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World of Warcraft: WoW, There’s a Lot to Catch up on!

Chris Leave a comment

My roommate convinced me to start playing World of Warcraft several months ago. After a one-month subscription and about thirty levels of playing, I set it aside and never really planned to play again. Recently, as he was preparing for the Expansion that just came out, he discovered that a few of our friends also played and so used my main weakness against me. I’ve got up to four other people who will play with me, now, so there’s not reason for me to worry about letting my money go to waste. Seeing that he was correct and that the new expansion looked like fun, I decided to follow most of my friends from our other online games to WoW.

My initial reactions, this time around, were about the same as last time. The game seems pretty interesting, but it feels way more invested in giving older players something to do than in bringing new players to the game in a way that is easy to learn. If, like me, you wind up purchasing an expansion and using the level-up on a character so you can actually participate when the new content comes out, you better hope you can learn things quickly because you’re otherwise going to drown in the mechanics of target managements, cooldown abilities (powerful abilities that can only be used once every so often, as determined by the ability itself and possibly some of your stats), and casted abilities (can be instantaneous, but often require your character to spend time preparing to use the ability before it goes off), movement in combat, how everything works, and what the hell is going on while you’re trying to remember which button you bound your fireball spell to after you finally bought a mouse with extra buttons that you can barely reach because people apparently don’t believe that MMO players might have large hands. I’m definitely not still annoyed about that last one. Not at all.

That being said, once I was finished having my mind exploded by all the stuff I had to track, found a key-binding I could work with, and started getting to the point where I could watch the battle instead of staring at my abilities constantly, it was actually a lot of fun. The quests are a little hard to follow and there’s so much going on in the world at large that it feels almost pointless to really dig into any of them, so I am pretty much only playing as a social video game. Which is a lot like social drinking. You’d never have more than maybe a beer on your own (do a daily quest) but you’ve got no problem cracking open a few cold ones when you’re with your friends or attending an event (doing quest lines and raiding dungeons). For WoW, that’s what I’d call myself: a social gamer. I don’t think I’ll ever play it by myself and not just because I’m worried I’ll get addicted. I just have other stuff I’d rather do with personal time than play WoW since I can do that with social time.

As far as I can tell, the game is basically a giant grinding machine with little bits of story thrown in every year or so in order to confuse new players who just want to understand what’s going on in the world when their friends pull them into it. That being said, WoW has a wide range of lore for people to peruse. There are books, comics, promotional videos, in-game cinematics, the dialogue from the quests you do, and then history brought in from other games. Most of the big, named characters have long, complex backstories that add nuance to their actions that isn’t really something you can do in a game that doesn’t have the actual history that WoW does. Because we know who everyone is and how they’ve acted in the past, we can generally see how they’ll react to something going on in the current story. One of the most popular parts of the pre-release for a new WoW expansion is going on message boards and theorizing about the plot or who is going to do what based on whatever little tidbit has been recently released to the public. I don’t really have the patience for it, but I’m still pretty new to the world. I have literally done the same stuff about the Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss (which are amazing books you should read), so I wouldn’t dream of judging or looking down on anyone who enjoys postulating theories for WoW. It just feels like so much more work to get caught up to speed because the Kingkiller Chronicles is two books and WoW is a bunch of games, books, comics, etc that need to be analyzed if I’m going to participate in dissecting nuance.

As far as my current experience? Well, I’ll admit I’m a little frustrated by the number of high-level Alliance players corpse-camping in the lower-level Horde area and the fact that apparently none of the powerful Horde NPCs will lift a finger to attack Alliance players that are camping out in our base. It was funny to get absolutely wrecked by two people–killed so quickly and effectively that I didn’t have the chance to do anything in response to their attacks–the first couple times, it has since gotten rather frustrating since I can’t kill them (or even effectively fight back) and they’re preventing me from completing quests. A bunch of Horde players showed up to clear them out at one point, but they apparently got bored and decided to leave the area to the Alliance players once again. So that, plus constantly getting spammed with invitations to join guilds, requests to party up with random strangers, and some dude trying to sell some dumb looking mount for three million gold,  means I’m pretty ready to just turn off all public chat and interaction with unknown players. I dislike the spam and I don’t want to make friends with random people who just want me for my DPS.

Thankfully, I’m getting better at the game. I’m not always so stunned by it, and I’m starting to remember to use my abilities in the correct order and at the correct times. The only mistakes I made today are a result of not looking at my keyboard instead of the fight like I used to. If I can mark the keys a bit or get a new keyboard (it’s about that time, since my mouse already died last week) that has some sort of tactile feedback for each key, I will be in really good shape. I didn’t see myself getting into this game as much as I have and I definitely struggled at first, but I feel like I’m finally starting to get a handle on it.

 

Octopath Traveler Was Pretty Alright, I Guess

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So, I’m willing to admit that a certain amount of my “underwhelmed” reaction to this game is because it was hyped so much by friends and the few advertisements I saw. That being said, the game I was sold via recommendations and the advertisements does not, at all, feel like the game I actually bought. The game I was promised had tons of choices and all this variation and wonder and the game I got has fun battle mechanics and a rather stunted plot with little variety available to me. Because, if I’m being honest, the plot is kinda boring, even for a JRPG. Honestly, I’m still not even sure what the plot is beyond individual quest lines that have nothing tying them together.

