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mediabasedlife · 4 years ago

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A Look Back At...The Last Generation (2013-2020)

I’d like to start this off by thanking those who encouraged me to write this article, my friends and family who encouraged me to rekindle this project despite my own trepidation. I hope its quality lives up to those lofty expectations.

Say what you will about the hobby, gaming is in many ways the gift that keeps on giving. Every year there are hundreds, if not thousands of new offerings for every brand of player out there. And wouldn't you know it, there's a fairly significant portion of that library that are actually pretty good. Now, people will argue ad infinitum about what games are the best, or what consoles, or even which generation trumps the rest. This diversity of opinion is what has allowed gaming discussion to thrive just as potently as the medium which it encapsulates. Like any opinion, all of this is especially subjective; great games have been coming out pretty much every year since gaming began, a trend that seems like it will continue as long as gaming itself continues to thrive. While some may argue, I would say the latest generation thrived especially well. Ignoring the Wii-U, since I never owned one, and skirting around handhelds, the latest generation spanned the life of the Xbox One, the PlayStation 4, and technically, the Nintendo Switch. And through their seven-year life [switch notwithstanding], we saw the release of some truly excellent games - from top budget AAA titles to humble indie offerings. Now, in 2020, while we as a community are taking our first steps into the new generation of gaming, I think it fair to take pause, gaze back, and remember some of the games that made the latest generation so memorable for so many.

2013

2013 marked the start of the last-gen, with the release of both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. Both consoles were built to shepherd out their predecessors, marking leaps in visual fidelity and infrastructure that would empower them to become the monoliths of gaming that they hoped to be. I won't say that both consoles had an equally vibrant launch, but they both tried to put their best foot forward. While the Xbox was busy desperately trying to become the multimedia center for your living room, Sony kicked off the next generation in style, releasing a whole seven days earlier than its competitor. With the Xbox not far behind, both consoles brought a suite of new, shiny games to play. Well, in theory, anyway. I'm not here to speak of the quality of the launch lineups of either console, but what I can do is list off the game that stood out, and why it made it onto my list.

-Assassin's Creed Black Flag Black Flag actually saw its initial release on the PS3 and Xbox 360 almost a month prior to the soon to be current generation, but with both new consoles came a second release, one that came equipped with all the bells and whistles you'd expect from what was then a next-gen game. It doesn't look good for my list to start things off on a technicality, but this game is worth it. Black Flag remains one of my top three Assassin's Creed Games, which is saying a lot considering the sheer scale of the franchise. Fresh off the love it or hate it Assassin's Creed III, Black Flag looked to take a revitalized approach to the franchise formula, playing off of fan feedback, expanding upon what fans loved from AC3, and adding in new activities and a broader, fresher open world to explore. In it, you play as Edward Kenway, a charming rogue of a pirate who kicks the game off by stealing the identity of a defected Assassin. Expecting nothing more than riches and glory, his masquerade instead goes quickly sour, thrusting Edward into the conspiracy filled, secretive world of the Assassin and Templar conflict. What makes this story stand out is how different Edward was as a protagonist, seeing him acting largely indifferent to the traditional formula the assassin's creed games had followed thus far. The game's setting also helped it immensely; the game plays more like a pirate simulator, seeing players sail the Caribbean searching out treasures and fame, gathering a sturdy ship and a hearty crew, engaging in thrilling naval battles, and basking in the warm glow of the sun-drenched sands that define the game's many islands. Along the way, you interact with a bevy of historical or mythical figures, such as Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Calico Jack, and many more. All of this came together to create an immensely satisfying game, a standout amidst its peers and predecessors, and an experience that still stands the test of time despite the numerous sequels it has received.

2014

2014 was the year the new generation really started to pick up. The consoles had begun to get their footing, truly ushering in the next wave of quality games and proving their value to the players. Several critically acclaimed games got their start here or saw revitalized releases on the current generation of consoles. However, there were a few strays, games that elected to release on the prior consoles first and foremost, games that wouldn't see new-gen ports for some time, and others that never did, but still merited recognition and praise. But how many will make it onto my list? Well, you'll just have to read on.

-Titanfall Titanfall was, for me, the first game on the Xbox One that truly cemented it as a worthy purchase. It was a melting pot of ideas and innovation that I immediately fell in love with. Built with an always-online principle, Titanfall sees players engaging in a pseudo-campaign of multiple, looping competitive matches. On the surface, you could easily glance Titanfall's way and see nothing remarkable. Another first-person shooter in a sea of competitors, all of whom had far more clout at the time. But what set Titanfall apart from the start was its dedication to movement, satisfying and fast-paced gunplay, and especially, robots. See, Titanfall's whole gimmick is this; players take on the role of Pilots, better than average soldiers of the far future who are deployed in times of conflict as superior ground troops, but more importantly, heavy artillery. As pilots perform well on the battlefield, they can call in the titular Titanfall, summoning their respective Titan to the fray. Titans are large, deadly mechs that can be piloted by the player to give them a distinct advantage in battle. What this translates to in gameplay is simple; as players make their way through matches, they build up a meter which when filled allows them to call down a massive robot to wreak havoc. Every player can do this, usually multiple times a match if they're good enough. Titans are fast, tough, and lethal, and fun as hell to control. But what kept the game balanced was the fact that titans weren't invincible. All players came equipped with anti-titan weaponry, alongside their usual loadout of rifles or handguns. This meant that anyone could take a titan down if they were savvy. The titans, coupled with the frantic movement and satisfying shooting, made Titanfall a one of a kind game. It's fitting, then, that the inevitable sequel would go on to improve on it in virtually every way, but that'll have to wait for later.

-Diablo 3 I will admit to not having played this in its initial release window, in fact, some years would pass before I finally picked it up on console during a sale. And though my time with it was quite belated, I would still consider it to be a genuinely fun game, one worthy of being on this list. In Diablo 3, players choose between seven classes; Wizard, Monk, Necromancer, Witch Doctor, Demon Hunter, Barbarian, or Crusader. From there, they are thrust into the demon-plagued land of Sanctuary, beginning their adventure in the town of New Tristram. Each class has a different backstory and a slightly different narrative throughout, but the core throughline is thus; you are sent to the village to investigate reports of a falling star, only to be swept up in a fight against hell and heaven itself for the fate of the world. In terms of game difficulty, the game sports an impressive twenty difficulty tiers; easy, normal, hard, master, and then sixteen levels of torment. Should players want an even greater challenge, there's also hardcore mode, which starts you off with permadeath: you get one life, no exceptions. Die, and the character is gone for good. Overall, I would say that Diablo's biggest strength is in its gameplay loop; Diablo plays like a top-down, hack and slash role-playing game, with players exploring the various levels in search of loot all the while battling hordes of enemies and leveling up, earning new abilities and skills that players can swap out to create their ideal builds. The core gameplay loop, while simple, is wildly addictive, with a massive loot pool to chase in an effort to grow ever stronger. Each class plays differently, but all of them are easy to learn. Diablo also supports local and online multiplayer, making it a great game to play with friends or family.

-Sunset Overdrive Sunset Overdrive is a game I've previously covered on this blog before. In fact, I'd say I did such a good job that if you want to read about it, go read that article. But if you'd rather not click away, let me give you the TL;DR. Sunset overdrive is a satirical open world game made by Insomniac in which you play as a cocky and comedic hero out to save their city from a bogus energy drink that caused a pseudo-zombie outbreak. It's built around movement, with the player grinding on rails and running on walls and doing everything they can to stay mobile while gunning down the mutated enemies and exploring the environment. It's funny and feels great to play while being hampered by an underwhelming character creator and suite of customization options, but still manages to come out on top as an immensely satisfying game.

-Destiny Destiny is the brainchild of one Bungie studios, the original creators of Halo, the next game on this list. Fresh off their amicable split from Microsoft, Bungie did what they did best; develop a truly great FPS. But this time, they added a twist; Destiny is equal parts Shooter, Looter, and MMO. It took these three core ingredients and mixed them together with gusto, delivering an immensely entertaining game that felt incredible to play both alone or with your friends. The story of destiny is a long one, but can be summarized simply; Some years in the future, Humanity met and allied with an alien being known as the Traveller, an alliance that heralded massive technological and social leaps, ushering in the new Golden Age of humanity. Unfortunately, the Traveller's natural enemies, The Darkness, attacked the solar system, destroying much, and whittling down the last survivors to a single safe city. In response, the Traveller created Guardians, reanimated protectors infused with the Traveller's power, tasked with defending the earth and all its colonies from the encroaching forces of evil that threaten this dwindling peace. Resurrected by a ghost, an emissary of the Traveller, you play as one of these Guardians; taking on the role of either the agile Hunter, the cosmically magical Warlock, or the strong and stalwart Titan. From there, you could either progress alone or join up with friends to take on the challenges of the solar system, pushing back the forces of darkness. Although lacking in longevity in its first outing, destiny was quickly expanded and iterated upon, turning it from an already impressive game to a true powerhouse and pillar of its genre.

-Halo: The Master Chief Collection I won't pretend this started off as a flawless, perfect compilation of prior Halo games. But I love Halo, and I loved playing these games again, so it makes the list. Especially after all of the improvements and subsequent additions 343 made to the collection post-launch. On release, it featured Halo CE, Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo 4, but has since gone on to include Halo 3: ODST and Halo Reach as well. If you're unfamiliar, Halo is a staple franchise in the Xbox lineup, and the master chief collection sought to unify all of the prior releases under one umbrella for the newest console. Halo is a sci-fi FPS franchise, largely following the saga of the titular Master Chief Petty Officer, John-117. John, or Master Chief as he is more commonly called, is a Spartan; a supersoldier of the future, who fights to protect humanity from an alien collective dubbed The Covenant. In the first game, Master Chief crash lands on an alien ringworld known as Halo, which later turns out to be an ancient superweapon created to exterminate all sentient life in the galaxy. Subsequent games only build the stakes from there, seeing John stave off one intergalactic threat after another in a franchise that continues to satisfy time and again. What the Master Chief Collection does is bundle everything up in one convenient package, while simultaneously offering tweaks and improvements to complement the technological advancements of the new consoles. It offers local and online multiplayer, both for its story and its competitive modes. Overall, even with the flawed beginnings, I would consider The master chief collection a must-have for Xbox players.

-Grand Theft Auto V Ah yes, GTAV, the game that refuses to die. Technically, this game released on the Xbox 360 and ps3, but it's been put on the PS4/XBO and now even the PS5 and the latest Xboxes too. I won't be surprised if this game gets ported to the consoles that come after that, too, in seven or so years. This game just won't quit. But that's also a testament to the dedication of its player base and the overall quality of the game itself. GTAV is an irreverent, biting joy of a game, replete with humor and charisma. It was, and remains, the latest in Rockstar's open-world crime franchise, in which players take on the role of not one, but three separate characters trying to make their way through life in Los Santos California; Michael, a retired crook stuck in the witness protection system, Michael's former, quite deranged partner Trevor, and rounding out the cast is Franklin, a street-savvy up and comer. Together they go about committing numerous heists, shady deals, and more than a few moments of mayhem in their quest for glory. Its secondary selling point was a robust and open-ended online mode, where players could create their own character and participate in myriad activities with and against their friends and strangers for fame, money, and clout. This is the mode that has kept GTA going in the years since its release, and it is the mode that has seen the most improvements and updates as well. I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time in it myself, but it was always the story of Michael, Trevor, and Franklin that drew me in overall.

-Tales from the Borderlands Tales from the Borderlands is the only Telltale game I'm putting in this whole list. Not for lack of quality on the other games' parts, but simply because this one has to be my favorite. For those unfamiliar, Borderlands is a series of FPS games that take place far in the future on the fringes of space; the titular Borderlands. It follows a revolving door of ragtag Vault Hunters, people who go in search of mythical, alien "vaults" that are rumored to contain vast amounts of treasure. They are incredibly popular, addicting looter shooters that match satisfying gunplay with beautiful cell-shaded graphics, topped off with charming and funny characters and not too shabby storytelling. Telltale games, on the other hand, are traditional point and click adventure games, released in episodic formats and usually broken down into seasons. They focus on storytelling first and foremost, showcasing incredibly compelling narratives influenced by player choice. You'd think, then, that these two dichotomous formats wouldn't pair well together at all, but Tales from the Borderlands proves that sentiment is wildly false. Tales from the borderlands took what was great about previous telltale games, and matched it perfectly to an original tale set in the Borderlands universe. It weaves an incredibly compelling narrative, filled with equal parts humor and feeling, and manages to tell one of the best Borderlands stories to date.

2015

I don't have a lot to say about 2015. The new generation was still going strong and saw some truly excellent games grace its shelves, many of whom are going to appear below.

-Bloodborne 2015 kicked off incredibly strong with Bloodborne, the latest instant classic from the studio behind the equally popular Dark Souls franchise. Bloodborne melds the skill-oriented, punishing combat and exploration heavy maps of the Souls games with an eldritch, psychological atmosphere, a match so perfect it went together like peanut butter and chocolate. To espouse the story of Bloodborne would be an effort in itself, but I shall do my best to summarize it; Shirking the more medieval settings of the Souls games before it, Bloodborne sees players navigating the victorian gothic town of Yarnham, a city plagued by beasts and monsters. It is these monsters you are tasked with dispatching, taking on the role of a Hunter of Beasts, sent to cleanse the town of that which ails it. But not is all as it seems, and the beasts may not be the only monsters Yarnham has to offer. Outside of its interpretive yet incredibly strong narrative, Bloodborne offered equally polished gameplay, iterating on the previously mentioned combat from prior dark souls games to create a punishing yet wildly satisfying gameplay loop that was easy to learn yet hard to master. Bloodborne forced players to always be on their guard but gave them no shield or barrier with which to do so, believing that offense was the greatest defense, making success hinge on your willingness to fight and your skill in surviving the nightmares that Yarnham had to offer. A melding of horror, action, and exploration, Bloodborne was a true success, cementing itself for years to come as a top tier action-RPG, and saw countless fans that remain dedicated to it to this day.

-The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt I'm going to be blunt; This is one of my favorite games of the last generation. It is a top tier RPG, made up of an incredibly charming cast of characters, a beautiful open world, and a thrilling, fantastical narrative that all come together to make one of the best games to release in the last seven years. Though a sequel to not only two prior games, but also a long line of books, The Witcher 3 was surprisingly friendly to newcomers, of which I was one at the time. Despite its pedigree, I felt right at home in the world of the Witcher, quickly picking up on what I had missed in its long and storied life. The Witcher 3 puts players in the role of Geralt of Rivia, the titular Witcher, a magically enhanced human tasked with routing out monsters that threaten the world of man. This time around, Geralt is searching for his ward, Ciri, as he navigates a world fraught with monsters and men in equal measure. what starts as a simple search for a missing friend quickly blossoms into an adventure for the fate of the world itself. Though a fantasy RPG at its heart, the witcher manages to tell some particularly grounded and human stories, and this game is no exception. One moment will see you stalking a beast out in the wild, the next will see you navigating political intrigue in the courts of royalty. But it all flows together to create one of the best RPGs I've ever played, and one that earned a not inconsiderable amount of well-deserved praise when it first debuted back in 2015.

-Assassin's Creed Syndicate Hot off the heels of the muddied AC Unity, Syndicate was the last proper Assassin's Creed game before the franchise would experience a massive genre and gameplay shift in its next entry. Where Unity saw too much focus on graphics and not enough care anywhere else, Syndicate finely balances all of its parts to create an impressive experience overall. This time around, players get to visit London, at the tail end of its industrial revolution. Out goes flintlocks and swords, in came steam and steel. This entry sees players in the role of both Evie and Jacob Frye, siblings fresh off their induction into the Assassin Brotherhood, tasked with dispatching justice on their Templar foes across London. The setting isn't the only big change for this game, as Syndicate saw an overhaul in both visual quality, scale, and gameplay. London feels lived large and lived in, with plenty of ground to explore and streets filled with people going about their day-to-day. Missions are split between Jacob and Evie both, with some allowing you to pick and choose and others forcing you into the shoes of one or the other as they work together to clean up the city. It innovated on the traditional gameplay loop, with this game having you going from borough to borough, toppling its templar leaders and expanding your sphere of influence with the aid of historical figures like Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Nikola Tesla. These famous faces are not the only people lending the Fryes their helping hand, as Syndicate also put the Fryes in charge of their own street gang, a ragtag group of brawlers and scouts that would come to their aid at the press of a button. Most times, conquering a borough involved you and your gang scrapping it out with those of the templar order, dusting knuckles to see who got the final say in the control of the area. This may seem at odds with the traditionally stealth-oriented approach prior games focused on, but that side of the game was not neglected either. Assassination missions saw fine-tuning and innovation as well, with players able to plan out and partake in uniquely tailored kills that matched the locale and personality of their target, from disguising yourself as a scientific cadaver to kill a corrupt doctor to allying with a guard and feigning capture to infiltrate and kill a target in the Tower of London. The game saw improvements out of combat as well, with Syndicate receiving a large overhaul in its parkour movement and general navigation. The Frye twins come equipped with a grappling hook that allows for speedy travel across London's many rooftops, while ground travel was made all the more expedient with the inclusion of horse-drawn carriages. The general parkour itself was also tuned, allowing for freer player movement and tighter directional control. All of this to say, Syndicate saw some truly welcomed improvements, iterating on the legacy and creating a lasting impression that stands up as one of the better games of the franchise.

-Star Wars Battlefront While I've spoken of a Battlefront on this blog before, this is not that same game. Rather, this is Battlefront 2015, a soft reboot to the previous Battlefront line of games for the new generation of consoles. This Star Wars Battlefront was helmed and developed by Dice, famed for the Battlefield franchise, a line of competent and entertaining military-focused first-person shooters. They were known for solid campaigns, but more importantly, massive scale competitive multiplayer modes. This pedigree is shown heavily in Battlefront, with the game sporting 64 players competitive multiplayer, with teams taking on the roles of either the empire or the rebellion as they fight their way through maps taken straight from the star wars universe, from the snowy plains of Hoth to the immense forests of Endor and everywhere in between. The game was replete with game modes and had the ability to be played in either first or third person. Players were given access to a modest selection of in-universe weaponry, and could even take the role of recognizable star wars heroes on occasion. Visually, the game was stunning, with incredibly faithful and detailed recreations from everything to weapons to the maps themselves. It felt like a genuine passion project, built from the ground up by competent developers and made for fans and first-timers alike. Battlefront, much like many games on this list, has since been usurped by a sequel but remains an incredibly competent shooter and a genuinely fun game to play.

2016

While 2015 saw the release of some truly impressive games, 2016 was a genuine powerhouse of a year. It saw the rise to prominence of Virtual Reality, through the oculus rift and the PlayStation VR. 2016 also saw the first re-released console of the current generation, in the form of the Playstation 4 Pro, a trend that Xbox would follow as well, seeing the release of 2016's Xbox One S, and in 2017, the Xbox One X. These were touted as faster, better performing, better-looking consoles than their base model predecessors, offering several enhancements to graphical fidelity and console performance, running games even better than they already did. And with these new consoles came an all-star suite of excellent games, a multitude of instant classics from big-name studios and fresh indie developers alike. Many of the games that released this year are ones I've individually covered before, but they still deserve their spot in this article. So without further ado, here are some of the most noteworthy games of 2016.

-Oxenfree Where Bloodborne was the standout hit that kicked off 2015, Oxenfree did the exact same thing for 2016. Developed by the California based indie team at Night School Studios, Oxenfree is a supernaturally infused, slice of life adventure game that follows Alex, a witty, rebellious, soon to be high school graduate as she makes her way to the fictional Edwards Island, accompanied by her best friend Ren and new stepbrother Jonah. This small group of friends is meeting up with what they assume will be a large group to have a weekend bash, But what was supposed to be a boisterous weekend party turns out to just be two extra guests; Clarissa, a fellow student who has ties to Alex, and Nona, a mild-mannered girl who just so happens to be Ren's current crush. Their modest get together quickly goes south when Alex uses a small handheld radio to tune into a weird signal emanating from the island, unleashing the spirits of a sunken military submarine, long since lost at sea. These wayward souls possess one of the kids and scatter the rest across the island, forcing Alex to uncover the mystery of their death and find a way to save her friends and escape the island. The game wears its inspirations on its sleeve, taking queues from classic ghost stories as much as it does retro coming of age stories, but it adapts these ideas masterfully. As for how it plays, Oxenfree is a side scrolling point and click adventure game, built around exploration and dialogue rather than complex game mechanics. It explores the interpersonal relationships between all the characters as much as it explores the haunted nature of the island itself. It easily shifts between these disparate tones, with a story filled with as many supernatural spooks as sarcastic teenage banter, seamlessly integrating player choice into the mix to create a truly excellent narrative. Oxenfree also features a high amount of replayability, with player choice going on to influence which of the game's many endings, as well as touting a new game plus mode that adds an extra smattering of content for your subsequent playthroughs. Oxenfree was a gift that kept on giving, more than earning its spot on this list.

-Firewatch Firewatch is the first of several 2016 games I've previously written about, and while my opinion of it may have not been the highest initially, ruminating on it since has led me to a new appreciation of the time I spent with it. I would recommend reading my original review, but the short summary is thus; you play as Henry, a man on the run from his troubles who takes a job in the Shoshone national forest, keeping an eye on the wildlife and ensuring nothing is amiss. Your companion through the game is Delilah, a voice through your walkie talkie, somebody else who has taken the same job as you over in one of the adjacent watchtowers. Throughout the game you explore the forest, keeping the area safe while exploring the mysteries of the area you now inhabit, all the while developing a friendly relationship with Delilah as you go. It's a simple, but satisfying first-person adventure game, with an emotionally charged but comedic narrative about one man's journey to get lost and find himself.

