Category: Gaming

April 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

April has felt like a really long month at this point. We had a very stressful health crisis with Lola that felt like it erased a week of our lives due to sleep deprivation and worry. One of my best friends from high school died and that hit me really hard. And at work we’re in the middle of a huge transition between support partners so things have been crazy there, too. I was about to talk about how I hadn’t played much but thankfully I was keeping a list and in fact I finished two games before everything went to shit. It was just a couple weeks ago but it feels like months ago! (Lola seems to be on the mend now but she almost passed twice during the ordeal.) [Spoke too soon, as of this afternoon she is back in the hospital.]

Playing

I finished Death Stranding and really thought I had written a post about it, but I guess not. LOVED IT. In fact the only real reason I stopped playing after completing the story is that Death Stranding 2 is coming out at the end of June and I wanted to take a bit of a breather from wandering the wastelands before it arrived. I will be there Day 1 for Death Stranding 2, no doubt!!

A tallneck (from the Horizon series) hologram in Death Stranding
A tallneck (from the Horizon series) hologram in Death Stranding

I played through South of Midnight and that one I did write about. Really enjoyed it as well.

Dragon Age: Veilguard is still in rotation and I think I’m liking it more the longer I play it. Basically it took a while for my expectations to fade and for me to accept it for what it is. It feels like a game that would’ve done better if it had just been called Veilguard and they’d dropped Dragon Age from the title. I mean it takes place in the same world and all, but it doesn’t feel like a Dragon Age game to me. But it’s a decent enough action-RPG. The image at the top of this post is from Veilguard.

Oblivion Remastered hit Game Pass and I couldn’t NOT try it. It’s kind of my background game. I fire it up when I have 15 or 20 minutes and just putter around. I’m enjoying it. I never got very far into the game when it first came out. So far I’m ignoring the main story and just messing about in some small-ish town (Bruma??) I stumbled into.

Character sheet from Oblivion
Ready for some fisticuffs!

Clair Obscura: Expedition 33 also hit Game Pass. This is a turn-based RPG set in a really interesting (to me) world. It feels like Logan’s Run meets The Hunger Games or something. On this island, cut off from the rest of the world, an entity known as the Paintress writes a number on a monolith every year. When she does, everyone that is the same age as that number basically dissolves and is gone. Every year an Expedition leaves the island to try to stop the Paintress. The first Expedition was numbered 100 and they’re counting down, so there hasn’t been a lot of success, and no one returns from these expeditions. The world is really strange, the voice acting is top notch, the character models are amazing…there’s a lot to like about this one and I look forward to really digging into it. Semi-trying to finish Veilguard before I fully commit to Expedition 33.

Lune's character sheet from Expedition 33
Lune is a little worse for wear…been a minute since the team has had a chance to camp and clean up

Watching

Daredevil Reborn, which I wrote about.

Years & Years, which I ALSo wrote about.

The Last of Us season 2, which has only dropped 3 episodes so far but has been really good. It is different from the game, but I’m always fine with that kind of change. I’ve already experienced the story in the game; I’m fine with having a somewhat different story in the show.

The White Lotus came highly recommended and since we’d signed up for HBO the The Last of Us, we decided to give it a try. We’re mid-way through Season 2. I LOVED Season 1 but not loving Season 2 quite as much. But we’ll see; they could still turn things around. But Armond in Season 1 was just fascinating to watch… (The White Lotus is the name of a chain of resorts and the show is like a much darker Fantasy Island. Season 1 took place in White Lotus Hawaii and S2 takes place at White Lotus Italy.)

Reading

Still working through the pre-Shannara books, by Terry Brooks.

Finished The Elves of Cintra and started The Gypsy Morph. These books are really tightly coupled. Cintra just kind of ends and Gypsy Morph picks right up. We’re still trying to save the elves from the demons and once-men. Which won’t mean anything if you haven’t been reading the series. But I’m enjoying them well enough.

And that’s April in the rearview mirror. Here’s hoping for a quieter and less dramatic May. I’m ready to be back in a rut, bored by my routine. Never thought I’d miss that, but here we are!!

Wrestling With the “Too Many Games” Problem

Posted on by Nimgimli

There are a lot of great games out there, with more coming all the time. There are more that I want to play than I have time to play; there just aren’t enough hours in my days, even though gaming is my only real hobby. I’m sure the same could be said about other media that folks are passionate about, whether that is books or movies or heck, even online content. In some ways it’s a good problem to have — at least it’s better than the opposite problem: not having enough content to keep you entertained.

But I struggle with it because I am constantly sliding towards making gaming a kind of a second job. I feel pressure to finish the game I’m playing because I really want to get to the next game I want to play, so there are times when I play because I feel like I “should” or I “have to” in order to get the current game done. I have learned that if I put a game aside I’ll at best have to start over when I come back to it, and at worst I’ll never come back to it.

The knock-on effect of too many desirable games is that I’m never comfortable stopping to smell the roses (even though I am the World’s Slowest Gamer) in big games.

This all came into focus the other day when Oblivion Remastered dropped. I got through the tutorial and started roaming around, and soon enough got caught up in some side activities. I was having fun, at least at first. But by the end of the first day of playing I was already scolding myself for not getting on with it and moving the main quest forward. In a game like Oblivion I really think powering through the main quest is kind of defeating the purpose of playing, no? What my heart thinks I SHOULD be doing is just experiencing things. Putter around. Join a guild, explore a new area, talk to everyone to build up my speechcraft. Learn to pick pocket. Then learn to flee from the guards. Just LIVE in the world and enjoy it. Immerse myself in there. Lose myself in Tamriel.

But I just can’t seem to find that gaming ‘flow’ state for this kind of thing very often these days. I can’t ignore the fact that another game I want to play is coming out tomorrow or next week and already I’m super backlogged.

It struck me that this is why I’ve drifted away from MMOs, too. In Ye Olden Days I’d log in and just be in a virtual world for hours at a time without a care in the world. These days when I dabble in an MMO, at the end of a session I think about the time I spent, and what I got accomplished, and make a value judgement on whether or not that play session had been “worth it”. Usually the answer is no.

At least part of this very #FirstWorldProblem is Game Pass and Playstation Plus. Having games constantly being “given” to you (in quotes because of course the sub isn’t free) for a fixed but not infinite period of time is mostly a blessing, but also a little bit of a curse. When I have to open my wallet to play the next enticing game, I’m much more critical of what is worth my time. Having games constantly get dropped into my lap makes them hard to resist, particularly since I know if I don’t play now, that game might leave the service.

There’s no real point to this post…sometimes it just helps me organize my thoughts by writing them down. I don’t know how to re-condition myself to just ‘let go’ of some titles so I can comfortably wile away the hours in a given game for weeks or months. I mean sometimes a game just hits right and does push everything to the side for hundreds of hours: Genshin Impact, Snow Runner and Fallout 76 all have done it in the past couple years. Maybe that is what this post is about… convincing myself to go find a game where I just can’t RESIST spending time in it. (Death Stranding 2 soon, please??!).

The one practical thing I’ve been doing is uninstalling stuff from my consoles. Just not seeing 100 games installed helps a little. I winnow things down and get rid of the “Hmm, this could be interesting” stuff and I only leave the “I know this is a solid game” titles. But there are still a bunch to pick from!

I’d be curious to know if anyone else struggles with this situation and if you’ve found any coping mechanisms that help.

Do Better By Your Customers, Playstation

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m a fan of the Playstation hardware and lately it has been my preferred platform for gaming. I love a lot of Sony’s first party IPs and I’ve liked a number of their execs over the years.

But damn do their store policies suck.

The biggest issue is their refund policy, or lack thereof. If you buy a game on Steam or Xbox and it just sucks, you can ask for a refund (assuming your playtime is under a few hours… I don’t have the exact numbers at hand.) On Playstation, not so much. Even if a game outright fails to run, the only way to be considered for a refund is talking to customer support and hoping you get a reasonable representative on the line. The official policy is that if you’ve downloaded the game, you are no longer eligible for a refund. Which is completely ridiculous.

But that’s old news. What prompted today’s outrage is learning that Bethesda is running a sale on ESO Plus. You can get the 1st month of a recurring subscription for 50% off. Of course there are some conditions, depending on platform:

Steam: Sale is open to anyone, even if you currently have a sub. Steam wins! (again)
ESO Store: Anyone without a currently active sub can get the sale price
Xbox: Anyone without a currently active sub can get the sale price
Playstation: Only people who have NEVER had a sub can take advantage of the sale. Game has been out on the platform for 10 years, so if you signed up for a month at launch, no sale for you!

Why are Sony’s terms so much more strict? Who knows? Because whomever makes these store policies hates their customers, I guess.

Anyway, that’s my rant for today. I wish I could feel as good about the Playstation Store as I do about the Playstation hardware.

March 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

It’s the end of March and I still haven’t done my taxes. Adulting sucks! But here’s the recap. Short and sweet this month!

Playing

Death Stranding has been my ‘main game’ this month and I’m having a good old time just puttering about. I spend more time building up and maintaining the world’s infrastructure than I do actually moving the story forward. Eventually I will move forward though as I find it really compelling (and really weird). Death Stranding 2 will probably be a Day 1 purchase for me in June! I have a deadline to meet!

Deadman leaning close to Sam Porter Bridges to whisper to him.
“Death Stranding is NOT a walking simulator, Sam.”

Dragon Age Veilguard hit Playstation Plus and I started playing. I like it well enough but not enough to pull me away from Death Stranding when I’m playing on the PS5. I don’t honestly know if my issue is with Veilguard itself or just that I’m so hooked on DS. I’ll probably circle back to this and start over at some point, but it certainly didn’t hook me like Dragon Age Origins or Inquisition did.

