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Games of the Decade: 2013

December 17, 2019 by Belghast

This morning we continue the series that involves me looking back at the games released in the past decade. When you look at 2013, there were an awful lot of good and interesting games released, but again we are focused on the games that were specifically important to me. You are probably going to have your own list and there are going to be titles that I exclude that were absolutely bedrock to your gaming experience. Lets dig in because I dredged up four games from my memories and want to talk about them.

Marvel Heroes

Every so often there is a game that comes along that you don’t fully appreciate until it is gone. You will know my love of Diablo style games if you have read this blog for any length of time. Marvel Heroes was an extremely solid entry into that genre, and instead of slaying demons you focused on playing one of the Marvel Super heroes and taking down the traditional baddies of that genre. This is a game that was probably well before its time, and had it been released with the full support of Disney it could have possibly ended up differently.

I mained Captain America because at the end of the day he has consistently been one of my favorite heroes. The only one of my friends who was also super into this game was Thalen, and as a result I spent quite a bit of time running amok with him and clearing content. When I look back this is one of the games that I find I miss the most and wish I had a modern equivalent. There is Marvel Future Fight on the handhelds but it is a little too “free to play” for my tastes. This game had quite possibly the best starting experience because you could effectively play any hero to level 10 before choosing which one you wanted to unlock all of the way. There were also plenty of options for unlocking random heroes withing paying cash shop currency. Will always miss this game and unfortunately it never seemed popular enough for us to be able to get an emulator server.

State of Decay

I love this game, and I am not entirely certain if I can fully explain why. Firstly I am a huge fan of the zombie apocalypse genre, and I still to this day watch Walking Dead and its spin off Fear religiously when the season is going on. Both shows have sorta jumped the shark but I can’t seem to pull myself away from them. I also love games that let me explore and loot areas freely, and State of Decay is a bit of an amalgam of what I think of as the Fallout experience with the Zombie Apocalypse genre. The game also has a heavy emphasis on base building and recruiting new survivor groups to help you out.

The original game was released in June on Xbox Live Arcade for the 360, and I think I bought multiple copies of the game when it came out on Steam to gift to friends. This is just one of those games that I keep going back, especially once the YOSE or Year One Survivor Edition came out adding in all of the DLC content. The big innovation that this game provided that I loved, was the ability to board up windows to buy yourself more time to safely look a location as rummaging tends to attract zombies. Still well worth playing especially as cheap as the YOSE package tends to be these days.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

I figured if I was going to talk about Final Fantasy XIV I should dig out some of my older screenshots. This is your reminder that I started the game as a Highlander. My true enjoyment finally came when I decided to Fantasia my way into Lalafellian adorableness, but my first experiences were as the angriest Bel ever. This game is still to this day one of the best roleplaying game experiences I have ever played. While I keep finding myself falling out of sync with its long term gameplay, I can always return and gobble up new story content and get back into the swing of things.

A Realm Reborn is a feat that should be celebrated, of a game company doubling down on a game that failed spectacularly and then managed to transform that lump of coal into a diamond. This is the “Rudy” sports movie metaphor for the video game world, and we all sorta love that it happened. When you see a bad launch you need this in the back of your head of a time when it did work out, and secretly hope that the company has the fortitude to pull something of this scale off (I am looking at you Anthem). I just heard some news yesterday that Final Fantasy XIV has passed into the 18 million active accounts territory, and that is phenomenal. If you’ve never played this game you should absolutely pick up a copy and try it out. Cactuar is by far the best server and if you can’t stand its radiance… then at least land on the Aether data center.

Pokemon X and Y

This game gets special recognition largely because this is the first time I allowed myself to get caught up in PokeMania. This is the first Pokemon experience I have ever played at launch, and honestly the first time I have really experienced the ins and outs of the game at all. I played Pokemon Blue a bit with an emulator, but I was a College Junior when the original games came out and had long since moved beyond caring about my Gameboy. I had a lot of fun getting caught up in the magic of a Pokemon launch and have since participated in other games including the most recent Sword and Shield. I am still not great at playing this sort of game but I do find them enjoyable. I however care way more about collecting all of the Pokemon than I do about battling, and more or less find battling to be a necessary evil to accomplish the first goal.

