Last night I spent my evening trying to catch up on Destiny and quite honestly failing miserably at doing so. The Dawning has been a complete failure for me in actually getting it finished. Over the Christmas break I fell into a giant Witcher shaped hole that I have yet to pull myself out of. The game that suffered most because of this is Destiny 2 and for the most part I am okay with this. What it ultimately means is that I never finished unlocking the sparrow because I didn’t deliver 200 packages, Again I am mostly okay with this because I have been trying really hard to play what I want when I want rather than forcing myself down some tube towards specific chase content.
A lot of my actions over the last several years have been governed by FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out. Games have factored themselves in a way as to tweak your anxiety centers and make you feel like you need to do a certain thing within a certain time frame or you are in some way failing. This is all to drive up the concurrency numbers so that it feels like the game is alive and well. As a result so much content is doled out in limited time bundles that require significant commitment in order to successfully gain whatever carrot happens to be dangling from the stick. The problem here is that when everyone is doing this thing it means that you are always going to feel somehow like you are failing leading to a pretty miserable gaming experience.
I’ve never been the sort of player who only plays one game, and it feels like so much of the design of modern online games is focused towards trying to make players only play the one game. As a result for the last few years I have sat back feeling unsatisfied with my gaming, knowing that while I was playing game A I was missing out on something in B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L. The Dawning for example was the only holiday event that I participated in during the 2019 extended holiday season. Pretty much every game had one going on, but I decided to nope out of all of them for my own sanity. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy Holidays in games, it is just that I am tired of being forced to consume content on someone else’s schedule.
There is nothing I enjoy more than the feeling of returning to a game and having a massive stack full of content to enjoy. When I return to SWTOR or FFXIV I tend to do so with enough of a lag between visits that I have a few weeks worth of catching up waiting for me. Nothing feels worse however than finding out that you missed out on something cool because the devs decided it was only going to be available during a brief window. I would personally so much rather see development time spent towards evergreen content that is always going to be there and available to the players rather than limited time flash in the pan gimmick content. Much of why I have never quite returned to Anthem for example is that they keep setting up limited time events and doing nothing to broaden the total game experience as a whole.
The one thing that I do appreciate about Destiny is that while I never seem to complete any of the content during a specific season, they seem to give me more wiggle room about this. Generally speaking if you get one of the big set piece quests for a season, you can then chew away on completing it over however long that it takes. For example during the Season of the Drifter they introduced a Gambit themed Heavy Machinegun called 21% Delirium which involved a ton of grinding to get. The final step of which I achieved last night by getting the “Notorious Hustle” triumph. I had been on the Envoys and Primevals defeated step for what felt like several seasons, because you have to be the person who scored the final damage on a target in order to get credit.
I am now the proud owner of another HMG, this time dealing Arc Damage… which I believe is not something I had in a legendary package. Traditionally if I needed an Arc Damage Machinegun I rocked Thunderlord taking up my Exotic weapon slot. All it all it seems like a pretty solid weapon, but I also have not had much time to spend with it as I mostly did Gambit and Crucible last night. The funny thing about the entire process is that I did in fact log in to see how far I was from completing the Dawning event, and when I saw that I still needed like some 60 packages I realized it was not going to happen. There is a part of my brain that is screaming, but I am desperately trying to deaden it as I figure out how to play on my own terms again.
2020 feels like a significant year because I am trying to do a bunch of things that I want to do. So far the reading every night thing is going extremely well, apart from the fact that several nights I have stayed up reading way later than I had intended to. I’ve finished one book and am 27% through the second book which is about par for the course for how fast I read. The Bel Folks Stuff thing is also going really well as shockingly most everyone I have talked to about it has accepted. Still in the process of reaching out to people, but like I only have had one no and one maybe for very valid reasons. Pretty much everyone has just been on board with this nonsense and I am kinda floored by it.
On the gaming front however I am still very much adapting to trying to do what I want to do and stop chasing that forever game. It is going to take some time, because I spent a decade letting my anxiety over missing out on something cool dictate my gaming schedule.
