One of the things that I noticed while going through my Giant Wall of Games list ™ is that during the 2020 Calendar year I pretty much played NOTHING on my phone. That isn’t entirely true, because I downloaded and tried a few things but nothing significant enough to actually log in the list. There were a handful of games that I installed and immediately uninstalled for various reasons, but in the past I had something like Dragalia Lost or Pokemon Go that was always on the list. So on a whim yesterday afternoon I put out a call to my Twitter family.
Okay friends. Since I have long considered mobile development a largely poisoned well. I figure I will crowdsource this… best mobile games available for Android that are not f2p monetization/gacha traps or match 3 games…. GO!@Belghast
The problem I have with mobile gaming is that the discovery mechanisms seem to largely be dominated by either Gacha games or games with otherwise similarly questionable free to play mechanics. There are also a number of games that I would clump into a category of being a port of a game from another platform but that are made worse by touch screen controls. I have a number of SquareSoft mobile ports and they are an infinitely worse experience than playing the same game on pretty much any other platform. What I seem to be lacking however are the games that either wouldn’t work without a touch screen interfaces are somehow uniquely enriched by having one. Some of the constraints I am looking for are as follows.
Must be Android – I have zero iOS devices by design
Must be a Direct Purchase, One Time Unlock, or Free to Play with very optional and non-obtrusive monetization
Should be a gameplay experience uniquely enhanced by the touchscreen interface and not just a port trying to make up for those shortcomings
No Match Three Games – While I love Bejeweled, I need to move past that
I have to say I absolutely love my Twitter family because once again they came through for me with a massive list of titles to try. This mornings post is as much for my own benefit as it is for sharing these picks with the world, because I wanted a nice clean way of keeping track of it. A few of the titles that were thrown out were games that I had tried and ruled out for one reason or another, so I am dropping them from the list. The titles that are currently in the running for eventually garnering my attention are as follows.
Ultimately the above block of six games is what I chose for my very first cohort. Monument Valley is a game series that I had heard really good things about but ultimately forgot existed. You Must Build a Boat is a game that I have heard someone at some time in the past raving about it… I thought it was Kodra but it might just be a fuzzy memory of Liore when Cat Context existed. Loop gets bumped up in priority because it is was created by a mutual, so absolutely going to check that out. Eve Echos is a game that I had already installed but never actually got around to checking… so just grouping it in by default. Pathfinder Adventures because i was curious and Pixel Dungeon because also curious.
Mobile gaming is pretty much a bedtime activity for me, and last night I managed to try out one of the games before sleep ultimately claimed me. I had not really been sleeping well for a few nights so I did not make it super far. Monument Valley is gorgeous and is exactly the sort of game I am looking for. I am not exactly sure how this game works without a touch interface, and as a result it isn’t just making up for that limited toolset but exploiting it. The puzzles are interesting and change enough to feel fresh each time you move onto a new monument. I made it through five before my eyelids were too heavy to continue, but I am probably going to be playing this one for awhile until I either complete it or get distracted by some other shiny object.
Since this has apparently turned into a post with just an excessive number of bullet point lists… why not add another? I wanted to take a moment to thank all of the folks who participated yesterday in throwing out game ideas. There was a flurry of them that all came in at once, and I think I have accounted for them all… but apologies if I inadvertently miss someone. Yall are awesome in my book.
Essentially over the years I have developed this borderline toxic attitude that mobile gaming is by nature mechanically worse than gaming on pretty much any other platform. I am trying really hard to break this mental block. My hope is that by exposing myself to the games that my friends consider the best, I will start to see the potential of this platform that I have largely relegated to idle match three games and Gacha gambling. I know there are unique experiences that can only be had on a mobile phone, so I am hoping to find more of them.
Now this is the point where I reach out to my readers as well. If you have any mobile games that you love and feel like are must play experiences, please drop me a line below in the comments. I will look into all of them and potentially add them to the list above.
The post Seeking Mobile Experiences appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
One of the things that I noticed while going through my Giant Wall of Games list ™ is that during the 2020 Calendar year I pretty much played NOTHING on my phone. That isn’t entirely true, because I downloaded and tried a few things but nothing significant enough to actually log in the list. There were a handful of games that I installed and immediately uninstalled for various reasons, but in the past I had something like Dragalia Lost or Pokemon Go that was always on the list. So on a whim yesterday afternoon I put out a call to my Twitter family.
