Mass Effect 3

Despite a three month hiatus in the middle of my playthough, I went back and finished Mass Effect 3. Awesome game.

The Trilogy

I've played all three games in the trilogy, although each of them was at least 5 years late. There were some truly great moments and I'm looking forward to Mass Effect Andromeda in a few years when I get around to it.

Overall, Mass Effect is great story telling. It is epic and engaging. The writing is generally excellent. The graphics are surprisingly good, especially in cutscenes.

Memorable Moments

Three moments stick out for me from the trilogy.

Samara and Morinth

In Mass Effect 2 you recruit an Asari justicar named Samara. At some point you accept a mission to help her track down and kill her evil daughter, Morinth. Well, I hadn't really clicked with Samara. She hadn't been on my crew for very long and I didn't fully get along with her. She was a little bit too goody-goody for me. When we went to hunt down her daughter there was a moment when Morinth tempted me with power and excitement. For just a split second I was tempted and helped her kill Samara. I immediately regretted the decision and almost loaded a save game. Instead I decided to live with the consequences. That's part of the game, right? 

Tali and the Geth

In Mass Effect 3 you sort of have to choose between saving the Quarians and the Geth. I was feeling ballsy and tried to save both. Tali tried to order the Quarian fleet to stand down, but generations of hatred wouldn't let them and their whole race was exterminated. Overcome by unbearable sadness, Tali takes her own life. I tried to stop her, but I was too involved in the cutscene and didn't notice the "save Tali" button until it was too late. I don't feel too much guilt for the Quarians -- I was asked to choose between two races and one of them wanted to cooperate. However being too slow to save Tali made me sad (even though I later read that she might have been impossible to save even if I was faster).

Activating the Crucible

The ending of Mass Effect 3 received a lot of criticism for various reasons. I liked it pretty well. My only complaint was not enough exposition. I wanted to explore the ramifications of the choices more deeply. But that's a big trait of Commander Shepard. He makes big decisions with little knowledge and he is usually right. The game sometimes uses that style to trick the player into morally ambiguous decisions.

I decided not to activate the crucible, dooming the galaxy to another cycle of Reapers. Killing the Reapers meant killing all synthetic life, and some people with synthetic parts. I already had some guilt at exterminating the Quarians in favor of the Geth, and I didn't want to willfully genocide that race as well. I had some attachment to EDI, who ran the last mission with me. Also, I feared for Miranda with her implants. Even in the best cast scenario, the Krogan would likely conquer the galaxy since I had cured the genophage. Additionally, the Catalyst said he was there to solve the problem of synthetic life vs organic life. Eventually the galaxy would create more synthetic life and would be back to the problems that the Protheans initially faced. By activating the crucible I might be setting the galaxy back thousands of years, would likely be dooming the galaxy to enslavement by the Krogan, and would certainly be genociding the Geth and dooming EDI and other friends.

I had the option to control the Reapers. I should have chose this, but I was tired. Not only was it 3am in real life, but Shepard had just finished being blown up, knocked out, and shot. There was ten minutes of Shepard being barely alive and it felt like a relief when he and his buddy let go of life at the end. When the radio woke Shepard up, I felt his pain. He did his duty and wanted to rest. So when the Catalyst said that Shepard's body would die but his mind would change and live eternally, it sounded like torture. It seemed very likely that Shepard would eventually take over the Catalyst's task of wiping out the galaxy every so often. I just didn't want to live in that Hell. I'd rather the current Catalyst keep his job than be the one to slaughter everybody every few hundred years.

So I decided to continue the cycle. Everything Shepard achieved was for nothing. Everybody's sacrifices wasted. Kind of sucks. But every cycle grew closer to completing the crucible and stopping the Reapers. Maybe next cycle there would be another Shepard who could find a better choice. For example, I wasn't offered the choice of synthesis. Maybe next cycle a better Shepard will achieve it. Liara's message to the future left me with some hope.

