Delfeir vs The Backlog General Update (Sept 2022)

Given that I’ve spent much of the year not updating this website, I figured I should rectify that.

Hi! I’m alive!

It’s been another one of those years that — while mercifully not spent in lockdown — has seen very little headway in any of the things I’d like to do or the projects I’ve begun. In addition to a status update on some of those, there’s a few games in particular I’ve played this year that I would like to write about, so I’ll put a spotlight on those in a mini-Backlog Report.

IGN Review of Galactic Civilizations IV

Let’s start off with the major positive news from the year: I got hired by IGN as a freelancer to review a game! If there was any doubt to myself (or others) that I’m not any good at what I do, that helped me dispel it significantly. Paid review work for one of the biggest games media sites on the internet? Regardless of your opinion of the website, that’s a big deal, and I was certainly thrilled. It was a good little opportunity to work with some very skilled, friendly, and communicative editors over there. 

The only negatives about the experience were that the game in question (Galactic Civilizations IV) itself was not particularly good, but writing about it was nonetheless interesting. If you’ve not seen it yet, you can read the review over on IGN. I also wrote the script for the video version, which is slightly different and a lot more condensed due to word limits.

There’s more I’d like to write about GalCivs 4 that I didn’t touch on in the review, honestly. But the reason I elected to omit it from the review is that it’s a heavily political deep-dive into some of the systems and writing there, both as a political reading and as a kind of “eureka!” moment on why I always felt the series failed to meet my expectations. I think there’s plenty to say there, but it’s not what IGN is really about or particularly pertinent to the rest of the overall review. Hopefully I’ll get to put it up here at some point.

Elder Scrolls Mod Survey

So some of you will likely recall the survey I put up a while back about modding habits for Elder Scrolls games. Thanks to that being shared around in a couple of communities, it ended up getting a lot more traction than I was expecting, with more than 200 responses. Given that I was only expecting maybe a couple dozen, that was a pleasant surprise, and so it encouraged me to push on and do a really good write-up on the results and statistics garnered there.

The fact that it’s not up on the website should prove a good indicator that that didn’t pan out.

As it turns out, actually getting all the information and data from the Google survey proved a significantly larger headache than I could’ve expected. Getting the graphs to save as images required jumping through multiple hoops, or else just slowly and painstakingly recreating them elsewhere. At best, I’d have to just manually cut and paste the images from another Google document or even my screenshots, and then manually type up all the numerical points for the graph that were previously just a mouseover popup. 

Trying to do this in addition to actually writing up everything I wanted to talk about, both before and after the results were factored in, proved to be an absolute chore. By the time I figured out a method to actually do it, I was so frustrated with the incredibly tedious approach that I elected to scrap that and just publish the data for the respondents to read without the additional feedback and conclusions.

Well, I couldn’t do that either. There was no way to just showcase the results or publish it in a way that was readable. I could access the results and see it all in lovely details myself, but I couldn’t just publish it like that. At best, I’d just be opening it up to responders again and letting them see the results after they were done filling out the survey. No telling if people who previously already filled it out would be able to access it though, so I’d just be opening it up to further applicants and compromising the data set even further. I got so sick of beating my head against the wall with this project that I just put it on the shelf and haven’t touched it since. 

The guilt of not being able to actually share the survey results with people is a major reason why much of my writing and other projects have stalled since. I would like to get around to posting it without such hassle, but I don’t know if it’s possible. Of course, I could be completely wrong about all this and have just missed a really obvious feature because I’m an idiot. If that’s the case, please let me know, as I would sincerely love to find a way to get the data out without further struggle. We’ll see how it goes.

I will just say this much: of the 237 responses, only 4 people haven’t played Skyrim, and only 2 of those played any other numbered Elder Scrolls game instead. In addition, only 60% or so of people surveyed have actually played Morrowind. As such, you have all disappointed me tremendously, and you should go fix that this very instant! It’s my favourite game ever for a reason, goddammit! Go play Morrowind, because I sure as hell did!

Morrowind

What initially started the mod survey was, in fact, my replaying of Morrowind. But unlike the most recent time I played through it to completion, wherein I kept the mods extremely light, this time I decided to see just what the modding community had been up to. So I installed what’s available of the Tamriel Rebuilt project, and went touring.

