Tyler F.M. Edwards's Blog, page 2

Song of the Month: Metric, Combat Baby

Was looking through what Metric songs I’ve already shared on the blog, and I can’t believe I hadn’t done this one yet. Not only is it one of the first Metric songs I ever heard, but between how much me and my father listen to it on our own time, how much radio play it’s gotten, and how often the band plays it live, this has to be one of my most listened to songs ever, by any band.

Age of Empires: Campaigns and Controversy

Feeling burnt out on the online game grind after a few months of playing WoW and The First Descendant, I’ve returned to my first love, RTS games, with a special emphasis on the Age of Empires franchise.

The crash bug in Age of Mythology: Retold finally got fixed, so I managed to finish the Immortal Pillars campaign at last. It was a pretty anticlimactic ending, made only worse by how long I waited to see it, but I do remain a big fan of the Chinese civilization, even if the campaign disappointed.

I then moved on to Ol’ Reliable, AKA Age of Empires II. My habit since the Definitive Edition’s release has more or less been to come back every few months, knock out a campaign or two, and then play something else, but even after five years and around 150 hours logged on Steam, I was still nowhere near close to finishing them all.

I decided it was time to finally admit to myself that maybe I don’t want to finish all of them. The DE DLCs have focused too much on Europe for my taste, and there’s a lot of very niche “civilizations” that I don’t think the game really needed. My enthusiasm for playing their campaigns is minimal.

So I decided to give myself permission to consider the game “finished” once I had played all the non-European campaigns,* which felt much more achievable.

*(That I currently own — I still haven’t bought the Mountain Royals DLC, though I may yet at some point.)

As of this writing I have technically completed that goal, though I may go back and play Prithviraj again. The first time I played it, it was still using the umbrella Indian civilization from before Dynasties of India, and I kind of want to play it again now that it uses the Gurjaras.

The last fully new (to me) campaign I played was Le Loi (Vietnamese), and I may have saved the best for last. It became one of my favourite Age of Empires campaigns to date. It feels like everything I want from Age of Empires on every level. A bit of history I knew nothing about, a fun underdog story about triumphing over an invading force, long missions full of multiple enemies to defeat, challenging but not unfair.

The second to last mission, A Three Pronged Attack, in particular really stood out. You get multiple bases to manage and several different objectives you can tackle in any order, so there’s a lot of freedom in how to approach the mission. It was quite challenging, and I was brought to the brink of defeat several times, but I managed to hold on. By the end I’d mined out most of the map, but I pushed through in the end. Just epic.

The Vietnamese civilization itself isn’t my new favourite or anything, but it was enjoyable enough. Using an army composition of the new fire lancer unit combined with rattan archers made for an interestingly different economic equation, since neither costs food.

“Finishing” the campaigns doesn’t mean I’m not going to play the game anymore, of course. I’m sure I will continue to pick it back up periodically. I may still get to those remaining European campaigns, or pick up Mountain Royals. I think it might be fun to replay some of the original campaigns, too. Many of them I haven’t played in over twenty years. And of course there will be more DLCs in the future.

On that note, there’s been a lot of rustled jimmies in the community lately over the recent Three Kingdoms DLC. I’m not as enraged by it as some, but I’m probably never going to buy it, and I do tend to agree it’s a step in the wrong direction.

I’m getting really tired of “variant” civilizations. I hated them in AoE4, and I’m not happy to see the concept now creeping in to AoE2. This franchise is supposed to be about empires and civilizations, not individual armies. The world is full of so many rich and diverse cultures that could be added, but it feels like these days the developers are focused on finding new and creative ways to keep rehashing what we already have, and honestly it’s getting hard not to see it is a bit racist.

I don’t mean this in a “the developers are secretly MAGA” sort of way. I don’t imagine there’s any conscious malice at play. But unconscious bias exists, and it’s clear that a lot of people in our society think civilization is something that has mostly only existed in Eurasia, in part due to failings of our education systems.

Like, it’s just wrong that we now have twice as many civilizations representing the Han Chinese as we do the entire continent of Africa. We have as many civilizations from the Italian peninsula as we do all of the Americas. People regularly argue that the reason we can’t have North American native civilizations like the Haudenosaunee is because they don’t fit the game’s time frame, but we can break the game’s time frame to add three new flavours of Chinese?

Playing through the Le Loi campaign really got me thinking about how that’s more what I want to see out of these games. I’m pretty sure most of the people playing AoE2 had never even heard the name Le Loi before this campaign, but it’s a really compelling piece of history and a story worth telling.

That’s where I want to see the developers putting their resources. Exploring elements of the world’s cultures and history that haven’t already been done to death in this and other games. I want to expand my horizons.

I also dislike that the Three Kingdoms campaign is apparently an adaptation of the fictionalized Romance of the Three Kingdoms rather than actual history, and I agree that hero units have no place in AoE2 outside the campaign (and barely even there).

So yes, Three Kingdoms is probably going to remain a no buy for me. On the plus side, since I don’t play multiplayer, I can pretty much ignore its existence entirely.

On a final and tangentially related note, I also did some looking into player made campaigns, mainly for the AoE games other than 2, which don’t have as much official single-player support.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find that much that looked interesting. I was especially hoping to find some player made AoE4 campaigns, but there don’t seem to be any, not even a single standalone scenario. I could have sworn I heard people were making such things, but apparently not. Very disappointing.

The only thing I found that looked appealing was a Swedish campaign for AoE3 that looked decently high quality for unofficial content. 3 may be my least favourite AoE game, but I may get around to trying this campaign at some point. I did always like the Swedes; they don’t feel nearly as overcomplicated as most AoE3 civilizations. Plus the sod roof houses are cute.

