Still Alive: An Update

For the one fan of Beware the Robot Squad out there, I thought maybe I should take some time to say hey.



Hey.



I'm sure I could give some big explanation for why updates have been so slow. Real life has gotten in the way or some such blithery nonsense, but really I'm just lazy. Anyway, here's what's going on with me right now.





I'm almost done with The Witcher 3, I think. After over a year of off and on playing it seems to be approaching something like a final act. Shit is getting serious. Stakes are high! And yeah, I had planned a year ago to write some sort of review or opinion piece about the game, but then it took me a year to get to this point, so I'll summarize: It's good.


It's really fucking good.


By now, I'm sure everyone has an opinion on the game. It's either one of the best games of all time or a janky game with slippery fish combat. My experience with it has been one of increasing wonder. Gaming is rarely better for me than with a good open world RPG. Give me a few hundred square miles of empty wilderness, a couple dozen townsfolk with missing necklaces, and a thousand identical looking goblins and I'm in heaven. It was always understood that the tradeoff you were making was a big playplace in exchange for any sort of interesting characters or narrative. I may be walking around as a boring create-a-hero that might be mistaken for an NPC in any other game with the one line of dialogue that they repeat over and over again, but dammit I'm a generi-guy walking around the future. Oooooh lasers!

After playing CD Projekt RED's latest though, it makes me think that maybe all of the other developers just didn't try hard enough. The world of The Witcher is vast yet filled with cool stuff, and populated by people and things that do a damn good job of making me care about them. Even when the game does have me finding some townsfolk's missing necklace, I'm really interested in what happens to that necklace, man. It's a rusty cliche to say at this point, but the world feels really alive in a way that a lot of game worlds don't. It must be the shaky trees. I can't go back to static trees anymore. I've been spoiled by Jell-O brand plant life.

*Shyamalan flashback intensifies*

It's always a bummer to me reaching the end of a long game. Like finishing a favorite TV show, it leaves me feeling like, what am I supposed to invest myself in now? Real life? Screw that. Luckily, I have the specter of The Witcher's lengthy DLC waiting for me in the shadows.

I have a pretty large list of games I want to play after The Witcher is over and done with. And coincidentally enough they're all incredibly long, investment heavy games with big open worlds and filled with dozens of filler side content I'm too compulsive to ignore. Metal Gear Solid V, Xenoblade Chronicles X, Far Cry 4, Fallout 4. I don't know when it happened, but a tight, linear gaming experience is apparently untrendy old man trash. Maybe next year I'll be done with one of those games and I'll check back in here.


In the near future, I'm excited for No Man's Sky.

Like, really really cautiously optimistic. It's one of those things that sounds like if it does everything it promises it will be one of the best games ever. Reminds me of how I felt reading previews for Fable. I imagine that isn't a good sign. Even if it missed the mark though, Fable was a pretty good game. And I imagine NMS will probably be OK too. We'll see.