Your character has a skill. They use the skill to complete a task in order to resolve a conflict that has interrupted their routine. They are prompted by some minor portion of their personality to pursue some greater task elsewhere. You move on to the next town. You repeat the whole saga for a new character. They join your party. You continue until you get to another portion of one character’s mission and then stuff happens that really doesn’t differ.

For how convoluted the skill crap is, in terms of actually completing the side quests, there really isn’t a whole lot of explanation. If you’re playing through this, I recommend ignoring the side quests until you’ve unlocked all of the characters so you understand what all the abilities are and can figure out how the shit you’re supposed to get fresh ingredients for some whiny-ass baker who can’t go talk to the shop keeper 50 pixels away from him. I mean, c’mon. Literally hiding them all behind these stupid skills that, for the most part, do nothing but force you to tap a bunch of buttons on every character who has the ability to talk? That’s super frustrating!

And don’t even get me started on how many unnecessary clicks there are in this game? Want to sell something you only have one of? First you have to select it, then you have to select the quantity, then you have to push up to say you want to sell it and then you have to tap the “A” button again to actually sell it. This mechanic is present EVERY TIME you have options, most of which mean nothing beyond choosing yes or no on selling something or saying if you’re reading to move on in the dumb little plot bits. Also, while I’m complaining, the writing is super cliché. There’s no real depth to the characters and they’re about as interesting as a cardboard cutout.

Now, all that being said, the game is still kind of fun. The battle mechanics are fun, the powers are interesting, and it’s got a rather smooth grind (in this case, grinding is the act of completing repetitive tasks in order to level up characters or gear in a game) without being entirely mindless. It’s basically a step up from Final Fantasy (auto-attack to grind and win), so about the same as Pokemon. You need to use the weaknesses of the enemies in order to gain an advantage over them, dealing more damage and preventing them from acting for a turn or two. Some enemies are weak to things you won’t have in your party, so it’s usually best to make sure you have a wide range of magic abilities and physical attacks so you can handle whatever comes your way. There’s a lot of grinding that happens early on, unfortunately, because all of the areas around the towns, the main areas you travel through as you pick up the characters, are really low-leveled. It quickly became pointless to fight those battles and it was frustrating to continuously have to run or to have to remember to equip a character’s special skill that lowered the chance of a random encounter (which I didn’t want in higher leveled areas because those areas were worth grinding in).

What makes the game the most fun for me is how easy it is to pick up and put down. There’s a bit of a long loading time when you start up the game, but that only happens whenever you fully exit the game. On a Switch, the only platform that supports it right now, that’s incredibly easy to avoid. I haven’t left the game in a week, despite only playing for half a dozen hours in that time. It’s a great unwinding game because it requires little input from me beyond actually pressing buttons and, if you get enough distance, the cardboard cut-out quality of the characters can actually be quite amusing. Hell, one of them seems like something straight out of a bad anime and I laughed my butt off as his super-serious and grandiose voice actor butchered his way through the lines. I don’t know if they just didn’t give the voice actors the context of their lines or what, but a lot of the emotive responses from this guy seemed a little out of place.

Aside from gameplay, the best feature is the beautiful pixel art of the game. It is a callback to old 16 bit games, but only in artistic style. The trees blow in the wind, the waves shift the water along the short, and there’s a level of detail to the environment that older games could only dream of. You move in two dimensions the entire game, but the backdrop and scrolling as you move around give an amazing approximation of three dimensions. The sound design is also impeccable. The music fits each scene perfectly and even the sort of off-key voice acting doesn’t negatively impact that.

Fun as it can be, I definitely understand that this kind of grindy game isn’t really everyone’s cup of tea. It’s barely my cup of tea. With a price point of sixty bucks, I wouldn’t really recommend it. If you can get it on sale for forty or less and want something to eat up some time, then I’d recommend it. There are plenty of hours in the game, they are just grindy hours with small steps in the plot that are so far apart that it seems like they just drop the stories between plot points (which they basically do).

Also, don’t let the demo fool you. Going through the initial arcs of the various characters gets old real fast. Just make a bunch of different profiles on your switch and play the demo once for every character. That way, you can experience most of the game without actually paying for it.

The Overwatch League Finals Approach!

Chris Leave a comment

Tomorrow evening, at 6pm local time, the team I’ve supported since their very first game, the Philadelphia Fusion, are going to be facing off against the London Spitfire in the first of three possible matches for the title of Season 1 champions of the Overwatch League. After an unexpected strong first round and a shocking sweep of the top-rated team in the league in the second round, the Fusion are facing against the next-lowest ranked team in the championship. That’s right. The two lowest seeded teams, Fusion and Spitfire, are facing off in the championship. I’d say it was a surprising turn of events, but such upset are honestly kind of common place in season 1 of the Overwatch League.

