Video Gaming

The Return of Pokémon Violet: It’s Shiny Time

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After several delays due to life chaos and the general distraction of other video games, I’ve begun playing through the first chunk of Pokémon Scarlet/Violet DLC. It felt a little odd, returning to the game for the first time in several months. I’ve kept the software updated and I’ve gone back into the game once or twice since I finished playing last winter, but never for more than a couple minutes. I don’t think I even saved either time, since I was mostly going in to check something. I’d avoided it for so long because there’d been a lot of reports of save file corruption due to one of the late winter or early spring updates and I didn’t want to risk my complete Pokédex. I figured that, until Pokémon Home was available, it just wasn’t worth the risk. Then Pokémon Home came out and I still didn’t play. Normally, I’d have restarted it and played through the game again that instant, but I have been busy this summer (to put it simply), so it fell to the bottom of my list until I remembered the first of two DLC segments was releasing sometime soon. After that, it was mostly just a timing thing and feeling uncertain about whether or not I was up for more Pokémon. I was in the middle of a wave of depression, so it was difficult to start doing anything new. Once I did, though, I was glad I went back.

It was easy to forget given how much stuff has happened since it came out, but I think this Pokémon game was the most fun I’ve ever had playing an entry in the franchise. I mean, sure, it was incredibly buggy and had enormous performance issues, but it was the first entry in the franchise that I could play with my friends. Some of my best memories from the horrible period that was the start of last winter involve getting together with my friends to play together, do some raids, or even just hang out in voice chat while we all played by ourselves. I think the game would have benefited from a few more months of work of course, but the people making the games have shown that each thing they do is part of a cumulative effort to improve the franchise as a whole, so I remain hopeful that the next game will have everything Scarlet and Violet did, but better. I mean, its not like they’re going to be backsliding or somehow releasing a worse game than the last one. Sure, the games may not have lived up to everyone’s expectations, but they’re still better games than the previous iteration. I mean, hell, people give Sword and Shield a lot of guff, but at least you didn’t have to be taught how to catch Pokémon if you’d already caught one and it was SO much better than the hours-long intro of Sun and Moon.

All the company really needs to do is stop redoing all the Pokémon models every release or two and focus on other work. There’s too many Pokémon for that shit. I know a lot of people didn’t like this game and while I absolutely understand the frustration they’re voicing, I can’t help but think that, laggy moments aside, it runs better than most BioWare games I’ve played right at release. Sure, it would have been better if they’d focused on optimizing the game for the Switch’s admittedly limited hardware, but it’s still not that bad, compared to the general state of the video game industry. It actually delivered on the promises it made, even if did so at a subpar framerate. I’m not saying we shouldn’t voice our opinions or attempt to hold the company to account for what seems like a product they rushed to the market (likely against the wishes of the people actually making the game), I just don’t think it’s worth hating the game over. I mean, it would bug the hell out of me to have worked on a piece of software that was this full of visible issues when it got to customers, but I also know that sometimes your schedule says “release” and you’ve already done everything you could to suggest (or demand) that the product should be delayed for quality reasons, so you can only sit by and watch a minor disaster unfold (save those emails, everyone, because it can be really helpful to show you noted all those issues months ago when someone comes knocking on your door to find out how, as the bastion of quality, test let something this poorly performing get past them).

I haven’t gotten very far into the DLC since, true to form, I stopped following the plot and ran as far as I could in the opposite direction. There’s tons of new Pokémon to catch and I have to catch ’em. Which has worked out pretty well for me, all things considered, since I’ve caught three new shiny Pokémon in the three evenings I’ve spent playing the game [predictably, my rate of catching shinies has dropped off since I wrote this]. I caught two the first night (a shiny Poochyena literally walked up to me within a minute of being able to control my character in the new area we went to) and one on my most recent night. All completely random shiny spawns. Just wandering around the world for me to find. Which is funny, since I’ve tried to go shiny hunting before, when some of my favorite Pokémon were showing up in swarms, but I’ve never managed to get a shiny one during those times, despite how much I’d shifted the odds in my favor. I literally spent four hours shiny farming a Vaporean outbreak and had nothing to show for it, despite encountering enough Vaporean that I should have seen at least four shinies if the statistics I’d looked up held true. It’s been a bit frustrating, to see all my friends have a great deal of success with shiny hunting but be unable to get lucky even once when I’ve gone looking.

