Regularly Playing Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Games Played 2022 Edition

December 30, 2022 by Belghast

The Grand Experiment – Tracking Games Played Since 2012

Well my friends it is time once again for me to drag out the spreadsheet porn and share with you my gaming habits from the last year. Since this post is likely going to see some fresh eyeballs who have never experienced this level of nonsense before let me give you a high level of this project. One of the cool things about daily blogging is that it gives me a pretty solid record of what I was doing at any given point since April of 2013 when I embarked upon my first daily blogging journey. I also take fairly meticulous care of saving my screenshots and have a collection sorted by game and genre that makes up well over 50,000 individual files and takes up around 140 GB. This has allowed me to more or less reconstruct my playing habits back to 2012.

For years I used a service called Raptr, but when it died I lost something that I considered to be a relatively valuable resource. I knew that trying to keep track of hours played was a fool’s errand and for Steam games that interface did a relatively good job of that. Instead what I wanted to track was whether or not I played a game in a given month. This was a simple data point that allowed me to view how my tastes in gaming shifted over time. The pattern that emerges is that I have a dozen or so “forever games” that I shift back and forth between, and a number of games that I visit for a month or two. Since starting this nonsense I have logged 374 different games that I have spent time playing and of those 236 have only been played for a single month.

Exploring Games PLayed in 2022

Games Played Longer than 3 Months in 2022

This was very much a year of forever games for me it seems. I spent a lot of time visiting old favorites, and this is also the year that I finally “groked” Path of Exile and allowed it to start dominating my life. The above list is every game that I spent time playing for more than three months. Some of these are going to be terribly deceiving because for example, you would think this year is dominated by Final Fantasy XIV and that would be a lie. What I did throughout the year was log in every 4-5 days and either go house shopping or retrieve my money because I failed to win a house in the lottery. Similarly, I played Guild Wars 2 quite a bit for several months in a row, and then have fallen into a routine of logging in and farming the guild halls for resources or doing the occasional world event, but not really spending a massive amount of time there.

Fallout 76 has been something I have quietly played off and on whenever the mood hit me, and it wasn’t really that I started actively talking about it until the rest of AggroChat got into it. New World was a major force in my year because I was either playing in maintenance mode for the first few months, playing on the PTR for the middle of the year and hit rerolling and hitting the game extremely hard for the last few months of the year. I decided to track World of Warcraft Dragonflight Alpha/Beta separate from World of Warcraft as a whole because I very much approached the game from a more clinical tester mindset. I’ve not actively played World of Warcraft legitimately since December 2020 and as such have not paid for a subscription either. Basically, my time in Dragonflight did not really feel like I was truly playing the game because I was playing a series of disposable characters for each testing session.

Apparently, I played Torchlight Infinite More than I thought

The game that sort of surprised me for how long I actually spent playing it is Torchlight Infinite. The weird thing about that is that I don’t really particularly like the game. I got into it from a testing standpoint and between mobile testing and PC testing, I dipped my toes into the water for six separate months. It isn’t a bad game necessarily but it isn’t exactly a game that compels me either. Similarly, I kept trying to play Monster Hunter Rise and never really attached to it. Whatever magic that kept me glued to Monster Hunter World for as long as it did seems to have passed because from what I can tell Rise is essentially a spiritual successor but I am just not finding it nearly as enjoyable. Lost Ark is similarly a game that I kept trying to enjoy, finally giving up on it and moving on with life. I am not entirely certain what it is about that game that I don’t enjoy but it is very much “not for me”.