Lost Records: Bloom and Rage Review

By now a committed Don’t Nod fanboy, I’ve been eagerly anticipating Lost Records: Bloom and Rage for a while now. The only reason it’s taken me until now to play this Life Is Strange spiritual successor is that I was waiting for both episodes to release so I could play through it all in one go.

By now, I think we pretty much know what to expect from Don’t Nod, and Lost Records fits that pattern to a T. It’s emotional, artsy, heavy on tragedy, a little messy, a little janky, occasionally self-indulgent, very queer, and anything but forgettable.

Lost Records splits itself between two timelines, with the story being framed by scenes in the present day but mostly taking place in flashbacks to twenty-seven years before. Our viewpoint character is Swann Holloway, a nerdy and awkward loner who stumbled her way into a close-knit friend circle of other misfit girls during one summer in her teen years.

The game is all about these four girls, the friendship (and potentially romance) that grew between them, and the dark secret they’ve been keeping for twenty-seven years. Between their heart to heart conversations and playing in their gods-awful garage band, the girls found something strange hidden in the forests outside their rural town, something that would shape their lives forever. Whether it was a blessing or a curse is a question this game will have you asking long after the credits roll.

I’ve said many times that I believe the mark of true greatness in media is not a lack of flaws, but when the highs are high enough to make you forgive the lows. Lost Records is a perfect example of that, as there is plenty about I didn’t like.

The dialogue is occasionally clunky. The pacing is glacial. The story is excessively tropey (the jock bully’s name is Corey, for Pete’s sake). The plot can feel forced or contrived at times. There’s probably one too many lengthy, emotional musical montages. There’s a lot of story choices that feel like they should be very impactful but aren’t.

My biggest complaint is that the split timeline thing feels like it was mostly just there as a marketing gimmick. I was hoping it would be an opportunity for some very experimental meta game mechanics with both timelines influencing each other, but that mostly didn’t pan out. It actually detracts from the story, because the most head-scratching plot points have to do with justifying why it took twenty-seven years for all this to come to a head.

In hindsight, I think the game would have worked better if it had abandoned the future timeline altogether and just focused on the story of the girls as teenagers. The important bits from the future largely could have happened in the past, and felt more natural for doing so.

In general it’s probably better just to not overthink the game’s plot, because I don’t think it holds up very well if you do, but a game like this is less about the Point A to Point B and more about the emotions it’s trying to evoke. On that measure, Lost Records nails it. This game perfectly weaves a tapestry of friendship, young love, bittersweet nostalgia, and the harsh reality that you can’t go home again.

A game like this lives or dies by the strength of its characters, and that’s another place where Lost Records sticks the landing. I can’t give enough praise to Swann especially. Normally in games like these, I find the protagonist can be a bit forgettable as they’re clearly meant to be a blank slate for the player, but Swann has a very well-realized personality all her own, and I found her both very relatable and almost overwhelmingly lovable.

Few other characters in fiction have made me want to cheer for them so strongly. The other girls are by no means forgettable, but Swann steals the show.

Add to that gorgeous graphics and a lovely soundtrack, and you have a game that feels like crawling under a warm and comforting blanket, even when it’s doing everything it can to shatter your heart into a thousand pieces.

Overall rating: 8/10

One final aside: I do find it a little strange that so much of Lost Records’ story is about punk music and the culture around it, but the soundtrack is almost nothing but soft, gentle synth music — almost as far from punk as you can get. Doesn’t really bother me — as I said above, I enjoyed the soundtrack a lot — but it is a bit of a weird choice thematically when you think about it.

WoW: Veteran of the Fourth War

Since I returned to World of Warcraft, I’ve been slowly catching up on what I missed in my years away. A few months ago, I capped off Shadowlands, and I’ve spent the last few weeks finishing up Battle for Azeroth, the expansion whose premise I hated so much it prompted me to stop playing in the first place. In the end, was it as bad as I expected?

New troll here

Yes. Yes it was. The best I can say about it was that it was not as uniformly bad as I expected, and did have some parts I genuinely liked, but the lows were much deeper and more numerous than the highs.

My expectation going in was that BfA would be all-in on the angle of “grr, rawr, go fight the faction war we’ve already conclusively wrapped up like three times now,” but at first, this didn’t pan out.

Surprisingly, the whole burning of Teldrassil — and indeed everything leading up to the outbreak of renewed hostilities between the Horde and the Alliance — is no longer in the game. Now, Blizzard usually does some kind of one time only expansion lead-in event that’s never seen again, but usually it’s nothing integral to understanding the story. Leaving out the entire inciting incident of the story is a pretty weird choice. I think there’s a novel that covers that time as well, so I guess you can still get the story there, but given my feelings on BfA I’m not strongly motivated to read that.

Already I need to go off a bit of a tangent here, because the whole Teldrassil thing never really made sense to me. Not just its destruction; everything about it. You’re telling me the famously intransigent Night Elves all just packed up and left the forests they’ve been living in for the last ten thousand years to move to a giant tree off the coast for no particular reason?

And keep in mind it is just a big tree. The Aspects never blessed it like they did Nordrassil, so there’s literally nothing special about it beyond its size. The whole thing is just a monument to Fandral Staghelm’s ego and Night Elven vanity.

I’ve always had my head canon that actually hardly anyone lives in Teldrassil and most of the Night Elves are still chilling in Ashenvale. I realize that’s not necessarily the actual canon, but it’s the only thing that makes any sense, so I haven’t been able to get my brain to believe anything else.

