Category Archives: Commentary
Reinvestment
Palworld, as we’ve established, is having a moment. A sensation, if you will. The latest figures is it selling 25 million copies across Steam and Xbox in a single month. It also breached the 2.1 million concurrent players milestone on Steam, which puts it at #2 of all time, above even Counter-Strike. Palworld has not sustained that concurrency, but it’s nevertheless in exclusive company.
That’s not really what I wanted to talk about today though.
I want to talk about the Japanese blog post by the Palworld game director that was released three days before the official launch. It details the 5+ miracles that he credits with even being able to get Palworld released at all. For example, the gunplay was all designed by a 20-year old convenience store clerk they found on Twitter, who created 3D renders of weapon reload animations in his free time. There are other bits of interesting serendipity, so let Google auto-translate for you and take the ride.
One element that struck me in particular though: funding.
So I thought the other way around. What is the maximum budget? The most obvious upper limit would be the limit at which the company would go bankrupt. Of course, you can borrow money, but let’s think about that when the balance in your bank account becomes zero. The budget limit is initially until the balance in your bank account reaches zero. When it reaches zero, you can borrow money.
In that case, do you need to manage your budget?
No, all you have to do is borrow money or release money just before the company goes bankrupt and your account balance drops to zero.Well, we’ll probably be able to develop it for about two more years. For the time being, I decided to keep making it without worrying about the budget. We want to complete it as soon as possible, so let’s hire a lot of people.
So that was Miracle #5, in that they basically built Palworld without setting a budget at all. It’s actually a bit more interesting than even that, because they didn’t originally want to spend a lot of time making the game at all. But, due to the positive feedback from the initial trailers, they decided to go for broke.
What really gets me though is this last part:
Almost all of the company’s money was gone.
It’s as calculated!
Well, maybe it’s as calculated…?
No matter how you look at it, it’s just a miracle.
It is not known how much money it cost. I don’t even want to see it.Judging from Craftopia’s sales, it’s probably around 1 billion yen…
Because all those sales are gone.
In case you were unaware, before Palworld this company released Craftopia. Which is also still in Early Access. The game isn’t bad, actually, and shows a lot of promise under the jank. Or showed. Because although it is clear that Craftopia’s measured success bankrolled Palworld, it’s not so clear whether any of those millions of Palworld dollars will make their way back back to Craftopia. And that’s just sad.
I get it – this is how most things work pretty much everywhere, especially in the game industry. Release game, collect revenue, use money to continue employing people to create new game, repeat. Indeed, if a particular release falls flat on its face, not only is that series’ future imperiled, sometimes the company itself is at risk. But in this case, the original game (Craftopia) isn’t even done yet. The creators of ARK infamously released a DLC to their Early Access game, but it was arguably necessary because they were running out of cash ($40 million lawsuit settlement will do that to you). I get no sense that Pocket Pair were in similar straits. Rather, it was likely a cold calculation that the Craftopia well was drying up and it was time to move on to other milkshakes, to mix metaphors.
Obviously, the move worked out for Pocket Pair. And, yeah, for millions of players too. I am happy for these devs’ success, as their willingness to try random shit and just go for it is (hopefully) an inspiration to other studios. I just hope some of that Palworld money comes back to Craftopia in a meaningful way, and not just a “we’ll keep these five original dudes employed in a broom closet” way. They don’t have to and economically it would probably be a mistake. But I think they owe it to themselves.
And that’s because without Craftopia there literally wouldn’t be a Palworld. Not just in the funding aspect either. Craftopia actually has capture spheres, riding creatures, and even the ability to capture human NPCs. This is a “Yo dawg, I put Early Access in your Early Access” situation – Palworld is probably 25% of what Craftopia already delivered years ago. Is it the best 25%? Well, it’s hard to argue against a literal pile of free speech cash.
I suppose we’ll have to see how Pocket Pair proceeds. There is technically still a roadmap for Craftopia (circa December 2023) and there have been a few bug patches released since then. I seriously doubt that any amount of reinvestment will have Craftopia achieve a comparable level of success as Palworld – clearly even AAA games have been blown aside – but I do hope that they at least replenish the coffers and allow Craftopia to reach release with the vision and funds it originally earned.
