Author: Nimgimli

In Praise of Vast Open World Games

Posted on by Nimgimli

This post is a few years too late, really. There was a time not so long ago when gamers as a hive-mind (in other words, some subset of gamers who managed to make enough noise to be noticed) were really down on open world games, and specifically Ubisoft open world games.

I wasn’t one of those gamers; I love a giant open world to roam around in.

Back in the dim days of the 1990s I used to play MMOs with a group of friends. We’d have terrific adventures exploring new worlds. OK mostly one new world: Britannia. Ultima Online was the big news back then. (My first actual “MMO” was MegaWars III on Compuserve, but Ultima Online felt like a breakthrough.)

Over time, friends drifted away and I forgot to make new ones. I kept playing MMOs but mostly by myself. I was still drawn to exploring and seeing what I’d find over the next mountain. Eventually though, I started getting frustrated at not being able to see all the content in instances and other groups-required places. Yadda yadda yadda/whine whine whine.

Then I just pretty much stopped playing PC games and moved over to consoles and that more or less put an end to my MMO days. (I mean, I still dabble here and there but never anything serious.) Why I switched to consoles is maybe good post fodder for later in the month.

Anyway enter big-ass open world games. Once again I had a world to explore, only now I could see it all if I wanted to. I was pretty happy about that. Granted eventually I’d see everything and unlike MMOs, open world games don’t get long term support. A year or two of DLC/expansions is about the best you can hope for. [This would be a good time for a PC gamer to point at all the mods available for Skyrim that continue to expand that game years and years after release.]

Hey, we play the hand we’re dealt. Anyway, I just wanted to share my love of one of my favorite types of games, and maybe convince someone to give one a try.

To that end, here’re a few tips to help you appreciate open world games as much as I do.

1) Pick one that has a protagonist that you enjoy. I’m speaking specifically of their personality and how they react to others. One of my favorite protagonists in recent years has been Kassandra in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. I spent over 200 hours in her company and was bummed when we finally hit the point where we’d done pretty much everything. If the character you’re playing as doesn’t bring you joy, you probably won’t last very long in an open world game.

2) If you start to get bored, let go of your inner completionist. Don’t fixate on clearing every point of interest on the map. Do enough stuff to keep you comfortably leveled and focus on the story. Alternately, do the content (most of these games have a variety of ‘quest types’) that you enjoy and skip the stuff that doesn’t interest you. Virtually every open world game gives you the opportunity to continue playing past the ending credits and if you get to the end and want more, that’s the time to go map clearing. (The image at the top of this posts shows the POIs in just a small area of AC Valhalla and it was taken 140 hours into the game & well past when the credits rolled.)

3) Take breaks. These are generally long games, some of them with 100+ hours of content. I find taking breaks to play other, shorter games helps to keep the open world title feeling fresh and full of wonder.

4) Tweak the difficulty as you play. If the game is too easy you’ll get bored, and if it is too hard you’ll probably get fatigued. A lot of these games seem to get easier the farther in you get (you unlock new skills, better weapons and get too strong for the content). If that happens bump up the difficulty. Conversely of course, if you’re finding it exhausting to constantly struggle with encounters, lower the difficulty down.

5) Immerse yourself. This one is hard to explain but I find that these games are most fun if I try to forget they’re a game. I do that mental role-play thing where I just try to become the character. When I’m REALLY into a game I may stop availing myself of quality-of-life features like fast travel. Instead I enjoy traversing the world and taking in the sites.

I realize none of these tips are revelatory but who knows, they may help someone. The biggest complaint I hear is that there are just too many points of interest on the map and things get overwhelming and tedious. I used to try to complete them all too. Letting go of that was hard for me, but doing so made the games so much more enjoyable.

My Latest Blogroll Solution

Posted on by Nimgimli

Problem: My Blaugust blogroll was a boring list of static links that I doubted anyone would ever notice, let alone use. I wanted a blogroll that showed activity and a preview of recent posts. Something to catch the readers interest and entice them to go visit other blogs.

Years ago I did this via some long forgotten plugin but it was glitchy and several times I got a nastygram from my ISP about how many resources my blog was taking up because of it. So I retreated to a static list of links.

