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Impressions: Coral Island
Coral Island is a farming/life-sim straight from the Stardew Valley vein, and recently came out of Early Access. I have spent about 30 hours playing on Game Pass and the verdict is… acceptable. Pretty good, even. But the whole time I have been playing, all I can think about is that I want to play My Time at Sandrock instead.
Which to be fair, is, well, an unfair comparison. Sandrock (and My Time at Portia) at not the same kind of life-sim. But what kept striking me while playing Coral Island is how low the stakes are. That’s also an unfair criticism given that all of these life-sims are meant more for relaxation purposes but… I dunno. Sandrock/Portia have an overall narrative, Sun Haven has plot plus a combat system that is a smidge more serious, and Stardew Valley kind of sets the bar. It’s tough for Coral Island to stand on its own with those kind of peers.
Coral Island does have some things going for it. The (non-rotating) pseudo-3D graphics set it apart from the typical pixelated style in this genre. The anime-esque portraits are extremely well done, with villagers having different outfits per season, per certain cutscenes, and even bathing suits. The map allows you to both see where everyone is located in real-time, and even search for specific villagers. The diving activity where you clean up trash on the ocean floor is satisfying.
Overall, like I said, Coral Island is just fine. If you’re looking for a chill life-sim with extremely genre-typical activities, this is your stop. It did capture my attention for 30 hours and scratches some optimization itches. But if you’re looking for anything more than that, e.g. some adrenaline hit or unfolding mystery, you will have to keep on looking elsewhere.
Mainlining: Wartales
My enthusiasm for gaming has been wanning for the past month or so. Cyberpunk’s expansion has been fantastic, but even at its height, I “only” played for about two hours at a time, maximum. For some reason, I would complete a mission, sit there for a second, and then turn it off and go watch Hearthstone clips on Youtube and/or scroll vids. Nothing was really grabbing me, you feel?
Then I downloaded Wartales off of Game Pass and… goddamn. Four hours a night has never evaporated so fast.
Wartales is medieval, low-fantasy mercenary RPG in the same vein as Battle Brothers. You control a small squad of mercs and endeavor to complete jobs to earn money to feed, pay, and outfit your crew. Combat is turn-based, but everything else takes place in real-time, with merchant caravans, bandits, and packs of hostile wildlife roaming the overland map (or hiding in the woods). A stamina meter acts as a clock to your escapades – requiring your team to camp and eat – but there is no other world-ending deadline like in Battle Brothers. As long as you can keep up with your food and salary, you can take as long as you want to do anything.
I started to type up explanations of the game’s various features, but let me just hit the highlights:
- Granular difficulty – You can toggle the combat and “upkeep” difficulties independently. Additionally, you choose between Free-Roam (scaling enemies) or Region-Locked. The latter mode allows you to over-level an area if you’re having trouble, and makes more sense overall (no max-level peasants afoot).
- Multiple Progression Systems – Gain Knowledge Points to unlock craftable items, learn recipes, gain permanent camp upgrades, and complete repeatable Path “achievements” to unlock more stuff.
- Optimization Galore – Choose talent specializations based on “class,” equip Legendary/unique items with powerful abilities, apply 1-2 of dozens of weapon enhancements, build your perfect merc band.
- Armored HP – Armor gives you an extra HP bar. Simple, grokkable, and you can cheese it in a few ways.
- Play As Bandits – Ambush Merchant caravans and loot all their wares. Run from the fuzz. Or play everything straight… only stealing items otherwise locked behind special currency.
Downsides? There are quite a few:
- Death Spirals – Characters get wounds when reduced to 50% HP, and require expensive medicine to cure. Armor damage also needs purchasable items to repair. Early game is rough going.
- Noob Traps Galore – Choices are everywhere, but some of them are objectively bad (or bugged!). Descriptions alone can be misleading, and there’s no good Wiki info.