Total Number of Games Played in Each Year

Something that I started doing last year is adding a bunch of graphs to this shindig. There seems to be a weird ebb and flow pattern arising from the number of games I played in a given year. There are years where I churn through a lot of games, and then years that I play significantly fewer. Considering the number of “forever” games that I engaged with, I would have thought this was going to be a low-count year I did have an exceptionally frantic few months in the beginning. January, February, and some of March I was a game-finishing machine. I was all about the single-player lifestyle and seemingly catching up for so much lost time. I thought that trend would carry forward but apparently, that did not, and starting in March I was diving hardcore into Guild Wars 2 and really finding a place for it properly in my life. Basically, I approached it with the level of gusto that I had Final Fantasy XIV several times in the past. Once that trend started it seemed to reignite my play of shared world games where admittedly I still mostly play like a single-player murder hobo.

Another thing that I like to do is compare the top games that I played this year against the top list of last year. The first thing I noticed as a trend is that this is the year that I effectively stopped playing mobile games. There is a period of time when lay in bed attempting to let sleep claim me, and that previously had been a time I played random mobile games. I would play a game for a few months, then when I got to the point where it started needing a financial investment I would bounce and move to another one. Instead, I have spent more time sifting through things like Instagram and Tumblr rather than playing a game. I have to be honest, the mobile gaming experience is fairly miserable in general on Android and I don’t really find that I am missing it.

I played an awful lot of Action RPGs, and while I had distanced myself from Diablo 3 in 2021… it made me miserable doing it. So this year saw a bit of a resurgence as I allowed myself to play it once more. I also branched out and played a lot of other games from Path of Exile to Undecember. Last Epoch is actually shaping up now to be a game worth playing and I am actively looking forward to the multiplayer client testing. Elder Scrolls Online and Destiny both fell by the wayside further and Guild Wars 2 really moved into the forefront of games I care deeply about. GW2 had been a title I had struggled to really understand for the better part of a decade and finally for whatever reason this past year it clicked for me. New World continues to be a major force in both years and while I was very much in a depressed state about the future of that game at this time last year, this year gave it a brand new lease on life.

Games Played Since the Start of This Project

Comparing my Top Games of All Time from Last Year and This Year

I am shifting things up a bit differently this year. In the past, I had posted a snippet of the larger chart and it didn’t really mean anything. Instead, I am looking specifically at the total months played counts at the end of this year s contrasted with where we were at the end of last year. World of Warcraft has finally been dethroned, but admittedly this is only due to some trickery and me not counting my time spent testing Dragonflight as me playing World of Warcraft. If you added the 4 months that I tested Dragonflight to the Warcraft totals, then you end up with Final Fantasy XIV finally tying it. For me, my “truth” is that I was not actually playing World of Warcraft but instead focused on rigorous testing and writing bug notes, so that is ultimately how I logged it but I could see the argument the other way around.

Destiny fell to third, and I found it funny that Diablo 3, Elder Scrolls Online, and Rift all held their relative positions at Third, Fourth, and Fifth. I technically did log into Rift and play for a little bit but not terribly munch. I was feeling nostalgic and trying to figure out what the hell I was doing the last time I played largely drove any of those feelings from me. Guild Wars 2 and New World shuffled the order as did Minecraft. You are not reading that wrong… I did in fact play Wildstar this year admittedly with the emulator server client that is deeply incomplete but I will be keeping tabs on that as it progresses. I do feel a bit bad because if trends continue to follow by this time next year Everquest II will have most likely been pushed off the list.

Something that I started last year is charting all of the games that I have played for longer than six months in total. You can really see that there are six games that have dominated my landscape for the last decade and that is Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, Destiny, Diablo 3, Elder Scrolls Online, and Rift. Of those I am no longer really playing World of Warcraft or Rift, so their influence will continue to be diminished while games like Guild Wars 2, New World, and Path of Exile are starting to gain ground. It will be interesting to see what this looks like in another decade if I keep up with this nonsense. I had been fairly regularly playing Magic the Gathering Arena but I largely stopped that. I am not entirely certain what led to me not playing it, but it has been ages since I have even booted it up to claim free cards, let alone sit down to play an actual game.