But with Blaugust getting me pumped about blogging I wanted to give it another go. I read about how others did it. For Bhagpuss it just comes with being hosted on Blogger, I believe. Wilhelm cobbled together a system using a few services and wrote a great post about it. Naithin uses a currently maintained plugin (I found several WordPress plugins that offer this service but most hadn’t been updated in years.)

Inspired by these other bloggers, I got to work.

Ideally I didn’t want to spend a ton of money on this since, prior to Blaugust, I hadn’t even written a blog post in like 8 months. I didn’t want to pay for a service if I was going to basically abandon the blog come September.

Trial #1 used Zapier to monitor a Feedly category and create an RSS feed based on posts as they hit Feedly. This worked OK, but it turns out the free version of Zapier is very limited in the amount of resources it offers. I would’ve been out of “tasks” by the end of the week, and the cheapest Zapier tier is $15/month which is more than I spend hosting the whole blog!

Then I looked at some plugins (Feedzy and WP RSS Aggregator, which is what Naithin uses) and they both are pretty nice but I was wary of how much of a load they’d put on “my” shared server. Ideally I wanted to offload the fetching and sorting to somewhere else.

OK at this point I’m even boring myself so let’s cut to the current solution.

Feed Informer is an RSS aggregator that for some reason is free to use and really flexible. You add the feeds of the blogs you want to include (sadly there is no mass import, you have to add them one by one and the service validates them as it goes) and then you choose a “widget” to display the feed. I used a javascript embed, which I just added to a Custom HTML widget in WordPress. The display of the feed is determined by a template. Feed Informer offers a bunch of these and lets you preview your feed on the fly. I got something close to what I wanted, and then used the ability to edit the template to make some changes to get it to where I was happy with it. The available tags are well documented, and you can tweak CSS and such too. It was super simple to set up.

Since it’s a javacscript embed pulling from Feed Informer it should put no load on the local server.

Of course that was 10 minutes ago so we’ll see how reliable it is over time. The only gripe I had is that it didn’t like certain feeds, giving me a warning about them being formatted incorrectly. I could choose “add it anyway” and I did, and I can see posts from some of those blogs in the feed now so they seem to be working.

I am also not 100% sure how long it caches the feed for, so I’ll be watching that over time.

The worst flaw for me personally is it won’t read Naithin’s Time to Loot feed. I can open his feed in a browser, but Feed Informer says “nothing was returned from the server” with no real opportunity for me to debug. This is a huge bummer because I really enjoy Time To Loot and I bet you would too. I’ll try to add him again tomorrow in the hopes it is a temporary glitch.

By the way if you see your blog over in the side bar and you want it removed, let me know. And if you’re part of Blaugust and don’t see your posts there (or, y’know, it says Blaugust & Friends so even if you aren’t part of Blaugust but we know/read each other), let me know that too and I’ll add you.

Darksiders Genesis Isn’t Great on Console

Posted on by Nimgimli

Doing actual reviews of games isn’t really my thing anymore, but sometimes you just gotta share what you’ve learned.

I’d been meaning to play Darksiders Genesis for a while but never got around to it. It was on GamePass on the Xbox so I had access to it but you know the drill. So many games, so little time. I got the kick in the butt I needed when I learned it was leaving GamePass on August 12th so I figured I’d better check it out while it was available.

Darksiders Genesis is an ARPG played from an isometric point of view. Y’know, like Diablo or Path of Exiles. I generally enjoy this kind of game and I might have enjoyed this one if not for some poor (in my opinion) technical design decisions. Keep in mind I only played for a few hours so again, I’m not going to touch on the story or character progression or anything like that.

My first issue is that the characters are really small on-screen. If you’re playing on PC or you have a console hooked up to a monitor that you sit right in front of this might not be a big issue, but from 10 feet away I kept losing track of my character in crowds of enemies, or even in the certain terrain (lava/fire areas in particular).

The second issue was that your viewpoint is fixed. There’s no way to rotate the map/level like you can in some ARPGs and often my character was behind some obstruction. You do get a character outline showing through the obstruction but it still wasn’t ideal, particularly if you were in a fight. I know this ‘fixed view’ is found in a lot of ARPGs but the level design here, with lots of verticality, made it a real issue for me in DG.