- Alpha Strike Focus – inevitable with turn-based combat, but the game seems (im)balanced around killing everyone within 1-2 rounds (if not the first few character turns).
- SAVED GAME BUG – Unpatched as of this post, there’s a bug that can remove a full day’s progress.
The last item in particular is unfortunate, and happened to me. Basically, you save the game as normal, everything seems fine, but next time you open the game it’s like whatever saves you made the previous day do not exist. There is an apparent workaround of making a copy of your saved game folder, but I haven’t confirmed whether it makes a difference (bug hasn’t struck again).
Looking at my /played number though… 60+ hours. Wow. Does this mean Wartales is better than any of the other games that deserved to be playing? No. But it is the game I apparently needed right now.
Microsoft (All But) Acquires Activision-Blizzard
The FTC has lost its injunction case against the Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard merger. Minutes later, the remaining regulatory holdout in the UK appears to be in back-room discussions with Microsoft. Although the FTC can still technically appeal the decision, in all likelihood things will be buttoned up by the time this post goes live.
I have not been following the court case itself too closely. The armchair legal experts on Reddit though suggest that the FTC’s arguments were weak, but don’t really go into convincing detail as what alternative arguments would have been stronger. On the face of it, everything seemed to hinge on Sony – who currently owns 45% of the entire console market – being negatively impacted by the merger. Considering Xbox is just 27.3%, one might surmise that the merger would actually increase competition in the console space. At least the UK’s argument was about cloud gaming… something that basically doesn’t exist, with even Google and Amazon unable to get it to work.
I am sympathetic to the argument that buying publishers and game companies is detrimental generally. There are no doubt millions of PS5 owners who probably wanted to play Starfield on their console of choice. Sort of like how I would have liked to play Ghosts of Tsushima on PC, which isn’t even considered a console by Sony/courts, but nevermind.
Perhaps it’s a bit myopic, but I’m obviously in Team Game Pass. I don’t care about Call of Duty and I doubt WoW will change, but potentially seeing Diablo 4 show up without having to spend $70 on it is a welcome surprise. No doubt the good times will come to an end at some point, especially considering the recent subscription price hikes, but it’s still worlds better (and cheaper) than the alternatives.
Will everyone come to regret this outcome 10 years from now? I kinda hope so. Because that means things are normal enough in 2033 that we can still give a shit about video games and not play Fallout 5 by walking outside our front doors.
Mid-Year Game Plans
Finally, with the Summer Steam Sale, my wait is over:
Of course, the best part of seasonal Steam sales these days is that it leads to 3rd party storefronts offering even steeper discounts. For example, I won’t be purchasing Elden Ring on Steam for $41.99, I will be purchasing it from DLGamer for $36.99. Using 3rd-parties has bit me in the past, but “Steam Activation” are the magic words. Well, provided there aren’t delays in getting the keys. The only real downside is losing the ability to refund the game within the 2-hour window, but I’m thinking that won’t be relevant here. Probably.
Aside from Elden Ring, there are a number of items on my wishlist that are on sale. Unfortunately, I cannot trust any of them to not just magically show up on Game Pass by the time I get around to playing them. For example, My Time at Sandrock is currently 20% off with an estimated 1.0 release date of September. The devs have stated that once the game is out of Early Access, it will be more expensive. I really enjoyed My Time at Portia to the tune of 107 hours. But here’s the thing: My Time at Portia is already on Game Pass right now. Is Sandrock currently listed as an upcoming Game Pass title? No. Does the original game being there make it more likely that sequel will be too? I’d like to think so.
It helps/hurts that Game Pass is becoming the new hotness for survival/crafting games, including Early Access ones. Coral Island, Grounded, Little Witch in the Woods, Homestead Arcana, Farworld Pioneers (ugh), Stardew Valley, 7 Days to Die, Disney Dreamlight Valley, No Man’s Sky. Story of Seasons: Mineral Town just hit the service too. Meanwhile, my Steam wishlist has:
- My Time at Sandrock (EA)
- Stoneshard (EA)
- Scrap Mechanic (EA)
- Travellers Rest (EA)
- Roots of Pacha
- Sons of the Forest (EA)
- One Lonely Outpost (EA)
- Forever Skies (EA)
- Survival: Fountain of Youth (EA)
- Voidtrain (EA)
- Life Not Supported (EA)
Which of those will land on Game Pass? Or in a Humble Bundle, for that matter? Who knows.