Time and time again, the general perception of the best teams, the favorites to win each stage of the season, has been thrown aside as some underdog or another rises up to shake up the top ranks. The only exception to that has been New York, who has sat at the top of the league for the entire season and has made it into the stage finals every time. It got to the point where I stopped watching because there was no longer any consistency. Every match was a giant ball of suspense because almost every team had a surprising victory or record-altering streak of victories. In fact, the only thing about the league that has been consistent is that New York wins a dumbly high number of matches and that the Shanghai Dragons never won a single match. For instance, the initial favorite to carry the league was the Seoul Dynasty. That expectation ended rather abruptly in the first stage and they never even made it into the playoffs. Even my favorite team, the Fusion, couldn’t manage to do more than jog up and down the standings as they won against fearsome foes like New York (they were the first team to actually beat New York) and then lose to some of the lowest ranked teams in the league who have only a handful more victories than the Shanghai Dragons.

It has been an intense and harrowing journey, let me tell you! Sure, the reason we watch sports is because it gets us fired up about something we care about. Suspense is good! We love it when we see our team land a win that could have easily been a loss. But most sports don’t occur with as much frequency as e-sports do and even then we have certain general expectations about our teams performance that help us set our expectations for what we’ll see. No one expects the Browns to go to the Super Bowl and so their fans don’t really feel as beaten down when they eventually lose. In the Overwatch League, a high-performing team can wind up sitting at the bottom of the roster from one stage to another. They can absolutely kick butt against one team and then get absolutely destroyed by another team despite there not being much of a shift strategy. There’s not even a consistency in their wins and losses. Players change all the time as certain people are bench so a new approach can be tried, but that’s still a poor indicator of success or failure. An individual player’s stats don’t even mean that much because they could carry their team to victory on one map and then wind up holding them back on the next one. There are too many factors at play to spot patterns.

I really hope the league gets a little more consistent in the future. And I’m not talking about places in the rankings so much as overall performance. If a team starts rising, they should get to a point where they’re more or less bumping up against similarly skilled teams on the rankings. The best teams should rise to the top and the teams who can’t get it together should sink.

That being said, e-sports are relatively new and it would be kind of foolish to expect the same analytics, predictors, and measures of strength to apply to Overwatch that people would used to measure baseball. I prefer consistency and dependability, but that’s not really the point of video games. Since they’re still so new and rely on every-changing physics, rules, and worlds, any team that can figure out an edge first can get an upper hand against their opponents. Any team can go from the bottom of the rankings to the top because there’s just so much that changes from time to time. Imagine how crazy baseball would get if one team figured out how to double the speed of their runners or how to identify when the pitcher was throwing a slider every single time without fail. That team would probably rise up before people figure out what they were doing an either adopted their skills or found a way to negate them.

I expect that, given time, the Overwatch League will eventually sort itself out. As more teams are added and the e-sport grows, I’m sure it’ll fall into a comfortable groove with reasonable expectations that still allow for surprise upsets and some teams occasionally shifting ranks around. That, or I hope they wind up spacing the matches out so I’m not committing six hours a night, four nights a week to trying to watch them. I wouldn’t have minded as much if they’d done a total of six or even eight matches a week instead of the current twelve. There’s just so much constant suspense and surprise that I can’t really stand it. Even when I watched more closely, I usually just had it on the background as I worked on something else. It’s so exhausting to get caught up in the energy of a match only to have it suddenly reversed when a team that should be winning suddenly loses with no clear reason as to why. As someone who has watched a lot of Overwatch, played a lot of Overwatch, and is really good at finding patterns, I can say that sometimes teams just lose and it isn’t necessarily because they’re performing poorly or their opponents are performing well. That’s usually the reason, but not always. Sometimes, they just do one dumb thing and they lose momentum. Or their tank dives in only to die instantly (literally a thing that used to happen to the Fusion more frequently than I could stand).

I like the way the championship competitions have been organized. Fewer matches a day and often with skips in between the days. I’ve been able to enjoy it a lot more when I don’t have another entire 3 match set, at two hours per match, to watch the next day. I’ve been able to focus more on the strategies the teams have used, what tricks have worked for them and what daring ploys did not. You can really learn a lot if you watch the pros play and know enough to really grasp what they’re doing. I know I do.

Regardless, I’m super excited to watch my team take a shot at the title and million-dollar prize that comes with it. I’d love to see them win after all the hard work they’ve put in to get this far into the championship. If they do, I might finally spend some tokens and get a second Philadelphia Fusion skin in Overwatch. They look kinda gross because they’re a deep, glossy orange, but I gotta show my love for the team that’s come way further than I ever expected them to.

A Date with Destiny

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After several months of delays, flaking, and people doing that thing were they commit to something but understandably have to bail when their mental health, physical health, or life gets in way, I am finally set up to do the raid on Destiny 2. I’ve literally been waiting to do it with this group of people because this group of six is my clan, they’re the people I want to play this game with. I’m not a hardcore gamer, I don’t really care about having a top-tier character or the best loot, and I don’t really enjoy grinding away (repetitively repeating tasks in order to reap the completion rewards as much as possible) in most games, so I was never going to do this with a group of strangers. I like to play video games with my friends, so I’m fine waiting until they’re all ready. Usually. The past 8 months of waiting have been a bit much, though.