Every shiny I’ve ever caught, outside of plot shinies, has been the result of completely random chance. I’ll admit that Violet has been pretty good for shinies, but three of the four I’ve found were found just recently, in the DLC, and this is not exactly representative of my experience as a whole. Outside of Pokémon go and the aforementioned plot shinies, I’ve averaged maybe one per generation, and that’s even counting Pokémon Legends: Arceus (my previous record-holder for most shiny Pokémon caught in a single game). Still, Violet is a lot of fun to play. I miss the days when my friends and I played together, but it has been a long year and a lot has changed since then. Half the people I played with back then are no longer in my life (all thanks to the wizarding world bullshit of February), so it’s not like I could recreate that experience. Now, all I can do is hope that I make new friends who are just as into Pokémon as I am and that the ones I’m still friends with are still up for playing it even though I’m a month late to the party. Time will tell, I’m sure, but I will continue regardless. Pokémon used to be a solo experience for me and it will be fine if it goes back to being that again.

Venturing Back Into Sanctuary For Seasonal Updates in Diablo IV

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Over the weekend, I played a bit over twenty hours of Diablo IV in a period of almost thirty hours. My friends and I, the people I played the game with during the closed beta last Spring and who I started to play with when the game fully released over the summer, have been too busy to play much, with each other or alone. Since this was the final weekend of Season 1, when I suggested we do something, my friend (the one who works on the game) suggested we try to get through as much of the seasonal content as we could. I said I was up for it and we launched into it once we had all finished with work and eaten dinner, at which point we realized I had not cleared the campaign on any of my characters. I was ready to tell them to go on without me for now, but they opted to pile into the campaign behind me and the three of us cleared the whole thing in about five or six hours. It was honestly impressive, how quickly we blasted through it (especially since they could use their horses to ride places and I could just teleport to them, which helped cut down on a lot of running around until I got a horse of my own), even with taking the time to watch the cutscenes. I still missed some nuance here or there, I’m sure, but it was a far more complete version of the story than I’m used to getting from my experience of being powerleveled through Diablo III. I really don’t feel like I missed much in Diablo IV (other than the hundreds of side quests, of course) and while I’m sure some of the story will fade in time, I actually have a pretty clear understanding of what was going on and why it was going. Conversely, I barely remember the story of Diablo III and I’m not sure I ever really understood what was going on in that game other than “angels and devils bad, fight them so they stay away.”

It took a lot longer to level up a new character in D4 than it did in D3. I have vague, hazy memories of trying to avoid dying as my more powerful friends ran me through one nightmarish dungeon after another in D3. It was always tricky to stay close enough to get the XP I needed for my level count leap upward but not so close than I’d get caught in the crossfire or aggro some enemies. What I remember more is feeling like this was the video game equivalent of eating my steamed mixed vegetables before I could have any casserole. Sure, it was nice to be at the table with my friends, but I don’t really remember enjoying the meal much. There was no sense of accomplishment from hitting the level cap and starting to gain paragon levels. Gear meant nothing since it was constantly being thrown aside for something better. I never once altered the cosmetics of my character since it didn’t matter what I did so long as I was there and mashing buttons. There was no strategy to the tier of play I ever got to and little I ever did seemed to make a difference in what happened on my screen. Everyone murdered a bunch of enemies, everyone got big numbers, and everyone got a cut of the loot.