Keep in mind, also, that most Night Elves are thousands or tens of thousands of years old, so from their perspective they basically only lived in Teldrassil for all of about five minutes. This is reflected by my own perspective as someone who’s been a fan of the franchise since long before Teldrassil was a thing. If you’re someone who started with WoW I can see how it might feel important, but for me Teldrassil still feels like something new and rather forced.

So it’s hard for me to really care that it got destroyed. I get that the loss of life is supposed to be significant, and that the Horde supposedly took over pretty much all of Kalimdor, but nothing in the game really reflects this, so again I can’t really make my brain believe it.

Back to the main topic, without the start of the war to play through, I was dumped straight into Kul Tiras and Zandalar. I took on Kul Tiras with a Kul Tiran Outlaw rogue (as noted in earlier posts), and I explored Zandalar with a Troll warlock. For his spec, I chose Demonology, which I found much more fun than I did immediately after its revamp in Legion, but still nowhere near as good as the Mists of Pandaria version.

Going in, I was much more keen on Kul Tiras than Zandalar, but I actually ended up preferring the latter by quite a lot. Trolls have always been a mid-tier Warcraft culture to me — nothing against them, but not super passionate about them — but I think Zandalar has converted me to a fan.

This time around they seemed to take Troll culture a bit more seriously, and it felt like a much more faithful/respectful depiction of an animistic culture than the campy “voodoo” stereotypes Trolls usually embody. The mythology nerd in me really enjoyed meeting all the loa and deep-diving Troll spirituality.

I also really enjoyed the charismatic and morally grey Rastakhan. I was a bit less impressed by Talanji, who feels too much like a clone of Anduin (squeaky clean heir to the throne with holy magic and daddy issues). Zul’s story also felt too rushed, but at least they didn’t forget to tie up that thread altogether, and all the G’huun stuff was fun.

The biggest downside to Zandalar is that it gets less interesting with each passing zone. Zuldazar is great, and Nazmir is decent, but Vol’dun just feels like filler.

My notes I made while playing just say “Vulpera make me stabby,” so read into that what you will. Even putting aside how cringey they are, I can’t believe they got made into a playable race after only playing a tiny and largely irrelevant role in one zone. So many other races with so much more history are still NPC only.

It also bothers me more than it should that the bad Sethrak keep calling themselves an “empire” considering they literally only control a tiny corner of a mostly empty desert.

Kul Tiras, meanwhile, was mainly just a disappointment. The zones are pretty, and I enjoyed the Halloweeny vibe of Drustvar, but the stories aren’t very memorable. Meanwhile the Kul Tiran people are consistently portrayed as various shades of corrupt, bigoted, and backward, and there’s never really an opportunity for them to reckon with all their many failings as a nation. I kind of just ended up wishing the whole place would sink into the sea.

Jaina’s ascension to lord admiral also came out of nowhere. Not that I don’t think she’s worthy of the position, but considering how much her people demonized her up to that point, it makes no sense they’d all suddenly be willing to bend the knee to her just cause she chased off some pirates.

So Kul Tiras was meh, and Zandalar was imperfect but largely enjoyable. Overall an okay if unspectacular leveling experience. It was once I got to what was originally level cap content that the faction war stuff kicked into high gear, and my frustration with the expansion really started to mount.

What really surprised is how much the Alliance feels like the bad guys in all of this. If you take out the context of the burning of Teldrassil (which again is not even in the game anymore), the BfA storyline comes across as the Alliance bullying the Horde unprovoked and causing mayhem wherever they go.

I mean their story in Vol’dun has you blowing up priceless archaeological sites literally just for fun; the characters fully acknowledge there’s no strategic benefit to this destruction. Oh, and then your next task is to steal food and water from mostly innocent exiles in a desert.

To say nothing of what they did to poor Grong…

You do have to appreciate that the first time we see any real personality from Gelbin Mekkatorque is him going full mask-off racist. Smug bastard sneering at the Zandalari’s “primitive” pyramid (it’s a glorious architectural marvel built around a wondrous piece of Titan technology). The worst part of this whole slog was doing the quest chain where you save his worthless life.

I don’t like it when the faction conflict is just good guys versus bad guys (I also don’t like the faction conflict at all, but I digress), so in theory the Alliance also doing lots of bad stuff should be good, but I found it totally unsatisfying. I came to realize I hate it for the same reason I hate it when the Horde does bad stuff. In both cases the story’s protagonists are just doing stupidly awful things for no reason.

Like, that’s what’s so frustrating about all this. Neither side has good reasons for doing what they do. They’re just being horrible to each other for no reason. There was no benefit to burning Teldrassil. There was no benefit to destroying Vol’dun’s history. It’s just cruelty for cruelty’s sake. You could maybe argue this is a realistic depiction of war, but hell, I’m not playing World of Warcraft for the realism.

At least Sylvanas’ actions can be retroactively explained by her secret deal with the Jailer, though it doesn’t explain why the rest of the Horde went along with her. I wish they’d tied in the later parts of the story about N’zoth from the start, because potentially this whole conflict could be explained by him bringing out the worst in everyone (something the story confirms he does), but as the war is already winding down by the time he’s released, that can’t really be the case.

I’m never going to be a fan of bringing back the faction war, but at least when they did it in Legion they found a way to do it that felt reasonable. From the Alliance’s perspective, it definitely looks like the Horde betrayed them at the Broken Shore, but when you do the Horde version you see they had no choice but to retreat. That’s a way to bring the factions into conflict that doesn’t make them both look like spiteful idiots.