It isn’t only Destiny, either. I’m having trouble getting friends together for almost any of the “old” online games. I used to play Overwatch a minimum of twice a week, but now it’s getting rare for me to play it at all during any given week. People have moved on to other games. Heck, I have as well. I spend more time playing Switch games than I do on playing computer games. I had a brief affair with Borderlands 2 again, and I even got to play it with a few of my friends, but that first week of playing it was all we had. We’re back to doing our own things for now.

Most of the time, that’s okay. It’s perfectly natural to go through cycles of spending more time with friends and then less time with friends. The same of true of bigger games without any real end, like Overwatch and Destiny 2. Something will prompt you to return to a game like that and then you’ll play a lot of it until something else captures your attention. If that was all of it, I wouldn’t mind it that much. I’d be quietly waiting for the cycle to come around again with some other game and then I’d dive right back into it with my friends. For the Destiny raid, though, it’s different.

My roommate, the head of our little clan and the center point for the entire group (since I only know half the guys in the group because of him), has been actively trying to organize a raid for months. Our clan has changed members and he’s even gone so far as to get a new person into the game and leveled all the way up JUST so we have a sixth person to do the raid with. And, you know, cause he’s a really nice dude who wants to share his interests with his friends, but also because of the raid thing. He’s found strategy videos for use to watch, shared diagrams and charts on how to navigate the read, done extensive research into the tricks of the raid, helped everyone optimize their characters, come up with a list of the best gear for each class, helped us all get the gear we want to use, and even managed to make the raid sound like a lot of fun despite the amount of work it sounds like from his pile of diagrams, videos, and charts.

And yet here we are, 6 months after the closest we ever came to doing the raid (we had four people online for it and the remaining two flaked last-minute). We’ve got a time set, we’ve got gear picked, we’ve got characters optimized, we’ve got teams picked, and people have actually started watching the guide videos. But only four of us are firm commitments. One has left some wiggle room in his commitment for last minute cancellation and another has committed, but he’ll be coming back from dog-sitting for his girlfriend and, as often happens when people encounter their significant others, he is liable to be distracted. I wouldn’t hold it against either one if they wound up bailing on us in order to go on a date/prepare food for the week or because they wanted to spend some time with their loved one, but I can see my roommate getting more and more frustrated.

Not only have people been flaking out or ignore his attempts to organize raids in the past, but they start asking if we’re ever going to do a raid after all of the dates my roommate set in the survey has passed by with only him and I responding. Neither of us can nag any of the people into responding to the surveys or queries, and no amount of enthusiasm on our parts has been enough to get four other people to commit to a date and time for a raid. It is incredibly frustrating to try to get people organized, have them ignore us, and then have them start complaining that we’ve never done a raid. I can only imagine how much worse it is for my roommate since he actually wants to have a fully optimized character and all the best loot (which is only possible if you grind through the raid at least once a week).

I mean, if I was in his shoes, I’d have lost my temper with this group and just done it on my own, with a bunch of strangers. There’s even a feature in the game for finding a group willing to random players join them for stuff like the raid, so it’d be easy to do, if somewhat time-consuming. He knows I don’t really care and the only other friend who cares would just do it on his own as well, so the only reason he’s still trying to organize us is because we’re his friends and he wants to play with us.

So I’ve cleared my night. I’ve had a couple of quiet conversations about the importance of honoring commitments. I’ve watched the videos and will do so again before the raid. I’ve responded to the messages and reviewed the charts and pictures. I’m ready enough to back up my roommate and be the second leader he’ll need to make sure everyone stays focused, on-task, and working as a team. I’ll be taking an hour or two before our scheduled time to get ready, including making sure my outfit and accessories are appropriate. Honestly, it feels a lot like preparing for a date that’s been a long time coming, minus the emotional turbulence and anxiety since I don’t need to worry about someone liking me.

I don’t think I want to pursue that metaphor too far. I don’t think I’m ready to make any kind of commitment, not while I’m still hung up on Breath of the Wild… And I know Destiny 2 isn’t the kind of game that will settle for an occasional fling. They’d be fun, but we’d both know that I’m mostly wasting both our times if I don’t make a serious commitment. For now, I’m just going to focus on the raid and we’ll see how it goes from there.

This Mario Game Was Super. What an Odyssey.

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I have a bit of a strange history with Super Mario Odyssey. I got it the day it came out, left work early to play it, and spent my entire afternoon and evening playing it, exploring the mechanics and getting invested in the story. Then I set it down for the night and didn’t pick it up again until last month, at which point I played it for an entire weekend before setting it down and not picking it up again until this past weekend. Which I only did because my roommate started playing it and I wanted to grab a few more power moons since I had fifteen minutes to kill.

This game is simultaneously a ton of fun to play but difficult to pick up. Odyssey takes me back to one of my first major gaming memories, when I tried to get all one hundred twenty power stars in Super Mario 64 on my own, but it feels even more rewarding now since there is no real interruption when going from one power moon to the next. In 64, you got brought out of the level after every power star (except for the 100 coin stars), but Odyssey lets you flow from one power moon to the next with only a small “got moon” cut-scene. The only exception is when you’re altering the map as a result of pursuing one of the ongoing plot points (such as causing an upside-down pyramid to rise into the sky, exposing a sinkhole or beating a mini-boss and returning to the level following the storm that was the backdrop for your battle. The fluidity of the gameplay is important because there are power moons EVERYWHERE, with a wide-range of difficulties associated with them. Some or simply sitting on the top of a tower you need to climb, while others are buried behind quizzes and mini-games or secret doors that are only revealed if you notice every tiny little detail or spend your time attacking literally everything. If there was even the relatively short “get sun” cutscene from collecting a Shine Sprite in Super Mario Sunshine after getting each power moon, it’d be a real drag to collect them since your gameplay would constantly be interrupted.