What an absolute joy of a month that proved to be. No joke, I spent a good month in the post-Elden Ring times (more on that in the next subsection) playing Morrowind with various builds, largely confining myself to the new content made by that project. Seriously, if you’re a fan of Morrowind but have never checked out Tamriel Rebuilt, I strongly encourage you to do so. The scale and attention to detail on those mods is seriously incredible, and there’s already a wealth of stories and quest content within that rival the base game and expansions (and the team is only half done).

When I wasn’t playing the game, I was basically writing mini-travelogues to my friends, showcasing screenshots and highlights of my adventures. I’d like to think I had them as equally enthralled by the world and tales as I was in playing them. Next time I revisit the mod fully, that’s what I’m intending to do: write up about my adventures and tell them here.

And I will definitely be playing that mod again as new updates and content rolls out for it. Tamriel Rebuilt is perhaps the most ambitious and yet utterly successful mod I’ve ever had the joy of playing. Morrowind is my favourite game, and the world and style it portrays is unlike any other fictional setting I’m familiar with. The reason I rarely played with mods was because most just didn’t mesh well with that original style and vision, and I was incredibly picky. But that’s the sort of attention to detail that the mod team focused on providing. It is just more Morrowind; more direct a sequel than Oblivion and Skyrim ever could have been, even if they’d tried to match that same style. It’s fantastic.

Have to say though, the gameplay didn’t quite match up to the other open-world RPG I was playing at the time.

Elden Ring

So when the Game Awards roll around this year, Elden Ring is just going to sweep all of them and be GOTY. We can all agree on this, right? Right. Put your hand down, person in the back waiting for God of War: Ragnarok; we all want to believe in it but it’s going up against some seriously tough competition.

Elden Ring basically consumed me for over a month when it was released. Not only was it all I was playing, but it was all I even felt like playing, and it felt like a physical chore to play games that weren’t it. That game is magnificent. And I… still haven’t finished it yet, though I was very definitely in the later stages of the game. In my defence, that was around the time I got COVID, and so I was out of energy and focus for a stretch there. Couple that with the fact that I was streaming it for friends and didn’t want them to miss the progress, while also starting to find my current playstyle (full mage) less satisfying, and I ended up stalling on it.

I’ve made efforts to go back since, and did start up another character with a different playstyle. It’s still always a blast, but I’ve just not been able to stick to it nearly as long since. It’s something I hope to finish by year’s end just to say I’m done. But even if I don’t, it’s still the unrivaled contender for GOTY for me. The game does so much right and there’s so little out there that can match it in terms of scale and density. Every other open world game feels lesser for it.

Dammit, now I want to play it again.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3

So. Let’s put aside the positive experiences for a bit. I went into Xenoblade 3 with a deep love of the preceding games and a lot of anticipation. In very little time, Xenoblade 3 pulled me in and had won me over. I was enthralled and eager to see where the story went. And that feeling stayed with me for about 80% of the game’s runtime, gradually hitting a crescendo as the game hit the emotional climax around the “Act 2 Low Point” of the three act storytelling structure. If you’ve played it, I’ll put it simply: the end of Chapter 5/start of Chapter 6. If you know, you know, and I can feel you nodding in agreement with me there.

The game was an easy contender for the best in the numbered trilogy. Whatever few shaky moments it had or rough gameplay systems that were still a little slow and bloated could be balanced by the story being strong. All they had to do was just not fuck up the ending tremendously.

…So what did they fucking do? Yeah, they fucked up the ending tremendously!

It’s been days — weeks? — since I finished it, and I’m still just frustrated and saddened by it. This one will probably get a full write-up soon going into more detail. But it’s enough to say that the ending made the whole thing feel meaningless. All the little issues or weaker moments and systems that had been coasting by, shielded by the prior quality of the story, were suddenly unshielded and exposed. Xenoblade 3 went from potential best in the series to easily my least favourite. It still beats out Xenoblade X, but it falls victim to many of the same story trappings that that one did to sour me on it too.

I can’t say I won’t recommend it to people who liked the prior games. There’s still a lot to like, and what’s good is really good. Just temper your expectations and brace yourself for the fall. And speaking of tempering expectations and bracing for the fall…

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is a fantastic video game, and the best one CD Projekt Red have made, easily beating out Witcher 3.

