Weregamer's Game Musings

After two plays through XCOM 2, in giving that a rest, just in time for the release of Grim Dawn. I kick-started this one, and though it failed to pull me away from Path of Exile while in beta, the complete game is more satisfying. Also, PoE league endings (which dump all your characters and stash contents into the base league) generally flush most of my interest, it's so anticlimactic to see the cool bestest loots, fruits of your labors, suddenly just drops in the bucket of what you've seen throughout the life of the game. Back to GD: The influence of the folks who worked on Titan Quest is very obvious, especially in the class and skill system which is pretty much a straight port. But the interesting addition of a Wild West flavor, and a bit of effort into various types of storytelling makes it more appealing to my current tastes, and the clean integration of firearms with magic is cool. Despite the similarity in the shallow high concept description, the setting is not muc...

The first week or two after Heart of Thorns went live, I was a bit disappointed. Playing on, first because four of my friends and I always play together on Mondays, I got a little more of a philosophical handle on how the expansion changes the game, and I'm no longer ambivalent about having bought it - I love some parts, and I just had to learn that the "different kinds of fun as you feel like it" game design is now painted in broader strokes - especially you should only go into one of the new zones if you feel like the activity that is going on in it. Roughly speaking, HoT adds four things to the game: A new character class, a new "elite" subclass for each class, a new form of progression at L80, and a bunch of new zones with their story. Of these, the zones are the most visible and important, and the mastery tracks are the most novel and IMO successful, so I'll leave those for last. In thinking about these changes together, I think I see a philosophica...

Rounding out what I played on my vacation are a game I had for a while but hadn't played yet, and two that got updates. Guild of Dungeoneering This is a funky little game that I filled my "I've got a half hour before bedtime" niche until I found Infinite Space III. It's an interestingly meta game, because the story is about the development of your guild itself, with individual adventurers and their expeditions as events in the larger story. While a single adventurer might get lucky with their "battle scars" from completing missions, they are all doomed to die. But even in dying, they bring in some loot that funds improvements for your guild, and when they beat a quest they bring in lots of loot. In an oddly contrary way, though, having an adventurer succeed and hence survive can do you more harm than good, because once a quest is complete it is no longer available, and the difficulty curve on later dungeons is steep. The optimal way to play is ...

Thea is a hard game for me to review, because I'm having a hard time deciding if I like or hate it. Seriously, I find myself playing Thea for a couple days straight, deciding that it's just too boring and repetitive, and barely deciding not to delete it. Then a few days later, I find myself firing it up for a few games to get one of my deities to the next level. I think the best unified comment I can give is that the concept and design of the game as a whole are very compelling, but it starts to get repetitive because there just isn't enough different on each playthrough. If there were many more of the interesting story vignettes, and if they were triggered more based on what you are doing instead of randomly, the story of each individual game could get compelling. But as it is, every playthrough starts to feel the same, both in what happens on the map and in what vignettes I see. The first dozen or two games were satisfying to me as a builder, but eventually there just...

Another favorite game I've played both before and during my vacation this year is 80 Days. This is actually a phone/tablet port but I would never have known that from playing - the PC interface is clean, and I think they did add some content to take advantage of the available storage. This game is just different and original. I could compare it to a "choose your own adventure" book but that doesn't do it justice. There is no combat system, but the choices are a not as simple as picking an option from a nested tree of lists, and include balancing your finances and your baggage space (more bags carry more stuff but can cost extra to carry on some transports and are just not allowed on others, especially the fastest and most experimental ones) as well as choosing both routes and what to do as events unfold in each city. You play Passepartout, the valet, who really runs the expedition. The gentleman made his bet, but it's the gentleman's gentleman who does all...

Ah, Winter Vacation. Time to start going through the too many games I bought on the Steam Holiday Sale, and look askance at the Steam Winter Sale coming on its heels. Except sometimes one or two of the sale games grab me so much that I don't get around to all of them. I can't complain. The surprise hit for me was Infinite Space 3: Sea of Stars. The Infinite Space series is more of a series of remakes, like the Space Empires series, rather than whole new games. But I've enjoyed each of the earlier ones for several hours and several days, and if I'd seen the Kickstarter for this one I'd have backed it. The big surprise when I tried it was its staying power. There are finally enough random things in the pool to be selected from that it took as long to feel like I'd found everything in this one as it had taken to wring the previous one dry entirely, and now I can still come back to try for a higher score on higher difficulty settings for a brief visit. The...

I've put a little time into this this week, and although the changes seem like little tweaks, the sum is a huge change in how fun the game is. Except for a few buggy places which probably involve uniquely scripted objects, switching characters to use a skill has been smoothly automagicked, and during character generation and leveling up, tooltips and shading help you see which skills are already in the party at which levels. So while your party is still basically a bucket of skills, you spend so much less time tracking who has what that it doesn't break immersion. The traits and quirks don't have a huge effect, but they are sufficient that you can have two characters with the same weapon skill who feel distinct in a fight, and some pairings of skills (combat and non, in all three combinations) yield interesting synergies. A lot of tuning also shows. There are no longer runaway best and worst choices in NPC recruits, and some of the more tedious, less interesting "pu...