Games, Games, Games

Over the weekend, I finished out Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. That was... an experience. As a hack-and-slash game, it's mediocre - the combat system has a certain "weight" to it that's kind of nice, but it doesn't have much sense of fun and gets to feeling repetitive (some of which may be by design), with fights that are scattered and yet still manage to overstay their welcome at times. The puzzles are sort of neat, but not all that compelling on their own. Graphically, it's nicely done, but pretty bleak. The thick Norse lore provides a good atmosphere/flavor. The sound is well done in general, and I think justifies the recommendation of using headphones. The game has a lot going for it, particularly for non-major developer, but as a game there's nothing really great about it. It only really shines as an experience. In a very vague sense, it reminds me of Spec Ops: The Line - it's more powerful as a psychological journey than a game.

GW2 progress has been on hold a few weeks now. My motivation in WoW is in an odd place. I like the Argus stuff and I'm eager to see through the plot of it (which will be another week, at least), but the world quests there are already feeling repetitive and with the recent spiking of token costs, I may have to actually start paying money to subscribe again in the near future. Those little details, coupled with the thought that this may be the last notable content chunk of the expansion, has made me start to wonder if I might be letting my subscription lapse again in a month or so. We'll see, but that feels distinctly possible.

I've started dipping my toes in Warframe.
I played Tom Clancy's The Division for quite a while. It was not perfect and would have been somewhat better in a group, but I found it a reasonably enjoyable third-person shooter - enough so that I probably spent a couple hundred hours in it. My interest has tapered off, but I think I got my money's worth. Along the way, I started listening to a Youtuber who would discuss aspects of the game and review weekly gear resets. So when a video of his about Warframe popped up, I gave it a watch. And it made me a lot more interested.
The game's been out for a while. I saw it free-to-play and wrote it off as a PVP-focused actiony game. It appears to be a lot more than that, with a much larger PVE aspect than I guessed. And it appears to have grown a lot over the last few years. It seems to be a third-person action "looter," where the primary gameplay loop is going out and killing stuff to get better loot or parts for better loot along the lines of Diablo or maybe Borderlands. There's some story, but it's probably not that strong or a big focus. It encourages high mobility, which acrobatic jumps and slides. It's... multiplayer, but is only just starting to or on the verge of (I'm unclear if it's not quite released yet or I'm just not to it) introducing an open world area, previously having been made up of shared hubs and instanced missions that can be done in groups. The mission maps are procedurally generated, which makes for another point of comparison to Diablo. And it's free to play. Though, if you so choose, you could dump a bunch of money into the game to unlock additional gear that you would otherwise have to grind/trade for.
I'm not sure if this is a game for me in the long run, but it sounded interesting enough to try, anyway.
I've not been able to put in a full two hours yet, so I've only seen a small bit of the game, clearing the initial missions that serve as a bit of a tutorial in a way. I don't yet have a full grasp of the movement system. I'm still using my initial frame and weapons. So far, it's been reasonably fun. The game seems to fully support melee, ranged, and stealth approaches to missions. The run-and-gun gameplay is definitely faster than what I've dealt with recently (which has largely been cover-based shootering or MMO-style stand-and-fighting).
Early opinion: Pretty cool for a F2P game. Not sure if it'll have longer-term appeal.