Gosh. Another year done and dusted. Tonight (from my perspective of sitting and writing this in New Zealand) we usher in a brand new year. I’m not sure I’m ready for that, frankly! So far as recent years have gone, 2024 was a pretty decent one.
I hope you’ve all also had a great year, and a fantastic Christmas!
Last year I hoped for a ‘less complicated’ year. And I think on the whole, the family and I got one. Well- perhaps save for the whole big move of house and island in the middle of the year. But that, at least, was a welcome and good complication.
And I guess my surgery — but the recovery from that is going well. I can move pretty freely, and the puree-style diet has been much less awful than expected.
Nor has it got in the way of gaming very much! \o/
There has been quite the sampling of games over December. (Again. This is definitely something of a pattern.) In a future post, I’ll take a look back at 2024 gaming as a whole, but for now, December!
Gaming Goals
December Gaming Goals
I didn’t set any specific goals for December, I didn’t know what state I’d be in post-surgery. So the ‘goals’ basically boiled down to, ‘investigate the two games I was most excited for this month’:
- Path of Exile 2 (Early Access launch)
- Marvel Rivals
Of the two, Path of Exile 2 held my attention for longer. By a factor of almost 10x. It’s far from perfect — end game is particularly rough at present — but the foundation of the game is fantastic, and one I see myself spending a large amount of time with over the coming years.
Rivals I haven’t got on with nearly so much.
Almost entirely down to the fact it doesn’t have — and seemingly won’t ever get — a role queue.
However, many are loving it — and I think this is very much a case of the game not being broken in any way, it just isn’t for me.
January Gaming Goals
Ahh! I have no idea.
Monster Hunter: Wilds isn’t until February. Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth (PC) is in January, but not until the 24th.
Oooh! Although… Over December, I did (finally) finish The Witcher 3. I mean- I had finished the base game yonks ago. And he first DLC as well- but Blood and Wine, the final full-expansion sized DLC, I had left half-completed.
I only picked up Witcher 3 again really because a friend did. I installed and opened it again just to check my quest log for what my outcome to a quest he had just done was.
And… Well… Then I stuck around. Even started a NG+ run, although that was only out of curiosity rather than any intent to seriously play through it again.
Next up though, we want to play a Cyberpunk 2077 run while starting at the same time.
I’ve played CP2077 before, but never more than 5-10 hours into a given run. But now, at last, all the big game changing patches are done, the expansion is out, so, why not?
Leading to my January 2025 goal of:
- Cyberpunk 2077: Start a new run, and make it more than 10 hours into the story!
Games Played December 2024
| Rank | Game | Hours | % Gaming Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Path of Exile 2 | 73.1 | 49.8% |
| 2 | The Witcher 3 | 21.6 | 14.7% |
| 3 | Wuthering Waves | 12.5 | 8.5% |
| 4 | Marvel Rivals | 7.8 | 5.3% |
| 5 | Cities: Skylines 2 | 5.8 | 4.0% |
| 6 | Helldivers 2 | 4.6 | 3.1% |
| 7 | Overwatch | 3.6 | 2.5% |
| 8 | RimWorld | 3.1 | 2.1% |
| 9 | Slay the Princess | 2.7 | 1.8% |
| 10 | Hero Siege | 2.6 | 1.8% |
| 11 | Farming Simulator 2025 | 2.2 | 1.5% |
| 12 | Beneath Oresa | 1.8 | 1.2% |
| 13 | Black Desert Online | 1.8 | 1.2% |
| 14 | Bellwright | 1.1 | 0.7% |
| 15 | Quasimorph | 1.0 | 0.7% |
| 16 | Neva | 0.8 | 0.5% |
| 17 | Medieval Dynasty | 0.7 | 0.5% |
I’m somewhat amused by the fact that The Witcher 3 — a game I first picked up when it came out, in 2015 — overtook any of the new games I picked up in the December sale. You know what? Not just any of them — save for Path of Exile 2? All of them. Combined. Hah.
Speaking of… I picked up a number of things in this sale. As is often the case, I thought I wasn’t going to… Until all of a sudden, bam:
Outside of playing things, I’ve also been bitten by a bug compelling me toward further organisation of my Steam library into collections.
I last looked at this back in 2021, when discontent over the dynamic collection limitations finally got the better of me. Unfortunately, nothing has changed between then and now regarding dynamic collections, so doing it by hand was the only option left to me.
Since then, what I had set up was organisation by date of purchase.1 For the current year, I break this down into months — then at the end of each year, then combine the months into a single year, then start the months fresh with the new year.
I had only bothered to do this back as far as 2019 or so though.
Now I have this running back to the start of my Steam Library in 2009.
Seems I wasn’t done there though. As this still left some 600-odd games uncategorised. My source, after all, was Steam’s purchase history. Anything not obtained via Steam directly (e.g., Greenman Gaming, Humble or other indie bundles, etc) had no information here to draw upon.
The answer of course… Genre mapping.
The list shown is neither my complete list (the screenshot was already far too long!), nor am I finished with going through my library.
I’ve started with my existing year categories, from 2009, and I’ve completed through to 2016.
My hope is to be done before going back to work again in a couple of weeks. ‘Complete’ meaning not only all the games already in the dated categories but also the remaining 600-odd completely uncategorised games mentioned earlier.
One of the issues I’m already finding with this approach though, is that it is leading to categorising games that have either not aged well enough to realistically ever be considered for play again, or have simply been completely superseded by a sequel. (E.g., Crusader Kings 3 vs. Crusader Kings 2.) And I have to wonder whether I really want to see those games at all.
Maybe more on that later once I’m done!
Books Read December 2024
I started and finished Age of Death (Legends of the First Empire #5) in December, and started the final book of the series, Age of Empyre in December.
I’ve mentioned this before — but this is going to be one of those series where I’m going to be sad when I’m finished.
I’m also getting concerned over how much remains to be wrapped up in this book! I’m a bit over 20% done, so it isn’t like there isn’t a good amount of the book left, but… eesh!
So I’ll have to see how that goes, and hope for the best in the meantime!
Footnotes
- More or less. There are some exceptions, e.g., Humble Choice acquired games had their own categories (not shown in the image), and I only added them to the ‘main’ category if I had a strong inkling I would play them. Purchasing a DLC or expansion for a game would lead me to re-adding the game to that date (in addition to the original purchase date category), and a 1.0 release of an Early Access game would be treated the same way.
