Games of the Decade: 2017

Horizon Zero Dawn – PS4

Once again I am continuing down the path to 2019 as I talk through the games of this decade that were important to me. Going back this morning and assembling my picks for 2017 made me realize what a freaking phenomenal year for gaming this was. There are so many games that would have been game of the year… were they not up against other competition. Once again a preface of that this is my personal list of the games that were important to me during the year. Your list probably looks a bit different and there are a few games that were left off because I never quite got into them the way that I should.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Nintendo Switch

Lets be honest… this is the game that sold a bunch of switches. This is absolutely the reason why I bought mine and even managed to start out on the WiiU and then rebought it and restarted from scratch when I ultimately purchased my Switch. I have issues with one gameplay mechanic, and that is the breakable weapons. However even taking that into account there is no denying how good of a game this is. I ultimately greatly prefer playing it now on Cemu running the WiiU game on emulator so that I can apply a mod that removes weapon durability. There is just something about this game world and the pacing that make me want to get out and explore. The fact that through climbing and stamina you can both gate your progress but also feel like you can get anywhere if you try hard enough kept me pushing forward and trying to find the next secret. If I could remove the gyroscope nonsense and the weapon durability this would have been the perfect game.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins

Assassin’s Creed: Origins – PC

I’ve made attempts in the past to break into the Assassin’s Creed series but there have ultimatley been two obstacles. Firstly they are games that were designed for the console in mind and seem to be way more reasonable when played with a controller than a mouse and keyboard. Secondly they were games that felt defined by a bunch of mini games and things like rooftop chases, which some sneaking around that felt forced and limiting. AC:O pushes the Assassin’s Creed game into a full open world experience where you explore large swaths of the Ancient Egyptian countryside and get a real sense of place and setting that make it feel like you are part of something much larger than effectively being trapped in a single city. The combat itself also seems to be way more forgiving of my desire to rush into combat and not stealth at all, which makes for a better experience personally. I love this game and at some point I will get around to playing the follow up Odyssey.

Night in the Woods

Night in the Woods – PC

While there are significant issues surrounding the co-creator of Night in the Woods, I cannot write the game off because it is extremely powerful. It spoke to me on such a primal level because it effectively could have been my story. I grew up in a tiny town much like the one depicted in the game, and was one of the few of my friends who successfully transitioned into college… but the fact that I lived at home for the first two years commuting back and forth made for a bizarre experience. I was living in two different worlds… the world that remained the same as High School where I saw the same people I did then on a regular basis… and this new fledgling world of experiences as I took my first steps into college. Like Mae I reached a point in my Junior year where I came perilously close to dropping out of School entirely. This game means so much to me, and nothing is probably ever going to change that.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

Mass Effect Andromeda – PC

While this game was universally panned by critics and social media… I loved it and will be forever saddened by the fact we wont see more of this setting. This is the game that YouTube killed because of some pretty bad issues in the early release candidate that were more or less fixed in the first patch. However by that time all of the damage had been done and all of the demo real of horrific facial contortions was shot giving it an endless stream of memetic images. I liked what this game did to Mass Effect by opening it up and bringing us to an entirely new galaxy with its own issues, while at the same time providing hints of the conflicts from the original game that ultimately lead to the splintering of the Andromeda project. I want to see more of this setting and I am hoping at some point EA allows Bioware to revisit it.

Destiny 2

Destiny 2 – PS4/PC

I love Destiny as a franchise, and while I would have greatly preferred that Destiny 2 didn’t exist from the standpoint of that I would have rather seen the first game transition to the PC and get the necessary upgrades it required, I was okay with the reset because it meant I could finally play the game on my platform of choice. Destiny 2 had a rocky road but today we are experiencing a renaissance of some of the best content that has ever existed in a game of this sort. All of that ground work comes back to the transition from the first game to the sequel and the subtle changes that were made to the way the game functioned. It has been an interesting ride but one that began back in 2017, and for that it will always deserve a space on these sort of lists.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn – PS4

Horizon Zero Dawn was easily my game of the year for 2017, and would be a heavy contender if I was trying to make a game of the decade. I love the setting and how it takes the post apocalyptic genre into some very new and interesting directions. I love Aloy the protagonist because she represents a new kind of character that we really haven’t seen much of to this point. I am absolutely hungry for more of this series and I fully expect to see a new game in this sequence release as a launch title for the PlayStation 5. I would love to see this release simultaneously on the PlayStation and the PC at the same time, but I somehow doubt that is actually going to ever be a thing. If you have yet to play this… it is worth the purchase of a console just for this game alone.

