Making some more progress through the list of games I’ve bought but not played, I spent some time in Atlyss, a lo-fi action RPG where you play as one of various critter races.
I am but a wee creature.
It’s fairly straightforward, clear out monsters from areas, go on quests to collect stuff, delve into semi-random dungeons, level up and get new gear and skills, etc. What’s distinct is that moving around is pretty fun, with a double jump and dash abilities that everyone gets, and you’re going to be doing a lot of that because the pace of combat is fast. Especially in dungeons, where most rooms lock you in until you defeat multiple waves of multiple enemies, and they’re instantly chasing and right on top of you so you’re constantly moving and trying to make space so that you can tell what’s even going on and when you should block and attack.
It might even be a bit too fast-paced for me, as I’m constantly dying in these dungeons and I feel a bit stuck on a current boss, but there’s only a minor penalty for dying at least (having to run back and the current wave of enemies will be healed). Still, it’s pretty cute and it’s still in early access, so I’ll have to revisit it again later to see what’s new.
Yesterday I finished off the Titan expedition in No Man’s Sky. It didn’t really take too long, this was one of the expeditions where you can knock out a bunch of the goals just in the course of regular play, and then it’s a quick sprint to clean up the rest of them and rush through the checkpoints. The main new experiences in this expedition were going really-deep-sea diving, and learning that gas giants kinda suck. I would recommend building your base somewhere that isn’t a constant raging storm…
I only intended to do the expedition, but after finishing it and converting back to a regular game, I wound up playing my regular save for quite a bit longer than expected. I restarted recently, so I’m still pretty early game, and haven’t found somewhere good to set up a base or claimed a freighter yet, and am mainly just running around doing the Artemis quest. But I did find a trade terminal that was selling drop pod locations, so I bought 30 of those and just ran around claiming drop pod upgrades for a while. The stuff I brought back from the expedition had left me short on inventory space, but after getting all those upgrades, I’ve got space to spare in my suit, at least. Now if only it was as easy to get ship inventory upgrades…
I need to start clearing out some of the stuff I bought in the big Steam Xmas sale, so today I played Clickolding. It’s more of an ‘interactive experience’ than a game, where a strange man in a hotel room insists on watching you click a tally counter, occasionally interrupting to dictate how you should click it, other tasks you should do in the room, or to reveal little bits of his personal history and needs, and…yeah, it’s an allegory for sex work. It’s creepy and uncomfortable and goes some unexpected places (it gets a bit metatextual too, though that seems like more of a bonus), but it’s worth experiencing.
I also got around to starting the newest Titan expedition in No Man’s Sky. This one’s mainly about experiencing the new features added in the new world generation, like the gas giant in the system you start out in. I still haven’t left that first system yet because I got hung up on trying to complete the fauna scanning on several moons, but got stymied by rare underwater creatures that I just could not get to show up. It doesn’t help that the gas giant moons tend to have very shallow water, making it harder to get underwater creatures to show up at all.
Steam keeps track of how much time you spend playing a game, and by far the largest one on my list is, uh…
I’ve been ‘playing’ it for a few years now, but Idle Champions is an ‘idle’ game, so very little of that is actual, hands-on playing of it. Most of that occurs early on when you’re just starting out, where the basic gameplay is to select an adventure, set up some party members in a formation, and then keep buying upgrades for them and tweaking things a bit (swapping members in and out, moving them around, clicking ‘ultimate’ attacks) when things start getting more difficult. It actually requires a fair bit of your attention at this point, managing all of this. Eventually you get some ‘familiars’ which can automate tasks for you, such as levelling up party members and clicking on the playfield, and ‘modron cores’ which can automate setting up a formation and restarting the adventure when you hit a certain point. With enough of these combined, the game then basically plays itself automatically, just continually running an adventure over and over again with no intervention required.
But, you might ask, why would you even do so? Well, there is Stuff to earn… Your party’s strength is affected by a lot of things, including the ‘item level’ of the equipment they wear. The item level is raised by either using blacksmithing contracts, which come from chests, or finding duplicate pieces of gear, also from chests. Chests can be bought with ‘gems’, and gems are earned by defeating bosses, which you do by…running an adventure over and over again. Hence, with the familiars and modron cores you can just set it up and let it run in the background and just check in on it every once in a while to buy stuff.
