Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Teer Fradee and Me

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Since this is the Monday of my week due to the holiday yesterday, I feel like doing a sort of general update post. I had previously been grinding away on my second playthrough of Witcher 2, in an attempt to see the other side of the story. I have more or less stalled out there because I am not a really big fan of the “humans” path thus far. It feels very much like I chose the correct path the first time. I am generally fine about hatred of high elves… but the dwarves and halflings are always my kinfolk. Witcher universe sets up a world where the elves are assholes, but also greatly abused assholes making me somehow care more about them. Dragon Age did the same thing to me with the Daelish, which I feel are probably at least inspired by the Scoia’tael. For now however I am probably setting this aside realizing that my first attempt was the best attempt.

Instead I managed to find traction finally in Greedfall, which is an RPG that came out last year. The control scheme is a little wonky with mouse and keyboard, but after my extensive playing of Witcher 2 it feels pretty solid compared to that mess. The game as a whole is Tolkien meets the evils of Conquest and Colonization as you set forth to the “new world” represented in this game by the Isle of Teer Fradee. The main continent is effectively divided by a central conflict of Science over Religion with its proxy factions of The Bridge Alliance representing Science and Theleme representing Relgion. You make up a third and attemptedly neutral faction called the Congregation of Merchants, which along with the Coin Guard attempts to make sure that commerce flows between the various warring groups. Lastly there are the factions of the Nauts which make up a group that controls the over ocean shipping lanes and the only route to Teer Fradee and then the Yecht Fradi which represent the native populace of the island being subjugated by these invaders.

You are thrust into a game world where the only group with potentially clean hands are those who originally inhabited the isle. I am doing my best to be a good man when presented with this central conflict and to the right and just thing… but truthfully right now that is more or less having me focus on nothing but the side missions of which there are plentiful. The Theleme are of course the faction of religious zealots dead set on conversion of the natives. The Bridge Alliance are unchecked scientific progress who wants to capture and experiment on all manner of creatures and peoples from the island. The Coin Guard and Congregation in theory are attempting to be neutral but in doing so have many of their own skeletons in their closet and a seemingly dark past that will need be accounted for. The Nauts have their own issues in the form that they demand children or “sea-born” as payment for trade contracts and any child born on one of their vessels becomes theirs as well.

You would think with all of those morally compromised positions, that the game-play experience would feel rather fraught. These things serve to set the texture of the world you are inhabiting, and the game gives you plentiful options to do the right thing and also plentiful options to abuse the powers bestowed upon you as the Legate of the Congregation. I’ve not spent a lot of time working on the main story because the game thrusts you into all of these deeply personal character arcs for your makeshift crew and I am finding myself enjoying that way more than any of the larger beats. I figure at the end of the day I will probably wind up at war with both of the major factions because I find them thoroughly distasteful. Ultimately I am spending most of my time running around with Vasco the captain of the ship that brought us to Teer Fradee and Siora the daughter of the Queen of a faction of natives at war with the Bridge Alliance who sought your assistance. I care about both of them as characters and more or less the joy of this game is running around with them doing stuff, thought Vasco’s “a bit of poison on my blade” combat line gets a little old.

I did not make it through yesterday without paying another visit to the animal shelter and seeing our kiddo. Right now we are leaning towards Josie… as in Josie the Pussycat. I am hoping all of these visits are doing a little bit of bonding along the way, in at least showing here that there are humans out there waiting on her. We still have to wait for final approval that comes after surgery… however we were given a bit of hope. There was talk that maybe just maybe they would be doing a number of surgeries today, and if she is in that batch we might get a call tonight. We have the isolation room set up and ready for her with a brand new fresh litter box, bed and some toys. However during the time when we are here we are likely going to be grabbing her and either shutting off my office, my wife’s office or the bedroom to let her roam around while we do our thing and get used to the world. You never really know how long you need before you can introduce her to the other cats.

