Category Archives: Archive

Blog: Exit the Apple Arcade – 03/04/20

Last year I, like many others, took advantage of the free trial of Apple Arcade and played a lot of what was offered and enjoyed my time with it for the most part. Earlier this year however, I cancelled the service without much deliberation.

For those who aren’t aware, Apple Arcade is a curated list of games you get access to for only five dollars a month. It’s a really good deal if you manage to find a few games worth sticking with. That’s what I failed to do and why I ended up ditching the service only a few months later.

While I was really impressed with the service (and still kind of am), I found that there were two major sticking points for me that led to this cancellation.

The first was the games themselves. A lot of the games that people liked on the service ended up being either card based games, strategy games, or puzzle games, all of which are perfect fits for a phone game. But two out three of those genres don’t really do anything for me, and the games I did stick with eventually wore out their welcome.

Take Grindstone for instance. Grindstone is a highly popular and perhaps the standout from the launch lineup of the service, but I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone who actually completed it. Grindstone got notoriously difficult and required a lot of (ironically) grinding to survive some of the later levels, to the point where I stopped playing it.

Then there are games like Oceanhorn 2 that are interesting games, but on a platform I don’t want to play them on. Sure I can tether a controller to my phone, but it still doesn’t change the fact that I have to hunch over my phone to play this massive adventure game. It’s worth mentioning that I’m sure people using and iPad or an Apple TV are having a different experience with these games, but for someone using exclusively a phone, it isn’t a great way to engage with these games.

The other big issue with the service ended up being the release of new games. In the weeks after launch, you could get 4 to 5 new games a week on the service. Not all of them were things I enjoyed, but there were occasionally one or two I stuck with. As time went on the addition of new games slowed down to the point where you might get one new game a week, and usually it was something that I didn’t want to play on a phone, or just in general.

It’s unreasonable to expect a constant trickle of quality games tailored to my tastes to come out every week, but eventually the offerings just stopped appealing to me enough for me to question why I had the service anymore. I had stopped playing the games I already had downloaded and didn’t really feel the desire to download more.

I still think Apple Arcade is a great deal if the games on the service are things you’re interested in, but I just don’t think a lot of the games Apple promotes on the service are great fits for a phone. I also find myself playing less and less phone games these days in general, making the concept of paying five bucks a month for them a big ask. Maybe one day there will be a game that makes me come back, but till then I’m fine leaving Apple Arcade behind.

Taking Chances with Baldur’s Gate III

5 Replies

For those of your who aren’t aware, for the past year or two, I’ve been running various Dungeons & Dragons campaigns for my friends. I’ve more or less chronicled this in our Master of Disaster feature on this site which for obvious reasons, I recommend you check out. Yet despite my love of playing Dungeons & Dragons, I’ve never been able to garner any modicum of enthusiasm for video games that try to capture the tabletop feeling.

This disconnect and lack of enthusiasm on my part has been perplexing to my friends to say the very least. How could someone who is literally the DM (Dungeon Master) of our campaigns not enjoy these mechanics in a video game? It’s been difficult for me to articulate over the years, but I think I finally understand it. But for me to explain it properly, you need a little context about me and how I absorb information.

At a young age, it became very evident, very quickly, that I wasn’t a traditional learner, often needing to read something several times over, or do some hands on learning if applicable. To this day I have a difficult time reading something and comprehending it on the first go, often needing to reread it 4 or 5 times before I can fully internalize the actual meaning of the text. As silly as it sounds, I’ve just never been great with reading comprehension making every online course I’ve ever taken in my life a tremendous chore.

I think it’s because of that mental hurdle that I tend to zone out in text-filled, management-heavy, and turn-based games. My experience with these kinds of games usually goes the same way every time, with me eager to hop into the action, only to be buried in menus and skill trees that I can’t comprehend on my first encounter with them. Even though I know that I’m only seeing a fraction of what’s to come, it still feels like I’m being thrown in the deep end.

What I like about playing D&D as opposed to something like Divinity: Original Sin II is the fact that someone is shepherding me through it. There’s a DM who isn’t only painting a word picture for me, but is there to answer any mechanical questions I might have. It’s that hands-on approach that works for me from an educational standpoint that’s also present here.

I’ve even run into this while running my own D&D campaign. When I started out, I bought a D&D module that I would run for my players. Yet after being asked enough lore questions that I had no answer to, I decided to blow up the world and start fresh with a campaign and lore of my own. It was a lot more work, but so much more personally engaging and rewarding.

