More Gaming Updates

Hollow Knight is a good game. And I like it.

It's a 2D action-platformer that performs well. It's got a certain stylistic charm mingled with the gothic darkness of a "Soulsborne" game. I wish there was a bit more interactivity and current story largely because the atmosphere and background lore seems interesting. It's also significantly larger than I expected.

But, I'm probably not going to finish it.

For all the good, of which there is a lot, the amount of backtracking has worn on me and I find repeating certain fights and jumping sections to be a bit above my frustration threshold. These are things that may not bother everyone equally.

I encountered a number of trying boss fights and struggled through from being overwhelmed to learning and overcoming. I think what finally got me was the Traitor Lord fight. I consciously understand his move set, but I wasn't able to pull things together. It doesn't help that many of his attacks deal two hits of damage. I think the actual worst part, however, is that the nearest save is half a dozen screen away, two or three of which actually involve some tight jumps through thorn-laden areas. That means getting back to the boss room itself requires a certain amount of focus and can lead to frustration even before the fight begins. It has reached a point where I just don't want to go through that all again.

This doesn't make me dislike the game, though. I'm quite fond of it and totally feel the 30+ hours of play I got were worthwhile. I may end up watching videos of the game ending(s), though haven't decided yet.

I've been plodding through Watch Dogs 2 after getting it for free with a recent Ubisoft promotion. It's... fine.

Thankfully, it's way less oppressive in tone than the first one. It might swing a little far in the other direction, though, with the central hacker characters treating big things pretty lightly. The open world looks good enough, but doesn't really excite me. The game makes use of drones more than just hopping between camera feeds while hacking/infiltrating places. As with the first one, I find chase sequences to be a little more frustrating than exciting as they drag on.

Overall... yeah, it's fine. Not overly good, not really bad. I'll probably continue through the main missions and that's about it.

I've also been pondering D&D a bit of late. I'm currently in two ongoing 5E games...

The Sunday night game has been going on for years, though only every other week (and sometimes much longer). The characters are level 14, though only have a handful of magic items. My fighter has a sword that can do an additional 1d6 of fire damage - no base plus or anything like that. Ironically, it's actually more powerful as an attunable weapon - once attuned, it can gain more abilities as you gain levels with it. But to attune this particular sword requires killing a cold-aligned creature, which we've never encountered. And at level 14, it would be slow progress to level it up even if that happened now. It's sort of a low-ish-magic setting to begin with, so I guess that makes sense, but it feels skimpy compared to the days of 3/4E that seemed to assume a certain amount of magical item resources even at low levels and I'm not sure how much of that is campaign-specific vs. game design of the edition.

We actually spent the majority of this last session converting from Roll20 to Foundry at the GM's preference. A lot of the functionality is similar, but the basis is certainly different. Roll20 is a service - you sign up and/or pay to access their servers and resources. Foundry is a program - you buy it and run it to host games one your computer. There appears to be a cloud-oriented version, but that still requires having/renting your own server to run the software on. This means you can't go in when it's not running to level-up or anything, which is a distinctly limiting factor, but pretty much everything else seems to work okay, if differently, compared to Roll20. It may take some getting used to.

The Monday night game has been weekly, though we've been down to two players a couple times so far. We advanced pretty quickly to level 6, though things have slowed down there. No magic items to speak of in that game yet either, though again I'm not sure how much of that is level/campaign versus the design of the game itself. If 5E has really make +1 weapons and armor rare items for those in the high teens of levels, that's a pretty radical shift from previous. I made my paladin with being a front line defender with healing in mind, but almost immediately found the option to use casting slots for smiting instead can make him a very impressive damage dealer. Unavoidable magic damage (magic missiles, guardian spirits, fireballs), however, proved his bane in the last major fight with a bunch of cultists and led to a number of death saves, but we've come through it so far.

I'm still looking forward to playing Ghost of Tsushima, but being occupied with other things for a few weeks is not bad as it gives time for a few post-release patches.