But, there’s other stuff to keep track of as well. A big source of your party’s strength will also come from legendary items, which requires earning dragon scales, which requires you to interrupt your gem farming and run a special adventure once a day for a week for each batch of scales. New heroes get added on a roughly monthly basis, and you have to run a bunch of adventures to unlock them and get them geared up. Special events occur every once in a while which require you to log in once per day for a week to open a special chest, or keep the game running to passively earn some new temporary currency. There is now a daily login to earn a new ‘platinum’ currency which can be used to buy some stuff that would normally require real currency.
All of this kind of begs the obvious question of ‘why’ though, and that’s where the FOMO starts to kick in in subtly interconnected ways. Why would you want to unlock a new hero? Well, new heroes are sometimes essential for the new ‘meta’ to make for a stronger party that can beat the more difficult adventures. Why would you want to log in daily to unlock a special chest? Well, sometimes you can get valuable things like a Potion of Polish from them, and you have to do so at least four times to get the Bonus reward, and you wouldn’t want to miss out on that, right? Why would you want to passively gather a new currency? Well, it’s the easiest way to get pigment buffs which raise your party’s strength significantly… They’ve done a great job of giving you a whole bunch of reasons to log in and play the game regularly, in order to help you…become better at continuing to play the game. There is no final goal to it all, as they’re regularly adding new campaigns and adventures, so you still feel this constant need to prepare.
The problem is that this starts to nibble away more and more bits of your time. You can leave it running in the background 99% of the time, but it still takes a non-zero amount of time to do that dragon scale run, to spend the currencies and buy the upgrades, to unlock that hero, to do the daily chest claim, etc., and if I spend a half hour each day doing these maintenance tasks, that’s a half hour less time for other games or tasks. The interconnectedness makes it difficult to limit your interaction, too. Oh, maybe I’ll just fire it up once a month to get the new hero. Except that I’m going to need chests to equip the hero, so I could just leave it running to farm gems for the chests. But if it’s running anyway, I may as well check the daily login… And before long it’s back to being a time suck again.
So, ultimately, I think saying goodbye to Idle Champions means quitting cold turkey. It wasn’t really a waste of time, but I think for me it’s the only practical way to get off this FOMO ride.
Just as a quick catch-up, here are some more specific comments on games I’ve played in the last year or so:
Vampire Survivors: This game was a bit of a craze for a while, and I was late to the party, but I got addicted to it for a while as well. With a bajillion things to unlock, it has that just-one-more-run quality that has you realizing that you sat down to play it for an hour and it’s been four… I finally shook it when I got to a point where I can just get near-infinite upgrade eggs and brute force past any challenge, but it was still a good 70-odd hours of fun to get there.
Super Lesbian Animal RPG: Despite what the name might make you think, this is a pretty wholesome (PG-13 at worst, for swearing) JRPG story about a group of LGBT friends trying to find their way as young adults, prove themselves, and work out their relationships, while saving the world from an ancient evil, of course.
It’s an RPG Maker game, with the limitations that implies, but the author’s put a ton of effort into customizing it and fleshing out the setting, characters, UI, etc. with her own work, so it doesn’t really feel like one. There’s a bit of extra depth to the combat where you have to build up ‘star power’ points to use more powerful attacks, so you can’t just unleash all your best attacks at the start of the fight. Which can sometimes feel a bit tedious because that generally includes multi-target attacks, so you have to spend a turn just getting the points to use one of those… But it’s not too much of a problem because it’s not very grindy overall; the level cap is pretty low and you only fight monsters by running into them on the overworld.
LOGistICAL: Earth: A kind of puzzle game where you have to unlock industries and roads around the world by delivering goods from sources to places that want them. And when I mean world, I mean the whole world, as it covers 50,000 towns and 590 different industries. It’s hard to get a good sense of progression with this one; you start out focusing on a few small areas, trading resources and unlocking industries and all that, but you can’t really “complete” a region because there’s a deliberate global interconnectedness to everything that forces you to keep expanding and exploring to find new industries and routes because you can’t satisfy everything locally, but there are also barriers to keep you from exploring until you figure out the ‘puzzle’ to deliver what they need.