I will close things out with another photo. While I was trying to take a photo, she kept trying to climb across my wife and come over to visit me which was adorable. She pretty much started purring as soon as she saw us, but our visit was a little truncated. By policy they have to have a staff member back with us while we interact with the animals, and in the middle of our visit they called the person up to the front to help another family. We didn’t have to leave but we opted to do the right thing and free up the resource, and I am glad we did because they had a family who had lost their animal trying to check to see if it had been captured as a stray. Right now I am hoping beyond hope to get a call, but I will I guess also be okay if I have to wait until Friday.

In the meantime however we are continuing to spend as much time as possible with Kenzie and Mollie because I am sure very soon they will be grumpy with us.

Friday Debris

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This is Tripod, named such for the fact that she is a three legged cat that comes to visit from time to time. Tripod does not realize we love her yet, and bolts at the sight of us… but we do our best to try and make sure she has food. She is one of a handful of neighborhood cats that occasionally visit our house and we were scared to death that she was no longer with us. We’ve had a cold snap and for a couple of weeks we had not managed to catch any sight of her on the front porch cam where we put out food every day. However several times this week we have seen her lurking around the backyard which was pretty much the highlight of the week. We are hoping she is still around during the spring and summer months and maybe just maybe we can teach her that we are friendly people while we are out and about in the back and front yard more often.

This Friday post is somewhat turning into a “things left on the cutting room floor” post about the week. The other day I talked about restarting Witcher 2 so that I could go down the path that was not taken, and I have now reached the first branch in the road… and more or less determined that I made the correct choice the first time. While I greatly enjoyed the “non-human” path, I gotta say I am not loving the blatant racism and bigotry of the “human” path right now. Additionally it is super weird to have as my companions, characters that I more or less learned to greatly dislike during the other play through. As a result my completion of this play through is pretty much in jeopardy. In many games the various path options are equally good and it is just a matter of taste, but for me at least there seems like a clear correct choice here and I made the wrong one on attempt two.

The other issue from which I am suffering is that I am staying up way the hell too late reading and it is starting to cut into my sleep schedule. It feels thoroughly odd to be saying this because I have not been a person to stay up late reading that often in my life. This is complicated by the fact that I read relatively slowly and that at least until my wife falls asleep she is pretty regularly making random comments while I attempt to follow the text. At this point I am roughly halfway through the second book in the Witcher series and I am looking forward to getting into the novels proper having focused on the two prequel short story collections first. The books have not really done much yet to improve my opinion of Yennefer, which is weird because I thought all of the loyalty fans have must have come from reading the books.

Another weird revelation is that there were a lot of moments in Witcher 3 that I mistook as me not knowing what was going on because I had not played the other games. Now I know I am completely incorrect in that assessment and instead the game is just deep diving into character relationships from the books without giving the player much of a heads up about it. Last night I read for example the story of Dudu Biberveldt, a character that I just assumed had showed up in the games before. However having played the second game and watched several synopsis videos of the first game… I am pretty certain that is not a thing and he just lives in the novels. I have to admit though it is this sort of thing that makes the setting so infectious for me, because the things that are constantly left unanswered make me want to go then dig for the answers. I have a feeling that it might have the opposite effect on some of my friends however.

Yesterday was a big reveal of the next expansion for Elder Scrolls Online, and we are going back to Skyrim. The expansion seems like it is going to center on the Solitude area and more importantly Blackreach, one of the coolest areas in Elder Scrolls V. I am all about Dwemer ruins, and supposedly Blackreach is going to make up roughly half of the playable content area in this expansion. They are once again doing a year long story that unfolds over the course of several updates, and considering that I didn’t play any of the “Year of the Dragon” content, I am wondering if this is time for me to update the client and go back into the game. I have most of Morrowind and all of the newer content to experience.

I realize this in some ways goes directly in the face of my whole desire to stop chasing the forever game, but for Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and Star Wars the Old Republic I play them more or less in a single player manner. I come back to the game after a large bundle of content has built up and then can happily binge the new story in an almost Netflix manner before leaving once again and going off and playing other things. I wish I could play World of Warcraft in the same sort of manner, but the way their patch content is released makes it a struggle to try and figure out what the hell is going on at any time if you were not around to see it doled out in small chunks. I am realizing that I find I greatly prefer content that is gated behind completing the previous content just for sake of making it easier to follow.