What I do know is that it will be difficult to find time to play all of the things anyhow. Just look at this:
- Hearthstone: Titans (Expansion) – August 1st
- Baldur’s Gate 3 – August 3rd
- Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure (expansion) – August 22nd
- ARK: Survival Ascended (Remaster) – August 2023
- Starfield – September 6th
- Lies of P – September 19th
- My Time at Sandrock – September 26th
- Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty (DLC) – September 26th
Needless to say, August and September are a little stacked. It was even more stacked on the September side until the devs for Baldur’s Gate 3 decided to release it a month early to avoid competition with Starfield. Of course, I do not necessarily plan to purchase all of these games… huh. Actually, both Starfield and Lies of P will be on Game Pass, and I’m eagerly anticipating the Cyberpunk DLC. And Hearthstone is Hearthstone. And GW2 is GW2.
So, uh, yeah. Maybe I will just wait on any more deal purchases until the Winter Sale.
Impressions: Farworld Pioneers
Steam indicates that I first added Farworld Pioneers to my wishlist back in August 2022. It was described as Terraria/Starbound meets RimWorld/Oxygen Not Included, and since I very much enjoyed all those games, it seemed like this one would be up my alley. Well, it had a surprise (to me) release a few days ago and was on Game Pass to boot, so I was super excited to start playing.
Unfortunately, the game is pretty much trash right now.
First off, the game is labeled “v1.0” but it is very much in the “minimum viable product” category. Like, barely Early Access. There are periods of inexplicable slowdown; all electricity generators delete their fuel whenever you Save & Quit; Colony AI is abysmal to the point where colonists will readily starve/freeze to death while getting stuck on the very resources they were collecting; several research products literally say “Coming Soon!”; the ultimate goal for exploring the rest of the game, the Dropship, simply… doesn’t work. That last one was the final kick in the balls for me, as I ended up exiting the game several times to try and get unstuck from the inside of the cabin, only to finally teleport out back to the original planet… sans Dropship. And its contents. According to others, I was lucky: they didn’t have a teleporter so they were truly trapped and had to abandon 10-hour saves.
As bugs and sloppy code, those things can hopefully be fixed. What is a bit more concerning is the overall design of the game.
Terraria and Starbound both have NPCs that you can “recruit” to basically progress the game. They are not active members, but more like glorified workbenches or vendors. In colony sims like RimWorld and Oxygen Not Included, giving detailed orders and blueprinting out a base is important because you can’t control people directly. In exchange, you can see most of the map for planning purposes. Farworld Pioneers is a bastardization of the two – main character and colonists – and it just doesn’t work.
You can certainly give orders like “cut down these trees in particular” or “build a concrete room that looks like this.” And if you happen to have the resources in your stockpiles to accommodate the request (and the AI doesn’t wig out), they will even build it for you! The problem is that your colonists will not move the Iron Ore into the Smelter to make Steel Ingots and then move those to make the Steel door. Colonists will use existing resources, and they will work “bills” at crafting stations, but you have to set those up manually yourself. In which case, you may as well do it yourself.
Now, perhaps that is a deficiency of the existing AI. Certainly possible. But even if that piece is fixed, the fundamental problem is that you can only manage things that your character can see – no setting things up remotely while you are mining or exploring underground caves – which kind of renders the entire exercise moot. About the only functional things colonists can do while you are gone is perform Research and farm food.
