Category: Gaming

The Worst Game I’ve Played in Recent History

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m always trying to earn Microsoft Rewards points because they are how I pay for Xbox Game Pass. One of the ways to do that is to earn an Achievement from an Xbox Game Pass title every day. A lot of the time I do this by using a guide for some game I’m not otherwise going to play (the YouTube channel Rewards Hunter is great for this) or I boot up a game that is leaving Game Pass soon just to get a couple of easy cheevos before said game leaves the service.

The other day I was looking for another game to check out. The “Leaving Soon” games have left for this month and the next round hasn’t been announced, and I wasn’t in the mood to follow a guide, so I looked at what I had installed, sorted the list by size (since my drives are almost full) and found Atomic Heart, a game that I had installed at some point. Figured I’d grab some cheevos then uninstall it.

Good lord is this ever a terrible game. The premise is that Russia won WW II and advanced technologically way faster than it did in real life. So now they have floating cities and a robotic work force and your goal is… well I have no idea what your goal really is.

You play P-3, who despite the name is human. He has got to be one of the most obnoxious and unlikeable characters I can ever remember playing as. He just constantly talks shit to everyone he comes in proximity to. I immediately hated this character and kind of hoped he’d get killed and then you would play as the REAL main character. No such luck, I guess.

The game starts at a glacial pace. I’m assuming someone was inspired by Half Life 2. First you are riding a boat, a passive passenger. Then you get out and run along the canal you were traveling down. Just running from point A t B. You follow way points. Then you get on an elevator and ride that down into some subterranean area, and that takes like, Mass Effect amounts of time. When you get down there, some hyper sexualized robot gives you a key. Just hands it to you. Then you have to ride THE SAME ELEVATOR BACK UP and it takes just as long. The key starts a car which you might THINK you’re going to drive but nope. Instead a robot lifts it into the air and you sit there again while you slowly traverse the world while you get a tour-guide narration of things to look at. The image at the top of this post is from that ride. I’m being unkind because of course it isn’t all like that but it was like that for a while as we flew through clouds. Anyway all of this takes, not exaggerating as I noted the time, about 20 minutes. Then finally you can start to play.

Game play is OK I guess. You start with an axe and a shotgun, but few shells for the latter. You meet an old lady named Grannie Dina (?) who inexplicably speaks with a British accent (again, you are in Russia). She blasts something out of the sky with a rocket launcher while you watch, then it’s ANOTHER elevator ride. Finally you smash up robots for a few minutes and think “OK maybe the game is finally getting going” then you are introduced to the upgrade system which takes the form on an AI in a vending machine and this is when things just go horribly, awfully wrong.

The AI, which goes by Nora and has a female voice, is just awful. Every line she speaks has some kind of sexual innuendo about as subtle as a sledgehammer blow. I took some screenshots so I could get some of these quotes completely accurate (I was upgrading a weapon while she was saying all of this):

“How titillating! Rebellious, dominant men really turn me on!”

“But I can do so much more! A quick romp with your axe is just a taste of things to come, you handsome beast!”

“Use this powerful weapon to split the skulls of your enemies and bring me gifts so we can get down and dirty. I’ll show you what real smut feels like!”

At some point she says something about how I should plunge my axe deep inside her, but I didn’t capture that. Meanwhile my character is talking about her being a ‘crazy bitch’ or something along those lines.

Screenshot of the Nora AI saying dirty things

While I was playing this @partpurple came in and just shook her head and said “Clearly this game was made for 12 year old boys.” I hoped the earth would open up and swallow me. Later she declared this to be the worst dialog she has ever heard, anywhere.

Finally I got free of Nora and her upgrades and moved on. Then I found a recording where some posh sounding man was complaining about the behavior of the robots (which, remember, are the labor force in this world), saying something along the lines of ‘The white ones are OK but the black ones really have an attitude’ and that they need to know their place. Those aren’t direct quotes because they were audio only, but that was the level of racism being conveyed.

It was at that point I quit and uninstalled the game. Maybe this was all a setup to make you hate the people (and AI’s) of the world. If so it worked, but it worked enough that I have no desire to be a part of this experience. I actually could’ve dealt with the pervy stuff (though probably would not have played when @partpurple was around) but the racist stuff was just too much. I actually spent some time on Google to see if anyone else had this reaction. It seems not, but I was reminded that the developers had to apologize for including racist caricatures from an old Soviet cartoon.

As well, it felt kind of ick playing a game that glorfied Russia, given the on-going war in Ukraine. I’ll give the devs the benefit of the doubt that the game was conceived and started before the war broke out.

Bottom line though, if for some reason you were thinking of playing this mostly forgotten title, I would suggest not doing so.

Being a Newb And A Veteran At The Same Time Is Weird

Posted on by Nimgimli

Remember when I said I was done posting about Fallout 76? I officially retract that!!