-Stardew Valley Stardew Valley is a retro-inspired simulator game about a down and out office worker who inherits their grandfather's farm in the titular Stardew Valley. They leave their mundane life behind and embark on a new journey in rural life, building up the farm from a rundown, untamed field into a bustling agricultural powerhouse, all the while making friends and forming bonds with the locals that you meet along the way. Stardew plays like a dream and features a stunning pixellated art style that complements its easygoing nature. Stardew is a game you can get lost in with ease, featuring an incredibly satisfying gameplay loop; It's a charmingly simple sim, one that encourages players to make their own way and their own choices, with a multitude of different ways to spend each in-game day. You're encouraged to play the game at your own pace, experiencing its range of content as it comes, rather than being railroaded into any one path for progression. It's a game that encourages exploration, diversity, and freedom, one that never really ends. Stardew made waves when it first came out for being such an open-ended, friendly experience, and it has since gone on to be heavily expanded upon by its developer, seeing releases on even more platforms and accruing even more fans along the way. It's a game that's easy to love and hard to put down, a comfort food game that makes you want to revisit it time and again.

-Titanfall 2 Where the original Titanfall was an excellent Xbox exclusive, Titanfall 2 bloomed the franchise into a multiplatform powerhouse. While it kept the excellent multiplayer modes, Titanfall 2's biggest change was the inclusion of a proper single-player story, and it's this inclusion that sees Titanfall 2 earn a place on my list. Titanfall 2's campaign is short, but sweet, seeing players take on the role of Jack Cooper, a pilot in training under the mentorship of an experienced soldier named Lastimosa. Unfortunately, on their first field mission, Lastimosa is killed, forcing Jack to embrace his future role as Pilot in an effort to survive and keep Lastimosa's experimental Titan out of enemy hands. This Titan, given the codename BT, is unique among Titans in that it can freely equip the various titan weapons and abilities, while simultaneously having an expanded AI that allows it to perform better in combat than its contemporaries. Together, Jack and BT make their way through the Frontier, coming into conflict with the varied enemy forces that they were originally sent in to stop. The campaign is brief, but what it lacks in lengths it makes up for in entertainment; the banter between Jack and BT makes for some great dialogue, and the campaign is perfectly built around the shooting and movement tech that made the first Titanfall so distinct, creating a series of levels that are just as built around gunfights as they are around precise first-person platforming. The game's environments are also beautiful to look at, varying from gritty industrial complexes to lush jungle environments that are as nice to look at as they are to maneuver through. Accompanying the stellar story mode is the recurring suite of multiplayer offerings, all of which have been upgraded and improved upon to complement the innovations of the sequel. Where Titanfall was good, Titanfall 2 is great, and it's a continual shame the series hasn't been given more time to shine.

-The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Special Edition This is another game that I've previously covered on my blog, and it's also another technicality. See, Skyrim technically released back in 2011 but saw so many re-releases in the years afterward that at this point the only device that doesn't natively play it are phones. With this particular re-release, Bethesda sought to give console players the same quality of life changes that PC players had been seeing for years, namely graphical improvements, stability patches, and most importantly, player-created content. Skyrim had developed a bustling and dedicated community of creators in its years since release, all of whom had made countless mods for the game that ranged anywhere from simple tweaks to full-on expansion sized stories, and the special edition release marked the first time Xbox and Playstation fans could get their hands on this library of unique content. It created a situation where the already hefty game could be made all the more robust with fan contributions. Don't like the music? Download one of the unique music packs somebody put together. Want any number of pop culture-inspired items? Looking for some new quests to spice up this five-year-old game? It's all there and more.

-Watch Dogs 2 You might be wondering why I've put Watch Dogs 2 on this list while its predecessor is nowhere to be found. While the first Watch Dogs was a middling revenge story that happened to incorporate some neat hacking based features, Watch Dogs 2 is where the franchise really found itself. It follows the story of one Marcus Holloway, a bright and witty young man who's been framed for a crime he didn't commit by a faulty surveillance network that monitors the city of Los Angeles in a pseudo-dystopic future not so removed from our own. So Marcus does what he does best, hacks into the network and removes himself from it entirely, embarking on a campaign to take the whole system down with the help of white hat hacker collective Deadsec. What sets this game apart from its predecessor is the charisma of its cast and the far more varied ways in which you can use the game's technology to your advantage. Hijack cameras, remote control vehicles, manipulate streetlights, the world of Watch Dogs 2 is yours to manipulate all at the press of a button. And if hacking doesn't get you where you need to be, Marcus has some skills of his own; he's particularly skilled at parkour and quite handy at non-lethally dispatching foes with a weapon of his own design, a billiard ball attached to a bungee cord. And if playing non-lethally isn't your thing, you can also accumulate quite the arsenal of homemade weaponry, all 3D printed from the base of your hacker collective. Watch Dogs 2 is a game about a group of people trying to take down a corrupt system using whatever means they can. It's a witty, satirical, but surprisingly grounded story told across a beautiful open-world recreation of Los Angeles, one that drew me in far more than its predecessor ever managed to do.

2017

2017 might not have had the same pedigree of games as its predecessor, but it did see the belated release of the latest current-gen console; The Nintendo Switch. A revolutionary step up from the Wii and Wii U, The Switch took the gaming world by storm thanks to its ability to seamlessly transition from a home console playing on your TV to a handheld console able to go with you anywhere. The Switch remains a staple of the console market to this day, easily standing tall next to the Playstation and Xbox consoles both new and old. Aside from the Switch, there was still a healthy collection of games for people to enjoy, some of which will be highlighted below.

-Night in the Woods Night in the Woods marks yet another game I've personally reviewed, and also stands proud as one of my absolute favorites of this generation. A humble offering from indie studio Infinite Fall, it was a gorgeously animated sidescroller of an adventure game that followed college dropout Mae Borowski as she returns to her small home town of Possum Springs to rekindle old friendships and reconnect with her family. Despite its anthropomorphic cast, it tells a genuinely human story, one that perfectly reflected what it feels like to revisit old haunts; how things can be so familiar yet change so much, seamlessly blending an emotionally charged narrative with a dark, suspenseful hometown mystery. Night in the Woods remains an absolutely incredible game to experience, showcasing themes like mental illness, sexuality, and identity through the lens of youthful wit and clever, dry sarcasm. I haven't played many truly perfect games, but Night in the Woods came damned close to being one.

-Kingdom Hearts 1.5/2.5 Ah yes, another collection of re-releases. Kingdom Hearts technically started back on the PS2, with the release of Kingdom Hearts 1. From there it blossomed into an incredibly diverse and lengthy franchise that saw releases on consoles and handhelds alike, from the PS2 to the Gameboy Advance. What these re-releases did was bundle all of the Kingdom Hearts games into one complete package, and tossed them all onto the PlayStation 4. It created a cohesive collection for this storied saga and presented it all in an easy to follow order that anyone could pick up and work through. Both games also offered the previously exclusive Final Mix content to the west for the first time, expanding on the already hefty games with more difficulty options, more enemies, more story content, and more challenges to keep the fun going and going. But what is Kingdom Hearts, I hear some people ask. Kingdom hearts is a series of action RPGs that follow the adventures of heroes known as Keyblade Wielders as they fight against the forces of darkness that threaten the worlds beyond. They play great, feature an especially enjoyable cast of characters, and tells a heartwarming story of good and evil. A joint project between Square Enix and Disney, Kingdom Hearts features an abundance of Disney characters and worlds, crossing over with various Square Enix properties in this epic struggle against light and dark. That's the easiest summary of the story by far, as delving any deeper would almost certainly confuse the casual reader, but let me say this; The Kingdom Hearts games are fantastic, well worth the time, and with these remastered collections, more approachable than ever.

-Nier Automata Nier Automata is a tough game to talk about in-depth, on account of just how easy it is to spoil for people who haven't experienced it. But it was also one of my favorite games of 2017, so I'll do my best to give it its due. Nier Automata is somewhat of a hybrid game; it blends so many genres together but somehow manages to do each one of them justice. Equal parts open world, action RPG, Bullet Hell, and more, Nier Automata takes place in the far, far future, in the ruins of earth. Humanity has long since abandoned the planet and sought shelter on the moon, entrusting a group of humanoid androids to defend the planet from an encroaching alien threat. The story follows several of these androids; 2B, 9S, and A2, as they wander the ruins of humanity and fight back against the robot foes that the aliens use as soldiers. It tells an amazing story that all but demands subsequent replays to get the full breadth of its narrative weight across, with each subsequent playthrough seen through the eyes of one of the other characters. Equal parts sci-fi story and humanist breakdown, Nier Automata is a deconstructive, philosophical pondering wrapped in the guise of an anime action game. That's not to say it doesn't wear the disguise well; Nier Automata plays like a dream, with stylish combat and an accompanying score that makes for easy listening both in and out of the game. It's another must-play, especially with the remake/remaster of its predecessor soon to release in 2021.

-Persona 5/Persona 5 Royal Persona 5 is an absolute joy of an RPG. It's slick, stylish, has a superb soundtrack, and tells a top tier story to boot. You take the role of a down-and-out high school kid who's been forced to transfer from his hometown in the countryside to Tokyo, thanks to a bogus police incident. Labeled a criminal and looked down on by the adults of his new school, the protagonist goes about bettering himself, raising his grades, and making the most of his new life in a new city. He forms bonds and relationships with the people around him, making fast friends with many of his classmates and even some chill adults along the way. Oh, he can also use a supernatural phone app to dive into the corrupted hearts of society, utilizing a special power to battle the evils that lie within and force them to change their ways and confess their deeds. Herein lies the dichotomy of the Persona 5; Much like the other Persona games that preceded it, the story it tells is a hybrid of supernatural mystery and coming of age drama, blending mundane highschool life with a fantasy adventure. It is equal parts life simulator and stylish role-playing game, as you and your friends do their best to repair a broken system using the fantastical powers they've been imbued with. These powers are the titular Persona, powerful creatures that embody the sides of ourselves we keep hidden behind the masks of society. These personas allow one to do battle with the shadows that lurk within these corrupted hearts, creatures that take on myriad forms inspired by religion and myth. Wielding this power, they embark on a journey of social reform, fighting a revolving door of less than scrupulous individuals that all culminating in a battle to change society itself. In spite of its overtly fantastical elements, the story it tells is decidedly grounded and surprisingly relatable; at its core, Persona 5 is about a collective of disenfranchised individuals trying their best to make it through life and change things for the better, a story that was and remains especially poignant and a welcomed escapist fantasy to fall into time and again.

-Slime Rancher Slime Rancher is an adorable simulator game and one I've praised before on my blog. It blends first-person shooter elements with the farming simulator genre, tasking players to manage and explore a planet on the fringes of space that's almost entirely populated by a race of creatures known as Slime. Slimes come in a varied selection of types and sizes, but all of them have one universal similarity; they all produce a resource known as a Plort that you can trade to an intergalactic trade center for currency, which in turn allows you to upgrade your slime farm and expand into new territories. The gameplay loop is nothing but fun, with each new expansion bringing in new species of slime that you can wrangle and combine to make hybrids that in turn create more valuable plorts. As you make your way through the planet, you start uncovering logs left behind by your farm's prior owner, that weave a narrative of love and loss, a story that drives you forward in your quest if only to see how it concludes. You're not alone in this quest, though, as you have your slimes for company as well as several long-distance conversations via the computer in your home between friends and fellow farmers alike. Subsequent game updates have only expanded upon the experience, seeing new opportunities for trade, daily activities, and more, making an already invigorating and enjoyable game all the more so.

-Destiny 2 It's no secret that Destiny 2 had a complicated launch window. Many fans felt that Destiny 2 left too much of what made its predecessor great on the cutting room floor, electing instead to reset the player base back to zero and tell a brand new story. While I missed some of what Destiny 2 left behind, I was still somebody who found a lot of joy in Destiny 2, as evidenced by the thousand-plus hour count it tells me I've poured into it since its 2017 release. The game has also seen countless improvements and additions in the years since its release, adopting a new seasonal model and even going free to play after a point. Most recently, Destiny 2 saw the release of Beyond Light, the first in a new trilogy of expansions that hopes to continue the game forward over the next few years. So, while it might have had a rough start, it still remains destiny at its core, making it one of the best shooters on the market, coupled with a satisfying loot hunt and a rewarding structure that continues to keep its fans coming back for more. That alone lands it in my list of games for 2017, and the generation as a whole.

-The Sims 4 Though this game technically saw the light of day back in 2014, I didn't end up playing it until its console release here in 2017. Thus, I place it here. There isn't a lot of complication with Sims 4. If you're at all familiar with its predecessors, you know exactly what to expect. An engaging simulator game, in which you craft an individual or family and set them on the path of life, influencing them as they go or leaving them to their own fates so as to see what happens. You tailor their looks, personality, aesthetic...it's a premier example of micromanagement as entertainment. This installment shirked some of the advancements made by its predecessor but still manages to be a robust and enjoyable game all on its own, made all the better by continued additional content releases in the years since its premiere. It's a game that keeps on giving and seems primed to continue doing so for some time yet.

2018

2018 saw the release of some genuinely top-shelf games, with the Switch continuing to establish itself against its contemporaries, while the Playstation continued to add excellent exclusives to its lineup.

-Far Cry 5 The Far Cry games have always been known for being competent shooters with large open worlds, and this one is no exception. Shirking the usual foreign locales, Far Cry 5 takes place a lot closer to home, seeing players cleaning up the rural backwoods of Montana, taking place in the fictional Hope County. In it, you play as a rookie cop sent in to apprehend an evangelical doomsday cultist; John Seed, The Father. This arrest quickly goes south, leaving you as the last lawman willing to stand up to the Seed family and free Hope County from their grasp. To do so, you systematically break the hold of his lieutenants, dismantling their bases of operations and taking down his associates in a slow climb to face him once more. Along the way you make friends and allies out of the locals, people with a similar drive to rise up and clean up their county. As far as the gameplay, Far Cry 5 is a mix of FPS and RPG elements, with a rudimentary character customization system and plenty of powerful guns to acquire. You level up and earn skills that augment your preferred style of play, be it stealthy or over the top, all in your pursuit of justice. Augmenting this quest is the world it takes place in, with players exploring lush forests, vibrant fields, and the general detritus of rural America. Hope county feels real, with looks to match, despite its farcical tone and over the top gameplay. All of this came together to make a Far Cry that felt fresh and fun, a genuine step forward for the franchise.

-God of War Prior games in the God of War series were not known for subtlety, nuance, or humanity. Rather, they were violent hack and slash games that featured the titular God of War, Kratos, seeking and exacting bloody revenge on the greek pantheon for their slights against him and his family. They were by no means bad games, but they weren't what I would consider masterpieces either. Then, we were given God of War (2017). This soft reboot/Sequel for the franchise saw Kratos embarking on a distinctly more grounded story than its predecessors, navigating the perils of fatherhood while on a journey to deliver his late wife's ashes in the world of the Norse Pantheon. He is joined by his son, Atreus, a bright but rebellious young boy who seeks only to prove his worth to the gruff and distant Kratos. This more human story is accompanied by a more grounded approach to combat and gameplay; while it retains the emphasis on action, it feels more deliberate than prior entries, shifting the combat style from the hack and slash nature to a more measured approach, with players needing to conserve stamina and plan their attacks lest they get easily overwhelmed. The game also incorporates a more open world structure than its predecessors, seeing Kratos and his son freely traversing their environment, unlocking shortcuts, and finding means to double back on past areas in a level progression that feels more like a Souls game than the God of Wars of old. All of this came together to make a game that felt genuinely innovative, a fresh new direction for a pre-established franchise that was as welcoming to newcomers as it was to prior fans.

-Donut County Donut County is a silly, short indie puzzle game in which you play as a mischievous raccoon delivering "donuts" to the unsuspecting populous around him. These donuts are, in fact, large sinkholes that expand as they eat different objects, eventually growing to swallow the entirety of the lot they were sent to. The core gameplay lies in this concept, with you controlling the various sinkholes from level to level, figuring out the order in which to consume the various objects on each map in order to grow in size. As the game progresses you unlock various upgrades to these sinkholes, like the ability to spit things out of them, adding new layers to the simple puzzles the game encapsulates. It isn't a terribly long game, as already said, only taking an hour or two to finish, but it cemented itself as a charming indie game amidst a sea of big-name titles.

-Marvel's Spider-Man Developed by Insomniac, previously mentioned in the Sunset Overdrive excerpt, Marvel's Spider-Man is a rare example of a genuinely amazing superhero game. In it, players take on the role of Peter Parker, a Spider-Man who has already established himself as the hero we know and love, but one that still has room to grow and learn. What starts off as a triumphant takedown of one Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin, soon blossoms into a complicated web that involves a shady group known as the Demons that Spider-Man must stop from wreaking havoc on the city. But the game isn't just about the Heroics of Spider-Man; The Game showcases the best aspects of Peter's character, splitting the game equally between his time as Spider-Man and his normal life as Peter Parker, a scientist working under the apprenticeship of one Otto Octavius, while simultaneously working with his Aunt May at the local Homeless Shelter and trying to rekindle his forlorn relationship with Mary Jane. All of this unfurls simultaneously, weaving a web that melds incredible movement with fast and stylish combat, stellar characters, and a heartwarming tale, cementing itself not only as a great game but also as one of the best Spider-Man stories out there.

-The Missing: JJ Macfield and the Island of Memories The Missing is a heartfelt, down to earth story told through the lens of a grisly but goofy premise. In it, you play as the titular JJ Macfield, a young girl who goes on a trip with her close friend Emily to a remote island off the coast of Maine. What is supposed to be a fun excursion takes a turn for the worse, as Emily goes missing, leaving JJ to track her down. Unfortunately, this quest quickly leads JJ to her death...but not for long. Resurrected by a bolt of lightning, JJ gains the ability to remove various parts of her body, as the island quickly goes from an idyllic wonderland to a psychedelic nightmare. Undeterred, JJ uses her newfound ability to traverse the island, ever searching for her lost friend. The Missing might sound like a horror game on paper, but it uses these macabre themes to tell a distinctly grounded story about dealing with personal identity and navigating a hostile and unfamiliar world, culminating in a heartbreakingly bittersweet twist that I won't spoil here. This is all to say; the Missing is an excellent game. It's a joy to play, despite its harrowing content, and it manages to convey its themes in a way that feels genuine and meaningful, telling a story that's still relevant to this day.

-Super Smash Brothers Ultimate Smash games have always been good, and Ultimate more than earns its moniker. This is the Ultimate Smash game; iterating on its predecessors without changing anything for the worst, Ultimate is an unabashed love letter to the series as a whole, incorporating every character and every map from every prior game all in one upgraded package. If you don't know what Smash is, let me explain; Nintendo is known for a lot of fantastic first-party titles, from Mario to Kirby to Metroid, and countless others. Smash takes all of these well-loved characters, throws them in an arena, and has them fight for supremacy. Debuting on the Nintendo 64, Smash has seen one major game release for every Nintendo console since, culminating in Smash Ultimate on the Nintendo Switch. As earlier stated, it features an absolutely enormous roster of playable characters, featuring every fighter from the previous games and several new additions for good measure. This roster was only further expanded with the release of the fighter passes, seeing an additional eleven fighters across the two that have thus far been released, ranging from surprise hits like Persona 5's Joker to fan favorites like Banjo and Kazooie. While not featuring a traditional story mode, Ultimate makes good use of its characters in a suite of different game modes that can be played both alone or with friends, online or locally. It's a fantastic party game and an equally praiseworthy fighter, rewarding skilled play but catering to casual players and newcomers alike.

2019

2019 marked the slowdown for the current generation, shadowed by the whispers of a new age of consoles. This made for a simple year for games, but one no less stacked with noteworthy games and worthwhile experiences.

-Kingdom Hearts 3 After years of waiting, 2019 finally saw the release of Kingdom Hearts 3. The wait might have been long, but the game delivered on the hype, simultaneously closing out the narrative arc that had begun so long ago with Kingdom Hearts 1 and beginning a new chapter for fans to look forward to. In service of this goal, Kingdom Hearts 3 wrapped up the majority of dangling storylines from all the previous games, while still leaving a handful of mysteries to chase into the future of the franchise. It featured a new suite of Disney worlds to explore, and incorporated Pixar properties for the first time in franchise history. The new content accompanied refined and polished gameplay mechanics and a complete visual overhaul, while still retaining the heart and soul that defined the games thus far. It all came together well enough but was later expanded upon through the release of Re: Mind, the game's beefy expansion that rebalanced gameplay and added in hours of new story content to better cap off the story. All told, Kingdom Hearts 3 was another great game, building on a legacy that seems like it will continue well into the future.

-Devil May Cry 5 For those not in the know, Devil May Cry is a series of games that follow the life of Dante, a half-demon sword for hire as he does his best to kill monsters and eat pizza. It's a franchise known for skillful, precise, stylish combat mixed with goofy, over the top stories, usually involving Dante and his associates contending with the fallout of his family, the demon king Sparda and his brother Vergil. While not a flawless franchise, it saw several excellent releases over the years, but then went depressingly dormant. Devil May Cry 5 was the perpetual waiting game, but 2019 saw it finally come out, accompanied by mass acclaim and praise. it really seemed like all the years of waiting were well rewarded. DMCV features three playable characters; Nero, a fellow demon hunter first introduced in Devil May Cry 4, Dante, the series' staple protagonist, and lastly the mysterious V, a newly introduced character for this game. Together the three were tasked with working together to take down the demonic Qliphoth and its master, Urizen, an immensely powerful demon lord. The game looks gorgeous, marking the first time the games have looked truly next-gen. Accompanying this boost in visual fidelity is the franchise's staple; combat was finely tuned to be more stylish than ever, with each character having a variety of tricks at their disposal to dispatch the demon hoard that stood between them and Urizen. Devil May Cry was back, and it was better than ever.

-Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Bloodstained is the spiritual successor to the Castlevania series, helmed by its most prominent contributor Koji Igarashi. Starting its life as nothing more than a simple Kickstarter, it blew through its funding goal and a few years later saw its release on the current generation of consoles. It's not a particularly complicated game, but it is particularly fun, with it adapting many of the staples that made Castlevania so great. As a spiritual successor to Castlevania, the games play very similarly; both are side scrolling hack and slash games that take place in fantastical gothic castles, and both see protagonists with varied combat and magical aptitude on their quest to take down the castle's owner. In the case of Castlevania, that owner is Dracula, but in the case of Bloodstained, players are tasked with defeating Gebel, an alchemically modified human known as a Shardbinder. You play as another one of these Shardbinders, Miriam. Miriam and Gebel are the lone survivors of an alchemical experiment that gave them the ability to wield a power called shards, crystalline embodiments of demonic essence. The narrative is simple, but the gameplay is where it shines; as players progress through Gebel's castle, you can accumulate more and more shards, all of which give Miriam access to new abilities, abilities that go on to aid her in her continued exploration. This creates a very satisfying loop; explore the castle, collect shards, unlock more of the castle to explore. Augmenting her shards are a suite of craftable and upgradeable weaponry, a selection of melee and firearms that allows players to diversify their preferred playstyle and experiment with what works best in any given situation. Subsequent content additions have added even more to the game, in the form of new modes, difficulties, and playable characters, adding to the replayability and longevity of what was already an excellent experience. Despite starting from simple roots, Bloodstained rose up and became something all on its own, paying homage to its inspirations while cementing a name for itself as a new staple of the genre.