Another thing that I started last year is keeping track of my longest streaks. What I mean by that is the most months in a row that I have played at least some of the game. This list changes a lot more slowly because while I may shift through several games in a year, it is very rare that I keep at them for more than a few months at a time. New World is gaining ground as a serious contender at twenty-three months so far, and Path of Exile while much further back in the pack is gaining ground with seven months. It is going to be very hard for something to top the salad days of Destiny and how active I was in that game. Thirty-Three months is going to be extremely hard to top and even Diablo 3 had its streak broken last year.

Another Year in the Books

Sometimes I roll into this post with thoughts about what might be on the horizon for me as a gamer or blogger, but this time I really don’t know what the next year might hold. I thought last year that I would be focused more on single-player games, and while the first few months were definitely that… I quickly fell back into my shared environment gamer ways. I am so far removed at this point from regularly gaming with others, that I wonder if I will ever get back to my “pugging” for hours at a time sort of ways of my past. I’ve not raided in any form since 2016 and even then I was not the most serious raider. I think I might have largely closed that chapter in my life and instead, find comfort in having other people around… but doing my own thing.

For those who might want to go back in time and see how this series has evolved, I finally actually created a proper category on my blog for it. I know it only took me seven years to get around to doing this. I think one side goal is to do a better job of charting this data as the year is going on, rather than having a flurry of activity in the last few months trying to catch everything up. Another thing that I want to do is dive back into Guild Wars 2 and finally finish up my Skyscale so I can fly like a proper player of that game. Maybe even finish my Epic Weapon that I started and then largely walked away from. I would love to be able to dive back into Final Fantasy XIV but I wonder if that game is “finished” for me. I am feeling about it much like I felt about World of Warcraft at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. The narrative was wrapped up in a clean and satisfying manner and it is going to take a lot to really engage me in quite the same way as I had been for the last ten years.

What are your goals for the coming year? Do you think this whole game-tracking project that I keep doing is pure nonsense? Feel free to drop me a line below. I hope you all have had a great holiday season and that you have a phenomenal start to the new year.

Games Played 2021 Edition

December 30, 2022December 30, 2021 by Belghast

Well friends it is that time once again to do my “Games Played” post for the year. Each year this image becomes significantly less readable as I am slowly expanding the width of what is shown in frame. For those who are completely new to the blog or might not have experienced one of these posts before I have a strange obsession. Back in 2015 I started keeping track of the games that I played during the year and have since then expanded my spreadsheet to included 2013 and most of 2012 all the way through the current year. Why do I do this? I honestly am not even sure at this point other than I enjoy making data points.

The truth is that I used to use a service called Raptr and it was a great way of keeping track of what I had been playing at any given time. Once I moved away from it I lacked any meaningful way to collect the same sort of data for producing any sort of long term trends. In 2015 I started keeping track of things in a very simple format. If I played a game during a month, it got a tick mark regardless of how much time I spent playing that game. This allowed me to tabulate how many months during a year was I actually engaged with a specific title. There are ways to track things at a more granular level, but for me it was enough knowing what I happened to be playing at a specific time. This has allowed me to go back and see when I have dipped in and out of games like World of Warcraft or Rift, and when I actually started playing a new game for the first time.

Since I started this officially in 2015, you might be wondering exactly how I was able to back populate up through 2012. The first way is that I am pretty prolific when it comes to taking screenshots in video games, in part because I need a constantly flow of them to break out the walls of text in these blog posts. At the time of writing this I have roughly 120 GB of screenshots in cold storage representing roughly 34,000 individual screenshots. I have an unknown number of active screenshots sitting in various directories on my machine that I have yet to file away properly but they represent roughly another 20 GB. On top of this my blog itself acts as a pretty great journal because if I am playing a game regularly, I am likely going to be talking about it. Combined this has given me a pretty good view of what I was doing at any point forward from 2013 when I first started the whole daily blogging thing.

