A Reminder for Future Me: Don’t Buy Diablo IV Expansions!

Posted on by Nimgimli

I don’t even remember why I bought the lastest expansion for Diablo IV. I know it wasn’t a thoughtful decision. Let me see if I can piece it together:

I’d just subscribed to GeForce Now and wanted to test it with something that has a ton going on on-screen at once. I “own” Diablo IV via Game Pass so I chose that. Started a new character, a Warlock, and went with the flow and made it a seasonal character. Started the campaign fresh since it’s been quite a while since I played. And I enjoyed it, as I always do when I first pick up a Diablo game. Smooshing hordes of baddies and hoovering up loot is fun for me.

Then I realized the Warlock was a ‘free trial’ of the character and you needed the Lord of Hate expansion to continue playing so I figured ‘What the heck’ and traded in some Microsoft Rewards points for $50 in Xbox Store credit and bought it on the Xbox.

That was a while ago. A month? Six weeks? Someting like that. Today I finished Lord of Hatred, finally.

This post is not a diss on Diablo IV. I know plenty of folks love it. It’s just another one of those “Good game, not for me” situations. Here’re my biggest reasons.

1) Although Xbox gives us Diablo IV on both PC (via the Xbox app) and the console, expansion purchases do not extend between platforms. Since I’d purchased on Xbox, I could only play my Warlock on the Xbox, unless I wanted to re-buy the expansion on PC. This is strange since Microsoft tends to really push “Play Anywhere!” in its marketing. Buy a game, play it on Xbox, PC, or in the Cloud. That policy apparently doesn’t extend to Diablo IV expansions.

2) The game is terrible about saving quest progress, at least on the Xbox. Diablo IV is an always-online game and there is no manual safe option. Many, MANY times I lost quest progress because the game hadn’t saved inspite of a message literally saying “Quest Progress Saved” on the screen. To be clear when this happened I didn’t lose exp and gear I had earned in the quest I now had to replay. The game does fine at saving that. It’s just the progress through the campaign it kept losing. This is a big deal for me because I tend to play games in short sessions. Often 15-30 minutes. If you’re someone who sits down for long gaming sessions this probably isn’t going to be that big of an issue. And of course if you’re skipping the campaign it doesn’t matter at all.

But those are reasons enough for me to give any future expansions a pass. I also don’t really like the season pass characters since Diablo IV is far from my ‘main game’ and I don’t like the time pressure that comes with a set deadline before things reset.

The PC and a group of NPCs standing around talking about things I've redacted for fear of spoilers
I’d love a game that looks this good but that isn’t ‘live service’

I did enjoy the story well enough, that’s true. But for me the gameplay got stale pretty fast, too. The ‘build’ (if you can call it that) I used was basically “throw down a couple of DOTs then spam the fire button.”

What I SHOULD have done is push up the difficulty level (I was playing on Expert which is really low on the difficulty tiers) to challenge myself and make me have to futz with my build or figure out how to upgrade my gear. But I didn’t want to do anything to slow me down because…. seasonal character! I’ve got a deadline to make!

I feel like developing a build and rotation is where the real ‘skill’ fo Diablo IV is. But I’m not an expert.

And speaking of expertise. I am baffled by the various ways to improve gear. Slotting gems I get. Temporing I get. The rest, who knows. There’s little hints that come up during loading screens but the load times are so short on the Xbox that I never could read them before they vanished. For most of the game I just kept replacing gear with better gear, until I hit Gear Level 850. I guess there is higher level gear but I never figured out how to get it. So then it was getting better quality Level 850 gear. Once I had everything Legendary I just ignored gear and scrapped everything. In fact gear went from a source of fun to another gaming chore since I still picked everything up. I just scrapped it all at the Blacksmith whenever my inventory got full. Except these little charm things that you slot into the page of your character sheet. No idea what to do with extras of those so I just deleted the lower quality ones. And runes. WTF are Runes for? Never figured that out.

Before I completely give up on Diablo IV I might create a character on the Eternal Realm and see how it feels to play over there without the time pressure but… I also feel like I have a ton of games waiting to be played that I really WANT to play. Now that I finished the Lord of Hatred campaign I feel like I got my money’s worth out of the expansion and maybe it’s time to move on to another game.

A break from Social Media, and musing about attention spans.

Posted on by Nimgimli

I have a fraught relationship with social media (I suspect I am not alone in this). About 20% of the time social media is a source of joy, laughter and useful info. About 20% of the time it is a source of frustration, anger and irritation. The rest of the time it is kind of just there, sucking up the rapidly dwindling hours I have left in this incarnation.

My relationship with social media is also like a pendulum. Those percentages (which I obviously just made up) change over time, from being over in the “having fun” side and slowly swinging to the ‘this is toxic as hell’ and then back again. Sometimes when the pendulum is over on the toxic side, I just skip town. Often in a rage-quit kind of way.