So as mentioned, I’ve started playing Fallout 76 on Steam. Since Bethesda doesn’t offer any kind of cross-play or cross-progression, that meant starting over. These days you can start at level 20, which I did, but really the first 50 levels of Fallout is newbie-ville. I hit 30 last night. I don’t really have a build, I’m constantly low on ammo, I have no mutations, and I haven’t even really picked a weapon type to focus on yet. I use whatever I happen to have ammo for. Taking down a non-trivial enemy can take 3 or 4 reloads of a weapon.

But I haven’t stopped my Xbox Fallout 76 character. There I have a build that is very solid. I have quality gear, a ton of mutations (including marsupial that lets you jump really high) and more ammo than I know what to do with. Only the toughest enemies take more than 1 full clip of my railway rifle and many things get 1-shotted, though the railway fires so fast I usually waste a couple of rounds. On Xbox I’m level 320 or somewhere around there.

Currently there’s a two week campaign running where at the top of every hour there is a Mothman event at Pleasant Valley (where the legend of the Mothman first arose, apparently). The bulk of this event is guarding 3 pyres from enraged cultists. On the Xbox I generally pick a pyre and defend it easily. In fact other players just kind of get in my way. I find the event rather boring really, as there is zero challenge to it. (But. y’know, LOOT!) After the pyres are defended you have to get up to a rooftop to commune with the Mothman, which I do via just jumping a couple of times thanks to the marsupial super jump.

So after doing that, I log off the Xbox and log onto Steam and an hour later the event happens again and I fast travel to it and OMG it is SO hard! I basically have to be carried. The enraged cultists can kill me pretty quick, half the time I run out of ammo, and when I don’t it takes me so long to kill 1 cultist that 2 or 3 others in the same wave will have done serious damage to the pyre. I absolutely need help. Heck I even struggle in the preliminary part of the event where you’re killing deer and regular cultists. Then when the pyres have been defended and it is time to get up on the roof? I have to follow a bunch of ramps and stairs to get there and often, since I’m always encumbered, I don’t get there in time to commune with Wise Mothman! So sad. At least I still get the “Event Completed” but I don’t get the Mothman’s buff.

Going from one experience pretty nearly directly to the other just feels so entirely weird. I realize in a lot of ways you’d have the same experience just playing an alt, but playing Fallout 76 on the console feels different from playing on the PC, too. Plus on console I use a controller and on PC mouse and keyboard. So even things like the muscle memory I have from Xbox don’t really translate to the Steam version. It’s like a different game, only it’s the same. LOL

Honestly I find being the struggling newbie on Steam is more fun. I think part of the reason I’ve somewhat drifted away from the Xbox version of the game is I just get bored. I have a ton of quests to do but the combat in them is so easy that they all start to feel like fetch quests. Only when someone drops a nuke and an end-game boss comes out to play do things get really interesting. It was a hoot being really powerful for a while, but eventually you start to miss that challenge, y’know?

At QuakeCon there was a Fallout 76 panel and they did mention that they are aware that there is not enough difficult content in the game and they heavily implied that more will be added, so I’m looking forward to that. Until then I’ll keep being the newbie on Steam, getting underfoot and in the way of the old pros who could probably solo the event without too much difficulty!

A Curious Little Fallout 76 Movement Bug

Posted on by Nimgimli

While I never signed up or declared my intention to take part in Blaugust, on August 1st I got some FOMO and wrote a post. Then another on the 2nd, and another after that and here we are half-way through the month and I’ve kept it up. But my batteries are running down, mostly because half my team at work is on leave or vacation just as the summer lull is ending and projects are starting to heat up. One team member comes back next Tuesday so I THINK if I can get through to then, I might make the full month, but this week has been tough. (Plus GamesCom is next week which should provide plenty of blog fodder.)

All of which is a preamble to a short little post about a curious bug I ran into in the PC/Steam version of Fallout 76. Yes, now I’m playing Fallout 76 on Steam…did I mention that here? First I was going to play it on GeForce Now but then I got hooked (again!) and decided to install it locally.

So I was having a great time of it for a while, then suddenly I lost the ability to move. I was playing with a controller and at first thought it was a controller bug. I would turn and look around a bit and then suddenly I’d start moving again. I figured that was my cue to get used to playing with mouse and keyboard. But the same thing happened even after I’d set the controller aside. It hadn’t happened when I was playing on GeForce Now, though. And I noticed it seemed to happen more when I was in a building than when I was outside. I had installed a mod that was supposed to improve wide-screen support, so I disabled that (honestly I didn’t notice much different anyway…but FO76 could really improve its wide screen support). That didn’t fix the bug. But through continued messing with it I discovered that it mostly happened when I looked down to loot a body, and looking up at the sky would often fix it.

