Games of the Decade: 2015

Fallout 4 – PC

Continuing the series we dive into some of the games that were important to me in 2015. There were a bunch of games that made the early version of this list, but in many cases I didn’t feel like I had a lot to talk about any of them. I’ve been trying to avoid expansions/dlc on the list, and as a result that knocked out Heavensward which took up a significant portion of my year. Similarly this knocks out Destiny Taken King which also was super important. The final list was whittled down to just four games but I feel like there is something special with each of them.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Witcher 3 – PC

For years I had heard wonderful things about the Witcher series, but I found them somewhat obtuse and difficult to get into. Maybe if I had played the original when it first was released it might have made a difference, but trying to make it with modern expectations was a nonstarter. I found the interface to be deeply cludgy and confusing. When The Witcher 3 released I was not expecting much from it based on my past experience with the earlier two titles, but I got a free copy with a new video card and gave it a shot. What I found was a deep and rich world that I really enjoyed exploring. I’ve not gotten anywhere close to actually beating the game, but it is on that list of titles that I keep meaning to restart from scratch and play through again. The recent release of the Netflix series is re-igniting that desire so maybe I will spend some time over the coming days giving it another shot.

Dying Light

Dying Light – PC

Dying Light is one of those games that is almost impossible to explain without actually experiencing it. At its core it is a game about surviving the zombie apocalypse, but it is much more than that given that there are rich systems where you gain favor with various factions of survivors. The other aspect that is hard to explain is how important movement is to this game. It is a game that takes parkour to the next level as you try and find a path to run on that is safe from the endless hordes of the undead in the world below. There is always this tentative balance between staying in safety and dropping down into the places where you need to scavenge materials from. The total package is wildly enjoyable and now that the game has been out for quite some time you can pick it up on the cheap. If you missed it the first time, well worth grabbing especially since there is a sequel in the works for 2020 release.

Victor Vran

Victor Vran – PC

If you have read this blog for very long you will know of my deep affinity for “diablo-likes” and ARPGs in general. One of these that sorta slipped under almost everyone’s radar is a game called Victor Vran, where you take the controls of a Van Helsing like character that hunts demons and monsters. What makes this game interesting to me is that it has really good WASD controls and extremely interesting level design that works in old fashioned Wolf 3D era “secrets” that can be unlocked to find both new paths and troves of loot. The combination makes for a compelling action RPG that in some ways reminds me of early Isometric shooters like Crusader: No Remorse. You have a wide variety of attacks and special abilities and the levels are hand crafted instead of procedurally generated. This leads to a more structured game-play experience but also somewhat harms the replay value. This is now out on even more platforms including the switch, so well worth checking out if you too are a fan of ARPGs.

Fallout 4

Fallout 4 – PC

I love the Fallout series and have since I first played the original back in 1997. The Fallout community tends to have two distinct branches… those who hold up Fallout 3 as the best title and those who hold up Fallout New Vegas in highest regard. I like aspects of both but tend to fall into the New Vegas camp. Fallout 4 was not exactly the game that either of those factions wanted and as a result it tends to be a fairly divisive title. For me… the aspect that I love about it is Base Building, which is the nail in the coffin for other games. I love feeling like I get to have an effect on the world by linking together disparate groups of refuges into a larger community. When I play this game I more or less ignore the story-line that is forced upon you, and the constantly limiting choice paths… and instead play a game where I am rebuilding the wasteland. I am pretty great at making up my own story when I find the current options distasteful.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2015

2015 was the year that I went to my first video game convention in the form of Pax South in San Antonio. I got to hang out with my friends Ashgar and Rae and explore all of the nonsense that makes up a Pax while also doing various press meetings. I managed to abuse those connections to sneak them into a gameplay session for Gigantic which was probably the game of the show that year. If you start on the right side, the faces that are pointed towards the camera at the screens are me, Ashgar, Rae and then hovering above Rae and explaining the abilities is Lonrem. It was a pretty good year, that started with a bang. I greatly miss going to Pax South each year, but the timing just hasn’t worked out since 2018.