Okay friends. Since I have long considered mobile development a largely poisoned well. I figure I will crowdsource this… best mobile games available for Android that are not f2p monetization/gacha traps or match 3 games…. GO!@Belghast
The problem I have with mobile gaming is that the discovery mechanisms seem to largely be dominated by either Gacha games or games with otherwise similarly questionable free to play mechanics. There are also a number of games that I would clump into a category of being a port of a game from another platform but that are made worse by touch screen controls. I have a number of SquareSoft mobile ports and they are an infinitely worse experience than playing the same game on pretty much any other platform. What I seem to be lacking however are the games that either wouldn’t work without a touch screen interfaces are somehow uniquely enriched by having one. Some of the constraints I am looking for are as follows.
Must be Android – I have zero iOS devices by design
Must be a Direct Purchase, One Time Unlock, or Free to Play with very optional and non-obtrusive monetization
Should be a gameplay experience uniquely enhanced by the touchscreen interface and not just a port trying to make up for those shortcomings
No Match Three Games – While I love Bejeweled, I need to move past that
I have to say I absolutely love my Twitter family because once again they came through for me with a massive list of titles to try. This mornings post is as much for my own benefit as it is for sharing these picks with the world, because I wanted a nice clean way of keeping track of it. A few of the titles that were thrown out were games that I had tried and ruled out for one reason or another, so I am dropping them from the list. The titles that are currently in the running for eventually garnering my attention are as follows.
Ultimately the above block of six games is what I chose for my very first cohort. Monument Valley is a game series that I had heard really good things about but ultimately forgot existed. You Must Build a Boat is a game that I have heard someone at some time in the past raving about it… I thought it was Kodra but it might just be a fuzzy memory of Liore when Cat Context existed. Loop gets bumped up in priority because it is was created by a mutual, so absolutely going to check that out. Eve Echos is a game that I had already installed but never actually got around to checking… so just grouping it in by default. Pathfinder Adventures because i was curious and Pixel Dungeon because also curious.
Mobile gaming is pretty much a bedtime activity for me, and last night I managed to try out one of the games before sleep ultimately claimed me. I had not really been sleeping well for a few nights so I did not make it super far. Monument Valley is gorgeous and is exactly the sort of game I am looking for. I am not exactly sure how this game works without a touch interface, and as a result it isn’t just making up for that limited toolset but exploiting it. The puzzles are interesting and change enough to feel fresh each time you move onto a new monument. I made it through five before my eyelids were too heavy to continue, but I am probably going to be playing this one for awhile until I either complete it or get distracted by some other shiny object.
Since this has apparently turned into a post with just an excessive number of bullet point lists… why not add another? I wanted to take a moment to thank all of the folks who participated yesterday in throwing out game ideas. There was a flurry of them that all came in at once, and I think I have accounted for them all… but apologies if I inadvertently miss someone. Yall are awesome in my book.
Essentially over the years I have developed this borderline toxic attitude that mobile gaming is by nature mechanically worse than gaming on pretty much any other platform. I am trying really hard to break this mental block. My hope is that by exposing myself to the games that my friends consider the best, I will start to see the potential of this platform that I have largely relegated to idle match three games and Gacha gambling. I know there are unique experiences that can only be had on a mobile phone, so I am hoping to find more of them.
Now this is the point where I reach out to my readers as well. If you have any mobile games that you love and feel like are must play experiences, please drop me a line below in the comments. I will look into all of them and potentially add them to the list above.
The post Seeking Mobile Experiences appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Sometimes you have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy a specific game. I noticed this quite a bit when we were doing the AggroChat game club. I am very much a victim to my whims and as a result when doing the game club titles, they almost felt like homework and as such I rarely enjoyed the experience going into them with that mindset. Similarly occasionally it takes me being in the right head space to finally be able to sink into a narrative game experience and enjoy it. Over the last few days I have been spending time in Dragon Age Inquisition, and this game and I have a fairly tattered past. Based on my calculations this is my fifth attempt to play this title since it released a little over six years ago.
One thing you need to know is that Dragon Age Origins is pretty much my ideal set up for a game of that sort. You get indoctrinated into this warrior caste with a mission to stand against the coming darkness, and while the game takes some twists and turns the core plot largely stays the same. You are the only hope this world has and the power to save it rests in your hands and it is up to you to gather the resources in order to make that final stand. It had an interesting cast of characters and did Dwarves better than any other game had up to that point. I have replayed this entire experience so many times over the years since it released back in 2009. I even had the weird experience of tanking for a raid made up of a lot of the writers back during the early days of World of Warcraft.