Screenshot of the fallout76prefs.ini file
If you’re playing the Xbox Windows version of Fallout 76, look in Project76Prefs.ini instead

To keep a short post short, it turns out it was a framerate issue. When I looked down at the ground, or when I was inside an enclosed area, the framerate went so high the that game just seemed to freak out and couldn’t keep up or something. THAT was when I remembered that I’d followed YouTuber AngryTurtle’s advice to change a setting in the Fallout76Prefs.ini file. The specific setting was iPresentInterval=1 which we were told to set to iPresentInterval=0 to make the game run much better. Which in fact it does…it apparently turns off the FPS cap and the game’s built in VSYNC. But it maybe does TOO good a job?

The solution is either to just turn that back to 1, or to use the Nvidia control panel to cap the framerate. I did the latter, setting max framerate to 144 fps which is what my monitor runs at. I had a bit of screen tearing when I looked down and ran, so I also turned on Nvidia Vsync. That fixed the issue for me.

It was just such a weird bug that rather than annoy me, I found it kind of amusing and fascinating (OK I mostly felt that way AFTER I solved it). If any devs wander by I’d love to hear a theory as to why too high a framerate would make a game engine just sit down and cry like this!

Screenshot of my nvidia control panel settings for fallout76.exe

An Ode to GeForce Now

Posted on by Nimgimli

A couple months before I broke down and bought a new gaming PC, I’d resubscribed to GeForce Now, Nvidia’s cloud gaming service. I’m sure if you’re reading this blog you know what cloud gaming is all about so I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole, but suffice to say I’m kind of a fan of it. I know “REAL gamers” poo-poo it because of lag or whatever, but despite how much time I spend playing games, I’m not super serious about them in terms of being competitive. In addition to that, my old man reflexes are slow enough that any lag introduced by streaming is insignificant compared to the lag between my eyes, brain and fingers! I’d love to sit some of these young gamers down in front of an OnLive session, if they want to experience True Lag! (That post is actually pretty positive because for 2010, OnLive worked pretty well, but nothing like the game streaming services we have today.)

For me, and this is SUPER subjective and depends on where you are physically and what ISP you use, GeForce Now works best of the various cloud gaming services I’ve tried (though Stadia, may it rest in peace, was even better), though it certainly isn’t the cheapest. If you have a 4K or widescreen monitor you’re going to want the “Ultimate” service which is $20/month or $100/6 months. I’d done the latter and after buying the new PC I thought “Well that was a wasted $100.”

But it turns out, no it wasn’t. My new PC only has 2 TB of storage (can’t believe we live in a time where I’m griping about “only” having 2 TB) and games are HUGE these days. I’ve found GeForce Now has transitioned from “the service that makes up for your weak-ass graphics card” to “the service that makes up for your miniscule storage space.” What I’ve been doing is installing the games I am playing regularly on my local machine, but games I just dip into once in a while, I play via GeForce Now. For example in in a post a few days ago I was musing about whether I’d make the switch from Fallout 76 Xbox to Fallout 76 PC. Eventually I decided to jump into the PC version, but rather than hassling with installing it, I played on GeForce Now. I’m not sure how big the Fallout 76 install is on PC, but on the Xbox it’s over 100 GB and that’s too much of my precious storage space to devote to a game I might play once every couple of weeks!

Of course expanding my storage space is a lot cheaper than upgrading a graphics card (an additional 2 TB drive is about $150 currently) so in the long term I might just do that, assuming my new motherboard makes that easy. Once my 6 month sub runs out I MIGHT do that, but I have to admit I really like the convenience of having 320 games “installed” on GeForce Now and ready to play on a whim. $16.67/month (the cost of Ultimate if you but in 6 month chunks) isn’t cheap, but it’s less than, say, my Netflix subscription. And as time goes on and my shiny new GPU turns into a ‘good but not great’ GPU while the GeForce Now GPUs get upgraded, it might make sense to play MORE games on GeForce Now.

Oh and I almost forgot that you can play your GeForce Now titles basically on anything with a browser, and in particular for me I have an Nivdia Shield streaming box so can easily play on the TV. Are my consoles obsolete!!?

I guess for now I’m taking a wait-and-see position. There are of course disadvantages to playing on the cloud. While lag is a non-issue for me, not having access to mods could be one. Even minor things you might tweak, like manual updates to an .ini file, are either not available or require jumping through hoops every time you play on GeForce Now. So it isn’t perfect. (Probably worth mentioning that Shadow PC is an option if you want a full cloud PC experience including mods, but that will cost you $35/month for a system with only a half TB of storage and a 3070TI card.)