Mario’s moveset has grown again, which is part of what has made this huge variety of difficulties possible. In addition to his classic air-dives, long jumps, spins, wall-jumping, this game introduces a companion, Cappy, a hat-spirit that replaces Mario’s destroyed hat and gives him all kinds of new abilities a whole range of attacks based around throwing Cappy, like a mid-air jump (by throwing Cappy out and then landing on him), and the ability to take over the bodies of various enemies. This lets you do thinks like turn into a T-Rex, a tank, a Hammer Bro, or do crazy things like create a tower of Goombas that stretches into the sky (my current max stack is 20), all of which is often a requirement to find hidden power moons or progress through the level. In addition to these powers, Mario can also roll around (for the first time in a 3D game) if you hold the crouch button while running, which so far seems like a great way to pick up a little extra speed when going down a hill. It’s a bit silly at times, but it can be super convenient despite the difficulty of steering Mario when he’s on a roll.

These abilities, combined with levels designed as somewhat “open-world,” means that it is entirely possibly to string together move-combos that entirely by-pass the mini-games that allow you to access secret areas or let you avoid lots of obstacles by moving over open-air that you probably shouldn’t be able to cross. If you spend any amount of time looking, you can find tons of creative solutions to the puzzles in the games that bypass using the intended mechanics for something either much faster or something incredibly and ridiculously over-complicated. The inventiveness required to get some of the power moons in the earlier levels does an excellent job challenging the player to think outside of the box when it comes to the usual linear approach to collecting power whatevers in a Mario game. It leads the player to consider the wide variety of options available when it comes to moving through space and then, after the second or third level, just starts dropping power moons everywhere and letting you figure out how you want to get them. The range of difficulties in the puzzles also means that less experienced players can find enough power moons to move the story along while still providing challenges to the more experienced players. It also cleverly helps newer or less exacting players find the more difficult moons by incorporating a hint system and a coin-based system to help you figure out the puzzles. With enough time, any player can find all the power moons.

The biggest downside to me, and the sole reason this game isn’t easy for me to pick up and play is that it almost requires you to play with the Switch on the TV and the two JoyCon in your hands. Because of the huge variety of moves available to Mario, there aren’t enough buttons or button combinations to let the player control Mario with button inputs alone. Some of the moves require specific motions to be made with one or both of the JoyCon. These moves can be reproduced using only inputs, but they are almost always incredibly complicated strings of inputs that combine other moves together to produce a move that can be done by simply shaking the JoyCon. They can also be done using the Pro Controller or the Switch in Handheld mode, but they become incredibly clunky (and create a significant risk of accidentally dropping the controller or system) because the JoyCon are meant to move independently. As someone who primarily uses the Switch as a handheld device, I’m super afraid of trying to perform one of the “controller twist” moves and accidentally flinging the Switch at the wall or the ground, so I only play this game when I’m feeling like lounging on my couch, in front of the TV.

That’s pretty much the only fault of the game, though, and is more on Nintendo for, once again, pushing a frustrating gimmick (I mean, most new games for the 3DS don’t even pretend to have a “3D mode” anymore…). I’d definitely recommend this game to everyone if it was easier to play without the JoyCon separated from the Switch, but I’m only going to recommend it to the TV players. The game is fun, but it’s not so fun that I’m willing to play it with a super frustrating control mechanic.

The Return to Overwatch

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I’ve been taking a break from Overwatch for a while. I got to a point where my favorite teammate, my roommate, wasn’t playing very much, so I was mostly playing solo or with other friends. Unfortunately, most of the time, I got placed with people below my skill level or who weren’t trying to play well, and so I got trounced repeatedly. I’d often wind up with the most kills, the most damage-dealt, the most time on the objectives, and the most kills around the objective, four out of five of the measures of individual player achievement in Overwatch, all despite playing a tank character who is supposed to focus on keeping people alive. One or two out of the possible four (the fifth is healing and all the tanks I’m best with don’t do healing) is not a problem, but consistently getting all four is frustrating, especially when we wind up losing because I’m the only person contesting the objectives or trying to coordinate the team.

I’m no savant. I’m not even an amazing player. I’ve got a good grasp of team strategy, character dynamics, and how to figure out people. I have a few skills I’ve polished very well and I’ve got an excellent sense of timing and battle flow. As a shot-caller, I’m pretty good at figuring out where my team needs to be and what we need to be doing. As a tank, I’m good at being where I need to be. Unfortunately, as I’ve said before but with a different take-away, Overwatch is a team game. I can’t win the match on my own. I can do everything right and still lose. I can call every shot with perfection and lead every charge perfectly, but my strategies are doomed to fail if all the people who were behind me when I started peeled away to do who knows what on their, leaving me to get shredded by an enemy team that stuck together.