AI Ouroboros, Reddit Edition
Last year, if you recall, there was a mod-led protest at Reddit over some ham-fisted changes from the admins. Specifically, the admins implemented significant costs/throttles on API calls such that no 3rd-party Reddit app would have been capable of surviving. Even back then it was known that the admins were snuffing out competition ahead of an eventual Reddit IPO.
Well, that time is nigh. If you want a piece of an 18-year old social media company that has never posted a profit – $18m revenue, -$90m net losses last year – you can (eventually) purchase $RDDT.
But that’s not the interesting thing. What’s interesting is that Google just purchased a license to harvest AI training material from Reddit, to the tune of $60 million/year. And who is Reddit’s 3rd-largest shareholder currently? Sam Altman, of OpenAI (aka ChatGPT) fame. It’s not immediately clear whether OpenAI has or even needs a similar license, but Altman owns twice as many shares as the current CEO of Reddit so it probably doesn’t matter. In any case, that’s two of the largest AI feeding off Reddit.
In many ways, leveraging Reddit was inevitable. It’s been an open secret for years that Google search results have been in decline, even before Google started plastering advertisements six layers deep. Who knew that when you allowed people to get certified in Search Engine Optimization, that eventually search results would turn to shit? Yeah, basically everyone. One of the few ways around that though was to seed your search with +Reddit, which returned Reddit posts on the topic at hand. Were these intrinsically better results? Actually… yes. A site with weaponized SEO wins when they get your click. But even though there are bots and karma whores and reposts and all manner of other nonsense on Reddit, fundamentally posts must receive upvotes to rise to the top, which is an added layer of complexity that SEO itself does not help. Real human input from people who otherwise have no monetary incentive to contribute is much more likely to float to the top and be noticed.
Of course, anyone who actually spends any amount of time on Reddit will understand the downsides of using it for AI training purposes. One of the most upvoted comments on the Reddit post about this:
starstarstar42 3237 points 1 day ago*
Good luck with that, because vinyl siding eats winter squid and obsequious ladyhawk construction twice; first on truck conditioners and then with presidential urology.
Edit: I people my found have
That’s all a bit of cheeky fun, which will undoubtedly be filtered away by the training program. Probably.
What may not be filtered away as easily are the many hundreds/thousands of posts made by bot accounts that already repost the same comment from other people in the same thread. I’m not sure how or why it works, but the reposted content sometimes becomes higher rated than the original; perhaps there is some algorithm to detect a trending comment, which then gets copied and boosted with upvotes from other bot accounts? In any case, karma farming in this automated way allows the account to be later sold to others who need such (disposable) accounts to post in more specialized sub-Reddits that otherwise require certain limits to post anything (e.g. account has to be 6+ months old and/or have 200+ karma, etc). Posts from these “mature” accounts as less obviously from bots.
While that may not seem like a big deal at first, the endgame is the same as with SEO: gaming the system. The current bots try to hijack human posts to farm karma. The future bots will be posting human-like responses generated by AI to farm karma. Hell, the reinforcement mechanism is already there, e.g. upvotes! Meanwhile, Google and OpenAI will be consuming Reddit content which itself will consist of more and more of their own AI output. The mythological Ouroboros was supposed to represent a cycle of death and rebirth, but the AI version is more akin to a dog eating its own shit.
I suppose sometime in the future its possible for the tech-bro handlers or perhaps the AI itself to recognize (via reinforcement) that they need to roll back one iteration due to consuming too much self-content. Perhaps long-buried AOL chatroom logs and similar backups would become the new low-background steel, worth its weight in gold Bitcoin.
Then again, it may soon be an open question of how much non-AI content even exists on the internet anymore, by volume. This article mentions experts expect 90% of the internet to be “synthetically generated” by 2026. As in, like, 2 years from now. Or maybe it’s already happened, aka Dead Internet.
[Fake Edit] So… I wrote almost exactly this same post a year ago. I guess the update is: it’s happening.