So anyway, the Alliance side of the story is basically just “hoorah for racism and colonialist brutality,” and meanwhile the Horde’s story is just a nearly exact 1-1 rehash of their story in Mists of Pandaria, except much dumber this time.

The thing I really couldn’t grasp about this is why the Horde stayed loyal to Sylvanas up until her weird unforced confession during the Mak’gora. In MoP, it was very clear that most of the Horde had turned on Garrosh by the end, leaving him supported by only a minority of fanatics. Meanwhile BfA explicitly says that most of the Horde stayed loyal to Sylvanas until the end.

That makes no sense. It’s always been the lore that the Horde’s Alliance with Sylvanas was one of convenience, and that no one much liked or trusted her. Yes, the Forsaken are fanatically devoted to her, the Goblins will go to the highest bidder, and some Blood Elves still feel loyalty to her because of who she was in life, but no one else in the Horde has any reason to stick with her. Saurfang is a legendary war hero, and Thrall freed his people from slavery, but we’re supposed to believe the Orcs would rather follow Sylvanas than them?

The entire faction war story is just awful. At least as bad as I expected going in, if not worse. Recasting Saurfang’s voice actor alone is an unforgivable sin…

Eventually, mercifully, I got the end of it, and once I’d finished enduring the faction war nonsense, it was time to wrap up the rest of the expansion, starting with Nazjatar.

I’ve been wanting Azshara and Nazjatar to be the basis of an expansion for nearly the whole history of the game, and one of my biggest frustrations with Battle for Azeroth as an outsider observer was seeing them wasted as a mid-expansion filler patch.

Playing through it firsthand did nothing to lessen this frustration. If anything it only made me angrier. I couldn’t believe how boring they managed to make Nazjatar. The visuals, the story, everything about it couldn’t be more bland. Compared to how colourful and fascinating Vashj’ir was, it’s enough to make a grown man weep.

Azshara does survive the expansion, so there’s still the chance for her to brought back and given her due, but it’s hard to imagine them rebuilding her mystique after doing her so dirty in BfA. What a waste.

The story in Nazjatar is a mess, too, because its flow is interrupted by both a week-long reputation grind and multiple sorties back to Kalimdor to rescue Baine and do more stuff with the Heart of Azeroth.

Oh, yeah, the Heart of Azeroth is a thing. You’d think having the literal heart of a worldsoul around your neck would be a big plot point, but it’s just a way to shoe-horn in a borrowed power system that barely has any story around it until the very end.

It was also around this time I started trying to track down some quest chains involving Vol’jin (or his ghost I guess) that were mentioned in the achievements pane, and I found that they require exalted with the Zandalari Empire. A trip to WoWhead and some quick napkin math told me that would take me at least a month or two of daily grinding to achieve. I love Vol’jin and really wanted to do those quests, but that’s just not happening.

Finally, I got around to doing the final story arc around the Old God N’zoth and the dread city of Ny’alotha. The achievement for the story required doing the raid, and I was already pretty much one-shotting everything with my level 50+ warlock and rogue, so I decided to tackle this arc on my max level monk.

This storyline was… actually okay. A bit rushed, as you would expect from condensing what probably should have been an entire expansion’s story into a single patch, but compared to how they bungled Nazjatar, it’s miles better.

Ny’alotha is something I was actually kind of hoping we never saw in the game. It was teased for so long that my imagination ran wild, and I did not think WoW was technologically or stylistically capable of delivering the kind of surreal horror I was picturing.

I won’t say I was entirely wrong about that, but they came closer to doing it justice than I thought they would. The visual design of the raid is pretty imposing and bizarre, and the concept of it being some dream-state otherworld rather than an actual physical city was pretty cool, if not particularly well represented by the gameplay.

So the beginning and ending of the expansion had their moments, but that doesn’t change the fact that on balance the story of Battle for Azeroth is one of the worst in the game’s history. Like Burning Crusade, it’s not just dumb on its own but also completely ruined great characters and did severe, lasting damage to the lore.

Playing through BfA further my conviction that Shadowlands’ story is over-hated. Shadowlands definitely had its share of moments where I rolled my eyes or scratched my head, but never did it feel anywhere near as painful as BfA did.

My overall impression of BfA is that it was the product of a totally directionless team. It’s like four or five different expansion concepts all blended together, and at least two or three of those were actually good concepts, but combining them together prevents any of them from being done justice. Everything is processed together into a flavourless grey mush.

This is what makes me madder than anything — when a really bad story could have been really good. I can imagine an expansion that starts with renewed faction hostilities but quickly pivots into the characters realizing none of this makes sense and discovering N’zoth has pitted them against each other. As the investigation progresses, it leads them to a most unlikely source of aid: Azshara.

In BfA, Azshara having a plan to betray and kill N’zoth after she fulfills her bargain to release him is barely a footnote, but properly fleshed out, it could have been an incredible climax to an N’zoth expansion. Then once the player is forced to work with Azshara to defeat the Old God, she inevitably turns on us, leading into another expansion with her as the Big Bad.

That could have been a great story. Instead, all the potential of those characters goes to waste.

In game design, I try not to pin too much responsibility on any one person, for good or ill, but it’s hard not to see BfA’s scattered nature as a result of this being the first expansion fully made after Metzen’s departure. BfA feels what happens when a leaderless team throws everything at the wall in the hope something sticks.

If there’s one silver lining here — other than Zandalar actually being pretty cool — it’s that it gave me a renewed appreciation for how much better The War Within is.