Yeah, I said it. And I wholeheartedly believe it, too. 

Now if you’re asking whether I mean that as a criticism of Witcher 3 or as praise of Cyberpunk, the answer to both is yes. In fact, the main reason I decided to play Cyberpunk 2077 was because I had been trying to play through Witcher 3. When I found myself actively disinterested in continuing the latter, and sometimes even dreading it, I knew something was up. But I remembered playing Cyberpunk on release, and despite it being broken and unfinished beyond all belief, I still found a shiny glint of something in there that I hoped to see polished in the coming year. Well, this was right after Patch 1.5 had dropped, so no time like the present.

Turns out, I was right. There is a shine there, and when I started digging in the muck to find it, I found a massive diamond. Cyberpunk 2077 is actually a great game, with a story that unfolded and ultimately concluded in a way that hasn’t left my mind for long since finishing it months ago. Despite everything that is still underdeveloped, questionable or flat out wrong with the game even to this day? That has been something I have clung to in a year that just seems intent on throwing terrible endings at me in every creative medium I look towards.

The game is better than it was at release, that much is true, but it’s still buggy. It’s still full of half-implemented systems and broken promises. All the criticism, ire, and badmouthing of the game since its release is completely justified and unavoidable. But it really is just such a shame that what is here — this special, narrative-focused and contained experience that tried and failed to be an open world cyberpunk life sim — will forever be tarnished by it. I will have more to write on this soon, I hope.

Speaking of tarnished, and not in a way that segues back to Elden Ring!

Final Fantasy 14 (and the Endwalker Critique)

Another project that remains unfinished is the Endwalker review and critique I mentioned long ago. I said that I was struggling to continue it and wasn’t sure if it was worth doing, but enough people suggested that I push on regardless and that it was worth doing. I agreed, and so I did try. But in the end, I just gave up. By the time I was making headway in it, I had found myself just uncaring about it any more. That’s not to say that I don’t still feel that ire towards Endwalker; I do. I fucking hate it, still, and I firmly maintain that the writing is bad and has actively damaged Final Fantasy 14. 

I do not know if the game will ever recover, and as the new plot unfolds with further patches, I’m even less convinced that it will. There’s little to no signs of improvement there. People still seem overall happy with the content and story of Endwalker, but I can’t help but notice that there’s a lot less disagreement with me when I bring up those narrative misgivings. As the rot seeps in and continues, I think it’s only going to become more noticeable. And then, on reflection, the extent of it and how far back it goes will come to light in a lot more people. Or maybe that’s just my talking about how Xenoblade 3 ended up feeling to me, I don’t know.

Even if you do still like Endwalker, and you actively disagree with my admittedly harsh and extreme claims of poor quality… fair enough. I get it. I won’t push it. But I will just ask you this: could there not have been multiple ways in which the story could have been told, structured, or paced that would have made for a genuinely better payoff? Maybe with Elpis’ accessibility? The antagonist’s motives and the pacing by which they’re all introduced? It could be anything, but if you start asking yourself how it could have been better, I have little doubt that you’ll find something really obvious in short order. And then again… and again. Even if it’s just a few things you find, know that I’ve looked through almost all of them, and I’m still finding issues.

Which is why I’m not continuing the critique. In short, it’s just too damn much. I had to wade back and forth through so many screenshots and cutscenes to find all the wordings and contradictions going all the way back to the earliest days of the game if I was going to be thorough and accurate. I didn’t even need to do that, too: I could’ve just compared it directly to what was said in Shadowbringers and it would do the trick. But if I was going to do this, I wanted to do it right.

And frankly, that’s too much work for something I no longer actively enjoy. I wasn’t having fun writing it, or doing the research. It made me miserable, frankly, to see how far a story and world that I found so memorable and meaningful had fallen, and in such a short length of time. It got to the point that I found myself disinterested in playing the game itself any more, so I’m not. I’m unsubbed, and I don’t know when I’ll go back. I miss playing the game a lot, but the gameplay itself is not something I can divorce from the story and world on offer.

To this day, I know a lot of people don’t believe me when I say how bad I think Endwalker is. They think I’m overstating it or are otherwise just delusional. They say I should just touch grass, or else just play the game and skip the cutscenes. So I’ll just come clean for you all then, to see just how deadly serious I am.

