Here, There And Everywhere

As may already be apparent, my game-playing in recent times has become fractured and fragmentary. I play something every day but what and for how long depends almost entirely on factors not wholly within my control. It's weird and annoying.

Factors affecting my "choices" include but are not limited to

• Dog-related interruptions and demands.
• Changing climactic conditions inside and outside the house.
• Work.
• Television programs to be watched at time of broadcast.
• Cloud gaming queues.
• Scheduled testing slots.
• Inertia, laziness and mithering.

For a few weeks now it's been a rare day when I've been able to sit down at the time of my choice, in the place of my choice, with the device of my choice and play the game of my choice for as long as I choose. I can't remember any point in the entirety of my gaming life, which goes back to the very early 1980s, when I had this little control. It's ironic, considering I am now semi-retired with ostensibly fewer responsibilities or commitments than at any time since I left college.

I only mention it to explain why it's so hard to find any through-line in what I post here any more. Of course, that's assuming there ever was one...

As I say, though, I am still playing games. Quite a few, in fact. The selection I'm mostly choosing from at the moment includes

• Cloudpunk
• Wuthering Waves
• Divinity: Original Sin
• Solasta: Crown of the Magister
• The First Descendant

That seems like more than enough to be flipping between but missing from that list only because I have not, as yet, gotten around to making it possible for me to play them on the laptop are

• EverQuest II
• Once Human
• Nightingale

Those three theoretically remain in my "Currently Playing" pile, a designation flawed only in that I'm not currently playing any of them.

Astute readers will notice the absence of a couple of titles I supposedly was playing

• The Outer Worlds
• Hard West

I'll refrain from listing all the games I've bought recently but not yet played at all or those I've signed up for or am thinking about. I probably need to play some games before I add any more to the heap.

On the positive side, I did finish something! Granted, it was only a demo but still. When I posted about Hard West, an anonymous reader left a comment recommending I try Mutant Year Zero. So I did. The demo, anyway.

And I liked it. The setting is interesting, the characters are appealing, the graphics are attractive and the gameplay is involving. When I finished the demo my immediate response was to go to the Steam Store to buy the full game. It was on sale at the time, although I forget what the discount was.

I didn't end up buying it, for two reasons. The most sensible was that, as I think I've made clear, I already have way too many games going unplayed to start adding more. MYZ isn't going anywhere so it makes much more sense to wait and buy it when I might actually play it.

The real reason I didn't pull the trigger right away, though, was the reviews. I read a bunch of them and they were mostly very complimentary. The game has an all-time Very Positive rating on Steam. Many of the reviews, however, make a point of saying how challenging and difficult the game gets in later stages and how important stealth becomes. 

I am not really in the market for anything "challenging" right now, if indeed I ever was, and I have never enjoyed stealth mechanics all that much, so that put me off somewhat. All of which goes to prove that, yes, reviews can make a difference to purchasing decisions.

Nevertheless, chances are high that I will pick up the game at some point, most likely in a sale. I have it on my wishlist. Thanks again to the anonymous recommender. 

As for the games I have been playing, I have a few notes:

Cloudpunk is really good. The story is really draws you in, helped enormously by the way it's told. It would work as a TV show or a movie but for once playing the game is adding to rather than detracting from the narrative experience. 

Things have opened out somewhat from the endless fetch quest architectonics of the early game and there have been some unexpected twists. Camus gets more and more delightful as does Rania's relationship with him. I'm loving the whole thing.

Divinity: Original Sin, though? Not loving that so much. All the same, I'm playing quite a lot of it, mostly because so far it's the only game I have set up to play directly on the laptop without using some sort of remote streaming. That means it's my default choice far too often just because it's less of a faff to log in. I need to do something about that.

Interestingly, when I visited Can You Run It? to see what games would run on the laptop, I checked D:OS and apparently it won't. The laptop doesn't meet the minimum specs. Weird, then, how it runs smoothly at high settings for entire sessions, with the laptop showing absolutely no sign of strain. I used to trust that site but I'll look at the results there a lot more skeptically in future. 

As for the game itself... it's a bit wordy, isn't it? I mean, I count myself as someone who's willing to undertake a good deal of reading (Or listening.) when playing video games. I generally like to give myself the full quest text/voice acting experience. But even I'm finding this one a bit much. It's all talk. If I play for an hour I'm lucky to get five minutes of combat - and I have to go looking for even that much. 

