560 hours of patch 9.1 of World of Warcraft. That's how much time I've spent these past two months in the new raid, the new dungeon season and the new pvp season. Here are some thoughts (ramblings if a madman perhaps) after spending the equivalent of 9.3 hours per day for 2 months playing World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands

June 29th (for US players) and June 30th (for EU players) marked the release of patch 9.1 of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. In the modern era of WoW, these big patches always bring with them a few things; a new raid tier, a new season for dungeons (m+) and rated PvP. Content outside of those three pillars is not as set in stone.

This time, we did get a new raid called Sanctum of Domination and the new seasons for dungeons and PvP. We also got a new zone with daily quests to trudge your way through for a marginal increase in player power.

By many accounts, this patch is straight up garbage and has been met with a lot of negativity online. So why have I spent nearly 500 hours playing it in the month and half that it’s been out?

The easy answer to that would be my guild and friends. I raid on the hardest difficulty, albeit not in any sort of high-ranking guild, and raiding is in my opinion always enjoyable in WoW, and the general consensus seems to agree with that. Where people usually differ in their opinions is the things you do outside of raid days. My guild raids two nights a week, leaving a lot of free time for other WoW related activities.

To many, the new season in M+ doesn’t provide any significantly new gameplay, it’s the same dungeons we had last season but with a new seasonal affix (modifier). In arena, the metagame has become so bursty and damage heavy that healers are having a tough time, and people have a tendency to die very quickly in some setups.

A lot of my time spent outside raids is spent both doing dungeons with my friends and raiding on a separate 3rd day, where we are raiding at a slightly lower level but also having a ton of fun.

Keeping my character up to date for all of this has proven to be really fun, but after 500 or so hours the magic is starting to wear off and I think I’m heading back towards a routine of playing WoW during raid nights, and going back to playing other games in between.

As far as non-raiding content goes, I’ve hit my personal goals of 2200 rating in m+ and 1800 rating in PvP (specifically 2v2 Arena). The only thing left to do in this patch for me is to go about my usual collecting shenanigans, where I look to get most, if not all, of the achievements that were released with patch 9.1 along with as many mounts and toys as possible. Collecting is in and of itself a very time consuming way of approaching the game, but I figure that this patch is gonna last a good 6 months or so, at LEAST, so I’ll have plenty of time to dip in and out.

I agree with the sentiment that the expansion as a whole feels very heavy on “chores” to keep your character up to date. Each week, you have to do 2 weekly quests to keep your “Renown” level up to date (up until this week you also had to do 1 weekly chapter of the story campaign), 2 wings of Torghast (which is WoW’s version of a rogue-lite dungeon) and some dungeons to populate your weekly vault (each reset, you’re treated to a chest with loot that is filled with different levels of gear depending on the content you did that week, and players are incentivized to do as much content as possible to get as many options as possible in this weekly welfare-loot system).

And if you’re stupid enough to have multiple characters, you just go through that list of chores and do it all again a second, third or even fourth time depending on how many characters you have.

I’ve always enjoyed playing around with multiple characters of different classes and seeing the same content from slightly different perspectives. This patch is the first one in a while where I’ve felt like doing that would severely impact my overall enjoyment of the game, so I’m opting out in favor of just focusing on my one main character and letting the rest of my characters idle for at least the remainder of this patch.

Overall, I’m happy that I have people to play this game with as I’m not sure I’d be able to stomach the grind if I was going about it as a purely solo player, but I’ve done the majority of my grinding for this patch so I’m happy to step down for a while and focus on other games.

Not a lot to say this week. New World of Warcraft stuff is coming next week, which I'm hyped for, so I figured I'd try to finish Final Fantasy VII Remake this week in time for it. Turns out I got kinda busy and didn't have time to finish it, and also for some reason starting playing Slay the Spire as well.

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade

I didn't get too much further than last week in Final Fantasy VII. I'm on chapter 11 or 12 now, and I've been keeping a kind of slow pace with this game. I've found I can't really play for too long before my interest wanes, which is a weird feeling since I'm enjoying it a lot. I think the over-the-top dialogue and delivery might be a little too much for me. This is especially obvious since the last game I played was Uncharted 4, which has some of the most natural sounding dialogue I've ever heard in a game. The contrast is certainly stark, but that's not to say there aren't parts of the writing that are fun, like the running gag involving a "will they/won't they high five" between Aerith and Cloud.

There are 3 areas so far that have contained side quests, and I've done every single one of them when I probably shouldn't have. I don't feel like they add that much world-building, and are most definitely of the MMO variety. Go to that place you've already been and kill some more monsters. Go around the town in search of these kids. Track down my father's inspiration. Et cetera. I don't know that I could actually skip these though, 'cause I'm definitely the type of player that tries to do as much as you can in a game, and if a platinum trophy isn't too obnoxious to get I'll probably try to get it. I usually draw the line at having to replay the game multiple times though, so getting the platinum for this particular game might be a wash since it requires you to beat it again on a higher difficulty that you can't pick from the start. Anyway, the side quests usually end with you having the option to instantly teleport back to the quest giver which is always appreciated.

Another thing I've noticed is the abundance of mini-games. It seems like each chapter so far has had some kind of mini-game breaks up the pace of the usual "walk down this mostly linear map and fight some monsters along the way" approach this game mostly takes. Sometimes, they feel fun and like they add something to the place you're exploring. Other times, they feel like a chore. And when a mini-game is less fun than walking down a linear corridor, you know something's wrong.

When reading what I've written down, it seems like I'm kind of down on the game as a whole, but I'm really not. I'm liking the combat a LOT, even if it took a little while to get used to. That and the visual spectacle alone would've probably been enough to carry me through the rest of the game, but the characters are growing on me (unrealistic and over-the-top as they may be) and the stakes are slowly but surely being risen, so there's some semblance of forward momentum in the plot - even if it does move at a snail's pace (expectedly so, given the nature of this remake).

Slay the Spire

These past few weeks, I've been hearing a LOT about roguelike deckbuilders. From Trials of Fire to Roguebook, to Griftlands (which I played about an hour of before deciding it was way too informationally dense for me at the time), everytyhing I've heard sounds like it would be up my alley given how much time I spent with Hearthstone back in the day (before they added all the extra modes). So I decided to go back to what I recall as being the source of this new wave of deckbuilders. Slay the Spire has been sitting in my Steam backlog for years, so I decided it was time to fire it up and maybe try setting a pace of "1 run per day" and see where it goes.

Unlike Griftlands, I was immediately getting out combos and feeling competent at the game. I was getting cards that I could see having synergy with my other cards and started thinking about deck archetypes. Of course, I have then also proceeded to not get past the 3rd world at all so I'm obviously not as good as the game at times makes me feel, but I'm enjoying the learning process and just how snappy it is. If I look at my hand and see the way I want my turn to play out, I want it to be super quick in regards to actually playing the cards.

I have unlocked the second character, but haven't tried it at all. My current line of thinking is that I wanna unlock everything on the first character, maybe beating the game on that character before moving on to the second, and third, and so on. We'll see if I stick with that, I feel like that gives me a lot of time to actually learn all of the cards that are connected to that specific character.

Like I mentioned though, this is probably gonna be a slow burn of a game for me, with me only playing 1 run (or as it has been a few times, a partial run because they can sometimes run quite long) per day. I am looking forward to playing a lot more of it though, but I want to balance it with actually finishing Final Fantasy VII and also since the WoW patch is coming out, I'm gonna be putting a lot of time into that.

For a World of Warcraft player like me, the biggest piece of news from this week has been the announcement of the next content patch, 9.1, which is coming out in less than 2 weeks. It's not bringing a whole lot with it other than a new raid, a new dungeon and a new area to explore, but a new "season" is kind of a shot of adrenaline and is probably going to make me play a lot more of this expansion, which so far hasn't been getting the kindest reviews. It's not that the expansion is bad per se, it's just that content updates have been non-existent up until this point and not having anything new to do in an MMO for over 6 months is almost a death sentence. But I guess we'll see how it fares in a couple weeks, I for one am pretty stoked to be playing it a bit more with a few friends. On the downside, it means I'll have less time to play all these single player games that I've been enjoying for the past few months while WoW has been slow.

Picking up from last week, I not only finished Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, but also went for the platinum trophy and 100% completion. It was a blast! I don't think I have a lot more to say that I didn't say last week, other than to reiterate my praise of almost every single aspect of that game.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

I played the first 3 Uncharted games a few years ago in the Uncharted Collection that was released on the Playstation 4, so the plot of the first trilogy kind of blended into one big mess for me. Coming back to the franchise wasn't hard at all though, 'cause even if I didn't remember much at all about the different plots, the characters felt like old friends I was rejoining after some time away.

There's a LOT to like in this game. The animation quality and overall fidelity combined with the stellar voice acting make these characters believable and real, and the dialogue is written in such a realistic manner that it was really easy getting swept up in the relationships between the different characters. The writing even managed to rope me in to the treasure hunting fantasy, and I was right there with the characters in terms of excitement.

The Uncharted games have a pretty specific kind of action set pieces that this game did not fail to deliver on, but this game brings with it some new knowledge that Naughty Dog brought with them from The Last of Us - namely giving stealth gameplay a bigger role. It's not a full blown stealth game or anything, but the added option of being a little sneaky went a long way when faced with some of the combat encounters in this game.

Speaking of the combat encounters, I feel like the cover-based third person shooting found in this franchise has kind of overstayed its welcome, as it is by far the most tedious part of the game. I'm reminded of a recent article on Waypoint, written by Rowan Kaiser, that brings up the topic of exertion versus reward, and that being the structure many games follow. The exertion in this case are the climbing, the puzzles and the shooting, and the reward being the next development of the story. The traversal and the puzzles were fine to me, but the combat tended to drag a little bit. The hook of the reward was enough to keep me going though, and I would definitely say it's worth sticking through those shooting sections to marvel at what the game has to offer in terms of story.

