Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Done For Now

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Good Morning Friends. This is a post that I have found myself avoiding for a month now, but I think it is probably time to make it. If my screenshot archive is correct, I have not logged into World of Warcraft since December 10th. That means I have had over a month to try and summon the desire to return to the game and it just hasn’t arrived. Shadowlands represents the expansion that I made the least amount of progress in before ultimately leaving. Generally speaking when a new MMO expansion launches I get two to three characters to the level cap and then ultimately bounce. This time I made it through one character and just could not bring myself to repeat the content again for a second character. I attempted to level a third character with Threads of Fate since that is a permanent choice and locks you out of the story content, but found it equally unenjoyable.

The Leveling Process

The disappointing thing is that I was greatly enjoying the leveling process prior to the launch of the expansion and managed to push up a full roster of horde characters to the new squished level cap of 50, along with six alliance characters as well. I am not exactly sure what is wrong, but I didn’t enjoy the overall leveling experience in Shadowlands. There were some zones like Bastion were just pure hell for me to make it through, and other zones like my favorite Maldraxxus were nowhere near as enjoyable to go through a second time once the story beats were known. On my second character I stalled out a little bit into Maldraxxus, and on my Threads of Fate character I didn’t complete a single zone worth of content. My favorite leveling experience was probably Legion, and I am not entirely certain what differs so much between the two expansions. It might simply be that I was in a different frame of mind this time around and as a result I had a vastly different experience.

Torghast

The feature that I was looking forward to the most in Shadowlands was Torghast, and the end result did not match up to my expectations. In Final Fantasy XIV there is a system called the Palace of the Dead which is this amazing endless dungeon leveling experience that has a chance of dropping some really cool items along the way, and also serves as a way to unlock once powerful and now at least cool looking weapons. Mentally I was expecting that sort of system to make its way to World of Warcraft and not a largely pointless mini game. Sure you get Artifact Power… I mean Soul Ash… but the end result is just a long grind for a benefit that feels like it does not match up to the amount of time that the activity just took. It feels sorta like you are being asked to solo a Heroic dungeon with no gear payout. Were I to fix it I would make it so that mythic+ dungeon loot could drop in there or something worth chasing.

Legendary Gear

I loved the Legendary armor from Legion, and as a result I was super excited to see a system like that returning. In Legion, knowing there was a chance of getting a Legendary drop pretty much elevated every single activity in the game for me. The problem was there was no way of chasing a specific legendary item, but past that the system was perfection as far as I was concerned. With shadowlands instead we got a system where you collect the patterns for Legendary items, grind Torghast to get soul ash and then combine that with exceptionally expensive crafting materials in order to craft a piece of gear that is going to fall behind the curve unless you pour a constant supply of money and materials into making it better. I essentially bankrupted myself crafting a single Legendary, and the piece that I liked about Legion was having multiple allowed me to rapidly swap up my play style to fit a specific encounter. Sure I got one that was useful immediately, but knowing it is likely the only one I will have kinda kills the Diablo 3 build creation joy of the earlier system.

Then there are the Legendary patterns which were extremely poorly implemented. They drop from specific encounters, some of which are the first boss of a dungeon… or can be engineered in such a way as to force them to be the first boss of the dungeon. Players are going to take the path of least resistance every single time and what ended up happening as a result is that folks would queue for a dungeon, steamroll the first boss… not get the drop they wanted and then bail out accepting the deserter buff. Most of my runs of Mists of Tirna Scithe saw us loosing either a Tank or a Healer after the first boss… and in some cases the entire party. De Other Side is a great dungeon, but Tanks would join… make a beeline for a specific one of the three starting encounters and then bail immediately following. Sure in some cases people were chasing gear, but more often than not they were chasing whatever happened to be their best in slot Legendary pattern.

