I found myself lucky enough in 2020 to have ample free time. With school going online and living with my folks to avoid paying rent. I had more time than I knew what to do with on my hands. So instead of doing something that I should be doing like learning a new language or helping out my local community. I figured it would be a great use of my time to start tackling that growing back catalog of video games.
Total War Warhammer 2
243 hours | release 2017 | PC
All hail the mighty war hammer!
Everyone has their first total war they sink their teeth into once they finally found a setting they enjoy, and o boy did I find mine. Like most people, I was very put off by most total war games. There is just a lot of going on and no real direction about where to go if you don't know what you're trying to accomplish. It kind of feels like getting thrown in the deep end of the pool after being told how much fun swimming is, but yet you have no idea what to do with your hands. So how on earth did I overcome this massive hurdle that stops many gamers from enjoying any total war games? Am I just this massive Warhammer fan? Did I watch hours of youtube videos from Zerkovich (Even though now that I play a fair amount of Warhammer, I do enjoy his channel)? Na, I just got drunk with a friend of mine while playing co-op, where we threw massive dragons at troops for hours. My friend, who we will refer to as ‘Big Daddy,’ has been a total war fan for some time now. For a better part of two years, Big Daddy would try his hardest to get me into total war Rome 2. “Dog your fucking greek?!?! Theses are like your people how are you not playing this game!!!”. Which let us be honest, he is not wrong but dear god, there is just so much going on in total war games. What units you have, what can the units do, Are they tired, are they under fire from missiles, where is my cavalry, o shit my general is fighting please don't die, how did I loses 3 units, o great they are shooting from the trees? Keep in mind that this is just from the battles! We have not even thought about the economy of paying for the army, treaties with other armies, or your peasants are now pissed and now there is a revolution. As you can imagine, you see the numbers for all of these stats! Green arrows, red text, glowing and pulsating icons all over the place. Granted, they do a pretty good job of slimming all this info down so it's easier to digest. But still, it's a lot to take in and a lot to get your head around. If a game has a built-in wiki that you can search for actions and stats, a lot is going on. So having a friend that could navigate you through the swamp of numbers. “Ya, that number is meaningless. don't worry about it. just build the building that gives you the rats with min guns” really helped me get to the kick-ass part of the total war games. The battles!
For the 4x nerds, there is a 1,000-foot view of the campaign map. You have to worry about things like who is trading with who, should I go to war with the damn dirty rat-men, and building settlements. Once you create an army and move it around the campaign map. Any battle you get into then warps you into an RTS-style battle. This is where the cool kids like me find the enjoyable section of the total war games. Playing a lot of RTS and MOBAs allowed me to feel right at home during the battles. Flanking, Waiting in the trees for an ambush, and getting the right matchups for my units. But here it is at this massive scale where you might be controlling 400+ soldiers. Plus, you have the added flavor of the Warhammer universe, so throw in some monsters and magic into the mix. This addition of monsters really busted open the game for me. Let me tell you; nothing feels better than flanking around the back of the enemy lines with two full units of trolls and start ‘smashing some gits.’ Everything has some mass to it and it acts as you might think with a 4-ton dragon drives into a mob of humans. The magic, even tho not really my playstyle, can really turn the tides of a battle. A well-placed lightning bolt on some expensive unit can send them running to the hills and open up that flanking opportunity you been eyeing on the whole battle. After over 200+ hours, I still feel like there is so much more game to see. How? So far, I have only played 4 out of the 15 playable races in the game. Each race feels so different from the other that when you start a campaign, it's almost like starting a new game entirely. What I'm trying to say is that I think my friend, big daddy, was totally right about why I haven't played a total war game before. The battles are just so much fun that I just needed to look over the campaign side of things. It turns out I don't hate the Total war games. I didn't find the one that I vibed with.