There’s also the matter of my own level of patience and tolerance for a game, but I’ve covered that before.

All of these things are factors in why I bounce off of and usually avoid these types of games. But we haven’t even talked about the gameplay portion of them yet. Even if I manage to find a suitable on ramp for me to get somewhat into the game, I still have to contend with the game itself.

It usually isn’t the turn-based part that turns me off as much as it is the “tactics” portion that bounces me off of a game. I’m just terrible at setting up plans and executing on them, whether it’s positioning, item and spell management, or whatever, I suck at it. Usually I’ll formulate a plan I think is great, try to execute it, and watch it fail miserably. Instead of doing what normal people might do and say, “oh, I should try a different approach,” my stupid-ass jumps over any rational thought and straight into a pit of self-loathing and dejection. It’s the same way I feel about the Dark Souls games, where I don’t feel emboldened to do better, I just feel like I could be playing a game I have a better time with.

And if I really wanted to split hairs (which is about to happen), I’d say that I think the tutorial levels of these games are usually the most excruciating parts. Take Divinity: Original Sin II for example. You start on a boat that promptly gets attacked by bugs and a tentacle monster, which sounds way cooler than it actually is. Then you wash up on an island where you eventually find your first village where I assume more of the game takes place. Despite trying to power through it on three separate occasions, I have yet to be able to get through what I found to be an incredibly dull part of the game.

When asked why I don’t like these kinds of games, I usually answer with something dismissive like, “cause they’re boring” or something, but what that really means is everything I’ve written thus far. But I agree with my friends when they say that I should enjoy these kinds of games. I want to enjoy these games.

But I’m not ready to write off the genre just yet. A little game called Baldur’s Gate III was recently shown off, and after reading about it more, I think this one might be the last one of these I try. After everything I’ve written up until now, you might be wondering why I would attempt this, ostensibly throwing $60 dollars into a virtual garbage can, but there are a couple of factors that are intriguing me with Baldur’s Gate III already.

First and foremost, it a Dungeons & Dragons based games, meaning I know a lot of these mechanics and have varying degrees of familiarity with them. That alleviates a lot of the mechanical obtuseness that I might have trouble with in other games. Like, I know what plenty of D&D spells, items and attacks are, so that won’t be such a steep learning curve. Having to learn both the mechanics of a game as well as their made up lore makes me feel like I have to learn two games simultaneously, which usually goes about as well as you might imagine.

On top of that, I’m really digging the presentation when it comes to dialogue options, opting for more of a Dragon Age or Mass Effect styled approach instead of a text box that pops up on the screen. It’s a small thing, but it adds a slight cinematic flair that I think goes a long way.

Despite my better judgement and spotty history with these kinds of games, I’m cautiously optimistic and dare I say, excited for Baldur’s Gate III. At the very least, I’m going to keep my eye on it and certainly give it a shot when it enters early access later this year.

Gut Check – The Coin Game

Leave a reply

Describing The Coin Game is going to be fairly tricky to be honest, mostly because even after playing over an hour of it, I don’t know what to say. In the simplest terms, The Coin Game is a virtual arcade experience where you get to play crane games, drive go-karts, play laser tag and more, in one of the strangest worlds I’ve ever seen.

The Coin Game is an early access title, which I mention because the experience itself, while supremely interesting, is a little thin. You start off by picking either a male or female avatar, both of which are so horrible to look at, I’m thankful the game is entirely in first person.

After making your grim decision, you find yourself in front a dingy arcade filled with games. Games and robots. From what I can tell, in The Coin Game, you’re the only human around and everyone else is some sort of egg-shaped robot on wheels that spouts random nonsense at you whenever you get close enough to them.

But once you get past these ovate androids, you walk around this arcade and just play some classic arcade games. Things like claw machines, whack-a-mole, and more are pretty lovingly made, with the physics usually holding up their end of the bargain and providing an, oddly enough, realistic representation of these attractions. Just like you’d expect, doing well at these games grants you tickets that you trade in for prizes, that you’ll use for some unknown purpose.

Now stick with me here, because if you didn’t think it was before, it’s definitely about to get weird.

The Coin Game is confoundingly an open world game with multiple arcades in it. You go between them by taking the bus, a limo, or my favorite, your own personal golf cart. Should you choose the golf cart, you have to stop at gas stations from time to time and refuel. There’s also an option for a survival mode, which is perhaps the most terrifying prospect. I did not attempt this mode.