Last, there’s a lot of jumping/gliding over bottomless pits. I lost far more health to plummeting to my death (if you fall into the abyss you respawn with some of your health gone) than I did to fighting. Again it’s about the isometric view and not being able to spin the level. I just kept missing; there weren’t enough depth cues or something. I’d think I was jumping onto a climbable column but instead my character would pass ‘in front of’ the column from the player’s point of view.

Three strikes was enough & after a few sessions of feeling like I was fighting the controls I uninstalled. I don’t mind a game being difficult, but I do mind game systems being difficult, if that makes any sense. I really think if the developers had given us some kind of camera zoom and the ability to rotate the map (I realize that isn’t a trivial ask) it would’ve made the game much more enjoyable for me.

On to the next game!

Encouraging Variety in Far Cry New Dawn

Posted on by Nimgimli

With Dragon Quest Builders 2 finally put to bed I was looking for a new game to fill its slot. Far Cry 6 is coming this Autumn and I realized at some point I’d picked up Far Cry New Dawn for cheap so figured it’d make a good candidate.

New Dawn is the sequel-of-sorts to Far Cry 5, which I played so long ago that at this point I’ve forgotten many of the details beyond Greg Byrk’s portrayal of violent cult leader Joseph Seed. Well that and lots of psychedelics (in the game, not in me…at least not this time).

Anyway New Dawn has an interesting game system I wanted to talk about today. I’m not claiming New Dawn invented the idea but it was new to me. It has to do with the Perk System.

New Dawn is basically an open world first person shooter, but there is some character progression via Perks. Perks are generally passive skills like the ability to move faster when in stealth, or the ability to carry more weapons or ammo. Since they are passive they seem at least technically optional, which may become important later in our discussion.

You unlock Perks via spending [surprise!] Perk Points. So far, this is all bog standard stuff. But what is a little different here is that you earn Perk Points via completing Challenges rather than (for example) gaining experience or spending currency.

OK so what are Challenges? Challenges feel a little like Achievements. You’ll complete a lot of Challenges organically. For instance I completed a challenge to defeat 3 bears because the bears in this game are mutated psychopaths that aggro on you for no apparent reason. “Jeez Mr Bear I was just walking down the road minding my own business, and now thanks to your anger-management issues you are dead and half my ammo is gone.”

I promise, I’m getting to the point.

Now let’s talk quickly about weapons. You can craft weapons in New Dawn, and weapons come in various quality tiers. At the start of the game you can only craft Tier 1 weapons, then you spend scavenged resources to upgrade your workbench and now you can craft Tier 2 weapons, and so on. (Crafting weapons also costs scavenged resources, and I should point out that you can also loot weapons from enemies.)

Back to Challenges. There are quite a few Challenges having to do with defeating X enemies with weapon Y. “Kill 5 Highwaymen with a Level 1 Melee Weapon” (Highwaymen being one of the main baddie factions in the game.) There seems to be one of these Challenges for each tier of each weapon type.

This means if you’re a completionist that wants to check off every Challenge (and earn all the Perk points) you need to craft (or find) one of each weapon type, at each quality tier, and use it to kill some enemies.

I chose my words carefully when I said this was an “interesting” system because I’m not sure that I actually like it. Maybe I do. Maybe you will and maybe you won’t. I tend to gravitate toward certain weapon types in games like this. I rarely choose to use a shotgun, for example. If a game offers a bow I will absolutely use it. But New Dawn is pushing me out of my comfort zone and I think that’s a good thing. It’s worth noting that I haven’t noticed any Challenges that require a large number of kills. They seem more aimed at getting you to at least try different weapons for a brief amount of time, not about forcing you to use a gun type you don’t like for hours and hours.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve tried to be more open-minded about games. When a new game throws something new at me and my gut immediately says “Oh hell no!’ I try to stop, take a breath, and give this new thing a chance. That’s definitely the case here, and after that initial resistance (“Shotguns stink! Rocket launchers are crass!”) I think I do like this system.