Top Games Played of 2021

The rules for this whole experiment are pretty straight forward. If I play a game at all during a given month I fill in a box, and then tabulate the number of filled boxes to give me a number of months I played a game during the calendar year. There are going to be specific “forever games” that game a regular showing and then a bunch of games that I only play for one or two months at a time. The biggest difference this year is that I made an attempt to keep better track of the mobile games that I happened to be playing. As such you see games like Mitrasphere, Tales of the Wind, and Undead World: Hero Survival consuming a few months. When it comes to mobile games I have this pattern of installing one, playing for a few months out of boredom before I fall asleep at night and then never playing it again.

A new feature this year is that I actually got my shit together and started keeping proper track of the total number of games that I have played in each of the years. Notice there is this sorta trend where I dip back and forth between 70ish game years and 40ish game years. I think more than anything this denotes just how involved I was with any specific games that ate up all of my time, or if I was floundering a bit and trying to find something to really sink my teeth into… but failing miserably. This was very much a year dominated by only a handful of games, but you can see how it ranks against other years in the above bar chart. Let’s specifically look at only the games that I spent more than three months playing.

New World – 11 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 7 Months
Outriders – 6 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 5 Months
Destiny 2 – 4 Months

This is a year where I played an excessive amount of New World. While the game only launched in September I was pretty active in alpha/beta testing all the way through from February onwards when I got into the permanent testing group. I also had a massive resurgence of Final Fantasy XIV this year starting in June and continuing on through the release of Endwalker in early December. Outriders was a pretty significant game for me as well with it taking up four months in a row and then my recent revisiting in November and December. In January of the year I got deeply involved with Elder Scrolls Online again and spent several months hanging out with friends there and leveling some of my very first alts in the game.

If we compare this year to last year… you are going to see a few games that are conspicuously missing. The year of 2021 was a year without Blizzard games almost entirely. This started as me simply being disillusioned with Shadowlands and being unhappy with the way that expansion rolled out. By January of 2021 I had entirely bounced off of that game. Then when the news about the awful working conditions and allegations of abuse hit, I decided that I wanted nothing to do with that company. This put an immediate halt to my reoccurring Diablo 3 plans and lead me to ignore the launch of Diablo 2 Resurrection. So when you take away a game that I played 12 months in 2020 and another that I played 9 months… the entire picture starts to look significantly different.

Top 15 of All Time

Another thing that I find interesting is how the games that I have played the most number of months shifts over time. The above graphic is sorted by total months played and shows 2019, 2020, and 2021. Now one thing that I need to talk about quickly is that some of the previous numbers were off significantly. When working on this years data I noticed that the numbers being tabulated were completely missing some of the past years, which means that some numbers went up a bit as compared to last years numbers. For example I did not play World of Warcraft at all this year but it is going to show that it went up to 75 over the 69 I listed last year. So with this correction in mind this is what the top 15 list looks like now.

World of Warcraft – 75 Total Months
Destiny 1/2 – 69 Total Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 67 Total Months
Diablo 3 – 55 Total Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 50 Total Months
Rift – 47 Total Months
Pokemon Go – 25 Total Months
MTG Arena – 21 Total Months
Guild Wars 2 – 19 Total Months
Minecraft – 17 Total Months
Dragalia Lost – 16 Total Months
Monster Hunter World – 16 Months
The Division 1/2 – 16 Months
Everquest II – 14 Months
New World – 14 Months

Something I have never really done previously but decided to this year, was to create another chart that shows every game that I have played over 6 months in bar chart form. Here is what that looks like.

For the most part the top six have held their places relative to each other for another year. World of Warcraft continues to hold onto that top spot, but having lost 12 months of play time… it is suffering. Destiny is also suffering a bit only having gained 4 months total as compared to Final Fantasy XIV with its 7 months of new play time. Diablo 3 only got 2 months worth of play time before I shut the door on all Blizzard games so it is going to suffer a bit in the future. Elder Scrolls continues to see regular revisits from me, but Rift is largely an artifact of a past era and now is standing there as a testament to what might have been. There is a significant drop down to Pokemon Go and MTG Arena, neither of which saw much play last year but still hold strong.