It can be incredibly frustrating to lose because my teammates either aren’t trying to win (“it’s just Quickplay, quit trying so hard” is a common refrain when I try to communicate with my team) or everyone is trying to play Call of Duty. I don’t might losing if the other team is just better than we are. It can be incredibly frustrating, just like any loss, but at least I know I lost because they were just better or smarter or faster than my team. Losing because my team is a pile of idiots who pick the worst possible characters or refuse to play healers or tanks doesn’t feel good at all.

A common response to this sort of behavior in matches is to just stop caring. Most of my friends don’t really care or can just shut it off when they started to get bummed by dumb Overwatch matches. They’ll lean into whatever dumb thing the rest of the team is doing and laugh as it inevitably collapses. I can enjoy that. Some of the most fun matches I’ve played have been when we did something dumb that would up working in the silliest way possible, or failing in a huge but hilarious way. The thing is, those matches aren’t super fulfilling to me. The matches I enjoy the most, that I get the most from, are the ones where we execute brilliantly timed plays, where the entire team operates in sync, where we manage to just barely scrape a win because we were slightly better or managed to combine our abilities perfectly. Those feel amazing and they’re the reason I play Overwatch.

I want those games because I feel like I’m learning something new or improving myself. I like forward progress and that’s difficult (if not impossible) to get when you can’t actually play at your current skill level. I don’t like re-treading the same ground again and again because I’m being held back.

I’m sure I’ve screwed up matches for other people. I’m not some poor victim of the twists of randomly assigned teammates, I’m also one of the perpetrators. I can get a little tilted (playing aggressively and unwisely because I’m angry) when I get frustrated. I’m good at keeping my cool and playing consistently, but I occasionally mess up horribly because I’ve misread the situation or made a terrible guess at what the enemy team was going to do. I get that most people aren’t doing it maliciously and I’d probably benefit from trying to help other people play well than lamenting that they play terribly, but there was little incentive for people to actually care during most matches or to try to be a team player beyond winning or losing the match (which people don’t always care about).

That might be different now. Recently, Overwatch added an “endorsements” feature. You can endorse allies for sportsmanship, shot calling, or being a good teammate. You can endorse enemies for sportsmanship. If you get endorsed frequently, you get rewards and a little ranking thing next to your name. It also shows what you get endorsed for by coloring each endorsement differently and showing the percentage via color around the endorsement level in your name. Now, players are rewarded for actually working as a team beyond a win or loss. You can also spot when people just get endorsed because people see no drawback to endorsing as many people as possible after a match. If they are heavily endorsed for sportsmanship and very rarely endorsed for anything else, there’s a really good chance their opponents are just auto-endorsing them at the end of matches. If their teammates like them, there should be a higher percentage of “teammate” or “shot calling” endorsements.

I’m cautiously optimistic (like always), so I’m willing to get back into the game. I’ll give constructive leadership and shot calling a try again. I’ll do my best to make my teams the best we can be, try to reward good teamwork with endorsements, and hope positive reinforcement is going to be enough to change my experience with the game. If I can get back to a year ago, when I just loved playing the game whenever I had the time, I’ll be ecstatic. If I can stop feeling frustrated every time I play, I’ll count this as a rousing success. The internet is aglow with praise for the endorsements feature, so maybe it really will mean a shift in the game’s culture.

Returning to the Borderlands

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Borderlands is one of my favorite game series, second to only the Legend of Zelda series. There’s guns, gnarly explosions, the ability to instantly reduce someone to a red mist and chunks if you do enough damage, stupidly high numbers, an incredible cast of hilarious characters, guns with ridiculous effects, weird missions, plenty of jokes, and some incredibly stirring moments. These games, and the second one in particular, have been responsible for some of the strongest emotions I’ve ever felt as a result of a video game, and they did it all by creating an over-the-top and crazy world with an equally over-the-top and crazy cast that are still entirely real and believable. And they say you can’t really tell an interesting story in a first-person shooter.

Since the second one, Borderlands 2, is my favorite, I’m going to focus on that one. When you start a game these days, you can pick one of six playable characters, each with their own unique back stories, class abilities, and role. Since the game has cooperative play for up to four players, each character tends to fall into one of the roles you find in a typical RPG. Axton, the commando, is the party tank. Maya, the siren, is the party cleric. Zero, the number (assassin), is the rogue. Salvador, the Gunzerker, is the blasty mage. Krieg, the psycho, is the barbarian. Gage, the mechromancer, is the off-tank. Each of the characters has three skill trees that allows you to focus them toward one part of their role over another. Axton, my personal favorite, can focus on hit points, regeneration, and not dying; putting out tons of damage, staying mobile, and tactical damage; or creating a turret that is going to be a huge threat to all of your enemies, thereby diverting their attention away from you.

No matter which character you pick, the story stays pretty much the same, aside from a slight variety in the way the NPCs interact with you and what background information you’re given for your character. Handsome Jack, the owner of mega-corporation Hyperion, wants to dig up a vault and unleash the creature within it upon the planet, removing the bandits and people who live on it in order to turn it into what he considers a more peaceful, happy planet. He’s willing to kill anyone he has to in order to do what he thinks is best, constantly blames the player for forcing his hand, and seems to delight in the violence he gets to personally inflict on the people who defy his tyranny. Your character survives a train wreck and is then recruited by the anti-Hyperion resistance in order to strike back against Handsome Jack in an attempt to gain control of the creature inside the hidden vault first, so you can unleash it upon Hyperion instead.