In D4, though, I actually feel like I accomplished something special when my friends and I managed to get my brand new season character from level four to level forty-five in just over twelve hours. Sure, we didn’t make a huge dent in the seasonal stuff, but it was still impressive how we managed to get strong enough to handle a helltide even if I was about fifteen levels too weak for it still by the end of thirty hours of gaming. It was a great place to get experience, though, since I got my last five levels in the hour that we participated in the helltide. If we’d been doing it at a time other than half-past midnight, I might have even gotten to access some of those cool chests since I wouldn’t be making foolish, exhausted mistakes that got me killed. I mean, I was also playing the party’s tank so I was always in the thick of it and that meant that, when we were doing high-tier stuff (like the capstone dungeon and the helltide), I was going to be dying a bunch anyway since I was the lowest-leveled character in the party. We still managed to get through it all alright, though there were a lot of close calls (which felt like a real accomplishment, given how underleveled we all were for the capstone dungeon).

I’m excited to launch into the next season (which will have already started by the time you’re reading this). I will probably try to play the game by myself a bit more than I did during season 1 [I’ve already played it twice by myself, which is double the number of times I played Season 1 by myself] so I can work on getting my map completed, but I expect to still be mostly playing it with my friends. Unless there’s a new Baldur’s Gate 3 style single-player game to drag me away from Diablo, I expect I’ll actually be able to stick to my plans of playing it on regular rotation. I would really like to avoid a repeat of last weekend, since I absolutely do not have it in me to have another weekend as chaotic and sleep-schedule-destroying as this past one.

I know D4 doesn’t really have the incredibly intense loop of leveling and loot of Diablo III, but I think the promises of what changes are coming to the game show that the people making it are paying attention to what their players want and are working on making Diablo IV the excellent game I think we all know it can become over time. After all, it took several years for Diablo III to become the game people loved and even then they were complaining about “missing” classes the entire time I was playing it. Anyone trying to tell you that IV is worse than III is either stuck in nostalgia or just wants to be mad about something. It is different, for sure, but not worse. Considering it’s barely a year old and most people are comparing it to a game that was over eleven years old (and supported via constant improvements and new seasonal content for all of the later years of that period), I think people are just being pissy. I mean, if they wanted Diablo IV to be the same thing as Diablo III, then they never would have stopped playing D3 no matter what D4 turned out to be. Which, you know, is pretty much what happened with those folks.

Anyway, I’m having a good time and I have no plans to stop any time soon. I will freely admit to a little bias since my adopted family sister-in-law works on it and I will always show up to support the endeavors of the people I care about as long as I can do so without sacrificing myself but, as I told said friend, I was going to be playing this game anyway. Diablo is the only game like this (adventure looter or whatever they’re calling the genre these days) that I actually enjoy, but I do genuinely enjoy it. It can be a bit overwhelming at times due to all the action and violence, but it really is an enjoyable experience since it’s so much less fiddly than other similar games. Sure, I can look up a build that is guaranteed to work for any similar game, but I can also do a bit of freestyling or experimentation in D4 and still enjoy my experience as long as I’m taking care to maintain a cohesive build. It’s so much simpler than the absolute mess and chaos of the similar game my friends tried to get me into when they’d gotten tired of D3 and craved that kind of gameplay. I really did not enjoy Path of Exile. It was far too finicky and messy for my preferences and the experience playing through the story was not just boring and largely unintelligible, but also incredibly time-consuming. D4 is so much more fun to play that I’m only ever tracking the hours in retrospect and I do that for literally everything I do.

Baldur’s Gate 3 On The PS5 Has Awoken Something In Me That I’d Long Forgotten

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Over the course of the last couple years, I’ve noticed I have a tendency to write a “My Final Thoughts On Video Game” blog post once I finish a video game. Pretty much every game I’ve played and written about in more than one post falls into this pattern. Except for Baldur’s Gate 3, which is probably good because this is the sixth time I’ve written about the game since it was fully released in early August and I have no doubts in my mind that I will write about it again. Today, I’m condensing another month of playtime into a single post because I not only returned to the game much sooner than I exepected (likely because it is a more manageable investment of my time to play it on my PS5 than on my PC since I can more easily kick myself off my couch than I can kick myself out of my desk chair), but I’ve moved from playing a single file to playing through several at once. It is a significant depature from my gaming habits with games of this size and complexity, though I’ll admit that this falls more closely in line with how I used to play games back in college and high school. What is most noteworthy to me about all this is the last time I played a large RPG with significant story variability on a console was in college. I’ve played every major RPG (and any other game with a story that is altered by player choices or moral alignment) on my PC since 2012 and don’t know if I’ll ever going to go back to that now that I’ve broken away from it.