I also have grave concerns about the scope of the game. Obviously building a Dropship and heading to another planet to get more advanced resources is one of the top goals. But what comes after that? Are they truly going the Starbound route wherein you then head to new star systems and discover even more exotic minerals and so on? Based on the current tech tree, it seems unlikely. And based on the gameplay on the starter planet, where you might get notified raiders are attacking your base while you are deep underground, I have my suspicions that this is a more “defend your colony” and/or “play on multiplayer and PvP strangers” endgame.
Overall, the game is a hot mess and should not have been released in this state. As someone starved of exactly the genre Farworld Pioneers professed to belong to, this has been extremely disappointing.
Impression: Potion Craft
Potion Craft is one of the most brilliant gameplay experiences I have had in years.
The premise of the game is that you are a new alchemist moving into an inexplicably abandoned former alchemist house. As the title indicates, your job is to wake up, craft potions for townspeople, get paid, buy ingredients, experiment a bit, go to bed, repeat. Unlike a lot of other titles in this sort of storefront genre, there is no looming debt payment or other time constraint whatsoever. It’s just you, the ingredients, and a bit of alchemy.
It’s that very alchemical gameplay though that is so fundamentally brilliant and elegant and intuitive.
To craft a potion, you must move a potion icon around a map and land on a specific, potion-shaped effect. To move around the map requires you to place an ingredient into the caldron and stir. At the beginning, you start off with a limited amount of basic herbs and mushrooms. Hovering over each one reveals the properties of that ingredient, showing you where it will move the potion icon. What you will notice is that there is a sort of baseline distance you move, and then a further distance denoted by a dotted line. If that extra distance is desired, you must place the ingredient into a mortar and then pestle it as desired. Put the resulting mash into the caldron, stir, and repeat until you reach your destination.
Everything about this is so deliciously analog. When using the mortar & pestle, you do not have to grind things up fully – you can choose to stop at almost any pixel distance. Additionally, the quality tier of the potion is dependent on how close you end up overlaying the potion icons. Just touching? Tier 1. More than half? Tier 2. If you want Tier 3 though, you start slowing way down, grinding herbs just so, stirring the caldron ever-so-slightly, and diluting the mixture with water (which moves the icon back towards the center of the map) drop by drop. Until, until… ahh. Perfection.
What continues to amaze me is how… correct all of this feels. The alchemical map starts off nearly blank, and you explore its boundaries by experimenting with what herbs you have available. Finding a new potion effect on the map is exciting because you don’t know what it is until you brew it. Thankfully, Potion Craft does allow you to save custom recipes (limited by magic paper you purchase) so you don’t have to manually recreate every single potion every time. But as you help out your herb/mushroom suppliers, you get greater access to new ingredients that have different pathways. This then allows you to create the same potions with different (and usually) fewer total ingredients, improving the efficiency of your business.
Seriously though, I am deeply, deeply impressed with this gameplay. Indeed, I have spent the last three days trying to figure out if there is a term for what the designers have accomplished here, by so tightly marrying the concept of alchemy with this gameplay that embodies it. The closest I have gotten is “the opposite of Ludonarrative dissonance.” If you have better words for this, let me know.
Having said all this, I do want make an important distinction here: the gameplay is brilliant… but not necessarily engaging long-term.
There are a set of tasks that reward XP that sort of guide you through the general game, which is fine. But after about 8 hours, I have seen pretty much everything I imagine I will be seeing in Potion Craft. It is sometimes fun to realize you can use different herbs in novel ways to improve the efficiency of a recipe, but at the end of the day you are still selling a potion to a random customer for X amount of gold – once you have enough of a income stream, it doesn’t matter too much. And all that XP? It grants you Talent points which you spend to… improve the uncover distance of the alchemy map, increase bonus XP nodes on said map, and increase profit percentages. It’s a very shallow, closed loop.
