Games of the Decade: 2015

Fallout 4 – PC
Continuing the series we dive into some of the games that were important to me in 2015. There were a bunch of games that made the early version of this list, but in many cases I didn’t feel like I had a lot to talk about any of them. I’ve been trying to avoid expansions/dlc on the list, and as a result that knocked out Heavensward which took up a significant portion of my year. Similarly this knocks out Destiny Taken King which also was super important. The final list was whittled down to just four games but I feel like there is something special with each of them.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Witcher 3 – PC
For years I had heard wonderful things about the Witcher series, but I found them somewhat obtuse and difficult to get into. Maybe if I had played the original when it first was released it might have made a difference, but trying to make it with modern expectations was a nonstarter. I found the interface to be deeply cludgy and confusing. When The Witcher 3 released I was not expecting much from it based on my past experience with the earlier two titles, but I got a free copy with a new video card and gave it a shot. What I found was a deep and rich world that I really enjoyed exploring. I’ve not gotten anywhere close to actually beating the game, but it is on that list of titles that I keep meaning to restart from scratch and play through again. The recent release of the Netflix series is re-igniting that desire so maybe I will spend some time over the coming days giving it another shot.

Dying Light

Dying Light – PC
Dying Light is one of those games that is almost impossible to explain without actually experiencing it. At its core it is a game about surviving the zombie apocalypse, but it is much more than that given that there are rich systems where you gain favor with various factions of survivors. The other aspect that is hard to explain is how important movement is to this game. It is a game that takes parkour to the next level as you try and find a path to run on that is safe from the endless hordes of the undead in the world below. There is always this tentative balance between staying in safety and dropping down into the places where you need to scavenge materials from. The total package is wildly enjoyable and now that the game has been out for quite some time you can pick it up on the cheap. If you missed it the first time, well worth grabbing especially since there is a sequel in the works for 2020 release.

Victor Vran

Victor Vran – PC
If you have read this blog for very long you will know of my deep affinity for “diablo-likes” and ARPGs in general. One of these that sorta slipped under almost everyone’s radar is a game called Victor Vran, where you take the controls of a Van Helsing like character that hunts demons and monsters. What makes this game interesting to me is that it has really good WASD controls and extremely interesting level design that works in old fashioned Wolf 3D era “secrets” that can be unlocked to find both new paths and troves of loot. The combination makes for a compelling action RPG that in some ways reminds me of early Isometric shooters like Crusader: No Remorse. You have a wide variety of attacks and special abilities and the levels are hand crafted instead of procedurally generated. This leads to a more structured game-play experience but also somewhat harms the replay value. This is now out on even more platforms including the switch, so well worth checking out if you too are a fan of ARPGs.

Fallout 4

Fallout 4 – PC
I love the Fallout series and have since I first played the original back in 1997. The Fallout community tends to have two distinct branches… those who hold up Fallout 3 as the best title and those who hold up Fallout New Vegas in highest regard. I like aspects of both but tend to fall into the New Vegas camp. Fallout 4 was not exactly the game that either of those factions wanted and as a result it tends to be a fairly divisive title. For me… the aspect that I love about it is Base Building, which is the nail in the coffin for other games. I love feeling like I get to have an effect on the world by linking together disparate groups of refuges into a larger community. When I play this game I more or less ignore the story-line that is forced upon you, and the constantly limiting choice paths… and instead play a game where I am rebuilding the wasteland. I am pretty great at making up my own story when I find the current options distasteful.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2015

2015 was the year that I went to my first video game convention in the form of Pax South in San Antonio. I got to hang out with my friends Ashgar and Rae and explore all of the nonsense that makes up a Pax while also doing various press meetings. I managed to abuse those connections to sneak them into a gameplay session for Gigantic which was probably the game of the show that year. If you start on the right side, the faces that are pointed towards the camera at the screens are me, Ashgar, Rae and then hovering above Rae and explaining the abilities is Lonrem. It was a pretty good year, that started with a bang. I greatly miss going to Pax South each year, but the timing just hasn’t worked out since 2018.

Not First Rodeo

The Waiting Game

Not First Rodeo

Yesterday marked the official release of The Division… or at least it did in some parts of the country.  Most of the evening was a simple case of me waiting around for the servers to unlock.  My friend Lonrem apparently purchased his CD Key from a UK reseller, and as a result he was able to get in and play significantly earlier than the rest of us.  It was completely unintentional as he was simply shopping around for the best deal, but I guess that is a neat trick for games like this that have a somewhat staggered launch cycle.  The rest of us however had to wait for midnight eastern to pop in and attempt to play.  I say attempt to play, because as the saying goes… this is not my first rodeo.  To the best of my knowledge UbiSoft has never launched an MMO, so as a result I expected the first night to be extremely choppy.  My only real complaint is the fact that I had to wait until around 11:50 to begin extracting the game from steam…  which was a process that took over twenty minutes.  I mean I get why they limit folks, but it seems like they could have flipped that switch about 11pm and let folks get through that step so they were quite literally ready to go when the final switch was thrown at midnight.  The bulk of last night was me playing other things while waiting on access to The Division.  My goal was simple… stay up long enough to create a character and then head to bed.

