Now that this segment is increasingly turning into a “what I’ve been playing” series rather than a grab bag of mixed personal anecdotes and industry news, I kind of wish I’d chosen a different title, but I feel like I need to keep the tradition alive.

Anyway, September was another month where I bounced around between a lot of different things. Let’s run through the highlights.

Overwatch

I’ve had a topsy turvy relationship with Overwatch Stadium. I had uninstalled due to my inability to consistently win on any character other than Reinhardt, but then a few weeks later, they added Brigitte and Pharah to Stadium. Those were both characters I really wanted to try, so I fired it up again without much hope, and… I actually did okay with them.

More than okay, actually, in Brigitte’s case. While I assume things will level out to a sane number at some point, after about three dozen games I’m sitting at an over 70% win rate with her, which at that point feels more like a matchmaking failure than any achievement of mine.

I’m not even doing anything special. I deliberately picked a very simple build for her. I just go for barrier upgrades and generally make myself as tanky as possible, a build I’m increasingly thinking of as “cockroach Brigitte.” Late game it usually takes at least two or three players working together to bring me down.

My proudest achievement to date is winning a 1v1 with a full health Junker Queen. I had the item that gives Rally a health drain effect, and I just pinned her into a corner and bled her out. Wish I’d thought to record the replay…

I’ve not done as well on Pharah, but I’m still staying above a 50% win rate, which is perfectly acceptable and far better than I managed on any other damage character I’ve tried. I started out doing the Barrage spam build and then switched to a Concussive Missile build when that got nerfed into the ground. Neither requires much in the way of precise aim, which is something I’m still terrible at.

I love Pharah’s mechanics and aesthetic, but I do find the squishy characters in this game (which is most of them) very stressful to play. One wrong move and I’m insta-dead.

Brigitte, by comparison, is probably the most chill I’ve ever felt playing a PvP game. Partly because of the confidence winning so much has given me, partly because it’s just an easy way to play. I keep my shield up, I boop people with my mace, occasionally I toss out a heal. It is a simple life.

I’m not sure what it is about these two characters (and Reinhardt) that lets me succeed with them. They don’t need much aiming, but there are other characters who don’t require that kind of precision I’ve also failed at.

Much as I’m happy with Pharah and Brigitte, I hope I’ll eventually find others I can play. I seem to be managing all right with Kiriko, but I haven’t played enough of her to say for sure, and she’s another character that stresses me out severely. I think I might finally be getting the hang of Juno after switching to a Hyper Ring build instead of the stereotypical Torpedo spam. I’m really interested in Illari — I adore her concept and aesthetic — but I fear my poor aim will prevent me from finding success with her whenever she arrives in Stadium.

I really wish I could have figured D.Va out, as she’s another character I love conceptually, but I tried and tried and just couldn’t hack it. I know she can be strong in the right hands, but she feels absolutely powerless to me.

Maybe this is another skill issue, but I feel like Overwatch has very poor mechanical clarity, especially compared to other Blizzard games. If someone outplays me in Heroes of the Storm, or if I see an amazing play in a pro StarCraft II game, I generally know how those players are getting such big results. I may not always have the reflexes or multi-tasking ability to replicate those plays, but I at least know what they’re doing.

In Overwatch? No idea. As far as I can tell, other D.Va players play her exactly the same way I do except it works when they do it, but not when I do it. I suppose I could try sharing some of my replays on reddit or something, but I’m not sure I care that much, and I suspect what’s holding me back are not things that training can solve.

At least I’m still pretty decent at D.Va in Heroes of the Storm…

The First Descendant

I’ve already covered my recent experiences with TFD pretty well over at Massively, so I won’t repeat myself too much. I’m just mentioning it for thoroughness’ sake as I did play a lot of it in September.