Song of the Month: Bear McCreary, Wander My Friends

I don’t recall what reminded me of it, but I was thinking about the Ron Moore Battlestar Galactica reboot recently. It’s a show I have pretty mixed feelings on these days. I was a massive fan of it through much of its run, but it really fell flat on its face in the final season, and I don’t think I have as much appetite for the kind of cynicism it embodies these days (though I will say it still did grimdark much better than most — the trick is that the protagonists still have to be good people deep down, even if they’re incredibly flawed).

One thing about the show that does remain absolutely unimpeachable, however, is Bear McCreary’s superlative soundtrack. And while there are numerous songs from throughout its run that are worthy of high praise, I think Wander My Friends stands out as the most memorable.

This has to be one of the most beautiful bittersweet funeral dirges ever written, and it’s from a show about horny robots.

Fan Fiction: Out of Time and Out of Place

The list of creative projects I want to get around to is staggeringly long. The list of creative projects I actually get around to finishing is… uh… let’s not go there.

But once in a blue moon I do get a flash of inspiration and actually make something. Today, it’s one of my rare forays into fan fiction. I’ve been wanting to explore the character of my monk from World of Warcraft for a while, and I put together this little slice of life piece for that purpose.

——————————

Out of Time and Out of Place

Dawn broke over Dornogal, and Nisa Oakfist began her day.

First came breakfast. The Earthen who ran the inn didn’t know how to cook food for more fleshly creatures, so a helpful Pandaren had set up shop to fill the gap. He served Nissa a bowl of steaming hot noodles in a sweet sauce.

It was delicious, and she enjoyed it not at all. It was too strange, too different. It tasted nothing like the noodles she had eaten as a child, in a small town she was fairly sure no other living being even remembered the name of.

Then she headed into the city. She wore only simple pants, sandals, a beaded necklace, and a cloth wrapping around her breasts, leaving most of her pale violet skin and the crimson tattoos upon it exposed. Her long ears poked out from the hair – a deeper violet than her skin – that she kept cut at shoulder length. The night’s chill was fading, and the sun was just barely peaking over the tops of the great towers erected by the Earthen.

The light stung her eyes, and its heat weighed oppressively against her skin. She felt tired; this was no hour for a Night Elf to be waking. The rising of the sun should mean a time for sleep, for rest.

This was just one of many discomforts she had learned to endure as she increasingly found herself working with members of other races, who mostly worked by day and slept by night. The “Alliance,” the “Horde” – she had scars older than both factions combined, but somehow the entire world was now shaped by their actions.

Already the city was buzzing with activity. As the hunt for Xal’atath had come here, to Khaz Algar, the peoples of the world had descended upon this once isolated place, and now representatives of virtually every known race walked the stone terraces.

Nisa looked upon them and found mostly alien faces staring back at her. There was a human, their face lined with age yet their entire species younger than Nisa. There was an Orc, a creature from another world now marooned on Azeroth. There was a Blood Elf, their visage so like Nisa’s own and yet so different. She spotted a Troll, and was almost comforted. Though their people and hers had been bitter enemies for eons, at least there was a people who had existed when Nisa had been born, though she reminded herself this particular Troll was still twelve thousand years her junior.

It was lonely. The world had become so strange she could hardly reconcile it with the world of her youth.

She passed the native Earthen, as well, and they at least were as old as her, or perhaps even older, though most of them had lost their memories of anything from more than a few thousand years ago. Perhaps she had even fought alongside some of them in the War of the Ancients, though she had yet to recognize any familiar faces here in Dornogal.

Still, she struggled to feel any kinship with them, even if they were more familiar than most people she encountered. Their ways were simply too different, driven by rigid edicts handed down by the Titans in an age long past. Their ways were of stone and steel, not shadow and leaf.

Even when she encountered her own people, Nisa often struggled to relate these days. Those who were old enough to remember life from before the Sundering had scattered origins from across the old empire. Each remembered the old world, but a different slice of it. Most of them were islands, alone in a changed world. Nisa had no surviving family, and the last of her comrades from the War of the Ancients had died at the gates of Ahn’Qiraj a thousand years ago.

She made her way quickly across the city, arriving at the grand courtyard of the Contender’s Gate. There had been a lull in the fighting since the battle in Hallowfall where the Dark Heart had been shattered, but everyone knew that was a temporary state of affairs, and Nisa knew that better than most. As she had for the last ten thousand years, she filled the time between battles by preparing for the next one.

She found a target dummy, a crude figure of wood adorned with a beat-up old metal breastplate, and she settled into a fighting stance.

She had learned some new techniques during her time in Pandaria, but by and large she had practiced the same way for ten millennia. She had not earned her last name idly; unarmed fighting was her specialty.

She warmed up by slowly moving through some fighting postures. She kept her breathing slow and steady, and her face calm. To the outside observer, she would have seemed the picture of serenity.

Then, she began to strike. Her fists and kicks rang off the dummy’s breastplate like the beat of a drum, harsh and steady. She felt no pain, even as the metal shivered under her blows. Her body had been hardened by centuries of such practice.

The hated sun rose higher in the sky. Her eyes watered, and sweat shone upon her skin.

Others arrived in the court and began their own training. A pair of humans clashed with their swords, and Nisa remembered watching one of her fellow Sentinels die at the point of a human blade just a few decades ago. An Orc strung her bow, and Nisa remembered seeing her favourite meditation glade torn down by Warsong axes. A Goblin conjured flame from his hands, and Nisa remembered the fires that had rained from the sky.

