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Traditionally at this time of year you start seeing a bunch of review and award posts, and quite frankly I am not beneath this in the least.  However since we are recording our official AggroChat Games of the Year show this weekend, I thought I would kick off this morning with a sort of “Games of the Blog” post.  I am not going to be handing out awards or anything of the sort but instead just going to be spending some time this morning talking about the games that were really important to me during this calendar year.  The problem with “of the year” stuff is that I always get tied up on the minutiae of whether or not I should only pick games that came out during a specific calendar year, or if I can freely pick the games that I played and meant something to me.  In the end this blog post is likely going to be an amalgam of the two.

Monster Hunter World – PC

If I was going to pick a true “Game of the Year” then it would probably be Monster Hunter World because I have spent more time playing it than probably any other game.  It released in January on the Playstation 4 and I played my way through to past Tempered Kirin and into my 50s for Hunter Rank.  Then I turned around and completely restarted the game when it released on PC in August and pushed my way back up past Tempered Kirin and into the 60s on my Hunter Rank.  I call out Tempered Kirin because it really is the bottle neck for progression and is a truly painful fight…  if you are apparently anyone other than Tam who supposedly breezed right past it?  The main reason why this game deserves the prime honors for this year is two fold…  firstly I played it all year long and never stopped being engaged with it.  While I might take breaks I can always return happily and there is always something for me to strive towards be it a weapon or a piece of gear or a new event that is happening for a limited time.

The secondary reason is that this is the game that made me “Grok” Monster Hunter as a franchise.  I have purchased several versions of this franchise and each time have bounced extremely hard off of it, because quite frankly the games do a poor job of on-boarding you into this world.  They were a game series that assumed you had been playing since the Playstation 2 days and would just simply know what to do without any question.  Monster Hunter World on the other hand took time to teach you the ropes and while it has a lot of weird things going on…  in the fact that its grouping system is obtuse as hell…  it is manageable and becomes way less so on the PC which utilizes Steam social groups in place of a clan or guild.  I love this game so much and am completely amped for the expansion later this year, and for the most part this has been a year about me playing Monster Hunter World and Destiny 2 as my primary MMOs.  If you have not played this game then I highly suggest you check it out soon.  If you end up picking it up on the PC let me know, because I am more than happy to show new folks the ropes.

Destiny 2 Forsaken – PC

During Destiny 1 the Taken King expansion refocused the game and greatly improved the moment to moment interactions, and was more or less the point where I turned from a casual fan to a rabid fanatic.  Destiny 2 on the other hand had a really rough start and it felt like they had simply not learned from the three years of lessons taught by Destiny 1.  With the launch of Forsaken…  Destiny 2 had its Taken King moment where they tweaked all of the things that needed tweaking and presented the best version of the game to the public.  The game went from being something that I played but often times felt like I had no real focus…  to being a game that I rabidly consume in a weekly cycle that never quite gives me enough time to actually feel like I have done “all the things”.  There are so many micro objectives to accomplish and the moment to moment gameplay feels so much more improved, removing all of my complaints from year one.  Forsaken presented a story that was not quite what I was expecting, and gave us a choose your own adventure path to move through it.  However the real reason why it is on this list is the massive replayability, and the ability for me to drop in any given night and have plenty of things that I want to be doing.  It is a great game and our clan is starting to get active once again which is excellent…  now I just need to find the people to make a raid happen once more.

Diablo 3 – Switch

A game that I totally did not expect to be putting on this list is Diablo 3 for the Nintendo Switch, but wow is this a great port of the game.  Lately this has been my go to game of choice for the Nintendo Switch and apart from some weirdness surrounding seasonal characters it is just flawless.  I had never really spent much time playing Diablo 3 on any of the consoles, even though there was a short lived experiment of me trying to play it on the Vita through Remote Play from my PS4.  At that point however Diablo 3 on console was a vastly different experience than on the PC because you lost seasons and adventure mode.  In the meantime however Blizzard has caught the software base up and as far as I can tell all versions of the game have pretty much all of the features.  Diablo 3 fits with the portability of the switch so amazingly well and allows you to drop in and kill some demons and then pop back out and get on with whatever you need to be doing.  Well worth checking out especially if you had trouble getting into Diablo as a mouse click game…  seeing as a few of the AggroChat folks latched onto this title when they never really had with the PC equivalent.

