIV - Shadowbringers 5.4, Futures Rewritten

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 09:06:24 -0500

Notes on the Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers Patch 5.4 Content, Futures Rewritten, which I finished well over two months ago at the time of this publication.

Endwalker is almost upon us, and you know what that means: It means I need to hurry up and finish these Shadowbringers posts.

While everyone else is peeing their pants with excitement all over Twitter, I myself largely forgot Final Fantasy XIV even exists. I’m playing single-player RPGs. As I’m typing this, I’m currently enjoying Pathfinder: Kingmaker more than I thought I would. Good single-player games are usually better than late-stage MMORPGialism.

5.4 Main Scenario Quest

I went through these ten quests, which included a Trust dungeon, on a Saturday.

We’re back in The Source now, resuming our “duties” as Scions, with a new and improved, completely fine G’r’a’h’a Tia (I don’t know where the apostrophe is supposed to go). Scions never die in Final Fantasy XIV anymore.

Well, except the one, who seems to die once per expansion. Rotten luck for her.

Oh, I guess that lalafel died too. And a few other new characters died in Heavensward, but they weren’t Scions. I can only assume Square Enix received customer feedback after Heavensward that they should never kill anyone important again, because the plot armor has been pretty thick in Stormblood and Shadowbringers.

Anyway, back to the story: First, Alisaie creates a cure for “tempering,” with her porxie buddy. They don’t have to go through FDA approval or anything for treatment in Eorzea, they just do it.

First up is Ga Bu, the poor little goblin from, I think, the end of Heavensward, wrapping up a long-standing dangling plot thread. The one and only experiment proves successful, so they immediately put this treatment into mass production. Science!

A “tempered” person is one who has been enthralled by a primal, if you’re not into Final Fantasy lore. The implications of a cure for tempering are huge in Final Fantasy-land, somewhat akin to a cure for cancer, though a casual player might not understand it, because they don’t talk about tempering much.

I only remember tempering because I happened to recently re-play the beginning of A Realm Reborn, so I re-experienced the tempering problem from the very first primal trial with Ifrit.

Back in A Realm Reborn, they simply euthanized/murdered any tempered souls, because they were beyond hope. In replaying the early game, I noticed that A Realm Reborn was much more grimdark than the disgustingly wholesome family-friendly fare that it currently is.

The point is Ga Bu is cured. Then there’s a little side quest with Limsa Lominsa working out a new treaty with the kobolds, a plot which has echoes of colonialism I’m sure we’re all familiar with seventeen times over by now.

It doesn’t really matter, though, because strange towers suddenly appear all over the place, and then our crazy new Ascian friend Fandaniel shows up with a dragon, and declares that he’s going to destroy the world just because he’s crazy like that.

Did I mention Fandaniel before? He’s an Ascian. But he’s not one of the Unsundered. So I don’t really know what that means. I feel like a non-Unsundered Ascian is just … a regular person. Because isn’t everyone technically a non-Unsundered Ascian? I don’t know. It’s too hard to understand and it doesn’t really matter anyway. The point is, Fandaniel is A New Bad Guy. And he’s craaaaaaazy.

It’s hard to imagine how Fandaniel and Zenos could carry an entire expansion, though. I had a theory that Zenos would exit the stage before Endwalker, but I don’t think there’s enough time now.

YoRHa Quest, To Make Amends

Anogg is still missing. We try to find her and … plot twist! Anogg and Konogg are androids! Well, Anogg, at least. Maybe? It’s not really clear. But I think they definitely want us to think that.

Stupid Car

Around this time I finished my grinding in the Gold Saucer for the Stupid Regalia Car. I didn’t even get it out to do a screenshot. I will never, ever use it, ever, because it looks dumb and I have no use for a 4-person mount anyway.

But I spent over a week doing mini-games for it because it’s important to be able to get it out in case anyone ever thinks they’re a better gamer than me because they’re riding around in a stupid car. That’s how social status works in MMORPGs. People think they’re better than you if they have something “rare.” It’s the dark side of MMORPG elitism nobody ever talks about.

Anyway that’s it for Patch 5.4. Only one-and-a-half more to go.