What surprised me was that Guild Wars 2 is gaining traction, and I figure with the new expansion on its way I will spend some more time playing that. Minecraft gained a few months which honestly I always thought it deserved to be higher on the list given how emotionally important the game is to me. The real surprise is New World and how much I have spent playing it through all of the testing phases and now after launch. I really hope that game can make the necessary changes in order to be something that I want to revisit over time. I fully expect to stop playing it once the holiday event is over and I stop getting free easy expertise increases.

Longest Streaks

Most Number of Months Played Sequentially

This is something new that started last year based on a conversation that I had with my friend Tam. We were curious which games I had played the most number of months in a row without pause. This year I have expanded this a bit and added a bar chart to show games and length of a given streak. For the most part there is not a lot of change here, but we did add a new game to the “more than six months” list and technically there would have been two but I already had a much longer FFXIV streak. New World was added to the list with its eleven months, which is pretty solid to be honest as streaks go.

Another Year of Gaming

This year saw a significant number of changes to the format of this post. More than anything I just expanded upon some footnotes that I used to talk about in this final section and turned them into proper charts. As I said before this game was marked by a handful of games that I spent a lot of time playing, but that does not mean that I also did not have several one off experiences. For example I had twenty five games that I only booted up and played during one month, and among these were games like Dragon Age Inquisition that I played through to completion.

I think more than anything we are all entering the third year of this pandemic and have had significant changes in the way we exist in life as a result. I know I did not expect most of the changes that have occurred in my own life, and would have had a hard time predicting any of them. I know for me at least I want to spend way less time in my office upstairs… where my gaming consoles and primary gaming rig are… because it also represents my work from home office. I play almost exclusively through Parsec now playing remote from my laptop downstairs and even most of my console gaming is done through a remote play app as well. It will be interesting to see what changes unfold during 2022, but for now I am not making any predictions.

If you are curious about the past gaming trends since I have started this experiment you can find my posts dating back to 2015 below. The format for the 2015 post is not quite following what ultimately ended up as my standard going forward.

If you are even more curious, you can check out the raw list of data that I have shared freely for years. I am still not certain why I started doing this, but it does make for an interesting tradition at the end of each year.

Games Played 2020 Edition

December 30, 2022December 31, 2020 by Belghast

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

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

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.

Games Played 2019
Games Played 2018
Games Played 2017
Games Played 2016
Games Played 2015 – The format is kinda wonky with this one

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.

Regularly Playing: April 2020 Edition

April 7, 2020 by Belghast

Okay folks, this is Topic Brainstorming week for Blapril 2020, and I thought I would use that as an opportunity to talk about one of the things that I have traditionally done where I update you all on what I have been regularly playing. I use this opportunity as a time to update the sidebar of the blog and talk about my feelings about some of the games that are in heavy rotation. I have been exceptionally bad at keeping this updated over the last few months, but that isn’t really a new thing either because I have gone through serious lapses before. The idea is that you have a dialog with your readers and talk about what has been going on in your gaming life. This topic could be adopted to pretty much any subject, talk about movies you have been watching, music you have been listening to or any number of other hobbies.

Since this is mostly a gaming blog I have simply chosen to call that aspect of my life out, and as such I talk about the games that are new to the list, the games that are still in regular rotation and the games that are departing the list. Last edition of this feature I also included the “ships passing in the night” feature where I talk about games that I have been enjoying but that won’t really have much staying power.

To Those Remaining

Destiny sweet Destiny… I am not sure what is going on between us. You right now are hanging by a thread and are just barely making the list. I am not sure what it is about the seasonal format but it actually disincentives me from playing, because deep down I know I won’t have the staying power to unlock everything and squeeze every last drop of good from the season before it expires. I think mostly I just have a problem with expiring content. If the seasonal content allowed me toe work through it at my own pace like something along the lines of Elder Scrolls Online, I would feel significantly better about playing Destiny on a regular basis because it doesn’t feel quite so much like wasted effort. I hope they re-evaluate the seasonal formula and make the additions to the game stick around a little longer. If they maybe give you three seasons to complete the content before it expires that might go a long way towards making this feel like a better experience.