Return of the Obra Dinn – PC

This one is extremely fresh to the list given that I played through it in a single sitting this weekend of about six hours.  Please don’t let that relatively short play time make you think that the game might not be worth every penny of its $20 price tag however.  There isn’t a whole lot I can say about this game that would not give away major plot points, however here goes the elevator pitch version.  In 1802 the Obra Dinn set sail with a sixty person crew and disappeared mysteriously…  five years later it washed up with no one still alive on board and you are an insurance adjuster for the East India Company tasked with the job of determining the fate of everyone that was on the manifest.  The trick is you are given a mystical pocket watch of sorts that allows you to see the last moments of a persons life, and through a series of these still vignettes you have to piece together what happened on the ship.  The game is essentially one giant logic puzzle, and as you go you are filling in details in a log book of sorts that asks you to determine who killed a given person and in what fashion.  All of this sounds kinda dry to this point… but once I got hooked I could not put the game down because the story it hints at is so interesting.  I guess there in lies the problem… you get hints and scraps of information instead of a cohesive narrative and are asked to draw a lot of your own conclusions…  which is sorta the thing Destiny does as well.  So if you bounce off that sort of indirect storytelling…  then it might not be for you.  For me however… I gobbled it up.

Draglia Lost – Android

I never expected to care this much about a mobile game.  I have been a bit of a snob in that department, not really considering mobile games to be of the same value as more traditional options.  Ultimately I would download something from the play store, play it for a week… and then promptly uninstall because whatever mirth was there was gone and I didn’t have a reason to keep playing once I reached the inevitable paywall.  With Dragalia however there has been a constant drip feed of content that has kept me engaged, and they do this great thing where when one event finishes…  they give you a preview of the event that is just around the corner to keep you interested and logging in every day.  This has become my before bed activity of playing through at least enough to finish all of this games Daily quests.  When there is an event going on I focus more on grinding my way through the really fun boss fights, one of which is shown in the left most panel of the above triptych.  It also feels like I am always trying to build better element focused teams, so swapping out characters and rapidly leveling them up with items to try and keep building a better fighting force.  I am still not the biggest fan of the touch to move interface…  but once I turned off the rotate 180 degree option the movement felt more fluid and manageable.  I still would prefer to play this on the switch…  but I am more than happy to keep logging in every day on my phone as I lay in bed.

 Magic the Gathering Arena – PC

Over the years I have dabbled in a bunch of digital card games like Hearthstone, but always found them to be lacking in one way or another.  I would play them and enjoy them on some level…  but never quite replaced Magic the Gathering in my heart.  The digital form factor works so much better for me personally as an adult than the paper one, because I just don’t have a group that I can play Magic with in the same way as I did in High School.  The other problem that I run into is that while Friday Night Magic exists… it is traditionally way more competitive than I want to be, seeing as I get a kick out of throwing together some janky decks built around a theme…  that just get plastered by anyone who is “netdecking” for efficiency.  Magic Online was a generally horrible experience because it did nothing to actually onboard the player into it…  not to mention its obtuse form of purchasing cards by talking to what is essentially an IRC Chatbot.  Arena however brings the sensibility of a digital first game like Hearthstone to my beloved Magic the Gathering and I completely love it.  I am not playing every night, but have played often enough to at least get a few rounds in every single week.  If you are or were a player of Magic the Gathering… I highly suggest you check it out because this is really the game I was waiting on all this time.  Essentially Hearthstone and all of the other related digital card games are dead to me now that the ACTUAL Magic experience exists in a user friendly form.