It wouldn't be so much of a problem if the writing was great. It's not. It's good, as in competent, grammatically correct, appropriate and all those professional kind of things so many games fail at but it isn't really doing much for me. The jokes aren't very funny, the characters aren't very characterful and the plot isn't very compelling. I'd rather it had less polish and more heart.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister, by comparison, is less professional in just about every possible way but also way more fun. The plot is much more linear but that means I know what I'm doing every time I log in, something that absolutely cannot be said for Divinity: Original Sin. I need to get Solasta onto the external drive asap so I can play it instead.

The First Descendant, as Tyler Edwards suggests, is a lot more fun than it has any right to be. It's the video game equivalent of one of those dumb action movies your friend drags you along to see and you think you're going to hate but you end up having a really good time even though you don't want to admit it. 

I'd be playing it more if it wasn't that the queues on GeForceNow are pretty chunky in prime time. I dropped out of the line twice yesterday evening because it was taking too long and I lost patience but then I tried again in bed and got in almost immediately. Bad omen. 

I played for an hour and spent my free token on Sharen before the event ends today just in case the option goes away. (I wanted Freyna but she wasn't in the offer.) Then I did two missions in a group to get the parts to make the Bunny costume. I had no idea what I was doing of course. I just followed one of the other players and shot stuff and we beat both missions and no-one yelled at me so op success!

There was some issue with the Bunny rewards. One I got, the other I didn't, which I suspect might be because my inventory was full (Don't say a word...) or maybe it was the wrong mission. I think there's a machine you can go to to get stuff from missions you didn't pick up so I'll have to check that next time. 

It's a fun game, anyway, if insanely over-complicated on the back end. I will be playing more.

Once Human I also want to get back to at some point. It's going to need a post of its own soon, for one thing. They're making even more peculiar changes to the Season system, which is now so ludicrously convoluted I can't imagine most players have a clue what's going on. I know I don't. 

I would have picked a new scenario but there's not much chance of me playing until I'm back on the desktop full time. I will try to make time to go through the process though, so I can at least attempt to describe it, if only so I understand it myself.

EverQuest II is another game I really want to get back to playing. It might run natively on the laptop, too. I need to get it onto the external drive to find out. 

I haven't really touched the new expansion, which just feels wrong. I saw the 2025 Roadmap and as usual it's a case of get on the bus or get left behind. I don't want to get left behind but I do wonder if my days as even a semi-regular player may be coming to an end. If I'm honest, I just like modern games better than old ones now. I enjoy the old games when I play them but when I'm thinking about playing I mostly want to play the new.

Speaking of which, I absolutely am going to get back to Wuthering Waves very soon, not least because Naithin says the new content has raised the bar on storytelling in the game and I already thought it was pretty darn good. I have to finish the Black Shores to get to Riniscita so I'd better get on with it.

And that's where I am right now in regards to gaming. I suppose this almost counts as one of those "My Gaming Plans" posts that I keep reading on other blogs but never do myself. Maybe I need to start. Winging it doesn't doesn't seem to be working quite as well as it used to.

Fleeting First Impressions Of The First Descendant

This morning I successfully logged into The First Descendant via GeForceNow, using a clever trick I discovered: it's called patience. It turns out there isn't any actual problem with the game per se - I'd been giving up too quickly. It takes frickin' forever to load.

Or it does the first time, anyway. I took a second run at it this afternoon and it wasn't nearly so bad. Still took ages but I only had time to tab out and read a couple of items on my news feeds before the game was ready. The first time, I could have taken Beryl for a walk round the block and made myself a coffee when I got back and I still wouldn't have been in.

Was it worth it? Hmmm....

I mean, I've clocked up a little over two hours. I did go back for a second session. I am probably going to play again. So... Maybe?

Let's go through what happened. I'm not even going to call this a First Impressions post. It's more like Fleeting Impressions. Which is a good idea for a new category, now I come to think of it.

The whole thing starts, as these things usually do, with a cut-scene or a video, whichever you prefer to call it. It was slick enough but it felt like whoever wrote the script was really phoning it in. I'm used to these things not making much sense but this was just gibberish.