I’ve been saying I feel like I’m on the outs with this game from the start, so I know it doesn’t mean much to say it again, but I do feel like the end is in sight. I still want to try swords when they get added, but after that…

RTS rogue servers

The current state of Stormgate is such that much of the discussion on its subreddit is about other, better RTS games. This brought my attention to some older MMORTS games I’d never tried, but which live on as fan-run rogue servers. I decided to check them out.

First is Age of Empires Online, which of course I knew of, but I had always had it in my mind it was a purely PvP game. It was mentioned that it had PvE scenarios, so I finally found the motivation to download its rogue server.

I didn’t last long. The gameplay is recognizably Age of Empires, but I found the cartoony graphics off-putting, and the lack of traditional campaigns in favour of generic “quests” made it feel too disconnected from its historical inspirations. It just felt wrong, somehow.

The other game that was mentioned was new to me. Battleforge was apparently a fantasy MMORTS that used TCG-inspired deck-building mechanics. I do love me some deck-building, so I had to try its rogue server, Skylords Reborn.

The initial impression wasn’t great. It’s hard to get into older games if you didn’t play them back in the day. The jank and dated graphics are very hard to overlook.

Once I built my first custom deck — a fire/nature build using swarms of Orcs backed up by several types of Elven archer — I started to enjoy it more, though. I may play more at some point, but it’s not a big priority. I like a lot of what it’s trying to do in terms of game design, but it is dated, and it doesn’t help that the story feels very thin.

Songs of Silence

I’ve been trying to work my way through Songs of Silence, off and on. There’s a lot I like about the game. The art is spectacular, the setting is interesting, and it’s clearly a game the developers poured a lot of love into. But I do find it an increasing struggle as I go.

Partly it’s that I’m just not that into 4X games, but also the quality of both the story and the gameplay are degrading as I get further into the game. Characters change viewpoints and motivations without any set-up or justification, and the difficulty is getting harsh, and in a very annoying way — constant resource-starvation and such.

It’s not a very long campaign, so it wouldn’t be a big commitment to finish, so I’d like to at some point… but still, I struggle to make that final push.

New World

I’ve been dipping back into New World a bit in anticipation of season ten. Mostly I’ve been refreshing my memory of the “recent” story by playing through Brimstone Sands and Elysian Wilds with my Covenant character.

I have complicated feelings on New World these days. The last year has been a very bad time for the game, and these days I have ethical issues around supporting Amazon. But it also needs to be said there’s a reason I’ve put eight hundred hours into this game. There’s so much it does so well.

Revisiting Brimstone has been a bittersweet experience. This was really the high watermark for the game. I wish they’d implement level-scaling in this game, because Brimstone is pretty much irrelevant content these days, but it’s such an incredibly rich, detailed, well-designed zone.

I’m hopeful that the upcoming Nighthaven is going to be a good experience, but somehow I feel we’ll never see the likes of Brimstone again.

StarCraft II

While my forays back into StarCraft II co-op seem to be growing increasingly few and far between, but they haven’t stopped entirely. I finally got around to unlocking Alarak’s final prestige talent, Shadow of Death, which gives him an air army by removing the time limit on his mothership and build unlimited destroyers.

It was quite a grind, and it turns out you still need to wait until level ten to unlock the Death Fleet, so the talent does literally nothing for the first ten levels. I just went back to Artificer of Souls until ten.

So was it worth it? Well, maybe. I’ve only played one match post-level ten with Shadow of Death so far. It’s nice to not require so many tech buildings and upgrades for your army, but he still feels pretty economically demanding, as you still need supplicants to keep Alarak alive and war prisms to warp them in on the field. If nothing else, it’s a pretty light show, and it’s nice to have another way to play Alarak.

I feel like I can claim some minor bragging rights now that I’ve fully prestiged both Alarak and Karax, both arguable candidates for the title of hardest commander to play (though personally I find Kerrigan harder). Alarak is so rarely chosen that I had actually never seen anyone playing Shadow of Death; my first experience with it was playing it myself.