Dealing with backlog: The Watch Dogs series

I've wanted to try my hands at these games for a while. I like a lot of Ubi's other stuff, so why wouldn't I like this? Open world adventure, kind of RPG... Sounds like my kind of stuff. So I got the first two games on this year's Steam Summer Sale. 

Watch_Dogs: I went into the first game expecting fun and possibly greatness. Instead I got a pretty cliché and mediocre story, gameplay that was pretty meh, and a main character about as interesting as watching paint dry. And he was fragile. Like damn. Jason in Far Cry 3 is more durable, and that's saying something. I shelved this game after ten hours. I just couldn't. There was nothing about this game that made me excited to play it. No sense of "I can't wait to go back in". It was just an overly meh experience. And annoying at times. Feels like everything I did during those ten hours was timed. Everything. I hated that timer. 

Watch_Dogs 2: I was skeptical towards  this game from the very beginning since I didn't like the first one, but decided to give it a shot. Already from the get-go this was a lot better than the original and I enjoyed my time in this game a lot more. But I never got to the point of "oh I can't wait to play some more!". It was always more like "Oh I guess I'll play some whatevs". At the time of writing this I still haven't completed the game but I also haven't played it at all for almost a month. I feel no incentive to go back in and play some more. I had some fun with it, there were some cool moments, and awesome characters, but mostly I just feel pretty meh about it. Wrench is best boi. I don't care about the rest.

I fully expected to finish these two and then head into Legion. But the way I've felt about these two games makes me not even want to pick up Legion. 

Mobile games

I keep getting pulled into these. Especially since they become better and better with each new generation of mobile phone. I've already talked about the two major Potter games, as well as PoGo, Fire Emblem Heroes and Mystic Messenger, but there are a few more that I've played around with. 

Matchington Mansion. This was my obsession for the better part of a year until now. It's a match-three game where every completed level allows you to redecorate/renovate a part of a mansion. I've put so much time into this, to the point where I finished every room in the mansion and I thought the game would be over, but instead it turns into some kind of open world match-three decorating game. When you finish the mansion you leave on a boat only to discover a tropical island (right next to a mansion that has a pine forest?) and you start helping the stranded hermit there repair his island villa. The hermit turns out to be a rockstar. It's weird. I stopped pretty soon after that.

Project Makeover. I started this while I was still deep into Matchington Mansion. It's basically the same game of match-three. But instead of redecorating a big house you're "redecorating" people. I didn't get very far into this since I was still grinding through Matchington Mansion. But I might pick it up again at some point.

Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells. This game has the Potter name on it, so of course I tried it. I didn't do much more than the first couple of levels, though. It's another match-three and Matchington filled that spot.

Choices. Several years ago I tried a game called Episodes and this seemed like a new, better and upgraded version of Episodes. It's basically a simulation game of interactive novels. A virtual novel game. It's super girly. And potentially super naughty. And super dumb. I did have some mindless fun with this, but like most of these interactive novel games they don't last very long.

Immortal Diaries. My current obsession. It's a dating sim and a dress-up game, but also an interactive novel,  but also kind of RPG-ish with levels and attributes and boss fights. The story is that you're an orphan who grows up at an orphanage until you're eighteen and a man comes to the orphanage and hands you your inheritance which is partly the deed to an old castle where the man works as a butler, and partly the inheritance that is in your blood. Your father had been a vampire of an ancient powerful bloodline. Your mother was human. As you learn to navigate the new world of vampires you also get to awaken and learn to use your dormant genetic powers inherent to your bloodline, all the while trying to avoid getting killed by enemies who don't wish to see your bloodline survive. The lore is nothing new, but also an amalgamation of a lof of different vampire lores. Super interesting how they've put it all together tbh. The character called Adrian looks deceptively like Dan Stevens, and the character called Nina looks strangely like Nina Dobrev. My favourite character is Marcus, but Adrian gives me all the right chills. The voice acting is amazing too. 

New World open beta

After I managed to get into the Preview last year I tried my hardest to get into the Closed Beta, but without any success. So when the Open Beta started I immediately applied for that and got in (ofc I did it's the open beta). From Thursday to Sunday this past week I exclusively played New World alongside friends Tio and Squirrel. 

The start was pretty much exactly the same as in the preview, although they had changed the tutorial a bit. There are still four different starting zones and they're random, so you don't have a choice where you end up which makes it pretty hard to do the first few quests alongside friends. Initially, Tio and Squirrel got lucky and ended up in the same starter zone, while I ended up somewhere completely different. So I ended up traversing half the map as a level 2 character to get to them only to realize that the first few quests aren't the exact same and so can only be completed in the area where you start. I had no way back to my starter zone, so I tried to die only to not be able to revive at my starter zone. So I ended up deleting my first character, remade her exactly the same and by some miracle ended up in the same starter zone as my friends. New World is a hassle if you want to play with friends from the very start. Around level 10 you'll have unlocked enough to go to the other three starting zones and do stuff together. 