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade

Ridiculous name aside, I have been really enjoying my time with Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, which is the PS5 release of last year's Final Fantasy VII Remake. I sit in the camp that doesn't have any real nostalgia for the original Final Fantasy VII, having only played a few hours of the Steam version that was released a while back. Back then, I thought the world and story was interesting enough, but for a newcomer it definitely didn't age well. This remake is then the perfect opportunity for someone like me to come along and learn to love these characters that have been so central to gaming pop culture for so long.

In typical Final Fantasy fashion, the game throws a LOT of tutorials at you right from the get-go, but I managed to stick it through those and have started to see some of what makes the combat tick and how it could turn into a really rewarding gameplay system. I'm on chapter 7 right now, which I think is somewhere around the later early game or early mid game, and so far I like how the different chapters feel in terms of pacing, length and variety in the sense of being either tightly narratively driven or more free-form roaming, completing sidequests etc. The latter sections feel a lot like walking around the open world of the Yakuza series in terms of both tone and feel, there's extended sections of little to no combat, but a lot of running around and talking to people and unearthing more character building and world details.

I'm hoping I have enough time to finish this game before WoW's next patch though, 'cause I feel like with how mechanically dense the combat is, I might have a hard time picking it back up if I take a break. All in all though, I'm really having a good time with it so far!

Wow, we're in it. E3 is finally happening but it feels very unceremonious this time around. I don't mind though, seeing as this week has been hectic as shit for me personally. Of the events that have happened so far (Summer Game Fest kick-off, Ubisoft and Devolver), there's not a lot that stands out to me. Elden Ring might be the only thing I'm truly hyped for, most of the stuff shown has been kind of "Yeah, I'll play that some day". I have been playing a LOT of games this week though, despite it maybe not being in my best interest due to the previously mentioned hectic as shit week I've had. But I went and did it, I bought a scalped Playstation 5 just in time for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.

Astro's Playroom

Upon setting my PS5 up, the first thing I did was fire up Astro's Playroom which I've heard nothing but good things about. And all the praise it's been getting is definitely deserved. Stripping away all the tech demo-y aspects of it, where every mechanic seems to be specifically crafted to show off specific features of the DualSense, it's a really solid 3D platformer. Turns out, I'd be spending a lot of my time this week playing this specific genre so this served as a nice appetizer.

It's a very brief game, made even shorter by the fact that I didn't bother getting every single collectable. Don't get me wrong, the things I did find were most of the well designed, self-contained puzzles or platforming challenges in and of themselves. I was just chomping at the bit to get to the other games that I played that I feel like I didn't give this game the full attention it deserves.

There's a lot to like in this little adventure. The trip down memory lane with all of the old Sony hardware you get to see rendered beautifully (shout out to the EyeToy Camera), the levels themselves being really well designed and all the things they do with the controller. The tacticle feedback of basically every event in the game was spot on, both in the vibrations and in the sounds emitted from the DualSense.

There are some really clever and inventive sections, like the climbing monkey sections, that had a real Nintendo vibe to them in the sense that they were designed to fit the hardware really well.

All in all, hats off to a pack-in product that's way better than it needs to be for the purposes of demonstrating the hardware.

Ratchet & Clank

No, your eyes do not deceive you. I'm gonna come clean here and say that I hadn't played a single Ratchet & Clank game prior to this weekend, if you don't count repeatedly playing the same level from the first game on a demo disc some almost 20 years ago. Suffice it to say, it's been a while. I don't think I've willfully ignored the series, it has always looked really interesting, but it kind of never aligned. In the PS2 era, I was a kid with little to no money to buy games with, so when World of Warcraft came out I gravitated towards that ("I can play this one game forever, I don't need to spend money on any other games!"). In the PS3 era, where I feel like most of the Ratchet & Clank games came out, I was on team Xbox 360 and missed out on the whole library. I do own a PS4, where I originally picked up a copy of this game that sat unplayed on a shelf for about 4 years.

Until now! I started off on the PS4, but the day after was when I finally was able to get my hands on a PS5. Thankfully, I didn't have to worry about carrying over my save or anything since I was so early in the game, I just re-started it. At 60 fps this time. Boy does this game look good, even for a 5 year old game!

I feel like the intention with this game was to, besides tying in with the movie, introduce new players to the franchise, and it did so really well. I'm not sure how much of it is lifted from the original first game (my guess would be most of it?), but I played through this in 2 days and felt ready to tackle the newest entry in the franchise.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

Finally, my first proper PS5 game. I've spent a lot of time just gawking at the pure fidelity of this game. I shouldn't be surprised by this level of technical prowess, seeing as I primarily play games on a pretty beefy PC, but it just looks so gorgeous. Of course, I'm playing on the performance mode with 60 fps and I feel like I'm happy to make that trade-off.