Needless to say, a lot of crazy stuff happens that severely complicates everything. All the while, as you try to sort out the plot and turn in as many side-quests as you can, you’re collecting guns with crazy effects like shooting in bursts of thirteen that, when shot into a wall, create a low-quality rendition of the oldest cave paintings in the world. Or guns that never run out of ammo, guns that generate their own ammo, guns that explode when you attempt to reload them so that you never have to bother with replacing ammo clips, grenades named after classic D&D spells, and automatic sniper rifles that get more accurate the longer you hold the trigger down. Half the fun of the game is seeing what crazy guns you get and what their crazy effects do and, since the guns are all entirely randomized aside from a few important ones, it is incredibly unlucky that you’ll encounter the same gun twice.

As you move through the missions, gaining levels and collecting loot, you get to unlock new powers and abilities, turning your character into a one-person murder machine whose only weakness is one-shot kill attacks like some of the incredibly powerful enemies have and the fact that you sometimes just run out of bullets. The reason Axton is my favorite is because he not only just gets straight boosts to his damage, he also gets incredible health regeneration. He is my ideal character for a solo game because I don’t need to worry about dying as much and can take my time to line up the head-shots that’ll make each fight a breeze. It is incredibly rewarding to watch the huge numbers pop up as I shoot a bandit or bizarre creature in its weak point. There are ways to get higher numbers with other characters, but that’s contingent on luck and the right combination of guns and abilities.

While some missions can be difficult because of the requirements or that the way the game is designed to accommodate both solo play and cooperative play with your friends, the game is also forgiving. Hit boxes for most enemies and weak points are rather larger than they look and there are ways to bypass any amount of aiming deficiency. Shotguns, for one. Grenades, combat abilities, melee attacks, and stubborn refusal to do anything but work on improving your aim until you can nail a head-shot from across the map also work really well. Your best bet, and the most fun way to experience the game in my opinion, is to play with at least one other friend. The cooperative experience only adds to the game, since it makes it a lot easier to just plow through whatever enemies are blocking your way forward, to a degree. There are usually more enemies as a result of extra players by your side, but a friend can help you get back on your feet if you’ve gone down far more easily than if you need to rely on killing an enemy.

If you don’t mind a little gore on occasion and enjoy first-person shooters, I cannot recommend Borderlands 2 (and the rest of the family) strongly enough. It is incredibly fun and, though the pacing can slow to a crawl at times of heavy side-questing, is never boring. Check it out for the PC (my recommendation) or the re-release put out on PlayStation 4 or Xbox One. You can’t go wrong, no matter how you choose to enjoy it.

This Week’s Theme isn’t Evolving at all!

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In keeping with this week’s unofficial theme, let’s talk about Evolve! Matthew Colville worked for Turtle Rock Studios as a writer on the creative team that designed the world and many of the core aspects of what would eventually become the asymmetrical multiplayer game, Evolve. The world was incredibly interesting and the core concept was novel, so pre-release reactions to the game were very positive. It even sold well when it came out, but it was plagued by a variety of problems that ultimately lead to its demise and the shut-down of its servers a couple of years after release.

The basic plot of the game is that you and your allies are a squad of monster killers that are occasionally called in to protect an at-risk Human colony on a new planet. The planet in question, Shear, seemed like a great place at first, but the colonies were eventually attacked by native inhabitants that showed the ability to quickly evolve in response to whatever defenses the Humans mounted. In each mission, you and your three human allies are tasked with taking out the monster. The monster, another human player, is tasked with killing all of the hunters or completing an objective (destroy a particular part of a facility or something like that). It is possible to play with fewer than 5 human players as you can set up a game with one to four AI players, but the main mode of play is online with a group of humans.

In concept, the game was a lot of fun. The battles were interesting and, though every game I played ended with the hunters winning, it was still a lot of fun to play the monster since there aren’t many games out there that have a similar style. It can be really fun to basically play hide-and-go-seek with a bunch of people online. It can also be incredibly frustrating if they always, unerringly hunt you down before you have a chance to even get established. Or if they seem to always find you as you find a hidey-hole in which to begin the annoyingly slow process of “evolving” so that you’re forced to give up your progress and flee only for it to happen again the next time you think you’re safe. Or if you wind up playing two dozen matches in row as the monster since none of your friends play the game and solo-queuing seems to always mean getting stuck as the monster.

There were a lot of problems once you got past the novelty of the game. You needed a bunch of dumb, negligent players on the hunter side of things for the monster to win and I don’t think I ever won as the monster and won maybe half of the matches I played as a hunter because my fellow hunters seemed to be incapable of working together or rudimentary communication. My hunter teams would almost always start to fall apart as soon as we started losing. Everyone ran off in their own direction, certain they alone knew what to do, and got picked off by the monster who was able to easily take us down when we separated. In short, it was every problem you’ve ever faced with online multiplayer compounded by a higher-than-average frequency of one-sided fights.