Disco Elysium

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 08:30:00 -0500

Disco Elysium is one of those award-winning games I bought mainly because it was on sale and I heard it was award-winning.

I never would have bought it otherwise, because it’s an isometric game, and I don’t like isometric games as a general rule. It bugs me that I can’t see past the edges of the screen, or behind things, particularly in role-playing sorts of games, where I want to see everything my character can see.

But Disco Elysium might as well be Zork for all the importance that the graphics have. The game is all in the text. Screenshots are meaningless. You technically do walk around on an map, but it’s only to interact with things that trigger very, very long sequences of interactive dialog. There’s so much text it’s actually annoying that they push it all over to the side of the screen instead of the middle.

Disco Elysium is weird. It’s bleak. It’s absurd. It’s gross. It’s depressing. It’s creative and intellectual. And it’s funny. And most important of all, it’s really interesting. I’ve never seen a game like it.

Well, I’ve seen dialog-heavy isometric adventure games before–they’re a dime-a-dozen, because they’re cheap to make–but the setting, characters, and general aesthetic in Disco Elysium are unique. I can’t think of anything similar to compare it to. They grabbed every genre known to humankind, threw them into a wood chipper, and built a world out of the sawdust.

The dialog trees go on for days and days and days. It’s a rare game where I forget how long I’ve been playing because I’m so engrossed in seeing where the conversations go.

Anyway, my character is currently working on two things: Finding alcohol and drugs, and restoring Communism. He’s also a Cop of the Apocalypse, whatever that means.

For the record, I’m supposed to be investigating a murder.

But there’s also a Union strike going on that I haven’t looked into, and there’s a secret door in the kitchen of the hostel I can’t get in, and there’s a bookstore with another secret door behind a curtain that I tried to break down, but I couldn’t, then I had a heart attack and died.

I also tried to hit an obnoxious kid once, but I missed and fell down, and my ticker gave out on me then, too. My guy is prone to having heart attacks (my Physique is 1).

I dug my police clipboard out of a trash can, which I threw away last night in a drunken stupor for some reason (before the game started). The clipboard has a secret compartment in it, which contains some mysterious stuff about my past, but I fainted as soon as I looked at it and had to be awakened with smelling salts.

It’s a lot to deal with, so I really need some drugs, and I think the obnoxious kid can get some for me, because he’s high all the time, but he’s really obnoxious and hates cops.

Luckily I found a bottle of Commodore Red in an apartment building, so I was able to get drunk on the job at least. I definitely think I should be drunk before I perform an autopsy on this murder victim, the Hanging Man, who I shot down from the limb he was hanging on with my partner Kim’s pistol. The corpse is still lying there on the ground while the kids play around him.

In any case, getting drunk gave me an extra point of Physique so hopefully I won’t have any more heart attacks for a while.

I also need to find some money or I won’t have a place to stay tonight, and I can’t even imagine what might happen if I have to wander the streets after dark. Maybe the ghosts in the bookstore will come out.

I don’t even know what to say about the RPG mechanics. It uses a skill system, but the skills all have names that don’t mean anything to me, like Esprit De Corps and Savoir Faire. There’s no Archery or Gymnastics to be found.

I picked the Inland Empire skill as my “specialty,” which is something about hunches and gut feelings. I made my first character with random stats that came out 1 Intellect, 5 Psyche, 1 Physique, and 5 Motorics.

Anyway, it’s a fun adventure-style game. I can see why it was award-winning.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister

Sun, 14 Nov 2021 13:54:08 -0500

I stumbled upon a new (to me) tactical RPG based on the D&D rules.

I’m glad that Endwalker has been delayed a bit because I’m not yet finished writing and/or publishing my posts about Shadowbringers. That would have been awkward to continue posting about the old thing when the new thing arrives.

So far in November I started NaNoWriMo, then gave up on the second day. Then I had fairly significant back pain that kept me away from recreational computing, sitting down, standing up, or moving much at all for a week or so. And now somehow nearly half the month is over in the blink of an eye.

My heroes finding clues.

I’d previously posted about playing Valheim again, but that’s now a distant memory.

I gave up because progress is just too artificially slow for me. I was vexed by the daunting chore of making metals, and while I did finally find the second boss, the prospect of traveling halfway across the world to spend hours setting up yet another forward operating base wasn’t that appealing.

