Time for another grab-bag on the games I’ve been playing lately, focused particularly on what I played over the holidays and into these first days of 2025.

This also marked my first few weeks playing with my very expensive and unnecessarily powerful new gaming computer, which I have dubbed the Thundercougarfalconbird.

New World

New World remains somewhat back-burnered as I remain unhappy with its sudden hard shift towards forcing everyone into raids and PvP in order to progress, but I did log in for my holiday event rewards, and I made some progress with crafting.

Originally I wanted crafting to be my main endgame activity, but the extreme grind involved put an end to that plan. Since then, however, I have occasionally undergone spurts of trying to level up my skills again, usually because my storage was full. In the past I had managed to max out furnishing and cooking, though the value of those skills is limited.

As the holidays approached, though, I realized that a number of my skills were getting close to maxed, so I made the final push and got to 250 in armouring, weaponsmithing, and arcana.

I still can’t make any useful gear, of course. That would require yet more grinding to get all sorts of rare trophies and crafting gear, to say nothing of the high end materials I’d need (and of course the mats for 725 gear are only available from the raid).

But what I can do now is make my own weapon and armour matrices, and that will save me a lot of gold on upgrading artifacts in the future. There’s also a certain satisfaction in making them yourself instead of just buying them from the trading post.

Saints Row reboot

I’ve only played one or two short sessions in the past few weeks, having finished the game months ago, but GODS IT’S SO PRETTY ON THE NEW COMPUTER.

Diablo IV

Diablo IV recently ran yet another free trial recently, this one featuring the new spiritborn class.

I didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm for the spiritborn as a concept. It uses the same resource mechanic as the monk from D3, and while I did play a monk and even finished the base game campaign with it, I always found it a bit clunky, and I abandoned it for good once the crusader game along. I wasn’t in love with the idea of essentially the same class but with a new (and admittedly cool) Mesoamerican theming.

I think the spiritborn improves on the monk, but I’m not sure it entirely fixes the fundamental issues. The tuning is a lot better this time, so you don’t feel nearly as resource-starved as you did on the monk, but there’s still a certain clunkiness to a resource that doesn’t naturally regenerate but also requires an inconsistent number of builders per spender.

If you’re going to do a resource that’s not affected by time, I think it would make more sense to use more precise numbers. The spiritborn’s builders are all about three-hit combos, so I don’t know why they didn’t make it take precisely three builders per finisher. Instead it’s always just slightly off of that, and passive abilities add more uncertainty to your resource generation, so you just never quite get into a clean rhythm.

I think the spiritborn also suffers from the extreme homogenization of class design in D4. Almost every build of almost every class follows the same formula of a builder, a spender, and four cooldown abilities. It’s not the worst playstyle, but it shouldn’t be how every class plays, and it fits the spiritborn very poorly. Spiritborn clearly wants to be all about hit combos and resource-management, and baby-sitting all these little cooldown abilities doesn’t fit with that at all.

On the plus side, it’s a very aesthetically appealing class. The visual and auditory design of abilities is excellent, and I do think the mix of Mesoamerican spiritualism with martial arts makes for a very fresh-feeling aesthetic.

They also have much better character models than any of the other classes. I’m not one of those person who thinks all video game avatars need to be super hot, but all the classes in D4 pre-spiritborn just look… unhealthy. Every character looks like they have an eating disorder and/or the flu. The spiritborn actually look like healthy, normal humans.

Overall, I liked the spiritborn more than I expected to, but I don’t think it’s going to be the thing that convinces me to finally buy the game.

The First Descendant

The majority of my gaming time for the last few weeks has gone towards The First Descendant, despite or perhaps because of the fact it’s one of stupidest games I’ve ever played. I’ve put most of my thoughts on that into a column for Massively Overpowered, though, so I’m only briefly mentioning it here for the sake of thoroughness.

I’m not entirely sure right now when Bree plans to publish the column, but hopefully within the next week or so.

Heroes of the Storm

Not much to say about this other than I’m still playing, albeit sporadically. D.va remains my de facto main these days, insomuch as that term ever has any meaning for my indecisive self. She’s now my third most-played hero of all time, though it’ll still be a bit before she catches up to Tassadar and Jaina.

The recent buffs to D.va have only encouraged me to keep playing her. I don’t think she really needed buffs — I feel she’s simply difficult to play rather than underpowered — but I certainly won’t complain about some increased survivability. It’s good to see the game is still getting updates, even if they’re small.

I’ve also returned to playing Li-Ming on a semi-regular basis. Once a favourite, I struggled to relearn her after my long absence, at least in part due to balance changes since her early days. But I tweaked my talents on her (mostly swapping out some Magic Missiles talents for more Arcane Orb support), and I seem to have gotten back into the swing of things with her.

It soothes my disappointment over Diablo IV abandoning III’s story, somewhat. That’s one of the great things about Heroes: All my favourite characters are frozen in time at their moment of greatest coolness. WoW ruined Jaina’s character? She’s still a cool-headed badass in Heroes. D4 pretends Li-Ming never existed? She’s still kicking ass in the Nexus.

Epic Games freebies

Finally, I sampled several free games from the Epic Games Store, though unfortunately none of them quite stuck.

First there was Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria. I loved hearing John Rhys-Davies as Gimli again, and it did seem to be made with some genuine love for the source material, but the gameplay didn’t particularly excite me. Is there some rule that survival games have to have the jankiest animations and combat imaginable? Once again it proves true that I enjoy survival mechanics, but not survival games.

Next up was Death Stranding, which I claimed a long time ago and never got around to playing until now. Based on its trailers and reputation, I was expecting it to be very strange, but it still managed to far more bizarre than I expected. At times I found the sheer surrealism coupled with the breathless seriousness with which it is delivered a bit unintentionally funny, but it’s so different I couldn’t help but be intrigued.

Again, though, the gameplay was the stumbling block. The vast majority of what I played was cutscenes, but when I actually controlled my character, the moment to moment mechanics were a bit dull. I wasn’t prepared to spend forty hours playing a mini-game to keep my backpack’s weight balanced.

I’m glad a game like this exists, though. It’s good to see developers taking chances. I might watch the rest of the story on YouTube at some point or something. Death Stranding may not be a game I enjoy playing, but I respect its originality.

Finally, there was Sifu. Like the original Mirror’s Edge, this is a game that I like, but which I simply suck too hard at to play. I’m pretty bad at this kind of combo-focused combat, and that coupled with an extremely punishing death mechanic was a deal-breaker. Definitely a skill issue on my part, but it is what it is.

The Secret Level episode based on it was quite cool, though.