I’ll play in a region until I reach a point where I feel stuck and then switch to another one I’ve unlocked, and I’ve gone through probably a pretty typical sequence, going through New Zealand, eastern Australia, Germany and Scandinavia, the western US, South Korea, North Korea, and the start of Russia. It’s starting to feel like I’m running out of options though, and that the key to progress is hidden in some singular town or road or something that I’m overlooking because there are ten thousand icons on-screen. There’s a spot in Russia where I could break out if I just had Bricks, but I only have access to one truck and some sand, but I could turn the sand to bricks if I build the Brickworks there, but to do that I need to raise an existing Brickworks to level 3 somewhere, which I could do in Germany, except for level 3 I need Machinery, and I do have Machineworks somewhere, but they need Engines as an input and I haven’t even discovered them yet so they’re in some other country and who knows when I’ll actually find them and when I do I don’t currently have a way to transport them to Germany… It’s…still fun in its own way, but it also feels like it’s constantly on the verge of “okay, that’s enough, had my fill of that”.
Kitsune Tails: Haven’t gotten very far in this one yet, but it’s a very cute take on a Super Mario World-like platformer. And either it’s surprisingly difficult in some places, or I’m just getting old…
Thank Goodness You’re Here: This one has been described as a ‘slap-em-up’, since that’s basically your only way to interact with the world, by running around and slapping things. It’s basically an extended British comedy sketch, centered around you “fixing” peoples’ problems. A bit short at 3 or so hours, but very funny and well worth it if you like that sort of thing.
Balatro: eh, it’s alright
Those actually aren’t the games where I’ve spent the most time, but those will really deserve posts of their own…
(No, seriously, Balatro didn’t really grab me in the same way everyone else seems to be obsessed with it. *shrug*)
I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age and I’m right at the end, just running around cleaning up sidequests, hunts, high-end gear, etc. I couldn’t remember how deep into the endgame stuff I’d gotten when I played the PS2 original though, so out of curiosity I fired it up to take a look and they were actually pretty close: both 88 hours in, very similar gear, and I’m currently level 57 versus 59 in the old save.
And then something suddenly hit me: I’m not sure now if I actually finished the original FF12, even though if you’d asked me before today I’d have sworn that yeah, of course, it’s one of the few Final Fantasy games that I have actually completed! My old saves were certainly ready to finish the game, but none of them were in what I’d consider a ready-to-head-to-the-ending spot; the most recent saves were just off in random zones in the world where I’d been doing hunts, not even by any teleport stones or the airship that I’d typically park myself by for the ‘final’ save. I don’t even really remember the ending, though I’d have chalked that up to it just not being very memorable, but who knows now. So did I actually finish it and just not leave an obvious save file for it, or did I get so caught up in endgame stuff that I just plan forgot to actually finish the game? *shrug*
There are enough PS4-exclusive games that I’m interested in now that I finally caved and ordered a PS4 Pro about a week ago, and it’ll arrive on the 20th (it’s the God of War bundle).
But I only just realized something: I don’t have an audio path for it. With the previous gen consoles, they all had cables that broke out plain old RCA outputs, so my current system is built around that. It’s a digital world now though, but unfortunately for me, the HDMI goes straight into a computer monitor with no audio. The only other option on the PS4 is S/PDIF, so I guess I’m going to have to look for a converter!
I also spent some time today cleaning up the rat’s nest of wiring around my current setup so it’s easier to hook up once it arrives. This mainly meant yanking out the Xbox 360 and Wii entirely, as much as it pains me. I keep thinking of the games on them that I still have unfinished and intend to play one day (mainly Xenoblade on the Wii; Lost Odyssey, Nier, and Resonance of Fate on the 360), but honestly, I’d barely touched them in years. If I ever do get the urge to use them again, I have another old monitor I could use for an ad-hoc setup as needed.
I really need to just completely redo my “home theatre” setup from scratch, though. I’ve been using a 24″ computer monitor and PC speakers for over 10 years now and yeah, it could be better…
Boy, it’s kind of embarrassing to have the posts on the front page cover a five-year span. I’ve had…issues, but that’s not for here.