I played a little bit of XCOM 2 (for the first time) and Wasteland 2 (again), both of which have good tactical turn-based combat, but the enemies in XCOM 2 have many unfair advantages and I don’t particularly like the parts of the game between the missions. Wasteland 2 also suffers from fairly tedious gameplay in between the combat encounters.

Overland journeys are a neat idea but it gets old.

In looking for another of the same kind of tactical RPG, I landed on a game called Solasta: Crown of the Magister. (Which I consistently mislabel Magister of the Crown.) I’ve had it in my wishlist forever, but I only recently noticed that it was fully completed and launched out of early access, and even has DLC already, and it was on sale to boot.

I didn’t expect much from it, as I often don’t with games that originate on Kickstarter, the “please give us money to write our first game in Unity so we don’t have to get real jobs” platform, but it’s actually good. Well, decent. It’s rough around the edges to be sure, but the core game is solid.

Town is where you do all your inventory management and buy magic stuff.

Solasta is a turn-based tactical RPG that uses the “Dungeons and Dragons SRD 5.1 Ruleset,” which probably means more to D&D nerds than it does to me. I just know the lingo sounds similar to Critical Role, except it’s missing the obvious Wizards of the Coast trademarks. For example, the spell is called “Hideous Laughter,” not “Tasha’s Hideous Laughter.”

I haven’t actually played Dungeons and Dragons since the first edition rules when I was a kid, which wasn’t even called the first edition back when I played it. In computer form, what I played is closest to the rules that are in the original Baldur’s Gate.

I believe Baldur’s Gate is actually the second edition ruleset, mutated for real-time combat. But if you’ve tried to play Baldur’s Gate with the “Core” difficulty setting, that’s the D&D rules I’m familiar with. (I recently played a game of Baldur’s Gate on “Core” difficulty and it’s brutal, especially if you start out as an Illusionist.)

This was the exact moment I learned that Counterspell was in the game.

Anyway, Solasta uses fifth edition rules, which, as far as I can tell, is 100% focused around managing the state of “having advantage,” a concept that did not exist in my youth. If you “have advantage,” you’ll probably be successful on your dice rolls. If you don’t “have advantage,” many of your attacks from your pitiful low-level characters will miss and most of your spells will fail and your party will die because of it.

God help you if you “have disadvantage.”

I learned a harsh lesson about disadvantage because I played my first Solasta game with the “Iron Man” difficulty setting enabled, which means if your party dies, the game is over. I tend to do that with tactical RPGs lately, like Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, or Wasteland 2. It makes for a more exciting video series. There’s not much dramatic tension if you can make mistakes willy nilly and re-load whenever.

This was a terrible place to fight, even with lights.

Anyway I was doing fine until I got to Caer Lem and a big underground fight with Soraks (lizard people who look a lot like the aliens in the 1980s hit miniseries V) in a cavern that had tons of verticality, and did not realize the importance of taking the time to light all the torches hanging all around the battlefield.

You see, if you don’t have enough light, there’s a good chance that all of your attacks will have disadvantage because the enemies are “unlit” and you’ll miss every time and everyone in your party will die screaming while you watch helplessly. (Even though you, the player, can see everything.)

After my party died, I realized I was enjoying the game enough that I wanted to continue. But I had to start all over again, and starting an RPG a second time can be painful. Thankfully Solasta makes it bearable by allowing you to skip the tutorial.

Solasta’s story isn’t fantastic but it’s good enough that I’m invested in seeing how my plucky randomly-generated adventurers react to stuff.

I'm sure that crown won't do anything bad if we touch it.

The voice acting is good enough that my player characters have some personality, even if you can tell that two of the female voices sound like they might be same actor. (Actually my rogue sounds like Daphne from Frasier.) But it’s not as bad as, say, Oblivion.

Most of all, I enjoy the combat encounters in Solasta. The camera viewpoints are frustrating sometimes but otherwise it has a turn-based system that keeps me engaged and on the edge of my seat throughout each encounter, forcing me to have to make good decisions throughout if I want to be victorious. I usually don’t know if I’m going to win or not until some clutch dice roll turns the tide of battle in my favor, and my party barely survives to fight another day.

