Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

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.

Slaying a Kingslayer

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Last night I finished my first play through of Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings and I have to say I rather enjoyed myself. As compared to the Witcher 3 it was a vastly different sort of game, and as a result any direct comparison is somewhat difficult. Witcher 3 is this gigantic open world experience that has you tackle tasks in whatever order you want, with significant freedom to keep going back and revisiting areas without never truly feeling you are done there. Witcher 2 on the other hand in comparison is super linear and is comprised of Prologue, 3 Acts, and an Epilogue each effectively containing a boxed area that once you have passed can no longer be explored.

Each one of these “gates” when crossed forces the player to make some rather world changing decisions, in that you are effectively going down a very different path because of them. As a result I am deeply considering seeing what the other major path structure would look like, because at the end of Act 1 you are asked to choose someone to ally with and as I understand it this kicks off a very different Act 2 and Act 3 depending on the choice. I enjoyed the act greatly because it was deeply focused on the plight of the non-humans, but the other path also involves some characters that I greatly enjoyed interacting with in Witcher 3. To be honest when I did the “simulate choices” option at the beginning of the third game I was mostly just making decisions without knowing what they meant.

I mostly just powered through the main story, because there is a not insignificant amount of tedium in doing the side quests for Witcher 2. Now had I played this game at the appropriate time when it represented one of the best possible experiences I could be playing… I would have probably gobbled up every side adventure. Playing it now and seeing how much better Witcher 3 does at presenting a world with interesting side stories, it more or less ruined the experience for me. The game however is still very much worth playing to present you with the story behind events that will ultimately resolve in the third game.

I made another attempt last night to get into the original Witcher game and even after installing a pack that supposedly fixes and tweaks a bunch of stuff I found the experience miserable. There is another mod out there that re-balances combat, but it does so in a manner I have no interest in trying. My hope was that it would take away the weird hold to attack and then play whack-a-mole system, but instead it just appears to make everything harder. Again this is a situation of if I had managed to play this around the time it was released, I might have been able to get used to it. Now however it just feels bad and my brain rebels against it every time I try and force myself to experience it.

I am guessing that CD Project Red understands how frustrating the first game is because at some point they released the above video as a recap. I guess I will accept that this is the only version of the original game that I will be experiencing. One of my favorite parts of Witcher 2 is when they show one of Geralt’s memories rendered in this same art style. So I am perfectly okay with watching that same animation style summarize the original game. The second game however is perfectly playable and I am really wishing I had started there instead of just picking up with the 3rd game. So were I to update my advice on how best to get into this series…

  1. Watch the Netflix Series – while this deviates from the novels a bit based on my experience so far, it does give you a pretty good primer into the world of The Witcher and will at least allow you to understand some of the core conflicts.
  2. Watch the Above Recap of Witcher 1 – you may not be as turned off by the original game, but the above recap video gives you enough detail to understand the events at the beginning of Witcher 2.
  3. Play Witcher 2 – while it feels like an older style of game experience it is still very much a good game. There are UI quirks that I wrote about in another post, but if you can get past them the game and story and world are rich enough to keep you engaged. Also it is fairly easy to golden path this game and only care about the main story beats.
  4. Play Witcher 3 – then of course import your Witcher 2 save into Witcher 3 and have a continuation of the world state you left in the second game. Once I determine which path I like better I am probably going to do this and play through the 3rd game again.

I’m also still working my way through the novels. I finished Last Wish last night and made it about three chapters into Sword of Destiny last night. I believe I am following the suggested reading order as Last Wish and Sword of Destiny are both effectively a bunch of short stories about Geralt’s adventures and also appear to be what the Netflix series is heavily drawing upon. Blood of Elves follows up next and begins the first of the proper novels. I am not entirely sure why I am seemingly so obsessed right now, but I am enjoying myself and am just going to roll with it for the time being.

User Experience Challenges

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I continue to slowly prod my way through the Witcher 2. This was probably an excellent game when it came out in 2011, but it has not aged terribly well. In a lot of ways it reminds me of the ways that the original Mass Effect just felt outdated and a little cludgy. The prime example of this is that too many things are tied to left clicking on objects, and often times your intent gets lost in the shuffle. Left and right click are both attacks in this game, and when you are in combat that takes precedence over anything else as it probably should. However lighting torches, opening doors, and looting bodies are all also tied to the left click action meaning that you can’t do ANY of these things while in combat. In practice this also means that more or less items don’t show up as lootable until you have been out of combat for a bit, meaning you have to keep retracing your steps to make sure you didn’t miss something interesting.

A lot of these problems can be summed up as this game being built before we had somewhat agreed upon what the ideal user interface was for this sort of game. We had some of these same problems upon playing Tron 2.0 for the AggroChat game club because it had a bunch of non-standard controls from an era before “FPS Game Controls” had effectively been codified and universalized between all games. The thing that kills me the most is the absense of a standard “confirm” button or options for selecting dialog choices with number keys. This means I am constantly moving between keyboard and mouse in a deeply uncomfortable way. While you can hit Spacebar to loot all items, you can’t hit the space bar to accept a crafting prompt for example and have to instead hit the enter key, but not the one on the numpad.

Another oddity is that you can see all of your patterns that you can craft in the inventory system, but can’t actually do anything with them there. Instead there is a completely different UI that is accessed by holding down the control key and shown two screenshots above… then you have to click the center symbol to go into another menu with no hotkey available. From there you have to go into yet another menu for Alchemy which finally allows you to brew a potion or make a bomb. There is no reason why this functionality could not have been accessed off of the inventory screen since that is already loaded with a bunch of other information.