All that is without mentioning the various exploits and bugs that showed up every few weeks. The developers didn’t update very frequently (which we eventually learned wasn’t the fault of the developers but the publishing company who wouldn’t put out updates more than once every few months), so a lot of exploits and broken gear/abilities/etc stayed around long enough to make it difficult to play against.

Most of the problems could have been fixed with enough software patches and a better response from the PR team of the publisher, but they seemed very uninterested in trying to please their customers once the game had achieved commercial success. I’m sure there’s most to it than a simple money grab from the studio that published the game, but that’s what it felt like at the time and it is ultimately why I stopped playing the game.

Looking into it now, after I discovered that Matthew Colville was a part of the creation of this game and did some research since the way I felt everything played out didn’t seem to jive with the way he acted in his videos and various online accounts, I’ve learned a lot. Originally, the game team was put together to create an alien world and that’s what they did. Incredible art, different modes of evolution, how species adapt to their environment, and so much more came out of their first years of work. It wasn’t until about two years of this research and development had passed that they learned the game was going to take the form we got: asymmetrical shooter. If it had been an exploration game or a team shooter against only computers, that would have been another thing entirely. I would have loved the shit out of the game if it hadn’t been so heavily dependent on the only PvP multiplayer.

It was nice to learn that the game they poured their hearts into wasn’t the game we got. I can only imagine how disappointed the team was when they learned what all their research and work was going to turn into. From some of Matthew Colville’s posts on the matter, it sounds like they didn’t get much of a choice in the matter since no one at the publisher believed that an exploration or PvE game would sell enough to pay for the development and distribution costs. I’m pretty sure a lot of people who have bought that and the studio would be swimming in all the money they got from it if they’d actually delivered the game the writers and artists had spent two years creating. It would have been like what No Man’s Sky could have been if it hadn’t been hyped so idiotically when it was still clearly far from complete.

Honestly, as the game slowly winds its way to complete shutdown (the servers are being turned off for good in september), I’ve gone back to play it a couple of times. It still isn’t the game I would like it to have been and I’ve spent more time waiting for a match than actually playing it, but I can see the game the development studio wanted to make in the background. Knowing what it could have been makes it a little more fun to play since I’m more focused on that than the outcome of the matches, but it leaves me sad once the match is over because I feel like I’m missing out on what would have been an amazing opportunity.

Until September of 2018, the game is free to play for anyone who downloads it. If you want a glimpse into what is an amazing world and what could have been a game to remember a few decades on, download it and play a few matches, even if it’s just with a bunch of bots. You might be frustrated, but you won’t be disappointed.

Town Management

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Argorath the Dark Lord, ruler of the Pits of Hindejnam, surveyed the city sprawling beneath his castle and sneered as more peasants flocked to his walls. They wanted safety from the horrors beyond his walls, even if it cost them their freedom. Their mewling sickened him and he had no use for them. He already had as many useless peasants as he could bear.

He signalled to his guards to drop the gates and, a few moments later, the chilling clank of his hell-forged gates slamming down was met by more wails from the pathetic masses rushing towards his walls.

It would be night soon. There was nowhere left for them to hide and the beasts would find them. Brutish adventurers would follow right after and anyone who survived the beasts would meet their death at the hands of treasury-hungry mercenaries.

It was terrible and he almost wished he could do something to help. Almost. He had enough on his plate with his own useless peasants. They did nothing but take up space and he had to have them around. If he didn’t, his knights would leave, his miners would disappear, and even his castellan would wander away. Peasants were an important part of keeping a town together and so he begrudgingly accepted the bare minimum.

He really wished he could expand his town walls, but he was out of space. He’d hit capacity and there was nothing he could do with his town to expand, so he mostly focused on strengthening it as much as he could. He didn’t want to meet his end at the hands of treasure hungry adventurers, either, and they just kept getting stronger.

He really wished he’d sprung for a premium account, now. Then there’d be no limit to his town’s size or strength.

The End of a Long Road

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The road was long and the directions did not always make sense. Despite it, he prevailed. It took years, many false starts, innumerable dead-ends, and more moments of hopelessness than he cared to remember. Finally, after everything he went through, he had reached his destination.

He walked through the empty city, admiring the towering structures that he had thought he’d only see in his dreams and trying to imagine what it would look life a year from now, when it was filled with people.

It took everything he had to keep himself from being overwhelmed by excitement. He wandered from one landmark to the next, checking them out as he passed and doing his best to stay calm as the city matched everything he’d always imagined.

Of course, it wasn’t entirely perfect. The entire city was in ruins, but that didn’t excuse the misaligned walls he found and the scattered bugs throughout. Nothing major of course, since the fact the city was a ruin hid most of them from even the most dedicated observer. He made some notes, but knew they’d need to wait.

Finally, it was time to leave. He’d be back eventually. He’d never be away for long, that was for sure. For now, though, it was time to leave and let everyone else in. He glanced at the timer overhead and decided to stick around a bit. Seconds after the timer expired, the first person showed up. A scant few seconds later, two more people blinked into existence around the first one.

“Have fun!” He smiled at their bewildered expressions and then logged out. After taking off his headset and gloves, he tapped a few commands on his computer and sat back to watch the active user counter quickly climb toward one million.