At least, that was my experience in the first three or four levels. After that, it got a lot easier, but that’s a topic for another day.

FFXIV - Shadowbringers 5.3, Reflections in Crystal

Sat, 30 Oct 2021 20:20:22 -0400

Notes on the Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers Patch 5.3 Content, Reflections in Crystal, which I finished well over a month ago at the time of this publication.

Super duper big-time spoilers ahead.

5.3 Main Scenario Quest

This time there are twelve quests to get through, which is a lot for a patch. And these are major, epic quests, too. This particular patch felt huge.

When I finished patch 5.2, not having seen any different, I had a theory that Endwalker would be all about fighting Elidipus. But that went out the window in a hurry with 5.3, because this one single patch was that. We dispatched Elidipus handily by the end, and we finally bore the Scions back to The Source.

So this patch felt like the official “end” of the Shadowbringers expansion story, and the beginning of the prologue for Endwalker.

Which, now, is likely to involve Zenos and this new Ascian in the body of everybody’s favorite kid, Ahasi. I recognized his sly grin and voice at the end of the last patch right away.

YoRHa Alliance Raid, The Puppet’s Bunker

Plot twist! 2P turns against us! The whole dwarf village is destroyed by powerful explosions!

In modern Final Fantasy terms, that means everyone’s fine except a couple of tables were knocked over. They enshrined most everyone and everything in impervious plot armor after Heavensward.

In any case, it turns out 9S was our friend all along. Then 2B shows up out of thin air.

That likely means little unless you’ve played Nier: Automata, of which I hadn’t played more than a couple hours by the time I entered this raid. In short, they’re androids.

Anyway there’s a new Alliance Raid, The Puppet’s Bunker, which is considerably harder than The Copied Factory. But I managed to get most of the gear drops from only two runs. The music in these Alliance Raids continues to be amazing.

Werleht Trials

There’s more trials, presumably, in the Werleht questline, but I didn’t feel like I needed to continue that. I don’t care that much about Gaius or his adventures, to be honest.

Valheim, The Return

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 10:35:45 -0400

I decided to try out Valheim again.

The first time, I bought it, played for less than an hour, then returned it, wondering why everyone was raving about it. It seemed obvious to me that it was an average survival game that wasn’t finished. I don’t understand why it caught fire with the MMORPG community.

Some six months later, is it more finished now?

Home sweet home and hearth, or something.

Nope, not really. It’s riddled with bugs and annoyances and quirky behavior. The character animations look like middle school art class projects. You can’t walk up even the slightest incline. You can’t hit anything if you’re standing on sloped terrain.

They’ve just done a supposedly major “Hearth and Home” update, but it doesn’t seem that major to me. They seem to be tinkering with whatever, following no plans or visions, blowing whichever way the wind and/or player forums blow, like a leaf on the wind and like most open source projects. Maybe it’ll get better, maybe it’ll get worse. Who knows?

But I can see why people like Valheim, especially fans of 1990s MMORPGs which had more bugs than features. The emergent gameplay of trying to brute force your way around the bugs, and the collective social bonding over dying to infuriating buggy behavior, was half the fun of 1990s online gaming. “Better in beta,” and all that rot.

The third-person camera is also a good distinguishing feature for Valheim, as compared to other survival games. I personally can’t play first-person games as much anymore without getting physically ill.

Anyway, I had a three-day weekend so I decided to give Valheim a more solid effort. I got through the first boss. It took two tries.

Slightly harder than a Boar.

The first time, I severely underestimated how much damage that electrified deer would do to me, and lost all my stuff. (I, of course, did not consider the possibility that I might lose to the boss and was carrying everything I owned. Fortunately your stuff never disappears, even if you die multiple times, or don’t come back for 60 days.)

After dying, I discovered the boss doesn’t go away after you summon it, and I got stuck in a death cycle, because I built my “forward operating base” a little too close and Eikthyr kept chasing me after each respawn. Eventually I got far enough away that I was able to regroup and rebuild. For future reference: Bosses have a massive aggro radius.