Last week I decided to skip town again. My ‘usual hideout’ was feeling decidedly unfriendly again. Rather than rage quit, I stated that I was taking a 2-week break from social media. That felt a little more mature and a little more controlled, and past experience has shown that some time away tends to move the pendulum back towards the good side.

It would have been better if I’d written down when I made the post, but I didn’t, so I’m not sure when two weeks is up. Not for a while though. I’ll put a stake in the ground at August 24th.

The idea was to engineer more peace in my life. In addition to breaking from social media I removed a bunch of blogs from my RSS feed, culling things down to the handful of bloggers who I genuinely feel like I “know” in some way and who I generally get along with. Then I turned my attention to my phone. Removed social media apps (the temptation was too strong otherwise!) and more importantly turning off a bunch of notifications that I really didn’t need.

So how is it going?

Well last weekend was actually pretty nice. I read a lot (as in words printed on actual paper), walked a bunch and generally just enjoyed some R&R from the hub-bub of modern life. That said, while I was reading I did get that antsy feeling and wanted to check my phone. I resisted, since that is also part of the point of this exercise: trying to rebuild my attention span.

This week, work has been frantic [it’s Thursday afternoon and this is the first chance I’ve had to catch my breath] so I don’t know that I would’ve even had time for social media anyway, but I did notice how my brain is trying to get around the guardrails. I’ve been commenting on other peoples’ blogs a lot more than I usually do. I can’t quite decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Props to my brain for fooling itself, though.

But going back to the attention span thing… mine is in the toilet these days. I think a lot of people are in the same boat. PartPurple can NOT watch a TV show or a movie without having her iPad in her hands. She has some little paint-by-numbers app that she works on while she watches (listens, really) to whatever is on the TV. When I go out into the world SO many people I see are walking around staring at their phones, oblivious to what is happening around them. We’ve just conditioned ourselves to that constant dopamine drip of ‘something new’ hitting our feeds every few minutes.

This is a really jumbled post. I have so many thoughts that are tangentially related to each other. But since I’m on a break from social media and so have no way to promote it, I guess it doesn’t matter! 🙂

I have been griping about not having a very active imagination these days. Another part of getting off social media is seeing if that helps. If giving my brain idle time where it can just float along and process whatever is going on in there; if giving it that time will help me revitalize my imagination. I already do this to some extent. I’ve been walking a lot and when I do, my phone stays in my pocket. My mind wanders. I really think it helps. I go from “I don’t really feel like doing this” but as the steps go by that feeling fades and suddenly I’m thinking about something from two weeks ago or whatever. Sometimes finding solutions, other times just passively committing things to long-term memory (I hope).

But when I’m indoors I’m either sleeping or DOING SOMETHING and I still haven’t managed to deal with that, or even decided if I need to. But at least, for right now, the something that I’m doing isn’t doom-scrolling.

If all that comes from this is that I spend more time reading, I think that’ll be a win. I saw a YouTube video (YouTube being the one vice that I haven’t touched) where some young Gen-WhateverTheYoungestGenIs was talking about “How to get into reading.” and I thought that was the most ridiculous thing. At least I thought that until I sat down to read last weekend and even my old man brain found it slightly uncomfortable to ‘do nothing but read one thing’ for an hour. A few times I found that I was still reading but not really processing what I was reading. I had to catch myself, back up a page, and restart and kind of focus on focusing.

Gotta tell you, that didn’t feel great. It had me thinking of the days before ‘smart phones’ or even PCs when I’d lose a weekend in a fantastic book, or I’d be recreating some historical battle in a paper map & cardboard chit boardgame, or I’d be building a diorama of some World War 2 scene, incorporating the plastic tank model I’d just painted and weathered. Now all I do is stare at screens all day, every day. I’d like to change that, but I’m not ready to give up on gaming, and work obviously requires staring at a screen.

So my small goal is to spend more time reading print books and magazines, and then maybe, just maybe, finding an interest or hobby that doesn’t involve electronics. We’ll see how that goes. Past experience suggests it won’t go well, but I gotta at least try. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, or however that saying goes!

[Header Image Note: That’s a shot I took on my phone (the one I just said stays in my pocket) during a walk. The park I tend to walk in has a nice playground and this sprinkler area designed for kids to play in and boy do they ever have a blast in there. It really has nothing to do with the post.]

[Here’s where my mind is at: I published this post after proof-reading it several times and never noticed I hadn’t given it a title so who knows how it’ll show up out in the wild!]

Early Days in The Planet Crafter

Posted on by Nimgimli

The Planet Crafter is yet another survival-box game that happened to hit Xbox Game Pass just as my Solarpunk infatuation was starting to wane. (Solarpunk was a great game. I’d just done pretty much everything there was to do.) Crafting a whole planet, though? That sounded like a serious challenge so I took it for a spin.