Oh, and before closing I should note that they offer a free tier (but you often have to wait in a queue to get in so if you’re going to use it regularly you’ll probably want to pay), and they also offer “Day Passes” which are a great way to test the paid tiers without spending too much money. Last, at the time of posting they’re offering 50% off the paid tiers which makes them a great deal, though sadly there is no way to “stack” memberships so I can’t take advantage of the deal. 🙁

Tonight We’re Going to Peripheral Like It’s 1999

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m not a dad but that doesn’t mean I can’t make dad jokes.

Back in the days of yore, say 1999 just to riff off the song, Logitech was pretty much THE PC peripheral brand, at least in my circles. Microsoft took a shot at going after Logitech and had some success for a while, and they still do make mice and keyboards, but I have to admit I had to go check Amazon to see if that was even that case. Logitech was king.

Times change and particularly in the world of gaming, new brands came along. Razer, Corsair, Redragon and Steel Series come to mind. A couple years back (2019) I decided to be like the cool PC gamers and invested in a Steelseries RBG keyboard and mouse, the former being a mechanical keyboard that feels OK but is pretty noisy. I think I went with Steelseries because the gaming laptop I had at the time had a Steelseries keyboard built in. I can’t remember for sure.

Anyway after about, I dunno, a day of using these peripherals I pretty much forgot about them. The mouse was a mouse. The keyboard made letters appear.

Except every peripheral brand has to have its own software to go with it, and the Steelseries software has caused a certain amount of trouble for me. An update of it completely broke my laptop keyboard and after I got it rolled back I had to be careful to never let it update. On my new machine it has helpfully installed a bunch of virtual audio devices for some reason. I’m 99% sure this was operator error and I installed something I shouldn’t have, and they don’t seem to cause any issues but it’s annoying having them there (none of them seem to do anything).

Screenshot of my sound settings showing lots of extra virtual devices
So many devices! I just want to hear the lamentations of my enemy’s women!

But hey, I roll with stuff like this because I’m lazy.

Meanwhile, I’ve had a ton of issues getting a microphone to work with both my last PC and my current one. I’ve been working from home long enough, and being on Zoom and Teams meetings enough, that I now feel pretty comfortable chatting with people (my work machine has no issues with the headset attached to it). I kind of thought, who knows? Maybe I can talk to other gamers? Eventually I bought a cheap USB “gaming headset” and eureka, the mike worked. The sound was OK for gaming, but not for music, so I ended up having 2 different headsets hanging off the machine, one for music and one for gaming. Except, again, lazy, so I rarely switched to the gaming headset with the working mike.

A few nights back I decided to give this voice thing another go. Put on the gaming headset which clamped onto my head like I’d stuck it in an alligator’s mouth. I have a big fat head and a lot of stuff doesn’t fit well (one-size-fits-all caps? they don’t fit this noggin). I took the headset off and tried to gently bend it open a bit and SNAP! It broke in half. I guess that’s what you get for $20

Undeterred and embracing the idea that a gaming PC is just a black hole that sucks up money, I headed to Amazon and picked out a better headset, and I thought back to the olden days and decided to go with Logitech. Specifically the Logitech G Pro X SE. It arrived the next morning (how does Amazon manage that?) and it is fantastic. It is comfortable, the sound is really decent, and the mike works perfectly as far as I can tell (haven’t actually talked to anyone cuz no friends). But of course, new brand of peripheral means new software, in this case the Logitech G-Hub software. But this software seems pretty slick. It even has an equalizer that comes with presets, and other owners with more time and confidence than me can upload theirs as well. Took me just a few minutes to find something that sounded good to me. It I was a REAL real gamer I’d swap to one profile for music and another for gaming. Oh also it is a surround sound headset; I have no idea how the physics work to create surround sound in a headset but damned if it doesn’t work really well. I nearly jumped out of my skin the first time I heard an NPC say something from right “behind” me.

Anyway while all THIS was happening, I was also looking to use more custom buttons on my mouse for PC gaming. This Steelseries mouse has 4 extra buttons, 2 on either side, but the two on the outside, which I guess you’re supposed to hit with your ring finger, are really hard for me to use. And anyway I wanted MORE! MORE BUTTONS PLEASE! And by now I was on a spending roll, so back to Amazon I go and order a Logitech gaming mouse, the G502 X Wired mouse that has I think 13 buttons altogether? More than I need, anyway. This thing is SO light it feels fake. Like an empty shell. And it feels really good in my hand. Early days but I think I’m going to really like it. It has no RGB on it though so… fail? (Kidding, I really do not care about lights on my mouse.) I assume no RGB because it isn’t wireless. I believe the wireless model of the same mouse does have a light strip.

Screenshot of the Ghub software
The family is all together. How cozy!

