Games

Probably gonna jinx it by posting about it, but I’ve started playing Minion Masters last week – it’s free to play with ingame stuff, no clue if it’s pay to win, so far I haven’t felt the need to buy anything. I’m only like 20 games in (2 hours) but it’s fun for a few minutes per day. Of course there’s free login stuff and small quests like “Win 3 matches” but also neat stuff like rotating free heroes (I think LoL also has this) and then some “Win 5 matches with the rotating heroes”, and several different tournament and ladder modes.

Oh, what kind of game? I’d say it’s realtime Magic: The Gathering. Two opponents face each other, you play the cards from your hand (mostly creatures, some spells), those run towards the enemy and hopefully kill their minions and then life pool. If it has strong MOBA vibes, I am not feeling them. It’s quick and fun and nothing of the annoying weird stuff, but I’m way down in the league. Anyway, fun game – recommended.

Currently a bit meh on everything gaming wise. Retail WoW is ok, but also not perfect, detailed post probably incoming soon.

I’m feeling the urge to play something Diablo-like, but not the same old Diablo 3 again. As I wrote, unfortunately I couldn’t find a lot of fun in the Torchlight Infinite Beta. I thought about Path of Exile, but as one of my main points atm would be co-op, and my wife wasn’t enthusiastic about returning to it, that’s a no. (“How about PoE?” – “Nah, I don’t like it” – “Steam says you played it for over 250 hours” – “Yeah, but maybe I didn’t have fun for the last 50 hours” – “…” – “…”).

Then I saw that Darksiders: Genesis was on sale and people described it as Diablo-like, so we tried that, but both didn’t really get to terms with the WASD movement and some research yielded: click to move doesn’t work, also in general some keybinds seemed to be “play this with a controller or GTFO” – so that was the first game in a combined ~20 years of Steam that was returned after 30min. (Only bought one copy and both tried it).

So, I also didn’t like Torchlight 2 (she did) and so I’m not fond of trying Torchlight 3 and that’s that. Maybe we should try Grim Dawn or Victor Vran after all.

Then there’s also the loose end of Guild Wars 2 where the bugged multiplayer story missions annoyed me so much that I completely stopped playing in July, also I don’t really want another WoW-like MMO atm, I want some ARPG. Maybe we should actually go back to Diablo 3 and I’ll just not take a Demon Hunter…

But I also played a little bit of “The Bridge”, a puzzle game I found in my Epic library, it’s really cool.
Then I tried out Solitairica which is kinda cute (but the sound effects are a little annoying) and I think it’s a good game if you enjoy Solitaire or Rummy or such things. I found it a little too luck-based and slow.

Then I also finally gave Prison Architect a spin, a game I’d had wishlisted for quite some time and then somehow got it, maybe also for free via Epic, but I noticed I don’t like it. Like, I was impressed with what you can do and it looks enjoyable enough.. but it simply didn’t click with me but I can give no objective criticism except one time in the campaign I had to let the fire brigade try to extinguish a fire and for some reason that burning tree would not stop, no matter how I positioned four firemen around it, moved them around, tried auto aim and manual aim. Had to restart the level, which was no problem, that were like 3 minutes lost, still weird.

Everyone knows (I hope) that mobile games have a bad reputation for being money sinks, but if only half of this is true (and I have zero reason to think that not everything is true) then Diablo Immortal might be the worst pay2win/money grab I’ve ever had the displeasure of hearing about:

Also small disclaimer: Usually not a huge fan of reaction videos, but in this case it’s kinda “watch one video and get the opinions of three people I value without having to watch several videos”.

Wow, it’s bad.

For some reason I had the idea that getting back into Guild Wars 2 would be fun on the weekend, not in a “let’s start and play a bit” but more “would I be willing to invest some time again” – because I think I was in a FFXIV duty roulette queue at the time and of course I can’t just stare at the screen for those 15 minutes…

I asked on Discord if my gear was still ok (or even good) and several people reassured me that nothing had changed in GW2 and my Level 80 Ascended and Exotic pieces were still completely fine.

Tessa remarked “Yeah, one of the reasons why Gw2 is casual friendly. Take 6 years off and your gear still holds up.” and that got me thinking a bit. What does playing something casual mean anyway? Our FFXIV static was formed to raid savage at our own pace, and originally once per week (we did add an hour for reclears on a second day meanwhile) but we’ve not yet skipped a week I think, and it’s savage – so ist that even casual? My WoW guild is strictly limiting raids to 2x2h per week, very rarely do we spend 5 minutes extra on a pull. We managed AOTC in 9.1 and before I joined they managed AOTC in 9.0 as well, and I think they’ve been doing that for many expansions. Despite taking everyone in the guild above a certain token item level and even getting them through heroic (unless someone actually sabotages a single fight) I wouldn’t call that casual. Non-hardcore raiding, yes – but casual?

On the other hand I guess my adventures in SWTOR are actually casual, it’s just that I spend a lot of my time there when I am playing. But apart from the launch raids in 2011/12 I’ve not raided progression and I only joined farm raids 1-2 times. I don’t do dungeons, I basically just level toons and get some gear and achievements. So that’s casual I guess. TESO is complicated, I think if you’re just starting a game and never coming close to max level or any real goal that might be casual by a proper definition, but I’d just call it being a beginner. So, GW2 then. I heard there are raids, but I don’t know anyone who does them. Most people also weren’t keen on fractals, maybe this game’s goals are actually more aligned to casuals overall.

Oh, and Diablo 3 – is it casual if you start a fresh season, grind yourself to max level and then through the rifts and Paragon levels until you lose interest? Do you actually have to be good (compared to others) to not be casual? Or is being invested (time) and progression-focused enough to temporarily not be a casual?

I don’t know. I guess my definition of being casual stops with having an organized scheduled group to focus on a goal that’s non-trivial (or pugging that stuff that’s usually done this way), so that would be raiding Heroic in WoW (but I guess Normal also counts) but in FFXIV I’d draw the line at Savage and EX because Normal Asphodelos is no comparison to a Normal WoW raid. You can have 2-3 of 8 people never being there, needing 2-3 rezzes each, and still winning in a reasonable time. Good luck with 5 of your 20 people dying early in WoW.

But back to the original question. I made a spreadsheet for my three main GW2 toons with their gear and plan to investigate if I can craft or otherwise get some upgrades before I actually plan to play, so maybe I really suck at casual gaming.