The Maw

The Maw is all stick and no carrot. The attempt was to create something Soulsbournian in World of Warcraft with this purposefully obtuse experience that you have to struggle with to slowly improve and unlock new things. The problem here however is that essentially The Maw, Torghast and Legendary Crafting are supposed to be this self perpetuating cycle. You run Torghast to get the material gate for crafting Legendary items and you run Maw to improve your experience running Torghast. The problem is that if any of that cycle is broken then the entire cycle of reward is broken. For me since I did not enjoy Torghast and ran out of money to craft Legendary items… The Maw quickly became something that I was doing each day to complete the daily quests but wondering why the fuck I was putting myself through the hassle. I logged in a few minutes ago to snag a screenshot… and apparently had just bailed in the middle of the maw the last time I played.

This could have been really cool, but again the reward systems are the problem. Just like Torghast you need to have some sort of reward other than more systems in order to interest me in coming back. I am super loot motivated and without loot as the reward waiting on me at the end… I am not sure I want to go through your obstacle course. Even if they had put a rare chance of something interesting dropping from the boss encounters, I probably would have farmed them every single day dealing with the constantly escalating series of bullshit in the form of the eye of the jailer. Instead I knew that going to the maw was going to yield absolutely nothing useful and little things like the inability to use a mount just pissed me off to no end.

Covenant Faction Systems

Now this is the one that I probably understand the least. I loved the Class Order Hall in Legion. It grounded me in the expansion and played into the whole class fantasy narrative in a way that has never been in the game prior to that point. It was amazing and each of them was filled with so many neat easter eggs linking back to past content. On paper the Covenant system seems like it should be fairly similar but in practice it just did not feel good to experience. I realize that the gates are there to keep players from finishing the Covenant system in a single week, but the gates also served as a disincentive for me to keep playing given that I knew I could only do so much in a given weekly reset period. It felt like everything I wanted to do required something that I could not get until the next reset and there were no slow and grindy systems that allowed me to make up that difference.

Additionally there were too many different systems going on at once and creating a dissonant experience. I’ve never loved the War Table style systems in World of Warcraft, but in the past you could always automate this experience with an addon. The Covenant table system looked like it might be different and more interactive, but in reality it is just complicated enough that you can’t easily automate it but requires no more interaction. As a result it sorta ends up being the worst possible version of the War Table because now you can’t even employ an addon (or couldn’t last I checked) to just sorta take care of it for you and it is still just a series of dice rolls. The soul bind system was kinda cool but the acquisition of these felt bad especially given that there were slightly better versions that you needed to somehow track down.

Loot Drought

The dungeons felt really good, and I give them credit for making a cycle of really enjoyable experiences. Unfortunately it also felt like I was not really making much in the way of progress. I ground my face against Heroic dungeons with a reckless abandon in an attempt to “gear up” and so often I walked away with nothing but an expenditure of time and a repair bill for my trouble. Blizzard shifted the way gear dropped in an attempt to make obtaining loot feel more important, which is probably a double edged sword. Sure when I finally got the thing I had been chasing it felt amazing… but similarly the thirty two times I attempted to get it before and got nothing felt soul crushingly awful. I have no clue how this applies to raiding but I feel like more than likely the loot distribution feels equally bad there. I didn’t survive long enough to actually attend a raid.

Healer Drought

I think the thing that probably contributed the most to my bouncing is the fact that I could not find a reliable source of healing to make groups happen. I have a lot of friends and almost all of them seem to be playing DPS these days. My usual partner in crime Grace, did not even make it through the leveling experience for some of the reasons outlined above. My guild seemed to have two active healers, both of which were available during times that were generally too late for me to commit to running anything. This ended up with me abandoning my goal of being a Paladin Tank, and instead spending most of my time pugging as a Retribution DPS. There are a lot of things I am willing to do… but tanking for pugs is not really one of them. I tried tanking a Mythic plus from the group finder and it went just as frustratingly as you might expect.

I think I probably would have stuck around a little longer were I able to reliably run all of the Mythic plus dungeons each week, but the struggle to make a single one happen just didn’t make the possible rewards worth the effort. Had I been enjoying any of the above items… I could have shifted my play style up and just melted back into the background leveling alts. Unfortunately the only part of the game that I did enjoy was the Dungeon game… and that required a constant flow of healers that simply did not materialize in order to make it happen. I am not sure what is up with healing this expansion, but it seems like folks that have been constant healers previously have abandoned it for the way of the DPS.