Night in the Woods – PC

This game did not come out during the 2018 calendar year… but it was really important to me regardless.  As someone who grew up in a Tiny town and went through the awkward transition of being one of the few people who made it past my first semester of college…  with pretty much a good percentage of my class mates dropping out to “go back home”…  this game personally attacked me at times.  I related to the tale and the downfall of the town a bit too closely.  Sure we didn’t have a creepy abandoned flooded tram system in town, but we had our share of things that were once glorious and had fallen into complete squalor.  I also came so damned close to dropping out of college at one point during my path, and I sort of related to that as well.  This is a great game and the problem is… I am not sure it would be for anyone who had not experienced some of the things that are slantwise related to the tale that is being told.  For me…  I latched onto this game hard and it became this weirdly remixed version of my life.  For you however… it might just be a cute game with cartoon animals and a weirdly dark story thread running in the background.  I think you owe it to yourself however to see which it is for you… because for me it was bordering on life changing.

 

 

 

For a good number of us this is “return to work day” and I am hoping it is finding you well.  Our holiday was a bit odd because my wife and I were realistically too sick to go to any of the family festivities.  As such we begged off on a few of the traditions until next weekend.  I used to take all of the time off between Christmas Eve and the day after New Years, but I was late getting my request in.  As such I am going to be stuck being the sole manager at work, and in truth the only voice of authority on my side of the house…  which will be interesting.  I did however take off all of next week to make up for it…  so I just need to get through the next few days.  This partial week is more or less going to be one of retrospection on the blog as I start doing the various year end activities.  This morning however I am going to talk about the various gaming related things I did over the weekend, starting with the Starlight Celebration in FFXIV…  which was adorable as usual but not really worth talking much about otherwise.

Next up there is a holiday event running in Magic the Gathering Arena where you can play Pauper for free for a handful of prizes.  I threw together some black and green jank and immediately lost the first round, so I thought this would be a short lived event for me.  My hope was to win a single round so I could get the full art Llanowar Elves.  Instead however I went five wins after that initial loss and wound up winning a Firemind’s Research…  which is in Izzet colors and not exactly the sort of thing I play but hey…  free card and closing out the event by winning.  I need to play a few more rounds so I can stack up three more of the Llanowar Elves, but when I say it is a bunch of jank I mean it.  There is literally no discernible theme in this deck other than a bunch of cards that I for one reason or another like.

Another thing that I did over the break was farm up a full set of the Universal Studios of Japan gear, which was available for PC players.  On the console you had to do a bunch of nonsense to get someone who had actually visited the theme park to start the queue for you.  On the PC however we could just join straight away so I got a cool set of reskinned High Rank Rathalos gear and a Rank 7 water based longsword.  Mostly these are things for the collection and while I will use Rathalos parts for mixed sets, it is going to be super rare that I actually break that sword out.

Another thing that happened is I played through Return of the Obra Dinn from start to finish in a single sitting.  Well technically not a single sitting as I took some bathroom breaks there, but more or less played for six hours start until I beat it that night.  For the uninitiated this is a game that is attempting to feel old school… but doing a bunch of things that those elder games never could have accomplished.  The elevator pitch is that the Obra Dinn disappeared on the high seas in 1802 and mysteriously arrived in port in 1807.  You are dispatched as an insurance adjuster for the London Office of the East India Company and armed with a special pocket watch that allows you to view the last moments of a specific individuals death.  This more or less is a logic puzzle as you need to sort out the names and fates of all fifty-ish passengers, but what hooked me was the story being told through snippets… because quite frankly I wanted to learn more and just kept pushing forward.  Well worth the play through and is now going on my list for the Games of the Year AggroChat show.

Finally I spent a ridiculous amount of time building in Minecraft because it was relaxing.  Ultimately I was watching something on History channel about ancient ruins, which prompted me to want to build in Minecraft.  That is generally how my Minecraft sessions go… I will get the urge to build something and then off I go into a project for awhile.  I am not entirely certain how this building came out the way it did…  but I started off wanting to build a giant pyramid and then decided to shift goals halfway through.  Each time I started building it sort of took a different direction and since I snapped this screenshot I have added more stuff onto it.  I did it in creative mode since I wasn’t really in the mood to mine tons of materials before I could start this sort of a project.  There are times when I will start something legit and other times like this one where I just wanted to build a thing that I had in my head.  Right now I am getting a strong urge to demolish the staircase and rebuild it as something with landings every so often.