She pushed herself harder in the hopes exhausting her body would empty her mind, but so rote was the routine that her mind began to wander, to remember, and twelve thousand years of memories rose up to swallow her.

The gardens of Zin’Azshari where she’d had her first kiss – consumed in emerald flame. The moonlit fields where she’d learned to ride her first nightsaber – drowned beneath the Great Sea. The glades of Felwood where she and her sisters had spent long centuries training for the Legion’s return – poisoned beyond recognition. Zarissa’s face – wracked with pain as the Qiraji cut her down.

Everyone she had ever loved, gone. The world she had known, gone. Forced to live under this burning sun for the comfort of child races who played with the flame of magics her people had mastered and then rejected millennia before. Twelve thousands years of loss and grief and pain and rage that had left her an alien in her own world, surrounded by people she could never possibly understand.

For a moment, it was too much. For just one single moment, she lost control.

Her wordless shout rang off the walls of the Contender’s Gate, and she struck the dummy with her full force. Its wooden frame shattered into splinters, its steel breastplate crumpling like paper. What was left of the dummy crashed into the wall behind it with thunderous force, kicking up a small cloud of dust.

All eyes turned to her. She lowered her hands, breathing heavily. Her lungs burned. Her fists still felt no pain.

The other adventurers gradually got back to their training. Once it became clear Nisa wasn’t going to break anything else, a few of the Earthen who maintained this part of Dornogal got to work removing the dummy’s wreckage and assembling a new one, their movements rote and mechanical.

The Earthen were perhaps not so different from her after all, she realized. Both of them bound to ancient duties. That was what kept her going. Not altruism, not heroism. Simply habit.

It was not that she no longer believed there were things in the world worth fighting for. She did, mostly. There were still moments, when the moon was high and the cold wind of night kissed her face, that her heart swelled with love for the beauty of all that Elune had wrought.

But that wasn’t really what kept her fighting these days. It was simply that being a soldier was who she was – what she was. It was the one constant, the only thing thing that the march of time had not been able to steal from her.

Just like the Earthen, she was a relic of a lost age, out of time and out of place, with only her duty to guide her. This was her edict: to stand watch, to be a Sentinel.

She moved to another dummy, settled into a fighting stance, and began once more to train.

Age of Mythology: Retold Continues to Disappoint

I’ve had a lot of criticism for Age of Mythology: Retold so far, especially around lack of content, so a lot was riding on the recent Immortal Pillars DLC, which reintroduces the Chinese. Completely redone from their first incarnation in Tale of the Dragon with a new campaign to boot, this is all entirely new content.

The campaign is a bit mediocre. It’s fairly short at nine missions, and three of those are “dungeon crawl” style missions with little to no economy, which never works very well in this style of RTS.

As with the rest of Retold to date, the voice acting is pretty dire, and the writing isn’t very good, either. The villain has a pretty sympathetic motivation, but then they have him randomly murdering innocent people wherever he goes for no reason whatsoever.

The mission design is a bit of a mixed bag, too. The early missions feel pretty basic, and while the later ones are a lot more enjoyable, I still find myself thinking that more mechanical creativity should be possible given the near limitless possibilities offered by the mythological source material. StarCraft II really raised the bar for RTS mission design, and no one else has even come close to equaling it.

The Chinese civilization itself, though, is excellent. The art design of everything from buildings to god portraits is simply gorgeous, and their mechanics hit the right balance of feeling fresh without making you feel like you need to fully relearn the game.

The Chinese have a very strong emphasis on defensive play and turtle strategies, which have always been my preference in RTS games, so they fit me like a glove. Despite my love of Norse mythology, the Chinese may be my new favourite civilization in this game, and I ended up having a pretty good time with the campaign despite its other shortcomings purely on the strength of the Chinese civilization.

Overall, the DLC has rough edges, but it still offers a lot of fun.

So why is that headline above so negative? Because I literally can’t play it.

Things were fine for the first half of the campaign, but then the game started experiencing random crashes to desktop. A lot of random crashes.

There doesn’t seem to be any pattern to when a crash occurs. Sometimes I can go almost twenty minutes without one, sometimes they happen every thirty seconds. I’ve found they also happen in skirmishes as well as the campaign. I tried updating my graphics drivers and reinstalling the game, and neither helped.

I tried brute-forcing my way through with constant quick saves, but after a while it just got too frustrating needing to restart the game every minute or two. I’m about halfway through the second last campaign mission, and I’ve thrown in the towel. The game is unplayable while this persists.

I tried looking online, but reports of similar issues are few and far between, and no one seems to have found a solution. Given the apparent rarity of the issue, I’m not hopeful for a fix any time soon.

Between this, the abysmal voice acting, the maybe AI beta god portraits debacle, and the incredibly poor state of Arena of the Gods, I’m just stunned by the lack of quality control in AoM: Retold. The Age of X franchise is usually one you can depend on for consistent quality. I don’t know what went so wrong this time.

It’s so frustrating because Immortal Pillars did seem like it was a step in the right direction, right up until the crashes started.

Song of the Month: Aurora, A Dangerous Thing

Been on an Aurora kick lately.

Gaming Round-Up: Darkness, Descendants, Delves, and Other Alliterative Things

Once again it’s time for a ramble on games I’ve been playing lately.

Age of Darkness: Final Stand

I bought this on sale during the Steam strategy fest a few weeks ago. Not gonna lie, I was a bit disappointed.

This is one of those cases where there’s no single glaring flaw with the game, but a lot of smaller issues piling up. My biggest complaint is that it just felt too slow. I always felt starved for resources, and there was nothing I could do but wait for them to slowly tick up.