-Catherine Full Body While originally releasing in 2011, 2019 saw an expanded re-release complete with new characters, new stages, and hours of extra story content. At its core, Catherine and its Full Body re-release are unique gems in the gaming world. One part puzzle game, one part dating simulator, it blends the complicated world of relationships with macabre block puzzles, all the while weaving a beautiful tapestry about one man's quest for love. In it, you take the role of Vincent Brooks, an unambitious 30-something simply going through the motions of life. He has a steady relationship and a stable job, a group of colorful and enthusiastic friends, but it's clear from the start just how much he's stagnated. His current girlfriend, Katherine, is starting to ask the big questions; marriage, children, their future. Unable to parse these ideas, he loses himself in his time at the local bar with his pals, shooting the shit and getting sloshed. That is, until, a new flame suddenly appears; the seductive temptress Catherine. One thing leads to another, and it comes to pass that they spend the night together...maybe. This is where the game's narrative really kicks off, with Vincent having to navigate the day to day, attempting to reconcile his long-time love with his possible new fling. This story is juxtaposed against the game's core gameplay loop, which sees Vincent forced to climb the deadly tower of babel each night in his dreams. To do this, players must stack blocks and avoid the perils and traps that each stage presents, making a mad dash to the top of the tower before the bottom collapses in on itself and Vincent plummets to his doom. For you see, this isn't an ordinary dream; if you die on the tower, you die in real life, making this desperate ascent a race for his very life. Each stage of the tower represents the game's various core themes, and each gets more and more complicated as the game progresses. In the interim of these climbs, players are set about answering multiple-choice inquiries that influence the direction of Vincent's relationships, with each answer adjusting a conspicuous morality meter that eventually comes to determine which of the 8 endings you could attain. With Full Body, this number was increased to 13, to adjust for the inclusion of a new paramour; Rin, a mysterious piano player that sets up shop in Vincent's favorite bar. Both Catherine and its Full Body re-release are excellent games, but I was especially smitten with the layers of extra content and story that Full Body brought to the table, additions that made Full Body one of my favorite games of 2019.

-Untitled Goose Game Untitled goose game is a simple premise on paper; players take on the role of an ornery, mischievous goose as it wreaks havoc through a small English town. Equal parts puzzle and stealth game, the goose has a laundry list of tasks it seeks to complete, from stealing hats off people's heads to infiltrating the local pub. It's not a long game by any means, but it has a ton of replayability in the form of additional tasks and challenges that only present themselves after your first playthrough. These range from time-based completions to additional bouts of mischief and all of them are incredibly satisfying to chase down. Untitled Goose Game has a quaint, painterly art style that compliments the charming simplicity of the game's premise, accompanied by a dynamic, classically-toned score that rises and falls in prominence as you go about your goosely business. All said Untitled Goose Game is a genuine treat, a brief but whimsical game that's just about having fun and goofing around.

2020

It's no secret that 2020 has been a rough year for a lot of folks. Between a pandemic, political controversy, and general drudgery, it's a year that feels like it can't end soon enough. But in spite of it all, 2020 was also a fantastic year for games. Serving as the last hurrah for the Xbox One and Playstation 4, we saw the release of some truly excellent stories that kept players going through the long months of an otherwise mediocre year.

-Animal Crossing: New Horizons Releasing right at the start of widespread quarantine, New Horizons supplied people with something they couldn't easily do in their own lives; escape. Animal Crossing New Horizons is the perfect escapist fantasy for the year it released in, seeing players partaking in an island getaway in the hopes of colonizing and forming an idyllic town on an untamed paradise. At their core, the animal crossing games are simple simulators. You create your character by selecting a few presets; hair, eyes, skin color, and then you're let free to explore your new locale. With this latest release, that locale is the aforementioned island, a small paradise in the sea dotted by trees and rivers, accented by flowers and weeds. You start your life on this new Island with a handful of other residents; the Nook Family, the proprietors of this island venture, and two random villagers who are looking to make a life on this island the same as you. Things start small, with everyone working together to set up tents and create a bonfire and find some food for a welcome party. Afterward, the game synchronizes itself to your console's date and time and sets you off on your way. Unlike other simulators on this list, Animal Crossing is a unique breed, running concurrently to the real world, continuously progressing in real-time. Flowers grow, trees produce fruit, and each day is a new adventure. It follows the general turn of the seasons for your respective hemisphere, celebrating holidays and alternating available activities with each passing day. As for what you can do yourself, the opportunities are legion; you can catch bugs, go fishing, search for fossils, chat up your villagers, visit other islands, and much more. As you progress, more ventures open their doors to you; catch enough bugs and fish, and you can elect to have a museum built to showcase your finds. Collect enough resources, and you can build new furniture and create plots of land that encourage more villagers to come and move to your island. Everything you do is in service of continued growth, but also serves just as simple fun, a charming, easygoing distraction from the concerns of the day-to-day.

-Final Fantasy VII Remake The Final Fantasy franchise is a long and storied one, replete with highs and lows. One such high was 1997's Final Fantasy 7, a game that quickly cemented itself as a fan favorite and an absolute classic. Now, in 2020, FF7 is back...sort of. See, FF7 Remake is the first in a line of games that will eventually go on to tell the entirety of the original FF7's story, which means that this release is only the first portion of a much larger narrative. Adapting what was originally the first few hours of the original game, FF7 Remake expands upon the opening section of its predecessor, simultaneously remaking the old content for modern audiences and adding in new aspects for old fans. FF7 Remake improves upon the original in practically every way, serving as a genuine remake that still manages to retain what made that original game so memorable and important to fans. The game might be new, but the heart is the same; FF7 Remake follows the story of Cloud Strife, an ex SOLDIER turned mercenary hired by an eclectic group known as Avalanche to dismantle a local power plant that's poisoning the planet. What starts as a well-intentioned but extreme case of eco-terrorism quickly explodes (pun intended) into a much larger story that sees Cloud and Avalanche bringing the fight straight to the corrupt Shinra Corporation and beyond, culminating in a battle against fate itself. Because this remake only covers a portion of what will go on to be a much larger narrative, it only scratches the surface of what makes the original FF7 so great, but it does so with gusto; the game plays and looks better than ever, bringing with it a heartfelt and compelling narrative that keeps you hooked the whole way through.

-Minecraft Dungeons Minecraft Dungeons takes the charming, voxel visuals and world of Minecraft and melds them seamlessly with a charming, easygoing dungeon crawler that's approachable for casual and experienced gamers alike. Where Minecraft is an open-ended sandbox game about building and exploring a blocky world, Minecraft Dungeons sees a collective of heroes on a quest to defeat the evil Illager, a powerful sorcerer whose armies have been sweeping the land leaving destruction in their wake. It's not a very complicated story about good and evil, but it doesn't have to be; Minecraft Dungeons prioritizes it's simple and easy to master gameplay first and foremost. You collect loot, battle recognizable Minecraft enemies, and progress through a litany of stages on your way to fight the big bad. It's not very long but encourages you to play it time and again, collecting better gear and trying your hand at the many difficulty levels for additional challenges. It's not the best looking or the best playing game that released this year, but it had heart and made for a short and entertaining way to pass the time.

-Ghost of Tsushima Ghost of Tsushima isn't a game to scoff at. One of the best looking games of the generation, this PS4 exclusive is one part historical timepiece, one part action-adventure, and one part stealth game. It follows the story of Jin Sakai, a samurai and one of the last survivors of the Mongol invasion of his home island of Tsushima, Japan. Left to die, he is found and nursed back to health by a wayward thief who teaches Jin the art of stealth and subterfuge, seeing him off on his quest for bloody revenge on the Mongol invaders that have encroached upon his homeland. To do this, he must first build up a fighting force of equal minded, skilled warriors, all while dismantling the various camps and operations the Mongols have set up in the absence of the defeated Samurai army. Jin can approach this in one of two ways; relying on his prowess as a formidable Samurai, Jin can challenge the many enemies in the game to flashy yet precise sword combat, or he can utilize the recently learned skills of stealth, infiltrating their encampments and silently picking the Mongols off one by one. There's no wrong answer to how you choose to play, although it takes some time for Jin to accept his new roles as both Samurai and assassin. Both methods of play feel equally as stellar, too; Combat in this game is incredibly polished, finely tuned swordplay that focuses on timing and well-planned strikes to dispatch your foes with ease, while the stealth feels tense and requires a distinctly tactical approach, planning your routes and cleverly dispatching foes so as to not raise suspicion. But the game isn't just about taking out your enemies. Ghost of Tsushima boasts one of the most beautiful open worlds I've ever experienced, a vibrant and gorgeous landscape dotted with myriad activities and side quests for you to explore and enjoy. One moment, you could be doing battle with a wayward group of Mongols or bandits, while the next could see you tracking a friendly fox to a shrine, composing a haiku in the shadow of a large tree, or recuperating your strength at a small hot spring while you ruminate on your adventures thus far. Ghost of Tsushima is an incredibly varied game, alternating between intense highs and calming lows, all coming together to become one of the best games of the last generation.

-Spiritfarer While I have not finished this game, it more than deserves recognition on this list. In it, you play as Stella, a young girl who takes over as the ferryman for the River Styx once Charon retires to the afterlife, tasked with providing for the wayward souls who live on the river as you ferry them to their final rest. To do this, Stella must collect various resources and build up her ship, outfitting it with living spaces and various commodities tailored to her current passengers. These aforementioned passengers will, in turn, begin to open up to Stella, tasking her with making certain foods or visiting different locales, all in an effort to give these wayward souls a proper farewell on their trip to the afterlife. Spiritfarer is a simple simulator game about resource management and exploration that showcases a lovely, genuinely heartfelt story about love and loss, one that will put a smile on your face as easily as it brings a tear to your eye.

And with that, I close out this hefty list, closing out the last generation. This compendium hardly scratches the surface of the last seven years' library, but hopefully, I did a good enough job remembering some of the games that made this last generation so great. There are a lot of games that I've still yet to play, resting in wait in my backlog for the time they get pulled out and given their due, but for now, this concludes my walk down memory lane. The last generation saw some excellent additions to the vast and ever-expanding library of video game history. Here's hoping the next several years can say the same. The start of the new consoles is off to a very promising start; in the last month or so alone we've seen excellent releases from both indie and big-name developers, fresh takes on old franchises, and new IPs alike. So, here's to the Last Generation, here's to the Next Generation, and here's to gaming overall; may it continue to thrive for years to come.

#A Look Back #Gaming #Game Review

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yekistraight · 4 years ago

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Hey, could you explain what being a feminist means? I’ve heard all these terms before, and there’s this huge stigma around it. So do you think there’s a way you could clarify at least what your beliefs are, and what you believe it to be? I’m simply trying to study stuff and see what it’s become or is. Thank you.

Sorry I wrote so much i just wanted to make it comprehensive:

General definition of feminist is someone who believes in the socio-economic equality of the sexes. In the beginning this was a straightforward ideology to follow. Women needed to be equal to men. It’s only fair, there’s no reason not to be. But sharing power is not something the ruling majority particularly enjoys so there’s been some bumps in the road. Decades and decades of bumps.

The feminists of the past started this push a long time ago with one message: ��we want to be taken seriously, we are humans too and we need rights that benefit us and protect us from you[men]” and they were right. Sex based crimes against women were happening at an alarming rate. So much so that it had become part of some cultures and traditions, meaning it would be defended and men would be protected while women basically died, physically and socially. Women lived in fear and helplessness, being sold a dream of subservience promoted by religion and ego in exchange for protection from men. What about the women that still, despite the odds, wanted to choose a different path? Well, they were brave enough to step out of line and others followed. They exist throughout history, inspiring other women will their bravery and confidence, proving that it was possible to have the power and authority that men had. Now imagine giving every woman that access to power? They’d have everything right? Well feminism didn’t start like that (it was racially exclusive actually) but fortunately the ideologies spread out through cities, across oceans and into continents where women wanted, no, NEEDED such power; the power to change their destinies that had been set upon them by another mere human being.

So feminism is like a sisterhood, where we’re only related by a common goal to protect each other while trying to defeat our common enemy. Here’s where the simplistic ideology begins to mutate based on strategy and cultural progression.

Feminism is a sisterhood, but not a monolith. There’s been different waves (eras) of feminism where each sisterhood used different tactics to achieve their goals for equality. Its like making a new checklist after the old one gets checked off. However there’s been one item that still needs a lot of work before ticking off and that’s dismantling gender roles. Gender roles are the root cause of every.single.thing. Toxic masculinity, performative femininity. Gender roles were created to control humans and keep them in their place. For a feminist to push her way into male dominated spaces, she must first acknowledge that gender roles have been constructed to work against her and break through it. So take note, everything is the way it is because of gender roles.

In this era, the sisterhood has been split into two major groups, two warring tribes if you will: libfems and radfems.

Liberal Feminists accept everyone. They use the tactic of assimilation, where they water down feminist ideologies to make it inclusive for everyone. They follow the lead of oppressed minorities who reclaimed slurs and instead reclaim methods tused to oppress women that past waves of feminists fought to dismantle. Remember what I said about gender roles? These women are bringing it back and think they’re reclaiming it. How do you reclaim something that hasn’t been dismantled yet?The only power they’re concerned with is the feeling of superiority that comes from thinking bowing down to the patriarchy is their idea. Their feminism tackles issues like rape, victim blaming and misogyny, things that affect them personally, while taking on the burden of other marginalised groups as their own, pushing their own goals to the backseat while feeling a self-righteous high. Basically, they’re activists who have lost the plot but would keep pushing blindly than admit it. The second group was born from libfems that wanted more than a feel good pat on the back from the patriarchy for not being too interfering.

Radical feminists are still following the original objective of their predecessors. They still have their eyes open to sex-based oppression and are aware there’s still a lot of work to be done. They don’t put the opposite sex’s needs above their own or let other group’s ideologies influence theirs and because of this, other groups as well as libfems have dubbed them as enemies to progress. Ironic isn’t it? The group that still fights for sexual equality has been silenced by none other than their own. Of course hatred for this group of feminists didn’t come out of nowhere. Radfems and their female-only values are presumed to hurt trans women, as trans women are biologically male and don’t have the same sex based experiences as biological women. Trans activists took these as transphobic fighting words and ostracised radfems, silencing them and their ideologies, claiming that everything they fought for was an attack against the trans community. Conservative americans also share some radfem values, basically the one on keeping the movement focused on female only issues, and because the right is notoriously bigoted (ironic because conservatives are the ones who uphold the gender roles feminists fight against so a conservative feminist is paradoxical) this is enough to tell people that radfems can’t be trusted. That they’re all racist, transphobic white supremacists. Because all groups that share similar ideologies are bad. The public, not wanting to be on the Unpopular Opinion side of history, shifted away and further pushed radfems into the background while libfems and their blind acceptance values were hailed as the patron saints of feminism.

So what feminism was and what it is now are vastly different. It started as a movement in different countries with different goals, then it graduated and took on more serious topics. It was like a game where every level gets tougher to prepare you for that last boss, the one who holds all the power you need to physically change your reality.

Today in the year 2021, young girls are being told that it’s feminist to enjoy selling their bodies for money. That it’s the same as working in a mine (a common comparative statement). That it’s feminist to look as womanly as the gender roles men created dictate. That it’s feminist to watch porn and be happy your romantic partner watches it to; this means you’re sexually liberated. Grown women go to Tiktok full of minors in the style of pimps to show off stacks of money they’ve made from pleasing men. They say “i did it because i wanted to and so should you”. Minors are all over twitter trying to lure men with financial dominatrix tags. They can’t wait till they become legal to start selling their nude bodies to men. They were told it would make them feel powerful. People who are skeptical are shamed into silence, because the popular crowd is always in control and no one wants to be the odd one out.

Now compare that to women who spend time researching horrifying news of sexual violence still happening today. Women still having to sell themselves to survive in 2021 is a clear indicator that we’re still not taken seriously. Sex buying, pimping and displaying women as commodities is the reason little girls are being stolen off the streets and shipped off to a disgusting dreg who think he’s owed sexual satisfaction.

Radfems want to end child sex trafficking, sex slavery, wedding night virginity checks, honour killings, femicide, sewing up little girls vaginas to avoid them exploring their sexuality before their wedding night and bring attention to way more hardcore shit being run by top dogs who are cooperating with the old powers that influence the governments.

Whose side do you think the media will be on? Whose side is worth not risking ruffling feathers?

Feminism has become many things now. You can choose the one that reminds you of the cruelty of man or the one that creates a comfortable fantasy of false empowerment while women’s violence continues. Both get stigmatised anyway.

If it wasn’t obvious already, I’m a radical feminist.

I’m an autistic radfem living in a backwards country where the lgbt community can’t thrive so there’s no pride parades, no trans movement, nothing that can be publicised anyway. I can’t create a fantasy where everything works because nothing works. Women are dying around me everyday for being female, my best friend is trapped with an abusive father who hates her for being a female firstborn (something babies get killed for), I’m not worthy of basic respect without a husband, a poor woman from a muslim state gets death threats from her fellow muslims for wearing a backless top while a rich married one gets praised and women can’t apply for anything important without a man’s permission.

Now why on earth would i want to pamper the gender that made and uphold those laws? The battle here is still greatly a battle of the sexes. Despite this stale level of progress, our movement, like many others have allies. Male allies are great, allies are great, we need them to push buttons yes but also remember they can never fully understand what we feel. All they can do is try their best to help and in return we give them acknowledgement and support; so no we’re not supposed to be misandrists or transphobes. We just hate anyone who uplifts what we and our ancestors have been fighting to destroy.

That’s all

#radfems do interact #radical feminism #feminism #terf

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kittypurritto · 5 years ago

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Helllu! I see you've been watching lots of chinese/korean dramas. Can you rec your favs?

Hello!! Of course I can n.n (sorry it took so long to answer, I kept making changes to this aha). I’ve decided to list my current top 3 favourites, because apparently I’ve watched a lot.

Okay guys, here goes.

Chinese dramas:

So lately the past year or so of my life has been consumed by cdrams (and recently kdramas by extension), but here are some of my faves that I’ve watched.

The Untamed

Anyone who follows my blog knows my crazy obsession with this amazing show. It’s based off of a novel called the Grandmaster of demonic cultivation (has an anime with the same name– s2 is slowly being released right now). The story takes place in a world ruled by the evil Wen Sect. Wei Ying and Lan Zhan cross paths and become good friends (hardcore bromance). Wei Ying tries to save innocent Wen from death, and in the end, he lost almost everything. After going missing for 16 years, the pair find each other again and try to find the real villain.

It’s full of action, mystery, adventure, heart ache, supernatural ghouls, longing, whumping, and an amazingly attractive cast that should honestly be illegal. If you’re looking for a show with lots of emotional pain that will swallow you whole, then you’re in the right place.

P/s. the 2 mains sing their love song which makes it that much more beautiful/painful.

Ps/s. IT ALSO JUST GOT PUT ONTO NETFLIX GUYS. No excuses not to binge it, and when you do, dm me so we can fangirl together.

Guardian

Another drama based off of a novel, with gay bros, longing, and adventure. Shen Wei is an immortal (kind of), and currently a university professor that has been waiting centuries for his lover/friend (Yunlan) to repay him for what he gave Shen Wei and will do anything for him. Zhao Yunlan is the head of the SID, a department that solves mysteries and crimes with supernatural origins. Together they help save others, solve mysteries, and save the world from Shen Wei’s evil twin brother.

All I can say about this one is that if you haven’t seen it, you’re seriously missing out (but warning, the cgi is horrible lmao). It was also super amazing seeing Zhu Yilong in a main role like this. The king of micro-expression seriously doesn’t let us down.

Legend of Fuyao

This show had consumed my soul for about a full month and a half until I finished it. When I finished watching, it left me sad that it was over. Got to be honest, the ending is still a bit confusing, but is still worth the watch. This is an epic love story about Fuyao, an orphan looking for adventure, but gets caught in a fight between kingdoms and destiny. Along the way, she meets the Crown Prince and they fall in love, but destiny has their fates already decided. They are on the opposite sides of good and evil and need to decide whether one lives and the other dies. It’s got amazing fight scenes and a really attractive male lead (his first lead in a show I believe). Super amazing acting, because let’s be real, any show with Yang Mi is an automatically good show. She’s just too amazing.

Other honourable mentions: Granting you a dreamlike life, Eternal Love, Untouchable Lovers, the Rise of Phoenixes, Detective L– were amazing shows I could rewatch until I die.

Side note: I am super excited for Xiao Zhan’s Jade Dynasty. So hopefully that movie will be available to us soon.

Korean Dramas:

All right guys. I’ve only recently started watching korean shows about half a year ago or so, so I haven’t seen too many, but the ones I have seen I’ve fallen into a deep love with that keeps me going lol.

My Country: The New Age (ongoing)

This show only has 8 episodes so far and I can’t tell you all how amazing this show is. Words can literally not even describe how much it’s consuming every waking second of my life right now. I think the main reason is Seon ho, who started off as someone you respect, but is constantly doing bad shit. He tries to salvage good things from the wrecks he keeps making, but who knows how long that will last. He is ambiguous and slowly turning into a villain. He is slowly turning into the things he wants to destroy and it’s heartbreaking. My heart aches for him and Hwi all the damn time. I just want them to be bff again and stop fighting, but of course this won’t happen. This show has political turmoil and a country at war with a royal family and council who just wants to watch the world burn. Of course, this means manipulating everyone to get what they want, but both Hwi and SH are trying to play their own game, accidentally putting themselves against each other constantly. Watch for heart break, friendship (sometimes), and very attractive male leads aha.