I also think it is important that (I’m fairly sure) you could beat the game without Perks, or certainly without ALL the Perks, and you’ll earn a certain number of Perk Points organically as you play. So if this “use all the weapons” system truly bothers you I think you could just ignore it. I wouldn’t let it prevent you from trying the game if Far Cry is your kind of thing.

Viking Synergy

Posted on by Nimgimli

Late last year I was sitting around at the end of the day, looking for something to watch on Netflix. I picked The Last Kingdom. Turns out it was about the Danes invading what we now call England. Or to put it in pop culture terms, it was about Vikings!

Through a happy coincidence I’d just started playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, a game where you play a Viking invading what we now call England!

I only watched a couple of episodes of The Last Kingdom before I noticed it was based on a book series by Bernard Cornwell, an author I knew from his Sharpe series. I really enjoyed the Sharpe books (they’re historical fiction that take place during the Napoleonic Wars) so based on the generally safe assumption that the books would be better than the TV series, I stopped watching The Last Kingdom and started reading Cornwell’s Saxon Stories series. (I just noticed he now refers to this series as “The Last Kingdom” series…the man knows marketing!)

I’m not a very fast reader. I generally read when I go to bed and I generally stay up much too late, so I often only get through a dozen pages before my eyes are drooping. Because of this, 6 or 7 months later I’m only on book #6 and there are 13 books (to date, anyway) in Saxon Tales.

I’m also not a very fast gamer and I’m not really sure why this is other than I tend to be methodical and deliberate when I game. So I’m still playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, too.

Over the months I’ve taken breaks from both the game and the books, but invariably when I pick one back up, I soon pick up the other. It’s been really fun to read about some location and then go there in the game, or vice versa. Both the book and the game use the names of locations from the time period. (They are not always exactly the same. For example York is called Eoferwic in the books and Eurvic in the game; I’m not enough of a historian to tell you why. Danish vs Saxon name, maybe?)

The point is, the early books and the game cover the same period. Alfred is King of Wessex but wants to unite all English speaking lands into one country. The Danes and Norse are in the north, Mercia is kind of stuck between the two. You encounter the same individuals, at least in some cases. For me it’s been really enjoyable to learn (in a casual sense) about this period of history from two angles and two different forms of media at the same time. (I came into both game and books more or less uneducated when it comes to this era.)

If you played and enjoyed Valhalla I think you’d really like the Saxon Stories sage (or the Netflix series). And if you’ve read the books, you’d probably get a kick out of the game. And if you’ve not been exposed to either, it might be fun to start both at the same time.

Too Much of an OK Thing?

Posted on by Nimgimli

The other day Naithin over at Time To Loot wrote about finishing, or not finishing, games. It’s something I’ve struggled with over the years and I mean that in two ways. Struggle #1 is “Do I care if I finish games?” and Struggle #2 is “If I do care, how do I get better at it?”

It’s actually a rather big topic (for me at least) but today I just wanted to share one anecdote. I mentioned in a comment at Time To Loot:

Sometimes I just get it stuck in my craw that I WILL finish some particular game. Right now that game is Dragon Quest Builders 2, which I feel like I’ve been playing for approximately 36 years.

Well as luck (or persistence) would have it, I DID finish Dragon Quest Builders 2 [DQB2] over the weekend. (Finished in that I got the “The End” screen…I didn’t go for 100% achievements or anything.) The feeling I had when I finished was pretty much pure relief. There was a whiff of ‘satisfaction’ mixed in but mostly it was “Thank gawd that is over with.” And if I were planning to review DQB2 I’d spend a lot of words on the terrible pacing in the game and how frustrating that was. My overall review would be negative.

However, if I’d just stopped playing half-way through and had someone at that point asked me if I liked the game, I would’ve said yes. For a good half the game I really was enjoying myself, but then small flaws started to feel like bigger flaws, gameplay started to feel really repetitive, and I lost interest in what little story there was. I don’t have a good way to tell how long I spent with the game. How Long To Beat says its a 75 hour game for “Main & Extras” and I am almost always slower than that site reports, so I’m going to guess I spent around 90-100 hours playing.