This time out, you’ve crash-landed on a barren planet. First order of business? Oxygen. You have a suit that only holds a very small amount of oxygen. You dash out of your escape pod, harvest some minerals, then head back into the pod to craft things and replenish your O2. One of your first goals will probably be crafting better O2 tanks so you can travel further. You also have food and hydration meters; but what is there to eat or drink on a barren planet?

One of the trickiest bits in survival-box games is the survival part. If one goal is to survive then the fail state has to be not surviving. So what happens when you die? How do you making dying a fail state that penalizes the player enough that they want to avoid failing, but not so much that your average gamer gets frustrated and quits. These games tend to be about exploring and figuring things out and if the death penalty is too harsh then players aren’t going to want to take too many chances. In this regard Planet Crafters plays it pretty safe. When you die you drop some items in a nice neat storage chest, then you respawn in a base or your Pod (I THINK it respawns you in the last place that held oxygen but I’m not too sure) and run back out and pick the stuff up again.

Considering your limited range (at least in the early game) due to O2 concerns, your dropped stuff is never very far away. In fact maximum efficiency might come from just ignoring the food and water stuff completely and accepting that every so often you’ll respawn and have to collect your stuff. I don’t play this way because I’m a fan of the I word (immersion) and I tend to ‘roleplay’ in games like this, so I try my best not to die of starvation, asphyxiation, or dehydration.

I actually prefer an easier death penalty that I can make more difficult via self-imposed rules (even ones as simple as “Try your best to stay alive even if the death penalty is quite light”) than one that is unforgiving, so while I do think they erred on “too little” of a death penalty I MUCH prefer that to having a severe death penalty.

Red-tinged image of my 'starter base' showing a building, drill and windmill
This is pretty much what your first hours are going to look like. Red-tinged, kind of bleak

Honestly The Planet Crafter didn’t make a great first impresion on me. It was just SO bleak and exploration was tough due to the O2 limitations. What I did, and I assume most people do, is build a string of tiny bases that you can duck into to refill your oxygen tanks. You CAN also craft O2 Refill Tanks but those use resources, take up precious inventory space, and vanish when used. A 1×1 base gets created once and it always there when you need oxygen.

In fact after my first session I was ready to put the game aside, but fortunately for me Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob was also playing. I read one of his posts about the game and it finally hit me that we’re here to terraform and as we do, things look less bleak. The game did try to tell me this; the “getting started” goal is called Blue Skies or something like that.

You terraform the planet by building machines that add O2 to the atmosphere (via plants), add pressure to the atmosphere (by drilling into the crust… not sure how that would work in real life but it’s how it works here) and by heating the atmosphere (via heaters). All these require resources and power. Power comes from windmills and solar cells which of course also require resources. This is all fairly abstract but it works. As the planet’s terraform rating increases new tech automagically unlocks. Power seems to be universal; there are no cables and aparently no distance limits. If you put up a solar panel on one end of the map it seems to happily power stuff on the other end of the map, via magic. That sounds odd but within the context of the game it works fine. I think having to run power cables across this rather large map would be a headache.

I’m definitely enjoying the game now, but I’m still not sure it’ll be a long-term title for me. I’m playing solo, or course, and I feel like there’s a LOT to do for one person. Most of my time has been spent building bases to expand the area I can explore. And you do need to explore. While you can harvest a lot of materials from mineral deposits on the ground (deposits that get replenished via some pretty cool meteor impacts), some of what you need has to be scavenged from crashed space ships (food, for example. You can ‘craft’ water from ice, but for your first hours of playing the only source of food is scavenging packets of “space food” from chests and ships), and these tend to be relatively far flung. At my point in the game I don’t have a vehicle so there’s a LOT of running back and forth which is what generally causes me to end a session; knowing I have item X in a storage chest in the base I built next to the wrecked ship that is barely in view and that’ll take me a ton of running to get to. Yeah, that feels like a good time to take a break. 🙂

Mind you, I still haven’t finished the ‘intro’ section of the game called First Steps or something. But the sky above my base is lightening and starting to turn blue, which is pretty neat. Seems local though since if I push out into the wilderness the world turns bleak again. So we’ll see.

Over on Steam Planet Crafter has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating with over 36,000 reviews as I’m typing this. There’s also a demo available in case you want to check it out, but I hope the demo isn’t just the start of the game because that really does feel grim. Also I thought it was a new game since it just hit Game Pass/consoles but it looks like it released in April of 2024. Huh. “Recent Reviews” are still Overwhelmingly Positive, though!

Bouncing off Hell Is Us

Posted on by Nimgimli

Hell is Us hit Game Pass a little bit ago. It’s a game that I was curious about based on previews and teasers I’d caught during various not-E3 events. Figured I’d give it a go.

I didn’t make it far.

When Hell is Us starts you’re being interrogated by a fellow with the most enormous double chin you’ve ever seen. No idea who this is, but the gist of it seems to be that you’ve crossed a border illegaly and gotten caught. In this world two ethnicities (the Sabineans & the Palomists), are at war and there’s pretty intense hate between the two groups. Basically they seem intent on exterminating each other. Anyway the setup is that the actual gameplay is all a big flashback as you succumb to the truth serum and polygraph and start telling your tale to your interogator.