And just so I could get rid of the Steelseries software, I bought a Logitech Keyboard, too. (The G915 TKL Wireless with “Tactile” mechanical keyboard.) They make a few versions of this keyboard, all mechanical but with different levels of clickiness. This one is pretty quiet which I really appreciate. ( @partpurple doesn’t believe it is mechanical because it doesn’t make a racket.) I bought the wireless version mostly because it was what I could get fast. I just wanted media keys and a backlight and a good typing experience — the keyboard does have RGB and you can program the colors through the Ghub software or through Windows 11’s Dynamic Lighting system. I’m pretty happy with a solid backlight color. I am so boring. The keyboard is going to take a little bit of getting used to but it really hits the sweet spot of feeling good without being loud. My ONE gripe with it is that the symbols on the number keys (#,$,%,^, etc) are not backlit. After 50 years of typing you’d think I would know where they are, but…I don’t. LOL

So now you get the dumb title of this post. I am back where I started, using all Logitech peripherals. They may not be what the cool kids use, but I’m really happy with all three of them so far. Granted it is early days, so if some weird issue crops up I’ll be sure to share.

Now I just need a new chair, and maybe a new desk, and then… just maybe, I can stop spending money on returning to PC gaming! Though you know, my widescreen monitor is only 1440P. 4K widescreen OLED monitor, maybe?!

Fallout 76 News From Quake Con

Posted on by Nimgimli

I thought I was done talking about Fallout 76 for a while but now we have some actual news courtesy of Quake Con, which is happening this weekend.

The next update, called Milepost Zero, is coming on September 3rd, which means the current season runs for 3 more weeks, ending on September 2nd. I can snag a lot more Perk Packs if I keep doing all the daily and weekly tasks for those three weeks!

In addition to the new season, there’s a new Legendary Crafting system that I’m a little wary of. It comes out on Sept 3rd as well. The general idea seems to be to give us more control over what we craft (right now it is pure RNG where we spend Legendary Modules and just HOPE we get the mods we want) and that’s a good thing, but the system is on the test server now and they seem to still be iterating and changing it in pretty big ways, and three weeks isn’t all that much time. I’m just a little worried the system is going to be wonky when it first launches, though I’m confident it’ll keep getting refined and improved after launch.

I haven’t played on the test server (since I play on Xbox) but it sounds like you’ll need to scrap Legendary Items that you get as drops for a “very small” (quote from one of the dev team on a Quake Con live stream) chance that you’ll learn the recipe to craft the mod for one of the Legendary Perks that were on that item. This leads me to believe that when the system is brand new, none of us are going to be crafting Legendary Gear for a while since first we’ll need to scrap a ton of stuff to learn the recipes. Fortunately I’m in a pretty good space for Legendary Weapons right now. The Legendary Mods you craft can be traded to other players so some lucky players who unlock recipes early are going to be rolling in caps from selling Mods.

There’s also a new game system coming for the update where you run a branch of the Blue Ridge Caravan Company. I haven’t seen a lot of details about that but it sounds like you’ll have to put together an Outpost, similar to your C.A.M.P., and then you can spawn caravans and will have to escort them to keep them safe. Other players can join in and help with the escort and these are intended to be farmable so I guess you’ll be able to fire them off as frequently as you want. I’m sure we’ll get more details on this system closer to launch.

Now that I’ve been doing a lot more PC gaming I’m kind of tempted to switch to the PC version of Fallout 76 for the new season. (I sure wish Bethesda would offer cross-progression for both FO76 and Elder Scrolls Online!) Tempted, but not sure it is wise. I have a lot of time invested in my Xbox account, and I bought a full year of Fallout 1st back in April so it is probably silly to walk away from the 7 months of remaining paid-for time. Maybe I just should dabble on PC this next season with an aim towards moving over completely sometime in Winter or next Spring, but not doing so until I have a PC character semi-established. Not sure I want to play without Fallout 1st, though… I guess I have time to sort this all out, though.

Anyway that’s it for today. A quick Fallout 76 post for a lazy Sunday!

Meanwhile, Back in Guild Wars 2

Posted on by Nimgimli

Before I started playing the new Diablo IV Season I had been playing Guild Wars 2 quite a bit. I am very much not ready to let go of that game so I have to figure out a way to balance things out a little. Both games have a bit of time pressure attached to them: the Diablo IV season will end, and Guild Wars 2 has a new expansion coming very soon (and come to think of it, D4 has an expansion in a couple months).

I’ve had a Guild Wars 2 account pretty much since it launched. According to the /age command my account is 4,366 days old. That’s not to say I’ve played a lot. I have a bunch of characters but only 3 of note.

I have a level 80 but that character did a lot of his leveling by logging in every day and collecting the daily experience rewards they used to dish out. This character has a play time of about 47 hours. He was my first character back when leveling was presumably the slowest it has ever been, but most days I’d log in, grab the daily rewards and log out. I don’t think he moved an inch for about 20 levels!

I have a level 56 character that I actually played all the way to level 56, and his play time is 67 hours; I honestly don’t remember much about playing him.