The Will of the Moon

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This weekend was largely about me trying to recuperate from whatever crud I had on Friday.  I’m feeling better as a whole but still not feeling 100%.  I’ve referred to this weekend as a name brand beta, because when a company throws a special test that most of the world seems to be invited to it definitely comes off as more marketing ploy than actual test of the game infrastructure.  Overall the game performed flawlessly other than an apparent known memory leak bug, that I never quite encountered because I didn’t play longer than the requisite two or three hours that it takes to encounter it.  The missions that I ran were rather enjoyable, and I fully expect to at a minimum play through the story content and unlock all of that.  I make no guarantees about how long it will take me given that it took me a good two years before I reached maximum level in the original game.

I still question how well the game fits my play style, but at the moment I am looking at it for a purely single player experience given that I know going into it that none of the other AggroChat crew will be playing it.  They all for the most part bounced off of the original Division, and primarily for the bleak story beats.  I think the fact that we were effectively working for the various communities that we discover makes the flow of the story feel better.  However as Kodra pointed out on the podcast, it does leave us a question of why exactly we are still an agent if there is no organizational structure left?  I mostly view that trope as the lone lawman in the wild frontier sort of approach.  I will say the game improved massively after I turned off the HDR, given that I was only able to SEE the HDR effect upstairs in my office and not while playing remotely through parsec…  and as such it made everything extremely washed out and hard to pick out details.

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The game I spent the majority of Saturday playing was Assassin’s Creed Origins and I have reached a point where I am staring down the barrel of the ending.  However I am extremely frustrated by what appears to be the ending that is unfolding in front of me.  Now I have said for some time that my opinion is that when this game was originally planned the ultimately design was that you could play it as Bayek or as Aya since the two characters at least on some level are interchangeable and have the same reasons for engaging in the main story plot.  For sake of budget I assume they cut one character so that they would not have to animate two copies of everything, but the problem with this is…  that every time you are forced to play Aya it is like stepping foot into a level one character.

What I mean by that is through the course of the game you make a lot of stylistic decisions about what weapons you want to use and what talent points to sink into.  Then each time you are throw into playing Aya you are forced to return back to the character that lacks the ability to customize anything.  So spoilers time…  but I just went through a sequence where it appears that I am saying goodbye to my character Bayek…  aka the one that I have spent the last 40 levels customizing to be exactly the way I want him to be…  and being forced to do the ending of the game with Aya the level 1 blank slate.  This makes me really not want to do any of the ending and just call it good enough… returning to playing through the fun part of the game which is doing random quests out in the world.  Maybe this isn’t exactly what is about to happen… but it certainly seems like I am just about to be forced into beating the game as a proxy.  Please note… I like Aya as a character and would have been fine playing her…  if I could actually control what sort of gear and talents she had.

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Lastly I spent some time playing Final Fantasy XIV this weekend and accomplished two things.  Firstly I managed to get my Blue Mage to 50…  which means I now need to find a party of blue mages to go collect the rest of the spells I have available to me given that everything else seems to come from a dungeon or trial.  I spent the podcast grinding out mobs in Northern Thanalan and managed to push across the line solo.  I also managed to get through The Burn which served as a bit of a roadblock since the final boss of that dungeon appears to be a PUG destroyer.  I’ve now moved the quest line along to where I am failing miserably at a fight that is about four times longer than it really needs to be.  Actually I have only failed it the one time and it was mostly because I didn’t catch on what was going on fast enough.  I opted to play through the mission as a warrior instead of a samurai, but that also meant that I was not prepared for a burn phase, because I assumed I was simply trying to out survive the encounter.

I will likely poke my head back in again tonight and give it another shot.  I think I am probably nearing the bridge between 4.4 and 4.5 and as such getting closer and closer to being able to understand what the hell is going on.

Giza and Memphis

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Today we return to my normal nonsense.  Yesterday felt really weird, but not as weird as I guess I expected it to feel?  I am still very much engaged in Assassin’s Creed Origins…  or in the way that I play it…  Egyptian Skyrim?  I’ve made it to Giza and can now die happy…  or actually at this point I have made it past Giza.  Climbing to the top of the pyramids was an interesting challenge as you effectively had to work your way from gap in the capping to the next gap all the way up to the top.  That is one of the bizarre things about this game…  in some ways it feels very much like Breath of the Wild where it seems like you can climb everything in your view…  until you suddenly can’t.  When the game wants to cut off a route it makes something un-climbable which just feels really odd considering the rest of the game you are pulling off crazy moves that would be impossible to actually do in real life.

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One of the mechanics that I both love and hate is the torch, because I am having to use it an awful lot here in Giza as I explore the depths of many tombs.  It feels cool because in theory the torch shows about as much as you would expect from an actual torch.  The negative however is the game knows this… and regularly presents you with rooms that have dimensions that do the torch no favors, and in those situations I find myself working around the edge in a vague attempted to not fall into some pit or something.  So far I have not actually encountered an actual pit, but by god my mind knows that the moment I stop being vigilant…  BAM A PIT.  Additionally I love that the game shows me actually equipping weapons…  but it really shows the nonsense of my inventory as I am equipping two different bows… a sword and shield…  and a giant freaking battle axe.