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Pokémon Going, Going, Gone… Well, Eventually Gone.

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One of the oddest parts of being an ex-Pokémon Go player is that I still have the app installed on my phone. Despite not having actively played it in years and frequently running into space issues on my phone, I have not yet removed the app. As it turns out, moving Pokémon from Pokémon Go to Pokémon Home is an incredibly slow, arduous process given that I’d collected over a thousand Pokémon by the time I stopped playing, many of them shiny, legendary, or incredibly powerful. In order to transfer Pokémon between the two apps, I have to use a limited resource in Pokémon Go, which burns up extra quickly if the Pokémon being moved are legendary, incredibly rare, or shiny. You can, of course, buy more energy to transfer Pokémon if that’s something you really want, but you could also just wait a week for your energy bar to be refilled again. Or just transfer a few every day. Whatever you prefer. After all, they wouldn’t just prevent you from using a long-advertised feature of the app, would they? They’d just put any means of it being made convenient behind a money wall.

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I’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 22

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It has been almost three months since I wrote the last entry in this series. I thought I’d probably hold off on more entries in this series until I’d spent more time in Tears of the Kingdom, but I’ve yet to have a reason to return to that entry in the franchise. All of my video game time has been spent on new games (or at least new to me, since Ni No Kuni is absolutely NOT a new game), so I haven’t felt much call to return to any old games, other than the sort of on-going repitition of playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (though I’d argue that doing alternate storylines isn’t exactly the same thing) and a desire to do a New Game + of Chained Echoes because I still don’t have anyone to talk to about that game. There isn’t as much beckoning replayability in Tears of the Kingdom as there was in Breath of the Wild. BotW had DLC already planned for it, that you could pre-purchase the day the game came out, after all. It has now been four months since TotK came out and there’s no word on DLC other than Nintendo’s usual “we have no plans at this time” statement. Which, you know, feels like it is misleading a lot of the time, but I’ll admit that this feeling might be a bit misdirected because Nintendo probably doesn’t get asked about unannounced DLC for small games that are unlikely to have it. They probably only get questioned on big games that don’t have DLC already announced, which feels like an incredibly skewed data pool to be used as the basis for drawing any kind of conclusions. So who knows what there will be, if anything, for TotK in the future, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

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Even A Fun Nintendo Direct Couldn’t Break Through My Exhaustion This Week

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We had another Nintendo Direct recently. I was hoping for news about any potential Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom DLC, but I wasn’t expecting any. The current official word on that front is that Nintendo has no plans to release any DLC and while we’ve been misled in the past (and I hope we’re being misled now), I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no DLC coming. After all, the entirety of Tears of the Kingdom was founded as a bunch of ideas for DLCs for Breath of the Wild, so it would be a bit recursive to start getting DLC for what was simply too big, complex, and complete to be a mere DLC add-on to another game. Plus, the DLC was basically announced from the get-go for BotW and there was nothing at all announced for TotK, so some reservation seemed wise (I’d be happy if we only got a Master Mode, so even my hopes for any DLC are pretty tame). Other than that unlikely reveal or the eventual announcement of the next entry in the Legend of Zelda franchise (which I’d be surprised to see so soon after TotK’s release), I wasn’t really expecting there’d be much for me. All the things I’ve been anticipating either had release dates from previous announcements, had come out already, or where just for different platforms, so I kept my expectations low in defense against the likelihood that there’d be anything of particular interest for me.