Borderlands 2 is the one game I finished this month and I had a good time, but everyone has already played it and I already posted about it, so I’ll just leave it at that. If I had infinite time I’d replay it with a different class but there are SO many games to play!

Atomfall turned out to be a bit of a disappointment for me personally, but I already wrote about it. It is short enough that I figured “OK I can just plow through this.” but after a couple sessions of playing I thought to myself, “Why?” and uninstalled. I spent $25 or so to upgrade to the Deluxe Edition so I could play early and boy did I learn my lesson doing that. Honestly it’s a lesson I have learned before but every few years I seem to need to burn myself to remember why pre-orders and deluxe-versions are rarely a good idea.

Some kind of nuclear plant seen from a distance

 

Watching

Arcane (Netflix) was amazing. This animated series is based on League of Legends but you don’t have to know anything about the game to enjoy the show. It’s 2 seasons long. Season 1 is a relatively straightforward origin story for the characters. Season 2 gets pretty weird and is dense. I think I could watch Season 2 several times and get something new out of it each time. Which season is ‘better’ really depends on your personal preferences but both are really good. Heck it’s worth watching just for the gorgeous animation style (and the soundtrack is really good, too).

The Wheel Of Time season three has been really good so far, for me at least. I honestly am not a fan of the books since they just feel way too drawn out and Jordan re-used certain phrases so often I find it distracting. Or at least that’s how I remember them; it’s been a while. So this is a rare case where I enjoy the show more than the books, though PartPurple, who is in the midst of a re-read of the books, grumbles about how much is different. We went back and re-watched S2 before diving into S3, but now we’re caught up and waiting for more episodes to drop.

Reading

Armageddon’s Children — Book 4 of the extended Shannara series. It’s I think 60 years after the end of Angel Fire East and the apocalypse has arrived. The demons and once-men are working to exterminate the remaining people. We meet some new Knights of the Word and a group of street kids living in the ruins of Seattle.  I liked this one quite a bit but I do love a good apocalypse!

Elves of Cintra — Book 5, and oh guess what? Elves have been here all along, remaining hidden from humans. With most of humanity now gone, some of the characters from Children team up with the elves to try to save the elven race from the demons. But I’m not finished yet so not sure what is going to happen. Enjoying this one so far, too!

 

So yeah, that’s the March highlights. I’m taking a 4 day weekend in April and hope to spend those extra 2 days in a gaming stupor, yay! And I guess do my taxes. Oh and sign up for Medicaire which, omg I have been sent about 50 different junk mails with different companies wanting to be my Medicaire provider and I’m just so confused. Like I said, adulting sucks!

Sam Porter Bridges runs down a road with a person strapped to his back
This is what a Lyft ride looks like in the world of Death Stranding. Yes, that is a living person in a body bag that Sam is carrying; the bag is to protect them from TimeFall

What I Don’t Like About Atomfall

Posted on by Nimgimli

I don’t usually do posts about games I don’t like, but I figured I’d make an exception in this case since I happened to buy the Digital Upgrade for Atomfall and got early access, so have been playing the past few nights. If the things that bug me about the game save someone from spending their money on normal release day tomorrow, I’ll feel like I helped.

I should also hasten to add that I don’t think Atomfall is a bad game; it’s just a bad game for me and my personal preferences. In fact I think it’s a pretty good game for the right gamer, and even then there’s a lot I do like about it: the setting and the exploration are both top notch, and the voice acting is very good, though the cast is small enough that a lot of characters have the same voice. Also worth noting that it is launching at $50 and is on Game Pass at launch.

Finally, I’ve only played 4-5 hours so far so things could change. On the other hand I’m told it’s about a 20 hour game so in theory I’m a quarter of the way through.

OK enough with the pre-ambling. Here’re some of the things I don’t like about Atomfall.

Character Progression

I have to admit I’m a shallow person who likes seeing numbers go up. The industry’s RPG-ification of virtually every genre is something I embrace. Atomfall doesn’t have a lot of character progression. There’re no levels, there’s no experience points. The only character progression is via a skill tree. To get a skill you have to do two things. First you have to find/buy a Skill Manual. Reading one of these essentially puts the set of skills in that manual into your skill tree, but it doesn’t actually give you the skill. In order to unlock the skill you have to use some serum things that, again, you find or buy. It’s an interesting system but I do miss “leveling up” and getting skill points. Essentially the serums are your skill points, and how many there are in the world is anyone’s guess.

Gearing

The only gear in Atomfall are weapons. Weapon stats are not numerical but like “High damage, slow reload times.” Weapons come in 3 tiers: rusty, normal and pristine. You can combine 4 rusty weapons of the same type (along with some gun oil) to create a normal weapon, and I believe 2 normal weapons to create a pristine. Guns are fairly rare and so is ammo, so you’ll probably use melee weapons a lot of the time. Weapons don’t seem to degrade but of course ammo runs out which again nudges you towards melee. I kind of miss having more stuff to search for like armor or trinkets or something, but this just isn’t a looter-shooter (nor does it claim to be).