Dragon Age 2 was a significant departure from the formula presented by the first game. Instead of choosing your own character you were placed in control of a male or female character named Hawke, much in the same style as Shepard with Mass Effect. I more or less was fine with surrendering control over the character because Hawke was not super dissimilar from the sorts of characters that I would create on my own. It told a much more focused story set around the city of Kirkwall, and the narrative point of view was being told by Varric one of your companions who was being interrogated by an agent of the Inquisition known as the Seeker. I personally came to dislike that character, because she seemed deeply unreasonable during the course of events of this game.
So because of this Dragon Age Inquisition set out on a bad foot right off the bat by making our character ALSO be captured by this same Seeker named Cassandra Pentaghast. Strike two was the fact that this game sets you up to be the Herald of Andraste… which is the patron deity of the southern areas of the game. Side note I am not a huge fan of organized religions and when a game forces very focused piety upon me, I tend to bounce super fucking hard. I am fine with general terms like the Light in Warcraft being this universal force of good, but when you have to deal with the clergy and zealots that isn’t exactly my show. The third strike was how generally oddly the game seemed to treat Dwarves… who DON’T by nature believe in Andraste but it becomes super freaking odd when everyone seems to think you are some Avatar and has to comment about how wrong it is that you are a Dwarf.
What has changed on this play through is my willingness to just go with the flow. For years I have heard from trusted allies how much this game means to them, and I wanted to understand why. Instead of my usual Dwarven character I opted to go with a Human Noble, and instead of fighting against Andraste… I just decided to go with the flow and accept that mantle while generally going with the “I am not sure” options when asked about it. Collectively these options seem to make the game more enjoyable because it eased me over some of the humps that I was getting stuck on. The game takes a long time to really sink its hook it… and it has the disservice of giving you a giant open world zone which is a complete trap. Moving the story along gives you a reason to stay engaged in the world… and without those specific narrative beats it just feels like a somewhat poorly designed ARPG.
I am sure I will do a post later about my thoughts upon wrapping up the story. I honestly have no clue where exactly I am in the progression. I’ve unlocked “World Two” which greatly opened the setting up and I figure I will spend a lot of time roaming around and looking at stuff. Earlier I said I had replayed Dragon Age Origins multiple times, but weirdly I had never done that with the second outing. Playing Inquisition actually makes me want to go back and experience those events with the fresh perspective that this game provides. We were seeing a very narrow lens on the world surrounding the events of Kirkwall, and I think this broader view will make those events feel more meaningful.
So friends a question. Have you ever had this experience with a game that did not work for you but then finally given time and broader experiences finally clicked? Drop me a line in the comments before because I am curious about this.
The post Changing Perspective appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I had a bit of a revelation over the weekend, and now I understand a little better some of my motivations. I hate daily quests, and I understand WHY I hate them, but first I guess we should probably talk a bit about the daily quest construct as a whole. If you are one of my readers that has not played a ton of MMORPGs, then maybe you have escaped the sirens call of them. Essentially they started their life as an optional method of creating repeatable quest turn-ins and have become widely signified as having a blue exclamation icon to signify that status. The very first repeatable quests I ever experienced were in Everquest, as I turned copious amounts of bone chips to the dude in the Kaladim Paladin guild.
World of Warcraft however had a more formal questing infrastructure and as a result they had to make a specific version of questing in order to support the repeatable nature. I am honestly not exactly certain when I first encountered them, but I know for certain that by the time we reached Silithis they were the backbone of the quests leading up to the opening of Ahn’Qiraj. At that point they served a very distinct purpose and were pretty straight forward in nature allowing you to gain favor with a faction for repeatedly turning in the same items over and over. They were more construct than feature at that point and served as a means to an end.
With Burning Crusade a number of optional faction grinds were put in place, and with them a series of limited daily quests were introduced. Each faction would give you a number of quests each day with additional options opening up as you increased your standing. The first of these that I participated in was Ogri’la, which required a flying mount so absolutely nothing you even saw prior to dinging the level cap in that expansion. These were time wasters more than anything, and if you decide to completely skip a week it didn’t feel terribly bad because it didn’t feel like you were really missing anything other than some incremental progress.