So why did I force myself to finish? I’m really not sure. Like I said on Naithin’s blog, sometimes these things just get stuck in my craw. I do have a bad habit of not completing projects so maybe I just need to prove something to myself now and then. I’d have to spend some solid time in introspection to tease that one apart.

At the end of the day, though, I kind of wish I hadn’t forced myself to keep going because now I have what are essentially bad feelings about the game, rather than good ones. I mean, even better would be if the developers hadn’t gone for quantity over quality, but I have no control over that.

I think in future if I decide I really need a “win” on finishing projects, I’ll make sure it is an actual project and not completing a game. Life is short. There are a lot of games I would like to play. Spending ~50 hours forcing my way through one that has stopped being enjoyable just feels dumb. (Of course I didn’t know it was going to be 50 more hours…I kept thinking “This has to end soon” but oh, how wrong I was!)

The Blaugust 2021 Plan

Posted on by Nimgimli

Welcome to August and to Blaugust, the NaNoWriMo of blogging. If you want to know all about the program, let me refer you to Belghast who started the whole idea a few years back. Today I just want to talk about my plans and why I’m participating for the first time.

Let’s start with what I am not committing to: I’m not committing to a daily post. I know myself well enough to know that while I’m sure I COULD do this, I would come out of the experience and probably delete my blog or something. I would grow to really resent blogging as it would have become one more chore I had to do every day. I don’t think it is a coincidence that that last time I wrote any fiction was the last day of the last NaNoWriMo I did many many years ago (2006, I think).

I have done the daily blog thing in the past. Or at least the Mon-Fri Daily Blog thing. It kind of sucked but I was getting paid for it so, as an old friend of mine was fond of saying, “That’s why they call it work.” I know I can do it, but I know doing it grows resentment.

My plan is to aim for 2-3 posts per week, and if I do more that’s great. 2-3 posts still represents a huge increase in the amount of posts I’ve been writing the past few years, when months and months have gone by without me writing anything. I also feel like 2-3 posts is few enough that I can write something meaningful, at least to me. I don’t want a bunch of dull posts that were just written to say I’d written a post. Going back to NaNoWriMo, one year I had finished the story I wanted to tell and was short of 50K words so I spent the last few days of NaNo injecting sex scenes into the story. It didn’t make the story any better but sex scenes are easy and fun to write. 🙂

Now as to why I’m doing it at all. The timing is perfect for me this year. After a brutal first half of the year, work-wise, things have eased up this summer. I’m only working 40 hours & feel like I have some available bandwidth to devote to blogging. I also have been yearning to create something but I am struggling to decide what it is I want to do. I figure writing a few times a week will at least prime the pump some. And lastly, I was feeling sad that Dragonchasers was effectively dead. This is an old blog; my first post is from May 2002. I wanted to see if there’s any life left in blogging for me. If I completely fail at Blaugust it might be time to humanely euthanize Dragonchasers. I hope that isn’t the case.

Oh and lastly because at this point I’m even boring myself, I want to try and branch out a little. Originally Dragonchasers was about gaming and movies and books and food and all kinds of random stuff. At some point I got the idea that I needed it to be focused so I dropped everything but gaming related stuff. I think I had a fantasy about it becoming a side-hustle or something (though back then we didn’t say “side-hustle”). I am officially rejecting that idea as of right now. Dragonchasers is going back to being my blog about stuff that interests me. If it finds an audience, that’s cool, but if it just becomes essentially my online journal, that’s cool too. Honestly the most popular posts in the history of Dragonchasers were a couple about Green Lemonade I wrote when I was trying to change my eating habits!

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla patch 1.3 is a game-changer

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Earlier this week Ubi rolled out patch 1.3 for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

The bad news: with it came a really annoying bug where your character would go into an infinite sleep cycle if you happened to be in Dublin. They seem to have addressed this so I won’t dwell on it. Life is too short to carry around angst about video game bugs.

The good news is, they added a Scaling Option to the difficulty settings. Prior to the patch, if you went to an area with lower level enemies, those enemies would scale but only to a power level of 50 below your current power level. This made a lot of content feel really trivial.