Tipa told me on Twitter I had to go to the Black Forest to get Troll armor before I could fight the first boss, so, being an obstinate gamer, I took that as a direct challenge to not do that. :) Besides, Hugin the friendly bird warned me not to enter the Black Forest until after I killed the first boss. And even though I died the first time, I whittled the boss down to half its health, so it seemed possible to defeat it, with slightly better dodging and blocking.

The second time, I had figured out how to upgrade my workbench to level 2 (not intuitive, ahem) and brought deer leather armor and a tower shield to block a little better. So after dodging its straight-line lightning bolt attack, the one unavoidable ground stomp only did a couple points of damage with the shield up. Then I chipped away at it with a flint knife until he was dead. (I forgot to make a flint spear the second time.) Easy peasy.

After that, I started wandering around the Black Forest wondering how to progress. I’m sure I can Google a checklist of things I’m supposed to do to advance, but I still cling to this weird idea that games should explain what the player is supposed to do. The last thing Hugin told me was to “explore the Black Forest,” so presumably I’ll stumble upon the next breadcrumb eventually.

Somewhere in here there's a path to a fun survival endgame.

That’s one of the problems with Valheim: The pacing is really slow. It takes hours and hours and hours to search around and get materials to make the simplest things.

I’d estimate that up to 90% of the time I spend in Valheim is “down time,” that dreaded condition that used to be so common in online games, where you’re not doing anything except traveling from point A to point B, or farming resources to make something, or methodically searching a large area, with nothing to do but think about all the productive things you could be doing with your life if you weren’t stuck in front of the computer holding down the “forward” key. Don’t even think about playing this game unless you’ve got a big stack of podcasts or audiobooks or television shows queued up and ready to listen to.

Anyway I’ve found copper and tin in the Black Forest, and mined a fair bit of it, but Hugin told me I need a smelter to do anything with it. Naturally the game hasn’t informed how to make a smelter. Again, I assume I could Google this, but the “correct” way to play this game, according to what it’s presenting to me on the screen, is to wander around hoping to stumble into the next arbitrary threshold beyond which I’ll be given the knowledge to make a smelter.

Tipa mentioned Trolls in the Black Wood, but for the longest time I never saw anything but dopey Skeletons and annoying Greydwarves. But I finally found a Troll yesterday. It’s big and intimidating! But it has a slow heavy attack that you can consistently dodge and avoid all damage.

Bigger than I expected, but easy to fight.

But … as soon as I assessed its basic attack pattern (it has precisely one), the moment I thought to myself, “Oh, this is easy,” a gaggle of greydwarves rolled up out of nowhere and ruined everything.

Greydwarves, you see, run around in chaotic patterns and never stand still, making them daunting foes in groups. And they throw things at you from range. So timing the dodging of a circus troupe of greydwarves and a massive Troll club at the same time became rather difficult. And also I was on a slope so movement was extra challenging, because for reasons that can only be to punish players and keep them from having any fun in their game, the developers made it so you can’t move up even a slight incline without sliding back down.

I had to run back to my base if I wanted to survive. Of course the Troll followed, where it proceeded to smash the palisade walls. I climbed up on top of my house inside to pelt it with arrows, then it did that massive club AOE attack that smooshed me from all the way outside the walls.

Then I spawned a million miles away at the original starting point of the game, because it turned out the troll had destroyed my bed inside the house while it was bashing on the palisades. It didn’t send me to the next-closest bed, but that stone circle starting point. Super lame and annoying.

Can't go there without a winter coat, apparently.

And that’s basically all there is to Valheim: The crazy stories that come out of unexpected adversity. It makes up roughly 1% of your game time.

Anyway I went back and killed the Troll and unlocked all the Troll armor. It was a pain to make the Troll armor, because I only have one Tier 3 workbench way back in the first zone, back in the Meadows. It’s rather time-consuming to gather flint and especially leather scraps, so it’s a massive pain to upgrade more than one workbench without tons of running back and forth.

Don’t even get me started an the irritating resource bottleneck with leather scraps. They only drop from Boars, which are the rarest of all creatures in the Meadows, and you need them for everything, and you need a lot of them to upgrade a workbench to level 3. Spending hours wandering the Meadows hoping for Boars to spawn might be an accurate throwback to 90s gaming but is not my idea of a fun game design in 2021.