My current “main” is level 70 Warrior with a play time of 32 hours. I’ve been using a bunch of exp buffs on her which might explain why she seems to be leveling faster than the level 56, or maybe the game itself has been tweaked to speed up leveling. Not sure.

Then I have some even lower levels not worth talking about. Grand total play time is 225 hours which averages out to like 18:45/year. 🙂 Obviously in reality the game just laid dormant for years at a time. (I seem to be injecting a lot of math into my blog posts lately for some reason.)

Anyway, yes when I came back after several years away I of course started a new character to “re-learn to play” and I of course grew attached to her and so just kept on. I have a ton of level boosts in my inventory so I could’ve just boosted her to level 80 but I figured that would defeat the point of playing a new character to re-learn. Plus it feels cheat-ie. One of my weird quirks… using a %exp booster is fine. Using an level skip boost feels like cheating!

Right now she is still in the base game story. My intention as of now is to play through all the content in order. With 10 years of content that will take me quite a while, I reckon. I own the first couple of expansion packs but have been resisting buying others until I catch up. And after 32 hours I am still baffled by a lot of things. I have a ton of hero points that I’m holding onto because I have no idea what to do with them after I have all my skill slots full, and I’m not really struggling much with the content unless I wander into an event that needs a big group and there aren’t enough of us there.

I’ve been trying to learn to be patient about games. I find that just playing and slowly figuring things out is more rewarding than googling or watching YouTube videos and then just emulating what some other player is doing. Since I’m not in an active guild, if I am doing it wrong I’m only hurting myself, and if I’m having fun I’m really NOT hurting myself even if I die over and over!

I am looking forward to how things change at level 80. It’s strange how much I’ve been changing as a gamer in recent years. I’ve mentioned a few times that these days it is much less common for me to get super hyped for an upcoming game and to jump in on Day 1, and I’ve been getting a lot more satisfaction out of playing older games that have had some years of patching and polish. But another change is that the old me tended to lose interest in a game once a character hit level cap. I was so addicted to the dopamine hit of the DINGS! that once there were no more levels to gain I either rolled an alt or moved to a new game. Now I’m much more liable to keep on playing (~glances over at his level 313 Fallout 76 character~) and exploring the game’s systems and nuances.

So yeah, no giant landmarks to celebrate in Guild Wars 2 just now, but I did want to get a post about out because it deserves the attention!! 🙂

Quick Look: Dungeons of Hinterberg

Posted on by Nimgimli

In gaming terms, there’re few things more disappointing than really looking forward to a game and then when it finally arrives, you don’t like it. I don’t mean situations where a game arrives buggy or has launch day issues — that kind of thing can be fixed. No, I’m talking about when you just don’t like the game’s design.

I’m sad to say, that’s me and Dungeons of Hinterberg. Now I hasten to add, this is a ME thing. The game has Very Positive reviews on Steam and I’ve seen plenty of folks on social media talking about how much they enjoyed it. But for me it just isn’t clicking.

But let’s back up. The premise here is that magical dungeons suddenly start appearing in the Alps, complete with monsters. Rather than this be a cause for widespread panic, the little town of Hinterberg turns it into a tourist attraction. You go there, enjoy relaxing at the resort and spend your days dungeon delving. In game terms, it’s a combination of dungeon crawler and life sim. When you’re aren’t in a dungeon you’re hanging around making friends, which in turn leads to better stats and such. It’s not a new formula (Persona is saying “Hold my beer” right now) but it’s not a super common one either. The graphics are bright and upbeat, the town of Hinterberg oozes cozy vibes. It seems like a place I would LOVE to explore.

Main character looking out over a dungeon interior
The start of the 2nd dungeon. The tiny purple portal above and to the left of my character’s head is the exit

Except, puzzles.

What I didn’t anticipate is how puzzle-heavy the game would be. If you like the kind of puzzle where you have to move items to climb on so you can get to place where there’s a button that opens a door so you can blow up a weakened wall to get through a locked gate, this game is for you. I am honestly NOT the biggest puzzle fan in the world, and what exacerbates the issue in Hinterberg is that there’s a lot of walking back and forth across pretty big areas trying different things, and your character doesn’t really move very fast. In addition to not being the biggest puzzle fan, I’m almost famously impatient. Y’know those Telltale games that so many people loved…walking across rooms in those games about killed me. SO SLOW. I feel the same way in Hinterberg.

To be fair and transparent I only did the first two dungeons and maybe these are just teaching you about puzzles; I’m not sure. But for the 2nd dungeon you have to find your way through a maze just to get to it, and THEN solve the puzzles inside. So yeah, I think puzzles are the point. They’re the kind of puzzles that take me 20-30 minutes to figure out, but once I know what to do if I re-played the dungeon it would take me like 5 minutes. Maybe I’m just dumb! There’s actually not much fighting in the dungeons. When you get near the end, suddenly monsters teleport in for a brief battle.