Risk of Rain

This is the game that made me realize that I actually do like Rogue Likes. I would probably not have realized this however without the help of Ashgar who spent time playing the game with me. I want to do this again at some point with Risk of Rain 2 and see how well the experience translates to 3D. This is a game that absolutely overwhelms the player, but over time you start to learn the rules of the road and figure out which power-ups you should be focused on. I enjoy the game way more when playing with other people, but I have found myself revisiting from time to time on my own and trying out new classes that I have unlocked. The difficulty scales as you go making it extremely frenetic as you near the end of a level. If you’ve never checked out this game, I am sure you can pick it up these days for next to nothing.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2013

I have to say that 2013 was a bit of a renaissance year for me. It was the year that I began my three plus year long adventure of blogging every single day. This taught me a lot about myself and also showed me the therapeutic benefit of sitting down every morning and dumping my thoughts and feelings out onto the written page. Because of this event so many other things happened like AggroChat my weekly podcast and the whole Blaugust thing and the community that has developed around it. It was a great year.

Games of the Decade: 2012

December 13, 2019 by Belghast

Last week I started this series where I am talking about the games that were particularly important to me during this decade. The end of the year generally makes me introspective about such things, and with this being the first “decade” I can really observe on this blog I figured it was a reasonable series to dive into. I’ve already covered 2010 and 2011, but today we are diving into 2012 which wound up being a pretty significant year for various reasons.

Diablo 3

At the time it released I would have had no idea that this game would become as important for me as it has. In fact I am not entirely certain if I actually managed to get a character all of the way to 70 before the end of 2012. The initial release of this game had some problems, namely when it came to any sort of loot drops that you actually needed. To make matters worse this initial release also had the real money auction house and it would not be until the release of Reaper of Souls in 2014 that a lot of this got sorted out. It was a game I dabbled with and I know that at the very least I had “beat” the story of the game within that initial month.

However in the years since its launch, I met my good friend Grace and with that I got indoctrinated into the tradition of running seasonal content… which also released significantly later. We’ve gotten into this cadence of every three months we return to Diablo 3 with excitement and spend a week or two of serious playtime before fading away again until the next seasonal launch. It mimics the behavior that we have towards any sort of a new MMORPG release and also manages to capture that same excitement every three months like clockwork. Due to all of these peripheral reasons… Diablo 3 has become one of my favorite games of all time, so it most definitely reserves a slot on this list.

The Secret World

Every so often there are games that mean an extreme amount to you on a personal level… but that you also just don’t really play anymore. Secret World is definitely in that camp and I cherish all of the moments we experienced during the launch of this game. It is firmly set in one of my favorite genres… occult fantasy, and saw me being able to mangle together a character I enjoyed that was not quite like any other standard character build. I ran around with a Sword and a Shotgun and had an immense amount of fun figuring out how to make penetration damage combos. It was a glorious time for many of the AggroChat crew as we each got to build our own very custom and tailored version of the character we wanted to play.

Then unfortunately all of that joy came crashing down around us as we entered what represented the end game… the Nightmare difficulty dungeons. We had an amazing time with the Story mode and the Elite mode… but when we moved up to that highest tier all of our fun and custom builds started to fall apart. At that level you needed very specific tank builds, healer builds and any sort of melee damage was punished to extreme levels and not really viable. It was around this time that the magic faded from the game and we all sorta went our separate ways. I would attempt to return periodically to gobble up the story content, but even that only lasted through episode 8. I have fond memories of Secret World but they are also deeply tinged with regret.