The Unknown
It’s a cliche, but I was thinking about “there’s nothing scarier than the unknown.” I find this to be literally true, although I haven’t asked whether its the case for people with, e.g. arachnophobia or similar.
In thinking about it though, “the unknown” isn’t exactly what I’m afraid of. Rather, the unknown is simply a placeholder for existing or imaginary fears. And since its a placeholder, it becomes dynamic and mutable based on whomever is experiencing it. This is handy in games, movies, etc.
What brought this up initially was my playing through Dead Island 2’s DLC content, Haus. The base game has plenty of jump scares – sometimes frustratingly unintentional, when zombies materialize from thin air – but Haus leaned into the whole creepy psychological nightmare house schtick. Which is fine, whatever. But I had a moment, in a particularly creepy room, where I thought “Oh, I bet they’re going to do X!” In this case, X is an overly-elaborate amalgamation of scenes from Silent Hill, Dead Space, and similar, that I won’t be getting into; solve for your own damn X.
Thing is, the devs couldn’t do it. The language of action necessary to do X wasn’t in the game. This isn’t Dead Space where an air duct could burst open and a giant tentacle kill you instantly if you fail the Quick Time Event. There are just… zombies, who attack you in predictable ways. Do the zombies crawl out of small sewer grates and other unexpected places? Sure. But zombies are zombies in Dead Island 2. I can panic when a Burster appears in close proximity, but that is a known hazard.
When you don’t know what the game can do, that’s when it’s scariest.
I’m reminded of when I first played Valheim, so long ago. The game was Early Access (still is), made by a small group of people (still is), and they were trying different things. For example, I don’t know of any other survival game in which chopping down trees requires my complete attention, lest I be crushed.
So, there I was, setting sail for the first time in search of… whatever. Vaguely, I knew about the existence of Serpents from Reddit posts, but not necessarily what they looked like, what their attack patterns were, or whether you could see them coming, outrun them, etc. And after a while of sailing, I started to think maybe they weren’t in the game at all.
Somehow, that actually made the situation worse. I started feeling uneasy any time I came across darker water, or other anomalous phenomenon (real or imagined). Wouldn’t it be just the worst if you were sailing along, oblivious, and then a dark shadow beneath your boat yawned, teeth the size of spears sprouting from the waves, while you and your boat disappear in an agonizing instant? Just me?
Anyway, as you can imagine, it was fun times when I encountered my first Leviathan and it sunk beneath the waves after my incessant barnacle trimming. This is it, I’m going to be eaten! It wasn’t. But for that first moment, it could have been, and Valheim got me.
Then lost me when I searched seven mountain ranges for a single goddamn silver node. Not bitter.
Nintenwon’t Sue
The meteoric rise of Palworld is a song for the ages. Two weeks ago, it was sitting in 5th place for all-time concurrent Steam numbers. Today, the throne is forever etched with it sitting at #2. Or #1 if you add the 3 million concurrent Xbox/Game Pass players to the Steam total. Overall, there have been 19 million players shooting adorable animals in the face and/or enslaving them in little balls.
Unfortunately, Palworld may have finally gotten to close to the sun. Or has it?
It always seemed a question of “when” rather than “if” Nintendo would sue Palworld over copyright infringement for what the media (and everyone) describes as “Pokemon with Guns.” In the latest Nintendo investor call, someone brought up Palworld and this is what the Nintendo president, Shuntaro Furukawa, said:
We will take appropriate action against those that infringe on our intellectual property rights.
Let’s just take a moment and appreciate the craftmanship of that sentence. It says so much without saying anything at all, which in turn says so much.
Nintendo has never been shy about suing anyone and anything into oblivion for copyright infringement, so the fact that Palworld made it into Early Access at all is indicative that any hypothetical lawsuit was risky. That it continued to make headlines and break records unimpeded further indicates hesitation. And this legalese statement essentially confirms that if Nintendo ever does get around to business, the lawsuit will be from an oblique angle, at best.