Also, the music is 1000000 thumbs up. All I can say is PLEASE WATCH IT AND FREAK OUT WITH ME.

It’s on netflix, so guys, no excuse lol (DM me to fangirl with me

Black

I don’t want to spoil too much about this show because it’s honestly an experience. It’s about a girl who can see when people are going to die because of the shadows that follow them. She meets a childhood friend, who has a secret, and he asks her to help him solve crimes and protect people from dying, but of course he has his own plans. Get ready for a funny and badass female lead guys.

It’s the first korean drama I watched and will always be one of my faves. It’s an incredible murder-mystery story with more layers than a damn onion. It’ll keep you on your toes and the ending makes me cri evry tiem.

Arthdal Chronicles

At first I thought this show was kind of weird, but an episode in and I was hooked. This show is difficult to explain, but it starts with a war between Arth and the Neanthal. 2 legendary babies get separated and live in opposite parts of the country. This show is hard to describe but it follows the 3 mains, Eunsom, Tanya, and Saya (and Tagon/ Taelha lol) and their fight through tragedy, and sometimes hell on Arth (lol – like hell on earth – am I funny yet). It’s all about a fight for power and revenge among the tribes. Every single character in this show has a different reason, but they all want power to get revenge, basically.

The fantasy aspect of this show and the different ‘species’ are incredible. It does get very political, but the fun of it is all the plotting, and how the characters fix their plans that don’t work out. Half way through I kept screaming at my TV for the mains (Tanya/Saya specifically) to just fkking talk to each other ughhh. Also, Saya will be my favourite unstable boy forever.

It has 18 episodes on netflix so far, but just signed up for 2 more seasons (thank god because if they stopped at 18 eps I’d pull a Rosa Diaz and kill everyone and then myself -.-”). I can’t wait for it to come back. GIVE ME MORE CONTENT.

Other honourable mentions: Hwarang, Rookie Historian Goo Hae-Ryung (not finished it yet, which is why it’s not up in my top 3), Missing 9, W Two worlds, Warrior Baek Dong Soo.

Thanks for reading and requesting!

I am always looking for new shows to watch, so send me recs too. I find my favourite ones are the historical dramas. But let me knoww!

#the untamed #cql #mzds #guardian #guardian cdrama #legend of fuyao #cdrama #kdrama #my country the new age #black korean drama #black #arthdal chronicles #my country a new age #chinese drama #korean drama #rec list

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Why Oblivion is Still the Best Elder Scrolls Game

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With their acquisition of ZeniMax Studios finally complete, Microsoft is poised to challenge Sony’s recent reign of exclusivity dominance by potentially making the next generation of Bethesda releases exclusive to Game Pass platforms. For the moment, though, the biggest benefit of this acquisition is undoubtedly the ability to access a good portion of Bethesda’s library of classic games via Game Pass.

While most of the Bethesda games recently added to Game Pass are worth playing for one reason or another, few are more intriguing than The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Sandwiched between the releases of the revolutionary Morrowind and the eternally re-released Skyrim, Oblivion is sometimes thought of as the middle child in the modern history of one of gaming’s most beloved RPG series. Nearly 15 years after its release, though, it’s remarkably easier than ever to appreciate the many ways that Oblivion represents the very best of the Elder Scrolls franchise.

Don’t believe me? Use its recent addition to the Game Pass library as an excuse to play Oblivion again (or perhaps for the first time), and you’ll find these reasons (and more) why it remains arguably the best Elder Scrolls adventure so far.

Oblivion Has (By Far) the Best Elder Scrolls Quests and Stories

Let’s start with one thing that few Elder Scrolls fans will argue against. When it comes to quests and stories, Oblivion is a far better game than Morrowind or Skyrim.

I’ve talked about this more extensively in my look at the best Elder Scrolls quests ever, but I remain truly amazed at how much thought and creativity went into even the most “average” quest in Oblivion. That baseline level of quality is really the key point here. While many of Oblivion’s biggest quests (such as the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild assignments) are obviously memorable, even the little quests along the way that you may have forgotten about offer something special that helps them stand out.

I don’t know why the Elder Scrolls quest design and writing teams were at the top of their game at this time, but I doubt even The Elder Scrolls 6 can top the work they did here.

Oblivion Found a Nice Middle Ground Between Accessibility and Depth

For quite some time, the line on Oblivion has been that it’s the “middle” game between Morrowind and Skyrim. While that’s obviously true of its release date, that idea speaks more to the suggestion that Oblivion represents Bethesda’s struggles to balance the more hardcore RPG ideas of a game like Morrowind and the accessibility improvements featured in Skyrim.

Some say that means Oblivion doesn’t truly excel at either pursuit, but I don’t see it like that. In Oblivion, you get a taste of Morrowind’s incredible RPG philosophies and mechanics without having to deal with that game’s most annoying aspects. At the same time, Oblivion manages to be much more playable than its predecessor while still feeling deeper overall than its successor from a role-playing perspective.

Oblivion doesn’t necessarily combine the best of Skyrim and Morrowind, but it finds a nice middle-ground between those styles that’s easy to appreciate to this day.

Shivering Isles is Still the Best DLC Expansion Bethesda Has Ever Made

Granted, I can’t (and would never try to) defend most of Oblivion’s DLC. There’s a reason that “Horse Armor” is still used as the gold standard for exploitative and uninspired video game microtransactions.

However, it’s easier to forgive Oblivion‘s DLC stumbles when you realize they all eventually led to the Shivering Isles expansion. That was the expansion that finally dared to answer the question “What if The Elder Scrolls just got weird with it?” By transporting players to a land ruled by Sheogorath (the often hilarious Daedric Prince of Madness), Shivering Isles dropped most of the stuffier fantasy elements of the franchise in favor of allowing the talented Oblivion design team and writers to breathe life into their wildest ideas.

The golden age of single-player DLC expansions was highlighted by the idea of letting studios break free and truly experiment with new and strange creations that would otherwise not likely see the light of day. Shivering Isles is perhaps the greatest example of that era.

Oblivion’s Atmosphere is Consistent and Helps Tell a Story

I will freely admit that the province of Cyrodiil isn’t always the most interesting place. There are certainly times when it comes across as “Capital City, Fantasyland.”

Yet, there’s a consistency to Oblivion’s atmosphere that I remain fascinated with years after its release. While Morrowind’s alien-like worlds are hard to beat from a pure design perspective and Skyrim’s tundras offer a welcome deviation from the most common fantasy tropes, there’s something about the way that everything flows in Oblivion that I’d argue Bethesda has never quite replicated.

Individual regions of Oblivion’s map manage to remain distinct while also feeling like the logical progression of the area you just arrived from and the area you’re going to. There’s also something to be said for how Oblivion sells the idea of people battling to protect their land from invasion and corruption by presenting a fantasy world that you might actually want to live in.

Get Past Their Voice Acting, and Oblivion Might Have the Best NPCs in any Elder Scrolls Game

I’d like to argue that Oblivion’s “bad” voice acting and awkward NPC designs actually give the game a personality you don’t find in refined titles, but I understand that some rough edges are hard to ignore.

Instead, let’s focus on the ways that Oblivion’s NPCs are advanced even by modern design standards. Nearly every NPC in Oblivion has a personality of their own, something unique to say to you, and will legitimately go about a daily schedule that even changes from day to day due to their ability to make dynamic decisions rather than simply follow a tightly scripted path.

At a time when developers are sometimes more interested in putting more characters on-screen rather than crafting richer NPCs (looking at you Cyberpunk 2077), there’s something undeniably refreshing about a game that emphasizes offering more unique interactions rather than simply relying on the quantity of NPCs.

Oblivion Let You Build Wild (and Broken) Characters

The “highlight” of Oblivion‘s character-building system in the minds of many fans will undoubtedly be the time they discovered it’s possible to make a truly invisible character who can pretty much do whatever they want. That kind of mechanical exploitation is certainly one of the most noteworthy examples of how Oblivion let you run wild with the characters you created.

Yet, when I think back on my hours with Oblivion, the kinds of broken characters I appreciate most are the ones who didn’t make it far. While Oblivion’s enemy scaling system has been (often rightfully) criticized for its shortcomings, there’s something to be said for how the game’s attempts at offering a consistent challenge level meant that your design decisions were tested more often throughout the game.

It wasn’t a perfect system, but when compared to a game like Skyrim, or even titles like Destiny, where building a viable character is really about reaching higher levels and reaping the rewards, I miss, at the very least, Oblivion’s attempts to challenge me to master the character I built and the times it would actively punish my worst decisions.

Oblivion is Less About Combat and More About Adventure

In terms of pure combat, Skyrim is really in a class of its own when compared to the other Elder Scrolls games. Its improved controls, cinematic qualities, and smoother animations are more than enough to make it the favorite among Elder Scrolls fans looking for the best action.

I certainly recognize that some of Oblivion’s combat system problems are the result of bad decisions and outdated technology, but years later, I really appreciate how the game was never really about the action; it was about the adventure. Much like how Fellowship of the Ring utilized action sequences as the response to danger that our heroes otherwise tried to avoid, combat in Oblivion is just one of those things that you’ll come across as you explore but isn’t necessarily meant to be the grand set piece or the big draw.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

While Oblivion’s main questline betrays this philosophy somewhat during its most action-heavy (and often worst) moments, there’s still a sense that the game is more about exploration, storytelling, and the little discoveries you make along the way rather than a desire to get you to the next big sequence or other chances to simply fuel a power fantasy.

The post Why Oblivion is Still the Best Elder Scrolls Game appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3vjIt9R

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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jczala · 5 years ago

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yaaaaaaass, let's play "send me an YGO character": Yusaku, Ryoken + Ai, please?

Hi! Thanks for the ask. (=^-ω-^=)Also answering for the two Anons who sent me Yusaku

Time for VRAINS protagonist himself, Yusaku Fujiki, aka Playmaker! I already answered for Ryoken’s, and I’m planning to do Ai’s on a separate post.

Let’s get started! (^._.^)ﾉ

Why I like them/why I don’t

Strong and steadfast, the cyber vigilante of Link VRAINS has a presence unlike that of previous franchise protagonists. He isn’t as high-spirited and youthful as Yuya or Yuma, or as carefree as Judai. Some people say he’s Yusei 2.0, but he has unique traits that make him so much different than Yusei. And unlike the previous protagonists who focused on bonds and friendships, Yusaku is a solitary character in a quest for revenge.

Yusaku has been through very traumatic experiences that changed him from his very roots. He was kidnapped at the age of 6, in addition to being imprisoned and forced to duel for six whole months. It seemed like a hopeless situation, but a single glimmer of light kept him going. When he was about to give up, one voice kept him strong.

Psychologically, all these factors and changes would scar anyone’s mind. Since then, the trauma would often disrupt Yusaku’s sleep, and he would wake up screaming and in cold sweat. The pain only grew as he grew older.

Then later on, he decided to embark on a quest in search for the truth and becomes a very self-driven person. For him it was a personal feud. He wants to destroy the Hanoi, settle his past, and save the person who saved him. The Ignis, or more specifically Ai, just happens to be a part of that.

Yusaku is quite sassy and edgy, presented in a way that it never cockiness, but instead it’s cool confidence with a bite. He is portrayed as a loner in school, and his actions and characteristics showcases his aloofness. His interaction with his classmate shows this–not fully caring about school and peers, and purposely building a wall to push away people who are friendly (except for Kusanagi). Needless to say, Yusaku is being unapproachable due to his past history. He is also shown to be incredibly intelligent and a natural computer-whiz with a knack for hacking.

As a Duelist, it is made clear in his character that he is well-rounded, versatile and understands his capabilities, not to mention that he is also a risk-taker. He doesn’t want to be top Duelist for glory or to selflessly help people. He was an emissary of revenge.

What I like about their appearance (≚ᄌ≚)ℒℴѵℯ❤

When news about VRAINS was released, it was love at first sight as the franchise introduced me to see what was seemingly like a male version of Serena from Arc V. He bears a striking resemblance that I immediately headcannoned him to be a Predatorshipping child. XD I was still a hardcore Arc V fan back then…

But honestly? Yusaku’s and Playmaker’s designs are both so good. I HAVE NO COMPLAINTS.

We have sexy and cool…

Cute and pretty…

Do I prefer their dub names or original names?

His name is still the same in the dub. XD

OTP

“I can tell you my true feelings! Even my suffering and my weaknesses! You live in the same world as me. You’re able to save me. And I’m able to save you.”

The prisoners of destiny…To Yusaku, Ryoken represents hope, and the show makes it clear that Yusaku’s feelings for Ryoken have been nothing but genuine feelings of gratitude, appreciation, devotion and forgiveness. The fact of the matter is that Yusaku would have never been able to survive the Lost Incident had it not been for Ryoken. And while Yusaku continues to live with his trauma, it’s also Ryoken’s “three things” that gives him strength and later on the motivation to pursue his goals.

But it’s not as if Yusaku’s feelings for Ryoken is just blind devotion. It’s a different brand of loyalty than that of the Knights of Hanoi. Yusaku truly understands the extent of Ryoken’s goals and cares for him so much to the point he’s willing to stand in his way and save Ryoken’s life.

When he learned Revolver’s identity, not once did Yusaku blame Ryoken for the Lost Incident, because he believes the good in Ryoken. He believes in the boy that became his voice of hope. Even when Bohman claimed that he was a fake, he didn’t waver and confirms the truth inside him because his connection and history with Ryoken are real.

As for Ryoken’s feelings for Yusaku, it’s quite clear that Ryoken both respects and cares for Yusaku. Season 1 made it especially interesting to see how much his past with Yusaku affected him. He is shocked and torn at the very knowledge that Playmaker is the same child he saved all those years ago, and fate really has a weird way of getting in your face. And in despite the difference in their goals, Ryoken continues to look out for Yusaku in his own way, like giving him the protection program and entrusting him with one of his ace monsters. If circumstances were different, they would have become good friends.

The rivals of this series are so much more than just ‘rivals’. It’s not just about the card game itself, or a show of strength and superiority. The show does a great job showing how far the both of them had gone as rivals and perhaps, more.

NOTP - Hotdogshipping

OT3

Yusei x Ryoken X Yusaku… (⁎˃ᆺ˂) Don’t ask why…

Ai x Ryoken x Yusaku… ~(=^‥^)/

Favourite card they use

Favourite moment they were in

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT FTW! (^･o･^)ﾉ”

Least favourite moment (=｀ェ´=)

Would I fuck, marry or kill them

I would hug him and marry him off to Ryoken. ฅ( ͒ᵕ̳ωᵕ̳ ͒)｡o○

#vrains #datastormshipping #yusaku fujiki #ryoken kogami #yugioh #serena (arc v)#arc v #ygo character discussions #reply #breakdawn-avenue

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bearpillowmonster · 5 years ago

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FF7 Remake Review (Story/Finale)

No matter what I or anybody else says or what you see, you have to experience it to understand it, I mean it’s playing hardcore with the story it’s presenting, newbies are probably not going to get it yet and will probably have to wait until the next game to figure it out but that’s okay.

DEFINITE SPOILERS IN THIS PART!!

Playing Crisis Core before this was probably the best move I could’ve made to prepare for this, it helps gives reason as to why Cloud has all these PTSD/mental problems. I guess you could say “His head was in the clouds.” but I could see how it would turn off normies. He had future vision in this game as well (not in og), some fans may be driven off by that, but I feel like they’re purposely making it that way, I’ll talk about it towards the end.

I didn’t expect the whole “save the environment” storyline, the way it’s delivered isn’t bad though. Guess you could say that it’s “recyclable” Ha, get it?

The whole Corneo plot is just like the ‘Eye of the Beholder’ episode of American Dragon: Jake Long which is funny. Except for the hand massage thing...why IS that in there exactly? That’s super weird. In fact all of Wall Market is weird. Just take that scene out of context and it’s bait, heck, put it in context and it’s bait.

This game presents its style to you in the first ten minutes, it’s an action experience, I’ve heard it compared to Uncharted because of the set pieces but the gameplay is too different for me to compare. But is it hype? Yes.

(Random screenshot I took) Another complaint I hear is that “this is a borderline remake, almost not even a remake.” So a reboot? I mean it’s over 20 years later and there’s a lot in there from the original and new stuff, did you just want the same game? When you see a movie remake, do you want to see the same movie? I know people hold FF7 close to their heart like I do the Lion King and whenever something comes up to threaten to take that place, they don’t like it. I don’t like the Lion King remake BECAUSE it’s the same thing, it was never going to live up or be better so I was looking forward to the new content. But they didn’t say that in the promos did they? Well with FF7, they did, they said it would be multiple episodes which I assume another will follow it in a few years, they also said they would be changing stuff, so we knew what it was going to contain, just how it was going to contain it and how much. I consider this well worth 60$, (35 hours) it's not be everything from the original game but I’m sure that game was a lot easier to make back then, you can see the amount of work they put into it and maybe they're stretching it out but I’m considering this as definitive and final as it gets, I’m down for it. I think if you expected ‘different’ then you’ll like the direction it heads. Not all characters from the original are in there (yet) and a few in particular are just teased but there’s stuff in there from the og that maybe you wouldn’t expect to be in there anymore, I can appreciate their outlandishness and loyalty in that regard, no matter how weird it was but some of it is still kind of dumb despite that.

Ok! So what about the Tifa/Aerith/Barret thing?? Well...it’s just a scene in Chapter 14, it’s not even that grand for each of them, I like the idea of the Gold Saucer event in the original more. I, of course, liked the scene I got with Tifa but I was expecting something a little more pronounced, stressed over nothing, I had to look up what the difference was because I didn’t even know that was a “special” scene.

Ending:

I didn’t expect them to go against literal “Destiny”, even with the Whispers which I guess weren’t in the original, it makes me wonder about it even more. I don’t know what predicts who joins you at the end to fight Sephi but I see people getting Barret, makes me wish. Another thing I dislike about RPGs are gauntlets, sure they make you feel powerful but failing Sephiroth and then deciding to quit and coming back to have to beat big mama Harbringer again (which I knew I’d have to do, I just don’t like it) makes it annoying, I did just fine with my equipment with Harbringer but I didn’t know about it making me weak with Sephi so I had to go back and re-evaluate then start over. But that’s just the baby gamer in me talking. I didn’t mind fighting the first two stages of him, I actually got pretty good and fast at it but the 3rd and final stage is brutal, even with 3 party members because of his Octaslash KO.

I mean we know Aerith’s fate in FF7 OG, might as well not beat around the bush about it, how do you surprise an audience that already knows the biggest spoiler? So they’re tossing it up. Ever since this was announced and we got that “Aerith Lives” cameo in Wreck It Ralph, I’ve always had a theory that maybe this remake will change Aerith’s fate? I guess we’ll see. Some characters fates have already been changed, I mean the credits even say “This unknown journey will continue.” we really don’t know what will happen.

They’ve said that the original game’s ending was the “bad ending” that they allude to at the end of this game so I see them literally making alternate timelines to change it up through these Whispers. Now I don’t know what I would think if they start time travelling and hopping dimensions, this isn’t Avengers: Endgame...who am I kidding, this isn’t Kingdom Hearts! The way it is now is fine with me, just don’t make it too complicated is all. But to say that the ending makes the rest of the game not matter, seems kind of wrong, what’s passed has passed, if they start retconning stuff then I get it but right now, it’s just saying that the future isn’t set in stone, this is a different story, the next game may even go under a different name.

Is it my favorite FF game? Well I found myself playing it for hours at a time which is hard for me to do, something I wanted XV to do so desperately for me but didn’t. I mean I would start at around 6 at night and just play until I left like leaving off or when I take a shower at 8:30 (yeah I schedule that) but with this game, I would check the time and be like “Oh it’s 8, I’ll play for another half hour and wrap this up.” And it will end up being 10:00 at night before I realize “Oh, is it really that late??” I get that for most people, it happens, they can play all the time but not me and I won’t get into why I’m like that but I will say that a game has never made me get that invested. I’ll probably end up playing the original, I know so many people say that it’s a totally different experience and I believe it. So far it is my favorite though, even if I haven’t played any of the original ones yet.

This game isn’t without flaws, when I was seeing some of the other complaints such as “being killed is sometimes out of your hands” and "some enemies are just bullet sponges, there’s no strat.” and “it’s dumb that every battle resets your gauge for everything (limits, AP, etc)” and stuff like that, I fully agree, but again it’s the light you view it in.

Does it belong in my top 15? I played it at night (as I mentioned) but that’s more or less what I would think about the whole day until I played it again. YES!

(PART 1)

(PART 2)

#ff7 #remake #final fantasy 7 #review #part 3 #story #spoilers #ff7 spoilers

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thesevenseraphs · 5 years ago

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Bungie Weekly Update - 10/10/19

This week at Bungie, the hunt is on.

Heroic Nightmare Hunts went live this week. Guardians must confront familiar foes from their past along with powerful Champions who will become more challenging over the next few weeks as the additional difficulties unlock. Keep a look out as new Nightmares emerge for the Legend and Master hunts.

That wasn’t the only event that started up this week. The Vex didn’t take too kindly to us venturing into the Black Garden. They have begun their own invasion and can be found mobilizing on the Moon. Fight off the Vex in our new six-player activity, the Vex Offensive. It’s available now for all Season Pass owners.

TOO HEAVY

Earlier this week, we issued a server-side change to reduce the amount of Heavy ammo spawning in the Crucible. The change affected Control, Clash, and Supremacy. We also have Heavy ammo changes planned for 3v3 Survival in a future update. You can read the full details here.

That wasn’t the only quick reaction we made to the Crucible environment this week. We also issued a server-side change that affected matchmaking in 3v3 Survival. You can read about the change here.

Experimentation with the 3v3 Elimination game mode is ongoing in the Crucible Labs. The first settings we deployed saw Heavy ammo spawning 90 seconds into every round. Revive tokens were also enabled. There was a bug causing Heavy ammo to spawn in instantly, but we were able to get that fixed with a server change. This week, these settings were slightly adjusted. Instead of receiving revive tokens, players can revive as many times as they are able—but the revive timer grows longer each time a player goes down.