The character creator has also been improved a lot and now not every character looked the same. In the Preview you could only choose between being male or female and then all the character models were the same. The character creator wasn't as detailed as some other MMOs but still a lot better than what it was. 

The zones are made for 10-20 levels each. So the starting zones have areas from level 1 to level 25, which makes some areas crazy dangerous to accidentally wander into as a low level, and sometimes a level 24 area can be found right next to a level 3 area. The level scaling is a bit wonky. The first four areas (i.e. the starter zones) allows you to play around with weapons and builds as much as you want, but if you don't have a specific build in mind when you enter the next tier areas you will get spanked by the enemies. The change in difficulty between level 24 enemies and level 26 enemies is pretty steep. Which I got to discover first-hand. I got to level 30 before the beta ended and played around with sword and shield, bow and arrow, musket, life staff, fire staff and ice gauntlet. Finally settling on a build with ice gauntlet as my main weapon during PvE and life staff for dungeons. (Although the life staff did come in handy during PvE as well).

Since the Preview they have added magic and made the combat more MMO-like. I lamented the lack of proper AoE attacks in the Preview, which made it difficult to combat more than one enemy at once, but now that was no trouble. There were some animation issues while in combat, for example the game wouldn't always register when the dodge button was pressed so only half the times a dodge would actually happen. 

I didn't encounter a lot of bugs, thankfully. The most frequent bug was the sound bug that usually happened during prolonged combat when the music would turn static and the character movements would just be completely silented. It sounded somewhat as if you had submerged yourself in water. This could be fixed (for some reason) by opening your inventory and then closing it again, which you can't do during combat because opening your inventory makes your character unable to move. Another bug I encountered was the quest Under the Same Stars, where one container just wouldn't spawn the quest item needed to progress. There was one bug that I didn't encounter until the very last day of the beta and that was that my character would suddenly get stuck in their last animated pose. So I couldn't move my character at all. Once I had to use the /unstuck command to be able to move again, but usually it could be solved by dodge-rolling out of it. Also, this happened and I don't know why, but logging off, closing the game and restarting solved it.

They had worked on the PvE a bit too, most of the quests were still go here, kill this many and loot these things, but they were embedded in story now so it didn't feel as grindy. There were a lot of quests that stuck with me this time. I especially liked the pirate ones in First Light and the ones from Megara in Walsham/Marcel's Hamlet in Brightwood. Not because the gameplay of those quests was anything special, but because I enjoyed their stories. 

Since I got to play for a lot longer this time around (40½ hours of beta versus 12½ hours of preview) I also got to really appreciate how diverse the zones were. All zones had their own distinct feel to them. From the pirate themed First Light, to the very Bloodborne-inspired Brightwood. From the cliffy and sea-salted Monarch's Bluff, to the swampy Cutlass Keys. Going into Brightwood for the first time was an experience. From the mostly sunny starter zones into the misty, creepy Brightwood where the first thing I encountered was a dilapidated village filled with ghosts. 

This time around I also got to a high enough level to do both my first dungeon and my first corruption breach world event. I feel like I did well enough healing my first ever dungeon in New World, but I definitely need some practice. 

All three of us were wowed enough by how New World was now that we all decided to buy the game when it comes out. I bought it after the third day of beta. Unfortunately it releases on a Tuesday of my night shift week so I rpobably won't get to play much during the first week after release. Hopefully it won't get delayed again, because now I really feel like I need more New World gameplay in my life. 

Game completed: Generation Zero

So last night we finished Generation Zero (jokingly dubbed "the Sweden game" in one of my discord servers). All in all we had a good run. We both had fun playing the game, and I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the whole thing. We both agree that the devs had really succeeded in making the game feel like Sweden. 

For the first ten hours or so we had a lot of fun reading all the labels on everything and all the signs. It felt so bizarre to see and hear Swedish in a game. Being in a country where hardly anything gets dubbed/translated unless it's specifically for children it becomes pretty rare to see or hear your language in games. But there was soooo much Swedish and it was so weird and hilarious in the beginning. 

One of our few gripes with the game, though, is that you could have all the sound in Swedish, but you couldn't choose to have the subtitles or UI in Swedish, so before we got used to it it was pretty jarring to hear and read Swedish but everything around it was in English. 

The story is that you're a teenager who wakes up on a beach after a party on an island only to discover that everyone is gone. The world seems empty of people, and everywhere you go there are robots trying to murder you. You find a gun in the nearby police car and then you head out trying to find out where the robots came from and where all the people have gone. 