Most of the locations are incomplete, brandishing various forms of “coming soon” signs or “under construction.” There’s a pawn shop that isn’t currently available, which makes me think that selling your prizes for cash will let you buy food and supplies necessary for human survival, but I’m just speculating.

What’s currently in there however is still pretty weird. From buying energy drinks, to having a dart gun and flashlight on you at all times, down to being able to just buy scratch off tickets are all weird things, that are for some reason in The Coin Game.

You can also visit your home, which might just be the strangest place of all. It looks like a normal house, and is decorated like one too, with one major exception. You have a pet goose. I don’t know why, but you do. You can feed the duck if you want, but mostly it spends its time watching TV. There’s also a room in the house that’s dedicated to the goose. I won’t go into specifics, but you should check it out.

The Coin Game is so delightfully weird and a little unsettling in a way that I’m totally a fan of. It revels in its strangeness and wants you to embrace it as well. The entire time I was playing, I kept thinking that it was going to have some sort of horror element to it because the atmosphere is just so off-putting in places, but luckily for me there was no terror to be found.

Like I said at the top, The Coin Game is a thin experience right now, boasting a few dozen arcade games, some bigger interactive experiences like go-karts and bumper cars, along with some truly lame rides that don’t really do anything but strap you in place and let you look around. It only took me about an hour or two to touch every attraction in the game to give you an idea of its longevity.

All things considered, I really like what The Coin Game is laying out. It’s very incomplete at the moment, with missing locations and attractions, any sort of story or motivation, full control support and more, the game earns its early access classification. I’m extremely curious to see where it goes from here and what delightful weirdness they continue to inject into this thing, but for now, I’ve kind of spent as much time with it as I think I can get out of it in its current state.

Blog: Which Way to the Zero? – 02/26/20

Leave a reply

Back in the year 2013, an episodic adventure game by the name of Kentucky Route Zero released its first of five episodes. A mere seven years later, the final episode of the story is out and available for public consumption. Was the wait worth it? I don’t know just yet because the last time I played Kentucky Route Zero was when it initially released and I can’t be expected to remember something from that long ago, so I just replayed the first episode instead.

Kentucky Route Zero is a beautiful and mysterious experience that hovers somewhere between a point-and-click adventure game and a visual novel, never veering too far into either of those territories. Most, if not all of what you do involves you selecting different dialogue choices, some of which are for gathering information while others seem to be more about you changing the story.

For instance, at some point in the first episode your character is caught in a cave-in at a mine. The dialogue you could choose from was either saying that you were fine, or expressing that your leg was caught under some rubble. I went with the latter option, which ultimately led to my character walking around with a limp for the rest of the episode. Now, it’s entirely possible that either choice would’ve resulted in this, but it felt like my choice had immediate gameplay ramifications. But then again, it could very well just be the illusion of choice.

Kentucky Route Zero is phenomenally visually crafted, with everything from locations, character designs and even menus, working in unison to achieve a cohesive atmosphere and tone that’s genuinely enrapturing. It’s so eerie and oppressive while also being just downright weird in some places. Even if you just watch a play-through of it on YouTube or something, you can appreciate the cohesive visual style that’s on display.

I’ve only played through the first episode thus far, but it’s left me wanting more, and luckily, there’s 4 more episodes along with interstitial episodes as well for me to sink my teeth into. There’s so much more I could say about the first episode alone, but I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone who hasn’t tried it yet. But if dissociative, trippy, mysterious nightmares are your thing, I strongly suggest trying Kentucky Route Zero.

Gut Check – Table Manners

Leave a reply

In the grand tradition of taking normal situations and injecting obtuse control schemes and wacky physics into them, Table Manners thrusts you into the miserable world of dating, somehow making it even more unpleasant than it already is.

The pitch is simple, swipe through your dating app till you find someone you want to take on a date, then do it. The only caveat is that you have one hand, and you’ve essentially forgotten how to use it. Also, the people you’re dating are utterly useless and need you to do literally everything for them. But let’s back up and start from the top.

If you’ve ever played Surgeon Simulator, the game largely responsible for creating this genre of “wacky hands, considerably less wacky scenario,” Table Manners is more of the same with less of the charm.