Controls

I'm a PC gamer and generally hate games where you can feel the console in the controls. Mass Effect is no exception. The controls is the worst part of the game. I've played it on console and hate it more. The only way to make it work is to have completely different control systems. Don't even try to reuse elements. Even things like the radial menus on the PC are annoying. 

Combat in The Division has a similar feel but is much cleaner. Fallout 4 also does a decent job with combat despite some annoying controls in the rest of the UI.

Combat

Combats were mediocre. They were a great tool for the story telling, but weren't great by themselves. I played long range sniper and combat rifle. Fighting from cover was reasonably fun but anything that involved running around was too chaotic. Battlefields were cluttered so I couldn't retreat backwards while firing very effectively. When getting swarmed I had to turn and run, which was generally too effective for getting away, and then too awkward at getting set up behind cover. The Division did a much better job at fighting from cover, although it doesn't really do melee.

The squad combat is still pretty mediocre. Not sure what the solution is. I appreciate that the player needs to be the hero in a very visceral first-person way, but the two buddies don't quite do it for me. They don't seem very effective and yet I don't want to micro manage them and I don't want them to out-shine me. It felt better in Mass Effect 2 for some reason. I mean it almost worked, but not quite. I want Garrus and Ash to provide distracting fire while I flank. I want Ash and James to protect my flank while I snipe. I want Liara to pull entrenched targets into the air. I want EDI's decoys to save the day when we get overrun and to draw out the enemy when they are hard to hit. They already do this to some extent, but not enough.

Diablo 3 Season 11 -- Monk

I've done a few of the Diablo seasonal achievements. It reinvigorated life into the game and the extra tabs are nice.

Why Do Seasonal?

I've done the story at least 3 times and spent countless hours doing endgame rifts and such. With seasonal you start from scratch so it's a new challenge. It lets you really see the unique styles of a new character.

Monk

Normally I avoid the monk in fantasy games. I don't like the fiction of an unarmed guy punching his way against foes wearing plate mail. I find the physical manifestation of focused willpower to be unconvincing. True, I'm already accepting magic and elves and the power of gods, so a little chi isn't too extraordinary, it just isn't my thing. 

So why play a monk? Mostly because I have played all of the other classes. I thought I would hate the Demon Hunter but I loved it. Maybe monk would be the same.

Nope. I didn't like it. Maybe it was the set I used. Maybe it was the low damage before you hit extreme endgame. It just didn't work for me. The dodgy nature of the monk meant jumping into every fight and hoping that your incredible evasion would save you. And usually it does, but sometimes it doesn't. I died a whole lot.

There are good think about the monk. The set I played, Raiment, really felt like a monk. I zipped around the battlefield punching things to death. There would be moments of power and moments of defense. Sometimes I could coincide everything and unleash devastation on a boss while completely immune. Of all the classes, the monk felt the most iconic. The end game barbarian feels like a squishy wizard who casts spells and avoids combat. Conversely, the firebird wizard feels like a barbarian who is most comfortable when surrounded by enemies in melee range. 

I would have played necromancer but I had just gotten one leveled up and really didn't want to start another.

Community

The online community is pretty great. I don't actually want much of that in my Diablo, but all of my interactions have been positive. I got someone to power level me, saving me hours of grinding. It's easy to find groups to do rifts, bounties, or whatever else you need. I found someone to help me with three of the conquests with almost no searching.

Diablo In My Future

I'm not going to play this season any more. One of my buddies wants to use this character for open play so I'll wait for the season to end before we start up again. Then I'll bring my necromancer back and see how far we can get in the open environment.

Blizzard says that won't be announcing Diablo 4 at Blizzcon, so I bet there is a lot of time to keep playing D3.

Gencon 2017

I had never been to Gencon. I've been close once or twice, but lately conventions don't have so much appeal. I attend BGGCon every year, but that's largely to see old friends. This was the 50th anniversary and was expected to be big.

Games

I sampled a few board games but mostly I was there for RPGs. A few games were memorable.

Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Adventurer's League

The big thing I did was D&D for 4 4-hour sessions. It was 5th edition which I hadn't played much of and it was Adventurer's League which I knew nothing about. Still, I ended up being the party leader and had a pretty good time. I'm lukewarm about Adventurer's League. The idea is that characters are built and progress in a fairly strict fashion so that characters of a given level are balanced. I suppose that's fine, but honestly if I am playing with strangers anyway I don't mind a pre-generated one-shot disposable character. I get enough long-term campaign play with friends.

So why play D&D at a con if I play at home? Good question. I guess it was to inject new ideas into my universe. I also wanted to try out 5th edition a little bit more, and I actually liked it. Not as crunchy as 3rd edition but more consistent than 1st and 2nd edition. 

Starfinder

Paizo put out a game just like Pathfinder but in space. It's really pretty amazing how much it resembles Pathfinder. 1st level Technomancers cast Magic Missile, and such. They were running 1-hour demos. I played 3 of the 5 so got a feel for the system. They added space combat which looks interesting, except I'm not convinced it will be worth the complication of the rules if every turn just involves turning to face the enemy and firing. Since I'm currently playing 3 space RPGs, I don't see picking this up any time soon.

Dominion

I've played a lot of Dominion in my life and still play some on dominion.games. I checked out Empires. Seems like a good expansion.

True Dungeon

There is an event which is like an hour of D&D but you move from room to room with prop and actors. Combat is handled by doing well playing shuffleboard and spells are cast by memorizing things. There are also puzzles, much like a lite escape room. I got into a very experienced group and we didn't have any difficulty beating the dungeon.

While I am glad I experienced it and might do it again, I'm not too excited about it. The props and acting were good enough but not mind blowing. Shuffleboard was fun but I can play shuffleboard much cheaper at the sports bar. It did make me consider perhaps using a dart board or something for my own D&D games. 

I was surprised that the operation wasn't smoother. In the waiting room, the guy who was supposed to explain things almost seemed to know nothing. There were multiple groups running simultaneously and there was a lot of noise. I couldn't hear the actors give their short speeches. Perhaps I'm a puzzle snob, but the puzzles weren't especially well done. The props were excellent but sparse. Still, it was a pretty unique experience.

They Might Be Giants

I'm a fan so seeing then was a no-brainer. Pretty amused how many times they talked about being in Indianapolis and got no response. I think eventually they figured out that everybody there was from out of town. They made it sound like they had never played such a large crowd, so good for them. I saw them a few years ago at a pretty small venue.

Cosplay

I love me some cosplay and Gencon did not disappoint. Favorites:

• Overwatch! Just about everyone was represented. D.VA and Soldier 76 were most common with quite a bit of Reaper and Tracer. There was an awesome Winston.
• 3 lady Yondo's, Starlord's blue adopted father. All had babies who, I assume, are Starlord.
• King Arthur, Sir Bedivere, Tim the Enchanter, and Patsy banging coconuts together
• A guy who looked like Stan Lee with an name tag that said, "not Stan Lee"

I'm forgetting a ton.

Larry Elmore

He's a fantasy artist who has been around forever. I always like his work and he was selling prints. It was neat to meet a guy who had such an influence on my life.

Final Fantasy Record Keeper

Final Fantasy Record Keeper

I don't play a ton of iPhone games. Sure, I've spent thousands of hours on hundreds of games, but mostly that was the past. Lately I have enough free time to sit at my desktop to play "real games". When I'm out and need to be entertained by my phone, I'm more likely to catch up on news or something.

Puzzles and Dragons

FFRK is quite similar to Puzzles and Dragons, which I played for a bit. In the end I quit Puzzles and Dragons because I didn't like the puzzling part. FFRK uses the typical Final Fantasy tactical combat, which isn't especially deep but doesn't bother me too much.