Actual gameplay is a 3rd person action/adventure game. You’re sneaking through a war-torn area that has the feel of World War I to it (trenches, bomb craters and the like). You have melee weapons and a drone, and rather than fighting people you’re fighting weird humanoid creatures that feel like something out of Silent Hill, maybe.

So far, so good. There’s a lot of puzzle solving mixed in with the combat, and lots of exploring to do

My drone distracts an enemy letting me get an easy backstab in
My drone distracts an enemy letting me get an easy backstab in

The first cracks appeared when I was learning to use the drone in combat. Your drone’s first trick is that it can distract enemies. If you’re faced with several baddies, the idea is you lock onto one, order the drone to distract it, then shift to a different enemy to fight. Sounds easy enough but I really struggled with getting the lock-on to work quickly and efficiently. A bit of Googling suggests this is a common complaint with the game. I eventually got things to where I could deal with this mechanic by increasing the sensitivity of the controls. Ideally we’ll see a patch for this but since the game launched last September I’m not sure how likely that is.

I was enjoying the gloomy aesthetics, the combat was OK once I got the hang of dealing with the lock-on requirement, and I was really intrigued by the story setup and genuinely wanted to learn more about this world. The puzzles I encountered weren’t overly hard, but they were hard enough to give a sense of satisfaction once you solved one.

Ultimately what ruined the game for me was one of the core tenets of the developers: no hand-holding. Hell is Us doen’t have a map. It doesn’t have quest markers. It doesn’t have a traditional quest journal. They want the player to feel really immersed in this world; this is an idea that I appreciate in theory. In practice it’s just not where my head is at these days. Some reviewers suggest taking notes while you play and my old-school gamer soul loves that. My current day lazy-ass gamer self can’t be bothered.

I realized the game probably wasn’t for me when I came back on the 2nd (IRL) day and already couldn’t remember which direction I’d been traveling in. I booted up and was standing in a trench on a battlefield and couldn’t recall, at all, which direction I should go. And this was after one day!! The way I tend to play several titles at once and jump from game to game often means I quickly forget details and need quest journals and game systems that nudge me in the right direction.

For the right audience, I think Hell is Us would be a hell of a game. It’s got Very Positive reviews on Steam and about an 80/100 on Open Critic. If I had a week’s vacation and wanted a game that I was going to focus exclusively on then I think I could give it a go and have a grand old time. But my old man brain and the fact that I get distracted by new games far too often make the old-school vibe too much of a challenge for me. A very much younger version of myself would have loved playing this game while drawing a map on graph paper and taking copious notes. Sadly, I’m just not that gamer anymore.

A High-Five for the Solarpunk Devteam

Posted on by Nimgimli

I mentioned over on Mastodon that I was coming to the end of my time with Solarpunk, not because I’m tired of the game but just because I’ve unlocked pretty much everything [I think] other than decorative items and I am not much of a decorator (sadly).

I never even really intended to play Solarpunk. My initial download (it’s on Gamepass) was a result of some jokes about how frequently we’re seeing “punk” added to the end of a word these days. Solarpunk was a lark at first, but then I really got into it.

It isn’t that the gameplay itself is all that unique, and there isn’t any kind of story. You gather, you craft simple items. You build workbenches and research stations and then you use the things you crafted to unlock new machines and new recipies for more advanced stuff. There’re some automation aspects, too. It’s all things we’ve done before, this time in a combat-free, and pretty much stress-free, environment.

Initially your power source will be burning things. Wood and leaves at first. Then wax bricks made from cloth (which comes from the cotton you’ve been farming) and wax (collected from beehives that you built… the bees show up automagically). Then you’ll unlock solar panels — unsurprising given the name. You’ll research batteries so you can store that juice for night time or rainy days. After that you get windmills and then giant wind turbines which hover well above your island, powering lots of stuff. I was a bit surprised that solar power became somewhat redundant! The wind is pretty constant, day or night.

One of the first automations you’ll unlock are drills. You put these on mineral resources that are scattered around the islands. Your first island has iron, a nearby one has copper and so on. The farthest flung islands have diamonds. Drills need power: you can set up a furnace that burns things, but using solar panels or windmills is going to be your ultimate goal.

Flying between the islands (which float in the sky) to gather the resources your drills have produced is initially fun, and just about the time it starts to feel a slight bit tedious you’ll unlock drones that will fly off and collect the ore for you. Of course these need power, too!

Solarpunk screenshot showing a first person view of coming in to a dock in the air ship
There’s one of my drones hard at work!

And here’s my first reason for giving the devs a high-five. The drones are physically modeled. You can watch them lift off and then head off towards their destination. I assumed, initially, that once they were out of sight they would despawn, and after some appropriate amount of time they would respawn laden with ore and a variable somewhere would decrement the amount of ore at the drill. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. When you’re out in the airship you can see your drones flying around, and they really are modeled for the entirety of the trip. I’m not sure exactly WHY I’m impressed by this, but I am.

