Every so often, I decide to watch something on Twitch. It’s usually Friends at the Table streaming something because, if I’m being honest, I don’t much care for watching one person play a video game. If it’s a group of people, or one person is playing but there’s multiple voices involved, I enjoy it more, but I still don’t generally enjoy watching people play games. Friends at the Table is different, though, because my entire familiarity with them is listening to them play games, so watching them play games feels like a lateral move. Another reason I tend to avoid it is because I’m a sucker for “this looks fun!” type enthusiasm. I will absolutely get suckered into buying a game because I saw someone else enjoying it and then wind up not liking it myself because a large part of the fun was watching the other person play it. If I avoid watching streams of people playing games, then I don’t have to contend with wanting to buy a bunch of indie or smaller-studio games that I will never play (like 90% of my Steam library) or that I just won’t enjoy for longer than I watched the person stream it. The rest of my reason for not watching much streamed stuff is that I generally enjoy playing a game more than watching someone else play it. There are exceptions to this, of course, but it’s still generally true. All of which is largely beside the point because I’ve been watching a little more streamed stuff lately than I usually do and I’ve been thinking about buying some new games to fill an incredibly specific and empty niche in my life right now.
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Tripping And Falling Back Into Palia
Well, I meant to spend a bunch of my free time last weekend getting through as much of Dragon Age: Origins as I could, since that is my book club assignment for the month of August (we’ve had to shuffle some things around a bit due to us both being busy). Instead of doing any amount of that, though, I wound up getting back into Palia again. Super heavily. Hours upon hours, most of which was spent blasting through quests, digging back into building and decorating my house, investigating all the fun new features that have been introduced since I last played in April, and spending some real-world money on the game so I could experience a little bit of video game-based gender euphoria (or at least as close as I can get to that, given to my general lack of feelings on the matter). It was a bit more than I probably should have spent, but I decided to just use my July video game budget and take the rest out of my “fun big purchase” account (which is slowly beginning to recover from buying my new gaming PC). Also, I played it for the first time on maximum settings and the game looks so much better when everything is dialed all the way up. It’s a really fun, gorgeous little game. Well, little for now. It has grown a lot in the year since I started playing and all signs point toward it continuing to grow. I’m not sure how fast that growth will happen given that my current sense of it is skewed by being away for four months, but it feels like it has been pretty fast.
Continue readingVenturing Back Into Sanctuary For Seasonal Updates in Diablo IV
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.
The End Of A Game Is An Opportunity To Start A New One
After multiple months, my saga with the unfortunate sunday gaming group has come to an end. My time with the people who were part of my introduction to Pathfinder 2nd Edition has concluded. Despite my plans to give the group six full sessions to see if we could salvage the group, we only ever played five. Which probably sounds funny because I started talking about this group back in June, but we only got two more sessions in July and then one in late August due to scheduling issues, the GM catching Covid, and my grandmother’s passing. We skipped a lot of weeks, as it turns out, and apparently I wasn’t the only one who was on the verge of withdrawing for a while since I found out today, two days after I withdrew, that the whole campaign was shuttered (which saves my friend the trouble of figuring out how to gently break it to the group that they also weren’t interested in continuing to play). The GM has had some on-going health issues (which contributed to us skipping sessions) and one of the other players apparently also has some scheduling conflicts, so the GM sent my friend a message that he was shutting the whole thing down. I wish the group had been able to continue (since I know how much it sucks to lose a game because a group falls apart), but I got the strong sense that only a couple of the players were really enjoying themselves and since I’m pretty sure the GM is struggling with Long Covid, I really don’t think things could have ended any other way.
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