Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start the show with discussion about Mechwarrior 5 and the multiplayer sessions that have been happening among AggroChat folks. We also talk a bit about the extremely confusing world of intellectual property when it comes to this game. From there we revisit the topic of why forcing a stealth mission is a bad idea when you are not expecting it. Grace talks about a short game she discovered called Space Court where you preside over a Court in Space. Tam talks about getting the Valve Index and finally maybe finding the killer app in the form of Half-Life Alyx. From there we dive into a discussion about the games that we have missed during 2020 and didn’t have time to play, which segues into a discussion about Bel giving Dragon Age Inquisition another shot and how maybe Kodra would like the games that are not the first one.
This was one hell of a weird year, I think for pretty much everyone involved. Traditionally on the last day of the year (or as close as I can actually manage to it) I have had this tradition since 2015 of attempting to talk about the games that I played during the last year. I am not entirely certain why I started doing this thing, but if you have been around for awhile you will recognize this sort of post. I do this thing where I keep track of what games I played during what months of the year. I think in part this has been my way of keeping track of when exactly I played something now that tools that I used to use such as Raptr no longer really exist, or at least I am not really using them.
The challenge as well is that so many games are spread out across so many different platforms. I consume content from Steam, GOG, Epic Games, PlayStation Network, Nintendo Online or Xbox Game Pass. So instead of relying on a single source of information… I started keeping track of things in spreadsheet form and then collecting what games I actually touched during a given month based on what I had been talking about on my blog and what games I was taking screenshots of from my massive archive of past screenshots. The end is a compiled list of games that I chart in spreadsheet form… which is by no means as complete as tracking hours (which would be impossible) but does give me an idea of what my year looked like.
The Top 10 of 2020
Top 10 Most Played Games of 2020
The rules of this experiment are pretty straight forward. If I play a game in a given month I fill in a box and then tabulate the number of filled in boxes giving me the number of months in a given year I actually played a specific game. There are always going to be a number of “Forever Games” that eat up a lot of my time, but throughout the year I ended up spending at least some time in seventy different games. Here is the list of games that I played the most months during the year of 2020.
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch – Played all 12 Months
Destiny 2 – PC – Played 10 Months
World of Warcraft – PC – Played 9 Months
Ghost of Tsushima – PS4/PS5 – Played 6 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – PC – Played 5 Months
Phantasy Star Online – PC/Xbox One – Played 5 Months
Genshin Impact – PC/Android – Played 4 Months
Hades – PC/Switch – Played 4 Months
New World – PC – Played 3 Months
The Division 2 – PC – Played 3 Months
Comparing Top 10 from 2019 to 2020
Another thing that I find interesting is comparing my top ten list from the previous year. First up it is zero shock that I am still playing a lot of Diablo 3. This game is comfort food for me and especially with the option of playing it on the Switch I spend a lot of time just tinkering around in it between seasons. My ultimate wish is still that I can just play my PC characters on the switch. Completely gone is Dragalia Lost and honestly… I have yet to replace it with a Mobile Phone game. Also gone is MTG Arena which I weirdly just sort of stopped playing out of the blue. Destiny 2 I probably played less, but I poked at it pretty often and World of Warcraft came back with the pandemic and my need to play something that I could ultimately shut my mind off while playing.
I played significantly less Final Fantasy XIV and for whatever reason I am finding it harder and harder to attach to that game. WoW Classic, Bloodstained, ESO, Anthem and Pokemon Go all ranked high in 2019 but are all completely absent. Replacing them would be Genshin Impact and PSO2 which I spent quite a bit of dedicated time playing… but have sort of petered out in both cases. Hades is another bedtime gaming experience that I continue to poke at… and while I spent a lot of months playing Ghost of Tsushima I never really was able to play for a very long time due to my lack of stamina when playing with a controller. Division 2 and New World both surprised me because I did not realize I had played for as many months as I ultimately did.
The Top 15 Of All Time
Top Games by Month Since Beginning Tracking
Another thing that I like doing is keeping track of the total number of months I have spent playing a game since starting this. I have data reaching back to 2012 and that gives me an eight year view of my gaming habits and trends. Since that image above is way too small to reasonably read, going to once again break it out into a text list.