Unintended Path of Post

So here we are at the end of a post that I did not mean to turn out the way it ultimately has. I’ve said before that I often times have no clue what I am going to say until I sit down and the keyboard and start typing. Originally I meant this to be a post just stating that I was largely giving up on World of Warcraft Shadowlands after a month of not playing it and having no desire to return. What ended up happening instead is a long rant about the things that frustrated me. I guess maybe I needed to get it out of my system and since this is my blog and everything is me editorializing… rant happened. I have friends who are still enjoying the expansion and I am happy to see that. The last thing I want to do is burn down the building on the way out. I am just not sure if this specific combination of systems was what I wanted out of World of Warcraft.

I was hoping for another expansion to rival Legion, which now sits atop the list of my favorite expansions. Instead I got something that is more down towards the Battle for Azeroth end of the list. Truth is I probably found more joy in BFA than I have so far in Shadowlands, but I feel like I am certain to give it another shot after a few patches to see if that impression changes.

Second Chances

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One of the things that I have learned about myself is that I have to be in the right mood at the right time in order to get engaged with a game. This has caused a bunch of problems in the past when I felt like I needed to play something, but for whatever reason kept bouncing from it. I think it is almost like I take this as a challenge, especially if I don’t fully understand why I bounced in the first place. For example I have spent so much time trying to like Guild Wars 2 and Warframe, because on paper they are games that I should like. However thus far no matter how many times I keep trying them, I fail to grasp the thing that my friends who are into them are so engaged with.

I wrote about this the other day in a post called Changing Perspective, as I chronicled my feelings about the Dragon Age series. Currently I show that I have 101 hours played in Steam, but originally I was attempting to play the game through Origin where I show 125 hours and I also own it on PlayStation where I attempted to play for an unknown amount of time. I kept thinking that maybe it was the platform or the way in which I was playing the game that lead me to struggle with it. The last thing I wanted to admit was that there was a game in the Dragon Age series that I just didn’t like at all. Thankfully I stuck with it and kept trying it every so often, with this fifth attempt at playing through the game seeming to finally be successful.

I can’t tell you with any certainty what is different this time around. However I have reached a point where Dragon Age Inquisition was my least favorite of the Dragon Age series, to where it may just be my favorite now. The game goes through a lot of changes and I’ve learned to love characters that I was absolutely diametrically opposed to going into the game. Cassandra for example I viewed as the enemy of the second game, but over time I have reached a point where I think she is absolutely one of the better written characters. Similarly my first time encountering Dorian I was annoyed by him, but now I have come to love his braggadocio.

I’m at a point in the story where I am effectively two quests away from the end of the game. As a result I am going back and wrapping up content that I had not had time to do yet. Yesterday I played through the entire Jaws of Hakkon DLC and then last night I started the Deep roads based one called The Descent. Once I wrap that up it will ultimately be time to face down the big baddy of the game and see the credits roll. I’m doing what I ultimately do every time I reach this point in a game and delaying the inevitable. I have come to love the characters that I am on this journey with and I don’t want it to end. So I will keep finding one more thing to do rather than committing and ultimately closing this chapter in gaming.

Sure I have a stack of games waiting to be played, but for now I am fully engaged with this one and that feels like a special time that I don’t want to end. I am sure I will revisit this game at some point in the future, but that will be then and a different sequence of choices will ultimately lead to a different experience. For now I am trying to savor the last drops of goodness in this experience before I ultimately dive into another. Dragon Age Inquisition is a game that does more for the larger world building of the setting than any of the previous games. The other two games were focused on a very narrow scope and this is more centered around wider themes of existence.