The Palworld devs aren’t worried. As they noted back in January:
Pocketpair isn’t concerned with the similarities, though. Speaking to Japanese gaming news outlet Automation, company CEO and lead developer Takuro Mizobe said that Palworld has passed all the necessary legal hurdles to clear it of copyright infringement. He also noted that there haven’t been any legal actions taken against Pocketpair for its overt comparisons to Pokémon—at least not yet, anyway.
“We make our games very seriously,” Mizobe said. “And we have absolutely no intention of infringing upon the intellectual property of other companies.”
Is it hubris? Actually, probably not.
We can say “Palworld is a rip-off of Pokemon,” but that is A) not all that accurate, and B) at best a moral statement. Game mechanics cannot be copyrighted. Attacking cute animals in tall grass and then capturing them with spheres is not protected expression. And three cheers for that! Can you imagine if Hit Points, Experience Points, talents, aiming down sights, side-scrolling, or any of the myriad of common mechanics were the exclusive domain of whomever first came up with them?
What about patents though? You may have heard about how Richard Garfield and Wizards of the Coast patented the “tapping” mechanic in Magic: the Gathering back in 1995, e.g. turning a card sideways to indicate its use. And over the intervening years, WotC has successfully sued at least two companies – ironically the Pokemon Company, but also the makers of Hex – into at least settling out of court. When it came to Hex though, they deserved it.
However, there is every indication that WotC’s gambit would not be successful anymore. This article touches on it, but basically a Supreme Court ruling in 2014 (Alice v CLS Bank) and subsequent 2018 Federal Court ruling all but closed the door on abstract game rules being patentable. Nevermind that the patent expired years ago anyway. Tap to your heart’s content! (This is not legal advice)
So, yeah. The Palworld mod that literally put Pokemon into the game? DMCA’d. Regular ole’ Palworld? Completely fine. And, honestly, kind of a perfect example of why none of this sort of thing should be locked down as the exclusive right of one corporation. Are the individual mechanics completely unique? Nope. But rather than the copy & paste shovelware you see in app stores, Pocket Pair is at least trying to take all the fun stuff from the games they like and mash it together and see if the result is just as fun. As armchair devs, we all like to say “I wish I could play X with the mechanic from Y.” Well, here is someone doing exactly that and it’s working. I saw that energy in Craftopia and I see that here in Palworld. We could do with more of that, not less, IMO.
Blizzard Decimation
It’s been rough going in the game development world, and it’s getting rougher: Microsoft has laid off 1,900 Activision Blizzard staff. Layoffs are an expected reality after corporate mergers, and certainly the industry trend is towards cutting staff this past year. But this… also cuts a bit deeper.
The changes announced today reflect a focus on products and strategies that hold the most promise for Blizzard’s future growth, as well as identified areas of overlap across Blizzard and Microsoft Gaming. Today’s actions affect multiple teams within Blizzard, including development teams, shared service organizations and corporate functions. As part of this focus, Blizzard is ending development on its survival game project and will be shifting some of the people working on it to one of several promising new projects Blizzard has in the early stages of development.
There’s some irony in Blizzard’s abandonment of the survival game project just as Palworld is eating the genre’s lunch – copying existing games and making them slightly better was Blizzard’s whole M.O! No doubt the layoffs were planned months ago, but part of me wonders whether the calculus would have changed had they known of Palworld’s viral success. Then again, if Blizzard released something to less acclaim, then that would be pretty embarrassing.
I’m actually low-key devastated that we won’t see Blizzard’s take on the genre. It may seem like there are a lot of options available – and there are – but it’s quite rare to see AAA development in this space. Right now, it’s like… Fallout 76 and maybe Grounded. No Man’s Sky might count? Just imagine your character running around with the detail of Overwatch rigs. Blizzard already has experience building giant, seamless worlds too. Although… hmm. If you squint hard and ignore the questing, I guess WoW itself really might feel like a survival game already. Maybe that slight overlap was the problem.