And then there’s the weather. Your one true enemy in this game is storms. They’ll flatten your crops and they can even harm you if you get hit by lighting. The skies grow dark as can be and thick clouds roll in. One of my deaths came when I was trying to get back to my ‘home’ island at the height of a storm. It was so dark visibility was near zero. I was squinting at the screen and suddenly a mountain loomed out of the darkness and I flew dead on into it. Splat.

Before lightning strikes you’ll see electrical arcs forming on the ground, then BAM! The lighting and thunder is loud enough and abrupt enough to actually startle you.

Then as the storm starts to wind down, the clouds break up and you can fly in and out of them… the clouds are also physically modeled. Some are white fluffy things and others are dark and forboding.

The most distant islands are cold. When you are on those and it rains, instead of rain you get snow. OK actually it looks a little more like hail. But considering you’ll only be able to get to these islands near the end game, and that they’re far enough out you won’t probably make any more trips than neccesary for to them, that they added snow for this tiny slice of the gameplay was another thing that impressed me.

Solarpunk screenshot showing a storm in progress
I need to rig up a rain sensor so the sprinklers turn off during storms. Also low-key proud that I almost caught that lightning strike!

Oh also worth noting that sometimes it just rains, without the storming bit. The wind changes direction too which doesn’t have much of an impact on gameplay, but it does cause all your windmills and wind turbines to rotate accordingly.

There are just all these little details that they really didn’t need to put into the game, but these are also the tiny touches that, for me at least, made it pretty special. I hope there’s a Solarpunk 2, or an expansion or something. All these detailed systems they’ve created need to come back in other forms. I can’t wait to see what they do next.

The only place I felt like the game fell a little short is with the hunger/thirst system. It is super easy to keep these topped up, and yet there’s a whole cooking system where you can make better and better foods. It’s nice for immersion but I basically lived on watermelons for most of the game.

Oh, there’re also farm animals: chickens give eggs, sheep give sheep’s milk and pigs give…. truffles. Whew, I don’t have to turn Doodle, my pig friend, into bacon. These animals add add more infrastructure: they need shelters built as well as to be fed and watered (eventually you can automate this). Oh, and transport. You don’t want to have to fly from island to island just to give your animals food and water, so there’s a system to fly them between islands. But you have to research and build it!

The most amazing part of all this is that apparently Cyberwave, the development studio, is apparently a 2-person studio (though they used another team to do ports.. the game is on everything from Steam to Switch). Here’s a YouTube video about the team and the game:

Sometimes a game comes along and just grabs you. And sometimes you feel like it’s only you! On Steam Solarpunk has a very positive rating but only around 1,600 reviews, which seems low. It’s not an expensive game ($22.99 on Steam with no sale running) and my first playthrough is sitting at around 30 hours with maybe a couple more to go.

Wuthering Waves Gacha’d Me Back

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yeah that there is a tortured title.

Last month I caught up in Neverness to Everness but playing it had given me the gacha itch, leading me back to Wuthering Waves, which I played while I waited for NTE version 1.2 to drop. It was a pleasant enough interlude and I enjoyed refamiliarizing myself with the characters and gameplay.

Then NTE 1.2 dropped, and even though it added a whole game-within-a-game (999 Nights) it didn’t take too long to get through it all. I finished it on “Story Mode” and started a second playthrough, played that enough to get all the limited Event rewards and then I was ready to set that game mode aside for a bit. And the ‘real’ game didn’t have much new content, leaving me with not much to do other than grind bosses to level up characters I’m not really using. Oh and I already have the “battle pass” beyond level 50 which is where the interesting rewards end (battle pass levels 51-70 just give currency for every level).

Landscape image of a battlefield in Wuthering Waves
This is from a cut scene because most of my gaming session was cutscene after cutscene. Here, things weren’t going well

So again, it was back to Wuthering Waves. I am WAY behind on the story content of WW so I’m playing it as if it was a narrative game, not a gacha. I’m using my standard max-level team that I was using when I last played, and I’m focused on just the main story quests (which means often I’m using characters the quest provides anyway).

Playing this way, Wuthering Waves is barely a game. It’s more like a long and intricate anime series with some interactive sections. Wednesday night I started a new quest and played for about an hour. I was still locked into that quest when I had to quit for the night. Thursday when I logged in I was standing next to a portal that took me back to the same quest. I played for just shy of two hours, finally completing the quest. Let that sink in… almost 3 hours on a single quest, nearly all of which took place ‘outside’ of the game world. And most of that 3 hours — I’m going to guestimate at 2.5 hours of it — was basically passive watching. Clicking through dialog, running towards quest markers. Very little combat.