I'm about 10 hours in and pretty close to the end, and I'm kind of kicking myself for not getting into this franchise earlier. The combat feels REALLY good, in a way that Ratchet & Clank (2016) wasn't able to. It just tightens it up somewhat. The DualSense is in large part responsible for this, I think. Having that tacticle feedback makes it really natural to use all the different functions of the guns in a seamless and effortless manner. The gameplay is also really varied. There's the combat sections, there's extended exploration/traversal/platforming sections (mostly when it comes to finding the collectables), and some novel mini-games (and what might very well be the best hacking mini-game ever).

There's a lot to absorb when it comes to the lore and the world, being as new to this series as I am, but this game does a good job of making sure that the bulk of the story is in character moments, with the exposition being baked in in an expert manner. If I would try to describe the game's plot from the beginning to where I'm currently at, I'm fairly sure I could do a pretty job of it. Which says a lot about how well they have managed to weave in their exposition with moments you truly care about.

Rivet (the blue-ish lombax to the right on the box art) is a wonderful character, and I hope we get to see more of her. Maybe a spin-off series? That would be kind of rad.

I'm looking forward to finishing this game up, and probably going for the platinum trophy and generally trying to do everything there is to do. When the basic gameplay feels as good as this does, it's hard to not want to squeeze every bit of content you can from the game.

It's June already. Which is crazy. This year has flown by for me so far, and in about a week's time I'm gonna get 2 months off work (being a teacher sure is nice in that way). All that time off is gonna mean a lot of video games, but.. not quite yet. I did manage to sneak some game time in this week, despite being way overloaded with work. I didn't write a World of Warcraft blog this week because nothing much has really changed in that regard - we're still banging our heads against the wall that is the final boss of the current raid, but I expect we'll get him down in a week or two. I also managed to play one new game and one somewhat old at this point.

Overboard!

Overboard! is an inkle joint - the makers of 80 Days and Heaven's Vault, among others. I'm not well versed in their portfolio, but I did find this game very intriguing from the description. It's 1935, you're aboard a ship heading for New York and you just killed your husband. You now have 8 in-game hours to get away with the murder.

The game's loop is laid out in that 8-hour timeframe that you replay in a visual novel/adventure/puzzle game format where you have to play through the day enough times to uncover information that can be vital in your success in either having the death of your husband be ruled a suicide or better yet, pin his death on someone else aboard the ship.

From the looks of things, you can pretty much pin the murder on any of the 6 or so characters that are present, or you could go the route of killing key witnesses or indeed everybody else aboard the ship. Doing so requires a lot of precise movement across the ship. Everytime you go to another area or talk to a character, some time passes and you only have so many hours in the day before at the end of it, everybody gathers in the restaurant to piece together what's happened.

I enjoyed it for the most part, though after a while I was going for some specific things that I wasn't quite sure how to pull off, but every time you fail you have to sit through the same conversations and do everything else perfectly but still try to find some wiggle room where you can experiment and see how your actions can have an effect on the outcome. It's a hard game to describe, but well worth the 4 or so hours I spent playing it.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

This game was on my radar when it came out back in 2019, but it was plagued by performance issues so I thought I'd hold off on playing it. I recently picked it up on sale and... a lot of the performance issues are still there. But it sounds like it's gotten a lot better, it's mostly framerate dips and the occasional crash. Don't get me wrong, those things are very annoying, but I can still get through the game.

It's quite reductive to boil it down to its genre inspirations, but it really wears its influences on its sleeve. The movement, climbing and cinematic set pieces are very reminiscent of Uncharted/Tomb Raider. The exploration leans heavily on metroidvania tropes (traverse old areas with new powers, gaining access to previously blocked off sections) and the combat is a somewhat watered down take on a parry-based version of the Dark Souls combat. When I put it like that, it feels like I'm shitting on the game, but I most assuredly am not.

So far, I don't care that it doesn't bring anything unique to the table. I'm not even that much of a Star Wars fan. I just think these environments and enemies look cool, the sheer fidelity of the animations, not to mention the facial expressions and voice acting, just leads to what should have been a really polished Star Wars action adventure game that I think everybody wants to be good. And it is really good! It doesn't get into the same depth when exploring the systems it's borrowing from other games, but it's easy to imagine that's because they want to keep it relatively appealing to a broader audience.

I don't think I'm the only one that would enjoy it a whole lot more if it didn't occasionally crash my PC or the framerate didn't just disappear everytime I'm entering a new area.

I did it. I finally finished Assassin's Creed: Valhalla! I'll probably come back later in the summer though, to mop up the side stuff and play the Siege of Paris DLC that's gonna be releasing somewhere around that time. I kept picking at Persona 5 Strikers as well, and I'm still not feeling that too much. But I also played some smaller-scale games that I enjoyed.