The problem is that as we have moved further from that original mission of simply facilitating multiple turn-ins they have spread more and more from something that felt like optional content, to something that is absolutely a requirement in order to function within the game. Now exists a tapestry of daily quests, world quests and weekly objectives that all feel like they need to be observed for fear of your character falling terribly behind the curve. In Shadowlands for example there are a number of things that can only be obtained while a certain World Quest is up, which only serves to add a fear of missing out on potential rewards by not logging in every single day.
This unfortunately isn’t a World of Warcraft problem, but a larger MMORPG problem. Every game has some version of this infrastructure of giving you limited rewards for logging in each day and doing some things… all in an attempt to make you appear to be “active”. This becomes important because in the free to play economy… no one reports subscription numbers at investor calls anymore. They instead report on MAU or Monthly Active Users, and if they can keep you logging in it gives the appearance of the game having a healthy ecosystem. However none of this is really compelling content and I’ve reached a point where I find it harder and harder to swallow as such.
In general I do pretty well with completing dailies for maybe a week at a time, but eventually I find I lack the desire to log in. I’ve reached this point with so many games now that I started to wonder why exactly I reject this construct so much. Now comes the realization part. I play games as an escape from the rigors of my day to day existence, and my life is basically a series of repeated rituals at this point. I am the primary caretaker in my household and when I get up I start running through a list of little daily activates that are required to make sure the household is running smoothly. Everything in my life has been ritualized in order to make sure it happens and to also try and make it as efficient as humanly possible so I can move on to more enjoyable things.
So for example this morning my list of rituals looked a little something like this:
get up and turn off the alarm clock
check email for any critical alerts overnight
turn on the morning news so wife can wake up slowly while listening to it
hop in the shower
get dressed
make sure wife is actually waking up
prepare Kenzie’s insulin shot and coax her into letting me give it to her
give the cats wet food and a little dry food
gather and take out the trash
feed the outdoor cats
sit down and consume caffeine while writing a blog post
There is a similar evening sequence of events that plays out in order pretty much every night, and if anything gets out of order there is a high chance of forgetting to do something. My life is so ritualized that daily quests don’t feel like an escape. They feel like converting what is supposed to be enjoyable relaxation and exploration time… into doing more “Wizard Chores” as my friend Grace calls them. I said before that I can seem to do them for about a week, and that seems to be the point at which I begin to realize exactly what I am doing. Then I start to wonder… why exactly am I logging in? I mean I don’t find the daily quest construct enjoyable in the least, and it is only out of that fear of missing out on something that I start doing them in the first place. Eventually I realize that I am probably better off finding something I actually do enjoy instead.
The problem however is that as more titles have shifted to the “Games as a Service” model, with it comes a “dailyquestification” of content. I mean I get it from the development standpoint. If you can create content that is largely just a ticking of boxes, make it repeatable and it has a positive hit on the MAU… then it absolutely makes sense. As a player however I look out upon a sea of task lists that are really no more enjoyable than doing the laundry. My daily rituals in the real world I have to do in order to maintain a quality of life that I have come to expect. In the game world… I can just log the hell out and go find something else to play instead. Unfortunately my buffer of willingness to deal with these systems has been full for quite some time.
That said I am still just as susceptible to them as anyone. For a period of time I can forget what exactly I am doing as I chase making gear numbers go up. However I always end up back where I started in realizing that I am just doing busy work, and that busy work isn’t fun. I hit Shadowlands hard and heavy for a few weeks until I realized that I wasn’t actually enjoying myself, and now have not logged in since before Christmas. I feel bad that I have not been logging in, but I am actually enjoying myself playing other games so I am mostly ignoring that guilt. I am not sure what the answer is to make repeating content more enjoyable. It isn’t like games have the budgets or hours to create fresh content every week for us to consume like the locusts that we are.
I am wondering if I am just outgrowing MMORPGs in general. Diablo 3 is a grind I do over and over, but it is a self paced grind that allows me to commit as much time as I want to it when I want to… and then bugger the fuck off and forget it exists when I don’t. I crave more experiences like that, but those seem to be fewer and further between. Being artificially gated when I am having one of my periods where I want to binge a game… also feels horrible and will similarly inspire me to bounce. I think maybe the real answer is to break down the lie that is Monthly Active Users… because if you are just logging in to clear your mailbox are you really active? That is a discussion for another day, but I think I now better understand why I hate daily quests.
The post Dailyquestification of Games appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