The campaign also wasn’t quite there. I don’t expect a game called Age of Darkness to be a happy story, but it wasn’t the flavour of grimdark I was hoping for. I was expecting some desperate final stand against the forces of evil in the vein of Myth: The Fallen Lords, but it was more of a Game of Thrones style “everyone is horrible” story mostly about humans screwing each other over. The characters I found most sympathetic were the anarchists who just want to destroy everything.

There were also far too many “dungeon crawl” style missions and too few focused on the epic scale wave defense that’s supposed to be the game’s key selling feature. Maybe I should have tried the survival mode before I put it down.

World of Warcraft

Yeah, I’m back in WoW. I haven’t quite gotten fully sucked back into it the way I usually do, though.

Mostly it’s that there hasn’t been that much new stuff added since I last played. Siren’s Isle is another entry in WoW’s long tradition of tedious, overly grindy island zones, and I dropped it pretty fast once I’d unlocked the one or two cosmetics I wanted. If I cared about gearing up, I guess I could take more of my characters through it to unlock the fancy ring.

If.

I’ve been finding other diversions here and there. Surprisingly my demon hunter is rapidly becoming my main du jour. Despite it having almost no meaningful impact on how I play, I find the Fel-Scarred hero talent tree has done a lot to make Havoc more enjoyable to me. All those big explosions make demon form feel a lot more meaningful.

I got her geared up enough that I was able to take down the basic version of Zek’vir without too much difficulty. I’m debating whether I want to try to do the harder version of him as well. Be nice to have the bragging rights, but… eh…

I did have a surprising amount of fun playing Plunderstorm. Which is to say more than zero. It’s actually a pretty fun PvE mode until you run into another player. Looking for treasure chests, fighting elites. Good times.

The conversion to full action combat within WoW’s engine is an interesting experiment, if a bit janky. I doubt we’ll ever see tab target abandoned in the main game, but it did leave me wishing for more mobs with avoidable attacks that aren’t just patches of fire on the floor.

Ultimately my interest in Plunderstorm didn’t last past unlocking the cosmetics I wanted from it, but it wasn’t the chore I thought it’d be, so I’ll call that a win.

My next big project in the game is to finish catching up by begrudgingly dragging myself through the Battle for Azeroth story. I decided to do the most obvious thing possible by playing a Kul Tiran Outlaw rogue. I also have a Troll warlock lined up to do the Horde side at some point.

I’ve only just made it to Drustvar, and I’ll have more detailed thoughts on BfA once I finish it, but so far it’s… fine? It’s barely had anything to do with the faction war so far, which is weird since that’s supposed to the be the whole theme of the expansion, but I’m not complaining. Learning about Kul Tiran culture has been interesting, if not riveting, and the visual design of the zones is unsurprisingly excellent. It’s not a thrillride, but it could be worse.

The First Descendant

With WoW not grabbing me much as I expected, I’m still playing The First Descendant. I continue to feel as if I’m about to lose interest, as I have pretty much since I started.

I began maining Valby, then switched to Sharen once I unlocked her, and now I’m bouncing around. I was very excited to unlock Ines, and I do think her mechanics are great fun, but she’s so unbelievably broken it can be a boring playing her at times.

It’s hard to talk about balance in TFD because gamers are so prone to hyperbole when it comes to these things. I struggle to find the words to communicate that when I say broken, I really mean it. I have never played a game where the balance was even remotely close to as bad as it is here. Ines isn’t a character; she’s a cheat code.

So I do often find myself turning to slightly less godly characters. Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Hailey. It’s a bit surprising as she’s more focused on guns than abilities, which is the opposite of how I usually like to play, but I don’t know, big gun go brrr, and I like her style.

I also unlocked Kyle the other day, and he’s been surprisingly fun. Real great tanky brawler charging around smashing everything. Pretty underpowered as most male descendants are, but at least he’s not as bad as Blair (whom I also love but who just plain sucks). May have to put some more time into Kyle going forward. Wanna give Noise Surge Luna a try, too.

The First Descendant is such a weird game. It manages to be so fun while being so bad in almost every way. I never understood those “5,000 hours played, do not recommend” Steam reviews until I played this one. I get it now.

I’m particularly fascinated by the story. It’s not good; it’s atrociously bad in fact. But it does hold this sort of train wreck allure.

The thing is, it’s not half-assed. They very much whole-assed this story. It’s quite high effort, and some of the plot twists later are on genuinely interesting in theory, but still the end product is just… terrible. It’s just too laden with ridiculous techno-babble, poorly translated nonsense, and jarring tonal dissonance.

The weirdest thing about The First Descendant’s story is how desperately serious and utterly angsty it is, despite how ridiculous literally every other part of the game is. You can make a game that’s all about broken people fighting to overcome their trauma in a world torn apart by war, or you can make a game where one of the main characters is a giggly half-naked girl whose actual legal name is somehow “Bunny Voltia,” but you can’t do both. Not effectively.

The voice acting is equally all over the map. Some actors are playing it entirely straight and actually managing to do a pretty decent job considering. The Guide and Yujin come to mind.

Some of them recognize how ridiculous the material is and have leaned into the cheese. Luna is a good example of this, and I genuinely love her character because her actress seems to be having so much fun with it.

And some of them recognize how ridiculous the material is and clearly just gave up. Sharen and Freyna are the worst offenders here. Can’t say I blame them. I wouldn’t bring my A-game either if I were asked to read some angsty diatribe about how even the trees despise me. I assume that made sense in the original Korean, but it sure doesn’t in English.