Last night I spent my evening trying to catch up on Destiny and quite honestly failing miserably at doing so. The Dawning has been a complete failure for me in actually getting it finished. Over the Christmas break I fell into a giant Witcher shaped hole that I have yet to pull myself out of. The game that suffered most because of this is Destiny 2 and for the most part I am okay with this. What it ultimately means is that I never finished unlocking the sparrow because I didn’t deliver 200 packages, Again I am mostly okay with this because I have been trying really hard to play what I want when I want rather than forcing myself down some tube towards specific chase content.
A lot of my actions over the last several years have been governed by FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out. Games have factored themselves in a way as to tweak your anxiety centers and make you feel like you need to do a certain thing within a certain time frame or you are in some way failing. This is all to drive up the concurrency numbers so that it feels like the game is alive and well. As a result so much content is doled out in limited time bundles that require significant commitment in order to successfully gain whatever carrot happens to be dangling from the stick. The problem here is that when everyone is doing this thing it means that you are always going to feel somehow like you are failing leading to a pretty miserable gaming experience.
I’ve never been the sort of player who only plays one game, and it feels like so much of the design of modern online games is focused towards trying to make players only play the one game. As a result for the last few years I have sat back feeling unsatisfied with my gaming, knowing that while I was playing game A I was missing out on something in B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L. The Dawning for example was the only holiday event that I participated in during the 2019 extended holiday season. Pretty much every game had one going on, but I decided to nope out of all of them for my own sanity. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy Holidays in games, it is just that I am tired of being forced to consume content on someone else’s schedule.
There is nothing I enjoy more than the feeling of returning to a game and having a massive stack full of content to enjoy. When I return to SWTOR or FFXIV I tend to do so with enough of a lag between visits that I have a few weeks worth of catching up waiting for me. Nothing feels worse however than finding out that you missed out on something cool because the devs decided it was only going to be available during a brief window. I would personally so much rather see development time spent towards evergreen content that is always going to be there and available to the players rather than limited time flash in the pan gimmick content. Much of why I have never quite returned to Anthem for example is that they keep setting up limited time events and doing nothing to broaden the total game experience as a whole.
The one thing that I do appreciate about Destiny is that while I never seem to complete any of the content during a specific season, they seem to give me more wiggle room about this. Generally speaking if you get one of the big set piece quests for a season, you can then chew away on completing it over however long that it takes. For example during the Season of the Drifter they introduced a Gambit themed Heavy Machinegun called 21% Delirium which involved a ton of grinding to get. The final step of which I achieved last night by getting the “Notorious Hustle” triumph. I had been on the Envoys and Primevals defeated step for what felt like several seasons, because you have to be the person who scored the final damage on a target in order to get credit.
I am now the proud owner of another HMG, this time dealing Arc Damage… which I believe is not something I had in a legendary package. Traditionally if I needed an Arc Damage Machinegun I rocked Thunderlord taking up my Exotic weapon slot. All it all it seems like a pretty solid weapon, but I also have not had much time to spend with it as I mostly did Gambit and Crucible last night. The funny thing about the entire process is that I did in fact log in to see how far I was from completing the Dawning event, and when I saw that I still needed like some 60 packages I realized it was not going to happen. There is a part of my brain that is screaming, but I am desperately trying to deaden it as I figure out how to play on my own terms again.
2020 feels like a significant year because I am trying to do a bunch of things that I want to do. So far the reading every night thing is going extremely well, apart from the fact that several nights I have stayed up reading way later than I had intended to. I’ve finished one book and am 27% through the second book which is about par for the course for how fast I read. The Bel Folks Stuff thing is also going really well as shockingly most everyone I have talked to about it has accepted. Still in the process of reaching out to people, but like I only have had one no and one maybe for very valid reasons. Pretty much everyone has just been on board with this nonsense and I am kinda floored by it.
On the gaming front however I am still very much adapting to trying to do what I want to do and stop chasing that forever game. It is going to take some time, because I spent a decade letting my anxiety over missing out on something cool dictate my gaming schedule.