The new patch lets you change this (if you want to). There’s an option to scale enemies to your current power level, to your level+30, or to your level+60. I dipped my toe in by changing the setting so enemies were the same level as I am.

Immediately the game became so much more interesting. In fact I am essentially having to re-learn how to play. Prior to the patch my Eivor would stroll into an enemy camp dual-wielding 2 giant axes and just lay waste to every enemy via me button mashing. It was a fun Viking power fantasy for a while, then it started getting dull.

Now I have to remember how to block, dodge and parry again. I have to use skills. I have to think about the battle, sometimes skulking around and assassinating some enemies to thin them out. I had to upgrade my gear! It’s great fun and has really re-invigorated my interest in the game.

Just wanted to throw this out there in case anyone else had grown bored with Valhalla. The Wrath of The Druids expansion has been out for a while, and The Seige of Paris expansion is coming soon. If you have the Season Pass (or are willing to throw a few more bucks at the game) there’s still a lot of enjoyment to be had. There’s some free content as well (the River Raid system) and they’re constantly adding new skills to play around with.

ESO: Companions & Solo Dungeons

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I play The Elder Scrolls Online on Xbox, primarily, and I play it like a solo game. Sure I’ll jump in with strangers to help take down a world boss or something, but I never communicate with other players beyond a /cheer at the end of those fights.

There are plenty of good ESO players that can solo dungeons. I am not one of them. My build isn’t ideal, my gear is just whatever I’ve had drop, and I only recently hit 160 Champion Points (before then it seemed silly to focus much on gear since I was replacing it so often).

The recent Blackwood expansion added Companions — NPCs that will fight beside you. I just finally got around to unlocking them the other day. My Companion is using mostly default equipment and doesn’t have all her skills or skill slots unlocked. In other words she is a noob Companion for now.

Thing about ESO is that the ‘overland’ content is really easy, even for my half-assed character. Add the Companion and we just slice through overland stuff like butter. (I’m not counting World Bosses.) While this is kind of fun in its own way, it left me wondering why I even needed the Companion. Delves are not much harder than overland content so I didn’t really need a Companion for those, either.

I decided to try a World Boss with my Companion at my side and she literally yelled out “I think we’re going to need some help” before we were both smushed. We’re both essentially DPS builds right now, and even with two of us we don’t have enough healing output to handle the damage we were taking.

Then I decided to try to solo a dungeon. I failed, but we did make it about half-way through an early-zone dungeon, Spindleclutch. (I know with “One Tamriel” everything is supposed to be the same level of challenge but in practice the zones that used to be low level are still easier.) I made it further solo than I ever have before, by a lot.

Now in ye olde days I have done Spindleclutch in a group, back when I knew other people playing. We blazed through it so fast that I mostly was frantically looting and throwing out some DPS and it was all a blur of spiders.

Going (part-way) through Spindleclutch alone was a completely difference experience. I was reading the notes scattered around. I was listening to what the NPCs were talking about. I was poking into corners looking to see what I could find. It was really enjoyable and pretty much a completely different experience from doing it in a group.

Now I’m really excited to kit out my character and my Companion, and to work on my character’s build. I really want to be able to do more of the dungeons solo. (I know that some literally can’t be completed solo because they require people to stand on pressure plates and so forth.) Being powerful enough to finish them while playing at my pace and drinking in all the sights and lore hidden within them is going to be a blast!

Suddenly I’m really jazzed to play Elder Scrolls Online again…just in time for the New World Beta to start. LOL

Preparing for Blaugust 2021

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This year I’ve decided to push myself out of my comfort zone and I’ve signed up for Blaugust, which you can read all about on Tales Of the Aggronaut. I’m usually not one to join things because, y’know, militant introvert, but I’ve been meaning to get back into blogging for months and clearly I need some kind of kick in the butt to get myself in gear. Besides my sense is that they need more console bloggers. (I’m 100% not sure if that is even true.)

I even joined their Discord. WHO AM I?

That’s really it. Basically I just wanted to see if I still remembered how to type, and to spread the word that Blaugust was happening again this year.

I desperately need some creativity in my life and hopefully blogging again will give me a taste of that.