The controls are cumbersome, yet somehow oddly simplified for a game like this. With your mouse, you control your general movements including going forward, backwards, side to side, rotating your hand and grabbing things. The only thing that took me a bit to wrap my head around was using the W and S key to control the vertical position of your hand. Not especially difficult, just cumbersome in the way these games usually are.

Table Manners starts you in a steakhouse with your desired date, tasking you with several mundane date tasks, and then a bunch of really wild stuff for anyone to ask on a first date with a stranger. Every level in the “steakhouse chapter” involves you doing the same tasks, while adding one or two into the mix in subsequent levels. Light the candles, pour the wine, let them try your french fries, it all happens every single time in every level in the “steakhouse chapter.” There are only four levels in a chapter, and somehow I was bored by the third instance because I was just doing the same stuff over and over.

It also doesn’t help that your dates are absolutely nuts, asking you to do things like salt their food, feed them out of your hand, and perhaps the most heinous crime, asking you to put ketchup on their steak! It’s like they know they’re committing a food crime and want you to be complicit.

After dates, you can choose to “text” your date or any random person on your dating app, but to what end, I don’t know. All of the dialogue options are these bad non-sequiturs, that are replied to with another non-sequitur, and followed up by one more. It’s complete gibberish that isn’t really every funny and seems to have minimal impact on anything considering anyone will go on a date with you before you have a conversation with them.

From top to bottom, Table Manners feels like a game made for people to stream and never think about again. While it isn’t aggressively bad or anything, it’s just aggressively bland and lifeless, at least in the early goings.

The trailers show off interesting locations including a cruise ship and an airplane, but the game itself makes you trudge through a bland steakhouse and lame objectives before you see anything remotely cool. It’s a shame too because it’s a neat concept that ends up feeling too rigid in its objectives and controls, ultimately robbing it of a lot of creative freedom you might have in similar titles.

Every moment of what I played felt less like I was doing something fun or being creative with my solutions, and more like I was just battling bad controls to accomplish a specific goal, the specific way they want me to. Games like this can be such a blast when they allow you to tackle objectives in any zany way you choose, but in the admittedly small slice of what I played of Table Manners, I found it a little too rigid and particular for my tastes.

It doesn’t help that each objective your date gives you is timed and is the only metric by which they judge you. You could literally hold a knife up to the neck of your date, and all they care about is if you put some salt on their fries in time. It doesn’t feel dynamic, comedic or fun, it just feels unnecessarily stressful. So by that metric, it totally nails the dating experience, as a game though, it’s really not worth your time.

Maybe Table Manners takes a turn later on and lets you really do some goofy nonsense and have a little bit of creative freedom, but the first act of this game really lowers the bar from the jump. Goofy physics based games are usually up my alley, but this one goes to show that there’s always going to be outliers that miss the point of why these kinds of games are fun.

Blog: The Hunt is On – 02/19/20

Leave a reply

Recently, Monster Hunter World: Iceborne was released on the PC much to the delight of existing Monster Hunter players. Now, I never finished or even got far in the base game and I’m not even close to being able to touch the new content, but it certainly has piqued my interest in Monster Hunter World again. So I decided to take the plunge and ask my friends to shepherd me along my long grind in the hopes of seeing that snowy wonderland called Iceborne.

The main hurdles with me and Monster Hunter World in general can be simplified into the combat, and how cumbersome the whole game can feel. The combat itself is a little slower and more complicated than I usually like, requiring a lot more forethought and planning before encounters. Despite being listed in the corner of the screen and giving you a training area to try out each weapon, I still always feel like I’m getting lucky in combat more than being skilled.

The other thing that bugs me is just how many menus you have to navigate to do the simplest functions. Upgrading weapons and armor, posting quests, joining multiplayer games and crafting are all done in the most daunting and convoluted way. I just feel like there are too many times where my screen is just covered in menus. But that could just be me and my aversion to games with deep RPG mechanics.

I get that people really like Monster Hunter World and I realize that my quibbles are my own and clearly not reflective of the popularity or success of the game. I’m the weird one in this situation and I know that. But I just wish the game was a little more action oriented and less menu driven.

But none of that has managed to kill my drive to keep playing and see what else there is. I still am very eager to hop back in and slay some more creatures with my pals. I did just get to a new area called the Coral Highlands or something to that effect, and that’s been a nice change of pace and really recharged my batteries. But I just think that Monster Hunter World is successful in spite of itself. I know that this is technically the most accessible the franchise has ever been, but it hasn’t dumbed itself down enough for me just yet.