The strange part is: I was totally OK with this. The story was that good. The artwork is that good. The characters are that likable. It maybe helped that I was playing on PC in a dark room, on a wide screen monitor and with my govee lights projecting the colors on-screen across the wall behind my monitor. It was all very immersive!

This was the Rinascita quest (“Dawn Breaks on Dark Tides”) and it came out last October, so I have 9 months of content (I’m guessing that’s 3 or 4 updates) worth of content still to go. I’m psyched. Heck if I catch this up maybe I’ll go try to catch up in Genshin Impact next!

This is why I love these Genshin-like gacha games. They’re my new MMO, essentially. Big, open worlds with tons of things to do, everything from epic questlines to exploration and ‘hobby’ tasks like fishing. Combat of course. Characters to collect and improve on. You can play these games for a LONG time once they’re up and established. I love ’em!

Granted, it’d be nice if we could get a bigger variety of art styles. They’re all pretty heavily anime influenced. Fortunately I still am enjoying that style; I know some friends who are getting rather tired of it, though. But… Galbrena…

Portrait of Galbrena from Wuthering Waves
Not gonna lie, I became a little obsessed with Galbrena.

I’m sure this is also exactly what other folks don’t like about these games. “If I wanted to watch a TV show, I’d be watching a TV show” is a perfectly valid and justified complaint one might aim at them. Or at Wuthering Waves, anyway. I do think it takes storytelling to extremes that most other games don’t reach.

We still have a few weeks before NTE version 1.3 is expected, so we’ll see if that’s enough time for me to get caught up in Wuthering Waves. Of course I’ve also been giving Diablo IV another go. I finished the base campaign last night.. it was quite a gaming night, defeating both Lilith and Leviathan in the same evening!

Yeah, I don’t have any real point to make other than Wuthering Waves has a great story and just basically… I’m in the mood to express my love of video games. Oh, did I mention I’m still enjoying Solarpunk, too? 🙂

[Notes on AI used in this post: I used AI to remove some subtitling from the portrait of Galbrena]

Has Souls-Like Killed Action Games For Me?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Late at night while I’m trying hard to get my brain to shut down so I can sleep (if I wasn’t employed my awake hours would probably be something like 11 AM to 3 AM; I’m most awake and alert after the sun sets) I often turn to YouTube and specifically videos that don’t make me think too much, like “Top upcoming games!” videos. Last night was no different and I watched this video:

These are the kinds of games I used to really enjoy, but as I was watching the video I kept muttering “Souls-like, souls-like, souls-like” under my breath. I do NOT like games with a high reflex difficulty level. My eyes are old, I have arthritis in my hands, and my time is limited compared to the number of games that look worth playing.

To be fair I’m making the assumption that most of these will be souls-likes but that does seem to be the trend these days. The only action-heavy games that feel safe are the ones from Sony or Microsoft; those companies cast the widest possible net so I feel safe buying a PS5 Spiderman or God of War game or on the MS side, a Gears of War game (well, that’s more a shooter but you get the idea).

I keep waiting for the “souls-like” fad to fade away, as gaming trends tend to do, but so far I’ve seen no sign of it. I guess this is what the gaming audience wants. Elden Ring sure sold well.

I do get the appeal and now I’m going to compare souls-like with a gacha game. When I’m playing Neverness to Everness or Wuthering Waves and I’m in a fight and pulling off parries and critical dodges and in doing so biting off huge chunks of an enemy’s health, it is SO satisfying. But it puzzles me that these gacha games can give me that experience without making the games hair-pullingly difficult, and this whole other genre of games seems unable or unwilling to make their products approachable for the widest possible audience.

For now, I’ll let go of my love of action games. I mean I still haven’t played Spiderman 2 or God of War: Ragnorak, so they’ll keep me busy for a while. But someone give me a shout if and when developers of hack and slash games go back to making titles all gamers can enjoy.

And yes, for this post I added a new “sour grapes” tag to the blog. 🙂

[ Featured image is from Bloodborne since it’s about the only souls-like I’ve played for any significant amount of time.]

Celebrating America’s Birthday with Three Days of Gaming

Posted on by Nimgimli

I really wanted to steal Tipa’s “I Know What I Did Last Weekend” title but that would be gauche.

I have fond memories of quite a few outdoorsy 4th of July celebrations from the days when I lived on Long Island. We’d get up early, set up a water smoker full of savory treats, then head to the beach for beer and surf. Late in the afternoon we’d come home to more beer, slow-cooked barbeque, and croquet matches that lasted until bedtime.

Life in the south is different. It is hot. Hotter than I can take for any length of time. This 4th in particular was brutal (actually more so up north than it was here). So I stayed indoors and played video games for all three days.

See, if AI wrote these posts it wouldn’t add all that superfluous prelminary junk. That’s how you can know I still write my own posts!