In any case, another unfortunate outcome of the axed survival game is the fact that the devs working on it were pulled from other areas months ago, only to be laid off. From a Hearthstone Reddit thread:
—FORMER Hearthstone Devs that were on cancelled Survival Game have been laid off!:
-Matt London – Designed Book of Mercenaries (solo adventures/stories/characters), Twist, and Caverns of Time Expansion
-Ates Bayrak – Designed Duels
—Current Hearthstone Team members laid off:
Cynthia Park – Hearthstone PR Manager
On second thought: oof. Book of Mercenaries was not good content, Twist has been an epic disappointment, and Caverns of Time was an insane cash-grab that’s especially egregious considering they “paused” Twist for months. Meanwhile, Duels is was… cut from the same cloth, let’s say. I don’t want to kick anyone while they’re down or anything, but I’m starting to wonder if Blizzard was really assembling an A-Team for the survival project. Maybe these devs were the ones most willing to take risks to see what works. And perhaps the monetization strategy wasn’t their idea. Who knows?
Oh well. Pour one out for the game that was not to be.
eBooks
I’m not much of a reader. I actually enjoy books quite a bit and have read a lot of them, but I have found that it takes a specific set of circumstances for it to occur. Back when I was stuck in an office doing menial data entry tasks 15 years ago? Conducive. If I’m sitting in my gaming chair in front of my $2500 gaming PC setup? Not conducive. I’m also allergic to cluttering up my house further with physical one-and-done objects; the subtle guilt that arises from even thinking of disposing of books is also something I can live without. So, the rise of eBooks and eReaders has helped the situation somewhat.
…aside from the friction that comes from buying a PDF of words. Who does that?
I have heard a lot of good things about the Three-Body Problem series. I’m a fan of sci-fi and philosophical musings – I really enjoyed the entire Foundation series, Ender’s Game series, and so on. If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time though, you understand the problem: parsimony as fuck. So, it looks like the trilogy is $28.78 at basically every online vendor, including Amazon. However, Amazon is selling the first book for $11.99 and the 2nd and 3rd for $5.99 apiece. Shit like that really starts to make you question the subjective value of particular arrangement of words.
So, I then start looking up local libraries in my area. As it turns out, a lot of libraries will loan you eBooks for free, and you can even sign up for a library card without stepping foot in the physical space. Top-tier Millennial innovations, let me tell you. Of course, predictably, this means that the two electronic versions of the books are already checked out and behind a 200+ waitlist of people who probably subsequently went directly to Pirate Bay.
That actually was my Go-To move in past, but I’ve been out of the skull-and-crossbones game too long and the scene moved on without me. I mean, I can figure out VPNs and Plex servers and Usenet groups… but I just don’t want to. No longer do I have near-infinite time with near-zero responsibility. Clearly, all that time is better spent doing an absurd amount of shopping to save a number dollars no longer enough to purchase lunch.
The end result was this: nothing. I gave up and read nothing.
Great story, right? If you could Paypal me $11.99, I’ll be right on my way.
Actually, what will probably occur is that I go to Google Play and spend the $10ish and change I have earned doing random surveys to purchase the first book, then buy the two $6 sequels from Amazon, and then hope they all work on my Kindle Paperwhite. Where they will likely stay dormant until/unless I find myself away from the house and any parental or driving responsibility for a substantial amount of time. Then, I might actually get to reading something again.
It’s a tough life I lead, I know, full of adversity.
[Fake Edit] Don’t worry, after browsing some older folders, I apparently already “acquired” the Three-Body Problem series back in 2021. Now, to read them. Some day.
The Haul
I purchased a number of games over the holiday break:
- My Time at Sandrock
- Dave the Diver
- Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands: Chaotic Edition
- Alan Wake 2
- Dead Island 2: Gold Edition
The (potentially) interesting thing is how four of them were from the Epic store and only one from Steam. As it turns out, throwing an additional 33% discount on top of the holiday sale discount is enough to get me to switch storefronts. Well, “switch storefronts,” with air-quotes. And, shit, I would’ve done it for like a $5 discount; I’m a cheap date. I do fully anticipate Epic to eventually stop with the free games and outrageous deals because they’re just hemorrhaging money, but for now I’ll soak up as much as I can and just assume them going bankrupt won’t lose my library.
