Endgame Viable

Continuing with Mass Effect week… I’m writing this Mass Effect 2 “review” on Tuesday, March 28th. I finished ME2 on Saturday. It took 31 hours, according to ManicTime, which is actually a lot less than I expected. I thought ME2 was huge compared to the first one and would take at least twice as long, but apparently it only felt bigger. There were definitely more cut scenes to watch in ME2. (1187 words.)

Continuing with Mass Effect week here on the ol’ blog… I’m starting this draft on March 22, but again I probably won’t publish it until after I finish Mass Effect 3. There are story spoilers below if you haven’t finished the game. Mass Effect 2 is a much, much larger and longer game than Mass Effect 1. I’m well over 20 hours into the game, and I don’t even think I’ve gotten to the halfway point yet. There are a lot more opportunities to get distracted with side missions. Omega, The Citadel, Illium: All teeming with entertaining vignettes to watch and interact with as you pass by. (829 words.)

No razors in the future. There are no story spoilers below, but I totally understand if you’re on complete blackout and want to skip. (I was, and did, and still do.) I finished the first three Mass Effect games and finally started Andromeda. First, if you’re like me and were way behind on the series, there is no connection between the original trilogy and Andromeda. Much to my chagrin, there is no need to play the first three or know anything about the previous story. I can’t explain why without spoiling the very beginning of Andromeda, but it’s a clean break and the start of a brand new thing. (And it makes sense, too, it’s not something like, “It was all just a dream.”) You don’t get to import your game from Mass Effect 3, so it doesn’t matter what you did in the past. (982 words.)

I’m writing this draft on March 21, launch day for Mass Effect: Andromeda. I probably won’t post this until much later, because I’m very paranoid about exposing myself to Mass Effect story spoilers right now, and my vivid imagination sees everyone running to the comments to post their Andromeda thoughts even though this post has nothing to do with Andromeda. Not only do I not want to hear about Andromeda, but I also don’t want to hear about Mass Effect 2 and 3. (1572 words.)

Totally ripped off from https://secretworldlegends.com/ There is some interesting MMORPG news out! Well, “shared-world” news, that is. Some time back, Funcom mentioned in an investor report that they were planning to “re-launch” The Secret World, and Internet speculation ran rampant. Nobody knew what that actually meant. Today, we found out. Funcom is planning to launch a new free-to-play game called Secret World Legends (the official acronym is apparently SWL, judging from my Twitter feed). This game will be a “shared-world action RPG.” You can read all the announcement information yourself on their site. (333 words.)

Over the weekend I tried to do three new gaming things: Play Mass Effect 2 (to finally finish it), play Mass Effect 3 (for the first time), and play Mass Effect 1 (over again). I installed Mass Effect 2 from Steam, hoping beyond hope that by some magical time-space temporal vortex I would be able to pick up where I left off years ago (probably at least two computers ago), but of course I had to start over. My goal was to play through the game quickly so that I could then finally start Mass Effect 3, a game I’ve had for years but never played. (710 words.)

I read on MassivelyOP that Shroud of the Avatar was having a free trial “test” (whatever that is) so I downloaded the game and tried it out last weekend. I’ve seen increasing buzz about the game and I was curious to see if there was anything to it. I only played for about an hour, and while I can’t say I was dying to play more, I did find it interesting enough to leave it on my games to continue watching. It had a number of things you just don’t find in traditional MMORPGs. (1012 words.)

I’m now 56 days into my Navezgane 7 Days To Die game. I’ve built a forge and a workbench and a cement mixer and my base is getting upgraded to concrete and reinforced steel. Just in time for the bigger zombies like policemen, soldiers, and weird alien “feral” zombies. I also found some iron veins to mine. I had a hard time finding them because I kept hearing that you’re supposed to dig where you find gravel but it’s not actually “gravel” that comes out of the ground, it’s sand and stone (which combine to make gravel). (1208 words.)

Yes, that’s a miniature panda on my head. Last night I took a look at Revelation Online for the first time. I played for about 45 minutes. I don’t have much to say about it, except I didn’t particularly care for it. It’s a solidly average anime-style MMORPG that takes no chances. It’s an Asian version of a WoW-clone. (A Lineage-clone?) I saw nothing that advanced the MMORPG genre in any way. (692 words.)

From a draft written somewhere around October 2016… I finally got around to watching Amazon’s teaser video, thinking that it would erase my earlier skepticism and soften my opinion about their upcoming games, and maybe even start to get excited about the possibilities. Unfortunately it only pushed my skeptical buttons even harder. “What if a game was built for Twitch,” wonders a voiceover 12 seconds into the video. Instant buzzkill. The video goes on to mention Twitch about five times in the first 60 seconds, before anything about games. If we go with the assumption that what they put into the very beginning of their video is the “hook” and therefore the most important message they want to deliver, we have to assume that Twitch integration is the most important part of their design philosophy for these games. And if Amazon making games to target Twitch viewers is not a corporate-synergy-driven game design, I don’t know what is. It’s as if they accidentally put the video meant for their shareholders out to the public. (317 words.)