Listless Gaming

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Last night was a fairly fraught evening with me needing to spend more time than I would have liked dealing with work stuff.  By the time I shifted over into gaming mode I was struggling to find the fun in almost anything that I played.  Initially I attempted to get into Dishonored Death of the Outsider and managed to make a tiny bit of progress…  but in the end just wound up taking screenshots of the weird shit appearing in the game like this…  that I can only term as some sort of a monkey baron?  For whatever reason this game is struggling to hold my attention in quite the way that Dishonored 1 and 2 did and I am not entirely certain why.  It could simply be that I am still not the biggest fan of Karnaca and greatly prefer the vibe of Dunwall.

Whatever the case I made it to about the halfway point of a mission before needing to shut down because my wife needed assistance with something.  When I returned to my laptop I did not return to the game and moved on to rummage around for something else to do.  Evenings like last night are frustrating because it feels like I squandered the opportunity to have a good time.  There are times where my mind is just not in the right place to really enjoy anything so I sorta flail about until eventually giving up for the evening and going to sleep.  I wish there was a button that allowed me to purge my mind of worries and just be present in the activity I happen to be doing…  and before someone suggests it… meditation doesn’t seem to work for me.  I just end up sitting quietly thinking about the same nonsense I was thinking about before I actively tried not to think about it.

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So what did I do instead of playing something I had not experienced…  I started a brand new game of Fallout 4.  In theory I need to get Nexus Mod Manager set up on my upstairs machine and get all of the mods I like to use there.  This whole remote playing everything is interesting because there were a lot of experiences like Fallout that I managed to make work downstairs…  albeit in a way less pretty fashion.  I have to say I could really get used to this whole being able to play games in full resolution and fidelity…  from the machine that is most comfortable at that very moment.  I need to drag my spare laptop to work and see how well this process works over the guest network there because in theory…  it should be accessible from any online connection.  I could even try tethering my phone and seeing how playable everything is over a 4G LTE connection.

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I sorta always create the same basic character in Fallout 4…  which is essentially a version of the same character I create in any game.  Little details change but the rough outline of the “Belghast” archetype remains the same.  Incoming spoiler alert for anyone who might not have played the game.  I don’t even mess with customizing the spouse anymore, because I know a few minutes into the experience she will be long gone.  I so rarely play female characters in games because they don’t really fit with the whole unified character thing that I tend to do.

I am not rejecting them because they are female…  more that I am rejecting them because they don’t fit the character I keep wanting to play over and over in every single game.  I do fine in titles that have a strong female character that you assume the reigns of…  like Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn or Lara Croft in the new Tomb Raider games.  However when you give me a game like the Mass Effect series that allows me to craft a tailor made character…  I will almost every single time create a “Belghast”.  I also have a lot of issue with the game if it impedes me from crafting this character…  which I experience a lot when playing games without beard options or “pretty boy” features.  Basically I am not really a fan of the whole Bishōnen thing.  Belghast is a battle damaged character and as a result I prefer whatever form that representation takes looks that way…  though I do worry that at times I am essentially creating a Marlboro Man.

A Warm Blanket

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Today marks the beginning of the whole “Daily Creative Thing” business and while you might have been expecting something from me…  unfortunately you can’t really expect me to get up and do creativity by six in the morning.  Sitting down and writing out a blog post is challenging enough.  I am however planning on making something happen today or tonight depending upon when the muse hits me.  The other big thing going on today is that it is my Nineteenth wedding anniversary, and while I am not entirely certain what we are doing to mark the occasion yet I am sure we will come up with something.  In truth what it will probably mean is that my wife and I go out to dinner, and then wander around hitting the various stores and checking to see if they have started marking down their back to school stuff yet.  “School Supply Season” is like Christmas for my wife, and while this is not exactly the normal thing for people to get excited about…  it is for a teacher.  I’ve spent many an hour over the years scrounging for one last folder or ruler or package of gluesticks for her classroom.