We have a few gripes with the story progression. While it all makes sense it got very repetitive very quickly. We both hated bunkers at the end, because there were so many of them and at least half of them were huge sprawling things leading down into the earth for what felt like miles with lots of corridors all looking the same so we got turned around and confused a lot. Another gripe is the sidequests. Basically all the sidequests are like "Find out what happened at this place" and you go there and the end result is "Oh, they died." For the duration of the base game you are the only survivor and from feeling kind of cool it soon becomes pretty incredulous. Like all these police and military have been killed by the robots, nobody survived... Except this teenager with a machine gun. Wtf. Third gripe is that the story made sense and worked out until the very end. The ending was very... "That's it? But, but, but... Now what? There's so much left unresolved!" But we figured that everything would be resolved by the end of the DLCs.

Alpine Unrest DLC was pretty cool, but we both got so sick of the Apocalypse class robots. Like telling the Hunters to "Stop BBQing me!! T_T" and everything was radioactive so everything hurt. Oof. The whole island was really cool and there were a lot of fun things to discover and explore (not so many bunkers) and we got some more backstory for the robots. And omg there are people here. Actual, real NPCs. Hooray! The story had a really sudden end though. To the point that none of us realized it was over at first. 

FNIX Rising DLC was probably my favourite. We found out exactly where the robots came from and who controls them and how that came to happen. The FNIX class robots were tough, but not annoyingly so like the Apocalypse ones. The whole DLC was action from start to finish. But once again the ending left too much unsaid and unresolved. These devs seem great at making stories, but not at finishing them. Maybe it's a way to leave people wanting more? But it's done wrong and it's mostly just frustrating than omg I need to know more.

Level is capped at 31, which seems a frustratingly odd number to cap it on. There was a point midway through levelling that things got really fricking hard. We were both left completely frustrated at how things were going for us. Then we got our first Experimental class weapon and suddenly we started to breeze through a lot of things. Some epic fights happened later, but they were epically awesome and not just awfully frustrating. There's an annoying amount of inventory management too, mostly because you kind of need to pick up everything so you can craft things, but everything has a weight and your character is just your average teenager so their carry ability isn't great. I absolutely hated that ammo was weighted. Especially since I favoured the Pvg sniper and its ammo weighs a shit ton. 

The lore in this game was great and I enjoyed discovering all the little bits and pieces from notes and photos and cassettes. The game takes place in the late 1980s so a lot of the technology and logos were very nostalgic for us. I didn't exist in the 80s, but a lot of those things stayed around for ten more years so I remember a lot of it. 

All in all it was a fun game, but it left a few things to be desired and many things were super repetitive. We still had fun with it, though, and I could imagine playing it again. 

Happy Back to Hogwarts day!

So it's September 1st and that means two things: 1). That summer is officially over, and 2). It's Back to Hogwarts day. 

This year it's 20 years since the first movie released and I can't believe it. I still remember going online and reading up on all the rumours of who was getting cast as which character and where they were going to film etc. It was insanely big already back then. Before the movies. Like imagine how big it got after the movies and then imagine that it was already huge before that. It's crazy. 

Unfortunately I don't remember when and where I watched the first movie. If it was at the cinema or on VHS at home. I think I saw it at the cinema and later I bought the dubbed version of the movie so my sister could watch it with me (back when the VHS tapes usually only had one version on each tape). Except she didn't care much xD 

I still remember the pre-movies Harry Potter merch we had and I kind of wish we didn't have to lose that in favour of WB merch. The original merch was quirky and magical and extremely book-literal. Or I may just be a Ravenclaw being salty over the fact that all my merch has the wrong animal on it.

But I've done so much in the past 20+ years of being a Potterhead, and while I'm not obsessing (as much) anymore it's still deeply and intricately a part of me ♥ I've even read the first book in Japanese ^^;

• I've been to Platform 9 3/4 in London twice. (Post and post)
• I've been to the Studio Tour. (Post and picture post)
• I've been to The Exhibition. (Post)
• I've gone to two conventions. (Post and post)
• I've been to the Harry Potter part of the Guiness World Records museum in Copenhagen. (Post)
• I saw the last movie at the cinema twice. (Post and post)
• I've played the Harry Potter games (Post and post)
• I loved the Cursed Child. (Post)
• Fantastic Beasts is just an excuse to dress up and obsess (Post)
• I own the Wizards Collection. (Post)
• I have a lot of stuff (more now). (Post)
• Picture bomb.

Apart from all of that I also distinctly remember two other Harry Potter related events in my life. One was in 2002 when I celebrated my 12th birthday by inviting a few friends and then my parents took us all to see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets at the cinema. A movie I subsequently watched so much that my VHS tape became all scratchy and jumpy. And I remember queueing for the midnight release of the Deathly Hallows in 2007. It was the first time I had been able to do that and it was absolutely amazing.

Over 20 years of Harry Potter in my life and here's to 20 more!