Silicon Dreams

It’s a testament to the writing of the team at Clockwork Bird, which I believe consists of 2 people, that someone who is normally as impatient as me had no issue sitting through what was basically 5 hours of constant streams of text.

I wasn’t familiar with the studio’s prior work (including games like Spinnortality, a cyberpunk management sim) but a stray article that I happened to skim through caught my eye, likening this game somewhat to Papers, Please and Blade Runner. The comparison is not entirely inappropriate.

In Silicon Dreams, the main gameplay loop is that you start off at your desk getting ready to interview a subject. Sometimes there’s evidence to read through before establishing a link to your subject. There’s a distant feeling to these interviews. The subjects don’t sit in front of you, in your cushy office with a view of a nice holographic looking tree. They’re sitting in a dark, industrial looking interrogation room that you have the power to manipulate. You can restrain them in their chair and affect the lighting to attempt to elicit certain emotional responses. Additionally, there is no voice acting and the soundtrack is very airy and sparse, leaving the focus squarely on the interview process.

Well. I say interview, but it’s really more a series of interrogations. The subjects (android and human alike) are almost always suspected of something, and it’s your job to get to the details. I think. This game features many branching paths, and it seems like there’s a lot of ways you could go about playing this. Do you want to be a company android solely looking out for the interests of Kronos, the big faceless corporation that manufactures basically all of the bots? Or do you want to sympathize with the revolution that is looking out for the interests of the androids, championing freedom?

I chose to play my android as a company bot through and through, always having the interests of my employer as my priority. That led to some questionable moral choices - but then again, the character you play as is an android specifically manufactured for the purpose of interrogating and identifying deviant androids. I realize that I’m basically just laying out what this game is, but seeing it have so few reviews on steam, I figured it can’t hurt to describe it and sing its praises a bit, ‘cause I definitely feel like this should be on more people’s radar.

As I said earlier, the writing is stellar. Which is good, because so much of the game relies on the written word. The music is just kind of there, more to set a mood than to inspire. The UI is both functional and sleek-looking, and given the studio’s size I’m not surprised to see the game doesn’t have voice acting. There is such a rich world here, and I genuinely hope we get to see Clockwork Bird return to this in either a sequel or a new game set in the same universe because I thoroughly enjoyed Silicon Dreams.

Batman: The Telltale Series

It’s been roughly 5 years since I last played a Telltale game. I’ve played most of the games they released during their heyday of adapting popular franchises into their signature style of game, but somewhere around 2016 is where I kind of dropped off. They started releasing a whole bunch of games quickly, which made it obvious just how much their games were following a template. Don’t get me wrong, their template is a good one, I just had too much of it too quickly. Returning after 5 years though lets you see it in a fresh light and appreciate it in a new way.

Batman has become well-trodden ground in the last 12 years, kicking off with the excellent Arkham Asylum. What Telltale has managed to do here though is to spin these well known characters in a somewhat different way, which makes the story as a whole unpredictable - not something you expect in a franchise like Batman. The story starts off as a political story where Gotham’s vote for the next mayor is imminent. Bruce Wayne is backing and funding Harvey Dent, squaring up against current mayor Hamilton Hill. It doesn’t take long for the story’s scope to increase, eventually encompassing many beloved characters like Catwoman, Penguin and Joker and even a new one in Lady Arkham. The story has some rough patches in terms of pacing, where things kind of slow down unnecessarily, but overall I really enjoyed this rendition of Gotham and its inhabitants. The new spin on the Wayne family’s backstory was also a really interesting take on Batman’s origins.

Gameplay-wise, it’s exactly what you expect out of a Telltale game. Conversation options with a timer, some (extremely) light adventure game scenes where you walk around a small area and inspect things in your surroundings and combat sequences of the quick time event variety. QTEs have had their fair share of critics, but I feel like it serves its purpose. It lets the combat sequences be more heavily tailored to each unique situation, and Telltale did a good job of directing these scenes.

Telltale also has a very distinct art style for their adventure games (I hesitate to call them this, I feel like “Telltale game” is a genre of its own at this point), but the comic book nature of this franchise lends itself really well to this sort of look. Other than some characters and a few animations looking a bit stilted, the game looks really good.

Overall, I remained invested in the story and enjoyed it. The sequel, Batman: The Enemy Within, wasn’t really on my radar before now but I might pick it up, because I thought this fusion of Batman and Telltale worked well.

Welcome back to the third week of bashing our heads against the last boss of the current raid in World of Warcraft!

Our best attempt this week:

Apologies for the music, I just like listening to brainless background noise while I raid. Helps me focus!

So. Another 6 hours of progression time on Sire Denathrius, and some small gains were had but also a lot of time spent re-progressing. Our first night of the week we were able to refine Phase 2 of the encounter and get that dance down, but our second night was a bit of a shitshow. Two key people were missing and we had to bring in people that weren't actively playing World of Warcraft anymore which definitely had us retreading old ground.