Chasing a Different Tale

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Last night was one of those nights where I didn’t really know what to do with myself. I burned the shit out of my hand while making dinner, so after that I sat down to a relaxing evening of retreating ground I very recently visited. I decided to restart Witcher 2 since there are very binary path options that you take through the three chapter journey that I am imagining lead to very different experiences. In the last play through I followed the non-human path and this time around I am going to follow Vernon Roche and see where that leads me. The first time playing I was very much in a rush to see the story, and this time I am wandering around a bit more and exploring all of the side quest options.

My eighteen or so hour play through of the game focused largely on the golden path. I did very little but the main story quests and as a result it was a very short experience. Now I am letting myself chill out a bit and especially now that I understand the lay of the land and the interface of this game the entire experience feels more enjoyable. A lot of the first play through was trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing given that the mini-map system does not exactly give you high quality advisement and messaging. There is a sameness to a lot of the textures and as a result the objects you are looking for to interact with don’t really appear obvious most of the time. I wish there was a fix for the whole having to wait until combat is over before you can begin interacting with things again.

The armor I am wearing in this shot always makes me feel like Beetlejuice. I’ve already made enough different choices to have seen a number of different things in the prologue, so I am really looking forward to watching this first chapter play out. If you are playing Witcher 2 and noticing that my screenshots look way better than the game on your screen, there is a reason for that. About halfway through my first play through I decided to venture forth onto Nexus Mods and look to see what tweaks were available. As it stands I have two different mods installed and I will talk a little bit about both of them.

Better Texture Environment: Enhanced Edition

This is the big one that replaces a good number of textures in the game for higher fidelity alternatives. I swiped one of those before and after comparison images from Nexus mods so you can see the sort of effect the changes have on the game. Prior to the patch playing in higher resolutions made everything feel blurry for lack of a better term. Afterwards the objectives are way easier to pick out because everything feels more in focus and detailed. If you do nothing else than I highly suggest taking the time to download this almost 800 meg archive.

Zero Weight Mod

One of the constructs of games that I hate the most is item weight and encumbrance. If given the option I will remove this from the game because the last thing I want to be doing is playing the game of carefully trying to keep under some number. For some people this adds enjoyment and realism but for me… it just makes me want to curse and throw things. As a result when I noticed a mod that simply goes through the item catalog and sets the weight of every single item to zero… I was completely on board. Now I can loot until my heart is content and just not care at all about trying to keep under some number on my stat page.

The only other mod that really interests me is one that allows for the dismantling of all of your junk items to get raw resources. A number of the mods available are among the more cosmetic variety, adding and removing hoods from armor sets that either have or don’t have them, making Geralt look more like the character from Witcher 3, and of course a truly nonsense number of nude mods because Nexus Mods is apparently thirsty as hell. The two I listed however have greatly improved my enjoyment of the experience and installing mods for Witcher 2 is pretty straight forward. You simply find your Witcher install and look for the “CookedPC” directory and then extract the downloaded files into that. I didn’t bother with a Mod Manager, but I did make a back up of this directory before starting.

I admit when I first tried to play this game I was none too certain of what I thought about it. However now that I have played through it once I am beginning to appreciate the simplicity of it. It is a very straight forward experience and is likely a much better starting point in the Witcher universe than jumping straight into the 3rd game. Witcher 3 deluges you with choices and as a result I bounced from it originally just because there was too much going on and too many things I had no clue about. Witcher 2 still uses the veil of Geralt still having amnesia to do a better job of introducing characters and concepts, whereas Wild Hunt just sorta expects you to have played all of the games and read all of the books to understand the context of what is going on.

I think my next goal after having played both paths is to decide which one I liked better and import that save into Witcher 3 and replay that game.