I’ve certainly been playing games, but of them all, Minecraft still dominates a lot of my playtime. I hardly touch vanilla anymore, just modpacks nowadays, and over the last few years I’ve tried:
Age of Engineering: A gated progression pack, where you proceed through a series of ‘ages’ where each age unlocks a new tier of machines and you progress to the next tier by crafting a certain item. Each age depends on stuff produced by the previous age so you can’t really skip ages, and many recipes are changed to make mods more interdependent on each other and more difficult to make. Can get a bit grindy, but I actually stuck with it all the way through this one and ‘beat’ it by crafting the hardest item in the pack, a creative vending upgrade, at which point you basically have infinite resources. Even if my base kinda looks like a hot mess…
Sprout: I had high hopes for this one since it’s by the author of Regrowth, another really good modpack. It is very well-crafted, as all of the mods fit together well and create a nice, coherent world…but I couldn’t really get into it. I guess I was expecting something a bit more goal-oriented like Regrowth, but this one has only vague, nonessential quests.
Craft of the Titans: A challenge pack where your goal is to survive an extremely hostile world (lots of new and aggressive monster spawns, even in daylight) and eventually get strong enough to work your way through defeating various bosses. I eventually got tired of this one before beating all of them, but did make it fairly far.
Project Ozone 2: Also a challenge pack, though not as hostile (just the occasional blood moon) and with more intermixing between the mods. Did almost all of the quests in it aside from killing the Chaos Guardian, which I gave up on after a while.
All The Mods Expert: Anther progression pack with customized, more-difficult recipes where it takes quite a bit of effort just to get to the basic sets of machines like Ender IO furnaces and grinders. No real end goal to it, so I stopped after I had a base where most processing was almost fully automated.
There are a few other packs I’m tempted to try out, like Modern Skyblock 2, Divine Journey, and Forever Stranded, but I think I might be kinda sick of Minecraft, for a little while at least…
I hadn’t played WoW in quite a while, but I wound up buying Legion in the recent Black Friday sale and have been working my way through Pandaria with my shadow priest (with xp disabled once I hit 90 so I don’t overlevel too much), and it’s been fun in that comfortably-scratches-an-old-itch sense, but I’m still feeling kind of unsatisfied overall.
I think that’s more on me than the game, though. For a while now I thought I’d just been temporarily “burned out” on MMOs and would eventually come back to them refreshed and ready to go again, much like other gaming genres at various times, but it just hasn’t happened. I think I just don’t have room in my life anymore for the social and time commitments for raiding and regular grouping, and past that, sure there are some new sights to see and new mechanics to play with here and there, but an awful lot of what’s left is just more bear ass collection and faction grinding.
And I could apply that equally well to Guild Wars 2, LOTRO, EQ2, etc. Sorry MMOs, you were fun while it lasted!
(Wish I’d realized that before buying expansions for some of these that I never even reached. :P )
So another Steam sale has come and gone and I bought a few too many games (as usual) and I haven’t really played many recently, so it’s time to start working through the backlog again…
Infested Planet: I’m not terribly good at RTSes, but this one is more up my alley. You’ve got a squad of soldiers on maps full of enemies and the goal is simple: eliminate them all. The tricky part is that you’ve only got a small handful of soldiers and there are massive numbers of those enemies constantly spawning from hives, so you have to plan out where to strike, proceed aggressively enough to push the enemy back but not so aggressively that you get overrun, protect your flank and bases so the enemy doesn’t take them back, buy the right upgrades for your current goal, etc. Enemy mutations can happen mid-battle so you suddenly have to adapt to something new, rethink your approach, and redeploy your resources. It gives you tons of choice and so far has let me proceed at pretty much my own pace, which I really like.
Super Amazing Wagon Adventure: Remember that old game Oregon Trail? Now imagine it as a scrolling shooter. With unicorn stampedes. And narwhals. And a whole bunch of other random, silly scenarios. It gets repetitive rather quickly, but it was only a buck and it’s great fun while it lasts.
GRID Autosport: A brand-new entry in the GRID series, this one leans more towards ‘serious’ racing. There’s not as much choice or career persistence as in something like Forza, but it’s nice to have a wider variety of racing disciplines (it includes endurance and open wheel races as well as the usual sports cars). I’m terrible at handling the RWD cars so far though; I just keep spinning out… I’d gotten kind of tired of GT6, so this should scratch my racing itch for a while.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons: An adventure game where you control two characters (the brothers) simultaneously, each one on a different analog stick, and many of the puzzles depend on coordinating the two. It’s really short and not very difficult, but it’s very well-done and moving. To say more would be spoilery, but it’s definitely recommended.