Combat and Expendables

There’s no real point to combat in Atomfall unless removing the person(s) you’re fighting is required to complete a task. The only upside to killing someone is searching their body and they don’t often carry all that much. Your health is replenished by bandages that you craft or find, and there are various potions (again, craftable once you find the recipe) that’ll buff you. But the game seems to really be pushing you towards avoiding combat as much as possible. The resources you need to craft things like bandages or Molotov cocktails don’t respawn, but the enemies do. This means you have to really weigh the pros and cons of each fight. Are you going to use more resources in winning the fight than you get back from looting the body? If so, probably best to sneak on by if possible. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this system but I’m more a guns blazing kind of player and I get bored with sneaking around pretty quickly. I also get a weird low-level anxiety about running out of materials in the world.

So those are my biggest issues, and none of them are flaws with the game; not in the least. They’re just systems that don’t really fit my particular playstyle, and if you think these things might bother you too, might be worth waiting for a sale or something (and of course if you have Game Pass you might as well try it). It is, in my opinion, an amazing setting and an amazing set-up and I really, REALLY want to love this game, but I’m just too impatient and too shallow for it to really hook me. I’ll still finish it and all, but buying the upgrade to get early access was a dumb move for me. Maybe this post will help someone else.

Borderlands 2 Done

Posted on by Nimgimli

This weekend I completed the main campaign of Borderlands 2. There’s not a lot I can say about a game that is this old and that was this popular; everyone who is interested in looter-shooters is probably familiar with the Borderlands series already.

But I still wanted to share what was the good, the bad and the ugly in it for me.

The Good

Well generally it was pretty good. I like playing shooters but not ones that are too realistic. Borderlands fits perfectly in my groove as far as that goes. It’s sharp looking but I never feel like I’m shooting real people. I spent about 35 hours on the character I finished with, and probably a dozen or so more on trying other classes, and I didn’t feel ‘relieved’ to be done with it, like I am with many games. In other words it didn’t feel drawn out to me, and even deep into the game I found little things that surprised and delighted me. I was level 31 when I went into the final boss level and at level 29 or so I got a gun that talked. At first I had no idea where the voice was coming from! I mean, not a big deal but there were lots of similar things that cropped up.

I also LOVED the “Badass” system. This is a series of many, many tasks that you’ll complete just by playing. Each one levels up your ‘badass rating’ and every so often you get a point to spend that will give you some small increase to stat: things like gun damage, or more health, or shield recharge rates. The clever thing here is that these perks apply to ALL your characters meaning if you play through again with a 2nd character it’ll already have a lot of perks waiting. I thought this was a nice feature for someone who wants to get deeply into the game.

Moxxie the very curvy barkeep standing at her post
Did you know Moxxie is the mother of Scooter and Ellie? Or that she was once married to Handsome Jack?!

And I have really come to like these characters. Briefly, in Borderlands 1 you could play as 1 of 4 characters, and they show up in Borderlands 2 as NPCs (three of them are in the image at the top of this post: Mordecai, Lillith and Brick). They are all bigger than life in various ways. When I did a quest for Moxxi and she pulled a long gun out of her cleavage, my inner 14 year old couldn’t help but giggle, though once upon a time I was kind of offended by a lot of these characters; once I got to ‘know’ them that dissipated.

The Bad

This is going to sound strange to a lot of people, but I was playing for the story and the design of the game is pretty bad for that. You frequently have voice-overs from one of the characters and that’s a lot of how the story is told, but you can rarely actually hear them since enemies constantly scream, your own character is “barking” frequently, and of course guns and explosions. If you miss what is said, you’re out of luck. There’s no log or anything, at least that I found. That was one of my biggest issues. I WANTED to hear what the characters had to say!!

The Ugly

One of my issues with Borderlands has always been the tone. Just the crass humor. I mitigated this somewhat by playing Gaige the Mechromancer.  She is a young girl so her voice isn’t grating and her barks are generally not too bad, though for a while she did yell “God! It smells like piss and tacos!” way too often. But mostly she talks about what a good robot pal she has. The only time I got REALLY annoyed was when I was fighting a faction called Tunnel Rats or something like that, and they just SCREAM constantly. They scream when they attack, they scream when they die, they scream all the time in between. The game ALMOST lost me in that section.

The other part that was ‘ugly’ to me were all the containers. I get that this is a looter shooter but why do they feel the need to put 4 crates next to each other instead of one crate with a lot of stuff in it. And why do I have to hold down a button to collect the ammo in these crates if I’m playing solo. I am never not going to take ammo if I have room for it. Guns and gear I can see, but ammo should just jump into my inventory.

