So I recently, maybe about in June, bought a new gaming PC after being an almost 100% console gamer.
Instead of diving into games that I didn't get into on console I went for using my new system for games I previously quickly abandoned
Genshin Impact: The freemium aspect is pretty severe relative to other free to play experiences but it's a solid amount of content for a game whose price of entry is zero. And it's a really competent blending of Breath of the wild and typical action jrpg mechanics. However, once you've played through the bulk of the story content the game grinds to a grind farming halt where your only motivation to keep playing is to do daily missions for "summon" currency and money and run dungeons to maximize your character builds to ultimately improve the efficiency of your runs in what little end game content there is. There are game play events that you can play and there's usually always one active, but many if not most are uninspired and repetitive. It's still a functionally good game, but mihoyo has some work to do to give it staying power. Also, the game can be played entirely F2p with the characters given for free. But the characters that are fun and more efficient to play have to be summoned with premium currency. And because freemium currency drips to F2P players so slowly, it requires them to spend their gems carefully and do diligent research on the characters they're summoning for. I don't regret jumping back into Genshin, but there's still more than a handful of drawbacks to the experience and nothing is worse than the typical gacha game rub that they all inevitably end up feeling like a daily job, where if you neglect it for even a day, you delay your progress a fair bit.
No Man's Sky: I got this game at launch on PS4 and was so disappointed I returned it for a full refund. Since then I've still been looking for an exploration/survival game that wasn't minecraft or terreria to just unwind with. I tried Valheim, getting it on sale from Steam before upgrading my PC and tried to pick it up with my stronger system. I just couldn't vibe with it, and the purchase has been a sunken cost with only 2 and a half total hours logged.
I've seen No Man's Sky on sale for 50% off ($30) and while I felt that was a more fair price for the game, I ignored the sales at least twice. For some reason, last night I saw it listed at half off again and decided to give it a go. I ended up playing for nearly 5 straight hours until I just absolutely needed sleep.
I'd still say this is only a 30, maybe 40 dollar game given its barebones story content and continued lack of interaction with other players in the over"world" (though they did add a multi-player social hub that can be accessed in any system you find yourself in). That said they clearly added a lot of content and QOL changes that heavily cuts down on the tedium that put me off initially. There's even a mode where you can play entirely free to explore with no survival penalties and no costs to build, buy, or power anything. Though I only experimented with this mode for maybe a half hour as working to gather resources for my travels and pursuit to make more money to buy upgrades and ships to make my exploration and gathering more efficient makes the experience more rewarding.
For my needs of a game to simply unwind with, 2021 NMS is well worth a 30 dollar price of admission. I wouldn't say going full price is advisable, but you wouldn't get a busted product at full price the way people did at launch in 2016.
Fire Emblem Three Houses (Third run through, maddening difficulty.)
As Three Houses is my favorite Switch game, and one of my favorite Fire Emblems ever, I've wanted to reach 100% completion of all the story content. For my third run with the Golden Deer I made the mistake of starting the game on maddening and I'm too far in to start over but too far from the end to just crank it out in one night. I'm not a big, challenge myself with the hardest difficulty kind of gamer so I'm not even sure why I did this in the first place, but every map takes at minimum 15 minutes but could extend to 45 minutes (and I'm positive the last 3 or so story missions will run at least an hour to an hour 30) And with the game basically requiring that you farm the "monthly" combat missions to level up your units to not be more or less instakilled by every story mission's increase in enemy level, this difficulty reduces the game to a nearly unbearable slog. But I'm committed to finishing what I started and I'll be spending about 16 hours in the car with my family on a road trip this weekend, so I'm probably going to use that time to get as far into my save as I can.
Instead of diving into games that I didn't get into on console I went for using my new system for games I previously quickly abandoned
Genshin Impact: The freemium aspect is pretty severe relative to other free to play experiences but it's a solid amount of content for a game whose price of entry is zero. And it's a really competent blending of Breath of the wild and typical action jrpg mechanics. However, once you've played through the bulk of the story content the game grinds to a grind farming halt where your only motivation to keep playing is to do daily missions for "summon" currency and money and run dungeons to maximize your character builds to ultimately improve the efficiency of your runs in what little end game content there is. There are game play events that you can play and there's usually always one active, but many if not most are uninspired and repetitive. It's still a functionally good game, but mihoyo has some work to do to give it staying power. Also, the game can be played entirely F2p with the characters given for free. But the characters that are fun and more efficient to play have to be summoned with premium currency. And because freemium currency drips to F2P players so slowly, it requires them to spend their gems carefully and do diligent research on the characters they're summoning for. I don't regret jumping back into Genshin, but there's still more than a handful of drawbacks to the experience and nothing is worse than the typical gacha game rub that they all inevitably end up feeling like a daily job, where if you neglect it for even a day, you delay your progress a fair bit.
No Man's Sky: I got this game at launch on PS4 and was so disappointed I returned it for a full refund. Since then I've still been looking for an exploration/survival game that wasn't minecraft or terreria to just unwind with. I tried Valheim, getting it on sale from Steam before upgrading my PC and tried to pick it up with my stronger system. I just couldn't vibe with it, and the purchase has been a sunken cost with only 2 and a half total hours logged.
I've seen No Man's Sky on sale for 50% off ($30) and while I felt that was a more fair price for the game, I ignored the sales at least twice. For some reason, last night I saw it listed at half off again and decided to give it a go. I ended up playing for nearly 5 straight hours until I just absolutely needed sleep.
I'd still say this is only a 30, maybe 40 dollar game given its barebones story content and continued lack of interaction with other players in the over"world" (though they did add a multi-player social hub that can be accessed in any system you find yourself in). That said they clearly added a lot of content and QOL changes that heavily cuts down on the tedium that put me off initially. There's even a mode where you can play entirely free to explore with no survival penalties and no costs to build, buy, or power anything. Though I only experimented with this mode for maybe a half hour as working to gather resources for my travels and pursuit to make more money to buy upgrades and ships to make my exploration and gathering more efficient makes the experience more rewarding.
For my needs of a game to simply unwind with, 2021 NMS is well worth a 30 dollar price of admission. I wouldn't say going full price is advisable, but you wouldn't get a busted product at full price the way people did at launch in 2016.
Fire Emblem Three Houses (Third run through, maddening difficulty.)
As Three Houses is my favorite Switch game, and one of my favorite Fire Emblems ever, I've wanted to reach 100% completion of all the story content. For my third run with the Golden Deer I made the mistake of starting the game on maddening and I'm too far in to start over but too far from the end to just crank it out in one night. I'm not a big, challenge myself with the hardest difficulty kind of gamer so I'm not even sure why I did this in the first place, but every map takes at minimum 15 minutes but could extend to 45 minutes (and I'm positive the last 3 or so story missions will run at least an hour to an hour 30) And with the game basically requiring that you farm the "monthly" combat missions to level up your units to not be more or less instakilled by every story mission's increase in enemy level, this difficulty reduces the game to a nearly unbearable slog. But I'm committed to finishing what I started and I'll be spending about 16 hours in the car with my family on a road trip this weekend, so I'm probably going to use that time to get as far into my save as I can.
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) and I thought it was pretty good. I wouldn't quite consider it the masterpiece some consider it to be, but I enjoyed myself thoroughly.