I had an awful lot of fun at the beginning of the season hanging out with Grace and Byx and have since then sorta faded away. Diablo 3 is never really far from my mind however and I am sure at some point I will finish building a reasonable set and push toward the end goal. I did at least get the 4 chapters of the seasonal journey knocked out, but Set Dungeon Mastery right now is what is holding me up because it is the one step I hate doing each season. I end up delaying it until I finally can’t anymore and now it is holding up two separate seasons journey ranks. I just really don’t like being on a timer when I am gaming.

To The New and Returning

This is effectively my very first Animal Crossing game, and as a result there has been a mountain of knowledge that I needed to climb in very short order in order to figure out what the hell was going on behind the various mechanics. This is a game that is exceptionally bad at explaining itself, and really this should have been their “Monster Hunter World” moment, because given that the Switch is an extremely popular console makes it attractive to a whole new generation of players. This should have been the title that they added a bit more scaffolding to the game in order to hand hold you through the process of engagement. There are so many things that I have had to take to external sources to figure out, and I feel like maybe some hand holding would have been nice at least to have an option to say “Hey I am a First Timer, Explain to me like I am 5 Years Old”. All of that said it is adorable and while I am not playing with the length I was in those first few days I am at least logging in each day to move the bar forward a bit.

This one is making this part of the list because I feel like there is a lot more here to explore. I have not finished the game, and I want to spend time once other things calm down a bit getting back in and roaming around. Essentially this poorly named game is “What if Fallout 1 and 2 were Russian themed and came out recently”. It is a re-imagining of the Fallout genre and plays like you remember those games playing, which is to say it plays much better than they do if you were to buy a copy from GOG and play it today. It can be brutally hard, and I seem to have more issue with ammunition than I remember having back in the day, but it did serve for several fun nights of gaming and I want to return to it.

While I have not been playing this a lot recently, there is still a lot of meat on these bones and I want to return to it. Wolcen has released a bunch of patches and tweaks since I last played and it will be interesting to see if my tanky spin to win build is still functional. Wolcen is the best Diablo game we have gotten in recent memory and does a great job of sorta cherry picking the best features of both Diablo 3 and Path of Exile… in a formula that feels closer to D3. Essentially it is a recipe for what I like in an ARPG, but I realize for the folks that hold Diablo 2 up in high esteem it might not be their jam. I wish this was available on the Switch because as much as I like playing D3 from the bedroom… if this supported cross save and allowed me to progress my character while chilling out horizontally… this would become my new sleepy time jam.

Ships Passing in the Night

Star Wars Galaxies – Legends Server – PC

In the months since January I have been on a bit of a MMORPG Emulator server binge. The first of these was Star Wars Galaxies because my good friend Tam got into the game heavily, as it was one of his nostalgia jams from the past. For him this was a great experience about space combat in the Star Wars universe. Since I do not really like flight simulators, it was less enjoyable, but I did greatly appreciate the first few levels that felt similar to a WoW or an Everquest 2. Unfortunately once you have finished the first ten levels and the game opens up… this helpful scaffolding falls away and the “real” game was far less enjoyable for me. What was there instead was slow progression and the unpredictable difficulty curves that I remember from Everquest. I was happy that Tam was having so much fun, but I was a bit saddened that I really was not.

This lead me down a path towards one of my nostalgic remembrances… and the game I was likely playing while Tam was playing SWG… City of Heroes. I had so much fun with this game and for the full nostalgia trip, I opted to play a Katana/Regeneration Scrapper. The game itself was way different than I remember it being, but not in a bad way. The homecoming server effectively is picking up where the game left off when it was shuttered, meaning it is several years worth of patches past the point at which I actually left off playing. For the most part the game holds up well unlike SWG or Everquest, and I could see myself maybe returning to it at some point in the future when I am not deluged with other games I want to be playing.