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I Finally Finished Baldur’s Gate 3

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It took over 130 hours, but I did it. I beat Baldur’s Gate 3. I finished every sidequest, explored every map, fought almost every enemy (there’s some parts near the end where fighting every enemy will get you killed because there’s no end to the number of enemies that will appear to fight you), and finally brought an end to my Dark Urge character’s story. Shadowheart and my character were in a committed, monogamous relationship, my character had denied their Dark Urge so hard it got yote from their body, and everyone lived. I want to append “happily ever after” to that last statement, but I’m pretty sure that Lae’zel is either going to get herself killed or attempt to conquer the Material Plane. Also, while Karlach lived, the jury is out on whether or not she gets to be happy (her ending cinematic was the only one that felt particularly fulfilling, I’ll admit, since all the others felt kind of just “over”). I fought hard to bring what seemed like the best end to the story I began on August third, exactly a month and a day later, and I’m pretty sure it all played out as well as I could have hoped. I mean. as well as I could have hoped given the circumstances. Everyone grew a little bit, no one became an evil megalomaniac, and we all saved the day.

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There Are Too Many Mechanics In My Baldur’s Gate 3 Storytime

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I finally passed one hundred hours in my save file of Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m really not sure how much time I’d have logged to the game if I could somehow account for the lost progress due to crashes or the hours lost to reverting back a couple or more save files because a choice without sufficient context was going to ruin my experience with the game. I don’t mind reverting in these cases, given how what sometimes feels like a flippant or jokey answer in a dialogue tree can wind up being taken very seriously and sometimes there’s a mismatch between what the game suggests will happen and what actually happens (which seems to be cranked up to eleven as a Dark Urge character). Overall though, as I’ve looked back at my one hundred recorded hours, I realized that a huge amount of that time was spent incredibly focused on the mechanical aspects of the game rather than the roleplaying and inter-character aspects of it. Sure, the ratio is probably much more balanced than most similar games I’ve played, but it feels odd at first blush to realized that it is closer to a standard video game RPG than to my experiences with the tabletop rolepalying game this CRPG was inspired by. As I’ve thought about it more, especially as I played last night, I noticed that, despite only doing one major fight last night, I spent about eighty percent of my play time focused entirely on mechanics. A couple percent of the remainder goes to puzzle solving and logistics and then the rest goes to watching dialogue play out and doing my best to roleplay my player character.

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Finally Playing A Pair Of Legend of Zelda Games In Sequence

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In one of the latest updates to the perks provided by having a Nintendo Online subscription, the Legend of Zelda games Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons were added to the Game Boy Color section. As a child, I was obsessed with the dual nature of these games. They’d blown my mind by introducing the idea of transferring save data between them by putting in specially generated passcodes or by using a link cable when you started a new game. I was not quite ten when they came out and it had literlly never occurred to me that you might be able to bring something from one game into another one. While a soft continuity (some aspects of a game carrying forward into another in a way that subtly influences your experience) are still fairly common, I don’t know if I’ve played another game that is quite so drastically influenced by including data from another. Technically speaking, I’ve never played any game that is this drastically influenced because while I’ve played both games, I was never able to play them sequentially.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 Is Missing Something

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I have continued to put a ridiculous number of hours into Baldur’s Gate 3. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game this intensely and consistently. I mean, I typically don’t play games that require a great deal of focus and personal investment on work nights, since I know they tend to make me ignore the passage of time, but I’ve not only started doing that, I’ve been doing it consistently enough to go from staying up until the wee hours of the morning to stopping at a reasonable time. Turns out two straight weeks of obscenely little sleep thanks to a combination of Baldur’s Gate 3 and stress will shake me out of my worst sleep habits. I’ve managed to stop playing between eleven and twelve at night for four nights in a row as of writing this, and only once squeaked in under that deadline solely due to the game crashing as I started “one more thing”ing myself into what might have wound up being the wee hours. Still! I’m counting this as a win, if only because I’m still enjoying myself and am now clear-headed during my work days (even if I’m still recovering from a severe sleep deficit and struggling to stay away right after I eat lunch). Baldur’s Gate 3 really has a lot going for it and I really don’t have much of anything negative to say about my play experience in the one hundred played hours I’ve accrued on my save file.

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