WoW, What am I Still Doing?

Leave a reply

You might have noticed a significant uptick in World of Warcraft based content on this website. Aside from that being a sentence I never thought I’d have to say, here we are with yet another entry in the chronicle of my WoW experience. Last time I checked in, I was significantly overwhelmed by creating a high level character and was coaxed into starting a new one at first level. So how did that go?

Going in with my extremely limited knowledge about World of Warcraft and its bevy of classes, I wanted to go with something simple and straight forward. Naturally I gravitated towards making a panda character who also uses a sword and shield primarily. I think it’s called the warrior class, but I could be wrong. After a short customization period, LargeDouglas was born. I initially wanted to go with ‘Bigger Douglas’ or something to that effect, but apparently the cowards at Blizzard weren’t ready for my radical new ways of doing things.

Very quickly, my two friends appeared in my world with their own ludicrously named pandas who I think were a mage and a monk. We ventured forth through the tutorial world of the panda-folk, an Asian inspired, pagoda-heavy region with a lot of questionable names and accents on display.

Compared to diving in at level 110, level one was significantly more manageable and easier to keep track of. I had time to get used to abilities and how to navigate some of the menus instead of it went last time, where I was essentially drowning in menus. I will say though, even at this rate, there was still a lot going on from level to level, which I imagine is a result of accelerating the leveling path over the past 50 years this game has been running.

I’m proud to say that in this excursion I only died once, and it was because I didn’t pay attention to an NPC who very specifically told me not to go into this windy room until the wind subsided. My negligence may have led to my demise, but in my defense, my friend who has played this game for years also died this way as well. Actually I believe he died twice there if memory serves.

By this point you’re probably wondering if I actually enjoyed myself or not. If I’m being honest, I really wasn’t blown away or won over by this fresh start. It was a better experience than my last dive into the World of Warcraft pool, but it’s still World of Warcraft when all is said and done. Meaning that regardless of which way I try to play it, it’s still a game that does nothing for me.

Sometimes I had to kill 10 monkeys, or kill 10 rats and collect their parts for whatever grim needs the quest giver had. Sometimes, when things got really exciting, I had to pick up driftwood or fireworks. It’s even more disappointing considering I had thought for years that the jokes that people made about collecting 20 boar pelts had to have been a relic of the early days of World of Warcraft. Surely over the years they would have removed as much of that tedium as possible? Nope, from what I experienced, about half or more of the quests I embarked on involved me killing a bunch of stuff and collecting enough of their parts to progress.

I get that every quest can’t be this life-changing experience that’s going to revolutionize how I perceive quests, but they really front load the game with as much tedious nonsense as possible. I might be being a little to myopic in my description of World of Warcraft, but it’s just super hard to get enthusiastic about this game.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. There were a couple of moments where I genuinely sat back and thought something I’d experienced was pretty cool. It seems utterly useless, but the panda-folk can balance on these vertical beams and bounce around on them and fight other people on them which is an objectively cool, martial arts thing to do.

Also, the world design, especially in the land of the panda-pals, was really pleasant. From the pagodas, to the rivers and caves, this starting area was a joy to be in and meander around. Also, I think it’s all on a big turtles back or something? Which once again, is objectively cool.

Ultimately, I still don’t like World of Warcraft. It has its moments where it can charm you, but no amount of that can make me ignore the core conceits of its mechanics. At this point, I’m not playing it because I want to play the game, I’m playing it because I get to talk to my friends. On that front, World of Warcraft succeeded, but I can’t imagine paying $15 a month for the ability to talk to them.

Difficulty & Patience

1 Reply

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself sinking back into more familiar gaming experiences, opting for what essentially is my comfort food over being adventurous in a sense. I still like getting my hands on a new release and seeing what there is to offer, but more often than not I find myself bouncing off a game the second I hit the tiniest of obstacles. I often would attribute that to just not wanting to bash my head against a difficulty wall in games, but these days I think I’m just more impatient than anything.

When talking about difficulty in games, a lot of people point directly to the Dark Souls series. Those games are very much too difficult for me, but they also do this thing where they try to emotionally crush you and mentally exhaust you. My extremely limited experience with Dark Souls involves me starting out, killing maybe 2 or 3 skeleton men, getting to the boss, dying, then having to do that all again just to make a few more feet of progress. Now, my lack of skill definitely plays into that, but before the frustration of dying repeatedly can make me quit, the extreme tedium of running through the level again and fighting the same dudes gets me first.

