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Finding fun in loot and adventure

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Second Go-Round with Nioh

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Ahh yes. The genuine Edo-period ‘Valve’ helm.

This has been coming for a wee while. Ever since playing Sekiro, the urge to play Nioh again has been building. Making time for it has been another matter entirely. I have been playing a bit more this month than I did last month though. Although in case you’re wondering — no, you didn’t miss the first outing with the game. Well actually you did, I guess. But it wasn’t in the lifetime of this blog.

The last time I played Nioh would’ve been the tail end of 2017. I’d somehow missed the fact it had even gained itself a PC release, but jumped right on it when I found out. I pushed through level 2 (the ‘hell level’, for new comers apparently) and a bit beyond. I’d wrapped up through most of the second area in fact. With one, significant, exception.

Tachibana Muneshige — Invitation from the Warrior of the West:
Invites you to an ‘honourable’ duel, then proceeds to cheat like nobody’s business. CHEAT I SAY.

This bugger was the true ‘hell level’ in my opinion. Stopped me in my tracks. This time through, already beaten him and on my way through the third region of the game. Even though it’d been so long since I last played, I’ve strugged far less with it this time around.

In terms of everything else going on (or not going on, as the case may be)…

Changes to the Game List

Added

  • Nioh

Remaining

  • Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
  • Final Fantasy XIV

Nearly Removed

  • Transport Fever

Removed

  • Tomb Raider

Assassin’s Creed is in a bit of a holding pattern until the third chapter to the Atlantis DLC is out (or is to be imminently out), but the hype for that moment is still high so I’m content to hold onto it.

Transport Fever is a bit more tentative. I acknowledged in the last journal that I wasn’t really happy with how the series was going. I thought I might take to the more general, intermittent style posting, rather than attempting it as a continuous story. But since then I’ve hardly touched it.

And Tomb Raider? Well, it’s fallen onto the wrong end of the Making Time equation. I’m still interested in it, and would like to finish the series. But now will not be the time for that it seems. It’s below the waterline in terms of time available vs. prioritised list of things I want to play.

I have no doubt it will be back… At some point. 🙂

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Steam Library (finally) to get Overhaul

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I just saw this from a Steam blog post from a few days ago. The blog post is mostly about getting game developers and publishers ready with the new art assets required to support the new look.

Fortunately, it also referred to the March 2019 GDC Talk1 where this was actually first announced. Unfortunately, very little about the proposed feature set has been discussed so far. Although Steam did also say that we’re now only ‘weeks away’ from a public beta being available — so it won’t be too long before we find out, at least.

Last years chat update though was amazing, but in some respects possibly too late. A lot of what Steam chat now solves for we’d already found a solution for in Discord. This means a lot of the group and voice functionality goes unused by us (and I would imagine in many other circles, too). Still — it is nice to know that should the business model of Discord suddenly change that we have another option.

It’s almost difficult to recall just how antiquated and tired looking chat was, now. And despite the group functions largely going by the by with us, the degree of thought and design effort put into it gives me great hope that they know what they’re doing and are likely running co-design sessions or some other form of human centred design framework to get where they do.

I’m pleased the left-side classic list of games is still present, though.

The main usability feature added that I can tell so far is the additional ways to sort and categorise. The ‘tags’ feature that has been present in the Steam Store itself for a while now can be used to sort your games. From the screenshot above there looks to be a time based sort option too. I believe this is reflecting last played — but I would really like to see a time filter based on last updated too.

I currently have a boat load of custom categories based on game genres and played state. My hope is that I’ll no longer have to manage these by hand and the tags will handle it for me. If I get even just that — I’m going to be pretty happy. Anything else on top is gravy.

I’ll certainly be giving the beta a go once its available in any case. I’m curious to see how games are handled that don’t have their library assets updated to the newly requested specifications. I would expect there are going to be a number of older (and possibly some not so old) titles where for whatever reason the update doesn’t happen, so I guess we’ll see!

Footnotes

  1. Timestamped to start at the Steam Library section of the talk.
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E3 Gleanings So Far

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February 11th 2020 cannot come quickly enough.

While perhaps not feeling as quite on the outside of things as UltrViolet of Endgame Viable, I can relate. Normally E3 is a time of vast excitement to me, even from around the other side of the world with no plans on physically attending. The announcements, the new trailers, the slew of release dates — it’s all awesome stuff.

This year things have felt a bit different. The excitement levels seem dampened compared to normal. I’ve taken a browse of the trailers, and while I’m sure there is absolutely still stuff to be found, things I’ve missed…

There just doesn’t seem to be any new announcements to truly spin up the hype-drive. There wasn’t any game that I didn’t already know about that excited me, this time around. There are certainly games I’m interested in, case in point being Ori and the Will of the Wisps trailer above. It isn’t the best of the Ori and the Will of the Wisps’ trailers by any stretch, but now we know when it’s coming, and it still looks and sounds1 amazing.

I also managed to catch the new Cyberpunk 2077 trailer featuring Keanu Reeves (and an April 16th 2020 release date) which was awesome, but with or without Keanu this was a title I was excited for.

I was hoping the Ubisoft press event would give some information on the upcoming Assassin’s Creed: Ragnarok — the Vikings themed entry to the series. After how much joy I managed to extract from the recent Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, I really hoped to hear more about how they’re improving on the new AC formula. I wonder now whether we’ll still see this in 2020?