Also very thin on detail. I'm used to being overwhelmed by tidal waves of lore coming at me from the start, often in the form of some deeply portentous narration that tells me far more about the setting than I have any need to know at that point. I'm not used to getting to the end and finding myself thinking "I could have done with a bit more context there."

Since it's come up, let's talk about the plot. It's nonsense, even by the astonishingly low standard of F2P video games. Earth got overrun by - I don't know... Aliens? Demons? Something nasty, anyway. They came from... no, I don't know that, either. Somewhere bad, I guess. 

Wherever they came from, we fought them and lost. And by "We" I mean Earth which, as always, immediately turned into a single, unified military-political entity in the face of existential threat because that's what would happen, right? 

Then another existential threat, bigger than the last one, arrived and kicked both our asses (That's us and the original bad guys.) or at least I think it was both but maybe the new bad guys were on the old bad guys' side...

Oh, who frickin' cares? None of it matters. None of it will have any consequences. It's there because it's expected and that's all.

It doesn't make any more sense when you get into the game proper either but no-one is playing this thing for the story. In my case, it didn't help that the Tutorial has noticeable narrative similarities to parts of the Black Shores storyline that I'm the middle of in Wuthering Waves, and when I say similarities I mean similar in the way your four year-old niece's fairy cycle is similar to a Harley Davidson Electra Glide.

Let's forget about the storyline. Nexon clearly did. What works a lot better is the voice acting and dialog. Not that anyone says anything that makes any sense there either but they say it with more conviction than it deserves and they say a lot of it, too. There's endless chuntering in the background, even during missions, as the various NPCs talk amongst themselves. It makes the place feel lived-in, if nothing else.

Did I skip Character Creation? No, not really. You don't get to make your own character. It's pick one from a list. A short list. There's a choice of three. There's a blonde woman, a guy who looks like he used to be in a boy band before he was drafted and some musclebound giant in an suit of armor that looks like one of Tony Stark's rejects.

Guess who I picked. Yes, obviously. I did at least look at what they all could do before I made a decision but even though the pretty boy had the abilities I liked most, I still went for the girl.

She has a name. They all have names. I've spent two hours playing her, though, and I can't remember what it is. I know it begins with a "V". Wait! Is it Viessa? I think it might be. Let me check... Yes! I remembered! She must have made more of an impression than I thought.

Viessa has cold powers. She can freeze things. I know she can because it says so in the mouseover descriptions on her skill bar. I certainly didn't know it from anything she did in the many, many fights she won for me. 

A lot of the time the icons had padlocks on them to show they weren't available but even when they were unlocked and I pressed the right keys, I couldn't tell what they were doing. Except for the "Q" key. That one fired missiles. I used it whenever it was off cooldown. I couldn't see anything freezy about the results, though. It just seemed to blow things up.

Mostly I stuck with the gun. Or the guns, I should say. She carries three because in games like this everyone lugs around a sniper rifle, a semi-automatic and a shotgun. It would be irresponsible not to.

In fact, by the time I stopped, Viessa had well over a dozen guns on her. Somewhere. I have no clue where she got them all let alone how she could walk while carrying them. I imagine they dropped off mobs I killed and I picked them up by running over them. That seems to be the preferred method of acquisition here.

And I like it. Saves time. Most of the mobs spew out power-ups - red for health, blue for "MP",which I assume doesn't stand for Mana Points, green for... not sure what green is. Ammo, maybe? 

Ammo is color-coded. It comes in green, amber and purple, which I think tells you what kind it is not what quality. Honestly, I'm going to have to go read an out-of-game guide if I carry on playing because there's just waaaay too much information coming at me in the game itself. 

The First Descendant is very clearly a game for people who like a lot of details. The kind who take notes and fill out spreadsheets. For fun. It would be intimidating if the game wasn't so darn easy.

It was the promise of unchallenging content in Tyler's review that attracted me to the game in the first place and so far I have not been disappointed. I managed not only to finish the Tutorial but the first sequence of missions as well. I think I leveled up at least three times and I opened the second mission area.

It was fun. The environments are visually appealing, for a war zone. Movement is fast and fluid. There's double jump and a grappling iron and you can climb. I bet there are gliders later.