I started writing about why I chose the five games above and not any of the other ones on my wishlist(s), but it started to feel a bit weird. Which has hardly ever stopped me before, mind you.
I dunno. My inclination to drop a game when it becomes less fun than something else I could be playing, is starting to run into guilt of a veritable landfill of half-chewed titles. I shouldn’t care – there is no one keeping score at home – but I’m also thinking about how silly it gets when talking about games to other human beings. “Oh, yeah, Baldur’s Gate 3 is amazing. I got 61 hours into Act 1 and then… stopped playing. Since August.” “Yep, 120+ hours in Cyberpunk 2077. Never finished.” “Elden Ring was beautiful, I agree. About 30 hours in, but haven’t touched it in 6 months.” WTF, mate?
Don’t get me wrong, there are still titles I’m very interested in that will be releasing in 2024. But at some point I hit a critical mass of straw such that my cognitive back can no longer sustain the dissonance. I need to get my shit together. Or abandoned shit. It’s getting a little ridiculous.
Welcome to 2024.
End of Year: 2023 Edition
Tangentially related to 2022, with n+1.
Workwise, I ended up receiving a significant “market adjustment” raise on top of higher-than-normal raise at the beginning of the year. Both were sort of defensive moves intended to stem the bleeding/poaching of staff, and it largely seemed to have worked. I certainly stopped looking for other positions… for the time being. Truth be told, I’m a bit of a big fish in a small pond. With golden handcuffs. On the, er, fins. Excellent health coverage, 99.99% work from home, substantial pension, the job is both intellectually fulfilling and easy, and I don’t actively hate anyone I work with. It would take a lot of money to make me roll the dice on something else.
Family continues to do great as well. Kiddo will be in kindergarten (!) next year.
For this look-back, I’m going to list out the new (to me) games I played along with the hours logged.
Steam (425h)
- Dark Souls [62.9h]
- Baldur’s Gate 3 [61h]
- Dark Souls 2 [44.5h]
- Across the Obelisk [44.1h]
- Against the Storm [40.8h]
- Sun Haven [36.2h]
- Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus [28.3h]
- Elden Ring [28h]
- Green Hell [15.7h]
- Arcanium [15h]
- Craftopia [9h]
- Cult of the Lamb [8.3h]
- Days Gone [6.7h]
- Wildermyth [5.3h]
- Rune Factory 4 Special [4.9h]
- Littlewood [3.7h]
- Necesse [3.1h]
- Tunguska: the Visitation [2.7h]
- God of Weapons [1h 37m]
- Cryptark [1h 34m]
- Her Story [1h 25m]
- Barony [1h 17m]
- Blasphemous [1h]
- Paint the Town Red [41m]
- Survivalist: Invisible Strain [35m]
- The Planet Crafter [34m]
- Dead Estate [25m]
- Die in the Dungeon: Origins [17m]
Looking up the /played time and putting them in order really puts things in perspective. As ordering things tend to do. Hadn’t quite realized how much time I spent with Dark Souls 1 & 2, for example.
I have every expectation on returning to Baldur’s Gate 3… someday. Originally, I was slowing down because of what I heard about Act 3 being buggy. But the reality is probably closer to what happened with me in Divinity: Original Sin 2: being too thorough. It’s how I could still be in the Underdark after 61 hours (!). Also, knowing that I would immediately turn around at the Act 2 prompt and go explore the Mountain Pass alternate route was a bit too much me. I mean, if you aren’t uncovering the fog on every square inch of isometric CRPGs, are you really playing them?
Epic Game Store (106h)
- Cyberpunk 2077 (Phantom Liberty) [62h]
- My Time at Sandrock [38.5h]
- Disco Elysium [4h]
- Surviving the Aftermath [1.5h]
Once again, can I just say how idiotic the Epic launcher is when it comes to gathering meaningful information from your games? I sort by “Recently Played” and it sorts by Recently Installed which is obviously not the same thing! And there’s no way to sort by install size. In any case, Epic has been doing better in the price department and will result in a few more purchases before the Winter sale is done. Still, not a whole lot of games played in comparison to Steam.