Regardless that was my holiday break in a nutshell.  We also recorded a show along the way at some point which I have linked above.  I hope you had the best of holidays and that you don’t have to go back today.  However if you do…  our tears will keep us moisturized as we return to the salt mines.  Let me know how your holiday break went, and what cool things you did along the way!

This morning I feel like I should be writing something terribly profound given that this is my last post before Christmas.  Unfortunately I am not feeling profound.  We went to a Holiday party last weekend and my wife seems to have picked up some crud, which has progressed throughout the week.  Over the the last two days it feels like I too am coming down with whatever it is.  Fortunately today I only work a half day and then am off for four days.  I used to do this thing where I would essentially take off from before Christmas all the way through to after New Years but unfortunately…  given the position I am in  the other two section managers got their requests in before me.  So as such I am back to work on Wednesday and then off again the first week of the year, which should be fine.  I honestly don’t mind so much given that Christmas is largely about the kids and the other two managers have them… and I do not.  Like my cats won’t actually notice that a holiday is happening and will instead just look at me strangely when I am home during the day on a non-weekend.

Because I used to have almost two weeks off at Christmas I would do all sorts of things with that amount of time.  One year for example I played through Mass Effect 3…  and then played through Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3 all over again in sequence to see how the decisions effected each other.  Another Christmas I leveled in duo the entire time in Star Wars the Old Republic.  This time however I don’t feel like I have anywhere near as much time as I would have liked so I am going to have to temper those expectations.  Some of the things I would like to accomplish over the break.

• Dad of War
  • I would love to actually make more progress in this game and better yet would love to beat it so that I could decide if it is in fact on my games of the year list or not.
• Monster Hunter World
  • both the USJ and Behemoth events are live on PC and I want to farm gear from both of those.
• Destiny 2
  • I would like to ignite the last few forges that I am missing.
• FFXIV
  • I want to do the holiday event and collect the items that come from it.
  • I would also love to get unstuck gear wise and learn to farm dungeons as a tank again.
  • I would really love to figure out the glamour chest system and clean out my banks.
• Elder Scrolls Online
  • I just want to figure out why the hell my patcher is no longer working and get back in game.

Now that is a lot of things to try and cram into four days, given that we also have holiday festivities involved as well.  However it is worth a shot.  We unfortunately still have a bunch of shopping to do because we are bad at thinking of things to get for people during the run up to the holidays and wind up frantic at the last moment.  It is going to be a rather un-fun holiday if my wife stays sick and I continue to get sicker.  However that does not preclude me from wishing all of you out there a very Happy Holiday.  I will likely be hanging out in various online games since that tends to be what I do on breaks, so if you see me around say hi and I will wish you a proper greeting in real time as well.  I hope everyone has a great break and some good times with whoever you choose to call your family be they related or just an assemblage of the people that matter to you in life.  Next week I will start doing my rundown posts to cap the year, but in the meantime…  enjoy yourselves and I will likely see you again on Wednesday unless the spirit hits me.

 

Holiday Checklist – I have a shortened break but here are a few of the things I would like to accomplish.

Yesterday I mentioned that I thought I had a blog post in me about games testing and NDAs, and this morning we are going to see if that is true.  For those who are uninitiated the NDA stands for a Non-Disclosure agreement, and if you have reached this step in life without having already signed one count yourself lucky.  As a software developer by trade, pretty much every job has required one from me so I was more than familiar with them when I also started signing them for games tests.  Since I am talking about material that cannot effectively be spoken about… I decided to mock up the experience of playing something heavily governed with the above image filled with watermarks.  Currently I am engaged in three separate alpha tests and it seems as though the winds have changed.  For awhile it was en vogue to do all of your testing as a public alpha that allowed those who were in to effectively act as free advertising for the game drumming up hype along the way.

The problem with that however is that I am not entirely certain it ever worked as intended.  YouTube has basically made a cottage industry of mocking games that are not quite ready for prime time, which in truth should be any alpha or beta test.  Originally those were times for the game to find itself and having a limited testing group helped to prune things that were not working and hone in and polish the things that were.  However within the last decade these shifted from being a development mechanism to taking on a bunch of different purposes.  You had some games where the alpha or beta served as an extended demo period… take for example Fallout 76 that went into “beta” on October 23rd and the final game “shipped” on November 14th.  Having been around software development for going on three decades now…  there are no meaningful changes that can be made in such a short period of time.