World of Warcraft – 69 Total Months
Destiny / Destiny 2 – 65 Total Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 60 Total Months
Diablo 3 – 53 Total Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 45 Total Months
Rift – 39 Total Months
Pokemon Go – 25 Total Months
MTG Arena – 21 Total Months
Dragalia Lost – 16 Total Months
Monster Hunter World – 16 Total Months
Guild Wars 2 – 15 Total Months
Division 1 and 2 – 15 Total Months
Minecraft – 14 Total Months
ArcheAge – 13 Total Months
Fallout 4 – 13 Total Months
Wildstar – 13 Total Months
As you can see from the list… this is mostly consumed by what I earlier referred to as “Forever Games” There are a good number of MMORPG/Live Service as well as some evergreen games like Fallout 4 and Minecraft. Diablo 3 and Elder Scrolls Online swapped spots in the list, which makes sense because I did not really spend much time in ESO this past year. Given my continued disinterest in FFXIV, Diablo may be able to lap that game by this time next year. Rift continues to hold solid even though I am not playing it because that 39 month seems like a hard plateau to cross with new games. Weirdly from that point down all of the games remained the same… because they are not games I was actively playing nor has anything else had the staying power to really compete with them.
Longest Streaks
While working on this post, I had a random conversation with my friend Tam about this process and that I was going through pulling together this post. To this he posed the interesting question of which game has the longest streak of unbroken months. I didn’t have an answer to this at all, which lead me to quickly compile a list of the longest streak for all of the games on the above list. It was around this time that I realized that if I did a longest streaks list… I would end up with a completely different top 15. Several of those games are played in short bursts over a large period of time which add up to a big number in the end. The end result is a bit surprising.
Destiny – 33 Months in a Row
Diablo 3 – 28 Months in a Row
MTG Arena – 23 Months in a Row
Pokemon Go – 23 Months in a Row
Rift – 22 Months in a Row
World of Warcraft – 21 Months in a Row
Elder Scrolls Online – 20 Months in a Row
Final Fantasy XIV – 20 Months in a Row
Dragalia Lost – 16 Months in a Row
Monster Hunter World – 15 Months in a Row
World of Warcraft: Classic – 7 Months in a Row
Anthem – 6 Months in a Row
ArcheAge – 6 Months in a Row
Bloodstained Ritual of the Night – 6 Months in a Row
Ghost of Tsushima – 6 Months in a Row
Other Interesting Data
In 2018 I played 70 unique games, which fell to only 48 in 2019. However with 2020 I returned to 70 games which means I seemed to be extremely restless as it comes to gaming. In 2019 I played 19 games that I considered to be “singletons”, or games that I only played for a single month and then walked away from usually meaning I bounced. During 2020 I played 44 of these Singletons so I wound up bouncing around quite a bit. I would like to play more single player narrative adventures, because I seem to really enjoy them when I allow myself to play them. However I still find myself being drawn back into the usual titles that I find familiar and comforting, which was something that I needed quite a bit during this year of Pandemic.
If you are curious about past gaming trends since starting this experiment, you can find my posts going back to 2015.
If you are terribly curious, you can even check out my raw list of data that I share freely. I am not exactly sure why I started this tradition, but I do find it interesting to reflect back each year on the past years games and the trends that occurred.
The post Games Played 2020 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Jedi Fallen Order was technically a game that I talked a bit about when it came out last year at roughly this same time. Prior to the Mandalorian, this game represented the single best piece of fiction set in the Star Wars universe that did not directly involve the main canon of characters. What it represents is a spreading out of the universe and the telling of other tales that just happened to be tangential to the main story through line of the Star Wars setting. I had a lot of fun playing this game in November of 2019, but I wound out stalling out very hard and never quite returning to it to finish things up. At that point I was playing with a controller, which is not my instrument of choice. For the last year I had wanted to restart this experience so that I could get a fresh start and also adapt to my more favored Keyboard and Mouse controls.