Anyway, I guess for now I’m still sucking down the brain rot.

The Revolution Will Not Be Interesting

I’m making some changes to my online presence. I will no longer be using Facebook, and I’ve started an account on Bluesky.

This was originally just going to be a bookkeeping post about my social media, but it’s really about much more than that, so let’s dig in.

Nearly a decade old, this photo is unfortunately still relevant.

I’ve never really been entirely comfortable with social media or big tech. I dislike the way it steers us all towards shallow soundbites instead of deeper discussions (hence why I have a blog and not an Instagram account), and I’ve never really been comfortable with these faceless corporations harvesting my personal data.

I’ve tried to mitigate the risks. I use Firefox and NoScript to block as much tracking as possible, and I save everything locally, nothing in the cloud. Still, big tech has done a superb job of boiling our collective frogs, and while I resisted the siren call better than most people I know, I have by no means been immune. I spend far too much time doomscrolling reddit, and I got very used to the convenience of having updates from all my favourite games, musicians, and meme pages in my Facebook feed.

But seeing the way the leaders of American big tech have been cozying up to the tangerine bastard who’s currently threatening to annex my country has been a wake-up call.

It’s probably a damning statement about me that it’s only when they started threatening me and my people that I really started to care. I know Facebook’s been toxic for years. I should have left when it helped facilitate genocide in Myanmar. But I was comfortable in my rut, and I didn’t want to change.

And that’s true of all us, isn’t it? We know we’re making unethical choices, but it’s just easier to turn a blind eye to the problem.

One thing that shocks me is how blasé everyone is about China these days. We know they’re committing genocide. We know they’ve built literal concentration camps where families are being torn apart and innocent people are being tortured or worse every day. And no one seems to care.

I get that our economies are so dependent on China that boycotting them entirely isn’t practical for the average person. I know most if not all of my electronics were made there; I’d take another option if I could, but I can’t.

But the fact no one’s even trying, no one’s even talking about trying, is just not something I can’t understand. You can’t always avoid buying Chinese products, but no one needs to play Genshin Impact. No one needs to watch cat videos on Tiktok. We could do more.

I get that life is hard and we need our little escapes. I get that we can’t always avoid supporting unethical nations or corporations. I think this is why I increasingly see leftists fantasizing about a violent overthrow of the ruling class. It’s way easier to imagine everything being magically fixed in one bloody night than it is to examine your own behaviour.

But just rolling out the guillotines is unlikely to fix anything in the long term. Killing off the ruling class is just going to create a power vacuum that will likely be filled by something just as bad.

That’s not to say the 1% don’t deserve a whole hell of a lot of blame for all that’s wrong in the world, and something definitely does need to be done about about them, but it probably looks more like tax increases, breaking up monopolies, and other dull regulatory changes than some heroic scene of freedom fighters waving flags in the town square.

What’s really going to make the difference is protesting and striking — consistently, not just once. It’s getting involved in all levels of government to steer policy. It’s making more ethical consumer choices. It’s hard, and it’s slow, and worst of all, it’s boring. But that’s what will actually make lasting, positive change.

The revolution will not be interesting.

One person making small changes won’t do much, but millions of people making small changes would add up to a big change. We just need to be willing to push ourselves a little.

We don’t need to abandon all modern convenience and go back to the Dark Ages, but we do need to start acknowledging our current way of life isn’t sustainable. Yes, you do need to use paper straws instead of plastic. Yes, you do need to stop uploading your entire life into the cloud for billionaire tech CEOs to pick over at their leisure. Yes, you do need to drive less, fly less, and eat less meat.

Which brings me back to shaking up my social media. I wish I could abandon the whole mess entirely, but it’s hard to live without in this day and age, especially for someone like me whose disability severely limits my capacity for face-to-face interaction.

Facebook is gone from my life, and I’m avoiding Google where I can. I’ve switched to using a mix of DuckDuckGo and Brave for my searches. YouTube is difficult to live without, but I installed an ad blocker to hopefully not contribute to its bottom line, and I avoid logging in as much as possible to prevent their algorithm forming an accurate picture of me. I never engaged with Amazon much outside of New World, and while I’m not sure I’ll abandon it entirely (for professional reasons if nothing else), the current state of the game has me hardly playing anyway.

(And yes, I know much of the Internet runs on Amazon services nowadays, so you’re still kind of using their stuff even when you’re not. We do what we can.)

reddit still seems to be confining itself to everyday villainy rather than cartoonish super villainy, and Bluesky doesn’t seem to be up to any particularly scary shenanigans that I know of, but I’ll keep a close eye on both. I’m also giving serious thought to abandoning my Yahoo and Google emails for a European provider. I’ll continue to look for ways to extricate myself from big tech, especially American big tech, and try to hold myself to a higher standard of accountability.

The point is that there are a lot of situations in our society where making an ethical choice isn’t possible. But there are also a lot of situations where it is possible and just takes a little more effort, and that’s what I’m trying to do. If I can buy Canadian instead of Chinese or American or Israeli, I will. If I can support one company with more ethical practices over another without, I will.

It may not be as fun as throwing up a picture of Mario’s brother on social media, but it’s a lot more likely to make a difference. The oligarchs of the world want you to think there’s nothing you can do. They don’t mind that you hate them; they want you to blame all your problems on them so you keep buying their products and using their services, telling yourself all the while there’s no other option.

But we do have the power to change things, and we can do it right now, not in some glorious revolt that is forever on the horizon. We just need to be willing to make the hard, boring choice to do the right thing where we can.

The revolution will not be interesting.