I don’t understand why nobody rattled off these long, long lists of problems with Valheim back when it came out. All I ever heard were good things. There’s a deep state conspiracy to suppress the truth about this game, for reasons I still can’t comprehend. There are some good things–the landscapes are fairly pretty–but there’s a lot of bad things, too.

For example, a teeny tiny bump on the ground will physically block your character from walking over top of it! What is that? I’ll tell you what that is: A bug. And an annoying one at that. Especially in the middle of melee combat when you have to dodge to avoid attacks, but some tiny little bump on the ground behaves like a brick wall. It’s a bug that should be fixed immediately in one of these patches that come out every other day, but mysteriously hasn’t been.

Getting killed because of weird terrain collision issues is one of my top pet peeves in gaming, and Valheim seems to have been specially designed for the player to get stuck on terrain a lot.

If only this meadow was teeming with Boars.

And the building system? It’s almost impossible to get two consecutive pieces of wall to snap together. That’s not normal. In ARK, you click-click-click and have a house in seconds. In Valheim, it’s an epic struggle of man versus nature to make a corner. It reminds me of Landmark, which incomprehensibly made their building system for industry 3D artists instead of casual players. In Valheim, they seem to think that I’m going to want to build a log cabin one log at a time for fun.

Still, Valheim isn’t bad. It’s just not finished. But for $20, you too can enjoy the constant frustration and time-destroying tedium of average 1990s online gaming.

A Plague Tale: Innocence

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 20:17:27 -0400

A Plague Tale: Innocence is good, with some caveats.

It’s essentially a different version of The Last Of Us. A stealth game with heavy story elements, it’s set in an alternate history medieval France during the bubonic plague years.

I love historical fiction games. They’re somewhat rare in the gaming industry. It was the main draw of Assassin’s Creed. Kingdom Come: Deliverance as well. A Plague Tale veers moderately far away from historicity (eg. lots of modern-sounding Gen Z dialog), but there’s enough in there to push those buttons.

Examining the iconography in these tapestries is fascinating.

French is also one of my favorite accents, so the fact that most of the voice acting is distinctly French is a big selling point for me personally. Your mileage may vary.

The biggest deficiency in A Plague Tale is the gameplay mechanics. It feels like it isn’t quite finished, or they didn’t have time for quality control. Subtle bugs and jankiness abound, which repeatedly pulled me out of the story immersion.

The mouse-and-keyboard controls chaff: There’s a lot of stretching to reach many keys simultaneously, so it felt like playing complex chords on a guitar at times. (Usually in the middle of fighting for your life, where the slightest mistake results in death and starting over.)

This is a bad time to be fumbling with controls.

There are (several) times when gameplay challenges undermine what could be powerful story moments, especially in the final climactic chapter. The music builds, the voice actors are voice acting powerful emotive dialog, and then you take one step in the wrong direction and die instantly, and start over. After the second or third of fourth time of hearing the same dialog again and again, the story impact is lost.

In situations like that, the game forgets that it’s a story game, so the story should be the most important part of the experience. Challenging gameplay should be put between the powerful story moments, not in the middle of them. If you want to put gameplay in the middle, it has to be so easy you can’t possibly fail it.

The Last Of Us got things like that right. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice was also brilliant at getting out of the way of its own story. A Plague Tale doesn’t.

That kid is too adorable.

But despite that, it’s a good game and worth playing. Not great, but good. It’s a solid story with twists and turns I didn’t expect, if you can push your way through the shaky gameplay foundation underneath of it.

FFXIV - Shadowbringers 5.2, Echoes of a Fallen Star

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 08:47:37 -0400

Notes on the Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers Patch 5.2 Content, Echoes of a Fallen Star.

Super duper big-time spoilers ahead.

5.2 Main Scenario Quest

Another ten quests to get through. These post-Shadowbringers patches are big and meaty, unlike what I remember of the first couple of post-Stormblood patches, which I remember as being fairly inconsequential. (No, I still haven’t fixed the images on older posts yet.)

The bodies of the Scions back in The Source are still deteriorating, even faster now, so we have to hurry up getting them back. So of course we’re soon distracted from that task again.