Limited Content Frustrations

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Last night I spent my evening trying to catch up on Destiny and quite honestly failing miserably at doing so. The Dawning has been a complete failure for me in actually getting it finished. Over the Christmas break I fell into a giant Witcher shaped hole that I have yet to pull myself out of. The game that suffered most because of this is Destiny 2 and for the most part I am okay with this. What it ultimately means is that I never finished unlocking the sparrow because I didn’t deliver 200 packages, Again I am mostly okay with this because I have been trying really hard to play what I want when I want rather than forcing myself down some tube towards specific chase content.

A lot of my actions over the last several years have been governed by FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out. Games have factored themselves in a way as to tweak your anxiety centers and make you feel like you need to do a certain thing within a certain time frame or you are in some way failing. This is all to drive up the concurrency numbers so that it feels like the game is alive and well. As a result so much content is doled out in limited time bundles that require significant commitment in order to successfully gain whatever carrot happens to be dangling from the stick. The problem here is that when everyone is doing this thing it means that you are always going to feel somehow like you are failing leading to a pretty miserable gaming experience.

I’ve never been the sort of player who only plays one game, and it feels like so much of the design of modern online games is focused towards trying to make players only play the one game. As a result for the last few years I have sat back feeling unsatisfied with my gaming, knowing that while I was playing game A I was missing out on something in B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L. The Dawning for example was the only holiday event that I participated in during the 2019 extended holiday season. Pretty much every game had one going on, but I decided to nope out of all of them for my own sanity. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy Holidays in games, it is just that I am tired of being forced to consume content on someone else’s schedule.

There is nothing I enjoy more than the feeling of returning to a game and having a massive stack full of content to enjoy. When I return to SWTOR or FFXIV I tend to do so with enough of a lag between visits that I have a few weeks worth of catching up waiting for me. Nothing feels worse however than finding out that you missed out on something cool because the devs decided it was only going to be available during a brief window. I would personally so much rather see development time spent towards evergreen content that is always going to be there and available to the players rather than limited time flash in the pan gimmick content. Much of why I have never quite returned to Anthem for example is that they keep setting up limited time events and doing nothing to broaden the total game experience as a whole.

The one thing that I do appreciate about Destiny is that while I never seem to complete any of the content during a specific season, they seem to give me more wiggle room about this. Generally speaking if you get one of the big set piece quests for a season, you can then chew away on completing it over however long that it takes. For example during the Season of the Drifter they introduced a Gambit themed Heavy Machinegun called 21% Delirium which involved a ton of grinding to get. The final step of which I achieved last night by getting the “Notorious Hustle” triumph. I had been on the Envoys and Primevals defeated step for what felt like several seasons, because you have to be the person who scored the final damage on a target in order to get credit.

I am now the proud owner of another HMG, this time dealing Arc Damage… which I believe is not something I had in a legendary package. Traditionally if I needed an Arc Damage Machinegun I rocked Thunderlord taking up my Exotic weapon slot. All it all it seems like a pretty solid weapon, but I also have not had much time to spend with it as I mostly did Gambit and Crucible last night. The funny thing about the entire process is that I did in fact log in to see how far I was from completing the Dawning event, and when I saw that I still needed like some 60 packages I realized it was not going to happen. There is a part of my brain that is screaming, but I am desperately trying to deaden it as I figure out how to play on my own terms again.

2020 feels like a significant year because I am trying to do a bunch of things that I want to do. So far the reading every night thing is going extremely well, apart from the fact that several nights I have stayed up reading way later than I had intended to. I’ve finished one book and am 27% through the second book which is about par for the course for how fast I read. The Bel Folks Stuff thing is also going really well as shockingly most everyone I have talked to about it has accepted. Still in the process of reaching out to people, but like I only have had one no and one maybe for very valid reasons. Pretty much everyone has just been on board with this nonsense and I am kinda floored by it.

On the gaming front however I am still very much adapting to trying to do what I want to do and stop chasing that forever game. It is going to take some time, because I spent a decade letting my anxiety over missing out on something cool dictate my gaming schedule.