At starter level, mobs seem to have the armor class of a wet paper bag and the hit points of a sickly gnat. Most die in one or two shots but nothing survives a volley. The main way they manage to inflict damage is by sniping or coming at you by the dozen, often in a conga line that means if you line them up just so,  you can watch them explode, one after another, like a string of fireworks.

Since they also drop heals all you need to do is run over them to refill your hit points, I found it next to impossible to go much below 90% health until I hit a bunch of mobs that didn't drop anything at all. That was the only time I died, mostly because I didn't notice it was happening until my screen went red around the edges.

It didn't matter because you get five attempts at a mission before it fails so I just respawned about ten yards away and carried on. I would have assumed this was purely for the newbie zones, to get you into the swing of things, had Tyler not strongly suggested the whole game is that way.

It suits me fine. I am not one of those people who gets bored quickly when things are too easy. More the reverse, really. There does come a point when I start to wonder what the point is but usually not until I start running out of interesting things to see or do.

That kind of attitude does mean I ought to avoid grouping with other players who'd rather take it all more seriously. TFD is a multiplayer game, if you want it to be. The tutorial tells you it's possible to set your missions to be either Private or Public but although I spotted that option, I missed how to set it, so my first time out I ended up in a group.

No-one said anything of course. Everyone just ran around on their own, barely in sight of each other. It was the first mission, after all. Most likely no-one had a clue what to do. My first session ended when I decided I'd better quit before I did something that would get me yelled at.

Next time, I made sure to set the mission as Private, which meant I could take it at my own pace and explore a bit. Not that there's all that much to see. The zones are more functional than scenic. Still, while it's new, it's interesting enough.

Performance on the laptop via GeForceNow's servers was excellent in private instances but the first time I zoned into the hub zone, where all the facilities are and where everyone hangs out, it turned into a slide-show. I could barely move and opening windows from the UI was hit or miss at best. 

I did manage to get Options open and as I expected the GeForceNow default for graphics was Very High. Once I'd changed that to Medium everything was absolutely fine again and the game looked almost as good, too. I see there are a lot of Optimization guides for playing the game on PC, most of which seem to recommend turning things off or down, so I'm quite happy to leave everything on Medium, at least for now.

When I was able to move again I went to the post-robot to check my mail. I had plenty. Even though I only started today, my mailbox was full of rewards for participating in various betas and events I'd obviously never done. I even got something for reaching Level 20, which was a surprise since I was Level 2 at the time.

I'm guessing this is an artifact of the GeF orceNow process but who knows. Tyler did say they were handing out a lot of freebies although I think he was talking abut the Winter event that's still running. I got stuff for that, too.

There was quite a bit of in-game cash in my mail, too. I looked in the shop to see what I could buy with it. I saw a good few things I fancied but I managed to stop myself buying any of them just yet. I think I need to do a bit of research first.

Which does suggest I'm thinking of playing some more. I'd at least like to get the dog. And maybe a few cosmetics.

That's how they get you, isn't it?

GeForce Now And Then

When I said in yesterday's post "I have yet to try GeForce Now but I see no reason why that shouldn't also work perfectly.", I knew I was taking a big risk. I ought to have done my due diligence and at least checked Nvidia's cloud gaming service would run on my new laptop.

Well, now I have - and it does. It does not, however, "work perfectly". I've tried two games so far and if GeForce Now was baseball I'd be batting 0.500. Actually, it would have been a strike and a home run. (Help! I'm on an analogy and I don't know how to get off!)

Shorn of the the sporting metaphors, I got one game to run without any issues whatsoever but the other one wouldn't run at all. The good news is that the game that did work is one of my favorites. The bad news is that the one that didn't was the one I wanted to try.

First, though, a little bit about GeForce Now itself. It's been a while since I last used it. A couple of years ago, I was playing New World in the cloud because playing it locally was threatening to set my PC on fire but then two things happened: 

1. I bought a really good graphics card that could run New World comfortably.
   
2. I pretty much lost interest in playing New World, comfortably or otherwise.

That was in the summer of '23. Back then the free version of GeForce Now limited you to an hour per session and put you in a queue each time the hour ran out. You could play any game that GeForce had on their servers and that you owned. Of course, you had to prove you did, in fact, own the game, which meant syncing it with wherever you'd bought it.

In the autumn of '21, when I first engaged with GeForce Now, I had a heck of a job getting it to link up with my Steam account which, as I remember it, was the only option then available for proving ownership, apart, presumably, from buying it direct. Or maybe it was the only one I was interested in at the time. I really can't remember.