Guild Wars 2

My experience with Guild Wars 2 is deeply fraught. I’ve told the story a dozen times now, but this is the only game I have ever resigned from an alpha process for. I remember being extremely excited when through my connections I managed to score a seat in the testing process. It also represents the most thorough NDA I ever had to sign, involving so much detail that it felt like I was signing away my first born. It was one of those testing processes where they forced everyone to join one massive all hands Ventrilo server, and gave us very focused testing directions. I was so excited for that first four hour testing session that I was nearly vibrating… and then I also remember the crushing “wtf is this shit” feeling I had moments later.

Guild Wars 2 was not the game I was expecting or the game that I wanted it to be… but by the time I reached launch I managed to push a lot of that beside me. However it still took years before I finally reached the point where I understood what people enjoyed about it. Now I get it… it is this weird casual sandbox that allows you to roam around and feel like you had an effect on the world with extremely short play sessions. It is a game of more or less checking things off lists, and if you are a list maker and a list completer I am sure it is an amazing experience. For me who was still very much in the rush to end game and raid all of the things mentality… I found the dungeons to be an extremely frustrating experience and the game play experience to largely be pointless. I’ve since found the joy in this game and the things that I apparently was missing, but in this first year it was a lot of confusion and frustration.

Borderlands 2

I am not really sure how much I actually have to say about this game save for the fact that it is important. The style of dialog and story was something unique at the time, and the slick package that it was all wrapped up in lead to some thoroughly enjoyable game play experiences. I played an awful lot of the original Borderlands, and this game took everything that was good about that game and iterated upon it. It truly is a masterpiece that still holds up extremely well by today’s standards. Unfortunately this is also the beginning of the end of the magic for Gear Box. I’ve not played Borderlands 3 at all, but the “pre-sequel” felt like they were phoning it in. When BL3 comes out on Steam I will likely use that as an excuse to pick it up and see where the game has gone. So far it has given me twinges of the same disappointment I felt playing Rage 2 just based on the trailers and such.

Dishonored

Dishonored is a game that deserves not only its spot on this list, but a spot on a “best games of all time” list as well. I have a bad relationship with stealth in games, and often times when I encounter a forced stealth sequence it causes me to nope the hell out of the experience. Dishonored is this weird game that works perfectly well for Tam on his desire to get “clean hands” and “ghost runs” where he is never spotted and never has to kill a single person… or for me where I murderate every single person I encounter. The game does an amazing job of allowing you to play however the hell you want to play… and then brutally judges you for your actions.

The first game is a masterclass in level design and how exactly you bring a brand new IP to market. I love everything about Corvo Attano and the setting of Dunwall. I love the weird mix of Steampunk, Magic and Chthonic monsters of the deep that come together perfectly in a single tight package. I also love the way that this game and its two DLC perfectly feed into the experience of playing Dishonored 2 and give the player backstory about the events that take place between the two games. The entire series is a phenomenal and I highly suggest that everyone play the entire thing through just to experience it. This is one of those settings that could be made into a television series on Netflix and would be almost universally loved. It is the type of game I feel comfortable suggesting because it allows you to largely carve out your own game play experience with so many different ways to be able to complete it.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2012

It was an extremely rough year for me. We had a bunch of deaths in the family and I was still more or less recovering from events that happened in 2011. One of the high points of the year however was recruiting my friend Rae to come work for me. I miss having her at work because her excitement and the unique way she viewed the world was infectious. 2013 would be a banner year, and 2012 was sorta this weird doldrum between the horrible year that was 2011… and me finally starting to come out of that storm.

Games of the Decade: 2011

December 9, 2019 by Belghast

On Friday I started a new series where I talk about the games from the last decade that specifically had an effect on me. The original plan was to do a bunch of single posts, but after some back and forth I decided upon the format of posting games from a specific year. One of the interesting things about this journey is that I am realizing just how fallible my memory is. There is no way I would have ever said that Rift, Skyrim and SWTOR all came out in the same year… but I would have been very wrong. This was seemingly a year of significant changes.