I played a little Destiny, and then ultimately retired to the sofa to piddle around.  After doing my Garrison chores in World of Warcraft, I ultimately landed in How to Survive 2, which is a game that is really growing on me.  It is not going to win any rewards for graphical fidelity, but there is something about it that I find appealing.  Sunday I managed to get the first mission that straight up wrecked me, so last night I attempted it again but this time dialing down the difficulty a little bit.  That is one of the things that I failed to notice at first is that you can repeat the missions, but each time you can adjust up or down the difficulty.  This creates some interesting ways to get easy experience, as the very first mission objective is simply kill 5 undead…  which you can do really quickly and if you crank up the slider to maximum difficulty you soak up lots of xp.  The mission I struggled with was the very first night mission, which means I had to see everything by either spotty moonlight or by shining my flashlight around.  This made exploring buildings as anxiety ridden for me as I imagine it would be for real in this situation.  I found myself playing vastly differently… shutting doors after me to buy myself some time just like I used to board up windows in State of Decay.  If that mission signals more of the game to come I am looking forward to seeing it, because I expect to repeat that mission a bunch just because it was extremely enjoyable trying to stay alive in a much more infected city at night.

Desert Parkour

Not First Rodeo

I guess I was simply in a zombie mood because after playing a few missions in How to Survive 2, I moved over and booted up Dying Light.  Now I have had a copy of this game for quite a while but never wound up playing it.  I am not exactly sure why, because at least aspects of this game are right down my alley.  The whole parkour thing… not so much, but their particular implementation is pretty great.  At base level the game reminds me a lot of the fun I had running around the rooftops in Assassins Creed II, but this time… the citizens were out to kill me and I couldn’t really blend in among them.  I feel like I am late to the party, but I had quite a bit of fun running the first several missions.  I managed to make it through the tutorial and into the “real” game where I chose to remain offline, because I absolutely did not want some player showing up in my game and hunting me down as the “Night Hunter”.  While I didn’t actually make it terribly far before feeling like I needed to log out and watch the clock again…  I want to definitely pick this back up the next time I want a single player game.  It seems like an amalgam of a bunch of other games that I enjoyed, and it looked gorgeous on my laptop and performed extremely well.

Crash and Burn

Not First Rodeo

I already talked a bit about the frustrations of having to wait for the game to unpack, and while I had not intended to… I popped on voice chat to hang out with Tam, Kodra and Ashgar who were all waiting as well.  Ash purchased through Uplay so he was up and running well before the rest of us.  Tam, Kodra and I all seemed to get in around the same time and I apparently took significantly longer on the character creator than the other two.  I was just about to finalize my appearance when I hit a server connection error.  As expected the UPlay servers crashed and crashed hard.  It was at this point that I decided to go to bed, because I doubted they would be playable for awhile.  My key complaint with this game is that you are not sent to a menu first, so that means you have no access to the graphical settings until after you wade through the introduction.  In the multiple betas I have played in and on multiple machines…  this game has never once auto selected a viable graphics option.  During beta it kept trying to tell me I could run the game on 4k… and this time around it seems to favor running the game in a postage stamp sized window.  It is only after logging in and changing the settings that things became usable.  Dear UbiSoft… never do this again…  in a PC game the first screen you see should ALWAYS be the Graphics/Audio/Whatsit menu.  I mean I get what they are going for…  wrapping the player in story from the second they launch the game…  but this could have been just as easily done from hitting the play button from a menu.

Not First Rodeo

I managed to get into the game this morning, created my character and poked my way around the Brooklyn starter zone that we did not get to see during the beta.  So far I am liking it, it feels like a less hectic version of Manhattan.  I am not sure if I am simply better at the game than I was when I first played beta, or if the AI is really dumb… but I am mowing down the mobs in the Brooklyn area without issue.  I like how often gear upgrades are dropping and at this point in the few minutes I have played I have already essentially swapped out my entire gear set other than weapon.  The only frustration is that I really want to get to the rewards vendor so I can make sure all of the items that I supposedly unlocked are really available.  I have an 8pm raid tonight in Destiny but it is my hope to pop in and play some Division tonight to maybe get out of tutorial land.  If the servers stay stable…  like will be golden.  I don’t think there was anyone who has ever experiences an MMO launch that did not expect the servers to crash and burn last night.  However in talking to my friend Ravener, it seems like they recovered pretty quickly and within an hour the game was completely playable for the rest of the night.