And really, that’s about all I have to say. I can’t believe it has taken me this long to get into Borderlands. Atomfall is up next but I do plan to come back to the Borderlands series. I’m debating on if I should play the Pre-Sequel or just move on to Borderlands 3. The vague goal is to be finished with 3 by the time Borderlands 4 comes out in the fall.

Atlas Fallen: Reign Of Sand Completed

Posted on by Nimgimli

Thanks to a 3-day weekend, I was finally able to finish Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand today. Total time was about 20 hours though I spread that out over quite a while. “How Long to Beat” says the main story should take about 11 hours which tracks for me since I always take like twice as long as HLTB says a game takes.

In Atlas Fallen you play an ‘unnamed’ — the lowest class of this society — who finds a magical gauntlet. Once you put it on you start conversing with an entity name Nyaal who acts as your ‘guy in the chair’ and guides you around the world. The gauntlet gives you various skills and as the game progresses you’ll uncover items that expand its range of powers considerably. Your primary opponent are “wraiths” which seem like monsters made of sand. Due to the nature of the enemies there’s no blood or gore which was kind of a welcome change. When you defeat an enemy it just dissolves into sand.

Combat is action based with a lot of air-dashing, parrying and dodging. This is not a milieu I’m very comfortable with so I eventually turned the difficulty down to easy and that was plenty difficult for me (at almost 65 my reflexes are not what they one were).

Overall Atlas Fallen was, for me, the quintessential “AA” game. Some of it I really liked, other parts left me pretty cold. Here’s a quick run down of both.

The Good Stuff

The Setting

I loved the world itself. This is a world in ruin, mostly desert though there are still small bits of green here and there. The world is littered with truly huge ruins to explore that make you feel tiny at times. You spend a lot of time unearthing things from beneath the sand using a magical power. The wraiths that you fight can get pretty weird and fairly big; you can often make your way to the top of a ruin and see the larger beasties prowling the world and know you can go and fight them if you want to.

A valley with a large flying enemy circling in the distance. It's so far away it is hardly more than a blog of pixels
In this shot I’ve circled a distant large enemy flying around in circles

Traversal

I just had a lot of fun moving around the world. By the time you finish playing you’ll have a double jump and a triple air dash and between those you can (and will have to) cross over pretty wide gaps and chasms and doing so feels really good. You can control your fall nicely so landing on a tiny pillar or something is pretty easy. When on the ground there is this ‘sand surfing’ mechanic that feels like a really decent snowboarding game, though you can surf uphill as well as down. I spent probably too much time just manually traversing the game rather than using Fast Travel. Honestly it was the traversal that kept me playing the game; it was SUPER fun.

Graphics and Sound

The game looks pretty good. Character models are decent for a game with this kind of budget (I mean, I don’t know exactly what the budget was but I think it is safe to say it didn’t have the budget of a blockbuster from one of the really big studios.) Voice acting was solid too, though Nyaal was the exception as something about his tone always kind of bugged me. Personal preference there, though.

The OK Stuff

Combat

This is really subjective, but for me the combat was just OK. Your gauntlet has 3 tiers of power, each with an active and a few passive skills. As you fight you built up “momentum” which powers up the gauntlet giving you access to these skills. When I fight ends your gauntlet quickly powers down so this is a process that happens in every fight. A lot of enemies are bigger than you, or are flying, which means either relying on ranged skills, or jumping and air dashing to get you high enough to hit them. I did the latter and in so doing I may have been my own worst enemy. But it is the kind of game where you can stay in the air seemingly indefinitely by air dashing and hitting enemies, as each hit seems to reset that ‘3 air dash’ limit. But there were times where I’d just lose track of what was going on in all the chaos, and later in the game you’ll encounter enemies that drain “momentum” and I found those fights much less enjoyable.

A chaotic image showing an obscrured enemy and the only really clear thing is a health bar
Combat can be pretty hard to read at times
A still shot taken with photo mode. We are in the bottom left and the vaguely crab-like sand-wraith takes up the rest of the screen
A still shot taken with photo mode. We are in the bottom left and the vaguely crab-like sand-wraith takes up the rest of the screen

Character Building

While you do have levels (and I was only level 10 when I finished) what really matters is the skills in your gauntlet. You add skills via Essence Stones which you find, craft or buy, and these can then be upgraded a few times each. Armor can also be upgraded, though armor comes as a complete set so you upgrade “armor” and not, y’know, your chest, your helmet, your gloves and so on. While this system was OK I had leveled up the skills I wanted to use pretty early. I think the game wants you to constantly be switching your skills around (you can set up 3 sets of gauntlet skills and switch between them via hotkey) but I couldn’t be bothered, which is maybe why combat was so hard for me. I think that if you were really into the game and playing on a harder difficulty and needing specific loadouts for specific enemies, the character building would be more interesting.