Anyway, yeah games. A LOT of games. Neverness to Everness is in a bit of a lull for me until the version 1.2 update (which is out this week). I still logged in and spent my daily ‘pixels’ and such, but with all the quests done and the ‘battle pass’ thingie completed there wasn’t a ton to do. I still had the gacha itch, though, so I patched up Wuthering Waves.

Screenshot for Neverness to Everness showing the main character and Hotori sitting in a movie theater
Having some downtime waiting for version 1.2 means I have time to go on dates with Hotori but… I feel like I should skooch over and get a little closer to her, eh?

Ohhh, they know how to getcha, these gacha folks. Now I have a whole “Returners” event in Wuthering Waves to work on. Daily login rewards and a mini battle pass thingie. It took a while to adjust back to WW after playing NTE. It helped to re-do key bindings to match (something I’m getting better about generally) and then a little help from Gemini to get my bearings, and WW was once more a fun time. Now how on earth can I balance two gachas at once? NTE is still my current darling and I am SUPER pumped for version 1.2 and the game-inside-the-game known as 999 Nights. (Which you’re supposed to verbalize it as “1000 Minus One Nights” for some reason.)

Meanwhile. progress is being made in Octopath Traveller. I beat that boss I had blogged about and found a shrine that lets me stack jobs. Apparently there’s a shrine for each job (each of the 8 characters has their own associated job) and once I started multiclassing everything got MUCH easier (and more interesting…figuring out the best pairings). Now I’ve found 3 shrines so I need to be on the lookout for the other 5. Game is getting more and more interesting though, even though the story beats are still far apart in terms of time played. It’s been a while since I stuck with a turn-based RPG for this long (I guess Persona 4 was the lat time) and its been a nice change.

I recently purchased an Ultimate GeForce Now subscription so I can stream games rather than running them locally. Why? Once again, heat. My office gets so warm and having a PC running hot to play games makes things worse. Plus a side-order of “My hard drives are full of large language models and I have no room for games.” Anyway, fired it up to test and what was the most popular game that I had in my library? Diablo IV. So I started it up. There’s a new expansion and new classes and they were offering a 7 day trial of the new classes. I picked a Warlock and started a new campaign (I TRIED to skip the campaign but my soul just wouldn’t let me.)

Screenshot of combat in Diablo IV, attempting to show the 'giant hand' skill mentioned in the text
I really tried to capture this giant hand skill but it’s fast and my screenshot reflexes are slow…

About 20 minutes later I was redeeming Microsoft Rewards points for a $50 gift card and buying the Diablo IV Expansion, Lord of Hate (or something…everything in Diablo IV seems to be called {something} of Hate which gets confusing). I never stick with D4 very long because the Seasons bug me. Because they exist it seems “wasteful” to play my Eternal (non-seasonal) characters even though I never come CLOSE to completing a season. I’m being my own worst enemy here and should embrace the Eternal since I’m not a die-hard player. With all that said, the Warlock is hella fun so far. GREAT skill effects. My favorite is a giant red etheral hand that comes out of the ground and drags baddies away from you.

Last but not least, I’m still playing Solarpunk. I’ve gone from burning wood to burning wax briquets to using solar power. Now I’m building batteries to store excess power, and I’ve researched windmills though haven’t built any yet. I’ve also unlocked switches and some logic tools which I’m just beginning to experiment with. All these fancy items require silicon and cobalt which are the latest resources to get unlocked and I’m also still working on getting production of those up and running. Solarpunk has been one of the more pleasant gaming surprises I’ve had recently. When I first booted it up I never would’ve dreamed I’d still be playing it weeks later.

Screenshot showing some of the tech I'm using. Solar panels, battery, switch, status panel...
Some of the tech I’ve researched. Solar panels, in the background is a battery. On the right is a switch to turn off the Advanced Dock since there’s no reason to power it while the airship is docked. And finally a panel to monitor power draw.

I ALSO fired up Star Wars Outlaws, liked what I saw, but realized this was NOT the time to add yet another game into my ‘currently playing’ list, so I quickly bailed on it so it would feel ‘fresh’ when I eventually circle back to it.

And now it’s Monday and back to work and no extra time off until Labor Day in September. How am I going to manage to keep up with all these games? Something is going to have to fall away. Probably Wuthering Waves since, again, two gachas is probably one too many.

I guess if nothing else, spending 4th of July weekend playing games in the A/C is better for my waistline and my liver than those lost weekends of beer and barbeque that we used to enjoy. [I DID manage a morning walk each day just to get SOME exercise in.]Cheaper too, come to think of it.

Octopath Traveler and the Temptation of the Internet

Posted on by Nimgimli

I think I’ve mentioned that I bought a Switch 2. I’m liking it a lot and have been using it pretty much every day. Rather than running out and buying new games I’m trying to play the handful I own from the Switch 1 days. One of those games is Octopath Traveller.

