gaming | Leo's Life

It’s been a while! Life has been going at a crazy pace and my traditional outlet of blogging has taken a backseat to, well, survival I guess. This holiday break is doing wonders to my sanity!

First, I want to restate for the dozenth time, the Steam Deck friggin’ rules. More than half of my existing Steam library is verified, and another quarter are playable. Things that aren’t typically are mouse/keyboard heavy, too old, has a weird launcher (looking at you Ubisoft), or just not optimized. Playing something like Cyberpunk Liberty City on this thing is a right joy. I am continually impressed and still feel like I’m holding the future of gaming in my hands – more so now that Microsoft bought out Acti-Blizz and Sony plans to port more to the PC. The downside is the harder-to-get-running other game stores, like Epic or GoG. It works, just not easy to get done.

Now to the topic at hand, the Steam Winter Sale. Or as it seems to have evolved, the everything-is-on-sale sale. My entire wishlist seems to be there, and savings seem to average around the 30%. In some cases, this is a great deal, in others (SquareEnix is bad for this), the base price is just dumb so the savings put it down to “I may consider buying it”. There are just so many games out there, it’s going to take a lot to convince me to play a $90 game on sale for $60.

So what have I picked up?

Sea of Stars & Octopath Traveller 2 are set up on my deck. I’ll get to them in a bit
Guardians of the Galaxy. A seriously impressive 3rd person action game with the humor of the comics, great controls, wicked fights, and a kick ass soundtrack. I almost feel bad not having played this earlier!
Robocop. This is timetravelling back to the late 80s in all the grimy glory. It has a solid storyline, the “heft” of being Robocop, the exact tone from the first two films, and frankly less jarring given that we are living in this world today. There are issues with character growth (max vitality is pretty much a requirement) and the gun customization (auto-reload is beyond OP), but they wash away in the larger scheme.
Talos Principle 2. A beyond solid puzzle game, with a seriously strong philosophical debate within. With about 150 puzzles inside, I could solve almost all with some time to think. Two of them required mechanics I didn’t grasp until I saw the solution. The storyline would make for a great sci-fi flick.
Graveyard Keeper. Sort of Stardew Valley with more quests and less time/energy to do things. You can make zombies to automate things, and the DLC are all but required to truly enjoy the game. There’s a (very) late game buff that auto-generates energy that completely changes the pace of the game… I’d go so far as to get a mod to put that in earlier.
Techtonica. This is an RPG with production chain elements, a sort of merger between Factorio’s grid-based design and Satisfactory’s exploration mechanics. It’s in early access, I saw Nilaus’ videos about it, gave it a shot. I like that the tech tree growth is based on quests and logical progression. I like the setting (tight spaces) and controls. I like the idea of production chains, but they are simply too complex at the start, with poor building option to find much joy. It goes too wide, too fast, and requires too much effort to “port” factories across the map. To me this is simply balancing, a natural step of any game in early access.

I’ve still got more to get through, and a few more sales that are catching my eye. Cocoon and V Rising are on the list, but at a price where I don’t mind paying full price to support great games. It’s been a hell of a 2023 for gaming, fingers crossed the pace continues next year.

IGN articles interest me more for their ideas than their content. There is a clear disconnect between their reviewers thoughts and the material that is posted on the site. The gents are smart and thoughtful but the reviews (Colin especially here) are clear shills for vendors. Their entertainment (movies/tv) sections are different though since the entire basis of that medium is subjective. Not everyone likes Michael Bay and a review won’t help you decide the value. What they do provide is ancillary material for people to comment on, like this LOTRO Legacy article, which posits that the series as whole changed the way cinema moved from that point forward.

The thing about MMOs that drastically alter them from any other entertainment format is that they are fluid. You can say that King Kong did X to cinema because of when it was made. Same with XCOM. You can’t say EQ is a benchmark because that benchmark no longer exists. You can say it was a pathfinder or trailblazer or some such, but every MMO has evolved from its humble beginnings to something else.

Take EQ’s raiding scene. When it launched, it was a zerg-fest and content was balanced against maxing out the zone population. They eventually put caps on the amount of people raiding, which helped with balance issues. Everytime they tried to bring the number down, in order to further provide some semblance of balance, the community resisted with massive outcry. EQ’s inability to innovate internally is the main driver for the development of EQ2. While at a high level, they operate under the same concepts, EQ2 is clearly a different take on the “Vision(tm)”. Which part of EQ’s raiding scene will be legacy?

WoW’s leveling method used to focus on spending 8 or so days from 1 to 60, focused primarily on grinding with a few quests thrown in. BC cut the leveling time down a fair amount and increased the amount of quests – you barely needed to grind at all. LK and on, leveling was a small hurdle and everything was 100% quests. Today’s leveling experience is but a shell for the end game, providing cut scenes throughout. It’s practically on auto-drive. Which part of leveling will be legacy?

Star Wars Galaxies is two games in one. It launched as a PvE sandbox then was rebooted after a short while to be a PvE themepark with some sandbox elements. People will always remember the NGE. Few remember the Beast Handlers or the perma-death Jedi.

MMOs are reflective of the time, more of a zeitgeist than an actual thoughtful game. WoW today could never have succeeded when it launched just like WoW of 8 years ago would be a massive failure today. What MMO’s have left as a legacy is the popularization of gaming, the breakout of the “geek” mold. No game made today will be able to succeed without some multiplayer online component. The actual mechanics – phasing, raiding, crafting, grouping, collecting, automated tools – are all by-products of this need to break down social barriers and achieve mainstream success. The true legacy is that we are now able to share gaming experiences with new and old friends, under nearly any terms we can come up with. That’s a pretty good legacy.