What have I been playing instead of Final Fantasy 14 since Endwalker? What is equally bad and yet has managed to keep my interest more?

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands

Yeah. Yeah. That’s how bad I feel Endwalker is: I started playing WoW again. And not WoW classic, but WoW retail, amidst the two back-to-back worst expansions in the game that weren’t Warlords of Draenor.

Now, it’s important to note that my playing the games and having anything to say about them (good or bad) does NOT change the fact that Activision Blizzard is a fucking awful company. The endless stream of news, controversies, abuses and frankly disgusting examples of corporate mismanagement and downright villainy is still ongoing, while still not being even remotely addressed. I wouldn’t piss on Bobby Kotick if he was on fire. But I would — and do — support the ongoing efforts of the ABK Worker’s Alliance to fight back against all this and seize back control of the company from the hierarchical scumbags who continue to exploit developers and players alike. Raven Software’s QA department getting unionised was a fantastic start and I hope the rest follow suit. Never stop fightin’, guys.

If ethical consumption under capitalism existed, then I would not play any of their games. Alas, that’s not the world we live in. For the longest time, I swore them off and had no intention to return to them. Even though I’ve begrudgingly loosened that stance over time, I give them as little as I can, and I will never discuss their games in any capacity without similar statements to the above condemning their management and corporate nature. And I’ll still never play Heroes of the Storm again after what they did to the eSports scene there, no matter how badly my heart aches to play it again. Seriously, I have genuine withdrawal symptoms. I miss that game so much. But fuck Activision Blizzard. The Microsoft buyout won’t save them, even if it does go through.

And yet. With all that in mind, my immediate group of FF14 buddies who were equally disillusioned with Endwalker opted to head to WoW again for something to do, and I joined them. None of us actually purchased Shadowlands, either; we had no intention of playing that cesspit of an expansion until it was given to us for free when Dragonflight rolled around. But they ended up giving it to players for free just recently instead, so we got it that way. Up until that point and for a surprising chunk of time, though? We played through the Battle for Azeroth content that none of us had been active in the game for, catching up on stories, quests, dungeons, and whatever else we could manage as a trio of level 50s. Only well after that was mostly dried up did we start playing Shadowlands and doing the same.

Now, it’s still not a good game. Shadowlands is a laughably bad story even by its own metrics, and then absolutely awful when you apply it to WoW and Azeroth as a greater whole. I am absolutely convinced that someone on the writing team had an original story or novel that they couldn’t get published, and so they somehow managed to convince the rest of the team to get it made as a WoW expansion. If Endwalker is incongruous with what came before it in FF14, Shadowlands is that for WoW, and it had to fall a lot less far to reach that low. That’s probably the only reason I tolerate it; I was used to WoW being an inconsistent and poorly written mess with nuggets of greatness sprinkled throughout. FF14 got there from the highest of highs in a single patch cycle.

But the core gameplay loop is, at its heart, a lot of fun. I enjoy playing my draenei warrior as I always have, and I’ve found moments and quests that I like. I’ve met some new friends in a new guild there that already feel like I’ve known them for months. I’m having fun with it, even if that’s frequently despite the game, not because of it. I just use the framework.

I can only hope that Dragonflight is a step in the right direction and makes WoW something to actually be respected again. I’m not holding my breath, of course, and it being status quo will probably just have me go “Oh no! Anyway” without batting an eye. But hey, I hope. And that is honestly, sincerely, genuinely more than I feel for the remaining patches of Endwalker at this point.

Starcraft 2

Speaking of ActiBlizz being scum and an awful company, the shift to WoW actually started here, when I decided to revisit Starcraft 2 for the first time since beating the Legacy of the Void campaign. Actually, that’s a lie: beating the last set of Nova Covert Ops missions. But I hadn’t replayed the Legacy of the Void campaign since beating it the first time, given how bad an ending it was.

Well, Starcraft as a franchise hasn’t seen much change since I last visited it. There’s a lot more microtransactions and such available with it having gone Free to Play as a baseline, with a hell of a lot of overpriced cosmetic guff. Stay classy, ActiBlizz. None of that was of any real interest to me aside from the new Co-op Commanders though. After all, Starcraft 2’s co-op is genuinely great and the best surprise of that game’s staggered rollout. And on my return to the game a few months back, I did end up playing quite a bit of this mode again, with both the new and old characters. It remains great, and I’d genuinely pay for a standalone RTS game in this vein. Maybe Stormgate can have a mode like that or something.