Two additional configurations will be introduced in the weeks to come. Our plan is to gather feedback on what you like the best. If you played Elimination back in D1, next week’s settings might be familiar to you.

IRON BANNER

Lord Saladin is about to make his first appearance in Season of the Undying. The great fires of the Iron Banner will burn again as Guardians face off against each other for bragging rights and new rewards.

Iron Banner and Valor Bonus

Start: 10 AM PDT on October 15

End: 10 AM PDT on October 22

This season, willing combatants have a chance to earn the new Iron Will armor set. Here is a look at what you stand to gain in battle.

The way you earn rewards in Iron Banner is changing this Season:

There is a new Seasonal pursuit, which must be completed prior to being able to turn in tokens to purchase packages from Lord Saladin

This pursuit is character based and rewards the new S8 armor set

Each step of the pursuit awards Iron Banner weapons or armor

Most of the objectives within the pursuit track progress at any point during Season of the Undying, even if you have not yet acquired the pursuit

Until the Seasonal pursuit has been completed, all rewards will be obtained from completing matches and bounties

All rewards are weapons until the Seasonal pursuit is complete

The existing seven bounties that offered powerful rewards have been adjusted to offer pinnacle rewards (960 Power max,) but only four are available per event

We are tracking a bug in which the four bounties offered as pinnacle rewards rotate each day allowing more than four to be completed during a single event

Because Iron Banner has its own version of Control, the Heavy ammo spawning changes we made early this week will not be reflected in this Iron Banner. We are planning to make this change in a future update before the next event.

Now go control those zones!

FIRST TO FINISH

Last Saturday, the race began to complete “Garden of Salvation,” the newest Destiny 2 raid. As is tradition, players prepared the best they could and waited at the starting line to see if they could rise above the rest and finish first. We watched on as fireteams fought their way through the mysterious Black Garden. Reaching the final boss was only the beginning, as several teams all stacked up and began to try to put the pieces together and be the first to take it down. In the end, Clan Ascend emerged victorious, finishing an astonishing 2 minutes before the second team. We asked them to share a bit about their experience.

Congratulations on being World First for Garden of Salvation! Tell us a little about your clan.

Ascend: Our clan was built with the intention of going hardcore on Destiny 2’s raids! We were founded back in Forsaken, a month before “Scourge of the Past’ was about to go live.

Since then, we have been doing speed runs, World First attempts, as well as low man and low Light challenges. Our ritual was to do a lot of the previous raids under leveled while making sure we focus on executing the mechanics as smoothly as possible! We have achieved a 4th spot on “Scourge of the Past,” a 9th spot on “Crown of Sorrow” and now finally we have gotten our World First that we have been putting so much effort in together! The clan is trying to focus on a very small community that enjoys playing and interacting with each other so we can push each other further than we would have gotten before and ascend together to the top!

Practice how you play. That’s smart. What were some of your favorite moments during the raid?

Ascend: First of all, the STUNNING scenery. Honestly, this raid is so beautiful! The tether mechanic was awesome, even though it got hectic at times. Figuring out encounters together as a team is always fun, and then executing them with as little deaths as possible is just always a great time!

Anything else you would like to say as a team?

Ascend: Thanks to everyone for stopping by and giving us some love after the clear! Thanks to all the big streamers that we look up to who came to spread the love. Thanks for all the compliments that we have gotten. It's honestly still unbelievable that we have achieved this—especially because it was such a super close and intense race with Reality... And of course, thank you Bungie for making these races possible!

Congratulations to Ascend on the World First victory. We also want to congratulate all of the teams who showed up make an attempt and all of the teams who have been able to clear the raid thus far.

Need help getting the most out of your lunar excursions? Player Support has the info you need.

This is their report.

DESTINY 2 HOTFIX 2.6.0.3

This week, we deployed Destiny 2 Hotfix 2.6.0.3 to players on all platforms. This hotfix targeted an emergent issue where players participating in equipment-locked activities would not receive the Gate Lord’s Eye artifact when claiming it at Season Rank 7.

As with all updates and hotfixes, players should follow @BungieHelp on Twitter or monitor our support feed on help.bungie.net for the latest details as soon as they are available.

DID YOU KNOW?

Help.bungie.net hosts more than just a feed of support messages from Bungie. It is the landing page of our knowledgebase archive, where players can search key terms to find official documentation from Destiny Player Support. Additionally, it features a tile board of linked images which directs players to support content for immediately relevant Destiny releases.

Are you new to Destiny 2? Check out our New Player Guide and Destiny 2 Guided Support.Jumping in for Shadowkeep? See our support resources for Shadowkeep and Season of the Undying.Getting set up on Steam? Visit our Destiny 2 PC Guide and PC Move support pages.

DESTINY 2 KNOWN ISSUES

In addition to the support resources above, Destiny Player Support monitors player reports on our local #Help forum and tallies the latest issues into our Known Issues thread. Listed below is a selection of issues that have been reported by players:

Players may encounter crashes in the Gofannon Forge.

“The Enhance!” EDZ quest is no longer available to veteran characters.

The “Exodus Black” Nessus quest cannot be reclaimed if abandoned.

Some players who created a new character right before October 1 will be at 0 Power when logging in. To resolve this, players will need to delete their affected character and create a new one.

The “Show Me What You Got” Achievement/Trophy can no longer be unlocked on characters created prior to Shadowkeep. This can only be unlocked by creating a new character and proceeding through the New Light experience.

The perks for Lunafaction Boots do not describe their updated functionality.

The “Scan Patrol” Triumph won’t gain progress if scans are completed in the Chasm area on the Moon.

Additionally, investigations are ongoing for issues reported by players attempting to perform PC migration. Since launch, we have deployed several updates to Bungie.net and encourage all affected players to try again . As always, players who encounter issues are encouraged to report them to our #Help forum.

#Destiny #Destiny 2 #Bungie Weekly Update #long post #Destiny 2: Shadowkeep

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inevitably-johnlocked · 6 years ago

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Hi steph. Do you have a fic rec list of novel- long fics? Ta

AHHHH Nonny you’re in luck! As I’ve been sorting, I’ve been separating them into word length too, LOL. And seeing as it’s National Novel Writing Month, I think this is a great time to give our fandom writers love and appreciation for their novel-length works!

So I Googled how long a basic novel is, and according to this site, it’s between 40k and 90k. Hmm, well, I have them sorted in 25K chunks, so I’ll start at 50K to 100K, since it works seeing as NaNo’s writing goal is 50K :D).

I really hope you enjoy! :D Love all you authors so very much, and I look forward to this year’s submissions!

NOVEL LENGTH FICS (50 - 100 K WORDS)

Triage by scullyseviltwin (E, 51,612 w. || Character Injury, Introspection) – Sherlock’s mind goes exceedingly, devastatingly quiet and gray-blank. When he speaks it’s through a thick haze, it’s through molasses, he’s so disconnected from the words that it may as well be the unconscious shooter speaking.

In the Dark Hours by hubblegleeflower (E, 51,639 w. || Friends to Lovers, Unreliable Narrator, Closeted Bi John, Angst, Miscommunications, Slow Burn, First Time, John’s Blog / Epistolary) – John, wounded and silent, drifts back to Baker Street for healing...and then goes home again. He visits, gets more upbeat, chattier, smiles, jokes... and still goes home again. Sherlock wants him to move back in - it just makes sense - but John shows no signs of doing so. This is the story of how John and Sherlock learn to say what needs to be said when they're both so very, very rubbish at talking.

The Homecoming Series by sussexbound (M, 51,744 w. across 12 stories, WIP || Domestics, PTSD, Love Confessions, Hurt/Comfort, Cuddling, Jealousy, Family Issues, Cuddling) – Sometimes home is all you need. After three years of horror, betrayals, and crushing loss, John and Sherlock find their way back home to one another, and together find new footing in a world that has changed forever.

Spare Change by Ermerness (E, 51,966 w. || Rich Holmeses AU || First Kiss / Time, Holmes Family, Virgin Sherlock, Anal, First Meetings) – The Holmes family is one of the richest and most powerful in England. Sherlock spends his time flying around the world on the family's private jet drinking a lot and shopping at expensive boutiques as a way of trying to alleviate his endless boredom. His mother decides it's time he settles down with someone powerful, wealthy and well connected. John Watson happens to be none of those things.

Coventry by standbygo (E, 52,020 w. || Dollhouse AU, First Time/Kiss, BAMF John, Slow Burn, Falling in Love, Case Fic) – “Let me get this straight,” John said, wondering when his life had become a science fiction film. “Some guy orders up a personality, a person, to his specifications, and they program this into a real live person, who has consented to do this, and she goes to this person and acts as his wife, or lawyer, or Royal Marine, or Navy Seal or what have you, and she has all the skills, all the knowledge, everything? Then you say the magic words, and she follows you back to The House, and they erase it all until her next appointment?”

Lost Without My Blogger by starrysummernights (E, 52,155 w. || Rev. Reich, PTSD, Hurt / Comfort, Fluff / Angst, Psychological Torture, Reunion Fic, Friends to Lovers) – John is abducted and declared dead. How will Sherlock cope without his blogger? How will he react when John comes back from the "dead?" Drama and angst with a healthy dose of romance. Part 1 of I'd Be Lost Without My Blogger

John Watson's Twelve Days of Christmas by earlgreytea68 (M, 53,464 w. || Christmas, Holmes Family, Fake Relationship, Alternate First Meeting, Falling in Love, Fluff and Angst, Hardcore Pining) – It's the holiday season. John Watson needs money. Sherlock Holmes needs something else.

Fan Mail by scullyseviltwin (E, 53,942 w. || Stalking, Obsessive Fans, Angst) – “WatsonChick143 has been rather maniacal in her commenting as of late... she’s left comments on everything you’ve posted John, something so obvious can’t have escaped even your attention."

Albion and the Woodsman by Glenmore (E, 54,437 w. || Post S3 || Parentlock, Pining Sherlock, Angst, Family, Drug Use, Depression, Sherlock POV) – Sherlock and John are devastated after Mary Morstan makes her final moves. Sherlock relapses at the crack house, John walks around the world ... and a lot happens in between. Parentlock, in the good way.

Guilty Secrets by Ellipsical (E, 55,086 w. || Drumsticks, First Time, Love Confession, Self-Sexual-Discovery) – John has a prostate exam and discovers something surprising about himself. Experimentation follows. Sherlock wants to help. They're in love. You know the drill.

Wars We Fought, Things We're Not by blueink3 (M, 55,204 w. || Parentlock, Fluff & Angst, Kidnapping, Whump, Post-TAB, UST, Slow Burn, Couple for a Case) – Five months after John's world has fallen apart, Mycroft sends the consulting detective and his doctor on a case that neither is prepared for.

The Great Sex Olympics of 221B by XistentialAngst (E, 58,611 w. || First Time/Kiss, Experiments / Sexual Experimentations, Multi Pairings) – John Watson thinks Sherlock Holmes should admit that he, Watson, is more of an expert on sex than Sherlock is. But Sherlock refuses to concede the point. He comes up with an experiment plan that will resolve the issue. The results will determine who wins the prize. But sometimes even the best thought-out scientific study has unexpected consequences.

Bridging the Ravine by SilentAuror (E, 58,887 w. || Post S4, Couple For a Case, Bed-Sharing, First Times, Confessions, Awkwardness, Sex Trafficking) – Sherlock and John go undercover at Ravine Valley, a therapy centre for same-sex male couples in an investigation into a possible human trafficking ring. As they pose as a couple and fake their way through the therapy sessions for the sake of the case, it quickly becomes difficult to avoid discussing their very real issues. Set roughly six nine months after series 4.

The Book of Silence by SilentAuror (E, 60,056 w. || S4 Fix It / Post S4, Virgin Sherlock, Rosie / Parentlock, Domesticity, Fluff, Praise Kink, Sex Toys, First Person POV) – As spring blooms in London, John and Sherlock begin to take new cases and cautiously negotiate this new phase of life with John living at Baker Street again. Despite how well it's all going, John struggles to forgive himself for the way he treated Sherlock following Mary’s death as well as trying to figure out how to finally put his long-time feelings for Sherlock into words. Part 1 of The Book of Silence/Rosa Felicia

Scars by SilentAuror (E, 60,493 w. || Rape / Non-Con / Abuse, Gaslighting, Manipulation, Dub Con Elements, Homophobia, Angst With Happy Ending, Mary is Not Nice) – S3 rewrite, showing Mary’s manipulation of John as he realizes his love for Sherlock. Mary is not having it.

The Progress of Sherlock Holmes by ivyblossom (E, 62,006 w || Sherlock POV, Pining, Angst, Slow Burn, Infidelity, Sherlock Learns About Himself, Happy Ending) – Sherlock struggles with his feelings for John, makes a mistake, and learns just how important he and John are to each other. Non-BBC Mary / John, but it’s a *complicated* relationship.

An Experiment in Empathy by belovedmuerto (T, 62,397 w. across 13 stories || Empath AU || Psychic John, Psychic-by-Proxy Sherlock, Empathy, Psychic Bond, Romance / Bromance) – In which John is an empath, Sherlock is Sherlock, and an epic bromance happens. In the aftermath of The Great Game, John creates an unexpected bond between himself and Sherlock. Now they have to learn how to deal with it. John is better at this than Sherlock is.

Perdition’s Flames by i_ship_an_armada (E, 63,435 w. || Treklock AU, Est. Rel, Genetic Engineering, Angst & Fluff, BAMF!John) – Sherlock would do anything to save him. Risk anything. Give anything. His money, his life. His soul. What he does, though, is change both of their destinies forever. Genetic re-engineering is the only option left. It turns out researchers underestimated the life expectancy and potential abilities of genetically re-engineered subjects. The British government and what would eventually become the United Federation of Planets, however, had not. Part 1 of PF Universe

Bedtime Universe by Liketheriver (M, 65,173 w. across 2 stories || Hurt/Comfort, Romance, Angst, Humour, Case Fic) – John's POV during Season 2 and beyond when Sherlock takes up semi-permanent residence in his bed. A collection of codas and missing scenes wrapped up into one long fic and topped with a bow that takes the story beyond Reichenbach and into happy territory once more.

Watches 'Verse by bendingsignpost (E, 66,905 w. across 2 works || Magical Realism, Reality Distortion, Angst, Partial MCD, BAMF John) – First, he is shot in Afghanistan. Second, he wakes to a phone call in Chelmsford, Essex. Third is pain, fourth is normalcy, fifth is agony and sixth is confusion. By the eighth, he's lost track. (John-centric AU) Part 1 of Watches 'Verse

You Have Drawn Red From My Hands by J_Baillier (T, 67,085 w. || Three Garridebs, Heavy John Whump, Hurt / Comfort, Pining, Heavy Angst, Case Fic/Adventure, Slow Burn, Sick Fic, Injury, Guilt & Depression, Just Talk Already Please, Medical Realism, PTSD) – John getting injured leads Sherlock on a path of guilt and revelations.

Electric Pink Hand Grenade by BeautifulFiction (E, 67,718 w. || First Time / Kiss, Seizures, Headaches) – "If Sherlock's brain is a hard drive, then these attacks are an electro-magnetic pulse." Sherlock Holmes does not do anything by half, not even a migraine. It falls to John to witness one of the greatest minds he has ever known tear itself apart, and he must do his best to help Sherlock pick up the pieces.

The Green Blade by verityburns (T, 72,929 w. || Casefic, Bromance) – As a serial killer hits the headlines, the police are out of their depth and the next victim is out of time. With faith in Sherlock Holmes at an all time low, this is a case which will push loyalties to the limit...

Darkling, I Listen by You_Light_The_Sky (T, 73,254 w. || Fairy Tale AU || Loosely Based on Beauty and the Beast, Magical Realism, Suicidal Themes, Romance, Creepiness, Adventure) – No one who enters old London ever comes out. They say that the beast devours them. When his sister disappears, John ventures into the dead zone beyond the wall, and finds a brilliant madman under a terrible curse... Part 1 of Darkling I Listen + Extras, Deleted Scenes

The Moonlight and the Frost by CaitlinFairchild (E, 77,289 w. || Case Fic, Post-HLV, Self Harm, Virgin Sherlock, First Time, Oral/Anal/Rimming, Romance, Angst, Mary is Not Nice) – John has to somehow rebuild his life in the wake of Mary's betrayal and Sherlock's deceptions.

A Cure For Boredom by emmagrant01 (E, 81,665 w. || Dirty Talk, Threesomes, Light Dom/Sub, Sex Club, Experiments, Anal, Mildly Dubious Consent) – They'd never talked about sex in the year they'd known each other. Well, that wasn't quite correct: Sherlock had never said a word about sex; John had bemoaned his personal dearth of it on many occasions.

Secrets and Revelations by Hisstah (E, 83,535 w. || Sentinel / Guides AU, Omegaverse, Aventure, Violence, Anal / Oral, Omega!John / Alpha!Sherlock, Case Fic, Politics, Mild DubCon) – Dr John Watson has some major secrets that he's kept from his flatmate, Alpha Sentinel Sherlock Holmes. Now the Sentinel Tower is after him. Can John stay out of their hands until he can reveal his secrets to Sherlock? Part 1 of Secrets and Revelations

Uphill by scullyseviltwin (E, 84,945 w. || Olympics AU || Sherlock POV, Skier!Sherlock / Medic!John, Rivalry, 2014 Olympics, Happy Ending) – Sherlock Holmes is striving for gold in this, his fourth and final Olympics as a downhill Alpine racer.

Not Broken, Just Bent by Schmiezi (E, 87,585 w. || Pining, Love Confessions, Torture, Hurt/Comfort, Heavy Angst, Villain!Mary, Suicidal Ideations, Main Character Death, Sherlock POV, Eventual Happy Ending) – "For a second, I allow myself to remember teaching John how to waltz. There is a special room in my mind palace for it. A big one, with a proper parquet dance floor. For a second, I go there. I remember holding him, closer than the World Dance Council asks for, excusing it with the fact that we are training for a wedding, not for a competition. For a second, I feel his hand on mine again, smell his sweat, hear the song we used. For a second, I allow myself to love him deeply. For a second, only a second, that love reflects on my face." Fix-it for S3, starting at the end of TSoT. Evil Mary.

Bleed Me Out by antietamfalls (E, 87,987 w. || Vampire AU || Bonding, Vampire Sherlock, Fluff & Angst, H/C, John Whump, Magical Realism) – John isn’t exactly surprised to discover that Sherlock isn't human. His vampirism doesn't pose a problem, even when their relationship gradually grows into something more. That is, until a deadly revelation about John’s blood sends their lives spinning dangerously out of control.

A Case of Identity by jkay1980 (T, 91,009 w. || Fake Relationship, Post-TRF, Case Fic) – John and Sherlock have succeeded in rebuilding their friendship after Sherlock’s fake suicide, but an unusual case puts their relationship to the test. They pretend to be engaged and attend a marriage counseling workshop. Under the pretext of the case, Sherlock turns out to be a master of seduction, and John finally learns he might like Sherlock more than he thought. Slowly, John discovers that he loves Sherlock not only in a friendly, brotherly way, but both men have to fight their own demons before they can think of taking their relationship to a new level… [[I love this fic. It’s a really great long-fic!]]

The Stars Move Still by BeautifulFiction (E, 96,022 w. || Magical Realism, Demons, Slash to Pre-Slash, AU, Happy Ending) – "What could I want so desperately that would make me sell my soul? What could possibly compel me to surrender the part of myself that makes me who I am: the source of my magic, my self-control, everything?"

#steph replies #johnlock fic recs #my fic recs #novel length fics #long fics #Anonymous #50 to 100k #long post #nanowrimo

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lostsolsdestinyblog · 6 years ago

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Thoughts on the Last Wish experience and journey to get there from an everyday player and longtime raider

We are now almost 3 weeks into Forsaken and as the game experience progresses, so does the player experience. Without a doubt this is the best version of Destiny I have ever played, but within that as I have progressed I have seen and experienced things that I still feel could be improved and today I would like to focus on 3 of them that are all intimately connected within the progression and endgame experience; the raid, powerful rewards and engrams, and infusion. I’m going to start with the raid and as I go through, the other two will wind their way into the narrative.

I did not raid when vanilla D1 launched and it was well into TDB before I ran into a group of players in the crucible who invited me to their PvP team to do the Titan Bubble strat and then from there asked if everyone wanted to do a HM Atheon and Crota. We ended up doing both successfully as well as a HM Crota and it was cool. I was a hardcore raider in WoW for years, but none of my friends played Destiny so I was a solo player for a long time. It led to a deeply developed perspective on Destiny endgame for the player without a ready fireteam which is a perspective I try to give voice to and advocate for in my game feedback to this day.

Midway through TTK, I met my friends I play with now and they were very heavy raiders. When I joined them, we would run King’s Fall 5, 6, 7 times a week because it was so fun and we wanted to not only run it ourselves, but allow as many others as we could to experience it. We even went so far as to organize a bungie.net community raid day and got about 30 different sherpas to join up and bring teams to get players through who’d never raided before.

When Rise of Iron and WotM released, it was my first day one Destiny raid experience going in blind. We ended up getting to the Zamboni the first day and beat it and the rest on day two, and I learned a couple of things from the experience; the foremost being something I was worried about going in, that the raid dropping so soon after launch would force a rush to level and take away from the story experience and it did. So leading up to the release of D2 I gave a lot of feedback hoping that the raid would be released a couple weeks after release in order to give the story and rest of the experience a real chance to shine.

Unfortunately this did not happen and the raid was released the first Friday after launch and it had the impact I feared. It forced those of us who wanted to go into the raid blind day one to power through the campaign on 3 characters and ultimately it ruined the vanilla D2 story experience for me to where there are cut-scenes and adventures that I have still never run to this day.

So here we are at Forsaken and once again I have given a lot of feedback on my belief that the campaign, strikes, Nightfalls, etc should really be more of a focus as the initial endgame and build players up for a few weeks running that content before dropping the raid. I brought this up on the forums, on twitter and at the Summit. When it was announced the new power level cap would be 600, I hoped even more that there would be a significant delay to the raid release and when it was announced it would be the second Friday after launch I was at once glad it wasn’t week one, but very unsure that would be enough time to not have to do an insane grind to be raid ready.