Another case that has sprung up are the games that began selling access to testing in the form of “early access” or “founders packs”, which amount to you helping to fund the development of the game and in theory helping to shape the features as they are being put into the game.  I’ve purchased a number of paid alphas over the years, because in some cases especially with Indie games it gives you the opportunity to lock the game in at a bargain price.  After all when I bought into Minecraft it was less than $10 and that certainly was an investment that paid off over time.  However all too often games languish in early access more as a means of getting their shit together and keeping websites from publishing “official reviews” of the title since they can keep claiming that it is still in beta.  Rust for example went into early access in December of 2013 and finally launched in February or 2018…  which maybe seems like an excessive amount of time in testing.  The other problem with early access is you are effectively squandering whatever hype you might have had upon launching the game…  because effectively in the eyes of your players you launched a buggy game when you opened initial access.

The biggest problem with public testing is that while it allows you to develop a bit of a grass roots community on platforms like YouTube or Twitch… it also means that at any moment you could be subject to the same sort of blooper reels that effectively killed Mass Effect Andromeda.  Within days of that game launching a number of the issues were cleared up and I found it to be an amazingly fun experience.  However once the glitch videos started circulating it not only killed the game… but effectively killed the franchise.  Opening your game to the world is effectively playing with fire and once you get to a certain level of hype there are going to be folks all too willing to shit on your game to make a buck and rake in the views.

So effectively what I am seeing as a result is that more games are going underground and slapping an NDA on so that they can safely get on with the business of testing.  I was one of the very early tests of Elder Scrolls Online, starting with the very first external test in February of 2013 and continuing right up until the April 2014 launch date.  During that time I watched that game change significantly sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse but it was legitimately a testing process where we provided feedback and the developers reacted to it.  That is how testing should be and started out with limited engagement testing every few weeks and then eventually worked up to being on for longer periods of time.  

I’ve been in extremely bizarre alpha tests as well.  One company required me to effectively fill out a contract that included the NDA as part of that, and not only sign a digital agreement but to print out a document and get it witnessed and notarized.  In addition to that I had to send in a photocopy of my drivers license.  I’ve had others where the game was technically restricted but I never actually wound up agreeing to anything and had a key just show up in my mail box with no mention of the NDA in the letter.  I personally tend to take the NDA pretty seriously, and in twenty years of testing maintained a firewall that keeps information about said games out of the things I am willing to talk about publicly.  I am only really comfortable talking about this in general right now because I am in three separate testing processes and there is no real way of you guessing which games that might be.

Sure it sucks that I can’t talk about the things that I am really enjoying, because there are things I could hype about each of them.  There are also things that I would complain about each of them, and that NDA is effectively buying the company time to fix or at least mitigate those problems.  I for one am happy to see closed testing returning to seemingly being the norm, because after years of public testing I am not sure the hype generated ever was worth the issues that arose from it.  There will always be people willing to break NDA like the individual who streamed Anthem and got some reportedly major circumstances for doing so…  but then later was confirmed to not actually have any games on their Origin profile to start with.  The thing is though… breaking an NDA is against the terms of service of most digital distribution platforms and in theory you could lose whatever account you used to cause the break on.  It would never be worth me risking my Steam account for example, just in the hopes of getting a few more eyeballs to find this blog or my neglected twitch stream.

To wrap this up… I am very much in favor of games testing starting to go dark again.  That said my job is also not tied to talking about games.  This is a thing I do for fun and as a hobby, and I have gone out of my way to not actually make any money from this blog in spite of the regular stream of folks who want to advertise on it.  Were this my daytime gig I might feel completely different, because then I would be grasping at things to fill the current 24 hour a day gaming news cycle.  Everyone loves seeing a sneak peek at games, and when you have alpha access and can take some really cool screenshots or videos to embellish your prose, it makes for a compelling user experience.

This is just my take, but I am absolutely open to other ideas. Are you in favor of games testing going dark or would you prefer that testing remain open and public?