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Work is still madness and I am still finding myself deep in the throes of turtle mode.  Honestly more than anything what happens during these times is I resort to comfort gaming.  I end up dusting off a game that I had not been playing that much and spend a significant chunk of time roaming around its world.  Lately that has meant an awful lot of Rift because much like Phantasy Star Online yesterday… I carry a significant torch for this game as well.  In honor of the occasion I decided to vary up my default wardrobe a bit from what I had been running around in the first screenshot… to what I am now running around in…  which is honestly mostly just some dye and swapping a few pieces.  I never managed to hit the “Prophecy of” level cap and I’ve just been working my way through any of the content that I had left to do in various zones.  So far the thing that I am liking the most about the content is the way that each zone has this major event that takes place at the very end of the zone that ties up a bunch of loose threads from various quests and packages it neatly in this really epic fight.  In many ways Rift feels like a game from a different time, and this has both good and bad aspects to it.  The bad is it feels much slower than other MMOs and the time to kill and time to level can feel a little grating at times.  However on the good side this is also this same thing that makes it feel familiar and lived in…  and something that I can return to over and over to wear it like a blanket.  The main problem that I have with Rift that ultimately causes me to wander away is that I don’t have my social infrastructure here.  My circle of friends that I record the podcast and game on a nightly basis with…  have moved on past this game and will likely never return.  At this point I think I am just too set in my ways to branch out and build new communities, and I also know that I will soon return to the fold and wander away from the game myself.

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Another game I have been playing a not insignificant amount of is Fallout 4.  This runs pretty damned smoothly on the laptop and it has been a recent go to for when I want to wander around a world and explore a bit.  In the theme of carrying torches for games… I have loved Fallout since I saved up my pennies to buy the first game when it released back in 1997.  I was going to college at the time and not really buying many games, but still made a beeline to Walmart to pick it up once I knew they had it in stock.  Side note… that was literally the only place in town that sold PC games and was before the mass expansion of Game Stop.  At that point Software Etc and Babbages still existed as separate entities as well as Comp USA and the unrelated Circuit City and Computer City.  When the games made the tradition to the open world format I was skeptical but quickly got on board thanks to my love of the Elder Scrolls games.  Now the modern Fallout games serve as this familiar touchstone that I can keep returning to anytime I need solace.  I’ve started countless games of Fallout 3 and New Vegas and it seems like now I am carrying that tradition over into Fallout 4 as well.  My default play mode tends to be to wander towards a corner of the map and do whatever happens to be there.  I am not really big for following larger quests in this game, and I likely would have never actually beaten it were it not for the fact that we chose this as a game club game… and I felt obligated to do so.  Gaming in general for me is not ever really about beating the game… but more about existing in that game world for a period of time.  The game world of choice is determined by whatever mood I happen to be in.  Fallout for me tends to be for when I am in a slower paced mood and want to wander around aimlessly dispensing frontier justice on the raiders.

 

Twitter GOTY “Poll”

Last night was a bit of a rough night, because we had a massive storm blow through.  A side effect of the storm was the fact that about 11:30 my wife woke up on the couch because something dripped on her foot.  In the middle of our living room, dripping from one of the beams was a slow trickle of water.  At that point there really isn’t much to do other than put down a towel and a bucket and hope it stops.  However that sort of ruined any thoughts of a really solid nights sleep.  This morning I had originally intended on writing about a rather hamfisted absurdist article that is making its way through my twitter circle, but in truth I am simply going to not deal with that today.  It reminded me of conversations that myself and Tamrielo have on a regular basis… but I also wanted to approach the topic with more grace than I probably have in me right now.  So instead I am going to answer a twitter poll in blog form.

While technically not a poll, it is definitely a thing that I thought looked interesting so this morning instead of tearing into discussions that I don’t really want to get into…  I started thinking back upon various years and trying to determine the games that mattered the most to me during that time.  Also I may or may not be applying a little “in retrospect” to a few of these choices, but that is also ultimately my prerogative.  I limited myself to only picking games released during a specific calendar year, but in many cases the true impact the game had happened much later.

2012:  The Secret World

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I really cannot say enough good about this game… from the perspective of someone just starting out playing it.  I’ve said an awful lot about this game over the years in three pages worth of blog posts… and probably some others that I failed to categorize correctly.  This often makes my “best games I am not playing” list whenever I compile one.  Functionally there are two vastly different game experiences…  the leveling game when you are digging through the story and trying to solve the mysteries of the world…  and the end game where you lose all creative freedom that you had while leveling.  The first game is phenomenal and something that I feel everyone should experience at least once.  The later…  is ultimately what caused us to quit and keeps me from reattaching to the game for any length of time.  However that said the ride is well worth it, and the game has some of the more interesting dungeons in MMOdom…  until you reach nightmare levels where everything sort of falls apart.  I am really looking forward to the re-release of the game under the Secret World Legends name… and hoping beyond hope that they can give me an experience to latch onto with both hands.