That happened over the break and even though this game came out last year… it is probably also going to go on my games of 2020 list because experiencing it with different controls made the experience so much better for me personally. I think pretty much all of my original points hold that this is a Dark Souls inspired game that doesn’t feel like Dark Souls thanks to the variable difficulty slider. I was mostly here for the story and the escapism of feeling like a Jedi, so I played on a lower difficulty setting. If you feel like you want to punish yourself, then you can absolutely crank the slider up to the maximum and start with Dathomir as your first planet and the game will allow you to bash your face against that wall for as long as you care to.
That is one of the major challenges that I have with Jedi Fallen Order is that it isn’t exactly great a messaging what you as the player should be doing. For example as mentioned above you are given a choice of a starting planet of either Zeffo, the correct choice or Dathomir, the masochistic choice. There is a SIGNIFICANT difference in the starting difficulty of both planets, and I personally chose Dathomir this go around because I had some knowledge of the game under my belt and it would allow me to unlock the Dual Saber faster. The thing is… even in doing this… you can only progress so far on Dathomir before you have to switch right back to Bogano because you lack the metroidvanian tools required to progress further at that point.
While playing the game it tells the story of you as Cal Kestis a Jedi Padawan who somehow escaped Order 66, but the emotional and mental toll of doing so damaged your connection to the force. Through interacting with the world you end up remembering bits and pieces of your training allowing you to access the classic Jedi powers like Force Push, Force Pull, and Double Jump as well as encountering a number of equipment upgrades like Rebreathers and Climbing Claws that assist in your traversal of the levels. These abilities are then used to solve puzzles in the same manner that you would have in a game like Zelda as you complete similar “Temples” to unlock the knowledge that you are seeking to fulfill the main quest of the game.
You are also aided by BD-1, a little robot friend that you find on the first planet of the game Bogano. BD-1 is the best companion character that I have seen in a game like this, and as you traverse the world you also improve its abilities to aid you in your challenges. An example is early on BD-1 will help you slide down zip lines, but eventually you find a tractor system for it which allows you to ascend those same lines opening new ways to traverse existing areas. In Star Wars the Robot companions are always the heart of the story, and BD-1 is essentially the “goodest” dog you could have ever encountered. I just sorta wish you could pet it, because it totally deserves head pats.
Another strong point of this game is the extremely solid cast of supporting characters. These characters are patterned after the appearance of the human actors which presents an interesting thought. Now that we are in this era of Disney Plus spinning off so many new shows set in the Star Wars Universe… Jedi Fallen Order could be adapted perfectly to the small screen. Cal Kestis is played by Cameron Monaghan of Shameless and Gotham, and Cere Junda is played by Debra Wilson who if you are old like me you will mostly know from Mad TV. In both cases the digital character is basically just them, and it would be super easy to translate those roles over to physical forms. It would be super interesting to have a oneshot series that takes place between Jedi Fallen Order and whatever the next game is that they are working on.
Maybe even more important than how well acted the main cast of Cal, Cere and Greez are… this game also has a phenomenal cast of antagonists. The best of these include the Second Sister, who is an Inquisitor that is constantly on the hunt for Cal Kestis and crew. Another stand out is the Night Sister that you encounter on Dathomir who is trying to keep you from progressing further on that planet. Both are exceptionally three dimensional characters that manage to be more than just an imposing person with a red lightsaber. Not going to go into much detail because spoilers, but suffice to say that the story takes some interesting turns and earns the adoration I am heaping upon it.
I said earlier that the game is bad at messaging what the player is supposed to do, and I feel like I need to dive into this further for a moment. When I started playing this game last year I hit a wall and that wall was me not understanding that the game was trying to tell me to leave the planet that I was currently on. During the quest you venture to Kashyyyk and help a band of freedom fighters to liberate the Wookies being enslaved there. Immediately following this repatriation you are given a subtle tip that maybe something interesting has happened on another planet… but the game doesn’t come out and tell you to freaking leave. Instead it explains how you would get to the next area of the planet… and I spent hours wandering around trying to figure out how to go down that path. You can’t get there yet and you really do need to leave the planet and go do something else for awhile before that path opens up.
