Nothing Wrong With Being A Casual

I very much dislike that point in an online game where it goes from being a fun chaotic mess where skill doesn’t much matter to being held to a strict tiered meta with only a few ways to win and “skill” means being able to properly apply said meta. It is a small peeve that doesn’t come up much, but it can be incredibly frustrating every time it comes up. Also, that fact that it comes up frequently enough for me to consider swearing off all online games says a lot about this as well.

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Horizon Zero Denouement

I finally finished Horizon Zero Dawn. I took my time, doing most of the upgrades, finishing every side quest, doing almost every hunting trial with a complete success, collecting most of the outfits and weapons and all that. It was good, though I’ll be the first to say that though the text logs are super interesting, they’re a little too hidden away and difficult to find for any but the plot-centric ones to be worth getting. I thought I did a pretty good job of looking, but I definitely did not, seeing as I found maybe a third of the non-plot data logs. I could look up a guide and hunt them all down, but that just does not feel worth it when I could move on to other games, like playing Ghost of Tsushima again or playing The Witcher 3 for the first time (it was on sale!).

All said and done, it was worth playing. I had a good time, enjoyed most of the gameplay, and only got bored three times. And it wasn’t game-terminal boredom, just session-terminal. I was able to take a day or two off of hunting for raccoon pelts and bellowback hearts before returning to the game, refreshed and ready to hunt again.

While there were definitely some difficult parts early on, the availability of arms and gear meant that by the time I hit level thirty, fights weren’t a challenge anymore. It was only ever a question of how much time and how many resources it would take to finish it. The only times I died is when I fucked up a hunting trial and decided it was easier to just die since I spent too many resource to just try again. I even successfully killed a giant t-rex monster robot called a Thunderjaw way earlier than I should have been able to by cheap-shotting it with fire arrows from behind a rock it couldn’t path its way around. It took, like, fifteen minutes, but I brought it down.

The narrative was worth binging, though, so I’m glad I largely ignored it until I was mostly finished exploring and sidequesting through an area. It’s not that it wasn’t memorable, but that it had a degree of urgency to it that was difficult to ignore most of the time. While the robotic movements and painfully awkward expressions of the characters in cutscenes was difficult to watch, the plot itself was enough to carry me along. It twisted in not entirely surprising ways, but it gave me villains to hate, assholes to yell about, causes to believe in, and a twist I didn’t expect. I always thought it was going to be a global warming/environmental thing that wrecked the world, but that wasn’t it. Turns out that problem was solved. It was something else that revolved around the hubris of humankind that ultimately did us in.

That being said, I felt like there wasn’t enough plot. It felt like maybe ten hours of plot stretched into sixty hours of game by refusing you the information you want until near to the end, at which point it just dumps it all on you at once. There were a couple places where the protagonist, Aloy, interrogates another character about some big plot element (usually about a character) that is just a bunch of question prompts, the option to bail out of this massive dialogue tree, and an NPC just word-vomiting. It felt kinda of stilted, to have it all dumped out at these points. I’d have preferred never knowing to this kind of expository dumping.

While I’m super excited for the next game, and very interested in what might be going on in this next segment, I do feel a little restless. The final conclusion to the game wasn’t terribly satisfactory. Not merely because it was a setup for a sequel (as far as sequel bait goes, this was relatively mild), but because it just felt sort of abrupt. We’re chasing this thing down, fighting to save the world, and then we beat the big bad and it’s just over. No wrap up, no denouement, just a final cutscene to set up the next game. I know that unresolved plot is the key to a new story and that I literally just wrote a post about wonder and the space between certainties, but I don’t like it when it feels like those things were created by cutting holes in something.

I would definitely recommend the game and this is one gripe in an otherwise wonderful distraction and experience, but it is pretty heavily on my mind as I reflect on the conclusion to the game. There was just a world demanding so much of Aloy, a moment of victory, and then a lead-in to the next plot. Seriously, it just feels like they clipped the actual denouement out of the game. It’s a frustrating end to a lovely game.

Another Rant About Beta Testing Video Games

As I’ve been trying to make my job less mentally taxing and find ways to reinvest myself in the work I’m doing that actually pays bills, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to test software and what it means to play video games in beta or early access. I’m not going to go on another full rant about it, not so soon after the last one, anyway, but given how much of my life is given to testing software and how much is given to video games, it’s difficult to avoid considering the place those two things intersect.

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I Never Wrote About Valheim

I have been updating my blog for two months and eleven days. A more merciful schedule means that I have posted sixty-one times in those seventy-two days. Things have progressed to the point where I no longer feel like this is something I need to do every day. This isn’t a task to fulfill, though writing and editing are on my daily to-do lists, but so is making my bed, washing my masks, and driving to work. Updating constantly, unless I need a break (and I guess I’m just taking Sundays off, since that is the pattern that seems to be emerging), no longer takes up psychic space.

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This One’s a Mulligan

I want to write about interesting stuff. Fun games I’ve played, cool D&D moments, problems I’ve overcome, things I’m working through, etc. The problem is, my life is kinda stagnating right now (or at least it sure feels like it!) since the only thing I’m really doing is listening through all of Friends At The Table and playing video games. Few of my D&D games have actually occurred lately and not much major has happened in any of them. The only interesting parts of them I could mention are things that I shouldn’t mention because some of my players might read this blog. I can’t reveal too many details here until after they’re no longer relevant. And all I have to say about Friends At The Table right now is that it is absolutely lovely, some of the best storytelling I’ve ever heard, and y’all should be listening to it if you like Actual Play experiences.

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I’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 6

This time, I’m not as sad as I am tired. I got my teeth fixed up the day before writing this, after over a year of problems that are (maybe) finally resolved, and I made myself a nice dinner of food I’d been avoiding because of the chewing involved. And promptly gave myself food poisoning. A saga fit for a sitcom, truly. It kept me up late into the night and I’ve spent the day as a largely useless lump doing his best to keep up with the world around him, so let’s talk about something I could almost literally write about in my sleep: the music of the Legend of Zelda franchise.

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We All Float On A Raft

I’ve recently started playing Raft again. The original crew I got into the game with no longer plays it, and it’s not exactly fun to play alone once you’ve progressed through most of the plot (or even as you’re progressing through the plot, given that fighting a bear alone sucks). Recently, though, I managed to convince some friends to give the game a shot and while the tedium of early survival sure hit hard, it was fun to hang out with my friends and play a cooperative game.

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It Was Worth It, Just To Pet The Foxes

So, there was this game, yeah? Ghost of Tsushima? Seemed pretty neat, cause you could ride around, explore, fight people with swords, and sneak around killing people. Lotta people kept saying it was a “Souls-Like” and that kinda pushed me away ’cause I dislike Souls-Likes. Wow, you rolled away from damage and were invicible for two frames and then got curb-stomped by some random mook during your fifty recovery frames because who gives a shit about fun when you can prove to the world that you’re a real badass by punishing yourself via video game? Just not my scene, ya know?

But then I learned you could pet the foxes.

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Dawn of the Second Play

After over three years, I’ve finally returned to Horizon Zero Dawn. I bought it back in 2018, started playing it, and then stopped because of some overly critical comparisons to Breath of the Wild (which I had just finished replaying) and a significant frustration that it LOOKED like I could climb anywhere if I did it right, but the game wouldn’t really let me do that. I never really got back to it because one of my roommates played through it and I dislike playing anything that he’s played where he can watch because he is terrible at not spoiling things. Just the worst. He makes a lot of comments and they’re all revealing rather than clever, plus he has very particular opinions about plotting and world building that I don’t necessarily agree with.

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