Eventually this path of madness lead me back to the progenitor of MMORPG gaming (for me at least), Everquest. I tried a few different server options and eventually landed on EZ Server, which is a super fast progression and super low difficulty Everquest experience that lets me play tourist and revisit areas I loved in the game without having to deal with finding a group. I realize this largely defeats the purpose of Everquest, but I also don’t have the time or patience that I did when I first played this game, and as a result I am down for cheat mode. It was a lot of fun for about a week and then I wandered away like a bored toddler. I might return the next time I get nostalgic about Norrath, given how hard I have found it to ease back into Everquest II.

This is the third game by Spiders that I have played and it suffers from a lot of the same problems. However still like Greedfall and Technomancer there is something about the gameplay that I find compelling. They all sorta play like low rent Bioware titles, but they are doing a thing that Bioware no longer seems to be doing which makes me interested in them nonetheless. Mars: War Logs was the first game in a series that continued with Technomancer, and I could definitely see some merit in playing this game first because it does introduce parts of the Mars setting that never get explored fully in the sequel. That said it is a much more primitive gaming experience, and while I enjoyed it I could see a lot of the awkwardness turning others off. If you want to experience a spiders game and have never done so… probably start with Greedfall and see if it leaves you wanting more before diving in deeper.

This game was in heavy rotation for me for about a week and then once again as is my usual I wandered away like a bored toddler. It is really charming and interesting, and I liked the pace of feeling like I accomplished something each day. What I did not love about it were how many precision jumps that were required to complete some of the puzzles. The basics of the game is that you are visiting an archipelago and each island has a different them, as well as a central puzzle to solve in how to unlock its shrine. There is no real combat, and if you fail something you start over immediately at the beginning of the room that you are in so it allows you to fail fast and rapidly iterate through ideas. The voxel theme is a lot of what makes the game charming, and the engine that is running it is among the more impressive ones available on the switch. The lighting, the animations, the subtle details all add to the feel of it being a living and breathing world.

It only took me four years… but I finally buckled down and finished my play through of Doom 2016 in anticipation of the release of Doom Eternal. It was a fun if nonsensical ride through a world of exploding demon corpses. I had an awful lot of fun pushing through the final bits of the game and would definitely suggest it to anyone who loved the earlier era and arcade shooters. I’ve not really had a chance to dig into Doom Eternal but it also seems to be a similar style of enjoyment. Right now I am buried under a bunch of games and I need to dig out before I really tackle anything else.

During the crisis we currently find ourselves in… I’ve struggled to allow myself to sink into the warm embrace of a video game. I’ve had trouble disconnecting mentally enough to really allow myself to engage fully with another universe. As a result I have been in desperate need of something that I could more or less play while at the same time shutting off my brain and just giving it time to rest. World of Warcraft fits that bill perfectly because all of the patterns of engagement are more or less muscle memory at this point. I’ve been taking advantage of the experience bonus currently going on in game and the speed of leveling is pure nonsense. I took my Horde Paladin from 110-120 in a few days and hit 118 before I had finished the first zone I chose to go through, Zuldazar. Now that I have that character at 120 I am swapping over to pushing up my Warlock, while at the same time dipping my head in periodically to gobble up any upgrades from World Quests. I’ve also leveled my Paladin on Alliance side as well, since it was the closest to the level cap… and am in the process of working my way towards unlocking the allied races.

Summary

When I allow myself to go more than one month without an update it ends up being this mammoth post as I have a bunch of things that I feel like I need to talk about. My hope is that I can get back in the swing of doing these early in each month. I find it helpful to sorta clear the slate each month and talk about what is and is not seeing play time. There are a lot of games that I might play, but ultimately don’t feel like dedicating one of my daily posts to, and this gives me the space to address those.