It makes me extremely interested to see where things go from here. I feel like we are going to the Tevinter Imperium, Nevarra and Antiva given that those are settings we have heard so much about in past games but never actually visited. I expect more information to unfurl about the core arc of the which centers around the events of when humans first set foot into the fade thousands of years ago. I mean effectively everything we have done to this point have been dealing with the ramifications of those events. Knowing what I know now… the teaser footage so far makes a lot more sense.

Seeking Mobile Experiences

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One of the things that I noticed while going through my Giant Wall of Games list ™ is that during the 2020 Calendar year I pretty much played NOTHING on my phone. That isn’t entirely true, because I downloaded and tried a few things but nothing significant enough to actually log in the list. There were a handful of games that I installed and immediately uninstalled for various reasons, but in the past I had something like Dragalia Lost or Pokemon Go that was always on the list. So on a whim yesterday afternoon I put out a call to my Twitter family.

Okay friends. Since I have long considered mobile development a largely poisoned well. I figure I will crowdsource this… best mobile games available for Android that are not f2p monetization/gacha traps or match 3 games…. GO!

@Belghast

The problem I have with mobile gaming is that the discovery mechanisms seem to largely be dominated by either Gacha games or games with otherwise similarly questionable free to play mechanics. There are also a number of games that I would clump into a category of being a port of a game from another platform but that are made worse by touch screen controls. I have a number of SquareSoft mobile ports and they are an infinitely worse experience than playing the same game on pretty much any other platform. What I seem to be lacking however are the games that either wouldn’t work without a touch screen interfaces are somehow uniquely enriched by having one. Some of the constraints I am looking for are as follows.

  • Must be Android – I have zero iOS devices by design
  • Must be a Direct Purchase, One Time Unlock, or Free to Play with very optional and non-obtrusive monetization
  • Should be a gameplay experience uniquely enhanced by the touchscreen interface and not just a port trying to make up for those shortcomings
  • No Match Three Games – While I love Bejeweled, I need to move past that

I have to say I absolutely love my Twitter family because once again they came through for me with a massive list of titles to try. This mornings post is as much for my own benefit as it is for sharing these picks with the world, because I wanted a nice clean way of keeping track of it. A few of the titles that were thrown out were games that I had tried and ruled out for one reason or another, so I am dropping them from the list. The titles that are currently in the running for eventually garnering my attention are as follows.

Ultimately the above block of six games is what I chose for my very first cohort. Monument Valley is a game series that I had heard really good things about but ultimately forgot existed. You Must Build a Boat is a game that I have heard someone at some time in the past raving about it… I thought it was Kodra but it might just be a fuzzy memory of Liore when Cat Context existed. Loop gets bumped up in priority because it is was created by a mutual, so absolutely going to check that out. Eve Echos is a game that I had already installed but never actually got around to checking… so just grouping it in by default. Pathfinder Adventures because i was curious and Pixel Dungeon because also curious.

Mobile gaming is pretty much a bedtime activity for me, and last night I managed to try out one of the games before sleep ultimately claimed me. I had not really been sleeping well for a few nights so I did not make it super far. Monument Valley is gorgeous and is exactly the sort of game I am looking for. I am not exactly sure how this game works without a touch interface, and as a result it isn’t just making up for that limited toolset but exploiting it. The puzzles are interesting and change enough to feel fresh each time you move onto a new monument. I made it through five before my eyelids were too heavy to continue, but I am probably going to be playing this one for awhile until I either complete it or get distracted by some other shiny object.

Since this has apparently turned into a post with just an excessive number of bullet point lists… why not add another? I wanted to take a moment to thank all of the folks who participated yesterday in throwing out game ideas. There was a flurry of them that all came in at once, and I think I have accounted for them all… but apologies if I inadvertently miss someone. Yall are awesome in my book.

Essentially over the years I have developed this borderline toxic attitude that mobile gaming is by nature mechanically worse than gaming on pretty much any other platform. I am trying really hard to break this mental block. My hope is that by exposing myself to the games that my friends consider the best, I will start to see the potential of this platform that I have largely relegated to idle match three games and Gacha gambling. I know there are unique experiences that can only be had on a mobile phone, so I am hoping to find more of them.