Blood and Wine — Witcher 3
35 hours | release 2016 | PC
The Final love letter to an old friend
I don't think I'm going to surprise anyone by having the hot take of “Man, the witcher 3 was a great video game”. It took the gaming community over by storm. If you don't believe me, look at some of the major AAA games that came out years after its release starting to take on ques set by witcher 3. Yes, I'm looking at your assassin's creed origins. It looked great, compelling storyline with loveable characters, and side quests that felt as big as the main storyline at times. This was the key factor to the witcher 3 success. The side content never felt like some piss way to pad out the game. Some of the missions were fetched quest-esk, but the story in the side quests always felt like it was given the same amount of attention as the main storyline. This gave a knock-on effect of making you feel like a pawn in this clockwork world. So when the last and final DLC for Witcher 3 came out, I wanted to savor Geralt's last adventure. Putting it off later to enjoy the closing moments in the northern kingdoms' land before it goes on the shelf to collect dust. 2020 was the last time where me, Geralt, and Roach would set out on our monster-killing adventure.
In every way, Blood and Wine felt like a farewell letter to the witcher 3. It ticks every box that you think would come with a Geralt adventure. An Epic overlapping grand story where the characters are more shades of gray than just a simple black and white. Geralt is out to say a vampire for a neighboring kingdom, requested by the local queen. Once you start tracking down the vampire's whereabouts, figuring out who is the bad and good guys start to get pretty muddy. The story itself occurs in a new landmass called Toussaint, which is more or less a medieval fantasy France. The land is filled with new monsters and vistas to fill any adventure's heart. Also, it has the fun side effect of wine vineyards everywhere. More often than not my Geralt would be drunk in a field instead of doing monster bounties. After he has sobered up, It's time to stumble into side quests and in this expansion do not disappoint; my personal first was the A Knight’s tail. Pretty much Geralt has to figure out why this random tree is bleeding; yes, a tree is bleeding. Which of course leads him to some panther witch to lift the curse on the tree. It is just the right mix of super high fantasy, things not being 100% explained, and Geralt just not really giving a fuck. Also, I should probably take the time to shout out to the quest where roach talks to you and helps you solve a monster mystery (If any of the devs are reading this, I would totally pay about 10$ to have some DLC where roach shouts oneliners and quips the whole game). This ‘fan services’ mission is really seen a few more times in this DLC pack. Which adds to this whole farewell love letter narrative to the game. At one point in the game, you're able to buy and trick out a wine vineyard to use as your ‘home’. Hell, even Ciri shows up near the tail end to have a final talk with the white wolf.
Is blood and wine my favorite chunk of story content for the witcher 3? Sadly no, there are a few parts that kind of hold it back. Mainly, the storyline in ‘Hearts of Stone’ is so good that it was just going to be near impossible for it to be overtaken for me. outside of that I feel like the Dev team kinda went a little too overboard with some of the ‘fan services/pro gamer moments.’ For example, taking over outposts just felt like some end-game type shit where Geralt is now just fighting off vs. about 20 enemies on screen? At no other point in my 150+ hour time in the witcher did I ever face off more than 8–10 enemies at once. Granted, they give you new tools and upgrade to handle it, but it just felt a little too on the “check out this epic gamer moment” for me. But as whole blood and wine is a great sending-off package for the white wolf. It takes every part that I loved about Witcher 3 and is packed into a nice 30ish hour package. Even tho some of the fan service was a bit on the nose. I think the two-year break from the game really made me enjoy the DLC so much more than I otherwise would have. Now that my time with the witcher 3 is over, maybe I will finally get around to reading the books? Na, who am I kidding… I'll wait around for me to forget everything and start the game all over again.
Vermintide 2
137 hours | release 2018 | PC
Those Damn Dirty rat men!
Vermintide 2 was never really on the top of my back catalog list if we are honest. I put some time into the first one and was looking forward to playing 2, but it never was at the forefront of my mind. With 2020 being the year that it was, I found myself listening to few news podcasts a day. Shout out to the new york's times ‘the daily’ podcast. Listening to an hour's worth of podcasts a day, I needed the perfect podcast game to tick away at while listening to reports about the known world caving in on itself. Vermintide 2 really did fit the bill quite nicely. Being a left 4 dead style game, it doesn't require 100% of your attention 100% of the time. More like 90% of your attention about 60% of the time. This isn't meant to be some dig. It's just more of that style of game that leverages gameplay tactics that the player learns from doing them repeatedly. Once you learn the levels and where the secrets are, you can sort them out while killing some rats all willy-nilly. This zen-like trance I found allowed me to dump hours into this game. After a while I started to notice the small nuances of the game and I found myself going, “Man, Vermintide 2 is pretty good, right?”