As you may have heard in the gaming press, Cyberpunk is indeed in the No Man’s Sky redemption club between the expansion release and the more-important 2.0 Skill rework. I actually started a brand new character to play through the expansion, and enjoyed myself thoroughly (as evident from the /played time). Still haven’t gotten around to finishing the game’s main plot though. The situation reminds me of Witcher 3 wherein the primary plot device is the least interesting thing going on.
Xbox Game Pass (302h):
- Wartales [76h 28m]
- Starfield [64h 54m]
- Coral Island [46h 18m]
- Far Cry 6 [20h]
- Everspace 2 [17h 47m]
- Potion Craft [12h 23m]
- Ori and the Will of the Wisps [11h 34m]
- Weird West [11h 33m]
- Farworld Pioneers [9h 20m]
- Common’hood [7h]
- Chained Echoes [4h 25m]
- Skul: the Hero Slayer [3h 41m]
- Atomic Heart [3h 38m]
- Redfall [2h 58m]
- Eiyuden Chronical: Rising [2h 51m]
- Remnant 2 [2h 3m]
- High on Life [1h 56m]
- Disney Dreamlight Valley [1h 32m]
- Homestead Arcana [1h 12m]
- Cocoon [52m]
- Death’s Door [45m]
- Dungeons 4 [30m]
- Eastern Exorcist [22m]
- Techtonica [??]
I, uh, really liked Wartales, huh? Hearthstone probably absorbed more time overall, but Wartales very clearly exceeds the total game time of any other item on the list. But guess what? If you said “I bet you didn’t finish the game” then you would be correct! It’s starting (ending?) to be a problem.
As for Starfield… man. What a disappointment. Bethesda was teasing some updates with “new ways to travel,” which is kind of a funny way of saying “new loading screens.” But seriously, what’s the point? Even if they added some kind of rover or fun new traversal mechanic, all that will do is get you over the nondescript terrain and into the copy/pasted POIs faster. Are they adding new Abandoned Mines, or is it the same one I saw on 13 different planets and our own goddamn Moon? It boggles my mind how these designers could experience the wild successes of the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series and then completely forget why those games are any good. “What if we took our dense environmental storytelling and, like, divided it into loading screens lightyears apart?” What a waste.
On a different note, Game Pass itself provided 302 hours of gameplay for me over the course of the year, at an approximate cost of $120. That’s a pretty decent >2.5:1 ratio for entertainment by itself. In September though, I snagged three 3-month membership cards for $22.56 apiece, each one granting me a bonus month when I redeemed them. So, $67.78 for as much Game Pass as I can stand through most of 2024. Not sure if the “trick” will still work for others, but it certainly beat buying Starfield or Redfall for full (or any) price.
What’s Next
Playing more games, of course. Just not the correct ones, or finishing anything.
For real though, I am actually running out of space on my 2TB game drive and thus have an external motivation to complete (or delete) these games. Specifically, in 2024 I’d like to finish:
- Cyberpunk 2077 (for real)
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- Death Stranding
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- Starfield (sigh)
I’ve already picked up a few other games during the Winter sale (not listed), so there will be some competition to my clearly limited attention span. Or maybe its just a healthy reaction to something in my life no longer sparking joy. After all, I did officially become Old™️ this year. Well, middle-aged, anyway. Which certainly feels pretty damn old (apologies to those bloggers with 20+ years on me).
Here’s to hoping we all get older in 2024.
Winter Epic Sale – 2023 Edition
It’s that time of year again: contributing to the financial instability of the Epic Game Store. And this time around, Sweeny is extra committed to going deeper into the red with an endless 33%-off coupon that stacks with existing sales + 10% “cash back” that you get unlocked 10 days later. While the 33%-off only applies to purchases $14.99 and above, you can get the discount by adding more than one cheap game together in the same cart.