Instead, we start working on clearing the name of poor Ardbert, the First’s much-maligned Warrior of Light, who’s reputation was ruined. Then, much to our surprise, Ardbert himself strides into The Crystarium and declares that he needs all the people of the First to rise up and become Warriors of Light like him.

They don't always get facial expressions right but this time they nailed it.

Long story short, it’s not Ardbert (whose soul has actually merged with the player’s soul), but that last pesky evil unsundered Ascian Elidipus in Ardbert’s guise, because of course it is.

After a quick trip to the Tree Village of the Bunny People for a fun adventure with the Bunny Sisters, we end up going back to another underwater ruin in The Tempest to research the Ascians, with the help of everyone’s favorite flying whale. This results in a moderately interesting dungeon run, the first part of which has the dungeon going past you while you stand still, which was a neat twist.

When we get back to The Crystarium, Elidipus causes meteors to fall from the sky and everyone hears the voice of Hydaelyn speaking to them and it’s all a grand spectacle with earth-shattering implications. Unfortunately you have to be a hardcore Final Fantasy nerd to understand even a little bit of it.

From a practical standpoint, the only thing that matters is that Elidipus is bad and we need to stop him. But not in this patch.

YoRHa Alliance Raids

There’s a couple of new quests, but no new raids. The wacky dwarves of Komra are getting ready for a carnival.

Eden Raids

There’s a new set of four raids but I didn’t do any of them. I played through the opening quests to unlock the first one, then walked away. I wasn’t all that enamored with the new character Pouty McPoutyFace, so I guess I’ll never know what becomes of Ryne, and Thancred and Urianger will forever remain in a time paradox, stuck in The First.

Pouty McPoutyFace

Werleht Trial

The main scenario quest directs you back to The Locks of Gyr Abania, where you unlock a Trial. The game sort of implies that you have to do the trial to continue the story and save the world, but in fact you can ignore it (which is what I did, because I didn’t have the required item level).

But I went back and did this trial after I finished the 5.2 Main Scenario Quests. I jumped into a PUG and got through it on the first try.

I can’t say I was terribly invested in the story surrounding Gaius and his adopted kids, so I doubt I’ll do any more of this quest line. I don’t know Gaius and I certainly don’t know his kids, and I don’t know how any of it’s related to anything.

Without a compelling story, I don’t know why I’d want to do these Werleht Trials, other than just to say I did them. I suspect they drop weapons or parts for weapons, but with Endwalker almost upon us, one hardly need bother working to get new gear that will immediately be replaced.

Now What?

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 16:48:45 -0400

Searching for the next game to play, and also apparently listing every game I’ve looked at recently.

I’m one of those people who only plays one game at a time. I’m the Charles Emerson Winchester of gaming:

“Gentlemen, I play one game at a time–I play it very well–and then I move on.”

With New World booted from the the “main game” spot, that leaves nothing pressing for me to play, and it also leaves me feeling somewhat burned out and uninterested in games. I’m in that mood where I start a game, look at it for a minute and sigh, then log out and watch YouTube. For me it usually happens after playing an endless treadmill game for too long (in this case, it was Shadowbringers). I have to go through a detox period.

There’s no reason to log back into Final Fantasy XIV until November anyway. I haven’t yet posted all the posts I was going to post about it, but the truth can finally be told that I’m done with the Shadowbringers Main Scenario Quest. (I’ve been done for weeks, actually.)

I re-installed Black Desert Online, but discovered I was supposed to do some kind of account transfer earlier in the year, which I didn’t, so all my characters and my entire account is gone. I have to buy the game again. Or play it for free. I think you can do that now.

I re-installed Elder Scrolls Online, but as soon as I saw the login screen I remembered I don’t like ESO that much. My characters mean nothing to me, and I can’t think of any zone story or NPC characters that mean anything to me. The most fun thing for me to do in that game is try to guess which NPCs are voiced by Critical Role cast members.

I even forced myself to log into Bless Unleashed a few times, but I just can’t with that game. Any time you add “combos” to a combat system, I’m going to back away slowly.

I logged into Guild Wars 2 a couple times, but meh. Not into it. Don’t care about the expansion. Maybe some other time.

The Mortal Online 2 stress test might still be available, but that game is hard work to play. That’s the game everyone says they want–an experience just like playing an MMORPG in the late 90s–but of course nobody is going to touch it because no sane person actually wants that. Also, it’s first-person only.