I did a lot more than play the co-op, though. I started in Brood War on a whim, because I wanted to check out some of the official unofficial campaigns that Blizzard outsourced and sold back in the day. A friend of mine had one of these on a disc when I was like 12, and I remembered so little about them that I was half-convinced they were a hallucination. Well, they’re real. And they aren’t particularly good either. They don’t hold a candle to the actual Brood War campaign in terms of mission design, balance, or story.

So I decided to play the Brood War campaign again. But having finished it not all that far back, I decided to put a spin on it: I’d play the Mass Recall mod that brought all the original campaigns into Starcraft 2’s engine. And that was an absolute blast, even if it really exposed how much of Brood War’s balancing was done around the limitations of the game engine. The only reason Zerg wasn’t massively OP was because it’s genuinely that hard to control and micromanage an army of that size while selecting only 12 units at a time. Take that limitation away like Starcraft 2’s engine does, and suddenly you’re an unstoppable killing machine.

Be that as it may, I still enjoyed the general feel of it enough to decide that I wasn’t done. So I went back into Starcraft 2 proper and started replaying all the campaigns on Hard mode, often going out of my way to get as many achievements as I could. It was a long and arduous quest and still not one I’m done — I do want to do them again on Brutal — but it was fun. I found a lot more to appreciate of Starcraft 2 in terms of mission design and overall campaign structure, even if the story remains pretty trash tier and a vast step down from Brood War. And that ending… ye gods, that ending is Mass Effect 3 levels of bad to this day.

It was a pleasant reminder, if nothing else, that RTS remains one of my favourite genres for a reason and that Starcraft in general is a great time that I am always eager to get into. I can only hope that the series doesn’t die here, just like the genre as a whole continually threatens to do. Please don’t let me down, Stormgate.

General Writing Practices

Unrelated to any one project or game is my general writing flow, because I continue to have annoying mental roadblocks there.

In short, if I’m working on a project and it stalls or I lose momentum on it, the wise thing to do would be to put it aside and work on something else instead. What actually ends up happening is that I try to brute force the project instead, almost inevitably get nowhere, and then just further spiral into doing nothing as the desire to actually work on it (and thus anything else) shrinks dramatically. It’s not even worth continuing this practice in the rare event that I actually do finish something, because it seemingly always ends up in a completed piece that I don’t care for or find lacking. There’s a handful of closed to finished drafts that I could probably post as is and they’d be fine, but they don’t meet my own standards, so I haven’t done so.

Relying purely on inspiration doesn’t make for great writing either, necessarily. It definitely doesn’t make me particularly more prolific than otherwise. I need to find a way to more consistently strike a middle ground. What’s frustrating is that I feel like I did that at DualShockers, frequently meeting tight embargos and only ever slipping by a day or so once or twice in the year I was there. Being in a more structured environment does seem to do better for me, but it does compound the stress I feel and the desire to succeed, so that if I do end up slipping there? It hits me even harder and sets me back further. Dilemmas. 

I would like to be writing in that sort of environment or group again, but I’m not going to do so for free ever again. I can and do write for fun all the time, but if I’m doing serious reviews or editorials, it becomes work. My work is good enough to be paid for — and now I have actual proof of that — so I’m not going to allow my passion (or even ambivalence) to be exploited again. There’s enough of that in the world, and if I’m going to write without pay, I’ll do so here on my own terms. End of discussion. But hey, if someone is looking and willing to work with me on this, my email and other contacts are open.

Alright. I think that’s enough. I basically just sat down and started typing this from start to finish after promising myself I would do so, and I’m pleased to have committed to it. Any sort of update has been a long time coming, but writing in general means enough to me that I always feel like I’m in a funk when I’m not doing it for long enough. With luck, that’ll propel me on both the gaming fronts here that I’ve listed, as well as the creative stuff that I do unrelated to this website that continues to remain private to all but a few until it’s ready to go. If that sounds intriguing, don’t get your hopes up: I’ve been threatening to write novels my entire life, and while I hope to actually do so soon, we’ll see how it ends up.