Rift

Rift released in March of 2011 and on paper appeared to be everything that I had ever wanted in an MMORPG. It was an game with a techno-fantasy setting that allowed me to multi-class builds until my heart was content. More importantly it gave me the ability to have a tank with Charge AND Death Grip! I cannot underscore how important that last bit was to my early enjoyment of this game. I rolled a Bahmi Warrior which placed me on the side of the Defiant, aka the Red Team. The central conflict in World of Warcraft was often presented in terms of Good vs Evil, and your definition of that depended greatly upon the side of the fence you started on. Rift on the other hand focused on a debate between Religion and Technology, with me firmly throwing in on the side of technology.

Rift released at a time when it felt like Blizzard was not listening to the players, and in contrast the fledgling Trion Worlds was constantly engaging with the community greatly increasing the appeal. I changed my own religion at the time of being a World of Warcraft site to being all in on Rift, heralding it as the WoW Killer and true savior of MMORPG gaming. I can’t say for certain why I wandered away from the game, but I think in part it was due to the fact that a large chunk of my gaming circle didn’t quite set down the roots that I did. Without a viable raid, we were limited to doing the hardest version of the Rifts, which got old pretty quickly. The release of another game on this list ultimately signaled the closing of my renaissance with the game. It however has been something that I have returned to time and time again and while I am not actively playing it at the moment, remains an extremely important part of my gaming history.

Rage

Every so often a game is released that I absolutely love… and that apparently no one else did. One of those games was Rage, released by ID software in October. What it promised on paper was Doom meets Fallout… and what it delivered was something that felt like it had all of the potential in the world but never quite delivered on any of it. Rage was one of those games that I finished during act one, and I fully expected to open up a wider world… but instead got a credits roll. The few moments before the credit roll however were extremely compelling game play and presented a really interesting world, that I spent entirely too little time in. The follow up this past year took the wrong queues from how to make a sequel and I largely bounced off of it.

I think Rage would have done well, were it not for the horrific technical issues that I remember at the time. ID Software in the post Quake world is often times more of a game engine company than a game developer themselves, and in some ways Rage felt more like a tech demo than anything fully fleshed out. It was the first game to release on the Id Tech 5 engine, and reportedly at launch was a buggy mess. I remember it being a bit of a beast when it came to requirements, but I also managed to play it fairly successfully on the PC. I remember this game being poorly reviewed… but looking back it managed to get a 79 on meta critic… though maybe at the time we didn’t view that as a positive score. I replayed through this game a few years back and it still more or less holds up well.

The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim

My first foray into the world of the Elder Scrolls was with Daggerfall, and I played through it well after that game was gone from its prime. The first Elder Scrolls game that reeled me in with the genres possibility was Morrowind, and when Oblivion released I was completely hooked. By the time Skyrim was announced and ultimately released I was a ravening fanboy ready to consume more of this giant open world setting, and the game delivered on every possible dimension. It would be impossible to create a greatest games of the last decade list without Skyrim on it, especially now that it is pretty much available for every conceivable platform.

What I love about Skyrim is how I am able to just roam aimlessly through the world deciding my own path at all times. The game doesn’t rush me to make any decisions and allows me to carve my own path through the world. I remember on my first playing I went about 15 levels without ever finding the stones that allow you to effectively choose what sort of “class” you were going to play. In fact I pretty much went the opposite direction and it was a significant time before I finally made it to town. As soon as the shackles of the intro quest were removed… I was off doing my own thing figuring out my place in the world. It is for this reason that the game seems to have infinite replay-ability for me personally. Most of the times I pick it up I don’t get even vaguely close to finishing it, but it gives me a fun escape when I need it most.

Star Wars the Old Republic

I have such mixed feelings about Star Wars the Old Republic. On one hand it is one of the best roleplaying games to ever exist with some of the most interesting story content I have ever played through. On the other hand, it is a clone of a very specific era of World of Warcraft and by the time the game released felt somewhat dated and awkward. This would have made a very worthy sequel to the Knights of the Old Republic franchise, if they would have taken a single path and expanded upon it. However what you have is some of the best story-lines that Bioware has ever created trapped inside the husk of a very traditional MMORPG.