Thing is, this is just how the game is designed and as mentioned, a lot of people really like it. But for me, I’d prefer mostly combat and a few puzzles rather than vice versa. So Dungeons of Hinterberg was a big disappointment.

And not to pile on here, but there were some other more objective issues. I felt like I was fighting the camera a lot. Particularly when I had to aim a projectile spell at something up high. As the ‘over the shoulder’ camera sinks down to let you see up, your character totally obscures the view. Likewise the FOV is such that monsters get a lot of cheap shots on you by hitting you from off screen. Of course that stuff could be tweaked in a patch and I hope it does get tweaked.

Your character having a dumpling and talking to a new friend
Hanging out with people equates to pressing A a bunch of times and reading the dialog

As to the ‘social’ aspects, they’re fine but are mostly just very narrative driven. You meet someone, click through some dialog options, get whatever bonus you’re going to get from talking to them, and that’s it. I’m not sure what I expected; maybe some kind of activity though honestly I’m not sure what.

This is a game I might come back to when I’m in a different frame of mind. Maybe when I’m on vacation or something and feel like I have lots of free time. Life is really hectic right now and my gaming time is precious so just kind of wandering slowly back and forth trying things to get a door open just frustrates me because I want to get on to the stuff I like (eg, smacking things with a sword). I’ve been tracking this game for a year or more and I’m not sure how I missed the fact that it was basically a puzzle game. Oh well.

On the bright side, it’s on Game Pass so at least it didn’t cost me anything!

Quest text saying "Find someone to spend the evening with"
Sadly this did not mean what I thought it meant. There’s no “We’ll always have Hinterberg” moments in the game 🙁

Diablo IV, Season 5, Day 2 Report

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yesterday I complained about how a quest reward gave me new gear that was so good it broke my character. I went from having to think about what I was doing and drink health potions to just mowing through enemies without a second thought. I was worried this was the way it was going to be, and maybe even what the typical Diablo IV players enjoys.

Then this happened:

"You Have Died" screen from Diablo IV
This is how I learned to once again pay attention to my health pool

So yeah, I was wrong. My character isn’t broken, I’m just impatient. I mean he DOES still plow through random overworld enemies without much thought, but the more I explored the more I found myself in really big battles. So now I get it. Your character is mighty when it comes to 1 on 1 fights, but a lot of the time in Diablo IV the fights are not fair and it is you and a couple of others against hordes of baddies. Lots of fodder to whittle you down and some big bads in there that can ruin your day. Of course you also NEED that fodder to generate energy and even do some good life stealing. Sometimes these fights feel harder WITHOUT all the trash mobs running around.

But look at all that stuff laying around and that’s after I picked up a ton. There’s a LOT of loot in this game and I’m still getting huge jumps. By the end of my session last night I had blue gear better than the gold and orange gear I’d collected the night before, though this example is blue to blue. But a jump from 157 armor to 477 armor is huge.

Screenshot from Diablo IV showing a big jump in gear quality

If you are sensing a change of tone, well that’s very perceptive of you. I played about two hours last night and really had quite a good time. I also went from level 13 or 14 to level 27. In one long drawn out fight I think I gained 5 or 6 levels. So if you’ve heard they accelerated leveling, you heard right. (I assume… I’ve never actually did this before.) It won’t be long before my Druid is higher level than my campaign character.

And there’s a ton to do. Look at all the icons on this map. Just don’t ask me what any of them mean. I just know they’re all stuff to do. Tonight I have to go figure out what quest I was supposed to do at Level 15 to unlock some kind of signature skill for the druid. One I only learned about after going to google to find out what all these Druidic Offerings I was picking up were for. So I will ding the game a little bit for having a somewhat steep meta learning curve. Run around fighting stuff is plenty straightforward but there seem to be a lot of systems that you have to kind of discover on your own. That or they taught me this stuff during the campaign and I immediately forgot it because it wasn’t needed.

Diablo IV seasonV map

So is this it? Have I decided Diablo IV is a Game For Me? Wellllll…. not quite. I am definitely having fun but it has only been 2 days. And since it’s a new season the servers are really populated and there’s people everywhere which makes things chaotically fun. What will it feel like a week from now? A month? Will it still be fun or will I have hit level 100 and be bored with the grind? Hard to say. And it’s a game like Borderlands in that there is SO much loot it starts to feel a bit like a chore sorting through it all, and that may wear me down over time. (In particular I wish I could just destroy stuff I’m carrying rather than having to drop it on the ground and then be careful not to click on it and pick it back up.)