In other ways the game does a really good job of telling you what you can and cannot do. Each Jedi Ability opens up new areas of the game much like a traditional Metroidvania, and these are generally messaged with terrain looking a specific way. This is called out when you first pick up the ability… for example in order to Wall Run, you need a specifically textured section of wall and once you notice this your mind starts to calculate what you should be doing in which sections. Eventually you learn that you can chain together a number of traversal elements which only serves to make you feel more like the Jedi Knight that you are becoming. It is only really when the Story wants you to go somewhere else that maybe it does a poor job of explaining itself.
The entire package however is extremely fun and while the game itself isn’t the longest I have played… it rides this line between being too short and overstaying its welcome. Nothing in the game feels like filler being used to pad the content or force you to jump through a series of hoops to slow down your progress. All of the content you experience is there for a story driven reason and as a result it feels like an extremely solid narrative experience. It doesn’t hurt that all of the set pieces are these epic views from the Star Wars universe as you roam around giant crashed hulks and ancient force user temples.
I went into this game expecting a fun romp that allowed me to pretend I was a Jedi. What I did not expect however was the sheer emotional prowess that the story wields in allowing you to feel like what it must have been to be a Padawan that barely escaped the purge. In fact there are moments within the game that allow you to relive the experience of barely escaping while Order 66 is being carried out. The game actually shows you several different sides of this same event that we are now familiar with thanks to the prequels. In all cases there is a sheer gravity of the action that sticks with you and I have to admit… the game extracted more than one tear from me as I lived through its tale.
Now that we are a year out from its release, you can pretty much pick the game up for around $20 on your platform of choice. If you have ever loved Star Wars at any point in your life… this is money well spent. I can only hope that we see a lot more of this cast of characters, because the game sets a few things up that it never quite delivers on, making me think we have many more adventures in our future. I want more games with the mechanical and emotional gravitas that this game provides.
The post Jedi Fallen Order Final Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! As I alluded to yesterday, one of the major things that I did over the break was finish off Cyberpunk 2077. Now I have already written a large piece talking about some of my feelings and impressions of the game and I don’t feel like I need to retrace most of what was said there. That piece was largely spoiler free and my goal today is also to largely remain spoiler free. I might talk about some situations in the game in general terms but I am going to try my best not to give away major plot points save for a few that have been widely spoiled through trailers and such. Also warning… there is a dong in one of the images so if you react negatively to such things that maybe skip this post.
Another thing that I feel like I need to get out of the way. There are still a lot of tensions surrounding this game. CD Projekt Red as corporation, publisher and marketing wing are complete shit bags for a lot of the things surrounding this launch. I personally feel like the game itself is a much better product than you would get the impression of through the whirlwind of crap surrounding the game. That said if you are a console player… may god have mercy on your soul. Essentially I am not going to be going into any of this… even the fact that it got delisted by Sony.
That said I do feel like I need to set up a baseline for what system I ran the game on, since this is running so generally crappy for so many players. Here are the key important bits of my system configuration that might be relevant to performance.
Intel Core i7-5820k 3.3 GHz processor
24 Gb of ram
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics
Western Digital 1TB WD Blue 3D NAND SSD – Sata III Storage
On this system I can technically run the game in 4k but the framerates are unstable and too low for me to be able to enjoy the experience without drastically turning everything down. Instead I opted to play in 1440p with the above settings and get over 60 fps for a fluid gaming experience. The game still looks gorgeous so I don’t necessarily feel like I am missing much of anything in the drop from 4k to 1440p.
Another point that I should talk about is that this game has become meme fodder on the internet. During my play through I had a relatively limited number of issues. Most of the things I encountered are odd clipping problems like the above image where the car is spawned halfway through the ground, or an NPC is standing in the middle of some other object. These are generally the sort of odd bugs you experience in Bethesda games, and didn’t really damage my enjoyment. However if you are prone to be triggered by this sort of thing then Cyberpunk is likely going to kill your joy. Not that there were a ton of these but there were enough that I rarely went a play session without seeing something “goofy” happening.