All of this just drives home how important user interface and user experience design is in a video game. We have evolved to the point of having a pretty standard template, and when a game doesn’t follow that logic it feels bad to play it. This is ultimately the biggest challenge about dipping too deeply into the back catalog of games that came out in the 2000-2012 era of games, because we were still sorta figuring out how these games should work on the PC without a controller. For all I know this might all go away and end up as a very smooth experience with a controller equipped, but that is not my default method of play and not something I naturally gravitate towards.

I am super thankful that by the time Witcher 3 rolled around all of these user experience problems had been ironed out. Yet again it is a scenario where I am hoping that eventually, much like they have started to do for Elder Scrolls Games… that someone will come through and do a mod that effectively recreates the first two games in the Witcher 3 engine. Erxv1 recreated the entire Witcher 1 Prologue for the Witcher 3 engine and it is available over on Nexus Mods. Unfortunately I am certain this took a massive amount of work, and came together largely because all of the needed assets were readily available in Witcher 3. It would take a lot more effort to recreate entire games, but god I would love to see it.

Lord of Corvo Bianco

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This morning is a day of reckoning. I’ve been on vacation since the 20th of December and in that amount of time you can really screw up your sleep schedule. Though over the last few days I have made failed attempts to reintroduce getting up at a specific time, this morning and the day as a whole is going to suck. This holiday was a dual edged sword in that I spent most of it sick, but because of that I also spent most of it gaming. Over the course of this extended break I poured 80 hours worth of game time into The Witcher 3 and have reached a point where I am happy to walk away from it having seen how the main story plays out and having knocked out most of the Heart of Stone and Blood and Wine expansion content. Blood and Wine specifically was fantastic because I absolutely adore the Duchy of Toussaint. I love my Vineyard and it helped give me a sense of ownership in the setting as I explored it.

Sometimes my brain works in a specific pattern where I end up going all in on something. Anyone who has engaged me in a Destiny lore conversation will understand what I am talking about because I sometimes get obsessed with things. Right now I am decades late becoming obsessed with the world of the Witcher and as a result I have started reading the novels. I don’t read particularly quickly and I tend to read before bed and as a result a chapter or two at a time. That said I am slowly chewing my way through The Last Wish which seemingly based on the consensus of sources I found was the proper starting point to this series, and also more or less what the Netflix show has been drawing from. I’m still on the first of the short stories but probably about halfway through it at this point.

As far as Witcher 3, I have to admit it is a little depressing to be walking away from it. I mean I could keep playing it and whittling down the remaining tasks that I have or collecting the last few Gwent cards that I am missing. That said when I reach the “endgame” for a single player game it just feels hollow. I know that all of those NPCs that I love will never gain new dialog lines and will just more or less sit there as a testament to the fact that the world is forever frozen with no new adventures to be had. I may at some point start New Game Plus to see if that is any different, but really I left the game in a good spot and am more or less happy with the various conclusions. There is only one thing that I might have tweaked but it was not worth the back tracking required to change the way something played out. Also I am just going to throw this out there… but Triss is infinitely better than Yennefer. Maybe the books will change my opinion, but Triss is a delight to be around and Yen basically treats Geralt like shit all the time.

In my tradition of doing everything the wrong way… I spent yesterday trying to find the next game to play and wound up falling back into Witcher 2. There is no way I will ever be able to complete the first game because it just feels like crap, and while it was suggested that I remap everything to a controller… that isn’t how I way to play it either. I would love to see someone do a complete port of the first game to the Witcher 3 engine. In the meantime however I have watched a few Witcher 1 recap videos and more or less understand what happens. Witcher 2 is way more sluggish befitting the era in which it was released, but I do think I will be able to get used to it. The pacing is just more slow than I had expected and it is frustrating dealing with all of the invisible walls that appear to be everywhere to keep your character from getting out of bounds. I am interested however in seeing how the story plays out, so more than likely this is what I will be playing for the next bit.

The weirdest thing about all of this is that I always thought that the Witcher universe is one that I would enjoy, but for various reasons I struggled to gain purchase. In some ways it is too reliant upon the source material because it expects you also to be obsessed with things in order to actually understand what the hell is going on. I’ve talked about this before, but the game absolutely throws you down conversation trees where you are expected to know who the hell someone is and are going to be struggling to pull together context clues as you go or make a trip out to the wikipedia page in order to sort out just why the hell we know who this Regis guy is for example. That said because it draws so deep upon an existing work, it means there is an absolute wealth of interesting characters to draw upon and I chose that specific example because I love him so much.

The witcherverse is a bit of a slog to get into, but having recently been indoctrinated into the cult of the white wolf… it really is worth the effort. The truth is had I not watched the Netflix series I probably would have bounced again. That is not to say that it is required viewing, but it did give me enough of a primer to feel like I could understand at least the layout of the world and how the various kingdoms fit together. It also helped that as I dug further into the Witcher 3, there were places and events that were brought up that I saw in the series giving me a bit of a rope ladder to try and climb towards understanding. At this point… I would probably suggest just starting with the 3rd game as the first is an unplayable mess and the second seems to have some pacing and user interface issues especially in the quest advisement area. I’ve spent way too long figuring out what the hell I am supposed to be doing already and have yet to clear the first area. The third one while it absolutely drops you off a cliff and expects you to learn to swim on the way down.. it does present itself in a familiar interface that is easy for any MMORPG player or someone who has played a modern open world game to understand.