This is where I would like to shift for a bit to the leveling/progression system. Throughout Destiny’s lifespan, there have been many different approaches to how we level. Within D2 we saw some extremes from vanilla where exotics and weapons were thrown at us early and often, to Warmind where we had very limited ways to get powerful drops each week and solo/small team players really struggled to level up to even be high enough level to raid, which was the best place to get leveled.

Things had to change with Forsaken and for the most part so far I think the progression system is the best it has ever been and has laid a foundation for which all future releases can be based off of. There is so much to do and so many ways to get powerful rewards now that there is always something to do to try to keep pushing forward. However, like any new system there are things that could be improved upon still and particularly in the days leading up to and now after the raid, those things have become quite apparent; which brings me back to the raid.

The decision to push it back ten days verses three ultimately made for a better launch week. It gave me a chance to really enjoy the campaign and the phenomenal work the writers, storytellers, artists and design teams did there. The leveling experience from 385 to 500 was very well done and went exceptionally smoothly outside of infusion costs which I’ll get to in a bit. I leveled all three characters to 50/500 the first weekend and had my main up to around 506ish, but that’s when the raid really started to loom and was compounded by the fact that we were less than a week out and still had no word on what the level requirements would be for it and where we needed to get to in order to participate.

I don’t think I need to say that raid launch day is like Christmas for Destiny raiders and as such, we had been so hyped for the new raid for a long, long time and adjusted schedules/took off work to be able to go in at launch. Thankfully within Forsaken’s new progression system there are a lot of ways to try to level up and playing pretty much every waking hour the final 3 days after the reset Tuesday (including a couple almost all-nighters), I was able to get my main up to 529 despite a streak of horrid RNG that saw me go 8 powerful engrams in a row at one point without getting an up in the slot they dropped for.

I was still apprehensive I hadn’t done enough despite basically playing the game every moment I wasn’t at work or asleep for 10 days, but it had been data-mined that the raid requirement was 520-550 so I was hopeful we’d be okay. My team had all gotten even further than me at between 536 to 541 and they had to play even more than I did and grind like never before on three characters to get there.

So it’s Christmas (raid day) and we are all there at launch and go in and it’s awesome. It’s a beautiful space and the mechanics were complex but fun and we were able to figure them out; the problem was the encounter was 560 and as much as we were able to basically figure out all the mechanics and knew what we needed to do, we weren’t doing close to enough boss damage at our levels. We gave it a go for a few hours and stopped to try to level more, then went back in and were still ultimately under-leveled to actually be able to compete in the first encounter.

I do not want to take anything away from what the raid is or what was achieved by everyone at Bungie in creating the overall experience and excitement that day with the raid world’s first chase, but as a raider and someone who’s team had looked forward to that day for so long and grinded so hard to try to be ready, it was ultimately anti-climactic and disappointing. Now the raid is out, everything is known and the game world has changed as a result of the raid being beaten and we’re still probably a couple weeks away from being leveled enough to give it a serious go.

I know there is a lot going around now about the raid being too hard or people need to shut up about the difficulty of the raid because it is good for the game if ultimately only a small portion of the community can play or beat it. I think while everyone is entitled to their opinions, it is these extreme generalities that you have to be one or the other that have ultimately ended up hurting the game in the past. I think that Forsaken has done a lot to correct going too casual in year one of D2 and ultimately I think the leveling/progression system so far has been very well done and will keep us invested and moving forward well into this expansion, but I also believe that all of that has been undercut to a degree the last few days.

It is okay to say that there should be things in Destiny that not everyone will get, but to say that not everyone should have the opportunity/ability to play the premier endgame content is not right in my opinion and to release a raid that only 18 people were able to complete in the first 24:02 verses 37,581 for King’s Fall was ultimately not the best approach. That is 37000+ players who if playing Friday, most likely didn’t get a chance to even beat the first boss let alone try to figure out any of the rest of the raid before it was all completed.

I was leveling my Titan this morning and a banner popped up on my screen as I did the mission that was unlocked by the team that beat the raid and it was advertising the Bungie Rewards program and saying I could get a reward if I beat the raid by Tuesday and it was kinda a slap in the face since there was realistically no way that 99.9% of the player base could be leveled enough to do that. The only players who could attempt this raid were people who either play Destiny for a living, have ungodly amounts of time to grind, or exploited Prime Engrams to level faster; and I don’t know if that was by design because the entire raid experience seemed like a love letter from Bungie to those players, but it could have still been that without leaving out the rest of the community.

I’ve raided since WotLK in WoW and as such I don’t go in expecting to beat raids on the first play through, but what I do expect is to make progress and to get some drops that will help in subsequent attempts. Destiny raids don’t play out over the course of days and weeks like WoW raids did when I played, but essentially it has been the same experience as we would beat a boss or a few and gear up to where we could finish. Spire took us 3 weeks to get to where we could do phase 2, but we still got to play the raid and get drops along the way.

We got nothing for our time and effort on Friday. There wasn’t even an ability to farm adds for moderately decent drops and ultimately I did not feel like it was respectful of my time or what I had to do to be there that day; and if that was going to be the case, it should have been stated weeks in advance what the requirements would be to not waste so many players time and effort.

The raid released too soon. Full stop.

It should not take power-leveling 3 characters 15-20 hours a day and spreadsheets of where and when to do what to be raid ready 10 days in and if you want to go with a raid release that is going to require a 3 character grind, the opening of said raid should not be level locking players who’ve put in that effort. There was simply no way this raid could be done without extreme leveling measures the first 10 days. I have teammates who put in 12 plus hours a day for 10 days and were still 20 levels under the first boss and what I don’t understand is why the raid just wasn’t scaled differently.

The opening boss could have been 540 and it would have still been challenging for everyone without level-locking most of the players. From there the rest of the bosses could have scaled to exactly the same levels they ended up getting to and it wouldn’t have affected the chase at all. Riven still would have been the same level and taken thirteen or however many hours to beat just her alone. The players who weren’t able to cheese or no-life their way to 550-560 would have still had a chance at raid rewards for their time and effort and everyone could have won.

That day was a great day for the game, studio and community in so many regards and I just wish it had not cut out 99.9% of faithful raiders to get there; which brings me back to leveling and infusion going forward now that we have solid goalposts to aim for to be able to attempt to clear the raid and I’ll start with infusion because it was an issue in the raid attempt itself.

The infusion system is not okay right now. It was one thing to have to drop our gear we prefer to use to level through the campaign, but I’m at 530 on 2 characters and I am to where I can maybe infuse a few weapons I need, but I’ve given up on armor completely. I used the last of my Masterwork Cores to put together an optimal-perk raid set and that cost me hundreds of Legendary Shards at the Spider to get to do that. I am now out of them and stuck wearing whatever high level armor pieces drop and at what looks like weeks until we hit 600 and I can get to wear an armor set I want and begin to think about putting a set together with mods/perks.

I dismantled my favorite D2 Titan armor set ever today that was completely masterworked and had my grenade cooldown PvP mods on it because I cannot afford to keep upgrading those pieces with the current infusion economy. I will just have to keep putting the mods on whatever gear I have at the time and getting them back when I dismantle them when something new drops and I don’t think that is what the system was intended to be. I know people who have lost thousands of Legendary shards at Spider without knowing because of his unnecessarily punishing MC costs doubling with every purchase. I have other friends that have chosen to spend shards for cores and now have neither and are basically hosed infusing anything. The system needs to change and it needs to sooner rather than later. I understand we could infuse too easily in year one and the game needs more thought into choice and consequence, but this is way too far that direction.

Then we have powerful rewards and engrams. Ultimately I think this system has been pretty good, but there are a few areas I believe it needs to improve. While there are tons of ways to get rewards in Forsaken and to continually level up without hitting soft caps or barriers to progression, the level things drop at has become more of an issue the further past 500 we get.

It started with regular legendaries basically becoming infusible blues at 500. They just drop too far below our character power level. Right now if we have any slot that is far below everything else we have equipped and anchoring us, only powerful rewards can raise them. This is a problem when you get 6 or 7 in a row that drop at or below the level of what you had equipped in a particular spot because say your boots are 10-12 PL lower than the rest of your gear but won’t drop. Regular legendaries need to be able to have a chance to drop within 5 of our character level to have other avenues to bring up those anchor spots without wasting powerful rewards.

This was an issue not long after crossing 500 and is becoming more so now because once you get to 520 or so, most of our powerful rewards only drop one power level higher than our character power level and so now even without gear or weapon slots anchoring us, there is a good chance that whatever powerful reward drops is not going to be an up. I ran my daily crucible, daily Gambit, weekly Gambit, the new mission unlocked from the raid, and turned in 2 powerful engrams this morning on my Titan and out of 6 powerful rewards, 5 were below my equipped item and did not raise my PL. The one that was an up was 1 PL above what it replaced.

Currently normal legendary engrams are performing like blues. Most Powerful engrams are performing like previous normal legendaries and in order to get the really good powerful drops, it requires doing the overall weekly Dreaming City (complete 3 weekly bounties). So while I have goal posts to be able to raid and the ability to continue to push forward constantly throughout the week, it’s baby steps outside of the Dreaming City content and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but feels unfortunate again by the release schedule of the raid. If the raid were still a week or two out, I’d say the regular legendaries would still need the chance to drop within 5 of our level, but the rest was okay. As is though, I think that locking most powerful drops to one level above our character is a problem as players try to reach raid requirements and they should have a random chance to drop anywhere from one to five over our character level. They could even be weighted to the lower end, but there should at least be a chance at a better up.

Also notice I have said nothing of exotics and leveling because they are so rare they are a non factor.

So those are my thoughts and I hope what has come through is that I still love Forsaken, the raid, the grind and the progression. The difficulty of things is great and it is okay for some things to be harder to do and achieve, but I think some of it could have and should have been approached differently and I hope the experiences of myself and other players like me will be considered in the future when planning content.

One last thought as well on the (not as, but still) early release of raids. While the raid release didn’t have the effect of taking away from the campaign and story that previous raids have, I do think that it rendered the Tangled Shore kind of meaningless only 3 weeks into the expansion and that is a bit sad. It feels like the patrol zone equivalent of the Farm at this point and it’s such an incredible zone that I wish had gotten a bit more time in the spotlight before the focus shifted to the Dreaming City (which is a hard act to follow after going there).

Thank you very much.

#Destiny2 #destiny 2 forsaken #forsaken #Bungie #lost sols #last wish

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penniesforthestorm · 6 years ago

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On Jane, Part 1

In Which I Yell About One of My Favorite Books

What do we talk about when we talk about Jane Eyre? After nearly 175 years, this novel remains lodged in the popular consciousness, enough that most people have at least a baseline familiarity with the story. An orphaned young woman, with little knowledge of the outside world, becomes employed at a mysterious mansion, and falls in love with the owner, who is harboring a Deep Dark Secret. Misty moors, bumps in the night, cruel relatives, an angelic child who dies of tuberculosis, a brooding anti-hero: so far, so Gothic. It’s been adapted and interpreted by the likes of Orson Welles and Franco Zeffirelli, referenced by C.S. Lewis, and been thoroughly dissected by hordes of scholars.

But I want to talk about it some more. Be forewarned: I’m not coming at this from any kind of ‘academic’ perspective. I’m not an expert on anything (though I have been told I shoot a pretty good game of pool, and my baked goods have lately been in demand at family gatherings). I am a Person Who Likes Things, and likes writing about those things, so that’s what I’m going to do.

One final caveat: if you have not read this book, this may not be the greatest introduction, as I’m going to spoil the heck out of it and also be discussing it from the perspective of someone who has read it many times. But I’m not going to stop you; I trust your judgment. To quote Rik Mayall in Blackadder: “Let’s dooooo it!”

Right. So, who exactly is Jane Eyre? In the opening pages of the book, we get a vivid portrait of our protagonist. When we meet her, she is ten years old, orphaned, and living a miserable life with her wealthy, widowed aunt and cousins. She is subjected to bullying of both the physical and emotional variety, treated as less than a servant because she is a ‘dependent’. But little Jane is a feisty creature: she fights back against her wicked cousin John, dealing him a well-deserved punch to the nose. She is roundly punished for this, locked in the bedroom where her uncle died, and she broods on the fact that his unquiet ghost might just visit her.

A visitor does come, in the form of the local doctor, called in after Jane faints from fear. For likely the first time in Jane’s life, someone listens to her, and takes her seriously. He suggests that Jane be sent to school, and her aunt is seemingly only too happy to be rid of her, though not before calling in the headmaster of her school of choice and putting a flea in his ear about Jane’s ‘deceitful nature’. In return, Jane boldly informs her aunt that she knows her dead uncle would disapprove of her treatment, and calls the older woman a liar to her face—which, honestly, is pretty hardcore for any ten-year-old.

This is something that I think people tend to miss about Jane, and often the reason why adaptations of her story feel miscast. Her appearance, throughout the book, is described as petite and unremarkable, her manner quiet and shy. But Jane is not fragile—no little porcelain doll. Her inner spirit is as bright and hard as a diamond.

Consider her in contrast to the first friend she makes at school: the gentle, but doomed Helen Burns. Helen is thirteen—nearly a grown-up in Jane’s eyes. And crucially, she sees and acknowledges Jane in a way that no one else has, taking Jane under her wing and trying to give her some guidance.

But Helen is already ill when we meet her, and, though she doesn’t say it explicitly right away, she knows that she is dying. Consequently, her mind, genius though it is, is turned away from the world—she dismisses her own intellectual prowess and cautions Jane against over-valuing human attachment. It’s cruel, because if her flame had been allowed to burn, it would have blazed, but instead, it’s snuffed out in the space of a few pages.

Helen is undoubtedly good, and her love for Jane is clear, but both the reader and the young Jane understand that her ascetic detachment is no way to live. After Helen’s death, the narrative skips ahead to Jane at the age of eighteen, now teaching at the school she passed through. And Jane wants to get out and see the world. Though the school itself has improved from the miserable place it used to be, it’s still a stifling atmosphere, and Jane wants to change her situation.

This, I think, is one of the most important elements of the book: Jane’s journey to control her own destiny. At the beginning, she is utterly at the mercy of authority figures, and though she makes some stabs at independence, she is largely acted-upon—things happen to her. But now, here she is, taking action and advertising herself as a governess. Soon enough, she is called to Thornfield Hall.

A word about the job of ‘governess’ is necessary here. For a woman in Jane’s position at that time: educated, but no family ties or sponsor of any other kind, being a governess was one of the most respectable things she could be doing (outside of marriage). Jane’s specific situation is an excellent one: only one child to look after, room and board provided, and a salary of 30 shillings a year. (I don’t know the conversion into modern figures, but consider this: in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit makes 15, and he’s got a wife and six kids to take care of, and they’re squeaking by. Jane isn’t exactly going to get rich, but in theory, she’ll at least be able to lay some aside.)

This new position brings three brand-new figures into Jane’s life. The first is the kindly housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax, who takes an immediate liking to Jane and makes an effort to secure Jane’s comfort. The second is Adele Varens, Jane’s charge. Adele is the daughter of a Parisian dancer, and though her situation is much easier than Jane’s was at that age, Jane sympathizes with her, because she’s in a foreign place, utterly dependent on the ‘kindness and charity of strangers’. The third, of course, is Mr. Edward Fairfax Rochester, master of the house and probable father of Adele. When Jane arrives at Thornfield, Rochester is away, but soon enough, the two of them meet, in a moment that, to me, represents another step on Jane’s path to self-determination.

Jane sees Rochester on the road to Thornfield on a winter evening, when his horse slips on ice. She offers aid, and it’s grudgingly accepted by this gruff stranger. As far as Rochester knows at first, Jane could be a visitor to any of the nearby houses, or someone’s daughter—again, he is able to see her without context. Likewise, Jane is undaunted by any fear of ‘impropriety’ toward her boss—he’s just a man who needs help, and no one else is there to do it. So she steps forward, laying the foundation for everything that will come after.

I have come to the conclusion that I’m going to need to split this into three parts; I hope you’ll all stay tuned. Before I go, let me say one more thing: during my most recent re-read of this book, one thing that leaped out at me was the beauty of the prose itself. Yes, the language is flowery and elaborate, and there’s a ton of rumination, but if you’re patient, you’ll find plenty of gorgeous phrases. Like Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Bronte was devoted to the land itself—in her case, the moors and ancient woods of Yorkshire. The countryside is just as much a character as any of the humans, rendered with vivid life, and tracking the seasons through the progression of the story is a fascinating experiment. I guess that’s all for now, but come back for Parts 2 and 3 if you like what you’ve read so far!

#prose #Long Reads #Jane Eyre #Part 1 of 3 #views my own

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mixxxfeelings-blog · 6 years ago

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Destiny 2: Out with the New..In with the Old?

So I’ve been a hardcore Destiny fan since its release and I will be the first to tell you it works best in bursts.

Throughout the entire franchise Bungie had always done a poor job at the simpler aspects of communication. They promised things, that depending on your interpretation of their words, were very feasible or too ambitious. At best their words came across as nebulous to much of the diehard and casual community.

In D1, The Taken King brought new life into the game when it needed it most. Now in D2 it looks like we’ve hit the same point.

A lot of players, myself included, have been running on empty trying to care about the expansions D2 delivered in the first year. Curse of Osiris had much to be desired and I’ll finish Warmind when I have the time. But after spending so much time maxing 3 characters on 2 systems I really needed a reason to do so.

So let’s talk about FORSAKEN.

THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN.

Quite literally we are going backwards and that’s a great thing. When D2 came out and the most devoted players had run out of content to actively do, the critiques and complaints started pouring in. If you lurked on the DestinytheGame subreddit you could see that most of the comments made comparisons to between D1 and D2 in regards to features, activities, and general quality of life changes to the franchise. Many players felt that D2 offered a more simplistic and streamlined experience in relation to D1, which left the hardcore players with little to do week after week. With Forsaken, Bungie is trying to take that criticism and run with it.

So what’s coming back? Over the course of the summer Bungie will be updating the game to reintroduce older modes and pother changes that all players (not just those who purchase Forsaken) will be able to take advantage of.

In general we can see that they will be tweaking some of the D2 systems to make them work better for players, while the roadmap doesn’t give us all the exact details. As of now the first two columns are already live, modifying players options in the Crucible, adding space to the Vault, and expanding the Masterwork system are probably the most notable changes there.

Between now and then with update 1.2.3, we will be getting 6v6 Quickplay and Permanent Rumble, two Crucible options that players have been asking for since the first couple months of the game. In addition to that we’ll be rounding out Year 1 with Prestige Raids and Triumphs, both returning systems from D1 and an event called Solstice of Heroes, which will probably be further detailed during Bungie’s E3 event.

In the final column we have a list of the smaller additions Forsaken will be bringing. Some of these changes we examined a little more deeply than others during Bungie’s ViDoc, so for now we are gonna stay focused on those.

The first guy on the list is Gear Collections. Separate from the Vault and the Tower Kiosks, the game will now allow you to track what Weapons, Armor, and Items you have obtained during your D2 tenure.

The categories tell you how many of the items you have collected, how many there are in total, and what you need to do in order to get the ones you’re missing.

Then with Exotics (maybe more but we’ll have to wait and see) you can purchase exotic items you have unlocked, but may have dismantled during your gameplay. With the exotics and you haven’t discovered the Collection will let you know if you have top complete a particular quest or objective in order to discover it.

Other additions that weren’t individually pictured, but are interesting nonetheless are Weapon Slot Changes, Weapon Randomization, and an update to the Mod System.

With the weapon slots, Bungie is looking to bridge the gap between new and old players.

D1′s weapon setup had 3 slots, Primary (Assault Rifles, Hand Cannons, Scout Rifles, Pulse Rifles), Secondary (Shotguns, Sniper Rifles, Fusion Rifles, Sidearms), and Heavy (Machine Guns, Rocket Launchers, Swords).

D2′s set was a tad different with their slots being Kinetic and Energy which shared all weapon types, with the exception of Grenade Launchers, Rocket Launchers, Swords, Trace Rifles, Shotguns, Sniper Rifles, Fusion Rifles, and Linear Fusion Rifles. whew

Players felt that D2′s changes made players weaker all around, by sticking the game’s more powerful and situational weapon types into the weapon slot that would have the least amount of ammo drops and overall use.

With Forsaken, you can move weapons to any of the 3 slots you want, which means things are gonna get a whole lot crazier, but its gonna be a great ride for both PvE and PvP environments.

To add to that insanity, we’re getting back Radmon Rolls (Weapon Randomization), meaning that not every gun of the same make and model is identical. Bringing more of the Borderlands style of gun drops to the game. Some gun/perk combinations will work really well, some will be useless and do nothing, and others will (this is may personal favorite), will cause players to janky, different things with their loadouts

NEW STUFF INCOMING

So what do we have on the way?

New WEAPONS

New ENEMIES

New PLACES

New MODES

New RAID

NEW SUPERRRRRS

So considering this is our first look at all this content, there may not be too much to say at this point, but the visuals give us enough to be excited about.

So it’s no surprise that we’re getting new weapons, I mean that happens all the time right? But new weapon types? Not so much. But Bungie’s taking us back to 2013, when Bows were dominating the video game ecosystem.

So Bungie didn’t go into the specs of the Bow weapon type, but this is what we know or can infer right now:

Different Bows are designed for different types of engagements, most likely close range, midrange, and long distance.

Some bows have energy related abilities.

Time-to-Kill is balanced to make up for the act of drawing the bow.

Now Enemies. Because Bungie will be exploring more of the story during their E3 slot, we only know a bit about who were are gonna be fighting in Forsaken.

But if you guessed Fallen

YOU’D BE RIGHT

I bet you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here today.

So what they have said so far is that there has been a jail break at the Prison of Elders in The Reef, so it stands to reason that all the enemies we’ll be fighting are some topnotch Fallen.

We will be getting new Fallen enemy types and a sizeable number of Baron boss fights.

The major Barons are said to each operate in their own way, providing different types of engagements, instead of just a simply Kill List.

So where is all this going down? So obviously we’re going back to The Reef, the section of the Solar System that has appropriated the asteroid belt in Jovians (the Jupiter/Saturn area).

More specifically we have a new area to explore!

The Tangled Shore is a network of terrestrial platforms floating in the Reef, that are linked together through cables and wires. The idea itself is reminiscent of Fallen architecture, but I think it’s safe to assume the Awoken are responsible for its creation.