What Vermintide nails is its melee combat. First-person melee combat is just hard enough to get to feeling ok let alone to some level of ‘good.’ They absolutely cush the feeling of swinging your sword or axe in the first person. Each weapon has its own ‘feel’ to using it. I'm not just talking about simply what angle the weapon comes in or if it's good vs. armor, but they have their own weight and force behind each blow. Swinging dual daggers at a group of rats might not sending them flying back, but a massive 2-handed hammer might knock everyone to their knees. Each weapon has its own stats for pushback, blocking, and knockdown. So that same 2-handed hammer might be really good at knocking groups of rats down. It might lack at pushing groups back or just being a tank. Now that one-handed hammer with a shield is starting to look pretty tempting if you want to hold back a doorway while your teammates clear up the mobs from afar. So why on earth would you want to use the dual daggers from before? A precision killing machine, my friend. These types of weapons are not great at blocking or pushing anyone back, but they are devastating at lading killing blows and knocking heads off. Headshots in this game are still a thing, so some of the melee weapons take advantage of this. Let me tell you it's a pretty damn cool feeling to dash your way through a bunch of rats getting headshots and body just dropping to the floor. On top of all this each weapon has a different attack pattern that allows different attacks to be better in different situations. So like the dual designers, while not great at clearing out crowds, does have an attack pattern that is OK at clearing waves. The more you play, you will start to gravitate towards different weapons. Not because of the stats but how they feel to use. Often I will pass over a higher tear weapon simply because I like how the lower tear weapon feels in my hands. On top of all this each of the 4 playable characters has sub-classes. Each subclass allows you to play a character a particular way with perks and your ultimate ability. Throw all this together and each run of a level can really feel different from each other depending on the loadout you go into them with. This really helps with breaking up the “running X level again for the X time.”
Wait, is this mud we are fighting in or rat sh*t?
With the great strides that Vermintide takes moving first-person combat and the “left 4 dead” styles games forward, it does stumble in some spots. Namely being the end/late game. So once you level up all the characters, there isn't much really to do? You can grind out to get higher-rated weapons, but the higher-rated weapons don't feel that cool to get. They are just simple stat bumps. Your push on your hammer is 40 instead of 20, ooooooo (throws up magic hands). So when you get that sick red weapon drop, it just feels rather flat. Even what your doing at the end of the game feels kinda flat. You're just doing the same levels but at a higher difficulty level and there are more enemies with higher stats. But it's not like your doing special level runs, so you can get special weapon drops. It just feels like the sliders on a bunch of stats get pushed to the right. Granted, this might be a problem for me. Not every game needs to have a “sink hundreds of hours” type of end game. It should just be ok to put your time into a game and once you hit a point, it goes back on the shelf. Leveling up all the characters did take me around 80 hours to do. This is even including some double XP weekends. During the 80 hours, the game did feel pretty varied, but this might be because I was leveling up all the classes. Also, the game is priced at 30$ USD. So how much unique content could I really ask from it? I fear that if a player only liked playing the dwarf one type of way, there might not be much for them to do. My fears are not completely invalid because one of the big DLCs for the game, winds of magic, tries to address the end game problem and completely missed the mark. Hopefully, these issues get addressed for their next game, “Warhammer 40,000: Darktide”.
Bring it all back
My big takeaway from this year in gaming for me is Yo, it's cool to play old games. All of the games I mentioned definitely did not come out this year, but I still dropped plenty of time into them. Is it as cool as playing a game that just came out last week? I mean, I guess not? Ya, I can't have that conversation about how cool hades is or o man the new call of duty is doing X things now. But it's not like I didn't enjoy my time gaming this year by any means, plus I got to enjoy the perks of playing games later in their life. They are priced way lower than at launch, all the bug patches have been pushed out, and normally there is some DLC you can add on. This is probably a part of a bigger conversation about how as a society we need to chill out with this feeling of always have to have the ‘new’ thing, but let's not have that conversation today shall we. So hit up that discount bin at your local game store. Use steam’s built-in shuffle feature to play some game you bought 8 years ago and forgot about. Go down a development studio's catalog and play their older games. The point is that older games do hold up, you just need to give them a shot.