This is an old game but in case you’ve never heard of it, it’s a turn-based JRPG. The hook is that there are 8 playable characters in the game. Each character has their own “main story”. You start by picking one of the 8 and doing their first quest and then the world opens up. Chapter 2 of their quest requires a much higher level character so what most people do (and what I did) is travel around the world and ‘meet’ the other seven characters, after which you can add them to your party. Of the eight, four can be in your party at any one time, and your initial “main” character you picked is locked in. So you have 3 slots to fill.

So I did that, and then set out to do the 2nd chapter of my main character’s story. It culminated in a tough boss fight that took me a few tries to make it past, but I completed it. Chapter 3 once again requires a much higher level character than I have. So I switched to work on Chapter 2 of one of the other characters. This meant that this second character was also locked into the party. So now I have two slots open to swap characters in and out of.

Generic combat screenshot from Octopath Traveller
NOT the boss I’m having trouble with!

The boss at the end of Chapter 2 of this character is wiping the floor with me even though my levels are high enough that I should be able to take it on. I’m sure it’s a matter of getting the right characters on the team to combat this particular boss and it’s minions. What to do, what to do…

I know what old me would have done: gone to the Internet for a walk-through. As this is an old game I am confident that out there on the web is a guide telling me exactly which characters I should use, and which weapons and gear they should have equipped, to make this boss fight easy-peasy.

Instead of doing that, new me reached for a notebook. I made a list of the weapons and skills that my characters use, and a list of the weaknesses of the boss and his minions. Then I had a think about what the best combo should be. I came up with a plan but now I have to level up the characters I’ve swapped into my party before I have another go. This is going to take some time and if my plan fails I’ll have to loop through this process again.

It’s REALLY tempting to look up the solution but I’m holding strong for now. The analogy I’ve been using to convince myself is that this way of playing is like building a nice chair out of a pile of lumber, whereas looking up the best party online is like building a flatpack chair kit from Ikea. Both are fun, both get you a place to park your backside, but these days I personally am finding the former is more satisfying.

Character Sheet from Octopath Traveller

What I would be willing to research online, if I could do it without spoilers, is how some of the game systems work. For example I have a character who has a spell that does Wind Damage which is something I need in this battle. But the damage she does is tiny compared to how expensive the spell is in mana cost. I know that certain spells scale based on certain stats, but I’m not sure what influences what. I COULD, I guess, puzzle that out through lengthy trial and error but, as much as I like Octopath Traveller, I don’t really want to spend 2 years finishing it. So there’s a balancing act there.

Going back to my analogy, learning what attribute impacts which spells is like learning how to use the tools you’re going to use to build the chair.

I probably need to let go of absolutes, too. Right now I want to solve the puzzle of how to beat this boss. On the other hand I also want to experience the story and eventually finish the game. If this boss fight holds me back for days and days I know my patience will erode and I guess at that point I should let go and find a guide. For right now, though, figuring out how to beat this boss feels rewarding. It feels like learning. Sure, very specific learning that I’ll never use again (unless maybe in Octopath Traveller 2) but at my age learning ANYTHING is good for keeping the old brain sharp. And that alone seems worth the effort.

Neverness to Everness Just Blew My Mind

Posted on by Nimgimli

This is going to be really short and is basically for Bhagpuss and Mailvaltar.

I watched the Neverness to Everness v1.2 preview show [that’s a YouTube link; Hotta labs doesn’t let us embed their videos, I guess… I get an error when I try] today and they announced the next two upcoming characters. One of them is a dragon-person named Shinku, the other is Iroi who we met on the Island in 1.1.

So that was cool and all and I’d already decided I’ll probably pull for Shinku when the time comes.

After watching the show I of course logged in to play. I was farming the Headless Rider to Ascend Zero when all of a sudden, towards the end of the battle, I get a cut scene and Shinku shows up to save the day and finishes the fight (not that I was going to lose, darn it).

I don’t know if this is just a crazy coincidence or not. I’d never seen her in game before and I’d never had another character finish that fight before. I am assuming it was a way to introduce the character and get us hyped for her. To me, it was brilliant! I can’t wait to play her.

Of course I was so stunned I forgot to take screenshots.

There was some other really interesting news in the preview. They kept talking about a Tabletop Game and I assumed it was literally a physical tabletop game that you would buy from some physical vendor to play offline with your family or something. But no. It’s a tabletop game that your character and their friends get together to play in-game. It’s a fantasy game within the NTE game, with it’s own progression paths and gear gathering and so on. I can’t wait to try it!

There’s also a system where you can get a fish tank for your apartment to display the fish you catch. You have to make sure the water is right for the fish (temperature, PH level, and whether it is a freshwater or saltwater fish) as well as choose the right fish to be sure they get along. Apparently you can automate this stuff if you want something simpler. I guess in the same way you can shop for your Cafe recipe ingredients yourself, or automate that.

Anyway version 1.2 is looking pretty good, though a little light on story content. We’re going to have to wait until 1.3 for the next and final chapter of the fight with The Scarlet Letter, I guess.

Anyway I’d love to know if everyone gets a taste of Shinku in their next boss battle!