I’m being a bit flippant here, but I’m actually pretty surprised at the deals at hand. Here is what is on my wishlist (prices do not include the 10% cash back):
- Untitled Goose Game – $6.69
Assassins Creed Odyssey: Standard Edition – $8.09(Game Pass)- Assassins Creed Valhalla: Standard Edition – $10.04
- Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria – $13.39
- Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands: Chaotic Edition – $13.39
- God of War – $16.74
- Far Cry 6: Gold Edition – $16.74
- My Time at Sandrock – $21.46
- Dying Light 2: Winter Tales Edition – $24.11
- Alan Wake 2 – $26.79
- Dead Island 2: Gold Edition – $32.15
Steam’s Winter Sale will not be kicking off for another week, but I would be very surprised if it beat any of these prices. For example, I don’t anticipate that My Time at Sandrock will go from 20% off at Thanksgiving to 50% during Christmas. And even if it did for some reason, that will basically just achieve price parity.
In any case, I’m not about to just purchase everything on that list. At a certain point, it’s less about Patient Gamer and/or Wait Until Game Pass and more about not setting oneself up for failure. I like the Assassins Creed games, but I haven’t played the last five or them, and it’s doubtful I would jump in and plow through the ones that take 100 hours to complete or whatever. Same with God of War. I played the first two way back in the day, and nothing since. Would I enjoy my time? Sure. But I still haven’t gotten around to Red Dead Redemption 2 after a year and a half.
Of course, none of that really matters. What matters is: what do I want to play right now. Sometimes it is bullshit farming sims to mindlessly pass the time, and other times it is Serious Business Games. More so the former than the latter these days, honestly.
In An Age 
Hurry Up and Wait: March Edition
Mar 4
Posted by Azuriel
Since I am already looking stuff up for myself, may as well write it down for others too.
Games – Waiting for Sales
Nightingale is the blogging topic du jour and I do admit feeling a bit left out of the same conversation everyone else is having. Similar to Enshrouded actually, although I see less posts about that for whatever reason. While I would like to say that I’m waiting for Nightingale to release their offline mode out of principle, the reality is that… surprise! It’s not on sale. That’s literally it.
May not have to wait for too much longer though, because my research indicates the next sales are:
It’s not guaranteed that the above games will actually be on sale more than their 10% EA “release” discount, but it’s worth the gamble in my eyes. Either there will be a steeper discount, or I can continue waiting while the games get (presumably) better.
Games – Waiting for Updates/Release
It may seem a bit weird seeing Stardew Valley on there, but at one point last year I had the urge to download the Stardew Valley Expanded mod, only to find out that ConcernedApe decided to put out another update with new stuff 4 year later. Guess the dude is taking a page out of G.R.R. Martin’s book. Anyway, it felt silly to start playing a mod that may or may not immediately work with a new patch.
I was originally excited for Diablo 4 to hit Game Pass, but then I remembered that I hadn’t thought about it at all since it was even announced. Like, zero interest. I’ve played all the other ones though, so may as well keep the streak alive. This time for free*!
As for the Early Access games on the list, I have come to understand and eventually accept that hitting 1.0 releases with them are usually irrelevant. For example, I waited until 1.0 to play Smallands (Impressions post pending), and yet there’s an update coming in April that will rebalance crafting and more patches on the roadmap to enhance the pet/mount system. So… whatever I was waiting for in 1.0 is kinda irrelevant. This problem is especially bad in life-sim games like Coral Island, Sun Haven, etc, which have added post-game/marriage quests material that is pretty important for fans of the genre.
Other Media
Dune: Part was released in theaters March 1st. I have been eagerly awaiting this for a while, but haven’t actually went to any movie theaters for years before COVID, and I’m not about to begin again now. So, optimistically, I’ll be waiting 2-3 months before this comes to a streaming service so I can watch it during the time I should be sleeping.
3 Body Problem is something I’ve already talked about recently. I am wishing it the greatest possible success, because I really want the second book to exists as some kind of Season 2. It would be quite the spectacle. And as for Fallout, I talked about that too. My body is ready… even if it is possibly dumb.
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Tags: Dune, Hurry Up and Wait, Nightingale, Sales, Stardew Valley, Waiting