The Bad Stuff

Story

The story wasn’t bad per se, it just felt a bit mundane given how cool the world was. Basically there’s a god you have to take down but first you have to level up the gauntlet and that’s really it. There’s a bunch of side characters that seem like they could have neat stories but they’re not really explored that much. But my biggest issue with the story was how often Nyaal would “sense” that we had to do something rather than there being some bit of narrative leading to doing that thing. It felt like the writers ran out of time or ideas or something. He would always be “I sense we need to head to the top of that mountain” when the next quest objective was up there. It just felt a little lazy.

So for me, Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand was an OK game. If I was letter grading I’d give it a B. On a 1-5 number scale more like a 3.5. Put it this way: I finished it but left side quests and a lot of activities unfinished and had no desire to go back and do more. Happy to have played, happy to have finished but 20 hours was plenty. On the other hand if you’re into this kind of combat (and since it isn’t my thing I can’t think of other examples though I know they are out there: Devil May Cry maybe?) you might like it a lot more than I did.

As of this writing it is available on both Game Pass and one of the Playstation Plus tiers. I played it on PC Game Pass using an Xbox Controller and using Xbox Game Bar’s “Auto HDR” feature.

It’s Hard to Say Goodbye (to an Open World)

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night, the day after posting a monthly recap in which I lamented the fact that I hadn’t finished any games in January, I “finished” Horizon Forbidden West.

But what does “finished” even mean with an open world game? With more linear games, you complete the story, maybe see a literal “The End” screen, the credits roll and then you are returned to the title screen. Not here and not with a lot of open world games. Instead you complete the last quest, the credits roll, and then you bounce back into the game with your character standing there with a “Now what?” expression on their face.

Generally speaking this is a good thing. Now you have all the toys and skills and the world becomes your playground. But for me at least, it makes putting the game aside a bit of a struggle. I was looking forward to finishing HFW because I have so many other games I want to play but now that I’m done, I’m finding it tough to say goodbye to Aloy and the world.

Specifically here is what I’ve completed:

Trophies

All in all I earned 58 of 80 trophies.
I missed 9 in the main game
I missed 10 in the DLC
I missed 3 in the New Game+ section (one of which is finish New Game+ at Ultra Hard difficulty…yeah no thanks)

The World

Finished the main quest of the main game
Finished the main quest of the DLC
Finished every Side Quest that I found
I did NOT uncover all of the world. There are still parts of the map covered in ‘fog’

Character Development

I’m well beyond the level cap
I’ve earned every skill I’m interested in, though there are some that could be upgraded a bit more
I have good gear, but not the best gear, and not all of it is upgraded fully (but it was up to the challenge of the final boss)

Activities

I did not complete the fighting rings
I did not complete the hunting grounds
I did not complete the machine races
I did not play the in-game board game, Machine Strike
I didn’t even ‘solve’ all the cauldrons

The first 3 of these Activities are all time based and I HATE time pressure so I just opted to ignore them. Machine Strike just didn’t appeal to me (I never find games inside other games to be too compelling) and the cauldrons, I just didn’t get around to doing.

Next Steps

So what’s next?

1) I could just not play anymore and be done for now
2) I could chase Trophies though several of them are based on the activities I didn’t do because I didn’t like them
3) I could explore the parts of the map I missed just to see what is there
4) I could start a New Game+

So which will I choose? I’m still not sure. Currently Aloy is back at her base, safe and warm. I always tend to take characters “home” when I’m done with an open world game. It’s weird, I know. I am pretty confident I am NOT up for New Game+ right now but the rest… well we’ll see. I have 112 hours on my current save and more in total since I re-started a couple of times. Seems like it should be enough. On the other hand it has been FOUR years since I earned a Platinum Trophy and doing so here seems plausible.

But…all those other games are waiting to be played.

Just not sure what I’ll do yet. Breaking up with an open world is hard to do. Am I the only one that has this problem?

[Image above is Seyka, not Aloy. Seyka is one of the main characters you meet in the Burning Shores DLC. I liked her a lot.]

 

January 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

And there goes January, drifting off into the past. I was REALLY hoping to be able to talk about the games I’d finished in this recap, but in the end I didn’t finish any. Once again. I’m maybe destined to play the same games forever! Well at least I’m having fun. I just need a couple of clones so I have time to play all the games I want to get to!

Playing

Horizon Forbidden West is one of the games I really thought I’d get finished. And to be fair I DID finish the main game, but now I’m working through the DLC. Horizon Zero Dawn was one of my all time favorite games, but I haven’t found Horizon Forbidden West quite as compelling. It took me quite a while to put my finger on why that is but I think it finally clicked. The newer game has a more complex combat system that rewards using the right kind of arrow on the right enemy part to cause elemental explosions. It also puts an emphasis on shooting off specific parts that you can then use to upgrade your gear. On paper this sounds great but I find myself just plinking away with regular arrows most of the time since I found the ‘right way’ to be too fiddly. Because of that battles tend to take a long time, which in turn slows down the pace of the game. I was at around 100 hours when I finished the main campaign and most of the side quests. How Long To Beat has that content taking an average of 60 hours. So yeah.