Now this is the point where I reach out to my readers as well. If you have any mobile games that you love and feel like are must play experiences, please drop me a line below in the comments. I will look into all of them and potentially add them to the list above.

Changing Perspective

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Sometimes you have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy a specific game. I noticed this quite a bit when we were doing the AggroChat game club. I am very much a victim to my whims and as a result when doing the game club titles, they almost felt like homework and as such I rarely enjoyed the experience going into them with that mindset. Similarly occasionally it takes me being in the right head space to finally be able to sink into a narrative game experience and enjoy it. Over the last few days I have been spending time in Dragon Age Inquisition, and this game and I have a fairly tattered past. Based on my calculations this is my fifth attempt to play this title since it released a little over six years ago.

One thing you need to know is that Dragon Age Origins is pretty much my ideal set up for a game of that sort. You get indoctrinated into this warrior caste with a mission to stand against the coming darkness, and while the game takes some twists and turns the core plot largely stays the same. You are the only hope this world has and the power to save it rests in your hands and it is up to you to gather the resources in order to make that final stand. It had an interesting cast of characters and did Dwarves better than any other game had up to that point. I have replayed this entire experience so many times over the years since it released back in 2009. I even had the weird experience of tanking for a raid made up of a lot of the writers back during the early days of World of Warcraft.

Dragon Age 2 was a significant departure from the formula presented by the first game. Instead of choosing your own character you were placed in control of a male or female character named Hawke, much in the same style as Shepard with Mass Effect. I more or less was fine with surrendering control over the character because Hawke was not super dissimilar from the sorts of characters that I would create on my own. It told a much more focused story set around the city of Kirkwall, and the narrative point of view was being told by Varric one of your companions who was being interrogated by an agent of the Inquisition known as the Seeker. I personally came to dislike that character, because she seemed deeply unreasonable during the course of events of this game.

So because of this Dragon Age Inquisition set out on a bad foot right off the bat by making our character ALSO be captured by this same Seeker named Cassandra Pentaghast. Strike two was the fact that this game sets you up to be the Herald of Andraste… which is the patron deity of the southern areas of the game. Side note I am not a huge fan of organized religions and when a game forces very focused piety upon me, I tend to bounce super fucking hard. I am fine with general terms like the Light in Warcraft being this universal force of good, but when you have to deal with the clergy and zealots that isn’t exactly my show. The third strike was how generally oddly the game seemed to treat Dwarves… who DON’T by nature believe in Andraste but it becomes super freaking odd when everyone seems to think you are some Avatar and has to comment about how wrong it is that you are a Dwarf.

What has changed on this play through is my willingness to just go with the flow. For years I have heard from trusted allies how much this game means to them, and I wanted to understand why. Instead of my usual Dwarven character I opted to go with a Human Noble, and instead of fighting against Andraste… I just decided to go with the flow and accept that mantle while generally going with the “I am not sure” options when asked about it. Collectively these options seem to make the game more enjoyable because it eased me over some of the humps that I was getting stuck on. The game takes a long time to really sink its hook it… and it has the disservice of giving you a giant open world zone which is a complete trap. Moving the story along gives you a reason to stay engaged in the world… and without those specific narrative beats it just feels like a somewhat poorly designed ARPG.

I am sure I will do a post later about my thoughts upon wrapping up the story. I honestly have no clue where exactly I am in the progression. I’ve unlocked “World Two” which greatly opened the setting up and I figure I will spend a lot of time roaming around and looking at stuff. Earlier I said I had replayed Dragon Age Origins multiple times, but weirdly I had never done that with the second outing. Playing Inquisition actually makes me want to go back and experience those events with the fresh perspective that this game provides. We were seeing a very narrow lens on the world surrounding the events of Kirkwall, and I think this broader view will make those events feel more meaningful.

So friends a question. Have you ever had this experience with a game that did not work for you but then finally given time and broader experiences finally clicked? Drop me a line in the comments before because I am curious about this.