I would appear to be very open from the shots delivered in the ViDoc, but these could be imagine captured from cutscenes or early builds of the game that haven’t been populated. So there’s definitely more questions than answers here.

There is definitely an overwhelming Western theme in play here so maybe it just empty???

With the new Raid Bungie confirmed that there will be a new location that will house the Raid itself, which is slightly different than the previous raids, which were typically connected to the general overworld. How exactly they plan to section all that out has not been discussed, but I’m sure we’ll get more information on that moving forward.

The new raid is takes place in the Dreaming City. This is the birthplace of the Awoken, who are descendants of humans that escaped Earth’s orbit during the Collapse. As it stands we don’t have a real sense of the general timeline of those events, but it seem reasonable that the Dreaming City may provide some answers.

Bungie has said that the new raid with offer new puzzles to solve and mysteries to uncover. But that’s nothing new. What’s new: The raid will CHANGE. Bungie says that as people continue to play the raid, the environments will change so that over the course of weeks and months the raid will not be the same as it was when it premieres.

Definitely gets points for being pretty.

Time will tell what the scope of these alterations and changes will be. Players at least remember that the Infinite Garden from the Curse of Osiris expansion didn’t live up to the hype. Hopefully, the Dreaming City can.

So we’ve hit some PvE content, some PvP content, so now let’s talk about some content for PvEvP???

So at first glance this takes me back to Archon’s Forge from D1′s Rise of Iron expansion. Not surprisingly considering some of Bungie staff have looked to RoI for some inspiration, but we’ll get to that in a second.

For starters, Gambit is a mode for some PvE arena goodness. You kill enemies for motes of light which your team collects to deposit in your bank.

When you do that you end up sending a stronger enemy over to the opposing team’s arena. While that enemy is alive the other team will be unable to deposit motes, so you can gain a lead. After that you can fill up your bank, which summons an enemy for you and your team to take down, called a Primeval. Once you defeat it, you win the the round. Simple right?

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE!

You can also use motes to jump over to the other teams arena to kill their guardians or just generally prevent them from advancing. Bungie didn’t say what limitations there are in doing this, but I’d bet there’s a once per round limit.

Hmmmm? Is that everything? I felt like there was something I was really excited about, but after getting this far Ican’t seem to remember what...it...was...

OHYEAH

NEW SUPERS

But now I’m sad because I just remembered. Bungie didn’t show us too much on this front. But what they did say give us enough to work with I think.

So, first thing, these are not really new classes. Big difference there. And I really think what they’re doing here is more reasonable. They are creating new perk paths.

In D1, each class at a suite where you could choose what perks you wanted to pair together, but you were limited to one perk from each column (i.e. you couldn’t use two grenade type perks at the same time). The downside to that system was that you typically wouldn’t alter your perks much. At best you found the right combination for your playstyle and kinda left it at that. You couldn’t go full RPG and style your perks for different engagements as much as you might’ve wanted.

But in D2, the classes were steamlined as well. You choose from a jump type, grenade type, and melee type. Then you chose your path, which contained perks that would affect your playstyle. With a new super getting added to check class, it would be unreasonable for them to not introduce new perks, or a new path to augment it.

From what we’ve seen older supers look like they could have new abilities and new supers may be lifting parts from the super we lost going into D2. Gunslinger seems to be pairing its Throwing Knife mechanic with the old melee Super Bladedancer.

Warlocks seem to have a flashier teleport during Stormtrance and beam super not unlike what Moira from Overwatch has. And Titans get a Warhammer, which seems to blend together abilities from the new and old Sunbreaker.

GEEZ, that was more stuff than I thought to have before E3. But we got through it and I’m definitely excited to get back into one of my favorite game addictions!

#destiny #destiny 2 #warlock #hunter #titan #ps4 #gaming news ps4 #xbox one #pc gaming #gaming #bungie #activision

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neon-serpent-llc · 7 years ago

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Time to stroke my ego and elevate my opinions to untouchable facts with the fourth annual Whatever Awards! Now, don’t let me being a veteran AAA game developer trick you into thinking this list has any merit. My pointless, subjective list carries the same weight as The Oscars, that is to say, none.

Now read my absolutely important, objective list of Best Games.

Intentionally Hardcore or Accidentally Impossible? - ELEX One of my gaming guilty pleasures involves wonky sandbox adventures from Europe. Colorful worlds with unconventional RPG systems make for...unique game experiences. Which means unpredictability; something AAA games sorely lack.

This year’s prime example was ELEX, from the makers of Risen. Adding a dose of sci-fi seemed like an interesting twist on this already bizarre sub-genre, but it may (or may not) have gone horribly wrong. Because I genuinely can't tell if this game is monstrously difficult by design, or by accident.

The leveling system is heavily balanced towards quest completion, yet most quests involve traveling to areas swarming with tough monsters (who reward almost no experience for being killed). The combat is extremely stiff, so fighting them is an uphill battle to begin with, but presumably easier with better weapons. Yet you can't upgrade weapons (or even hold fancy weapons, like a blaster pistol) until you level up your character...which is almost impossible, since you finish so few quests. There's no good way to break in to this loop.

So my brief time with ELEX devolved into cautiously exploring the world and running away from all combat. And reloading often from the never ending stream of one-shot kills.

The Tale of Two Takes Award(s) - Nioh and The Surge Both games offered a take on the Soulsborne formula this year, with varying degrees of success. Without naming names, one was fast, fun, and interesting, whereas the other was slow, awkward, and frustrating. I liked the settings of each, and the core systems, but ultimately one I finished and the other I dropped after getting lost for hours in the second level. And for me to get lost is an almost unheard of feat. Remember, I make virtual mazes for a living!

Phrases to Retire Award, part 1 - Love Letter Every indie game on Steam is a love letter to some game from the past. Just once, I'd like to see a reply from one of the games that’s been called out.

Dear Face Xploders Xcelsior, Thanks for the kind thoughts. I tried your demo, and it kinda sucked. Please, don't write me again. Ciao, Castlevania.

P.S. Stop mentioning my name!

Too Much of a Good Thing Award - Prey Prey is a smart, rewarding game with confident, emergent design. Except for the last four hours of backtracking and more backtracking through monsters that repopulate at mach speed. Because of this, there is little motivation to fight them, only to flee, leading to a marathon of speed-run style tactics to get from point A to B, and back again. That said, the ending IS great, and makes everything come together as a whole, but it could have arrived much sooner. AAA games are so afraid to cut any finished content, (hey, that cost time and money!), but sometimes its necessary.

Way Too Much of a Good Thing Award - Miitopia Miitopia is a quirky, cute game with fairly standard JRPG design. And there's a good dose of humor in the unexpected interactions between Mii characters. Nothing close to the likes of Tomodachi Life, the insane, brilliant Mad-Lib generator, but still amusing.

This is a slow paced game, one that I burned through over the course of many nights, falling asleep in bed. But the thing is, this game is HUGE. It keeps going and going, world after world. Long after it has run out of new things to show you, there is just MORE. Even beating the game unlocks two worlds and an infinite side-quest system. As a kid, I never imagined that a game could be too long. Sorry, Little Me, but you were wrong!

Bad Habit Award - Hyperbole Headlines Everything is either the Best Thing Ever or the Worst Thing Ever. This reaches much further than the game industry, but some (not all) of our news sites have jumped fully onto this trend, which is the Worst Thing Ever, by the way.

I Forgot This Came Out Award - For Honor One of my only repeat awards, the "I Forgot This Came Out" Award is not meant to downplay the award's recipient, its meant to humbly remind us that hype and excitement mean nothing when it comes to standing the test of time. For Honor was a big E3 reveal for Ubisoft, a new IP set to redefine online combat. It had the world's attention. I tried the beta and it never clicked for me, but I know some of my co-workers adored it.

And then...it was gone. Like so many of the games we pour years of our lives into creating, they get their 15 seconds of fame, and nothing more. No end of the year praise, no all-time best lists. Just another momentary fragment of joy.

Best MMO - Destiny 2 No matter what Bungie claims, Destiny 2 is an MMO...and it's pretty fun this time! There's a deep-seated momentum to the gameplay. You never sit still as you dance through a progression of ever more colorful worlds. And strong art direction bleeds through everything. Compare that to my only memories of Destiny 1: sitting around, waiting for a FitBit to decode computers in dull, empty rooms.

Phrases To Retire Award, Part Two - Blowing Up My phone is blowing up! This game is blowing up! These awards are blowing up! They got two whole retweets!!

Remasterpiece Award - Final Fantasy XII Sometimes its sacrilege to mess with a masterpiece. Even the phrase "Who shot first?" evokes memories of defending Han's trigger finger. Yet, in videogames we buy remakes and remasters with the express hope that our masterpieces HAVE been messed with. They better have spruced up them graphics and tripled the FPS, re-recorded the voice-overs, let me fast travel, save anywhere, and given me a new epilogue for good measure.

Such is the case with Final Fantasy XII, a masterpiece to begin with, and much more so now with the addition of one clever feature: the fast-forward button. One click and the entire game runs at either 2x or 4x normal speed. I was certain using it would cheapen the experience, but to my surprise, it greatly enhanced it. By speeding up the tedious parts, players have more time to enjoy the tasty bits. It encourages deeper exploration of the world and its content.

One could argue, of course, that there should be no tedious parts, but I can think of few narrative-heavy games without some tedium built-in. Every second of the story can't be exciting, we need peaks and valleys. A sprinkle of tedium helps virtual worlds feel more lived-in and authentic. Pure games like Ikaruga can dispense with tedium because the story of Ikaruga is "shoot or die!"

It'll be interesting to see what happens with Shadow of the Colossus next (this) year. A ground-up remake of yet another masterpiece, but by a completely different creative team. Every line of code is new. If I told you I had the exact blueprint to replicate the Mona Lisa, I doubt you'd be excited to see my "remake."

Trend That Needs To Die - Loot Boxes They've been lame since day one and everyone finally seems to agree. Companies, just let us directly buy the dumb consumer junk we want!

Game that Most Impressed my Parents Award - Horizon: Zero Dawn My Dad is a classical landscape painter, so I like to show him vast game environments. While he was impressed by Assassin's Creed's Egypt, and Zelda's rolling fields, he was blown away by the sheer beauty of nature on display in Horizon. And my Mom also remarked that it was "very pretty." I made a brief attempt to explain robot dinosaurs to them, but ultimately concluded with, "look, its a videogame, ok?"

The Inverse Xenogears Award - Mass Effect Andromeda Xenogears, if you'll recall, started strong and remained strong...until disk 2 where, frankly, the game kinda fell apart. Many games fall into this mold, most famously Mass Effect 3 which ended on a particularly underwhelming note.

So what happens when I game STARTS on a particularly underwhelming note, but gains momentum and finishes strong? Such is the case with ME:A. The game sets up a simple, awe inspiring premise: humanity goes to Andromeda. We've finally reached a new galaxy. Things beyond our imagination await here, just you wait!

Oh, never mind. Turns out its just the standard bipedal dudes-with-guns waiting for us, behind cover no less. Also, some animations were weird. Buzz killed. Understandably, most people bailed out around this point.

But, given about ten hours, the game opens up. For one, you start visiting proper alien-looking planets, and the scope of the story broadens vastly. Around the same time you've gotten enough abilities to zip around the battlefield, never needing to hide for cover again. This is where the game should have started.

By the end, the fate of Andromeda convincingly rests in your hands in a truly bombastic finale that hits on every level. And your character is a bona fide joy to control by this point. This is easily the strongest ending in Bioware's history, overcompensating for the ME3 ending fiasco. Shame that most will never see it, and the stage that it sets will never continue. Mass Effect is likely dead now.

What's the Fuss Award - Player Unknown's Battlegrounds This game has been around for years, more or less, in various forms. So why do people suddenly care? Why this one? Nothing about it is particularly new. If anything, it seems like a slower, clumsier version of almost any other shooter that comes to mind. The Zeitgeist is weird.

Might have been game of the year, if I had more time to play it - Persona 5 Even though I've played ten hours already, I know I'm basically nowhere in this game. Which is more than I can say for Divinity 2, another supposed GOTY candidate that I've yet to even start. There were just too many good games this year. Who has the time to play them all, especially these 100+ hour behemoths?

Movie and music critics can easily keep up with new releases, but game reviewers are obligated to complete these massive games before rendering judgement. Most professional game outlets divide reviews across numerous individuals and even then these outlets only review a fraction of new releases. Is there a single soul on Earth that played EVERY Steam game released in 2017? Doubtful. Given this, is any "game of the year" pronouncement valid? At best, GOTY is more like "Best game I played this year, of the 5% of total releases that I actually played"

Phrases to Retire Award, Part 3 - Is a thing. Apparently, Microsoft Windows 3.1 is still a thing. Listen, it might have been cute if it was said once, by one human, and then retired for a decade. But instead it's said by every human, every second, about every THING. How is this a thing?

The Long-Lost Everything Award - Xenoblade 2 This game reminds me of all the best bits of ye olde games of yore: A huge, sweeping story that keeps evolving and unfurling with none of the cut corners I associate with the PS3 era (where every game got really short, and every environment got reused 200 times). A huge, sweeping soundtrack with countless memorable songs and none of the generic movie-orchestration I associate with games made in the west. A huge, sweeping overworld that's intricately hand crafted to match the story (living on the shoulders of Titans is escapism at its best), with none of the generic cities/fields I associate with, well, most open world games.

Mostly, this felt like a great, overlooked space-opera Anime that we've all somehow rediscovered 15 years later. That said, the fan service also feels fifteen years out of date, and is the only questionable bit from ye olde games of yore.

“Hey, I Have a Fun Idea” Award - Super Mario Odyssey The award is named after how the game was designed. Just a bunch of people sitting around saying, “hey, I have fun idea,” and then making that into a tight, micro-slice of gameplay bliss. This game is loaded with brief, memorable moments that are novel, and never overstay their welcome. As the last drop of fun has been reached with one activity, the game is already moving you along to the next...hundreds of times in a row. Now that's impressive.

Everyone's a Speedrunner Award - Ys VIII: The Lacrimosa of Dana Most games try to mimic real-world physics when it comes to character movement. A character's jump, for instance, looks wrong if it doesn't match what we'd expect to see in reality. Speedrunners know how to exploit these pseudo-physics to great effect, and use this knowledge to "break the game" by moving and jumping in ways unintended by the game's developers. Usually this type of movement is difficult to perform, and requires hours of practice to master single-frame animation windows and pixel-perfect jump arcs.

But not in Ys VIII! Just mash on the jump and dodge buttons and you'll soon become a whirling dervish of energy, constantly increasing in speed. It requires no practice, and feels exhilarating. The music's tempo matches the speed, and nothing ever slows you down, making it clear that this freedom of movement was by design. Brilliant!

The Armchair Architect's Wet Dream Award - Gravity Rush 2 Gravity Rush 2 is a beautiful game. Maybe too beautiful, as I spent most of my time slowly walking the streets, taking in the colorful architecture. And while this world is obviously an impossible place, most of the buildings still seem like they could work. In particular, I liked that the bottom of every island was explorable as well. I guess there are literally no places to hide when your main character is a badass, flying-cat superwoman.

Game of the Year Award (or Best game I played this year, of the 1% of total releases that I actually played) - Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Hardly surprising given that Zelda has won this award from...well, everybody I think, but there is no denying this game is just sublime. A profound sense of freedom and old-school Adventure permeates every inch of this vast world. And the game is greatly unpredictable, thanks to all the emergent physics systems built-in to the core gameplay. No two encounters play the same because of it, keeping this behemoth utterly engaging from start to finish.

Art of the Year Award - Nier Automata Videogames are an Artform, which we all (finally) know by now, but of course they're only one of many Artforms that fight for our hearts and minds: Movies, music, literature, painting, sculpture, and sandwiches made at Subway (hey, they're made by "sandwich artists," right?). And with this in mind, I offer up my first ever "Art of the Year Award" to the best damn Art I've seen in many years: Nier Automata.

It's hard to explain why this game packs so much of a punch, especially given that, at first glance, it seems like an easily dismissable fan service game. Do not be fooled! What starts as a standard sci-fi premise, becomes more and more involved both in terms of plot and philosophy. This buildup leads you exclusively in one direction, thematically. This theme is remarkably consistent, from the music to the side quests, even to the enemies you encounter. That is, until the credits of ending five roll (there are 26 endings, but you'll only need to see five to fully understand what I mean). Then everything gets flipped, so to speak, in what is EASILY the best ending in video game history. This turnabout is not only well earned, but it makes every second preceding it feel more important and absolutely necessary. In terms of vision, this is a Complete Thought, delivered in video game format.

Most importantly, Nier showed me that "art games" don't have to be boring. It's so fun to play! With my game, ULTRAWORLD EXODUS, I kept many exciting elements of movement out because I was worried players wouldn't pay attention to the message, which was the game's reason to exist. But instead, they paid attention to the lack of movement options, and missed the message anyway because they were too frustrated. Nobody wants a symposium, they want to smash giant robots. And hey, if someone is talking that philosophy stuff in the background, that's cool I guess, as long as I can keep smashing. This one will stay with me for years.

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And that’s all; what an embarrassment of riches this year was! Feel free to disagree with me, because honestly, that’s the point. Your opinions will always hold the most weight, far more than mine, which suck. So, yeah, whatever :P

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sentinelkelly · 8 years ago

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“Disappointed Fans” Stopped Being Fans Months Ago or Never was to Begin With

Rise of Iron: Same Shit, Different Day (the most tired and incomprehensible argument still being used). Ever since Rise of Iron released, a lot of people who claims to be fans of Destiny were up at arms about how lackluster Rise of Iron is. Not because it’s boring or anything, but because “its same thing.” Oh Lord... Where do I even begin?

The Story is Short

Whaa the main quest line is only 5 missions long, Kelly! It’s short like The Dark Below and House of Wolves! OH NO! The set of missions that you were only going to play three times before you play nothing but Strikes, Raid, and Crucible is short! BUNGIE PLEASE FIX THIS! Honestly, who the fuck cares? If Wrath of the Machine was available before even taking back the Iron Temple, a good portion of the Community would have 20+ completions without ever setting foot on Felwinter’s Peak. But Kelly, MUH LORE! I remember being ridiculed because I didn’t know Queen Mara was alive until Bungie released a statement about her fate. You people laughed and said, “lol It was stated in the Grimiore Cards!” You suddenly forgot about those? Your precious lore is on an app.

Another thing: In Main Story, you hunted the Black Heart and destroyed it. In the Dark Below, you hunted down Omnigul and Crota then killed them. In House of Wolves, you hunted down Skolas, captured, then killed him. In the Taken King, you hunted down Oryx and defeated him twice. In Rise of Iron, you stopped Fallen occupation in an important location of the Cosmodrome and stopped their bioengineering experiment from giving them upgrades that could have made them unstoppable. SIVA IS NOT A PERSON! HOW COULD THIS POSSIBLY BE CONSIDERED “THE SAME THING?!” Whatever, let’s move on.

Wrath of the Machine

This is basically another point to the statement I made earlier. I haven’t heard anything too bad about the raid itself surprisingly. In fact, all I hear is “Rise of Iron is bad but I love the raid tho.” What are you, retarded? That's like saying, “I’m smart, but I’m a terrible test-taker” or “She has an ugly face, but have a nice ass so I’d still bang her.” That’s hypocritical! You just got finished belly aching over how short the story is, yet you enjoy the very thing you unlock after the story. And I bet you have more play time in the raid more than of the story.

One of the few criticisms I do hear about the raid is that bosses are bullet sponges again. ..What are you smoking? The whole raid was a combination of Bullet Sponge and Mechanic. Hell, I use “Bullet Sponge” loosely because some YouTubers/Streamers make Vosik and Aksis look like a joke. For people who aren’t that skilled or knowledgeable of the game, playing normally involves a lot of mechanics. Plus, Gjallarhorn, the God-Slayer of Year One, didn’t make the boss fights any easier, Dark-Drinker did!

Crucible is the Same Shit

Supremacy, Private Matches, and eSports compatibility aren’t new concepts in gaming, but it’s a first for Destiny. For Destiny fans, that’s all that matters. Hardcore Crucible players welcome new modes, whether they’ll play it a lot is up to them. Casual and Hardcore Crucible players alike always wanted a mode to have a friendly contest of skill with their friends without trying to lock a skirmish lobby. “Professional” Crucible players always wanted an eSports league to actually be considered a Pro. Pre-Rise of Iron Crucible was just a competitive mode.

Before I get hit with the terrible RNG post game drop rate, lemme just tell you something: SHUT UP! RNG giving shitty drops is normal, has always been apart of the game, and won’t be changing anytime soon. Yeah it’s annoying, but you’re not going to get an exotic every time you play, no matter how good you did. Deal with it.

Grinding is so “Easy” Now

I wouldn’t say that... I virtually have no life. Just throwing that out there. I take online classes, work around 20-24 hours per week part time, my girlfriend and close friends all live in other time zones, and usually have no interest in leaving my home. Reaching 400 Light was easy... for me! FOR ME! But that’s because I converted my free time into hours and hours into getting to 400 Light on all of my Xbox characters and at least 385 on my newly created PS4 characters. That and, unlike most people, I use LFG Forums and get raids and Nightfalls done weekly. Sometimes I play crucible. There’s people with more free time than I do and played since Day 1, but never peaked 375 Light on one character yet... To this day! I can’t fathom the thought of that! What can you possibly be doing to stay that low yet play everyday? The Heroic Strikes alone can get you up to 385 as of October 18th. People belly ached that reaching 310 Light and eventually 320 Light was difficult last year (which it was), unless you were lucky. King’s Fall was the only way to reach 320 if I remember correctly. The factions weren’t going to give 310 Light gear. Crucible was iffy. Court of Oryx did nothing really. People were pushed to do King’s Fall and Nightfalls every week to have a chance at high Light gear. Even then, it wasn’t guaranteed. The old infusion system wasn’t helping much either. Now, the max level cap is achievable without depending on a single activity, yet that’s still a problem because no lives like me play too much. The real problem is the changes were meant for the people who choose to play a social game like Destiny, but blames their social anxiety and lack of friends as the reason why they haven’t got to a certain light level yet. The problem is these people claim to love Destiny, but aren’t motivated to actually play it. Of course, lots of people have responsibilities stopping them from playing a lot of video games in general and I’m not referring to them.