There does appear to be an ultimate goal to create the Philosopher’s Stone, but it all seems kinda arbitrary. “Craft this precursor with these five potions, craft stage two precursor with these ten potions with an eclectic mixture of effects, etc.” This was all much less interesting than exploring the original map, trying to figure out how in the world you would make it past that obstacle, or figuring out that a potion which previously took 5 herbs to make can be done in two. The process novelty is very finite, in other words.
Be that as it may, I do commend the designers of Potion Craft and encourage anyone subscribed to Game Pass to give it a shot. It is a very unique, grokkable experience which is very rare these days.
End of Year: 2022 Edition
Just like 2021, except we all just gave up.
Workwise, I ended the year still at the same company but promoted to a more senior role. There have been a number of bonuses and raises offered company-wide, as management starts understanding that, yeah, this new labor market is here to stay. There are apparently some more raises in store for my specific department, but we’ll have to see how that pans out. Despite spending literally $15,000 in daycare this year, my family is doing perfectly OK. Which means I made it, I guess. My options trading and crypto are most definitely not making it, but I’m in a position where I can realize some losses and at least not pay taxes on the gains this year, while still having some upside exposure. It has to rally again someday, right guys? Guys?
Family is doing great. My kiddo is potty training like a champ.
Enough real life. Let’s talk games. First is the Steam lineup:
- Meteorfall: Kromit’s Tale
- Black Book
- FAR: Lone Sails
- My Friend Pedro
- Per Aspera
- Borderlands 3
- Before We Leave
- Raft
- Necromunda: Hired Gun
- Legend of Keepers
- Despotism 3K
- SOMA
- Core Keeper
- Satisfactory
- Sigil of the Magi
- Gordian Quest
- Rimworld
- DOOM (2017)
- Cardpcalypse
- Slay the Spire
- Noita
Although many of the games don’t necessarily have a defined “win state” (and many are Early Access besides), realistically I only finished Meteorfall, FAR, Per Aspera, and Borderlands 3. It was especially egregious with games like SOMA, wherein I played to the first area where the first monster appears, Alt-Tabbed to see what happens if they get you, realized that there is an EZ-mode with no real consequences, and then never actually booted the game back up again. At the same time, I have been trying to embrace the whole “Spark Joy” Kondo-ism a bit more than in years past. Play games when they are fun, stop when they aren’t. Just a shame that games stop being fun before they’re over.
For the Epic Game Store:
- Horizon: Zero Dawn
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Everything
- Final Fantasy 7 Remake
I… think that’s literally it. And again, I only really finished FF7R from that list. Going forward, I think I’m going to have to start making a concerted effort to completely ignore side quests and such for the more open-world games. Or maybe not. Sometimes the sidequests end up being much more interesting than the main quest for a lot of those kind of games.
By the way, the Epic Store interface is still embarrassingly shitty in 2022. When I go to my library and choose “Sort by Recently Played,” I would expect the games to be sorted by, you know, how recently they were played. But they’re not. You can’t even have the games sort themselves by most played. Ugh.
For Game Pass:
- Dreamscaper
- Amazing Cultivation Simulator
- Offworld Trading Company
- Citizen Sleeper
- Deathloop
- Grounded
- Sable
- Metal: Hellsinger
- Superliminal
- Unsighted
- Vampire Survivors
- Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion
- Hardspace: Shipbreaker
- Loot River
- Nobody Saves the World
- Tunic
- Sunset Overdrive
- We Happy Few
- Outriders
Once again, Game Pass is the de facto best place to try out games you wouldn’t otherwise play unless they were wedged in a random bundle. Of the list, Grounded was the clear winner here with a whopping 68 hours played… and I haven’t even beaten it yet. We’ll see if I ever pop back in.
For completeness’s sake, I also continued to play Hearthstone and Guild Wars 2 throughout 2022.
Looking at 2023, my goal is to actually sit down and play Red Dead Redemption 2, Disco Elysium, Death Stranding (played 7 hours and fell off), Chained Echos, Wildermyth, and… SOMA. Maybe Assassin’s Creed Odyssey or Origins. And finish off Cyberpunk 2077 and Horizon: Zero Dawn. According to HowLongToBeat, that lineup is 256 hours all by itself (main stories only). Which is like 5 hours a week, so not unreasonable even if I pretend to be a responsible father figure. We’ll see.