That second night started off really well; we managed to get to Phase 3 for the first time within our first hour of raiding, but the following 2 hours were spent dying to silly mistakes in Phases 1 and 2 - probably because people were starting to get a little too relaxed with the knowledge that we're capable of hitting that 3rd phase .

I think this is a pretty common occurrence in the WoW raiding space, but it always feels demotivating when you've spent 2 hours basically doing nothing. We're up to 137 total attempts, with the expected amount of attempts before killing the boss being somewhere around 150-250. We're probably gonna be hitting that latter number or somewhere close to it.

I'm starting to get a little stressed out about it, because what we're after in killing the final boss on the hardest difficulty is an achievement that becomes unobtainable as soon as the new patch comes out (some are speculating it will be as early as 4 weeks from now). If we don't manage to kill the boss in that timeframe, it feels like everything we've been working towards since December will have been for nothing and is gonna be a huge blow to the morale of the guild. Here's to hoping next week gets us closer to killing this fucker!

Of the games that have been released recently, not that many are of interest to me. I want to play Returnal, but I don't have a PS5 yet and have no idea as to when that's gonna be available. I have never played a Resident Evil game and don't plan to start now, horror is just not my jam. The Mass Effect re-release is something I might have been interested in, but I don't know that I'm ready to put 100 hours into something I played when it came out. It kind of speaks to the strength of its worldbuilding that when I started reading about particulars of that universe again, I was still able to recall little details that under normal circumstances would have been completely forgotten. I did dip my toe into Knockout City after watching it on last friday's UPF, and I'll try some more of it once its ranked season starts.

What I've actually been playing this week is a little all over the place. I keep chipping away at AC: Valhalla - SOME day I'm gonna be done with that. I played through Little Nightmares with the thought of maybe trying out Little Nightmares II that came out this year. I played some more of Persona 5 Strikers, but that made me want to play Final Fantasy XV... As I said, it's been a little all over the place. I think I need to get a little more focused for next week when it comes to gaming time.

Little Nightmares

Every year, I like to try my hand at some new game genres that I traditionally have not liked to see if maybe my tastes have changed. Maybe I can find specific reasons why certain things don’t resonate with me. With Little Nightmares II having been released this year, I thought I’d check out the first game in this little series. Little Nightmares checks two genre boxes for me - horror and stealth. I think the combination of these might be something I’m just never going to get into.

There are certainly things about Little Nightmares that I enjoyed. The aesthetic, the design of each area’s baddies, some of the puzzles, the at-first small story beat where the player character gets hungry once a level which leads to some really cool things. When the game showed the first signs of where this little tidbit might go, I was on board for that plot point.

Other things were hit and miss for me. The platforming was sometimes good, sometimes a little finicky. The stealth sections were the epitome of what I don’t enjoy when it comes to gameplay of the sneaky variety. Oftentimes, you’re presented with a path you’re pretty sure you know how to navigate to get to the next checkpoint. Only thing is, a big bad is standing in your way. So you hang back, hiding, observing the enemy’s routine. Once you know what to do, the tension of the moment eases off and you set about trying to perform the scenario you’ve envisioned. But when something goes wrong (and it will go wrong quite a few times), you’re often set back quite a ways back and you have to replay the same section over and over, until you’ve figured out that last detail. Any suspense the moment initially had is long gone, replaced by frustration.

I asked myself why I felt frustrated at times like these. Dying and replaying sections where you failed is a common enough occurrence in games, why does this process irk me so much when it comes to this game? I think it might be the passive nature of stealth games. I get restless, and sitting idly waiting for your window to sneak by an enemy is just something that I don’t find particularly fun, especially if I’ve already done it a few times.

The last 2 levels were for me the best part. They were quick and heavily de-emphasized stealth, letting you see the sights without having to replay the same sections over and over. There were some cool set pieces as well, and the final minutes leading up to the ending were genuinely great.

Having played through it, I don’t know that I’m clamoring for more of Little Nightmares straight away. For me, the thing that stood out here were the visuals and the last level in particular. And stuff like that is readily found in other genres I’m more comfortable in.

Persona 5 Strikers

Contrary to popular belief, this isn't a Persona soccer game. It's actually an Omega Force/Koei Tecmo kind-of-musou-but-not-really spin on the Persona 5 universe. I didn't expect much when it came to the gameplay portions of this game, but there is more to the combat than you would think. Rather than the traditional turn-based combat of the Persona games, it's more of a Kingdom Hears-style active combat with free-flowing Persona/spell-usage. It has its moments, but more often than not it's just really messy and visually cluttered. After about 10 hours, I turned the difficulty down to easy just go breeze through the combat sections that tend to drag on for a little too long to get back to the good parts, which are the talky bits.