They clearly plan for a 3rd game and I kind of hope they walk back the complexity of the combat. I love shooting off parts of machines and stuff but my weapon wheel is so cluttered and the machines turn so quickly it is just rare that I get the right arrow drawn at a time I have a visual on the appropriate elemental weak point. Plus I’ve never been one to use traps and stuff. I just want to let fly with a ton of arrows! This is for sure a “me” issue more than an issue with the game itself. Anyway hopefully I’ll have the DLC wrapped up in February!

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition is another title I thought I might finish in January but it is still rolling on. My character is level 30 now and since that triggered an Achievement I thought it might be cap and I might be nearly done, but it seems not. It isn’t a game I play every day, either, so I’ll keep plodding along. I’m determined to finish…for some reason.

Over in the MMO world, I started the month playing both Warframe and Elder Scrolls Online, but drifted away from both of them for no reason other than distraction and wanting to finish some finish-able games.

Our hero looks out over the remains of a buried town
Our hero looks out over the remains of a buried town

Atlas Fallen is a game I bounced off of, but then came back to. It has somehow become my after work palette cleanse. I never play it for long… 20-30 minutes/session. But I find the traversal systems really fun, between double jumping and air-dashing, and the snowboarding like sand-surfing mechanic. I find the world pretty compelling too. It’s post-apocalypse, but not of Earth as we know it. But there are ruins of HUGE ancient structures half-buried in the sand and the sense of scale is great. This is aided by an incredibly long rendering distance meaning you can climb up on some tall structure and see huge lumbering beasties way off in the distance. It’s pretty cool. The story and the characters I find less interesting and the combat was frustrating to me until I stopped being stubborn and turned down the difficulty. Now I can mostly button-mash my way through the combat, which is fine with me.

Screenshot of "The Herta" gacha character from Honkai Star Rail

Early in January Wuthering Waves came to Playstation and I’d read so many positive posts about it from Bhagpuss at Inventory Full that I knew I wanted to try it. What I found is a game remarkably similar to Genshin Impact, which led me to firing up Genshin again. Meanwhile Dusty at I’m Still Playing was talking about Zenless Zone Zero so I wanted to give THAT another go, and as long as I was gacha crazy I fired up Honkai Star Rail, too. I knew there was no way I could play all these games but I figured I’d settle on just one. In the end I kind of just burned out on gacha and the daily tasks they all ask you to do. If I ever decide to focus on one, I’ll talk more about it.

A group of characters from Eternal Strands showing a variety of species

Eternal Strands is the newest game in the recap; it just came out last Tuesday. It’s from Mike Laidlaw’s Yellow Brick Games. Laidlaw was Creative Director for Dragon Age over at Bioware back in the good old days of Bioware, so I was anxious to check this game out. It’s very early days but so far I’m enjoying it. You play a ‘weaver’ (a mage) who uses various elemental spells to fight and solve puzzles. (Though there is melee and bow combat as well.) It has an interesting cast of characters and a world that feels ripe for exploration. Part of the reason is that the game’s map is more of a sketch than a detailed map, and the first zone, at least, is pretty dense and complex. I found myself learning landmarks to help me find my way around, which is the kind of thing I enjoy. The compass is off by default, but you can toggle one on in the options, and there’s a “wisp” feature if you’re not the exploring type… you can follow the wisp to your next quest goal. But by ignoring those features and finding my way, I’m just having fun exploring so far. But again, very early days…at the time of this writing I just have a few hours into it.

Watching:

Nobody Wants This (Netflix) stars Kristen Bell so of course it was great. She plays a podcaster who, along with her sister, talks a lot about sex. She falls for a rabbi. His family is appalled because she is not Jewish and because of the tone of her podcast. Hilarity ensues, for the most part. It’s irreverent, sometimes heart-warming, often funny, often quite dirty. We really loved it.

Silo (Apple TV) – Season 2 had its lulls but overall it continues to intrigue us and we can’t wait for Season 3, which, along with a Season 4, is already greenlit. The show is based on a trilogy of books, I’m told. S1 & S2 covered book 1 and S2 and S3 will cover books 2 & 3 respectively. I hope things don’t feel too rushed. But overall, great show!

The Gentleman (Netflix) – When an army captain finds he has inherited his father’s estate and title, he learns there’s an underground marijuana farm that is helping to keep the estate afloat. His father had just kind of looked the other way but our new duke gets involved in an attempt to get the criminal element off the grounds. He pals up with the daughter of the drug kingpin who owns the farm. She gives off “criminal Emma Peel” vibes to me and I loved the character. Meanwhile the new duke’s brother, who is a hot mess, keeps causing trouble. I’ve never watched Breaking Bad but I’ve heard this described as “Breaking Bad meets Downton Abbey”. We enjoyed it, but since there’s a bunch of organized crime baddies running around, it can get pretty violent.