In the single-player realm, I wanted to finish Nioh, but at this point, I might as well admit it’s dead to me and uninstall it forever. I quit in the middle of some ice lady boss, and you can’t go back to any Souls-like game in the middle of a boss fight. I didn’t like the repetitive nature of that game anyway.

I could try Nioh 2, but I’ve already assessed that it’s the same as Nioh 1.

I started Greedfall a while back, but it didn’t click with me. It was “okay” but running back and forth to watch cut scenes is the main game activity. It wasn’t a good game for videos.

In a similar vein, I started A Plague Tale, which I like a lot, but it’s another game of watching cut scenes and listening to voice acting, and it isn’t a good game for videos.

With that kind of game, I could theoretically play it without recording it, but it just seems like a waste of time to play games now without leaving some kind of creative work or archival record behind to show for it. (And before you ask, blogging is too much work.)

I started Hellpoint some months ago but lost interest. It starts out as a decent indie Souls-like but it drifts into repetitious mediocrity after a while.

On to other games I’ve looked into recently. I have some interest in continuing Nier: Automata, but that’s a controller game so I can only play for a couple of hours a week if I want to retain the use of my left thumb for, you know, real life. Also, it’s a fantastic award-worthy soundtrack, but the game feels hollow.

Another controller game that I like but can’t play very much is Wreckfest. It’s by the same people who made Flatout from olden times, which I also liked. One of the first ragdoll games! Anyway, you get in a car and wreck other cars. That’s it. Pretty cool. Sometimes you drive lawnmowers instead. Also cool.

I’m near the end of Final Fantasy XIII, but I haven’t had much interest in continuing since the Stupid Face Boss. You just know there’s going to be even more annoying bosses to come. Also, it’s another game that’s not good for videos. It’s button mashing and cut scenes. Incidentally, I also bought Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Lightning Returns in a recent sale for some future day.

I got a little indie visual novel called Tiny Bunny which popped up on my Steam front page on sale one day. I got it because I thought a scary nightmare bunny was a funny idea. I played it for an hour, but it’s not well-written, or at least the English translation isn’t well-translated. Tons and tons of adverbs. Don’t use adverbs in your visual novels, he advised sagely.

I tried to get into State of Decay 2 but I just can’t. I loved the first game and played it to death, but the second one is just … the same. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime game concept, apparently.

I made the mistake of buying Mortal Shell because it had been on my wish list for a while and finally launched. Learn from my mistakes. I thought it was going to be a cool Souls-like. I played an hour or so, and it’s not a cool Souls-like. The beautiful graphics are a trick, as they often are. I should have returned it. [UPDATE: I forgot to mention the worst part: You can’t dodge while moving, and if you hold down the dodge key slightly too long, it doesn’t dodge at all.]

Speaking of returning games, I bought Biomutant in a sale, played for an hour, and returned it. It’s a cool idea, but it’s not executed well.

Buying games, playing for an hour, and then returning them might be a good model for me going forward. It’s rare that I find a game I want to play more than an hour. New World would have been a game I returned in an hour if everybody in my social circles wasn’t constantly emoting so much about it.

I played a bit of Wildermyth, a game which was all the rage for a week or so. It’s cute, and a cool concept, but it ran out of steam for me in a couple hours.

I was going to play Ashen, another Souls-like-ish with an interesting visual aesthetic, but it mysteriously crashes on my new gaming PC.

I got DOOM Eternal on sale, but I haven’t even installed it yet. I assume it’s exactly the same as DOOM 2016, which itself got somewhat repetitive around the middle. Other big name games I’ve gotten recently but haven’t installed include Far Cry 5, Disco Elysium, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and XCOM 2.

And I think that about covers all the games that have crossed my desk in the last six months that I haven’t already mentioned before. I feel no inspiration to play any of the above games.

Maybe I’ll try Valheim again. And I’d like to try Deathloop, because Dishonored was fantastic. But what I should do is avoid games and play guitar or watch television or something else instead until I’ve recharged. Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker is coming up in November and then in January the big, big, big game Elden Ring, the biggest, biggest, biggest game release since Sekiro.