Too Much Initial Grinding

I haven't totally given up on FFRK because I feel like I haven't given it a real chance. The problem is the initial grind. I've done over 100 dungeons and they are almost always too easy. I hit "autoplay" and wait for the boss encounter. For the boss I use the friend Soul Break to kill the boss. No decisions or anything. Just an annoying process. 

The boards talk about interesting strategies and tough encounters. I'm sure that's true but I might not have the patience to get there. You are pretty much forced to clear the initial dungeons to improve your max stamina and pick up magicka. But clearing hundreds of dungeons on auto-play isn't fun.

Even worse, it takes a fair amount of attention even to do the auto-play. There are a lot of loading screens and a lot of "push to continue" buttons. Worst of all, there is a "start" button followed by a long load followed by combat. However combat isn't paused and doesn't default to auto-play, so if you put the phone down for 45 seconds you might end up dead. If they simply paused combat before it started I would be able to grind these dungeons while doing something else. Instead I have to spend 10 seconds staring at a loading screen before each encounter. Multiply this by 3 encounters per dungeon and 500 dungeons and that 15000 seconds staring at a load screen. That's over 4 hours staring at a load screen.

Recommendations

Because the grind is so bad I don't know who to recommend this game to. I suppose a big fan of Final Fantasy would enjoy unlocking all of the characters more than I do. Also, it revisits the stories of all the Final Fantasy games so that might entertain someone who has played more than I have.

World of Warcraft: Legion

Legion

Where Has the Time Gone?

I've been playing so much WoW that I haven't gotten other games off my Steam backlog. I hope to get back to other games, and I left Mass Effect 3 in the middle.

MMORPGS

I've played lots of MMOs. I mean lots. I got the rank of Wizard in a MUD in 1990 and have logged countless hours in so many different MMORPGs. I've played most of the major ones. 

The only one I regret not trying is Ultima Online. Not sure how I missed that given that I had friends who worked on it at Origin. That was a busy time in my life -- I was working 60 hour weeks, had an active social life, and was steeped in Final Fantasy XII. 

Despite all of the time I spend with other MMOs, nothing has stolen my time like World of Warcraft.

WoW

I've played all of the expansions but for some reason I was never there at launch. Even for Vanilla WoW I was months late to the party. The one exception was Warlords of Draenor, which launched while I was working for Blizzard. My account was free, all my coworkers were playing it, and it was common to see everybody log in during lunch hour.

Starting late to the party made me feel like I was always behind and that shaped my perception of the game. Also, the interference of real life made it hard to join a raiding guild. I never did real raiding until Legion. Instead my end-game was focused on casual battleground PvP, where I could log off pretty quickly if the family needed me.

Legion

You can see a definite evolution to WoW with each expansion. Not only is the basic content of instances and raids easily obtainable, the more difficult modes are facilitated with the dungeon finder. I just did a pick-up group for Nighthold, the toughest raid, on Heroic mode with no wipes. 

The leveling process has also become more friendly. There is a central location where some guy will give you quests to know where you should be. The mobs in the different areas scale with your level, so you can go to any place you want. There are a lot of interest plots going on, and some fairly large stories lines (like Suramar). 

Plenty of missions, daily quests, and weekly quests make sure you keep coming back. It's insidious.

The Force Unleashed 2

I'm still going through some of the older Star Wars games I got in a bundle.

Story

The story isn't bad. Good voice acting, great cinematics. There isn't a lot of meat there and it relies on knowing the previous game to really feel it. The events are a little too important to the Star Wars universe for my taste. Darth Vader is an obvious villain and this lets us live out our fantasies of confronting him. I prefer plots that are more subdued.

Gameplay

The gameplay bothered me enough that I set the difficulty on Easy so I could just zip though the story. 

Encounters

Most of the encounters were really fun. There were a variety of threats that required different tactics to beat. Many of the environments were really interesting and added a lot. Sadly, for me by the end of the game I would just do "mind trick, stab" over and over. At least the mechanical mini-bosses were immune and I never found a good trick for beating them.