Last night I finished my first play through of Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings and I have to say I rather enjoyed myself. As compared to the Witcher 3 it was a vastly different sort of game, and as a result any direct comparison is somewhat difficult. Witcher 3 is this gigantic open world experience that has you tackle tasks in whatever order you want, with significant freedom to keep going back and revisiting areas without never truly feeling you are done there. Witcher 2 on the other hand in comparison is super linear and is comprised of Prologue, 3 Acts, and an Epilogue each effectively containing a boxed area that once you have passed can no longer be explored.
Each one of these “gates” when crossed forces the player to make some rather world changing decisions, in that you are effectively going down a very different path because of them. As a result I am deeply considering seeing what the other major path structure would look like, because at the end of Act 1 you are asked to choose someone to ally with and as I understand it this kicks off a very different Act 2 and Act 3 depending on the choice. I enjoyed the act greatly because it was deeply focused on the plight of the non-humans, but the other path also involves some characters that I greatly enjoyed interacting with in Witcher 3. To be honest when I did the “simulate choices” option at the beginning of the third game I was mostly just making decisions without knowing what they meant.
I mostly just powered through the main story, because there is a not insignificant amount of tedium in doing the side quests for Witcher 2. Now had I played this game at the appropriate time when it represented one of the best possible experiences I could be playing… I would have probably gobbled up every side adventure. Playing it now and seeing how much better Witcher 3 does at presenting a world with interesting side stories, it more or less ruined the experience for me. The game however is still very much worth playing to present you with the story behind events that will ultimately resolve in the third game.
I made another attempt last night to get into the original Witcher game and even after installing a pack that supposedly fixes and tweaks a bunch of stuff I found the experience miserable. There is another mod out there that re-balances combat, but it does so in a manner I have no interest in trying. My hope was that it would take away the weird hold to attack and then play whack-a-mole system, but instead it just appears to make everything harder. Again this is a situation of if I had managed to play this around the time it was released, I might have been able to get used to it. Now however it just feels bad and my brain rebels against it every time I try and force myself to experience it.
I am guessing that CD Project Red understands how frustrating the first game is because at some point they released the above video as a recap. I guess I will accept that this is the only version of the original game that I will be experiencing. One of my favorite parts of Witcher 2 is when they show one of Geralt’s memories rendered in this same art style. So I am perfectly okay with watching that same animation style summarize the original game. The second game however is perfectly playable and I am really wishing I had started there instead of just picking up with the 3rd game. So were I to update my advice on how best to get into this series…
Watch the Netflix Series – while this deviates from the novels a bit based on my experience so far, it does give you a pretty good primer into the world of The Witcher and will at least allow you to understand some of the core conflicts.
Watch the Above Recap of Witcher 1 – you may not be as turned off by the original game, but the above recap video gives you enough detail to understand the events at the beginning of Witcher 2.
Play Witcher 2 – while it feels like an older style of game experience it is still very much a good game. There are UI quirks that I wrote about in another post, but if you can get past them the game and story and world are rich enough to keep you engaged. Also it is fairly easy to golden path this game and only care about the main story beats.
Play Witcher 3 – then of course import your Witcher 2 save into Witcher 3 and have a continuation of the world state you left in the second game. Once I determine which path I like better I am probably going to do this and play through the 3rd game again.
I’m also still working my way through the novels. I finished Last Wish last night and made it about three chapters into Sword of Destiny last night. I believe I am following the suggested reading order as Last Wish and Sword of Destiny are both effectively a bunch of short stories about Geralt’s adventures and also appear to be what the Netflix series is heavily drawing upon. Blood of Elves follows up next and begins the first of the proper novels. I am not entirely sure why I am seemingly so obsessed right now, but I am enjoying myself and am just going to roll with it for the time being.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
As we work on our “Games of the Decade” show, one of the things that kept coming up was whether or not to put tabletop games on the list. After some back and forth we decided that really the tabletop show was a show of its own, because this decade changed the status quo significantly. There is a certain amount of hyperbole in the show title, but in truth this is the decade when D&D and Settlers of Catan started being sold at Walmart and Target, and you can’t get much more mainstream than that. We talk about the meteoric explosion of tabletop gaming and some of the factors we feel potentially triggered it. It was a wildly meandering show and we found it impossible to come up with a bullet point list of what we discussed. We almost completely missed miniature wargaming, which may end up being its own show at some point.