One thing I love about Rise of Iron is how the drop rate of Strange Coins and reputation gains have increased. That’s beautiful in my opinion. The material and reputation grind is a bit easier now. That’s a good thing!

Microtrans--

I’m gonna stop you right there. It’s still not pay-to-win after a year and few months. If you don’t have money to spend or don’t want to spend your hard earned money, you don’t have to buy anything! But Kelly, I want that cool sparrow and Dab emote. So buy it! I have them and love them. Worth every penny. But why we gotta pay? Shit, Bungie said we were going to get free DLC and it never happened yet. It’s because of cheap whiny assholes like you. If you’re not going to contribute to the Free DLC Cause, shut the fuck up!

Where’s Vault of Glass and Crota’s End?

Wow! You do care about post game content! You was crying about the story, Bungie probably thought you’d just play the story missions over and over until the next game. Unfortunately, Bungie had the bright idea of keeping Wrath of the Machine (and King’s Fall to a certain extent) relevant. I for one want to them to come back too, but mind you, this DLC wasn’t supposed to be a thing at first. We should be playing Destiny 2 by now, but shit happens. I’m glad they’re held back on revamping Vault of Glass and Crota’s End. The Great Content Drought of 2016 was bad. I lived, other people got impatient and abandoned Destiny. Bungie still has the “Bring Back the Old Raids” card. Had they would’ve used it early, they may not have anything planned for post-SRL 2k16 Destiny. We’ll have to wait and see what they’ll do, but there’s still hope.

The Plaguelands is Just an Expanded Version of the Cosmodrome with Snow

So? That’s still technically not a copy and paste job. It’s still new and different with some respect.

Quality Wise, Rise of Iron is Living in the Taken King’s Shadow

I agree, but that’s a good thing! It’s a very beautiful thing. What if Rise of Iron was the best DLC to ever happen to the game? What if Rise of Iron was so great that everyone loves it, yet Destiny 2 flops... badly? People like me will try to see the good in Destiny 2, some might go back to Destiny 1, others might stop playing Destiny all together. The Taken King was a great DLC. At least if you love it so much, you can still play it. If being on the Dreadnaught gets you get excited, you can still go there. If fighting Oryx makes you cum in your underwear, you can still do that. However, there’s no guarantee if existing content is coming to Year 4. I rather Bungie save all the magic for the next game because I rather have the Taken King being considered the better DLC than Destiny 1 being considered the better game for reasons that aren’t nostalgia.

Conclusion

I’m not telling that you gotta love Rise of Iron like I do. You’re entitled to your own opinion, but make sure its rational. The bulk of the criticism are coming from people who clearly have stopped playing months ago or just started playing but allowed other people’s opinion affect their own. It’s clear that they’ve eternalized something from another DLC and are trying their best to not be opened to change (even though they claim that’s what they want). Saying Rise of Iron is the same is a down right lie. It shows that you haven’t put enough time into it. If it is the same, how the Taken King better? Shouldn’t they be equals if that was the case? There’s nothing wrong with admitting that Destiny doesn’t hold the same appeal to you as it have at whatever point. It’s okay to admit that you play occasionally just to see if you get invested again. It’s okay to admit that Rise of Iron is not your thing. You can’t say it’s the same thing when you weren’t there for the changes or choose not to acknowledge them.

#destiny #destiny the game #destiny 2 #destiny the taken king #destiny rise of iron #the taken king #rise of iron #bungie #activision

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tonxstark · 4 years ago

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Macho game, on the internet ??

This is actually the 145th original of Xianren JUMP 1 My childhood is a story lingering with toilet literature. You can find traces of my creation in every wall of the school toilet. The protagonist is normally the foreign language teacher I hate the most. He continually taught me some tough English, and I always suspected he tried too hard. When I grew up, I read Mr. Chuan's Twitter to confirm this. Isn't the English of the President of america the same? Top of the limit of the English world reaches this level. Needless to say, I realized later on that the value of learning English lies in finding him grammatical errors. In lots of years of literary creation, I did not encounter any difficulties. The only trouble is that I don't possess time and energy to play games. During the past, when I just knew more easily, I could still have a hardcore stand-alone for 3 hours prior to going to bed. Later, We double-opened Pinterest, and I could only take the time to purchase two pesticides and chicken, and I would occasionally sigh easily viewed my accounts with full pores and skin and inscriptions. Before I started to tinker with station B this past year, I had to cut all the game time. Except on weekends, I could only play idle mobile video games, and the reason is really boring-for a apparently high-producing sow, in fact, there is absolutely no one that can let me play with paper while smashing the liver. People, there is no delay in the game. Yes, I'm discussing swords and expeditions. 2 The sword and the expedition are burning, and the fire is really a little unusual. A new public beta mobile sport has been on the very best 3 of the IOS best-seller listing for just two consecutive months, eating poultry and pesticides makes the chrysanthemum tremble. I am afraid that if I'm not careful, I will give out an intoxicating fragrance. Lots of people were caught away guard by the fire of sword and expedition. Right now when Tencent and NetEase dominate the mobile game market, only the crazy cooking strength of the two-dimensional component to the document man's wife can barely support one or two explosions and struggle against it, or it is a re-enactment of the terminal game IP mobile game a decade ago. Stable gold absorption. Making money is so boring. The complete Chinese mobile online game market has been without interesting waves for too much time. Five or six years ago, the era when thousands of cellular game groups of thousands of heroes in troubled occasions were effective, all publishers had been looking for products and teams. Nobody would have believed that Lilith, who utilized to create her debut with the legendary dark equine of Dota, would usher in her 2nd spring after a few years of dormancy. Lots of people cannot understand the sword and the fire of expedition. The overall game screen looks unremarkable, revealing a staleness in the popular flat UI. Placing apart the idle gameplay, Sword and Expedition seems to be at best two or three generations behind the current trend of aged card game primary. The character development is a serious pit visible to the naked eye, revealing an aura of cheating and running, and the players who've been washed again and again by the domestic Krypton gold mobile game have always been developed to run away with their noses while watching VIP system. Knee-jerk reflex. But Sword and Expedition continues to be on fire. 3 Why did the sword and the expedition fire? Many people can tell the answer making use of their eyes closed: because the announcement is normally ready to spend money. The advertisement of Sword and Expedition has been spread since November, and following the public beta in January, it has spread over the sky, land, and air without dead ends. Many people see the spokesperson Luo Zhixiang more often than their very own mother. Binance Right down to Douyin Kuaishou, around top KOL, Bao Yuan is really a master performer, all APPs get turns to open the screen, and also the legendary account of GQ Labs is also a lover of Sword and Expedition. In the last second, I worked on Weibo, and in the next second, he repeatedly jumped across Kuaishou Douyin at Station B. You can also see his primary video clips and ghost music on the website where you find out about sow postpartum treatment. This kind of non-lifeless corner private sale has produced mobile game advertisements from the era of silly dicks once talked about by people to the era of coin throwing. It's not that I've in no way seen mobile sport ads brainwashing the screen, but it is the first time that I've gotten this battle. "Sword and Expedition" was suggested by the homepage of various channels It really is conservatively estimated that the marketing cost of Sword and Expedition inside the initial month is a lot more than 300 million yuan. It has caught up with the yearly turnover of many game companies. Banknote capability is definitely the core competitiveness. After the events at the beginning of the year, everyone's living conditions are specific. The entire online entertainment sector has experienced a spurt of growth, and video games are usually no exception. What the marketplace blowout brings is a mixture of seafood and dragons. Everyone wants to catch a wave. Then why just sword and expedition can perform it. The answer is easy. During the past, no enterprise dared to spend so much cash on advertising. You imagine that throwing money is just throwing coins, and the influencing causes of it are actually very complicated. The technical content of throwing money is quite high, and the difference between the actuary and the Kaizi is 10,000 in the market. Everyone inside the mobile sport industry opens their mouths. DAU ARPU ROI CPI, one by one, is better than anyone else. At first glance, it is a sport item, but behind this is a total data analysis system. Just how much a consumer will probably be worth, and how much money can be paid back are known. It's another issue if the amount of money goes out and not collected. If it were not for 100% confidence in the product, no company may have this type of large budget. The quantity will be more expensive as it sells. Sword and Expedition has already been continuously and intensively screened for just two months. It is really rich. Actually, the reverse also shows that Lilith really has confidence in her own products. Otherwise, no sum of money will make sense. 4 Delivery and product quality participate in the relationship among 0 and 1. Don't think about it. The merchandise can stand, that is, there is 1 ahead. And the placement is the 0 behind. If there is zero 1, how many 0s is a 0, without the real value. When there is zero 0, there is only 1 1, that would be very lonely. Swords and Expeditions isn't just the saturation announcement, the merchandise itself actually has a deep doorway, and the art style of cup painting is a big plus point. Before the national service went live, the overall game had been operating overseas for a year, also it had the highest income from domestic cellular games overseas. Community content and user portraits accumulated overseas also provide precise model guidelines for domestic publicity strategies. The accumulation of overseas operations in advance isn't only this content of the game version, but has actually fully verified the payment style of the complete game and the player's recognition of the gameplay. This is a base for Lilith's daring to saturate domestic investment decision. 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thomasroach · 6 years ago

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Top 10 Epic Raid Bosses in MMORPGs

The post Top 10 Epic Raid Bosses in MMORPGs appeared first on Fextralife.

The following post is this author’s opinion and does not reflect the thoughts and feelings of Fextralife as a whole nor the individual content creators associated with the site. Any link that goes outside of Fextralife are owned by their respective authors.

Raid bosses are easily in my opinion the most important aspect of MMORPGs. Games that fall into a different genre may be more dynamic, but only here will tens and sometimes hundreds of players need to come together and work together to defeat an epic boss in a raid. Just simple getting together as many players as possible is not enough to determine your success. Players usually need to use trial and error with a number of different strategies before they can actually take down the boss. All this is done in order to test the weaknesses, come up with an effective approach and correctly coordinate players in the raid.

Top 10 Epic Raid Bosses in MMORPGs

Over time, the concept of an “epic boss” has become rather blurred. Colossal monsters, the destruction of which requires a long preparation time, and then became just another episode from grandma’s fairy tales. Some raid bosses have already gained the “cult” status, and veterans of MMORPGs could tell you a dozen stories about those legendary fights. I’ve tried to select the most powerful bosses who once upon a time, caused a burning sensation and will certainly awaken stirrings of nostalgic feelings from experienced raiders!

10. Illidan Stormrage (World of Warcraft)

A well-known exhibit is Illidan Stormrage, a night-elf born Demon Hunter and the founder of the Illidari. He was the former self-proclaimed Lord of Outland, ruling from the Black Temple until his defeat.

Illidan Stormrage (World of Warcraft)

He was the final boss of the Burning Crusade update. Perhaps, it was the best expansion in World of Warcraft history (at least that’s what the players say). An important aspect of such success was the storyline surrounding the Black Temple raid, and the quests which at the end led the player into the instance to fight the Betrayer.

Only a few players could fight Illidan due to the instance difficulty, until the game received an update later on. The fact the difficulty was so high, was one of the reasons why Blizzard made various changes, after which other players had the opportunity to see this epic game content.

9. Valakas, The Fire Dragon (Lineage 2)

Valakas is the second dragon to make an appearance in Lineage 2 C4: Scions of Destiny global update, and it’s the strongest raid boss to make this update. He inhabits a volcanic terrain located in Goddard, known as the “Forge of the Gods”. Valakas is allegedly the strongest child of Shilen (goddess of destruction in L2 lore). His gigantic stature and massive four wings exemplify his majesty and strength.

Valakas, The Fire Dragon (Lineage 2)

One of the main difficulties of killing this raid boss (which is common for Lineage 2) was to win a massive battle between players to even begin to attack the dragon. All the strong clans and alliances wanted to get the raid boss epic jewelry so battles could last for several hours. Only after that, the winning side would kill the dragon in about an hour, if their mages had enough power damage and mana pool. Many veterans of the game will remember this beast.

Unfortunately, the dragon is still not a part of the classic version of Lineage 2, but it will probably be added in a future update.

8. Baium (Lineage 2 Classic)

Baium’s power is considered inferior to the dragons, but among players there it’s hard to find anyone who does not remember his bright ultimatum strike when he reached a certain level of health. His wrath could easily destroy all raid players in one go.

Baium (Lineage 2 Classic)

The backstory of Baium is that the once great emperor was so powerful that he decided to challenge the gods. He used his kingdom’s forces to construct a tower rising high into the clouds. The magnificent tower of Baium’s designed took thirty years of construction. He intended to use the building in order to climb to the residence of the gods, and obtain the secret of everlasting life. When he did indeed climb the tower, the gods got angry about his plans and severely punished him. Having brought the fury of the gods upon himself, Baium was trapped for all eternity at the top of his tower in immortal silence.

Since then, this became known as the Tower of Insolence, and anyone who broke it’s silence would wake Baium and lose their life. The heroes of Elmoreden who reached the top floor came to measure their strengths with the demigod in an epic battle and Baium is doomed to an eternal life of this continuous war.

Today Baium’s raid is available on the Lineage 2 Classic servers, there are instance and “real” boss versions. The instance zone is a lighter raid version, but to kill a hardcore boss, players need to have the best equipment in the game and come together in an army comprising of 100-200 players.

7. Brothers: Dagon, Dagan and Dagnu (Rising Force Online)

Dagon, Dagan and Dagnu or known as the DDD brothers, are the strongest raid bosses in the game. The next brother that follows, is always stronger than the previous one. They are 3 separate bosses who are located close to the Elan Plateau. Taking into account their direct connection, it wouldn’t be right to review them separately.

Brothers: Dagon and Dagan (Rising Force Online)

According to lore, these terrible beasts were created by the ancient civilization of Herodian as a result of experiments on the High elven race (PvE faction). There are currently three warring races in RF Online: Bellato Federation, Empire Accretia and Holy Alliance Cora. They quite often discarded their blade of war and make temporary alliances against these abominations. Dagon and Dagan almost always could be defeated by one of the races over time, but it is incredibly difficult to fight against Dagnu alone.

Dagnu (Rising Force Online)

The reward from these bosses make the ordeal all worthwhile. The unique jewelry that the brothers drop is combine into one powerful epic object which not only grants great stats to its owner but also cannot be transmitted. Just imagine the authority of the player who gets ownership of it! Today, you can take part in a DDD raid on the recently open European server Zucker.

6. Bael’Zharon (Asheron’s Call)

In November of 2000, Turbine (the founder of Asheron’s Call) presented an unprecedented mass, in-game activity. Players were asked to go down into the new Catacombs of Ithaenc to choose their role in the game world: become a follower of the creepy demon Bael’Zharon and try to free him, or prevent his escaping by any means.

Bael’Zharon (Asheron’s Call)

On some servers, players guarded the demon for several months, not letting anyone pass. On Thristledown server, players were extremely severe and guarded the demon soul during one whole year. The developers installed a monument to Shard Vigil Memerial, as a symbol of perseverance and courage of the catacomb defenders. But finally one day the crystal prison was destroyed, and Bael’Zharon broke free. Managed by developers, he immediately began to wreak havoc in the peaceful lands of Asheron’s Call.

Bael’Zharon wasn’t an ordinary boss and had tremendous power, but he was not immortal. The destruction and massacres caused by the demon’s doing did not stay unpunished. On each server, players joined forces and attacked the monster. Not all raids resulted in success because there was no specific pre-set strategy to fight the monster. However, sooner or later, the boss was defeated. The body of a man named Ilservian Palacost, once a nobleman turned into an demon creature, remained in the place of the defeated Bael’. Inside the corpse were 6 crystals that held the demon and became the material for creating a powerful artifact.

Bael’Zharon doesn’t seem so scary now, but for Asheron’s Call veterans, his appearance inspired confidence in their own death.

5. The Lich King (World of Warcraft)

The Lich King is the master and lord of the Scourge, he rules telepathically from the Frozen Throne atop the Icecrown Glacier. The fallen prince Arthas succumbed to the dark powers and blended with the former Lich King to take the role and title. He is one of the main villains of the World of Warcraft. Many fans would have been upset if this boss raid could be defeated without much trouble. The Lich King due to his infamy was really strong.

The Lich King (World of Warcraft)

The fight in Normal Mode was fairly brutal for the majority of WoW players, but in Heroic Mode, he’s was downright unforgiving. The fight had 3 stages, each stage it took weeks of farming to succeed before the next one could be attempted properly. The boss stayed invincible until it received the first nerf, which increased the damage and healing from players in the Icecrown Citadel. People believed that it was impossible to kill the boss without it. One guild decided to disprove this statement by deliberately turning off that buff, and defeated the King. However, by this time many of these players already possessed equipment obtained from the last raids.

4. Kerafyrm, The Sleeper (EverQuest)

Kerafyrm used to be the main boss in the The Sleeper’s Tomb dungeon. According to the game’s plot, he was immortal, and there wasn’t even any loot to gain from him. This ancient and enraged dragon, which the elders had put to sleep, was confined to a cave with four powerful guards. Kerafyrm was awoken for the first time in July 2001, when the players of The Rathe server managed to defeat his guards. The phantom however did not remain in debt but destroyed his rescuers, then climbed to the surface and began to destroy all life in its path. Having found out where the dragon lived, other players joined forces to measure themselves against the legendary creature.

Kerafyrm, The Sleeper (EverQuest)

In November 2003, the three strongest guilds from the server Rallos Zek teamed up to awaken the monster. There was only one known tactic that worked against the dragon: crowd pounce, continually attack, resurrect after your death and rush into battle once again. The fight lasted more than three hours and the dragon had only lost 74% of his health points. It was at this moment he suddenly disappeared!

It turned out that Sony Online Entertainment did not want the dragon’s death to come to fruition, because it went against the prehistory of EverQuest. The community reacted vehemently. The developers tried to justify themselves and said that the death of Kerafyrm would cause an onslaught of bugs in the game, but in the end they surrendered to the cries of the community and on November 17th, the legend was defeated. The dragon would kill players with one swift blow, but they were able to resurrect rather quickly. According to rumors, many players have died more than a hundred times for three hours as that epic battle raged.

Kerafyrm was awoken on all servers except one and players only succeeded in killing him a total of three times. The mighty boss lived in The Sleeper’s Tomb dungeon, but nowadays on many servers it is already empty. After the release of the Secrets of Faydwer update, Awakened Kerafyrm can be found in the Crystallos zone, Lair of the Awakened.

3. Ragnaros, The Firelord (World of Warcraft)

Ragnaros the Firelord is an incredibly powerful Elemental Lord and the master of all fire elementals. He became the strongest raid boss in the game shortly after WoW released. It was the last main challenge in the Molten Core and the first raid dungeon, so no one really knew how to approach him properly to begin with. The fight with Ragnaros was much longer and more challenging than any other battle in the Firelands. Players had to kill 9 of his loyal lieutenants first, in order to summon the Elemental Lord. Perhaps, this is the reason why it took so long before he was defeated for the first time.

Ragnaros, The Firelord (World of Warcraft)

The flaming lord himself is invulnerable to fire attacks and every two minutes summons elemental sons that draw mana from players. It was tricky to kill Ragnaros because he utilises several special attacks: throws melee players in the different directions, casts fireballs and creates lava flows. He was a real piece of work in Heroic mode (a harder difficulty). His hammer, Sulfuras, repeatedly slapped players into air, and raiders had to adapt to the random minions that respawned and could easily at any point break the raid try.

The boss lost his power after the release of the ‘Wrath of the Lich King’ add-on’, and now he can even be killed by one player.

2. Pandemonium Warden (Final Fantasy XI)

This particular boss had the unique ability to make players physically ill and no that was not an in-game debuff, but had a real affect to people’s health. The first try to slay Pandemonium Warden took place in 2007, where one of the best guilds which consisted 36 players fought valiantly with the boss for a gruelling 18 hours, but could not claim victory. The players were forced to interrupt the raid due to the fact that some players began to faint from exhaustion.

Pandemonium Warden (Final Fantasy XI)

It was the main reason for which the developers nerfed the boss by adding a 2-hour timer to ensure that the players wouldn’t be overloaded with long fights. The overall complexity has been significantly reduced since it’s initial introduction to the game. This case will probably remain as one of the most hardcore raids in MMO history.

1. Antharas, The Land Dragon (Lineage 2 Classic)

Antharas was the first ever Epic Raid Boss to be introduced in the first chronicle of Lineage 2. He is the father of the famous game gimmick and considered a stereotype of a gargantuan monster needed to be killed by an enormous number of players. Absolutely every player who played Lineage 2 knows his name as his reputation proceeds him, even many who have not faced Antharas know of him.

Antharas, The Land Dragon (Lineage 2 Classic)

The humongous size of Antharas far surpasses that of all other evil beasts. Even a very powerful sword would not easily inflict damage upon the body of the dragon, as it is so densely covered with rock-hard scales. Beams of light emitted from the monster’s eyes, causing those who gazed upon it to freeze in horror. Antharas is fittingly regarded by all adventurers as the ultimate symbol of pure terror. The dragon deals massive amounts of damage, summons minions and has several fighting strategies depending on it’s level of health.

It was necessary to gather all the alliance members (more than 200 – 300) to kill this raid boss, or even those who were at war relations. Even by doing this, the dragon until this day was not successfully slayed on all servers. Therefore, game masters often organized various events with this epic boss. They summoned the dragon into places with large numbers of players. But as a rule, the dragon was weakened or after some time was killed at the game master’s command just for the public fun.

Today, the dragon is still is found in the lair depths in Lineage II Classic and is stronger than ever as no one yet has managed to defeat him on the European server called Skelth.

It is impossible to fit all epic raid bosses of all MMORPGs into one review. So, if you have not found your favorite epic boss raid here, then tell us your story about that adventure in the comments!

If you enjoyed this opinion piece be sure to check out 5 Innovations Dragon Age Should Keep After Inquisition. You can also find out more about more MMORPG content in Elder Scrolls Online: The Champion System & The Future Of ESO In 2019 and World Of Warcraft Character Boost VS Leveling.

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