One complaint is that many of the encounters felt rehashed. Like, "wasn't that a fun encounter? Now do it again!"

Boss Fights

While the boss fights had great cinematic quality, I didn't find them fun. I felt like I was mostly getting knocked down and standing up while trying to figure out how to hurt the boss. There was also a lot of "hold E and left click" which is fine for a while but here it was overdone.

Platforms

I really hate platform jumping puzzles. This game had plenty and with the quirky controls (see below) it was just annoying. I don't mind having to do this sort of thing as part of a larger encounter but jumping platforms by itself isn't fun.

Odds and Ends

The Force Unleashed 2 forces you to do a lot of minor things to keep you engaged while the story is being told. I appreciate that sort of thing, like in Telltale Games. Here it felt a little clunky but not overly annoying. I hope I never have to put another power cell in another door.

Controls

Ugh. The game loses at least half a star for the controls. I'm a PC snob and want the controls for my game to be right for the PC. This game had that clunky console-port feel. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great. Maybe equivalent to Assassin's Creed. Not as good as Fallout 4.

Overall

As a Star Wars fanboy, this was well worth the 7 or 8 hours I put into it on easy mode. 

More Heroes of the Storm

I'm still playing Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch. I've gotten most of the new heroes to level 5. Here are my impressions.

Zarya

Felt lackluster. Maybe her role isn't so great as primary tank and in quick match you don't often get two tanks. I like playing tanks so why waste my time with this one?

Diablo

I already had this guy at level 5, but he is a big part of the meta these days so I'm re-learning him. Fun, beefy, tank.

Alarak

Hated him. Just didn't get a feel for his skillshot. Decided I didn't want to even get him to level 5.

Greymane

This guy was fun and I could see learning him for real. He isn't part of the meta right now, so I'm not keep to put too much more time into it.

Guldan

Feels clunky. I often had top damage but didn't feel like I was doing much. I see his value and I didn't hate him, but I won't be rushing to learn him.

Li-Ming

Fun long range hero with decent damage. I haven't played Chromie yet but I see the appeal of Li-Ming. If I was going to learn a ranged mage, it would be her.

Ragnaros

Holy crap this guy is awesome. Just my style. Combines powerful 1v1 melee with amazing wave clear and some extra map utility. Kerrigan is my favorite melee but this guy offers more.

Tracer

Loads of fun but needs support which you don't get in Quick Match. If I were playing with a team I might consider her, but that isn't likely.

Tychus

I already had this guy at level 9 but I really suck with him. I think his only role in the meta is vs. Cho'Gall or multiple tanks. Had one fun game vs Cho'Gall where I really ate him up.

Samuro

The first no-mana hero that I sort of like. Normally I like my melee assassins to be YOLO and have no escape, but this guy is pretty fun. I had trouble securing the kills but it's nice to be able to bail out of a bad situation.

Auriel

Didn't feel comfortable. Had a hard time generating mana and healing effectively. I'm not so good with most healers and this is no different. Except Uther. I love that guy.

Medivh

Fun and unique play style. I don't think he is so good in quick match, or maybe that's just me.

Sgt. Hammer

I finally got this guy up to level 5. Previous he was avoided because I tend to not like the heroes with no mount. I like to mount up a lot when I play, especially if I'm not a warrior. A mounted assassin can really threaten the back line. With this guy I kept trying to mount and blowing the escape cooldown. Still, fun hero with straight-forward playstile. 

Xul

While I loved playing a necromancer in Diablo 2, this guy didn't cut it for me. Not sure why since I tend to enjoy melee and specialists. The abilities were never comfortable. Maybe if I was going to dedicate a lot of play to him I could make it work, but for now I really enjoy Zagara, Nazeebo, and Gazlowe who all push lanes well. 

Lunara

Getting to level 5 in quick match wasn't so great. Often there was no front line so I just got to play the poking game mostly. Eventually I started to take the leap ability to play around with it. I might like Lunara if I dedicated some time to her.