There is something to be said about the joy that comes with memorizing the patterns and placements of enemies, and finally executing that perfect run that gets you to the next checkpoint. I get that. But for me, it’s less a feeling of triumph and more a feeling of relief. Then I’m confronted with the reality that this loop I’m describing, is the entire loop of these games, and that just isn’t enough for me.

It isn’t just games like Dark Souls that revel in their difficulties that repel me, it can be any game that doesn’t manage to hook me that can make me tap out early. It’s part of why I created the Gut Check feature on this site, because while I try every game I can, there are very few that actually keep me playing. And that isn’t because they’re too difficult, it’s because I don’t have the time or patience anymore to dedicate to a game that isn’t immediately wowing me.

There are people that will say that certain games get better after a few hours, but why would I waste my time struggling through something I’m not having fun with, in the hopes of eventually having fun. Games and I have turned a corner in recent years, where I want them to engage and entertain me with a minimal amount of effort or exertion on my part. It’s selfish, it’s lazy, and I don’t care. In my free time, when I want to just have fun, I don’t want to have to work for it.

It’s why tactics and in-depth RPGs and I, don’t get along well. There’s a lot of time to invest and in some cases, it feels like you’re learning a new language. For instance, I really wanted to try Disco Elysium last year, but seeing it in action reminded me just how much of an investment of time and mental energy that would be. Time and mental energy I just don’t have.

I like a mechanics deep and story rich game as much as anybody does, but I just feel as if my patience is waning with a lot of games. It leads to this internal conversation where I have to ask myself if I really have the energy to play this game about mental illness, or coping with loss, or just with a lot of reading, or do I just want to turn my brain off and play more NBA 2K20? And honestly, I usually just opt to turn my brain off and play hoops instead.

Blog: Hertz Me – 02/12/20

Leave a reply

Since I built my computer back in 2016, I’ve been kind of bolting new baubles and trinkets to it in an effort to stave off obsolescence. At some point the rubber is going to hit the road, vis-à-vis me having to build a new computer from the ground up, but for the time being, I’m okay with my Frankenstein’s monster of a computer, especially now that I purchased a shiny new monitor.

For context, I’ve been living that dual monitor lifestyle for years now and have been pretty happy with it. The problem was that my secondary monitor was old and starting to fail. It was a 720p LCD monitor that starting getting acne in the form of dead pixels. It was fine considering I was only using it to watch Netflix and stuff, but my tax return came through and I decided to pull the trigger on a new monitor.

I initially wanted a 4K display that had G-SYNC capabilities. After seeing those prices, I set out for a 1440p monitor instead that checked all of my boxes. The problem was that I noticed my computer was starting to show its age on the CPU front, which made the prospect of high framerate, high fidelity gaming while watching something on the side less realistic with how I use my computer these days.

I strolled into my local Best Buy with all these factors in mind, hoping I could maybe find an open box item or special sale I could take advantage of. The 4K monitors were out of my price range, and the selection of 1440p monitors they had were pretty sparse and expensive. I was about to walk out and settle on waiting for Amazon to provide me an acceptable deal, when I spotted a monitor that checked the most important box: The price.

The monitor was larger than anything I’d had before, boasted G-SYNC compatibility with a refresh rate of 144hz. The only thing that made me pause was the 1080p display. But considering this monitor was only $100, had just about everything I wanted, and was about $200 cheaper than any alternative I had seen, I pulled the trigger and purchased it.

After some tinkering and ordering a DisplayPort cable (cause that’s the only way you can get G-SYNC to work apparently?), my monitor was ready for prime time. I decided instead of putting this new framerate capability through its paces, I would just do things the way I normally do to see how it all holds together. So I booted up NBA 2K20 and turned on a movie on the second screen.

Doing this actually helped me feel better about my purchase of a 1080p monitor in 2020. My computer couldn’t maintain the 144FPS I was aiming for while watching a movie, which I can’t blame it for, instead I averaged around 100-110FPS. The movie would stutter anytime I managed to get close to 144FPS, and even out when I dipped back around 100FPS. So I capped the games refresh rate at around 90hz, and everything has been running really nicely.