Reading:

A Knight of the Word and Angel Fire East – I’m continuing with my read-through of the Terry Brook’s “Pre-Shannara” series. So far they are just OK. I liked A Knight of the Word well enough to keep going, but it’s not like I can’t wait to get my work done so I can get back to reading. I’m just still curious about how he’s going to tie all of this into the Shannara series, because we’re still solidly in modern America urban-fantasy land. A Knight of the Word took place in Seattle at Halloween and Angel Fire East has us back in the main character’s mid-west small town around Christmas. Nest, the main character, is now 29 and spends a LOT of time putting on cold winter clothes and making cookies and hot chocolate for house guests, which isn’t really what I’m tuned in for. In all three of these books (book 1 was Running With the Demon) Brooks spends a little too much time showing off how well he knows these areas, constantly describing the buildings and roads our characters travel on even though they’re all pretty mundane. But again, I keep reading so there must be something here!

And that’s January in the bag. I don’t really do goals but I REALLY hope to be done with Horizon Forbidden West by the end of next month, and I’m looking forward to more Eternal Strands. Stay warm, everyone!

Microsoft Changes How We Earn Rewards Points via Gaming

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m a fan of Microsoft’s Rewards program. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a program where you can earn points for doing things like answering quizes, using Bing to search, or more interestingly to me, playing Xbox Game Pass games. A point is worth a tiny amount; I tend to wait until I have 95,000 points to redeem them for a $100 gift card, meaning a single point is worth about a tenth of a cent. Seems not worth the bother, right? But they do add up and about twice a year I’m able to cash in a $100 card, plus I find the gamification of the system kind of mindless fun.

In terms of Game Pass rewards, most recently there were Daily, Weekly and Monthly tasks to complete. The Daily tasks were always “Play a Game Pass Game” and “Earn an Achievement in a Game Pass Game.” The first was trivial (it popped as soon as you opened a Game Pass title), the second was variable depending on what you were playing. The Weekly tasks were things like “Play 3 different Game Pass games” and “Complete 3 Daily tasks.” The Monthly tasks were where the big rewards were and they were basically an accumulation of the Daily and Weeklies, with the highest one rewarding 1000 points for doing 8 Weekly tasks and X Daily tasks, where X was a number around 45. This meant that you HAD to earn an Achievement in a Game Pass game once a day for about half the days of the month.

What this led to, at least in OCD folks like me, was “hoarding” Achievements. If I was playing a Game Pass game and I earned an Achievement I’d IMMEDIATELY stop playing the game for the day so I didn’t unlock another Achievement which ‘wouldn’t count’ for anything. I appreciate and admit this was entirely a “me” issue but based on conversations in the Microsoft Rewards reddit, I wasn’t the only one who did this.

Today all that ends. All the details are on Xbox Wire but the gist of it is, rewards based on Achievements are gone; all tasks will be based on just playing games. Good news for me. That said, you now have to spend 15 minutes in a game for it to count, so no more hitting the title screen and quitting, though I guess you could sit at the title screen for 15 minutes and that would work. There also seems to be a big focus on ‘streaks’ of playing 5 days a week, each week. Lastly there is a monthly “Game Pass 4 Pack” and “Game Pass 8 Pack” task which rewards us for playing 4 or 8 different Game Pass games, respectively.

And then the big news is, there are now equivalent rewards for PC gamers. Same rules seem to apply only now you’ll be playing on PC rather than on console.

As of today I am seeing these tasks on the Xbox app on my phone:

Play a PC game -> 10 points
Weekly PC bonus -> 150 points if you play for 5 days
Play a game on console -> 10 points
Weekly console bonus -> 150 points if you play for 5 days

In the name of science I snuck off from work and played Borderlands Game of the Year edition on the Xbox for 20 minutes. This is NOT a Game Pass game but it counted for “Play a game on console” so it seems these do not have to be Game Pass titles. (Though I imagine in the case of PC it’ll have to be a game played via the Xbox app which for most of us means a Game Pass title.)

As a Game Pass Ultimate member I also have:

Play a Game Pass Game -> 10 points

Game Pass Monthly 4-pack -> 50 points
Game Pass Monthly 8-pack -> 350 points

Then there are streak bonuses.

Days 1-4 -> no bonus
Day 5 -> +40 point
Day 6 -> +20 points
Day 7 -> +40 points

These last numbers increase as you maintain your streak from week to week.

Week 2 -> x2 bonus
Week 3 -> x3 bonus
Week 4 & beyond -> x4 bonus

OK now the caveat is, this is a brand new system and I haven’t actually tested any of it yet. I’ll update the post if I find I’ve made any mistakes or if I’ve missed anything.

I haven’t done the math but I’m guessing there are fewer points to earn over the old system since Microsoft continues to decrease Rewards points over time, but for me personally I am super happy to see the end of tasks based on earning achievements. But we’ll see how it goes!