I haven’t posted here in a while, for no reason other than I just haven’t been able to muster the energy to write anything long out. I feel in the mood for it today, though, so here I go.
I want to first say that I find myself in a very strange position in regards to gaming right now. Never before in my life have life circumstances so significantly affected my gaming time and how exactly I make use of it when I have it. Obviously this is to be expected when one is married with three children under the age of three and works a full time job, but what I did not quite expect was how this would affect my taste in games. Now, I wouldn’t say my tastes have changed, exactly. My taste preferences have simply shifted a bit. My toleration for certain gameplay types and certain difficulty levels has been reduced significantly, and it’s a weird feeling.
For example, I started Horizon: Zero Dawn shortly after completing Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception (which, by the way, is a great game, even if it doesn’t quite reach the same level of excellence of Uncharted 2). I was incredibly excited to play it because I have heard many good things about it, and it seems just like the kind of game I would love. And I did... for the first three or four hours. The setting, plot, and protagonist grabbed my attention. The gameplay struck a lot of the right chords. But the longer I played, the more I found myself wanting to rush through everything. That isn’t that unusual for me. I often get this way with narrative-driven open world games. The difference, though, is that in times past, this desire to rush through everything didn’t come until much nearer the end of the game. With H:ZD, this began happening within the first five hours.
It all came to a head when I climbed my first Tallneck. These are equivalent to synchronization points in the Assassin’s Creed series. Using them basically causes the game to vomit icons all over the in-game map, showing you the billion points of interest (whether they be quests, hunting grounds, significant places) in a good-area around you. The moment I opened the map and saw all that stuff was the moment I knew I wouldn’t be able to get through the game. At least not at this particular point in my life.
Maybe this sounds weird, but I just can’t muster the energy to care about all that stuff. I want to see how the game’s main plot plays out, but the game’s design won’t allow this without at least some investment in side activities to get me to the recommended level for the next main mission, and I just... I can’t do it. With all the busyness in my life, with the myriad choices I have to make on a day to day basis, I can’t bring myself to plod through so many ultimately meaningless tasks to just get to the missions I’m actually interested in. Just a couple years before, this wouldn’t have bothered me. Sure, I might not have enjoyed these aspects as much, and toward the end of the game I might get a little fatigued with it all, but I would have accepted it as a minor investment to get where I really wanted to go and that would be that. I can’t do that now.
I recently played God of War, which also had a decent amount of side stuff to do, but I never felt like any of it was meaningless. It all seemed specifically designed to be entertaining and move me toward an ultimate goal. I could handle that. It was more refined and more purposeful. The side stuff in Horizon just feels like busywork to pad the runtime and justify the open world.
The game’s on hold, at this point. I will return to it someday, but for now, I’ll just keep it in the catalog.
So to fulfill my gaming needs, I diving back in to Bloodborne. I’ve been feeling the itch for a while now, and as my interest in Horizon waned, I decided to just do it. I’m trying for a Strength and Arcane build, mainly because I want to dabble in some of the stuff I ignored in my first run through the game. I considered a challenge run of some kind, but I don’t feel familiar enough and good enough with the game at this point to feel confident in one. I settled on something of a compromise: my goal is to use the Tonitrus as my melee weapon and supplement it with Hunter’s Tools and other Arcane weapons/abilities. I don’t think this at all qualifies as even remotely optimal, but I suppose that will be the challenge: optimize my build within the small limits I’ve self-imposed. We’ll se how it goes.
I’ve explored most of Central Yharnam. All I have left is part of the sewers, and then it’s on to Father Gascoigne, who is one of my favorite bosses in this game. I already tackled Cleric Beast, which is an okay boss but felt particularly tedious this time. I suspect this was because I wasn’t using a serrated weapon (which would have provided bonus damage) and because I had only 10 Strength. I’ve pumped a little more into Strength now, though, and I’ve already seen improvement with standard enemies. My true test will be Gascoigne. My first run I did a Skill build, so I was able to make extensive use of gun parries and visceral attacks. Because visceral attacks scale exclusively with Skill and I have no intention of raising Skill at this point, they won’t be quite as effective this time around. Plus, the Hunter Axe is a bit slower than anything I used on my previous run.
It should be exciting.