2013:  Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

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The impact this game has had on me and my friends is immeasurable.  Largely because it gave us a common ground in the form of an MMO experience that we all care about.  More than anything however it knows how to tell story in and interesting and serialized fashion, where the story arc from one expansion sets up the key players for the next.  This is also the only MMO that has ever sufficiently pulled off a surprise plot twist, and has done so many times…. and been willing to assault structures that I assumed were fixed and sacred to the game itself.  From August onwards in 2013…  my life pretty much belonged to Final Fantasy XIV until we slowly petered out when we ran out of things we were capable of doing.  However we came back and had a renaissance with the game that has continued to the present times with this still being the game we can all sort of agree on.

2014: Destiny

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This is another game that realized its ultimate impact on me long after the year it actually released in.  Destiny is a really important game to me for a whole lot of reasons.  Firstly it has amazing moment to moment gameplay and it is hands down the best feeling shooter I have ever played.  From the moment I heard about the world and the setting I was completely sold… and in truth this is the game that pushed me to buy my way into the current console generation.  I got my PS4 console the week the first PlayStation exclusive alpha was happening, and the little I played of it hooked me extremely hard on the concept.  Year one had a lot of problems, and I sort of picked at it like you might pick at the remains of a meal you know you are done with…  but just keep nibbling on.  I did return to paying regularly towards the tail end of the first year, so that I was primed and ready for the launch of The Taken King.  From Year Two on however I have been a dedicated acolyte of the world, and own it for both PS4 and Xbox One…  and am contemplating making the leap to PC version with the launch of Destiny 2.  The game still has some narrative problems, but it does not stop me one bit from enjoying it.

2015: Fallout 4

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I love Fallout as a franchise.  I still remember saving up the cash to buy the first one when we were in college, and I was completely hooked.  I am not old school enough to remember Wasteland fondly, but I have always been a fan of the whole post apocalyptic nukepunk genre.  So while I am listing this as my game for 2015…  it is a hype cycle that began long before and continues long after.  This is still the game I boot up when I am in a specific mood.  Similarly I have played Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas countless times, and Fallout 4 simply replaces those in succession.  This game is proof to me at least that I care far more about systems, and gameplay…  than I really do about the main narrative in a game.  In fact the only reason why I probably beat this game is because we chose this as our November/December AggroChat game club game for the tail end of 2015.  I would probably still be avoiding the main story… and still off on my own having adventures in my head….  which is in truth my preferred method of playing a game.  Just talking about the game has given me this huge urge to boot it up…  right now…  which would be a horrible idea considering I have to go to work.

2016: World of Warcraft: Legion

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I have to give a lot of credit here to World of Warcraft and the rebirth of the game that happened with the launch of the Legion expansion.  They took a game I thought I no longer really cared about, and was legitimately done caring about…. and turned it into an experience that I rabidly played.  I even managed to return to raiding and didn’t check out this time until we were a few bosses into Nighthold…  which is in truth way longer than I lasted in Draenor.  I’ve reached this point where I am not really playing the game or following it now… but the transformation that took place should nonetheless be honored.  They tried a whole bunch of new ideas that they admittedly borrowed from other games… but wove it together in a fashion that felt new and fresh.  Similarly I feel like it has to be said that they have done and continue to do a great job of managing patch cycles.  They finally broke the “three and done” mold that had happened with Pandaria and Draenor and by all accounts are still releasing interesting content.  I know at some point I will return and at the very least finish out the Legion flight meta achievement, but for the time being I am simply not forcing myself to play a game I am not super into.  Legion however is probably going to go down in history for me as their best expansion…  toppling what was previously my current favorite Wrath of the Lich King.

 

So now that I have given you mine… what are yours?  Feel free to post them in the comments section here… or join in the twitter poll.  I am curious to hear everyone’s thoughts.