I always knew that higher framerates were better, and thought and still do think that 60FPS is just fine for gaming. But man, if you have the chance to play a game at 120FPS, you might never want to go back. That’s kind of where I’m at right now with my new monitor. I’m still feeling it all out and trying to find the optimal settings that work for me and my computer, but I’m genuinely happy with my new monitor. If you’re looking to upgrade, I would strongly suggest finding something with at least 144hz as a refresh rate. I think you’ll be happy with that decision.

WoW, What am I Doing?

4 Replies

Not too long ago I wrote a blog about how I was gifted a subscription along with the latest expansion for World of Warcraft. To say that it’s been a period of adjustment would be a gross understatement. I think I can genuinely say that I haven’t played a game as overwhelming as this before.

Before I describe the fugue state I entered upon launching the game, I think it’s fair to briefly explain how we got here. Out of the sheer desire to talk to my friends, all of which had been consumed by World of Warcraft as of late, I expressed my increased feelings of isolation I had been feeling to one of them. In their extreme generosity and kindness, they gifted me a subscription along with the latest expansion in an effort to get us playing and talking together again. I was apprehensive, but desperate to engage with my friends once more.

I was told that I’d get a level boost that I could apply to a character to get me to the latest content, avoiding the 120 levels of what I assume were going to be pure grind. It sounded good on paper, and although I expressed that I have literally no enthusiasm to play these kinds of games, my friend decided to pull the trigger on the purchase anyway.

So here I was, with a game I never wanted to play, at the ready. After a much longer than expected download of 60+ gigabytes, I was ready to jump into to the world of Azeroth and see what all the fuss was about.

I didn’t press play for a few days.

But eventually I did, and I created a wolf-man (I don’t recall the race name) Death Knight, which I was told was a pretty straight forward class that was pretty powerful and dealt a lot of damage. Sounded great for a first timer like myself. After picking the wrong server, playing the tutorial, then doing it all again on the right server, BigDouglas was finally ready for prime time… except he actually wasn’t.

Before I could do anything with my friends, I had to go through a pretty excruciating tutorial with a lot of cut-scenes that honestly, while well made, were very presumptuous in assuming that I knew literally anything about the lore or these characters. But whatever, it all looked cool.

After getting killed in the tutorial a half-dozen times, I finally trudged through and made it to a city where my quests involved walking over there to watch a cut-scene, walking somewhere else to do it again, and eventually getting on a boat to watch another cut-scene before I was thrown in prison to play through another mission where I died several more times.

I don’t mean to come across as dismissive or anything, but it’s incredibly difficult to muster any enthusiasm or excitement for what World of Warcraft did, even though it’s pretty standard in the MMO and RPG space. The whole time I kept thinking to myself, “man, this would be way more interesting if it wasn’t an MMO and was a game that was more mechanically fun to play.” I get that people like the gameplay loop in World of Warcraft and MMO games in general, but to me they’re incredibly dull and cumbersome.

I will say though, the world of Azeroth and the broader aesthetics of World of Warcraft itself are beautiful and made me eager to explore more and see everything I could. Something I had never really considered but seems painfully obvious now is just how cool everything looks. It makes sense that the world building in such a long running MMO would be phenomenal, but I guess it never clicked until I got to see it first hand.

But for as cool as everything looks and how well designed it all clearly is, it doesn’t shake the fact that this is still an MMO and I was starting it from what was basically the endgame.

It turns out, there’s a lot of stuff to pay attention to, manage and keep track of in World of Warcraft, and boy howdy is it overwhelming. Aside from minor gripes like every menu being incredibly small and hard to read, there’s just so much stuff on the screen to look at. I know this is an MMO thing and not and exclusive World of Warcraft, but holy hell is it a lot deal with. And it’s all compounded because I’m starting at level 110 where I have way more stuff at my disposal.

My eyes were glazing over, my brain couldn’t comprehend anything anymore, and I was getting frustrated because I didn’t know what any of my spells did and kept dying because of it. I wasn’t having a good time.

I eventually wished my friends a good night and disconnected. My friend texted me with a new plan of attack. He and the others I was playing with said they had heard people have more fun while having a root canal than I did playing World of Warcraft. That’s why they decided it was time to start from scratch.

Level one. Level one of 120. I don’t know if I’m going to survive this, but I owe it to them to give it a shot. I’ve never been more terrified and intimidated by a video game than I am right now, but I guess I’ll have to spin up a new character and hopefully gain a better understanding of World of Warcraft.