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Another thing we need to continue talking about is how freaking gorgeous this game is.  I’ve always been enthralled by Egyptian history… and roaming around all of these locations in virtual avatar form is amazing.  Memphis is pretty much how I imagined it…  a swampy mess.  I also love the fact that there is a dedicated croc hunter in a vague attempt to keep the waterways clear enough for the people to safely traverse.  I am not entirely sure why I am on this single player kick, but I am going to roll with it at least until Anthem starts going through its pre-release posturing early next month.  I will say… all of this is really making me want to pick back up Witcher 3, which is even less linear than Assassin’s Creed Origins… and quite literally something I could play for six months and never have seen everything.  The biggest thing about this game…. is I am always happy to return again the next night.

So readers… what are you up to that is interesting?  Playing anything great?

Friends through Food

I know I have talked briefly about this in the past, but we have been adopted by two of the neighborhood cats.  First we had the cat that we refer to as “big boy” who comes running from several yards away when he sees us come out in the morning.  He does this thing where he rears back on his hind paws to reach up and headbutt our hands and it is adorable.  He wants food of course but I think he mostly wants attention, and I take a break from the coffee and blogging time to go give it to him when my wife shouts up that he is out there.  He isn’t out every single day… but comes close to it and we know which house he belongs at and they have a doggie door so he is sorta on free roam as he likes.  He apparently visits lots of houses during the day and ours is but one stop on his trip.

Over time we developed a second cat…  that admittedly we refer to as “Two” because we are unoriginal and also have no clue where she belongs.  This cat seems way more “permanently struggling” than big boy, and over time our relationship with her has improved.  At the beginning she would run the second we got near the door…  only returning once she was sure we were no longer around.  Each day she would run away a little less…  to this morning when she did not budge at all when we opened the door and only eased away as I walked out on the porch to set down some piles of food.  I set out two piles since I know that her and big boy have a sort of uneasy truce…  but cannot be expected to eat from the same pile.

From what I can tell she lives somewhere behind our house, as often times in the morning I will come into the kitchen and our backyard light has tripped.  We have it on a motion sensor and I have looked out a few times and seen her back there and even when I have not…  often times she shows up in the front of the house as soon as we turn the porch light on.  We’ve built a little box full of blankets on the front porch in hopes of enticing her to snuggle in since it has been fairly cold of late…  but so far no luck there.  We’ve seen her hanging out on the porch and using it as a windbreak…  but no actual snuggling.

I am sure however that at some point in the next few weeks/months we will reach a point where she is comfortable enough around us to stay while we feed…  or even let us pet her.  She has been super skittish but each day feels like a tiny victory as she becomes less so.  I mean it is not like we need more cats…  given that we have three indoor ones, but we are suckers for animals that look like they need taking care of.  So as a result we now have our indoor family and our outdoor family…  and someday maybe an amalgam of the two.  For the time being however I am just trying to teach “Two” that we are pretty okay human beings that are setting this food out just for her.

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On the gaming front, I am still engaged with Assassin’s Creed Origins, even though I had a bit of a fragmented night for reasons.  I didn’t get out of work until almost 6 pm which put me getting home way later than normal…  then I fixed dinner for myself and fixed dinner again for my wife when she got home around 8:30 pm.  So as a result I got a bunch of little things accomplished in the game, but didn’t move the story forward much past opening up the next sequence of targets.  I somehow doubt that those are actually the FINAL list of Targets however…  because I figure there will be a final batch after those that represent the end game.  These targets mostly seem like they serve a way to open up new areas of the game like Giza and Memphis for example.  Still having a blast, especially in the weird amalgam of Egyptian and Greek culture that are sort of mashing together.

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One thing the game does a good job of is what Pete mentioned yesterday in the comments…  of showing just how insanely long the Egypt was a major world player.  The period of Egyptian dominance that we think of in the history books started in roughly 3150 BC and concluded somewhere around 332 BC…  which is 2818 years…  so yeah no wonder we are exploring ancient ruins in a game that appears to be set towards the end of the Ptolemaic period of Egypt when it is effectively ruled by the Greeks.  There are so many interesting themes going on in this game that I just sorta want to wallow in the world instead of pushing the story forward.  I’ve helped out so many random people just as a diversion from moving the needle forward.  The moment to moment gameplay feels really good and as such I am super happy to be out exploring new areas.

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Last night I had to sneak my way up to the Lighthouse of Alexandria…  because I assumed there would be a leap of faith…  however it was a bit shorter than I was expecting.  I halfway expected to have one that would take me down the entire length of the tower, but instead it just deposited me at a hay pile a few stories down.  Maybe there is another post that I somehow missed on the climb up that would provide a more gratifying experience.  All in all I am still very much enjoying myself and look forward to playing it over the upcoming four day weekend.