At this point, at the 10-hour mark, it's been about half visual novel and half dungeon crawler/jail infiltrator. I almost wish it went completely in the visual novel direction, 'cause that's the part I enjoy the most about this. Which definitely is rough, the reward for completing a dungeon being that you don't have to play the game anymore for maybe an hour. I think I might stick with it a little bit longer to see if it'll get its hooks in me a little more, cause I'm really enjoying revisiting these characters on a brand new road-trip adventure in a condensed time frame (this takes place over the course of a summer rather than a whole school year), but a lot of the things about Persona 5 that made it amazing are kind of missing here. So far there's no time management aspect in deciding who or what you spend your time with, the story just kind of chugs along at its own pace.

You don't get to spend as much time with the supporting cast one-on-one either, but so far it definitely feels like everyone gets their time in the spotlight during the main story. The new characters, Sophia and Zenkichi have been good so far as well, fitting right at home with Ryuji, Ann, Makoto and the others.

Final Fantasy XV

What Persona 5 Strikers managed to do though was that it made me want to clear Final Fantasy XV from my backlog. Back when this came out, in November 2016, I think I played about 2 hours before I put it down for the night and just never came back to it. I started up a fresh save on the PC this time and so far it looks a LOT better and playing at 120 fps instead of 30 definitely is helping me enjoy the sheer fidelity of this game. I don't know why I started this right now though, 'cause now I'm kind of playing 3 big games concurrently: Assasssin's Creed: Valhalla, Persona 5 Strikers and this.

This time around, I've played for about 2 hours again but hopefully I'm not gonna abandon it again only to pick it up nearly 5 years later. Early impressions are that it looks really cool. Combat so far hasn't been amazing but at least it looks really good. The friendship of the 4 main characters is a big draw here, even at the onset these relationships feel lived-in, like their lives have been going on and you just happen to peek in to see what they're up to. Of course, you play as the blandest of the four, but that just feels like a standard JRPG trope at this point.

I'm no Final Fantasy die-hard, the only entries I've played previously are Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XIII, but I'm very curious to dive deeper into a franchise that a lot of people seem to love.

This week in World of Warcraft, pretty much nothing of substance has happened. Like I said in my previous post, we're at the stage of the patch cycle where most people have completed their seasonal in-game goals and are waiting for the next content patch. There's still no release date, but that might be Blizzard trying not to take away too much hype from Burning Crusade Classic, which has started its pre-patch period and is going live on June 1. Personally, I played enough of the Burning Crusade back when it was current and have no real desire or intention to play that again. It was kind of the same deal with WoW Classic, I have so many fond memories of that time, but I don't really care to play through that again.

There have been trickles of news about the coming patch, but I think I'll wait until closer to release before putting down my thoughts on it. In the meantime, my current WoW routine is that I log in two nights a week to raid for 3 hours with my guild.

Last week I had hopes that we'd be able to get to Phase 2 of the Sire Denathrius encounter, and I'm pleased to say that we did so in our first night for the week.

Phase 2 is kind of cool. After the intermission phase between Phases 1 and 2 (named March of the Penitent) there's a change in boss arena and you are pulled down to the floor below. The boss has 4 "horsemen" that need to be dealt with, 2 at a time. So the raid of 20 people splits up into two groups, and each of the adds has their own set of mechanics to deal with.

The add I've been dealing with has a sort of bullet hell-like projectiles that she spews out at regular intervals that you just need to dodge. Not that bad. But Phase 2 is kind of an intricate dance of positioning. Go to this position, deal with this add, get dragged to the middle by the boss and take a warlock's demonic gateway to get to another platform to outrange one of the boss' deadly attacks, deal with the new set of 2 horsemen adds that spawn and... that's as far as we've gotten. We're 89 attempts (about 9 hours) in so far, so I think our progress is on track with what is to be expected.

Looking at this graph taken from progstats.io, our expected pull count should be between 150-250 and expected progression time to be 18-32 hours. Stuff like this is one thing I love about the hardcore WoW community. There's tons of sites for different types of information, and the community takes it all so seriously. I love it. I think the reason is that raiding in WoW is to me one of the most satisfying types of PvE combat. There's all the different boss mechanics to keep in mind all the while pulling off your regular damage rotation which to me is just inherently satisfying. From an outsider's perspective, I'm sure it looks like a mess. The fact that most people don't use the default UI doesn't help for watchability of WoW content to an outsider either - how is someone who isn't familiar with the game to glean any sort of information when every video looks different? Well. Maybe what's going on on the screen isn't that important.

I thought a fun thing to do with these weekly boss progress check-ins would be to upload a video of our best attempt so far. Here's us on a good attempt at our current progress.

Phase 1 is going by relatively easily at this point. We're getting comfortable with the movements and the mechanics, and that's usually when the banter starts. You can hear the shift in tone in our Discord as soon as we get close to Phase 2 and once we enter it, that it's time to put your focus pants on. Progress next week is probably not going to be much further along, we're going to be shifting around our strategy a bit during the horseman type adds, so we will probably need a good few attempts to get comfortable with that.