I really enjoyed Void’s “Games of the Year” schtick over at A Green Mushroom, where there was a running tally of games played and how they sorted themselves over the year. I’ve always struggled with “justifying” creating a blog post about some of the random shit I try to play (e.g. Nobody Saves the World, Metal: Hellsinger, etc), even though personally I enjoy reading every single article by anyone still posting on my blogroll. So, heads up, there may be some experimentation with that format in 2023. Or maybe I just continue doing my own thing, which apparently continues to work.
Well, “work,” for given definitions of work.
…which I’m defining as being awesome. See you in 2023.
Citizen Sleeper
I appreciate a game that hits from an unexpected angle, and that’s why I appreciate Citizen Sleeper.
In Citizen Sleeper, you play as a “Sleeper”: an emulated mind in a biomechanical body, desperately fleeing the corporation that owns your total being. You awake in a shipping container, near broken, starving, and alone. Well… not quite alone. The scrapper who found you is hesitant, but allows you to work with him for some meager pay and sleep in the shipping container. From there, you attempt to build what little life you can from whatever you can cobble together.
For the most part, the game is essentially a visual novel with some “diceplay” bolted on. Each morning, you roll up to five dice depending on the condition of your body, and then choose what actions to spend those die on. The numbers on the dice you spend correspond to RNG outcomes associated with the actions – a 6 is always a 100% positive outcome, whereas lower numbers can be as poor as 50% neutral/50% negative. In this way, you have some measure of control over actions, even though things are random. However, since your condition dictates how many dice you have in the first place, this is definitely a “rich get richer” slash failure cascade mechanic. Especially considering how you must earn money to purchase food (starving results in condition damage), earn money to purchase the drugs that repairs condition damage (you decay each day), and negative results can sometimes lead directly to condition damage.
If that sounds stressful… that is kind of the point. Probably.
Once you manage to get a toehold somewhere though, the ramshackle space station begins to open up. You can start spending dice on things other than immediate needs. Start socializing at the neighborhood bar. Chat up the noodle vendor. Start helping the mercenary stuck in the docks. Maybe utilize your quasi-AI mind to dive into the abandoned corners of station. Each encounter adds a splash of color to the otherwise bleak setting, both emphasizing how alone everyone is and yet how much a helping hand can change one’s trajectory.
The unexpected hit I got from Citizen Sleeper was the understated poignancy of the many offramp endings. There are quite a few different endings you can focus towards, but the nature of the game sometimes passively (dice rolls) and actively (wait periods) prevents you from just mainlining them. Which leads you to perhaps explore some of the other stories and meet other kindred spirits. And so there I ended up at the precipice of one such ending, a simple Yes away from escaping my fate on the station… and realizing that in so doing I would be abandoning everyone I met. That particular ending was not Good or Bad – you are not a Chosen One, you have no preexisting connection or responsibility to anyone, and the station and its inhabitants would have just grinded on without you.
But I was there. I was making a difference for people I could touch. And so I chose to continue doing so.
Now, granted, I also was interested in getting all the various storylines fully maxed out before choosing a preferred ending. Yeah, I optimize even visual novels. HOWEVER! I did actually get a pang of melancholy there, despite the fact that I had copied the save file to a separate location so that I could choose other endings without having the play the game all over again. I never did though. I completed all the storylines and chose to stay behind, until it was time to go with the family I made over the course of the game.
Overall, I recommend giving Citizen Sleeper a try on GamePass.
In An Age 
End of Year: 2023 Edition
Dec 31
Posted by Azuriel
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)
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)
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):
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:
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.
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Tags: End of Year, Epic Game Store, Officially Old, Spark Joy, Steam, Xbox Game Pass