Now, there are several ways to tell GeForce Now you own a game. You can link to your Steam account but also to Ubisoft, Epic, XBox and Battlenet.

That's quite a selection. I have all of them, although I only really use Steam. I might branch out now I know I can play on Nvidia's servers, though.

For this experiment, I stuck with Steam, having completely forgotten the problems it gave me last time. Luckily for me, either I did all the set-up then or the information required has been trimed because it took just a few clicks and some confirmatory emails and it was all done.

I didn't have a particular title in mind so I took a look through the list. It was good to see Fortnite featured in numerous flavors because only a few days ago I uninstalled it to make some space. Now if I ever want to log in to watch a metaverse event I won't need to download the damn thing again.

There were several obvious possibilities, not least New World, but it was one of the "free" titles that caught my eye. Only a couple of days ago I read a piece by Tyler FM Edwards at MOP, where he described The First Descendant as a game "with very little genuinely challenging content". That sounded right up my street so I thought I'd start there.

Even though it was free, I still had to add it to my Steam Library before GeForce Now was happy. That lit up the Play button and I pressed it.

Other than the enhanced range of partners, about the only noticeable difference to the process is that now you get adverts while you sit in the queue. And if you skip them it sends you back to the start of the line. 

That sounds much worse than it is for a couple of reasons:

1. Watching ads beats staring at counter, which is all you used to get.
2. You can both mute the ads and tab out and do something else while they run without losing your place in the queue, so you don't need to see or hear them at all. 

There were only fourteen people ahead of me anyway, the perks of playing mid-week during work and school hours. There was barely time for an ad to run before I got in. 

Or rather didn't get in...

It would be nice now to go into a few First Impressions paragraphs, where I either confirm or refute Tyler's opinion. Unfortunately, the game repeatedly hung at login, offering me nothing but a black screen and the blue, spinning ouroboros that's replaced the good old hourglass. 

In the end I had to exit GeForce Now by right-clicking the icon in the toolbar, there being no option to quit on the screen itself. A form popped up asking me to rate my experience from one star to five. I gave it one but only because I couldn't give it zero.

Not a great start. I might have stopped there had I not also noticed, as I was checking the roster of available games, that one of them was Wuthering Waves.

This piqued my curiosity. I currently play WW directly through publisher Kuro Games' portal . I wasn't aware it was available on any other platform so I wasn't sure how it would work in the cloud. 

I guessed that if I tried to play the game on GeforceNow, I'd be starting over as a new player. I didn't want to do that but I did want to see how it worked and also if the spinning PoV issue would recur so I clicked the button to say I owned it just to see what would happen.

To my considerable surprise I was offered a couple of options, one of which was the Epic Store, where I'd completely forgotten the game was also available. Much more exciting for me, there was also a link to the Kuro Games version. I couldn't believe it would take me to my existing account but that's just what it did.

In fact, it took me straight to the exact same login process I've been using ever since I started playing. It let me log in using Google, select my existing character and server and pick up playing from where I left off - except now I was somehow doing it on GeforceNow's servers in The Netherlands.

Honestly, it felt like magic. There I was, sitting all warm and cosy in an armchair in front of the gas fire, playing my familiar character just as though I was at my desktop, only in a great deal more comfort. 

Gameplay felt as smooth as it ever does. I had maybe ten seconds of lag in an hour but I often get more than that on a direct connection.

I worked my way through another full chapter of The Black Shores (Great story. Makes no sense but the feels are off the charts...) before I had to stop for lunch. There was no sign of the mysterious spinning problem. That's clearly down to Splashtop but now I don't need to think about how to fix it.

I mark my laptop trials of both Luna and GeForce Now resounding successes. There are all kinds of advantages to playing this way, not just the top-line benefit of turning a middling business laptop into a high-powered gaming machine but also in the savings in disk space and time sent keeping the games up to date. Let someone else handle all those huge downloads for once!

I might even push some of my gaming to the cloud when I'm back on the desktop. I'm struggling for disk space there and it might make sense to play new games remotely where possible, rather than try to free up space to download them.

Either way, the technology has clearly improved and it looks like remote gaming is here to stay. Now, if I can just get The First Descendant to join the party...