What Cyberpunk does better than most games I have played is present a world with extremely rich and fleshed out characters that I deeply care about. The game is a marvel of writing when it comes to character interactions, and the team working on story and quest design should be winning awards. The game presents you with a cast of characters and then allows you to become involved with them in any number of ways, the vast majority of which have little to nothing to do with the main story arc. There is a through line of the game and you can beat the entire thing relatively quickly if you focus your way through it. However you would be missing a wealth of the best content I have experienced this year for certain… and honestly in MOST years.
Traditionally one of my core problems with a game that has romance elements, is that it is ultimately locking away some of the most interesting character development behind a system with a limited number of choices. Romance is one of those game systems that can be both amazing and terribly frustrating at the same time. Cyberpunk 2077 is no stranger to having a very limited number of options with absolutely strict requirements for them. Essentially your deeply limited options for romances follow:
Male V Options
Opposite Gender Relationship with Panam
Same Gender Relationship with Kerry
Female V Options
Opposite Gender Relationship with River
Same Gender Relationship with Judy
If you don’t happen to like your options, then you are more or less fucked… or not in this case. Panam and Judy however are two of the best written characters in the game so I was perfectly fine with my options were I to play a male or a female V. Which leads to a whole other issue with the game. During the character creation system you are given 3 options for your character… Masculine or Feminine Body, Masculine or Feminine Voice, and your choice between three genitalia options of Cut and Uncut Penis and Vagina. None of this actually seems to matter when it comes to any of the options in the game… and more or less it is the voice and occasionally body type that determines how someone reacts to you. This whole genital system just appears to be something that was put in just for kicks and has no bearing on anything other than causing memeworthy issues of dongs clipping through your pants on consoles.
What the game does absolutely nail perfectly however is the platonic relationship. Earlier I talked about my frustrations with romance systems in general and how they lock away some of the most meaningful character development behind whether or not you choose to try and get in a specific characters pants. This is not the case for Cyberpunk 2077, because for each of those four characters mentioned above there is both a romance path and a friendship path. I said that Judy was one of the best written characters in the game, and by the time you reach the climax of the story the two of you have “seen some shit”. You are battle hardened compatriots, and that deserves a fitting conclusion to that story even thought she has zero interest in me sexually.
The game does just that and from what I can tell there is a friend path and a lover path that sort of interweave as you go through the game. Similarly there is this excellent storyline that involves you and a former NCPD detective named River that turns into this whole Buddy Cop story as you try and solve a crime together. The ultimate climax of that could break off into a romance were I a Female character, but instead I got the tale of two buds having a great BBQ and shooting the shit now that things have settled down a bit. This isn’t just limited to the romance characters however, and you have what feels like meaningful connections to a large number of characters in the game.
A lot of the interactions between characters during the game are over the holo as they call you with details about your specific mission or to ask your help with some new issue. This connection that you have built with the characters ends up playing out in the final moments of the game as the credits roll. Regardless of the ending you are treated to a number of calls from various characters who are trying to get ahold of you. It seems that whether or not a character appears, is determined by how much of the story you managed to complete for each of them. There are even quirky side characters that make their appearance here that I never expected, but also had a similarly meaningful wrap up to their tale.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a game of phenomenal beauty and depth, but sadly only for players who chose to play it on the right platform with sufficient hardware. For others this is a frustrating and kludgy mess that is going to keep them from seeing just how damned well written some of the interactions are. For even more the horrific antics of the corporate wing of CDPR are going to keep them from ever picking up the game and seeing how hard someone worked on creating this. Cyberpunk 2077 is likely my favorite game of 2020, but it is also by that same token probably its greatest tragedy. As much as I enjoyed the experience there will always be a part of me that wonders what we could have gotten had the game been given a realistic development schedule and enough time to finish all of the finer points.
So I would be curious to hear your thoughts. Did you make it all of the way through Cyberpunk 2077, are you still chewing on it, or did you either nope out of it or skip it entirely? Drop me a line below. This is an extremely divisive experience, but one that I am thankful I got to have.
The post Cyberpunk Final Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.