This era is also somewhat tainted by the fact that it was a grand experiment in guild building as I attempted to make lots of disparate groups of people mesh together, a problem that I consistently find myself in. This experiment however didn’t go so smoothly and saw the guild fracturing into two factions. In later years the game redeemed itself as the sort of expression of pure joy that I seem to find myself returning to anytime there is a Star Wars movie on the horizon. The more single player focus allows you to churn through the story and feel powerful doing so, more or less allowing you to skip over the bumpy bits. The Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne campaigns represent some of the best RPG goodness I have experienced in a long while. I would at a bare minimum suggest working your way through the original story-line on every single class, because there is interesting overlap and interplay between them. It was and continues to be a pretty phenomenal game-play experience, once you get past a few of the rough spots.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2011

I felt extremely off balance, having left a game I had been playing for the better part of several years and trying to find a new home. House Stalwart had been that home and as I ventured forth into post WoW territory I found a bunch of temporary housing but it really did take me a long time until I settled into a new family. It also begins the era I am in currently of never quite being able to fully commit to any game. I was super prolific when I was into Rift… and then not at all as I started to pull away from that game. During April I had 24 posts… and by the time you get to November I was down to a single post for that entire month. I found myself actively avoiding the concept of raiding, having effectively just had a “bad breakup” with World of Warcraft and raiding in that game.

So where were you in 2011? What were the games that you found important during that year? Drop me a comment below and let me know what I missed that really mattered to you personally.

If You Give a Warrior a Weapon

November 12, 2019 by Belghast

First off, sorry for the lack of a post yesterday. My brain was in weekend mode even though it was a Monday. I was scurrying around trying to get a pet dropped off at the vet, and when I finished I just came home and ate breakfast without thinking once about logging in and posting something. That is life I guess, but I am going to blame that I was off work for Veterans day. The other thing I don’t quite understand about my brain is the way it sometimes does the opposite of what I think it would. When I relinquished the blockade of Blizzard games I fully expected to return to World of Warcraft Classic. Instead I find myself dusting off my Warrior and running around in retail as Fury.

I think it largely started with the concept that there are a bunch of potential drops available through the Holiday event, including updated versions of several two handed weapons I have been chasing for years. This lead to a line of thinking that in order to do the events I needed to be 380 item level. In order to get to 380 item level I needed to do enough of Nazjatar to unlock the Benthic items. Then I remembered that these were trade-able and I purchased a full set on my demon hunter to trade over. This still left me a bit short, but I found level 400 artifacts on the Auction House for pretty cheap, which finally tipped me over so I could start grinding content for an achievement and mount I have already gotten.

Then at some point I realized that I really should be working on the second achievement which is get 200 Timewalking Badges in the nostalgic version of Alterac Valley. Doing this managed to complete a quest that gave me one decent two-hander, a version of the Ice Barbed Spear. However as to the achievement… getting 200 Timewalking Badges feels like a WAY bigger ask than doing every one of the nostalgic raid encounters. This involves a certain amount of grinding that I am not entirely certain I am willing to do considering that I am not even halfway there and have run four AV groups. I am wondering if badges earned on multiple characters counts, because there is a quest that gives you a large chunk at once that is completed only your first time.

Having one decent weapon lead me down another path… which is effectively the MMORPG version of “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie”. I started running through the most recent raid content… of which there are exactly two available two handed weapons… and neither of which dropped. This gets into the problem that I have with the post Legion version of World of Warcraft, Weapons are just a pain in the arse to get. Had they thrown a weapon on the benthic vendor it would have gone so far to helping make this not suck. It still feels like Battle for Azeroth drops were designed around thinking we still had our Artifact Weapons. Today is reset however so here is hoping that I get one of the many two handed weapons from the nostalgic 15th Anniversary content so I can move on with my life.