Gaming Round-Up: Wrapping up 2024

Posted on January 6, 2025 by Tyler F.M. Edwards

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.

Gaming Round-Up: Massively Leftovers

Posted on January 29, 2024 by Tyler F.M. Edwards

One of my struggles with this blog since I started working at Massively Overpowered, and one of the reasons I don’t post nearly as much as I used to, is the decision of what to put here versus what to put on Massively. My recent Not So Massively column on Redfall, for instance, is something of a sequel to a blog post I made about it a few months ago, and I originally intended it to go on Superior Realities, but ultimately I get paid if I put it on MOP, so that’s what I did.

New World is another good example. It’s been my main game for the last two years, but I’ve barely mentioned it on my blog, because nearly everything I have to say about it goes into the Vitae Aeternum column.

That said, I now find myself with some thoughts to share on multiplayer games that are too short and rambly to form a MOP column, so it’s time for another gaming round-up blog.

New World

I’ve settled into a loose pattern of playing New World heavily for a few weeks, then putting it on the back burner for a few weeks (but rarely quitting entirely), rinse and repeat. It’s a good fit for both my own fickle attention span and the game’s seasonal content model.

During December I went through a phase where I took the unusual (for me) step of actually playing it the way you’re “supposed to” play MMOs: doing lots of endgame group content, chasing rare drops, trying to improve my gear.

This mainly took the form of elite chest runs, a form of open world zerg that will feel very familiar to anyone who’s ever done a hero point train in Guild Wars 2. In fact, the more I play of it the more I feel the endgame structure of New World is closer to that of GW2 than anything else. Despite its increasingly inaccurate reputation as a hardcore PvP game, New World truly has become a casual PvE paradise.

A particular goal was earning some more artifacts. I grabbed the Boltcaster bow for my Convenant alt (who is now more of a co-main, as usually happens with me) without much difficulty. What took more grinding was the Abyss, a great axe that deals void damage and can scale off intellect, but after a few dozen Corrupted portals, I finally got it on my main.

I like the idea of artifacts, but so far most of their designs have been a little unambitious, not really delivering on the “build-defining” role Amazon intends for them. However, the Abyss is an exception. Being able to use a great axe in a mage build is a fun novelty, and I completely retooled my fire staff skills to support the close combat. I wasn’t sure I’d actually use Abyss much, but I’m actually having a blast with this newfound battle-mage playstyle.

I also took a run through the new dungeon, the Glacial Tarn, to finish upgrading Boltcaster. This was only my third dungeon run in my New World career, and we didn’t have a proper tank, so things got a bit hairy at points, but the story mode introduced with the expansion is indeed pretty easy, so we were able to press through.

I wouldn’t say the mechanics of the dungeon were anything too exotic in the MMO space, but the environment art was great, the music was amazing, and overall it was a pretty good time, despite my dodgy group. It has me excited to see more of the game’s dungeons once the dungeon finder finally launches.

I also did quite a bit of grinding on the Winter Convergence event. Various circumstances led to me being unable to fully participate in it for the first two years, so I essentially did three years of grinding at once, but I managed to get pretty much all the cosmetics I want on both characters.

Finally, I did some redecorating on my Reekwater home, and I think it’s cozier than ever. All in all, a pretty productive couple of weeks.

Heroes of the Storm

When I wrote about my brief return to Heroes of the Storm on Massively OP a few months ago, I said I’d already uninstalled, and I did… but I reinstalled again not too long after. I’ve been playing off and on since.

As I always have, I maintain mixed feelings on the game. When you get a good match, it can be an incredibly exciting experience, but you won’t always have good matches, and it is kind of an empty and mindless experience even at the best of times. I can never quite escape the feeling that I’m wasting my life even more than one usually does when playing video games.

It also remains true that nearly every major change to the game since launch has made it worse, at least in my opinion. I hardly play my old favourite heroes, because almost all of them have been altered or nerfed too much. Jaina and Johanna are the only major exceptions.

The loss of Tassadar as a support character stings especially. I’ve been playing nearly every remaining healer trying to find a replacement, but none of them quite click so well. Whitemane is very fun, but also very difficult and thus too stressful to play all the time. Anduin is very easy, but a little bland. Tyrande’s not bad, but she still doesn’t feel as good as Tassadar did when he was a support.

I’m painting a very bleak picture of the game, but the core gameplay does remain very fun, and in terms of balance, the game is in a pretty good place. There’s a few overtuned heroes, but this feels like one of the most well-balanced periods of the game’s life.

And as always, the chief appeal is simply in nostalgia. Even with all we’ve learned in the last few years, I can’t help but get the warm fuzzies from all those classic Blizzard characters all together.

As is the case for all MOBAs, the sheer variety of heroes also does a lot to keep things fresh. Of the new heroes added since I lasted played, Fenix is probably the biggest hit for me. He’s very simple to play, but that can be a nice change of pace. I’m quite perplexed that I rarely see anyone else playing him; he feels incredibly strong to me, and I’ve had many dominant performances with him.

I’ve had a lot of fun with Imperius, too. Brusier was never my favourite role, but charging into the thick of it to impale people with your spear just never gets old.

Also, while I do tend to complain about the revamps over-complicating heroes, in the case of Raynor adding some depth to him was actually welcome. He’s still pretty simple, but no longer to the point of being boring. This pleases me a lot because he’s always been a favourite character of mine lore-wise, and I was disappointed he wasn’t more fun to play in Heroes.

Finally, I’ve been playing a lot of D.va lately, to the point where she feels like potential “new main” material. I barely played her before my long hiatus, so I can’t say if she changed or I did, but she feels far stronger and more fun than I remember. The fact you can almost completely avoid death with her given good play and a little luck is just so nice. Plus she combines my long-time affinity for short, mildly insane women and my natural masculine desire to pilot a big stompy robot.

I don’t know if I’m going to stick with Heroes much longer or not. I do want to at least try every hero, which is proving frustrating since Qhira and Hogger almost never get picked for the free rotation and Mei was never added to it at all for some incomprehensible reason. I’m grinding the gold to buy her just for completionism’s sake, which for now keeps me doing my dailies and trying to find a healer who feels just right.

Share this:

Share this: