Tyler F.M. Edwards's Blog

The Age of “Hey, Remember When” Media

I’ve always had a great love for big fictional worlds. The kind that extend for decades of real world time over many different pieces of media. I love when you can explore a setting in that depth, and watch an imaginary world evolve over time. These days it feels like sprawling media franchises are more prevalent than ever, and you’d think I’d be happy, but I’m not.

Like anything, there’s a right way and a wrong to do a long-term media franchise, and I feel like these days most of them don’t grasp what’s appealing about these kind of big picture stories. Reusing familiar elements in a story is a tool, not an end unto itself, but I think modern media has lost sight of that. So many of the stories we see in these franchises today have nothing to say but, “Hey, remember when…”

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but I was inspired to finally put virtual pen to virtual paper by a post by an old friend of mine from the GalacticaBBS days (gods, that was a lifetime ago). Over on his blog, he complains that the third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds spends too much time rehashing legacy characters and plot threads without any of the deeper social commentary traditionally seen in Star Trek.

This captures how I’ve felt about most modern Star Trek, and why I gave up on SNW after one season. I’ve often said that I don’t think the people in charge of the franchise right now don’t understand Star Trek.

When I say this, I often get pushback from people who will cite all all the callbacks to the franchise’s past throughout the modern shows, X Y or Z deep cut reference in the latest episode of Lower Decks or whatever. But that doesn’t really prove anything other than that the writers know how to read the Memory Alpha wiki.

There’s a difference between knowledge and understanding. It’s possible that the modern writers do have genuine love for and knowledge of the franchise and still totally fail to understand the heart of what it’s about. I’ve met enough far right Trekkies in the fanbase over the years to know how common that can be.

(I’m not saying the new writers are right wingers, just that it’s a common example of how you can be a diehard fan of the franchise while completely misunderstanding its essence.)

So much of modern franchise media is like this. Just an endless string of callbacks, references, and plays to nostalgia without any deeper thought behind it, without the understanding of what made these characters and stories special the first time around.

“Hey, remember how people loved this plot? Let’s do it again! Hey, remember this character people loved? Let’s bring them back! Hey, remember when…”

It’s not just Star Trek suffering from this, of course. A lot of Blizzard’s games have suffered from this in recent years. “Hey, remember how people liked the faction war? Let’s do that again! Hey, remember how the Dragons were cool? Let’s bring them back! Hey, remember the Skeleton King? Let’s throw him into the mobile game!”

There are other franchises that could be cited. Somehow, Palpatine returned…

There’s nothing inherently wrong with callbacks to the past. As I said at the start, I love it when it’s done well. Nostalgia is one of the most comforting feelings we can experience, and there can be plenty of beauty and meaning to media that’s based around it.

But you still need to do it with thought and creativity. For an example of nostalgia done well, I’ll again go back to Star Trek, and the one modern incarnation I actually liked: Prodigy.

The first season* of Prodigy is a fantastic example of a story that plays to nostalgia in an intelligent manner. Janeway is a familiar character, but she’s in a new role, an advisor and mentor rather than the ultimate authority on the cast. Tellarites and Medusans are previously established species, but they haven’t been main cast members before, and the other cast members represent new species.

The story also took place in a largely unknown area of space, and having the crew not be official members of Starfleet provided a new angle to the story. Initially irreverent to Starfleet’s many rules, they gravitate more and more towards living by its ideals as they come to understand it’s a better way to live. It was the perfect blend of familiar and original, capturing the spirit of what the franchise is meant to be while exploring its themes in a new way.

*(While I still found it more enjoyable than not, I think Prodigy’s second season did fall a bit into the “hey, remember when” trap, and that’s the main reason I rate it lower than the first season.)

After the blunders of Dragonflight, I would also say that World of Warcraft’s Worldsoul Saga arc is currently doing a decent of balancing the old and the new. Alleria has been around since Warcraft II, but they didn’t bring her back to fight Orcs again. She has a whole new role in the story as the face of Shadow as a force for good.

From what we’ve seen so far, the Midnight expansion is also shaping up to be a good example of nostalgia done the right way. We’re going back to Quel’thalas, but not to rehash the same story we had last time we were there. Instead of dealing with the Blood Elves’ magic addiction and their flirtations with demons, we will (hopefully) see a redeemed Quel’thalas uniting the world against the forces of the Void. It’s a familiar location, full of familiar faces, but it looks like it will be a fresh story all the same.

Cases like that are rarer than they should be, though. I think the problem is that in most cases the people behind these legacy franchises aren’t continuing them out of any passion for their stories, but simply out of a cynical desire to cash in on their name recognition.

You can’t make effective nostalgia bait if you don’t understand what made these things special in the first place. It needs to come from a place of genuine love.

It also needs to be said that a lot of people do genuinely just want more of the same. When legacy franchises do take chances with new directions, the fans often punish it, severely. See The Last Jedi, Stargate: Universe, Star Trek: Enterprise, and many other examples.

And even those of us who do complain often keep showing up anyway. We as consumers are culpable in the staleness of legacy franchises, and will continue to be so until we start being more discerning. Hence why I’m trying to be a bit more picky these days, and why I have up on current Trek shows beyond Prodigy (RIP).

With the executives of major media corporations more risk adverse than ever, I think the dominance of legacy franchises will continue for the foreseeable future. I can have the hope that we’ll see more cases like Prodigy and the Worldsoul Saga, which evoke nostalgia for the past while charting a new path, but I fear it’s going to be far more common to continue seeing media that has nothing to say beyond, “Hey, remember when…”

Gaming Round-Up: Gamescom Reactions and What I’ve Been Playing

In this installment of Ye Olde Grabbe Bagg Poste, I’ll be talking about my thoughts on some Gamescom announcements, as well as my recent activities in World of Warcraft and other games.

Minutes to Midnight

Every MMO blogger is contractually obligated to use that pun at least once in the coming months.

I’ve been listing off my hopes and predictions for WoW’s upcoming Midnight expansion over at Massively OP, and following the reveal at Gamescom, it seems I got pretty close on most things.

As expected, I am mildly disappointed by the lack of a new class or other major gameplay features outside of housing (which doesn’t seem to be hitting the notes for what I want from player housing), but it’s what I expected, so I’m not too fussed.

The prey feature sounds like it could be fun, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that’s going to shake up the game in any big way. Just something to slightly spice up grinding world quests by the sounds of it. Conceptually the new demon hunter spec sounds awesome, but we’ll have to see what the actual game mechanics for it are like before I get too hyped.

The cinematic, though, was a thing of beauty. I’m a huge Liadrin fanboy, and I’m so glad they seem to be centering her in the story. Plus Gideon Emery is always spectacular in everything he does.

The new zones look great, too. For me the expansion will be worth the price of admission just to revisit Quel’thalas and Zul’aman. I’m also happy to see another underground zone, as War Within didn’t fully capitalize on that premise. The Voidstorm zone looks a little too similar to K’aresh at first blush, but I’ll try to keep an open mind about it.

Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with how Midnight is shaping up.

Age of Empires 4 debases itself further

My expectations for the AoE4 DLC announcement at Gamescom were pretty low, but even so they somehow managed to massively disappoint me.

I was expecting another Sultans Ascend: An over-priced DLC with a short campaign, a couple new civs, and a bunch of dumb variant “civilizations” no one asked for. Instead, we only got the dumb variants.

Yup, that’s right. No campaign, no new civilizations. Just more variants. I’ll give them some credit that at least the Golden Horde was an actual empire — you know, the thing the whole franchise is supposed to be about; does anyone but me remember that was supposed to be the premise? — but the rest I couldn’t care less about.

My flabbers are particularly gasted by the addition of a second Japanese civilization. Even having the Japanese in the first place when the civilization roster is so limited is mildly questionable given Japan wasn’t really a particularly large or influential nation during the Middle Ages, but two different Japanese civilizations is just ridiculous.

Again, it’s getting harder and harder not to feel like the developers are tacitly endorsing racist attitudes towards history that view anything outside of Europe and Asia as being beneath the term “civilization.” We only have one civilization from Africa and none from the Americas, but hey, at least we have two different flavours of Japanese to cater to the weebs.

A lot of people are saying that the developers must be starved for funding and doing the best they can with limited resources, but that doesn’t really add up. Sultans Ascend was supposedly the best selling DLC in the Age franchise’s history. They should have plenty of cash.

Even if that isn’t the case, no one was forcing them to start churning out noble houses and random armies and calling them “civilizations.” If your goal is asset re-use, there are smarter ways to do it. You could make a Scottish civilizations that shares most of its building and unit skins with the English. You don’t need to call it a variant, you can just use similar visual assets like the franchise has from the beginning. Similarly I don’t think anyone would mind if, say, a Vietnamese or Korean civilization shared architecture with the Chinese.

No, this bizarre tangent into variants is an entirely unforced error. We had every opportunity to expand the cultural and historic diversity of the game, and the developers simply chose not to.

The only thing about the Dynasties of the East DLC that vaguely appeals to me is the Crucible, a new single-player roguelike mode. I’ve wanted some more repeatable versus AI content in the game forever. But considering that the skirmish AI has been broken since launch, the fact the mode is barely even mentioned on the store page, and the failure of Age of Mythology’s conceptually similar Arena of the Gods mode, my hopes for it are basically zero. It’s pretty clear by now that AoE4 devs only care about catering to PvP sweatlords, so I expect this to be a very half-hearted feature.

The sands of K’aresh

Moving on to what I’ve been playing lately, I’m back in WoW just for a month to catch up on the story. The rest of this segment will have story spoilers for 11.2, so skip ahead if you want to avoid that.

I’ve been a bit underwhelmed with this patch. K’aresh is a cool zone — the art team hit it out of the park as always — but phase diving and ecological succession are pretty weak features, and the story’s conclusion was disappointing.

Xal’atath’s betrayal was the most obvious twist ever. I’m fine with the idea that our heroes had no choice but to work with her against Dimensius, but the fact they actually believed she would be trapped in the Dark Heart strains credibility a lot more, as does the fact Alleria apparently had no contingency plan for the inevitable double cross. This is one of those moments where instead of making the villain look smart, they just made the heroes look stupid.

K’aresh’s world soul surviving also makes it feel like there’s no real danger in the story. If a world soul can survive that, can anything ever actually threaten them?

This is one of the biggest flaws of Warcraft’s story-telling. No one stays dead, nothing is ever really destroyed, and there’s no consequences. It sucks the tension out of the story.

I also don’t really get how Ve’nari went from a morally grey rogue of uncertain purpose to a selfless eco-warrior. That character really lost her edge. While not as bad on that front as Dragonflight, War Within is still suffering from being a bit too saccharine. I’m not saying we need to go back to the ultra-edge of Shadowlands or WoD, but there’s a happy medium between that and the hugbox we have now.

Still, I remain mostly happy with The War Within and its story overall. It’s just a shame it stumbled a bit at the finish line.

I do think it’s interesting how much of Xal’atath’s story is about her fighting other agents of the Void. Infighting in that group is common, but she seems to have a special devotion to it. I’m starting to feel like her goal is not to conquer Azeroth in the name of the Void, but to use its power to make herself top dog of the Void. Like we’re just a stepping stone to her greater plans.

Outside of the new stuff, I’ve been half-heartedly leveling a few more alts. My Undead death knight from Pandaria Remix is almost level 80 now, and may be there by the time you’re reading this. My enthusiasm for the character has been waning since the recent Frost revamp, though, which added more pointless attention tax cooldowns to what had been possibly the only spec left without them. Playing Blood now, which is… fine, I guess, but man I just want one spec that’s purely resource-based.

I had planned to put a lot of time into my latest hunter, also from Remix, this time around. I’d collected some cool pets to fit her Dark Ranger ethos and everything. But try as I might, I’m still struggling to enjoy playing a hunter. I’ve tried so many times over the years, and it just never sticks. I wish so much we could get another class that uses bows.

Minidan returns

I’ve also been playing a little of Pandaria Classic. That expansion had my favourite incarnation of the warlock class, with Demonology in particular being possibly my favourite spec in WoW’s history, so I wanted to check it out.

MoP Demonology is every bit as good as I remember it (the gameplay anyway; the graphics less so…), but leveling up from scratch all over again has been rough. Theoretically I would like to get to level cap and check out those Celestial dungeons, but right now I’m kind of stalled out around level 30. Classic dungeons are so painful, man.

Spidey sense tingling

Before getting back to WoW, I played through Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (they really couldn’t have given that a better name?), one of my latest Steam sale purchases.

I wasn’t really motivated to do the whole open world grind shtick, so I ignored most of the side activities and just blitzed through the story. It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was a fun romp full of Spidey nostalgia. I appreciated the wholesome, classically heroic vibe of it. Peter’s just a good person doing his best to make the world a better place. Feels good, man.

I found the boss fights pretty annoying (yet another recent game where my reflexes held me back), but otherwise the gameplay was fun enough. Tossing around goons was a good time, and the web-slinging was well done.

I’ll probably buy the sequels at some point, but I’ll definitely wait for sales.

ARPG ennui

I’ve run out of steam in Path of Exile and Diablo: Immortal. PoE did finally start to get a bit challenging, but mostly in the form of being one-shot by boss mechanics I couldn’t see because the visual clarity in that game is terrible.

I still kind of want to finish it, but it was really starting to feel like a slog. I may just watch the rest of the story on YouTube or something, IDK. The story isn’t even that interesting, really, but closure would be nice.

I realized after a while the story is actually incredibly basic but just seems deep at first because the dialogue uses such flowery language. And don’t get me wrong, I love how over the top dramatic the language is, and the voice acting is great, but there is something off-putting to the realization of how much of it is just smoke and mirrors to make things seem deeper than they are.

Everything in Path of Exile is like that, and I realized that’s my biggest issue with the game. It’s how hard it works to seem deeper and smarter than it is. It would be so much more fun if it just embraced its own dumbness. ARPGs aren’t meant to be a cerebral genre; they’re just dumb violence simulators, and that’s why we love them. Path of Exile feels so ashamed of what it is.

Meanwhile in Immortal, I really was loving their take on the druid, but — in stark contrast to what people will say the problem with mobile games is — it’s just far too generous.

I’ve never said that about a game before, but it’s true. If I play for twenty minutes, the first 15 of that will just be claiming freebie rewards and sorting my inventory. I’m only a few zones deep into the campaign, but I’m already level-capped with legendary gear in most slots. Nothing is challenging, and none of the rewards I get from actually playing compare to what the game gives away for free.

What a bizarre game.

Overwatch struggles

I’ve uninstalled Overwatch for the moment. Even with the accessibility aids of Stadium, I’m just hopelessly bad at it, to the point where it felt unfair to make other people play with me. You’d think eventually the MMR would put me low enough to reach a 50% win rate, but I don’t think there’s an MMR low enough for me.

I can play Reinhardt okay because he’s so brain dead easy, but I don’t want to be limited to playing just one character, and I’m pretty hopeless otherwise. It’s frustrating because I otherwise enjoy the game, but I just get curbstomped every time I try to play it.

I may give it another try at some point. I was looking forward to Brigitte joining the Stadium roster. But I worry I’m just never going to be good enough to hack it in this game.

Future plans

I’ve only got a few days left in my WoW sub. I’m kind of leaning towards doing more frequent but shorter stints in the game, at least for the near future. Once the current jaunt ends, I’ll be on to other things.

I’m planning to revisit The First Descendant soon. My always shakey interest in the game was feeling like it was running out, but Nell is my favourite character in the game (not for any good reason; I just like the cut of her jib), and making her playable is enough to entice me back, or at least poke my nose in.

I also picked up Songs of Silence on the last Steam sale, and I want to get to that soon. Like Clair Obscur, it’s another turn-based game that seemed interesting enough to give it a shot, despite my usual dislike of such things.

Farther down the line there’s the upcoming Legion Remix, which doesn’t excite me the way Pandaria did but will probably be worth playing a bit of, and in theory the release of Heavenly Spear for Age of Mythology: Retold shouldn’t be too far off.

After AoE4’s recent embarrassments, I find my criticisms of Heavenly Spear feel a bit less relevant. I still wish they’d prioritized something else over the Japanese, but it does look to be shaping up to be a cool civ based on the previews, and at least it will have an actual campaign, and skirmish AI that meets the bare minimum of functionality.

Song of the Month: Wolf Alice, Bloom Baby Bloom

There’s a certain list of bands/musicians who are a little too out of my usual wheelhouse to be a true favourite, but whom I enjoy keeping an eye on because they’re unique and interesting. Even if I don’t always like every song they write, I’m always happy to see them making new stuff, because I feel they bring something different to the table. That list includes the likes of K. Flay, Hollerado, Billie Eilish… and Wolf Alice.

Wolf Alice fascinates me because they’re such chameleons. I swear you could play five different songs of theirs and never know it was the same band if you didn’t already know better. One of their most recent is Bloom Baby Bloom, and once again it has a totally different vibe from anything else I’ve heard of theirs.

Normally I prefer studio versions, but this was a cool performance, so we’re doing a live version this time:

Out of the Comfort Zone: Frieren and Expedition 33

There are two pieces of media I’d like to discuss today. There’s no real connection between them, except that they’re both a bit outside my usual wheelhouse in terms of interests, but that’s a good enough excuse to lump them together in my books.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Not to get all hipster, but I stumbled across Expedition 33 well before it launched and blew up like crazy (can’t remember how) and thought it looked interesting enough to keep an eye on. Despite that, and the universally rave reviews it received once it actually launched, I spent quite a few months waffling on if I actually wanted to buy it.

The problem is I don’t enjoy turn-based combat in video games, at all. It’s normally an instant dealbreaker for me. I was intrigued by E33’s introduction of real time mechanics to the formula… but it’s mainly precisely timed parries and quick time events, which are by far my least favourite parts of real time combat.

Still, it seemed like such a unique game I decided to give it a shot.

Sure enough, I didn’t love the combat. Conceptually I think needing to defend yourself in real time is a brilliant way to improve turn-based combat. Usually what kills turn-based for me is the boredom of sitting on my hands and watching the game play itself when it’s not my turn, and the real time avoidance completely eliminates that.

But I don’t enjoy the extreme precision that E33 requires. Bluntly, I’m really bad at it. My reflexes just aren’t that fast. I’ve always been a fan of needing to actively avoid enemy attacks in games, but I’m growing increasingly frustrated with the current trend towards requiring super precise timing for such things. I’m used to just running out of the way or keeping my shield up being good enough. The fact a dodge or block doesn’t count in a lot of recent games unless you do it at the last possible second is irritating.

I struggled to find a comfortable difficulty setting, as the dodge windows on normal were too unforgiving for my sluggish brain, but story mode was so completely bereft of threat that it became boring. I ended up downloading a mod that let me have easier dodge and parry windows without otherwise altering the difficulty (as well as a mini-map mod as the lack of such was frustrating me).

I don’t think I would have finished the game without mods, but with them, I managed to find a decent balance where the combat felt mostly tolerable, and even actually fun sometimes. One upside to this kind of JRPG style combat is the attack animations are truly spectacular (Crystal Crush, my beloved).

I settled on Sciel, Lune, and Verso as my go-to party, with Sciel largely carrying the team. I got her set up such that she could pump out massive heals, keep the entire party buffed with Shell and Powerful at all times, and still dish out huge damage. To the game’s credit, though, I did get the feeling that pretty much any character could end up broken with the right build.

My other major frustration with the game is that I don’t like how it handled open world exploration. While the instanced zones will warn you if you’re underleveled for them, there doesn’t seem to be any way to find out the intended level of open world mobs, so it’s easy (and common) to stumble your way into fights you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. At one point I spent a full hour exploring the map and getting into fights only to get absolutely curbstomped every single time. That was the most mad I’ve been at a game in quite a while.

Act 3 is kind of a mess in terms of game structure, too. There’s one story quest, which ends the game, but there will at that point still be tonnes of optional content left undone (some of which you’ll still be underleveled for, even). Up until that point it’s a very tight and well-paced RPG, but then it turns into this janky pseudo sandbox experience where you can either ignore a huge chunk of content, or completely kill the story’s momentum by ignoring the epic conclusion for another dozen hours or more of random exploration.

I ended up skipping most of the optional stuff and just going straight to the end. I am considering going back for the rest at some point, as you can at least continue exploring after the main story ends, but I’m in no rush to do so.

The story was the main draw of the game for me, and I mostly liked it, but it didn’t entirely meet my expectations, which is maybe on me as those expectations were very high.

I think it’s mostly that I never really felt surprised by anything that happened. I’m not going to claim I predicted the exact twists and turns, but the story clearly telegraphs that there’s more going on than seems apparent at first glance, and I’ve played enough Don’t Nod games to know what to expect from the ending of a French game.

For the record, I’m in the camp that views the Maelle ending as the (marginally) lesser evil.

I did enjoy the characters a lot. They feel very well realized, and Verso and Sciel in particular feel like some of the more authentic depictions of mental illness I’ve seen in media.

To put it more clearly, I enjoyed the combat a lot more than I expected to, but still not that much, and I enjoyed the story a little less than I expected to, but still pretty well. I think it’s fair to say I’m not as awestruck by Expedition 33 as most people seem to be, but it’s still a very good game, and I’m glad I took a chance on it despite it being so far outside my comfort zone. I’d give it about an 8/10.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

With a few minor exceptions, I’ve never been much for anime, but given my obsession with Elves, people kept recommending me Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, and I decided to finally bow to the peer pressure.

Having finished the season, I’m honestly still not sure if I like it or not.

On the one hand, I definitely love the premise. A deep dive on the psychology of an immortal Elf as she struggles to come to terms with the mortality of her companions and the changing world around her is tailor-made for someone like me, and I think the writing mostly does a good job of illustrating Frieren’s alien perspective and genuine struggles to fit in among humans. I would really like to see more sci-fi/fantasy stories that centre non-human perspectives like this.

On the other hand, it’s an incredibly slow series. I think a lot of Western TV these days is too rushed, and I don’t mind a slow burn, but this is so slow I’m not sure it’s burning at all. Most of the time it feels like they’re going out of their way to avoid anything even close to dramatic tension.

I think they also waste the show’s premise a bit by not employing more time skips. The first half dozen episodes or so take place over the course of around eighty years, but after that everything takes place within a year or two. I think it would have been a more interesting series if it was constantly skipping through the years, showing how the world changes even as Frieren stays the same. They could have done a Doctor Who kind of thing and had her get a new set of companions every season, every season a new generation that teaches Frieren something new about the human experience.

Finally, I did find the attempts at humour quite grating. It feels like it has to have been a mandate from some studio executive to include X jokes in Y style, because it’s always totally out of the blue and wildly mismatched with the tone of the show. “This is a thoughtful, introspective series about processing grief and learning to be grateful in the here and now, but also here’s a random gag about how some dude has a tiny dick.”

I’d consider watching the second season when it shows up, but I wouldn’t be in any hurry about it.

New World: Fresh Faces

Just a small post today about something I felt was worth marking but wouldn’t fill a Vitae Aeternum column over at Massively OP.

A few months back, New World revamped player faces, leaving both my characters with new faces I didn’t ask for. While I didn’t mind the new look for my Syndicate main too much, I hated the changes made for my Covenant alt. This left me eagerly awaiting the release of this season’s barbershop feature.

Of course, the barbershop tokens come from the cash shop. I’ve nothing against that on principle, but considering they changed all our faces a few months before, they really should have given every character a free token off the bat. Instead they offered only one for free, at level 90 of the season pass.

I spent a few hours enduring the misery of grinding the current season pass as a PvE player and got the freebie, and my Covie now has a new new face, as you can see above.

To be honest, I’m still not thrilled with it. It’s nowhere near as ugly as the one the update saddled her with, but it doesn’t suit her. She looks mean now. While I imagined her having a fairly rough past, she’s a true believer in the Covenant’s mission now, and “mean” doesn’t fit. Problem is there just aren’t that many faces in this game, fewer that look good, and even fewer with Asian features. Maybe the new one will grow on me with time. One could hope…

That was to be the end of it, but my Syndicate main’s new face wasn’t quite sitting right either. It didn’t look bad, but it wasn’t her, either. Thus, in a moment of weakness, I bought a second barbershop token and changed her up, as well.

This does mean I broke my boycott of Trump-aligned big tech, and I feel genuinely bad about that. It is complicated because I’m pretty confident the California-based developers of a game about a multi-cultural setting that’s featured bisexual and nonbinary NPCs since launch aren’t particularly supportive of Mango Mussolini, but at least some of the money still does get filtered up the chain to Amazon’s orange-scrotum-gobbling boss. I won’t attempt to make excuses. It was, as I said, a moment of weakness.

At least I’m happy with the result. While I struggled with my Covie, for the main I was able to find a nice-looking face that feels like a pretty good match for her original look. While I was there, I also gave her a messier hair style and a nasty facial scar, as I figure a few years on Immortality Is Actually Hell Island would have her looking a bit less prim and proper.

This reflects how my view of the character has evolved over the years. I’ve always pictured her as a magical scholar, but originally I was picturing her as very book smart and civilized, whereas these days I’m seeing her as more of a witchy, druidic type. This can be seen as a natural evolution rather than a retcon. You can read all the books on alchemy you want back in Europe, but once you get to Aeternum, the wild powers of the island don’t follow such clear-cut rules.

With that done, I’ve largely dropped New World, and I imagine that will remain true until season ten launches in fall. Maybe I’ll drop back in for the occasional world boss or something, but I’m pretty burnt out on the game on its current state of content drought. Let’s hope they hit it out of the park with the new zone that is probably Dunwood. I want me a nice spooky zone where I can get a gothic horror mansion for a house.

Song of the Month: Olivia Rodrigo, Good 4 U

While I listen to a tonne of music in the pop genre, I rarely give much attention to the big name pop stars. Not so much because I think there’s any virtue in scorning the mainstream, but simply because most of it fails to make much of an impression on me.

I have been enjoying exploring Olivia Rodrigo’s catalogue lately, though. Her music is certainly nothing innovative, but it’s damn fun.

Gaming Round-Up: Mods, Demos, and Ashes

Feels like we’re about due for another post on odds and ends of my recent gaming not covered by other posts.

RTS mods

Finishing all those Age of Empires campaigns a few weeks back didn’t entirely quell my RTS lust, and I ended up turning to the modding community for more options.

Firstly, I did end up trying that Swedish campaign for AoE3. For fan-made, it was pretty decent, but still well below the quality of professional content, and I quickly remembered why AoE3 is my least favourite installment of the franchise, so I didn’t make it that far before losing interest.

Next, I was looking for some good PvE custom maps for Warcraft III: Reforged. The problem with that is that most of them are RPG campaigns or MOBA-like modes or otherwise radically different from the baseline Warcraft III experience, and I just… like… wanted to play more Warcraft III. A lot of mods aren’t compatible with Reforged, either, and I can’t go back to the old graphics at this point.

I did find one interesting option, though: Advanced Melee AI (AMAI) updates the skirmish AI to behave more like a real person, with more diverse strategies.

It may succeed in its goal of replicating ladder players a little too well. I got tower rushed my first game. On the plus side, it did make for a fun comeback as I eventually broke free of the choking siege.

The AI is also programmed to periodically trash-talk you, which is… something. It hasn’t thrown any racial slurs or threats of sexual violence at me, though, so we haven’t quite perfectly replicated a real gamer yet.

I wouldn’t say it’s a perfect solution to skirmishes quickly getting stale, but it definitely added some variety, and I got a good few hours of fun out of it. I’m not ruling out playing more in future, either. Still wish I could have found some proper custom campaign-style missions using the original factions, though.

A Warcraft III version of StarCraft II co-op missions is probably too much to hope for, but it doesn’t stop a man from dreaming.

Steam demos

I’ve tried out a few more Steam demos lately. Most were swiftly uninstalled and forgotten, but a few stood out.

I actually quite liked Section 13 aside from the fact it’s a roguelike. After running the first mission at least three times without beating it, I just lost patience, but I did like the art style and the humour a lot, and the combat was mostly enjoyable. I find the roguelike and soulslike trends have ruined a lot of what would otherwise been great games.

One that did make it onto my wishlist is Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. Gameplay-wise it’s sort of like a low budget Skyrim, which isn’t my favourite thing, but the story was actually pretty intriguing. It’s allegedly based on Arthurian mythology, but aside from using some familiar names it’s pretty much its own thing.  The music and voice-acting were top notch, too, and I really liked the twisted visual aesthetic.

I probably wouldn’t pay full price for it, but it’s definitely something I might pick up on sale one day. I am curious to see where this story goes.

Ashes: Red Rains

I haven’t been playing physical card games as much these days, partly due to a certain degree of burnout and partly due to my ever-worsening mental health leaving me with little energy to, but I did stumble across a new (to me) game I wanted to try.

Ashes — later rebranded as Ashes Reborn and now rebranding again as Ashes Ascendancy — was originally envisioned as a competitive card game but has since added robust solo/co-op support with the Red Rains expansion line and the upcoming Ascendancy expansions. Intrigued, I picked up The Corpse of Viros, a de facto starter set for the Red Rains line.

I’ve only played one game so far, so I’m still making up my mind, but my early impression is mostly positive with a few quibbles.

The onboarding experience could have been better. The layout of the rulebook wasn’t always intuitive, and the starter deck they give you didn’t feel like it had reliable tools for dealing with all the boss’s mechanics.

The card art isn’t bad, but it isn’t amazing, either. I also would have liked some more context on the lore. There’s basically nothing on the setting, the characters you’re playing, or the boss you’re fighting. I don’t expect much story in a card game — I actually find the amount of story in something like Arkham Horror LCG a bit tiresome — but give me something.

On the other hand, I like how the resource mechanic is based on rolling a dice pool every round, which makes you adapt your strategy on the fly a bit, and the way they implemented escalating boss phases was really cool. In general it feels a bit more dynamic and less predictable than I’m used to solo card games being.

I don’t think I’m going to go all-in on this one like I did with Lord of the Rings LCG (I might have considered it if I was still at the peak of my card game obsession), but I’ll probably pick up a couple more expansions.

Two ARPGs Enter, One Leaves

I’ve been really craving a good Diablo clone lately, but there haven’t been any new releases that have really interested me. Therefore I decided to give some older ones another try. I reinstalled Titan Quest and Path of Exile and started new characters in both to see which, if any, would stick.

Titan Quest didn’t last long. I love the idea of Diablo Meets Mythology, but the game is just too dated. I kind of want to go back and give it a bit more time… but realistically I don’t think I will.

Right now I’m about about fifteen hours into my new run at Path of Exile, and it’s been scratching my ARPG itch, but I wouldn’t say I’ve been fully converted to a fan. I can only reiterate what I said in the past: Despite what its fans like to tell you, it’s actually a very easy game that mostly gets its “challenge” from poor UI design and a pathological aversion to basic quality of life features.

I started out playing a templar, but melee turns out to feel awful in that game (seriously, why is he swinging so slowly?!?), so I quickly went back to playing a witch like I did the first time around. Going for a basic necromancer build; I was in the mood for a minion swarm.

I decided to play on “Ruthless” mode. Given my main complaints about the game were a lack of difficulty and the pain of inventory management, a mode that increases difficulty by drastically decreasing loot drops seemed like the ticket, and it definitely has improved my experience significantly.

There are still some downsides. I like limiting gear drops as a way to add challenge to the game and make rewards feel more meaningful, but the incredible rarity of skill gem drops feels more like a nerf to fun.

On that note, I’m still not convinced that the game’s build system is really all that. The skill web looks overwhelming at first glance, but it’s not hard to figure out you just take the nodes that buff the stuff you’re using. I’d actually argue having so many nodes cuts down on meaningful choice because you never really run out of ways to buff your core stuff, leaving no space to take luxury nodes. I’d like that area of effect buff, but I still have about twenty more minion nodes I need to take to keep my zombies alive.

If I’m to try to be fair, I guess it comes down to what you want an RPG to be. If you see RPGs as a math problem to be solved, then yes, Path of Exile is as deep as they come. There’s never ending ways to tweak your numbers to min/max your performance.

But if you see RPGs as, y’know, role-playing games that are about living out cool character fantasies, then I’d say PoE’s customization options are middling at best. Builds mostly just seem to come down to picking a nuke, choosing the passives that buff it, and spamming one button until the cows come home. There’s not the variety of gameplay or aesthetic customization you see in games like Diablo III or Wolcen.

I also need to say that even Ruthless mode still isn’t that hard. A few of the boss fights have gotten a little hairy, but even then I mostly beat them without a single death, and even if I do die, they don’t heal to full health. Compared to how much Belial mauled me on my first run through Diablo III, this seems pretty forgiving.

To be fair, I do get the feeling running a minion witch build is playing on easy mode a bit, but even accounting for that, I don’t see how any honest assessment of this game could describe it as especially challenging.

Which is fine. I wasn’t necessarily looking for a nail-biting challenge. It just makes it hard to take the game seriously when its community has spent so many years heaping sneering scorn at how supposedly brainless Diablo III is, when in reality PoE even on Ruthless is at most maybe equal in challenge to vanilla D3 on normal mode.

I’ve never had a community negatively impact my opinion of a game as much as PoE’s does. Lost Ark comes close, as does First Descendant — for the love of the gods, guys, just watch some porn like normal people.

Anyway, I’m not really sure if I’m going to stick with PoE or not. It’s fun enough, and I do like the art, music, and ambiance, but the minimalistic story is starting to feel more unfinished than intriguing, and the gameplay is very repetitive, even by the standards of this genre.

Age of Mythology: Heavenly Spear and More Grumping

Age of Mythology: Retold has already announced their next expansion, Heavenly Spear. It adds the Japanese civilization, and it’s once again time for me to be disappointed by Retold.

I don’t hate it or anything, but going for another east Asian civilization immediately after the Chinese feels a bit tiresome. While I understand that Chinese and Japanese culture are very different, and especially their mythologies are wildly distinct, there is still a lot of overlap in terms of things like architecture, art design, and map biomes.

It also ties into my growing frustration with the Age franchise’s current hyper-fixation with Europe and Asia. I periodically see unsavoury members of the community say that we can’t have more content from Africa or the Americas because the people there have always been nothing but savages with no culture or achievements to worth mentioning, and it’s getting harder not to feel like the developers are tacitly agreeing with that on some level.

The other problem is that this is probably the last DLC they’ll make. Given the poor player counts on Steam and the game’s other stumbles, it’s hard to see it having much of a future once they’ve met their obligation to premium edition buyers, who were always promised two DLCs. If this is to be the end, I’d rather have seen something with no thematic overlap with any existing civilizations.

The community is also continuing to add to my frustration. The toxic positivity brigade is already out in full force on social media to shout down even the mildest criticism of Heavenly Spear.

I don’t like this attitude that we can’t ever criticism the game because we’re lucky it’s still getting support at all. The same arguments came out during AoE2’s recent Three Kingdoms controversy, but at least it’s much less prevalent in AoE2’s community, which seems more mature generally.

Personally I would rather no content than bad content. Not that I think Heavenly Spear is bad, but I don’t think its very existence should place it above criticism, either. I don’t think that’s healthy for a game, and I’m sure the developers would agree. As a sometimes developer myself, I wouldn’t want my players to hold back on legitimate critiques; I want the opportunity to grow.

There are a few things about Heavenly Spear that seem promising, but each comes with a caveat. The campaign focusing on an ordinary farmer’s daughter sounds like a great hook for a classical heroic journey… but Immortal Pillars’ story was so bad it’s hard to have hope for this one.

That the campaign is longer than Immortal Pillars’ is welcome and could be a sign the game’s development is winding up rather than winding down… but the fact they haven’t done any god packs since Freyr reinforces the idea that they’re just meeting their obligation to premium buyers before dropping the game.

There’s talk of improving Arena of the Gods… but its current state is so poor it’s hard to see them ever getting to anything approaching a good state.

That said, Japanese mythology is very rich, and we’ve already seen what look like some incredibly cool myth units. I’m sure this DLC will add a lot of positive things to game, even if it’s not what I would have chosen.

It’s not that adding the Japanese to the game is a bad idea. It’s just the timing that’s wrong. If they did Mayans or Sumerians (or ideally both) and then Japanese, I’d be celebrating.

Songs of the Month: ggwendolyn, Mango Sticky Rice and Small Town Rodeo

Aways back, I talked about discovering ggwendolyn when she opened for Lauren Mayberry at the Horseshoe Tavern. I’ve been following her since, and she’s slowly been trickling out more songs, including studio versions of songs she performed at the Horseshoe. I’ve decided to highlight two rather than just one because I think they’re both interesting stories in different ways.

Being someone who has spent much more time missing friends than making them, Mango Sticky Rice is a song that’s stuck with me all this time, and it’s great to finally hear the finished version of it.

Hearing this at the Horseshoe also inspired me to try actual mango sticky rice for the first time. I didn’t think I’d like because I’m not usually a fan of coconut, but it’s pretty good.

On the other hand, I’d completely forgotten about Small Town Rodeo until I heard it on YouTube, but I was instantly transported back to that night at the Horseshoe. I had the vivid image of ggwendolyn making the lasso motion with her hand as she sang that line. It kind of felt like rediscovering buried treasure.