I am now 100% sure that the campaign does not do the game justice AT ALL. I had WAY more fun in those 2 hours last night than I had in the weeks it took me to plod through the campaign. So that’s good. But on the flip side, it is still a very grim world and it may be that over time that just wears me down. Put it this way: As a Game Pass game that I didn’t pay for (OK I paid for Game Pass itself but I mostly spent Microsoft Rewards points on that) it is definitely a winner so far.

Though… Guild Wars 2 also misses me and I don’t want to lose track of that!

*Sorry the screenshots are all kind of dark. I play with HDR on and am using Game Bar to take shots and it doesn’t seem to adjust the color properly This used to be an issue on the Xbox Series X but Microsoft eventually fixed it and I’m hoping that do that here too. But it’s just so convenient to use that screenshot button on the controller rather than having to hit a key combo to use some other capture system. If anyone knows a good screen cap app that adjusts for HDR though, I’d love to hear about it.

Diablo IV, Season 5, Day 1 Report

Posted on by Nimgimli

As threatened, I jumped into the new Diablo IV season last night and the results were somewhat mixed. I didn’t get a ton of time since before D4 I had to do the daily and weekly tasks for Fallout 76, plus there’s an event running that had a few extra tasks needing to be done this week. That’s all done so now it’s just F076 Dailies until next week.

Back to D4. I choose a Druid totally randomly and that is thing one with Diablo IV for me. When it is time to create a character none of the classes really excite me. I can’t really put my finger on why. Whether it is the look or the archetypes or what. So I literally picked a random number between 1 & 5 and it came up 5 so Druid it is! Druids are big burly people. As I am an old fat man IRL I wasn’t super hyped to play as such a large individual in-game but once I tweaked his look a little he started to grow on me.

I was a little confused when I first logged in. You get a starter quest that talks about Mother’s Blessings which seem to be a staple of this season. Then you’re sent out to collect some. I looked at the map expecting some kind of marker or something but there was nothing. It turns out you get these things from killing the non-fodder enemies. The ones where it announces in chat that you are fighting them. So you just have to go look for them.

So off I went exploring, which was pretty entertaining, and while I was doing it I actually saw other players out there doing the same thing! When I played on the Eternal Realm it was so rare to see another player that it tended to startle me because I’d forget I was playing a MP game!

The map, when you start a Seasonal Character and skip the campaign, is a mish-mash of explored and unexplored areas and I couldn’t see any kind of pattern. Maybe the major “towns” are explored? But there was plenty of fog of war to wander around in, and while doing so I found a dungeon. While playing the campaign I skipped all dungeons so as not to get over-leveled since the game was already so easy. And as I started out on this Seasonal Character I had to actually gulp health potions. I nearly died a time or two! Exciting!

The dungeon I found had 3 sections, the first two of which had certain mobs I needed to kill in order to open the next section. While I was working through this I was gathering those Mother’s Blessings I needed, and at one point my inventory was full so I had to Town Portal back to sell/scrap junk. While there I turned in two “tiers” worth of Mother’s Blessings The first one gave me some OK gear. The second one broke my character. I went from an attack rating of about 150 to an attack rating of 580 and when I went back into that dungeon I just plowed through everything without thinking about it. I mean I guess this is on me… I could just choose NOT to use the new gear I was given. But who has that kind of willpower? Instead I’ll equip it and then complain the game is once again too easy.

Shot of random combat in a Diablo IV dungeon
It is so darned hard to get a good action shot in Diablo IV!

Meanwhile I was building my character, just groping along. Just to be contrary I resisted buying new skills until I’d fully upgraded earlier skills. On my Eternal Realm character I was all over the place but this time I chose one skill per skill tier and maxed it. By the end of the night I’d gotten to tier 3 (level 13 or 14) which is when I picked a couple of wolf friends as a skill. THAT was fun. I love me some canines and it made me like the character a lot more. But it was getting late so I barely had time to give some belly rubs before it was time to quit.

So yeah, overall a mixed bag. I just want to be somewhat challenged. I can’t go to the next World Tier until I beat some dungeon that I haven’t found yet. But generally speaking I enjoyed the open world and roaming around exploring way more than following along with the campaign.

Oh! Also while I started on the Xbox I eventually moved to the PC just to see how that felt. I’m playing the Xbox version on PC too. My characters were all there and the PC version supports a controller, which is great (in the way-back times I had to quit playing Diablo 2 because it was wrecking my wrists from all that mousing…using a controller to “drive” your character is much more comfortable for me). Playing on high/ultra settings on the widescreen monitor with HDR on was pretty sweet and I noticed details that I had missed playing on the Xbox from across the room. It’s REALLY nice to be able to “Play Anywhere” as Microsoft likes to say.

So tonight I’ll be diving back in and seeing how this plays out. I’m not 100% convinced Diablo IV is for me, but neither am I convinced it ISN’T for me. But I AM convinced that the campaign makes a bad first impression.