In any case, for a much more complete overview — Belghast has done a fantastic write-up already on the Google Stadia, EA Play, Microsoft and Bethesda events here. I had missed seeing Darksiders Genesis before Bel’s post — but taking a look at it now? Sigh. It looks to be carrying on the legacy of disappointment begun with Darksiders 3. But in an even more low-effort way.

If you haven’t played Darksiders 2 yet — definitely do that. It had a remaster a few years back which keeps it looking fairly fresh. It’s an epic adventure, mixing elements of the Metroidvania-style games, with a bit of Zelda, a bit of Action RPG and a dash of Devil May Cry. Definitely play it. Just… Stop there. 😉

Ghostwire Tokyo might be interesting? Just too little shown to be sure. The concept is intriguing though. Anything leap out and grab you guys?

Footnotes

  1. The musical scores for these games are incredible
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Humble Bundle: June 2019

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For last month’s introduction, I spoke a bit about how there seemed to be less ‘quality’ titles willing to go into the Humble Monthly. Even though I was talking mostly about the non-headliners, I still had a bit of a giggle when CoD was revealed in that pack. 😉

Originally, the version of CoD to be included was to be the Battle edition, which includes the core multiplayer experience and the battle-royale mode ‘Blackout’, but not zombies. At some point over the month, this was upgraded to the standard edition — so Zombies ahoy!

July Headline Titles

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Legitimate excitement at seeing this included. It has been in my steam cart on multiple occasions, just never at a time when I was quite willing to indulge my impulse-purchase side over and above the possibly more rational, ‘But I have scores of games still untouched already!’ side.

I think I will have to make time for this one. Perhaps I can finish Nioh (incidentally, another Ninja Theory title As SpiderProvider correctly pointed out in the comments below, these are not from the same studio!) this month before the bundle lands.

Moonlighter

Moonlighter reminds me a great deal of Recettear in concept, although some of the execution looks quite different. You are a shopkeeper by trade, adventurer by night. With a bit of the social and town systems of Stardew Valley possibly thrown in there too.

Moonlighter recently had a ‘Switch’ announcement, which for this style of game is by far my preferred platform. Something about the style just lends itself so well to the more portable nature of the Switch. Plus I suppose when I’m at the PC I typically want to be playing something a little more demanding.

Even so, it’s another one I’m quite happy to receive and take a little look at, to see if I do want it on Switch. As unfortunately, titles there are typically much pricier than their PC counterparts.

Revealed Titles

911 Operator after a quick look actually seems like it could be pretty decent. It had never crossed my radar before, but it came out early 2017 and looks to have been fairly well received at the time. It has a nice touch of being able to download any city map in the world to play on. I wonder if it has some integration with Google Maps for this? In any case, not sure if it’ll surface to the top of my ‘want to play’ list sufficiently to find time for it, but it doesn’t look bad.

Duskers also looks interesting. This one had crossed my radar in the past, but I never quite pulled the trigger on purchase. It’s a game at least in part played through a command line console. … In spaaaaace. You’re in control of a series of drones, investigating a derelict ship. The crew is gone without a trace. Signs of damage throughout. Most of the power is down. But something is moving in there.

Of the revealed titles, those are the two most likely to get a look-in. The others will almost certainly be straight dumped to the ‘Humble Monthly – Never Played’ steam category. 😉

Red Faction is a series I missed in its hey-day, but the remastered — sorry, remarstered edition doesn’t look especially compelling to me. I think this series though was the forerunner for the hyper-destructive 3D environments before there was a Just Cause.

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Making Time for Games

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I mentioned back in the April Journal that playing Sekiro was, more than anything else, making me want to play Nioh again. But I didn’t really act on it at the time. I didn’t feel like I had the time for it, and instead mentally slotted it into a short-term backlog. This is not an unusual cycle for me to go through. It also happened with Final Fantasy XIV, just since this blog has been alive.

It doesn’t always happen that way though. Sometimes it’s more of a spontaneous, ‘I want to so by golly I’m going to’ type arrangement, as was the case with Transport Fever when I wanted to play something more tycoony again.

In any case, I digress! With this post I don’t mean to talk about creating more total time to spend gaming. But rather about prioritisation. Fitting the games I want to play into the time I have, and the ones that get dropped as a result.

I was reflecting on this and how things may’ve changed since I started blogging again. And how it hasn’t. I think for the most part I’ve simply become more aware of it now that it can have a fairly direct impact on what I write about here. I certainly believed my game choices to be fairly random previously, but in truth the same patterns were followed.

Perhaps just a little more… Quickly. I found that before the rate at which I would flip games was much higher.

Either way, it does have the rather poor side effect of meaning that I rarely finish a game. I imagine there being a sort of seesaw style graph where interest in the current game and interest in a new game intersect, and eventually tips from current to new. Typically well before the current is finished.

The strength of interest in the current game can shift where the tipping point is precisely, but it’s a rare thing indeed to have it occur after I finish a game.

I guess the question then becomes is this actually a bad thing if fun is still being had? I tend to view incomplete games as a negative, but also simply as a fact of life. I would never have time to play everything I wanted to if I insisted on finishing everything I started… So perhaps it’s actually OK.

But there is no other entertainment medium I’d apply this to. I finish books. I finish movies. Generally even TV shows. I couldn’t imagine even trying to apply a taster style approach to these… So why games?

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