I spent a lot of time this week catching up on some tv shows. The new Shaman King reboot is kinda cool. With season 4 of Castlevania coming out, I figured it was time to watch season 3 at least. And I finished up American Gods season 3 and desperately praying that shows finds a new home somewhere now that it got cancelled on Starz.

As far as games go, I spent like 15 hours playing Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, mostly focusing on the new Wrath of the Druids DLC and also played through Hitchhiker.

Hitchhiker

In Hitchhiker, you play as an amnesia stricken photographer who is looking for his girlfriend. It starts off with you in the passenger seat of a car belonging to Verne, the raisin farmer and it only gets weirder from there.

The story takes a lot of twists and turns, and the presentation of it all is fantastic. Each chapter consists of sitting in a car next to a driver, listening and responding to their dialogue. Each chapter contains a story-within-the-story that the drivers are in some way relaying to you, and these switch up from being the regular 3D car environments to 2D animated shorts. Each chapter's little movie fleshes out the nature of your surroundings in a really neat way. Roads, gates and guardians are the symbols the game introduces as tools to understand your journey and in the context of the game actually makes a lot of sense.

Apparently, this game bears some resemblance to Virginia which I unfortunately have not played yet, but from what I remember people talking about when it comes to that game is that it's very light on the interactivity. The same goes for Hitchhiker, where you are mostly focusing on the dialogue with the occasional light puzzle. I tend to be impatient when it comes to games that mostly have you listening and absorbing your surroundings, so I opted for playing it in spurts, one chapter at a time with breaks inbetween. That way worked out really well for me, giving me some time to digest the goings-on of each chapter before diving into the next one.

I felt like it started off really slowly, but the pace picked up considerably the further along you go and as the scope of the world widens. It might also be that I watched the first 30 minutes of the game in the quick look and seeing the exact same thing play out makes you really impatient, especially in a narrative heavy game like this.

The game being what it is, though, hinges almost entirely upon the visuals and the voice acting, both of which are mostly great. I really like the art style of the drivers and the cars, that looked somewhat like a Dreamworks movie. The animated shorts are also a visual treat. The voice acting falls flat in some areas though, mainly the protagonist and the girlfriend. The drivers were all amazing, which made the 2 examples mentioned stick out like a sore thumb.

All in all, I was definitely on board with this story, right up until the very last few minutes where it just kind of ended abruptly, leaving me with a somewhat unresolved feeling. The 3 hours I spent with it were well worth it though, even if there are some problems with it.

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla - Wrath of the Druids

The first DLC of the season pass for Valhalla came out this friday, and so far I've had enough time to basically play through the story campaign portion of it. It's mostly what you expect in terms of mission structure - escort this person, clear this camp, hunt down this order member, etc. What made me enjoy my time with it are the 1 stand-out character, Ciara, and how beautiful Ireland itself is.

In terms of side activities, I was somewhat disappointed. There is some new stuff - pidgeon coops that carry Royal Decrees (repeatable quick little quests that give you some resources) and a trading minigame being the big ones. The royal decrees felt mostly not worth doing. The trading minigame however is interesting.

The goal is to make Dublin a trading hub with a far reach, so you need to establish trading outposts throughout Ireland that when built provide resources over time (hovering over them gives a straight-up indicator of how many resources per minute you gain from any given trading outpost). All resources generated from these trading posts then go to a chest in Dublin that you need to empty about once an hour lest it reach its resource cap and all the newly generated resources go to waste. You then take these resources to Azar, another new character that is overseeing this whole trade business, and ship it off to distant locales in exchange for some new armor sets, weapons, ship decorations, settlement decorations etc. Making enough of these trades raises Dublins renown, giving you access to new trading partners (and new rewards). I've had fun with this system, and am probably gonna max it out to get all the different armor sets etc.

The open-world side stuff is the thing that has disappointed me the most. It seems like they took the most boring activities and made you do only those. Stone cairns, fighting arenas, treasure hoard maps, altars that require materials to be sacrificed. It's mostly stuff of that caliber, the more interesting side quests of the variety seen in the base game are nowhere to be seen, which is a shame.

Of course, there is also a new Order Member hunt of sorts, though this time instead of members of the Order of the Ancients, you're hunting down druids known as the Children of Danu. It's kind of exactly what you expect, but I find these hunts fun enough.

All of this leads me to a question. When it comes to a lot of this side stuff, I don't often enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay. However, I'm still going for 100% completion for some reason? Why? It still feels satisfying to see an area that is 100% complete, even if the individual pieces required to give you that percentage aren't that enjoyable. Which maybe says something about how damaged I am that when faced with an exhausive Ubisoft open-world checklist, my instict is to tick every box.

I'm looking forward to the next DLC, the Siege of Paris, because with these last games it seems the pattern has been that they first release an alright dlc, followed up by a really good one. I still enjoyed Wrath of the Druids, but I'm keenly aware that might just be because of Stockholm Syndrome.